Bud had followed us out, and was lying down, trying to look small, I think, like Gulp tried, but he had his head raised — oh, a mere seven or eight feet off the ground-watching me. After I had crawled around on my hands and knees for a few minutes, just reminding myself of dirt and plants — I think I did some whimpering too — I stood up, staggering a little, although I'd been walking in the fire-cavern okay, and turned my face up to the sun, and did a crazy little dance — and Lois did it with me, cavorting and peeping.

One of the weirdest things about the fire-cavern was how quiet it was. Except for Lois and me nobody ever said anything — or growled or harked or whined or peeped or chirped or chortled or shouted. Most ly you heard nothing at all, except the sound of your own breathing and a sort of low, eerily harmonic background sssssssssh that was presumably the dragons breathing, but you couldn't identify it. It sounded more like gremlins to me — some kind of cave spook whispering around in the dark. Occasionally you heard these great big creatures moving around, big soft echoey rustles, a few clicks and clatters of talons and wings; and occasionally they made one or another kind of rumble, like maybe a dragon cough or a dragon snort, but they didn't talk. Or hum. Not to hear anyway. (That came later, when the other dragons started deciding that Bud and Gulp's idea about me wasn't so awful after all. Or maybe it's just that dragons are good losers.) You did hear the fire a bit, but a dried-dragon-dung fire doesn't crackle like a wood fire does, as well as being too purple-blue.

And my human thing about talking had gone away too. You know how I kept talking at Westcamp after Gulp arrived. Not in the dragon rave. I hummed a little bit back at Lois but that was about all. It was almost like my mouth was pressed shut, by the weight of all that darkness and all those dragons.

But I had a little tiny epiphany then, that first time outdoors, with daylight on my skin and in my eyes. You know how deaf people are taught to talk, if they can learn it, because even though they can't hear, it makes it easier for them to communicate with hearing people, who are used to talking. And then hearing people who want to be able to talk to deaf people learn sign language, and then — sometimes — they talk at the same time as they use the sign language, to help the deaf people, lip-read, I suppose, or get used to the way the mouth is always flapping in hearing people, or something.

While I was still high with being outdoors again — with being reconnected, even if only barely (where the hell was I, in all of five million acres of Smokehill?), with my life — I went over to Bud, stopping when I was still far enough away not to get a crick in my neck by looking up to where he was holding his head (which he probably had as low as he could without getting a crick in his neck), and started talking. Out loud. Like a normal human. Like I hadn't done for five days in Bud's cave. I've always been a big hand-gesture person, like Mom – Dad only waves his arms around when he's mad — so I used hand gestures too. I tried to make pictures in my mind while I was telling him the stories – like the hearing person using sign language — but my words led the pictures. Us humans, we lead with words. This is how we do it. And — I think — they got it. Maybe they had a great big dragon epiphany too.

It's been and still is all totally hard sweating dia-freaking-bolical work after that — in fact in a way it's been worse because that's when I started to believe in what we were doing, Bud and me, talking to each other here we go again, like when I first began to realize what raising Lois was really going to be like. But this time — this time I was going to let myself know how hard it was going to be, and do it anyway. I know how dumb this sounds, but I wanted to be a grown-up for Bud. This was different from what had happened with Lois. Duh.

But if you've hung on this long because you think I'm going to Explain Everything — stop now. Put this down, go away, wash the car, look up the horoscope for your goldfish, and I'm sorry I've wasted so much of your time. Give this book to your library (if they want it). But it was a big thing, that day, for me anyway. Back there in the dark Bud had been patiently holding the dragon space for me — while I mostly cowered in my niche. (Of course I couldn't cope, any more than I could have coped with a dragonlet, which was clearly impossible.) But out here in the light I could see that that is what he had been doing — that it wasn't all just being in the dark surrounded by dragons and making stuff up to make myself feel better. It was happening in daylight too. Bud was listening. Bud wanted to listen. To me.

I think the last few days had been pretty intense for the dragons too. I may be unbelievably weeny in dragon terms but that I was there was epoch making. And look what trouble one really weeny new germ can do somewhere it's never been before.

The point is that that was the first day it seemed to me possible — a human talking to a dragon. That it wasn't just craziness and desperation and darkness. The craziness and desperation may have started it . . . but it had a future. Talking to each other had a future. There is pretty much no bigger wow than that.

So I told him — them — because Gulp had moved to lie down by Bud and was obviously "listening" too — about finding the dying mother dragon who'd only just given birth, and how Lois was the only one of her dragonlets still alive. How I'd tucked her down my shirt without thinking about it, and run away. How I'd made myself doolally trying to keep her alive, and without knowing how to keep her alive, and my only excuse was that she'd survived. I told them about the Institute — I can't begin to imagine what my pictures of the inside of the Institute must have looked/felt/smelled/something — else/whatever to them — and about the human laws that made what I'd done so dangerous. That part didn't go in pictures so well, but I tried. (So you try making a picture in your head of laws. All I could think of was that big famous picture of the Constitution, with John Hancock's signature taking up half the space. So, I skipped over the law thing a little.)

I told them that the Institute existed only because they, the dragons, existed, and that we were doing the best we could and knew how and although that wasn't very good it was the best we could, and that we were probably losing too, and that if anyone ever found out about Lois that would probably be the end of the line because the people who were against the Institute kept imagining that we were doing something like Lois, although we never had before; and that if they did find out, and especially if they figured out who her mother was, they'd say that she was the daughter of a rogue killer dragon and genes will tell and she had to be destroyed twice, first because she was illegal anyway and second because of her mom.

What I didn't try to tell them about was the dragon dreams. And that's funny too, because I planned to, to the extent that any of this was planned. Once I was telling the story I would've told them about the dragon dreams, how I felt that especially at the beginning they were helping hold me together, like rope, or a straitjacket — and I sort of hesitated on the brink, with a tentative picture of Lois' mom as I saw her in my dreams, and there was almost this pause where I swear everyone understood everyone else, two dragons and one human — I don't suppose even Bud got even 10 percent of all the rest of it, the question was what fragments were he and Gulp fishing out of the nutso deluge and what were they doing with them?? — and it was about this thing I knew was crazy, about Lois' mom, this is the place where we understood each other — and then while it was over in just long enough for it to have been a pause, it was like that was all that was necessary. I didn't have to tell them. Lois' mom in my head, keeping me together. Yes. Of course. Oh. . .