The fires rose in Tokyo. They jetted down from the sky, touching roofs and vehicles and trees. They raced over hills and whipped up gusts of superheated air, scattering sparks and bits of burning wood and paper. Flames twisted in the wind. Houses, silhouetted black against the inferno, ignited and burned, lit from the inside like paper lanterns. Nothing more was green, or cool enough even to touch; the city was erupting into a volcano fed by wave after wave of yellow fire spewed by the beasts coasting in formation overhead.
Katsumi Kurahawa fled up a street, leading her younger brother by the hand. Sweat stung her eyes, and she kept wiping her face with her free hand.
“Yasuo.” She pulled him close as a plank flew past, turned into a flaming missile by winds approaching hurricane force. People hurried by, dragging mattresses or whatever belongings they could manage. The only smell now was smoke, along with something rancid that Katsumi spat out and hoped wasn’t burning flesh. Red anti-aircraft bursts sent dotted red lines across the sky. Now visible, now hidden by the smoke, she glimpsed the dragons.
The green and brown of their angled, scaly bodies showed plainly in the glare from below. Three V-shaped formations appeared, flying at staggered heights, descending to rooftop level and opening their jaws to belch their flamethrower-breaths. Each formation cued off its leader, the rest of the beasts vomiting out their fire an instant after the lead. For three or four seconds they coasted, across streets, over neighborhoods, heedless of whatever or whoever their flames might catch, before rising again with lazy beats of their wings.
Everywhere she looked, north, south, up, and down, she saw the same flames, the same buildings collapsing, the same whirlwind of smoldering debris. In all this, the hurricane howled, the descending dragons now visibly straining. The wind caught the flames spewing from their mouths, blowing some out like candles. Still the beasts arrived, formation after formation, descending, blowing and rising, descending, blowing and rising, flapping madly now, they came. The whole world had been caught in one great forest fire racing from neighborhood to neighborhood, the earth’s superheated core breaking to the surface to ignite the world into a second sun. And still they came.
A clear path remained up the street. Katsumi tugged Yasuo toward it, jostling in the crowd. They had lost Mother and Father in the stampede, but Father had mentioned the Sumida River.
“Can we go home?” For the past several minutes, the boy had pleaded this, scampering in his shorts and shirt. “Please, can’t we just go home? Mother and Father are there. I know they are.”
“The river, Yasuo.” She must keep her mind on that. The river, yes, get to the river and find them and then we will be safe.
There was no doubt who had sent the flying beasts. Stenciled in white on the underside of each left wing was a white star, and on each tail a white number with a dash.
The Americans knew, of course. It had never been a secret. Japan was built of densely packed wooden homes, and many of these served as shadow factories, manufacturing munitions and war parts. If the enemy was able to capture European dragons and train them for war, as ancient India had done with elephants, then they knew their massive high-flying bombers were not needed…especially since their precision bombing was proving ineffective.
All of Tokyo was wood and paper. An attacker only needed to set fires.
Clutching Yasuo’s hand, bathed in sweat and her whole body sunburned, Katsumi recoiled.
One of the creatures had lost control. The hurricane caught it, whipping it like a scrap of paper. It plummeted, shearing a roof and thudding to the packed street in a shower of sparks and flaming shards. People fled from it.
The dragon closed its eyes, opened them, emitted a deep growl, and lifted into the air again. Spreading its wings—its span could cover two homes—it shot skyward, disappearing behind a column of smoke. Tangled bodies marked where it had fallen, arms and legs, blood and wet entrails.
By now, the beasts had abandoned any attempts at remaining in formation. The flames had grown to where they generated their own cyclone. It caught and threw and battered them, the reptiles pitched back and forth like the sparks and debris.
Most remained aloft. But Katsumi saw another dragon, corkscrewing down, wings tight against its body, disappearing over a rise. She neither saw nor heard the impact.
Yasuo cried out and gave his sister a shove. She slammed to the street, face in the dirt as a shadow flashed over them. An instant later an impact shook the ground, as if a great building had toppled.
Katsumi, spitting out dirt, looked up.
Another fallen dragon—but this one differed from the rest. She had not seen one like it among all the attackers tonight. This beast lacked all aerodynamic grace. It was round, squat, a leather boulder with wings and teeth and white-hot slit eyes. Spines like a stegosaurus encumbered its back. Its wings were too short and too stubby, and its face sloped into a pug-nosed snout.
“Katsumi?” Yasuo tried to pull her to her feet. She saw the dragon and opened her mouth, heedless of her brother tugging on her arm. She shook him off, got up, and sprinted toward the fallen beast.
The dragon was floundering in the dirt, making the same deep grumbles as the first one. Katsumi knelt by a monstrous eye that, while glaring with inner heat, seemed to have a lazy look. Perhaps the impact had dazed it.
“Mr. Dragon? Is…is it really you?” She spoke not Japanese, or even the Mandarin Chinese, of which she knew a smattering, but a strained speech of throat and timed whistles. The beast did not react save to close and open its eyes.
“Mr. Dragon?” she repeated in the language.
Yasuo, standing back with a gathering crowd of onlookers, yelled. Rumbles sounded, more from the beast’s throat than its mouth, rising and falling, punctuated with snorts like a horse sneezing. With each snort, traces of smoke puffed from its nostrils.
For the first time in what seemed a lifetime, back when the world was normal and nothing was on fire and there was no need to flee or be afraid, Katsumi’s heart lifted.
“Don’t be afraid, Yasuo. It’s speaking to me.”
“It talks?”
She uttered a few more words, clumsily rendered in her far smaller human throat and mouth. The dragon rumbled, snorted again, lifting its head. Onlookers fled, while Yasuo held tight to his sister’s arm.
Katsumi heard it thus, “Young girl. Yes, I remember you. You found me by the sea after a storm and called me Watatsumi. I corrected you that I was a fire dragon, not water, and was blown down by a storm while traveling—”
In its own speech, she replied, “You were half-drowned. I pulled you from the water, but I think you pushed me more than I pulled you.”
“Katsumi?” Yasuo said, keeping his distance.
She spoke over her shoulder to him. “Remember all those days when I said I was visiting a friend, and you thought it was a boy and teased me that I’d be married any day now? I was learning the dragon’s speech.”
Yasuo wagged his disheveled head slowly from side to side, and for a moment, he seemed to forget even the inferno erupting all around him.
The beast closed and opened its eye again. Its pupil was narrow, like a cat’s, and large enough for Katsumi to put her hand through.
“Can you help us find our mother and father?” she asked.
Yasuo called out, “They’re at home. I know they are. Can’t we just go home?”
The beast squirmed in an effort to flatten its squat bulk. “Climb onto my back.”
“Here, Yasuo.” She lifted him up. “It won’t harm you.” He climbed, scrambled between two of the spines. The girl followed, straddling the creature, wedging her brother between herself and the spine he was hugging with both arms.
Onlookers murmured, and some asked what they were doing. Katsumi ignored them. The dragon flapped its impossibly short wings once, twice, then left the ground, borne up by the hot air, higher by the instant until dizziness seized the girl and Tokyo lay too far beneath her. She glimpsed a crew pumping water by hand, and a red row of bursting anti-aircraft shells. Katsumi scrunched down, covering Yasuo with her body—she had forgotten about those.
The dragon passed through a thick column of smoke that caught her full in her open mouth, and she sputtered out coughing.
“Which way?” the beast rumbled.
“They are by the river, or one of the canals. May we search all the canals?”
The dragon, in an unexpectedly graceful move, wheeled toward the Sumida. Katsumi looked down.
Her city was a sea of flames. People were flocking, crowding all along the riverbanks. Thousands were gathering at the canals. Many had thrown themselves in and bobbed in the muck, heads just above the surface. Katsumi imagined, tried not to imagine, the flames sucking away their breathing air, the water growing hotter and hotter until people boiled alive.
And Mother and Father are down there…
The dragon’s wings beat the warm air rapidly, almost blurry like a hummingbird’s in the glow from beneath. Here it was more bearable; her skin no longer stung, the wind drying her sweaty skin and singed clothes. But periodic gusts tried to tug her from her mount. She hugged her brother tighter.
“We will fly lower.” The dragon descended.
This was dangerous. The beast could crash again, and its passengers with it. But Katsumi held her breath, the creature holding its wings steady, circling down toward the conflagration.
The closer they got, the more she saw the situation was hopeless. There was no counting the crowds fleeing to the parks and gardens lining the Sumida’s banks. As she watched, people there were pressed in by new arrivals, forced over the edge and toppling by the dozens to splash in the river. Could they swim?
“We’ll search all night if we have to!” Katsumi barked it out, an order, like the ones given by her father during his time in the Marines. “Do you hear me, Mr. Dragon?”
No telling how such a beast would respond. But it merely grunted an assent and went on beating its wings against the wind. “Young girl, we will search if you wish. But know that this will not be the only night. We are to keep burning your cities—”
“Why?” Katsumi slapped the creature’s back. “Why are you helping the Americans?”
“I found them on Okinawa. I was drawn by their machines of war that breathe fire as we do. They fed me and have been good to me.”
“But you’re destroying our homeland!” Why could it not understand? This reptile seemed to think like an automaton.
“Because you understand our speech,” it went on in that same maddening matter-of-fact tone, “I can tell you of things no one else yet knows. The worst is yet to come—”
“The worst?” She wanted to cry, but fought back the tears. “How could this possibly become any worse?”
“What’s he saying, Katsumi?” her brother asked.
“A new weapon is coming,” said the dragon. “One that can burn a whole city in an instant.”
An instant? “How can this be?”
“Young girl, my masters did not want me to come tonight. But the will of a dragon can only be denied for so long. I would not endure the disgrace of remaining on the ground while my brothers and sisters fly to vent their flames. When a dragon’s mind is made up, it is impossible to restrain him.”
“Why did they not want you to go?”
“Because, young girl, I am that weapon—”
Suddenly she wanted to jump off and pull Yasuo with her, to plummet to the river and meet an honorable end smashing to its surface. From this altitude, it would be like hitting concrete. They might well strike fellow citizens, but that would be better than boiling alive. But she bit her lip, steeled herself. The self-control she had learned during the sufferings of this war took hold.
“You, yourself, are this weapon?”
“Yes, though I will not explode tonight. I am a freak among dragons, and the oldest here now. We normally age far past the ability to vent flames. But I could go on for centuries until I die. Very few dragons receive this gift.”
“But an entire city at once?”
“A dragon must not die on the ground of old age. A dragon chooses a time and self-combusts. It is simply a matter of building up heat and pressure in my chest, holding in it until it takes over.”
Katsumi chewed her lip, thinking. “Would there be, perhaps…a freak Watatsumi? One that explodes not fire, but water?”
“I know little of the Watatsumi—”
“May we search for one?”
“If you wish. I should like to fly out to sea. I have vented enough for now, and even a dragon can grow tired of heat.”
It banked back toward the ocean.
***
In a few minutes, the hot gale subsided. Cool air, smelling of the ocean, refreshed Katsumi’s face. She did not look back, dared not look back at her burning city. Each time she closed her eyes, she relived it all; the people on fire or pushed into the river, hit by flaming debris and squashed like insects by fallen dragons. She had forgotten a world still existed outside the inferno.
“Katsumi?”
“Yes, Yasuo?”
The boy spoke slowly. “There’s no more home, is there?”
She had been about to direct him to watch for Watatsumi in the swells below. But now her tongue stiffened in her mouth. Her brother began to cry.
“It’s all right, Yasuo. It will be all right.”
“Our home is gone…and now Mother and Father…” His words choked in sobs and his body heaved.
Slowly, her heart sank. What if they did find a Watatsumi? Those were not so common as tuna or mackerel. And they lived mostly beneath the surface, like whales. One might search for days before sighting one. And then, of course, there was almost no chance of finding some exceptional water beast that could extinguish all of Tokyo.
The dragon seemed to sense this, for it said: “Young girl, even if we found now what you seek—”
She turned her eyes homeward. A wall of flame devoured the city, somehow even more terrifying from a distance, and something inside her died as she accepted it at last. Mother and Father were gone. The home where she had grown up and where Yasuo had been born, mother’s garden in the back and the kamidama shrine, father’s old uniforms that schoolgirl Katsumi insisted on dusting herself, his medals that she knew by heart—all were gone. Yet even now, those ragged arrow-shaped formations kept coming.
“Mr. Dragon.” Her voice was choked. “You once told me dragons can fly very fast…faster than any airplane?”
“Yes, that is true.”
“Could you fly all the way to America?”
It hesitated before answering. “I have flown that way on occasion before. It takes between one and two days, with stops to feed—”
“You see what they’ve done to our land, your homeland, what you have done for them. They have never suffered this way, except for one of their islands. Shouldn’t that damage be balanced?”
“Little girl,” it said. “Are you not aware, my kind has burned cities in China for your army?”
What? No, she had not heard about this. And the dragon stated it with such perfect innocence, a simple fact of life. It continued, “And in Europe, some years ago, my kind have burned buildings for Germany.”
“But why?” She slapped its scaly back, then slapped it again. “Why do this for anyone?”
But she thought she knew. Horses, elephants, dragons—they could be trained by anyone who knew how. And Japan, of course, had its dragons too. “You’re burning everyone alive!”
“The destroying was happening before us. And my masters feed me well. Food was difficult to find here.”
“But you’re making it so much worse, don’t you see?”
The beast did not reply. Fire was a dragon’s element; seeing everything burn was just normal life to them. But what about all the people, the suffering, the cries? Maybe they saw humans the way humans saw bugs… It was as if its brain, however big or small that was, could only fix on one thought at a time. How to change that thought, if even all this horror could not do it?
“Take us down,” she said. “Please.”
The dragon bore them back west, across the bay to the city, back into the heat and the corpses and the walls of flame, then glided down to a grassy area by the riverbank and set itself down with surprising grace. The people around it backed away, but did not cry out. No one had the strength left to cry out or flee.
Katsumi half-slid, half-fell off, then helped Yasuo down. What she had in mind would never have occurred to her in the years of peace, when Father spent his days with his books and Mother tended her garden and all was well. But now fire and death had overrun her whole world, confronting her everywhere she looked, stinking in her nostrils, and it was all there was.
So she went around the dragon as it shifted on the grass, tail twitching. She bowed as if to the Emperor.
“Mr. Dragon, you spoke of food. I am young, only thirteen—”
Yasuo squealed, seized and hugged her from behind, crying. “No, Katsumi, no.”
“You may have me, Mr. Dragon,” she shouted over her brother, “if you will go and burn the U.S. capital city. I’m better than whatever the Americans are feeding you, and you will exit honorably, repaying flame with flame.”
She felt the dragon’s heat and its moist breath, heard it snort. Its breath smelled of burnt charcoal. It was directly in front of her, looking her over. She trembled, wanted to panic and bolt, but where to go? She held herself in place, the beast’s breath washing over her, and waited.
The dragon drew back. “Little girl, you helped me from the water years ago. If you want this so badly that you offer your own flesh, then you shall have it. I will do as you ask.”
“Thank you, Mr. Dragon, thank you!” She sprang forward, embraced its leathery head, felt its skin tense. She jumped back, tottered, regained her balance. “Thank you.”
It straightened itself up, as far as such a misshapen creature could, and spread its wings. “But little girl, be aware. Other freaks like myself do exist, if very few, in different parts of the world. And no one can know what the future holds.”
She did not care about this, could not register it. The fiery holocaust that her city had become and the parents she would never see again, did not allow her to care. She had something to hold on to now, a hope, and that was far more precious than any possibility. Worry about possibilities tomorrow, if any tomorrow for Japan remained.
She bowed. “Goodbye, Mr. Dragon.”
She backed away, Yasuo locking his arms around her waist. The dragon shuddered and sprang into the air, wings blurring, ascending eastward into the sky. In a few moments, it vanished in the smoke and the darkness.
