Page 62 of By the Orchid and the Owl
The cockroaches hissed and chirped words I could barely understand, as if they were speaking with a foreign accent full of harsh, jagged inflections.
I forced another step upward, until all of me was standing on that little stepstool, and my fingers were curling around the top edge of that tank. How could I do this? How could I plunge myself headfirst into this scuttling, hissing abyss?
Coen had told me he’d stay out of my head during my entire time in the Testing Center so as to avoid breaking any rules, but… I craved his snarky, cocky tone more than anything right now. I needed the heat of his presence to combat the cold dread of what I was about to do. Or maybe I needed Jagaros’s silk-soft fur, or Fabian’s comforting voice telling me it was going to be okay, or Emelle’s familiar, timid smile.
Ms. Pincette cleared her throat.
No, I realized, glancing at her pincer-sharp eyes. I neededmyselfright now. I needed to gather this panic fraying the edges of my vision and bundle it up deep inside my core. Cockroaches didn’t bite, and neither would fear unless I let it.
Exhaling, I swung my leg up and toppled over the edge of the tank.
CHAPTER
22
My body thumped to the bottom, the full force of my fall cushioned by a hundred tinycrunchesas my weight cracked a hundred tiny shells.
But there were still a thousand more, and they all clicked against each other as they swarmed me, millions of needle-thin legs washing over every part of my body: my legs, my torso, my arms, my neck, my hair. They dug into every crack, every fold of clothing, every space between my limbs and core.
I snapped my mouth shut mid-scream before any of them could slip down my throat. But I still had to talk to them, to order them off me, and that would require opening my mouth again. How, though?
How?
How?
How?
A gag formed in my throat, but I brought my hands up, shaking off the stray cockroaches still clinging to them, and made a cage of fingers around my mouth.
Ms. Pincette had taught us that insects understood human language equipped with the same accent they themselves presented. Grasshoppers, for instance, listened more if you chirped your vowels. Ladybugs listened if you buzzed through the first sound of each word. Centipedes listened if you rolled your ‘r’s. The ants had listened to me that one time because my breath had been rough and raw, like the sound they made when they rubbed their ridges against their abdomens.
I simply had to mimic the cockroach accent of harsh, spitting sounds, then.
“Get off me,” I hissed through my fingers.
The roaches didn’t move. One tried to squirm into my ear, and I flailed, scrabbling at it. Another crawled over my eye, and my foot kicked out, colliding with the end of the tank and making the whole thing quake around me.
“Get off me,” I tried again. “Go to the dummy. Get off me.”
Nothing. No reaction, except for perhaps a swell in their own voices, a sharp, high-pitched kind of laughter. And I hated them for it, hated every tickle and prick and invasion, and I was going to scream if they didn’t stop.
“Get off me!” I said again, my voice rising against my will.
The roaches simply crawled over each other in their haste to crawl overme, again and again, as if burying me alive and letting me rest under their combined weight wasn’t enough. As if the burial had to constantly move and swirl and writhe.
Ms. Pincette got to her feet. She was going to mark this as a fail.
Something slipped through the cracks of my bones. Something deep and restless andaware.
It lunged, lashing out at the thousands of little invasions to my body.
The cockroaches flew off me, skidding up the sides of the glass and overflowing to the floor, where the dead ones remained and the live ones scuttled for the dummy to swarm its rubber figure.
But rather than crowd its body like they’d done to me, the thing inside me nudged them deeper and deeper, willing them out of existence, willing them to disappear completely.
I watched through the glass, horror-struck, as the cockroaches burrowed into the dummy itself andmerged withits rubber surface, until all that was left was an ink-black figurine with twitching cockroach legs for hair.
Ms. Pincette’s head snapped toward me.
