He knew Luna wasn’t scared, like he would be in six days when his own Metamorphosis time came. Luna had always felt ready for life with wings. Blue was not, and most of all, he was not ready for life with her wings, which meant everything changing.
Once she had wings, Luna would be assigned to a work order. Soon she’d be paired up with whichever partner the queen chose for her and given another cell to live in. She might even be moved to another Hive.
It was normal; it was the way life always was for SilkWings. Everyone had a Metamorphosis. Everyone had a new life chosen for them. Everyone moved on.
But now that it was happening to his family, Blue found it extremely nerve-racking.
He was already awake when Luna bounded across the web and started shaking him, shortly before dawn. He wasn’t sure he’d slept at all. For a while he’d been watching the glow of tiny lights moving far below them in Cicada Hive, imagining himself as one of those early-rising dragons on their way to work, awake before the sun. In the distance he could see Hornet Hive in one direction and Mantis Hive in the other, although the webs that connected them were mostly invisible in the dark.
He’d never been to any of the other Hives, but he knew they were spread out in a wide circle around the plains of Pantala. The enormous dragon cities rose from the grassland and reached for the sky like towering, dragon-made echoes of the trees that used to dominate the land. Their roofs arched out like branches, and the dense silvery threads of SilkWing webs created a canopy tying those branches together, so even wingless SilkWing dragonets could travel between Hives far above the ground, if they wanted to (and were allowed to).
He yawned and batted Luna’s talons away, pretending he’d been in a deep sleep. Dewdrops glittered all across the web around and above them, as if it had rained tiny diamonds in the night. He could see the silk-bundled shape of Luna’s mother on the outer edge of their cell, still fast asleep. His own mother was on a night crew these days and had been gone since midnight.
“It’s today, it’s today!” Luna whispered. Her pale green tail flipped back and forth, sending tremors through the silken threads. She bounced closer to Blue to poke his shoulder again and sent his hammock rocking perilously.
“Hey, watch it,” he teased, nudging her away. “Some of us won’t have wings for another six days.” There were layers and layers of other strong webs crisscrossing below his family’s web, ready to catch any falling dragonets … but even so, it was hard to forget how far down the ground was. He always felt safer in the Hives than he did out on the webs, which he worried was not a very normal SilkWing attitude.
“And some of us,” she sang, “will have them todaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!” She sat up and flexed the tiny wingbuds on her shoulder blades.
“Well, not exactly,” he pointed out. “Today is only your cocoon-spinning day. It’ll take another five days for your wings to actuaaaaAAAAH!” he yelped as she upended his hammock and dumped him onto the web.
“Don’t you ‘actually’ me,” Luna said sternly. “I’m your older sister and I’ve been to, like, twelve Metamorphosis days, plus I have the highest grade in our class in silk studies. I can ‘actually’ you under the table.”
“Yes, all right,” Blue said, stretching his legs one by one. “You’re the smartest dragon in the family, I know, I admit it.” He snuck a glance over his shoulder at his own wingbuds. They looked the same as yesterday: small, tightly curled, and iridescent violet, a brighter, more purple shade than the gemlike azure of the rest of his scales.
Luna’s wingbuds were starting to unfurl, so he could see whorls of cobalt and gold inside the pale green exterior. There were also signs of her silk coming in; already her palms and wrists were glowing a little, as though tiny fireflies were waking up under her scales.
That’ll be me soon, he thought, tamping down a wave of panic. After my own Metamorphosis, I’ll have wings and silk, too.
Maybe the changes would be small. Maybe he’d be assigned to live right here to help his mother strengthen the bridges between Hives. Maybe Luna would stay, too, and be a Hive drone like her mother, working for one of the upper-class HiveWing families.
She wouldn’t like that, though. Luna wanted to be a spinner. She was hoping to be paired with Swordtail in an artist’s cell near the sunny heights of the web. She wanted to make a weaving so beautiful it would have to be given to the queen of the HiveWings, who ruled both tribes — or at least to one of the queen’s sisters.
Blue had seen the queen only once, when she visited Cicada Hive. Queen Wasp had come through to inspect their school with twenty HiveWing soldiers marching in impressive exact unison behind her. Her scales glittered in perfect black and yellow stripes and her eyes were large and completely black, surrounded by an oval of yellow scales.
Imagining himself into her was almost impossible; it was like trying to imagine life as the sun. But he couldn’t help trying. He thought about how she must wake up in the morning and eat breakfast like anyone else. (Although if the rumors were true, she ate as rarely as possible, and only predators: the head of a lioness for lunch one day, slices of black mamba in squid ink soup for dinner twelve days later.)
He wondered if her wings felt strong or heavy as she flew from Hive to Hive to check on her subjects. Was she relieved to have sisters to share her responsibilities with — or did she worry that they might covet her throne? How often did she check the Book of Clearsight? If he were queen, with two tribes full of thousands of dragons depending on him, Blue guessed he’d read it every day until he had it memorized.
At one point during her visit, she had spotted Blue and Luna and stared at them for approximately a century and a half, by his internal clock. He’d gotten the distinct feeling that she was trying to decide between adopting them or eating them.
Queen Wasp was as breathtaking and superior as all the stories said. After that, her sister Lady Cicada, the ruler of their Hive, had never seemed quite so terrifying to him again.
And maybe that was the point of the queen’s visits: to remind everyone whose claws held the real power.
“So?” Luna said, taking one of his talons in hers. “My last day as a dragonet! What are we going to do?”
“Lie around on the web in the sunlight?” he suggested hopefully.
“No, you lazy banana slug,” she said. “All my favorite things! That’s the correct answer.”
“This isn’t fair,” he pointed out. “By the time it’s my Metamorphosis Day, nobody will be left to do all my favorite things with me. You’ll all be too busy flying around with your big flappy wings doing fancy busy wingish things.”
Luna managed not to make a face, but Blue instantly felt guilty anyway. He knew she wished Swordtail could spend the day with them, too. But Swordtail was on construction duty on the west side of Cicada Hive all day — probably getting dusty and frustrated and missing Luna like crazy.
“Sorry,” Blue said.
“Don’t be,” Luna said. “Once I have my wings, Swordtail and I can be partnered, and then I’ll see quite enough of him.” She grinned, as though applying for the partnership actually meant they’d get it, which Blue thought was far from certain. He didn’t know any adult SilkWings who’d been given the partner of their choice. His mother and Luna’s mother hadn’t even known their father, who had been whisked away to another Hive once there were eggs. Blue knew his name — Admiral — and nothing else.
Better this way, though, he thought. Burnet and Silverspot ended up loving each other much more than they could ever have loved Admiral. They were a good family, the four of them. It had all worked out for the best. Queen Wasp and her sisters knew what they were doing with the partner assignments. If Luna and Swordtail weren’t matched up, it would be for a good reason.
“So where do we start?” he asked. “No, wait, let me guess. Honey drops.”
“Honey drops!” Luna sang, bouncing the web again and fluttering her wingbuds. “Move your tail and maybe we’ll beat the line at the checkpoint.”
He dipped his snout into their dew collector, washing his antennae and the dry scales under his eyes, as Luna darted across the web to her mother. Silverspot sat up and wrapped her wings around Luna — quickly enough that Blue wondered whether she had been awake all night, too.
“Have a wonderful day, my darling. I’ll try to make it to the Cocoon,” Silverspot promised. “But —”
“I know,” Luna said. “It’s all right.” Silverspot’s mistress was bad-tempered and frantically insecure about her place in the Hive hierarchy, and she tended to take out her rage on Silverspot with thousands of small cruelties. Keeping Silverspot from her only daughter’s Metamorphosis would probably be the highlight of her year.
“Just think,” Luna said brightly, “next time I see you, I’ll have wings! We can go flying together!”
“I can’t wait,” Silverspot agreed. But when she hugged Luna again, Blue caught a strange expression crossing her face.
Anxiety? Fear?
He felt a weird chill run through his scales. Silverspot looked as though she knew something they didn’t.
As if, for some reason, Silverspot suspected she would never see her daughter again.
The creeping sense of foreboding followed Blue as he clambered along the webs after Luna. The sun was rising, sending shafts of filmy gray light through the silken strands around them. The soft hum of insect wings rose from the tall, waving grasses of the savanna below.
Luna was a reckless climber, leaping from one level to the next like a monkey … or like a dragon who already had her wings. Blue was more sensible, relying on the slight stickiness of the silk to keep him anchored as he ascended. Even so, today he felt more airsick than he normally did. Each tremor along the silk seemed to vibrate right into his bones, making his antennae twitch nervously and his teeth ache.
He was relieved when they reached the Hive entrance, where the webs connected to the uppermost tier of the city. There was already a line twenty dragons long, but at least here they could wait on the solid ground of the entrance tunnel. He stepped off the web onto the papery dry surface and flexed his talons.
The walls of the tunnel were painted with a mural of SilkWings and HiveWings flying together in a bright blue sky, all of them looking as happy as Luna on a honey drop spree. Much of the mural was covered up, though, by the posters that lined the walls.
BE VIGILANT!
WE ARE ALWAYS IN DANGER!
BEWARE OF LEAFWINGS!
REPORT DISLOYAL SILKWINGS TO A HIVEWING AUTHORITY IMMEDIATELY!
QUEEN WASP SEES EVERYTHING. QUEEN WASP PROTECTS US ALL. ALL HAIL QUEEN WASP!
LEAFWINGS: GONE … OR LYING IN WAIT?
REPORT ANY SIGHTINGS OF POSSIBLE LEAFWINGS TO A HIVEWING AUTHORITY IMMEDIATELY!
That last one had a drawing of a snarling dark green dragon on it, complete with bloodstained claws and teeth. It seemed as if a new poster appeared on the walls every other day, and half of them were about the threat of LeafWings.
Luna caught him studying the picture and snorted.
“What?” he said.
“Come on,” she said. “You’re not really afraid of LeafWings, are you?”
“Why not?” he asked. “They nearly wiped us out half a century ago. Or has my genius sister forgotten all our history lessons already?”
“But they failed,” she pointed out. “And now they’re extinct. So there’s nothing to worry about. It’s not like they can attack us if they’re all dead.”
“We don’t know that they are,” he argued. “Tussock said his uncle saw one flying overhead a couple of years ago. And what about that section of Mantis Hive that collapsed last year? Everyone said that was LeafWing sabotage.”
“Pffft,” Luna said scornfully. “What Tussock’s uncle saw was a green SilkWing. He’s just hysterical. And that collapse was caused by shoddy workmanship. The sabotage story was so obviously a cover-up.”
“Shhhhhhh,” Blue said, glancing at the HiveWing soldiers up ahead. They looked busy checking IDs, but they might still overhear Luna’s treacherous talk.
“Look,” Luna said, lowering her voice and rolling her eyes. “No one has really seen a LeafWing in over fifty years. And we cut down all their trees, so where would they even be living, if they were still alive? Slithering through the tall grass of the savanna? No, they’re gone, thanks to Queen Wasp, so all of this is totally unnecessary.” She waved her claws at the warning posters.
“The Hives don’t cover the whole continent,” he suggested, but she was already talking over him.
“The queen just needs us to have a — what’s it called — a common enemy, you know? So the SilkWings don’t start complaining or asking for their own queen or anything like that.”
“Our own queen?” Blue was startled. He’d never even thought about the SilkWings asking for a separate queen before. It was kind of alarming that Luna had. That seemed like the kind of dangerous idea Swordtail might have put in her head.
“I mean, not that I think we should,” Luna said hurriedly, and this time she was the one to glance over at the soldiers. “But, you know, someone might, if they were unhappy with the way things are.”
Blue shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t know any unhappy SilkWings.” The poster behind Luna read LOYALTY ABOVE ALL, with a giant drawing of Queen Wasp’s huge dark eyes. Sometimes they were a comforting sight, but in the middle of this conversation, they were making him uneasy. “Everything is great in the Hives. We’re safe, and we all work together, so I don’t see what anyone would have to complain about.”
The line moved them within earshot of the soldiers, and they both stopped talking instinctively. Blue gazed at the long, pale blue wings of the dragon in front of him, imagining where she might be going, until finally it was their turn.
“Names?” said one of the soldiers in a bored voice.
Every HiveWing had at least a few black scales, inherited from their common ancestor, Clearsight, but this dragon was almost entirely black, with only a few orange flecks here and there. Blue and Luna had seen him here at the checkpoint nearly every day for three years, and yet the soldier never gave any indication of recognizing them or caring that they existed beyond their IDs. His name was Hawker, not that he’d ever told them that. Blue had picked it up from listening to the guards grumbling at one another.
“Blue,” he said, holding out his right arm. The soldier studied the letters that had been carved into Blue’s palm when he was a newly hatched dragonet: B for his name, forming a triangle with a smaller B and A for his parents’ names. Luna always said she was glad the marking happened while they were too young to remember, but Blue was pretty sure he did have memories of that day … a bright light, a searing pain, and, most clearly, a sense of betrayal.
Hawker grunted and moved on to examining the wrist cuff on Blue’s other arm. It was a dull bronze color and annoyingly heavy, although Blue was mostly used to it by now. It indicated that he was a student at one of the schools in the Hive, so he was permitted to go in and out through this checkpoint. The name of the school was inscribed in the metal: Silkworm Hall.
“And I’m Luna,” said his sister.
“Ah,” said the soldier, turning to consult a list on a small rectangle of paper. “Metamorphosis today.”
“That’s right,” Luna said. Blue could tell she was trying so hard not to smile. Smiling at soldiers was always risky. You never knew if you’d get a rare smile back, or if you’d end up spending an afternoon on Misbehaver’s Way for “taunting a figure of authority.”
Blue imagined that the soldiers had to be that alert and suspicious — if dragons didn’t respect them, how could they keep the peace and control the Hive?
But he also believed that Swordtail hadn’t deserved it any of the three times he’d wound up on Misbehaver’s Way. Swordtail had wild ideas and talked a little too freely, but he wasn’t a danger to the Hive.
“You’ll have a new one of these next time you come through here,”
Hawker said, tapping Luna’s wrist cuff, which matched Blue’s.
“I know,” she said, as Blue’s heart sank. One more change: Luna was done with school now. He’d have to go without her.
Not for very long, though. I’ll be needing a new wristband soon, too. How would it feel to have this one cut off and exchanged for something else? Surely it would be a bit like having one of his toes casually replaced.
“Well,” said the soldier. He looked at his list and then back at Luna again. “You may go.” Hawker cleared his throat gruffly as they started forward. “Hrm. Good luck.”
“Oh — thank you,” Luna said, startled. She dragged Blue forward, managing to hold on until they were far down the tunnel before she burst into giggles.
“He said so many words to us all of a sudden!” she cried. “I didn’t know he knew so many words!”
“Maybe he likes you,” Blue suggested with a grin. It was a joke — but then, what if he did? Blue felt himself slipping into visions of the HiveWing’s possible life. Did Hawker go home and dream of the SilkWing he saw every day but couldn’t ever be with? Did his friends tease him about his dedication to his work? Did he like being a soldier, following orders all day long, or did he ever wish the rules were different?
“Oooo, maybe we’ll have a forbidden love!” Luna gasped, falling into Blue and knocking him back into reality.
“Well, I am not going to be the one to tell Swordtail,” he said.
Luna laughed and started telling a story about something funny Swordtail had said the night before. Blue padded beside her, glad to be off the topic of SilkWing-HiveWing relationships. Forbidden was putting it mildly. Whatever the strongest word for illegal was, that was the right word. Prohibited? Outlawed? Punishable by death? All of those times a million.
They reached the end of the tunnel, where it widened and forked into several other tunnels. The path to the right led to the Mosaic Garden, but they’d go there later, Blue was sure. It was Luna’s favorite place in the Hive.
First, though, they made their way down three levels, through two more checkpoints. It was warm, as always in the Hive, with sunlight filtering through the walls to cast an amber glow over everything. All the Hives were made of treestuff, which was a particular mix of wood pulp and silk and clay and other things Blue would learn about if he was assigned to a construction crew. It looked paper-thin and allowed light to filter through, but it was solid as rock. Under his talons, the treestuff floor was dry and mostly smooth, apart from a few lumps where workers hadn’t been careful enough.