The Last Zoo Page 3

  ‘It’s ketchup.’ Pia smears the sauce from her mouth with the back of her hand and wipes it on the leg of her dungarees.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ Ishan has a faint tan line around his eyes and a quiff of thick black hair. Both are from the goggles he wears when interacting with his nanoscopic creations. It makes him look permanently bewildered. ‘Are you OK, Pia? Did something happen?’

  So he doesn’t know. How has he not felt them gone, or noticed the garden wilting? Ordinarily, Pia would tell him. The main basis of her and Ishan’s friendship is that they are two of the biggest klutzes in the entire zoo.

  This time, it’s too risky. Ishan is a stickler for rules. He would pull the procedure up on the goggles, see Siskin’s bullet points and insist they report the disappearance.

  Or – and this would be worse – he might try and cheer her up. Then he might decide to try and kiss her again, and Pia would have to give him another punch.

  She bounces his question back at him. ‘What are you doing here?’

  She might have spoken just a bit too aggressively, because Ishan turns pink and looks at the floor.

  ‘I sent you some chats,’ he says.

  Pia glances over at the slips of paper on her desk. ‘Oh. Yeah. Well, I haven’t read them. Been busy with stuff.’

  Ishan glances up. ‘I’m guessing that means it didn’t go well then.’

  Pia frowns. What is Ishan talking— ‘My appraisal!’ she screams. Good luck, the chats said. It’s this morning, her meeting with Siskin, oh facepalm!

  ‘Wait, what?’ says Ishan. ‘Haven’t you been?’

  Pia jumps up. The chair hits the shantyscraper of stacked-up plastic pots and topples it over. Ishan throws himself out of the way as she pelts from the cabin.

  ‘I thought it was half an hour ago?’ he calls.

  ‘It was!’ She is late, she is so late. She runs across the deck, legs and arms pumping. Doesn’t even take her respirator. Ishan runs after her waving it in his hand and yelling something sensible-sounding about today’s tox levels. Pia is in too much of a rush to care about the level of peroxal-whatever in her lungs. She has to zephyr to Ark One.

  Pazuzu, the genie that serves the celestial ark, curls from her old aerosol can of a lamp and spirals into a bow. Even in her panicked state, Pia remembers to bow back. Genies are not slaves, and don’t have to grant wishes if it isn’t an emergency. Getting them to help you is mostly about good manners. Luckily, Solomon and Bertoldo are Pazuzu’s parents, so she has a big soft spot for Pia.

  Pazuzu glances back across the ship at Ishan. She twiddles her long thin handlebars and narrates a question: ‘Running from the persistent prince, she wishes for a zephyr?’

  Pia is too out of breath already. She just nods yes.

  ‘For her?’ Pazuzu asks dryly. ‘Or him?’

  ‘Me,’ Pia manages between gasps. ‘Annual. Appraisal. The boss.’

  To survive as a serial klutz, multi-tasking your calamities is essential. It is a talent Pia has honed over many years and many subjects. She just takes whatever she doesn’t want to think about and throws it out of her head. Simple as that. Gone. For a little while, at least.

  It is sort of like juggling. Actually, exactly like juggling. Which is an activity, she reminds herself, for clowns.

  Pia puts the angels out of her mind and worries instead about this other, slightly lesser calamity: how late she is for the most important meeting of her year.

  The meeting where all of the data Pia’s nanabug has monitored, day and night for almost twelve whole months, gets collated and summarised for Zoo Director Siskin.

  Who will then decide whether or not to send Pia inside the mountain.

  To the Seam.

  And the Seamstress.

  • • •

  When Pia was six years old, her parents took one of the zoo’s little ferry boats, and went to show her what the Seam was like.

  They motored as close as they could get to the glitch-storm surrounding the mountain, and then they waited. Pia stood with her arms wrapped around her mum’s leg. She was afraid. Against the sides of the mountain, the waves roared on the rocks, loud as a Rhinosaurus rex. The boat bobbed and bucked in the swells. But it wasn’t the sea that scared Pia. There was something else. Something inside the mountain.

  ‘Do you feel it?’ Mum said. ‘This is what we came here to show you.’

  Pia squinted past Mum’s finger, deciding to be brave. She watched the mountain. She had a strange feeling. Somehow, she didn’t think it was a mountain at all.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ Mum asked.

  Pia nodded. ‘Yeah. Where the scientists detonated the reality bomb.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mum, sounding pleased.

  ‘Normal bombs destroy matter,’ Pia recited, trying to impress her even more. ‘But reality bombs are different. They...’ She paused, trying to remember. ‘They destroy the under lion laws of the unifirst.’

  ‘The underlying laws of the universe,’ Dad corrected gently. ‘That’s right. The scientists used the reality bomb like TNT: they blasted through the laws that govern the possible, so we can mine the impossible.’

  The weird feeling was so close that Pia felt dizzy, as if she stood at the centre of some wild spinning wheel. She blinked, and cried out. ‘It’s not dark,’ she said. ‘Behind my eyes, when I blink. It isn’t dark.’

  Whatever it was inside the mountain was in Pia’s head too. She could see it when she closed her eyes, like a dream.

  ‘She’s shaking,’ Mum said, voice low. ‘We shouldn’t have brought her this close.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ Dad stroked Pia’s head. ‘Don’t worry. You’re safe.’

  ‘You don’t have to close your eyes if you don’t want to,’ said Mum. ‘We can go home. It doesn’t mean you’re scared.’

  Mum was wrong. That was exactly what it meant. Pia scowled. She had to prove to the others that she was brave. Some kids were still taunting her for what happened with the Rhinosaurus rex.

  She shut her eyes, and this time she kept them closed.

  • • •

  In her mind’s eye, Pia sees the mountain. She sees it for what it truly is: not a jagged black mountain, but a jagged black hole. A tear in reality’s fabric, where all logic and laws have come loose and lie unstitched.

  The Seam.

  And there are threads hanging in that shining space, millions of them, in all the colours of starlight. Threads years wide and eternities long, threads microns thick and photons brief. Threads made of moonlight and threads of glittered silence. Threads made of majesty, threads that sing, threads that weep. Each one alive and each one dreaming.

  And like a hand plays a harp, a being dances across them. Something in the Seam is alive. And weaving.

  See her ten legs clack, see them gather and braid. Plucking at the threads in the endless shining, each leg tapered to a needle’s point.

  Her body a glitter-black blur, her two eyes glinting inscrutably.

  A life-weaver.

  A dream-spinner.

  A Seamstress.

  • • •

  When Pia opened her eyes, the boat was back amongst the arks and the Seam was far away again.

  Dad was next to her. He just smiled and knelt down and patted his thighs, and Pia clambered on. She burrowed into his jacket, feeling his scratchy wool jumper against her cheek and his heart beating in his chest.

  ‘What is she?’ Pia asked.

  Dad sighed. ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Is she God?’

  ‘We don’t know, Pia.’

  ‘Is she real?’

  ‘She might be. Or she might be a mirage. When people get close to the Seam, they see what they want to see. Maybe our imaginations created the Seamstress. Or maybe she’s always been there. Maybe she lives
in unreality, and now because of the reality bomb we can see into her home.’

  Pia thought about this. ‘I saw her making something,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Life,’ said Dad. ‘The Seamstress makes life. All the voilà in the zoo have come from the Seam. From her.’

  ‘But...’ Pia was confused. ‘I thought Mummy made the angels. When she was little.’

  Dad nodded. ‘She did. Sort of. Did you see the threads and strings? We think they come from us. From our imaginations. That’s what the Seamstress weaves. But no one knows for sure. No one who comes out of the Seam can remember. You know how waking up can make you forget a dream? It’s like that.’

  Pia followed Dad’s gaze toward the mountain. ‘Did I go inside the Seam?’

  Dad leaned down and kissed her on the head, quickly and a little fiercely. ‘No, Pia. You went right up to the door, but you didn’t go inside. Your mum and I would like it if you never went inside. Sometimes, when people go in, it can hurt their heads.’

  ‘Even kids?’

  ‘Even kids, though not as much to them. We call it mind-fray.’

  ‘But Mummy went in, and she didn’t get mind-frayed.’

  ‘That’s right. Your mum is very brave.’

  ‘I’m brave too! I’m going to go in and make more angels, just like her.’

  Dad looked over at Mum, who slumped her shoulders and said: ‘It was worth a try.’

  • • •

  It was only when Pia was older, and she looked back on this moment, that she understood it. Mum and Dad had been trying to scare her. They didn’t want Pia to become a Seamer, and didn’t want her to take that risk. They wanted her to stay on the ark with them, and look after the celestials.

  Where it was ‘safe’.

  They couldn’t have known.

  6

  ARK ONE

  From her dungarees pocket, Pia unrolls the text she has to speak for Pazuzu to zephyr her to the meeting. To come true in the way that you want, wishes have to be said perfectly, word for word. Otherwise you might zephyr halfway inside a wall, or reappear half as big as you were, with your fingers and your toes swapped over. It has happened.

  Or, just as bad, you might hurt the genie. A wish gone wrong is nothing to do with them, of course; it’s in the nature of wishes themselves. Wishes are living things, born the moment they are uttered and dying the moment they are granted. They are squirmy, twisty creatures, and there is malice in them. There is a reason zephyring tends to be the main wish zookeepers make: teleporting from ark to ark is useful, but it also has a start and end point. It happens, and then it is over. It isn’t a dangerously vague wish, the sort that might live for a long time and cause all sorts of unintended consequences, like I wish for happiness, or I wish to live for ever.

  There’s a zookeeper saying: Angels mend, devils deal, genies grant a slippery eel. It sums up wishes pretty well. Wishes are slippery eels, and if the cage of words you speak isn’t strong enough to hold them, they’ll wriggle out and bite.

  It takes a whole minute to go through the wish-script, only for Pia to mispronounce the phrase ‘Siskin’s office’ as ‘Siskin’s orifice’. Now that would have been a particularly horrific zephyring accident. For everyone involved.

  ‘Gently, Pazuzu urged her not to panic,’ the genie narrates in Tellish as Pia begins again.

  She tries not to, but it is hard. She feels sick. What was she thinking, eating that hot dog? Solomon added too much mustard. Oh Seamstress. Not only has she lost the angels, she has wasted the boss’s time. She doesn’t know which one he is going to shout at her more for. He will definitely be moving her off the celestial ark. She’ll be transferred to care for some voilà so boring it will make her brain weep. The ice slugs, maybe, that look like mini glaciers and move at the rate of five centimetres per year. She can imagine Siskin’s mocking smile as he reassigns her.

  At least you won’t lose them, Cornucopia. (He is one of the few people who always calls her by her full name.) Also, he adds, stop imagining me and keep your attention on the wish you’re making.

  She finishes the zephyr script at last.

  ‘. . . all this, I wish.’ You have to say it this way: backwards, saving those two binding words until the very end, just in case you made a mistake.

  ‘So she spoke,’ Pazuzu says. ‘And thus the genie granted.’

  • • •

  The weird thing about zephyring: it doesn’t feel like anything. No breathless rush of speed, no whirligig of motion and smoke. You vanish with a clap as all the air rushes in to fill the you-sized vacuum you leave behind, but you aren’t around to hear that. You are already somewhere else.

  It’s best to close your eyes, pinch your nose and blow out through your cheeks. It stops your brain getting too confused. Zephyring is quick as a finger-snap, and sometimes it causes double vision and headaches. Two things Pia definitely does not need, feeling as queasy as she does.

  So she stays with her eyes shut for a few moments, waiting for her body to get used to Ark One: the slight change in breeze, the stillness of the deck beneath her boots, the chill on her skin from standing in the shade instead of the sun.

  Her belly sends up a little burp. Something definitely not right about that hot dog. She hurries for the ramp that leads down into the offices and canteen, working her jaw to ease the popping in her ears.

  Her nose and eyes are streaming as she heads across the deck. Ishan had been right: the air is seriously toxy today. By the time Pia descends the ramp and waves the door open, her throat feels raw and sludgy. At least the taste of chemicals is overpowering the taste of the hot dog.

  ‘Sorry!’ She stumbles in, the door blinks shut behind her and she doubles up with coughing. ‘Here now!’

  A bluebottle buzzes over to her, looking and sounding like every other security drone Pia has ever seen: same ugly black plastic, same bristling nodes, same fat buzzing rotors.

  ‘I’m here for my appraisal.’ She wipes her eyes and sniffs. ‘I had a meeting with Director Siskin forty minutes ago.’

  The bluebottle pings a message to Siskin’s secretary and gets one back. A message scrolls across the drone’s display: It was forty-three minutes ago.

  Ugh. Bluebottles. So pedantic. Everything they say just makes Pia want to splat them.

  She shrugs. ‘I’m sorry.’

  The bluebottle hovers.

  ‘I slept in,’ she adds.

  The bluebottle hovers.

  ‘My nanabug is broken. She normally wakes me up.’

  You are now forty-four minutes late, chats the bluebottle.

  Pia stifles the urge to punch the stupid thing right in the node. All she has to do is get through the next half an hour. It is entirely possible she will zephyr back to the celestials and find the angels back in the garden, busy braiding sunbeams. Hey, if the zookeeper of a celestial ark can’t believe in miracles, who can?

  Careful, Pia, says a voice inside her that sounds like Bagrin. That sounds suspiciously like hope.

  The bluebottle pings. This way.

  • • •

  Ark One is the only non i-era ship in the zoo. It is new, custom-built, and super, super boring. Every time Pia zephyrs here, it always amazes her how dull it is. Just several security clearances and a boat ride away, the Seamstress sits spinning creatures into life from the raw threads of human imagination.

  Not that you’d know it here. On Ark One, the air con makes everything taste of plastic and the walls are painted beige and the secretaries all have voices that sound like long-drawn-out yawns.

  Pia follows the bluebottle to Siskin’s offices. They pass admin staff in grey suits, and scientists in doom-rock T-shirts for bands like N Diz Nigh and Horsemen, and security patrols with black uniforms and long sleek rifles that they hold in a way that always reminds Pia of concert violinists standing before a pe
rformance.

  There are drones too. Nanabugs for monitoring, bluebottles for security, and cleaning drones that nobody notices enough to give a nickname to. And though Ark One contains no habitats or enclosures, there are plenty of voilà. Floating by a busted strip light, Pia sees a young red genie she hasn’t met before. His human ’genieer (Dirk? Kirt? He’s Dutch, Pia knows that much) is talking through the wish-script to fix the bulb.

  Pia tenses up. Genies might not have the empathy levels of angels, but they’re still drawn to those who need help. What if the red genie senses her massive, unfixable problem?

  He doesn’t, of course. She needs to get a grip. The guilt is making her sweat, and the air con is making her shiver. By the time the bluebottle drops her off at Siskin’s offices, she looks like someone with rat flu.

  The boss’s new secretary sits working at a desk by the door. He’s a recent transfer, even newer to the zoo than Ishan. Pia has only talked to him once before, on the canteen ship. All she remembers is that his name is Blom, which she’d accidentally misheard as Blong.

  No, wait, maybe it was the other way around.

  ‘Take a seat,’ the secretary says. He doesn’t take his eyes out of his goggles. Rude. At least he can’t see the mess she’s in.

  ‘Sorry I’m late.’ Pia perches on one of the chairs, trying to get her heart rate under control. ‘Is he really mad?’

  Blong – it is definitely Blong, not Blom – twitches a finger as he deletes something on his goggles.

  A small genie sits on the desk too. He looks young, maybe only a few weeks old, and is the size and colour of a cigar puff. The genie’s beard is extraordinarily long. It’s like a heap of grey spaghetti. He sits on top of it, by his old Zippo lighter of a lamp, going through a flip chart of written-down wishes without a ’genieer. Pia’s never seen a genie wish unsupervised.

  As she watches, the genie bows after reading each wish-script, and murmurs: ‘The wish was granted, and it was so.’ Each time, one of the letters on the desk zephyrs away with a puff. Letters and reports, mailed off to the mainland.

  There used to be a thing called the internet, which was what the i-era was named after, and it was basically a computer network that zephyred information. It hasn’t existed for decades though, not since a virus called Megalolz spread through every device connected to the net and turned them all to junk. After that, pretty much the only working tech left were spare parts that hadn’t been assembled, or military stuff that ran on its own networks: security drones like bluebottles, and surveillance drones like nanabugs.