But I got so that I couldn't think as far back as the institute and other human beings — Dad, Billy, Martha — that was too hard. Even not remembering Eric or f.l.s or cleaning odorata's cage, which you might think was a good thing, left a hole, made me less me. The dragons weren't being deliberately cruel — you know, something like, hey, his kind is responsible for all our problems! Let's make him suffer! — or even thoughtless. I was just too strange for them. (But presumably a lot less scary. At least as just me, all by myself. As the forward scout of the army at your gate, maybe scary enough.) And maybe Bud figured out that what he was increasingly picking up from me was misery.
On the fifth day, if it was the fifth day, Gulp moved forward from whatever shadows she'd been in — although mostly I could see her, like I could see Bud, near to Lois' and my corner, and the other dragons stayed farther away — anyway she unwound herself from some shadows and then carefully did her invitation-for-transport display, which is that she folded herself up as low as she'd go and then laid her neck and head flat on the ground in front of us . . . which I might still not have got except that suddenly there were some very queer-looking things in my head that were enough like trees, in my tree-deprived state, that I was willing to jump at anything that looked like a chance.
With us in our small-by-dragon-standards niche, and having her arm's length — my arm's length — away, her breath was like the blast from the biggest fan heater you ever imagined although I swear she was trying to breathe shallowly. Lois clambered up her head to the top of her skull at once, making a happy peep this time, but when Gulp didn't move, I, well, I didn't jump, couldn't she just have pointed to the door and I'd walk? But that didn't seem to be an option. She rolled her ginormous eye at me — and I've already told you that being glared at by a dragon is a powerful experience — and I took a deep breath just taking a deep breath makes you feel extra paltry, by the way, in a cavern full of dragons. And I reluctantly followed Lois, although I went the long way up her shoulder. Even the thought of getting out of the cavern didn't make me like stepping on a dragon. And I wasn't even thinking about the throwing-up part of traveling that way.
But I also didn't really know that she might not be taking us farther in. The trees in my head really weren't very good trees — not as a human thinks about trees — not as a human who doesn't yet know how to connect thinks about trees — and I was afraid they were just an echo of my longing. Maybe the caves had sort of greenish geometric rocks farther in (although it was a geometry I didn't know and I wouldn't have wanted to say they were rocks either).
I had my eyes closed for a lot of it — rocky walls flashing past that close are not comfortable viewing — and there were a lot of lurches that if they were dragon stair steps were a lot too long for human legs. But I noticed that we were humping our way upward not down and I think it probably would have broken what remained of my sanity if it had turned out she wasn't going to take us out of the caves after all. But she was. I smelled it first — cool, moving air that didn't have burning in it — and then I opened my eyes and saw daylight. . ..
It was another sunny day outdoors. Outdoors. I had felt so far away, not just underground, which is intense enough to someone like me whose desk is always as close to the window as I can get it and who can't sit still more than a few hours without going outside, barring blizzards, and even then I'll probably go stand on the doorstep and look hopefully for any sign of it stopping till the flakes make my eyelashes stick together and I can't see any more. But in the whole crazy inexplicable business of trying to talk to Bud, it felt like years had passed in the flickery reddish windowless darkness — I was crazy enough by then to wonder if maybe years had passed, like in old tales of people who visit the fairies.
I slithered down Gulp's shoulder and fell on the ground — the stories of the early ocean crossings, when sailors and passengers get out and kiss the ground when there's finally some ground to kiss after months at sea. But at least they'd had air and sky.
I plastered myself against the bit of ground I landed on, like it was my best friend, which it was. I even bit off some grass — well, it wasn't grass, but it was some kind of green thing. I suppose I might have poisoned myself, but I didn't. It had a bitter taste but it tasted good. It tasted of sunlight — of the world aboveground, of the world where humans existed — I don't know. I almost felt crazier from having got outside again — from having spent five days (or five hundred years) trying to adjust to being a light-deprived lab rat and being scared out of my small lab-rat mind about one of the dragons losing its temper. Bud may have been boss dragon but I knew without being able to talk to any of them about it that not everybody agreed with him about wasting time on me.
Bud had followed us out, and was lying down, trying to look small, I think, like Gulp tried, but he had his head raised — oh, a mere seven or eight feet off the ground-watching me. After I had crawled around on my hands and knees for a few minutes, just reminding myself of dirt and plants — I think I did some whimpering too — I stood up, staggering a little, although I'd been walking in the fire-cavern okay, and turned my face up to the sun, and did a crazy little dance — and Lois did it with me, cavorting and peeping.
One of the weirdest things about the fire-cavern was how quiet it was. Except for Lois and me nobody ever said anything — or growled or harked or whined or peeped or chirped or chortled or shouted. Most ly you heard nothing at all, except the sound of your own breathing and a sort of low, eerily harmonic background sssssssssh that was presumably the dragons breathing, but you couldn't identify it. It sounded more like gremlins to me — some kind of cave spook whispering around in the dark. Occasionally you heard these great big creatures moving around, big soft echoey rustles, a few clicks and clatters of talons and wings; and occasionally they made one or another kind of rumble, like maybe a dragon cough or a dragon snort, but they didn't talk. Or hum. Not to hear anyway. (That came later, when the other dragons started deciding that Bud and Gulp's idea about me wasn't so awful after all. Or maybe it's just that dragons are good losers.) You did hear the fire a bit, but a dried-dragon-dung fire doesn't crackle like a wood fire does, as well as being too purple-blue.
And my human thing about talking had gone away too. You know how I kept talking at Westcamp after Gulp arrived. Not in the dragon rave. I hummed a little bit back at Lois but that was about all. It was almost like my mouth was pressed shut, by the weight of all that darkness and all those dragons.
But I had a little tiny epiphany then, that first time outdoors, with daylight on my skin and in my eyes. You know how deaf people are taught to talk, if they can learn it, because even though they can't hear, it makes it easier for them to communicate with hearing people, who are used to talking. And then hearing people who want to be able to talk to deaf people learn sign language, and then — sometimes — they talk at the same time as they use the sign language, to help the deaf people, lip-read, I suppose, or get used to the way the mouth is always flapping in hearing people, or something.