The Dragon Keeper (4 page)

Antonio sat quietly next to her, rolling his cup from one hand to the other and staring at the contents as if he were having a silent conversation with his drink. She took another sip of her own, and the bubbles burst sharply in her mouth. Maybe it was the stupid toast he’d made her say or the embarrassment of sharing champagne with him, but the longer she sat there, the more surreal the whole situation became. Antonio Rodríguez, corporate climber and self-proclaimed ladies’ man, pulling an all-nighter like some mother hen clucking over her eggs? Not likely.

“Nobody asked you not to go to the World Series or see your father.” She broke the silence. Meg’s own father was halfway across the world, too, but she didn’t go around whining about not being able to visit him. Then again, she and her father weren’t the visiting kind, or even the talking kind.

“What?”

“What are you even doing here, anyway?”

“Same reason you’re here.”

“I don’t think so. Is it the data? You need to gather that last bit of information to clinch your cover page?” The alcohol and lack of sleep made her words a little slushy, but she had to ask; it just wasn’t possible for him to be here out of the goodness of his heart. Antonio didn’t do something for nothing.

He swirled his cup again and sipped slowly, nodding. His hair curled down around his forehead, bouncing free from its slicked-back style.

“I want to make sure the hatchling is healthy, Yancy. It’s the same thing I want for all the animals at this zoo.”

“And microchips to match.” She snorted.

He couldn’t dare deny it. As the first vet in the country to chip the animals—injecting little bits of plastic and metal called Sero-Adrenal Microchips, or SAMs, into every land-dwelling vertebrate over five pounds—he’d drawn international attention. The chips radioed in to a central server every ten minutes, sending readings on serotonin and adrenaline levels, heart rates, and GPS coordinates. While the rest of the world called them everything from “artificial keepers” to “brave new microchips,” management at the Zoo of America fell all over themselves congratulating one another as pioneers of the zoology field. SAMs allowed the animals to be managed with less human interaction, which meant lower overheads and reduced insurance rates. Antonio had become the overnight darling of management and had gotten his studies published in the most prestigious magazines. On paper, he was kind of hard not to hate.

“We’ll only chip whichever dragon the zoo is keeping. The other two will go to less-advanced zoos.” He took another sip, ignoring her second snort. “And if it weren’t for the SAM data, we wouldn’t be able to know the next time Jata lays eggs. The sero-adrenal behavior is completely documented now.”

“God forbid we just find the eggs like I did, without any help from I.T.”

He leaned in and leveled her with a black-eyed stare that rivaled Jata’s for intensity. “We both know what happened when you found the eggs. Do you really want to go there?”

She sucked in a breath, looking away, and, just like that, the anger was gone. Deserted her completely. The ghost of wet sand filled her head in its place, clumping in her ears and gritting between her teeth. It was frightening how easily he could send her back there.

“The SAMs will help. That’s what I’ve been trying to say for years, and none of you want to hear it. You’re so scared for your jobs.”

“I’m scared for the hatchlings.” It was easier to say it from under the sand he’d buried her in, from where everything was distorted and distant—the place that had haunted her since she’d discovered the eggs eight months ago.

She stared sightlessly at the incubator. “Everyone wants a piece of them. They want their zoo space, or their marketing value, or their budget dollars. They want to bottle their fame and sell a miracle.”

“Forget about that for a minute, okay? None of those people are here now. It’s just you and me and a bunch of dragons in here.”

He poured her another cup of champagne.

“Truce?” he asked.

He tapped his cup to hers as if everything was fine again, as if the fight wasn’t just beginning. Maybe he didn’t understand yet, but to her it was absolutely clear. No more fuckups. From this day on, she had three more dragons to defend from Antonio, the zoo, and anyone else in the world who tried to claw his way between her and them.

Still insulated against all that, the last egg sat motionless and intact in the incubator. Meg and Antonio settled in for the night and watched it, sipping to the bottom of the champagne around one in the morning. By two, they were both drowsing. At three, Meg felt a nasty crick in her neck and, rubbing the shooting pain out of her spine, scooted over between Antonio’s sprawled limbs and dropped her head onto his shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t wake up and notice. It was only a warm shoulder, after all, just a body waiting by another body, exhausted from the endless watching. A keeper could only watch for so long before something had to happen. Birth. Death. The mess in between. Something was always coming, always looming around the edges of the next day; it was only a matter of when. She rubbed her cheek into Antonio’s lab coat and fell asleep.

2 Weeks
before
Hatching

D
ragons attack people.”

Meg paused mid-lecture and sized up the woman who’d interrupted her. The visitor stood at the front of the group with her hip cocked and her eyes narrowed in a smug, pseudo-omniscience that made Meg wish more animals attacked people. Humans were such a self-righteous species.

“They are certainly capable of it, yes, but attacks are rare and usually occur because of human encroachment into the dragons’ natural territory.” Meg crossed her arms, a gesture that the Member Center team kept telling her was
defensive
and
inhospitable
—whatever the hell that meant. They sent secret shoppers out sometimes to rate the quality of the tours, and that stuff always showed up on her performance reviews in the Opportunities for Improvement section.

Every zookeeper at the Zoo of America had to lead a group tour of his or her building once a week. It was a term of the employment contract, according to her boss, Chuck. Meg had tried to reason with him because, come on—it wasn’t as if someone became a zookeeper because she liked people so much—but Chuck had just handed her a copy of the standard Keeper Level I job description in his usual constipated, twitchy way, and that had been the end of the discussion.

Now, standing at the front of the group that was crowded into the last exhibit of the Reptile Kingdom—Jata’s exhibit—she thought for the six thousandth time that she should have fought a little harder. It was a pretty equal divide today between stroller moms and tourists, both gunning to be the biggest pain in the ass. The mothers who took the tours were like their own planets, with strollers, diaper bags, purses, and greasy-fingered children revolving like frenetic moons around them. Meg might have appreciated their efficiency a lot more if it didn’t come with crying babies, children who uprooted the trail plants, and endless questions about cartoon animals she’d never heard of.

Tourists were a different breed. The Zoo of America made up one-fourth of the America compound, an interconnected group of tourist attractions packed into the tract of land between the Twin Cities airport and the Minnesota River. Visitors bounced between the Mall of America, Water Park of America, SportsPark of America, and the Zoo of America on the red, white, and blue light rail trains that stopped in front of each main gate, coming from all across the country for their prepackaged, temp-controlled, multi-pass vacations, with cameras dangling from their necks like abandoned lead ropes. The tourists’ questions, while usually more grounded than demands for unicorns, were also generally more annoying. Like this woman and her thing against dragons.

The woman leaned on the railing that overlooked Jata’s enclosure and didn’t even glance down to look at the animal she was blindly categorizing. If she’d bothered, she’d have seen that Jata lay fewer than ten yards away, her legs spread-eagle and osteoderms bunching in lazy folds down to the thick claws that lined her feet. Her scales were a mosaic of delicate, sea-foam green and dull gray. Looking at her was like seeing the product of a gecko and an elephant. She was ancient, primordial—but some people only saw a predator.

It was obvious that the woman had no idea what Jata had done, how this single Komodo dragon blindly tried to save her entire species from extinction.

“I read about a Komodo attacking that boy in the Philippines the other day. It killed him.” The woman’s voice bounced off the towering skylights in the roof and around the clustered tour group, eclipsing the nearby tortoises’ waterfall with the fascination that people constantly brought to this platform. The fascination Meg got, no question, but it was that undercurrent of ignorant superiority—that’s what she couldn’t stand. The word
it
was like an ice pick in her ears.
It
killed him, as if the
it
could have been a wheelbarrow or a book.

“You mean in Indonesia.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A country.”

Meg knew about the attack. A young boy in the dry season. In the dry season, everything was prey.

“We’re not here to talk about attacks, but there are some other headlines that I’d like to share with you.” Damn, that was a nice transition, which pretty much guaranteed that no secret shoppers were here today. They never evaluated her when she said smooth stuff like that.

Meg walked to the edge of the viewing platform and swung a wiry arm over the railing.

“This is Jata, our famous Komodo. You might have heard about her recently.”

At Meg’s voice, Jata swiveled her head fully around and surveyed the group. Her gaze wandered the faces until she saw Meg, and then she stared coolly up at her, unblinking. Meg smiled and winked.

“She likes you,” one of the kids said.

“I’m assigned to her exhibit, so she recognizes me. If you want to stick around after the tour, I’ll be feeding Jata her weekly meal at one o’clock.”

“Cool.” The boy pushed his head against the steel bars that lined the platform, trying to see Jata better.

Meg turned back to address the group as a whole. “Eight months ago, Jata laid a clutch of eggs, which isn’t uncommon for an adult, female dragon. They should have been sterile. What made the eggs so extraordinary is that they were viable.”

Blank gazes surrounded her. A dark-haired man wearing a Mall of America T-shirt started chewing on his fingernails, glancing between Meg and Jata.

“Jata has never mated with a male dragon. She hasn’t been exposed to a male since she was a hatchling. You are looking at one of the few known animals in the world that has reproduced via parthenogenesis.”

“Oh, the virgin-birth dragon!” The boy’s mother piped up, pulling her son’s head away from the bars. “I read about that in the paper earlier this year. That was so cute, just like a miracle, and that reporter Nicole Roberts was talking about it, too. What did she say?” She looked around for help. “Oh, I can’t remember, but it was odd, like—”

“I don’t know,” Meg interrupted. Heat seeped into her cheeks, flushing her skin with a mix of anger and embarrassment. She pulled her forearms tighter into her chest, imprinting her wrist with the security ID clipped to her breast pocket, and looked around the rest of the group to see if anyone else listened to second-rate news. A few of them glanced uncertainly at Jata, and the man in the Mall of America T-shirt suddenly took Meg’s picture.

“You are absolutely right about the virgin birth, though.” Meg tested her voice, and it came out clear and passive. Good. “Jata has reproduced asexually, although technically she hasn’t quite completed the job.”

She glanced down at Jata’s green-and-gray scaled head. “The eggs are due to hatch any day now. Then, if everything goes well, she’ll be a virgin mother to three baby boys.”

“How do you know they’re boys? Do they do ultrasounds?” someone asked.

“No. It’s the nature of parthenogenesis, actually. It’s the same way that you know if you made a human clone, it would be the same gender as the parent. This type of reproduction eliminates the possibility of females, so we know the babies will be boys.”

“We’re studying DNA in my science class,” said a bored-looking kid.

“Oh, then let me show you.” Meg lit up, her forced friendliness turning into genuine excitement at the opportunity to explain. She grabbed his visitor map and sketched it out on the back.