The Menagerie #2 (2 page)

“But your great sacrifice was worth it,” Logan pointed out. “We got the cub back here, and SNAPA never knew any of them were gone.”

Blue poked the garment bag with his toe. “Oh, good. From all of Zoe's frantic texts, I thought they'd figured it out. So if everything's fine with the cubs, then what's wrong? Why did I have to HURRY BACK OMG 911 END OF THE WORLD?”

“Blue . . .” Zoe's voice wavered and she stopped.

“What's going on?” Blue looked back and forth between Zoe and Logan, his annoyance fading as he noticed their expressions.

Zoe took a deep breath. “It's Pelly. She's dead—or, or missing, or—no, she's probably dead.”

Logan thought of how the nest had looked and had to agree.

“What?” Blue exclaimed. “How?”

“We don't know. Dad and the SNAPA agents are inside looking for clues.”

“Wow, that's just . . .” Blue shook his head, unable to finish the thought. “What do we know?”

“Not much.” Zoe filled him in on what they'd seen. She rubbed her eyes and sighed. “I just can't imagine who would want to kill Pelly.”

“You mean, apart from anyone who's ever met her?” Blue said.

“Blue!” Zoe cried.

“Well, it's true. I mean, it's still sad and awful, but you have to admit she was not the nicest bird. Always demanding stuff and going on about how important she is to the Menagerie. Didn't she once make you spend two hours fluffing up the pillows on her nest only to decide they were the wrong color?”

Pelly had seemed like kind of a diva to Logan. But still, she was a mythical creature. A talking goose who could lay actual golden eggs . . . who would destroy something that rare?

“I can't handle just standing here,” Zoe said. “We have to do something. Maybe we could look for witnesses. Or check the security footage. Or—”

“We have to let SNAPA do their job,” Blue interrupted gently. “This is the kind of thing they investigate all the time.”

“Is there another way into the Aviary?” Logan asked. “Could we at least go check on the roc and make sure she's okay?”

Zoe smacked her forehead. “That is
absolutely what we should do.
We're doing that right now. Blue, go get my iPod and meet us in the Aviary.”

Blue nodded and took off toward the house. The mermaids called his name and whistled as he went past, but he ignored them.

Logan followed Zoe around to the back of the Aviary, where a narrow metal ladder went straight up the side of the dome. Zoe looked at it for a moment, then kicked off her shoes and climbed in her socks. Logan did the same, guessing this way the adults inside the Aviary wouldn't hear them.

“Maybe Pelly's not dead,” Logan said, trying to distract himself from how high they were about to climb. “Maybe someone took her for the golden eggs.”

“Then where did all the blood and feathers come from?” Zoe asked. “Those aren't ordinary goose feathers. They were definitely hers. I
wish
I could think of an explanation where she might still be alive, but I can't.”

Zoe stepped off the top of the ladder onto a rusted platform that seemed entirely too small, considering how high in the air it was. She reached up to a large crank on a wheel right over her head and then paused.

“That's weird,” she whispered to Logan, pointing.

He peered awkwardly over her shoulder without relaxing his death grip on the ladder. Now he could see there was a large panel of the dome that could roll open, like a garage door. It was big enough for a small house to fit through. A house the size of Logan's, for example.

“What's weird?” he whispered back. “What is that door for?”

“This is how we get the roc in and out if we ever need to,” Zoe said. “We installed it when she was brought here.” She pointed at the door again. “But look. It's already a little bit open.”

Logan saw what she meant. A gap at the bottom of the door was just wide enough for them to slip through.

“Maybe this is where whoever it was got Pelly's body out,” Zoe said. She crouched and studied the door. “I don't see any blood, though.”

“We shouldn't touch it,” Logan said. “There could be evidence here.”

Zoe hesitated, and they both heard another tragic gigantic-bird noise from inside the Aviary.

“I really want to check on Aliya,” she said. “We'll squeeze through—just try not to disturb anything.”

She crouched and ducked through the gap, disappearing inside before Logan could argue. He glanced around at the Menagerie. From up this high he could see almost the entire place. He could see the distant shapes of the griffins, now sprawled on their boulders sunning themselves. He could see the house and a couple of black hellhounds playing chase around it. He could even see the dark shape of the kraken coiled below the lake's surface, and what he guessed were the dragons' caves in the cliff at the back of the Menagerie. No sign of any dragons themselves, though.

“Come on,” Zoe's voice whispered from inside.

Logan ducked and stepped cautiously through the gap in the rolling door. His socks touched smooth, dark brown wood. He nearly slipped, caught his balance, and looked up—and found himself face-to-face with a wickedly hooked beak the size of a school bus.

“Don't move,” Zoe said. “She's hungry.”

L
ogan froze in place, half-crouched just inside the rolling door. He was on a ledge high up in the Aviary, surrounded by treetops and greenery. Next to him was a huge, messy nest built from piles of scattered branches.

But mostly what he noticed were the sharp black eyes pinning him to the ledge, the giant talons only a few feet away, and the sleek white feathers of the world's most enormous bird of prey.

“It's okay, Aliya,” Zoe said soothingly. “This is Logan. He's a friend. He works here now.”

Aliya clacked her beak, once, with a loud snap that reverberated off the dome overhead. Then she stepped back and settled into her nest, although her gaze stayed fixed on Logan.

“She's just rattled today,” Zoe said. “Normally she's really calm, but the strangers and all the noise around Pelly's nest must have freaked her out. And we usually bring her breakfast at sunrise, so she's hungry and confused, too.”

Logan peered over the edge, but he couldn't see Pelly's nest from up here—there were too many trees in the way. A spiral staircase wound down from the roc's ledge into the greenery below. Zoe's dad and the two SNAPA agents had stopped shouting, but their voices were still loud and angry. He spotted several birds perched in the branches with their eyes closed, so the tranquillity mist must have worked.

“It's all right, Aliya,” Zoe said. She reached into the tangled nest and pulled out a small set of speakers. “There was a—um, an accident of some kind. Something's happened to Pelly.”

The roc let out a kind of “
awk
” sound and made a face that to Logan looked hilariously like
Well
, that
bird had it coming.

“How much does she understand?” he asked Zoe.

“It's hard to tell,” said Zoe, “but I think she's very intelligent.”

“Me, too,” Logan said. The roc blinked slowly, as if she were trying to look wiser. “Did my mom bring her in?”

He knew his mom had found Zoe's mammoth. He kind of liked picturing his mom flying an enormous bird into the Menagerie. At the same time, it made him pretty mad that she'd never told him the truth about her amazingly cool job, when Zoe got to know everything about it. But then whenever he thought about what might have happened to her, he started to worry, and then he felt guilty about how angry he'd been after the last postcard she'd sent . . . but he still wasn't sure he'd forgiven her for that, and anyway he had no idea what the truth was, so maybe it was better not to think about Mom too much for now.

Zoe shook her head. “No, that was a different Tracker. Your mom brought the alicanto, though; you should meet it sometime. With earplugs.”

Blue's feet appeared through the gap in the door, followed closely by the rest of Blue, and then almost immediately by Keiko. Now that he'd seen her as a fox, Logan wasn't sure whether he was more or less intimidated by the sixth grader Zoe's family had adopted from Japan.

Keiko had changed out of her shape-shifting white kimono into a pair of sleek black pants and a fitted sapphire-blue T-shirt that spelled out
FOXY
in little rhinestones.

“Oh,” Logan said, pointing at her shirt. “Foxy! Ha-ha! I get it!”

Keiko gave him a golden-brown glare.

“Because you're a . . . kittensy . . . kiztoony . . . um, the thing where you turn into a fox sometimes . . .”

“Kitsune,” Keiko snapped. “And I do not
turn into a fox
. I
am
a fox, but right now I'm choosing to be a girl.”

Logan blinked in confusion, but no one seemed to think that required any more explanation.

“Why is she here?” Zoe asked, plucking her iPod out of Blue's hand. “She'll just make Aliya worse.”

Keiko tossed her braids over her shoulders, put her hands on her hips, and sniffed the air. The roc shifted on its nest, rumbling unhappily. Logan realized that it didn't like having Keiko around—like most of the animals in the Menagerie, now that he thought about it. The unicorns hated her, too. Perhaps they could all smell or sense her foxiness.

“She saw me taking your iPod,” Blue said, “and she wanted to know what was going on.”

Zoe rolled her eyes and crouched beside the speakers, scrolling through songs on her iPod. A moment later, the faint sound of Bollywood music echoed tinnily through the air, and the roc visibly relaxed, flopping her head down on her nest.

“Someone murdered Pelly,” Logan said to Keiko. “It's a huge mess down there.”

“Oh, I highly doubt she was murdered,” said Keiko.

“Really?” Zoe said, lifting her head with a hopeful expression. “Like, you can't smell enough blood or something?”

“Right,” said Keiko. “More likely she was eaten.”

“Oh, VERY COMFORTING,” Zoe yelled.

“I wasn't trying to be comforting!” Keiko yelled back.

“Shhhh,” Blue said. They all fell silent, and Logan realized that the adult voices below had stopped.

“Oops,” said Zoe.

The spiral staircase began to shake, and then Mr. Kahn emerged from the trees, climbing toward them. His reddish-brown hair was standing up in wild tufts and he looked exhausted.

“Zoe!” he said in a shocked voice. “What—”

“We were checking on Aliya!” Zoe said quickly. “Didn't you hear how upset she was? We were just making sure she was all right.” She patted the nest of branches, and the roc clacked her beak in a self-righteous way.

“You should be back at the house,” he said sternly.

“All right, I know,” said Zoe, “but come up here and look at this door first. It was a little bit open when we got here. Maybe someone came in and out this way last night.”

The two SNAPA agents did not look pleased when they followed Mr. Kahn up to the ledge and found not only Zoe but also Logan, Blue, and Keiko gathered around the roc's nest.

“Dad, is Pelly really dead?” Zoe asked.

Logan could guess what she was thinking, because he was hoping the same thing.
Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it was some kind of stunt Pelly set up to scare us all into appreciating her more.

“I'm afraid so, dear,” Agent Dantes said softly, and Mr. Kahn nodded, his shoulders slumping.

“Although it's impossible to know for sure with no body,” Agent Runcible said in a voice that sounded like it had its edges ironed flat. “Robert, I must insist we lock down the entire Aviary. This is no place for children right now.”

Logan tried not to stare at him. So far it seemed like the SNAPA agent hadn't recognized him, and Logan wasn't sure how Agent Runcible would react once he realized where they'd first met.

It had been six months ago, when Logan and his dad still lived in Chicago. They'd gotten the postcard from Logan's mom only two days before Runcible showed up. The postcard that said basically,
Hello hello, sorry to say, just got a great new job opportunity, love you heaps but I won't be home again anytime soon, have a nice life, etc.

Dad had asked if Logan wanted to take a couple days off from school “to process,” which had sounded kind of dopey to Logan. Lying on the couch watching TV wasn't going to make him feel any better about Mom being gone, so he might as well take his math test. Even failing couldn't make him feel worse, he'd figured.

So he'd heard Runcible before seeing him—that clipped, severe voice on the other side of the apartment door when Logan got home from school.

“You're telling me you have no idea where she is.”

Logan had stopped with his keys halfway out of his pocket, leaned into the door, and listened.