“Thank you,” Pangaea said, both to the spikefrill and to Amy as he accepted her offered hand up. Pangaea was a little concerned at first that his clawed fingers and toes would be painful to the spikefrill, but as he gingerly dug his claws in between her tough, pebbly scales, he realized that she could probably barely feel him. Soon he and Guido had joined Amy atop the spikefrill’s back, and the horned leafeater began lumbering forward.
Under normal circumstances, Pangaea would have felt thrilled to be riding on the back of a ceratopsian, but at the moment he was still overwhelmed with misery over the recent events (and probably would be, he thought gloomily, for a long time to come). He curled up dejectedly beneath the spikefrill’s spreading, horn-studded crest, burying his head in his wings.
Guido crawled up alongside him. “Hey, Pangaea,” he said, “what’s wrong?”
“It’s all my fault,” Pangaea groaned, not even moving his head. “Everyone who died back there…the only reason they were there is because of me. I screwed up, I got myself captured, and now they’re dead because they came to save me. I’m not worth all those dinosaurs dying.”
“Oh, come on,” Guido said in a comforting tone. “Who told you that?”
“No one,” Pangaea said pessimistically, “but it’s true.”
“Hey, it’s not your fault,” Guido told him. “You…uh…” he paused embarrassingly. “…What happened to you exactly?”
“Amy and Pterano were going to leave the valley, and I went with them to see them off,” Pangaea explained. “On my way back, I ran into these two egg stealers I recognized. I knew that they’d come to raid nests, so I tried to convince them to leave the valley. But while I was talking to them, Screech and Thud showed up, and caught me.”
“Oh, yeah,” Guido said, “I saw that part.”
Suddenly Pangaea realized something that made him mentally slap himself. Oh, shoot! he thought. Guido’s the one who told everyone I was in trouble. He’s the reason there was any rescue party at all. What if I just made him feel like he’s responsible for all those dinosaurs getting killed?
If Guido had made that inference, he didn’t show it. “C’mon, that doesn’t mean it’s your fault,” he said. “I–I–I mean, the sharpteeth could have caught anyone.”
“Somehow I doubt it,” Pangaea muttered. “I think Screech has a grudge against me.”
“Still, they’re the ones who set up the whole,” Guido reasoned. “I didn’t even know sharpteeth could do that. Where’d Red Claw get so many fast biters?”
“He sent Thud to round them up,” Pangaea said. “He must have had the whole thing planned. We’re going to have to be a lot more careful about sharpteeth. They’re more organized than we thought they were.”
“Yeah…” Guido shuddered. “Anyway, sure, it’s terrible what happened,” he said gravely, “but we got you back alive, so I think it was worth it.”
Pangaea still felt guilty for what had happened, but admittedly, Guido’s words were making him feel better. He rubbed his eyes with the downy feathers on the inside of his wings to dry them, briefly pausing in wonder at the fact that he still had humanlike tear ducts. (Pangaea didn’t even cry very often, even when he was genuinely upset, though he found that the tears were much more likely to start flowing while he was talking to someone.) “Thanks, Guido,” he said, “for being so nice to me. And thanks for organizing the whole rescue party, too. You really have no idea how glad I am to have a friend like you.”
“Ah, don’t mention it,” Guido grinned.
