I decided not to try to tell my dad how much better she looked than she had a few weeks ago. Or why she was still alive on deer and squirrel broth, which I didn't have a clue about myself.

Or that I dreamed of dragons, big grown-up dragons, almost every night, in those two-hour chunks, and now that I was sleeping for longer the dreams felt like they got bigger and I used to wake up out of those dreams lately with my headache bigger than my skull for a while. There was usually a moment, before I was fully awake again, where I'd think, that's it, you stay out there, before it fell in on itself like a tent being taken down and jammed itself and all its sharp edges and too-long pointy tent poles back inside my head again.

She drank half a bottle and collapsed, the way she always did, going from some kind of pathetic baby animal with something terribly wrong with it, to something more like a beanbag or a water balloon in the shape of a you don't know what, but whatever it is, you hope they don't make any more. I gathered her up — she was nearly twice as long now as she'd been when I'd found her — shoved her back under my shirt, and wiped my greasy hands on my jeans. I was going to have major trouble if she started jumping around much before she grew thick enough skin not to need to be oiled all the time.

There was silence for a long tense moment.

"And what is it you're suggesting we do?" said my father to Billy.

"Jake will have come back from his first overnight solo in the park knowing that he wants to apprentice as a Ranger," said Billy. "You will believe him, and decide that this is a good thing for him to do. He will have to keep up with his schoolwork — "

"Yes he will," said my father.

" — But so long as he does so I don't think anyone will ask too many questions." I loved Billy at that moment for not taking the opportunity to give me an "are you paying attention to this, I am the grown-up and I'm doing you a biiiig favor so you'd better cooperate" look. I knew what he was doing for me. "Meanwhile we'll have accepted him as an apprentice and therefore he will live in the Rangers' quarters. Since we do not usually accept apprentices so young he will have a special billet; but while we are accepting him this young because we know him, we cannot allow him to go on living with his father. The Ranger apprenticeship is very serious."

It is too. Because of the dragons — and because more than half our staff funding is still from the trust Old Pete set up — we do get to make some of our own decisions, and our Ranger program has like trickled down through everything. You couldn't even work part time in the cafe or the gift shop without being vetted six ways from Sunday. Twenty-seven ways. This drives the National Park Service crazy because they think their rules and regulations are the important ones, but they do a crap job of keeping the congressional drones off our backs so why should we pay any more attention to them than we have to?

There was a longer, even more uncomfortable silence while my father thought this over. My hand had involuntarily gone to my stomach again. Let's say that it's just that I still wasn't quite convinced of the safety of the sling to hold the (greasy) dragonlet where she wanted to be, and that my hand cupped itself around her because my hand was still used to being needed to keep her there. And let's really not get into the way Katie used to put her hand under the bulge that became Eleanor when she was upset or uneasy, which she was a lot, because she had found out she was pregnant right around the time her jerk of a husband said he was leaving because he was tired of living a hundred miles away from the nearest real restaurant, and he wanted her not to have Eleanor because he didn't want to pay child support on another kid.

(Yeah, it's amazing what some grown-ups will say when there's a kid right there. Martha told me because she was worrying that she was the reason why her father was such a creep. All I want to know is how Katie married the guy in the first place. He must have had a brain transplant after the wedding. I was only eight, but Martha's story made an impression. Also having a five-year-old girl to play with — and Martha loved Snark — was better than having no other children around at all, and the bulge might have turned out to be a boy.)

But I wasn't holding the sling in place, of course, or the dragonlet. I was protecting her from my father. I didn't know that at the time — and fortunately I didn't think about Katie and Eleanor-the-bulge either — but I know now what I was doing. And that some of my feelings (including lower back pain) weren't so different from Katie's.

My father's a very bright guy. He knew what he was seeing at the time. And, of course, a dragon . . . whatever the damn laws were, dragons were why we were here.

After a couple of eons he said, "Okay. Let's do it."

It was the second time in my life I wished I knew how to pray. The first time had been when Mom disappeared. I was going to do better by my dragon.

CHAPTER FOUR

I named her Lois. She looked like a Lois. I know how that sounds: It sounds like the ugliest woman I ever met must have been named Lois. But that wasn't it at all. It was really interesting after having that weird flash when I was seeing her how my father saw her. Maybe when Billy and the three other Rangers saw her for the first time it was still so soon, or I was still so tired, or I hadn't finished realizing that we had, you know, bonded, and I wasn't going to be able to hand her over to someone else, or maybe it was just that I couldn't read Rangers the way I could read my dad — my dad in a passion anyway, which didn't take a lot of reading.

But it was like the Rangers just saw her. My dad looked at her with all this other stuff going on about it. Granted that he was my father and the head of the Institute, and an Institute that was under sudden siege, but even so, it was interesting. And it gave me kind of a shock. And another teeny insight into what I was going to be doing and how hard it was going to be. Teeny because I slammed the door on it, before I saw any more of it, and then tried to forget what I had seen. I'd let myself see a little bit of the bigger picture in Dad's office — but only long enough to understand why Dad was so wired, even for Dad, who is always wired. This was what Dad later named my Footman Period. Remember the Frog-Footman in Alice, who, while all hell was breaking loose around him, sat on the doorstep and said, "I shall sit here till tomorrow — or the next day, maybe. I shall sit here, on and off, for days and days." That was me. Days and days and days and days. While plates whizzed past my head and there was lots of screaming.

I named her Lois because I liked the name. And the reason she seemed like one to me was because after my father had looked at her I realized that I thought she looked like one of those wallflower girls in kids' books that suddenly grow up one summer and then they get a new haircut and contact lenses and go back to school that autumn and wow. (I used to read a lot of books about kids going to school and having normal lives, even ones about girls. You figure out why.) Lois was still in her squatty-with-glasses, wallflower stage, but I knew, she was going to get over it. It was just up to me to make sure she lived long enough to do it.

Yes, I did think about calling her Alice — I thought about it a long time — but she just wasn't an Alice. Also, I didn't feel like encouraging any loose karma hanging around to put her through any more of the human wonderland than she absolutely had to go through — which was already more than enough. Also I was seeing the dragon caves nearly every night and they were just nothing like Alice's underground, and this seemed important somehow.