All this so that there would be some future for dragons after all, and there was some future because Lois and I — and Halcyon — and Gulp and Bud and Dad and Martha and the rest of us on both sides — were making it.
Halcyon was talking to Lois too — I could feel that — but I don't know what she said. Some of what she said was the same as what she'd said to me, I guess, but she'd've been saying it differently. What I could feel was Lois shivering like a frightened puppy — Lois had never shivered in her life that I knew of — and I put my arms around her neck (although I couldn't reach the whole way around any more), thinking, Halcyon had a choice. It was a horrible choice — she's the one who died, who knew she was going to die — but she did make it. She was a grown-up, and she decided. I was only fourteen, but I'd had the life I'd had, including that if there was a live baby orphan anything I had to try to keep it alive (and that I was nuts in this case enough to try) — but I was still old enough to make a choice, and I made that choice — that impossible choice — and while I've already moaned and whimpered about how the loss of my own mom had kind of removed the "choice" part of my choice — I was still, you know, responsible, and I still made it.
But poor Lois had never had any choice at all. Or not much of one. She'd chosen to stay alive. She'd fought like anything to stay alive — and her mom and me may have been helping her as much as we could — but she was sure in there herself, struggling like gosh-damn-and-how to keep breathing. And then again . . . if you're going to believe me about Halcyon, then maybe it's not such an enormous leap of credibility or imagination or hope or what you like, to think that maybe Lois did have a choice. When the souls were all lined up that day in the recycling center, the head angel came in and rapped on the desk to make everybody pay attention and said, Okay, gang, we need a volunteer, and explained what the volunteer was going to have to do. There'd have been dead silence for a minute, maybe, and then the Lois-soul put its hand-equivalent up and said, Yeah, okay, me, I'll do it. . .
I hope Lois' siblings all got a good go next time around. A real life. An adventure or two. True love. Whatever.
Whatever else a dragonlet escort is maybe supposed to do, I hope some of it got sucked out of my strangely shaped wrong species (and as YOU might say nontraditional gender) self because after the sixth blob went to join its brothers and sisters in Gulp's pouch and Lois and I had our "conversation" with Halcyon I literally fell down where I stood and slept. (And felt ninety years old and arthritic when I woke up.) But Bud and Gulp must've been braced for Jake getting most things wrong when they decided to have me there.
I've told you that you pick up dragon stuff when you're sleeping that you can't when you're awake. I probably soaked up more in that one short sleep than I had in all the years before, and while I damned forgot most of it again when I woke up, like you forget most of your dreams, still, something changed. I don't pick up "words" any better than I ever did — nothing I can revolutionize my dictionary with, unfortunately — but my brain has learned how to handle dragon space!!! It's like there's a whole new lobe grown on my brain: the dragon lobe. It CAN be done! Even the headaches are better!!! Wow. I mean, wow. I hadn't even realized how gruesomely awful the headaches — the Headaches — have been the last seven years — seven years — almost EIGHT — till they lightened up. They're still there. But they're easier. Martha says she doesn't feel like she needs to use a hammer when she tries to rub the tension out of my neck and shoulders any more.
I think Gulp's babies were early. Even as unborn pre-blobs they're already countable individuals to their mom but neither mom nor blobs, I think, have a reliable sense of when they're going to be born, any more than human moms do. And so I think that's why they didn't have me on tap, so to speak, at Dragon Central, where it would have been a comparatively short hop for a flying dragon to take me to the birth place in the Bonelands. Mind you, I have no idea how they would have convinced me to stick around — I guarantee I would not have understood "Hey, Jake, wanna be escort to one of Gulp's babies?" — but they'd've thought of something. They could always have just got in the way. What would I have done? Forced past them? Playing tag with a dragon just doesn't appeal much.
I'd wanted to walk back, that morning in the Bonelands after I woke up, but I was staggering and kind of crazy, and still full of the dreams I was half forgetting and that were half turning into a new part of me, which is maybe why I was staggering and kind of crazy. (Kind of crazy includes that I was two or three hours of a big dragon flying full pelt into the Bonelands and the nearest good water supply was back out of them again, and I wanted to walk.) Anyway the dragons wouldn't let me walk anywhere. They'd brought Bud like six sheep to help him recuperate, and he'd specially char-grilled a piece for me, and we lay around like we were on holiday for a couple of days — all eight of us (fourteen if you count the tucked-away blobs) — and then he flew me back to Dragon Central. We all went together in little hops, because Lois couldn't fly very far yet. Let me tell you flying in a troop of dragons (a squadron, just like the game) is even more amazing than anything. Life. The universe. Everything. And Gulp looked . . . I don't know how to describe it. Transcendent.
But I had had a look at the front part of the caves — where we all went as soon as the sun got high — and with my new dragon-sense I got a promise (which is like putting your hand into your empty pocket and finding that someone has slipped you something, money or chocolate or a magic ring) that I'd be brought back to the birth place in the Bonelands from Dragon Central some time. Because I think that is the Birth Place — and you remember what I said about the Dragon Central caves, how it's like the rock itself had become dragony — it's like that only way more so at the birth place. At the birth place you know the stones can talk to you. Now if only I could learn the language.
I'm also no longer sure about mom and dad in dragon terms. I'm not sure but what it's some kind of marsupial kibbutz, in those pouches, and that while maybe Gulp and Bud contributed some of the eggs and sperm — assuming it's even an egg-and-sperm deal, which I don't know either — they may not have contributed all of them. Put it on the list of stuff to try and find out. Including whether the kibbutz thing might have something to do with getting 'em started on how dragon communication works. Maybe the birth place will tell me.
One more thing that I did learn is that having your dragonlets born during a full moon is maybe the best good luck omen there is. Dragon moms start doing whatever the dragon equivalent is of "star light star bright first star I've seen tonight" as moons get full toward the ends of their pregnancies. Are dragons superstitious? Beats me. Do dragons actually have an oar in the ethereal what-have-you so that wishing on stars (or whatever) actually has an influence? Beats me too. But it won't surprise you if I tell you I think dragons are capable of almost anything. And if you want to think that I say "good luck omen" because I'm superstitious and that's not what the dragons were telling me at all, that's your privilege. But my version is that it would have been a very bad omen if Gulp's last baby had missed — had got into the pouch after moonset, when the only thing touching its gummy little hide was darkness and clueless human hands.