Dragon.

Fire. Breathing. Dragon.

Another screech, and the flames continued to swirl and rush, a hissing, hungry cascade, pummeling the floor of the tunnel until it glowed red.

“Farthing!” My voice was lost over the roar of the blaze.

She’d brought me to safety and then … I spun, searching the tunnel for a sign of her, but I’d have seen—

Farthing wasn’t here. She was out there; I’d almost tripped over her when I fell.

Little lizard like that. Be burned to cinders.

With a final scalding lick at the cave floor, the flames disappeared.

A gust of scorching air hit my face, and I pictured the beat of wings.

Silence. I collapsed back against the cave wall. Farthing. I had to accept she had been directly in the path of the flames. It wasn’t fair—she’d brought me here, and she’d saved me. My eyes blurred. I pulled in ragged breaths and then coughed them back out again in the smoke. What were those dots of shattered light? I rubbed my eyes with my fists. The red-hot rock of the cave floor was cooling to black, circled by patches of moss, alight. Fire. I could hardly think for the shock, but I knew I needed fire.

I scrambled at my pocket with shaking hands to fetch out the kindling I had picked up earlier and fed the small fire farthest from the hole above. There were scraps of scrub around that must have fallen from above, and I crawled around to fetch them all up, moving like a clockwork automaton I’d once seen in a shopwindow, my mind on Farthing.

When I had used everything that could be burned, save the clothes on my back, I sat by the flame and clasped my hands together to stop them shaking. A dragon. A dragon.

I swallowed. I could still see the inferno behind my eyelids, that last dart of Farthing’s glossy green scales.

I forced myself to look around me.

I was in a tunnel, one of the lava tubes Mr. Darwin had warned me about. It stretched two ways, toward the sea and toward the volcano. I remembered what my master had said: The lava tubes often run only inches beneath the surface above in places. So we must be very cautious of falling into one.

But my fall had been no accident. It had saved me.

Farthing had … I swallowed.

It was just a lizard. A plain, ordinary creature …

“No! Stop it! Stop …” My voice echoed in the cave and I covered my ears, although I knew Scratch was in my head as well as on my back.

I slapped my hand against the wall of the tunnel, hard enough to smart, and the pain helped to keep the tears behind my eyes from falling. Getting attached to a lizard, talking to a fiddle … I needed to come to my senses. But how could I? I was going to die here, either trapped inside the earth or burned to ash outside.