The benefactors send a telegram to the zookeeper at the hospital, informing him that a miracle will occur. In the morning when the zoo opens, there will be three healthy, reasonable, slightly disoriented giraffes making their way delicately across their new surroundings on twelve perfect little hooves.

Lulu has another vision. Floating across the city, she passes Saint Sebastian’s. She glides by the zookeeper’s window and notices him in a hospital bed, propped up, asleep, and covered with electrodes. She can see Matilda by the bed, knitting, her skirt hitched to the side, a corner tucked into the zookeeper’s hand. Matilda has a kerchief tied around her head; her eyes are set fixedly on the needles working back and forth. The window is open a crack and Lulu hovers closer. She tips her nose against it, and clouds the pane with her breath.

Inside the zookeeper’s hospital room, the needles click and the heart monitor beeps. The zookeeper is dreaming in time— the sound becomes a train moving along a track. Click click beep. Click click beep. Lulu follows this rhythm into the zookeeper’s dream and discovers the boxcar of a traveling circus. Inside she finds Matilda, curled up on a pile of straw. There is no air, no water, in the boxcar. Matilda is pressing her mouth against a crack in the wood. She is trying to breathe; her lips are full of splinters. Lulu is afraid. She feels the zookeeper’s hands go weak and watches as Matilda’s skirt slips from his fingers.

The zookeeper wakes. He reaches up and pulls the electrodes off his chest, throws back the covers on his hospital bed, and says, “I have to do something.” His legs look white and thin. He grabs hold of Matilda to steady himself as he climbs out of the bed.

Lulu takes a deep breath. She watches Matilda help the zookeeper button his pajamas. There is something else here, she thinks. A part of the dream is lingering. She tries to catch the scent of it, inhaling and exhaling, searching the hospital room. Suddenly she recognizes the smell—it is the chemical used in the tranquilizer darts that brought her down in Africa. It seems to close around her, and Lulu feels herself slipping away from the zookeeper and Matilda. She remembers the boom, the sting of the needles, and how the heaviness of her body pulled her to the ground.

Lulu opens her eyes. She is back in the zoo, on the floor of the pen. Through the darkness she senses movement. A crowd of figures is climbing through the safety railing. Lulu’s long black tongue feels dry and unfamiliar—she cannot make it form a sound. She turns her head and sees Francesco and Doë begin to run. There is a shower of cracks, Lulu sees the glint of the darts, and the two giraffes fall like trees.