Chapter Text
The city looked wrong from above.
Not wrong in the way a place changes when you've been away. Wrong in the way a photograph looks wrong when it's been torn in half and reassembled with the pieces slightly offset. Taylor knew the Docks. She knew the rust-eaten shipping cranes and the boarded-up warehouses and the way the Boardwalk curved south toward the commercial district like a bent finger. She knew all of it the way she knew her own name, which was to say with a certainty that lived in her bones rather than her brain.
Her brain was the problem. Her brain had holes in it.
She banked left over a derelict cannery and the motion came easy, natural, like she'd been flying her whole life instead of whatever span of time had passed since... since...
The gap yawned. She prodded like a tongue probing a missing tooth. There was before and there was now and the space between them was a static hiss that tasted like copper and ozone. She'd been Taylor Hebert. She was still Taylor Hebert. Something had happened. She couldn't remember what. She couldn't remember where she'd been or how she'd gotten here or why the wind felt different against her skin, and every time she reached for those answers the static surged and her thoughts scattered like roaches in light.
Home. She needed to get home. Dad would be there. Dad would know what happened. Dad would look at her and explain.
Her wings hummed. Four of them, gossamer-thin and iridescent, mounted to her back in overlapping pairs. She could feel each one individually, could modulate their pitch and angle with a granularity that didn't belong in a human brain. The sound they made was a low drone that vibrated through her ribs and into a sternum that felt too hard, too smooth, and she was not thinking about that right now.
She dropped altitude. Her shadow rippled across the surface of a retention pond behind a warehouse, and she caught a glimpse.
Just a glimpse.
Something tall and narrow-waisted and wrong, with too many limbs and a silhouette that belonged on a nature documentary about wasps.
Taylor wrenched her gaze away so hard she lost a wingbeat and dropped six feet before catching herself. Her lower hands seized the edge of a fire escape. Her upper hands pressed flat against the brick wall. The metal groaned under a grip that was stronger than it should have been.
Four hands. She had four hands.
She'd known this. She'd known it since she woke up wherever she'd woken up, in the dark, on the ground, surrounded by the sound of insects she couldn't see. But knowing and seeing were two different species of horror, and the reflection in the pond had collapsed the distance between them.
Don't think about it. Get home. Dad will fix it. Dad fixes things.
She pushed off the wall. The fire escape stayed attached to the building, barely. A rivet pinged loose and bounced off a dumpster twenty feet below. Taylor climbed, because climbing was easier than flying right now. She was shaking and her wings wouldn't stabilize and she needed something solid under at least two of her hands at all times or she was going to come apart.
She reached the rooftop and stood there, breathing air that smelled of salt and diesel and rotting fish, and that was when the first bee found her.
It came from the east. A single honeybee, fat-bodied and dusted with pollen, buzzing a lazy spiral up from a rooftop garden three blocks away. It landed on her shoulder. Then her forearm. Then it crawled up to her collar, to the ruff of dense fluff that ringed her neck and collarbones, and buried itself there like it had come home.
Taylor stared at it.
"What are you..."
Two more. Five. A dozen. They rose from the garden in a loose cloud and made a beeline, because that was literally what they did, straight for her. They settled on her arms, her wings, her antennae. They vibrated against her chitin and the vibration felt like language, like a frequency her body already knew how to parse.
Queen, they said. Or something that meant queen. Or something that her rewired brain interpreted as queen because that was the only frame it had left.
Worker. Hive. Ours.
She could feel them. Not just on her skin. In her head. A warm pressure, like a hand on the back of her neck, like a teacher guiding a student into the right posture. She could feel the garden they'd come from and the flowers they'd been working and the health of their hive and the mites on three of the workers in the second wave and the queen in the box who was old, old, faltering.
The awareness expanded.
Under the sidewalk two blocks south, a carpenter ant colony: twelve thousand strong. She felt them redirect, felt the foraging trails abandon their pheromone highways and orient toward her. A paper wasp nest under the eave of a shuttered bodega. A bumblebee nest in an overgrown lot. Termites in the walls of a condemned apartment building.
They all turned. Every single one of them. Like compass needles swinging to a new north.
They came.
Taylor watched the first wave of carpenter ants crest the rooftop edge, a black river pouring up and over the parapet, and she opened her mouth to scream and what came out instead was a sound she'd never made before. A low, resonant pulse that started in her chest and rolled through her throat and out past mandibles she hadn't known were there. The insects responded. The swarm tightened, organized, formed a spiraling orbit around her body like a living halo.
Below, someone screamed. The human kind.
A woman on the sidewalk had looked up. Taylor could see her through the eyes of a wasp perched on the gutter. The woman's face was white, her mouth open, her hand already reaching for her phone.
More people noticed. The swarm was visible now, a dark column rising from rooftops and cracks in the pavement, all converging on one point. Wasps in particular were alarming. Taylor could feel their venom sacs and the eagerness that was less emotion and more chemical directive, a readiness that vibrated at a frequency she could tune like a radio dial. She wanted to tune it. She wanted to ramp it up, to push the signal into something sharper, more aggressive, because the people below were too close and too loud and this was her territory.
No.
She clamped down. Not on the insects. On herself. The word territory echoed in her skull and she grabbed it and shook it and asked herself what the hell she was thinking, because this was not her territory, this was a street in the Docks, she was a fifteen-year-old girl standing on a roof covered in bugs.
The wasps settled. Their venom sacs relaxed.
Below, sirens.
The PRT arrived first. Two vans, white and green, disgorging troopers in containment gear. Taylor watched them from the rooftop through the compound awareness of nine hundred and fourteen individual insects and also through her own two eyes, which were apparently capable of tracking both data streams simultaneously without giving her a migraine, which was more than she could say about trigonometry.
She should go down. She should talk to them. They were the good guys. They handled parahuman situations. She was, in this case, a parahuman situation.
She should go down and she couldn't move.
The troopers were setting a perimeter. Containment foam launchers, which she recognized from the news, from before, from the life she could still mostly remember. Civilians being waved back behind barriers. Phones up. Cameras pointed.
At her.
At the six-foot insect girl standing on a rooftop wreathed in a swarm.
Taylor took a step back and collided with an HVAC unit. Her wings flared out in surprise and the insects mirrored the response, the swarm expanding and contracting like a single organism's startle reflex. The troopers below flinched.
I'm making it worse.
She couldn't make herself smaller. She'd always been able to make herself smaller before. Hunch the shoulders, duck the head, fold inward. She'd perfected it during the months of... of... the static buzzed, and Taylor lost the thread. But the instinct was there, carved into muscle memory. She tried to fold and her wings wouldn't tuck right and her lower arms got in the way of her upper arms and her abdomen, the hard-shelled weight that extended from her lower back, shifted to counterbalance and she overcompensated and stumbled sideways.
A new sound cut through the sirens. The low thrum of a tinkertech motorcycle.
Miss Militia came up the fire escape. No theatrics. She climbed with the measured pace of someone who had decided in advance not to appear threatening and was committing to the bit. She reached the rooftop edge and paused, one hand resting on the parapet, the other visible and empty. Her weapon, the ever-shifting energy construct, sat at her hip in the shape of a holstered pistol. Deliberately nonthreatening. Deliberately visible.
"Hey."
Taylor's stingers were out.
She hadn't meant to deploy them. They'd extended from her wrists the moment Miss Militia appeared over the edge, six inches of curved chitin tapering to a point that glistened with something her body apparently produced in response to perceived threats. Her abdomen stinger, longer and thicker, curled forward from behind her.
She could feel the venom. She could feel the chemical cocktail sitting in glands she hadn't known she had. She knew, with the same innate certainty with which she knew how to fly, exactly what it would do to human tissue.
"Easy." Miss Militia stayed where she was. Her voice was steady, the kind of steady that came from years of practice. "I'm not here to fight you. Can you tell me your name?"
Taylor's mouth opened. The sound that came out was layered. Her voice, normal, fifteen-years-old-girl voice, and underneath it a harmonic buzz that resonated through her chest plates and her mandibles and made the words land with a weight that didn't match their content.
"You shouldn't be here."
It was the wrong thing to say. She knew it was the wrong thing to say the moment it left her mouth, because what she'd meant was I don't want to hurt anyone and what had come out was a territorial warning, delivered in a register that made two of the troopers on the street below adjust their grips on their foam launchers.
Miss Militia didn't move.
"I hear you. This is your space right now, and I'm in it uninvited. I understand. I'm asking permission to stay and talk. That's all."
Something in Taylor cracked. The queen-voice, the territorial imperative, the chemical cocktail of defend, dominate, control that had been riding her hindbrain since she'd woken up in the dark... it collapsed. Like a wave hitting a seawall and falling back into itself, leaving behind the ordinary water of a terrified teenage girl who didn't know what was happening to her body.
The stingers retracted. All three sets. The abdominal stinger curled back. The wrist blades slid home with a faint click.
Taylor wrapped all four arms around herself and tried to become small, and managed something closer to hunched.
"I'm Taylor." Her voice was just her voice now, thin and shaking. "Taylor Hebert. I live on Maple Street. I don't know what happened to me."
The swarm, still orbiting, pulled tighter. A living blanket, warm and humming, filling in the space between her arms and her body as if the insects could sense her need to be covered and were doing their best to comply.
Miss Militia climbed the rest of the way onto the roof.
"How old are you, Taylor?"
"Fifteen." A beat. "I think I'm still fifteen. I don't know how long I've been..." The static buzzed. She pushed through it. "My dad. Is my dad okay? Danny Hebert. He works at the Docks. The hiring hall."
"We'll find out. I promise. Can I come closer?"
Taylor nodded. Then shook her head. Then nodded again.
"The bugs," she said. "I can't make them stop."
"That's okay. I've dealt with worse." Miss Militia crossed the rooftop with the same measured pace. Up close, Taylor could see her eyes above the American flag bandana. Dark eyes. Assessing, yes. But not horrified.
Or maybe she was just good at hiding it.
"Taylor, I need to ask you some questions, and I need you to be honest with me. Have you been in contact with any parahuman groups? The Empire, the ABB, anyone?"
"No. I don't. I just woke up. I was somewhere and then I was here and I can't remember the middle part and I need to go home."
"Okay." Miss Militia stopped six feet away. Close enough to talk normally. Far enough to react if Taylor's stingers came back out. Taylor noticed the calculation and couldn't even be offended by it. "We're going to help you. But I need to call this in, and more people are going to come, and some of them are going to be wearing uniforms that might make you uncomfortable. Can you handle that?"
Taylor looked down at her arms. At the chitin, amber-gold and dark, that covered her in overlapping plates from her fingertips to... to everywhere. At the seam lines between the plates where the joints flexed, where her skin was softer and darker and very obviously not human. At her four hands, two large and two slightly smaller, with fingers that were the right number but the wrong texture.
"Can you..." She stopped. Swallowed. "Can you tell them not to stare?"
Miss Militia's eyes softened above the bandana. "I'll do my best."
The Protectorate HQ was a converted oil platform anchored in Brockton Bay's harbor. Taylor had seen it from shore a hundred times. She'd never imagined seeing it from the air, approaching under her own power, flanked by a PRT transport helicopter that kept a respectful distance because the pilot had been informed about the swarm and had opinions about wasp-related FOD.
She'd left the swarm behind. Most of it. The natural insects had peeled off as she crossed the water, returning to their hives and colonies and nests with a reluctance she felt as a physical tug in her sternum. The carpenter ants went last, flowing back down the rooftop and into their tunnels with a synchronized precision that felt like a salute.
She kept a handful of bees. A dozen. They nestled in her collar fluff and she told herself it was because she needed the sensory input, the ambient awareness, the early warning system. She did not admit that it was because she was scared and they were warm and they were the only things in the world right now that looked at her without flinching.
They brought her in through a service entrance. Not the main landing pad. Away from windows. She understood why even if they were far enough away from shore that someone would need a telescope to see. She appreciated it and she also wanted to throw up.
A medical suite. Clean, white, too bright. Taylor sat on an examination table that creaked under her weight because she was denser than she looked and chitin was not light. A doctor. A PRT officer. Miss Militia, still present, leaning against the far wall. Questions.
When did you go missing?
She didn't know. Weeks ago. Maybe.
What do you remember?
Dad. School. Then… The static surged and the memory slid away like soap in a bathtub. Something about school. Something about being trapped.
Do you have any memory of your transformation? Where it happened? Who was involved?
Nothing. A blank wall where memory should be.
Do you know what you are?
Taylor looked at her four hands, folded in her lap. She looked at the wings folded against her back. She looked at the shadow her antennae cast on the wall behind her.
"Something that isn't me."
They classified her as a Case 53 with anomalous memory retention. The PRT had a file for people like her, she learned. People who woke up changed, with no memory of how or why, often with a strange mark somewhere on their body. Taylor had one. A small, stylized symbol on her right hip, visible between two chitin plates. She didn't know what it meant. Neither did they.
But unlike most Case 53s, she remembered. Not everything. Not the important thing, the how and why. But she remembered her name and her father and the city where she lived and the girl she used to be, and that made her an anomaly. Anomalies generated paperwork.
She was fifteen. She was visibly parahuman. She could not pass for human at any distance. She could not live unsupported. The swarm response was involuntary, which made residential neighborhoods a non-starter. Her father's house on Maple Street was out of the question unless Danny wanted carpenter ants in his walls and wasps in his gutters and every hive-forming insect in a three-block radius restructuring itself around his daughter's bedroom.
The Ward conversation started three hours after she arrived at the Rig. She sat in a conference room and a woman from the PRT's Youth Services division explained the program in clear, simple language while Taylor stared at the table and counted the wood grain lines because it was easier than making eye contact. The woman was kind. The woman was also very carefully not trying to look for Taylor's mandibles, which had retracted into her mouth.
"You'll have a room here. Meals, education, medical support. You'll be part of a team. Other teenagers. People who understand what it's like."
Other teenagers with mandibles? Taylor thought, and didn't say.
"We'll need a parent or guardian's consent. Your father has been contacted. He's on his way."
Taylor's stomach dropped. Or whatever organ occupied that space now. Something dropped.
Danny Hebert was a tall, thin man with glasses and worry lines and hands that were always doing something: adjusting his frames, rubbing the back of his neck, gripping the arms of chairs. Taylor knew this about him the way she knew Brockton Bay's street layout, with a deep familiarity that survived whatever had been done to her memory.
He came through the conference room door and stopped.
Taylor was standing. She'd been sitting but she'd heard him in the hallway, heard his footsteps and his breathing and the rapid hammer of his heartbeat through senses she hadn't possessed a month ago, and she'd stood up because she didn't want him looking down at her, or maybe because she didn't want to be in a vulnerable position, or maybe because her body's new instincts parsed his approach as a potential threat and put her on her feet before her brain could intervene.
She was taller than she'd been. Not by much. An inch, maybe two. But the proportions were different. The narrow waist, the wider hips, the way her legs articulated. The wings. The extra arms. The chitin that caught the fluorescent lights and threw back a faint amber luminescence that she'd been trying not to notice.
Danny stared.
He tried not to. She could see the effort in real time, the way his eyes locked onto her face and then drifted, involuntarily, to the antennae, the collar fluff, the mandible sheaths flanking her jaw. Down to the four arms. The abdomen behind her. The wings. Back to her face, searching.
"Taylor?"
"Hi, Dad."
Her voice was the same. That was the cruelest part. Her voice hadn't changed. It came out of a mouth that was her mouth set in a face that was her face framed by features that belonged on an entomology textbook, and it sounded exactly like a fifteen-year-old girl who was trying not to cry.
Danny crossed the room. He reached for her and then hesitated, hands hovering, because he didn't know where to touch. He didn't know what was safe, what was soft, what was her. Taylor closed the distance and put her arms around him. Upper arms. The bigger ones. She kept the lower pair pressed against her stomach because she didn't trust them not to do something instinctive and wrong.
He hugged her back. He was shaking. She could feel his heartbeat against her chest plates and the warmth of him through chitin that turned out to conduct heat just fine, and she pressed her face into his shoulder and breathed in laundry detergent and cheap coffee and the machine oil smell that clung to him from the hiring hall.
He smelled like home.
She smelled like something else now, and she could tell from the way his breathing hitched that he noticed.
"What happened to you?" His voice, muffled by her shoulder. By her collar fluff, which his face had landed in because she was taller now and his usual position didn't fit anymore. "Taylor, what happened?"
"I don't know." She held him tighter and felt her upper arms flex with a strength that was new and frightening and she forced herself to ease off before she cracked one of his ribs. "I can't remember."
He pulled back. Looked at her. His eyes were red and his glasses were fogged and he was doing the thing again, the thing where he tried to keep his gaze on her face and kept failing because there was so much that was different and he couldn't take it all in and he was looking for her. She could see him searching for Taylor in the compound eyes and the mandibles and the chitin, and she wanted to tell him she was still in here.
She wasn't sure that was true.
"They want to put me in the Wards," she said, because silence was worse. "The team. The one that operates out of here. They say I can't... I can't go home."
Danny's face did something complicated. "I know. They called me. They explained."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't. Don't apologize for this."
"I'm sorry anyway."
He signed the paperwork twenty minutes later. Taylor watched his hand move across the consent forms and felt something that wasn't quite grief and wasn't quite relief. It was closer to the sensation of a door closing in a house you'd already left.
Her quarters were temporary. A repurposed single-occupancy room on a residential level of the Rig, stripped of its previous furnishings and equipped with a reinforced bed frame, institutional linens, a desk, a chair. The bathroom had been checked for fixtures that could cut chitin. Standard precaution for new parahumans, the escort told her.
The escort was a PRT staffer named Jenkins who treated Taylor with the particular brand of professional warmth that meant he'd been briefed and was overcompensating. He showed her the room and explained the light switches and the thermostat and the emergency call button and did not mention the camera in the upper corner of the main room. Taylor spotted it through a bee she'd tucked into her collar fluff, its compound eyes giving her an angle she shouldn't have had.
They were watching her. Of course they were watching her.
"Mess hall is two levels up. The Wards common area is down the hall, badge access. Someone will come by in the morning for orientation."
"Thank you."
"Get some rest. It's been a long day."
He left. The door closed. The lock engaged from the outside, which she heard because her antennae were apparently capable of detecting the mechanical vibration of a deadbolt through a steel door frame, and that was a fun new ability to add to the list.
Taylor stood in the middle of her new room and looked at it.
Sterile. White walls. Gray carpet, industrial grade. The bed was a rectangle. The desk was a rectangle. The chair was a rectangle. Everything was corners and right angles and flat surfaces and recycled air that smelled of filtration systems and cleaning solution and other people and it was wrong.
She didn't decide to start rearranging. Her body decided.
Lower hands pulled the blankets off the bed. Upper hands shoved the bed frame into the corner, angled, so two walls formed a pocket. The mattress came off next. She dragged it into the corner pocket and piled the blankets on top of it. The pillow went into the center. She pulled the desk chair over and draped a sheet over it to create an overhang. The desk itself she pushed against the open side to narrow the entrance.
She went into the bathroom and came back with towels. All of them. These went into the pile. Layered. Arranged. Tucked. She climbed into the structure and adjusted the overhang and rearranged the towels and climbed back out and looked at it from the outside and climbed back in and moved the pillow and the whole process took fifteen minutes.
When she was done, she had a nest.
She was standing outside of it, breathing hard, and looking at what she'd built, and the word arrived in her head with the weight of a gavel.
Nesting. You're nesting. You're building a hive.
Her upper hands clenched. Her lower hands went to the ventilation grate, which she'd covered with a folded towel because the air coming through it smelled like processed nothing and her hindbrain couldn't tolerate processed nothing, it needed warmth and wax and pollen and bodies.
You're an insect.
Taylor sat down on the floor with her back against the wall. Her wings folded flat. Her abdomen rested on the carpet behind her. Her four arms wrapped around her knees.
She stared at the nest she'd built and thought about the girl who used to sleep in a normal bed in a normal room in a normal house on Maple Street, and she couldn't remember what that girl's face looked like without mandibles.
Sleep didn't come.
Taylor lay in her nest and stared at the sheet canopy six inches above her face and felt every second of the night like a physical weight. The Rig hummed. She could hear it through the floor, through the walls, a constant low vibration that was the sum of generators and pumps and ventilation systems and the ocean moving against the platform's pylons. She could hear footsteps three corridors away. She could hear the breathing of someone in the next room over, asleep, and the rhythm of it made her feel more alone.
No drones. No swarm. The bees she'd brought were sleeping in her collar fluff, twelve small warm bodies that pulsed gently against her neck, and they weren't enough. They were a dozen individual minds, simple and familiar, and they filled a fraction of the space in her awareness that was screaming to be filled.
The anxiety built like water behind a dam.
She needed guards. She needed sentries. She needed something standing between her and the door, between her and the window, between her and the dark. The locked door was not enough. The camera was not enough. There was nothing between her and whatever might come through that door except her own body and her stingers and twelve sleeping bees.
Her chest tightened. Not metaphorically. Something physical, something glandular. A pressure behind her sternum that spread upward and outward, warm and thick, pooling in tissue she hadn't had a month ago. She could feel it building, the way you could feel a sneeze building, inevitable and unstoppable and originating from a place that didn't respond to willpower.
Honey.
Her body was producing honey.
Taylor pressed her hands against her chest and felt the change starting. Subtle. A fullness that hadn't been there an hour ago, growing denser, heavier. Her chitin plates shifted to accommodate, the seam lines widening fractionally. She could feel the honey accumulating in specialized tissue, her body converting whatever she'd eaten today into something sweet and thick and warm.
No. Not now. Not here.
Her body didn't care. Her body had assessed the situation, catalogued the threats, noted the absence of drones, and initiated the only response it had. Produce. Stockpile. Prepare.
The pressure increased. Taylor bit down on a sound that was half gasp and half something else, something she refused to categorize. Her lower back ached. Her abdomen felt heavy in a way it hadn't before, a dense internal weight shifting, and she knew with a certainty that bypassed cognition entirely what was happening.
She got up. She went into the bathroom. She closed the door and locked it and turned on the shower and sat on the tile floor with hot water drumming against the glass enclosure and her back against the wall.
The production cycle took hours.
She didn't have language for most of it. Her body did things it knew how to do and she held on and breathed and pressed her face into her knees and made sounds that the shower covered, mostly. The honey continued to build. She could feel her chest straining, the expansion pushing past any baseline she'd established in the handful of days since she'd woken up changed. Her chitinous skin stretched in ways that felt organic and alien and she gripped the bathroom tile with her upper hands and cracked two of them.
The eggs came near dawn. Two of them. She felt them descend through her abdomen and the laying was intense in a way that left her wrung out and shaking on the bathroom floor, curled on her side, wings plastered to her back with condensation from the shower.
Each egg was roughly melon-sized. Smooth-shelled. Warm. They sat on the tile between her lower hands and they were the color of dark amber and they weighed almost nothing for their size.
Taylor stared at them.
They didn't have eyes. They were eggs. They were inert biological objects produced by a body that had been transformed against her will through a process she couldn't remember.
They felt like they were staring back.
She turned off the shower. Dried her hands on one of the remaining towels she hadn't already committed to her nest. Picked up both eggs with her lower hands, cradling them against her belly with a care that was more instinct than choice.
She carried them into the main room. Her nest was where she'd left it, the sheet canopy slightly collapsed, the blankets rumpled. She knelt beside it and arranged the towels she had left, the ones from the bathroom, into a smaller ring inside the nest. A cup shape. She placed the eggs into it and adjusted the towel walls and then sat back and looked at what she'd made.
A nest within a nest. Eggs in a cradle in a hive in a room in a building on a platform in the ocean.
Morning light bled through the window. Gray and thin, filtered through cloud cover. It caught her chitin and lit the seam lines along her ribs and threw faint amber refractions across the white wall.
Taylor looked at the eggs. She looked at her hands, all four of them, resting on her thighs. She looked at the room she'd dismantled and reassembled into something that felt, if not right, then less catastrophically wrong.
She had no idea what she was doing.
Her chest ached. Emptier now. The honey was depleted, spent on the eggs, and the deflation left her feeling hollowed out and raw. She was exhausted. Her muscles shook with a fine tremor she couldn't suppress.
But something in her chest that wasn't honey and wasn't fear settled at the sight of those two eggs in their towel cradle. A warmth. A thread of calm in the static.
She would need to feed them. She didn't know how she knew that, but she knew. Honey. Her honey. They would need to be infused before they could develop into anything, and the thought of starting the production cycle again so soon made her want to curl up and sleep for a week.
She reached out with one lower hand and touched the nearer egg. Smooth. Warm. Alive in a way she could sense through her fingertips, a potential coiled tight inside a shell, waiting.
I made you, she thought. I don't know what you'll become. I don't know what I've become. But you're here and I'm here and nobody is taking either of us apart to find out how we work.
The bee in her collar fluff stirred, crawled up to her jaw, and pressed its small fuzzy body against the underside of her chin.
Taylor closed her eyes. Breathed. Let the exhaustion pull her down.
She fell asleep sitting up, her back against the corner walls, her lower hands resting on the edges of the towel cradle, her upper arms wrapped around herself. The eggs sat in their nest. The morning light crept across the floor. The Rig hummed its constant industrial lullaby.
At some point, a camera operator in the monitoring station flagged the footage and called a supervisor, and the supervisor called the Youth Services liaison, and the liaison called the Wards program coordinator, and nobody quite knew what to do about the insect girl asleep in a nest of towels and institutional linens with two melon-sized eggs and a dozen bees.
They let her sleep.