An Anatomy of Beasts

by Olivia A. Cole

  And then the side of a face I know, moving toward the back of the room. Tall. Taller than the rest. Broad through the shoulders. Hair gray at the temples. He is not looking at me, instead seems intent on getting out of the room, away from the window.

  It is my father.

  He looks back one more time as the door opens silently before him. I can’t read his face. It’s as empty as my lungs. And then he’s gone.

  Chapter 11

  I lose track of the days. I haven’t seen my father since the first day, when Dr. Albatur attempted to lift knowledge from my skin. It had started as a tingling sensation on my bicep, a tool shaped like a hammer but electronic, emitting tiny red sparks. Gradually the tingle had kindled to a burn, then an all-out inferno on my arm, the skin lasered off layer by layer as he gathered the samples of my epidermis needed to examine in his many tests. The next day, my other arm. The next day, my back. The patches are treated with narruf gel when I am returned to my white-walled cell, and every time the attending whitecoat applies the thin layer of goo to my burned skin, I think of Dr. Adibuah, the day he’d applied it to my neck. The day I’d seen the philax. The day this all began. I wonder if he knows I’m here, if he knows what they’re doing. Maybe he’s dead too. Or maybe he’s one of the faces watching coolly from the window.

  But my father knows. And I know he’s not coming. And the pain of every cell of my skin they steal is even worse with the knowledge that he knows. My father knows. And still I am alone.

  Dr. Jain will be in for me soon. The days blur together, but I was given sustenance through my intravenous some time ago, and they usually come to retrieve me a few hours later. That allows enough time for the morning drugs to wear off, helped by the tube food midday. They want me alert for their evening experiments. My reactions must be clear and observable, not artificially enhanced or stunted in any way. This is the worst part of the day, my body weak, but my mind awake. I sit like a stone in the lonely white room, wondering if the Faloii have left for the Isii, if they’ve already convinced the planet to swallow us up. If I could see Alma again, maybe I could try to get through to her, break whatever chain has tethered her to the Council.

  I think the same thoughts over and over again. Escape. My father. My mother. The Faloii. War. Dr. Albatur. Escape. My father. They give me only enough liquefied food to keep me going. They want me weak.

  The door hums open.

  “Awake,” Dr. Jain says, his smirk ever present. “Good. Today will be a little different.”

  “Different,” I repeat. My fists are already clenched. They keep my limbs tethered to the cot. I might choke him if I had half the chance.

  “Yes. We’ve finished with your dermis and epidermis.” He studies his slate. “Today we’ll be moving on to your bones.”

  “I’m not Faloii,” I spit. “Nothing in my bones is going to help you. And theirs won’t either. I won’t let you.”

  He doesn’t have to say what his eyes express: that I’m not in any position to make threats.

  “You don’t have to let me go,” I say. “But I need to talk to the Council. They need to know what they’re doing has consequences. If we start a war, it’s not something we can win.”

  “War,” he says. “You don’t know the meaning of that word.”

  “I don’t,” I say. “Neither do you! You’re younger than my parents. You were probably a baby when they left the Origin Planet.”

  He squints. “I don’t need to remember it to know where I belong.”

  “Maybe not,” I say, desperate. “But that’s not the point. The point is, what you think you know about war isn’t what’s going to happen here. I’ve seen the drones. This isn’t that. The whole planet will turn against us.”

  “It’s always been against us,” he says, and returns his eyes to the screen of his slate.

  “That’s such a stupid thing to believe!” I cry. “Do you not even think about what he tells you before imagining yourself as a victim? Stars!”

  I hang my head when he doesn’t respond. “Just let me talk to the Council,” I say. “They need to know more than just what he tells them. Does he not have to prove his theories? Isn’t that science?”

  He stares at me, his lips pursed, his dark eyes clouded. He’s hearing me, I think, and my pulse quickens. He understands.

  “This isn’t about science,” he says, putting his slate away. He’s reaching for the cot. “It’s about power.”

  I jerk away, the clang of my bonds echoing in the small stark room. I hear the snarl rise out of my throat and can’t recognize the sound of it as myself. The beast in the white coat takes me out into the hall, away to where they will prod at my anatomy as if it is I who is the monster. I keep snarling. I can’t stop.

  When I’m returned to the white room, the snarls have been drained from me by a series of syringes. I lie limp and sweaty on the cot, near unconsciousness. I hadn’t even bothered looking for my father as Dr. Albatur prodded my bones. I had expected the Head of the Council to continue pontificating about the future of N’Terra, but when the needles came out, his mouth was sealed into a thin line, the weak blue of his irises turning shiny and hard. I don’t see a future. When my eyes are open all I see is the vicious white of the room; when they’re closed, nothing but faint patterns of stars on the backs of my eyelids.

  Dr. Jain is there in the room, staring down at his slate, swiping through what must be data gathered from my anatomy. The light of the screen glows in his square spectacles, and he takes on the beast-like quality again. Glowing eyes. A smirk. He barely looks up when the door hums open.

  It’s Alma. The sight of her expressionless face floating above her white coat is like another needle plunging through my skin and into my breastbone. I can’t take it, her round eyes empty when they pass over my face. Has she been coming in and out of my room as I slept these days away? The idea that she has seen me held prisoner day after day and done nothing makes me want to die.

  “The tranquilizer?” Dr. Jain says, still not looking up but addressing his words to Alma.

  “Yes, doctor.”

  “Good, right on time. You may administer it now. Her vitals are stable enough.”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  She approaches my cot, the syringe gleaming on a small silver tray. I don’t even try to twist away, as I had the last two nights when drugs were administered. What’s the point now?

  The hands of the girl who had been my best friend are cool on my clammy skin. I remember when she’d removed my intravenous after I’d been lost in the jungle, so long ago, when my reappearance meant relief for her. Her fingers had been deft and expert in their movements, as always. She seems to be having some trouble now, fiddling with the port where the syringe goes in. Then a pinch. Not inside my vein. On my wrist.

  I crack open one eye. I don’t have the energy for both. The syringe is there in her fingers, but the liquid inside it is clear—not the blue substance I know to be the tranquilization drug. Is this new? I force open both eyes, afraid that they have invented some new superserum that will immobilize me even further. But then I see Alma’s eyes.

  They’re hers again. The flat, lifeless stare of the last few days falls away, the disguise put aside. Her two fingers are still at my wrist where she’d pinched me to get my attention.

  I’m wide awake now.

  She flashes her eyes down to the syringe in her other hand and, darting her eyes in the direction of Dr. Jain, gives one quick nod. Then she lifts the syringe to the intravenous port, fits the needle in, and injects me with whatever is in the syringe.

  I feel it immediately. Not the deadening effect of drugs but the sweep of energy and vitality usually associated with a vitamin compound. She’s given me the opposite of a tranquilizer: she’s given me some kind of liquid energy.

  “She shouldn’t give you too much trouble,” Dr. Jain says, but his voice is distracted, his eyes still on the slate’s screen.

  “None at all, doctor,” Alma says in that dead vo
ice. But her gaze holds mine, as bright as before. Now she closes her eyes and tilts her head ever so slightly. I know her meaning: Be asleep.

  I close my eyes, my heart pounding. I know I need to get it under control in case Dr. Jain checks my pulse. I focus on breathing deeply, slowly, even as the burst of energy from the vitamin compound rushes through my circulatory system. Alma, I think, hope taking off in my stomach like a flock of oscree.

  “All done, doctor,” she says. With my eyes closed, I feel her move away from my bedside and make her way toward the door. “She is unconscious.”

  “Good work,” Dr. Jain says, and his slate case snaps shut. The door hums open. I pray that he will go, that he won’t bother to come touch my wrist, my chest. His voice is eager: there must be some results from my data that he wants to go chatter with Dr. Albatur about. Or some other specimen that they have imprisoned nearby that he can’t wait to go prod with another set of needles. Either way, I am forgotten as they leave together.

  I remain still. I have no idea what is to come, but Alma has a plan. Her eyes were on fire with it. Now all I have to do is wait.

  Chapter 12

  Even if I wanted to sleep to pass the time, I couldn’t. The vitamin compound Alma had injected me with buzzes through my veins like beetles: I am a swarm in my cot. The room seems to get darker and darker, even with my eyes wide open. As the hours ooze into one another, a terrifying thought occurs to me: Had I imagined the whole thing? Had I hallucinated the light in Alma’s eyes?

  There’s a sound beyond the door. Not the hum of it opening, but tapping, shuffling. Like someone has pressed themselves against the other side and inches sideways down the hall. I’m here, I want to call. Had Alma forgotten which room I am in? Or is this all a hallucination too?

  My ears pick up a low, muffled beep. A long, heavy silence. Then the whisper of the door sliding open. It’s too dark for me to make out who stands there in the hall until they step into the room, and then the motion sensors bathe the room in harsh white light. I blink rapidly, and when the spots clear from my vision, I am rewarded with the two familiar shapes of Alma and Rondo.

  Rondo immediately goes to the wall, his body blocking my line of vision. He does something to the lights: there’s a click, and two sharp clips, as if he’s cutting wires. They are abruptly extinguished, and the tower of blinking lights attached to my intravenous goes dark and quiet.

  “I needed the light,” comes Alma’s voice through the pitch black, an irritated whisper.

  “Use the slate,” he says.

  “Are you . . . are you real?” I croak. Tears are gathering in my eyes.

  Rondo is at my side a heartbeat later. I can’t see him, but his thumb caresses the back of my hand. A soft, gentle pressure that I had felt my first night in N’Terra . . .

  “You were here,” I whisper. “I thought . . . I thought it was a dream.”

  “I was here, O,” he says. He seems to know I’m crying, because his other hand finds my face in the dark, searching gently upward until his fingers find my tears. He carries them away, and for a moment all that is heavy in me is made light. I know those hands. I know this heart.

  “Oh please.” Alma sighs. “No time.”

  She appears beside us and a rectangular light glows from her hands. The slate illuminates one side of the bed, the crook of my elbow centered in the glare.

  “First things first,” she says.

  She passes the slate to Rondo, who reluctantly unhands my face, and with him holding the slate steady, Alma removes the bonds and my intravenous. The feeling of the needle pulling free of my body is as uncomfortable and bizarre as ever, but it’s as if light and life rushes into the tiny hole it left in my skin and fills me up. Free. I sit up from the cot and start to swing my legs over the edge.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Alma whispers. “I know the injection I gave you makes you think you’re invincible right now, but if you go too fast you’re going to regret it later. Take it slow—”

  “No time,” Rondo mocks.

  “But not too slow,” she finishes. She shoots him a poisonous look, and the smile that stretches my dry lips is almost painful.

  “What’s the plan?” I say. I’ve got both my legs over the edge now, and my toes stretch for the cold white floor. It’s strange feeling the artificial ground of the Zoo again, especially with bare feet. I hate it: just one more cold, dead thing in this place.

  “The plan is stay with me,” she says. “I’m going to have to help you walk because Rondo needs to navigate with the slate. We’ve got a route laid out.”

  Rondo gives my knee a comforting squeeze and moves toward the door. He raises the slate and bends his neck the way I’m used to him doing: hacking.

  “This door is locked from the inside?” I say.

  “Yes,” Alma says. “They all are now, thanks to you. They changed all the access points from handprints to ocular scans since the night we busted Adombukar out.”

  “Speaking of which,” I whisper, leaning on Alma as she walks me closer to the door. “How are you working in the labs? You tranquilized Dr. Albatur, if I remember correctly.”

  She chuckles under her breath.

  “Yes, but I must have stunned the stars out of him because he didn’t remember a thing. I don’t know how it wasn’t on camera. All he remembers is you. He’s fixated on you as the cause of all of this. Now that . . . now that your mom is gone.”

  The sound of Rondo’s fingers tapping away on the slate pauses for the briefest moment as the mention of my mother’s death blooms in the air around us. Gone, she said. Like my mother lives, just elsewhere. I don’t even know what they did with her body. A fiery lump forms in my throat.

  The door hums open, light spilling in.

  “Time to go,” Rondo whispers.

  The hallway is empty. It must be very late. Even the most dedicated whitecoats have gone home to their communes.

  “No guards?” I whisper.

  “Sometimes.”

  I lean on Alma only slightly: the injection she had administered thrums through my veins. I shiver in the flimsy gown the whitecoats had dressed me in.

  “I need clothes eventually,” I say as we slowly round a corner, Rondo squinting at whatever system on his slate guides us.

  Alma nods.

  “I have a package hidden outside,” she says. “Water and a skinsuit and shoes and stuff. We just have to get there.”

  “Shh,” Rondo hisses, and throws an arm backward, pressing us against the wall. I hold my breath. Some distance away I hear one pair of steady footsteps. Rondo peers around the corner. “They’re going the other way. Just wait.”

  We remain frozen, the blood pulsing in my ears.

  “It was a guard,” he whispers when I can’t hear the footsteps anymore. “They must not have had a comm or they would have shown up on my screen.”

  “New program he made,” Alma whispers. “He had a lot of time on his hands when they had him on house arrest.”

  “House arrest?” I breathe.

  “For knocking out that guard. Aiding and abetting or something,” he says, motioning with his head for us to continue. I want to touch him, inspect him for harm. The task at hand stands between us. We creep down the hall as before.

  “Speaking of which,” I whisper to Alma, “Dr. Albatur doesn’t remember you tranqing him, but they must know you helped get Adombukar out, right?”

  “Not really,” she says. “Honestly, they were incredibly disorganized about the whole thing. That’s definitely changed, by the way. But they knew I was your friend—I just convinced them I was jealous of you and never really liked you.”

  “Who is they?” I hiss.

  “In here. Now.” Rondo jerks sideways in the hall and we immediately follow suit. After a few lightning-fast taps on the slate, a section of the wall hisses open, revealing what seems to be a linen closet. Racks of antimicrobial cloth. Shelves of gowns like the one I’m wearing right now. Rondo shoves me and Alma into the small space. �
�In.”

  The door hisses closed behind us, and the only light inside is Rondo’s slate. I smell everyone’s breath, the worst of which is, of course, my own. I try to breathe shallowly and away from Rondo, straining my ears for any sound in the hallway. I detect the faint murmur of two or more voices, and peer over Rondo’s shoulder at his screen.

  “Two guards,” he whispers. “Both have comms.”

  On his screen is what appears to be a map of the labyrinthine Zoo, an orange line winding its way through the corridors. The route, I assume, that Rondo has laid out for us. Very close to one section of the orange line are two red glowing dots, moving slowly along.

  “Is that them?” Alma whispers, nodding at his screen.

  “Yes. The program picks up the comms and registers them as red dots. I don’t have any way of tracking the whitecoats unless they have a slate, which registers as a blue dot.”

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  “We’re invisible,” he says, and I can see his smile from behind by the rise of his cheekbone. “I’m encrypted.”

  The voices beyond our linen closet sound clearer: they are very close to passing just outside the door. I fasten my eyes on the two red dots, praying they won’t pause in this little section of orange line. Keep going, I think. Keep going. Let me out of here.

  “They have them on a stricter patrol now,” Alma whispers. “Since Adombukar escaped.”

  “Who is they?” I repeat.

  “The Council,” Alma says, her voice sounding jagged in the dark. “It was honestly Dr. Albatur’s dream: a reason to crack down. A couple of the animals we released killed some of the guards in the stampede. Dr. Albatur blamed Adombukar. Called it an act of war.”