Dragonhaven (6 page)

The Institute smells of dragon. The tourists here pick it up immediately, as soon as they come through the gate. (I suppose the wall kind of keeps it in too.) You can see them sort of straighten up and get all sparkly-eyed. And it makes them feel that the dragons are
close
—it makes them feel better about not actually seeing any. And of course they are close, comparatively speaking. I don't notice the smell much at the Institute—I don't really notice it till I get out into the park.

Oh, and every human who walks in the park either carries a squirtgun or has a Ranger with them carrying a squirtgun. This is supposed to be the dragon equivalent of what most animals think about skunks, but I don't know how they think they know. None of our Rangers has ever shot theirs at anything. But the checker-uppers for the squirtguns come round every six months like the other checker-uppers come round to test your fire extinguishers. But even if you happened to have a handy backup antitank gun you're sunk if your squirtgun didn't work, since it's a federal offense to harm a dragon. This is pretty funny when it's also a HUGE messy spectacular federal crime to aid in the preservation of the life of a dragon—in fact one of the hugest and messiest—but that's another story, and I'm getting to it, just shut up and listen.

Billy must have been working on Dad. Billy misses Mom almost as much as Dad and I do, and I think he knew that Dad barely being able to let me out of his sight any more was starting to make me kind of nuts. (No comments on the “starting to” please.) Dad had offered to get me another dog but I just wasn't ready for that yet. I didn't know how to think about having a new dog; I'd had Snark since almost before I could remember anything. It would be like getting a new mom: no. (I spent some time worrying about this too. If there was ever a man who needed a wife to pry him out of his obsession occasionally, it was Dad. Except I couldn't deal with this either—worrying about Dad or worrying about the idea of a new mom. I can worry about anything, but as an idea it never really got very far because Dad didn't notice women. He'd notice people if he had to, but if any of them was occasionally single and female it didn't register.)

Anyway. I was keeping the homeschooling admin happy (speaking of checker-uppers) but I was spending way too much time blowing up aliens with a lot of other people online who apparently didn't have lives either. But my family had been cut down by fifty percent and there was like a cold wind blowing through that freaking great hole. On a computer you don't have to notice who's missing. I was almost beginning to forget Smokehill, in a way. I hadn't changed my mind about dragons, and I was still going through the motions (most of them), it was more like seeing everything through the wrong end of the telescope. The only stuff up close was just me and the hole, and a dad who only noticed scientific abstracts and problems about the Institute that got in his face and screamed at him, except that at the same time I had to be like the lucky charm he kept in his pocket or something and always
there.

So it seemed like it came out of nowhere—I'd stopped asking—when I finally got permission to hike out overnight alone.

This is maybe the single thing I'd been wanting to do all my life. I'd always planned to grow up and study dragons like Mom and Dad, but that was a ways off yet. Presumably I'd get my butt out of the park for a few years to go to college…and then I'd think about living somewhere with a lot of other people around…
all the time
? We get to close the gates at night here. So then sometimes I'd think I'd chicken out and just stay here and apprentice to the Rangers. Most of our federal parks make you go to school for that too, but that's one of the things Old Pete set up when he set up Smokehill, our Ranger system. Billy had told me he'd take me if I decided that's what I wanted to do. He's never been away from the park overnight since he was born (both his parents were Rangers). His idea of a holiday is to hike into the park somewhere he hasn't been before, and stay there awhile, beyond the reach of f.l.s. (I admit I'd have to think about it, whether I'd choose hanging around too close to grizzlies and Yukon wolves, or f.l.s. Billy likes the
really
wild places. But maybe if I was his apprentice I'd feel more competent. I'd
rather
rather hang out with grizzlies and Yukon wolves, if you follow me.)

When the f.l. percentages were unusually bad I was sure I wanted to be a Ranger, but the rest of the time I wanted to have some PhDs like my parents because it meant more people would listen to me. I still wanted to be able to protect our dragons as well as study them and the head of the Institute is the head of the Rangers, as dumb as that is. And when the congressional subcommittee guys come here to stick their noses in and make stupid remarks, Billy has always left it up to Dad and goes all Son of the Wilderness silent and inscrutable if he's introduced to them. (It's proof of how much he thought of my parents that he would babysit the Institute when Dad and Mom took me and Snark for one of our summer hikes in the park. One of the higher-strung graduate students actually left with a nervous breakdown after one of those holidays. Apparently Billy didn't let her weep on his shoulder the way Mom had. Dad used to call her Fainting in Coils.)

But my PhDs were a long way off. I read a lot but I'm not so bright that any of the big science universities were begging to have me early. But I was a pretty fair woodsman for almost fifteen. I'd had the best teachers—our Rangers—and I grew up here, which is a big advantage, like you're supposed to be able to learn a second language really easily if you start when you're a baby. My French and German are lousy, but I've learned the language of Smokehill—some of it anyway. Before Mom disappeared I was going to have my first overnight solo after my twelfth birthday. Then she disappeared and we sort of stopped breathing for five months and then they found her. After that, as I say, Dad could barely let me out of his sight and he could never get away from the Institute himself because he's doing both his and Mom's jobs.

And then one day out of the blue Dad calls me into his office (I go in flexing my hands from Joystick Paralysis) and says, “Jake, I'm sorry. I'm not paying the right kind of attention to you and I know it, and I don't know when I'll have time either.”

He glanced back at his desk which was a wild tangle of books, notebooks, loose papers, charts, bits of wood and stone and Bonelands fossils, coffee cups and crumbs. The Institute (of course) can't afford a lot of support staff so we do all our own cleaning and cooking. Although we'd shared it when Mom was still around Dad and I stopped doing any about a month after she didn't show up at her checkpoint. We had started to try to do it again but if it weren't for eating with the Rangers sometimes I might have forgotten food ever came in any shape but microwave pouches or that cooking ever involved anything but punching buttons. And cleaning? Forget it. I can run the dishwasher—hey, I can run the washing machine, are you impressed?—but my expertise ends there.

Dad rearranged one of the coffee mugs on the pile of papers it had already left smeary brown rings on. “I've been talking to Billy. You did really well in your last standardized tests, did I tell you?”

He hadn't. I'd thought he should've had the results by now and had begun to worry. I'd been trying to be extra careful since Mom died because I knew social services was just aching to take me out of my weird life at the Institute, but I could have missed something important because since Mom died I just did miss stuff, and sometimes it was important.

“And I know”—he hesitated—“I know you've been keeping up with your woodcraft.” The one thing he would let me out of his sight to do without a huge argument was go out for a day with one of the Rangers—as long as we were back the same night. And it was the one thing that would turn the telescope I was looking through around too. For a few hours. “You're fourteen and a half.”

Fourteen years, nine months and three days, I wanted to say, but I didn't.

“And—well—Billy says you're more than ready to—uh—”

Tie my shoes without someone supervising? I thought, but I didn't say that either, not only because my shoes have Velcro straps. I knew Dad was doing the best he could. So was I.

“Well, I wondered, would you like to take your overnight solo? I know you were—we were—” He hesitated again. “Your first solo is overdue, I know. And Billy says you'll be fine. And the weather looks like holding. So—”

“Yes,” I said. “I'd love to.” I tried not to sound sarcastic. I almost forgot to say thanks. Almost. But I did say it.

If I'd been twelve I'd've gone whooping out of the Institute offices to the Ranger offices which are right across the tourist center lobby and reception area, and probably telling everyone on the way, Nate in the ticket booth, Amanda in the gift shop, poor Bob doing detention in the café, Jo and Nancy answering questions as they shepherded gangs of tourists to and from the bus stop, and anybody else I recognized, but I was nearer fifteen than fourteen and it had been a long almost-three years in a lot of ways. I walked slowly through Nancy's busload (ID-ing the f.l.s among them at first glance), waved at Nate, and told Dan, at the front Ranger desk, that whenever Billy had a moment I'd like to talk to him.

“He's hiding down at the caves,” said Dan. “You could go find him.”

I've forgotten to tell you about the caves. As soon as the first geologist set foot near Smokehill they knew there had to be caves here. The Native Americans had known for a long time, but after a bad beginning they'd kind of stopped telling the European pillagers anything they didn't have to, so Old Pete may be the first whiteface to have done more than guess. The caves near the Institute aren't very good ones compared to what there is farther in, like under the Bonelands, but these little ones near the front door were busy being developed for tourists, so they weren't going to be much use for hiding in much longer.

Getting the work done was a huge nuisance and everybody who lived here hated it, but we are always desperate for money (I should just make an acronym of it: WAADFM, like some new weird alternative radio station), so we were going ahead with it. Of course in the short term this meant money we badly needed elsewhere was getting spent on making the caves touristproof…and tourists coming to the caves was going to mean more staff to keep an eye on them and more upkeep because tourists are incredibly destructive even when they're behaving themselves, but the grown-ups (including a lot of bozo outside consultants—for cheez sake, what does some pointy head from Baltimore or Manhattan know about a place like Smokehill?) all seemed to think it was going to be worth it in the end, if we lived that long. Dad had told me that the caves were going to fund him hiring another graduate student, maybe even full-time, because he didn't think he was ever going to get one otherwise. I was sure hiring anybody was a bad idea because it would mean we
could
, and everybody would cut our grants accordingly.

Billy was sitting by one of the little pools near the entrance. As soon as my eyes adjusted to the dark—the construction crews had gone home for the day, and turned off all the lights—I could see both his lantern and its reflection in the water. I went up to him as quietly as I could, but the caves are totally quiet except for the drip of water (and the bats) and on the pebbly path with the inevitable echo I sounded like someone falling through a series of windows CRASH CRUNCH CRASH only without the screaming.

If you'll pardon the expression from someone who wants to grow up to be a scientist, there's something almost magical about our caves, even the little boring ones near the park entrance. Maybe all caves are like this and I just don't know the analytical squashed-flat-and-labeled word for it. But there's a real feeling of another world, another world that needs some other sense or senses to get at it very well, in our caves. I suppose you could say it's something about underground, lack of sunlight, nothing grows here but a few creepy blind things and sometimes even creepier rock formations, but that doesn't explain it. Cellars aren't magical. The old underground bomb shelter that's now a really boring museum in Wilsonville isn't magical. Our caves are magical.

It could have been the weird shadows that lantern light throws but the moment Billy looked up I knew he was worried about something besides more tourists. I was used to Dad worrying. He'd been worried about something since Mom disappeared, and once she died it's like his worry metastasized and now he worried about everything—and
I
worried about the holes it made in
him
, all the gnawing worry. If I lost any more family there wouldn't be any left. As I looked at Billy I wondered what I was missing. Like that the world's total
Draco australiensis
numbers were still falling and there had been only a few hundred left when they died out in the wild. Like that even with the zoo Smokehill was barely surviving. I knew both of these things. But dragons are so hard to count maybe they were wrong about there being fewer of them. Maybe they were just getting even harder to count. And Smokehill had always barely survived, from Old Pete on. But Dad's a worrier. Billy isn't.

“What's wrong?” I said.

Billy shook his head. He was a good grown-up, but he was still a grown-up, and grown-ups rarely talk about grown-up trouble to kids. Eric took the question “What's wrong?” from a kid as a personal attack, even when it was something like a zoo-food shipment not arriving when it should and it was perfectly reasonable to be worried. I'd often wished Dad would talk about missing Mom to me more. Not only because then I could talk to him back. We could barely mention her at all.

At least Billy didn't lie to me. “Nothing you can do anything about. Nothing I can do anything about either. That's what's wrong.” He shook his head again and then looked at me, visibly changing the subject. “What's up?”

I thought again of how I'd've felt if this'd happened three years ago. It was almost hard to get the words out. “Dad says I can do my first solo. Hike into the park and stay overnight.” I felt as if I needed to apologize for interrupting him for such a lame reason. It could have waited. “Dan told me I could find you here.”

Billy nodded. My solo wasn't news to him—Dad would have discussed it with him first. Even though I knew this was logical and responsible and necessary and all that it made me feel about four instead of almost fifteen. I wasn't really tying my shoes by myself. Dad and Billy were both watching me. I wished Snark was there. Snark was
my
responsibility. And furthermore he didn't seem to mind. That's being a dog, I guess, not minding being totally dependent on someone who may talk over your head to someone else about you and not let you in on it till everything's already been decided.