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I start my day like I always do.
My antennae shoot up, my torpor broken by the scent of food, and I skitter from my shared hollow in the Hill to the higher levels. I join the feast our scavengers have hauled in and sip some nectar, nibbling on a grub. Belly full of breakfast, I feel another heft in my thorax. I scurry through the swarm of my siblings toward one of the exit tunnels, wings twitching against my carapace.
Walls of magenta sand, packed tight by spit and generations of maintenance, narrow around my segments. Living between these walls, I can practically taste everyone who’s come before me. It comforts me as I crawl from the tunnel into the minty glow of the sun. The sky, teal and inviting, embraces me when I set off for work.
I fly out over the expanse of our territory. Long contested by another hive from the neighboring jungle, our dunes surrounding the Hill are hard won. I take pride in the mounds of sand dotted by succulents, their bulbous fruit plump and sweet to lure prey closer to our home.
Then I see that beast on the horizon is back, and I hiss. I fucking hate it. It’s a blot on the pink sand, a grey brick that drops down periodically to guzzle from a pit that grows by the season. Anything growing around it withers, and that withering spreads every time it drops down to drink.
It makes me angry. I want to destroy it. But I’m alone right now, and it’s much larger than I’d be able to handle even with a group of fellow adults.
I get only as close to that fucking beast as I dare. I do have to fly near it to do my work, when I see a smudge, the heat of it making clear what it is even as its coat tries to blend into the sand. A mammal, one of those furry ungulates that chases fruit to cool down in the dry months. It’s split from its herd. Distracted, it looks like, chowing down like it hasn’t even noticed its kin have moved on without it.
It’ll do. I land and steady myself on the sand. The pocket in my thorax pulsates, the burden inside making me antsy. I have at least a dozen eggs stored up, maybe more since I hadn’t deposited yesterday. They bead up in the pocket above my ovipositor every month, and while I could just lay them in the Hill, I’ve been pressured to go out and convert.
Without its herd, this mammal’s going to die. At least if I convert it, it has new options: dying and making a hearty meal for the little ones, or living once it’s compelled to go and be fertilized in the Hill.
Those fuckin’ fertilizers. Yes, I’ve been one before, and sticking myself in anything that moved had been fun, but I’m all grown up now. I’m fully developed, my metamorphosis complete, and while I lost out on the easy gig, I get to go explore on my own. My wings came in after my nymph stage, meaning I can travel and convert just about anywhere I want.
I’m much better suited to this job. I like feeling the suns on my carapace, the dry air in my spiracles, the sand against my tarsi. The ovipositor is a bonus, too, the long length of its needle descending in anticipation. I move for the mammal. It doesn’t even detect me until I’m already upon it, jabbing just below its skin.
The venom comes first, freezing the mammal’s muscles. It stands perfectly still, because I’m perfectly placed, my central legs straddled like a vise to hold its limp body up.
The sharp barb on my ovipositor sinks deeper, and I angle myself to prepare for step two.
I tap my antennae at the body beneath me. There’s a cavity amongst its organs, and I insert my entire shaft inside to form the pocket.
I spin up the sack in my thorax, then blow.
The feel of the pocket inflating takes all my concentration. Blow too quick and the pocket will burst, stretched to its limit before I can even drop my clutch. Blow too slow and the pocket will be uneven, sides too thick and too thin, just as likely to break open. Good luck putting anything in without rupturing a stomach or something else equally vital.
It’s delicate work, and I killed a handful of prospects before I got it down. But this many seasons into my adulthood, I’m a professional. I’m confident that this pocket is exactly the right width and size. Even so, I taste for the ammonia hint of death, the signal this mammal won’t make it.
I taste something else, and I pause. Something acrid, sour, though not wholly unpleasant. What is that? My feelers prick up and wave, snatching at the smell.
My ovipositor throbs at me, demanding I empty into the pocket I’ve just expertly formed. I ignore it, in case there’s something bigger and badder than me to take us out while I’m occupied.
Oh, fuck off. The smell’s coming from that fuckass huge beast on the horizon. The ground hums with its ascent, the tell tale rumble of its departure. Good riddance. I hate that bastard.
But the smell is still there, sharp as a pheromone yet lacking intent. It’s not telling me to gather, flee, or fuck. It’s telling me something else.
Damp mist floods my chest. Toxic yellow, an electric tang on my tongue as I breathe it in. I feel my fingers wrap around the tiny plastic vaporizer, the cloud billowing from my lips, the buzz of the hit blurring my pain at its edges.
I pull myself out of the mammal. It’s still dazed enough that I'll be able to come back and finish my conversion. Tell that to my ovipositor, furious I’m not emptying right this very second. Usually I’m proud of it, proud of my effort to master how it’s wielded, but right now its pestering is inconvenient. I tell it to shut up while I go investigate.
For all I’m obligated to convert for the Hill, I’m also tasked with scouting danger. I scuttle over a dune toward the beast.
The beast’s shadow casts massive over the magenta, swirling hot grains as its hot breath blasts the ground to propel itself skyward. In the dust I see a figure. It’s familiar, just like the sour stink of the vaporizer. What is a vaporizer? I assume it makes vapor, and that the vapor tastes good. So pheromones, for pleasure? As erect as I am, I’m not feeling any more aroused than normal. I just feel weird. Afraid. Angry. Images slap me across the face, striking me between the eyes.
Of myself, upright on my back legs, missing my central pair, the forelimbs folded across my chest as I inhaled and puffed out a plume of yellow mist. That beast loomed above me as I kept hacking. The coughs burned. I wasn’t meant to be out here, sucking up atmosphere that my lungs aren’t made to process, but it was my only smoke break. A little cancer from the planet wouldn’t do much more to me that I hadn’t done myself, and I was already due for another surgery when this rotation wrapped up.
Then I’d be done. No more debt crushing me at all times, no more running this body into the ground. No more two year missions on freight ships like the one lording over me, chewing me up as I worked myself to the bone in its belly.
I leaned against its steel hull and exhaled.
I starle. The thing in the dust is squawking and it won’t shut up. I strain to make out its noises. Are they calls for its herd? That’s long gone. The beast won’t be back to refuel for at least another rotation, and members of its kind only show once a month or so. Long after the thing will asphyxiate without a respirator.
How do I know that?
I watch the thing kick the dune I’m concealed by, shrieking. Its fury is too much for it and it slumps to the sand. Its shapes are so lumpy and irregular, its torso heaving, and it’s too familiar. I get closer.
It scrambles away. It shouts. I can’t quite understand its meaning, but I feel like I should. I feel like I know this thing.
“Assholes!” it screams into the sky. “You fucking dicks! Come back here!”
The vaporizer in its hand still burns. A too hot drop of yellow liquid sizzles on its jumpsuit’s sleeve. Fucking garbage. They expected us to live on scraps and keep the ships up to code on wishful thinking these days. Whichever company ran the freight ship didn’t matter. I’d worked for all the Big Four, and all of them paid about the same with the same neglect for their upkeep. Someone must have skipped this door’s functionality on their checklist. I beat on it with my fist, but it wouldn’t open. It was for crew, after all, not the management who paraded around to make sure we didn’t set fire to the cargo. Who cared if I didn’t make it back on? Who cared if I was stranded out here?
I buckle. That’s not me. This isn’t me. But this thing is what I was, just a variation. Another sixth, stuck on a planet so far from Earth it was comical. Painful. I want to bury myself in the sand to block the images out, but the stink of the vape bores holes in my head and I can’t stop seeing the thing I was before I converted.
It wasn’t even a good smoke. The vaporizer between my fingers lacked the tactility of the pre-rolls I could get planetside, my cartridge synthetic, and the smoke tasted like the innards of the ship’s nuclear waste tank.
The only person who would smoke it was Sieg, and only because we had nothing better. They got me hooked, but they were off on their fifth and final rotation. Two more years and they’d be cut loose.
They were supposed to be cut loose. They weren’t supposed to be in front of me now, glaring like they thought I was going to eat them.
Their eyes are the same black and grey, like the hull of a freight ship. Their hair hung red as rust, their body toned and lean from tossing cargo, their jumpsuit noncompliant because of the patches I’d sewn on them.
Sieg. Sieg!
I chatter my mandibles. I need to tell them. We need to get them back on the ship!
They approach me. I see them because of course I do, I can’t close my eyes. I used to be able to, but I have no lids to lower. I see them as I see him, the person in their place only two and a half years ago.
My first rotation, I’d hardly been bright eyed and optimistic. Everyone on a freight ship knew why you were there. You needed the money more than you needed your limbs or your life. My surgery expenses were too much to keep me off the deck of a beast like the ones I tended. I would keep climbing into their mouths until I could cover the cost of care. But on my sixth, I could muster up a little wonder for the planet I found myself trapped on.
I was supposed to leave sights like it behind. Maybe I’d miss them when I retired, but this work was for young folks, and I was pushing thirty. You had a short window before the life crippled or killed you, and most who were in this long were out by now.
Hell, we considered the forty-something in facilities an ancient crone. Folks that old were planetside and calling the shots, not the ones acting them out.
Not that I saw myself calling shots. All I wanted was a break.
“Hey. Hey?”
I’m not attacking them, so Sieg doesn’t run. Naive. They were so quick to befriend me and…
Doesn’t matter. I bite the sleeve of their jumpsuit, tugging them toward a nearby hollow. It’s not connected to the Hill, but it’s enough cover that I won’t have to keep something from predating on them.
I drag them into the dark. They cut their sleeve loose of my mandibles but too late, tumbling to the sand while I dig at the walls and close up the exit. It’ll be easy to open again, but I want to dissuade anything from thinking there’s a free meal in here.
“This is L210,” they bark, slapping at the square of light on their wrist. Their comms. Tried that. The static Sieg gets as an answer is the same they gave me. I had one of those comms. I had a jumpsuit like theirs, my designs stitched in geometric triangles I drew to busy my hands in the commons room.
Sieg spits. I taste their anger, and it matches my own. They’ve been ditched here, same as I was. I remember a hollow like this one, hiding out while I watched my comms for reply. None came. Eventually I was rescued, but not by the humans who could have found me just fine by the chip in the back of my neck.
There’s a blinking dot in the dark. My chip, shoved out of my skin by the one that encased me in my larval stage, before the exoskeleton that armors me now. Sieg plucks it from the sand. They stare.
Not far off are the scraps of my jumpsuit, stitched with the designs I cherished as I’d sewn them in.
“Marc?” they mutter.
Marc. Me. I’m Marc. I was. Before I was laying there, the stab of a long needle in my gut, the venom flooding my bloodstream until I froze up. I expected those clacking mandibles to chew on me, but they clamped shut, the strangest sensation stirring from the wound where the barbed stinger entered.
“You,” says Sieg. “You killed him.”
I thought I’d be bug food. This ant crossed with a wasp, or something close to it, was about to eat my paralyzed body. But that wasn’t what happened.
I look at Sieg. They cough, and I can tell it burns. It burned when I had this planet’s air in my lungs, before the conversion remolded them to a siphon. The spiracles in my chest now sputter. My friend is going to die if they don’t convert.
I’m going to have to do it.
“He’s dead. I go out here one more round to see if I can find him,” they laugh, mirthlessly. “They never found a body. Bet they didn’t look, though. No. I know they didn’t.”
They rub their neck, their own chip blinking under their hand. Their other holds the vaporizer.
I shake from my stupor. I have to tell them. They were my bunkmate. They’re my friend.
“I thought you would make it. You know? Always tough. I thought you were gonna make it,” they whisper.
I don’t have any words. I try to scratch letters out in the sand, but it’s not making any sense to my eyes. It’s just random lines. Bugs don’t need audible speech, much less written language. All I have are scents, smells I project when I need to send out a message.
I run through them. I’ve got only one I can think of. I butt Sieg’s vaporizer, my antenna wrapping twisting around the hunk of plastic.
“Stop!” they snap. Their eyes glisten. They’re crying. They’re crying for me, and I’m right here. “You want this?”
I nod. The motion is awkward. The joint where my head meets my abdomen isn’t meant to bend like that, but I try.
They blink. Is that recognition? I nudge them, and they put the mouthpiece to their lips. They huff out a billowing cloud, the mist catching on my underbelly and dragging me into memory.
Our commons room, worn out and dilapidated as anything else on a freighter. Sieg’s fourth rotation, mine and Lola’s fifth. Lola. I see her dark ringlets, bouncing around her face as she laughed. We were cozy in our sleepwear, like the work jumpsuits but warmer. We weren’t thinking about our debts, our aches. We were just laughing at a stream, the screen playing something that didn’t need to be good to be enjoyable. I indulged in my vice, funneling the resulting smoke into a ceiling vent before we got caught.
“Hey? Hey! You with me? I can’t tell if I lost you.”
I refocus on Sieg’s face. Somehow my old friend could tell I’ve zoned out. I hold the hit inside my spiracles, then expel it toward them.
They sniff. They watch me as I tap my antenna from their vaporizer to mine, dislodged from the sand by my tarsus. I try to tap myself, but I can’t reach.
Ugh. What else can I do? Death is ammonia, and I can send a spurt of it out to alert other bugs to danger. But can I simulate the scent of life?
The pocket in my thorax takes that as a cue to pulse ravenously. Standing right next to Sieg, my ovipositor’s barb feels cold. The instincts that kept me alive out here, saving me from a sandy unmarked grave, are battering at the human coming awake in my head. I need to convert for the Hill.
I need to save Sieg from my fate.
“Marc?” they ask.
I perk up. They spread their fingers on my face, the prints leaving a faint oily mark on my iridescent shell. I click my mandibles quietly, garbling out nonsense.
“If that’s you,” they say, thinking aloud. “Tap my head twice.”
I do so.
I see their eyes full of tears. They hug my head.
My ovipositor lines itself up. Before it can jab, Sieg stumbles back.
“How?” they cry. “What happened to you? Have you been here the whole time?”
I emit the signal for gathering, the saccharine stink of nectar. The smells wafts into Sieg and they wheeze. “That’s… what is that? It smells like the mess.”
Right! Greasy fried food from the mess, and the little cups of sweet gelatin you could get to keep your potassium up! I’d been so comforted by the banana scent when I first arrived at the Hill. It smelled like home, even before I nestled myself into a hollow.
Sieg has another coughing fit. My feelers twitch. They believe it’s me. That’s so much. It’s everything. But I need to come up with the rest.
Without my ovipositor following them. I shudder, feeling my segments shift, but I can’t bring it back up into myself.
I chitter and scuttle to the wall of the hollow, pressing my plates flush to the sand. I need distance from them to think.
But Sieg is still there. They flop onto a mound. “It really is you,” they say. “Closing off like that. You should have been a pillbug, eh?”
I do not respond. I need to get across an explanation, but it’s difficult when they’re literally right here. Their proximity makes the memories keep coming. Some of them as a human, working the freighters. Meeting Sieg and our trysts, our history, the closeness we established as two people who’d made our deals with the same devil.
Some of them after the conversion, as I receded into myself. I didn’t have anything off this world. I didn’t want to think about the Earth where I was broke, the exoplanets where we dropped off our cargo.
The void of space, where I watched Lola’s face as she drifted into the black. Her mouth a silent scream, the ice creeping up her body and crystalizing in her hair.
“Fine. Whatever you are now, you’re still looking out for me. Not that I deserve it, but thanks.”
They do deserve it. We all deserved so much better. What happened to them leaving after their fifth rotation? They’d put a dent in their debts by the time they were in their fourth, and they said they wouldn’t tempt fate with a sixth if they could help it. Unless they’d taken on more loans, but no, they’d sworn it to me when I asked.
“I hoped you were alive somewhere. Like, changed your name and fucked off to a commune alive.”
A sigh hissed through my spiracles. Their voice grounded me, but I hated what it did to my mind.
This morning had been so much simpler.
“I wonder if that’s why I stayed on. Wanted to find you, I guess. Or anyone else that died out. You remember Lola?”
I shiver. I let out a small buzzing whine.
“No chance she’s here, too?” Sieg asks. “Nah. Saw the body out there, last time we took the route past Io.”
Lola, a corpse that would never decompose. Never decay, never go into the sand, never be fed upon. The fees to get her through school would have been paid off in full, if she’d made it back, and she’d died before we were even out of the solar system. I’d gone back to smoking a lot more when she was dead. I closed off, holed up.
I wanted to disappear. I did disappear, though I didn’t get to pick where or how.
Sieg sniffles. I glance at them.
“The company killed her, didn’t they?”
Management called it an accident. I didn’t buy it. I thought it was too convenient. Right before they’d have to pay her out a small fortune for surviving a sixth rotation, according to regulations, her luck ran out? No. Lola was a genius. She was too smart. She wouldn’t have made such a rookie mistake with the airlock.
I hadn’t thought about her or Sieg in so long. It had been easier just to dive into my work.
“I heard the news after you were already gone. Both of you, dead. It didn’t make any sense. I watched the other sixes die this rotation like that, too.”
My antennae stand straight up. I remember the door.
I remember the manager, the only one of us who was career rather than contract. I remember his voice, dull and monotone, as he said the door was stuck. I remember how angry the ship made me every time it stuck its pipe into this planet and slurped up enough fuel for another crew like mine to get picked off, one by one.
I thought it was neglect. Maybe it was. Maybe that’s how little we matter to them.
“Disposable,” Sieg says. “That’s what they think of us, huh?”
The edge in their voice makes me shuffle over.
“Do you think you can get on the next ship?” they ask.
I don’t know. Never tried. Definitely not alone. The Hill was dwindling enough as it was, hence the impulse to shore up our numbers and convert. That beast kept drilling, creating that gaping chasm that was sucking color from the sand, the border faint and jagged like a wound.
I nod again, uneasily. They cough and I rush to them. They lean on my carapace, using me to prop themselves up. I could carry them to the Hill and protect them there, but not like this.
Terrifying as the conversion had been, that feeling as my first sibling formed my pocket and deposited that first egg, there had been a promise in it. I’d been swaddled in that aroma like home, like the mess and Lola’s sweat and Sieg’s vape. When I came out of the metamorphosis, I wouldn’t be alone. I’d have a community, a role, and when I really died instead of being reborn, I wouldn’t go to waste.
“Okay, Marc,” they mutter. They don’t have much time, their cheeks red. “I want you to go up there and– and–”
They’re coming with me. If I go back for our revenge, I won’t be alone.
I jab my barb in.
Their knees tremble. They brace on me, and I lower them carefully. They lay there, the venom in their veins relaxing them.
Retracting the barb, I maneuver to stand over Sieg, forelegs bracketing their head. I have to fight my whole body to keep from moving down the other steps. I want to try and make the promise first.
I’m sorry. I wish this wasn’t you. I wish it wasn’t me. But if we both make it, I’ll go up there with you. We’ll have to stay here until the next refuel comes, but I’ll go with you.
“M-Marc?” Sieg’s mouth mumbles as the venom sinks in. Marc?
I sense it. It’s not the broad meaning of a pheromone. It’s language. That’s words I’m hearing in my head.
Sieg?
I fucking knew it! I knew it was you in there! What did you just do?
Well, now I’m embarrassed. Holy fuck. They left you here to die. They did that to us.
You’re going to help me kill them?
If I can. I’ll try.
Their face sets, determined. They raise their head with the last of their strength, setting their brow between my eyes. I’m shaking. I mean it. I mean every word.
If they can live with me for what I’m about to do. Sieg, I am so sorry. If you don’t want to die before we go up there, you’re going to have to convert.
What? Their lips twitch. Their lids hood. Use ‘em or lose ‘em. I heard that! What the fuck does that mean?
I'm going to have to make you like me. It’s how I didn’t die. It’s going to be really fucking weird and I’m really sorry in advance.
Okay.
That venom stabilized you but I still need to– wait. Okay?
Is your connection bad? Okay! Hurry it up. If I’m like you, that actually makes more sense than what I had in mind.
Which was? A smile quirks the sounds as they transmit. My voice. I sound rough, my vocal cords harsh from testosterone and smoking.
Dying. I didn’t want to be a martyr.
I don’t want that either. I’ve bought us a little time. Fine. Step one: you’re going to be paralyzed. This is super delicate and I don’t want to hurt you.
Step two?
Oh, I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to put words to what I’ve done over and over to any mammal that gets too close. I haven’t done it to any humans, have I? Not in my memory. Then again, my memory hadn’t been great less than an hour ago.
Some of it leaks across our mental connection. Sieg’s pupils blow wide. They remind me of art I’d seen on the tablet next to Lola’s bunk.
That was mine, actually.
YOU TOLD ME IT WAS LOLA’S. ARE YOU A FUCKING XENOPHILE, SIEG?
Weirdly judgemental when you want to stick me with your proboscis or whatever.
My wings flap rapidly against my carapace. It’s an ovipositor, you prick!
I want one of those.
I wish I could roll my eyes. All I can do is tap along their abdomen, searching for the right place to move ahead to step two. They’re smaller than the mammals I’m usually converting. The bug who converted me must have been a legend. You’ll get one, eventually. Only big boys get to swing these around.
Ovipositors are for females, actually.
Fuck off, I send over. Where do you want me to do it?
Their hips wiggle. Oh, fuck me.
Actually…
I hate you. Seriously, I hate you.
What’s more is they’re right. That’s actually perfect, where I can just put the pocket where their uterus is. That’s the spot my pocket had been, before it migrated to my thorax.
Ha! Go for it. You have my permission.
That’s more than I thought I’d get. Is this better or worse than silence?
Better. They’re agreeing to it when I never did. Maybe they won’t repress this whole experience once they come out the other side.
I’m going to part your legs. I do, using my back claw to prod them into place. Don’t move. Just kidding. Anyways.
Get on with it.
Fine! I angle myself. This isn’t quite the insertion straight down I’m used to, but I’ll make it work. I place the barbed tip into their crotch, lining myself up to tear through the jumpsuit fabric. My whole body hums. I’ve held off since I woke up, and the eggs are ecstatic to be out of me.
I stab. There’s no wound on the outside, the needle spearing into the uterine lining internally. The placement is strategic so the wall will hold until I’ve got the pocket secured.
The sensation makes me wobble on my legs. Oh. That’s new.
That’s something else.
Yeah. Their hole grips my ovipositor, clenching around me like nothing else ever has. The pheromones for sex trickle out of my emitters. Normally this is satisfying, sure, but like the pride of a job well done.
Sieg breaks through the venom enough to rut against me. I press the clawed ends of my central legs to their hips to still them. Don’t move. I could pop something important.
Buzzkill.
I buzz against them, and their mind cackles at mine.
You’re like a vibrator.
I am trying to save your life. Will you shut up? Step two is making the pocket. I need to concentrate or I could blow up one of your organs. No, it’s not like what I saw in your… reading material.
If they could move their face from its rictus, I’m sure Sieg would be smirking at me.
Quit narrating and go for it, then.
I settle my nerves and go. It’s like blowing a bubble, like exhaling a hit. I feel the walls waver as they inflate, until they’re so even I could check it with a ruler. Can’t, actually, but I would if I could. Practice pays off.
You’re right, Sieg groans. That was weird. What’s that for?
Eggs. I blurt it out and wait. It’s like I can see the delight beaming out of Sieg. Your body’s going to change to protect them. The conversion’s so we get a host who can bring in new genes from outside the species. It’s a whole thing.
Damn, look who actually attended fucked up space bug anatomy class. You having fun, professor?
What, do you want me to do this without explaining it?
The slightest shrug. I watch sweat slick their hairline. That rust red hair is going to be gone. Their grey eyes, already closed. They’ll be like me soon.
I memorize all of it. Then I sheath half my length and finally move on to step three.
I flex, and the first egg lodges in my tube, sliding down as a noticeable bulge on my ovipositor. When it meets Sieg’s hole, it puckers and I hiss. That has no right feeling as incredible as it does. They’re squeezing me so tight the egg is instantly slurped into their pocket, my vision distorting at the release.
Fuck. Fuck! Sieg moans. Is that normal?
I’m too lost in the second egg, relishing in their grip on me. The release this time is as cathartic as the first, and I’ve got a dozen of these to look forward to.
Under me Sieg’s skin has already taken on a pinkish pallor. Their flesh is sagging, going translucent, ready to cocoon them in their larval stage. I send a third egg down, their hole swallowing me deeper. Their human organs aren’t going to liquify before the eggs stretch their pocket, the first I gave them merging with their spine to lay the foundations on their new body. I aim myself where I won’t poke anything essential in the meantime.
Watch out, I warn. I don’t want to lose you.
They shift a little, scraping their clit on the bulge in my ovipositor. Eggs are pliant, squishy orbs of jelly when they leave my tube, but inside they stay semi-solid, sliding against my sensitive nerves when they travel down. I can’t imagine how good it feels on their end.
Except suddenly I can, and I snap my jaws, their feelings echoing into mine. Me neither. I’m so happy I found you. I don’t care how. I missed you, Marc.
Say my name again. I sound pathetic, but they don’t have room to mock me when they’re so dead set on sucking my whole shaft inside their rib cage.
Marc?
I forgot. I lost everything when they ditched me. I lost Lola already. I thought I’d never see you again.
Two more eggs have slid down the tube. My mandibles click, rivulets of drool dangling from them. I black out once or twice, my orgasms only comparable to when I’d been an incubator myself. The fact it’s with Sieg makes my body seize in a hedonistic blur.
I missed you, Sieg. I didn’t remember you, and I missed you.
They pant, without the rattle of a cough. Their siphon must have come in. They tip their head back, drawing in gulps of air like they’ve been underwater.
They laugh. Not how I thought we’d have kids. Want to settle down? Buy a house? Build a picket fence on a nice moon somewhere?
Maybe after the vengeance quest.
Sieg has lost their limbs now, all of them fused as their new skin spits off shreds of the jumpsuit. Their chip pops out like a button on a too-tight shirt. They’re bundled in plush, pillowy flesh to form the worm they’ll be for a few weeks, while they’re fertilized and incubating the eggs. Then they’ll lay and get their own turn fertilizing. They always did want a dick more than I did.
So what’s it like here?
Beautiful. I think of the sunset, when the teal of the sky is painted emerald like an aurora. I show them a view of my first night surrounded by glittering stars, snug amongst my siblings’ shining shells. Our mutual wonder crashes together, a single emotion across two bodies.
And more, once the eggs are hatched. Sieg sees where the little ones are raised through my eyes. The younger converts will be their crowd until they make it to second adulthood. The puberty is a bitch. But everyone around them will have been through that ringer, and I encourage them as I spread their hole with my last egg.
You’re gonna be okay, Sieg. Welcome to the Hill.