He laid his hand on the wood. “Okay . . . thanks.”
Auntie’s wings snapped open with an excited clap. Jacq’s stomach twisted. Her wing edges were shredded as if they’d been snagged on huge rocks and ripped free.
Jacq rushed toward her. “What happened! Are you okay?”
She nudged him back with a wingtip. “What are those things? Give me the scanner! I think they’re pretty.” She patted him in place with her tail, and went back into the hive.
Over the next few hours, Auntie brought back a dozen loads of cargo: fabric, dried grass, bark, and other useful things. Whenever Jacq tried to help, she pushed him back into the chamber until he finally stopped trying.
By the time Auntie finished, her scales were tinged with gray. She folded her tattered wings and sat, breathing heavily.
“I know something’s wrong,” Jacq said.
She blinked at him, inner and outer eyelids moving in separate rhythms. In an exasperated, male voice, she said, “They’ll eat the goddamn sheep.”
Sometimes it made Jacq so angry that Auntie could talk to him in a hundred different strangers’ voices, but never communicate a word of her own. He snapped, “I wish you could just talk!”
Both sets of Auntie’s eyelids opened.
She stared at Jacq with the intensity he sometimes suspected meant she was trying to talk to him in her true language, whatever that was, something different from postures and colors and imitating human words. Sometimes, there was something that felt like a portent; sometimes, the rock beneath him trembled as if with intangible breathing.
Abruptly, Auntie rolled him up in her wings and hoisted him onto her back. She hadn’t carried him like this in years, not since he’d hit puberty. Something was so wrong.
Jacq’s stomach roiled as she carried him through the hive’s slanting corridors. Briefly, he had the urge to tear free, but after a moment, he was surprised by how comforting it felt—the smell of the fine scales under her wings, the crackle of her joints, the thump of her steps.
Filtered through the veiny, purplish membrane of Auntie’s wings, the hive looked misty and distant. A passing trio of dragons—Gatherers, like Auntie—began as a blur. Nearing, they came into dreadful focus; they looked even more haggard than Auntie, eyes sealed shut with saplike clumps, patches of hide hanging from remnant forelimbs.
Jacq squeezed his eyes shut. He thought of the Gatherer dragon he’d seen last week who’d gone into the snow with what should have been a treatable gash in her side, but which must have killed her in the cold. Something wasn’t just going wrong. It had been wrong for a long time.
Dizzily, he thought, And it’s not going to get better.
Collector dropped Child at the edge of the fermentation pit, rolling him forward over her shoulder and swallowing a grunt of pain. When she’d first found Child alone on the hillside, making loud distressed noises, his face hot and salty-wet, she had lifted him easily into the embrace of her wings. He had calmed and then slept as she’d carried him back to the hive. He’d been much smaller then, but even when he’d grown larger, she’d had no trouble lifting him. Now, with the next hatch nearing its last molt, the effort she’d just made to bring him her gift had bruised her phalanges and left her joints sore and stiffening.
Well, it didn’t matter. “Damn dragons,” she said, and nudged Child gently toward the edge of the pit. She felt her ear webs opening out in anticipation, and perhaps just a little worry.
Shivering in the sudden cold after having been wrapped warmly in her wings, Child looked down into the pit. He made a series of little puzzled noises, and looked at Collector with an expression she had learned was confusion.
“What’s that,” said Collector reassuringly. “We should go home! How? We can’t even get back to the orbiter anymore.” Behind her, faintly, she felt as much as heard the comforting hum of the hive, faltering here and there, but still her sisters, still near.
The other human in the pit stared up, silent now, though it had shouted and struggled all the way up the hillside, tightly wrapped as it had been in Collector’s weakening wings.
Child’s eyes dilated, and he waved his forepaws in the air, making distressed noises now.
“Damn dragons,” said Collector. She wished there were some way to really communicate with Child, to tell him her thoughts. To explain. But he seemed mostly deaf despite his pretty mammalian chittering. And he seemed not to be able to smell much at all.
Child made another distressed sound. He covered his eyes and snout with his forepaws for a few seconds, and then released them again, huffing. He made more noises, clearly unhappy.
What was the problem? Was he afraid of the new human? Collector had worried that might happen, or that neither of the two humans would smell right to the other. In the hive that would end in injury or death. But humans were different. Weren’t they?
She looked down into the fermentation pit. The new human sat, still staring up, one forepaw wrapped around a lower extremity—the limb was badly swollen, definitely wounded, and Collector hoped again that it was the sort of injury that would heal on its own. The new human was larger than Child had been when she’d found him, and differently shaped. Perhaps it was further along in its development, an instar Child hadn’t reached. Or perhaps it was a different caste.
It hardly mattered. Collector didn’t have time to be fastidious.
Maybe she’d failed. Brought the wrong sort of human. Failed to help Child as she’d intended. Down in the fermentation pit, the new human began making noises of its own.
“Shit,” said Collector, though so far the sounds she made seemed not to soothe this one.
And, well, maybe she couldn’t blame it. It was injured, apart from its own sisters (horrifying thought), and no doubt frightened—most humans Collector had seen had fled the moment they’d realized she was nearby. And this one was sitting atop a layer of bones and rotted viscera, feathers, and fleece, the remains of animals that no one in the hive could eat without a good, long aging. Child had never liked the smell.
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.