In this case while postcard-sorting was making me very noticeable to Peggy — and to Dan, who'd almost tripped over me when he came to steal some pens, since tourists are always walking off with the info booth's pens — it was making me invisible to the cops, although I'd seen them come in, through the gap in the counter so the staff can get in and out. I looked out of the corners of my eyes and could see Peggy wearing a very fierce, un-gift-shop-like frown (mustn't scare the customers). But I could imagine her trying to decide whether to tell me to stand up or the cops to shut up. I stopped peering out of the corners of my eyes and looked up at her. She looked down at me and I shook my head. Her frown deepened (any deeper and her face would fold up like a fan), but she didn't say anything.
The other one said, "The kid's apprenticed. Nothing wrong with that."
"The kid's fourteen. Three years too young."
Just by the way, I'd turned fifteen by then. Only two years too young. I sat there staring at the photo of indigo Ridge. It's one of our best sellers, for good reason. I thought, They could at least find out my name, and use it.
"I think if I were Dr. Mendoza I might think my only child was safer in the Rangers' hands too."
"If I were Dr. Mendoza I'd think my only child was safer outside the park somewhere. Send him to live with relatives and go to a normal school. The fence gives me the heebie jeebies. Have you noticed what it does to the sunlight? At least we don't have to stay here, and I can get some real daylight with my coffee in the morning before we have to report in."
Oh, good. Some really balanced individual who can get claustrophobia in five million acres. Our fence only does something funny to sunlight if you stand next to it all the time.
"He probably doesn't want to send him away because he'd never see him."
"But the Rangers are crazy. They seem to think this park and the damned dragons are some kind of sacred trust or something."
Peggy's head snapped up at that. She's still only an apprentice, and she's black and grew up in Chicago, but in a way that shows how much she wants to be here and a Ranger. She'd survived the vetting to get here and after three years she was still here. I didn't hear the cops apologize, but they did suddenly move out of earshot.
It is a sacred trust, I thought fiercely. It is. And then the box of indigo Ridge fell off my lap and two hundred postcards plunged across the floor.
As I said, mostly I was preoccupied. But even I could see all these flaming (I wish) investigator people trying to find more people like Nancy and Evan who weren't even apprentices, trying to get them to dish some dirt, but people who aren't crazy (yeah, okay, crazy) about the place don't work here. Eric, who hates everybody who doesn't have fur or feathers or scales, hates everybody outside of Smokehill worse than everybody inside, so even he wasn't any use to them. (In fact he was so nasty that they decided he had something to hide and began to investigate him. At the time I was hoping they'd find out he'd escaped from jail for extortion or bigamy or something which was why he was willing to disappear in a place like Smokehill but no such luck.) I complained to Grace about the way they acted like escapees from a bad secret-conspiracy movie but she only laughed. At least she could still laugh. "If you're an investigator, you want there to be things to investigate," she said. Yes. Exactly. They might find out there were.
As it happens Dad was graduate-student-less when Lois arrived and the roof fell in, which all things considered was more good than bad but it meant he couldn't help trying to drag Rangers off the other things they already couldn't keep up with because of all the escort duty to try to bail some of the Institute stuff out. Later on he hit on the idea of asking me to type some of his letters for him. This worked pretty well. It was something I could do back at Billy's house with Lois, especially on those afternoons after she'd definitively outgrown the sling and would not just go to sleep and let the humans get on with human stuff, so I was mostly keeping an eye on her. Not paying attention was the best way to try to translate Dad's handwriting — which kind of looked like the White Queen's hair — what the words were would kind of tango out at you if you were looking somewhere else. And it did mean that I had some clue some of the time about some things that were going on outside Billy's house. Outside Lois. Whether I wanted a clue or not.
Billy and some of the other Rangers cremated Lois' mom. They knew they had to let the cops and the scientists measure and test and take millions of photos and so on, but barring a few samples they wouldn't let them move her. Some of the scientists got pretty shirty about the "wouldn't let" part but Smokehill as part of its charter has absolute control over its dragons (within evil little caveats like not saving any of their lives) and while people started spitting phrases like "legal challenge" and "in the public interest" around — and they'd already been using words like "obstructionist" when Dad had refused to okay their doing a mini rainforest-type raze for a gigantic helicopter pad to fly all these visiting bozos in and out — they couldn't actually do anything. So after about two weeks Billy said "that's it" and one night they burned her. They burned her and they sang while the scientists and cops and journalists stood around with their mouths hanging open. The Arkholas are usually dead private about their singing so I was amazed, but Grace told me and while it's not like I doubted her or anything I still asked Kit too, because he was there. He almost smiled. "Yeah. They thought we were raising demons or something."
"Wow," I said.
Kit knew what I meant. "Yeah. But it stopped them from trying to stop us, you know?"
It's not like we have a lot of practice at it but we knew already that dragon bodies burn a lot easier than human ones. Human ones, they're all water, they don't want to burn. Dragon ones, it's like you just show 'em a matchbox and they go up — whoop — bonfire to the stars, no boring ignition necessary. (The guys that went out to Australia two hundred years ago reported on this, over and over again, like they kept not believing it.) You'd've thought that the smell of something that size decomposing after a couple of weeks would have made everybody think burning was a good idea, but ironically decomposing dragon doesn't stink as spectacularly as decomposing most — other — things do, although I guess that "as spectacularly" is relative. Forensic morgue guy is a job I've never been interested in.
There might have been more trouble but then all the samples everybody'd collected started turning to ash and some kind of sticky black tar stuff. We were lucky that there was a lot of info on the way dragon stuff does disintegrate really fast — the scientists had been doing their tests in quadruple-time because they knew the clock was ticking but they still didn't get anywhere: Every test said something different, and nothing made any sense. What a good thing scientists would rather die under torture than be accused of being Bad Scientists or some of them might have been a little tempted to go along with the Arkhola curse thing that the National Stupid People Press tried to get going.
That was about as much as I knew at the time. What I didn't know anything about was what happened when they ID'd the poacher. You've got it that I was what you might call pathologically not interested in the poacher, I hope. So you get it that for a long time I didn't think about not hearing about him.
CHAPTER FIVE
The first two years of Lois' life are both really blurry and really clear in my memory. There are all kinds of little sharp clear pieces in it, mostly about watching Lois grow and worrying about keeping her healthy, that are still dead immediate like they happened yesterday. But I have very little sense of the time passing, except for Lois getting bigger, which I really liked seeing, was hooked on seeing, because it was the only clue I had that maybe she was okay and thriving. I'm sure we had lots more close calls than I know about (or want to, even now) but one that I do know about, and scared me to death at the time, was the next time the school-form-filler-outer gang came to test me on the nonacademic stuff.