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Read an Excerpt From The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang
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Read an Excerpt From The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang
Speak another people’s language. Know them. Become them. And discover you’ve destroyed them.
By S.L. Huang
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Published on March 26, 2026
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang, a new science fiction novella out from Tordotcom Publishing on April 21st.
In his training as a spy, Ro was warned: you will always be living a lie.Jumping into a Star Eater’s mind in the first place requires a moment of perfect psychic connection, and he has studied all his life to comprehend their species. Admires them, respects them, is reverent at the idea of being one of them—the only species physiologically capable of mining the element needed for lightyear-spanning space travel. The species all others crave to know more of, but who have notoriously shared so very little. The species Ro’s own small civilization, with its dwindling resources and withering reach, needs to know more about.It will feel real, his elders impressed upon him. It will never be real.But Ro’s certainty runs deep: he will be different. Ro will not be an imposter hiding the truth of his past, because his heart will be one of them. He will be one of them.To understand is to become. It never occurs to him that the mere act of understanding can destroy.
Nineteen Words for Doubt. Twenty-Six Ways to Lie.
At first the Orro Primaries were skeptical. “Language causes the mind to jump?” they said.“No. Understanding causes the jump. Language is the tool,” said the Master Linguist.“This ability would make us feared. It will only give us trouble from the conglomerate,” said the Primaries.“No,” said the Master Linguist. “It will give us spies.”
—Orro Internal Records, Dissolution Era (labeled for destruction)
The day Ro jumped was the first day he doubted.
Doubt. In his language, it meant uncertainty, apprehension, a lack of confidence or conviction. The feeling of a squiggle in his third and fourth stomachs.
In Birjivina, the trade language of the Andu-Erjians, doubt meant a question—either a question raised or a question asked. Andu-Erjians said things like Ask your doubts or We have seventeen doubts to settle about this treaty with the Gendamese.
The Gendamese had twenty-two common languages across three species. In one of them, everything could be made negative. You could have minus doubt, which roughly meant self-assurance or security. Another of their tongues used the word “doubt” as a slang question tag: You get me, doubt? Undoubt.
The Koi people had only one language and didn’t name it. Why did you need a name for something self-evident? The closest concept to “doubt” in their language roughly meant “miasma.” They didn’t have words for abstract concepts; they had sensory metaphors. You weren’t happy, you were the sound of trilling. You weren’t in love, you were enveloped by warmth. “Sound” and “warmth” themselves were odd translations, since both species of the Koi had cell splinters that would break apart not very far above absolute zero—the literal translation of warmth was a numerical measurement a fraction of a degree above nothing. Warm to the Koi, perhaps, but a death sentence to most other species in the conglomerate.
Except the Star Eaters.
The Star Eaters—those most studied, and least known. Beings born of nebula and cold vacuum.
The Star Eaters had at least nineteen gestural words and phrases that meant some variation of doubt. Doubt of place. Doubt of identity. Doubt of purpose…
Ro scuffed against the clay where he lay claw-curled on the surface—not precisely hiding from his teachers—and hitched himself around to snuff at the hazy sky. None of those words meant his own people’s concept of doubt, not really. Their learning at the Warren stressed it over and over: Language is unpaired. It will not match like a converted measurement. Only clouds of overlapping colored meaning that, in their shifting, might briefly end up combining to form almost the same hue as a word or phrase or gesture or semantic unit in the other language.
That seemed obvious to Ro, but his Seniors didn’t like him saying so.
They also didn’t like him skipping meditation or answering his milestone testing in a dialect of Haazgi. In Ro’s defense, he tried to remember to meditate, but he and schedules had never gotten on well, and he often remembered his good intentions a half night past when he meant to go. And he truly hadn’t been trying to caper when he wrote in Haazgi! He’d just been trying to think in it as practice, and it was such a common trade record that it hadn’t occurred to him that most of the Seniors couldn’t read it. They were Senior Linguists, weren’t they? Why wouldn’t he assume they knew more than he did?
That hadn’t been the way they took it.
Skipping meditation or training wasn’t supposed to be against the rules anyway. The Warren had never had a rule slate before Ro’s fifth cycle here—Warren recruits are too self-motivated to need rules, had been the lofty claim.
Until me, Ro thought. He was always tripping up people’s good opinions without meaning to.
Of late the Seniors kept pushing at him mentally, their emotions a looming shadow in the corner of his empathic sense. The type of shadow that meant, We need to have a serious talk with you, Ro, where “serious” meant unpleasantness and sour faces and hot dollops of shame. Hence the hiding.
Ro liked the surface more than most of his people did. With any luck the Seniors might fail to seek him up here, as they flinched from the open space and the bright, without Ro appearing to avoid them. He’d tried to scrape himself into going to training today, but every bristle of his fur shivered away from that towering judgment, only releasing once he’d scurried up here and pattered in circles against the hardness and dust.
Acceptance at the Warren had been what was supposed to finally let him prove himself. An Orro Linguist, for real! After so many sighs and disappointed snufflings from his hive elders… When Ro was a youngling, those elders had sometimes referred to him by a nickname that roughly meant cheerful disaster. Affectionately, of course. And sometimes right after exclaiming over his potential, the way he gobbled new words and new tongues so eagerly (“ALinguist! Do you think? Could he be?”). But Ro couldn’t deny how often he found himself befuddled after ending topsy-turvy on what everyone else did with no effort, like scraping lichen without making a mess, or remembering which tunnel he wanted, or keeping his fur from getting sticky again and poking up every which way… To then be selected for the most prestigious, the most respected studies on all Orro! It had felt like putting all the rest behind him, the chance to show himself worthy.
Once he learned what the Warren trained for in truth, that determination had only rocketed.
Jumping. Orro’s largest and most bewitching secret.
Ro was resolved to be the first Linguist in generations to make a jump. If he worked hard enough, with both hearts behind it, and remembered to log his training properly instead of getting carried away with untangling ghost consonants in ancient Kerkard…
He could remember to do all that. Mostly, at least.
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S.L. Huang
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S.L. Huang
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And so Ro had thrown himself into gaining a full linguistic understanding of the Star Eaters. Enough for those dancing colors of unpaired meaning in his mind to find a match, just for a blink. One precious beat of him, an outsider, syncing with some nameless Star Eater out in the black—a crystalline pulse of matched understanding. Language was the tool: a language just alien enough, a learned secondary language that would cast one’s mind in a mold just different enough, for that perfect alignment to snap his people’s empathic neurology against the mind of another being.
How fabulous! One thought, fully subsumed in another’s words as a native mind would perceive them. Speaking from their perspective in a perfect fluent paradigm. One thought different enough from Ro’s base linguistic patterns, from his own learned language paths, and instead resonant with another in the same moment.
That was what it took, to trigger a jump.
The power of language. Ro marveled at it regularly. The meditation, the study, everything the Warren had built around—it all aimed toward that singular goal, that one moment.
That one moment was, admittedly, near impossible. In the history of the Warren, not more than three Linguists in any generation had managed to jump into another mind this way. For many cycles now, none had. The unique neurology of the Ponto species might make such an ability possible—but not easy.
Ro ruffled his fur against the clay and closed his eyes, imagining again how it might feel. That quick pure fluidity in another mind’s point of view… it would yank his consciousness instantly, imprinting him lightyears away in the body of a Star Eater. His chance to study their intricate, full-body communication and poignant, tragedy-soaked history and culture—to really study it. To understand in a way no outsider ever could.
How could such a thing not be any Linguist’s double-heart desire?
Admittedly, some of his compatriots couldn’t handle the idea. They washed out of the Warren, sworn to secrecy. The prospect of a one-way trip away from their hives, away from their homes—it proved too much for them.
Those were the minority. Most trainees stayed. And trained. And yearned.
And failed.
Ro had never conceived that he might fail.
The Warren had felt such a paradise at first. A place where Ro would finally, naturally fit. He’d quickly shot past most of his colleagues on the language study—by so much that their auras chafed with an angular and unhidden envy. Ro, exuberant to at last be among classmates who would understand him, had attempted to defuse such tension by offering mnemonic tricks or delicious facts, or to earn wriggles of amusement through multilingual wordplay. Too late he caught on that his peers, like his Seniors, only interpreted it as arrogance.
(How could he explain that excitedly sharing an Oltasol and Yotz mixed pun was the opposite of arrogance? He thought they’d get it! And, more importantly, it had been funny.)
Niggles in the back of his mind began to chew at him sometimes. To make a jump was also to adapt, to excel at all the small life challenges that Ro so regularly stumbled over. What if his Seniors thought he couldn’t handle that part?
He would just have to stay good enough at the language bits. Jumping would make up for whatever else his Seniors sighed at. It would make up for Ro, eclipse any deficiencies with the magnitude of his service to Orro.
If he could make it.
The miasma of Ro’s continued lack of success had begun stalking him over every recent revolution of their moon. Most Linguists who had managed the jump had done it young. Ro was barely an adult, not even at second molt yet—his peers who hadn’t been recruited to serve Orro would only now be embarking on lives outside their hives at his age. But he imagined he could feel his mind becoming less flexible by the day, resisting that conceptual malleability.
What if he couldn’t do it? What would be his worth to anyone?
He wouldn’t say he doubted, though. Not yet.
He felt his Senior’s neurological aura before any other sense: a pulse of high discipline and exacting organization that made him twist around. Senior Aga. They’d found him.
He resisted the urge to scamper away. Senior Aga would have felt him too by now, was clearly up here seeking him. A moment later his Senior’s distinctive stride stumped around the clay brick of the nearest entrance mound— Senior Aga tended to walk on three legs instead of two or four, swinging one foreleg down to lope lopsided unless carrying something. And today with an aura that seared brittle at the edges, a sharp tang that Ro could feel directed at himself.
He scrambled to uncurl and straighten, pressing his paw pads apart on the ground in nervous habit.
Ro’s studies had once included a foreign analysis of the empathic sense that had been normal to him since birth. The outside researcher had marveled at the transparency, the intimacy, the inability to lie when one’s emotions were on such full display. Their language does not have a word for lying, as there is no such concept, the author had claimed.
So incorrect as to be comedy! Ro’s species—the Ponto— had spread among at least seven different domains of the conglomerate, every one of which had some cultural concept of falsehood, including Ro’s home of Orro. Originally a small colony of the Ponto homeworld, on a settlement moon they still shared with others, Orro remained ninety-seven percent Ponto—and their eponymous mother tongue included plenty of words for untruth. It simply had no paired word. Ro’s native speech labeled socially kind, harmless untruth as different from political spinning into untruth, which was again different from intentional, targeted untruth meant to distort what is felt or real. That last one could be a serious crime on Orro—enough for offenders to be removed from their hives for their loved ones’ safety.
Mental auras were like facial expressions, or postures, or ripples of fur; they gave away some things and hid others. Such an odd misapprehension, to think they couldn’t lie!
Ro’s Senior was coming straight for him, claws clicking against the hard-packed ground. Ro marshalled his mind away from scattering on linguistic factoids, soothing his own aura. He hadn’t technically broken any rules…
“I see you, Senior,” he offered in polite rote greeting.
“Seen,” Senior Aga grunted.
The disapproval reeked at Ro in waves. He flexed his paw pads against the ground, trying to keep the motion small.
“You missed training again with no log,” Senior Aga said. “What are you doing up here?”
“Meditating,” Ro lied.
An untruth that is adjacent enough one can pretend. An untruth of self. His aura would show consternation, but not the lie.
Senior Aga gave the too-familiar huff of disappointment. “I have defended you.”
Ro couldn’t help his flash of surprise.
“The Seniors have long shown laxness toward your lapses in attendance and required study, far beyond what many believed wise. I have reminded my colleagues that we impress upon all of you how one cannot jump merely from preparatory reading, that doing is the only way. How using the language must be the greatest share of time. Your dedication to that, at least, has been impossible to dispute.”
Ro’s dread swelled. He’d practically lived in the practice cocoons before his worries began to gnaw. Lately, however…
He hated failing again. It hurt.
“Your hours in the cocoons have dropped inexcusably. It has not gone unnoticed.” The ridges above Senior Aga’s eyes dipped in severity. “Are you ill?”
Ill could have a large meaning here: ill, disturbed, struggling.
“No, Senior,” Ro lied. A partial untruth, a technical untruth. He was not ill. He ignored the broader shape of the word.
“You have great potential. But potential is nothing unless it can be realized.”
Ro’s fur spiked and stung. “I know—”
“Do you? The resources of the Warren do not exist for you to play at being a Linguist, Trainee.”
“I—I’ll go to the cocoons today,” Ro managed.
“See that you do.”
Senior Aga’s long, flat nostrils huffed and snuffed for a moment, shoulder fur rippling… that same long-suffering expression that Ro had seen so many times before. Then the older Ponto loped past and toward the staff tunnels for the fully trained Warren Linguists—the ones who hadn’t jumped.
Some still tried. Others seemed resigned to their evolved positions, as researchers and revered advisors to their government’s Primaries. And naturally, they also donned the mantle of sculpting new, young recruits toward the ultimate service to Orro.
Like one of Ro’s elder hive mothers. Mother Hobi. Several generations above him, she’d been his favorite hive elder—he’d followed her around as a youngling, begging for new words, new ideas, and she’d delighted in obliging him. Following in her footprints had been his greatest ambition.
As far back as Ro could remember, Mother Hobi had been esteemed by the rest of the hive as an Orro Linguist. It wasn’t until Ro learned the secrets of the Warren that he realized she was an unsuccessful one.
The tricklings of guilt reminded him how his view of her had changed. He’d assumed so easily—that he would prove himself where she had not, that his path would take him to the stars.
How had she coped?
Ro cast about for any sense of Senior Aga, but his Senior was gone, aura indistinguishable among the bubbling of life in the tunnels. Ro had promised he would go to the practice cocoons today. But he hadn’t said he would go right now.
He twisted, dropped to all fours, and scuttled in the opposite direction.
Orro’s tunnels didn’t have firm boundaries between their uses like some urban areas Ro had visited. A much smaller body politic than most in the conglomerate, Orro itself wasn’t much beyond a single large population center—what the Faomish League called a city-state or what the Zayallayi called a micro-world. World, of course, was a misnomer, given that Orro shared this moon and its spaceports with territories under thirty-seven other governments. But language wasn’t mindful of such literal definitional mappings.
(Except for the Lukyusi language, of the Baihyan people, which was painfully literal, and defined anything else as a lie. A single-species people, the Baihyan had a physiological stress reaction to any meaning that strayed. Funny that Ro’s people got labeled the ones who couldn’t lie. But then, the Baihyan had a single word for it.)
Ro padded along beneath the haze-pale sky, past where the Warren’s tunnels phased into leadership halls beneath his feet. The lonely emptiness of the surface paths cradled his moroseness. The atmosphere was high today, and light air pops puffed against his fur occasionally. With a population of less than seven million, Orro sprawled among the dusty northern mountains and was able to comfortably house everyone by urbanizing mostly straight downward. Which meant the space near and on the surface had plenty of room for government offices—more comfortable for their less subterranean neighbors to visit—as well as gardens and public surface parks and the aboveground transportation hubs.
It wouldn’t take long to get to this ward’s lift. It never took very long to get anywhere on Orro.
One geothermally assisted capsule tumble later, Ro rolled out near the back of his family’s hive, two hundred layers down. His nostrils flared with the familiarity of the damp mineral scent he’d been born to. He could sense his aura vibrating. He rolled his paw pads against the cool grit of the rock floor.
When was the last time he’d been home? He’d thought at first that he should see them as much as possible before he jumped, soak in the love of his hive. He would miss them dearly, but who could say no to such a chance?
Only later had crept the sneaking apathy. If I can jump, I won’t see them anymore anyway. Best to distance myself. Isn’t it?
And then, the dribbles of shame: I’m still here. I shouldn’t still be here.
His family didn’t know that. But Mother Hobi would. She’d know he was failing, like she had.
He was suddenly desperate to see her.
“Ro!” Lalo’s aura burst onto him as she tumbled out of one of the tunnels. “I felt you coming! Coro and Sa are going to be so happy, they said they’ve sent you a whole canyon full of voice bubbles. Why have you been so long!”
“Just busy,” Ro lied. A face-saving lie, for privacy. But his fur couldn’t help cresting up in joy, his mood lifting. “I see you, Lalo.”
“Seen.” She said it with an exaggerated quiver, a vivacious impatience with the pleasantries. “Now come on!”
She mauled her shoulder up against his and hustled them from the lift.
Ro let himself be hustled. Lalo’s scent, like bright clean earth, and the texture of her fur, somehow both sleek and coarse against his—they carried him along the familiar, softly lit tunnels. Like the Warren, his hive had no firm boundaries—only Orro tunnels that became theirs at some juncture by virtue of them sprawling to live in and maintain them. Lalo wasn’t the only one who had felt him arrive; his litter-sisters Coro and Sa barreled into him with excited trills, and then he was buried under an excited pile of family.
Lalo drew back a little then. Ro’s awareness kept seeking her out, though he tried not to be obvious about it. Her aura was like a treasure nest, surprising and delighting in its bursts of vividness. Her strand of the hive had joined his when her thirdkin cousin traded bonds with one of Ro’s firstkin, and about fifty of them had come along to join hive with Ro’s. Ro had been about to leave for the Warren then, talking nothing but language—which languages have contranyms, and which are exceptions to the accepted etymological evolution for visual adjectives, and Did you know it’s this common for people to split differently from having one audio system and one visual system like writing, the Bash have five sensory representations of the same language!!— until everyone but Mother Hobi gave him an exasperated nudge-off.
But Lalo had been fascinated.
Fascinated, and appallingly awful. She mangled the pronunciation of any word not her own and was prone to wrinkling her cheeks and saying things like, “But what do you mean I can’t put the word big after the word round in Kuyqish because the vowels aren’t friendly? I just did!”
And Ro’s fur would go straight up, and he wouldn’t know what to say except, “Because you can’t!”
Then she’d say, “But why? I bet you there’s some Kuyqish poet who does that just to get her claws in people,” and he’d keep saying, “but you can’t, it’s disharmonious!” and then she’d go and look it up and find a Dissolution Era culture rebel who sang discomfort and shouted messages of love and peace in aggressively atonal discordance, and caused an entire generation of Kuyqish youth at the time to mix disharmonious vowels in slang.
And then she found the medical case studies of the ones who sustained nerve damage from it.
“Oh,” she said. “I guess you can’t.”
Lalo was so different from Ro. She wanted to go spaceward and study exotic materials engineering. She’d chattered Ro’s ears off about space skipping and the meridian element, and he’d let it wash over him like a different tongue.
Once the Warren pointed him toward the Star Eaters, though… then he’d paid much more avid attention.
Occasionally he’d even dared ask her careful questions, trying to keep his aura casual: Why is it that scientists haven’t been able to figure this out? Why is it only the Star Eaters?, or But if the meridian element is the only thing that can make bubbles of spacetime go faster than light, how can the Star Eaters sense it from across a galaxy?
Doesn’t that mean their senses go faster than light, too?
… isn’t that impossible?
Lalo’s fur would electrify and her whole aura would pop off in starbursts and she’d cry, “Oh oh oh, this is why it’s smashing!”
He always tried very hard to follow at least half of what came next.
Lalo was so different from him… and so the same. The hive never knew quite what to do with her, either.
Ro had promised his Senior he’d put in practice time. But in the rowdy puddle of warmth that was his hive, he delayed going back, and delayed again. He let Mother Pogo ply him with mineral juice and freshly marinated lichens, and his youngest thirdkin proudly show off their twirl-rolling, and he claw-curled next to Lalo by a geotherm vent, bathing in her patter about the minimum number of meridian paths you’d need to visit the known galaxy.
He must have dozed off, because when he opened his eyes Mother Hobi had replaced her. He couldn’t sense anyone else nearby, their auras bobbing in the surrounding tunnels.
“I shooed them. So as not to wake you,” Mother Hobi said. “I see you, Ro.”
“I see you.” Ro shifted, uncurling his claws from beneath him.
“Se qetů?” Mother Hobi asked quietly. Her nostrils huffed out wide and flat in sympathy.
Ro’s fur riffled before he could stop it. The phrase was from Oltasol, the minority language on Orro—spoken mostly by non-Ponto and those they hived with and lagging far behind either Ponto or the trade pidgin in usage. The question was a phrase absent from Ro’s native tongue, and it meant, roughly, Share with me.
No, it meant more than that. It meant she knew something was wrong, and it obligated a reply via her concern and connection. It was one of Oltasol’s “undeniable phrases,” the ones that defied any argument.
(“They’re not undeniable,” Lalo liked to say. “You can deny them all you want!” What she didn’t understand was that the undeniable phrases more properly should have been translated as disarming. When someone said one to you, they were imbuing a meaning of having crossed over with you into a shared vulnerability. To refuse an undeniable phrase was to take that vulnerability and punch through it with a claw.)
Ro was not about to punch his closest hive mother in an undeniable phrase.
He did take his time in answering.
“Se qetȅ ti pu qaifu?” he whispered finally, into the vent’s warmth. What if I can’t?
Mother Hobi paused. Shifted. Then she said, in Ponto: “I hope you never make the jump.”
Ro jerked around toward her. His aura must have reverberated like a shock wave.
Mother Hobi shouldered up against him, trapping him in her warmth like he was a youngling. “When I was your age, I was the same. Such ambition. Now I know that if I had gone… I would have missed everything.”
“But the keykka!” It was a Nahonic word for chance, but bigger, backed by the cataclysm of incalculable loss.
“My young Ro. Perhaps the jump is ‘keykka.’ But so is what I have built here—the long stretches with the hive mothers, with you. That’s keykka, too. I would not trade it.”
“Bchni,” Ro said promptly. From Pichto Creole: impossible. But mildly vulgar. Slang. Disbelieving.
“Wipe your tongue,” Mother Hobi said, but she sounded amused. “I notice the way your aura bends around Lalo. You see keykka in the jump, so you think the choice is easy, but discarding all this—it would not be nothing for you. The chance to enter bonds, to raise the hive’s next younglings, to build a vibrant life—even to continue learning and growing in your own skin, and not hiding your true self until you die… Our Primaries ask a great sacrifice. It would be very lonely, after a time.”
“But worth it,” Ro insisted. His resolve was kicking back in, reminding him of all the reasons to keep striving. “To be able to experience another culture that way? Really experience it? It’s, it’s incalculable!”
“It gives you no hesitation, the theft of another’s self?”
Ro paused. That was the part he tried not to think about. As far as anyone knew from reports of the jumped Linguists, the leap took over the original Star Eater completely. At least for the Ponto lifetime.
“The reports all go silent eventually,” Ro pointed out. “We’re so much shorter-lived than a Star Eater. Chances are we’re only borrowing.”
“The great lie,” Mother Hobi murmured.
She used the word that meant a lie enough repeated until it becomes true.
“They might not even care. They might not even notice,” Ro pressed on. “Their culture is so hard for us to comprehend! That’s why we have to do this. We don’t even know if they remember past the last confusion period. And it’s not like I don’t think about—but it’s so few of them that we borrow, right? And for just a blink from their perspective. Isn’t it worth both my life and theirs, to build these sorts of better understandings? Especially with the Star Eaters. Think what it could mean for our people, for all people!”
Mother Hobi was still nestled against him. “Meámpīgl leù xài weāglwìm,” she said.
A Hattadine proverb, usually translated as: The young are able to believe. Or sometimes: To be young is to be sure.
Ro told himself he was sure.
“I have to go back,” he said.
Mother Hobi pressed her head against his for a long moment, then let him go.
The moon had rotated into second darkness by the time Ro returned to the surface, with only a sliver of reflected planetlight stretched in a dim curve against the sky. The conversation with Mother Hobi had reinvigorated a stubborn ambition. Ro had promised Senior Aga he’d visit the practice cocoons today, and practice he would, for sessions upon sessions upon sessions.
He trotted down to the Warren’s astral hub, dust kicking up beneath the pads of his feet. The time had rolled late enough that few of the cocoons were in use. Only the most ambitious trainees still stayed.
Ro used to be one of those. He could be again. He would resolve to be again.
He wound the strings and wheels on one of the cocoons to set it for Star Eater. Not that the Warren trained them toward much else, these days. But sometimes trainees wanted to attempt Qwani, or Red Top, or one of the other languages the Warren had created astral pockets for that Ponto mouths and claws had little hope of practicing without chimeric help. Ro had spent his whole first cycle at the Warren ecstatically trying them all.
Remember why you love this. Why it matters.
Ro pressed the pads of his feet apart against the cold ground, then thrust his paws through the folds of the cocoon and plunged inside.
The Warren practice cocoons were one of the only places on Orro that could generate a full astral pocket. One sprang up instantly, grabbing hold of Ro’s aura and overtaking every one of his senses. For the briefest of overlaps he could feel his Ponto body sinking into the yielding depths of the cocoon, then his Ponto self was gone.
He floated in a body of twisting sinew and sensitive cilia, no defined head, the cocoon giving him a vague scattering of patterns that mimicked sensory organs down each fanning tentacle. The scenario had placed him in space, as it often did. Other Star Eaters floated some distance from him, reflected in gently flaring lacework from some unseen sun, enormous filigree creatures of the black.
Simulations. Painted into his mind by the cocoon.
Ro tried to sink into the language without a ripple. He would go and speak to the simulations in a moment—first he sought to become of one mind with this constructed body of sensations, of speech without tongues. Normalizing its perceptions, considering the universe as a Star Eater might.
A residual consternation flickered down the cilia, in a very un-Star-Eater-like expression.
You’ll never be able to jump like that. Think like them. Be of them!
This was why he was supposed to practice meditation, wasn’t it? Ro forced himself into a rhythm and began reciting some rote phrases, in the Star Eaters’ way: work is life, work is work. baseline, baseline. unbothered.
The muscle pulses and electromagnetic pops fell into cadence in a way that felt much more correct. One of the simulations began wafting toward him, and he prepared to engage in practice conversation with a fluent mind.
Unbidden, Lalo’s scent overwhelmed his memory.
Star Eaters couldn’t even smell.
Ro’s mind crashed away from the cocoons. For the first time, he doubted.
What if Mother Hobi was right? The weight of what he would miss here piled in suddenly, the imagined loneliness, the loss of self. The worthiness of what they did, which he’d not questioned—even for Orro, even for the greater ideal of bringing all civilizations closer, that keykka of cross-knowledge he and other Linguists would contribute to a blossoming future…
Fear. That the adventure he envisioned would rust into pointlessness, somewhere far away.
Doubt.
They had to be the least Star-Eater-like thoughts that had ever intruded in the cocoon. He worked frantically to soothe his mind, grabbing for those Warren meditative techniques, resigned that this practice session, too, would be a waste. He would fail here, again, at his greatest ambition.
But—did he want it?
Doubt of place. Doubt of identity. Doubt of purpose…
In that moment, he jumped.
Excerpted from The Language of Liars, copyright © 2026 by S.L. Huang.
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