So, first there had been that flying, feathered thing, and then there had been a trio of leaf-creepers that had delighted her with the way their segmented bodies would change color from pink to brown to green to blue, and she’d loved to watch them slide around, their cilia waving sinuously.
And there had been the water worm she’d kept in a bowl in the back of an empty egg cell—she’d bred mudhops to feed it, until her sisters had complained about the constant buzzing.
None of them had been like Child. Child seemed to return her affection. He could manipulate things with his so-dexterous paws—tying sticks together, stacking stones, weaving leaf stems. Sometimes his chittering seemed almost to be speech. Sometimes she was sure that he was actually speaking to her, like a person would. He was different.
She was glad for it. She was glad that things were different, and would continue even after she was gone.
As a picker, Stel had a sharp sense for adapting materials. She interrogated Jacq about what he could grab, and figured out how to make a cart they could use to get her out of the hive. Apparently, once she was outside, she’d be okay; her clan had a signal point nearby.
It wasn’t hard to gather what they needed. They divided the labor, Stel molding sap while Jacq worked with the wood.
“How did you end up here?” Stel asked.
Jacq cringed. Stel made him uncomfortable with her bluntness, and her volume, and her humanness.
“Auntie found me.”
“Found you where?”
“Near one of the radiation patches.”
“Why didn’t your parents stop her?”
Jacq hesitated. “They weren’t there.”
“And no one found you?”
“No one was looking.”
Stel shook her head in dismay. “How old were you?”
“I was pretty small.”
“Like, under ten?”
Jacq shrugged.
“Under five?”
Jacq looked at his hands. “I had a fever.”
“Okay, but why—” Stel cut off. Her eyes went wide. She slapped the ground with excitement. “Wait! Are you from the city?”
Jacq shrank away, but he didn’t like to lie. “Yeah.”
“You’re from Landing? Really? You really grew up in the city?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, wow,” Stel said. “Oh. Wow. We heard they were sending people out by the end, but I thought it was old people and babies.”
Jacq’s knuckles whitened as he gripped a plank. He kept his voice blank despite wanting to shout in her face. “It was a bad fever.”
“So they sent you out to die? Why? To save food?”
“There wasn’t enough,” he said tightly.
“Wow. Just wow.”
Jacq threw down the wood with more force than he intended. The smack finally got Stel’s attention, and she shot him a guilty glance.
“Oh. Uh, sorry,” she said. “I guess maybe that’s hard to talk about.”
Jacq shrugged, picking up a new plank.
“Uh,” Stel said. “I guess, maybe I should tell you. They died. The people in the city. Things got worse, with the food and the radiation. Some of them left, even toward the end, but the ones who stayed died. Um. A lot of the ones who left died, too. They were pretty sick, and they didn’t know how to find the clans. We would have helped. We tried.”
She paused, watching for Jacq’s reaction. He said, “I see.”
“I guess . . . maybe . . . it’s revenge . . . ?”
“I had a baby brother.”
“Ah. Yeah.”
Jacq said nothing, letting the conversation sink into silence like a stone into a lake. Stel fidgeted, increasing discomfort visible on her face.
Words finally burst out in a rush. “It’s so weird to think, like, there’s a ship that’s traveled so, so far, all the way from Mars. By another star! And it’s been made into a city, and it’s been there for like five hundred years—I mean, it’s really old! Then there’s a storm, and something happens to the old engines underground, and boom, no one can live there anymore, even though they keep trying, and dying. It makes you think, like: What else can get destroyed? What else can just go boom, and you lose everything?”
“It was an earthquake.”
“Huh?”
“An earthquake, not a storm.”
“Oh. You remember?”
Jacq shrugged.
“So, uh, yeah. The dragons found you and brought you here?” Stel asked.
“Just Auntie. She took care of me.”
“Before or after throwing you in a fermentation pit?”
“Will you stop?” Jacq asked. He wanted to sound cold, but his tone was plaintive. “She saved your life, didn’t she? Isn’t that important?”
Stel’s mouth shut on whatever she’d been about to say. She looked down, embarrassed. “I made a stupid mistake. I shouldn’t have needed rescuing. Everyone always tells me to be more careful.”
“Maybe you should.”
“You’re right,” she said quietly. She cleared her throat, and when she spoke again, it was with overloud confidence. “Well. It’s good I got here. At least I can get you out.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“I don’t think you have a choice. Every dragon you know is going to die. The new ones might not like you.”
“Humans would be new to me, too,” Jacq snapped. “Newer.”
“Yeah, but new dragons don’t like humans breaking into their hives. We won’t murder you just because you don’t look like you belong in our camp.”
Jacq’s lips thinned. “As long as you have enough food.”
She paused. “Okay, yes, fine, humans can be crappy. But I promise you, our clan takes in strangers. You can stay with my family if you want. There’s an empty mat. My brother—”
For the first time, Stel balked. It was more than embarrassment; she looked as though she had swallowed something living, something that was flailing its way down her throat.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Well, anyway, there’s a free mat.”
Jacq thought of Auntie, and the hive, and the people before them who he could usually put out of his mind.
His throat ached. “Thank you. Truly. But I live here.”
“They’ll hurt you!”
“No. They’ll know me.”
Waving away his objections, she leaned urgently toward him. “We could look for your brother. Not everyone died—that means there’s a chance! I know you must want to find him. I know how you feel. You can’t stay!”
She was so red and vulnerable and hurting. Almost crying, because of him. The first human he’d seen in years.
“Okay,” he lied. “I’ll go.”
The queen was dead. Collector knew from the oppressive silence, and the smell that drifted from the center of the hive, the last cry of the old queen—Collector’s queen—as she struggled weakly against the newly molted Warriors. Her own daughters.
That was the way of it. That was life. The new queen would feed on the body of the old, would grow large and strong and lay the eggs that would, someday, hatch her own death.
Collector had known all her life that it would come to this: herself among the last of her sisters, her eyes clouded, her wings tattered, her queen dead. She had always expected to die in the course of her duties to the new hatch, her lifeless body disassembled by the Cleaners and piled in food storage. Still serving the hive, even in death. If she had never been eager for it, nor wished it to come sooner, still it had always seemed right and fitting.
She hadn’t realized that it would be so lonely.
She hadn’t realized that her stiff and weakening joints would hurt so much. The sudden absence of her queen had struck her like a thunderclap—or like its opposite, a shocking, painful, empty silence. The newly molted hatchlings—the Warriors, the new Egg Tenders moving about the hive, few now but increasing daily—smelled familiar, but were somehow blank and alien to her.