I named her Lois. She looked like a Lois. I know how that sounds: It sounds like the ugliest woman I ever met must have been named Lois. But that wasn't it at all. It was really interesting after having that weird flash when I was seeing her how my father saw her. Maybe when Billy and the three other Rangers saw her for the first time it was still so soon, or I was still so tired, or I hadn't finished realizing that we had, you know, bonded, and I wasn't going to be able to hand her over to someone else, or maybe it was just that I couldn't read Rangers the way I could read my dad  -  my dad in a passion anyway, which didn't take a lot of reading.

But it was like the Rangers just saw her. My dad looked at her with all this other stuff going on about it. Granted that he was my father and the head of the Institute, and an Institute that was under sudden siege, but even so, it was interesting. And it gave me kind of a shock. And another teeny insight into what I was going to be doing and how hard it was going to be. Teeny because I slammed the door on it, before I saw any more of it, and then tried to forget what I had seen. I'd let myself see a little bit of the bigger picture in Dad's office  -  but only long enough to understand why Dad was so wired, even for Dad, who is always wired. This was what Dad later named my Footman Period. Remember the Frog-Footman in Alice, who, while all hell was breaking loose around him, sat on the doorstep and said, "I shall sit here till tomorrow  -  or the next day, maybe. I shall sit here, on and off, for days and days." That was me. Days and days and days and days. While plates whizzed past my head and there was lots of screaming.

I named her Lois because I liked the name. And the reason she seemed like one to me was because after my father had looked at her I realized that I thought she looked like one of those wallflower girls in kids' books that suddenly grow up one summer and then they get a new haircut and contact lenses and go back to school that autumn and wow. (I used to read a lot of books about kids going to school and having normal lives, even ones about girls. You figure out why.) Lois was still in her squatty-with-glasses, wallflower stage, but I knew, she was going to get over it. It was just up to me to make sure she lived long enough to do it.

Yes, I did think about calling her Alice  -  I thought about it a long time  -  but she just wasn't an Alice. Also, I didn't feel like encouraging any loose karma hanging around to put her through any more of the human wonderland than she absolutely had to go through  -  which was already more than enough. Also I was seeing the dragon caves nearly every night and they were just nothing like Alice's underground, and this seemed important somehow.

The Rangers' wing of the Institute is really two wings: barracks and offices. If you were on night duty, you had to sleep in the barrack wing, but once you were a real Ranger, which took anywhere from two to six years, you got your own little cabin in the woods beyond the Institute  -  with the Institute buildings protecting you (somewhat) from all the tourist stuff that went on on the other side. Tourists still managed to gatecrash sometimes, because tourists are like that, but it was supposed to be private. You were pretty much automatically on call all the time if you were in the Institute buildings. I'm not blaming my dad for being a little touchy, you know? He lived there all the time. And while I did too  -  till I adopted Lois  -  I was still only a kid. And some of how he protected me was that I didn't realize how much he did protect me. Once you got your Ranger badge and sewed it on your shirt, you got a house. Sometimes you built it, and on the night of the day it was finished, the other Rangers came round as soon as it was dark and sang to you and your house, sang these long songs in Arkhola, and the chills went up your spine, even if you were just a kid hiding in the shadows so you could listen, and it had nothing to do with you. If you didn't build it, they still sang, telling the house that you were its new person (Arkhola doesn't have a lot of words about owning stuff). And once you had a house you could even get married. To another Ranger was a good idea. (People who weren't Rangers tended to leave, taking the children with them. A few tough guys compromised by having their families in Wilsonville, and didn't see much of them.) Billy was married. She wasn't a Ranger, but she was an Arkhola, and she'd grown up in this weeny village the other side of Wilsonville, so she should have had some idea what she was getting into. They were still together thirty-five years later so maybe she did.

As an apprentice I should have been in the barracks wing but (this was the official version) since I was an underage apprentice, I got given to Billy instead. Billy's cabin happened to be a little farther in the woods than most of the rest of them, and farther away from the institute and the tourist trails, so that was good too, and also just farther away, period. The other Ranger houses, if you went to the front door and shouted, all your neighbors heard you. Except Rangers don't shout much, especially the Arkholas. Billy and Grace's house was a good half mile from the Institute, and what's really interesting is that it was one of the oldest. Old Pete's son, who built it, obviously took after his old man in terms of seriously not wanting a lot of human society.

Lois and I lived in the tiny bedroom Billy's son had grown up in. I was used to little  -  my bedroom at the Institute was little  -  but Lois made it smaller in a way Snark never had. (Billy's son was now an investment banker in Boston, but  -  surprisingly  -  not a bad guy. He's the one who got me interested in the political side of what Old Pete had done  -  had made me see he wouldn't have got Smokehill going if he hadn't been able to play the political game. Jamie had obviously learned those lessons well. There aren't exactly a lot of Native Americans who are successful investment bankers in Boston.)

Grace had at least as much to do with Lois' continuing to thrive as I did. She's the one who, once we were installed in the spare bedroom, made the broth, and she kept putting different extra stuff in it, all that vitamin and mineral stuff for babies that are still growing, but how she knew which extra vitamins and minerals a growing dragonlet needed is beyond me. She did all the plant and flower drawings for the various Smokehill guidebooks as well as a lot of stuff for national guidebook publishers about Smokehill's vegetation. (Which is, they say, increasingly uniquely peculiar because of the fence. We've still got big old full-grown elms in eastern Smokehill. Eat your heart out. There are beginning to be botanists out there who are getting on as crazy to do research in Smokehill as the dragon nuts.) When you saw Grace at her drawing board you could believe that everything about the plant she was drawing was soaking into her brain, including what was good for making baby dragons go a better color and grow some scales. She'd also always been a fabulous cook  -  most of us who lived at Smokehill would do anything to get invited to dinner at Billy and Grace's  -  but I don't know if Lois noticed.

By the time the next lot of school equivalency testers came around to aggravate me, Lois could bear to stay by herself for an hour or two, knotted up in our very-us-smelling bedclothes with a hot water bottle. This only worked if the sheets hadn't been changed in a while. I thought this was very funny, because it meant that when our sheets got so high that Grace insisted that I change them  -  and this happened pretty last; baby dragons are smelly little beasts, however often you change their diapers  -  we couldn't wash them till the new ones had got pretty high too, so that I could go on practicing leaving Lois by herself. We couldn't even keep the door to our smelly bedroom closed, because part of Lois' fragile feeling of security was that it wasn't too quiet, and it was, too quiet I mean, in there by herself. She needed to hear Grace or Billy moving around. Which also meant that one of us had to be home all the time. (Occasionally one of the other Rangers who were in on it baby-dragon-sat.) Very labor intensive, raising a dragonlet.

Anyway I aced all my tests so fast the testers didn't know what hit 'em. I'd always been a pretty fair student  -  I've told you this already, I knew I needed to be  -  but this was almost ridiculous. I even aced Latin. Well, A minus. (But boy did I earn it.) But I was home all the time, wasn't I? I had a lot of time to study, so I might as well  -  and because the school-equiv creeps weren't going to go along with this apprenticeship scam if I didn't look like I was blooming and booming on it. (I actually gave up playing Annihilate  -  I mean completely. Lois didn't like the way I jerked and shouted when I was losing.) I was still having sleep-and-dream-and-headache problems, but I was getting more used to them, and it was actually easier to ignore  -  no, not ignore, live with  -  the headache if I was doing something, even schoolwork.

Martha was usually the grind who did the extra work and didn't just get As but hundred percents. I say it that way because I felt really bad about Martha (okay, here's a deep dark secret for you: also I was jealous that she is brighter than me), because she knew there was something up beyond just that I'd had some kind of freaky vision during my first solo and for some reason the grown-ups were taking it seriously. We used to do a lot of our schoolwork together, and we didn't any more, and because of pressure elsewhere the "class" lectures when some Smokehill person talked to the three of us stopped pretty much altogether so we didn't have that either. And that I was supposedly spending more time on learning Ranger stuff didn't cover it while the social worker and school-equiv gang still owned my ass, which they did. Even when I was there it was like my mind wasn't there with me  -  which it wasn't. It was on Lois, and whether she was okay. Zombie Jake, the New Not Improved Model.

Martha was sad because I hadn't told her what it was all about, but, being Martha, didn't nag me about it. She barely even asked, just wanted to know if I was okay. "Sure," I said, and she smiled, that smile you do when you know the person is lying to you. I felt lousy. She knew that I was  -  had been  -  planning to go off and get a few PhDs so I could study dragons like my parents. She also knew that I periodically packed that one in and swore that I was going to apprentice to the Rangers  -  but she also knew I said that mostly out of funk. Most of the grown-ups might buy it that I suddenly really knew what I wanted, but Martha knew me pretty well, and she also knew that Billy wouldn't've accepted me if it was just funk. Martha takes after her mom. They're both way too sharp to be easy to have around.

Eleanor knew there was something I wasn't telling her too and she was a total brat about it, but at seven, being a brat was almost her job and I didn't take it too seriously, except that Eleanor's force of character did kind of mean you had to take it seriously. She took it particularly personally from me because I was another kid, and there were only the three of us. The last family with kids had come and gone while I was still pretty out of it after Mom and then Snark, so I didn't remember them much (although I remembered their dogs), but Martha and Eleanor had been friendly with them and Eleanor really noticed when they left and kind of realized that what it was about the three of us was that we were the only ones who ever stayed. Eleanor nagged me, all right, but she didn't get any more out of me than Martha did. The difference was that sometimes I almost told Martha, and I never had to stop myself from telling Eleanor.

The real point was that Lois was, amazingly, still a secret from most of the Institute  -  usually everybody knows everything about everybody else who lives here. (It's a joke among the grown-ups that either your partner is faithful or gone.) Somebody was watching over us. Maybe the Arkhola had a song for it. But even if the Arkholas had a lot of songs for it, Lois' guardian angel was going to need a very, very, very long vacation when all of this was over.

This is hindsight again, but you weren't there, so I'm trying to tell you the story as it might have looked to a sane person at the time, if there had been any sane people around, which obviously there weren't. Hindsight tells me that we couldn't POSSIBLY have kept Lois a secret. So we didn't. But I've told you how ginormously difficult it is to get hired to work at Smokehill, and all that vetting does a pretty good job. I think the Rangers who do the hiring, and the senior ones pretty much all have a lot of Arkhola blood, sort of hum over the candidates, and if the humming goes right, you get hired, and if it doesn't, you don't. So what we had at the institute is a lot of people who were willing to leave a secret alone, because they would guess it must have something dangerous to do with dragons. Maybe Dad suddenly looked twenty years older and Billy stopped making his peculiar bone-dry jokes because of what was going on after the dead dragon and the poacher . . . but in that case why was Billy's house suddenly off limits now that the Rangers' underage apprentice was living there? Not to mention my mysterious semi-disappearance  -  what was I doing all those hours I was holed up at Billy's house? Vision on my first solo, huh? It must have been sooome vision.

Even now it's an effort for me to think about the poacher, even now when that part of it is more or less over and I'm trying just to tell it as a story. I don't even know his first name  -  I don't even really know what he was doing in Smokehill, except ruining everything. He was  -  and still is  -  always just "the poacher" to me like you might say "my worst enemy" or "the devil," if you go for devils, which I don't much since

I stopped playing computer games, but it's that kind of feeling, that blasting him through seven levels isn't good enough. He's "the poacher" because I hated him so much.

Sometimes I stopped even pretending to have any rational view of anything and called him "the villain" or "the bad guy" like what was happening was a Clint Eastwood film or something. He destroyed Smokehill. He did too. Sure, Smokehill is still around, and everyone (maybe even including me) would say that it's in massively better shape than it was four years ago. But the old Smokehill is gone, and he killed it, when he killed Lois' mom. This is the new Smokehill, and not everything about it is better (like me writing this story), and making anything better was certainly not in his plan.

Anyway. The whole big thundering emergency that the poacher created was enough to make Dad look (and feel) twenty years older, and Billy stop telling jokes. So some big cheezing camouflage. And that we are here means that anyone who couldn't keep the secret about Jake's solo bought it that the only big stressful thing going on was about the poacher. Which is not the sort of thing you want to have to rely on, but sometimes when there's nothing more you can do and you know it's not enough it works anyway. As I say, maybe the Arkholas have a song for it.

Which isn't to say we didn't sweat trying keeping her a secret. We did. So when carrying a spectacularly illegal and mercilessly increasing in size wiggly baby animal under your shirt is your only real alternative, you stay home a lot. I'd  -  we'd  -  started working on convincing her to stay by herself as soon as we got her back to the Institute but it was a struggle. I was really disgusted that the best cover story anybody could think of, the first two or three months, for why I never seemed to leave the house at all, was that I was having nightmares so bad that I wasn't sleeping, because it made me sound like such a wuss, but it did explain the way I looked if anyone did see me  -  haggard and haunted. I didn't know it at the time but the people who'd been involved in removing what remained of the poacher said that it had given them nightmares  -  and these were outside guys who did stuff like Official Wilderness Cadaver Removal or whatever, so maybe it wasn't such a bad cover after all except for the offer of counseling; which Dad helped me to fend off.

But even at four months old an hour without me began to stress Lois  -  and not too long after that she'd start mewing and scrabbling at the blankets, and once she'd uncovered herself she got panicky, because while being able to hear Grace and Billy was okay for noise, she couldn't bear being handled by anyone but me. We eventually found out that if they buried her again wearing gloves that I'd also worn and Lois and I had also slept with for a while that worked pretty well, but it was still all really hairy.

Scrubbing up before I went up to the Institute was a colossal bore like I can't begin to tell you too. Especially all the sore hot-baby-dragon bits. But as I say, baby dragons are smelly little beasts  -  and the scrubbing up had to be done fast because my time was ticking away. (I had had some practice for this part of it though, having perfected the ninety-second shower as soon as we moved into Jamie's old bedroom. I was not going to do the Bath with Friends thing even one day longer than I had to. For ninety seconds once a day she could just lie on the bathroom floor in my old clothes by herself and live with the vile and tragic trauma of separation.)

I don't think we'd ever have got away with that part  -  the smelly part  -  if it weren't for this sinus-blasting incense Billy started burning, and he used to like soak me in it. All the Rangers started using it, burning it at their doorways, even bedrooms at the barracks, and later on they got enough of it made up to sell in the gift shop; tourists will buy anything, and if it's true that smell is our most evocative sense, well, any tourist who lit a wand of the stuff once they were home again would be transported back to Smokehill all right. WHAM.

I don't know how anyone who didn't have a secret baby dragon around to give them a powerful motive stood the stuff, but the story was that it was to keep off the bad luck/fate/ghosts/spirits/supernatural thingy of choice that were flying around as a result of the death of the dragon and the poacher. Yeah, it was too woo-woo for me too, and then again it kind of wasn't. After all, I was dreaming about caves full of dragons every night, I no longer knew what woo-woo was.

And, you know, I'd try anything for Lois. Too goofy? Fine, bring it on.

I should explain a little more about the dragon smell. The main thing is that there was so much of it. It wasn't a proper stink like stink. It was just really thick. It didn't make you feel sick or grossed out or anything  -  it wasn't destroying your life, it was just there. It was kind of almost like another person (well, dragon) in the room. There's you, your dragonlet, and the way your dragonlet smells. That makes three. It was kind of the second cousin twice removed of the normal Smokehill dragon smell  -  not only was it a lot more up close and personal but it just wasn't quite the same thing. Whether this is the difference between baby dragon and grown-up dragon or because Lois was having a seriously nontraditional dragonlet-hood I don't know.

Smell is kind of underrated generally. Other than how evocative it is and like you don't taste your food right when you've got a head cold, and you open the window if you've made a really bad stink stink in the bathroom, we don't really think about or live with smells much. I mean we try not to live with smells much. Except stuff like perfume and aftershave. Rangers  -  and anybody who helps out at the zoo and orphanage  -  are forbidden to wear it, but sometimes the front hall at the Institute is so full of tourist perfume and gunk smells  -  this in spite of the fact that the roof of the dome is thirty feet overhead  -  that I want to run away. It used to make Snark sneeze. I'll take baby-dragon smell, thanks.

But once we both had our first bath after she was born it wasn't really awful. It was just strong, and it really hung around. It got sort of the edges worn off as she got older, or maybe it was our edges that got worn off instead, because it's also true that Lois was kind of, uh, smeary, for kind of a long time. Some of it was that I had to keep slapping salve on her because she started to crack at the corners if I didn't, but some of it she produced her own self. I helped poor Grace hang plastic sheeting over the bottom half of the walls and doors all over her house, as soon as Lois started climbing out of her sling occasionally  -  and caroming off things, things besides me. That started really early  -  at about three months  -  which is also to say I'm so glad because it was not early from my viewpoint, and if I'm going to be honest it's the dragon dreams that had kept me going even that long, they provided a sort of alternate non-reality since the reality I was living in had got pretty non- in other ways.

I slept a lot, those first three months, partly because getting up four times and then three and then twice a night still left me pretty tired and partly because when I did sleep I got to dream about dragons. You don't normally know where you're going to be when you go to sleep, you only know where you're going to be when you wake up. But those first few months, the stronger the panicky sense of being trapped by this little live thing that was utterly dependent on me and only me got, the stronger the dreams got. And if I slept I dreamed of dragons. In the dreams it was like they were responsible for me, and this was such a relief it even weirdly carried over a little into being awake and being RESPONSIBLE for Lois.

In the in-between bits, falling asleep and coming awake, I thought/dreamed of Mom, and how much I'd've liked to have her there, making me laugh with her stories of diapers and 2 A.M. feedings  -  I knew she'd've even been able to make me laugh about that awful scary imprisoning dependency. I could have really used a laugh. I could've asked Grace  -  and I did later on, about other things  -  but it didn't occur to me. It was like I was too far away and holding on by too skinny a thread.

I might have been just holding on myself but only three pouch months has to 've been way early from dragonlet perspective, it's just that there was a limit to the size of sling you could hang on me, and it's not so much that Lois grew out of it but that she gyrated out of it. There was about a week when you kept seeing baby dragon butt or nose or foot sticking out briefly from under my shirt . . . and then not so briefly, and when it was the nose it was more and more nose till it included eyes and . . . I remember Snark as a puppy being a perpetual motion machine but he had nothing on Lois. Fortunately she didn't have the needle puppy teeth and the habit of cruising with her mouth open, looking for things to chomp. She gunked them instead. You know how in someone's house you can tell the furniture that the dog or cat sits on most  -  either it's completely trashed or there's a blanket or something over it and the blanket's really trashed. (Snark's and my TV sofa was about three layers deep in semi-trashed blankets: we moved 'em around so none of the holes went all the way through to the sofa.) Grace kept their bedroom door closed all the time and everything else in the house was wrapped up in old blankets and oilcloth. Even table legs.

For something with no legs to speak of Lois just-out-of-the-sling sure liked to climb. Maybe it was being short when everything else was so tall (Eleanor liked to stand on chairs). Maybe it was the complicated process of getting in and out of the sling which had kind of a lot of up and down to it. Anyway, Lois climbed. Or tried to climb. At first she was too tottery to do anything but totter and then for a while when she'd come to something in her way she'd just stop, like it was the end of the universe. Then later she tried to climb. Going around appears to be a very late developing concept in dragonlets.

After a while she stopped trying to climb on anything she'd found out wasn't very dragon-shaped  -  the kitchen chairs for example  -  and I sat on the floor a lot to make life easier when she was first starting to explore life outside the sling, since at first she'd go two steps and then rim hark to Mom and then she'd take three steps and run back, and the house was small enough that when she got up to four steps she started bumping into things. At first this was just The End, as I said. But then it was like . . . sometimes I imagined she bumped into them almost kind of thoughtfully, because I don't think she ever tried to climb on anything if she hadn't bumped it thoroughly first.

I don't know if her eyes didn't focus right to begin with (which would be my fault for raising her wrong, guilt guilt guilt) or maybe were built to focus in different light (the light in the dragon caves in my dreams was always weird) or on something very different from human house stuff (duh)  -  or if baby dragons just do bump into things a lot, like instead of having whiskers, which dragons don't, telling them about how much space there is or what the shapes of the solid parts in it are. But she was a big bumper, and she did a lot of bumping into things sidelong; she didn't necessarily lead with her nose, the way something with whiskers does. But it was like she didn't know what it was till she'd bumped into it a few times. Which was harder (or at least gunkier) on the things than whiskers would have been.

I didn't mind sitting on the floor, I'm mostly not big on soft squashy furniture and certainly no cold draft had a chance to bother me with Lois nearby, and also I found watching her so interesting. (Proud Mom. Obsessed Mom. Silly with relief for even a few feet and a few minutes of semi-freedom Mom.) For example, not only did she do a lot of her bumping from a funny angle, bumping into things to learn what they were seemed to depend on the thing rather than where it was. She'd bump into some things no matter where they were and some things after the first few times she never bumped into them again, also no matter where they were either. Go figure.

Even when she was no longer using her sling she still didn't want to be more than a few feet away from me if she could help it, and she preferred some kind of contact. She was hopeless as a lapdog  -  the wrong shape, and she was too thick-bodied to curl properly  -  but she'd lie pretty contentedly on my bare feet, or behind my ankles  -  that's when she was willing to stop exploring, and lie down at all. She went on wanting skin, and she still spent the nights lying against my stomach.

Fortunately Ranger cottages don't run to wall-to-wall carpeting  -  I don't even want to think about wall-to-wall carpeting with a greasy, low-slung dragonlet in residence. Grace rolled up their few little rugs and stashed them, and I helped her mop the floors, except that Lois usually wanted to play with the mop. And if you held it steady for her, in the developmental stage between Too Small and Too Big, she could climb up onto the top of the broomy part of a broom and sway there for a minute, like a high-wire act.

Grace is a saint. After all, she was there all the time  -  Billy mostly wasn't. She'd used to go hiking to find her own plants for her drawings, but once we moved in she stayed home. The Rangers brought her what she asked for, plants and photos, but it wasn't the same  -  not that she said so. But I knew she was trapped too  -  that she'd just let herself be trapped. And nobody had asked her. We just showed up, that first day, after my interesting interview with Dad. I was too shell-shocked to notice much after that so I can't tell you about the expression on her face when we arrived. I don't remember what Billy said, or whether he said it in Arkhola or English. I don't remember anything, except I also don't ever remember Grace being anything but Grace, which is to say kind and unfrazzled, all the time Lois and I were infesting her space. (Her Arkhola name translates as Beautiful Dancer. I think I was raving to Kit about the way Grace put up with us and he's the one told me. So "Grace" is a pretty good job.)

And I've said that everyone at Smokehill would sell their grandmothers to be invited for a meal that Grace cooked  -  she liked cooking for people, and now she couldn't do that either, or only for the few of us official secret Lois society members. And she lost her studio because Lois and I took over Jamie's room  -  she had to set up her drawing board in the kitchen. But the funny thing is that Lois learned not to whang into the drawing board first, when she was still really little and tottery. She was still crashing into the kitchen table occasionally when she was big enough to make a glass standing on it fall over, just from not paying attention. (Maybe she picked it up from me. I've made a few glasses fall over in my time.) But she never did that to the drawing board. And it wasn't that Grace was ever mean to her about that or about anything. Made you wonder just what she was learning by all that bumping.

But the stuff about the poacher and the dead dragon  -  Lois' mom . . . I mostly didn't know how bad it was till a lot later. Even at the time I knew that everybody was trying their damnedest to make sure I didn't know . . . but I was trying not to know too. I know how much of a jerk this makes me look. But I had really, really, really as much as I could handle with just Lois. And the dreams. And the headaches. And the no-way-out. I don't want to get all moany and whiny about this but even if it's a unique scientific opportunity giving up your life to keep someone else alive is kind of hard, and pain is tiring and headaches, you know, hurt, and while the burn marks weren't too bad, they were tender, so if they got clawed or gouged that hurt too.

And the dreams . . . sometimes, after a really vivid one, it was like I never quite woke out of it all day, like if I only went a little bit farther into this trance I was trying to hold off (or maybe I was trying to bring it on), I'd see big bus-wheel eyes shining at me from the trees around the house. I wasn't putting on the Space Cadet thing, I was there. And I'm sorry I was a jerk. But Lois pretty much blotted everything else out.

I don't know how everybody else stood it, everybody else who knew about Lois, even if it wasn't them she couldn't be more than three feet away from all the time. Being a Space Cadet was also kind of a help, for me, being so out of it.

I named her Lois. She looked like a Lois. I know how that sounds: It sounds like the ugliest woman I ever met must have been named Lois. But that wasn't it at all. It was really interesting after having that weird flash when I was seeing her how my father saw her. Maybe when Billy and the three other Rangers saw her for the first time it was still so soon, or I was still so tired, or I hadn't finished realizing that we had, you know, bonded, and I wasn't going to be able to hand her over to someone else, or maybe it was just that I couldn't read Rangers the way I could read my dad  -  my dad in a passion anyway, which didn't take a lot of reading.

But it was like the Rangers just saw her. My dad looked at her with all this other stuff going on about it. Granted that he was my father and the head of the Institute, and an Institute that was under sudden siege, but even so, it was interesting. And it gave me kind of a shock. And another teeny insight into what I was going to be doing and how hard it was going to be. Teeny because I slammed the door on it, before I saw any more of it, and then tried to forget what I had seen. I'd let myself see a little bit of the bigger picture in Dad's office  -  but only long enough to understand why Dad was so wired, even for Dad, who is always wired. This was what Dad later named my Footman Period. Remember the Frog-Footman in Alice, who, while all hell was breaking loose around him, sat on the doorstep and said, "I shall sit here till tomorrow  -  or the next day, maybe. I shall sit here, on and off, for days and days." That was me. Days and days and days and days. While plates whizzed past my head and there was lots of screaming.

I named her Lois because I liked the name. And the reason she seemed like one to me was because after my father had looked at her I realized that I thought she looked like one of those wallflower girls in kids' books that suddenly grow up one summer and then they get a new haircut and contact lenses and go back to school that autumn and wow. (I used to read a lot of books about kids going to school and having normal lives, even ones about girls. You figure out why.) Lois was still in her squatty-with-glasses, wallflower stage, but I knew, she was going to get over it. It was just up to me to make sure she lived long enough to do it.

Yes, I did think about calling her Alice  -  I thought about it a long time  -  but she just wasn't an Alice. Also, I didn't feel like encouraging any loose karma hanging around to put her through any more of the human wonderland than she absolutely had to go through  -  which was already more than enough. Also I was seeing the dragon caves nearly every night and they were just nothing like Alice's underground, and this seemed important somehow.

The Rangers' wing of the Institute is really two wings: barracks and offices. If you were on night duty, you had to sleep in the barrack wing, but once you were a real Ranger, which took anywhere from two to six years, you got your own little cabin in the woods beyond the Institute  -  with the Institute buildings protecting you (somewhat) from all the tourist stuff that went on on the other side. Tourists still managed to gatecrash sometimes, because tourists are like that, but it was supposed to be private. You were pretty much automatically on call all the time if you were in the Institute buildings. I'm not blaming my dad for being a little touchy, you know? He lived there all the time. And while I did too  -  till I adopted Lois  -  I was still only a kid. And some of how he protected me was that I didn't realize how much he did protect me. Once you got your Ranger badge and sewed it on your shirt, you got a house. Sometimes you built it, and on the night of the day it was finished, the other Rangers came round as soon as it was dark and sang to you and your house, sang these long songs in Arkhola, and the chills went up your spine, even if you were just a kid hiding in the shadows so you could listen, and it had nothing to do with you. If you didn't build it, they still sang, telling the house that you were its new person (Arkhola doesn't have a lot of words about owning stuff). And once you had a house you could even get married. To another Ranger was a good idea. (People who weren't Rangers tended to leave, taking the children with them. A few tough guys compromised by having their families in Wilsonville, and didn't see much of them.) Billy was married. She wasn't a Ranger, but she was an Arkhola, and she'd grown up in this weeny village the other side of Wilsonville, so she should have had some idea what she was getting into. They were still together thirty-five years later so maybe she did.

As an apprentice I should have been in the barracks wing but (this was the official version) since I was an underage apprentice, I got given to Billy instead. Billy's cabin happened to be a little farther in the woods than most of the rest of them, and farther away from the institute and the tourist trails, so that was good too, and also just farther away, period. The other Ranger houses, if you went to the front door and shouted, all your neighbors heard you. Except Rangers don't shout much, especially the Arkholas. Billy and Grace's house was a good half mile from the Institute, and what's really interesting is that it was one of the oldest. Old Pete's son, who built it, obviously took after his old man in terms of seriously not wanting a lot of human society.

Lois and I lived in the tiny bedroom Billy's son had grown up in. I was used to little  -  my bedroom at the Institute was little  -  but Lois made it smaller in a way Snark never had. (Billy's son was now an investment banker in Boston, but  -  surprisingly  -  not a bad guy. He's the one who got me interested in the political side of what Old Pete had done  -  had made me see he wouldn't have got Smokehill going if he hadn't been able to play the political game. Jamie had obviously learned those lessons well. There aren't exactly a lot of Native Americans who are successful investment bankers in Boston.)

Grace had at least as much to do with Lois' continuing to thrive as I did. She's the one who, once we were installed in the spare bedroom, made the broth, and she kept putting different extra stuff in it, all that vitamin and mineral stuff for babies that are still growing, but how she knew which extra vitamins and minerals a growing dragonlet needed is beyond me. She did all the plant and flower drawings for the various Smokehill guidebooks as well as a lot of stuff for national guidebook publishers about Smokehill's vegetation. (Which is, they say, increasingly uniquely peculiar because of the fence. We've still got big old full-grown elms in eastern Smokehill. Eat your heart out. There are beginning to be botanists out there who are getting on as crazy to do research in Smokehill as the dragon nuts.) When you saw Grace at her drawing board you could believe that everything about the plant she was drawing was soaking into her brain, including what was good for making baby dragons go a better color and grow some scales. She'd also always been a fabulous cook  -  most of us who lived at Smokehill would do anything to get invited to dinner at Billy and Grace's  -  but I don't know if Lois noticed.

By the time the next lot of school equivalency testers came around to aggravate me, Lois could bear to stay by herself for an hour or two, knotted up in our very-us-smelling bedclothes with a hot water bottle. This only worked if the sheets hadn't been changed in a while. I thought this was very funny, because it meant that when our sheets got so high that Grace insisted that I change them  -  and this happened pretty last; baby dragons are smelly little beasts, however often you change their diapers  -  we couldn't wash them till the new ones had got pretty high too, so that I could go on practicing leaving Lois by herself. We couldn't even keep the door to our smelly bedroom closed, because part of Lois' fragile feeling of security was that it wasn't too quiet, and it was, too quiet I mean, in there by herself. She needed to hear Grace or Billy moving around. Which also meant that one of us had to be home all the time. (Occasionally one of the other Rangers who were in on it baby-dragon-sat.) Very labor intensive, raising a dragonlet.

Anyway I aced all my tests so fast the testers didn't know what hit 'em. I'd always been a pretty fair student  -  I've told you this already, I knew I needed to be  -  but this was almost ridiculous. I even aced Latin. Well, A minus. (But boy did I earn it.) But I was home all the time, wasn't I? I had a lot of time to study, so I might as well  -  and because the school-equiv creeps weren't going to go along with this apprenticeship scam if I didn't look like I was blooming and booming on it. (I actually gave up playing Annihilate  -  I mean completely. Lois didn't like the way I jerked and shouted when I was losing.) I was still having sleep-and-dream-and-headache problems, but I was getting more used to them, and it was actually easier to ignore  -  no, not ignore, live with  -  the headache if I was doing something, even schoolwork.

Martha was usually the grind who did the extra work and didn't just get As but hundred percents. I say it that way because I felt really bad about Martha (okay, here's a deep dark secret for you: also I was jealous that she is brighter than me), because she knew there was something up beyond just that I'd had some kind of freaky vision during my first solo and for some reason the grown-ups were taking it seriously. We used to do a lot of our schoolwork together, and we didn't any more, and because of pressure elsewhere the "class" lectures when some Smokehill person talked to the three of us stopped pretty much altogether so we didn't have that either. And that I was supposedly spending more time on learning Ranger stuff didn't cover it while the social worker and school-equiv gang still owned my ass, which they did. Even when I was there it was like my mind wasn't there with me  -  which it wasn't. It was on Lois, and whether she was okay. Zombie Jake, the New Not Improved Model.

Martha was sad because I hadn't told her what it was all about, but, being Martha, didn't nag me about it. She barely even asked, just wanted to know if I was okay. "Sure," I said, and she smiled, that smile you do when you know the person is lying to you. I felt lousy. She knew that I was  -  had been  -  planning to go off and get a few PhDs so I could study dragons like my parents. She also knew that I periodically packed that one in and swore that I was going to apprentice to the Rangers  -  but she also knew I said that mostly out of funk. Most of the grown-ups might buy it that I suddenly really knew what I wanted, but Martha knew me pretty well, and she also knew that Billy wouldn't've accepted me if it was just funk. Martha takes after her mom. They're both way too sharp to be easy to have around.

Eleanor knew there was something I wasn't telling her too and she was a total brat about it, but at seven, being a brat was almost her job and I didn't take it too seriously, except that Eleanor's force of character did kind of mean you had to take it seriously. She took it particularly personally from me because I was another kid, and there were only the three of us. The last family with kids had come and gone while I was still pretty out of it after Mom and then Snark, so I didn't remember them much (although I remembered their dogs), but Martha and Eleanor had been friendly with them and Eleanor really noticed when they left and kind of realized that what it was about the three of us was that we were the only ones who ever stayed. Eleanor nagged me, all right, but she didn't get any more out of me than Martha did. The difference was that sometimes I almost told Martha, and I never had to stop myself from telling Eleanor.

The real point was that Lois was, amazingly, still a secret from most of the Institute  -  usually everybody knows everything about everybody else who lives here. (It's a joke among the grown-ups that either your partner is faithful or gone.) Somebody was watching over us. Maybe the Arkhola had a song for it. But even if the Arkholas had a lot of songs for it, Lois' guardian angel was going to need a very, very, very long vacation when all of this was over.

This is hindsight again, but you weren't there, so I'm trying to tell you the story as it might have looked to a sane person at the time, if there had been any sane people around, which obviously there weren't. Hindsight tells me that we couldn't POSSIBLY have kept Lois a secret. So we didn't. But I've told you how ginormously difficult it is to get hired to work at Smokehill, and all that vetting does a pretty good job. I think the Rangers who do the hiring, and the senior ones pretty much all have a lot of Arkhola blood, sort of hum over the candidates, and if the humming goes right, you get hired, and if it doesn't, you don't. So what we had at the institute is a lot of people who were willing to leave a secret alone, because they would guess it must have something dangerous to do with dragons. Maybe Dad suddenly looked twenty years older and Billy stopped making his peculiar bone-dry jokes because of what was going on after the dead dragon and the poacher . . . but in that case why was Billy's house suddenly off limits now that the Rangers' underage apprentice was living there? Not to mention my mysterious semi-disappearance  -  what was I doing all those hours I was holed up at Billy's house? Vision on my first solo, huh? It must have been sooome vision.

Even now it's an effort for me to think about the poacher, even now when that part of it is more or less over and I'm trying just to tell it as a story. I don't even know his first name  -  I don't even really know what he was doing in Smokehill, except ruining everything. He was  -  and still is  -  always just "the poacher" to me like you might say "my worst enemy" or "the devil," if you go for devils, which I don't much since

I stopped playing computer games, but it's that kind of feeling, that blasting him through seven levels isn't good enough. He's "the poacher" because I hated him so much.

Sometimes I stopped even pretending to have any rational view of anything and called him "the villain" or "the bad guy" like what was happening was a Clint Eastwood film or something. He destroyed Smokehill. He did too. Sure, Smokehill is still around, and everyone (maybe even including me) would say that it's in massively better shape than it was four years ago. But the old Smokehill is gone, and he killed it, when he killed Lois' mom. This is the new Smokehill, and not everything about it is better (like me writing this story), and making anything better was certainly not in his plan.

Anyway. The whole big thundering emergency that the poacher created was enough to make Dad look (and feel) twenty years older, and Billy stop telling jokes. So some big cheezing camouflage. And that we are here means that anyone who couldn't keep the secret about Jake's solo bought it that the only big stressful thing going on was about the poacher. Which is not the sort of thing you want to have to rely on, but sometimes when there's nothing more you can do and you know it's not enough it works anyway. As I say, maybe the Arkholas have a song for it.

Which isn't to say we didn't sweat trying keeping her a secret. We did. So when carrying a spectacularly illegal and mercilessly increasing in size wiggly baby animal under your shirt is your only real alternative, you stay home a lot. I'd  -  we'd  -  started working on convincing her to stay by herself as soon as we got her back to the Institute but it was a struggle. I was really disgusted that the best cover story anybody could think of, the first two or three months, for why I never seemed to leave the house at all, was that I was having nightmares so bad that I wasn't sleeping, because it made me sound like such a wuss, but it did explain the way I looked if anyone did see me  -  haggard and haunted. I didn't know it at the time but the people who'd been involved in removing what remained of the poacher said that it had given them nightmares  -  and these were outside guys who did stuff like Official Wilderness Cadaver Removal or whatever, so maybe it wasn't such a bad cover after all except for the offer of counseling; which Dad helped me to fend off.

But even at four months old an hour without me began to stress Lois  -  and not too long after that she'd start mewing and scrabbling at the blankets, and once she'd uncovered herself she got panicky, because while being able to hear Grace and Billy was okay for noise, she couldn't bear being handled by anyone but me. We eventually found out that if they buried her again wearing gloves that I'd also worn and Lois and I had also slept with for a while that worked pretty well, but it was still all really hairy.

Scrubbing up before I went up to the Institute was a colossal bore like I can't begin to tell you too. Especially all the sore hot-baby-dragon bits. But as I say, baby dragons are smelly little beasts  -  and the scrubbing up had to be done fast because my time was ticking away. (I had had some practice for this part of it though, having perfected the ninety-second shower as soon as we moved into Jamie's old bedroom. I was not going to do the Bath with Friends thing even one day longer than I had to. For ninety seconds once a day she could just lie on the bathroom floor in my old clothes by herself and live with the vile and tragic trauma of separation.)

I don't think we'd ever have got away with that part  -  the smelly part  -  if it weren't for this sinus-blasting incense Billy started burning, and he used to like soak me in it. All the Rangers started using it, burning it at their doorways, even bedrooms at the barracks, and later on they got enough of it made up to sell in the gift shop; tourists will buy anything, and if it's true that smell is our most evocative sense, well, any tourist who lit a wand of the stuff once they were home again would be transported back to Smokehill all right. WHAM.

I don't know how anyone who didn't have a secret baby dragon around to give them a powerful motive stood the stuff, but the story was that it was to keep off the bad luck/fate/ghosts/spirits/supernatural thingy of choice that were flying around as a result of the death of the dragon and the poacher. Yeah, it was too woo-woo for me too, and then again it kind of wasn't. After all, I was dreaming about caves full of dragons every night, I no longer knew what woo-woo was.

And, you know, I'd try anything for Lois. Too goofy? Fine, bring it on.

I should explain a little more about the dragon smell. The main thing is that there was so much of it. It wasn't a proper stink like stink. It was just really thick. It didn't make you feel sick or grossed out or anything  -  it wasn't destroying your life, it was just there. It was kind of almost like another person (well, dragon) in the room. There's you, your dragonlet, and the way your dragonlet smells. That makes three. It was kind of the second cousin twice removed of the normal Smokehill dragon smell  -  not only was it a lot more up close and personal but it just wasn't quite the same thing. Whether this is the difference between baby dragon and grown-up dragon or because Lois was having a seriously nontraditional dragonlet-hood I don't know.

Smell is kind of underrated generally. Other than how evocative it is and like you don't taste your food right when you've got a head cold, and you open the window if you've made a really bad stink stink in the bathroom, we don't really think about or live with smells much. I mean we try not to live with smells much. Except stuff like perfume and aftershave. Rangers  -  and anybody who helps out at the zoo and orphanage  -  are forbidden to wear it, but sometimes the front hall at the Institute is so full of tourist perfume and gunk smells  -  this in spite of the fact that the roof of the dome is thirty feet overhead  -  that I want to run away. It used to make Snark sneeze. I'll take baby-dragon smell, thanks.

But once we both had our first bath after she was born it wasn't really awful. It was just strong, and it really hung around. It got sort of the edges worn off as she got older, or maybe it was our edges that got worn off instead, because it's also true that Lois was kind of, uh, smeary, for kind of a long time. Some of it was that I had to keep slapping salve on her because she started to crack at the corners if I didn't, but some of it she produced her own self. I helped poor Grace hang plastic sheeting over the bottom half of the walls and doors all over her house, as soon as Lois started climbing out of her sling occasionally  -  and caroming off things, things besides me. That started really early  -  at about three months  -  which is also to say I'm so glad because it was not early from my viewpoint, and if I'm going to be honest it's the dragon dreams that had kept me going even that long, they provided a sort of alternate non-reality since the reality I was living in had got pretty non- in other ways.

I slept a lot, those first three months, partly because getting up four times and then three and then twice a night still left me pretty tired and partly because when I did sleep I got to dream about dragons. You don't normally know where you're going to be when you go to sleep, you only know where you're going to be when you wake up. But those first few months, the stronger the panicky sense of being trapped by this little live thing that was utterly dependent on me and only me got, the stronger the dreams got. And if I slept I dreamed of dragons. In the dreams it was like they were responsible for me, and this was such a relief it even weirdly carried over a little into being awake and being RESPONSIBLE for Lois.

In the in-between bits, falling asleep and coming awake, I thought/dreamed of Mom, and how much I'd've liked to have her there, making me laugh with her stories of diapers and 2 A.M. feedings  -  I knew she'd've even been able to make me laugh about that awful scary imprisoning dependency. I could have really used a laugh. I could've asked Grace  -  and I did later on, about other things  -  but it didn't occur to me. It was like I was too far away and holding on by too skinny a thread.

I might have been just holding on myself but only three pouch months has to 've been way early from dragonlet perspective, it's just that there was a limit to the size of sling you could hang on me, and it's not so much that Lois grew out of it but that she gyrated out of it. There was about a week when you kept seeing baby dragon butt or nose or foot sticking out briefly from under my shirt . . . and then not so briefly, and when it was the nose it was more and more nose till it included eyes and . . . I remember Snark as a puppy being a perpetual motion machine but he had nothing on Lois. Fortunately she didn't have the needle puppy teeth and the habit of cruising with her mouth open, looking for things to chomp. She gunked them instead. You know how in someone's house you can tell the furniture that the dog or cat sits on most  -  either it's completely trashed or there's a blanket or something over it and the blanket's really trashed. (Snark's and my TV sofa was about three layers deep in semi-trashed blankets: we moved 'em around so none of the holes went all the way through to the sofa.) Grace kept their bedroom door closed all the time and everything else in the house was wrapped up in old blankets and oilcloth. Even table legs.

For something with no legs to speak of Lois just-out-of-the-sling sure liked to climb. Maybe it was being short when everything else was so tall (Eleanor liked to stand on chairs). Maybe it was the complicated process of getting in and out of the sling which had kind of a lot of up and down to it. Anyway, Lois climbed. Or tried to climb. At first she was too tottery to do anything but totter and then for a while when she'd come to something in her way she'd just stop, like it was the end of the universe. Then later she tried to climb. Going around appears to be a very late developing concept in dragonlets.

After a while she stopped trying to climb on anything she'd found out wasn't very dragon-shaped  -  the kitchen chairs for example  -  and I sat on the floor a lot to make life easier when she was first starting to explore life outside the sling, since at first she'd go two steps and then rim hark to Mom and then she'd take three steps and run back, and the house was small enough that when she got up to four steps she started bumping into things. At first this was just The End, as I said. But then it was like . . . sometimes I imagined she bumped into them almost kind of thoughtfully, because I don't think she ever tried to climb on anything if she hadn't bumped it thoroughly first.

I don't know if her eyes didn't focus right to begin with (which would be my fault for raising her wrong, guilt guilt guilt) or maybe were built to focus in different light (the light in the dragon caves in my dreams was always weird) or on something very different from human house stuff (duh)  -  or if baby dragons just do bump into things a lot, like instead of having whiskers, which dragons don't, telling them about how much space there is or what the shapes of the solid parts in it are. But she was a big bumper, and she did a lot of bumping into things sidelong; she didn't necessarily lead with her nose, the way something with whiskers does. But it was like she didn't know what it was till she'd bumped into it a few times. Which was harder (or at least gunkier) on the things than whiskers would have been.

I didn't mind sitting on the floor, I'm mostly not big on soft squashy furniture and certainly no cold draft had a chance to bother me with Lois nearby, and also I found watching her so interesting. (Proud Mom. Obsessed Mom. Silly with relief for even a few feet and a few minutes of semi-freedom Mom.) For example, not only did she do a lot of her bumping from a funny angle, bumping into things to learn what they were seemed to depend on the thing rather than where it was. She'd bump into some things no matter where they were and some things after the first few times she never bumped into them again, also no matter where they were either. Go figure.

Even when she was no longer using her sling she still didn't want to be more than a few feet away from me if she could help it, and she preferred some kind of contact. She was hopeless as a lapdog  -  the wrong shape, and she was too thick-bodied to curl properly  -  but she'd lie pretty contentedly on my bare feet, or behind my ankles  -  that's when she was willing to stop exploring, and lie down at all. She went on wanting skin, and she still spent the nights lying against my stomach.

Fortunately Ranger cottages don't run to wall-to-wall carpeting  -  I don't even want to think about wall-to-wall carpeting with a greasy, low-slung dragonlet in residence. Grace rolled up their few little rugs and stashed them, and I helped her mop the floors, except that Lois usually wanted to play with the mop. And if you held it steady for her, in the developmental stage between Too Small and Too Big, she could climb up onto the top of the broomy part of a broom and sway there for a minute, like a high-wire act.

Grace is a saint. After all, she was there all the time  -  Billy mostly wasn't. She'd used to go hiking to find her own plants for her drawings, but once we moved in she stayed home. The Rangers brought her what she asked for, plants and photos, but it wasn't the same  -  not that she said so. But I knew she was trapped too  -  that she'd just let herself be trapped. And nobody had asked her. We just showed up, that first day, after my interesting interview with Dad. I was too shell-shocked to notice much after that so I can't tell you about the expression on her face when we arrived. I don't remember what Billy said, or whether he said it in Arkhola or English. I don't remember anything, except I also don't ever remember Grace being anything but Grace, which is to say kind and unfrazzled, all the time Lois and I were infesting her space. (Her Arkhola name translates as Beautiful Dancer. I think I was raving to Kit about the way Grace put up with us and he's the one told me. So "Grace" is a pretty good job.)

And I've said that everyone at Smokehill would sell their grandmothers to be invited for a meal that Grace cooked  -  she liked cooking for people, and now she couldn't do that either, or only for the few of us official secret Lois society members. And she lost her studio because Lois and I took over Jamie's room  -  she had to set up her drawing board in the kitchen. But the funny thing is that Lois learned not to whang into the drawing board first, when she was still really little and tottery. She was still crashing into the kitchen table occasionally when she was big enough to make a glass standing on it fall over, just from not paying attention. (Maybe she picked it up from me. I've made a few glasses fall over in my time.) But she never did that to the drawing board. And it wasn't that Grace was ever mean to her about that or about anything. Made you wonder just what she was learning by all that bumping.

But the stuff about the poacher and the dead dragon  -  Lois' mom . . . I mostly didn't know how bad it was till a lot later. Even at the time I knew that everybody was trying their damnedest to make sure I didn't know . . . but I was trying not to know too. I know how much of a jerk this makes me look. But I had really, really, really as much as I could handle with just Lois. And the dreams. And the headaches. And the no-way-out. I don't want to get all moany and whiny about this but even if it's a unique scientific opportunity giving up your life to keep someone else alive is kind of hard, and pain is tiring and headaches, you know, hurt, and while the burn marks weren't too bad, they were tender, so if they got clawed or gouged that hurt too.

And the dreams . . . sometimes, after a really vivid one, it was like I never quite woke out of it all day, like if I only went a little bit farther into this trance I was trying to hold off (or maybe I was trying to bring it on), I'd see big bus-wheel eyes shining at me from the trees around the house. I wasn't putting on the Space Cadet thing, I was there. And I'm sorry I was a jerk. But Lois pretty much blotted everything else out.

I don't know how everybody else stood it, everybody else who knew about Lois, even if it wasn't them she couldn't be more than three feet away from all the time. Being a Space Cadet was also kind of a help, for me, being so out of it.

Anyway. However boring  -  and painful  -  scrubbing up to go to the Institute was, I had to do it. I had to go on leaving Lois by herself so she could be left (of course I worried about stressing her till she had a heart attack or whatever dragons have, and died; from my perspective at the time we could have afforded to lose a few staff members, they were only human) and I had to start going to the Institute as soon as I could and keep going because it would have looked even weirder than it did  -  about my conversion to early Rangerhood I mean  -  if I never came. And if the "nightmares" hadn't cleared off pretty soon, they'd've had a psychologist in to test me for echoes, and I'd probably've resonated like a cave full of bats. Besides, there were the school testers and I really didn't want to get on their suspicious side. So I went up to the institute every day and tried to be as conspicuous as possible so it seemed as if I was up there more.

My time at the zoo and the orphanage of course got cut down to almost nothing. Eric was really pissed off (surprise) and tried to make out that I didn't really want to be a Ranger, I was just looking for a way to get out of doing any work, i.e., at his zoo, because I'm a teenage boy and teenage boys are always lazy and dishonest. (Made you wonder what kind of a teenager he'd been.) But hindsight even makes Eric being his normal super-avoid-worthy self look different. Eric was the head of the zoo and the orphanage  -  if anyone would know about an orphan baby dragon, it would be him  -  and all he was doing was kvetching about that worthless lump Jake . . . like maybe he had a suspicion it would be a good idea to distract anyone from wondering if the worthless lump had a reason for disappearing, besides being a lazy and dishonest teenage boy?

I did start cleaning odorata's cage again. The smell was still awful but it wasn't as overwhelming as when I lived like a human being rather than an australiensis mom, and as another sign that I had lost my mind I began to notice how beautiful the damn critters are, no matter how they smelled: The parrot-green and crimson-and-yellow frills on the big male are really amazing, and if you can hold your breath long enough to appreciate it the way he flaps 'em around is almost choreography And I was used to taking really violent showers these days so the prospect of another one after I took the last radioactive odorata barrowload to the pit where we buried the stuff was no big deal.

It's funny though  -  another thing that's funny  -  I got all kind of loosened up about all the things in the zoo. They were what they were and they were probably pretty interesting, even if they weren't dragons. I almost missed having some herpetologist around studying the Effect of the Tourist Gaze on Draco something-or-other-ensis. Hey, you lizards, how's it going? Eaten any nice celery/rhubarb/beetles/snails lately? But the zoo was happening on another planet, which was almost like relaxing I'm only a visitor and boy do I not belong here.

But not belonging here was an advantage, dealing with f.l.s. I'd smile at them and let what they said (because smiling only encourages them) roll over me. I found myself nodding calmly to a major f.l. one day from sylvestris' cage, saying mmm hmm as I kept on with my shovel. He was talking about how something or other, I don't remember which one he liked, is the real dragon, and most of that stuff at the tourist center about australiensis is just hooey to pull the tourists in, everyone knows australiensis is extinct, because when's the last time anyone's ever seen one, and it wasn't like that even when it was alive . . . but then his wife interrupted to say that something had killed that poor man and it was criminal the way the Institute was flogging the story about his death to draw media attention when any half intelligent person knew that there'd been some human screwup and they just didn't want to admit it and. . .

I was starting to straighten up over my wheelbarrow and reconnect with my surroundings and I don't know what might have happened next but Eric came along and snarled at me to stop standing around wasting time when I was supposed to be cleaning that cage and then the f.l. and his wife turned on him and said that that poor boy should be taken away from this den of scoundrels and liars and given to good honest folk who would try to reverse the effects of the warped and wicked Smokehill brainwashing . . . but I'd picked up the handles on my wheelbarrow and was trundling as fast as possible out of earshot, and I hope Eric had a good time. Those letters to congress people about cutting off our funding never mention Eric, so he must actually know how to weasel. More hidden depths in our Eric.

I might still have gone stir crazy, trapped in the cabin with increasingly hyperactive Lois and only brief nerve-twangling paroles up at the Institute and the zoo  -  the dragon dreams, for better or worse, did begin to tail off as Lois started climbing out of the sling more and I started going to the Institute regularly  -  but then for a while the more active she got the harder it was to leave her because she wouldn't stay buried in her nice smelly sheets any more. For a few days there this looked like it was going to be Jake's Last Straw and one day as I was trying to leave and I'd only just got her buried and (apparently) settled but she'd started to cry before I got to the door, and I don't remember what I said but it was in the "aaaaugh" category.

Grace said mildly, "Children are like that sometimes," and I said, "But she's not a child, she's a dragon, and what if  -  " And Grace said, "Every mother says, 'But my child. . . .' That's how it works."

"But I'm not her mother," I wailed, hearing in my own voice that I sounded like a baby myself, crying for a toy or an ice cream. "That's the point."

"You're the only mother she's got," Grace said, smiling, "just like Eric was the only mother Julie had." Julie was the first, and only, Yukon wolf cub any human had ever successfully raised and successfully released into the wild  -  without getting eaten in the process, that is. Even Yukon wolves thought twice about Eric, although Julie had left a few marks. "Go on, Jake," said Grace. "I'm here. Lois will be fine."

I wanted to say, How do you know she'll be fine, but I didn't. I went. And she was fine. Even if that was when I had to start really working at wearing her out so she'd actually sleep while I was gone.

So what is the point of living on the edge of five million acres of wilderness if you spend all your time inside four walls? But Billy took me out with him every chance he could invent, and while as Lois got bigger walking around carrying her got harder, Billy was really clever with his sling making and at the point I really wasn't going to be able to carry her in front any more she hoisted herself up another of those developmental stages, and agreed to ride on my back, and even more exciting, over the T-shirt. I think this must have been the moment when she would have started looking out of her mom's pouch sometimes, if her life had been normal; because she used to look over my shoulder (and snorkel around in my hair, making it stick together with smelly dragon spit) and (except for the spit) that was kind of fun, although it meant Billy had to be even more careful where he took me. Having a large bulgy restless stomach was bad enough, having an obviously exotic animal riding in your backpack is something else. Although I don't believe anyone could have recognized Lois as a dragon yet (she looked more like the Slug That Ate Schenectady, only lumpier), still, she was obviously something pretty strange, and anyone who caught us would have wanted to know what, and why whatever it was wasn't safely at the zoo in a cage being studied.

So anyway that was my life. Meanwhile . . .

The very very first instant thing that had happened after Billy gave the bad news over the two-way from Northcamp, is that our rules for anyone getting normal permission to enter the park to study something, any farther than the usual short, guided tourist treks, suddenly got impossible  -  even the zoo lizard note-takers got banned. You have a certificate signed by God that you can come in? Sorry. God's not good enough.

At first since as I've told you, I wasn't into the big picture about anything, I just thought "some good out of a whole cheezing lot of bad" that we weren't going to have nosy prying researcher types around at all. But we'd only ever had a few researcher types around at a time, and their nosying and prying was usually pretty focused  -  and actually some of them were pretty nice too  -  and instead we had all these investigator people hanging around wanting to, well, investigate, and there were a lot of them, and none of them were nice, and they wanted to investigate EVERYTHING, so we didn't finish ahead after all.

Almost everything. At least they didn't want to investigate the Chief Ranger's house and even the Institute director's nutcase son was mostly only interesting as a side issue, of how living in the wilderness was bad for children, I guess. Because I was a kid  -  and because of the nightmares and what the cadaver removal guys had said  -  and Billy had somehow managed to subtract the "solo" out of it so most people kind of thought he'd been there too  -  they didn't insist on interviewing me all over the place. Some nice-cop type took my statement once and then they left me alone. Maybe I put over "pathetic idiot" really well too and they decided they weren't going to get any more out of me. Although that meant they immediately wanted to take their high-tech magnifying glasses and deerstalker hats (ha ha ha) and stuff into the park where it happened, but they were going to do that anyway.

A long time later I asked Dad if they hadn't thought of pretending not to know anything about the poacher or the dead dragon  -  Pine Tor is twenty miles from Northcamp, and Billy had only officially scheduled us as far as Northcamp. Dad said that of course they had but had rejected it. In the first place, we don't like lying. You have to work too hard on keeping your story straight if you're lying. (We know.) But the big issue was, as always, PR.

Some of the other big predators bag the occasional human in some of the other wilderness parks, but that's okay or something (except to the bagged guy's friends and family), part of the natural order out in the wild, the risk you take by going there, yatta yatta. Dragons are different. Like those two speleologists who disappeared on their way to the Bonelands twenty years ago  -  you know about them, right?  -  are still getting brought up pretty much every time Smokehill gets mentioned in the national press, and the point is they disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to them. Quick  -  how many people have been taken out by grizzlies  -  are known to have been taken out by grizzlies  -  in the last twenty years? You don't know, do you? But it's more than two. Maybe it would be easier if more people did deny that our dragons exist.

We couldn't risk it that the villain hadn't told someone what he was going to do, and then having to arrange our faces in the appropriate expressions of surprise and consternation when someone came to ask where he was. Which in fact he had done  -  left a record of what he was planning to do, I mean. ("I'm going to break into Smokehill and ruin everything because I'm a sick, greedy bastard.") With his girlfriend. Can you imagine a guy like that having a girlfriend? But our Rangers cover eastern Smokehill pretty thoroughly, and a dead human might have turned up anyway (even if the dragon was ash by then), and it would be major bad press for us if it didn't because nobody but someone who lives there realizes what "wilderness" really means, and, as I keep banging on about, everybody's really jumpy about our wilderness because it has dragons in it.

So anyway we had the investigative police-type people and the investigative scientist-type people and the investigative tech-type people and a few investigative spy-type people, who tried so badly to look like the rest of 'em that even I noticed: I hadn't realized dragons counted as intrigue  -  and of course the investigative journalists who were a total pain because if it wasn't bad it wasn't good copy.

Especially now that a dragon had killed someone (circumstances irrelevant) there was no way anyone, which is to say investigative creeps, was going to be allowed into the park without an escort, and Dad did manage to prevent our being swamped with the National Guard right away (that came later), which left the Rangers, and then some high-ranking jerk insisted that as a condition to not being swamped by the National Guard, all the escorts carry guns. If anyone had stopped to think about it they would have noticed that the grenade launchers and bazookas and things that the poacher had been carrying hadn't done him any good. . . . Anyway this made even our Rangers cranky, and it takes a lot to make our Rangers cranky, but being investigator-minders meant that they weren't doing any of the stuff they felt was their real job, about keeping an eye on the park. And the dragons. And Rangers only carry guns if they want fresh meat for dinner. Not to mention what a big rifle weighs.

But since the fence went up, and Smokehill became Smokehill, we hadn't had any successful burglars, thieves or murderers. At least we didn't know of any  -  the two guys from twenty years ago still haven't turned up. That's an eighty-six-year clean record. Till now. And the first conclusion everyone had jumped to was that someone must have finally managed to steal the fence specs  -  that that had to have been how our poacher got in. And if it had happened once presumably it could happen again. The thieves might even be out there flogging them on eBay. Speaking of feeling insecure. We'd trusted that fence. The techies were working like blazes to change the waves or fields or the particle flow or some damn thing or things so that if there were stolen specs out there they wouldn't work any more, but the fence had been hard enough to invent in the first place. . .

So why we didn't have staff dropping like hailstones in a spring blizzard with weird stress diseases and panic attacks and stuff I have no idea. But we didn't. We all hung in there. Even Dad. He's a great guy, my dad, even if he tries to hide it sometimes. Sometimes I think about those first months with Lois, before we were like used to unbearable strain, and I think Dad and I probably never looked each other in the face that whole time. Although Dad came down and had dinner with Billy and Grace and me (and Lois) almost every night. And started a joke about how he'd let me sign on as an apprentice when he found out I'd he living with Billy so he could sponge up more of Grace's cooking. So at least he got something good out of it.

But somewhat strange behavior on the part of the only child of the widowed head of the Institute wasn't too much commented on. I heard one cop investigator say to another one, "You know I think this has addled Dr. Mendoza. He's pretty well turned his only kid over to the Rangers, you heard about that?"

I was sorting postcards on my knees behind the counter in the gift shop. This was the sort of thing I did now, to make myself noticeable, instead of mooching around in tourist-free zones. You wouldn't have caught me dead offering to sort postcards in the gift shop before Lois. And furthermore I'd got there on time. I'd said I'd be in at three, and here it was 3:05, and I was already here with a lapful of boxes.

In this case while postcard-sorting was making me very noticeable to Peggy  -  and to Dan, who'd almost tripped over me when he came to steal some pens, since tourists are always walking off with the info booth's pens  -  it was making me invisible to the cops, although I'd seen them come in, through the gap in the counter so the staff can get in and out. I looked out of the corners of my eyes and could see Peggy wearing a very fierce, un-gift-shop-like frown (mustn't scare the customers). But I could imagine her trying to decide whether to tell me to stand up or the cops to shut up. I stopped peering out of the corners of my eyes and looked up at her. She looked down at me and I shook my head. Her frown deepened (any deeper and her face would fold up like a fan), but she didn't say anything.

The other one said, "The kid's apprenticed. Nothing wrong with that."

"The kid's fourteen. Three years too young."

Just by the way, I'd turned fifteen by then. Only two years too young. I sat there staring at the photo of indigo Ridge. It's one of our best sellers, for good reason. I thought, They could at least find out my name, and use it.

"I think if I were Dr. Mendoza I might think my only child was safer in the Rangers' hands too."

"If I were Dr. Mendoza I'd think my only child was safer outside the park somewhere. Send him to live with relatives and go to a normal school. The fence gives me the heebie jeebies. Have you noticed what it does to the sunlight? At least we don't have to stay here, and I can get some real daylight with my coffee in the morning before we have to report in."

Oh, good. Some really balanced individual who can get claustrophobia in five million acres. Our fence only does something funny to sunlight if you stand next to it all the time.

"He probably doesn't want to send him away because he'd never see him."

"But the Rangers are crazy. They seem to think this park and the damned dragons are some kind of sacred trust or something."

Peggy's head snapped up at that. She's still only an apprentice, and she's black and grew up in Chicago, but in a way that shows how much she wants to be here and a Ranger. She'd survived the vetting to get here and after three years she was still here. I didn't hear the cops apologize, but they did suddenly move out of earshot.

It is a sacred trust, I thought fiercely. It is. And then the box of indigo Ridge fell off my lap and two hundred postcards plunged across the floor.

As I said, mostly I was preoccupied. But even I could see all these flaming (I wish) investigator people trying to find more people like Nancy and Evan who weren't even apprentices, trying to get them to dish some dirt, but people who aren't crazy (yeah, okay, crazy) about the place don't work here. Eric, who hates everybody who doesn't have fur or feathers or scales, hates everybody outside of Smokehill worse than everybody inside, so even he wasn't any use to them. (In fact he was so nasty that they decided he had something to hide and began to investigate him. At the time I was hoping they'd find out he'd escaped from jail for extortion or bigamy or something which was why he was willing to disappear in a place like Smokehill but no such luck.) I complained to Grace about the way they acted like escapees from a bad secret-conspiracy movie but she only laughed. At least she could still laugh. "If you're an investigator, you want there to be things to investigate," she said. Yes. Exactly. They might find out there were.

As it happens Dad was graduate-student-less when Lois arrived and the roof fell in, which all things considered was more good than bad but it meant he couldn't help trying to drag Rangers off the other things they already couldn't keep up with because of all the escort duty to try to bail some of the Institute stuff out. Later on he hit on the idea of asking me to type some of his letters for him. This worked pretty well. It was something I could do back at Billy's house with Lois, especially on those afternoons after she'd definitively outgrown the sling and would not just go to sleep and let the humans get on with human stuff, so I was mostly keeping an eye on her. Not paying attention was the best way to try to translate Dad's handwriting  -  which kind of looked like the White Queen's hair  -  what the words were would kind of tango out at you if you were looking somewhere else. And it did mean that I had some clue some of the time about some things that were going on outside Billy's house. Outside Lois. Whether I wanted a clue or not.

Billy and some of the other Rangers cremated Lois' mom. They knew they had to let the cops and the scientists measure and test and take millions of photos and so on, but barring a few samples they wouldn't let them move her. Some of the scientists got pretty shirty about the "wouldn't let" part but Smokehill as part of its charter has absolute control over its dragons (within evil little caveats like not saving any of their lives) and while people started spitting phrases like "legal challenge" and "in the public interest" around  -  and they'd already been using words like "obstructionist" when Dad had refused to okay their doing a mini rainforest-type raze for a gigantic helicopter pad to fly all these visiting bozos in and out  -  they couldn't actually do anything. So after about two weeks Billy said "that's it" and one night they burned her. They burned her and they sang while the scientists and cops and journalists stood around with their mouths hanging open. The Arkholas are usually dead private about their singing so I was amazed, but Grace told me and while it's not like I doubted her or anything I still asked Kit too, because he was there. He almost smiled. "Yeah. They thought we were raising demons or something."

"Wow," I said.

Kit knew what I meant. "Yeah. But it stopped them from trying to stop us, you know?"

It's not like we have a lot of practice at it but we knew already that dragon bodies burn a lot easier than human ones. Human ones, they're all water, they don't want to burn. Dragon ones, it's like you just show 'em a matchbox and they go up  -  whoop  -  bonfire to the stars, no boring ignition necessary. (The guys that went out to Australia two hundred years ago reported on this, over and over again, like they kept not believing it.) You'd've thought that the smell of something that size decomposing after a couple of weeks would have made everybody think burning was a good idea, but ironically decomposing dragon doesn't stink as spectacularly as decomposing most  -  other  -  things do, although I guess that "as spectacularly" is relative. Forensic morgue guy is a job I've never been interested in.

There might have been more trouble but then all the samples everybody'd collected started turning to ash and some kind of sticky black tar stuff. We were lucky that there was a lot of info on the way dragon stuff does disintegrate really fast  -  the scientists had been doing their tests in quadruple-time because they knew the clock was ticking but they still didn't get anywhere: Every test said something different, and nothing made any sense. What a good thing scientists would rather die under torture than be accused of being Bad Scientists or some of them might have been a little tempted to go along with the Arkhola curse thing that the National Stupid People Press tried to get going.

That was about as much as I knew at the time. What I didn't know anything about was what happened when they ID'd the poacher. You've got it that I was what you might call pathologically not interested in the poacher, I hope. So you get it that for a long time I didn't think about not hearing about him.

Tags: Robin McKinley Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net