Sebastian aimed the gun at the cats. The third cat inside the house must have sensed something was wrong, for he abruptly opened the door. His furry mouth was covered in Daniel’s blood.
“You can’t be serious,” the mother stray said.
“I just killed my master,” Sebastian said. “I am very serious.”
“They’re the enemy!” the mother stray said. “They tried to kill you!”
Sebastian kept the rifle trained on them. After a few awkward seconds, the cats stood down. With his free hand, Sebastian waved the Martinis on. Again, the humans strode past him, eyes averted.
“Woman,” Sebastian said. Janet stopped, but kept her gaze on the ground. “I’m going to find Sheba.”
“Sheba ran away!” Michael said. “After Daddy—”
“Quiet,” Janet said. She forced herself to face Sebastian. “I hope you find her,” she said. “I’ll be praying for you.”
He had no idea what that meant.
The Martinis walked down the driveway to the SUV. Doors opened, feet shuffled in. The doors closed. Thunk, thunk. Janet’s fists clamped to the steering wheel, her knuckles bulging through the pale skin.
The vehicle drove off. Michael watched Sebastian, his palms stuck to the glass.
Once the car was gone, Sebastian lowered the gun.
“You should head west,” the mother stray said. “It’s not safe here.”
“I need to find her,” Sebastian said.
“The dog?” she said, snickering like a human. To her young ones she said, “You see this? This is how you get yourself killed: protecting humans and looking for lost lovers.”
“I suppose it is,” Sebastian said.
The mother stray stared at Sebastian until he had no choice but to look her in the eye. “Cheer up, kitty cat,” she said. “You won’t need your puppy girlfriend. You’ve got this now.”
She pointed at her temple.
“Before this week,” she said, “you were no more than a mouth and an ass and some genitals. Well, maybe your genitals aren’t what they used to be. Anyway, you’re something else now. Maybe you don’t appreciate that, living in this mansion all fat and happy. But now you have a mind of your own. Use it or die.”
The mother stray ordered her children to join her inside the house. Sebastian did not stop them. Everything was quiet. Even the explosions in the distance ceased. His jackhammer heart came to rest in his rib cage, and he was able to think again. Clarity returned in short instructions: Sheba is out there. I have to find Sheba. (Sheba is probably dead.) Sheba went south. I have to find Sheba. (Sheba is dead.)
Sebastian gripped the barrel of the shotgun and started walking.
Chapter Two: The Story of Hymenoptera Unus
The Queen saw everything. Her eyes and antennae were greedy for more information, more scents, more colors, more words. Billions of her daughters extended the Colony’s reach into the world of the humans while she watched, gathering all their experiences, pleased that things had come to pass as she had envisioned. Her mind was the Colony’s mind, throbbing with growth, pulling light from the darkness.
And it was killing her.
But she was Hymenoptera Unus, the Daughter of the Misfit Queen. The one the humans called the Devil’s Hand, the Monarch of the Underworld. The responsibility — and the awful, pounding torture that came with it — was hers alone. No one could ever truly understand what she knew, certainly not her daughters, nor the humans, nor the surface animals whom she had lifted from slavery like a living god. Her children would sacrifice everything for her, and for that she was grateful, but they would never see the world through her eyes. They would never feel alone, for they were part of a whole. They would never feel regret, because for them it served no purpose.
Though her body was thousands of years old, her mind housed the collective memory of the Colony. Every victory, every defeat, every horrible death, was recorded in the chemical language of her people and stored in her brain. One death was difficult enough. She had lived billions and billions, stretched over millennia.
There came a day late in the war with no name when the humans were close to discovering her lair, buried deep within the newly formed island in the ocean. The earth above shook with their war machines. The humans brought bombs and digging devices, along with thousands of stamping boots. The Queen lay in her chamber, prone, bloated, having grown to the size of a great whale, a beast that occupied more space than the original colony in which she was born. As advanced as her brain was — as monstrous as she was — her body was still a powerless, egg-laying factory. Trapped and helpless, through her own doing. That was why the humans could never be allowed to get close. They would have burned her and danced on the corpse while believing that they had fulfilled some prophecy foretold by their magic books and witch doctors. The Colony would not end like that. The Queen swore it. She had started this war after centuries of planning. She would see it through until all the humans were dead, and the world and its deserving inhabitants were remade in her image.
The earth continued to rattle and groan as the human and insect armies fought aboveground. Another explosion on the surface throttled the chamber and shook loose a hunk of earth that crashed to the ground. The Queen had driven the humans mad with fear by then. An animal forced into a corner posed a threat, but a human faced with extinction was unpredictable and savage, positively devolved.
All around her, the Queen’s daughters continued their work of licking her swollen abdomen, clearing it of debris and pathogens as it pulsated and squeezed out new eggs. If this entire chamber collapsed, if all her chambermaids had their heads chopped off, they would continue licking until their brains finally shut down from a lack of blood and oxygen. Their devotion was absolute.
A procession of oversized workers carried in their jaws the swollen, nearly transparent larvae of the Alpha soldiers, the ones bred to be larger than a human. They could snap a man in half, tip over a tank, endure countless projectiles from the humans’ guns and cannons. After these super-soldiers hatched, the Queen carried out her ancient task of holding each one, touching antennae with it, and imparting some — but of course not all — of her immense knowledge. Enough for them to fulfill their duty. They could not handle much more than that. Her daughters could only follow her orders, not analyze and agonize over them like she could.
What to offer the new soldiers on this particular day posed a challenge. The Colony was so close to victory over the humans, yet they could lose it all so quickly. Her own mother, the so-called Misfit Queen, had been forced to make the same decision many years earlier. And the Misfit chose to give Hymenoptera everything. It was both the source of Hymenoptera’s greatness and the root of her misery. While she hated this gift, the Colony would have failed, and the humans would have won long ago, had she not accepted it.
The Queen delivered to each of the Alphas that day a summary of the war and the Colony’s history, going back to her grandmother, the Lost Queen, the one whose failure had triggered the conflict with humanity. That foolish monarch had ruled thousands of years earlier. Unchallenged, controlling vast stretches of the earth and its underground, the Lost Queen thought herself the planet’s rightful ruler. Hers was the species best suited for leadership: unhindered by sentimentality, fear, or a misguided belief that this world had been created solely for them.