He looks uncertain but smiles sarcastically. “You can’t prove that empirically either.”
I shrug, indifferent. I’ll save the debate for the Greenhouse when I have evidence to back me up.
“What are you doing here anyway?” he asks, leaning against the tree. When we were kids I had a crush on him—mainly because of the color of his eyes, the same shade as the leaves. He’s still handsome. But annoying outweighs attractive.
“My father takes me to the other compounds when he goes to meet with other scientists. Occasionally.”
“Seriously?” he says, impressed. His lack of conceit takes me off guard. He’s always talking or bragging, and I hadn’t expected him to be interested in what anyone else has to say.
“Yeah.” I’m hesitant to give away how excited it all makes me—I can almost hear my father calling it adolescent. But Jaquot doesn’t seem to have any concern about seeming juvenile.
“That’s amazing,” he says, pushing off the ogwe to face me directly. “Have you been to them all?”
“All except the Fin,” I say, referring to the Aquatic Compound.
Jaquot moves his hand like he’s sweeping the Fin away.
“Eh, you might be able to skip that anyway. I’d rather hear Dr. Espada lecture on grubs than fish. Mind-numbing.”
I laugh. I’ve been rolling my eyes at him since we were six, but maybe he’s not so bad anymore. I make a mental note to send Alma a message about it when I return to the Paw. We’ve always thought Jaquot was all talk and no insight, but I’ve never considered that he may have changed. That seems fairly unscientific, now that I think about it.
“That is really cool, though,” he continues, and turns to go back down the original path that leads toward the main entrance. “What does the Slither dome look like inside? Do they let the reptiles run loose?”
We walk and talk, birds flying around us like tiny, colorful comets. Some of the comets aren’t so tiny: one bright orange bird lands on a branch above us, so large that the wood makes a groaning sound. No sooner does it land than it takes off again.
“Species?” I say, pointing.
“Roigo,” he says after the briefest pause. “I think. It took off too fast.”
“Distinguishing quality?”
“They hatch at their adult size.”
“How?”
“No one knows. But we will.”
We grin at each other. It’s nice to talk about specimens without all the gravity that accompanies it with my parents and the whitecoats. For many of my peers, I know being a greencoat is just about memorizing facts. For me, it’s more. I open my mouth to tell Jaquot this, or some less serious version of it, when there’s a commotion somewhere through the trees.
“What’s that?” I look around.
“I don’t know,” he says, craning his head to try to get a glimpse through tree trunks. “I’ve never heard anyone yelling in the dome.”
There’s more than one someone. There’s a chorus of voices, rising and falling.
“It’s coming from around the main entrance,” says Jaquot. “Let’s check it out.”
We follow the worn path through another cluster of trees. The flora in the dome isn’t quite thick enough to mimic walking through the real forests of Faloiv—or at least how I imagine them to be. We approach the tree line. There are just bushes and rocks after the trees thin out, a clearing before the dome wall and its door.
“Oh man, look!” Jaquot’s hand whips out and grabs my wrist, unconscious of how tightly he grips me. His eyes are wide, his mouth open. I almost jerk away from him, but then I look.
Four or five whitecoats shout, their words a combination of curses and caution, their bodies a flurry of waving arms and shuffling feet. One woman’s spectacles fall off, and I watch her scramble to recover them before they’re crushed . . . under a foot.
The foot isn’t human. It’s not even a foot: it’s a collection of claws and scales, attached to a leg as thick as my calf. My breath catches in my throat, as if those claws are around my neck, choking me. The red of the plumage is shockingly bright. I’ve heard things described as bloodred before, but it was never accurate until now. This creature is the true color of blood, and huge: my eyes travel up its body, taller than I am. Its wingspan is as wide as the wigwam outside, and the scientists from the Beak scramble to subdue the animal, to pinion its wings with thick brown straps. One of those wings buffets a whitecoat, sending him sprawling. Then the animal throws back its colossal head, opens its curved beak, and emits a sound like a roar and a screech, a deep reverberating cry that echoes into the trees. A headache blooms in my skull.
“It’s a philax,” Jaquot breathes. He’s still gripping my wrist and I’m too shocked to shake him off.
“We’re so close,” I whisper, pushing aside the headache.
“Look out!” one of the whitecoats yells, and swings one of the thick straps over his head. Fastened to the end are two smooth round objects, heavy, I can tell, by the way they whirl. After a few rotations, the whitecoat lets go and sends it sailing toward the philax, where it spins around and around the animal’s feet, entangling them. The philax screeches again, and it’s as if the sound shakes every cell in my body. The creature totters, wavers, and then falls, crashing to the ground in a tangle of bloodred feathers and scales.
When the philax is prone on the ground—the whitecoats leaping on top of him to secure his wings with more straps—he stretches his neck out so that it’s fully extended and gives one more long, cavernous screech. And in that moment, my eyes meet his.
Lightning flows through my body, a sudden jolt of an electric current. A storm of charges invades my head, my fear becoming enlarged, intensified by some titanic presence. My body goes rigid and the eyes of the philax drill into me, wild with terror. His fear vibrates in my fingernails and in my tongue: I feel it in my earlobes and in the throbbing of my head. The philax’s panic builds a nest in me alongside my own fear, which is now small beside his, dull next to his intensity. I can’t tear my eyes away from his.
“Octavia! Octavia!” Jaquot is shaking me by my shoulder, but I can’t quite hear him. My mind is gray, busy, filled with noise . . . and behind it all, something taps.
Someone near the philax shouts as the bird manages to rise again, words I can’t make out, and a lab door opens to reveal a whitecoat with a tranq gun. Behind him is Dr. Albatur, raising his hood as he steps back out into the sun of the dome. His face is hard as his mouth forms the words, “Shoot it.” The whitecoat aims the tranq gun at those beautiful bloodred feathers, pauses, and then pulls the trigger. I only hear the whispered zip of the dart leaving the barrel, and then the philax is falling, I’m falling, into dark, dark space.
CHAPTER 2