“What are tortoises?” Alma says quickly.
“Ahh. A reptile from the Origin Planet. Very slow.”
“I see.” Alma’s round face is serious, her eyes squinted. I shake my head at her, laughing. The rest of us roll our eyes when Dr. Espada and the other whitecoats use words that have no place on Faloiv, but Alma mentally records each one, as if they might be worth something later.
Alma and I take our seats down front, closest to the transparent display board where most of Dr. Espada’s presentation will appear. Rondo chooses a seat behind me, and my entire body stiffens. He never sits here—always in the back with Jaquot and other Beak dwellers. Jaquot even shoots his friend a quizzical look, glancing undecidedly toward the back row, before sitting down next to him. I try to act like I don’t notice, straightening my back.
“What’d you do on your rest day?” Alma asks me, settling in and powering on her slate. “I sent you a message but you didn’t write back.”
I swallow. I don’t want to talk about what happened in the Beak here in class. Too many opportunities to be overheard—specifically by Rondo.
“All right, let’s get started,” Dr. Espada begins, and I can’t help but feel relieved that we’re interrupted. A gentle hum rumbles through the walls as Dr. Espada powers on the three-dimensional projector, the sound of energy being drawn from the Greenhouse’s solar store. He’s just raising his hands to start gesticulating, when his eyes flick to the doorway, away, and then back again in a double take.
“Oh,” he says, and his hands drop.
The heads of my classmates turn as if attached to a single curious neck. It’s rare that class is disrupted: I can recall only one other time, when the Slither was flooding, that we were excused early. But the person in the doorway doesn’t look urgent as if an emergency has brought her. She glides into the classroom.
“Council,” Alma murmurs in my ear, just as I glimpse the gold Council pin on the breast of the woman’s lab coat—a delicate likeness of the Vagantur surrounded by five circles representing the compounds.
“May I come in?” the woman says, though she’s already in. Her voice is unexpected for someone so broad, its tenor reedy and thin like a blade of grass.
“I . . . of course,” Dr. Espada says.
“Dr. Albatur has sent me to make an announcement,” she says, turning to us. I note the frown that flickers across Dr. Espada’s mouth.
“He couldn’t have come himself?” Alma whispers. “Everybody knows he doesn’t actually do any of his own research.”
I conceal my smile. I’ve heard my mother say the same thing—that it was his long rambling speeches that got him elected, not his work.
“An announcement? Has something happened?” Dr. Espada says.
“You could say that.” The councilwoman shoots him a flash of teeth. Her smile remains focused on him a beat longer than is called for, and I’m not surprised when he doesn’t smile back. Her expression is like the painted clay decoy animals used in some field experiments. False. Hollow.
“There has been an exciting breakthrough in N’Terra,” the woman says. She spreads the fingers on each hand wide like two fans. “Tomás, could you please bring up a photo of a myn?”
“Certainly.”
A moment later, we all gaze up at the image of a fish presented before us, slightly blurry: it’s light gray in color with a long wispy dorsal fin, eyes an opaque orange in sharp contrast to the dull color of its body.
“And now an oscree, please,” the councilwoman says. She still hasn’t told us her name.
Alongside the fish appears an image of the common oscree, its delicate wings folded along the length of its body.
“Two different animals,” the councilwoman says. “Two different species. And yet today we have discovered that they have more in common than we could have ever predicted.”
She pauses. I dart my eyes at Dr. Espada and find that his face has lost its frown. Instead, every wrinkle seems to have been laid smooth. It’s like looking at a mask.
“Would anyone like to hazard a guess?” the councilwoman goes on. She lets her eyes drift across the room, and as they wander through my row, I swear they pause on my face for just an instant too long. I wonder, my breath becoming shallow, if Dr. Albatur had told her about me, if I’m already getting a reputation in the Zoo.
“Myn and oscree? How about”—Jaquot draws out the words comically—“they instantaneously die of boredom when they come across each other in the wild?”
A subdued current of laughter courses through the room, and the councilwoman’s hollow smile widens. Her eyes don’t change. I glance back at Jaquot and find him reclining in his chair, grinning. Ordinarily I would be throwing ocular poison in his direction, but today I send a subtle salute, which he accepts with a kingly nod.
“I was under the impression that your students were erudite,” the councilwoman says, turning her teeth on Dr. Espada again, whose neutral mask falters. Jaquot’s smile fades. “Apparently not. So I’ll get right to it. In these two unrelated species, we have a confirmed study that proves myn and oscree are able to communicate without any means of physical or aural input.”
“Excuse me.” Alma beats me in breaking the silence. “What does that mean exactly? Psychically? If they’re communicating without physical or aural signals, then you mean they’re communicating . . . how? Telepathically?”
“Someone is paying attention after all,” the councilwoman says, beaming, but Alma doesn’t smile. “Yes, that’s what our studies appear to conclude. Preliminary studies began by exploring intraspecies communication and found that mammals may be communicating psychically. Then, thanks to Dr. English’s research, we realized there was more to it.”
“Dr. English?” Dr. Espada says quickly.
“That’s correct,” the councilwoman says, and this time her gaze is definitely on me, that empty smile lasering in on me with almost predatory intensity. “Samirah English, that is.”
The class claps, as we always do when one of our parents is recognized for a breakthrough in N’Terran science, but I barely hear it. I sat in the kitchen with my mother last night, eating and talking, and she didn’t mention this discovery at all—she just disappeared into her study and whispered about pulling me out of the not-yet-announced internships. A movement from Dr. Espada catches my eye—he reaches for his slate at his desk, typing something in a flurry of silent finger taps while the councilwoman resumes her speech.
“Quiet now,” she says, her hands fanning out again. “There’s one more thing. As you know, under current policy, you won’t be assigned to a specialty of study until you’re eighteen, after you’ve shown some aptitude for a particular branch. And then won’t be in the labs until you’re twenty-one, after extensive guided research.”