“Give it some vegetable oil and a few hard kicks,” she said, trying to organize her scattered thoughts into real questions. “So who are you? How do you know Jiri and Aunt Dita? Where’s Ambrose?”

The brothers glanced at each other. Ivor shrugged mildly and disappeared around the side of the wire tree trunk, which was wider than her home on top of the shanty-stack. The goat-dog padded silently at his heels.

Magnus smiled at her again, or tried to. Since their meeting in the zoo, each subsequent smile had been a little less enthusiastic. Now he was down to a hard, thin line. In her head she counted the steps it would take to reach Nelson at a dead sprint.

“How much do you know about Unison?” he asked.

“Enough,” she lied. The truth was, like most subcanopy residents, she didn’t know very much at all.

Magnus arched his bushy white eyebrows and pursed his lips. Then he nodded slightly and said, “Hmm. Well, Ivor and I were part of the original UniCorp development team. We designed the framework for the Unison 2.0 upgrade, and then shortly after it went live, Martin Truax assigned us a highly classified new project. We were … very well paid for our work.”

He spoke with barely disguised longing for what Mistletoe assumed was his old life topside. Around the other side of the wire trunk, something whirred to a clunky stop. Ivor swore.

“At first our instructions were vague,” Magnus continued. “Martin Truax was reluctant to share even the sketchiest clues about the purpose of our project. We were given coded transmissions and accompanying data that was meaningless and jumbled—we didn’t know from where, or from whom—and told to decipher the content as best we could. When we complained, pointing out that knowledge of the transmissions’ origin was vital to our task, Martin threatened to remove us from the project. The next day he changed his mind and admitted that the transmissions were from someplace within Unison.”

Magnus began to wander the room as he talked, hands clasped behind his back like a gentleman taking a stroll in his garden. The skin around his eyes wrinkled and smoothed as he concentrated on his memories. Mistletoe followed warily as they moved farther away from Nelson.

“My brother and I decoded enough of the transmissions to realize that they may have been discovered within Unison, but they surely originated somewhere else. Unison was merely a communication tool for the senders. When we presented our findings to Martin, he was able to determine that the decoded transmissions composed a sort of…” Magnus trailed off and chewed his lower lip. “Instruction manual.”

“For what?”

Mistletoe had forgotten all about Jiri and Aunt Dita, and the cops, and the silent zoo. She was thinking about the creation dream she shared with Ambrose. She had a horrible creeping notion that she knew the answer to her own question.

“A hybrid organism.” Magnus coughed nervously. “Erm … two hybrid organisms, to be exact.”