I’d never been carried by something flying.

Kesh’s wings roared behind us, a blur of veined light, and the passages streamed past faster than I could map them. The walls flickered gold and grey and gold again. Dust sifted from the ceiling. Somewhere ahead, the hive was screaming — not with sound, but with a high, thin pressure in my skull, like a nail drawn across slate.

The smaller ones streamed past us in panicked golden rivers. Their scents had broken loose in their terror, and the air was thick with it. Fear. Fear. Fear.

We burst into the great chamber.

Vael was on the dais, but not lying. She’d reared up to her full height, her torn wings flared wide, her whole body rigid. Her head was turned towards the east. Her eyes were open and blind and wet.

“I can’t feel them,” she was saying. Over and over, in my language and her own. “I can’t feel them. I can’t—”

Kesh set me down at the foot of the dais and flung himself up it. He caught her face between his upper hands. He said something low and urgent in the hive’s tongue.

She didn’t seem to hear him.

“There were workers in the eastern reach,” she said, her voice cracking. “Tending the outer walls. Twenty. Perhaps thirty. The walls came down on them and I can’t feel them, Kesh. I don’t know if they’re alive. I don’t know where they are. I can’t find them.”

The chamber spun around me. I sat down hard on the floor.

Thirty workers. Somewhere in the dark. Somewhere in the eastern reach, where Vael’s song hadn’t reached in years. Where she couldn’t feel a single wall.

The only part of the hive I’d mapped before I ever met her.

My hands were already moving. I tore open my chart case and spread the pages across the floor, scattering them in a frantic fan until I found it. The first map. The one I’d drawn by glowstone light on my very first day, smudged and creased from the fall. The first chamber. The three tunnel mouths. The cell-tiers. And beside it, the pages I’d added since, piece by piece, every time Kesh had walked me along the eastern edge.

It wasn’t complete. But it was more than anyone in the hive had.

“Kesh!”

He turned.

I held up the pages. My hands were shaking. “The eastern reach. I’ve got most of it. Where were they working? Which walls?”

He stared at me for one heartbeat. Then he was off the dais and on his knees beside me, his claws hovering over the paper.

“Here,” he said. “The outer cell-tiers. Above the first chamber. Where you fell.”

Where I’d fallen. Through the thin, dimmed, living wall.

“It was already weak,” I said slowly. “I tore it open. And it’s been weak ever since.”

The guilt hit like a fist. Kesh’s hand closed over mine before I could pull away.

“It was dying before you came,” he said. “It would have fallen. Tell me how to reach them.”

So I did.

I don’t remember everything about the next hours. I remember Kesh carrying me through the shaking passages, my maps clutched against my chest. I remember the eastern reach — the first chamber half-buried, the tunnel mouths choked with fallen wax and stone, dust hanging thick and grey in the dying light. I remember reading my own charcoal lines by glowstone, calling out turns, counting steps. Left here. Thirty paces. There should be a side passage under that fall — dig there.

And Kesh dug.

He tore at the rubble with all four hands. The smaller ones swarmed in to help, hundreds of them, carrying away fragments too small for him to bother with. I held the light and read the maps and shouted until my voice went raw. Twice the passage shifted and groaned above us, and twice Kesh threw himself over me until it stopped.

The first worker we found was alive.

She was pinned under a slab of fallen wall, her wings crushed, her small body barely humming. Kesh lifted the slab and the others carried her away. Then the next. And the next. Some of them were alive. Some weren’t. I stopped counting after a while. I just read the maps and pointed and held the light.

We found the last of them deep in the cell-tiers, behind a wall I’d sketched on my very first day. Kesh pulled away the final slab of rubble. The worker beneath it was alive.

And beyond her, where the wall had been, there was light.

Not gold. Not the honeyed glow of the hive.

White. Pale and cool and unbearably bright.

I stood up slowly. My legs were shaking. I took one step towards it, then another, until I was standing at the bottom of a long, jagged shaft that the collapse had torn open through the rock. It slanted up and up and up, a rough throat of broken stone, scattered with handholds and ledges.

At the very top, small and far away, was a circle of sky.

I hadn’t seen the sky in eighteen days.

I didn’t hear Kesh come up behind me. I only knew he was there because the light from the shaft fell across his plates and turned the bronze to silver.

Neither of us spoke.

The smaller ones carried the last worker away. The passage behind us went quiet. Far away, I could hear the hive’s hum — thin and frayed, but there. Still there.

“It reaches the surface,” Kesh said at last. His voice was very calm. “You could climb it. Your ankle is healed.”

I didn’t answer. I was looking at the sky.

I took out a clean page. My hands moved on their own. I sketched the shaft — the angle of it, the ledges, the handholds, the places where the rock looked loose. I marked the distances. I noted where a careful climber would need to rest. It was the best map I’d ever drawn. Clear and simple and precise.

A way out.

When I finished, I looked up at Kesh.

He was standing with his back to the light, so I couldn’t read his face. But his antennae had drooped low. And his hands — all four of them — were open and empty at his sides.

“Go,” he said.

The word landed like a stone in still water.

“Kesh—”

“You asked for time to think. On your own. You cannot think on your own down here.” His voice didn’t change. Calm and flat and careful. “Everything here wants you. The hive. The Queen. Me. Even without scent, it is in the walls. You will never know your own mind with all of us around you.”

He stepped aside. The light fell full on my face.

“Go up,” he said. “Sit in your sun. Breathe your own air. And if you do not come back—”

He stopped. The hum in his chest faltered, just once.

“If you do not come back,” he said, “then that is your answer, and it will be a true one. And I will carry it down to her myself.”

I stared up at him. My throat had gone tight and hot.

“And Vael? Does she know you’re—”

“She told me to let you go,” he said. “When I left the chamber. Before you had found the first worker. She said, if a door opens, Kesh, you will not stand in it.”

Of course she had.

I looked at the shaft. At the circle of sky. At the map in my hands.

Then I put the page in my chart case, slung it across my body, and began to climb.

I didn’t look back. I knew if I looked back I would never leave, and then I’d never know.

It was a long climb. Hard. My ankle ached and my hands bled and twice I slipped on loose stone and caught myself with my heart in my throat. But my map was good. The handholds were where I’d marked them. The ledges were where I’d said they’d be. And the circle of sky grew and grew and grew until it filled my whole world.

Then I hauled myself over the lip of the shaft and lay on my back in the grass.

The sun was setting. The sky was gold and rose and soft deep blue, stretching on forever without a ceiling. Wind moved over me. Real wind, cold and clean and smelling of heather and rain. A bird was singing somewhere nearby — a small brown one, very loud.

I laughed. Then I put my arm over my eyes and cried.

When the tears ran out, I sat up and looked around.

I knew where I was. The high moors above the Underreach, maybe a day’s walk from Harrowgate. I could see the old drovers’ road winding away to the west, pale in the dusk. If I started now, I could reach the shepherd’s hut at Carran Cross before full dark. I could be home in two days. Sleeping in my own bed. Drinking terrible tea in the Guild hall and telling everyone the honey-drunk stories were true.

I’d have a map. The first map of a hive anyone had ever brought back.

They’d write ballads about me.

I stood up. I picked up my chart case. I walked to the edge of the drovers’ road and stood there, looking west.

I waited to feel free.

The wind blew. The bird sang. The first stars came out, pale and cold, one by one. The moor stretched away on every side, empty and vast and silent.

Silent.

That was the word for it. I’d never noticed before. I’d spent my whole life in silence like this — on mountaintops, in caves, in my two rooms above the chandlery in Harrowgate with their one cold window. I’d always thought of it as peace.

But I’d spent eighteen days inside a song. And now, standing in the open air for the first time in nearly three weeks, I could feel exactly how much was missing.

No hum in my bones. No golden light breathing in the walls. No smaller ones leaving honey cakes by my bed. No dry voice telling me I was loud. No long pale fingers waiting, palm up, for me to choose to take them.

No one asking what I wanted.

No one waiting for my answer.

I thought of Kesh, standing alone in the shaft with his empty hands. Of thirty-one years of sealed cells in the dark. Of Vael on her dais, blind and weeping, saying I can’t feel them. Of the moment in her arms when the whole hive had sung through my body, and for one heartbeat I’d known the shape of everything.

I’d spent my whole life making maps so other people wouldn’t get lost.

I’d never once had anywhere I belonged.

I stood on the edge of the drovers’ road until the stars were fully out. I let the wind blow through me. I let myself feel all of it — the fear and the grief and the cold, sharp loneliness of the moor. I let myself imagine the walk home, and the bed, and the Guild hall, and the ballads.

I waited until I was sure. Until I knew, all the way down to my bones, that what I felt was mine and only mine.

Then I turned around, and walked back to the shaft.

The climb down was harder than the climb up. It was dark, and my hands were raw, and I had to feel for every hold. But I’d drawn the map. I knew the way.

About halfway down, I saw a light below me. Faint and gold, like a lamp in a window.

It was the walls. The torn edges of the hive at the bottom of the shaft, glowing softly in the dark.

I didn’t remember them glowing when I’d left.

When my feet finally touched the floor of the cell-tiers, Kesh was still there. He was sitting against the rubble with his knees drawn up and his wings folded tight, exactly where I’d left him. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t gone back to the Queen. He’d just sat in the dark at the bottom of the shaft, looking up at the circle of sky.

Waiting.

He rose to his feet so fast he nearly fell. His antennae flew forward, then froze. He stared at me as if I were a ghost.

“You came back,” he said.

“I did.”

“Why?” His voice cracked down the middle. “Wren. Why?”

I crossed the rubble to him. I took his face between my bleeding hands.

“Because it’s too quiet up there,” I said. “And because I want to come home.”

Then I kissed him. And I let him feel, in every breath, that it was my own.

When I drew back, his hum had started up again, low and unsteady, filling my head like the sound of the sea.

“Take me to her,” I said. “I have an answer to give.”