The Dragon Keeper (21 page)

“Nothing. Everything.” He blinked off into that vortex again, and she shook him by the shoulders, all patience for this act long gone.

“Quit stroking out on me and spit it out.”

“They’re female. The hatchlings’ chromosomes. I checked all three of them. All of them have the 500 bp DNA band; they have opposing alleles.”

She laughed once, a hard, scoffing sound. “Are you going to tell me the real problem or not?”

“They’re female,” he repeated.

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s true.”

He mirrored her move, grabbing her by the shoulders and staring her down, repeating the words until they burned into her eyes and ears. It’s true. They’re female. It’s true.

Denial paralyzed her for a moment, and then she shook her head. “Jata has never mated. She couldn’t have produced female offspring. It’s not genetically possible.”

His five o’clock shadow cracked open into a crazed, insomniac smile, and finally she understood. His distraction. The blood tests. Babbling incoherence from the veterinarian with a plan for every warm body under the sun.

“It’s impossible.” It was only a whisper now, losing conviction.

“It happened anyway.” His smile grew bigger and saner as the news numbed her body. Shock was strange like that; it got handed over, passed off to the next unsuspecting idiot. She could feel it now, moving out of Antonio’s body and into hers. He got taller, or maybe she shrank. As her hands fell off his shoulders, his moved to support her elbows, holding her on her feet as another wave of applause rolled through the room. The lights dimmed, and she leaned into his side for balance as the screen on stage flickered. The video was going to roll.

“It’s a miracle,” Antonio said, his voice quiet but filling up with excitement as the projector beam reflected off his profile. She was completely dumb, unable to do anything but watch the light play over his face in splotchy blues and yellows.

“Can you imagine?” he was saying. “At our zoo? Do you know what this means? Every scientist and reporter in the world will be knocking on our door. It’ll make this reception look like nothing.” He waved his free hand at the room, and she followed it up to the stage where the final hatching was being projected onto the giant screen. It replayed larger than life, bigger than anything she could remember. The giant egg cracked open, and it looked as if the walls themselves were breaking apart as the mottled shell shuddered and splintered under the force of the thing inside.

Everything else in the room stopped. Glasses stopped clinking. The music, which must have trailed off before the speeches, was replaced by the video’s recorded cracks and muffled scratching. The conversations peppering the crowd died little deaths, and everyone turned to watch something that they couldn’t possibly understand. A ten-foot dragon snout broke through the end of the shell, and some people clapped as a single black eye gazed blankly over their heads. Maybe they clapped out of respect for the birth, or the fact that the birth was magnified to Godzilla proportions, or because they were drunk and it demanded applause on the invitation, but no one clapped for the most stunning reason of all because they couldn’t. They were watching a miracle blindfolded.

The dragon shuddered out of the rest of the shell and flipped over to its stomach, poised as if to crawl right out of the screen, snake through the crowd, and ascend to its rightful place in the food chain. At that moment the video paused, and Gerald turned back to the microphone.

“And now, for a brief discussion of our brilliant Komodo mother, I would like to present one of our reptile keepers—Megan Yancy.”

She didn’t remember leaving Antonio or walking through the crowd, only the hatchling—that frozen dragon hatchling that grew and grew, consuming everything in her field of vision until there was only a giant black gaze in a nest of glossy scales. She climbed up to the stage and stood where Gerald had stood, looked at the empty podium and wondered how it could be there, how something so mundane could still exist after her entire world had just turned upside down.

Later, she didn’t know what had happened first—if the reporters had rushed to the stage or if Antonio had jogged to the podium and grabbed the microphone. The questions tumbled over one another, hesitant at first, all variations of “How is that a problem?” and “What are you saying?” rising above the stage lights, into the air, circulating through the baby tanks in growing rumbles and sending the animals into hiding, the swelling of the crowd pumped up by the beat of waiters and staff as the impossibility of the thing started to sink in, heads swinging wildly from expert to supposed expert, cross-examining, demanding explanations that didn’t exist, grasping for any conclusion, any reasonable excuse why Meg had stood in front of them, shaking, and blurted out: “They’re girls. The dragons are female.”

21 Days
after
Hatching

G
arbled faces moved in and out of spotlights, attacking her with gaping mouths. The hatchlings, projected up onto the giant video screen, broke free of the picture and one by one climbed down onto the stage, towering over the room. They ran for the doors, but as they tried to escape, their bodies shrank in a panic of whip-cracking tails. The crowd dove for them, ripped their bodies apart, and ate them in a whirl of flashing canines until nothing was left except a stain of blood and saliva. In the back shadows, the water buffalo stared at her with shuddering glass eyes, and as the dream twisted and faded, the crowd inched toward the buffalo in hungry, determined steps.

~

The city slept as Meg roared past the cozy, dark houses lining the St. Paul streets and onto the empty freeway, where the sun kissed the other side of the horizon, warming the sky from a pale gray to blushing pink. Her shift didn’t start for another two hours, but the nightmare chased her all the way to the zoo.

Only security beams lit the baby building, and the wood floor, littered with garbage, felt sticky and wet under her sneakers. The red carpet was bunched and curled after a night of being trampled, and the empty stage and bar still haunted the far side of the room. The mess looked huge and irreversible; it seemed impossible to go back to how things had been before last night.

She flipped on the exhibit light and found the hatchlings in the trees, wrapped around branches and staring steadily back at her, gauging how much of a threat she might pose to them. After a long silence, the one closest to the door shut her eyes, dismissing Meg and the intrusion of the light. Meg pulled on a glove and carefully unlatched the exhibit door. The hinge was soundless, but Meg’s scent sent the closest hatchling skittering down the tree trunk into her waiting hand. Re-locking the exhibit door, Meg sat down on the floor and cradled the dragon in her palm.

The dragon opened her thumb-sized jaw and tasted the air with a shot of her tongue. For eight months, Meg had been thinking of them as males, but the dragon she held was female. The delicate pointed head—female. The miniature folds lining the skin of her neck that rippled in and out from a balloon of nervous oxygen—female. From the pinpoint claws to her bright black, green, and yellow splashes of infant scales—every detail was perfectly, impossibly drawn in front of her eyes.

“How can you be?”

The question breathed out into the room and surrounded them. They were alone—she and the dragon and the question—and Meg felt the uneasy certainty they would remain alone. Questions about creation could only be answered at the source, by the creator, which meant that all the media, management, and every scientist in the world who demanded explanations would march past these doors without a sideways glance and go straight to the reptile building. They would go to Jata.

Jata held the answer.

22 Days
after
Hatching

B
en came home on Sunday afternoon. Meg was in the living room, poring over books and journals of dog-eared field studies, looking for clues, a whiff, anything that could possibly explain how Jata had produced female offspring, when she heard him unlock the kitchen door. She hadn’t seen or heard from him since he’d disappeared from the reception on Friday night—no phone calls, no texts, nothing. Not that she’d expected him to call.

The washer lid banged open, and she heard him start a load of laundry before going back to the kitchen and opening the fridge. She’d been holding her breath and let it out carefully, unsure whether she should go talk to him or not. But what could she say? She’d never really understood her relationship with Ben; it never fit into any of those easy labels other people used for their partners and friends. So if she couldn’t even identify the animal in the first place, had gone out of her way to stab it and try to hide the wound, how could she possibly hope to treat its injuries now? After a few minutes of queasy indecision, she buried herself back in the books, where at least she knew what she wanted, if not how to get it.

She had to find out how Jata had daughters.

The principles of parthenogenesis were fairly simple, just as she had drawn out on that kid’s visitor map so many weeks ago. The DNA replicated; it created a mirror image of itself. It was impossible for something else to stare back in a reflection. She rubbed her eyes and concentrated. It was all in the chromosomes. ZW. Z and W. Copy it, fold it over onto itself, and you have ZZ and WW. One male and one worthless eggshell. How could you get females out of that equation?

Compound replication, DNA recombining, gender switching, and all the other far-fetched, science-fiction possibilities swarmed through her head. She turned the pages of her case studies, searching for an answer that didn’t exist.

“What’s going on here?” Ben appeared in the doorway, along with the smell of resin and booze—not the nice yeasty waft of beer but a sharper stink, something with the pouncing meanness of gin. It filled the room, rolling off him in waves as he collapsed on a rocking chair, which shrieked under his weight.

“The hatchlings are female.” She picked up another book, flipping to the index.

“Yeah, I mean what’s going on with us, Meg?”

The glare heated up the corners of her mouth, and she dropped the pretense of research. “Well, let’s see. You stay here at my apartment during the winter and smoke and drink and sit on your ass. I go to work every day and pay the rent and the bills, and now one of my animals is ripping apart everything the scientific world knows about reproduction and maybe even biology itself. Oh, and sometimes you try to get me fired. For fun, I guess. To keep things interesting.”

He launched himself up, grabbing the gauntlet with both hands. “I spent hours researching those animals for you, collecting the articles, documenting the births.”

“For me?” She almost laughed. “The only thing I asked was that you wouldn’t make a scene with Nicole Roberts. That’s all. That’s what I wanted, Ben. You picked a fight because you wanted to, because you’ve been dying to go head to head with one of these reporters for years, so don’t try and pass it off as some favor to me.”

“I was trying to make her see outside the system. See what the dragons really are.”

She jumped up and stood on top of the couch to get closer to his eye level, waving the book she held in the air between them. “No one knows what they are. I don’t know what they are. They’re impossible! And you want to piss away your time making some nobody reporter ‘see outside the system’? What the hell does that mean, anyway?”

“I live outside the system. I don’t slave my life away in the big sparkly cage that this society lures everyone else into—even you. You’re stuck in there just like the rest of them, and you don’t even know it.”

“What are you talking about?”

He closed the gap, inches from her face and still towering over her. The ceiling light eclipsed the back of his head. “You’re going to these goddamn receptions and cozying up to management and pandering to the money and media machine. You say it’s for the animals, but you’re lying. You’re so fucking blind. You’re like one of those prisoners who starts to need the prison. That’s how they get you. They make you depend on them, and then they break you, like—what’s the word you guys use? Death watch. You’re on a long, slow death watch, babe, except nobody’s watching you but me.”

“Don’t compare me to them.” The words boiled out of her. “I am nothing like them.”

“Then why are you fucking him?” He kicked the front of the couch, and she fell, her whole body flinching back, then slamming down into the cushions. The reverberations from his steel-toed boots jolted through her. The anger, pumping so pure and bright just a second ago, exploded in a heart attack of adrenaline, and she was suddenly afraid in the way you only can be when an animal that seemed harmless and vaguely lovable transforms into a deadly hunter.

She shrank into the couch and fought the urge to hide her face in her hands. The rage seemed to freeze on his face, contorting it into an ugly, ripping mask that looked nothing like Ben.

I made this person, was all she could think. This is what I’ve turned him into.

“Answer me,” Ben shouted.

She dropped her head and forced the words out. “I don’t know why.”

A moment passed in which neither of them moved. The air in the room changed—it twisted from the echoes of their shouting into something raw—the combined relief and terror of exposure.