I was so tired I fell asleep leaning against a tree with the dragonlet belly up in one sleeve and a potful of broth propped between my legs. A weird sort of distant whoosh and a sudden splash of light woke both of us. I opened my eyes slowly, for a moment having no idea where I was or what was going on. The dragonlet was trying to turn itself over so it could dive back into my shirt. Absentmindedly I helped it while I looked at the big orange streak . . . in the sky . . . over the rocks and treetops . . . the old brain was trying to churn out some kind of recognition. . .

A flare. A Ranger's flare. And it would be Billy, wondering where I was, if I was in trouble. Knowing that I had to be in trouble, because I wasn't back at Northcamp when I should be. And probably even more worried because I hadn't radioed  -  I should have radioed in last night  -  I didn't even have mine turned on so I'd hear him trying to call me. I'd forgotten all about my radio  -  all about "radio Billy and stay put." That's how tired and crazy I was.

Everything is harder when you only have one hand and are using the other to keep a dragonlet in your shirt, even if you're busy talking to yourself and telling yourself how to do stuff. (Some of the time I seemed to be talking to Mom. Sometimes I seemed to be talking to the dead dragon, except she was alive. Sometimes they seemed to be there too, and to be talking back. Like I keep saying: tired and crazy.) Eventually I turned the backpack upside down and shook it hard, and everything fell out, including the two-way and my three flares. The twoway bounced and made a nasty clank when it hit the second time. Oh well. Flares are less breakable and perhaps easier to use one-handed. I managed to wedge one between two stones. Then I clutched the empty backpack over the dragonlet in case the flare freaked it out through my shirt, and yanked the flare open.

Rangers really are amazing. I guess I was on the right trail so it wasn't like he had to do a big search, and the moonlight was blazing bright again tonight in a clear sky, but even so. Billy was there by midnight. You try following an almost invisible path in bad country in the dark for nine or ten miles. I didn't even hear him coming, so I didn't have to worry about what big animal was about to eat me and the dragonlet, although getting eaten would have let me off another six months of every-thirty-minute feedings. Getting eaten was probably the nicer death. Or maybe I didn't hear him coming because I was talking again. I used to talk to my orphans at the zoo  -  most of us do ("Theeeeere now, isn't that gooooood?" and other inane remarks)  -  but not like this. I couldn't shut up. I think talking kept the whole gruesome situation at a little distance so I didn't quite finish going crazy. That and keeping myself awake, of course. Also if the dragonlet peeped why shouldn't I answer?

Billy was just suddenly at the edge of the firelight like we'd been together all along and he'd been gone briefly to have a pee or collect firewood or something. Maybe it's just I was crazy by then, but I looked up between spoon-tipping and spoon-tipping (and mutter and mutter) and said, "Oh, hello, Billy," and went back to the dragonlet. It fell asleep between one spoonful and the next, the way it usually did now, and although I woke it up when I turned it over to put it back in my shirt it peeped one burpy peep and instantly crashed again. Then I looked up at Billy who was still standing there like Cinderella's fairy godmother had turned him to stone.

Billy slid out of his backpack very, very carefully and set it down very, very carefully. I don't know if he was trying not to disturb the dragonlet or whether he thought I'd gone off my rocker and had to be treated gently. I noticed distantly that he was acting peculiar but couldn't put it together somehow. I'd also forgotten that I was covered in dried blood, birth slime, dragonlet pee and poop, wound salve, and who knows what else. So he may also have thought I was injured.

He squatted down slowly beside me. "Hey, Jake," he said. "What's that?"

I actually didn't know what he meant for a moment. "Uh-oh, you mean the dragonlet. It's a baby dragon. Oh!"  -  because I was beginning to remember that Billy being here was a kind of reentry into the real world. "There's a dead dragon . . . and a dead, uh, poacher, I guess . . . just beyond Pine Tor. The dragon had just given birth. All her babies were dead." I had to stop and swallow. "Except this one."

I feel a little better about being as crazy as I was, thinking about it now, because Billy didn't really register the poacher or the dead dragon  -  why I was sitting there with a dragonlet. It's not that he looked surprised or anything  -  Billy doesn't do surprise  -  but all he said, slowly and unbelievingly, was, "It's a dragon."

"Yeah," I said, coming back a little farther into the real world. "It doesn't look like one, does it? I suppose I only knew because they were  -  " I had to stop and swallow again. "It eats all the time. You can get a better look at it when it wakes up again. Which it will. Soon." I sighed. "I'm sorry I missed getting back tonight. I know I've blown it. But I'm . . . so tired."

Billy was silent for a minute. I can imagine, now, what he must have been thinking. Nobody had ever so much as seen a dragon giving birth. It was Old Pete who figured out, working backwards from seeing dog sized dragonlets for the first time, why the dragon whose pouch they fled for when they saw Old Pete for the first time had changed color for a few hours about a year ago. No one  -  no human, not even Old Pete  -  had ever seen just-born dragons  -  let alone kept one alive for thirty hours and counting. I was some kind of eco-naturalist hero. Except that what I'd done would also get me thrown in jail for the rest of my life if anyone found out about it . . . and get everyone who knew about it thrown in jail for the rest of their lives too. It might even shut down the Institute  -  or Smokehill itself. There were always a few people rumbling away about dragons being a danger to society, and writing to the money guys in Congress who kept Smokehill alive about child poverty and cures for cancer and other things more important (they think) than dragons.

Smokehill is actually really precarious, although I know that's kind of hard to get your brain around when you're looking at several million acres of rock and dirt  -  and that fence. The Bonelands  -  the deserty part  -  are probably their own best defense, but developers would love to get their hands on the prettier bits of Smokehill, and the government would love to get their hands on the money developers would pay them, if they could find a good excuse to break their promises to us  -  and there might be gold here after all. And now I might have provided the excuse the government wanted. My not having made it back to Northcamp by nightfall would have been the last thing Billy was thinking about at that moment.

It's no wonder I kept talking to myself. I wasn't keeping myself awake, I was drowning out thoughts like these.

And that's still leaving out the poacher. A dead human killed by a dragon.

On the other hand there'd be no way that Billy would ever have told me to let something that had the possibility of living die without a struggle, and he wouldn't care whether it was a dragon or a caterpillar, so that part of it was all right, as far as it went. But I had put everyone in deep deep trouble by what I'd done automatically  -  automatically as a result of having been Billy and the other Rangers' willing slave from the age of two. What I'd done was exactly what every Ranger would have done. And they'd have done it automatically too. Hey, our Rangers bring back orphaned or injured gray squirrels. They'd bring back rats, if we had rats. Well, we do, but our Rattus are Rattus maculatus and R. perobscurus, and endangered.

My point is, we save things. It's what we do.

I was drifting in and out of . . . semi-consciousness, let's not call it sleep. When the dragonlet woke up again Billy watched very carefully while I fed it, and the next time it  -  and I  -  woke up Billy had the broth ready and some piece of something he'd cut off something to make a nipple, and his nipple worked, and that made things a lot easier. The rest of the night was better. I didn't get a lot more sleep, but I didn't have to think about anything else either  -  Billy did all that. He didn't offer to touch the dragonlet, but he did everything else. By morning I probably had nearly half my brain available again, which was up on the 10 percent I'd had at midnight when Billy arrived.

We made it back to Northcamp that day, don't ask me how. I think Billy was beaming Strength Waves at me or something. If I could keep a baby dragon alive anything was possible, including Strength Waves. It took us all day, and Billy carried my pack as well as his own, and we stopped a lot, and every time I sat down (which I had to, to feed the dragonlet without worrying about dropping it), I thought I'd never get up again. But I did. Also standing up always made my headache worse (bang bang bang), and I kept trying to walk so as not to joggle my head, let alone the dragonlet.

At some feeding or other I noticed that the dragonlet was already bigger than it had been two days ago. If I held it upside down in my hand now, it spilled over onto my wrist. It wasn't going to fit up my sleeve much longer. And it was heavier too obviously. I didn't have to come up with any way to measure that. It was a good thing Billy'd brought food. The dragonlet got through a lot of broth.

When I staggered into the little clearing in front of Northcamp I almost couldn't believe it. It was like adopting a baby dragon had sent me into some kind of alternate reality where things like buildings and electricity didn't exist. Billy got the generator going while I was still sitting in a chair and staring at the stove in the big central room. Stoves didn't exist in my alternate reality either. Or chairs. When the teakettle whistled I jumped a mile and the dragonlet woke up and started peeping. I wasn't sure whether it was a frightened peep or a "hello, who are you?" peep but it stopped as soon as the teakettle did and went back to sleep. Feeding it sitting in a chair was weird too. Dragons just don't fit in the human world. Duh.

And then there was taking a bath. . . . In a way that was the first time some of the hairiest implications of what I'd done began to sink in. I'd told Billy, during some night feed or other, that it went nuts any time I tried to lay it down . . . and then we'd found out the hard way the next day that it hated Billy trying to hold it only slightly less than it hated being laid down. This was a blow. Make that a BLOW. Until it happened I hadn't thought about having someone to trade off red welts and disgustingness duty and nooo sleep with  -  but it occurred to me real fast at that point that I didn't have it. That I wasn't going to have it. And dragonlets stay in their moms' pouches how long??? Also I was used to Billy being able to do anything  -  including get me out of any trouble I was in. But I was too zonked to follow what this really meant very far. And that's a good thing.

Maybe the teakettle and being in a square place lined with planks (called a "cabin") and furniture and plumbing and stuff were the thing too many for the dragonlet (see: dragons do not fit in the human World, and don't forget the "duh") like getting back to human space seemed to be this weird shock to me. My new permanent headache, which I was almost sort of getting used to, was making me feel queasy and dizzy. But the bath was a kind of a watershed (ha ha ha) moment for both of us. The dragonlet had a complete mini Eric-type meltdown. I thought it was going to do itself an injury when we tried to make it a nest with (a) warm ashes, (b) warmed-up blankets, (c) anything else we could think of.

So the way it ended up was, we kept the dragonlet half wrapped in a piece of my by then truly gross shirt and moved it kind of up and down my front while I got in the bath that way and tried to wash around it, which is to say Billy held it while I tried to wash  -  this was more embarrassing than I can begin to tell you and it was only being so tired and out of it that made it even possible  -  and then I got up on my knees and Billy held it against my back while I crouched forward to wash my face and hair. Oh good. New red spots too.

Billy noticed the red spots, both old and new  -  he'd probably noticed before but maybe he hadn't realized how many of them there were  -  and did his more-expressionless-than-expressionless wooden-Indian face thing and I noticed, which was interesting, since I wasn't noticing anything, but I suppose it just proves I was fully into my new dragonlet-defending-and-fostering role, because I said, "Oh, they don't hurt, they're just marks, they're no big deal, they're no deal." And I looked at Billy and Billy looked at me and I could see that Billy knew I was lying but I just kept looking at him and . . . he looked away. I didn't get into staring contests with Billy because I knew who won and it wasn't me, and furthermore I'd had this one standing there naked and stinking (and red-spotted). The maternal instinct is sure powerful.

The dragonlet hated all of this. I started getting so worried that it would explode or something that I sort of hurried up. Besides, there's only so much embarrassment you can take at one time.

The dragonlet wasn't crazy about clean clothes either but I guess it was so glad to sec its pouch equivalent again it wasn't going to complain.

And Billy had come up with some new kind of salve for my stomach (and my back, and my arm) which the dragonlet seemed to like a lot, so we smeared some all over it and then wiped some off again which kind of cleaned it up too, but the salve made it fantastically slippery like a sort of extra-large watermelon seed with legs, and by the end of the process my clean sweatshirt and sweatpants were almost as sticky and disgusting as my shirt had been, although we smelled a lot better than we had. And Billy  -  which may be the single best thing he's ever done for me in my entire life  -  had rigged up a kind of diaper for the dragonlet  -  it didn't have any tail to speak of yet, just a kind of vaguely pointy lump at the back end  -  so I stayed poopless.

This was so blissful my third night of almost no sleep seemed almost okay. Even if Mom was in a lot of my dreams, when I got near enough to being asleep to have dreams. Although you may have noticed that you can dream even when you're only about half asleep, and know it, like you know you're still lying on a thin little rubbery mattress under mousy-smelling blankets curled up around a pillow supporting a dragonlet against your stomach. I even said to her once, I'm too tired to be dreaming. Even about you. Bang bang bang went the headache. The headache never slept.

If you've ever been for a long time without anything like enough sleep you know that you get pretty non compos pretty soon. I was forgetting things the moment Billy said them and couldn't really think of anything but feeding the dragonlet. (And talking to it. I was still doing that. Although I was still calling it Ugly.) It was like my life had become feeding the dragonlet and I hadn't noticed or minded. This was just the way it was now. A haze punctuated by feeding the dragonlet. Speaking of the maternal instinct. Maybe the headache was the fourteen-year-old boy with a dragonlet version of postnatal depression.

The haze was also stabbed and ripped up by visions of the dying dragon's eye. The cavescape was still there when I looked into her eye which is where the dreams about her always started  -  but I seemed to get farther in now, when I did that weird stepping-forward thing, till there was nothing behind me either except more caves  -  reddishy purply and shadowy and smoky and twinkling and something else, I don't know what, some presence. Sometimes I got so far in I imagined seeing her with a lot of other dragons there, in those magical looking caves that I'd got into by looking into her eye. Real Arabian Nights stuff. I didn't try saying "open sesame" but I'm not sure I wanted to leave.

I don't know why I thought the caves had to be magical except that like I've told you that's the way I've always been about caves. And these didn't look anything like the caves near the Institute. These had stalactites and stalagmites that were landscapes and worlds all by themselves, and in colors you can't even really dream. I'd be looking at some stony sculpture Michelangelo would have killed his grandmother to have been able to do, and thinking, I don't know that color, that color doesn't exist, but like wow. Those dreams  -  whatever they were  -  were another thing that made the headache worse, although it was a weird kind of worse, there was something kind of curvy and rippling about it, like one of the cave sculptures, and it like fitted into my head differently, almost as if it thought it belonged there and couldn't figure out why it couldn't make itself comfortable. And made me uncomfortable. Sometimes I felt it would have apologized if it could've figured out how. Nuts of course. Of course I had a headache most of the time  -  it was just from not getting enough sleep.

At least the dreams about Mom didn't make my head hurt more. They made my stomach hurt more instead  -  on the inside, not the outside where the dragonlet was operating.

I didn't hear Billy's first check-in after he found us  -  and I really don't know how he got through the one when I should have been back at Northcamp and wasn't  -  but that meant two check-ins I should have talked to Dad and didn't. This would have made Dad frantic, and while probably the only person who could have talked him out of sending for the helicopter was Billy, it's still interesting that Billy managed it somehow, since even on no sleep I would have noticed a helicopter. Ha ha. But even our special two-ways don't work very well in a lot of Smokehill, which is why we always carry flares too. It's something about the charge on the fence, and the permanent campsites were chosen almost as much for good radio transmission as a good water and firewood supply. So maybe Billy did something cute with the two-way during my unscheduled absence and just undid it once I was back again.

Billy made sure I heard this one. I heard it through my haze, but Northcamp is small anyway, and we were both (all three of us, but I doubt the dragonlet got much out of it) in the central room. Also Dad was pretty noisy. The roaring coming out of the radio as soon as contact was made must have just about knocked the thing off the table except that Billy was holding it down.

Even Billy's eyes narrowed a fraction but he flipped the switch as calmly as ever and said, "You can talk to Jake in a minute, Frank, and he's fine."

Flip  -  ROAR  -  flip.

"Frank, listen to me. I'm afraid I have some bad news. Something Jake discovered. I think you need to hear this first." And Billy went on to make up some true-as-far-as-it-went story about a dead dragon and a dead guy. The sheer bald chutzpah of it almost jerked me into full attention  -  Billy sounded like he was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him whatever.

At the same time what he was telling  -  even without what he wasn't telling  -  was of course totally huge  -  the BIGGEST  -  scary news for us anyway, and was going to distract everybody very, very effectively from Jake's first solo, even Dad right now in full roar. Dad sounded almost normal as he said head-of-Institute things like "Where?" and "Just the one man?" and "No visible time line, I suppose?" which is to say who killed who first, which was going to be a big one. It was all big and deadly anyway, but if she'd killed him first, it was worse. Dad said a couple more times, "Let me talk to Jake," and Billy finally said, "Jake's a bit in shock, you know. You might let it pass for now. You can talk to him about it later."

There was a pause that probably wasn't so long in actual time terms but it sure echoed in Northcamp's little common room. The dragonlet chose this moment to rearrange itself too, so I felt briefly like I was caught in some kind of nowhere between my old life/world and my new one. Sleeplessness makes you dizzy too, in case you don't already know that.

"Okay, Billy," Dad said finally. "Thanks."

Another, shorter pause, and Billy nodded to me, and I put my hand under the settling-down bulge of dragonlet and went over to sit down by the two-way. I flicked the switch. "Hi, Dad."

As awkward father-son conversations go this one was pretty impressive. It was even worse than the one we'd had about sex about a year before. At least this one was over the two-way where we didn't have to be obvious about not being able to look each other in the face. But I agreed that I was fine, just like Billy had said. And I did try to say something about the dragon, just to sort of, I don't know, show I was trying or something, but all I could manage to get out was, "They're so big, you know? You know they're big  -  I walk by that picture every day  -  " It's one of those artist's representation things, right outside the theater (and not half bad by the way, it does not look like someone who is trying to make ends meet because his only job is part-time substitute illustrator for a bad comic book series), and it goes on and on and on and on because eighty feet (plus tail) is a lot of wall, or a lot of dragon. But my voice cracked when I said it, and Dad let it go, and I changed the subject to asking if there'd been any interesting new orphans since we'd been gone, which was the best I could do at subject-changing and Dad wouldn't know how bad a try it really was.

Then I gave the two-way back to Billy and he and Dad started discussing immediate ways and means. Billy was going to stay out here a few more days, needed help, and couldn't spare anyone to see me safe home while they investigated because he wanted anyone who could be spared to join the hunting party. Clue-hunting party. He said, And besides, Jake can help. That was the best joke of all. I heard him say it. He lied amazingly. I didn't know he had it in him. Billy can just not say things, although I'd never heard him do it on quite such an epic scale before, but I'd never heard him lie.

I'd better make this point now and then I'll make it several more times later on because it's one of the things that makes no sense  -  or maybe it's the thing that makes the no-sense make sense to you reading this about Crazy Jake and His Dragonlet. If it hadn't been for this sticky, smelly, hot little blodge of dragonlet I'd've been totally blown away by the poacher. I should have been totally blown away. This was The End of Life As All of Us Knew It, at Smokehill. Dragons were safe here, that's what Smokehill was for  -  we may save raccoons; rats and squirrels too, and provide cage space (and cleaning) to a lot of lizards, but dragons are what we're for. But to everybody outside Smokehill, the really important thing that Smokehill was for was to prove to people, from the other direction, that dragons were safe  -  that they didn't kill people and nobody ever, ever had to worry that they might, and besides, no one could get through the fence.

I can't BEGIN to tell you how important this was  -  how important everyone at Smokehill knew it was. Except me. I knew the poacher was really bad and everything  -  but wasn't it time to feed the dragonlet again? Yes. It was always time to feed the dragonlet again. If there were any cracks in my dragonlet obsession, they were full of remembering its mom. The way she'd looked at me. Slightly in my defense, it was a pretty overwhelming experience. It had been overwhelming enough that Billy reminding Dad of it had stopped Dad in midroar, which wasn't something that happened in the world as I had known it. And Dad didn't know the half of it.

That first conversation with Dad I got sort of for free though. I had to pull it together more after that, because of course Dad was expecting me to. That was pretty bad. I had this brilliant idea of telling Dad I'd walked into a tree branch while I was looking the other way and it banged up my throat, so talking kind of hurt. After Billy assured him it was no big deal Dad let me get away with this too. I don't know if he suspected anything right away or not  -  but he probably couldn't afford to waste time thinking about it. Dad had to figure out what he was going to tell the world about the poacher, and he had to figure it out fast, so I imagine that he was relieved to take Billy's word for it and leave his clumsy, idiot son in Billy's hands for a while longer. He did sound a little distracted, although it made him keep asking me if I was really okay, which I suppose meant he cared, although it sounded a lot like he'd just forgotten I'd already said yes thirty seconds ago. Although really it was pretty amazing of him to remember he had a son, in the circumstances. I'm not sure I would've in his shoes.

Billy's everyone, when they arrived, turned out to be three more of the oldest Rangers, and he must have told them what they were getting into because I don't remember their acting surprised when they were introduced to me and my new buddy. Or maybe I don't remember because I was so stupid from being that tired. I registered that they'd brought me some more clothes and a couple of old baby bottles from the stash at the orphanage. I didn't ask how they'd got them past Eric. And I wondered when Billy had told them what kind of orphan to expect.

Anyway, Whiteoak took over the Jake-tending duty while Billy, Jane and Kit went on to Pine Tor. They were away for three days. And when they got back something else had happened. The dragonlet had gone from needing to be fed every half hour (or twenty minutes) to needing to be fed every two hours. Suddenly. On the tenth day of its life it had still wanted half-hour feedings. That night it slept two hours . . . and then two hours . . . and then two hours . . . and then two hours.

When it woke up, there was Whiteoak with warm broth. I don't know if he'd been waiting an hour and a half each time or not and I didn't ask him. Only partly because he wouldn't have answered. I was in awe of Whiteoak  -  he could speak English but he didn't want to, and mostly he talked to the other Arkholas in their own language which I knew about six words of. (Eleanor, for whom it is a principle of life never to be in awe of anyone, said that he did this so he got off tourist duty. I wouldn't want to say absolutely that she's wrong. But that only made me admire him more.)

It was weird enough to have anyone waiting on me, even if it wasn't for my sake but the dragonlet's, but it was particularly weird that it was Whiteoak. I mean, just his name  -  all the other Arkholas had some kind of Anglo name that they used. I guess Whiteoak thought he was meeting us halfway by translating whatever the Arkhola for "white oak" is into English. So it was kind of all part of the space-cadet quality of everything that it was Whiteoak who got left behind to keep me going. And then I was dazed by getting some sleep, finally. You know how when you finally do get some sleep you're more tired? That's how I felt. Three days without sleep didn't seem to faze Whiteoak at all.

But it was still confusingly weird, like I had any room for any more confusingness or weirdness: wham  -  two hours was okay, for feeding the dragonlet. I know how it sounds to put it this way, but it was like I he dragonlet was now saving my life, for saving its.

Over the next week I began to get pretty good at sleeping for two hours at a stretch, and since the Rangers were doing absolutely everything for me but actually having the dragonlet down their shirts, the fact that this meant I was spending twenty or more hours a day horizontal didn't matter. Although I got bedsores. Yuck. I was a healthy almost-fifteen-year-old boy (or at least I had been). But if you lie in the same position for hour after hour, whether it's because you're old and weak and sick or because you don't want to wake up a dragonlet, and maybe you need all the sleep you can get because your permanent headache means you don't sleep very well besides having to wake up again every two hours (and also because you're maybe having a better time in the dream cavescape in your head than you are outside and awake), you get bedsores. They weren't bad, but that's what they were. Whiteoak had some kind of new gummy stuff for this which stank but helped. Although I'd wake up with the dragonlet trying to get its tongue under me to lick it off. It had a surprisingly long tongue. And its tongue was hot too, so along with the blotches I started getting these sort of skinny whiplash red marks.

But I'd been away from the institute for long enough by then that I think even with everything else that was going on (or maybe because of it) Dad was smelling a rat pretty hard  -  and this was the first time he'd let me out of his sight since Mom died and this is what happened.

I was still talking to Dad on the radio every day and I sounded a little better than I had but I was still so tired I know I must have sounded funny, even on a two-way where you tend to kind of squawk and squeal anyway, and the branch-across-the-throat excuse didn't cover my brain. He always sounded sort of preoccupied and jumpy at the same time when he talked to me, which is a good trick but I wasn't enjoying it. I was too tired to jump after him. Once my throat had supposedly healed he'd wanted to talk to me about finding the dead dragon and the dead guy again, but this time while I got a little farther I got way over the top upset  -  and nearly called her "she" which would not have been a good slip to make  -  so he let me off again. It's just as well because he was getting me so spooked with his jumping-around-ness and of course I kept thinking about his not knowing about the dragonlet that I might have blurted out something even worse.

So after Billy and the others got back we left for the Institute pretty fast. Again, at the time, I didn't notice it so much, but I remembered later, that Billy and Kit and Jane had come back even quieter and more expressionless than old Arkhola Rangers usually are (at least when there aren't any tourists around). I suppose, at the time, I just thought they were sad about the mother dragon too. What I did notice is that what conversations they had were all in their own language  -  which is something Billy never does when any of us poor retarded English-only speakers are around. That should have really bothered me. But nothing much bothered me as long as there was hot broth every two hours.

We took it really easy, going home. All I had to carry was the dragonlet, so I didn't have too bad a time, although I started getting pretty short of sleep again because we kept walking (slowly) most of the day. (At least the bedsores went away.) Billy had rigged a sling to keep the dragonlet in my shirt too  -  we'd tried putting it in the sling itself but that wasn't good enough, it continued to demand SKIN although that may have been that it liked all the gooey salves  -  cloth just doesn't slither like skin does. Anyway, with the sling I could walk without having to clutch my stomach all the time.

And while my priorities were a bit skewed I did know we were walking into a huge ugly situation  -  and that I had to pay attention because my dragonlet's future depended on it. Worrying about this was enough to make me lose sleep, and I couldn't afford to lose sleep. Also it made my headache worse, and there wasn't anything interesting about this worse, like there was about the dream-cave worse. The fact that I knew I wouldn't give it  -  the dragonlet  -  up, and that Billy would back me up about this didn't anything like mean we were going to win. He also loved Smokehill  -  actually I don't think the way most of our Rangers, including Billy, feel about Smokehill is covered well enough by the word "love"  -  and probably, till he'd found me leaning up against a tree at midnight with a baby dragon in my lap, he'd've said that nothing could make him risk doing any harm to Smokehill. Or maybe he'd thought a lot about what could happen if one of us (almost certainly a Ranger, certainly not a dumb kid who'd never even soloed overnight before) ever found themselves in a position of trying to save a dragon's life. Or maybe (I was light-headed from sleep debt, remember) it had happened several times in the last hundred years  -  dragon saving I mean  -  and I just didn't know about it.

But I was pretty sure (in my light-headed way) that even if dragon saving was a regular occurrence no one had ever rescued a hot, squodgy little just-born blob. . . And if Billy had had any of these thoughts they didn't seem to be helping him now. Billy is never talkative and he does a brilliant poker face, but you never saw anything so silent and so pokerfaced as Billy over most of the hike back to the Institute. And none of them were talking by the last day, in any language. Jo, who met us with the jeep, didn't say anything either. Her eyes rested on the bulge at my middle but she didn't ask for show-and-tell.

The dragonlet did not like the jeep ride. It didn't like it so much that eventually Billy and I got out and walked back into the trees so it would calm down and stop yelling and kicking. I wasn't entirely sorry since the jeep was making my headache worse again too. We'd've had to get out before we got to the Institute anyway, we just got out a little early.

I had no idea how I was going to handle the next step myself. Dad and I just didn't get along as well as we had when there'd been three or four of us. I was too much like him. "Laid back" wasn't in either of our vocabularies. (It wasn't really in Mom's either, but she had a better sense of humor than either of us did. And petting a dog is good for your blood pressure  -  they've done studies.) I'd been trying almost from the first night with the dragonlet to think about what I should do and what I should say (and not do or say) when I had to face Dad again, but then it would be time to feed the thing again, and there goes my train of thought.

When we saw the first gleam of the Ranger office wing  -  which is the first you see of the Institute when you're coming from the park side  -  Billy said, "Your dad wants to see you first thing. You and I'll go straight up to his office. I'll go in first and tell him what's happened. You wait till I call you." He hadn't said that many words together since he and Kit and Jane got back from Pine Tor.

I  -  the dragonlet and I  -  followed him silently.

I was wearing one of Billy's huge sweatshirts over my own clothes to hide the new bulge in my middle, and to disguise the sling. (None of the stuff I'd been wearing when it happened turned out to be salvageable  -  dragon birth slime is very, uh, intense. We saved my shoes only because I knew Dad couldn't afford to replace them.) I tried to sort of round my shoulders and slouch along  -  aren't teenage boys expected to slouch?  -  but Maria, who was in the ticket office, gave me a strange look, and Katie, standing in the door of the Ranger office, looked worried. Maybe they were worried because it wasn't only Dad who'd been smelling a rat.

But everyone at the Institute would have been feeling strange and worried because however Dad had decided to handle it, the news of the dead dragon and the dead poacher would already be out there in the world by now and the reaction started, whatever that was. And here finally Billy and I were back again, the vanguard returned to give witness of Armageddon. But I was only thinking about the dragonlet. Maria and Katie looking at me just made me slouch harder.

There's a tiny vestibule with a couple of dented metal chairs outside my father's office. I sat down and Billy went through the moment he knocked, so he just managed to get the door closed behind him before my father tried to get out through it and get at me. I could hear Billy saying, "He's fine. He's not hurt," because of course my dad thought that that's what the Rangers weren't telling him, and after Mom . . . I was pretty impressed that Billy succeeded in keeping the door closed. I was pretty impressed Dad hadn't hiked out to Northcamp two weeks ago to see for himself what was going on. He really trusted Billy. Well that gave us something in common at least.

But Dad had been busy here, dealing with the world outside Smokehill. I kept forgetting.

Billy's voice dropped and I couldn't hear words, just a low murmur, Billy trying, I guess, to make it all sound normal and okay and scientifically interesting and brave and stuff.

It didn't work. I heard my father bellow, "A DRAGON? Jake's brought home A DRAGON?" in a voice they must have been able to hear in Washington, DC, so they could get started on the paperwork to take Smokehill away from us  -  good going, Dad  -  and then the door crashed open, banging against the wall so hard that my father, coming through, had to put his hand out so it wouldn't brain him on the rebound. I jumped and the dragonlet jumped, and it would pick that moment to start making the noise I've been calling peeping or mewing. I was used to it by then, but it really really doesn't sound like any animal noise you've ever heard, and I could see in my father's face that it was all too horribly new to him and also, at that moment, that he knew what Billy had told him was true.

In this struggling-to-be-calm voice Dad said, still too loud, "Billy says  -  " and stopped, like it was also finally sinking in that there were other people around who might hear him. He stood aside and I stood up, cradling the invisibly peeping dragonlet in my hands, and went in. He closed the door and I sat down in the first chair that I came to, waiting to see if the dragonlet would quiet down or if I was going to have to whip it out immediately and feed it, which was usually the answer to everything in the dragonlet's case, feeding. (I was, of course, carrying a bottle. A bottle, unlike a camping pot, at least fits in your pocket.)

I was glad when it subsided. I thought my father needed a little more time before he saw it.

When I looked up again and saw the expression on my father's face. . . . In hindsight I think he was having a parental crisis moment. Traumatic experience or no traumatic experience I had Broken the Rules  -  I hadn't radioed Billy and I hadn't got back on time  -  and I was in huge amounts of trouble and should have been totally focused on finding out what kind of punishment my father was going to give me, or whether he was going to force me to go through the "let's discuss this like rational adults" lecture which I would have to go along with to prove that I could be treated like a rational adult although only a parent would ever think that a kid believes that's what's really happening. And instead I'd positively ignored him while I attended to this other responsibility that was not only mine but had nothing to do with him. At least when I used to shut him out by saying I had to take Snark for a walk, Snark was really his fault. My parents had bought and given me Snark. The first time a kid ignores a parent because something else is realio trulio more important, has to be hard on a dad, especially when the kid is only fourteen (and eleven months).

And that doesn't even touch the federal-prison-for-the-rest-of-our-lives, losing-Smokehill aspect of this case, which Dad had only just found out about this minute. And the eyes of the world were already on us, because of the dead guy. And I don't suppose Dad was sleeping too well either.

I didn't understand any of that at the time but I did see the expression on his face. The bits of it I understood were that he was furious and at a loss. I hadn't seen this expression before. I was pretty scared, but I didn't want to scare the dragonlet too, and . . . well, having that kind of responsibility does make a difference. All that crap parents give you about Learning to Take Responsibility . . . it's not crap. And what was happening wasn't even in the same universe as being "responsible" for Snark had been. I was probably having a son crisis to go with my dad's dad crisis. Things you can do without at the age of fourteen and eleven months.

"I've heard it from Billy," said my dad. "Now you tell me what happened."

So I told him. I don't think I told it as well as I'd told it the first time, even on no sleep, and in the first shock of everything. But when I'd told Billy I'd known he'd be sympathetic. Three years ago I'd've known  -  I think I'd've known  -  that my dad would be sympathetic too, but I didn't know that any more. The last three years had screwed up a lot of things. So I left out a lot. I didn't tell him about having to feed the dragonlet every half hour or about being so filthy I wanted a bath or about being so exhausted I was hallucinating and crazy. I wanted to sound a little bit remotely in control. And I didn't mention the headaches. Or the dreams. I hadn't even told Billy about crying when she died. I stopped when I got to Billy finding me.

My father didn't look at me while I talked. When I was done he sat down, heavily, in his desk chair, and Billy quietly took the remaining third chair.

"You realize that if anyone finds out, we'll all go to jail," was the first thing my father said. I had my mouth all open to reply  -  and while I don't know exactly what I would have said, I guarantee it would have been the wrong thing  -  when he raised his hand to stop me, even though he still hadn't looked at me. "No, you don't realize. You haven't thought about the fact that you'd be sent to a reformatory, and when they let you out you'd go to a foster family, they'd have their eyes on you all the time, and so would the media, and about half of them would think you were a hero and the other half would think you shouldn't ever be let out of reform school at all to corrupt the rest of our population with your depraved ideas, and while I'm not going to tell you your life would be ruined, it would certainly be complicated, and I am telling you they'd never let you within a mile of studying dragons. They'd probably bar you even from taking natural history or biology or ethology in college.

"Meanwhile, of course, we'd all go to jail too, and my guess is that any parole any of us got would be on the condition that we didn't try to make contact with each other." My father paused. I semi-registered that he hadn't bothered to mention that being sent to jail almost certainly would ruin his life, as well as Billy's and any other adult they decided to crucify.

At the same time I could feel stubbornness breaking out all over me like measles. "I won't give her up," I said, which is how I found out I thought it was a she. "If she dies then she dies, but I won't let her die. I'll go away in the park and hide till she gets big enough to fend for herself"  -  like I knew how to keep either of us alive till then, or that the social workers wouldn't prosecute Dad for making away with me if I disappeared  -  "but I won't just let her die."

"Yes." My father heaved a deep sigh, still not looking at me.

"Sir," said Billy. Billy only called my father "sir" when it was really serious. "We can do this. It will be difficult, but we can do this."

"You've kept my son hidden at Northcamp till you figured this out," said my father with a bitterness that scared me.

"I was really really tired," I said, before I thought whether this was wise or not. "I was spending all my time looking after her. She eats all the time. I couldn't've walked this far any sooner. And she'll only  -  she only  -  only I  -  " There was no way to say this without feeling like a complete jerk. "She thinks I'm her mom."

But I think blurting it out like that helped. My father looked at me, finally, as if registering the real problem, which was the dragonlet, instead of all the other problems, which were created by the fact that some morons in Washington had decided that a bill against saving dragons was good for their careers  -  plus the dead guy, which because of all the other moron laws against dragons no one would be able to think about in terms of "self defense" or "what was he doing in Smokehill after our dragons in the first place because pardon me he killed a dragon which is also you know illegal?" But he was dead, and wasn't going anywhere (except into the headlines). Which is what my dad would already have been coping with and been thinking was enough, thank you very much.

But the dragonlet was not only here, she was alive. And it was up to us to try to see that she stayed that way. Dad had to see that. It was, as I keep saying, what we  -  us and Smokehill  -  were for.

I tried to make myself get it that part of my dad's bitterness was that he knew he was going to be stuck with all the treacherous political stuff and Mom again had been the person who poured the most oil on the permanently troubled waters between the Institute and everybody else, chiefly Congress and the Federal Parks Commission, partly because she didn't start off all heavy and scowly and hyper the way Dad did. Which meant we were already in worse shape going into our little treason-and-insurrection dance around my adopted daughter because the FPC, goaded by Congress, was already looking for reasons to think the worst of us because Dad couldn't always remember that to a bureaucrat bureaucracy is important. Dad would be all on his own with not only the totally unrewarding admin stuff and the horribly dangerous new stuff about the dead poacher and the dead dragon . . . but hidden in the background there was a secret live dragon . . . and the Rangers and I got her.

And he was right. All of our necks would depend on whether or not my dad lied, and kept on lying, convincingly enough, first to the squinty-eyed congressional subcommittee drones, then to the FPC guys, who weren't all morons but tended to be horribly law-abiding, and to everybody else who walked through the gates who thought they had a right to talk about "accountability," which had been hard enough, since Mom died, Without the lying part. And now we'd be having a whole new lot of squinty-eyed types who would arrive determined to disbelieve everything but the worst, just when we had the Secret of the Century to keep. Dad had every reason to be bitter. And scared. And I want to point out that he's the real hero in this story.

But for the moment he let himself be distracted. After all, he was here running the institute because he was fascinated by dragons. "She would expect to be able to eat all the time, living in her mom's pouch," he said. "Couldn't the Rangers help you?"

"Well," I said uncomfortably, "she seems to have sort of  -  imprinted on me."

My father nodded, and I saw his eyes flicker to the short shelf of primary sources on dragon contact.

The dragonlet chose this moment to wake up again. I'd already begun to notice that she was a little more active in the daytime, when I was (comparatively) more active  -  and I was also wondering if she could pick up anxiety. A dog does, and a dog doesn't live pressed up to your stomach all the time. On the other hand, dogs have been living with humans for thirty or forty thousand years and dragons have been avoiding humans for a lot longer than thirty or forty thousand years. Maybe it's just that my stomach gurgles more when I'm nervous and the noise would wake her up.

"I think I'm going to have to feed her," I said apologetically.

"Go ahead," said my father. Very drily he added, "I want to meet her."

I pulled up my two layers of sweatshirts and slid her out behind the sling inside my shirt in what were by now very practiced moves, but having my father watching me made me self-conscious in a way the Rangers hadn't. My stomach isn't particularly lovely anyway, but I wanted to be sure my father did not notice any strange red scalded patches (although chances are, with a baby dragon in the room, he wasn't going to notice anything else short of a pterodactyl dive-bombing through the ceiling). Also, while to me the dragonlet looked a whole lot better than she had that first afternoon I'd picked her up still covered with birth slime, she still looked . . . while I balanced her in one hand before smushing her up my (extra-large, extra-stretched) sleeve, and fished for her broth bottle I saw her as my dad must: ugly damn little critter, shapeless pulpy-looking body in that awful bruise color, little spastic legs with half-formed toes (no claws yet, fortunately for me) and a squished-looking head, and glistening all over from the salve.

The diaper made her look like some kind of truly grotesque doll  -  you know how little kids will diaper their teddy bears or whatever. Eleanor used to put diapers on her purple plush iguana (speaking of tail problems), although the dragonlet's at least hid some of her unloveliness which had to be a good thing. (It hid quite a lot really due to the logistics of keeping it in place.) But the dragonlet looked like one of those gross things you see supposedly pickled in bottles in movies about mad scientists. Not just hairless  -  or in the dragonlet's case scaleless  -  but somehow skinless, although she wasn't, and deformed, which I had no idea if she was or not. She was more or less symmetrical, in her squashy, sort of jelly-y way, which was probably good as far as it went. But she looked, well, fetal, which she pretty much was. She wasn't supposed to be out here in the air, needing salve and sweatshirts. And broth bottles. She was supposed to be in her mom's pouch, stuck on a nipple for the next however many months. Or something like that.

I decided not to try to tell my dad how much better she looked than she had a few weeks ago. Or why she was still alive on deer and squirrel broth, which I didn't have a clue about myself.

Or that I dreamed of dragons, big grown-up dragons, almost every night, in those two-hour chunks, and now that I was sleeping for longer the dreams felt like they got bigger and I used to wake up out of those dreams lately with my headache bigger than my skull for a while. There was usually a moment, before I was fully awake again, where I'd think, that's it, you stay out there, before it fell in on itself like a tent being taken down and jammed itself and all its sharp edges and too-long pointy tent poles back inside my head again.

She drank half a bottle and collapsed, the way she always did, going from some kind of pathetic baby animal with something terribly wrong with it, to something more like a beanbag or a water balloon in the shape of a you don't know what, but whatever it is, you hope they don't make any more. I gathered her up  -  she was nearly twice as long now as she'd been when I'd found her  -  shoved her back under my shirt, and wiped my greasy hands on my jeans. I was going to have major trouble if she started jumping around much before she grew thick enough skin not to need to be oiled all the time.

There was silence for a long tense moment.

"And what is it you're suggesting we do?" said my father to Billy.

"Jake will have come back from his first overnight solo in the park knowing that he wants to apprentice as a Ranger," said Billy. "You will believe him, and decide that this is a good thing for him to do. He will have to keep up with his schoolwork  -  "

"Yes he will," said my father.

"  -  But so long as he does so I don't think anyone will ask too many questions." I loved Billy at that moment for not taking the opportunity to give me an "are you paying attention to this, I am the grown-up and I'm doing you a biiiig favor so you'd better cooperate" look. I knew what he was doing for me. "Meanwhile we'll have accepted him as an apprentice and therefore he will live in the Rangers' quarters. Since we do not usually accept apprentices so young he will have a special billet; but while we are accepting him this young because we know him, we cannot allow him to go on living with his father. The Ranger apprenticeship is very serious."

It is too. Because of the dragons  -  and because more than half our staff funding is still from the trust Old Pete set up  -  we do get to make some of our own decisions, and our Ranger program has like trickled down through everything. You couldn't even work part time in the cafe or the gift shop without being vetted six ways from Sunday. Twenty-seven ways. This drives the National Park Service crazy because they think their rules and regulations are the important ones, but they do a crap job of keeping the congressional drones off our backs so why should we pay any more attention to them than we have to?

There was a longer, even more uncomfortable silence while my father thought this over. My hand had involuntarily gone to my stomach again. Let's say that it's just that I still wasn't quite convinced of the safety of the sling to hold the (greasy) dragonlet where she wanted to be, and that my hand cupped itself around her because my hand was still used to being needed to keep her there. And let's really not get into the way Katie used to put her hand under the bulge that became Eleanor when she was upset or uneasy, which she was a lot, because she had found out she was pregnant right around the time her jerk of a husband said he was leaving because he was tired of living a hundred miles away from the nearest real restaurant, and he wanted her not to have Eleanor because he didn't want to pay child support on another kid.

(Yeah, it's amazing what some grown-ups will say when there's a kid right there. Martha told me because she was worrying that she was the reason why her father was such a creep. All I want to know is how Katie married the guy in the first place. He must have had a brain transplant after the wedding. I was only eight, but Martha's story made an impression. Also having a five-year-old girl to play with  -  and Martha loved Snark  -  was better than having no other children around at all, and the bulge might have turned out to be a boy.)

But I wasn't holding the sling in place, of course, or the dragonlet. I was protecting her from my father. I didn't know that at the time  -  and fortunately I didn't think about Katie and Eleanor-the-bulge either  -  but I know now what I was doing. And that some of my feelings (including lower back pain) weren't so different from Katie's.

My father's a very bright guy. He knew what he was seeing at the time. And, of course, a dragon . . . whatever the damn laws were, dragons were why we were here.

After a couple of eons he said, "Okay. Let's do it."

It was the second time in my life I wished I knew how to pray. The first time had been when Mom disappeared. I was going to do better by my dragon.