Failure lay on the ground, waiting for whatever was going to happen. Food, apparently, if the condescending soldier had been telling the truth. If it wasn’t telling the truth, there was no real loss. A day with no food wouldn’t kill it. It had gone hungry before.

It breathed in the musty smell of the forest floor, snuffing up spores and dust and bits of rotten leaf. It wasn’t a very pleasant smell, but it wasn’t really unpleasant either, so it didn’t move. It wouldn’t have moved if it had been unpleasant, but it probably would have thought about it.

Some time later, time enough that Failure almost fell asleep waiting, a dead animal fell on it with a wet, meaty sound. Thick, cooling viscera dripped down its tentacles and flanks, and a loop of intestine fell over its face, covering one eye. The body was barely warm anymore, not yet cold or stiff, nice and fresh and pungent with the appetizing aroma of fear and death that clung to a fresh kill like thick mud to a gatherer’s legs.

A soldier stomped away, claws bloodied and dripping, somehow managing to exude smugness even with its back turned. Failure used its tentacles to remove the carcass from its back. It smelled amazing, and it had agreed to eat, so it dug in, starting with the soft parts in the middle, and kept eating until it was thoroughly stuffed and could eat no more.

Then, reluctantly, stomach bulging, achingly full, it picked up the remains of the meal, mostly muscle and bone (the organs were the best part!) and dragged them over to Sturdy for storage.

The meat and marrow would go bad if it wasn’t stored properly, and Sturdy could give it to the Queen for processing, but Failure had had no idea of how much it had missed the taste of fresh, unprocessed food. It almost wanted to hoard the carcass in a tree so that it could gorge on muscle tissue the next day, and crack the bones for their marrow.

Sturdy slurped up the ravaged animal’s body without complaint or comment, then went back to chewing on the underbrush, not seeming to consider one any different from the other.

Failure lay down next to it. With the job done, it didn’t have the energy to move farther away, even though its belly was full and it was unhurt. It closed its eyes and went to sleep, listening to the sharp crunching and snapping sounds of the gatherer collecting tough, woody plants for whatever the Queen did with plants, or maybe that was just what gatherers ate when they were on their own.

It would be nice if plants tasted good. Then Failure could have something to eat that was nice and fresh meat every single day.

——————-

Some time later, Failure woke up, feeling tired still, as though it had barely slept at all. Something was poking at it, repeatedly, in the same spot. While not yet painful, the steady jabbing in its flank was very insistent. Opening its eyes and turning its head revealed that one of the soldiers was poking it with a stick. How the soldier was holding a stick in its claws like that without dropping it, and how it was manipulating it well enough to get the same spot on the hunter’s flank every time, was a bit of a mystery. Failure stared at the soldier. The soldier poked Failure. The hunter reached out a tentacle and poked back, gently, careful of its own claws.

said Failure.

said the soldier, indicating that it had been poking the hunter with a stick for its own amusement. It was the soldier that had brought the food, not the one that had treated Failure like a larva. It should probably have a name, but Failure was too tired to think of one, so it just lay on the gritty forest ground and stared up at it, absently trying to figure out how someone with such long, sharp claws and thick, meaty paws could handle anything as delicate as a thin length of wood so accurately.

Failure said again, calmly, feeling devoid of emotion or urgency. The leaves of the forest canopy swayed overhead in the breeze, dark purple against the bright green sky. Failure’s eyes drifted away from the soldier and followed them back and forth.

the soldier said.

Slowly, Failure stood up. The soldier dropped its stick to the ground, turned, and started walking back the way they had come, toward their Hive. Failure followed, feet shuffling and tentacles dragging limply in the leaf litter of the forest floor. It felt gritty against its skin and raised soft clouds of debris, but it barely noticed any of that.

It kept its eyes trained down, watching the ground more than what was in front of it, following the soldier ahead of it more by sound and its tracks in the soft, fallen leaves and crumbly forest soil than by anything else. Desperate to avoid thinking about where it was going, and what awaited it there, Failure focused on the moment, on the unimportant sensation of the breeze on its skin and the scents of the forest animals.