::: subchapter "Well? What are you going to tell her? I imagine she won't be up there for long." You glance up at the dark curtains of your parent's platform. Shafts of sunlight rain on it from the windows, and dust floats in the light like sparse snow. "Yikki has to stay here. I don't want her to have to leave." "I agree," Shimare says. She isn't standing. Her tarsi grip the handles of a perch, her small abdomen resting on a cushion. She doesn't look relaxed, though, eyes regarding you intensely. "She's like the rest of your agemates, right? Adores vesperbanes, defers to them?" You nod. Who doesn't? "Good." Her antennae unfurl, reaching for you. "Still, you didn't answer my question." You run a palp across the dentation of a mandible. "I don't know. I keep thinking about what Yikki said. It's a risk." "So is keeping it secret." Shimare is still looking at you with mantid gaze, her Brismati eyes open, but not directed at you. "It's..." you start and stop. "Secrets get out eventually," you say. How could you keep something from Tlista forever? She seems to figure everything out. "We have more time to work things out if she doesn't know right away." You glance at her curtain, half expecting unlucky timing, your mother appearing right as you allude to the secret. She doesn't; you're safe for moments more. This is like last night, you realize. You're still seeing it as a binary. There are more options than asking Tlista or keeping it a secret. "Maybe we could ask other nymphs' parents, just in case Tlista finds out and doesn't let her stay?" Maybe Maune herself would be amenable to her staying in the woods with her. Or! You've heard legend of the secret treehouse the older nymphs got the bees to build years ago. No one's been able to find it since, with those nymphs (now imagos) keeping it a grave secret. "Bad idea," Shimare's quick to say. "Can you trust other parents not to just take her back? You should keep her close." The vesperbane stands up. "But if you're not going to tell her now, we're eating our luck by staying here. Let's go." You turn to the door, but stop. "Wait. If Yikki just woke up, she's probably hungry." "I can just give her one of my ration bars. It's half of what we eat, so we're packed with them." You nod, not having better ideas; your father cooks. "Wait for me outside while I go down there? Can get the quilting board too, so we aren't caught in an obvious lie." Outside, the sky is as clear as a vast emptiness. The atmospheric enervate is fainter this deep in the day, and has been driven completely out of the radius of the sun, like a great celestial banishment. "Want one?" A vesperbane surprising you should not be a surprise, but you still jump. The white mantis is offering you a paper-wrapped tube. It's hexagonal, like it was extruded alongside a hundred others from a mold. You smile and take it, feeling the mid-day pang in your abdomen. The bland, unappealing brown tube is lumpy, studded with what might be nuts. You pause. It smells like meat. Shimare tsks at your look. "Please don't tell me you were raised on any of that noble hunter bullshit. Sure, haemofab'd meat is farmed like a crop rather than killed, but it tastes like meat. Calories are calories. If you want to be a vesperbane, by no means can you be picky." In the end, your stomach decides. Shimare hums, then says, "Follow me." The bane starts walking. "Uhm, where are we going?" She doesn't stop or turn to reveal her expression, but the tone is of answering a stupid question. "Our camp. Have you forgotten my offer already?" "I do want to learn about being a vesperbane, and you are --" "I can see the 'but' in your words, nymph. Cut to it." "I don't want you to get in trouble, showing me something you shouldn't." "And if I tell you I know my teacher and what he wants better than you?" "I'd have to be around the others, wouldn't I? I know they're your teammates, but they don't seem very nice. Or good vesperbanes. And after last night, they might not trust me." "Should I save myself the trouble of eviscerating your new excuses, and assume the ground truth here is you don't want to, and this game is what? Trying not to hurt my feelings?" Or revealing what you'd rather do. When you decided you wouldn't take up Shimare's offer, you didn't determine if your intentions should be secret. There was nothing wrong with visiting the apiary, was there? "It's worth remarking," Shimare scrapes, tone light, "how odd that is. A child of the Pantheca, an aspiring vesperbane, and you don't want to learn from your superiors? I'm sure any other nymph in your village would leap for the chance, and yet you hesitate. And I wonder why that is. Do you trust the Stewartry? Do you believe in the Dream?" You nod with vigor. Had you made a terrible mistake? Was this going to ruin your chances of becoming a vesperbane? "Or perhaps... is this your interpretation of caution? Or do you just distrust me, specifically?" "I think you're nice!" you say, extending antennae outward to her, wiggling them. Shimare frowns at that, and you aren't sure why. You decide to move the conversation along. "I won't accompany you today," you emphasize, "but maybe there is a way you could help me. I've read of the sovrans at Greci, and I was wondering --" "No," Shimare curls up her antennae. "Not only are you wrong, you're doing it wrong. First of all, no bane of rank lower than fiend has ever been to Greci --- and it's forbidden for us to be transported there. I have no connections for you to exploit." She leans toward you, and it's not a pleasant look on her face. "Was it just flattery, a moment ago? Is this what you really think of me --- a big, influential name, a ladder for your little ambitions?" "No! I just --" "You should take a lesson from this, nymph. About the implications your words may carry, to those who aren't blind to them. If you just want to use mantids as stepping stones for your schemes, then you'll be in good company, becoming a vesperbane. Or perhaps you aren't even capable of that depth yet, and you really thought your intentions innocent. I don't care." You take a step back, palps quivering inaudibly. You glance around -- anywhere but at the bane. Should you just leave? This isn't what you wanted. "Don't run away just yet. There's something I need to tell you --- that I was going to tell you, before your little... infelicity. Walk with me, we won't have to part ways for a bit." You welcome walking beside the bane, where keeping your gaze fixed ahead of you is expected and not impolite. You're breathing a bit fast, but you have the composure to slow it. "Here. I'll present this in the form of three questions. Questions you should have asked, questions a good vesperbane would have thought of. Listening?" You nod. You meet her Brismati eyes, rather than her compound eyes. The unease her vein-marred, glowing orbs stir is appropriate. "Why, if speaking at the schoolyard was a test from our teacher, would we skip out on the test by sending ourselves a fake message? Does that make sense? And how, if your friend was able to sneak out of her house, could her windows be barred or door locked from the outside? And why, if I am a vesperbane born of one of the most prestigious clans, taught by the arch-fiend of one of the major cities of the plains, would I find you impressive? Do you think you're that special?" She shakes her head. "When you leave for the academy, and you have more than one generation of a tiny village to compare yourself against, you'll discover just how unremarkable you are." You stop walking. "Why --- why would you... you lied? Why lie about those things?" "My teacher loves his tests, and I think it's infectious. When the examiners speak of Shatalek's stock, the one they talk about is Hervanium Alcha. But you come up second. I wanted to know if that meant anything. And, well." You make a wordless scraping noise. "But, having met you, I had another motive. You're gullible, Eifre. Listen to me. Vesperbanes are liars! If they tell you something, it only means they wanted you to think that. Always interrogate motives." "You-- you can't treat everyone like that. Some are good, some are trustworthy. Some are..." --- you reach for a word the vesperbane would like --- "allies." "Even your allies, bug. Vesperbanes make sacrifices. And what's truth mean next to lives saved, or concrete results? It's ephemeral. This is the heartlands. Truth is scarce. Your trust should be, too." Brismati Shimare closes her eyes. "It's something a lot of new vesperbanes get stung by. And I'm willing to bite, and demonstrate directly, even if it makes you see me as some kind of venomed scorpion, because it will make the Pantheca stronger. I want you to know this, before you have to learn it from some renegade or defect, at cost." When you part ways, she walks back, directly opposite the way you had been walking. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crossing town towards the apiary takes you tangential to the important building at its center, where Tlista talked to the syndic. You see unfamiliar mantids in purple robes outside it now, adorned with eight-pointed stars. They are talking to passersby. Had they arrived recently? Most mantids in town are vaguely familiar, but strangers pass through the tavern, uncommonly. Most weren't interested in the syndic or the assembly building, though. Bees grow more numerous as you near their home. You always see them digging around in the flower cups, or tending to the flowers and you wonder if that's what they all do. Do they ever play? Locating the apiary's no mystery. Though your fleeting familiarity with the fringes of town begins to fail you, there is an irregular stream of bees diving in this direction. The apiary sits as a squat thing, a hexagonal slab of a building, whose colorfully painted façade shows more creativity than its shape. From the lo