She wriggled through the ventilation duct like a soft, pitch-black snake.
The narrow duct forced her to compress her ribs and shift the position of her internal organs. Her synthetic bodysuit warped along with her limbs in ways no ordinary human body should have been able to, allowing her to squeeze the organic parts of herself through gaps between metal plates and weave through the complex insulated power conduits wrapped in black rubber. Through the ventilation grilles, she heard the hurried, tense conversation of those creatures dozens of meters below. When the building underwent a brief tremor, the conversation stopped. She stopped moving as well, avoiding any possible deformation of the metal that might trap her in a section of duct without ventilation grilles.
She knew the conversation between those two meant her disguise had been exposed. The human skin she had peeled off had rotted and begun to stink in the high heat. Even though she had hidden it in a ventilation duct leading to the substation, that had been seven standard Earth Days ago. The stench released by decaying biomass was unbearably foul. But she did not care, because she had already obtained what she wanted through that identity.
This isolated Mutant settlement had developed its own civilization, and everything here was utterly different from Earth. Yet before she infiltrated this base by riding a faint solar wind, the Regent had instilled its writing and language into her. As for why the Regent could understand the language of this Mutant population, that was not a question she needed to answer.
As the vibrations subsided, the conversation resumed, even more tense and impatient than before. Elongated skulls wrapped in scaled skin swayed back and forth, while tongues and teeth like those of cold-blooded creatures sprayed saliva. These Mutants had