As recently as a month ago, the aroma of fungus and rotting sheep would make Collector’s gizzard contract in anticipation. But Collector hadn’t been hungry in days. Never would be again.
Child laid his forepaws on Collector’s snout, and made louder, more insistent noises. Liquid welled in his eyes.
Maybe Child couldn’t really talk, but she’d heard those particular noises before, when Child didn’t want some food she’d offered him. Why . . . ? Oh.
The new human was sitting in the fermentation pit. Collector usually fed Child things unfermented—fermented food made him sick. But he must have understood somehow what the pit was for. He must be afraid Collector had brought the new human here to eat it!
Really, sometimes she was sure humans actually thought about things. They were almost like people sometimes. This was good. Her spines softened, and her ear webs quivered with relief. “Not food, not food,” she said, repeating back the sounds he’d just made. Despite the ache in her muscles, she brushed Child with her wings. And she wished, oh, she wished there was some way to just explain.
The girl in the pit was older than Jacq by a few years, maybe just turned adult. It was hard to tell. It had been a long time since he’d been close to another human.
A really long time. That docked nose. Those comical ears. The hairs pricking out of her skin.
“Fuck!” the girl shouted. “Help me out!”
Jacq broke out of his daze. “Oh. Uh, right. Just a minute.”
The words came easily, and Jacq realized it was probably a good thing he’d kept talking aloud to Auntie all these years, even though she couldn’t understand him.
The pits weren’t that deep, but the girl’s leg was injured, and she kept making things worse by trying to jump. Jacq finally located a rope in the adjacent storage cell, and threw down one end. The girl tied some impressive knots to help heave herself up until Jacq could pull her the rest of the way.
Her smell was an overwhelming wave even in the already foul cavern. Her face was sallow with pain and sweat. Bits of sheep hide and rotting meat stuck to her skin and clothes. She breathed heavily as she slumped onto the ground, propping herself against a disposal box.
Jacq pressed the back of his hand over his nose. “Did you fall into the hive?”
“What!”
Jacq removed his hand to shout, “Did you fall in?”
The girl looked disgusted. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
“I don’t understand why you’re here.”
“A dragon threw me in!”
“To the hive?”
“To the pit. First, she kidnapped me—wrapped me up like a spider with a fly! Then she carried me here, and dumped me in.”
“Wrapped you in her wings?”
“Yes!”
Jacq gestured to her leg. “Because she found you injured?”
“Look,” the girl said. “Call me Stel. You’re . . .”
“Jacq.”
“Fine. Jacq, I’m a picker, okay? My clan spends the cold season near here. We just set up camp, so I slipped off to go looking for scraps in my old scouting spots. One of them is at the old Landing site . . . Well, maybe I went farther past the radiation warning signs than I should have. By the time I realized, it had been a while. I was scrambling over stuff to get back and . . . I admit it. I tripped. I probably looked like a great catch, separated from my herd.”
“She wouldn’t have eaten you.”
“Why was I in a food pit?!”
“I don’t know. She . . . wanted me to meet you? Something is wrong. They’ve been acting weird. The whole hive. Auntie especially.”
“Auntie?” Stel asked, with a look of disbelief.
Jacq made an impatient noise. “She’s bringing me stuff. She’s getting sick . . .”
“Isn’t that normal when there’s a hive collapse?”
The silence was flat.
Jacq said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“The hive is in shutdown. They’ve laid a new queen. You must be able to tell. Haven’t you seen the dead workers? There were at least three on the way in.”
“I haven’t seen . . . anyone dead . . .” Jacq said, but he could remember the dragon with the fatal gash who’d gone into the snow.
“You live with dragons,” the girl said. “Do you know anything about hives? How did you end up here? What clan are you?”
Jacq stared past her. “What’s going to happen to the hive?”
“It’s going to collapse! Hive. Collapse.” She clapped her hands together to illustrate. “All the old workers and warriors and whatever are going to die to make room for the new ones. It’s kind of neat, actually. It’s part of their reproductive cycle, every few centuries.”
Jacq didn’t move.
Stel made an exasperated noise. “Whatever! The point is, I’m getting out before that happens! You, too. I can’t leave you here. What are you, fifteen?” Stel clapped again. “Pay attention to me!” she said. “It’s time to leave before everything dies.”
Everything dies. The message had been passing in the base thrum of the hive since the new queen hatched. Everything dies. You will die, but other life will continue and new things will come.
Collector labored up the hillside, a bundle of mite bark clutched in her forehands, pushing her way through the pain as she would have pushed herself through a too-small corridor. Bracing, sliding, pausing, twisting, breathing. Her body was done, but she had more to finish—the duties she had postponed while she dealt with Child.
Collector had always been the odd one of her Gatherer sisters. Not that they didn’t love her—she had always been one of them, part of them, another voice in the song that lent the world order and purpose. No, she had loved her sisters, and they had loved her. And she loved to gather for the hive, loved going out into the open to find food or materials for building or digging, or whatever the hive seemed to need.
But she also loved to look at and collect things no one seemed to have any use for—the quivering, gelatinous underside of a wideleaf; flakes of corroded metal from the abandoned human hive that gleamed when scrubbed; stones shot through with sparkling crystal. Then there’d been the tweeting, feathered creature with the injured wing. Its body seemed more similar to human than dragon, and Collector had exasperated her sisters by trying to explain why she’d kept it, fed it till its wing healed, and fed it still when it kept coming back. She’d tried to explain her idea about animals and plants and how they were related and how they weren’t, how lately there seemed to be two kinds of life in the world that were, if not inimical to each other, somehow starkly different.
Her sisters all said she had too much work in her joints—she could never be still; when she was done with hive work she had to make her own.
She stopped, peered down at the pitifully small bundle of mite bark. She had found barely any—there seemed to be less and less of it in recent months, though perhaps that was just because she no longer ranged so far from the hive, or else her dimming vision. But there seemed to be less in her hands than just moments before. Slowly, she turned to find, once she’d stared fixedly enough, a trail of brownish-blue strips reaching back in the direction she’d just come from.
There was no excess work in her joints now. Still, the hive needed every bit of what she’d gathered. She would have to go back and pick up what she’d dropped.