Rewrite That Witch
CH206 · Rewrite
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Chapter 206: Insect Swarm

Soraya solved the mirror in an afternoon.

She fetched mercury from the laboratory, spread it directly on glass, and painted a sealing coat over it before the vapor could build — no fumes, no contact, and the reflective surface that resulted was better than silver-backed glass by a visible margin. Roland set aside several pieces of crystal glassware afterward, had her coat them the same way, and distributed the results as small hand mirrors, one per witch.

The witches were, to a woman, pleased by this in ways they did not announce but demonstrated clearly. Even Scroll, who generally treated gifts as data points requiring classification before response, showed what Roland could only describe as an actual smile. He caught himself thinking: they are still women, whatever else they are, and then revised the thought, because still was the wrong word. They were women the way anyone was — not despite everything else, not as a secondary property.

The hand mirrors had one further consequence: the laboratory used crystal glass for flasks and condensers, and the supply was finite. Kyle Sichi could produce crystal glass in principle, but the laboratory’s hands were occupied with sulfuric and nitric acid production and the ongoing effort to synthesize mercury fulminate as a primary explosive for detonators. He had Chavez and Luo working in parallel on two separate problems and he himself appeared to operate without sleep on some days and with very little on others. Roland did not add to his queue.

The mirror question resolved, the way to the first fundamental biology lesson was clear.

Lily arrived in the courtyard before most of the others.

The grapes had gone deep red-purple in the last week. If she was calculating correctly — and her calculations on such matters had become reliable — they were less than a week from peak. Lightning was already working the upper shelves, pulling clusters down by selective inspection: this one, skip that one, this one. Above her on the wooden frame, that large and recently arrived bird — the one that had attached itself to Nightingale and apparently intended to stay — sat with its neck extended upward, pecking grapes and swallowing them whole without any apparent selection process.

At the table under the tree: His Highness and Anna, heads close, talking. Which meant they were not talking about anything a normal person would say to another normal person — from two meters away you could sometimes catch fragments, and the fragments were things like the photon problem or what the particle’s position costs you in momentum. Nightingale was maintaining her characteristic five-meter radius from this conversation, back against the wall, expression of someone who has tried listening and determined that the investment does not repay itself.

Wendy sat with Scroll near the entrance, the two of them at ease in the way of people who have known each other long enough that silence between them is not uncomfortable. Whenever Lily approached Wendy, she was aware of something — not exactly being seen as a child, but something adjacent to it. She looked at Wendy’s chest and then at her own. There was a measurable difference.

Someday, she thought, and did not specify the timeline.

When they were all assembled, His Highness put two instruments on the table and explained: microscopes. Lenses arranged in sequence at precise distances, each bending light in a way that made the image at the eyepiece larger than the object at the other end. He called a guard, had a bucket of water fetched from the well — water so clear and still that it looked like captured air — and placed a single drop on a glass slide beneath the objective.

Lily had prepared, reasonably, to see the balls he had been teaching them about.

“Something is moving in the water!” One of the sisters pressed away from the eyepiece. “It ran away!”

Lily waited her turn without visibly hurrying.

When she pressed her eye to the eyepiece, she saw —

Not balls. Not the theoretical substrate of matter, the invisible foundation of everything, the units of existence too small for any instrument.

Creatures.

In the lit circle of the microscope’s field: dozens of them, moving without pattern or purpose, each one different from its neighbor. Some were squared at the edges with internal structures she could not name. Some were entirely covered in fine hairs that oscillated in some invisible current. Some had shapes that were genuinely impossible to describe in any vocabulary she possessed. All of them were transparent — not glassy but genuinely without opacity, so that the inside was visible from the outside, empty-looking chambers and threads, the internal mechanics of life rendered in miniature and rendered naked.

“Good gracious, are these bugs?” someone said from behind her.

His Highness explained: microorganisms. Not insects in any meaningful classification. An independent order of life, smaller by orders of magnitude than anything previously visible, present everywhere, responsible for food spoilage and disease. The majority could be killed by heat — which was why they boiled drinking water, why food was cooked, why bathwater was not reused.

Lily thought: They’re in the water we boil. They’re in the bread. They’ve been there the entire time.

Then she thought: I keep food fresh. She looked at her own hands. What is it I’ve been doing to the food, exactly?

She reached into herself for the familiar pull — the extension of will that reached into whatever she was preserving and stayed there, quiet and invisible, and kept — kept what, exactly? Kept the change from happening?

She let the magic out toward the drop on the slide.

And watched.

The creatures changed. Not all at once — the nearest ones first, then the ones they touched, rippling outward in a chain of contact. Each one that changed went from transparent to purple-tinged, and then grew — not larger, but different. Tentacles emerged from the body wall in pairs, four below and four above, fine as threads at the tips. The color deepened. The motion changed: from random to directed, to purposeful, and then to something that made the word purposeful seem insufficient.

They formed rows.

She was not telling them to form rows. She was not conscious of giving any specific instruction at all. But they formed rows, and then — as if aware of her attention, which was impossible and which was happening — they raised their tentacles together.

Salute.

Lily straightened from the eyepiece.

Her hands were perfectly steady. She did not know why this surprised her.

“My lady,” Nightingale said quietly from somewhere behind her — addressing His Highness, not her.

Lily looked around. The lesson had stopped. Everyone was looking at her. His Highness was looking at her with the expression he sometimes wore when a result came in ahead of schedule, the one he quickly replaced with something more neutral but which she had learned to read first.

“What happened?” she asked.

“What did you do?” he said.

She told him about the creatures changing. About the tentacles. About the rows and the salute.

His Highness nodded slowly, very carefully, as if the information were fragile.

“Stay after the lesson,” he said.

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