My point is, we save things. It's what we do.

I was drifting in and out of . . . semi-consciousness, let's not call it sleep. When the dragonlet woke up again Billy watched very carefully while I fed it, and the next time it — and I — woke up Billy had the broth ready and some piece of something he'd cut off something to make a nipple, and his nipple worked, and that made things a lot easier. The rest of the night was better. I didn't get a lot more sleep, but I didn't have to think about anything else either — Billy did all that. He didn't offer to touch the dragonlet, but he did everything else. By morning I probably had nearly half my brain available again, which was up on the 10 percent I'd had at midnight when Billy arrived.

We made it back to Northcamp that day, don't ask me how. I think Billy was beaming Strength Waves at me or something. If I could keep a baby dragon alive anything was possible, including Strength Waves. It took us all day, and Billy carried my pack as well as his own, and we stopped a lot, and every time I sat down (which I had to, to feed the dragonlet without worrying about dropping it), I thought I'd never get up again. But I did. Also standing up always made my headache worse (bang bang bang), and I kept trying to walk so as not to joggle my head, let alone the dragonlet.

At some feeding or other I noticed that the dragonlet was already bigger than it had been two days ago. If I held it upside down in my hand now, it spilled over onto my wrist. It wasn't going to fit up my sleeve much longer. And it was heavier too obviously. I didn't have to come up with any way to measure that. It was a good thing Billy'd brought food. The dragonlet got through a lot of broth.

When I staggered into the little clearing in front of Northcamp I almost couldn't believe it. It was like adopting a baby dragon had sent me into some kind of alternate reality where things like buildings and electricity didn't exist. Billy got the generator going while I was still sitting in a chair and staring at the stove in the big central room. Stoves didn't exist in my alternate reality either. Or chairs. When the teakettle whistled I jumped a mile and the dragonlet woke up and started peeping. I wasn't sure whether it was a frightened peep or a "hello, who are you?" peep but it stopped as soon as the teakettle did and went back to sleep. Feeding it sitting in a chair was weird too. Dragons just don't fit in the human world. Duh.

And then there was taking a bath. . . . In a way that was the first time some of the hairiest implications of what I'd done began to sink in. I'd told Billy, during some night feed or other, that it went nuts any time I tried to lay it down . . . and then we'd found out the hard way the next day that it hated Billy trying to hold it only slightly less than it hated being laid down. This was a blow. Make that a BLOW. Until it happened I hadn't thought about having someone to trade off red welts and disgustingness duty and nooo sleep with — but it occurred to me real fast at that point that I didn't have it. That I wasn't going to have it. And dragonlets stay in their moms' pouches how long??? Also I was used to Billy being able to do anything — including get me out of any trouble I was in. But I was too zonked to follow what this really meant very far. And that's a good thing.

Maybe the teakettle and being in a square place lined with planks (called a "cabin") and furniture and plumbing and stuff were the thing too many for the dragonlet (see: dragons do not fit in the human World, and don't forget the "duh") like getting back to human space seemed to be this weird shock to me. My new permanent headache, which I was almost sort of getting used to, was making me feel queasy and dizzy. But the bath was a kind of a watershed (ha ha ha) moment for both of us. The dragonlet had a complete mini Eric-type meltdown. I thought it was going to do itself an injury when we tried to make it a nest with (a) warm ashes, (b) warmed-up blankets, (c) anything else we could think of.

So the way it ended up was, we kept the dragonlet half wrapped in a piece of my by then truly gross shirt and moved it kind of up and down my front while I got in the bath that way and tried to wash around it, which is to say Billy held it while I tried to wash — this was more embarrassing than I can begin to tell you and it was only being so tired and out of it that made it even possible — and then I got up on my knees and Billy held it against my back while I crouched forward to wash my face and hair. Oh good. New red spots too.

Billy noticed the red spots, both old and new — he'd probably noticed before but maybe he hadn't realized how many of them there were — and did his more-expressionless-than-expressionless wooden-Indian face thing and I noticed, which was interesting, since I wasn't noticing anything, but I suppose it just proves I was fully into my new dragonlet-defending-and-fostering role, because I said, "Oh, they don't hurt, they're just marks, they're no big deal, they're no deal." And I looked at Billy and Billy looked at me and I could see that Billy knew I was lying but I just kept looking at him and . . . he looked away. I didn't get into staring contests with Billy because I knew who won and it wasn't me, and furthermore I'd had this one standing there naked and stinking (and red-spotted). The maternal instinct is sure powerful.

The dragonlet hated all of this. I started getting so worried that it would explode or something that I sort of hurried up. Besides, there's only so much embarrassment you can take at one time.

The dragonlet wasn't crazy about clean clothes either but I guess it was so glad to sec its pouch equivalent again it wasn't going to complain.

And Billy had come up with some new kind of salve for my stomach (and my back, and my arm) which the dragonlet seemed to like a lot, so we smeared some all over it and then wiped some off again which kind of cleaned it up too, but the salve made it fantastically slippery like a sort of extra-large watermelon seed with legs, and by the end of the process my clean sweatshirt and sweatpants were almost as sticky and disgusting as my shirt had been, although we smelled a lot better than we had. And Billy — which may be the single best thing he's ever done for me in my entire life — had rigged up a kind of diaper for the dragonlet — it didn't have any tail to speak of yet, just a kind of vaguely pointy lump at the back end — so I stayed poopless.

This was so blissful my third night of almost no sleep seemed almost okay. Even if Mom was in a lot of my dreams, when I got near enough to being asleep to have dreams. Although you may have noticed that you can dream even when you're only about half asleep, and know it, like you know you're still lying on a thin little rubbery mattress under mousy-smelling blankets curled up around a pillow supporting a dragonlet against your stomach. I even said to her once, I'm too tired to be dreaming. Even about you. Bang bang bang went the headache. The headache never slept.

If you've ever been for a long time without anything like enough sleep you know that you get pretty non compos pretty soon. I was forgetting things the moment Billy said them and couldn't really think of anything but feeding the dragonlet. (And talking to it. I was still doing that. Although I was still calling it Ugly.) It was like my life had become feeding the dragonlet and I hadn't noticed or minded. This was just the way it was now. A haze punctuated by feeding the dragonlet. Speaking of the maternal instinct. Maybe the headache was the fourteen-year-old boy with a dragonlet version of postnatal depression.

The haze was also stabbed and ripped up by visions of the dying dragon's eye. The cavescape was still there when I looked into her eye which is where the dreams about her always started — but I seemed to get farther in now, when I did that weird stepping-forward thing, till there was nothing behind me either except more caves — reddishy purply and shadowy and smoky and twinkling and something else, I don't know what, some presence. Sometimes I got so far in I imagined seeing her with a lot of other dragons there, in those magical looking caves that I'd got into by looking into her eye. Real Arabian Nights stuff. I didn't try saying "open sesame" but I'm not sure I wanted to leave.