Buzz didn't know if the blood leaking from his side was his or something else's. It had dried halfway, crusting over his abdomen like a guilt he hadn't earned but was stuck carrying anyway.
The tunnel ahead didn't so much stretch as lean into him—dark and quiet, too quiet. Dirt pressed inward from all sides, and the silence wasn't passive. It listened. It judged.
Zza was quiet behind him. Her footfalls were light, but the scent she carried gave her away—pollen and cracked shell and something else. Something that had watched someone you loved get reprogrammed into a husk and didn't flinch when it happened.
"I keep thinking she'll change her mind," Zza whispered.
Buzz didn't look back. "She won't."
"Not even to gloat?"
"No," he said. "She already did."
The silence swallowed them again.
This wasn't the same tunnel they'd fled through when the Queen had first turned her back on them. That one was alive with pheromones and the idle chatter of drones who still believed in purpose. This tunnel was where belief went to die.
Buzz kept crawling.
His wing dragged behind him now, the one Drii had punctured without a word. Not from hatred. Just programming. And somehow, that was worse.
When the first vibration hit his antennae, it wasn't threat. It was memory.
Thread. Cold and delicate. Laid into the walls like music notation only the Weaverworms could read.
Zza stiffened beside him. "They're already listening."
Buzz didn't nod. Didn't slow. "They've been listening since we entered."
They crested the final slope, and there it was: the veil of silk. A membrane of impossibly fine threads stretched across the mouth of the Weaverwarren like a curtain in an opera no one ever left.
Buzz reached out and touched it.
It didn't hum. It didn't react.
It simply accepted his touch.
Then it opened.
No glow. No sound. Just a ripple, like a breath taken in a deep, dark lung.
And then they were inside.
---
The Weaverworms didn't announce themselves. That would've implied they had to.
They were just... there. Hanging in the air like lanterns made of bone and breath, watching with eyes that didn't blink and bodies that moved only when they needed to, which was rarely.
One of them, larger than the rest, unfurled from the ceiling like a descending truth.
Buzz looked up. "Elder."
Its antennae flicked once. "Buzz Windbreaker."
He dipped his head.
"I'm here to ask for what you don't give."
Silence.
Buzz didn't wait. He couldn't. Not anymore.
"She's not evolving. She's pruning. Everyone who resists is being gutted from the inside out. And the nectar she's using? That's not food anymore. It's anesthesia."
Zza stepped forward, jaw trembling. "The drones don't even cry when they go under."
Still, no movement.
Buzz's voice cracked. "They thanked her. Right before they dissolved."
A pause.
Then the Elder spoke, voice like polished obsidian scraping a tomb wall.
"You want a war."
Buzz flinched, but held still.
"No," he said. "I want a choice."
"Same thing."
"Then so be it."
Another pause. Threads shifted subtly above, around, below. Buzz didn't look up. He didn't need to. The others were moving. The decision was being braided around him in silence.
The Elder leaned in, impossibly close.
"You are wounded."
Buzz's breath hitched.
"I'm still crawling."
"You bleed."
"I've bled before."
"You are alone."
Buzz turned, slowly. Zza met his gaze, didn't flinch.
He looked back. "I'm not."
The Weaverworm's mandibles clicked. Once. Twice.
And then it whispered.
"We remember your kindness during the flood."
Buzz blinked.
"You didn't have to pull us free," the Elder said. "You were barely more than a mouth and a wing then."
Buzz swallowed. "I wasn't a hero. I was just... trying to fly."
"That's why we'll help."
---
Later, much later, they sat in a cocoon-shaped alcove lit by soft bioluminescence.
Zza was wrapping gauze-thread over the worst of his wounds. She didn't speak. She didn't have to.
Buzz stared at the ceiling, tracing patterns he couldn't name. "Do you think I ever mattered to her?"
Zza didn't pause in her work. "You made her laugh once. That's more than most can say."
"That was before she drank the nectar."
"That was before she learned how to smile without meaning it."
Buzz exhaled slowly.
"I hate this place."
"I know."
"I hate what it made me into."
Zza's voice was soft. "I don't."
He blinked. "Why not?"
"Because you're still crawling. And I need someone who remembers what it feels like to bleed for someone else."
Buzz didn't answer. But his breathing slowed.
For the first time in what felt like a year, his wings went still without trembling.
---
The next day, the air changed.
They heard it before they saw it.
A low frequency. A hum that wasn't wings. A note vibrating just beneath the floor of the world.
Zza stiffened. "No way."
Buzz stood, legs shaking.
Then the light came—soft, pulsing bioluminescence cresting the horizon.
Glowbeetles.
Not scouts. Not spies.
Marchers.
They came in slow, deliberate waves. Some were scarred. Others missing limbs. But they came.
Behind them, the Swamp Ants. In silence, heads low, mandibles clean and polished. As if attending a funeral they'd waited too long to mourn.
Then the Scarab Sisters, dragging old battle drums on their backs like badges.
Zza's breath hitched. "They came."
Buzz stepped forward. "They listened."
"And if they listened," Zza whispered, "what else can change?"
Buzz didn't answer. He was watching the forest beyond.
A ripple of gold still glowed on the edge of the canopy.
The Queen.
Still waiting.
Still believing she was the only one who could rewrite the song.
Buzz flexed his wings. Not out of pride. But purpose.
"We don't need to sing louder," he said.
"We just need to teach the forest how to hear again."