Chapter 69: Simply a Fact of Daily Life

The weeks after the auditor's visit were, by any measure Sacha had learned to use, the quietest since the water heater — and he spent most of them doing the thing he had never once had the luxury of doing for this long:

watching the colony simply be a colony.

It had grown past ninety, and the growth had stopped being an anxious calculation and started being, simply, a fact of daily life — enough bodies now that Sacha did not know all of them, which had once frightened him and now, watching Vek's naming practice spread through every line, felt more like evidence than loss.

He noticed the changes in the young first, because the young changed fastest.

A cluster of Carapace born since the second water came out of their molts with a density along the back that made the crawlspace generation look, in memory, almost fragile by comparison.

A pair of Cerci twins — Vek's word, not a biological fact but close enough to one that nobody corrected her — who moved together with a coordination that suggested the lineage itself was beginning to specialize into pairs rather than individuals, something none of the four founding strands had shown before.

And there was Tessa.

She was Essaim, young, and she talked — not in words, because there were no words yet for what she did, but in a stream of scent-marks so constant and so cheerfully unfiltered that half the reporting junction had learned to let her run rather than try to keep pace.

She narrated.

Everything.

The state of the food stores, the mood of the nursery, a theory she'd developed about why the second water tasted different after rain that, on investigation, turned out to be completely correct.

She is exhausting, Vek marked, without heat, the first time Sacha asked about her.

She's the first one who isn't trying to sound like me, Sacha sent back, and meant it as the compliment it was.

He had built a colony, without entirely meaning to, that spoke in his own clipped, weighted register — Khrr's economy, Vek's bluntness, even the drill shorthand itself carried the shape of a man who'd learned to say only what mattered under pressure.

Tessa said everything that occurred to her, cheerfully, without apparent concern for whether it mattered, and Sacha found, listening to a full afternoon of her reports, that some of it mattered more than he expected and none of it cost anything to hear.

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Keep her on the junction, he sent to Vek. Don't train the talking out of her. I think we need at least one voice that doesn't sound like the rest of us.

He sent as much to Tessa directly, a few days later.

Where Vek would have taken the observation and folded it silently into her own practice, Tessa received it the way she seemed to receive everything — immediately, enthusiastically, and with three follow-up observations Sacha hadn't asked for.

You want me to keep talking, she sent, and then, before he could confirm it: because everyone else got quiet learning from you and quiet is useful but somebody has to notice the things quiet people stop mentioning, and also the water's tasting strange again today, not bad, just strange, I think it's the rain—

Tessa.

Sorry. Yes. I'll keep talking.

Sacha found himself smiling in whatever way this body approximated it.

The physical change nearest his own body came slower and quieter than any of the colony's, and he only noticed it fully on an evening he caught himself standing upright at the border longer than the posture should have been comfortable — weight balanced differently, forelegs held closer to something that could, with effort, grip rather than simply brace.

He did not mention it to anyone for three days, turning it over privately, because the last time a body had changed shape this significantly it had been Khrr's — and Khrr's had happened so slowly, alongside the grammar and the channel and the long, slow setting of its mid-leg, that nobody in the colony could have named the day it crossed.

Sacha had only understood it in hindsight, on the evening he realized Khrr had been laying its marks standing upright for weeks and he could no longer remember when it had started.

That slow change had cost something to arrive at, and Sacha was not certain he wanted the same for himself without understanding the price first.

You are close, Thresh told him, when he finally asked, without needing the question spelled out further. The Humanoid threshold. I have watched Khrr's own crossing closely enough to recognize the early shape of another one.

I didn't ask for this.

Neither did Khrr, Thresh sent. It came from what you asked it to become, not from a request either of you made directly.

Its antennae settled. You have spent a season fighting, deciding, killing, being killed at nearly. The body follows the god, in your species, more honestly than in most. You should not be surprised that yours has started asking the same question Khrr's did.

Does it frighten you? Watching us change like this?

Thresh considered the question longer than it considered most things.

It reminds me, it sent, finally. My own colony never changed. Four hundred of us, and not one crossed any threshold beyond what the molt gave freely, because my god never asked anything of us that required it.

Its bad side shifted against the wall. I do not know if that was mercy or the absence of ambition. I have spent a long time telling myself it was mercy. Watching you and Vek approach a threshold my own people never touched, I find I am less certain than I was a season ago.

Sacha didn't have an answer for that, and didn't try to manufacture one.