"Little Theta, it's me. It's really me. I'm Tserriednich. The Fourth Prince."
The silence on the other end lasted exactly as long as it would take someone to decide what kind of response to give.
"The Fourth Prince is dead," Theta said. "His obituary has been published nationally. If you're calling to tell me you're a dead person, I would need some evidence."
"Little Theta, I need you to secure the ant soldiers at the facility in—"
"I don't know what you're referring to." Her voice was completely flat. Professionally flat, in the specific way of someone who is aware their phone may be compromised and is performing for an audience. "The Fourth Prince is dead. This has been confirmed. I suggest you not call this number again."
The line went dead.
Chelich held the phone and looked at it.
That was not grief in Theta's voice. That was not even good acting. That was the specific performance of someone who knew they were monitored and was saying the minimum required to communicate maximum distance from whoever was calling. She had emphasized "the Fourth Prince is dead" twice in under thirty seconds. She had been doing it deliberately.
Which meant she was under surveillance. Which meant whoever had taken down the Fourth Prince had Theta's communications covered. Which meant this phone call had already been noted by someone.
Chelich set down the phone.
She opened the laptop, which was old enough to have a fan that sounded like a small agitated animal, and navigated to the Kakin news network. The obituary was there, front page, prominent placement, the photograph a formal one from three years ago. She looked at her own face in the photograph for a moment, noted that the face was objectively better than her current face, and moved on.
Benjamin's obituary was also there.
She had expected this. Benjamin's death had been part of the operation against her, presumably. She felt the mild satisfaction that Benjamin's death had always promised to produce, registered it cleanly, and continued scrolling.
The coronation photographs took up considerably more real estate than either obituary.
Camilla Hui Guo Rou, Second Prince of Kakin, crowned as the new monarch following King Nasubi's voluntary abdication citing health concerns. Multiple photographs from multiple angles. The formal ceremony. The crown. The expression on Camilla's face that was trying to be composed and was not entirely managing it, the specific expression of someone who has wanted something for a long time and is still in the process of believing they have it.
Chelich gripped the laptop edge.
She reviewed the sequence. Benjamin had been eliminated. She had been eliminated. The king had abdicated in favor of the only remaining viable candidate. The A-family, which had served as her external operations arm for years, was a criminal organization that survived by backing the right royal: they would have redirected their loyalties within twenty-four hours of her public death. The ant soldier facilities she had established were staffed by her own people, but her people had known her as Tserriednich, and Tserriednich was legally dead, and without his resources and authority they would be in disarray, and some of them would have tried to manage the soldier ants they were suddenly responsible for without support, and the soldier ants had been specifically designed to be loyal to one person and one person only.
She did not want to think about what those facilities looked like now.
Theta was under surveillance. The criminal network had flipped. The official record showed her dead. The royal household was under new management.
Camilla had done this with Kurapika's life-death verification as backup, which was the only explanation for how someone would have the confidence to proceed this methodically. She had known that Chelich's body was destroyed and had some mechanism for determining that Chelich was or was not dead, and had proceeded according to that assessment.
Did Camilla know she was still alive?
Chelich closed the laptop carefully instead of through the wall.
There was a kind of clarity available in having all one's external resources evaporate simultaneously. The previous identity, the resources, the networks, the political position, all of it: concluded. Whatever she did next, she would do as Chelich, starting from this abandoned building in the south of the Kukan'yu Kingdom, with a body that could walk through reinforced concrete and an Ant King for a sibling.
She went to find Meruem.
He was in the main room, which the ants had cleared of most of its original furniture and replaced with nothing, because ants did not require furniture. Meruem was in this room anyway, seated on the floor, one leg drawn up and one arm resting on the bent knee in the posture of someone who has decided that their own preferences determine the appropriate configuration for any given space. The laptop was in front of him. He was typing on the keyboard with his right hand.
The tail was also typing.
The needle-point tip of his tail moved across the keyboard at its own speed, which was considerable, covering different keys than the right hand in a rhythm that suggested two independent trains of thought finding parallel expression on the same device. The screen was cycling through open tabs faster than most people could track.
"There are fewer division commanders than there were," Chelich said.
"Correct," Meruem said. He did not look up.
"I would appreciate an explanation of where they went."
He pulled up a video. It was a compilation someone had made of military hardware, the assembled capability of the world's major powers displayed in sequence: precision-guided munitions, fuel-air explosions, naval bombardment, long-range ballistic projectiles, and toward the end, the archived footage from the two cities in the eastern island nation that had been reduced to ash decades ago. The thermal columns. The radius. The specific quality of destruction that did not have a natural analogue.
Meruem's tail tip tapped the screen where the thermal column was brightest.
"It seems powerful," he said. "I sent some to test whether it is as powerful as it appears."
The specific emotion that moved through Chelich at this statement was one she had not expected to feel as an ant, which was the emotion of a military strategist watching resources be committed to a test that could have been conducted theoretically.
"Those were my subordinates," she said.
"They were in this nest when I was born," Meruem said, in the tone of someone clarifying a definitional point. "They are mine."
Chelich took a breath.
The En she had been maintaining told her that the distribution of large bodies in the building had changed since she last checked. She extended it further, which was uncomfortable compared to what it had been before she had a body designed for this, but functional.
The three guards were gone. All three of them.
"You sent all three of them?" she said.
"Youpi is handling something that came close. Pitou and Pufu are gathering information." He closed the military footage tab. "Do you have something to say, or are you here to observe me typing?"
What Chelich had to say was that this was strategically identical to what the ant colonies in canon had done, which was to operate with complete disregard for the visibility cost of their activities, which was the behavior that had produced a response culminating in a man with a bomb inside him walking into a room containing the Ant King. She had been planning to discuss this at length, with examples.
She looked at his En.
The diameter of Meruem's En extended outward from his body with the quiet, comprehensive expansion of something that was not trying hard. She pushed her own sensitivity to its limit and probed the boundary of it.
She did not find the boundary within her own considerable range.
Conservative estimate: a hundred kilometers in every direction. No living presence she could detect. The wilderness zone Pariston had selected for the facility was doing its job, and Meruem's En had covered the entire thing and continued past it.
"If there are not enough soldiers, the queen can produce more," Chelich said.
"Yes," Meruem said. He had moved to a different tab. Something involving maps.
Chelich decided to accelerate her own timeline. If Meruem was going to spend his first days in the world conducting field tests of military capability with the ant army, she was better served working around that than attempting to stop it. She would send a small contingent to Kakin. Something calibrated, something that would create a problem for Camilla and simultaneously flush out the people who had helped Camilla, specifically the person who had been present at the airport and who she very much intended to meet again.
She went to arrange this.
Behind her, Meruem was still on the laptop. He had been navigating through network infrastructure with the methodical interest of someone learning the shape of a new environment, opening things and reading them and following the connections they led to. He had, in the process, accumulated a considerable amount of information about how human society had organized its knowledge and why.
A window appeared on the screen.
Not a webpage. Not a search result. A dialogue box that had opened from somewhere he could not immediately trace, sitting on top of everything else, refusing to minimize or close.
It read: Are you an AI program that has just been born with self-awareness, or a human who has just been uploaded to the internet world?
Meruem tried to close it. The close button did not produce a close. He tried several alternatives. The window sat where it was with the patience of something that did not need to be anywhere else.
He looked at the question for a moment.
He positioned his tail needle at the bottom of the window and typed: What is the difference between those two?