Ruptured Feast Hive

A designator rather than a creature in its own right. When one of the tenth floor's shells becomes aware enough to tear at its sewn eyes, the System swaps its label for this one and the body locks rigid with its hands still raised to its face. The hole in the face peels back like a punched sheet of metal and Sacred Feaster Scarab Beetles come out of the eye socket and the mouth in numbers the body could not possibly have held. Imani's mother is the first the Royal Court watches turn. A shell that has not yet been opened still reads as a shell, which is how the racers work out which bodies are still safe to drive between.

Book 8 appearances

• Chapter 75 — Imani's mother pulls a stitch fully open, goes still, and the designator over her head changes; beetles half the size of the truck pour from her face while everyone else in apartment 310 freezes with bugs coming out of their eyes, noses and mouths.
• Chapter 76 — The relative on the living-room floor is still reading as a shell rather than a ruptured hive, which is exactly why Donut aims her Hole at his feet — and Carl's contingency for snapping Prepotente out of the last apartment is to open his mother's head and let the bugs leak.

Related entries

• Human Shell (Creature)
• Sacred Feaster Scarab Beetle (Creature)
• Imani C (Character)

Browse

• All Creatures & Bosses
• Everything debuting in Book 8, Chapter 75
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