Section F: Fairy Tales & Physicists

Chapter 25

"Graham, what the hell? You just toasted Radovic!"

"Yes. Although I suspect roasted is probably a more accurate term."

"But...but...you can't do that kind of thing!"

"Why ever not?"

"Well, because it's...you know—wrong. Plus, we're federal agents. We don't roast perps, we bust them."

As if on cue, the wreck of the SUV—already burning ferociously—exploded below them with a tremendous concussive whump, the shockwave washing over the dragon and the agent in a torrent of heat and noise. They watched on as fragments of flaming wreckage rained down upon the desert.

"Not a word," growled Fields. "Not a bloody word."

The voice in his head was pure innocence. "I wouldn't dream of it. At any rate, you're the one who's a federal agent, Fields. I'm a fire-breathing dragon. Roasting kind of goes with the territory."

"But—"

"Look, you said you wanted him stopped, so I stopped him."

"I didn't want him stopped from existing!"

"Well, you should have been more specific. I'm not a mind-reader, you know."

"What?" exploded Fields. "You're literally communicating with my mind, right now!"

"One-way traffic, Fields. Projecting a message into a human brain is a very different kettle of fish to extracting meaning from the jumbled morass of misfiring synapses you choose to call consciousness. Honestly, I sometimes wonder how on Earth you people manage to walk and breathe at the same time, let alone invent new and exciting ways to clog your arteries, conduct wars, and ruin your planet. Trust me, it's quite enough listening to the things you vocalise, without trying to wade through the mental quagmire you call a mind in search of even more tiresome mundanity."

"Yeah, yeah, I love you too. But next time, dragon-boy, questions first and flamey-flamey later. We don't just go around killing people."

"Not even self-confessed murderers, bent on world-domination?"

"No! Of course not. We don't get to be judge, jury and executioner. We're agents and we follow the letter of the law."

"Oh Fields, you do amuse me. Do you think the letter of your law was designed to account for inter-dimensional dragons and multiverse-spanning plots? For fairy-tale princesses and storybook giants? Tell me, just how much use do you think the letter of your law will be in a world overrun by monsters and madness and creatures beyond your ken? Don't you think that in such a world a flames first and questions later policy might be fitting?"

"No." Fields surprised himself with the immediacy and vehemence of his response. With his absolute certainty. Maybe, on this day—on this very long, very surreal day, on this day of mind-bending, reality-warping, comprehension-defying, unrelenting weirdness—maybe his floundering, flailing sense of self just needed one solid thing to hold on to. One rock in a raging stream. One port in a storm. One double-shotted short black in a sea of decaf skinnycinos.

Whatever the reason, while he hadn't been sure about much today, he found he was very sure about this. "Never. If we haven't got rules—if we haven't got justice—then what have we got? When things get a little crazy"—he couldn't resist a wry grin—"when the freaky shit hits the bizarro fan, that's when those things matter most. Fire-breathing pan-dimensional entity or not, you break the law again, and we're gonna have a problem."

Being mocked was not something Fields ever enjoyed, but to have a dragon doing it telepathically in his head was at least novel.

"Oh, stop it Fields. You're killing me. If you haven't got justice, well then what you've got is most of the history of the world—trust me, I was there. And as for us having a problem? I'm massively stronger than you, I weigh at least a hundred times as much as you, and in the next five seconds I could tear you limb from limb, incinerate you, eat you, or simply let you fall to your death. Or, quite possibly, all of the above. You understand that don't you?"