The Last Zoo Read online

  ‘Dad!’ Gowpen is yelling. ‘Dad, stop!’

  Pia’s knee jangs on the deck. She bites her lip, tastes blood. Tej reaches down to grab her again.

  Something butts him off his feet. Tej flies sideways and hits the ship’s rail with a clunk. Threedeep, with (ง•̀_•́)ง flashing in neon colours on her screen, has rammed into him at full speed. The impact sends the nanabug’s rotor snapping off and whizzing up into the air. The rest of her falls on to the deck with a crack and skid of plastic, and the emoticon on Threedeep’s screen vanishes, and the little plastic box of a drone is still.

  ‘Threedeep!’ Pia scrabbles on hands and knees towards the drone, but rough hands grab her, pulling her to her feet, yanking her in all directions. Wilma tries to pull her towards the Quark. Pia is wrenched away.

  Panic and pain, wailing in her head like sirens. Jutting elbows and barging shoulders. People she knows all around her. Wanda, the ’genieer. Vivi, the doctor at arrivals. The canteen guy whose name they didn’t know. The one Wilma nicknamed Pasta La Vista because he only ever ate ravioli. Now he has Pia in an armlock and is wrestling her towards Urette.

  She passes Weevis, lips moving as he chants to himself. Oh Seamstress, they are all completely doomsick. How has it happened so suddenly, spread so fast?

  Then Pia notices Blom floating unshrouded beside him, and she realises Weevis is speaking a wish-script under his breath.

  Blom bows. His mouse-tail beard tumbles down his cigar puff of a chest. The genie lights up briefly, the way thunder flashes inside a cloud.

  ‘And so it is granted,’ he says.

  Pia has no time to close her eyes or take a breath. There is a heaving whirligig of light and sound around her as she zephyrs away.

  27

  PLAN C

  Pia is below deck somewhere, in a large dark hold. On an ark, she guesses. Which one, she doesn’t know.

  Weevis is there, with Blom.

  And Threedeep’s broken box of a body too.

  Pia can’t say or do anything, though. She just lies there, trembling from the adrenalin. With the savagery of what happened to Siskin, and almost happened to her. If it hadn’t been for Weevis and Blom...

  She checks herself over. Her dungarees are torn, her knee aches, her lip feels fat and tender, but she is OK. She is OK.

  But Threedeep...

  The drone’s blank screen flickers on.