---

CW: self-harm and suicide, violence, death or dying.

---

1A

The soldiers start rounding up us factory girls just before sunrise.

We smoke cigarettes and stand in a line against the remnants of a brick wall that used to be a bakery, facing the sheer black of the mountains above the town as muted light spills across the fog and folds of the ridgeline. One girl wearing four layers of coats asks if we’re still getting paid, and everyone has a good laugh. No, someone tells her, they don’t pay for time off the line when they’re upset.

And when they find soldier-bodies near the town, they are always upset.

“Gemma, next. Balaga.”

My line manager directs me to an inventory house they’ve repurposed into a holding area, and an old man in uniform sits behind a table and adjusts a console loaded with photographs.

Four strange little soldiers in the pictures, with white little eyes, unmoving.

Did you know them?

Did they have any problems with the workers?

Did you see anything unusual during the night shift?

In the distance, a truck beeps as it backs through fog and parks at the gate where a couple of workers wobble their way up a mechanized ladder-bed, up to the hanging bodies.

One. Two. Three. Four.

Where were you after the shift?

One. Two. Three. Four.

Where were they after the shift?

Four strange little men with bloodshot little eyes and purpling faces, cables coiled around their throats, dangling below the arched gateway like human windchimes.

“Do you think they were sad?”

Someone else speaks—a young man who’s been observing from a chair by the back shelves. He’s in plain clothes, not their uniform, and his face is long and his eyes are soft. Or, not soft, but there’s calm in them.

“Sad? I don’t—”

“When they died.”

The young man’s eyes do not go through me, but instead fix on something inside.

“I would not know.”

“But there must have been something. Don’t you agree? Regret. Guilt. Something at the end.” The young man’s voice is both unusual and familiar, and I can’t place his dialect.

Behind him, larger eyes begin to open in the walls, like spring flowers growing across the mildew-stained bricks.

“If occupiers can feel anything, I imagine it’s anger.”

Ne more.

Welhamin.

Fingers from somewhere beneath the chair, emerging from the floor tile, wrap around my ankle—a warning that I’m being baited.

“If I could . . .” The old man clears his throat. “Inspector, I’d like to . . .”

The younger one apologizes and sits back. He doesn’t say another word, but I can feel him listening closely to mine. When the interview is over, the young Inspector stands, and I realize then he isn’t short and solid like the soldiers. He’s like us—in fact, maybe a little taller, the more I look at him. So stretched and lean that he bends a little to pass through the doors.

Out in the yard, I put a cigarette to my lips and thumb the lighter a few times.

His large hand draws up to shield mine from the wind.

“I’m still getting used to the chill,” he says.

Ne more.

Welhamin.

He and I watch the morning fog drift from the black ridges, across the sloping hillside and over the houses. A military ship passes slowly overhead.

“Don’t get too used to it. The air in Bia-Peitha’s not good for visitors.”

I crush the cig in the dirt and head to the factory floor.

His eyes follow me every step of the way, as if he knows.

We killed them.

One. Two. Three. Four.

1B

I find her interesting, the young woman at the factory, Gemma.

She knows something about how the four soldiers died.

One of my first acts as Inspector was to request perimeter footage. Unsurprisingly, it shows the men methodically preparing cables, climbing to the top of the arch above the main gateway, securing the ends, and then dropping, one after the other, without ever exchanging a word. Not something done under duress or threat, like some had suspected.

It matches the pattern of the other inexplicable deaths on Bia-Peitha. At least fifty-two non-naturals in several months that do not align with projected suicides, casualties, or anticipated losses in occupied territory. They do not all present as self-harm. Some are disappearances. Others are labeled as “training accidents,” friendly fire or emotional disagreements that arise without cause.

Colony Madness, Captain Roshla insisted when I’d arrived. A catchall term, sometimes misused by commanding officers to dismiss accusations of supervisory negligence.

But this is different.

And Gemma knows something is different.

Because unlike the others, she showed nothing during her questioning. No nano-expressions indicating anxiety, no measurable manifestations of empathy or hatred for the deceased. No posture-displays for aggression, or any associations with emotions, even when I specifically prompted them.

Nothing at all.

And though I am accustomed to unusual engagements, this surprises even me.

Still, this is my first contract on Bia-Peitha, and I’ve never been so close to a place touched by the war. So I spend the initial days after the interviews walking the town, familiarizing myself with the settlement.

It’s difficult to ignore the disrepair, even though it’s been years since the uprisings. Crumbling gashes in the quaint stone and brick buildings, rubble and rebar left in unsightly heaps. Captain Roshla admits that they prevented Bia-Peitha from rebuilding at first—a petty punishment for their attempt at independence. But after a time, the residents themselves apparently decided to leave it as it was.

Look at what you’ve done, it seems to say to Roshla and his stationed men.

And, to that end, it certainly works to engender a constant sense of unease.

As for the Bia-Peithans, they’re neither hostile nor overly welcoming. Avoidant is probably the right term. The townsmen go about trade or craftwork around the main plaza, exchanging supplies or painting yellow circles above door frames. I notice many stopping at the central well, which I understand has been partially filled and is no longer functional but serves as a monument where some reflect.

The rest live on the outlying edges of town, on farm plots in the hills. There is a noticeable absence of families, children. But I’m told that’s not unusual for colonies recovering from conflict.

The I.C. soldiers are similarly distant, if not more withdrawn.

While I’m on contract to work among them, I am not one of them—so that causes a palpable suspicion.

Captain Roshla and his coterie enjoy drinking in the evenings and attempt to include me, but it’s only a means to learn what I might be reporting to the homeworld. What kind of man doesn’t like to drink, eh? Roshla chides as he and his cadre carouse and imbibe until one, or many, of them vomits something white.

I have little desire to explain my condition, so I often find reasons to excuse myself from their activities.

Night walks along the slopes suit me, under the shapes of those mountains, darker than the darkness and swallowing the starlight, with the blighted smoking shape of the factory nearby. I linger outside a blue house with gold curtains, aglow with candles inside.

On some evenings, Gemma emerges, looking at me from the landing.

“I suppose you’ll be leaving soon. With nothing more to investigate,” she says one night. And again, she’s like stone—none of the reactions that the others have to my presence.

“Who says that’s why I’m here?”

She tilts her head, as though listening for something. Though there is no sign of anyone else, I begin to feel like someone may be with us nonetheless.

2A

–Jus, Grottmata.

-Ne, Grottmata.

I see bodies falling, one after the other. Drop, then drop, then drop. They rain down on top of one another, like wet shirts, waiting to be washed.

“Gemma.”

Someone on the line gets my attention, and I remember the factory floor and return to sealing containers with the hydraulic press. A large sign flashes, “WELHAMIN,” cautioning us to back behind the yellow line as bulk plant samples are transferred by forklift.

“Complaints of assault—for those four soldiers, hanged at the gate.” The young Inspector finds me on my break, next to the grimgray oak outside the factory walls. “Not workers on the floor, but from years ago. The records were difficult to find. So little was reported in the early transition after surrender. But I’m wondering if you knew anything about that.”

“Soldiers are what they are,” I answer. “The reclamation of Bia-Peitha is what it is.”

The Inspector reaches for my work gloves on the bench. “May I?” He pulls on the wrist strap and folds it in half. His fingers slide inside, and when he pushes something in the folded strap, the glove tightens. “I noticed you and the other girls wear the straps hanging. But if you fold and compress this, the fibers along the seam are designed to mold to your fingers. Prevents slippage.”

I ask if he spent time with I.C. Manufacturing.

“Extraction,” he answers. “My family used to be on outer system tanker ships.”

It explains his height. Unfettered by the heavy gravity of the homeworld like the others. Another colony child. Or maybe station-raised. The more he speaks, the clearer it is that he may work with the I.C., but he is not one of them.

“Captain Roshla believes the hanged men simply cracked, psychological degradation from time away from the homeworld. Colony Madness, they sometimes call it.”

“And you don’t think it’s real.”

“Oh, it’s real. Or used to be. An incidence of Exoplanetary Anomie, though—that hasn’t been documented in almost a lifetime. But you know this . . .”

“Do I?”

“I suspect many in Bia-Peitha do.” He purposefully lets that hang without explanation, then pivots without warning. “What’s Grottmata?”

For perhaps the first time with this man, I falter.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a Bia-Peithan word that seems to be without translation. Grottmata. I was hoping you could tell me what that might be.”

Something with many eyes stirs behind the oak.

Malhaem da san abad Grottmata.

I mumble the words to myself and sort through what it’s telling me. “It can be difficult to explain. Easier to show. We’ll have to go, not close, but not far. After the shift.”

The Inspector nods.

“I’ll be here.”

• • • •

I realize what unnerves me most about this Inspector—more than the questions and the detached curiosity—is his unburdened nature. Having seen him during these weeks, in the town, along the hills, the freeness with which he moves among us makes itself apparent.

He doesn’t watch the skies, doesn’t tighten around the shoulders, anticipating falling fire. Doesn’t flinch at the clicking of rifles or thudding of boots. But he isn’t like them, either. None of the hardness from barracks life, none of the frustration and boredom churning within.

Just an absence—separation from all of it.

What must that be like, I wonder.

We take the trail behind the far houses, up the slopes through the yellowing grass where the night fog gathers, and he talks a little about where he’s from as we wend our way.

He mentions that his work for the Intrasystem Consortium keeps him in transit more than on soil, and I sense he’s seen more colonies than most, though he doesn’t speak about them with any attachment.

There’s something soothing about that voice, the dialect, I admit, that keeps me from focusing on the pocketknife in my coat and the voice coming from beneath our feet.

Welhamin. Salha soongyum.

–Jus, Grottmata.

The four-headed shape follows along the tree line where only I can see it, making sure that I remember why we’re here.

Eventually, we reach the black pool, and he’s first to bend to the pond’s edge. His hand touches the floating plants. In the weakening sunlight, the hundreds of cosmid loti glow, the whorled shapes of those petals relenting slightly against the chill of coming nightfall.

I bend next to him and through the dark ripples pull forth one of the lotus roots.

“Here.” I pry the moist, white growth from the lotus and drop it in his hand, edges of it sliding ponderously along the contours of his palm. “They used to think this was part of the lotus rhizome, because it collects in the water along the plant bodies, where it aids the lotus maturation process. But we learned that it’s a separate botanic structure.

“This is Grottmata.”

The Inspector moves the white trichoderm along his fingers, and as he studies it, I stand over him at the water’s edge.

My hand goes slowly to the knife.

“But Grottmata has other meanings too, doesn’t it?”

“Other meanings . . . ” I feign ignorance.

“In pre-war records, the references to Grottmata suggest that it’s more than just a plant structure. It’s conceptual—something akin to soft power, or control without control.”

“That’s . . . I suppose that’s one way to interpret it.”

The Inspector continues to study the Grottmata, almost ignoring my presence.

So I hover over his back, and I tighten my fingers around the knife, watching the point where his shoulders and neck meet, the way they taught us. For a moment, I see my mother hurling herself desperately toward the I.C. men, kitchen knife forward.

I imagine myself, like her, about to do the same.

“Better to use a rock.” The Inspector straightens, but he does not turn to look at me. “The blunt force might make it seem like I fell, if you do it correctly. And the I.C. men won’t care to disprove the story,” he says.

“I don’t . . . ”

“If you use a weapon, protocol may require an investigation.”

“Such strange ideas . . . such . . . ”

He’s fast, and his reach is long enough to get my hand before it nears his throat.

The Inspector slaps the knife from my grip, and it clatters, gradually swallowed by the Grottmata sloughing off the edges of slick pebbles. And then, almost as if he doesn’t expect it.

He laughs.

2B

Did they tell you about the well?

What they put down there?

How, after the bombing, and the dropships, those men went through and pulled us from the wreckage like worms? In every one of the towns on Bia-Peitha, for surrender and reclamation, for some kind of peace.

Only it never is with them, is it?

Their peace is a street that goes only the one way.

Because when the homeworld sleeps, and her thug-generals aren’t in orbit, their spoiled cunt kids use the long quiet to do whatever they please. Bash us, break us, use us. And then when they’re done, discard and hide their mess.

Right there, in the old well where we used to get our mountain water.

Drop, then drop, then drop.

A pile of those poor bodies, growing higher.

Even saw a dead woman still clutching her crying child, cast down into the dark there.

Then, after it was done, our people were sealed away like fissile waste, under several feet of poured concrete, so no one would know. And now they just shrug their shoulders, whistle.

“Long time ago,” they say. “Let the past be the past.”

But it’s not the past.

It’s always now, in here.

It’s always now.

• • • •

The stories are all like this.

Sometimes it’s the bearded man on the hills working his plot—sometimes it’s one of the wary tradeswomen near the plaza. Whoever it is, whoever stops me to confide something, they all seem to have accounts like this—things that shouldn’t have come to pass after the surrender. And for some reason, more of the residents are comfortable speaking than before.

Something’s changed since that day that Gemma and I went up into the mountains.

I think she realizes that I’m not here to investigate the deaths, at least not in the way they’d assumed. Maybe word got through to the rest of them because of it.

Getting in with the locals then, Roshla says to me one day, having noticed the change as well. Cozier with the lunars than you are with us. How fucked is that? Even if my perception were not augmented, it would be impossible to miss the Captain’s hostility—barely masked, if it ever really had been masked.

For the first time I notice, too, that his pupils are semi-dilated. Sweat cascades down his throat. His head turns, as if he’s listening to an empty corner. At times, when we’re riding one of the jeeps from the barracks, I catch him singing under his breath, white discharge in the lining of his gums.

He’s infected with Grottmata, I realize.

Just like the four men who killed themselves at the gate.

Just like the others who died without explanation before them.

I’d found masses anchored to spots along their spinal cords. Some kind of organic compound that matched nothing in the I.C. archives, but which were linked to semi-deleted records labeled “Grottmata.”

Then, when Gemma showed me the growth on the lotus rhizome, I understood.

This was how the Bia-Peithans were doing it.

This was what I was here to learn.

• • • •

But Gemma’s frightened by something in me, still.

I thought she’d be relieved, knowing that I’m not here to interfere with what she’s doing, but I think she preferred clear lines—Bia-Peithans here, Intrasystem Consortium there.

I attempt to put her more at ease and assure her that my objective is not to hinder whatever she intends. “It’s like the factory, for instance, where you and the others assemble those bio-containers. Theoretically, the I.C. would say they don’t need this. They’d tell everyone they’re more advanced than any of the colony-moons, that they have other methods of duplication and mass production.

“But I’m not so sure that’s true.” I hesitate, even though nothing I’m about to share is confidential, only conjecture. “I think the war has cost them more than they anticipated. Made certain machinery harder to maintain and improve. Because of the loss of human capital.”

A man stops painting a yellow circle on a nearby house, almost as if he’s listening, though he’s much too far for that to be the case.

“Human capital,” Gemma repeats.

“What they call institutional knowledge. All the bright minds who were once part of the colony-moons, like Bia-Peitha, now gone.”

She’s likely too young to know that the colonists here were the ones tasked with solving the Exoplanetary Anomie problem. Supposedly, the Bia-Peithans were developing methods to prevent the mass social breakdowns and clusters of mental health problems that arose when our people traveled too far from the homeworld. Or they were attempting to, before the conflict broke out.

“And the I.C., they hope to recover what they lost.” Almost as if she senses my thoughts, Gemma breaks eye contact. “The man who severs his arm hopes, too late, to reattach it.”

“That’s . . . well, that’s certainly one way of conceptualizing it. The I.C. has an interest in re-appropriating what was learned here, at the least.”

“And you would be the one to help them do that.”

Something about the way she says it makes me feel slightly ashamed.

“I . . . have no unique loyalty to the Consortium, if that’s what you mean.”

“This is a job.”

“Well, yes.”

Even as I say it, I know it’s the wrong answer, and I feel her pull away. I find that it’s not a feeling I like, like something painful under the surface that I remember from long ago. A memory of burning, of reaching, and hands pushing me up through the dark.

• • • •

We find moments anyway, despite this impasse, to spend time with one another. She emerges on the landing of the blue house with gold curtains when I pass for evening walks. Occasionally she joins me, down the hill roads, and I get the sense she feels protected by the dense fog that obscures us, that she likes the sensation of Bia-Peitha disappearing.

Does she feel trapped by the I.C.?

Something else?

When I talk about station-hopping, moving from contract to contract as an Inspector, I see she’s imagining it vividly. Perhaps I’m not fully conveying the loneliness of it. That there’s something about being rooted that I miss, something I haven’t had since the tanker ships, with my family, before I’d been injured.

Now, there is nothing but monotony and maintenance.

So sharply singular.

Still, in the shroud of the gray floating around us, I feel that Gemma yearns for that kind of separation. Of having something for herself, apart from everything here.

• • • •

It’s not long after that I begin seeing the woman with four heads, standing over me.

It begins late one night, when I think I’ve woken, to find eight widened eyes staring at me in a way that feels accusatory. She touches my lips, gently at first, and then with more pressure as she pries apart my mouth.

And then I actually wake, coughing, to the sound of yelling near my room. In the hall, soldiers are beating at flames, smoke dissipating around us. Captain Roshla steps out, and I notice a yellow circle painted above his door.

Had that been there before?

Roshla walks through the main hallway, naked, and I realize he’s dragging one of the soldiers by the neck. The soldier on the floor is terrified, and his skin looks clammy, almost jaundiced.

Sickness, Captain Roshla roars in that tight little hallway. Madness. Another one. Trying to burn us in the night!

The frightened soldier whispers, but he isn’t speaking to any of us, his eyes are on the ceiling, and I can barely make out the words.

Grottmata. Grottmata.

Roshla is right that the young man is sick, but he clearly doesn’t see the others around him—tongues coated in white, and eyes wet and glassy.

Sick and dangerous. Sick. Dangerous!

Roshla’s foot cracks the soldier’s face, then his gut and ribs. Others nearby begin to kick him too. The soldier flops back and forth, whispering while they beat him, blood pouring from his nose, his mouth, his ears. Until the whispering stops, and his eyes remain open and still.

I hear they later take him to the plaza and throw him in the well, drop him down in the dark—their old habits, returning.

This body, it turns out, is only the first of many.

3A

Ne ma welhamin, dala.

This feels like the old days.

Like the invasion again, or, what I remember of it.

There are long stretches at night, of the mountain quiet, then a popping in the distance, sometimes a continuous string of noises, coming from the barracks.

I don’t know why, but I had always assumed that this was going to go differently. Slowly. Carefully. For our protection. But I sense the impatience in it, the Grottmata, the desire. Not an escape from the old days like I had thought, but a return, instead.

In its mind, the war isn’t over.

Because it was never over in ours.

Some of us try to continue with the facade. We head to the factory in the dawn fog out of habit, but fewer and fewer girls show up at the line. The I.C. men who oversee the work are distracted, disheveled. Sometimes they whisper to each other, sometimes they yell. The Grottmata is in their heads, drawing their eyes to other places, the ceilings and dark corners.

We may as well be invisible to the I.C. now.

On the fourth day, they power down the machines and shutter the entrance. Many of us have been hoarding our rations in anticipation. Those who grow food in the hills have taken others in and pooled supplies. It’s like the way it used to be, when neighbors would crowd together in whatever house was still whole.

Meanwhile, the soldiers have gone back to dropping things in the well.

But this time it’s not us.

It’s their own people they’re discarding, bit by bit.

The Captain in particular takes to bringing bodies to the plaza. His eyes are clouded, filmy, and he screams, but not in words or sounds I thought could come from throats. A factory girl says she sees him carrying around a soldier’s head, but she can’t be sure.

The Inspector finds me in the plaza, and we watch the unloading of trucks. Drop, then drop, then drop. I don’t know why, but I tell him the story about the well, about what they did then too, and he listens.

“Sometimes, we talk about a mother, and a child, still crying, that they threw in the well.”

“I’ve heard that,” the Inspector observes, noticeably grimmer, troubled despite his supposed neutrality.

“The child was young, left in the dark. She screamed and held on to her mother, but her mother was gone. And the girl just sank into those hands and arms and faces. And any time anyone above tried to go to the well to get her, the soldiers fired at them, ordered to kill anyone that disturbed the bodies.

“And so, down below, the girl stayed. With gray light above her during the day, and nothing at all at night. Over and over. All by herself, or so everyone believed.

“But there was something else in the well, too. Growing in that water. Something taking bits of the bodies and learning from them. Something pale building in that blood. The girl looked at a shape in the darkness, until it became something familiar. In her tired mind, it looked almost like her mother again. It held the girl, and the girl held it. And she knew that this thing would never let her go.”

I don’t tell him the rest of the story, that I’m not really sure how much of the girl ever got out of the well. Whether the thing that came out was even a girl at all. But the Inspector seems to understand the point, and he gently touches my wrist.

Grottmata will never let go.

Not after it’s bonded with all of that blood and those bodies—taken the thoughts and experiences of all of those Bia-Peithans into itself, making them its own. And now, the growth in the lotus and its ability to connect with living organisms, the thing the researchers here once studied, has become something else, something vengeful and incapable of moving on from what happened.

And it turns out, control without control still feels very much like control.

The Inspector sees it too, like I do, and he understands.

• • • •

Later, on the hills, the Bia-Peithans stand separate, yet together, with little candles as the fog drifts around us. I assume they are praying, like I am. Communing, in hopes it will hear.

–Grottmata, I plead. I think this . . . all of this, is too much.

The Grottmata is within the I.C. men, and within all of us, having slowly spread to new bodies through the water and perhaps even the moisture in the air. I know it can do what it wants, what we want, if we will it enough. Grottmata could make those men leave, or put them to sleep, or scare them into submission, or subdue their hunger for violence until it becomes like a dream. Anything.

It does not have to be like this.

But are the others praying for the same, I wonder? The workers, the factory girls, the men and women on the slopes, the ones who remember what happened before. I’m not so sure the communication, the latent emotion with the Grottmata, moves in one direction.

–Please.

Ne.

–Please, Grottmata.

Ne, Gemma.

–Please. No more.

Ne, Gemma dala.

I continue to beg, but—much like a mother hushing an upset child— it dismisses me.

Salha weah, soongyum.

–No. He’s not with them, and he’s not done anything to us.

Soongyum.

-I never ask for anything for myself. Can’t you leave him? Please.

Ne.

The four heads and that pale, shapeless body flicker in from the grayness, and the eyes do not blink or look away. Like a mother, she will not be told what’s best for her children.

But it makes me think of my mother, the woman standing in the kitchen with the knife, ready to throw herself at the men coming through our door. The woman who held me, even as we fell all the way below.

What would she do if they were trying to control her?

What would she do?

3B

I don’t have time to transmit any more reports.

They move often, Roshla and his men, in and out of the barracks and the fog. Restless, guttural, milky eyes and white mouths.

Even the Bia-Peithans, too.

They are aware, but it feels like the entire town is in a kind of sleep. There’s stillness in the mornings, when I walk past the doors, now all with yellow circles. I’ve been hiding, mostly in the factory, rifling through the storage lockers. Most of them hold only bio-containers and cosmid lotus plants packed away for shipment.

I realize much of what the others are seeing is a kind of mass-hallucination. The Grottmata is co-opting their nervous systems, altering their visual and auditory pathways. They are in a waking nightmare, reenacting things from the war, but collectively. The soldiers are committing atrocities against themselves, and the Bia-Peithans watch and seem to enjoy it.

Part of me is asleep too, like the rest of them.

I see shadows of what they see, glimmers of the Grottmata manifesting in different places. Sometimes it’s a large shape, back crouched along the boughs of the oak trees. Other times, there are corpses standing on roofs, like fleshy sentries, speaking with one another, mouths moving without sound.

But most often, it’s the woman with four heads. I don’t respond to her, or any of it, like the others do—likely because of my condition. I suspect the brain damage prevents me from processing the information. So while there very well may be Grottmata in my body, it is not penetrating my cerebral tissue in the same way. My disabilities and the associated augmentations are saving me, for now.

I could try to warn my handlers, to send them what I know about the Grottmata. Caution them that it’s sentient, or at least imbued with consciousness of the people here, a collective projection of some kind. I still have no idea if it was partially engineered by the colonist-residents, or something naturally occurring.

But any thoughts I may have of reaching a messaging console disappear when I hear a noise on the factory floor. Something’s coming closer, pushing into the backrooms. I’ve blockaded the door with a desk, but an arm breaches, and part of a white-eyed face, skin seemingly bloodless, of what I believe must have been Roshla.

Cozier with the lunars—sickness—sick!

Roshla’s words are empty chatter, a fevered brain regurgitating lost bits of memory.

His fingers curl in the air, grasping at me.

Then, without any reason, he goes away, and the factory is quiet.

• • • •

“It’s me.”

Gemma appears at the door, and I don’t remember if I let her in, or if she finds another way. But she sits on the floor beside me. Things are harder to reason, and I’m losing words I once grasped easily. There are pains in my chest and stomach. I have the sense, the keen feeling, that if the Grottmata cannot dominate my body, it will dismantle me from within, like this, slowly and unpleasantly.

“It’s okay,” Gemma says. “It’s . . . well, nothing more to be done. But it’s okay.”

She holds my arm—my sleeves are high, so she can see now, the chemical burns I’ve shown to very few people. The swathes of skin grafted and regrafted. She does not flinch but touches them, and her fingers feel soft, even on deadened skin.

I tell her, or I think I tell her, about the big ships we worked on when I was a boy. My parents. An older brother and sister too, I think. Cleaning those cavernous fuel containers, all of us. Until that day, with the accident, when the pressure valve cracked. The chemical overflow, the wet that felt like fire, that poured in and drowned them alive.

I can see all of their hands, with me, in the dark.

The hands lifting me up to a ladder, to the hatch.

Lifting me higher.

Gemma listens to the story, about the boy in the ship, just like I listened to the story about the girl in the well, and she holds my arm tightly.

I explain, then, that part of me is synthetic, portions of the parietal lobe, temporal lobe. The I.C. saw fit to try it, given my low probability for survival. And it suited me, later on, for observational tasks of a certain kind. Gave me use, gave me pay. I liked it, being useful, if only because I had nothing else.

No one else.

She pauses, then asks if the encasement can be breached, if there’s an access point the I.C. doctors use for maintenance. I tell her it’s near the sinuses, the back of the throat, the nose. There are methods of relieving pressure and reaching the original neural matter with tensile instruments. I don’t need to analyze her closely, the nano-expressions, her posture, to know what she may be thinking. We understand each other now—maybe the last people here who do, really.

Gemma lays me down, and I notice she’s wearing her work gloves the way I taught her, with the fibers tightened. She undoes one strap and loosens it, pulling the tips from her fingers, one by one, sliding it over her wrist, her palm, then drops it to the floor. She takes a knife from her coat, a thin blade that she drags over the end of her finger where, under the skin, something emerges.

She opens my lips.

Her bleeding finger thins and branches as she enters me with the gentlest touch.

4

Welhamin, dala. Ne anjun, Gemma.

They are outside, the townspeople and some of the soldiers who have been allowed to survive. They stand outside the factory, many eyes, many faces, waiting. They likely know what’s been done.

I approach the charred and broken brick wall, the one that used to be a bakery.

They can go in and look, if they want, if they really feel the need. All they’ll find is the crumpled shell of the Inspector’s body. He isn’t in there now, not after I’ve taken him in.

It was less difficult than I thought, what the Grottmata did once. How it took the people in the well, their thoughts, their identities into its cells. I don’t think it really knew for certain I could do it too, but I am part of it, after all, and have done it before at least once. A piece born from the growth in that well, all those years ago, given shape and memory of a little girl that had been down there too.

The Inspector is funny to have in here with me. Not as sad as he expected about leaving that body—used to the detachment in many ways, I suppose. And with me, he doesn’t have to worry as much about being alone.

Grottmata says something to us, maybe angry or anxious, but we push the words away until they’re only a murmur. Like a daughter, or son, who began as fragments of a mother’s blood but becomes something else outside the womb.

Grottmata gets louder. Men and women with her voice shout, trying to make us understand—threats, then negotiation, pleading, though we don’t internalize the specifics.

I think we’re beginning to realize that we don’t have to live with Grottmata’s words, in here, if we don’t want to.

We don’t necessarily have to let her have a say in our thoughts at all.

We look past the faces in the gray and past the hills.

We watch the sheer black ridgeline and hear nothing but the ship passing overhead.