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things. He thought he’d like to run in the opposite direction of the roar and keep running until he ended up back at his grandfather’s house. Then he thought that he shouldn’t run, because that would make him look like a chicken. But then he thought that it was better to look like a chicken than to be stomped, or crushed, or shredded.
    “What was that?” Pearl asked as the roar faded.
    “I dare not say.” Mr. Tabby smoothed out the front of his vest. “Now, on to business.” As he opened the door to the Identification Room, he said to Ben, “Would you be so kind as to bolt the front door?”
    As Pearl followed Mr. Tabby into the Identification Room, the cookie tin still in her hands, Ben hurried across the lobby. He grabbed the dead bolt, but it wouldn’t budge. He didn’t have dead bolts in his house back in Los Angeles. Instead, there was a security keypad that activated an alarm system. Ben pinched his fingers trying to slide the rusty bolt into place. After a few tries, he gave up. The door was closed—that was good enough. Besides, he didn’t want to miss one second of whatever was going on in the other room.

10

    P lease set the patient on the identification table,” Mr. Tabby said.
    The table sat in the middle of a cluttered room. A wide conveyor belt ran from one end of the table to a huge hole in the wall. The hole led into a tunnel of some sort.
    Mr. Tabby handed Ben and Pearl each a fire-fighter’s helmet. “We must take precautions. Even a hatchling can produce a powerful flame.”
    “It did,” Ben said. “It almost fried my face.”
    Mr. Tabby set a helmet on his head, then loweredthe face shield. Ben and Pearl did the same. “Step away, please.” The kids stepped back as Mr. Tabby removed the lid of the cookie tin.
    The baby dragon arched its neck and turned its face, looking up at Mr. Tabby. A watery hiss emerged from its mouth, but no flame. Its head fell back onto the green-stained paper towels. Mr. Tabby removed the helmet. “No need for concern. It is too weak.”
    Ben and Pearl took off their helmets and set them aside. Mr. Tabby slid on a pair of white gloves, then grabbed a pair of tweezers from the table drawer.
    “I thought it might be a bat,” Ben said.
    “That is understandable. The color, the wings…” Using the tweezers, Mr. Tabby gently stretched out the bad wing. “But just as I suspected, it is a wyvern. My nose is rarely wrong.”
    “What’s a wyvern?” Pearl asked.
    “A wyvern is a winged dragon with two legs,” Mr. Tabby said. “They appear in many medieval stories from the area of the Known World calledWales. The wyvern was popular with knights in shining armor, who often wore its image on their shields and in their coats of arms.” Using the tweezers, he delicately uncurled the hatchling’s tail. “This sort of dragon often has a barbed tail.”



“Can you fix its wing?” Ben asked.
    “The wing is easily mended,” Mr. Tabby said. “As is the puncture wound in the tail. Do you have any idea how it became injured?”
    “My grandpa’s stupid cat caught it.”
    Mr. Tabby narrowed his eyes at Ben. “
Stupid
cat? You dare call a cat
stupid
?” A low growl arose in Mr. Tabby’s throat.
    Ben thought that
stupid
was a perfectly good way to describe a cat, along with
mean, nasty
, and
rotten
. He didn’t like cats, ever since the neighbor’s cat ate his first hamster. All that had been left was the end of the hamster’s tail. “I don’t like cats.”
    Mr. Tabby’s mustache flicked with annoyance. “My dear boy, perhaps cats don’t like
you
.”
    “The baby closed its eyes again,” Pearl said, pointing.
    Mr. Tabby mumbled as he typed on his creature calculator. “Species: dragon. Breed: wyvern. Age: approximately three days.”
    “Is the other dragon its mother?” Pearl asked.
    “What other dragon?”
    “The one Ben and I saw flying. The one that landed on the factory roof.”
    “That is a bothersome question that I shall ignore,”