Chapter Content
Chapter 16: The Retreat
He stood very still and did the same thing, because if the centipede — which had pursued him through an underground network for eight solid minutes with the patient commitment of a professional — had stopped at the entrance of this space, then the space was doing something that had priority over him, and he wanted to understand what.
The centipede shuddered. The movement started at the head and traveled down its body in a visible wave, the chitinous plating along its back lifting slightly and resettling, the way a cat’s fur rose when something was wrong. It made a sound he hadn’t heard from it before — short, high, involuntary, the sound of a nervous system receiving information it didn’t have a framework for and reacting before the brain could organize a response.
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