The Dragon Keeper (2 page)

“Do I look like I report to the veterinary department?” She grabbed her keys from the ground and started walking back to the keeper door. “Go piss off. I’ve got an irritated Komodo to release.”

She fumbled with the ring, looking for the key with the sticker of a Chinese parade dragon, the tiny tumble of yellow and red that stood out from all the other keys, and hollered over her shoulder. “Aren’t you supposed to be working? Injecting monkeys with microchips or analyzing bat shit or …” Found it. As she slid the key into the lock, he stopped her with a word.

“Meg.”

They weren’t first-name people. She was always
Yancy
—or
Yance
in a hurry;
the dragon keeper
around newbies;
Miss Yancy
when he was being a smart-ass; and
Queen Bitch
when she was the smart-ass and he thought she was out of earshot. Any of these names, fine, but not Meg. Never Meg.

She spun around, her jaw dropping. The knowledge punched her in the gut with a breath-robbing, giddy certainty. Antonio leaned farther over the railing, practically dancing now. He looked as if he might leap the thing and fly into the exhibit.

“Really?”

He nodded. “Just now. I had to tell you in person. Come on, let’s go.”

Opening the door, she ran to the restraint box and knelt next to the wood that sent out the sweet stink of blood and rancid, post-feeding dragon breath. Jata rustled, rapping her tail on the box once, getting impatient. Meg leaned over the airholes, holding her cheeks to keep the smile from breaking her entire face apart.

“They’re hatching.”

~

Meg had never seen so many people jammed into the nursery before. The room was no bigger than her kitchen, and at least a dozen bodies lined the walls. Every keeper and vet intern she’d ever seen in the hallways wanted a piece of the party, all of them clamoring above heads and around shoulders for a look at the incubator and the three Komodo eggs that lay inside. Meg tried not to turn around often. Looking at all the faces was too much like being on exhibit herself—a particularly surreal, fishbowl kind of nausea.

When she and Antonio had arrived, it was already crowded, but he’d just grabbed her hand and slogged through the crowd straight to the back of the room. A couple of chairs were set up around the machine, but she couldn’t sit. She stood with her arms crossed, rocking on the balls of her feet, eyes fixed on the incubator.

“Hey, down in front,” someone said.

“Piss off. Where were you for the last eight months?” She didn’t even bother to see who it was. They were all bandwagon freeloaders, lazy kids fresh out of college who’d rather play voyeur than take care of their own exhibits.

Antonio, who sat next to her jotting notes in his charts, poked her leg with the back of his pen. “Play nice.”

“Why?” she grumbled. “None of them rotated the eggs or monitored the temperature and humidity of the environment. They didn’t lie awake at night worrying about hatchling diets and exercise stimulants.”

“I wouldn’t admit that in public, Yancy. People might get jealous of your fascinating life.”

A few people snickered behind them.

Gemma Perkins, Meg’s fellow reptile keeper and the only one who apparently still had exhibits to tend, radioed in on their mobile com units. “How’s it going in there?”

“The same,” Meg replied, without glancing away from the incubator. When her eyeballs started to itch and water, she rubbed them with her wrist.

The egg that had started the entire circus was at the front point of the three-egg clutch. Hairline slices ran diagonally from its base up to the apex, where the leathery surface of the shell waved open into a tiny sliver of black. All eyes in the room, some with more success than others, strained to focus on that one slice of space. Meg could practically feel a dozen people’s breaths pulsing around it, like some creepy fan club waiting to witness what some of them insisted on calling a miracle.

As the minutes ticked by, no more slices appeared in the shell. The tiny Komodo remained invisible underneath the crack in the egg. The initial excitement and laughter that had buzzed around the room slowly quieted, and the chatter fell to murmurs and shuffling feet. Meg tried to ignore the worry circulating in the air behind her.

“Why did he stop?” someone murmured, but no one answered.

It was the second time today that Meg had stared into a black void, but this was no cave. She couldn’t crawl inside and make it safe or do anything that would ease the hatchling’s way into the world. For this journey, he was on his own. Somewhere inside that blackness he’d grown a single, serrated tooth for this sole purpose—the shell tooth. Once he struggled free of the shell, the tooth would fall out, spent.

The shell tooth was at the front of the hatchling’s mouth on his top palate. Meg’s own tongue now pushed at the same spot, focusing the tension toward the only point in the entire world that mattered right now. The pressure in her mouth spread into her skull, seeped through her temples, and pounded against her ears, filling them with the rushing void of a seashell that silenced everything else inside the room. It brought the Komodo kings back to her mind—what the roar of the sea must have sounded like as it rose to meet them, then the cold press of water that welcomed them into the nether region between life and death. The hatchling was crossing paths with them now, trying to find his way out of his egg and into the world, fighting to be born.

At that moment, the crack in the egg ripped open.

The entire room shouted. Meg’s jaw stung from the sudden release, and she grabbed someone’s hand, squeezing the palm into pulp.

A long slice of shell, the size of a carrot, fell off the egg and revealed the underside of a wet jaw and part of a foreleg. The jaw moved, glistening under the incubator lights like a pearl, and thrust itself up through the hole. Suddenly his whole head was visible, a yellow and green crown no longer than two inches, and his slatted eyes blinked open.

“It’s a boy!” someone said, and a giddy excitement filled the room. People laughed and hugged one another, pushing forward for a better look at the zoo’s newest baby. Meg took it in, dumb with surprise. Were these the same people who grumbled alongside her every day, bitching about management, long hours, low pay, and the humiliation of being replaced by little pieces of plastic? It was as if they’d collectively shed some itchy, brittle skin and slithered out into the summer sun, as unrecognizable as the crazy pounding of her own heart.

Without warning, Antonio swooped over to wrap her into a huge bear hug and twirl her around. The antiseptic on his clothes stung her eyes and pricked tears into their corners. She protested and shoved him off, grabbing the chart out of his hand so she could look away and dry her eyes.

“April ninth,” she said as she wrote down the date.

Antonio looked at his watch. “Five-fourteen.”

For a split second, they both paused and stared at each other. It was there—in that flash of knowing between them, the first time in the history of the Zoo of America that Meg Yancy and Antonio Rodríguez shared a moment in which neither of them sneered or poked or flat-out tripped the other one for the hell of it—that time split open. Only a handful of people in the world had ever witnessed a birth like this. It was the beginning of a life that shouldn’t be. No one inside or outside of this room was ready for Jata’s babies, but here they were anyway, severing everything in her life into the distant, messy before and the impossible, triumphant now.

Meg and Antonio grinned at each other, then he grabbed his chart back, scribbling like mad. She bent down toward the hatchling, who’d shimmied out of the rest of the deflated shell and lay flanked by the two eggs that hid his sleeping brothers.

There was a hypnotic glaze over his black eyes, that cloudiness born from the inner war between determination and exhaustion. She knew that look. He was gathering his strength. He was getting ready to change everything.

5 Hours
after
Hatching

I
t was ten at night when the second egg started cracking. The zoo closed at six, and usually all the staff except for maintenance punched out by seven. Everyone had packed up and left the nursery while Meg watched with a fierce—but quiet—satisfaction, eager to finally be left alone. Zookeeping would be so great if it weren’t for all the people.

At five foot two, Meg was a tiny blast of a woman who usually prowled the grounds with the military stalk of a disillusioned lieutenant assigned to a remote and hostile outpost. Most of the visitors shied away from her, though she could never tell if it was because of her attitude or just her face. She scraped her hair into the same severe ponytail every day and had never bothered with makeup in the twenty-eight years of her life. Appearances ranked somewhere below dental surgery and marriage on her priority list. Some of her coworkers avoided her, too, but Meg helped anyone who needed an extra hand with their exhibits—reptiles or not. If the keepers put their animals first, Meg made time for those keepers. Besides, the busier she was, the less time she had to dwell on the watching.

At the heart of it, that was all a zookeeper really did; she worked and she watched. The work ranged from feedings to cleaning the exhibits, writing logs, maintaining environments, administering medical treatments, and quarantining the animals when necessary, even when that meant wrestling an eight-foot crocodile. Working was the easy part. Watching could drive you crazy. Every zoo in the world lived by the same biological clock that ticked back and forth between birth and death, birth and death, while all the keepers crowded in the middle keeping watch. Some of them watched in patient vigils; some watched through careless, meandering logs; others poked glances through their rakes and clippers; and even when they snuck out behind the aquarium filtration tanks for a smoke, they were still watching. No matter how hard they worked, how busy their days were, they always watched their animals with the same two questions in the backs of their minds—
Can they be born healthy in this place?
—and then—
How long can they stomach it?
Sometimes the zoo had as many as five thousand visitors a day, and Meg still felt as if she were the only person who ever saw her animals. The crowds pushed through in a gawk-and-go traffic pattern, on their own little clocks that ticked from interest to boredom in a millisecond, moving in and out until they were just a blur of faces. The keeper was the constant, the only real witness to the animals’ lives and deaths.

But as wrenching as it could be at times—and as many animals as she’d had on death watch in the last six years—these were the moments that made it all worthwhile. This was the birth watch.

She’d been debating whether to go home to get some sleep when the egg on the left side of the incubator started pulsing, as if to say,
Go, then, and miss everything you’ve been waiting eight months to see
. She leaned down against the machine, fingers splayed on the glass, and a greedy kind of joy surged through her chest because she didn’t have to share it with anyone this time. The first egg had hatched with the entire freaking world watching; this one was hers alone.

This Komodo, unlike his brother, had no trouble slicing open his shell. The egg fell to pieces in soft splits and chunks, and Meg held her breath, awestruck. It was as if he was bursting to get out. The shell crumpled into garbage, and a sleek head and spine—a head created without a father, a spine that shouldn’t even exist—crawled out of the waste.

She’d seen dozens of births at the zoo, and they were all special in their own ways, but calling this birth special was like saying Minnesota got a little cool in January. Komodo dragons reproduced sexually. One male plus one female equaled a heap of baby dragons, which was fine—except the Zoo of America didn’t have a male Komodo. Jata had never met a mate in her life. Her eggs should have collapsed into infertile waste, but instead they grew and flourished. The technical term was
parthenogenesis
.

In other words, Jata had a virgin birth.

Completely unaware of his importance, the Komodo hatchling climbed unsteadily over the broken shell on his way to the front of the incubator, as if he wanted to say hello. Pulling on leather gloves, Meg popped the lid and lifted the little guy out.

She held him up to eye level and let her eyes dance the new-mother survey. Four legs—check. Twenty tiny claws curled into the meat of her glove. One whipcord tail wrapped around her wrist. A head, tilted, sleepy. Two almond slits for eyes staring ahead, reflecting nothing. Everything inside her beamed at him. “You can’t put evolution in a cage.”

He blinked and rustled weakly against her palm. Not a philosopher.

“What are you un-caging now, Yancy?”

She jumped and squeezed the hatchling too tightly, making him squirm.

“Jesus. You scared me.”

Antonio pushed away from the door against which he’d been leaning for who knows how long and walked over to pet the hatchling’s head with a fingertip. “Jesus saves, not scares.”

“Jesus doesn’t stalk either.” She jerked her head toward the door.