An Anatomy of Beasts

by Olivia A. Cole

  I peer at the water. “It looks clear now,” I say. “Just because the color doesn’t show any microorganisms doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

  “Let’s see if the canteen detects anything,” she says, swigging the last of her own water.

  Scooting down the bank on her butt, she stretches an arm to reach the fast-flowing water. She holds the mouth of the canteen against the current, allowing the water to flow in, and waits for the sensor on the side to indicate whether the liquid inside is drinkable. Rondo and I stand watching from the bank as Alma squints at the vessel. I glance at him, but he’s staring off across the river, not making eye contact. The worm of irritation in my brain wriggles.

  “Looks mostly safe,” Alma says from the bank. “Pale green sensor light. So could be some microbes but nothing that should be too dangerous. Octavia, if they’re microscopic organisms, shouldn’t you technically be able to communicate with them?”

  The question takes me aback. She’s right, I guess, but when I listen in the Artery, I sense only the blur of noise that I’ve come to associate with Faloiv, with specific consciousnesses registering when a nearby animal makes itself known. But in my sudden attention to the Artery, a vague flare catches my attention. A spark of blue from nearby, there and then not there. I’m only starting to sharpen my focus on it when Rondo collapses.

  “Stars!” cries Alma, leaping up from the embankment alongside the river. She spills most of what she’s gathered in her canteen as she moves toward him, but I’m already at his side.

  “Rondo!” I’m just inches above his face, practically screaming at him, and his eyelids flutter but do not open.

  “Green wings,” he says softly, in a voice I don’t recognize as his. “Red stars. I love their eyes.”

  “What?” Alma says, kneeling at his other side. “What is he talking about?”

  “I don’t know! Rondo? What’s wrong?”

  “They disappear when you point,” he says. “But I’m invisible. How do they see?”

  “He’s delirious,” Alma says. “He’s speaking nonsense!”

  I grab his hand and pinch a bit of his skin, watching for how quickly it flattens, searching for signs of dehydration. He needs water, but his skin doesn’t respond the way it would if he was severely dehydrated. I grasp his chin and open his mouth slightly, touching the inside of his cheek. It is wet and warm.

  “I don’t think it’s just dehydration,” I cry. “Did something bite him?”

  I scan his suit with my eyes, searching for any splashes of red.

  “The dirixi would be hanging around if he was bleeding,” Alma says. “Maybe an adverse reaction to the odor released by the microbes?”

  “I don’t know!” My heart pounds and my hands shake. “His breath seems shallow. I don’t know what to do!”

  Without bidding, the vague blue flare appears on the edge of my consciousness again, stronger this time. I ignore it as it fades in and out, as if deciding if it wants to be seen. I grasp Rondo’s face in both hands.

  “Rondo!” I cry. “Tell me something! What’s going on?”

  “Like fins,” he says.

  I hold him tighter, forcing back the tears that burn in the corners of my eyes. His skin under my hands is slick with sweat, perspiration that increases with every second, his breaths almost hollow. I’m about to watch him die, I think. Another person I can’t bear to lose. I knit my fingers behind his neck to elevate his head, and my finger brushes something stiff.

  “What is that?” I murmur.

  “What?” Alma snaps. “What is it?”

  “Help me turn him over!”

  I let his head back down onto the ground as gently as I can and with Alma’s help we tilt him onto his side. I yank the neck of his skinsuit down, searching for the thing I had felt. I see the holes in the suit before I find what caused them. Three pinpoints, almost undetectable, through the material. I tear the skinsuit, my heart running away into the jungle, exposing more of his neck.

  Spines. Three spines. My lungs constrict with panic at the sight of them. Each of them a quarter of an inch long, reddish where they enter Rondo’s skin but a soft blue color out to their tip. They stick out from his neck stiffly like the beginning of tiny trees growing from his body. As if to confirm this, one of them sprouts the smallest, thinnest branch right before my eyes.

  “Something . . . something is in him,” I whisper. “His neck.”

  Alma shoulders me aside so she can see. “Stars,” she says. “What is that, O? What is that?”

  “I don’t know! What is it?”

  “You’re the one who wanted to study plants!”

  “Ones you eat, Alma! Not vicious ones!”

  “Your grandma studied plants! She never said anything about this?”

  “There are a million plants on this planet, Alma!” I scream.

  “Like stars,” Rondo murmurs.

  “Rondo, hang on,” I cry, cupping his face. “I’m going . . . I’m going to figure this out.”

  “They never taught us this stuff!” Alma says.

  “Just wait,” I say. “Let me think.”

  But there’s nothing to think of. There is no lesson that correlates with this problem. This is not an animal specimen we can identify from the database of our memories—N’Terra has spent forty years teaching us the wrong things. My head is empty right now because of them, and I suddenly want to burn down every white dome in the settlement. . . .

  The blue flash appears in my mind again, this time fully visible. It is a presence that demands my attention.

  “What,” I cry, lacking the focus to say so internally. “What is this?”

  You require antivenin, someone tells me. The plant from which the quills come provides it at the root.

  I give the blue presence all my attention.

  Antivenin, I say. What plant?

  You will not find it by its name, so I will show you.

  Like a phantom, a smell wafts through the Artery, a sharp reminder of my first day in the jungle, when Dr. Espada showed me the image of the rhohedron field. But this is different, the sensation of the plant I’m being shown sharper and more vibrant, its smell as real and present as if it were blossoming right under my nose.

  In the hallway of my mind emerges a plant with bluish leaves that taper into points. It grows in a cluster of its kin, the stems thin but sturdy, with a covering of fuzz along the length. The leaves jut out every six inches or so, and at the joint where the leaves connect with the stem grows a beautiful flower: purplish and downy looking, fluffed like the breast of a baby bird. I gather from its smell that it needs shade to live, and my eyes immediately dart to the tree line along which we’ve been walking.

  You see it, then? the presence says. So unusual.

  “What is it?” Alma cries. “What do you hear?”

  “Stay here,” I bark, and force myself to leave Rondo’s side. I dash back the way we’d come, scanning the edge of the jungle for the bluish leaves.

  “Octavia,” Alma cries, panic tingeing her voice. “Where are you going? You can’t be out here by yourself!”

  She’s still afraid of the jungle, but I’m not: there’s no point. The dirixi is somewhere out there among the trees, but so is the plant that will help Rondo. The presence in the Artery has faded away again, but I don’t have time to wonder about who they are. I take in the tangle of flora, searching for the one I’d been shown. It doesn’t have an odor the way the rhohedron does, at least nothing that I can pick up in the tunnel, so I have to rely on my eyes. There are so many red plants here! Splashes of yellow, the overwhelming green of everything. I search for the violet blossom. I need violet. Rondo needs violet.

  I would have missed it if it hadn’t called to me. Not in the tunnel the way an animal would but with its blossom. I’ve just passed a cluster of plants, the thick green leaves of a rounded bush obscuring the trees behind it. But a small movement catches the corner of my eye, and when I look back I find the violet head of a flo
wer extending up above the layer of the bushes. It’s almost as if it’s greeting me: it grows before my eyes, stretching up toward the sun periscope-like, the downy fluff of its blossom expanding in the light as if preening.

  “There you are,” I whisper, and move toward it. The bluish leaves have reached above the bushes that obscure the rest of the plant now as well: it’s definitely the plant I had seen in the Artery.

  Something snatches at me, sharp and sudden like the snap of teeth. Its origin is obscure, like a bruise I’d awoken to find, unsure of when I got it. I pull up short.

  The friendly-looking violet blossom sways atop its bluish stalk in a breeze I don’t feel, beckoning me. I don’t move, regarding it carefully. Some kind of warning travels from my brain down through the rest of my body, but I can’t identify where it’s coming from.

  Until the quills come out.

  The violet flower unsheathes them faster than even my eyes can react—the petals whip back, exposing the quills like a row of fangs. Before I realize what’s happened, the quills are buried in the soil mere inches from my feet. The violet blossom looks pleasant and inviting once more, as if it hadn’t just shot at me like a tranq gun. I’m so busy watching the flower I almost fail to notice the slow approach of two vines, creeping out of the thick guard of bushes like green spies.

  I stumble backward, my mouth dry. The vines reach only the place where the quills had penetrated the ground, and like the hands of an eyeless monster, grope blindly about in the dirt, surprisingly tactile and with a slithering, reptilian quality.

  At the root, the voice tells me, but even before I’ve fully registered what’s been said, I find myself leaping forward. I crush the quills under one of my shoes and grasp one vine in each hand.

  The plant’s reaction is immediate. The vines, initially pliable when I’d first grasped them, stiffen at my touch; the slightly hollow feeling of their insides solidifies into something like muscle, the parent plant realizing its minions require defense. It’s as if the vines are the tails of a creature whose body I can’t see: they writhe, using considerable strength to drag me toward the bush where the parent plant hides. I’m afraid of more vines, but I’m more afraid of the violet flower, which seems to rear even higher now, as if gazing down at me imperiously. Can it see me? Sense me? The neck of the stem beneath it appears to be rippling upward, and I know somehow that it is drawing up more quills from someplace in its blue body, ready for a second attack.

  I yank on the vines with all my strength, even as they seem to thicken in my hands. Not seem to: they have thickened. When I first grabbed them, I could close my fingers around each side. Now I feel the strain in my palm as I attempt to keep my grip. But I don’t let go. Gritting my teeth, I dig my heels into the ground, the muscles in my back stretching and flexing. I lean all my weight backward, keeping my eye on the violet blossom, which fluffs itself daintily as the throat of its stem ripples upward, preparing more ammunition.

  But worse than the fear of being attacked is the odd sensation of understanding that sprouts somewhere inside me—a buzzing language whose words I can’t decipher but whose meaning is clear: you are not prey. Its confusion is almost amusement: it regards me not as a plant, exactly, but as an ally. It reaches for me, almost apologetic about its assault. It sees me as a child of Faloiv, and it is uncertain about why I’m traveling with what it considers a dangerous species.

  Humans.

  I choke. Have the Faloii already reached the Isii? In the rush of colors and sensations I am connected to inside the plant, I don’t sense any great shift has occurred in its biology. But there’s something else . . . something that makes my blood seem to run backward in my veins. A message. A message that the planet itself has begun to pass on its own. Humans. Danger. And behind it, a message for me: Don’t you agree?

  It’s a silent, green invitation and it yawns over me like the mouth of the jungle itself. A smell, sweet and sharp like torn leaves, invades my nostrils. Don’t you agree?

  Something snaps. I experience a floating sensation in the brief moment that inertia and gravity battle for my body, and then I fly backward, still clutching the vines with both hands, a shower of black soil raining down on me. I land hard on my butt, but the pain I notice isn’t a dull ache—it’s a sharp stab on my shin. I can’t see my own legs: the entire plant lies on top of me, blue stems tangled, leaves overlapping, and, just beyond my reach, the purple blossom, no longer fluffing itself but lying slack against its parent plant.

  I’ve pulled the entire plant out of the ground. I realize there are many purple blossoms just like the one that had watched me like a carnivorous eye. And I realize carnivorous is exactly what it is: below each harmless-looking violet flower is what looks like a slit in the stem. One of them is slightly open as the plant wilts and I can make out two rows of many sharp spines, thicker than the quills the purple blossom had aimed in my direction.

  My foot throbs. I slowly allow my hands to let go of the vines and they slip limply through my fingers, falling onto the bluish leaves with a rustle. They’ve shrunk back down to their original thinness, the muscle died away. I almost feel like vomiting again—the sudden de-escalation of the plant’s attack and my rising adrenaline clash somewhere in my guts. And the pain in my foot . . .

  I kick weakly at the jumble of stems and blossoms, trying to avoid the areas below the flowers where the mouthlike places are and scrabbling backward away from any remaining danger the plant may mean. When the leaves are cleared away, I can see my feet. The left one has a quill sticking straight out of the shoe. The little spine is so harmless looking by itself; only an inch long, it could be a thorn or a splinter. But it’s not. The nausea I noted swirling through my stomach isn’t just fear and adrenaline: it’s this.

  Quickly, the blue presence says. The root.

  I snatch the quill out of my shoe, expecting a welling of blood to rise. But no red appears, no sign that the quill had even touched my skin. Whatever poison the hostile blue plants offer is subtle and slow: Rondo could have been walking for many minutes before feeling the effects.

  Quickly, the voice says again, and I haul myself to my feet. The place where the plant had been nestled amidst the bushes is an empty hole now that I’ve yanked it from the soil. I stare down at the hole in the soil, some of the smaller adjacent stems still holding on by strings to the dirt—I scan them quickly for purple blossoms, but either they’d all been yanked out or these plants were too young to bloom. I bury my hands in soil.

  There’s a layer of heat that rises from the dirt, as if a mouth of Faloiv is open and breathes upward. But beneath the topmost layer, the soil is cool—I almost sigh in relief as my hands dig. There are many small roots of the plant that give way easily, thin and stiff. It’s beneath them that my fingers come in contact with a thicker root, and it feels so much like the vines from before that I flinch from it at first. But it’s still and doesn’t writhe in my grasp, so I get a tight grip and brace myself to yank once more.

  I topple backward again, but this time stagger, catching myself before I fall.

  “Octavia,” I hear Alma cry from down the path where I’d left her. My heart lurches, imagining Rondo’s condition deteriorating while I’m here digging around in the dirt. Meanwhile I feel the poison stirring in my own body: my tongue feels thick and my throat dry. And still in the back of my mind, the green words that hang there, tinged with my guilt: an invitation. A fading thing that sees my friends as prey and wants me to see them as prey too.

  “I’m coming,” I whisper, pushing the remnants of the feeling away, and eye the root. It’s long and thick, lumpy like waji before it’s cooked down and mashed, but bright orange. I can’t tell which part should be the antivenin, so I take another look at the hole I’d dug in the soil to ensure I’m not missing anything and then just pick up the whole thing. It’s heavier than it looks, and I hoist it over my shoulder, turning back down the path to Alma and Rondo.

  I try jogging, but after three steps the wor
ld around me feels unstable, as if the ground has shifted invisibly under my feet. I slow, noticing the edges of my vision looking shiny. I blink hard and swallow, willing the effects of the toxin to remain still in my blood. Alma is ahead of me on the path, standing when I approach, but the distance between us first stretches and then shrinks before expanding again like elastic. I put a hand out in front of me to steady myself, the root like an anchor on my shoulder.

  “What happened?” comes Alma’s voice, and I know this must be how Rondo had felt, his tongue heavy in his mouth and the air thick around him.

  “I’ve got the root,” I say, but maybe I don’t say it, because my ears feel dense, filled with ringing.

  Inside, the blue presence tells me in the Artery, but by now it feels like a hallucination. I move toward Alma as if through water, her voice like a blur around my head, not fully entering my brain. Rondo is on the ground at her feet, his eyes cracked, his lips parted. He doesn’t move. I stumble onto my knees next to him.

  “Inside,” I repeat, fumbling with the thick orange root. The half-moons of my fingernails are black with soil, and I use them to tear clumsily at the skin of the root. It peels off but reveals nothing but a paler orange meat. I want to bite it. The desire to use my teeth and gnaw open this strange thing that supposedly holds the key to our survival is strong—I feel like an animal, like fangs could sprout from my mouth. But instead of biting the root, I punch it, frustration and panic making my fists unfeeling. I punch it again, then raise it over my head and slam it against the ground. It has no sound. Nothing in the world does.

  I don’t hear it, but I feel it: the slackening of the root, the softening of its outer skin. Something shining inside, a version of thirst hatching in me as the sight of it catches my eye like a glimmer of water. Red, glinting like precious stones but soft and wet: a nest of many round seeds, clinging together within a jelly of brilliant crimson.

  Eat.

  I don’t hesitate. I dig my fingers into the core of the root and snatch at the seeds, surprised by their coldness. They stay together in one moist string, and I drop the whole thing into my mouth without taking another breath. The cold somehow intensifies once in my throat, and my body seizes in surprise.