Had she meant to teach me to talk to her? Or was that an accident of having to spend too much time with me — because of Lois? Having decided not to fry me, that is. Then why hadn't it happened with Old Pete? Because if he'd started having dragon-shaped, dragon-identified headaches, he'd have mentioned it — because it wouldn't be just boring human weakness any more, it would be about dragons.

Was it Lois again — the emergency of Lois? First the extended emergency begun by having stuck her down my shirt front right after she was born. And then . . . you know those stories of moms lifting the front ends of trucks off their children the trucks have just run over? Maybe it was like that. In the stress of those last moments back at Westcamp, I managed to get through to Gulp. I mean, just having a headache . . . Eric gives me a headache, and we've never gone in for mind-reading. (Automatically the thought followed: Now there's a really horrible idea.) And then I thought of his voice over the two-way, and I wondered how he was doing. How everyone at the Institute was doing. My father was hostage . . . ?

And I'm sitting around, trapped and helpless and hallucinating, in a cave full of dragons. I know dragons don't eat humans . . . but if we're playing the Walrus and the Carpenter here, I'm definitely an oyster.

So there I was — out of time, out of humanity, out of life, certainly life as I knew it, with an aching, echoing head full of . . . waiting. Oh great. What do I do now?

I can't tell you how bad this was, how lost I was, how mindsmithereeningly alone I was, in this flickery shadowy red-purply nowhere, full of huge breathing shadowy things with huge shining eyes. And there I was, scared silly, scared beyond silly. And one of the things I came out of that experience with is a total inability to use the word "telepathy." It just doesn't fit, okay? And also . . . telepathic dragons. Pleeeease. That is so last century. I've got like shelves of Mom's old story books with telepathic (if pouchless) dragons in them.

But the problem remains that us mouth-flapping talking-crazy humans don't have any words for any kind of silent stuff, which is maybe why we overuse "telepathy" so hard. Like a color-blind species making everything red because it's the only color they've heard of, even though they can't see it either, but it makes them feel clever, like they can imagine color. We can deal with radio waves, that they exist I mean, and even stuff like our dragon fence, but communication that isn't through our standard five senses is as taboo as the idea that any animals but us have real intelligence. So I've called it "telepathy" a few times already because I haven't got anything else to call it, but I'm stopping now. You can just make up your own word. "Ummgmmgmm" or something, because it occurred to me eventually that the nearest thing us humans do have to some of what dragons do is a kind of inaudible hum. Which is maybe how Lois and I groped toward a common wavelength at the beginning. Mouth talking isn't completely on a different planet from an audible hum, and once you've got to the vocal-cord-jiggling humming part. . . . That's still not right, okay? But it's a piece of some of it. Maybe.

I'm sitting here now, a long time after I woke up in the cave full of dragons for the first time, thinking, It's nothing like that. But what is it like? If it's like anything — and it's not like anything or I wouldn't be making such a drooling idiot of myself trying to explain — it's maybe more like sign language, except that it's going on in your head, with a little audible harmonic background some of the time. Like you might wave your hands (or you do if you're me) while you're talking. Part of where my Headache came from was just trying to grab on to something that almost makes sense, but not really — like the brain strain version of your eyes struggling to see through somebody else's glasses.

I remembered that thinking words at Gulp hadn't done much good, and while I wasn't sure what Gulp had understood, she'd got us away before the helicopter had arrived, and while she might have had a big avoid thing for helicopters the way all our dragons seemed to about all human stuff . . . she'd got us away. Maybe only because Lois was too young to leave her mutant freak serial murderer mom, but I couldn't quite believe that. I may have been her worst nightmare but I just didn't feel Gulp was defending us both now only for Lois' sake. Which is also to say that I freaking — mutant well was picking stuff up from the Gulp rock in my head. Emergency may be a hell of a way to make contact, but by golly it works.

So one way or another here I was in a cavern full of dragons, and still alive to tell about it. Supposing I got out of the cavern full of dragons again, alive, and there was anyone I dared tell. . . . I was going to tell them what? I squeezed my skull with my hands again, till my wrists ached. Sometimes it's just your thoughts you can't deal with, and I couldn't deal with mine.

Slowly I tried to organize a picture in my head of Lois and me playing in the meadow where Gulp had first found us. Sort of out in the front of my head, away from my private thoughts.

This was sucked away — the same dizzy, queasy no-longer-entirely-me-doing-it feeling as I'd had when I'd been trying to "talk" to Gulp and almost immediately there was a picture in my head of . . . well, in hindsight, it was a cavern full of dragons, but I didn't know that at the time. It was way too bizarre. The only reason I even knew I was receiving something was that it was way too bizarre for me to have made it up. I've learned a little more now about how dragons see things, or at least how they make their head-picture-communications of what they see, which I guess is also some kind of shorthand like an alphabet is for us. I know the this-group-of-dragons, uh, thingummy. It isn't even really a picture. But it's an image, or a symbol of an image, or a gesture of an image.

But it's not only an image. This is the really hard part. You have to do something too — like if one person puts out a hand the other person is supposed to put out their hand too and shake it. It's the handshake that makes it — a handshake. Or like the famous stability model of the three, legged stool. If there was a dragon-alphabet version, it would have one of its legs missing: You'd hold it up — you'd make it stable — by thinking about it, or by thinking, "This is a three-legged stool. Never mind one of its legs is missing." The dragon alphabet mostly doesn't just lie there like ours does. Mostly you have to connect with it somehow, with what you're seeing or receiving, you have to hold something up or plug something in, to make it really work. This makes "reading" it a lot harder. If your two-legged stool falls over, you aren't getting the message "stability." More likely you're thinking it's something about falling over, which it is, kind of, only backwards.

This was the first time I'd received something sent from a dragon. At least that I knew about. Well, any dragon but Lois. That I'd started maybe picking stuff up from Gulp was new and uncertain — and I hadn't learned about having to plug in yet either. This time at least I was sort of expecting it — expecting something — probably because I'd "known" that the big lump of peaceful clay in my head was actually Big-Goes-on-Forever Dragon. It was a little like — a little tiny microscopic — like looking through one of those cheesy 3D viewer things, that you put a wheel of pictures in and click them around, and what you see is really nothing like what you see in the world-it's sort of too flat and too jumping-out-at-you simultaneously. (Okay, how retro are we at the Institute? We still sell the glasses, and half a dozen wheels of 3D photos of Smokehill. The funny thing is that people still buy them.) It was a bit like that, only worse. At least when you're looking through the viewfinder at several rows of mountains that don't line up in any direction, including with the horizon or with each other, you know what they're trying to do — what the picture is trying to be. And you can take the viewer away from your eyes and your normal, ordinary life is still there.