There is a zoo in the lost city, and all of its animals are extinct. The aviary is filled with dodo birds; there are fiberglass cliffs inhabited by saber-toothed tigers. There is a marine exhibit filled with animals Leora couldn’t even name—ancient animals, giant scaly things and tiny feathery things and spiky things and slimy things that probably never made it out of the primordial soup. The mastodon show is particularly popular, because at certain times of day, children who come to the lost zoo are allowed to ride the woolly mammoths, grabbing at the behemoths’ curly hair in their tight little fists, screaming and crying and begging their parents to take them down. And then, of course, she saw the dinosaurs, their might buried in their loins, their force hidden in the muscles of their bellies. As they jumped and thundered amid the fiberglass hills, they stiffened their tails into tall cedars and the sinews of their thighs knit together, their bones like tubes of bronze, their limbs like bars of iron. But they didn’t look much like the dinosaurs you see in pictures and movies. Instead of being covered with scales, they had skin—real skin, almost human, though without hair, soft in some places and callused in others, pulled taut over muscles so that each thunderous step set off a ripple of flesh. And instead of camouflaging themselves in dulled, earthy colors, these dinosaurs were radiant: their skin shone an iridescent blue, fading to indigo, fading to purple, fading to a deep, glowing, unearthly red, the different colors shimmering in turn depending on the motion of the water around them, like tropical fish.

Yet even in the zoo, outside of the exhibits, Leora saw only the ordinary. Children banging on the aquarium’s glass, their parents screaming at them in the Manhattan language; younger children feeding the dodo birds; older children throwing coins at the glass, trying to rouse the saber-toothed tiger. The animals, she saw, were castaways. But the people? Ordinary!

Still searching for novelty—though, admittedly, the lost city is not a very good place to find it—she wandered even further into the congested streets until a few helpful citizens directed her to the municipal library, one of the largest buildings in the lost city. She walked up its giant barnacle-covered front stairs, feeling more certain with each slippery step that behind the seaweed-encrusted doors she would at last find her buried treasures.