Chapter Four
Forest was seventy-two acres all told, with a hundred and fifty-six extraordinary creatures in eighteen different habitats.
It was the second biggest section in the LEZ, only smaller than Lake, which had over two hundred ECs, skyrocketing to more than three hundred during the thundertoad mating season (the Saturnalia festival of the amphibian world).
Frida spent the day finishing the landscaping of Dragon’s Deep, an impressive enclosure by anyone’s standards: twenty acres of steaming rainforest complete with waterfalls, lakes, palm trees and the merry twittering of tropical birds.
At a toasty forty degrees, Frida, Hamish, and Antony sweated through their uniforms. Frida could kill a spider plant just by looking at it, and Hamish wasn’t much better, but they both loved to watch Antony’s cheeks glow as he feverishly directed them to ‘plant this’, ‘prune that’, and ‘for the love of great Boinayel and Márohu, do not touch those!’
By the time they were done, the enclosure was finished, the lights of the LEZ were starting to dim, and the entrance gates had closed on the last of the guests.
Hamish and Antony had gone home but she was on a roll, well into her second shift, fuelled by twelve – or was it thirteen?
– cups of Watering Hole coffee. The sky was a gorgeous twilit hue, clear as bells.
The evening spotlights had come on, lighting the world with silver, a colour designed to look exactly like moonlight, the very essence of extraordinary.
The zoo shifted to the night-time rustlings, muted howls and the occasional loud fart of a manticore digesting her dinner.
A deep peace came over Frida, reminiscent of the calm she felt when an EC’s warm breath brushed her neck, when the earthy scent of manure and hay settled in her nose, or when she ran her fingers through someone’s silken fur.
The zoo was the only thing that kept her going when her mum had died, but she especially loved these nights when she drove around in her buggy and could convince herself that this was all the world was or needed to be.
Frida was just gearing up to give Issy her final feed of the day.
The willow woods were wafting around them, and Frida was dreaming of the baby dragon, racing towards them through the emerging stars.
Earlier, she’d made the unicorn a gigantic football of griffin feathers, with the aroma of old fish, and Issy was still sheep-dogging it, dodging and swan-diving in an uncoordinated gleeful tumble.
When she inevitably impaled it, she spent a few seconds trying to shake it off her horn before it burst in a spray of gold.
The unicorn stood for a few seconds, gazing down at the mess, heartbroken, before turning her liquid turquoise eyes to Frida.
Frida snorted. ‘What do you think I am? Someone who makes balls for a living?’
Issy gave an optimistic neigh, then started herding Frida towards the feeding station.
A few moments later she was eating with gusto, pausing between bites to gaze up at Frida adoringly, her long muzzle pale in the twilight, her breath smelling of hay and, somehow, moonlight.
Twelve years ago, Issy had been found on the banks of the Thames.
A foal half drowned, with both her back legs broken.
No one had seen another living unicorn for over fifty years.
Nobody could figure out where she’d come from, all they knew was that she was truly an endling, the last of her kind.
Issy was only a Level 2, and that was largely because she often stuck her sharp horn where it wasn’t wanted.
Some of the other ECs were much too dangerous to go inside with.
Level 1 meant: gentle enough to crawl in your shirt and take a nap.
The highest level, Level 8, meant: will rip your head off and eat it.
The new dragon would be a Level 8, the first Level 8 to grace Forest since Frida had been a zookeeper.
The radio at her belt crackled. Frida was trained to listen in for Cliff’s specific boom, and she turned the volume up, raising the radio to her ear.
‘This is Papa Bear. Giving you all an update on the dragon’s ETA. He’s just crossed the Atlantic. I repeat, his plane has just CROSSED THE ATLANTIC!’
Frida squealed. This was really happening.
‘He should be here in two hours!’
Two hours was less time than it took to clean out the manticore’s meat freezer!
The sky was truly black now. A scattering of clouds floated behind the treetops, a few clusters here and there of dark shapes amongst the deeper darkness.
Nothing to worry about. It was peaceful, a few birds in the trees singing their nighttime chorus, and Frida imagined she could hear the stars pinwheeling.
She would make it so that the dragon loved this place just as much as she did.
She imagined her mum laughing softly. A deep, honey-like, full-bellied laugh.
That’s my Friduska, she would have said. Destined to be a dragon’s butler.
She wanted to laugh, and she wanted to cry.
In the end, she did a bit of both, trying to contain the ice-chip in her heart.
Grief was like that, she’d learnt. As the months had passed, there were times when she was fine.
Then there were times like now, when she thought her legs would give out from under her.
Panting hard, she managed to force it all back inside.
Then, balancing the empty feeding bucket and manure shovel across her shoulders, Frida headed for the exit.
Behind her, Issy was already asleep, the telltale bright-moon glow of her horn indicating that she was dreaming.
As Frida passed through the gate, she touched the fence reverently, feeling the familiar electric hum of the wards.
The soft feather touch against her skin, the safety net that was on every cage, every fence, every door – keeping them all protected: animal and human alike.
These wards were powerful enough to stop a basilisk turning a tourist to stone, or a kraken’s song from making you want to slit the throats of all your nearest and dearest. They could stop a manticore from flying out into the clear skies of Melody, or a vengeful poisonous shrimp from willing a hapless keeper to walk into oncoming traffic.
Without the wards, the LEZ wouldn’t be here.
Without the wards, none of them would be here.
The hairs on her arms rose as a chill wind blew through the nearby boughs.
Sea breezes were common in Melody though and, shaking off a sense of unease, she tossed the empty feeding bucket into the back of her zoo buggy, Jennifer – a vibrant green golf cart with an engine like a hummingbird’s wings – and drove with agonising care down the cobbled streets towards her final stop for the night – the Hawthorn of Higgleton Common.
All she had to do was feed the tree, and then she’d be zipping back across the LEZ, ready to join the others at Dragon’s Deep.
Six months ago, Crumble the stone giant had gone into labour, and Frida had been so excited, she’d crashed her old zoo buggy, Beatriz, into a tree.
She’d missed the birth of the first ever stone giant baby in a UK zoo because she hadn’t checked her blind spot.
She was determined nothing like that was going to happen tonight.
She was so focused on keeping her buggy on the road however that she didn’t notice when a few of those misty clouds from earlier began to grow, slowing creeping across the sky, and beginning to eat the stars, one by one.