Read Online The Dragon Keeper by Mindy Mejía - Free Book Online

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