An Anatomy of Beasts

by Olivia A. Cole

“Come,” Hamankush says to all of us. “We must help the eyenu to the cave!”

  June moves through the crowd of the eyenu slowly, touching each of them, delivering them from their fear, at least momentarily.

  “Where is the cave?” Alma yells. The wind has picked up. The animals of the jungle are silent but the trees are not: the whipping leaves and the groaning trunks fill the air with a violent noise, dense and green. Alma’s voice barely cuts through.

  “Just here,” Hamankush says, but we can barely hear her. I get the feeling she is not accustomed to raising her voice. Instead, when the wind shrieks, she shows me the way in the Artery.

  Just there, she says, laying out the route. Up the mountain a little way, toward higher ground, the cave a mouth in the rock that extends deep. Form a line, give the eyenu something to follow.

  “Come on!” I shout to Rondo and Alma, and Kimbullettican follows too, the four of us fighting the strengthening wind as Hamankush and June work on gathering the animals.

  Wait here, I tell Kimbullettican when we’ve gone a little way. When the eyenu reach you, keep moving toward us.

  “What are we doing?” Alma shouts. The just-risen moon is obscured by clouds, dimming by the moment. The storm is sweeping in, ready to swallow the light.

  “The cave is just up here,” I shout back. “We need to guide the eyenu to it. When we get to this outcrop, wait there until June brings them up!”

  Between the whistles of the wind I can hear the eyenu chorus beginning to rise, still as scattered as it had been when I’d first laid eyes on them, but shrill, fear turning their song desperate. From this distance I can barely sense June in the Artery, but she’s there, reassuring them, coaxing them to higher ground. Now that I know, their connection makes sense: they are part of her, and she of them. She had come from a rock across the galaxy and found what is, in a way, her true self. Her birth on Earth was a coincidence, somehow: the green language shows me the way her biology aligns with the eyenu’s, a miracle of genes and chance. June, like me, is between two worlds. Except she doesn’t feel stuck. She feels like she’s where she belongs.

  The first drops of rain land on my forehead.

  “Hurry,” I call to Rondo, who is a few paces behind me. The ground has gotten steeper and we struggle upward. I don’t want to imagine what the soft soil under our feet will become once the rain comes down.

  “I think I see it,” Rondo shouts, and when I look ahead there’s a yawning hole where the dark is even darker. In the Artery I hear Hamankush encouraging the eyenu upward with gentleness that feels foreign coming from her.

  “Keep going,” I yell when Rondo reaches me. “I’ll wait here for the eyenu.”

  “No, you keep going,” he argues, pausing.

  “Rondo, go,” I say, pushing him upward. “I need to be after Alma in case the animals get confused! I need to hear them!”

  He starts to say something but is stunned into silence by lightning so intensely bright that when I blink afterward, there’s a glowing seam across the dark of my closed eyes. A clap of thunder leaves my ears ringing. Every hair on my body seems to rise, drawn up by the storm. Another few drops of water spatter my head and shoulders.

  “Hurry up!” I shout, pushing him again. Only when he turns reluctantly do I cast my eyes back down the mountain, peering through the thickening dark for a sign of the coming flock. At first I see nothing, but the next crack of lightning illuminates them: the dozens of wide and rolling eyes, making their way higher, led by June, tailed by Hamankush.

  Come now, babies, June is telling them in her way. A little more, a little more.

  I catch sight of Kimbullettican, waving an arm for June. Their confusion has not abated, and they reach out in concern to Hamankush.

  Why did we not know? they say, about June and the eyenu. The source of the kawa?

  The Faloii cannot very well demand much of humans, Hamankush says, when we rely on one of them so much.

  The kawa, I say. We used it for power. What do you use it for?

  Everything, Hamankush says. Power. Memory. We pass the kawa to the Isii to balance the planet’s lifeblood. Before June, we searched the universe for cells like hers, cells that would join with Faloiv’s and create what could not be created by Faloiv alone, flexible cells with change embedded within. Her biology was wasted on Earth, but Earth did create her. In that way the kawa belong to humans as well—so they should be allowed them. They should be allowed to use the power to destroy themselves.

  Only the one they were given, June says. They must only be allowed what they were given.

  This storm, Kimbullettican says. Their energy feels elastic, as if they are stretching toward Hamankush, needing something. It is strange. Why?

  At this Hamankush communicates in Anooiire, and my own concern is left dangling before being knocked sideways by thunder so mighty that the very mountain seems to tremble. I crouch, pressing my hands against the ground. My fingers find grass in the near dark and grip it, as if clinging to these frail roots will tether me to the ground. When the rumble dies, the cries of the eyenu rise again, bridging the distance between us.

  Here, I try to tell them. Come up. You’re almost safe!

  Their fear is purple in the Artery, but I feel them recognize my reassurance and continue upward, June still at the head of the flock. They’ve reached where Alma stands waiting and she now turns to make her way up toward my post on the trail.

  That’s when the sky splits open.

  It’s as if the spattering of raindrops that had fallen on my forehead were part of an exploratory mission, the first travelers out of a ship, scenting the air. What comes now is the invasion. The rain is not rain. It is an endless army, all its ferocity unleashed at once, turning the ground to mud and the air to water, transforming everything on the planet to a limp version of itself.

  Quickly, Hamankush says to anyone listening.

  The eyenu have almost reached me but they stall, Alma between their numbers and me, her hair plastered down by the rain’s viciousness, her mouth open and shouting but indecipherable. She won’t be able to hear me, so I just point, point hard, my finger a spear aimed at the cave one hundred yards beyond, its mouth almost invisible in the downpour. Alma scurries upward, slipping and sliding.

  Hurry, babies, June says, her presence as calm as ever. The eyenu slip and slide after Alma, whose suit glows white in what’s left of the moon. I look down at my own suit and find it glowing as well. I don’t know if it’s a result of saturation or because it knows I need light.

  Almost, almost! I tell the eyenu. Their feet, clawed talons as thick as my own legs, struggle through churning mud. There is nothing I can do, no help I can offer. June says they’ll be safe in the cave, and the only thing I can do is get them there.

  The thunder cracks above like two meteors colliding in space, the reverberation shaking the ground, causing the mud to shift under my feet. I fall, my back slamming against what had been the ground but is now more like a slow-moving waterfall. It slides down toward the eyenu, and the animals balk at the sight of me, struggling in the mire.

  Something is wrong, Kimbullettican says.

  I’m fine, I answer, trying to right myself, trying to get my feet under me as the rain drowns out the moon. The only thing I can see clearly is myself, the white of the qalm-grown suit like the inner flesh of a shell, exposed to the light.

  But they mean something else. The realization hits me and the eyenu at the same time. Up until this moment, June has been keeping them calm, her silent murmuring in the Artery like a spell that keeps the flock moving up the mountain, even under the assault of the rain. But something stirs them from their near hush. Their throats open and the raucousness slices through the roar of the storm. I try to shout something at June, but my mouth fills with water.

  They’re here, someone says, maybe two someones, maybe everyone, maybe the whole planet, the words echoing in from the trees, already screaming from the fury of the storm. But by the time I real
ize who “they” is, they are upon us.

  They come from lower on the mountain, their shadows emerging from the trees the way the qararac had come from the underwater gloom: they appear like haunted beings, the rain giving shape to their bodies but the thunder and water masking all sound of their attack. They are barely present until the moment that they’re not. Three gwabi, their eyes white and empty, so empty they are like hollow bone, so empty that the only thing about them that remains familiar is the smell of the Zoo steaming off them like heat rolling before a wildfire.

  “No,” I whisper, too late, and by then there’s already blood on the ground, mixing with the mud, everything stirred by the lashing of the storm, a cyclone of screams and violence toppling in waves down the mountainside.

  And then the buzzguns. Lightning to my ears, at first, until the spark of one catches a fleeing eyenu in its graceful neck, the smell of smoke filling my nose, the explosion of fuchsia feathers, the screech that erupts from its beak to join with the clamor of thunder, shaking the world.

  “Not the birds!” shouts a voice from the dark. “Shoot the others if you have to, but not the birds!”

  I watch the eyenu fall and without choosing to, I’m running toward it, my hands outstretched, as if I reach it before it falls, everything will be okay. If I can keep its blood from joining the soil, I can stop this blur of horror and set everything right.

  I reach the animal’s body at the same moment as another person: a person wearing a gray suit, their face obscured by a mask that looks like glass, glowing crimson with some infrared vision, something that makes them a friend of the storm. The lightning flares like a volcano in the sky, and maybe behind the mask they smile. I try to run downhill: if Alma, Rondo, and the other eyenu could reach the cave, they can stay concealed. The graysuit drags me backward and flings me down, mud filling my mouth and eyes. Somewhere in the dark I hear June’s scream splitting the air like a century of mothers before even she is lost in the rain.

  Chapter 26

  They march us all night, through rain that renders every tree uniform. The deluge conceals the scents I’m accustomed to, the darkness disguising everything familiar. But the graysuits seem to know where they’re going, or perhaps it’s the Albaturean gwabi that lead our tense procession. It is only June, the eyenu, and me. When they had eventually paused our march near daybreak, they lit a fire and lounged around it, their captives bound and set to the side like rubbish.

  “If it’s not cooked, I don’t want it,” a man’s voice says says.

  “Why would I offer you food if it wasn’t cooked?” says another.

  “I don’t know why you do the things you do.”

  “Oh, shut up. At least we’re finally drying out.”

  “Barely. The humidity is murder.”

  I can’t see them, only hear them. My face is pressed into the damp soil. Inside my suit, the sharp edge that I know to be Captain Williams’s pin stabs me, undiscovered with my grandfather’s map.

  “Watch the sparks,” one voice says, a woman. I recognize it: Manx. “You’re going to char my meat.”

  “A little char makes it taste better.”

  Meat. I force myself not to inhale—I know I will be sick if I do. Meat. After everything that has happened—that’s still happening—N’Terrans are eating dead animals. Anger and revulsion flood through me, and I breathe out hard through my nostrils.

  “It’s too hot for a fire, honestly,” one of the male voices says.

  “Almost,” says the other. “But as long as it keeps the beasts away, I don’t mind a fire.”

  “You mean besides our beasts,” Manx says, chuckling.

  “Is that what he likes to call them? His beasts?”

  “No, that’s just what Dr. Jain calls them. Albatur probably calls them something more sophisticated than that.”

  I struggle against my bonds, but June’s voice is immediately in my head.

  Be still, June tells me, and I almost jerk at her nearness. She doesn’t feel like Kimbullettican and the other Faloii in the Artery. Her Arterian feels softer, weaker. Like my mother’s. Like Dr. Espada’s. Human.

  Where are you? I ask, trying to keep from wriggling.

  Behind you.

  Do you know if my friends . . . ?

  I don’t know if they survived, she says.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. Alma had carried on past me up the mountain, toward the cave, where Rondo had been waiting. Had they made it? Had they managed to hide themselves? What about Kimbullettican and Hamankush? I remember the gwabi’s jaws flashing in the swirl of dark and storm, fangs that had seemed to float. Had those fangs found flesh? This all feels so much like the night my mother died: the blur of noise, the uncertainty about what had befallen whom. Separated from my loved ones. Again.

  Three of my children dead, June says, her grief thrumming in the Artery thick and blue. I remember now, her wail breaking through the storm like its own shrill thunder. The comfort I offer her is weak: my mother’s death is too near for me to comfort her now; all the condolences I give seem aimed, at least in part, at myself. I focus instead on the stretching ache of my arms’ tendons, bound uncomfortably behind my back.

  Why are they doing this? I think, not to June but to the entire Artery, as if the world might answer, as if the stars themselves might offer something solid.

  Someone told them it’s right, June says.

  Nearby I hear a scuffle of movement, a faint whine reaching my ears. I stiffen, my eyes cracking open.

  “They’re moving again,” one of the people by the fire says. I wonder if they’re still wearing masks, the reflective shields that had rendered them inhuman there on the mountain. Are we still on the mountain? The sun has risen now, but I can’t tell where we are.

  “Let them move,” Manx says. “They’re not going anywhere.”

  This time I roll slightly sideways, an inch at a time, my cheek still pressed into the soil, but my eyes taking in the people sitting around the fire. They wear the predictable gray suits, darkened by the crush of rain. They turn from where they sit on stones and wood, looking over their shoulders at the eyenu, almost in a pile, their legs and beaks bound with what I can only guess is the same fibrous material that binds my wrists against my lower back. Some sort of chariot is parked nearby, a wide flat bed at its rear. I can only assume this is how the eyenu were transported. The three Albaturean gwabi crouch nearby, on guard.

  “I don’t know what he’s going to do with them,” Manx says, turning back to the fire.

  “I heard it’s like the bones,” one of them says. “Something that will give energy.”

  “I thought they got the bone machine to work?”

  “They did, but you need the bones to do it, don’t you?” Manx snaps.

  “We were so close to getting the Faloii on the mountain. That would have been something.”

  They’re silent for a moment and I merely watch them through the slits of my eyelids, a feeling like hate roiling within me.

  “Something would be finding our egg,” Manx says. She pokes at the fire with a stick, sending sparks up into the canopy. “That would be something. He won’t be happy when he hears we found one of the pods but nothing inside.”

  They found one of the pods. Was it the same one I found with Kimbullettican?

  “It has to be in the aliens’ city,” one of the men says. “The humans who turned sides had to have taken it with them. He’ll find it when we finally go in.”

  Aliens, I repeat mentally, trying to make sense of it.

  They mean the Faloii, June says.

  That doesn’t make sense. How can they be aliens on land that’s theirs?

  This . . . this is something I remember.

  Her energy in the Artery seems to swell with something, something that swims as it looks for its name.

  What are you talking about?

  The rats in the ship. The man who now leads your people and makes these monsters—he was a rat, a young man at one time. This
has begun to feel like Earth. He brought it from there.

  What do you remember?

  There is nothing to remember. They killed my mother for loving who she was. She was from a place called Trinidad. She wanted to remember and they hated her for it. When the Faloii came, I couldn’t wait to leave.

  And they took you with them, I say. They wanted you.

  I was special, she says. Somehow. My genes were made for the stars. But now Earth has followed me through them, and I wonder what it was all for.

  “The lady doesn’t look so good,” a voice says.

  I dart my gaze back to them. The three people around the dwindling fire are all standing, moving toward us.

  Manx and one of the men clutch strips of meat, tearing at them with their teeth. The image of knocking those teeth out of their mouths flashes across my mind unbidden. The other man carries a buzzgun.

  “They’re tied up, Rand,” his compatriot sneers. “It’s a tiny woman and a kid.”

  “The lady bit me when I grabbed her before,” the one called Rand says. “Look, I have a mark.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Manx reaches us first. “Hey, kid,” she says. “We know who you are.”

  I stare back at her from my twisted position on the ground, glaring at the meat in her hand. She takes a bite, chews hard, looking me in the eye.

  “Do you know where your friends went?” she says.

  I can’t help it—my chin quivers. If the graysuits don’t know where Alma and Rondo are, then that at least means they aren’t dead. These three people didn’t find Kimbullettican or Hamankush, and they didn’t personally shoot my friends. If they’re not here tied up, they’re free. For now.

  “Brave, huh?” Manx says. She looks almost sorry. Maybe just disappointed. “Well, it would be better if we had you all. Their parents are worried, Octavia. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  I grit my teeth. It does bother me. But that’s not what’s important here. My voice finds itself at the back of my throat, and when I open my mouth I sound like I’m croaking.

  “You’re making things worse,” I say.