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Vallen flared his wings and started to fly a circle around a spot on the ground beneath him. "Look out below, coming down!" he called, and the humans walking through the wide-open circle of brick quickly moved to the edges, giving him room to land. Once he was on the ground, however, they immediately clustered around him; they didn't even wait for him to fold his wings first, and he had to be careful not to get any stray humans' limbs caught in their folds as he pulled his wings tight against his body.

The humans gasped as he opened his mouth and some of backed away nervously, then everyone clapped and cheered as Vallen breathed a jet of fire straight up into the air. After a few moments, he cut off the flow and roared, the noise chasing the pillar of flame upwards as both sound and fire dissipated into the air. "Dragon!" one of the humans shouted, and he looked down to see a boy standing so close Vallen would risk stepping on him if he tried to move.

"Yes?"

"My-my little sister and I were arguing on the way here, and isn't it true that dragons like treasure?"

Vallen snorted. "What, like gold, silver and jewels? What use could I possibly have for that stuff? They're all shine and nothing else. There are things that I treasure, of course, but they are my sons and my good friends, not pieces of metal."

"Then what about all the stories that say you do like to make hoards of treasure?"

"They were probably excuses made by human thieves when caught with someone else's valuables. I don't remember exactly how the explanation goes, but a lot of stories involving dragons were also meant to be... metaphors, I think the word is. That popular story about St. George, for example: the dragon in the story is meant to represent the evil figure of some religion, not an actual dragon."

A little girl laughed and pointed at the boy. "Told you so, told you so, told you so!"

"Don't point, that's not nice," a woman said, holding up a camera. "Now you three hold still a moment so I can take a picture..." The camera flashed, then the woman walked forward and took the shoulders of the two children in her hands. "Come on, you two have seen the dragon now, and he even talked to you, Andy! It's time for us to go home."

"Aw, man..." the boy said, but he allowed the woman to steer him away. Another boy, this one a couple of years older, took his place in front of Vallen almost immediately.

"I've read other stories about dragons," he said. "Those stories said that dragons will let humans ride them, if they ask nicely enough."

Vallen didn't say anything, though he had to keep his tail from lashing with annoyance so he wouldn't accidentally knock anyone over. He'd only heard this request about fifty times today.

"So can I ride you, please?" the boy said, smiling up at him and blinking a couple of times.

"I've been asked that more than enough," he growled, "and Walter says that the zoo's insurance policy doesn't cover dragon-riding-related injuries, so no, you can't ride me. But even so, those stories aren't right either. We dragons only let humans we trust onto our backs, and even then only on rare occasions."

"Oh..." the boy said.

A horn blared in the distance, and Vallen raised his head. "That's the dinner call; I have to go, and the zoo's going to close soon anyway. Back up, everyone, I have to take off."

The humans backed off to the edge of the walkway, and he spread his wings out wide, drawing a collective gasp from the crowd he couldn't help but enjoy. He was about to go airborne when a voice called, "Vallen, wait!"

He paused; not only had the human used his name, but he knew that voice.

"Chris?" he asked, surprised, and spotted the man squeezing through the crowd of humans to get to him. He brought his head back down to the human's level and asked in a low voice, "what are you doing here?"

"No time to talk now," Chris whispered back. He pulled his hand from his pocket and showed Vallen Sean's dragon-sized earpiece. "Take this, and once you're alone later tonight, use it to contact me. We'll talk then."

He nodded. "Will it be safe in my mouth for a few minutes?"

Chris hesitated and glanced back at the crowd of people, as did Vallen; they were watching the two of them, but didn't seem to find anything about their interaction unusual. They probably didn't suspect him of anything... At least, he hoped so. "I think it'll be fine, but be careful with it."

He dipped his head and curled his tongue around the communicator, then drew it into his mouth and tucked it between his teeth and his cheek. "Talk later," he said, careful with the device in his mouth, then crouched in preparation to take off. Chris backed away as Vallen launched up into the air, then turned to look for Dave and Sean as the crowd dispersed.

"There you are. Sean, how durable is that thing?"

"Well, it's been through a couple of storms I was dumb enough to try and fly through, but..."

"Vallen has it in his mouth for now; hopefully he'll find a better place to hide it. Will it be okay there for a few minutes?"

Sean thought a moment, then nodded. "Should be fine."

Vallen glided over the slowly emptying zoo and drifted towards the west corner, landing on a ledge that overlooked the park entrance. He glanced around, then hid the communicator behind a small rock near the entrance to the cave before he walked inside.

A couple of minutes later, a human came in through a back door of the cave, carrying along a small tray of food. "Here you are, Vallen," the man said. "Have a good day today?"

"Oh, it was fine, Walter," Vallen shuffled his wings. "But is there any chance you could put some sort of notice up to tell people not to ask to ride me?"

Walter laughed. "Why, how many people asked you today?"

"Too many for me to remember the number."

"All right, I'll see what I can do," he laughed again. "Eat up; we can talk once you're done."

Vallen nodded and dug into the assorted meats, working his way through the food on the tray. At his request, the two meals Walter brought him were smaller than a full meal; dragons were used to just one meal a day, and if Vallen was going to eat twice each day then he didn't want to be eating twice the amount he was used to having.

He finally sat back and allowed Walter to take a wet rag to his face and claws, cleaning away the blood and stray bits of food from his dinner. It was hard to suppress a laugh; what the rest of the clan would think if they saw him getting a human to clean him up after his meals!

"The call is still on for tomorrow morning, right?" Vallen asked once Walter had finished.

"Yes, I talked to the San Diego zookeepers just an hour ago. They say Aithsa is eager to hear from you."

"As he should be. It'll be good to be able to speak to him, even if we can't actually be together."

Walter nodded. "They said he's been getting better with his acting, too. They plan to rehearse the show with him tonight, and if it goes well they'll start performing tomorrow."

"I'm sure it will. I wish I could see him perform."

"I can ask them to send a video of it, if you want me to."

"Please."

"All right, I'll mention it to his handlers when I next talk to them, so probably sometime tomorrow." Walter sighed, put the bucket and dirty rag by the door and leaned against Vallen's side. "You want to try acting?"

He chuckled. "I'm an old dragon, Walter, and I don't think I have it in me to start something like that. No, I'll stick to flying around the park and showing off; that's enough for me."

"You sure? You might end up liking it."

"I'll leave that to the younger dragons."

Walter laughed with him, then started rubbing the scales within reach of his arm. They were silent for a short while, then he asked, "you aren't going to try to break out, are you?"

He looked away, lowering his head a little; the human had asked the same question a few days before, when news of Carnoc's escape had reached them. "I don't mind it here, really, but I won't lie to you; it just doesn't compare to home. As nice as everyone is here and as confident as I am in Nesleh's ability to keep peace in the clan without me, I just can't choose to leave them without a real elder, and I can't go so long without seeing both my sons face to face. I'm not going to actively look for a way to escape, but you can't expect me not to take the chance, if the opportunity comes along."

"A lot of the staff likes you. The other dragons can take care of themselves; just stay with us! You said yourself that you like it, so there must be some advantages. I mean, we bring you your meals, you get to fly around wherever you want without getting attacked, and... Well, you know."

"I never really made a big deal out of it, but dragons prefer to hunt their own prey over having food available for them to just take. It's a sign of good health for a dragon to be able to hunt on his own."

"Though you have to understand that letting you hunt just isn't possible here. And besides, isn't flying during the day so much better than having to sneak around at night?"

"Well... We haven't always been a nocturnal species, but when you humans started to encroach on our territory, we gradually had less and less range that was safe to fly in without being seen, until we just had no room at all. It was either attack you all, or fly at night instead, and we chose to fly at night. It works, but it's never really felt natural."

"You're really daytime creatures?" Walther thought for a moment. "How on earth does a creature your size and of your coloration sneak up on prey during the daytime? You'd be either spotted or heard before you even got close enough to use fire, let alone your claws or teeth."

Vallen laughed. "Then it should come as no surprise to you that the phrase 'death from above' was first used by a dragon named Taobor back in your eighth century."

"Even still, animals would be able to see you floating overhead, or even in mid-dive. How would you be able to get down fast enough to catch them?"

"When we travel to the dragoness' clan... They still fly during the day, so I've done some daytime hunting there, and the same dive I use at night seems to work fine there, too. I guess they just don't see us coming, or at least not until it's too late."

"I don't think you've mentioned them before. There's a whole group of dragons living together that are all female?"

"Yes, the two clans live apart from each other, coming together only to mate. That's one of the reasons I'd prefer to leave, actually--we were captured just a day before we were supposed to leave for their territory. They're probably wondering what's taking us so long to get there. We usually leave for their territory in the spring, but certain circumstances delayed us this year."

"Oh, I see." Walter looked around, then lowered his voice. "Honestly, if it were up to me, I would probably just let you go. The problem is, then I could pretty much guarantee I'd be fired, and besides, I like spending time with you. But even then, I would understand if you had to go--enough that if I saw you escaping, I wouldn't stop you. I mean, it's just not right to keep you here like this. It's not like you're an animal, like the other... animals here, and you've made it clear through your actions that you definitely don't mean us humans any harm. Keeping you here would be like keeping you as a slave, and that's been outlawed for hundreds of years."

"If you want to help, then you can tell that to other people. We certainly won't be able to do it ourselves, especially not if most of your kind thinks that our whole race acts like Carnoc when his blood's raised. But..." Vallen hesitated. "If you want to help me escape without being directly involved, you can tell me what security's keeping me here."

He looked at the ground, deep in thought. After a minute or two, he said, "yes, I'll help. I can do that. Anyway, there's the barriers that surround the park, like I told you on the first day. I didn't mention the backup, which is basically just an internal generator that will start up and send its own power to the barriers if external power is cut off. That takes about a minute to start up, though, so there would be a short time when the barriers would be down. There are a few backup systems in the planning stages to defend against that beam weapon that helped Carnoc escape, but none of them are close to implementation yet."

"Thank you, Walter. That's all I have to know."

He nodded and got to his feet, then turned and hugged the base of Vallen's neck.

The dragon growled softly. "Calm down, I'm not leaving tonight. I have to talk to Aithsa in the morning, remember?"

"I know, but I still need to start thinking about you being gone. It'll be hard."

"I'm sure you'll manage."

Walter nodded, and let go after a moment. "See you in the morning, then," he said, then he picked up the bucket, rag and empty tray and left the room.

Vallen waited for a little while after the man left, then went out and retrieved the communicator. It took a little work to manipulate the tiny device, but finally he managed to wedge the speaker into his earhole and shape the microphone down towards the corner of his mouth. He hesitated, then said, "Chris, are you there?"

The reply was a little quiet at first, but after just a couple of words it came out of the speaker as if Chris was standing right next to him. "Finally, Vallen. You sure you're alone?"

He glanced around the empty cave again. "Yes-- Yes, I'm... sure." He shuffled his wings; it felt odd to just talk normally, and know that his words were somehow traveling somewhere out of sight in an instant to be heard by someone else. He felt like he should be shouting to make sure he was heard, but resisted that urge. "I already know a lot of what's been going on; Walter's been reading any newspaper articles concerning dragons to me each morning, so I already know that Carnoc killed some people, and that he escaped with human help. The news didn't mention the identities of the humans who had helped him, but it's obvious to me that was you. Did he make it home all right?"

"Yes, he's fine, though apparently Nesleh ordered him not to fly for a while, and they're working on his self-control again."

"Good, he needs it. What about the clan? Are they doing all right without me?"

"Nesleh's been acting in your place, as I'm sure you've guessed, and they seem to be getting along well enough from what I've seen of them. They're all fine; what we need to focus on is getting you out. We've already scouted the security workings, and from what we can tell all we have to do is cut the power that keeps the barriers around the park up. You aren't restrained at night, are you?"

"No, not at all." Vallen lowered his voice. "They trust me not to try to escape--which I won't unless you come for me--and just let me roam the zoo whenever I want to. There is a backup system, though, that Walter told me about. He said that if you cut the power, the barriers will go down for about a minute before the backup generator gets them running again. But that's it."

"Who's Walter? And why were you talking to him about security?"

"Walter is... He's the man here who takes care of me, I don't know what you'd call it... The newspapers called them, 'handlers,' I think. Anyway, we were talking earlier, he asked me if I wanted to escape, like Carnoc had, and I said that I would if I got the chance." He lowered his voice still further. "He wasn't happy, but he realized that it was for the best, and that they really shouldn't be keeping an intelligent being as their captive. So he told me about the security system and the backup."

"All right. Dave and Sean just got back, and they say that the power lines are easy to see, and easy to shoot. We're getting you out tonight."

"No!" he lashed his tail and clenched his claws for a moment. "I mean, tomorrow night, please... I heard about Aithsa in San Diego, and Walter arranged for us to speak to each other over the phone tomorrow morning. I need to be here for that, and I can wait another day. You be patient, look over your plans and be sure they'll work, and that they won't leave any obvious tracks for the police to follow. In fact, tell me the plan. I should be able to see any glaring problems there may be."

"It's simple, really. We tell you to be ready, Dave shoots the wires, you fly out, Sean gives you a backpack, you fly home. Nothing to it."

"Who are Sean and Dave? I don't think I know them."

"You don't. Dave is the younger brother of Jim Fuller. That's someone I think you do know."

Vallen hissed, claws clenching against the rock. "The man who captured us."

"Yes. But Dave doesn't like what Jim did, so he's been helping us to free the rest of the clan, which he did first at the auction, then at Animal Kingdom. Sean... Well, he's a mutant. And he can turn into a dragon."

"Really. Full-size and everything?"

"Not just that. He's bigger than Carnoc; his dragon body is that of a blood warrior."

"That's..."

"Vidac's bolt and everything."

Vallen wasn't sure what to say, and while he paused he heard another voice faintly in the background. "Jeez, Chris, do you have to go on about me like that every time you tell a dragon about me?"

"Well, I can't just not tell them. What do you want me to-- Never mind. So anyway, Dave shoots the cables, which cuts the power to the barriers. We'll have told you to be ready beforehand, so you'll be waiting to fly out as soon as they go down. You'll fly out, and Sean will meet you in midair. He'll give you a backpack, and you have to strap that to the base of your neck, then you can fly back home. We'll meet you there."

"What's in the backpack?"

"Something of Sean's. As long as you have it, you'll be able to fly around in broad daylight without any human attacking you, because they'll think you're him."

"And where will Sean be while I'm pretending to be him?"

"Driving Dave and me back home."

Vallen nodded, then realized that Chris couldn't see him. "All right. I'm going to hide this thing, then I'll contact you tomorrow night when I'm ready to go."

"Good, we'll see you then. Oh, and Sean says not to lose or break that communicator, because he only has one spare and it's not with him."

"I'll be careful. See you tomorrow night."