But that was all beside the point. She needed to be at the Reserve more, for the purpose. Suppose the impossible came true and Grog found a place where they could go and together they persuaded Dad and the others to let them, to help them when they got there, and all the other parts of the dream slotted in, what would be the use if the chimps themselves weren’t ready? You couldn’t tell them what was going to happen, teach them how to cope, any of that, so “ready” just meant trusting Eva, being prepared to follow her lead—an outsider, a female, a juvenile, coming and going at random. Not easy.
Winter had been tough. Some days the chimps hardly went out into the open at all but stayed in their “caves” squabbling for places nearest the heated patches of wall and floor. In those close unnatural quarters tempers were bad, and the signals for keeping them in control didn’t always work. Tatters and Geronimo had several real fights, with serious bite wounds. By the end of the winter Tatters was boss, which was a bad thing all around, because Geronimo used to use his authority to keep the fights among the females from getting serious, by siding with the one who looked as if she was losing, which was why on the whole the females had supported him, but Tatters wasn’t clever enough for that. By the time the spring sun was strong enough to lounge and scratch in, the whole group was in a sour mood.
Lulu stole Wang deliberately. She must have been waiting her chance for some time, not only for Wang to get far enough away from Lana to be grabbed and run off with but also for Tatters to be somewhere near. In fact, thinking about it afterward, Eva realized that she had been half aware of Lulu sitting about a dozen paces off, watching Beth’s group most of the time but also glancing over her shoulder as if looking for something out of sight of the rest of them. They should have been aware of the danger. Lulu had never managed to rear a baby of her own because her deafness kept her from hearing the cries and whimpers that would have told her its needs, so she couldn’t really be trusted near someone else’s. Unfortunately Beth was in a cantankerous mood, and the other three were preoccupied with watching for a sudden attack from her. The first they knew of the kidnapping was Wang’s cluttering scream as Lulu dashed away, dragging him by one arm and bashing him casually against the hard ground as she went.
Lana raced after her, shrieking, with Eva close behind. They galloped around the corner of a slab and stopped dead because Tatters was there, facing them, with his hair bushed out and his face drawn into a hoot. Beth and Beth’s group had supported Geronimo longer than any of the other females, and Tatters hadn’t yet forgiven them. Lulu settled down behind Tatters and started grooming Wang, holding him upside down by one leg while he struggled and shrilled. Lana shrieked at Lulu until Tatters rushed at her. Eva raced in to try and grab Wang while his back was turned, but Tatters must have seen what she was up to, because just as she faced Lulu’s snarl, looking for an opening, she felt a stunning buffet on the side of her head and was spun sideways across the rough concrete. Before she could rise, Tatters landed on her with all his weight, driving her back to the ground. The breath shrieked out of her. As Tatters jumped to come down again she managed to wriggle sideways so that he half missed his footing, giving her a moment to tumble herself right over into one of the pits and out of sight. By the time Tatters realized what had happened, she was out on the far side of the pit and swinging up one of the iron trees.
Tatters was still full of aggression. He could easily have followed her up the tree and continued punishing her there, despite her advantage of being uppermost he would have been much too quick and strong for her, but that was against the rules. He swung around looking for another target. Lulu was crouched where she’d been, licking a bite wound on her arm and moaning between licks. Wang had gone, and so had Lana, but Geronimo had been sitting all this while (about twenty seconds) with his back to the squabble, pretending not to know it was happening, while Sniff had been perched a little farther off, as usual watching the whole scene.
Now Tatters knuckled over to Geronimo and began to circle him, hooting, with his hair bushed out. Geronimo, head bowed, watched him out of the corner of his eye. Geronimo had three options. He could challenge Tatters back or he could submit by bowing down and panting and letting Tatters step over him or he could run away up a tree. The tension mounted. Any moment now, he would make a dash for it. But then an odd thing happened. Sniff rose, came over, settled by Geronimo, and put his arm around him. Geronimo looked at him. Tatters, absorbed in his aggression display, seemed not to notice what had happened until he had circled completely around the pair and come face-to-face again. By this time they were standing. Their hair rose like Tatters’s. They hooted. Geronimo took a half pace forward. Tatters stopped dead in his tracks and looked away. Geronimo hooted again. Tatters hesitated, turned, and knuckled away. Geronimo and Sniff settled down to groom each other.
Waiting till Tatters was safely out of sight, Eva climbed down the tree, but Sniff must have been watching her, because he instantly left Geronimo and came across to meet her. Eva hadn’t seen much of Sniff during the winter. According to the human observers, he’d gone off and joined up with a different group in one of the other ruined factories while Tatters and Geronimo were fighting it out, so it didn’t seem like him to have behaved as he had just done, especially since he was intelligent enough to know that Tatters would make him pay for it as soon as he could get him alone. Now he looked at Eva gravely. She stayed where she was while he went around and gave her rump a quick sniff, then returned to peer into her eyes again. He grunted quietly to himself, then put out a hand and patted her twice gently, on the side of the cheek. It was not a signal she had ever seen one chimp give another, but she understood at once what it meant. “Don’t worry. I’ll look after you.” He grunted again and went back to Geronimo.
Later that morning Tatters came charging into Beth’s group, buffeting them aside and rushing away before they could join up to drive him off. Apart from that, nothing much happened until it was time for Eva to leave. She found Sniff sitting in the little nook that screened the door. She paused. The obvious thing would have been to greet him briefly and move on, as though she were passing by on her way to somewhere else, but she could see from his whole pose and the sudden alertness at her arrival that he had been waiting for her and wouldn’t be deceived.
He rose, looked at her, went to the door, and rattled the grill, then turned and went to the box that contained the lock. He rapped it with his knuckles, looked at her sharply, and held out a hand—“Show me.” All right, thought Eva, I’m going to need a male I can trust, so I’ll have to let him see I trust him. She undid the catch, lifted the lid, and punched the code. Sniff watched every detail but jumped with alarm when the door lock clicked. Eva opened the door.
Grinning with nerves, Sniff peered into the darkness beyond. She switched on the light and led the way through, but he stayed close by the door, excited, frightened, his eyes darting from side to side. Now that she’d made the decision to trust him, Eva felt it was important to let him understand as much as he could, so she fetched her overalls from the peg and put them on. Though the policy at the Reserve was to keep humans out of sight as much as possible, from time to time they had to intervene in one way or another, so all the chimps would have seen them. They might not understand about clothes but they’d know they had something to do with humans.
She turned and faced Sniff. He came a pace closer, put out a finger, and touched the butterfly on her chest. (This had become a sort of trademark that she always wore—in fact, a kid’s clothing firm had just signed a contract to market Mom’s designs worldwide, under the name of Evaralls. Apparently it was going to bring in a ton of money, both for Mom and the Pool.)