The command to show ourselves resulted in a discussion that lasted far longer than it should have, if you consider the insects were already numbering in the thousands around the window frames and under the doors. They made a sound that didn’t so much disturb one’s sleep as take it over and transmute it into another entity altogether, something that shared no distinguishing properties with its original but still managed to get lumped in with it under the same category by those who were paying attention. And felt the need to categorize, to draw maps with symbols on them and keys to deciphering those symbols in case anyone was unfamiliar with how these things worked. The first shots rang out around noon but no one paid them any attention because they had been expected. We had prepared ourselves by alluding to them without using exact terminology and this process continued until the wee hours of the morning when everything was effectively shut down by a power surge and the effects, direct or otherwise, of a moon that wasn’t full exactly, but appeared to be, and the only way you could tell for certain was to break out the charts and the atlases and go over them as carefully as might a scholar his treatises on The Gospel of Thomas or that other one that treats of similar themes without all the complex allegory and mythmaking, I can’t remember the name of it at present. It will come to me. She flew down the stairs at a dizzying rate precisely because they were stairs, because they all but tempted one to speed and recklessness by their very design and when she reached the bottom she was out of breath but this didn’t stop her from exhaling. Part of the problem is we never know when we are being followed or watched or even spoken of by those who have no business even knowing we exist. They take their cues from the investigators who investigated the theft of fine art from the museum where most of the art was, let’s face it, mediocre, and when everything was returned as mysteriously as it went missing, a lot of people suspected the foul play had really been a publicity stunt of some kind, though who would have benefited and how anyone might have conceived of such an elaborate plan in the first place were questions left mostly unanswered.