From Chapter Three. I love these people.
Vine Rhizome waited for her father to go to sleep. Her hair was covered up, bright red obscured beneath coalish cotton, and tied back so tightly that she worried unreasonable things: the follicles would pop out like plugs jerked from sockets; her forehead skin would slide back to reveal what it hid; and what if it hid circuitry? “But it’s cool out tonight,” she rehearsed, “and I’ll freeze to death if I don’t wear it.”
The Hivelord snored.
Vine heard a chainsaw once. It was in a museum, in Babel. The thing was orange and black, plastic. She thought she saw bloodstains on it. It was set up on a pedestal in the middle of the auditorium, and the lights were all clicked off except for one, and it shone so brightly on the blade that it hurt her eyes. The Anthropos was standing behind it for a demonstration. “This,” he said, “is how they used to murder the children of the Goddess.” He revved it up and swung it around and lost his balance and fell over and cut his left hand off. But, before that, while the chainsaw was ripping through the hair, for just a moment the as yet whole left hand of the Anthropos was centered in the light, and Vine studied it. It was like a child’s: the fingers were thin and short; the nails were perfect semicircles. And, whenever she heard her father snore, which is to say every night, she thought of that man’s delicate, childlike hands with the semicircle nails.
The Hivelord’s snoring sounded like that.
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