Chapter 14 #3
Sam stepped closer to me, voice low as he said, “She really scares me sometimes, you know that? Like, she is genuinely terrifying when she’s trying to be.”
“Oh, no,” said Thomas. “This isn’t her trying to be terrifying.”
“What is it, then?”
“This is her forgetting what terrifies the rest of us, and being honest for a change.” He smiled a bit at our expressions, shaking his head. “She spent a long time alone, and leaning in to being the monster everyone around her was afraid of kept her alive. She’s been getting better, I promise.”
He turned and hurried after her, climbing the slight slope of the building without hesitating or looking back at the pair of us.
I blinked, feeling obscurely like I’d just been scolded.
Sam’s tail wrapped around my waist and tugged me forward as he continued onward, and after a brief stumble, I let myself be pulled, hurrying to catch up to him.
Still no one at the street level seemed to realize we were there.
They went about their business, ignoring the figures climbing the side of their central building.
We really were invisible. It was kind of amazing how much dependance they placed on a single sense.
It made me wonder how their society dealt with cuckoos like Angela, the ones who couldn’t receive telepathic messages.
Would one of them be able to see us, forced to use their eyes instead of their minds?
And on we climbed, higher and higher, away from what little we knew, into the silent heights of the structure.
We reached a point where the building began to climb directly upward, rather than following the soft curves and slopes of a wasp’s nest. Alice cocked her head, looking at it, then produced two knives from inside her shirt and drove them into the papery wall, pulling herself up like she was climbing a mountain.
Every cut created a gash she could use as a foothold while she was moving the knives up for her next hand grip, and she moved with remarkable speed for a human woman without proper climbing gear.
Thomas followed with his own knives, making use of the holes she’d already opened to speed his own progress.
Sam snorted, then scooped me off his feet and slung me over his shoulder, beginning his own ascent at a speed that put both of them to shame.
No shock there: he was designed to do this sort of thing, and they weren’t.
Sometimes it’s good to have a natural advantage.
He slowed as he pulled up level with Alice.
“Where are we heading?” he asked.
She turned toward him, looking utterly unsurprised by his sudden appearance. “Highest window. They’re very fancy wasps, but they’re still wasps, and they keep their prisoners as far as possible from their queens. It’s instinct codified into municipal planning.”
“On it,” said Sam. He surged upward, ripping handholds out of the wall as he went.
When he reached the topmost window, he paused, peering into the room on the other side.
Only when he was confident that no one was there waiting for us did he grasp the frame and wrench the window out of the wall.
“I thought someone might notice if I just pulled it out while they were looking,” he said.
“Good thinking,” I said agreeably. “Boost me over to the window.”
“Got it.” He transferred hold of the window to his tail, then swung me down and maneuvered me over to slide through the hole that he’d created, into the room on the other side.
It was smaller than any of the other rooms I’d seen so far, with sides that mirrored the hex shapes of the cubbies downstairs.
Apparently, the smaller the space, the more obviously it was part of a giant wasp’s nest.
Fascinating. Humans evolved from early primates, but we don’t live in nests of grass and mud. It seemed a little odd that the Johrlac would still live in the materials and shapes of their ancestors. Then I paused, taking a closer look while I waited for the others to catch up.
The room was hex-shaped and made of paper, yes, but there was glass in the window—or had been, before Sam wrenched it out—and the door had something totally new to my experience of this dimension.
A lock. Metal and gleaming in the light, clearly machined.
I moved closer, skating my fingers across it.
It felt exactly like I would expect a metal lock to feel, and there were hinges on the door, also metallic.
They had upped their security here, and that meant revealing some of the things I was reasonably sure had to be widespread throughout their culture, yet were shunted to the side for whatever logistical reason.
“Fascinating,” I murmured.
“What is?” asked Thomas, sliding through the window.
I gestured toward the lock.
He crowded close, peering at it. “You’re right—that is fascinating. If you’d asked me earlier, I would have said they didn’t do metalworking on this dimension.”
“No, but they do mining,” said Alice, popping up behind him.
“They figured out the value of their mineral deposits a long, long time ago. They trade them with neighboring dimensions, and they do all their metalworking elsewhere. Keeps their own air clean, and keeps the general population from getting too excited about the idea of using metal in their daily lives. You can only manage so much of an agrarian uprising when all you’ve got is bamboo. ”
My surprise must have shown. She shrugged.
“No hive mind is perfect. They figured out a long time ago that having one mind for the entire world made them inflexible and unable to progress: the original cuckoos happened because the locals tried too hard to cling to the idea that you could run an entire society on a single way of thinking. So they divide themselves by collectives of queens, and each collective manages a territory. They can’t catch every remote farmer or woodsman.
Every Johrlac on Johrlar dreams the dreams of the collective they belong to, but sometimes the ones who live in the middle of nowhere manage to wake up, even if it’s not for very long.
Without metal, they can’t exactly challenge the collectives. ”
“So the queens, what, keep it all for themselves?”
“For themselves and for their guards.”
Sam slid through the hole as we were speaking, then held up the window for us to see. “Should I put this back?”
“The Johrlac do have eyes, and they do see the inanimate,” said Alice. “It would be best if you could, dear, yes. Please.”
Sam nodded and shoved the window back into place, frowning as he asked, “If they have eyes and everything, why do they not see us?”
“Oh, they see us. We just … don’t matter,” said Alice.
“We’re nothing important. We can’t be people, because they don’t pick anything up when they look at us.
Most prey species that evolve alongside telepathic predators develop natural mental shields, and the predators just look right past them.
They might as well be rocks, or trees, or something else not worth bothering with. ”
“But a missing window would matter,” said Thomas.
“Someone would notice that it didn’t look right, and report it to someone else, who might come to have a look.
Sooner or later, they’d figure out that something was going on, and then we’d have to worry about people who were actually looking for something out of the ordinary.
When they start paying attention to their surroundings, they can find things they wouldn’t normally notice. ”
“So we’re invisible until we’re not, got it,” said Sam. “That is the absolute worst superpower ever. ‘You’re invisible until someone realizes they might need to see you.’ Why not just skip the invisibility entirely?”
“Why not spend some energy picking that lock rather than criticizing the way the brains of people from another dimension went and evolved?” asked Alice.
“Yes, ma’am.” Sam turned toward the door.
Meanwhile, I began circling the room, looking for anything that might tell us what we were up against. It was a depressingly featureless space. There was no furniture: no desk to break into, no computer to poke at. Not even a filing cabinet or chair. “What do you think they do in here?” I asked.
“Best guess? They station someone to stand in here and listen to the prisoners,” said Alice, with more cheer than felt entirely appropriate to the statement.
“The lock helps them be sure that if anything goes wrong, they’re secure in here until help can arrive.
And Johrlar isn’t big on written records, so it’s not like they’d need to keep any sort of files in here in order to track their prisoners. ”
“Not sure that makes me feel better,” I said, slanting a glance over at the door, where Sam was dutifully trying to pick the lock.
He’d been practicing, and his natural dexterity combined with even the slightest understanding of what he was trying to do was rapidly making him one of our better locksmiths.
“Just about—there,” he said, and there was a sharp clicking sound from the lock. He leaned back on his heels, looking pleased with himself.
Thomas stepped forward and turned the knob, then pushed the door inward, revealing the featureless hall beyond.
Literally featureless: the walls were smooth grayish paper, with no decoration or texturing at all.
Looking at them drove home just how much the downstairs atrium and map room had been intended for public use, and just how much this space, well, wasn’t.
“Try to stick to the curve of the outer wall,” said Alice. “Again, they’re going to be doing their best to keep prisoners as far from their queens as possible.”
I nodded, stepping out into the hall.
Together, the four of us moved along it, pausing when we reached the first door. It was smooth and unmarked, without any sort of window or peephole. What use would they have been? It wasn’t like the guards were going to be checking on their prisoners visually.