The Last Zoo

by Sam Gayton

Accused?

  Yet?

  Siskin speaks up above the trugging of the boat’s engine. ‘And I’ve changed my mind. I would like to hear it.’

  Pia pulls her knees up to her chest and hugs them.

  ‘As in, your theory,’ he adds.

  ‘I know what you meant.’

  ‘Then please oblige me.’

  ‘I tried to tell you back in your office. You said it was irrelevant.’

  ‘I hope I’m mistaken. I hope I’m mistaken about a great deal of things about you, Pia.’

  He has never called her Pia before. Somehow, this frightens her.

  She breathes deep. ‘I haven’t got it all figured out, OK? I just blundered into all this by accident.’

  ‘That, at least, seems believable,’ says Siskin.

  ‘I think there’s a bad voilà. It’s a worm. But not like an earthworm. More like a serpent or a snake, probably. A predator animal. I know this because it attacked the Seamstress after she wove its pattern, and then it attacked the angels when they appeared to help her. It left... holes in them. And now I think it’s loose.’

  ‘And if your theory is true, Pia, why haven’t we seen this worm?’

  ‘We can’t see lots of voilà unless conditions are right, can we? Maybe you need numinous lamps to see it. Or something else.’

  ‘How convenient.’

  Pia bristles. She doesn’t like Siskin’s tone. ‘Maybe that’s what makes it a successful predator.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Siskin looks at the security guards. ‘And who is responsible for this worm? A Seamer? Perhaps you would like to suggest a suspect? Since most of the Seamers are your friends?’

  Pia shakes her head in frustration. Obviously it isn’t one of the Rekkers. Whoever is behind this is lurking somewhere out of sight, like a gargantula in its silk mist.

  ‘I don’t know whose voilà it is,’ she says quietly. ‘But I know they hate the zoo.’

  Siskin nods. For a long time he sits there, sliding across the bench as the boat see-saws over the waves.

  ‘It’s quite a theory,’ he says at last. ‘I still can’t figure out how it is too that you know about the Seamstress, when all the other dozens of Seamers, across decades, cannot say for sure whether she exists.’

  ‘Because she didn’t take my memories.’ Pia is trying her best not to get frustrated. ‘She unpicks them from everyone’s head like thread. Said she uses them to stop herself fraying. And it’s not good to carry around too much unreality in your head, either – she said that too.’

  ‘You mean like you are, presumably?’ Siskin asks.

  Oh Seamstress, Pia hadn’t thought of that. What are all these unreal memories doing to her mind? She remembers the story Urette told about the first research team. She thinks of Marie Curie, with her desk drawers full of radioactive test tubes.

  Siskin chews his tongue and makes a sour face, as if the words he is about to speak taste bad in his mouth. ‘Will you hear a second theory, Pia? Think of it as an alternative to yours. I haven’t decided which has more evidence to support it.’

  Pia swallows. ‘OK.’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t lose our angels – maybe you did something to them.’

  ‘What? Ow!’ Pia has stood up from her seat and hit her head on the passenger-area roof. The two guards leap up with her. Siskin waves them back down.

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ she shouts.

  ‘Is it? An accident-prone young zookeeper makes a mistake and tries to cover it up? Sounds plausible to me.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t do that! I didn’t!’ She hits her knees with her fists. ‘I’m telling the truth!’

  Siskin’s voice is chilly. ‘Apart from all yesterday, when you were lying?’

  Pia has no answer to that – again. She looks past him at the churning sea, tears blurring her sight. The idea that she would harm any of her celestials – even Bagrin, that impish little twerp – makes her sick to her stomach.

  ‘Do you really think I’d hurt my angels? My mum’s angels?’ She is unable to stop her voice trembling.

  ‘You mean the zoo’s angels?’ corrects Siskin coldly. ‘No. Not on purpose. But I believe you’re very ill, Cornucopia. I believe you’re very sick.’

  ‘Sick?’ It comes out a frightened squeak.

  ‘This is why you were never made a Seamer. This talk about worms and glasshouses and memory boxes?’ He shakes his head.

  ‘I’m not mind-frayed,’ Pia insists. Which is exactly what someone who has mind-fray would say. Oh facepalm, this is really bad.

  ‘I’ve no doubt you believe what you saw, Pia. But I’d ask you to consider the possibility that the Seam did something to your head. Something that makes it hard for you to differentiate between reality and illusion. Maybe what you saw was your way of dealing with the guilt of something terrible. Something very similar happened after the prism breach, didn’t it?’

  Pia clenches her fists. So he’s been reviewing her past nanabug reports, has he? So what if she insisted that her parents had been away on a trip to the mainland? It was easier than thinking about where they’d really gone.

  ‘I was eight years old, Siskin. As if you could understand. You zephyred me a card with condolences written on it. I couldn’t even read a word that long.’

  Siskin looks away, towards the great grey ship they are approaching. They must have been heading towards it for the past few minutes, but Pia has been too preoccupied with talking to Siskin to notice.

  He doesn’t care about her theory at all, she realises. He’s just been distracting her. Now they are almost at the ark; the only ark that doesn’t hold voilà.

  ‘You’ll be safer in here, Pia. Just for now. We all will. Even if you aren’t mind-frayed. You break things. And I have too much to fix right now as it is.’

  Pia sits there numbly. OK, so she’d lost her angels, but the quarantine ark? Siskin has reacted so so so much harsher than she thought he would.

  She should refuse to leave her seat. Kick and bite and spit if security tries to move her.

  Yeah, sure. Great way to convince Siskin she isn’t crazy.

  ‘This is a mistake.’ She tries to keep her voice level and calm. ‘The zoo’s in danger, real danger.’

  ‘I agree.’ Siskin regards her thoughtfully. ‘But I’d ask you to consider, Pia, that the danger might be you.’

  And once again, Pia has no answer to that.

  23

  THAT KISS

  Wilma calls it the Quark. Whenever she says it, she juts out her elbows and flaps and squawks like some demented chicken: Quaaaark! Quaaaark!

  The joke being that Gowpen’s mum Fay came out of the Seam once years back and had to go into the quarantine ark for a while because she got a mild case of mind-fray and came out thinking she was a Fabergé chicken.

  Pia used to find it funny when Wilma did that. She doesn’t think she will again if she gets out.

  When, she tells herself fiercely. Not if, when.

  The Quark has one entrance: a grey auto-door on its deck. Two bluebottles buzz either side of it, waiting for her as she clambers off the ferry.

  Will you comply? they both ask, and the left one flicks up its jabber and crackles out a little blue jolt.

  Pia is too frightened and too tired to do anything else. She ought to turn back to Siskin and the guards, over by the ferry, and say something before she leaves them, but she can’t even manage any sarcasm.

  So she goes in, and the grey door closes behind her.

  That’s it.

  She’s in the Quark now.

  She’s a Quarker.

  Quaaaark! Wilma goes in her head, strutting and pecking and rolling her eyes all crazily. Quaaaark!

  Pia stands at one end of a long corridor. It branches off in many directions. The bluebottles buzz forward, one node swivelled around to
make sure she follows. Every so often, the leader crackles its taser, just to remind her who is boss.

  Pia ignores it. She tries to focus on how ridiculous this is. How funny a story it is going to make when she tells it to Ishan. After all the calamities she has caused with her lies, Siskin has put her in a cell for telling the truth. The thought makes her giggle.

  Then she remembers Hum, and she stops laughing. This will never be a funny story. Never. The fact she has even just smiled makes her furious at herself, and a little scared too. Maybe she is mind-frayed.

  ‘Has Siskin assigned someone to my genies’ beards?’ she asks suddenly. ‘Solomon and Bertoldo are both due a trim today.’

  The bluebottle doesn’t answer.

  The quarantine ark is decorated almost identically to Ark One. Same blank beige walls, same humming air con, same air of boredom. Pia almost expects to pass a secretary with an enormous blackhead on his nose sat goggling at a desk, but the beige-walled corridors are deserted. Every now and then, another bluebottle buzzes past.

  Pia has never really given much thought to all the mind-frayed people who have passed through here: all the surviving original research team, all the ’genieers whose wishes went wrong, all the Seamers whose minds were warped and torn by glitch. Now she is one of them. The thought makes her shudder.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ she asks.

  This time, the bluebottle does answer: You are the only patient currently in quarantine. All other patients have been transferred to mainland facilities.

  The corridor ends, and Pia steps through into a prisoner bay that hums noisily. Looking up, she sees four more bluebottles hovering by the ceiling lights.

  There are four cells either side of her, each with fuzzed glass fronts.

  Last on the left, chats the bluebottle.

  Pia ignores all the scary security around her and focuses on making this into not-such-a-big-and-terrifying deal in her head. This colossal mess is, in actual fact, just a minor spot of bother. She’ll be out of here in a day. Whatever hurt the angels and the Seamstress won’t stop. It will prey on more voilà, and Pia will be in here with bluebottles for her alibi.

  Once that happens, she tells herself as she steps inside her cell, Siskin will let me out.

  ‘Ugh.’ Her good mood evaporates at once. ‘Not you.’

  Hello! ╰(◕ᗜ◕)╯ It’s me: Threedeep.

  ‘You don’t have to introduce yourself to me every time we meet, you know.’

  Would you like a tour of your room?

  ‘Call it what it is, Threedeep. It’s not a room, it’s a cell.’

  Saying that, Pia’s cell actually looks pretty similar to her cabin. There’s a cot, a desk, a chair. It even has a genie with the tiniest little beard, probably with just enough power to zephyr a couple of slips of paper or thrint a sandwich.

  Do you know Jazzamin? Threedeep displays a big arrow, pointing to the tiny, timid genie peeking a blue flame from her lamp. She is a very good friend of mine. Shall I get her to thrint you some water?

  ‘No.’ Pia goes over to her cell’s cot and flops on to it and kicks off her boots with her feet. ‘Just go on standby. Please.’

  Threedeep processes this request. Sorry, Pia. As a minor, you are prohibited from being confined without full monitoring. I guess you’re stuck with me!

  ̄_(ツ)_/ ̄

  Pia groans.

  I’m sure you’ll feel better after a nice snooze, Threedeep chats.

  Ugh. The most annoying thing about nanabugs is how often they are right. Pia really is very, very tired.

  ‘Fine, I actually am going to sleep right now, but not because you told me to, because I want to.’

  Sleep tight!

  (˘³˘)♥(ᴗ˳ᴗ)

  Pia yawns. ‘I need thread, though. And scissors.’ She won’t sleep until she does her remembrances for her parents.

  Umm, says Threedeep. Scissors are sort of a forbidden item in here.

  Perhaps I can do your remembrances for you.

  Here.

  ( ͡ ° ͜ ʖ ͡ °)=ε✄ | |

  *snip snip*

  How is that?

  Pia stares at the screen. What does it matter anyway? The thought shocks her, and yet it won’t go away. It doesn’t matter. Nothing does. The Seamstress is dead and Hum is dead and her parents are dead. Cutting two little lengths of thread won’t change that.

  • • •

  Pia falls asleep. She dreams about the kiss and its aftermath. Ishan and her on the Rek, in the starry dark. Her knuckles hurting. Him, holding his cheek. She’s never dreamed a memory before.

  She feels the kiss on her lips, hot and cool at the same time. It is not romantic or anything. Maybe if she liked him that way, it would’ve been a tiny bit romantic. But it is mostly awkward and not really even a kiss at all – more of a lip collision.

  His mouth tastes really strongly of Pepsi and crisps.

  She jerks away and WHACK – her fist flails up and bounces off his cheek.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ she yells.

  Ishan blinks at her for a long while. Then at last he gives a sigh. ‘I read a book on my goggles about bees.’

  ‘What? ’

  The relief is just massive. A book about bees?! His answer is so weird, so Ishan, that her anger evaporates and she laughs. At once, the kiss is no longer something that might ruin their friendship. It is just another calamity in a long list of calamities: just another thing for two klutzes to laugh about.

  But Ishan doesn’t smile. Doesn’t go all goofy. He just looks really, really sad.

  ‘I thought I might learn something about the nanites: their hive structure and stuff. But the book was just about solitary bees. They were bees that didn’t live in hives. I never knew there were so many different types. I don’t know anything about nature at all, really. None of us do. Not even most of the grown-ups. Funny for a zoo, right?’

  Pia isn’t laughing any more. Ishan looks too serious.

  ‘And then I asked Sixtip some more questions, and you know what? There were twenty thousand known species of bee before the mass-extinctions. Twenty thousand.’

  Will every one of Ishan’s kisses have this sort of rationale behind it? Be followed by a speech? Well, pointless questions, because she isn’t finding out. There will be no more kisses, ever. No way.

  ‘Do you know how many different species we’ve managed to make with the Seamstress?’ he asks quietly. ‘Ninety-five, not counting all the imagerations. About sixty of which survive. In just over thirty years. At that rate, maybe in a couple of thousand years, we’ll have enough to replace all the bees we wiped out.’

  He lets that sink in.

  ‘That’s why I’ve never created any voilà. Because I know the truth. Siskin wants us to believe we can save the world. But the world’s already dead, and we’re just the worms on its corpse.’

  Pia looks away from him. Above the sprawl to the east, chemtrails criss-cross the night sky like scars.

  ‘And when I realised that,’ Ishan says, ‘I asked myself: What do you want to do before the world ends?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘And that’s why I did it.’

  • • •

  When Pia wakes the next morning, a bluebottle has been in the cell and placed three beige cards on her desk. Printed on them in capital letters are various wish-scripts: one to zephyr away dirt and sweat, another to kill the bacteria on her teeth, and a third to zephyr away her pee and poop from the cell’s plastic pot. So the Quark doesn’t even have toilets installed? Ugh.

  She uses the pot (she makes Threedeep swivel her node the other way), then recites the scripts. Jazzamin grants each wish with a tiny, terrified squeak.

  ‘You don’t have to be scared of me, you know,’ Pia says to the little genie.

  Jazzamin peeks out from her shroud at
Pia. ‘But we is a redshirt,’ she says in babyish Tellish. ‘And thee is a Hyde.’

  Pia doesn’t know those phrases, and Jazzamin looks too young to know English. ‘Threedeep, translate.’

  Redshirt: Tellish, noun: An expendable individual who is often killed to demonstrate the powers of a nemesis. SEE ALSO: Nemesis.

  Hyde: Tellish, noun: the evil version of a character/individual.

  ‘What the—?! Jazzamin, I’m not evil! And I’m not going to kill you!’

  ‘Clichéd Hyde dialogue,’ narrates the genie, vanishing with a puff back inside her lamp.

  ‘Hey!’ Pia rubs the lamp. ‘Hey, I hadn’t thrinted breakfast yet!’

  Jazzamin won’t come back out though, so Threedeep goes off to fetch Pia something to eat and comes back a little later with a drone-made sandwich. Pia takes one bite and leaves it. Nanabug sandwiches are the worst. The ratio of butter-to-bread-to-filling is always way, way off.

  Threedeep pretends to busy herself cleaning the already spotless cell, but her node stays focused on the uneaten sandwich by Pia’s side. Pia grimaces and takes a few more bites. For creatures that don’t have any nerve endings, nanabugs are way too sensitive.

  Time passes. Pia lies restlessly on her cot and stares at the walls. If breakfast is any sort of indicator, today will be about the same level of awful as yesterday. There isn’t much left for her to do but sit and wait for it all to happen.

  More time passes.

  A whole bunch of it.

  Would you like to read a story? Threedeep asks.

  ‘No.’

  Or we could do an educational quiz?

  ‘No.’

  Or—

  ‘Or you could put yourself on standby.’

  ʕᵔᴥᵔʔ Do you know what I find helps when I am grouchy?

  ‘You don’t have emotions, Threedeep.’

  If I’m ever grouchy, I sing a song. ( ͡ o ͡ ) ♪.*･｡ﾟ

  ‘You don’t have a voice, Threedeep.’

  That’s OK! I’ve always thought music is something you feel, not just hear.

  Pia’s spiteful reply catches in her throat. Hum. Poor, poor Hum. Her bones still ache with his song. They always will. Why didn’t she listen to Ishan? If she hadn’t followed Hum into the Seam, the angel might be alive now.