Lin’s broodma (who scorned a name as a decadent affectation) taught Lin and her broodsister that Insect Aspect was the lord of all creation, the all-powerful force that knew only hunger and thirst and rutting and satisfaction. He had shat out the universe after eating the void, in a mindless act of cosmic creation the purer and more brilliant for being devoid of motive or awareness. Lin and her broodsister were taught to worship Him with a terrified fervour, and to despise their self-awareness and their soft, chitinless bodies.

They were also taught to worship and serve their mindless brothers.

Thinking back now to that time, Lin no longer shuddered with revulsion. Sitting in those secluded Kinken parks, Lin carefully watched her past unfold in her mind, little by little, in a gradual act of reminiscence that took courage to pursue. She remembered how she had slowly come to realize that her life was not usual. On her rare shopping expeditions she would see with horror the casual contempt with which her khepri sisters treated male khepri, kicking and crushing the mindless two-foot insects. She remembered her tentative conversations with the other children, who taught her how her neighbours lived; her fear of using the language she knew instinctively, the language she carried in her blood, but that her broodma had taught her to loathe.

Lin remembered coming home to a house that swarmed with male khepri, that stank of rotting vegetables and fruit, littered as it was with organic rubbish for males to gorge on. She remembered being commanded to wash her innumerable brothers’ glistening carapaces, to pile up their dung before the household altar, to let them scuttle over her and explore her body as their dumb curiosity directed them. She remembered the night-time discussions with her broodsister, carried out in the tiny chymical wafts and gently rattling hisses that were khepri-whispers. As a result of these theological debates, her broodsister had turned the other way from her, had burrowed so deeply into her Insect Aspect faith that she outshone their mother in zealotry.

It had taken Lin until she was fifteen to challenge her broodma openly. She did so in terms that she now saw were naive and confused. Lin denounced her mother as a heretic, cursing her in the name of the mainstream pantheon. She fled the lunatic self-loathing of Insect Aspect worship, and the narrow streets of Creekside. She had run away to Kinken.