“I don’t think so. My dad was hyperventilating about it when I was in the ’wam. I doubt they’ve tracked it down.”
Rondo holds my gaze a second longer and then bends his head to the slate, his fingers making quick, precise selections.
“What are you doing now?” I peer over his shoulder. All I see are lines of code in two columns, one longer than the other.
“Monitoring their communication patterns,” he says without looking up. “I don’t want to use the wrong kind of language. They’d notice something was weird.”
He straightens his neck and taps the enter key.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Alma whispers.
“I did,” he says, pointing at the lines of code as if it’s obvious.
“But you didn’t say anything,” I say.
“I don’t need to say it.” He squints at the screen. “I took a voice pattern sequence and applied it to text. It will sound like the last person who said something on the comms. Watch.”
I can’t kiss him, so I reach down and squeeze his shoulder.
“They received the communication,” Rondo whispers, then kisses my hand.
“But they’re not moving,” Alma says, chewing on her thumbnail.
They’re not. The two guards listen to their comms, exchange a few words with each other—one shrugging—then go back to leaning. They show no sign of leaving their posts.
“What? What’s the problem?” Rondo mutters. He turns back to his slate, peering at the lines of code. “I don’t get it. My syntax is correct. I used the right sequence. Damn.”
Alma leans over his shoulder, her eyes darting left to right. Her hand leaps out to point.
“You forgot to translate your compiler. All they heard was static,” she says.
I have no idea what it means, but I snicker as Rondo’s eyes nearly jump out of his head. He holds the slate close to his face, lips moving wordlessly as he calculates, or reads, or both.
“You’re right,” he says. “How did you—?”
She shrugs. “Ever since you started digging into private files and stuff, I started learning some hacking on my own. It’s not that hard,” she says.
“Okay, okay, try again,” I whisper. He does, tapping a few lines of code, and then hitting enter once more.
We all swivel our heads around the trunk of the ogwe to look at the guards again. At first I’m afraid it didn’t work, and I’m already thinking of a backup plan when the guards crane their necks again, fingers to their ears, listening. Rondo looks at the screen of his tablet.
“It’s working,” he whispers. “It’s working!”
“Did you tell them to report to the front of the dome?” Alma says.
“Yes. Even said immediately.”
The guards speak a few words and then jog away. I move to the other side of the tree to watch their path toward the front of the dome, terrified that they’ll misunderstand the instructions and double back to where we hunker behind the ogwe.
“This is our chance,” Alma says, grabbing my arm. I’m up and running before it’s fully registered in my mind that we’re actually doing it. I think it’s my feet that are thudding on the ground as we dash toward the door, but it’s my heart, clamorous in my ears. It’s so loud I almost don’t hear the voices coming down the path.
“They’re coming back!” Alma hisses, and moves as if to sprint back to the trees. But Rondo throws an arm out, stopping her.
“Go with Octavia!” he whispers fiercely. “I’ve got this.”
And then he’s gone, running to the trees to head them off before they reach the end of the path. I place my shaking hand on the scan lock, praying that whatever my mother did to my prints hasn’t worn off or changed. The square surface illuminates blue as my flesh comes in contact with its cool surface; in the long pause that follows I think my heart might explode, or my arm will be torn off by Alma’s robotic grip. But the scanner turns green, my father’s stern face appearing on the screen above it.
“Welcome, Dr. English,” the automated voice says.
We throw ourselves through the door and against the wall inside. As the door slides closed, Rondo’s voice drifts to my ears: “I was just looking for my slate. It must have fallen out of my bag when I left my internship earlier.”
“So you came to look for it at night? I think we need to give Dr. Okadigbo a call. That’s your father, isn’t it?”
The door closes with a gentle thud and we remain pressed against the wall for a moment longer, frozen. I expect the door to open again immediately, the guards onto us. But it doesn’t. The long white hallway is empty and silent aside from our breath, the seemingly endless line of empty windows continuing down into glowing oblivion.
“Ready?” Alma says, her voice sounding as pale as the walls.
No, I think.
CHAPTER 27
“Should you . . . you know, start listening?” Alma whispers. We’re alone in the hallway, or so it seems, but I understand her need to whisper.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I don’t want to get too tired or be overwhelmed. Sometimes there’s a lot of noise, and I want to be able to hear him.”
I wait until we near the end of the hallway, almost to the sorting room, and then I decide to open the tunnel. We’ll waste precious time if we open every single door we pass.
I stop walking and concentrate, Alma by my side with her head swiveling and her eyes wide. All these years we wanted to have free rein in the Zoo. Well, here we are.
Just a little, I tell myself. I don’t want everything to come flying into my consciousness, as it sometimes does. I’m still figuring out how this works, but I do notice—a brief feeling of satisfaction—that my grip on the tunnel is stronger, more adroit.
My mind widens, and the buzz rises in my inner ear. There are animals here: I can feel them on either side of me. Some of them are tranquilized: their energy alive and thrumming but softened and made clumsy. They can still hear one another, I realize: the faintly glowing chain that connects my mind to them connects them to one another.
“Anything?” Alma whispers.
“Nothing,” I say, taking more steps down the hall. Vasana on my left. Kunike on my right. Igua. Marov. I can feel them all, sense their uncertainty. Some of them—untranquilized—sense me and prickle on the horizon of my consciousness, trying to figure out what I am, sizing me up in their minds. Some of them close their minds to me.
“I don’t think he’s going to be anywhere in this hallway,” I say after we’ve walked some distance down the corridor. Alma looks nervously over her shoulder. “I mean, they hid Vasana 11 deeper in the maze, in a secret lab. This is one of the Faloii. They’re not going to have him somewhere easily found.”
We pause, almost at the end of the hallway, near the sorting room where we spent our first week of the internship just ahead. Right? Left? To our right is the Atrium, with only a few doors in between, and to our left is the longer hallway that will lead to yet more hallways and the observation rooms.
“Left,” she whispers. “It’s the most logical.”
I almost smile. Never have I heard her more displeased about something being logical.