Felix stared at the hand-drawn maps and rendering of a seed like the one he’d found above the ant colony. He laid the maps out on the table, organizing them so that the edges lined up, making one large map.
“We’re here.” Lydia pointed with her knife at the top-left corner of the collective map: the NW region of the documented area. Felix noticed the village with a dotted line around it, presumably representing the spiked barricade. But outside of that, to the northwest, the map had nothing except the hashed line of a road that traveled from the southeast, through the village, and continued northwest, off the page.
“What’s out there?” Felix pointed to the northwest of the village on the map, and physically northwest. “Has no one explored that area yet?”
Lydia and Kyle exchanged a glance.
“We don’t go that way anymore. The last explorers from the Delta never came back alive. We found one of their hands in our fish net about a week later. I was… changed. Occasionally, there are noises from up in the mountains that way. That was a season ago. After that, the people here started leaving.”
Felix looked in that direction.
“But the road on the map looks like it goes that way, too.”
“It did. Maybe a long time ago. From what I’ve heard, that road follows the river upstream. The story is there used to be another village, maybe even a small city, but all of those people are either dead, or they’ve moved downstream to the Delta.”
“You keep saying Delta. They moved to a river basin?” Felix asked.
“Delta is what we call the source tree city in the flats at the bottom of the river. It’s about a two-day hike.” She pointed at the circle near the center of the southeast quadrant of the map. The river flowed from their current location, collecting tributaries from either direction, before it started snaking through what looked like a grassland flat. A circular depiction of a large tree sat in the middle of the grass field.
“What about here?” Felix circled the northeast quadrant with his finger.
“That’s an entirely different story. People go up there from time to time to look for different stones and other rare things. It’s mountainous, but not like here. There aren’t many trees. Mostly tall peaks with caves and a lot of shrubs. Not much to eat up there. The Delta has mining camps that hike up to bring stuff back. I’ve heard a lot of people die from the cold or starvation. They can keep it. Give me trees and water and quiet.”
Felix continued to look at the maps and flipped the picture of the seed umbrella over to study it.
“Where did you say you saw more of these?”
“My turn. What are those?” Lydia countered.
Felix paused for a second, remembering the TSSCI security clearance he had when he was being briefed on what little he knew. Was he even on the same world as that, or the same time? Did that matter here?
“Question. What planet is this?”
Kyle eyed him quizzically.
“Planet?”
“Earth?” Felix asked.
They looked at each other for a moment, and then back at Felix like he was speaking another language.
“How is it you guys speak the same language as me?”
Again, they just screwed up their faces at him.
“Languages?”
“Yeah. Like, I’m speaking these words, and you both use the same words. Hell, you even sound like we’re from the same place.”
“Doesn’t everybody talk like this?”
“Not where I’m from originally. People have many ways of talking, depending on where their families are from.”
Felix plopped his bug-arm mace onto the table.
“Have either of you ever seen something that would have an arm like this?”
“Can I hold it?” Kyle asked.
Felix nodded, and Kyle hefted the club into his hands, seeming to struggle with the weight.
That struck Felix as odd. Kyle was a fair bit larger than him. To Felix, the club was pretty light, and he had wondered if it were hollow.
“Let’s pretend this were the bottom portion of an ant like the ones we see.”
Kyle laid the club on the ground. He then took a whittled stick from the stove and drew out in the dirt the shape of an ant’s leg, then the body and thorax, then the other legs. By the time he was done, the sketch on the ground was at least four meters long.
“Nope. Think I would have remembered something like that.”
“That’s a big bug,” Felix said flatly.
“You were telling us about this.” Lydia pointed at the seed drawing.
“From what I can gather, they may be a piece of a program. I remember seeing a picture like that before I woke up with the ants. You say you’ve seen or heard about several of them. Is there one at the Delta?”
“I’ve never heard of anyone seeing one of these there, but the tree at the Delta center is the biggest thing I’ve ever seen. The few other objects I’ve seen like this are inside of giant trees, so it would make sense there’s one.” Lydia answered. “That’s where the Clergy base out of, so I wouldn’t go wandering down there.”
Felix looked back to the maps.
“I don’t see where the other locations of the devices are on the maps.”
“I didn’t mark them,” Lydia said.
Felix didn’t respond, but instead waited to see if she would elaborate.
“It feels like something people wouldn’t understand. I use these maps to go from village to village, selling and buying. Other people mark locations, and if they see marks from some of the things I’ve seen, they might think to go there. That would be difficult for me to explain, considering I don’t even know what they are. How would I describe something like that without sounding crazy?”
“Fair point. But you know where they are?”
“Maybe. Not sure we know you that well yet, though. Let’s get through tomorrow first.”
Lydia smiled as she and Kyle stood and walked back to their cottage, hand in hand.
Felix spent the rest of the night carefully copying the maps with the paper and pencil that Lydia had left him.
Artavus Quill 