Later that day, they moved through a city's bones while the sun leaned west and the air lost its sharpness.
Scar-Mandible did not lecture so much as indicate, and each indication held more schooling than a speech. An antenna traced the contour of a channel cut to turn violence into useful flow. A pause beside a terrace that drank light in winter and rejected it in summer. A gesture toward a wall whose staggered stones meant it could fracture without falling.
"This wasn't survival," Whisper said, reverent. "This was civilization. Optimization layered on understanding."
Ember brushed dust from a recessed panel and found interior marks—narratives scratched into an old plaster that had outlived its roof. The early lines spoke agriculture and calendars. Later scenes jerked and blurred: figures larger, strokes hurried. Panic in stone.
"What happened?" Kai asked. The question came from genetic memory as much as mind; the paw-pattern thrummed with recognition.
Scar-Mandible answered in layered pheromones that tasted of iron, grit, and something like respect for the dead. What happens when a map is mistaken for the land. They understood—until the world changed outside their model. They built high to escape water below; the sky poured instead. They anticipated teeth and were eaten by another mouth. They unified strategy. When the strategy failed, their unity failed them too. No alternatives. One perfect answer, perfectly wrong.
"They did everything 'right' for the wrong world," Twitchy said softly.
Yes, Scar-Mandible marked. Thinking there became a single shape. Perfection fell all at once.
Dusk poured indigo into the empty places. The twin moons brightened like two eyes opening. Scar-Mandible took them to a ridge with a clean horizon and gestured. Above, the moons held a subtle tilt that made the belly feel unmoored.
They pull water, the ant commander conveyed. Separately, the world breathes. Together, it holds breath until the caves choke. Alignment makes flood. They knew this. They planned. They failed.
Whisper's mind raced, correlating orbital intervals with surge signatures etched into different stones. "If the double pull equals catastrophic push, then the focal constriction underground—the sealed pressure throat—is where the system screams first."
Scar-Mandible's markers came crisp. Forty-two cycles between alignments. Catastrophe repeats. It has always been so.
"How long?" Kai asked. The chest felt already cold.
Thirty-eight cycles remaining, Scar-Mandible answered. Perhaps fewer.
No one spoke for a count of fifty heartbeats. Scout finally inhaled, slow and deliberate, as if lungs could learn patience from stone. "We have to map the throat," the water specialist said. "Know the timing and shape of the surge. Not pictures—numbers."
"Numbers don't float," Twitchy muttered, but wrote the number anyway in the dust: 38.
They descended in a silence that wasn't empty. Scout counted gradients in the dark, tasting air for truth. Whisper muttered moons and pressure into equations only they could see. Twitchy checked every mark they'd made on the way up as if paranoia and care were synonyms. Ember walked beside Kai without filling the space with comfort. Shadow carried all of them on a thread so thin it should have broken and did not.
At the den mouth, Striker and Bitey stood like parentheses that could become claws. Current's eyes flicked from each returning face to the number painted on Twitchy's shoulder.
Shadow reached for the colony and opened a clean channel. Show me. The team poured it in: sky and ruins and moons and mathematics and the cold count of thirty-eight.
Shadow did not flinch. The telepath widened the weave—making room for weight so the net held.
They gathered everyone except Quick—six days old is too young for clocks. The circle formed: Kai at center; Twitchy against stone; Scout and Current pressed together; Whisper with rocks at their paws; Bitey in a hunter's squat; Dig counting stresses only they saw; Shadow's crystal brightening with load; Striker guard-still; Patch braced; Ember quiet. Silence took a shape.
Kai reported like a builder placing stones: facts first. Ruins that optimized instead of endured. Rain as system input. Twin moons as metronome and lever. Focal throat as failure point. Thirty-eight cycles as runway.
"Not enough time," Bitey said, voice like a blade.
"No," Kai said.
"Thirty-eight cycles," Dig murmured. "Barely enough to frame work, not to finish it."
"The ancients had centuries," Patch said. "They drowned anyway. Numbers won't pull lungs from water."
"We're not them," Striker said, steady. "We're messier."
"I don't know how to fight water," Striker added, almost apologizing to the stone.
"You don't," Scout said gently. "You negotiate with it. You trick it into being where you are not."
"Higher ground?" Bitey asked.
"They built high," Shadow reminded. "Water learned heights."
Shadow pulsed calm—not to smother fear but to keep it from leaking. Fear is fuel. Panic is a leak. Seal the leak.
Whisper lined stones into three parallel rows. "Uniform thought failed them. We build redundancy: multiple strategies in parallel, not one ladder we all climb."
"Network, not chain," Current said, catching the shape. "Many small survivals rather than one big salvation."
"Exactly," Whisper breathed, and some of the frantic brightness in their eyes found a channel.
"We breed," Ember said into the opening. "On purpose. Specialists for water, for memory, for building under pressure, for moving in three dimensions, for carrying knowledge where stone can't. Not one plan. Many."
Patch's gaze sharpened. "Ethical cost acknowledged. We create beings for functions. They will feel their edges."
"We already do," Striker said quietly, thinking of Quick's first day. "Quick is Quick because we decided speed mattered. We didn't love them less because their first night broke them."
"We don't create tools and abandon them," Patch said. "We create people and accept responsibility. For life. For care. For their choice to refuse the role we imagined."
"Consent is complicated when existence is the question," Kai said. "Responsibility cannot be."
Shadow lifted their head. "We vote. One weight each."
Twitchy: "Yes. Diversity is our only antidote to alignment."
Scout: "Yes. Swimmers who think like rivers."
Whisper: "Yes. Knowledge keepers who remember when stone fails."
Bitey: "Yes. Fighters who make violence slow in fast water."
Dig: "Yes. Builders who lie to currents and make them believe it."
Current: "Yes. Networks instead of ladders."
Striker: "Yes. Tactics that don't require the ground's consent."
Patch: "Yes—with vows. We will not create and discard."
Shadow: "Yes, and I will carry the weight of what that means."
Ember: "Yes. Difference survives what sameness cannot."
Kai: "Yes."
The number did not change, but the shape around it did.
"Then we start," Kai said. "But first we need to see the throat. If we prepare blind, we prepare wrong."
"Hybrid predator territory," Scout warned. "The guardians patrol that axis."
"We go anyway," Twitchy said, and somehow it sounded like affection for inevitability.
That night, they made lists. Dig chalked structural priorities along the chamber wall: seal low vents; cut new gutters; raise nurseries; double anchors on upper braces. Bitey paired kits by complementary habits—speed to caution, theory to claws. Whisper began a lexicon of moon phases; Scout mapped pressure signatures; Shadow rehearsed surge-broadcast patterns until the room hummed with the mental equivalent of hand signs.
Quick, mercifully, slept—twitching with kinetic dreams, Ember curled nearby as the colony's quiet anchor. Every few hours, Patch rose to check the speed kit's pulse and pupils, then went back to sharpening salves for lungs that might have to relearn breathing in hostile water.
When the den finally dimmed to its soft, functional night, Kai stood alone before the eleven stones and pressed a paw to Stone One's broken circle. "We saw you," Kai whispered. "We saw the other half."
The stones did not answer, but the air did: a slow exhale through the upper vents, cool with the promise of dawn and work.