Hawk got Alex and Emile situated with the soil samples—her sample, from the center of the tomato plants, was the only one labeled, and Emile gave Alex a severe look. Her husband pled for rescue, but she left them to it. She had to go back to her house for the ants.

It was not that short of a drive. She made it, knowing that she was going to be in the car all day long. Meanwhile, her husband was left behind, with a lone enby babe who was also one hell of a scientist, and it said a lot about the caliber of friends she kept, that she wasn't worried. Alex wasn't going to start an affair; if he was, it'd be about the thrill of deception, and he knew better ways to get that than fucking outside of marriage. Poker, for example. Or else he'd run another "teach your cashiers how not to get scammed" course. He was a magician whose greatest pleasure was ensuring his audience would never be fooled again. Tricking his wife the way he would a mark? That was the sort of thing his father would do.

Funny how the one guy who didn't view women like a starving dog views pork chops—or at least, the one who wasn't willing to make a big deal out of it—was an ex-con-artist who wasn't so much ex as he was contentiously abstaining. Someone who understands deception knows better than to bring out that trite nonsense. Men don't jump supermodels at the catwalk, and women don't jump the lifeguards at a public pool. They're more than capable of self-restraint when the consequences outweigh the possible benefits. Alex liked his life with Hawk, valued her enough to choose not to hurt her, and thus chose not to cheat. He knew how temptation worked, and knew enough about how to build it in someone else to sabotage it in himself.

He'd never cop to it, of course. He'd blush, and mumble something about love, like it's a feeling that happens to you and not a choice you make every day. Alex woke up each morning and chose Hawk, and she felt that through the domestic air currents. She had no fear of Alex looking at a beautiful woman because she'd watched him do it, watched his eyes fill with admiration and desire for the feminine body, curves of hip like unexplored tributaries, hidden clefts to delve into, deep, and then he would look at her and those embers would smolder into conflagration as he deliberately chose her. He turned "cleave" into a verb of the highest order, made a gift of stray lusts, did pilgrimage past the foreign gates to lay his favor exclusively at Hawk's altar.

It was sexy as fuck.

But as Alex wouldn't understand the ants, Hawk got a nice, long, lonely drive back home while Alex got to play in the dirt with her friend, and she'd have been alone if that friend hadn't also told her she wasn't about to turn into glass.

We aren't going to die! Part of her sang. And the rest went, we might not be dying. Don't count your lifespan until you've gotten to the grave.

She drove on.

***

"Does it really need to be Hawk's ants?" Alex asked. He was sitting in Emile's living room, looking at a tablet with most of a word document on its screen. It was his statement about what the Wests had done the previous night. Emile had asked him to be as clear and impartial as possible, but he'd had to resort to profanity a few times. He didn't have the greatest vocabulary, but when saying "it was blue" doesn't quite convey the appropriateness of shade, saying "it was fucking blue" somehow gets the point across. Great horror, like great beauty, should come with a thesaurus as a memento of the experience. Reality forces us to make do with fucking blue.

"Do you know how honeypots work?" Emile said.

"I live with Hawk," Alex said.

"So when she talked for an hour every day about Honeypots' place in the ecology...did you listen?"

Alex sighed.

"Thought not. So they're a pollinator that travel from flower to flower to collect nectar. The difference between them and bees, aside from the obvious—bees fly, ants walk—is that bees store their nectar in wax. Honeypots store their nectar in themselves, in the secondary 'social' stomach."

"Right. I get that part."

"So if we are right, and the stuff that kept you alive came out of the Honeypots...well, there's a lot of variables there. It might have been a specific flower nectar, like honeysuckle or barrel cactus flower. It might be something else entirely—a mineral in water or an enzyme in lipid fluids from your feeder insects. Or—and this is what we need to hope for, Alex—it's something unique to the ant. Like a gut microbe or the antimicrobial properties we already know the social stomachs have."

"Why do we want it to be the microbial whatsis?" Alex said.

"Because that makes it something we can replicate, just by breeding and feeding the ants. And, hopefully, we can get more ants with the same properties from the wild."

"How about trying to grow our magic enzyme in the lab?" Alex said. This seemed the most obvious solution. Find small insect with tiny amount of important thing, collect important thing, shove important thing into a computer until the computer starts making more of it. He could dress that idea up with some neat machines and science talk, but that was the gist.

"How do you think we grow things in a lab, Alex? We aren't growing mice in test tubes. We need something like mouse wombs to make mice. Theoretically, we can make more mice without mouse wombs—very theoretically, mind—but it's cheaper and less fuss to use real mouse wombs to make mice. If the microbe only exists in an ant stomach, we need something like an ant stomach to replicate it. And given how profoundly little we understand about ant stomachs, the easiest way to get an ant stomach is to get an ant."

"Hawk's ants."

"They're the known quantity. We know—or rather, we're the kind of 'pretty sure' that kick starts most hypothetical experimentation—that Hawk's ants have the thing that kept you alive. We do not know that statement to be true about any other group of ants. The only way that can be true would be to test another group of ants for the same substance."

"And that's hard because..." Alex said.

Emile gave Alex a look. When Hawk gave him that look it was because he was being particularly stupid. He figured one of his favorite scientists had cribbed that look from the other one. He just waited out Emile's patience. They had less practice with Alex, and folded pretty fast. "How many honeypot attempts has Hawk made? Not this year, but since the two of you've been together."

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

He winced. "Nineteen."

"And she's been successful?"

"You need to define successful."

"How about you define it?" Emile said.

Alex sighed. "She's gotten actual workers out of her queens ten times. They made it to their first feeding six times, and gotten out of 'the founding stage' whatever the hell that is, twice. Happy?"

"Actually...those are really good odds for Honeypots," Emile said. They looked a little sour, even.

"They are?" Alex said.

"They're fragile as fuck and don't really have any defenses. Their primary defense from other ants is living in a desert. And like all ants, they make hundreds of potential queens when they reproduce because they know most of the queens won't make it. But to get back to the point, Alex, you have to go out to the nearest desert and pick through the brush until you find another nest of honeypots. You have to find a mature one that has active repletes, because we don't have time for a colony to mature. And for the data to be viable, we need to have the same feeding regimen, same sugar source, same protein source, and same species, as the ants Hawk has. Which is impossible, because Hawk uses that obscure commercial sugar source she likes." Emile hesitated, and added, "Meaning no wild insects would be eating it."

Alex nodded, and said, "So if we did go wandering through the brush, and we found ants that did have that same property. The microbial whatever. Wouldn't that mean that our whatever is not something Hawk made?"

Emile blinked for a couple minutes. "Yeah." They said. They clearly hadn't thought about that detail.

"But it would also involve going through the brush in a desert, looking for ants, and I can't tell Honeypots from RIFAs."

Emile winced. "You're not that bad."

"Em. I once put a fire ant supermajor in her Carpenter ant enclosure."

"I mean, some carpenter ants are very big—" Emile said.

"C. Pensylvannius," Alex said. Camponotus Pensylvannius was one of the largest carpenter ant species in North America, and a very profound coal black. Red Imported Fire Ants, as the name implies, range from a light orange to a dark garnet. Even a beginner ant-keeper would recognize that these ants are a different size and color. Alex had even been proud of himself for "Catching" the "escapee".

"I hope they killed the little shit," Emile said, proving that Hawk's all-encompassing hatred of invasive RIFAs was consistent throughout the hobby.

"They carried its head around for a while. So you're right. The last thing we need to do is put my dumb ass on ant-collecting duty." Alex nodded to Emile. "And we can test the dirt until Hawk gets back, in this nice air conditioning, rather than spend a couple days hiking around the desert. So. What can the dirt tell us?"

Emile gave him a slightly muted version of the look, and said, "Well, the first thing we can do is determine if it's safe to handle, and if it isn't, what we can do to make it safe."

There was silence following this. It was the silence that follows those who chart undiscovered territories, who stand in the breach and distribute names to the things observed. It was the silence one uses when contemplating their own grave. Emile glanced from the bag full of test tubes, each of them filled with dirt, to the equipment that one day ago had been up to its task. Alex could not follow the enby's thoughts, but for himself? He wanted to label each test tube with something far less scientific than name, date, and location. A more primitive note, more primal, more emergent: here there be dragons.

"You have feeder insects, right?" Alex said, once oxygen use forced his lungs to remember how breathing works. "Chuck a few into the vials and see what happens."

Emile winced.

"What?"

"I'm imagining Oppenhimer chucking roaches and nuclear waste together," they said.

"Me, I was thinking of all the guys they sent to Chernobyl, to look into reactor four. Confirm the fucking thing is open and on fire." Alex shuddered. Everyone who had done that, who had looked into the burning heart of the star humanity thought tamed, had died.

He looked now at one of the vials. It should have killed him already. It should have had eyes, so he could look into them and see his own death, and at least have the dying make sense. It's almost more merciful to die because someone wants you to, than to die because an inert rock sat doing inert things, that are somehow more capable of murder than every active pair of hands in existence. All things die, but at least when you fight back you feel like there's a damn choice involved.

"It's a good idea," Emile said. They didn't get up. "See if it kills the roaches. So let's say it kills the roaches. What then?" a pause. "Lead gloves?" They sounded like they'd been stabbed by the lead gloves.

"We don't know lead can stop it," Alex said.

"We don't know glass can stop it," They said.

"If glass can't stop it, it's killing us now, so we might as well jam it under a microscope and write down what we see before we die." Alex said.

Emile did not argue with him. Instead, they said "Ever want to rewind time?"

"Make it so Hawk and I didn't get to Elizabeth Cummings before Willheim's people did?" he thought for a moment. "Would you?"

"You met him. I didn't." Emile said.

Alex nodded, and considered it. First, not going through all this. Not risking his life. Being at home, right now, doing the midday routine. And then further than that. It was an analysis of words and movement and action most people do not need to do. It's the sort of thing you learn when the scam is in play and the mark has his hand on the Wizard of Oz's curtain. You need a word, a deed, an action, that will keep the mark away, and you fuck up, maybe you find out the mark has concealed carry and is much quicker with a gun than his wits. He saw Kaiser Willheim, the whole entirety of their interactions, and he ran the man through a con-artist's equation.

"He reminds me of my father," Alex said. "And Baylor...you didn't trust him. He'd save your life, because it'd keep you from noticing he's got your wallet. And I'd rather be a dumbass and put my life at risk than trust any man who reminds me of Baylor West."

"He's got more resources," Emile said. “Kaiser does. More than your dad.”

"And he's got more of a debt to pay. My problem is, men like my Dad and Kaiser, they don’t pay their debts. They run from them. Face it, Em. We shouldn't want any guy ruthless enough to be a billionaire in charge of saving the planet. We know what he had to do to get there. And it looks a whole lot more like my father's line of work than yours or Hawk's. And yes, my brain is screaming that I need to leave this to the man who can afford to buy radiation suits and decontamination protocols. But in the world I grew up in, that's the set-up to get fleeced. I hear Kaiser talk about energy, and he might as well talk about pool tables, marching bands, and a stupid number of trombones."

"What, you think Kaiser is causing trouble in River City?" Emile said.

"I think he would if he could," Alex said.

"Why? I'm not saying you're wrong, but...why would a businessman plot to do something like this?" Emile said.

"You think he's cleaning up those dead spots for free? What do you want to bet there's a rider in every NDA and contract Willheim gives you that gives him the rights to all your discoveries while you try to save the world? Disaster is a business, my friend. And to finish the cliché..."

"Business is fucking booming," Emile said. "Okay. That makes sense, but there's something I don't get. If Kaiser's trying to profit off this, why let you two escape?"

"Who says we escaped?" Alex said. "It's the most obvious move to make, if this is a con. Let us run for a bit, realize we're in over our head, and then land us like a rainbow trout. If we died, he'd have some mild cleanup. If we live...well. We'd have to have something, wouldn't we? Some part of the answer. Or else, something Willheim wants."

"But Alex...if you're right, Hawk—" Em shook their head. “You let her go out there alone.”

"She kept her mother in line for decades. My daddy would have left her alone the way he would a rattlesnake. Willheim thinks she's the malleable one. The only concern I have is what play Hawk will make."

"Will make when?" Emile said, after waiting for him to continue.

"When she reaches our house and finds it crawling with Willheim's people. If I were him, it's what I'd do." Alex shrugged.

"And if he doesn't already have people at your place?" Emile said.

"Then we're completely fucked," Alex said. "Because that will mean we really are on our own."