Pandemonium.
I’m closest to the door and think I’ll be the first one through, but the gwabi who had the kawa in her belly leaps over my head, landing with her full weight on the first two guards. Two igua, eager to escape the containment room, bull past me to my left, heads lowered and tusks aimed. Blood splashes. I look away. My heart feels as if it’s inside every warm body around me, pulsing a hundred times too hard. Adombukar stands over the body of a guard. I can’t tell if he’s dead. I don’t know what Adombukar did to him until I see him do it again. He dodges a blast from a buzzgun, grabs the owner of the gun with both of his strong paw-hands, then puts a gentle finger to the guard’s forehead. And just like that, the guard is out.
“Come on!” Alma screams. There’s a hole in the wall; the world is filled with noise. Not just in my head but all around me: the sounds of animal rage and human terror. Even the kunike, small as they are, do what they must to make way: two of them attack a guard’s ankles. He shoots one of them with a buzzgun and my whole body lurches.
“No,” I moan, my limbs going weak. I can sense the kunike’s death filling my mind, his energy leaked away into nothing.
Then I feel Adombukar, his presence pushing images through the tunnel and into my head: the kunike’s light returning to Faloiv, his energy filtering through the ground and into the trees.
Is that true? I say.
Yes. Death has a place on every planet. But the violence must stop.
“We have to go!” I scream. I find that I am able to speak while also sending the animals an image of what we need to do. The long hallway leading to the main dome: we need to make it there.
Alma leads the way, the animals streaming after us like a river of bodies. The gwabi stays close to me, a comforting light coming from her. She means to watch over me.
More guards. The gwabi leaps on them. Her curved fangs gnash into the flesh of someone’s throat, a bright arc of blood. I think of what Rasimbukar has said about war having grave consequences for Faloiv. Has the war already begun? We make it to the hallway, Adombukar catching a lone guard in his hands, shaking the gun from her grip, and then putting her gently to sleep. He lays her on the floor, then looks at me for direction.
“Down here!” I shout, motioning with my arm. We’re in the long corridor that will take us to the main dome. We could make it. We’re almost out. I sprint down the hall, the gwabi’s breath loud and hot beside me.
One moment the hallway ahead is empty, and the next moment two struggling bodies tumble out from an open door—one of the deceptively empty exam rooms. One wears white, the other is a guard in gray; between them, the glint of a buzzgun’s metal, which the two fight for. The guard throws the person in white against the wall.
“Alma, that’s Rondo!”
I put on an extra burst of speed to reach them as Rondo throws himself at the guard again. The gray-suited man uses the buzzgun as a club and the dull sound of it striking Rondo’s face jerks through my body. He staggers, then cocks back his arm and delivers a punch that sends the guard spinning. Adombukar overtakes me, reaches the guard as he’s beginning to rise; and with one touch of Adombukar’s finger, the man is sinking back to the ground, unconscious.
“What are you doing in here?” I cry, reaching Rondo and holding him by the arms. His lip is split, a trickle of red trailing down his chin.
He points over my shoulder, swiping at his blood with the back of his hand.
“Your mom!” He pants. “I found your mom.”
I whirl. The window shows the room to be empty, but through the open door I see one end of an exam platform. Someone is stretched out on its surface, but all I can see are the shoes.
I shove past Adombukar, leaping over and around the animals that mill in the hallway. I shoulder past the door and enter the room to find my mother strapped to a tall platform, the arm of her skinsuit red with blood. Her eyes are closed. I rush to her side, too alarmed to cry.
“Mom!” I grab her, shaking her. “Mom!”
She doesn’t move, her body deeply asleep with tranquilizer. I fumble for the blue wand as Alma appears beside me, tearing at the straps holding my mother to the platform. I reach out for my mother in my mind. I’m coming, I tell her, and her energy flares in response. I yank the wand out of my skinsuit and immediately press it to her neck, the tip glowing blue.
Her eyes flutter open, taking in the room in a series of blinks before they settle on my face.
“Afua,” she says, a slow smile spreading across her face. “You found me. I’ve been calling.”
I tug her into a sitting position, Alma unfastening the last of the straps around her feet.
“Where is Dr. Espada?” I cry.
She bites her lip, holding her injured arm.
“Octavia . . . he’s gone, baby,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “He’s gone.”
Her words sink in to me too slowly. Gone? Dead? I just saw him. How could he be dead when I just saw him?
My mother pulls herself to the edge of the platform and then jerks in surprise. Adombukar fills the doorway with his body, and around him crowd the animals we freed from the containment room, all looking in on her with various shapes and colors of eyes. She can’t hear them, but they’re all buzzing about her, sensing that she is like me, if in a slightly different way.
“Adombukar,” she says, and then looks at me. “You found the kawa I left for you.”
My mind is still processing the fact that Dr. Espada is dead. It takes me a moment to hear what she says.
“You . . . ?”
She pulls herself off the platform, standing beside it and swaying just a little.
“Yes. I had to. I put it inside the gwabi while she was sleeping, I hope she doesn’t mind.”
The gwabi is nearby and blinks. I wonder if she understood.
“I knew your father would put things together,” my mother continues. “He and I . . . we’re at odds.”
“Dad sent the Council for you . . .”
“Yes.”
“Octavia,” Alma warns. She’s standing by the door now.
“We have to go, Mom,” I plead.
I grasp her hand and pull her toward the door, and she follows. Outside in the hallway again, I notice that the alarm has stopped blaring.
“We have to move,” Rondo calls. He’s dragged the unconscious guard to the side of the hallway so he won’t be trampled by animals.
“Yes,” Adombukar says, and moves quickly down the hall after Rondo. I run after them, my mother in tow. The gwabi is at my side again, and together we dash in the direction of the doorway.
Something is happening in my mind: a flash of energy, a rippling in my consciousness that is as intense as it is abrupt. Adombukar feels it too: he pricks his mind toward it in the tunnel, curious. Another flare. And then another. As the intensity grows, I know something isn’t right. The stirring in my mind is like the tumble of dead leaves. Ahead, Adombukar slowly comes to a stop midstride. My mind has filled with this new, wrong something. Adombukar turns to gaze down the hallway, and I look too.
At first, I think they’re vasana that we left behind in the containment room, just now catching up. They mill about at the end of the hall, a herd of them. I don’t recall seeing them in the cages—perhaps Adombukar had set them free? But I feel his confusion, a gray cloud of worry entering the tunnel, cautioning me, cautioning us all. The vasana move toward us slowly, their steps long and graceful, but their path puzzled and aimless.
“Should we wait for them?” my mother says, not understanding why we’ve stopped, Alma beside her.
“Something’s wrong,” I say. I grope for the vasana in the tunnel, looking for a connection. I sense their vague presence, a dim consciousness floating in the dark. But there’s no chain connecting us, no glowing string. They feel stripped, hollow.
“Oh no,” I whisper.
“What is this?” Adombukar says, softly at first. Then he’s bellowing, “What is this!”
“We didn’t know,” I start to say, but with the realization starting to spread in my mind, I know we don’t have time. “Adombukar, we have to go. Now.”
He stands like a tree in the hallway. Like a ripple, the animals around me begin to notice that something about the herd of vasana is off. They think that the animals down the hall are sick, and some of them shuffle uncomfortably, moving toward the door where Rondo stands waiting.
“What have you done?” Adombukar turns on me and my mother, his anger and pain surging through the tunnel like a whirlwind.
I run, dragging my mother and Alma. I can’t close the tunnel—I don’t have enough focus to do it, and there’s no time.
Adombukar, I call for him. Please come. Your daughter needs you.
And then there’s a scream. Not a human scream, but an animal sound that tears through the air like lightning, electrifying the hairs on the back of my neck.
The herd of vasana, all twelve of them, are halfway down the hallway, their bodies trembling and writhing, stamping their feet. Even from this distance I make out the whites of their eyeballs, wide and exposed as they roll in their sockets. Their mouths are open, the screams rising from their elegant necks like a dirge. And beyond them, at the end of the hallway, stands Dr. Albatur, leaning against the wall for support. He has something in his hand, something black. It’s too far to see properly, but I don’t need to see it well to know that it’s the control device.
“They will bring me your bones, Faloii!” he bellows, his voice echoing down the hallway.
I turn to run again just as the fangs emerge from the vasana’s mouths, long shining dagger-like teeth sprouting from their jaws like nightmarish spikes. I shove Adombukar, whose heart I can feel breaking in the tunnel, shout for Alma and my mother. Rondo has disappeared, already out in the dome. In my mind, I scream for the other animals to get away, escape. Some of them run in time. Those who are farther behind I can feel being torn apart, my body on fire with their pain. Adombukar runs beside me, silent. I feel nothing from him.
A guard strides into the mouth of the door ahead, buzzgun drawn. Its muzzle is aimed squarely at Adombukar’s chest, and there’s nowhere to hide in the corridor, no place to dodge its blast. Inertia hurtles me forward even as my brain tries to urge retreat. I hear the zip of the gun being fired, my eyes squeezing shut involuntarily. The screech that rips from my throat could be from any one of the animals that stampede behind me.
When I open my eyes, debris is falling from the ceiling, embers and dust from disintegrated clay showering the hallway ahead. I look frantically for Adombukar, expecting to find him lying in a pool of blood beside me, but he’s passed me, crouching by a tangle of two bodies lying there in the doorway.
“Rondo!”
The stampede of animals is no longer in the hallway around and behind me but in my chest. A massive egg of panic hatches deep inside, the creature bursting forth sending me sprinting to the Zoo’s entrance, skidding to my knees and almost falling on top of him, pushing Adombukar away.
“Oh, stars,” I scream. My voice cracks: everything inside me is cracking. “Oh, please, no, please, stars, no.”
I grip the hand I can reach—his other hand holds the branch he used to strike the guard. Around me, the sound of my mother and Alma screaming my name filters in through what feels like a cloud of noise, the shrieking of the vasana echoing louder and louder.
“I see,” Adombukar says. He presses his finger against Rondo’s neck, as if checking his pulse, but the flare of green light in the tunnel tells me something else is happening, even if I don’t know what. “Both are alive.”
“Rondo, Rondo, Rondo,” I repeat, as if saying his name over and over will stir him.
Another guard approaches, aiming his buzzgun. I throw my hand up at him as if the force of my rage and pain alone will stop him. Above my head is a hot blur of energy as the gwabi hurdles over me and Rondo, leaping upon the guard. She doesn’t have to bite him: all five hundred pounds of her landing on him is like a meteor crushing his body.
Then pressure on my hand. My head snaps down to look at Rondo, his beautiful fingers squeezing mine ever so softly.
“Leave,” he groans.
I have no choice, but I can’t make my hand let go. I need his eyes to open. I can’t move until I’m inside his dark eyes.
His eyelids flutter. His pupils adjust to the white hallway. He squeezes my hand, his grip weak. “Octavia, go.”
I don’t recognize the sound that rips from my throat as I force myself to let go. My mother drags me after Adombukar, who makes his way smoothly through the dome like the shadow of a cloud on water. His emotions are so intense it makes it difficult for me to breathe: his rage at the fate of the vasana combined with a breathless exaltation for his freedom. He looks around at the trees and then up at the sky through the transparent roof. It’s night, with only the moon lighting the dome, but his relief at seeing the sky flows like grass blown by wind.
I can smell my mother’s blood like I can smell the blood of the igua, the kunike, whose bodies I can’t see but I feel lying behind us in the hallway, torn by the vasana. All around me, the ogwe give off their terrifying scent, transformed from a warning to its own silent alarm. It fills the animals’ noses and drives them on, away from this place.
Alma makes it to the main door of the dome before the rest of us, slamming her palm against the scanner. The square turns red, refusing to let her out.
“They’ve locked it!” she screams. “Octavia, please do it!”
My mother releases my hand and I sprint to Alma’s slide, slapping my palm on the scanner. They know I have my father’s hands. They know. They’ve changed the prints. But the scanner turns green, the door slides open, and we stumble out into the hot night air of Faloiv.
Adombukar holds the door, silently calling for the animals. They streak off headlong toward the main gate. Behind us in the dome are the screams of the twelve vasana as they follow our scent. Whatever’s been done to them has altered their brains in such a way that they can’t speak to us in the tunnel, can’t see us in the way that other creatures of Faloiv can. Worse than death.
The last of the animals we freed storm past us. Two igua throw their bodies at the gate, shoving with their tusks, digging in with their back legs. It topples underneath their immense power, the sound of the metal striking the ground echoing out into the trees. I search the tunnel for Rasimbukar, but if she’s out there she’s sealed herself off from me. I turn to call for Adombukar, but he’s standing in the archway looking back into the dome, the spots on his forehead arranged into a low, flat line. I dash to his side, hoping to persuade him to come with me. But when I reach him, glancing into the dome to gauge the distance of the vasana, I see Dr. Albatur.
He’s one hundred yards away, taking slow, almost leisurely steps toward us. He has a bit of a limp: I wonder if it’s from me and Alma tranqing him, or if it’s the effect of the door outside to Faloiv being open. I have no idea what else this planet does to his body—maybe even the air hates him. I hope it does. Behind him, the vasana wander loosely, dizzily—a flock following their pale shepherd. His left hand is behind his back; in his right is the black control.
“English, stop this nonsense,” he calls. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing!” I scream. “How could you do this? The vasana? The Solossius! You’re putting the whole planet in danger!”
“This planet!” he shouts, taking his left hand from behind his back and balling it into a fist. “This tiny, sweaty planet! We’re only here because we have no choice. Our choice has been taken from us.”
“But we’re here!” I yell. “I was born here! Just because you have to wear a red hood—”
“Me? This is infinitely more vast!” he shouts. “This is about our survival: our legacy! We did not come so far to be limited to one sphere! We will return to our former greatness. Faloiv will be ours, and we will be free to make of it what we wish!”
“But we are free!” I scream. “This is our home. We’re here and you’re putting that all at risk by—”
“The risk is stagnancy,” he bellows, stopping to glare at me. “This is about rebuilding the life we used to have! I came here with one purpose. I will not die here, with that purpose unfulfilled. And his people”—Albatur aims his finger like a buzzgun at Adombukar—“have what we need to change that! Their greed keeps us from rebuilding a civilization greater than our ancestors ever imagined. . . .”
“People like you killed our ancestors, Eric.” My mother steps through the door, her arm bleeding steadily. “We came here to start over, not to make the same mistakes. Or did you forget what my parents always said? They were your peers.”
“Your parents were traitors!” he roars.
Truth seems to be all around me, but every piece is wearing a mask. I want to interrupt, to demand answers once and for all, but my mother is raging on.
“If it wasn’t for them, we would already be dead,” my mother says.
Someone is running toward us from the labs. My father. The sight of him chokes me: love and fear like two serpents rising from the abyss between us, teeth bared as they wrap each other in their coils. I want to run to him and from him at the same time.
“Samirah,” he shouts desperately at my mother as he nears us. He’s on the other side of the pack of vasana and stands there hesitantly. His creation or not, he fears them. Scientist face-to-face with the monster he created. “Why are you doing this?”
“I could ask you the same thing, Octavius,” my mother calls. She has none of his desperation: despite the pain from her wound, she’s as calm as ever.
He shakes both his hands at her, his face a mask of storms.
“Look what you’ve done! The containment room is in ruins! Work lost! Death! For them!”
“What I’ve done? Eric did this!” My mother shouts at my father. “You did this!”
“The only thing I’ve done is pursue progress,” Albatur yells, spit flying. “The Solossius will succeed and we will go on!”
“And this entire time you’ve been lying to me!” My father interrupts. He paces, looking for a way to get around the vasana, which stand swaying between him and us. He sounds the way he sounded when I last spoke to him in the ’wam: wild sorrow colors his voice. “Going behind my back. Sabotaging work that would get us closer to our goals! This is why I ordered that the vasana project be kept secret! I knew someone was causing trouble. And you! You tried to keep the telepathy discovery secret, when you knew something that significant could turn the tables for N’Terra. Why, Samirah?”
My mother lifts her chin.
“Because you’re lost, Octavius. Because I knew you and Albatur would find a way to weaponize it all. To try to control the Faloii: make them do what you want. He has made you believe that the future is what lies behind, not ahead. . . .”
My father’s voice is like thunder. The silence that has filled our family for so many years is finally broken, but the bridge across the chasm is uncrossable.
“You lied to N’Terra! You lied to me!”
“And I’d lie again,” my mother shouts, “if it meant protecting this planet from people like Albatur. People like you.”
“Albatur is a genius. He’s overcoming his condition and providing us with a future—”
“I don’t have a condition!” Albatur shouts. His eyes seem as empty and wild as the vasana. “This planet is the condition, for which I have a solution!” He pauses, his chin trembling—he looks so old. The ogwe trees pulse their warning into my nostrils. “And you will not jeopardize that.”
He raises the black control, pointing at us like an arrow, and presses the button.
“Mom, run!” I scream, grabbing her shoulder and dragging her through the doorway. Adombukar runs with us, his long legs keeping him several paces ahead. I don’t see Alma anywhere. But I hear her calling my name, and as I run, tripping in the dim light of the moon, I look for the source of her voice. I find her on the roof of the guards’ ’wam, brandishing a buzzgun.
“Octavia! Up here!”
I don’t stop to think how she got the gun or what she plans to do with it. I run toward the ’wam, gripping my mother’s hand, wet with blood, thinking that if we can just get away from the vasana, maybe we can reason with Dr. Albatur. But the hope is shallow, desperate; my prayer is a shout down a well I know to be dry.
Behind me, the vasana scream so horribly it sends tears fleeing down my cheeks. I risk a glance over my shoulder: they’re close, too close, their eyes dull with artificial rage, and behind them, by the door, the shape of Albatur, watching hungrily. I can’t see my father.
When my mother’s hand slips from my grasp, it’s as if I’m in a bad dream. I grab at the air, thinking I will find her fingers again, I will hold on and not let go, and she will be running beside me as before. Empty space. The world slows. My mind is a stone, crashing through glass, the pieces shattering and piercing my heart. Held by the inescapable weight of the air, I spin around, so fast but slow, slow, slow. My mother falling, the red dust swelling around her in a cloud. Rising to one knee to stand before the herd of vasana envelops her like a wave, the moonlight on their teeth flashing like a thousand pointed stars.
My mind widens to encircle the universe. The whole world and all its pain is in my head, infinite lights extinguishing in agony. Somewhere, Rondo bleeding onto false ground. Somewhere, Alma screaming my name. My father screaming my mother’s. And Adombukar’s finger on my forehead, sending me sailing into blissful blackness.