The willow fronds sprang apart, taken by surprise by a sudden lack of resistance, like a man leaning against a suddenly open door. Swarmers poured between the fronds, a cascade of them, dozens and dozens. They pattered and bounced on the root-gnarled ground like a strange, hard rain, rapidly righting themselves and huddling together into a nearly solid mass. When they moved, they ran in a bunch, parting to clear roots or flailing branches and flowing back together afterwards, like a school of minnows.

Alice had a hundred tiny hearts and two hundred legs, all moving at once. In the first instant, the pain of so many fragmented perceptions overwhelmed her, and she thought she would go mad. She wanted to back away, release the Swarm’s perceptions as she did when she peered through their eyes, but this time there was nowhere to go. She wanted to scream, but didn’t know how.

It was that first instinct, the terrified desire to curl up into a ball until the horror went away, that saved her. The swarmers took over, flowing around the clumsy, reaching branches like a tide. She didn’t need to control the little bodies, like a puppeteer jerking their limbs about. The swarmers knew how to move, just as her human body knew how to walk or jump or run.

No sooner had she got the hang of this than her perceptions resolved as well, snapping into place like a trompe-l’oeil painting into its component parts. Alice realized in that moment that she had never really understood the Swarm. She’d thought of it as a pack of creatures, like a bunch of wolves running side by side, but it wasn’t like that at all. They were one creature in a hundred bodies, one mind – her mind. And those bodies knew how to use their multiple eyes, just as well as Alice’s own body could use her two. She could see all around her, see all sides of a branch as the swarmers split up to run past it. The sudden rush of understanding was such a glorious sensation, she forgot her pain completely.

The willow branches, recovering from their surprise at suddenly grasping nothing but air, bent back down to block her path, fronds writhing and twisting into a living wall of greenery. But Alice-the-Swarm was a hundred times more agile than Alice-the-Girl had ever been, and she slipped through gaps in the barrier in a hundred different places. Where there wasn’t a hole, she made one, her sharp beaks nipping and slashing at the hanging tendrils. Then she was through, leaves and branches boiling furiously behind her. Her tiny legs blurred, and she felt grass underneath her claws.