​ The New Kingdom

© 2021 Katrina Cooper-Hinton
ISBN 9789082352818

Cover and illustrations (drawn from my photo catalogue) by Katrina Cooper-Hinton

     No matter how he wriggled his shoulders against his suit, Jae couldn’t get to the itching spot between them, further irritated by the trickle of sweat creeping down all the way from his stubbly hairline. He itched all over, of course, but this was one of the nasty ones that got through a person’s detachment, already worn thin by his essential immobility when he needed to be on his way. He squirmed furiously, combining turning to look behind him with cramming his spine against the suit’s inner seams.
     Jae fought back a fresh wave of frustration. Now that he was out here at the edge, the process of drifting slowly farther away from the caves while seeming not to was proving to be completely boring and absolutely terrifying at the same time. The disparity, and the effort needed to bridge it, was getting on his nerves. Concerns about visibility and safety didn’t help any with reestablishing peace of mind. If anything really big or numerous was out here today, especially if it was flushed and fleeing, he could be in real danger. He wasn’t sure whether it was safe to leave yet, though. If the others hadn’t dispersed far enough, entirely dependent on the fickle movements of random wildlife, it would be noticed if he called Flash and Geoff; as well, a draw-capsule might bring other hunters’ animals running too, if they were close enough. He needed to wait until the others were as far from him as possible, but at the same time he needed to get away as fast as he could manage it if this was going to work.

     Jae wasn’t wearing a stay-still suit, which was basically why he was having this problem in the first place. It was why he had to keep moving around without going anywhere, and people would probably notice very soon now. He pushed thoughts of inadequacy away. Jae was a hunter. He was one of the most adaptable, most resilient, most clear thinking of the people left or he wouldn’t be a hunter, he told himself earnestly again now. It would be foolish to think that nothing would go wrong; cockiness was one of a hunter’s Deadly Sins and he was about to do something admittedly crazy. But likewise thoughts of failure, dwelling on what might go badly, second-guessing, wasn’t planning, it was self-indulgence, and it was often fatal.
     He’d have to be moving on; he was causing a minor commotion. A cone of spiraling insects had already formed above him to prey upon the smaller creatures disturbed by his slogging, repetitive steps. Larger flying hunters had noticed and were beginning to zoom through, snatching prey on the wing. Lurking wasn’t a common pastime among the more harmless of the animals living here; something big skulking around just outside the settlement boundary would bring everyone able-bodied out as a matter of course. Not only would it imply a huge cache of walking meat and various resources, the other side of the matter was that human babies were perhaps the most vulnerable existing life form left except for a few kinds of eggs and soft-bodied grubs, and pretty much everything knew it. Once a toddler could wield a stick effectively it was possible to go outside the caves, and after passing the Coming Of tests, children could start training beyond the wall. Never before that, even in a parent’s arms, even with a large, well-armed group. It was rare nowadays that something came to them looking for mammal flesh, but not unheard of.

as he was, was a hunter and always had his stick to hand; he’d managed on the third try to get it through the abdomen just above the tail and held it down while it thrashed itself out, also taking control of the child’s stick from the toddler, who promptly sat down and burst into tears. The youngster’s shock faded to pride when they roasted it for dinner, the mouthwatering smell of fresh, sizzling fats dripping through the shell into the fire bringing neighbors who praised him for his skills and exclaimed over his wounds, and then to giggly wide-eyed apprehension at the idea that he could start to train just outside the mouth of the cave on the very next day-shift.
Jae sobered, suddenly wondering if he’d ever see either of his brothers again, but pushed the thought away.
     Jae was himself at that completely pointless age between childhood and Anything Useful, so even though he was a hunter and subject to the admiration of the more cavebound, he was still out here in the shallowest, most polluted bogs where the least dangerous things lived, poking around with his stick while trying to edge farther from the settlement. Just now he was traversing an underwater ridge trodden flat by generations of hunters like himself, keeping the tri-forked end of his stick toward the ground in case of treacherous new algae patches. As he walked, flicking and sweeping the multipurpose tool in a tactile search pattern, he thought about what it must have been like for the ancestors, coming in for the first time. It was in the records that although they came from the edge of a great bog, they hadn’t had the faintest idea how to cross one; many thousands had been damaged here and a lot of them died. When the vehicles, existing now as a variety of tools made from the scavenged metal and parts, had proven unequal to the mud-like biomatter of the wetlands, they’d had to cross the turgid, redolent, insect-covered water on foot, poking ahead of themselves into the murk with whatever came to hand even as they fled everything that pursued them and came down from above, shielded the wounded, wrapped the children in anything they could grab to protect them from the teeming mouthparts. Some drowned, a lot were savaged by underwater creatures, but most of the fallen were simply eaten alive while they struggled across. Of those who made it, many succumbed to infections in the weeks that followed, their wounds deeply infested with a host of microorganisms and in many cases, venoms. Going back now, across generations of taming influence, almost felt easy. Cockiness again – he took a shaky breath.
     There had been considerable sun over the past few days since he’d been here last, breaking unexpectedly through the clouds at random intervals. It was one of his favorite things, that instant when the whole world sparked suddenly into a blazing light show and colors danced. It wasn’t all good news, though; algae loved sunlight so he needed to be very careful. It was possible that new slick patches could have made it past the scraped zone in this kind of weather; that stuff grew fast. And where there was tender young algae, there were grazers, and where there were grazers, there were hunters. Almost subconsciously, he scanned the bog’s surface for specific patterns of ripples.

     He watched the whirligig’s fading ripples regretfully. It would have been a prime kill. If he used his stick and knife or called the mantises now, though, everyone would flock to him; that would mean a lot of meat or a terrible danger. Or a foolish child… Jae shook his head against the hooks and seams lining his lumpy helmet as he recalled the time at eleven years old, on only his fourth or fifth solo trip out, he’d let a dragonfly nymph get him by the ankle. It couldn’t penetrate his beetle-plate boot scales but it wouldn’t let go, and it couldn't pull him under because he had wrapped himself around his stick and jammed it between the rocks just as he’d been taught. He was running Greenie and Speedster at the time and they were well-conditioned by the Bugmaster, springing to his aid and taking the armored larva apart while his kin slogged over to help, laughing at the sight of him trapped and soggy, crying all over his faceplate, covered in the lacy foam-green centipedes that nested in those rocks.
     Jae slogged to a stop again as he neared the end of the underwater causeway, evaluating his choices for how to approach his escape point. Ideally, nobody would notice his absence until the cave was closed up for the night. Going out again before morning was unthinkable. He needed to get well away before they came after him or his efforts and planning would be for nothing. All going to plan, Jae would take shelter tonight in the legendary cubical caves of his great-great-great-grandfather’s quest right about the time he was missed and his note found. If not, he would die. Young and impetuous as he may be, Jae wasn’t stupid enough to think he could attempt a night outdoors.
     Stephen got away with it when he twisted his leg that time, true – and came home in the morning without half that leg because dragging it behind him had gradually strained an ankle seal, the exposed under-layer of beetle membrane had been scraped free of repellent, and, just as he came into sight of the settlement, something with jaws strong enough to take on the lining had opened a hole in his suit. He’d been on solid ground, so the horde poured in. He’d been lucky to be able to slam his leg with a shock-seal band, just above his knee, just in time. A ragged stump of bone protruding from the lump of heatblast and fused carapace was all there was left as he dragged himself toward the suited guards lumbering out the gate to get him, throwing chemical bombs to clear the way. Even still, several animals had burrowed up his bone marrow and a surgeon had removed the leg somewhat higher a few days later, once those were confirmed dead. Now Stephen was apprenticed to the boilerwoman.
     Jae started walking again as a number of different forms of life became increasingly earnest about climbing up and penetrating his suit, trying to look from the perspective of the other hunters, should they happen to glimpse him through the ubiquitous flying insects, as though he were following an unpromising lead.

     “Who can we risk losing? Me? You? An elder, a child? Would you send a child out there? There’s nobody; you know that!”
It went on as it always did, and ended as it always did, with bitter feelings and fear and no resolution.
     They were both right – everyone here would eventually die if someone didn’t go out and hunt for the way back to the society Jae’s great-great-great-grandfather – and all their ancestors – had abandoned. In the end, and this was the end, the people had not thrived after all. The environment had deteriorated in unexpected ways. Some of their planned refinements hadn’t worked. The things they had accomplished, while masterful, had always been one step behind events, one beat too late. Reactive, not proactive. They were few now, and unless they could find refuge back with the others or a way to stop the deaths in time, their gene pool would soon be in danger. Jae knew already that his parents’ generation was the last that could afford the luxury of tying child production to affection; the list of girls and women it would be safe, genetically, for him to reproduce with, when he was deemed old enough in a year or two, could be counted on one hand – and of them one was nearly too old, two much too young, the other two pregnant already from council-selected men but living in the main dorms. And one was ill.

     Geoff and Flash abruptly deserted whatever they’d been so intrigued by and oriented themselves visually, through the curtains of flying creatures, on him. He raised the clumsy sacks of the arms of his suit, fingers of the gloves spread wide, in the “follow” command. They would now meander along in his wake, alerting him with a flamboyant display if they came upon prey or danger. Should he be looking the wrong way, one would come to get him and lead him to the find. He fervently hoped they wouldn’t turn anything up.
     Someone had to go find out if the way back was still there. It was time to slink home defeated.
     But. But, but, but. The counterarguments were always the same, all equally valid or speculative. There was no adult who could be spared. There was probably no point: surely nobody would be there. No-one had ever come after them; there had never been an incoming communication. The messages they sent out long ago, via ways no longer possible, remained unanswered. They must have died out too. They must have succumbed like the ancestors had said they would to the new dangers and advancing new forms of life. It was disloyal to think anything else: fleeing for the high ground, for these tunnels, striking a balance with the new ecosystem, had been the only sensible thing to do. That’s why they were here.
     That bothered Jae more and more lately: this clinging to his great-great-great-grandfather’s philosophies, when they had so clearly failed. Jae wanted to think about other possibilities, like maybe the others had been right after all, like maybe someone should go and see. An increasing number of adults thought so too.

the subject up publicly for them. Given this excuse, they might even mount a wholesale expedition. Would pretty much have to, he figured.
     Jae didn’t think of himself as an adult, for all that he did his share of the work and held his own outdoors. Obviously neither did the council, because they hadn’t called him up for his ceremony and adult work schedule, nor instructed him about what to do when the… time came. At 15, though, he certainly didn’t consider himself a “child”. He had thus decided to take in a perversely literal manner the words of those arguing. Although no adult could be spared, they could never under any circumstances send a child.
Once so deep into the rising canyons that he had left the shallows and walked on land, Jae finally felt safe enough to strike off with a will. It was peaceful here; his surroundings were plunged into a tranquil deep green gloom thanks to the algae-lichen blanket, festooned with dangling agglomerations of barnacles and tiny seed-mussels, spanning the termite towers overhead, while the frantic sounds of the marsh chorus were muted, making way here for the softer trills, chirps, creaks and moans of land animals.
     He dropped a few personal-smell shell fragments now, counting on Geoff and Flash, who would have responded to the draw-capsule and be looking for him now more intently than a visual follow command dictated, to find them before local wildlife cleaned them to a shine.
     Jae’s legs were getting heavy fast now that he was walking on land; he shook them violently one at a time, showering the ground with scuttling forms. He wanted to make the most of the morning’s relative coolness so he didn’t stop to do a really thorough job yet. He didn’t have far to go in kilometers, and once (if) he reached the point at which he should turn, the way would be downhill again for the rest of the day. It would be arduous, though, across entirely unfamiliar terrain, and take him into the kind of swamp he had only heard hunters’ tales of, and that never first hand: no-one dared risk going that far alone, and too few could be spared from the day-hunt and other tasks anymore, even for the two or three days it would take, for such expeditions to have been undertaken since his grandfather’s youth.
     Anyway, even within a couple hours’ walk from the caves it was all too easy to get lost nowadays. The entire landscape could change quickly, becoming alien to the eye, or a hot spot could open. Nine of the people who had died over the fifteen years of Jae’s life had been disappearances. They’d gone out for crustaceans or shellfish or ant moss and never been seen again, only fragments of message-shell remaining to tell what had happened to a few of them. Even their bones would have been pulled deep underground within days. In the perpetually metamorphic landscape of the termite city areas, it could take weeks to find the spot someone had last lain down (if they ever did), even if they’d had time or the sense to set a beacon reeking. One beacon had been found four meters underground! Jae could only hope he could find the way back. Everything would be so different now… but the journal and map were supposed to have taken that into account.
     Here on solid ground, the Carpet, which replaced the perpetual gloss of water-striders lower down, boiled away from his every step, ring-shaped ridges forming where the arthropods overtook each other in their scramble to escape. Always, a few roaches or other creatures were too slow – knocked over by their fellows, sick, or just unable to find a clear path in time, they went the way of all food. He was followed everywhere by a devouring horde of opportunistic predators and scavengers. They clung to his boots, chewing away crushed bodies, and he knew they were working their way up his back. Disinclined to eat the fear-rich sealant at the seams, they cleaned his suit of debris and rested, laid eggs, or dropped off.
     As he climbed, the clumps of land-adapted shellfish and barnacles dwindled, replaced by clusters of spider colonies. Halls and chambers of silk hung suspended from stone eruptions where the multitudinous chewers could gain little purchase, the attachment points zealously guarded by specialized soldiers. Even here, several kilometers from and in much rockier terrain than the main bulk of the local mother group, satellite termite colonies lined the cracks and faces of the walls. Wherever the canyon opened to a wider floor, their towers divided the ground into narrow passageways. The Carpet split itself around them like gritty, brightly colored water, splashing up the sides. When Jae crossed damper patches, a froth of springtails popped and fizzed around his boots. Far from here, closer to the local Queens’ towers, these walls of concretized sand would meet overhead, further cutting off any light that made it through the green sheets of algae, now petering out as the land rose.

of groans, chirps, trills, wheezes, and pops developing now and then an unfamiliar throb or dominance.
     Jae was leaving the canyons now. There was a lot of rock up here; less opportunity to burrow. The colony types would be changing accordingly. Larger shapes moved ominously under the Carpet now and then, and he swung his stick around so that the long lobster spine set semiperpendicular to the end swept a defense pattern in front of his toes. He needed to watch his footing and it was impossible to see far ahead anyway: the air was thick with flies, wasps, midges, and all those other things which flew by day. He stopped to look behind him, hoping for a glimpse of the lowlands he’d left behind. Suddenly, and then again, the curtains of bodies parted and he could see all the way behind him into the valley.
Jae had never seen his home from this angle before. This way hadn’t been used in generations and the only other path that led up, away from the bog, went straight into the taller towers, quickly limiting sight to a matter of a few meters. Some of the older hunters had bombed out and climbed a big tower once, to see what they could see from there, and they’d been awestruck when they looked down at the smoky courtyard and jumbled wall, the surrounding marshland’s insect-fog sloshing all around it like a vibrating, frenetic liquid.
     That’s how Jae felt now. The brief glimpses he was getting were showing him everything familiar to him and rendering it foreign. The vast courtyard where the vents from the small glassworks, the ovens, and the machinery dispersed a protective screen of smoke, allowing outdoor work to be done in only thin membranous suits during much of the year, the glassed gardens where specialty medicinal algaes and fungi were cultivated and the children could play unsuited in the light of day, the gigantic, chaotic wall itself – it all looked small, the angles strange. As though all the things he knew had been transplanted into a smaller space, compacted, forced awkwardly together. All around this was a plain of heaving black, glittering with sudden sparks of color, through which were wading hulked forms – the other hunters, when he could see more of them than ripples in the insect lake, looked like children’s dolls from here. And between him and that? He was looking across an eerily smooth surface, dotted with wasps’ nests constructed from chewed algae, with land crustaceans, centipedes and spiders wandering across it: the top of the algae canopy he’d been walking under. Where it sagged or sheets came together, detritus had accumulated into a web of trails over which Carpet flowed, eating. Jae, profoundly affected both by the shift in perspectives and the sight of home, tried to pull his thoughts together. His resolve hadn’t faltered but he was deeply shaken now, the enormity of what he was doing again laid bare. He shook himself, trying for hunter-detachment, trying also to ignore how exhausted he already was, aches and pains taking advantage of his sudden lack of disengagement to assert themselves.
     Jae forced himself to think practically. There didn’t seem to be a lot of action down by the settlement, he saw; no ruckus, nothing that looked unusual. He concluded that his departure remained unnoticed. With an effort of will, Jae turned his back on his entire world and set off again.

channels inside, flaked here and there with green, grey, blue, or yellow lichen colonies. The surface was slick and slightly giving, making footing uncertain. Even the Carpet was sparser here, rushing over itself in streams in the depressions, as atop the canopy behind him.
     Jae was up so high now that the ground-hugging cloak of flies falling off around and below him looked like some kind of giant animal, some monstrous thing from the ancient days when great mammals and reptiles roamed the land and birds flew, only far more vast. Vivid wasps zoomed across and through the clouds, grabbing victims and devouring them as they flew. As for the view ahead, far below him, across the seething ripples and explosions of the hovering field, spread a vast marsh. Dragonflies, scintillant even in the late morning murk, divided the scene in jerky flight, marking off angular geometric forms, cutting their way through a near-solid fog of flying insects which completely obscured most of the algal growth which would cover the surface of the unmanaged bog.
This seething plain was broken by a startlingly bright sinuous line of heaped globes of slick, vibrantly green algae. Many of those balls would be easily large enough to convert to an emergency shelter, he noted with interest. The slash of green was itself slimed and adorned with the ropes, shreds, ribbons, sheets, pools, and feathers, the reds, purples, blues, yellows and oranges of multiple other types of algae, some of which he could tell even from here would be edible. His mouth watered at the thought of a fresh salad.
     The river!
     Jae’s heart hammered and adrenaline wiped his pain and fatigue away. Anxiety gave way to excitement. If he could see the river, he could see the landmark. If it was still there. Mouth dry, he eagerly scanned the length of the waterway. Nothing. He forced himself to slow his breathing. Realizing that he was becoming Strung Out, a dangerous condition which, like Bedazzled or Cocky, could kill a hunter, Jae called upon his training, slowed his breath, and Placed Himself.
     No conclusions. No emotions. Where was he? Here. Where was here? Here was perched on a frilly bit of an algae outcrop gripping a rock near the dangerously sloping edge of a large rubber-algae encrustation at the top of a mesa overlooking a river valley. Here was a position exposed to surrounding predators but by the same token providing excellent visibility in its own right. Here was a rich collection of smells and sounds he’d known since birth, creating a language he could read, overlaid with new and enticing threads indicating species not found lower down. He calmed himself further, went more abstract. Here was a still point (himself) in a sea of sliding, shifting, glimmering motion, a fluid land. Below was a green line, a blaze of fecundity across a brooding expanse of potential and dark. He waited. The pattern of his surroundings settled into him gently and he saw where it was broken.
     Jae leaped up, clutching the tough algal fronds to keep from sliding, the spikes on his boots and the splayed points of his stick forming a triangle of stability. Where was a way down? He knew where to go now, but not entirely how to get there. The botyroidal tumble of giant algae delineating the river had an unusually smooth edge, just there, barely perceptible. In ages past there had been a wall there, massive for its time but laughable in the face of all that came later, which defined part of one edge of what was now river and had once been some kind of human-settled, concrete valley. It was difficult for Jae to picture humans living above ground like day-millipedes, walking around in unarmored clothing made from plants without a care in the world.
     It took all of Jae’s concentration and training not to start running down the slope in front of him. The way up had been termite-controlled, devoid of all but the hardiest algaes, but below him a paradisaical jungle rioted its way to the edge of the forbidding marsh. It was very likely that nothing he was looking at was actually solid ground. He eased his way across the springy algal mat to where he thought the edge of the mesa might be and peered downward. He could see that at least the first few dozen meters were still covered by this water-conserving, almost indestructible black algae but after that it would get tricky. He sighed, and prepared to open his cart.

been lost to insects eating sections of an inadequately-smeared rope, or one smeared too early so that the paste dried and broke off when it was uncoiled for use. He always had a short length of thinner but still very strong twine wrapped around his stick but this was going to take a lot more. He’d stolen as much as he dared from the main stores yesterday, knotting the lengths together inside his sleep sack last night in case he wouldn’t be able to take his gloves off when he needed it (as was indeed so).
     Puffing the bladder again at the encroaching swarms, Jae set about resealing his suit as well as he could without taking it off. This inevitably resulted in wasted paste as precision was impossible when doing the more awkward seams, but the suits were designed to make this maneuver manageable if not elegant. This completed, he coated the sled’s lacings in fear, plucked a few insects and spiders out of the interior, stuffed the jar back in, and tied it up. Lastly, he plunged both hands into his own-scent pouch, so that Flash and Geoff would know him, and pressed his gloves against the algae around him for them to follow.
     Securing the braided insect-sinew-and-spider-silk rope wasn’t difficult. Jae pulled a spike out of the hollow storage section of his stick where the leg joint had been and hammered it with his tool-rock deep into the algae, at an angle to keep the rope, doubled and tied into a loop, from sliding off. Clinging to the rope, Jae, cart secured to slide or dangle just below his feet, navigated the first part of the downward journey, across the dark rubber-sheet algae, in a swift but controlled slide. He’d never moved that quickly in his life. It was perhaps the most fun he’d ever had, and he whooped, briefly silencing most of the deafening chorus.
     Pulling himself up where the algal mat petered out, Jae risked a look out over the edge and saw that he was, as he’d expected, now far above the ground. In his great-great-great-grandfather’s day there had been a trail up the side of the mesa here, wide enough for the vehicles the exodus had ridden in, but at some later point the entire face had crumbled into a sheer cliff, and now the jungle had climbed all the way up to meet the black algae coming down. The piled mass of fibrous vegetable forms was complicated and thick; he had no way of knowing what was strong enough to support him and what might crumble, crack, shear, or sink. He lashed himself and the cart to a thick arm of deep green land kelp with the short rope from his stick, untied the knot in the doubled long one and pulled it in, and thought, occasionally brushing arthropods from his faceplate to look down at the layers of growth and, farther out, the roiling swamp.
     After a while, Jae simply pounded in another spike, secured the rope again, and started dropping downward carefully. Often he found good footing quickly enough to reach out and retrieve the spike and repeat the process, extending the time before he would have to use another one and precluding the need to continually untie and retie the rope, or a handy branch of kelp eliminated the need for a spike entirely. Sometimes he let himself down onto a sheet of algae that seemed solid, only to plunge through, and other times he had to select a spot to hack laboriously with his precious glass axe in order to gain passage. In one place, the algae proved to be more than thirty centimeters thick and his arm was aching and trembling by the time he had a hole large enough for his body.
Jae was becoming concerned about shelter. The afternoon was advancing, and he was weak now with hunger; he hadn’t had the foresight to line the inside of his helmet with dried food and couldn’t eat until he could take his suit off. Thankfully he’d taken the opportunity to proboscis-sip some honeyed, salted water while stopped, but now he had to urinate, and didn’t know how he was going to go about it. To pee in the suit risked an epic rash which could easily go septic in this climate.
     He guessed he was still pretty inexperienced, and fought down a wave of regret and fear about what he’d gotten himself into. He felt like he could carry on if only he could get a comforting hug from Mom, a clap on the shoulder from one of the cooks, a pep talk from an older hunter. But they weren’t here. Only he, out of the entire human race, was here.
     Had they noticed him gone yet? If nothing eventful had happened they would be unlikely to have. The light was just angling toward the point at which he might consider starting back for the caves on a normal day, and nobody in particular would be expecting to see him until bedtime. If he was lucky, his parents would think he was in the hunters’ den and the hunters, and anyone else, would think he was at home, or in the gardens, or the kitchen or armory or down by the boilers to see his friend, and so on.

     Finally, Jae felt the springy resilience of a ground-based lichen sheet under his feet and let go of the rope, sobbing for breath as his body reacted to safety. He forced himself to relax his shaking limbs quickly, and recall and coil the rope; no time for hysterics now! Anything could live here. He turned ponderously to look behind him at the wide and gloomy marsh.
     Jae was grateful that, if the directions in the glassed journal handed down over the generations were correct, he didn’t have to cross that morass. He reckoned he still had enough light, though, to make it out, barring events of any kind, to one of those globes by dusk if he couldn’t find the shelter.
     Jae snorted at the smells getting through the pheromone-paste on his mask. He was in entirely new territory now. This was no half-tame bog like the one by the caves where they hunted fat little lobsters the size of a man’s head and bushels of popping shrimp and swarming yellow crabs. This was the kind of bog legends were made of. Some of the new odors were nasty, others simply unbelievably strong. One particularly tangy scent cut periodically through it all, and he wondered what it was. New types of everything swarmed over his body. If he found the

shelter, he would have to re-pack carefully for the second half of the trip, would have to experiment with sprays and pastes: some of these things weren’t deterred by the ones he used habitually.
     Out in the water, something big splashed, and Jae shivered, facing his loneliness. Humans were not, especially now, solitary animals. Again he was suffused with the idea that the oppressive heat, the nervousness spawned by unfamiliar dangers, even the pain throbbing through his entire body would be better if only someone were with him. Stephen, maybe, but of course he didn’t go out anymore. So maybe Olma. Someone. Even Dad. And with what appeared to be a perfect sense of timing, Geoff clattered down suddenly, bearing something truly disgusting, half eaten, pressing it at Jae. He accepted it with ill grace, glad to see the meter-tall insect.

would happen eventually, although not at such glorious jaws, to every lucky male mantis.

     If his ancestor’s journal was leading him true, he must be very near the ancient shelter now. None of his people had been here since the trip out, but so far the basic topology was holding to description, and he was encouraged. The slope up, the mesa, the river, the evidence of the fragment of wall. He knew he should find the cave somewhere along the cliff base in a similar erection opposite the section of wall, but he could see nothing through the thronging fibrous extrusions. He made his way along the extreme edge of the swamp, prodding the sludge with every step in case of sucking mud-stuff, predator, treacherous stone, or dropoff. He needed to be cautious: even in the well-managed home bog there were things that could bite or stab through a suit or even a boot sole, and he didn’t have any antibiotics with him – not another oversight; the medical team lived in the same room with them and someone was always awake. He cursed and proceeded very carefully, peering into the algal growth to his left periodically as he neared the area opposite the wall. He decided that every five meters, he would bore his way through to the cliff face and see what he found. Along the way he began gathering a variety of edible algae sorts to supplement his supper (should he ever again have opportunity to eat), stuffing them into a waist bag.
     Jae now often found his way further blocked, visually at least, by swarms of heavy-bodied flies bigger than his eyeball, hovering in almost impenetrable agglomerations over maggot-fields. Individuals looped out toward the swamp, returned with rotting material for their squirming young. Crouching beneath their masses, Jae could see that a relatively clear path still lay ahead. As he bent low now to do this, Jae noticed that his muscles were stiffening fast. He was worn out.
There was no doubt his great-great-great-grandfather had been wrong about humankind's adaptive talents; he just prayed the others would still be there, and would let them come home.
     Jae entered a fog of vigilant routine. Probe, step, probe, step, chop away at things and clamber awkwardly around, over, or under obstacles, observe cliff face, retreat, repeat. Eventually, though, he came to his senses, found himself stopped, staring, and realized why: he was looking directly at the splash of red sketched in the journal, where his great-etc.-grandfather had thrown a growth-toxic dye bomb against the concrete of the wall where little could take hold, marking the location of the cave’s entrance below.

     Jae ran his hand along one side of the entry tunnel as he walked in, his thickly scaled glove ruffling the moss-like, dew-dependent algae that lined it. A wave of minuscule red centipedes rushed ahead of his fingers, dropping off the wall in a fine mist to escape. He had donned a slick cape of insect membrane soaked in bioluminescent fluids, and strange shadows zoomed and scuttled through the dim light it threw on his passage. This cave, which was really a remnant of the original wall’s internal storage area, had been reinforced at some point in the last days of Civilization, generations before his ancestor’s sedition and the subsequent exodus. Great-etc.-Grandfather had found it, in extremis, when he and his team slipped out to seek the rumored caves in which Jae had been born, themselves actually the remnants of some fabulously ancient underground transportation system.
     The shelter, according to the journal, comprised a trio of square concrete chambers separated by sliding stone barriers on tracks, recessing into the walls. At the moment, though, he was in a rectangular concrete corridor badly choked with life. On the floor, a meter-thick accumulation of detritus supported a spongy organic mat thoroughly animated with creatures. The Carpet was here dominated by darkness-loving types. It trickled across the fuzzy walls too, sparkling colorfully with random bioluminescence, sometimes parting to flow around a steadfast colony of scorpions or spiders or wall-clinging wasps. The number of animals hovering in the air was smaller here by far, and he could see a couple of meters ahead without adopting the stooping, lurching, twisting walk of someone trying to go somewhere outdoors. Tunnels into the spongy material on the floor spoke of other wasps, and colony types like blind termites.
     Jae was getting edgy. Something large could shelter in a place like this, but the light was fading behind him and his glowing cape was only good for scouting out the next several footsteps. Flattening himself against the wall, ignoring the immediate flood of animals across his body and mask, Jae threw a chemical light grenade ahead of him into the darkness. To his immense relief, it smashed onto a surface only a few meters away, splashing phosphorescent liquid across it and sending up a cloud of fear stink to which most of the species between him and that wall responded. There had indeed been something there that could give him trouble. A one-and-a-half-meter millipede, liberally splashed with the glowing fluid, reared up into the stench and fled for the tunnel mouth, jaws capable of ripping his suit open passing within centimeters of Jae’s foot. He gathered himself and approached the splattered surface.
     Jae finally had to resort to burning the entire area around the stone door to get it freed up, and scrape the surface of it until he found the handholds buried in grime. An anxious hour as the smoke poured out (standing in it to create the most arthropod-free outdoor experience of his entire life, back to the cave most of the time and head down in the breathable-space pose, eyes nonetheless strained upward in their sockets to watch for dangers) and then another one before it was cool enough to enter and shove at the door made it deep twilight by the time he hauled the precisely-cut square stone slab aside and stumbled into the first room.

long-burn keep-away bundle and backed himself into a corner. He guzzled the water and was asleep before he had finished swallowing the last mouthful.

     Jae awoke lucky to be alive. That was simply a given; he had spent the night in shelter, yes, but with only the most emergency of other measures undertaken. The triple layers of insect-gut membrane and sheets of interwoven spider-silk and arthropod sinew, closely glued all over on both sides with a variety of the toughest small-to-medium beetle wing casings, had prevented all but the tiniest creatures from creeping into the bag. These had set about merrily chewing holes in his skin but this was par for the course of a normal day. All people were adorned at all times with a variety of colorful reactions, from the bright red stippling of cave-bugs to the purple under-skin flush of bog fungus.
     Even before he opened his eyes, Jae’s heart started hammering when he realized he had been so tired he hadn’t even looked around the room. If another of those millipedes was in here it could have chewed through the triple-suit easily, unless deterred by the foul-tasting glue. Not everything was. He started shivering.
     Now that his system wasn’t running on terror-adrenaline anymore, Jae could take stock of his physical situation, which was pretty grim. He was so stiff and torn it took him twenty minutes to sit all the way upright. The faintest glow from the smudge-bundle remained, but all he could see was a bit of floor. Concrete floor, covered in drifts of dust and small particles and tiny segments of carapace, similar to the floor at home. It gradually dawned on him what was so remarkable about that: nowhere in his entire life except within the living and working chambers of his own people’s home tunnels had he seen any ground not thoroughly obscured by Carpet, droppings, algal growths, lichens, mold, toxic sludge or writhing larval bodies. He was well and truly indoors. He pulled himself painfully to his cart and, using the gloves on the sleep sack, felt around for a space candle.
     The room turned out to be about ten meters on a side and was indeed cubical. It seemed to Jae, looking around, that the only living arthropods in here were ones he had brought in himself on his cart and body or which had entered during the twenty seconds or so while he had the door open. Only a few hundred were visible, of which none could do worse than sting or bite painfully. To be on the safe side, he spun the cart around and looked at it from all angles, and did a visual on his piled suit, lying where he’d left it. Then he slicked out of the sleep-sack and did his best to stretch, muttering in pain and giving up quickly. Shuffling slowly through the tasks, he set a couple of traps and squashed a few things, then grimaced at the ceiling. All of the smoke from last night hung there, and the air smelled decidedly stale despite his having briefly opened the door yesterday. He couldn’t stay here – but he couldn’t leave.
     Allie would have been good to have around right now. She led the teams that investigated older tunnels, both the ones sealed over as the population dwindled and concentrated and those even beyond the original walls of the colony, looking for resources. She was the one who had discovered the new ways through to the coastal sections of the tunnel system connected to the settlement when the earthquake cut off their access to sand for making the glass upon which their civilization depended. She knew all about air quality and venting and so forth; her life, and the lives of her teams, often depended on it. Jae found himself trying to breathe shallowly while he thought about what to do.
     Doing his best to stay relatively upright and sobbing with pain and effort, Jae gagged as he fought his way back into his exosuit. It reeked evilly and was covered in a huge variety of biological fluids, pastes, powders, spores, eggs, and assorted detritus. He shuddered, whacking some of his bruises and scrapes against the same features of the suit which had caused them, whimpering. After a rummage through his pull cart he staggered to the stone door and heaved it open a few centimeters, immediately dropping a burst-bag of fear powder and snatching up his stick, prepared to whack the first large creature that made a dash for the interior. Naturally, myriad tiny whatsits floating on the air simply wafted in, and a lot of things on the door itself ended up inside as they continued to just walk forward, but as he’d hoped, the billows of stale keep-away smoke which puffed out the door as soon as he opened it deterred almost everything not stopped by the fear bomb. A few defensively-flattened scorpions shuffled in but these he ignored; they’d be easy to find later, and would make a tasty snack. He frowned, thinking about the benefits and dangers of a cooking fire, but shook it off, eyes fixed on the crack through which the smoke of the room was still pouring.

vigilance by this point, Jae speared it reflexively through the head, only coming to himself when the weight of its struggles threatened to jerk his stick out of his grasp. The curved spines down at that end would keep it from sliding up the shaft toward his hands, but its flailing body was heavy and powerful enough to bruise and its legs were dangerous too, sharp enough to score the suit and render it less resistant to molds and weathering. If it tore its own head off and went cartwheeling around inside the room it could cause a lot of trouble, but, renewed floods of adrenaline erasing his weariness and pain, he decided to haul it in anyway. He held it pressed against the wall with the spear as he shoved his back against the door and shimmied, getting it slid closed seemingly with sheer willpower before anything else major came in. Then he sat on the spear until the millipede stopped moving enough to be dangerous. Jae keened lightly again as his body came back to itself and didn’t like what it found.
     A seeming eternity of traipsing around setting up attractor-lights and waving sticky-sheets and scattering fear powder later, he wrestled his way gratefully out of his suit again and the sweat-stiff clothes under it, collapsing this time not onto bare concrete but onto the sleep sacks (normal and emergency) and variously-utilized sheets and blankets which made up half his cargo. For a long time, he did nothing but lie still, naked, scratching here and there, hands roaming around in search of ticks and other parasites, gently rubbing his scrapes and exploring his bruises, which seemed to cover him entirely as far as he was concerned. It was heaven.
     He wondered about Geoff. The insect would stay loyal to him for weeks without reinforcement, so unless he had met with an accident he was out there now, walking stiffly about, no doubt having the time of his life. None of these things could take him, and he was skilled at finding overnight shelter. The mantises didn’t come indoors. Jae hadn’t seen him, of course – even if he had braved the corridor, which was very unlikely, and had been right outside the door when Jae cracked it, the outrushing fear-smoke and the powder bomb would have driven him away instantly. Knowing it was silly, Jae missed the insect’s company, although the opposite wasn’t true. He missed Flash, too, named for the way his upper arms reflected sunlight, when there was any, in a brief dazzling flicker when he struck prey. He wondered if Flash’s babies, when they hatched, would do well here.
     Finally Jae sat up, groaning, and fumbled in the pouch he’d dragged with him from the cart. First carefully downing another liter of reinforced water, Jae pulled out a wad of analgesic gum, sighing appreciatively as the venom from modified scorpions began to take effect. Accomplishing nothing more this day but calling it a great deal indeed, Jae slept once more.
     When Jae again found himself conscious, he could barely move at all. He had slept deeply. Every muscle in his body, and it felt like a few more besides, had stiffened up. Additionally, he hurt fiercely all over in several completely different ways, and he opted immediately for another dose of venom gum. When he’d brought it along in case of injuries he had been thinking of something more immediately fatal like a broken leg, but this certainly counted as “injured”. When after a while the race between bladder and painkiller was won by the bladder and he dragged himself to his feet to piss against the door crack, the victory wasn’t by much; he was limping much less when he returned to his cart, and the contents of the room were starting to get through to him.
     First of all, there were the clothes. In one corner, a pile of clothing and what looked like some kind of exosuit had been abandoned. He frowned in that direction but the illumination from his dying candle was very weak now and he didn’t want to waste light-hours by pulling another out until he had to, so he pondered the dark heap sleepily as he wolfed down lobster jerky and a couple of tasty bars of pressed, dried, crispy-fried assorted beetles, larvae, and eggs, liberally spiced with zesty ants.

bay, he was wearing something a lot like this: an exosuit with embellishments and odd features to try to model it after some kind of early Civilization garment, from the times of open air. What had Jae so excited was the fastenings: they were actually metal! He had only seen metal before in a few forms: scientific equipment, the machinery and wiring of their generations-old electrical and ventilation systems, carefully-hoarded tools such as shovels, pickaxes, hatchets, and knives, and the bigger machines, made from the vehicles the ancestors had brought, that opened walls to look for resources or smashed ceilings to bring down a seal. Most cutting edges were of course made of glass: their fuel sources couldn’t heat metal forges, so everything had been made by laboriously cutting and piecing together what they already had, and anyway, sources of new metal (the trains which had run in these tunnels, girders and infrastructure where they took out passages, tangles of pipes, whatever they came upon that hadn’t rusted away) had long dwindled. There were barely enough people to keep even these systems going now, along with everything else that needed to be done. Jae was coming back to himself enough to remember why he was even here, what was actually happening to him.
     He snatched up a piece of the suit, freezing in dismay as part of it disintegrated and fell. He rotated it this way and that, realizing that the stuff that had fallen off was a solid, cracked and crumbling, which had, judging by what he was seeing, worked as a seal. All of the seals Jae was familiar with were some variant on the old reliable combination of gut membrane, arthropod web, fear paste, and glue. This material, either black with age or black to begin with, had filled the groove in a ring of actual metal, which formed the neck hole of the weird stylized shirt, itself made of some sort of bizarre material, shiny and unlike hide from any beetle he had ever seen. It probably would have attached to a helmet. Jae discovered to his surprise that the inside of the garment was covered with a fine mesh of metal. The lower edge had a ring similar to the one around the neck and Jae soon saw that it would have locked to the trousers that still lay on top of the bulk of the Civilization-style garments.
     Jae reached out and picked up the pants. He shouted and fell over backwards when his abused body tried to jump. It wasn’t just a pile of clothes. There was a dead person under there.
     Jae was completely overwhelmed now, and starting to tremble. He was also terrified that he might have to open the door again before his suit was clean if he remained awake much longer. The adrenaline jolt of the body, obviously generations dead, didn’t last long – nothing was attacking him. His numbed brain simply backed him away, hauled off a wad of gum, and fell him over onto the sleeping arrangements on the floor.

     The next time Jae woke up he felt immensely better. Still horribly stiff all over and in a great deal of pain, and sporting a new personal record for overnight insect bites, he nonetheless found his mind clear and active, restless to study the body, the clothing, and the few other objects scattered around the room, which he had in his exhaustion ignored completely. Furthermore he realized that he had been in grave danger of suffocating himself. At the moment he didn’t think the air was dangerous yet but now that he had his faculties back, he saw that in his condition he wouldn’t have been able to tell when it started going wrong and certainly wouldn’t have done anything sensible about it if he somehow had.
     On the other hand, Jae thought, almost cheerfully, he had also been stupid in another way, and didn’t have to put the horrible suit back on.
     It took a couple of hours to get set up, during which Jae began to fret seriously about the air although he had no signs that it was getting stale. He was continually checking himself, bringing his heart rate and breathing down, even forcing them to meditative trance levels. As he worked, he wished the other hunters could see how ingenious he was being. This would make a great story when he got back. He staunchly suppressed any thoughts about not getting back.
     First, Jae had sacrificed one of his emergency blankets, slashing it into four wide strips which he glued together to double their strength and increase scale overlap. For good measure he had scattered fear powder onto the inner surfaces. He was trying not to use too much – he still had to go on and then back again – but if there was ever a call for some, it was now. He still had the pastes, gels, aerosols and a lot of bombs.
     Once the sheets were stuck together he glued them across the doorway, leaving a gap for his hands and for smoke at waist and ceiling height respectively. At the base of the door he placed his shield, which had served as an added cover on the cart. This centimeter-thick single beetle wing cover would protect the membrane sheets from the fire he now laid before it. He strategically scattered fatty dried armor-moths, lightly smashed, throughout a decently-sized pile of dried fuel species of various large types with varying burn rates, a feeder pile nearby, and garnished the heap with some twists of extremely dry algae soaked in rendered moth fat. Jae had cleaned out the millipede, leaving it in the shell for now. Its organs he set aside to pick through – the poison sacs were useful in medicine and hunting. A crab-foot hook through a gap forced between its scales, it now dangled from his portable tripod of interlocking chitin slivers over the fire pile, waiting.

 a couple of hours gently flexing himself, trying to do his customary daily exercises, thinking, and endeavoring not to doze off. It was imperative that he not take his eyes off the two gaps in the door. So far a few things had braved the fading stink outside and the climb up, down, or across the fear-rich blanket but all had immediately fallen into the fire, spattering excitingly when they burst, now and then producing jets or flares of exotically-colored flame. It was hypnotic. When the smell of the cooking millipede was overpowering and its sizzling and popping loud enough to drown out the beginnings of the afternoon chorus outside, he used his stick to pull it away, allowing much more smoke to escape. When the fire died down so far that the smoke was no longer enough to keep everything out, Jae scooped it up with the shield, dumped the whole smoldering pile out one of the holes, and slammed the stone door to. Then he stripped himself out of the sleep sack and fell upon the millipede, moaning in pleasure at the freshly roasted, delicate meat. There was enough to feed him for a few days, but it wouldn’t keep that long and there were no drying or smoking chambers here. He had no intention of repeating the whole fire thing either, so now he sighed and, eyeing the stuff yet to be explored, instead sat on his cart. With scrapers and sanders, he began to strip his suit down to its basic carapaces, membranes, and seams, after which he would patch it anywhere necessary and polish it with antifungal gel, re-glue the joins, touch up the lining with scraps of membrane from one of his blankets, and coat the exterior in fear paste once more, picking the suit up to give it a shake now and then over the next few hours so that the paste wouldn’t dry too immobilely and flake off later when it mattered.
     Then, more gum and sleep. He may be clear-headed, but he felt wrenched half inside out and most of his abrasions were still seeping. Tomorrow would have to be first a self-care day and then a day of investigating the things in this room. He crawled back into the sleep sack and was asleep almost immediately. He dreamed of home, of achingly normal activities: cleaning the algae-farm filter screens, chasing a group of children around the play-dome, helping Stephen with the bellows. Talking.
     Another awakening. By this point Jae had no idea whether they even corresponded to actual mornings. It had clearly been afternoon when he opened the door yesterday, but how long had he slept? Was this tomorrow now, or the middle of the night?
     This time, Jae simply padded his bruises with handfuls of algae, put on the sharply-antiseptic-smelling refurbished exosuit, opened the door, threw a bomb, and stood there for two hours swatting or stabbing anything that came through the two gaps. It was good target practice. Then he closed the door, dispatched everything that had made it past him, and took off the suit. It was all so easy he got the giggles until he cried, and had to sit down.
     While Jae re-inventoried his first aid supplies (disinfectant gel, a variety of venoms and venom compounds for various types of pain relief or antibacterial uses, antibacterial and antifungal powders, spider-silk bandages, insect-head sutures, knives) and began finally to properly see to his hurts, he thought about the body. Great-great-great-grandfather had put in the journal that the party had lost three people by this point but it had never occurred to Jae that they would have been… preserved. It was creepy.
There hadn’t been a year of Jae’s life when at least a couple people hadn’t died, so he was well used to bodies and what you did with them. Edible parts went to the funeral feast, of course, a sacred reminder that once upon a time, everyone ate the flesh of mammals. The bones were a vital source of minerals. Everything else went to the farms or to supplement the diets of the species mankind had tamed after the other vertebrates were gone.
     Who would this have been? The leg from the original settlement to this shelter, with primitive suits, no idea what lay ahead, and (it became apparent to the travelers quickly) all the wrong supplies had cost them the lives of a man and two women. A farmer, a bootmaker, a doctor. Which one was this? Where were the other two?
     That evening (and it was evening; whether he had lost or gained a day at any point in his drug-and-exhaustion fueled stupor, he didn’t know, but his circadian rhythm appeared to still be on point) he found spending two hours stabbing and swatting at arthropods a small price to pay for going to bed knowing he had a full chamber of air.

were only unidentifiable bits and bobs, some of which he set aside as potentially useful for the next part of his journey.
     The second day Jae used to inventory everything he had left and had acquired. Medical supplies he lined up against one wall, and in front of those he set out his food. The millipede wasn’t good anymore and he had scraped and cleaned its beautiful shell segments, which were stacked by the cart, tossing the spoiled flesh out during the last airing, a gift for the life thronging just outside. He still had plenty of both lobster and staghorn jerky, a few handfuls of the trail mix, most of the algae salad greens he’d gathered on his way in here, a large bag of a dried, frilly algae rich in vitamin C, and a bag of stripped, desiccated fat-moths. Mineral powder. Several bladders of honey. When all else failed, there was always honey; a person could live a long time on just honey. His people were proud of their underground flightless bee colony, which thrived on a diet of sugar-rich algae and had grown docile and nearly stingless, as long as his thumb and velvety soft. He sobered when he realized they would stand no chance were the settlement breached. He had never thought about that before.
     In his great-great-great-grandfather’s father’s day, it was reported in the journal, glassed and ensconced in the small museum at the caves, there had still been some especially tough and toxic woody plants but entire phenotypes were being wiped out by the day, chewed to the ground by the insects. Only the strangely hardy, the rock-like, the caustically poisonous survived. Fungus existed by then only as a swiftly-blooming haze of traveling bumps, an impenetrable sheet or a nodule like a stone, or an incredibly brief explosion of solid forms spitting out spores as they were devoured. Foraging slime molds were seen increasingly often. All of it was bitter, noxious, inedible. The Despair Riots wiped out a lot of people but the algae breakthroughs restored hope, it was written, and Civilization went on just a little while longer. Great-Great-Great-Grandfather had been born while it still existed.
     Jae still had a jumble of hooks and barbs, glass knives and his rock-tool, his shield, his chipped glass axe. A crustacean net. His rope was in remarkably good shape, but his boots were nearly bare, and he spent four hours patching them with membrane and fear-enriched glue and re-scaling the uppers with the beautiful millipede segments. There were enough scales to lengthen the boots considerably, lining the new uppers with layers of tough fear-sealed membranes. It gave him a funny feeling, but a proud one, to be dressed so richly by his own hand, and he admired the gleaming indigo knee-tall boots for a while before returning to his tasks.
Day three of these heady, oxygen-rich days was devoted to packing. He found the fourth and last scorpion under one of the empty water sacks, and almost decided to let it live but then he realized it would have nothing to eat and so he would have to go through a complex bunch of maneuvering to catch it in something he should be packing away, so as to throw it out on the last airing. He speared it instead, and added it to his food and medical stores.
     Jae had learned a lot during his terrifying day outside; now the rope was coiled and accessible around his waist and the non-sliding surfaces of the cart were adorned with his remaining water and the empty bottles, accessorized with proboscis tubes for through-the-suit drinking. All of this was wrapped the long way around (so as not to impede the lid) with an elastic scaled membrane sheet drenched in fear, slick side out. Anaesthetic gel was prominent in his waist pouches, along with the gum and a couple of space candles, as these were likely to be among the first things he would want if he made it all the way through day after tomorrow. The biolumiescent lamp he’d rigged up and the few other things he’d need tonight and tomorrow could be put in waist pouches when he set out or snapped under the sheet on the cart. Feeling prepared and proud, he slept again.

approached the interior one. He almost felt now like he’d lived his whole life in this one small space, a planet in the cosmos of the insects, but here was a way into another kingdom at least as large as the one in which he’d spent these days. He centered himself, dispelled as much emotion and expectation as he was able. Steeling himself for exertion, strained tendons and muscles complaining, he hauled at the stone door. Catching him by surprise, this one slid open smoothly, and he tumbled over, crying out as his strained ribs were tugged by the fall.
     Very stale air puffed past him. The light from his lamp wasn’t strong; he didn’t want to burn air more than necessary, though, so instead of lighting another candle he threw a chemical light grenade as high against the opposite wall as he could, hoping he wouldn’t break or irreparably befoul anything important. He gaped at what he saw, intrigued. The liquid light dripping down the wall let him see that there were two boxes in there, made of something he couldn’t identify from here but was probably metal because it looked so smooth and… formed. He turned away ruefully, though; he had another few hours of work to do before he could take a break and look at those. He wanted all three chambers fully aerated before he paused. He could study the crates and whatever was in them, and anything that might appear in the third room, which would have been the first one his ancestors had opened when they were coming the other way, later, before he slept.
     Jae returned to the first door and, steadying himself, opened it again. He dropped the stink bomb and waited. A couple of hours of dancing on, swatting at, stabbing, and whacking a variety of creatures and he slammed the door again. Hunter-survival instincts rose then: Jae began to realize that he was once again running on pure adrenaline. He felt gaunt and he trembled with weakness, and he hurt all over. In the past days he had done more sheer hard labor and experienced more terror than in the rest of his life put together. He was going to have to take a break. Stripping regretfully out of the suit, he plumped himself to the floor by the cart and fell to. He ate mechanically, chewing jerky and vitamin-algae strips and recently-gathered delicacies alike without noticing. His body knew what he needed and he followed it all up with a huge squirt of honey and two liters of water. He would be going out tomorrow and water was everywhere, and he still had three liters besides.
     Given that he was already out of the suit, and still shaky, Jae took up his lamp and approached the mysterious crates. Might as well check them out now.
     It only took him a moment to realize that they were made of plastic. The process had been lost when Civilization fell, but the people retained some objects. All of them were cracked all over, pitted, gouged, bleached, and sacred. The more delicate items, like a perfectly cylindrical mug, had been glassed. The rest were preserved carefully and handed around on Days of Remembering.
These boxes were scratched and one had a crack but to Jae’s eyes they were nigh on pristine. The colors were nearly as bright as some beetles and lichens, and both the blue main surfaces and the orange clamps were shades he had never seen before. He didn’t notice that he was shivering, clammy goosebumps rising all over him despite the warm air. It was only when he attempted to puzzle out the latches that he noticed that his hands were shaking too badly to grip anything.
     Jae laid his forehead on the box before him and sobbed. He may have survived so far, against odds which would be legendary if he made it back, and he may have extremely good hunter-training and stamina, and willpower besides – the most precious personal commodity – but he was still a 15-year-old boy, injured, who had never before been away from the hive-like closeness of the home caves, where one was never more than a few steps or a slightly raised voice from other people. He treasured the solitude of the hunt, one of the things that had qualified him and even marked him out for the vocation, but now he understood what it was to truly be alone.
     Eventually his shuddering sobs and wails subsided and he lay purged and unthinking on the filthy concrete floor.
After an indeterminate time, Jae rose again and limped back to the crates. He felt very calm now, burning youthful curiosity coming back fast.
     Somehow in his delirium of grief and catharsis his brain had, as often also happens in dreams, put together how the catches worked. Jae reached out and smoothly lifted the front rectangle of disturbing orange on each of the two latches. With a faint pop, the box opened.

out of his mind. He was uneasy about his plans now. Under no circumstances could he risk being caught out at dusk. He tried not to think about what would happen if he just plain failed, and didn’t find the home settlement (would they let him in? Suddenly thoughts of what might really be waiting for him began to creep into his confidence. What if they wouldn’t let him in?). He was sure he hadn’t slept but to be fair with himself he didn’t know whether the episode had lasted half an hour or five. He was very disoriented, and now very tired. He decided he would have to open the third door tomorrow, and hope he still had enough time to go forth. Thus resolved, he turned his attention to the second box.
     It was full of glassies.
     Jae lost all track of time and self, pulling tray after tray of neatly organized glassy out of the crate, staring into a world long dead. People in odd clothing did uninterpretable things, unarmored, with objects and in surroundings he couldn’t begin to process. His mind hammered at him about the bizarre, primarily green growths everywhere in almost all of the outdoor pictures and even most of the indoor ones (not that they seemed indoors to him; above ground and covered in windows, these places would scare him silly) and he finally realized he was looking at plants. Plants. And other animals, nonhumans… he wept again as he saw dogs and cats, brought to photographic life at last, and fish and birds and elephants and horses and cows and some things he didn’t know what they were. Lots of those. And the pictures that were stranger still, the cities and homes, the gatherings of people right out in the open air for obscure purposes. The machines. Some of those were flying.
     Jae sincerely could not comprehend the old times. The world had once been covered by humans; he understood that. They’d been as numerous as beetles, as common as flies. The best image of it he could cobble for himself was some sort of Carpet: a shifting tapestry of constantly active human life. Teeming, rushing, eating, mating. Had they climbed over each other, scrambling like roaches, as the flesh-eaters came down? Had they turned on each other in their panic, tearing at everything they touched? These pictures didn’t look anything like the world he’d imagined.
     Then Jae came to the bottom layer of glassed-photo trays. They were illustrations of the Last Days. When the balance shifted. These were the most annotated, and the script wasn’t so uniform anymore. The images were incredible. Entire houses under centimeters-thick blankets of mosquitoes, of locusts, of ants, rendering day night. Towns turned to mounds. Passageways between above-ground dwellings – streets! – littered with the bodies of plague-ridden rats and cats and dogs and humans… This was the end of Civilization, which he knew had once been a system vaster, a hive more complex, than even the continent-spanning termite colony.
     Some things had been much worse in the early post-Civilization period than they were now, Jae knew. He himself was immune, for example, as were all living people, to yellow fever, filariasis, sleeping sickness, most cyst-forming parasites, and a host of other formerly deadly diseases and conditions. In fact, the only things he really had to worry about, provided he was careful not to be eaten outright, were injuries, bacterial and fungal infections, egg infestations, viruses, and poison/venom. This hadn’t been true in his ancestors’ time; people then still died by the hundreds of thousands. Still existed by the hundreds of thousands. Records, scratched or embossed or pierced onto metal sheets or preserved in glass, told of people devoured in their beds, imperfect early suits that filled with voracious ants, people who went berserk and stomped on insect colonies or floods until eaten alive. The Insecticide Wars, the “Let's Make Them Useful” campaign (the “Let's Diversify the Buggers Fiasco”, it came to be known, although it had rendered unto humankind the mantis controls and the few farmed food animals they had now), the early disastrous attempts at burning the pre-Carpet, the diseases…
     Jae’s thoughts drifted imperceptibly from cogitation to scattered sleep ideation as his body slumped and his overwhelmed brain took him away. His dreams were uneasy at best.

hoppers, but it resembled none of these. The energy it gave him was both faster and of a more surging nature than he was accustomed to but also less fortifying physically somehow. It made him feel buzzy without feeling particularly stronger. He forced himself to finish it, but he couldn’t decide whether he liked it or not. He followed it up with a dollop of honey to be on the safe side.
     After the food and some water and some personal elimination in the first room’s corner, where most of it was now anyway, he again went through the ritual of airing the two rooms. It was almost routine now to stand there spearing things and stomping, and his mind wandered to what his people would do with these spaces. He understood from the journal that these comprised a storage bunker inserted into the old wall fragments once it became clear that humans were going to have to move from some places to other places (which had done no good, but it is what it is). The stone doors were so good even now because the fall of Civilization had by that time at least been postulated seriously, and some altruistic, far-thinking group or other had decided these chambers would be useful to, well, such a one as Jae himself someday. Originally they had been stuffed with supplies of some sort, deemed sufficient for whatever post-apocalyptic world should arise, but they’d been looted generations ago, well before his great-great-great-grandfather’s day.
     Great-etc.-Grandfather and his compatriots on the journey had found this place by chance in their hour of need and camped here overnight. The exodus didn’t touch it because those people came in the stolen last of the land vehicles, making the entire journey in a mere five hours. They’d committed themselves to launch the insurrection as soon as the smoke balloon went up when the old transport system tunnels proved not only still in existence, but viable for human habitation. For all Jae knew he would be greeted as the descendant of a terrible outlaw.
     Once the two rooms were fully aired, Jae took off his helmet portion only, willing to deal with the half hour it would take him to re-seal everything when he put it back on, and ate as much as he could force down, eschewing for now the fancy antediluvian rations and eating a combination he knew from experience and training would keep him going as long as possible.
Once he deemed himself fully prepared to transfer everything one room further and then move on if the time of day was right – no matter what wonders might be stored there, he warned himself sternly! – with his helmet restored and sealed, Jae grabbed the door’s handles and heaved. It resisted. He hauled. It resisted. He braced his feet against the rough floor and gave it his all, and the door gave suddenly. Expecting it to fling him across the floor as the other had, he overcompensated when it stopped at around 40 centimeters, staggering backward. And through that narrow gap, a million creatures flooded.
     Jae got a wild glimpse of jumbled human bones, covered in silk. A flash of several of the alien-seeming ancient plastic crates, pitted and hazed with cracks, strewn under filthy ropes of cobweb. Teeming scavenger-mites of every color. The far door was open directly to the outside! As a multitude of creatures started pouring into his two rooms, Jae got a really good look, suddenly, at what else was in there. He threw the door shut before more than a few of them got through.
     Wolf spider nest.
     Jae backed against the wall and held his stick cross-body, heart hammering. If they felt like hunting him, three or four would be enough and he had no idea how many had got in. One could do him very serious harm, suit or no suit. He hoped they weren’t able to understand that they were trapped now.
     Wolf spiders, unless hunting and sure of their prey, were generally docile enough. He had touched several in the home tunnels as they sat immobile in niches, watching the human activity. They were a vital defense against arthropodal invasions from the lower tunnels and the ventilation shafts, because as the colony of humans shrank over the generations not all of the seals and smoke channels worked perfectly all of the time. Their nests, however, were staunchly defended and far from well-traveled human paths. And those spiders, he now saw, were different from these. Fatter. Sedentary. House spiders. He watched the ones he could see now and realized he was facing a different order of creature altogether.

body of a small scorpion, which flailed its stinger uselessly against the spider’s armored legs.
Jae tried to relax. How many of these were in here? He peered around him. Three on the cart: two males about the size of the one enjoying the scorpion and a bigger female. Was that all? Cautiously, he slid further along the wall and the three on the cart backed away, two dropping off to position themselves in the corner opposite him. They were cautious about him, but they weren’t being immediately aggressive. He started to calm down.
     The female remained on the cart as he sidled closer, angling herself to keep her two largest front eyes on him. One of her side eyes glittered as he moved his lamp. Her fur was beautiful, rich red-brown with dusky greyish dark-brown stripes. He had a sudden urge to stroke her, even with his glove on, but checked himself sharply. This was a very dangerous wild animal, not one of his father’s home-cave bees. Nonetheless he watched with interest as she seemed to settle. Her enormous forelegs protectively before her, she rested her abdomen on the cart’s surface now, no longer standing on all toes ready to spring. Almost as though she were signaling that if he didn’t make any sudden moves, she wouldn’t either.
     Jae took a long, ragged breath and let his tension flow out with it. Apex predators were all about conserving energy; he began to think that if he didn’t threaten the spiders, they would leave him alone too. Taking a calculated risk, he turned his paltry two eyes away from them and looked around for what else might have got in. It felt like he’d been locked in a standoff with the spiders for hours but he knew it was really a matter of a few seconds.
     To Jae’s relief, nothing else dangerous to a suited human had made it through the door. The spider nest would have been kept clean of major dangers, he realized. Wolf spiders had always been protective of their young and the colonizing types which had arisen as the climate changed were zealous about it. Watching his four new roommates, he began to wonder if he could get out without a fight. He sat down against the wall, the spiders tensing and relaxing again as he did so, and thought about what he had seen on the other side, in the five seconds or so before he had got the door slammed shut again. He looked over there, holding his lamp high, the starry eyes of the spiders following his movement. A number of creatures, including at least one wolf spider, had been smashed in the door, and the legs sticking through to this side, still gently writhing, were encrusted with tiny multicolored flesh eaters.
     The room on other side of the door had been, he now understood, the final resting place of the two other humans lost on the outward trek. He knew that his great-etc.-grandfather’s party had dragged one of them a long way and had been dismayed, upon investigating, to find most of him eaten. From the brief glimpse of that room, which had been a jumbled mass of human items and remains and spider web, Jae concluded that his ancestors had dumped most of what they were carrying when they got here, probably in a rush to take shelter against the hordes of enemy species which had hunted them this far, and, finding themselves for whatever reason (probably haste) unable to close the outer door, brought through only the rations/medicines crate and the glassies. The person Jae had found inside must have died after going in. Over the decades, the open room had filled with whatever elements of the Carpet found it and settled here, and at some point the wolf spiders had moved in and cleared out everything else big. The way these spiders were acting, he might be able to just… walk out. And that would have to be now; he had seen and, more importantly, heard that it was, indeed, early morning.
     Jae frowned, thinking. He didn’t know how many spiders were out there but the room had been decidedly… glittery. Lots and lots, he had to assume, even at eight eyes per animal. They would apparently not attack him, if these four were anything to go by, if he moved deliberately and slowly and didn’t actively disturb any of them. However, those great sheets and ropes of web made a simple walk impossible. If he accidentally tore through it in such a way as to trap or injure a spider, they might feel attacked. He certainly didn’t know what made the difference in such events that caused the entire group to fall upon the perceived aggressor or to flee, both behaviors having been observed frequently, but he thought being inside their own colony might skew that tipping point away from his favor.

would need to open the cart.
     As he cautiously approached, the spider drew herself together, spiky legs forming an armored cage around her body. She made no other move and Jae was puzzled as to what to do. He could try poking her with the stick to get her to move, but she might just as easily jump on his face, their favorite move when directly threatened. In the end he slowly, cautiously untied the lacings holding his shield on top and lifted it up, spider and all, heart pounding. He guessed her weight at around 700 grams. He set the shield down as gently and with as little tilting as he could on the floor. The spider reached out with one foreleg and tapped the edge of the shield shell, then the concrete floor, then the shell again. She stopped moving. Jae regarded her curiously, then pulled the cart a ways away from her and opened it.
     An hour later Jae was as ready as he would ever be. He’d tricked his suit out for the day ahead earlier, even having the foresight to slide his (generously greased) penis into the mouth of a liquid-collection sack glued to the front panel, remembering the agonies of trying not to wet the suit. If this went well… If he made it through the spider nest… If the rest of the way was clear enough… then by the time he needed to sleep again he would be doing it in the home of his ancestors, the technological fortress built when humans had to go to ground. The place his great-great-great-grandfather had left to create a new, semi-symbiotic way of life in the wilderness.
     The spider seemed resigned to her fate as Jae again picked her up, on the shell-shield, and lashed the cart closed. Struggling to see through the doubled faceplates, which kept shifting across each other, Jae stood lumpy and formless in his suit and the triple-layered sleep-sack around it. His cart was rigged to pull behind him again, his stick polished and sharp. He exuded a miasma of fear-inducing odors courtesy of keep-away sprays, powders, pastes and gels, none of which seemed to be bothering “his” spider any. Cautiously, ignoring the floods of brightly colored mites that engulfed his body immediately, he eased the door open and looked into a scene which every nerve in his system told him to flee.
     Dozens of spiders were looking at him. Some were shaking webs aggressively, some were retreating. Most were poised on their toes, frighteningly still, waiting to see what he would do. The way before his feet was a tangle of potential danger, and as he set his first step forward, what had seemed to be the floor itself came away in a sheet of sticky web, wrapping itself around his foot, dragging debris. He cursed, trying to free his foot with his stick, but the stuff wouldn’t come loose. He hacked and sawed at it with his glass knife, as slowly as he could, trying to see all the way around himself the way these spiders could but in truth restricted to a tiny, blurry, unstable visual field. Behind him during one particularly athletic twist, he glimpsed “his” female, still impassively riding the cart.
     It took Jae almost two hours to cross the one small room. Afraid to move quickly, he was trapped in a molasses world of dragging, impeded movement. Every foot he put forward had to be laboriously sawn free again. He could only see in a narrow field directly ahead of himself, so he stopped often to shuffle in a complete circle to see what his roommates were doing. For the most part, that was watching. They bunched up farthest from him and stared. They waved their legs softly in what looked like communication but surely wasn’t. They leaned from side to side, seeming to triangulate their massed eyes on him. Once, one did jump onto him, landing on his back with a thump that made him scream, but then it did nothing. “His” spider reared up briefly at this, unseen behind him, but sank back down into her former stillness. Once he suddenly found himself face to face with a female and saw that she was covered in small, scuttling forms. Young. Her babies. He changed course to avoid brushing against her. Sweat pooled in his beautiful new boots.
     At last Jae was fully outdoors. He had never thought that he would feel safer out in the wild than inside a shelter but he was so glad to be out of there that he drew great whooping breaths as he fell to his knees, looking back. His cart was still just inside and he pulled on the rope. It slid smoothly out to lie on bare lichen just outside the door, the Carpet splitting around it. The spider on top stood languidly, waved her forelegs around enigmatically, and stepped off the cart, walking backward into the room from which hundreds of shining eyes regarded him. He had been unable to close the inner doors again; this place was entirely theirs now.
     Jae staggered to his feet before too much could climb onto him. He was outdoors again in unfamiliar territory, and no matter how paradoxically safe he felt after the ordeal in the spider room, he was most definitely in immediate danger. He struggled out of the sleep sack, and after seeing how thoroughly entombed it had become in amassed webbing and trash, nearly abandoned it, but deeply instilled instincts of resource management spurred him to tie it to the back of the cart instead.
     Now that Jae was underway again he could feel every ache and pain of his previous journey. His legs were still a bit wobbly at first but gained strength as he went, wincing at the now-familiar chafings and pinches of the suit. Eventually he found his pace, moving down-slope through the algae-globe jungle, legs swinging in the familiar long-walk stride: a jerk and shuffle at the start to shake off the ground creatures, a long swing, foot slamming down to incapacitate whatever wasn’t fast enough and to jolt off whatever had come along for the ride. According to the journal, it wasn’t far now. The ground was rising again; there should be a hill, and then a long sloping trip down to the river again, which curved here and almost met itself. Where that happened, there would be a soggy plain and beyond it an artificial lake, and at the edge of that… the home of his ancestors.

     Spiders worked tirelessly all around him now, building expanses of air-trapping, glossy web. Floating fortresses, these colonies could travel quite a distance if they got into the occasional open channels between the great algae globes. Now, though, they gummed up his legs, so recently cleaned of webs, and his face-screen began to feature tiny dancing, angry arachnids trying with their gesticulations to intimidate him and drive him away. Jae laughed out loud, brushing at them.
     As the gloom reasserted itself, Jae browsed on the dried vegetation and jerky he’d stuffed into the front of his mask. The ground was rising again, the towers merging. He was back to mulling over what kind of reception he could expect. He knew that their philosophy had been one of total exclusion; they were building an isolated world in there and they might not welcome visitors even after all this time had passed. Might not be willing to open the door, especially for the descendant of the guy who took all their vehicles and half their scientific equipment. But if they did – what would they think of Jae’s people now? Would they mock their failures or embrace their innovations?
     They had learned so much. Eschewing the exclusionary isolationism of their counterparts, the attempts to keep lines of food mammals alive inside, the plant farms, rejecting the idea that co-existence was impossible, they’d learned to extract vegetable matter, antibiotics, glue, psychedelics, and the range of behavior controls that kept what was left of outdoor mankind alive from the arthropods themselves, from the native algaes and fungi and molds. Great-etc.-Grandfather had insisted that this was the only way left to make a go of it, the only way to keep humanity, the sole surviving vertebrate species, alive.
     What would their life be like? If their way had been the correct one, they could be thriving in there. Machines maintaining vents rising from the lake waters, bringing in fresh air and stopping the heat, the worst of the other greenhouse effects, the bugs. Fresh mammal meat every day, and plant salads.
     His mistaken ancestor had called them crazy, had told them that their hydroponics, their solar panels, filters, patrols, deep-gas-well forges, and genetic screening, their hopes for a space program, would all be nothing against the rise of the arthropod. That the only way humans could hope to survive would be to learn to live in, to live with, the new world, like primitives if necessary. They laughed at him, and he left, and because he had been a world leader when those had last had relevance, several tens of thousands fled to his beacon when his party reached the caves.
     Their long-planned flight made away with the vehicles, with kilometers upon kilometers of wire, with medicines and tools for glassblowing, with metal spades and axes, with plastic mugs and light bulbs and bees. They ran and until they made the mesa they were convinced that the humans they had left behind would open fire on them with the long-distance projectile weapons which still existed then.
     Jae stopped suddenly, going cold. Did they still? What if they could see him coming? What if they could see him right now? What did a projectile feel like if it hit you? Did you know it was coming? Something grabbed him by the leg and he shrieked.
It was a bog lion, a far cry from its tiny ancestor the antlion, pale against the dark waters and the flies and the muck. Jae had only seen shells. He thrashed backward, shouting, stabbing at it with his stick. It was trying to drag him under the surface; he was already half-supine, one hip deep in the sludge. This was one of the things that could open his suit and he was near panic, sobbing for breath, trying to get the point of his stick between its jaws. This was a big one, probably almost ready to transform to the benign night-crawling adult form. Its ancestors had flown but they had grown too large for that; an adult’s wings were vestigial now.
This thing could kill him in several ways. It could bite through the carapace armor itself, probably, and it could easily pierce a seam. Its venom wouldn’t kill him on its own but would render him temporarily helpless, and that was the same thing. It could pull him under the mud where he would suffocate. It could tear the suit by dragging pressure alone, like Stephen’s leg, and if he couldn’t get it patched quickly, he would be eaten alive by hordes of tiny animals. He pounded at its head with the point of his stick, and it shifted its grip. The pressure on his leg was getting so high he was afraid the limb would break. He felt one of the millipede plates splinter.  And then everything went crazy.
     Somewhere in the maelstrom of whirring green wings and splashing, Jae felt the pressure on his leg release and he sloshed backward, instantly aware that he could feel a splash of water directly on his skin, and a sharp pain. Screeching in panic, he clawed for the patch kit in a pouch at his waist, not taking his eyes off the fight. The lion had Geoff by one leg and was trying to drag him, but Geoff, in the methodical way of his kind, had bent elegantly forward and was chewing the lion’s head off.
     Picking out pieces of broken shell to expose the area, Jae found the tear in the suit very quickly and shuddered with relief. It was small enough to seal with one large beetle wing cover. He saw red in there but he wasn’t dizzy, there was no burning sensation; apparently he was scratched or cut, not bitten. He went a little nuts with the fear glue but forgave himself under the circumstances. When he was again able to look up, Geoff was wandering in contented circles, holding the lion’s body and occasionally ripping a mouthful of meat from the hole where its head had been. Limping badly, Jae carried on.

any kind.
     Life here in the lowlands was shockingly prolific. Predators and scavengers crawled all over him, testing the seals of his suit. Nervous, he looked for Geoff, and found him standing twitchily a way off, waiting for Jae to do something. The number and size of the insects around them was becoming alarming. Geoff jerked and leaped suddenly, flying briefly to clatter down closer to Jae. His legs were covered with small animals, and Jae could see them gnawing at him anywhere they could get a purchase.
     This was it, then – Jae wouldn’t force the mantis to accompany him any further. Fighting back tears he walked to him, ran his hands over his carapace in farewell. Broke a go-away bar and waved it all around Geoff’s spiracles, smearing the sticky liquid onto his wing casings and forelegs, finally giving the bar to him to taste. The insect would drift off now, the go-away smell agitating him and gradually erasing the training and imprints of the last three years. By the time the smell wore off completely, Geoff would have returned fully to the wild.
     Jae entered a sort of walking fugue now. Competing waves of stink-bug communication washed over him and he lost track of time. It rained again, and he nearly forgot to re-coat his suit. Interconnected termite towers such as he’d never seen rose to three and four times his height here. The world was lattice, draped with assorted webbing and struggling prey. He traipsed through it all blindly, instinctively, brushing away streamers of web, ignoring the enraged psychedelically-colored spiders. All around him, termites were repairing rain damage, pasting gummy soil in layers, chasing off wasps and other scavengers trying to enter through the breaches. His leg was heavy and burning now. He thought maybe he had a fever.
     Jae had never seen this many animals. He could see no fundamental surface to anything, no un-moving point in the entire landscape. The air was suffused with them; eventually, his eyes decided they actually comprised meta-shapes, made up the fabric of the world itself. Their bodies weighted him into a form not human. He'd had to abandon the cart, rendered spherical by the accumulated bodies, and carried now only sealant gels, medicines, fear spray, smoke bombs. A bandoleer of water bottles. He wore the shield shell on his back and hoped it might help save his life. Gradually the towers grew shorter again and the ground grew stonier, until finally he exited the termite city proper and stood above the building, if such it could still be called. Jae stared down at two seething acres of carapace.
     He threw a smoke bomb, watching, hypnotized, the explosion of life forms away from it. A cone-shaped spiral formed over the spot immediately, predators skirting the edge of the cloud looking for stunned insects. Shortly, adventurous animals tested the ground-hugging vapor cloud’s limits. The circle of somewhat bare groundcover lichen became a polygon as insects accepted the new feature, racing in straight lines across its edges. He started across.

     As it played out, Jae hadn’t needed to explore in much detail. It had been enough to see the steady retreat of half-finished barricades and the last chamber, with evidence of living conditions appallingly primitive by Jae’s standards. If they’d had the knowledge accumulated by his people, they probably would have lived, but instead, when their ways had failed, they’d been reduced to literal fire-walls and smashing weapons. They had made many mistakes. It was clear they’d retreated to the part of the structure immediately around the generators and ventilators a very long time ago, had lived in suits twenty-four hours a day for years, would have suffered the associated fungal infections and flesh rot. Their suits had been made of some sort of synthetic material similar to the clothing in the shelter, and all of it, chewed into tiny, precise shapes and glued in geometric patterns with spit over the generations, was now now lining the walls of a massive wasp nest engulfing one corner. Time and building insects had rearranged their bones into a kind of art. Judging from their condition, the last of these people must have died a long time before he was born. None of the bones he could see were those of children; he wondered how long ago they had stopped having any.
     Jae, reeling now with fever from the building infection in his leg and bereft of any way to remove the suit, dragged himself through the ground floor of the place in amazement, blown away by the things they had done wrong and the things they had left behind.

     He knew that in this entire city-fortress there was only one thing of real value to his people: the place itself. The extensive, metal-walled labyrinth that had housed his ancestors. Damaged, heat-buckled in places (which is how he’d got in), no longer hermetically sealed, it was nonetheless reparable. The stilled fans were in nearly working condition, just needing the encrusted detritus of decade after decade after decade of arthropodal colonization to be cleared by hand, the electric generators lacking only insulation for the wires, de-rusting, a few new parts which could be smithed in no time with the nearly automated forges lying idle here, powered by the reservoir of natural gas tapped by the installation.
     This was the message Jae painted in brightly colored fear-gel on the walls, on his suit, on pieces of shell to leave along the way because he knew he wouldn’t make it all the way back. Both parties had been right, and both had been wrong.

     When finally, watching a spectacular sunset from just within the doorway of the wolf spider nest where he knew his body would be coincidentally defended from scavengers, where he knew his people would come following the journal’s directions as he had, clutching his shield shell daubed with an abbreviated account of his journey and findings, Jae closed his eyes, it was in the knowledge that his people would have a chance now. Their hard-won skills, inadequate as they were for their own homeland, could keep them alive here long enough to use them well. The human species could find hope again.