“No!” I shout, the sleeping animals around me like a cemetery. “He doesn’t need water. He needs the kawa, and I don’t know where . . .”
I freeze. My gaze pauses on the gwabi, its inky body prone in its cell. I stand slowly, my legs wobbly. The buzz in my head is a roar, but I squeeze the muscle in my mind as hard as I can, identifying the source of each hum and pushing them out one by one. There’s something swimming just beyond the edge of my consciousness, the image getting clearer and clearer as my mind becomes quiet. A memory, and not even a memory of something real. A dream. I’m remembering a dream I had, the pieces of it floating up through the darkness in my mind and reassembling to form a complete image: my mother, her hand in the mouth of a large, fanged beast. A gwabi. She pulls her hand from its jaws, and in it she holds . . .
“The kawa,” I say.
I rush to the creature’s cage, one of the largest in the room. The body of the gwabi is like a velvet boulder: enormously muscled and covered in fine sable fur. Its huge head lies just inside the bars, close enough to touch, the eyelids fluttering in sleep.
I reach out for the gwabi in my mind. She’s there, waiting for me: her energy flares as we meet. I greet her—not with “hello,” but with a feeling like hello. Open. Warm. Familiar. She feels hard at first: I can sense her perceiving me but holding back, keeping her mind just out of reach. She investigates me, the chain between us glowing brighter, and then she bends, allowing me near, letting me see her. Like all the others, she’s afraid.
I reach into my skinsuit pocket and withdraw the wand I used to wake up Adombukar.
“Octavia,” Alma snaps.
“Wait,” I say. Behind me Adombukar is slumped on the floor, his pulse of light barely registering in my head. He’s not dying, but he’s drained, weak. His mind is slipping.
No time to waste. I reach my hand through the bars, work the wand through the gwabi’s mane of fur, and press the tip to her neck.
She stirs, both in my mind and beneath my fingers. I withdraw my hand as slowly as I dare, just as she opens her eyes.
They are huge and green, a strange pixilated color as if painted with a thousand different overlapping shades. The eyes fix on me, and I can’t help but break the gaze for a moment to glance at the huge fangs that protrude from her mouth.
I need it, I tell her, communicating not with words, but with feeling.
She knows.
“Alma, give me the pavi extract.”
“Are you insane? It will kill us—”
“Give it to me!”
She slaps the vial into my palm and backs away as I uncork it. I stare into the multifaceted green eyes before me.
Not us, I tell her.
She stares back, knowing.
My nervousness grows hooves, galloping so fast in my lungs that it makes my breath ragged. I flick my wrist, splashing the thick white bars of the cage that holds her captive with a few drops of the pavi extract. A moment later, the bars are crumbling into piles of white dust, leaving an opening large enough for the gwabi to fit through. I retreat, nearly falling, and out she comes, her huge body graceful and lithe. She stops in front of me, her paws enormous, each of the six toes tipped with a fearsome claw.
The great mouth opens, each tooth as long as my finger. One snap and she’ll end me.
But the mouth doesn’t close. It waits there, held open. The wet heat of her breath wafts into my face, smelling of jungle and something else I can’t identify. Terror makes my chest heave, but I swallow hard, move closer, and put my hand into the gwabi’s mouth.
At first, nothing. Just the hot, wet sensation of her tongue on my palm; the terrifying texture of her molars brushing a fingernail. But something’s grazing my fingertips: a hard, smooth object, rising from her throat and rolling into her mouth, heavy and strange. I grasp it, my hand deep in her mouth, and slowly, slowly—avoiding her curved fangs—pull it from her jaws. I don’t need to look: I know it’s the kawa.
I nearly drop it, slick with the gwabi’s saliva. She stares at me neutrally. Her energy hums, glowing. She’s pleased to be out of the cage, ignoring Alma completely. I thank the gwabi, who acknowledges and dismisses my gratitude with a coy blink of her luminous eyes, translating as a twist of pink in my mind.
“Where did that come from?” Alma breathes from the corner where she’s hunched.
I rush to Adombukar’s side, where he still slumps on the floor, his eyes barely open.
Adombukar. I form the shape of his name and push it through the tunnel along with the shape of the egg. He struggles to turn his head. I’m trying to figure out how to help him without dropping the kawa when Alma appears at his shoulder, glancing nervously back at the gwabi, and helps raise him into a sitting position.
“Where did it come from?” she says again.
“Here’s the kawa,” I whisper to Adombukar.
I put it near his face. I don’t know what he needs from it, what he plans to do. Unlike the gwabi, his jaws aren’t big enough to swallow it whole. Instead, though, his large paw-like hands slowly rise and take the kawa from my grasp.
“It’s hot,” Alma gasps, and I almost ask her how she knows—but then I feel it too. In Adombukar’s hands, the kawa has begun to radiate a halo of heat, warm at first and then intensifying into a blast I have to back away from. Alma is forced to release Adombukar’s shoulders to get away from it, but he doesn’t need her anymore. He’s growing stronger: the blue of him in my mind glowing brighter, its flame widening until the tunnel is illuminated with its blaze. He rises from the floor. It’s not just in my mind that he’s glowing: the kawa is illuminated, bathing him in its light. In the tunnel, I perceive something deep in his body growing stronger. His very bones seem to radiate, absorbing some unnamed energy from the core of the kawa.
Are you better? I ask him, afraid to interrupt, but we don’t have time to spare.
Soon, he tells me. The spots on his forehead find a fixed pattern, evenly spaced, and stay there. The light fades from the kawa. When it flickers out, Adombukar approaches the gwabi, who obligingly opens her mouth and swallows the kawa once again.
“Now what?” Alma says, looking up at Adombukar’s face. With his back straight and some of his strength regained, he’s an imposing figure. “Where can we go? The only other door is the one at the back that goes deeper into the Zoo. We’d get caught for sure.”
I squeeze my eyes shut tightly.