It was already hot. So if this was the time when baby fire-stomachs get lit up, at least the escort isn't expected to do it. Not this escort anyway. I put the blob at the lip of the pouch and made sure it got in it, and then stumbled down the foreleg and leaned against Gulp — and watched a lot of shards of memory and grief and fear toppling and tumbling over one another, some of them bursting like sparklers and spinning like Catherine wheels. Lois came and pressed herself against me like she was remembering too.
And — snicker if you want, I don't care — I talked to Lois' mom, talked to her, to Halcyon — and she told me that yes there had been some doubt about the keeping-the-human-up-there part of the Lois-and-Jake highwire act (let's try a parasol for balance but I don't think he's ever going to be ready for the unicycle): I hadn't been so far wrong, guessing that being only fourteen when it happened and still a bit squishy myself was part of what made it possible, and even so it was only just maybe possible. Halcyon had like watched my brain shimmy with the headaches — but the, um, markers she'd left (remember "shouldering aside your gray matter and putting up signposts for other travelers, eeeeek") had given Bud somewhere to start — and some warning about human fragility. She'd worried about the burns too; even young healthy fourteen-year-old human skin is eventually going to get tired of being reburned all the time and refuse to heal. It was maybe true, what I'd said to Eleanor, that you get used to it. But some of it was Halcyon, who was unhappy she hadn't been able to do it better, that I still had headaches, that the "eczema" had left scars. I could feel her worry and her care, and hey, moms are moms, however many pairs of limbs they have. And she'd been all alone, really alone, much more alone than I'd been.
All this so that there would be some future for dragons after all, and there was some future because Lois and I — and Halcyon — and Gulp and Bud and Dad and Martha and the rest of us on both sides — were making it.
Halcyon was talking to Lois too — I could feel that — but I don't know what she said. Some of what she said was the same as what she'd said to me, I guess, but she'd've been saying it differently. What I could feel was Lois shivering like a frightened puppy — Lois had never shivered in her life that I knew of — and I put my arms around her neck (although I couldn't reach the whole way around any more), thinking, Halcyon had a choice. It was a horrible choice — she's the one who died, who knew she was going to die — but she did make it. She was a grown-up, and she decided. I was only fourteen, but I'd had the life I'd had, including that if there was a live baby orphan anything I had to try to keep it alive (and that I was nuts in this case enough to try) — but I was still old enough to make a choice, and I made that choice — that impossible choice — and while I've already moaned and whimpered about how the loss of my own mom had kind of removed the "choice" part of my choice — I was still, you know, responsible, and I still made it.
But poor Lois had never had any choice at all. Or not much of one. She'd chosen to stay alive. She'd fought like anything to stay alive — and her mom and me may have been helping her as much as we could — but she was sure in there herself, struggling like gosh-damn-and-how to keep breathing. And then again . . . if you're going to believe me about Halcyon, then maybe it's not such an enormous leap of credibility or imagination or hope or what you like, to think that maybe Lois did have a choice. When the souls were all lined up that day in the recycling center, the head angel came in and rapped on the desk to make everybody pay attention and said, Okay, gang, we need a volunteer, and explained what the volunteer was going to have to do. There'd have been dead silence for a minute, maybe, and then the Lois-soul put its hand-equivalent up and said, Yeah, okay, me, I'll do it. . .
I hope Lois' siblings all got a good go next time around. A real life. An adventure or two. True love. Whatever.
Whatever else a dragonlet escort is maybe supposed to do, I hope some of it got sucked out of my strangely shaped wrong species (and as YOU might say nontraditional gender) self because after the sixth blob went to join its brothers and sisters in Gulp's pouch and Lois and I had our "conversation" with Halcyon I literally fell down where I stood and slept. (And felt ninety years old and arthritic when I woke up.) But Bud and Gulp must've been braced for Jake getting most things wrong when they decided to have me there.
I've told you that you pick up dragon stuff when you're sleeping that you can't when you're awake. I probably soaked up more in that one short sleep than I had in all the years before, and while I damned forgot most of it again when I woke up, like you forget most of your dreams, still, something changed. I don't pick up "words" any better than I ever did — nothing I can revolutionize my dictionary with, unfortunately — but my brain has learned how to handle dragon space!!! It's like there's a whole new lobe grown on my brain: the dragon lobe. It CAN be done! Even the headaches are better!!! Wow. I mean, wow. I hadn't even realized how gruesomely awful the headaches — the Headaches — have been the last seven years — seven years — almost EIGHT — till they lightened up. They're still there. But they're easier. Martha says she doesn't feel like she needs to use a hammer when she tries to rub the tension out of my neck and shoulders any more.
I think Gulp's babies were early. Even as unborn pre-blobs they're already countable individuals to their mom but neither mom nor blobs, I think, have a reliable sense of when they're going to be born, any more than human moms do. And so I think that's why they didn't have me on tap, so to speak, at Dragon Central, where it would have been a comparatively short hop for a flying dragon to take me to the birth place in the Bonelands. Mind you, I have no idea how they would have convinced me to stick around — I guarantee I would not have understood "Hey, Jake, wanna be escort to one of Gulp's babies?" — but they'd've thought of something. They could always have just got in the way. What would I have done? Forced past them? Playing tag with a dragon just doesn't appeal much.
I'd wanted to walk back, that morning in the Bonelands after I woke up, but I was staggering and kind of crazy, and still full of the dreams I was half forgetting and that were half turning into a new part of me, which is maybe why I was staggering and kind of crazy. (Kind of crazy includes that I was two or three hours of a big dragon flying full pelt into the Bonelands and the nearest good water supply was back out of them again, and I wanted to walk.) Anyway the dragons wouldn't let me walk anywhere. They'd brought Bud like six sheep to help him recuperate, and he'd specially char-grilled a piece for me, and we lay around like we were on holiday for a couple of days — all eight of us (fourteen if you count the tucked-away blobs) — and then he flew me back to Dragon Central. We all went together in little hops, because Lois couldn't fly very far yet. Let me tell you flying in a troop of dragons (a squadron, just like the game) is even more amazing than anything. Life. The universe. Everything. And Gulp looked . . . I don't know how to describe it. Transcendent.
But I had had a look at the front part of the caves — where we all went as soon as the sun got high — and with my new dragon-sense I got a promise (which is like putting your hand into your empty pocket and finding that someone has slipped you something, money or chocolate or a magic ring) that I'd be brought back to the birth place in the Bonelands from Dragon Central some time. Because I think that is the Birth Place — and you remember what I said about the Dragon Central caves, how it's like the rock itself had become dragony — it's like that only way more so at the birth place. At the birth place you know the stones can talk to you. Now if only I could learn the language.