The Egg Hatches (Everyone Panics)

Once upon a time — a very square time, in a very square world — two boys had absolutely everything.

Now, if you heard the first story, you'll remember it started the other way around: two boys in an empty field with no tools, no food, no house, and no idea. That was Miles and Beno, thirteen years old, back before all of it — before the mountains and the deserts, before the Nether and the End, before they sang a lullaby to the sleepiest dragon in existence and adopted the egg she left behind.

This story starts one year later. Same field. Look at it now.

A real house on the hill, with warm windows and a crooked fence that's crooked on purpose. A potato farm so successful it basically runs itself and, some say, votes. A chicken named Clucky asleep on the mantel in a tiny iron helmet — she thinks she's a wolf; she is legally a wolf; do not bring it up. A creeper named Gerald in the tidy corner by the woodpile — the politest creature alive, hug-certified for one year now, never once gone boom. A grandmother figure named Granny Ender who visits on full moons. A judgmental sheep. Peace. Plenty. Breakfast on the table.

And by the fireplace, in a nest of purple knitted wool: the egg.

Deep violet-black, freckled with tiny lights like a piece of night sky somebody wrapped up to go. For one entire year, the egg had done exactly one thing, and done it beautifully: it wobbled. A little tip to the left, a little tip to the right, a settle, like someone getting comfy under a blanket. Wobble, wobble, settle. Every day. All year. The house had learned to live around it, the way you live around a ticking clock.

Which is why, on this particular morning, in the middle of breakfast, everyone stopped chewing at the exact same moment.

"Miles," said Beno, potato halfway to his mouth. "Listen."

"I don't hear anything."

"THAT'S the thing. Listen to all that nothing."

The egg had stopped wobbling.

It had never stopped wobbling. Not once, not all year, not even during the Great Thunderstorm or the potato harvest or the time Beno tested his homemade trumpet. The egg sat in its woolly nest, perfectly, completely still — and let me tell you, listener, there is no silence in any world louder than a wobble that stops.

For nine full seconds, nobody moved. The fire popped. The sheep, outside the window, paused mid-judge.

Then, from inside the egg, quite clearly, came a sound like a spoon tapping the world's smallest door.

*Crack.*

And everyone panicked.

I want to be fair: they panicked *lovingly*. But there's no other word for what happened in that kitchen. Miles knocked over his chair sprinting for the cupboard, yelling "PROTOCOL! HATCHING PROTOCOL!" — because of course Miles had a Hatching Protocol, he'd written it months ago, fourteen steps, laminated. (Fourteen. It's always fourteen. Some things about a boy never change.) Beno grabbed the nearest useful item, which was a saucepan, and stood guarding the egg from — his words — "everything, in general, as a category." Clucky was down off the mantel before anyone saw her move, circling the nest with her wings half out, growling her growl at the crack in the shell, then at Miles, then at the concept of surprise itself. *Grrr-BAWK. Grrr-BAWK.*

And Gerald did nothing at all.

Gerald simply came over quietly and sat down next to the nest, the way he'd sat next to it a thousand mornings, and watched the little crack with his gentle green face, and when Miles skidded back into the room waving the laminated Protocol and shouting "Step one! Boil water! Step two, why do we need boiled water, I wrote this months ago, WHY DID I WRITE BOILED WATER—"

Gerald said, softly, without looking away from the egg:

"You can't schedule a wobble, Miles."

"—Step three! Towels! GERALD, THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR—"

"Things hatch when they're ready," said Gerald, in that whispery voice like wind through leaves. "Our job is to be here."

"And to bring snacks," added Beno, still holding the saucepan.

Now, listener, I'll tell you a secret about stories, the same secret I told you last time: the most important sentence in any story always sneaks in early, dressed as a joke, while everyone's too busy panicking to hear it. Nobody heard it. Miles was on step five (step five was "remain calm"; the Protocol did not say how). Tuck it under your pillow anyway. *You can't schedule a wobble. Be there. Bring snacks.* We're going to need it — all of it — out on the far oceans of the world, at the top of a sea stack, in the fog. But that's later.

Right now: the crack ran all the way around the middle of the egg, and the top tipped back like the lid of the world's most important jar, and out of the world's most important jar came —

a head.

A little head, no bigger than a melon, on a bendy little neck. Scales the black of deep water, still eggshell-damp, catching the firelight in tiny sparks. Two ears like small crooked sails. And then the eyes opened — and they were violet, glowing softly, enormous in that little face, the exact eyes that everyone in that room had last seen looking down at them from a head the size of a house, at the bottom of the sky, at the end of the world.

The baby dragon looked at Miles, frozen mid-Protocol.

She looked at Beno and the saucepan.

She looked at Clucky, mid-growl, and at Gerald, sitting calm and green and close.

And she sneezed — *pfft!* — a tiny puff of violet sparkles that drifted down over everyone like glitter at the world's smallest party — and then she did the thing that decided every single day of the rest of their lives: she smiled at the whole room at once, the whole pack, all of them together, and made a sound like a kettle and a cat agreeing about something, and fell in love with everybody simultaneously and forever.

Scientists call that imprinting. Beno called it "she LIKES us," in a whisper with a wobble in it.

The dragon climbed out of her shell — mostly; she wore the bottom half like roomy pants for the first hour — and wobbled her first wobble on her own four feet, and everyone saw it at the same time: her left wing. It didn't fold like the right one. It stuck out a little, crooked, like a bent umbrella.

"Her wing—" started Miles, reaching for a fresh page, already worried.

"It's like her mom's," said Beno softly. And it was — exactly like the great crooked fold they'd loved at the bottom of the world. "It's not broken, Miles. It's *inherited*."

They tried names all morning. Miles proposed dignified ones — Aurora, Violet, Midnight — and the dragon ignored every single one with the serene indifference of royalty. Beno proposed forty-one names in eleven minutes, and she ignored forty of those too. And then, around lunchtime, she climbed onto the kitchen table, gathered herself importantly, tipped left, tipped right, wobble, wobble — trying to keep her balance on the slippery wood — and Beno laughed until he fell over and gasped:

"WOBBLES. Look at her. She's WOBBLES."

And the dragon stopped. Turned. Looked at him with those enormous violet eyes.

And made the kettle-cat sound, twice, which — Clucky confirmed with a formal double-peck on the table — is legally a yes.

Wobbles. It had been her name for one whole year already, if you think about it. Some names just wait for you to notice them.

---

Now. Let me tell you what it's like to live with a baby ender dragon, because for the next several weeks, the house on the hill found out.

First: a baby dragon does not sleep. I need you to understand this the way the pack came to understand it, which is: *at all*. Baby dragons are solar-powered, moon-powered, snack-powered, and powered by some third thing science hasn't found yet. At midnight, Wobbles was awake. At three in the morning, Wobbles was awake, and standing on Miles. At dawn, Wobbles was awake and had already been up the chimney "to check."

Except.

Except when Clucky sang.

They discovered it by accident on the second night, when the whole exhausted household had given up in a heap by the fire, and Clucky — out of habit, because she'd done it every night for a year and a half, because it's what she does — tucked her head, fluffed her feathers, and sang her song. The weird one. The one you know.

*Brrr-buk-buk-brooooo... brrr-buk-buk-brooooo...*

And Wobbles — mid-climb, halfway up the curtains, eyes like violet headlamps — went still. Blinked once. Blinked again, slower, the long blink, the losing-battle blink. Climbed down the curtain. Walked over to Clucky. Curled around her in a circle exactly the shape of her mother's thousand-year flight path, put her chin on the floor...

...and was asleep before the second *brooooo*.

The kitchen was silent. Nobody dared high-five.

"The song," breathed Beno, at last. "It works on ALL dragons. Clucky. CLUCKY. You're not just a wolf. You're a *dragon-whisperer* wolf."

Clucky accepted this with dignity, and from that night on, the lullaby wasn't just a habit. It was infrastructure. Remember that too. (I'm asking you to remember a lot tonight, I know. That's how first chapters are. Everything I hand you now, you get to unwrap later.)

Second thing about baby ender dragons: the hiccups.

It started small, in week two, after Wobbles ate her first chorus fruit — Granny Ender had sent a crate of them ahead ("dragon vegetables, dearies; she'll know what to do") — and Wobbles knew exactly what to do, which was eat nine. That evening, sitting by the fire, she went *hic*.

And she was in the pantry.

Not "ran to the pantry." Not "walked while nobody watched." One moment: fireside. *Hic.* Next moment: a violet glow from inside the closed pantry, and the sound of a baby dragon discovering where the potatoes lived.

"Did she—" said Miles.

"She DID," said Beno, delighted beyond all reason. "She's got her people's TELEPORT. It comes out when she HICCUPS. Miles, we have a hiccup-dragon. This is the best day of my LIFE."

It was not the best day of Miles's life. Miles had recently taped a very neat piece of paper to the wall titled WOBBLES: WEEK-BY-WEEK DEVELOPMENT SCHEDULE, and nowhere on it, in any week, did it say *begins randomly teleporting*. Over the following days, the hiccups came whenever she got excited, or startled, or too giggly, or too proud of herself — which, if you know babies, is most of the time. *Hic* — she's on the roof. *Hic* — she's in the camel-sized guest room. *Hic* — she's inside the cupboard where Miles kept the Protocol, eating the Protocol, and looking radiantly pleased about it through the little keyhole.

The pack developed a warning system. It went like this: whoever saw Wobbles' tummy do the pre-hiccup shiver would yell "INCOMING!" — and then everyone would dive to cover the breakables, and then the hiccup would happen anyway, somewhere else, to something nobody predicted. As warning systems go it had a perfect record: zero successes. Beno was very proud of it. "It's not about WORKING, Miles. It's about TOGETHERNESS."

And the third thing. The flying.

You'd think — wouldn't you? — that flying would be the easy part. She was a dragon. Her mother had owned the entire sky at the end of the world, worn a groove in it, a thousand years deep. Flight was in Wobbles the way the circling song was in her — and the song was in her, by the way; she hummed it in her sleep, curled around Clucky, the old tune that rises and circles and never quite lands.

But the wings wouldn't do it.

She tried. Oh, listener, she tried. Every morning she climbed the fence post — the tall one, her spot — and spread her wings, the straight one and the crooked one, and looked out at the air with her whole small heart in her eyes. And jumped. And *glided* — for one glorious second, two — always curving left, because of the crooked wing — and then the curve got away from her, and the ground arrived, and she face-planted into the potato farm with a soft *whumf* and a puff of soil.

Every time, she got up. Shook the dirt off. Looked around to see who saw.

And every time, the getting-up got a little slower, and the looking-around got a little more worried, and — here's the part that hurt to watch — every face-plant made the hiccups worse that evening. *Hic* — the roof. *Hic* — the well. *Hic*, *hic*, *hic* — three blinks in a row, further each time, like the teleport was trying to do what the wings couldn't, like something in her was saying *if I can't fly there, I'll just GO there,* and didn't quite know where "there" was, or how far was safe.

Miles responded to worry the way Miles responds to worry. The wall schedule grew. Wing measurements, twice a week, with the soft measuring tape. Glide distances, recorded. A chart titled DAYS UNTIL PROBABLE FLIGHT with a number on it that Miles kept quietly revising upward, then hiding when Wobbles walked by.

He wasn't wrong to care. I want to say that clearly, because Miles gets a hard chapter later and you should know his heart the whole way through: every measurement was a way of saying *I love you and I am terrified of losing you,* written in the only language Miles spoke fluently. But here's the thing about being measured, and every kid in every world knows it even when the grown-ups forget: when someone checks you against a chart often enough, you stop hearing *I love you.* You start hearing *not yet. Not yet. Not yet.*

Wobbles couldn't read the wall.

But she watched Miles look at it, and then look at her, and she understood the wall completely.

---

The night this chapter ends on was warm and blue, early summer, fireflies out over the potato farm.

Dinner was done. The dishes were stacked. Wobbles had spent the evening being magnificent at everything except the one thing: she'd out-raced the sheep (the sheep demanded a rematch), out-swum the pond frogs, learned to open the front door with her tail, and stolen Beno's hat with a move so smooth he applauded. Then, at dusk, when she thought nobody was watching, she'd climbed the fence post one more time, and spread her wings one more time, and jumped.

*Whumf.*

Potato farm. Face first. The fireflies scattered and regrouped.

She lay there a moment longer than usual. And from the porch, three hearts broke quietly in three different ways, and three someones started toward her — and the fourth got there first without moving at all, because the fourth was already out there, as he was every dusk, waiting by the fence in the warm dark.

"Good glide," said Gerald.

Wobbles lifted her face out of the dirt and looked at him.

"The best one yet," said Gerald. "Nearly three seconds. I counted. I'm very good at counting slow things." He settled down next to her in the potato rows, unhurried, unbothered, green as the leaves. "You know, I once followed your family across the entire world. Every biome there is. And do you know how fast I walked?"

Wobbles made a small kettle-sound, interrogative.

"Slowly," said Gerald, with enormous satisfaction. "The whole way. And I still got everywhere that mattered." He looked up at the first stars. "Skies are patient, little one. Skies have been waiting for people since before there were people. Yours isn't going anywhere. She'll find you when you're ready — or you'll find her. That's how it worked for your mother. That's how it works for everybody."

And Wobbles sighed a tiny violet sigh, and put her chin on his small green shoulder — carefully; she was already learning to be careful with the ones she loved — and they sat together in the potato farm while the stars came out, a creeper and a dragon, the two most misunderstood shapes in the whole world, watching the sky be patient.

That's where the pack found them. Nobody said anything. Miles brought out blankets. Beno brought out snacks ("it's the OTHER half of the job, Miles"), and the whole family ended up in the warm dirt between the potato rows, under the wheeling square stars, too comfortable to move, the way summer nights sometimes arrange things.

"Terrible Idea Number Thirty-Five," murmured Beno, on his back, nearly asleep. "We build her... practice sky. Close to the ground. A short sky. A starter sky..."

"That's..." Miles yawned. "...we're not... how would you even..."

"Pillows, Miles. Acres of pillows..."

And high on her fence post — her spot — Clucky the wolf stood one last patrol, tiny helmet silver in the starlight, watching over her pack: two boys in the dirt, a creeper being used as a pillow, and a baby dragon whose eyes were doing the long losing battle at last.

She tucked her head. She fluffed her feathers.

And she sang the song her whole family sleeps to — the one that has worked on chickens, boys, llamas, grandmothers, and exactly one thousand-year-old dragon — the one that means, always and only:

*Brrr-buk-buk-brooooo... brrr-buk-buk-brooooo...*

The pack is safe. Sleep now.

Wobbles hummed one bar of her mother's circling song, soft and slipping, the tune that rises and circles and never quite lands —

— and landed.

Asleep. In the middle of everyone. Where babies belong.

The fireflies drifted over the farm like slow green stars. The real stars wheeled slowly over the fireflies. And far away — farther than any of them knew yet, past the coast, past the reefs, across every ocean of the world, on a sea stack at the top of the waves — an enormous, ancient, empty nest sat quiet in the dark, holding one old feather and a hundred years of wind.

But that's tomorrow's problem. That's the whole rest of the book.

Goodnight, house on the hill. Goodnight, potato farm. Goodnight, Wobbles, one week old, dreaming in circles.

*Brrr-buk-buk-brooooo.*