“Well, yes, but also so that everyone can see the same anatomy we do. Scientists will look at this recording for years and learn what we do. So to begin with, I’m going to describe what we’re seeing.”

Felix and the rest listened and watched while Vik described the tube’s head, the jaws and teeth, measured it, inspected the lines of triangular fins and the three holes in the tail that she said were vents.

But the real fun came when Vik used a scalpel and sliced down the length of the thing.

“Zambo!” Felix whispered as Vik used metal probes and laid the tube open so that its insides were exposed.

Felicity said, “Ohh” and made a face.

Breez asked, “What’s it made of?” She stood to the side, eyes still wide. Periodically, she would press at the bottom of her jaw and the sides of her throat as if it hurt.

“Fascinating,” Vik said. The woman carefully splayed the creature across the blotter, exposing all kinds of linear “organs” that ran the length of the creature. Pointing at this piece and that, Vik rattled off a lot of terms that Felix couldn’t understand as she made the official record. For long moments Felix lost himself, suddenly frozen when the Voice took over. It used Felix’s eyes to stare at the exposed pieces of the tube. The Voice was listening, watching, and totally absorbed as Vik picked through the tube’s separated guts with a probe.

Felix might not have been in his body, as if the Voice was running it, learning. Weird. Felix was there . . . and he wasn’t. Sort of like he was in a dream.

From a great distance, Felix heard Vik say, “What all that scientific jargon says is that this creature has three sides, see. People, like you and me, have two. Right and Left. That’s bilateral symmetry. Donovanian life is three-sided. Like the tube. So, look. There is a central, shared digestive system that runs through a kind of web. When you look closely you can see the little bugs it ate for dinner being digested in different places around the net.”

“Ohh!” Felicity took a step back.

“Grow up,” Sheena told her. “This is zambo.”

“But here”—Vik used her probe to separate out one of the three light-brown strands that ran from the root of one of the jaws clear to the vent—“we have the most fascinating organ. See the thick places with all the blood vessels? Those are the gills, our equivalent of lungs, and then we have these bands of muscles running all the way to the vent at the rear. I’m betting they work like our esophagus does, through something called peristalsis. They expel water out the back and shoot the tube forward like a jet. This organ serves to both aerate the blood and propel the creature. Call it a gill jet.”