“Shite dogs,” he said, shaking his head. “Should be exterminated.”
The Watchman walked away, apparently not interested in further abusing any creature for the moment. Such a painless departure was unusual and lucky, since Cuthbert was surely on the Red Watch List. At best, the Watch List meant arrest and internment; at worst, an Indigent on the list could be neuralpiked to death if she or he met the wrong Watchman. Officially, Indigents not databased or indentured had no restrictions on movement in Britain, but unofficially, the Watch sometimes beat them away, on sight, from places where the upper-middle classes and the new aristocracy congregated, and this almost always involved checking their compliance status. Whatever negligible power and dignity an Indigent ever held, the Watch List instantly crushed them.
HAVING ESCAPED THE WATCH once again, Cuthbert didn’t feel relief so much as curiosity. Why was England on alert this time? Was the Army of Anonymous on the attack again? He thought, then, that he heard distant sirens, but he wasn’t sure.
On the far side of the jackal enclosure, a few zoo workers in loose, pine-colored spawn-ball shirts had shown up. They were beginning to work their way through the series of chain-link fence walkways and double gates that led into the jackal enclosure. One of the keepers, a woman with a short brown ponytail, was staring at Cuthbert. He almost felt she was appraising him as a fellow animal, both absentmindedly and indulgently, like a bosonicabus passenger gazing at the face of another passenger in a passing bosonicabus, then glancing away.
Cuthbert decided that he should leave the zoo immediately. He felt certain that he was about to be found out. That last Watchman may have already put in a call. He needed to come back, but only in the deep of night. Or maybe he could get an Opticall to Dr. Bajwa, tell him he was ready for the Whittington, ready to detox.
Cuthbert strolled down footpaths. They sagged and veered with such wide egressions, and offered so few forks, they seemed designed for people easily bewildered. He felt a little more relaxed, simply moving, but this calm would wear out fast, he knew. Oh, god, he could use another good pull off that Flōt orb in the grotto.
He came to a capsule-shaped white sign that hung on black metal tubing. In black lettering, it read: GREEN LINE TRAIL: FOLLOW THE GREEN LINE—YOU WON’T GET LOST AND YOU WON’T MISS A THING! There was an arrow pointing to the ground and a set of paws, but Cuthbert saw no green line. He suspected somehow being tricked by the zoo. The idea that the zoo had merely placed a reference sign poorly did not occur to him. He clipped along but kept pausing at footpath intersections to read cryptic signposts. A taloned claw denoting Birds of Prey; a single long-necked antelope for the Arabian Oryx’s lonely zone; a crescent and stars for Moonlight World. Another sign had the zoological society’s initials in animal-skin prints: ZSL—for Zoological Society of London—in zebra, snake-scales, and tiger stripes, above its long-used phrase “Living Conservation.” Cuthbert did not grasp the meaning of conservation, really, but he took it as an article of faith. It had to be somewhere, in some tiny hidden cage or test tube in a back office. Unlike the rest of Britain after the Second Restoration, the fifteen-hectare scalene triangle that housed the London Zoo hadn’t slid back to an almost pre-Victorian ethos where the poor, the animals, and the non-English were to be worked, caged, and subtly subjugated. After the Property Revolts, conservation outside the zoo had ended in all but signage and laboratories, and if not for a dedicated and well-connected core of ZSL scientists, the zoo would have shuttered in the 2020s.
CUTHBERT FINALLY REACHED one of the two main exits and headed out like a satisfied punter. As he pushed the timeworn, clicking, cage-like turnstile around, a sudden lump of terror seemed to expand in his throat in that bad spot he could never see with his eyes—and just as quickly disappear.
He was out—and free to return, as long as the Watch didn’t nick him. He shuffled away from the gate now, and stood there, amazed at what he had done. He savored the feeling, glancing around himself. He hadn’t released any animals yet, but he’d done something rather nonpareil, and all his slipshod planning and grotto-making and crawling and Flōt-guzzling had somehow led to it.
to be worse than animals