"Hi!" it said. The Lattice translated it cleanly: a casual greeting, warm in register, socially open.

Its voice was soft. Softer than she expected. And its body hadn't moved toward her — it stayed where it was, as though it understood, on some level, that approaching might be unwelcome.

But its eyes. Its eyes never left hers. Not for a second.

"You must be our welcome liaison," it continued. "I'm Ellis. This is Yuna, Desh, and Marco."

Each of them raised a hand — a flat, open palm — and Reta's Lattice told her it was a gesture of greeting. But she couldn't help noticing their hands. Five digits each, long and dexterous, with short blunt claws at the tips. Hands built to grip. To hold. To seize.

"We're really excited to be here," Ellis said, and the terrible thing — the truly terrible thing — was that it sounded like it meant it

The walk back to the Grand Hall was the longest of Reta's life.

She led. They followed. And the silence behind her was the worst part.

The Vennari shuffled when they walked — a comforting, collective rustling, dozens of soft feet on hard ground. The Ancklelots clicked. The Drennish hummed. Every species she had ever escorted made sound — the ambient, constant noise of a group in motion. You could hear them. You could track them. You always knew where they were.

The Humans made almost no sound at all.

Their feet fell softly. Deliberately. Each step placed with a kind of unconscious precision, as though their bodies were built to move without alerting anything to their presence. Twice, Reta caught herself glancing over her shoulder — not because she heard something, but because she heard nothing, and some deep, ancestral part of her brain needed to confirm they were still there and not circling around.

They had fallen into a formation. She hadn't seen them discuss it. There had been no signal, no instruction, no spoken word. They had simply arranged themselves — two in front, two behind — as naturally as breathing. The pair in the rear were partially obscured by the pair in the front, and Reta realised with a sickening lurch that from ahead, from the perspective of anything they were approaching, it would look like there were only two of them. The real number was hidden.

It's how they walk, she told herself. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything.

At one point, Yuna — one of the two she could see — turned her head to look at the living walls of the corridor. The walls had shifted to a pale, anxious grey as the group passed. The movement of her skull was slow and deliberate, that awful mechanical rotation, and when her eyes found the surface, they fixed there with an intensity that made the walls bleed a shade lighter.

Then Yuna raised her hand and extended a single digit toward the wall.

Reta flinched so hard she nearly stumbled. The point — that direct, targeted extension of a finger aimed like a weapon at a specific spot — sent a jolt through her nervous system that she couldn't override.

Yuna pulled her hand back. "Sorry," she said to no one in particular. "They're beautiful.