### Chapter 14
The translation hit her mid-thought.
No, no, no, no, no-
The sound came through layered, overlapping itself, like several channels trying to occupy the same space at once. Clicks, whistles, and dry consonants compressed into something sharp and exasperated.
"Do you have any idea," the voice snapped, breathless and tight, "how structurally improbable your species is?"
She blinked.
"I... Huh?"
"- you are held together by soft tissue and optimism," it continued without pause. "Your bones are hollow. Your circulatory system is exposed. You lose consciousness if you stand up too quickly and you thought it was acceptable to experiment with a local gravity well?"
She turned fully toward the doorway.
The moss-and-mud colored Keshin stood there, tendrils rigid with stress, posture pitched forward like someone who had just sprinted down a corridor they were not emotionally prepared to sprint down.
"I didn't experiment," she said automatically. "I adjusted."
A beat.
"Oh, that is worse," Moss, the name automatically assigned by her subconscious in the moment, said flatly.
"Also, they're not hollow. They're differentiated. Trabecular where we need flexibility. Dense where we need load-bearing."
Moss froze.
Not dramatically. Not visibly, if you weren't looking for it. Just a half-beat too long between one movement and the next, tentacles arresting mid-pattern as if the system running them had been momentarily yanked backward.
Re-run.
Re-evaluate.
The clicking beneath the translation dropped out entirely for a second.
"That is…" the translation said, then stopped.
The interface pulsed once.
"…not how the summary table phrases it."
She tilted her head. "Phrases what?"
"The designation," Moss continued, attention snapping back to her with unsettling precision. "You referred to your skeletal structure as not hollow."
"Yes," she said. "Because it isn't."
Another pause. Shorter this time. Tighter.
"Why," Moss asked carefully, "would you name a condition in a way that implies absence?"
She blinked.
"Because that's how we were named," she said slowly. "By comparison. Not by construction."
The clicks resumed, rapid and dry, too evenly spaced to be conversational. Data moving fast through constrained channels.
"That makes this," Moss said, after a beat, "more upsetting. Not less."
She frowned. "How?"
"Because ignorance is predictable," Moss replied. "Structural incompetence can be mitigated. But competence - "
It cut itself off again, recalibrated.
"- within a fragile container? That introduces... variance."
Ah.
There it was.
"I understand the limits of my body," she said evenly. "Very well, actually. I live in it."
"That does not entitle you," Moss shot back, sharper now, "to adjust the constants of the room that contains it."
She didn't flinch.
"I needed to know where the boundaries were."
The tentacles stilled again, but this time the pause felt… internal. Not computation alone. Something closer to reassessment.
"You sought boundary conditions," Moss said.
"Yes."
"By altering gravity."
"Yes."
Silence stretched.
She could almost feel the internal model collapsing and reforming, threads of logic being rerouted around an assumption that no longer held.
Finally, Moss spoke again - more quietly.
"The careful ones," it said, not quite to her, "are always the ones who scare me the most."
She absorbed that without comment.
Because if she'd learned anything in the last twenty-four hours, it was this:
Fear, when it showed up in a system that didn't usually feel it, meant something important had just been discovered.