So Billy left (leaving me the rifle, just by the way, and spare ammo and reload stuff), but Kit finished making everything as everything-proof as you can ever make anything everything-proof out in the middle of a nowhere that didn't care if you were human, dragon, or squidgy tentacled blob from Alpha Centauri. Which was the good news.

Because the bad news was they had an outbreak back at the Institute. Nothing to do with dragons — flu. I'd been worrying about everybody's stress levels and why nobody had a heart attack or a nervous breakdown yet, right? Well they got summer flu instead. (Maybe it was because they all relaxed as soon as Lois and I were out of bus-tour radius.) First flu epidemic we'd had since I'd been alive, and believe me, tourists on holiday come and sneeze and cough all over you rather than miss their chance by keeping their germs at home. (No, you're right, I don't really blame them. I'd come to Smokehill with terminal body-parts-dropping-off-itis if it was my only chance.)

By the time Billy got back to the institute there were seven Rangers down and with it being summer which is high season anyway, the extra tourist load (and lingering investigative drones, although there were mostly only a symbolic crab and grumble of these left) meant everyone still standing was going crazy. Kit sort of hung around being twitchy for several days and then he asked me if I thought I could stay at Westcamp alone for a little while. The alternative was going back with him to the Institute. No way.

There's maybe a drawback to suddenly looking like a grown-up, which is what I had started to do the second half of the year I was fifteen. By now — and yeah, no doubt partly as a result of all that good-student crap first so they wouldn't take me away after Mom died and then later to protect Lois — I could put over maturity-beyond-his-years like you wouldn't believe. I'd also had my own growth spurt and was six-foot-something and bulky too you try hauling a baby dragon around and see if it doesn't grow you muscles like a furniture mover. So I knew what I had to do with Kit — I'd also guessed it was coming so I'd been like secretly practicing my role. I just about packed his gear for him and shoved him out. There was no question about risking Lois back at the Institute. That tourist who had bumbled past our cottage had gone missing when we had a full complement of Rangers watching out.

So I had to stay, and I had to convince Kit it was okay if he left me. Us. I did. And I'm afraid Billy's rifle helped — helped convince Kit. (He hadn't seen me try and shoot it:) But then I had to convince Dad. That really challenged my competent — maturity program, and it was only a beta really. Turned out that he'd just told Kit to bring me (us) back. When he mentioned that — almost in passing — like it was no big deal — then I mainly had to not lose my temper and yell. If I'd yelled Dad would've just yelled louder and ordered me back to the Institute, and the main thing about handling Dad is preventing him from giving an order, because then it's an order and that's the end of the discussion.

The problem was that I was scared. But it wasn't a scared that anybody else could do anything about. When I was younger sometimes being ordered to do something was secretly kind of okay because then it was Dad's (or Mom's) fault, I couldn't do anything about it. I kept telling myself it would actually be easier if there wasn't anybody else around; Lois' and my training-each-other-to-do-things sessions were getting more and more complicated, and if it was just me and Lois I could concentrate more on her, and not worry about explaining anything to anybody who caught us at it, and who knew how far we would get how fast.

But, you know, look at what had happened to me the last time I'd been in the park alone, which I know I've said before, but are you surprised it kept kind of running through my mind? Okay, maybe it had been a good disaster. But it was still a disaster and it had changed all our lives tremendously in a stretch-till-you-snap way and there was no stretch left for even a little tiny disaster-ette. This flu was pushing it. And I was also not absolutely sure I wanted to find out how far Lois and I could get how fast — or why didn't I want anyone around to notice?

There's another little tiny factoid about all this. Sure, I'd been Billy's willing slave since I was two. And I knew a lot more about Life in the Wild than your average seventeen-year-old. But that's not the same thing as knowing what you're doing out here. To the extent that you ever know what you're doing. And then I also had to work way too hard not to wonder what, exactly, Billy had been anticipating when he left me his rifle (even if I couldn't hit anything with it, except maybe stomping beetles with the stock end. The beetles in the cabin were kind of a plague).

But I smiled and did my responsible trick, and Kit was satisfied, and maybe Dad was so impressed that I hadn't lost my temper that he believed my beta program after all and said okay. Or maybe it was worse back at the Institute than I realized and what Dad really hadn't ordered me to do was not come back, but stay at Westcamp, and he'd told Kit to bring me to piss me off, so I'd be sure to do the opposite. (Although this is a little devious for Dad.) Martha sounded really worried when I talked to her, and she was obviously trying to figure out a way to tell me something we hadn't got into our code. There weren't any cop shows, she said, but there was new thriller that everybody was talking about but she hadn't seen yet.

"Maybe you should stick to science fiction," I said.

"Maybe I should," Martha said. "The problem with science fiction is . . . that it's just all made up, you know?"

Uh-oh. I knew. "Anybody else come down with the flu?"

"No, but Mom's driving one of the buses and I'm cleaning odorata's cage."

"Oh, yuck for you. You know about using lemon juice on your hair after?"

Martha giggled. It was good to hear her giggling. "Yes. I have to use so much it's making me blond."

Which proves Martha has superior hair too. All lemon juice ever did for mine was make it go kind of rusty in streaks, like there'd been a terrible chemical accident on my head.

And then we had to stop because the two-way went into one of its snits, which it was still doing, even with the new gizmo. Kit was out of earshot so I didn't tell him about the radio. It did not bear thinking about if the radio went seriously gazooey, but I was not going back to the Institute, so everything else was just going to have to be whatever it was, grotty radios included.

Kit took off the morning after I had that conversation with Martha. I checked in on the two-way as soon as he'd gone. I now had to check in twice a day, Dad said. He would've liked to make it three times but I said I was still going to go on with the dragon study even though there was no one to help me, which meant I'd be out a lot of the day. I could hear Dad thinking about ordering me to take the radio with me but fortunately he didn't. Reporting in even twice a day I was wondering if my crummy sense of time was going to be cover enough if the radio had too many hissy fits and I checked in at the wrong time too often. But I'd worry about that when it started happening . . . and then, before I had to think about staying here alone, where the nearest other human being would soon be a light-year or two away . . . Lois and I went for a walk. Lois was thrilled. Usually we were doing chores in the morning. I know, she thrilled easily, but she totally loved the greater freedom of the camp almost as much as she loved fires. She was either on a constant adrenaline high (insert Unknown Dragon Equivalent here) or two-year-old dragonlets are like that. She galloped and rootled and scrabbled and poked . . . and peeped and chortled and gurgled and burbled and purred and hummed and cheeped and chirruped and hooted and . . . her amazing range had only got amazinger as she got older; and her qualifications as a chatterbox had been established long ago.