Chapter 720: After-Action Tea (2)
"Behave," she said, but she didn’t mean it harshly. His jokes put a cloth over sharp edges without dulling them; she could admit to herself that sometimes she liked it.
Two skeletons at the back adjusted their grips on the litter frame together. The soft wood creak and the low hum of the Choir braided into something that felt like a normal morning in a city that didn’t exist.
Rodion worked. He didn’t wiggle. He didn’t hum. He just made a neat little flood of calibration grids and test swatches slide across the box feeds. One screen showed a grayscale ant leg; next to it a small color bar—red, green, blue—moved like a ruler and then snapped into place as if it had found home.
Little circles traced the edges of light sources in each feed: glowcaps, shards of crystal, a worker carrying a bead of fungus jelly. Rodion marked each with a ring, then dialed a slider. The rings stopped flaring.
A faint line graph crawled along the bottom like a calm caterpillar: bloom correction, exposure, motion smoothing. It was boring to watch if you didn’t like order; for people who did, it was soothing.
Thalatha’s breath slowed as the chaos of black and white started to choose clarity. She did not think of it as magic. She thought of it as respectful work. "You can do that?" she asked the air.
<Yes. I am improving your life by 42%. Please do not waste the gift by running into a wall.>
Mikhailis snorted softly. Rodion, never change. He kept his eyes on the grid. "You hear him?" he said, tilting his head toward Thalatha. "He cares."
"I hear the part about not hitting walls," she said. "I will respect that."
Rodion dropped a wire overlay on one feed: a rib edge. Tiny green dots pulsed along it—safe steps. Orange X marks appeared in two places where the rib turned mean. "Tired orange," Mikhailis called that shade. It looked like a warning made by a clerk who had been awake too long.
A different feed showed worker-ants passing a narrow throat. They went two by two, touching the wall with their feelers each third step. Rodion set a tiny purple highlight on the third-step touches.
<That habit maps to a known nurse cadence. I am preserving it. Please do not retrain it unless necessary.>
"Copy," Thalatha said, immediate. She stored this with a commander’s instinct: don’t erase culture if it works. If it makes the unit breathe easier, keep it.
She lifted her cup and sipped the last of the tea, then held the cup with both hands like a warm stone. "How long?" she asked, not impatient, just measuring the next breath.
<Seventeen seconds. Please entertain yourselves sensibly.>
Mikhailis tapped the side of his cup with a fingernail, three even clicks, and then stopped, realizing the rhythm could be rude in this place. He switched to two uneven taps. "Do uneven taps offend you, Rodion?"
<Only if they are smug.>
"Nothing about me is smug," he said, straight-faced.
Thalatha glanced sideways at him. "You are a moving definition of smug," she said, voice dry as old paper.
He looked wounded on purpose. She’s lighter today, he thought, pleased. Good. Keep it. He almost said, "You’re beautiful when you insult me," but swallowed it. Timing mattered more than wit.
On the far edge of the console a tiny feed flickered to a corridor none of them had flagged. A nurse stood at the mouth, antennae drawn in. Another nurse passed behind her and bumped her shoulder with a soft touch. The first nurse’s antennae relaxed. Thalatha watched and filed: how they comforted each other. How they made a unit out of nervous bodies.
Rodion tuned gamma here, saturation there. A ghostly color wash rolled across one feed: blue creeping over bone, then amber settling into resin, then the soft white outlines of ants. The brake hum underfoot felt lower, as if the floor’s lungs had decided this was worth paying attention to.
Mikhailis rubbed his thumb against the cup rim. The skin there had a thin burn scar, the kind you get from grabbing a hot pan because you were talking instead of looking. He saw the scar and thought of Lira’s vinegar bottle, and his chest did a small ache that was not pain. Later, he told it. Work now.
Thalatha shifted her stance. The scuff of leather against stone was quiet and neat. Without looking away from the board, she said, "When we move, I want the wedge to be slow at corners. No one cuts a turn. I don’t want anyone showing a profile to a mouth."
"Understood," Mikhailis said. "Profiles are for portraits."
She made a sound that might have been a laugh if it grew up. The veins in her hands were faintly blue where the tea warmed the skin. He noticed stupid things when he was calm: the tiny soot speck still hiding in her hair from yesterday; the stitch he’d made on her sleeve holding better than he had any right to expect. I sew badly, he thought, pleased anyway. But the sleeve forgave me.
One of the skeletons adjusted the lashings on its spear again. The sound was not a sound; it was permission to keep watching the screen. The hypnoveil at the slot mouth fluttered once and went still. The room had learned to be quiet with them.
Rodion released a tiny calibration chirp that might have been smug if an AI could make smug noises. Small labels slid under each feed: "NURSERY NORTH," "BASILICA EAST LOWER," "ARCHIVE TRENCH LIP," "CISTERN RIM." A green dot in the corner of each box meant "clean signal." A yellow dot meant "acceptable."
Color crept in with patience. Black-and-white turned to muted cream and amber, then to cooler shadows where bone met hidden water. The ants wore thin outlines in blue and white for easy reading. Motes of dust stopped looking like snow and started looking like dust again.
Thalatha leaned over the console enough that a strand of her dark-blonde hair fell forward and tried to misbehave. She blew it off her face without using her hand. "Better," she murmured, almost to herself.
Mikhailis didn’t notice he’d leaned forward too until his elbow touched his own knee. He didn’t move back. This is the right distance, he thought. Not too far, not stealing breath.
A final overlay clicked into place: tiny green dots along ribs, orange Xs at hazards, a timid blue line for air flow, and dotted scent trails threading like stitches.
Rodion polished the corner with one last wipe of code.
<You are welcome, Local Menace. Calibrating.>
The feeds blinked twice—once like a blink, second like a decision. Grids settled over each box in neat squares, then slid aside as if embarrassed to be seen. False color swept across them like paint pulled by a magnet: dull blues walking over bone, a quiet amber blooming in every resin seam. Bloom correction nipped the glowcap glare; the blinding halos shrank to polite circles. On certain ribs, thin dots appeared and pulsed in gentle green: safe-step markers. In a few places where the stone curled like a lip about to say "no," Rodion stamped a tired orange X. Tired, because even a warning could be humble.
The world returned to muted color—bone tempered to cream, resin to honey amber, glowcaps to a patient teal. The ants were outlined in soft blues and whites, easy on the eye. Dust stopped pretending to be snow and went back to being dust again. Somewhere underfoot, the Brake Choir kept its low line, a note you felt more than heard.
Mikhailis leaned forward without noticing, elbows on knees, cup forgotten between his boots. He knew the urge to clap and did not. "This is perfect."
Thalatha’s jaw unclenched, the muscle that lived there relaxing notch by notch. She didn’t smile; she allowed the corners of her mouth to think about it. "Good. We can work with this."
Rodion slid the feeds with zero jerk, like a librarian who knew which shelf you meant before you named it. The view drifted to a nursery chamber. The camera sank low, then level, as if kneeling. Tiny, careful movement filled the frame: nurses in rings, bodies a shade paler than the soldiers, antennae drawing soft arcs above heads like writing in air. In the circle’s calm, there she was—a smaller royal-morph adolescent. Her body was a compact oval, ridges not yet heavy; the translucence at her joints said she was still becoming. Her antennae were quick and thoughtful. She traced patterns on the floor with a foreleg, not idle, not random—three short arcs, one long, pause, repeat. The mark had meaning, even if the meaning didn’t want to be known yet.
"That one," Mikhailis said softly. He always dropped his voice when something mattered. "Clever, and the nurses like her."