The Last Zoo Page 11

  He tries sending her the chimera again, but she shuts her mind. He pushes against her, and she sings catchy pip-pop songs with her hands clasped over her ears, until at last his voice howls into the distance, and the warmth on her cheek turns cool.

  Pia sits there with her heart racing, wondering where the willpower had come from to resist a chimera so tempting.

  She doesn’t have an answer. Now Bagrin has gone, she doesn’t have any answers.

  And at last she can no longer fool herself: this mess is way beyond her ability to fix. She hopes that it isn’t beyond Siskin’s.

  • • •

  Urette is full of apologies when she comes back into the bubble. ‘I’d love you to stay longer. But I can’t have Nancy getting sick, especially with her carrying a brood...’

  Pia rummages around for the bit of paper that will get her out of there. She feels sick with despair. Now she has turned from Bagrin’s lies and admitted the truth to herself, she will have to admit it to someone else too. The thought of coming clean to Siskin after lying to him that morning is almost unbearable.

  ‘It’s due to their solitary nature,’ Urette explains, maybe interpreting Pia’s silence as offended.

  ‘Is that why you keep their ark so far from all the others?’ Pia makes small talk as she searches through her dungarees pocket.

  ‘They’re not that fragile,’ Urette says, a little defensively. ‘Their cobmist contains ultra-powerful antibodies, which screen out most disease.’

  So that is why the zoo breeds the gargantulas. Almost one hundred species have come from the Seam, but the zoo only has a limited number of arks to hold them. Those that aren’t useful in some way or another are allowed to go extinct.

  ‘Well,’ Urette says, the genie lamp in her hands. ‘You’ll have to come again, once you’re better. If you’d like to.’

  ‘Oh, sure, definitely.’ She is getting better at lying. Bagrin’s influence, or maybe just practice.

  ‘And give me advance warning next time,’ Urette says.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘So I can be on hand with the de-cobber spray.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And keep your breather on.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you like hot chocolate, because I could—’

  ‘Choo! ’ Pia fake-sneezes again, just to remind Urette that she is ill.

  The old zookeeper recoils, and starts to rub the lamp and summon Vizier. Then she pauses. ‘You haven’t told me,’ she says, hand hovering above the lamp’s brass surface.

  ‘Told you what?’

  ‘What the angels told you about me.’

  ‘Huh?’ Then Pia remembers. ‘Oh, right. They said you had the wrong solution.’

  ‘Wrong solution to what?’

  Pia shrugs. ‘That’s not how angels talk. It’s up to you to work out what they’re saying.’

  That, at least, isn’t one of Bagrin’s lies. Genies have Tellish, devil-speak is rooted in deals, but no one has figured out yet what language angels speak. It is a mishmash of allusions, riddles and wordplay, and just like the angels themselves, the meaning of it is something you have to feel to understand.

  Urette stands there pondering, rubbing the lamp in her hands. The ark’s genie, Vizier, rockets out like a firework, burning so bright Pia has to shield her eyes.

  ‘Who dares summon the dread djinn Vizier?!’ he booms in a theatrical voice.

  Pia sighs. Poor thing. No one to wish for apart from Urette. Must have turned him into a bit of an exhibitionist.

  She bows, then starts to plod through her wish-script. Vizier makes a great show of spinning shadows around himself and twirling his smoky beard into the shape of arcane symbols as she speaks.

  She gets to the part of the script that says [insert location here], and fills in the blank. Urette cocks her head in surprise when she hears where Pia is going, but she doesn’t interrupt.

  ‘...all this, I wish.’

  Vizier throws all of his shadows across the bubble like dust sheets. Everything around Pia is cloaked in velvety blackness. Then he pulls himself into one dense point of light and spins around her like a meteorite, trailing rainbow colours. She does her best to look suitably in awe.

  ‘And! So! It! Was! Granted!’ his voice booms, and Pia zephyrs away to the cybernism ark.

  If she is going to come clean, if she is going to cause an unprecedented panic, she might as well have Ishan with her.

  [SPIDER PARLOUR]

  After Pia leaves, Urette takes the mugs to the sink to wash up. She dunks them in the suds and plonks them on the side to drain and pulls out the plug and listens to the water gurgle away. That was nice. Just to talk, just to listen. Whatever brought the girl to the Spider Parlour, Urette is glad of it.

  She dries the mugs and puts them away and sits back in her armchair with her thoughts. Around her, the ship groans and tilts in the ocean’s current. Nancy chitters in her nest and wakes Nutella. Another night of nervy dreams from those two, then. Perhaps it’s the cold weather.

  To her surprise, Urette finds she can’t settle either. She keeps noticing how dusty and cluttered her bubble is. Getting to her feet, she starts to make a pile of old things for Vizier to zephyr away. Then she waters her sorry-looking plants. She fetches a cushion and puts it on the plastic crate where Pia sat.

  There. That will be a lot more comfortable, next time she comes for tea.

  It’s only then that she realises that Pia has left something behind. Well, not a thing, no, not exactly. Some sort of feeling. A kind of heat, warming one side of her face.

  Psst, it says.

  Urette blinks. A bony finger is stuck in one ear and wiggled. Is she hearing things? Getting mind-frayed in her old age? Oh well. It feels long overdue.

  Psst.

  There it is again. Very faint, crackling with static. A voice.

  ‘Vizier? Is that you?’ But the genie is sleeping in his lamp.

  Psst. Hey. You.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Urette looks around the bubble.

  And, like an old wireless radio, an answer comes through the fuzz.

  Just call us the Whisper.

  19

  FHG K UGH R

  The cybernism ark is one of the smallest in the fleet. Pia hurries from the zephyr zone on deck, down its rusted steps, towards the central hold. Halfway there, a second blue scrip zephyrs in front of her face.

  I believe Weevis told you thirty minutes, it says.

  And I believe he told you thirty-one minutes ago.

  My office. As in, right now.

  Siskin.

  So she’s made the boss mad. Nice move, Pia. She flings the note aside. No point worrying now. She is about to make him a whole lot madder.

  Ahead, she can hear the humming throb of the nanite hive stacks. A dozen of them are arranged in a neat row on the floor of the hold: tiny glittering cities of circuit boards and blinking lights and silicon chips that rise up like tower blocks.

  Power cables as thick as anacondas snake across the floor, feeding the nanites steady rivers of electrons and data. Pia picks her way over them to Ishan.

  He is slumped in his chair, asleep. In front of him, a dozen monitors are squeezed on to his desk. His forehead rests on the keyboard, nose touching the space bar. Every time he breathes in and out, long nonsensical words type on the screen.

  FHG K UGH R.

  G VU H.

  BUU YU YB.

  Pia looks at him. Most of the zoo staff just use goggles when they need to do tech stuff, because they are faster and easier and take up less room, but Ishan salvaged all these old flat screens and a keyboard and taught himself to type. Apparently, it’s retro.

  ‘I lost the angels,’ Pia says, quietly enough not to wake him.

  U U, types Ishan’s forehead.

 
; ‘I’ve been searching for them all day, Ishan. I just had to tell you. I don’t know what to do. And you can’t help me, because you’re asleep.’

  ‘Uh, actually...’ Ishan opens one eye. ‘I was sort of pretending.’

  Pia stares at him. He sits up, rubbing the back of his neck, a mosaic of little squares stamped on his forehead. ‘Sorry, Pia.’

  Calamity. She is an absolute calamity. She facepalms so hard there’s a slapping sound. ‘Why were you pretending?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was weird. I don’t think you’ve ever come here before.’

  She looks at him. He is right. It has always been Ishan coming to her, before this.

  ‘And it’s way past curfew, and I saw you coming on the camera...’ He nods at a monitor, where a grainy image of the ship’s zephyr zone is windowed in one corner of the screen. ‘And I sort of panicked.’

  ‘Panicked?’

  He sneezes. For some reason, sometimes Ishan does that when nervous.

  ‘Bless you.’

  ‘Thanks. And don’t act surprised. You make me do a lot of stupid things, you know.’ He points at his eye, still bruised from last week when Pia punched him.

  Pia sinks to the floor and curls over, hands over her head.

  ‘So. You lost the angels, huh?’ Ishan speaks softly, quietly, like she has a migraine or something. ‘That’s... Wow.’

  ‘I haven’t lost them,’ Pia says, voice muffled. ‘I know exactly where they are.’

  ‘You do? Where?’

  ‘Inside the Seam.’

  ‘Oh.’ Air blows out of his lips. ‘Wow. OK. Wow.’

  Pia actually feels worse now she’s told someone. The great calamitous secret has finally broken loose from the flimsy enclosure she built to hold it. Soon it will rampage around the zoo, followed by a stampeding horde of procedures and inquiries and reports...

  ‘How do you know they’re in there?’ Ishan asks.

  ‘They told me.’

  ‘What? How?’

  ‘In a halo. You wouldn’t understand.’

  Ishan scratches his head. ‘Celestials are so weird. What the nihil are they doing in the Seam?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What does Siskin say?’

  ‘Um.’

  Ishan grips his chair’s armrest. ‘You haven’t told him ?!’

  ‘Don’t tell! Please, Ishan!’ Pia hates how pathetic she sounds.

  ‘Me? Are you crazy? I’m not doing it, Pia, you have to. Here.’ He grabs some scrip and waves it at her. ‘Here, you can zephyr a message to Ark One.’

  Ishan’s words take all the will from her. Pia crumples to the floor and starts to cry. She can’t stop it. She just doubles over, leaking tears and spit and snot, and Ishan knows her well enough to know not to come and comfort her.

  Then she hears him make a noise – half yelp, half gag. She doesn’t need to look up to see why.

  She feels the reason.

  The giddy relief. The triumph. The numinous lamp has winked on in a sudden miracle. Lit up beneath Ishan’s desk is one of the angels, faint and shivering and almost dead.

  • • •

  It’s almost impossible to kill an angel, Pia tells herself as she crawls under Ishan’s desk and sets the lamp down by the celestial.

  Still, that hasn’t stopped whatever did this from trying.

  The angel is all flicker and static, like one of Ishan’s monitors. It keeps trying to form itself back together and collapsing into a heap of fuzz. Whenever it does coalesce, Pia sees a round perfect hole in its shoulder like a gunshot wound.

  Pia has always known angels can die, but not that they can be wounded.

  She reaches out her finger and lets the angel hold on with its tiny hand. Which of the two is it? The littlest one? Yes. She is almost sure. The littlest, who likes singing blossom from the garden’s apple tree; who weaves halos a little lopsided; who loves to make rainbows in the rain.

  How could someone do this? She shakes with the fury of it. The fear too.

  ‘Do something,’ Ishan says behind her. ‘Do something, Pia. Do something.’ He is freaking out, stuck on a loop. He doesn’t understand that Pia is doing something. She is believing. Belief is the oxygen that angels breathe. So she shuts her eyes and clasps her hands and believes as hard as she can.

  You’ll get better. You’ll mend.

  ‘Do something, Pia. Pia?’

  She ignores him, and at last he goes silent. Pia’s focus is on her belief, feeble and faked as it is. She stares at the angel.

  You’ll be OK, she thinks. You will.

  After what seems like hours, the angel sits up in its shape again and crawls on its hands and knees into her lap. It feels like holding an empty plastic bag. The angel still trembles at its edges. The wound in its shoulder is round and ugly.

  ‘How did it – why did it – what is it doing under my desk?’ Ishan backs away. He is not dealing with this well at all.

  ‘Tears, despair and impending doom,’ Pia mutters to herself. ‘These things summon angels.’

  She didn’t know for sure, but perhaps her crying had mixed with her despair and brought the angel back. But why hadn’t that worked this morning, when she had come back from Ark One and burst into tears? And why had only the littlest come? Why not both of them?

  Maybe Pia’s tears and despair weren’t enough. What if the angel itself provided the third element: impending doom? Pia glances at the wound in its shoulder. It looks like it is getting bigger.

  Oh Seamstress, don’t think that. She throws the thought from her head and cuddles the angel, believing and believing and trying not to doubt. Don’t die, you won’t die, if you die I’ll die.

  ‘What do we do?’ Ishan says.

  Pia has no idea. In her lap, the angel speaks.

  ‘Hole in this whole,’ it says. ‘Going once, going twice, going going gone with the wind.’

  ‘What was that? What did it say?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ishan.’

  ‘Why not?’ He doesn’t get angel-speak. Ishan is used to a language of ones and zeroes. Yes or no.

  ‘Angels don’t speak like nanites. They can say yes and no and maybe all at once, depending on who’s listening.’

  ‘Ohhhh,’ Ishan says. ‘Superpositional.’

  Pia guesses that is gogglehead-speak for Now I get it.

  ‘Hole in the whole,’ says the angel again. ‘Moth in the cloth. Worm in the apple. Oh, rose, thou art sick!’

  Then, in a way that somehow makes the back of Pia’s neck crawl, it whispers: ‘The worms. The worms.’

  Ishan sneezes. His hands are suddenly tugging at her shoulder. ‘Get away from it, Pia. It’s not – it doesn’t sound right.’

  She turns round and whacks him. Not hard. Just a little jab in the arm to say, Shut up. Then she looks back at the angel and follows its words like they are a trail or a path.

  Hole in the whole. Moth in the cloth. Worm in the apple. Oh, rose, thou art sick! The angel has a hole in it. Perhaps it means that. And moths make holes in cloth, and worms make holes in apples. Apples grow on trees and roses grow on bushes. Pia thinks of the angel’s garden. But that isn’t sick – it’s dead.

  And dead things get eaten by worms, she thinks with a shudder.

  Her thinking has gone in a circle. Now she is back to worms, and holes, and death. She needs to be thinking of healing; of the angel getting better. It is in a bad way, body flickering and buzzing with static. A few bright particles of light fizz away from the edges of its wound, like sparks from a bonfire.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Pia says on impulse. Her voice sounds loud and hollow beneath the desk. ‘It’ll all be fine. Don’t be worried. I’m not.’

  Another spark of the angel breaks away. Pia makes a pointless grab to stop it. It passes through her hand a
nd vanishes, leaving a vague tingling warmth that goes cold.

  The hole in the angel is now the size of her fist, and growing.

  What can they do? Try to bandage the wound? With what? She looks at Ishan. No point asking him. Confusion and panic fill his face. He is used to looking after a species that makes back-up copies of itself and runs automatic diagnostic checks. Nanites don’t die, they just update.

  Bagrin? Pia calls out to the devil, not knowing where else to turn. Bagrin, are you there?

  Silence. Where has he gone? Now that she thinks about it, she hasn’t felt his presence for a while. Maybe after rejecting that last chimera she blocked him out for good. Perhaps he is punishing her. Or the angel.

  She shuffles back out from under the desk. Stark violet shadows from the numinous lamp light up the hold. Circuit boards and power cables and qbit stacks. What does she do? In her hands another piece of the angel drifts away, like an ark without an anchor.

  Anchor! That’s it! ‘We need to anchor it, Ishan. Keep it here.’

  Ishan runs his hand up his vertical fringe. ‘How do we do that?’

  Pia looks down at the celestial in her lap. The hole has widened across the angel’s shoulder and is spreading across its body. She feels panic inside her like a bird; it flutters and flaps its wings. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know, Ishan.’

  Pia freaking out seems to focus him. Suddenly he snaps his fingers. ‘Hey, remember when Arlo got bitten by the salamadder?’

  Of course Pia remembers. Arlo is the old Spaniard on the aviary ark, with the eyebrows like fluffy clouds. He lost his whole foot to that salamadder bite. It just turned to smoke and drifted off his ankle. The poison put Arlo in a coma for a week. The doctors didn’t know if he’d wake up, but he did. Said he’d heard his friend Toro’s voice by the hospital bed. Calling him back. Out of the darkness.

  Saying his name.

  Ishan starts to explain his idea, but Pia has already figured it out. It’s a risk, and it’s against procedures. The angels are nameless for a reason. If Bagrin and Gotrob weren’t given names, they might still be angels and Pia’s parents might still be alive.

  Ishan sees all of this in her eyes. ‘If it works, we can deal with the risks later. And if it doesn’t work...’