“I guess they don’t realize that you snore.” I smile, feeling a little stronger.
They both smile back: small, strained smiles. My arm aches: I don’t need to look at the needle to know where the intravenous line enters my body. Three days. It feels like it’s been years. But I can still feel the footprints in my mind where Rasimbukar had been, can still feel the stretchy sensation of the tunnel opening and closing in my head.
“Are you in pain?” Alma asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say. Do I tell them? Do I know how? “I feel weird. Are you guys okay?”
Rondo shrugs, as is his custom. His gaze doesn’t seem to want to leave my face until this moment.
“Yes,” he says. “I was just . . . we were just worried about you. We didn’t know where you went when Dr. Espada came back to the tree without you.” He shakes his head.
“We wanted to stay and help,” Alma says. “But Manx made Dr. Espada and the finder who was bitten take us back while they looked for you and Jaquot.”
“Jaquot?” I say. “Where was Jaquot?”
Alma’s eyes fill with tears as if I had slapped her. I turn to Rondo and he rubs his temples.
“What happened to Jaquot?” My voice gets shrill, high. “He’s dead isn’t he? Jaquot is dead.”
Neither of them can look at me. It seems a long time until Alma says, “Yes.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to choke down the nausea that’s rising in my throat. Jaquot. Dead. The cocky boy from the Beak, whose eyes I thought were pretty when we were children. The boy who squeezed my arm the first time we saw the philax. Alma and I used to call him a moron and I wonder if she remembers. We thought he was a moron and now he’s dead. I think of Yaya, her secret smiles at Jaquot—the only person I saw make her laugh. I open my eyes to find my vision blurred with tears.
“The dirixi?” I say, trying to keep my voice from breaking.
“Yes,” Rondo says, his mouth twitching as if to say more, but closing again before any other words escape.
“What? What is it?” I don’t want anyone to be gentle with me right now. I’m already lying here with a needle in my arm, the lights turned low as if I’m on my deathbed. I don’t want to be coddled. I want to know everything.
“We . . . we won’t be able to cremate him. All Manx and her crew found was a piece of his skinsuit. And . . . and blood. They found his blood.”
“Because the dirixi doesn’t chew; it swallows,” I say. It feels sickeningly comforting, reciting Greenhouse research as if I’m talking about a case study. Not a person. Not a guy who I’d studied next to, laughed with, rolled my eyes at. I remember his last words to me in the jungle and my chest nearly seizes.
“Yes,” Rondo says. I wonder if his eyes are red from crying or sleeplessness. Both, I imagine. I wonder if he thought I was dead too. I wonder why I’m not dead. How had I known to find the rhohedron field, the sweet-scented flowers that had protected me but not Jaquot? The tunnel in my head . . . I try to open it now, but it stays stubbornly closed. I find myself drawing up the smell of ogwe trees, their scent of fiber and sap crosshatched in a complicated but soothing aroma.
“Do you guys know what ogwe trees smell like?” I blurt out, sitting up as much as my strength will allow.
“Ogwe trees?” Rondo asks. “No. The compound’s filled with them and I’ve never smelled anything.”
“They don’t have a smell,” Alma agrees.
I remember Jaquot saying the same thing and bite my lip to keep from crying.
“But they do.” I sigh, closing my eyes and falling back onto my bed. “They do.”
“Octavia.” Alma says my name like she’s talking to a child. “What happened out there? Where did you go?”
“I ran from the dirixi,” I say, keeping my eyes closed. “I got lost. Just like my grandmother. Maybe the same dirixi that killed her killed Jaquot.”
“Don’t do that, O,” Alma says. “There’s no point. It’s illogical and it doesn’t help anything.”
“Where are my parents?”
“In the Zoo,” Rondo says. “Going over your charts. Making sure you don’t have any toxins that will make you sick later. Your mom did a procedure on your hands too.”
“My hands?” So it wasn’t a dream, waking up and feeling them tingling. I look at them now: they look normal and I don’t feel any burning.
“Yeah, she thinks you might have touched some jival? The poisonous vine thing,” Rondo says.
“Yes, jival. She said you were fine though,” Alma adds. “Just a quick laser cleansing. She hasn’t been here since she brought you back from the procedure. Neither has your dad.”
It occurs to me that my parents might be questioning the spotted man, Rasimbukar’s father. If my father kidnapped him—for whatever reason—then he might somehow think the Faloii had kidnapped me for revenge. Who is the villain here? I try to remember the feeling of gentleness that came from Rasimbukar. She seemed to want to avoid violence, not cause it. Violence has grave consequences. . . .
“I met the spotted man’s daughter,” I say.
“You what?” Rondo barks. He had been sitting on the desk platform across from the bed, but now he’s on his feet and standing close to me, one hand extended as if he thought to clutch my leg and then changed his mind.
“Yes.” I tell them everything. “She said to find the kawa when I was ready to come to her,” I finish.
“The kawa? What is that?” Rondo sounds almost angry.
“I have no idea. Alma?”
“I don’t know that word,” she says, sinking onto the chair at my desk. “How strong was her grasp of our language? Maybe she mispronounced something? Water, maybe? Kawa, water.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “She said it really clearly. And her speech was perfect: there’s no way she didn’t know the word water.”
“How could it be perfect?” Rondo breathes in wonder. “They’ve only interacted with us a handful of times. The only thing Dr. Espada and the other whitecoats say about them is how mysterious they are. How did they learn our language?”
In spite of everything, I smile. Rondo always said he wasn’t interested in studying animals. He preferred people, he said. I see it now in his fascination with the Faloii.
“I don’t know,” I say, shaking my head. “But Rasimbukar barely had an accent. She did have one, but nothing I can compare to anything I’ve heard from any whitecoat.”
“Amazing.” Rondo sighs. He sits on the desk next to Alma, leans his back against the wall, and breathes deeply. “Wow.”
“Am I the only one freaking out?” Alma says indignantly, looking from Rondo to me and waving her hands. “Great, Octavia talked to a Faloii woman. Yes, it’s cool. But what are we going to do? She’s talking about a war here, guys! This is critical! You have to talk to your mom, O. Seriously.”
“And tell her what?” I snap. Almost all the fatigue has faded from my body. “That a Faloii woman told me what happened by showing me pictures in my mind? You think my mother won’t just go straight to the Council, to my father, and tell him everything?”