The Dragon Keeper (31 page)

Meg didn’t know what to say. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

“It’s lovely out there, isn’t it?” Dr. Reading’s voice might as well have been coming from that far bank of blooming trees, it sounded so far away.

Meg shrugged and turned to leave, but then Dr. Reading looked over and asked, “Has the river always been this shallow?” and Meg saw her eyes. They were hollow and dark, completely unconnected to her mouth. As soon as Meg registered them, dread clenched her chest. This wasn’t about a river.

“Antonio … did something happen?”

Dr. Reading shook her head, and Meg started breathing again. She turned to the river, hugging the coil of hose tightly to her chest, and played along. “There’s a lot of sediment runoff from the north. It clogs the water, chokes it off into sandbars and pools.”

“Where does it lead?”

“It links up with the Mississippi a couple of miles down, and then they head south for the gulf.”

“And the ocean beyond,” Dr. Reading added, then was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice still had that disconnected quality, as if she wasn’t here at all.

“My creek led to a small lake in the New England woods. It was a tiny thing, but I was just a little girl then. It was a fine place to tramp around and explore. I catalogued all the native fauna in my notebook.”

“Oh.” It was hard to tell what kind of a conversation they were having.

“What about you?”

“What about me?” Meg turned around on the off chance Dr. Reading was talking to someone else, but there was no other staff in sight.

“How did you get started? Forgive me, but you don’t really seem like you fit in around here, Ms. Yancy.”

Meg huffed out a laugh and shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t have a creek, if that’s what you’re asking. I grew up in the burbs.”

“People don’t just end up in our profession, Ms. Yancy. You must have had a calling.”

No one had ever asked her that before. Granted, she didn’t exactly invite idle chitchat with her coworkers, but it wasn’t anything anyone talked about anyway. It was just who they were, something imprinted into each of them in their own way.

Eyes unfocused, she let herself remember when it had been imprinted into her. How old was she then? Twelve or thirteen at the most.

“My mother was into dogs, and we traveled a lot,” she said. “Once a year, we’d go to Florida for a show and stay with one of her friends who bred border collies. I liked it there; she had a pool. Anyway, one morning we woke up to a lot of barking, and then my mom’s friend started screaming. We ran out and saw an alligator swimming in circles in her pool, with one of her dogs locked in its jaws. The other dogs were going crazy in their kennels, and my mom ran to call the police. Her friend kept shaking and screaming next to me on the patio, but I couldn’t do anything. I just stared at it. There were streams of blood trailing out along the alligator’s back, turning the water red. I guess any other girl my age would’ve been freaking out, but I just couldn’t believe I was so close to this huge, powerful predator. I knew better than to walk forward, but I couldn’t walk backwards either.

“The dog was long gone by the time this guy showed up in an unmarked truck. He said he was a trapper. He noosed the alligator and wrangled it out of the pool all by himself. I remember noticing he wasn’t a very big guy, just wiry and tough. I watched him the whole time and handed him rope and tape when he asked. I wanted to help. I thought he’d take it to some alligator farm or a marsh somewhere, but after he loaded it in the back of his truck he said he was happy it was so big, that he’d make a lot of money off of it.

“Later I asked my mom’s friend what he meant, and she said the trappers got to kill all the nuisance alligators and sell their meat and hides. She said she wished she could have killed it herself. My mom and I argued the entire drive home, all the way from Florida to Minnesota. She kept sticking up for her friend, saying how horrible it was that her dog was dead, that the alligator deserved to die. I argued back, saying there had to be someone somewhere who could’ve looked after it, made sure it had enough to eat so it didn’t have to attack pets.

“After that I became kind of obsessed. My mom hated it.” Meg smiled, remembering. “I knew I wanted to take care of animals—the outcast, unfriendly ones always appealed to me the most, go figure—but I was naive and idealistic then; I thought I could change people’s minds about them, too, and it seemed like the best place to do that was at a zoo. Look at all the people that come to zoos.”

A noisy group passed behind them, the mothers’ warnings and kids’ shrieks echoing down the path.

“And now you don’t want to change people’s minds?” Dr. Reading asked, watching them go.

“Look at them.” Meg faced the receding group. “They’re way too preoccupied raising their offspring and managing their own crazy lives to think about the ethical treatment and care of animals.”

“Maybe you’re looking at the wrong people.”

“They’re the only people here most days.”

Dr. Reading shook her head. “No, not the parents. Look to the children.”

They tracked the group’s progress down the path, listening to the kids’ shouts and laughter. One of them pointed at a hawk circling the river, and then they disappeared inside the Bird Kingdom. A minute of silence passed, punctuated only by the breeze and the traffic on the bridge. Meg was thinking she should probably get back to her exhibits when Dr. Reading took a deep breath and braced her hand on the arm of the bench, leaning forward.

“There were no deformities.”

Meg’s jaw dropped.

“Her reproductive system was textbook female. The blood and tissue samples are all coming back normal. We haven’t been able to substantiate the DNA recombination theory at all. We discussed the possibility of cloning to try to duplicate the scenario—”

“Oh my God.” Meg’s back hit the fence with a dull clunk of the hose.

“—but even if we recreated the same genetic dragon, there’s no guarantee that she’ll reproduce by parthenogenesis again. I think that idea is on its way out already. At this point, we’re setting up some long-term tests on the sexual argument, but after that—we’re just hoping that it will happen again and give us a chance to gather more data.”

Dr. Reading met Meg’s shock and relief with a microscopic shake of her head. Meg could see an emotion swelling at the edges of her eyes and cheeks, but it was locked underneath the grid of meshed lines and tendons tightening her face. “I have no explanation.”

Never in a million years did she think those four words could come out of Dr. Joyce Reading’s mouth. The impact of it sank through the shock of the results and gave Meg a hollow, bitter satisfaction. “So despite everything, with all your fancy tests and Jata’s dead body laid at your feet, you can’t explain this any more than I can.”

“We’ve eliminated many possibilities and are working to segregate more. When and if the aberration appears again, we’ll have a solid foundation of research to draw from.”

“Why can’t you just admit it?” Meg took a step closer.

“Admit what?”

“That you can’t force evolution into a cage. That these animals who are stuck in the tight spaces you hate so much are free in ways you’ll never understand.” She knew how she sounded, could hear the snottiness in her own voice, but she couldn’t seem to help it.

Dr. Reading’s eyebrows and voice both shot up. “I’m not trying to cage evolution, Ms. Yancy, but we should be able to explain it like any other scientific principle.”

Meg shrugged. “Komodos are running out of mates, both here and in the wild. It’s only logical that if they couldn’t reproduce sexually, they had to find another way to do it.”

“What, you think your Jata looked around, saw there was no available male, and switched on some parthenogenic code in her body?”

“No. Obviously it had to be inherited, but the species has been threatened for some time now.”

Dr. Reading leaned farther forward, in full professor voice now. The lost old woman on the bench had completely disappeared. “Define ‘some time.’”

It had begun with the Western explorers or maybe even before, when the locals started settling on Komodo Island. “At least a hundred years.”

“A hundred years isn’t enough time to evolve an extra toenail, let alone an entirely new reproductive method.”

“The environment forced it to happen.”

“Now you sound like Lamarck.”

Meg barely remembered the name—he was one of those European guys putting out evolutionary theories before Darwin came along and made everyone look like idiots. Dr. Reading stood up and started pacing up and down the railing next to Meg.

“Lamarck’s adaptive force stated that acquired characteristics would transfer genetically to the next generation. A giraffe, stretching her neck to the higher leaves, would give birth to giraffes with longer necks.”

Pausing at the far end of her pacing circuit, Dr. Reading nudged a wildflower with her foot and watched a moth flutter to the next patch of flowers down the bluff. When she finally looked up, her expression was condescending.

“What you’re proposing, Ms. Yancy, is even more ridiculous. If every species that sensed it was threatened could spontaneously reproduce, there would be no such thing as extinction.” She swept a hand across the river. “There would be a brontosaurus over there, chewing on those trees.”

“Fine,” Meg practically yelled. “You explain it then.”

“I can’t, and I won’t presume to.”

Toe to toe, they stared each other down, the anger congealing on both their faces as the seconds ticked by and neither threw back another retort. Eventually Dr. Reading sighed and turned back to the river.

“Jata’s daughters are a biological mystery—like unearthing a bone that has no match in the fossil record. You can barely begin to speculate about what it is without the rest of the skeleton.”

Meg looked at the ground. “Maybe they were right. Maybe it really was a miracle.”

“It’s unexplained.” Dr. Reading’s tone said the discussion was closed. She smoothed a loose strand of hair back into her bun and looked toward the Reptile Kingdom building across the pond. “It’s still a shame she had to be locked up in here, that any of you have to. I’d go crazy here.”

“We’d put you in a really nice exhibit.”

A smile cracked over Dr. Reading’s face, and she patted the hose on Meg’s shoulder before heading back toward the main grounds. “I’m sure you would.”

Meg watched her for a minute and then, on an impulse, ran to catch up with her. Dr. Reading cocked an eyebrow at her but kept walking. Apparently the time for sitting still was over.

Meg swallowed. “I need a favor.”

~

A few hours later, in the boardroom, management called a meeting to review the bids on the hatchlings. Gerald Dawson, Dr. Reading, Chuck, and a bunch of admins all sat around the table going through a list of the bidding zoos and the highlights of their offers. Borrowing one of Chuck’s pens, Meg crossed out every zoo on the list except one.

“The Tallahassee Zoo wants to take just one hatchling in exchange for—”

“No,” Meg said, making Chuck pause.

“It’s one of the top five bids we’ve received, Megan. They’re offering an albino alligator in exchange, which is an exceedingly rare specimen, in addition to a generous sum.”

“All they have there is the old alligator exhibit space, and when I say ‘old’ I’m talking about both the alligator and the space. We’re not a nursing home, and their exhibit is a ten-by-twenty-foot box with a concrete floor and an unfiltered pool. We can’t give those people one of Jata’s hatchlings.”

“I would concur,” Dr. Reading added.

“Well, there’s also an offer from Anchorage that—”

“No.”

Chuck turned in his seat, the vein in his forehead starting to pop. “You haven’t even heard what they’re offering.”

“They get less than six hours of daylight in the winter. It’s incredibly difficult for a tropical animal to regulate in those conditions.”

“So we’ll have them buy a UV light.” One of the finance guys chimed in, throwing a disgusted look toward the head of the table.

“Ms. Yancy.” Gerald steepled his fingers and gazed down the table at her. “We’re going to move two of these hatchlings out of the Zoo of America. That’s a non-negotiable fact. I think we can all appreciate your concerns, but no zoo is going to be perfect.”

“No, but we can get closer than this.” She waved the list in the air and dropped it, facedown, on the table. Too keyed up to sit any longer, she pushed out from her chair and stood up to pace the room.

“All the zoos that you’ve listed in your top slots are U.S. zoos. They’re all registered members of the AZA. I have, uh, every respect for the AZA, but everyone in this room knows that there’s no way they’ll allow all three of these hatchlings to breed. The Komodo population in the U.S. zoos is so limited that the three of them would completely unbalance the gene pool.”

She walked over to a world map at the end of the room and stood in front of it, pointing at all the hulking countries that floated on top of the blue graphs. “We have to send both hatchlings outside the U.S., where the AZA won’t have jurisdiction.”