I don't know why I thought the caves had to be magical except that like I've told you that's the way I've always been about caves. And these didn't look anything like the caves near the Institute. These had stalactites and stalagmites that were landscapes and worlds all by themselves, and in colors you can't even really dream. I'd be looking at some stony sculpture Michelangelo would have killed his grandmother to have been able to do, and thinking, I don't know that color, that color doesn't exist, but like wow. Those dreams — whatever they were — were another thing that made the headache worse, although it was a weird kind of worse, there was something kind of curvy and rippling about it, like one of the cave sculptures, and it like fitted into my head differently, almost as if it thought it belonged there and couldn't figure out why it couldn't make itself comfortable. And made me uncomfortable. Sometimes I felt it would have apologized if it could've figured out how. Nuts of course. Of course I had a headache most of the time — it was just from not getting enough sleep.

At least the dreams about Mom didn't make my head hurt more. They made my stomach hurt more instead — on the inside, not the outside where the dragonlet was operating.

I didn't hear Billy's first check-in after he found us — and I really don't know how he got through the one when I should have been back at Northcamp and wasn't — but that meant two check-ins I should have talked to Dad and didn't. This would have made Dad frantic, and while probably the only person who could have talked him out of sending for the helicopter was Billy, it's still interesting that Billy managed it somehow, since even on no sleep I would have noticed a helicopter. Ha ha. But even our special two-ways don't work very well in a lot of Smokehill, which is why we always carry flares too. It's something about the charge on the fence, and the permanent campsites were chosen almost as much for good radio transmission as a good water and firewood supply. So maybe Billy did something cute with the two-way during my unscheduled absence and just undid it once I was back again.

Billy made sure I heard this one. I heard it through my haze, but Northcamp is small anyway, and we were both (all three of us, but I doubt the dragonlet got much out of it) in the central room. Also Dad was pretty noisy. The roaring coming out of the radio as soon as contact was made must have just about knocked the thing off the table except that Billy was holding it down.

Even Billy's eyes narrowed a fraction but he flipped the switch as calmly as ever and said, "You can talk to Jake in a minute, Frank, and he's fine."

Flip — ROAR — flip.

"Frank, listen to me. I'm afraid I have some bad news. Something Jake discovered. I think you need to hear this first." And Billy went on to make up some true-as-far-as-it-went story about a dead dragon and a dead guy. The sheer bald chutzpah of it almost jerked me into full attention — Billy sounded like he was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him whatever.

At the same time what he was telling — even without what he wasn't telling — was of course totally huge — the BIGGEST — scary news for us anyway, and was going to distract everybody very, very effectively from Jake's first solo, even Dad right now in full roar. Dad sounded almost normal as he said head-of-Institute things like "Where?" and "Just the one man?" and "No visible time line, I suppose?" which is to say who killed who first, which was going to be a big one. It was all big and deadly anyway, but if she'd killed him first, it was worse. Dad said a couple more times, "Let me talk to Jake," and Billy finally said, "Jake's a bit in shock, you know. You might let it pass for now. You can talk to him about it later."

There was a pause that probably wasn't so long in actual time terms but it sure echoed in Northcamp's little common room. The dragonlet chose this moment to rearrange itself too, so I felt briefly like I was caught in some kind of nowhere between my old life/world and my new one. Sleeplessness makes you dizzy too, in case you don't already know that.

"Okay, Billy," Dad said finally. "Thanks."

Another, shorter pause, and Billy nodded to me, and I put my hand under the settling-down bulge of dragonlet and went over to sit down by the two-way. I flicked the switch. "Hi, Dad."

As awkward father-son conversations go this one was pretty impressive. It was even worse than the one we'd had about sex about a year before. At least this one was over the two-way where we didn't have to be obvious about not being able to look each other in the face. But I agreed that I was fine, just like Billy had said. And I did try to say something about the dragon, just to sort of, I don't know, show I was trying or something, but all I could manage to get out was, "They're so big, you know? You know they're big — I walk by that picture every day — " It's one of those artist's representation things, right outside the theater (and not half bad by the way, it does not look like someone who is trying to make ends meet because his only job is part-time substitute illustrator for a bad comic book series), and it goes on and on and on and on because eighty feet (plus tail) is a lot of wall, or a lot of dragon. But my voice cracked when I said it, and Dad let it go, and I changed the subject to asking if there'd been any interesting new orphans since we'd been gone, which was the best I could do at subject-changing and Dad wouldn't know how bad a try it really was.

Then I gave the two-way back to Billy and he and Dad started discussing immediate ways and means. Billy was going to stay out here a few more days, needed help, and couldn't spare anyone to see me safe home while they investigated because he wanted anyone who could be spared to join the hunting party. Clue-hunting party. He said, And besides, Jake can help. That was the best joke of all. I heard him say it. He lied amazingly. I didn't know he had it in him. Billy can just not say things, although I'd never heard him do it on quite such an epic scale before, but I'd never heard him lie.

I'd better make this point now and then I'll make it several more times later on because it's one of the things that makes no sense — or maybe it's the thing that makes the no-sense make sense to you reading this about Crazy Jake and His Dragonlet. If it hadn't been for this sticky, smelly, hot little blodge of dragonlet I'd've been totally blown away by the poacher. I should have been totally blown away. This was The End of Life As All of Us Knew It, at Smokehill. Dragons were safe here, that's what Smokehill was for — we may save raccoons; rats and squirrels too, and provide cage space (and cleaning) to a lot of lizards, but dragons are what we're for. But to everybody outside Smokehill, the really important thing that Smokehill was for was to prove to people, from the other direction, that dragons were safe — that they didn't kill people and nobody ever, ever had to worry that they might, and besides, no one could get through the fence.

I can't BEGIN to tell you how important this was — how important everyone at Smokehill knew it was. Except me. I knew the poacher was really bad and everything — but wasn't it time to feed the dragonlet again? Yes. It was always time to feed the dragonlet again. If there were any cracks in my dragonlet obsession, they were full of remembering its mom. The way she'd looked at me. Slightly in my defense, it was a pretty overwhelming experience. It had been overwhelming enough that Billy reminding Dad of it had stopped Dad in midroar, which wasn't something that happened in the world as I had known it. And Dad didn't know the half of it.

That first conversation with Dad I got sort of for free though. I had to pull it together more after that, because of course Dad was expecting me to. That was pretty bad. I had this brilliant idea of telling Dad I'd walked into a tree branch while I was looking the other way and it banged up my throat, so talking kind of hurt. After Billy assured him it was no big deal Dad let me get away with this too. I don't know if he suspected anything right away or not — but he probably couldn't afford to waste time thinking about it. Dad had to figure out what he was going to tell the world about the poacher, and he had to figure it out fast, so I imagine that he was relieved to take Billy's word for it and leave his clumsy, idiot son in Billy's hands for a while longer. He did sound a little distracted, although it made him keep asking me if I was really okay, which I suppose meant he cared, although it sounded a lot like he'd just forgotten I'd already said yes thirty seconds ago. Although really it was pretty amazing of him to remember he had a son, in the circumstances. I'm not sure I would've in his shoes.