Ants live by chemical pheromones. It’s their entire vocabulary, awareness defined by the scent of home, of colony, of family. But when an ant dies, the scent of decay is very particular, something special to the ant itself, and it triggers an automatic reaction in every ant—move the body to the graveyard. After, of course, you make sure the body isn’t carrying anything good. And to these creatures, she was five-and-a-half-feet of meat on the hoof. As soon as her goop started smelling like death and not a sister ant, she was toast.

  So where’s the brood chamber?

  The center most room would be the guest bathroom. That’d be her next bet.

  Shedding gasoline as she went, Hawk crept through the halls of her house. The carpet, polyester, was unharmed. The walls and ceiling were beginning the slow, ashen drift as Glass energies ate through their organic components. She watched as ants dug into and through this, digging through to the internal house wiring. She could hear regular crackles from somewhere deeper inside; they’d bitten through the house circuits and freed electricity from its cage. Well, that would make lighting this stuff on fire easier.

  But she didn’t head there first. Instead, she went looking for the garbage dump. All ant colonies have one, a place for the bones and carapace of prey to go when the ants were done flensing edibles from every surface. And Hawk did mean bones. Fire ants were capable of bringing down birds if they got in the nest. Their venom did not dissipate, but built in the system until organs began to struggle, and cascade failures became a possibility. Even humans were at risk from RIFAs of traditional size. These things were big enough to put humans squarely in their prey window, and they’d have no problem dropping one if their venom was as potent as it was plentiful.

  A dump is kept in the dryest, least hospitable part of the colony, usually in old chambers already fouled for one reason or another. The parts of the colony the ants intended to abandon later. However, a house is less like a colony and more like an artificial formicarium. Constrained by boundaries, they’d choose whatever room best fit their needs. So likely the garage. It would be baked dry by Phoenix sun every day. She hurried through her house to the door just off the kitchen (the refrigerator had been totaled. The door lay on the floor, ripped off its hinges by unforgiving mandibles. The reek of rotting meat assailed her, and ants were still working over the pile of waste in search of yet more food for the brood) and stepped out into the alien landscape that had once been earmarked for car storage.

  Her car was comfortably parked where it belonged, but it sat with a strong list. Three of its four tires had been punctured. There were four or five ants inside of it, having crawled in through busted windows. One sat on the steering wheel, where it appeared to be stripping off the leather. And there, in front of the car, was the pile of ant detritus she’d wanted to find. The refuse was nearly hip high, filled with bits of her house, electrical wiring, fragments of glass and ceramic from her dishes, shredded fabric from the linen closet, and bones. Far more bones than she’d ever stored in that fridge. There seemed to be cat bones, dog bones, bird bones, coiled vertebrae from a frighteningly large snake with the shredded remnants of scaled skin, and an awful lot of foam and fiber-fill. The ants had been tearing her furniture apart.

  She knelt beside this and began to rummage. Ants came over, curious at her noises, the vibrations triggering protective instincts. Please don’t smell dead yet. Don’t smell dead. She ran her fingers through the pile, discarding bones, her own car keys, a strip of cloth she recognized as one of Alex’s shirts…and then she found what she was looking for.

  It was crystalline and shattered like a hot marble in water. Hawk could even find the small indentation that had done it, from the bullet that had killed the being this Orb belonged to. This was the Ape’s Orb, but just the hard core where life had once resided. The valuable rind, the hope for Henry and Mattias, had been consumed entirely. That was where these great, giant ants had come from. Like the Holian gods, they had consumed the Orb of an Archetype, and gained an enormity of power.

  And I’ll bet the Queen is at the center of it all. Probably drinking in life, too. My house is Glassed, but not by a Prism. Its organic life is being devoured by the Queen. And they’re finding ways out of the house; these bones aren’t Glassed. They haven’t been here long enough to turn to ash.

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  We made it just in time.

  But the Orb! She made a fist around it, little bigger than a shooter marble now where once it had been grapefruit sized, the pearlescent flesh of it thick and radiant. This wasn’t going to help Henry; it wasn’t going to help anyone. It had made a small problem into a potentially world ending one, all because of her impulsive stupidity. Damn it, she knew better. These weren’t Acrobat ants with cute little heart-shaped gasters, or honeypots with their swollen jeweled bodies. These were red imported fire ants, and if there was a way for them to fuck something up, they’d find a way to do it.

  She splashed a little gas in here, all across the trash mound. If nothing else, it was full of flammables. And now she lit it on fire. No use waiting now. Not with the Orb effectively gone. She stumbled backwards, away from the heat and smoke as giant ants began to make distressed, skittering noises.

  And now she slammed the door open to her bathroom, ignoring the hole chewed through one corner of the door, and found herself in antkeeper hell: this was the brood chamber, alright. Ants were already moving frantically, trying to haul precious eggs, larva, and pupae away from the abrupt movement…and possibly away from the heat. Surely the alarm pheromones had already gone out. And there, in the middle of all of it, sat the Queen herself. She was larger than all the rest, the size of a golden retriever, maybe. Her legs spread lazily over the gelid white mass of eggs and brood. Bits of rotting meat—a bird here, a cat skull there—were clenched in larval mouths as the brood blindly munched their way through. Here was the seat of eternal hunger, the brood, always the brood, driving the adults to ravish the world with insectile passions. From this mountain of want the Queen watched Hawk, her forehead crowned by three small eyes, the better to see on her maiden flight.

  And, to Hawk’s horror, there were other Queens in the room. Not yet matured, still pale and soft but recognizably maiden Queens, their wings neatly folded across their legs, waiting for eclosure and maturity to pump lymph through arial veins. The end of the world would be heralded by this, at least as we knew it.

  Mute with horror and urgency, Hawk poured the last of her gasoline across the brood. This caused instant panic, but her own scent still matched that of the colony. She pulled the barbeque lighter out of her pocket and lit the brood pile on fire.

  The Queen howled. There was no other description for it, though no sound would ever equal this. It was a combination of scream and carapace clacking, and her great head began frantically waving back and forth as heat and gasoline ended her line for good. And now Hawk had to run. Flame was leaping out of the garage, licking along the floor where she’d left a trail of gas like a fuse. She bolted for that back window, trying to outrace flame. It was a lost cause, for both her and the ants trapped in her house.

  The smoke was thickening. She was having trouble finding her way back to the ant-room. It was left…right? She put a hand to the wall, felt the building warmth of the fire she’d started, and began feeling her way down. She needed to be low to the ground, but that put her level with the ants’ frightening jaws. And now that she was sweating and coughing, was the colony-scent starting to fade? She thought it was. Oh, dear god, but she thought it was. Frantic antennae were finding her, and she felt the first nip, a soft bite at her shirt’s hemline.

  She hurried, pushing through the terrible smoke, the fire she’d caused. An Armageddon for ants. Not all that different from Argon’s fire in the swells and secret places of the Holian Rift. She’d done this, and if she died here maybe she’d deserve it. She’d have earned it, betraying her pets. Logic screamed no, you’re not, but logic was fading against CO2 exposure and the growing number of interested antennae as she felt her way blindly towards the exit.

  Just as the mandables were getting brave, and mouthparts began brushing her flesh, she reached the ant-room. It was starting to smolder but the window was there, wide and open. Smoke came billowing out, but oxygen was coming in at nearly the same rate, ready to feed the growing flames. She got up off the floor and bolted for it…just as an ant grabbed hold of her boot, and yanked her back down.

  She couldn’t take it anymore. She screamed, a panic driven as much by the fire as by the ants. Coughing, she kicked out, nailing the little beast in the head, right between its bulbous eyes. She kicked again, launching it into a patch of fire, where it’s mandibles clacked and steam screamed out through carapace. But that one ant was replaced by two more. The first one grabbed her by the leather uppers of her boot, the second by the toe. And she felt the enormous pressure of their jaws immediately. If it weren’t for the boot, she’d be bitten all the way down to the bone.

  “Hawk?” Emile’s voice at the edge of her haven. “Hawk, can you hear me?” And oh, God, it was hope and hell in equal measure.

  “They’ve got me!” She shouted. “They’ve got me!”