The line of twenty alcazar elites flanking Pasha does little to calm her nerves.

She waits outside the room, Sixt next to her, watching every man as if he could spring out at her any moment. Inhibitor agents work, she reminds herself. The mixtures have been around for decades, with four or five surgeon elders confirming their effectiveness. There’s only one reason why that child born today was maligned.

“Breeding should be natural,” says Sixt.

“Breeding should, firstly, occur,” Pasha retorts. “After that, we can worry about whether it’s natural. Your circumstances are a little different than ours.”

The beetle says nothing to that.

At the end of the hallway rests a single door leading into a suite belonging to the residential quarters closest to the alcazar’s labs. The way is open, and through the door flickers the glint of armor from more elites inside.

Captain Drinnam sticks his head out. “It’s all clear,” says the alcazar captain. “No traps, or wires or hidden passages. He is confined to his lab now, and he didn’t take a lot of stuff with him. He doesn’t own much, which is impressive given the mess.”

“Be sure that eel doesn’t slip through the vents,” she utters, remembering the slits on the walls in the Surgeon Elder’s lab. She stands at the precipice to the door. “And Koyle?”

“Burned. And the suitors. And that… monstrosity. And…”

Pasha has no time for weak people. “I ordered you to do it.”

“I did, Signature.” Drinnam sighs. “Never thought I’d have to burn a woman, but yes. All by my Hells damned self, too. Spared the vats they sat in, though.”

“Good. Reflect on it.”

The alcazar captain seems to have done a lot of reflecting already. “We tracked his movements. He was in the vat chambers the day before you arrived.”

Pasha looks to Sixt, a flicker of understanding passing between them. Pasha had been right. “Leave us here, Drinnam,” she says, “but watch him closely.”

He seems more than happy to, waiting for his elites to leave before following them and shutting the door behind him.

“I wish every one of my elites were Entrusted instead,” says Pasha.

“That may happen sooner than you think,” croaks Sixt.

Pasha doesn’t hear it. Instead, with Sixt, she steps into the quarters that once belonged to the Surgeon Elder but will be burned immediately after her inspection.

Drinnam hadn’t lied that it was a mess. Broken books lay everywhere, as well as glass shards and water puddles. There’s no sense in the chaos as if the Surgeon Elder wanted to break things for breaking’s sake. Despite it, the room is still mostly barren, Drinnam having taken most of the possessions with his elites for careful scanning—grunt work that the Entrusted are too valuable to perform.

The space consists of a single open room with a kitchenette, work benches, a long desk, and bookshelves lining three of four walls. The remaining wall has a single window with black curtains nailed over, and Pasha peers outside to a steep drop, looking down several stories onto stalks of tall grass.

She inspects the kitchen: the cans of cultured meat and fruits, the pots of grain, the rice, the modest water boiler on the counter, and a rack of wine bottles, mostly empty save for one that looks older than the rest, and is still full of some liquid Drinnam probably missed or deemed not worth his time. The Surgeon Elder appears to be the most austere of her staff, likely because his great possession is his knowledge, of which, Pasha knows now, he does not divulge completely.

“I should never have hired that man,” Pasha says, moving on to check the bookshelves. All sorts of textbooks line it, covering topics from medicine, surgery, anatomy, law, medical zoology, geology, physics, botany, and many more disciplines Pasha hasn’t even heard of.

“Is that why you brought him to the vat chamber?” Sixt asks. “To see how he’d react to it?” It had been Vakye there, not Sixt, but the two usually talk like teenage incubators, sharing everything they see.

“I didn’t,” Pasha admits. “I tried to catch him in a lie before, but he’s thought of things.”

Sixt’s pause says it all. “Pasha…”

“I’m not paranoid.”

“Why aren’t you?”

She shakes her head. “Alright, I’m a little paranoid, but what else can I do? Be complacent?”

“I wasn’t suggesting you do either. Mainly, ask yourself why he would even try such a thing. What are his motivations?”

“I don’t know. He’s with the Chant?” And they’ve got something to do with this strand as well? Those implications are enormous, almost too much to fathom.

“He’s overseen you for half a decade,” Sixt says. “That’s a long time for the Chant.”

Pasha doesn’t think so. The acolytes are zealots, more likely to live intensely than plan anything out. They operate on basic impulses that they seem to find satisfied in the strands. She frowns. “I hate those fucking cultists.”

“I’m sure your Thurmgeist will find out his involvement. We should look elsewhere.”

That sounds too optimistic. Pasha scans her Entrusted, this warrior being, this walking bulwark. Sixt is not a detective, probably unaccustomed to wrapping her head around situations like this. She is a well-honed tool for one purpose that is not the one at hand, and Pasha reminds herself that’s why there are two of the beings. “I’d like to be alone, Sixt.”

The beetle takes a moment to register. “Pasha? Did I upset you?”

“No, I just… need to clear my head. From everything.”

The Entrusted sags and then nods. “I’ll be outside the door with my shell pressed to it should something go wrong.”

Pasha guesses that is to detect the vibrations of her voice inside. “Thank you.”

Once Sixt exits, Pasha walks around the room, closing her eyes and imagining herself as the Surgeon Elder. An adult not yet in his middle years, maybe a third of Pasha’s living age, and an expert in his field—in all medical fields. In other words, irreplaceable.

“I remember what you did,” she murmurs. She directs the words at her memories, sitting in the plushiest chair in the room, hoping that Drinnam checked it for pressure spikes. “Don’t think I forgot.”

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A chair rests across from hers, tattered and featureless as the Surgeon Elder himself. She imagines the man sitting in it, speaking to her as he did five years ago, days before the first Kaskitian riot. He had been the one to approach her, stepping up to the alcazar like he was some prophet foretelling a new age. He may as well have been.

“Fleet Admiral Delah Stalt is dead,” he had said. “And I have something of hers.”

It had been another annoyance to Pasha, but to the Surgeon Elder, it may have become a defining moment of his life.

Back then, Pasha had a feeling of what the Surgeon Elder was keeping from her. Back then, he wasn’t even the Surgeon Elder yet. “That’s Emergence Corps property. I don’t have to tell you how much shit you’ll be in if you keep that.”

“I agree,” he had said, “men like me can burn this city to the ground if they don’t get what they want.”

How frustrated Pasha had felt at the gall of that man. Still, back then, she had to know. “Show it to me.”

He did, splaying before her the glass case holding Delah Stalt’s fire seed, which she was supposed to throw into the Gash at the Hyrnlak Archipelago. It is the same one Pasha had handed off to Genebrict before the Flung departed.

“All I want,” the man went on, “is to be the Surgeon Elder.”

It had been such a harmless request back then. He did not seek riches, a wife, land, privilege, or adventure. “Is that all?”

He had nodded the affirmative, and as quickly as he did, Pasha had taken the seed and summoned her Entrusted to descend on the man. They had almost ripped him apart. They should have.

Instead, Pasha had asked him, “Why should I not kill you right now?”

“Because,” he replied, “I will do great things.”

He lived up to that promise. Until today, Pasha had thought he would continue.

“‘Great,’” she murmurs, “might be relative.”

As she’s about to go, she sees a box discarded from Drinnam’s search. It’s about the size of one that would contain jewelry. Pasha picks it up, and dirt crumbles off and onto her hands. She throws it away, frustrated, and steps outside to meet Sixt. She nods to Drinnam to begin the burning.

“I’d like to see them,” she tells the Entrusted.

----------------------------------------

Pasha stands above the substrate, kneeling to inspect the soil. “You two have been busy.” She smirks and blushes. “Where do you find the time?”

The Entrusted’s enclosure is circular with a diameter of twenty meters, pocked with precisely fifty holes. In each lies a yellowish-white larva about as tall as Pasha, squirming as they digest the nutrients from the soil. Sixt, their mother, has burrowed eight feet underneath the soil substrate, forming a passage not unlike the one leading down to the First Signature’s alcove.

“We have at least five minutes in between each shift change,” says Vakye, standing at the edge of the hatchery room. He makes it sound like a boast. To an Entrusted beetle, it just might be.

Pasha sprinkles a bucket of wood chippings mixed with dried leaves over the soil while Vakye eats out of a sap trough. “You know that’s the same stuff burners use,” she tells Vakye. “You should adjust your tastes to something cheaper.”

“If making me a walking candle is the cost of ingesting this substance, Pasha, then light me now, for I will burn happy.”

She laughs. “You and Gauss need to have a poetry session.”

The mention of the lieutenant general stills Vakye. “Do you trust him, Pasha?”

“More than I trust the Surgeon Elder.”

The two beetles seem to share the unspoken advice. “Let it go,” their gazes say, but Pasha won’t.

“Besides,” she continues, “what choice do I have? Gauss may be tasked with defending the First Signature, so I had to tell him anyway.”

“But why now?” Vakye asks. “What is the urgency?”

Pasha shakes her head, sitting at the edge of the enclosure and staring down at one of the larvae. “This city wants the First Signature dead, but they wouldn’t hesitate to push through me on the way to him. What’s my use if Rue isn’t here to bind the Decree together?” Not the current Decree, at least. She crumples a handful of leaves and scatters them over the larvae’s hole. “A rewrite. Hells, can you believe that?”

“It makes the most logical sense,” Vakye says. “It will be needed eventually, Pasha, but I agree the timing now is a little… rushed. Maybe he sees things you don’t.”

“I bet he does.”

“We are entitled to our secrets.”

“I suppose, but that doesn’t make this any easier.”

“Nothing, I believe, will make it easier, Pasha.”

She frowns, spreading her arms above the cage and the fifty life forms nestling inside. “These will make it easier. When will they be ready?”

“They are in the L3 stage now, so they will begin building a pupal cell in a few days. After that, they’ll shed again to become a pupa. From then on, the growth will accelerate. Maybe… one week after.”

“So in two weeks, I’ll have a small Entrusted force at my disposal.”

Sixt picks this moment to climb up out of her burrow. “Not before I train them!” She looks to Vakye. “They must know how to defend before attacking. Tell him, Pasha, how important that is.”

“Your enemies can’t attack you if they’re dead,” Vakye says.

“Our enemies will never be dead,” Pasha says, much for herself as the other two. “Let me know as soon as they become adults. I want to give them all names.” The two beetles nod at that, but one question remains. “Will they be as loyal as you both are to me?"

The Entrusted look to each other, sharing eons of understanding.

“We hope so,” says Vakye. “All of them? Probably not. The Decree has not named them specifically, Pasha. Another reason why it should be rewritten.”

“I doubt I could convince Sacramount to add that clause. How would that thing feel if I had an army of Entrusted beneath me?” Pasha runs the numbers, imagining decades in the future. She could eventually have a force as large as the Emergence Corps. Every new Entrusted, however, would require a new line in the Decree that would bind the Entrusted to her. Each Decree would require another rewrite. Sacramount wouldn’t like that at all.

“More likely,” Sixt starts, “he will come and whisk them away. That we’re even doing this is almost an insult to him.”

“Then let him come,” says Vakye. “I was taken. You were. So was Pasha. We are all taken away from our mothers at some point. If he doesn’t notice, we may be the first organisms to have a family.”

“That’s uncommon with… your kind?” Pasha hardly talks about their origins, the beetles seeming to steer clear about their pasts every time it’s brought up. More importantly, where have these bouts of emotion come from? These confidences in her? Do you both feel it, too? Do you feel the burning hands of this city clasping around you?

“That would be a sight to see,” says Sixt. “Sacramount himself trying to abduct my children. He could not fit three of them on each wing.” The beetle climbs out of the cage and looks down to the larva underneath Pasha’s feet. “That one will be our biggest. It eats double the portion of the others. Maybe because you keep talking to it.”

Today is not the first time Pasha has visited the hatchery. Ever since learning of the Inciter strand, Pasha has spent more time in the mycorrhizal hub, the hatchery, and other places the staff of the alcazar have limited access to. Call it safety, or call it paranoia.

As her feet dangle over the substrate, she attempts to piece together her past and find the moment when she had lost control of Kaskit. If it were a single event, it would have been when she conceded to the man who had shown up at her alcazar and accepted the fire seed in exchange for the Surgeon Elder position. She cannot ignore everything that happened after that, however. Since then, a gradient of evolving circumstances made her wake up and one day realize she was not the maker of her destiny but a pawn of humanity. More like an obstacle as of late. All she can do is wait, and pray that she is ready by the time the city topples onto her.

Pasha tightens her boots, shifts on the edge of the cage, and jumps in. The soil is thick enough to support her weight, and she trudges through it to the larva’s hole, the one as large as her. It squirms and pulls its soft belly back as if welcoming her.

“Can I stay here tonight?” she asks.

“Pasha?” Vakye asks.

“Just tonight.”

Sixt nods, and so does Vakye. Pasha slides up to the larvae and takes it in her grip, letting its warmth flow through her, the same feeling her mother or father must have experienced when holding her. She dozes off, trying to remember those times.

“Pasha?” Vakye asks again. “Please do not contaminate the substrate.”

She frowns and gets up. Her eyes weren’t even closed for a minute. “What do you mean?” She climbs out of the soil and stands atop. “I wasn’t-”

Sixt walks over to her, the most upset she’s ever seen the Entrusted. The beetle rakes a mandible across Pasha’s dress and inspects the tip of it. “Where did you get this soil?”

“What are you talking about?” Pasha squints at the tip of Sixt’s mandible but notices nothing. She wipes her dress with her hand. “That dirt is from your substrate.”

“No, Pasha. Not all of it.” Sixt bends and delicately picks another speck of soil. She holds it in front of the girl, and how the Entrusted can be so elegant with those enormous claws escapes Pasha. “This is from a mycorrhizal.”

“It’s not,” Pasha says, “I haven’t stepped into that chamber all day.” She knows the rules of not mixing soil with the substrate well—she always changes her dress before entering the hatchery.

“I believe you, Pasha,” says Sixt, “but I know what I’m seeing. We are… experts on this.”

It comes to Pasha at that exact moment, rushing in. “The Surgeon Elder had a box in his room,” she says. “It… must have belonged to a mycorrhizal. Not the one in his lab, either—a different one.”

But why would the Surgeon Elder need another mycorrhizal?