between. Something was always coming, always looming around the edges of the next day; it was only a matter of when. She rubbed her cheek into Antonio’s lab coat and fell asleep.
2 Weeks before Hatching
D ragons attack people.”
Meg paused mid-lecture and sized up the woman who’d interrupted her. The visitor stood at the front of the group with her hip cocked and her eyes narrowed in a smug, pseudo-omniscience that made Meg wish more animals attacked people. Humans were such a self-righteous species.
“They are certainly capable of it, yes, but attacks are rare and usually occur because of human encroachment into the dragons’ natural territory.” Meg crossed her arms, a gesture that the Member Center team kept telling her was defensive and inhospitable —whatever the hell that meant. They sent secret shoppers out sometimes to rate the quality of the tours, and that stuff always showed up on her performance reviews in the Opportunities for Improvement section.
Every zookeeper at the Zoo of America had to lead a group tour of his or her building once a week. It was a term of the employment contract, according to her boss, Chuck. Meg had tried to reason with him because, come on—it wasn’t as if someone became a zookeeper because she liked people so much—but Chuck had just handed her a copy of the standard Keeper Level I job description in his usual constipated, twitchy way, and that had been the end of the discussion.
Now, standing at the front of the group that was crowded into the last exhibit of the Reptile Kingdom—Jata’s exhibit—she thought for the six thousandth time that she should have fought a little harder. It was a pretty equal divide today between stroller moms and tourists, both gunning to be the biggest pain in the ass. The mothers who took the tours were like their own planets, with strollers, diaper bags, purses, and greasy-fingered children revolving like frenetic moons around them. Meg might have appreciated their efficiency a lot more if it didn’t come with crying babies, children who uprooted the trail plants, and endless questions about cartoon animals she’d never heard of.
Tourists were a different breed. The Zoo of America made up one-fourth of the America compound, an interconnected group of tourist attractions packed into the tract of land between the Twin Cities airport and the Minnesota River. Visitors bounced between the Mall of America, Water Park of America, SportsPark of America, and the Zoo of America on the red, white, and blue light rail trains that stopped in front of each main gate, coming from all across the country for their prepackaged, temp-controlled, multi-pass vacations, with cameras dangling from their necks like abandoned lead ropes. The tourists’ questions, while usually more grounded than demands for unicorns, were also generally more annoying. Like this woman and her thing against dragons.
The woman leaned on the railing that overlooked Jata’s enclosure and didn’t even glance down to look at the animal she was blindly categorizing. If she’d bothered, she’d have seen that Jata lay fewer than ten yards away, her legs spread-eagle and osteoderms bunching in lazy folds down to the thick claws that lined her feet. Her scales were a mosaic of delicate, sea-foam green and dull gray. Looking at her was like seeing the product of a gecko and an elephant. She was ancient, primordial—but some people only saw a predator.
It was obvious that the woman had no idea what Jata had done, how this single Komodo dragon blindly tried to save her entire species from extinction.
“I read about a Komodo attacking that boy in the Philippines the other day. It killed him.” The woman’s voice bounced off the towering skylights in the roof and around the clustered tour group, eclipsing the nearby tortoises’ waterfall with the fascination that people constantly brought to this platform. The fascination Meg got, no question, but it was that undercurrent of
2 Weeks before Hatching
D ragons attack people.”
Meg paused mid-lecture and sized up the woman who’d interrupted her. The visitor stood at the front of the group with her hip cocked and her eyes narrowed in a smug, pseudo-omniscience that made Meg wish more animals attacked people. Humans were such a self-righteous species.
“They are certainly capable of it, yes, but attacks are rare and usually occur because of human encroachment into the dragons’ natural territory.” Meg crossed her arms, a gesture that the Member Center team kept telling her was defensive and inhospitable —whatever the hell that meant. They sent secret shoppers out sometimes to rate the quality of the tours, and that stuff always showed up on her performance reviews in the Opportunities for Improvement section.
Every zookeeper at the Zoo of America had to lead a group tour of his or her building once a week. It was a term of the employment contract, according to her boss, Chuck. Meg had tried to reason with him because, come on—it wasn’t as if someone became a zookeeper because she liked people so much—but Chuck had just handed her a copy of the standard Keeper Level I job description in his usual constipated, twitchy way, and that had been the end of the discussion.
Now, standing at the front of the group that was crowded into the last exhibit of the Reptile Kingdom—Jata’s exhibit—she thought for the six thousandth time that she should have fought a little harder. It was a pretty equal divide today between stroller moms and tourists, both gunning to be the biggest pain in the ass. The mothers who took the tours were like their own planets, with strollers, diaper bags, purses, and greasy-fingered children revolving like frenetic moons around them. Meg might have appreciated their efficiency a lot more if it didn’t come with crying babies, children who uprooted the trail plants, and endless questions about cartoon animals she’d never heard of.
Tourists were a different breed. The Zoo of America made up one-fourth of the America compound, an interconnected group of tourist attractions packed into the tract of land between the Twin Cities airport and the Minnesota River. Visitors bounced between the Mall of America, Water Park of America, SportsPark of America, and the Zoo of America on the red, white, and blue light rail trains that stopped in front of each main gate, coming from all across the country for their prepackaged, temp-controlled, multi-pass vacations, with cameras dangling from their necks like abandoned lead ropes. The tourists’ questions, while usually more grounded than demands for unicorns, were also generally more annoying. Like this woman and her thing against dragons.
The woman leaned on the railing that overlooked Jata’s enclosure and didn’t even glance down to look at the animal she was blindly categorizing. If she’d bothered, she’d have seen that Jata lay fewer than ten yards away, her legs spread-eagle and osteoderms bunching in lazy folds down to the thick claws that lined her feet. Her scales were a mosaic of delicate, sea-foam green and dull gray. Looking at her was like seeing the product of a gecko and an elephant. She was ancient, primordial—but some people only saw a predator.
It was obvious that the woman had no idea what Jata had done, how this single Komodo dragon blindly tried to save her entire species from extinction.
“I read about a Komodo attacking that boy in the Philippines the other day. It killed him.” The woman’s voice bounced off the towering skylights in the roof and around the clustered tour group, eclipsing the nearby tortoises’ waterfall with the fascination that people constantly brought to this platform. The fascination Meg got, no question, but it was that undercurrent of
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