Emile Yung lived in the back end of New Mexico, facing Nevada and Las Vegas. They often said they felt like Lot's wife, only they weren't just looking back. They were thinking burn, motherfucker, burn. Emile was the sort of person who would listen to the nightmares of their political opponents and go, that sounds like a great plan. They kept dying their hair rainbow colors because it kept the shitheads away, or so they said. Verbatim. Emile kept a white picket fence around their house like domesticity's last rites, and once again someone had spraypainted profanity across its face like that meant something. They didn't know they'd just added to the layers, obscenity upon white upon obscenity, built up like layers of metamorphic stone. Em called it a monument to themself.

They'd been Hawk's best person at the wedding. Complete with a sash and a red velvet tuxedo that ended in a mermaid skirt, because why the fuck not. It was almost bigger than the wedding dress. Hawk had loved every inch of it.

"Eventually, they're going to give up on the fence," Hawk said.

Alex grinned at her.

"What?" She said.

"You wanna know what ant bait looks like to ants? Welp. There you go. That thing will attract every bigot in the area code."

"And that's worth the coats of paint because?" She said.

"They know the bigots are there. That it's not safe to put anything they really care about out where the bigots can get to it. That's why you have banners in war. Stick it out, see if anybody shoots at it. They shoot, you know better than to camp there." He turned into Emile's driveway. They'd moved house a couple times in their acquaintance with Alex—he radiated heteronormativity the way stars do gamma rads, and unfortunately that made the more interesting people a bit hesitant to bond with him. He tried to make up for it with a lack of pressure and a willingness to turn bigots into human chutney—but each time they did move, Emile Yung stayed in the shadow of the volcano, so to speak. Far enough that they didn't worry overmuch about someone poisoning their dogs or chickens (...or turtles. Or beehives. Or...Hawk and Emile had a lot in common) but close enough that they had neighbors to talk to…and to fear.

Humans, Alex thought, and not for the first time, can really fucking suck sometimes.

It was nearly dawn when they reached Emile's place. Neither of them felt like going home. It felt...wrong, to Alex. It'd be like tracking mud, or worse, through the wide and white expanse of someone's parlor carpet. Home was safety. Home was inviolate. Home, with this inside of it, would be flayed open, gutted and spread eagled and defiled. Better to drive all night and more and keep the genie in the bottle. Safety in the house. Danger in this car. Either, or. Your pick. Alex picked Emile Yung and his wife's intellect.

They were waiting outside.

Alex stopped the car and looked at them for a couple minutes without moving.

"...are they standing outside, in public, in a bondage harness?" Alex said.

Hawk looked at her friend. "Well, yes, dear. But they're also wearing a peasant dress."

A peasant dress, Alex thought, that was missing enough of the skirt to be a blouse with a tail. He was pretty sure the missing skirt was intentional, and since that harness would be rather hard to put on at all, let alone over that much fabric, he had to assume that they had not walked into a closet with their eyes closed and still managed to trip into the sex drawer, and that the harness was as intentional as the dress. Their hair was a riot of color, golds and blues and greens and oranges, clashing with anarchic disregard for taste or harmony. They clashed with everything, largely because they wanted to.

He tried to imagine this person meeting with Kaiser Willheim and felt much happier about the world's state of affairs. He got out of the car. "Hey, Em!" He said.

They nodded their chin at him, a movement that conveyed reluctant welcome far better than anything short of a shotgun full of rock salt, aimed in his direction. That was how Em had greeted him the first time they met. With the rock salt. "Where's Hawk?"

Hawk had a door open, her hands thrust up with the strap of her ant bag tangled in one of them. "Hey, Em!" she shouted this the way one held up hands during a stick-up.

"What the fuck are you idiots doing with Willheim?" Emile said, and marched across the red desert soil to their friend, who began nodding and shifting bags around.

"He found us. It was one of Alex's clients who bought it—did you confirm she bought it?" Hawk said, to Em.

Alex gave her a sharp look.

Emile said, "Yeah. As much as I could. You know how HIPAA and privacy work. But yeah, old woman dead." They spat sideways. "Death sucks."

"How did you confirm that?" Alex said. "Just curious."

"I called the morgue. Well, I got a contact to call the morgue. I've done some consulting work with Phoenix PD. They said that the morgue at that hospital's been shut down completely. Lots of big ugly cars and people with white tents, and before those guys showed up they were already breaking out the quarantine protocols. My friend asked if he should be scared. I told him no." A pause. "Did I lie to my friend, Hawk?"

"I don't know," Hawk lied. Her eyebrow twitched. It was one of her bigger tells. Emile would know it, same as Alex did.

"Baby," he said, and gave her shoulder a squeeze. "You're still dogshit at lying. And yeah. Everything around the old woman's house was dead. Be worried. We are."

"Okay," Emile said.

Hawk stuck a hand out, pulling her friend's attention back to her. "No, Em. You don't get it. Everything was dead. Everything. Every single thing around that woman's house, dead, like this spreading stain across the world, and—"

"Hawk," Emile said.

"—and we were in it. So the first thing we need to do is go to—"

"Hawk!" Em interrupted. Both Hawk and Alex turned towards them. "I know. I know how bad this is. You haven't told me about anything I don't already know."

Silence for a moment as Hawk fumbled her way towards an answer. Alex didn't need to. "You're working for Willheim anyway?" He said.

"No," A pause and a deep breath. "But I've been talking to Henry Dyson. And....maybe, a little bit, working with Dyson."

Alex did not respond to this with much enthusiasm, because he was a normal human being who had normal relationships and who regarded the rarified atmosphere of academia the way one would the phone tree of the gods—something scary that you don't need. Hawk responded the way a Beatle fan had when Lennon and Yoko crashed the band's party: "Are you kidding me?"

"Hawk. You know Dyson. You know he's never been all that hot on mites and isopods and....well, he needed a consultation and some of what he was showing me just...wasn't adding up.”

“And he was showing you what, exactly?” Hawk said.

“Soil samples. Very, very, very dead soil samples. But what’s scary is, the samples he asked for advice on weren't from the same location. They couldn't have been. Even if you leave aside the differences in minerals, the microscopic population—mites, diatoms, that sort of thing—didn't match at all. He's been showing me samples from nine different locations—"

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"Nine?" Hawk said, and Alex felt his own shock at that number, nine, radiating through his gut like a punch. The fear was so huge it seemed to unstitch his own colon. Nine locations, it echoed. Nine. Fields turned to frail beige astroturf. Squirrels dropping, their own skin split into fragments. A woman--imaginary and beautiful as all purely mental things can be--falling to earth in a spreading pool of her own ashes. Nine.

Emile nodded. "And that was two weeks ago. He called yesterday, said that there was a new one. And then you guys called. And I thought...well, let's keep our mouth shut, see what happens. Dyson couldn't get me any samples. He said it wasn't safe. You guys would be a secondary source, without Dyson’s influence. You could confirm or deny what he’s been showing me." A pause. “Did you get samples?”

"We got some. But Em...we should be hotter than the surface of the sun right now."

"I know. So when you said you were going in, I called Henry—Dyson—and I got the formula they're using to clean people off. I'm just real hesitant to use it because...essential oils, Hawk. They're using essential oils and...fuck, it might as well be prayers, and he says it's working?" They paused. "Fuck. Neither of you pray, do you? If you do, I’m sorry."

"If we did, it would be for the continued existence of the human race, because that kind of desperation smells bad." Alex said.

"Well…Hawk, Dyson knows where you and Alex were. Their whole camp knows. They're all saying Kaiser set you up and you took the bait."

Hawk smiled, a thin and secret sort of thing, sick on its own survival. "They were waiting for that bang, weren't they?"

"Dyson said yes. It happens every event. It’s like something closes up and then it’s safe to work. It's not safe to be where you were, until after that bang happens. He said they're going to wait until you both are too far gone, and then come get what you took...and that if I'm smart, I wouldn't even let you on my property. You would be lethal to me."

"But we're here," he said. "You're letting walking dead people on your porch."

"Well, he also said that if I give a solitary shit about the human race, I'd let you in and get whatever you bring me to every single expert I can, as fast as I can. And..." Emile stopped. They looked a bit sick.

"What?"

"Dyson implied that it'd take a miracle to get you guys to me. That you'd be dead on the side of the road somewhere. That I should be looking to...to salvage what I could from you. You were in the worst of the dead zone during the worst possible time. And that's not my quote. That's Dyson." A pause. “I don’t even know what the dead zone is.”

Alex made the jump. He knew jack shit about science. He knew people. "So either there was something there that Kaiser wanted to keep people away from, and he lied about the danger...or there's something different about us."

"Or you're about to drop dead," Emile said. "You just don't know it yet. Slotin, right?" And they walked into the house without a second word. But they left the door open. For Emile, that was a graven invitation. Alex and Hawk went inside.

Emile's house was like Emile: straight up high pitch goblin energy. They were a David Bowie song incarnate and given lots of sugar. Lots of greens and browns, earth tones in batik. A huge sewing machine—Alex kept thinking angle arm when he looked at it, but he was pretty sure he was wrong—sat with half a quilt in its teeth, beneath a large pile of camping equipment that looked like it was growing. There were plates of moss and isopods beneath green grow lights, and a huge tank of fish with what looked like basil growing out of the plastic tray holding the roots in place. Alex always felt like he was visiting Radigast the Brown when he spoke with Emile. He was also pretty sure they kept rescue rabbits in the back yard, so maybe he wasn't that wrong. Any day now they were going to wagon-train the bunnies and disappear into the unknown. They also had some skill with phlebotomy, because they had both the Wests' blood sampled and fizzy lavender sodas provided to make up for the blood draws within minutes.

Homemade sodas, damn it. Alex would have wanted a case.

"So how long have you and Dyson been talking instead of trying to kill each other?" Hawk said, lightly. She was peering into a terrarium full of ants. They seemed to be dismembering leaves. He really needed to pay more attention, and he was also pretty sure that leafcutters were on the "You must kill on sight" list, next to RIFAs and velvet ants and the ants that were an Egypt name but not the one named after pyramids. Pharaohs. There you go. Anyway, he paid attention to his wife's hobbies, and he was pretty sure she hated leafcutters. She seemed okay with these.

"Just a bit. I told him before he took Willheim up on his offer that he'd regret working with the Ararat Project."

"Is that what he's calling it?" Hawk said, warmly.

Alex, meanwhile, was starting to think Oh, fuck. "Honey?" He said, with tone. Hawk would respond to tone.

"Yeah?"

"I would be very concerned about that project name. Very specifically, Mount Ararat is where the Ark landed after God fucking obliterated the world."

"Noah's ark? Alex, it's a Bible story," Hawk said.

"Yeah. And it's about the chosen--and only the chosen--surviving a disaster. Look, if I were picking names for a 'let's save the world' incorporated adventure, I would absolutely not pick anything Bible related, specifically because I would not want anyone's eschatology contaminating the rest of my life. But I didn't pick that name. Kaiser Willheim did. He's calling this nonsense the Ararat Project?"

"Yep. Only when it started it wasn't about the dead spots. It was about climate change. It's why I didn't take Kaiser up on his offer. Corporate activism is like cleaning toilets. Everybody knows you're not going to eat out of the thing. You just can't see the shit anymore. They're gonna do a fundraiser for the rainforest so you don't find out they burned a thousand acres. You want to whitewash your money, fine. Do it without me." Pause. "Henry wanted the paycheck."

Alex thought, to himself, that he'd be more inclined to agree with Emile if they weren't independently wealthy. Everybody wanted a paycheck.

"Em, we know Dyson. We both know Dyson."

"Yeah, and I know you, too. If Kaiser had shown up on your doorstep with that kind of money, you'd have gone," Emile said.

"Not necessarily," Hawk said.

"That's what Henry said. He wasn't going to do it. He knew Kaiser was rotten. It'd be like signing up to design AI for an electric car magnate. You'd get his shit all over you no matter what you did. But Kaiser just kept raising the offer. Like...stupid money." Emile stopped themselves and began just...breathing. Their eyes rounded, as if they were seeing some horror clearly, for the first time. "I just realized...I've never been so glad to have money, you know? To be in a place where you can't buy my morality. Because... Henry. He didn't want to go. That was why he called me. He thought I could talk him out of it. And I could. I did. Multiple times. Until I couldn't, anymore. And I think that's why I never got an offer. I almost took one of Kaiser's toys away."

"Well," Hawk said, sniffing. "I always suspected I wasn't batting the same average as you two—"

"Yeah. You're doing actual science with species that matter. Your honeypots are easily a keystone species. You could hang a whole nature preserve on those little beauties. Henry and I are doing work with pest species—He's got a project on P. Longicornis, on their genetics. I've got a fire-ant colony I'm working with, have for a few years. And where this matters is, Henry and I have been working in fields Kaiser understands how to monetize. How do you make money off of honeypot ants?"

"Raise them commercially. They taste amazing." Alex said.

"Okay, her I get, but where the fuck would you have eaten the things?" Emile said. Because of course they had a mouth that could bleach the depths of a tar barrel.

"We had some..." And both Alex and Hawk froze. He couldn't speak to his wife, but Alex was making some real sudden connections.

"Spill," Emile said, as the two Wests stared into each other's eyes. Not lovingly, but in utter, shared horror.

"Last night. Right before we went to Elizabeth Cummings' house? I have two honeypot colonies, and they both just crossed the one year mark. So I took some of the oldest repletes and we ate them."

Silence echoed through Emile's close little house. The rooms here smelled of damp earth, likely from the banks of grow lights and moss propagation pans. There was an herby sort of smell Alex didn't have the palate to identify past "oregano" and "that stuff that makes Herbs De Provence taste real interesting", explained by the rows and rows of drying herbs just over the cold fireplace. Shock made the air shiver, made the scent of possibly rosemary, possibly sage, possibly pine into something far sharper than its component parts.

"Last night," Emile said, nodding. "So...maybe you should actually be dead on the side of the road."

"Maybe we should be," Hawk said, and inhaled through her teeth. "We had six, each. And they were M. Depilis."

"Depilis? Like...why not Mexicanus? Or Mimicus, at least?" Emile said, wincing.

"They're what the supplier had. My Mexicanus collapsed and the Navajo got eaten by ferals. I ordered what they had two of." Hawk glanced at Alex. "The species we're talking about are more common than the ones we ate, and one of them is bigger. You get more honey from those."

"And a year old colony isn't going to have much to work with, either. Can you move them? Your colonies?" Behind Emile was a very large, hundred gallon paludarium, a planted terrarium with a water feature, fish, and a very large number of insects. He even thought he could recognize the ants in this one: Red Imported Fire Ants. The dreaded RIFAs. A hundred gallons of fire ants, sitting in someone's living room.

"They're both still in the original formicariums. Outworlds are modified display cases, like for a baseball or something. I can move them."

"Alright. Let me make sure you people aren't about to die on me. And then let's figure out why you aren't dying, and go from there." Emile said.