But since the fence went up, and Smokehill became Smokehill, we hadn't had any successful burglars, thieves or murderers. At least we didn't know of any — the two guys from twenty years ago still haven't turned up. That's an eighty-six-year clean record. Till now. And the first conclusion everyone had jumped to was that someone must have finally managed to steal the fence specs — that that had to have been how our poacher got in. And if it had happened once presumably it could happen again. The thieves might even be out there flogging them on eBay. Speaking of feeling insecure. We'd trusted that fence. The techies were working like blazes to change the waves or fields or the particle flow or some damn thing or things so that if there were stolen specs out there they wouldn't work any more, but the fence had been hard enough to invent in the first place. . .

So why we didn't have staff dropping like hailstones in a spring blizzard with weird stress diseases and panic attacks and stuff I have no idea. But we didn't. We all hung in there. Even Dad. He's a great guy, my dad, even if he tries to hide it sometimes. Sometimes I think about those first months with Lois, before we were like used to unbearable strain, and I think Dad and I probably never looked each other in the face that whole time. Although Dad came down and had dinner with Billy and Grace and me (and Lois) almost every night. And started a joke about how he'd let me sign on as an apprentice when he found out I'd he living with Billy so he could sponge up more of Grace's cooking. So at least he got something good out of it.

But somewhat strange behavior on the part of the only child of the widowed head of the Institute wasn't too much commented on. I heard one cop investigator say to another one, "You know I think this has addled Dr. Mendoza. He's pretty well turned his only kid over to the Rangers, you heard about that?"

I was sorting postcards on my knees behind the counter in the gift shop. This was the sort of thing I did now, to make myself noticeable, instead of mooching around in tourist-free zones. You wouldn't have caught me dead offering to sort postcards in the gift shop before Lois. And furthermore I'd got there on time. I'd said I'd be in at three, and here it was 3:05, and I was already here with a lapful of boxes.

In this case while postcard-sorting was making me very noticeable to Peggy — and to Dan, who'd almost tripped over me when he came to steal some pens, since tourists are always walking off with the info booth's pens — it was making me invisible to the cops, although I'd seen them come in, through the gap in the counter so the staff can get in and out. I looked out of the corners of my eyes and could see Peggy wearing a very fierce, un-gift-shop-like frown (mustn't scare the customers). But I could imagine her trying to decide whether to tell me to stand up or the cops to shut up. I stopped peering out of the corners of my eyes and looked up at her. She looked down at me and I shook my head. Her frown deepened (any deeper and her face would fold up like a fan), but she didn't say anything.

The other one said, "The kid's apprenticed. Nothing wrong with that."

"The kid's fourteen. Three years too young."

Just by the way, I'd turned fifteen by then. Only two years too young. I sat there staring at the photo of indigo Ridge. It's one of our best sellers, for good reason. I thought, They could at least find out my name, and use it.

"I think if I were Dr. Mendoza I might think my only child was safer in the Rangers' hands too."

"If I were Dr. Mendoza I'd think my only child was safer outside the park somewhere. Send him to live with relatives and go to a normal school. The fence gives me the heebie jeebies. Have you noticed what it does to the sunlight? At least we don't have to stay here, and I can get some real daylight with my coffee in the morning before we have to report in."

Oh, good. Some really balanced individual who can get claustrophobia in five million acres. Our fence only does something funny to sunlight if you stand next to it all the time.

"He probably doesn't want to send him away because he'd never see him."

"But the Rangers are crazy. They seem to think this park and the damned dragons are some kind of sacred trust or something."

Peggy's head snapped up at that. She's still only an apprentice, and she's black and grew up in Chicago, but in a way that shows how much she wants to be here and a Ranger. She'd survived the vetting to get here and after three years she was still here. I didn't hear the cops apologize, but they did suddenly move out of earshot.

It is a sacred trust, I thought fiercely. It is. And then the box of indigo Ridge fell off my lap and two hundred postcards plunged across the floor.

As I said, mostly I was preoccupied. But even I could see all these flaming (I wish) investigator people trying to find more people like Nancy and Evan who weren't even apprentices, trying to get them to dish some dirt, but people who aren't crazy (yeah, okay, crazy) about the place don't work here. Eric, who hates everybody who doesn't have fur or feathers or scales, hates everybody outside of Smokehill worse than everybody inside, so even he wasn't any use to them. (In fact he was so nasty that they decided he had something to hide and began to investigate him. At the time I was hoping they'd find out he'd escaped from jail for extortion or bigamy or something which was why he was willing to disappear in a place like Smokehill but no such luck.) I complained to Grace about the way they acted like escapees from a bad secret-conspiracy movie but she only laughed. At least she could still laugh. "If you're an investigator, you want there to be things to investigate," she said. Yes. Exactly. They might find out there were.

As it happens Dad was graduate-student-less when Lois arrived and the roof fell in, which all things considered was more good than bad but it meant he couldn't help trying to drag Rangers off the other things they already couldn't keep up with because of all the escort duty to try to bail some of the Institute stuff out. Later on he hit on the idea of asking me to type some of his letters for him. This worked pretty well. It was something I could do back at Billy's house with Lois, especially on those afternoons after she'd definitively outgrown the sling and would not just go to sleep and let the humans get on with human stuff, so I was mostly keeping an eye on her. Not paying attention was the best way to try to translate Dad's handwriting — which kind of looked like the White Queen's hair — what the words were would kind of tango out at you if you were looking somewhere else. And it did mean that I had some clue some of the time about some things that were going on outside Billy's house. Outside Lois. Whether I wanted a clue or not.

Billy and some of the other Rangers cremated Lois' mom. They knew they had to let the cops and the scientists measure and test and take millions of photos and so on, but barring a few samples they wouldn't let them move her. Some of the scientists got pretty shirty about the "wouldn't let" part but Smokehill as part of its charter has absolute control over its dragons (within evil little caveats like not saving any of their lives) and while people started spitting phrases like "legal challenge" and "in the public interest" around — and they'd already been using words like "obstructionist" when Dad had refused to okay their doing a mini rainforest-type raze for a gigantic helicopter pad to fly all these visiting bozos in and out — they couldn't actually do anything. So after about two weeks Billy said "that's it" and one night they burned her. They burned her and they sang while the scientists and cops and journalists stood around with their mouths hanging open. The Arkholas are usually dead private about their singing so I was amazed, but Grace told me and while it's not like I doubted her or anything I still asked Kit too, because he was there. He almost smiled. "Yeah. They thought we were raising demons or something."