“It’s on the menu, Agent Woolf.”
“So are pancakes. I don’t think I’d have those for lunch.”
“Just—”
He stopped because his eye was caught by a young man coming out the door of—he read the sign—Betty’s Drugstore. The young man’s clothes were poor, or perhaps just very old-fashioned, or perhaps this part of Canada still had school uniforms designed with the word “prairie” in mind. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, though nothing particularly in the ordinary either. If Agent Woolf had asked him straight out why this one boy out of everyone they’d seen on this trip had caught his attention, he wouldn’t exactly have been able to spell it out but—
“Those are the public clothes of a Believer,” Agent Woolf said.
Yes, Agent Dernovich thought, that was it.
Woolf watched the boy, too, as he trudged down the street, bag on his shoulder, hand going once, twice, three times to the side of his head facing away from the agents.
Agent Dernovich frowned. “Believers. I’ve never seen so many otherwise rational people take such complete leave of their senses. Lost idiots.”
“I used to be one,” Agent Woolf said, calmly drinking her coffee, seeming to take no offense whatsoever.
Dernovich damn near sputtered. “You what?”
She pulled up her sleeve about two inches. Sure enough, a dense set of tattoos started there that Agent Dernovich knew would cover all the skin she wouldn’t be expected to show the world. That it reached her wrists showed how deep her commitment had gone, at least at one point in a previous life Dernovich was now angry with himself for having had insufficient curiosity about.
Believers. A small cult that had sprung up two hundred years ago in BC and Alberta to worship dragons. It was insular and so surprisingly antihuman—despite being exclusively human in membership—it had never, unlike many North American sects, made the transition into a wider religion. They worshipped in churches they called Cells, observed a disgusting policy of free love and communal family-rearing, and were always led by someone called the Mitera Thea, “Mother Goddess” in Greek—a language neither of dragons nor western Canada—who was a kind of Pope to them, an infallible representative of a living deity. They even prayed to her, rather than any dragon god or goddess because they considered themselves unworthy of direct contact. She controlled every aspect of their daily lives. When she died, the fools didn’t free themselves, they just elected another.
They had been terrorists for a while, though mostly toward the end of the last century, burning down buildings deemed to be owned by the enemies of dragons, tearing down the border fences of the Canadian Wastes (even though the dragons themselves seemed to prefer the Wastes and obviously cared not for fences), and once—this was the bit that had sent the FBI to Canada, when the verb had resurfaced in their intel—assassinating the U.S. Ambassador to Dragons for being insufficiently respectful in the 1890s. But that was decades ago, before Dernovich was born, before the dragons had withdrawn from communications even. Believers were a historical footnote that, by virtue of decades of quiet, had somehow persisted into an irrelevance to most people.
The great joke of it all was that—even when Believers were committing crimes on their behalf—the dragons seemed to ignore them as much as they ignored everyone else these days, which was to say, almost completely. What kind of person would worship a god who clearly lived in the world, but who just as clearly didn’t care whether you lived or died?
They’d been watched idly by governments, usually by very bored agents nearing retirement, but filed away as a dead case. Until those now-somewhat-less-bored agents started reporting strange plans being made, hints of a prophecy the Believers thought was real, possibly even aided by a dragon or two. Maybe. The details were maddeningly thin and often contradictory. Through an improbably lucky car search at the U.S. border, they’d gotten copies of the runes that supposedly told this prophecy, but Agent Woolf went over them every damn day and could barely make sense of them either. Dragon runes were a spectacularly inexact language that changed with each breed, and so obscure they could mean anything or nothing. Except this time, the Believers clearly saw something that had made them act. The dragons weren’t talking, and worse, by virtue that most of the core Believers actually lived in the Wastes, they were technically under the purview of the dragons. You couldn’t just barge in and start arresting people to get more information, as much as you wanted to.
Dernovich had considered it all a wild goose chase, even with the word “assassin” showing up now and then. Until Chase and Godwin—who were cold-interviewing members of the non-Waste Cells willing to talk to them (a perishingly small number)—had clearly found something they acted upon without telling the bureau. Dernovich thought they were probably hoping to get in good with the new boss by making an arrest, but had instead turned up melted with their car this morning. Now he had to face the extraordinarily unpleasant possibility that the Believers not only did have a serious plan but seemingly the wherewithal to commence it with gusto. It was enough to make him lose his appetite.
“You’re Canadian, then?” he asked Agent Woolf, setting down his fork.
“Montana,” she said. “There are some isolated chapters in the wooded north of our own country, Agent, not just here.”
“How long?”
“Until I was nearly thirty.”
Dernovich wouldn’t have guessed she was much older than thirty now. He was on the verge of asking when she answered. “Thirty-four,” she said. “But I was on my way out of it for many years before then.”
“The journey out isn’t years long,” he said. “You just leave.”
“Spoken like someone with opinions on the subject but no actual experience.”
His face got hot. “Not the way you want to be speaking to a senior agent, Woolf.”
She shrugged, as if it were nothing. “I was merely being factual. That’s our job, isn’t it?”
“Our job is to ascertain if there is an assassin—”
“There is. We know the runes they’re reading from.”
“Find him—”
“Or her. It’s likely to be—”
“And stop him.”
She finally seemed a little piqued. “Shall we just arrest every Believer we see? Like this boy?”
“Of course not,” Dernovich said, so firmly that it shut off all the ambiguity he’d felt when he’d first seen the boy. And “boy” was right. He couldn’t be more than seventeen, disappearing into the trees that lined the river, probably to smoke, or whatever Believer teens did to rebel. Not a chance he was the one they were looking for, and they needed to find that person, as soon as possible. It had all suddenly gotten very serious.
Obscured as it was by the shock of finding out Woolf had once been a Believer, Agent Dernovich would only remember this mistake when it was far too late.
Malcolm walked along the riverbank. He had not had to kill anyone, which, despite all he’d been taught, was a relief that nearly made him dizzy again. All in all, a success.
“Thank you,” he remembered to whisper as he walked.
His ear felt better, too, and the day, though still bitterly cold, was shaping up to remain clear. He had no doubts. His fears had lessened. The FBI agents who were hunting him, had they but known, had he but known, were receding behind him.