Vittal saluted the Archon. She gestured to the guests from Africa. “Gajavu,” she said, pointing to the elephant. The trunk lifted from between the two tusks and extended to the Archon’s face. The man did not know what to do until Vittal mimicked a handshake. The Archon nervously palmed the underside of the trunk. In response, the nostrils expanded and contracted. The Archon had no choice but to interpret it as a friendly sign.
Vittal motioned for the lion to step forward. With his amber eyes glowing in the sun, the giant cat leaned in to the Archon. He offered his paw, large enough to pulverize the human’s tiny hand.
“Mufasa,” the lion said in a voice so low it could have been a bass drum.
That name meant nothing to Falkirk. But the Archon—who until now maintained a solemn demeanor befitting of his post—burst into giddy laughter. “I’m sorry,” he said, holding his hand over his mouth. “It’s just—wow. Mufasa.”
While the Archon made small talk to cover for his indiscretion, Vittal caught sight of D’Arc and began to work her way through the crowd, giving quick handshakes to the council. The captain nearly knocked D’Arc over when they embraced. After they untangled themselves, Vittal held both of D’Arc’s hands. “Your children?” she asked, her voice quivering.
“I lost two,” D’Arc said.
“I’m sorry.”
“But one survived.”
“One,” Vittal repeated. She stepped in front of Falkirk and eyed him up and down in a way that humans were not supposed to do with animals anymore. “You’re the father?”
“I am,” Falkirk said.
D’Arc reached into a pouch on her belt and pulled out a notebook. Falkirk had seen it before: the unofficial logbook of the SUS al-Rihla.
“My final report,” D’Arc said. “For your records.”
Vittal flipped through the pages, dumbfounded at possessing such a holy object.
“I followed your advice as best as I could,” D’Arc said. “We both did.”
Vittal did not seem to remember.
“Beacons of light,” D’Arc reminded her.
Vittal smiled. “Right. Beacons of light in the darkness.”
“Guiding the other ships home,” D’Arc added.
By this point, the formal diplomatic ceremony had become a party, with people of every species hugging and laughing. The guards let the spectators on the street enter through the main gate. These were the people who had survived to rebuild this place once more, to do it right this time. And behind the noise of hundreds of voices, the song of the Sarcops hummed through the crowd like distant foghorns. Falkirk recognized it as a message of peace—but also as a warning, a reminder that what they held in their hands right now could easily slip away.
Chapter 31
Sanctum
The howling began as soon as D’Arc crossed the border and only grew stronger as she and her bodyguards left the highway and entered the woods. Quay had told her: someone was always watching in wolf country. More voices joined in as they passed Camp Echo, coming from opposite directions, far off in the hills. At the river, where the new forest mingled with the old, the howling came from all the points on the compass.
“How do they see us?” D’Arc asked.
“They don’t,” Quay said. “They watch the trees sway. They hear the twigs breaking. The bugs swarming. And then they wait for the wind to carry your scent. Everyone knows your scent.”
The wolves meant well. The same song that warned intruders served as a greeting for her. D’Arc could get used to this, if she put her mind to it. She had grown accustomed to far stranger things in the last few weeks.
Near sunset, they at last arrived at the abandoned vineyard, where the mansion served as her command center. The grapes grew wild here, overtaking the rotten wooden posts. The Spanish tiled roof gave the illusion of a faraway place that never saw winter. With no city and no capitol building, a sturdy farmhouse in a clearing would have to do. D’Arc intended it as a more inviting place than a police headquarters, or a corporate campus, or a factory farm that had once processed meat. The wolves regarded houses as strange, unnatural objects, having spent so many years sleeping in caves and ditches. They would enter only when she commanded them to do so. The rest of the time, they stuck to the growing wilderness beyond, mapping out the hills, flattening new trails. Before the day ended, a few more of them would most likely leave. Those still hungry for war would find it somewhere beyond the frontier. For the rest, the miracle surrounding them would compel them to stay. Protecting this new forest would become their sacred duty. Besides, in the coming months, many of them would be carrying babies, which rendered war an increasingly foolish prospect. Quay had already picked three marauders who could father her children, though she had yet to settle on one. And when Falkirk returned—after wrapping things up at the pier—D’Arc would have to fend off the female suitors who considered him an exotic arctic wolf.
As D’Arc entered the main gate, walking on two feet, the guards greeted her with lowered snouts and wagging tails. A few of them went through the trouble of rolling onto their backs, getting leaves and pebbles in their fur, a performance that always made D’Arc uneasy. Someday, when the time was right, she would relinquish her power to the pack elders. It would get messy. Some would not understand and would fall into the old ways. But if the ants could change, if the bats and the beavers could change, if even the humans could change, then so could they.
Two guards opened the large wooden doors. D’Arc stepped into the foyer and then the dining hall, with its long table and wooden chairs, and an empty wine rack at the far wall. When the humans had evacuated many years before, they knew exactly what to take with them.
In the doorway, D’Arc’s bodyguards awaited her orders.
“Find out about how the fields are coming along,” D’Arc said. “See if you can pull together some more volunteers to help.”
Quay nodded. She sent one of the other guards to the new farm, where the former hunters worked the soil with plows and shovels.
“And I want to know as soon as the scouts spot the husky,” D’Arc added. She tried to think of something else since the wolves appeared so eager to receive new orders, but Quay lifted her hand to put a stop to it.
“Please rest, Aneega,” Quay said. “See your little one.”
D’Arc embraced Quay, resting her head on the wolf’s snout for a few seconds. Then she closed the door and leaned on it to recover her strength.
She took the spiral staircase to the third level where the master of the house once lived, which now served as her personal quarters. She followed the light to the end of the hall, past the study with its musty smell of books, and into the main bedroom. The hardwood slats creaked as she entered. With the room completely silent and the king-sized bed empty, she knew exactly where to find her son. In the padded rocking chair facing the window, her little Revelation lay curled between two pillows, resembling a pillow himself. She eased herself next to him. Without opening his eyes, he crawled into her lap and rested his ear on her chest. Missed you, he said in her mind. She pulled him in tighter.
He fell asleep here as he often did: staring at the countryside, where the forest continued to grow from its focal point at the crash site. The tree line rose higher each day, and the hills and meadows grew green under the spring sun, with blotches of yellow and purple indicating new patches of flowers. In the center, the ants crawled about their mound. With their mating season over, the ants lost their wings again, and set about digging their tunnels and harvesting plants for their underground stores. Some days, entire swaths of trees collapsed and then vanished into the mound, which Rev could watch for hours on end.
A breeze puffed the curtains. She stroked his fur and let his warmth seep into her own. D’Arc turned to the bed. She listened for movement coming from under the mattress, but could hear nothing. So she clicked her tongue a few times.
> “Come on out,” she whispered. “It’s okay.”
Two tiny feet emerged, covered in white fur, with a whiskered face leaning over them. A pair of green eyes peered at her, slit vertically in the middle.
“It’s me,” she said. “Come on.”
A creature that no one had seen in over a decade crawled out from under the mattress. An orange cat the size of a loaf of bread, with white fur around his maw and his underside. His stubby tail popped out last, sticking straight in the air. He had been found like this not far from the crash site, wandering about and sniffing the grass. Though lost, he did not seem to have a care in the world. All his worries had been wiped clean, all his regrets left buried in the dirt, consumed by the roots of the trees and released into the air as oxygen.
With his nostrils twitching, he reached his front paws onto the chair and sniffed at Rev. The pup stirred, and then settled again. Without a sound, the cat hopped up next to him, draping his body over D’Arc’s leg and tucking his head into Rev’s neck. D’Arc ran her finger under his chin. He tilted his head to give her more surface to explore. With each stroke, his eyelids drooped until he fell asleep.
The sun dipped behind the trees. As the sky cooled from orange to purple, D’Arc felt herself dozing off, her arms wrapped around her pack.
Chapter 32
The Story of Sebastian and Sheba
After he took his new name, after the animals rose up and overthrew their oppressors, after there was talk of prophecies and saviors, after the seas rose and the old empires fell, the great warrior Mort(e) became a simple house cat, known to his companions as Sebastian, the only name he could ever remember having.
He could not recall the exact circumstances that brought him here. He remembered padding through a wooded area while his paws turned brown from the mud. The dew on the grass and the tree bark compelled him to sniff everything. When the Alphas found him, he fled into a thicket and cowered there, not realizing that they, too, could locate him through scent. Despite their massive size, they appeared all at once, with virtually no sound. When one of them reached for him, he tried to bat the antennae away. Rather than force him to come out, the insects waited patiently for him to grow calm again.
Before long, his curiosity got the best of him. He emerged from the bushes and sat on his hind legs while pawing at an antenna as if it were a toy. The insect let him do it until he grew bored. Gently, like a mother cat lifting her kittens, the ant took him in her jaws and placed him onto the back of one of the other creatures. They marched single file, forming a new path through the forest. The swaying made Sebastian sleepy, and he promptly slipped into darkness with his head bouncing on the ant’s flexible shell.
He dreamt of things that could never be. The hills on fire. Metal flying machines streaking across the sky. Terrible screaming in the night. Eventually, his dreams placed him on the floor of a house, beside a window, where a square of sunlight warmed the carpet.
He awoke in a bedroom and immediately set about exploring the place. The old mortar hid many secrets, as did the musty wine cellar, the layers of wallpaper, the dusty bedsheets, the darkened closets where overcoats and suits hovered like spirits above him. It would take a lifetime to map out the entire mansion.
At the end of that first day, Sebastian heard someone speaking at the bottom of the stairs. While he waited in the hallway, the voice got closer, rising to the third level of the mansion. He retreated to the bedroom and waited. When the door opened, a dog entered, standing on two feet. He knew her name was Sheba. The word simply formed in his mind, so clear that it had its own scent. A much smaller dog appeared at Sheba’s ankles, hiding behind her. Sheba smelled like the square of sunlight from his dream. When he approached her, she lifted him to her chest, whispering gently. I know you, her affection seemed to say. Where have you been?
He purred. Don’t worry. Don’t be sad. I am strong. I will not leave you. She made a wheezing sound in her throat. He frantically licked her chin until her tail wagged again. As she set him on the bed, the pup jumped onto the mattress and crouched into a fighting stance. Sheba whispered to the young one, and the pup grew calm. He crept closer, letting Sebastian rub his cheek on his legs to get the scent buried in the pup’s fur. To reciprocate, the pup gave him kisses so sloppy and forceful that they nearly knocked him off balance. Sheba seemed pleased with this.
From that morning on, the days dissolved into one another for little Sebastian. As the pup grew stronger, Sebastian followed him around the house, into the overgrown vineyards, past the wolves who guarded the hallways and entrances. At one window, they watched the ants tending to their hills. At another, they saw the dogs and wolves working the land, turning over the soil so that the wet smell traveled on the wind. In the sky above, flocks of birds returned from their winter homes, on their way to nesting grounds to the north. Sebastian understood that some things ended while other things began, and all of it would repeat again and again. His simple mind could not ponder it beyond that, and anyway, something new would always grab his attention before long.
In the evenings, Sheba would return, exhausted from the work she did during the day. She would sip tea and let both her son and the cat rest in the chair with her. She whispered to Sebastian. He would tell her about his day, using meows of differing lengths and pitches. Sometimes, she seemed to understand him. He was sure of it. Oh yes, she knew that there was a world to explore and a home to protect. The love they created here did not have to remain locked inside the walls, where it would shrivel and die. Instead, it could build and build until it overflowed and washed over the land. And then long after they were gone, what they created and shared would still live.
As always, the thought drifted away once it took up too much space. It would return to him when he needed it. For now, these were his people, and he belonged with them. This was home. Everything was now, in the present moment, and it was perfect. He was safe here. There was nothing else to life. There didn’t need to be.
Acknowledgments
It has now been twelve years since I had a strange dream about sentient animals taking over my hometown by force. That image stayed with me for months until I started writing a novel, thinking the entire time that my Animal Farm on steroids epic would most likely never see the light of day. But writing a draft with no expectations turned out to be the easy part. The real work began when I shared the book with the many, many people who helped it along on its journey.
First, I’m grateful to my agent Jennifer Weltz, who helped to shape this series, and found a great partner in Soho Press. At Soho, I was fortunate to have fellow novelist Mark Doten overseeing this project for nearly a decade, and his effort, passion, and insight turned this from a quirky idea based on a dream to a real novel. I am grateful to the team at Soho, which included Bronwen Hruska, Rachel Kowal, Rudy Martinez, Paul Oliver, Juliet Grames, Erica Loberg, Janine Agro, and Steven Tran, among others. Thank you so much for the work you do.
Kapo Amos Ng designed the beautiful covers for this series. I’ve never met this man, but if he called me and asked me to hide a body, Goodfellas-style, I think I have to say yes at this point.
I’m lucky to have a supportive family, and I’m grateful for the enthusiasm and encouragement they’ve given me. My friends Brian Hurley, Jane Berentson, and Michael Hennessey have been champions of my work for a long time, even when they were reading some very rough first drafts. There are a few people—some I’ve met electronically, others I know in person—who have helped to promote this series, including Eric Smith, Maria Haskins, Katelyn Phillips, Rick Kleffel, Kelly Justice, Paul Hammond, Kenya Danino, Justin Wolfson, Jeff Wong, David Barr Kirtley, James Scott, Jenny Doster, Jenny Keegan, Kelly Caldwell, and Anna-Lise Santella, among many others. (Seriously, let me know if I left you out.) And I am eternally grateful to Ashley Wells for encouragement, understanding, advice, and patience.
If you’re holding this book many years from now,
take a look at the publication date and know that most of the work was done during a very difficult time for everyone involved. That fact makes me even more grateful, and more aware of how publishing is a collaborative process. I wrote these books in part to explore what it means to see the humanity in people who are different from you, people you were raised to distrust, dismiss, or hate. I hope this surreal time has encouraged you to find some empathy, as well as its active form: kindness. Thank you for reading.
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