Chapter 1: A Slippery Gullet
The cave entrance yawned like a gaping wound in the forest’s damp, emerald curtain. Thick ivy draped the jagged rocks. The air hummed with the low, rhythmic drip… drip… drip of water from unseen stalactites, a sound drowned out by the ragged, wet clicking that echoed from the darkness within.
Kai’s world had collapsed into a tunnel of white-hot pain.
His four arms scrabbled against the slick moss of the cave floor, human fingers digging grooves into the soft earth. His brilliant white hair was plastered to his scalp with sweat and a thin, dark mucous. Below his heaving, slim torso, his massive centipede tail—three meters of reddish-brown segmented chitin—lashed and coiled in uncontrolled spasms. The hundreds of little legs scrambled for purchase, kicking up clods of damp soil.
A deep, convulsive gagging shook his entire frame. His black eyes were wide with a terror that had nothing to do with the flashlights now cutting through the gloom.
It was the terror of what was inside him.
A distinct, human-shaped bulge distended the pale skin of his throat, just above his collarbones. It was lodged. It moved with a weak, suffocating struggle. The primal drive of his February season, the blinding need to consume and mate, had blurred the lines. The scent, the movement in the underbrush… he’d struck on instinct. The taste was wrong. The feel was horribly, catastrophically wrong.
His snake-like stomach, capable of digesting a dozen rabbits, could not handle this. It was too big, too angular, and worst of all, still alive. His body didn’t know how to vomit it back up. It only knew how to pull it down, and now it was stuck, a solid, struggling mass that was tearing him apart from the inside. He felt every twitch, every feeble kick. Guilty acid burned in his real gut, below his human abdomen.
A desperate, keening purr rattled from his chest, morphing into a series of frantic, clicking staccatos. Help. Wrong. Pain. Sorry. Sorry.
“Easy. Easy now. We see you.”
The voice was calm. It cut through the cacophony of his distress.
Dr. Helena Voss took another slow step into the periphery of his vision, her boots careful on the uneven ground. Her short auburn hair was a dark helmet in the shadowy light. She kept her hands visible, palms out, at her sides. Her sharp green eyes weren’t on his threatening mandibles or his thrashing tail. They were fixed on the painful bulge in his throat, calculating, assessing.
“I know it hurts,” she said, her voice low and even. “I know you’re scared. My name is Helena. We’re going to fix this.”
Behind her, two other members of her rescue team held back, their lights trained on the scene but their bodies non-confrontational. One clutched a medical kit, the other a canister of oxygen. They were statues, letting her lead.
Kai’s head swung toward her. His mandibles twitched, dripping a clear fluid. A low warning click erupted from him, but it was undercut by another full-body heave that made him crumple forward, his forehead thudding against the cool earth. The bulge shifted slightly, and a muffled, choked sound came from within him. He froze, a shudder of pure remorse wracking him.
Helena saw it. The guilt. It was the key.
“You didn’t mean to,” she whispered, taking another incremental step closer. She was now within reach of his front arms. “It was a mistake. Your season, your drives… they got confused. I understand. But we have to get them out. They can’t breathe in there, Kai. You know that, don’t you?”
He did. The awful, slowing struggles told him. He let out a whimper.
Helena slowly knelt, bringing herself to his eye level. The smell of his distress was pungent—musky and sharp. “I need you to trust me. I need you to try to be still. This will be harder if you move.”
She glanced back at her team and gave a sharp, almost imperceptible nod. The medic began moving forward, slow as a glacier.
Kai’s eyes darted to the new movement, his tail giving a warning rattle against the stone. Helena didn’t flinch. She reached out, not for his face, but for his nearest upper hand, which was clenched into a trembling fist. She laid her own hand gently over his knuckles. The human contact was startling.
“Look at me,” she commanded, softly. “Just at me. They’re here to help. We’re all here to help.”
Her touch was a tether. His black eyes locked onto her green ones. The clicks that came from him now were questions, fractured and pleading.
“I’m going to touch your throat,” she explained, her other hand moving with deliberate slowness. “I need to feel where they are. Okay?”
He didn’t pull away. He held her gaze, his breath coming in wet, ragged hitches. Her fingers, cool and sure, pressed gently against the distorted skin of his neck. She felt the firm shape of a shoulder, the curve of a skull. The person was curled, head down, lodged in the esophageal pathway. Time was a thin, fraying thread.
“Oxygen ready,” the medic murmured, holding up a clear mask attached to a narrow, flexible tube.
“Okay, Kai,” Helena said, her voice gaining a new, gentle firmness. “This is the hard part. You need to try to relax your throat. I know it’s fighting you. I know it wants to pull them down. But you have to fight that instinct. You have to push.”
A confused, desperate rumble shook his chest. He didn’t know how.
Helena’s mind raced. The anatomical models, the chimera dissections, the theories about duplicate nervous systems. “The muscles you use to click,” she said suddenly. “The ones deep in your chest. Use those. But backward. Push the air, push the feeling, up. Not out. Up.”
He stared, uncomprehending for a second. Then his eyes narrowed in concentration. Another internal convulsion took him, and he gagged, a string of dark saliva webbing from his mandibles.
“Now! Try now!” Helena urged.
A series of weak, internalized clicks pulsed inside him. The bulge moved a centimeter upward, then slid back. Kai let out a sob of frustration and pain.
“Again. You can do it. Push.”
He clenched his eyes shut. The purring in his chest changed timbre, becoming a deep, vibrational grumble. The muscles along his human torso corded and strained. Helena watched, heart hammering, as the bulge began a slow, tortuous ascent. The skin of his throat stretched obscenely.
“The mask,” she hissed to her medic.
As the tip of a limp human hand emerged from between Kai’s twitching mandibles, the medic sprang. He slid the thin oxygen tube past the teeth, past the mandibles, down alongside the emerging arm. “Flow on!”
A wet, choking cough exploded from Kai, and the head of a young man began to crown from his mouth, face blueish, coated in digestive film. The medic sealed the oxygen mask over the nose and mouth. A weak, gargling breath fogged the plastic.
“Keep pushing, Kai! Slowly! Slowly!” Helena’s hands were now guiding, helping to support the weight of the shoulders as they emerged. It was a grotesque, reverse birth. The centipede tail lay utterly still now, all of Kai’s being focused on this single, Herculean expulsion.
With one final, agonized heave, the young man slid free onto the moss, followed by a rush of viscous fluid. The medic immediately rolled him onto his side, working to clear his airway, the sound of ragged, oxygen-assisted breaths now the loudest thing in the cave.
Kai collapsed. His head hit the ground with a thud. A long, shuddering whine poured from him, his body going limp with exhaustion and shock. The guilty bulge was gone, replaced by a raw, hollow ache.
Helena didn’t go to the victim first. She placed a steadying hand on Kai’s trembling shoulder. His black eyes opened, swimming with uncomprehending relief and residual horror.
“You did it,” she breathed, her own composure cracking for just a second. “You saved them.”
A low, broken purr trembled in the air between them. He nuzzled, weakly, against her hand.
Behind them, the medic spoke, tense. “Helena. He’s breathing, but he’s in bad shape. We need the stretcher. And… we need to move.”
Helena looked from the profoundly docile, devastated creature under her hand to the rescue being performed on the human he’d almost accidentally killed. The two realities hung in the damp air. This wasn’t over. Extraction was one thing. Consequences were another.
“Get the stretcher in here,” she said, her voice once more cool and authoritative. Her hand remained on Kai’s shoulder, a anchor point. He was watching the humans work on the boy, his clicks soft, questioning, drenched in a sorrow that seemed too deep for any beast to bear.