“It’s nearby,” I say, opening my eyes. The feeling is like a trail laid out through empty space, glowing ahead of me. “Something is wrong.”
“It’s all wrong,” Rondo says.
“It’s worse,” I say, looking around for I don’t know what. “Something horrible.”
It’s a female. I can feel her now. Her mind is as open as mine, searching. She feels me, reaches out with the shapes of her fear. No words, just horror. She doesn’t know who or what I am, but she reaches.
I race down the hall, trying to pick up on the traces of the vasana’s plea. She’s everywhere at once: I can’t make my mind focus on finding her. I shut my eyes tightly and allow her to come galloping in. I see her as she imagines herself: her long sloping neck, her gentle ears, her round eyes. Sadness rises like a blue serpent, encircling me. She thinks she’s dying.
“They’re going to kill her,” I gasp, and I follow her. It’s as if she’s leaping in front of me as I run through the white warren of the labs, streaming past doors and the false empty windows of the rooms. Behind me Rondo and Alma hiss my name, trying to run lightly.
“We are way out of bounds, O,” Alma whispers urgently. “If someone sees us . . .”
I ignore her. I’m close. I don’t understand how this works: I can’t see her, the way I’ve seen the philax and the tufali in their moments of fear. Yet this feeling is more intense than anything I’ve felt so far. But I can’t find the source: wandering through the long white halls is fruitless. We turn another blank corner and I glance from side to side. No doors, no windows, just signs in thick black print that read Restricted Access. A hallway of nothing: smooth white walls without a crack.
“Where does this go?” Alma whispers. “I don’t even see any doors. What is this?”
“There has to be something,” Rondo says. “It’s like the illusion windows of the exam rooms O told us about. Hidden.”
My brain pulses, the vasana’s heart beating so fast that it’s like a drumbeat of lightning in my head. I stretch out my hand to feel the smooth white wall, trail my fingertips across it. I walk very slowly, the vasana’s fear reeling me in close. My fingertips tingle on the faultless white wall. And then I hear, “Enter, Dr. English.”
I jump back in shock, jerking my tingling fingers away from the wall. Its blank whiteness has illuminated: not all of it, just a faintly blue square. In the middle of the blue square is a digital image of my father.
The white wall moves. Not a door like any I’ve seen in the compound, but a door nonetheless. It slides open to reveal a room, dimmer than the stark hallway and entirely empty.
“Octavia,” Alma whispers. She and Rondo stand back away from the door as if it’s a trap, their eyes wide. Rondo’s neck is craned to peer into the doorway without actually going in.
“It thinks I’m my father,” I say, looking at my hand. The door stands open in front of me, and the vasana’s mind leaps from the emptiness. I step into the room, ignoring Alma’s urgent whispers behind me.
It’s an observation room, like the one we were in moments ago. Only here there are no whitecoats watching: there aren’t even any benches to accommodate observers. The room is empty, the light illuminating the floor cast from the large observation window at the front of the room. I take three paces forward and then freeze. There she is: the vasana.
Two whitecoats have her on a slightly raised platform. She’s bound securely in a standing position, her eyes glassy from the remaining tranquilizer in her blood. And above her, white coat pristine and glaring, is Dr. Albatur.
“Him,” I whisper.
“Dr. Albatur attending Vasana 11,” he says, his voice loud and clear. “Today we will be viewing the implications of the previous session’s experimental additions. In the last session, we implemented the synthetic genes, along with some alterations to the brain. The alterations, we hope, will—on command—override the specimen’s first nature and revert to the programmed behavior. Dr. Jain?”
Dr. Jain, his assistant, steps forward quickly, pulling on thick padded gloves. I approach the glass, wondering if it’s two-way, if Dr. Albatur will look up and see me, stop whatever he’s doing that has the vasana so terrified, and curse at me. She feels me—she can’t move her head, but inside she’s looking right at me. I can’t tell her anything. It’s like being without a tongue.
With the thick gloves padding his hands, Jain reaches for the vasana’s face. The animal doesn’t resist, merely folds her ears backward in a submissive way as Jain grasps her muzzle and opens her mouth.
“Dr. Jain is opening Vasana 11’s mouth to examine the animal’s standard dental bite,” Dr. Albatur says.
The vasana’s teeth are white and somewhat small, the four canines at the front of its mouth—top and bottom—a little longer than the others and leading to flat molars in the back. Jain holds the animal’s mouth open and looks to Dr. Albatur. I feel as if I’m floating outside my body: I’ve spent my entire life hoping to get into the Zoo and observe procedures with the animals of Faloiv. But the coldness of the whitecoats freezes my blood. It’s not just the vasana’s fear: it’s the way the whitecoats treat her as if she isn’t alive at all, as if she’s just one more piece of equipment.
“Initiating synthetic genetic command with Vasana 11,” Dr. Albatur says, and takes a device from the workstation by the door. The device is like a slate but not as wide, its design thicker and more rudimentary, with actual knobs and buttons. As he manipulates the controls, a light begins to flash on the device. In my head, the vasana’s heart begins to pound. She knows what’s next, even if I don’t. My heart pounds too. I put my hands on the glass, desperate to help. But I can’t.
The vasana trembles on the table. She picks up each of her hooves one at a time, over and over, as if standing on hot coals. Then I look at her mouth, which Jain still holds pried open. The teeth—the regular, even, white teeth—are growing. They’re enlarging and elongating, the canines becoming dramatically long, sharpening, narrowing; extending beyond her mouth and hanging over her lips. I know those teeth, but they don’t belong in a vasana’s jaws. They’re the fangs of a dirixi.
“Do you see . . . ?” Alma says breathlessly, somewhere close behind me but far, far away.
Jain finally releases the animal’s jaws, and the vasana attempts to close her mouth, prevented from doing so fully because of the enormous new fangs. I gape through the glass at the scene before me. The vasana is an herbivore, but terrifying fangs resembling that of the dirixi now sprout from her mouth. I reach out to the vasana, but her terror makes her difficult to look at inside the tunnel.