Some pretended sickness, the more clever of the animals, and he had learned over time that cleverness existed as much among those with inhuman faces as those with bodies that in some manner mimicked the human. For even embedded within that wall like bizarre floating jewels, some of those he inspected must have heard the myths surrounding the holding ponds. That if you made it to the holding ponds, you might die brutally and of the instant, but also that you might become free, or have a chance at freedom.

But it was the one that spoke to Chen that took him finally, even though once he no longer lived within a space that the Company might approve of, once he had moved past the point on the map where he might still know where he was … he knew that it should have come earlier, at any other time, on any other subject.

The agony that was the speech, a human attribute issuing forth from a nonhuman mouth, that he responded to, that had value to him. Or woke him from a trance, from a state of being asleep while standing, while going about the rituals of his day.

The way it was said to Chen, as he had one glove through the membrane and was holding the creature, which presented as a thistle-bright hedgehog face erupting from something with too many legs, all of it bathed in plush golden fur. Holding it in such a way that he could have crushed it as the creature spoke, so that he did not have to hear that voice. A brave voice, a voice that sounded like no other because this creature had never existed before and so he could not describe the voice to another person. Except to say it was like the thrushing of a beating of soft wings that had been doused in calm waters.

After, Chen had stumbled out of the Company building, walked past the holding ponds, staggered lost and bereft across the sand, first to the wooded ravine and then to a southern entrance of the Balcony Cliffs. But he could not enter, as if a wall of force held him in check, as if there were a physical barrier, but it was just the trauma in his mind. He stopped, bent over, breathing heavily, outside the Balcony Cliffs. He knelt in the gravel, staring unfocused back at the distant Company building.

It was there that Moss and Grayson found him. Eventually. In time. The Chen they needed. The Chen who knew the Company. The Chen who knew the wall of globes and their terrible cargo.

But Chen never told them what the thistle-bright hedgehog creature had said to him. There, in the globe, as it died in his hands from whatever had been done to it on the other side of the wall, what it could not recover from. What Chen could not recover from.