The road up to the insectarium was brief and unhindered by live things. Hawk didn't know which was worse: the silence of ashes, or the soft hooting sounds in the distance as the ape-creatures moved through the unknown. She wanted to say the latter, but she kept seeing pairs of shoes, slowly emptying of the ash that had once been feet, and her skin went crawling. At least the creatures were something you could do something about. Violent things, maybe, that she'd prefer to avoid, but at least it was motion, movement, positive inertia. This quiet death surrounding her, scattering across every surface and gusting on the wind...she wanted to run. She wanted to move until her lungs burst because at least that meant she was alive, and could go back to the world where plants were green, animals weren't disappearing into particulate, and life at least had a chance.

The golf cart made its obedient little purring sound. It was almost a whine. Some chariot for Armageddon's opening act. But it was faster than walking and, worst case scenario, would be easy to abandon if they had to.

The insectarium was a large, geodesic dome around a butterfly garden. Hawk swallowed, knowing this was going to be bad. But as they drew closer, Hawk's breath caught. There was green within the dome. Yes, she saw beige. She saw all kinds of death within. But there was green. There was life! Oh, all she had to do was get inside, and...and...

...and what?

"You know," Alex said, from the driver's seat. "I'm getting real sick of the rules changing on me every twenty minutes. First the apes, and now we've got plant survivors. What'd they do here? Feed honeypots to the ivy?"

"I'm going in," Hawk said. "In and out. You can stay or come. Have fun." And she lept out of the golf-cart without waiting for anyone else to follow her. Footsteps echoed like gunshots in the silence, and the remnants of trees trailed their own dissolution like flower petals. Wind hissed in an unfamiliar tone, unblemished by the rustle of leaves, the scent of grass. It was cold. It was sterile. It clashed with the bright colors of the nearby bug-festooned carousel. Hawk could see large cartoon eyes on a mantis, the big black spots on a ladybug...and the bodies piled against the ropes where people had once waited in civil lines. Oh, god, the shoes that must be over there. Tennis shoe soles with pleather toppers and cheerful plastic cartoon decals. Strappy rattan heels with the rattan gone, only rubber and metal buckles left behind. The soles and uppers of tennis shoes. There would be diaper bags and purses, pacifiers, polyester blankets, strollers. Dental fillings. Pacemakers. Did they have time to run? From the jumble of velvet ropes, she thought they did. Barely.

There was another pile of dead people at the doors to the insectarium. Hawk stepped over these. Sheltered as they were by the building, she could still make out features. Noses. Open, staring eyes. The tangle of hair turned to ashen filaments. Wedding rings still on fingers. Hands still clasped together. One prone shape appeared to be a woman holding a child to her breast. The wind had taken away most of her hair. It left the curve of her lip, the soft shadow of her child's closed eyes.

Hawk did her best to pass through without disturbing them. And the insectarium was mostly vacant once she was past the door. She could breathe easier. Even had enough space left amid the panic and the horror and the grief to look back and see where the others were. They'd left the golf-cart, were seemingly taking their time as they picked through the corpses.

Maybe Hawk could finish up before they even got inside.

She found a kiosk with a map. It was partially gone, as the backing was metal mesh and it had been printed on paper, but enough of the ink and laminate was still pressed against the kiosk glass for Hawk to locate what she wanted. Not the butterfly garden, but the honeypot feature. It was down the main hallway a ways, framed by small enclosures filled with Glass. Hawk knew why: the sides of each terrarium might be glass, and thus safe shelter from the Glass energy, but the lids would be permeable. Screens of varying mesh sizes, or plastic with holes drilled in, stuffed with cotton to keep the bugs in but allow air to move freely. And so the Glass energy had gotten in, winding its aural spikes down through the living contents like eldritch anemone tentacles. Here was a scorpion, beige and dead, the harsh aquarium lighting reflecting on the illusion of an intact carapace. Hawk was tempted to break through the layers of drywall, remove the terrarium screen, and press down on the corpse until it was obliterated. She hadn't had that impulse with the human corpses, but she wanted the dead insects gone. It made it real. Seeing a pile of glassy beige ash in tennis shoes still felt unreal, like it could somehow be staged. But they couldn't have staged the dead scorpion, or the dead tarantulas in the next set of cases, or the dead preying mantises or the living ants—

Hawk froze. Swallowed. Turned to the large terrarium with the words Leaf Cutter Ants, (Atta Texana) beside it. These ants were moving frantically, scanning through a beige colored lump that probably used to be their life-giving fungus gardens. The fungus was gone. Most of the leaves that it had grown in were gone too. Most. Not all. There was a light litter of green throughout the enclosure.

Heart beating faster—was that fear? Was that hope?—Hawk followed their foraging trails. Like most captive leaf-cutter colonies, the keepers had gotten elaborate with these, giving them a series of wire-enforced ropes (the rope was mostly gone. A few ants were still braving the ashen leftovers) connecting small islands in a pool of waters the ants could not cross. It lead to a second terrarium with a certain amount of leaf litter within. And most of this was ashen, too. Hawk thought she could identify one mostly intact rose leaf, which made sense. Leaf cutter's preferred food was tender plants like roses, which obviously would not survive...and yet there was still green in the pile of destroyed cuttings. The leafcutters were working these over with frantic, twitching movements.

She reached into the open terrarium. It was a bit of a stretch—she supposed it should have been more of a stretch, but most people would take one look at Atta Texana's massive majors and realize this display was strictly no-touch—but her fingers closed around the rich, damp smoothness of living plants. And immediately got bit by the leaf-cutters. It hurt. A lot. And she savored the hurt. She'd never thought she'd love a colony of leaf cutters, let alone revel in the sharp agony of their nasty bites. But they were alive to bite, weren't they? Still, she wasn't going to court contact with the little shits. She shook the plant out until it seemed relatively ant-free, and then she held it up to the emergency lighting.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Footsteps behind her. Alex was there, looking as shell-shocked as she felt. He pointed at the leaves in her hand. "Please tell me that's not a silk plant." He said.

"I think it's honeysuckle," Hawk said. She was sure of it. The white and yellow flowers on the end, the absolute intoxication of its perfume. "And the ants in here are alive, too."

Alex peered into the open-concept setup and made a face. "Leafcutters, huh?" Alex was no less desperate for other living things, but he'd lost more than his fair share of rosebushes to the nasty things. "Why are these alive?"

Hawk, thinking, said, "I might be starting to get an idea. But let's look around for a minute. See if anything else survived."

There weren't many ants in the insectarium, but the carpenter ants were still alive. Their setup was mostly ash, now, and Hawk watched the frantic efforts of a pitch-black C. Pensylvannius colony as it moved the brood out of a destroyed cell. The next enclosure held an Asian Weaver Ant nest's remnants. The ants here were still carapace and lipids, not ash, but they were dying. Hawk watched as the last princess, winged and a beautiful blue hue, collapsed into its fatal curl. Most of her workers had already bought it, and the brood...well, that was already ash.

And then she reached the honeypots.

They'd gotten three different species. The tags read M. Mexicanus, M. Navajo, and M. Placodops. Mentally, Hawk filled in: Big honeypot ants, small honeypot ants, and big honeypots with red heads. The enclosures for both the Navajo and Placodops were intact, and filled with both living ants and living honeysuckle. The latter was planted in a shallow pot in each enclosure, with the walls of the formicarium constructed as a sort of planter.

The third alcove was empty.

A closer look at the formicarium proved it as far as Hawk was concerned. The video Kaiser had shown them had the missing box of honeypots being fed to the elderly gorilla. She'd found where they'd gotten the ants from. And now she frowned as footsteps behind her said Alex was on his way.

"What is it, babe?" He said.

"They're using honeysuckle as one of the ants' sugar sources...can we go into the butterfly garden? I think I need to see what the green plants are."

They walked together through the quiet, the silent dead enclosures, the carpeted gallery that had once been so bright, so alive. The beige ash muted everything, even here where there had been no traffic. It seemed to whisper over the carpet like obscenity.

The butterfly garden likely would have escaped death if it had been made entirely of glass, but it wasn't. Ventilation requirements and the drywall join between the garden's geodesic dome and the rest of the building had doomed most of the contents, and it had done so quickly. There was a rubber tree, still recognizable, with one dead butterfly clinging to a branch. Its ashes were so light that even the delicate wings were still intact, a last trace of color marking it as a monarch.

Rubber trees, dead. Butterflies, dead. Cornflower, sunflowers, bougainvillea, passionfruit, all dead. Marigolds still kept a trace of gold, near their hearts. The sunflowers were completely bleached out. Dead, dead, dead, almost all of it. But through it all, silken and green, ran honeysuckle vines. Already established, too. Hawk followed a vine down to the dirt, where the shoots were thick and woody and the air heavy with the scent of yellow and white flowers.

"Holy shit," Hawk whispered. "I think I might have an idea for why this is alive."

"Okay. Spill." Em said. The quartet had gathered in the butterfly garden, where ashes fell like rain and honeysuckle wound its roots deep into sterilized dirt.

"On that video that Kaiser gave us, the one that watched the gorillas. Do you remember what they put inside the Prism?" She was quivering with the energy of this idea. Both exhilarated and terrified. "Henry, have you ever found anything in a Prism before?" This got a shake of the head. "Okay. They put the elderly gorilla and the Mexicanus setup inside before they activated the Prism this time. And if the zoo used the same setup for the Mexicanus that they did for the Navajo and Placodops, that means they put a honeysuckle vine into the Prism too." She held her fingers above her head, where the plants were growing and flowering with verdant enthusiasm.

"You're saying...what? The Prism made a whole species of monkeys out of one elderly gorilla?" Em said.

"No. Because if that was how it worked than we wouldn't have had Atta Texana and the other two honeypot colonies survive. This vine isn't the vine inside the Prism, but it's alive. It's like the vine in the Prism. Same with the ants. They're not the ones in the Prism, but they're alive. There were three other species of ant in the insectarium. Leaf cutters, and they're alive. Carpenter ants, and they're alive. And Asian weaver ants. Those are dying, but they're dying much slower than the other species."

"And why would that be?" Henry said.

Em, however, was on point. "They're all native species. The survivors. Myrmecocystus, Camponotus, and Atta Texana. Those are all native to this continent. Asian Weavers aren't native, and they're pretty distinctly different from our natives. Same with the apes and the honeysuckle. It's like Archetypes."

"That's bullshit," Dyson said. "No offence, Emile...Dr. Yong—"

"Emile's fine," Emile said, with flush. "Or Em."

It was Dyson's turn to flush.

"Archetypes. As in the Jungian psychology Archetypes?" Alex said. "The things that are the defining example of other things?"

"Exactly." Hawk stepped forward. "Somehow the Prism doesn't just rip holes in the universe. I think it's also transmitting or transmuting the energy somehow. The things that are in the Prism don't get the same treatment as the things outside of it, and it's like the energy can read the Prism's contents, and the things that match the archetype enough make it."

"So why is this shit killing humans?" Dyson said. "We're apes."

Em had picked up the train of thought. "But we aren't enough like gorillas to pass muster. Just like how Asian Weavers are ants, but they're not enough like honeypots to make it. But Honeypots and Leafcutters are from the same part of the country, and Myrmecocystus share a lot in common with Camponotus. I think there's even a Camponotus species of honeypots. Maybe it's like...vibrating at different frequencies or something. But there's a reason why these species made it, and I think it's because an example of their species was inside the Prism."

"Which would be what Studdard was testing, maybe." Alex said. "By putting something in this specific Prism, he's testing survivability." A pause. "But he'd have to know he'd get this result somehow. Or maybe not this result but something else valuable. Something that he would view as worth the risk. He must have put something in a Prism before now, and the Ararat Project just...never found it."

"That's possible. The us-not-finding-it part," Henry said. "I think the archetype thing is full of shit. It sounds like something Kaiser would pull directly out of his ass."

Hawk did her best not to look crestfallen. Alex reached over and brushed his fingers over her arm. It's alright, babe, said without words. She reached back and squeezed his hand, then let go.

"Well, we'll get a good look at that Prism here in a minute. Let's go check out the monkey..." Alex trailed off. He was looking at a point just beyond the geodesic dome. "What the hell is that?"

And the rest of the team followed his gaze to the roof.