Eric opened one of the cage doors at the zoo. Just think about that for a minute. Eric. Opened. One. Of. The. Cages. Eric. But we were looking at the possibility — no, the likelihood of losing Smokehill, so last ditch efforts were in order. I'm still really impressed. But this is the best part if you're going to do something like let something out of its cage to make an uproar, you want to let the one that's going to cause the most uproar out, right? Like, you might say, the biggest stink. So guess who he let out. You get three guesses and the first two don't count.

So then he came screaming up to the Institute, which was by then buzzing with Guards doing moving-out things, and all these great horrible (Martha said) army super jeeps and things were rolling through the gate like Grond at the siege of Gondor, and Eric had a tantrum of, I guess, epic proportions even for Eric (even Eleanor was almost impressed), and nearly brought the entire National Guard to its knees single-handed, between the tantrum itself and — well, you guessed it, right? — odorata, who was cavorting around having a high old time doing what odorata does.

It just happens that this was all going on during odorata mating season, so all the males would have been trying out their courting steps anyway, and while the young males had all been too crestfallen (so to speak) while they were all crammed in the same cage with the big guy, once they got let out they decided to have a stab at the show themselves, so we had mating-dance odorata pretty much all over the landscape — I'm sorry I missed it — and big strapping members of the National Guard passing out from the smell right and left (have I mentioned that odorata is especially smelly during mating season? Because the males are proving to the females that they can protect them) and Eric trying to kill anyone in a Guard uniform, claiming that some damned soldier had opened the cage door and that he was going to have the entire Guard court-martialed unless they brought the guy who did it forward and let Eric kill him. And, you know, one of the reasons Eric was so convincingly off his rocker was that he was worried sick about the possibility that odorata might get hurt. He'd decided that it was worth the risk, but he still hated doing it. And it made it really easy for him to channel that hatred at the guys who were making it necessary.

Dad had been on the phone at that point for about forty-eight hours straight, trying to get hold of somebody who could cancel the order to do this big search for my dead body — I mean, where's a nice little international incident when you need one? If there'd been any real news going on even all the Searles' money couldn't have turned our dragons into a civil war — because he knew that as soon as they found anything they could pretend was evidence that I or anyone else had come to some kind of harm, they'd start killing dragons. Don't ask me how they were managing to discount my twice-daily check-ins — that the dragons were holding a gun to my head and making me say I was okay?

I asked Dad about this when I was trying to write this part, and was sorry then, watching it in his face as he went back to that terrible time. Finally he said, "Nobody sounds too great on our two-ways and the one you were using was worse than usual. Somebody decided that maybe it wasn't really you. That I'd rigged it somehow. That's when they started. . . keeping a watchful eye on me." Jesus. If I knew who it was I'd . . . hang him out to dry and then give him to the dragons for their fire.

So everything had gone seriously wrong enough that Dad — and Eric — thought it was worth it to tell me to get out — the way the party politics were being driven, finding Lois would be even worse than finding me dead — gee, thanks — but whatever they were going to find (or whatever they were hoping to find) they were still going to start looking at Westcamp. Of course back at the Institute they didn't know about Gulp. Dad has said since — and I did not ask — that he got ten years older for every day after I disappeared and there was no news of me of any kind. . ..

Anyway. Even odorata couldn't make the second helicopter dematerialize, of course, although they were doing a very good job of razing troop strength and creating rampant chaos — and the big strapping guys keeling over weren't later on going to admit that it was just a bunch of smelly lizards, so that's where the violent, club-wielding animal activists got shoved into the story. Okay, there'd been some animal rights guys — way too low-key to call activists — hanging around, but they only wielded banners and they never made it through the gate. (Although they did spray-paint one or two of Saruman's jeeps.)

But meanwhile Eleanor was also on the case. While Eric and odorata were doing their various dances, Eleanor was hitting herself over the head with a shovel — you know how scalp wounds bleed — and staggering in to the Institute covered in blood and crying for Katie. (Martha says she really was crying and she really was staggering but Eleanor says she wasn't, that it was all planned. Martha says that it wouldn't have worked if she hadn't really been crying and staggering and that she was paying her a compliment so please relax but it was also the stupidest thing she'd ever heard of, and I say amen to that, also that she's amazingly brave and maybe that's all that counts, since it worked, aside from the fact that it was an utterly idiotic thing to have done and she's lucky she didn't give herself permanent brain damage.)

Katie understandably pretty much had a heart attack on the spot and gathered up her freely bleeding child and demanded the remaining helicopter to fly them out to the hospital now. Dad — who is very capable with needle, thread, sutures, staples, and those butterfly things, as most of us can vouch for — instantly backed her up, and so that's what happened. Martha says she couldn't be sure that the reason the helicopter crew volunteered so fast didn't have something to do with the rapidly-spreading odorata smell, but the point is that was two helicopters out of two (they never did figure out exactly what went wrong with the other one: ninja chipmunks maybe?), and it took another six hours to get more helicopters "mobilized" to Smokehill, and that's when they started hunting me. That last conversation with Dad was with the new helicopters rolling through the gate but he couldn't just tell me that with Saruman monitoring him and that last shout from Eric was only because even Saruman was a little leery of him after his odorata performance, and he'd managed to snitch a two-way.

But all of this had given Gulp and me a few more days to make some kind of a relationship, and who's to say if I'd put my hand on her nose the day before or even six hours before and started thinking pictures at her, it would have worked?

The new helicopters flew directly to Westcamp, and found no me, of course, but all my gear — including all the stuff that would let me stay alive in Smokehill — was still there. And of course there were signs of some big animal having been around a lot and a lot of recently-shed dragon scales, if any of them were clever enough to recognize them, which, since it was Handley and his guys, they probably were.

(Dad certainly was, when they brought some of the scales back to the Institute. He says he kept telling himself that we'd all made the best decisions we could have right along from the beginning — from the moment I put Lois down my shirt the first time — and that if it was now all going horribly wrong we still couldn't have done anything else. But that's one of the worst things about this whole story, what those fifteen days I was missing did to Dad. It didn't do anything good for Martha and Billy and everybody else but Dad was, ultimately, responsible, and I was his son . . . and I really was the only family he had left. And even if you counted Lois — which I did — she was missing too.)