She is five and the sparks from her father's forge draw her in. She reaches for them and they fall on her fingers like snow. Her father snatches her back and tells her that fire is dangerous and not to be treated so carelessly. She asks why he puts his hands into it. He says he will tell her when she is older. Three days later he gives her an old staff, and even though the wood is worn smooth from many hands, she can feel the carved dragon slithering around it. It feels like it moves, but she likes that.
She is ten and there is a real dragon before her eyes. Pictures in every newspaper of one climbing from the water onto the shore of America. She asks her father if the dragons are the same as the ones in the legends he and mother tell. He says these are like the evil dragons, the ones that the good and brave dragons must fight. Mother gives her something that night. A little pin, a dragon coiled in a circle with its teeth bared and the crest on its head gleaming with red enamel. It looks like the dragon on her treasured staff, and it is warm when she touches it. It never feels cold, not even in winter.
She is thirteen and she tells no one that the blue in her hair is not her choice. She tells no one that it appeared when the blood of the evil dragon fell on her hand like the fire sparks in the forge. She tells no one that the dragon pin sunk through her jacket when the blood touched it, and that that night she watched it glow through her thin pajamas as it worked its way under the skin into her heart. She lies there and hears the fire whisper in her blood, and finally she understands. She is the dragon in all those stories. It is her job to kill the monsters.
She is eighteen and the fire in her blood is what gets her through the first terrible weeks at the Academy, where people underestimate her and think she is too delicate for this. She lets the fire burn in her hands at night, when she takes the staff her father gave her and practices long and hard while others sleep. In the morning there are scorch marks on the mat. Her dragon staff is the only one that does not turn to ash in her hands on those nights. She challenges all comers and wins, and she must, because she must be good enough, strong enough, to fight the monsters. All she has left of her family is the secret they protected and the duty they held. The duty now memorialized in the red and gold circle above her heart.
She is twenty and her new father says she cannot take a dragon heart into the drift. He says she is too strong for anyone else to bear. That the fire in her heart would be too much. So she turns to work restoring jaegers, where she can take the heat in her hands and bend metal to suit the places it is meant to go. She can stare into the heart of the double nuclear core of the Mark III jaeger she is repairing and not be burned. She knows that this heart is like hers. Fiery, damaged, and desperate to fight back. And she waits for when those hearts can be joined. It is all she dreams of in the night now. Fire reaching fire.
She is twenty two, and when her father says she needs more control she knows he saw the fire in her eyes. She has not let that fire come out this way in years. But the dragon in her heart is awake and calling out to something in Raleigh as wild as itself. She can feel the snow and ice that balance her fire, the wolf standing beside the dragon, and she knows this is the missing piece of the puzzle. This is the one she will fight beside, the one who can withstand her fire. Even the dragons of legend did not defeat the monsters alone.