It would not have been inapt to call us mantises. If I still had the capacity to squint, had I squinted at Lark and Nina, the resemblance to praying mantises would have definitely been apparent. Insofar as the general build of our bodies, it was more or less the same as the insect's, with some modifications, of course. Our slender abdomens lay roughly parallel to the ground, supported by four jointed legs. A flexible stinger-tipped tail grew out from the ends of our abdomens and curled forward and over it, though, unlike the scorpion's stinger it resembled, there was no trace of segmentation, just tightly banded cords. With a bit of practice, I could curl my stinger forward and back, and jab it, and turn it left or right.

The front ends of our bodies rose upright, perpendicular to our thoraxes (?), in a torso bearing four more jointed limbs. My arms were pretty dextrous, even more so than a human's. I could fold them up against my chest with ease, only to lash out in an instant at the slightest provocation. Each arm ended in a two fingered "hand" resembling stubby tweezers, and though my arms didn't twist around and pronate nearly as much as a human's (or wyrm's) could, my "wrists" could rotate nearly a full 360°. Similar, slightly more robust-looking bident toes studded the ends of my legs, though they were nowhere near as flexible as my hand's wrists.

Our bodies were suffused with a silvery radiance. The luminescent streams wafted off us in vague clouds, and pulsed bright and thick through our limbs, like a heartbeat.

Lark pointed at herself with her pincer fingers. "I spend my whole adult life struggling with body issues, and now, I get turned into a fucking bug?"

I won't lie: despite my companions' clear distress, Lark and Nina's company was a definite bright spot of my current situation.

All three of us lay on our abdomens, with our legs sprawled at our sides.

"The creatures we've become," I said, "I've seen them before."

Lark pointed at her head. "Do I have something on my face? Because it feels like I have something on your face."

"Your face is what's on your face," Nina quipped.

Our heads and faces truly were the strangest parts of our new bodies. They looked like radio dishes, if radio dishes were built like flowers, with a bundle of stamens and pistils and other sensory doodads sticking up in the middle.

I could tilt my head up and down and left and right, and, much like my wrists, I could spin it nearly all the way around.

"I'm pretty sure these stamen- and pistil-like structures are our sensory organs," I said. "Maybe they even work like radio antennae."

"Is that why my vision is…?" Nina said.

I nodded. True, nodding felt unnatural in this body, but not nodding would have felt even more so. "Yeah," I replied. "At least, I'm willing to bet that that's why."

Was this how a radio antenna saw/heard the signals it picked up? I wondered.

Lark grumbled. "Whoop-de-doo…" She threw her upper pair of arms up, while doing her best to grumpily cross her lower pair.

Again, if I could have squinted, I imagine we'd have looked like praying mantises wearing sizable upturned ruffled collars.

Actually, it turned out I could squint, after a fashion. I could flex my radio flower's wrap-around petal, and by doing so, I could tighten the aperture, and the overall effect was very much like squinting.

"Shit," Lark said, glancing at the ground. "What is that?" She pointed.

I looked down to see she was pointing at the needle shield. The shield had definitely gotten bigger since I'd last held it, in human form. Obviously, this meant that our new bodies were smaller relative to a human being's.

"Oh, it's a useful self-defense device," I said. I reached to pick up the shield, only for the thing to fracture at my touch, as brittle as a cracker. The shards splayed out along the bottom of the gully.

"Wow, really useful," Lark said.

Well, so much for that.

"Where are we?" Nina asked.

I looked up at the sky. "In an Archive, most likely," I said. "That's probably why we were transformed into these creatures."

"What do you mean?" Nina asked.

"Whatever Vyxit set up this Archive, they must have set this species' bodies as the 'default' form."

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"How are you gonna find Dr. Horosha?" Nina asked.

I paused for a moment. "I don't know."

"Maybe you can use those nifty mental powers of yours?" Lark said. "It might at least give us a head-start."

"No way." I shook my head. "I don't want to risk getting the AVUs on our tail. Hacking into these spaceships isn't easy."

"Yeah, I noticed," Lark said.

Nina spread her arms—all four of them. "Then what do we do?"

I rose onto my four legs. The things were surprisingly sturdy, despite my generally slender frame (abdomen not withstanding). I turned to where the gully rose up to ground level. "Well, we won't find Suisei by staying here."

"Uh… how do I walk?" Lark asked. "I've got fucking two left feet!"

"Huh…"

This turned out to be a very good question, and it had an equally bad answer.

We spent several increasingly flustrating minutes trying to figure out how to navigate the world with eight limbs.

There was a great deal of tumbling involved. Our frustrated gripes bounced off the gully's walls like bubbling bonfires.

Then, the sky overhead lit up with sound and thunder.

An instinct we didn't know we had jolted through our bodies and, before we realized what had happened, we'd quickly skittered up half of the way to the top of the incline leading out of the gully.

"Shit!" Lark cursed. "What the hell was that?" Then she shook her head. "Wait a minute. I… I walked!"

Her stinger tail made happy flicks.

It turned out the secret to walking with four out of eight legs was pretty much the same as walking on two legs, or slithering on none: don't overthink it.

The sound of thunder was bright overhead. It drew our flowers' gazes skyward.

I folded my arms against my chest, not wanting to tangle my limbs with Lark's or Nina's.

"By the Godhead…" I muttered.

It seemed that day and night had lost their meaning. Particles fireworked out from the Sun overhead, refracting through the cloudy skies in constant spray of movement and color. The hills and mountains in the distance were little more than dark triangles beneath the aerial static. They lingered on the horizon like voids.

A great creature passed high overhead, streaming along in a wake of electromagnetic music. The core of its silhouette was like a whale's, or a giant hammerhead shark's, mixed with a ray's and a skate's. Protrusions on its side spread long; some kind of gigantic wings.

"There's a whale in the sky…" Lark said, softly, pointing with a mantoid limb.

"That's not a whale," Nina corrected.

"Well, I'm calling it a whale."

Silvery veins sparked within this sky-whale, as if we were looking at the nervure on the underside of a leaf, only the sap was electric.

Then, the creature sang.

"Holy…" Lark mumbled.

She skittered ahead, toward the top of the hill.

The sky-whale's song was an alien melody, written in the sounds of light. Its luminous cries spooled out in threads and waves that echoed forward, mirroring the silences trailing off its finned, muscular tail. The signal stormed through the air's dusty currents, diffracting as it frayed and faded.

There was another crack of lightning. The light was so loud, but the thunder that followed it lived only in my imagination.

This body must not have been able to hear.

Tilting its wings, the creature let out a bellow, and then banked toward a stretch of cirrusy thunderclouds.

Immediately, a swarm of particles around the storm cloud lit up with the same silver glow alive in the whale and ourselves. The electricity flowed into the bobbing motes, but then the sky-whale plowed into the swarm, head-first, stealing the energy for itself.

"See, they even eat sky-plankton!" Lark said, pointing again. "I'm tellin' you, they're sky-whales!"

I certainly believed it.

Another lightning bolt struck, this time, hitting the whale. The energy flowed directly into the creature's body, whose network of silver light glowed with sudden vigor.

"Whales don't eat lightning," Nina said.

"What the fuuuuuuuck…?" Lark said, long and drawn out.

Staring in astonishment, Nina skittered out in front of me, rising up to ground level. "Ay yai yai…"

Her body shifted slightly; she was still unsteady on her legs.

I pushed forward, trying not to think too much about coordinating all four of my legs. It got easier the further I went.

I came to a stop beside my companions. While Lark and Nina continued to gawk at the sky-whale, I took in the panoramic view spread out before us.

In one of our more memorable conversations, Brand had once likened ecology to language. I'd resented that comparison at first, but as he explained his point, I realized there really was something to it. Both language and ecology were subject to evolution through natural selection. Likewise, the processes that shaped them both played out on timescales larger than what was allotted to human beings, which meant we ended up going about our lives so immersed in them that we hardly gave any notice to their nature or origin, except when they got pulled out from under our feet.

Pel and I had experienced that very thing on our honeymoon trip to Vaneppo. It happened as we exited the taxi we'd ridden from the aeroport to our hotel and took our first steps into the Costranak capital's warm, welcoming chaos. Snippets of the Trenton language rose up like landmarks from the sea of foreign chatter here and there—sometimes on billboards or buildings, other times on people's mouths—but other than that, it really had felt like we'd stepped into another world. But peer closely enough, and you'd discover—as we did—that the difference was only skin deep. At the end of the day, the rules underlying the Costranak and Trenton tongues were ultimately the same. They'd merely played out differently, just like people's lives.

I felt that same, uncanny bewilderment recapitulated all over again as I stared out into the panorama before us, only at scale and scope far greater than ever before.

It was a double whammy. Even with human eyes, the landscape before me would have been alien in everything beyond its most basic details—the mountains, the distant seas, and the plains and woodlands in between. But I didn't have human eyes here. I didn't have eyes at all, just a cluster of radio antennae.

Angel…

The sky and sea were different shades of magma, while the forests belonged underwater, on the rocks of a coral reef, and everything that lived glowed with that silver light. The animals that crawled or ran or climbed or hovered or flew; the plants that moldered and rambled; the groves and the thorns; everything was wired, and it glowed.

I could have spent a lifetime starting, but then realization struck a chord with something I'd seen before, and all of sudden, everything came together in my mind's eye.

"By the Godhead," I muttered, "we're in the Lantor Incursion."

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