But Ksho knew the danger would not pass. Not by itself.
Something would have to be done.
And there was no one but Ksho to do it.
It took her many long, panting breaths to convince her body to move. To edge one limb forward was an effort; to haul her ungainly, gravid body across the floor was an agony. And hunger, always present, clawed at her stomachs like a predator.
She must be her own adult, and her sisters’ adult as well. She pulled in her eyes for a moment, comforting herself with the darkness, before resuming her painful movement. The sharp flavor of her own fear soured her stomachs, but she persisted, returning to the door through which she’d seen her parent’s death.
Nothing in the room moved. Ksho’s sisters sat as motionless as Xinecotic’s acid-mangled body. Even those that had writhed in pain now lay still.
Bitter grief lay strong on Ksho’s fingers.
“Ksho will find help,” she told her unmoving sisters, though she didn’t know how she would manage it. Even the shape of the number Ksho in her mandibles reminded her that, no matter how close she was to pupation, she was still only a juvenile—unfit to bear a personal name or to use the pronoun I. “Seko-cho,” she said, addressing the eldest of her younger siblings, “after Ksho leaves Xinecotic’s nest you must seal the doors behind her, and do not let anyone else in until she returns. Can you do this?”
“Seko-cho does not know…” she responded, her voice very small, only her mandibles moving. The flavor of fear seeped from her. She was only a little more than two-thirds Ksho’s age.
“You must.” Ksho hauled herself to Seko-cho’s side and stroked her trembling skin. “You must.”
“Seko-cho will try.”
Ksho stayed beside Seko-cho for a moment longer, taking comfort from the touch herself as well as giving it, before dragging her heavy body to the nest’s weather door. She closed the door behind herself, satisfied to hear Seko-cho’s mandibles working at the edge of the door to seal it. The seal would not withstand a concerted effort, but would hold off anyone who tried to enter out of idle curiosity, at least for a day or so.
She turned away from the door and took in a great breath, letting it out with a shuddering hiss through the spiracles on her sides.
The expedition had set up on the side of a rocky, inhospitable mountain far from the nearest outpost of the Grand Nest. The individual nests of the expedition members—all criminals, Ksho realized now, except her own dead parent—lay scattered across the gravel-strewn slope wherever their occupants had thought best to build them. A cold wind blew down from the top of the mountain, making Ksho shiver.
What should she do now? What could she do?
No one here would help her voluntarily. There was nothing to eat here outside of the central refectory, and only an adult could requisition food from there. Stowing away on the lone air transport that connected this site with civilization would be impossible—Ksho had often overheard the pilot complain about how every minim of weight was accounted for and double-checked. She could, she supposed, slip a written note onto an outbound transport, but to whom, and who would believe a note written in a juvenile’s scrawl?
But there was one other way out of the encampment.
Ksho considered her options. A long moment’s thought convinced her that the few alternatives were no better.
Tasting determination as well as fear, she shambled toward the center of the encampment.
The portal was a ring of pale glowing metal standing upright, twice the height of an adult. Its bottom edge hung a span above the ground, apparently unsupported. Anyone or anything that passed through the ring went… elsewhere. Some people and things came back. Armed soldiers surrounded the ring, ready to defend the encampment and the planet against any attack from the other side at a moment’s notice.
They paid no attention to Ksho, though, as she waddled across the stony ground toward the ring. Juveniles were often seen running errands and carrying messages to and from their parents on the other side. Ksho herself had done so several times a day since the portal had been opened a month and a half ago, and all juveniles looked alike to adults other than their own parents.
She remembered how pleased everyone had been when, after months of fruitless searching, the portal had finally connected to a world with breathable air and people worth trading with. A very strange people, but people nonetheless. Ksho hoped they would be willing and able to help an orphan.
Using all four hands of her first two pair of limbs, she boosted her swollen body over the ring’s lower edge.
Immediately the suffering of her overgrown body seemed to double as she fell into the other world’s gravity field. The gravity here was actually only a little higher than what she was used to, but its leaden pressure seemed to emphasize the grief that weighed her down. The air, too, seemed heavy—chill and dense with unaccustomed metallic and astringent flavors.
And then there was the weight of the hunger in her stomach, which dragged her down and sapped her energy. She realized she should have eaten something before she left her deceased parent’s home. How many other mistakes had she made? Would the armed soldiers shortly come charging through the portal, with orders from Takacha to detain and dispose of her?
Ksho straightened herself and moved away from the portal as quickly as her stumpy limbs could carry her in this strange environment. The ground here had been covered with a prickly bed of tiny plant stalks when they’d arrived, but after the first half month many paths had been trampled into bare dirt. Eventually the dirt had been replaced by a dark and gritty surface that tasted like a cross between fuel and broken stone.
This side of the portal had its own defenses: towering two-legged aliens clad in their own version of body armor, huge hulking vehicles flavoring the air with iron and solvents, towering walls of rough artificial stone topped with coils of jagged metal. But the alien defenders, too, were so used to juveniles appearing from the ring that they paid her little heed. As always, she was required to pass through a portal that hummed and tickled her insides, but otherwise her progress was unimpeded.
Beyond the defensive walls stood an even larger structure: smooth sheer cliffs of gleaming white stone pierced at regular intervals with hard-edged, angular openings. This structure, which the aliens called the White Nest, was the center of the aliens’ government and was the reason the portal had been shifted to this location from the point of initial contact. The structure was entirely flat planes, straight edges, and square corners except for an imposing forest of cylindrical columns that stood in a semicircle before the structure’s weather door. This enormous pile of stone was the dwelling of just one alien, one who held more power than any on this world. Or else it was the workplace of hundreds of aliens and home of none of them. It wasn’t clear. Perhaps there were translation difficulties.
There were always translation difficulties.
Ksho was seized again by a spasm of pain, her body stretched nearly to its limits and her aching bones squeezed by the higher gravity of this place. Her stomachs, too, throbbed with renewed hunger, and whether the White Nest was dwelling or workplace, it seemed the most likely place for her to find something to eat. She moved toward it as rapidly as she could manage.
As she hauled herself along the path, she passed several of the towering aliens, all of which stared at her with predatory intensity. Their disturbing eyes, dark circles within light circles, each looked like the opening of a weapon pointed directly at her; their movement, accomplished by a shift of weight from one of their two lower limbs to the other, emphasized their intimidating height and made them seem even more huge and ponderous than they were.