““I thought I could wait to tell you until everything was figured out,” she says. “I didn’t think you’d have any contact with actual animals until you were twenty-one, when you were in the labs. The philax was an accident and then the damned internships.” She flops her hands to her sides, the hands that look like mine. “And the dead animals?” I demand, my anger still large and bright. “What about that? They’re eating animals in there!” My throat convulses at the thought of eating something dead, a body that was once alive and walking around, stripped and lifeless and cooked like zarum. “It’s wrong,” my mother says, her jaw setting. “It was never supposed to happen. But it was commonplace before Faloiv—a custom passed down from the Origin Planet—and many of the elders of N’Terra resisted the Faloii’s order when we landed.””
