And there was something else, something stronger still. Abil had never seen an animal larger than a rat. But that was how he labeled this smell: a stink like that of a huge rat’s nest, pungent and overpowering.

He looked down at the woman who had reached up to him. Her face really was beautiful, he thought, narrow and delicate, with high cheekbones and large blue eyes. She smiled at him, showing a row of teeth that came to points. He felt warmed. He longed to speak to her.

An attendant leaned over her, a girl who might have been twelve. He thought the girl was kissing the pregnant woman. When the girl pulled away her jaws were opened wide, and a thin rope of some kind of paste, glistening faintly green, pulsed out of her throat, passing from her mouth into the breeder’s. It was beautiful, Abil thought, overwhelmed; he had never seen such pure love as between this woman and the girl.

But he, in his clumsy, bloodstained suit, would forever be kept apart from this love. He felt tears well. He fell to his knees and reached forward with bloodstained gloves. The breeding woman screeched and thrashed backward. The attendant girl, regurgitated paste dribbling from her mouth, instantly hurled herself at him. She caught him off-balance. He fell back, and his head cracked on the ground. He struggled to get up. He had to get back to the mother, to explain.

There was an arm around his throat—a suited arm. He struggled, but his lungs were aching. He heard Denh’s voice call: “Kill the breeders. Move it!” A gloved hand passed before Abil’s face, closing his faceplate, shutting out the noise of babies crying, and through its murky pane he saw fire flare once more.

The captain sat on the edge of Abil’s sick bay bed. “Denh is acting corporal for now,” Dower said gently.

Abil sighed. “It’s no more than I deserved, sir.”

Dower shook her head. “That damn curiosity of yours. You certainly made a mistake, but hardly a fatal one. But you weren’t adequately briefed. In a way the fault’s mine. I argue with the Commissaries before every drop. They would tell you grunts nothing if they had the chance, I think, for they believe nobody but them needs to know anything.”

“What happened to me, sir?”

“Pheromones.”

“Sir?”

“There are many ways to communicate, tar. Such as by scent. You and I are poor at smelling, you know, compared to our senses of touch, sight, hearing. We can distinguish only a few scent qualities: sweet, fetid, sour, musky, dry . . . But those Coalescent drones have been stuck in their hole in the ground for fifteen thousand years. Now, the human species itself is only four or five times older than that. There has been plenty of time for evolutionary divergence.”

“And when I cracked my faceplate—”