Prologue
Matta fell low. Already his net-scooper tipped over, length almost pulled down into the thick waters. He’d lost a spine-grasp on the grille, thin wires spaced for raptorial spikes to lock into. A mantis didn’t let go that easily — but Matta hadn’t been clinging tightly. Why bother?
The cheap metal splashed into waters that looked like pink oil, infested with black swimming maggots. They relished this haven of abundance, an algae-soup that left morning-misted air salty and stingy. It always felt like that down here, no one could escape it :– beneath the Falls, you felt the Ashpool.
Let’s make that literal, Matta thought. He reached down.
“Brother, no!” A stridulation of maxillary palps sung a voice deep and feminine. His sister wasn’t old enough to properly sound that deep — her prothorax was larger than his, but not yet as large as a grown imago. No, she’d sucked in the scratch of mouthparts, held it resonating in her chest long enough to make it that deep.
Matta’s hand darted faster for the sunken tool, but she was lunging and striking :– a three-fingered hand closed around his foreleg, not the bite of a raptorial strike. He’d have preferred an attack.
Blue chitin contrasted against his green-streaked yellow. Strong foreleg-arms pulled him, twisting him around to stare concern in its light-blue eyes. He’d have preferred an attack ~ this was worse. No, not worse, just more annoying.
Karoo, looming tall and thickly built, was staring, her dewfocals darkly fixed on him. Palps pinched, she said, “Brother, the lake water is dangerous! It’ll sting :– it’ll burn.”
Matta glanced sideways at the pink shallows. Calm, always calm, the waters too thick to easily disturb. This lake swallowed corpses every day without flinching.
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“It’s caustic,” she added. “Eats at your membranes, turns you to soap!” Her antennae were flared wide in alarm, as if seeing her concern would make him concerned.
Matta scratched a palp against his face in a wordless noise. Really? I’ve lived my whole life in Gutterpool and I’ve never noticed. But the look his sister gave when he cracked sarcastic was worse. No :– just more annoying.
But that warning, patronizing, condescending? He had to answer it.
“There’s no outlet,” he started, “except mist rising skywards, so all the salt and dissolved limestone sticks around when the water dries away. Gets concentrated like that, becomes a soda lake. It’s basic, he finished, meaning that word both ways.
Karoo let go of his arm and pat his head between the eyes, palps in pleased crescents. “You’re such a smart grub,” she said, pausing as if to let the compliment hang or sink in. Didn’t work, because he felt that she had paused. “On paper. Why not put it into practice?”
Because I know enough to know it doesn’t matter. Don’t drink it, don’t splash it in eyes or open wounds, certainly don’t soak in it. But grabbing a scooper that slipped into the shallow edge? He’d be fine!
He could argue the point, and he’d win, but if Karoo was down a score, it’d make what he really wanted to do today harder. He needed her receptive, if he was going to ask her help.
Matta sighed. “Whatever.”
That didn’t make Karoo happy ~ but it was a concession. Her antennae relaxed, hackle-fluff falling.
“Right, okay. Lemme get that for you.” Karoo had a net-scooper of her own, held spine-grasped in the foreleg that hadn’t grabbed him. She wiggled it through the water, disturbing the murk and clouding up the water. Matta remembered exactly where it fell :– it’d be much faster to let him grab it. But no, Karoo had to be helpful.
When Matta slid his raptorial foreleg back into the grooves of the grille, it wasn’t dirty from its time the lake :– the water had washed the grime off. If anything, it was cleaner, stripped of the oil from soft flesh’s touch as if dunked in soapy water.
Matta got back to work. Brine-fly larvae, small swimming things like leggy little worms, scattered across the water like black blades of grass across a field. Did that make us like ruminant beetles, in this analogy? he pondered.
Controlled sweeps of the scooper caught a twitching mass of maggots in the net. Matta lifted it from the water and, dripping, moved it toward their bucket. Karoo’s net-scooper, already there, banged against the rim. She’d caught more, of course she had, moving her arms with quick, powerful strokes. More than half of the morning’s catch came down to her :– as always, Matta didn’t carry his weight. Couldn’t.
He had managed to drop his net-scooper, after all :– screwing up the main thing you do to survive down in Gutterpool. Sifting, whether that’s skimming the flies and shrimp that you ate, or riding out in a boat, picking through trash and gambling on finding something worth selling off the bodies that tumble down from the upper districts.
“Is this it?” he asked, tone still plaintive ~ now drenched with contemplation. His foreleg sagged, and Karoo shot a look like he might drop the scooper again.
“No, let’s try to get our bucket two thirds full. Are you hungry already?”
Matta shook his head, antennae closed into spirals. “I’m tired of scooping. When will we be done?”
Karoo’s mandibles tightened and antennae folded ~ a downcast look. “Sorry, lil bro, but we have to—”
“I don’t mean today. Just. A year from now, t-ten years from now? Will we still be getting up at dawn, scooping up maggots to eat for breakfast? Or will we just be—” dead.
Matta flinched ~ the lake wouldn’t.
He cast his eyes around. They weren’t the only ones out catching brinebugs, though Karoo had tried to grab a spot all their own.
Largely, it was not young nymphs like them at the water’s edge. Imagos, bugs of limps and melanized chitin-cracks, rose and sifted all the same.
Karoo’s silence in the wake of Matta’s question, her antennae working, palps moving without touching the voice-grooves, was answer enough. She didn’t want to say it, or she didn’t know :– which only meant she couldn’t imagine anything else.
Matta said, “It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.” He stabbed his tool into the lake bed; larvae swam haphazardly away from the rippling water. “She said we could—”
“Matta,” Karoo said. Not ‘brother’, not ‘lil bro’ ~ a name spoken like a warning. “Forget about her. After all…” Karoo trailed off, words darker, dimmer ~ unspoken, flinching from clarity.
To spare my feelings, I bet she’d say. Matta didn’t really care ~ and Karoo did. When Karoo spoke of her, there was emotion stripped as raw as if it’d been soaked in the Ashpool overnight. No, worse than that. Soaked every night, in the year since we’d last seen her. A wound picked over and over.
Matta was a smart grub, she would always say :– why didn’t she realize he could figure out what she meant, said or unsaid?
Forget about her. After all: she forgot about us.
Matta laughed, and his sister’s look flashed from unamused to a stricken scowl. He said, “Do you really think we need someone like her? We’d manage just fine on our own. Already have!”
Karoo looked away, her legs steady as she dragged more worms into her net, but her raptorial vise clenched tight. Palps tapped against her faceplates ~ lashing, rather.
“You never listen to me. I’m telling you not to get yourself hurt, or worse.”
“We’re both grubs, sis. You aren’t some sage of wisdom just because you hatched a few years before me.”
Halfway into his remark, one antennae arched ~ as if she didn’t recognize the word ‘sage’.
She growled. “And you are, because you’ve looked at a few scrolls?” Karoo paused, dewfocals sliding across her compound eyes as she looked away, sucked in breath behind her, and continued, “Two-thirds full, then we can go back home. C’mon, lil bro.” She dropped another net full of brine-worms into the bucket.
Finally, Matta wrenched his own net-scooper out of the lake. A pitiful amount caught between the woven fibers, but he stared at the larva. “Is this it?” he repeated. “Do you really just want to be like worms flopping around in the mud, when we could metamorphosize? We could fly.”
Matta craned his gaze up, to look a the grand city on high. Ashpool lay at the base of a range of mountains ~ from which the namesake waterfall of Tsinpathi Falls dumped water into Ashpool year-round.
Bridging the two sides of the range-splitting river, the Lord’s Arch endured, embellishments and repairs craddling stones first placed there two thousand years ago. Spires rose across its length - the prongs of a crown. On either side, rank upon rank of houses terraced and packed the face of a mountain. Bugs emerged and crawled, so far above them.
Matta had never seen the streets and monuments of Tsinpathi Falls, nothing outside the slums of Gutterpool. Did they even know what the lake smells like, up there? That high up, it must be far beyond the corpse-fumed, salty miasma ~ so much like a well-fed hunter’s breath in your face ~ that defined the Ashpool. They had houses there that weren’t mud-huts and crumbling banestone tenement-slabs. They had architecture he’d never seen; he could only sharpen his dewfocals and imagine.
But he would not die wondering.
Matta’s grip tightened on his net-scooper, and determination set his mandibles in a toothy grin. His eyes fell to meet Karoo’s eyes, and her look was sympathetic ~ it was apologetic ~ it was pitying.
Her scooper banged maggot-dumping against the bucket as she spoke. “You know that brine flies don’t live longer than a month. Being grubs is their life. Most get eaten, and for the ones that make it… Emerging from that cocoon is the end.”
Matta hissed. “You’re not some wise sage because you think everything sucks and is hopeless, either!” He stabbed his scooper into the lake again. It sunk into the lake bed, and clouded up the water. Some of splashed on to the shore where they stood.
“I don’t know why you want so badly to be like her.”
He tugged on his scooper, and it didn’t come free, so he tugged harder. Pulling pulled him toward it, head and prothorax reflected down in the pink soup, but the scooper had budged. A few more tugged, and—
Two things. Splash-wet dirt slipped under his tarsi, tipping his balance :– and Karoo was just as quick to throw a foreleg out, catching him under his prothorax. She didn’t even drop her tool.
Matta grunted, incensed enough that ‘thanks’ felt far away.
“She’s not here, and I am. I’ll keep you from falling into the lake. I’m not going to leave you behind. Don’t leave me behind either, okay? Don’t run off and die like all the other tributes. Don’t…” be like her, Matta guessed. But what he really imagined was: Don’t make your own choice. Don’t strive to pull your own weight. Don’t try.
Two can play condescension.
“You’re scared,” Matta said. No, it was worse. “You don’t think I can do it, do you?”
Karoo’s white antennae drooped. Her eyes fell back to the bucket, half full thanks mostly to her own efforts, and she looked back toward the lake.
Did Matta expect an answer? Did he need one? Said or unsaid, he was smart enough to figure it out.
But there was one thing he couldn’t.
He started, “I’d stick around, you know. It wouldn’t even be hard. And I’d definitely last longer than a month.” He stared as Karoo kept working. Her palps twitched, as if fighting a smile-curl. “But you’d let me stay, right?”
Karoo had changed since mother disappeared — but how far? Did she think chasing this ravin was too dangerous, or wrong?
This question prompted a look. Searching — both in her dewfocals scanning his eyes, and her palps trying for words. Somehow, a simple yes or no didn’t suffice, and that was never a good sign. “If you aren’t around… it’ll never be because I didn’t want it.”
Matta was smart enough to trace back the tangles of thought that must’ve given rise to that strange phrasing. Not ‘yes, of course’, not ‘only if you want to’, not ‘if you aren’t, it won’t be my fault’.
He laughed. “Good, because someone needs to call you out on your wise sage act.”
With antennae bent sharply, she said, “I still don’t know what that means. I think you’re calling me stupid.”
No, it’s worse, Matta thought. You’re just smart enough to make this difficult.