“Something bad’s going to happen,” said another.
“Please, people,” Astrid called to them, but no one was listening. She had never felt quite so impotent in her job. “For your own safety, please get into your gliders.”
But only the old reporter heeded her, and even he seemed more motivated by fatigue than any desire to comply. He slouched back to his glider, which was, as it happened, surrounded by other gliders and immovable. He got inside, broke open an orb of Flōt, and spired away.
ASTRID THOUGHT she should go back to the pandaglider and check on Atwell and Mr. Dawkins. Because of the major incident tumult, the Paladin was now well out of the center of things, located on the northern tip of the gathering in a comparatively dark, quiet grove where the Broad Walk seemed—it was an illusion of landscape architecture—to narrow to an arbor. As she walked toward the Paladin, she came upon a rather overweight fotolivographer with a smartly dressed TV autoreporter. They stood there, the reporter banging an apparently broken torch on his knee. He was being illuminated by the blazing light attached to the videocamera. There was an illicit air about them, somehow, and Astrid felt wary.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“Oh, how you can!” said the autoreporter. “We’re looking, as it were, for the—front? The main entrance? To the zoo? We understand there’s a sign there.” He stood up more erectly. “We need an establishing shot?”
Reluctantly, Astrid explained how to get there.
“You see, we also need—” the autoreporter said. He waved toward the fotolive camera. “That’s not on, not at all.”
“You really shouldn’t risk it,” Astrid said. “We’ve not at all got the area secured.”
“Of course,” said the reporter, scratching his chin, but the two then just silently walked off toward the entrance, as if Astrid simply had ceased to exist.
All at once, again, there was a great human scream from the zoo. “DRYS! STAN! DRYS! STAN!”
“Jesus! Listen! Listen!” the reporter said.
A new flurry of noises seemed to reply, and the call became only one of hundreds of feral clamors in the cooling air.
“Fucking hell,” said the reporter.
More and more squeals, chitterings, and yowls came. To most of the emergency workers, zoo staff, and journalists gathered, it sounded as if all twelve thousand of the zoo’s residents had been freed and now beset one another. In fact, fewer than fifty were out, and most were simply petrified. But that was about forty more than the metropolis could manage with all its powers assembled in the best case.
As the TV news crew walked away from Astrid, dozens of so-called blue-freqs—the main class of message on the all-London emergency tactical channel—began crackling softly in her ears. Their pale, zinc-tinted hue filled her eyes. The night had gone all metal: Bronze 7, Bronze 7, this is Silver 2, orders from Gold. New orders from Gold, subdue animals by any reasonable means. Orders from Gold to Red Watch. Repeat, orders from Gold: Red Watch should neutralize intruders. Astrid saw that she seemed to have been passed over, operationally. Events were hurtling forward, and she had become an onlooker.
But she felt, for reasons she couldn’t work out for herself, that she could not let it stay that way. The man inside the zoo had brought her here tonight, and now she needed to get stuck in. She didn’t feel great clarity about this, but rather an inexplicable urge to bring something, if only her self, and to “take a place at the table,” so to speak. And there was the matter of Dawkins’s sister, Una, too. There was a practical problem. Una needed help. But why on earth had a man calling “Drystan” snuck into the zoo? Who was he, and why this dawning feeling of a need to see him. Why her? Was it because she was, very simply, out of her mind with withdrawal insanity? Or was there something else—something that couldn’t so easily be dispatched? There was a pragmatic problem with him, too, she thought. The Red Watch would kill him, and she felt she must find him and, somehow, try to protect him before they swooped in. The man’s very vulnerability felt vast to her, like a whole new country, a world of very hard-won innocence, and she, if for no other reason than the kindness of strangers, had been called to it.
relieved of duty
AS ASTRID REFLECTED ON THESE THINGS, THE corners of her eyes began flashing purple—a regular, nonsecure audio Opticall. It was Omotoso again.
“Dear Astrid—I have some . . . strange news. But where are you?”
“Probably less than a hundred meters from you, sir.”