The Dragon Keeper (27 page)

“This isn’t about Jata, and you know it. It’s about us.”

“There is no us.”

He grabbed her elbow and steered her back toward the feeding rock. She tried to twist away without the crowd noticing, but he sensed it and held her tighter. On the far side of the exhibit, Jata circled around the sunning boulder. She swaggered eagerly, almost aggressively, around the rock bed. The direct sunlight washed out her scales; the greens and grays looked like sea foam being swallowed by a dirty ocean. Licking the air in greeting, Jata bowed her head with each step, and her eyes locked on Meg.

“Jata.” Her voice shook. “Feeding time, Jata.” And underneath, only to him: “Let me freaking go and get out of here.”

Children were pressed up to the glass, their faces squished into pancakes of fascination. Tourists angled their cameras over others’ heads, trying to get a good shot of the dragon. There were so many of them. Meg had the fleeting impression of bodies shuffling around one another in a mosaic of color and sound before she pushed them all out of her mind and tried to focus her attention on Jata. Only Jata.

“Smile for the people, Meg. They’re here to see our baby.”

As they reached the feeding rock, Antonio’s teeth flashed in a flirting, crowd-pleasing grin, and before she registered anything beyond that flare of white—too white; how could any feeling person’s teeth be that shockingly white?—she jabbed her elbow into his ribs.

Grunting, he crumpled a little and let go of her arm. In that split second, Jata stopped at the base of the feeding rock—the same place she became aggressive last week—and peered through the long stalks of grass from the bucket to the man.

“Take it easy, Meg,” he was saying behind her. “I’m just assisting … ”

His words trailed around her, the syllables breaking apart into abstract, meaningless sounds as her gaze sharpened on her Komodo, less than five feet away.

Jata’s tongue whipped the air. Antonio had accompanied Meg into the exhibit before. Jata knew him. She did. She wasn’t like other dragons, who had to be handled through bars and barriers. She—

Meg’s heart tripped and a breath trapped itself in her throat as she saw Jata’s legs stiffen through the waving grasses, her head bent low, and a strange hiss eclipsed the growing rumble of the crowd. It was the hiss from her nightmares.

“Get out of here,” Meg repeated, choking out the words this time, but there was too much noise. The hissing grew louder, like a snake ready to strike, and filled her head with a dreamlike panic, the kind that paralyzes as it obliterates everything else. For a moment that was all there was in the world, a drowning hiss that severed time into only before and now.

Then Jata lunged.

Meg dropped the bucket, shoved Antonio back, and together they stumbled toward the exhibit door, twenty feet away. There was nothing between them and the door—no trees to climb, no fences to jump. The emergency supplies were in the keeper’s closet. Years of training videos and exercises echoed through her mind in seconds. Gemma, who must have already hit the panic button, was holding the door open, shouting and braced behind a body shield. They raced for the opening, chased by the sudden screams of the crowd.

Out of the corner of her eye, Meg saw a flash of black as Antonio went down, and then a weight struck her behind the knees, knocking her legs out from under her. She hit the ground and rolled. The sky tumbled over itself, and she inhaled dirt and bruised grass.

Someone was screaming. She pushed herself up and saw Antonio crawling toward her, shock and pain crunching his face.

Jata stood over him, her jaws digging into the back of his thigh. She arched her neck and shook her head back and forth, the folds of muscles undulating with a savage power, slicing her teeth deeper into his leg. Meg heard the sick, wet tear of flesh that her brain associated with feeding and saw Antonio kick Jata in the side with his free foot.

God, no. She didn’t know if she was thinking or screaming. No. No. Suddenly Gemma was there, pulling Antonio by the shoulders, trying to extract him from Jata’s jaws. Gemma yanked backward on him, but she was even smaller than Meg, and Jata was 180 pounds of scale and muscle.

No. Meg ran into the darkness of the exhibit door and felt blindly through the supply closet until her fingers closed over the cool, etched metal. In the hollows of the reptile building came a distant pounding of feet on concrete. She wiped her eyes furiously and ran back into the sun.

Jata had released Antonio’s leg and was standing near the bucket Meg had dropped. Blood stained her snout, and the sweet stink of copper filled the air. Gemma dragged Antonio across the grass toward the door, and Jata slowly followed them, stiff-legged and hissing, pink saliva hanging in strings from her open mouth.

Meg lifted her arm to point at Jata and braced her legs the way she had been trained. The gun wavered in her hand, shaking violently.

No, this isn’t happening. It isn’t real. Voices shouted in every direction, and a siren pierced the air. Acid clawed up her throat as she aimed the gun at the animal she loved. A heartbeat passed, then two. Gemma lifted Antonio through the door.

With a sudden burst of speed, Jata charged again.

Meg pulled the trigger.

31 ½ Days
after
Hatching

I
t was a cage within a cage—two rows of bars, roughly welded at the corners with thick balls of misshapen iron, and its sheer size made it impossible to imagine movement or liberation of any kind. It wasn’t transported here. The bars were brought in, beam by heavy beam, dragged down the stairs and through the long vet hallway into this windowless room, then welded and hammered, erected into immobile place. A quarantine. A prison within a prison. And inside of it all, at the very heart of captivity, was Jata.

Meg watched Jata’s body, the unnatural stillness of her drugged sleep. Her SAMs read like surgery. Heartbeat: 38 bpm. Blood pressure: 80 over 65. Adrenaline: 12 ppm. A robot dragon. Meg hugged her still grass-stained knees tighter into her chest, rubbing one hand over the ripening welt across her forearm. It was turning from shocky to numb, and the reds and purples had started to bloom in a diagonal column between her wristbone and inner elbow.

The desk she sat on looked completely abandoned in the corner of the room, the cracking wood veneer covered in dust and random sheets of paper. Resting her back against the cold concrete wall, she tucked into herself like a switchblade, rocking slightly. She’d come into the quarantine room how long ago? She’d wanted to be here when Jata woke up; she remembered that much. That was her intention.

She dropped her head into her knees. Intentions. What a useless word. You either did something or you didn’t. You controlled something or couldn’t. That was it. End of show. Intentions were worth as much as all those other bullshit words, like
wishes
or
hopes
. They were used by powerless people who couldn’t control what was happening two feet in front of their tiny, blindside d faces.

She had control over nothing. Her relationship with Ben was over. She couldn’t protect Jata from Dr. Reading now, and Antonio might be dead. Meg couldn’t tell if Jata had severed one of his major arteries, because there had been so much blood covering his legs from not one attack—but two.

~

The Telazol dart Meg had shot sank directly into Jata’s neck, blooming a little red flower out of her throat as she lunged for Antonio’s injured leg. The dose was high but not instant. Only a bullet could have brought her down immediately. This time she bit below his knee, tearing through pants that were already dark and sticky, but she didn’t hold her grip as she had during the first attack. It was a taste, a warning this time. Her tail dropped slightly, and she seemed to be losing momentum. Meg grabbed the body shield Gemma had dropped and used it to push Jata back in shoves and halting steps.
Stop it, Jata
, she’d screamed.
Get back
. She got Jata to turn around by throwing the emptied gun at her; the sick, dull thud on her side broke the buzz of hissing. Meg kept walking and yelling, watching the animal she had trusted retreat unsteadily to the back wall of the exhibit. By the time Jata collapsed, the medical team had already arrived.

They didn’t tell her where they had taken Antonio. She might have gotten him killed, and she didn’t even know where he was. They wheeled him away in a cloud of frantic people with Gemma jogging alongside the stretcher, her braid bouncing and uniform splattered with blood, holding on to one of Antonio’s hands. She’d thrown a last, desperate look back at Meg before disappearing around the staff corridor.

Meg stayed behind to help load Jata onto the cart, taping her lax, bloody jaws shut and binding her feet. Numb, she walked alongside as the security staff and keepers silently wheeled Jata’s body out of the reptile building, across the zoo amid stares and frantic pointing, down the freight elevator to the veterinary wing, and into the quarantine room. One by one they all left, leaving Meg pacing next to the cage and thinking—insanely—that Jata would be all right as long as she was there with her when she woke up. Tranquilizers worked unevenly at the end of the dose, and most animals came out of the drug in fits and slow starts. But Jata was different. Meg paced the room, turning back and forth, back and forth, until suddenly she stopped in mid-stride.

Jata stood at the cage door, staring at Meg. Her tail hung in a downward docile position. Her legs bowed out slightly farther than normal, but that was natural enough, considering the dose of anesthetic. Jata’s head tilted forward, eyes unclouded and focused on Meg, as if waiting to be told how and why she had come to be in this strange place.

“Jata!” Unconsciously, Meg rushed toward the cage and the cool metal of the outer layer of bars. “It’s too cold in here, isn’t it? I’ll have the heat turned up so you don’t get sick.”

She leaned into the metal, meeting Jata’s quaking stare.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” Her voice rose in pitch, as if unsure of who she was trying to comfort. Then it happened.

She snaked her hand through the outer layer of bars toward Jata, reaching half-heartedly in a pathetic attempt to reassure her. Without warning, Jata lunged at her.

She jerked forward, throwing her entire weight at the cage. As her jaws cracked into the metal inner bars, Meg’s hand flew back and slammed into the outer bar. The pain shrieked through her arm, but she didn’t scream; she didn’t make a sound. Uncurling her throbbing forearm from the bars, she shuffled backward until her legs touched the desk, lifted herself onto its surface, and grasped her knees to her chest.

~

What time was it now? It was hard to tell down here where there was no sound from the zoo, no bustle of tourists or animals or hassled staff. The only other presence was the damp, mossy smell of the river soaking through the walls. They said the river used to be hazardous in the spring before the dams were built, that it ruined basements and moved whole houses off their foundations. The planners had done a study before they built the zoo to be sure that all the buildings were sufficiently elevated and the bluffs couldn’t be flooded anymore, but the smell still permeated the lower levels. That smell filled Meg’s nose, and she wished the river still had the power to rise up over its banks, pour into the zoo, and break the quarantine room apart, sweeping them both away, freeing them.

Meg sat rocking for an hour, two hours, and beyond, while the world passed above them. No one came to tell her what happened to Antonio, and she was too terrified of the answer to go ask.

“I’m sorry,” Meg whispered to the massive back that was shadowed in stripes. Her voice sounded tiny and whimpering. She couldn’t force anything else out. There were no other words, and no river could save them.

5 Years
before
Hatching

S
he’d called her mother the week after Jata arrived at the zoo. It was Christmas or something, one of those obligatory phone- call holidays.

“A dragon?”

“Komodo dragon.”

“I never understood why you liked those slimy creatures. Remember when you brought that snake into the house and scared poor Daphne to death?” Her mother laughed over the phone. “Her coat stunk of fear for weeks after that.”

“If you’d ever let that dog outside the yard she might have seen a garter snake a time or two in her life.” Or a prairie, or a swamp, or another dog that wasn’t inbred and reeking of Aveda.

“Here we go again.” The weight of a ten-year argument groaned through her mother’s voice.

“You never let her be a dog, Mother. This Komodo dragon is just that—a dragon. Not some trophy or a twisted, surrogate child. They put me in charge of her care, and I’m going to do everything I can to give her a good life at the zoo.”

“I know this is what you wanted and you think you’re making a difference, but these lizards … they don’t have the slightest capacity to understand what you’re doing for them. Say whatever you want about Daphne’s life, but she loved being a show dog, remember? She would absolutely prance around that ring, and she loved us for putting her in it.”

“Keep telling yourself that, Mom.”