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Andy wouldn’t tell her where they were going. Nile asked her when she brusquely bundled Nile into the car with no explanation, and again when they left town, but Andy only smiled enigmatically. Like the Mona Lisa with sunglasses and a better haircut. She was so deliberately casual on the drive out – light topics only, getting to know each other without touching on anything too heavy or too raw – that Nile began to suspect there was a mission waiting for them, some kind of job that Andy didn’t want Joe and Nicky to know about. After about an hour, they pulled into a large parking lot. A large parking lot attached to –
“ – a zoo? We’re going to a zoo?”
Andy grinned. “This is a really good one. I used to hate them, sad animals in small cages, but they’re great now.” She unbuckled her seatbelt and reached for the door handle, but Nile’s hand on her arm stopped her.
“We’re here to rescue illegally-trafficked exotic animals?”
“What? No.”
“There’s some weird evil scientist shit going on behind the scenes?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Andy, why are we here?”
For the first time since their fight on the plane, Andy looked at her like she was a child. “We’re here to enjoy the zoo. We needed to get out of Debrecen for the day. Zoos are fun. What’s the problem?”
“Oh. I thought… never mind. No problem. A zoo, cool, let’s go.” She’d liked going to the one back home, the few times she’d gone. It felt like stepping into another reality, like a movie, to be near these animals that she’d only ever seen on screen, in a setting so unlike her daily life. Her life lately had been an entirely different kind of unreality; even the most exotic animals would feel comfortably familiar.
Andy watched her curiously as they got out of the car, but otherwise seemed willing to let it go. "Come on, they've got English translations for everything, you can skip language classes today."
After Andy obtained tickets and maps (conversing in Hungarian, Nile noticed) they stood a little out of the way to get their bearings. "Anything you want to see first? Or just wander? They've got some shows, I think. Sea lions doing tricks, watching sharks get fed. If you're into that. Are you?" Andy looked at her, calculating and assessing. "You don't seem like someone who roots for the killer in a nature film." In fact Nile had a vivid early memory of watching a documentary as a small child and crying when the baby deer was killed. She wasn't sure if Andy's perception felt like closeness or a violation.
"Yeah, I think we can skip that." She scanned the map, still a bit bemused by where she found herself. "Um, tigers maybe? We didn't have tigers in Chicago.” She’d been a little afraid of tigers as a child, but Shere Khan himself would look like a teddy bear to her now.
“Which one?” Andy pointed to two illustrations on the map. “Siberian tiger or white tiger? Siberian’s at the far end, we could start there and work our way back.” How many times had Andy come here, that she knew the place so well?
Nile picked the white tiger, in the middle of the zoo, out of a strange stubborn desire to feel like she wasn’t ceding all control over the day. She kept close to Andy as they navigated the paths, staying on Andy's left and a little ahead of her. She'd been healing remarkably well, according to Nicky, but she didn't need some random tourist jostling her wound. Their eyes met once, when Nile turned to check their six, and it was clear she knew what Nile was doing. But she didn't object, and she didn't move out in front, so Nile considered it settled.
"How many tigers would you say you've gotten up close and personal with?" Nile asked as they passed India House. "Rough estimate. I'm all excited to see one in a zoo, but you've probably petted one. Right?"
Andy let out a bark of surprised laughter. "Petted a tiger? Just because my hand would grow back doesn't mean I wanted to lose it. Anyway wild tigers don’t really want to deal with humans. They mostly didn't want to be seen, so I mostly didn't see them. Quỳnh always said that the tiger you can’t see is far more dangerous than the tiger you can. I was just happy to be left alone.”
“But you’ve got some stories, right? Punching a shark? Hugging a bear? Picking up a cobra? Doing things everyone thinks about, but you could actually get away with it.”
"Oh, you're talking about the ‘dumbshit phase’."
"Excuse me?"
"The ‘dumbshit phase’. Sorry, that’s the best I can do in English. We all go through it.” They drifted to a halt near a rhinoceros. “Look, right now you know in your head that you're immortal. Eventually, you'll know it in your heart, in your bones. You'll forget what it even feels like to fear death. And that's when you start being a dumbshit."
"You mean reckless?"
"No, I mean literally as dumb as shit. Reckless is walking too close to the edge of a cliff. Dumbshit is jumping off a cliff for no other reason than to know what it feels like."
"Or wrestling a crocodile just to see if you can win."
"Exactly."
"How long does this go on?"
Andy shrugged. "Depends on the person. How long it lasts, the things you do, what makes it stop... At some point you decide that even if you heal quickly, you still don't like being in pain. For me, I got annoyed by what it did to my clothes." She looked at Nile sharply. "Next time you pray, thank your buddy for mass-produced clothes." Nile sighed. Well, it was better than the last time Nile's faith came up. Baby steps.
"What about the others?"
"Quỳnh and I went dumbshit at the same time." Though her eyes were sad, she was smiling. And her sadness wasn't haunted, the way it had been at the church. "I never felt like that when it was just me. But with her... fuck, we were a mess. She didn't really rein it in till Lykon came along. It upset him. And Lykon... I think he was a little embarrassed about it. He was the baby, and he wanted to be one of the big kids. So he pulled himself out of it faster than we had."
Nile wondered when Andy had last talked about Lykon. When they'd first met, she'd carried her age like a burden. She was so much lighter now. Beyond just being happy for Andy’s sake, it had been deeply reassuring for Nile to see millennia of memories bringing joy rather than only pain.
“What about Joe and Nicky? I can’t really picture Nicky doing stuff like that.” Joe had gone off the roof and swung into Merrick’s penthouse window, a sight she still regretted not seeing. Joe as a reckless daredevil was easier to imagine.
But Andy just snorted. “That’s only because you haven’t had a chance to get to know him well. Trust me, Nicky’s dumb shit was spectacularly dumb. He and Joe kept trying to outdo and impress each other. But then also they hated seeing each other get hurt. It was brief but intense.”
The next name on the list was obvious, and sat in the conversation like a landmine. Andy, as usual, went in first. “You could argue that Booker is still in his dumbshit phase.” She sounded only a little strained, but she also turned away and resumed walking.
Nile hesitated; this was the first time any of them had spoken to her about Booker since they left him behind. She desperately wanted to talk about it, but just as desperately didn’t want to say the wrong thing. “He didn’t seem like he was having much fun with it.”
“Yeah, well, like I said. Different for everyone.”
Andy’s sudden departure had taken them off the main path toward the white tiger, but Nile didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure if Andy was actually upset or just didn’t want to talk about Booker, and she didn’t particularly care what route they took. “Are those snow leopards?” She gestured for Andy to join her. “I’m telling you now, I don’t care if it takes a thousand years, I am going to pet one of those. Look how fluffy they are!”
By the time Nile had finished gushing over the snow leopards and moved on to cooing at the red pandas, Andy’s mood had lightened. They meandered toward the African section of the zoo, where Nile confessed that she had called meerkats “Timons” through most of elementary school. And then had to explain The Lion King to Andy. This expanded to a more general tutorial on Disney movies when they noticed that the walkway around the area was called “Tarzan’s Trail.” (Nile only had to fill her in on the modern movies — Andy had seen Snow White in its original run.)
The trail took them high enough around the central clearing that they could feed the giraffes; a couple of families were already gathered at the railing, children digging in bags of zoo-provided treats. Andy pulled her own bag out of a voluminous jacket pocket and came to a stop a few feet farther along. She looked positively gleeful when she was able to coax a giraffe away from the crowd.
Nile watched her expertly avoid the (frankly alarmingly long) questing tongue to get a pellet into the animal’s mouth. “You really like them, huh?”
“More than that, I respect them.” Nile looked at her quizzically; it was hard to imagine respecting something that was so determinedly waggling its tongue at you. Andy handed over another pellet. “They were my greatest failure. I’ve had a soft spot for them ever since.”
“Failure to do what? You said you didn’t do any stupid animal stuff.”
“No I didn’t. I said I didn’t mess with predators.”
“So you messed with herbivores instead? That doesn’t sound like being a dumbshit, that’s almost more like bullying.” She supposed if it was possible to respect an animal as ridiculous-looking as a giraffe, it should also be possible to bully an animal three times your height. And if anyone could manage it, Andromache the Scythian could.
Andy just shrugged, unbothered by the accusation. “I didn’t hurt them. I just wanted to see if I could ride them.”
“Ride, like riding a horse?”
“Yeah, I figured, why limit myself?”
Nile remembered Joe mentioning, in their first awkward days together, that he thought Andy might predate the domestication of horses, that it might actually have been her people who started the whole thing. Nile had looked it up at the first opportunity and then spent half an hour shaking and staring at the wall. Andy’d said, “too old,” and Booker had said, “she says she doesn’t remember,” but if Joe was right, then Andy was… even weeks later she shied away from the thought.
“And you tried to ride a giraffe? How did you even get up there?”
“We climbed trees. Me and Quỳnh, I mean. To about this height.” She gestured at the elevated walkway. “And then we just jumped.”
Nile focused past the tongue at the humped, sloping back. “And then…?”
“We fell off. And got stepped on. Painfully. We tried it a few times, over the years. Never made it.”
“And now you respect them, because they beat you.”
“Something like that.” Andy seemed way too self-satisfied for someone who’d just confessed to repeatedly falling off giraffes.
“Wait a minute – if they’re your greatest failure, then you’ve had other failures. How many animals did you try this with?”
Andy looked triumphant, as if she’d been waiting for Nile to ask. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
They continued on Tarzan’s Trail until they saw black and white bodies in the trees. Andy waved her arm like she’d conjured them. “Those bastards confused the hell out of me. They looked like horses, right? But I couldn’t do a thing with them. I even tried raising my own herd. But they don’t act like horses. No, they don’t think like horses. You can’t teach them anything, and they’re mean as hell. I could get on and stay on one of them, eventually, for a little bit. But it was just stubbornness and brute force. No finesse. Definitely not worth all the biting and kicking.”
Her own herd of zebras. Damn. “I’m not sure if that counts as dumbshit or just really obsessive.”
“It can’t be both? Let’s keep going.”
They passed through an area populated by a variety of elegantly-horned antelopes. Andy insisted she’d left them alone. Mostly. “They’re just too fragile. Look at their legs! No, I only ever tried a wildebeest. Oh, and maybe that one.” An eland, as they determined after hunting down some signage.
The end of the African section was a disappointment. The lions were impressive, of course, but… “They only have little ones,” Andy grumbled. “I thought they had regular ones.” Nile looked back and forth between her and the pygmy hippos.
“Andy. Andy, please tell me you did not try to ride a hippopotamus.”
“Hey, I didn’t just try. I succeeded. For about four seconds. Not enough for a rodeo, but I still count it.”
“That is definitely dumbshit. What happened?”
Andy winced. “Nothing you want to hear about right before eating. Come on, we’re close to the white tiger and we can grab some food while we’re there.”
Part of the path through the heavily-wooded South American section was a narrow suspended walkway with lattice-enclosed sides. It was wide enough for just one person – and not a large one, at that – and swayed alarmingly underfoot. Andy navigated it with such graceful self-assurance that Nile kept having to remind herself to look at the animals instead.
Shortly thereafter the trail came to earth and was enclosed in some kind of plexiglass, on top as well as along the sides. It all made sense when she saw the jaguar stroll over them. She thought about its casual power, the intense energy behind the languid posture. She imagined it in a cage like the old zoos Andy mentioned. And she remembered Andy and the guys, strapped to tables in a sterile lab. She sometimes doubted herself, late at night when she couldn’t sleep. She’d killed so many people in order to save men who couldn’t die. But also to save Andy. And she couldn’t look at the jaguar without feeling like she’d made the right call.
They spent some time watching the elephants. “I’m not even going to ask,” Nile said. “I already know.”
“Plenty of people have ridden elephants,” Andy said. “The Asian ones, anyway. It didn’t mean much.”
“I noticed, all your stories seem to be about African animals.”
“That’s just how the timing worked out. I didn’t spend much time there when I was on my own. Like I said, Quỳnh and I went dumbshit together. Too late for wooly mammoths, too soon for the Americas and Australia. Who knows what would have happened if I’d seen bison and moose back then. Something ridiculous and bloody.” She laughed, but she also looked a little wistful, like she was sorry she’d never get to be gored by a buffalo.
Nile ran dates through her head. Nicky and Joe would have been at least like 500 years old when they first visited America, but Booker had died in 1812… “Did Booker do anything dumb with bison or moose?”
She regretted asking when Andy went still. “Ask him yourself. You’ll be able to, one day.”
They stood in silence for a while longer. Nile cast about for something to say. Another vague memory from a long-ago documentary surfaced. “You ever go after poachers?”
“Poachers?”
“Yeah.” She gestured toward the elephants with her chin. “Killing elephants for their ivory, or rhinos for their horns. That kind of thing.”
“Nah. The guys doing it are mostly just trying to feed their families, you know? But the people behind the scenes, making the real money … you want to put that on the list, bring it to Copley? We could take them out, I bet.”
She regretted bringing it up; stories were one thing, but Andy was talking about planning a murder. It made Nile a little queasy. “I don’t want to take anyone out. I told you, I can’t be like that. All the things you’ve done… that board was about the people you saved, not the people you killed.”
“You think you can have one without the other? Corporal Freeman? That’s how we save people.”
“Not always, some of the photos he had – "
“You heard about the job he faked for us? That really happens to other girls. You know what those men do to them. How many of the bastards would you be willing to kill, to save a girl from that? And what about the future girls, the ones who’d never be on Copley’s radar because they never got kidnapped at all, because you killed the men who would have done it.”
“I know. I know that. But not always. There are other ways to use what we can do. Like… search and rescue missions that are too dangerous for regular people. We could do that. You’ve done that. We could work with Copley, be strategic, and not have to kill anyone.”
For the first time since the lab, they were squared off against each other. Nile had her chin up, back straight, weight on the balls of her feet. She would fight for this if she had to. It was the one thing she was sure of in the chaos of her new life. The massacre at Merrick’s might have been the right choice, but she wouldn’t let it be her only choice.
But Andy just shrugged and said, “Okay.” She leaned back against the fence, hands in her pockets, fully at ease.
“Okay?”
“What the hell do I know? Not as much as I thought I did a month ago. You’re not wrong, and you don’t have to do what I say.” This was news to Nile, but she was so off-balance from Andy’s agreement that she didn’t pursue it. “Monsoon season’s coming up, if you like that sort of thing. And there’s always people running away, trying to get somewhere safe sailing in a shitty boat. You’re gonna live with what you do next a lot longer than I will. And you know now that you can make the hard choices when you have to.”
“Oh. Well. Okay. When Copley catches up with us – "
“If Copley catches up with us – "
“I’ll ask him about it. Joe and Nicky won’t mind, right?”
Andy got that shrewd look Nile had found so unnerving earlier. “Won’t mind what you’re suggesting, or that you’re suggesting it?”
“They call you ‘boss.’ I’m new.”
“They’ll be delighted.” She put her arm over Nile’s shoulders and steered her back along the path. Even when she stopped directing her, she kept a hand on Nile’s back.
They walked into the oceanarium discussing the logistics of riding a shark. Andy had never even tried, and Nile kept proposing increasingly outlandish strategies that she would certainly use herself when her dumbshit period began. But they both fell silent once inside. Nile felt edgy, uncomfortable, with the giant walls of water on either side of her. She wouldn’t have minded looking down into a pool, or even a display at eye level, but there were things swimming around higher than her head and it made her tense.
When they caught sight of the tunnel, the aquarium extending over people’s heads to create the illusion of being underwater, Nile’s chest tightened painfully and she had to force herself to breathe. She turned and nearly ran for the exit, with Andy keeping pace so smoothly they might have planned this in advance. Andy looked calm and unbothered, but when Nile brushed against her in the doorway, her hand was as cold as the bottom of the ocean.
Finally, after the Siberian tigers, the white tiger, the white lions, a return to the giraffes, the gorillas, the kangaroos, the polar bears, the penguins, the monkey house (“They don’t have my favorite kind,” Andy said, and waited for Nile outside), a sea lion show, more birds than Nile could keep track of, the orangutans, and yet another visit to the giraffes, they were ready to leave. Nile happened to look down and realized with a shock that the shoes she’d worn that day were not really meant for this much walking. Her feet felt fine.
“Hey Nile.” As they walked through the front gate Andy elbowed her in the ribs, but gently, like there was a funny joke coming. “When we first parked. You thought we were here for a job?”
“I mean… maybe? It wouldn’t have been the weirdest thing that’s happened.”
Andy laughed. “Definitely not the weirdest. I can’t even say I’ve never lured someone to a job under false pretenses.” She shot Nile a look that Nile thought probably required a thousand years of shared history to read. “I wouldn’t do that to you, though.”
“Oh sure, for me you just do abduction and head trauma.” She’d been aiming for light and breezy, but it didn’t come out that way at all. An awkward silence ensued. She expected Andy to say something – a joke or a justification. Probably not an apology. Did she even want an apology? This was a woman who’d knocked her out, shot her in the head, broken her arm… she hadn’t thought she was still angry about it, that first day had been drowned out by camaraderie and affection and the overwhelming whirlwind of her new life… but she didn’t seem able to make light of it either.
They got in the car, still not talking. Andy spent a while fiddling with the radio, looking for a station she liked. Nile wondered if Andy was waiting for her to apologize. Just the thought of it made her resentful and defensive. Andy settled on classical music, leaving Nile with nothing to focus on but the confusing stew of her thoughts.
Finally, once they were back on the highway, Andy spoke. “Look, you probably don’t need me telling you this.”
“But you’re gonna tell me anyway?”
“Sure, what the hell. You know the saying about generals always fighting the last war? We’re all going to be treating you the way we wish we’d treated Booker. Which sucks, because that’s got nothing to do with what you need. But we’ll end up doing it anyway. Try not to take it personally.”
It was not where she’d expected the conversation to go. “You wish you’d taken Booker to the zoo?”
“I wish I hadn’t been such a miserable bastard. I wish I hadn’t taught him that the only way to be happy in this life was to be paired up like Joe and Nicky. I wish I’d shown him that there are things to enjoy that don’t come out of a bottle.”
“But you couldn’t have. Right? I mean you were basically still a miserable alcoholic bastard when you brought me in.”
“That’s kind of what I’m saying. We’re bound to get things wrong.” That was probably as close to “I’m sorry I shot you” as Nile was likely to get. She decided she could live with it. Andy continued, “Maybe in a few hundred years, Nicky and Joe will be kicking themselves about not treating you right when you were new, and you’ll tell them that they couldn’t have, they were too caught up in grieving Booker.”
“Huh.” She pondered this for a minute. “I guess… this is only the fifth time you’ve ever done this. If you count Joe and Nicky as one time. And I’m only the second new one for them. I always think of y’all as having done everything a million times. Is there anything else you’ve only done five times?”
“Tried to ride a giraffe.” She laughed and hooked her arm around Nile’s neck, bringing her in for an awkward and uncomfortable side hug. “At least I did better with you than that.”
Nile didn’t even realize she’d fallen asleep until she woke up, sudden and startled and squinting in the unexpected light. The dream had been so short she hadn’t even felt herself drowning – just darkness and fury and madness. She tried to keep her posture casual and glanced surreptitiously over at Andy, to see if she’d noticed Nile’s little nap and correctly guessed the context of her abrupt awakening. But Andy was placidly humming along with the radio, looking totally relaxed. If she’d noticed, she wasn’t following up on it.
As Nile’s awareness of Quỳnh faded and she settled back in her own body, she realized that she was hungry. Ravenous, in fact, despite having eaten a filling if unremarkable meal at the zoo restaurant just a couple of hours ago. It had been like that for weeks now, hitting her out of nowhere. It wasn’t like the appetite she got from exertion; even on lazy days she sometimes needed additional meals. She suspected it had something to do with her new immortality, like her body needed extra calories to fuel the healing. She’d been reluctant to ask the others about it, without quite knowing why. She told herself they’d be back at the house in less than an hour, which was no time at all, but she was so hungry it hurt, in a way that nothing ever hurt anymore.
“Hey.” Andy tapped her shoulder to get her attention, then, without taking her eyes off the road, reached into her jacket pocket and passed over… a Balaton chocolate bar? She must have hit up a vending machine while Nile was in the bathroom. Nile was sure her grumbling stomach wasn’t audible over the music; she wondered how Andy had known.
She had a flash of… not déjà vu exactly, because they weren’t her memories. But she imagined Andy on stakeouts, waiting for a train, sitting up unable to sleep, passing over a cigarette, a sandwich, a water bottle, without looking or needing to be asked, to these men she’d known for centuries. This was what it meant to be one of Andy’s people – not a violation, not being scrutinized. Being known.
Andy waved the bar impatiently, pulling Nile out of her reverie. “Thanks,” she said as she took it. “I mean, kösz .”
She tried to savor rather than inhale the candy, with only moderate success. But it took the edge off, and she was no longer counting the minutes until they got back to the Yellow House. Andy was watching with amusement, so Nile smiled sheepishly and said “kösz ” again. But it felt inadequate. She took a breath, looked back at Andy, and said, very seriously, “köszönöm szépen.”
“Nincs mit.” Andy smiled warmly, like she knew Nile was thanking her for more than the candy. “Egészségedre!”
It might not be much, Nile thought, but it would get her through.