The Year’s Best Science Fiction Read online

  At last, there was the sound of an engine and a shadowy shape gained definition in the fret that hung offshore: a boxy, old-fashioned landing craft that drove past the police boat and beached in the shallows close to the dragon. Its bow door splashed down and soldiers trotted out and the police and several civilians and scientists went down the beach to meet them. After a brief discussion, one of the soldiers stepped forward and raised a bullhorn to his mouth and announced that for the sake of public safety a two-hundred-metre exclusion zone was going to be established.

  Several soldiers began to unload plastic crates. The rest chivvied the people around the dragon, ordering them to move back, driving them up the beach past the bonfire. Lucas spotted the old man, Bill Danvers, arguing with two soldiers. One suddenly grabbed the old man’s arm and spun him around and twisted something around his wrists; the other looked at Lucas as he came towards them, telling him to stay back or he’d be arrested too.

  “He’s my uncle,” Lucas said. “If you let him go I’ll make sure he doesn’t cause any more trouble.”

  “Your uncle?” The soldier wasn’t much older than Lucas, with cropped ginger hair and a ruddy complexion.

  “Yes, sir. He doesn’t mean any harm. He’s just upset because no one cares that he was the first to find it.”

  “Like I said,” the old man said.

  The two soldiers looked at each other, and the ginger-haired one told Lucas, “You’re responsible for him. If he starts up again, you’ll both be sorry.”

  “I’ll look after him.”

  The soldier stared at Lucas for a moment, then flourished a small-bladed knife and cut the plasticuffs that bound the old man’s wrists and shoved him towards Lucas. “Stay out of our way, grandpa. All right?”

  “Sons of bitches,” Bill Danvers said as the soldiers had walked off. He raised his voice and called out, “I found it first. Someone owes me for that.”

  “I think everyone knows you saw it come ashore,” Lucas said. “But they’re in charge now.”

  “They’re going to blow it open,” a man said.

  He held a satchel in one hand and a folded chair in the other; when he shook the chair open and sat down Lucas recognised him: the man who’d been sitting at the head of the dragon, sketching it.

  “They can’t,” Bill Danvers said.

  “They’re going to try,” the man said.

  Lucas looked back at the dragon. Its steamlined shape dim in the streaming fret, the activity around its head (if that was its head) a vague shifting of shadows. Soldiers and scientists conferring in a tight knot. Then the police boat and the landing craft started their motors and reversed through the wash of the incoming tide, fading into the fret, and the scientists followed the soldiers up the beach, walking past the bonfire, and there was a stir and rustle amongst the people strung out along the ridge.

  “No damn right,” Bill Danvers said.

  The soldier with the bullhorn announced that there would be a small controlled explosion. A moment later, the dragon blared out its loud, long call and in the shocking silence afterwards laughter broke out amongst the crowd on the ridge. The soldier with the bullhorn began to count backwards from ten. Some of the crowd took up the chant. There was a brief silence at zero, and then a red light flared at the base of the dragon’s midpoint and a flat crack rolled out across the ridge and was swallowed by the mist. People whistled and clapped, and Bill Danvers stepped around Lucas and ran down the slope towards the dragon. Falling to his knees and getting up and running on as soldiers chased after him, closing in from either side.

  People cheered and hooted, and some ran after Bill Danvers, young men mostly, leaping down the slope and swarming across the beach. Lucas saw Damian amongst the runners and chased after him, heart pounding, flooded with a heedless exhilaration. Soldiers blocked random individuals, catching hold of them or knocking them down as others dodged past. Lucas heard the clatter of the bullhorn but couldn’t make out any words, and then there was a terrific flare of white light and a hot wind struck him so hard he lost his balance and fell to his knees.

  The dragon had split in half and things were glowing with hot light inside and the waves breaking around its rear hissed and exploded into steam. A terrific heat scorched Lucas’s face. He pushed to his feet. All around, people were picking themselves up and soldiers were moving amongst them, shoving them away from the dragon. Some complied; others stood, squinting into the light that beat out of the broken dragon, blindingly bright waves and wings of white light flapping across the beach, burning away the mist.

  Blinking back tears and blocky afterimages, Lucas saw two soldiers dragging Bill Danvers away from the dragon. The old man hung limp and helpless in their grasp, splayed feet furrowing the sand. His head was bloody, something sticking out of it at an angle.

  Lucas started towards them, and there was another flare that left him stunned and half-blind. Things fell all around and a translucent shard suddenly jutted up by his foot. The two soldiers had dropped Bill Danvers. Lucas stepped towards him, picking his way through a field of debris, and saw that he was beyond help. His head had been knocked out of shape by the shard that stuck in his temple, and blood was soaking into the sand around it.

  The dragon had completely broken apart now. Incandescent stuff dripped and hissed into steaming water and the burning light was growing brighter.

  Like almost everyone else, Lucas turned and ran. Heat clawed at his back as he slogged to the top of the ridge. He saw Damian sitting on the sand, right hand clamped on the upper part of his left arm, and he jogged over and helped his friend up. Leaning against each other, they stumbled across the ridge. Small fires crackled here and there, where hot debris had kindled clumps of marram grass. Everything was drenched in a pulsing diamond brilliance. They went down the slope of the far side, angling towards the little blue boat, splashing into the water that had risen around it. Damian clambered unhandily over thwart and Lucas hauled up the concrete-filled bucket and boosted it over the side, then put his shoulder to the boat’s prow and shoved it the low breakers and tumbled in.

  The boat drifted sideways on the rising tide as Lucas hauled up the sail. Dragon-light beat beyond the crest of the sandbar, brighter than the sun. Lucas heeled his little boat into the wind, ploughing through stands of sea grass into the channel beyond, chasing after the small fleet fleeing the scene. Damian sat in the bottom of the boat, hunched into himself, his back against the stem of the mast. Lucas asked him if he was okay; he opened his fingers to show a translucent spike embedded in the meat of his biceps. It was about the size of his little finger.

  “Dumb bad luck,” he said, his voice tight and wincing.

  “I’ll fix you up,” Lucas said, but Damian shook his head.

  “Just keep going. I think—”

  Everything went white for a moment. Lucas ducked down and wrapped his arms around his head and for a moment saw shadowy bones through red curtains of flesh. When he dared look around, he saw a narrow column of pure white light rising straight up, seeming to lean over as it climbed into the sky, aimed at the very apex of heaven.

  A hot wind struck the boat and filled the sail, and Lucas sat up and grabbed the tiller and the sheet as the boat crabbed sideways. By the time he had it under control again the column of light had dimmed, fading inside drifting curtains of fret, rooted in a pale fire flickering beyond the sandbar.

  * * *

  Damian’s father, Jason Playne, paid Lucas and his mother a visit the next morning. A burly man in his late forties with a shaven head and a blunt and forthright manner, dressed in workboots and denim overalls, he made the caravan seem small and frail. Standing over Julia’s bed, telling her that he would like to ask Lucas about the scrape he and his Damian had gotten into.

  “Ask away,” Julia said. She was propped amongst her pillows, her gaze bright and amused. Her tablet lay beside her, images and blocks of text glimmering above it.

  Jason Playne looked at her from beneath the thick hedge of h
is eyebrows. A strong odour of saltwater and sweated booze clung to him. He said, “I was hoping for a private word.”

  “My son and I have no secrets.”

  “This is about my son,” Jason Playne said.

  “They didn’t do anything wrong, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Julia said.

  Lucas felt a knot of embarrassment and anger in his chest. He said, “I’m right here.”

  “Well, you didn’t,” his mother said.

  Jason Playne looked at Lucas. “How did Damian get hurt?”

  “He fell and cut himself,” Lucas said, as steadily as he could. That was what he and Damian had agreed to say, as they’d sailed back home with their prize. Lucas had pulled the shard of dragon stuff from Damian’s arm and staunched the bleeding with a bandage made from a strip ripped from the hem of Damian’s shirt. There hadn’t been much blood; the hot sliver had more or less cauterised the wound.

  Jason Playne said, “He fell.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Are you sure? Because I reckon that cut in my son’s arm was done by a knife. I reckon he got himself in some kind of fight.”

  Julia said, “That sounds more like an accusation than a question.”

  Lucas said, “We didn’t get into a fight with anyone.”

  Jason Playne said, “Are you certain that Damian didn’t steal something?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Which was the truth, as far as it went.

  “Because if he did steal something, if he still has it, he’s in a lot of trouble. You too.”

  “I like to think my son knows a little more about alien stuff than most,” Julia said.

  “I’m don’t mean fairy stories,” Jason Playne said. “I’m talking about the army ordering people to give back anything to do with that dragon thing. You stole something and you don’t give it back and they find out? They’ll arrest you. And if you try to sell it? Well, I can tell you for a fact that the people in that trade are mad and bad. I should know. I’ve met one or two of them in my time.”

  “I’m sure Lucas will take that to heart,” Julia said.

  And that was that, except after Jason Playne had gone she told Lucas that he’d been right about one thing: the people who tried to reverse-engineer alien technology were dangerous and should at all costs be avoided. “If I happened to come into possession of anything like that,” she said, “I would get rid of it at once. Before anyone found out.”

  But Lucas couldn’t get rid of the shard because he’d promised Damian that he’d keep it safe until they could figure out what to do with it. He spent the next two days in a haze of guilt and indecision, struggling with the temptation to check that the thing was safe in its hiding place, wondering what Damian’s father knew, wondering what his mother knew, wondering if he should sail out to a deep part of the Flood and throw it into the water, until at last Damian came over to the island.

  It was early in the evening, just after sunset. Lucas was watering the vegetable garden when Damian called to him from the shadows inside a clump of buddleia bushes. He smiled at Lucas, saying, “If you think I look bad, you should see him.”

  “I can’t think he could look much worse.”

  “I got in a few licks,” Damian said. His upper lip was split and both his eyes were blackened and there was a discoloured knot on the hinge of his jaw.

  “He came here,” Lucas said. “Gave me and Julia a hard time.”

  “How much does she know?”

  “I told her what happened.”

  “Everything?”

  There was an edge in Damian’s voice.

  “Except about how you were hit with the shard,” Lucas said.

  “Oh. Your mother’s cool, you know? I wish…”

  When it was clear that his friend wasn’t going to finish his thought, Lucas said, “Is it okay? You coming here so soon.”

  “Oh, Dad’s over at Halvergate on what he calls business. Don’t worry about him. Did you keep it safe?”

  “I said I would.”

  “Why I’m here, L, I think I might have a line on someone who wants to buy our little treasure.”

  “Your father said we should keep away from people like that.”

  “He would.”

  “Julia thinks so too.”

  “If you don’t want anything to do with it, just say so. Tell me where it is, and I’ll take care of everything.”

  “Right.”

  “So is it here, or do we have to go somewhere?”

  “I’ll show you,” Lucas said, and led his friend through the buddleias and along the low ridge to the northern end of the tiny island where an apple tree stood, hunched and gnarled and mostly dead, crippled by years of salt spray and saltwater seep. Lucas knelt and pulled up a hinge of turf and took out a small bundle of oilcloth. As he unwrapped it, Damian dropped to his knees beside him and reached out and touched an edge of the shard.

  “Is it dead?”

  “It wasn’t ever alive,” Lucas said.

  “You know what I mean. What did you do to it?”

  “Nothing. It just turned itself off.”

  When Lucas had pulled the shard from Damian’s arm, its translucence had been veined with a network of shimmering threads. Now it was a dull reddish black, like an old scab.

  “Maybe it uses sunlight, like phones,” Damian said.

  “I thought of that, but I also thought it would be best to keep it hidden.”

  “It still has to be worth something,” Damian said, and began to fold the oilcloth around the shard.

  Lucas was gripped by a sudden apprehension, as if he was falling while kneeling there in the dark. He said, “We don’t have to do this right now.”

  “Yes we do. I do.”

  “Your father—he isn’t in Halvergate, is he?”

  Damian looked straight at Lucas. “I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re worried about. He tried to knock me down when I went to leave, but I knocked him down instead. Pounded on him good. Put him down and put him out. Tied him up too, to give me some time to get away.”

  “He’ll come after you.”

  “Remember when we were kids? We used to lie up here, in summer. We’d look up at the stars and talk about what it would be like to go to one of the worlds the Jackaroo gave us. Well, I plan to find out. The UN lets you buy tickets off lottery winners who don’t want to go. It’s legal and everything. All you need is money. I reckon this will give us a good start.”

  “You know I can’t come with you.”

  “If you want your share, you’ll have to come to Norwich. Because there’s no way I’m coming back here,” Damian said, and stood with a smooth, swift motion.

  Lucas stood too. They were standing toe to toe under the apple tree, the island and the Flood around it quiet and dark. As if they were the last people on Earth.

  “Don’t try to stop me,” Damian said. “My father tried, and I fucked him up good and proper.”

  “Let’s talk about this.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” Damian said. “It is what it is.”

  He tried to step past Lucas, and Lucas grabbed at his arm and Damian swung him around and lifted him off his feet and ran him against the trunk of the tree. Lucas tried to wrench free but Damian bore down with unexpected strength, pressing him against rough bark, leaning into him. Pinpricks of light in the dark wells of his eyes. His voice soft and hoarse in Lucas’s ear, his breath hot against Lucas’s cheek.

  “You always used to be able to beat me, L. At running, swimming, you name it. Not any more. I’ve changed. Want to know why?”

  “We don’t have to fight about this.”

  “No, we don’t,” Damian said, and let Lucas go and stepped back.

  Lucas pushed away from the tree, a little unsteady on his feet. “What’s got into you?”

  Damian laughed. “That’s good, that is. Can’t you guess?”

  “You need the money because you’re running away. All right, you can have my share,
if that’s what you want. But it won’t get you very far.”

  “Not by itself. But like I said, I’ve changed. Look,” Damian said, and yanked up the sleeve of his shirt, showing the place on his upper arm where the shard had punched into him.

  There was only a trace of a scar, pink and smooth. Damian pulled the skin taut, and Lucas saw the outline of a kind of ridged or fibrous sheath underneath.

  “It grew,” Damian said.

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m stronger. And faster too. I feel, I don’t know. Better than I ever have. Like I could run all the way around the world without stopping, if I had to.”

  “What if it doesn’t stop growing? You should see a doctor, D. Seriously.”

  “I’m going to. The kind that can make money for me, from what happened. You still think that little bit of dragon isn’t worth anything? It changed me. It could change anyone. I really don’t want to fight,” Damian said, “but I will if you get in my way. Because there’s there’s no way I’m stopping here. If I do, my dad will come after me. And if he does, I’ll have to kill him. And I know I can.”

  The two friends stared at each other in the failing light. Lucas was the first to look away.

  “You can come with me,” Damian said. “To Norwich. Then wherever we want to go. To infinity and beyond. Think about it. You still got my phone?”

  “Do you want it back? It’s in the caravan.”

  “Keep it. I’ll call you. Tell you were to meet up. Come or don’t come, it’s up to you.”

  And then he ran, crashing through the buddleia bushes that grew along the slope of the ridge. Lucas went after him, but by the time he reached the edge of the water, Damian had started the motor of the boat he’d stolen from his father’s shrimp farm, and was dwindling away into the thickening twilight.

  * * *

  The next day, Lucas was out on the Flood, checking baited cages he’d set for eels, when an inflatable pulled away from the shrimp farm and drew a curving line of white across the water, hooking towards him. Jason Playne sat in the inflatable’s stern, cutting the motor and drifting neatly alongside Lucas’s boat and catching hold of the thwart. His left wrist was bandaged and he wore a baseball cap pulled low over sunglasses that darkly reflected Lucas and Lucas’s boat and the waterscape all around. He asked without greeting or preamble where Damian was, and Lucas said that he didn’t know.