2: Escape Route

First —- Previous —- Glossary —- Archive —- Next

Tyk feels her body slow down in automatic response to the dirt pressing in on all sides. There’s no particular danger in their situation, she knows; she’s been buried before, as a training exercise, and knows perfectly well that there’s enough oxygen in the soil for them to dig their way out if they’re calm and careful. Even if they run out, they’ll simply go into emergency hibernation, and the rest of the hive will dig them out and revive them soon enough. Bette knows where they are.

The main advantage of being buried is the thin wall of soil between her and Ayan, preventing Ayan from talking to her. But that’s not to last long; Ayan’s between her and the hive. Reluctantly, Tyk digs forward, not bothering to try to shore up the walls behind her; there’s nowhere to move the excess dirt and no reason to leave the tunnel accessible. If the hive wants the tunnel, the women can dig it back out their rotting selves. Tyk and Ayan just need to get themselves out.

So Tyk leaves a mess behind her as she crawls her way forward to Ayan. It’s a matter of seconds; the two weren’t very far apart. And the moment they’re together again, Ayan stops her own digging to start complaining.

“This is just great! Of course you had to drag us all the way out here to – ”

“Nobody asked you to come! Would you just calm down and dig?”

Ayan growls at her, but does, pushing her own way through the loose soil ahead of Tyk. The pair don’t make it particularly far before Ayan stops, swears, and starts clawing frantically at something ahead without actually moving forward.

“Calm down!” Tyk snaps, and climbs over her to see what the problem is.

Rock. Whatever shook the land did so severely enough to destabilise the tunnel walls and mortar supports over a large area, and one of the weighty rocks that the tunnels were dug under had fallen through and blocked the tunnel.

“We’ll have to dig around,” Tyk says. “Over the top is probably best; there might be an air pocket where the boulder fell from.”

“Dig over it? Are you stupid? Do you realise how heavy it must have been to fall through like this? There aren’t many tunnels through here! That’s a lot of dirt that was holding it up! Meaning it’s got to be a lot taller than it is wide, and you want to dig up?”

“We can dig sideways if you want, but it’ll be a longer tunnel through undug earth. Even if there’s no air above, it’ll at least be looser – ”

“Yeah, if we can dig that high in the first place! Either way, it’s hard earth, and there’s only two of us, and there’s nowhere to displace the soil to! Ugh, I don’t have time for this!”

“I didn’t want to spend the night buried with you either, but it’s not like – ”

Ayan bites her. Or tries to; in the darkness and the dirt, her mandibles scrape harmlessly off Tyk’s back, and probably won’t even leave a scratch. Nevertheless, Tyk freezes in shock. Ayan had tried to bite her. Ayan never bites first. Her game is playing gentle and innocent and incensing others to fight.

“Are you okay?”

“What do you think, Tyk? I’m ready to lay!”

Tyk takes a few moments to process that. Ayan is about to lay her first egg, her truebrother. That can’t be right; she’s too young. They’re too young for that. Right?

No, they aren’t. Tyk’s own first egg grows inside her every day, and Ayan is a half-season older. If she’s ready to lay, then there’s only a half-season or so before Tyk… that doesn’t seem right. She’s not old enough for that. Is she?

Tyk pushes aside the insecurities of a too-brief childhood to worry about another time. If Ayan’s right, they have a serious problem. While it’s very risky, baby girls can sometimes survive being hatched underground, but for boys, with their fragile shells and their delicate wings in need of immediate drying, being laid so far from the sun is a death sentence. If they don’t get to the surface, and soon, Ayan will lose her truebrother.

Which isn’t the end of the world, really. Sometimes girls lose their first egg; it’s rare, but it happens. And when they do, their body makes another. A girl can go through four or five tries at laying a truebrother before the body gives up on the task. If Ayan loses the egg, her childhood will be extended by another season or so while her body makes another. And she might fall behind her friends a bit, watch while younger members of the hive mature and move into more important duties while she waits to try again, watch them hit milestones without her and wonder if they pity her or think she’s incapable for her failure…

Tyk suspects she might be a pretty bad person, because for a moment, she wonders if maybe that fate would be such a bad thing for Ayan after all.

Then she pushes the thought aside and focuses on the task at hand. “Your mother knows where we are. There’ll be a rescue party – ”

“That tremor dropped a rock in front of us, Tyk! Can you imagine what it might have done to the hive? There’s probably a whole bunch of repair and rescue work to be done! We’re not anyone’s highest priority right now; they’ll expect us to just sit tight and wait!”

“Normally, sure, but Bette will tell the others how close you are to laying and they’ll come right away.”

Ayan doesn’t respond to that.

“You didn’t tell your mother?!”

“I was going to in the morning!”

“What, when it was time to lay?” Of course she was. That would be the most dramatic way to do things.

“She wouldn’t have wanted me down here tunnelling if she’d known. But of course you had to drag us down – ”

“Nobody asked you to come!”

“So I should’ve left you to curry favour with my mother behind my back? Typical of you. I bet you timed this excursion on purpose. You probably noticed how close I was and thought I wouldn’t be able to come.”

“You’re getting hysterical. Calm down.”

“Or what?”

“Or we’ll run out of oxygen. Will it help your truebrother at all to fall into anoxic hibernation right now? Shut up and let me think.”

“What, you’re gonna think our way around the huge rock?”

Tyk doesn’t bother responding to that. There’s no way around the rock in time; with no tunnel behind them, digging through the dense dirt would be complicated, hard work and involve limited oxygen, meaning they’d have to go far too slowly for Ayan whether they went around or over. So they need another route.

“We should tunnel to the river,” Tyk says.

“I’m sorry, what? You want to dig away from the hive?”

“Have you ever been to the Redstone River?”

“Well, no, because some of us aren’t vagrants-in-waiting whose parents just let us wander – ”

“The banks are very steep and the river is deep. Deeper than this part of the nest. And the water doesn’t move fast this time of year. The end of this tunnel is closer to the river than it is to the hive, or to the surface. And wet dirt is a lot easier to dig through than packed, dry dirt; we’ll move a lot faster. Normally, I’d suggest digging into another tunnel, but we don’t know how many have collapsed or how many rocks have fallen in. There’s a lot less rocks in the ground nearer the river.”

“What if the water washes us away?”

“It won’t. It moves slow this time of year. We can swim to shore.”

“I don’t know how to swim!”

“Your body does. It’ll be fine.”

“This is hands down the worst idea you’ve ever – ”

“Do you want to save Keyan or not?”

Ayan continues to grumble, but follows her back through the loose earth of the collapsed tunnel to its end, and the pair get to work.

Digging a proper tunnel requires a lot of workers. You need one or two up the front to actually dig the dirt out of the way. You needed a few behind them to chew the dirt into mortar and plaster it on the walls. And you needed a train of haulers to carry the excess dirt back through the tunnel and out of the hive. But for a pair of kids just burrowing their way out of the ground, most of that isn’t necessary. The pair quickly fall into a rhythm, with Tyk using her stronger claws to dig through the wet sand and Ayan taking it and packing it behind them. They move slowly, resting often, and the air around them slowly turns to water. Tyk has some experience breathing in water, having swum in the river before, but for Ayan, it’s a new experience. They press forward, until suddenly, Tyk’s claws don’t encounter any more sand, and the two burst out of the ground and into the water.

As she’d predicted, the river is moving slowly, but movement is still movement. As the pair swim for the surface and then for the bank, they have no idea how far downstream they’ve been dragged. The hive isn’t visible over the rise of the steep bank. Tyk climbs high enough to avoid being splashed by the water and shakes herself as dry as she can.

“Great, so we’re out of the ground. Where are we?” Ayan shakes herself dry, wetting Tyk again.

“Does it matter?” Tyk moves far enough away to shake herself again without splashing Ayan. “Look, the sun’s starting to come up. Keyan’s going to be fine.”

“What?! Listen, laying on a random riverbank like some dispossessed vagrant might be fine for a wanderer like you, but my truebrother has a home! He’s going to be born at our hive! Which you dragged us away from, so you’d better get us – ”

Tyk ignores her and concentrates on making her way further up the riverbank. It’s steep, the sand unstable, and she’s tired. She doesn’t recognise the topography of this part of the bank, which worries her for a moment – have they been swept much further downriver than she’d thought? Where are they? – but the looseness of the sand tells her that it has probably just been disturbed by that tremor.

The Redstone River Hive has never, so far as Tyk knows, had an earthquake. It isn’t something that happens here. She knows that hives very far away, hives so far that she’ll never see them and knows of them only from the wingsong, experience the shaking of the earth regularly and have to be built with that in mind. But it’s never happened here.

What does this mean?

Her thoughts are interrupted by a sound more useful and interesting than Ayan’s whining. Wingsong. Not the long call of a message, but a single man in flight, close by. More than that, she recognises the particular pitch and pattern of this hum – it’s her older brother.

“Kedahm!” she calls.

“Tyk?” He appears over the steep curve of the bank and drops down to land on her horns. Like all men, Kedahm is small – about one sixth the size of Tyk, or one eighth the size of a fully grown woman. His shell is thin and light, his claws and legs small and suited for delicate work, not the hard digging or walking long distances that women are suited to. His whole body shape is different, more straight, so that as he perches on her horns his claws are oriented down like his feet and he can comfortably grip her with those as well; he can bend up, the same as a woman can bend down, but where Tyk’s comfortable resting posture puts the front part of her body vertical with claws out front, his comfortable resting posture has his front half as horizontal as his back half. The elaborate rainbow colouring of his large wings advertises the last three generations of his genetic lineage, marking him as Tyk’s brother – or, more accurately, as Ketyk’s brother once Ketyk is born, since girls don’t have wing colours to compare.

He looks her over, wings buzzing in concern. “You’re okay! Thank the stars. Where’s – ?”

Tyk indicates Ayan, some way down the bank, with one claw. “She’s about to lay.”

“Now?!”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll tell the hive.” He takes flight once more.

The sun continues to rise, and as its rays reach the climbing girls, Tyk relaxes. She stops climbing to let Ayan catch up, tuning out her complaints. There; they have sunlight. The hive is alerted to the situation. Everything is fine. It was a long night of hard work, but now she can take advantage of one privilege that Ayan, about to lay, doesn’t have.

Tyk takes a nap.

First —- Previous —- Glossary —- Archive —- Next