The sky grew light and went dark again, and then again, and again. The lighting here was very different from the ship, and the ceilings were higher; I couldn’t even climb to them. After the Red Girl took Lawlimi, I ran and ran after them, but the roads were confusing, or there were no roads, and people kept trying to fight me, so I killed them. It was sad killing, because I did not have time to eat, I had to run and run and run until I came to a big forest that felt like home. It wasn’t home, home was the ship where I’d been born, but the forest felt more like home than the ship had. I could hear someone talking to me all the time, but I couldn’t understand them, like a humming. Hum. Hum. And there were so many little tasties that seemed to want to be my friends, and I ate them and ate them. But Lawlimi was gone. I saw him go up in a metal pod like the one we had come down in, and I couldn’t climb that high. I thought I couldn’t, until I saw the tower.

It was dark and shiny like a roach, and I could see it was getting taller. It stood out from the forest like a tree that forgot to stop growing, and I wasn’t the only one trying to get to it. There were heroes on the way, and they tried to fight me, they were stupid. The Red Girl had put a sword in my body and I didn’t like her, but Lawlimi had taken the sword out again and now it was mine. It went snicker-snack, snicker-snack, and I made the heroes stop attacking me. Light and dark again, and light and dark, it wouldn’t stop being light and dark, but being under the forest leaves was like having a ceiling, and that kept it mostly dim. There were big monsters around the tower too, but they didn’t try to stop me, and that made me sad, because they looked delicious.

The forest got burnt and cut away so there was only the tower and a big, flat, dry space, and when I got there the air exploded. It made me jump and call the sword from my other space, but when the explosion was done there was nothing but a small girl with pink hair and fox ears. I could smell the power on her, and in her armor, which was like a lot of rocks that someone had smashed together until they were armor. My hair got excited, because it knew we were going to be fighting.

“I’m here to help you,” the girl said. “My name is Tasma, and I’m working with your mother.” When she said that, a bug crawled out from her armor and up her neck, but she didn’t do anything about it. My hair relaxed a little.

“Chi?” I made my noise.

“I want to help you,” she said, “because she says if I do then she will let me go. I have to give her to you, pass her on. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

“Chi?”

“It doesn’t matter, she said it wouldn’t matter if you understood, because you weren’t done growing yet. You need more of her to be more of you, am I making any sense? I guess not. Jinkies, I am so ready for this to be over.”

The girl opened her mouth, and more bugs came out, lots and lots of them making a high humming noise. So many came that I couldn’t see her anymore, just the bugs in a bubble around me, and crawling over me, but they couldn’t hurt me, they weren’t even trying, and I ate a handful to see how they were.

They were the best I had ever tasted. They felt right. Once I started eating, I couldn’t stop. I opened my skin to drink them in, drink all the ones that were touching me, and there were more. The husks fell away and more landed on me like they wanted to be eaten as much as I wanted to eat them. It was hard to think. It had always been hard to think, but not as hard as when I used to hang from the ceiling. My old thoughts were so boring. Swing swing, eat and eat. Then Lawlimi and the Red Girl had fed me those sweet cakes, that was before the sword had happened, and I had felt like I was dying, but they were so good, and then my thoughts had changed, and most of my body had gone away into my other space. This was like that. Whenever I ate anything it went into my other space, and then it went away and I got emptier, especially if I was hurt or I was fighting, then I got emptier faster. These bugs were going into my other space too, but they didn’t feel the same as other kinds of eating. They weren’t making me full, they were making me different. My other body was changing, and that was hard to understand because I couldn’t see it, but I felt the changing.

“Chi!” The change was so uncomfortable that I wanted to stop eating, but I couldn’t stop, they were too good. Too sweet. Too right. And then they were gone, and I was standing knee-deep in their husks, bug husks, they had been cicadas. The girl with the fox ears was staring at me. Not a girl, a moderator, she had one of their tablets and she was using it to scan me and scan herself.

“It worked!” She jumped up and down in her excitement. “Oh my god, I’m sorry. I don’t know if that was what you wanted, or if you wanted anything, but that was what she wanted. Now I’m getting out of here. Good luck, okay, whatever you are, ganbatte!”

There was another explosion as she warped away, the air rushing into a vacuum rustled my hair, and I was left alone on a patch of scraped earth overlooked by the Dark Tower.

I was different now, different in so many ways. The cicadas had helped me to grow, but I could sense that I still wasn’t complete. I needed more, so many more, and I was so terribly hungry. When I found Lawlimi again, he was going to be so surprised. I looked around, at the tower, the jungle, the skyflower, it all looked so new and so clear, so I said the one thing that made sense.

“Chi.”