1: Rotting Rhizomes

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You’re not supposed to do it, of course, but it’s not unheard of for parents to try to ensure good destinies for their daughters by timing their conception carefully. Most hatchings take place under somewhat clear skies, so the gods that bear witness to the young larvae and claim them for their paths are stars. And stars are notoriously regular in their habits, for the most part; if you want a sturdy and caring daughter born under Zimma, or a strong leader under Yorlu, then it’s all a matter of timing.

But there’s always a gamble. Sometimes, the clouds are so thick that no stars can witness the hatching at all, and girls are instead born under Arnu, the blind shadow. More rarely, Kelennin, lancing the sky with flashes of light and her booming song, claims a capricious larva for herself. Such gods come by more often during some parts of the year than others, leaving an imbalance among the star children and making it a real gamble for parents attempting to have a winter star guide their daughter.

But even when the skies are clearest, nothing is fully predictable. Tyk’s parents, the elder stargazers, her entire hive, were certain that she would be born under Pyrrah, and grow to be a beautiful beacon of joy to bring happiness to her hive through the best and the worst times. Instead, as Tyk clawed her way blindly out of her egg, the first thing she ever saw would have been the bright glare of a wandering star making its way across the clear night sky. She doesn’t remember being born, of course. But she’s heard the story enough.

Not even the best stargazers can always predict a wandering star.

Some wanderers are predictable, appearing in the sky once every three or ten or thirty years; others come randomly, like Tyk’s. And whether the hive is excited and proud to raise someone with a traveller’s personality, envisioning her future as a master trader or diplomat or legendary storyteller, or whether they’re cautious and sorrowful, expecting to raise an antisocial vagrant who will die young and alone, Tyk thinks it all shakes out basically the same – nobody really raises a child of a wandering star as part of the hive. Not fully.

Nobody, in planning the structure of the hive, is concerned about where Tyk will make her burrow in the long term. Nobody is all that concerned if she isn’t all that good at digging or surveying; lessons hammered into other girls’ heads aren’t half as important for her. Oh, she might stick around to raise her truebrother, she might help build some tunnels and lay some farms, she might say she wants to stay forever – but they all expect her to pick up someday and leave.

So there might be a hint of spite, Tyk would have to admit, in her determination to be the best saltbitten burrower in the Redstone Riverbank Hive. It’s already clear that she’ll inherit her mother’s unusually large, strong claws (although they haven’t fully grown yet, much like the rest of her), perfect for scraping aside soil and pulling back large rocks. She can chew mud into mortar like no one else, knows how to sense and repair a weak tunnel better than anybody else her age, and is determined to master sweetroot tracking as well, which was why she has snuck off to learn from old Bette, the best sweetroot tracker in the hive.

Which does, unfortunately, involve being around Bette’s daughter. Ayan.

Ayan tilts her mandibles condescendingly as she comes to meet Tyk at the mouth of Bette’s burrow. “So you’ve come to waste my mother’s time as well as your own.”

Tyk keeps her mandibles indifferently slack. “If you have better things to do, feel free to leave.”

Ayan tilts hers more sharply. Aggressive. “Some of us have a hive to look after. Not that it matters to you, I suppose.”

That causes Tyk to square up. Ayan’s always known how to push her buttons. Older than Tyk by a half-season and hatched under the gaze of Pyrrah, Ayan is a beacon of beauty and charm, gifts that Tyk has always thought she doesn’t deserve. If Tyk had been born with such an attractive carapace and distinctive laugh and quick wit with words, she wouldn’t use them to be mean. The hive would be a better place if Ayan was the one destined to leave them. Then everyone could just wait until the chittering grub was gone, and they’d all be able to live peaceful lives.

Holding her weight on her hindfeet and midfeet, Tyk lifts her forefeet fully off the ground and rears up to her full height, claws raised and mandibles tilted at Ayan in a clear signal to back the damp off. Ayan shrinks right down as if afraid that Tyk is going to hit her; a massive overreaction, but before Tyk can back down, Bette appears in the mouth of the burrow. “Girls!”

Ayan scampers under her mother for safety, feigning fright, as Tyk guiltily lowers herself to the ground. Bette brushes her feelers briefly over Ayan, ensuring she isn’t hurt, then looks between the two. “Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Ayan says before Tyk can explain. “Sorry, Tyk. I didn’t mean to make you so mad.”

Tyk, suddenly very aware that she’s very obviously stronger than Ayan and with larger claws despite being younger, tries to think of a way to explain the issue to Bette without sounding petty, and comes up with nothing. “It’s fine,” she says, reluctantly. And then, like chewing broken shells, “Sorry for scaring you, Ayan.”

“It’s okay, I know you didn’t mean it,” Ayan says, her voice all pleasant, body angled so that Bette can’t see her incredibly smug expression. With Bette watching her, Tyk fights to keep her own expression neutral.

“Alright,” Bette says. “Should we get started?”

Bette is fairly old, for the mother of an adolescent girl. She walks at a measured pace as she leads the two of them down a work tunnel, her right back leg weaker than the other five. Her carapace is encrusted with gems, marks of honour denoting a lifetime of accomplishments in service to the hive, but some of them are marked with traces of dirt and mud that are several days old, which tells Tyk that Kebette’s eyes might be failing. No man would intentionally leave his truesister’s gems anything other than gleaming when grooming her, especially not one who had as much to be proud of as Kebette. The only reason that dirt would collect on a burrower like that would be if she was separated from her truebrother for several days, for some reason… or if his own health didn’t lend itself to proper grooming.

Tyk makes a mental note to ask her father and half-father how Kebette’s doing. Maybe it’s something that the men all know about.

The living spaces in the upper levels of the hive are well lit, but lower down in the farms, mines, and exploratory tunnels, the places where only women go, navigation is done mostly by touch and taste. The trio quickly lose sight of the light and plod on through the dark, first through wide well-maintained tunnels that see a lot of traffic every day, then narrower, more ramshackle passages, until finally the soft, barely-shored-up earth of newly dug tunnels is brushing Bette’s body on both sides and nearly doing the same to the smaller children. Bette’s footsteps stop, she drops to the ground, and Tyk and Ayan, taking their cue, scramble over her and into the end of the tunnel.

“There’s sweetroot somewhere around here,” Bette says. “Can either of you tell me which way we need to angle the tunnel to find it?”

Tyk presses her claws into the soil, scraping it over her feelers and into her mouth. The water of the redstone river permeates the earth here, bringing its slight tang of foreign earth and, more worryingly, the damp itself, which weakens tunnel mortar and can make tunnels prone to collapse if one isn’t aware and ready to take countermeasures. And that’s not to mention the risk of tunnel flooding when the river swells. The hive won’t, Tyk thinks, be exploring much further in this direction; they’ll dig out the sweetroot that Bette has found here, and then close the tunnel.

Bette has stepped back to allow them space to work. Tyk can hear Ayan moving about, too, but she doesn’t seem to be doing as much exploration as Tyk; she seems, if Tyk had to guess, to be mostly listening to Tyk. Tyk does her best to ignore her, testing the soil, ignoring the water for now and searching instead for the distinctive sweet tang of sweetroot rhizomes that indicate the presence of the tubers nearby. The left side of the tunnel tastes of nothing but river. The right side, though… not near the floor, but up at the roof… yes, is that it? That’s it! That’s where the sweetroot grows!

There’s something wrong with the taste, though.

As soon as Tyk’s found it, Ayan speaks up. “Mother! We’ve found it! Over here; up and to the left!”

Bette returns. “Yes, exactly! Well done, girls! You’ll be the pride of the hive yet!”

Right next to Tyk and too quietly for Bette to hear, Ayan mutters, “One of us will. Maybe you’ll find somewhere else to be the pride of.” And Tyk clamps down on the urge to bite her.

Instead, Tyk says, “Bette, I think there’s something wrong with the sweetroot.”

“Something wrong? Why do you say that, Tyk?”

“It tastes… too sweet.”

Tyk can just about feel Ayan gearing up to mock her – sweetroot is sweet? You don’t say! – but Bette clicks her mandibles in assent. “Quite right, Tyk. Do you know why that might be?”

“Um. Some roots are sweeter than others, just by chance. But, um. I’ve never tasted it in their rhizomes before. Maybe it’s something else?”

“Like what?”

“Something in the water? Something the river’s carrying down from the mountains?”

“That’s a good guess, Tyk, but no. What you are tasting are the telltale early signs of rot.”

Ayan’s stance changes in the dark, suddenly all serious. “Rot?”

“Mm-hmm. The sweetroot are beginning to rot in the ground.”

“Can we do anything to stop them?”

“From rotting? Not really. We can gather and preserve as much of it as possible in the years we have left, but even if the rot never took hold, you girls have to know that the roots would run out eventually. A hive eats sweetroot far faster than it can grow. You know your history, don’t you, girls?” She scampers forward and lowers her voice conspiratorially. “The others haven’t noticed yet, I don’t think. You two and me might be the first to figure it out.”

Tyk does know her history. Hives have life cycles of their own as much as the people who live in them do. Explorers establish homes in soft, diggable soil and build hives there, digging out sweetroot and burrowing farm tunnels to grow fungus, and they might stay there for two or three centuries until the sweetroot runs out or starts to rot away, and they run out of food for the fungus farms, and then the hive’s numbers dwindle and the remainder disperse to new lands or to join other hives. And the tunnels left in their wake, aerated passages full of compostable biomatter and leftover fungus farms, are the perfect growing location for new sweetroots, springing up from the hardy remains of the rhizomes left behind and filling the earth until a few centuries later, it’s ready to support a new hive again.

“How much time do we have?” Tyk asks.

“Oh, more time than any of you need to worry about. Your children’s children’s children will be the ones to make the hard choice about whether it’s time to leave. These things are very slow, dear girls, and your excellent senses have caught the very beginnings of it. Now let’s get ourselves back home before people start to worry about us.” Bette heads back up the tunnel, back towards the living areas of the hive, and Tyk turns to follow her, but Ayan blocks her way.

“You think this is good news, don’t you?”

Tyk steps back, confused. “What?”

“I bet you think you’re going to be a big hero, go off somewhere and find a new place for the whole hive and save everyone, don’t you? I bet you wish we were going to run out of food faster, so we’d all be relying on you.”

“What is your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem. I’m not the one who dragged us out here to play in the mud.”

“Nobody asked you to come!”

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d prefer if you were the only one my mother told these things, so it could be your little secret. Everyone is going to be so relieved when you finally get a clue and leave.”

Bette is well out of hearing distance by this point. Tyk tilts her mandibles to Ayan, who probably doesn’t notice in the dark. “Get out of my way, Ayan.”

“Why? You in a hurry to go somewhere?”

Tyk bites her.

As soon as her mandibles close over Ayan’s leg, she realises her mistake. They both know that Tyk won’t permanently hurt her, but when Ayan limps out of the tunnel with Tyk’s mandible scrapes on her carapace… Ayan shrieks and drops to the ground under her, clawing at Tyk’s throat under her mandibles, getting soft flesh and probably hurting Tyk more than Tyk had hurt her but in the circumstances, it’s going to look like a defensive wound. Tyk lets go and leaps back and Ayan stands tall and though Tyk can’t see her in the dark she just knows that Ayan is doing that condescending tilt with her mandibles that she’s so, so good at.

“You’re a brute, is what you are,” Ayan says, her voice not nervous or wary at all, just smug. “Everyone’s going to be so – ”

And then the earth moves. A pulse, a shudder, a wave of force rippling through the ground around them, causing them both to lose their footing. New and confusing and scary, but not enough to actually hurt anyone.

But plenty enough to destabilise the narrow, new, waterlogged, unsupported tunnel, and bury both girls alive.

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