He shook his head, so I continued down the path reluctantly, the sidewalk rough but not really cold against my bare feet.
“My favorite part about running the menagerie was closing time. For hours, there was nothing but calliope music and bright lights, and callers shouting at the customers, trying to get them to play a game or buy some food. But when the customers went home, we could turn all that off, and the world just felt so...still. So quiet. So civilized.”
Pagano chuckled. “That’s not a word often used to describe carnival life.”
“Well, after we’d freed everyone who could safely be free, that’s what it felt like. It was the first time most of them had been allowed to step out of their cages and eat real food. Put on real clothes. Spin around and around, then fall down on the grass, too dizzy to move. There’s nothing more civilized than freedom.”
“But they can’t read. They can’t add.”
I shook my head. “Civilization isn’t about what you know. It’s about how you behave. How much respect and dignity you give to those around you. The staff here...” I let that thought fade away, because insulting my handler when he’d gone to bat for me wasn’t a great way to buy future favors.
“Say it,” he insisted, as the infirmary drew nearer.
I stopped walking and turned to look at him. “You guys have never been denied adequate food. Proper shelter. The right to raise your own children. To choose to have them. To choose who to have them with. You don’t know what it’s like to truly suffer, so it means nothing to you to perpetuate suffering in others.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“No, I really haven’t. It doesn’t require much thought. Dignity and respect are the most basic of social concepts. Children understand them before they can even say the words.”
Pagano rolled his eyes and started walking again, leaving me no choice but to follow. “Okay, but not all cryptids are like you. You were raised human. Youarehuman.”
“That’s bullshit. People are different just like cryptids are different. Some are kind, and some are cruel. This isn’t a one-species-fits-all world.”
Pagano looked like he had something to say. Or something to ask. But we were feet from the infirmary, and someone was already waving at us from the well-lit foyer.
He opened the glass door and waved me inside, where a woman in pink scrubs and a white lab coat looked me up and down. Then took a step back. “You’re sure this is safe?” she said to Pagano over my shoulder.
He nodded as he clicked something on the remote, restricting me to the infirmary. “But you won’t be with her anyway. Lead the way.”
Instead, the nurse gave us directions. “Third door on the right. Restrict her to the back half of the room. There’s a shifter cuffed to the last bed. She can get him water and talk to him. But that’s it.” Then she crossed her arms over her chest and watched us follow her directions, mumbling under her breath about how unsafe it was to have me “wandering the halls.”
As far as I could tell from glancing through the long viewing windows, the first two rooms were full. In each, a row of narrow, sturdy steel cots was bolted to the floor. The occupants were all cuffed to the cots and covered up to their chests by a white sheet. Most appeared to be sleeping.
A small figure in the second room caught my attention, and I stopped to stare through the window. “Genni.”
Pagano followed my gaze. “They say she’ll have a limp, but she’s going to be fine.”
“For how long?” How could a thirteen-year-old with a limp possibly survive another round of hunts? “Why do you even know that?”
He didn’t answer. Yet I understood.
“You’re betting on her? Or against her?”
“I don’t gamble,” he insisted. “But I hear the talk. Her odds are good, if she gets placed in the second round again.”
“And if she’s placed in the third?”
He shrugged. “No one’s odds are good in the last round.” He waved me forward again, and I had to leave little Genni asleep, chained to her bed.
The third room looked empty, but unlike the first two, it was divided in half by a wall and a doorway fitted with a red sensor, and I couldn’t see much of the back half.
Pagano adjusted my collar to allow me through the first two doorways, but when I stepped into the rear section, I forgot he was even there.
“Claudio!” The werewolf’s hands were cuffed to the side rails of an actual hospital bed and his ankles were secured with chains to something beneath the thin mattress. “What happened?”
“J’ai survécu.”His voice was even huskier than usual for a shifter, as if his throat were very dry. “They hit me with a Taser, not an arrow, so I will live to run for my life another day.”
“Those bastards.” I took a small plastic cup from the counter to my left and filled it with cold water from the sink. “The game is rigged in their favor and you can’t fight back, yet they think they’ve somehow conquered the universe by cornering an unarmed man in a closed course.”
