Lying in bed and listening to the sounds of life going on outside one's window was actually pretty soothing, Zana thought sleepily; it was the heat that made staying under the covers unbearable. Summer seemed to be scolding her for sleeping in — everyone else was up before dawn, hurrying to get their chores done before retiring for their well-deserved siesta.
The closest source of disapprovement was loudly clattering with something metallic downstairs, followed by rapid, swishing strokes — Prila was scrubbing the floors, and banging the bucket on the stone tiles whenever she moved to a different room. Zana rolled over and squeezed the pillow over her ears. She didn't care for Prila's opinion of her, and she didn't care for it being transmitted by the sounds of her housework. She knew well enough that the old housekeeper's adulation of 'The Doctor' equaled her disappointment in the good doctor's lazy wife.
Galen would've been up before dawn, too. A twinge of guilty conscience drew a sigh from her. She should at least have joined him for breakfast; he had looked so happy when she had come down for dinner yesterday.
Zana suddenly remembered that during that dinner, she had promised him to go to the shelter again, and regretted her lack of spine now. She should've stuck to her decision; after all, she'd given it a lot of thought. But now she felt bound by that promise, much as it irked her.
I only have to go once, she decided. And if I go today, it'll be off my back.
She rolled onto her back again and flung the pillow an arm's length away. Next step was to open her eyes.
The ceiling needed a fresh paint, she decided after staring at it for some time. Maybe in a different color than bone-white. Maybe a light yellow, or very light pink...
I could go by the scroll shop on my way home, she tried to bait herself. Maybe the next adventure of The Rogue is finally in — what was it again? The Rogue's Revenge, or The Rogue's Bargain... ?
The series was her favorite — in her imagination, the eponymous rogue looked like Galen, but had Peet's personality, and though a lot of his adventures bordered on silly, she couldn't get enough of them. The promise of a fresh infusion of the dark and mysterious ape's exploits finally gave Zana the strength to get out of bed and sit in front of her mirror to brush her fur.
She was dragging her feet again when it came to selecting a fresh robe. She'd need something light, considering how late the morning had already grown; the heat would be brutal, and it was quite a long way to the outskirts of town. But her light robes seemed too flimsy to her, unsuited for hiding in them. And none of them had a hood, which meant she'd have to carry a parasol, and you couldn't hide your face under a parasol as well as you could hide it inside a wide hood...
Zana couldn't say who she wanted to hide from — their new identities had been accepted without question, and no stranger had appeared in town to ask any penetrating questions; she had stopped expecting Nelva to turn up at their doorstep to arrest them. Really, she had.
She just didn't... didn't want to have to make eye contact with people right now. That always led to greetings, and the greetings led to gossip, and she hadn't yet found a way to gracefully extricate herself from those improptu meetings in the middle of the street.
Well, nobody would be out in the heat of noontime, anyway. Zana randomly grabbed a summer robe and let the lid of her clothes chest fall shut with a resounding thud.
She should probably tidy up her room before she went out; the thought of Prila doing it made her fur bristle. Zana returned to her bed and began to scoop up the scrolls that lay scattered at the foot of the mattress and on the floor. A lot of them were only half-read; whenever she came to a passage that spelled too loudly that the author had never waded through a stream, or hid in a thorny thicket to let a patrol pass by, or stumbled in terror through the underbrush, the sounds of hooves and the heavy snorts of horses almost above her...
... anyway...
Some of these stories were simply not captivating enough. She'd probably continue with them later, if she was out of The Rogue's adventures, and had nothing better to fill her time with. Until then...
Zana looked around, clutching the heap of half-opened scrolls, searching for a place to store them. She finally decided to simply dump them into an empty wicker basket.
The sight of too many bent and crumpled scrolls stuffed into a too-small container reminded her of Felga's archive, and that memory brought up all kinds of complicated feelings. She'd roll them up later, maybe put some marker ribbons in them, sort them by author, or in the order she intended to read them.
The door downstairs opened, and the sound of heavy boots and muffled voices filtered up to her as she stared at the basket. It was one of Galen's town practice days; patients with their owners would be coming and going all day. The surgery was well-frequented. People appreciated a good doctor, even for their animals. Galen had really made a new life for himself here.
And for her, too, yes, but what kind of life had she made for herself? She and Galen both agreed that her former position as a human behavioral analyst was too unique to take up again — not that Chubla had any scientific institutions in the first place. The shelter had been the closest thing to her former work in Cesaria's zoological institute, but even if Aska hadn't been such a little monkey, it still wouldn't have been paid work.
Her gaze fell on the typewriter huddling under a dust covering on the corner table. Galen had suggested that she could work for the Northern Gazette, and the memory made her curl her hands into fists. Yes, she had talked about Ugon's typewriter a lot, maybe too much, but that hadn't meant she wanted to follow in Felga's footsteps. Or join the police force, as Rogan had suggested, just because she had exposed her murderer. Well, at least with him it had been clear that he meant it as a joke. Galen had been serious, and she didn't understand why that annoyed her more than Rogan's teasing.
She wasn't an investigator, neither for the paper nor the police. She was a scientist, and now she'd never be able to work as one. All because she had refused to become an accessory in a politically motivated murder scheme — even if nobody but herself would call it murder.
Zana sat heavily down on the still-unmade bed. Zaius hadn't wanted to kill Alan and Peet for escaping the institute; he had wanted to erase the reality of having to deal with offworld humans who challenged apekind's preconceptions about humans, and about their place in society. She had made the right decision back then, but oh, at what price?
They were both gone now, looking for a way home, and she couldn't blame them for wishing to escape this world that would never treat them as anything but slaves, but everything seemed so pointless now. She had lost her life's work, her home, her... her baby...
I'm not crying, I'm not crying, because it's stupid, it's pointless. You're not going to cry, Zana...
... I don't even have my own name anymore.
And that last thought did make the tears well up. Zana, spark of lightning. It was as if she had lost all her fire when she'd had to give up the name.
She had nothing now, but had she ever had something meaningful in the first place? The girls at the shelter, Zorya herself even, didn't look at the humans the way she did. Nobody did, and nobody had back in the City, either, and she suddenly realized that her position as an animal behaviorist for humans had been so unique because Zaius had created it for her — just like he had made sure that she'd get the assignment to find out Alan's and Peet's origin and motivations.
Had he created that position as a favor for Father? The thought made her wince with embarrassment. She looked at her former self as if through Zatis' far-viewer: and what she saw now was a foolish girl, self-involved and self-important, who had been given a round pen with toddlers to play with—
— she'd been no better than those girls at the shelter.
Is that why they're grinding my gears so?
She saw now what a fool she had been then. She had thought her work would change something, something profound in how the public related to humans, and that it would happen in her lifetime, and that she would bring on that change single-handedly, with her work.
A pipe-dream, as Peet would've called it. Nobody would change their stance towards humans; not because they could't see that humans were intelligent and self-aware, but because they didn't want to. Ape society was founded on the exploitation and enslavement of humans.
Everyone knew it. They just didn't care.
The realization stopped her tears; for a long moment, Zana silently stared into thin air, too stunned to move. How could she have failed to see it before? It was so clear, so undeniable...
If she wanted to change anything for the humans, the way to go about it wasn't one of science. Zana eyed her typewriter. Maybe she should write pamphlets... maybe even a book: 'Human: The Fourth Ape'...
... but she couldn't. She couldn't draw attention to herself.
Urko had won: he had wiped her out as completely as if he had really killed her.
With a deep sigh, Zana dried the tears that had flown anew after she had realized her utter defeat. This was the other reason she devoured The Rogue stories: they kept her from thinking too much about her own, completely powerless existence.
She leaned across the bed to fish a torn-up scroll from her candy bowl. She still had no idea what to do with the day that was looming before her, but the room was almost tidy now, so she could as well put the scroll into the fire basket down in the kitchen. Maybe fill up her bowl with some candied cherries while she was already there, and see if Prila had made fresh lemonade...
She made it to the kitchen without running into either Prila or Galen, which was a relief. There was, indeed, fresh lemonade in the cooling box, and she greedily downed a whole glass. It was cold enough to distract her, and calmed her overheated mind.
When she bent down to toss her scroll into the kindling basket, her eyes fell on a brightly colored scrap of paper poking out from the thin slices of wood that Prila used to start the oven in the morning. Curious, she pulled it out to see what it was.
It was... a pamphlet, and for a moment, her fur rose at the synchronicity — hadn't she just thought about writing pamphlets herself? But when she started reading, the sensation subsided; it was just an advertisement for some traveling circus, and Zana had no interest in having her future read from chicken bones, or to gawk at a minature trapeze number where the artists were supposedly fleas.
She tossed the paper back into the basket, and went to fill her bowl with candied cherries and oranges, then, out of a vague feeling of guilt for spending another day with nothing but reading and snacking on sweets, checked the water reservoir of the cooling box, and decided to top it up before going upstairs. The cooling box consisted of unglazed earthenware, and only worked as long as it was kept moist. Zana was sure that there was a scientific explanation for that, but neither Prila nor Galen had known what it was. Prila didn't care, as long as it did work, and Galen pointed out that his expertise was medicine, not engineering.
Alan could've explained it to her, but he had been preoccupied with other things while he had still been here, and she hadn't dared to ask him.
She missed him.
The door burst open, and Prila came in carrying a mop and a bucket, busy as always. "Are you going out today, Mila? Don't forget to take a parasol, it's already dreadfully hot outside!"
"Maybe later," Zana said vaguely, "it really is too hot right now to go anywhere." She glanced at her candy bowl.
"Oh, that's good! Then I can show you how to clean and disinfect the doctor's tools," Prila beamed. She rushed past Zana to put her cleaning tools away, and thus didn't see her grimacing. "That's something a doctor's wife needs to know how to do," her voice sounded from the hallway. "And I'm old — I won't be around forever, you know, dear?"
Zana was sure that Prila intended to be around forever, and was just using this as an excuse to put the lazy housewife to work, but before she could think of a good riposte, Prila was back with a tray full of syringes and unidentified metal tools. She shoved it into Zana's hands, and Zana took it by reflex, before it could fall to the floor; the syringes were made of glass, and wouldn't have survived the impact.
"Once we're done with these," Prila announced, "I'll show you how to make pills and plasters. I don't feel comfortable with the doctor letting that human healer do them; it's not right to give them ideas, don't you agree?"
Yes, Zana thought bitterly as she followed Prila down the hallway, they'll never change their stance towards humans. It's hopeless, and I finally need to grow up.
Half an atseht later, Zana knew one thing with absolute certainty: she'd never be a good doctor's wife.
They were in the second laundry room, which had been dedicated to the care and storage of Galen's instruments. Prila had her take the syringes apart, clean them — one by one, to avoid breakage — in soapy water, then rinse them off thoroughly, and put them in perforated metal containers that Prila then stacked in a huge pot on the oven where they were boiled in clear water to sterilize them. The heat of the oven, added to the heat of a summer's day at noon, turned the laundry room into a steaming jungle and made Zana gasp for air.
It wasn't just the syringes that had to be boiled, Prila explained to her — the doctor insisted that everything he used had been sterilized: the linen sheets that he used to cover his operating table and the patients with, the gauze that covered his instruments until he used them, the bandages, the cotton swabs... everything.
"He's so meticulous," Prila gushed. "Not even doctor Egvon does this, and he's an ape doctor! But I s'pose it's that new science they teach down in the South now. 'twas high time someone brought it to Chubla, too!"
No, Zana thought grimly while she rinsed another batch of glass cylinders in blistering hot water, it's very old science, things that Alan and his ancient book on human surgery taught him — you know, the humans that you despise so much. But it was too hot in the laundry room to argue with Prila; it was so hot and humid that Zana seriously contemplated taking off her robe and working in the fur, like the Mothers had made her, hopefully scandalizing Prila enough to send her up to her room.
Once the metal boxes had been boiled for a time, Prila fished them out with wooden tongs and lined them up on a drying rack over yet another stove in the adjacent storage room, rattling them once in a while to make sure that all the water in them evaporated through the punched holes. Zana had no idea how Prila determined when the contents of the box had dried completely, since they weren't allowed to open the boxes again to look inside; but at one point, the perforated box was put into another metal box — one without holes — and sealed shut.
"The doctor will still soak them in hard cider before he uses them," Prila said, beaming with pride. "Can't be cautious enough not to contaminate them things."
The needles were even worse. They, too, had to be boiled in soapy, then in clean water, but you also had to thread a thin wire through each of them to make sure that no substance was still sticking to their hollow insides. Zana firmly told herself that the only substances would be Galen's medicines, not blood or other bodily fluids, but she still shuddered every time the wire emerged coated with some unidentifiable film.
And she repeatedly pricked her fingertips, although it thankfully only happened after the needles had been boiled.
Prila took it upon herself to sharpen the points, which Zana didn't mind at all. She still had to sort the needles into their containers — these were then put into the oven, to be sterilized in dry heat.
"The doctor didn't have to do surgery today," Prila said while stacking the hot boxes onto the tray that Zana was holding, "so I can't show you the other instruments, but they're cleaned just the same. But we need to stock up on blistering plasters, and our pills against constipation are also running out—"
"And I'd love to see how it's done, but I have an appointment at the shelter, and I'm already running late," Zana said hastily. She felt as if she'd faint from the heat any moment. There was no way she'd ever submit herself to this torture again, doctor's wife or not. In the unlikely event that Prila really retired one day, she'd have to find someone else to train for this task; Zana was fiercely determined that she'd not play maidservant to Galen, their cover be damned.
She fled upstairs to change into a fresh robe, and splashed her face and hands with cold water. Then she grabbed her handbag and her wallet and raced out of the door.
The heat hit her like a hammer, and for a moment, she couldn't see anything against the sun's glare. Zana steadied herself against the wall and squinted her eyes shut. She had forgotten her parasol.
She didn't dare going back inside to get it. She'd keep to the shadows and pray that she'd make it to the shelter before she got a sun stroke.
Her determination melted quickly in the heat, though, and when she discovered a small shop selling parasols and fans, she ducked inside without a second thought. After all, a woman could never have enough robes, parasols, and hand fans — or so she'd heard.
The shop also sold toys and other knickknack targeted at children. Zana stopped at a display of chalk paints. Her own little humans back at the institute had loved drawing and painting. They had drawn pictures of her, crude and yes, primitive, but with so much unrestrained enthusiasm and love...
She felt a sharp, stabbing pain behind her breastbone. The heat, it had to be the heat. Maybe she'd have a glass of lemonade on her way to the shelter first.
Zana bought a small red metal bucket filled with chalk crayons in every available color, an assortment of colored clays, and a set of orange-sized fabric balls and wooden rings. Maybe, if she could entice the ape girls into participating in the games, she could sneak in a bit of education for the human children, too.
The last stretch of the road to the shelter turned into a dirt track that blessedly ran under a thick canopy, shielding Zana from the pounding heat. Even so, she had to step off the track and into the cover of the underbrush to open her robe and let the breeze tear away some of the heat that had accumulated under it. Decency be damned; she felt as if she would faint any moment.
Maybe that Purity movement down South has gotten some things right, she thought, letting the soft breeze ruffle her fur. Even if they got all other things completely wrong... But maybe we should get rid of those robes and return to the old ways, at least during the summer.
The humans in the shelter seemed to have come to the same conclusion, she saw when she walked through the gates: the men wore nothing but a loincloth, and the women little more. Zana would've bet that those last vestiges of decency had been insisted on by their handlers, and more for the sake of the girls' fragile souls than out of any concern that the humans would fall into a rutting frenzy the moment they were exposed to the sight of each other's genitals. On the other hand, it was true that humans didn't have seasons of heat, and did mate year-round, and did produce a lot of offsprings...
Zana remembered the Purity movement's spaying campaign that Galen had told her about, and felt slightly ill. If clothing them curbed some of the humans' mating urges, she'd absolutely support it over mutilating them. Even in this heat.
The Drey, half-buried in the ground, would be cool; at least the smaller children would be there. And if she was lucky, Aska would have to tend to some upper-class daughter's duties in her parents' house, or simply find the weather too hostile to come here today.
If not, the heat had made Zana cranky enough to deal with the brat. In theory, she shouldn't judge the girl so harshly; as the daughter of the equally intolerable Dr. Egvon, she probably had that attitude instilled in her from birth. Apparently, Galen had had a few encounters with the father, and they seemed to have been just as unpleasant as Zana's interactions with the daughter, although he hadn't told her much, just rolled his eyes and sighed expressively.
Luckily, Aska was nowhere to be seen when Zana entered the Drey, though Zana was absolutely positive that the deep breath she drew wasn't owed to that fact, but only to the blessed coolness of the room.
"Hello, Vilka," she greeted the supervising girl, a quiet young Chimp whose relationship to Aska she had not yet figured out. Vilka mostly kept to herself and her protegés, and avoided openly taking sides. Of course, that meant she could also be a particularly nasty surprise, if she decided to show her true colors eventually.
"Hello Mila," Vilka said, glancing at the bags in Zana's hands. "Aren't you hot? The weather is awful today."
"I'm dying," Zana said truthfully. "If I'd known it'd be this hot, I'd probably not have come, but I discovered this adorable little shop, and thought of you and your cubbies. Look!" She bent down and started unpacking, and after a moment's hesitation, Vilka crouched down beside her to have a better look. The little humans, intrigued by their strange behavior, soon joined them.
"I thought we could maybe play a few games," Zana offered when Vilka picked up one of the rings and turned it over in her hands. "Something to pass the time until it gets cooler outside." She sneaked a crayon to the little human beside her without taking her eyes off Vilka, who didn't seem to notice, or to care.
"Well, how do you play with these?" the girl wondered, and Zana hurried to explain the rules. She wouldn't breathe a word about teaching speed, endurance, and coordination, or the far more important social skills of cooperation and tactical understanding — and not a word of enriched environments or creative and tactile stimulation when Vilka would eventually turn her attention to the clays and crayons. She had learned her lesson: the humans were not to be educated in any way. Let it all be just a game, then; as long as she was allowed to subtly direct its flow from the sidelines, she could at least do some good.
The children were ecstatic, taking to the game with natural grace and a surprising quick grasp of its tactical challenges. Vilka and some of the other girls were playing just as enthusiastically, and after a while, Zana quietly dropped out of the game and joined the huddle of children who were too young, too shy, or too slow to enjoy the wild chase in the center of the drey.
"Look, all those clays have different colors," she said to a chubby little girl, and gently plucked the yellow lump from her fingers before she could eat it, "but they taste awful, honest!" She smiled at the other children looking on, including everyone with her next question. "Which color do you like best?"
They all stared at her. Finally, a small boy with an adorably piebald face — freckles, Alan had called it — pointed a finger at the red clay. "Dis one!"
"I like this color, too," Zana nodded. "Do you know what it's called?"
"Red!" the boy said triumphantly.
"That's right! Do any of you know other things that are red?" Zana changed from her crouched position into a cross-legged seat, feeling her shoulders relax. This was almost like back in the institute, back home...
"An apple!" a girl shouted.
"Director Zorya's fur!" — "That's not red, that's orange, dummy!" — "No, it's not!"
"Well, you can say orange is a shade of red," Zana tried to quell the argument before it got out of hand. "But it's not exactly like the color of this clay, it's true. So both of you are right, in a way."
Neither of the children looked convinced, or placated, and Zana decided it'd be better to move on to the green clay. "What's the name of this color? Does anyone know?"
"What is this? Are you pretending to be a teacher again?"
Zana felt her teeth click together in her mouth, hard and too fast to stop herself. She jumped to her feet, fur bristling, to face her nemesis who had sneaked up behind her and was now towering over the children, arms akimbo.
"No more than you are pretending to be the manager of this place," she ground out. "Zorya invited me to help out here, in case you'd forgotten."
"Director Zorya made me the supervisor of this cohort," Aska said icily, "which means that you do have to run your little experiments by me before you inflict them on my helpless cubs. Unless, of course, you have the director's permission, but I don't think to bothered asking her, did you?" A nasty little smile spread on her face when Zana didn't answer, but she didn't wait for an answer.
Instead, she abruptly turned to Vilka. "Collect this stuff and put it outside, Vilka. And then you and I will have a talk about allowing unauthorized activities to take place as soon as I turn my back for a moment." She made a shooing motion to the silent children. "You, scatter."
The children fled; Aska jumped and grabbed a little girl by the arm to wrench a lump of light blue clay from her chubby fingers. "Give that to me!"
The girl had no chance against the Chimp's strong fingers. Aska slapped the clay into Vilka's hand, ignoring the wailing child. "What are you waiting for? Get to it!"
Vilka crouched down and hugged the crying little girl. "Do it yourself, if you think it's that important," she said, and turned around, the still hiccuping toddler on her hip. "I'm here to take care of the cubs."
"You do that, Aska," Zana said sweetly. "Meanwhile, I'll have a little talk with the director. So helpful of you to remind me of it." She turned just as abruptly as Vilka, and strode to the exit. She had to get away before she slapped that smug little monkey.
The afternoon heat hit her with full force again when she stepped outside, making her heart race even more. Zana suddenly realized that her hands were clenched into fists, and unclenched them with some effort. She'd had those encounters with Aska every time she had come here, and every time she'd complained about her to Zorya, the director had found excuses and explanations, and appealed to her greater age and maturity. It would just be like that again today.
I shouldn't have listened to Galen. It was a mistake to come back here.
The last thought brought a sudden cold clarity. Yes, it had been a mistake to think she could find a place here if only she tried often enough. But simply staying away had been a mistake, too. If she broke with this project — admitted that it had been an empty promise from the start — she would make it a clear break.
The tightness around her chest dissolved; she took a deep, easy breath. Even the sun didn't burn so hot anymore. Zorya's office was just across the exercise field. She'd be in and out in no more than half an ahtset, and then she'd go home.
As she strode across the field, she refused to think about what she'd do with herself then.
Zorya's office was in a part of the building that was shaded by trees almost all day, and thus blessedly cool even at noon. Now, with the sun already low over the horizon, Zorya had opened both windows to let the hay-scented air fan the room. Golden stripes of sunlight gleamed on the polished top of her desk and lit fiery sparks in her red fur. It was such a peaceful scene that Zana stopped involuntarily in the door frame; save for the smell of tobacco, this could've been Zaius' office. They both even had the same penchant for potted ferns. Maybe it was an Orangutan thing.
"Mila, what a surprise!" Zorya seemed to be genuinely happy to see her. "I haven't seen you here for a long time."
The friendly greeting was wasted on Zana, who was still overheated both from the outside weather and from her recent clash with Aska. "Well, I haven't been very welcome here," she said and sat down on the chair opposite Zorya's desk without waiting for an invitation. "As you know."
Zorya sighed. "Is this about Aska again? You shouldn't stoop down to the level of a schoolgirl, Mila..."
"It wasn't me who made that schoolgirl your second-in-command," Zana snapped, "but that is neither here nor there. I want to find a solution for this situation, Zorya, and I want to believe that you do, too."
"Well, of course I want to find a solution," Zorya said, slightly indignant, "but what do you expect me to do? Throw her out? On what grounds? I would've thought that a grown woman would've found a solution on her own by now."
"She's interfering with my every move here, wielding the authority that you gave her," Zana said with forced calm. "So I'm afraid it is your problem, too, Director. And I would ignore her, but all the other girls obey her orders, so if they usher the children out of the room, there's nobody left to play with." She consciously didn't use the word teach; Zorya had made it clear before that she regarded the humans as nothing but animals — smart, yes, but not on the level of apes. Sending a human to school was an outlandish thought to the Orang-utan. "She's sabotaging me, because she knows you're turning a blind eye to it, Zorya!"
The other woman opened her mouth, but Zana wasn't done yet. "We've been through this again and again, and I'm tired of going in circles, so I'm asking you this: do you want me here?"
"Yes, of course I do! I wouldn't have invited you if I didn't!"
Then why don't you support me?
But the thought that pushed to the forefront and jumped from her lips, surprising even herself, was, "But I no longer want to be here, I think."
There was a moment of silence; Zorya fussed with the scrolls on her desk and avoided Zana's eyes. "I... that... I didn't expect that," she finally murmured. "I'm very sorry to hear that, Mila. I wouldn't have thought that a young girl like Aska could chase you off like that. I know she's not easy to handle, but—"
"It's not Aska," Zana interrupted her. "I'm not sure the shelter wants my kind of help, it seems... it seems you and I have very different ideas of what 'help' for the humans looks like."
Zorya's gaze jumped up, a piercing stare that startled Zana. "What do you mean?"
"Well..." The words that had come so easily the evening before, when she had poured her heart out to Galen, now deserted her. She tried to find the thread of her reasoning again.
"I see no efforts to reintegrate them into society. They are treated very well here, but none of them move into the human villages, for example. Or are adopted by a simian household. They don't learn any new skills here, from what I could see..."
"A lot of these humans have been severely traumatized by their former owners, or by the district-appointed overseers," Zorya interrupted her. "What they need, and what they're getting here at the shelter, isn't yet another skill to make them useful to an ape! They need to heal, Mila, and not worry about being thrown to the bushcats once they get better!"
She seemed to be genuinely upset, and Zana's rightful anger deflated. "Of course they do," she murmured. "And I didn't mean to groom them for sale, it's just, humans like to learn new things! They're curious, they're inventive, they like to explore, and forgive me, Zorya, but yours are bored out of their minds!"
Zorya sighed. "You could be right about that. But if even I misunderstood you, it's no wonder that Aska and the girls did, too." She rose and went to the window, leaning heavily on the sill as she stared across the exercise field.
Zana didn't break the thoughtful silence. She felt wrung out, hot under her robe, and close to tears. It had been an awful day, in a long row of awful days. Sometimes she wished she had left with Alan and Peet... Sometimes she felt that she'd become unable to live a normal, settled life anymore.
"Maybe what we need is a demonstration of your ideas," Zorya broke the silence, turning to face Zana again. "That's always better than words, words can be misunderstood so easily. I have a very special case here in the shelter, and I think you'd be perfect as his caretaker."
I'm pleased to tell you that I have procured some adults for you to work with.
"A very special case, hm?" Zana said warily.
"Yes." Zorya hurried back to her desk. "About a year ago, someone dropped a young human at our gates, in the middle of the night, and left. No note, no nothing, and the human didn't talk. We discovered that he had a nasty throat injury when we had him examined by doctor Ropal the following morning, so of course everyone assumed that was the reason he was mute — that he simply hurt too much when he tried to speak. But he also refused to even sign a yes or no when we asked him about what had happened. And nobody came to claim him, either. He has no brand, it's impossible to find out where he came from or what had happened to him."
"I think you mentioned him to me once, when I came to you to seek help for one of my own humans," Zana said, fascinated against her will.
"Could be, could be. In any case, nothing has changed since we got him — he still won't talk, and Aska and the other girls have long given up on him, and so he's simply roaming the grounds. I think he feels quite at home here, because he never tried to run away; he even helps a bit with work around the compound — on his own accord; he doesn't take directions from anyone." Zorya shook her head. "He keeps to himself. He doesn't even seek out the company of our humans, and they completely ignore him, too. Nobody can figure him out."
"And you think I can figure out your 'special case'?" Zana grumbled. "It sounds more like an 'impossible case' to me."
"Well, look at it this way — you won't have to worry about interference from Aska, or from anyone," Zorya pointed out.
Yes, because nobody cares one way or the other if I mess up this boy even more. "I don't think I'm qualified to try my hand at this case of yours," Zana said, and rose. "But it seems he found a good home here."
Zorya folded her hands under her chin and looked up to her with clear regret written on her face. "I want you to know that if you change your mind about this, Mila, you're always welcome back here!"
"I know. Thank you, Zorya."
Zana made sure to close the door softly behind her; and still the click sounded loud and final, and the relief she had hoped for didn't come.
For a moment she stood outside the building, fighting an overwhelming sense of having made a mistake. It wasn't a mistake; Zorya herself had shot down her vision of what a human shelter should provide to its protegés, and she wasn't qualified to mentor a severely traumatized human — not after it had become clear to her that Zaius had simply humored her father when he created the position of a 'human behavioral scientist'. She wasn't a scientist; she had never been one.
She slowly walked across the exercise field, back to the Drey, to pick up the toys that Vilka had deposited just outside the entrance on Aska's orders. Maybe Prila would take them home to give them to her grandchildren. It would be a waste to leave them here.
She stopped short when she saw a human examining the clays and crayons. He hadn't noticed her yet; his attention was fixed on the heap of discarded gifts she had brought.
Zana guessed that he had just entered puberty; he had the tall and gangly, slightly disporportionate build of a sudden growth spurt, and even the light shadow of a beard trying to grow on his cheeks, but not yet the muscular frame of a full-grown male. If his height was any indictation, he'd be an impressive specimen one day. His long hair — why didn't he have it shorn, like the rest of them? — had an unusual reddish-yellow tint, noticeably different from the flaxen color of Alan's hair, but just as striking.
She missed Alan with a fierce pain all of a sudden.
The boy jerked back and whirled around to face her, and Zana gasped involuntarily when she saw a bright-pink scar covering his throat, almost as wide as her hand; an ugly patch of cauliflower-like flesh, as if he had been badly burned there.
At her gasp, the boy threw his head back like a wild horse, and began to move along the wall of the Drey, away from her. He kept his gaze on her as if he expected her to charge at him, but Zana was rooted to the spot, dumbstruck by the ferocity in his eyes. She had always thought that Alan and Peet were the only true wild humans she'd ever met, humans who had never been tamed by an ape. But now she realized that she had been mistaken.
Alan and Peet were the only free humans she had ever met; unspoiled by any ape, but still cultured, civilized. Only theirs had been a culture and a civilization that had been completely alien to Zana, impossible to even imagine.
This human was wild; a savage who had only known pain from the apes, and nothing, no guidance, no formation, from his fellow humans. He was only steered by his own instincts, and those instincts made him wary of her — understandably so.
This is the 'very special case' that Zorya thought I should handle? She didn't know if she should feel flattered or offended.
"You can have the clays and the crayons, if you want them," she said before she knew what she was doing. "And all the other things lying there, too. They're free for the taking."
The boy stopped his crab-like crawl away from her; his gaze wavered between her and the heap of toys, a clear longing in his eyes.
"Take them," Zana encouraged him. "I brought them here, and I say you can have them."
He pondered her offer, his eyes lingering on the crayons. Then he looked at her, studying her face for a long moment, and Zana felt a jolt go through her. The boy's eyes were a stormy gray, not Peet's dark brown, but somehow, it was as if she had found him again. The same mixture of defiance and vulnerability, and a savage streak underneath it all.
The boy pushed away from the wall and ran across the exercise field, in a gangly trot that was nothing like Peet's graceful run, and yet... and yet.
Zorya didn't look at all surprised when Zana opened the door to her office.
"That special case of yours — does he have a name?"