The sun was harsher than Melissa had expected. Both herself and Iorek found themselves squinting as they stepped out into the light, sniffing in unison as a subtle sweetness hitched a ride on the breeze. Melissa stretched one hand out in front of her, the other shielding her eyes, and felt that breeze whispering through her fingers. It felt like the air that flowed from the ventilation shafts of the vault, but in some way softer. It rustled the leaves of the trees all around like a chorus of tiny tambourines. The noises were gentle, alien after a lifetime of metallic clanging and mechanical whirring in the background of every room Melissa had ever known.
“Come,” said Iorek, deep and low. “Best move while we have the light.”
He led the way, though nominally Melissa was the one in charge. She kicked her feet out as she walked behind him, her boots knocking over thin mounds of dirt back into the furrows left in the wake of his claws. If Iorek asked, she would say that she was covering their tracks, hiding the path back to the vault. In truth, she simply found the action fun. Ironically, there was no dirt to play with when you lived underground, and on the surface, there was nobody left to threaten the vault should they follow the trail backwards.
Their pace was slow as they moved through the forest, the young woman stopping every minute or so to marvel at a new discovery. She rubbed her fingers in the sticky sap that seeped from the cracked bark of a pine tree and laughed when Iorek licked them clean. She gazed fondly at the gills of oyster mushrooms growing up out of the rotting wood of a forgotten stump. She gasped and giggled when a pigeon swooped past her head, landing on the forest floor to pluck an earthworm from between the lush blades of grass and then ascend into the canopy once again.
“It’s so beautiful up here,” Melissa murmured dreamily as she stroked the white hair that crowned Iorek’s black face.
“Beautiful, but dangerous,” he replied. “Remember your mission, Melissa.”
She remembered the mission, of course. It was hard to forget something you had heard about every day of your life. Melissa Beckett, the girl with the bee in her brain, is destined to save the world.
Melissa was ten the day Iorek was born. In fact, it was her tenth birthday. She was in her bedroom, head buried in a book, when Dr. von Schreber came to get her. The room had little in the way of decoration, the walls all galvanised steel and the floor covered in faded burgundy carpet. In the corner was a bookcase, tomes stacked haphazardly wherever they would fit, and a growing pile beginning to reach up from the top of the case to the roof. Beside the bookcase was a stepladder, for obvious reasons. She had a closet for her clothes and a bed for sleeping in. She was under the bed when Dr. von Schreber found her. She heard his knees crack as he got down on all fours to peer beneath the bedframe and smile at her.
“Happy birthday, Melissa,” he said. “Soon you’ll be too big and tall to fit under there, hmmm? Perhaps then you’ll go to the library and read with the other children?”
She shook her head, golden curls whipping back and forth past her face, and returned to reading.
“I see,” he continued, “and I appreciate your trepidation. People can be so cruel to that which they don’t understand, and children understand so little of the world. That being said, today is your birthday, Melissa. It’s not every day a brave little girl turns ten, now is it? And brave little girls get exciting presents for such important birthdays, don’t they?”
The mention of presents dragged her face away from the pages. She shimmied forward as Dr. von Schreber moved out of her way and strenuously pulled himself back to his feet. She took his hand, her book still clasped in the other, and together they strolled out her bedroom door and through the labyrinth of chrome corridors that separated them from the laboratory. When they arrived, Dr. von Schreber pulled his surgical scrubs over his clothes, the cap and gown, gloves, and mask, and then helped Melissa into a smaller but otherwise identical outfit. He took her book and promised it would still be on the table outside when they returned, then led her inside.
She did not recognise anyone else in the laboratory, but most of the lights had been dimmed, and their faces were hidden behind masks and shadows. A white tarp, speckled with red, covered something on a nearby table. She heard whispers, fragments of conversations. Unexpectedly large… and …too much internal damage… and …not important. She ignored them, gripping Dr. von Schreber’s hand tighter as they made their way to the centre of the room. Overhead was the only light in the room still at full brilliance, and it acted as a spotlight shining down on the incubator beneath it. Melissa could feel the eyes of the doctors and scientists on her as she approached the glass, and for a second, she wondered if they were going to trap her inside. She was about to turn to Dr. von Schreber, to promise to play with the other children and be nice to them and be a normal little girl, a good girl, and then she saw movement on the other side of the glass. The creature that burrowed out from a nest of blankets was blind and pink, and about the same size as Mangy the vault cat. It wriggled around in the incubator, four limbs flailing pathetically, and let out a series of weak cries.
“I know he’s not much to look at right now,” said Dr. von Schreber, placing his hand on Melissa’s shoulder, “but he’ll grow quick enough. He’ll soon be the perfect companion to help a brave little girl save the world, hmmm? Would you like to give your new friend a name?”
She thought about her book lying on the table outside. Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. There was a little girl in that book, a girl who had to save the world as she did. And that little girl made a friend along the way, a fearsome friend who protected her and kept her safe.
“Iorek,” Melissa replied, reaching out and pressing her latex-covered fingers against the glass. “His name is Iorek.”
Melissa’s Iorek was not the same as the Iorek from her book. She found herself thinking, not for the first time, about the differences between the two as they set up camp for the night. Book Iorek was a magical polar bear; her Iorek was a genetically engineered honey badger. Book Iorek had a suit of armour; her Iorek had skin so thick he did not need armour. Book Iorek was a king among his people, her Iorek had no people. Just like her, he was a freak. In that sense, he did have a people, or at least one person. That was part of the reason the Council created him, to mitigate her isolation from the humans who dwelt in the vault. On top of that, her mother had also died in childbirth.
She cooked a ration pack over the campfire while Iorek went out foraging. Honey badgers could eat almost anything naturally, and the Council’s editing of Iorek's genetic code in the womb meant that his vast dietary range was expanded even further. His biggest issue was quantity rather than quality. He was ten feet long, six feet tall at the shoulder, and weighed over two thousand pounds. A body like that required a lot of feeding.
When he returned, his snout was coated in dirt, and there was a faint smell of blood about him. She did not ask about his dinner, and he did not volunteer the information. He simply lay down near the fire and waited for her to sit beside him and lean back into his furry flank before curling himself around her. Instantly, she felt a sense of relief. The world above was exciting but also terrifying, and even below the trees, it was more open space than she was accustomed to. She pretended his body had become the walls of her bedroom and the beating of his heart had become the steady thumping of the vault’s life-support systems, and soon she was drifting off to sleep.
Iorek was already up when she awoke, digging a hole for the smouldering embers of last night’s fire. She drank a mouthful of fortified water from her canteen and then packed it away, slinging the bag over her shoulder and following Iorek through the trees once again. The sounds of animals crashing through the undergrowth were never far from their ears, and once or twice Melissa caught a glimpse of a deer bounding away from them. They were frightened, she realised. Probably by Iorek, his predator scent and the trembling of the earth beneath his heavy razor footsteps. Some small part of her wondered, however, if she was in fact the harbinger of terror among the forest fauna. Generations had passed since any of them had smelled a human, but genetic memory is a powerful instinct.
Soon, they left the cover of the trees and found themselves on the bank of a great river. The water was vast, flowing rapidly southwards. On the far bank lay the ruins of the city, steel and concrete behemoths, worse for wear but still standing. The sweetness in the air was stronger here than it had been outside the vault. Melissa could see saliva dripping from Iorek’s jowls.
“Come on, Iorek,” she insisted, “the Council said there should be some kind of tunnel around here we can use to cross the river.”
They made their way to the water’s edge and turned north, stopping to drink along the way. The river was icy cold, and so clear Melissa could see the whole way down to the silty bed where oysters and mussels were filter feeding. Fish of all shapes and sizes swam about, seemingly immune to the current, nibbling at aquatic plants or digging small crustaceans out of the mud. Her biggest surprise was not the abundant life that made the river home, however, but the taste of the water. It tasted like sugar and fresh fruit, and the scent of a rose all mixed into one. She took a sip from her canteen and almost recoiled at the blandness that coated her tongue, so overwhelming that she had to fill her cupped hands with river water again and drink deeply to wash away the non-taste of the vault’s sterile water.
Further along the bank, they found the hairy blob. Almost as big as Iorek, a great misshapen lump lying half-submerged in the shallows, lank brown fur clinging to the hills and valleys of its flesh, limbs barely recognisable amid the mountains and the craters of cold meat. The head, if it was the head, was beneath the surface of the water, and the small fish were stripping it bare. Iorek edged closer to the blob, his claws sinking into the soft mud until he stood next to it, sniffing tentatively. After taking in the scent, he turned his head and called back to Melissa.
“Grizzly bear. Stomach full of honey. Veins full of venom.”
They left the dead bear behind quickly. No further discussion was needed of the fate that had befallen the animal. That had befallen so many animals, so many people over the years. The tunnel, when they found it, was luckily still intact. Rusted vehicle carcasses were lined up from the grassy meadows that had once been asphalt into the darkness beneath the river, queuing eternally like condemned souls awaiting judgement and Tartarus. Iorek forged ahead, oxidised steel and flaking rubber crumbling at his rough touch, and Melissa strolled through the path left behind him. Together, they delved away from the light, away from the surface world after only the briefest of introductions.
Melissa was twelve the day the Council told her why she was different, why she was going to save the world. Dr. von Schreber was dead. His body, from the creaky knees to the cancerous spleen that killed him, had been ground up for fertiliser. He had been replaced as her handler by Dr. Gray, and she was now old enough to understand that she had a handler. She did not like Dr. Gray, and neither did Iorek. To be more accurate, it was Iorek’s intense dislike of the young scientist that fueled Melissa’s own distaste for him. The honey badger was only just out of his cub phase, growing bigger and smarter every day, but still an infant really, yet Melissa trusted his judgement of people more than she trusted her own. Sitting in Dr. Gray’s office, waiting for him to explain why she was there, she had a nagging feeling that he would soon prove herself and Iorek right.
“Melissa,” he said, not bothering to look up from his computer, “the Council has decided that it’s time to proceed with a very special project, one that you play a central role in. Do you know why you’re so important to our future?”
She shook her head.
“Dr. von Schreber never told you? To be expected, I suppose. Even a brilliant scientist is entitled to his flaws, and Christian’s was his sentimentality.”
Dr. Gray finished his typing and rolled his chair out from behind his desk, shuffling over until he sat face to face with the young girl.
“Long before you were born, Dr. von Schreber came up with a theory. He believed that the nervous systems of two completely separate organisms could, under the right circumstances, be fused into a single super-organism. For our purposes, we wanted to create a being that would combine the best of both humans and apiformes. Are you following so far?”
Melissa nodded. It sounded like Dr. von Schreber had been a very important man in the vault, more important than she had ever realised. She wondered why the old man had never told her the things Dr. Gray was telling her now.
“Excellent,” he continued. “I was only studying to become a scientist myself at the time, so I wasn’t there to witness the early experiments. The Council’s research files indicate that those experiments all ended in abject failure, however. The nervous systems of the volunteers and the bees we used never fused properly. They rejected each other, and shortly after, they expired. Dr. von Schreber finally realised that the problem was that we were attempting to fuse two fully developed nervous systems together. Imagine you’re making a cake. You’ve made cakes in school, yes? Excellent. Now imagine you take each individual ingredient, the flour, the eggs, and the rest, and you put all of them in their own pots and pans to cook them. Then, when they’re fully cooked, you mix them together. Would you have a lovely cake at the end?”
“No, you’d have a big mess,” she replied.
“That’s right. Those early experiments gave us big messes because all the ingredients were finished cooking when we tried to add them together. That’s where you come in.”
Dr. Gray rolled himself back behind his desk and tapped at his keyboard a few times, presumably bringing up Melissa’s file. He turned his computer screen around to show her the X-rays of herself just a few days after her birth. There was something in her skull, a bright speck next to the ghost of her pituitary gland. She gripped the arms of her chair tighter.
“We took a bee larva, one that we knew was genetically predisposed to develop into a queen, and surgically grafted it onto your brain. This might be somewhat beyond you and your age, Melissa, but I want to stress how incredibly brilliant Dr. von Schreber’s work was. The bee is just as much a part of your brain as your cerebellum or your hypothalamus, and it’s the functions of this unique organ that we’re hoping will help us save the world. Do you have any questions?”
She was silent for several minutes, wishing Iorek were beside her. When she was upset, running her fingers through Iorek’s fur always helped to calm her down. Now she thought her fingernails would leave dents in the hard plastic where she gripped the chair.
“The bug in my head?” she finally asked. “How do you get it out?”
“Get it out? Melissa, weren't you listening? The queen bee is a part of you, removing it would be akin to a lobotomy. And even if the risk to your cognitive functions wasn’t extraordinarily high, such an action would render over a decade of work completely pointless. Humanity would be back to square one. No, there’ll be no more talk of brain surgery from you, young lady. Now follow me. It’s time to test Dr. von Schreber’s hypothesis.”
She followed Dr. Gray out of his office and down through the corridors towards the laboratory, even though she did not want to. He did not hold her hand, and she did not want him to. She thought about running, but knew it was useless. There was nowhere to go in the vault, nowhere that the Council would be unable to reach her. When they reached the laboratory, Dr Gray ushered her inside, and Melissa found the room empty aside from a glass partition splitting the space in two. On the other side of the glass sat Iorek. He raised his paw and waved at her, and she smiled and waved back. If Iorek were here, everything would be ok. Then she heard Dr. Gray’s voice emanate from unseen speakers.
“Begin test.”
A panel in the roof slid open, and Melissa felt the buzzing in her bones before she even heard them. One by one, they descended from the ceiling. Three massive bees. Each of them was the size of a football, wings beating so fast they were just a blur. Black and yellow fuzz seemed to bristle as they languidly circled her half of the room, large black eyes taking her in, long segmented legs dangling lazily, curved stingers glinting under the fluorescent lights. Soon they landed on the floor and began darting this way and that, probing the walls with their antennae, passing so close to her that she felt their papery wings brush against the bare skin of her legs. Her heart, which had been hammering on her ribcage in a desperate bid for freedom, began to slow as she realised that the bees were ignoring her. She took a small step towards one. No reaction. She took another step. The bee looked up at her and took flight. It hoovered in front of her face, then began to wiggle its legs and sway around in the air. She giggled then, because the bee looked like it was dancing.
“Excellent.” She heard Dr. Gray’s voice again. “Begin test control.”
With a hiss, a small section of the glass partition slid up into the roof, and all three of the bees shot towards it with a furious buzzing. Melissa’s laughter died in her throat as she watched them fly into the other half of the laboratory and descend on Iorek. The honey badger fell backwards, swiping clumsily at the air above him as the bees darted in again and again to stab at him with their stingers. She ran forward to press herself against the glass, watching in horror.
“Lissa! Lissa!” She heard him cry as they stung him.
Tears flowed freely down her cheeks as she screamed, pounding her fists on the glass, begging Dr. Gray to make them stop. Her heart was racing again, blood and buzzing, and the cries of her best friend filled her ears in a crescendo until his furry body went limp under the assault of the venomous stingers.
The memory of Iorek’s unmoving form and the buzzing of the super-bees was still clinging to Melissa’s mind as she emerged from the stagnant shadows of the tunnel and into the city. Iorek had not died that day, of course. A few hours after Dr. Gray’s test, another scientist led the honey badger into Melissa’s room, tired and sore but very much alive, his body having broken down the bee venom before it could cause any serious damage.
The test had proven Dr. von Schreber right, much to Dr. Gray’s delight. The super-bees, which attacked any perceived threat with a vicious and tenacious fury, saw Melissa as one of their own. She alone could venture forth from the vault and walk the surface world, safe from the planet’s new apiform overlords.
The city had been built to last, yet signs of abandonment were everywhere. The skyscrapers were missing chunks where structural flaws had finally revealed themselves, and some had clearly collapsed onto and into their neighbours. The asphalt and concrete of the roads and sidewalks were shattered, leaving barren archipelagos in narrow seas of hardy grasses and flowering weeds. Like the tunnel, the streets were filled with the rusted remains of cars that had been exposed to the elements for over a century.
Construction within the borders of the city had not ceased with the flight of humankind, however. Everywhere Melissa and Iorek looked, they could see them. Beehives. Not super-bee hives, though there were surely plenty of those around. Regular beehives dotted the urban landscape, in the trees that lined the avenues and filling the gaps in the crumbling masonry of the old world. They jutted out from the corners of buildings like gargoyles, and honey dripped from them in abundance so that Melissa’s boots stuck slightly to the ground as she walked. In the broken gutters flowed tiny streams of the viscous syrup that disappeared through grates into ancient pipes.
“I guess that explains why the river water is so sweet,” Melissa muttered, lifting her foot to examine the shiny strands that connected her sole to the asphalt.
Iorek grunted in response, and they continued on. There was a soft buzzing in the air, and she knew it made him uncomfortable. She was not the only one who remembered Dr. Gray’s test. The bees that lived in those hives in the trees above their heads, barely bigger than her thumbnail, he would not even notice their stings if they chose to attack him. She knew he knew this, yet the honey badger sometimes woke in the middle of the night, groaning quietly about the fire of bee venom in his veins.
They slipped down a side alley to avoid a wall of rubble blocking their path. Detours aside, they knew they had to head north. Those were the Council’s instructions, the path to completing the mission. Viscidly, they trudged towards the far end of the alley, Melissa in the lead and Iorek’s great frame brushing against the walls on either side of them. She stopped so suddenly that his snout bumped into her back between her shoulder blades and nearly knocked her over. On one of the walls, protected from the elements by the narrow confines of the alley, was a piece of graffiti. She read the stylised lettering, then read it again. And then she laughed.
“What is it?” Iorek asked, and she had to remind herself that despite his intelligence, he was illiterate.
“It says ‘BE KIND, BEEPOCALYPSE!’,” she wheezed, her laughter sucking the air from her lungs and making her ribs ache.
“And this is funny?”
“I guess so,” she replied after a moment of deep breathing. “I mean, the world was ending. Super-bees were killing people faster than we could kill them. Cities like this were being evacuated while death swarms descended from the sky. And somebody stopped in the middle of all that chaos to paint this, to ask the beepocalypse to be kind. I don’t know Iorek. Maybe it was hopeful, maybe it was sarcastic. But it’s kinda funny that the last message humans left for the world before we fled underground was ‘be kind’, isn’t it?”
“If you say so, Melissa.”
The colours seemed to explode all around them as they left the shade of the alley. Flowering plants were everywhere on the avenue, blues and yellows, reds and purples, pinks and whites. The tiny bees danced from one flower to the next, paying the two newcomers no mind as they gathered nectar and pollen to bring back to their hives. To the north, Melissa and Iorek could see the mighty trees of a forest framed by the decaying husks of skyscrapers. They continued on, their destination ever closer.
Before they reached the forest, Melissa stopped to fish around in her bag for a ration pack. The gloop was easier to stomach when it was heated up, but it was safe to eat straight from the packet too. She wondered if Iorek was as hungry as she was, and soon found her pondering answered by a deep gurgling from the honey badger’s flank. She laughed and patted his side, then felt awful for laughing. The city was full of trees and flowers, but they had seen nothing with fruit or nuts or berries. And no animals other than bees. Evidently, it had not occurred to the Council that there would be nothing for Iorek to eat once they crossed the river. She was about to fish out another ration pack and offer it to him when he lifted his paw and pointed. Ahead of them, on the last corner before the forest began, was the first super-bee hive they had seen. A faded fast-food mascot watched over the new honeycomb walls that had replaced glass and steel, the hives clearly filling up the entire space of what had once been a restaurant. Iorek began to creep forward.
“Iorek!” Melissa hissed. “No! It’s too dangerous!”
“A stomach full of super-bee honey will keep me going for days, Melissa,” he growled back over his shoulder. “I won’t end up like the bear. I was made for this.”
She watched, feeling helpless, as he kept moving towards the hive. They were downwind of his target, hiding his scent from what lay within, but still he moved cautiously. The closer he got before the alarm was sounded, the more time he would have to gorge himself. Even honey badgers could be overwhelmed by an angry colony if they loitered too long. Several tense minutes passed before he reached the wall of the hive. With the spectral smile of the mascot over his head, he reared up on his hind legs and roared as he tore through the wall with his claws and forced his way inside.
Even down the avenue, Melissa could hear the frantic buzzing of the bees going on the defensive. Battle-cry vibrations echoed off the concrete. The tiny bees all took flight from the flowers at once and fled in every direction, presumably returning to their own hives. She tapped her foot nervously. The memories of Dr. Gray’s test came rushing back to her, and she had to remind herself that just like her, Iorek was no longer a child. At eight years old, he was the badger equivalent of a man in his thirties, when the wisdom of age was beginning to show, and the vigour of youth was not quite ready to fade. The buzzing was growing louder. She stepped forward. How long would he need to eat? How long would he want to? How long would he be able to, under the hammer of the swarm? Then she heard him yowling, his anguish piercing through the buzz, and she was running.
Carnage greeted her when she reached the hole in the hive wall where Iorek had invaded. Honey was flowing freely into the street, and when she saw him, she could see it was dripping from his snout and forepaws. He was standing on his hind legs again, head pressed against the wax-coated roof, swiping at his legion arthropod adversaries. Dozens of corpses already littered the floor around him, cleaved at odd angles by his claws, but more of the giant bees crawled out of the honeycomb to replace the fallen. One of the bees darted up to try and strike at Iorek’s eye, and he slammed his paws together around the insect’s head, spattering its insides over the dark fur of his underside before letting it drop to the ground where its legs continued to twitch feebly.
Each attack he repelled was matched by a dozen stings that broke through his defences, though. Melissa could see him beginning to weaken, his swiping getting slower and his roaring growing fainter. With a thud that shook the entire hive, he fell forward onto four legs again, and the bees converged. They latched onto every exposed inch of his body, from his honey-coated snout to the tip of his tail, striking with their stingers and flapping their wings with ever more intensity. Melissa knew what they were trying to do. She had seen this before.
“STOP IT!” she yelled.
To her surprise, they did. She felt something as she shouted, something deep in her grey matter flowing out, something ethereal. All at once, the bees stopped their stinging and their buzzing, resting immobile on Iorek’s heaving form, compound eyes all pointed in her direction. There was a tingling in her head that radiated down her spine until she felt stars in her fingertips. The only sounds throughout the hive were the whistle of the wind from outside and Iorek’s heavy panting, matched by her own. The bees were silent and seemed to be waiting. She heard Iorek groan from beneath them.
“Leave him alone,” she said firmly.
The swarm departed from the black-and-white landscape of Iorek’s fur all at once. Their buzzing was softer now. The honey badger lumbered past his charge, out through the hole in the hive wall, where he lay down and lapped at the river of honey that flowed from his demolition work. Melissa remained where she was, watching the bees. They began to weave around each other in the sweetened air, painting a writhing tapestry with their bodies. Their legs wriggled in sync. The tingling in her brain flared as she gazed at the whirling mass of black and yellow before her, and she felt it spread into the muscles of her legs and draw her closer to the dance. With all her strength, she tore her eyes from the bees and turned, running back to the street.
Iorek was licking his wounds when she left the hive, but did not seem seriously injured. They moved on before the bees decided to follow them outside. Melissa still had the swirling patterns of the bee dance etched on her retina. She found herself unable to shake the feeling that they had been trying to tell her something, and the feeling only grew stronger as she and Iorek made their way through the forest in the middle of the city. There were hives in the trees, regular hives, and if they spotted signs of another super-bee hive nearby, they skirted around. Here and there, they passed a carousel or a kiosk around which flowering vines had grown, or half-disintegrated statues. Signs that this wilderness was growing up from the compost of civilisation.
“So…” Iorek began, breaking the silence.
“So,” Melissa responded.
“Back in the hive… That was not something Dr. von Schreber predicted…”
She could see the concern in his eyes as he spoke. Like her, he had been raised with a single purpose in mind. The mission. Save the world. The Council had laid out its plan, and the pair of them were to follow it to the letter. There was never a question of deviation. Variables got under Iorek’s skin far more efficiently than any sting, and Melissa too was unnerved by the strange ability she had seemingly uncovered. Dr. von Schreber’s plan was centred around the fact that she could walk freely among the apiformes on the surface; he and the Council had never expected her to control them. She reached out and placed her hand against Iorek’s shoulder, feeling a wound that was already closing over.
“For now, nothing changes,” she told him. “We still have our mission.”
Melissa was fifteen the day Dr. Gray finally explained what her mission would be. Details, not just the vague statements about being special and saving the world that she had heard all her life. She and Iorek sat in the doctor’s office, the honey badger curled around her chair protectively. Iorek was now fully grown, and some of the doors in the vault had been widened specially for him. Dr. Gray had complained about it, but quickly accepted the necessity when it became clear that Melissa went nowhere without her mellivorous companion. Now the three of them sat watching a viewscreen as it played a short video.
The drone that was filming swooped through the city with falcon grace, the noise of its motors designed to mimic the buzzing of a super-bee. It climbed higher among the dead towers, keeping above the elevation where bees would build their hives, heading straight for the heart of the urban island. The ruins gave way to treetops as it flew over the forest that surrounded its destination, and then the camera altered its angle on the approach. There was a meadow in the middle of the sea of foliage, and at the centre of that meadow rose a great honeycomb tower. The hive was not nearly as tall as many of the skyscrapers that dotted the cityscape, but it rose high above the trees, and the drone had to adjust its trajectory upwards to aim itself at the entrance located near the apex.
Inside the hexagon tunnels, the drone buzzed quietly along. The camera swung from side to side, searching. The hunt was cut short with the arrival of the swarm, however. Super-bees poured down the passageway, a great insectoid wave, and the screen went dark under the flood. For a few minutes, the sound of harsh buzzing continued to emanate from the viewscreen, then the feed cut out completely.
“That’s called a ‘hot defensive bee ball’,” said Dr. Gray. “The swarm surrounds the threat, each individual raising their core body temperature to cook the predator alive. You can see why we quickly abandoned the idea of using drones to attack the hive.”
The next video began to play. The footage was not as smooth as what was filmed by the drone, shaking slightly as the honey badger with the camera ran through the trees towards the hive. There were two more badgers sprinting ahead of it, none of them quite as large as Iorek but still showing obvious signs of the Council's genetic machinations. The hive loomed large through the green tint of the night-vision lens, and then the badgers fell on it and tore through the structure with their claws and teeth.
“This is Ratel Three,” came the voice of the badger behind the camera. “Strike team has breached the perimeter. Heading for the queen cell now.”
The badgers dug their way into another tunnel, this one lined on either side with brood cells in which larvae wriggled, terrified. One of the badgers stuck his head into a cell and chomped down on the infant bee, swallowing the juicy meat in two gulps and licking his lips as he pulled his head back out. Buzzing signalled the arrival of the swarm, just as it had when the drone invaded. The badgers fought violently against the cloud of angry insects, crushing and cleaving and biting all around them, their thick skin keeping out the worst of the stings. One of them opened his mouth wide to roar at the buzzing soldiers, and one of the bees flew itself directly into the gaping maw to plant its sting upwards into the badger’s brain. The badger’s eyes rolled back in their sockets, and its heavy body fell to the hive floor with a defeated thud.
“Ratel Two is down! I repeat, Ratel Two is down!”
The battle dragged on for nearly half an hour. The floor was so littered with bee corpses that every step the badgers took crunched like they were walking over the crisp fallen leaves of autumn. Eventually, however, the numbers of the swarm proved too great. Ratel One and Ratel Three collapsed under the assault of the bee stings, and the camera continued to record as the bees pumped their unmoving bodies with more venom than their metabolism could break down. Dr. Gray stopped the video and turned to Melissa and Iorek.
“And this is why the Honey Badger Program was discontinued. After this, we knew we needed to try a different tactic, but until Dr. von Schreber, we had no idea what that tactic would be.”
Melissa could feel the tension radiating off of Iorek’s body. His entire life, he had been surrounded solely by humans, and his first time seeing his own kind was old video footage of their slaughter. She balled her fists and chewed on the inside of her cheek to keep herself from crying. If Dr. Gray noticed the emotional state of his guests, he gave no indication; instead, he continued speaking as the viewscreen changed to show a diagram of Melissa’s body.
“You already know that you’re the only successful example of nervous system fusion. We’ve proven that the queen bee in your brain tricks the super-bees into thinking you’re one of them. Dr. von Schreber’s surgery wasn’t the only one you went through though.”
The diagram on the viewscreen zoomed in on Melissa’s right arm, switching to x-ray, and she saw the long black spike hidden among the whites of her bones.
“A graft was made in your arm, as you can see. A weapon, one that would grow alongside you and the guest in your grey matter. That stinger was genetically coded to cook up a lethal toxin in its venom sac. Like many venomous animals, however, you need to reach a certain level of physical maturity before the poison is effective. We estimate you’ve got a few years left, but once you’re ready, you’ll be able to leave the vault and track down your target, the Prime Queen.”
Melissa rubbed her right arm. It did not feel any different from what it had been a few moments ago, yet she was suddenly acutely aware of the aberration in her form. The limb looked human, but it was not. Not fully, anyway.
“What’s a Prime Queen?” she asked, desperate to turn the conversation away from her body.
“The original super-bee,” Dr. Gray replied. “The first of her kind, genetically engineered to combat the colony collapse threatening global bee populations and the world’s pollination system. Scientists back then didn’t know everything that the Council knows now, especially about genetics. In their bid to save the world, they ended it. Their experiments changed the bees in ways none of them ever predicted, and we’ve paid the price for their mistakes ever since. But you, Melissa, you can help us atone for those failures.”
“Wasn’t the end of the world like, a hundred years ago or something?” she said. “The first super-bee has got to be long dead by now, right?”
“Our information says that she’s alive. Not only that, but it seems that she’s the only queen capable of producing more queens. Their entire reproductive system, their entire species, it all hinges on a single individual. That’s where you come in, Melissa. That’s your mission.”
She reached out and stroked Iorek’s fur. Dr. Gray was up and pacing the room with excitement, rambling about the future, and she let him talk without interrupting. Inside, she wondered what place there would be in a human’s world for freaks like her and Iorek.
Standing outside the central hive, Melissa put her hands on her hips and took a deep breath. When she looked up, the peak of the tower seemed to sway against the blue background of the sky, and the ground beneath her feet no longer felt solid. The stinger in her arm burned, with fear or anticipation she did not know, and she lowered her gaze before her stomach could twist and paint the outside of the hive with half-digested ration pack. The queen cell was not at the top of the tower anyway. Neither the drone nor the honey badgers had ever come close to completing the mission. The Prime Queen was hidden deep underground, safe from anything the humans could throw at her. Well, almost anything.
“You don’t have to come with me,” Melissa said, looking at the scuffed surface of her boots. “You got me here safely; I can handle whatever is waiting inside.”
“I know you can,” she heard Iorek’s voice beside her, “but my mission isn’t to get you to the hive. My mission is to get you to the queen. Even Dr. Gray admitted that the Council has no idea if you can fool her like you can fool the worker super-bees. And if she decides you’re a threat, the entire hive could turn on you. I was created to protect you, Melissa. I’m not going to stop now.”
She looked up at him then, and his teeth were bared in what she realised was his approximation of a smile. She returned the gesture, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face in his fur.
“Thank you, Iorek.”
After a moment, she stepped back, allowing him to approach the wall of the hive and begin to claw his way through it. The wall was thicker than the one he had destroyed in the city, and it took him several minutes to breach. She followed him through the hole when it was wide enough for him, rummaging in her pack once again. Beyond the halo of sunlight piercing the hive around them, the space was dark. The Council had prepared her for this, however, and from her bag she pulled a set of night-vision goggles. She had not used them in the tunnel beneath the river because the battery life was limited, but she could not afford to be blind so deep in enemy territory. Iorek’s eyes were keener than hers, his sense of smell incomparably better. The shadowy tunnels of the hive would pose no issue for him. He sniffed at the air and turned left.
“This way,” he grunted.
Their feet stuck to the floor as they walked. The soles of Melissa’s boots soon had a growing layer of honey coating them, and they squelched with every footstep. The noise echoed down the tunnel, all by its lonesome, and Melissa found herself holding her breath every few minutes, waiting to hear the sound of buzzing growing steadily louder. The sound never came, however. Deeper into the hive they went. They saw super-bees crawling along the walls, tending to the larvae in their cells. The bees watched the intruders as they went about their tasks but did not attack, not even when Iorek’s presence provoked their fury.
“Are you keeping them at bay?” he asked her.
“No, this isn’t me,” she whispered back, worry knotting in the pit of her stomach.
Neither the girl nor the badger could have said with any accuracy how far they walked through the looping tunnels and dark caverns of the hive with nothing but Iorek’s nose to guide them. Despite her earlier trepidation, Melissa was glad he had insisted on joining her for the final leg of the journey. Without him, she would have surely lost her way in the super-bees’ maze of hexagonal corridors. But beneath the comfort he brought her was a growing sense of unease at the placidity of the bees. Why were they not attacking him? A predator so deep in their haven should have the entire colony on high alert, and yet the workers gave Iorek no more consideration than the residents of the vault had. A look of mild and fleeting curiosity before returning to the routine of life.
“We’re getting close now,” she heard him say.
She rubbed her right forearm again, feeling the stinger burn. For eighteen years, she had been moulded, mentally, physically, and genetically, to complete this mission. Now the end was in sight. They turned a corner and, for the first time since breaking through the wall of the hive, found their way blocked. Half a dozen super-bees guarded the path, one perched on each flat plane of the hexagonal tunnel. These bees were much larger than the football-sized workers up above. Each of them was as big as the stuffed German Shepherd in the vault’s Museum of Genetics. Iorek took a step forward, and the bees alighted from their perches, vicious buzzing filling the tight space as they glided forth in unison. Iorek took another step, and the closest bee jabbed at him with its stinger.
“Let us pass,” Melissa commanded them.
She tried to conjure up the feeling in her brain, the one that had accompanied her control of the bees in the city. Something was blocking her, however. Her mind felt like it was coated in honey, thick and sticky, a layer of resistance keeping her abilities locked inside her. The bees ignored her order, hovering in formation. Around each other, they twirled, slowly, legs wriggling to an apiform choreography. The dance was subtle, in the confines of the tunnel, but meaning began to dawn on Melissa as she watched them moving through the green-tinted lenses of her goggles.
“Iorek, I think they’re trying to talk to me,” she said. “I think they want me to go alone.”
“No!” he shouted, twisting his body between her and the bees. “I can’t protect you if I’m not with you, Melissa. There are only six of them, I’ll tear them apart in seconds.”
She reached forward to hold his face in her hands.
“I know you would, but more would come. Enough to overwhelm even you. I feel like this is the way it has to be, Iorek. There was a reason we were allowed to get this far unharmed. And there’s a reason I’m the only one allowed to go any further. I’m glad you’re here with me, but I have to complete my mission alone.”
She moved around him, and he did not try to stop her. The bees parted before her, and she passed through their buzzing like a waterfall, the sound briefly deafening her, pressing down on her with a physicality that surprised her. Then she was on the other side of them. She turned and watched as the bees moved back into formation. She saw Iorek twitch, as if he was going to charge after her, before he thought better of it. Instead, he roared at the bees, pouring all his frustration into the shout so that for a moment not even the buzzing could be heard above it. Melissa stifled a cry as she saw him turn, defeated, and retrace their steps back to the surface. For the first time in eight years, she was all by herself.
She did not have far to go. The tunnel soon opened into the large queen cell, shaped like a peanut shell, and the chambers along the walls filled with royal jelly. At the far end of the cell stood the Prime Queen. She stood as tall as Iorek, massive wings occasionally flitting above her. Her movements were stiff, and there seemed to be streaks of grey through the rings of black hair along her body. Behind her rose a pile of translucent baseball-sized eggs, growing smaller by the second as workers hurriedly ferried their precious cargo to the brood chambers higher in the hive.
“Welcome, Melissa.”
The voice seemed to come from everywhere all at once, but most strongly from the deepest recesses of Melissa’s mind. It was soft and smooth, and carried years within it. The compound eyes of the Prime Queen glistened with the words.
“Are you…talking? To me?” Melissa stuttered aloud.
“Yes, hatchling,” came the voice again, and Melissa knew for sure it was the Queen speaking. “That is the customary greeting between humans when one enters another’s home, is it not?”
“I mean, yeah? I guess I just wasn’t expecting to be greeted.”
“I know what you expected. I can see it there in your mind. Violence and battle, victory or death. Your badger friend is falling beneath the stings of my guards. Rage guiding your own sting into my body to wipe out my species in one fell swoop, or else to finally experience his pain and fail in your mission. So much killing, far too much.”
“You killed everyone!” Melissa screamed. “You killed billions, all over the world! That wasn’t too much killing for you?!”
The worker bees briefly struck up a chorus of frenzied buzzing before settling back to their task, and the Queen shuffled forward until she stood only a few feet from Melissa.
“Surely you,” she said, “more than any of your kind, can understand being a slave to the fate set out for you? My species was created, not born. We were forged with a singular purpose, organic machines commanded to save the world. Sounds familiar, no? We were faced with a choice: the extinction of humankind or the extinction of everything. We made the only choice we could. I made the only choice I could. War. But the war is over now, and has been for a long time, despite what you believe.”
Melissa and the Queen circled each other, inch by inch. There was a small beeping sound, and the battery in the goggles died. Even when she removed them, though, Melissa was surprised to find she could see in the lightless void. Some of the sight came from her eyes, but most of it was something else, a sense of everything around her.
“Your abilities are growing stronger with time,” said the voice of the Queen. “I apologise for dampening them in the tunnels, but I couldn’t risk my guards letting the badger through. His presence would not have been conducive to conversation.”
“Are you really the first-ever super-bee?” Melissa asked suddenly.
“Indeed. The first of my kind, mother of my people. Over a hundred years since I hatched, and still I live. I doubt I will see another hundred years pass, and I only hope a new Prime Queen will rise after my death to lead my species.”
The stinger in Melissa’s arm felt white-hot. She had to grit her teeth and clench her fists to stop herself from grabbing her arm and crying out in pain.
“Why let me come here?” she asked, her voice strained. “Why not send a swarm to kill me and Iorek?”
“Haven’t you been listening, Melissa? The war you’ve been trained your whole life to fight, it was over decades before you were born. That’s why I cleared your path to me, to offer you the chance to save the world for both our species. To offer humanity a chance to start again, free from the mistakes of their past. To offer peace. You’ve never had a choice in the path you’ve had to follow, hatchling. But you have a choice now. Fulfil your mission, or help me build a better future for us all.”
Melissa stood, dumbstruck, facing the Queen. She thought about her mother, whom she only knew from pictures, her entire short life spent underground. She thought about Dr. von Schreber, ground up into fertiliser before he could see his life’s work come to fruition. She thought about the city beyond the forest, and how every person who lived there was long dead. She thought about Iorek, all alone, the last of his kind, waiting for her outside the hive. She made her choice.
The stinger split the skin of her wrist as it emerged, black and shiny, nearly a foot in length. The voice of the Queen remained silent, but Melissa felt the fear radiating out from her. The worker bees struck up their chorus again, buzzing frantically around the diminished egg pile. The eyes of the Queen seemed to glow in the darkness, and her silvery wings spread out from her body as she waited for Melissa to strike. With her left hand, the young woman gripped the stinger tightly and began to pull with all her might. Pain seared every nerve ending from the tips of her fingers to the joint of her shoulder, and still she pulled. She fell to her knees, screaming, tears running freely down her face, and still she pulled until she felt blood vessels snapping and the stinger began to come loose. She wrenched at the black spike until it came free of her arm, the venom sac pulsing, and she dropped it onto the hive floor where her blood was dripping. Standing up, she stomped on the stinger until it was pulped beneath her boot.
Outside the hive, Melissa sat with Iorek in the grass, nursing her arm in her lap. The wound was coated in honey, and both the woman and the badger chewed on lumps of honeycomb. Behind them, worker bees were patching up the hole in the wall with propolis. It might have been her imagination, but Melissa thought their buzzing had taken on a happy tone.
“So,” mumbled Iorek, his mouth full of honey, “back to the vault to inform the Council of the Queen’s offer?”
Melissa did not answer right away. She savoured the taste of honey on her tongue, the smell of greenery in the air, and the fiery crimson of the sun setting above the treeline.
“No.”
“No?”
“Not yet, I mean,” she corrected herself. “There’s a great big world out there, and I’d love to see some more of it. The vault isn’t going anywhere, and neither are any of the other vaults across the world. Wouldn’t it be nice to just take some time for us? No mission, no peace negotiations, no responsibility?”
She heard him swallowing the last of his honeycomb.
“I’ve never been without a mission. What do people do when they’re not fulfilling their responsibilities?”
“Going to the beach, beside the sea, I think that was a popular choice before the end of the world,” she replied. “I’d like to see the sea.”
She felt him curl tighter around her as the last of the daylight began to disappear behind the trees. She lay back into his warm fur, tiredness making her eyelids grow heavy.
“Tomorrow we’ll start heading towards the sea,” she heard him say.
She smiled sleepily, wondering what the sea smelled like. She also wondered how difficult it would be to get the Council to accept a peace treaty with the bees. The Prime Queen said her kind were ready to leave the past in the past, but was humanity ready to do the same? Could they overcome a century of hatred to build a better tomorrow? A recent memory flashed, unbidden, across Melissa’s mind, and she found herself laughing uncontrollably.
“Be kind, Beepocalypse,” she giggled, and she kept laughing until she drifted off to sleep.