Page 52 of One Adult, Please

"Clearing it. Securing it. Making it safe. We've secured the adventure part and established a safe base in the fish part. Can you let us in? Are you okay? Do you need water? Food? A conversation with a mammal that talks back?"

The face disappears. I hear sounds behind the barricade. Crates moving. Feed bags shifting. The methodical deconstruction of a fortress by someone who built it alone and is choosing, against what I imagine is significant psychological resistance, to let someone through.

The door opens.

He's taller than I expected from the face in the crate gap. Lean in the way that says "hasn't been eating enough" rather than "chose this body type." He's wearing a WonderSphere veterinary staff jacket, a green one with the Wonder Garden logo, and it's covered in animal hair and feed dust and what I'm going to optimistically identify as mud. His hands are steady but his eyes are tired.

In his left hand, he's holding a tranquilizer gun. It's pointed at us.

"Sorry," he says immediately. "I'm sorry. I'm not going to... I just... sorry. I've been alone and I heard noises and I didn't know if you were..." He lowers the gun. His face collapses into something that looks like relief mixed with embarrassment mixed with the social mortification of a person who just pointed a weapon at strangers and wishes he could redo the last ten seconds with better choices. "I'm sorry. I'm Grant. I'm the veterinarian."

"Did you just apologize for pointing a sleepy stick at us?" I say.

"A what?"

I nod at the tranquilizer gun. "The thing that makes things get sleepy. The sleepy stick."

Grant looks at the tranquilizer gun in his hand. "It's not a stick."

"It creates sleep. I'm naming by outcome."

He lowers it further, pointing it at the ground.

The front of his jacket is moving. There's a bulge at his chest, between the zipper panels. The bulge is shifting and something inside it is making a small chirping squeak.

A tiny pointed face pokes out of the collar. Enormous dark eyes. Ears that are too big for its head. A nose that twitches with rapid-fire intensity, processing the entire olfactory landscape of a new situation and finding it overwhelming.

"Why is there a kangaroo in your coat?" I say.

"It's a wallaby," Grant says.

"Those are different?"

"They're quite different, actually. Wallabies are smaller and they have different dentition and their hind legs are proportioned differently relative to…"

"It's in your coat."

"Her name is Pepper. She's seven months old. She was hand-raised, her mother rejected her, she still needs supplemental warmth, and the incubator lost power, so I've been... I'm the pouch right now. If I put her down she gets cold and if she gets cold she..." He trails off. His hand comes up to cup the wallaby's head through the jacket fabric, a gesture so gentle and so automatic that it's clearly something he's done a thousand times, a reflex born from the kind of care that doesn't turn off when the world does. "She needs me."

"Oh no," I say. He's tall, exhausted, apologizing to me with a weapon in one hand and a baby animal tucked against his chest. This shouldn't be doing anything for me. It's doing several things.

Joel and Beck both look at me.

"You stayed." I point at him. The friendship paddle is in my other hand and it waves when I gesture.

Grant flinches slightly.

I lower it because this man doesn't need to be threatened by nautical sporting equipment right now. "Everyone who could evacuated. The park went to hell. And you stayed for the animals."

"I couldn't leave them. The wallaby can't survive without me."

"Then you're one of us. Welcome to the park. We're keeping it."

Grant looks between the three of us. His hand is still on the wallaby. "Come in," he says, stepping back from the door. "I should... you should meet the others."

"The other people?" I say.

"The other animals."