Christine Tyler - [BCS298 S03] Read online

  We breathed hard, our gazes locked. But, of course, I’d only made it halfway across the table. Inevitably, Charlotte’s mandibular pheromone did its work, slowly bringing us back down, restoring rational thought. The drones and other attendants were frozen in place amid a pool of pekoe and shattered porcelain. I couldn’t rip someone’s wings. I’d go straight to the toxic flats. Looking like this, threatening a fellow Imago, acting like an outlier—any more of it and I’d have one foot out the door.

  “You’re not worth it,” I said.

  Alexandra scoffed. “I’m worth more than you.”

  The air went completely out of me. It was true.

  “Get off the table,” said Flat Cap. The nursemaids clacked their mandibles.

  I crawled back down, my knees soaked in tea. I stood on the grass for a moment, not knowing what to do with myself. Should I clean up? Apologize? I opted to just leave. A collective sigh rose up as I turned away, but their chatter followed me.

  “She just about gave me a heart attack!”

  “Did you see the look on her face when she—”

  “Weren’t you scared, Alexandra?”

  “No,” Alexandra’s voice fell further and further behind. “I knew she didn’t have it in her.”

  My antennae burned. I stalked out of the gardens as quickly as I could and disappeared into the kitchens, amid the dishes and the noise and the smell. My head wouldn’t stop ringing and my wings wouldn’t stop shaking. The truth was, she was right. I didn’t have it in me. I was grey, inside and out.

  High Tea—6:00 p.m.

  Priscilla and I took high tea alone in her kitchen office, sitting at her desk, surrounded by ledgers and recipe books. I told her everything that had happened that day, and she handed me a teacup of watered-down nectar she’d heated on the stove.

  “Remember when I used to do this?” she asked. “And we’d pretend it was Earl Grey?”

  I took the teacup. “It’s not Earl Grey.” It had never been Earl Grey. I didn’t even know what that would taste like. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Would it have made you feel better?”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s the truth.”

  Priscilla drank her watered-down nectar.

  “It’s not fair,” I said. “4408 didn’t do anything to deserve this.”

  Priscilla set her cup down gently. “First it wasn’t fair she would live in luxury. Now it isn’t fair that she’ll suffer? When are you going to learn, none of us deserve anything we get?”

  “How can you make all that food every day? Knowing it’s not going to change anything?”

  “Because I love her.” Priscilla’s antennae twined. “Every day. I think about making it a little bit better. And it gives me purpose.” Priscilla’s purpose hadn’t just been nectar for the queen, it had been nectar for herself—and it had sustained her, soul and body, through more years and more daughters than even I remembered. I knew it, before. Now I understood.

  “Purpose is nectar,” I whispered.

  “Purpose is nectar,” Priscilla repeated solemnly.

  A waft of the queen’s mandibular pheromone drifted through the office. It hit my brain like a good night’s rest, easing my muscles, soothing my nerves. Across the desk, Priscilla deflated.

  “It’s stronger,” I said.

  “That’s not Queen Charlotte.”

  “4408?”

  Priscilla nodded. “She’s close. It should only be a couple hours now.”

  “I wonder if they’ve briefed her yet. If she knows.”

  “They have,” said Priscilla. “I told you this morning, she’s scared.”

  Not just jitters. Not just nervousness. 4408 was terrified. But what could be done?

  I looked at Priscilla, this worker with so much love for an unseen queen—and so much faith in food—that she’d dedicated her life to giving that queen a few moments of reprieve in a burst of citrus, a flash of comfort in a perfectly crisp ham. A worker who made herself a mother by claiming every larva who came into her kitchens as a daughter. Now one of her daughters would be the queen, and she’d work harder than ever. Every time the dishes went out she’d wonder if it helped at all. If any of it mattered. But she’d do it anyway. And I wanted to help.

  I set my cup down. The same one I’d used when I was young, when I still knew how to pretend diluted nectar was Earl Grey. “Priscilla...” I said tremulously, “Can you teach me how to cook? Like you?”

  No sooner had the words come out of my mouth than Priscilla fumbled her way around the desk and wrapped me in her arms, enveloped me in the scent of tea leaves and cinnamon, pork fat and cheese, chutney and jam, golden brown pastries fresh from the oven, pheromones and sweat. The scent of my mother. Because I was her daughter too.

  Dinner—8:00 p.m.

  Priscilla kept me in the kitchens during dinner. When the servers headed out to the pavilion—with their procession of rind cheese and cranberry sauce, roast lamb with mint chutney, parsnips and potatoes, beef with horseradish, pork chops with cinnamon apple sauce, and Lapsang Souchong for tea—I wondered, which would Queen Charlotte choose? How much would she eat? No, I didn’t wonder; I obsessed. I stewed and sweated, practically tore my antennae out, imagining what would happen if that quota wasn’t met. Hoping that it was.

  Hours later, the wait staff came back with the plates, sent the scraps to the liquefier, and that was the day. No questions answered. The kitchen maids lined up at the towers of dirty dishes, rolled up their sleeves, and began the long night of scrubbing so it could start all over tomorrow.

  I was scouring a crusty soufflé dish when Priscilla called me to her kitchen office. With me at her side, she began planning tomorrow’s five meals for the queen, and I felt like a soldier being trained by a brigadier. Breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner. Each meal was a battle waged against an onslaught of currant-flavored nectar.

  Queen Charlotte may have had memories of eating food before she became queen, but 4408 had memories of cooking it, of pining for it. We’d make it possible for her to finally taste it. I’d make 4408 a whole roast chicken and hope she stuck her face in it.

  Priscilla pulled a massive folio from her bookshelf and dropped it onto the desk.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Menus,” she said. “I write up a new one every day, but they’re good to revisit for ideas. These are last year’s.”

  “Menus...” The bookshelves lining Priscilla’s office were bursting with folios just like this one. One sheet of paper for each meal, five meals every day, three hundred and sixty five days in a year, and over a hundred of those years belonged to Queen Charlotte.

  There would be a hundred more for 4408.

  Every roast and pudding, every lemon soufflé, could only save the queen for one meal. One piece of paper. And save her from what? Getting a tube stuck down her throat? That was the least of her worries.

  Priscilla reviewed her notes, dipped her pen in an inkwell, and started scratching on a fresh sheet of paper, rejuvenated now that she finally had someone who understood what she was doing and why she was doing it. But the horrible truth roiled in my gut. I started thinking of 4408, the apprehension on her face when it had been time to go to the Chrysalis House, the way her hand paused on the side of the column before she went in, the way she looked back at Priscilla and me... like she didn’t want to go. Crazy, I’d thought. Anything was better than the kitchens.

  I was wrong.

  “I can’t do it,” I burst out, interrupting Priscilla’s breakfast planning. “I can’t do it! It’s not enough!”

  Priscilla’s antennae wilted. “It’s something.”

  “It’s your something,” I said. “And it helps, it does. If only it weren’t her, I could do it. It’s just... it’s 4408. And I can’t imagine... every day... that food laid out in front of her and... she knows if she doesn’t eat it...”

  The image of Alexandra forcing a tube down 4408’s throat rushed into my mind, and instead of
shoving Queen Charlotte back into her room she was shoving 4408, and Flat Cap was flying faster than thousands of drones, his teeth bared, to get his piece before he died, and its 4408 he’s catching and...

  “I can’t!” I yelled, slamming my hands on the table. I shut my eyes against the fall of Priscilla’s face, the stillness of her wings, but I could smell her disappointment.

  “Someone has to make the food, Olive. And it won’t be me forever.”

  I stared at her. She was just as old as Charlotte, wasn’t she? Born before the Imago, she’d seen the entire human race transition from larvae into... something else. Something I’d always seen as so obviously superior. Was it? There was no way for me to know. But Priscilla had held on to this, this one aspect of humanity for so long... She knew what I’d never know, and she wanted to pass it on.

  And I considered, for the first time, that Priscilla’s dogged, ridiculous optimism might actually fade one day, that hope must have been a heavy burden to carry alone. And just as Charlotte’s waning pheromone signaled for nature to create a successor, Priscilla’s weary defiance cried out just as fiercely for someone to metamorphose, to become like her.

  Queen of the Kitchens.

  “Olive?” One of the kitchen maids popped her head into the office and jutted her antennae toward the line of sinks. “Did you need help getting this meringue off?”

  Behind her sat the stack of plates I’d been scrubbing. The dirty soufflé dish. A memory from that morning replayed in my mind—flinging open the oven door, the rush of steam, the fallen soufflé.

  “Priscilla,” I said, my mind whirring.

  “Yes, Olive?” Priscilla’s wings fluttered. Dishrag wings. Ruined wings. In that moment, I wished, again, that I would be the one to metamorphose. That I would be the one to fulfill this very special role. Alexandra was wrong. I was wrong. I did have it in me. I had red and blue and purple, and I had dishrag wings in me too.

  Priscilla followed my gaze to her trembling wings. She took a deep breath, and her eyes locked with mine. And in that moment, we didn’t need pheromones to know what the other was thinking. Priscilla knew what I needed to do. What was more, I knew it.

  “I think I should go see 4408,” I said.

  The kitchen maid balked. “At this hour?”

  I nodded. “Before she hatches.”

  “But—”

  My hands, balled into fists, were sweating.

  Priscilla ushered the kitchen maid out of the office, then hugged me just as she had at high tea, but this time she didn’t smile. She didn’t cry. She just held me, tight as a cocoon. A plan was taking form in my mind, swelling, solidifying, until the idea of what I was about to do was too big for me to contain. I was shaking.

  And then came Priscilla’s voice—so careful, so quiet, I could hear my heart beating over it. “Are you sure about this?”

  I buried my face in her apron and breathed her in for the last time. “I have to,” I said. “She’s my sister.”

  My body itched all over, apprehension like an unwanted skin. I kept moving, and the night breeze cut across my face, sheared my inhibitions. The old me hung at my back. The stars were out, and my breath clouded as I wondered which ones were Priscilla’s. All of them, I decided. I’d give her all of them.

  The Chrysalis House rose up in front of me, sublime and colossal, golden and glowing. I told the guards I wanted to see my sister. I took a deep breath. Calm. Stay calm.

  “Five minutes,” they said. It was more than enough.

  I went straight to the pillar with the red pupa. “Hey, 4408, you know your wings are red?”

  Her royal mandibular pheromone plumed out of her chamber.

  I took that as a yes. Back at the entrance, the guards clicked their mandibles, watching. I edged closer. “You know what that means? What it really means?”

  A hint of distress pheromone, stronger than it had been earlier. Again, yes.

  The guards shifted their halberds. They must have caught a whiff.

  My hands reached for the smooth column, the soft membranous window. “Do you want to be queen?” I whispered.

  Panic billowed out of the chrysalis. It filled the column, spilled through the membranous window and flooded the ground, deep as November fog. The room reeked with alarm, a miasma powerful enough to alert the entire colony.

  No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

  It was the scent of screaming.

  I saw myself from far away. My body wasn’t me anymore. It belonged to someone else, someone long gone. I was someone braver, someone strong enough to punch her fist straight through the protective membrane, leaving a gaping hole that spewed humid air and raw, unfiltered pheromones.

  Guard boots pounded behind me. I tore past the membrane and touched the glassy surface of the chrysalis, all red underneath. Red as rosehip. I found purchase, steeled myself, and pulled with all my might. Wet, fibrous threads stretched. A sound—like a thousand oysters shucked open at once—and the exterior peeled away like a rubbery shell.

  The guards rushed over, but they were too late. 4408 spilled out of her chrysalis and into my arms, a tangle of red and black. Her pheromones seared my receptors like ambrosial kerosene, overloading my brain with love, love, love, like a royal decree. Bliss, blinding bliss. I moved my hands as gently as I could, but her wings—sopping wet, the softest thing I’d ever felt—disintegrated beneath my fingers like soaked tissue paper. They would never dry properly. She would never fly. And she would never, ever, be queen.

  Except, perhaps, Queen of the Kitchens.

  Breakfast—9:00 a.m.

  I entered the toxic flats hauling a cart teetering with five feasts. Enough for a queen to eat for a day, a worker to eat for over a week. The higher-ups wanted me to live—for just long enough.

  I’d like to say that when the guards took me away, my body still wasn’t me anymore. That it belonged to someone else, someone long gone. I’d like to say the pain wasn’t mine. But it was. And it will be again if I’m still occupying this body when the poison vapors start to turn me inside out.

  So I left the food at the gates, abandoned it amid the craters of green chemical dust and goat-head thorns. Five entire meals. Meat and cakes and sandwiches. Meticulously crafted confections decorated with pastel icing and glittering sugar. A whole roast chicken, shimmering with grease. 4408 was right. I did finally get mine. And I left it. Shining in the sun. A banquet for ants and bees and butterflies—what the Imago call proto-colonies. I didn’t take a single bite. I didn’t need to.

  Instead, I took a walk. Nowhere in particular. In circles, maybe. After all, I have a purpose now. And purpose is nectar.

  © Copyright 2020 Christine Tyler