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Please see our important Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

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Dr. Nirwater Leera only agreed to study Mr. Girat because he is supposed to be dead.

Tomorrow, they will meet in person for the first time. But today, Leera wastes time by staring at a cellophane bag full of Girat’s vomit.

Thacceran braconids store libraries of generational memories in their nests, and human vomit is the closest analog to the woody pulp and fermented fruit braconids churn in their crops. Creating and reading these memories is a skill they have learned from the wasps.

Leera only needs one memory from Girat: the moment his braconid companion died.

The last message he received from Girat is a video of him puking into a biohazard bag. The package arrived this morning. It sits in a briefly tidied oasis amongst the scattered mess of Leera’s lab bench.

When braconids make their memory-full nests, their carapaces shine like stained glass with each peristaltic motion. Brood comb and queen cups become sculptures beneath the delicate movements of their pedipalps.

Tapping on his cell, Leera opens his messages. The video’s right there: Girat holds back his dark hair, wipes his lips with the back of a scarred hand, and, looking into the camera, winks. Clenched in his pink-fleshed fist, the crinkling plastic is almost obscene.

Leera stares at the shape Girat’s lips make in the thumbnail, then replies: You could have just told me it was in the mail.

You’re welcome. Attached to this is a selfie of Girat flipping him off.

Leera’s braconid companion chatters from his lounging pallet. A querying sound.

“It’s professional correspondence, Riverspine,” Leera says. He’s trying to think of something clever to text back.

Repeated: the same chatter. Riverspine thinks he’s lying.

“Well, I’m being professional,” Leera argues. It should come as no surprise—Riverspine enjoys reading Girat’s texts, too.

But Leera places his phone to the side and meets Riverspine’s gaze. The braconid wasp’s head is haloed by the dead drones pinned to the wall behind him.

When standing, Riverspine is six feet at his tallest notum, from which springs his first pair of wings, but he seems so small when he reclines. Unlike the bulky drones, his elegant thorax ends at a tapered head, better suited for navigating between trees. When they fly, Leera fits like a puzzle piece in the curve of Riverspine’s neck.

Through their psychic link, Leera senses Riverspine’s unease. Memory-materials serve a specific purpose: pupae chew out of their cups, brimming with the memories of their sisters. Like most nest affairs, this is entirely communal and sacredly public. The exchange of memory-materials as individuals is as intimate as it is taboo. He and Riverspine exchanged their own on their fifth anniversary.

But they barely know this Mr. Thurvild Girat. Leera would be lying if he said it didn’t make him nervous, too.

Girat was a soldier from a feral nest located in the wilderness far out of the reaches of the province. Just a few months ago, he was recovered from the aftermath of a border skirmish.

When a braconid wasp dies, its human symbiote dies. Yet Girat bears the scar of a symbiote and no wasp companion.

Of course, Girat told his captors: The bug’s dead.

Leera taps on the acrylic countertop.

The bug’s dead.

Each tap makes his glassware rattle.

The bug’s dead.

What if Girat had never uttered those words? The Queen’s council had tried on multiple occasions to pull Leera away from his retirement in the eomir forests before this, but it was Girat who brought him here.

If he can figure out how Girat survived, he may be able to save other human symbiotes, himself included.

So he cleans the quartz glass slides he needs to prepare samples for memory decoding and sees himself reflected in each one.

All of his previous tests have been inconclusive. Before anything else, he needs to prove that Girat was truly once bonded to a braconid. He hoped the drones—recovered from the same battlefield—would yield a genetic match to Girat, but they weren’t so lucky. Sure, Girat has a recombinant genome, but so do the human children of symbiotes.

Leera sinks into his chair. Mixing together the correct solvent is tedious work and a stark reminder of one of the many reasons he retired. The silence of the lab is counterpointed by Riverspine typing away on his keyboard. His movements are slow and erratic, and that alone fills Leera with a creeping dread.

“What are you working on?” Leera asks.

Riverspine’s answer is prefaced by an amber-warm smell. Aggregation pheromone, used to call foragers together in the field, but more accurately translated here as: I would love for you to be closer to me.

With the click of a button, Riverspine enables text-to-speech and a tinny voice reads the beginning of an essay about braconidae collectivist influences on post-contemporary impressionism.

“Fascinating,” Leera says. He allows himself a smile. “Is this the one you’re writing for the Post?”

Riverspine blinks in affirmation. Humming, he starts writing again, but a tremor strikes his foreleg. His keyboard falls to the floor with a chest-piercing clatter. Startled, Riverspine jumps upright, back arched. His hackled chitin scratches the ceiling.

“Oh!” Leera steps away from his desk to pick it up. “Oh, love. It’s fine, it’s fine. See?”

He props the keyboard back up, but Riverspine doesn’t touch it. The tremors are getting worse, and they both know it. When Riverspine sits again, his aortae are pumping so quickly that his thorax heaves.

Leera lingers for a moment, but Riverspine says nothing at all.

Resigned, Leera swirls a gram of Girat’s memory-materials in the solvent then places a few drops on each of the slides.

He reminds himself: he is going to crawl inside of Girat’s brain. He thinks of Girat’s lips. He’s here for a reason. He will claw his way back to the living. He will force his fingers into that scowling mouth.

Before he retired, Leera designed a machine to decode memory-materials so one doesn’t have to depend on a braconid-human pair. There are so few symbiote academics—in fact, Leera and Riverspine are unique at the Queen’s University.

But he eyes the rest of the bag, then spoons out another gram, and places it on his tongue. It’s quicker this way.

• • • •

Girat’s memory is a flash of ten seconds.

A drone’s stylet—twenty-five centimeters across at its widest point—enters his abdomen. Blue ivies hide him and the drone from the rest of the jungle. The silt beneath them is black, the dirt on their bodies the color of ash, the blood gem-like around his wound.

The drone in the memory is excited, nervous, fumbling. The drone in the memory has killed before, and the blood smell makes his hemolymph pump faster. He enters too deep, past the cutaneous fat and into the muscle.

Through the new and thread-bare link between drone and soldier, burning anger prefaces the familiar smell of a dying mind.

• • • •

Leera takes a picture of the view outside of the passenger side window. The province’s capital city, Diuprasula, sits in the distance. Her towers are wasp-made, sculpted from eomir bark and woven into the clouds like a network of blood vessels. With each second, she becomes fainter and fainter.

He sends the photo to Girat, captioned, We’re an hour out.

At Leera’s insistence, the Queen’s University graciously agreed to the following terms: Girat would be transported to the Leera estate for further examination, he would have complete privacy while boarded there, and he would be released at the conclusion of the study.

You’re in a car? Girat asks. I thought you were the flying type.

Riverspine sits on the roof of their vehicle, tapping a melody against the steel. He hasn’t flown in weeks.

Leera hums along. All of Riverspine’s brood sing the same song because they emerged from the same nestbuilder’s pulp.

Not all symbiotes fall in love with their companions. Braconid-primate dyads are coworkers, domestic partners, brothers-at-arms. The province’s Trivia Pact, which delineates the correct procedures for symbiosis, gives braconids the right to select their symbiote. New volunteers live in the Queen’s nest for weeks before the selections, which allows these relationships to bud far before the stylet goes in.

It’s so much easier for humans, Leera thinks, because they are trained to love with their whole being—there is no collective, there is no Queen. He continues to love his identical twin, Auna, long after her untimely death. He continues to love the mountainous vistas of the eomir tree although he is now hundreds of kilometers from the nearest one. He will continue to love Riverspine. He will return to them all.

Now he looks into the blaring white of his cellphone where Girat sent a blurry picture of the Leeran gardens with the caption, Arrived, as if he were staring down the inky blackness of a well full of love.

Leera doesn’t text back, but his cell pings again, this time with a photo of the guest room and a waving hand. Trellised walls give way to arched windows, gauzy curtains, and clouds floating past the green glass. The manor sits on stilts. A century of seasonal floods have yet to touch it.

During the months of organizing this trip—shipping Girat in from the city, getting the paperwork for Riverspine to take a sabbatical, keeping Queen Leszachka’s chosen, the human symbiote Ms. Idarr Rasa, up to date on their laboratory findings—he and Girat spoke every day.

You rich? Girat asks.

Leera types, I am entirely obsessed with you. You are a crime against nature. You are everything I need to be.

Then he deletes it and writes, My father’s money. I don’t live here.

• • • •

Leera arrives in the morning and finds Girat sitting on a bed of imported velvet.

Even after being washed, Girat looks like he was just pulled out of the jungle. His long black hair is uncombed. His heavy brow shadows his eyes. Pale skin like his is unusual in this province.

“Dr. Nirwater Leera!” Girat says, patting the space beside himself. “The one and only! Sit.”

Leera sits automatically. The heavy fabric of his robes fold in a puddle beneath him.

“Do you mind if I record this, Mr. Girat?” Leera asks.

Dew-touched from the bath, Girat wears trousers and a spider-silk robe. There are so many more scars than the symbiosis mark. Each one cuts a silver line through his hair. The way he lounges tells Leera that he has already forgotten: a mere six months ago, he was imprisoned for killing provincial soldiers.

The province faces threats at both her flanks: from the human settlements opposed to symbiosis and from the feral nests of runaway men and their drones bristling with surgically installed bioweapons.

“You’re still calling me that?” Girat lifts his lip. One of his incisors is chipped. “How long have we known each other?”

Leera wonders if six months is a long time to a soldier.

“Mr. Girat—”

“Don’t.”

Leera clears his throat, discomforted by how easily he has thus far yielded to Girat’s orders. He thinks that maybe he shouldn’t be sitting.

“I am here under orders of the Queen and her chosen, Mr. Girat,” he says. “I will refer to you properly.”

“Say that again.” As Girat leans closer, he braces his hand on Leera’s thigh. The touch is overfull with a nauseous heat. “Tell me to get on the floor and beg while you’re at it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Did you miss it?” Girat asks. “Being so much more important than a little farmer? Is that why you’re in full scholar’s attire? You look ridiculous.”

“I think—”

“I don’t mind being recorded,” Girat answers finally. “I think you will, though.”

Leera lets out a breath, lips pursed. When a beat follows without interruption, he asks, “And why is that?”

Girat weaves his fingers through Leera’s hair and grabs a fistful. When he tilts Leera’s head back, he exhales slowly, downcast eyes sliding across the exposed skin. Leera thinks Girat is going to kiss him, but instead, he presses the flat of his tongue to his neck.

• • • •

Leera has dinner brought to the guest bedroom. Through the door, he asks the maid to leave her cart there.

“Riverspine asked me to give you this.” She slips a sealed note beneath the door. Inside, the letter reads: Stop making me feel so dizzy.

Riverspine’s snide affirmation rings in Leera’s head.

“Tell him to meet me in the garden in about two hours,” Leera says through the door. Before they arrived, he arranged a tour of the library and art collection for Riverspine. For your next critique, he said when he told Riverspine about it. There are some rare pieces here, and I can only hope they will hold up to your discerning eye. But he knew it wouldn’t mean a single thing to Riverspine if he didn’t get a chance to tell Leera about it.

“Nirwater?” Girat asks.

“Hm?” Leera waits. The maid’s footsteps disappear down the hall.

“Can you blush like that more often? It’s hot when you’re pathetic.”

Leera hides behind a forced laugh. “My companion doesn’t like you.”

“She’s right.” Girat snorts. “Jealous lover?”

“It isn’t like that.”

Riverspine hardly knows what jealousy means, but he can and will judge Leera’s taste in bed partners. Leera’s lucky Riverspine has little appreciation for scientific integrity, but perhaps this is a trait they both share.

Leera brings the platter inside. Sprawled on the bed, Girat has the muscled body of a panther. Despite having seen it, held it, dug his teeth into it, Leera is newly struck by its lethal practicality. Apparently, Girat’s guards confiscated three knives from him, each one crafted from plastic cutlery and glass, before he arrived on the property.

Girat tears a piece of roast bird from the cart and swallows without chewing. He stares Leera down as he bites fat out from beneath his nails, as oil drips down his bare arm.

“I could get used to this,” he says.

“Don’t.” Leera pulls a chair over and, sitting, plugs a microphone into his cell. It was sitting in his suitcase for so long that the case reeks of eomir flesh. The fruit—because it is rich with selenocysteine—is necessary for the creation of memory-materials, so Leera keeps a few vials of pulp handy.

“Oh,” Girat moans. “Put that thing away.”

“I thought you didn’t mind.”

“I don’t want to work.”

Not gently, Girat prods the circular scar on Leera’s abdomen. Keloids run in Leera’s family, so the scar is bulbous and black. In provincial cities, symbioses are formed in sterile suites; feral nests have no such facilities. Yet he and Girat share the same scar.

Girat says, “Never known a scientist with a parasite.”

From his new favorite spot in the garden, Riverspine hisses. I know, Leera thinks.

“I’m a forager with a parasite. Think of it like that.”

Leera tries to sell his nonchalance with a shrug. He doesn’t think Girat buys it. But it should be easier now that he isn’t dressed up. The cotton gown he found in the closet is more similar to the tunics he wears out on the farms.

Maybe Girat can’t get past the scholar’s marks tattooed beneath Leera’s eyes. One, the University’s sigil. The other, the Queen’s. He usually covers them with dark brown foundation.

“Is she here?” Stretching out, Girat taps Leera’s forehead. “Can she hear me?” Unlike Leera, he didn’t shower after so a faint musk follows his hands, and a shimmer of sweat decorates his skin.

“He only knows what I’m feeling,” Leera says. “Sometimes he catches thoughts.”

“‘He’?”

“This generation of braconids is so different,” Leera breathes. What is sex to a young braconid but the difference between fighting and foraging? “Riverspine loves reading Earth literature. He loves art. He writes. He likes the aesthetics of men.”

Foragers often referred to each other as sisters in their writing, but braconids like Riverspine were sister-brothers instead. Oh, the day that Leera learned this: how they cut English into little bits to suit their new selves as he once had when he’d come out.

“The bug has a name, too!” Girat deadpans.

“You’re stalling.” Shuffling through his suitcase, Leera hands a folder to Girat. “Take a look at this.”

Girat holds the enclosed images an arms-length away. They’re CT scans of a braconid worker as evidenced by the vestigial ovaries in the abdomen.

This planet’s braconids, Macroplitis equites, share a common ancestor with terrestrial wasps of the same family. Their anatomy is startlingly identical despite the fact that Thacceran braconids live on an oxygen-rich, tropical planet capable of sustaining the circulatory system of a horse-sized insect.

“Notice the dark area on the ventral surface,” Leera says. “In a healthy braconid, we would see undamaged ganglia there.”

Girat asks, “Ganglia?”

“Nerves.”

“Ah.” Girat’s face lights up with the revelation. “Skitters.”

This ailment is highly publicized, even outside of the province. Leera knows it as idiopathic ganglionic atrophy.

The label at the bottom of the scans lists the species, the hydrocarbon signature, the sex, and the name “Riverspine” in quotations at the very end. Quotations, like a dog’s name on a veterinary file.

Leera’s fingers tingle when he points out each organ, each ink-blot of nervous damage. He’s memorized it by now. If someone presented him Riverspine’s carapace, hacked open like an overripe mango, he would be able to recognize him by the layout of his aortae alone.

“You’re looking at a dying braconid,” Leera says.

Girat drums his fingers against the mattress.

“Even accounting for improved screening procedures, the number of affected foragers is rising each year. If our symbiotes could do what you did, Girat, we could save quite a few lives.”

“I didn’t expect you to have such a good poker face,” Girat says.

“Excuse me?”

“If you were here for this little study of yours—” Girat tosses the folder to the side. “You wouldn’t have let me finger the back of your throat. So what are you doing here?”

Riverspine prods Leera with the smell of an inquiry pheromone. Why is your heart beating so quickly? comes the implied question.

“Let me level with you,” Leera says. “You don’t care about the Queen’s hive. I don’t care that you don’t care. Memorize that image. That’s why I’m here.”

This explanation is safe. He won’t admit that, when scrolling through the database, he kept coming back to this one: the dark line crawling along Riverspine’s belly. A black snake visits Leera’s dreams each night, but it doesn’t strike. It curls up in the underbrush and waits.

Leera walks to the window. Dotted with the iridescent chitin of dragonfly swarms, red trees sprawl before the manor.

Why should he send a report to Ms. Rasa, condense his findings so she can send it off to her other scientists, and wait years for the preliminary studies to make it to the eomir farms? Why should he when he could get the information straight from the source?

“I have something to give you,” Leera says. “In return, you’ll give me the whole story.”

“Do you really want to live without him? I heard you provincial symbiotes are loyal beyond death. I heard once a woman slit her throat when she found her companion maimed on the battlefield. She knew she was going to die anyway, but she wanted to go first.”

Leera opens the window. The breeze, laden with rain, arches its back against his cheek. On the horizon, the rivers swell between the feet of the eomirs whose roots are painted a bloodless sky-purple by the distance. Here, he doesn’t have to meet Girat’s black-eyed white-rimmed gaze.

Girat tuts. “For shame, doctor.”

“He wants me to live, too.”

He’s spoken to Riverspine during those long nights when neither could sleep, when Leera lay curled up in the crux of Riverspine’s body and listened to the oceanic tides of his hemolymph.

It seems this is all Leera knows how to do. After Auna died, he kept on living. He can’t believe that, for a moment, he thought it would be different this time. When Riverspine dies, Leera will find no reprieve. He is cursed by Girat, and haunted by him too, to continue on and on.

“So what’s my gift?” Girat asks.

Leera retrieves an ornate box from his luggage. Placing it beside Girat’s belly, he reveals its contents: cubes of nest material, dried and nestled in silk.

“I’m assuming that your companion died before he could give you something like this,” Leera says. To make drones the Queen must lay eggs in her supplicants, whose protein-rich, virally-weakened bodies signal to the larvae that they should develop male characteristics instead of the default female. This allows the Queen to control the drone/worker ratio, but it also means drones aren’t fed nest-memories. Instead, they’re given curated memory-materials from their cohort as they graduate to their last instar.

Girat pinches a cube between his fingers. Wasp-made cellulose is so much nicer than a human’s memory-materials.

“In these,” Leera says, “you will find the following: the birth of my sister’s daughter and the emergence of the raintime pupae we buried a year ago; the thundering elation of the Queen’s mark detected at last and the smell of my dog’s head; lastly, a worker’s first taste of eomir fruit fed to her from the palps of her dearest friend while, in the nest beneath the mountain-tree, her sisters dance to a song they’ve known since they hatched.”

Girat laughs. “You really think I’m that sentimental?”

With a frown, Leera takes out another box, a padlocked one.

“In here,” he says, “you will find the sweet taste of a supplicant’s flesh, the ejaculatory rush of pumping poison into a man, the ecstasy of detecting and killing an invading drone, the strange nauseous invasion of a patient who woke up in the middle of a surgery, and the moment I tried to kill myself when my sister died.”

Leera clears his throat. “These ones are harder to source, so they’re shorter.”

He tosses the key to Girat, who finally sits up straight. Box in lap, Girat examines its contents. When he licks a cube, his body tenses and relaxes, then he gives a long, shuddering sigh.

“Did you think I was lying?” Leera asks.

“I don’t trust anyone.” Girat clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Don’t take it personally.”

Girat places the cube back into the palm of Leera’s hand. “It was a first-death,” he says, hyena-faced.

“A first-death,” Leera echoes.

Humans are not M. equites’ first host species. Braconids need primate riders with delicate hands and clever tools to find the fruits hidden in the deep cracks of the eomirs’ bark. But the Irithpha, a planet-native species of Micone apes, spontaneously died off. Only a few Irithphite villages remain.

When the first research team landed, this extinction was already well underway. Three-fourths of the wasps’ ancestral nesting grounds were lost due to the selenocysteine shortage, entire colonies wiped out via malnutrition.

The researchers—healthy, strong, fat with a wealth of exotic food—had no clue that the first wasps they’d meet would be starving.

The first human symbiote, taken without permission, succumbed to his stylet wounds. This is the first-death: a memory that has propagated itself throughout every Diuprasulan nest, where it lies dormant until pulled to the forefront of a pair’s mind at the moment of bonding. Every new symbiote sees the empty hole left inside of that man, the intestines stuck to the drone’s stylet, the dying sickness spreading through the tenuous link between bug and corpse.

Some pairings still die from symbiosis wounds. Some pairings still die from the psychic stress of first-death.

“No one emerges from first-death,” Leera recites, “it is always two or none.”

“You’re not going to like what I have to say.”

“Please.”

“I killed it,” Girat says. “I remember waking up from the fever dream, bleeding, and I saw it seizing on the ground. It was disgusting. I was promised a super soldier. They’re breeding drones with guns now, you know? So I saw it fucking spasming on the ground and I thought it was the most pathetic thing I had ever seen. Who told it that it could kill me? So I took out my knife and when the blade hit its neck, something snapped inside of me. Maybe it was my brain breaking in half, but it felt so good. I didn’t even feel the blade go in.”

The taste of bile rises in Leera’s throat. “You’re telling me you survived by killing him first?”

Girat’s laughing.

“No.” Shaking his head, Girat plunges a strange knife into the roast bird and twists until the keel cracks in half. “I lived because I hated its guts.”

Leera stares distantly at their shared meal. Now in the library, Riverspine runs his antennae over the spines of dusty tomes, pauses, and chatters quietly as Leera’s presence brushes against the back of his mind. He looks happy.

“Why don’t we get some air?” Leera suggests.

He needs to get as far away from Riverspine as possible.

A grin. “I would love to.”

So Girat stands and slips on a robe and pants—they were given to him by the maids, and they don’t quite suit him. Leera cracks the door because the color of the walls, a soft red, returns him suddenly to his childhood, and he wonders irrationally if his father might hear him abscond into the night with a strange man. But he’s long dead, and the house is full of a silent dark.

Girat walks too heavily. The ground yields to him at every step.

“I have to admit,” Girat says as they step outside. “You’ve surprised me.”

“How so?”

“I thought you’d kick me out.” He pauses. “But maybe you’ll keep me around.”

“I wouldn’t speak so soon.”

Girat laughs from his belly.

They stop at the koi pond. The fish swarm toward Girat’s shadow because the shadow of a human always prefaces the arrival of food.

“Would you like my knife?” Girat offers it, handle out. “It has a legacy now. That’ll make it easier.”

The gesture makes Leera’s skin crawl. As if the decision has already been made. As if Girat said Sit, and Leera knelt at his feet.

“Keep it,” Leera says.

Girat shrugs, but he tucks the knife into Leera’s purse anyway. Leera doesn’t ask how he snuck it past the guards.

“While we’re at it,” Girat says, hands planted squarely on Leera’s ass, “take these off.”

Girat guides them to the ground. Water from the soil bubbles around their knees, their toes. Leera digs himself deeper into the mud, fingers plunged between fibrous roots and mycorrhizae. He would let them swallow him if he could, but he’s on his back now and he thinks that being beneath Girat is the same as being buried. He turns his head toward the pond. Behind his hazy reflection, orange scales flicker.

Girat knows where to kiss this time and where to put his teeth. The familiarity makes Leera sick, so he puts his hands on either side of Girat’s face and lifts him away.

“You’re disgusting,” Leera says. His thumb leaves a trail of dirt from cheek to jaw, and he wonders how Girat doesn’t smell the provincial hydrocarbons.

“Never wanted you to like me.”

“I mean it.”

“Sure, honey.” Girat lifts his lip, the same chipped-tooth leer, before he dips back down. “How about this: I’ll give you something to live for. Or, even better: I won’t be the one to kill you.”

Leera finds the koi again. To any other fish, the waves made by his braids would be a warning. But the koi nibble on the ends of his purple nylon hair, their fins breaching the water, unaware of the waterstriders at the pond’s edge.

• • • •

Girat’s MRI comes in a few days later. The images, emailed to Leera directly, include a note from the tech.

Is it possible to see the patient’s medical history? she asked. These are difficult to interpret without additional context.

Although Girat’s skull shows no previous breaks, it looks like his brain had been smashed in. The goop and scar tissue reformed into something resembling a frontal cortex.

The patient is a poor historian, Leera writes in his reply. No formal records exist. In his line of work, head trauma is remarkably common. I would write this off as an occupational hazard.

Ms. Rasa would get ahold of the MRI anyway; in as soon as a week, her scientific advisor would see Leera’s notes and refute them.

Maybe that will keep her from calling him back here.

Leera’s cell beeps. It says: Lunch? On me.

He’s been getting nicer since Leera started ignoring him. The attached image shows a wrought-iron table overlooking the topiary garden. Girat accidentally got his hand in the shot. What rifles carved each callus into his palm? What blade painted each scar? The dirt wedged beneath his nails makes Leera want to vomit.

Leera types, I am entirely obsessed with you. You are a crime against nature.

He stares at the message for a moment; he still can’t send it.

He shuts down his computer and heads back to his room. Riverspine is already there, napping. There are holes in the sheets where he must have rolled around until his chitin poked through. Already, Girat’s scent has been replaced with his.

Leera sits on the edge of the bed, which is hardly large enough for the both of them, and traces a finger down the edge of his carapace.

He wonders why Thacceran braconids have eyelids when terrestrial wasps do not. Years of studying braconid genetics, months consumed by PCR data analysis, hours spent in clinics, never prepared him for the question: how does Riverspine look so peaceful when he sleeps?

Leera puts his hands on either side of Riverspine’s face, thumbs stroking the axillary spiracles between his eyes. A cluster of iridescent scales decorates his forehead. His antennae are curled and covered in a soft down.

Leera whispers, “Show me the one where we met again.”

Riverspine stirs at the sound of his voice, lays his snout in the palm of Leera’s hand, and sighs.

When was the last time Riverspine’s proboscis reached down Leera’s throat covered in the honeyed memories of his hatching day? Show me the one where you found me in the bathtub, Leera thinks, tracing the scales. Show me the one where you thought I was dead, but he can’t say this one aloud.

Leera’s cell vibrates. He’s getting a call, but the flashing screen shows another notification:

You know what? Girat sent this two hours ago. Fuck you.

Leera answers the phone. It’s the Queen’s scientific advisor, a graying Irithphite woman. Leera recognizes her accent before she even says her name, and he takes a moment to swallow his fear. There’s no way she’s seen the MRI yet.

She hasn’t. In her low drawl, she asks for an update on the case.

Leera apologizes and explains that the recording of his conversation with Girat was corrupted when he tried to compress the file.

Really, he’d deleted it yesterday.

You’re a coward, Girat texts. A bitch.

Unfortunately, Leera continues, it seems that Girat is nothing but a madman, a genetic fluke. Perhaps Ms. Rasa should ask another scientist to investigate, maybe a sharper one, a younger one, for he fears that there is nothing else for him to discover here.

As he listens to the advisor’s reply, he checks his bags. His clothes are newly folded, rolled up military style. Both boxes are nestled beside the yellow-and-black of his robes.

Frowning, he opens them and finds them both half full. The forager’s dance is among the missing memory-materials. Leera wants very suddenly and painfully to go home.

I think I might miss you, Girat texts.

Perhaps—Leera clears his throat and tries not to stutter; he has been silent for too long—there has always been a rare exception when it comes to first-deaths, but they simply don’t have a sample size large enough in the province to observe it.

He pauses as the bedframe creaks. This house is too small for a pair like them.

“Dr. Leera?” the old voice stutters.

“It’s just—we take too many precautions. Barely anyone dies first-deaths anymore. Really, it’s a good thing.”

After Leera hangs up, the keyboard’s voice chimes. “You lied.”

He jumps. He didn’t realize Riverspine had woken up. When he turns, Riverspine’s eyes reflect a dozen variations of his face.

“Because I love you,” Leera says.

“You lied.”

Leera thinks: He knows.

Swallowing slowly, Leera sits on the bed again. On a better day, his skin would stink of Riverspine, of the heady drops of venom that had fallen onto his wrist as a mark of their union, and he would listen to the sleepy happy buzzing in the back of their shared mind as if it were a song.

“If you could make me hate you,” Leera asks as he sinks against his companion, “how would you do it?”

Wings hugging his body, Riverspine releases an inquiry pheromone. He shares an image of Girat’s knife: stuck in the bird, cradled in Leera’s purse.

I would hand you the knife, Riverspine says, typing, and I would make you choose.

It’s in the contract: Girat leaves tonight.