The Roach God

What they gave him in return took nineteen days to learn, and he did not understand its value until the sixth.

It was not a weapon.

It was not a route, or a map, or bodies.

It was the thing two hundred pale roaches had been studying continuously for longer than their own records ran:

what a claim looks like from outside, and what changes it.

They knew, Sacha discovered, an enormous amount.

They had never possessed a Sanctuary themselves and had therefore been obliged to learn it the way a person with no sense of smell learns about perfume — entirely from the outside, from observation, from the behavior of everything that hunted by reading claims and from the wreckage of everything that had been read.

A claim is a shape, the Mother’s emissary had told him.

What the pale ones had spent centuries establishing was the far more useful proposition underneath it:

a shape has variables, and some of them are yours.

Size was not one of them.

Sixty-one bodies read as sixty-one bodies and no arrangement changed it.

But stress did.

A claim under strain read differently from a claim at rest—thinner in some places, denser in others—and a reader at a distance read the strain as much as the substance.

A colony that concentrated everything at one anchor read as a single hard point.

A colony that distributed its weight across several read as something diffuse, larger in footprint and softer in outline, and — this was the part that took Sacha six days to see the use of — considerably harder to price.

You cannot become invisible, the pale one laid. That passage is closed for you and you closed it yourself when you took the ground. What you can do is stop being easy to read.

Sacha asked the question he had been holding since the fourth day.

How do you know all of this. You have never had a claim.

We watched them be taken. The pale one’s marks came evenly. Sixty-one entries on that wall and we found most of them before they closed. We watched what read as what, and what came, and how long after.

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A widening in the grammar. We are not scholars. We are the thing that stood at the edge of sixty-one funerals and took notes because there was nothing else to do.

Sacha had no reply to that and offered none.

He worked on it with Khrr, and the work was the best two weeks of his second life, and he knew it even as it happened.

They shared a grammar again — the drill shorthand, plus nineteen days of topology, plus the private thing that had grown between them over three months of laying marks on a dirt floor — and for the first time since the water heater, they were working on a problem neither of them could solve alone.

Sacha had the model of what a claim was.

Khrr had nineteen days in the pale ones’ grammar and a spatial intelligence that read structure the way Sacha read a chart.

On the thirteenth day Khrr laid something Sacha had not thought of and could not immediately fault.

If stress reads, it marked, then a colony that is visibly under strain in one place reads as a colony whose weakness is in that place.

Sacha followed it for three seconds and then felt the whole thing arrive at once.

You want to fake a stress point.

I want to know if it can be done. The mid-leg made Khrr slow to shift position, and it shifted anyway. We cannot make ourselves small. We can perhaps choose where a reader thinks we are soft.

[Divine Creature — Echelon 4 of 9.]

It arrived on the seventeenth day, without ceremony, while Sacha was in the middle of laying a diagram on a chamber floor, and he had to stop and read it three times.

He had not been trying.

That was what he kept coming back to.

Two months at Echelon 3 — a fight, a border, a migration, an entire colony moved through two thousand lengths of stone — and the thing that finally moved it was nineteen days underground learning how to be looked at.

The change in his body was not dramatic, and he cataloged it anyway, because he had cataloged every other one.

Denser plate along the dorsal ridge.

A measurable improvement in vibration resolution, enough that he could now distinguish two sets of footfalls at a distance where a week ago he would have read one.

And something less easy to name — a steadiness in how the Sanctuary sat behind his eyes, less like a tent staked at the corners and more like something with a foundation under it.

Echelon four, he thought, and then, because he could not help himself:

the emissary said any claim above the fourth echelon can read the shape of a claim below it.

As of this morning, he was on the reading side of that line for the first time.

He did not try it.

There was nothing down here to read — two hundred roaches with no claim at all, which was the entire point of them — and the first thing he intended to look at with a new instrument was not going to be his hosts.

He mentioned that decision to Khrr, in passing, expecting nothing.

Khrr laid its answer without hesitating, and it was not agreement.

Try it on me.

Sacha stopped.

You have no Sanctuary.

I have a spark, Khrr marked. You have never once been able to reach me and neither of us has ever known why beyond the reason you worked out in the first week. You are now on the other side of a line you were not on this morning.

The mid-leg shifted. If there is nothing there, we will know. That is worth an hour.

There was nothing there.

Sacha looked at his lieutenant with a sense he had possessed for six hours and found exactly what he had found on the first night in the crawlspace:

a spark, unmistakable, and no way at all to speak to it.

He told Khrr so, plainly, because softening it would have been an insult.

Then that is one more closed passage, Khrr marked, and we have a map with one fewer wrong line on it.

It went back to the diagram on the floor.

Continue.