Morning found the ache with teeth.
By mid-sun, the imperative had stepped out of suggestion and into command. Not a shout. The opposite—a steady, incontrovertible presence: This is what bodies are for. Kai had learned to breathe around it, to stack tasks on top of it, but tasks slid off the slope of that certainty. Rushing would be sin and doom; waiting past the moment would waste the pull's usefulness. What remained was the narrow bridge between.
Dig's sketch-maps had a symbol stenciled in the corner of one page, different from the ordinary marks: a soft-edged triangle with three dots like embers within. "Heat," Dig had said, tapping it. "Not the kind we've seen before. Air that forgets to be cool where it should be, stone that hums even when water is sleeping. It's wrong. I love it."
Kai went alone, not out of secrecy but efficiency; bringing bodies brings noise. The upper system's new corridors leaned and spiraled unpredictably; the flood had planed old corners and gouged new runs. Twice, Kai paused and laid a palm flat to the wall, let pressure-sense read the argument the stone was having with itself; twice, the argument promised to keep its voice down, and Kai went on.
The air changed first—took on that charged taste that rides ahead of a storm on the surface, metallic and clean, like a blade rinsed in rain. Furs along Kai's spine lifted at once, as if told a joke only hair could hear. The hum arrived next: not water's deep muscle, but a higher, finer thread, a string plucked gently and repeatedly. It lived more in claws than in ear.
They were there in a chamber that should have been too narrow for that many bodies, except their choreography made space where there was none. Hundreds at first count, then more when a cluster lifted and revealed another layer beneath. Insectoid, yes, but the word did not carry their elegance. Carapaces the color of metal when heat has just thought about kissing it—straw-gold, tempered-blue, oil-slick violet. Each body pulsed with bioluminescent points, not like moss's lazy glow, but like a language with syllables. They moved in formations that answered questions no World Cat had the grammar to ask.
The lightning beetles.
Kai flattened scent and lowered profile, and still a dozen heads turned as one. We see you. The ripple ran through them not by sound or smell but by voltage—arcs short and precise. A larger beetle—older, or simply more central in the logic of the cluster—detached. Its gait made a suggestion of a circle around Kai, not trapping, merely defining the conversation's shape.
Kai offered peace the way peace is offered by a species that breathes chemistry: simple markers of intelligence and nonaggression, clear edges on intention. But in the charged air, the message felt like speaking underwater. The beetle's language was the crack between claw and stone, the blue stitch when charge leaps gaps.
It lifted a delicate forelimb. Paused. Decided.
The touch was gentler than a whisker. The current that followed was not.
It was not attack. If it had been, the conversation would have ended in the first blink; a system that delicate could be silenced like a candle. The beetle's gift was measured, not maximal, a gorgeously cruel calibration: exactly as much electricity as a nervous system can take without forgetting its name.
Every nerve lit at once. Vision broke into geometry—the cave reduced to clean lines: angles, arcs, a sudden comprehension of where force lives in stone. For a heartbeat-length and then another, consciousness wasn't thought, it was shape. Pain sat like a white animal on the chest; the city of the body went dark and rebooted.
When Kai could count again, the cluster had flowed backward like tide, reassembled its sentences into a different paragraph. The larger beetle waited a moment longer, head at a mathematical tilt. It tapped one foreclaw to the floor—done—and rejoined its pattern. The hum softened by one degree.
Kai flexed. A blue thread stitched between two claws with a sound like a spark kissing a wick. No scorch, no smoke; only possibility.
"Thank you," Kai said aloud to an audience that spoke in arcs, and the chamber's hum rose a little, and maybe Kai hadn't said it in the wrong language after all.
The return was long and simple and not simple at all. Muscles misfired twice and then remembered they were on a team. Once, turning a corner, Kai moved too quickly without asking the legs to share, and it was almost a sweep to the floor; the landing turned smooth because practice is stronger than pride. By the time the familiar notch that marked the upper chambers' threshold came into view, the fur along Kai's sides glittered with tiny, constant pins of light, so faint they belonged to the idea of light more than light itself.
Whisper's head came up before the scent did, as if chemistry used the language specialist's nose as a home address. "You're wrong," they said, delighted, and then was kind enough to add, "You smell wrong. But in a way that suits you."
Kai touched claw to claw. Showed the stitch. Scout leaned in, curiosity bright as a fish eye.
"Control?" Patch asked, all efficiency and mercy.
"Learning," Kai said. "It's less like lifting and more like not lifting the wrong way."
"Words," Dig sighed happily. "Show me later. Then: we build a run that lets failure be funny instead of fatal."
"I want to spar with the air around you," Bitey said, approval like a coin sliding across a table. "See what speed does to patience."
Shadow pressed a thought along the inside of Kai's skull with the gentleness of a hand to a fevered brow. Your nerves are writing a second alphabet. I can read some of the letters. I will learn the rest.
"Will it pass?" Twitchy asked, businesslike despite the brightness behind the eyes.
"It's built to," Kai said. The ache pushed agreement like a thumb into a bruise. "And soon."
Control is practice plus kindness. The first day, the sparks came when they wanted; the second, when asked; the third, when asked politely; the fourth, when told no. Whisper found the scent of overload and branded it in Kai's mind as stop. Patch designed a set of movements that forced muscle and mind to shake hands before either tried to sprint; Dig carved a narrow, slightly forgiving run whose walls said yes to claws and no to disaster. Scout stood at one end and said "here" without moving and taught Kai how to arrive without colliding with the idea of arrival.
Bitey watched, amused and intent. "You're going to make someone faster than me," they said, and did not make the mistake of sounding threatened by their own prophecy.
"Good," Striker said from the doorway, eyes bright. "We should all be someone else's slow."
By night, the ache had cupped its hands around the world. The private chamber waited with its deliberately boring walls. Twitchy sat outside with a ledger that needed columns added, not because the ledger mattered more than the moment inside, but because the quiet of neat rows makes a shield others can lean against.
Kai let the pod happen the way you let thunder happen: by not pretending you're the one making the noise.
This one crackled.
The membrane sang in the teeth like foil between molars. The glow inside wasn't the soft, wet light of ordinary biology; it was the kind that casts its own edges. Tiny arcs traversed the surface, mapping nerves before the body had them. Patch dabbed salve along a line where the charge had dried flex too fast. Whisper hung back, eyes wide, language failing into reverence.
"It's beautiful," Shadow whispered, voice small, awe making even thoughts tread lightly.
"Terrifying," Kai said, because reverence must not be left without its twin. "Both is honest."
The pod took longer. New alphabets cost time. Kai felt hours pass and didn't. Twitchy drank and handed water through the door and did not ask if it was time; bodies tell you when it is time.
When it was, the crack sounded like thin glass surprised by heat.
What emerged was not the smooth spill of prior births. It was a collision of ideas into form—as if the body had been moving before it owned space to move in and only then remembered gravity. The newborn landed, ricocheted, landed again. Limbs too fast for their joints, eyes too big for their day. Fur limited by static, scales along the shins fine as wire. Everything beautiful and wrong and exactly as designed.
"Neurological overload," Patch said from the threshold, not stepping further. "Seventeen commands, all green. No traffic officer."
Kai moved and was careful not to be a new command. Cleaned what could be cleaned without turning touch into demand. The kit panted and shook and bolted from the idea of hands.
"Your name is Quick," Kai said, and names have a way of making a floor where there had been a cliff. "You are fast. We will teach you how to be kind to that."
The kit's eyes darted like goldfish in a dish. A tiny arc leapt between their whiskers and the wall; the sound was a thought trying to be spoken.
"Less," Twitchy said from the doorway. Lamps went down to a smear. The world simplified to stone and breath and two heartbeats trying to slow.
Shadow sat with their back to the wall, which is how you tell a frightened thing you will not chase it. Their mind extended, the thinnest possible thread. Not organizing. Not yet. Witnessing. I am here.
Quick pinged off the room three more times and then four. Each collision left less panic behind and more shame; Ember—already sitting in the corner because Ember is wherever the room needs a corner—said softly, "You don't have to be good to be loved," and didn't look to see if anyone admired the sentence.
The first night was long. The kit wore a path in moss. Patch marked the wrist with the smallest amount of calming paste and made sure it would not become a crutch. Whisper tried a scent and then backed out when Quick flinched from it. Dig measured the wall with the eyes of a corridor that would cushion better tomorrow. Bitey looked in once, nodded, left: this is a fight too. Scout leaned into the doorframe like water finding the right edge and did not offer advice. Twitchy counted breaths and refused to make a plan for a body that had not met itself yet.
At dawn, Quick slept the way a sprint collapses—twitching, dreaming, still moving inside the stillness. Ember did not move. Shadow dimmed the thread until it was a hum the kit could not hear and would never entirely not hear again.
Kai looked at the tiny body and felt pride and fear sit down together like neighbors sharing tea. "Welcome," Kai said. "To the worst and best lesson: how to be what you are without breaking on it."
The ache went quiet. The day started.