The Last Zoo

by Sam Gayton

  But then, when she was much older, Vivi accidentally fed one mantis the last page of a novel with the words THE END on. The phrase spread like a disease over the whole brood, until eventually they all unfolded into single sheets of creased and lifeless paper with THE END stamped all over them in large type. There are no origami mantis in the zoo now.

  ‘Moonbim’s a fierce one, but fragile still.’ Gowpen smiles at Pia. ‘Tell your angels to sing prayers for her, won’t you?’

  ‘I will.’ Just like that, Pia’s sick feeling creeps back into her belly. Gowpen just shared his worries with her, like a good friend should. And still she hid behind lies.

  ‘How’s life without your nanabug, P?’ asks Wilma. ‘Threedeep’s been gone days.’

  ‘Weeks,’ Pia corrects.

  Wilma whistles low. ‘That must be some butt you have.’

  Pia grins. Wilma’s jokes would make her scowl if anyone else ever said them.

  ‘Think you could sit on my drone too?’ Wilma adds in a mock-whisper.

  We have talked about this sort of inappropriate joking, chats Wilma’s nanabug, Fourcandles, on her screen. Normally nanabugs leave the kids alone at meal times. Fourcandles has probably turned up to punish Wilma for something or other. The two are always squabbling.

  Gowpen is the only one in the group without a nanabug. Every kid working in the zoo without parents has to be monitored. Ishan’s parents are back in the sprawl, Pia’s parents can’t look after her any more, and Wilma’s parents are busy with their diplomat duties back on the mainland. Wilma doesn’t go back there much because she argues with them even more than with Fourcandles.

  Zugzwang, the latest member of the Rekkers, has a nanabug too, despite his dad being here on the zoo. Pia guesses it’s because Siskin is too busy.

  Wilma fixes her nanabug with a withering stare. ‘If you would just leave me alone, like all the other bugs, maybe you wouldn’t be offended by my sense of humour.’

  She motions to the canteen entrance, where Ishan’s drone Sixtip and Zugzwang’s drone Sevenheaven are out in the corridor on standby.

  Fourcandles stays put. We have also discussed answering back, Wilma.

  ‘Aaaaaaaanyway.’ Wilma gives a huge eye-roll. ‘That’s weird what you say about your unicorn, Gow. The mirrorangutangs have been nervous today too.’

  Just like Gowpen and Zugzwang, Wilma is a Seamer. The voilà she brings out are big rusty-coloured creatures that can only exist in reflections. The mirrorangutangs live on an ark of mirrors that needs to be kept lit twenty-four hours a day and has its own back-up generator, because if the engine ever blows and the lights go out, the mirrorangutangs will cease to exist.

  Siskin was very excited when the first of them had appeared, because beings that live in light might have been able to be trained to carry instantaneous messages, like satellites and optical cables once had. But the mirrorangutangs have turned out to be yet another disappointment to him. They are too much like Wilma. You can never rely upon them doing what you want.

  Ishan frowns. ‘The mirrorangutangs are being funny too?’

  ‘Mum said at breakfast that one of the Fabergé chickens, laid an egg that was completely plain,’ says Gowpen.

  ‘Yeah.’ Wilma grins a ghost-story smile. ‘And when she threw it in the bin, the shell cracked and a scream came out.’

  ‘True story,’ Gowpen confirms. ‘It made Mum cry.’

  Wilma snorts. ‘Fay’s always crying.’

  ‘She’s been pretty emotional today,’ Gowpen says. ‘Even for her.’

  Pia is stabbing her salad with her fork, feeling sorry for herself. Suddenly she pushes away her plate. This is interesting. Other voilà are acting strangely? What if there’s a link to the angels’ disappearance?

  ‘You heard of any other voilà being weird?’ she asks. Everyone shrugs or shakes their heads. ‘What about you, Zugz?’

  Zugzwang sits a few seats away from them, watching some video on his goggles, shovelling his lunch into his mouth.

  For someone with such a cool name, Zugzwang is a real loser. Pia doesn’t really know why he is even in their group. Maybe it’s because he is Siskin’s son, and they feel scared to chuck him out. Or maybe it’s because he is Siskin’s son, and they feel sorry for him.

  Zugzwang has never brought anything out of the Seam. Wilma blames his addiction to his goggles. Tech has junked his imagination, according to her. Apparently Siskin once instructed Zugzwang’s nanabug to limit his eye-time, and Zugzwang just hacked the thing and overrode it.

  ‘Oi, Zuggers!’ yells Wilma, and they all try to get his attention.

  ‘Zuggy!’

  ‘Zugz bunny!’

  ‘Zug, zug, give us a shrug!’

  ‘Let’s hang with the zwang!’

  Zugzwang’s goggles glow with kaleidoscopic light. A faint tinny noise comes from his headphones.

  ‘Gogglehead,’ says Gowpen sadly.

  ‘Hey!’ Ishan points to the tan line around his eyes. ‘Some of us find that term offensive.’

  Wilma makes a face. ‘The only thing that’s offensive here is Zugzwang eating with his mouth open.’

  They all laugh, and for a while it becomes a game to try and chuck one of Gowpen’s soy peas so it lands on Zugzwang’s fork at just the right moment for him to eat it.

  This game carries a risk of choking, chats Fourcandles.

  ‘That’s why it’s fun,’ Wilma explains, as if talking to a one-year-old.

  ‘Uh-oh.’ Pia’s pea flies way over Zugzwang’s head.

  Wilma’s nostrils flare. ‘It could only be you, Catastro-P.’

  ‘Heads down!’ hisses Ishan. The soy pea has landed on Urette’s table. The wrinkled-up zookeeper sits on her own like always, draining orange juice out of plastic cartons.

  Pia’s pea rolls over the table like a little green marble. They all watch out the corners of their eyes as it scoots past Urette.

  Old spider lady doesn’t even move her head. Just raises up her hand and WHACK!

  ‘She mushed it flat,’ whispers Gowpen.

  Wilma grins madly. ‘That is so creepy.’

  ‘She is most definitely crazy,’ says Ishan.

  ‘Have you seen how she drinks her juice? Doesn’t use a straw. Just squeezes it out, like she’s sucking out the guts of a fly.’

  You should apologise, is the advice from Fourcandles, which they all ignore.

  ‘Time to go.’ Pia gathers her plate and takes it across to the kitchens.

  ‘They’re frightened.’

  Urette’s voice cuts through the hubbub of the canteen. The tables all go quiet. The sound of cutlery hitting plates dies away. Pia feels the prickly heat on her skin that means people are looking at her. She turns. Urette has stood up from her lonely table.

  ‘They’re frightened,’ she repeats, speaking to the room but looking only at Pia.

  Pia can’t think of anything to say back except: ‘Who are?’

  ‘The gargantulas,’ says Urette. ‘You wanted to know if any other animals were acting differently.’

  Pia flicks her eyes to Ishan, Wilma and Gowpen. They look away, red-faced. A few seconds ago this was funny, but now they know Urette was listening to them. She heard every mean word they said about her.

  ‘Stare into any one of a gargantula’s sixteen eyes, and they’ll show you exactly what it’s thinking.’ Urette gathers up her plate and scuttles towards Pia. ‘And my spiders are scared.’

  Urette comes up so close Pia can see her white scalp through grey hair that is thin as silk wisps. Her chin has tiny hairs sprouting out of it, black and spiny. Pia has the sudden image of Urette pulling the legs off a fly and gluing them there. She can’t stop staring at them; she half expects one to twitch.

  ‘I don’t know what would scare a gargantula,’ Urette says. ‘I do know one thing, thoug
h.’

  Pia swallows. ‘What?’

  ‘We should be scared of it too.’

  She turns and scuttles off. For a moment, her words hang in the silence of the canteen like cobwebs, before the chatter rises again to brush them away.

  The Rekkers come over a bit sheepishly.

  ‘Thanks for the backup,’ Pia huffs.

  ‘Sorry, P, but she is freaky.’ Wilma shudders.

  Ishan nods. ‘Mind-frayed, for sure. You know she was one of the original research team? Hey, Pia, you OK?’

  Pia shrugs, hugging her arms. Goosebumps are suddenly crawling up the back of her neck like a hundred little legs tiptoeing across her skin. Urette’s words are stuck in her mind. Up until now, she’d thought the angels were missing either through mischief, or through some fault of her own.

  But what if it’s something else? What if there’s danger coming? Something that makes even gargantulas afraid. That makes even angels flee.

  12

  SUSPICION KLAXON

  They scrape their plates and stack their trays and wait in the zephyr queue. Pia keeps a little ahead of the others. Urette’s creepy monologue has cranked up her anxiety levels a few notches, and she needs to get back to the celestial ark and think. Half the day is gone already, and she hasn’t even started working out the details of her angel summoning.

  ‘Get thinking about collective nouns, Rekkers,’ Gowpen says behind her.

  It’s something they do. When a new voilà joins the zoo, they come up with a collective noun for it. A choir of singing hippos, a bonfire of phoenixes, a pong of smellephants (Pia’s personal favourite).

  ‘A sparkle of unicorns,’ says Wilma. ‘A glitter. A majesty.’

  ‘A multicorn?’ Ishan is useless at this game.

  ‘A multicorn of unicorns?’ Wilma laughs nastily.

  Ishan looks wounded. ‘You know, for someone with ambassador parents, sometimes you could be a little more diplomatic.’

  ‘I like a glitter,’ says Gowpen. He looks guiltily at Ishan. ‘Although, a multicorn is kind of cool too...’

  ‘What about humans?’ says Zugzwang suddenly, his goggles kaleidoscoping as he shuffles forwards in the queue.

  Like whenever Zugzwang speaks, it takes everyone a moment to work out whether he’s just mumbling something at his goggles, or actually taking part in the conversation.

  ‘A humans of unicorns?’ Wilma looks at Ishan. ‘I’m searching for a way to be diplomatic about this, but I... just... can’t.’

  ‘Humans are a species living in the zoo,’ Zugzwang clarifies. ‘We don’t have a collective noun for us.’

  Wilma dongs her head against an imaginary wall. ‘We’re the Rekkers, stupid.’

  Ishan grins. ‘No, it’s a good point. Zugz doesn’t mean me and you guys, do you?’

  Zugzwang nods in a slow, zombified way. ‘Yeah. I mean humans.’

  Pia shrugs. ‘A crowd?’

  Ishan made a pfff sound. ‘A plague of humans.’

  ‘A plague?’

  He nods. ‘Or what about an infestation? Hmm. An invasion? That’s good, but invasions have a point. They aren’t thoughtless, endless, stupid, the way humans are.’

  Pia groans.

  ‘My favourite,’ says Zugzwang, ‘is problem.’

  Ishan claps his hands. Out of all of the Rekkers, he probably understands Zugzwang best. The two of them are fellow goggleheads, after all. ‘That’s perfect! Take us away, and you solve the polluting, the extinctions, the mass depletion... Humans are the greatest problem on the planet!’

  ‘Then what’s the solution?’ Pia asks him.

  Ishan shrugs. ‘I’ll leave that for the angels to figure out.’

  They get to the front of the zephyr queue. Pia takes a moment, like she does every day, to feel sorry for poor Ozima, the dining ship’s emerald-coloured genie. Swamped with wishes three times a day, right after breakfast, lunch and dinner.

  ‘Ozima doesn’t mind all the wishes,’ the genie explains to them when Wilma remarks on how bored he must be. ‘It’s just the spinach in everyone’s teeth when they’re said.’

  ‘Then we promise never ever to eat spinach,’ Wilma answers solemnly. ‘For your sake.’

  Gowpen zephyrs first, back to the arrivals ark to check on Moonbim. Pia steps up after him and starts to speed through her wish-script.

  ‘Hold it!’

  Pia stumbles to a halt. Around her, everyone bristles. Interrupting someone mid-script is just not done at the zoo. It could be sort of dangerous: your words might get tangled up in the wish. At the very least, it’s rude.

  But then, Weevis has never cared much about that.

  ‘Feeling better?’ he says to Pia.

  She glares at him: greasy, slouchy Weevis with his shiny forehead and the little dotted blackheads in the creases of his nose and chin and brows. He meets her stare and hands her a folded scrip of paper. It’s yellow, the colour that ’genieers use for their communications.

  ‘Your drone is fixed.’

  No hello, or sorry for jamming up the queue, or anything. Pia ratchets up her glare to its fullest level.

  ‘How do you know that?’ she asks. ‘Are you reading my messages?’

  Not only that: why is Weevis bringing this here? Why doesn’t he just get his little grey genie to zephyr it? An alarm trips in Pia. A klaxon wails out in her head, loud and terrifying.

  He suspects.

  Weevis is on to her!

  Of course he is, Bagrin whispers in her ear. You’re a very, very bad liar, Pia.

  Weevis is still holding out the yellow slip of paper. Pia can’t even get herself to take it off him. She’s frozen with dread. Her secret is about to bust out into the open, in front of everyone.

  She glances desperately at the Rekkers, and though none of them can know what’s going on, they all recognise that look and what it means: it means Big trouble, send backup.

  And this time, they all come rushing to Pia’s rescue.

  ‘Hey!’ Wilma steps up. ‘Whatever your name is. Blom?’

  ‘That’s his genie,’ Ishan corrects.

  ‘He’s got a genie?’ Wilma looks confused. ‘I thought he was admin staff. Whatever. We all hate him though, right?’

  ‘A little,’ says Ishan, with an apologetic look at Weevis.

  ‘A lot,’ mutters Zugzwang darkly. He’s blacked out the lenses on his goggles and put angry red targets on them, like pupils.

  ‘Hey!’ someone yells behind them. ‘There’s a queue you’re holding up!’

  Weevis ignores whoever that was. ‘I’m not admin staff,’ he says snootily at Wilma. ‘What I do for the boss is none of your concern. As in, it’s a little above your security clearance.’

  Wilma clicks her fingers, as if remembering something. ‘Oh yeah,’ she says. ‘That’s why we hate him. Because he thinks he’s Siskin’s new adopted son, or something. As in, he even tries talking like him.’

  ‘HEY!’ yells the voice behind them, considerably louder and angrier. ‘LET’S MOVE IT ALONG!’

  ‘Aaand now the security meatheads hate you too,’ Wilma says, arms folded. ‘You got a procedure for that, Mr Secretary?’

  Zugzwang grins. He’s clearly enjoying this. Weevis is sort of his nemesis. When the secretary (or whatever his actual job description is) first came to the zoo, random bluebottles kept flying into Siskin’s office and trying to arrest him. According to Ishan, Zugzwang was hacking the security drones and deleting Weevis’s profile, so they identified him as an intruder. Which was kind of hilarious, and also kind of brutal.

  He got away with it too. Zugzwang covered his tracks like a professional hacker. Which didn’t surprise Pia – the kid was a genius at tech.

  Zugzwang could resurrect the internet though, and it still wouldn’t be enough to impress his dad. Siskin is indiffe
rent when it comes to technology. A little indifferent when it comes to his son too.

  Pia’s thoughts snap back to now as Weevis flings the paper slip at her. ‘I know you’re up to something,’ he says. ‘I’ll find out what.’

  Then he turns and leaves, and the Rekkers all shoot laser-beam stares into his back, and the zephyring can start up again.

  ‘Oooh,’ says Wilma. ‘I am so moving him up a few places on our enemy list.’

  Pia’s calmer as she goes through her wish-script. Weevis obviously doesn’t know about the angels – otherwise actual alarms would be ringing, not just those in Pia’s head.

  She’s OK. For now. But she’s running out of time. And with Threedeep operational again, summoning the angels just became that much harder.

  13

  ʕᵔᴥᵔʔ

  Pia puts on her breather and zephyrs back to Ark One. She meets the same rude bluebottle at the door. Or maybe it’s a different bluebottle with the same rudeness settings. The drone scans the code on her letter and escorts her to the ’genieer who has fixed Threedeep.

  The ’genieer is a tall lady called Wanda who always wears jeans, old cowboy boots and floral shirts. Every time Pia sees her, Wanda has got her genie to give her a new hairstyle. Today, it is all curled and shiny.

  ‘Hey, gal.’ Wanda waves Pia inside.

  Wanda’s wishing lab looks a lot like the Sunset Pagoda, with sandy floors and shadow-quilted walls. It has a desk and workbench too. On the desk is a pair of goggles and a stack of files and a little navy-blue genie sitting in a glass ashtray like it’s a jacuzzi tub, her beard gently smoking upwards in the air.

  ‘That there is Boppity-Boo,’ Wanda says as the genie vanishes inside her teapot lamp. ‘Don’t mind her. She’s just embarrassed because we couldn’t mend your nanabug.’

  ‘Couldn’t?’ Pia checks the note again. ‘But—’

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry. Threedeep’s fixed, all right.’ Wanda looks at the workbench. Threedeep is powered down: a boxy, single-rotored drone with a message screen. ‘It wasn’t me and Boo who did the fixing, though. We were still weeks away from a finished wish-script. Then we woke up this morning, and she was good as new. It’s a miracle.’