I’m dreaming of my mother. She’s standing in a green field, with plants that I’ve learned to identify on Faloiv. They are as deep green as they are in life, but richer somehow, their smells even more complicated. And among it all stands my mother: she’s younger than the way I know her to be, her locs shorter, her face slimmer. But it’s my mother, and in the dream she opens her arms, although I’m not sure if she’s opening them to me or to everything around us. My feet are bare, which would never be allowed on Faloiv, and buried in short green plants bearing round purple buds.
“Listen,” says my mother.
“Mom?”
In the dream she puts a finger to her lips.
“Listen,” she repeats.
I listen. I hear wind. I hear birds: the chipper sound of the oscree and the booming caw of the muskew. Both are soft. I hear water, somewhere distant.
“Listen,” my mother says a third time.
I strain my ears. Plants swaying against each other. The creak of branches in the trees that line the meadow we stand in. My breath sighing through my nostrils. And then I hear it.
My name. I hear my name, the syllables whispering through the grass under my feet, slithering up my legs, and sliding into my ears.
“Octavia . . .”
“I hear it!” I say. “I hear it!”
“Octavia . . . Octavia?”
Dr. Adibuah is gently nudging my shoulder with the back of his hand, his voice close and soft. A doctor’s voice, I think as I come awake. Calm. Soothing.
“Octavia, are you all right?”
I open both eyes and stare at him for a moment before answering.
“I think so.”
It’s hard to sit up—a pain throbs in my neck: a deep, sharp pain—but I do. My vision swims, and my body is clammy with sweat. Our skinsuits were designed to radiate our bodies’ heat out and away from us—a technology we learned and borrowed from the cellular structure of the ears of an animal called a maigno—but usually its benefits aren’t needed indoors. I look down and realize I’m staring at my bare stomach, deeply brown against the white of the skinsuit. My suit has been unfastened to the waist, meaning I’m lying there in my chest wrap in front of Dr. Adibuah. I cross my arms over my chest and struggle to fully rise.
“What happened?”
“You were unconscious,” Dr. Adibuah says in his doctor voice. My father sits behind him with his hands on his knees.
I was? Why was I unconscious? The memory comes back like a spark of fire. The philax . . . his eyes . . . falling . . .
This time a pain in my head flowers, lancing out and down, gripping my heart. I cry out without meaning to, falling back onto the bench where I’ve been laid. I’m in a small room and the sound is louder than it should be.
“Octavia, what’s the matter?” Dr. Adibuah has my shoulders in his hands and leans down over me. My father remains seated, watching.
“I . . . my head.”
“What happened, Octavia?” My father stands now, his hands in the pockets of his white coat.
“The—the bird . . .”
I can’t tell him. It’s the feeling you get pulling your hand back from the fire before you even touch the flame—instinct. I swallow my words.
“A philax managed to escape a facility room,” Dr. Adibuah says. “It somehow got out into the main dome. Did it hurt you?”
Dr. Adibuah’s eyes roam down my bare arms with renewed concern, looking for wounds.
“No, it didn’t hurt me.”
“Did it upset you?” he asks, his voice gentle.
Did it upset me? It seems such an illogical way to describe what I felt in the dome.
“Yes,” I say slowly. “It . . . upset me.”
The lie tastes sour in my mouth.
“Octavia is sensitive,” my father says. “I’m sure it was a shock. It happened very quickly.”
I say nothing, glowering.
My father studies me, his hands still in his pockets. Dr. Adibuah’s eyes are softer.
“Do you want to get her home, Octavius? Her neck has a minor sprain from her fall.”
My father doesn’t answer right away. One hand has crept from his pocket, the fingers curling below his lip and resting there, motionless, as he takes me in.
“Yes,” he says eventually. “Octavia, can you walk?”
Pulling my skinsuit back up over my upper body, I stand quickly to prove that I’m fine. I’m punished with an array of spots before my eyes, the room spinning. I ignore it and nod but don’t speak.
“Before you leave,” Dr. Adibuah says, his finger raised, “you should allow me to apply some of the narruf. For her neck.”
My father looks at me, his face stone. But he nods.
“I’ll get it,” Dr. Adibuah says, and leaves us alone.
I lean back against the platform where I awakened. My head isn’t spinning and the noise that had crowded my brain earlier has subsided to a whisper. But I feel strange, open. Like a room in my mind has been unlocked, the door ajar but the room empty.
Dr. Adibuah returns with a beaker containing a gelatinous substance. He’d said “narruf,” which I know is a species of bird, but I half expected him to return with the animal itself, not a jar of orange goo. I want to ask what it is—these are the things I love about what we do here: the mysteries that, once deciphered, might mean our continued survival. But my father’s face is granite, so I close my mouth around the question.
“This is a substance from inside the narruf egg,” Dr. Adibuah says, as if he can sense my thirst for the knowledge, dipping a small, thin spatula into the goo. “It’s collected at hatching. It has healing qualities for injuries sustained after leaving the egg, such as falling from the nest.”
He wipes off the excess on the jar’s rim and motions for me to turn my head to the side. I obey, and he reaches forward to spread the thick substance along the side of my neck, from just under my ear down to the outside of my shoulder. My throat begins to tingle.
“Does it feel warm?” he asks, the spatula hovering.
It does. The warm feeling spreads, a small, sudden fever. I nod.
“Good.” He drops the spatula into a sanitation pouch hanging from the wall and returns the lid to the jar.
My father opens the door.
“Let’s go.”
My father and I ride in silence, this time with him steering the chariot, at his insistence. We travel the same red dirt road, but something has changed. The distance between us is always present, but now it feels like a chasm.
“Next time I go to the Avian Compound, I know to come alone,” my father says.
I jerk as if his words are a spear he’s lodged in my ribs.
“Wait, what?” I say, ignoring the little stab of pain left over in my neck that spikes when I raise my voice. “Sir—”
“Octavia.” He cuts me off, making an effort to sound nasty. “You do realize that to do what we do—to be a scientist—you must control yourself, don’t you? Are you aware of that?”
“What? Control myself?”
My father takes his eyes off the road for an instant to glare over at me. I’m almost as tall as he is, but suddenly I’m rendered small. Even through his driving goggles I can feel the intensity of his stare, shrinking me.
“Science requires reserve. Calm. Control.”
Reserve? It’s my passion that makes science so appealing to me. Doesn’t that count for something? And what about Jaquot—always bragging and telling jokes? I can’t remember anyone lecturing him about reserve.
“Do you believe that you exhibited calm and restraint at the Avian Compound today?”
I start to tell him it wasn’t my fault, but he cuts me off again.
“We study life-forms, Octavia,” he says sharply. “Your first time seeing a specimen up close, and you behave this way. How do you expect to be a whitecoat when you get emotional at the mere sight of an animal being tranquilized?”
“Emotional,” I repeat.
“Fainting at the sight of a tranquilization is hardly the behavior of a logical human being. A scientist.” He’s raised his voice: it rings out loud over the thrumming of the chariot.
“I’m not emotional!” I say, even louder. He’s not hearing me. “I felt . . . I felt . . .”
I want to say afraid, but that’s not right. He doesn’t understand what the fear felt like, shoving its way in and occupying my body. “I felt—something!”
“It’s not about what you feel!” my father shouts. “It’s about what you know!”
I have nothing to say. He’s not listening anyway. The Paw appears up ahead, but jumping off the chariot and walking into the jungle currently seems more appealing. I set my jaw and stare blankly as the guards—more buzzguns—stand aside to let us enter the compound.
“Control is how we will survive,” he says more quietly but still with noticeable sharpness. “Entire cities have fallen because they weren’t free to command their circumstances. N’Terra will not lose control. And neither will you.”
The chariot comes to a stop between two others just like it, and I don’t wait for my father to switch off the power cell before I leap off the standing platform and walk quickly away toward the main dome of the Paw. He calls me but I continue on, my steps long and hard. Right now the sound of my own name sounds too much like his, and I don’t want it to belong to me.
The air of the Paw flows over me and fills me with a sense of comfort that I welcome. I jog through the sparse jungle of the main dome for a minute or two. I want to get farther away from the entrance before I rest, so that my father doesn’t immediately spot me when he comes in. When I’ve trotted a sufficient distance, I stop and lean against an ogwe, breathing deeply. I smell the smell that Jaquot says doesn’t exist: the multilayered scent seems to curl into my nostrils. My mind feels clearer now, the noise that invaded it earlier fading into silence. Don’t be emotional, I think, and even though the thought makes me as annoyed at myself as I am at my father, I tell myself that maybe he was right.
I hear voices and peep my head around the trunk of the ogwe to look back the way I came. My father with—of course—another whitecoat, the two of them following the other path at the fork, the one that leads to the labs. Typical, I think bitterly, he’s going to the Zoo on his rest day, even when we’ve been at the Beak for hours. He disappears down the path, his back tall and straight, his right hand gesturing to emphasize some point he’s making to the whitecoat, who’s nodding vigorously. “Yes, Dr. English,” he’s probably saying. “You’re right, Dr. English. You’re so brilliant, Dr. English!” I roll my eyes.
When my father and the whitecoat are out of sight, I carry on down to the communal dome. The doors open on their own for me when I approach.
With the main dome constructed on a small hill, the attached commune is built into the shallow valley alongside it. Above is the characteristic arching roof, transparent to let the sky in, but I’m more focused on the commune below. Things change so quickly lately, and every time I come home I pause to make sure everything is as I left it. Last week I returned from the Greenhouse to find that the curving stream that divides the dome had two additional bridges constructed across it. From here I can see the stumps of the three young trees used to build them. My father says the trees were dying.
Today a team of engineers is painting the roofs of several wigwams. Our homes are low and smooth, built with the white clay abundant around N’Terra, and with the light coming through the dome roof, they light up and shine like white stones in water. The paint the engineers are adding must serve some kind of purpose, I think, watching them work: insect repellent, perhaps—we need that. Surely it can’t be for the aesthetic alone—they’ve chosen red—as there are ordinarily so many colors in the commune already: swatches of fabric dyed with plants grown around N’Terra, draped on the sides of ’wams and hanging from poles driven into the ground. But there are fewer flags and streamers than usual. A new decree by the Council perhaps, I think, like the one that had authorized the construction of the tower.
The tower has grown since I left the dome this morning, planted there in the exact center of the compound, a spiny-looking gray tree of a structure that the Council had ordered construction of eight weeks ago. The shadow of it falls across the commune like a thorn. After so many years standing in this same spot on the hill, I find the protrusion of the tower is strange. Instead I choose to focus on my ’wam: even from here I can see the yellow cloth that hangs on our door. It was brought here all the way from a place called Englewood, where my grandmother was born. I wonder if I—if we—will ever stop missing her. As I descend the curving steps down into the commune, I brush my fingers along the flowers that grow on either side, tiny petals that curl closed at night, bright yellow in the morning and deep blue by dusk. As always, they lean away from my fingers. I smile, sympathetic. That’s how I feel right now too.
At the bottom of the stairs, it’s as if some blanket of silence has been pulled back, and I’m grateful for the chaos of children laughing and running. Far across the commune the first beats of a drum rhythm come to life, people relaxing after spending their day at various kinds of work. I frown, thinking of when my father used to play. It’s been a long time.
I’m so focused on the sound of the drum, I run straight into someone on the path.
“Stars!” I curse, stumbling. The sudden jolt of my body reignites some of the ache from my sprain, and I grab my neck with both hands as if to clamp down on the pain before it spreads.
“Sorry,” says a low voice.
I know this voice but am surprised to find it here—it belongs to Rondo, who, until now, I’ve only ever seen in the Greenhouse, and who I know to live in the Beak.
“What are you doing here?” I blurt, and I realize too late that I’ve snapped at him, still irritated from hurting my neck.
“I live here.” He adjusts the burden under his arm, a medium-size black case.
“Since when?”
“This morning. My parents transferred their study.”
“That explains why you look lost.”
Rondo doesn’t answer. He merely smiles in the quiet way that I always see him smile in the Greenhouse. Rondo is the one our classmates listen to when he speaks, myself included. Maybe it’s because he talks so rarely. There’s something interesting about a person who knows what he has to say is correct but chooses to keep it to himself.
“What’s in there?” I ask, nodding at the case under his arm. I realize suddenly that this is how my father apologizes—by changing the subject, making his voice gentle. Never really an apology.
Rondo withdraws the case from under his arm. I don’t recognize the smooth black material.
“An izinusa,” he says.
“A what?”
“An izinusa. It’s an instrument.”
“For the lab?”
He chuckles low in his throat. The sound has a rhythm of its own, as if it too belongs in the drum circle.
“No, a musical instrument.”
“Oh.”
“It makes a beautiful sound.”
“You can play it?” I’m impressed. My dad tried me on his drum once or twice, but it wasn’t a skill that came naturally to me.
“A little.”
“How did you learn?”
“A woman in my compound was teaching me before she passed. Now I’m teaching myself. This was hers.”
“Can I see it?”
We catch eyes for an instant, his as deeply brown as mine but the lashes thicker, making his expression gentle. I look away, at his hands where they grip the edge of the case.
“Of course you can.” Something about the way he says it—soft—makes my face hot.
With the case being so rigid, I envisioned the izinusa itself as metal, serious. Instead the instrument is like a lovely fruit hidden inside rough peel. I sigh at the sight of it: sloping brown wood almost the same color as his skin, elegant strings, Rondo reaching in the case and lifting part of it out so I can see better.
“Wow” is all I can say.
“I know.” His voice carries a smile—I can see it without having to look.
He carefully settles the izinusa back into the case. His fingers are like instruments themselves.
“You’re not going to play me something?” I tease.
“Not today, O.”
He talks to me as if we’ve been alone like this before. As if we’re always alone. Now we stand in silence, looking at each other without looking at each other. It’s strange that in a class as small as ours—thirty of us, together year after year—I’ve never spoken to him one-on-one. N’Terra encourages rivalry, and the result is much self-chosen independent study. You have maybe one good friend, and everyone else is competition. Rondo has strictly been the latter. Perhaps we’d be closer if he had lived in the Paw. And now he does, I think.
“So you’re just carrying that thing around?” I ask to distract myself.
“It was just delivered from the Beak. My dads ‘forgot’ to bring it when they finished transporting our stuff today.”
“You play that badly, huh?” I smile. “They tried to leave it behind?”
He grins at this, and a thrill shoots through me.
“I think they’d just prefer that I focus on my studies. I’m not exactly the best pupil.”
“Disagree. Dr. Espada loves you. Whenever you contribute you’re rarely wrong.”
“Contributing and doing assignments on time are two different things,” he says. He runs his hand along the curve of the izinusa one more time before closing and latching the case.
“Well, you’d better get it together. I heard a rumor about them introducing internships.”
Why did I tell him that?
“Hmm.” That’s all he says, and I’m disappointed. Any other greencoat would have snapped at the bait, but as his eyes wander over the commune, I become more and more sure that Rondo isn’t like any other greencoat.
“What do you think the tower is for?” he says, nodding at it. “They’re building one in the Beak’s commune too.”
I turn to follow his gaze.
“An observation deck is what I hear.”
“Observing the commune?”
“No. What purpose would that serve? It’s to observe the sky. The stars.”
“The stars,” he says, and that’s all.
“Yeah. You know how it is. Always trying something new.”
He nods.
“I need to get back,” I say. I’m reluctant to leave. “I don’t want to run into my dad out here.”
“Why not?”
I hesitate.
“It’s a long story.”
“Maybe next time.” He catches my eye and the pain in my neck momentarily subsides, or maybe I’m just distracted by the tingle he infects me with.
“Yeah, next time.”
I turn away before he has a chance to catch my eye again—otherwise I might end up standing in the commune all night. Still, I can feel his gaze on my back until I turn the corner and go out of sight. Even then I feel like I can still see his eyes.
I follow my feet along the wide path to my home, the ground made smooth by the daily travels of many feet. When I reach my ’wam, I slide my hand across the illuminated panel and the front door hums open.
I assumed my mother would be home from the Zoo since it’s my parents’ rest day, but the ’wam is dark and quiet. While some whitecoats run shops during their days outside the lab, rest days never really mean much to my mother and father. The Zoo is the only thing that distracts them from their grief.
My grandfather died long ago: before the Vagantur even rose into the stars. But somehow losing my grandmother here was a different depth of tragedy for my parents. She was my mother’s mother, but my father had loved her just as much. Me too. I didn’t see her often: she was even more obsessed with science than my parents. But my mother says I got my logic from them and my passion from my grandmother.
“Hey, you.” I jump at the sound of my mother’s voice. I didn’t even hear the door hum open, which she walks through carrying a slate and a box of slides for her three-dimensional projector.
“Oh, hey.” I peer at the labels of her slides to see if there’s anything interesting I can sneak a look at later. “You’re just getting home?”
“Yes. And I ran into your father in the lab.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh,” she says, placing her slides on the kitchen platform. She levels her gaze at me, and it’s like looking into deep water. I can see my reflection, but there’s so much swimming behind it. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine now. I don’t even know what happened.” Once upon a time I might have looked to her for comfort, a refuge from my father’s stoniness. But his words on the way back from the Beak have lodged themselves in my skull: emotional. Irrational. The implication of ineptitude is too much. Bending to it now—even with my mother—might make it true.
“They say you were unconscious.”
“I guess.”
“What do you remember from before it happened?”
I pause before answering. Sometimes I can’t tell if my parents actually care or if everything is an experiment to them.
“Not much,” I say. “I mean, I remember the philax.”
“Yes, your father told me.”
We’re silent, and I wonder what it is that’s hanging inside the quiet, if she’s thinking what my father was thinking.
“Do you think I’m emotional?” I ask.
She crosses her arms over her chest.
“Why do you ask me that?”
“I’m just asking.”
“Someone told you you’re too emotional?” I can hear the edge in her voice, the rare tone that makes whitecoats falter when telling her something they were so sure of a moment before. I feel closest to my mother when she’s angry: she lights up, fierce compared to the calm, cool scientist’s manner that she usually carries.
“No,” I lie. As much as I like to see her when she’s fired up, I don’t want it directed at my father. “I’m just wondering why I fainted.”
My mother hmms and goes to the kitchen, where cupboards dug into the clay wall are filled with round fruits of orange and green, plus the long thick sticks of zarum, which are dried plant tubers but taste, I overheard my father say once, like something called meat. My mother takes down one of the green hava fruits and slices it with the bowed knife that hangs on the wall. The sliced fruit goes into a misshapen ceramic bowl my grandmother had made, another artifact of her life.
“Passion, compassion, is not a weakness,” she says. “No matter what your father says.”
Seeing her now, her cheekbones still visible but less defined, I suddenly remember my dream, the one I had when waking in the room at the Beak. I open my mouth to tell her, but she’s moved on to talking about a project she’s working on in the neurology department, studying the brain of a kalu they’d found dead outside the compound. She loves talking about brains almost as much as I love hearing her talk about them.
“Have you finished your research for tomorrow?” She’s cleaning up the hava skins, feeding them into the biotube in the kitchen.
“Yes, I finished most of it before class was over.”
“My girl.” She smiles without looking up.
The lights flicker a little as the hava skins are fed into our energy surplus.
“Do you know anything about internships?” I ask.
“Internships.” Her eyes are on me now and I shrug.
“Yeah. Dr. Adibuah said something about it at the Beak.”
“Internships for whom?” Her eyebrows are almost touching in the middle where she’s scrunched them.
“Greencoats.”
“Greencoats,” she repeats.
“That’s what he said. But he said he wasn’t sure,” I add.
“Did your father know about this?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell.”
“I see.”
She doesn’t say anything else, so I don’t either. It’s easy to be quiet in a house that’s already silent so much of the time. She finishes disposing of the hava skins and wipes her hands on a cloth.
“All right, Afua,” she says. “I have work to do.”
She scoops up the slate and slides she brought in with her and moves toward the hallway, where she’ll disappear into her study and hunch over her desk until well after I’m asleep. She stops at the mouth of the hall and looks back.
“I’d avoid him tonight,” she says. “I think it’d be better if you two discussed things on another day when you’re both less . . . stressed.”
I raise and drop one shoulder. No answer necessary.
I sit alone for a while at the platform in the kitchen. My body feels heavy. I look down at my white skinsuit—which is almost like an actual second skin, as tight as it is—and realize I’ve been wearing it all day. My scalp is gritty at the root of the braids that my mother calls cornrows. At one point I asked what this word meant and she couldn’t remember. But the word survives, stitched into my head, part of Faloiv now. The grit in my hair motivates me to take a shower and I finally drag myself up from the kitchen platform. I pad down the hall, unfastening the neck of my skinsuit. I’m halfway to our bathroom, the material peeling off, when my mother’s voice, soft and low, floats to my ears from her study. I drift closer.
“I knew nothing about the internships. And, yes, they do give me great cause for concern.”
She pauses.
“I imagine it would be the entire age group,” she says. “Pulling Octavia and no one else would be unusual. I don’t want to draw attention to her.”
My stomach lights up with anxiety. She’s talking about pulling me out of the internships? The internships that haven’t even been announced yet? My grip on the skinsuit slips as my fingers begin to tremble. I press even more closely to the door, determined to learn more.
“Yes, she had an episode today. With a philax. No, I don’t think she understands.”
Silence for a long moment: whoever she’s talking to goes on for a while. I hold my breath.
“It’s not the time for that kind of talk,” she says. “They wouldn’t understand how she . . .”
The rest of her sentence is lost as my ears pick up a sound from the front of the ’wam: the sigh of our front door opening. My father is home. Lungs fluttering, I scramble away from my mother’s study and into the bathroom, turning on the water in the slim bathing cell. I don’t step in the water yet: I wait, my hands shaking, still half-dressed, until I hear my father make his way down the hall and into my parents’ room.
I finish shedding the skinsuit, unfastening my chest wrap, and finally step into the cell, careful to keep my mouth closed. I rinse my body off thoroughly, letting the water run over my scalp and through my braids. I don’t have time to wash them tonight. I must finish quickly: it takes a lot of energy from our surplus to bathe, and I don’t need another grievance to add to the list my father already has. I step out, drying myself with the largest size cloth from the wall holes and wrapping myself in it.
When I slide the door open, I poke my head out into the hall. There’s a light in my mother’s study and a light in my parents’ room. Separate again, I think. I pause in the hallway one more time, and I can hear each of their voices murmuring: two rooms, two conversations. I enter my own room, where I unsheathe from the wrap like a hatching insect. I take the little bottle of jocada oil from my desk and sit on the edge of the bed to oil my scalp. Usually the feeling of the warm oil and the pads of my fingertips relaxes me, but the events of the day churn through my head in an endless parade of shadows. When I lie down, restless, it’s as if the philax is lying beside me, his fear shortening my every breath.
I don’t remember falling asleep, but my room is bathed in midnight when the sound of my parents’ bedroom door wakes me. My father’s long stride moves almost soundlessly down the hall, toward the front of the ’wam. A heartbeat later, the whisper of the front door gliding open and then shut.
Back to the Zoo, I think, but I rise and go to my small window, sliding the shade aside. It feels strange watching him like this, but in a way it’s comforting: to see him and love him without the burn of his eyes staring back. I follow the shadow of him as he moves down the path, but instead of toward the labs, he veers deeper into the commune. Odd. I lean sideways in the narrow window to keep watching.
He stops at the base of the tower that rises against the moonlight like a fang. Something curls in my heart: a sinking feeling, like watching a bird about to be crushed in the talons of a predator. But there is no shadow other than my father’s; he places his hand against the slick trunk of the tower and leans heavily forward, as if it’s the only thing in the world keeping him up. I watch until the clouds shift over the moon and the commune is lost in black.