“Don’t you dare make a sound, Duke!” she whispered harshly when she heard Duke’s chest begin to rumble. She caught his little jaw between her fingers and glared straight into his faceted eyes, which had begun to whirl with happy colors. “She’ll kill me!”

He clearly understood her warning and hunched closer to her, clinging with sharp nails to her hair and hiding his face against her braid. Then she crawled backward from the beach edge until she was screened sufficiently to risk standing up. Dead fronds and branches tangled her feet as she ran, and she encountered a disheartening variety of thorny bushes and needly plants. But she plunged on.

When she could no longer hear the cries of the dragonets, she turned west and crashed back out to the beach. She pelted down the sands as fast as she could, ignoring the stitch in her side in deference to the antics of the egg beating at her ribs. Duke circled about her head, keening with obediently muted anxiety.

Surely she must be almost back at the camp. Was that the first cairn she had passed, or the second? She stumbled, and Duke cried out in terrible alarm, a shrill strident shriek like the cries of the peacocks that had inhabited her father’s farm, a ghastly sound like someone in extreme agony. He swooped, tugging valiantly at her shoulder, as if he himself could support her.

His shriek had been sufficient to rouse the sleepers. Jim Tillek was the first one to struggle to his feet, which got tangled in the bag for the first few steps. Pol and Bay were more laggard until they recognized Sorka.

Sorka, ignoring both Tillek’s urgent queries and helping hands, staggered to the plump microbiologist, dropping heavily to her knees and fumbling to get the egg into Bay’s hands for she could feel a crack beginning to run along the shell.

“Here! Here, this is yours, Bay!” she gasped, grabbing the astonished woman’s hands and closing them about the egg.

Bay’s reaction was to thrust it back to Sorka, but the girl had thrown herself toward the supply packs, rummaging for something edible, fumbling to open a packet of protein bars and break one into tiny pieces.

“It’s cracking, Sorka. Pol! What do I do with it? It’s cracking all over!” Bay exclaimed uncertainly.

“It’s yours, Bay, an animal that will love only you,” Sorka said in gasps, floundering back with full hands. “It’s hatching. It’ll be yours. Here, feed it these. Pol, Captain, see what you can find under the seaweed for it to eat. You be bronzes. See, watch what Duke’s going after.”

Duke, chirping with exultation, was dragging a huge branch of seaweed up from the high-tide line.

“Just bundle the seaweed up, Pol,” Tillek said moments later as he demonstrated.