One of the bird-men poked at Thuy’s thigh with his curved beak; one of the jackal-women snuffled her armpit. Thuy thought of the old Norman Rockwell painting of a white family saying grace around Thanksgiving dinner. When she’d been a kid, she’d gone through a Norman Rockwell phase, trying to decipher what it meant to be white. And now she was a subdimensional roast turkey. But still non-white. Her thoughts were jumping all around. The jackal woman gave her neck a little nip.

“Don’t eat me!” cried Thuy. “I have to stop the nants.”

“We like the nant plan,” said the beetle bucking his abdomen to make the Luty-penis talk. “We subbies grow vatoscale roots to draw info from the quantum level of your cosmos, you see. We poke through the Planck frontier’s foam. Once the nants eat Earth, your planet’s high-level structures will be folded into the tasty quantum states of the nanomachines. We want to help the nants, yes. I’ve tweaked my metabolism to synthesize antinantanium, so I can send a root hair to exude a timely drop.”

“Kkrt,” croaked one of the bird-headed men. “Kth krrb.”

The beetle chirped a response; the dangling Luty-shape explained. “My friends want to eat you right away, Thuy. But first I want you to tell me what that harp is for. I don’t understand what my root hairs are drawing from your brain.”

“I need to hold the harp to explain it,” said Thuy, her mind racing.

The big sacred scarab dropped onto his six legs and ambled over to the harp. Impatiently a jackal-women bit off one of Thuy’s pigtails and wolfed it down.

A bird-man gave the jackal-woman a sharp peck, then snipped Thuy’s other pigtail and swallowed it, holding his head high to work the bolus down his crane’s neck. The other subbies closed in on Thuy, tearing off bits of her clothes: her sleeves, part of her miniskirt, and then—oh no!—both of Thuy’s beloved golden piezoplastic shoes. The beetle interrupted with a peremptory chirp. He backed into the circle of subbies, dragging the harp with his mandibles. The crowded painting gleamed.

This was Thuy’s last chance to escape. Hoping for the best, she plucked a few strings. They tingled against her fingers in a highly unpleasant way, but she bore down and began strumming steadily. Thuy felt a flicker of sympathy from the harp, and then the sound took on a life of its own, rising to a whining drone like a leaf-blower’s buzz.

The rhythmic noise got deep into Thuy’s head; for some reason she recalled her mother’s fear that an electric fan in her bedroom at night might chop up her dreams.

Lo and behold, the harp was ripping apart the subbies’ root hairs! The illusory Egyptian-style props disappeared.