Bee struggled with Em, worming on her lap. Between the writhing of her sister and the jostling of the wagon, she couldn’t get comfortable. Looking back, Bee saw the rest of her sisters were still quietly tucked beneath a blanket. Being blinded seemed to soothe them. Not Em, though — she was too big for that and chirped for attention whenever Bee stopped petting her wormy back or wasn’t feeding her.

And sometimes, she demanded both.

“Watch out,” Ay growled. “Steep bit.”

Despite her better judgement, Bee looked up to Ay. He seemed so sure of himself, capable and independent, venturing between the cities when Bee had only struggled to survive. Her gaze flicked from him to his servants, pulling them down the fetid streets. As the wagon surmounted a crest, her eyes moved over the iron rigging that bound them, screwed into their bones, and lashed together with hanging chains.

A foul updraught brought a terrible reek from the city’s underbelly. Retching, Bee clasped both hands over her mouth and nose. Corpse stench filled the air. But there, ahead, beyond the mountainous foothills of the great slug, stretched a glass desert.

Bee marvelled at the sight, which she had only glimpsed from the highest reaches before, even as her eyes watered from the decay. Yet it felt like an eternity before they moved beyond the rotten swell to something resembling fresh air.

The desert winds were hot like a furnace, and the freaks at the lash struggled even as they were driven forward.

“Help us,” rasped one of the enslaved.

Bee leaned forward to see. Meanwhile, Ay didn’t deign to break his vigil of the bright horizon.

“Please— Help.” It was the smaller one, struggling on five legs, of all those bound together in their iron rigging.

“How did you get like this?” Bee asked, curious.

“They tricked us,” she answered. “A few days’ labour for water and meat, they said. Never said we’d leave the city. Let us go. Let us out...”

“Huh.” The child sat back against her seat. She held Em close.

“Please...”

“Well, you really shouldn’t just agree to do things,” Bee helpfully informed the woman, reduced to a beast of burden. “No one has your best intentions at heart.”

The enslaved freak wailed. Ay pulled the reins tight, silencing it.

“A few days old. Already smarter than you lot,” Ay croaked.

“You’ll let them go when you’re done, right?” Bee asked him.

“Of course. Freak of my word. Put them back where I found them.”

The child accepted that, leaning forward to say to the woman, “See? You shouldn’t try and go back on a deal.”

Ay laughed, though Bee couldn’t work out what was so funny and eyed him sidelong.

They rode on, out past the last chitinous building, onto the very lip of the dead slug’s lowest foothills. There, a forest of spines stretched up into the sky. Sharp and craggy, the city’s barbed defences were the only parts that still stood tall. Pikes of shell and steel stood ready to guard it against something unfathomably colossal in death despite failing it in life.

The hot wind carried traces of the wasteland beyond. Sand sparkled like infinitesimally shattered crystal, and the gales blasted it into steep dunes that crept up towards the city itself.

The carriage summited the first dune, rocking and bouncing as it crested the hill and began to descend. It was over this sandbank that they caught him. An eight-limbed beetle frantically kicked its legs, struggling with the loose ground and trying not to fall into a roll with its squat, flat body — overburdened as it was with a tall and heavy pack.

“It’s Heych,” Bee said quietly.

Ay stirred when she spoke, beak cracking open. His head turned into the wind in time to see the freak slip and kick, falling down the rest of the way, clumsy with exhaustion. The beetle’s form was not designed to travel these scoured wastes.

“You know this freak?” He rumbled.

“Um… Yes. I met him when I was born.”

Ay’s gaze shifted to Bee.

“He knows who you are?”

“Yes?” Bee answered, unsure of where Ay was going with this. She looked up to him curiously as he lifted a lance from the side of the carriage, hidden amongst the bones.

“What is that?” She asked as Ay pointed the lance towards Heych, still struggling in the sand and spitting pheromone panic.

A flash of fire. A crack of noise. Bee felt it rock her bones, and her ears screamed.

Heych broke in two, his body spinning in two separate directions before they hit the sand and rolled the rest of the way down the dune. Blood and viscera sprayed out in their wake.

“No!” Bee screamed.

Far too late, Bee dropped Em and reached for the weapon, trying to pull it from Ay’s hands. It was too big for her to hold onto properly, and she couldn’t even shake the hunter’s massive grip.

“Let go,” Ay croaked at her. Still, Bee struggled against him, so he lifted the lance from her reach with a simple twist of his arm.

“Are you done?” Ay croaked at her wailing before slithering off of the carriage.

The bone cage rocked as his weight left it, and the hunter’s slithering body met the sands. Left behind, Bee clung to the wagon’s sides, watching Ay smoothly descend down the dune and toward Heych’s destroyed body.

Bee watched as he picked over both halves of the dead freak — her only friend. Tears flooded her eyes. Her heart beat too hard. She suddenly felt sick, trembling, then vomiting over the edge of the carriage. Her waters mixed with the heavy crystal sand, pouring down the bank.

Coughing and spluttering, Bee managed to look back over to Ay again. He hefted the heavy packs that Heych struggled with with a single hand. Then, gracefully, Ay snaked back up the dune to meet her. Even standing upon the inclined sandbank, he towered over Bee in the carriage.

“Just another dead freak,” Ay told her, slamming down Heych’s supplies into the wagon next to Bee. “And if you keep doing that…”

Ay pointed a claw at her face and then the mess she made.

“... You’re going to end up the same way.”