Page 51 of One Adult, Please

There are chickens in the botanical garden, scratching through the labeled plant beds, destroying months of careful horticulture with the focused efficiency of tiny dinosaurs who never got the extinction memo.

And there are two animals sitting in the middle of the main pathway like they own it.

I stop walking because they're the most perfect things I've ever seen in my life and I need a moment.

They're enormous. The size of medium dogs but shaped like... like if someone drew a dog from memory but made it rounder and flatter and gave it the face of a creature that has achieved spiritual enlightenment through the complete elimination of urgency. Their fur is coarse, brown, slightly damp. Their eyes are small and black and communicate absolutely nothing except a deep, abiding calm that I find personally offensive because I've never once been that calm and neither has anyone in my genetic line.

"Oh my God," I say. "The round friends."

"The what?" Beck says.

"Capybara," Joel says.

"Look at them. They're round. They're friendly. They're round friends, Beck."

Joel looks at them. They look at Joel. Both parties appear to reach the same conclusion, which is mutual acknowledgment followed by complete emotional neutrality. They're spiritually the same species.

One of them stands up. Slowly, like it finds standing to be an inconvenience imposed by a universe that should have designed better seating. It walks toward me. It reaches me, sniffs my shoe, sniffs my legging, sniffs the friendship paddle, and then presses its enormous head against my thigh and just... stays there.

"It's touching me," I whisper. "The round friend is touching me."

"Don't move suddenly," Joel says.

"Joel, I'm never moving again. I live here now. Notify my mother. Forward my mail. I live wherever this round friend is pressing its head against my leg."

The second round friend watches from the path. Unmoved. Unimpressed. Round Friend Two has seen things and remains committed to sitting.

I want to stay with the round friends forever but we have a mission and the mission is the rescue center and the rescue center is past the aviary, past the tortoise enclosure, in the big steel-frame building at the back that has WILDLIFE RESCUE AND VETERINARY CENTER painted on its facade.

The building looks sealed. Doors closed. Windows intact. A barricade of stacked animal crates blocks the main entrance from the inside, visible through the glass. Someone is in there. Someone built walls out of pet carriers and feed bags and whatever else was available, and someone is still maintaining those walls, because the crates are not thrown together in panic but stacked with careful attention.

Joel tries the door. Locked. He pulls out his keyring.

"Wait," I say. "If someone's alive in there and barricaded, we should probably not just walk in. That's how you get a thing pointed at you."

"A thing?"

"A weapon thing. A whatever-they-have thing."

"She's right," Beck says. "Someone sealed in since Thursday isn't going to love a door opening without warning."

Joel steps back. I step forward and knock on the glass.

Nothing.

I knock again. "Hello? We're alive and we're people and we're not the wrong ones. We have teeth that we're using for normal mouth purposes."

Beck looks at me. "Normal mouth purposes."

"Chewing food. Talking. Teeth stuff, Beck."

A shadow moves behind the barricade. Then a face appears in the gap between two stacked crates, pale, framed by dark hair that hasn't been washed in a few days and a pair of glasses that are held together on one side with medical tape.

"Who are you?" The voice is the kind of voice that's been talking to animals for days.

"I'm Grace. That's Joel, he works here. That's Beck, he lives on a crime boat. We're keeping the park."

Behind the glasses, brown eyes process this information. "You're... keeping the park?"