Iecka feels an itch under her mask. Right in the middle of her labrum, where her maxillary palps can’t quite reach. She sighs, and lifts a dactyl — a thick one at the end of her raptorial foreleg — and slips it beneath the silk to scratch. It breaks protocol, yes — but she looks down at her patient, and she dares the unconscious, practically rotting form to report her. If he could, he would, she was sure; Iecka recalls the disgust on his withdrawn palps when he had first seen her yellow and black chitin.
Meanwhile, her other raptorial foreleg — augmented with endowments — rests on his sickly-thin abdomen. Near the base of her tarsus, a tentacle grows out, its texture like a sclerotized fungus. It’s pointed like a needle, and pierces a soft part of the patient’s chitin. The vesper-grown appendage is sensitively lined with micronodules and hairs, and, when it’s plunged inside the flesh, she can taste the patient’s coagulating hemolymph better than the inside of her own mouth.
This means she feels when the patient’s heart stops, and it’s a relief. She sighs, and all but yanks out her rhizoneedle.
Her other tarsus is withdrawing a pen and she begins to write a report, as well as a note of clipped pleasantries to be delivered to — she glances at the patient information — the wife. Idly, she licks the lingering droplets of hemolymph from her rhizoneedle.
Flavor hits different when it’s not coming through endowments. The bitter, crawling taste of ichor is less enticing on her natural receptors, but she’s used to that. She wonders whether this hemolymph carries any of the soulbleed that led to the patient’s — heh, former patient’s — stopped heart. She wonders whether her immune system — the overworked, hypertuned immune system of a practicing hemotechnic — is enough to rebuff it. She wonders whether, if it isn’t, she’ll get to spend the rest of her excursion to this backwater failtown in sick leave. The prospect of devising a cure to a disease while it proliferates within her sounds like the sort of challenge Iecka hasn’t seen enough of this month. Better than all the stale hours spent in this hospital.
On her way out of the room, she flips the card beside the door from red (‘critical’) to black (‘deceased’). Her timing was just right: she hears the distance chime of the town bell, and knows it’s time to break for lunch.
Iecka strolls down the hall, her tarsi quiet on the banestone floor and her antennae engulfed in the twin smells of nerve-rotted flesh and the bright, bitter chemicals of hemotechnics desperate to assuage the former. It’s the smell of a struggling hospital. Or is it struggling, when they’ve already lost? This town can’t last the year, given the hundreds of mantes that have or will be churned through this building, dead or forever crippled by soulbleed.
All this effort, and is it more than just practice for her peers, those fresh blood hemotechnics experiencing their first lives saved and lost? It was practice Iecka would rather get in a city, where the people have respect for vesperbanes and there’s more than two things do with your free time.
Three turns down the corridors of the schoolhouse-turned-hospital takes Iecka to the lunchroom. She holds the door open for an exiting nurse as she scans the room for familiar faces.
A high voice calls out from behind her, aggressive scraping palps. “There you are, wretch! I expected you wouldn’t stay with your assigned patient, and I was right. What are you doing taking lunch already?”
If you listened to her supervisor, you’d think Iecka never did any work.
She turns around slowly, doing her best not let arch-fiend Glaike see her antennae twitch. Iecka has to look up to meet the imago’s gaze. “Code black, madam. Heart stopped.”
“I don’t trust your judgment. I swear it’s every day now a code black sits right back up, brain damaged but still breathing. You wretches need to double check your work.”
Iecka doesn’t say, I wonder whose job it is to make sure we get it right the first time. Just barely. “Understood, madam. Is there anything else?”
“Yes, a new patient in one of the just-emptied rooms. Floor 3, room 12. Medium-high priority, won’t last the night without help but should be an easy save, even for someone of… your caliber.” Her caliber. As if she wasn’t the most talented hemotechnic in the building. Including Glaike.
“Work. I love work,” she says. “Will get on it right after lunch. I assume the other patient I had had scheduled for this isn’t my responsibility anymore?”
“Seeing to them can be shifted down to this evening.”
“Wonderful.” Iecka watches the arch-fiend nods and start to turn, and almost restrainedly asks, “I assume I’ll get something for the extra work?”
“We’ll see.” That is a yes — Glaike hates giving a straight yes.
Iecka lets the lunchroom door bang shut behind her, and, after a serving male passes her a plate of black sludge, with sides of badly fermented pollen and bland nuts, she sets off for a certain table by the window. Two mantes sit there, and a third stands paces away. Like her, both of them have welkinmarks on their forehead. On the left, a pale red nymph wears wide-sleeved robes that cover her raptorials. On the right, a purplish nymph sits, wearing nothing but an identifying antennae-band and a short dress over her abdomen.
They both have the look of vesperbanes already. The purple one wears a mask even here in the lunchroom, and rather than the disposable ant-spun masks most wore, hers is expensive and spider-woven. She wears it to hide the tumors on her labrum — long, discolored things. At least they’ve stopped growing. The red one, meanwhile, is wearing so many layers because she is covered in fur.
There was some humor to be found in how a skilled hemotechnic could regenerate from most injuries. Instead of wounds, the relics of harm were those mutations and cells gone wrong.
“Iecka,” Purple greets.
“How goes the fight against soulbleed?” the red one asks.
“It goes on. Enervate conduction is always a damn chore. I miss dealing with the withering affliction, patients were always more manageable, when they were already half dust.”
“You… you’ve dealt with blood plagues before?” Neither of her friends had spoken. It was the third mantis, paces away from the table, tapping dactyls together and glancing furtively up. Her chitin is a plain green, and she stands shorter than anyone else present. She doesn’t have a welkinmark.
“A few. It never becomes less of a drag.”
Her maxillae go wide, and she lavishes Iecka with a reevaluating glance (and perhaps another, where she finally notices her yellow and black chitin).
Is she impressed? Good, Iecka is an impressive mantis. She peers closer at the newcomer, considering the way she must have been waiting there for several moments. Working up the courage to ask to sit down?
“Hey,” Iecka says, looking her up and down. “What was your name?”
“Neme.”
“Ah, Neme.” Iecka nods. “Hey, Glaike was looking for you earlier. Said there’s a patient on the third floor, room twelve, you need to see immediately.”
“B-but I’ve just come down for lunch.”
“Sorry, just how these things go sometimes.”
Neme hadn’t been holding her head high to begin with, but it is entirely slumped now. “I’ll get on it.”
“Do good work, alright? I don’t want to have to clean up after you.”
As the green mantis trudges off, Iecka turns back to her friends.
“That was your patient, wasn’t it?”
“Was, yeah.”
“I don’t know how you’ve gotten multiple blood plague assignments when you don’t work and don’t give half a fuck.”
“I have a way of convincing people,” she says with a bright smile in her maxillae.
The purple one nods. And she would understand; like Iecka, she was a clan’s bane. Clan Vestiga. As far as Iecka knows, they don’t have any special bloodline magics, but they do trace their lineage back before the Third Dominion, which was notable. Not impressive — Iecka’s clan descended from the angels of Oosifea herself, all the way back in the Second Dominion — but it was notable.
“Convincing people? You ask for plague work?”
“…Yeah.”
“Why.”
“Personal reasons. Don’t worry about it.”
Red is waving for attention, and she returns to an old topic. “You realize she works harder than any of us?” she asks. “She would have to, for her to make it this far. She tends to patients first thing in the morning and late into the night. A little — mean, to pile more work on top of her.” Her voice was flat. Red’s expressions always seemed a bit muted, because she never moved her antennae. Iecka wondered if she could.
She shrugs elegantly. “Sure, she’s made it this far, but she’s not cut out to make it much farther. Better she burns out now than later. I’m doing her a favor.”
Red looks like she wants to say more, but doesn’t. “Whatever. Speaking of burning out, I’m seriously feeling the strain of this constant bloodwork, and more patients are piling in everyday. You wouldn’t know what it’s like, Iecka, but it sucks when you’re worn to the point that you’re still doing work in your dreams.” She lets out a grand sign.
Iecka waves her off. “Don’t worry, it’ll be over in a week or two.”
“How can you tell that?”
“Like you said, more patients keep piling in. It’s got to the point where we’ve started having to turn people away because the hospital’s at max capacity. We can’t contain it any more. Won’t be long before central gives up, we pull out, and they call in the vindicators to bleach it.”
“Don’t say that.” It was a whisper.
“Calling it like I see it.”
“Then how am I supposed to keep working if it’s not going to mean anything?”
A single laugh slipped out of Iecka before she stopped herself. “If you’re struggling with a little pointless work, you don’t want to hear what I think of the odds you’re going to last another year in this field.”
“Do you have to disparage everything just to feel a little better?”
“No, but it helps.” Iecka pushes aside her plate, which she’d finished in between all this talking. She looks to see Red is only one quarter done (eating under a mask was slow), and purple had nothing in front of her.
“Eaten already?” she asked.
“I’m not hungry.”
Iecka sighed. She knew purple’s parents were merchants, and they’d sold her as tribute. She wouldn’t have any money to spend except the stipend from the stewartry.
Iecka reaches into her robes’ pocket, pulling out gleaming white bone pieces. Three of them clink down in front of the purple mantis.
“Here, go get yourself something.” It was more than enough to buy a few meals, and not nearly enough for Iecka to notice the difference.
“I appreciate this, but—”
As a way of counteracting the prideful refund she knew was coming, Iecka stands and turns to walk away. She’d have no choice but to keep the money.
A few corridors walked and turns taken outside the lunchroom, Iecka was walking through the lobby where lay workers were triaging sickly incoming mantes. She walked on through without anyone giving her a second glance.
Just outside the door a vindicator stands guard in reflectionless shadowsteel mail armor. Iecka is torn between the twin impulses, both natural to a vesperbane in face of a vindicator, of moving slow and non-threateningly, and getting out of their sight as quickly as possible.
“Halt, wretch.” The imago stares her down, a raptorial already resting on the hadle of their hammer. “I know you. Hemotechnics should be tending to the patients. That’s what you’re here for.”
“Something came up and my patient was rescheduled to the twelfth hour, later this evening. You can ask Glaike herself.”
“I am beyond sure it wasn’t rescheduled so you could go traipising around town.”
“I’m sure you’re sure, but your overconfidence doesn’t mean you know my schedule better than I do. You’re wasting my time, and I don’t get paid to get things through the thick skulls of vindicators.”
“I expect you back well before the twelfth hour. I’m remembering this, you little wasp.”
“Aww, that’s what my mommy calls me.”
The vindicator starts to unbelt her hammer, and that’s when Iecka decides it’s time to move on.
The school (now, hospital) has an extensive grounds to pass before you got to the town streets. Iecka cuts a path that winds along the building and passes by the old training yards.
The training yards are fenced in with a barricade made of farmed silk tied into a sort of thick net. At one end it attaches to the hospital, and on the other it attaches to the chitin-bark of a locust-leaf bush (a “bush”, with a trunk as tall as a church. Common names are so stupid).
She would have kept walking, but there’s a figure in the training grounds, a few black nerve crystals on the ground beside them. Their legs are folded beneath them, and their foretarsi are forming vesper-instructing signs. Every so often, a large black circle will form in the air in front of them, black strands connecting it back to the mantis and feeding it more black mass. And then the circle will explode, some of it landing on the mantis, and some on the dirt of the training ground. You can see dark tracks melted into the dirt where the blackness must have landed before.
Iecka watches them form another black circle — orb, she told herself it was an orb, but it has no shadows or form to speak of. Like all enervate, it looks like a lightless hole in the world.
No one watching would be impressed by how Iecka, in the span of a second, leaps four meters high into the air, pausing among the branches of the “bush” and her claws scratching the chitin-bark before she lauches violent off and flips in the air and lands inside the fenced training grounds, the locust-leaf swinging in the air behind her.
(They would be impressed to learn she did this without any augmented muscles or enervate-propulsion. Between the hypertension and the precise blood control that comes with being an advanced hemotechnic, Iecka is able to manipulate blood pressure into the hemocoels of her legs to grant her a hydraulic boost; none of her endowments are specifically for enhanced physical motion, the way a combat-focused vesperbane’s might be.)
The orb-creating mantis is so deeply focused that they do not register Iecka’s approach, or they deliberately ignore it.
That lasts until she slices down with a tarsus covered in her own black secretions. She hits one of the black strands the mantis uses to feed the black orb, and severs it.
This time, instead of exploding, it collapses or implodes, forming a dark puddle on the ground below. The mantis dips a tarsus to recover the wasted enervate.
Their mandibles are grinding as they stridulate. “Do you have a single reason for interrupting my practice? I’m having a lot of trouble here.”
Iecka regards the mantis. The clue to who they are is on the antennae-band they wear, a cloth suspended between the two appendages. It has a trio of emblems that all but identify them: on the left, the mantis with a single wing on just one side, and mismatched antennae — one with the linear anatomy of a lady and the other is the fluffy, feathery length of a male (this is the symbol of the Pantheca of All Mantiskind); on the right, there is a sword crossing with a spike-lined tentacle (symbol of the Vesperbane Wardens); and largest and centermost, a mountaintop bleeding (for their country: the Land of Mountains).
What was a warden doing here? “Are you supposed to be some kind of defense?”
The mantis cringes, antennae falling back behind them. “Yes, but I’m off duty right now. Don’t tell me something came up.”
“Nah, nothing came up.”
“Then why are you bothering me?”
Iecka points a tarsus at the puddle of enervate, which had shrank but not disappeared. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to create a first-order condensation orb. Again, can you answer my question?”
“Ah, neuroconjuration. I was curious what you were doing.”
“Why don’t you go back to cooking potions or whatever it is bloodbanes do? You can’t hope to understand the delicate umbral physics that goes into something like this. You’re ruining my concentration.”
“Could you try to form one again for me?”
“Why—”
“What, too scared you’ll fail again?”
“I’m learning. Of course there’s going to be false starts.”
“Just do it, you little larva.” Iecka steps to the side, putting as much of her as she can behind the warden. It was their blindspot, but she didnt care if they saw her.
The mantis sighs, and turns back to focus on what their tarsi are doing. They’re anxiously making signs, and it takes a minute before the flow of black nerve begins again, and the dark circle begins to form.
It’s another thirty seconds before the thing explodes again. None of the flying globules land on Iecka, standing safely behind them as she is.
She taps her labium with a tarsus.
“Don’t make that face like you have anything to think about. This is advanced enervate manipulation, far beyond whatever they taught you before realizing you weren’t cut out for it.”
“The problem is,” she started, “you have to form the zeta-nrv bilayer after the core has stabilized from partial neurolysis. Yes, it lets a little bit of ambient enervate in, but the way you’re doing it means that the iota-nrv calcination is going to attack the bilayer as well, and ionize it. And then you’ll end up with hydroxide as well as a compromised membrane. Between the build up of negative charge and the physical catalyst you’ve created, it’s no wonder the thing keeps exploding.” Iecka pauses to give them a look. “You don’t feel the hydroxide landing on you? Didn’t your teacher ever tell you if it hurts you’re doing something wrong?”
“I don’t think you can just—”
“Try it, please.”
They toss their antennae, but they ready their raptorials and begin to channel the enervate again.
This time, there’s a moment where the orb wavers and goes misty at the edges before the outline grows solid. It collapses later, but that takes a full minute.
“Wow, that — that actually helped. What the heck.”
“I’m not a bloodbane because enervate equations are too scary for me, I’m a bloodbane because the simplicity bores me. If that were ichor you were trying to manipulate, there would be a different reason for it exploding every time.”
The mantis gives her a long look. “Are you some kind of genius? You can’t be any older than me. You look an instar younger.”
“I get that a lot. You can believe I’m just a genius, if it makes you feel better.”
“It makes me feel worse. You aren’t even an enervate specialist.”
“I couldn’t be, in a clan like mine.”
They give a meaningless grunt.
On a nearby trading post, Iecka sees the mantis has a cloak made of some common setae. Yet he’s already wearing leather wardens armor. “What’s with the cloak?”
“Helps when I’m going into town. I have the wretched raptorials and it — avoids some mean looks and judgments if I’m not obviously a vesperbane.”
“Could I… borrow it?” Iecka looks down at her yellow and black striped chitin. “I’m recognizable as a vesperbane too.”
“Your name?”
“Iecka.”
They smile. “Funny, given your clan. Yes you can, but if I don’t get it back, I will find you.”
“Wonderful.”
The region around the town bulges with more hills than pus-filled cysts on a plaguespitter’s thorax. From a distance these rises are hairy with metataxites and locust-leaf bushes and sundew corals and on occasion steadfast trees will rise up, lingering like relics. All of it is wet too, the air thick and humid below clouds that micturate into creeks and settle into ponds which are like mosquito brothels. The source of it is a kilometers-distant salt lake, whose perspiration carries on eastward winds and gets trapped in a particular way that has fog bearing down more days than not. The sunlight falls vaguely through all of this and illuminates the land in a stark, desaturated light. It’s this sight that greets anyone advancing along the road into Linhem’s Mistmill, a town dying as they watch.
Walking through the empty, enshrouded streets, Iecka is run through with the slow, intense feeling that mantid claim on this land is being washed away like a mold. Signs fall apart in wear and rot. Uncorrected, the dirt roads crawl with onyx-colored vines and clonal weeds, and they seem shiny in the fog. No distant sounds of life reaches her, any noise engulfed and rendered mute in the heavy air.
This town lies in the grip of something deeper and ulterior, like a debt collector arriving at last to extract their due. Fittingly, Iecka stands at a familiar distance, and observes the transaction. After all, the cudgel and whip of taxladies or loanmongers is a sight no one goes without seeing in the heartlands.
It’s these long, protracted moments that pass before Iecka sees another mantis. They are leant against a wall inside a building with no door in the entryway or glass in the windowframes. Wind blows dust and pollen inside and they sit there, a pile of dirty brown chitin clad in rags. She briefly wonders if they are some worthless drunk before she hears the grind and squish that is characteristic of untended cadavers.
Iecka’s spent enough time tending to this latest blood plague to know being dead wouldn’t necessarily stop it from getting back up, but that’s made unlikely by the detritivores she can hear.
Corpse slugs have special beaks for cracking open chitin and, once inside, they like to lick you clean of muscle and fat, scraping and ripping at the flesh with radulae textured like sandpaper. Their young, pliant bodies can then squeeze around the less tasty organs, which have grown soft and sloppy in decomposition.
Her stride veers closer to the building. She knows that in the slugs’ midgut microbiome, there is a strain of bacteria that makes a useful enzyme; and she knows that the slugs’ flighted, sexually mature lifestage has a particularly sensitive olfactory tentacle that can be repurposed in an ichor-fixation; and last of all, the prospect of not even killing and harvesting the creatures, but gently plucking one out, perhaps along with a bloody chunk of mantis to sustain it? She could keep one as a simultaneous experiment and pet. It would avail the stale hospital hours, at least; snailflies can’t compare to wasps, no, but Iecka can appreciate them nonetheless.
But she stops. Back at the school-turned-hospital, the vindicators repeatedly ransack the students’ rooms in their periodic searches for contraband, and she knows those zealous brutes would not understand or appreciate any exotic chemicals or strange pets, not if they’re in possession of a vesperbane. And vindicators are distressingly stubborn in the face of her well-reasoned persuasion.
She scratches under her mask again, and walks on, raptorials clenched.
She doesn’t advance six steps before her thoughts return to an old track; she casts her eyes over the town before her, once more inclined to see it like a bankrupt gambler or pauper, head under heel of a creditor who applies force, like enough of it will extract their owed sum instead of just more blood.
Iecka is one who witnesses this as a third party, always. But how different is it — at its core, it’s action compelled by force — from what the vindicators inflict on her?
It’s a thought that stops Iecka. She is not a peon to be pressed this way or that by the will of those above her. She is descended from the angels of Oosifea. Few are above her, and certainly not a bunch of vesperless vindicators.
She doubles back, slipping into the doorless building. Her antennae do not curl as she nears the rotting body; something as inert as a smell certainly doesn’t have that power over her.
Up close, the corpse slugs are seen as much as heard, admittedly as only subtle bulges and shifts of the body. She can tell from the rather subdued level of activity (it’s not yet a writhing, squirming mass), as well as a confluence of other olfactory and visual tells, the body is freshly dead, in the bloated stage of decomposition, enough that she can reach into its darkened, burst-open eyes and — there. Corpse slugs will lay their eggs in a singular mass that looks like frothing bubbles. Iecka scoops up a few that must have been stranglers or newcomers, just enough the egg-mass covers the tip of her dactyl, and produces a ripped off scrap of paper to wrap it up, gently drops it into her bag. The eggs will keep longer than a larva, she decides — as exciting as a live, wriggling specimen would be.
She walks away, and she thinks, and these lines of thought weaves into plans and contingencies for hiding this from the vidicators, and escaping the consequences of discovery. It’s enough to have her maxillary palps shiver in delight.
The next mantis she meets is huddled in a narrow alleyway, moaning and dripping black like one in the throes of soulbleed. This sight comes not long after the last mantis, and the signs of uninhabited desolation have also receded. As the hemotechnic walks towards the center of the town, it begins to look like a place mantes live.
Really, this is all just a consequence of the route she took. Her way in had wound through the woods at the edge of town and detoured through this crudely-maintained neighborhood of ill-repute. It’s the sort of district that does not feel the tramp of guards’ boots, and is neglected by the shifty hands that rake in bodies for the in-training hemotechnics to attend.
It’s the sort of route that Iecka expects to leave her nice and unbothered by civilians. She would see fewer mantes, and those few were likely to be more… interesting. A welcome refresher from stale hospital hours.
She is drawn over at first by the smell of mantes that stink, but in an… alive sort of way. As she approaches, the draw instead becomes a tall sign that tells of a place called Westcreek Truck n Barter.
If these last few streets she’s dragged herself through is Westcreek, she decides this is a patch of town gone feral. The inhabitants strewn along the streets sit huddled insensate (strychnine or alcohol, probably), or walk past her with avoidant eyes — which is all to say, they are largely docile — but she has spotted, with a bit of distaste, roaches chittering and picking among the refuse, allowed to roam without a master. Twice she’s seen a black fungus crawling out of the ground — a growth that, had it occurred near the hospital, would see the surroundings drenched in acid, the earth burned and salted.
Of course, soon it will be clean when central sends in the pure vindicators. All of it will be.
A beggar crouching in front of the shop now reaches out for her as she passes. She does not look at them.
The bell on the door chimes as she enters, and a red mantis behind the counter nods with tired eyes. Red, with a welkinmark. She doesn’t look like the mantes that actually live here. But of course, how could you be, if you intend to run a shop?
She wanders the shelves a moment to get a sense of what’s here and what idiosyncratic order it’s all in. She has a simple goal, concerned with tracking down something more palatable than the thick black vesperlard that hemotechnics must subsist on at the hospital.
There are other patrons in the shop; a figure clad in centipede chitin; a mother and her child, both with thin, emaciated abdomens; and a green worker-roach sweeping the floors. All catch sight of Iecka striding swiftly in, taking stock of the shop with confident sweeps of her eyes. The chitin-clad mantis has a roguish profile, a face dark and purple, and she ensures their gaze lands on her.
Iecka is first to the counter with a few items: a small bee suspended in preservative slime and sealed in a container; a long cut of honeyloaf; and a bottle of oskeila. The latter she was shocked to find outside of a city shop stocked for vesperbanes. But the surprise is welcome, even if the predictable markup is not.
When the shopkeep gives the grunt of acknowledgement, the hemotechnic indulges in a subtle palp-smirk only she’s aware of. She’s deliberate in pulling her moneypouch out from her bag, and bone coins inside clink against each other.
She’s counting out coins before the red mantis ever states a price. And they dont get a chance to, before she stops and speaks.
“I’d say this is quite enough,” Iecka says, her voice tinged with the bright rasp that accents city-dwellers’ speech. Normally, she keeps it unnoticeable.
“Hardly,” comes the response. “Hardly at all. You think I cut you a deal that generous with the plague squeezing my throat like a vice? No, times is too tight.”
“I think four bone pieces is plenty.”
“Nine. I know you have enough, I can see it. Don’t be stingy, four pieces is tantamount to stealing.”
Iecka slowly pulls out four more coins to drop on the counter. She curls her maxillary palps up mirthfully, and at once collects her items to leave.
The shopkeep’s labials are scraping quiet and wordless, and they watch her leave with dark eyes, their antennae twisted up mean.
Outside, light is draining from the sky. The sun lowers without quite yet touching the horizon, but clouds have drifted in to obscure this fact, dulling the light that lingers.
If events unfold as she has envisioned (Iecka’s apprehension is too complex and subtle to be called mere calculation) she should be bringing with her more than just the food items in her bag.
(Admittedly, this strategy was more fitting for a spider than a wasp, but that which works, works.)
“Not the way it usually goes, to catch a lady like yourself in parts like these.” There’s enough enough menace in the scrape of their voice that their expected target is sure to stop in their tracks. Iecka does this merely out of courtesy. “You’ve got swagger like a cityshitter, and you sound like one too.”
A dark-purple mantis appears behind her, strides like lunges. They stomp a midtarsus down on one of her hindtarsi. They stab something sharp into the delicate hole of one spiracle. They say, “The question is, do you have the coins like one too?” It’s the centipede chitin jacket mantis. They must’ve skulked unseen in the mouth of an alley she strayed near.
Their insertion of knife to trachea is only gentle enough to avoid drawing blood, not to avoid drawing pain.
Pain, though, is a welcome friend of a hemotechnic like Iecka, and she would have laughed. But that would give the game away.
Yet in all honesty, Iecka is not one for playing pretend. She speaks at last. “For fairness’s sake, I think I should give you a few moments to start running.”
“What nonsense you on about? I’m not scared of your fake moxie.” Then, “Your pieces, now.” Words are emphasized with the knife. This time, blood is drawn. The flow is red, rather than green. Iecka can feel it and direct it, letting it crawl up the knife. If she wanted, it could be over now. But that’s no fun, is it? She leaves the red ichor to its own devices.
The genius hemotechnic turns around quick, the mugger’s knife drawing a sharp line across her soft abdominal chitin. She’s free to move, because they did not think to restrain her with a raptorial.
By now, they’re trying to rectify that. The spike-lined limb is flung out on a course for Iecka’s thorax. But she bats it away, and takes one step back.
“They really do make you stupid, out here in the country, don’t they? A plague-struck town that’s crawling with hemotechics from the college, and you think the first unfamiliar face you see is an easy mark?”
“A v-veebee?” The mugger takes a step back. But after a moment, courage finds them again and they brandish their knife, swinging it through the air in meaningless gestures. “Feh. Blood wretch or not, you’re still an easy mark. I can see it. You freaks and your freak powers aren’t going to do anything here. Bet you dont even do good doctorwork.”
Palps scrape against pars stridens in a wordless tsk, her only deigned response. Iecka thinks about making her move now, but the mugger is quicker. The knife has weight behind it, aiming for her eyes.
But the hemotechnic is quicker in reaction, head tilting out of the way. She swings her tibia at them in a precise swipe. Hits the intersection of prothorax with mesothorax, a soft part that can bleed.
(There are advantages to the long hours a hemotechnic spends staring at anatomical diagrams.)
The mugger lunges forward now, trying to get inside her guard. This close, a deft knife can do more than her long raptorials. Cunning fucker.
Iecka can still manage blunt force. Using the blood pressure trick, she extends a limb with hydraulic force. She hears thoracic chitin crack.
Mugger staggers backward. A tarsus rises to clutch at their injured thorax. She can hear the whine of palps striding unconsciously against labium.
Iecka steps forward, maxillary palps curling into a smug, mirthful pair. But it was a feint. Their knife-leg snaps instantly upward like a snake. They’re putting a lot behind it, and their maxillae are proudly gritted. They must think that speed is terribly impressive.
Iecka watches the blade stab upward, and there’s at least one surprise. It twists at the last moment, and goes right for her eyes. Into her eye.
She gasps abdominally, her first involuntary reaction this fight.
Almost unconsciously now, the hemotechnic flexes abstract muscles, staunching the eyeward flow of blood with internal constriction, and compelling her fluids to clot.
This’ll leave a scar, at least until her next moult, but hemotechnics are yearly left with worse disfigurements. Iecka does not care.
“I think,” she starts, her words leavened with raw inharmonic grit, “that it’s dangerous to let you keep that thing. You’ll make someone blind.”
“That’s the point, you freak.” Their eyes’ fovea is still trained on the wound just inflicted — taken aback by the lack of bleeding?
The purple mantis stabs again, and this time Iecka catches their leg in the air. She tries to pluck the blade from them, and they grip tighter, and she opts to actually apply force now, and the tool is wrenched from their grasp. She throws it carelessly to the ground.
Breathing heavily now, the mugger just stares at her with darkened eyes. Bravado gone, but a concoction of more wrath than sense keeps them rooted here and fighting.
“You’re a blight. You’re a leech sucking this country dry.” The mugger audibly spits.
Iecka decides now is the time to take off the warden’s cloak. Wouldn’t serve to get it dirty, after all.
“Wasp… bitch,” they say, on sighting her skin. But it’s not with the right emphasis. None of the dawning horror that ought to accompany one seeing her yellow and black chitin.
Unsurprising from an ignorant country louse. Iecka is not disappointed.
She surely has it in her to give her clan a proper introduction.
Iecka rises from where she deposited the cloak, turning her gaze back to the mugger. They flinch. But the disgusted curl of the palps that follows rules out a fear reaction — and then she feels it.
A sliming, congealing sensation in her eye. Her vespers’ leash on the red ichor has slipped just a bit, and it’s gone a little bit feral. The wound in her compound eye is dominated by a swelling growth of hyperactive flesh, a liquid tumor spilling out. The growth feels much larger than it is, owing to the fineness of her internal senses.
Iecka would have to end this soon, no more playing around.
“This is why you freaks will never burn in the welkin. Your bodies are perverted and ruined.”
“I’m bored now.” The hemotechnic leaps high above, vaulting over the mugger to land behind them, farther than she judged. Was the tumorous ichor clot getting to her already? An instinctual lunge makes up the difference, and her raptorials yawn open and wrap right around her prey in a natural motion.
She isn’t gentle in closing her vice-grip. She feels their green, vesperless blood spill out between her leg’s tubercules.
The mugger has one last surprise. A small makeshift knife, more of a shiv, was strapped in under their cloak. A lucky gambit sees them stab it right into the muscle whose contraction kept them constrained. Thus weakened, they are able to burst out of her grasp in a panic.
They abandon the shiv embedded in her leg, and she doesn’t remove it just yet.
“Let me show you something special,” Iecka says. She slowly reaches back over her abdomen, tarsus running along her hemotechnic uniform, and grasping the straps that hold her undergarment in place.
Like all females of her clan, Iecka wears bespoke terminalia sheaths, thick and tight and paranoidly secure.
Yet, it’s designed to be undone without need to remove the abdominal clothing that — conventionally — would cover the undergarment.
What’s underneath is something of hers that none but those in her clan had ever laid eyes on.
But it’s what everyone really sees when they glimpse her yellow and black chitin.
With a fluid motion, Iecka withdraws her long, sharp stinger. It drips with a single drop of fluid, dark green and terribly vibrant — a strain of living poison her clan cultivated.
“So it ain’t just looks. You really are a wasp bitch.”
“You haven’t heard tales of our clan?” Iecka asks, staring down at them. “Oosifea’s blades in the dark, the god-queen’s blackest interrogators and the connoisseurs of pain and punishment?”
“Are—” Their palps were getting jittery and stuttery in exhaustion. “Are you one of those old vermin clans?”
The mugger does not smirk, because if they did she would have ripped their palps off, grizzly in blood and sinew. Short of that, she tosses their shiv back at them and it scrapes along their eyes. Lacking her acquaintance with pain, they hiss out a cutting scream from their spiracles.
Distracted by their pain, they don’t flee Iecka’s approach. It gives her ample time to bear down on them, and she pierces their supple abdominal flesh with her stinger, their tight cuticle splitting under her ministrations. Following subconscious intuition, she navigates their internals and stops beside an aorta, a place to inject venom and swiftly reach the whole system.
They’ll be paralyzed, and this’ll be over.
The fight isn’t entirely out of the mugger just yet, though. Their raptorial foreleg is reaching blindly outward, grasping along the ground, in the direction she threw their knife. All the while they are writhing and struggling beneath her.
“I still have my stinger in you, you know,” she coos into their tympanum. “There’s a reason our clan name is spoken with so much dread. Want me to show you our secret technique? We simply call it… the ichneumon method.”
“I… don’t… give a fuck.”
“Here’s a hint,” she continues. “Our stingers? They’re modified ovipositors. Egg-layers. I could leave you with something… living, to remember me by. Want to be a mother for me?”
By now the venom has reached the extremes of their body. The low, unsteady scrapings of their palps could only be discerned as words by efforts Iecka did not find worth expending.
Without a vocal audience to react to her threats, there was no remaining need to entertain the idea of ovipositing. The obvious path of greatest return — dropping this thug off by some guard and collecting an appropriate reward — would not be served to find some of her spawn incubating in the body.
As the glistening-green stinger emerges from the puncture, Iecka regards her work. There’s a part of her hungry for victory, and it preens to see the blood and paralysis. There’s a part of her yearning for challenge that loathes that there was never any real danger.
Iecka picks up the body and sags under its weight. She walks off, and a dactyl traces the tumor on her eye.
“Where- where are you taking me?”
When the mugger comes to, the two of them several streets over, in a neighborhood with houses someone might actually pay to live in, and mantes braving the street, some even with masks. She carries the mugger slung between metathorax and abdomen, their raptorials tied together.
Iecka no longer wears the cloak. She figures it’ll avoid some questions if she’s visibly a vesperbane.
It also lets her avoid people — one look at her on the street sees so many passersby exploit any and every opportunity to avoid her.
Iecka takes a moment to bother responding. “Some guard, or anyone else who’ll pay to take you off my hands.”
“Pay? Telling me you’re doing this for coins? No fucking way you’re hurting for coins. No way whatever bounty I’ll get you matters. You were talking about clans?” They’re agitated enough she can feel them trying their bonds, but they’re not so weak as to break.
“Yeah, I don’t care about the money. But it’ll go down under my name, in my record. Might look nice. Might come in handy.”
“For what?”
Iecka shrugs in a way she’s sure the body she’s carrying can feel. She gestures. “Makes a good impression. Shows I’m useful.” Her words come slow, and there’s indefiniteness to them.
“Doing this, for maybes you can’t even tell me straight?”
“I do what vesperbanes are for. I enjoy what I do.” Iecka readjusts her grip on their body, tightens it.
“Let me go. If you just enjoys it, you’ve had your fun. Let me go.”
“No, I don’t think I will. You deserve this.” Iecka is holding them with her raptorials. She squeezes, and hears them hiss when her spines press against chitin. It flexes. It bends more than is tolerable.
“I’m trying to keep living. It’s a struggle, and you don’t know anything about it.”
Iecka lets the silence be her response. The conversation had begun to bore her.
“I don’t deserve this, you wasp bitch. You vesperbanes came into our town and brought everything to ruin. You trapised around my neighborhood like it was some kind of game.”
“You don’t think you were courting danger deciding to prowl around in a plague? I’m a countenanced blood doctor, you are not.”
“Plague? What, the lie you want us to swallow? The excuse for the syndics to wrest control of our town?”
“The syndic party, famously… not in control of the Pantheca of Mantiskind. Do I have that right?”
“Not in control as they like. No amount of control is enough for them. They’ll strap us down and plant worms in our brain to make us obedient little pawns. Make us sit and smile like roaches while the wingless hordes invade and defile our towns.”
“I’m not sure which is sadder, that you get your news from the fiction section, or that I have to listen to you vomit it back up.” Iecka could bring up the mass graves, explain how she could examine the genetics herself with her vespers. She didn’t feel like arguing with conspiracy, not seriously.
“You vesperbanes are pawns too, you know. You think they’ll stop with us pure folks? You’re stupid if you don’t see it.”
This time, Iecka’s squeeze is enough to draw more blood. She doesn’t let up until she can hear the mantis hissing for relief. “I’m not stupid.”
The eye-tumor is paining her still, and she decides now is time to crack open that bottle of oskeila she bought. Thought she’d be saving it for an occasion, but no.
The mugger is making some thoughtful noise like they’re capable of thought. “Mark my words. The more power you think you have, the more they’ll train their soulless little bat eyes on you.”
“Do vesperabats have eyes?”
“Rats. They’re like rats.”
“You’re like a rat, you know that?”
Before they can respond, Iecka’s stride is interrupted by something thunking on the ground just behind her.
“No! My pocketwatch!”
Iecka continues walking.
“Go back and pick it up, please!”
She wonders if they’re any closer to seeing a guard. The ones that are still around seem to patrol only the centers of town.
“My mother gave me that, please…”
“That’s some sour luck. Can I suggest not being a criminal next time?”
“Look, I’ll be quiet if you do.”
Iecka pauses her stride.
“Why should I trust your word?”
“I’m a pure blooded welkin, and you’re a wretch who cavorts will foul spirits. Ain’t it clear which of us has more honor?”
It was a small price for potentially infinite gain.
As Iecka is reaching down to grab at the pocketwatch, all goes wrong, and she grasps her mistake.
The mugger has another shiv on them, and they cut through their bindings. The hemotechnic’s moment of distraction, momentary loosening of grip, is enough for them to throw themself free.
They’re leaping for freedom, but Iecka can leap too. She could catch them in the air, but decides it amuses her more to soar high above them, airborne for unseen seconds, and then come down right in front of them, denying them escape.
“Are you going to add some pursuit to my hunt, I wonder?”
“You can play yourself as a mighty hunter, but don’t forget that you and your fancy vesperbane smarts got outdone by a ignorant countrymant like myself.” Their palps are curled awfully smug. “Are you a genius? Or are you just a wretched, stupid abomination?”
Iecka lunges right at them. They expected this; they dodge the side, which buys them more seconds of escape, and darkens the vesperbane’s eyes further.
But this engagement could only ever have a single conclusion, however it went.
When Iecka stands over the again-prone form of the mugger, it’s not paralysis keeping them down. She has snapped their legs. She’s punched their abdomen hard enough that all their breaths are coming ragged.
(Maybe it’s that her patience has ground down into nothing. Maybe the Oskeila and its depressants have finally been absorbed through the gastrointestinal lining and taken effect. Either way, there’s satisfaction in the contractions of her muscles that end with their cracked chitin and blood spilling. Visceral. The immediacy — always within reach — impresses upon her. It’s like an itch.)
The mugger speaks softly. They still manage to sound smug. “There is… one last thing you forgot.”
“What could I have forgotten, you worm?”
“An ee’dee.”
“What?”
“Aren’t you a learnéd vesperbane? How could you have not heard of an Ee’dee-ah?”
Iecka takes their third and final knife into a tarsi and drives into a leg and twists it. “What” — the knife goes deeper, to emphasize — “are you talking about?”
“An aedeagus up your gonopore you miserable cunt.”
Iecka’s eye-tumor twitches, blood pressure spiking enough to bleed. She feels that burn of oskeila. That itch in her muscles.
Later, when she’s calmed down and backing away from the corpse, their head is more of a puddle.
She lost control. Murder while she’s supposed to be duty definitely broke protocol.
She hopes no one finds it, and no one cares enough to divine the correct conclusion. This cost her the corpse slug eggs, and she had to risk upsetting her blood more by using a ichor-working to accelerate the natal slugs’ development — but the evidence should be all but gone by tomorrow.
If it all comes to worse, she could find some persuasion in her to change minds.
So long as it’s guards or fellow vesperbanes who find it, and not vindicators.
Iecka walks now on the wide, direct road that leads to the hospital. With every step, her head swims ever so slightly.
She walks past mantes, clothed both in rags and silks, trudging hopefully toward it. She passed the dejected ones who are being turned away due to overflow. Iecka hasn’t yet thrown the warden’s cloak back over herself. She needs a vesperbane’s intimidation to cut a quick path through this mass.
How was she going to find the warden and return the cloak? It’s been long enough that they’re sure to not be still out training, whether from exhaustion or schedule.
Did she need to return it? She could just toss it on the ground somewhere near the hospital and let things play out as they would.
By the entrance, a beetle-drawn carriage is pulled aside, emblazoned with the trademark of a company specialized in ichorslime preservatives. They were restocking the pantry! Would she finally be able to eat a meal whose centerpiece was something besides vesperlard?
Iecka’s palps curl into a smile, and she even lets out an uncharacteristic woop. She turns and regards with a glare any mantes surrounding her, that might’ve heard.
But no one is paying her any particular mind. She takes another swig of her oskeila. Oskeila was the venom of a particularly contumelious mosquito, one bold enough it could dare to feed on vesperbats. The shit smelled like poison, tasted like poison, burnt your throat like poison — but it hurts the ichor more than it hurts you. It had a kick, too. Something powerful enough to make vesperbats ease up.
Smiling, she strides into the doors of the hospital. The smile lasts a moment more, and then she’s greeted by the sight that bodes the worst for her — Glaike stood in the lobby, talking with one of the hospital staff.
Iecka stops her stride, and starts to walk backwards — bumping into sick mantes trying to get in. But, like the motion caught her eye, Glaike’s gaze spins around and lights on her.
“Wretch, I thought I assigned you a patient. What are you doing out?”
“Just stepped out for a fresh breath. I’ll get right back to my patient.”
“Just stepped out? Is that why I saw that n’winger in your room instead of you every time I checked this past hour?”
Glaike’s maxillae were spreading and she could see all their little sharp segmentations. The imago stood three heads taller than her.
Iecka was not intimidated. She shoves aside one of the patients, baring both of her raptorials at her superior. She loathes that she does not yet have wings to complete the threat display, but she does hiss a little.
It’s all very stupid. But the impulse to do it is bursting out of her. She has to scratch the itch.
The junior hemotechnic speaks. “So I enlisted a little help from someone with time to spare. Are you going to grab my cerci over that? You think having two mantes at work is going to make it take longer?” Iecka had perfected the soft, sliding tone of remark that would have most wondering if they really were the stupider party. Her palps were clumsy, but she manages.
Glaike takes a step forward, her antennae swishing in the air. “Is that oskeila I smell?” Her maxillae tighten. “No wonder you’re talking to me like you’re crazy.”
A few more steps, and the imago is looming above the nymph. “Good work ruining yourself for the rest of the day.” She snatches the unmarked bottle — and throws it against the wall, the remainder of the venom spilling onto the ground. She then looks down at Iecka, her palps scraping a harsh grunt, and the back of of her foretarsus smacks Iecka across the face. The sound fills the room for a moment.
Glaike turns and departs without another word.
When it came to sleeping arrangements, most of the hemotechnics were packed together like bees in a hive. The makeshift dormitories made Wardens’ barracks look like royal accommodations. And those staff less crucial than hemotechnics — the assistants and the males who were trained to clean up after hemotechnics, they didn’t even have that luxury, consigned to sleep in tents setup in the schoolyard.
The room Iecka lives in has a wide table adorned with books and tools. Centermost was a convoluted construct whose components looked equal parts petri dish and alembic — an essential device for ichorfermentation. Against one wall there is a looming wardrobe Iecka has stocked with the few bespoke outfits she brought out here with her, and several she’s found exploring the derelict buildings of the town. On the opposite wall there is a biolamp bathing the room in blue light.
The lamp is weak enough to leave part of the room in pure darkness.
But the most important feature of this room, far away from the one window, was a bed. Not a cot, not a mat, but something with actual bedding.
The existence of this room owes to several logistic and organizational mistakes. They were easy to perpetrate in her offtime (and sometimes on her ontime). Most of the staff couldn’t put a name to Iecka’s face, and when she swaps her hemotechnic robes for the utilitarian garb some of the secretaries wore, few paid enough attention to think twice. With all the pressure everyone was under, the reaction is relief, not suspicion, when a bright-face nymph comes to you offering to deliver messages and go over patient accountings.
When the documents even acknowledged this room existed, it always went down as in various states of inaccessibility. There was a black mold that needs to be bleached. The ceiling is partly collapsed and needs repair. There’s already a patient assigned to this room. Vindicators have booked it for classified purposes. N/A, reason unspecified.
Iecka enters with heavy, stomping footsteps, and slams the door behind her. She can practically still hear Glaike’s words echo in her head. In her mind, Glaike is still talking, and her words grow toxic, fermenting in her head.
“Good work ruining yourself for the rest of the day,” becomes “Good work ruining yourself for life.”
“No wonder you’re talking to me like you’re crazy,” becomes “No wonder you’re crazy.”
“Is that why the n’winger in your room is doing better work than you?”
“Is that failure I smell?”
She was in the lobby. There were patients and staff who saw what happened. She can still feel their gazes on them. The sensation washes across her cuticle and it burns and it crawls.
She does not move. But she is not paralyzed, she can’t be.
In her mind, that last moment with Glaike recurs again and again. It doesn’t always stop with a slap. There’s a certain inevitability to the events marching further forward. It becomes like the violence more characteristic of her former supervisors. Sometimes she tries to fight back, and then her imagined Glaike truly fights, and she stands as much of a chance as the mugger had against her.
She is one who witnesses this as a third party, always. As the scene recurs this becomes true, and she becomes one of those anonymous gazes watching Iecka lose to Glaike, those gazes which are expectant and impelling.
When she again feels her body, and sees the room around her rather than imaginings, the helplessness is replaced with a terrible potential. Iecka knows where her supervisor sleeps. She imagines standing over her paralyzed form and enacting the ichneumon method — and then, when she again stands with a crowd around her, her spawn would burst in blood and hunger from Glaike’s abdomen and she would win.
She would even get away with it. Her name would protect her, and then the rest of her clan could deal with the political fallout.
But relying on them…
As such ideation normally goes, the plans die in conception, never turning to action.
This does nothing for the burning sensation still crawling underneath her chitin, begging her to act.
Across the room, the curtains are drawn over the window, and most light comes from that biolamp. It was a special long-term derivation of Ngini’s light, a biochemical reaction, standard among bloodbanes.
Liquid glows brightly blue and bubbles and froths, suspended behind glass.
It was exertion. Iecka leaps across the room to the lamp, and, in her mind conjuring images of Glaike’s face, she throws out her foreleg to crack and smash the glass in two hits. To scratch the itch.
She doesn’t feel better, but now she lacks a lamp.
“What has become of my daughter?”
Iecka spins around fast, her raptorials lifted and her legs settling into a quick fighting stance.
A figure emerges from the darkness on the other side of the room.
The black gown they wear cuts to reveal polished yellow and black chitin. It relaxes the part of her concerned with immediate danger, and incites a whole different type of concern. The figure pulls down a mask to reveal their face.
“Father? What are you doing here?”
“You haven’t answered our letters.”
“So you break into a room no one knows I even have, and wait for me? How long have you been there? How have you been there?”
“Do not forget, little wasp, that vesperbanes were assassins and saboteurs before ever we were healers.”
“That doesn’t give me any indication as to how you could track me down without it ever coming to my attention I was being sought. I’m not oblivious. I’d know if you were asking around, I might even see if you were skulking.”
“You think you would, but you’re still a nymph. I have years more experience.” Their palps curl upward, a superior smile.
“There’s no need to be secretive. Can’t you cut straight to it?”
“I’ll just say,” and there’s a pause, as if searching for a phrase, “it was all in perspective.” There was something familiar in the cadence of those words.
“So you’re just not going to answer. Typical.” It wasn’t, actually, but he wouldn’t call her on that.
“Are you going to answer as to why you’ve ignored the five letters we’ve sent out to you?”
“They’re fomites. Delivered to me by potentially infected couriers, or while I was working with diseased samples. Standard protocol is destroy such things rather than leave them around as potential vectors of infection. I was just doing as I should.”
“If you had read the letters, you would know that you’ve missed the hatching of your new siblings’ ootheca, and our celebration in the queen’s revival festival.”
“Anything important?”
“Your aunts’ prion… condition has only gotten worse. You should have received samples of them before you left. It is well within your capabilities to devise a cure.”
“It’s beneath me. There are much harder, more satisfying protein folding puzzles in the student paper. Why would I divert time from more stimulating matters?”
“Saving the life of one of your kin is beneath you?”
“Maybe they aren’t fit to wear our name.”
Her father had a tic, of running a tarsus back over each of his antennae. When he reaches the end, he holds it between two dactyls, and twists it. He continues speaking, “Your mother assumed that you’d be obstinate. And there’s nothing to be done about it, with you on the other side of the country, under the jurisdiction of other sovrans. Do you know she hasn’t seen you in the flesh in well over a year? Don’t you think she misses you?”
“No, I don’t think she does. Misses commanding me, maybe. But I know her well enough — and you should know her well enough — that she obviously doesn’t.”
He doesn’t contradict her. He moves on to another point, like he was rattling off a list. “She’s wondering when you’re going to find yourself a mate.”
“I’m tenth instar. I can’t even mate yet!”
“I met your mother when I was seventh instar.” Her father releases his antenna, and it fluidly curls back behind his head, flowing back parallel to the other. “There’s more to having a mate than mating. Think of the politics. There are alliances we could foment with some of the new blood clans, like Kalemic, or Oon-brismati.”
“Bleh, politics. There are more pleasant wastes of time.”
“It’s vital, dear.”
Iecka says nothing, and merely waits for him to placidly accept her stubbornness and move on to the next item on his list.
“She wants grandkids, you know.”
“There are nymphs in the clan. Or she could adopt, if she wants a screaming bundle of piss and shit that bad.”
“Blood is important, Iecka. The Stewartry is being overrun with wingless filth. We cannot let the noble clans be bred out and let our blood secrets be lost.”
“I could just become a waspmaiden. Then I wouldn’t have to bother finding a mantis for a mate.”
“You cannot become a waspmaiden. You’re her heir. Or, you are, for now. I mentioned your siblings — your mother wished me tell you that, should you continue to disappoint, you can be estranged. And she will not make the same mistakes raising your successors.”
Iecka felt impulse burning on her skin again, and burning in her mind.
Scratch. it.
She gives in. The blood pressure trick is simple to her, even with oskeila impairing her faculties.
Her spine-lined foreleg flies out with a moment’s thought. It was speed an vesperless couldn’t hope to match.
Her father already has a limb in place to stop her, with speed that was to her like she was to a civilian. The limb she meets isn’t a foreleg, midleg, or hindleg — instead, she looks upon the blood-red length of a wretched raptorial, visibly rippling with muscle and teeth.
Her foreleg impacts against it like it’s meeting a stone wall.
As quick as it started, her father retracts his wretched raptorial, and then straightens his posture with a nod.
“Ah. I see now what’s become of my daughter.”
His stride is swift as he makes for the door. His steps make no sound, and when the door falls shut, he is gone.
Iecka watches him leave, and no rebuttal ever comes to her palps.
It was all in perspective.
She’d heard the phrase once before.
It could be said that slipping out of the hospital once more would be anything but a smart move. But Iecka still felt the burning impulse to move — the oskeila still in her system.
And really, could things get much worse?
It was all in perspective.
She’d bumped into a strange hooded mantis once, who’d said those words to her. Everything they’d said was so out of place she could recall it nearly word-for-word. Their parting words:
“In time, your duties will close like a vice around your skull. It will feel as though there’s no way out. When it does, come find me. Trust the blackened brain.”
They’d given her a note, but, all things considered, she’d burned it, and she still doesn’t regret that.
There’s a location near the hospital she goes sometimes to think. It was a big pond, and she liked to think of it as the lake despite that. She could throw a rock from one side and it could land on the other, but it was still a lake to her.
Iecka felt drawn to that pond. And not all in her imagination — with senses tuned from her stay in a vesperbane academy, she knew there was something… umbral, about the buzzing internal vibration that seemed strongest near the lake. She didn’t have all the umbradivination training it’d take to make complete sense of it — but she guessed she’d find answers wherever this led.
Or it was a trap, and she’d be in over her head, and she’d die.
Still, would that be so bad?
“Your supervisor hates you. You’re up to your neck in medical work you’re loath to do, and which you know wouldn’t even save lives if you did it. Your clan expects you to excel in the political games they’re drenched in, but it’s all meaningless to you. Your body is struggling under the load of ichor you’ve injected into it, and you’ve self medicated this with a frankly worrying addiction to oskeila. You have no friends, and the most pleasing interaction you can imagine with another mantis is relishing the power over them you’d feel if you laid parasitoid eggs into their paralyzed body.”
A pause. “Do you have that right? I’m just a third party observer here, it’s quite possible my perspective is skewed.”
“I want to punch you, so I have to admit you’re on to… something.”
“That’s heartening to hear. Would you like out?”
“What?”
“Your family piles on demands, expectations and responsibilities, and you respond by seeking remote field assignments that keeps you from having to deal with them for months. You’re exhausted from all the work it takes to avoid doing any work, and you return to more demands, more disappointed expectations, and, exhausted, you return to your one way of escaping this. It’s a cycle. Would you like out?”
“…How? How could you do anything to help me?”
“My name… Well, you may call me Percipient Depthseer. There are… anomalies arising in the land of mountains. Potential exclusions, dangerous renegades, rogue experiments. I’m putting together a team to deal with them. I think you’d fit in nicely.”
Iecka pauses for a long moment, and she thinks deeply.
But this offer could receive only one response, however she got there.
“What do I need to do?”
“Sleep. When you awake, we will begin.”