“And Grandfather,” I say. “What about him? I know he didn’t die the way you said. I saw the files. He was here. He was on Faloiv.”
She looks as if she’s taken completely by surprise, her eyes squinting.
“Your grandfather . . . ,” she says but can’t seem to finish; her eyes lose their steel and turn soft and shiny. “I miss him. But, Afua, there are things that we must do.”
I shake my head, waving my hands. I don’t want to hear any more. She sounds like my father: “There are things that we must do as scientists” if we want to survive. Obscure things that don’t tell me anything about what happened to my grandfather. Everything I’m hearing sounds as if we’re doing whatever we can to ruin our chances of survival.
“No!” I shout, staring at her accusingly. “You sound just like him! Things we must do to survive here? Like what? Like killing animals and eating their dead bodies? Like implanting vasana with dirixi teeth? Altering their brains so that they become killers? No wonder we’re so worried about war, we—”
But she’s rushing over to me from the hallway, the space between us closed in an instant. Her fingers grip my shoulders like talons, her eyes inches from mine.
“What did you say?” she snaps, all the softness gone from her eyes.
“Wh-what?”
She shakes me and I almost hear my brain rattle.
“What did you say?” she repeats. “About the vasana? What did you say?”
I shake her off, stumbling backward, fear creeping in to share space with my fury.
“The vasana!” I shout. “I saw Dr. Albatur with Vasana 11. The dirixi fangs. I saw the procedure. I know what you’re doing back there in the secret parts of the Zoo! Don’t act so—”
“Dr. Albatur?” she interrupts. “You saw the Head of the Council tampering with the brain of a vasana?”
I wonder briefly if she’s manipulating me: running an experiment on my strange, colorful brain; an experiment she’s recording with some hidden device.
“Yes,” I snarl, sizing her up for any discernible reaction. “I snuck into a restricted part of the Zoo. I saw Dr. Albatur. I saw the vasana. I saw everything.”
At first I think she’s attacking me. She springs forward and I cringe, waiting for I don’t know what: for fists, for a tranq gun she hid somewhere in her lab coat. But instead she’s at the front entrance to the ’wam, standing there in the open door looking back at me with her eyes slanted into piercing slits.
“Hurry up,” she says, jerking her head at the commune outside.
“Wh-where are we going?” I’ve already taken a step toward her, but I pause, unsure. Is she taking me to the labs? To find my father and tell him what I’ve done? I feel the way the vasana must have felt; fear and anger erupting in my veins like a serum. If she tells me we’re going to the Zoo, I think, preparing my body for my blooming plan, then I will run. I’ll run and find a way out of the compound, find Rasimbukar. . . .
“To the Greenhouse,” she says, turning her back on me, forcing me to follow. “We need to find Dr. Espada.”
CHAPTER 24
The sun and my fear combine to wring the sweat out of my skin. The softness of my mother’s face has been replaced by stone, a blank wall that fends off every one of my questions as she marches us outside to the chariots.
“Why are we going to see Dr. Espada? What’s going on between you and Dr. Albatur?”
She ignores me, backing up the chariot and steering it toward the gates. Only then does she speak, the steel of her face giving way to a warm smile. I realize I was right about the second face she wears in N’Terra, and I shiver in the heat.
“Hello, Amelie.”
The guard at the gates steps out of the small white ’wam, her buzzgun slung across her chest. The pleasure at being greeted by name is a ripple that stirs her solemnity. She holds out her slate, my mother’s face already displayed on its screen.
“Dr. English,” she says, holding out her slate. My mother presses her thumb to the corner of the screen and hands it back, and Amelie makes a few selections before passing it across to me. When I press my thumb to the square alongside the image of my face, I expect the usual nod from the guard before she opens the gates. But this time she squints at the screen.
“Is there a problem?” my mother says.
“Well,” the guard says. “Sort of. Some kind of glitch. Miss English’s print registers as Dr. English. Her father.”
She turns the slate around so my mother can see, and there’s the same image of my father that had appeared on the wall outside Dr. Albatur’s hidden lab.
“That’s strange,” my mother says, as if it’s not strange at all. “I’ll mention it to Octavius. He has a meeting with Dr. Older this evening anyhow.”
“Oh . . . ,” the guard begins.
“Thank you, dear,” my mother says. I’ve never heard her call anyone dear in my life.
“You’re welcome,” the guard says. She opens her mouth as if to say more, but changes her mind. She opens the gate.
My mother guides the chariot through the opening and out onto the red road. We say nothing until we are a safe distance from the compound, then I turn my head to look at her.
“Mom?”
She glances at me, her eyebrows raised.
“I told you that you had your father’s hands,” she says.
“What does that mean?” I say. “Why do the scanners think I’m Dad?”
“Because I reimprinted your fingers,” she says.
“You what?”
“When I had you in my lab after you got lost in the jungle,” she says. “I knew it would be . . . useful.”
“What do you mean?”
She ignores me, unfolding her hood from the inside of her skinsuit and latching the mouth guard. She glances at me with a pointed look that tells me to do the same. When I do, she puts the chariot into high gear and we’re buzzing down the road, red dust flying.
“Why are we going to see Dr. Espada?” I shout over the whir of the chariot and the whine of the wind.
“Listen!” she shouts back.
My mind prickles instantly, a rippling in the center of my brain. The mental muscle I use to access the tunnel feels more solid this time. I locate it without much teeth grinding, and coax the tunnel into spiraling slowly open.