The Normal Initiative

Chapter 1

The woman did as she said she would and locked the grouchy parrot up. Rachel looked in at each of the other birds as she waited for Tatiana.

"Hello, birdies," Rachel sang at the collection of parakeets. She was about to try to imitate their chirps by whistling when she heard a chorus of voices.

"Hello! Hello! Hello!" the birds chirped back, flitting their wings excitedly. Rachel smiled, wishing that Tatiana would bring them out to talk instead. Sunshine might be larger, but he was not one for socializing.

Tatiana came back into the room a minute after the birds started speaking, chattering wildly. Rachel groaned as her mentor went to unlocked the door to Sunshine's cage once again.

"What? I thought you loved the birds." Tatiana looked over to Rachel in astoundment. Her surprise was reasonable. Rachel had begged her repeatedly, after all, to take her to the birds' area.

Rachel shook her head. "I do, I do. But do you think you could take out some of the little ones to talk to? Instead?" She pointed to the parakeet cage.

"I can take out one of the parakeets if you really want me to," Tatiana said. "And you can talk to them all you want. The thing is that those birds aren't going to say a single word back to you."

Rachel frowned. She looked over to the parakeets and studied them curiously. "What do you mean?"

"Parakeets don't talk, Rachel. They can't. Don't have the vocal chords to do it," Tatiana said as she brought out a green and yellow bird about four or five inches from head to tail.

Instead of saying something back, Rachel just accepted the small creature when her Counterpart offered it for her to hold. That didn't mean Rachel didn't want to contradict her mentor at least a little bit, for she was fairly sure of what she had heard. But then again... The more she looked back on it, the more certain Rachel was that she had misheard. The birds had just been chirping and she misinterpreted as talking.

It was like that thing where people want to see faces everywhere, Rachel decided. Her older sister Saffron had done a report on that for a psychology course. Rachel had been volunteered by her parents as the stand-in audience for Saffron to practice to. It had been annoying at the time, but now Rachel knew enough to doubt even what she had been nearly certain she had heard. Either way, the noises from the parakeets had been some sort of greeting, even if not in actual words she could understand.

The parakeet who Rachel held was very friendly. All of the birds there at the zoo were (at least compared to others of its breed) with perhaps the exception of Sunshine. They were trained animals, after all, and were used in children's shows and brought in to hospitals for ill patients. Tatiana and a few other trainers worked with different birds and other animals around the zoo to keep them friendly and docile.

Tatiana had informed Rachel that she did not know the name of the specific parakeet she was holding. This was due to the difficulty in telling all of the members of the aviary apart. Still, Rachel insisted that meant she needed to give the bird a name. She decided to call him Fizz.

"Why?"

"Because."

"Yes, alright, but why, Rachel?"

"Why not?"

Tatiana fed the large, black bird (which Rachel learned was, in fact, a raven that was only in their aviary because he was recovering from illness). She gave him a few bites of something that looked like meat. "Neville doesn't talk much either," Tatiana told the younger girl.

More than once, Tatiana tried to convince Rachel to talk to some of the other birds. The only problems that Rachel could see with that were—

only two of the birds were trained to talk at all,