In the bright hallway outside the observation room, I crumple to the floor. The hidden door to the empty room slides shut, blending back into the smooth blankness of the white wall. The vibrations of the vasana’s strange, unnatural rage still quiver through the tunnel.
“Octavia,” Alma says. She crouches down in front of me and grabs my face in both her hands, forcing me to look at her. “You have to get it together. We can’t get caught here!”
I stare into her round brown eyes, their thick black eyelashes. I focus on those eyelashes. Their blackness is comforting in this terribly bright hallway. I finally find a hold on the slippery arm in my head and wrench some central muscle, the vasana’s pain and anger slowly dimming. I breathe in short gasps. The tunnel spirals shut, the red clouds disappearing inside it and my lungs expanding to take in more air.
“Better?” Alma asks, her eyebrows crunched down in the middle. I nod slowly. My mind quiets, and the only buzzing I hear is the vague hum from the lights above.
“What did we just see?” Rondo says.
“I don’t know,” Alma says, reaching her hands down to help me rise. “But we can’t talk about it here. We need to get back to our observation room now.”
“She’s right,” I say, scrambling up with Alma’s help. “We need to go.”
We hustle back down the direction we came. My mind prickles as we continue past stretches of blank white walls, but I grit my teeth and concentrate on keeping the tunnel shut. I need to learn how to control this better: I can’t risk having it open whenever there’s something on my radar. I wish I could talk to Rasimbukar; and at the thought of her, I’m stabbed with anxiety. What if she’s already here? Locked up like her father probably is? Being experimented on? Seeing what we saw, feeling what I felt . . . no wonder Rasimbukar thinks her people could start a war. Members of the Council, the lawmakers of N’Terra. If the Faloii knew what we were doing . . .
“It’s this room on the left,” Alma says. “Be smooth. Maybe no one noticed we left.”
Slipping inside, I expect to see two dozen pairs of eyes turning to stare at us, my father’s among them. But all we see are the backs of whitecoats, right where we left them, peering into the procedure room where Dr. Depp has moved on to a young igua, which stands cowering on the table, Dr. Depp rubbing an ultrasound against its belly to view its digestive tract. I wonder if these animals will eventually be subject to painful experiments too.
I exhale softly, grateful that no one seems to notice we were gone. They’re all rapt, watching the procedure and taking notes on their slates.
“Where have you three been?”
I jump at the voice so close to my ear. It’s Yaya, standing even farther to the rear than we are. I hadn’t noticed her leaning against the wall.
“What is wrong with you?” I demand, hissing. “Stars, you scared me. Why are you hiding at the back?”
She shrugs, her eyes wandering to the procedure.
“I came back here to ask you guys what you thought of the igua and then I realized you weren’t here. Where were you?”
“Dr. English stopped by,” Alma says quickly. I’m impressed with the smoothness of the lie. “She was just asking some preliminary questions about the procedure.”
“Oh.” Yaya looks disappointed. “She could have asked me. I hope you didn’t make us look bad.”
She offers a close-lipped smile to show she’s kidding, but I know she’s not.
“You didn’t miss much,” she says, turning back to the procedure room. “Besides it’s kind of sad.”
“Sad?” I say. I wouldn’t expect her to attach any emotions to the work in the Zoo.
“Yes. They’re all so scared.”
“How can you tell?” I ask.
She gives me a look like maybe it’s me who needs to be on an exam table.
“Look at him,” she says, turning her eyes to the igua. The igua baby crouches as low as its splayed legs will allow, his body shaking. “He looks miserable.”
“Yeah.” I will the twisting tunnel to stay shut.
“I suppose it’s just what we have to do,” Yaya says.
“What do you mean?”
“How else are we supposed to learn?” she says. “We’re not hurting it, even if it is scared.”
I don’t reply. If she could sense the igua’s fear, I think she’d feel different, and after seeing what I saw of the vasana, everything seems like a horrifying precursor to a looming atrocity.
“You okay?” Rondo whispers.
“I still feel dizzy,” I say.
“The vasana . . . this really is worse than we thought,” he says.
“I know.”
“If the Faloii found out . . .”
“I know.”
The whitecoats are all standing up, their murmurs turning into ordinary voices. I crane my neck to see the procedure room and find it empty. The procedure is finished, the baby igua carted away, hopefully back to its mother.
The whitecoats file out, leaving the four of us alone—four: I can feel that we’re all suddenly aware of Jaquot’s absence again, a hole in our team. We try to fill the void with chatter. Yaya and Alma talk about Yaya’s host family, whether she’ll be going back to her home compound any time soon. I focus on not shrinking to the floor until Dr. Depp rejoins us, his skin a bit glossy from the decontamination regime.
“Thoughts?” he says to us, taking out his slate and studying something on its screen. He doesn’t care about our answers; he’s already on to the next procedure in his mind.
“Very interesting,” Yaya says.
Dr. Depp doesn’t respond, just frowns at his screen, his forehead lined with concentration. I swallow the first small ripples of panic, wondering if somehow he’s receiving word that we left the observation room during the procedure.
“Good,” he says finally, looking up and nodding once before turning back for the door. “I was skeptical about allowing greencoats internships, but I believe the Council was right about the value. If whitecoats are truly invested in this work, they’ll be less likely to leave. Now, I’m going to hand you off to Dr. Wong. He’ll get you back to the prep room so you can get a head start on your assignment.”
“Sorry, leave?” Alma says in her note-taking voice, as if she just wants clarification. But I know her too well and I can hear the edge in her tone like a scalpel.
We’re already following him out into the hall and he’s barely acknowledging us, staring at his tablet instead.
“Yes,” he says, still distracted by whatever is on his screen. Then he looks up and squints. “What? Oh, Dr. Wong, lovely. You’ll take it from here?”
Dr. Wong has appeared from the procedure room with a smile, nodding at Dr. Depp, who doesn’t even wait to hear Dr. Wong’s reply. He’s walking down the hallway, off to his next procedure. Rondo stares after him as if he has a mind to follow, but instead turns on Dr. Wong.
“Dr. Depp was just telling us about why they decided to allow interns,” he says matter-of-factly.
“Why?” Dr. Wong says, a little surprised but not unfriendly. “Well, I’m not positive. But I can see a few reasons for allowing younger scientists into the labs.”
He begins to move down the corridor, motioning for us to follow.
“Greencoats inducted into the labs for internships will get to spend significantly more time learning the fundamentals and getting acquainted with the methodology, for one,” he says. “By the time you’re old enough to be assigned a specialty, you will have lab experience on which to base it. Dr. Albatur is ambitious: he has lofty goals for N’Terra and believes that if we want to achieve them, we need to pursue them aggressively. I think the Council hopes that by training greencoats into our processes sooner, you will be better, more committed whitecoats in the long run.”
“If we don’t start a war first . . . ,” Alma mutters.
Dr. Wong doesn’t hear her. “I wouldn’t question it, if I were you. If I could go back and enter the labs at sixteen, I certainly would!”
Rondo turns to look over his shoulder at me and squints. These aren’t the answers we were looking for. But we all heard Dr. Depp.
My head still throbs and I focus my energy inward. I ignore the white lights and the hard floor under my feet and turn my attention to the core of my brain. I don’t know why I want to reach it: the pain from the vasana is still fresh, the echo of it still floating within me. But I want to know if she’s alive.
Now that I know where the tunnel lives and how to summon it, it’s easier to find. I pinpoint it nestled in my consciousness and nudge it, willing it to open. At first, nothing. My mind is tired. My headache intensifies as I focus on it. But then I feel the prickling, the stirring spiral of the tunnel yawning open. My brain suddenly feels wide and bright.
And then the buzzing. We pass one of the empty windows and even though my eyes tell me nothing is there, I feel a presence. A feeling like sorrow comes crawling out of the tunnel, a damp helplessness. An igua, I think. It’s the mother of the baby igua Dr. Depp just examined: her worry pulses into my brain. The baby has not yet been returned.
We pass door after door; and in passing each one I sense the fear, loneliness, and anger pulsating out from the animals trapped inside. I feel them all, and even smell them: the things that come through the tunnel are various. Some impressions, some sensory details. The familiar scent of the tufali, the sharp smell of an animal I don’t recognize but whose biology I can now hear and feel like a shell I’ve handled while blindfolded. By the time we near the end of the hallway, tears form in the corners of my eyes.
Dr. Wong leads us into the prep room to change out of our lab coats. I keep my head down as we file into the small room.
“A scientist will be in for you in a little while,” he says. “I don’t know if you’ll be viewing any other procedures today. They’ll probably just let you work on your assignments.”
He smiles and then he’s gone, the door sliding shut behind him. Yaya rounds on the three of us, squinting at me where I slump on a stool. I don’t have the energy to conceal my exhaustion.
“Is there something you’re not telling me?” she demands.
I take a long time deciding whether to answer.
“Well?” she says, sniffling against her will. “Is it something about Jaquot? Everything is strange. They couldn’t find his body. Did the Faloii take him? Maybe they set the dirixi on us. Maybe the whitecoats just don’t want to scare us . . . maybe that’s why people are leaving the labs, like Dr. Depp said.”
“He didn’t say leaving the labs,” Alma corrects. “He said leaving. We don’t know what he was referring to.”
“What else would he mean?”
“N’Terra,” Rondo says. He’s not even addressing her, or any of us. He’s thinking, gazing at the door but not really seeing it. His fingers tap out their silent melody, and I wish more than anything that my head was full of his music and not the buzzing.
“No one would leave N’Terra when the Faloii are out there killing people,” Yaya says, and I wonder where the rational girl from the Greenhouse went. Is this what fear does to people? “The Faloii probably threatened us and people are afraid to work in the labs. Afraid of all their absurd rules.”
I sit up a little straighter on the stool.
“Why would that be your theory?” I demand.
“You know why!” she snaps. “We don’t know anything about them. I know what my grandmother told me, and Magellan said—”
“Who in the stars is Magellan?”
“Magellan. The finder who was bitten that day in the jungle. Weren’t you paying attention? He said the Faloii won’t let us expand N’Terra. And they won’t let us study them to see how they survive here so easily.”
“Why should they let us study them?” I say loudly, standing. “This is their planet. They don’t owe us anything. And they damn sure don’t owe us running experiments on them.”
Rondo and Alma stand uncertainly between us, Alma’s hands half-raised as if to tell us to keep our voices down, but not wanting to say it.
“Magellan said they still act like they’re the only ones that live on this planet. They won’t even let us explore their part of Faloiv—”
“Why should they?” I snap again. “You’re stupid enough to give that argument weight?”
“Don’t call me stupid,” Yaya says, taking a half step toward me. The shine of tears in her eyes is gone: she’s fully angry now and it shows. But I’m angry too. Is this how humans got ourselves into this mess? By believing that we have as much right to this planet as the Faloii? Do we think we own the galaxy? I’m surprised they haven’t already thrown us back out into the stars.
“Guys,” Alma says, keeping her voice low. “We can talk about this later. This really isn’t the place.”
Yaya and I glare at each other, and I find myself wishing for the prickle in my brain. What could I hear in Yaya’s mind that she’s not saying out loud? Maybe I would understand her better.
“To answer your original question,” I say, hearing the nastiness in my tone but unwilling to remove it, “I don’t know anything about Jaquot that you don’t know. But I will tell you this: if you’re as smart as you think you are, it’s not the Faloii you should be worried about.”
The whisper of the door opening turns our attention to the front of the room, where my father is stepping in through the doorway with his eyes on his slate.
“What’s this?” he says, raising an eyebrow. “Still in white coats? You must have enjoyed the procedure.”
“It was brilliant,” Alma says quickly. She moves almost imperceptibly to stand between me and my father. Maybe she thinks there’s still some trace of emotion left on my face. “But I do have a question about the procedure with Kunike 13,” she continues. “What purpose does the data serve for human use? Altering the specimen’s diet means that if it ate foods not usually in its nutritional regimen, it could eventually change its fur pattern to camouflage itself with the flora it consumes, correct? But what’s the implication for humans?”
She already knows the answer, I’m sure. She’s buying me time to calm down.
“The hope is that we will be able to find the proteins that give the kunike this ability and imitate them synthetically for our own use,” my father replies. “Just like our skinsuits, the technology of which is a synthetic reproduction of a maigno’s ears.”
“Do we have their permission?” I can’t stop myself from saying. My father tilts his head sideways to look past Alma, who moves out of the way so he can see me.
“Do we have the animals’ permission?” he says. It wasn’t what I meant—I had meant the Faloii—but now that he says it, it doesn’t seem stupid at all, the way I know he thinks it does. “No, we haven’t asked the animals’ permission. We will, however, continue to do our duty as scientists of N’Terra and study them for our benefit. We will learn from the kunike’s camouflage, for instance, as we design future skinsuits.”
“For camouflage,” I say. “What are we hiding from? The Faloii?”
“Not at this time,” my father says. I don’t think such coldness has ever existed on Faloiv. “The dirixi, for one, is high on my list of things we need to hide from.”
I almost feel Yaya’s heart clench at the reference to Jaquot’s death. I can assume that’s the part of my father’s statement that got her attention, not the more sinister “not at this time.” “Not at this time” doesn’t mean “never.”
“I have a procedure in the Avian compound very soon,” he says, addressing the group without taking his eyes off me. “I’ll walk you to the Atrium before I’m off. Remove your lab coats and gather your things.”
We walk in silence down the long bright hallway. My father isn’t even staring into his slate: he leads us down the hall with his eyes forward.
He turns to face us as we catch up to him. He ignores me, instead addressing Alma, Rondo, and Yaya.
“Get something to eat. Afterward someone will find you an empty room to work in.”
He takes a step away to leave us, and Yaya surprises me by stopping him.
“Sir, may we continue our work in the Atrium?” she asks.
“The Atrium?” he says, turning slightly.
“Yes. It’s . . .” She hesitates, as if realizing she shouldn’t have asked. “The light. The light is better there.”
“The light.”
He squints at her, then glances at me, perhaps to see if this is something I put her up to. But I’m as surprised as he is.
“Yes,” he says, turning back down the hall. “Stay out of the way.”
“Yes, sir.”
He’s gone, sweeping down the hall with the tails of his lab coat waving behind him. Off to the Beak, I think—off to oversee more horrors.
“Let’s go in,” Alma says gently, touching my arm.
I pull away and move toward the door, which opens. Yaya catches my eye, her expression closed and flat. She’s angry with me. Our friendship was really just beginning and now it’s bent and broken. I was harsh with her, but I wonder which of my words had done the damage: implying that she’s stupid or damaging her trust in N’Terra.
As we make our way across the Atrium, I’m grateful that it’s almost empty—I have to stop myself from glaring at every whitecoat I pass. How could N’Terrans be so stupid? My temples are throbbing, as if everything I have learned is screaming inside my head. I try to relax and breathe deeply through my nose. Doing so, I catch a whiff of the smell of cooking food, the same scent from the first time we visited the Atrium. I know it’s the same smell—full and smoky—but it feels different in my nose. It’s as if I only smelled it on a shallow level before, and now I’m taking in the whole of it. It’s pungent. Inhaling deeply, it’s almost as if the scent takes the shape of something else, knotting in my nostrils and sticking there. I pause, bending slightly, nausea gripping me unexpectedly. What is wrong with you now? I think to myself, irritated. My friends didn’t notice: they continue toward the central tree, eager to see what the men in green skinsuits offer in the way of food today.
I catch up, drawing even with Rondo. He’s already taken a platter and is piling it with zarum and waji. There are the chunks of brown food that we’d seen before too, the dish I’ve never had a chance to try—zunile, I remember it was called. It’s the source of the pungent aroma. I inhale again, trying to identify the scent. It’s familiar, somehow. An echo. Rondo dips the spoon into the dish of zunile, stirring up the juices and releasing the odor more fully into the air.
I recoil. It’s as if fire has sprung from the very air and burned me, and I double over, retching involuntarily.
“Octavia?” Rondo lets the spoon clatter back into the dish and he drops his platter onto the platform. He reaches out for me. “What’s the matter?”
“The zunile,” I gasp. It’s all I can say before I clamp my mouth shut to keep from vomiting. I bite my lip so hard it bleeds, my hands trembling before I ball them into fists.
“Zunile? The food?” He glances quickly at the dish, as if expecting to see a slimy creature crawling out of the juices. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”
Now Alma and Yaya have also noticed. They swing back from the other end of the platform, their eyebrows low and faces squinted in worry. I can’t wait. I turn and run, sweeping past the whitecoats, who look up with only mild interest. I race through the door, out of the warm sunlight and back into the glaring halls of the labs.
The hall is mercifully empty and I tear down the corridor, its whiteness a blur. Finally I reach the sorting room, unoccupied by both animals and humans. Far down the hall I hear Rondo and the others calling for me as loudly as they dare.
I pay them no attention, careening through the gap in the sorting room’s door as soon as it opens wide enough. Inside, the piles of eggs wait there impassively. No attendants. I stumble to the corner of the room, sinking down where two walls meet. I breathe deeply, willing the vomit to stay down. Even here, far from the Atrium, I still smell the stink of the zunile. The smoky brown chunks were on the platform as if they too are food, but they’re not. Zunile isn’t food. The smell is of death. Zunile is a dead animal.