We starve before that, Cornelia insisted.
That was enough. Caesar lunged at her, and she scuttled back, then began to descend.
True, she signed, defiantly, once she was out of range. He watched her go, fuming. But then he settled against the tree-trunk.
Sleep, he told Rocket. And he closed his eyes.
He slept the rest of the day and the night. When he awoke, he found Maurice there.
Three apes died in the night, the orang told him.
Caesar absorbed that for a moment, and then acknowledged the news.
Maybe Cornelia… Maurice began.
Caesar cut him off with a rough bark. Maurice looked mildly apologetic, but he didn’t back down.
I know she’s right, Caesar finally said. She was annoying, but she had made good points. She had been thinking.
And he was tired of reacting. It was time to plan.
Find Rocket, he told Maurice. We three must talk.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Clancy said, her eyes preternaturally wide. “So beautiful.” She reached up to brush stray strands of straw-colored hair from her face.
Malakai gazed out the window of the Humvee as it bumped along the service road, considering the massive columns of the coast redwoods and wondering what the trees in the understory were. Back home he could have named any plant you showed him. This forest was a cipher to him.
“Have you been here before, Mr. Youmans?” the woman asked, apparently undeterred by his failure to respond to her comments.
“No,” he replied.
“The first time I came here, I thought it was like the most amazing cathedral anyone could imagine,” she gushed. “It’s like the trees are holding up the sky. Dinosaurs knew trees like this, did you know that? Relatives of redwoods used to dominate the globe. Now they exist in only a few places.”
Malakai suppressed a sigh.
He had discovered upon waking in the two-bedroom prefab hut that another occupant had joined him there—Clancy Stoppard. She was a primatologist, she studied at UC Berkeley, and she wanted to help rehabilitate apes to the wild. He got all that within thirty seconds of meeting her. She was pretty and upbeat and twenty-seven years old, and he wondered how long it would be before he killed her. If he had known she was to be on his team—worse yet, in his hut—he might not have signed that contract.
He hoped another few moments of silence might send the proper message. There were, after all, five other people in the Humvee she could be bothering.
But such was not the case.
“Where are you from, Mr. Youmans?” she asked.
“I’m from San Francisco,” he replied.
“No,” she said. “I meant… you know, your accent.”
“I was born in the Belgian Congo,” he clarified. “What is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
“Oh, really? What part of the country?”
It was funny how often people asked that, even when they knew not the slightest geographic detail of his native land. He would tell them, and they would blather something useless.
“North Kivu,” he replied. “Near Butembo.”
He hadn’t thought it possible for her eyes to widen further, but they did.
“That’s near the Virunga National Forest,” she said. “Where the mountain gorillas live.”
“Yes, that’s true,” he said. “You are quite knowledgeable.”
“I hope to go there one day,” she said. “Is that where you acquired your knowledge of primates?”
“My uncle took me to see the gorillas when I was just eight,” he replied. “And many times after that.”
“That must have been amazing.”
Amazing wasn’t the word he would have chosen, but he didn’t have much interest in continuing with the conversation. Fortunately, a moment later, the vehicle rolled to a stop.
Malakai opened the door and stepped out onto the rich leaf mold, looking up toward the treetops, trying to put this forest together in his head. Inwardly, he did find the trees rather impressive, but that was sort of the American thing, wasn’t it? Everything bigger. The question on his mind was how the apes would perceive this place, how they would bend themselves to it and it to them. What they would forage, where they would drink, sleep, and take refuge.
The other members of the expedition—four men and another woman—piled out of the back and began loading their tranq guns. Two of them, however, had automatic rifles, and they all had sidearms. Malakai found himself longing for one of the weapons himself. He felt naked without a firearm, especially in the woods. And most especially when almost everyone else around him was heavily armed.
“Guns?” Clancy noticed, too. “Those are real guns?” she said, her expression startled. “We won’t need guns other than the tranqs.”
“The apes were violent on the bridge,” Corbin said. He was a blunt-faced man of maybe forty years. Malakai had him figured for an ex-Marine.
“Yeah,” Flores, his guide from the day before, said. “And one of ’em tried to take my head off last night.”
“Flores,” Corbin said, “shut up.” He gestured with the muzzle of his AR-15. “This way.” He led them about a hundred yards from the road, then pulled out a handheld global positioning device and studied it. He gestured, and they continued a short distance.
He didn’t have to tell Malakai when they reached the site. The scuffle of prints, the empty shell casings and shredded vegetation did that. Malakai walked carefully, trying to see everything without disturbing it.
“This is a chimp print,” he heard Clancy say. She picked up a spent rifle round. “Somebody was shooting at them.”
Well, Malakai allowed, she isn’t a total idiot.
“They came down from the trees here,” he said. “Five, maybe six. They weren’t all chimps.” He stooped to look at a larger print.
“That’s an orangutan,” Clancy said. She frowned. “They said this happened at night?” she added. “Why would they come down to the ground at night? Chimps and orangutans are diurnal. They stay in trees at night, where they’re safe.”
“Maybe because they weren’t so safe in these trees,” Malakai replied, nudging one of the casings with his foot. “That’s a big round, .50 caliber, probably from a mounted weapon. Somebody was shooting from the air. It was probably fired from a gun mounted on a helicopter.”
Clancy’s brows lowered, and she frowned.
“I was told we were trying to recover the apes,” she said. “Not kill them.”
“They’re dangerous,” Corbin asserted.
“How dangerous could they be to helicopters?” she demanded.
“They took one down on the bridge,” Flores said.
“Flores!” Corbin barked.
That wasn’t in the news, Malakai thought, but he didn’t show it. He was following the tracks again. He remembered that a policeman had been killed in a chopper accident, but no mention was made of the apes causing the crash.
“The idea,” Corbin said, still talking to Clancy, “was to force them to the ground so troops with night-vision gear could capture them.”
“Capture them?” she snapped. “With machine guns?”
“The choppers just raked the treetops,” Corbin replied, looking exasperated. “They didn’t shoot down at them. Which would have meant shooting down at us, by the way. We only meant to tranq them.”
“You were on this detail?” Malakai asked. “All of you?”
Corbin nodded.
“Here’s where the ambush occurred,” Malakai said, pointing.
“Chimps can’t see at night,” Clancy persisted. “They would have been helpless.”