The Dragon Keeper (16 page)

He reached for a scalpel and explained how to choose a spot for minimal bleeding, the type of scalpel to use for scales, and on and on, while the intern nodded, taking notes with his round, bloodshot eyes. Meg watched the SAM screen, hoping the lecture didn’t outlast the anesthesia.

When Antonio finally cut into Bob’s bubble, slicing the tissue with minute, confident jabs, it was over almost immediately. He placed the sample on a petri dish and sealed it, handed it to the intern, and looked up at Meg.

“So, Miss Yancy, have you been thinking about it?”

“I don’t know. It’s a growth of some kind. Gila monsters don’t get a lot of cancer that we know of.”

“So it’s just a cyst?” the intern asked, as he and Meg both watched Antonio disinfect the incision area. The SAM computer beeped softly.

She’d been thinking about this constantly over the last eight months, and no matter how it formed in front of them, no matter how many different labels and categories appeared, it still came down to one single principle, and here it was staring right at them, as a cyst this time. Deformity, mutation, adaptation. Whatever the hell anybody called it, it still boiled down to just one thing: change. Bodies evolving.

Meg answered the intern’s question. “Who knows? You know, if Jata had some physical precursor to parth, something that looked like an abnormality, we’d have cut it off. I bet you anything.”

“Mmm.” The intern looked at Antonio, whose eyes crinkled up as he opened the Gila monster’s transport tank, removed the tape from his claws, and unlatched the collar. Meg supported Bob’s neck, gloves clamped tight against his skull in case he woke up and got nippy, and they slid him back inside the tank. He opened his eyes just as Meg slid off the oxygen mask.

“Bob’s poisonous, right?” she said. “Bad for us, right? But now the pharmaceutical companies are synthesizing Bob’s spit to help treat diabetes. So wait, Bob’s good for us now.”

“Unless he bites you,” Antonio threw in.

“You just can’t call something a deformity. Bob’s bubble? Rodríguez just took a snapshot of it, just a single point in its growth. The bubble’s not the end product.”

The intern stared at her. “It’s a cyst.”

“What is a cyst? Describe it to me.”

“An abnormal clot of cells.”

“What do the cells do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing yet.”

The intern rolled his eyes and asked if they were done. As soon as Antonio said yes, he took off as fast as the surgical gown could be balled up and dunked into the biohazard bin. Meg pulled her own gown off and was heading toward the door when Antonio cupped her shoulder and turned her around.

“That was really interesting, Yancy, but not what I meant.” He peeled the mask from his face, revealing a mischievous grin to match the gleam in his eyes. “Have you been thinking about it?”

They were alone, and his fingers were like flash paper, transporting her back to the last room where they had been alone. Papers flying off his desk. Clothing unzipped and unbuttoned, skin meeting greedy skin.

She met his smile and basked in it a second, just a second, before shifting back to the door. “No.”

2 Weeks
after
Hatching

I
don’t think those chairs were made for that.”

Wearing one sleeve of her uniform shirt, with her purple Hanes underwear as an anklet, Meg lifted her knee to trace the cherry bloom rubbed over its outside. She was half-leaning, half-lying against the wall next to the nursery door, and the wheeled office chair in question was propped against the door handle and missing an arm.

Antonio crawled over to inspect her knee and gave a nice show of shoulders flexing and stretching across the floor. He still wore his socks and shoes, and his pants were caught around one foot in an inside-out wad of beige and lime green with frogs.

“You want me to bandage you up?” He gave her knee a light kiss and rolled over to his side, propping his head on one hand. “I’ve got some monkey Band-Aids around here somewhere.”

“That’s sweet, Rodríguez, but I think I’ll live.”

She stretched her leg up into the air and twisted it back and forth, flexing the banged-up muscles. It wasn’t the only bruise he’d given her, and apparently, glancing down his torso where a rosy patch was developing on top of his hip, she gave as good as she got. Sex hadn’t stopped their fighting; it just moved the fight into a new habitat. She’d convinced herself she was staying late to get extra work done—typing logs and checking her e-mail while all the other keepers punched out and went home—until Antonio showed up in the doorway of the cage, leaning against the doorjamb and smiling wordlessly, daring her. They’d ransacked the security guard’s station last night while trying to figure out where the cameras weren’t pointed (
Hey, there’s no cameras here …
) and now tonight the nursery floor. He’d tried to push her into the chair, and she’d flipped him, throwing him down onto the seat instead, snapping the chair arm and sending them rolling across the floor into the walls. When she tried to speed up, he wanted to slow down, and neither of them seemed to mind the fevered chaos that ensued.

Animals fought during sex all the time. Lions nipped each other in the flank, raccoons screeched and tumbled all over each other, and banana slugs, the poor schmucks, got their penises chewed off if they couldn’t maneuver properly. It was a natural part of the courtship process. Most species, though, except for the doomed slugs, reached some point during mating when the dominant animal subdued the other, when one body moved while the other body fell still, accepting and in sync with each other. Meg and Antonio hadn’t come close to that point. They fought, again and again, driving each other to the brink of submission but never reaching it. Hell if she was going to be the first one there.

She spied the chair arm underneath the exam table.

Antonio ran a finger up and down the outside of her thigh, a warm callus on a highway of nerves.

“Why’d we come in here again?” he asked.

“Hatchlings.” The word sounded a lot more confident and less breathy in her head. His finger was almost scratchy, a delicate scrape back and forth along her leg. He started down by her knee and traveled all the way up to her hipbone, which stuck out in an awkward and pronounced hill, and her body picked it up from there, shivering all the way up her spine and into the top of her head and ears. The shiver refused to go away, tingling her scalp and teasing the line where her neck met her hair.

The electricity of his touch was fascinating, and the zookeeper in her recognized it for what it was—the biology of new chromosomes meeting, the subconscious excitement when a new combination of alleles becomes possible. It had been years since she had felt that pull, and never like this. Ben was everything old and comfortable: all submission, no fight. She could have sex with Ben in her sleep, pulling him over her like a worn, heavy duvet. That wasn’t possible with Antonio. He was something out of a textbook: human, male, at prime. The picture would rotate his body under glass, arrows signaling various points of his physiology. Here were the muscular deposits. Note the bone density and normal, hyper-functioning genitalia. The textbook, though, like all other textbooks, would cover the basics, the generic facts, always oblivious to her favorite parts of the subject matter. On Rodríguez, her favorite part ran along the inside of his right thigh, a splotchy birthmark that colored his skin a deep, baboon-butt red. It was like some undiscovered continent, full of peninsulas and tiny dots of islands that she wanted to chart, mapping all the hidden species that lived there.

“Right. The hatchlings.” He watched his finger trailing along her skin, as if he were equally aware of this strange magnetism.

“I need to transfer them to the community tank, and you need to … do whatever it is you do.”

She lifted and shook her leg half-heartedly, jiggling the underwear back in the direction of her torso.

“Blood samples. I need to take some samples for a first round of testing, little bit of training for the interns, genetic mapping.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She jiggled the underwear close enough to reach and drew them back over her hips. “Where’re my pants?”

“A question for the ages.” He grinned and continued to stroke her thigh. “Let’s not try to answer it. Leave a little mystery in life.”

She batted off his hand and spotted them behind the substandard chair. Rolling up, she heard him shifting behind her.

“You in the monkey Band-Aids already, Yancy?”

Glancing back, she followed his finger toward her triceps and reflexively scratched the area around the small square. “Birth control patch.”

“Hmm. That’s why you didn’t freak out about not using a condom.”

“I’m still thinking it over. Do you have rabies or syphilis?”

“Syphilis—definitely not. I haven’t gotten checked for rabies in a while, so who knows? And that one redhead a few months ago was foaming at the mouth, now that I think about it.”

She pulled on her clothes, which—thanks to the fact that she didn’t own an iron—didn’t look any worse than they did a half hour ago. What was the point of ironing when you never knew if you’d be containing an alligator or cleaning up random fluids? Or jumping the head vet, apparently.

“What about you? Are you rabid?” Antonio asked. She threw his lab coat at his head and watched his body jump, muscles tensing like lions the second before they leapt between outcrops. The reaction ran down him in one long ripple.

“Doubt it.”

He stood up and dressed, a grin hanging off the side of his face. “I don’t know. Have you even been tested, Yancy? I should probably grab some shots as a precautionary measure.”

She lifted from the floor a small animal carrier that was slightly dusty but not bad overall. It would work just fine to taxi the hatchlings to their new exhibit in the baby building. She was so focused on the carrier that she barely heard herself reply. “Not worth it. I’ve been sleeping with the same guy for the last seven years.”

It wasn’t until she wiped out the carrier with a rag that she realized … and turned around.

Antonio was buttoning his shirt, and his chest disappeared almost as fast as the joking. Neither of them had mentioned other lovers in any real sense—no spouses, partners, nothing specific that could incriminate them—and the silence had created a delicious bubble where the outside world didn’t exist, not in any important or consequential way, at least not until now, when she’d popped the bubble with a big, fat
fwop
. Now all that reality rushed in with a suffocating weight, filling the room, pushing them back into opposite corners of the ring.

He finished the last button and finally looked up. “Not married. There’s no ring. Boyfriend?”

“No. Ben’s just—” Another mistake. His name was huge and oppressive. How the hell did people have conversations like this? It was like walking through viper pits. “He’s just there, like the kitchen or the TV, you know? Except he’s leaving soon. He leaves every summer and he—you don’t need to know this. I’m sorry.”

Antonio hooked his fingers in his belt loops and leaned on the opposite side of the carrier, ducking his face to hers. She could feel him trying to make eye contact.

“It’s okay. We all make do.”

“Okay.” She nodded, pretending she knew whatever that meant, and glanced over. He looked expectant, as if he wanted her to say something or maybe as if he were going to say something, and whatever it was—whatever was humming at the edge of his eyes—looked like the kind of thing that would be impossible to ignore in the light of day when they pretended none of this was happening. Whatever it was, she wasn’t ready to hear it.

She flipped the sink on full blast and scrubbed her hands raw. “Are you just going to sit around and watch while I transport these guys to the baby building? That’s a little creepy.”

Gloved up, she lifted the first dragon out of the tank and waited, torn between the terrifying silence behind her and the comforting dig of claws into her hand and wrist. The hatchling met her eyes, steady and fearless, as if even at twelve inches long he was ready to swagger into his place as an apex predator. She concentrated only on him, on how he didn’t seem bothered by the crazy sex noises or loud faucets, on how he was untouched by the mess brewing behind her. It was classic Komodo behavior. The earliest explorers thought the dragons were deaf because they didn’t react to shotguns fired right next to them. Turned out, Komodos just didn’t give a rat’s ass about what the humans were doing. Smart dragons. She needed to learn how to do that.

“I’ll give you a hand with the transport,” Antonio finally said and opened a cabinet behind her, clanking some glass together. “But you have to help me first. Hold them still while I collect the blood.”

They worked together. She lifted each dragon out one by one and contained them while Antonio pricked their tails with a small needle. He only took a few cc’s per draw, lining the marked vials up on the exam table and making little comments, like “Easy there” and “Steady,” his voice just a murmur over the scales, needles, and blood. Each word sent the hair on the back of her neck up and cramped her muscles tighter, drawing away. She’d brought Ben into the room, and Antonio was back to acting as if this were cuddle time, as though nothing had happened.