I don't know if they commented on the vomit but I do know that the glaring lack of blood and guts gave them some pause (nobody had told them dragons generally don't leave crumbs). My stuff had made them decide it was me that was missing after all, no impostors necessary, the lack of blood and guts made them willing to assume that I was still alive, and Dad's phone marathon had eventually put some brakes on the whole gone-bananas spectacle of Dragon Vanquish but since they had all this hardware flying around already they decided while they were out there they might as well look for me. So they did. And they had some kind of fancy infrared dingle-dangle and some high-tech bozo to read it, so they could keep looking for human-shaped things of the right temperature, since there would only be one of them out there.

Unless another poacher had got in, of course. And unless I was dead after all and the dingle-dangle wouldn't find me.

I wonder, now, if it was just accident that Bud took us outdoors the afternoon that the choppers were due to fly over that meadow. Because even infrared gizmos can't read dragons through rock. Let alone small human visitors.

And Eleanor has an interesting new scar under her hair, and Eric got odorata rounded up again — which wasn't as hard as it might have been because the local landscape doesn't really suit them and they were beginning to drift uncertainly back toward their cages like sozzled party-goers stumbling home at dawn — and there was a record-breaking number of odorata babies the following season, so much so that we had to negotiate with some other zoos to build odorata cages and take some of them off our hands. But by that time we were golden and any zoo lucky enough to have anything to do with us would do pretty much whatever we said.

I doubt Lois is ever going to get as big as she would have, if she'd stayed with her mom, if her mom hadn't died. And she's still a lot paler than any of the rest of the dragons I've met, although it's become a kind of pinky-coppery-tawny-iridescent pale and — okay, never mind everything I've said about how ugly she is — is really kind of pretty, although I don't know if any of the guy dragons are going to think so when she gets older, and I don't suppose chances are she'll be let (is "let" the right word?) breed, unless the dragons decide that the bond she and I have is the sort of thing that might get passed on somehow — or would be worth passing on. (No, I don't know if dragons have sex for fun too. And I probably wouldn't tell you if I knew.)

Sometimes thinking that I've ruined Lois' life really bothers me and sometimes it doesn't. I mean, she's alive, isn't she? And it's horrible that her mom died, and her brothers and sisters. But at the same time if all that hadn't happened the Institute would still be worrying about how to keep the government from readjusting our status so the oil drillers and the gold diggers and the country-getaway builders and all the other greedy villains could come in and ruin our dragon haven — the only dragon haven left on the planet where the dragons are thriving — and now certainly the only one where they hang out with humans.

And yet the millionaire parents of that utter total absolute piece of dog crap that killed Lois' mom nearly got their evil law blasted through Congress (with a little help from the oil drillers) to kill off all our dragons. And if they'd succeeded, I don't think the Kenya sanctuary would have lasted much longer, or the Australian park. I've told you, the dragons besides ours aren't doing too well, which in a weird way gives people the excuse to make them do worse. And they may not want to admit it, but some of them are glad of the excuse. (We're still waiting to see what effect what's happened here may have on the other two parks. We're waiting hopefully.)

Dragons make people very, very nervous. You think the panorama of Gulp and me sells so well because it's cute? It sells so well because it gives people a cold feeling in their throats and a flutter around their hearts. Dragons are, as everyone knows, so big. They make Caspian walruses look small. And they aren't safely in the ocean like whales, or Nessie in those lochs — you can't stay on the shore and keep away from them. Dragons belong on land. And they fly. And they breathe fire. And real dragons aren't beautiful, at least not like the paintings of Saint George. Those dragons may be dying on the point of some dumb hero's spear, but they're also gorgeous. The real ones are just BIG. And strange. And pouched, of course. And smelly. All the photo shoots and TV documentaries can't make them romantic. Just real. Which is a mixed blessing. And why, even though we're golden right now, we know we have to work at staying golden. Not to mention that the side effect of all this popularity is keeping me out of jail, which is good too.

I keep away from arguments on dragon intelligence. In the first place I can't be bothered, and in the second place I have a good line in being young and dumb myself I didn't mean to, but you try waking up one morning to discover you're an overnight sensation — especially when you've been tired and scared half out of your remaining half a mind for most of the last two years — and see how well you come across in your first big national interviews. (I should have got Eleanor to write my lines.) The first big national interviews that are, as well, going to make the difference between whether your dad and your friends and your entire world gets prosecuted into oblivion or not, for something you did. Sure I agreed to be interviewed — I was desperate.

Well, we won. But most of it hasn't been much fun. Wildly exciting, some of the time, and fascinating, but rarely fun. There's been a lot of pressure on us from the beginning to go on tour, Lois and me. Gulp's too big and also too scary and also practically speaking impossible to transport. Just one kid sneaking back to watch Gulp take off from the Wal-Mart parking lot in East Styrofoam and getting a broken head from being caught in the backdraft would destroy all the good we'd done, not to mention the wear and tear on poor Gulp even if nothing went wrong. (It probably bothers me the most that she'd try to do it, if I figured out how to ask her.) And I won't risk it with Lois either — I wouldn't even when she was still small enough to squeeze in the back of a big station wagon, and the Searles still looked like they might win, and I was still desperate.

Dad backs me up, every time, when I say No tours. And he's still the head of the institute, as well as my dad. Dad says that I'm the real expert, and he's right, of course, except that "expert" is not what I am, but it takes a really big person, it seems to me, to sit back and let your barely-eighteen-year-old son take the lead in your life's work, which is essentially what my dad has done. (Have I mentioned recently that he's the real hero? The human real hero.) And yet he's as happy as a puppy in a closet full of shoes, because he can finally study his beloved dragons up close — although he's still at the early "ow ow ow" Stage of the Headache, which gets in the way. Turns out all humans get it, sometimes even some of the TV crews and they're not even trying to communicate anything except "please do something that will get me a bigger budget."

(And just by the way, Dad and I had the worst roaring and thundering argument of my entire life when he found out about my Headache. I know what it was, of course — he'd been feeling like a Bad Father all along, about everything, and especially about the eczema, even though I'd managed never to let him see it, which probably made him even more suspicious, and the truth is there are more bits of me that will never be beautiful because of Lois, and while Dad kept uneasily letting me make that decision, he didn't like it, and he was pretty sure I wasn't telling him the whole truth, which I wasn't. I never told anyone about the Headache. Because I didn't have to. And that pushed him over the edge. I kept yelling at him, "So, what were you going to do? Make me send her back?" Stupid of me maybe to tell him at all, but it was going to come out anyway as soon as he read about it here.)