"About the caves?" I said, completely at a loss. I remembered Dad yesterday saying, really casually, that I could have the day off, stay home, away from the Institute. At the time I thought he just meant, and give Lois a break, because I'd been so long we knew she'd be in a state when I got back. He probably did mean that — but had he arranged for me to be delayed yesterday, to give himself the excuse to tell me not to come up today? What damned meeting? But suddenly I knew. And I didn't want to know.

Eleanor gave me one of her famous you-don't-know-anything-you-pathetic-schmuck looks. "No, stupid. About the dead guy. Oh!" She looked back at Lois. "You're right, Martha. It's a dragon." That's another thing about Eleanor. She never believes anything anyone tells her until she works it out for herself and it suits her to believe it. "The dragon the dead guy killed was a mom dragon, and this is her baby."

I decided without any difficulty not to say that this was her fifth and only living baby, and how I knew this, but I didn't deny that Eleanor was right. Pretty good thinking for eight. . .

"She doesn't look like a dragon," Eleanor continued. "She looks like. . ."

Eleanor actually paused. I'll tell you for free that most people's imaginations aren't up to describing what a dragonlet looks like, and Eleanor was always so busy trying to figure out how to get in the way out here in the real world she hadn't worked on her imagination much. I was allowed to describe Lois to myself as looking like roadkill or one of the monsters out of the first series of Star Trek, but I didn't want anyone else doing it. So I managed to interrupt. "Just stop there. I don't want to hear."

Martha knelt down, the way you do with small children and animals to get them to come to you. This works too well with Lois — she peeped delightedly and shot out from under the desk where she'd been keeping the backs of my legs hot. I dropped Eleanor's arm just in time to fend Lois off. "Don't — she'll burn you." Too late, of course — Martha might have listened but Eleanor instantly reached out to pat her. "Ow," she said, like Lois had hurt her deliberately.

This made me madder than it should've. Not at Lois. At Eleanor. "I told you," I said, trying to be patient. "She'll burn you. She can't help it. She's just hot."

"What do you — " Eleanor began accusingly, and then stopped and looked at her hand. She hadn't touched Lois long enough to have left a red mark. "Oh," she said. "Eczema. It's not because your mom had it." The things that kid picks up. "No," I said.

"If she opens her mouth, can you see the fire inside?" said Eleanor. It was a reasonable question for an eight-year-old.

"No," I said. "It's a special organ, like you have lungs to breathe, dragons have a fire-stomach for fire." Which was about as much as anyone knew: We were all eight-year-olds about dragons. I was down on the floor now too, with my arm around Lois' neck. It was mostly only fresh bits of me that weren't used to it that really burned any more — although my stomach stayed pretty scaly — and I was wearing a longsleeved shirt. Eleanor sat down in front of me, staring with renewed fascination at Lois, now only a few inches away. I was used to it, but at this distance you could feel her radiating heat, like sitting too close to the stove.

"Your eczema should be a lot worse," said Eleanor.

"You get used to it," I said.

"I've always wanted to see a dragon up close," said Martha.

And suddenly we were on the same side again. Suddenly I realized that while everything, Lois' life, Smokehill's future, everything that mattered, was about to have to rely on whether we could come up with a good reason to make Eleanor keep her big blackmailing mouth shut, it was also a relief to be a kid among kids again, even if I was the oldest and Eleanor was a pain in the butt. When you're the only kid surrounded by grown-ups, even when the grown-ups are busy protecting you, you spend a certain amount of time just holding your own line, just hanging on to being yourself. When you're with other kids you don't have to do this. Well, not so much. Eleanor has always been pushy. She was a pushy baby.

"Yeah," I said. "Me too."

"What's her name?" said Martha matter-of-factly, as if naming a dragon is a perfectly ordinary thing to do. As if having a dragon to name was a perfectly ordinary thing.

"Lois," I said.

"Lois?" said Eleanor. "That's a stupid name for a dragon."

This was so typical an Eleanor remark I didn't bother to answer it, and I didn't care either. But Martha said quietly, "I think it's a nice name," and mysteriously this made me feel really good.

We all sat there a little longer, staring at Lois. Lois, who was extremely used to me holding her off from flinging herself on the few people she ever got to see, had given up, and collapsed half onto my lap, grunting and murmuring a little from the awkwardness of her position, but also because she had this funny habit of muttering into silences in conversations. That was how we usually have conversations, right? Someone talks while everyone else is quiet, then someone else talks while the first person shuts up, and so on. I hadn't had a good shouting-over-each-other match with Dad since Lois came. Probably all the conversations she ever heard were polite ones. Snark had known my schedule better than I did, and if I was late to be doing something (like getting on the sofa after dinner to watch TV, so he could join me), he reminded me. Lois didn't seem to have much sense of time, but she had a sense of conversation. If no one else was saying anything, she did. And I'd got in the habit of letting her finish. After Lois had had her mutter, I said, "What is this about the poacher?"

Martha sighed her worried sigh, but Eleanor launched straight in. "His parents are on TV all over the country saying that dragons are too dangerous and they should all be killed!"

I gaped at her. "They'll never make that stick."

Martha said, "They're very, very, very, very wealthy."

I don't know how good an idea about money most kids have, but I'd grown up listening to my parents not just trying to figure out how to make the year's budget work and what we could get along without so it would stretch a little farther, which probably most kids listen to in most families, but about the really dazzling mess of getting, keeping, justifying, and accounting for funding for the Institute. I knew about congressional subcommittees and private donors and action groups and lobbyists. And I knew instantly — as Martha, whose mom was a member of the Institute's budgetary council, also knew — that very, very, very, very wealthy people who wanted something and didn't care how they got it were very, very, very, very dangerous. I hadn't thought I could worry any more than I was already worrying, all the time, about Lois. I was wrong.

"It's been going on for months," said Martha. "Well, since— since it happened. At first nobody took them seriously. But they just kept at it — "

Kept throwing money at it, I translated silently.

"And they've started the Human Preservation Society" — I didn't know Martha knew how to sound that scornful — "and they're really well organized."

Have hired goons to write letters and hang out with members of Congress and other people who like playing with money and power, I translated. And because they have lots of money, they've hired effective goons and send lots of letters.

I hoped Dad's coping mechanism was up to it. My brain was doing a slow, dazed reshuffle of my awareness of the tension level around the Institute. It made me feel silly and self-absorbed (or Lois-absorbed) to be reminded that the world — the world that mattered — didn't actually revolve around us. I wasn't enjoying the reminder. It was also incredibly stupid of me to have forgotten about the death of the poacher, even if it had been months ago now, and I didn't want to remember. I remembered the death of Lois' mom all right. I still thought of her every day.