She says it in her scientist voice: One moment please, colleague. But scientist voice or not, I still hear mother voice in its undertones. All the warm feelings that had fluttered about when walking with Rondo crumble back down into the shadows of my stomach.
“How’s it going?” she says, this time in her mother voice. But now it’s the scientist voice I hear in the undertones, the roles swapped but never really independent of the other. I wonder if it’s because she’s in the Zoo and the whitecoat voice is hard to shake in work territory, or if it’s because I’m both daughter and project.
“Fine,” I say. “It’s a good group.”
“Are they enjoying the experience?” she says.
“I think so. How long do you think our work will be limited to the sorting room?”
“Do you not like working with the eggs?”
“No, I do. I was just curious.” The thought of the violet egg and the tingling it had left on my skin emerges out of the shadows of my brain, but I push it away hurriedly, as if she might see it.
“How do they make you feel?”
My gut ties itself into an elaborate knot. Is there surveillance equipment in the sorting room? Has she been watching me, observing my reactions to the specimens?
“Um . . . how do eggs make me feel?”
She nods, as if this is the most natural question in the world.
“Um . . . fine, I guess? Calm?”
She looks pleased, her mouth widening into the smile I know well.
“Which ones make you feel calm?”
There is definitely a trap somewhere in the short distance between us.
“You mean, which exact eggs? Uh, I don’t know. I hadn’t really been paying attention.” I pause, contemplating what she’s actually asking, striving to see the parameters of the experiment she might have laid out around me. “Do different eggs have different effects on humans or something?”
She gives me a look I can’t quite decipher. She practically glows with excitement, but I can almost see her holding something back.
“Different eggs have different . . . purposes. Not all eggs produce young, you know.”
“In that case, is it really an egg, then? What does it do if it doesn’t hatch?”
She studies me, saying nothing, and my head starts to buzz. I hate these bright white lights. My headache is back.
“Later,” she says finally, the smile wavering. I suddenly have the impression that she’s wearing a mask, a second face that she dons specifically for the white hallways of the Zoo. It plants a shudder in my spine. “Soon we’ll talk all about it. Soon.”
Behind the smile mask I detect concern, hidden in places only I would notice: the subtle droop of her lower lip on the left side; the creases at the outer corners of her eyes, slight wrinkles that are deeper than I remember. I have decided to ask her if she’s okay, when a door just down the white hall slides open and we both turn our heads to look. Two whitecoats appear, guiding a massive rolling cart out into the wide corridor. At first I think it’s a bin like the ones we’ve been filling with eggs all morning, but then they turn the corner of the doorway and I instead see that it’s a cage. Inside crouches a very large, sleek-furred animal, blue-gray in color, ears like large round leaves, snout snubbed and short, multiple tusks sprouting from either side. My headache throbs but doesn’t dampen my excitement.
“A tufali,” I say. I’ve only ever seen it displayed on a screen as a three-dimensional projection, and now here it is, vividly alive. I’m surprised to find that I can smell it, its musk wafting down the hall toward me like an invisible, sentient cloud. I’m taking a step toward it to get a better look when my mother’s fingernails bury themselves in my arm and I’m hauled around to face her.
“Stars, Mom—” I snap, surprised, swiveling my head back around to look after the tufali, but the cart is disappearing down the hall. She takes my chin in her hand and roughly directs my face to look at her.
“What the—” I gasp.
“Male or female?” she asks, her voice urgent, as if she’s asking me the password to a computer that might explode at any moment.
“W-what?”
“The tufali that you just saw. Was it male or female?”
“I don’t—”
Her eyes drill into mine, deeply brown and shining with a look I don’t recognize. “Think, Octavia.”
After a long pause, the pressure of her fingers on my chin making my jaw ache, I grind my answer out.
“Female.”
She lets go of my face, her eyebrows raised slightly with what looks like grim satisfaction. She was leaning in toward me and now withdraws, hesitantly as if she might grab me again.
“How did you know?” she asks.
I’m not sure how to answer. It hadn’t felt like a guess. But I’d glimpsed the tufali for no more than a half second before my mother pulled my gaze away. I’m angry at the thought: the first animal specimen I’ve seen all day—something I’d never see milling around the side of the road or grazing beyond the compound gates—and she keeps me from looking. What is her problem?
“I should get back in,” I say, moving toward the door to the sorting room. All my sadness about our fight has disappeared, replaced with anger. “They won’t appreciate having to do my work for too long.”
She nods. She seems unsettled and glances over her shoulder, back down at the Atrium as if to see if anyone is watching us.
“Go,” she says. “I’ll see you at home.”
“Yeah maybe,” I say, the sarcasm leaking into my voice like a toxin.
Inside the sorting room, Alma and the others are all talking but stop when I walk in. I look around, waiting, but no one says anything.
“What?” I say.
“We were just talking about your mother,” Yaya says.
“What about her?”
“She’s brilliant,” Yaya says, as if that should have been obvious. “My mother studies neonatology. Which is interesting, fine. But to study mammalian neurology—the brains of the biggest animal class on Faloiv . . . well, it’s just awesome.”
“Was she helping you cheat?” Jaquot asks. His grin would ordinarily rub me the wrong way, but I can tell he’s just trying to show how much he admires my mother. At one point it would have been flattering; now I just feel queasy. “Giving you some tips?”
“No,” I say. It’s true, but I can see the disappointment on their faces: they were hoping for a peek behind the curtain, some privileged piece of information that will make knowing me worthwhile. “I did see a tufali though.”
Their expressions brighten, even Rondo’s. Yaya’s mouth falls open.
“You did?”
“Just now?”
They all say variations of this, various expressions of excitement.
“Yeah. A female.”
“How do you know? The males and females look identical. Their sex only becomes apparent when they mate.” Yaya says this like she’s answering a question on an exam and I can’t help but laugh. We’re greencoats. The nearest mention of animals and we go into Greenhouse mode, like a knee’s reflex bursting out under the tap of a mallet.