“Octavia.”
I snap awake from a strange dream that disintegrates as soon as my eyes open. It was my mother’s voice I dreamed of, and I expect to find her in my room, stirring me for my first day in the labs. But the door is closed, my room is dark, empty. I shut my eyes again, the dream washing over me but fading. I rise and go to the window, and now the dream is fully gone, fragments dispersing into specks. I slide open the window shade and am blinded by sunlight.
“Damn!”
The sun is already up. I spin away from the window to snatch my skinsuit from where it hangs on the wall. No time to eat.
I race through a deserted commune—everyone has already left to start their day. I try not to think about what will happen if I miss my group’s entrance to the labs. Will the guards even let me in? Once I get into the main dome, I tear through the trees, down the path toward the entrance to the Zoo. A stitch in my side punishes me: I’ve barely been awake ten minutes and now I’m sprinting, my flat white shoes pounding the packed dirt. I round the curve toward the labs, praying that I’ll see Alma and Rondo lined up, ready to go in.
I wheel around the corner and slam into Jaquot, almost knocking him to the ground.
“Hey!” he yells, catching his fall against a tree.
My group is ahead of him, filing toward the guarded doors, and, like a nightmare, the three other interns and the single whitecoat turn in surprise to find me steadying myself, reaching up and smoothing my braids, clearly out of breath. The sight of Rondo, for the smallest second, makes me stop breathing altogether, the music of his izinusa flashing across my mind like a stripe of sunlight. But any comfort it offers is gone again the instant I see that the whitecoat at the head of the small group is my father, slate in hand, his face stony. His white coat is unbuttoned, his mouth like a crack in the ground when the rains are late.
“Glad that you could join us, Miss English,” he says.
I don’t answer. I know that voice. He’s going to pretend that he’s Dr. English and I’m Intern English. No relation. Might as well be true, but I don’t let my embarrassment show on my face. Stone, I think, I too am made of stone.
“As I was saying,” he says, turning away, “you are to arrive here in the main dome every morning, gathering at the entrance of the labs until one of the scientists comes to admit you. Who that scientist is will vary, depending on what you are studying in a given week. You will not have unlimited access to the facilities until you have completed at least one year of your internship. Understood?”
We’re all outside the Zoo now, most of us probably wondering if this has all been an elaborate ruse or if we’re actually going in. I was so absorbed by showing up late, I didn’t even notice the fifth member of our internship group, and when I finally look, annoyance crackles through me like a strike of lightning. Of all people, Yaya. I’ll have to watch my step with her in the group: she’s eager to get top marks, and I wouldn’t put it past her to find a way to inform the nearest whitecoat if I’m not meeting standards. Alma catches my eye from across the group, and I expect to exchange a mutual rolled eyeball over the presence of Yaya. Instead my friend’s face is open, asking a question: What is it with you? I wish I had an answer.
“I’m sure most of you have heard about the oath that will be required of you. You will take it at the end of your first week in the labs,” Dr. English is saying. “Not only does it signify your commitment to research in N’Terra, it holds you to secrecy about the work you will do here.”
The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.
“Secret from whom?”
All eyes are on me, including my father’s. Alma stares at me, eyes wide and disbelieving, from across the group. We’ve always asked questions in class, but this is a different kind of question, I know. This question has roots, talons. I order myself not to look at her. Rondo, on the other hand, has the smallest of smirks on his lips.
“The who is not a question,” my father says after a pause. “The oath is a Council-implemented requisite for all who wish to enter the laboratories.”
I expect him to go on, but he doesn’t. I also expect him to admonish me, but he doesn’t. He barely looks at me, instead just turns to the guards with the buzzguns, nodding at one. She steps aside, allowing my father to press his thumb against the entry pad, and the doors whisper open, revealing a long hallway, painted stark white. No one moves. No one even breathes. I chance a glance over at Alma and her mouth is squeezed shut, her hands clasped tightly together. Even Rondo, who “doesn’t give a damn about mammals,” seems to be frozen by awe. My father has stepped inside already and looks back at the huddle of us, taking in our faces. This is the moment we’ve been dreaming of: the Zoo has opened its doors to us. I anticipate impatience from him, annoyance, but even he can’t help but chuckle.
“Come on now,” he says, beckoning. “We haven’t got all day.”
When the doors slide shut behind us, I feel the way my grandmother must have felt when she stepped out onto Faloiv for the first time. My first step into the Zoo feels like setting foot on a new planet entirely. The ground is hard—too hard. It doesn’t give under my feet at all, solid and smooth.
“What’s wrong with the ground?” Jaquot asks, scuffing it with his shoe.
“It’s artificial,” my father says without looking back. He leads the way down the hall. “Made of synthetic material. It makes for a more sanitary environment.”
Yaya stumbles, the strange floor catching at the bottom of her shoes. Jaquot is at her side like a flash of eager lightning, his hand on her elbow. She thanks him with a smile, and I roll my eyes, even as I trip slightly myself. It’s strange not seeing grass or soil at my feet. Even our ’wams are grass and dirt inside, with mats laid down in the bathroom and hallway. Walking normally doesn’t seem possible: having something so hard between me and Faloiv is unfamiliar. Rondo appears beside me as the interns troop down the hall. Alma is at the head of the group where I would have been, as if nothing has changed. I don’t blame her: for her, nothing has.
The rooms we pass are all empty according to their windows, but still my classmates turn their heads eagerly as we pass each one. They’re looking for animals: any kind. For years we’ve seen projected images of them in the Greenhouse with Dr. Espada, learning their unique characteristics and their adaptive trajectory, but aside from the occasional winging oscree or scurrying kunike, that’s generally where greencoat first-person experience stops.
“Where is everyone?” Jaquot says. He says “everyone” as if referring to the whitecoats, of which we’ve seen none, but we all know he’s talking about specimens. Still, for me the thrill of the proximity to animals is lessened as I also think about another organism: the spotted man. Is he still here? What had happened to him? Every time we pass one of the windows of the research rooms, I sneak a quick, nervous look. Nothing. Brought under cover of darkness and now invisible.
We’re approaching the end of the hallway, a set of doors ahead, and I glance back over my shoulder at the entrance, far behind. The hallway had seemed like it might go on eternally, the whole lab one sprawling illusion. At the sight of the doors, I can sense the eagerness of the group: beyond this are the animals. We can feel it. All those empty exam and research rooms: this is where the specimens are. Dr. English approaches the doors—they don’t require a scan—and they slither open to reveal what we’ve been waiting for. . . .
Eggs. All I see are eggs. Hundreds of them. In baskets and in piles. My blood initially freezes at the sight of them, thinking of the egg I have hidden under my mattress. I shoot a glance at Rondo and find his eyes already on my face. Do I have the egg of some monstrous creature of Faloiv in my bedroom? I imagine it hatching while I’m in the Zoo, growing exponentially in a matter of moments and wreaking havoc on N’Terra from the inside. I scan the room for a sign of an egg that resembles the one I have, but nowhere do I find the same pearly iridescence. The colors here are bright and in some cases almost jarring: fuchsias and deep greens. I admire the varying sizes and shapes before me, like a vast beach of multicolored stones. The sight of them fills me with a pleasant feeling that is welcome under the harsh, artificial lights.
“Your first project,” Dr. English says. “These eggs are from recent collection trips. They need to be classified and sorted so they can be transported to the correct compounds. Be gentle, but don’t worry too much. Their shells are very durable.”
“They have to be on this planet,” Jaquot jokes. My father, astoundingly, actually smiles. The corners of my mouth dip in a frown, remembering him raging at me about “scientist decorum.” Jaquot is anything but decorous, and besides, it baffles me when Jaquot talks about Faloiv as if he wasn’t born here: as if our home is a temporary habitat.
“I didn’t know N’Terra asked finders to collect eggs,” Yaya says. Jaquot, of course, makes a sound of agreement.
“Only if the specimens have been abandoned or have been found to be nonviable.” The smile is gone from my father’s face as quickly as it appeared.
“They’re beautiful,” Alma says, and I wonder if she’s filled with the same warm feeling as I am when looking at them.
“Yes,” he says. “You have six hours.”
He leaves, and for a moment we’re all silent. Around us, the eggs are piles of rainbows, some as small as my fist and others so large that I think carrying them might require two people.
“Well,” Yaya says. We all look at her and she shrugs. “I guess we get started?”
I know better than to let my face betray the stab of irritation that sprouts between my ribs. Instead, I study her, searching for weaknesses in her faultless scientific armor. But the penetration of my stare stops at her face, finding only perfection. Her skin is deeply black, almost blue, her eyes wide and curving upward at the outer corners. I remember hearing Jaquot tell Rondo once that she was the prettiest girl on Faloiv, which now makes perfect sense given what I’ve observed of Jaquot’s crush, and which I agreed with at the time without much jealousy. I had no need to be jealous—Yaya’s beauty is a fact, and to be envious seemed irrational. Now reason seems to mean little as I take in her prominent cheekbones, the wide curve of her nose. Before I can allow myself to explore the idea of whether Rondo also thinks she’s the prettiest girl on the planet, I snatch myself back from the precipice and hope that my momentary logical stutter hasn’t showed in my eyes.
“And where would you suggest we start?” I ask.
She looks me square in the eye. “I would suggest that we look in our slates for the identification charts, because I don’t have a damn clue.”
Disarmed, I laugh—loudly—without meaning to. She gives me a half smile and shrugs in a nonchalant way, but I glimpse a flash of shy pleasure in the way she blinks her eyes away from mine. This is the part where I’m supposed to snap back with something as clever as it is barbed, but all my words seem dull now. Jaquot appears between us, his slate illuminated with one of the charts.
“Luckily you have your resident egg expert here to lend his genius,” he says, and this time I can’t tell if he’s doing the thing where he defuses tension, or if he’s just flirting. I think the latter, the way his smile beams onto Yaya like her own private sun.
I open my mouth to say that his project on mammalian eggs hadn’t even been in the top 10 percent of Greenhouse scores, but I don’t want to risk irritating him in case he decides to regale everyone with tales of my fainting at the Beak. I close my mouth and turn to my own slate.
“Remember, they’re not all mammalian,” Yaya says. She could have been obnoxious to him about it—the way I wanted to be—but instead she shoots him a small smile. Interesting, I think. The sun might glow both ways.
“I don’t care what they are,” Alma says, running her hands gently over the surface of a round orange specimen. “I just want to stare at them.”
Almost as if we agreed to do so, we all allow ourselves to admire the contents of the room for a few minutes.
“Nobody younger than twenty-one has ever been this close to this stuff before,” Jaquot says. At first I think he’s as filled with wonder as I am, but then he adds with a laugh: “I hope I don’t break one! They’ll kick us out.”
The idea of him breaking one of these eggs makes me want to break one of his bones.
“It makes sense that this is where they would start us,” Yaya says, studying the screen of her slate on which she’s pulled up the classification matrices. “There are so many subtle variations between types of eggs. If we can tell these apart, we can tell animals apart easily.”
Once we’ve gotten over our awe we get to work, picking up on those subtle differences as we sort. There are differences in color but also in shapes and textures. Reptilian eggs are mostly oblong, and mammalian eggs tend to be rounder, little hints we use to make identifying them a bit easier. We find large empty bins at the back of the room and use them to sort the eggs by class, the bins filling as time ticks by. I pause as I pick up a globular violet egg with a texture like tiny pebbles.
I stroke its surface and it leaves my skin feeling tingly. Rubbing my fingers together, I feel the sensation traveling up my arm. Alarmed, I put the egg back in the bin it came from, as quickly as I can without dropping it. I glance up, my eyes searching the room for Rondo, but he’s absorbed in trying to identify a smooth blue egg, lost in his slate’s matrices. I open my mouth to call him only to close it again, knowing that if I attract his attention I’ll attract everyone else’s too. I can’t touch my arm through my skinsuit, but I continue rubbing my fingers together, trying not to be too frantic as the tingling dulls into something difficult to describe—as if under my clothing, my arm is transforming into air.
“Are you stuck on one?” Alma says. She hasn’t spoken directly to me since we arrived in the Zoo, and I can tell from her tone she’s trying to break the thin layer of ice that’s crept up between us.
I look away from my tingling hands and up into her eyes. It’s as if the brown of her irises drives the sensation out of my mind, because my skin abruptly feels like skin again, the vibrating residue on my hands gone. I feel nothing, and when Alma comes over, scooping up the violet egg I’d just put down, I can only stare wordlessly as she places it in the mammalian bin. She doesn’t rub her fingers, she doesn’t pause or look troubled.
“The egg . . . ,” I start, but Yaya turns her eyes on us, listening, and I realize, with a shade of nausea, that whatever I just felt might be the reason my mother sought to keep me out of the Zoo: some hidden weakness that I’m barely concealing. One word from Yaya might get me booted. “Yeah, I was stuck. But I’ve got it now. Thanks.”
“Are there any animals that don’t lay eggs?” Jaquot says, and I’m grateful that his interruption draws Yaya’s attention. “We could build a whole new compound with these damn things.”
“I think it’s fascinating,” Alma says. “I do wonder how long we’ve been in here though.” She stands by the reptilian bin with one knee bent, her hip pushed out. Her hair, braided today like mine, is covered by the gauzy headwrap the procedure file ordered us to wear. We all wear them, but she’s tied hers with a high knot to give it a decorative flair.
“Three hours,” says Rondo.
“I wonder if we get food,” says Yaya, stifling a yawn.
As if on cue, the doors at the front of the room slide open. I expect to see my father, but it’s another whitecoat. I’ve seen him before in the commune, always looking busy and rushed. He’s no different now and doesn’t even greet us.
“How many garifula eggs have you sorted so far?” he says.
My brain scrambles to find an answer. I haven’t been looking at the totals, just entering numbers for each egg I sort. I’ve been busy admiring the specimens, letting my mind wander. I open my mouth to provide some reason why we don’t have that information, but Yaya answers instead.
“One hundred and twelve,” she says without hesitation.
“Good,” the whitecoat says, already melting back out into the corridor. “Come with me. It’s your allotted time to eat. I’ll be taking you to the Atrium.”
“Yes, sir,” she says, and it seems she has now established herself as the leader of our little class. I make a mental note to find a way to distinguish myself later.
We troop out into the hallway where the whitecoat had gone. I don’t see him anywhere. We stand there, alone, and it feels cold compared to the sorting room: the eggs seemed to lend a warmth to the air. Despite the chill, the hallways beckon to me. I’m considering taking a few steps back down the impossibly long entrance corridor, just to peek into some of the previously empty research rooms, when the squat whitecoat reappears. He tells us to follow him, Yaya leading the way under the glaring artificial lights. Out here, away from the warmth of the eggs, I realize how sluggish I am. My energy feels as if it has leaked out of my veins and pooled invisibly on the stark white floor. Alma falls back from the group and walks beside me.
“It feels so weird,” she says in a soft voice. We must speak quietly if we don’t want our words to bounce off the walls.
“What?”
“No windows. I’m used to seeing the sky.”
I look up, expecting to find the transparent ceiling of all the domes in our compounds, including the Greenhouse. But my eyes meet only glaring white lights.
“Yeah,” I agree. “I hadn’t even noticed until now. Maybe that’s why I feel so tired.”
A cluster of whitecoats makes its way toward us, and we stand to the side to give them room as they pass us in the hall. Two women and one man, all with serious looks on their faces, murmur softly to one another. I catch a thread of their conversation as they hurry by.
“They should just build it anyway,” the man says. “Damn the landing agreement.”
“Truly,” his colleague says. “Those people are a threat to our safety.”
“If you can even call them that,” the second woman whispers. “Dr. Albatur’s right—we need a barrier.”
“Did you hear that?” I whisper to Alma.
“Hmm?”
“Ah . . . nothing.”
I dart my eyes around, looking for Rondo, but he’s several paces ahead. The white-clad trio disappears down the hallway. I can only assume they were talking about the Faloii. A barrier? Rondo sees me lagging and drops back to join us.
“I’ve never even seen some of these people before,” he says as another group of whitecoats passes.
“The woman with the freckles used to live in the Newt,” says Alma.
“It’s easy to forget how many of us there are,” I say. “With everybody in different compounds. There’s gotta be hundreds of us.”
“There were already five hundred people on the Vagantur when it landed,” Rondo says. “Over two hundred of them were scientists. And that was over forty years ago.”
The whitecoat is leading us to doors at the end of the corridor. As we approach them, the doors open and two whitecoats enter the hallway. With them comes a scent from what I realize must be the Atrium, its doors still wide open. Inside there are groups of whitecoats sitting and talking at various long platforms. The light is softer, and I know even before walking through the entry that the space ahead has a transparent domed ceiling: the light we see is the sun. I feel like one of the myn that’s been flopping on a bank, gasping for air, finally tossed back into the compound’s stream.
“What’s that smell?” Alma asks.
I ignore her, taking in our surroundings. It’s a dome much smaller than our commune, and smaller than the main dome too. Thirty or so whitecoats sit and stand at various platforms, some at ground level with us and some above on a small hilltop, into which stairs have been dug. Ogwe trees dot the land, most of them average in size, aside from a large one growing near the center, around which a cluster of platforms have been molded from Faloiv’s abundant white clay and in front of which a short string of whitecoats has formed a line. The scientist who escorted us from the egg-sorting room gestures toward the central ogwe.
“You can get your food there. Take your time eating. Someone will come get you when it’s time to return to your duties.”
He removes himself without another word, marching back the way we came. Jaquot is already making a beeline for the central ogwe, leading the way with long urgent paces. I remember now that I’d skipped first meal and my stomach clenches in a gurgling fist.
“Whatever that is, it smells amazing,” says Yaya.
The whitecoats ahead of us in the line pass through with their platters, and I note that the platforms bearing the food are being manned by two youngish men wearing the same headwraps we wear, except theirs are green, matching their leaf-colored skinsuits. The green is nice, and I wonder if the color has a purpose or if it serves only as a demarcation of their duties. It bothers me, for some reason, the idea that wearing green as opposed to white might not have a function other than differentiation. N’Terra has always put those who study in the Zoo on a pedestal—especially since Dr. Albatur was elected—but the scowls on the faces of the men in green makes me wonder if the pedestal is higher than I thought.
“Do we serve ourselves?” Jaquot asks, and one of the green-suited men nods.
We take our platters and pile food onto them: hava slices, strips of zarum, the thick red paste of tangy waji. Jaquot makes a big show of loading his platter into a massive mound. In a basin at the end of the platform are some brown chunks I don’t recognize, flecked with black.
“What’s that?” Yaya asks, pointing.
“Zunile,” one of the greensuits says. The frown that had been etched on either side of his mouth eases a little when he looks at her, taking in her big brown eyes, the lashes that curl so dramatically they almost touch her eyebrows, her locs that reach her shoulder blades. She notices but just nods.
The zunile doesn’t look appetizing, but new food is exciting—it takes a long time to vet whether something is safe for N’Terrans to eat. I add a small mound of it to my platter and follow Jaquot, who has made a direct path to an empty platform close to one of the smaller ogwe trees. Our group sits and eats immediately, speaking only after we’ve taken the edge off our hunger. It’s not until after I’ve taken a few bites that I realize Rondo has chosen the space next to me, and even though his leg is five inches from mine, I imagine I can feel the warmth of it. Alma catches me staring at him and bats her eyelashes exaggeratedly, stopping to laugh into her waji only when I mouth I will kill you.
“This place is brilliant,” Yaya says, looking up and around as she chews.
“It is,” I agree. I’m watching a row of bright red flowers. Their stamens keep extending, reaching up several feet into the air with movements so fluid they could be underwater, before slithering back down into the conical shape of their petals. “It’s so different from the rest of the Zoo in here.”
“Seeing the sky helps,” Jaquot says. “And, you know, having good company.” He directs this to Yaya, the rest of us seemingly invisible. I take a bite of food to hide my smile, remembering how in the Greenhouse he always sat in the back row. Now I know why—that’s where Yaya sits.
“What’s with the face?” Jaquot says, jutting his chin at me with a smile.
“Good company does help,” I say. Then I turn to Yaya. “Matter of fact, Yaya, Jaquot was just telling me how much better our group is because of you.”
“What?” Yaya draws her attention back from observing the Atrium, squinting like maybe she missed a punch line. Under the platform, Jaquot’s feet are searching for my shin to kick. I pull my ankles in closer to my seat.
“A small intern pool could be tricky,” I say, trying to sound casual. “Only five? The wrong fifth could have made us all look like idiots. I mean, we all know Jaquot isn’t the sharpest scalpel in the set, so he was really happy to hear you were placed in the Mammalian Compound.”
Jaquot glares at me until he sees that Yaya has turned her wide dark eyes on him; then his expression immediately goes smooth as glass.
“I think he’s plenty sharp,” she says, and then dips her head to her tray of food, like she possesses only a measured volume of flirtation and is rationing the rest. Still, it was enough for Jaquot and he shoots me a grin that tells me I’m absolved. I can’t help it—I grin too.
“Why did they build the labs like this to begin with?” Alma says. “Why wouldn’t they make everything with a transparent ceiling? It’s so much better in here.”
“Looks like the whitecoats like it, too,” says Rondo, nodding in the direction of a platform of them, who are laughing. The serious silence that has seemed the norm in the rest of the Zoo is like a broken spell in the Atrium: hushed voices and solemnity are abandoned as whitecoats gather around the surfaces of eating platforms, stuffing food in their mouths and talking.
“Except them.”
I almost don’t understand Jaquot, who continues to speak with his mouth full. But he points with his eyes at a group of whitecoats sitting at a secluded platform toward the back of the Atrium. It’s almost as if they have a bubble forming an invisible atmosphere around them, deflecting the relaxed energy of the rest of the dome. Their food sits nearly untouched in front of them, their faces long and grave as they converse.
“At least two of them are on the Council,” Rondo says. He doesn’t look at them, instead directing his gaze upward as if studying the branches of the central ogwe. Rondo has a way of seeing everything at once, missing nothing. I start to ask him how he knows they’re on the Council when even I have never been to their dome, but I realize I already know. Hacking, I think. Of course. The identity of councilmembers isn’t exactly a secret, but the fact that Rondo knows them by sight tells me he’s been doing more snooping than he’s admitted.
I observe the councilmembers more closely: two women and two men, their gold Council pins glinting from their lapels, and one person whose face I can’t see until someone leans forward to whisper across the table, revealing him. His face stands out like a bone protruding from soil: pale and unpleasant looking, with sharp edges to his cheekbones that remind me of an insect’s mandibles. He’s leaned forward in his chair, speaking with squinted eyes to the rest of the table.
“That’s Dr. Albatur,” I say. “The pale one. The Council Head.”
“That’s him? We saw him in the Beak that day,” Jaquot says. I hear the hitch in his voice as he realizes what he’s broached. He pilots right around it, and I cast him a look of gratitude. “That day you and your dad came to visit.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” Alma says.
“Oh . . . well, it was no big deal,” I say. I pretend to focus on scooping waji onto bread and tell them about my encounter with Albatur outside the Beak that day with my father, the strange red hood he has to wear. I leave out everything else.
“He seems to be okay indoors,” Alma says, eyeing him. “Did he happen to say what his condition is called? I wonder if it’s only direct sunlight that’s a problem for his skin.”
“Could be there’s something protective in the dome’s roof,” Yaya says, pointing upward. “To block the rays and keep him safe while he’s inside.”
“What a wretched life,” Jaquot says. “To be stuck on a planet that your body hates.”
I think back to the day I met Dr. Albatur, his disdain for Faloiv. It’s more than his body that hates our planet, I think. He hates it too, no matter what the shopkeeper thinks.
“What did Draco say on the Worm that day?” I muse. But Rondo only shrugs, not yet following my train of thought. “Didn’t he say Dr. Albatur plans to change things?”
I almost mention that it had something to do with the Faloii, but I close my lips around this part of the thought. I want to think about it a little longer myself.
“I guarantee he has whitecoats working on projects that can help cure him,” Alma says. “There has to be an organism here that we can learn something from for that. I wonder if it’s genetic? I’d hate to live on this planet if I were him.”
“I’d hate to be sitting at that table. They all look miserable,” Jaquot says, and Yaya laughs. They share a small smile. Yaya has always made herself a secret, but I’ve been hanging out with Jaquot at the Greenhouse since I was six—it still baffles me that I missed this crush of his. A key part of what we do in N’Terra is observation, but somehow I missed this. What else have I overlooked?
“They need to eat instead of just sitting there—that would cheer them up.” Alma interrupts my thoughts, turning her gaze from the whitecoats to me. “Are you going to try the zunile, O?”
The brown chunks are the only thing that remain untouched on my plate. They’re the source of the tantalizing smell hanging in the room.
“I mean . . .” I raise my eyebrow at the small pile. “Do I want to?”
“It’s actually pretty good,” Jaquot says. He puts a piece in his mouth, the massive quantities of food he heaped almost entirely consumed. “Really chewy—I can’t compare it to anything. It must be a new plant the finders discovered on one of their trips. Don’t be a coward, O. You’re supposed to be our future nutritionist.”
“Okay, okay, fine.” I pick up one of the brown chunks between thumb and forefinger and eye it. It looks fibrous and squishy. The odor is interesting. I open my mouth and bring my hand up to drop the zunile in, when another hand appears in front of me and fastens its iron grip around my wrist.