Octavia.
There is a flutter of interest, both in the room and in the tunnel. My skin and my consciousness prickle as both eyes and minds readjust to settle on me, and suddenly, though I’m at the edge of the room, I’m at the center of it. Everyone is staring, and I don’t know who to look at. My hand automatically fastens around my grandmother’s wrist. I am eleven again.
“Octavia.” Rasimbukar’s voice carries across the silent room. I fight the chill it sends down my spine.
“They want you in the center. With Hamankush,” my grandmother whispers. She gently pries my hand loose from her wrist, slipping back into a N’Terran accent. “It’s okay, sweetness. I’m here. I’ll be right here.”
I walk to the center of the chamber, joining Hamankush by the glowing tree. Every pace feels like I’m stepping farther out into the blackness of space, the unknown yawning before me. Hamankush doesn’t look up when I join her.
“You may sit,” Rasimbukar says. Her voice is indecipherable but her facial spots drift gently outward, and I hold on to this small observation as I sink down on the platform beside Hamankush.
Rasimbukar says something in rapid Anooiire, and in my head there’s a sensation of a flower blooming, the tunnel widening to admit the minds of the many Faloii present. It’s almost dizzying, the presence of this many. I would never be able to isolate my Arterian to address only one out of so many—and perhaps this is the point—but Rasimbukar says only to me: All is well. This is a place for truth.
Other voices begin to ask me questions. I can’t discern who they are or any identity attached to the questions. When I answer, it is as if I answer to them all.
Hamankush took a life, the Faloii say. You saw this?
You mean the igua? I reply. Yes. But she had to.
Do you understand that the killing of one who takes no prey is a violation? ask the Faloii.
I—I don’t know, I say.
Do you understand what it means for one of our people to commit this violation?
I don’t know.
They are angry. And somehow I am to blame. Their emotions rush into the tunnel, fear tingeing it all in deep purple hues. Suddenly the tunnel snaps shut and the Arterian is silenced. At least for me. Around the room, the looks of concentration paired with a haziness of the eyes that I have come to associate with Arterian conversations continue. I have been shut out. A lump forms in my throat. Then Rasimbukar speaks.
“This portion of this discussion will be held in your language,” she says, her eyes on me. “You are overwhelmed. It is agreed that truth will be more easily discerned if you are able to fully comprehend what is being asked of you.”
“It is not customary for a discussion in this chamber to be held in any language but ours,” Hamankush says, raising her eyes.
“It is not customary for one of our people to take a life of Faloiv,” Rasimbukar says. She adds something in Anooiire, her facial spots gathering near the center of her forehead. Hamankush bows her head even more deeply.
“It wasn’t her fault,” I say, my body flushing with heat at the memory of the igua’s fangs. “The igua . . . it wasn’t normal. It wasn’t an igua anymore.”
“The Faloii have a deep awareness of the life on this planet,” someone says from the back of the room. “There is no parasite capable of changing the nature of a creature. We inherit the knowledge of this planet’s creatures. Hamankush committed a violation.”
“But she didn’t have a choice,” I reiterate. “It’s not like she wanted to!”
I look at Hamankush, waiting for her to raise her head and tell them what happened. But her eyes remained fastened on the packed reddish dirt of the floor.
“She made a choice,” another voice says.
“She had to do it,” I cry. “It would have killed us all!”
“The igua do not kill,” a Faloii woman says, her facial spots communicating a deep frown.
I cover my face with my hands. Too many emotions are flying inside me, a whirlwind catching all the fragments that I’m feeling and throwing them skyward. Hamankush did what she had to do, I know this. I also know that what she had to do is a direct result of what the whitecoats are doing in N’Terra. Why has Hamankush not told them what I communicated to her—the vasana? Is this a ritual of this qalm, where she is not allowed to defend herself? Or is there another, hidden reason that I can’t see? I remember Rasimbukar keeping the knowledge of her father’s abduction secret, knowing that the truth could start a war between her people and mine. If I tell the truth now, what could it mean?
“What are you going to do to her?” I say quietly. “To Hamankush?”
“Such a violation would mean banishment,” Rasimbukar says without hesitation. “Revocation of the Arterian tongue. She would be extracted from the veins of Faloiv.”
Beside me, Hamankush’s body gives the smallest quake. Even with the tunnel shut, the grief seems to drift from her skin to my heart. My own chest clenches. Rasimbukar knows the truth about N’Terra. Adombukar knows. If they have knowingly kept it a secret, is it one that I can tell? What will they say?
I turn and glance over my shoulder to find the eyes of my grandmother waiting there at the back of the chamber. Round and brown. My mother’s eyes. My mother’s face.
“It wasn’t Hamankush’s fault,” I say. Like her, I fasten my eyes on the soil. It offers no comfort, but I try to lose myself in it. “The igua was . . . changed. It was made into a weapon. By N’Terra. By my people.”
Chapter 6
In another world, the silence might have been true silence. There’s not a sound, not a breath. The qalm itself is soundless, as if it is repressing its heartbeat in the gravity of this moment. But around me, the patterns of facial spots ripple, constantly changing, like a storm has been contained in this small chamber and will burst forth at any moment.
“Child,” a Faloii woman says, standing. Her voice does not betray any emotion but her spots are jagged, rigid across her brow. “You are telling us the star people have harmed the animals of this planet?”
“Yes,” I say, my voice so small I can barely hear it.
“How is this possible? Why have the animals not told us?”
“They are cut off from the Artery,” I whisper. “Their brains . . . they . . . we . . . some of the star people . . . they’re changing them. They’re altering them. The animals aren’t . . . themselves anymore. They’re gone.”
Another period of silence. In the conversation they have sealed me out of, I imagine flashes of red traveling at light speed. I don’t dare look at my grandmother.
Someone nearby speaks a few words in Anooiire. Though I can’t understand them, something about the words feels like a blade, as if they were directed straight at my heart. Rasimbukar’s eyes are on me.
“What did they say?” I ask.
“They said, ‘The star people have brought a new death to Faloiv. Just as we predicted.’”
“A new death,” I whisper, squeezing my eyes shut.
“We have much to discuss,” Rasimbukar says.
I brace myself for more questions, but instead the room explodes into Anooiire. After the prolonged silence it makes me jump, and I think even Hamankush does too. Her eyes are still fixated on the soil. Her future depends on what is being said. I wish I could speak to her. Touch her. I can’t decipher the flurry of words being spoken around me, but her terror is a language I understand. The storm of conversation goes on for some time, until Rasimbukar says a few words that send quiet rippling out through the chamber. She looks at me and I quail under her eyes.
“Hamankush took the life of an igua,” she says. “And your truth is that this igua would have meant her harm?”
Rasimbukar knows this already.
“Her. All of us. Did you not see the teeth? How do you think Revollettican got . . . hurt?”
Hurt. I don’t want to ask if the youth is dead.
“We noticed nothing unusual about the corpse of the igua,” a Faloii man sa
ys from near Rasimbukar.
I hadn’t seen the body after Hamankush had killed her. The scene had erupted into chaos, Hamankush trying to staunch the blood of Revollettican, the other Faloii youth scrambling, Jaquot and the other humans all but hyperventilating. Then Rasimbukar and the others had appeared and swept us all away.
“The teeth can be hidden,” I say. “I don’t understand how it works. Maybe when the igua died the teeth retracted.”
“You did not see these teeth when you approached the igua, Hamankush?” Rasimbukar says.
I hear the smallest intake of breath, Hamankush raising her eyes to speak.
“I did not.”
“But you saw them when the igua attacked, as this child says?”
“I did.”
Another flurry of Anooiire ripples through the room, which Rasimbukar silences in Arterian.
“Hamankush, leave the qalm. We are finished with you for now.”
Hamankush rises immediately and passes through the parting vines. I’m alone on the platform—the many Faloii eyes upon me feel almost too intense to bear.
My grandmother appears at my side and it’s all I can do to keep from reaching for her like an infant. Instead I bite my lip and hope my eyes tell her how grateful I am that she is now sitting there on the platform beside me. I half expect one of the Faloii to object, but Rasimbukar merely nods.
“Your truth is that Hamankush is not responsible for the death of the igua,” she says.
Rasimbukar knows she’s not. She knows we are.
“Yes,” I manage to get out.
“Your truth is that the igua died another kind of death. Before coming to the trees.”
“Yes.”
“And your truth is that the responsibility for that death lies with your people.”
The “yes” catches in my throat. It gags me. All the fears that drove me to get Adombukar out of the labs, to avoid the light of truth shining on what N’Terra had done . . . why did I think this could be avoided?
“Yes,” I finally say.
I can’t tell if the silence in the room is true silence or if within a private tunnel my fate is being decided in the colorful, wordless language of Arterian. Or maybe I only think it’s silent. The world around me seems to have faded as my mind creates different outcomes for this scenario without my bidding. I imagine N’Terra crumbling, my people cast back out into the stars. Or maybe just buried in the soil of Faloiv.
“We have reached an agreement,” Rasimbukar says. Beside me, my grandmother doesn’t move a muscle. I wish I could tell if her heart is beating as hard as mine, or if her cool demeanor is the extension of some inner certainty. I squeeze my hands into fists, my nails digging into my palms, waiting for Rasimbukar to speak to me again, to tell me what’s happening.
But she doesn’t. She speaks in Anooiire, and the words sound slower this time. As if she is enunciating carefully, delivering something solemn to the ears of the listening Faloii. Then she looks at me, and I think her facial spots look like the leaves of an ogwe after heavy rain, low and heavy, bearing the gray storm.
“You are finished here,” she says. Then turns her eyes away.
Chapter 7
My grandfather is waiting in my nana’s qalm when we return. No Faloii had accompanied us, no one steering me back to my room as a prisoner. We had left the single-chambered qalm and walked in silence through Mbekenkanush. Even if we had wanted to speak, it was as if the city forbade it. The trees were still, the hush that I felt creeping on me like insects since Hamankush killed the igua ever present.
When the vines weave back together at our backs, my nana goes to my grandfather, who sits motionless in the leaflike chair as before.
“They have decided?” he says. It’s the first time I’ve heard his voice. Deep, rumbling.
“They have decided . . . something,” Nana says. “I don’t know what.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” I blurt. All my fears have nipped at my heels as we passed through the city. Now, in this dim room, they burst from the corners with teeth bared. “They’re going to make us leave Faloiv. All of us.”
“That may be,” my nana says, sinking onto her bed.
I recoil from her words as if burned. “How can you sound so calm?” I demand. “Where would we go? And how? The Vagantur is dead. Your home planet is dead.”
“These are not questions the Faloii will be concerned with if their decision is to expel us.”
“Us,” I snap. “It’s not us! It’s them! Dr. Albatur and those other idiots!”
“We are responsible for them,” she says. “Your mother and I worked very hard to change the path N’Terra was walking upon. Your grandfather too, in his way. But it wasn’t enough.”
My grandfather nods silently.
“There has to be something we can do,” I plead, as if my grandmother is the one I must convince.
“What is done is done,” she says. “Events have been set into motion. What Albatur and the others have done has violated the nature of Faloiv. There is a very delicate balance here. The planet has already begun to change.”
“I feel it,” I say.
“You feel it?” she says, raising an eyebrow. She exchanges a look with my grandfather.
“Yes.” I sigh. “When the igua died . . . I felt something. Something in the ground. Something in Faloiv. I can’t explain it. Like the whole planet froze.”
“If you can feel it, then the Faloii certainly can,” my grandmother says, standing from her bed. She moves toward my grandfather and perches on his knee. “You hypothesize about expulsion. War may in fact be the outcome.”
“War,” I breathe, squeezing my eyes shut. “Rasimbukar always said she wanted to avoid war.”
“Whatever decision the Faloii make will be in the best interest of the planet. This is not our home. We will do what they ask.”
“But it is my home,” I cry. “It’s my home!”
My grandparents stare at me, sad and still.
“There has to be something we can do,” I say again.
“What was needed should have happened a long time ago,” she says, the irritation leaking into the river of her voice. I don’t know if it’s for me or for N’Terra. “You are young, and this all feels new, but Albatur and the Council were warned. Your father was warned.”
She pauses, her eyes shooting to my face, assessing for damage her words might have caused. I get the feeling that my father is a wound in her life as well as my own. I glance at my grandfather and his face has hardened, his eyes fastened on the floor.
“I don’t like it either, baby,” my grandmother says, her N’Terran accent peeking through again. She bites her lip. I’d forgotten she does this. She does it when she’s worried and doesn’t want you to know. Would the Faloii spare her? Or would they turn against all humans, even those who have lived among them for so many years? The idea of my grandmother, who only just joined me again in the world of the living . . .
I shake off the thought before it can fully form, and turn to leave the qalm.
“Octavia,” she says, her voice grabbing me as the vines begin to part. “We have to do what we have to do.”
“There has to be something that can be done besides just . . . waiting,” I say forcefully. “Otherwise it’s a countdown to the inevitable.”
When she doesn’t reply, I leave.
I wander aimlessly through Mbekenkanush, winding my way around the trees and the qalms, the silence crushing me. I wonder how long I would have to live here to become used to the animals that roam freely. They hunt one another. They feed their young. They cross the path and the sky. I go back to the day I had seen the philax in the main dome of the Beak: how the transparent ceiling far above had seemed like plenty of room for the birds to wing and cry. I see now how wrong I was: how some of them climb so high in the sky they become specks against the blue before plummeting toward the ground, pulling up before they reach the dirt. They relish their freedom. Mbekenkanush pulses with their libert
y. The memory of N’Terra’s walls fills me with guilt: its boundaries had seemed suffocating to me, but I had never questioned whether keeping the animals of Faloiv in the labs was just. Here, feeling how deeply the planet breathes when free, I know how cruel our prison was.
I walk for what feels like hours, and I keep expecting someone to stop me, to drag me off and interrogate me further about the happenings inside N’Terra. But they don’t need to. Adombukar knows plenty, and so does his daughter. Were they just waiting for confirmation? For something to happen? Was this all a test, seeing if I would tell the truth about my people when the time came, testing where my loyalties lie, seeing if we really are all the same?
“We’re not,” I whisper.
“Talking to yourself?” says a voice, and I gasp, turning to find Joi standing by the qalm I had just passed by. I realize now it’s the school, that my feet have been carrying me along the city’s well-worn paths, my mind on another trail. The school appears to be deserted now except for her.
“What are you doing?” I snap, embarrassed. “Where is everyone else?”
“I came to return a book,” she says. “I have been told we are all supposed to be reporting to our own qalms right now. What are you doing?”
“Just . . . walking,” I say. “Clearing my mind.”
She moves off toward the pink lake, which will lead us back toward the part of Mbekenkanush where my qalm is. She pauses and gives me a pointed look, as if she doesn’t quite trust me to be unsupervised, and I’m too weary to be annoyed so I follow.
“I heard about the hearing,” she says. “But everyone is being secretive. Do you know if Hamankush will be . . . exiled?”
“I don’t think so.” I sigh. “They’re trying to figure out what to do with us.”
“You mean the N’Terrans?” she says.
Beside us, the pink lake is motionless within its gentle black banks. Had there been ripples before? A sign of the planet’s breath? If there had, the pink water, powdery looking with its dense minerals, is motionless now, its surface eerily placid.
An Anatomy of Beasts Page 6