“Yes,” he says. “You have six hours.”
He leaves, and for a moment we’re all silent. Around us, the eggs are piles of rainbows, some as small as my fist and others so large that I think carrying them might require two people.
“Well,” Yaya says. We all look at her and she shrugs. “I guess we get started?”
I know better than to let my face betray the stab of irritation that sprouts between my ribs. Instead, I study her, searching for weaknesses in her faultless scientific armor. But the penetration of my stare stops at her face, finding only perfection. Her skin is deeply black, almost blue, her eyes wide and curving upward at the outer corners. I remember hearing Jaquot tell Rondo once that she was the prettiest girl on Faloiv, which now makes perfect sense given what I’ve observed of Jaquot’s crush, and which I agreed with at the time without much jealousy. I had no need to be jealous—Yaya’s beauty is a fact, and to be envious seemed irrational. Now reason seems to mean little as I take in her prominent cheekbones, the wide curve of her nose. Before I can allow myself to explore the idea of whether Rondo also thinks she’s the prettiest girl on the planet, I snatch myself back from the precipice and hope that my momentary logical stutter hasn’t showed in my eyes.
“And where would you suggest we start?” I ask.
She looks me square in the eye. “I would suggest that we look in our slates for the identification charts, because I don’t have a damn clue.”
Disarmed, I laugh—loudly—without meaning to. She gives me a half smile and shrugs in a nonchalant way, but I glimpse a flash of shy pleasure in the way she blinks her eyes away from mine. This is the part where I’m supposed to snap back with something as clever as it is barbed, but all my words seem dull now. Jaquot appears between us, his slate illuminated with one of the charts.
“Luckily you have your resident egg expert here to lend his genius,” he says, and this time I can’t tell if he’s doing the thing where he defuses tension, or if he’s just flirting. I think the latter, the way his smile beams onto Yaya like her own private sun.
I open my mouth to say that his project on mammalian eggs hadn’t even been in the top 10 percent of Greenhouse scores, but I don’t want to risk irritating him in case he decides to regale everyone with tales of my fainting at the Beak. I close my mouth and turn to my own slate.
“Remember, they’re not all mammalian,” Yaya says. She could have been obnoxious to him about it—the way I wanted to be—but instead she shoots him a small smile. Interesting, I think. The sun might glow both ways.
“I don’t care what they are,” Alma says, running her hands gently over the surface of a round orange specimen. “I just want to stare at them.”
Almost as if we agreed to do so, we all allow ourselves to admire the contents of the room for a few minutes.
“Nobody younger than twenty-one has ever been this close to this stuff before,” Jaquot says. At first I think he’s as filled with wonder as I am, but then he adds with a laugh: “I hope I don’t break one! They’ll kick us out.”
The idea of him breaking one of these eggs makes me want to break one of his bones.
“It makes sense that this is where they would start us,” Yaya says, studying the screen of her slate on which she’s pulled up the classification matrices. “There are so many subtle variations between types of eggs. If we can tell these apart, we can tell animals apart easily.”
Once we’ve gotten over our awe we get to work, picking up on those subtle differences as we sort. There are differences in color but also in shapes and textures. Reptilian eggs are mostly oblong, and mammalian eggs tend to be rounder, little hints we use to make identifying them a bit easier. We find large empty bins at the back of the room and use them to sort the eggs by class, the bins filling as time ticks by. I pause as I pick up a globular violet egg with a texture like tiny pebbles.
I stroke its surface and it leaves my skin feeling tingly. Rubbing my fingers together, I feel the sensation traveling up my arm. Alarmed, I put the egg back in the bin it came from, as quickly as I can without dropping it. I glance up, my eyes searching the room for Rondo, but he’s absorbed in trying to identify a smooth blue egg, lost in his slate’s matrices. I open my mouth to call him only to close it again, knowing that if I attract his attention I’ll attract everyone else’s too. I can’t touch my arm through my skinsuit, but I continue rubbing my fingers together, trying not to be too frantic as the tingling dulls into something difficult to describe—as if under my clothing, my arm is transforming into air.
“Are you stuck on one?” Alma says. She hasn’t spoken directly to me since we arrived in the Zoo, and I can tell from her tone she’s trying to break the thin layer of ice that’s crept up between us.
I look away from my tingling hands and up into her eyes. It’s as if the brown of her irises drives the sensation out of my mind, because my skin abruptly feels like skin again, the vibrating residue on my hands gone. I feel nothing, and when Alma comes over, scooping up the violet egg I’d just put down, I can only stare wordlessly as she places it in the mammalian bin. She doesn’t rub her fingers, she doesn’t pause or look troubled.
“The egg . . . ,” I start, but Yaya turns her eyes on us, listening, and I realize, with a shade of nausea, that whatever I just felt might be the reason my mother sought to keep me out of the Zoo: some hidden weakness that I’m barely concealing. One word from Yaya might get me booted. “Yeah, I was stuck. But I’ve got it now. Thanks.”
“Are there any animals that don’t lay eggs?” Jaquot says, and I’m grateful that his interruption draws Yaya’s attention. “We could build a whole new compound with these damn things.”
“I think it’s fascinating,” Alma says. “I do wonder how long we’ve been in here though.” She stands by the reptilian bin with one knee bent, her hip pushed out. Her hair, braided today like mine, is covered by the gauzy headwrap the procedure file ordered us to wear. We all wear them, but she’s tied hers with a high knot to give it a decorative flair.
“Three hours,” says Rondo.
“I wonder if we get food,” says Yaya, stifling a yawn.
As if on cue, the doors at the front of the room slide open. I expect to see my father, but it’s another whitecoat. I’ve seen him before in the commune, always looking busy and rushed. He’s no different now and doesn’t even greet us.
“How many garifula eggs have you sorted so far?” he says.
My brain scrambles to find an answer. I haven’t been looking at the totals, just entering numbers for each egg I sort. I’ve been busy admiring the specimens, letting my mind wander. I open my mouth to provide some reason why we don’t have that information, but Yaya answers instead.