The Last Zoo Page 12

  Pia gets him. If it doesn’t work, there is no risk, because the angel will be gone.

  She takes a deep breath.

  ‘Would you like a name?’ she asks the little wounded celestial in her lap. ‘You know what a name is, don’t you? It’s a word that means you.’

  ‘Angel,’ crackles the angel, flaring brighter.

  ‘That’s right. But angel means you and your friend, doesn’t it? You’re both angels, aren’t you? A name is just you. Let’s think of a word that just means you.’

  ‘Me.’

  Pia nods. This is good. Keep the angel talking. Keep its focus here. Make it feel noticed, and needed.

  ‘Like Cornucopia means me. Just me. And Ishan means just Ishan.’ She points at herself, then behind her. ‘So what about you? Let’s give you a name.’

  ‘Angela?’ suggests Ishan.

  ‘Angela? How do you like Angela?’

  The angel buzzes a low flat sound: No.

  Ishan sighs. ‘Wilma is right, I’m terrible at names.’

  ‘How about you pick your own?’ Pia suggests.

  The angel flickers silently in her lap for so long that Pia wonders if it understood. Then suddenly she hears: ‘Om Mani Padme Hum.’

  It’s a little startling. ‘That’s a big name. Shall I... call you Hum for short?’

  ‘Hum,’ repeats the angel in a whisper. He (with a name like Hum, he somehow just seems to Pia like a boy-angel now, she doesn’t know why) crackles.

  The hole in his shoulder disappears.

  Ishan blinks. ‘Did it work?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Hum?’

  The hole reappears at Hum’s centre. Ishan swears in sprawl-tung. Pia chokes back a sob. For a moment, she thought naming the angel had helped. Maybe it did. But not enough. Not nearly enough.

  ‘Tell us how we can help you. Please, Hum.’

  ‘Down the rabbit hole in one,’ Hum whispers. ‘Way to the weft undone.’

  The hole is as big as a handspan now. Hum looks like he is melting around it. Dripping into some molten spinning violet ring, bending himself around the wound. With a gasp, Pia recognises the shape. The angel is weaving the wound. Turning it into a halo-shaped miracle.

  Making it from himself, from his own light, and shrinking as he weaves it, until he is a shining mote, barely alive and no bigger than a star, so small and faint that Pia can barely see or feel him.

  And wobbling on the floor is his miracle. A warped ring of light. A woven halo, big enough to hula with.

  And in the hole in the middle of the halo is another place. Not the cybernism ship – another place entirely.

  This miracle is not a dream, or a message or map.

  It’s a doorway.

  20

  GLITCH ENCOUNTER

  Slowly, Pia and Ishan circle the halo. They peer down into the hole at its centre. Light warps into a ring shape around it, but the hole is absolute black, absolute silence. Like a well dug down to the bottom of the ocean.

  For a long time there is only the drone of the nanite stacks around them, and under that the ship’s deep thrum: two low notes of dread beneath Pia’s drumming heart.

  ‘What is it?’ Ishan says.

  ‘Hum’s miracle.’ She steps closer. It is big enough to climb through. ‘I’ve never seen a halo like it.’

  ‘What did it do to him?’

  Pia looks at the tiny fragment of angel. Hum has fallen down into her palm, so small she can’t make out his shape. Just a glint. A smithereen thrown from a steel welder. ‘He wove it from his own light. His own essence.’

  ‘But what is it he wove?’ Ishan breathes in sharply as she puts a hand over the hole. ‘Don’t!’

  ‘There’s air, Ish. Rising up. It’s warm.’

  A sudden, horrible thought: the hole is a mouth, breathing on them. She shudders and wipes her hand on her dungarees.

  ‘Don’t, Pia.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Stand that close.’ He motions her back. ‘Use the lamp.’

  Good idea. Taking up the numinous, she swings its beam downwards. The hole lights up. It’s a riveted metal tube, rusty-brown and streaked with water stains. On one side is a bolted rung ladder that goes all the way down, beyond the reach of the lamp. Is that writing on the side? Some long serial number, in stamped black lettering.

  Ishan blinks. ‘That isn’t... there aren’t any vents beneath this cargo space.’ He goes to his monitor and pulls up the ship’s blueprints to double-check.

  The back of Pia’s neck tingles. ‘It isn’t beneath the deck, Ish. It isn’t even on this ark.’

  Ishan is too engrossed in his own theories to hear her. ‘The angel must have zephyred around the layout of two ships or something? Or maybe...’

  Pia shines the numinous lamp closer. ‘Look at that bit of the serial number.’ She reads it out loud. ‘1-17-US-WRDB.’

  Ishan blinks. ‘That’s... that’s...’

  ‘It’s a portal,’ Pia says in wonder. ‘To the Weapons Research Development Bunker.’

  ‘But that’s—’

  ‘Inside the mountain,’ Pia finishes for him.

  ‘It’s practically inside the Seam!’ Ishan backs away. ‘That’s the delivery tube! They dropped the reality bomb down that nulling tunnel!’

  ‘The wardrobe that leads to Narnia,’ Pia murmurs.

  ‘We need to report this. This is... this is... I don’t know what this is.’

  ‘What are you freaking out about? It’s basically just a door.’

  ‘Are you serious? Basically just a door?’

  ‘How is this any weirder than zephyring?’

  ‘Because a genie can’t zephyr you to the hypocentre of an r-bomb blast!’

  ‘It could if its beard was long enough.’

  Ishan starts shaking his head, very much not able to deal with what is in front of him. Does Not Compute. Does Not Compute. Like his brain is overheating.

  ‘Stop thinking how it is,’ she tells him. ‘Start thinking what we do with it.’

  ‘OK... OK, what then?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? What else do you do with a doorway?’

  And as if to demonstrate, Hum slips straight through her hand and down through the halo. Pia points the numinous lamp to light him up again. He twinkles inside the vent the size of a firefly. Waiting for her to follow.

  Ishan sees the look she gives him.

  ‘Uh-uh. No way, Pia. As in, absolutely not. As in, don’t even think about it.’

  His voice is like iron and his stare is unblinking. It isn’t a bad impression of Siskin, but it’s still just an impression.

  Pia steps closer to the hole.

  ‘Pia, stop!’

  ‘Maybe the other angel needs rescuing,’ she says. ‘Maybe whatever hurt Hum is hurting the other angel too.’

  ‘OK.’ Ishan is holding up his hands pleadingly. ‘OK, yeah, maybe that’s true. But you’re not the one that goes down that hole. You haven’t been authorised. They have to psych test you, you know that. It isn’t just dreams that come real in the Seam, it’s nightmares, phobias, buried traumas... What if you get mind-fray? What if you don’t come out at all?’

  Pia has already reached down and gripped the first rung.

  ‘I’ve got an angel to guide me,’ she says, swinging down one foot.

  Ishan’s hands scrabble at her dungarees, trying to haul her back but almost making her slip. She glares at him, hand balled into a fist. ‘Do I really have to punch you again?’

  He cringes away from her. His eyes are trembling with tears. ‘You’re so weird sometimes,’ he says. ‘I wish... I wish I didn’t like you.’ Then he turns and runs to his desk to ping for help.

  Pia clips the numinous lamp to her belt and grips the floor and swings her second foot down through t
he hole and into the vent.

  Warm, damp air rises up in gusts. It feels like climbing down some enormous throat. Again those same thoughts – mouths, throats, teeth.

  ‘Bagrin, if that’s you trying to scare me, stop it.’

  The devil doesn’t reply. It occurs to her that she is now a long, long way from the celestial ark. She doubts his powers reach this far or this deep.

  Hum is flashing in red urgent colours for her to be careful. She glances down at him as she steps on to the rungs. Bad idea. The vent has no bottom that she can see. The dark beneath her feet might be miles deep. She feels a weird nauseating wobble. A sick dizzy feeling.

  Vertigo, she decides. Or food poisoning. How typically ludicrous it will be, if she has to climb back up to Ishan. And the angels were abandoned, and the Earth was doomed, all because of one disastrous hot dog. The End.

  But it’s only the motion sickness, or lack of it. Because she isn’t on the ocean. The floor isn’t gently rocking beneath her feet. She is on the island. Inside its mountain. Climbing down towards her angel, and the Seam.

  Hum hovers up by Pia’s face, changing from red to green. Go, the colour says to her, so she climbs down, counting the rungs as she goes. Ten, twenty-five, fifty.

  She tries not to think about the glitch. When the r-bomb exploded, it didn’t just create the Seam. Like any bomb, it threw out shrapnel. Debris. The official term for it is glitch. Little pockets of the universe where time stops working, or where matter no longer exists; where there is only one dimension, or seven.

  This close to the Seam, the glitch will be orbiting inside the mountain, moving very fast. Tiny patches of it are whizzing through her even now. A larger one might swallow Pia up in one gulp. A lot of the original research team were gobbled up like that, never to be seen again. Others had been lost, only for the glitch to spit them out days or months later, mind-frayed or changed in other awful ways.

  To reach the Seam, Seamers are taught paths and schedules through the glitch. Pia only has Hum to guide her.

  Suddenly he flashes from green to red. Pia stops.

  A second later, just below her feet, a patch of glitch rushes past. It thunders through the mountain and the vent like a Rhinosaurus rex. The same crushing roar of blurred fury. Except the glitch is not an animal, it is an emptiness. And in its vast cavern of nothing, Pia’s own thoughts echo back to her.

  Suddenly she can smell the apples as they rot in the angel’s garden; can taste hot-dog mustard and salad and green tea and cobmist spray; can feel Ishan’s lips on her lips, and her knuckles on his cheek, and night frost sprinkling on her shoulders; can see the blinding sunlight, Weevis’s blackhead, Bagrin’s chimeras, a squashed pea; can hear her father’s ghost and the gargantulas clicking and Threedeep pinging.

  All overwhelmingly at once.

  A thunderous rush of memory.

  She is nine again, and crying on the Rek. She is ten, and failing the psych test. She is with Wilma, teasing an old genie called Sesame by wishing for his wishes not to come true. She is listening to Gowpen talk about his unicorn.

  Then the glitch is gone, leaving Pia alone in the vent again.

  Her head reels. At some point in the last few moments (seconds? Minutes? Hours?) her legs buckled and she had nearly fallen. Hum is blinking green again, which means she has to go on before the glitch orbits back round again.

  Step by step, rung by rung, guided by Hum: stop, go, wait, go, wait, stop, go. Each time she glances up, the halo is a little further above her. A faint circle, the cool-blue colour of Ishan’s monitor light. She can’t tell whether it is only a hundred metres overhead, or a mile. Her sense of distance is all skewed. There is no other way to gauge how far she has moved. The darkness and silence around her are an oblivion.

  It’s the mountain. All this rock, this stone. The crushing weight of it, pressing downwards and inwards for a billion years. Squashing the dark blacker than black, squeezing the silence deeper than deep.

  Passing through the vent feels like it happens in one endless second that has been set in stone. Time here is like the silence and the dark. The weight of the mountain has fossilised it.

  Then the vent comes to an abrupt end, and the ladder with it. Pia’s foot gropes for a rung that isn’t there, and she slips and falls in the darkness, falls into it like a dream.

  And when she lands, it is softly as a feather, inside the Seam.

  It’s nothing like what she expected.

  21

  ANGEL SONG

  Pia looks around the curved glasshouse. It is made of tall thin windows that arch from floor to ceiling, set in iron frames painted green. Sunlight angles through them. The long slanted beams fall warmly on Pia’s skin.

  She glances up. There is no sign of the mountain, or the vent she travelled down.

  The glasshouse smells of waxed wood and washed linen and dry crumbly earth. Dark green, viciously spiked plants sit on the shelves in terracotta pots full of pebbles, soaking up the sun and sprouting extraordinary magenta flowers. Against the red-brick wall that the glasshouse curves against, vines dangle little bunches of purple-black fruit amongst their hanging leaves.

  A wicker armchair sits in the centre of the worn and wobbly paving stones. And cushions. So many cushions. All piled up. Round, square, long, tasselled, buttoned, woolly, big, small. Like the chair is there just for the cushions to sit on.

  Pia notices each of these things one after another instead of all at once, as if they aren’t there and then they are; like someone is sketching the glasshouse in front of her eyes and slowly filling in its details.

  She is tingly and tired. The warm feeling sinks into her skin as she stands there, motionless as a prickly plant, until she starts to think that some of the cushions might have to budge up and make room, because she feels like sitting on the armchair to rest or even nap.

  And then it is like the cushions on the armchair have been rubbed out, because they are gone and in their place sits a woman, who is turning round in her seat and looking around the room with the same expression of pleasant wonder as Pia.

  The woman has long grey hair, tightly plaited. It reaches the small of her back, where the brown wispy end has worked free of its hairband and is starting to unravel. Her fingers are long and knuckled, with nails clipped short, and large blue veins that wriggle across the back of her hands as she gestures. A plain gold ring sits on her littlest finger like a tiny halo. Her spectacles too are round and gold-rimmed.

  The woman is Doctor Celeste Lalande, the inventor of the reality bomb, the leader of the first research team, who walked into the Seam thirty years ago and vanished.

  ‘I like what you’ve done with the place,’ Doctor Lalande says. She looks around and nods. ‘Very cosy. Much dustier than I normally have it. And one of us has a cushion obsession. But that’s to be expected. With three of us here, of course, things can get a little crowded.’

  Lalande bends her neck and inspects herself in the reflection of the mug of water she holds. Her outfit is the exact same one as the photo on Siskin’s wall: a blue paisley skirt with a frayed grey T-shirt. And long white-green earrings, like little cuttings of watercress. The ones Urette must have lent her on the day she vanished.

  ‘And I like what you’ve done with me.’ Lalande beams. ‘It’s always a little nerve-wracking, meeting someone new. You are new, aren’t you?’

  ‘I think so,’ Pia said.

  ‘Well, sometimes newcomers make me just monstrous. The stuff of nightmares. But you’ve clothed me very nicely. I always like being dear old Doctor Lalande.’

  The back of Pia’s neck tingles. Wait. This woman isn’t Lalande?

  ‘No,’ answers the woman, and Pia has the eerie realisation that her thoughts have just been read. ‘Although Celeste is a part of me – everyone who enters the Seam is.’

  Pia takes a step back. She is afraid. ‘Who ar
e you?’ Even as she speaks, she knows it’s the wrong question. ‘What are you?’

  ‘Too many questions, Cornucopia. Questions in here can tie you up in knots.’ The woman sips her mug. ‘Just call me what you always call me. OK?’

  It takes a moment before the name comes to her. Before it falls into Pia’s head like a dream.

  ‘You’ve gone all pale,’ says the Seamstress with a kind smile. ‘And look what a state you’re in. Let me tidy you up a little... there.’

  Something like an electric current runs through Pia. The rusted grime on her hands from the vent’s ladder has gone, and her dungarees are free of sweat and muck.

  ‘Now drink this.’ The Seamstress’s mug is suddenly in Pia’s hand, and there isn’t water inside any more, but something hot and rich and sweet and creamy.

  ‘None of you kids know what real hot chocolate tastes like, you know that?’ The Seamstress smiles. ‘You just have that genie-thrinted stuff. But the research base? The WRDB? It still had supplies of the genuine article before the detonation.’ She sighs. ‘Oh, the taste of hot chocolate. One of Doctor Lalande’s most precious memories. I make sure I hold on to it. You can see why, can’t you?’

  Pia finds herself drinking from the mug, though she hadn’t been aware of raising it to her lips. The hot chocolate is tooth-hurtingly sweet and tongue-scaldingly hot and the most wonderful thing she has ever tasted in her entire life.

  Now the Seamstress holds the mug in her hand again. ‘Thank you.’ She smiles. ‘You’ve drunk a little of me, and I’ve been decorated by a little bit of you.’

  She gestures around her.

  ‘It’s good to mix imaginations in here, and do it as often as you can. Otherwise, the realities drift apart. Yours and mine. Like cloth unravelling. Very dangerous. We wouldn’t be able to see each other. Or anything, eventually. And you don’t want to be in the Seam without some reality around you. That’s like being on the ocean without a boat.’

  She takes Pia by the shoulders and together they sit down on the armchair, which is now a scuffed, wine-coloured velvet couch with patched arms leaking cream-coloured fluff.