"Wow," I said.

Kit knew what I meant. "Yeah. But it stopped them from trying to stop us, you know?"

It's not like we have a lot of practice at it but we knew already that dragon bodies burn a lot easier than human ones. Human ones, they're all water, they don't want to burn. Dragon ones, it's like you just show 'em a matchbox and they go up — whoop — bonfire to the stars, no boring ignition necessary. (The guys that went out to Australia two hundred years ago reported on this, over and over again, like they kept not believing it.) You'd've thought that the smell of something that size decomposing after a couple of weeks would have made everybody think burning was a good idea, but ironically decomposing dragon doesn't stink as spectacularly as decomposing most — other — things do, although I guess that "as spectacularly" is relative. Forensic morgue guy is a job I've never been interested in.

There might have been more trouble but then all the samples everybody'd collected started turning to ash and some kind of sticky black tar stuff. We were lucky that there was a lot of info on the way dragon stuff does disintegrate really fast — the scientists had been doing their tests in quadruple-time because they knew the clock was ticking but they still didn't get anywhere: Every test said something different, and nothing made any sense. What a good thing scientists would rather die under torture than be accused of being Bad Scientists or some of them might have been a little tempted to go along with the Arkhola curse thing that the National Stupid People Press tried to get going.

That was about as much as I knew at the time. What I didn't know anything about was what happened when they ID'd the poacher. You've got it that I was what you might call pathologically not interested in the poacher, I hope. So you get it that for a long time I didn't think about not hearing about him.

CHAPTER FIVE

The first two years of Lois' life are both really blurry and really clear in my memory. There are all kinds of little sharp clear pieces in it, mostly about watching Lois grow and worrying about keeping her healthy, that are still dead immediate like they happened yesterday. But I have very little sense of the time passing, except for Lois getting bigger, which I really liked seeing, was hooked on seeing, because it was the only clue I had that maybe she was okay and thriving. I'm sure we had lots more close calls than I know about (or want to, even now) but one that I do know about, and scared me to death at the time, was the next time the school-form-filler-outer gang came to test me on the nonacademic stuff.

I think they were suspicious of the apprenticeship, although at that point, with the hooha about the poacher going on, everyone who wasn't one of us was suspicious of everything at Smokehill, and maybe it wasn't only cops who hang around talking loudly in gift shops who thought there was something strange about Dad "handing over his only child" to the Rangers. So what happened was that the usual school pencil pushers brought a doctor along without warning us. Usually I got a complete medical only once a year, and the last one had only been them six weeks before Lois happened, so I should have had a long spell yet to get her used to staying by herself, or at least not needing skin, which she kept burning. And here less than six months later was this dweeb telling me to take my shirt off so he could listen to my heart. And he took one look at my stomach, of course, and freaked.

Don't panic, I said to myself. You look guilty when you panic. This is another of those great hindsight things — he must have been thinking about some kind of really kinky child abuse or self-harm (I can't offhand think of anything that would leave marks like a dragonlet's tongue), and if I'd seemed frightened that would have made him think so all the more, and he would have started raking through our business and discovered that we were keeping some kind of big horrible secret. Child abuse didn't cross my mind at the time, but the big horrible secret sure did. I don't know where I got the nerve — maybe from spending so much time with Billy, who even told cops where they got off calmly — but I looked at my stomach and said, "Oh, yeah, eczema. My mom started getting it when she was about my age."

The tension level immediately sank about sixty fathoms and although he still wasn't happy — "Why didn't you report it? We could have given you something for it long ago, before it got this bad" — I think he stopped worrying that he had something to report back to headquarters. He muttered about stress levels and preoccupied single parents and looking at my diet and changing our laundry detergent and taking some scrapings to see if it was some kind of weird fungus instead of eczema (he did this, and the results must have been negative for weird funguses, even if Lois did kind of look like a large walking weird fungus), since it was rather unusual eczema (duh), and then he said he'd prescribe some cream for it as it was a pretty painful looking case (that was true enough; I give him credit — he was very gentle with the scraping taking) and it was peculiar that it was only on my stomach. Here I showed him some other littler Lois marks on my arms and my feet and legs, and this seemed to cheer him up. Doctors are weird.

Then when he found out I was living with Billy and Grace he wanted to talk to Grace about laundry detergent and what I ate which I found pretty insulting but Grace thought was funny. But at least it meant I got back to Lois before she had a heart attack and Grace had to go up to the institute and get her instructions how to take care of me. At least the doc didn't insist on coming to see my room.

After that it was always the same doctor, and after a while he wanted to write some kind of paper on my skin complaint, which he wasn't even sure was eczema, he said (bright of him), and he sure tried to get me to come up to some hospital and have some fancy tests done, but I didn't want to go (leave Lois overnight?) and Dad wouldn't make me, obviously, and since I was healthy except for the eczema, the doc reluctantly let it go.

The other seriously scary near miss — except that it wasn't a miss at all — was Eleanor's fault. That she and Martha knew something was up in itself wouldn't have been a big deal, necessarily, kids at the Institute were always being not told stuff, and overlooked or got out of the way — or told to get out of the way like it isn't normal to want to know what's going on. Being a kid is probably like that everywhere. It's maybe worse here in some ways because we all live here — nobody goes home from the office. Martha and I knew this — I've been here since I was born and Martha since she was two — and it was just the way it was. But it's one of the reasons that families with kids old enough to know the way the rest of the world works never stay here long. Even if both parents have jobs they like the kids hate it. They're kept out of the grown-up stuff and there is no kid stuff. Since pretty much every kid I've ever talked to (and most grown-ups) say they hated school I don't entirely get this — seems to me not having to go to school might balance not having lots of friends your own age. But I guess it doesn't.

Eleanor was another story. Of course she's the youngest, so that's a big thing right there — she's always trying to be older. But Eleanor has to be out there. Martha and me, if we're told to go away and leave the grown-ups alone, find a book to read or baby orphan to feed (ha ha). Eleanor hates being shut out of anything. Which is why, since she got old enough to be usefully and sort of applied-ly a brat instead of just a general brat sort of brat, Martha and I knew more stuff about the Institute than we used to, because she's always generous (to the other members of our oppressed race, the children) with her info. And this time whatever they weren't being told bothered Martha too; because I was in on it. I think Martha might have been kind of bracing herself for, this to happen — that I would suddenly become one of the grown-ups, or at least not a kid like her and Eleanor any more — and maybe she thought my solo overnight really had been it, the place where I crossed the line. But this was kind of more spectacular than she expected. And it drove Eleanor insane.