“Worse?” Dr. Yang says. There is a shade of angry amusement somewhere in her voice: as if someone my age can’t possibly imagine worse, but she can.
The sound of voices makes us both jerk our heads toward the doorway.
“Stars,” she whispers. “You need to hide. Quickly, Octavia.”
But I recognize these voices: this isn’t the sound of a stern group of whitecoats. I hear banter and laughter. Greencoats. One voice rises above the others: “You’re not fooling me, Yaya. I saw your eyes bug out. You don’t have to admit it, but next time you ask me to dissect a morgantan for you I’ll know why.”
Yaya. And the voice: Julian. Other voices laugh, at least two. I move quickly away from Dr. Yang and step into the hall.
The group of greencoats stops abruptly at the sight of me.
“Yaya,” I say, surprised by the relief in my own voice. “It’s you!”
I don’t know what I expected from her, but it wasn’t a look of almost revulsion. She looks nauseated at the sight of me, as if my appearance were the equivalent of a troubling specimen of fungus showing up in her path.
“Octavia,” she says eventually. “What—?”
Julian cuts her off. “What are you doing here?” he says. “They said you defected.”
“Defected?” I say. It’s a strange word to have chosen to describe my disappearance. “Do you even know what happened?”
“You helped one of them break in,” a girl named Janelle says. She had sat near me in the Greenhouse, but now her eyes are cold and hard as if she’s never seen me before. “You got multiple N’Terrans killed.”
“We know exactly what happened,” Julian says.
“Why are you here?” Yaya says before anyone else can continue.
“That’s not what happened,” I snap. “It’s Albatur who’s getting people killed. We have to stop him. That’s why I’m here.”
“Did your mother tell you that?” Janelle sneers.
“Octavia, don’t!” Yaya shouts when I lunge forward, my fist raised. I’ve never hit anyone in my life, but I’m prepared to take off Janelle’s head.
Yaya and I scuffle, me still swinging and her holding me back while trying to avoid my flying hands. Julian yells something. Dr. Yang is gone.
“Octavia, don’t!” Yaya shouts again, but over her words I hear Janelle repeating something about my mother. I stop fighting Yaya, and I hang back, panting.
“I called them,” Julian says.
“Who?”
“This is exactly what the Council said would happen,” Janelle says, her face a combination of anger and ruffled fear. “They’re drawing people into their lies and turning them against us.”
“They,” I say, my chest heaving. “Are you really this dense? It’s Albatur and the Council that are lying! Stars, he killed my mother!”
My eyes are filling with tears even as I grit my teeth against them. The tremble in my chin feels like a betrayal, but I stare at the greencoats in front of me with as much steely cool as I can muster. Yaya’s eyes waver, but Janelle and Julian return my steel.
“There are two sides here,” Julian says, and I remember that his father is on the Council, that he’s been advocating for N’Terran control over the Faloii for years now, echoing his parents’ venom. “If you’re not for N’Terran progress, then you’re against it. Dr. English—your mom, not your dad—was against it.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. It’s as if they have swallowed every lie that Albatur ever dreamed and now regurgitate them in a stream of blood and poison. I had come here with such resolve, but the look in Julian’s eyes is impenetrable to reason. I think of all the people in N’Terra with this same look in their eyes. The day the graysuits had searched people’s ’wams . . . some had resisted, but even more had gulped down the fear and let it roost in them, building nests.
Behind Julian, the door of the Greenhouse slams open, and against the sudden glare of sunlight from outside, two figures appear. They pause there in silhouette only for a moment, and then the two figures move swiftly toward us, fast becoming the bodies of two guards.
“She’s here,” Janelle calls unnecessarily. “We kept her here.”
“Good,” says one of the graysuits.
“I need to talk to Dr. Albatur,” I say. “Or my father. He—”
One of them grabs me before I can continue, their grip around my bicep like metal shackles.
“Zap her,” the voice says. It’s then that I realize they have on the same masks I’d seen the night we broke Adombukar out of the Zoo: the strange armor that conceals their faces, leaving only a smooth featureless countenance, a reflective visor across the eyes.
“Why are you wearing those masks?” I demand, hoping my voice sounds stronger than the fear betraying me.
“Zap her,” the voice says again, and my left arm is freed for the second it takes for the hand to reappear with a tranq gun. My mouth has just started to form the word no when my body convulses, a burst of yellow light exploding behind my eyes before it all goes dark.
The air isn’t right. Before my eyes even open, my lungs, my skin, tell me that wherever I am is not . . . normal. The sky is gone. The smell of the jungle is gone. I am in a tomb. I feel empty and alone, as if drifting deep into outer space, where the world is so dark it’s blindingly white. . . .
“The monitor reads that the subject is regaining consciousness,” says a familiar voice. My brain is still swimming. I’m not quite awake, not quite alive.
Nearby, something beeps. A machine. It has no smell.
“Yes, I see. Fluids have been administered?”
“Yes, doctor. Though she didn’t really need much.”
My head swims toward one of these voices. I know it. In the white darkness, my mind tries to put things in order. How did I get to this place? The only part of my body I can feel is a piece of my arm, the vague pain there the only thing defining it as real.
“English,” the voice I don’t know says. “Can you hear my voice?”
I try, but I can’t. I’m still rising from the bottom of a deep pool. The white darkness is beginning to fall away, and I struggle against it, trying to swim higher.
“The subject’s heart rate is climbing,” the voice I know says.
“Good. She’s with us.”
When I open my eyes, I’m blinded by the whiteness again, and I shrink back, thinking I left it behind. But the bleariness is clearing away with every blink. I feel as if I’m emerging from a cocoon. My skin feels exposed and thirsty, like whatever had protected it inside the cocoon has been stripped from me in this dry, scentless place. I can move my hands. The fingers of one brush the bare skin of my thigh.
“My suit,” I can hear myself whisper. “Where is my suit?”
“We have confiscated your clothing for further analysis,” says the familiar voice. I had thought it was familiar but it sounds different to me now: like the thing that had made it familiar has been clipped, shorn somehow.
“I need my suit,” I whisper. My eyes are less blurred, and I find that I’m wearing a thin white garment. It ties around my neck. The back of me is bare against the stiff white cot I lie on.
“English,” comes the other voice from farther across the room. “Quiet now. You’ll want to save your energy for what is to come.”
“What is to come?”
“Yes,” says the familiar but clipped voice. Right next to me, fiddling with the painful spot on my arm. I use all my strength to turn my eyes toward that voice, force my vision to focus.
“Alma,” I whisper.
Her round brown eyes hold mine for only a moment before they dart back down to the task at hand, injecting more fluids into my intravenous. Her mouth is pulled down ever so slightly in a practiced frown. When she looks back up, the eyes I’ve always known to sparkle with curiosity, with mirth, are expressionless.
“Alma,” I say again, afraid she hadn’t heard me, that my voice is not working.
The once-familiar ey
es squint slightly.
“It’s Intern Entra,” she says.
Chapter 10
Whatever Alma injected me with makes me sleep again. But not the deep sleep of a tranquilization: a half sleep, where my body is aware of itself and my ears pick up nearby sounds, but my eyes are not controlled by my brain, and time has no definition. I have no idea how long I lie in this state of halfness. As the immeasurable time passes, I find the panic growing from tremor to earthquake inside me. Will I lie like this forever? Is this my punishment for betraying first one world and then the other? Eternal unsleep?
But then there is a spark in the darkness. A tiny thing at first, so faint it’s like an indistinct spot you see after glancing at the sun. It persists there on the periphery of my consciousness like a distant star. My mind is numbed by whatever Alma introduced into my veins, but gradually the clouds that come and go clear, and the familiarity of the faint blaze grows stronger.
A child of Faloiv. They’re too far for me to grasp who or what they are, but the realization that, even in this prison of pale darkness, the Artery still exists fills me with a new energy. It’s not enough to give me the power to move, or even speak, but my mind sharpens, strengthens as it clings to consciousness. I struggle against the noxious invasion in my veins, trying to focus on the tiny burning star of consciousness in the Artery. But it’s fading away, either because my mind is weak or because the actual presence has disappeared.
Just beyond the small universe of my mind comes a sound. A hum that I recognize from some part of myself that feels ancient. Then I hear the hum again . . . the closing of a door. I’m in the Zoo. Beyond my closed eyes that I have no control of, I remember the white walls I had seen so briefly before Alma had put me under again, into this half sleep. Now I know I haven’t been moved. I am in the same bed, in the same white room, but I have no idea who I now share the room with. Terror creeps from every corner. I imagine Dr. Albatur slithering in, caped in his sinister red hood, clutching a cylinder of one final injection—the lethal one that will send me into a permanent sleep. My mind grows antennae, tentacles, as I try to reach out with every one of my senses to feel the danger before it comes any nearer. . . .
Something touches my hand. If I could jerk away, I would, but I am trapped in the soft paralysis. I brace myself for the feeling of a needle pricking at one of the vulnerable veins on the back of my hand, but instead my skin experiences . . . a caress.
A thumb brushed across my flesh. Almost nonexistent pressure, as if the hand touching mine isn’t there at all. Maybe it’s not.
“I’m here, O,” comes a deep voice, so soft it could be made of smoke. My mind experiences the voice as a code: I know it but the drugs keep me from recognizing it, and I struggle to unscramble the cypher, fighting against the injection’s clouds. It’s all too much. Fear, hope, and the almost imaginary feeling of someone stroking my hand . . . I slip back into the emptiness, spinning in space.
Times passes. I don’t know how much. I open my eyes. The world I perceive now is real, and my brain crawls over every detail, first the white-paneled ceiling, artificial lights glaring down on me. I cringe from them, my head lolling to the side, and my eyes find the tower of blinking lights and tubes, some of which lead down to my intravenous. My brain tells my hand to reach out and grasp these tubes, tug them from my skin. But my fingers only wiggle. I am waking up, but in pieces. My body hasn’t realized that we belong to each other yet.
“I know what you’re thinking,” says a voice. “Better to leave those alone.”
My eyes slowly search the area before me for a face, but find only more white walls, more blinking lights. With considerable effort, I loll my head in the other direction, and come face-to-face with a dark-haired man in a white coat. His features swim, arranging and rearranging. Eyebrows, thick but neat. A white surgical mask obscures his chin, but only his chin: he’s pulled it down from where it is supposed to cover his nose and mouth. I recognize that mouth, a blur of a memory.
“Doctor . . . ,” I croak.
The eyes before me, just a mere foot away, crease at the corners with a smile. It’s not pleasant.
“Yes, I am a doctor. Your memory is returning. Good.”
I squint, trying to focus, jerk the memory to the surface of my brain. His voice. More than the mouth, I know the voice. The hidden sneer within it, the slanted enjoyment of the specimen on the table before him . . .
“Dr. Jain,” I say. The words sound like shards of glass, jagged and irregular.
Those eyebrows rise in surprise. “Oh?” I can’t tell if it’s a pleased sound or not. “He will find this very interesting.”
He. He’s talking about Dr. Albatur. This is Dr. Jain, Dr. Albatur’s assistant: the whitecoat I’d seen first experimenting on the helpless vasana. When the feeling first begins to buzz inside me, I almost don’t recognize it: a red invasion, like a virus lancing through my biology. It flows through me, clenching my fists and tightening my jaw. Rage. There it is. Rage, hot and red and flaming through every vein.
Dr. Jain notices. “Good.” He smiles, and pulls up his mask.
As it turns out, Dr. Jain is there to remove me from this room. But I know better than to be grateful. He hums under his breath as he wheels me down the hallway. There is nothing to see here. This is a hopeless déjà vu. The endless white hallways. The windows full of nothing. At least this time most of the illusions of emptiness are true: the Zoo is almost empty. I close my eyes tightly as my wheeled cot passes infinite doors, trying to remember what it had felt like as the animals rushed past me in a river of fangs and claws, eager for their freedom, the smell of it filling their noses and mine. There are still specimens here, but nothing like before. We had all but depleted them in our battle in the containment room. I hold this thought in my mind as the hum of a door once opening, and then again closing, fills my ears. I know before cracking my eyes that I am being watched.
At first I see only him. Indoors, he doesn’t need his red cloak, but the pale sickliness of him is indicator enough of who stands before me. He looks even sicker than before, the creases around his mouth purplish. He looks like he needs more blood, like some essential element has been drained from him, pooled somewhere he can’t reach. His eyes are as cold as the metal table alongside my cot.
“We meet again,” Dr. Albatur says.
I don’t trust my voice to sound brave, because I’m gradually realizing where I am. This is the man who killed my mother. Rage leaves me wordless, and fearful. The metal table. Its attached lariat used to trap specimens in place. The nearby tray bearing its collection of glittering tools. The recording device. The window.
The faces in the window.
Rows of faces. All clad in white coats.
I’m in an observation room. I am a specimen.
“We are curious about your suit,” Dr. Albatur says. “And it is under analysis. But we are curious about you as well. I don’t think you can be too surprised that we have many questions. After your . . . departure.”
Again he pauses, his metal eyes dissecting my face. I stare back as calmly as I can manage, remembering that while he may have the tools to cut my skin, he doesn’t possess the ability to read my mind. He doesn’t have that gift. In a lurch, I’m remembering where I’d found my mother the night she died. Alone in a room. Strapped bleeding to a table. Had she endured what I’m about to experience?
“As you can see, we’re all riveted by where you went and where you came back from. And wearing such a wondrous suit! How did you describe her vitals, Dr. Jain?”
“Remarkable,” Dr. Jain says.
“Remarkable,” Dr. Albatur repeats in a low voice. “Remarkable. One might assume it might have something to do with the suit. But of course the curious mind wonders if it’s something more.”
I glare at him until he moves away, adjusting some dials on the recording device and rearranging a few instruments. He slips on a pair of exam gloves before turning to the window filled with faces.
“I’m not the only inquiring mind, as you can see,” he says, gesturing broadly. “Much of the N’Terran scientific community is as thirsty for answers as I. Based on the events that took place here in these labs, N’Terran priorities have shifted. We can only assume that your biology was compromised in some way. Perhaps a mere toxin. Perhaps some implantation of the bones. Perhaps something hidden more deeply. Something in your brain.”
He turns back to me as he says these last few words. My horror has surpassed fear. I am frozen by the meaning of his words, their roots sinking through my skin and down to my skeleton. I can only stare at him, my teeth clenching and unclenching.
“Yes, compromised,” he says softly. “I have been a patient man, slowly rebuilding the world we were cut off from, moving toward a bridge back to that world. There has been entirely too much tolerance for variance of opinion on the matter. I don’t know what it is that makes a person stand in the way of their own species, but we will find the answer. Layer by layer, we will dig until we find it. And along the way perhaps we will find something advantageous, like your special suit. I can see many uses for that back home.”
He moves closer, his gloved hands shining like wax. This can’t be real. Dr. Jain has moved around to the foot of my cot, tightening the strap that binds my feet. I hadn’t even noticed them until now, I’m so out of touch with my body. But the pressure around my ankles wakes my skin. I wriggle, weakly at first. Then more strongly, desperately as Dr. Albatur comes nearer. His hands are empty of any tool, but the idea of his fingers on me is torture enough.
“Don’t,” I finally wheeze. “If you touch me . . .”
He waves away my words.
“We are past the place where threats have meaning,” he says. “And, in any case, I have yet to encounter a threat I couldn’t neutralize. How do you think I got here? Why do you think I was sent?”
I don’t know what this means and I don’t care. I look frantically around the room, searching for some means of escape. It’s in vain. I cast my eyes toward the glass of the observation room, taking in the faces in a frenzy, hoping to find just one pair of eyes that carry empathy. Nothing. The reflection of white light in spectacles. Alma’s words from the Greenhouse come echoing through my mind: Knowledge is power. I had come here thinking that if they just knew what Albatur was doing, they would do the right thing. But they do know. I stare into the face of their knowledge, the blank stare of a cold sort of science. They are two dozen strangers: I am not real.
An Anatomy of Beasts Page 9
