“I mean, spots are markings.”
The commune is starting to wake up. Other greencoats are coming out to roam while their parents are in the labs, enjoying their day off before internships begin. In a few days they’ll be moving into their new compounds. It’s strange to think that this time tomorrow, I’ll be walking into the most restricted dome of the Paw.
“What are you thinking about?” says Rondo.
A man carrying a basket walks onto the bridge, headed across the stream to open his shop. I wonder if the basket carries one of Albatur’s new scarlet banners. I don’t answer right away, standing aside to let the man pass.
“I don’t know. Tomorrow, I guess.”
“Nervous?”
“Not exactly. Curious, maybe.”
“A whitecoat through and through,” he says, turning his eyes back to the fish in the stream.
A while ago, it would have thrilled me to hear it. Now I’m not sure. But my fondness for science and discovery is unchanged. Hardly anyone used to spend time outside their ’wams at one point: the heat drove us straight from lab to home. But then someone in the Paw made the maigno breakthrough, making our clothing more adaptable to the heat. What we don’t know, we will. I wonder if my father still wants to solve these mysteries of our home, or if his sights are set on something else entirely.
“Are you going to tell me why you requested the Paw?” I ask, turning to Rondo. I’m hoping to catch him off guard before he has time to be evasive.
“Am I wrong to want to be assigned with the two smartest people in class?” he says, holding his hands up as if in surrender.
“What, you’re going to try to cheat off our exams or something?”
“Would you let me?”
“Um, no.”
He chuckles. He doesn’t laugh enough. I’ve found that I like the way it sounds.
“I brought you something,” he says, and leans down to touch something at his feet.
It’s the smooth black case he was carrying his first day in the Paw. I didn’t even notice it until this moment, so absorbed in thoughts of the Faloii.
“Your izinusa,” I say, and I can’t bite back the smile that bursts out of hiding.
“Yes.”
He opens the case and lifts the instrument from its bed, bringing it to his shoulder. From the bottom of its curving wood base he pulls what looks like a long feathered stem from where it had been hidden in a groove. He takes it gently in four fingers of his left hand.
“No laughing,” he says, but I can tell by the crease in his forehead that he has no intention of making me laugh.
I’m not prepared for the music. From the delicate look of the izinusa’s neck to the graceful arch of the feather-like bow, I had expected a lighter sound than what Rondo coaxes from the strings. Instead, what flows into my ears is deep and rich with many layers of rising and falling notes. They weave with one another in ways my ears can barely comprehend, and I stare at the bow in Rondo’s fingers, the music filling me up. I feel empty and full at the same time, as if all the smells and sounds of the commune have been summoned by Rondo’s izinusa and swirl around me, waiting for me to make room inside my head. I look up from Rondo’s fingers and find his eyes on me as he plays. I can’t look away. It feels like the red sun has planted itself in my chest. Flowers grow under my skin.
When the hammers on the tower start again, Rondo stops playing, but the music has filled my ears the way the smell of ogwe fills my nose. I’m trying to think of something to say when his hand travels the short distance between us, closing around my bicep. He squeezes the softest part of my arm, a slow gentle pressure that makes my head swirl. When he lets the squeeze go, he leaves his hand there on my skinsuit, the heat traveling through the thin material. I smile.
We stand there for a while. This is a silence I can stand. Under it is only contentment, and for a few moments my head is empty: no sadness for my grandmother, no pain for my parents and the broken pieces of their love, no concern about the egg. Just Rondo: his hand, my arm, and, above us, the sun.
CHAPTER 9
“Octavia.”
I snap awake from a strange dream that disintegrates as soon as my eyes open. It was my mother’s voice I dreamed of, and I expect to find her in my room, stirring me for my first day in the labs. But the door is closed, my room is dark, empty. I shut my eyes again, the dream washing over me but fading. I rise and go to the window, and now the dream is fully gone, fragments dispersing into specks. I slide open the window shade and am blinded by sunlight.
“Damn!”
The sun is already up. I spin away from the window to snatch my skinsuit from where it hangs on the wall. No time to eat.
I race through a deserted commune—everyone has already left to start their day. I try not to think about what will happen if I miss my group’s entrance to the labs. Will the guards even let me in? Once I get into the main dome, I tear through the trees, down the path toward the entrance to the Zoo. A stitch in my side punishes me: I’ve barely been awake ten minutes and now I’m sprinting, my flat white shoes pounding the packed dirt. I round the curve toward the labs, praying that I’ll see Alma and Rondo lined up, ready to go in.
I wheel around the corner and slam into Jaquot, almost knocking him to the ground.
“Hey!” he yells, catching his fall against a tree.
My group is ahead of him, filing toward the guarded doors, and, like a nightmare, the three other interns and the single whitecoat turn in surprise to find me steadying myself, reaching up and smoothing my braids, clearly out of breath. The sight of Rondo, for the smallest second, makes me stop breathing altogether, the music of his izinusa flashing across my mind like a stripe of sunlight. But any comfort it offers is gone again the instant I see that the whitecoat at the head of the small group is my father, slate in hand, his face stony. His white coat is unbuttoned, his mouth like a crack in the ground when the rains are late.
“Glad that you could join us, Miss English,” he says.
I don’t answer. I know that voice. He’s going to pretend that he’s Dr. English and I’m Intern English. No relation. Might as well be true, but I don’t let my embarrassment show on my face. Stone, I think, I too am made of stone.