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.