Dragonhaven (22 page)

She groaned like she was being tortured but she came. In her defense she wasn't used to spending all day walking any more than I was (she also didn't know how to walk—she was either zigzagging full tilt from Interesting Thing to Interesting Thing or keeled over) and I was built better for it, but I'd unfolded kind of slowly when I got up too, and I was really glad she agreed to do her own staggering, so I didn't have to carry her.

I already had a new mantra, from about the afternoon of the first day: We're farther
in
than we've ever
been
. It repeats really nicely when you're walking: da da da
thump
da da da (well, da again, but you can run “we've ever” into two)
thump.
We weren't really, not yet, but that's where we were going, and also it put a good spin on all the No Going Back. We were going farther in than we'd been since I first brought her home as a blob, when she was still small enough to fit under my shirt. The fourth night it was like I was beginning to believe it, or believe that we were going to get away with it somehow. At least for a while longer.

I couldn't think about it that I'd probably never be able to bring Lois back to the Institute, because she'd've got too big, and would have wings and a flame-thrower…couldn't think about the fact that no doubt Billy and Dad knew this just as well as I did and they hadn't said anything about it either, at least not to me. I mean, sure, we'd talked about our long-range plan-substitute, about Lois getting to the point that she didn't have to have me around all the time, but we'd only talked about it sort of sidelong and half casual, like it was obvious and irrelevant and didn't really need discussing.

Lois and I were both stiff the second morning and worse the third (although this may have been aggravated by the power struggle over how
close
we slept to the fire every night). I know this is a fitness thing and proves that we weren't, but it's funny how you get one day like free of charge. The second day starts to count (especially after that first night on the cold hard ground). And then it's the day after the second night when it all catches up with you. In my defense I
was
carrying a lot more gear than I would've been if this was just a few days of an ordinary field trip.

That third morning Lois was so slow starting off that nobody had to notice I would have been slow. Although maybe this wasn't so useful (I mean worth it to my vanity) because I had to carry her more. Finally Billy and Jane split my gear between them and I concentrated on carrying Lois for a while. I was a little worried about her because there was no drama about her collapses. She just collapsed. And if I didn't notice right away and kept shuffling on she didn't even sound like an opera heroine when she cried after me. She just sounded exhausted. But I thought about how tired
I
felt and decided this was just what happens to you when you're still pretty little and you go for a real walk in our park. She may have been picking up on our motivation or something too—I wouldn't put it past her to notice that this wasn't a field trip like our other field trips. We weren't really going any faster than we ever went when she and I were part of the convoy, but we were more
determined.
And then of course I had to have one of my Guilt Attacks because she was a dragon and she shouldn't have spent the last twenty-three months in a
house
.

She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder and her (prickly) brow ridge wedged under my left ear. I hadn't had a burned ear before; on other, less intense trips she was too busy looking around. Always new experiences with Lois around. Oh well.

But like all the rest of us (humans) who'd gone for walks in our park and had to learn how, she brightened up again slowly over the next few days. She was already better that fourth day, when I had my unexpected insight into the concept of “relaxation.” And a good thing too, since the farther we got from the Institute the rougher the tracks got. I was also starting to notice that while we went up and down and back and forth and sideways and other-sideways the trend was definitely uphill. The Bonelands were several thousand feet higher than the Institute, they were just far enough away to make the slope gradual. Sort of. You rarely went
up
anything: You were busy tacking for the best footing, and sometimes you snaked up the same bit of slope several times before it like
stayed
up and stopped sending you back down into another streambed.

We had lots of prairie farther in, mainly north and south; the Bonelands sucked up most of the west, although beyond them it began to get a little friendlier again; where we were the landscape was still mostly a mixture of patchy forest and meadow with the occasional sudden startling burst of hill and rockface. You wouldn't think it possible that something a couple hundred feet tall and
vertical
could jump at you from nowhere, but sometimes it did, and you'd have to swerve aside, like not walking into a wall, with it
looming
over you. But the moments when you had the best view and might have wanted to stand still a minute looking around and saying “gosh wow” I was mostly looking around for Lois and her Interesting Things; the farther we got in too the more wildlife, and I couldn't guarantee that everything was going to get out of Lois' way. And ours of course.

Most things will give humans a wide berth if they have the chance, and I assume they feel the same about dragons. And Lois made a lot of noise. She talked to herself—and to me—
and
she crashed and lolloped through everything. Going
around
was mostly not in her vocabulary. (I was reminded of how late she figured out “going around” in Grace's kitchen, when she was first experimenting with leaving the sling.) I did occasionally see her doing her sideways investigative bumping-into trick, but not very often. Mostly it was just plunge and thunder. As we got into more open territory I told myself that any self-respecting rattlesnake would have got out of the way long before she arrived—and I'm not sure a rattlesnake's fangs would get through even a twenty-three-month-old dragonlet's skin, which is already pretty horny. Fortunately I never had to find out. (Or whether skunk musk will stick ditto.) But there was so much birdsong (and bird warning-screech) sometimes I couldn't hear Lois burbling and crashing and then I
really
had to look round for her. I had reason to be tired by the time we stopped for the night: Nobody else was twisting themselves into pretzels keeping an eye on their hyperactive dragonlet.

By the seventh day I was carrying all my own gear again—and I'd noticed, when Lois scrabbled around at night, that the bottoms of her feet had got rougher and grittier, like when you take your shoes off for the first time that year, when you're (probably) not going to get frostbite from going barefoot. First few days you wonder if it's worth it and then suddenly you're okay, except the noise your feet make on the kitchen lino is suddenly less of a slap and more of a scritch. I was used to sleeping with an overheated self-maintaining turbine going nowhere fast so this comparatively minor alteration for the worse didn't really wake me up…but then I was awake already.

The dreams about the dragons' cave were getting worse, or more vivid, again, out here deeper and deeper in the park, and about a week in the Headache seemed to be trying to change shape again, and it pissed me off in this fretty, oh-go-
away
useless way. The dragon dreams were
enough
—and the way they had too many moms in them, Lois' and mine. Can't stick reality, and this time imagination is no comfort either. Well, damn. So much for relaxation. It had been a nice idea. Although also in a strange, freaky, not-going-to-admit-it-even-to-myself way I was kind of glad to see the caves again, it was like going back to somewhere you used to know really well and haven't been in a long time. Oh, yeah, remember that tunnel, with the long pink streak in the rock overhead, it always used to catch my eye like it might turn out to be a sort of monster Cthulhu earthworm, and it still does…I even recognized several of the
dragons,
not just Lois' mom.

But last time I was seeing the caves this clearly and graphically I was spending up to twenty hours a day asleep, wrapped around a small sticky dragonlet. There wasn't enough of me to have
two
lives, you know? The sleeping and the waking. And I had a life (of sorts) when I was awake, now.

But I must have been sleeping pretty okay in spite of Lois' feet and the dreams and the Headache. Because I really enjoyed the last few days of the hike in a way I couldn't remember enjoying anything. The nearest I could think of was from when I was like ten and Snark and Mom were still alive. Pretty sad really. (But it made me think of one of Martha's and my favorite jokes:
You need to get out more!
It applied to almost anything about life at Smokehill. And then we'd laugh like we were going to break a rib. So that cheered me up again.) But it was like time out, in a way. We weren't
there
, wherever there was. We were leaving one there and going to another one. (We're farther in than we've ever been.) But at the moment we were suspended in between. Footloose and carefree, except for the thousand pounds of backpack and the baby dragon.

The other thing that messed me up sometimes was in the evenings when we called in to the Institute. We called in every day just like everyone who walks in our park has to. I always talked to Dad and since we couldn't talk about Lois over the air we had a nice fresh valid reason not to have anything to say to each other. He found different ways to make jokes about not talking about her though, which was brighter than I was. He'd say things like “Hope your pack isn't too heavy” or “Hope you aren't sleeping too close to the fire and waking up toasted.” And then I'd laugh and then we'd agree that he and I were both fine and then I'd give him back to Billy for the grown-up debriefing.

No grown-up had still ever mentioned the Searles to me, or the Human Preservation Society. Sometimes it was hard to remember I didn't know anything. Occasionally Billy actually had the chutzpah to send me off to collect firewood while he was talking to Dad. Oh come on. Second time he did it I said, afterward, after I'd brought some more firewood and Billy was off the two-way, as blandly as I could, “What's going on?”

Billy never looked sheepish. He knew well enough what I meant. He gave me one of his almost-smiles and said, “Nothing you have to worry about.” From Billy this isn't the put-down it would have been from almost anyone else. When Billy said it he meant, “You've got the dragon. It's up to us to do the rest of it.” He'd been totally like this from the beginning, you know? Billy was big on focus. He'd understood a lot more a lot sooner than I had—from when we'd had that first awful bath at Northcamp and Lois hadn't wanted to be put down
his
shirt. But I still couldn't help wanting to know something.

Martha and I had figured out a code about some of it. I got to talk to her a couple of times on the hike in, and I'd say, “Anything good on TV?” And if she said, “No, just stupid science fiction,” it was okay. But if she said, “There's a new cop show, and it's kind of scary,” then it was
not
okay. The second time I got to talk to her was after Billy had sent me to pick up firewood the second night in a row while he talked to Dad, and when I asked her about TV she hesitated and said, “There's supposed to be a new cop show starting soon and it sounds pretty scary.” Oh great. “Well, try not to lose any sleep over it,” I said.

“I'll try,” said Martha. “But I'll probably watch it anyway, you know?” I knew.

Westcamp was in a bit more of a mess than the permanent camps usually are. And I actually helped with some of the clean-and patch-up. It was weirdly exhilarating. It was because we were out in the middle of nowhere and I didn't have to watch Lois every minute. And also because I was doing something that both was not about Lois and was about helping somebody else out for a change. Even my time at the Institute, the last couple of years, had been about Lois really—about pretending everything was normal, to try and keep her safe and secret—even if most of the work I did was also useful that had been almost beside the point.

Of course like a good parent I quickly learned to shift my worries to the present situation so now that we'd got here and weren't immediately leaving again I was afraid she'd eat something that would poison her the third or fourth time she went by it because it had got familiar (or that she'd been snatching mouthfuls right along and the third or fourth time the toxic accumulation would finally get her) or get lost because she hadn't learned where the new edges of her new territory were or blunder into something like a herd of no-nonsense Bighorn that would recognize her as a predator even though she didn't know it yet herself, and stomp her to death. But she stuck pretty close to me just like she usually did (…so I started wondering how long
that
would last before she got used to the idea that I wasn't watching her every minute, and how her next developmental stage would be exploring beyond Mom, and
then
she would blunder into the Bighorn, etc.), and then after a while it wasn't so exhilarating but we had to do it anyway. Also I couldn't stop myself jumping every time the two-way yammered at us.

A tree had fallen on the roof and poked a window out on its way, in spite of the heavy shutters. Jane climbed up onto the roof to lop branches till we could get the rest of it off without doing any more damage (waste not, want not, I would be cutting it up and stacking it for firewood, but I like chopping wood, so that's okay…just so long as a baby dragon doesn't get in the way. Worry worry) while Billy looked to see if there was any spare glass in the store (there was) and if it could be made to fit (yes) and if there was a glass cutter and sealer (yes). And made notes to replace what we were using. Fortunately the tree hadn't taken out the solar panels for the generator—
that
would have been a disaster. Then all over again for the door frame, where some kind of Arnold-Schwarzenegger-wannabe sapling had managed to crack the door away from the sill. (That was a bit of a mind boggler to me since I believe that the Rangers, you know,
rule
, and that no mere sapling would
dare
.)

And the hole that sapling had made, with the window, meant that the indoors had been pretty well colonized, which is why the Rangers are so anal retentive about keeping the permanent camps as invader-proof as poss. It's a lot of remedial work when things go wrong. I did way more than my fair share of the blanket-mending because I was so cheezing good at it from all those months of patching diapers. I did a lot of muttering when I had a needle in my hands. Lois really did pick up that mood—she'd come and mutter too, winding around my legs like a cat except for the fact she wasn't built for winding, and she was tall enough now that my legs would go
bumpbumpbumpbump
down her spinal plates which did
not
help, and the blanket would fall or get pulled off my lap when she'd get tangled up in it, and…. Billy managed not to laugh at this. Jane didn't. Manage
not
to laugh.

So anyway both Jane and Billy stayed longer than they'd originally meant to because there was all this work to do. Billy also went out hunting one afternoon. I'd noticed he'd bothered to pack in a rifle, which I was kind of surprised about, since we didn't have any
investigators
with us, ha ha ha. Maybe it was just a Ranger thing for longer hikes, although generally speaking a Ranger would rather sit up a tree for a week than kill something that had a perfect right to be there, and to keep themselves fed on long trips they mostly used snares or bows and arrows—no, I'm serious. I keep telling you our Rangers are good. Jane had her bow with her.

I suppose I must have noticed when Billy left Jane and me replacing shingles with his rifle cracked over his arm, but I didn't think about that either. He came back later and told me to come with him. He'd shot a deer and needed someone to carry the other end of the pole, to get it back to camp.

Lois came too and was very surprised by the deer. She was used to her food coming to her in small pieces in a bowl of soup, or flicked at her. (I'd managed to teach her “Yours!” without having to demonstrate grabbing stuff tossed to me in my mouth, but food is a great motivator to learning.) Dragons don't chew—they have pointy, widely separated teeth, for stabbing, tearing, and holding on—but along with all the other things nobody knows about dragons we didn't know when Lois' infant digestive juices might be up to bigger chunks, so she wasn't getting any yet. (Lois' teeth were one of her trouble-free zones. They just appeared. She never went through a chewing-everything-she-could-get-her-jaws-around-but-particularly-the-things-you-most-mind-being-transformed-to-gloppy-shreds phase the way puppies do. This was actually sort of off-balancing. It's one of the ways you know a puppy is growing up. There were
no
familiar markers with Lois, except that she kept getting bigger.)

She had a lick at the spilled blood where Billy had gutted it but didn't seem to think much of it. She was a little subdued on the way back like maybe she was thinking about it. I was a little subdued on the way back because why was Billy already laying in a whole
deer
? I'd seen the store cupboard, which was still about half stocked with usual stuff, plus everything Billy and Jane had brought, which seemed to me enough even for several Loises, or if one Lois put on a tremendous growth spurt, and it wasn't like they were going off and leaving me. Oh well. Maybe he just wanted a break from cabin repair.

The smoker was already there, but I'm the one who kept the fire going. However smoking is smoking so you might as well do more than less so I told myself the deer was fine. Billy made me practice some of the cutting-up too but you could sure see which he'd done and which I had. You'd think all you'd need is a sharp knife and a steady hand. Wrong.

He also tried to make me practice a little with his rifle, but Lois hated the noise so he let it go. He'd taught me to shoot a few years ago and I had been a demon with old beer and soda cans (they recycle just as well with holes in them) pretty much up till Lois arrived, so I still knew the, you know, theory, and my hands still knew the motions, but I was way out of practice and Lois hating it meant I was freezing before I pulled the trigger which ruined my aim
and
my shoulder. I might not have been able to hit what I was aiming at anyway for thinking about why Billy was suddenly taking it into his head to have me brush up on my gun nonexpertise.

But then Billy merely shifted survival-skill gears and got me brushing up on snare-setting instead. (I'm not exactly hopeless with a bow, but…close.) But rabbits are smaller. I could've coped with the idea of the occasional fresh rabbit. Supposing I could set a snare properly. We'd eaten rabbit and pheasant on the hike in. But it
didn't really matter
because I was never going to be here alone, of course. There was always going to be a Ranger with me, and Rangers can set snares in their sleep (I mean snares that catch something).

We'd just about got everything fixed up so Jane was finally getting ready to go back. There'd been a lot of radio contact including about stuff Kit could bring when he came to take Billy's place. After this there was only going to be one Ranger at a time here with me. So Jane left and then Billy waited for Kit, and Kit turned up on schedule with various small crucial bits and pieces—including one to make the radio work better; it had been dropping in and out a lot in a pretty uncomfortable way and everyone on it sounded like they were being strangled while breathing laughing gas. We'd had a lot more problems with the two-ways since the techies had monkeyed with the fence, so we all hoped the monkeying was
working
—there was no real way to know except backwards, by people
not
breaking in.

So Billy left (leaving me the rifle, just by the way, and spare ammo and reload stuff), but Kit finished making everything as everything-proof as you can ever make anything everything-proof out in the middle of a nowhere that didn't care if you were human, dragon, or squidgy tentacled blob from Alpha Centauri. Which was the good news.

Because the bad news was they had an outbreak back at the Institute. Nothing to do with dragons—
flu
. I'd been worrying about everybody's stress levels and why nobody had a heart attack or a nervous breakdown yet, right? Well they got summer flu instead. (Maybe it was because
they
all relaxed as soon as Lois and I were out of bus-tour radius.) First flu epidemic we'd had since I'd been alive, and believe me, tourists on holiday come and sneeze and cough all over you rather than miss their chance by keeping their germs at home. (No, you're right, I don't really blame them. I'd come to Smokehill with terminal body-parts-dropping-off-it-is if it was my only chance.)

By the time Billy got back to the Institute there were seven Rangers down and with it being summer which is high season anyway, the extra tourist load (and lingering investigative drones, although there were mostly only a symbolic crab and grumble of these left) meant everyone still standing was going crazy. Kit sort of hung around being twitchy for several days and then he asked me if I thought I could stay at Westcamp alone for a little while. The alternative was going back with him to the Institute. No way.

There's maybe a drawback to suddenly looking like a grown-up, which is what I had started to do the second half of the year I was fifteen. By now—and yeah, no doubt partly as a result of all that good-student crap first so they wouldn't take me away after Mom died and then later to protect Lois—I could put over maturity-beyond-his-years like you wouldn't believe. I'd also had my own growth spurt and was six-foot-something and bulky too—
you
try hauling a baby dragon around and see if it doesn't grow you muscles like a furniture mover. So I knew what I had to do with Kit—I'd also guessed it was coming so I'd been like secretly practicing my role. I just about packed his gear for him and shoved him out. There was no question about risking Lois back at the Institute. That tourist who had bumbled past our cottage had gone missing when we had a full complement of Rangers watching out.

So I had to stay, and I had to convince Kit it was okay if he left me. Us. I did. And I'm afraid Billy's rifle helped—helped convince Kit. (He hadn't seen me try and shoot it.) But then I had to convince Dad. That really challenged my competent-maturity program, and it was only a beta really. Turned out that he'd just
told
Kit to bring me (us) back. When he mentioned that—almost in passing—like it was no big deal—then I mainly had to not lose my temper and yell. If I'd yelled Dad would've just yelled louder and ordered me back to the Institute, and the main thing about handling Dad is preventing him from giving an order, because then it's an order and that's the end of the discussion.

The problem was that I
was
scared. But it wasn't a scared that anybody else could do anything about. When I was younger sometimes being ordered to do something was secretly kind of okay because then it was Dad's (or Mom's) fault, I couldn't do anything about it. I kept telling myself it would actually be easier if there wasn't anybody else around; Lois' and my training-each-other-to-do-things sessions were getting more and more complicated, and if it was just me and Lois I could concentrate more on her, and not worry about explaining anything to anybody who caught us at it, and who knew how far we would get how fast.

But, you know, look at what had happened to me the last time I'd been in the park alone, which I know I've said before, but are you surprised it kept kind of running through my mind? Okay, maybe it had been a
good
disaster. But it was still a disaster and it had changed all our lives tremendously in a stretch-till-you-snap way and there was no stretch left for even a little tiny disaster-ette. This flu was pushing it. And I was also not absolutely sure I
wanted
to find out how far Lois and I could get how fast—or why didn't I want anyone around to notice?

There's another little tiny factoid about all this. Sure, I'd been Billy's willing slave since I was two. And I knew a lot more about Life in the Wild than your average seventeen-year-old. But that's not the same thing as knowing what you're doing out here. To the extent that you ever know what you're doing. And then I also had to work way too hard not to wonder what, exactly, Billy had been anticipating when he left me his rifle (even if I couldn't hit anything with it, except maybe stomping beetles with the stock end. The beetles in the cabin were kind of a plague).

But I smiled and did my
responsible
trick, and Kit was satisfied, and maybe Dad was so impressed that I
hadn't
lost my temper that he believed my beta program after all and said okay. Or maybe it was worse back at the Institute than I realized and what Dad really hadn't ordered me to do was
not
come back, but stay at Westcamp, and he'd told Kit to bring me to piss me off, so I'd be sure to do the opposite. (Although this is a little devious for Dad.) Martha sounded really worried when I talked to her, and she was obviously trying to figure out a way to tell me something we hadn't got into our code. There weren't any cop shows, she said, but there was new thriller that everybody was talking about but she hadn't seen yet.