Two ex-military nurses, one human and one alien, share a friendship in a city following an alien invasion.
Novelette | 9,750 words
Gr’chak didn’t like it when Mary laid traps for the cockroaches.
“They’re so cute,” Gr’chak protested, tilting her triangular head to one side as she nudged the dead insect onto the spines of her grasping leg.
Mary made a queasy sound. She plucked the roach from Gr’chak’s spines with a tissue. She dropped it in the trash. “Tell you what. When we live on your planet, you can kill the tiny primates, okay?”
“We don’t have tiny primates on Mantodea,” Gr’chak said. “Can’t we just keep a couple? As pets?”
Bending over to refresh the trap, Mary felt Gr’chak’s sad, compound gaze on the back of her neck. Primal prey-fear shivered through Mary’s spine to her tailbone as it’s wont to do when one is being closely observed by a giant, carnivorous insect. Even a giant, carnivorous insect who’s a friend.
Common wisdom said it was impossible for Humans and Mantodeans to live together, but common wisdom was like assholes and politicians: best friends with bullshit. People yelled traitor and crawly-lover and sometimes bugfucker at Mary when she left for work, but she didn’t give a damn about that. Mary and Gr’chak had been nurses together during the war as part of a joint humanitarian mobile hospital. To be frank, they’d been through some shit.
Mary had no intention of letting asshole terrorists push Gr’chak into a refugee camp. God, she hated Terra for Terrans. There was a truce; they didn’t like it. So what? Mary hadn’t liked the war, thank you very much.
Anyway, the assholes had blown up Gr’chak’s nest box; Mary’s apartment had a guest room; problem solved.
Sort of.
“If you want to set up a tank in your room and get another Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, that’s up to you,” Mary said. “But I mean it this time. It can not be free range.”
“He was bored.”
“Nevertheless.”
Mary straightened. Her Mantodean friend continued to watch her soberly, grasping arms in a neutral position. Mary tried to rub the shiver out of her neck. Sometimes she wished she hadn’t read all the way through the pre-war emergency briefs speculating about possible similarities between Mantodeans and Earth’s mantids. Specifically, the part about how Earth’s praying mantises didn’t usually bite each other’s heads off. Unless they were hungry. Or stressed. Or didn’t have enough space.
How much space was there really in a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment?
She kept thinking: Remember all those old documentaries about people befriending bears? Everything seemed a-okay and then—
Enough. Stop it, she chastised herself. Gr’chak has been your friend for more than ten years. All this anxiety is just the primitive mammal parts of your mind chittering in the trees.
Mary hadn’t realized how long she’d been lost in thought until Gr’chak rubbed her wings together to get her attention.
“Sorry. Thinking about work,” Mary lied politely.
“I will not bring home a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach,” said Gr’chak with worrying specificity.
Mary’s eyes narrowed. “What are you going to bring home?”
Gr’chak moved into a playful stance. Coyly, she said, “I will bring home my food, of course; hygiene items if I need them; perhaps some new bulbs for the heat lamps. What else would I bring?”
“If you’re planning to bring home crickets from the pet store because they’re technically sold as food—”
Gr’chak rumbled her wings in Mantodean laughter. “I will not bring home crickets from the pet store.”
Mary said, “Hm.”
All right, she’s not going to eat me, Mary thought, but I am definitely coming home to an apartment full of bugs.
Anyone can like pinball.
That was thing number five Thi’ikx loved about it. Number one: the shiny silver balls. Number two: the machine rumbling in your grip. Number three: the giant, surprised eye in the center of the alien’s head in the picture on the back of the outer space machine. Number four: the patterns of light that flashed between games. Number five: anyone can like it.
Anyone did not include her mother, neighbors, or any other Mantodean in the city—but it could have. Human kids liked pinball; Human elders liked pinball; Terran ants liked pinball after someone spilled soda on the machine. One of the regular players even had a parrot who would press random buttons with its beak unless it was distracted by cubed apples.
Thi’ikx’s mother disapproved. She wanted Thi’ikx to train for the army. “If there’s another war, we have to be prepared.”
Thi’ikx’s mother was a Traditionalist. As a career officer, she’d earned enough carapace ornaments to shine like a silver ball.
“The war is over,” Thi’ikx would complain. “We don’t all have to be soldiers anymore.”
“Hatching on Earth made you lazy,” her mother would say.
Eventually, Thi’ikx’s mother would stalk away, and Thi’ikx would sneak out to the arcade.
The arcade had a lot of vintage games besides pinball, but Thi’ikx didn’t like them. Mantodeans could technically use the steering wheels, but she’d never managed it. Dancing games were too easy if you used all six legs, and too hard if you pretended to be bipedal.
Platformers were stupid. If she wanted to run and jump over pits, she’d go train with her mother.
Most Mantodean families argued about army training these days. Younglings like Thi’ikx—the ones who’d hatched here, the ones who’d never seen the fighting—they just wanted to chill out and be earthlings.
“Training all the time just makes Humans think we’re up to something,” Thi’ikx would tell her mother. “Do you want the war to start again?”
Her mother refused to answer that question. It was easy enough to guess what that meant.
Humans assumed that when you were concentrating on something else, you couldn’t hear them. They talked about Thi’ikx while she played pinball. The conversations were usually pretty much the same. Such as:
“That guy is so weird,” some girl would say.
Some guy would answer, “He’s pretty good, though.”
“At pinball? I’m soooo impressed.” She’d snort. “We’d all be better off if they went back where they came from.”
“I think he hatched on the East side.”
“Whatever.”
Thi’ikx occasionally told the Humans she was female, but it didn’t stick. She’d noticed that Humans assumed all Mantodeans were male and all arcade players were, too. Humans had trouble getting over both at once. Anyway, Thi’ikx didn’t really care. She had no interest in things like laying eggs and who was supposed to eat whom, which made her mother even madder.
“Your whole generation is a waste,” Thi’ikx’s mother would say. “We should never have laid eggs here.”
Thi’ikx copied the Human-style answer. “Whatever.”
Of course, just because Thi’ikx felt the same about army training as the rest of her generation, that didn’t mean she had Mantodean friends. Other younglings weren’t any more interested in pinball than the military. They liked tedious things where you occasionally needed fast reflexes: baseball, fishing, drilling oil, wildlife photography, truck driving. She only knew one other Mantodean who liked arcade games, and he spent his free time training because it was easier than arguing with his mother.
Anyone could like pinball—but they didn’t.
Thi’ikx was having a good game when two male-smelling Humans walked up behind her. One sucked the last of his drink through the straw. It rattled against the bottom of the cup.
“That guy’s here every weekend,” said one male. “Most weekdays, too.”
The other one: “Doesn’t he get bored?”
“I guess not. Dad says all the bugs are obsessive.”
“What does your dad know?”
“He helps construct the nest boxes by the river. If a board’s out of place, they have to redo it.”
The second male made a shivery sound. “I hate the weird holes in those things. It makes my skin all creepy-crawly.”
“I wonder if they think our houses are gross.”
“Maybe we could ask. Have you ever talked to one before?”
“Just at school.”
“It could be kind of cool. We could invite him to lunch. They’ve got to have bug snacks at the counter, right?”
“We can’t bother him now. He’s on a streak.”
“So let’s stay and watch.”
“I can’t. Dad’s cleaning the garage. I can grab a hot dog, but then I’ve gotta go.”
“But I’m going to camp next week. I won’t be back for two months and then there’s school. Can’t you hang out any longer?”
“Not really. You know how Dad gets.”
The straw rattled against the bottom of the cup again. Across the arcade, blaring notes announced someone had high scored a platformer.
Thi’ikx watched her shiny silver ball—her favorite thing about pinball—bounce around the top of the machine. It rushed downward. She twitched, ready to send it flying up again, but then her eye flickered to her ball count. This was her last one.
She let the ball drop with an unsatisfying clunk.
“Do you really want me to come to lunch?” Thi’ikx asked, turning around.
The boys turned back, too. They were both small, squishy, and brownish. One wore shiny headgear covering his eyes. The other held an empty soda cup.
“Sure!” The shiny one pointed at the pinball machine. “Maybe you can give us some tips?”
The other one raised his cup. “We can buy you a soda.”
Thi’ikx jingled the coins in her satchel. She hadn’t changed all of them for tokens yet. “That’s all right. I’ve got plenty.”
They went out together. Behind them, the abandoned pinball machine played its patient patterns of light—Thi’ikx’s fourth favorite thing about pinball—waiting for another player.
Zykgi liked to go to bars and show off his collection of Human skulls. Holding up one, he’d say, “I got this off a moron in Florida who shit himself when he saw me. Almost didn’t bother picking it up, he stank so bad.” Digging a small one out of his bag, he’d add, “Don’t worry, it’s not a kid. Just an inbred hick with a teeny, tiny head. That’s Alabama for you. Hey, this one’s from West Virginia. Can’t you tell?” He’d raise a grasping arm and mime taking a shot at someone running away. “There’s a hole in the back of the head.”
That was for Southern states. Place names were flexible. Inbreeding jabs worked almost anywhere rural. City boys hated being called sissies. No one liked being called a coward.
“Got this off a fat prick in Los Angeles who almost shot off his own dick,” he might say in California. “Guys out here are halfway to being girls anyway.”
By the end of the night, he always got his way, even if he had to go to a couple different bars to get it. If he couldn’t start a full-out, drag-down bottle-smasher, he’d settle for a bloody round in a back alley.
The real problem was finding new bars where he could start shit. Most of them wouldn’t let you back after you’d strung half a dozen of their customers’ teeth onto a necklace. From time to time, though, he found a real cut-’em-up dive, the kind of place that didn’t bother to clean bloodstains off the floor. He’d go back to those places time after time; sometimes he didn’t even start out the night looking for trouble. He’d crouch by a stool and play his wings along with the jukebox until sniffing venoms made him maudlin.
“Why don’t you go back to Mantis World or whatever it is?” asked a bartender in one of those places. He was squint-eyed with a crooked nose and crooked teeth that slanted in opposite directions. “You don’t seem to like it here much.”
Zykgi wasn’t used to being asked real questions like that. Sure, plenty of people asked him Why don’t you go back to where you came from, crawly motherfucker?, but the only answer they wanted was a face-off and he was happy to oblige.
It got to him somehow, the simplicity of someone asking a question. Asking him, Zykgi, who hadn’t really been close to anyone since the war. His male comrades who hadn’t had their exoskeletons cracked open in battle went to pair up with females afterward and got decapitated. And Zykgi wasn’t about to spend time with females; he knew how that went; sooner or later biology took over and made you think it was your idea to die fucking.
Things had been better before the truce, even under the constant wing-shredding barrage of bombs and bullets. At least you didn’t have to watch your friends wander off happily to their own demise. Trying to talk them out of it was pointless, which didn’t mean he hadn’t tried.
His tattered wings felt dry and useless as he thought of the songs he’d once sung in the choir of his ranks, their bright young voices ranging through varied and complicated melodies. He’d been a beautiful singer once. Sometimes he couldn’t even manage a true tone anymore.
If he’d been Human, Zykgi thought he’d probably start crying. Too many venoms. Too many tear-jerkers on the jukebox.
He leaned forward so that his necklace of teeth clattered against the bar. Most Humans didn’t like to meet a compound gaze, but the bartender barely flinched.
“There’s not much on Mantodea for a male,” Zykgi said. “Find a mate, get fertilizing, end up in her belly. Better being stuck here with you fuzzy skin-bags than spending my last seconds as a severed head staring down a gullet.”
The bartender muttered something and then went back to wiping down glasses.
Zykgi’s tattered wings spread threateningly. He lifted his grasping legs so the fluorescent lights glinted on his spines. “What was that?”
Unfazed, the bartender looked up again and shrugged. “At least we fuzzy skin-bags get to fuck and live to talk about it. I heard you guys don’t even get to finish first. That true?”
The bar was in a lull between customers, deserted except for the two of them. Zykgi would have felt better if the bartender had at least reached for a baseball bat or something under the counter, but he kept on wiping glasses as if Zykgi was nothing.
Zykgi’s wings deflated. He wanted to fight. He did. He was just suddenly so tired. He pushed himself up onto his walking legs and went out.
There had been a bomb.
It wasn’t the first breakout of terrorist violence Mary and Gr’chak had lived through, of course. It wasn’t even the first on their block. They knew what to do after bombs; it was easy to fall back into wartime patterns, starting triage as emergency workers scrambled to transport the worst casualties while Mary and Gr’chak tended the patients that couldn’t be moved.
Mostly, those patients died. Especially the Mantodeans. It had helped the Humans during the war. Mantodeans were stronger, but so much more fragile. An exoskeleton was formidable armor, until it wasn’t. Mammalian skin healed so fast. Mary could remember times during the war, even times when she was helping to treat Mantodean patients on the battlefield, when she’d been grateful for their disadvantage—a horrible guilty kind of grateful, but still. It was nothing but a nightmare now, listening to the Mantodeans’ thin keening as they died.
If the wings were too badly damaged, they had to cut them off. It was horrifically painful and they didn’t always have access to the right venoms. Mary never wanted to make the call. “You are not helping them by leaving their injury,” Gr’chak chastised Mary all too frequently. Mary knew that; she did. But somehow, sometimes, it was even more heartbreaking to see the crushing grief in a mutilated Mantodean’s eyes than it was to see a Human’s pain. At least Mary could imagine what the Human was going through. She’d never really know what was happening inside the Mantodean.
So, yes, Mary and Gr’chak had been through many bombs before—but this was the first time it had been on their block. This was the first time they were targets.
To be honest, it probably would have happened before this if they hadn’t been battlefield nurses. There was still a gloss of respect for the neutrality of the “war angels” who’d helped both sides before the truce. That was disappearing as memories of the battles themselves faded; more and more young people who’d never fought themselves were joining the terrorist groups.
“We don’t know it’ll happen again,” Mary had told Gr’chak after the bomb went off.
“We do not know the planets will continue to circle their stars,” Gr’chak replied. “Cause and effect are only guesses based on our experience.”
“Come on, assholes planting bombs isn’t like planets staying in orbit,” Mary said.
“I choose to make decisions based on my guesses about cause and effect,” Gr’chak said. “You do, too. I note that you do not walk out of the window in the morning instead of going downstairs.” The Mantodean tilted her head toward the stairwell. “The new nest box that is mine is ready and has been for some time.”
“I don’t want you to go,” Mary said.
“Yes,” Gr’chak agreed. “I don’t want you to die.”
That had been the end of the conversation.
Today, Gr’chak was moving out. Mary had brought the first load down to the curb and was helping the driver load his truck. He kept glaring at her out of the corner of his eye. His mouth occasionally moved as if he might say something, but then he’d clench his teeth and twitch his lips around. Mary thought, That’s right, asshole. Just keep it to yourself.
“Sorry, do you need clarification on your job?” Mary asked. “Pack. The boxes. In. The truck.”
The driver opened his mouth to start some sneering response, but flinched when he saw Gr’chak coming out of the rotating apartment door with her final load of luggage. Mary could almost see the goosebumps go up on his skin as he started working, suddenly efficient. Why were these assholes always cowards, too?
Because they’re afraid of the Mantodeans, Mary thought. It’s not anger. It’s not indignation about losing Earth to aliens. They’re terrified.
Further, she thought, And I do not give a single flying fuck.
“You really can stay here if you want to,” Mary told Gr’chak. “It’s not too late.”
“I thank you, but no.” Gr’chak adopted her playful posture. “I suppose you could move into my nesting box.”
Mary sighed. “Well, at least there’s one good thing. You can keep as many pet insects as you want now.”
“So can you,” Gr’chak said. “Which I believe is zero.”
Mary laughed. “Yes. Yes, it is.”
The guys who hung out at the fishing shop called the old girl Orchid because she was from a different continent than most of the Mantodeans that had come to Earth. Her carapace wasn’t green, but a florid pink that flushed deeper at its edges as flower petals do.
She lived in a small seaside town in Florida, running the fish and tackle shop that had become a place for the guys to get together. They set up camping chairs and lounged outside in almost all weather, drinking lemonade (sometimes spiked) or beer (sometimes non-alcoholic), and complaining about how the changes in tides and storm seasons made it impossible to figure out where the fish were going to be these days. When the weather was too awful for that, they loitered inside instead, getting fingerprints on every glass surface in the place.
Most of them were veterans, but they didn’t give Orchid a hard time about it. They’d fought; she’d fought; the people who made decisions had signed a truce; now they didn’t have to fight anymore. If Orchid had a trophy finger bone or two stashed with the odds and ends under the register, well, it was hardly uncommon for a Human soldier to have come home with a knife that had a handle carved from shiny carapace. They’d just been aliens to each other back then. Arguing about it was substantially less entertaining than ranting about how the fishing in California had gone to shit now that the agricultural conglomerates had bribed the politicians to divert every drop of water in the state to growing orchards in the desert.
Sometimes they theorized about what creatures they could summon from the Atlantic depths if someone hooked Orchid on the end of a line.
“You’d be the best bait in the world,” they said.
“Thank you,” she replied, raising her grasping legs to show their spines. “However, you would never see what came to catch me. I would eat it first.”
She probably would have. She ate fish the way other Mantodeans snacked on butterflies. Enormous catfish would be gone in the time it took a man to turn his head. “Can’t leave anything around you,” one of them complained once after Orchid made her way through a glut of tuna that should have fed armies. “You’re like a damn dog swiping food off the counter.”
“Thank you,” Orchid said to that, too. None of them were ever quite sure if Mantodeans saw gluttony as some kind of compliment or if she was pulling their deficient number of legs.
Sometimes, when they’d exhausted discussion of the king mackerel, the jumping tarpon, the monster jack crevalle, and the strong cobia, they even talked a bit about their lives.
“The part of Mantodea I’m from is tropical,” Orchid told them. “That’s why I moved out here. Ah, where I’m from there are waterfalls and leafy ferns. Gigantic flowers, big as I am. The humid air—it never seems to stop raining.” Her wings drooped, the Mantodean equivalent of a sigh. “I wish it wasn’t so dry here.”
To the humans, of course, the humidity was already overwhelming during that part of the year. They sat listening to Orchid, drenched in steamy sweat and fanning themselves with fishing magazines.
Orchid was old. She’d been old when she came to Earth as an officer. No one knew how old, and anyway, most Mantodeans didn’t seem interested in converting things to Earth time. Just, old. It was hard to remember because who knows what being old looks like in a Mantodean? Well, maybe it was the way the translucent parts of her wings had gotten filmy, or the way she sometimes reclined in the middle of a conversation to take a nap.
Inevitably, they found her body on the floor, awkwardly curled up between the counter and the display of fish magnets that read FLORIDA. It was weird to see how her colors remained so vivid. It felt like that glorious pink should have been connected to her soul somehow, as if they should have faded together. So maybe Mantodeans didn’t have souls? No, that was impossible. You couldn’t get to know Orchid and think she didn’t have a soul. Nothing without a soul could look forward to yammering day after day about nothing very much. Something without a soul would have gone off to eat or reproduce or do one of those other things animals do to get the endorphins spiking.
After they called someone to take away the body, the men milled around the shop for a while. Someone suggested they pass the hat around to get together the money to send her back home. “She’d want to decay in her own ground,” he said, and everyone agreed.
They gathered on camping chairs the day the burial pod was set to launch. The Mantodean mechanics looked weird after spending so much time with Orchid. So very…not pink.
The man who’d suggested raising the money to send Orchid off stopped one of the weirdly green insectoids and gave it—her? him? He’d never learned to tell—the woven lei of orchids they’d bought from the shop next door to Orchid’s, the florist whose six-year-old daughter used to peer out from behind her mother to watch Orchid with bright, fascinated eyes. The florist had been convinced her daughter only liked Orchid because she was pink—little girls, you know. But she gave them a discount on the flowers.
“I guess they’re pretty lousy compared to the ones where you’re taking her,” the man told the green Mantodean. “We thought maybe she’d like them.”
Without comment, the Mantodean put the lei in with Orchid’s body—on top of her rather than around her neck—but no one wanted to complain.
Watching the pod take off, one of the other men said, “Maybe we should have sent her off with a big catfish haul instead.”
“Nah,” the first replied. “She’d just be frustrated she couldn’t eat ’em.”
They left happy that she was going back to the rain.
Roger had been eighteen when his girlfriend Maggie was vaporized in the cornfield behind her house where he’d come to pick her up for prom. He could still remember how she’d looked, rosy-cheeked in her puffy pink dress, blonde hair set in ringlets to frame her face. One moment, her eyes on him had been radiant with excitement; the next moment, they widened, terrified, as she saw the Mantodean soldier emerge from behind the house. The bug raised his ray gun; Maggie tensed to run; the laser whined as it shot through her chest, vaporizing tissue as it went. For a moment, Roger could swear he’d seen her ribcage, could swear he saw the heart struggling to thump in its enclosure of bone, and then her body was falling in seared halves. The air smelled horribly like roast pork; he was sure enough about that part. The skirt of her prom dress stirred in the breeze, showing the eerily still-smooth skin of her legs.
Everything had gone so fast. Maggie’s eyes went wide; the Mantodean shot her; a Human soldier running just behind shot the Mantodean and then called out to Roger, “Are you all right?” which was a stupid question. A medic or something came, wrapped Roger in a blanket, and told him to breathe deeply. Breathe deeply, right. Inhale the smell of roast pork.
They tried to distract him from watching them wrap Maggie up, but he shook them off. He wanted the sight to live inside him. Since the first moment Maggie’s eyes widened, he’d felt shocked and mostly blank. He wanted to feel something else. He wanted to be angry.
He’d enlisted the next day. Maybe he hadn’t been a distinguished soldier, but he’d done all right. One thing he never had to deal with was losing sight of why they were fighting. Maybe some Mantodean nurses worked with Humans as “war angels” in mobile hospitals; maybe some Mantodean guards snuck notes to prisoners of war; maybe some Mantodean soldiers shared supplies with their Human counterparts in the trenches. None of it mattered—he was never, never going to stop being angry.
Then the Earth government decided to sign a truce with the invaders. That was supposed to just be the end of it? No way. He’d never signed on to a truce. A document and some politicians’ signatures couldn’t change what was right. He enlisted again, this time in Terra for Terrans.
“I’m telling you, it’s over there,” Pinto snapped at Sally.
Roger looked up from his thoughts. The three of them in his resistance cell—him, Pinto, and Sally—had been hiking down this muddy mountain for the past several hours, arguing over the map they could barely see in the dimly lit night. Let them argue; Roger didn’t want to get involved. He had other things to think about. He liked to repeat his story to himself at least once a day. It kept him rooted in who he was.
“I’m telling you it’s not,” Sally snapped back. “I studied the aerial maps, okay? There aren’t any tracks around where the crawlies built their damn nests. They’re not idiots. They know we’re after them. They’re good at concealing shit.”
Pinto, who had the map, retorted, “No one’s that good at concealing stuff if you know it’s there.”
“Haven’t you ever watched a mantis hunt?” Sally asked. “A real mantis, I mean—an Earth mantis. They’re terrifying. Silent, swooping masters of death, if you happen to be smaller than a blade of grass.”
“Mantodeans aren’t mantises,” Pinto pointed out. “They just look like them.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Sally said. “I’m just saying. Bugs like that, they can be damn good at not being seen.”
Sally reached for the map. Pinto yanked it away. Sally waved her hands angrily.
“Will you just listen to me?” Sally asked. “You know I’m better at navigation than you are. I swear, it’s like after we broke up, everything’s a fight, you have to be better at everything than I am.”
Roger ignored their squabble to scan the muddy slope. Pinto and Sally had their own reasons for being there. Pinto had lost his little sister. Sally lost her mom and her whole Girl Scout troop. They spent way too much time being angry at each other instead of at the actual enemy.
When they’d broken up, Sally had pawned the carved carapace pendant Roger had given her on their third date. Just in time, too, because these days the assholes in Paris and Milan were using that kind of thing as propaganda, charging thousands for couture bone-and-exoskeleton jewelry branded as “peace jewelry” to “show love for your insectoid brethren.”
Pinto exclaimed, “Fine! Since you know everything, we’ll follow your orders, commandant.”
Sally glared at him. “Keep your voice down!” she said in a vehement whisper.
True enough, Pinto’s voice had been getting louder and louder as they went. On the other hand, Sally could stand going down a few notches, too. It didn’t end up mattering because they all fell silent as Sally led them onward—Sally’s stance determined, Pinto’s face sullen, and Roger’s anger seething unspoken in his ribs.
Sally was right about where to find the Mantodean hatching site. No surprise.
Pinto took the lead when the grove came into view, leading them carefully through the fallen branches and deadfall. He was the best at sneaking. He’d trained as a spy in the war even though the truce got hammered out before he actually got to do anything.
Their intelligence indicated there would be a pair of guardian Mantodeans on opposite ends of the grove, watching for animals and things like that. The bugs wouldn’t be expecting Humans to know how to find the weak points for breaching their hatching sites. Terra for Terrans had managed to uncover a lot more “secret” data than they thought. They didn’t realize how many people in the government—how many Humans everywhere—were quietly furious about the truce, looking for opportunities to slip humanity an advantage.
Sally gestured for Roger to take out his ray gun. They turned to sight the Mantodean guards, their shiny exoskeletons not very well hidden among the dull bark and leaves.
“Got it. Ready?” Sally asked.
“Ready,” Roger agreed.
Their laser beams whined. Even though he couldn’t see it, Roger knew that in the dark, there was a thorax being seared in half. The air nearby would smell like cooked bug, like the smell of a dark porch with a hot lamp hanging from the eaves to catch the moths.
Pinto passed out the baseball bats.
Yes, they could have shot up the egg sacs. But they wanted something more brutal, something to show the Mantodeans just how serious they were.
Now that the Mantodean guards were dead, Sally switched on a lantern and set it at her feet. All around the encircling grove, egg sacs hung suspended like cocoons from the strongest branches. There would be up to three hundred eggs in each one: three hundred germinating invaders growing fat on the earth.
Roger swung his bat. The nearest sac smashed, slime and silk bursting like a ruptured cyst. He hit again, imagining tiny Mantodean bodies crushed by his blows. The thought brought back real memories of dead Mantodeans: antennae twitching alone on the ground, fragments of triangular heads in pools of amber ichor. Then it brought back his dead compatriots, too: the man whose fingers were still grasping for Roger when he died; the woman whose body was so sliced up by tibial spines that they gave up trying to clean up the blood until it dried. The smell of roasted pork.
They moved from tree to tree, battering. Roger felt free; he savored the vigor of cold air in his lungs; his arms felt strong enough to swing forever.
Behind him, he heard Pinto cackle and start dancing.
“Keep going, you idiot! We have to get this done and get out of here!” Sally shouted with no fear of volume now that the Mantodean guards were dead. She shrieked as Pinto grabbed her around the waist and pulled her into his arms to dance along with him, their silhouettes highlighted by glistening smears of egg matter.
The smell of the broken sacs was rancid. It carried heavily on the night wind, insinuating into Roger’s hair and pores and the folds of his leather jacket. He decided he wouldn’t shower or wash his clothes when he got home, just let the smell sink deeper and deeper. He was going to smell like this as long as he could.
Mary was living in Chicago when she got the call from Gr’chak about her eggs. She left her husband, Allen, with their two children and flew same-day to D.C.
Mary and Gr’chak had been living separate lives for a few years now. Mary had taken a couple of years off to have children which had been nice, actually—for the first three months until she got bored. When she got pregnant a second time, everyone said she wouldn’t stay bored once she had both an infant and a toddler to take care of. They were incorrect.
Now, Mary worked at a big hospital that reminded her of a soap opera except that instead of being one of the glamorous leads, she was the extra changing the IVs. On the other hand, she also didn’t have to deal with going into a sudden coma, or discovering she had a lost twin, or whatever other bullshit writers threw at soap opera stars.
Gr’chak had moved to D.C. as part of an experimental cooperative community: a newly built suburb where Human houses and Mantodean nesting boxes stood side by side. Mary had considered convincing Allen to move there, too, but then they discovered that the program didn’t want any of the aliens and Humans to know each other going in for some reason. Maybe they thought it would ruin the results. Whatever, she was pretty rooted in Chicago these days anyway.
Gr’chak’s nesting box was…nice. Sort of. It was a weird mix of Mantodean and Human architecture with a kitchen, living room, and guest bedroom sort of stuck to one nest wall.
Mary found Gr’chak slumped near a sofa. Her head was tilted upward, compound eyes blankly staring at the overhead glare of the heat lamp. She moved long enough to acknowledge Mary’s entrance with a dipped antenna, and then she went back to staring.
Mary compensated by spring cleaning.
“Have you ever cleaned this house?” she asked when confronted with the seemingly infinite supply of dust- and dirt-covered surfaces.
Gr’chak vaguely lifted one of her front walking legs to indicate a negative. Her leg drooped again.
Mary went out to find a pay phone. She knew the head nurse of the Mantodean ward. Once she got Skreek on the line, Mary described Gr’chak’s behavior and the circumstances of her visit. Skreek made sympathetic noises about what had happened to Gr’chak’s eggs.
“Is this Mantodean depression?” Mary asked Skreek.
“Very likely,” Skreek said.
“So, this is normal? She’ll be okay?”
“She should be. It’s good you’re there. The dangerous thing would be if she stays essentially catatonic long enough to starve, but you’ll see signs of that long before it becomes a problem. The important thing is that she gets moving again before it becomes a problem. Don’t push her yet. She’ll probably come out of it in a few more days.”
“Right. Okay.” Mary breathed deeply. “What do I do if she starts starving?”
“That won’t happen for weeks,” Skreek said. “It’s a good sign she called you. It means she’s still thinking about the outside world.” Skreek added soberly, “It also means she trusts you. She trusts you a lot.”
“I trust her, too,” Mary said.
Returning to Gr’chak’s house, Mary decided to set aside cleaning for a while and read aloud from her book. When Lord of the Flies didn’t seem to interest Gr’chak, Mary switched to Charlotte’s Web which evoked a twitch or two. Mary regretted her decision when she got to the part where Charlotte dies as she hatches her eggs, but astonishingly, it didn’t seem to make things worse. In fact, Gr’chak stirred a little more. Maybe it was something about the circle of life.
Mary went back to spring cleaning. The corners were filled with spider webs. Out of consideration for her friend, she carefully cleaned around the active ones while sweeping away the old remnants.
She wasn’t surprised to see that the refrigerator was a mess. Gr’chak probably never used it. However, as Mary chipped away at the ice in the freezer, she discovered a dark, triangular shape. She hopped backward and made an involuntary exclamation of shock.
Maybe that was good, too, because before Mary could regain her composure, she noticed that Gr’chak had dragged herself into the room to see if she was all right.
Mary gestured at the shape in the freezer. “Is that…your husband’s head?”
Gr’chak hadn’t spoken yet during Mary’s visit. Slowly, with a distant tone, she said, “…I like to remember him.”
“I suppose it’s like, um. Saving your wedding cake,” Mary said, trying to be cosmopolitan about it despite her queasy stomach.
“Yes,” said Gr’chak.
“You liked him a lot, didn’t you?” Mary asked.
“I loved him,” Gr’chak agreed. In a monotone, she continued, “He gave his love for our eggs. Now I have no love left, neither him nor our eggs.”
Mary made a decision. Gr’chak was moving around again which was great progress, but the gloss in her eyes remained dim, her movements small and hesitant. Mary reached into the freezer to pull out the head, tamping down a new surge of disgust as she realized half of it was already gone, including most of one frozen eye.
“Maybe you should let yourself remember him,” Mary said.
Gr’chak’s wings perked very slightly. “Maybe I should.”
Mary ate nothing as she watched Gr’chak clasp her husband’s head between her grasping arms and gnaw. Mary had washed her hands several times. It had not been enough.
When she’d finished eating, Gr’chak looked to Mary. She seemed more alert already.
“He was good.” Gr’chak must have understood Mary’s wince because she added, “I do not mean good to taste. He was kind and loving. He was good. It is good to have this small part of him.”
“I’ve never understood why you do that,” Mary blurted. Her eyes widened as she realized what she’d said.
Come on, subconscious, you think nowis the time to bring this up? Mary scolded herself. You’re going to send her catatonic again and next time she’s not going to trust you enough to come back.
Gr’chak, however, seemed unperturbed. “Do what?”
“Uh.” Mary couldn’t remember the last time she’d flushed, but she felt the heat rush into her cheeks. “Eat their heads. Mantids—I mean, well, Earth mantids—they only do that when something is wrong, like they’re starving. You don’t have to, do you?”
Gr’chak tipped her head. “Sacrifice is part of love.”
“Don’t you wish he was still here, though?” Mary asked, again without thinking, again shouting at herself internally for failing to keep her mouth shut.
Gr’chak said, “I wish he were here, but he would not wish to be here. Should I have told him I did not love him?”
Mary tried to keep the disapproval from her face. She didn’t understand this thing Mantodeans did; she didn’t want to understand it. It was horrifying morally and physically. It was the kind of thing that reminded her how vastly, incomprehensibly different she was from even a Terran praying mantis, a creature that was essentially her evolutionary sibling. It was a miracle of the universe that Humans and Mantodeans could understand each other at all.
“It’s…not how we do things,” Mary murmured.
“This is a good thing,” Gr’chak agreed. “I do not think your teeth are strong enough to gnaw through a male Human’s neck.”
“I don’t think one would stay still long enough for me to try.” Mary stood, gesturing to the remains of the head. “Should I put this back in the fridge?”
“Yes. Please. I would like to remember him again.”
Jin’xi had been, as they say on Earth, working in sex for a long time now. She’d started during the war after throwing down her ray gun. It wasn’t long before her term of service expired, but it still hadn’t been fast enough. Parts of her wings had been shredded beyond repair, but that wasn’t what she regretted. She hated the killing she’d done before she ran, the metaphorical blood on her vestigial horn that would never wash clean.
She’d always had an empathetic disposition. She’d been the kind of youngling who, as they say on Mantodea, felt bad for the proverbial butterfly impaled on the spine. She’d joined the army voluntarily, more or less—or at least, she’d enlisted before they could get her in the draft. She’d wanted to leave Mantodea anyway. She was sick of living in slums, watching other Dune-Stalkers squeeze into overfilled refugee camps as more and more of their desert homes were lost to jungle. She was sick of shiny and mottled Mantodeans who called her stripes “dirty.” She was sick of the pressure to grind down her horn and polish her carapace green.
In army training, they’d said it was normal to feel nervous about killing, but they also said that once you saw an alien up close—with its weird mammal movements and squashy mammal skin—your instincts would take over. The impulse to destroy them would be irresistible. You’d demolish them without even thinking, the way you’d crush a packet of worm eggs.
That didn’t happen.
Those shrill mammal screams— that hot redness pouring out of shredded mammal flesh— those were so much more horrifying than the sight of a mossy, gelatinous vertebrate, however ugly.
Jin’xi couldn’t be a defector and stay with her people so she’d found one of the narrow paths a Mantodean could take to earn a place behind enemy lines. Humans, it turned out, were shockingly adventurous when it came to sex. Jin’xi was not adventurous when it came to sex, but she did not mind assisting Humans in their adventures. For her, the things they did were as unerotic as a Human might find washing dishes. Why not wash dishes if it kept you off the battlefield?
This time, her Human customer was tiny even for his kind. He had diminutive shoulders, sparse yellow-white hair in intermittent patches from his scalp to his feet, and vividly blue single eyes.
He gave his name which was predictably weird and unpronounceable. Jin’xi put her grasping arms around him gently, careful not to poke the spines into his shoulders.
“I’ve never seen a Mantodean with, you know, stripes before,” he said.
“There aren’t many of us left,” Jin’xi said.
“They’re pretty,” the Human said. “The brown on brown is like, you know, light on wood, and your green wings look like leaves. And your horn, it’s, regal.”
Jin’xi pushed down a surge of defensiveness; even with her war injuries, she wasn’t that ugly. She reminded herself that he was trying to give her a compliment. He wouldn’t know Mantodeans were disgusted by most things Humans found “beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Jin’xi said. “Your hair is pleasingly flossy.”
Jin’xi tilted an antenna toward the shelf of snacks she kept for clients. She kept her pet spiders on the same shelf, but she covered their tanks with a cloth while she was working. One might assume that Humans who chose to work with Mantodeans for sex would enjoy positive feelings toward arthropods, but she had discovered this was emphatically not the case.
“Would you like a soda or a packet of peanuts?” she asked.
“No, thank you.” The Human cleared his throat. “I want to ask something strange. At least I think it’s strange, I mean. You know, I mean, I guess I don’t really know what people ask you, so, I think it’s strange, but—”
His speech was rapid and stuttering, a Human signal of anxiety. Jin’xi soothingly swayed her head back and forth.
“You don’t need to worry,” Jin’xi said. “To me, all the things Humans ask for are strange. They are only more or less common.”
His lungs inflated with bravery. He asked in a rush, “Will you sing for me?”
Jin’xi’s genuine surprise unfolded her wings.
“Did I offend you? Are you shocked?” the man asked. “That means you’re shocked, right? The thing you did with your wings?”
“Surprised,” Jin’xi said. “Most Humans don’t like Mantodean singing.”
“I don’t know. I was young when you guys got here. When the war started, I mean. You know. When I was little, you guys had control of Austin. That’s in Texas, you know, it’s where I lived. There were always Mantodeans around. I liked listening at night. The soldiers sang.” His fleshy hands pawed the air. “Sometimes the vibrations of the songs, they’d make the ground rumble and it was— well, you know, it was a hard time. I kept having these nightmares…The singing and the rumbling, they, you know. They helped me sleep.”
“I am not a very good singer,” Jin’xi said. “My wings were badly injured a long time ago.”
“Oh, is it— Do you not like to sing? From what I read, most Mantodeans like singing. Like most Humans like dancing. I’m sorry. I should have asked. I didn’t mean to make you do something you don’t want to.”
“I like singing,” Jin’xi said. “I am just not very good at it.”
“I’m not a very good dancer.” The man hesitated. His face changed color to signal embarrassment. “If you like singing…can I hear you?”
Jin’xi considered. This was not like washing dishes. But it was not sex either. It was singing. Singing was meant to be done in company. And it had been a very long time since she’d joined a choir of her people; she knew how they would judge the sour sound her wings made together.
Jin’xi crouched. “Climb on my back.”
She helped him to mount in that awkward way Humans used with their draft animals. Between his shifting and her shifting, they found a position comfortable enough for both of them, with his legs straddling her striped abdomen just above the insertion point of her wings.
“Hold on,” she said.
He hugged her torso to keep himself steady as she began rasping her tattered, green wings. They vibrated with a low, sonorous susurration that hummed through both their bodies. For a moment, it was almost melodious; for a moment, her wings played in harmony. Then the ragged edges sawed against each other and the song went sour.
Jin’xi stilled her wings. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If you continue looking, I am sure you will find a better singer.”
He rubbed his cheek against her shoulder where her grasping legs met her thorax. His mammalian breath was warm and even. “I wish you’d keep singing. It’s beautiful to me.”
Chzz was the first Mantodean to be ordained as a priest.
He’d been invited to give the homily at the Cathedral Basilica. It had become a spectacle with too many media people and too many spectators and a crowd of protestors dwarfing both. Apparently, Mantodeans and Humans could set aside their stubborn self-segregation if they were mad enough. It wasn’t much of a consolation when the thing they were mad at was him.
He’d known it was coming, but it still made his anxiety spike even higher. Apparently, Chzz’s heresy was going to cause the end of the world. It was the doom of civilization and the downfall of the single-mantis household. Chzz would just be happy if he could get through the homily without throwing up.
As Chzz settled his wings, a hush fell over the church. Only the murmuring of reporters and cameramen outside the door echoed from marble wall to marble wall. The few dozen Mantodean churchgoers crouched behind the last row of pews, a dappled line of green and brown interspersed with a blot or two of pink.
Chzz began, “In Egypt, there was the plague of locusts.”
He tilted his head so that his audience could see themselves in all the facets of his eyes.
“They fell on the crops of Egypt, an unstoppable horde, hungry and devouring. Behind them, they left devastation, famine, and their inevitable successor, death.”
He continued, “We of Mantodea have our own stories of the horde. On our home planet, leaders and intellectuals prophecy doom for our race if we do not spread among the stars, grasping other worlds between our tibial spines and devouring them as the locusts devoured the crops of Egypt. Our leaders say this will lead to our greater glory. They do not speak of the life already there; it, too, is supposed to nourish our greatness.”
He took a moment to let the words settle. The Humans seemed pleased that he was condemning the Mantodean role in the war. On the other hand, these were the Humans who had come to hear him speak in peace. Many, many more would still be furious over the ordination of a bug.
Chzz wondered how many opponents he’d seen around him every day, hiding antipathy behind amiable smiles. How many priests hated him in secret because they were afraid to contradict the “bug-loving” bishop? They might not hold their tongues anymore after this.
He glanced quickly at the Mantodeans in back. What were they thinking? Were they disappointed? Was he failing them?
Chzz continued, “These tales are told from different perspectives, but they have an important thing in common. They end in devastation. Why should either of our peoples let this pass?”
Chzz tipped his head toward his praying hands.
“Let me tell you another story,” he said. “A story of sacrifice, of he who allows himself to be eaten so that the horde might be forgiven. Jesus offers his body and blood in exchange for salvation. Why? Because of love. How can this not speak to a Mantodean? Almost all of us have been strengthened by the sustenance of our fathers. Half of us prepare ourselves to be consumed because of love.
“Let us learn this from Jesus. Love can mean salvation, not destruction. Let us love each other and survive. Humans and Mantodeans can love each other as Jesus loves us both.”
Chzz let the sound of his voice fade. Its echoes disappeared into a gathering tide of indistinguishable murmurs and rumblings. Some seemed angry, some seemed excited, but could he trust his jangling senses? Or was he only hearing what he expected to hear?
The Human-celebrating priest took Chzz’s place as he withdrew. The murmuring faded to quiet as the congregation stood for the Creed. The anxious itch in Chzz’s wings intensified as they progressed through offertory and prayers. He scratched them against each other as quietly as he could, but he could still hear a trembling note. The Humans around him seemed oblivious; he hoped the Mantodeans hadn’t noticed either. They didn’t need to know he was a nervous wreck.
Things were going to get worse. There would be fury and protests. There might be excommunication depending on which faction was rising. There might be assassination if terrorists got their way.
Terra for Terrans would be happy to see him dead, but the Mantodean Traditionalists posed the real danger. The militia of retired career soldiers made Human terrorists look like angry hatchlings. The Traditionalists were already denouncing Chzz as a traitor, but they didn’t really understand Human religion. They hadn’t worked out how much of a threat he really was.
Jesus gave His blood and body to save His followers: one sacrifice transcending the need for all others. Someday, Chzz hoped, Mantodeans would accept His gifts. Someday, they would sustain their families with wafers and wine. Someday, all males would live.
The Traditionalists weren’t stupid. Someday soon, they’d figure it out. Chzz hoped by then it would be too late.
Chzz rose again for the communion rites. His anxiety abated for a moment as he remembered taking his own first communion not so long ago—fulfillment blended with awe and the warmth of acceptance. Chzz was presenting communion to the Mantodeans today. He took his place beside the Human priest, each standing before a line of his people.
The anxious itch in Chzz’s wings came back all too soon as he went to stand before the line of his people. He still felt sick; he still felt inadequate; he was still afraid of what would happen next. Despite everything, it was all worth it for the awe he saw in the youngling male who accepted the first wafer, clasped it between his tibial spines, and ate.
After Mary’s husband died, she and Gr’chak decided to take a cruise around the world. Neither of them had much to tie them in any one place anymore.
On the deck of the ship, they watched younger generations of Humans and Mantodeans cavort. Gr’chak kept eying the families with fathers. Mary couldn’t tell if her friend was wistful or disgusted.
Eventually Mary lost the battle with self-control and gestured at a male and female herding their younglings toward the prow. She asked, “What do you think of that?”
Gr’chak paused for some time before saying, “Times change.”
“I probably shouldn’t ask…” Mary continued.
“So you will anyway,” Gr’chak said. “It is all right. I give you permission to ask.”
“What happened to your new husband? The one who fertilized your second egg sac?”
Gr’chak answered, “He has moved across the ocean to Europe. I do not know what he does there.”
“So, you—didn’t eat him?”
Gr’chak shook her head. She had recently learned to do it; she was studying Human gestures. “It was not love.”
“You did not love him—or he didn’t love you?”
“Neither. He did not wish to sacrifice, and I did not wish to make him part of me. Neither of us wished to raise children as double parents. We agreed on this before there were eggs.”
Mary pressed, “You said once you wished your first husband were still with you.”
Gr’chak’s wings played a melancholy note. “I would have raised children with him, but I do not think he would have wanted to raise them with me. He would not have thought it was love. If we had met now, perhaps…” She trailed off, staring into the blue distance of sky and ocean.
Mary had read more about Earth’s praying mantises since she’d found the head of Gr’chak’s first husband. Among Earth’s insects, females were more likely to eat the males if they needed the protein for their eggs. It passed through them to the children. Was that love? Mary wondered what had happened in some distant Mantodean past. A famine, perhaps? One that lasted so long that biological necessity became sacred custom? Now, things were changing again.
“I do feel sorry for you sometimes,” Gr’chak said to Mary.
“Hm?”
“Your husband is gone and you do not even have his head to remember.”
Mary glanced at Gr’chak to see if her friend’s posture was playful, if this was teasing, but Gr’chak was as sober as Mary had ever seen her.
That night, in the ballroom, Mary and Gr’chak danced together. Gr’chak had learned to imitate several Human stances and was able to hold Mary so that her grasping legs met at the small of Mary’s back.
When fast music played, they improvised two-steps with eight legs between them. Now and then, giggling, they fell into a clumsy pile on the floor and had to ask for help to get untangled.
Slow dances were easy. Swaying was natural to them both.
On Sunday, they went to the first service held by the Mantodean priest traveling aboard. Gr’chak said she was curious, and Mary had been toying with a return to her Catholic roots after her husband’s death anyway. During the sermon, Gr’chak bowed her head and held her grasping legs in their natural prayer position.
Afterward, Mary asked, “What did you think?”
“It is a pity about the Mantodean officiant who was killed,” Gr’chak replied. “However, I do not think it is for me.”
“Tell me about it.” Mary laughed. “Sometimes, I wonder if anything is for me anymore.”
Things kept changing. Girls these days played at biting their brothers’ heads off. Mary didn’t like that. The glitterati posed for photos with their arms bent in front of them like grasping legs. Mary thought it looked stupid. Both bones and fragments of exoskeleton had become jewelry, the one exotically pearly to the Mantodeans, the other alluringly iridescent to the Humans. She thought that was just morbid.
Sitting with Gr’chak, though, relaxing on the deck as the sun set over the water—that she liked. Gr’chak seemed to like it, too. Her wings were humming very quietly with contentment. Somewhere on the other side of the ship, a few Mantodeans had formed an evening choir, singing down the sun.
Twitching an antenna, Gr’chak gestured to a couple sitting several feet away. “Do you see those two? They’ll never work out.”
“Shh!” Mary exclaimed, worried they might be overheard, but the pair was far too enraptured with each other to notice two old females with wrinkles and notches.
The Human girl laughed as her fingers brushed lightly across her partner’s mandible. She rested her hand against the faint brown stripes striating his thorax. His wings sang softly in response.
“They’re too different,” Gr’chak explained.
“Probably,” Mary agreed. “Oh, probably.”
The sun continued to sink, bruising amber to carnelian to indigo to night.
“After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens” copyright © 2025 by Rachel Swirsky
Art copyright © 2025 by Chalzea Xu
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After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens
