My father and I live under different suns. In reality, it is the same: red and hungry, an intense crimson eye that sends the sweat fleeing from my skin. It’s as beautiful as it is harsh, but my father sees none of the beauty. The past has dulled his wonder, and so the light of this planet shines differently on each of us. For me, it is part of home. For him, it is a beacon over a prison. Like others in N’Terra, he had his heart set on another sun. This one is a poor replacement.
“Slow down, Octavia,” he says.
I tighten my hands, made thick with the white driving gloves I wear, on the steering column. My father has been allowing me to pilot the chariot since my birthday but still insists I drive too fast. I decelerate, only slightly—I love the feeling of the wind, tinged with the scent of the jungle, whipping across my face. This is one of the few times I feel relaxed.
My father says nothing else, so I squint at the intense green of the wilderness that blurs more slowly past us now, allowing the colors to blend. A smallish smudge of brown catches my eye—I’ve seen that mottled texture somewhere before in one of my research projects.
“Kunike,” I say out loud without really meaning to. Usually I would keep my observations to myself when driving with my father, but kunike are difficult to spot—I’ve never seen a live one—and I’m surprised to have happened across them. There are two: small and standing impossibly still at our approach. Their fur has blended into the grasses that surround them.
My father nods, unsmiling.
“Stop,” he says.
I bring the chariot to a gentle halt, tamping down the eagerness that swells in me like helium. My father lifts one hand from where it rests on the front bar and presses the signal key by the steering column. A short, sharp sound barks from our vehicle, and the two kunike become fully visible immediately. Their fur turns vividly red, and now I can see them clearly: small and fuzzy with large wide ears like sails. One rears up on its back legs, baring its surprisingly impressive fangs.
Years ago, my father would have prompted me for knowledge: “Purpose? Adaptational trajectory?” That was when I was still a kid, allowed out of the compound and into the open air of Faloiv for the first time. By now he doesn’t need to ask: he signaled the kunike merely as a demonstration—a hint of his rare generosity when it comes to his only child. But I find myself answering in my head anyway: The sentry kunike turn red to signal the rest of the pack. In the event of an attack, they would stop and fight while the others got away. The red coloring doubles as a diversion for the predator. Before, when my father and I would actually talk, he might have told me that the kunike turn a different color if what’s approaching can be considered prey. This alternate color would signal the hidden pack to attack rather than flee. But these conversations are long past. At sixteen, I’m expected to know these things already, and I do.
I’ve guided the chariot into motion again—the kunike fading back into camouflage behind us—and the wind picks up dust from the road, swirling it around us in rust-colored clouds. Our goggles protect our eyes, but he motions for me to fasten my face guard. Ahead, what looks like a scarlet bird hovers in the air, scanning the ground for food. I recognize it as a carnivore from its claws. But before I can even identify it, another creature—larger, a winged blue reptile—zooms in from out of nowhere and buries its talons in the red bird’s body. Both plummet to the ground, struggling.
“I’ll say one thing for this miserable planet,” my father says. I can barely hear him over the wind: I’m driving too fast again, but he hasn’t yet noticed. “It has an interesting predator-prey hierarchy. Carnivores preying only on other carnivores? Fascinating.”
I say nothing. When it comes to my father’s feelings about Faloiv, I tend to keep my opinions to myself. He hasn’t always hated it here, but many things have been different since my grandmother died five years ago, lost in the jungle on a scavenging trip. Perhaps the knowledge that this planet can swallow us up so easily had stirred some feelings of desperation. Faloiv has been his home for over forty years, after his birth planet became hostile to human life, and I doubt he remembers much of life before Faloiv. But home isn’t just memory, I’ve decided: it’s knowledge, knowing where you belong and where you fit. My grandmother’s loss ignited something restless in him, something angry and afraid. Faloiv is different for me. Greencoats—green, the color of a young branch, the sign of our inexperience but also of our commitment to growth—were born here. This is home.
“Sir,” I venture. “Will we see Dr. Adibuah today?”
“Yes,” my father answers, keeping his eyes trained on the dust path ahead.
“Does Dr. Adibuah ever come to the Paw to collaborate on your projects?” I ask, refusing to let his monosyllabicity irk me. “Or do you just come here because you’re on the Council?”
“I’ve told you not to refer to the Mammalian Compound as the Paw, Octavia. It’s adolescent and unspecific.”
Behind my goggles I roll my eyes. The greencoats have our own set of expressions: we call the Avian Compound the Beak, and the Amphibian Compound—where my best friend Alma lives—the Newt. Not exactly clever, but it is efficient—even if it is unspecific and adolescent. And we’re supposed to be clever, we students of N’Terra, children of whitecoats. It is our skills that will determine our survival. The founders of N’Terra had not meant for us to stay forever: Faloiv was the only habitable world their scouts had time to chart before evacuating the Origin Planet, and a meteor to the Vagantur’s hull during descent damaged the ship’s power cell irreparably. What had originally been envisioned as a brief stop on the hunt for a more survival-friendly sphere had become the final destination of the Vagantur. The original Council tried for twenty years to fix the ship before they gave up. Now here we are.
Outside the Beak, I pull up to a woman standing by the white, smooth-walled wigwam that serves as a gatehouse. I’m surprised by the buzzgun she carries—more and more guards have them these days, and it’s jarring to see it slung so casually over her shoulder. The woman had been smiling before we pulled up, but when she sees my father alongside me, she tucks the smile away. He has that effect on people.
“Names?” she says. She has a thin, almost-transparent slate in her hands. It’s a formality: she knows who we are. My father is a member of the Council—the twelve-person congress that makes decisions about N’Terra. My mother is on the Council as well, which makes for some interesting debates when we eat our evening meal. Or at least it used to, before my grandmother’s absence filled all our mouths with an ash of silence too thick to talk around.
I lean back as my father stretches across the steering column.
“Dr. English, Octavius. Mammalian Compound. Daughter: English, Octavia.”
“Dr. English,” she says after a moment, nodding in confirmation.
The guard passes the slate to my father, who applies his thumb to the screen, then passes it to me to do the same. I take the slate, center my thumb in the red square beside a picture of my face and profile, and the slate’s screen goes blank. I pass it back to her.
The solid white gates ahead of us slide apart and the woman with the buzzgun nods us through. Under my hand, the chariot whispers forward toward a cluster of other vehicles, where a small group of whitecoats stands conversing. One of them wears a strange article of clothing that I’ve never seen: a red cloak with a tall collar that extends well above his head, which then curves forward and outward like the palm of a hand. It covers his face in shade: I can’t make out his features until I’ve parked alongside another chariot and the red-cloaked man moves toward us.
“English,” the man says, raising a hand gloved in the same red, scaled material as his cloak.
“Dr. Albatur,” my father says, nodding. He’s removed his traveling gloves and his hands look comfortingly human in comparison to the other man’s red fingers. “A pleasure to see you.”
So this is Dr. Albatur. I’ve heard his name a lot in the last year—he’s the recently elected Council Head of N’Terra. Somehow I’d pictured him differently. Younger. Stronger.
“Looking forward to hearing your proposals,” Dr. Albatur says. My parents have debated Albatur’s policies many a time at evening meal, but they’ve never mentioned his garb. I study it, trying to guess its purpose. He seems to see me for the first time and forces what could be interpreted as a smile onto his narrow mouth. “Ah, your daughter.”
“Hello, sir,” I say, nodding respectfully, but my eyes still wander to his covering.
“I see you’re curious about my hood,” he says. His tone is unpleasant to my ears, the sound of someone drawing a line and daring you to cross it.
“Yes, sir,” I say without hesitating.
He squints at me.
“So. Ask.”
I consider his expression, wondering if he means it. I almost look at my father for confirmation, but the idea of needing permission to ask a simple question irks me.
“What animal did we learn this technology from?” I finally say.
Dr. Albatur smirks.
“So very N’Terra of you, Miss English,” he says. “To assume everything we know is from this hot little globe. No, what I wear isn’t an innovation of Faloiv. This technology is of the Origin Planet: the material is from the hull of the Vagantur.”
My forehead wrinkles involuntarily.
“I wasn’t aware we dismantled the ship for personal items,” I say.
Dr. Albatur’s expression clouds and he fixes me with a sharp look.
“The Vagantur has not been dismantled,” he says quickly. “Nor will it ever be. And this is not merely a personal item. My skin and the sun of Faloiv are . . . incompatible, you see. This material acts as an effective barrier in order to keep me alive. A scrap of the hull that was damaged in the landing was salvaged when my condition became apparent.”
“Oh. But why will the Vagantur never be dismantled?” I go on. “Faloiv is our home. We’re not going anywhere.”
Dr. Albatur’s eyelids seem to thicken and droop: suddenly they too seem to be wearing a hood like the one over his head. He stares at me hard, the corner of his mouth twitching ever so slightly.
And then he turns his eyes to my father, transferring his gaze without moving his face. He addresses him now as if I’d never said a word.
“Dr. English,” he says. “How goes the progress on our other project?”
I look at my father to hear his response and note a change in his eyes. Normally round and wide like mine, they’ve narrowed slightly.
“It continues. We are still attempting to locate a specimen,” my father says. “I will alert you the moment we find one.”
“Good,” says Dr. Albatur, nodding from deep inside the hood. “Good.”
He turns abruptly, the bulky redness of him moving away from us and toward the doorway to the Beak, which guards with buzzguns are now opening—Albatur’s posture suggests that he’s bending slightly, bowing his head away from the sun. The whitecoats that accompany him scurry at his heels, staying close. I expect my father to follow him directly, but instead he’s rubbing the material of his gloves between two fingers, staring after Albatur with an expression of preoccupation.
“I guess I shouldn’t have asked,” I say when Albatur is out of earshot. “It just seems strange that he was so adamant about not dismantling the Vagantur. It just sits over there in the jungle, growing moss.”
“Dr. Albatur has many ideas as the Council Head,” my father says, and I’m surprised that he’s not angry with me. “The Vagantur is just part of them.”
“What else?” I ask. This is one of the longest conversations we’ve had in some time.
“The Solossius,” he says.
“The what?”
He looks at me then, quickly, his eyes refocusing.
“Dr. Adibuah will be waiting for us.”
My father has prepared me for what awaited in the main dome of the Beak—an absence of cages, with the herbivorous birds allowed to fly freely in the wide expanse of the dome. I duck immediately upon entering, two flurried pairs of wings darting just above my head in a flash of gold and crimson. From outside, the large dome appears to be solid white, but inside, sunshine pours in through slow-traveling clouds at the highest point of a transparent ceiling. The clouds are both real and not, my father has told me: made of moisture like real clouds but engineered indoors to provide the birds with a lifelike habitat. With the birds all around me, and the clouds above, it’s almost like being outside, beyond the borders of N’Terra.
Dr. Adibuah is approaching, and my enjoyment of the dome fades momentarily. His usually sunny disposition seems dimmer today, the tension in his jaw turning his face somber.
“Octavius,” he says. He shakes my father’s hand firmly. “I didn’t know Albatur was coming.”
I catch a glint of something like regret flit across my father’s face before he buries it again.
“Apologies. I assumed you knew.”
“I didn’t.” Dr. Adibuah looks at me, his eyes losing some of their gloom. “And here’s O, on my turf for the first time.”
I like when people call me O. Sometimes Octavia is unbearably close to Octavius: my father had claimed my name like a scientific discovery, a new species; something he thinks he owns. My mother had at least insisted on me having my own middle name, Afua.
“Hello, Dr. Adibuah.”
I follow my father and Dr. Adibuah through the dome, simultaneously admiring the Beak and eavesdropping on their conversation. We pause as a large flightless bird appears at the edge of the path, eyeing us almost irritably, as if commanding us to make way. I’ve seen this species before—the molovu—but only in the floating three-dimensional displays of the Greenhouse, where my peers and I go for our daily classes. The animal is so close now—just out of arm’s reach. My head seems to buzz with the wonder of it. I squint, looking for the tentacle it hides in its orange breast plumage, an opposable, trunk-like limb that it uses to essentially vacuum seeds from the jungle floor. But the bird disappears into the bushes on the other side of the path.
“Today is the first day that we were able to manipulate the oscree pattern to appear on a skinsuit,” Dr. Adibuah is saying, not bothering to conceal his excitement.
“Good,” says my father, who never gets excited about anything. My grandmother’s death had stolen the light from his eyes, and she wasn’t even his mother.
Dr. Adibuah opens his mouth to add something else, but a flash of red through the trees draws his attention and mine. We’re almost through the indoor jungle to the entrance of the Zoo, and Dr. Albatur stands ahead with his cluster of whitecoats like a drop of blood seeping through gauze, the red hood still shielding his face from the sun pouring in from above. The gloom returns to Dr. Adibuah’s eyes. He turns to me as if to distract himself from the sight of the Council Head.
“You’ll be in the Zoo with us one day,” he says.
I smile at Dr. Adibuah’s teasing use of “Zoo”—whitecoats don’t usually call it that; it’s another greencoat nickname for the laboratories in each compound, and is the place where greencoats such as myself desire to go most—a territory we won’t be allowed to enter until we’re twenty-one. It’s where all the important animal-focused research takes place, and while I’ve heard rumors that Dr. Albatur wants to cut back on zoology for other avenues of research, the Zoo is still the place where my grandmother said we would find the keys to our survival.
Dr. Albatur is absorbed in conversation with one of the guards, but he turns to eye me, as if I’ll come charging at the doors to the Zoo with a battering ram. Dr. Adibuah must notice my scowl because he pauses to give me one more smile before he and my father join the other whitecoats.
“One day at a time, O,” he says, and it seems like something he might be saying for his own benefit as well. “I hear they’re considering introducing internships, so you may be in sooner than you think.”
“Internships? Seriously?”
“I hope I haven’t given anything away,” Dr. Adibuah says, smiling. “Let’s keep that between us.”
“Yes, sir,” I say.
“Octavia, you can occupy yourself while I’m with Dr. Adibuah? You have your research?” my father asks as we near the Zoo’s doors.
He doesn’t wait for me to say yes, but instead turns to the guard, who stands aside and allows my father and Dr. Adibuah to register their thumbprints on the scanner. The door slides open without a sound. Dr. Albatur doesn’t bother to scan his thumb—he sweeps in through the entrance and everyone else follows.
When the door closes, I turn back to the main dome of the Beak. As much as I’d like to be in the labs, the fact that I’m unaccompanied for my first visit to this compound means I can actually explore. Everywhere there are whitecoats with slates and recording equipment, standing and observing different birds as they hover and dart and do the things that birds do. Some of the white-coated doctors are even perched in trees, motionless as they watch a bird in a nest or an egg hatching. The animals go about their business. Many of them were born in the compound; they don’t know anything else. Like me.
I eye a whitecoat twenty paces away using an oxynet to snag several avian species from a passing flock. The triggering of the oxynet is silent, but the net itself makes a whistling sound as it flies through the air, trapping the birds in a sort of bubble. It’s a new technology that’s supposed to be gentler on the animals than an actual net. Part of the Faloii’s rules when we settled, I’m told, is that we’re forbidden to cut down trees or harm wildlife, and as I wander along the dirt path, letting reaching branches brush my arms, I’m glad. I look up. Beyond the arched dome ceiling, I catch a glimpse of a cluster of birds not contained in the Beak flying fast and free. I envy them as I breathe in the scent of the towering ogwe trees. The trees aren’t edible—my grandmother’s studies had focused on functional nutrition, and I know as much about plants as I do about animals—but the smell is almost delicious. It’s hard to explain, but even their scent is striped, like their trunks: smooth but complicated, with a pattern of undertones that cross one another inside the nose when I breathe deeply.
“What are you smelling?”
My eyes snap open—I hadn’t even known they’d been closed. Beside me is Jaquot, the braggart of the Beak and my classmate in the Greenhouse.
“The trees.”
“Which ones?”
He’s testing me, like all greencoats do to one another.
“The ogwe.”
“Distinguishing quality?”
“Each ogwe leaf is perfectly identical, for one,” I say.
“Why?”
“No one knows. But we will.” I recite N’Terra’s motto, reluctant to give him what he wants.
“Good,” Jaquot says smugly, as if he’s satisfied I’m not an idiot. “Except one thing: ogwe trees don’t have a scent.”
“What?” I don’t need him to repeat himself, but what he’s said seems so stupid that I’m not entirely sure I’ve heard it correctly.
“No smell,” he says, smiling in a way that shows too much of his gums. “Not discernible by humans, anyway.”
“Wrong,” I say.
“No, I’m not.”
Jaquot leaves my side and walks toward the center of the dome where the trees grow thickly. The back of his head is flat, and I mentally compare it to the thick-headed marov that stump around the bushes of the jungle. I don’t follow him, but when he notices he’s alone, he turns back and beckons at me.
“Come on, English!”
“Do you ever get sick of the sound of your own voice?” I stay where I am.
“Oh, you don’t want to defend your theory?”
I follow him so he’ll keep his voice down, and we approach an ogwe tree. He reaches out a palm, laying it flat against the gray striped skin of the trunk. He closes his eyes and inhales deeply through his nose, lifting his chin for dramatic effect. I roll my eyes.
“See?” he says. “Nothing.”
“You can’t prove that empirically,” I say. “I have no way of knowing what you do or do not smell.”
“You smell something?”
I inhale deeply. I don’t need to close my eyes: there it is again, the powerful, crosshatched smell of the ogwe.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s strong.”
He looks uncertain but smiles sarcastically. “You can’t prove that empirically either.”
I shrug, indifferent. I’ll save the debate for the Greenhouse when I have evidence to back me up.
“What are you doing here anyway?” he asks, leaning against the tree. When we were kids I had a crush on him—mainly because of the color of his eyes, the same shade as the leaves. He’s still handsome. But annoying outweighs attractive.
“My father takes me to the other compounds when he goes to meet with other scientists. Occasionally.”
“Seriously?” he says, impressed. His lack of conceit takes me off guard. He’s always talking or bragging, and I hadn’t expected him to be interested in what anyone else has to say.
“Yeah.” I’m hesitant to give away how excited it all makes me—I can almost hear my father calling it adolescent. But Jaquot doesn’t seem to have any concern about seeming juvenile.
“That’s amazing,” he says, pushing off the ogwe to face me directly. “Have you been to them all?”
“All except the Fin,” I say, referring to the Aquatic Compound.
Jaquot moves his hand like he’s sweeping the Fin away.
“Eh, you might be able to skip that anyway. I’d rather hear Dr. Espada lecture on grubs than fish. Mind-numbing.”
I laugh. I’ve been rolling my eyes at him since we were six, but maybe he’s not so bad anymore. I make a mental note to send Alma a message about it when I return to the Paw. We’ve always thought Jaquot was all talk and no insight, but I’ve never considered that he may have changed. That seems fairly unscientific, now that I think about it.
“That is really cool, though,” he continues, and turns to go back down the original path that leads toward the main entrance. “What does the Slither dome look like inside? Do they let the reptiles run loose?”
We walk and talk, birds flying around us like tiny, colorful comets. Some of the comets aren’t so tiny: one bright orange bird lands on a branch above us, so large that the wood makes a groaning sound. No sooner does it land than it takes off again.
“Species?” I say, pointing.
“Roigo,” he says after the briefest pause. “I think. It took off too fast.”
“Distinguishing quality?”
“They hatch at their adult size.”
“How?”
“No one knows. But we will.”
We grin at each other. It’s nice to talk about specimens without all the gravity that accompanies it with my parents and the whitecoats. For many of my peers, I know being a greencoat is just about memorizing facts. For me, it’s more. I open my mouth to tell Jaquot this, or some less serious version of it, when there’s a commotion somewhere through the trees.
“What’s that?” I look around.
“I don’t know,” he says, craning his head to try to get a glimpse through tree trunks. “I’ve never heard anyone yelling in the dome.”
There’s more than one someone. There’s a chorus of voices, rising and falling.
“It’s coming from around the main entrance,” says Jaquot. “Let’s check it out.”
We follow the worn path through another cluster of trees. The flora in the dome isn’t quite thick enough to mimic walking through the real forests of Faloiv—or at least how I imagine them to be. We approach the tree line. There are just bushes and rocks after the trees thin out, a clearing before the dome wall and its door.
“Oh man, look!” Jaquot’s hand whips out and grabs my wrist, unconscious of how tightly he grips me. His eyes are wide, his mouth open. I almost jerk away from him, but then I look.
Four or five whitecoats shout, their words a combination of curses and caution, their bodies a flurry of waving arms and shuffling feet. One woman’s spectacles fall off, and I watch her scramble to recover them before they’re crushed . . . under a foot.
The foot isn’t human. It’s not even a foot: it’s a collection of claws and scales, attached to a leg as thick as my calf. My breath catches in my throat, as if those claws are around my neck, choking me. The red of the plumage is shockingly bright. I’ve heard things described as bloodred before, but it was never accurate until now. This creature is the true color of blood, and huge: my eyes travel up its body, taller than I am. Its wingspan is as wide as the wigwam outside, and the scientists from the Beak scramble to subdue the animal, to pinion its wings with thick brown straps. One of those wings buffets a whitecoat, sending him sprawling. Then the animal throws back its colossal head, opens its curved beak, and emits a sound like a roar and a screech, a deep reverberating cry that echoes into the trees. A headache blooms in my skull.
“It’s a philax,” Jaquot breathes. He’s still gripping my wrist and I’m too shocked to shake him off.
“We’re so close,” I whisper, pushing aside the headache.
“Look out!” one of the whitecoats yells, and swings one of the thick straps over his head. Fastened to the end are two smooth round objects, heavy, I can tell, by the way they whirl. After a few rotations, the whitecoat lets go and sends it sailing toward the philax, where it spins around and around the animal’s feet, entangling them. The philax screeches again, and it’s as if the sound shakes every cell in my body. The creature totters, wavers, and then falls, crashing to the ground in a tangle of bloodred feathers and scales.
When the philax is prone on the ground—the whitecoats leaping on top of him to secure his wings with more straps—he stretches his neck out so that it’s fully extended and gives one more long, cavernous screech. And in that moment, my eyes meet his.
Lightning flows through my body, a sudden jolt of an electric current. A storm of charges invades my head, my fear becoming enlarged, intensified by some titanic presence. My body goes rigid and the eyes of the philax drill into me, wild with terror. His fear vibrates in my fingernails and in my tongue: I feel it in my earlobes and in the throbbing of my head. The philax’s panic builds a nest in me alongside my own fear, which is now small beside his, dull next to his intensity. I can’t tear my eyes away from his.
“Octavia! Octavia!” Jaquot is shaking me by my shoulder, but I can’t quite hear him. My mind is gray, busy, filled with noise . . . and behind it all, something taps.
Someone near the philax shouts as the bird manages to rise again, words I can’t make out, and a lab door opens to reveal a whitecoat with a tranq gun. Behind him is Dr. Albatur, raising his hood as he steps back out into the sun of the dome. His face is hard as his mouth forms the words, “Shoot it.” The whitecoat aims the tranq gun at those beautiful bloodred feathers, pauses, and then pulls the trigger. I only hear the whispered zip of the dart leaving the barrel, and then the philax is falling, I’m falling, into dark, dark space.