The Dragon Keeper (7 page)

“Three.”

“Meg, I know it’s none of my business.”

“I’m not going to marry him.” She unwound the scarf from her neck, which was crocheted in uneven loops of red yarn—a Christmas gift from Gemma—and raised her eyebrows at him. “Is that what you’re worried about?”

Hard to say why she even bothered reassuring him.

“You’re not going to marry Ben? He seems like a catch.” Her father paced casually around the kitchen, stooping to examine a teakettle, glancing out the window into the dead grass of the backyard. He picked up a saltshaker shaped like a gecko and wagged it playfully at her. “He even pays rent.”

The laugh escaped before she could kill it. Once it did, the tension in the room drained a little, and the edges of his eyelids crinkled up. Smiling, he replaced the gecko next to its match.

“Ben’s just … Ben.” She shrugged.

“Do you love him, Magpie?” No one had called her that since she’d learned how to nuke her own microwave dinners.

“You sound like a Lifetime movie. Did Ireland turn you into a chick?”

He laughed this time and grabbed her scarf from the table, winding it back around her neck.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to take you out to dinner. That is, unless you had something you wanted to cook.”

They both glanced at the kitchen table, where a basket of clean underwear and socks sat on top of a pile of newspapers.

Meg tightened the scarf and nodded reluctantly. “I guess I could eat.”

1 Day
after
Hatching

T
he morning after the first two hatchlings were born, Meg was in the Mammal Kingdom discovering the existence of gnomes.

The Zoo of America segregated all the animals into six main buildings; reptiles, amphibians, insects, fish, mammals, and birds were all grouped according to their kingdoms, with the exception of the dolphins, who got their own building because their trainers refused to be part of either the fish or mammal kingdoms. Each area had designated supplies, but the Mammal Kingdom had poached one of Meg’s water hoses twice in the last month, and she couldn’t figure out who was doing it. Michael, the head mammal keeper, who was as giant as the bears he tended, blamed it on gnomes. The purple ones with the fuzzy butts, he said, liked using the hoses for playing jump rope. Another day she would have been mad or even logged a complaint with Chuck, just to make him fill out a stack of forms and take a wild gnome chase, but nothing could piss her off today. She laughed and slapped Michael on the shoulder, or as near to his shoulder as she could reach, coiled the hose around her head and arm, toga style, and headed back to her reptiles.

The winding path that snaked along the edge of the zoo grounds over the Minnesota River was her favorite walk, despite all the visitors and the snack and souvenir stands lining the sides. If you didn’t look at the freeway bridge or the power-plant smokestacks upriver, or listen to the dull roar of morning traffic, it was really beautiful. The dark river shallows pooled into lazy lakes and bogs that lapped at the surrounding tree-covered bluffs. Sometimes, on spring mornings like this, fog danced up from the river in crazy corkscrews, and the great egrets darted through the puffs looking for an unsuspecting meal. Fog made the whole valley look different, as if the river was from another world in which subdivisions and tourist attractions didn’t crowd its banks and smokestacks didn’t belch into its sky. There’d been huge, dense forests here once, too, but that ecosystem was as long gone as the logging industry that destroyed it. Now the cranes and red foxes stuck to the valley, where a wildlife preserve was their last refuge, at least until the power company or the America compound needed to expand, and then maybe some zoo in Shanghai would think they were exotic enough to open an exhibit and give them a shot to bring some money through the gate. Look at all the dull American birds, white as the tundra, almost extinct.

It all boiled down to money. That was why Jata had been brought here in the first place. The world’s largest lizard, king of the reptiles. That kind of bill drew crowds. Meg had a feeling the river valley species wouldn’t be able to catch the same life raft; egrets weren’t half as gorgeous outside the fog.

She was trying not to think about money, the zoo, or the future at all—but trust her boss to dump a four-inch binder of it in her lap. Chuck walked in front of her line of vision, ruining her view.

“Megan, it’s amazing, isn’t it? The entire zoo is revolving around Jata’s babies.” The way he said it, he might’ve been constipated with excitement or just plain put out that his carefully organized monthly schedule had gone to shit.

Ben talked about The Man a lot, and The Man—he was a lot of different guys. The governments, the corporations, a media empire here or there—no matter who The Man was, Meg would bet he had a Chuck. Chuck Farrelly was the kind of guy who maybe once had tried to have a sense of humor, who twenty years ago would have tagged along with coworkers to the bar, all eager and awkward, always wanting to stay for one more drink but never having anything to say. You could still see that sad sack around the edges of Chuck’s eyes. Getting the position of General Zookeeping Supervisor was probably the highlight of his life so far; he could finally make use of the fact that nobody liked him. He had an office in the basement of the Visitor Center that smelled like Windex, and on his desk was a picture of him with a fat woman and three children, all wearing pseudo-safari gear; it was the only evidence Meg had that Chuck was capable of smiling. She tried to make his life as difficult as possible.

“What’s up, Chuck?” She didn’t bother to stop walking. The sooner she tended to her exhibits, the sooner she could go back to the nursery. Chuck fell into step with her, his tense, bulky frame easily keeping pace with her quick march.

“Marketing has taken out a quarter-page ad in Sunday’s paper, a birth announcement for the Komodos. They’ve already sent a press release out. Channel 12 is running a spot tomorrow, and they want to come down and take some pictures of the hatchlings. We need to transfer them to the baby building as soon as possible for the news crew.”

Meg felt a gut-punch of fear at the mention of Channel 12. “Nicole Roberts?”

“We don’t know.”

She swallowed and worked her way through to the rest of his brilliant idea. The baby building was the least private, most chaotic place at the zoo. It was classic Zoo of America: All of the baby animals born at the zoo were required to go there after birth—with their mothers, if possible—where the public could ogle them all at once without tiring their feet on the two-mile walk around the whole park. Without any permanent residents, no keepers were assigned full-time to the area, yet all of the kingdoms were thrown in there side by side. Meg knew the hatchlings had to stop through there eventually—she’d redesigned a series of terrestrial tanks with fresh shrubs and logs full of cubby holes—but the move should’ve been at least a few weeks out. Not freaking tomorrow.

“Chuck, no.” She squeezed the hose with a death grip. “They’re not even all born yet, for Christ’s sake. There’s one egg left to hatch.”

“That one will follow soon, Antonio said.”

“Oh, Antonio said, did he? Did Antonio read everything ever written about Komodos reproducing in captivity? Because I did, Chuck. It could be another month before we see the last Komodo hatchling,” she lied.

“A month, hmm? He didn’t mention that possibility.” Chuck glanced at his clipboard—as far as Chuck was concerned, the ten-year-plan of the entire planet was on his checklist on that clipboard—and frowned.

Some people might say you shouldn’t lie to your boss, and maybe they were right, but they didn’t work here. Other zoos, the ones that acted as conservationist sanctuaries for threatened species, wouldn’t put themselves in this situation. Those zoos put the animals first; they tried to understand and mitigate the stress of captivity, they created partnerships with organizations that protected indigenous animal populations, and they participated in breeding and reintroduction programs with local Department of Natural Resources offices.

The Zoo of America was a totally different species. It showcased big-ticket animals like Jata in high-tech, elaborate environments while cramming the “fillers” into box-like exhibits no larger than the minimum space that regulations required, knowing that the average visitor went straight for the dolphins, bears, and lions anyway. “Charismatic mega-vertebrates,” the zoo called them. The moneymakers. The rest of the animals just rounded out the collection and helped justify the price of admission. Meg spent most of her time disgusted by management’s bald preoccupation with the bottom line, but secretly—and she would never admit it to any living soul—she was relieved, too. Relieved that Jata was a charismatic mega-vertebrate, and a cost-effective one at that. Other than the thermoregulating heat for her exhibit and some dead animals for a weekly lunch, Jata didn’t cost the zoo an extra dime. The zoo probably barely broke even on the dolphins, but Jata was a guaranteed cash cow. And that meant Meg could keep her as long as she lived.

While Chuck seemed to be mulling over what she’d said, they passed the turnoff to the bird building, a soaring triangle on a peninsula of land that jutted over the river, designed to look like a grand, golden wing. The morning light hugged its transparent walls and created the illusion that it was glowing from the inside. The Bird Kingdom was the flagship building of the zoo; marketing put the golden wing on every postcard and souvenir they sold, and people loved it. It had even been featured in
Architectural Digest
once. What most people didn’t know was that the building had killed hundreds of birds. Originally, the exhibits had backed up to the windows so visitors could squint their eyes and almost imagine the birds were flying around in the river valley. Unfortunately, the birds had thought so, too. In the zoo’s opening days, bird bodies had littered the exhibit floors every morning. They flew into the glass again and again, trying to escape. Maybe they would have designed the thing better if there were charismatic mega-vertebrate species inside, but birds were pretty much all fillers, so the keepers had to find their own ways to keep their exhibits alive. Tinted glass didn’t matter; mesh netting didn’t make a difference. The sky called to the birds, and no amount of diversionary tactics could convince them of their captivity. Eventually, after the back of the exhibits had been completely blacked out, blocking all of the natural light, the birds finally got the idea that they were in a cage, but all the other keepers still referred to the long, narrow path out to the golden wing as death row.

Their walkway veered away from death row toward the western side of the zoo. After another minute of silence, Meg tried to drum up some more points for her case. “It can be extremely stressful to transfer the hatchlings into a public exhibit before they’re ready. They’ll be more likely to attack each other and possibly even go into shock.”

The first part was true enough. She didn’t even know if hatchlings went into shock, but then neither did Chuck. As a trump card, she threw down the m-word. “You don’t want a dead miracle baby on your hands, do you?”

He was listening. Whenever he pursed his lips into little razor-blade slashes like that, Chuck was actually listening to what someone was saying. He looked a lot more pleasant when he was just blowing you off: Then he’d just nod and wait for a pause so he could give you the corporate answer he had all lined up in his head.

Meg’s mind raced ahead; she was desperate to keep the Komodos out of the public eye for as long as she could. If she could keep their stress levels as low as possible in the next few weeks, they’d be much more likely to adapt well to a social environment with one another.

“Every baby at the zoo goes through that building,” she said. “How can the public understand how rare the hatchlings are if they’re displayed like every other specimen? Let’s bring the news crew into the veterinary nursery and give them some behind-the-scenes footage. They can get clips of the broken eggshells and everything. They’ll see the whole process.” She jabbed him in the side of his arm. “Tell me that wouldn’t be a headlining story for the local news.”

Chuck pulled his arm away and rubbed it, slowing down. They had reached the end of the bluffs, where the path curled back into the heart of the zoo. Meg could hear the bridge traffic zooming behind the two-story noise wall. When the zoo had first opened, it had hired some artist to paint a tacky mural of America across the entire thing; the Golden Gate Bridge and the Rockies bled into the Great Plains, and animals the size of West Virginia—gray wolves and buffalo, all the species that early settlers wasted no time clearing out—wandered aimlessly around the picture.

Meg glanced up at the bald eagle soaring over the top of the painting and then ahead to the Visitor Center that towered over the main gate. Was there a completely shallow and commercial angle she was missing? She wanted to rub the bald eagle’s head like a genie’s lamp. Tell me, favored beast of America, how to get Americans to protect you.

“We really need to distinguish the hatchlings, Chuck.” She didn’t know whether he was still listening. “Not only are they exotic—let’s face it, the kings of all lizards—but they’re a miracle. They really are.”

Chuck frowned and tapped his clipboard on her toga of hose. “I understand your point, Megan, and I know how much this exhibit means to you, but, well—I tell my son that language and presentation can be just as important as action—”