Stomach empty and taste buds aching, I searched for the tubes in the floor, trying to coax them out from their compartment. I cleared my throat, filled my chest, and – feeling imbued with unique powers ordained by the tube food – pounded the floor with both my fists.

No tube.

“Patton, wake up.”

My beard itched. Wait. I have a beard?

I hadn’t shaved in the time since our kidnapping and so already had a rugged sort of cattle rancher look going, but this was down to my clavicles. Six inches of new beard in one night? What the hell was in that shit?

“Patton!” I yelled. There was a big yellow tuft below his chin. A neckbeard. He looked like a Himalayan marmot. “Wake up!”

Patton came to and laughed when he saw me. I raised my eyebrows expectantly and waited for him to check himself. “Ah!” he screeched. “But we weren’t asleep for long, right?”

I checked my Timex, which was, miraculously, still on my wrist. “Yeah. Like a solid ten hours.”

We both looked to our belly tubes. It had to be the narco-food.

I stunk. We stunk. Hungry again, thirsty, disgusting. I could feel patches of enflamed skin developing in my armpits and the top of my crack but couldn’t access them for scratching. Five stars for food, no stars for accommodations. Two-point-five stars overall. Would not recommend.

A big section of the wall melted away, and there was Eyes standing on the other side of it. Different shaped holes opened across their face. Ripples of color passed over their visage. Come, they whispered in my own voice.

I stood up, wobbly. My stomach cramped. “Can you give us some more to eat first?” I asked.

Come.

I stepped from the enclosure and the membrane drew quickly closed behind me before I could offer Patton a parting salutation.

I followed Eyes across the huge expanse of floor toward the rotunda’s distant perimeter. Shuffling closely behind my escort, the divisions between the boid units that made their body were better discerned. Most remained in place, but sometimes moved independently of the larger being. They were generally dark in color, with lighter, mottled areas near the edges. Displays of color seemed to come at random and with no apparent stimulus. An expanding circle of indigo across their back. A stripe of magenta down an arm from the shoulder.

“So, uh, where are we headed?” I asked lightly.

No answer.

The perimeter of the room was considerably farther than I’d estimated from inside the enclosure. We traveled for several minutes before reaching the misty boundary. I looked back toward the center of the vast room to the distant nodule of membrane that housed Patton. From where I was it looked like a curled up dead leaf made of glass, thin enough to see the veins. Or a chrysalis.