Chapter Nine
Frida jumped back on her bike and headed for Dragon’s Deep.
A number of times, she felt her hand drifting towards her phone, aching to talk to Antony and Hamish about what had just happened.
But she’d left their chat on mute, not able to face another conversation about her needing a day in bed.
Instead, she pushed the strange encounter out of her mind and, trying to breathe through another bout of dizziness, propped her bike against the wall of the unassuming cobbled courtyard where a grey door led to the heart of Dragon’s Deep.
It was meant to be a secret, but secrets lasted as long as an unattended chocolate croissant in this place.
The courtyard was packed with Extraordinaires, LEZ nerds dressed in sparkly merch, trying to peer through whatever notches in the soundproofed fencing they could find.
In her Forest uniform, she was spotted within seconds.
‘Has the dragon woken up yet?’ an eager enthusiast, wearing fake wings and a jaunty witch’s hat, demanded.
‘When can we see him?’ called another in full wizard’s robe and Gandalf beard.
‘What’s his name?’ a third coaxed, sporting a Lagarfljót Worm beanie.
Frida shook her head with regret. Basking in their attention, she felt like a minor celebrity.
‘I’m sorry,’ she exclaimed. ‘I’d lose my job if I told you!
’ The word Lucky blazed through her, and she had to bite down on it with a grin.
She was lucky. If she wasn’t wearing khaki, she’d be right there with them in a purple dragon onesie.
Sighs of disappointment followed her as she placed her thumb on the door’s security panel.
She had to take a moment on the other side, steadying herself against the wall, her head spinning again.
She wondered if she was about to faint. As long as you didn’t count last night, she’d never fainted in her life.
She had the constitution of an ox. Once she’d eaten twelve tofu-dogs, washed them down with a chocolate cake and two bottles of wine, and run a marathon the next morning to raise money for the conservation of endangered green-tongued frootelies. She’d been fine.
But the scent that hit her as she moved through the labyrinth of corridors was enough to clear her dizziness.
It registered in the deepest part of her memory, the smell of her childhood.
It was countless hours, days, months, years, hanging outside Fireheart’s enclosure with her mum, just watching that terracotta miracle basking in the sand and sending smoke rings up into the skies.
It was heat and sulphur and all her dreams wrapped into one scaly package.
When she pushed open the final door though, she blinked, momentarily blinded by something vivid and green, fluttering through her with the ephemerality of a hummingbird.
Raz? She rubbed her eyes. No. Taking a few slow breaths, she grounded herself.
Just the green of the jungle, locked behind a thick layer of heat- and power-resistant glass.
Nothing cryptic about it, just the maze of palms and ferns, vines and banana leaves that she’d helped to plant.
‘Swan2!’
She grinned. Cliff looked incandescent. She stumbled towards him across the long, tarmacked avenue.
This was the ‘behind the scenes’ of Dragon’s Deep, where they kept the bits no one was meant to see: the vet materials, the foods stores, the tool supplies.
The air around her was thick – a heady, meaty conflagration of sweat, humidity and noxious sulphurous fumes.
‘All ok with Raz?’ Cliff asked as he towered over her.
On a normal day, she would have told him everything, spilling like an overturned teacup. But this wasn’t a normal day. She was just staring past him, unable to say much of anything past, ‘Gaaaahh.’
Cliff chuckled. ‘What did I tell you?’
Her mouth opened and closed. Purple.
He was so purple. Amidst the shifting, sun-blanched forest, she took in the purple of his forked tail.
The four purple splayed-out legs, the two mammoth purple wings.
A tapestry of every shade of purple ever imagined; aubergine, plum, violet, amethyst, mauve, lilac, wine, maroon.
. . She was sure, in that moment, that even a lifetime of studying the colour purple could not prepare someone for its meaning – not until they saw him.
‘Oh. My. God,’ she whispered.
Cliff bobbed his head. ‘Isn’t he magnificent?’
Frida felt as if she might take off. Suddenly everything else was wiped away and all that mattered was this. ‘He’s resplendent! He’s dazzling. He’s beatific.’ She bit back tears. ‘Thank you.’ She didn’t think she’d ever meant two words as much.
Cliff’s beam grew. Then another zookeeper named Zuzka beckoned to Frida, and Cliff waved her away, returning to his personal reverie.
Frida drifted over, unable to look anywhere but through the glass.
Even sleeping, the dragon looked menacing.
His tail, which twitched like a dog’s, was lined with razor-sharp spikes and was as long as a bus.
His intricate scales gleamed, mother-of-pearl.
His coal-black claws glinted in the sunlight, sharp enough to make her catch her breath.
She couldn’t believe he was just a baby.
Barely a hundred years old. Most dragons stayed with their fathers for the first two hundred years of their lives.
Nobody had been able to find out what had happened to this dragon’s father.
Not for the first time, something cracked inside Frida at the thought.
For all his majestic power, he looked like he hadn’t quite grown into his front paws yet.
As he slept, his massive eyelids flickered.
His long neck was twisted, his big boxy head tilted clumsily to one side, half-formed beard a tangle of pale gold wool.
A puddle of drool spread outwards from his half open mouth.
Frida didn’t dare blink for fear that if she did, she’d wake up to find Antony poking her again, telling her this too was a dream.
‘Look at his wings!’ Zuzka signed, her eyes wide as saucers.
Zuzka was, after Antony and Hamish, Frida’s closest friend.
Her bright pink hair always made Frida smile.
She was Czech, her creamy-pale face wrinkled as an old book, an aged punk rocker who’d taken more than a few drugs in her time.
One of many Deaf keepers who flocked to the LEZ, inspired by Gloria and the LEZ’s policy on sign language, she was also Frida’s tattoo partner in crime.
Frida couldn’t count the number of LEZ-themed tattoos they’d got together.
Frida nodded emphatically. ‘I see them!’ she signed back.
His wings had completely flattened the flowers they’d planted only yesterday.
She didn’t care. This dragon could flatten whatever he wanted.
Each wing glinted with talons so dark, they seemed to eat the sunlight.
Frida had spent every second of her free time these last months reading up about this type of dragon, so she’d known what to expect, but to see him, right there in front of her .
. . Long-tailed tree-crawlers were so rare.
Zuzka made a sign of her mind blowing up, and Frida giggled helplessly.
His right wing was a perfect dragon’s wing.
Massive, bat-like – the picture of grace and majesty.
His other wing though, the one closest to them, was different.
Just like all the pictures of male Long-tailed tree-crawlers that she’d seen, this left wing was segmented.
Split into three, like interconnected flapping sails.
As if once, before the dawn of time, something had happened to slice one of the male’s left wings into thirds, and then they all just decided that this was a better way of doing things.
The best evolutionary reason that biologists could come up with was that, since the males were the ones who cared for the babies, it was a way to keep them on the ground whilst the females did the hunting.
Although the males could fly, in the AI videos Frida had found (no real video footage existed), they always looked slightly lopsided.
The upper section of Lucky’s left wing was a bit furled, tucked under the rest of his wing, like folded velvet.
‘Sora says he’s snoring.’
Frida nodded at Zuzka through her teary smile. ‘Louder than Antony after a night out,’ she signed back.
Zuzka chuckled.
‘Louder than Cliff on the staff sofa,’ Sora, from Zuzka’s other side, contributed with a wry smile.
Together, they fell back into awed silence, watching as Lucky flickered with some unfathomable internal fire.
Rings of smoke tinged with gold drifted through the overhanging canopy. His belly looked like a banked inferno.
Suddenly, a flurry of activity emerged through the door that Frida had come through, just moments before.
‘You arrived just in time, Frida,’ Zuzka motioned, using Frida’s unique sign name: the wings of a dragon taking flight.
Frida nodded, breathless. She watched as Irma, vet in charge, led a troop of pink-scrubbed nurses, fluttering around her like terrified butterflies.
Irma was a broad shouldered, muscle-ripped force of nature, raised on New Zealand sheep farms and current world record holder for the number of sheep sheered in one day (768).
Irma turned to Cliff and rubbed her hands together. ‘Ready to rock and roll, Papa Bear?’
Cliff drew himself away from the glass, his grin splitting his face. ‘Ready like a hippogriff at sunset, my dear.’
For an instant, Frida felt a stab of guilt.
She’d lied to him – or more accurately, made Antony lie – and if she hadn’t, someone else would be standing here in her place.
But then she joined the others waiting by the gate and Irma was peering at the screen on her tablet, carefully monitoring the rhythm of Lucky’s heartbeat, transmitted from the chip they’d inserted in his foreleg last night.
Cliff, beside her, was all focus and gravitas.
When Irma started to hustle them inside the tunnel, Frida barely registered her headache spiking.
The first time she’d had gone inside an enclosure for a vet check, it had with Moira the manticore during her third week on the job.
Frida had thought she was just observing, but within seconds Cliff was barking at her to, ‘Get down here and help me hold her paws.’ Moira’s feet were the size of dinner plates.
Since then, Frida had participated in so many sedations she’d lost count.
The fear faded, but she never lost the feeling of astonishment at being close to an extraordinary creature, no matter who they were.
But this was a whole other level. Quite literally.
Frida didn’t believe in heaven. Her mum had been a lapsed, runaway Jew, and the only thing she’d taught Frida to believe in had been dragons.
Hamish was of the same mind. It was only Antony who subscribed to a panoply of actual gods, despite being a die-hard empiricist at heart.
His dad was Taíno, and his mum Christian, and the afterlife played a big role in his house.
Frida didn’t believe, but at this moment, she would have liked to think that Antony was right.
Because she longed to think that her mum was watching her right now, dancing the samba on the kitchen table of heaven, maybe with Sir Joshua waltzing at her side.
They were through the wards and inside the enclosure before she knew it, the phenomenally awful stench of sulphur filling her every pore.
Vets were pulling out their equipment, Zuzka was helping Cliff monitor Lucky’s breathing.
Ten yards away, Lucky’s gigantic, forked tongue lolled between teeth made for shredding.
Was this the most incredible, surreal thing that had ever happened to her?
She’d seen Hamish get up on stage and proclaim an ode to Crumble the stone giant at the staff Christmas party.
She’d seen the pregnant Icelandic Lagarfljót Worm strike a guest around the face with their eight-foot-long worm penis.
She’d seen Cliff dress up as Gloria after drinking too much fizzy wine at Halloween, prancing around Ground Control shaking a broomstick, threatening death and dismemberment to anyone stupid enough to steal the chocolate croissants.
Something was chirping, but she shook her head, ignoring it.
‘Come closer, Frida,’ Sora whispered.
Frida approached with caution. Sora was lifting Lucky’s massive, rumpled eyelids, touching the edges of his snout, avoiding the threads of smoke that puffed from the cavernous pits of his nostrils.
The two of them watched, barely breathing, for a reaction – a twitch, a rumble, a blink.
Any sign that he might be waking up. Frida was so close, the urge to touch him was magnetic.
She knew it might be one of her only chances.
Lucky looked so peaceful, a giant baby curled up, his formidable power banished momentarily to the edges.
She tentatively reached out a hand. Most dragons, especially forest-dwelling ones, were endothermic.
They could regulate their own body temperature, banking the fire inside them against an icy exterior, handy if you lived in places with a lot of kindling.
Academically, she knew this, and yet still she flinched as her fingers brushed his neck.
Ice. Like the crystal smoothness of a ripple-free lake.
He felt untouched by time, unlike Fireheart whose two thousand years showed in every wrinkled crag and pitted scar.
But Frida knew better. He wouldn’t be here if he were untouched.
‘You watch his eyelids,’ Sora instructed quietly, brushing a wisp of greying hair behind one ear. Tiny beads of sweat glimmered on her temple. ‘I want to check his mouth again.’
With alacrity, Frida took Sora’s place. The dragon before her was so big, she could have crawled inside his eyelid and wrapped herself up like a blanket.
The sun slanted through his golden eyelashes, casting long shadows across her chest. She cautiously inched to one side, avoiding a growing puddle of drool.
The vets were working at top speed. They’d be done in minutes.
She wanted to stretch these last moments forever – to curl up in Lucky’s claw and make a fort.
When would she get to be this close to him again?
Next month? Next year? Never? She hadn’t known, all those years spent gawping at Fireheart through the fence, that she would get even this.
It felt as if her head was going to pop off, fireworks shooting out of her craniovertebral junction. She—
‘HELLO LITTLE STINK!’