She peeped at me. "Hey, Lois."

She peeped again, except it was more of a grumble. "Hey, Lois."

Another rumbly peep. But this one was a three-syllable peep, and the first syllable was longer than the other two.

"Hey," I said, more softly. "Lois."

And she answered a quieter three-syllable peep, and the long syllable fell down the scale and the first short syllable was higher and stronger and the second short syllable was lower and deeper.

I looked at her and she looked at me. Sure, mynah birds can do better, but do they do better while you're both straining with alertness at each other? It takes weeks to teach a parakeet to say its first words. The air was nearly humming around us, and the Headache tried to break out of my skull again, which it didn't do so much as it used to except when I woke up from dreaming about big dragons and caves with weird lighting effects. I suppose I'd noticed before that the Headache tended to get worse when Lois and I seemed to be getting, you know, intense at each other. But I wasn't thinking about that either. I did wonder occasionally if maybe it was a brain tumor, but weirdly since I'm so good at worrying about everything I could never really get going worrying about that.

So I sat there looking at her with her looking at me. I was excited and thrilled and also . . . frightened and horrified. Frightened because it was like I was finally facing that I had this whole extra responsibility I'd only been trying to keep her alive, which had been more than enough, but now I'd been reminded, forcefully, that just feeding a wild orphan isn't enough, and what do you teach a dragon about being a dragon? What was Lois trying to learn from the very funny-looking dragon she thought was her mom by mimicking the noises she (well, he) made?

I had no idea. And nobody could tell me. And I had read Old Pete's journals so often I knew them almost by heart and he couldn't tell me either.

And I hated the idea that the best Lois had to look forward to was growing up to live in some kind of cage and being dumbly fed by humans for the rest of her life because no one would've taught her how to be a dragon. Okay, Lois being alive was a miracle.

I wanted more miracles. That's all.

I also perversely suddenly didn't want any other humans to notice that Lois was trying to speak human. Add this to the long list of things I can't really explain. I was afraid of . . . how their reactions might make me think about it, I guess. Just the fact that they'd have reactions (Dad would get all fascinated and remind me to keep careful notes and Billy would just nod slowly and go on with whatever he was doing) felt like someone putting a hand on your soap bubble: pop. (Although as soap bubbles go, Lois didn't make the grade.)

But I was realizing what it really meant that Lois was Lois to me first and a dragon second, however stupid that sounds, like I could forget 1,61. half a nanosecond that she was a dragon. But everybody else could afford to see her as a dragon. And this meant I saw her as . . . ?

I had a lot of sleepless nights after that afternoon. While Lois snuffled and gurgled under the bedclothes. While I worried I also noticed — especially noticeable in an enclosed space like between your sheets — that her burps and farts smelled more and more like singe and char. I was sure Lois would be brokenhearted if she woke up one morning and discovered she'd fried me in her sleep . . . but what if she did?

CHAPTER SIX

I'm still doing a lousy job of giving you any sense of time passing. Well, time passed, and all of us pre-adult things kept getting bigger, me, Martha, Eleanor . . . Lois. And the seasons kept changing, the way they do. You don't not notice things like which season it is in Smokehill. (Well. You get confused sometimes, like when it snows in August, or when the February thaw is longer than usual and every critter in the zoo and the orphanage starts shedding, and everything underfoot that isn't rock turns to mud, and that year you have to go through this twice.) But weather and seasons are kind of the same even when they're different: It may be spring now, but winter will come round again soon enough. You know that. So I was lying awake smelling farts like burned toast and scorched hamburger, and thinking about how Lois was getting on for two years old.

She'd turn two right before I'd turn seventeen. I'd have my high-school equivalency certificate by then easy, and then I could stop pretending to be a fast-track early-acceptance Ranger apprentice and become a real one — out of reach of social workers and bureaucrats. At last. And doctors trying to treat me for a unique variety of eczema. We'd been so lucky so far. (I keep saying that. But it's maybe the most important thing of all.) Martha told me there was a big new Friends of Smokehill movement that was holding the Searles off. The Searles were the parents of the villain. Somehow I didn't manage not to learn their/his last name. They said that while it was true that their son had been in the park when he shouldn't, he only wanted to see a dragon and that this one had turned on him for no reason. Like they were there and saw it happen. Like that explained the spare grenades he'd still been wearing when she flamed him and the big-bore lightning rifle heavy enough to penetrate six rhinos standing in a row. Even I'd half-noticed the heavy artillery at the time. Sure he'd only wanted to see a dragon.

Our Friends had made a biiiig fuss about the lightning rifle and the grenades, which is why the Searles hadn't closed us down yet, but the Searles said that he would of course have taken gear to protect himself in case of an unprovoked attack . . . blah blah blah. . . . The forensic morgue guys had even proved that he'd died instantly when she flamed him, so he had to have shot her first. But . . .

Several eons ago I'd been hanging around the ticket booth bugging Katie who has always been really good about being bugged (even before Eleanor was born). Snark was with me because he always was with me. I had him lying down. My parents had hammered it into me that if I was going to have a dog I had to train him because of all the tourists (and, of course, the park itself). This was fine with me. It's not like I wanted to play football with my pals every afternoon after school. So I trained Snark to do all kinds of stuff. Lying down for a few minutes while I gave Katie a hard time was nothing to Snark.

There were only a few tourists around and I wasn't paying attention. Snark was behind me, and Katie's view was blocked by the corner of the ticket booth. I turned around in time to see some kid only a little younger than me trying to poke Snark in the eye — I don't know, to get a reaction or something? — because Snark would have been ignoring anybody who was a stranger. Several things happened at once. I saw Snark jerk his head away from the poking finger, the kid said, "You're a really stupid dog, aren't you?" and poked at his other eye, I yelled, "Hey!" and Snark jerked his head again . . . and growled.

And the mother of this kid suddenly appeared from nowhere — where had she been a minute ago? — shrieking that this was a vicious dog and we were to destroy it at once and it was savaging her only child in a national park, and she was going to write to her congressman — I was screaming that her kid had been trying to poke my dog in the eye, and Katie was trying to shut us both up. Katie lied and said that she'd seen the kid — she knew Snark, it wasn't really like lying — the mother said she didn't believe it, I was nearly in tears — I now had Snark standing beside me with my hand around his collar — and it might have been a whole lot worse than it was except the kid tried to sneak around and give Snark a kick while everyone else was busy yelling at each other, and not only Katie but a couple of other Rangers who'd been drawn by the commotion saw it. The mother saw it too although she denied it. She didn't deny it convincingly however and when Katie told her she had better take her freaky kid and leave, she actually went.