Kingdom of Cages

by Sarah Zettel

  The ferns thickened around her, reaching up to her knees, then her shins, then her waist. The insects thickened too, and pitcher plants yawned wide to lure them in. Getting there. She passed a cluster of bright yellow Peristeria orchids and, oh, glory, Cerastium aquaticum, which would grow thick and tall near standing water, but less so near running streams. She was approaching her marsh.

  Splash!

  Correction—Chena pulled her boot back, chagrined—she was in her marsh. There were the Salix tropica trees with their leaves like fat hands drooping down to trail in the pools of standing water, where frogs the size of Chena’s head sat submerged to their eyeballs in black water and watched the fog of insects skimming the ponds. The tropical willow’s gray bark was a terrarium for at least a dozen kinds of fungus, and some of the fungus grew other fungus, like the parasitic belladonna mushroom.

  The stuff she wanted would grow higher up, near the canopy, in the crooks of the branches where the dribbling moisture gathered. Chena set down her pack, unlaced her boots, stuffed her socks inside, and slung them over her shoulder. When you had no help and didn’t want to harm the tree, the best way to climb was barefoot. Especially knowing that if her unfeeling soles smashed too many little fungi, she would effectively be leaving boot prints.

  Chena dug her fingers and toes into the grooves in the bark and started climbing. She enjoyed climbing trees. She was good at it. Even with a fully loaded pack on her back, she could swarm up the sides of the tallest tree like any squirrel. When she was climbing, she felt strong and free.

  All too soon, she reached a wide crook where the branches were patched with telltale umbrellas of pink and brown. Chena broke off a piece of fungus and sniffed it, then broke a piece off the piece and tasted it, spitting it out instantly after she did. Her tongue didn’t numb or itch, and the taste was salt and nut. This was the stuff.

  Chena squatted on the branch, braced against the main trunk, and opened the collecting sacks hanging from her belt. Three pounds of the stuff would be enough to dose fifty or sixty people and was a small enough amount that it could still be smuggled to where it was needed. They’d have to hope the whole village wasn’t sick by the time Chena made it back. What they really needed was a hundred pounds of the stuff, or a thousand, but they couldn’t have that.

  Madra, after her third trip inside the hothouse, said they were giving all the same old reasons for not helping Offshoot. Antibiotics and antivirals, they said, would introduce “an artificial pressure” on the microsphere, causing artificial evolution of the microorganisms. Changes in the microsphere would have repercussions all the way up the life chain and therefore could not be allowed.

  “But it doesn’t make any sense!” Chena’s hand had tightened around the pestle she was using to crush more foxglove seeds. “Don’t they see that it doesn’t make any sense?”

  “Human societies, especially old ones, seldom make sense,” Nan Elle had said. “Tell me, why do the Athenians always pick their management committees from the same five families?”

  Chena shrugged. “Because that’s the way they do it.”

  “Exactly. The hothousers are doing these things because that’s what they do. It doesn’t make any sense, but nowhere else makes much sense either.”

  Chena had narrowed her eyes at Nan Elle then. “You’ve never lived anywhere else. How would you know?”

  Nan Elle had just stirred at one of the pots on the stove. “When you are sixty-eight years old, ask me that again.”

  So, no real medicines. The hothousers forbade it, because that was how they did things and no one was able to make them stop yet.

  Chena pulled her knife out of its sheath and began shearing off mushrooms and dropping them into her bags. She worked quickly, ignoring the bugs and the sweat, the hoots of the birds and the skittering lizards. She climbed from branch to branch, taking the most hidden fungi, never clearing out a patch completely. Inside a week, the evidence of her presence would be completely erased by fresh growth.

  Some of the bugs, of course, were not bugs at all. They were little cyborgs with mote chips in their heads, sending back swarms of data to the hothousers. They saw her up here, crouching like a gigantic monkey in the tree, stealing forbidden fruit. There was no help for that. She had to trust her suit. Surely, if the suit wasn’t working, they’d have been on to her before she could touch their wilderness.

  The last bag full, Chena closed her knife and slithered back down to the ground. Aching but elated, she stowed her little sacks inside her pack. Nan Elle had forged her a license for carrying salad mushrooms that should cover things if anybody searched her pack. If anybody made her eat one of the things to prove it was what she said, she’d have at least thirty minutes before she got sick.

  Chena drew in a great lungful of the moist tropical air, feeling like the queen of the world. All she had to do was find her way back to the dock and to Farin in the Peristeria library.

  She pictured his eyes when she told him how smoothly she had accomplished her task. They would widen with pleased surprise, and he would tell her how brave she was. He would take her hand and squeeze it, and then she would lean forward, and he would lean forward, and they would kiss, and it would be long and slow and he would wrap his arms around her and hold her close, and then… and then…

  Chena shook herself. Wake up! You keep dreaming like this, and you are going to be out here in the dark for the snakes to eat.

  She brought her compass out again to check her orientation. She turned slowly until her face was toward the river and she had sighted on landmarks among the vegetation to keep her going in a straight line. She set off.

  Ahead of her, the undergrowth rustled and a black and yellow cat emerged and stared straight at Chena.

  Chena froze, one foot still in the air. The animal was lean, with a ringed tail that looked at least as long as its spotted torso. Its huge clawed paws seemed to be made more for climbing trees than pacing on the ground. Its lips parted just enough that she could see the gleam of one fang, and it did not even blink as it looked at her.

  A Pandoran jaguar. A wave of dizziness passed over Chena and for a moment she thought she might faint. One of the largest carnivores in the continental rain forest. They liked to stalk their prey by moving through the trees and then suddenly dropping down on it. She’d read all about that with a kind of morbid fascination.

  The jaguar growled, a low whining sound, and took a step forward. Chena’s blood rushed to the soles of her feet.

  Stop it, stop it. What did Nan Elle tell you? Don’t act like prey. If you don’t act like a prey animal, they won’t chase you.

  She lowered her foot slowly. All she had to do was walk away calmly. All she had to do was not run. The jaguar’s back only came up to her waist. Surely she was too big for it to take down. Except for that tail, it was about the size of a wolf, and wolves never attacked full-grown human beings. Everybody knew that. She had not come this far just to be cat food.

  Mustering every nerve she possessed, Chena made herself take three calm steps forward. The jaguar screamed and leapt. Chena screamed in answer, stumbling backward, expecting to feel claws tearing through her. But the jaguar was crouched a meter away, its long tail lashing and the high-pitched warning growl trembling in the air between them.

  Another blur of yellow and black fell from the trees, and a second jaguar stood beside the first.

  Chena’s nerve broke. She screamed again and ran, tearing at the tangled curtain of undergrowth with her hands, heedless of anything except the need to get away, get away, get away! A couple clear meters opened in front of her and she ran, and tripped, and scrabbled to her feet again, and clawed at the next wall of undergrowth, and vaguely realized her hands were bleeding and the growling was still behind her. She ran again, tripped again, fell, and tried to get up, and she couldn’t, because she couldn’t breathe, and she just lay there crying and panting and waiting to die.

  After a few minutes, she lifted her head. She was not de
ad. Shaking, she looked over her shoulder. The jaguars waited a meter away from her, tense and wary, but not moving forward.

  Still shaking, Chena got to her feet. Something was wrong. Something was so wrong she couldn’t even think clearly about it. She took a step toward the jaguars. One of them growled and took a swipe at the air with its huge paw. Chena froze. She stepped to the left. Another growl, and the jaguar stepped to the left too, crouching as if getting ready to spring. Chena stepped right, and the jaguar held its position. Another step to the right, and another, and all the jaguars did was pad a few steps forward.

  She knew, then, and the sudden revelation washed over her with the same strength as the fear had. All she could do was laugh, making a noise as high-pitched and hysterical as one of the jaguars’ screams. The two cats did not like this noise and stalked slowly forward, growling their warnings. Still laughing, Chena held up her hands and turned to the right. She began walking forward. A growl sounded behind. She picked up the pace. That was apparently satisfactory. The jaguars took up their positions, one on each side of her, matching her step for step and making sure she did not deviate from the path.

  She had not gotten away with anything, and it was not just insects that the hothousers controlled. They controlled these two creatures walking at her sides and the jaguars were taking her to their masters. Why had she believed that the hothousers would have to come out and get her? That she would see them coming? They were already here.

  Slowly, Chena’s hysteria faded and she felt the chill of fear take her again. She was being walked to the hothouse. They had seen her and they had captured her. Why had they waited so long? Why hadn’t they taken her before she packed up their precious fungus?

  Probably because they wanted to catch her red-handed so there would be no question about whether they could put her in the involuntary wing. She fingered her false nail. Should she take the poison now? Make them come and haul her body out of the pristine rain forest before it decayed and upset the delicate balance of nature?

  Anger rushed over her then. How could they do this? They killed her mother, now they were going to kill her—and everybody in Off-shoot, if she didn’t get the medicine back to them. They didn’t care. They never would care. It wouldn’t make any difference to them how many bodies dropped to the ground, as long as they could get them cleaned up fast enough. She curled her fist around her false nail and looked at the cats guarding her.

  They were herding her. The fangs and claws were threats. Real threats, but they did not want to use them. They wanted her alive. Chena swallowed hard. They were keeping her for the involuntary wing, for the information she had, like where she had gotten the suit.

  Chena hesitated at that thought and got another warning growl. The suit. She had almost forgotten. They had not really seen her, they had seen someone in a suit. The hothousers knew they had someone, but could not possibly know who they had yet. Another reason to tell their creatures not to kill her.

  They did not want to kill her, but she had no such qualms about them. A plan, sudden and solid, formed in her mind. All she had to do was keep Nan Elle’s advice firmly in mind and pay attention to the world around her.

  There, there—a fallen tree within arm’s reach, its spiky branches protruding invitingly. They were just about to pass it. They were passing it now.

  Chena let herself stumble. One of the cats snarled. Chena straightened up with a length of dead wood in her hands. The nearest cat growled a warning and Chena answered with a snarl of her own as she swung the club down on its skull.

  The cat screamed and Chena screamed and swung the club down again. Something snapped, and Chena dropped the stick and ran. She had only seconds. She tore the false nail from her finger and whirled around as the jaguar leapt at her.

  She thrust her hand straight into the creature’s mouth.

  Teeth gouged her skin as she then fell backward, rolling and scrabbling to get out of reach. The jaguar rolled onto its feet. Chena scuttled backward like a wounded crab, pain and blood streaming down her arm. The jaguar sprang, and all at once it was on top of her, fur and weight and carrion smell, screaming and batting at her with its huge paws, clawing at her suit and rolling her over.

  Then it was gone. She sat up, dizzy, fear making everything crystal clear. She saw the sharp edge on every leaf surrounding her, heard each individual insect hum. The jaguar, now a couple meters away, staggered back and forth, shaking its head. The warning growl turned to a whine.

  Chena didn’t wait. She was on her feet, grabbing her pack and running, before the animal fell. She had to get to the river, to Peristeria, to a crowd of humans, where she could strip off veil and hood and become just another villager.

  The world narrowed down to a green tunnel in front of her. She’d hesitate just long enough to check her compass and refine her course. She ran until her lungs burned and her ears sang. She ran on legs that felt like stone and rubber. She ran until she forgot she had ever done anything else.

  At last the trees cleared away and she saw the brown river spreading in front of her. Beyond thought, Chena hurled herself into the water. She tried automatically to swim, but her pack and her exhaustion hampered her. Her head sank beneath the surface, even as her hand reached out…

  And clasped another hand that jerked her upright. Yet more hands clamped hold of her and pulled her up, dropping her on something hard. A boat deck, she realized. She opened her eyes and saw Aban bending over her. He reached out and stripped the veil off her face.

  “What in the burning name of God are you doing?” he demanded. Chena couldn’t speak, she could only gasp for air.

  “Get her out of that thing and get her below,” ordered Aban. “Somebody, you, get to the library and find that cousin of hers.”

  Rough hands yanked the camouflage suit off her. Chena couldn’t see what they did with it, but she didn’t care.

  I did it! Triumph filled her with each wheezy gasp for air. I did it! Got through them, got what I needed, got away from them.… She barely felt the men dragging her down the narrowed stairs and sitting her on the bunk. She leaned against a wooden support post, nothing but her own victory singing through her. Maybe she slept, or passed out. She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that the world went away somehow until she heard footsteps clumping down the stairs, followed by Farin’s voice.

  “Chena?” His silhouette leaned over her.

  “Farin!” Chena threw her arms around his neck. “I did it! I did it!”

  “Did what? Chena, the village is in an uproar.” He disengaged her arms. “Oh, God’s garden, what happened to your hand?”

  “I did it!” They seemed to be the only three words she had left. But then she saw Farin’s worried face. How silly of him to worry. Didn’t he see? They had won!

  Farin found water, washed her hand, and dressed it with bandages from her own pack, which had managed to get only slightly soaked from its dunking. While he fussed over her, Chena poured out the whole story, how she had found the belladonna mushrooms, how she had deceived the hothousers’ interceptors, how she had clubbed one and poisoned the other and found her way back to the village. She expected him to cheer, to hug her, to tell her how magnificent she had been. Instead he just looked grave and kept glancing overhead.

  “When are they going to get moving?” he muttered.

  “Right. We need to get the medicine back to Offshoot. I cannot wait to see Nan Elle’s face when I tell her what happened.”

  Farin shook his head. “Chena, I don’t think you understand what did happen.”

  “Of course I do.” Chena grabbed his shoulder and shook it gently, enjoying the way it felt warm and strong under her good hand. “I just screwed the hothousers down to the deck.”

  “I hope that’s what you did.” Farin stared at the thin coverlet Chena sat on. “They were patrolling the village looking for someone who had broken the quarantine. I hope you did not just get the entire village dismantled. I hope you are not carrying a camera plant.
I hope they are not searching the boat looking for us, and getting ready to arrest Aban and throw him in an involuntary wing.”

  Chena let her hand drop and she looked away, biting her lip. No, he couldn’t be right. Up above, the tramping of feet and ticking of the metronome vibrated through the deck. Water sloshed as the oars began to dip and rise, and the boat rocked as the current took it.

  “There.” She grinned at him. “We’re already getting away. You’re starting to sound too much like your grandmother. Always worrying.” But Farin did not return her smile.

  Before either of them could say anything else, Aban rushed down the stairs.

  “You!” He stabbed a finger at Chena. “You’re Elle’s apprentice, aren’t you? We need you up here.”

  “She can’t,” said Farin. “If anybody from Peristeria sees her—”

  Aban just made the piss-off sign. “This load’s from Canopy. We just stopped at Peristeria to pick up you and some cargo. They won’t have gotten the news yet. Come on.”

  “Chena, don’t.” Farin grabbed her good wrist. “We do not need you attracting any more attention right now.”

  Chena looked at his hand on her wrist, and for the first time she felt no thrill at his touch, she just felt angry. He did not understand. He thought she was still a child, a screw-up, someone who would not be there when she was needed. That was not who she was anymore.

  “Someone needs my help.” She caught up her pack in her bandaged hand, ignoring the way it sparked fresh pain, and walked away, and he let her go.

  “Her name’s Vonne Sesi,” said Aban, leading Chena up the stairs. “She’s got burrow ticks.”

  The cabin was full to the brim. People had even hunkered down in the aisles beside the rowers, talking to each other in their hard-edged, clipped-off southern accents. Despite that, Chena had no problem picking out the person Aban was talking about. A woman sat cross-legged in the aisle, cradling her arm. Pain distorted her broad face, and her deep brown skin had a greenish tinge to it. She had one loose sleeve rolled up and Chena caught a glimpse of red welts about the size of thumbnails with black centers peppering her arm.