The Honeys

by Ryan La Sala

Does the butterfly know the rainbow is just the shadow of something greater? Would we? What beauty in our reality is simply an unfathomable refraction across space, light, and time?

She does dance, though. The music breaks through her nerves, and like a raindrop on a window she tumbles through her movements. Shy at first, fluid the next, then suddenly captivating. Wild is what she becomes, spinning so fast her veil rips away in the rising winds.

I knew it, and they made me forget. And the moment in the woods with Callum, too. It rings with the same threatening frequency. A warp in the comb of my memories.

I can only depend on what I can provide for myself. Nothing more, nothing further.

The monsters worth fearing are the ones that are dangerous enough to hide in daylight.

We pass through a graveyard of wicker chairs and a tennis court cracked open by saplings. I feel that if we screamed, the silence of this place would swallow it up. I don’t want to go inside, but I need to know more. Everything.

The pressure sets in right away, strands of the whispering lace reconnecting me to Bria’s will, wrapping around my wrists, my neck, pulling me toward her.

“We had to. Something stalks our hive. We’ve lost too much this season already—first Caroline, then Sierra. We needed to fortify ourselves. I don’t deny what you witnessed was shocking. You saw a portion of one of our most holy rituals. Nothing I say to you will make any of this make sense until you see for yourself. Really see, I mean. With the eyes of all. To be shown is an honor. Our greatest honor …”

She means the comb. She must. The energy from the girls isn’t just basic hunger. It’s intelligent desire. The look of artists gazing upon their work with pride.

The girls chew and chew; they feed one another small morsels from their plates. They laugh, and they laugh, and they laugh. Their laughter is like a bell that rings another bell—a bell in each of them, a bell in me. The more I watch them and the more I hear them, the brighter the vibration is within my own chest. I can feel it right between my lungs. A bell, bright and happy, begging to ring with them.

The world will never run out of predators worth turning to prey.

Dancing is one of the many ways we enter the lace.

Why yes, we say. You were Brayden.

We purify their flesh. The umbral honey flows from corruption, from the sacrifice of darkness to the light. That’s what makes it so potent. That’s why it takes just a drop to join us, here, within the mind that connects all things. We call it the lace. You’ve been here before. We can access it in many ways, but umbral honey is the purest. It unveils within us our most connected self.

But I remember the feeling of being spread through that brilliant network. The lace. It was like there was nothing to me at all, no body, no weight. I danced with the fluidity of thought, arcing like light between the small windows of other worlds. I felt all of them with the rich, casual certainty that they were mine.

And there was no Mars. No I. Just a thunderous us. A voice made out of all the voices, speaking in words made of pressure. A willpower that called itself we.

Wyatt’s eyes go wide. Those eyes. One brown and one bluish-brown. I stared into generations of those eyes, in the lace. Wyatt isn’t a Honey, my instincts say. Not yet at least. But I need to be sure of at least this.

“I get it,” I say. It’s the same—the way the Honeys buff away doubt and dissent, and Aspen binds its children in agreeable untruths. It’s pressure and persuasion, and if the Honeys wield it as some supernatural power, it’s only because they’ve concentrated the perfume Aspen has doused us with all along.

“I found enough to know that Caroline wasn’t alone in the end, after all.”

Restraint has done its job; in the slow language of patience, we learned about each other from afar, and grew toward this moment with slow, organic chance. When we crash together now, there’s no awkwardness of discomfort. Just an instantaneous intimacy, too perfect to be crafted. Perfect enough that it could only have evolved.

“Caroline was weak. She never should have been queened. We all knew it. Even she knew it! It’s no wonder the throne rotted her from the inside out. And then Sierra invites this into the brood?” She shoves an accusing finger at me. “A queen must be a queen. If she is anything less, the hive exterminates her!”

“Sierra created a liability and I moved to solve it. It was her mistake for getting in my way. I did what none of you could, and I did it in a way that gives you all plausible deniability. In other words, you’re welcome.”

I’m not so sure. The song of the hive is singing for me. It searches through my mind and, finding the knot of my pain, it picks at it. Unravels it. Begs it open so that it can fit itself inside.

“So dramatic, Mars. You’ve never needed anyone to tell you who you are. It’s what I admire about you most. No force on this planet can compare to that will of yours.” She taps my head.

Once upon a time, in a broken barn beneath the stars, Wyatt looked at me like he saw me. Not the abstraction, not the performance, but me, Mars. The person. When he looks at me now, it’s like he’s not sure what he’s seeing.