An Anatomy of Beasts

by Olivia A. Cole

  “He was already sowing the seeds before. All his fear tactics,” Rondo mutters, his eyes glued to the screen. “This gave him all the justification he needed. He’s running the Council like his private army.”

  “And my father?” I hear myself say. I hadn’t wanted to say it.

  “He—he still sits on the Council,” Alma says softly.

  I watch the two red dots continue down the corridor, going deeper into the maze. My father could be with them for all I know. Walking like a ghost beside them and Rondo’s program wouldn’t know the difference. I shudder.

  “They’re gone,” I whisper.

  “Yes. Let’s go.”

  We don’t meet anyone else as we make our way along Rondo’s orange path. Occasionally I widen the Artery to see if there are any animals here that I might be able to take with me. But the tunnel is dark, lifeless. What if they are here, imprisoned as before, but Albatur and his Council have discovered how to keep us from hearing each other?

  “Should be right around here,” Rondo says, finally raising his eyes from the screen and scanning the empty hall before us.

  I pause, leaning on Alma’s shoulder, sweeping my eyes over the motionless corridor.

  “What should be?”

  “Our route.”

  “You don’t know where it is?”

  “I’ve only seen it digitally. We didn’t have time to come check it out first since we didn’t exactly know you were coming.”

  “What is it?” I demand in a whisper.

  Alma shushes me. “Let him concentrate!”

  Rondo passes me the slate, whispering, “Hold this. Look out for red dots.”

  “What about blue ones?”

  “Those too.”

  He moves slowly down the hallway, running his hands along the walls inch by inch.

  “Here somewhere . . . ,” he mutters.

  “What are we looking for?” I whisper.

  “It’s a ventilation shaft,” he says, pausing to inspect a seam in the wall. “The early blueprints of N’Terra show it as being in this corridor. They closed it off twenty years ago when they learned a better way to cycle the air. It was one big shaft before that served as a kind of vacuum to force the air to move. . . .”

  He pauses again, inspecting some tiny spot I can’t see from where I stand.

  “So hot here, you know . . . ,” he murmurs. “They dealt with the noise just to get some airflow.”

  “Rondo, focus,” Alma hisses.

  “I am.”

  He continues to inspect each inch of the wall. I’m starting to sweat, even wearing this stupid skimpy gown. It’s fear that sends my pores into overdrive, not heat. I hold the back of the gown closed with one hand and hold the slate with the other, anxiously glancing down at it every few seconds before looking back at Rondo to see if he’s found anything. Alma has moved to the opposite wall now, mirroring his inspection of every seam and irregularity in the smooth white clay walls. I stand alone in the middle of the hall, helpless except to keep watch and try to tame my pulse.

  “What are we going to do when we find it?” I say. “Break through the wall?”

  Alma taps her hip pocket but doesn’t look up. “I have pavi extract. I steal a little whenever I can. Just like it dissolved Adombukar’s cage, it should dissolve the wall.”

  “Not exactly subtle,” I mutter. “All it takes is someone walking by and seeing a huge hole in the wall and we’re busted.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” Alma trails off.

  “Stars,” I groan.

  “I think I found something,” Rondo says, and Alma and I rush over before he can go on.

  A ridge in the clay, raised ever so slightly above the surface of the rest of the wall. I sweep my eyes anxiously over the surrounding area, looking for more. Sure enough, there is another ridge farther along to the right, running parallel to the first.

  “Up there,” Alma whispers, pointing. We all take a step back and tilt our heads, taking in the ridge near the ceiling.

  “A square,” Rondo murmurs, gazing at a faint line near the floor. “This is it. They just patched it up. It is huge.”

  Alma is already reaching for her pocket, withdrawing a long vial of pavi extract.

  “I hope I have enough.” She frowns, and crouches. She uncorks the vial and extends her hand to pass me the stopper.

  But my hands aren’t free. I’m gripping the slate with all ten fingers, staring at the maze of the Zoo, trying to map where we are. Trying to decide if the blue dot coming in our direction is actually our direction or somewhere else in the lab.

  “Rondo,” I whisper, scarcely daring to breathe. “Is this . . . is this where we are?”

  I want to be wrong. I shove the slate in his face, and he has to wrench it from my shaking hands.

  I watch each muscle in his face go slack.

  “What? What is it?” Alma demands, standing, craning her neck to see the screen.

  I’m not looking at the screen anymore. I’m looking at the corner just six feet away, hearing the sound of footsteps over the pounding of my own heart. They’re coming right toward us. Not a harmless blue dot. But a person. Blue means whitecoat. Blue means . . . it’s over.

  There’s nowhere to hide. I stare at the corridor before me, at the shadow bearing our capture.

  He comes around the corner. White coat. A slate clutched in tan fingers. I only see pieces at first, the horror of being caught causing my brain to fire in intermittent bursts. Then in a rush of adrenaline it all comes together as the whitecoat takes one step toward us and stops.

  It’s not just a whitecoat. It’s my father.

  Chapter 13

  “Don’t try to run,” he says. His voice is a skeletal version of itself, all bone and no blood. I’m not close enough to see his eyes, but I know the ghosts that lurk there. They’ve always been there, but now have more company with the addition of my mother.

  The three of us stand motionless before him, three kunike waiting to decide on fight or flight. But I know neither is an option. Where to run? Fight with what? The only weapon I have is my eyes, and I use every bit of viciousness they can muster as I stare him down.

  “Octavia,” he says, but his mouth can’t quite form whatever words his mind had planned. His lips are empty like his eyes. “I think you three had better come with me.”

  Alma takes one tiny step backward, as if at least one muscle had decided on flight.

  “Don’t,” my father says quickly. “You wouldn’t get far.”

  Another long moment of silence, of staring. “This way,” he says. He stands to the side in the corridor, swinging one arm out to show us the way. He doesn’t appear to be armed. In one hand is his slate, the one that had registered the blue dot on Rondo’s device. The other hand is empty, but who knows what his white coat conceals.

  “How did you find us?” Rondo says, searching for the flaw in his plan even now that it doesn’t matter.

  “Because I was looking,” my father says. “Now move.”

  I move first. Forcing my feet forward is like walking through a treacherous swamp, and I give him a wide berth, nearly pressing myself against the wall in order to be as far from him as possible. For a brief moment I consider lunging at him, wrapping my arm around his neck and squeezing, giving my friends time to escape. But even with Alma’s vitamin in my veins, I know I’m too weak. Alma and Rondo follow, my father bringing up the rear.

  We continue down the hall in silence. I keep my eyes straight ahead, waiting for my father’s voice to tell me where to go.

  “What do we do?” Rondo whispers. I know my father can hear him. My eyes are open for an opportunity, but I know better than to hope there will actually be one. The Zoo had once been a place for hope. Not now.

  “Just here,” my father says. I stop moving, casting my eyes left and right. Doors surround us like any other place in the labs. I have a vague feeling of recognition. I think if we were to continue down the hall we would run into the Atrium.
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br />   My father comes from behind us and chooses a door. He rubs his eyes, then leans close to the lineless white surface, opening them wide. A thin blue line that I hadn’t noticed before illuminates, emitting a subtle flash as the hidden device performs the ocular scan. A muted beep of recognition, and the door slides open.

  I recognize it right away: the sorting room where the other interns and I had spent our very first day inside the Zoo. The bins are not nearly as full as they were the week we were on duty, but there are still dozens of eggs of various sizes and colors shining all around us. Something has changed though: the relaxing atmosphere that the eggs had once provided seems faded and dull. I can’t put my finger on it exactly . . . something in them has shifted.

  “What are we doing here?” Alma says as the door hums shut behind us. I know her well enough to know that she’s terrified, but she does her best to put on a brave face, daring to look my father square in the eyes.

  “Octavia,” my father says, ignoring her. “There are so many things I wish you would have done differently.”

  I look away from Alma and go back to staring at the eggs. The rage that’s building inside me could shatter every shell in this room. In this moment I wish my father could speak Arterian, so that I could fully communicate the violence of my anger, shove the shapes of my fury into his mind. Our language seems so rudimentary. It lacks the power of what I feel.

  “You don’t see the whole picture,” he says, his voice harder than it had been a moment before. “And why should you? We said our children wouldn’t know the pain of our world. . . .”

  “Who’s we?” I snap, unable to stop myself. “You and my mother? She’s dead. Because of you.”

  He stops short and moves so quickly that I almost don’t have time to dodge. I spring sideways, avoiding whatever blow he’s intending to land on me. But he merely brushes past, almost shoving me out of the way as he lunges toward the back of the sorting room. He kicks a bin of eggs out of the way, and I leap forward to catch a lavender egg before it crashes to the ground. My anger spikes again, filling the tunnel in my head. But there is no one there to receive it as my father shoves the examination tables out of the way. A metered scale is next: he nearly sends it toppling in his effort to clear a path. I cradle the lavender egg, staring at him in furious bafflement.

  “What is he doing?” Alma says under her breath.

  “I’ve worked my whole life so that you wouldn’t have to know,” my father goes on. He sends a shelf bearing a projector and slides careening to the floor, the crash filling the room with an orchestra of echoes. I cringe, cupping the egg to my chest as if to protect it. “Just to create a world for you that’s safe.”

  “You sound just like Albatur,” I spit. “Always going on about how no one understands what you’re trying to create, no matter who you kill in the process!”

  “If Albatur doesn’t get what he wants, the death has not even begun,” he says, not looking at me, forcibly moving another shelf.

  “And you think that’s a good thing?” I cry. “We killed our home planet, and now we’re going to kill this one? You don’t even know what you’ve done—”

  He whirls on me, cutting me off. “The death followed us here, Octavia,” he says. But the fire is fading from his voice, sputtering out. “It was a stowaway. There’s so much you don’t understand. And that’s why I need you to do what I cannot do.”

  His eyes are damp coals. All the wind that had swept my angry ship forward dies, and I stare at him, at a loss. “I need you to do what I cannot do,” he repeats, pleading. “I need you to understand.”

  He turns away, back to the wall he has cleared of shelves and tables and charts. He places two hands against the smooth white clay and slides them slowly in a gentle circular pattern, the motion of someone feeling their way through a dark room. They seem to find something after a moment of seeking and stop abruptly. His hands flex against the wall, and something shifts.

  “Stars,” Rondo says, impressed.

  The wall is sinking in. Not all of it, just a section. Twice as wide as my father and almost as tall. It’s as if a mouth is opening in the clay, swallowing itself. It retreats from my father’s hands, then folds sideways in a loose way, like fabric. Had it ever been a wall at all, or was it a mirage, like so many other pieces of the Zoo?

  “What . . . ?” I trail off, amazed. I return the lavender egg to its bin and against my better judgment move toward what has revealed itself to be a passage at the back of the sorting room.

  “It’s time for you to leave,” my father says. He doesn’t even look at me. He stares ahead into the mouth of the tunnel, and then disappears into its shadows.

  I stand frozen for what feels like an eternity, hope and logic battling in my mind. If my father is helping us escape—and he seems to be—then surely there must be a motive greater than fatherly love. Love hadn’t made him put a stop to Albatur’s experiments, after all. But through the tunnel comes the drifting scent of Faloiv, and it’s too much to resist.

  Somehow Alma is already ahead of me, eager to explore whatever secrets this strange turn of events contains. Rondo is at my side a half second later, taking my arm and letting me lean on him as we take our first step into the dark. My father’s slate is a lantern ahead of us, and his steps are brisk and purposeful. He knows where he’s going, obviously. I should know by now that anything shocking to me is old hat to him.

  There’s not much to see. I had expected dampness, the distant sound of dripping water. But this is not a cave, hollowed out by the powers of the planet itself. This is man-made, a human tunnel. The ground doesn’t have the comforting give of soil—it is the same artificial substance as the Zoo, firm and cold against the soles of my feet. But warmer than the labs, I observe: the temperature is changing. We’re leaving the cool filtered air of N’Terra and inching closer to the hot natural breath of Faloiv. And something else. Heat and stench are ahead, something that crawls into my very skin as well as my nostrils.

  “Do you smell that?” Alma says, but I don’t reply. I might be sick if I do.

  “This will be unpleasant,” my father says.

  There’s a blur of light ahead, and he puts his slate to sleep, its glow no longer needed. The moon is guiding us now. The moon and the stench.

  “They’re dead,” I whisper, so quiet that only I can hear.

  In a few steps I know that I’m right. At the end of the tunnel is the edge of the jungle, but even the smell of the ogwe and syca cannot mask what lies on the ground before us. Dead animals. A half dozen. Two vasana. One lonely gwabi. The other bodies are unidentifiable. I falter against Rondo, my hands over my nose and mouth, horrified. The empty eyes of the dead stare up at the black sky of Faloiv, the stars too far to reflect in them.

  “Killed the night Adombukar escaped. The night your mother . . .”

  “What are they doing here?” I say. I fasten my eyes on the jungle instead of the bodies. I’m afraid if I stare too long that I will find the bloody hands of my mother emerging from the pile of hooves and paws.

  “This is the tunnel Manx and the finders use to smuggle in specimens,” he says. “Hidden.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” I say. “Why are the bodies here? Just . . . here?”

  “I have no answer,” he says, his voice a husk. I want to strike him.

  Rondo and Alma have moved close to me, sensing my anguish. But their nearness does nothing to ease the stench. Not just of death but the smell of anger that seeps from the trees down upon me and my people. I dare not widen the Artery, afraid of what other witnesses to this horror I will find. The ogwe see. The syca know. Their anger burrows into my head, becoming my own; and in that instant I think of the Faloii, the small group my nana said is heading to the Isii. Had they already arrived? Is this why the trees’ anger feels so much more intense? Or is it because the part of me that is connected to Faloiv is naturally siding against the damage my people seem to insist on doing?

  My father tur
ns to me, and the pain in his eyes isn’t enough—it will never be enough. “We don’t have much time,” he says. “There is more at work than you realize. The Solossius was always a backup plan. For the years we have been studying its construction, we believed it to be our only option. But then you reignited Albatur’s original desire. You and your friend.”

  “Me?” Alma says.

  “No, not you. Him. The Faloii man.”

  “His name is Adombukar,” I snap, bristling. “But what do you mean? We reignited what?”

  “He brought Albatur’s desire right into the labs. Not just his bones. Something infinitely more powerful. The thing that brought Albatur to this planet to begin with.”

  “The kawa,” Rondo says softly. “You’re talking about the kawa.”

  I turn to my father, trying to see him with the eyes necessary to understand everything that’s happening.

  “The kawa? Albatur wants that? But why . . .” I pause, the pieces floating together. “Power. Adombukar was able to extract energy from it. Albatur thinks he can do the same thing.”

  “More than thinks,” he says, his mouth a hard line. “Knows.”

  “How? How does he know?”

  “The kawa powered the Vagantur,” he says.

  “What?” Alma says. “Come again?”

  “A kawa powered the Vagantur,” he says again. “But it was lost when we landed. Albatur and the first N’Terrans spent many years looking for it as they attempted to repair the ship. The Faloii told us there were no more. But when you helped Adombukar leave the labs, we learned that they lied—we saw Adombukar use the egg. There is another kawa. Maybe many more.”

  “How did a kawa power the Vagantur?” I say. “It’s an object of Faloiv!”

  “We only have time to discuss the present just now,” he says. I again fight the urge to strike him. “And what you must do.”

  “What I must do?” I cry. “Must? What I thought I must do was come here and expose Albatur. But . . .”

  “You can’t expose that which you don’t see the whole of,” he says roughly. “This can’t be your aim now, Octavia. The only course of action now is to give him what he wants. What we’re owed. Before this gets worse.”