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I wrote all that five years ago. (So, yeah. I've got all old and gross and legal-adult and everything. Deal with it.)

It's taken that long to get it through the Searles' lawyers. When I wrote it I hadn't even thought about the Searles'-lawyers aspect. I was only worried about trying to tell the story as well as I could without looking like any more of a moron than I had to - plus what people like Dad and Eric would think when they read about themselves. I wasn't trying to hurt anyone's feelings (although I admit hurting the Searles' feelings didn't bother me a lot) but where do you start, or where do you stop, telling the truth?

But it's the Searles that were the real problem. Somebody told me what I'd written was going to have to go through some legal stuff and I said "whatever" and went back to my dragons. Then it took months to hear any more - but I'd never been happy about trying to write the story of Lois' early life so I wasn't sorry that it went away for a while. Then we started getting legal letters. At first I thought, Drop dead, I'm not changing anything, and then I thought, Hey, great, it's not going to get published after all and go out into the world and be read by strangers . . . and then Dragon Drivel came out, or whatever dumb thing they finally called it, which is the "sensitive" version I mentioned on the first page, and it was even more gruesome than I'd expected. So then I thought, Well, okay, I'll have a try at changing what the Searles don't like - or I'll try to change some of it. Our lawyers had helpfully highlighted what they thought were the most controversial bits.

And I did try. But then I thought, I'm supposed to be nice about the Searles and their psychopath son when I'm not being nice about my own family? And if I start being nice about everybody all that's left is the me looking like a moron part. So then I went stubborn all over again and said "drop dead" officially, and our lawyers translated that into legal speak and . . .

So it's been five years. And I didn't change anything after all. Our Friends got involved and it was all going against the Searles - even I felt a little sorry for them - a little - they're stuck in their own reality warp which they have to make everyone else agree with, except almost nobody does any more, however much money they spend. But I suppose it's hard saying "yes okay our son was a rotten evil creep."

Rereading it now - now that we've finally got the go-ahead, which gives me the grisly opportunity to have a fresh attack of second, or two-hundred-and-sixty-fourth, thoughts about doing it - what I remember most was how OVERWHELMINGLY shut in and squashed and paranoid it was, Lois' first two years. Even "claustrophobic" sounds kind of loose and easy, compared to what it really was. I know, I said this at the beginning, I said I didn't want to go back there, back to that tiny cramped heavy scared space, I didn't want to have to live through it again to write about it. But it gets worse with time, not better. I can feel the walls leaning on my elbows and my head is suddenly the only thing keeping the ceiling up as I reread what I wrote. Even though mostly things didn't happen, you know? Mostly they were still just days . . . and oh-by-the-way the crazy, appalling obsessiveness of every one of those days. Necessary? Sure. Fascinating? You bet. A fun time? No cheezing way.

I also keep thinking about all the stuff I left out. Maybe I left the wrong things out, you know? Too late now. I can get back there even less now than I could five years ago, and I'm not going to try.

Which reminds me of the conversation I had with Eric after I'd given what I'd written to him to read. He didn't say anything immediately when he gave it back, although that wasn't necessarily a good sign. Eric's got human lately, by the way. He's got a boyfriend. Yup. Boyfriend. He says himself (I told you he'd got human) that it hadn't ever occurred to him that he was gay. He knew he wasn't very interested in girls and then just didn't think about it any more - maybe he was just 100 percent animal oriented - and Smokehill or any place where you're dealing with tourists all the time is not going to improve your opinion of the human race. Then one day Dan kissed him and (he says) it was like . . . oh.

He looked at me and I waited for the blast. It's not like he's not Eric any more, although the expression on his face was a lot more sardonic and a lot less toxic than it would have been before Dan. I tried not to shuffle my feet.

"Yeah, okay," Eric said finally. "Fair's fair. I was pretty much a bastard in those days and I was more of a bastard to you than to most people. But you were . . . bless your little pointed head, you were such a lightning rod for it.

"I don't deny anything you've said in here" - and he gave my manuscript a flap - "but there is other stuff. Like that your self-absorption was way beyond spectacular long before Lois." He brooded, continuing to give the big wodge of manuscript little jerky flips. The middle pages were starting to stick out from the rest. I probably wanted to be mesmerized by this because I didn't want to listen to what he was saying, but I did think about what was going to happen when those middle pages finished slithering out and you know how the harder you grab on to the outside the more of the middle waterfalls out. Maybe Eric and I could bond some more over putting them back in order. I don't think so.

"The best thing about YOU when YOU were a kid was that dog," he said. "That was a really nice dog and you did a really good job with him. So there: was that in your favor. Outside of that . . . you were so convinced you were the center of the universe - and the worst thing was you were right. You were the only child of the directors of the Institute, and the directors of the Institute were the rulers of the only universe that mattered. You bled arrogance like a slug leaves a slime trail."

Eric's way with words.

"Jake, stop staring at your manuscript and look at me," he said, testily. That sounded so much like the old Eric I had to smile. I also looked up. He smiled back, sort of, but it was a pretty steely smile. "I was the grown-up, so I admit it was my fault, and my responsibility, and I didn't do it very well. All right, I did it lousy. And it maybe needed someone like you, someone catastrophically self-absorbed, and someone furthermore who doesn't have a clue about anything but his own strange little world - have you ever had a McDonald's hamburger, for chrissake?"

"Once. I didn't like it."

Eric snorted one of his laughter-substitute snorts. "Well, come to that, I don't like McDonald's food either. But I was twenty-six when I applied for the job here. I'd spent twenty-six years living in cities. Where there are always people everywhere - their noise, their buildings, their garbage - even if you're out in what passes for the country there's a permanent light haze at night from the nearest city and you're still smelling car exhaust. And you can always hear a car on a road somewhere, or your neighbors' TV through the common wall - and your electricity comes on wires from the power station. It may have taken someone like you to raise Lois - to raise a Lois. Someone far enough out of what passes for normal experience to connect with a dragon. That didn't make you a joy to have around."

"A misfit," I said, half involuntarily. I didn't really want to encourage him to keep talking about this, but I couldn't help myself. "A mutant."

"Nothing wrong with your genes," he said, and I remembered that my father was his Staunchest supporter and Mom had actually liked him. "But a misfit, if you like. just as Lois is. And the misfit the two of you have made together is changing the world. And yes, I was jealous, when I got here, watching you. That's the part Martha's got right. If a fairy godmother had offered me the chance to be a misfit like you - to grow up in Smokehill, to know it as the only world there is - I'd have been all over her."

"I do - I don't - I read the news - " I started to say, I started to try to say with some kind of dignity.

"Oh, the news," Eric said, like you might say, Oh, the cat threw up, or Oh, that's chewing gum on the bottom of my shoe. He shook his head. "You've changed. Or I wouldn't be bothering to tell you any of this." He did his laugh-substitute again. "Hell, I admire you now - I wouldn't want to be Jake Mendoza, hero of the universe - anybody designed the logo for your cape yet? Only time I've ever seen anyone with his head that far up his ass just keep on going and come out into the sunlight after all. Wouldn't have said it was possible. All part of the new physics I guess. I'm just saying . . . you were a damned annoying little bastard."

Only half to change the subject, because I also really wanted to know, I said, "When did you figure it out - about Lois?"

Eric looked away - up, down, sideways, as if he was looking for an answer like a lost tool that he must have left around here somewhere. "I can't remember not knowing. But I can't remember some kind of blazing moment of Eureka! It must be that Jake's raising a dragonlet! either. It's such a long time ago. Thank god it's all a long time ago." He went silent and broody again, but this time he wasn't looking at my manuscript, but at me, and worse, he seemed to see what he was looking at. More not-shuffling-feet from Jake. "Do you find it hard to remember, now? To believe that it was as bad as it was?"

I nodded. "Yeah. And I like finding it hard to remember."

"Yeah. Worst for you. . .for you and for Frank, and maybe Billy. It still sucked for all the rest of us. First the dead dragon and the son of a bitch who'd killed her, and - that was enough. And all those ass holes wandering around, with their cheap suits and cheaper attitudes, demanding to know everything, including a lot of stuff they wouldn't be able to get their heads around anyway, but especially not when they'd already decided we were guilty and couldn't prove ourselves innocent. You couldn't turn around without another asshole wanting to know what you were turning around for. And we were guilty of course just not of what they thought they knew.

"Slowly we all realized we hadn't lost the plot, there was something else going on, besides trying to save Smokehill. It wasn't just we'd made something up because we wanted it so badly. We all knew by the time you went off to Westcamp, I think. But saying it out loud might make it true somehow the assholes could catch us at. We saw it in each other's faces - and jerked our eyes away.

"It's funny now. But the thing - the only clue - that something was going on besides major damage control and the likelihood that we would lose Smokehill - the one thing anyone could actually point to, that didn't look like desperate wish-fulfillment - was the way you were behaving. You weren't even on the planet - which in your case, Jake, is saying a lot. There was this crazy wired intensity about you - but what could be more important than the havoc over the dead dragon, the havoc that might cost us Smokehill? And the way you'd always hated the poor damn lizards in the zoo and the poor stupid fools who wanted to believe they were dragons because at least they were there and you could look at them jeez, chill out - and suddenly all that went away? What else could it be but that you had got yourself a real dragon? And if you could hide it in a Ranger's cabin, it had to be a very small dragon. Baby dragon. So the one that got killed was a mom dragon. Simple. Simple when we knew you."

I took a deep breath and said firmly, "Eric, I always thought you were pretty arrogant."

Eric really did smile at that, a long, slow, glinty-eyed smile, like nothing I'd ever seen on his face before. "Takes one to know one, kiddo," he said. "And I dare you to put that in your story."

So I have.

Eric still cleans odorata's cage, if nobody volunteers. What head zookeeper cleans his own cages? Eric's even got staff now. Mind you, I don't think - Dan or no Dan - Eric's doing it to spare anyone. He just doesn't want anyone being mean to odorata. So I suppose I have to say he's not only not the kind of bully who likes to assign the worst jobs to the people he hates most, that he let me clean odorata means that even if he did think I was a pain in the ass, I was a responsible, conscientious pain in the ass. I suppose this should make me feel better.

But a tremendous lot has happened in these five years, besides most of us lifers being able to start to forget. And if you've got this far in my dragon adventures and have learned to survive (or skip over) my philosophical blather and general rant you might like to hear about some more of it. Help make up for the five years you've been waiting. Ha ha. And if you have been waiting, the first thing on your last-five-years list is the story about how Bud almost flew through the front gate - at least according to the mail we, especially me, gets, that's the first thing on your list. (I get a lot of lists. People seem to think I'm going to find them helpful.) But if this is all really a soap opera with dragons - as it is, according to the mail - you might want to hear some of the rest of it too.

Like how I asked Martha to marry me. At Dragon Central with Bud watching us. Not that he knew that I was asking her to marry me (although I never know what he knows really). I didn't know I was going to ask her to marry me. I was doing my famous dragon headache skull squeeze. I've got pretty good at this; I can temporarily ease about 75 percent of human dragon headaches in about 75 percent of humans who get them (which is to say all humans who spend any time at Nearcamp). Although unfortunately it seems more to do with my hands than with the squeeze, which means I haven't been able to teach anybody else to do it, which is bad news for at least two reasons, the first being the obvious one and the second being that this contributes to the Great Jake Myth and while five million acres is plenty to hide in most of the time there's no escape from the mailbags they bring every day and I've begun to wonder if I'd better never go out the gate again myself ever either. Just like the dragons. (I did finally learn to do TV, but only because the public was so weirdly eager to love me that they turned my deer-in-headlights mental and physical paralysis into becoming modesty, and after that it was like, oh, well, okay, if it's going to be that hard to do anything wrong I suppose I might as well relax and go with the flow.) At least we had our honeymoon in Paris.

So that evening at Dragon Central, it had kind of been in the back of my mind for a while, I'm a retro kind of guy in a lot of ways and I'd begun to feel I was getting (even) less normal with every arriving mailbag and/or TV interview and I wanted to do this normal thing of marrying my sweetheart, okay? I was kneeling behind her and she was half lying with her legs stretched out in front of her, but she'd leaned back so her forearms and elbows were braced on my thighs and her face tipped up toward me with her eyes closed and even upside down she was so beautiful, so Martha, that I heard my voice say, "If you married me, you could get this on demand."

Martha's eyes opened and she smiled an upside-down smile. "I can get it on demand now." She closed her eyes again, and probably my grip on her skull faltered a little, because she opened her eyes and said, "That doesn't mean I won't marry you."

"But does it mean you will marry me," I said, pathetically, and she pulled herself up and out of my hands and turned around and said, "Yes, of course I'll marry you, YOU silly man, and I won't even tease YOU about it being for your hands," and then she kissed my hands, one after the other, and then she kissed me.

Bud was lying there with us - or some of the end of his nose was (the loooong hot rising and falling gust of his breathing politely angled past us), the rest of him going on and on to Wyoming or so the way the rest of Bud always does - and his eyes were half open, watching us, although it's interesting, there's no voyeur thing about it when he watches us, which he does a lot, although I'm pretty sure he has a pretty good idea what kissing is about. So after this kiss had gone on for a while and I started to get it through to myself that I'd just asked Martha to marry me and she'd just said yes, I wanted to jump around and shout and the only person [sic] available was Bud so I said, "Let's tell Bud."

It's a good example of the Marthaness of Martha that she didn't say, "What do you mean, tell Bud? We've spent five years trying to learn to tell dragons anything, or they us, and even you can't do it." She just said, "Sure," and got up out of my lap and we both went the few steps to Bud's nose and touched it with our hands. One of the things we have learned is that the getting-something-through - and I'm not going to call it "telling" or "communication" because that's a lot more grand than it mostly is - usually works better if the human has a hand on the dragon's nose, slightly depending on what the message is. (There may be other bits of both dragon and human that would work as well, but they'd probably be more embarrassing.) I sort of instinctively guessed that, that day I "told" Gulp that the bad guys were coming for us, and she got Lois and me away - but you tend to grab the other party when you're really urgent about something, and the reflex remains even if it's a dragon's nose rather than a human arm or shoulder. (And for those of us addicted to hand gestures, you still have a hand left over for flapping around.)

The refinement Bud has come up with is that it works better yet if the dragon curls its lip very slightly so the human can put his or her hand on the softer skin there just inside the tough horny outside. It's just about not too hot to bear, although I've begun to suspect that Bud anyway has pretty good temperature control. The first time Bud curled his lip at me of course I thought I was going to die - but he could have eaten me any time for months by then so why now? And if I was going to do something so offensive to dragon culture that I'd get munched in some kind of involuntary reflex (I've told you dragons are amazingly pacific; I doubt they've got any execution laws about anything) I'd probably already done it and hadn't been munched, so this new lip-curling must be something else. I figured it out eventually.

So now Martha and I both put our hands (delicately) on the hot red lip-margin of Mr. Dragon Chief and tried to tell him our news. I was thinking pair-bond-life-[that'showhumansdoit]-children-starting-just-now-hooray, more or less - pictures are better, but how do you put any of that in pictures? and stuff with high emotional content usually gets across the best even if there aren't any pictures - and Martha, who knew what I'd been trying to do with my dictionary almost as well as I did, was thinking something similar because I could actually feel her like an echo, "talking" to Bud.

And Bud, without moving, opened his eyes all the way and gave a huge sort of held-back (don't want to blow your tiny friends a few hundred yards across the cavern accidentally and bang them into the wall by unrestrained breathing) wooooooaaaaw, I mean with sound in it, and I've told you dragons don't use larynx noises much, and it sure sounded like "congratulations" to me. Furthermore Bud's wooaaw had roused the other dragons and there were little soft (little and soft as dragons go) rumbly wooaaws from the moving shadows, and one of the moving shadows slipped away - I'd also got pretty good at learning to hear the diminishing huge rustle of a dragon leaving the vicinity: You'd be surprised how confusing dragon noises are; makes most people dizzy (and nervous) till they get used to it, if they get used to it and while Martha and I were still sort of giggling and saying inane things to each other like "I didn't think dragons would be such romantics" there was a coming-toward-us gentle gigantic rustle and there was Gulp. And about two minutes later Lois was there too and for the first time in a year or so she forgot that she wasn't little any more and knocked me down. So Dad and Katie and Eleanor and Billy and Grace and Kit were only the second people to hear that we were getting married. The dragons were first. (Whatever they actually got out of what we told them.)

Now if you haven't already, this is probably the point where you talk about how it's creepy, me and Martha getting married, we'd grown up together, we were the only boy and girl either of us had ever really known (besides Eleanor, and it's going to take a better man - or woman - than me to tackle her), we should be like brother and sister, and at best we should go out and meet other people first, before we decide on each other, the implication being that then we won't. Well, in the first place, I don't ever remember feeling like Martha was my sister, although never having had sisters maybe I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about one. But while you're sitting there pitying me for being so limited, think about it this way, friend: What if you'd met the girl who was going to be the love of your life when you were four and a half and got to spend the rest of your life with her? Is that the biggest piece of luck you could ever have or not?

Growing up together had also made us able to communicate or anyway react to each other on levels that people who don't get to know each other till they're adults I think probably never can. I'm not using the "t" word again here. But it was like that sometimes - like what I just said about hearing her like an echo when we were trying to tell Bud we were getting married. Martha and I are in this together, and that's a big help. It makes it realer, saner, less just incredible. Even if it's more stuff that can't be taught. We'll figure out the teaching later. I hope.

I think both Katie and Dad had had those "they should meet other people first" thoughts, but life at Smokehill had got even stranger in the last few years and no one would understand any of it except those of us who'd lived through it. (Eleanor is going to use this to get elected president, of course, so her priorities in a partner are going to be different. If she changes her mind she could always marry a really tough Ranger.) And we'd waited till I was twenty-one and Martha was nineteen which meant they couldn't really stop us although we wouldn't have wanted them to try. And they took it really well after all. I could see them both worrying but I could see them both being glad too so that was okay.

We didn't tell anybody till it was all over - and we were back from our honeymoon. Dad's a JP so he could read the words, and Eric somehow got a license to do the blood test. Don't ask me how. Katie cried. Eleanor didn't. Eleanor said, "Great. I can have my room back." To Eleanor's tremendous credit, she'd let Martha and me drive her out of their cabin kind of a lot, so we could have the room - they shared a bedroom - a couple of hours in the afternoons sometimes, when Katie was on duty somewhere too so the house would be empty. It wasn't worth trying anywhere else at the Institute - and out at Farcamp and Nearcamp and Dragon Central privacy doesn't exist.

We had the wedding at Dragon Central. This was so great a piece of serendipity it made the whole wedding business even more . . . something. None of the adjectives will do here: great, wonderful, amazing, terrific. Maybe I should just say vvooooaativ like a dragon. But about twenty of us Smokehill lifers creeping off to do . . . something? No way somebody - some wrong body - wouldn't have noticed and maybe said something to some other wrong body and . . . but twenty of us lifers going to do some kind of private something at Dragon Central? Sure. Everyone goes all hushed and respectful and admiring and wishing they were a member of the magic circle too. It was . . . great. Plus having Bud and Gulp and Lois and some of the others there - watching the latest unintelligible human ritual.

I don't remember ever talking about a honey moon in Paris. Martha's always wanted to go to Paris and I've never wanted to go anywhere (no dragons). So we were going to get married . . . and then we were going to go to Paris. It was simple. I'd thought fine, I'll survive Paris because I'm going to be there with Martha, and she really wants to go, and I'll catch it from her. But I fell for Paris myself - loved it almost as much as Martha did. I kept thinking about being a freak who's barely been out of Smokehill, who's never even been on a plane before (two freaks, only Martha's always known the rest of the world existed, and she's visited her grandparents in Wisconsin a couple of times), and how Paris might have been Mars to us, and if this is what Mars is going to be like, well, those astronauts are going to have a great time when they get there, and I hope the lichen puts on a good welcome.

Dad's wedding present included five nights at this amazing hotel . . . all he'd said was that he'd "take care of it" . . . and I mean amazing. Reception was nearly as big as the Institute tourist hall and a lot grander, and our room was nearly big enough for dragons. There was one afternoon I'd actually gone out alone because Martha had admired this ring in a jeweler's window and - when did I ever go anywhere, right? - I hadn't bought her a ring although Katie had bought us plain gold wedding rings at a jeweler's in Cheyenne because she said (mildly outraged) that we had to have wedding rings and we didn't have to wear them after if we didn't want to. Rings hadn't occurred to me so then I thought that I hadn't done it properly (after all I'm Jake the Clueless Wonder Boy) so I was watching Martha fixedly like a dog watching you palming a dog biscuit, for any sign of wanting anything I could buy her in Paris, although it didn't have to be a ring. And there was this ring . . . so I went out to buy it, I can't remember what I told Martha I was doing.

When I got back she was just getting out of the bath and came out of the bathroom wrapped up to the chin in these huge pink towels so you couldn't see anything of her but feet and face, and her hair tied up on the top of her head all wet and curly, and she said something like, You know, Jake, you're doing really well here in Paris pretending not to miss your dragons every minute and only me to keep your attention . . . and she dropped the towels. I will remember that sight of her - the long golden afternoon light through the window blinds streaming over her like golden ribbons with every curve and hollow highlighted, and the white light from the chandelier in the bathroom haloing her from behind - I'll remember the picture she made when I'm on my deathbed and die happy. Oh yes, and she liked the ring. She wears it all the time. I'm still wearing the ring Katie bought.

It's true I was really glad to see my dragons again. Even after Paris. So we got back to Smokehill and then Dad released the news and everybody outside was pissed off that we hadn't let our wedding be turned into a circus, and we went off to Dragon Central till the uproar quieted down. And then we got a cabin of our own outside the Institute - a new one (and yes, our Rangers came and sang for us, and I sang, well "sang," a little bit too because Whiteoak has been teaching me some Arkhola), beyond the fortress, which has become office and official dragon-studying visitor space, although everyone calls it The Fortress - which was great, having our own house, although we still spent most of our time at Dragon Central and Nearcamp.

We pack in some human food and a change of clothing, but that's all. The dragon caves remain dragon. Which among other things means you have to be fit and strong enough to climb up and down the dragon "stairs." They're mostly okay at Nearcamp, but the ones at Dragon Central, while they aren't as bad as I'd thought when Gulp was transporting Lois and me, are still pretty hairy for us midgets, and at the foot of a few of the cliffs I still had to ask for some tactfully-placed boulders for scrambling. Once you get to the big main fireplace room there are always plenty of shed scales if you don't feel like sitting - or lying - on rock. And warm water in the sulfur pools.

And the answer to drafts in caverns full of dragons is to a dragon. Of course you have to choose one who'll remember not to roll over on you - and you say "please" first. Bud will uolirld :c wing a little and let you - well, Martha and me - sleep under that, which is pretty amazing. A dragon wingtip is surprisingly light, but you ran IM the hot blood whooshing through it. Like sleeping under a waterbe, l. The first time we got stranded by a blizzard it was maybe a little dark - I will never learn to love windowless underground caves and purple firelight - but we were plenty warm enough. And there was plenty of toasted sheep to go around.

Sleeping with dragons is useful too - you know your brain waves change when you're asleep. You pick up dragon stuff when you're asleep that you can't when you're awake - well, I knew that, from that first time I spent with Lois at Dragon Central with probably every dragon there except Bud and Gulp (and Lois) wanting me somewhere else. But the wanting-me-out-of-there, and the mortal terror, made the subtler stuff hard to recognize. Especially through the Headache. And then in the early days of Farcamp when I was spending every minute I could get with the dragons it sometimes got to be a little too much - well, I mentioned it five years ago, about not wanting to wake up some day and discover I'd started growing spinal plates. But with Martha with me it was suddenly okay - it was good. I stopped losing being human, you know? No matter how far into the dragon labyrinth I went.

And it also makes sense, about brain waves, in a way that a lot of stuff about dragons does not. But this doesn't mean we're going to start having a human dormitory at Nearcamp, so don't bother asking. You'd never sleep through the headaches anyway.

Martha and I got married two and a half years ago. That's a really good time to remember. Back a little farther, to when I finished writing this book the last time, that isn't so good. Five years ago is about the start of the really rough year or so I had learning to let go of Lois - and her to let go of me. There's some of that starting to happen at the end of what I wrote back then.

It was sort of easier in a gruesomely traumatic sort of way than it might have been because as soon as the world found out about Lois - as soon as the tape loop with me prancing around on Bud's head started playing around the world - our lives changed so drastically that we didn't know which way was up and which way was down (although if I'd fallen off Bud's head ninety feet up I'm sure it would have hurt, ha ha). So I spent a lot of that first year after the World Found Out feeling torn apart anyway and "losing" Lois was . . . it was, as I think about it now, not even the most shocking thing, which made it worse, if you follow me, how could anything be more shocking than losing Lois? Even if all that was happening was that she was growing up and that was good?

But what happened to Smokehill - all that attention and all that money, suddenly, after we'd been this goofy fringy theme-park kind of thing - the theme being our endangered invisible but smelly dragons - counting every penny, and yeah, okay, paranoid from the beginning, but we had cause, didn't we? Whatever Eric says about what growing up as the center of the Smokehill universe did to me, it did to me what it did to me because that's how it was. And then Smokehill changed. Smokehill changed. Lois and I were just the detonator for the Big Bang and the new universe. It was not so surprising that we lost each other in the process . . . even if we were going to have to lose each other anyway. So that Lois could have the life she should have. And I could have a life at all.

Well, you don't need to know a lot about that, and if Eric's right, then I don't really want to tell you about what even I know isn't me at my best, but it's one of those things I feel I should mention, because it's a big thing.

So by the time Martha and I got married Lois was spending most of her time at Dragon Central, which meant she was spending at least a major minority of her time without me, and she'd had a growth about a year after we met Gulp so the idea of touring her died the death a lot more easily than it might have if she'd stayed little longer (although a couple times a year we still get some enterprising head case who wants to provide the specially designed airplane to carry a dragon, and take us around to all the football fields in America, but Dad gives 'em short shrift). And then Martha and I did get married and after that it was a whole lot more okay that Lois had her own dragon family and her own life without me.

We still don't know where Lois actually fits in the family, by the way. The weird thing is that as the new post-Big-Bang hierarchy settled down, Lois got kind of taken over by Gulp while Bud kind of took me over. Oh, Lois and I saw and see a lot of each other, a lot by anybody's standards but ours, and when I was with the dragons she turned up pretty fast and stuck pretty close, and sometimes at first she still came back to the human world with me for a little while.

Grace - and Eleanor - who rarely got out to Farcamp, were always really glad to see her, although "glad" is easier to identify with Grace. Eleanor tended to say things like, "The bigger you get the more you smell." Or, "Nobody's going to respect a pink dragon. I hope you're going to turn green or something soon." Although I think it wasn't only that I understood what the words meant that I was the one who got pissed off when Eleanor said stuff like this. Eleanor gets better at aggravating me as she gets older. And Lois isn't really pink anyway. Not pink pink. Also I tell myself that Eleanor is just developing useful skills by practicing on me and it'll all be worth it when she hits the campaign trail and makes hash of her opponents during the debates ("and furthermore you smell.").

But Lois came back to the Institute less and less once she hit her growth spurt. By the end of her third year she wouldn't fit through ordinary doorways any more and although she didn't have keeping-up problems with people on foot, she couldn't squeeze into the back of a jeep any more either, while her wings weren't anything like big enough yet for flying. She also began to lose interest in strange humans - every new human wasn't immediately her new best friend, the way she had been. She would still turn it on for a TV crew, but you - well, I - could begin to see that her heart wasn't in it. It was as if she was being polite. Where did she learn polite?

She was learning to be a dragon. Who are I swear genetically polite. Which was the thing I'd wanted most of all, Lois becoming a, you know, genuine, 100 percent dragon, and that did take a lot of the edge off the whole mom trauma. What stopped me from getting too comfy about it though was that she was also obviously sweating learning "dragon language" almost as badly as I was. Like maybe there's a developmental window for learning language in dragons the way there is in humans, and if you miss it, you've had it. And that made me feel really, really, really bad.

But there are a couple more things I think I know now that I didn't then - three or four years ago. Now pay attention because I'm not going to tell you twice. I'm getting out into woo-woo territory and I don't much like it out here. Or rather, I like it fine, while I'm out there, with Bud, or occasionally some of the others, it's coming back to human ground level with what he or they have given me I find kind of bad, looking at it as a human and wondering what the hell I do with it and how to explain it in any way another human - any human but Martha - is going to believe - or be able to make sense of. Yeah, everybody gives me lots of slack - make that lots of slack - because of Lois, but old habits die hard and nobody outside space opera and unicorns likes the "t" word either. Maybe especially when the only stuff I bring back that isn't bits and pieces is all woo-woo and nothing I can shake down into words and put in my dictionary. So don't ask me any questions, okay? Just listen.

One of the big questions has always been what Lois' mom was doing having her dragonlets so far away from the rest of the dragons - from anywhere dragons ever go in Smokehill - and especially from her mid wives. Okay, you think, maybe the dragons did it differently when they were in cages, and maybe what Old Pete saw wasn't like what they'd be doing on their own. But that's not it.

The reason it happened is because she had a . . . uh, I'm going to call it a vision . . . that told her to. That told her to go off by herself and have her babies alone. I can still hardly think about it, it's so awful - her going off like that, and what happened. And it might explain why Gulp was quite so, well, beside herself, when she first found Lois and me. They'd known Lois' mom died, of course (I think dragons feel it when one of them dies), but somehow they'd missed that one of her babies had survived.

Or then again maybe they didn't miss it. I'm pretty sure I got what Bud is telling me about Lois' mom, but I'm not sure about this. It wasn't till two years later that we started getting those dragon sightings away from the usual dragon stomping grounds. But maybe a dragonlet has to be two years old before it starts showing up on dragon radar. Or maybe Lois didn't show up on dragon radar because her radar was crippled by being raised by humans. Or maybe part of the original vision included that the dragons should go looking for some kind of sign two years after Lois' mom died. (Okay, she did have her own name. It's something like Hhhhhllllllsssssssn. So I call her Halcyon.) I like that version myself - that they didn't know what the sign was they were looking for. Which really does explain why Gulp briefly lost her mind.

It's obvious that all those dragon headaches I was having before there were any dragons around but Lois, weren't Lois herself, but Halcyon, or Halcyon's ghost, if you like, although you probably don't like. Why did Lois survive? There is NO WAY that poor globby fetus had a prayer of surviving, stuck down some strange species' shirtfront and fed alien liquids. But she did. She did at least partly because . . . because Halcyon's ghost was making me have Mom Dragon Vibes? (Was Halcyon's vibes coming off a grotesque human dwarf like me what sent Gulp - briefly - mad?) I don't know. But a big piece of the answer about Lois is there somewhere.

Here's the, uh, controversial bit. So far this was just the easy bit, okay? I mean I've told you a lot about Halcyon already, but I'm guessing you've been finding it a little hard to believe - you weren't there having the brain version of the hamster running up the inside of your pantleg, and I was, and I still tried really hard to make out that it was just dreams and shock and native goofiness. So I keep trying to make being haunted by a dragon ghost sound more convincing - or maybe I'm just hoping if I mention it often enough you'll start accepting it just because it's there all the time like a tree or a house or that tub of yogurt in the back of the fridge that turned green months ago. Familiarity breeds getting to used to the idea. My master plan.

Okay, here we go. Bud believes that what's happened to Lois and me is not only the thing that's going to make it possible for dragons and humans to learn to talk to each other - but that it pretty much wouldn't have happened any other way. Some poor dragon mom was going to have to die all by herself and all but one of her babies die with her and that one remaining baby get picked up by a human just in time for the dying mom to somehow kind of zap herself into her surrogate. And the human had to have been young enough and/or weird enough - like maybe dragon-as-center-of-universe weird - for the zap to take. I don't want to even think about thinking about the odds . . . or what that might mean about how stuff gets, you know, arranged . . . is it worse to be scared to death by the odds or to consider the possibility that it was what-I'm-calling arranged? Brrrrr. Whatever you do with this idea, it makes me colder than a cavern without a dragon to lean on.

But if Bud believes it I believe it. Some of the other dragons don't. But there are probably stick-in-the-mud dragons like there are stick-in-the-mud humans, who don't want to believe anything too new and strange and world-detonating, and personally I'd be happy to entertain a better (i.e., less scary) hypothesis if you've got one but I did say better.

One thing that makes me think Bud is right, besides the fact that he's Bud, is that while Lois is sweating learning dragon language almost as hard as I am, we talk to each other better than we talk to any-dragon-body else, most of the time, Lois and me. Maybe it's not really all that much better. But there's a kind of ease or fit to it that I don't have with any of the other dragons, even Bud. For example we have a, uh, let's call it a glyph, although it's maybe more a kind of spasm (maybe helps to explain the headaches, and the wigglyness of the dragon alphabetor alphabets - or that moods and layers thing, thinking of a, uh, unit or module or something of it as a spasm) for "frustration" which we made up together out of how we felt about trying to learn to talk to (other) dragons. But when I used it on Bud he knew instantly what I was "talking" about, so Lois and I get gold stars and pats on the head for that piece of initiative-taking homework.

You don't have the smiling, nodding, pointing to your chest and saying your name option with dragons. Nor can you point to another object and say "rock" and wait to see what they say. They won't say anything. If you've been pointing at a rock and saying "rock" for the last six months, however, if you've been working at it really hard, you may have begun to wonder why after you say "rock" you very often get a kind of heavy sensation in the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet (and furthermore it seems a bit diagonal. Right hand, left foot. Left hand, right foot). Although the first elation (supposing you manage to be elated through the confusion) drains away real fast as you start to wonder if they're talking about a kind of rock, a size of rock, a shape of rock, a color of rock, weight of rock, age of rock, even a hardness of rock, or a kind/size/shape/color/weight/age/hardness of anything, or maybe it's about something else entirely (Where it came from? How it was created? Or if it's a big rock, which way its shadow falls as the Sun rises up over it and goes down the other side, and no I am not joking) and maybe it's not "rock" at all, but "thing pointed at" or "humans sure are into rocks, I wonder what that's about?" "Hello" in dragon is a sort of short, stylized flash of . . . something like my first look into Halcyon's dying eye, and it'll knock you over if you're not ready for it.

And there's not a lot you can do about the Headache but try to wait it out. See if you're going to be one of the lucky ones, and that it won't just go on swamping you (flounder flounder squelch squelch), that you'll be able to kind of go with the flow after a while. And that's already supposing that you're one of the (lucky) ones that don't just dissolve into a quaking, gibbering mess the first time you get within hailing (so to speak) distance of a dragon, and, more to the point, don't stay dissolved (and gibbering). Almost everybody gets a little melty around the edges on first introduction. But some people can't learn to cope. And you can't blame them - well I can't, anyway. It's the size of three or four Tyrannosaurus rexes, and it breathes fire, you know? What's not to be brain-burstingly afraid of?

But despite all the up-against-it-nesses, see above, I'd much rather be at Farcamp and Dragon Central because when I'm at the Institute I start to lose faith in my dictionary - and the dictionary has to be what I'm for. Maybe I can figure out a way to break the idea of "dictionary" out of words on a page . . . but even the Son of the Son of the Son of the (okay, Daughter of the) Best Graphics Package in the Human Multiverse - I mean the latest update of the one I was using at the beginning - hasn't shown me a way to do it yet. Maybe because all the graphics packages are designed by humans. I need some kind of three- (or four-, or five-) dimensional Sens-surround thingummy. Any major computer whizzes out there who want a real challenge?

Us humans, we still think word = word, mostly. I'm still best with Lois partly I think because we're kind of on the same level - young and stupid, and, you know, disadvantaged - we didn't get raised right, in our different ways. I'm second-best with Bud but I think the second-part is because Bud is so far beyond me.

Here's another thing you're not going to want to hear: Okay, so, maybe it's because they're so much bigger, maybe their brainwaves are bigger somehow or something, and they can't fit in our tiny skulls (that's aside from the three-or-four Tyrannosauruses eeeeek brain-melt aspect). But (you sneer: I can hear you sneering) if dragons are so bright, why are they living in caves instead of out conquering the galaxy and living in penthouses and eating their toasted sheep off jewel-encrusted platinum platters?

Now you just sit there and think that back at yourself for a minute. Why do dragons live quietly in caves and human beings have invented global warming and strip mining and biological warfare and genocide? Who's the real winner here in the superior species competition? What dragons do is think. That's what they're really good at. Like it or lump it. And that's why when I get out there in the dragon space, it's okay . . . except I'm only a stupid human and I can't go very far, and even as far as I can go it's farther than I can bring back with me to all the other humans, who even when they don't want to kill something or pave something over, still tend to think in terms of x = y and only if x and y both take up normal space in three dimensions and can be measured and checked off a list.

Yeah. I'm prejudiced. Sue me. Or take this book back to the bookseller and demand your money back because you don't like my politics. But all right, enough of the woo-woo and the politics. I'm still human, no spinal plates yet, and I guess I kind of need to spend some time at the institute . . . and at least that means Martha and I get to sleep in a bed in a house sometimes and the house is ours and we can close the door. So you can relax now. I'm going to tell you the story you want to hear, about Bud. I'm going to tell you about something that everyone knows happened out here in the human approved three-dimensional world. Well, let's say something that made the news, which isn't the same thing, but it'll do in this case. And I'm finally going to tell you why it happened.

This was about twenty months ago as I'm writing now. I was back at the Institute, stoically showing myself to hordes of tourists (we've got a new amphitheater that'll seat one thousand and when I'm scheduled to do the Q&A it gets booked out way in advance) and grinding away at my dictionary. I do the dragon side of the dictionary better at Farcamp, and I do the human side of the dictionary better at the Institute. Caught between two worlds and don't belong to either? You bet.

I knew Martha wanted kids - although I can't remember ever especially hearing her say she wanted kids, it's just always been there, like Paris, since she was seven or so, and yes, when I was trying to explain "marriage" to Bud kids came into it. But she hadn't started talking about babies like maybe now till she was pretty sure I was mostly out of my bereft-mom phase. It has to be a little bit strange to have to deal with a twenty-two-year-old husband who's already been through the full pulverizing parental experience, in an all-new Short Intense Variant of the usual scheme, and is kind of off the wall. But Martha took it in her stride. I guess I'd also got over my earlier decision that nothing on Earth or in the outer reaches of the solar system would ever make me have human children - if Lois and I lived through our little adventure, although that had something to do with the idea that these human children would be Martha's babies.

Besides, there were babies in the atmosphere. Because I was pretty sure Gulp was pregnant. I don't know how I knew it, other than I'd got it off Bud, Lois and Gulp herself. (Although Gulp's thoughts/telling/sending/being were significantly different from Lois and Bud's, that made it kind of more likely to be what I was guessing somehow, sort of like how some languages you speak slightly differently if you're a man or a woman or a child. You speak pregnancy differently if you're the one who's pregnant, if you're a dragon.)

I hadn't told anyone but Martha because I didn't want to answer any of the 1,000,000 questions that would follow, or waste more time turning down the 1,000,000,000,000 study proposals the news would produce - although to be fair, poor Dad would have to do most of that part. We had a lot more help than we used to (Eric had four assistant keepers, for example, which is how he got to spend time at Farcamp, in spite of the renovated and expanded zoo) and Dad had as many graduate students as he wanted - in fact he had to keep turning them away - but no matter how much he delegated, pushy people were still always trying to go over everybody else's heads and talk to the big chief boss of the Institute, which was still Dad. Some things don't change.

Anyway Martha and I had cleared a little time one day to have a Paris morning, which meant we slept in, which is pretty much an alien concept at Smokehill. And we were talking about babies. Again. There's another reason I'd come around to the idea of human children (so long as they were Martha's). Are you with me here? Okay, so you get a gold star and a pat on the head: Maybe the next thing was to try to raise some dragon babies and some human babies together. Maybe the reason my headaches had been so bad from the beginning was because I was already fourteen and three quarters and like my fontanelles had closed years ago. I had no idea how long dragon gestation was, and my experience with Lois wasn't much to go on about normal dragonlet development, but if there was a human baby around about a year after some dragonlets were born which was maybe when normal dragonlets start spending serious time outside mom's pouch. . .

So not like we knew what our time frame was or anything, including how long it might take for us to provide the human side of our new equation, but it probably wouldn't hurt to start trying. . .

It should have been a lovely warm romantic morning - we'd had a few Paris mornings before and they'd been a huge success - but it wasn't, this time. It wasn't, because every time this idea of children touched me it was like being shot or hit by lightning. It got worse till I was literally jerking with the jolt of contact. I was too confused and (increasingly) upset to think about what might be causing it (aside from brain tumor redux of course) and it was Martha who said, "Someone's trying to get through to you. One of the dragons. Bud. It has to be Bud."

And suddenly she was right - or rather as a result of what she'd said I was slowly orienting in the right direction like tuning your aerial, and I could start picking it up. First time, mind you, that anything of the sort had ever happened, long distance messages between us and our dragons, and I was finding it horribly uncomfortable and, you know, deranging. We both got out of bed and Martha made coffee, but I kept spilling it, and when I tried to get dressed she had to help me. It took about another hour of shivering and twitching before I could begin to hear it or read it or have a clue about it besides urg or whatever you say when someone keeps poking you and the poked place is getting sore. And what it said was: Coming for you. Be ready.

Coming for me at the Institute? Have I mentioned lately that Bud is eighty feet long (plus tail) and his wingspread is easily three times that? And I may not have impressed on you enough that the Institute is pretty much buried among its trees. The only conceivable place for even a medium-sized dragon to touch down is just inside the gate, and even at that he's going to have to be one hell of a tricky flyer - and Bud isn't medium-sized. But if anybody was going to be a tricky flyer it would be Bud. Which was okay as far as it goes. Which wasn't far enough.

I did think briefly about some of the more open spaces on the far side of the gate, but I didn't think of them long. In the first place there aren't any wide open spaces on the other side of the gate for at least a couple of miles - sure there's a lot of parking lot but it's full of streetlight stanchions (yes, at our front door - but they're really dim and the fence blocks the light) and the row of garages runs down kind of the middle of it, and beyond that was the first (or last) of the motels and the gas stations.

And "letting the genie out of the bottle" didn't begin to cover what letting one of our dragons fly out through the gate would do to our lovely user-friendly new reputation, no matter how good the excuse turned out to be. And while I was sure I would see it as the perfect, ultimate, unchallengeable excuse, I couldn't be sure it would translate that way to all the people who only knew anything about Smokehill from reading about it over their coffee in an apartment building where they have to walk three blocks to see a tree, and their idea of "animals" is the Pekingese next door or the goldfish across the hall. And what had happened once could happen again, which had been the only point worth making about the poacher. So it was going to have to be the little squeezy-by-dragon-standards space inside the front gate.

The best thing I could think of to do was tell Dad. He was, as I keep saying, still the big boss of the institute. If he said "we have a dragon flying in and we need the space inside the gates clear" people had to listen. And he did and they did but it was still a messy business - the first thing tourists do when you tell them it's an emergency is complain. Cooperate is way far down on the tourist-response list. You'd think the idea of seeing a flying dragon up close would appeal to them, but their first reaction was that they'd paid their entrance fee and they were going to stay entered. Then Dad applied me to the problem like a tourniquet to a wound - or maybe more like a gag - anyway having made the announcement and got the Rangers on shepherding duty (a lot of tourists all moaning together doesn't sound so unlike a bunch of baaing sheep) I played the Pied Piper out through the gate and then hung around answering questions while the Rangers rounded up the stragglers.

"Answering questions" is a euphemism for saying "I don't know" a lot punctuated by trying to waffle gracefully. ("Do you really talk to dragons?" for example. You know I am going to chicken out of turning this over to a publisher at the last minute.) But the new post-Lois breed of dragon fanatic calms down immediately when I show up, like a chick under a heat lamp, which is useful. So then after I didn't answer questions for a while ("Why is there a dragon flying in?" "We're just clearing space for everyone's safety") I signed about a million autographs which always makes me feel like such a jerk.

I wrote all that five years ago. (So, yeah. I've got all old and gross and legal-adult and everything. Deal with it.)

Eric's way with words.

"Once. I didn't like it."

"A misfit," I said, half involuntarily. I didn't really want to encourage him to keep talking about this, but I couldn't help myself. "A mutant."

"I do - I don't - I read the news - " I started to say, I started to try to say with some kind of dignity.

Only half to change the subject, because I also really wanted to know, I said, "When did you figure it out - about Lois?"

I nodded. "Yeah. And I like finding it hard to remember."

I took a deep breath and said firmly, "Eric, I always thought you were pretty arrogant."

Eric really did smile at that, a long, slow, glinty-eyed smile, like nothing I'd ever seen on his face before. "Takes one to know one, kiddo," he said. "And I dare you to put that in your story."

So I have.

So not like we knew what our time frame was or anything, including how long it might take for us to provide the human side of our new equation, but it probably wouldn't hurt to start trying. . .

It still took an awful lot of time to get everybody out through the gate. As would happen, we had a couple of world-champion whiners that day, as well as an unusually frisky assortment of demon children. It was really tempting to say, "Right, on your buses, you're out of here." But we'd let them back in when Bud had done whatever he was doing (I'd been trying not to imagine this) so meanwhile why not let them have the chance of most people's lifetime and see a real live dragon up close and personal? Although the Rangers were ready to deflect any rebel faction. Also, the grumps were right, they had paid their entrance fees.

Or you could call it a calculated risk. It's not uncommon for a busload of tourists to see a flying dragon any more, but it's nothing you can count on. But it brings 'em back, hoping to see one, or even hoping to see one again. No matter how hard you're hoping for a puppy for your birthday you don't know till that morning and the wobbly box with air holes and ribbons around it going "mmph mmph oooooo" that it's happened. Seeing Bud should be the puppy and the triple-chocolate six-layer birthday cake of longed-for surprises. With any luck every one of the tourists standing around in the parking lot would rush back through the gates after and sign up to be life members of our Friends. Including the grumps. Converts are always welcome. We still need as many people to love us as we can get. Dragons are still fashionable right now, but fashions change.

This is also a good example of how we think about our dragons. We weren't worried about how the dragon would behave. Especially not after I told Dad it was Bud.

When the last of the tour buses came out through the gates (they were still slow even now we had money to keep them running properly), I went back inside again and waited on the, er, landing pad, and tried not to chew my fingernails. I've never been a fingernail chewer but it felt like a moment when a brand new bad habit might be in order. Martha came out to wait with me - tucking her hand under my arm and keeping me from fidgeting myself to pieces - and Dad, and a few of the Rangers, and Eric. The tension level was so high even the premium-class grumblers shut up. Maybe it was sinking in that they were going to see a dragon.

I've told you that our fence does weird things to your eyes (this includes standing outside the gates looking in). One of the things it does is make a low heavy cloud cover even lower and heavier. It was cloudy that day. I began to feel Bud getting close - feel the urgency of him - before anybody could see him. And then when he finally did break through the clouds he seemed already right on top of us. The tourists gasped and one or two of them screamed. Well, think about it: eighty feet is a tennis court plus some extra feet of tail or three tourist buses end to end and now here it is flying at you, and among other things, however much we're beginning to learn or guess about the way dragon bones are made so that dragons aren't as heavy as they look, they're still waaay too big and heavy to fly - any sane person looking at one could tell you that. Okay, planes fly, and they're even way-er too big, but we all learned about how those stiff wings are built so the air rolls over and under 'em and gives 'em lift. Dragons' wings flap like birds' wings flap - like the biggest bird out of your worst nightmare's wings flap. And the dragon smell comes at you like a spear - I don't know why a smell is scary, but it is. So when a dragon is directly over you, well, even if you're me and you're kind of used to it, your medulla oblongata is still telling you "the sky is falling, you're about to die, run like hell."

Bud looked blacker than ever against the blurry, swirly gray background, and the red eyes and threads of red that flicker over some of his scales I'm afraid make him look a little like some evil dragon out of a fairy tale, the kind that eats princesses - and he is a lot bigger even than Gulp, and while every one of those tourists may have had a copy of that panorama postcard of Gulp and me clutched in their hot little hands, here it is not only enormously live but EVEN BIGGER. I'm impressed there wasn't more screaming.

And speaking of eating princesses, as he swooped the last little way toward us, he kept turning his head back and forth like he was choosing which princess-substitute he was going to snatch first. For anyone whose brain was still working it probably looked like he was looking for me - the announcement had been that Bud was coming for me, and there I was; maybe the tourists were expecting me to wave - but I knew better. He knew exactly where I was. I wasn't the problem. He was trying to figure out where and how to land. I've said this was the only possible place for him to land - I didn't promise it was going to be possible. And when I saw all of him overhead like that ("The sky is falling! You're dead meat!") I thought, "He'll never make it. What do we do now?" - because by now I felt as urgent as he did - I'd sucked up enough of his urgency that I felt all squeaky - stretched like an over - inflated balloon, and whatever it was he wanted, I had to do it, even if it meant sprouting (smaller) wings myself and flying after him.

I've never seen anything like the way Bud landed. There was so not enough room for him. It looked for a minute like he was going to fly straight through the open gate after all - fortunately the tourists were all paralyzed for that minute - and then at the last possible instant, or maybe slightly after that, he reared up, not unlike the super humongous, four-legged version of a bird stalling to land on a branch - and the wind from his wings was terrific, and he had all four of those legs thrown out in front of him and you could see the dagger tips of those demolition-grappling-gear claws sparkling in the murky, oppressive light - and as he landed, he threw himself backward, just to stay in place, and it was like a tornado and an earthquake all at once, plus the massive boom of those wings, which he whipped together with a noise like thunder: and even so he was all kind of piled up on himself because there wasn't ROOM.

I felt Martha kiss my cheek and her hand briefly in the small of my back as I bolted away from her, into the hurricane and the thunder and the earthquake and the claws, because Bud was saying now now NOW NOW and he hadn't actually finished landing, or perching, or settling on his tail like an old-fashioned rocketship, and he curled his neck down toward me as I ran as fast as my little short human legs could carry me toward him. He curled his lip at me and I just about got the message so that when he opened his mouth just wide enough I already had a foot on his lip and was groping for purchase with one hand - I've said that dragon teeth are wide-spaced. Well, I have to say they're not quite widespaced enough when you're throwing yourself between them, and it was not at all comfortable as I belly flopped into his mouth - what do you call it when you don't impale yourself on the points but get stuck between the uprights, like someone falling into a spiked fence? That's what happened to me. I had aimed toward the front as his mouth opened, simply because that was the end nearest the ground, but since he then promptly closed his jaws over me I was just as glad that I wasn't back nearer the hinge where he'd have to concentrate more not to squash me.

It must have looked pretty, uh, peculiar. I knew Dad and Martha and our lot wouldn't be worried - a little taken aback maybe, but not really worried - Martha told me later there was a lot more screaming at that point (even if I wasn't a princess or a virgin and furthermore had obviously gone willingly, which your average evil villain dragon type presumably wouldn't have found nearly so much fun) but that may have been Bud's takeoff. I couldn't see it, obviously, but I could feel it. I imagine the laws of physics would tell me that he'd've lost all his momentum even by landing long enough to pick me up, which probably took about a minute, but from where I was lying, he sprang back into the air again because he hadn't lost all that momentum. He flung his head back - so it's a good thing he had closed his mouth again - gently - although some of his side teeth had little low crags on the inside like vestigial premolars or something, and I could get a grip on these with my hands.

And I felt-facedown in the dark of his hot resiny-organic-fire-smelling mouth - every muscle in his body slamming down against the earth while his wings unfurled and unfurled and unfurled till I imagined them stretching across all of Smokehill to the Bonelands and then clapped forward to scoop the air violently out of the way so we could just dive upward - you know all those stories about all the mega-Gs pressing the fearless astronauts into their padded flight seats on takeoff, speaking of old-fashioned rockets that sit upright on their tails . . . well, I swear I had all those Gs and I can sure swear I didn't have a padded flight seat. I felt like all my brains were about to be shoved out through my face, and my heart would punch a hole through my breastbone in a few seconds. The middle of me was pretty well held together by large teeth, but then there were my legs, that were simply going to come off and get left behind.

And then we were airborne. I felt him level off and he parted his jaws again ever so slightly, and I, trying not to be any more absolutely clumsy than I had to be under the rather awkward circumstances, dragged my heavy, stiff, semi-detached legs the rest of the way into his mouth. This was not a hugely fun process. Bud, big as he is, still had to counterbalance my heavings and floppings and I was way too aware of how far down the ground was as Bud twitched his head and sideslipped. It's not at all drooly, a dragon's mouth. A bit damp, but it's more like what you might call humid, because it's so hot. A sort of jungle experience, only without the vines and the monkeys (and the poisonous snakes and spiders and whatever). I managed to lay myself down along one side, between teeth and jawbone, like an extra-large plug of chewing tobacco, and I won't say it was comfortable including for Bud (Chewing tobacco doesn't kick and thrash), but it could have been worse.

It was a long flight. He set down only once, after only about half an hour or so, near a stream where we could both have a drink; and then I climbed up his shoulder and neck and lay down in that hollow at the base of the skull, and the space there on Bud was a lot more comfortable for me at my runty but inconvenient human size than the space on Gulp was, I don't know if it was from being bigger or being male, or maybe I was just more used to riding dragons by then (although in fact I don't ride dragons, barring emergency) but I half curled up and half went to sleep. I didn't even get cold, although it was cold, and the breath from Bud's nostrils was steaming like a (very large) teakettle.

But even though I was dozing I was aware that we just kept going on and on and on - the sky cleared in time to see the sun finish setting and then the moon rose, a blazing big full moon, and then it rose up farther and over us, and the stars wheeled along with it, and still Bud was flying, no racing, over the landscape. Whatever I've pretended to understand about the laws of physics, I doubt that they're all suspended for the flight of dragons, and I imagine something Bud's size, to keep flying at all, has to fly at some speed. But it was more than that. Bud was pouring it on. The thrust - the bang - forward of each downbeat of those enormous wings had an almost audible THUNK about it, like feet hitting pavement; when I peered ahead the wind clawed at my eyes. We were on our way to whatever we were on our way toward as fast as Bud could take us. Which is why I imagine, it was Bud himself who came for me. Although I would have had trouble throwing myself into the mouth of almost any other dragon.

When I raised my head and looked forward (eyes watering in the gale) I could just see Bud's head, an outline of a craggy red-flecked moving blackness in the surrounding smooth moonlit gray. We were out over the Bonelands by now - pretty well nothing as far as you could see in any direction except rock and shadows. Bud's blistering urgency, which had settled to a kind of intense dull roar once we'd started, came back again, like spikes of flame surging up out of banked embers. The moon was getting low and dawn wasn't too far off and I picked up that we had to get there, wherever there was, before the moon set, and it was like suddenly Bud kicked into some final burst of overdrive and my scalp was getting peeled off, the seams on my clothes were going to part any minute, and I wasn't just curled up and dozing any more, I was hanging on for dear life.

At last we slowed and banked and began to come down. I couldn't see what we were coming to, and for a moment I didn't care, because I'd been wondering just how much this flight had taken out of Bud, and as he tried to organize himself for landing in a space that had plenty of room even for an eighty-plus-foot dragon, I realized just how exhausted he was. His wings would barely hold him - us - and he juddered and jerked like a plane running out of fuel, and when he landed he landed like a wrecking ball, and the Boneland dust whirlpooled up around us. I'd been pretty well dug in where I was, and I bounced, and my neck was probably going to hurt a lot pretty soon, but I was still clinging on. Bud - ? I said, frightened.

Go, he said. Go. There was more to it - I assume it was something about "I'm okay don't worry about me," and his voice, or his signal, or his space, still sounded like Bud, and if this urgency to get me here was something he was willing to half kill himself to make happen, the least I could do was whatever he'd brought me here for.

I climbed down, and a dragon I knew slightly, Opal (Oooooaaaaaaalllllll), was right there, fairly dancing with impatience, and I looked at her, and looked at Bud, and they both pointed their noses in the same direction, so I went thataway. Thataway was a lump of black rock sticking up out of the deserty flatness of the Bonelands; the kind of lump of rock that makes you think "caves," where the Bonelands are, by reputation full of, although us humans don't know much about them, bar the little that a few foolhardy speleologists have mapped. I could feel that I was going toward dragons before I could see them . . . and then I could feel Gulp . . . and then Lois . . . and there were at least three more, dragons I didn't know so well, like I didn't know Opal.

Lois came running out toward me, silvery-coppery in the moonlight, and I was getting off her something I'd never had before, and if I'd been able to make sense out of any dragon it should have been her, but again, all I could pick out of it was URGENT URGENT URGENT NOW NOW NOW. She chased after me like a sheepdog, but I was half walking and half trotting as fast as I could, and all my bones ached. It had been a lot harder on Bud; but I was near the end of my pathetic human strength too, stiff and bruised with it, and half stunned with sleeplessness.

When Gulp raised her head I could finally make her out from among the weird shadows. Some of my slowness to take it all in was just how tired I was. There was enough moonlight, now that I saw what I was looking at, to see that she was . . . orange and maroon and crimson. And I at last realized, although they must all have been trying to tell me, that I'd been brought to witness Gulp's babies being born: and I broke into a shambling run. I didn't know anything about moonset, I didn't know anything about anything, but I finally had a clue. . .

A whole lot of sad and overwhelming stuff spilled out of me from the last time I'd seen a mom dragon and her babies, and as it went a whole lot of lovely warm live dragon stuff came pouring in . . . like that what I'd been guessing about the "midwives" wasn't quite right: Mom knows how many babies she's got, and chooses an escort for each one - almost like a godparent sort of thing - to help each tiny little dragon droplet from her womb to her pouch. Usually the escorts are all female, although sometimes Dad is invited to be the last one. Dad had been invited. That was Bud. And Bud said, I think it should be Jake. And Gulp said, Great, I thought of that, but it seemed a little way out there, even for us, but it's the next step, isn't it? And Bud said yes - or something like that, I don't know what they said.

Lois was there because she was an escort.

Gulp had six dragonlets - and I could feel these tiny soft glowing blobs in my - I have no idea my what - somewhere. Somehow. Faint and fragile but there. They were a kind of orangy maroony themselves. They were . . . like coming from somewhere and going to somewhere, and I'm not sure I just mean from one piece of Mom to another. But it was almost like someone - Gulp? - had me by the elbow (the dragonhead-space elbow equivalent) and was saying, Here, look right here. Otherwise it would have been kind of a huge stupendous glittery fireworks display and I'd've just kind of stood there going, Uh, wow.

Five of the dragonlets were already in her pouch.

The moon, I swear, paused and hovered while for the second time in my life I picked up a smudgy, wet, blobby, just-born dragonlet, and felt its little stumpy legs moving vaguely against my hand . . . but I knew the difference at once, and grieved all over again for Lois and her mom and her dead siblings, because this one wasn't confused or bewildered or terrified; it was just waiting for the next thing to happen; it was borne up comfortably by what was supposed to happen, even if it was happening a little slower than it was expecting, and I imagine my hands didn't feel a whole lot like whatever a dragon dragon escort does. I don't know if I was being borne up too - like someone helping me "see" the six dragonlets - or whether any fool, having got that far, could see what to do, but the slit in Gulp's belly that was the opening to her pouch was perfectly obvious, and Gulp had curled herself around and stretched out a foreleg so her last, pygmy dragonlet-escort could scramble up it (cradling a sticky dragonlet against his own permanently-scarred-from-previous-dragonlet-experience belly) and reach far enough.

The dragonlet - my dragonlet - was a very specific orange and maroon blob in my mind's eye/somewhere/whatever even though the little thing in my hand was only a bulky shadow - surprisingly heavy for its size the way almost all baby things are - could I just see an edge of that bruise-purple color that poor Lois had been? Or did dragonlets only turn that color if they were living down someone's shirtfront and eating deer broth?

It was already hot. So if this was the time when baby fire-stomachs get lit up, at least the escort isn't expected to do it. Not this escort anyway. I put the blob at the lip of the pouch and made sure it got in it, and then stumbled down the foreleg and leaned against Gulp - and watched a lot of shards of memory and grief and fear toppling and tumbling over one another, some of them bursting like sparklers and spinning like Catherine wheels. Lois came and pressed herself against me like she was remembering too.

And - snicker if you want, I don't care - I talked to Lois' mom, talked to her, to Halcyon - and she told me that yes there had been some doubt about the keeping-the-human-up-there part of the Lois-and-Jake highwire act (let's try a parasol for balance but I don't think he's ever going to be ready for the unicycle): I hadn't been so far wrong, guessing that being only fourteen when it happened and still a bit squishy myself was part of what made it possible, and even so it was only just maybe possible. Halcyon had like watched my brain shimmy with the headaches - but the, um, markers she'd left (remember "shouldering aside your gray matter and putting up signposts for other travelers, eeeeek") had given Bud somewhere to start - and some warning about human fragility. She'd worried about the burns too; even young healthy fourteen-year-old human skin is eventually going to get tired of being reburned all the time and refuse to heal. It was maybe true, what I'd said to Eleanor, that you get used to it. But some of it was Halcyon, who was unhappy she hadn't been able to do it better, that I still had headaches, that the "eczema" had left scars. I could feel her worry and her care, and hey, moms are moms, however many pairs of limbs they have. And she'd been all alone, really alone, much more alone than I'd been.

All this so that there would be some future for dragons after all, and there was some future because Lois and I - and Halcyon - and Gulp and Bud and Dad and Martha and the rest of us on both sides - were making it.

Halcyon was talking to Lois too - I could feel that - but I don't know what she said. Some of what she said was the same as what she'd said to me, I guess, but she'd've been saying it differently. What I could feel was Lois shivering like a frightened puppy - Lois had never shivered in her life that I knew of - and I put my arms around her neck (although I couldn't reach the whole way around any more), thinking, Halcyon had a choice. It was a horrible choice - she's the one who died, who knew she was going to die - but she did make it. She was a grown-up, and she decided. I was only fourteen, but I'd had the life I'd had, including that if there was a live baby orphan anything I had to try to keep it alive (and that I was nuts in this case enough to try) - but I was still old enough to make a choice, and I made that choice - that impossible choice - and while I've already moaned and whimpered about how the loss of my own mom had kind of removed the "choice" part of my choice - I was still, you know, responsible, and I still made it.

But poor Lois had never had any choice at all. Or not much of one. She'd chosen to stay alive. She'd fought like anything to stay alive - and her mom and me may have been helping her as much as we could - but she was sure in there herself, struggling like gosh-damn-and-how to keep breathing. And then again . . . if you're going to believe me about Halcyon, then maybe it's not such an enormous leap of credibility or imagination or hope or what you like, to think that maybe Lois did have a choice. When the souls were all lined up that day in the recycling center, the head angel came in and rapped on the desk to make everybody pay attention and said, Okay, gang, we need a volunteer, and explained what the volunteer was going to have to do. There'd have been dead silence for a minute, maybe, and then the Lois-soul put its hand-equivalent up and said, Yeah, okay, me, I'll do it. . .

I hope Lois' siblings all got a good go next time around. A real life. An adventure or two. True love. Whatever.

Whatever else a dragonlet escort is maybe supposed to do, I hope some of it got sucked out of my strangely shaped wrong species (and as YOU might say nontraditional gender) self because after the sixth blob went to join its brothers and sisters in Gulp's pouch and Lois and I had our "conversation" with Halcyon I literally fell down where I stood and slept. (And felt ninety years old and arthritic when I woke up.) But Bud and Gulp must've been braced for Jake getting most things wrong when they decided to have me there.

I've told you that you pick up dragon stuff when you're sleeping that you can't when you're awake. I probably soaked up more in that one short sleep than I had in all the years before, and while I damned forgot most of it again when I woke up, like you forget most of your dreams, still, something changed. I don't pick up "words" any better than I ever did - nothing I can revolutionize my dictionary with, unfortunately - but my brain has learned how to handle dragon space!!! It's like there's a whole new lobe grown on my brain: the dragon lobe. It CAN be done! Even the headaches are better!!! Wow. I mean, wow. I hadn't even realized how gruesomely awful the headaches - the Headaches - have been the last seven years - seven years - almost EIGHT - till they lightened up. They're still there. But they're easier. Martha says she doesn't feel like she needs to use a hammer when she tries to rub the tension out of my neck and shoulders any more.

I think Gulp's babies were early. Even as unborn pre-blobs they're already countable individuals to their mom but neither mom nor blobs, I think, have a reliable sense of when they're going to be born, any more than human moms do. And so I think that's why they didn't have me on tap, so to speak, at Dragon Central, where it would have been a comparatively short hop for a flying dragon to take me to the birth place in the Bonelands. Mind you, I have no idea how they would have convinced me to stick around - I guarantee I would not have understood "Hey, Jake, wanna be escort to one of Gulp's babies?" - but they'd've thought of something. They could always have just got in the way. What would I have done? Forced past them? Playing tag with a dragon just doesn't appeal much.

I'd wanted to walk back, that morning in the Bonelands after I woke up, but I was staggering and kind of crazy, and still full of the dreams I was half forgetting and that were half turning into a new part of me, which is maybe why I was staggering and kind of crazy. (Kind of crazy includes that I was two or three hours of a big dragon flying full pelt into the Bonelands and the nearest good water supply was back out of them again, and I wanted to walk.) Anyway the dragons wouldn't let me walk anywhere. They'd brought Bud like six sheep to help him recuperate, and he'd specially char-grilled a piece for me, and we lay around like we were on holiday for a couple of days - all eight of us (fourteen if you count the tucked-away blobs) - and then he flew me back to Dragon Central. We all went together in little hops, because Lois couldn't fly very far yet. Let me tell you flying in a troop of dragons (a squadron, just like the game) is even more amazing than anything. Life. The universe. Everything. And Gulp looked . . . I don't know how to describe it. Transcendent.

But I had had a look at the front part of the caves - where we all went as soon as the sun got high - and with my new dragon-sense I got a promise (which is like putting your hand into your empty pocket and finding that someone has slipped you something, money or chocolate or a magic ring) that I'd be brought back to the birth place in the Bonelands from Dragon Central some time. Because I think that is the Birth Place - and you remember what I said about the Dragon Central caves, how it's like the rock itself had become dragony - it's like that only way more so at the birth place. At the birth place you know the stones can talk to you. Now if only I could learn the language.

I'm also no longer sure about mom and dad in dragon terms. I'm not sure but what it's some kind of marsupial kibbutz, in those pouches, and that while maybe Gulp and Bud contributed some of the eggs and sperm - assuming it's even an egg-and-sperm deal, which I don't know either - they may not have contributed all of them. Put it on the list of stuff to try and find out. Including whether the kibbutz thing might have something to do with getting 'em started on how dragon communication works. Maybe the birth place will tell me.

One more thing that I did learn is that having your dragonlets born during a full moon is maybe the best good luck omen there is. Dragon moms start doing whatever the dragon equivalent is of "star light star bright first star I've seen tonight" as moons get full toward the ends of their pregnancies. Are dragons superstitious? Beats me. Do dragons actually have an oar in the ethereal what-have-you so that wishing on stars (or whatever) actually has an influence? Beats me too. But it won't surprise you if I tell you I think dragons are capable of almost anything. And if you want to think that I say "good luck omen" because I'm superstitious and that's not what the dragons were telling me at all, that's your privilege. But my version is that it would have been a very bad omen if Gulp's last baby had missed - had got into the pouch after moonset, when the only thing touching its gummy little hide was darkness and clueless human hands.

So at least Lois had had something going for her.

Oh yes, and what did we say when everyone wanted to know why the big black dragon had come booming in for Jake? What was that all about? We waffled. Oh, my, how we waffled. Now that we've been kind of winning for a while (and there's even money in the bank, we've NEVER had money in the bank before) Dad's developed quite a flair for waffling. (I'm still a lousy waffler, so I just disappeared.) Katie's really good at it too - she's always been a gift to the business admin side, and she's done more and more of the interface with Outsiders stuff since Mom died, and she got him started on Waffling as a live art (as opposed to his natural style of thumping and roaring). Katie's weakness is being too nice, which has never been one of Dad's problems.

So you're reading it here for the first time, about Gulp's babies. The publisher who thinks they're going to get this - although they haven't actually read it yet, so who knows - have already been sworn to ninety-six jillion kinds of secrecy, with sub clauses about underlings being chained to their desks with no internet access till pub date, etc. And even if it does get out, it doesn't really matter. I hope. Our security nowadays makes your average bank vault look like a wet paper bag, and a lot of the Dragon Squadron money has gone on the fence - which at this point probably would hold up against a bomb or two. I wish I knew whether I should be glad about that or not.

It was about two months after this, after Gulp's babies were born, that Martha told me she was pregnant.

There should be a very large white space here on the page . . . because I don't care how much else has happened to you in your life and how many unique things you've been a part of and how many endangered species you've rescued and how many laws of science and biology you've personally exploded . . . there's nothing like the prospect of your own first child for making your life turn over and start becoming something else.

. . . And it got worse fast. First Martha said that she was going to spend as much time at Nearcamp and Dragon Central as she could - which is to say as much of the headaches as she could stand - which I understood but didn't want her torturing herself and who knew if this would mean the baby was busy adapting and wouldn't have to have dragon headaches or whether it would just start having the headache before it was born, which seemed pretty rough. Martha said no, she'd be able to tell if the baby was unhappy. I'd've (nervously) said okay to that one . . . till she said she wanted to have it at Dragon Central, I mean, born there. She said that if she had a totally free hand she'd have it at the birthplace in the Bonelands, if the dragons would allow it and whew I started bouncing up to the ceiling and making holes in it with my head she said, Jake, calm down, Dragon Central was good enough.

And I said something like GOOD ENOUGH??? And the conversation went on like that for a while. Her point was that birth was a big deal (. . . duh . . . ), and that Gulp's dragonlets' birth that I'd been able to be a part of had changed me profoundly and made my connection to the/my dragons so much stronger and the least we could do was try to return the favor. And I was damned out of my own mouth because I'd told her about this. And I could see her point but I couldn't stop gobbling about "safety" and "if something went wrong" and so on.

We were still arguing and in fact we had so not come to any conclusions or even any working hypotheses that we hadn't told anybody, not even Dad and Katie, yet, when Dad and Katie came to us and said that, uh, well, they'd decided to get married.

"Oh, that's great! That's wonderful!" Martha said, and grabbed her mother and swung her around in an impromptu tango. And I hugged my dad, and he hugged me back, which is absolutely the dragons' fault, all that sticking my hand (or more) in dragons' mouths and learning to see/hear/read the atmosphere and all that group-bond stuff with dragons and so on, I've got so touchy-feely with my human friends it's probably pretty repulsive, but they put up with it, probably partly because to the extent that they hang out with dragons it's happening to them too, which certainly includes my dad. So we actually hugged each other pretty well.

It's been this hilariously open secret that Dad and Katie have been together for, I don't know, years now. Eleanor, before she went off to boarding school last year (she's got accepted on some kind of Eleanor-invented fast track and is going to be a lawyer by the time she's seventeen or something: it may not take till she's fifty to become president), asked them why they didn't just get married and get it over with? Or at least move in together. Poor Eleanor - if "poor" and "Eleanor" can ever be combined - had the worst of it. She'd got Martha and me out of her hair but here was her mom still hopelessly soppy and silly with my dad - and pretending it didn't show.

"They just told me that it was their business and not mine," she said disgustedly to Martha and me. "You see if you can do anything with them while I'm gone. I don't get it - all those secrets when Lois was a baby, you'd think they'd be glad not to have a secret that they don't, you know, have to have." (I'm hoping Eleanor will keep this attitude. Think of it: a president whose default position is not "whatever we do don't tell the voters." Can the country stand it? Stay tuned.)

So this was terrific news. We were still celebrating, and Martha had got out the cranberry juice to put in the champagne glasses because she wasn't drinking because of the baby, but since it was the middle of the afternoon we thought maybe no one would think about it being cranberry juice, and it's not like we had a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator waiting for a major announcement either. But we'd just made the first toast when Martha said, "So, okay, is there a reason you've finally decided to get married now and not two or three years ago?"

And the two of them looked at each other as guiltily and sheepishly as, well, teenagers, and then Dad said, "Well - Katie - "

And Katie said, "I'm pregnant," at exactly the same moment as Martha said, "You're pregnant," and then Martha and I started laughing and couldn't stop, and Dad and Katie were obviously relieved, but they were also a bit puzzled till Martha finally gasped out, "So am I!"

So then the fun really began because Martha told Katie about her idea about the birth at Dragon Central and Katie thought it was a great idea and wanted to do the same, and then Dad started behaving in a way that made the way I'd been behaving look restrained, which isn't entirely surprising because while Katie was completely healthy and had popped out her two previous daughters with no particular effort, from what she said less drama than most women have to put in, she was now forty-six and so automatically on all the high-risk lists, and Dad wasn't having any. She'd have that baby in a hospital like a normal twenty-first century first-world woman, and there was no argument.

Oh yes there was an argument. Martha and I were so fascinated we almost forgot to keep arguing ourselves. So pretty much within a day or two all of Smokehill knew that (a) Dad and Katie were getting married, (b) Katie was pregnant, (c) Martha was pregnant, (d) Katie and Martha wanted to have their babies at Dragon Central, (e) and the dads concerned were AGAINST this. Soap opera with dragons? You never saw anything like it.

I don't know how Dad really felt - we didn't dare talk about it, we might implode and there'd be a black sucking hole into a parallel universe where two generations of Mendoza men used to be - but he never said This is all YOUR fault although he must have thought it. I thought it. I could almost have done the black hole thing alone. Of course our baby should be born with dragons around. It was the obvious right thing to happen. And it was mean and horrible and two-faced and disloyal and treacherous of me to be trying to make something else happen instead.

But how could we risk it? (What had Gulp been risking? Was the sixth blob - was my dragonlet dangerously tainted or weakened by its contact with me?) And Katie was part of my family no matter whose sibling her new kid was going to be. But the dragons were a part of my family too, and the ties were . . . they weren't even unbreakable. They weren't even ties. They were a part of ME like my ear or my pancreas was a part of me. Like Martha was a part of me. The way the question kept presenting itself to me was, Who was I going to betray?

It was nearly getting to the point that the newlyweds and the almost-newlyweds weren't on speaking terms which would have been funny if it hadn't been us. And then Grace said softly into one of those dinner conversations that were only not getting loud and nasty through violent self-control of parties concerned, "Jamie married a midwife, you know."

Dead silence.

"Sadie's a midwife?" I said finally.

"You could see what she says - ask her advice."

What she said, of course, was "You're all nuts." But she still agreed to fly out and talk to us in person. Which was amazingly nice of her. Although I had the impression she hadn't decided whether to laugh or to bring a cattle prod to keep us at a safe distance. Maybe both. She'd only ever met any of us once, four years ago, on their way from Boston where they got married to their honeymoon in Hawaii - and they'd stayed here in Jamie's old bedroom, which was still a bit redolent of Lois despite a fresh paint job in the bride's honor. So she had a little idea of what she was getting into, and she came anyway.

It was my idea to take her straight out to Farcamp and Dragon Central and let her meet, uh, some dragons. Everyone else was still saying "hello." I was like at the end of my tether and starting to get rope burns.

She looked from face to face and said hesitantly, "Farcamp?"

I said, "Farcamp is where the humans stay when we want to spend time with the dragons. Dragon - er - Central is - er - next door."

She blinked maybe twice and said, "Okay."

But I knew that as soon as we all went to Dragon Central and I actually tried to tell my dragons what was going on, or at least finally let them pick up what I'd been trying to hide, they'd have to know how much I both did and didn't want. . . . My stomach hurt. The old scars throbbed, and the inside felt like someone had tried to light me up, mistaking me for a dragonlet with an igniventator.

Sadie didn't disintegrate nearly as much as most people and she pulled herself together really fast. Maybe it's the midwife trip. Which isn't to say she didn't have a rough time. Everyone does. She shook like a leaf and Martha had to hold her up when she saw her first dragon - lying just outside the cave mouth of Dragon Central. She - Valerie (Vhaaaaaahhhhreeeeee) - recognized Sadie as a new human and raised her head only a very little and very slowly, and didn't move the rest of herself at all, at first, till Sadie stopped clinging to Martha and at least half stood on her own feet again. And then Valerie unwound that long neck, which is one of the things dragons do, you're even used to how big they are, and then it's like that day Bud came to fetch me when his wings seemed to unfurl hundreds of miles: when they stretch their necks out toward you the neck goes on and on and on like the yellow brick road and however many times you've seen it you're briefly not sure if there's maybe a wicked witch involved this time after all.

Valerie brought her head about ten feet from us and Sadie gallantly held her ground. I went up to human-arm's length of her - it's no wonder I'm always surprised how big I am with other humans because I'm so used to being bug-sized next to a dragon - and she lifted her lip in what was now standard-dragon invitation to known-human-friend for a chat, and I put my hand there and she said something like, Hmmmm? which meant, more or less, A new one, huh? and I said yes, and Valerie said something like, And there's a purpose to this one, a different purpose, a new purpose? and I rubbed my hand over my face in the basic human "arrrgh" gesture and said something like z1k09&dflj;kgo*&^vx+iueaiiiimmbjdcudpf!!!! because this was so way beyond my powers of communication, and Valerie "laughed" and said, You'd better talk to Bud. (I don't know how the dragons managed to pick up what I call him, but I knew the dragon "word" - the tiny mind-spasm they used to name him to me wasn't his dragon name, and it felt like Bud . . . but that's more stuff I can't explain. They call Gulp Gulp to me too, and Lois I think is Lois, even in Dragonese.)

The two of us other humans each had a hand under one of poor Sadie's arms and we were both saying, Look, are you sure you're okay, you don't have to do this, you don't have to stay. It's hard on us old timers too, watching a newbie go through the initiation hazing and of course in this case we felt guilty because it wasn't her idea, we'd asked her to come. But she was saying, No, this is fascinating, this is amazing, don't you dare take me away, wow, I never imagined. . .

We got her down the long first tunnel and into the hearth-room, and she met Bud and Gulp and Lois. She had to sit down - there are a couple of decent human-chair-sized rocks near the hearth, with hollows where your bottom goes, full of shed scales: I had a furniture-moving party with a couple of dragons a while back - but even though she was a little floppy her eyes were obviously focusing as she looked around, and she didn't throw up or pass out or anything, which, trust me, is very good for a first timer. Martha did the out-loud version of why we were there with the hand gestures, which was as much for Sadie's benefit (yes we do talk to them, the rumors are true) and then I put my hand inside Bud's lip and tried not to shriek at him, and he did the dragon equivalent of murmuring "there, there" and the funny thing is I actually did feel a little comforted.

It sort of seeped in, the "there, there" - like the answer-feeling, like trying to find out the dragon word for "rock." It was like the misery was a specific quantity, like forty bales of hay, and someone had coolly backed in with a large truck and smuggled thirty of them away. When I looked at Martha she was wearing the same fragile haven't-smiled-in-a-long-time smile that I could feel on my face.

Sadie went really quiet when we got back to Farcamp though and I made coffee and offered the aspirin and thought about feeling better, and Martha held Sadie's hands like you might a lost little girl's (while the person at the info booth puts out an all-points for Mom and Dad over the loudspeaker). You could see Sadie kind of coming back to herself and the first thing she said was, "Light. . . we're going to have to do something about having enough light." And the second thing she said was, "You're going to have to give me a job, you know, if this gets out, they'll have my license off me so fast it'll leave tread marks."

Martha managed not to look at me triumphantly, but I said, or rather squeaked, "What if something goes wrong?" Sadie barely glanced at me - she was deep in thoughts of practical planning - and said, "Have a helicopter standing by, of course. You don't have to tell it what it's standing by for, do you?" Which in the new Smokehill was true, we didn't have to. We hadn't told the pilot why we were taking Sadie out here, for example. Mostly we still make everybody go the old slow route, including ourselves. But as soon as Martha got too big to make the hike she'd need the helicopter to get out here anyway. Anyone not on the Smokehill grapevine would assume it would whisk her away if she went into labor. Avoiding the question of why she'd want to be joggling around in a chopper going to Farcamp at all.

"It's still a long flight to the Wilsonville hospital - longer to Cheyenne," I said, failing to be reassured.

Sadie came back from wherever she was, and paid attention when she looked at me. "Yes. But I can minimize the risks as much as anyone outside a big hospital and all its equipment can. And after that, Jake, I'm sorry, but you have to make the choice."

I looked at Martha, but I already knew I'd lost. I didn't like it but in the end I believed Martha's vote counted more than mine.

So that was that. But do I think Bud. . . yeah, yeah, I would think Bud did something. But . . . once you're kind of used to answer-feelings, to getting your answer as a kind of slow leak . . . once the headaches have softened you up and made you spongy, so you can soak up all kinds of stuff, like pancakes in maple syrup (which is the nicest image I can think of, since spongy doesn't sound too great), I don't know . . . but I don't know how I let it go, even if I did think Martha's vote counted more. Justice and fairness don't mean shit when you're in love and scared to death. And I knew Martha wasn't dumb enough not to be worried. But I've told you why I named Bud Bud in the first place. He does kind of have that effect. Maybe Martha and I should have gone out there first thing and told him all about it at the beginning.

And once Martha had won there was no stopping Katie. Bud has to have done something to Dad. Dad never gives up, once he's made up his mind.

And then, about five weeks before Martha was due and nine weeks before Katie was, Gulp's babies made their first public appearances. I'd walked past Zenobia on door duty at Dragon Central and even my stupid thick human radar could pick up the excitement, but I didn't know what it was about till I rounded the corner into the big hearth-space and there were six small greenish and blackish blobs making slow lurching forays over the more-or-less level floor to one side of the fire - they're so (comparatively) small still at that age that it takes a lot of dragons staring at them to make you realize they're not just odd fire shadows, which is your first thought, but in that case why are all the dragons staring - ? Oh. . . . Gulp had made herself into a half-crescent and the open side was toward me. Lois was a rusty-pink gleam beside her, and I realized one of the blobs was sitting between her forefeet. Which is when I figured out what they were.

I stopped dead when I first caught sight of the whole scene, and then really couldn't move a second later when I realized what it was I was seeing. At about the time that I was going to sit down on the ground and make dopey chirping noises at them the way you might a litter of puppies, one of them peeled off and came straight up to me. I'm embarrassed to say that I no longer knew which blob it was I'd picked up at the end of that long bumpy weary terrifyingly thrilling windblown night, but he sure knew who it was had done the picking up of him. I did know he was a he, the way I'd known Lois was a she, and I knew why he'd come up to me once he had . . . well, because I knew.

As I started to kneel down to him it was like I could see the setting moon in his little red eyes, and for a moment I wasn't standing in the hearth space of Dragon Central, but outdoors in the Bonelands, and there was a cold gritty wind blowing, and then I wasn't there either but standing by a dying dragon near Pine Tor. . . . If I learn a word for the knowing, I'll put it in the dictionary. And with what he's going to grow up to add to the conversation between dragons and humans, that dictionary may eventually be really worth having after all. Then I sat down and he hoicked into my lap, so like the way Lois used to, and I could feel the new little blob in my head that was this dragon, this dragonlet. And he said Rrrrrrrreeep. I mean, he said it, out loud, the way Lois used to. Dictionary here we come.

We're going to do this, you know? This cross-species communication thing. We really are.

Well, you've had the baby dragons, and now I'll give you the baby humans, and then I'm out of here. But like I said at the beginning - the real beginning, not just this epilogue - there's some stuff I'm just not going to tell you. No way. Watching Martha's and my baby get born is one of those things. No, there weren't any complications, and Martha was in labor only about six hours, which everybody keeps telling me is short, but it didn't feel short at the time. Sadie was brilliant. The dragons were brilliant. Martha was the most brilliant of all. And it happened all over again for Katie, and the look on Dad's face. . . . And we're all really happy, okay? This is the happy-ending part - I just hope it continues, like through the next book, since I think I'm going to have to write another one, and maybe a next one after that. . . . But life is just so amazing, and when you think it can't get any more amazing it does, like when you hold your own baby for the first time, the world just stops, and you hang there in the very absolute center of the universe, and never mind Galileo and Newton and all those spoilsport scientists, you and your baby are the center of the universe for just that moment. And everything changes. And that's the way it's supposed to be, or it wouldn't be that way.

Us humans have sure messed up a lot of stuff but we haven't quite finished the job so maybe we can still unmess it a little. Maybe with some help from dragons. And Eleanor as president. Maybe in time for our babies to grow up into a slightly less comprehensively messed-up world. And, forgive my Latin, I can't help myself, but I hope I've got the subjunctive right:

Madeline Sophia Mendoza

born 11 April, 4:25 A.M.

at Dragon Central

seven pounds six ounces

Donato Francis Mendoza

born 6 May, 5:10 P.M.

at Dragon Central

eight pounds nine ounces

Arcadiae vias peregrinentur

Tags: Robin McKinley Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net

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