Grasping hands pry off her armor and her clothing and throw her naked body into the gas chamber where a glass window permits a view of the party watching her; elites, captain Drinnam, and that sod of a little girl standing on a stool with the biggest grin on her face June has ever seen.
Nozzles the size of bottles shoot milky white tranquilizer vapor that June tries to stay conscious against. She hammers the windows, kicks, claws, and bites at the glass, and at one point, she swears cracks form, though the sight could just be induced.
She wakes to churning gears, teeth catching on steel, and liquid shot out of nozzles. A snot-green murk fills the space faster than a sinking boat, reaching her shoulders and chin.
“You need the tubes, June!” yells the Second Signature outside.
“Sh-”
Water shoots down June’s mouth. She coughs, reaches out, and finds the tube the little shit was referring to. She clamps it over her mouth and sucks in the oxygen. Already, she can taste the flavor of sterile neutralizer and inhibitor agents, plus a whole cocktail of other gases she doesn’t know and can’t choose to turn off.
The murk covers her eyes, then her head, and before long the barely transparent liquid consumes June’s whole existence.
Manacles bind her wrists and ankles, fixed to chains that snap taught against two anchors at the bottom of her submerged prison and two more to the underside of a lid at the top. She doesn’t need to move to make out the shape of alcazar elites on the other side of the glass, and more chambers like June’s behind them, tubes snaking out to tanks all over the room. On the walls, too, though darkness encapsulates most of the space.
June has drawn the conclusion and sees now that the Second Signature lied to her and that the incubators never had quarters—they were in the vats the whole time.
You fuckers. You moved them. Worse. How stupid you were to believe them.
A man’s voice comes from beyond the glass, stepping forward just enough for June to see his face. She recognizes him as the captain of the alcazar elites. “Think of the poetry,” he yells into the vat, flanked by pikemen. “You forsake incubation, and now you’re chained to a vat.”
At that moment the lamps outside flick on, angled mirrors refracting the rays to illuminate every crevice of the vast chamber. Along the platforms above patrol the alcazar elites, right in front of hundreds of incubation vats plastering the walls and laid in rows in front of June. She can see now that they’re all drained and empty.
“Star of the show,” Drinnam says and walks off, leaving her alone on the floor, chained to an incubation vat—this pen for humanity’s pigs and her subset of the Hells.
She would rip the tube off and scream if she wouldn’t drown in the amniotic fluid. This is a fate worse than death. This is humiliation incarnate.
Yet as she calms herself and inspects the cavernous chamber beyond the glass, this space with no windows and a location impossible to place in the broad expanse of the alcazar, she counts only a dozen elites guarding an area where there should be fifty. Too far, they spread out—spread thin.
It comes to her just as a messenger swings over from a gantry to an elite sergeant and relays a message June knows the contents of. The sergeant nods him away, folds his arms, and doesn’t say anything, but even down here, June can make out the dismay on his face, the worry. He signs something incomprehensible, and elites from a higher scaffolding tier leave along gantries, bringing the room’s total down to nine.
She pulls at the chains and tries to bend or break the anchors, but the links are thicker than her in a heavy shell.
She should not have returned to the alcazar, instead suffering Tale’s presence for just another day, and led the assault alongside the conspirators. There would have been sketches of her standing on the rooftops waving her machete, and she would have hung them in the alcazar’s war room next to the head of the First Signature and maybe the Second, too, that little cunt.
“Rats would have a better chance of escaping that cage, Thurmgeist,” the alcazar elite sergeant barks from above.
“Fucking coward,” June wants to say. Come down here, and I’ll break this fucking glass.
The sergeant spews more taunts, but June stops listening.
A pounding thud reverberates from somewhere on the other side of the ceiling. The elites look up, calling to each other, scrambling to investigate the noise, but June knows it is too late for them to make any difference.
The ceiling crunches, and tears open. Fragments of the roof rain down and crash against the incubation vats but never break them. Steel and stone and the building’s frame mix, and high above, through a blown-out passage in the ground, the noon sky reveals itself. The ends of plants hang over the lip, Kaskit’s enclosure looming high above.
At the end of the hole small shapes of figures shout to each other, coordinating, hauling over what looks like a powder keg. It teeters at the lip of the opening, and after gesturing, they push it down and climb out of the hole.
The keg spins in the air, spewing thick gray liquid all over as it falls, dousing onto the vats, the floor, and the scaffolding where the elites regard the stuff on their armor like it’s not the last thing they’ll see.
The barrel smashes down right in front of June’s incubation vat. The roar deafens her, a shrieking beast’s call that ruptures her innards. The room goes white, her vision along with it. The heat of the mixtures magnifies, beginning as a bonfire in a cave, then Hyrnlak’s sweltering jungle, and then an incinerator. By some temperature equalizer, the vat continues to work, draining the fluids and replacing them with cold water spewing from a pipe near her face, dousing June.
She stays anchored in place, her eyes open, adjusting to see the stoked firestarter flames rip up along the walls and the ceiling, covering every ounce of the room in a burning carpet. The fire does not move normally; instead, it runs along every surface and leaves nothing of lesser material behind. The elite sergeant and his men go up like candles burnt to completion in seconds. One elite falls from a platform, and before his body can hit the floor, the flames consume him, melting flesh and charring bone until only his ash flutters down.
The burning takes less than a minute, a time June-Leckie recalls the young Skelton’s explanation of the rival mining plots. He had considered Foktle Firestarter to burn in a ‘small area,’ but to June, this space eclipses such a classification.
When the burning is over, she wonders if that’s what it’s like to stand over a fire seed when it explodes.
Grappling lines lower from the ceiling, men sliding down them as quick and deft as monkeys. The first is clad in what looks to be a heavy shell, though of thicker steel and with no personal atmosphere. It’s seared from the firestarter’s flames, but the man inside is undaunted as he pulls a lever that opens the vat. The lid lifts, and the conspirators cut the chains.
Naked, June runs to the man who removes his helmet. Skelton’s got this proud smile plastered across him, having saved a woman’s life, and June does the thing that will boost his ego most and plants a kiss on his quivering, sweating lips. There’s no romance in it, no sense of attachment, and not even gratitude. She pushes the young man away before he can think more of it.
“I couldn’t let them take you after everything you told me,” Skelton says. He is more naive than June ever thought.
She puts a hand on his shoulder. “I want this suit.” It’s another request, almost a jest, to see if he’ll bend to her again.
He obeys, of course, and while the other conspirators grapple down and fit June into the fire suit, Tale Jethry joins them. His grimace is plain and is not unexpected, either.
Tale will always be a jealous man, and June will always exploit him.
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It happens when all of the bullwheels outside the alcazar stop spinning.
A butler sweeps the war room floor. A groundskeeper lays a stone brick on a flower bed. A horticulturist climbs a hanging tulip two stories tall but carries a set of binoculars, using them to scan the complex. The elites outside her room change, but the man posted is one Pasha has never seen before. When Pasha inspects the horticulturist from her perch in the war room, she finds he is also new. Why would anyone need binoculars?
She retreats to her quarters, where a human soul has never stepped into—and won’t start today. It is an austere arrangement with a bed at its center, no windows, and reinforced behind layers of stone and steel. The pipes worming from the gas chambers through the alcazar reach the room in six different places, each a calculated mixture that emits at a rhythm Pasha has memorized. By noon, she notices the rhythm is off.
The lid of Vakye’s tunnel to her chamber opens, and the beetle steps through. “Pasha, who is that man atop the plant?”
“I don’t know.”
“And that groundskeeper?”
“I don’t know either.”
Humming as the beetle clacks its mandibles. “I do not like what is happening here.”
Me neither. “Gauss was right. Where is the Thurmgeist?”
“Captain Drinnam has her. In the vats.”
Those words do not hold the same assurance they once did. Who can detain a Thurmgeist for any amount of time?
Vakye speaks. “My advice is-”
“I know.” Pasha rises from the bed she had been sitting on the edge of and listens to the alcazar’s crevice, pressing her ear to the wall. Rumbles come, then shakes. “Trust the Surgeon Elder’s words in that respect. It has been here the whole time.”
“Why ever trust him?”
“I think…” She has been dwelling on the deduction for some time and still has trouble voicing it, imprinting it on reality. “I think he meant well.”
They flee through the Entrusted’s tunnel, large enough for Pasha to stand upright, though she is perhaps one of the only life forms in the alcazar that can do so, save for the children. Hells. “Where are the incubators?”
“They have all been evacuated to deeper chambers, but we’re not sure how long they’ll last.”
“Closer to the raw ground and the Gashes underneath our city, Entrusted. Make them last as long as they can.”
“The surface or the raw. Pick your threat, dear Pasha.”
That is not a choice Pasha wants anyone to make. The chambers underneath the alcazar are heavily reinforced but small and do not hold enough rations to sustain life for even a few months. Eventually, the incubators will have to emerge.
The Inciter strand must have spread years ago, even before the bubble. The first Kaskitian riot comes plain in her mind as the strand’s first attempt to take her and Ruinalk down. It had failed miserably, but it had rebuilt, spreading throughout the city before Pasha erected the enclosure. When she finished that bubble surrounding Kaskit’s core, immigration was at an all-time high, and the conspirators in the surrounding towns flooded through if they were not inside already. Her recent policies to close the airlocks do not matter in the slightest.
Assume everyone has it. Assume all my work, and all that of humanity’s, is undone.
The beetle pauses. “I cannot go back and relay your orders.”
Pasha knows they are not orders as much as thoughts, frustrations, and regrets. The riot is here now, and she should have seen it coming. It is the second one in Kaskit’s history and maybe the last.
They emerge into a side passage attached to the hatchery. In the center of the cage of dirt, the two Entrusted huddle together regarding the shadowed forms buried in the soil around them. The larvae are now pupae at least as large as their father and mother, and many are more than that. They wiggle as they try to escape the confines of their birth prisons, perhaps hearing their words and surmising what’s to come.
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Blades crunch against armor beyond the foggy glass as a fighting press closes on the hatchery. The conspirators push through her line of elites that shout and relay orders, at least the ones still loyal to her. They cry out and press their hands against the glass, some attempting to pry the door open in desperation. Their shadows raise halberds, then fall against a mob unarmed but growing.
“Monsters,” says Sixt, in a shriek that is more frightened than Pasha thinks the beetle could ever make. Vakye tries to console her, but the female shoves her mate away. “You should be out there!”
Vakye’s gaze on Pasha says the Entrusted is torn between two treasured sets of lives to defend. Looking down at the squirming pupa, she knows there won’t be enough time. “When will they hatch?”
The doorway pounds. The glass shakes.
“In hours,” says Sixt, “but there’s so many. They are pervasive. They are in every inch of this place. How could we let them infiltrate us so?”
“They planned all this. It planned all this. Patient fucking strand. All of this is Incited.”
“Pasha,” says Vakye. His gaze holds all the words that even he is too afraid to say. The Decree still binds them to her, but that does not mean the things are invincible and will charge in haphazardly. Even these otherworldly beings can sense their and their children’s demise.
She kicks the beetle’s shell, which must feel like nothing more than a speck of ash dropping on it. Still, the Entrusted turns and frowns at her as if in the path of a tossed pebble. “I will tell you when to give up!” she screams. “You’re sworn to me, not them.” She gestures at a writhing pupa. “You should not even have these. What will Sacramount think?” She has never considered broaching the subject, but that’s what desperation does to you.
The topic doesn’t sit well with the Entrusted, and she wouldn’t be surprised if they turned on her and slaughtered anyone who threatened their children. Yet they need Pasha, and she needs them. She needs everyone.
“We have to move them,” Pasha says.
“Where?” both Entrusted ask.
She doesn’t answer, but they know.
Desperation hits the Entrusted harder than the men slamming the doors to the hatchery. They start hauling the squirming pupa through the tunnel, Vakye passing with one on his back and crawling faster than Pasha’s ever seen, almost knocking the girl over. Pasha pulls one of the forms along, the large one she had slept next to that night before, but it is as if she is hauling a wagon by herself and barely gets it a tenth of the way through the passage. On the way back from carrying another pupa, Vakye pushes Pasha and her cargo along and almost throws them into her quarters.
He hurries back, his horn scraping off the tunnel’s walls as he corrects himself. While Vakye runs to retrieve another, the mandibles of the largest pupa burst out from its protective covering. Pasha uses the scrambling limbs to help her haul the hatching Entrusted into the darkness of the mycorrhizal room and towards Rue’s passage.
Ruinalk also senses the attack, for the flesh of his passageway has expanded like a throat gorging. Pasha pushes the pupae inside, its mandibles scraping and sensing a direction, and the fleshy walls swallow it, forcing it down into themselves and disappearing into the darkness. When the throat opens again, a maligned dog with a bird’s head steps out, regards Pasha, and licks her with a slick tongue. It crooks its head and runs towards the hatchery, following a flood of more creatures, amalgamations Pasha had seen during her visit with Rue. The last one is the thing that approximated Gauss, and it looks around as if expecting the general to be there.
The ceiling shakes. An unlit lamp falls from its protective sconce and breaks. Shouts flood in from somewhere far off—men fighting.
Vakye throws aside someone in Pasha’s chamber, leaps on top of him, and severs his head from his body with two blades. The man sputters and dies with an outstretched hand on the beetle’s mandible. The maligned dog pulls a downed elite around the corner into the mycorrhizal chamber, where the flesh underneath the mushroom eats it up. Pasha hopes Rue’s other maligned are fanning out across the alcazar.
“I have to get more,” Vakye says. “Pasha, wait here.”
“No!”
Before she can go, Vakye hurls another pupa, and she has no choice but to pull this one into the passageway and shove it down, this time with only one flailing mandible to help her and two more maligned dogs, skinny hyenas standing on two legs. Ruinalk’s chamber swallows it and does the same with the next one and the next until Pasha’s lost count and forgets that it’s been minutes since Vakye last emerged from the tunnel to her quarters.
Pasha runs through the hatchery passageway and peers inside.
Blades rake against shells while men prod with six-foot polearms, surrounding Vakye and Sixt in the dirt cage. Some men wielding torches rush at the Entrusted, jump into the dirt, and sink to the bottom, drowning in soil. They pile into the room like water from a broken dam, seeping through its cracks, limbs and faces squashing against each other. The glass shatters, and more pore in; house staff, rioters from outside the alcazar, and commoners with their pitchforks, scythes, and shovels but united. Incited.
Vakye shares a look at Pasha but does not yell, only sneers before the riot stumbles over themselves in a ball of eager bodies set on reaching the two Entrusted. Enough men have piled into the substrate where they’re standing on each other, pulling the beetles down.
“Leave, Pasha,” Vakye seems to utter, but his words drown in the screams of ten men burying him under their weight.
Pasha wipes her eyes when she runs down the hatchery tunnel faster than she ever has and may ever again. Someone shouts after her, but the beetle’s screams are louder, croaking, and full of curdling blood.
Far off come more shouts, then silence.
A roar fills the tunnel, and then a wave of intense heat whips at Pasha’s back. She leaps out of the passage’s entrance and rolls over underneath the lip, flames scorching her hair and the wall across from the tunnel’s opening.
The sensation is gone in an instant, leaving her cold, as if all the warmth has been sucked out of the alcazar. The voices on the other side have receded. The approaching footsteps that she thought she heard are silent now.
A wall of the mycorrhizal chamber is open, and Ruinalk’s maligned fend off men on the other side.
Pasha sees mother and father Adderey, her parents entwined as a mycorrhizal that, even in death, watches over her.
As she throws open the hatch to Ruinalk’s passage and closes it from the other side, she wonders if they will overlook her failures and be proud she tried to hold humanity together.
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The grounds are in shambles, structures with entire walls blown open, men and elites clashing atop rubble heaps. The conspirators gather their forces into ragged clumps, still fighting off the fading numbers of the Second Signature’s elites and the First Signature’s maligned. The latter are the inhuman equivalent of the elite guards but more coordinated as they follow orders from their maligned overlord, the putrid half of the Decree’s Signatures. The creatures are few, relying on their strength instead of turning. Before long, the conspirator contingent overwhelms them.
On the other hand, most of the men on June’s side of the equation have been plucked from the populace. They are faces she swears she has seen in storefronts and at the end of the bridge when she’d first arrived, shouting in their collected circle, the middle and the working and the lower classes united against… what? An idea? A child representing it? How could Tale have pulled together so many followers? He’s not an orator precisely, and his words to the conspirators at the pub were not awe-inspiring. Yet he has moved mountains.
It’s everywhere, the girl had said. The Surgeon Elder told them the strand was aptly named, too.
“You knew,” June says and turns to Tale. “You knew this whole time that-”
“I’m sorry.”
June blinks. “Sorry for knowing? Sorry for not telling me? Sorry for holding everything back?” This is too much deception from a lowly, diminutive, and subservient man. Yet even rodents can overwhelm if guided.
Tale seems to have heard none of this, and his head dips slightly. “Sorry for keeping you for five years, June.”
This is not a line of answers June expects. Tale knows of the Inciter strand, doesn’t he? What else does he know? Insistence grips her, extending until she seizes Tale by his tunic’s collar. She takes his machete, and he lets her. “Keeping me out of what, Tale?”
The man begins the account with the casual review of a deposition. “He sought me out. I don’t know how he found me, but he did, or was it that thing inside him? But he came for me, specifically. He must have known that you and I conspired and that I would not deny a chance to take care of you. I had to take care of you, June. Who else would? I had kept so much to myself already, so why not a bit more?” He sniffs, though his eyes remain dry. “He was going to expose us to everyone, June. You understand, don’t you? I couldn’t tell you a damn thing because I thought you’d let them all know.” That smile that writes itself over his face does not reach his eyes, which stare distant and dead. “But it’s alright now. We can find the First Signature, get rid of him, and grant complete rule to the Second. The Decree can be rewritten.” He still gazes at her, an apology there. “I had to keep you safe, June.”
June does not move from her spot, anchored by years vanished, years held hostage by this man, this servile thing she thought she was gaining the upper hand over, but indeed, was the opposite. He had played himself as subservient, as a jealous man, and as a cuck, and she had fallen for it.
She hacks into Tale Jethry with his own machete, ignoring his screams and his attempts to run. June keeps on until his innards are exposed, his face to the floor, his sobs wreaking.
With the bit of strength he has left afterward, he caresses her cheek, and his skin is wet and devoid of warmth. “June,” he says, “I’m s-”
She kicks his head once, twice, ten times until she swears the skull has caved in while his fellow conspirators watch without interest. There is the baby face man, the old veteran, the short one who had to stand on a stool, and it occurs to June that these proportions are not just odd but incorrect—inhuman.
“Chant,” she breathes, walking forward and caught momentarily by one of Tale’s legs. She pushes it aside. “Where are your robes?”
The men do not speak, do not acknowledge her as they walk around with their backs turned, as if she is not worth their time or anyone else’s anymore. A rat strung along from the very start. She never had a chance to help her Thurmgeists, for they are all dead in the ground, and this whole alcazar soon will be.
She cuts them down, one by one, each turning away from her before she reaches them as if not even she is worth their time. Annoyed, she seizes a conspirator by the head and searches his face for expression as she slams the blade into his side. Not once does he look at her.
It is worse knowing these men are Incited and could leap onto her and turn her any moment, but instead choose to hold back as if they are better, or she is one of them.
When her blade is bloody and her arms are sore, she joins their cabal procession. Eyes press all around her from them or other sources she can’t discern, considering, looking on, following command as devoutly as Corps soldiers would from their leader. She pushes past the ones in front, sees where they’re walking, and runs ahead, up the stairs, into the Second Signature’s chamber, and to the mycorrhizal room where the giant mushroom stands.
It’s the ugliest organism June has ever seen, with two corpses intertwined at death when the Myco strand consumed them both. She inspects the woman melded into the fungus, her pale pupils. The man is much the same.
“Let me,” she tells her audience. She recognizes none, doesn’t bother looking around to check, and hacks the mycorrhizal’s trunk. She starts sawing like a logger, like the Thurmgeist she is and still is and forever will be, no matter whatever presence thinks to rule her. She carves through bone and sinew, heaving back and forth over the sounds of fingernails scraping on stone, of her girls screaming as they turn. Even those regrets begin to recede, something worse replacing them.
The cap falls to the ground, pulling roots of flesh up with it, lifting a portion of the mound it stands on, where a singular wooden doorway is latched closed. June orders two Ox-infused to pry it open, and she is not surprised when they listen, though not obeying out of her authority, but something else’s.
They rip the door off its hinges to reveal darkness beyond a line of steps. June descends ten feet and stops against a hard surface, a dried substance like scales or shells.
“He’s in here, I know it,” she tells the audience, stepping out. “Get me all the firestarter we have. I want this pried open. Burn it if you have to.”
They do not talk back to her, instead moving at her command—something’s command—like ants, like the Second Signature’s Entrusted, and it’s no surprise when a few of them emerge from the girl’s quarters carrying the hollow shells that belonged to the two beetles.
They push through the towering plants and hanging flowers blanketing the alcazar. After setting up the powder kegs, June does not bother plugging her ears this time when the flames whip up the section and spread to the rest of the grounds in contagious fireworks. A first-time witness could be told all the Foktle Firestarter in the world was unleashed here, and they would know no better as gouts of fire shred the stalks of grass that once raked against the gondola windows but now cannot stand. Three-story tulips, lilacs, and strange flowers once standing curious and proud now bend, wither, and fall, dragging bulbous plants she couldn’t name and never will. The heat wall slams into June, but the cracking is more satisfying than maligned bones crunching underneath her feet.
When the grounds are entirely singed, leaving nothing but the superior structures of stone, a large circular object remains. It pulses and writhes with life inside. June orders the barrels of firestarter and other explosives to be ignited here to carve out that fleshy shell.
“Where is she?” she asks no one in particular, for all have not stopped listening to her potential words, her breaths, and maybe her thoughts. Perhaps you’ve got me too, Inciter, but we want the same thing. We always did.
No pang of agreement pulses, yet none of disagreement, either.
Far off, it could even be laughing.
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The warm place holds her as the world shakes outside. When the heat beyond becomes too great, the walls of flesh close in, pressing against Pasha’s cheeks, filling the space under her neck but never once applying pressure. The layer moves her closer and closer to its center until she nestles against the largest of the pupa that writhes, eager to escape.
Not once does Ruinalk remind Pasha he was correct in telling her that he had nothing to do with the Inciter strand, yet the regret plays out inside Pasha’s head endlessly.
There are dreams in this place, the passage of time as clear as a world of no light could ever indicate. Days could be elapsing, weeks too, but the only sensations are what she can feel on her skin and Ruinalk’s tissue wrapping tight around her. It slides gelatinous substances down her throat and tilts and massages her neck in just the matter needed to swallow for her. Water leaks, quenching her thirst, and it is then that she is a baby once more, cradled in Ma’s arms.
“I must send them,” says Ruinalk a time later.
“They’re not ready.” Pasha’s not sure if she thinks or says this.
“They have to be.”
Pasha flails her hand around, finds she can, and feels the warmth of the large pupa slowly drifting away. When it’s gone, she grasps for another of the young Entrusted and another, and when she can’t find anymore, she swims around in this ocean of flesh that encroaches but does not suffocate. One by one, the pupa leave her, and when the last one goes, she curls up in a ball, just like the larvae had.
“They’ll get to us eventually, Pasha,” says Ruinalk. “Please…”
Her hand is curled next to her, and air rushes around it as Rue opens a passageway through the flesh towards her. Something crumples, and then a parchment touches her fingertips. Ruinalk lifts her fingers individually, passes the paper down, and pushes it into her open palm.
“This is the final copy.” Rue closes the passage, forcing Pasha’s hands around the draft even though she refuses to grasp it. “You will do better, Pasha. I know you will.”