IN THE COMICS I liked to read hidden behind an oversized Look magazine, heroes came by their superpowers via startling and novel means. Captain America was injected with a serum by Dr. Josef Reinstein. Superman was born on a distant planet where his literally unearthly powers are commonplace. Both Doll Man’s shrinking to just six inches tall and Shock Gibson’s electrical attacks were acquired via chemical formula.
I died for my power.
I’d left the States behind and gone to London, blithely confident in my youthful optimism that there would be no war. After all, the grim-faced men with the task of politics had all seen the devastation of the Great War and knew its repetition must be avoided. Neville Chamberlain insisted that if we left Hitler and the Nazis alone, they would settle and be quiet, and at home in the States most of the talk was of letting things work themselves out.
So I went to London in 1939 on the pretence of furthering my education, but really in search of a good time, and I found it. I met a man who said he knew a fellow and could get me a job at the Windmill Theatre, performing in their tableaux vivants, but that I would have to audition for him privately first. I scrubbed my skin raw and shining, chose the lingerie which was the best combination of flattering and easy to remove, and climbed upstairs to the projection room of the Folly Theatre. I hiked my skirt with practiced nonchalance to ascend the short ladder into the booth, never giving a thought to the thick metal door I had to pass through, or the iron shutters hanging over the projection ports facing the silver screen, or the chains which ran between the massive projectors and the shutters. All this meant no more to me than the machinery of the projectors themselves, and I had come only for Harry.
So he started the film and gave me the nod, as A Girl Must Live flickered over the heads of the audience below. We had twenty minutes before the reel change, and I began my audition for Harry.
I must have done pretty well, for I distracted him from the cigarette he’d lit in blatant violation of the sign upon the door. When he rose to come toward me—“a girl in the tableaux vivant must not move, no matter what, so let’s test your resolve”—he let it fall to a stack of film canisters, one of many ringing the projection booth, but this one with a lid which was not quite closed over the coil of celluloid inside.
What I did not know then, but I know in exquisite detail now, is that nitrate film is very nearly the same substance as guncotton. It’s relatively safe when handled properly, but it becomes volatile with age. It is intensely inflammable, and great care is generally taken to keep it from igniting via the carbon arc lamp in projectors.
When a burning cigarette touches it, it is a candle to flash paper.
The roll of film burst into flame, and Harry jumped backward, cursing. He struck the projector with his shoulder and grasped at it to stay upright. A tower of fire leapt upward from the canister, and around it ominous noises came from the adjoining canisters, warming in the sudden blaze. Celluloid ignites from mere heat.
Harry whirled and ran for the door, leaving me naked behind him. He wrenched back the heavy metal shield and fled through it, pulling it and the attached chain shut behind him. I stared, uncomprehending, hardly understanding the danger or that he had simply abandoned me to it.
The room exploded.
Fire raced around the walls, shooting out from stacked canisters. I snatched up my discarded skirt and blouse and tried to press out the fire, but I only burned my hands and arms. Celluloid creates its own oxygen as it burns; there is no smothering it. The heat fuses in the chains overhead burned through and the shutters slammed down, trapping me in the rising inferno.
Smoke poured from the burning film, nitric acid which began to dissolve my skin. I beat at the door, screaming, but it held fast, designed to seal solidly against a wall of flame and expanding with heat against its frame.
There was a fire grenade on the wall, a red globe filled with fire extinguisher. Its restraint melted with the rising heat and flung the globe into the rising flames. The glass shattered and its carbon tetrachloride spread over the fire, quelling the places it touched and transforming with the heat. The incongruous scent of freshly-cut grass swept over me, and I gasped the new-formed phosgene gas—the trench gas of the Great War—as I screamed.
I burned. I burned from nitric acid without, from phosgene within, from fire everywhere. The booth was filled with smoke and flame and my screaming.
Mistress.
The word seared my mind as the fire seared my flesh. I could not respond to it as I clawed frantically at the door, the wall, the flame-spitting forge of a projector.
Mistress. Come to me.
I turned, less in heed than in desperation, and saw a great black dog standing unaffected in the fire. It looked like something between a wolf and a great hound, tall and lean and dark against the flame, and it watched me as if waiting for something.
The blood waits, mistress.
I did not know what that meant, did not know where the words were coming from, did not know how I could see a dog where there could be no dog, did not know how to end my agony.
Breathe the fire.
I had been breathing the fire, had been scorching my lungs with acid and gas and flame. I cried in pain and frustration and fury.
Yes! Claim it!
I threw myself upright, clenched my blackened fingers into fists, and drank deep of the smoke and poison and blaze. I flung my head back in my pyre and poured out my crucible-purified rage in one incandescent scream.
The scream became a roar, matching the inferno in intensity, and despite myself I hesitated, surprised even in my anguish.
But the work was done. The fire continued around me, but my fingers uncurled, the skin uncracked, the charred black crumbling off into the carpeting fire to reveal pure skin. I gasped, and my lungs did not burn. I looked down at my unnaturally whole flesh, and my eyes did not water and peel.
I looked at the dog. It did not wag—this did not look like a dog who would often wag—but it somehow looked pleased.
Yes, good, mistress. You have done well. It cannot harm you now.
I tried to speak and found that I could form words with what had been my blistered lips. “What—what happened? What am I?”
The dog’s ears moved back slightly. You are a child of dragons, though the blood had weakened through generations of disuse. But it was there, and enough to be claimed.
Child of dragons? I had a brief memory of Grandmother dragging me to sit through some part of Der Ring des Nibelungen, which had felt more like all fifteen hours of it. There had been a dragon. But I was still standing in fire and I could not think clearly.
Fire and poison are your birthright and your tools, the dog said to me, however it was speaking. They cannot harm you once you make them yours.
I relaxed my posture, gradually coming to grips with the fact that I was not burning to death. “Who are you?”
Brand.
The dog approached me, tail waving loosely behind him. Flame reflected in his eyes, or they were glowing with their own fire. I reached out and touched him—not giddily, as if he were a lap spaniel, but respectfully, as if he were a wolf-dog of fire.
The carbon tetrachloride was doing its work, and the nitrate film was burning out. But no one would enter the theatre soon, not with all the poison still in the air.
Brand went to the door. We can go before they come.
“I’m naked,” I said. My clothes were ash.
His ears flattened in a canine grin. Perhaps you should have considered that before disrobing.
“I didn’t know the room would catch fire!”
I, too, wear no clothes.
I resolved to steal one of the usherettes’ overcoats on the way out, in the likely event one had been abandoned in the evacuation.
The cooling door slowly shrank in its frame, and I pulled it open with fingers that should have blistered from its residual heat. We left.
I DID NOT go back to the nightclubs, and I never went to the Windmill Theatre. That part of me had burned away in the projection booth, and now I craved purpose. Also, I did not want to see Harry.
I spent time in the public library, looking up all the reasons I should have died. I replaced the books on the shelves myself, irrationally afraid a librarian should wonder at my assortment and guess at something I could not myself identify.
The Prime Minister was wrong, and war came. A new prime minister replaced him. And then the Blitz began.
I joined the Women’s Voluntary Services, aiding with evacuations, mobile canteens for the firemen, clothing and shelter for refugees, inquiries from survivors seeking those they hoped were survivors. It was hard, but worthwhile, and we did not bow beneath the bombs which fell so often on us.
Brand stayed by my side, and in daylight he looked much like any lurcher to be found in the English countryside, and few people gave him a thought beyond how much of my rations he must consume. By night, however, he took on the appearance of a hellhound, and he was careful not to draw attention to himself.
You are a dragon, he said to me one morning, as he did so often. You have power to make war. And yet you stand here and make tea.
“I am doing important work,” I said, and I waved to a woman kicking fresh debris from the night’s bombing off her doorstep as she retrieved the morning’s bottle of milk. She returned the wave with a smile. “I do not wish to make war, only to survive it.”
You are hiding from yourself.
That might have been true. I did not know what to make of my dragon blood, and alone in London I had no one to ask. Four times I had started a letter to my grandmother, asking about the dragon in the opera, and four times I had abandoned the half-filled sheet to the rubbish bin.
Christmas came. It was 1940, and much of London was rubble, although morale was still high and even the children were bearing up well. We at the WVS served refreshments and handed out toys to children, and I gave our Father Christmas a peck on the cheek to their great delight. We had gotten through the worst of the Blitz. Beginning in September, the nightly visits had come fifty-six of fifty-seven nights, and then the Germans seemed to have, while not given up entirely, at least exhausted themselves as much as their targets and to have slowed their attacks.
I’d treated myself to a viewing of The Great Dictator—it had been months before I’d entered a cinema again, and I was proud of myself for having done so tonight—and was heading home. I made a face as we crossed the Thames. The tide was exceptionally low this night, and the river stank with refuse and exposed muck. I went home to my flat, Brand at my side as always, and kicked off my shoes. It was Sunday the twenty-ninth, my night off-duty, and I meant to enjoy it. My flat-mates were away in their various roles, so I had the place to myself. There was an Anderson shelter in the back garden, should the sirens sound, but I meant to curl up in a comfortable chair with a novel and my windows safely blacked to hoard the light.
Brand curled into the matching chair beside mine, coiled into himself more tightly than seemed possible. I had not worked him out. He was a hellhound, he admitted that much, and he had recognized me for what I was when I passed him en route to that fateful cinema. Beyond that, he said only that he was adrift here much as I was. We should be doing more than we are.
“What more can we do?” I asked. “I cannot fly a bomber to Germany. I haven’t the skill.”
There are many women doing the war’s work, he answered with a reproving tone even in my own mind, and you have another skill.
I did not like to speak of the time that a bomb had splashed fire onto the exposed wood of a pub and I had smothered the smouldering corner with my bare hands. No one had seen what I had done, as they were too busy fighting the rest of the fire, and that meant I did not have to face questions to which I had no answers—except from myself and Brand, and myself I could distract with a novel.
We must fight them, he growled.
“The Germans?”
Those who drive them. They are warg, outsiders, outlaws. Their spread must be stopped.
I did not know if he meant the Nazi party or something else. I did not ask. I opened my book.
Sometime near six, the banshee wail of the air raid sirens began to scream their warning, and I groaned my annoyance. Should I go out to the Anderson shelter, beneath the earth of the garden, or should I remain where I was? Most citizens sheltered at home, and there seemed little difference in results. The Anderson shelter would be crowded with other flat tenants, while here I had only Brand and myself. I turned the page and kept reading.
But this night was not quite like other nights. I heard the planes, and the booming of the guns trying to bring them down, but I did not hear the explosion of heavy bombs. Several times I heard what sounded like a scuttle of coal being spread through the streets, but there were no familiar whistles and booms. I read on; after over a year of constant raids, it needed more than a curious sound to draw me out.
An hour or two passed, with my attention primarily on the book and only vaguely aware of the continuing drone of passing planes. What eventually caught me away from the novel was not the shaking roar of explosions, but an ever-increasing light which pierced even my black-out blind. The bombs had ignited buildings. I glanced at Brand, whom I’d observed to sense fire as other dogs sense their master’s returning footstep.
He was already looking at me. We must go.
I put on my uniform and we went out into an eerie London, with points of fire in all directions and planes screaming overhead, picked out by clawing searchlights.
Look.
I did not need Brand’s instruction to note the conflagration rising through the city buildings, drawing the returning bombers with its guiding light. Its flames whipped into the air and whirled, caught in a fierce wind I knew did not blow over the rest of London.
Firestorm.
I turned and ran ahead of the growing inferno. Telephone lines could go down in large fires, and the fire stations must know what was coming so they could meet it.
Wind pulled at me as I ran down the street, and I realized it was the firestorm drawing air even at this distance. At the fire’s base it would be a howling torrent, screaming as it built the flames into a tower which leapt ever forward as its heat began to combust the buildings around it.
I looked ahead and my heart froze in an icy clench despite the fire. The dome of St. Paul’s rose above the surrounding buildings, lit clearly for every German bomber to target.
Brand and I made it to Redcross Fire Station and I slipped inside the door. The electricity had gone; the office was lit with a few battery and oil lamps. “The fire,” I gasped. “It’s coming for St. Paul’s.”
The firemen inside, already soot-streaked and weary, nodded, not wasting time or breath to acknowledge what they already knew. Further within, firewomen worked at the phones, coaxing information out of failing lines.
“There’s simply no more water,” a woman said urgently into the phone. “The mains are destroyed. You must do something.”
Another shook her head. “The river is too low,” she reported in professional tones, as if she were not announcing the death of a city. “The pumps are drawing only mud and muck and are clogging. The fire boats cannot reach. The only water is what has been stored ready at the Cathedral.”
A man finished his terse conversation with a woman and turned, and the firemen trooped out together.
I turned to the women. “Is help coming?”
“And the line’s down,” announced a firewoman with controlled frustration, putting down her handset.
Another firewoman, who by her sooty appearance had run through the street as I had, turned to me. “Yes, as much as we can. The Prime Minister has ordered all units are to concentrate on St. Paul’s, saving it at all costs.”
This surprised me. Yes, the cathedral was important, but it was a building like all the others. It was important—but was it so much more important than the rest?
She read my face. “Yes,” she said. She leaned nearer me. “I came here from my own station when I could not remain any longer. The very asphalt had begun to burn around me. I came here, because I knew St. Paul’s would need protection.”
“But why at all costs? Why not try to save more?”
“Of course we will try to save more! But we must save St. Paul’s.” She bit her lip and frowned at me. “It is more than a building. It is a symbol—but it is more than a symbol. It is our hope.”
“Our faith, certainly, and hope—”
“And our hope for aid.” She held my eyes. “You are an American. You understand?”
I was an American, but I did not pretend to a knowledge of the complex politics between our countries. “I do not.”
“My husband works in the Home Office. He says the talk there is that the Americans will not enter the war if they believe Britain is lost. If the continent is occupied and if they have no secure base, they cannot hope to succeed, and so they will remain well out of it rather than commit themselves to failure. If we want allies, we must not fall—and we must not appear to fall. There are photographers and reporters everywhere. St. Paul’s is not just the cathedral, it is London.”
“Then—if St. Paul’s burns, the Americans will not join the fight.”
“And if the Americans do not join the fight . . .” She did not say the rest. No one would say the rest. It was inconceivable that Britain would not triumph, with or without the Americans—but it was agreed that it would be easier with them.
I nodded. “Then St. Paul’s must be preserved at all costs.”
Brand barked once outside the door, a sound he did not make often, and I went out. The firestorm had reached the cathedral yard.
“God in heaven!” cried a voice from within the station behind me. “Cannon Street station reports an incendiary on the roof! On the dome!”
Brand turned and looked at me. This is your task.
“What?”
This is for you. Go and protect the Cathedral.
I looked about me, drew a breath of air to scorch my lungs, and ran for the gates.
THE WORLD WAS on fire.
Paternoster Row was ablaze beyond all hope of recovery or control, as maddened flames devoured the millions of books in the publishing houses. Ave Maria Lane was burning, but firefighters held their ground, struggling to wet the buildings with the weakened pressure of their hoses. The fires lit the street as brightly as day, so that I could clearly see the waist-deep rubble and pick my way across it as if in some monstrous children’s game.
“Look at the dome!”
I shielded my eyes against the heat and squinted at the glorious, iconic dome, catching the bright smoulder of an incendiary lying on the sloped lead roof. I ran as best I could across the treacherous terrain, mindful of sliding debris and hidden flames. Brand bounded beside me, far more agile.
I could see members of the Watch scurrying about the Stone Gallery outside the base of the dome, hauling sandbags and stirrup pumps and rushing to several dots of fire scattered about the walkway. High above them glowed the lone incendiary, burning through its thermite.
When its magnesium load caught, its fire would grow to white-hot, turning the dome roof to butter beneath it and dropping into the gap between the outer dome and the hidden supporting dome, where it would immediately ignite the wooden supports and heat-crack the brick structure, dropping all into the cathedral itself.
That a single tiny device, less than the length of my forearm, should be capable of bringing down this great symbolic landmark brought me to fury. I rushed into the churchyard.
The Watch was spread thin about the buildings, fighting fires in the roofs, in the gardens, in the library. Incendiaries had lodged in roof timbers and narrow pockets, and sandbags and individual buckets had to be hand-carried to these all-but-inaccessible nooks to smother them before their magnesium could catch. Everywhere were shouts of alarm and of orders.
I climbed the stairs to the Stone Gallery and emerged into what should have been open air, but what was a view onto an inferno.
Nearly two hundred feet below, the streets of London were yellow and orange, with abandoned fire trucks left where their tires had melted. Tornadoes of flame rose spiralling above the burning buildings, clawing high into the sky above me, as if to catch the German planes which had birthed them.
Buildings on either side were engulfed in flame. All across the roof of the cathedral, men rushed from place to place, attacking smouldering incendiaries and calling locations of devices spotted on other roofs, shouting through the roar of the fires and the crash of collapsing buildings and the hot wind which blew flame and burning embers across roofs to spread anew.
I turned and ran along the Gallery, looking upward for the incendiary on the dome. It was easy to pick out, burning against the solid backdrop of the dome itself, but I could not reach it.
Brand had followed me, unnoticed like me in the fierce concentration of the battling Watch, and now we stared up at the tiny, treacherous thing. It still burned only thermite, but even by only the orange light of the towering flames we could see the discolouring around it as the lead exterior softened.
I had once been inside the exterior dome, a private tour with a handsy guide. Great wooden beams spread across the gap between the decorative outer dome and the brick cone which supported both it and the seven-ton golden cross and ball above. I knew during raids the Watch patrolled along the open wooden beams, with careful balance of their buckets of water and little handheld stirrup pumps to throw water onto small fires.
There was no means of fighting a large fire there.
If an incendiary were to penetrate and lodge in one of the joints, there would be a brief scramble to extinguish it before the magnesium ignited and then the intense burst of heat and flame would be caught against wood and brick, and the three nesting domes would collapse together and drop onto the cathedral floor.
Melt it out.
I looked at Brand. “What?”
It lies on a slope, caught against lead. Melt the lead to the outside, so that it slides down the slope instead of burning through directly beneath itself.
The incendiary would slide downhill like a child’s sled and drop onto the Stone Gallery, within easy reach of the Watch and their sand and water. “But—how can I do that?”
Brand’s ears turned outward in irritation. You are a dragon’s child. Use your skill.
I had no skill but survival. I had never had control of fire. Certainly I could not exhale it like the dragon tales of old.
Draw it. Pull it. Stretch it.
I looked up at the firelit roof.
You can feel it just as I do.
I knew Brand could sense fire. Could I? Could I—call it? Direct it?
The wind from the south-west drove a hail of sparks and embers across us, stinging against my cheek. I could only imagine how it burned the Watch fighting fires across the lower roof.
I concentrated on the incendiary, trying to grasp it in my mind. I had seen Brand alert to fire he could not see, but I had never seen him control it.
You can sense it.
Of course I could sense fire—I was standing on island of rooftop among blocks of devastated buildings. All around us was a sea of flames, broken only by the occasional spire of blackened stone which had not yet fallen. Smoke glowed orange and pink above us, a travesty of sunset.
Brand was insistent. Reach for it.
I took him literally and stretched my hand toward the glowing device, as if I could feel its warmth above the charring wind which swept the Gallery. I curled my fingers as if I could grasp it, and in my mind I pulled the flame like taffy, tugging it resisting toward me.
The flame flickered.
I did not think it was my doing. I had felt nothing, did not even know what I should feel, and there was a strong wind to pull it. But I continued, for there was nothing else to do and I would rather feel silly than helpless.
The burning canister slid a few inches, catching against a seam of unmolten lead.
Good, good, called Brand. Bring it down.
I still believed it the wind rather than myself, but there was no point to arguing. If I were doing nothing at all, at least I was not hurting, and there was nothing else to be done. I tugged at the fire, drawing it toward the lower end of the device, urging it to soften the outer ridge of lead before the sheathing below it. The wind blew a hot gust against my face, making me squeeze my eyes against ash and sparks, and when I opened them the device was a hands-breadth lower.
Bring it down!
There were voices near me, the Watch shouting to one another, but I did not let myself be distracted. I clasped my hands before my chest, squeezed my fingers as if I could actually catch the flame within them, and tugged.
The incendiary rode a smear of melted lead and rolled free, hitting the steep drop of the dome and tumbling to the Stone Gallery. My heart leapt with triumph, even if it were only my imagination that I had done it.
A host of cheers rose into the hot air, along with sharp cries of “Smother it! Smother it!” I turned and saw several members of the Watch converging on the device, crushing its fire with the pitiful remnants of sand they carried.
“It must have melted out, maybe the weight on the outside.”
“Was that the only one?”
“Only one which stayed on the dome. There was a whole cascade of them what hit it and bounced everywhere. Still fires in the roof timbers.”
“What are you doing here, miss?” This fireman, streaked black with smoke and sweat, was curious.
“I came to help,” I said, trying to think of how I might be helping in a way which required less explanation. “I was carrying buckets. The mains are out.”
He nodded. “No water to be had, that’s the truth.”
“Help!” This was from someone new. “Fire in one of the pocket roofs, and we have men trapped!”
We followed him to the fire. It did not occur to the Watch to warn me back; every capable hand during a raid was welcome. While men generally handled the pumps and hoses against the fires, women drove the trucks of petrol through burning streets to refuel the fire-fighting equipment.
The fire had caught in one of the pocket roofs, the space behind an arch, and penetrated to the timbers in the hidden space between the roof and the nave’s ceiling below. The fire was contained, but only just; sand and water kept it from spreading across the roof, but there was a wall of fire cutting off the far end of the space. We hung back, shielding our faces from the heat.
“We’ve got them all out,” called a Watch member as we arrived, “all but one. Damned fool won’t rush the flames to come through, but that means he’s trapped for certain against the far wall.”
“He’s got to come out through that?” One of the men who had come from the Stone Gallery looked dubiously at the flames.
“We need water. No way to fight that down.”
“He’s afraid to come out through it,” a man observed without judgment. “Sure, he’ll burn if he does, but he’ll burn if he doesn’t. Least here we can catch him and smother him out. If he stays, he’ll die there.”
“Where’s more sand? How much do we have? Can we make a path in?”
“We’ll never find him in the smoke, if he’s even still standing.”
“We’ve got to try, haven’t we? What have we got?”
As they conferred, eyes on their dwindling resources, I took a breath and stepped into the fire.
It took all my courage and more. While I remembered surviving in the projection booth, and while I had touched fire unharmed more than once in the past year, it still required an incredible act of will to step into flames my own height. If Brand had not walked beside me, I am not certain I would have done it.
Brand seemed to almost disappear in the fire, moving through it as if he were dark flame itself, so it was difficult to follow him and I had to press on in what I thought was a straight line. The smoke was so thick I could not see where I went, despite the flame all around, and what I breathed should have sickened me.
My blood rushed through me as if I were on a Coney Island coaster. I should have been terrified, should have been thinking of the poor man I’d come to find, and instead I felt a strange thrill or glory.
Here!
I found Brand beside the huddled figure of a man, clinging to himself on a patch of exposed brick against the outer wall. His stirrup pump lay abandoned beside an empty bucket. I rushed to them, wobbling as my shoes broke apart.
You know him.
I reached the man and seized him. “Come on! Can you walk? We have to go!”
He looked up at me, eyes wide with terror and surprise, and I saw it was Harry.
He recognized me, too. He saw the woman he had left to die in an inferno, who now had come for him in the flames at his own death. “I’m sorry,” he whispered through cracked lips. “I’m sorry. I was afraid. I’m afraid now. I’m sorry.”
For an instant I felt a perverse pleasure in his horror, and then I concentrated on the job at hand like the WVS woman I was. If a job needs doing, it will be done. “Get up,” I said. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”
He twitched away from my hand. “I don’t want to go,” he said. “Not where you’re taking me. I’m sorry! I don’t want to—”
I slapped him hard across the face. “Does that feel like a spectre’s hand?” I snapped. “I came to help you to live. Sort your soul once we’re out of this. Come on!”
I pulled him to his feet and steadied him; the smoke was taking its toll. Brand went ahead of us, passing through the fire, but I had to choose the less intense ways for Harry and myself.
He was terrified, and I had to drag him forward. “Hurry—don’t give it time to catch you.” He squeezed his eyes shut as we stepped into the flame.
I knew better now the stretch between us and the waiting Watch, and we burst free in a rush. Cheers went up as two men rushed forward to put out his burning clothing. Harry stumbled and went to his knees.
“Good Lord, miss,” a Watch member said, “you put us all to shame. We didn’t even see you go until you were already disappearing into the fire.”
I smiled, patting out my blackened and smoking uniform. The wool had resisted catching fire, which made my lack of obvious injury slightly less implausible. “I didn’t want you to try and stop me.”
“I’m glad we couldn’t. He’s glad, too.”
Harry was staring at us. “Can—can you see her?”
The Watch member laughed. “Did you think she was an angel, coming for you?”
Harry’s face suggested he might yet think otherwise.
“Get them down to fresh air—what there is of it—and first aid,” another man ordered. “And let’s do what we can for this.”
THE ALL-CLEAR sounded, which meant firefighters could work without fear of fresh bombs exploding over them. Dawn revealed the full devastation. The area around the Cathedral was ruins, a wasteland of rubble which, though contained, continued to burn for days. But the dome stood unvanquished, an island of faith and perseverance in the smoky sea of London.
They called it the Second Great Fire of London. Over one hundred thousand incendiary bombs had fallen upon the city, starting over one thousand five hundred fires which were visible in the night from one hundred miles away, and we had borne up under it. St. Paul’s still stood, towering above the smoke. London could, as ever, take it.
A few weeks later, two men were waiting for me as I arrived for my WVS duties. They had the suits and undefinable air of government men. One wore aviator sunglasses. “Can I help you?” I asked, taking a notepad from a desk and a pencil from the incendiary tailfin we used as a holder.
“We understand you were present at the defence of St. Paul’s,” the man without sunglasses said, his hands folded before him. “Is that correct?”
“I was.”
“You were seen near where the burning incendiary fell off the dome,” he continued, his voice neutral, “and then you participated in the rescue of an entrapped Watch member.”
“Yes, I was there.” I did not know where this was going, but I was starting to feel wary. I did not know what I had to be ashamed of or conceal—but I did not know what I was concealing, either.
“You have a large black dog,” he said. “Large for keeping in this time of rationing, and his coat is not long enough to be useful for the dog’s-hair yarn you ladies use for refugee clothing.”
Brand ate very little, in fact, but that was also a difficult thing to explain. “I have not overstepped my rations,” I said, “and he’s not been any trouble to anyone.”
“I did not say that he had.”
“What’s this about, sir?”
“We should like to speak with you about doing special work for His Majesty’s government. We understand you are an American, but arrangements can be made.”
I blinked. “What sort of work?”
The man with sunglasses spoke for the first time. “Very specialized, and appropriate to your particular skills.”
“Sir, I’m just a girl with the WVS, I haven’t any particular training—”
He stepped forward and tipped his sunglasses down to look over them at me, revealing eyes with a peculiar orange tint to their hazel and curiously narrow pupils. “The training will be made available to you.”
Those eyes. My heart quivered in my chest. “Do you—you know—do you know what—” I could not formulate the complete question.
“We are assembling a team,” the first man said, “toward a specific end. That team will visit specific industrial centres in Germany. Hamburg, for example.”
They knew. And they knew more than I did. And they wished to teach me to fight.
You are a dragon. You have power to make war. They are warg, outsiders, outlaws. Their spread must be stopped.
I thought of the thrill when the bomb had fallen from the dome, of the rush I had felt passing through the flames in the roof timbers.
“I’m listening,” I said.