Kay had an atlas, one of those picture-book-type deals for kids that she’d gotten one Christmas, with a world map across two pages, all the countries shown in different colors. She’d marked places all over the world she wanted to go. Climbs she wanted to conquer: Yosemite National Park; Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa; Trango Towers in Pakistan. She didn’t quite know how she was going to do it, besides making a lot of money somehow. Winning the lottery, maybe. She wasn’t the best student and didn’t see herself in a fancy high-paying job. Never mind that many of those dots she’d marked on her map were in dangerous places. The regions of Dragon were in the north, shaded gray. Shadowy, unknown, off limits. “Here be dragons,” the map may as well have said. So wasn’t crossing the border another adventure? But rather than seek this one out, it had come along and plucked her out of the river.

Crossing the border by accident was one thing, and she hadn’t crossed very far then. Just washed up on the riverbank. No one could blame her; no one could punish her. But crossing intentionally?

Kay stood on the human side of the creek and looked across. The other side didn’t look any different. Going over there shouldn’t have been such a big deal. And why did she have to be the one to cross anyway? Meeting like this was the dragon’s idea. He should be the one to cross. Except she was a little easier to hide than he was, wasn’t she? Her tracks would be easier to cover up on his side of the river than his would be on her side.

The log he’d dragged across for a bridge was still in place, maybe wetter than it had been. It would hold up.

She ran across it before she could second-guess herself. Her hiking boots didn’t slip on the wet bank, and the log didn’t budge. This could have been any makeshift bridge across any creek, and the forest on the other side was just the same: tall pines, earthy smell, calls of distant birds. The only difference was in her mind, knowing she had crossed the lines on the map. It was enough to make this another world. She stayed by the side of the creek, perching on a smooth boulder. She pulled her knees up and waited. No dragon appeared.

Half an hour, she told herself. That was how long she’d give him. If he didn’t appear by then, she’d run back home and pretend that none of this had happened. Then again, maybe it hadn’t happened. Maybe she’d been knocked on the head and imagined the whole thing. But she wanted to know. She hadn’t thought about how the dragons had their own side to the story; now that she had, she wanted to know what that side was. And she would never, ever get another chance at this. This was another impossible rock face, and her uncertainty was the usual fear vying with exhilaration. Sure, she might fall. But she’d rather reach the top.

She heard the dragon’s breathing first. A short gust of wind rustled nearby trees, then another, and the gusts, like those that sometimes came suddenly from the mountaintops before letting the forest fall still again, were too regular. These gusts didn’t rustle, murmur, and startle. They breathed.

How could something so large move so quietly? Trees creaked all the time, branches rustled, so when he wound his way around the trunks, the sounds were no different. His steps were silent on the soft earth.

Her heart pounded hard, and she almost ran back across the log. She didn’t remember standing, but there she was, ready to take off like a rocket.

And there was the dragon’s head, right in front of her, his neck lowered almost to the ground so it was at eye level—with his eye nearly as big as a car window. The large, black, glistening surface showed her stricken face back to her. His body stretched out behind him, nestled among the trees.

“You came,” he said softly.

She nodded quickly, feeling like a mouse—a mere bite of food—caught in his gaze.

“Wondered,” he said. “Thought you might not.”

“I almost didn’t,” she said, backing away a couple of steps. Every time he spoke, warm, smoky breath brushed by her.

He gave a small growl, and her heartbeat sped up to a jackhammer rhythm. Was he angry? Maybe he was angry. She glanced over her shoulder, but didn’t think she could run fast enough to escape that long neck and lithe body.

Or maybe he was chuckling.

“Not hurt you,” he said softly, like a roll of distant thunder.

“Won’t. Won’t hurt you.” She winced at her own tone of voice. She sounded like an English teacher.

The dragon flexed his neck in an expression she couldn’t read. “See? Practice.”

Almost, it was too much. “But why?” she said, her arms spread, pleading. “You’re not even supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to be here. We’re not supposed to be talking to each other. If anybody finds out about this, they’re going to be so pissed off, it might start a war like the last one. So why do you even need to learn to talk to people? Why?”

“Too fast,” he said. “Again. Slow.” His expression shifted, the scales around his mouth turning downward. A frown, she realized. She’d been talking too fast, and she’d confused him.

She took a deep breath and started over. Slower, this time. Simple.

“Why do you want to talk to people, when there was a war between dragons and people? When dragons haven’t talked to people for sixty years?”

He sat still as a rock, the bulk of his body resting motionless. He could fall asleep and be mistaken for a pile of boulders—shimmering, silvery boulders, but still boulders. However, tiny flickers of expression—a twitch around his eye, a stretching of scales around his mouth, a tension in his neck—revealed that he was alive, that he was thinking. Considering how to answer.

“To understand,” he said finally. “Both sides.”

He gazed at her. Kay tried not to think of how neatly she would fit into his mouth. Two bites, at most.

She said, “We have stories. Thousands of years of stories about dragons. They’re always evil. They always destroy.”

Until sixty years ago, the stories were only stories. Over the previous centuries, the dragons withdrew to strongholds underground, beneath mountains and in unexplored caves, until people forgot they’d ever been real. Then the atomic blasts at the end of World War II brought the dragons out of hiding. When the shockwaves from the bombs in New Mexico and Japan reached them, they clawed their way back to the surface, and humanity’s nightmares came to life. The old stories—tales of Leviathan, of serpents and the evil they brought, of virgin sacrifices, warriors slain, and miles of land burned to nothing—had been history. Even recent sightings of sea monsters and lake monsters that had been discounted as legend may have been lone dragons, briefly reemerging into the world.

This time, though, unlike in the days of swords and armor, human technology very nearly matched the dragons’ power. They’d gone to war, fire-breathing dragons against fighter planes and tanks. Both sides feared such a war would destroy them all, and the land they lived on, so they called a truce, made a treaty, and the dragons retreated to a territory carved out for them in the northern Rockies, Siberia, and the Arctic Circle. Each side promised to leave the other alone, so they could all live in peace. That taut, anxious, so-called peace had lasted since. People lived with the images lurking in the backs of their minds, of fire blasting from the sky, melting ships, tanks, and cities. Silver River, Montana, where Kay lived, was the closest American town to one of the dragon territories and home to the U.S. branch of the international coalition that monitored the borders of Dragon. Fighter planes from Malmstrom Air Force Base patrolled the border, the schools ran dragon-raid drills, and you lived with it because that was just the way things were.

“We have stories,” the dragon said. “Of people with swords. They hunt us down. Seek us out. Wicked deeds.”