The jadebloods tended to the Mother Grub who brooded in underground caverns where the lusii were born. The duties of the jadebloods included aiding the mother as she laid her eggs, taking the eggs somewhere safe to hatch and pupate, and ensuring the newly pupated children faced difficult trials to survive before they could find their lusus and live on the surface. Porrim Maryam accepted her fate as a jadeblood, and she relegated herself to the duties of her caste.
She paced down the stone corridor, kicking aside empty cocoons and stepping over dead larval trolls ravaged by hungry lusii. Most of them were the lower castes, the warmbloods, with blood colored like rust or dirt or the dead yellow of thirsty weeds. They were always born in great hordes, and they all died in swarms. Most never made it out of the caverns.
This season, the Dark season's first winter, the wrigglers were just beginning to pupate. The lowbloods would hatch by first spring, the midbloods by second spring, and the highbloods by third. Porrim liked first winter. The wrigglers stopped screaming.
She approached the Mother Grub's brooding cavern, carefully bowing her head under low-hanging wreaths to keep her horns from getting tangled in them. As she straightened, she saw a few of the other jadebloods congregated around something small.
"What is it?" She heard someone hiss.
"Is there something wrong with the Mother Grub?"
"That's a disgusting mutation."
"Is it dead?"
Porrim drifted over to the gathering. On the floor was a larval troll whose carapace was a lurid red, far off the bottom of the hemospectrum. It was limp. It didn't seem to be breathing.
"Just kick it to the side and let the lusii deal with it."
"It's not some sort of seadweller, is it?"
"It's bright, but it's still red — it can't be a seadweller."
"Leave it alone, we have work to do."
The other jadebloods began to wander away. Someone gave the little grub a kick in the gut, so that it skidded across the stone floor to the wall.
It gave a tiny mewl.
Porrim glanced around; everyone else ignored it. Quietly, trying not to draw attention to herself, she drifted over to the wall and knelt beside the mutant.
Its eyes were closed, but there was a tiny flutter in its chest. It was still alive.
She felt pity for the little thing. To have to struggle to live was a familiar concept to all trollkind, but the audacity to do so was not one many were equipped with. She'd seen the corpses of children who'd failed to complete their trials. She pitied those children too.
And what would this thing face if it lived? It would pupate into an even more disgusting being; its trials would be more trying for its mutation; it would never find a lusus to share that blood color, so it would have to raise itself — and even after all that, it would still be a pariah, and persecuted by the Empress's guards to the ends of the galaxy. No good would come of this thing's life. She pitied it.
She poised one hand on its shoulder and the other on its cheek, preparing to snap its neck with a quick movement. Its eyes fluttered, and it nuzzled against her palm. She hesitated.
She picked it up. Its head lolled. Had she imagined it? She put her palm to its cheek, and again it nuzzled her. Must be a reflex so trolls don't strangle wrigglers. She dug her fingers into it and started twisting its neck.
It mewled again, its tiny eyebrows pulling together and its eyes fluttering open. Almost against her will she relaxed her hands and watched its eyelids settle back and its eyebrows ease.
She stood up, holding it, though not quite letting it touch her body. It licked its lips dreamily and sighed. She saw a bruise forming under its carapace where it had been kicked. She ran her fingers over the injury — it felt almost feverish. Rustbloods ran hot, so a mutant surely must run hotter.
It cooed at her cool fingertips. She pulled her hand away a moment, then pressed it back against the bruise — lightly, just so it could feel her hand. It chirped, and opened its eyes a bit.
They were sweet.
Porrim didn't know what to make of her sudden instinct to thrust the small creature into her cloak and carry it somewhere safe. She acted on it anyways.
…
Jadebloods don't leave the cavern.
…
Porrim forged her way through the desert in the day, when other trolls were forced to cower from the blistering Alternian sun. She, however, suffered a rare defect that allowed her to survive the light, and as such she found a small cave to hide in during the night. The little mutant did not wake nor stir in the day, but as the sun sank, it began to squirm and fuss in her arms.
Porrim pressed her back against the farthest side of the cave as she undid her cloak and to look at her transgression. It was struggling to open its eyes, fighting against sleep and death. It pulled together its eyebrows and screwed up its mouth
It hiccuped out its first cry. The second was drowned out by a gasp. On its third try, the wriggler coughed out a tiny ear-spitting scream.
Seized by terror at the noise, Porrim pulled him against her chest to muffle the sound. It did not stop. She threw the cloak over her stolen wriggler and searched her mind for anything she could think of to soothe it.
Her lusus — what did she do when Porrim couldn't sleep? Her lusus would make that noise, that little — hum.
She tried to imitate that little noise. She pressed her lips together and sang a little, a slight buzz in her throat. The wriggler still cried. She hummed louder, and held it closer to her. It stopped its cry to breathe, and while it gasped, she brought it up to her neck and hummed a little louder yet.
It still fussed a bit, but it was soothed for the most part. She quieted her humming and found herself rocking it even, an utterly unnatural thing for an adult to find instinctual.
When it had quieted completely, its eyes opened. It looked up at her with sleepy curiosity.
She smiled a little sadly. Those eyes would fill with his mutant red one day, and he would never be able to hide the color of his blood. Yet, despite that, despite his inevitable suffering, despite her inevitable execution once she was found out, despite the millions who'd endure the wrath of the Empress when she caught wind of this small rebellion brewing, it was important. In some small way, this little wriggler was important.
Porrim held her tiny insurrection. Kankri, she named him, meaning only. He had no blood type, and therefore his last name was Vantas, meaning dark. Something in her chest hurt for him.
"You're a special one alright," she murmured to her mutant.
Kankri smiled and gurgled back.
…
Her absence from the caverns did not go unnoticed. She saw them in the distance, across the moonswept desert, the forms of the approaching cobalt-blooded sentries come to put her in her place. As of yet, none seems to have noticed her crime of taking a wriggler, or else the hunt would surely be more than a small party of brutish bluebloods searching haphazardly through the night. Still, they were a danger to her and her Kankri, so once she saw them, she stole away with him after daybreak and ran somewhere else to hide.
She lost them after this last break. The sentries gave up looking for her, waiting instead for her to come crawling back to the caverns, starving and shaking in withdrawal from sopor. And she did almost give in a few times, for when it was not the constant aching of her head and itching under her skin, it was the nightmares that came relentlessly in the absence of sopor. Her people all slept in sopor for a reason, and it was to stifle the terrifying bloodlust plaguing Alternian dreams.
But as she laid awake, cradling her mutant and watching his eyelids flutter, she was grateful he didn't suffer as she did. He couldn't know the touch of sopor, so he couldn't crave it like she did. She admired his courage daring to sleep dry, and she wished for his independence.
As the nights passed over the Alternian deserts, she soon had another fear — Kankri seemed to be fast approaching his pupation.
A mutant such as he should surely deviate from any semblance of an ordinary maturity timeline, so Porrim had no standard by which to measure his growth. Caring for wrigglers was finicky, but no more difficult than tending to the mother grub: soft foods in the evening and morning, liquids about twice as often, and sleep through most of the day. Kankri proved to be especially fussy for a wriggler, spitting up this or that which Porrim ground up for his sensitive little mouth, refusing nectar and water in their own forms preferring instead to suck on a damp corner of Porrim's cloak. He always slept too soundly, and Porrim often woke him when she feared his stillness too close to death.
Still, his appetite had been growing in ferocity and his sleeping grew troubled, sure harbingers of pupation. His breathing was sometimes erratic, and his hot skin was growing hotter — feverish, even, she dared to guess. She did not know what to do but hold him against her cool body and let him suck water from the corner of her cloak. Soon, he was throwing up half of what he ate. His skin grew taut and his lips dried out. His tiny dull horns became flimsy, scaly, and once in a while she would find flakes of them in his dark curly hair.
It was only about a perigee before he pupated. She woke up and found his sickly red cocoon inexpertly weaved against the wall of that day's cave. She was afraid to touch it, should she break it and he spill out with half-formed limbs and gasping undersized lungs.
Waiting should not have been a problem, but Porrim soon saw that the hunting party had given up waiting for her, and were again seeking her. Her transgression must have been found out, some spiteful jadeblood noticing the mutant went missing when Porrim did and tipping off the bluebloods to get them to leave.
She panicked. She knew very little about surviving in the wild, and she knew too much about the dangers of moving a cocoon from its spot, but she had no choice. She packed a bag with a blade and some greens and a cup for rainwater, and said a desperate prayer to the gods of the Green Moon as she wrapped the weak cocoon in her ragged cloak. She breathed in relief when she felt that though the cocoon's walls were thin, they were flexible, and held against her interference. She held him in her arms and stole away through the day.
She ran for miles then walked for more. The sun bore into her brutally, making her eyesight fuzzy and her lungs painful — but she was Porrim Maryam, and she could survive the sunlight.
After more than a perigee of aimless running and near-starvation, she came across a desecrated temple in the desert. Though the gods it worshiped were blasphemous and amphibian, she counted her luck in finding it. She took her bundle into the safety of the darkness and she relished in the sand giving way at last to stone.
Though there were no animals for meat and little natural water, her luck had not yet run out — for she saw, stashed in the bowels of the ruins, a cache of stored goods. The cans were ancient and certainly so were their sustenances, but the food was hardy and still valid. She drank the strange liquid stored in cans and ate the thoroughly salted meat and felt alive again.
For Kankri, she did not know. He still did not stir from his cocoon, nor did the cocoon itself give any indication of when it might crack. She'd felt it stretch and fill while Kankri grew, and now it seemed fit to burst, but still it did not.
She was afraid to wake him prematurely. She'd seen them, the half-wriggler half-child corpses, lying tiny and prostate in cocoons shredded apart by lusii or bloodthirsty children fresh from their trials.
And yet, she had also seen the swollen cocoons, their trolls unable or unwilling to wake, and passing away in their sleep before tasting the world.
He seemed ready. She ran her hand over the contours of the tight cocoon and felt a shoulder through the thin membrane. She followed it down to a hand, twisted over a leg, that had all five fingers. The cocoon rocked with his steady breathing.
She told herself to wait for first spring before taking that gamble.
He still did not wake up.
The moon set and rose each night, casting long shadows against the pink and white sand that stretched past the horizon, and giving away to the gentler green light of Alternia's second moon. Porrim saw no approaching figures and figured she had enough of a head start against the sentries that she need not worry for a season or two. Kankri grew stiller and stiller in his overstuffed cocoon, and Porrim fingered the little tube of lipstick she'd found in the ruins with their rations.
Third winter came to an end and the nights grew shorter with the approach of spring. The damp season came sleepily after the quiet of the dark season, with mild winds and rain coming in from the east. The desert slowly came to life, goldflowers sprouting haphazardly from the dirt deep beneath the sand and prickleplants flowered impressively. An occasional desertbeast darted across the horizon.
One night, when the green moon set and the pink moon began its journey, Porrim began pacing. She thought of what she would do should Kankri die. She could turn herself in, and perhaps avoid the irons in favor of slavery. Seadwellers are ruthless to their slaves, but being a slave is better than being dead.
Alternia's first moon set and Porrim stood over the cocoon, rolling the lipstick between her thumb and forefinger. Kankri wasn't moving anymore. He might've already died in the night.
She uncapped the lipstick.
Her chainsaw roared to life.
She held it above the sleeping boy who was ready to wake.