Vantari's fear lodged in his throat as he dared not breathe too deeply, lest the cicada on his tongue decided to slide back down into his lungs.

Then came Decima's voice, as smooth, sly, and soaked in silk and poison as ever.

"So the blind man does see," Decima purred. "Well, I knew you would taste the pattern sooner or later. Of course I knew Vantari plotted treachery. Every tongue tells its secrets eventually, so I had cicadas planted in every throat he trusted, singing to me their schemes, numbers, and academic sighs. Every word muttered in that burrow they called a 'laboratory', I was there to listen."

Vantari gave a strangled whimper, his tongue trembling beneath the cicada.

"Oh, and you knew I was never going to let the treachery pass," Decima went on, her words lilting like a song. "Once the research bore fruit, I would have slit the gardener and kept the orchard. I would have loosed a thousand Grafting Bug Afflicted upon the Outer Regions—and what sweeter dialect of war exists than fear and betrayal? The Outer Region lords would howl of the Capital's tyranny, and the empire would split in half, civil war blooming like fungus in damp soil. Could you imagine that, little Zora?"

Zora angled his head slightly.

Calmly, evenly, he said, "I figured."

"You did?"

"You already spoke through that Mutant-Class gliding ant back on the train. There was never a chance that Vantari was uninfested, and you are meticulous in paranoia, so I figured you had a plan of that sort when I learned of the Grafting Bug Afflicted."

The cicada chortled, wings thrumming against Vantari's tongue. "And you are not furious to learn the empire's greatest scholars have been my ventriloquists for years?"

"Furious?" Zora's lips curved faintly. "Not particularly. I know what you are, and you are not Nona. She is thunder—boisterous, overt, and squanderous in her strength. You are mildew in the dark. In fact, you probably suck at fighting, which is why you weave into other bodies, steal their breaths, and speak through their throats. What are the chances your real body is frailer than even the Mutant-Class gliding ants I have already bested?"

Decima's laughter was low and unkind. "I was not pretending otherwise. Why would I? I am not ashamed. I would never meet you in battle. You alone, as you are now, would annihilate me in battle, and with that… that Worm Mage next to you? I am not fool enough to pit air against stone."

Then her tone sharpened to a dagger-point.

"And that is why you will not see me until the sparks you lit today swell into the pyre of civil war," she drawled. "Our first meeting shall be our last, so I am already resigned to my death. Tell me, little Zora—have you conjugated that verb for yourself? Are you prepared to die?"

Zora was unshaken. "If civil war will come whether by your hand or mine, then let it. Better the flames rise without you having control of the Grafting Bug Afflicted."

"Oh, you are fluent in futility." Her laughter was even sharper now. Cutting. Maddening. "And yet so… predictable—"

"Witness divination."

His spell barely left his mouth before the little cicada burst into flames, and Vantari spat it out now that it was no longer clinging to his tongue.

But even as the little cicada burned, Decima's voice keened and splintered.

"Ah, this story, this tired aria!" she howled. "Decades upon decades it plays the same: humans tinker, posture, and become certain they've found the idiom of victory—only for us to answer with a word you cannot parse! Again and again, defeat repeats in your history, and I conduct the chorus!"

The cicada's body split open with a hiss of flame, her voice shrieking through its death rattle.

"I let you believe you stand a chance! I fatten your hope until it breaks the skin, and then I savor the ruin! Every decade, rise, fall, rise, fall, and always the same story!" she sang. "This decade, little Zora, you shall be the center of my story! You shall watch the empire sing the same lament your academy sang, because for how foolish Nona was, she was still my sister!"

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The cicada shrieked. Fire bloomed upon its shell. Decima's voice dissolved into screeching laughter, then guttered out with the last of the burning insect.

Silence dropped like a curtain, and only Vantari's ragged, shuddering breaths remained.

Then the professor slammed his remaining fist against the wooden floorboards. the impact echoing through the soaked ceremonial hall.

"Shit," he hissed. "She knew. She knew all this time."

His words trembled with the realization that the ground beneath his feet had never been his. Every scheme and every night of research had been a puppet's dance for Decima's amusement, though, of course, Zora couldn't help but wonder if this was the folly of a professor: too smart to devise a formula for monstrous Afflicted soldiers, but too foolish to realize Decima couldn't have survived sixty years of war if she wasn't the least bit cautious with her plans.

Slowly, Vantari dragged his gaze upward.

"We have to stop her," Vantari rasped. He began to push himself upright—

And Zora's boot pressed flat against his chest, forcing him back to the stage floor.

The professor coughed sharply, sucking air past pain, then growled, "What are you—"

"I knew Decima already knew of your imminent betrayal," Zora said, "but even if she hadn't, I would still do this."

For a heartbeat, silence. Then the sound of Vantari's shallow breathing quickened as his disbelief painted itself across the hall.

"... Why?" he croaked, stunned. "Why would you still—" His voice cracked. "Don't you understand? If this research is completed, humanity can win! We can still win against the Swarm! The research records are still intact, so we can take it elsewhere, somewhere far away from her reach, and continue the project—"

"Two years ago," Zora said, "I was ready to sacrifice the world for the sake of a child. In the end, I sacrificed a child for the sake of the world. Since then, not a single night has passed where I haven't asked myself: Kethra or Kethra?"

Vantari frowned, spitting the words. "What?"

"It's an old phrasing in one local translation of The Earthen Princess," Zora said, leaning slightly on his staff. "In that version, the earthen wall that saves the village rises only when the child of ill omens lays her body in the flood. Every time the people live, she suffers. Tell me what you think, professor: should I save Kethra, the wall, or Kethra, the girl? Is a world that demands a sacrifice a world worth protecting?"

Vantari hissed through clenched teeth. "That story is for children! It's nonsense! You're wasting time with fairy tales when we have real research—"

"Of course it's for children," Zora murmured. "I wrote the damn story when I was five years old, after all. I never liked the fact that it grew as popular as it did."

The stage fell into stunned stillness. Even over the ragged din of panicked breaths and guards outside the shattered walls, Kita's sharp intake of air behind him was loud. Vantari, however, had no such pause. He stared up with disbelief thick in his breath as Zora lifted his staff, angling the sharp bottom end of it at his chest.

"Wait! Wait, wait, wait!" Vantari rasped, his remaining hand shooting upward in a weak shield. "Your mission from the Salaqa Lord is to expose me, isn't it? Expose my research and drag my name through the mud all you want, but you haven't killed a single human in two years, have you? Not once! How could you possibly—"

"This isn't killing a man," Zora replied coolly. "This is killing the monster that feeds on children in the dark."

For the first time since Zora had known him, Vantari's composure fractured. He wheezed in panic as he seemed to realise—finally—that this blind schoolteacher's patience had a boundary.

And he had trampled upon it too many times.

In his terror, Vantari did the only thing left to him: he whistled.

The sound pierced the hall like a blade, so high and shrill it seemed to slice through the marrow of every listener's bones. Zora, especially, winced as the pitch cut through his skull, but then he heard the small crack of glass vial behind him—and that alone stopped him from stabbing Vantari as he whirled.

Eria?

The girl staggered back, her steps fumbling.

"Kita…" she gurgled. "Help… me…"

Then she crumpled, collapsing against the stageboards. Kita dropped beside her at once, her voice breaking as she shouted, her hands frantic over the girl's shoulders.

But Zora knew immediately that the whistle hadn't been for them. It'd been for Eria. Some hidden glass vial, buried inside her chest, had been shattered by that perfectly tuned pitch.

The next sound was wet. Flesh tearing. Eria's scream ripped open as segments of black chitin burst from her back. Splinters of her uniform tore away as two extra arms clawed their way out, glossy and jagged, and Zora's body moved before his thoughts did. One of the oversized newborn limbs lashed towards him, so he vaulted back, staff intercepting the air where the strike would have cleaved him.

Enki was faster still. He seized Kita by the wrist and pulled her away, warping both of them out of reach, and now the three of them had retreated to the side of the stage.

Before Vantari, the little girl's body convulsed and split even further, her human form swallowed whole by black shells. Her frame ballooned, reshaping itself into something hideous and utterly alien: a swollen, giant teardrop-shaped bug with golden streaks and equally golden eyes. He just knew it was gold, though he couldn't even see it with his own eyes.

Her cry, once human, was gone. What came from her throat now was the raw, screeching wail of a grafting bug.

Zora's grip tightened on his staff.

… Shit.

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