"Not eating, but making!"
At the Movies
The Kavatch coat flared on my shoulder, a defensive field. The ants swerved around me like I was a stone in a stream, flowing over my boots, over my coat, ignoring me. I was noise. Vik was a shining beacon of easily takeable Karma. The ants reached Vik's feet, and they climbed his legs and closed the shell over his body, a second skin of chitin, and for a heartbeat Vik stood inside an ant-shaped sculpture of himself. Then the shell imploded. It collapsed inward onto the flight suit, and went to work. The suit was karma-proof, and karma-proof is not ant-proof. They tore it, but they held the pieces as they tore: every shred kept in its relation to every other shred, the man-shaped jigsaw never once coming apart, the destruction accomplished with the tidiness of evidence being catalogued rather than destroyed. The suit came off him in one piece, the whole garment peeling away in a single movement, hanging momentarily in the air in the shape of Vik and then falling to the bricks. And underneath, clinging to his skin, there was another layer of ants. The second skin separated from him in one movement and there, beside Vik, stood a second Vik. Hollow. Made of multitudes of ants, and I could see the light through it where its chest should have been densest. It turned its head. It watched him with jewel eyes. It took a step away from him. And another. The ants walked away in the shape of Vik the Brick, and that, I understood, with a clarity I have been trying to blur ever since, is how the ants dealt with someone who would not take the hint. They had not taken the Amulet. They had assembled a hollow body to make off with Vik’s Karma.
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