The Mixing Bowl

The *Tulou* was designed to amplify sound. The circular structure acted as an acoustic chamber, catching every whisper and magnifying it.

Ken lay on the hard wooden bed in the guest room on the second floor. It was 3:00 AM. The silence of the mountains should have been absolute, but the house was alive.

It sounded like stirring.

A wet, heavy *thwack-thwack-thwack* echoed from the central courtyard below. It sounded like a giant unseen hand kneading a massive ball of wet clay.

Ken kicked off the heavy quilt. He couldn't breathe. The air in the room felt used, recycled from the lungs of the hundred people sleeping in the concentric rings around him.

He crept to the window. The wooden lattice was stiff, but he pushed it open just enough to peer down into the courtyard.

The moon was full, casting a pale, milky light into the center of the ring.

Ken clamped a hand over his mouth to stifle a scream.

The courtyard was full of people. His family. But they weren't standing. They were a pile.

In the center of the stone patio, near the ancestral well, the clan had congregated. But they had lost their edges. Uncle Liu’s shoulder was melted into Auntie Mei’s back. Cousin Wei’s head was emerging from the torso of another relative Ken didn't recognize.

They were a single, undulating mass of biomass, a soup of limbs and faces churning slowly in the moonlight. They were sharing nutrients, sharing warmth, sharing *self*.

It was efficient. It was communal. It was horrifying.

Ken watched as Popo’s face surfaced on the back of the mass. Her eyes opened. They didn't look at the sky; they looked directly up at the second floor. At his window.

The mass stopped churning. Thirty heads swiveled in unison to look at him.

Ken stumbled back from the window, tripping over his suitcase.

* They aren't people,* his mind screamed. *They’re a hive. A colony.*

He grabbed his backpack. He didn't bother with his clothes. He needed to get out. He needed a road, a car, a plane, anything that would take him back to a world where people ended at their own skin.

He bolted out of the room and onto the balcony walkway that circled the building. He ran, his sneakers squeaking on the ancient wood.

He reached the stairs and took them two at a time, sprinting toward the main gate—the only way in or out of the fortress.

The massive timber doors were shut. A heavy iron bar, thick as his arm, rested across them.

Ken threw his shoulder against the bar. It didn't budge. He grunted, adrenaline surging, and pulled until his muscles tore. Locked. Sealed from the outside? No, the mechanism was ancient, rusted... or maybe fused.

He looked closely at the hinges.

The iron wasn't rusted to the wood. The wood had grown over the iron. The gate was part of the wall. The wall was part of the ground. The house was a living organism, and he was the virus trapped inside its stomach.

"Leaving so soon, Kenny?"

The voice didn't come from behind him. It came from everywhere. It bounced off the curved walls, wrapping around him like a blanket.