Chapter Two
I stayed out in the Nothing for a few weeks, acclimating myself and hoping the law enforcers would write me off as dead. No one came out to where I was, and no one would. It was a dangerous trek, and one could easily become lost in the endless, flat land with nothing but the horizon and blinding heat in every direction. I had to learn the movements of the air and the shifts in the Earth in order to survive, and I listened to every rock and studied every bug I came across. They had been there much longer than I, and, surely, had more expertise than I could ever hope to have.
I learned to stay up late into the night and use the stars in the sky to direct me around the Nothing. While the Earth was full of secrets, the stars revealed everything and spelled out their directions across the sky. All I had to do was look for the warrior’s spear above my little home, and I could journey, in the same direction of its flight, to the well I found in a patch of soft ground. The water in it was surprisingly cold. A small cluster of bright stars – I named them the Children – helped me get to the ant hill where I would find the little morsels slowly making their way home and I could eat until I was full. The stars helped me chart out the way to the president’s mountain, the area free of snakes, and even the way back home to the compound. Not that I was going. I just wanted to know.
I learned to sleep during the hottest part of the day in my fossa form. I was too scared to sleep in my human form; I would have been more recognizable. Of course, anyone who was, even a little, educated would spot the Malagasy fossa in the wrong part of the world and become highly suspicious, but I doubted they would approach me. Life in such a sparse environment was making me very agile as a hunter. I had always loved running and climbing, but there had never been much call for me to kill my dinner before that strange time of exile. However, hunting suited me, and I made sure to hunt at least one thing every day, even if it was a tiny bug slowly trundling along in the dirt.
To hunt something was to know it entirely. I could smell and almost taste my prey from very far away. I learned not to chase, but to observe for a long time before making any moves. I waited for the thing I was following to make mistakes; it would get tired; it would miss the small reserve of water; it would stay in the sun just a little too long. I crept up softly and slowly, making sure to roll my paws along the Earth so that I moved with it and not against it. I never ran unless the thing I was hunting gave chase. Energy was for saving, not spending, and I kept my budget in check.
At the end of the night, when the morning light pushed its way up into the sky and the threat of intense heat stared me in the face, I didn’t feel fear. Instead, I would rise and stand in human form so I could sing the traditional welcome song of Madagascar, the one I had heard my mother sing when her sister came back to her after so many years apart, the one we sang to the American delegation, the last people to call themselves Americans. I raised my head and sang that melody that was meant to be so warm and open, and yet always sounded so sad and lost. As I sang, I walked back to my little enclave where I would spend the daylight hours fast asleep in fossa form yet again. I was hardly ever human in those days.
When I slept, I dreamed of Tina and my family. They were the only ones to truly understand me, to not demand that I act like everyone else. I would dream of the day my mother made me a gown out of the papery papaya leaves from the tree in front of our house. I had been so little and scrawny that the long, ovular shapes covered me completely. I would dream of laughing with Tina and the way her face would light up with a funny story. Tina seemed to constantly forget that she was a prisoner and came from one of the poorest shifter families in the compound. I always loved that about her, that she just didn’t care.
And after shuffling through the familiar faces, I would dream of Black Feather. Black Feather with his mussed hair, his piercing eyes, and his constant smirk. I’d always felt drawn to him, but nothing had ever happened. He was too much of a jerk, too presumptuous. I hated the way he thought every girl wanted him, and hated him even more any time some poor female threw herself at him. Yes, he was handsome, but there was no reason for him to be so bold about it. After all, I thought, I was gorgeous, but I didn’t go around bragging to all the average girls. Why would I?
So, I would sleep with Black Feather’s face in my mind, and then I would see it get buried under piles of dirt and rock. Even in my sleep, he was a prisoner locked deep inside a mountain and all I could do was claw at the surface and scream. I had to free him, but I saw no pathway that led to his cell. I was lost.
Because I had no road that led to him, I stayed where I was. I hunted, I learned the stars, and I sang. When I slept, it was to explore the mountain in my dream. I begged my subconscious for help; there had to be some way inside that I could use, but I just couldn’t see it. I kept my eyes closed and prayed for some new nugget of truth to emerge from the dark.
One night, in human form, I walked across the desert. I looked up and saw the Children. They were burning so brightly, that I staggered a bit in my steps. My stagger stubbed my toe against a small rock that I had never noticed before. It jutted out of the ground like a knife, and I realized I had a small river of blood coming out of my big toe. I sighed; an injury always set me back a few days. I got angry at the rock that had cut me so easily, and I reached down to pull it out, but it was much bigger than I realized.
I tried to loosen it from the ground by rocking and wiggling a little in each direction, but nothing worked. I had softened the ground a bit, but there was no progress with the rock. ‘It must be huge,’ I thought. Leaving it behind, I went off to the water hole to wash my foot. I bandaged my foot with some soft grass, then carefully walked back to the rock, and sat down to contemplate it.
Pulling it up was useless. I was at an enormous disadvantage; the rock had all this earth holding it down. So to lift it up, I had to fight not just the rock, itself, but the Earth as well. Why was I fighting this Earth that had taught me so much? Maybe there was something else it wanted to show me.
I used my hands to brush away the first few centimeters of dirt and saw that the rock spread out and down. If I wanted to lift it, I would have to dig in the ground until I could get under the massive thing and then lift it out of the ground. I crossed my arms and consulted the sky.
The first stars I saw were the spear in its flight, and I looked to the target it pointed at. Could there be something useful that way? I shifted to my fossa form and walked slowly in the direction that the spear flew. I was hunting, but this was the first time I didn’t know what I was tracking. I had this feeling in my gut, the same feeling I would have as a child when a distant relative was about to arrive for a visit. Something was close, something was calling me. And I had to see what was under that giant rock.
My father had given me odd missions back when we lived on the shores of Tamatave, Madagascar. There, he would look out into the horizon and say something like, “There is a man in a dark hat standing out there. He knows something that you don’t know. Go find out what it is.” Then I would run out the door and go, full speed, to the man in the black hat, yelling out “Uncle! Uncle, tell me your secrets!”
Of course, it was always an acquaintance of my father’s. The new person would scoop me up and teach me something about the seashells and the whorls the sea had formed inside them, or tell me why the sunset painted the sky with so many colors. Sometimes, my new person would be a storyteller and tell me about a kidnapped princess or a beautiful warrior who saves her father’s legacy with her courage. I liked stories about people who may or may not have existed, but what truly captivated me was the real world and how it functioned.
That an ocean would take the time to carve out a small seashell was fascinating to me. Or that sunlight could be bothered to refract into purples and pinks as it faded away was something I always marveled at. The natural world seemed to be the most unpredictable and strangest character of them all – so vicious and unforgiving one moment, and so soft and lovely the next. I drank it up.
“Father,” I asked one day, “have you ever been in the snow?”
“No, my darling,” he answered me. “The snows don’t fall on Earth anymore.” He said this casually as if it were the most mundane detail he could pass along, but it stopped me in my tracks. The snow no longer fell? What was he talking about?
“But Father,” I insisted, my little legs struggling to keep up with his long, strong strides as we walked, “I’ve seen images of snow on the network. We learned about it in school. Isn’t there snow somewhere?”
“What you have seen,” he explained, “is from the past. Before the Earth became too warm. That was back when the oceans had fish so large no boat could hold them, back when people had to buy special clothing to keep out the cold. I remember being very small and having to wear a thick sweater my mother made, so that I would not catch a chill. Now, no one wears them. The Earth is getting hotter and hotter, so the snow can’t fall.”
“But,” I crinkled up my little eyebrows and looked up at him with consternation, “where did the snow go? Did it find a cold place?”
He reached down and stroked the black star on my face as he always did and smiled. “I don’t know, darling. I only know that it’s not here anymore. We humans made a mistake, and so we’ve lost something very important and special to us. We can’t do that again. It’s important to cherish what we have.”
He reached down and took my hand to walk me over to the little boat that he used to farm his long, shiny plants from the sea, and we sat inside it. He used his long paddle to push us off, and we drifted and bobbed out into the water. I watched as he checked on his plants and harvested the longer, stronger stalks. I thought about a picture I had seen in school of an ocean full of fish and coral. It must have been a beautiful thing, something so beautiful that the humans around it gobbled it up.
I thought of a video we saw of a man using explosives to kill all the fish around him and bring them to the surface, and I remembered how angry that video had made me. He didn’t seem to realize what he was really doing – blowing up the ocean, pulverizing it so that no one could fish in that spot again. On the screen, the man just smiled and gave a thumb’s up as if he were incredibly intelligent. I felt a slow, angry burn in my chest at the sight of his joy. It was thoughtless people like him who had reduced us to eating weeds from the sea. I lived right by the ocean my whole life, and I had never tasted a single fish.
My questions about the snow inspired my father to take me to a cold place. He carried me into a cold storage where his friend worked with different chemicals that had to be kept at very cold temperatures. I shivered as my father walked me to the different displays of test tubes and beakers, and I held on to him tightly. I loved the lab, but the cold was something I had never contended with before and it frightened me. He, and the scientist we visited, chuckled at my fear, and she held her hands out for me to jump into her arms. I did gladly, and she gave me more details about the compounds she was working with to help people stay healthy in the changing world, to create foods from new sources, and look at chemicals differently.
I fell asleep in my father’s arms as he carried me home, my head full of new facts but one more important than any: it was important to change the way I looked at things as often as possible. Otherwise, I would take things like the ocean and the weather for granted and start to eat them up as if they would never disappear. I had to change my perspective and keep things turning and remind myself that nothing was permanent. Not even me.
Thinking of this as I approached my tiny water source in the Nothing, I tried something. I stopped walking and shifted into human form. I put my hands on the ground, kicked my feet into the air, and stayed up on my hands. Now, I was looking backwards at where I had come and seeing the Nothing from an odd, upside down view. The Nothing looked very different from here. I staggered forward on my hands a bit and forced my head forward, but that was too painful. I turned on my hands so that I was going the other way. Walking on my hands, I approached the water source and looked beyond it.
For the first time, I saw the rise of the ground and the shape of it. It was like a spade – an old gardening tool that my mother had used to grow her scraggly little vegetables. She had worked with the hard earth. How would she have gotten that rock out?
I gently kicked my legs down and stretched up to the sky, imagining the huge rock in my hands, weightless and floating up to the sky. If only I were a magical being, but I am a scientist. A biologist and non-believer, despite the fact that my own body changes from human to animal. After all, magic is just a misunderstood science. Maybe one day rocks will drift overhead, but that night I needed to let go of my dreams and work with facts.
I wandered back – a little on my hands, a little bit on my feet – to curl up and sleep in my little hovel. I sang the welcome song backwards, all the words in the wrong order, to let the Earth know I was seeing it in a new way. I fell asleep with my feet up and my head down, in hopes of changing my currents and my personal flow. And then, I dreamed.
I floated over the shifter compound and hovered low over Tina as she slept. Black Feather was there, free, but wandering restlessly around the empty space. Everyone was out cold in their beds and completely unaware of the angry, young man in their midst. He looked up and saw me in the sky and gave me his overly-confident smirk at first, then dropped the act.
“Larissa,” he called up to me, “Larissa…Larissa…”
I tried to ask him how I could come to get him, how I could reach him through the tons and tons of earth that he was buried in, but I couldn’t speak. All I could do was listen.
“The key is underneath,” he continued. “You have to find it. You have to find me. Don’t leave me alone. Please. The key is underneath.”
With a gasp, I rushed to the surface of my consciousness and sat up with a gasp. I was sweating terribly and felt shaky from the effort of dreaming. I couldn’t believe how desperately I needed a drink of water; my whole body screamed for just a few drops of water. The sun was high in the sky. It was the hottest part of the day; there was no way I could walk all the way across to the water. Not in the burning sunlight, not without my stars.
So, when I stood and started walking out into the scalding daylight, I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing. I moved slowly and saw my handprints in the Nothing from the night before. The fingers of my own hands pointed to the water, and I followed them in as straight a line as I could. My feet dragged as I forced myself to walk. I couldn’t remember the last time I had sweated so profusely, the last time I had burned so thoroughly under the sun. Living at night had taken away any tolerance of the heat, and my body begged me to find some shadow or shade. But there were no dark spaces between me and the water; I had to brave the white-hot desert.
As I walked, I swore I could see the heat rippling the air like the old corrugated metal roofs of my country. Sweat dripped into my eyes and stung terribly, making me stop and bend over to blink it away as much as I could. I straightened up only to find myself back where I started. I walked a little faster.
The water source seemed to hover above me for hours, though it was probably only a few minutes. I made my way to the water and collapsed just a few feet shy of my goal. Digging my fingers into the dirt, I crawled to the clear liquid and dunked my head into my drinking water, completely oblivious to all the dirt and sweat I was putting into the formerly crystal clear liquid. I lifted my head out and threw it back so that the cool rivulets could travel down my neck and back, then went down again to drink.
I had never been so thirsty. I was like a creature possessed; no amount of water seemed to be enough. I kept drinking, unable to take a break or stop myself, and soon my stomach was swelling with the excess of water. I stopped to catch my breath and then dove in again. I did that over and over, shocked at the burning thirst I felt in my throat. Was I sick? I wasn’t the kind of person who came down with this or that illness. I’d always been a resilient child. Perhaps I was finally capitulating to my mortality out here in the desert.
As I thought about the possibility of having an illness, I stopped to feel my forehead and do a mental scan of my insides. No warning signs. I closed my eyes and listened to myself breathe; my lungs were normal.
When I opened my eyes, I saw the water a little differently. In front of me was the small well. Now I saw a bit more clearly where it came from. One side of the well was a sheer plane of rock that led sharply down into the ground, just like the one I had become so interested in the night before. I put my hand against the rock and slid it down until I was up to my armpit in the water. It went all the way down to my fingertips and there, at the bottom, the rock lifted and presented a great, cold chasm. I gasped…could it be? Was I just on top of a great, underground cave with its own lake?
I had heard stories of places like this – great bodies of water hiding just under the ground. I looked at the water again and desperately tried to think of a way that I could take some air with me to the bottom, but I had nothing. Inspired all the same, I jumped up and ran back to my shady spot between the rocks and grabbed a white piece of dolostone and used it to draw out a plan. Where could an outlaw like me get some diving gear? And, was there any chance this waterway could lead me underneath the Earth all the way to the president’s mountain? Perhaps this was the key Black Feather told me about in my dream. There was a chance. It was a tiny, miniscule chance, but I had to try.
I slept the rest of the day. The whole time I was asleep I had a smile on my face.
***
That night, I started the first phase of my plan. I had to get some kind of gear and take it back to my water hole. So, that meant I needed a trip to the city.
I kept my human form and made myself more male. The fossa is one of the few animals that can change genders, and luckily for me, this ability has affected my human appearance as well. With a flat chest, broad shoulders, and a strong jaw, I walked out of the desert and toward the east side of the city. I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly, but I knew if I kept myself alert and aware that something would appear to me.
I came up on the first set of buildings and was surprised to see that they were apartments. Usually, humans don’t like to live too far apart. Maybe they were finally a little sick of one another. I walked through the buildings as casually as I could, telling myself to be broken and useless, someone no one wanted. A few people turned their heads to look at me, but I just sailed by at a casual lope, and they went back to their conversations.
Reminding myself to breathe, I continued down the street. I thought I heard a voice that I recognized, but I shook my head no. It couldn’t be. But it was; the one and only Tina Traxon was there about two yards ahead of me and hiding between two old buildings, no collar to speak of and talking animatedly with a human.
“How many more of these can I get?” she was asking.
“Hard to say,” the guy responded. “I have to make them myself. I can’t recruit anyone else to help. Too dangerous.”
“Maybe, we could work something out…” She moved a little closer to him, and he pushed her away.
“I don’t want to get with some dirty shifter. Aren’t you, like, a dog or something?”
“A wolf. Look, tell me what you need to make your life a little easier, and I will do what I can.”
At this point, I was a bit closer and looked over at Tina to see if she would recognize me. It had been a while since we had seen one another, and she didn’t recognize me at first. I put my hand up with all five fingers extended, our old greeting, and she froze. She gave me a tiny, non-verbal ‘no’ and focused on the guy in front of her.
“I guess I would like to have a shifter at a party.”
“What?” She stepped back in surprise. “I thought we were dirty.”
“Yeah, but if word gets out I got one or two shifters into a human party, that would be a big deal for me. Like, some real credentials.”
Tina snapped her fingers as she thought of a solution. “What about a shifter band? We have a great group of musicians on the compound. They shift as they play. You’ll love them.”
“Oh, whoa! That would be insane.” He laughed a little as he shook his head in wonder. “You shifters always surprise me. You get me that band for the 14th of next month, and I’ll de-collar five more. Deal?”
“Deal.” Tina held her hand out to shake on it, but the guy just looked at her hand and then moved away. She let her limb fall and sighed. The guy she’d made the deal with passed me without a second look; I was sitting on the ground as if I’d fallen asleep out in the open. I drew no attention. After I heard his footsteps fade off into the distance, I stood and found Tina standing just over me.
“So,” she said, that little half-smile-half-smirk of hers on her face, “still practicing this great vanishing act of yours.”
“Yes. No one is putting a collar on me.” I quickly threw my arms around her in a big hug and held her for a long time. She squeezed me right back. It was amazing to have contact with someone else after all that time alone in the desert. She felt like a cool drink of water after all the heat I had withstood for hours on end. I smelled her hair and recognized the apple-scented soap that she always used at the compound.
“Where is your collar?” I asked her, pulling away. She smiled and moved her shoulders from side to side to show me the lack of metal.
“That guy I was talking to, has a device that unlocks them without setting off any alarms. You just put it in your bed or somewhere in your house and the government thinks you’re sleeping or just wandering around your home. It’s great. The only bad thing is you can’t keep it off for more than eight hours or else they get suspicious. Of course, now I owe a massive favor to a total jerk, but it’s worth it. Everyone’s tired of being locked up in their own house.”
“It’s still a shackle. The shifters should revolt. No one should put up with any of this.”
She rolled her eyes at my insolence. “Larissa, you know everyone is too scared. Bachmann has everyone under his thumb. The only people who even consider standing up to him are the losers I dig up in the city, and they’re all separated and, well, unpleasant.” She paused and then added, “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for something.”
She cocked her head at me. “What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know yet. So, I’m looking.”
She sighed and put her hands on my shoulders. “Are you hungry?”
I nodded, and she turned me so that we walked further toward the city looking for all the world like a couple on a date. We made our way further south into the heart of the city where we could peruse the street vendors. I could smell roasted meat and toasted breads. My stomach rumbled so loudly that Tina and I had to suppress a giggle at the sound. We found an outdoor collection of plastic tables and chairs and then kept walking until we were just a few feet away and able to duck behind a tall, crumbling building.
“Ready?”
Tina nodded. “Ready.”
I wandered out to the vendor and consulted his menu of pictures as if I were undecided. “Hey, how’s it going,” I said, focusing on the little images.
“Not bad. Just working. Let me know what I can get you.”
“Sure, just give me a second.” I stroked my chin and kept my gaze forward as a scream let loose from behind me.
“Wolf! Wolf!” Everyone, who was eating, suddenly sprang up and ran away as Tina charged forward, foaming at the mouth and growling like a wild thing. I quickly ran over to a table full of food and grabbed everything I could as she ran off in the direction we’d come, and I took off after her. I found her on a park bench with her legs crossed and a big smile on her face.
“Hi, honey. Did you pick up dinner?”
I laughed and tossed her a couple of sandwiches. “Sure did. Dig in.” I sat next to her and bit into my own food. I had to force myself to eat slowly and not make myself sick. A few people passed the abandoned tables and saw us on the bench, but no one made the connection. Some even did the same, helping themselves to barely touched food so as to not see it go to waste. Another couple sat across from us and, after a moment’s hesitation, we resumed our talk in a whisper.
“Where have you been?”
“Out beyond the compound. In the desert.”
“Doing what?”
I filled Tina in on everything I had been focused on, all the trials and tribulations of living in the Nothing. I let her know I thought there was a great underground body of water but I had no way of traveling it without some kind of apparatus. I didn’t even know the name of what I needed; I just knew I couldn’t do it with the air in my lungs.
She listened patiently as she chewed her food and then nodded slowly. “Okay. I think I know what you’re looking for.”
“What’s it called?”
“I don’t know the name,” she said, cuddling up to my side to maintain the appearance of being my girlfriend out with me for a date, “but I know where it is. Let’s go for a walk.”
We stood up and threw our refuse in the recycling bins. We watched our garbage get sucked down the bin vacuum and then moved on. She pointed me in the direction of the shopping district, and we walked arm in arm into the heart of enemy territory. A law enforcer rode by on his motorcycle and didn’t even turn his head at the sight of us.