I open my eyes and find the oscree in the dust at my feet. If I were only looking with my eyes, I would think they were ignoring me. They hop about, picking at things my eyes can’t see, ruffling their feathers. But in my mind, they’re looking at me. There are no words, only their fragile trust. We are here, they seem to say. Now what do you want?
One lands on my shoe, unafraid. I almost laugh out loud, in awe. They are so beautiful up close, free from cages and fear. They respond to my amusement: they return the yellow feelings of warmth down the tunnel, which my mind absorbs gratefully, like a stomach digesting nutrients. It feels the way the rhohedron nectar had felt as my body absorbed it in the jungle.
“There’s more, baby,” my mother says, reaching out to touch my cheek, her smile small. “More than you know yet. So much more.”
At the sound of her voice, the oscree take flight and flap off into a nearby ogwe. They apologize as they go, tiny shapes of green coming through the tunnel whose meaning I understand perfectly, even if they lack a common language.
I allow the tunnel to close, and a moment later I’m faced with only my mother and Dr. Espada in the flesh.
“If you can’t hear the animals,” I say, “what can you hear?”
“Just each other,” Dr. Espada says. “And the Faloii. The Faloii, of course, can hear us, each other, the animals, everything.”
“Now take off your shoes,” Dr. Espada says.
“What?” I don’t move. The idea of taking off my shoes outside makes me nervous. I’m rarely without my shoes even in the compounds: Who knows what could be in the grass out here? I think of the morgantan and its nasty bite on the finder’s leg in the jungle, the bleeding that had drawn the dirixi out of the trees.
Dr. Espada starts to repeat himself, but a noise draws my attention away. At first I think it’s the wind, whipping up the dust and moving it toward us in red billows. But the whining isn’t the wind: it’s three chariots, speeding down the path toward the Greenhouse. One of them is a longer chariot, the Worm that used to carry me to school in the morning. I cover my nose and mouth to protect my lungs from the sweeping dirt, squinting my eyes to keep out the grit.
The chariots stop just yards away from us, their drivers leaping off the standing platforms and striding toward us and the Greenhouse. Their pace seems urgent and intent.
But they don’t pass us for the Greenhouse entrance; they stop in front of us and one says, “Dr. Espada, Dr. English, we need you to come with us.”
“Come with you?” Dr. Espada says. “Has something happened?”
“Come with us, doctors,” the same driver says, his mouth a rigid line across his chin. I’ve never seen him around the compounds and I don’t like his face. A square jaw with reddish hairs sprouting from it. He seems too young to be speaking with any authority, yet here he is. “You’ll be briefed when you arrive at the Council.”
“The Council?” my mother says, stepping forward. “I’m on the Council and I haven’t heard anything about this. What’s going on?”
“You’ll need to come with us, Mrs. English,” the shortest of the three says, and my mother smirks.
“Mrs. English?” she replies in a voice that very clearly says she doesn’t need to do anything. “You will address me as Dr. English. Now tell me who has asked for Dr. Espada and myself.” She says “asked for” in a peculiar way, as if she knows whoever has sent these three young men in gray uniforms had not been asking.
The one whose face I don’t like moves his hand. Not any defensive movement or a gesture that says anything specific. But in its tiny motion, up toward his hip before settling again by his side, I become aware of the tranq gun in a holster there on his white belt.
“Mom . . . ,” I say quietly, sending her a flare in my mind.
“Come, Tomás,” my mother says, stepping forward, triggering a look of surprise on the first driver’s features. “Someone at the Council wants to see us, it seems. I can’t imagine what for.” She drawls this last part in a voice slanted with sarcasm, and the driver tightens his jaw.
Dr. Espada follows my mother over to the Worm, where the third driver steps forward as if to put his hands on them. The square-jawed man waves his hand and the driver steps back again. My mother boards the Worm calmly, expressionless. Dr. Espada climbs on behind her, his face a picture of annoyance. The man with the square jaw turns back to me after watching them take their seats.
“Miss English, your father has asked me to inform you that he’ll be waiting for you at home when you return to the compound.”
For a moment I think he’s going to grab me, force me onto the Worm with my mother, and I tense my body in preparation. I’m not sure if I’ll run or if I’ll fight if he touches me. Or maybe neither: maybe I’ll just let him push and shove me over to the long chariot. But he turns his back on me.
The third driver boards the Worm and powers on its battery. The whine of it fills the air as I stand there in the red dust that has begun to swirl, watching my mother being carted off to the Council under ominous circumstances. My nails dig into my palms, balled in helpless rage. And then I sense the prickling in my mind: my mother is waiting there in the tunnel before it’s even fully open.
Your empathy is your greatest asset. My mother’s words come through to me as a firm shape like a stone. Ambystoma maculatum.
I almost yell to her, to ask her to explain, to tell her I don’t understand. But I don’t. The three chariots turn slowly away from the Greenhouse and leave me standing there in their churning dust, reaching out in my mind for my mother. But she’s either too far away or she’s closed herself off. Only when the machine bearing my mother is out of sight do I allow the tunnel to relax.
As it’s spiraling shut, slowly and resolutely, something causes me to clench the muscle in my mind, gripping it tightly to hold the tunnel open a moment longer. I hear something—not hear, but feel: an abrupt pulse of energy that appears on the horizon of my mind like a sudden burst of starlight. I can’t make out what it is, not quite. I’m starting to develop a sense of near and far in the tunnel: the hazy buzzing of all Faloiv, the constant pleasant thrum of the lives around me; the prickling of someone or something nearby that’s prodding my consciousness; and then this, the hazy illumination of something close enough to register in the tunnel but just far enough to remain obscure. I wonder if this is what carnivores register as for each other, predators hunting predators, and at first it makes me afraid. But the presence is changing, right now: the pulse of it grows in clarity, and a sense of familiarity makes its way into my mind, a shape of smells and feelings and echoes that forms a name.
“Rasimbukar,” I say out loud.
Nothing at first, just the increasing clarity, blurred edges of thoughts becoming close enough to read clearly.
I am here, she tells me.
Where?
In the trees.
I squint at the tree line a hundred yards away. Though I can see nothing, I feel her there, can almost imagine the dots on her forehead arranging and rearranging in a shifting frown.
They took my mother, I tell her.
Yes.
Are they going to hurt her?