Jack could not see a way forward that didn't ultimately end in disaster. A rescue attempt was foolish. If he could free the nobles it was possible they would fare better on the surface. But that was much easier said than done. They were not being bound and conveniently placed in holding cells where they could free themselves at leisure. Those new hivers had held each of them by the throat, unwavering in their attention. Death was the promise their grip held; death at the first sign of dissent. That the hivers had even taken them alive was strange, but those new ones... they had been so unlike the others. They had been working together to maneuver the nobles in their grip; violent against their more mindless kin, but always purposefully. No, he couldn't imagine that he might take them unawares, not by blindly rushing in.

But flight led to other disasters, only shortly deferred. If he could even get out of the city, what then? Trying to ride back to the caravan on the nimbles? Warning them against the coming threat, only to be followed by a wave of hiver warriors within the hour? And that would mean leaving the nobles for dead, or whatever worse fates the hivers could deliver. The impossibility of the circumstances spun through his mind, twirling through dead end after dead end.

'I'm being bound by my fears. I didn't make it here by caution, I—, ' the thought collapsed. It hadn't been him, at least not wholly. The serum had been driving him, pushing him beyond what he'd ever think of as possible. It hadn't changed him per se, just taken some parts away and enhanced others. But the taste had left him. Drawn back to himself by the familiar act of climbing, by the feeling of connection to others, that had alienated him from the cloying saturation of the serum.

The thought of descending back into that feeling frightened him, what it might do, how long it might last, when it would come again. The question had arrived, what was he willing to become to survive? What was he willing to do?

The answer was already there, just waiting for him to realize it.

Anything.

'And if you become a monster? Like the worst of the nobles? Better to spare your family, your friends, having to see that. Better to die.'

'Stroph is a monster. I don't think he should die. He saved me because of what he is. I'll manage.'

Jack found his resolve.

He remembered the moment that he had first tasted green apples and when the taste had surged. As he'd butchered the hivers. As he'd laid like a corpse among the pile of dead. On reflection it was obvious, these experiences resembled the deaths of the travelers, the umbrar's due. He had no corpses here, atop the spire. No bodies. But one.

The cut stung, but less than he thought it should. Whatever effect of the hiver's paralytic still left him bleeding surprisingly little. That didn't make it any easier. Surface level cuts wouldn't be enough, he had no doubt. White knuckling the knife, he cut. Feeling the flesh part, he forced himself to look. Imagining himself laying in the sun, every tendon torn, unable to move. Hearing the birds arrive. Feeling the first beak. The taste of apples bloomed in his mouth like liquor and saliva gushed to coat his parched tongue.

The concern he felt melted away. Intellectually he knew what was happening, but the emotional component disappearing left him disinterested. He had other problems to solve.

‘Why so cautious? When has caution ever served that careful boldness can’t? I take the initiative. I find opportunities, and when I don’t find them, I make them.’

Jack looked down at the tower below him.

‘The hivers seemed quite irate at my approach here. They defended the ground like a kicked ant-nest. Now what could have made them so perturbed?’

That thought was enough to inspire an automatic twitch in his good arm. He wanted to go inside now.

‘Let’s see what a good kicking does to them shall we?’

He had seen openings around the top of the tower, just below him, spaced evenly on the exterior to give it a comprehensive view of the surrounding landscape and the hiver territory.

After a minute of thought, he trialed his new cards. Pivot, Gotcha Dash; and then the new pair he'd mental dubbed Double and Bounce.

A quick combo consisting of a Pivot assisted back-flip and then dashing down to absorb double the energy and give him paired charges of 'forward momentum' extending from the top of his head.

He slid down the sloped side of the tower. The paired charges should be enough to bring him back to the roof if something went wrong—the ability to direct his momentum was already showing its worth. He was starting to speed up when he felt his feet pass over the top sill of the window, Pivot, and then a moment later he could see in, he oriented himself forward and released the energy of Bounce, shooting into the room at speed. He avoided the edges of the window thanks to the precision of Pivot, but the ceiling was approaching rapidly. He instinctively triggered his remaining dash, landing in the middle of the room with a soft whump.

The room held three hivers of a caste he hadn't yet seen. Their most deviant characteristics were muted, they lacked the intensity of the altered features of the common hivers. The prominent nasal ridge was diminished, leaving them with an almost human nose. Taking up that lost territory sat large, almost bulbous eyes. They didn't seem to rotate in their sockets, instead requiring darting shifts of their entire head as they examined Jack, much like a bird contemplating a novel object. They were hairless, just as every other hiver, but their skin had an unhealthy pallour not present in any of the others.

One side of the room held basins filled with fluid, smoothly built into the floor. He had landed on one of the walkways that moved between them, and he could just make out strange globules resting within the liquid. The basins surrounded a central podium of an elaborate, organic structure, made up of small holes and tubes that descended into the tower and parts unknown. Jack could see only one exit, a narrow opening to the far side of the room, descending into the floor, closer to the hivers than him.

His arrival was greeted with a stunned silence, a confusion that hadn't been present in any hiver he'd encountered until then. For a moment, both parties contemplated each other. Jack watched, waiting for any cue that would give him the edge he needed.

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One of them suddenly ran for the podium and he saw in its hands a wet looking orb clutched closely to its chest. Broken from their paralysis, the other two suddenly made for him, trying to interpose themselves between him and the runner.

"Missstaaake," Jack sang out.

He tilted forward towards the runner and triggered his remaining charge of momentum. He barely had time to protect his head with his good arm before cannoning into the hiver. The blow left him breathless, aching. Standing delivered a grinding feeling in his cut arm, and a sharp pain in his ribs where he'd impacted them. The hiver was far worse. It had looked frail, but the damage he'd done had exceeded all his expectations. It looked like it had been crushed. There was no feeble movement, it simply lay broken on the ground.

The living hivers made no moves against him. They watched him with their too large eyes and otherwise remained perfectly still.

‘So they’re smart enough to plan, to not just blindly rush in,’ Jack mused.

He took a threatening step forward, bringing his still clutched blade forward in the same motion.

The pair of hivers scrambled away in paroxysms of panic, retreating to the side of the chamber farthest from him and clutching at each other in distress.

‘...Or they’re just scared shitless.’

One of their oddities finally registered to him. Unlike all the hivers he’d encountered until now, which maintained largely placid expressions—only disrupted by the frenzied action of their mouth-legs, this pair showed emotion on their nearly human faces. What they now held should have been obvious to him: sheer, simple terror.

Their incapacity was obvious. Jack kept half an eye on them while he took the time to fully consider the room.

One section was strangely domestic, holding several coils of braided plant fibre, foodstuffs, some bowls, a heavy iron cook pot, and a small fireplace overflowing with cold ashes, leading to a narrow chimney. They were evidently not suited to the diet of regular hivers.

It was a nearly inaccessible chamber. The only interior exits were a pair of holes in the floor, one clearly used for waste, the other holding a woven fibre rope descending out of sight—the source of their supplies. It was obvious why none of them tried to run, there was nowhere to go—they were cut off from the rest of the hive.

‘We have our watchtower, our watchers, our warning bell...?’

The thought niggled at him, how did they communicate what they saw? That the tower was even used for its intended purpose was strange, he’d assumed it to be merely an impulse of the hivers—an expression of an unthinking instinct, but the presence of this strange caste indicated otherwise.

Jack returned to the hiver he had killed.

“Now, why were you so desperate to reach the centre, hmm? Trying to call for help?”

He remembered the object it had clutched, and a brief scan revealed it miraculously intact, having rolled only a short distance away. It was a small orb, faintly red-tinged but largely translucent, fitting easily in between his thumb and index finger. It was obviously organic, some film holding an inner chamber under pressure that gave only a little when he applied pressure. His experiment nearly sent it flying as the slick gel coating slipped beneath his fingers.

‘An egg? No. These are no queens. Why are they so isolated? There’s no exit ’

He made for the central podium. It was a bristling network of tubes, made of some polished wood without visible grain, all descending into the floor. They were arranged in orderly concentric rings, densely packed all the way to the floor, all the approximate diameter of the orb he held. It wasn’t at all like the rough, utilitarian adobe of the rest of the hiver, it reminded him most of the disturbing creche he had stumbled upon underground—too artful for the hivers by far.

‘They didn’t make this,’ he felt no need to consider the thought, it arrived self-evident and resonantly true, ‘it was brought here. It was given.’

Stirrings of anger flickered in his heart, but without a target his attention shifted to the hiver pair. Whatever frustration he couldn’t fully name went unsatisfied when he noticed them watching—not him, but the hand that held the orb.

Casually, he drifted that hand over the tube structure, watching the pair from the corner of his eye. Their expressions gained a hopeful, desperate focus as his hand neared the central point.

‘Oh, you poor creatures. Never learned to lie.’

Satisfied with their transparency, Jack inserted the orb into one of the peripheral tubes. It fit perfectly, falling away into darkness in a moment.

The disappointment of the hivers was obvious, but their attention had shifted now, to the window aligned with the tube.

‘Mustn’t let on! They’re naive, not stupid. Let’s see what else your faces have to tell me.’

He busied himself by examining the basins that held the submerged spheres. There seemed to be three varieties, held separately from each other. Red, as he’d already found, yellow, and green. One red basin seemed significantly depleted.

But then the hiver’s attention on the window seemed to peak. Jack followed their gaze. At the very edge of the hiver city a small swarm had formed, even as he watched more were aggregating. It was difficult to tell from the distance, but their activity seemed particularly frenzied.

He comprehended then, the facility with which the hivers had pursued him and how their numbers had grown so swiftly through the chase. The orbs held something, a scent he supposed, that moved the hivers according to the coordination of the watchers in the tower.

‘What did I tell you, Jack? Opportunities.’

The beginnings of a plan were forming in his mind, nothing complex, no elaborate subterfuge. He saw a path to chaos, a landscape he could travel better than the rigid hivers.

He would need every edge.

A portion of the rope fibre bound his injured arm to his chest, tricky enough to do with one hand, but with it secured it no longer flopped uselessly.

He tested the other colours. Green also aggregated the hivers but rather than violent action they seemed spurred to work, busying themselves with small tasks, not of much use to him. But yellow held promise. When he sent it down the same tube as the green, a minute later the hivers abandoned their labours and vacated the region en masse.

‘Threat here, work here, flee this. I’m already fluent.’

He gathered some of each, but focused primarily on the yellow, filling the cookpot to the brim before tying the lid down with elaborate knot-work he’d been taught in the caravan. He managed to give himself a handle that he could manage with only one hand, and a long loop of extra length wrapped around his torso in case he needed to swing it around like some kind of bizarre censer.

Next, he tested new combinations of his cards, discovering a pair of synergies that made him shiver with excitement.

Finally he was ready. First, he dumped piles of green orbs into the centre, delighting in the growing swarm aggregating around the tower outside, milling about in confusion. The hivers had watched his preparations with confusion, and growing dismay as his understanding increased.

But when he gathered up as many of the red orbs as he could fill in the bowls and dumped them all into the central tubes of the podium, their dismay grew to full horror.

Gleefully, Jack ran to the window and hopped up on the thick sill. Mindful of the timing, the orbs would strike in only moments, he yelled out to the hivers below.

“My Audience!”

A sea of grotesques turned their attention to him.

“I beseech you, do not take what happens next as a personal failure—”

Violence erupted below as the sea went mad.

“I am simply, very very good.”