The Last Zoo Read online

  Slowly, some ember of understanding kindles in Solomon. ‘She comes to the genies with a quest!’ he tells Bertoldo, his eyes dancing with lilac fire.

  ‘A quest?’ the lime-coloured genie murmurs. ‘Could it be true?’

  Pia nods. ‘Yes, that’s right. A quest!’

  Why didn’t she say this straight away? Genies are obsessed with stories. They literally see the whole world as one great interweaving epic they call the Tale. They have their own particular way of speaking too, called Tellish, that involves narrating their thoughts and actions.

  ‘The desperate heroine was willing to embark on any journey,’ Pia says. Her Tellish has always been clunky, but at least the genies might understand her. ‘Go any distance, endure any hardship, to find her beloved angels. If only the genies might aid her...’

  She trails off. Solomon and Bertoldo are actually fizzing with excitement. Sparks whizz from the tips of their beards like miniature fireworks, spiralling and popping in rainbow colours. Pia is buzzing too. They get it! At last, some progress.

  ‘The genies were only too happy to help the heroine!’ Solomon announces, as Bertoldo nods furiously. ‘They summoned a mighty boon to bestow upon her! It would guide the heroine to what she was so desperately seeking...’

  Pia’s eyes widen. A boon is a powerful object that genies give to those they perceive as ‘heroes’. What will this one be? Magic compass? Talking sword?

  Bertoldo plunges one long, flickering hand into the smoky blue wisp of his beard and pulls out a foot-long hot dog.

  Solomon points with his candlelight fingers, and adds ketchup, mustard and fried onions.

  The two genies offer it to Pia triumphantly.

  ‘The mighty boon!’ they both announce. ‘Take it, and it will lead the way!’

  Pia does her best to look pleased as she takes the hot dog. Ah well. At least that’s breakfast sorted. Bless the old dears for trying.

  ‘The heroine rushed off on her quest with renewed purpose!’ she lies, not wanting to hurt their feelings.

  Solomon and Bertoldo are so happy they both discard their shadows and go pinwheeling naked around the room, spitting sparks and smoke and setting off the fire alarm in the corridor outside.

  Pia heaves the door to the Sunset Pagoda shut and flaps one-armed at the alarm until it stops wailing. She slides down the door, hot dog still in hand. Muffled through the bulkhead, she can hear Solomon and Bertoldo singing to each other on an infinite loop.

  ‘The quest can’t fail,

  It just can’t fail,

  With the mightiest boon in all the Tale!’

  Pia looks at the hot dog, oozing sauce down her thumb. She has no idea what to do with it. No idea what to do at all, in fact. She ends up just sitting there and eating the hot dog in a dozen miserable little bites. The onions taste funny. And there’s way too much mustard. By the end of it, she feels vaguely sick. More of a mighty barf than a mighty boon.

  ‘Ugh.’ She gives an acrid little burp. ‘Thanks, genies.’

  4

  CHIMERAS

  Like most ships in the zoo, the celestial ark is an i-era vessel, patched up and repurposed to hold voilà. Before the crash and the war, it chugged around the world, ferrying parcels for some internet auction site called dib$.

  On the dib$ company logo, the dot on the i is a smiley face and the d and the b are both thumbs ups. The dollar sign is in a speech bubble next to the smiley’s mouth. A happy little logo, speaking a simple language of money and bargains and lucky finds.

  Pia calls him Dibsy. Versions of him are stuck in various sizes to the ark’s doors and corridor walls, and a few transparent Dibsys still cling to the porthole windows, bleached by decades of sun and faint as ghosts.

  Dibsy is in the hold too, beneath Pia’s feet. Hundreds upon hundreds of him, smiling in the pitch-dark, plastered to the sides of the stacked crates of dib$ freight that sit on pallets of rotting wood. Stuff that has been out for delivery for thirty years now.

  As a kid, Pia used to sift through a few of those packages, marvelling at the pointless junk people had once found it necessary to order. A noise-cancelling fork for people who slurped noodles too loud. A man’s tie that looked like a rasher of bacon. A glass bowl on wheels, for taking your pet goldfish for a walk. Glow-in-the-dark toilet paper. Bubblegum-flavoured shoelaces.

  So much garbage. No wonder the world was a mess.

  Pia doesn’t go down to the hold any more, though. No one does. The entire lower decks are blocked off by a round metal door that looks like it has been salvaged from a bank vault or nuclear bunker. The door’s edges are sealed with lead and an emergency concave mirror is suspended above it, ready to swing down and reflect any attempted escapes.

  Without really being aware of it, Pia finds herself wandering down the corridor and drifting towards it. She barely registers her movements until she feels her fingers rest upon the small square peephole cut into the door’s centre.

  Before she can stop herself, she pulls it open, just a crack. Then she jerks her hand away, as if the peephole was red hot.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says aloud.

  She’s not talking to herself.

  Her cheek grows warm, there’s the fuzz of static, and a wicked little whisper sounds in her ear.

  Why not? says the creature behind the door. What is Pia so distracted about? Tell us. We can help?

  Pia shuts off her thoughts. She is nowhere near desperate or stupid enough to go ask Bagrin about the angels.

  Angels?

  Oh, Bagrin knows all about angels.

  Facepalm! He’s powerful this close. Even through the door. She backs off, singing an annoyingly catchy pip-pop song in her head to drown out her other thoughts.

  Null it, gurl, be my ohtwo

  You breathe me, yea

  I’ll breathe you

  She tries to hear the synth solo, but Bagrin whispers above it: Don’t go. We won’t bite. Won’t do anything tricky. Deal? He sends the image of Dibsy into her head, only the logo is holding out both his hands, as if to say Come on, now. Would we lie to you?

  Pia stares at the vault door. Deals, deals. With devils it is always deals. There used to be two of them down there, amongst the dib$ crates, trapped in the infernal prism. The other devil’s name was Gotrob. He had not been as good at deals as Bagrin. Perhaps that is why Bagrin ate him. Who knows.

  Bagrin did it for you, of course. After what Gotrob did, we knew you wanted revenge.

  ‘Liar.’ Pia shakes the devil’s presence away. ‘And stop reading my thoughts.’

  It’s her own fault, for lingering too long here. Lead and concrete can only block out so much temptation. Devils have a particular talent: they can send their voices into the ears of anyone, anywhere.

  Sometimes, they even send images. The official zoo term for them is chimeras. Every now and then, Bagrin manages to slip one through to her. Often while Pia is asleep, thoughts unguarded.

  Chimeras are like adverts, with Pia at the centre. Most of them are really generic desires. Her, but pretty. Her, but smart. Her, but ruling the world. All obvious stuff like that. Not particularly tempting. A standard safety procedure set-up is that Pia should keep conversation with Bagrin to an absolute minimum, to stop the devil from learning too much about her. It has stopped him from tailoring his adverts and making them irresistible.

  Before the crash and the war, everyone owned devices that did the same thing as devils. Dark little boxes called phones, that sat in your hands promising you anything and everything. Listening to your desires and murmuring back: I can make you pretty; I can make you interesting; I can make you cool.

  Pia touches her dungarees pocket. Just imagine it. Mum and Dad carried phones. A lot of sprawl-punks still do, even though there isn’t much for them to connect to any more.

  Bagrin whispers to her again. What
do you want to know about angels? We can tell you. Deal?

  ‘No deal,’ Pia corrects. She knows the devil is lying. That’s what makes him so tempting. There is comfort in lies. At least they offer hope, unlike the truth. Hope can be comforting even when it’s false: Pia knows that from experience.

  But it always turns bitter in the end. Hope didn’t bring Mum and Dad back. Why would it bring the angels?

  • • •

  Back up on deck, the halos in the garden have slipped. With the angels gone, the tiny ones above the grass and flowers, small and golden like wedding rings, have mostly blown away. A few of them hang in tangled loops in the branches of the apple tree, the leaves around them already fading to autumn shades.

  What can Pia do? The garden won’t last long here, a kilometre from land on a repurposed cargo ship. Not without the angels feeding it a steady diet of miracles.

  And what if someone sees?

  Pia runs up to the rail and looks around for nearby ships. The celestial ark – her ark – is just one of the twenty-two that make up the zoo. Pia can see the old supertanker that holds the megafauna; the small coaster that is the zoo’s aviary; the bulk freighter with modified cargo holds where the singing hippos wallow and the pigasi fly.

  Each ship is a little brightly coloured island in a colourless ocean: navy and rust-red, brilliant-white, burnt-orange. And at the centre of them all, like the spoke around which they all turn, is the island mountain.

  Pia can see it clearly this morning: a shard of black volcanic rock that juts from the sea in a crest of white foam.

  It doesn’t always look this way. Depending on the glitch that rages around it like an eternal storm, the mountain might look smaller, or see-through, or not there at all. Sometimes it shines. Once, it wriggled and flexed, like the tip of a finger that was half a kilometre high.

  It’s all an illusion, of course. Just the glitch, playing tricks on the mind.

  Pia shudders. Suddenly she’s aware of how alone she is up here on deck without the angels. Usually her nanabug would be there to monitor her, but Threedeep is off being mended after Pia accidentally sat on the drone whilst she was in standby. A really high-authority genie is having to wish her back together.

  Sitting on Threedeep has turned out sort of lucky, though. If the nanabug was there, alarm bells would already be ringing throughout the zoo.

  Why hasn’t Pia raised the alarm yet, though? The angels have been gone twenty minutes at least now. Seeing as they can travel at the speed of light, that is quite a long time. They might be anywhere. They could be topping up their tan on the surface of the Sun.

  And say they did want to go sunbathe in space rays – how could Pia even stop them? The zoo has procedures for keeping other celestials contained: devils are bound by prisms and contracts, genies by lamps and wishes...

  But angels? Well. The only known way to keep an angel in one place was, basically, to need them. That’s what has kept them here since they first came from the Seam. Pia’s need, and above that the zoo’s need, and above that the world’s need for them to stay.

  Only now, it seems like that’s not enough.

  • • •

  Since she is up on deck, Pia decides to check the numinous lamps before she raises the alarm. They form a floodlit perimeter around the ark. You can’t see celestials without numinous light. Maybe they’re malfunctioning?

  She checks: they’re not.

  OK.

  Time to go back to her cabin and fully freak out in private.

  Pia’s cabin is her bedroom and office, combined. It has windows you can blacken, cloud or clear. It has a chair, a desk, a cot. It has piles of reports, organised into various categories (overdue, way-overdue, half-written) and several stacked towers of old plastic food pots from canteen-pilfered snacks. Various communities of mould are slowly moving into each level of the piled-up pots, like they are penthouse flats.

  Pia barges in and waves the walls from clear to cloudy. She catches sight of herself in the reflection. Torn dungarees, wonky fringe, untied shoelace, shirt inside out. Solomon’s and Bertoldo’s hot dog has left a smear of ketchup on her lip. There’s mustard on her boot.

  How, in the name of the Seamstress, could the angels have left someone so obviously in need of them?

  A few slips of green paper have appeared on Pia’s desk since she woke: little messages zephyred there by her best friends, the Rekkers. Pia glimpses a few scribbled notes from Wilma and Gowpen and Ishan:

  Rekkers assemble, it’s unicorn day!!

  Good luck!!

  Hey! Slee-P! You up?

  Scribbling chat to her friends can wait. She sweeps the messages aside and scrambles around for her goggles. They are i-era, old and cranky. No connectivity any more, just lots of pre-loaded files for reference.

  She pulls them over her eyes, blinks them on, and calls up Procedures of Care, the zoo’s basic keeper handbook. Ninety-five different species of voilà have appeared out of the Seam in the last thirty years, and the handbook has entries concerning every single one. There are tips for grooming phoenixes... advice on hummingdragon training (reward them with gold dust, which they love to hoard)... regulations on trimming genie beard lengths...

  It takes a while to find what Pia wants. One of the lenses was cracked (another victim of her butt), so she can’t use the search bar. She has to keep paging everything over on to her left eye. Soon she has a headache to add to her panic and her hot-dog burps. It’s a day that keeps on giving.

  Finally there’s a list of procedures titled ENCLOSURE BREACHES / ARK ESCAPES. It consists of several bullet points from Director Siskin, written in the boss’s usual way:

  #1 – Raise the alarm at once.

  #2 – As in, five minutes ago.

  #3 – WHY ARE YOU STILL READING THIS?

  Pia pulls off her goggles and drops them to the floor. Of course, Siskin is right. Raising the alarm is the proper thing to do. The only thing to do. Facepalm, facepalm, facepalm. There have to be other options. Anything.

  Prayer?

  She clasps her hands. ‘Please, please, please come back. Please let me open my eyes and see you there. I need you. The world needs you. Amen. Amen.’

  How long should she crouch there like this, broadcasting her prayer loop like some sort of distress call?

  Are they listening?

  Is anyone?

  Suddenly the door sweeps open. Pia leaps up, daring to believe. It worked. She can’t believe it worked!

  But it isn’t an angel that comes to her aid. She might have known. In reality, there’s only one creature in the entire universe tuned into Pia’s wavelength.

  It’s Ishan.

  5

  THE KLUTZES

  Ishan. Who else would it be? He always seems to know where Pia is hiding. Sometimes she wonders if he might have bugged her somehow.

  It isn’t such a crazy thought. Ishan works on the ark with the zoo’s only cybernisms – the nanites. (Nanabugs and bluebottles and ark pilots are electronic too, but technically they are just really smart drones, rather than animals, so they don’t count.)

  Apart from people, the nanites are the only creatures in the whole zoo that haven’t come from the Seam inside the mountain. Ishan accidentally evolved them himself out of a ream of computer viruses he bred in a hive stack. Apparently they worship him like a god. They’ve even built tiny monuments to him out of silicon. He has one of them glued under his fingernail. He showed it to Pia once under a microscope.

  When the authorities found out what Ishan had done, they sent him straight to the zoo, giving him a new ark to himself – the cybernism ark. For the first few hours after he arrived, it was like he was the most exotic creature in the whole place. It had been sort of hilarious. Zookeepers stopped grooming their phoenixes and training hummingdragons with gold dust, and zephyred to the cybernism ark
to catch a glimpse of the wiry little kid from the San Silicio shantyscraper.

  Ishan hadn’t known what to do with all that attention. Dutifully, he’d tried to explain the workings of his nanites, who had by then upgraded themselves into a primitive civilisation. And people nodded and stifled their yawns and said:

  ‘Oh, how interesting. Now tell us about San Silicio.’

  That was why, of course. It wasn’t Ishan they were fascinated by, it was where he’d come from.

  The mainland. The sprawl.

  From the arks, the city on the coast fifty miles east was just a yellow glow that spread over the horizon each night like a fever. But Ishan had lived there. The zookeepers wanted him to make it real for them. What was it like? To wake in its morning haze and bike through the shimmer of its dusk? To thread through its heaving crowds of Free Staters and refugees, beneath shantyscrapers stacked upwards like dirty plates? Had he fought in the bread riots? Lost anyone to rat flu? Was it true the air-scrubbers in the ohtwo factories were failing?

  Ishan had just blinked at them. ‘It’s, um, pretty crowded there. I mainly stayed in my room.’

  ‘. . . Oh,’ said everyone, realising the kid was just another gogglehead dork. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Would you like me to show you the nanites again? I’m hoping they’ll bring back the internet, eventually.’

  ‘Umm,’ said everyone, as they worked out somewhere else they had to be.

  Just like that, without even realising it, Ishan blew his one chance to be popular.

  Pia had instantly decided he was awesome.

  He’s been at the zoo for six months now, and they have been solid best friends for five of those months, apart from fifteen massively traumatic seconds during one evening last week. Pia tries not to think about those seconds too much, although of course with Ishan now standing in front of her she is thinking about them – all fifteen.

  ‘Pia?’ Ishan waves on the cabin’s lights, dazzling her. He rears back. ‘You’re bleeding!’