The word burned like napalm. I staggered backwards, clutching my head. All the guilt and pain of Pelapatarn—all the raw feelings I’d thought exorcised via the verses I had written—came crashing back in on me like the walls of a collapsing temple. The only way I could survive such an onslaught was to do what I had done ever since that inglorious day, and cleave to the belief I had been right in my choices, and that by deciding to follow orders and burn the sentient trees, I had in fact opted for the lesser of two atrocities.

Humans are unworthy.

I shook my head and took a deep breath, forcing down the tears of rage, shame and frustration that threatened to overwhelm me.

“Unworthy of what?”

The Marble Armada exists to defend life, but the life that created us has gone. We lack purpose. Many races have come here over the millennia, but all have been judged unworthy.

The words had a flatness to them that chilled me to the marrow. “You’re going to judge the whole of humanity based on me, and whoever else has wandered this far?”

The beast pawed the air. You came here pursued by killers. You were complicit in the destruction of an arboreal intelligence a thousand times older than your species.

“But not all humans are alike.” I don’t know why I was so desperate to convince this creature, just that there was something about the way it pronounced the word “unworthy” that frightened me. Having touched my mind, it had left me in no doubt that being judged unworthy was a fate best avoided. “You’ve seen my memories. You’ve seen Adam, the boy I was with. The boy who…” My voice cracked for a second. I swallowed hard and plunged on. “The boy who died. He was pretentious, but he was young and innocent. He was good.”

Claws and teeth caught the light.

You enable the perpetration of massacres, and then base your appeal on the innocence of a child?

I felt a lump in my throat. I threw out my hands. “What else have I got?”

My arms and legs were shaking with a mixture of annoyance, dread and exhaustion. I had to get out. I had to find a route to the surface, and then find some food before I collapsed entirely. Heart pounding, I turned and walked back the way I’d come. Even if I ended up starving to death like that couple I’d found in the corridor, at least I would have died in an attempt to escape.

Behind me, the creature let out a roar that stopped me in my tracks.

I faced it, more irritated now than afraid.