A minute went by. Then another. Fraction by fraction he let himself relax and take stock of his circumstance.

'I need to be deliberate. Grant and the others will be able to hold out in the tight quarters of the tunnels. Noble privilege to simply kill your problems... The plan is utterly awry, I doubt they’ll pursue the queen with a hive this extensive. They'll retreat, successfully no doubt. They can use light to navigate and still fend off the swarm, the luxury of power... But rescuing me stretches credulity. Even if Grant has a way to find me, there’s no way they’ll make it here. I’m alone.'

The depths were a sanctuary only from the hiver presence, but they were no oasis. He had found no sign of water, of food, and the cold rock and earth hungered for the warmth of his body. He would need to ascend through the hive if he was to live, even if it risked his demise.

'I can make my way up again. But it will be meaningless unless I can penetrate to the surface. I’m not strong enough to simply crush all before me, I can’t think like a noble. I only defeated the umbrar by being smarter than it, by understanding it. I need information. Hivers are capable collectively, but stupid individually. They work by rules, that’s how they were made. Rules can be exploited once I know them, at least long enough to get me out of here. What I need... is a test subject.'

The thought resonated within him, so confident that this was the correct path.

The depths were left more carefully than he entered them, the mummified hiver he'd found made him cautious–it would be easy to find himself lost and wandering. The longer he took, the greater the danger he faced.

His descent had included more than a few barely controlled slides down narrow openings, the kin of those traversals were far less kind on their ascent. His familiarity with climbing and his dash-shadow were essential as he used it to feel for likely handholds. More than once he was forced to use Pivot to slam himself painfully against the rock and bring a sudden slip to a halt long enough to regain his grip and footing.

By increments he returned to the surface, the slowly warming air and faint echoes encouraged him, filling the desolate emptiness the wretched depths had created.

Finally the sounds of movement became common and proximal enough that he hesitated. He was in a partial dead-end tunnel, a narrow opening in the floor had been his entrance, a squirming and unpleasant squeeze, but the main entrance led to a corridor. He traversed it in the dark, retreating as he heard more activity further on in both directions. It was a side-channel, a somewhat twisting connection between two more traveled routes, infrequently traversed itself. It suited him perfectly.

Jack settled in to wait. In fifteen minutes, only a single hiver passed by, but he kept his patience, merely noted its passing and continued to listen. In another fifteen a pair passed, and then another solo hiver, a hulking warrior treading loudly.

He'd learned enough. There would only be a few minutes that he could expect to be alone with the hivers he planned to evaluate, perhaps as much as ten if he was lucky, but safer to expect five.

Next step was the capture.

He waited at the corner of his discreet tunnel, listening for the distinctive shuffling of a hiver worker moving through the area. He needed to take them unawares and alone. His spear was unusable in the tunnel, but his fang-knife would be ideal in the close quarters. A pair passed him by, and he only just managed to recognize the sound of the second hiver before pulling back from his strike. A few minutes later he heard another approaching hiver, but it sounded different, like it was dragging a burden along the ground. He waited for the sound to come near to the opening he crouched behind, and then just when it started to pass by he readied his lunge and the necessary cards. Vital Flow. Gotcha Dash.

'A limb or a glancing blow and I'll have to run. I need to hit the gut. Something debilitating but not lethal.'

Precise aim was impossible. He drew on the subtlest cues of his senses, targeting the feeling of presence more than any specific signal. The dragging sound slowed as it neared his hiding place, and Jack knew he needed to act.

'Now!'

He darted around the corner, plunging forward with his blade into the darkness, and was rewarded with the feeling of resistance, before it suddenly gave way and sunk to the hilt. He released it immediately to free his hands for what came next.

He stepped up and grabbed the groping arm of the worker reaching for the knife in its gut. Exactly where he needed it to be. Pivot. His grip secured, he jumped and spun himself upside down and around the back of the hiver, twisting the arm out of its socket in the same motion. The hiver stumbled to kneel on the ground with his twist, and he heard the sickening clatter of a hiver pain cry. He knew that the insect-leg appendages were undoubtedly extending from its too-human mouth, calling for aid.

His dash-shadow gave him a continuous impression of his position relative to the ground, but also gave him a textural awareness of any part of the hiver that appeared beneath him, a strangely fine sense of 'object' that he could place in space without sight. Pivot brought him back to his feet, and the combination of the sound of the hiver’s clatter and the glimpse the dash-shadow gave as he loomed over the hiver meant his knee struck it perfectly in the face. He could feel chitin cracking as he drove his knee up hard, using Pivot to enhance the blow. The sound stopped.

It was still dangerous. The workers possessed a crushing grip, and even now, as the stun he gave it wore off, he could hear it groping for him.

He jumped into the air over the hiver, immediately filling his mind with a clear picture of its position in the darkness. His hands met the low ceiling, and with a push off he plunged his kick directly for the hiver’s upper knee, using Pivot to adjust his aim.

Crack.

He didn’t need to see to know he had just utterly crippled the limb, and the hiver finally collapsed, unable to compensate for the destruction he’d laid upon it.

Jack froze then and listened. The ambush had taken only moments, but it hadn’t been silent. When no sounds of rapid approach reached him, he finally let himself relax minutely.

Remembering the distinctive sound the hiver had made on its approach, Jack went to find out what it had been dragging. Blind groping worked against him as a sudden sharp pain brought his hand jerking back.

'Cold?'

He reached out again, more carefully, and found the edges of a gaping wound on a hiver warrior corpse. The edges of it were still sharply cold, clearly the work of Vasala's card at its full potential.

'The worker was moving it... why? Do they treat their wounded? No, not only is medicine beyond them, this one would have been dead instantly. So why do you move a corpse? For cleanliness? As a resource? Both of those make some sense... How can I use that?'

The time he had was limited—he needed to focus on getting what he could out of the worker before it either lost consciousness or another arrived in the area.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

He turned back to his captive. It had slowed its flailing in his absence, and was clearly suffering from the damage he had inflicted on it if the broken clicking it was producing was any indication.

'You sensed me when you approached, didn't you? You slowed down. But you couldn't have seen me, I was around the corner, hidden and silent. How did you know?'

Then he remembered something Calre had mentioned, the death response of the hivers on the loss of their queen. He hadn't said how it was triggered, but Jack was beginning to suspect he knew.

Jack returned to the warrior corpse and gave silent thanks to Vasala's efficiency. The flesh around the wound was cold and brittle. With only a faint sense of revulsion Jack stomped down it. Fresh hiver blood sprayed on him and began to pool slowly in the wound as he broke up the frozen tissue. With only a flash of hesitation he dipped his hands into the flesh and coated his hands and arms with the fluid.

'Now the risky part.'

The fallen worker was still moving feebly in the darkness, Jack approached it carefully, as quietly as he could. He needed to minimize alternative cues it might use to recognize him such as the sound of his movement. When he crouched only a couple meters away, he stopped and slowly extended his soaked hand in the direction of the soft clattering of the hiver's head. All the ways his approach could go wrong swam in his head. What if he'd damaged its sensing organs? What if it didn't use scent at all, but another cue and he was about to lose his hand? And even if the hiver in front of him did act as he hoped–and he had little idea of what that would even look like–could he trust that a healthy hiver would behave the same?

Jack could be sure of none of it, but he needed to forge ahead even with the doubts. He couldn't survive down here, he would be found and killed without a doubt. Grant had been clear: hivers don't take prisoners. Neither could he get out of the hive on his own, the tunnels were filled with activity, that he'd even slipped by was undoubtedly only due to the chaos of the tunnel collapse and the noble presence. He couldn't expect the nobles to rescue him, they would be pressed to even escape themselves. He needed a different ally.

His hand was getting closer to the hiver's head. The impulse to flinch back rose higher and higher, he was reaching into a darkness that promised the possibility of pain and death, but hesitation meant certainty.

The sound of the hiver's clatter changed. The weak, almost pained repetition became more energetic, almost... searching... to his ear.

'Come on. Come on.'

His heart raced, his breath wasn't enough to satisfy. He extended his hand further.

The first touch nearly sent him sprawling back. Up and down his hand ran the few functional mandibles of the hiver, almost gentle, exploratory as they sampled the blood he'd coated his hand in.

He couldn't contain a shiver through his body, a reaction that was immediately met by a changing tone in the hivers wheezing breath. He jerked back on an impulse, spared by the merest inches as he felt a swoosh of air in front of his face. He scrambled further back and laughed softly at what he'd learned.

"Figured me out, have you? Well, so have I."

He couldn't help but read frustration in the clatter that followed.

'Until I wavered, it didn't recognize me. In the dark they rely on scent, touch, and a smidge of hearing. I can cover my scent, but it's still not enough to fool my way to the surface if I'm challenged.'

Jack grinned in the dark. 'But I won't be.'

"Thanks for the lesson, friend."

Jack replayed Pivot, and with a jumping somersault into a spin kick slammed his heel into the prone hiver's skull, he heard it bounce off the ground with a grotesque crack.

Almost casually he pulled his blade from its gut and slit its throat for good measure. Then the real butchery started.

First, he undressed down to his smallclothes and put aside his spear and all the gear he'd brought with the exception of his dagger. He set at the bodies of the hivers methodically, cutting into their viscera and methodically coating himself in the blood and lymph and bile that ran forth. His hair matted in the drying fluids, he could feel the tug of crusting liquid pulling at his skin as it cracked with his movement.

The stench was horrific, but above all what he couldn't escape was the cloying taste of green apple that seemed to fill his mouth, it had been growing in intensity from the moment he’d encountered the hiver, and now it tasted like a thick apple liquor poured into him from an endless vessel, filling him overflowing.

Jack had imagined he would be moving in a daze by now, but instead it felt the opposite. He was indescribably present, intensely aware of himself and the texture of his experience. He could feel the hairs of his body strain against crusted filth that covered him. The beat of his own heart did not rush, no, it ran a steady rhythm that seemed indefatigable.

He prepared the final touch. He reached into the mouth of the fallen hiver and pulled forth its broken mandibles, sawing them off with impatience. He didn't hesitate before biting down on a few of them, making sure they extended out of his mouth an appreciable amount. Once again the taste of apple dominated his senses. It felt bizarrely familiar, but he didn't interrogate what he assumed was just a quirk of hiver physiology. He didn’t think to reflect on the hiver Stroph had killed, which had no such scent.

Adorned, he crept to the major corridor, mimicking the shuffling gait he'd heard repeatedly from hivers in the darkness. He could hear activity in the tunnel up ahead, and without pause he joined it. Hivers were all around him, scurrying about in their strange, inhuman manner.

'Showtime.'

Jack clacked a few of the broken mandibles in his hands, a pitiful clicking that immediately caught the attention of nearby hivers as their clacking intensified and oriented towards him.

Center stage, Jack collapsed into a facsimile of a boneless faint, carefully falling in a manner that left his legs under the rest of him.

A clattering cluster formed on Jack's still form. He remained limp, even as questing mandibles explored his face, tap-tapping against the extended structures he held rigid in his teeth.

Soon enough the explorations ceased, and he waited with bated breath for the judgment of his ruse.

A hiver grabbed under Jack's arms and began to drag him down the corridor.

It had worked. They'd interpreted his false injuries as that of a dead or dying hiver, limited to their assessment in the dark they were taking him to the hiver's final resting place. He'd found his allies to take him through the nest–the hivers themselves.

'It's not exactly a dignified manner of transport,' Jack thought as he was jostled again by the growing density of hivers in the tunnels, 'but compared to the alternative, I'd say it's impeccable service.'

Their trajectory, he'd felt, had been decidedly upwards. A great relief to Jack, who'd imagined the possible destinations as either an above-ground source of fertilizer or, the intrusive paranoid thought, an underground larder. He’d planned this knowing that fear of cannibalism was not a well founded concern. It was a rare creature that would eat its own dead, and only then in dire circumstances. The risks were too great, and the hivers were too well designed to follow such risky practices.

He breathed shallowly, slowly, doubting the growing freshness until even a surfeit of wishful thinking would fail to explain the crispness of his inhalations.

The first touch of sun on his face, a treasure, and the next trial of his guise.

But the hivers were unimaginative creatures. They had determined him as a corpse, and it would take a significant contradiction to persuade them otherwise. He waited patiently for the hivers to deposit him, and when they finally did, he could feel the lumpy bed of limbs and torsos that undoubtedly reflected a corpse pile. Handiwork of the recent noble incursion. Now he simply needed to wait for an opportune moment, even if nothing presented itself until nightfall, he would bide his time until he could flee under the cover of darkness.

He could hear crows and ravens calling all around him, but curiously felt little anxiety. He noticed again the hiver death miasma of apples filling his mouth and nose from the corpses he rested on.

A sudden weight landed on his chest. Jack slowly cracked his eyes and saw, sitting upon his chest, a nightbird looking back at him with a tilted head.

It pecked him. He remained silent and still, even as fresh blood flowed from his chest, the hivers were still too close to shoo it away. Unsatisfied, it walked forwards coming close to his face. He looked into avian eyes looking back into his. A long moment as young man and bird contemplated each other. Eventually it turned away, brushing tickling feathers against his face.

Jack held still against a growing, deadly reflex.

The nightbird turned again, brushing its tail feathers slowly, one by one against Jack's nose.

He sneezed.