Burn by Patrick Ness

Author:Patrick Ness
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

Part 2

Fourteen

SARAH’S WORLD HAD disappeared, but somehow also not. There was a moment of shimmer, as if she were underwater, and the world above stretched and ebbed until she broke the surface. But broke the surface where? For all she could tell, she was on a road that for most of its length looked just like the road to her farm. The turn, the small hillock beside it, the gravel, all the same.

But it was daylight, and the hillock was in slightly the wrong place.

There was the usual uniform gray cloud of the Pacific Northwest winter obscuring all horizons, where it had been completely clear just a split-second ago. If there was a Russian satellite flying overhead, no one here would ever see it. She looked back down the road.

“Daddy?” she said.

He was gone, too. She’d seen him put a hand to his chest, stumble to the ground. She’d seen his eyes go out.

Then he was gone.

So was Jason, no longer in her lap. The cars were gone as well. Her father’s truck, the sheriff’s car, the truck that had belonged to the boy with the claw. Who was also gone.

From the utter madness of what was happening, from a crowd of friends and strangers at night, from a bloodbath and a dragon and some sort of world-warping magic thing, she was—in an instant—alone on her road.

But also not her road.

She got to her feet. She could see the roof of her barn from here, a sight so familiar and comfortable it was all but invisible to her on her thousands of walks home to it. It was now taller than it should be, with a second-floor hayloft door looking out at the road. She also shouldn’t have been able to see her house from where she stood, but the rise that crops of onions had curved over for her entire life was now a dip of land instead, still filled with onions, but now leaving a clear view to the farmhouse.

Which was painted white, not the natural wood it had always been. The fields beyond, too, had none of the clearing that Kazimir had done. They were still thick forest, as were the fields next to them, which had been waiting for sugar beets to be planted until a moment ago. The clouds were so low, she couldn’t see Mount Rainier and had a panicked moment wondering if it was there behind the clouds at all.

“What is this?” she said, to herself, to no one, turning in a full circle. Was she just waking up? Had she sleepwalked out here and dreamed a different landscape that had felt so real the one she was seeing now was causing doubts?

But no. Jason had died in her arms. His blood was still all over the front of her work dungarees. Oh, no. Oh, nonono, Jason, her father—

“It is not as I expected,” she heard a voice say, the voice of a young man but oddly deep. She saw him walking side-on to her out of a ditch that also hadn’t been there a few moments before.

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