Opening
In these chapters, Marcos Tejo moves from numb survival to dangerous hope. An encounter with life in an abandoned zoo cracks his desensitization, and a storm-soaked act of care transforms the “female” in his barn into a person he names and loves—Jasmine. As the world’s machinery of slaughter churns on, Marcos builds a secret family that the system will not tolerate.
What Happens
Chapter 21
After a tense lunch with his sister, Marcos drives to a long-abandoned zoo to clear his head. The ruins force him back into memory: his infant son Leo’s funeral, the cremation, and his own blankness—trauma that leaves him present but unreachable. The zoo mirrors that emptiness. Cages hang open, signs rot, and graffiti sneers at sentimentality; someone has crossed out “I miss the animals,” as if affection itself must be punished. The chapter brings the theme of Grief, Trauma, and Desensitization into focus, showing how Marcos’s grief mutates into paralysis.
He wanders under a shattered stained-glass cupola of Icarus—man trying to be bird and falling—and into the serpentarium, where a deft Venetian mask stares from the wall beside a poem about the “mask of apparent calm.” Then he hears it: a faint cry. In a terrarium, a litter of four puppies wriggles, alive and unafraid. Marcos crawls in with them. He pets them, plays, and the shell cracks: he laughs, he cries silently, and for a moment he belongs to a world that still feels.
Chapter 22
Time blurs as Marcos names the pups—Jagger, Watts, Richards, Wood—and the joy dredges up pain. He remembers his dogs, Pugliese and Koko, and how he killed them during the Transition, even as he suspected the virus was a lie. Killing Koko, his father’s companion, helped break his father’s mind. The memory stains him with Complicity and Moral Corruption: he upholds the system even when he doubts it.
A growl snaps him back. Six feral dogs—the parents—appear, fangs bared. For a beat, he longs for them to kill him so his body can feed them. Then he thinks of his dependent father and chooses survival. He props open the puppies’ door so the parents can reach them, barricades the adjoining terrarium to carve out an escape, and sprints. The pack slams after him; he dives into his car and locks the doors. Staring at their hungry faces, he thinks they’re “beautiful.” He drives away, devastated that he cannot save them.
Chapter 23
A storm breaks as Marcos reaches home. He goes to the barn and leads the “female” outside into the sheets of rain. What begins as cleaning becomes a rite. He gentles her movement, keeps her calm, and slowly sees her: long eyelashes, freckles, green eyes, a scent he names “jasmine.” In this moment, the logic of Dehumanization and Objectification flips. He refuses her product status and tends to her as a person.
He combs her hair, kisses the brand on her forehead, and touches the scar at her throat where her voice has been taken. She appears to him “fragile... translucent... perfect.” Overwhelmed, he holds her; then he undresses and has sex with her in the rain, defying the foundational taboo of their world.
Chapter 24
Part Two opens in spring, after a time jump. Marcos wakes on the sofa with the woman—now Jasmine—sleeping beside him. The house holds a fragile domesticity. On TV, an old Transition broadcast plays: people smashing animal sculptures, history rewriting empathy as weakness.
Jasmine learns the rhythms of the home. Marcos has taught her to wear clothes, use the bathroom, and approach the stove and TV without fear. He admires her tenacity and strength, unties her when he’s home, and lets her move freely. She sits beside him; he rests a hand on her belly. She is eight months pregnant.
Chapter 25
Marcos and Jasmine share morning mate before he locks her in a room for safety and leaves for work. Calls from his estranged wife, Cecilia, multiply; he fears she wants to return. At the plant, he confronts the Church of the Immolation, whose members volunteer for ritual slaughter because they believe humanity is a “virus.” The government forces plants to accept them in exchange for tax breaks, a bargain meant to contain a doctrine that endangers the euphemisms keeping cannibalism acceptable.
Taking over from Krieg, Marcos meets an elderly volunteer, Gastón Schafe, and remembers the chaos when a previous young woman panicked and was stunned and tossed to the Scavengers. To avoid a repeat, he offers Gastón water laced with a tranquilizer. When it takes effect, he leads him to Sergio at the stunner, who kills him quickly. Workers drag the body to the fence for the Scavengers. Marcos watches, thinking about the “decadence and the insanity” of it all, and then about Jasmine and their child.
Character Development
Marcos’s numbness fractures and reorganizes into purpose. The zoo awakens his capacity to feel; the storm baptizes his defiance; the plant exposes the lengths he will go to protect a secret family.
- Emotional Reawakening: The puppies pierce his paralysis, letting grief and joy coexist.
- Transgression into Rebellion: Washing, naming, and sleeping with Jasmine breaks social taboos and asserts her humanity.
- Protector’s Pragmatism: He tranquilizes a volunteer and choreographs slaughter to reduce chaos that might threaten his hidden life.
- Complicated Responsibility: Thoughts of his father, Jasmine, and the unborn child tether him to survival, even when he longs to surrender.
Themes & Symbols
The novel turns its gaze from public horror to private resistance. Dehumanization and Objectification, once the state’s unassailable doctrine, falter under a simple ritual of care: washing, naming, seeing. Marcos’s tenderness builds a counterethic inside the same world that brands and silences. Meanwhile, Grief, Trauma, and Desensitization still govern him, but not absolutely; the zoo and the puppies show that feeling can be buried without dying.
Complicity and Moral Corruption persist in the background hum of bureaucratic slaughter. Marcos refines the killing process with tranquilized “volunteers,” exposing how systems demand participation that feels necessary, even protective, while still corroding the soul. The Church of the Immolation takes the logic to its endpoint: if people are meat, then turning oneself into meat can be sold as virtue.
Symbols:
- The Abandoned Zoo: A mausoleum for empathy where memory survives in ruin—and where life, improbably, returns.
- The Puppies: Innocence that rekindles attachment, proof that instinctive care still lives in Marcos.
- Rain: A baptism that washes away product-status and apathy, inaugurating a forbidden bond.
- Icarus Glass and Venetian Mask: Emblems of failed transcendence and fragile identity—faces we wear before the world rips them off.
- The Feral Pack: Beauty and hunger fused; a mirror of a society where survival and savagery blur.
Key Quotes
“I miss the animals.” Crossed out in rage, this graffito captures the policing of sentiment: longing for lost kinship is treated as weakness. Erasure becomes ideology—feel nothing, or be punished for feeling.
“The mask of apparent calm... of not knowing when this thing I call skin will be ripped off.” The serpentarium’s poem articulates life under terror, where identity is provisional and the body is property. Marcos recognizes himself in the tension between composure and the threat of annihilation.
“Fragile... translucent... perfect.” As he washes the “female,” Marcos’s language shifts from commodity to person. The triad distills re-humanization: he sees vulnerability, depth, and value, and his desire becomes entangled with recognition, not object-use.
“We are our own virus.” The Church of the Immolation’s creed distorts ecological anxiety into self-erasure. By sanctifying slaughter, it validates the state’s logic and exposes how ideology can aestheticize atrocity.
The “decadence and the insanity” of the ritual. Marcos’s verdict on the volunteer’s death names the spectacle for what it is: not order but theater. The line marks his sharpened moral vision, even as he orchestrates the scene to protect his private life.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters pivot the novel from world-building to personal stakes. The conflict is no longer Marcos versus numbness; it is Marcos, Jasmine, and their unborn child versus a society that will destroy them. By creating a home in a killing world, he becomes a dissident not through speeches but through care. The result is a story that tightens from dystopian panorama to intimate tragedy, where every choice at the plant echoes back into the fragile refuge he is fighting to keep.