The ape-creatures knew how to tie knots. They were good knots, even. Wrapped around Hawk's wrists, they were, in fact, the best knots she'd ever seen. Given the context of captivity, this was something of a troubling discovery.

Of greater concern was the care with which those knots had been applied. The ape-creatures had grabbed the quartet of humans, yes. But gently. Every touch had been nearly reverential, as if they were afraid to give offense. The hoots and guttural sounds the apes made were even soothing in their own way. Hawk was starting to get a feel for rank among these creatures, first in that they had some sort of system, because as soon as they were bound, their captor's small party of four immediately sat down while one of their number went away and came back with one of the apes in the priest-like robes. This creature grunted with surprise, then vanished back into the monkey house.

Hawk was pretty sure this encounter had been complete chance. Two of the ape-creatures held baskets filled with dead insects. The large alates, some still twitching in the recesses of a basket woven from honeysuckle vines, had been very efficiently butchered. One of their captors even pulled out one of the broken ant-Queens and popped the gaster off with a knife. It ate the contents with some relish, offering it to its fellow with a near universal gesture, want some? The negatory signal the other ape gave seemed just as universal. They both glanced at their captives, who watched back. In Hawk's case, it was with a combination of fear and intense interest. This could still go horribly wrong…but so far it hadn’t, and that was interesting all by itself. After an exchange of hand-signals, she, Alex, Em and Dyson were all shepherded by spear-point into the building, hands were bound with ropes made of woven vine-bark, and then several baskets of dead bugs were set all around them as the apes stepped away, resting their spears on the ground as they watched their first humans watch them back.

"Those spears do not look like something you'd pick up at the gift shop," Em said. They sat between Dyson and Alex. Hawk sat to Alex's side.

"They also don't look all that primitive to me," Alex said.

"It's a spear." Dyson said. "That defines primitive."

Hawk watched her husband expend a great deal of patience in not lecturing Dyson about observational bias. Instead, he just said, "Yeah, but it looked forged to me. You wanna tell me a bunch of apes can figure out how to forge a spear head in twelve hours?"

"Or that a zoo had a bunch of them on a shelf in the monkey house?" Em sighed. Paused. Began to look a little horrified. "But what if you're right, Hawk, and they're from fucking Narnia?"

"What?" Hawk said, though she felt she knew where Em was going. She'd had the same thought, peripherally. She just had never managed to grab on and make it conscious.

"It's fucking Narnia. Nothing that's come out of the fucking hole has followed physics as we understand them. Why we assume time is working the same way inside the rifts as outside is beyond me." They sighed and began thumping a heel against the ground, as their ape-captors looked on with concern. Hawk took the moment to really look at the apes. Yes, they stood upright, like a human, with elongated legs like a human. But their arms were the same length as their legs and their fur came in patterns, because one of their captors was brindle-patterned, like a tortoiseshell cat in some ways. The other was patched over with white. Both wore loincloths, but these were more elaborate than expected, multi-layered stuff, a luxuriant thick fabric over something that seemed made of nearly transparent leather. And now Hawk recognized what the apparent "baubles" on their belts were.

"Gasters," she whispered. "They're using alate gasters as containers."

And then something more thrilling, more shocking, than any other thing Hawk had seen so far. The brindle-patterned guard turned to the patchy one and began moving its hands through intricate patterns. Almost like...

"Sign-language." Alex whispered.

"Not ASL," Em said, hurriedly. "Though...gimme a second." They began clapping their hands, as if for attention. Then, holding their bound wrists in front of them, they began signing something themselves. "I'm just doing the basic alphabet, spelling the words. Untie me. Maybe it'll be enough—"

Both the guards stepped back, looking stunned. Then the patchy guard began to run. It was a two-legged gait, smooth and practiced. It hooted as it ran, but before it turned a well-lit corner—where Hawk suspected the roof had fallen in—its hands began waving frantically, and a chorus of hoots and hollers greeted it, followed by more silence.

"Okay," Em said. They looked nearly catatonic. "Let's state a batshit insane theory, outright, on the record, so we can get it off our chests. The Prism ripped a hole in reality, the monkey house fell into it, and time runs differently so while we were farting around with helicopters and our own little Prism, these things were evolving a society that revolves around an American Sign Language derivative, vines, and honeypot ants."

The words hung in the air.

"That's the most batshit insane thing I've ever heard." Dyson said. "I think I love you."

"Why? Because it's brilliant?" Em said.

"Because if we're spouting insanity, I figure I might as well confess my feelings and get it over with." A pause. "Sorry."

"We're not about to die," They said this confidently. "And I thought you were straight?"

"Maybe it's like a spectrum thing. Most guys? No. Most girls? Yes. Most thems? I have no idea. You're the first one that made me start thinking 'yes'...and I kind of stole your research. I needed a lot of therapy back then. I didn't understand jack shit."

Em's flush had been deepening this whole time. "This is completely inappropriate, given the circumstances. And you're never supposed to confess love in public. It puts undue pressure on the person you're confessing to." They looked straight ahead, at their rather lost-looking captor.

"Oh," Henry said.

"So I'm going to make you wait until we get home—to my house—before I do anything about it." A pause. "But it'll be a positive action. Just, you know. So you don't suffer too much before then." A longer pause. "You might want a safe word. I think romance is a lot better with safe words."

"Okay," Henry Dyson said. He shifted in his seat. "How...how much of a safeword are we talking here?"

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"And just think," Alex said, as movement just beyond their line of sight promised more apes incoming. "Two days ago we were obsessing over your mother's cake pearls."

Henry made a face. "Cake pearls? You mean those chalky things they keep putting on cakes? To make them fancy?"

"My mother gave us nineteen boxes of them." Hawk sighed as their captors returned...with something else between them.

No. She should have said Someone. Capitals required. This person came with a sense of Their own importance. Not as if importance were something they did, but as if it were something they were. Light shimmered around them, beautiful spirals of blue and violet. It trailed behind them like a kiss of glory. It was another ape...no. It was the Ape. The archetypical ape, and a bit more than that. In a way, it was more ape like than the ape-creatures around them. They walked with more of a stoop than their fellows, and leaned on the arm of a priestly ape, who was clearly male—these apes might like clothes, but they had zero nudity taboos, if this creature's rather generous endowment was anything to go by—and who guided the Ape with reverence. But where the priestly ape's robes were beautiful, elaborate creations of creamy silk—and, Hawk realized with a jolt, it was silk. Silk from the ant cocoons—the Ape wore something more like the zoo uniforms. It was not precisely like. Nor was it a child's imitation, though there was something imitative about what the Ape wore. It was more like a gorilla than anything else, but that humble word didn't fit this creature any more than a child's shirt fit the adult. It was the Ape, and clearly the other apes had brought Them here for a reason.

The Ape paused, looking at the priestly ape, then leapt into a gorilla's excitement. They spun on fists, leaping, hooting. Then, in a more sentient gesture, the Ape grabbed Their escort's head and kissed it...though how it managed this seemed to involve an anatomical contortion that made Hawk's head hurt a little bit. It was as if it had anatomy because it wanted to, and there were moments where it seemed to...to forget the shape it wanted to hold. And then it raced forward, eating up the distance between the Ape and the captive humans, until it was all the way in their space, its large hands moving rapidly through signs that seemed purposeful.

"Holy shit. Now that is ASL. Hey, monkeys—untie me." And Em signed something. "Thank god I remember how to spell. U-n-t-i-e-m-e, untie me. Untie me." And they were nearly jumping as the Ape leaned forward and...

...and the ropes were gone. Flowers bloomed around Em's wrists instead, falling in a dizzying pattern of heady honeysuckle, down across Em's ankles and knees. It happened to Alex's ropes next, then Hawk and Dyson's. Each time there was an excited nod, and then the ropes were flowers.

The Ape looked proud of itself, like a child who had learned a trick. It gestured to the priestly ape, who began to sign something, slowly and with great care.

"What." Em said. "What the actual fuck."

"Em, if you know ASL, that makes one of us." Alex said.

"It said...it said greetings to the Beloved. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what it signed. Yeah...now it's saying that..." Em peered at the moving fingers. "Grandmother...I think that's this one," and they gestured at the Ape, "wants to know...where Keeper is."

The Ape pushed forward, signing frantically. Em translated its hasty movements as Keeper. Where is Keeper? I've been good. I took care of the others. I was a good girl. Keeper's been gone a long, long time.

Then, having translated this, Em leaned over to Alex. "What was the name of the elderly gorilla? The one that could sign?"

Alex thought for a minute. "It was something like Kira, I think?"

Em signed Are you Kira, translating for the others.

Yes, yes! She got excited signs in response. Kira is a good girl. Kira is a very good girl! Beloved! Where have you been! Beloved! Where is Keeper?

"I think she's asking for her keeper. The man who took care of her." Em said.

Hawk thought of the dead body in the uniform, just behind the barrier Studdard's black-garbed terrorists had erected. She thought she knew where "Keeper" was. She also knew she wouldn't be telling the Ape its beloved was dead...at least, not until she had a better idea how it would handle bad news.

Then the priestly ape began signing something with far more complexity, which the Ape returned in kind.

"What are they saying, Emile?" Dyson said.

"I...I don't know." Their eyes were searching from Ape to ape. "It's not ASL. It's like ASL. I'm catching like...one word in ten. It reminds me...god, it reminds me of having to sit through a Shakespeare play."

"Or maybe the reverse," Hawk said, as the Ape conversed with the priest.

"What?" Alex said.

"Like we're the Shakespearians listening to modern English." She said. "I mean, it would stand to reason. If these things did...evolve inside the Rift..." she trailed off for a second, caught by the enormity of what she just said. A mountain of time seemed to press on her chest like a heart attack. "If they did, and it is fucking Narnia in there, then ASL would evolve too. We may be looking at a couple millennia worth of linguistic drift. Contractions, the evolution of new words..."

"But they kept the OG ASL. Why?" Alex said.

The Ape, having watched them this entire time, suddenly shoved their hands into the conversation. It's my words, that is why. They love my words, as I love your words. I love you. I love you all. Please, don't leave me again.

This brought a hushed murmur through their captors, and the growing crowd of apes behind the Ape. As if...

"Ask it if it was the gorilla in the zoo display, the elderly—" Hawk began to say.

The Ape turned to her, signing. Their eyes, she realized, weren't the same golden brown as the other Apes. They were a clear, crystalline shade, like starlight. Except that wasn't quite right, either. The Ape signed, with Emile translating, I know your words. I love your words. Yes. I was here. The Darkshirts came and offered me candy bugs. They gave some Candybugs to OtherFemale. OtherFemale with NewBaby. NewBaby was Male. Father of all Apes. OtherFemale was Mother of all Apes. This is a GoodStory. The Ape paused. Old words don't have right words. Sorry. I teach them the way Keeper taught me. And then more excited. Come. Come see! Come see what Kira made with her people. Come! Come!

Hawk's heart was pounding. She looked to Alex. Alex looked to her, brow raised, little smirk on his lips as if he were enjoying this immensely. "What do you say, love? Let's follow the Ape?"

"Of course." They began walking through the wreckage of the monkey house. This had been some rear employee entrance. There were another four dead bodies in here, in the invasive black of the murderers behind it all. These had gained a guard themselves, and there were honeysuckle flowers laid all around them, in thick patterns.

And some of the flowers were blue, and nearly the size of Hawk's forearm. They were undeniably honeysuckle. They were also undeniably the size of housecats, and ran from a deep almost-purple to something nearing turquoise.

"Looks almost like a shrine, don't you think?" Alex said, jerking a chin at the display. "So let me ask you a quick question...if these ape-people evolved in twelve hours, how the fuck is the thing we're following the same gorilla?"

Silence as Hawk weighed this. Also, while she navigated the rubble of the building. The roof had partially collapsed over a set of cages, and Hawk was hard-pressed—almost literally, against the wall—to get past without skinning the crap out of her waist. Alex wasn't nearly skinny enough to make it without having to near-limbo through. Em, tiny thing that they were, had no problem, and Dyson was about Hawk's size. And now they were all past, and it was time to look at the Event, at what they came for. They'd done all of this, not to catch ants or talk to apes, but to look at the Prism, and now that they were here Hawk would have rather done anything else.

They were close enough for aural spikes. The long, ropey strands of light radiated through the air like refractions through water. Organics had long ago failed to ash, save for the apes, the ants, and the vines.

The monkey house was gone. The hallway Hawk and the Ape had been following sheared away shortly after it turned the corner. Around this break, aural spikes wound like tormented anemones. Mostly it was a gentle drift, like currents in a river flowing gently past. Now and again, however, a spike would wrench itself out of the stream and dance away, across the apparently conductive surfaces of ash. Hawk stopped being horrified by her theory of rapid evolution and became horrified by the idea of conductive ash. It would explain why this spread as far and as fast as it did, why the energy did not simply pool or stay near the Prisms, and—

--and the hole was filled with apes and ants.