As the cartilaginous pipe that invaded Bee’s mouth died, the air that sustained her grew choking thin, and her lungs burned. Panic seizing her, Bee struggled, but her limbs were too tightly constricted by the wet resin. As hypoxia overcame her and carbon dioxide saturated her blood, she whined against the ribbed tubing forced down her throat. Then, her body began to twitch and seize against her control. Her head was swirling. Her blood was boiling. But then something in her tripped. The sensation of a taut wire snapped between her ears, and she felt a reverberation through her skull and chest cavity. Something awoke in her, and suddenly, the pain was replaced with the urge to sleep — to rest and wait. So her struggling stopped, eyes drooping, a thrumming in her chest casting aside all urge to breathe.


    The world around her dimmed. Even the beating of her heart fell quiet and slow, replaced by that thrumming, a pink light escaping through the flesh on her chest and neck — silhouetting bone and plate in its wake. Bee didn’t even know how long she was trapped in that dead chrysalis prison when the structure began to groan and rattle and strain. The connective tissue between metallic bones — pulled taut, snapping with a twang — crunched away and out poured a wet tide of biogel.


    A freak — asymmetrical and swollen, skin mottled and patchy with spots of red infection, his eyes shining white, mirror bright in the cool infrared — pulled away the fleshy front of the cocoon with a massive biomechanical limb before casting it aside where it landed with a heavy thump. Then, in its smaller left hand, he seized the object down Bee’s throat and pulled it. Inch after inch of artificial gullet and trachea emerged from her mouth. An entire foot of it was eventually loosened, and Bee gasped and retched as she was free of it. Last came her tongue, pulled taut from her mouth, latched to the intrusive tubing. Its bladed tip detached from a metallic catch with a click, free at last.


    The freak rasped, mandibles working, but Bee couldn’t hear what he said through the mucus in her ears and the rush of blood to her head. She slid down out of the remains of the cocoon and tumbled to lay on the floor, heaving for air through her siphons and throat. After a few moments of shivering contemplation, the creature twitched and began to look desperate. Then he stepped back again to survey the scene.


    “Thanks,” Bee said, still gasping on the floor, her voice hoarse and throat sore from the thing that breathed for her. She then squirmed and pushed the mucus off of her face and hair. “Who— who are you?”


    “Oh no, no... What’s this? No, no...” The freak muttered to himself, unstable. He then turned aside and started to argue with the empty tunnel. “I don’t want to. No, no, I don’t. Please don’t make me.”


    Bee met his gaze, grimacing at the freak’s state as he stood there twitching and glassy-eyed.  So she tried to stand but felt suddenly off balance. Sprawling on her arms and knees, she looked down at herself. First, she checked that her hand had not regrown. Then she noticed that her remaining hand was longer of finger now, larger overall, if still slender in shape. Her arms, too, were longer, and their plates smoother. The wings on her back flicked, spraying biogel away. Unsure what exactly had happened to her, Bee held herself and whined. The proportions of her body felt wrong to her. She had grown too much, too quickly, and it felt dizzyingly alien. All that mass that she was being force-fed must have increased the size of her body frighteningly quickly.


    Bee patted down the curving plates of her chest and legs as if they were some foreign object before looking back at the freak. Then, with revulsion, she realised he was still muttering to himself, barely coherent. But no sooner than when she fixed her attention on him did he turn back to her.


    “Will you—... Will you eat me?” Murmured the freak. “Please... Please eat me.”


    “What?” Bee froze on the spot, her eyes widening. “No! Why would I do that?”


    He grunted at her answer, picking up a jagged piece of wreckage from the floor. “Love you,” He said to himself, not to her. He seemed to be talking to some entity unseen, pacing around in a maddened state. “Love you... Love you.”


    Then, to Bee’s horror, he started to cut at his own body, stabbing himself repeatedly. Blood welled out of his torso as he worked himself into a frenzy. Unable to believe what she saw, Bee hesitated before standing and trying to grab his wrist to stop him. He pulled away, though, stepping back, and sank the sharp edge of the plate deep into his neck before falling over backwards. Groaning in delirious pain, the freak managed to offer out a strip of his own meat to Bee, who backed away before he collapsed unconscious and gurgling.


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    Bee paced, circling around him. Fretting, she wasn’t sure what to do. He did it to himself. Why would he do that? She panicked and knelt down, trying to press on his wounds with her remaining hand as if she could stop the bleeding. It did nothing. There were too many.


    “Don’t. Don’t die,” Bee whined, but as his blood stained her hands, she realised it was futile. When his blood stopped pouring out, his heart stopped, and she pulled away in silence.


    Again, weapons were fired in the tunnels above. The crack of metal flechettes and shrapnel striking silicon flesh and metal bone wrestled Bee’s attention back to the present, back from her horror at the sight of the freak killing himself in front of her. She was overwhelmed with dread and confusion over what had just happened. She couldn’t take her eyes off it, holding herself tightly.


    “Sorry,” Bee said, trembling as if that could change anything. “I’m so sorry...”


    The urgent sounds of combat above eventually became too overpowering to ignore. Bee crawled away from it, over the uneven ribbed floor to a junction. The passage forked sharply upwards or to the left. The leftmost tunnel appeared to wind around in the haze before joining another. Turning her head back, the child tried to peer upwards into the higher reaches. Above her, the passage breached into a cavernous expanse after ten metres. Veins that ran through the flesh amidst the bared ribs bulged hideously as water was pumped through them.


    Bee could make out rushing, shouting figures above. Instinctively, Bee tried to scale the vertical passage to get back to the open space and out of this claustrophobic pit. Her nails scratched at the bones exposed from the wall. But, as she pulled herself up, she slipped and fell. It was useless. Her arms and legs were clumsy. She had just gotten used to them, and now they felt too long again, hips too wide and back too straight. The wings on her back kept twitching and flicking, biomechanical engines all too eager, but they were throwing her off balance. Above all, her missing right hand meant she couldn’t get any leverage when she tried to get a hold of the ribs of the shaft and pull herself up.


    Bee realised she needed time to adapt to her new shape. A knot of frustration seized her belly, remembering her first days alive. She didn’t want to feel that helpless again.


    Then, movement caught her eyes. The fearful, slithering serpents that scavenged the tunnel peeked out of the cracks and crevices that they had hidden in. Tentatively, they sniffed at the dead freak’s body before fleeing through the leftmost passage, scattering around Bee’s feet as they went.


    “Where are you going?” She called after them before movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention. She looked back at the dead body.


    Its torso twitched and convulsed. Its belly distended and bulged hideously, some ropey mass coiling beneath the softer flesh of its abdomen. Bee turned to regard it with wonder and disgust, mouth agape. Then, a ribbon-like worm erupted from the freak’s belly. It began to spiral and take on a wide helical dance, coiling against the floor as it extricated metres of its length from its dead host.


    “What is that?” Bee started, shaking her head rapidly. Gasping, her stomach turning, she began to back away, unable to tear her eyes away from the sickening display.


    Then the worm came towards Bee, its spiralling motion far too fast. Panic seized her, and she screamed as she ran.


    “No!” Bee shouted, squealing with fear, her footfalls unsteady on the uneven floor. “Stay away from me!”


    Bee slipped and crashed into one of the oily walls, the floor slick beneath her feet, tumbling to her knees before scrambling to keep going. Daring to look back, she saw the worm kept coming. So Bee continued to run, throwing herself over fleshy knots that filled the tunnel and slipping as the undulations in the floor gave way to a sharp decline. Suddenly, she was sliding down, only for the curve of the floor to throw her head over heels across a machine-like growth and land in a heap on the far side with a gasp. Bee had just enough time to roll over onto her back when it was upon her.


    The ribbon-like worm spiralled over her before its head lunged down. Still screaming, Bee managed to grab it. It seemed deceptively delicate, and she easily bent its long, slender body as she pushed it away. That wasn’t enough, though.


    To her horror, the flat body of the worm was slick and frictionless and then started to glide between her fingers. It coiled around her arm as she ineffectually tried to slap it with her other wrist. Unrelenting, it found her shoulder and then turned down her body. Unerringly, the worm found where her skin met her plates, above her ribs, and then slipped beneath the pieces of her bioarmour.


    It was gliding inside of her, inch by inch, and then metre by metre. Bee took a sharp inhalation of breath. She could feel it in her chest cavity, snaking its way around between her bones, around her lungs, and then up her spine. Soon, all of its ribbony mass had coiled itself inside her and Bee — hyperventilating, sitting up and patting her own body down — yelped out again in fright.


    Bee whimpered as a pressure built into the back of her head. Then, hearing a snap and a pop between her ears, the pressure abated and was replaced with the disturbing sensation of a rushing, warm mass pushing into her skull. She collapsed onto her back, legs locking straight, arms and wrist bent sorely, paralysed from traumatic brain injury.


    But just when Bee thought it was over, a soft, breathy voice whispered into her ear.


    “Hello, Sweetheart.”