I also fell asleep a lot — although I think that was more like passing out — in the middle of my attempts-at-talking with the black dragon, who I started out calling Nero because I kept thinking about burning, but in the first place that only scared me worse, and in the second place it was pretty unfair under the circumstances. He never so much as showed me his teeth, let alone shot fire at me the way Gulp had, and he couldn't help being big. (I don't know who it was fired at me when Gulp first arrived with her passengers, but I'd stake Smokehill's ownership deeds that it wasn't him. He wouldn't have missed.)

And that sense of waiting he did so well — at first it rattled me too, but then everything rattled me — and never mind what a wuss I am, it would have rattled you too — and then I began to, I don't know, be kind of grateful, or to rely on it, or something, and then the writingness seemed to be even a kind of serenity, even, almost, a kind of — comfort (at this point I started worrying about what I knew about prisoners identifying with their captors and people in institutions forgetting how to live in the world, but at least worrying, even about very weird new things, made my brain feel sort of like it still belonged to me, that we hadn't totally parted company as a result of recent events), and by the time they let Lois and me out of the fire-cavern for the first time since we'd come in, I'd started calling him Buddha. Which became Bud, of course.

I think it was him who told Gulp to take us outside, although it may have been Gulp's idea. At first I think I — and probably Lois too because she was attached to me — were strictly Gulp and Bud's problem. After the initial brief outburst of semi-mayhem the other dragons sort of sat back and said "good luck" or "better you than me" or something (possibly "I hope you get over this dumb idea soon"). It took longer before I started getting any kind of an individual fix on any of the other dragons, although I was often aware of that barely-restrained-avalanche thinking — or "thinking" — from them, like a bunch of journalists being held back by the yellow tape at a crime scene on a TV cop show.

The thing is that as the hours, or the days, passed, I got more and more fixated on sunlight, sky, trees, fresh air, and less able to think, or try to think, about anything else. Some of that was just fear, of course. All there was in the cavern was stone and fire and darkness — and dragons, the smallest of which still made me look like a Yorkshire terrier standing next to a hippopotamus. There were no dragonlets that I ever saw, except Lois.

I don't think it was dark in there, to the dragons, or maybe they just liked dark. But they moved easily among the shadows, winding their ways among the boulders and stone pillars, and there was this almost-motionless thing they did, where all you could see was the glow of their eyes (dragons don't blink nearly as often as humans do; mostly their eyes are either open or closed), and then you'd try to follow the rest of them and decide which of the hummocks were stone and which of them were dragon, and then every now and then a boulder would move. Occasionally the firelight fell on someone's side so YOU could see him or her breathing, but not very often. I think this probably made it worse, the not knowing, although being a Yorkshire terrier surrounded by hippos, how much detail did you need? You're alive because nobody's eaten you. Or sat on you.

But I got so that I couldn't think as far back as the institute and other human beings — Dad, Billy, Martha — that was too hard. Even not remembering Eric or f.l.s or cleaning odorata's cage, which you might think was a good thing, left a hole, made me less me. The dragons weren't being deliberately cruel — you know, something like, hey, his kind is responsible for all our problems! Let's make him suffer! — or even thoughtless. I was just too strange for them. (But presumably a lot less scary. At least as just me, all by myself. As the forward scout of the army at your gate, maybe scary enough.) And maybe Bud figured out that what he was increasingly picking up from me was misery.

On the fifth day, if it was the fifth day, Gulp moved forward from whatever shadows she'd been in — although mostly I could see her, like I could see Bud, near to Lois' and my corner, and the other dragons stayed farther away — anyway she unwound herself from some shadows and then carefully did her invitation-for-transport display, which is that she folded herself up as low as she'd go and then laid her neck and head flat on the ground in front of us . . . which I might still not have got except that suddenly there were some very queer-looking things in my head that were enough like trees, in my tree-deprived state, that I was willing to jump at anything that looked like a chance.

With us in our small-by-dragon-standards niche, and having her arm's length — my arm's length — away, her breath was like the blast from the biggest fan heater you ever imagined although I swear she was trying to breathe shallowly. Lois clambered up her head to the top of her skull at once, making a happy peep this time, but when Gulp didn't move, I, well, I didn't jump, couldn't she just have pointed to the door and I'd walk? But that didn't seem to be an option. She rolled her ginormous eye at me — and I've already told you that being glared at by a dragon is a powerful experience — and I took a deep breath just taking a deep breath makes you feel extra paltry, by the way, in a cavern full of dragons. And I reluctantly followed Lois, although I went the long way up her shoulder. Even the thought of getting out of the cavern didn't make me like stepping on a dragon. And I wasn't even thinking about the throwing-up part of traveling that way.

But I also didn't really know that she might not be taking us farther in. The trees in my head really weren't very good trees — not as a human thinks about trees — not as a human who doesn't yet know how to connect thinks about trees — and I was afraid they were just an echo of my longing. Maybe the caves had sort of greenish geometric rocks farther in (although it was a geometry I didn't know and I wouldn't have wanted to say they were rocks either).

I had my eyes closed for a lot of it — rocky walls flashing past that close are not comfortable viewing — and there were a lot of lurches that if they were dragon stair steps were a lot too long for human legs. But I noticed that we were humping our way upward not down and I think it probably would have broken what remained of my sanity if it had turned out she wasn't going to take us out of the caves after all. But she was. I smelled it first — cool, moving air that didn't have burning in it — and then I opened my eyes and saw daylight. . ..

It was another sunny day outdoors. Outdoors. I had felt so far away, not just underground, which is intense enough to someone like me whose desk is always as close to the window as I can get it and who can't sit still more than a few hours without going outside, barring blizzards, and even then I'll probably go stand on the doorstep and look hopefully for any sign of it stopping till the flakes make my eyelashes stick together and I can't see any more. But in the whole crazy inexplicable business of trying to talk to Bud, it felt like years had passed in the flickery reddish windowless darkness — I was crazy enough by then to wonder if maybe years had passed, like in old tales of people who visit the fairies.

I slithered down Gulp's shoulder and fell on the ground — the stories of the early ocean crossings, when sailors and passengers get out and kiss the ground when there's finally some ground to kiss after months at sea. But at least they'd had air and sky.

I plastered myself against the bit of ground I landed on, like it was my best friend, which it was. I even bit off some grass — well, it wasn't grass, but it was some kind of green thing. I suppose I might have poisoned myself, but I didn't. It had a bitter taste but it tasted good. It tasted of sunlight — of the world aboveground, of the world where humans existed — I don't know. I almost felt crazier from having got outside again — from having spent five days (or five hundred years) trying to adjust to being a light-deprived lab rat and being scared out of my small lab-rat mind about one of the dragons losing its temper. Bud may have been boss dragon but I knew without being able to talk to any of them about it that not everybody agreed with him about wasting time on me.