A Conspiracy of Stars

by Olivia A. Cole

  I eye a whitecoat twenty paces away using an oxynet to snag several avian species from a passing flock. The triggering of the oxynet is silent, but the net itself makes a whistling sound as it flies through the air, trapping the birds in a sort of bubble. It’s a new technology that’s supposed to be gentler on the animals than an actual net. Part of the Faloii’s rules when we settled, I’m told, is that we’re forbidden to cut down trees or harm wildlife, and as I wander along the dirt path, letting reaching branches brush my arms, I’m glad. I look up. Beyond the arched dome ceiling, I catch a glimpse of a cluster of birds not contained in the Beak flying fast and free. I envy them as I breathe in the scent of the towering ogwe trees. The trees aren’t edible—my grandmother’s studies had focused on functional nutrition, and I know as much about plants as I do about animals—but the smell is almost delicious. It’s hard to explain, but even their scent is striped, like their trunks: smooth but complicated, with a pattern of undertones that cross one another inside the nose when I breathe deeply.

  “What are you smelling?”

  My eyes snap open—I hadn’t even known they’d been closed. Beside me is Jaquot, the braggart of the Beak and my classmate in the Greenhouse.

  “The trees.”

  “Which ones?”

  He’s testing me, like all greencoats do to one another.

  “The ogwe.”

  “Distinguishing quality?”

  “Each ogwe leaf is perfectly identical, for one,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “No one knows. But we will.” I recite N’Terra’s motto, reluctant to give him what he wants.

  “Good,” Jaquot says smugly, as if he’s satisfied I’m not an idiot. “Except one thing: ogwe trees don’t have a scent.”

  “What?” I don’t need him to repeat himself, but what he’s said seems so stupid that I’m not entirely sure I’ve heard it correctly.

  “No smell,” he says, smiling in a way that shows too much of his gums. “Not discernible by humans, anyway.”

  “Wrong,” I say.

  “No, I’m not.”

  Jaquot leaves my side and walks toward the center of the dome where the trees grow thickly. The back of his head is flat, and I mentally compare it to the thick-headed marov that stump around the bushes of the jungle. I don’t follow him, but when he notices he’s alone, he turns back and beckons at me.

  “Come on, English!”

  “Do you ever get sick of the sound of your own voice?” I stay where I am.

  “Oh, you don’t want to defend your theory?”

  I follow him so he’ll keep his voice down, and we approach an ogwe tree. He reaches out a palm, laying it flat against the gray striped skin of the trunk. He closes his eyes and inhales deeply through his nose, lifting his chin for dramatic effect. I roll my eyes.

  “See?” he says. “Nothing.”

  “You can’t prove that empirically,” I say. “I have no way of knowing what you do or do not smell.”

  “You smell something?”

  I inhale deeply. I don’t need to close my eyes: there it is again, the powerful, crosshatched smell of the ogwe.

  “Yes,” I say. “It’s strong.”

  He looks uncertain but smiles sarcastically. “You can’t prove that empirically either.”

  I shrug, indifferent. I’ll save the debate for the Greenhouse when I have evidence to back me up.

  “What are you doing here anyway?” he asks, leaning against the tree. When we were kids I had a crush on him—mainly because of the color of his eyes, the same shade as the leaves. He’s still handsome. But annoying outweighs attractive.

  “My father takes me to the other compounds when he goes to meet with other scientists. Occasionally.”

  “Seriously?” he says, impressed. His lack of conceit takes me off guard. He’s always talking or bragging, and I hadn’t expected him to be interested in what anyone else has to say.

  “Yeah.” I’m hesitant to give away how excited it all makes me—I can almost hear my father calling it adolescent. But Jaquot doesn’t seem to have any concern about seeming juvenile.

  “That’s amazing,” he says, pushing off the ogwe to face me directly. “Have you been to them all?”

  “All except the Fin,” I say, referring to the Aquatic Compound.

  Jaquot moves his hand like he’s sweeping the Fin away.

  “Eh, you might be able to skip that anyway. I’d rather hear Dr. Espada lecture on grubs than fish. Mind-numbing.”

  I laugh. I’ve been rolling my eyes at him since we were six, but maybe he’s not so bad anymore. I make a mental note to send Alma a message about it when I return to the Paw. We’ve always thought Jaquot was all talk and no insight, but I’ve never considered that he may have changed. That seems fairly unscientific, now that I think about it.

  “That is really cool, though,” he continues, and turns to go back down the original path that leads toward the main entrance. “What does the Slither dome look like inside? Do they let the reptiles run loose?”

  We walk and talk, birds flying around us like tiny, colorful comets. Some of the comets aren’t so tiny: one bright orange bird lands on a branch above us, so large that the wood makes a groaning sound. No sooner does it land than it takes off again.

  “Species?” I say, pointing.

  “Roigo,” he says after the briefest pause. “I think. It took off too fast.”

  “Distinguishing quality?”

  “They hatch at their adult size.”

  “How?”

  “No one knows. But we will.”

  We grin at each other. It’s nice to talk about specimens without all the gravity that accompanies it with my parents and the whitecoats. For many of my peers, I know being a greencoat is just about memorizing facts. For me, it’s more. I open my mouth to tell Jaquot this, or some less serious version of it, when there’s a commotion somewhere through the trees.

  “What’s that?” I look around.

  “I don’t know,” he says, craning his head to try to get a glimpse through tree trunks. “I’ve never heard anyone yelling in the dome.”

  There’s more than one someone. There’s a chorus of voices, rising and falling.

  “It’s coming from around the main entrance,” says Jaquot. “Let’s check it out.”

  We follow the worn path through another cluster of trees. The flora in the dome isn’t quite thick enough to mimic walking through the real forests of Faloiv—or at least how I imagine them to be. We approach the tree line. There are just bushes and rocks after the trees thin out, a clearing before the dome wall and its door.

  “Oh man, look!” Jaquot’s hand whips out and grabs my wrist, unconscious of how tightly he grips me. His eyes are wide, his mouth open. I almost jerk away from him, but then I look.

  Four or five whitecoats shout, their words a combination of curses and caution, their bodies a flurry of waving arms and shuffling feet. One woman’s spectacles fall off, and I watch her scramble to recover them before they’re crushed . . . under a foot.

  The foot isn’t human. It’s not even a foot: it’s a collection of claws and scales, attached to a leg as thick as my calf. My breath catches in my throat, as if those claws are around my neck, choking me. The red of the plumage is shockingly bright. I’ve heard things described as bloodred before, but it was never accurate until now. This creature is the true color of blood, and huge: my eyes travel up its body, taller than I am. Its wingspan is as wide as the wigwam outside, and the scientists from the Beak scramble to subdue the animal, to pinion its wings with thick brown straps. One of those wings buffets a whitecoat, sending him sprawling. Then the animal throws back its colossal head, opens its curved beak, and emits a sound like a roar and a screech, a deep reverberating cry that echoes into the trees. A headache blooms in my skull.

  “It’s a philax,” Jaquot breathes. He’s still gripping my wrist and I’m too shocked to shake him off.

  “We’re so close,” I whisper, pushing as
ide the headache.

  “Look out!” one of the whitecoats yells, and swings one of the thick straps over his head. Fastened to the end are two smooth round objects, heavy, I can tell, by the way they whirl. After a few rotations, the whitecoat lets go and sends it sailing toward the philax, where it spins around and around the animal’s feet, entangling them. The philax screeches again, and it’s as if the sound shakes every cell in my body. The creature totters, wavers, and then falls, crashing to the ground in a tangle of bloodred feathers and scales.

  When the philax is prone on the ground—the whitecoats leaping on top of him to secure his wings with more straps—he stretches his neck out so that it’s fully extended and gives one more long, cavernous screech. And in that moment, my eyes meet his.

  Lightning flows through my body, a sudden jolt of an electric current. A storm of charges invades my head, my fear becoming enlarged, intensified by some titanic presence. My body goes rigid and the eyes of the philax drill into me, wild with terror. His fear vibrates in my fingernails and in my tongue: I feel it in my earlobes and in the throbbing of my head. The philax’s panic builds a nest in me alongside my own fear, which is now small beside his, dull next to his intensity. I can’t tear my eyes away from his.

  “Octavia! Octavia!” Jaquot is shaking me by my shoulder, but I can’t quite hear him. My mind is gray, busy, filled with noise . . . and behind it all, something taps.

  Someone near the philax shouts as the bird manages to rise again, words I can’t make out, and a lab door opens to reveal a whitecoat with a tranq gun. Behind him is Dr. Albatur, raising his hood as he steps back out into the sun of the dome. His face is hard as his mouth forms the words, “Shoot it.” The whitecoat aims the tranq gun at those beautiful bloodred feathers, pauses, and then pulls the trigger. I only hear the whispered zip of the dart leaving the barrel, and then the philax is falling, I’m falling, into dark, dark space.

  CHAPTER 2

  I’m dreaming of my mother. She’s standing in a green field, with plants that I’ve learned to identify on Faloiv. They are as deep green as they are in life, but richer somehow, their smells even more complicated. And among it all stands my mother: she’s younger than the way I know her to be, her locs shorter, her face slimmer. But it’s my mother, and in the dream she opens her arms, although I’m not sure if she’s opening them to me or to everything around us. My feet are bare, which would never be allowed on Faloiv, and buried in short green plants bearing round purple buds.

  “Listen,” says my mother.

  “Mom?”

  In the dream she puts a finger to her lips.

  “Listen,” she repeats.

  I listen. I hear wind. I hear birds: the chipper sound of the oscree and the booming caw of the muskew. Both are soft. I hear water, somewhere distant.

  “Listen,” my mother says a third time.

  I strain my ears. Plants swaying against each other. The creak of branches in the trees that line the meadow we stand in. My breath sighing through my nostrils. And then I hear it.

  My name. I hear my name, the syllables whispering through the grass under my feet, slithering up my legs, and sliding into my ears.

  “Octavia . . .”

  “I hear it!” I say. “I hear it!”

  “Octavia . . . Octavia?”

  Dr. Adibuah is gently nudging my shoulder with the back of his hand, his voice close and soft. A doctor’s voice, I think as I come awake. Calm. Soothing.

  “Octavia, are you all right?”

  I open both eyes and stare at him for a moment before answering.

  “I think so.”

  It’s hard to sit up—a pain throbs in my neck: a deep, sharp pain—but I do. My vision swims, and my body is clammy with sweat. Our skinsuits were designed to radiate our bodies’ heat out and away from us—a technology we learned and borrowed from the cellular structure of the ears of an animal called a maigno—but usually its benefits aren’t needed indoors. I look down and realize I’m staring at my bare stomach, deeply brown against the white of the skinsuit. My suit has been unfastened to the waist, meaning I’m lying there in my chest wrap in front of Dr. Adibuah. I cross my arms over my chest and struggle to fully rise.

  “What happened?”

  “You were unconscious,” Dr. Adibuah says in his doctor voice. My father sits behind him with his hands on his knees.

  I was? Why was I unconscious? The memory comes back like a spark of fire. The philax . . . his eyes . . . falling . . .

  This time a pain in my head flowers, lancing out and down, gripping my heart. I cry out without meaning to, falling back onto the bench where I’ve been laid. I’m in a small room and the sound is louder than it should be.

  “Octavia, what’s the matter?” Dr. Adibuah has my shoulders in his hands and leans down over me. My father remains seated, watching.

  “I . . . my head.”

  “What happened, Octavia?” My father stands now, his hands in the pockets of his white coat.

  “The—the bird . . .”

  I can’t tell him. It’s the feeling you get pulling your hand back from the fire before you even touch the flame—instinct. I swallow my words.

  “A philax managed to escape a facility room,” Dr. Adibuah says. “It somehow got out into the main dome. Did it hurt you?”

  Dr. Adibuah’s eyes roam down my bare arms with renewed concern, looking for wounds.

  “No, it didn’t hurt me.”

  “Did it upset you?” he asks, his voice gentle.

  Did it upset me? It seems such an illogical way to describe what I felt in the dome.

  “Yes,” I say slowly. “It . . . upset me.”

  The lie tastes sour in my mouth.

  “Octavia is sensitive,” my father says. “I’m sure it was a shock. It happened very quickly.”

  I say nothing, glowering.

  My father studies me, his hands still in his pockets. Dr. Adibuah’s eyes are softer.

  “Do you want to get her home, Octavius? Her neck has a minor sprain from her fall.”

  My father doesn’t answer right away. One hand has crept from his pocket, the fingers curling below his lip and resting there, motionless, as he takes me in.

  “Yes,” he says eventually. “Octavia, can you walk?”

  Pulling my skinsuit back up over my upper body, I stand quickly to prove that I’m fine. I’m punished with an array of spots before my eyes, the room spinning. I ignore it and nod but don’t speak.

  “Before you leave,” Dr. Adibuah says, his finger raised, “you should allow me to apply some of the narruf. For her neck.”

  My father looks at me, his face stone. But he nods.

  “I’ll get it,” Dr. Adibuah says, and leaves us alone.

  I lean back against the platform where I awakened. My head isn’t spinning and the noise that had crowded my brain earlier has subsided to a whisper. But I feel strange, open. Like a room in my mind has been unlocked, the door ajar but the room empty.

  Dr. Adibuah returns with a beaker containing a gelatinous substance. He’d said “narruf,” which I know is a species of bird, but I half expected him to return with the animal itself, not a jar of orange goo. I want to ask what it is—these are the things I love about what we do here: the mysteries that, once deciphered, might mean our continued survival. But my father’s face is granite, so I close my mouth around the question.

  “This is a substance from inside the narruf egg,” Dr. Adibuah says, as if he can sense my thirst for the knowledge, dipping a small, thin spatula into the goo. “It’s collected at hatching. It has healing qualities for injuries sustained after leaving the egg, such as falling from the nest.”

  He wipes off the excess on the jar’s rim and motions for me to turn my head to the side. I obey, and he reaches forward to spread the thick substance along the side of my neck, from just under my ear down to the outside of my shoulder. My throat begins to tingle.

  “Does it feel warm?” he asks, the spatula hovering.

&n
bsp; It does. The warm feeling spreads, a small, sudden fever. I nod.

  “Good.” He drops the spatula into a sanitation pouch hanging from the wall and returns the lid to the jar.

  My father opens the door.

  “Let’s go.”

  My father and I ride in silence, this time with him steering the chariot, at his insistence. We travel the same red dirt road, but something has changed. The distance between us is always present, but now it feels like a chasm.

  “Next time I go to the Avian Compound, I know to come alone,” my father says.

  I jerk as if his words are a spear he’s lodged in my ribs.

  “Wait, what?” I say, ignoring the little stab of pain left over in my neck that spikes when I raise my voice. “Sir—”

  “Octavia.” He cuts me off, making an effort to sound nasty. “You do realize that to do what we do—to be a scientist—you must control yourself, don’t you? Are you aware of that?”

  “What? Control myself?”

  My father takes his eyes off the road for an instant to glare over at me. I’m almost as tall as he is, but suddenly I’m rendered small. Even through his driving goggles I can feel the intensity of his stare, shrinking me.

  “Science requires reserve. Calm. Control.”

  Reserve? It’s my passion that makes science so appealing to me. Doesn’t that count for something? And what about Jaquot—always bragging and telling jokes? I can’t remember anyone lecturing him about reserve.

  “Do you believe that you exhibited calm and restraint at the Avian Compound today?”

  I start to tell him it wasn’t my fault, but he cuts me off again.

  “We study life-forms, Octavia,” he says sharply. “Your first time seeing a specimen up close, and you behave this way. How do you expect to be a whitecoat when you get emotional at the mere sight of an animal being tranquilized?”