- "There are, of course, also those who find benefit from the hive, not as predator but as parasite."
---
The classroom smelled faintly of chalk dust and disinfectant, the kind of sterile tang that lingered in the air after too many lessons. The hum of fluorescent lights above buzzed over the restless murmur of students. It was late afternoon, the slant of sunlight through tall windows cutting the room into golden strips and shadows. Kael sat in the far corner, his notebook open but only half-filled, his pencil hovering while his gaze wandered across the shifting hive of bodies around him. He didn't hear the teacher so much as the whispering currents of conversation—the droning repetition of the lesson like background static.
That was when he noticed her.
Not because she burst in, not because she was dazzling like Lucian always was, but because she was not out of place. And yet, in that lack of disruption, she stood apart. Taisia sat near the center of the classroom, posture perfect, the line of her spine straighter than anyone else's. She wore clothes too formal for teenagers who slouched in sweatshirts and sneakers—an ivory blouse buttoned neatly at the wrists, a dark skirt that brushed the edge of propriety, polished shoes catching the light. Nothing about her screamed for attention. She looked like an old photograph mistakenly placed among moving figures.
Her hands, slender and deliberate, arranged her books in precise angles. Her penmanship was immaculate, lines of ink without hesitation. She listened to the teacher with a composure that wasn't obedience but calculation—like she was weighing the words, dissecting their worth before letting them pass into her notebook. Kael recognized the pattern instantly. Not mimicry for the sake of survival, like the others who giggled, whispered, or glazed over with boredom. She mimicked because it let her function, let her stay within the swarm, while quietly holding her own direction. An intruder in the colony.
Kael's pencil tapped once against the margin of his paper. He could see her lips curve at the edge, not in a smile, but in concentration. Her gaze flickered occasionally to the other students, assessing—not like Lucian's devouring stare, not like his own cold recording—but something else. She was not above the hive, nor outside it. She was within, moving as one of them, but her eyes betrayed she was not of them.
---
The teacher, droning on about historical cycles, paused to pose a question about decadence and collapse of civilizations. Lucian, naturally, leaned back in his chair, voice smooth and cutting as a blade. "It isn't difficult to understand. Societies rot because they swarm with parasites. Each generation fattens on what the last built, producing nothing. Consumption without contribution. Collapse is inevitable."
A few boys laughed, uneasy, admiring. A few girls looked at him with the breathless attention he always drew. The teacher frowned but lacked the spine to challenge him. Kael merely kept his pencil moving, though he felt the faint pull of attention in the room tighten.
And then, softly but with precision, another voice broke through.
"Parasites drain without thought. Humans can be educated. To collapse everything into one category is to simplify what is complex—and to rob yourself of the challenge of reform."
Every head turned.
Taisia hadn't raised her voice. She hadn't leaned back like Lucian, hadn't let a trace of smugness enter her tone. Her words were surgical, each one placed with quiet certainty. Her posture remained flawless, her eyes steady on the teacher rather than Lucian, though everyone knew who she was addressing. She didn't seek the reaction, and that was why the silence after her words lasted so long.
Lucian's jaw twitched with the faintest smile. His eyes glittered—mockery, maybe, or the thrill of finding an unexpected opponent. Kael watched him closely, the way Lucian thrived on challenges but rarely encountered one worth his attention.
Kael, however, found himself more unsettled than amused. He had catalogued her already: the formality, the precision, the mimicry. But this? To speak with such calm conviction, without flinching under the public's gaze—it marked her as something different. Not a god, not a scientist, not a drone. Something else entirely.
---
The discussion moved on, though the echo of her words clung to the room. Kael's pencil scratched lines into his notebook, but he wasn't recording the lesson. He was recording her: posture, cadence, the slight pause she took before each sentence, as if ensuring the words were the sharpest she could choose.
He found himself irritated. Not because she had challenged Lucian—that was inevitable, almost natural—but because she seemed to fit nowhere in his mental order. The others were insects, all too easy to classify. Lucian was the divine deity assured that he would execute the utmost judgement. Kael himself, the one to record the results as nothing more than data. But Taisia? She was mimicry, yes—but not the kind that sought survival. Maybe, Kael wondersd, she had intentions, hidden behind the performance of belonging.
The thought bothered him.
When class ended, the students spilled out in buzzing knots, laughing, shoving, dispersing. Taisia rose gracefully, or it was at least clear that that's what she intended, smoothing the line of her skirt, collecting her books with no wasted movement. She didn't look at Lucian. She didn't look at Kael. She simply left, walking through the swarm like she'd always belonged.
But Kael's eyes followed her, and for the first time in weeks, the silence of his mind felt interrupted.
---
The corridor emptied in a scatter of noise. Doors slammed, sneakers squeaked, laughter clattered off the tiled floor like glass dropped and rolling. Kael stood a beat longer by the classroom door, notebook under his arm, eyes tracking the movement without stepping into it. His gaze fixed instead on one figure moving against the tide.
Taisia.
She once again walked alone, posture still impeccable, her books held neatly against her side. Her stride was measured—never hurried, never faltering, as though she were following a rhythm that no one else could hear. The others brushed past her, loud and careless, yet none collided with her; she navigated the current with an uncanny precision, like a fish cutting through the stream while appearing not to move at all.
"Did you hear him?" a boy muttered nearby, snickering. "He calls us parasites. Lucian thinks he's God."
Kael's eyes flicked sideways. The boy's words were met with thin laughter, but then a voice slipped in—quiet, steady.
"Better to think yourself a god than to behave as though you've no capacity to rise above insects."
It was not Lucian's voice. It was hers.
Taisia didn't raise her tone, but it carried, silencing the half-circle of boys in a way no barked retort could have managed. She didn't glare or posture. Her expression was calm, her hands folded over her books. "Mocking ambition won't make you less of a drone," she added, before stepping past them as if their talk was no more than the clinkering of mandibles.
Kael's lips twitched—half amusement, half calculation. Not many cut through noise like that.
---
He caught up with her near the stairwell, his footsteps quieter than hers. "You said parasites could be educated." His voice was flat, almost interrogative, without preamble.
She stopped, turning slightly. Her blue eyes, level and unhurried, met his. "I did."
"On what grounds?" he asked. He wasn't mocking, nor agreeing—only prodding, placing the specimen under glass.
Her gaze flicked briefly over him, registering his stillness, the neutrality of his tone. And in just a moment, her expression shifted - she studied him the way he was used to studying others. "On the grounds that ignorance is not immutable. People rot when no one expects anything of them. Raise the standard, and some will rise to it."
Kael tilted his head. "Some."
"Yes," she admitted. "Not all. But some is enough. Otherwise, why bother with education at all?"
For a moment, the bleak stairwell light hummed between them. Kael's eyes narrowed, recording the cadence of her logic, the absence of self-doubt in her delivery.
"You watch," she said suddenly. Her voice wasn't accusing, more observing. "You observe more than you speak. But you ask directly when it matters. That makes all the difference."
Kael blinked once, not answering. He didn't need to ask what she meant.
She inclined her head, a small, final gesture, before descending the stairs. Her footsteps echoed hollowly until they faded.
Kael remained, motionless, his pencil in his hand itching though no notebook was open.
---
Later, in the lab, he told Lucian.
"She argued with you."
Lucian was measuring out a powder, the delicate pinch of his fingers theatrical even in precision. He smiled faintly, not looking up. "They all argue with me, Kael. Some out of jealousy, some out of stupidity. Which was she?"
"Neither," Kael said. "She believes what she says."
Lucian finally glanced up, golden light from the lamp catching his irises. "Ah. An ant who thinks it's a butterfly." He chuckled, shaking the powder into a vial. "Let her flutter. Wings tear easily."
Kael's silence stretched.
"You're intrigued," Lucian said, almost sing-song. "I can hear it in the way you bring her up. Careful, Kael. Ants bite. And ants are expendable."
Kael didn't respond. But as they worked, the memory of her tone threaded through his mind—not sentimental, not naive, but carved from conviction.
---
The week wound forward, and he saw her again. Evening, after most students had gone. The hallways echoed with the hollow quiet that came after the swarm had dispersed. She sat on the bench outside the library, a book open across her knees, her posture still impossibly composed.
Kael slowed, hesitating before stepping nearer.
"You don't go home?" he asked.
She looked up, one eyebrow lifting slightly. "I could ask the same."
"I work."
"I study." Her lips curved, not a smile but a subtle acknowledgment of his scrutiny. She closed the book, tapping the cover with a finger. "Tell me, do you believe people cannot change?"
Kael considered. "They can alter behavior. Adjust patterns. But the core—the drive—rarely shifts. It's more efficient to predict decay than attempt reform."
"Efficient," she echoed. Her gaze didn't falter. "Perhaps. But efficiency without humanity is… sterile."
He tilted his head, almost curious. "And sterility has flaws?"
"Sterile collapses," she said simply. "You can't build a future on eradication alone. You need something to preserve."
For a long moment, they regarded one another.
Kael finally asked, "What would you preserve?"
"Potential," she said. "The capacity to rise. Even ants, given structure, can build colonies that last. You would burn the nest. I would try to teach them to climb."
Her words lingered, threading into him like a foreign code. Not dismantling his worldview, but troubling it.
---
That night, Kael lay awake longer than usual. Lucian's voice still thundered in his head, all certainty and divine scorn. But Taisia's words had a different weight—quieter, sharper, like a pin pressed just beneath the skin.
He thought of her posture, the deliberateness of her speech, the way she had said potential as if it was not sentiment but an axiom.
His chest felt hollow, not with longing, but with awareness. She had seen him. Or maybe she had not. There was no way to tell with the mimicry, with how one second she was with the swarm and the next was clearly alien to them.
That unsettled him most of all.
---
The school laboratory that evening had its own personality.
The overhead lights hummed, too pale, flattening every shadow into surgical white. The air was thick with the smell of ethanol and plastic, the faint sting of metal shelving. Most students rushed out at the strike of seven, eager to dive back into their noise and bright, useless distractions. Only a few lingered: the ambitious, the lonely, or those with nowhere else to go.
Lucian was not used to seeing anyone but Kael here after hours. Usually, the two would work at the university's labaratory and only stay here after class when convenient. Or when there was a need to test something outside the tight specification of their task list at the STAE* medical organisation department.
The sight of Taisia bent over a set of petri dishes at the far bench slowed him mid-step. Her figure was composed, rigid in its economy. She was not there to impress; her back never curved in awareness of being watched. She worked like someone who had carved the evening away from herself and now intended to justify every stolen second.
Kael noticed another difference. The way she did not fill silence with noise. The way her hands moved in deliberate order, never wasting a motion. He leaned slightly toward Lucian, though his voice was low, unremarkable.
"She's here again."
Lucian's lip lifted, not quite a smile. "Of course she is. Some insects don't feed at midday, Kael. Sometimes they prefer the hidden hours."
---
The pretext for interaction came naturally. A centrifuge beeped its completion, sharp in the sterile quiet. Taisia reached for the samples, and Kael, without thinking, stepped forward at the same time. Their hands nearly touched on the rim of the rotor.
Her eyes flicked up, steady, unembarrassed. "Do you need these?"
Kael hesitated. He almost never did. But instead of retreating, he said, "Yes."
For the first time since he had noticed her, her mouth tilted upward. Not warm, not coy—an acknowledgment, like two players recognizing a piece moved on a board. She withdrew her hand.
"Take them, then."
Lucian watched this exchange with something like interest, the way one might watch the first ripple disturb an otherwise still surface.
---
It did not take long before words passed between the three of them.
"You don't talk much," Taisia said one evening, her tone directed at Kael but carrying enough weight to include Lucian, who stood nearby sorting through notes.
Kael looked at her over the rim of his glasses. "Neither do you."
"That's not true," she returned. "I talk when it matters. Which is most of the time for me, and almost never for you."
Lucian laughed—soft, sharp, the kind of sound that unsettled more than it invited. "She has you pinned, Kael. An entomologist with a pin through the thorax."
Taisia didn't flinch at his words, as most would. Instead, she tilted her head as though accepting the analogy. "Insects are still useful. Even pinned, they teach us how to categorize."
That earned her a look from Lucian that lingered a heartbeat too long. Something shifted in his gaze, not dismissal, not amusement, but evaluation.
---
Over the next weeks, their coexistence thickened. In the sole school lab classroom open after lessons (though this was not often, since on most days Lucian and Kael had trainee positions to fill at work) the three sometimes crossed paths at the benches, sometimes trading brief fragments of observation.
It was an alliance in which each of them believed that Taisia did not belong.
Lucian tested her in small ways. He would leave a vial uncapped, a hazard unspoken, watching if she faltered. She never did. She capped it without a word, a glance sharp enough to suggest she had noticed the game.
Kael spoke to her more than to anyone else, though their exchanges were blunt, as though words were pieces of evidence laid out between them.
"Why work so hard," he asked once, "if you don't believe in purging the useless?"
"Because they feed me," she said, unbothered, moving her scalpel across a thin slice of tissue. "I don't have to admire the colony to understand it sustains me. Eliminate them all and you lose the infrastructure. Keep enough and you control it."
Lucian had looked up from across the bench at that, his interest plain.
"And who decides how much is enough?"
"I do," she said simply.
The silence that followed was not awkward but electric. A hierarchy tested, a line drawn, though none of them stepped back.
---
It was in the third week that Lucian found himself staying behind a little later than usual. Kael had gone to store samples, leaving only the two of them in the stretch of humming refrigeration units. Taisia worked at her bench, her hair pulled back, the curve of her neck stark against the clinical white of her coat.
"You're not an ant," he said without preamble. His voice was low, deliberate.
She looked up, one brow lifting. "No?"
"No. Not an ant pretending to be a butterfly, either. You're something else. A rove beetle, perhaps. Parasite and predator at once. The colony takes you in, feeds you, never realizing you're eating it from the inside."
She regarded him for a long moment. "And what does that make you?"
Lucian smiled, slow, predatory. "The fire. The hand that tips the anthill into the river. The god they never see coming."
Her lips curved faintly. "Then perhaps we can coexist. Parasite and fire. Each has its use."
When Kael returned, the air between them was different. Subtler, heavier, and with an utmost resolution, as if a misunderstanding had been cleared.
Kael could tell from Lucian's eyes, from his contracted pupils, that he had zeroed in on just what she was, he had at last accurately identified her.
---
By the time Taisia's role in the lab solidified, there was no question she had become a fixture in the infrequent evenings when Lucian's and Kael's personal schedules aligned with hers. Professors praised her diligence, peers envied her composure. But what mattered was not what the others saw—it was what she was planning to do with her independent project and study she was conducting.
She was not part of the swarm, not any longer. She was inside it, using it, reshaping it to her will. Because, though Lucian and Kael didn't know it yet, if the two had gotten into STAE through their academic excellence and connections, Taisia was planning to do it through nothing but pure hard work and grit.
And Lucian, for all his disdain, did not move to burn her down. He was too curious to see how far the beetle could burrow before the nest collapsed.
Kael, watching them both, felt the ground beneath him shift. He had more recently mirrored Lucian, echoed his certainty, found safety in its violence. But with Taisia, there was another axis, another possibility. Her pragmatism pressed against his hollow center, her logic threading into his own in ways he did not entirely understand.
Now, he wondered if agreement was just another form of weakness—and if perhaps he had made his first ever mistake.
---
*Scientific Testing, Analysis and Evaluation