Jezzer’s boids fluttered in a way that portrayed bemusement and gestured the big door open. Walking backward, I dragged Patton, arms burning, back aching, to the great rotunda, through a patch where the Scythin had resumed their swarming. They stopped, watching curiously as one human dragged another back to their prison cell.

Jezzer sauntered some distance behind, seeming unfazed by Patton’s condition or my threats to leave the Chime buried.

“I got you, buddy,” I said. “We’re together now. I’m so sorry, I’m a piece of shit. I’m never going to leave you again. Remember Pickles? He’s in there waiting for us. We should go ahead and crack those open, huh? It’s over now, Patton. It’s over. I’m sorry.” My voice cracked. Patton’s body felt like... a body. Was he still there? Had the dredge eaten his brain?101

We got to the enclosure and I pulled him inside, right to the middle. Sitting with Patton’s head in my lap, I screamed, “Jezzer! He needs the nectar!”

Jezzer appeared at the opening of the membrane, gestured nonchalantly to the floor where the tubes appeared. “You better not be fucking with me,” I said, grabbing the correct one – I think – and pushing it onto Patton’s rightmost umbilicus.

He went bow-shaped and flopped out of my lap, arms spread in a swan dive and feet en pointe as every muscle in his body fired. His head was thrown back, sinews and veins in his neck popping through the skin. I’d put in a fair time on the tube and don’t think I’d ever reacted like this.

“What the fuck is happening to him?” I roared.

Jezzer was watching the mists where, for the first time since we’d arrived, the full Scythin horde weltered in fervid murmuration; cycling through forms of colossal crawling beasts and swelling leviathans.

I understood it. Something about my knowledge of this swarming language taken from the same behavior in birds made it less alien. I couldn’t translate what they were saying to each other exactly, but the sentiments were unmistakable. Excitement. Anticipation.

I watched even as the membrane drew closed, holding my neglected friend as he absorbed nectar into what was left of his body. A moment later, Jezzer broke off in a dead sprint for the perimeter, disaggregating halfway into multicolored boids that tumbled into the circling mass. The swarm pushed around the perimeter, moving faster than I’d seen it do yet, transforming from one thing to the next at a pace that defied the laws of momentum and inertia.