Content Warnings

Extreme pain (again!)
Suicidal intent

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Elpida was intimately familiar with the doctrine and mechanics of tactical withdrawal — the fighting retreat, the fall back action, controlled and coordinated to avoid collapsing into a rout.

Legionaries died in routs; retreat saved lives.

Two thirds of every Legion-led sortie beyond the Telokopolis plateau — and ninety percent of every cadre-only expedition into the deep green — had ended in contested withdrawal, with Silico murder-machines nipping at Legion flanks, pressing assaults to split formations, and infiltrating down through the gargantuan tree trunks to target the all-important defoliant equipment, the flame-thrower units and herbicidal crawlers, essential for cutting a path back through the green, as the teeming plants regrew in fecund masses right inside the Legion’s hour-old hardshell bootprints.

A cadre-only retreat was less vulnerable: cradled close inside their combat frame pilot capsules, cushioned by pressure gel and a constant communications uplink, fed each other’s sense-data and combat judgements and split-second warnings — but also random musings and sisterly reassurances and stupid jokes. Watching each other’s backs was easy when you had twenty five pairs of eyes hooked into twenty five combat frame sensor suites, when you knew the insides and outsides of each other better than you knew yourself, when you could hear each other’s thoughts on the data-stream plugged into the rear of your skull.

But even the cadre was not invincible, not like they were presented for the public.

The longest cadre-only fighting withdrawal had lasted five weeks — the culmination of the deepest ever expedition into the green, far past the gritty slopes and sudden cliffs of the drop-off line, down into the dark where the sun could not penetrate through miles of dense vegetation, beyond communications with the city, beyond any link with Telokopolis except each other.

The cadre had seen strange sights down there, where no human beings had walked for millions of years: albino plants sucking nutrients from the trunks of giant trees, shaped like exotic fungi with fans and frills and biological armour plates to fend off parasites; plains of sandy soil and rock penetrated by roots tough as steel, drawing geothermal heat from beneath the earth’s crust; vast dome-like structures and metal frameworks buried in mountains of silt, penetrated and ruined by ravenous stems and clinging ivy and sucking tendrils, with shapes — words, writing? — obscured by an eternity of dirt; and Silico giants, sinuous and silken, crawling like centipedes amid the forgotten bones of the world before the green.

Five weeks, some of the longest of Elpida’s life. Five weeks of trudging back through that labyrinth of wonders that nobody in Telokopolis would believe — nobody except the committed expeditionists, not without the vid-records and sensor data from the combat frames. Five weeks of hiding in canyons from Silico leviathans, of giving battle only when they could no longer evade pursuit, of day-long struggles with monsters swarming up the sides of their combat frames or pummelling them like amateur pugilists with a hundred fists.

Five weeks of listening to Silico ‘intelligence’ calling out to them from among the pale roots, singing songs from inhuman throats, squirting alien data-streams and radio bursts and tight-beam comms in all directions. Five weeks of listening to their combat frames creak and groan with the barely contained desire to grow beyond their carbon bone-mesh armour plating. Five weeks of crawling through millennia-stagnant mud — and of crawling into each other’s cockpit enclosures, desperate for the comfort of companionship, their skin and pilot suits slick with capsule gel, shivering in the dark while the frames guarded themselves with their own unleashed neural architecture.

Elpida had not lost a single sister on that retreat — but not a single frame had gone undamaged. The Orchid Eightfold had lost both left arms and part of a shoulder; the Aculeata and the Chromatic Infinity had both been almost unable to walk by the time they’d reached the plateau; the Spiral Witch had suffered some kind of green-borne infection running rampant through her machine-meat innards, contracted via a piercing wound from the stinger of a Silico giant; the pilot program had kept her in dry-dock for a full year afterward, amputating and grafting new machine-meat muscle tissue hundreds of times over. Elpida had been piloting the Tromos on that expedition; the frame had endured a score of deep-tissue bruises, fractured support beams, and gouges to her carbon bone-mesh armour. By the time they’d crawled back home, the Tromos had been shaking and shivering like a dog with a neurological disease, clinging to Elpida through the MMI cranial uplink slot, mewling and whining in the back of her consciousness.

The cadre had fared better.

Daysalt had lost a leg — replaced with the best augmetic the Legion could supply. Fii had contracted some kind of liver problem from green-exposure, and received a lab-grown transplant. Metris had a fractured spine, Kos had three broken ribs, Quio had some kind of problem with her eyes; nine cadre-sisters had been in their pilot capsules long enough to develop short-term eating problems, and six more had balance issues which lingered for weeks. Yeva did not sleep for ten consecutive days — not until Elpida personally jabbed her with a powerful sedative. Emi suffered nightmares for months; Arry kept repeating snippets of Silico ‘language’.

But they’d all survived the retreat; they’d all come home, back to Telokopolis.

Elpida had never envied the Legion foot sloggers, fighting Silico with rifles and monoedge swords, protected by greensuits and hardshells, at best. In combat frames the cadre could duel the Silico’s gods to a standstill. On foot a single bullet could end even the most heavily modified nanomachine zombie.

“Retreat!” Elpida bellowed at her comrades, spitting blood. “Heads down! Down the stairs, go! Go!”

Howl cackled inside her head: Advancing to the rear!

Bullets and energy bolts cracked and crackled down the skyscraper corridor, cutting through the dark air, chipping the marble walls and crunching off the floor; the Death’s Head revenants at the other end of the corridor struggled to set up proper suppressing fire, kept down by the pounding of Hafina’s massive anti-materiel rifle and the crack-thump wave of light-drinking projectiles from her strange energy weapons. They resorted to blind-fire spray, sticking their guns around the corners and hoping for the best. They dared not throw any explosives for fear of hitting their own trump card: Kuro was still sprawled on the floor halfway down the corridor.

But she was beginning to pick herself up. The armoured giant got one hand beneath her fallen bulk — and then rolled and flailed as Hafina shot her in the flank again, bouncing her armour like a rag doll.

Elpida and the others scuttled down the stairs and into the dark, bullets pattering off plates and thumping into armoured coats. The others were sturdy and fresh, but Elpida—

She felt two solid-slug rounds slam into the back of her coat; her armour deflected any penetration — but the impact rang through her gut wound like a lance to the belly. She wheezed and spluttered and pitched forward, toppling down the stairs. Small, strong, desperate hands grabbed her around the waist — Amina, holding on tight. Amina’s grip dug into Elpida’s gut wound. A wave of fresh fire roared up through her torso and down into her hips and groin, obliterating thought, turning Elpida’s body into a lightning rod of pain.

She staggered down the rest of the steps, half-blind, panting and heaving, drooling blood, with one hand jammed against her own belly to stop her guts from spilling out. Another pair of hands caught her, less clumsy than Amina.

Amina was squeaking: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! S-she was going to fall! She was going to—”

Atyle said quickly: “Hush, little rabbit. We must move fast. Your angel endures.”

Elpida whined: “I’m— fine— fine— go— keep going—” She forced her eyes open.

Dark corridors stretched off left and right. Gunshots cracked and snapped from the top of the stairs; Hafina was backing down slowly, holding the high ground for a few more seconds. Her liquid armour under-layer and shifting skin shimmered under small arms impact, her hanging layers of armour plates and ragged robes breaking up her outline in the gloom.

Ooni was muttering from inside her helmet, expression masked: “By all the gods. It’s real. That’s a real ART. That’s real. Leuca? Leuca, do you see this?”

Atyle spent those precious seconds glancing left and right. Her peat-green bionic eye whirred in the gloom.

Atyle murmured a reply to Kagami’s instructions in her comms headset: “The rear, scribe? Our chariot suggests this?” Then she pointed with the cyclic sliver-gun — left. “We go! Betrayer, arm our prize!”

Pira said: “The coilgun?”

“The same!”

The group hurried down the corridor, through decades of dust and dank mats of dark nanomachine rot. Ooni helped Pira to strap the coilgun’s aim-assist rig around her waist as they ran; Pira handed Ooni her plasma rifle, unhooked the coilgun receiver, and activated the magnetic containment. The power-tank hummed on her back; a sabot-round clunked into the barrel. Elpida gripped her stomach in one hand and Amina’s bloody paw in the other, dragging her onward, staggering and sagging, lurching and lagging. Behind them, Hafina loped through the darkness, cracking off anti-materiel rounds and exotic bolts of charged particles, keeping the Death’s Heads at bay.

Elpida knew she wasn’t in charge anymore; she could do nothing to keep her comrades alive, nothing but trust.

Pira snapped: “Sentries? Atyle, where are the sentries? You said two?”

“We go around them, betrayer,” Atyle said. “We make our own exit. The scribe is unhappy, but the small titan will have a shorter journey.”

They hit a marble wall and stopped — another t-junction, branching left and right. Was this the exterior of the skyscraper? Elpida couldn’t tell; her sense of direction was scrambled by pain, her legs were shaking with effort, and her stomach felt like it was splitting open beneath her fingers.

Atyle pointed at the wall. “Betrayer. One strike.”

Pira nodded. “Right.”

Pira raised the coilgun receiver, took aim at the stretch of marble wall, and covered her eyes with her free arm. Elpida pulled Amina back into cover, sheltering the smaller girl behind her armoured coat. Atyle ducked and turned her back. Ooni stood there for a second, then crouched into a ball and covered the plasma rifle with her own body, her flesh protected inside her armour carapace.

Down the corridor Hafina was a vague dark shape of hanging rags and liquid armour, shimmering and shifting in the backwash of weapons fire.

Where’s the big bitch? said Howl. Where’s that tank-suit gone, huh? Elps, you were always good at this, where’s she fucking gone?

Elpida had no answer. She gurgled through a bloody throat: “Don’t know. Howl, stop. Can’t think.”

Amina made a curious sound against Elpida’s front.

Pira yelled: “Firing!”

The coilgun’s magnetic containment discharged with a stomach-pounding thump. The sabot-round slammed through the marble wall, pulverised breeze block and concrete into dust, and bent steel supports with a screaming chorus of tortured metal. Debris and shrapnel pattered off Elpida’s armoured coat. Amina whimpered into her chest. The Death’s Heads behind them ceased fire for a second.

Pira shouted: “Another?”

Atyle replied, “No. Through the hole, my lambs!”

One by one they clambered through the exit wound.

The coilgun sabot-round had punched a wide ragged hole through the filthy marble and hidden guts of the skyscraper wall, splintering the concrete and flowering the steel supports outward in a blossom of twisted metal; there was nothing to see through the hole, nothing but the night. Atyle went first, ducking and wriggling through the gap; then Amina, small enough to squeeze through without effort. Ooni and Pira held the rear as Hafina retreated toward them, cracking off shots with the plasma rifle and pointing the coilgun to scatter their pursuers.

Elpida was not certain how she made it outside. She could barely bend to duck through the gap, let alone push past the hanging chunks of concrete and twisted steel beams. Her vision went dark, the blood draining from her head. Urgent hands pulled her through and dropped her to the ground on the far side.

She heaved up a mouthful of blood and spat on the concrete pavement. Her stomach was on fire, blood leaking through her fingers and smeared all up the arm of her coat. She was amazed her belly was not a writhing mass of spilled intestines. She stared at the dirty ground, drooling crimson, on the edge of unconsciousness.

Get up, said Howl. Get up!

Pira squeezed through next — Elpida recognised the sound of her grunting as she pulled the coilgun free — then Ooni, hampered by the bulk of her armour carapace, helmet going clonk as she knocked her head on the concrete.

“The ART—” Ooni panted through her helmet. “It’s too big, how’s it going to fit?”

Atyle said: “Learn faith, animal.”

Elpida raised her head from the pavement just in time to witness Hafina emerge from the hole. The robe-wrapped giant had dislocated her limbs to fit through the gap; she had re-articulated pieces of her body at angles which would have killed any other nanomachine zombie, let alone a human being. She emerged like an unfolding stick insect, joints popping loudly as she resumed her shape, framed by the dark skyscrapers and the choking black ceiling of the night sky.

Her hanging curtains of bulletproof plates were scored and bent; her clinging under-layer of liquid armour was whited-out in places where it had caught bullets or deflected plasma bolts.

She stepped sideways to clear the hole in the wall, then stuck one of her guns into the wound and pulled the trigger several times. The hole flashed with energy backwash; a strangled scream came from the other side.

Ooni chattered through her helmet: “They’re going around! They’re already going around! I-I’ve got the comms network still, Yola’s sending them round the front!” Her voice rose in shrill panic. “She’s— she’s still giving commands! No! Fuck, no! I blew you up, I blew you up!”

Optimistic pot-shots cracked and banged from the second floor of the skyscraper; Hafina straightened up, aimed her guns, and blanketed the upper windows with energy bolts. Atyle raised the cyclic sliver-gun and raked firepower in her wake, chewing at the concrete, forcing the shooter’s heads down.

Pira yelled: “Stay here or move?”

Hafina’s head turned a full one hundred and eighty degrees on her neck, pointing her black helmet in the opposite direction.

“Pheiri!” she said — in that high, delicate voice. “Pheiri!”

“Your titan is on his way!” Atyle said. “We hold a moment, betrayer, we—” She cut off. Then, to Kagami, over the comm link: “Left, right, left, right, make up your mind, scribe! Little rabbit, Hafina, the warrior must be carried, she—”

Get up, Elps, you sleepy bitch! Howl shouted inside Elpida’s head. This lot are falling apart! They’ll leave the other one behind!

Elpida got her feet beneath her body and pushed herself upward. Hands grabbed at her arms, as if she might fall. But got herself upright.

They had emerged from the skyscraper into the rear street — the wide road from which they had first approached the Death’s Head fortress. The ground floor windows and doors were all stopped up with boards and furniture; the Death’s Heads’ own improvised fortifications were choking their response. To the left the road stretched away into the ruins. On the opposite side of the street, dark buildings clawed toward the silent, rotten sky. Behind them, hidden by the skyscraper itself, lay the combat frame. To the right was the neighbouring skyscraper, with the ground floors scoured by firepower, cleared of tall cover, and patrolled by a Death’s Head drone.

Elpida shouted: “Ilyusha!”

The effort made her stomach roar with white-hot fire. Her vision throbbed black. She felt blood dribble down her chin. She shook her head to clear her thoughts.

Then, from far away: “Yaaaaaaaah!”

Ilyusha, howling like—

Like me! cheered Howl.

Elpida pointed. “That— way. Now. Now!”

Atyle said: “The small titan—” A pause. “Very well. Our titan agrees, though the scribe is screaming and soiling her underclothes. Stay right, stay close to hiding places. Hurry now, lambs!”

They fled along the pavement, sticking close to the edge of the skyscraper. Then they burst out past the end of the side-street; Elpida stole one glance to her right, at a sliver of the combat frame’s leg, a soot-stained white ghost abandoned upon the earth. Then they plunged on, hugging the half-ruined walls and naked steel uprights of the neighbouring skyscraper.

A roaring rumble was approaching through the ruins, knocking aside the rubble and smashing down the walls, cutting a path through the guts of the corpse-city.

But it sounded too far away.

Elpida knew they had only moments before the Death’s Heads emerged into the road behind them. The cover in this street was better than the bare-earth crater where the combat frame lay, but as soon as enough Death’s Heads got clear and formed a firing line to their rear, they would be pinned down. The only real cover lay to their right — the wall stubs and twisted metal remains of the ground floor of the neighbouring skyscraper.

Hafina snapped off a few shots to their rear. Small arms fire answered, bullets chewing into the concrete and asphalt. Pira turned as well and loosed another sabot from the coilgun; Elpida glanced back just in time to see the round explode a crater in the pavement, showering running figures with asphalt rain.

A familiar voice rose over the din of weaponry, purring wet with honeyed pain: “Come back, superhuman! Come back to me! I admire your tenacity, but this little game is over!”

Yola.

Rotten bitch, Howl spat. Hope that plasma det burned her face off.

A moment later the Death’s Heads got enough zombies into position. They drowned the street in firepower.

Elpida and her comrades bundled each other into cover — into the ruins of the ground floor of the neighbouring skyscraper. Soot-blackened wall stubs and a few sheets of standing metal were better than the open pavement. Atyle just stepped behind an upright beam, once again unwilling to duck now her stealth field was useless. Amina hit the ground, whimpering as bullets slammed through the air. Elpida crouched, blinded by the pain in her stomach. Ooni sheltered Pira with her own body, her suit of armour carapace protecting them both from stray shots. Hafina stood almost in the open, replying with rapid-fire anti-materiel rounds thumping out of her massive rifle; but even the artificial human would not stand for long — she was jerking and twitching under a hail of bullets, plasma bolts sparking off her armour, tiny metal flechettes catching in her robes.

Yola’s voice rang out over the incessant gunfire: “Superhuman! Elpida! Elpida, won’t you be ours!?”

The Death’s Heads spat other insults down the street, less well-amplified than their leader’s plea: Elpida heard sneering cries, sexual suggestions, scatological impossibilities — and more than once, Ooni’s name, accompanied by fragmentary descriptions of what the Death’s Heads did to traitors of their own.

Ooni screamed, “Where’s our fucking extraction?! I thought you had extraction!”

Atyle said: “The titan—” A pause, listening to her headset. “Resistance? Scribe, be clear. Stop screaming.”

Where was their extraction?

Fuck that! spat Howl. Where’s—

“Illy!” Elpida howled into the ruins on their right. “Ilyusha!”

Atyle said: “The scorpion is right here, warrior. Save your breath. If she cannot join us in time, she must make her own way—”

“Illy!” Elpida howled again, “Il—”

A blood-drenched imp staggered out of the ruins, right into the middle of the group.

Bleeding from a score of deep cuts and wide grazes, covered in dirt and grime, blonde hair plastered down with filth and blood; her red-black bionic tail was coiled over one shoulder as if too exhausted to lift the limb. Eyes wide and wild with triumph, teeth gritted tight, lips peeled back. Her backpack hung by a single strap. One bionic arm dripped with dark fluid, shotgun hanging limp. The other red-clawed fist gripped a drone sensor-suite, wiring ripped off at the base, support beam snapped, like the severed head of a vanquished foe.

Ilyusha locked eyes with Elpida, raised her trophy in one hand, and roared in triumph: “Raaaaaar!”

Elpida howled along with her, spitting blood, too lost in the moment not to join. Her gamble had paid off: knocking out the Death’s Head drone controller had bought Ilyusha the opening she needed to kill her semi-autonomous foe.

Amina said: “Illy, Illy, Illy!” and bundled herself into Ilyusha’s side, careless of her wounds.

No sister ever left! Howl screeched inside Elpida’s head — because Elpida couldn’t find enough breath to say it herself. Her vision wavered. Illy was safe. Everyone was accounted for. Now they only had to get out.

But then Ilyusha saw Ooni.

Ilyusha’s eyes burned like molten lead as she looked at the Death’s Head traitor; she must have already spotted the unfamiliar armour carapace — and Hafina — and assumed they were both with Elpida. But now her eyes dipped, locked on the grinning black skull on the front of Ooni’s armour. The symbol was only partially obscured beneath a smear of Elpida’s own blood.

Ilyusha dropped the severed drone-head; her shotgun whipped upward, muzzle pointing at Ooni, teeth parting in a scream. Nobody had time to shout a warning, before—

Elpida closed one hand over the shotgun’s muzzle.

Ilyusha’s eyes flickered from Ooni to Elpida in horrified incomprehension. Ooni stayed very still, plasma rifle pointed at the ground, still sheltering Pira.

“Mine,” Elpida growled, her throat full of blood. “Illy. Mine now.”

Ilyusha’s horror turned to grudging acceptance. She yanked her shotgun back and spat a glob of bloody saliva at Ooni’s feet. “Eat my shit, reptile!”

Elpida had to keep this under control; Ilyusha had not witnessed Pira’s betrayal, nor was she aware of anything which had happened since. She would be furious, perhaps driven to violence, but later — not in the middle of a firefight.

Atyle jerked her head upward. “Our chariot arrives. We cross this path on the count of five, little lambs. One—”

“What!?” Ooni yelped. “We can’t even stand up! We can’t—”

“-two-”

Hafina suddenly stepped back and crouched, abandoning the street.

“Brace!” Pira shouted — and grabbed Ooni, shoving her to the ground.

“-three—”

On the far side of the street a brick building exploded outward, overwhelming the cacophony of gunfire. A wave of debris washed across the road. Broken bricks and shattered beams cascaded down the dirty white hull of the machine-giant which roared through the gap.

The crawler, the tank — ‘Pheiri’, if Elpida had understood Hafina’s word correctly: a humped titan bristling with weapon systems, covered in horns and curls and calluses, an overgrown cyst of Telokopolan carbon bone-mesh armour.

The tank slammed through the building, demolishing the structure, skidding to a halt. A dozen tracks and treads spun wild for a second before they bit into the asphalt again. The machine used its own momentum to swing itself around, to point its frontal armour down the street, toward the increasing fire from the massing Death’s Heads. Elpida flinched — she couldn’t help it, even with her nervous system hardened by Telokopolan genetic engineering and deadened by blood loss and pain: to a combat frame that maneuver would have been nothing, but combat frames had legs. This crawler had armoured tracks and concealed banks of wheels. Over forty feet tall and easily a hundred feet long. To pull off that maneuver in such a large crawler would require a genius driver — or the tank was piloting itself, like a combat frame given full autonomy.

Active shielding flowered to life in a semi-circle dome around the front of the vehicle: an interlocking matrix of hexagonal energy fields, sheets of hissing electric blue, and curves of shining white. The shield sparked and flickered as it deflected small arms fire.

Atyle didn’t miss a beat: “—four—”

The crawler opened fire on the Death’s Heads: coaxial weapon systems and anti-personnel machine guns roared and barked, pouring a wave of bullets and sabots and energy bolts down the street, exploding chunks of concrete from the skyscraper walls and chewing waves of asphalt grit out of the ground. Only the massive turret weapon lay still, a distended purple-red lance, quiet and dark amid the firepower lighting up the night.

Elpida grinned; she felt tears running down her cheeks. Was this what it felt like to be a Legionnaire saved by a combat frame?

No, saved by ‘Pheiri’ — and why not? The combat frames had names too. This crawler, whatever it was, it was wearing Telokopolan armour. A little piece of her home had come roaring out of the infinite darkness at the end of time, to pluck her new comrades from defeat and death.

A crew hatch opened in the rear of the tank; a ramp hit the ground.

All aboard! Howl cackled.

“—five!” Atyle finished.

Elpida lurched out of cover, dragging Amina behind her. The others rose as well, running for the—

Thooom-crack!

A beam of burning bronze burst through the air and lanced into the tank’s active shielding. The shield-web exploded with a concussive wave, washed over Elpida’s face, and turned the world white.

The white-out lasted only a split-second. Elpida was left blinking and dazed, her ears ringing with the pressure impact. That shield failure was not like when the tank had duelled the worm-guard trio; that was a true overload. Pheiri’s shields were down.

Standing at the far end of the street, out in the open, disdaining cover, was the Death’s Heads’ own walking tank — Kuro.

The huge zombie had deployed the massive plasma cannon from her back; it curved over her shoulder like a scythe, and sent its own support mounts down into the ground behind her, locking her in place, anchoring her to the road surface. She was reeling from the recoil, recovering her balance. A shield hissed with static in a spherical bubble around her, protecting the Death’s Head from return fire.

The plasma cannon steamed and hissed, glowing like a torch in the night.

Kuro straightened up, locked her knees, and re-armed the plasma cannon for a second shot; the coils began to glow brighter.

“Pheiri!” Hafina screamed — a terrible sound, more machine than meat.

Pheiri’s hull blossomed with missile pods, opened up with massive rotary machine-guns, and revealed ports to aim concealed laser arrays. The tank slammed that tiny bubble-shield with a fortress worth of firepower. Kuro vanished behind a wall of bullets and detonations and a shower of kicked-up asphalt — but the bubble held.

The Death’s Heads rushed back into the street. They kept well clear of Kuro and began to pour fire down on Elpida’s comrades once more, cutting them off from their extraction.

Kuro’s plasma cannon coil’s glowed white-hot. Almost ready to fire.

Hafina strode out into the road, uncaring of return fire, adding her own weapons to those of her titan-machine. Elpida could hear the distinctive crack! of Serin’s rifle, somewhere far away; but that did not help either. Pheiri’s tracks shuddered and jerked, as if the machine was uncertain.

Yola’s voice floated over the firefight: “Come back to me, superhuman! Stand now and I will spare your vassals!”

Elpida let go of Amina’s hand; somebody else grabbed for her, but she shook them off. She couldn’t let this happen, she couldn’t let her cadre die all over again, not in a failed rescue, not for her, not for—

Pira rose from cover and sprinted out into the street.

The flame-haired zombie flew right past Hafina and into the hail of gunfire from the Death’s Heads. Bullets bounced off her body armour, cracked off her bulletproof vest, tore through her clothes, and ripped holes in her flesh. But Pira didn’t stop — she put her head down and ran for the tank.

“Leuca!” Ooni screamed.

Was Pira saving her own skin?

No — she was going for the front, not the hatch! She needed height. She needed an angle.

Pira leapt on to the front of Pheiri’s armour, hauling herself up the gnarled bone-mesh hand over hand, all the weight of the coilgun dragging on her back. She got partway up, found a good pair of footholds, and stood. Bullets punched her backward, tore gouges in her arms and legs, and threatened to jerk her off balance.

Pira pointed the coilgun receiver down the road and pulled the trigger.

Thump!-clack-thump!-clack-thump!-clack — the coilgun firing on fully automatic was like standing next to a combat frame stamping on the ground. Waves of magnetic discharge slammed over Elpida and sent her head spinning.

The coilgun sabot rounds bounced off Kuro’s bubble-shield — once, twice; but then Pira found her aim, and hit her target: the ground.

Coilgun rounds exploded the asphalt and concrete in front of Kuro — and then beneath her feet. The giant tumbled into a hole of rubble and grey mud. The plasma cannon fired — but the beam went high, lancing through the sky, swallowed by the rotten clouds.

Pira held the trigger down, digging with the world’s most dangerous shovel, until she had buried the walking tank.

Maddest bitch of all! Howl roared.

Then Pira dropped the coilgun receiver and toppled sideways.

Elpida picked herself up, belly streaming with blood. She ran for the side of the tank, to get herself beneath Pira before Pira’s skull cracked open on the ground; the pain was white-hot, blotting out her thoughts, stitches popping, gut screaming. One last burst of adrenaline was all she had left.

But she was roaring with bloody laughter: Howl was laughing through her.

Pira’s battered form slid down the side of the tank; Elpida bounced off the hull, stuck out her arms, and caught her. They almost collapsed together in a bloodstained heap.

Strong hands in grey armour helped her haul Pira’s limp form around to Pheiri’s rear. A crew access hatch yawned wide. The inside of the tank was dark and jumbled. The others hurried in; somebody half-threw Amina up the ramp. Stray shots whipped and cracked through the air. Yola was still shouting. Hafina stood to one side, the last one aboard, popping off anti-materiel rounds at the Death’s Heads down the road.

Pira was still conscious. Her eyes were full of blood. As Elpida hauled her up the ramp, she gurgled: “Let— me—”

Elpida and Howl laughed in her face: “You don’t get to die! I told you, Pira, you’re mine now!”

Up the ramp, into the crawler, into the cramped darkness; Elpida heard Hafina swing in behind them and heard the rear hatch begin to close.

“Everyone in?” she gurgled through a mouthful of blood.

Yes, Commander, said Howl.

Only then did Elpida allow her knees to give up. She slid to the cool metal floor, and passed out in a pool of her own blood.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Yes, Commander.

Pira attempts self-sacrifice (to atone? who knows) and digs hole in the ground, Ilyusha clamps down on her anger for long enough to listen, Elpida establishes that these girls are hers now, Kuro gets buried under the road, Yola gets rejected, and Pheiri reveals that his AI core once started life as a Toyota AE86.

Last chapter of arc 7! Wow, well. This whole arc went in some directions I didn’t expect, but I’m very happy with the result. I’m having such a blast writing this story so far, and I hope you’re enjoying reading it as much as I am creating it. Onto arc 8 next week! We might be taking a little tonal breather after all this combat. After all, Elpida’s badly wounded, Pheiri needs to recharge his shields, and somebody’s going to have to disarm a traitor and a turncoat. But we might not switch POV for a little while. I’m not 100% sure until I hit the page. Could go either way!

And if you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

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Content Warnings

Cannibalism
References to suicide
Extreme pain (you gotta know this one by now)

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Pira and Ooni: two lost girls with the muzzles of their guns pressed against each other’s hearts, a pair of old lovers who had come to love death more than each other — to adore the grinning skull and the release of giving up.

Elpida waited for them to obey her orders, lower their weapons, and follow her instead.

She knew they would.

Elpida also knew that she was acting irrationally. Blood loss and burning pain had pushed her to the edge of delusion. Howl cackled in the back of her mind: Your girls now, Elps! Your girls now! She swayed on unsteady feet. She panted through clenched teeth. She squinted hard, fighting down the agony which radiated out from her oozing gut wound.

Pira might still pull the trigger of her stolen handgun, put a bullet through Ooni’s chest, and then turn the weapon on herself. Elpida could not predict how the flame-haired revenant would act; she hadn’t predicted the betrayal, after all. And Ooni was an unknown. Was she about to panic, jerk her rifle out of Pira’s grip, and paint Elpida with a bolt of plasma?

Elpida could not allow herself the luxury of doubt.

Fake it ‘till you make it! Howl screeched inside her mind. That’s how we all did it, back in the day, right?

The trick of true command was not only to act as if her authority was unquestionable — Elpida had to believe. Since she had choked and gagged and thrashed back to life in that metal coffin, the deaths of all her sisters had opened a rift in her mind and flooded her with doubt: she was no Commander worthy of the role, she would get her comrades killed all over again, nobody without a death wish should follow her into anything. The Commander was nothing without belief, and without something in which to believe.

And now the Commander gave orders to a traitor and a foe, and expected them to follow.

I’m going mad, Howl.

You were always fucking mad! It’s why we followed you! The maddest cunt of all!

Elpida heard the covert sounds of Atyle and Amina entering the conference room, creeping up behind her. Pira and Ooni looked up briefly. Elpida tossed back her hood and unhooked the comms headset from around her skull; she couldn’t concentrate with Kagami shouting into her ear. Howl’s advice was better. She passed the headset over her shoulder.

Atyle accepted the device, then whispered: “The animals heard that gunshot, warrior. We have one or two minutes at best.”

Pira’s hollow eyes crusted over with a frown. She said: “You can’t be serious. Elpida, get out of here. You’re free, don’t jeopardise—”

Elpida took a step forward. “Do not make me— repeat myself,” she panted through the pain. “You have your— orders, we can discuss discipline later. Right now we’re in combat.”

“Elpida. I shot you. I—”

“You don’t get to die. Not your choice. Lower those weapons.”

Ooni’s bright green eyes flickered from Elpida to Pira. She jerked her plasma rifle out of Pira’s grip — and pointed the muzzle down. Her gaze wandered over the pair of corpses on the floor — Cage-Head and Vomit-Armour. Elpida was standing with one boot in the pool of blood spreading from the shattered throat of the latter. Ooni swallowed, hard and rough.

Pira lowered the heavy handgun. She shook her head. “I shot you. How can you—”

Elpida pointed at the second plasma rifle, pinned beneath one of the fallen Death’s Heads. “Pick up that other— gun. We may need the firepower. You are going to fall in— behind Atyle and me. You follow her hand signals, move when we move, do exactly as ordered. Do I make myself clear?”

Pira’s face was a mask of disbelief. “I—”

Elpida and Howl spoke as one: “You are mine, Pira!”

The effort made Elpida’s gut flare with pain. She hunched and heaved and whined through her teeth, drooling blood, spitting to clear her mouth.

Pira stared for a heartbeat more — then she stowed the handgun inside her body armour, tugged her clothes back into place over her bionic arm, and crouched down next to the fallen Death’s Head. She rolled the body sideways and extracted the plasma rifle. Her hands flickered over the controls. The weapon hummed briefly, then fell silent.

She looked up at Elpida. Her sky-blue eyes were full of compressed pain and guileless wonder.

“Yes, Commander,” she said.

Elpida didn’t even nod; her authority required no acknowledgement.

Ooni said: “What about me?”

Her voice trembled with desperation and jealousy. Elpida heard that as clear as Howl’s words inside her head.

Ooni glanced at Pira, and said: “Leuca? L-Leuca? What about me?”

Ooni was a terrible mess; her mouth and chin were stained with the greasy pink smears of half-chewed brain matter, cut through with twin tracks of bloody tears. Her long black hair was matted with sweat, stuck to her forehead, smeared with blood. She stood half-crouched over the boxy, matte-black body of the plasma rifle. Her eyes were wide and red from crying. That black skull still grinned from the middle of her chestplate.

Ooni hated Elpida for ‘stealing’ Pira; Ooni had gleefully jammed a hand into Elpida’s guts; and Ooni was a Death’s Head — but the corpses on the floor were testimony to her true allegiance: Pira, Leuca, her decades-lost lover.

Elpida could work with that. It was leverage. A way in.

Elpida had dealt with situations like this dozens of times before. Her sisters in the cadre had disagreed, feuded, fought, burned with confused overlapping passions and multi-directional jealousy: Third and Quio and their dirty little knife fight; those three months when Scoria and Arry had gotten obsessed with passing Bug back and forth, until it wasn’t a joke anymore; Kos and Vari and Snow swapping clothes in an escalating game which ended in tears and blood, and then Kos bringing Elpida in to force a reconciliation; even Howl — that one time she’d driven Metris to a night-time ambush, and they’d gotten so loud they’d woken up the whole cadre. But those feuds had never involved live ammunition — well, almost never. And at the end of the day the cadre all slept in the same dormitory; they all shared the same skin and hair and blood and genetic template; underneath even the bites and the scratches and the scars, they loved each other. The sisterhood of the cadre, against the green, against the Civitas, and then against the Covenanters. There was always a status quo for the cadre — each other.

In this nanomachine afterlife there was no return to any status quo but death. Elpida could not afford a mistake.

Atyle hissed from behind her: “Warrior, time grows short. We—”

Crack — crack!

Serin taking a double shot, from far beyond the walls.

Everyone flinched and looked up. But Elpida just stared at Ooni.

Atyle hissed again: “She buys us time. Heads are down. Warrior?”

Elpida marched up to Ooni — dragging her feet a little, blood dripping from between the fingers pressed to the bandages around her gut wound. She raised her blood-soaked hand, slapped her palm against Ooni’s chestplate, and met those staring green eyes.

Elpida said: “Your choice.”

Ooni swallowed, rough and thick. Her green eyes were wide. She glanced down at the crescent-and-line symbol daubed on Elpida’s t-shirt. Her breath came in ragged little gasps. She said: “Do you promise not to kill Pira?”

Elpida took a deep breath. Expanding her ribcage made her gut scream. She swallowed the pain.

You have to mean it, Elps, Howl snapped. A lie won’t work. Make her one of us.

“I promise,” Elpida said.

“Y-yes,” Ooni whispered. She glanced at Pira. “Yes, then. Yes, Commander?”

“Good enough,” Elpida grunted. She dragged her hand across Ooni’s chestplate, smearing crimson mess across the black and grinning skull. Elpida’s blood blotted out the Death’s Head symbol. “Now you’re mine, too.”

A triangle: her, Pira, Ooni. All welded together. An unstable atomic configuration? It only had to hold until extraction. She would deal with the Death’s Head ideology later, and deal with whatever lurked inside Ooni’s skull.

Elpida stepped back. Ooni stared down at the defaced emblem with a haunted expression.

Pira said: “Ooni. Eyes forward. For you.”

Ooni swallowed. “For you,” she echoed.

Pira said, “I told you about her, Ooni. I told you she was real. She can do it.”

Ooni said: “Does she eat, or is she like you now?”

Pira sighed. “She eats.”

Before Elpida could react with fresh orders, Ooni rushed over to the conference room table and grabbed a handful of human brains. She hurried back to Elpida and held it out. “Y-you gotta eat. You’re bleeding. Like, a lot. A lot. I’m sorry I—”

“Stop,” Elpida grunted. “Later.”

Elpida accepted the handful of greasy grey-pink meat; she had not felt hungry, but her body suddenly shook with need. She crammed the gobbet of brains into her mouth and swallowed almost without chewing. It didn’t help the pain.

She realised that Amina still had her knife out. The younger revenant was staring at Pira and Ooni, blade trembling in her fist.

“Knife away, Amina,” Elpida muttered.

Amina whined — but she slid the blade back inside her coat.

Ooni was staring down at one of the fallen Death’s Heads — the one with the extendable bionic arm. She looked at Pira and gestured at the other corpse — at the sword rammed into the skull.

Pira shook her head. “No time to cut out the bionic. Would take twenty minutes not to ruin the nerve connections. Forget it.”

Ooni nodded, eyes downcast.

Elpida pointed at Atyle, at the oil-smear blob of hazy camouflage. “You follow her hand signals— and her orders— as if they were mine.” Atyle extended an unblurred hand, to assist with the explanation. “We are making for the exit, then for pick up. Absolute silence, and stealth. Atyle, any chance we can still get— to the coilgun?”

Atyle chuckled, low and soft; she was looking left and right, up and down, her peat-green bionic eye a blur amid the smear, seeing through brick and concrete.

“Perhaps, warrior. A band of stalkers comes this way. We may elude them, with haste. The scribe says we should let Pira shoot us all and be done with this. The scribe says many things. She is furious with you. She will guide us still.”

Elpida nodded. She would apologise to Kagami later. “We move. Amina, come here, hold my hand. Pira, Ooni, in the rear. Keep those plasma rifles—”

Ooni suddenly hissed, her voice hushed with awe: “That’s the ART. The ART everyone was going on about. Oh fu-fuck.”

She was staring at Hafina.

The invisible giant had stepped just inside the doorway of the conference room. A water-sheen illusion hung in the air, against a backdrop of gloom.

Elpida said quickly: “Her name is Hafina, she’s on our side. She provides some kind of stealth field, so stick close to her. What does ART mean?”

Pira said: “Artificial human. Ooni, it’s not. There’s none left.”

Atyle raised one hand, her camouflage unblurring to show her dark skin and the cuff of her coat. She jabbed two fingers toward the doorway. “Quiet, wayward lambs. We leave now or we are cornered animals. Speed over stealth. No more crouching. Hurry, warrior!”

Elpida and her comrades plunged back into the dark corridors of the skyscraper, well-armed, enlarged, and dangerously unstable.

Hafina took point once again, a translucent shimmer striding through the shadows. Atyle stuck close to Hafina’s heels now, no longer crouched, crossing the marble floors at a loping jog, her head and her cyclic sliver-gun swinging to cover all angles. Elpida hurried to keep up, gripping Amina with one hand, cradling her own leaking gut with her other arm; each step invited a fresh wave of pain from her re-opened gut wound, throbbing and pulsing in her belly. She strangled her whining, swallowed the taste of her own blood, and tried to stop breathing.

Pira and Ooni ghosted along in the rear. Elpida did not glance back; she had to trust that they belonged to her.

Why had she done this? The sensible tactical option would have been to leave both of them there, not invite instability and potential points of failure into an already precarious combat situation. Pira had betrayed her; Ooni was the sort of person who dropped her own allies for an old friend. Why had Elpida done this?

Because you’re the Commander, Howl whispered.

And you’re a hallucination caused by blood loss, pain, and stress. You’re not Howl. You’re a metaphor dredged from a dream. I’m not even really hearing you. My brain is shunting processes around to keep me on my feet. You’re a neurological glitch. Shut up. Let me concentrate.

Howl cackled. You can’t even concentrate on your own feet right now, bitch! And you’ll miss me the second I’m gone.

The group shot through the t-junction and down the corridor leading to the exterior wall of the skyscraper. Left, then right, then left again, moving as fast as they could, passing empty rooms and quiet hallways, filled with dust and echoes.

A clatter of booted footfalls reached the t-junction behind them, hurrying in the opposite direction. Snatches of voice floated down the corridor, too far away and muffled to make out the words. Were the Death’s Heads about to discover the bodies of their friends? When they did, all stealth would be over, they—

Crack! Crack!

Serin again, the perfect distraction, like she was watching through the walls. She probably was.

Atyle hissed: “Keep moving, little lambs.”

Time ceased to make sense. Elpida was a standing wave of gut pain, putting one foot in front of the other, holding one arm over her belly, holding onto Amina. Holding on. Hold on! Not far now!

Ten hours or ten seconds later — Elpida knew it was the latter, but it felt like the former — Atyle stopped and held up a fist.

The group halted in near-silence, all except for the gentle click-clack of Ooni’s armour plates and the soft hum of two active plasma rifles. From behind them, back up the marbled corridor, raised voices and running feet echoed in all directions. Another sudden crack split the air — Serin rendering more aid. The Death’s Heads could have been a hundred meters away, or right around the corner; Elpida put her trust in Kagami’s overwatch.

The end of the corridor was less than fifty feet away; a set of wide marble stairs led down into darkness.

On the right a row of massive wooden doors all opened into a single, huge room — some kind of gathering place or entertainment hall. Elpida could not see much — brightly coloured carpet thick with dust, gaudy gilt-and-gold walls laced with nano-mould, and rows of machines drenched in shadows.

Atyle waited, fist raised. Seconds crawled by. Elpida’s shoulder blades ran with sweat. Her t-shirt and her hair stuck to her skin. Blood dripped from between her fingers, pooling on the floor. Her vision wavered.

Then, suddenly — fingers forward! Go! The group scurried past the row of doors.

Inside the huge room gleaming wooden tables were topped with strange numbered mechanisms, spaces for dealing cards, horizontal wheels, tilted glass sheets, and slots for tokens. Slender machines with brightly coloured shells stood in upright rows, their rusted mechanical arms jutting outward, limp and broken. Dead displays showed nothing but black amid a riot of clashing hues. A clownish place, coated in rot.

The room was tiered, climbing upward toward an elevated viewing screen designed for a projector: the screen was lit up with a herky-jerky night-vision view, showing ruined buildings and chunks of concrete.

A shape darted across that screen: a flash of pale skin caught in ghostly green night-vision.

The screen flashed with weapons discharge — once, twice. From beyond the skyscraper walls Elpida heard the thump-thump of Ilyusha’s shotgun in time with the display. A long dark bionic tail lashed out and whipped the viewpoint camera, sending it lurching off-target. A spray of bullets chewed into the concrete, missing the figure by inches.

Up on the screen, Ilyusha vanished behind a stub of ruined wall.

Arrayed in front of the screen were several Death’s Head revenants: Yola, in her distinctive dark purple, her helmet retracted to show her gleaming ruby hair; she stood alongside another pair of figures wearing suits of powered armour, their helmets firmly on, painted with matching skull designs; three more revenants clustered around a fourth, all of them more lightly armoured than their leader. The fourth was contorted backward, her spine hanging at an impossible angle, her front opened to disgorge a tangle of machinery. Her eyes were fluttering, rolling into the back of her head. She was caked with sweat and shaking as if gripped by fever. Elpida realised that revenant’s own body was projecting the image from the drone — a living televisual uplink.

Another Death’s Head revenant was draped and encrusted with wires, with a trunk of cables plugged directly into her eye sockets. Her hands and forearms were a mass of control surfaces, sparking and flickering with holographic motion. She gestured like a musical conductor, swinging and swooping her hands through the air. The view on the screen whirled and zoomed in time with her motions. She was piloting the drone, hunting Ilyusha.

All the revenants in the Command Post were watching the screen. One of them was chuckling. Another was clapping, slowly.

Yola was saying, in her wet and clicking voice: “—determined degenerate, is she not? With so little weaponry to her name, too. Nothing but small arms. She can’t even penetrate the drone’s armour. Sofika, do you think there is any chance of a crippling blow, rather than seeing her dead? I would love to examine that tail, preferably with the neural connection still intact. A fascinating piece of balance work. It should be ours.”

Elpida and the others reached the far side of the row of doors, once again concealed behind the wall and wrapped in the dampening of Hafina’s stealth field. Atyle raised her fist again: all stop.

Inside the Command Post, a jerky, heaving voice answered Yola’s question: “Crip-crippling? Legs o-off? Cut off. Cut off. Laser, acceptable? Can’t get too far from the target, she slips— slippery. Fast-fast. Upside. Downside.”

Yola sighed. “Sofi, do not make us reprogram your uplink again.”

One of the other Death’s Heads laughed, harsh and metallic, from inside a helmet.

‘Sofi’, the drone controller, replied: “Crippling blow, yes, boss. I’ll take off her legs. I promise. Off at the legs. Off with her leggies. Leg.”

Atyle gestured at the row of doors with two fingers. She hissed: “Coilgun. On the left, fifteen feet from the door, in the open.” Then down the stairs. “Out.”

Elpida hissed: “How many skull-fuckers between us and the door?”

Ooni flinched; Elpida pretended not to notice. Atyle turned to look down the stairs, then whispered: “Two guards. Lightly armed. A straight line, warrior.”

Elpida squinted through the pain. She whispered: “How do they not— know we’re free?”

Atyle paused, listening to Kagami, then said: “They will discover the bodies any moment. Coilgun or go, warrior?”

Elpida shook her head, fighting a wave of brain-fog and the throbbing agony in her gut. She was not capable of making this decision. “Illy—” she slurred. “Illy’s fighting all by her— herself. Maybe we if can— take out the drone— pilot—”

Amina squeezed her hand, hard and urgent. “Elpida … ”

Look lively, Elps! Howl snapped inside her mind. The Commander goes down now and these bitches might run — then what happens to little Illy, huh?

Elpida blinked hard. “We have to help Ilyusha. Break stealth now, hit the drone pilot, forget the coilgun—”

Ooni suddenly hissed: “How important is this weapon?”

Ooni had unhooked her helmet from her belt, the same dirty grey as the rest of her armour; she was holding it up to the side of her head, listening to the click-buzz crackle of the Death’s Heads’ encrypted comms network. She stared at Elpida and the oil-smear of Atyle with manic eyes, panting raw and rough, biting her lower lip so hard she drew blood.

Pira whispered quickly: “That coilgun is tomb-grown, high-powered, more than anything else we could get our hands on.” She nodded at the sliver-gun in Atyle’s arms. “But we have that. There’s no sense in this.”

Atyle nodded once. “The scribe agrees. Warrior, we—”

Ooni hissed, quick and quivering: “Yola will come after us.”

Elpida whispered: “Ooni, follow your orders. One hit on the drone pilot is all we—”

“You don’t know her like I do,” Ooni said. “She’ll come after you. After Pira. She’ll throw resources at revenge long after it stops making material sense. She’s a genius and she’s right. She’s always right, she’s right about everything. She gets us, gets it. But she’ll come after us.” Ooni panted so hard that a human would have been hyperventilating. Her hands flew over the controls on her plasma rifle; the weapon pulsed out a deep throbbing hum. “I’ll get your coilgun. And disrupt the drone.”

Before anybody could reach out and stop her, Ooni shot to her feet, jammed her grey helmet into place over her head, and stepped out in full view of the Command Post.

Elpida grabbed for her — but Pira grabbed Elpida.

“Hold, warrior,” Atyle hissed. “Let the fool distract. The scribe and I agree.”

Ooni stepped through the doors, into the Command Post, beyond Elpida’s sight.

But Elpida was already twisting to face Pira and Atyle, heaving through the pain in her gut. Pira recoiled from the look on Elpida’s face.

Howl hissed through Elpida’s teeth: “One of us fights, we all fight!” A throb of pain, hard enough to make Elpida’s head spin. Then she hissed: “Up! Prep for covering fire! Amina, keep your head down!”

Atyle and Pira stood up and pressed themselves to the wall next to the doors. Elpida did the same. Amina ducked. Hafina — Elpida couldn’t see Hafina.

A few seconds passed, then Yola’s voice rang out from inside the Command Post: “Ahhh, our little addition. Ooni, how is the apostate? A glowing picture of health, I hope? I take it she’s eating, if—”

Click-buzz. A power-armoured muffle: “Boss, I can’t raise Hatty. She’s supposed to be testing the apostate. I can’t—”

Another Death’s Head revenant squeaked in sudden alarm: “Hey! Hey you can’t take those, they’re not pool weapons, they stay there until—”

“She’s going for the—”

“She’s red-lined her fucking rifle!”

“Boss, down!”

A thudding of falling bodies clattered to the floor, punctuated by the heavy-weight slam of powered armour going down. Solid-shot weapons cracked and barked, bullets slamming into concrete, chewing through carpet and plaster — and bouncing off carapace plate.

“Now!” Elpida shouted.

Atyle and Pira swung out into the doorway. Pira’s stolen plasma rifle coughed and barked, painting the raised platform with bolts of eye-searing electric blue; the cyclic sliver-gun in Atyle’s arms turned into a blur as the barrels spun up, rounds blasting through tables and upright machines, filling the room with shrapnel and debris. Elpida joined them, dragging the compact shotgun from inside her armoured coat, ready to make some Death’s Head zombie keep her skull down for a few vital seconds.

The revenants up by the screen had all hit the floor. The projector-zombie was tumbled in a heap of limbs and metal pieces. The drone-pilot had dived behind a table. The screen was blank. Elpida saw the glint of Yola’s purple powered armour, then—

Ooni stepped out from behind a row of machines on the left; she swung her plasma rifle like a stick-grenade and hurled it toward that hint of deep purple armour.

The weapon arced through the air. Bodies scattered. A high-pitched whine, a click-whirr, and then—

An ear-splitting explosion blew a shock-wave of pressure out through the open doors of the Command Post.

Elpida staggered back around the corner. Small arms and strong hands caught her around the waist. Amina hung on tight. Pira and Atyle retreated too, guns down, little ammunition spent.

Ooni staggered out of the Command Post moments later, her armour scorched all down the front; Elpida’s hand-smeared mark of blood across her chest had baked black from the plasma detonation. She had a submachine gun — Elpida’s submachine gun — hanging from a strap around her neck. She cradled the power-tank, receiver, and aim-assist rig of the coilgun in both arms, straps spilling down her legs, almost too heavy for her to hold.

Pira caught her and helped her with the weight of the weapon.

Elpida coughed, and said: “Good— girl. Now— go, we— have—”

Atyle dropped her oil-smear camouflage. Her head snapped up. Her peat-green bionic eye locked on the far end of the corridor.

“Stealth is done, lambs!” she shouted. “Turn and go! The scribe says—”

A power-armoured giant stepped around the distant corner; eight feet of grey metal, festooned with weaponry, faceless and blank, with a skull painted in the middle of her chestplate. A walking tank.

Kuro — Yola’s giant. She’d not been in the Command Post.

Other Death’s Head revenants were rounding the corner behind Kuro, raising weapons, taking cover, shouting commands and orders and warnings and insults.

Kuro’s faceless helmet snapped toward Elpida and her comrades. The power plant on her back hummed and whined with spiking output, air-exchange vents throbbing with heat-haze. Her mounted weapons began to deploy, rising from their housing, lifting on articulated arms; only the massive back-mounted plasma cannon remained stowed.

Then Kuro put her head down and charged.

Atyle and Pira both opened fire — but that armour ate plasma bolts like they were splashes of water, and deflected the deafening roar of sliver-gun rounds like a shower of ball bearings. Kuro pounded up the corridor, massive armoured boots cracking the marble tiles, seemingly intent on slamming head-first into the group and killing them with her hands. Even through the haze of pain, Elpida recognised this tactic. She’d seen Silico perform it against hardened Legion fire-points: get a heavily armoured fighter into close-quarters, disrupt any return fire, and then pile on from a distance against the neutralised team.

Atyle started to back up, lowering her weapon. Pira and Ooni struggled with the coilgun, trying to power on the magnetic coils and raise the receiver. Amina screamed something. Elpida raised a fist, a last gesture of defiance.

Hafina stepped up, in front, right in Kuro’s path.

The invisible giant dropped her optic camouflage like a sheet of falling water; beneath the shimmering illusion was a figure wrapped in layers of robe and rag, hanging plates of bulletproof material inside curtains of fabric, cocooning an under-layer of ultra lightweight liquid armour, all to protect a core of ever-shifting cuttlefish-skin. Her helmet was a smooth black beak, without eyes.

Hafina looked more Silico than human, artificial or otherwise.

Six arms came up, two holding a massive rifle, four with smaller weapons of a kind that Elpida had never seen before; silver, chrome, and light-drinking black.

Hafina opened fire; the corridor flashed with energy bolts, all colour washed away in a blink. Anti-materiel rounds slammed into Kuro’s armour — cracking her head back, ramming her chest sideways, and smashing one hip so hard that she went spinning to the floor. The Death’s Heads’ walking tank crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs and clattering weapons.

Felled, but far from dead.

Kuro’s armour was not even penetrated, from what Elpida could see. Behind Kuro, down the corridor, the other zombies were beginning to return fire, bullets and bolts hissing through the air and slamming into the marble walls. Chips of stone pattered off Elpida’s armoured coat.

Elpida spat blood to clear her mouth, raised her voice, and shouted the only order which made sense.

“Everyone up, behind Hafina! Down the stairs! Retreat!”

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What’s worse than being a nanomachine zombie? Being a nanomachine zombie with the voice of your dead sister-comrade-lover driving you to highly symbolic but tactically unsound decisions. See, this is why Howl wasn’t in charge. Anyway, it worked! But there’s going to be a long tail of consequences here; even if they all make it out alive, (well, ‘alive’) I doubt an apology to Kagami and a heartfelt conversation with Pira is going to patch things up. Maybe the aftermath will be worse than the escape. But hey, at least Haf is massive and well-armed (pun intended). Now, if only they can call Pheiri to come pick them up …

In other news, this is the second-to-last chapter of arc 7! This arc has gone on longer than I expected, and it’s been a real challenge at some points, but I’ve ended up quite happy with it. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it! One more chapter left before arc 8!

No patreon link this week! It’s literally the last day of the month, so if you subscribe now it’ll charge you twice. Wait until tomorrow! Go check out some other serials instead!

But there’s still a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps.

And thank you for reading my little story. You know, I wasn’t quite sure if it would ever get this far, or if many readers would be interested in this kind of narrative. But it has, and you are! So, thank you. I couldn’t do this without you. And we’re only just beginning.

Content Warnings

Extreme pain
Extensive bleeding
Suicidal intention/ideation, discussion of suicide

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Hafina took point — a transparent shimmer ten feet tall, moving with absolute silence, near-invisible in the unlit corridors. Atyle stuck close to the giant’s heels, but not too close; Atyle’s camouflage turned her into a smear of oil-dark shadow — good for hiding in corners, but not in plain sight. A Death’s Head revenant might miss Hafina right in the middle of the corridor, but Atyle was less well concealed.

Elpida stayed in the rear, her white hair tucked down the back of her coat, her hood pulled up over her head. The best she could do.

She held Cantrelle’s compact pistol-grip shotgun in one hand, and Amina’s sweaty little palm in her other.

The makeshift holding cell in which they had been confined was on the fifth floor of the skyscraper, perhaps to avert a window-based escape, or to discourage others from interfering without permission. The Death’s Heads were mostly using rooms on the second floor of the building; Atyle whispered this information to Elpida as they hurried down the fifth-floor’s main corridor. They had a straight shot to the first set of stairs. Going down.

The interior of the skyscraper was all gilt and gold, marble floor tiles and sculpted window frames, doors of darkest wood with handles of deep brass, and light fixtures shaped like torches ablaze; all quiet and cold now, blanketed in decades of dust, smeared with soot and filth, marked by black traces of nanomachine mould.

Hafina slipped down the first staircase like a torrent of falling water; Atyle followed with a crouching lope, her weapon cradled close to her chest, a blurred shadow among friends.

Elpida did her best to minimise her target profile and move quietly — but her gut wound burned inside her belly, raking her nerves with claws of barbed acid, jerking skewers of pain into her spine and lungs and groin.

Her skin streamed with sweat. She clamped her teeth tight and closed her lips against the temptation to whine. She pulled Amina along.

There was a window in the stairwell. No glass, just a hole, like a dry-socket wound. The black-choked sky was heavy with night, the ring of skyscrapers a skeletal hand below the gravid rotten belly, pockmarked here and there with tiny signs of undead activity, lights showing in empty windows. The combat frame was a dirty white ghost lying prone upon the grey and ashen earth.

Crack!

Another distant gunshot from a high-powered rifle. Serin, taking another swing.

From somewhere far below, muffled by concrete and brick and broken asphalt, Elpida heard the distinctive thump-thump of Ilyusha’s rotary shotgun.

And then a shout? A laugh? A cackle caught on the night air? Too far away to be sure. She hoped Ilyusha was winning.

And then they all plunged back into the skyscraper’s innards. Revenant night vision was essential here; a human being would be blind.

Atyle paused at the stairwell exit to the fourth floor; the stairs terminated here. She crouched, a blurry blob in the dark. Elpida joined her and swallowed a grunt of pain. She couldn’t see Hafina anywhere.

Atyle whispered: “Silence now, warrior and rabbit. We walk in the valley of death. Follow my lead, to the smallest detail.”

Elpida nodded. Amina whimpered. Elpida squeezed her hand and Amina held on tight.

Atyle turned her head to stare at Elpida. The dark smear of technological camouflage was difficult to read, but Elpida recognised the peat green colour of Atyle’s bionic eye, obscured and blended with the colour of her face.

Atyle whispered: “Warrior.”

Elpida wheezed. “What?”

A pause. “You are bleeding.”

Elpida looked down at her stomach; the fresh bandages applied by Cantrelle were saturated with dark red blood. One corner was dripping onto the marble floor, leaving a tiny puddle of sticky crimson between Elpida’s boots. Had she burst more stitches than she’d realised? The bleed was slow, for now.

She shoved her stolen shotgun into her coat and cradled her belly with one arm. “I won’t— leave a trail.”

Atyle stared. She tilted her head. Unreadable behind that camouflage blur. Then she whispered quickly. “Hafina can carry you, but contact will shed her invisible skin, and lift the blanket that protects all of us from curious eyes, from eyes like mine.” Her peat-green bionic winked shut, then opened again.

Elpida blinked sweat and tears out of her eyes. “I can— make it to the exit— I won’t pass— out.”

“If you falter, ask for aid before you fall.”

“I won’t—”

“We cannot slip back and forth between combat and stealth, warrior.” Atyle gestured with the cyclic coilgun, a long gunmetal blur in her hands. “We are not armed for a silent raid. Once we are seen, we fight, and that will be all.” Atyle tilted her head again — listening to Kagami through her headset? Then: “The scribe wishes me to say that you look like a ‘microwaved dog turd’ and that you are fooling nobody. I agree. When you are ready to fall, tell us first. Hafina will carry you. Then we fight.”

Elpida knew she was fading; between the gut wound, the thought-rending pain, and the effort of strangling Cantrelle, she was all but spent. Telokopolan genetic engineering could keep her on feet through almost anything, as long as she had a beating heart and an intact brain — but her head felt like it was full of cotton wool. Her thoughts were jumbled, her sense of time was inaccurate. She was caked in sweat and quivering with pain. And now she was losing blood, again.

But the longer she kept moving, the better the chances of escape.

“I won’t fall,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “Stop wasting time. Go. Lead.”

The fourth floor was occupied by only a handful of Death’s Head revenants — high-ground sentries, their attention turned outward. Dark armoured shapes crouched by windows, blanketed in a constant click-buzz-click of encrypted transmissions. Atyle only signalled a halt twice, fist raised, stopped in the middle of a corridor; both times they all crouched, frozen, unbreathing, waiting for Kagami’s all-clear, for mission control to tell them that nobody was looking.

The third floor was almost empty, nothing occupied except a room of corpses at one end. The bodies had been peeled out of their clothes and partially eaten, limbs removed, guts spilled across the floor, heads severed and skulls cracked open for the brains. Nanomachines for the wounded, meat for the revenants, strength to the victors.

The second floor was crawling with zombies.

Serin’s sniper fire and Ilyusha’s muffled assault had stirred up the Death’s Heads into a frenzy. Armoured figures clustered at the windows, encrusted with extra limbs, machine-tentacles, eye-stalks, weapon-implants, and more — and then they ducked away again, rushing to and fro, talking in a jumble of orders and suggestions and insults, punctuated by audio-transmission clicks.

“—can’t see her, still can’t see her, the rat, the rat, rat! Come on, take a shot again you—”

“—use your fucking eyes, Alheri, you’ve got enough of them.”

“—that’s a grav-sig, she’s got grav gens inside her—”

“Then pinpoint her!”

“She’s invisible! Fuck you!”

“—elevation thirteen meters, estimated trajectory departure point, third window from left—”

“It’s not invisible, I saw her! I saw her! She’s just good at hiding!”

“—hiding sense, hiding inside sense, no sense in shooting at us—”

“Is this the ART? The ART signal? Are we fighting a bot?”

“Yola said—”

“Down.”

“She’s not the ART. She’s just another fucking zombie.”

“Down.”

“Don’t rush. Keep clear of the windows.”

“Down.”

“You fucking cunt! Shoot again! Go on, I fucking dare you!”

“Down, down. Pholet, get your head do—”

Crack-crack!

“Told you, Pholet. Duck faster.”

“ … ooouurgh, ow. What the … ? She— she bounced my helmet! This isn’t even armour-piercing calibre! This degenerate is playing with us!”

“Duck faster.”

“Mocking, mocking, mocking!”

“She’ll be playing with her own fucking guts when we zero her! I’ve got the drone missiles online, let’s just blanket that building, fuck her up, fuck her—”

“What about the little bitch? What the hell is she shooting at?”

“Ignore her, she’s fighting a drone. Making noise. Let her play.”

Creeping through the second-floor corridors was a painstaking process of constant stop-start motion, of watching the blurred oil-smear of Atyle’s back, of waiting for Kagami’s instructions to come through Atyle’s headset. Atyle used hand-signals to communicate: halt, stop here, retreat, into that room, no!, that room instead, wait, wait, wait — go!

Whenever Atyle raised a fist her blurry camouflage effect momentarily peeled back from one arm, like a limb thrust out of a blanket. Elpida could barely see Hafina up ahead; she assumed the giant was following her own stealth procedures. Amina gripped Elpida’s hand so hard that her bones hurt.

Kagami’s inaudible instructions to Atyle were often opaque, always without explanation, and several times almost too late. She halted the group at strange moments, held them waiting in the middle of wide hallways, exposed and vulnerable — or sent them scuttling into side-rooms, behind desks and lockers, hiding beneath tables or crammed into corners while Death’s Head revenants stormed past outside. Elpida’s shoulder blades itched; sweat matted her long white hair shoved down the back of her coat, prickling on her skin and running down her face; her stomach wound burned like fragments of molten metal rammed into her gut, the pain ratcheting upward with every moment she stayed crouched or hunched or pressed flat. She clutched her coat to stop from dripping on the floor. She closed her throat to stop from screaming.

Once, Atyle’s hand signal flashed downward — Kagami ordering them all prone, in the middle of a corridor. Elpida hit the ground and pulled Amina after her, then bit her own tongue so as not to cry out, swallowing mouthfuls of her own blood. Another time, Kagami had them pause outside an open door for a full seven minutes, waiting, aching to move, her own crimson blood smearing all over the sleeve of her coat.

Elpida was not used to being outside of the command loop, let alone following orders she did not understand and could not hear — but in her current state she would not make much of a commander.

She could not have escaped alone.

Elpida’s mind was growing dull with exhaustion and pain, even as her senses stayed sharp and open. She felt like a true walking corpse, an undead puppet, moving without internal direction. Silico. Zombie.

She followed orders. She held onto Amina. She did not breathe.

If she and Amina had broken out of that cell without help, they would have lasted less than a minute, crawling through this without the benefit of Kagami’s overwatch and Atyle’s direction.

Atyle had become an enigma. Elpida’s mind ran the questions even as she fell into dull automatic action: where had Atyle learned the hand signals, or the basic techniques of physical infiltration? Since when did she follow orders from anybody, let alone Kagami? A few hours ago Atyle had been unwilling even to duck her head during a firefight, disdainful of bullets, contemptuous of death, walking proud and tall and showing off the cyclic sliver-gun. Now the same woman took and gave orders like she had been doing so all her life, freezing in place rather than be seen by her foes, relaying the control of another.

Was this even the same Atyle?

Didn’t matter. This Atyle was breaking Elpida and Amina out of imprisonment. If she was a Necromancer, so be it. She was on their side. She opposed the Death’s Heads. Elpida needed nothing more, not then, not yet.

Elpida put her trust in her cadre — no, she corrected herself, trust in her comrades. Her fellow zombies. Not her cadre. Her cadre was dead.

While any of us still stands, the cadre lives too, Howl whispered in her memories. Don’t be such a bitch.

Keep moving, follow orders, stay silent, hold on to Amina.

The second-floor corridor circled almost the entire circumference of the skyscraper, drawing Elpida and her comrades away from the Death’s Head revenants; the zombies were grouped on the south side of the building, trying to locate Serin’s vantage point. The north side was quieter. The shadows pressed deeper, unbroken by windows; dust lay thick along the skirting boards; the walls were smeared with nano-mould.

They reached a t-junction; floor tiles marbled with gold led off both left and right — into the core of the building, and out, toward the edge.

Atyle stopped and crouched. Hafina paused just beyond, in the middle of the junction. The giant shimmered like a sheet of water, then turned invisible. Elpida crouched next to Atyle; her stomach wound throbbed and burned, her sleeve was coated with crimson overflow. She gritted her teeth and tried not to shake so hard. Sweat dripped from her eyebrows and blood dripped from beneath her coat. Amina huddled close.

Atyle gestured left, into the core of the skyscraper, and whispered: “Pira.” Then right: “Coilgun. Stairs. Exit.”

Elpida waved a hand — left.

She hissed: “Pira gets— one chance. But not— we’re not— leaving her. If she— wants.”

Atyle’s face twisted beneath the oil-smear blur. A grin? “And if the betrayer declines?”

Elpida didn’t have the energy to think about that question, let alone answer; she was not in charge here. She shook her head.

Atyle paused for a moment, listening to Kagami over the communications headset. “The scribe urges haste. Leave the betrayer behind. She calls you many things, which all mean ‘fool’. Warrior, loosing our terrible arrows will be the end of our stealth, and the beginning of a fight. The betrayer’s refusal could end us all.”

Elpida glanced back at Amina; Amina’s eyes were wide with fear, her face a mask of white, her lips clamped tight. The younger girl could not take much more of this.

“We’re going— to get out of here,” Elpida whispered. Then to Atyle: “We’ll check. If she— if we can’t ask— safely—” She panted with the pain. “I have to try.”

Atyle nodded. “We will see, warrior. We—”

“Maddeuwch iddi?”

The whisper came from invisible lips; Hafina’s voice was surprisingly delicate.

Atyle waited a moment. Kagami must have supplied a translation, because Atyle chuckled. “Perhaps. It is not up to me. But just in case the foolish betrayer refuses forgiveness.” Atyle lifted her cyclic sliver-gun.

Forgiveness?

Elpida hadn’t considered that. ‘Forgiving’ Pira hadn’t even entered into her thoughts. This was not about that — or was it? Would a member of the cadre require ‘forgiveness’?

Elpida’s mind was too full of haze, too fogged by pain. She pushed all that away.

No time to think now anyway; Atyle was hurrying away to the left. Elpida followed, staying low, holding tight to Amina’s hand. Hafina brought up the rear, a looming wall of shimmering water.

The left-hand fork of the corridor was quite short; it turned once and then led to a single large door, which was standing wide open. Atyle pressed herself against the wall next to the door and gestured for Elpida to follow. She gave Elpida the best spot to peek into the room, right next to the door frame. Amina huddled between them, one hand clamped over her own mouth. Elpida could not see where Hafina had gone, but she assumed the giant was standing right there, covering their escape.

Beyond the door was a conference room. Dozens of chairs surrounded a long table, with a wall of televisual screens at the far end. The table and chairs were caked in ancient dust. Some were rotting, black with nano-mould.

Lumps of red raw meat lay on the table in a puddle of gore.

Low voices came from inside.

“—may as well end this farce,” squeaked a voice Elpida had never heard before. High-pitched, raspy, and rough, like too much air forced through a thin and corroded pipe.

“Shut up!” snapped a second voice. “Just shut up, Hatty! Shut the fuck up!”

Elpida recognised that one: it was Pira’s friend, the woman who had delivered the raw blue and rammed it into Elpida’s stomach.

A third voice, a weird giggling gurgle, said: “Ooni, stupid Ooni, thinks she can order us around? She’s deluded and slow.”

“Uunnh,” squeaked the first voice again — ‘Hatty’? “Don’t get above yourself. Yola gave us real clear instructions.”

Silence fell for several seconds. Somebody was breathing hard, panting in anger or panic. Pira’s friend? Ooni?

Then: “Leuca?”

Ooni said the name with deep tenderness — but desperate, quivering with fear.

“Leuca. Leuca, please, you have to eat. You have to eat, or they’re going to k-kill you. Leuca? Leuca. Leuca, look at me, at least. Please. Please!”

Leuca — Pira.

Her ‘real’ name? To Elpida, she was still just Pira.

Elpida glanced at Atyle and mouthed: “Am I clear to look?”

Atyle stared through the wall with her peat-green bionic eye, then nodded once. “Be quick, warrior. Time is short.”

Elpida made sure her hood was up and her hair was hidden. She eased one eye around the door frame.

On one side of the conference room was a more intimate area, with several low tables and a cluster of comfortable chairs. Two Death’s Head revenants were standing with their backs turned to the doorway; both wore lightweight carapace armour — the left in muddy brown, the right in a clashing smear of vomit colours. Grinning skull symbols leered from a shoulder plate on the latter.

The zombie on the left possessed a bizarre metallic structure sprouting from her skull, like a web of antennae, or a cage wrapped about her cranium. Her dirty brown hair was tangled with the metal fronds. The zombie on the right — the one in the armour coloured like a splash of vomit — had flowing blond hair woven into braids, surprisingly clean and neat. Both of them were armed with high-power plasma rifles, bulky matte black weapons with wide muzzles. A long gladius-style sword hung from the belt of the cage-head. Miss vomit-armour had a brace of heavy pistols around her waist — and her left arm was unarmoured, bionic, with half a dozen elbows. The limb was folded up like the bellows of an accordion.

A third revenant was down on her knees in front of them. Long black hair, olive skin, green eyes ringed red from crying. She wore grey armour carapace, with a grinning skull painted on her chestplate. She carried no weapons.

Pira’s friend, ‘Ooni’.

And slumped in one of the chairs was Pira.

She was not imprisoned as Elpida and Amina had been, with stakes and chains and manacles; she’d been disarmed, but her wrists and ankles were free. She still wore her bulletproof vest, her tomb-grey underlayers, her boots, her body armour — but her clothes had been roughly peeled back to expose the chrome-and-matte of her bionic right arm.

She was staring at the floor. Her flame-red hair hung down, partially obscuring her face. Her sky-blue eyes were red and puffy from crying.

Elpida expected to feel anger. Pira had betrayed her, shot her in the gut, almost got everyone else killed. But instead she felt only numb resignation.

Pira had chosen this; Pira was not her comrade; Elpida could do nothing to help. She was almost spent, an unthinking zombie, running on automatic.

Not the Commander, not right then.

It’s not something you get to switch off, Howl whispered, deep down in Elpida’s brain. Lost girls need you, bitch. Get to it.

Shut up, Howl, Elpida thought. I can’t. Too slow. Can’t think.

But Elpida didn’t look away.

Ooni was offering Pira a handful of pinkish-grey meat — a chunk of human brain.

Cage-Head, the revenant on the left, spoke with that giggly gurgle: “She won’t fuckin’ eat, Ooni, you little shit. She won’t eat, so what good is she?”

Ooni turned and looked up; Elpida resisted the urge to pull back. A flicker of motion presented more risk than staying still. And Ooni was too full of rage and fear to notice Elpida.

Ooni spat: “She shot the pilot for us! She’s one of us!”

Vomit-Armour — ‘Hatty’ — spoke in her squeaky rasp: “She won’t eat. She’s some useless apostate. Yola said we check. We checked. We check! Check, check, check.”

Ooni shot to her feet, eyes bulging with rage. She raked her long black hair out of her face and gestured with the chunk of brains. “Leuca is a better fighter than both of you put together! She was more than one of us, she was the best of us! We took a fucking tomb together! We killed a worm-guard and ate the—”

Vomit-Armour and Cage-Head both laughed.

“Yeah, right,” gurgled Cage-Head. “She won’t even eat. Go on, carrot top. Eat your din-dins. Num num num num. Here comes the air-plane!”

Pira said nothing.

Vomit-Armour squeaked: “We could use the bloody meat, that’s for sure. What-say, what-say, Hats? Make some more meat?”

Crack!

Everyone looked up at the sound of Serin’s rifle, muffled and distant — all except Pira.

Cage-Head said: “Yeah, so, like, how do we know that shit isn’t her friend or something?”

Ooni’s eyes flickered across her comrades — and over the pair of plasma rifles in their hands. Elpida recognised that wild and desperate look. Ooni was trying to decide if she could fight them and win, if she could take both of them down in hand-to-hand combat, or ambush them, or trick them, or do anything except plead — anything to save Leuca, Pira, her friend.

Elpida knew that look, that mortal calculation; she’d seen it on her own face during those last days, just before the cadre had been imprisoned by the Covenanters. Ooni had made a deal with monsters. Now the monsters were going to devour something she loved.

Elpida’s numb resignation fell away.

Before Cage-Head and Vomit-Armour could resume their conversation, Ooni shoved the chunk of brain matter into her own mouth and took a bite. She turned back to Pira, chewing quickly, and fell to her knees again. Then she leaned forward, mouth open, trying to press her lips against Pira’s.

Pira lashed out with her exposed bionic arm. She caught Ooni by the throat and shoved her away.

Ooni fell to the floor with a crash of armour plates. Cage-Head and Vomit-Armour both burst out laughing, guffawing and snorting. Ooni pulled herself to her knees, weeping, sniffing, her black hair all stuck to her face; mashed brains dribbled down her chin, mixed with bloody saliva and twin tear-tracks. She sobbed hard and wet, swallowed and hiccuped. One grey-armoured hand reached toward Pira.

“Leuca, p-please. Please! I did— I did what you told me. I did everything! Please, you have to eat! They’re gonna kill you! And then— again— not again— not again not again not again not again—”

Pira didn’t even look at Ooni; she just stared at the floor.

Atyle tapped Elpida on the shoulder. Elpida withdrew and turned to find Atyle offering Elpida her headset, her link with Kagami.

Atyle mouthed: “The scribe wishes your ear. Quickly now, warrior.”

Elpida slipped the headset beneath her hood.

“Kagami?”

Kagami’s voice crackled into her ear: “Elpida! Elpida. ‘Commander’. What the — fuck! — are you doing?! There’s four of them in there! You cannot take four fucking zombies without making any noise, you’re not an infiltration agent linked to my— whatever! And the moment you break stealth, this is over — you’ll have to shoot your way out through a wall of bullshit. And you’re too far from the entrance for effective fire support. I can’t get this moronic tank to come close enough. He doesn’t have any infantry support, so — okay, fine, fair enough! And before you ask a stupid question: no, I have no idea what that berserker idiot Ilyusha is doing. I’m not in contact with her. Now move! Stop stalling!”

From inside the conference room, Vomit-Armour was saying: “How about we go get the little one?”

Elpida whispered: “Kagami, I’m not leaving Pira behind—”

Kagami spat down the comm-link: “She shot you! She’s one of them! She fucked us, she betrayed us, and I swear to Luna’s silver soil that if you bring her back, I will shoot her in the mouth myself. Move! Now!”

Cage-Head grunted: “The what?”

Vomit-Amour said, “The little one. The little one that Yola brought in with the superhuman. She’s small enough for some fun.”

Elpida whispered: “Kagami, Pira is not— one of them. She won’t even pretend to— follow their ideology, to save her own life. She won’t eat—”

Kagami snapped: “So she’s stupid and treacherous! Fucking hell. I should leave you lot where you are. What about Amina, huh? Your pet psychopath? What if you fuck this up and she ends up dead as well? Pira or Amina, Commander? Hell, Pira or me? Who matters more? Fucking hell!”

In the conference room, Cage-Head laughed: “Ha! Right. Let’s go get her little friend, crack her head open, see if Leuca here will eat those brains. Maybe she needs one she’s rutted with before, huh? Like Tak does? Or maybe we should break your head, little Ooni?”

Elpida glanced over her shoulder, at Amina.

Amina had her knife out. Her eyes were wide with terror and full of tears. But her blade was naked, shaking in her fist.

You’d never leave one of us behind, whispered Howl. Not even if we fucked up. Especially if we fucked up.

And you would have followed me anywhere, Elpida thought. And now Amina wants to do the same? But I’d get you all killed—

Howl screamed inside Elpida’s head: One of us fights, we all fight!

Elpida whispered to Kagami: “I can’t let this happen. We’ll do it quiet. If—”

A confused grunt came from inside the conference room. Elpida quickly peeked around the corner again.

Pira was on her feet.

Cage-Head and Vomit-Armour watched as Pira walked over to the table. They covered her with their plasma rifles. Ooni stood up as well, gaping at Pira, her tears trailing off. Pira stopped before the pile of dripping meat. She stared down at the gore for a long moment, then selected a chunk of pinkish-grey brain.

Pira lifted the meat to her lips and took a bite.

She chewed slowly and carefully. She turned back to face the other Death’s Heads. Ooni hiccuped with relief, wiping her eyes, sniffing hard, raking her long black hair back out of her face. Cage-Head snorted.

Vomit-Amour lowered her plasma rifle and squeak-rasped: “Hunger gets you all in the end. Yola always says that. Starve ‘em out, let ‘em feel it.”

Pira raised her eyes to the ceiling and took a deep breath through her nose. She was still chewing.

Kagami’s voice crackled in Elpida’s ear: “She’s one of them. Let her go, Commander. She’s a lost cause. Get moving!”

Cage-Head lowered her gun too. “Fuck. I was looking forward to—”

Pira spat a mouthful of masticated brains into Cage-Head’s eyes.

The Death’s Head revenant yelped and spluttered. She attempted to wipe her face and point her weapon at the same time. Pira was already in motion — she jerked to the side, dived for the floor, then rolled to her feet inside Cage-Head’s guard. Her augmetic right arm lashed out and drew the sword from Cage-Head’s belt. Pira crouched like a spring to put all her body weight and bionic strength behind the tip of the sword. She rammed the blade through Cage-Head’s throat and up into her skull. The edge crunched off the revenant’s metal cage structure. Cage-Head went down like her strings had been cut.

Ooni reacted almost as fast; she leapt for the Vomit-Armoured revenant. They grappled for the plasma gun, rolling on the floor. Vomit-Armour’s multi-jointed left arm ratcheted outward, as long as her body, and whipped toward Ooni’s head like a metal chain. The smaller zombie jerked and wriggled and hung on tight, deflecting the blow onto her armour instead of her skull. She spat and hissed and clacked her teeth, trying to bite Vomit-Armour in the face

“Fucking— cunt— fuck!” Vomit-Armour spat — and then head-butted Ooni right in the nose. Blood flowered in the darkness.

Vomit-Armour rolled on top and slammed Ooni to the floor, but the weapon was still pinned between them.

Vomit-Armour raised her head.

Click-buzz.

Comms open. She was about to call for help.

Elpida stood up and drew her shotgun from inside her coat.

But then her vision swirled and throbbed; her legs shook, about to give out; her stomach burned with consuming fire. Cadre-standard pain-blockers and adrenaline and re-balanced hormones flooded her circulatory system to keep her on her feet, but she would be a second too late, a second spent feeling the blood rush to her head and drip from her belly and—

Pira stepped forward, yanked one of Vomit-Armour’s pistols from her own belt, then jammed the muzzle against the back of her neck and pulled the trigger.

The round exploded the revenant’s throat in a spray of blood and bone — destroying whatever bionic communications equipment she had been about to use. Vomit-Armour collapsed in a clattering heap, choking and gurgling and flopping, in a pool of spreading blood.

Ooni wriggled free. She ripped the plasma rifle from her former comrade’s twitching grip. She was panting hard, covered in blood and brains.

She hissed: “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit—”

“Ooni,” said Pira. “Stop.”

Ooni looked up at Pira. She blinked, then broke into a quivering grin.

“Leuca!” she yelped. “Leuca, we can run, we have to run! You and me, like before, we can—”

“Ooni, stop.” Pira stared at the pistol in her hands and shook her head. “There’s no point.”

“W-what? L-Leuca? No! We can—”

Pira reached out and grabbed the barrel of Ooni’s plasma rifle. She stepped forward and pressed her own chest against the muzzle. She stared into Ooni’s eyes.

“Shoot me,” Pira said. “Then shoot yourself. If you can’t do it, I will.” She raised the pistol and pressed it gently to Ooni’s chestplate, right against the forehead of the painted skull. “Doesn’t matter which way we go. Just that we do.”

Ooni was crying again, wide eyed and open-mouthed. “Leuca … L-Leuca … I love you. Please. It’s been— for me it’s been … it’s been decades.”

Pira said: “I love you too. But this can’t go on.”

In Elpida’s ear, Kagami made a gagging sound, then said: “Fucking no. Absolutely not. Get moving, Commander, right now!”

Elpida whispered — to Atyle and Amina: “Get ready to move. Follow my— lead.”

Elpida stepped out of cover and into the doorway.

“No,” she said.

No, not forgiveness.

Pira and Ooni looked up. Ooni gaped, amazed, like she was seeing a ghost. Her eyes boggled at the crescent-and-line symbol daubed on Elpida’s chest. Kagami was screeching in Elpida’s ear.

Pira’s eyes were unguarded, open, all her defences abandoned. She stared as if Elpida was a summation of all her sins.

Elpida wheezed. “You don’t get to kill— yourself, Pira.” She had to clutch her bleeding stomach. The gore was seeping between her fingers. “You aren’t getting off— that easy. You’re coming— with us.”

Pira said: “I can’t be trusted.”

“Pira. I am your Commander. And that was an order.”

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‘Commander’ is not just Elpida’s rank or role; it runs deeper than death, and means more to her than a bullet in the gut. Is she hopelessly naive, or holding firm to what she believes in? Is this stunt going to get her shot in the face – or overcome even the cannibalism and predation of this black and grey afterlife?

I actually don’t know! Fuck me sideways, but every single character in this chapter (even Amina!) did the complete opposite of what the outline said they were supposed to do. As soon as they hit the page, none of them were having any of it. Elpida was meant to retreat, Pira was supposed to accept her failure, Ooni was meant to shoot her friends, and Amina was meant to start crying, not pull out her knife and back Elpida up. I’m not in charge of these zombies anymore, I’m just along for the ride.

Kagami has a point, you know? This is a bad tactical error. There might be costs for this. But also rewards. We’ll see.

In the meantime, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters in the future, or even more. I got a request for 5 chapters ahead, so … gonna try!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And as always, thank you for reading! I couldn’t do this without you. Thank you for reading my little story about zombie girls at the end of the world and all the various ways they get hurt and shoot things and maybe also make out with each other. I’m having a blast with it, and I hope you are too! We have so much more to see, so many dark places to visit. Until next week, reader!

Content Warnings

Pain (you know this by now, considering the last few chapters)
Strangulation/choking

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Cantrelle returned to the makeshift holding cell a few minutes later.

The Death’s Head medic disengaged the tarry-black bio-tech lock from outside the door; Elpida watched carefully, trying to figure out how the lock was operated — but the mechanism was beyond her understanding. Perhaps it was released by a near-field electronic signal. The door opened with a meaty ripping sound. Cantrelle stepped inside; she was carrying an additional pair of the heavy, bulky metal cuffs, ready to secure Elpida’s ankles.

Cantrelle stopped when she saw that Elpida was up on her feet.

The door slapped shut. Cantrelle’s flat, blank, disc-shaped eyes flickered rapidly from Elpida to Amina — to confirm that their wrists were still in their cuffs, their chains were still staked to the floor, and Amina’s metal muzzle was still secured to her face.

Cantrelle frowned, hard and craggy beneath her perfectly bald head. Her quartet of segmented metal tentacles went still.

Elpida couldn’t help herself — she smiled.

Cantrelle spat in her buzzing half-mechanical voice: “And how many of my stitches have you popped with this little stunt? I swear, if I have to re-do that all over again … ”

Elpida croaked, slowly: “You’re alone. Confident?”

Cantrelle gestured at the tilted metal surgical table with one of her pincer-tipped tentacles. “Lie the fuck back down. Right now.”

Elpida had done her best to tug her grey thermal t-shirt down over her bandaged gut, to better display the crescent-and-line symbol she’d daubed on her chest, but the stomach of the t-shirt was ragged where Pira’s bullets had torn through the fabric, and soaked through with sticky, half-dried, red-brown blood. She still had her armoured coat — the ‘tomb-grown coat’, as Yola had called it — but one flank of the lower torso was stiff and scored, damaged from deflecting the impact of the rest of Pira’s magazine.

No shoes. No weapon. Wrists cuffed, chained to the ground. Elpida’s long white hair was in her face — it was too difficult to sweep it all back over her head while her wrists were manacled. Amina sat in a teary-eyed heap on the floor, her hands still covered in Elpida’s blood, her muzzle against her mouth.

Elpida realised she didn’t want to kill Cantrelle; the medic had done an honest job tending to Elpida’s gut wound. She had administered anaesthetics, glued her intestines back together, and sewn her up with professional skill. She hadn’t hurt Elpida on purpose, or rushed the task, or cut corners.

But she was a committed Death’s Head. She was no different than the Covenanters.

Elpida briefly wished that Cantrelle had delegated this task to some other Death’s Head, some brutish enforcer Elpida had never met; she almost said it out loud — I don’t want to kill you, turn around, go away — but she kept her mouth shut. Cantrelle was her enemy, both ideologically and materially. She had to escape. Any hesitation would put her comrades at risk. She refused to be the cause of another murdered cadre.

Elpida said: “Nah.”

Cantrelle’s face scrunched with anger. “Lie. The. Fuck. Down.”

“You’re gonna— have to— make me.”

Cantrelle reached over her shoulder and drew her shotgun.

Short and stubby, shiny and black like a beetle’s shell, with a pistol grip for the trigger mechanism and second pistol grip up front, for easy handling and improved accuracy. A short-range urban fighting weapon, for room-to-room combat — or the last-ditch personal defence weapon of a medic who didn’t like to get her hands dirty? Elpida gambled on the latter.

Cantrelle aimed the shotgun at Elpida, one-handed. “You’re gut-shot, dip-shit. You can’t even speak a full sentence without stopping to wheeze. Lie down.”

“You won’t shoot me.”

Cantrelle clenched her jaw.

Elpida pressed: “You won’t shoot me. Yola thinks— I’m important. Yola practically wants to— sleep with me. And Yola’s— in charge. You won’t shoot.” Then, too quickly for Cantrelle to think about the previous statement: “Why’d you decide— to do this alone? Don’t want to delegate? Feeling jealous?”

Cantrelle’s face twisted with rage: bullseye. But then Cantrelle shifted her aim — she pointed her shotgun at Amina instead.

Amina flinched, whimpering behind her muzzle, raising her hands to ward off the attack.

Cantrelle said: “I’ll shoot her, then. How about that, huh? Actually, forget that. Either you lie back down, or I’ll go fetch two of my best friends and tell them there’s a free meal up for grabs. You can watch your little fuck-toy here get eaten alive. Did you know that one of us revenants can survive, conscious and screaming, with as little as thirty percent of her brain mass? You wanna see that happen up close? Then, when they’re done eating, I’ll cuff your ankles anyway.”

Elpida frowned; it did not take much effort to maintain her exhausted, sullen, dead-eyed expression.

Cantrelle said, “Think I won’t do it?”

“Yola said—”

Cantrelle laughed. “Yola’s not the only one in charge here. Maybe she’s right about you, or maybe not. But she’s not the only fucking voice in the Sisters. Now lie down. Don’t make me do this. Don’t make this difficult, for fuck’s sake.”

Elpida glanced down; Amina was panting through her muzzle, eyes wide with terror, skin covered in panic-sweat.

She needed Amina to hold on; tipping their hand early would ruin the plan.

“Amina,” Elpida said. “Amina. Look at me. Look up. Look.”

Amina managed to look away from the muzzle of Cantrelle’s shotgun.

Elpida said: “We’re going— to be alright. Just— do what she says.”

Amina stared right through Elpida. Did she remember what to do next? A successful escape relied on them working together. Elpida could not do this alone, not with a gut wound that might leave her incapacitated. But Amina was just a child, no matter how bloodthirsty or dangerous she had shown she could be, to a foe with their back turned. Maybe she couldn’t pull this off, maybe it was too much, she was too scared. Elpida needed options.

“Lie down,” Cantrelle grunted. “Last chance.”

“Alright,” Elpida sighed.

She put all her trust in Amina, and lay back down.

Returning to the tilted surgical table was only marginally less difficult than standing up had been; Elpida sat, dragging her chain after her, then slowly lifted her feet onto the metal shelf, right first, then left, then eased her torso backward. Her gut wound screamed inside her belly like a demon trapped beneath her skin, shafts of flame roaring up her nerves and wracking her spine with fire and acid. She let out a strangled grunt, streaming with sweat. Her vision swirled dark for several heartbeats. The last of the anaesthetic must have been wearing off.

She prepared herself for much more pain.

Cantrelle muttered as she crossed the room: “Serves you fucking right you great big idiot. You’re like a giant goldie but a lot more stupid. Bet you’re not even housebroken.”

Elpida’s pain ebbed down to merely soul-destroying rather than all-consuming, strangled by Telokopolan pain-blockers pounding into her bloodstream. Her vision cleared. She blinked away a veil of tears.

Cantrelle paused several feet from the surgical table. She was frowning at Amina, still covering her with the shotgun.

Elpida’s heart lurched; if Cantrelle noticed what they’d done, she really would retreat and return with reinforcements.

“Hey,” Elpida panted. “Leave her alone. Hurt her, and then you’ll— have to kill me. ‘Cos I’ll hunt— you, for as long as it— takes.”

Cantrelle sighed and shook her head; her disc-eyes could not roll in their sockets, but the tiny muscles of her face revealed her contempt. She gestured at Amina with her shotgun. “Get into the corner. Away from me. Go on, right into the corner.” Amina crawled away from Cantrelle and Elpida, dragging her chain along the marble floor, wedging herself into the corner of the filthy public toilet, like a small animal trying to escape a predator. Cantrelle said: “Good. Now stay there.”

She approached the foot of the surgical bed. She kept her shotgun covering Amina. The four mechanical tendrils which sprouted from her shoulders all pointed toward Elpida — the pair of pincers were open, as if waiting to intercept an attack, while the saw and the needle just hung, ready for surprises. She lifted the heavy metal manacles in her free hand and opened them with a flick of her wrist. They went clack.

Then Cantrelle paused again. She frowned at Elpida.

“You’re planning something,” she said.

Elpida smiled back, still streaming with sweat. “‘Course I am.”

Cantrelle eyed her up and down, frowning harder.

Elpida needed to keep her here, keep her riled up, keep her angry. Elpida said: “Wanna go— fetch some help? Somebody to hold me down? Maybe bring Yola back— so she can— she can compliment my ankles— or something? Why does she call you ‘Ella’, anyway? You two close?”

Cantrelle said, “Reach out with your hands.”

Elpida said, “What?”

“Reach out with your hands. All the way. To the limit of your chain. Go on, so I can see.” Cantrelle waggled her shotgun at Amina.

Elpida obeyed. She lifted her cuffed hands to full extension, dragging the chain off the floor link by link. She allowed it to scrape against the side of the bed, just to irritate Cantrelle. At full extension she was several feet short of being able to touch the medic, even if Cantrelle had to get right on top of her to put the cuffs on her ankles.

Cantrelle smirked. “Whatever you have planned, it’s not going to work. Here. Let’s get this over with.” She lowered the cuffs toward Elpida’s waiting ankles.

And Elpida spread her legs apart — too wide for the cuffs.

Cantrelle stopped and gave Elpida a sour look.

“Now what?” Elpida asked. “Gotta make me— close my legs. Can’t get those cuffs on— like this.”

Cantrelle glanced at Amina. The younger revenant was still crammed into the corner of the room, cowering and shaking. Cantrelle finally moved her shotgun away from Amina; she jammed the muzzle against Elpida’s left knee instead, point-blank, jabbing into the underside of her kneecap.

“I’ll make it so you can’t fucking walk for the next six months; then we won’t need the cuffs. Stop fucking with me.”

Cantrelle waited. Elpida allowed her smile to die; that didn’t take much acting. The moment of truth was approaching fast. If Amina could not carry out her part of the plan, they were both doomed. Elpida was already trying to calculate new possibilities, but it all came back to the need for an opening, a single moment of distraction. She couldn’t force that kind of opening herself, not alone, not against somebody as vigilant as the Death’s Head medic.

Elpida sighed as if defeated, and closed her legs.

“Better,” Cantrelle spat.

She reached down, set the open manacles over Elpida’s ankles, and slammed them shut. They locked with a heavy click.

Cantrelle quickly straightened up. She lowered the shotgun and started to take a step back. “Right, now that’s do—”

Amina came out of the corner like a rabid dog.

Her muzzle went flying — thrown at Cantrelle with her cuffed hands, already removed by Elpida earlier, and held in place until that moment by Amina’s own teeth. Her chain rasped against the floor tiles as she shot to her feet and hurled herself toward Cantrelle. The muzzle hit Cantrelle in the face — no damage, but surprise enough to make her flinch.

Cantrelle’s stubby shotgun came up in her hands, ready to blow off Amina’s head. Amina hit the limit of her own chain; she yelped, almost yanked off her feet by the pull on her wrists, crying and panting and grasping for Cantrelle’s front. But the Death’s Head was out of reach.

Cantrelle laughed.

Elpida lifted her cuffed feet.

Her body weight slid her down the tilted incline of the surgical bed, until her backside hit the foot-shelf; the impact sent a lance of blinding pain up through her gut wound. She howled through her teeth, eyes streaming with tears of pain, hands yanked backward by the anchor of her own chain.

But she didn’t need hands to hit Cantrelle.

Elpida swung her cuffed feet out wide — stomach wound screaming, stitches popping free — and then slammed the heavy metal cuffs into Cantrelle’s spine.

Ribs went snap like damp twigs.

The medic went flying. Her shotgun tumbled out of her grip and clattered to the floor on the far side of the room. She sprawled on her hands and knees, heaving for breath, spitting bile — and well within Amina’s range.

Amina jumped on her. Fingernails clawed at the tomb-coat, scratching for throat and eyes; teeth snapped shut on a mouthful of fabric, then a piece of hand, then a wet crunch of cheekbone and flesh. Cantrelle screamed and reared up.

Cantrelle fought back with her metal tendrils; the pair of pincers went for Amina’s neck and eyes. The saw slashed for her throat.

And the massive needle reared back, ready to punch through skin and deliver neurotoxin or knock-out cocktail or worse.

Elpida rolled to the side and fell off the surgical bed, right on top of Cantrelle.

The agony in her gut exploded beyond anything she had previously considered possible; Elpida was certain that she had popped every stitch, opened every flap of flesh, torn asunder every muscle fibre, and voided the very tubes of her intestines. She was certain that her bowels were spilling out like a nest of bloody snakes. Unconsciousness throbbed at the edge of her tear-blurred vision; the world was going dark. But she couldn’t pass out yet; if she did, Amina would die.

She hooked her chain around Cantrelle’s bionic throat. She put her knees into the small of Cantrelle’s back and her elbows into Cantrelle’s shoulder blades. She pulled.

Nanomachine zombies did not need to breathe — but zombie brains needed circulation, in imitation of biological life.

The medic wheezed and spluttered, then crackled and buzzed; apparently her metal-encrusted throat and cybernetic jaw did not fully protect her from strangulation, from having her blood flow cut off with a length of chain. Her hands scrabbled at the metal links, breaking her nails and bloodying her knuckles. Her segmented tendrils turned on Elpida instead; Elpida squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head left and right to throw off the pincers’ aim; snapping metal jaws took chunks out of her scalp, ripped out clumps of hair, and left bleeding welts on her cheeks and neck. She heard a crunch and snap — was that Amina dealing with the other two tendrils, the saw and the needle? Elpida could only hope.

Choking an opponent unconscious should only have taken a few seconds. Elpida’s internal clock was so scrambled by pain that it felt like hours. Cantrelle gurgled and hissed, flailing and bucking, weaker and weaker. Her bionics allowed her to hold out longer than an unaltered human, but eventually her tentacles ceased their battering. She went limp in Elpida’s grip.

Elpida kept the pressure on. Hours passed, or perhaps only seconds.

Then she let go. She collapsed face-down on Cantrelle’s back.

Unconscious oblivion coaxed her deeper. Elpida’s body was a sea of pain, flooding outward from the ruined muscle and torn tissues of her gut wound. Telokopolan pain-blockers may as well have been prayer and hope. Her vision went dark; her extremities went numb. Nearby, somebody was sobbing softly. If she didn’t get up and move soon, then this would all be for nothing. Cantrelle would be missed. Another revenant would come to check on them. But the pain was—

Get up said Howl, inside Elpida’s head. Get up, Elps. I fucking love you. Get up!

Elpida rolled off Cantrelle’s back. She hit the floor — more pain, ringing upward through her body like a cracked bell. She coughed blood, spluttering and wheezing. She lay still for several seconds, eyelids fluttering. Couldn’t force them open. If she could only rest for—

Get up, bitch tits!

Elpida sat up. Her guts felt like they were flowing out into her lap. Sitting was difficult with cuffed ankles. She stayed very still for what felt like another hour — two — three.

A tiny voice murmured: “Elpida?”

Elpida blinked to clear her vision.

Amina was crouched on the opposite side of Cantrelle’s corpse. She was staring at Elpida with horror and hope in equal measure. Blood was smeared around her mouth, a crimson mess on her soft brown skin. She had fragments of flesh in her teeth. She was still gripping Cantrelle’s hands. Her sandy hair was wild and tangled. She was crying slowly.

“Ami— na,” Elpida forced out. “Good. Job. Good— girl.”

“I’m— I’m— I’m not—”

Elpida looked down at her own gut; to her surprise, she was not a pile of loose intestines. Cantrelle had done an incredible job with those stitches. Several were broken and burst, no doubt about that, but the wound was still closed, despite the dark red blood seeping into the bandages.

“—not a good—” hic “—girl. I-I-I should have—”

“Shhhhh,” Elpida mumbled. “Shhhh. Amina. Shhh. Good girl. Well done.”

Elpida rolled Cantrelle over and went through her pockets; the corpse was red in the face from strangulation, but her flat disc-eyes were emotionless and blank, grey-dark screens gone out. The tendrils were limp, just cables lying on the floor. Amina had somehow snapped both the saw and the needle, probably by stamping on them. There were chunks taken out of her hands where Amina had bitten and gouged to keep Cantrelle from fighting back.

Another moment of truth presented itself, but Elpida and Amina got lucky — Cantrelle did possess a keyring. She also had a small snub-nosed pistol with a couple of extra magazines. Elpida offered those to Amina, but Amina shook her head and murmured something about her knife; Elpida pocketed the gun. All Cantrelle’s other possessions were either medical equipment, or personal effects which meant nothing to Elpida. She found a lock of blonde hair inside a little box, a fragment of a photograph of a building, several folded paper documents covered in hand-written notes; a pen-knife, a tin mug, a lighter, a scrap of pale leather — human skin?

Elpida tried the keys in her own manacles first. She found the correct one, then freed her ankles, then Amina’s wrists. Amina was sobbing quietly, her breath coming in little sips and judders as she rubbed her wrists. Amina needed praise, but Elpida had to finish the kill.

Elpida stood up, slowly and carefully. She had to pause several times, screwing her eyes shut, panting for breath as she fought down the pain. She wanted to vomit, but she had to resist; the stomach contractions might knock her unconscious.

“Ami— Amina. Amina. Shotgun. I can’t— probably can’t bend over.”

“A-ah?”

“Her shotgun. Get me her— shotgun.” Elpida gestured at the stubby weapon.

Amina scurried over to the gun, scooped it up, and then presented it to Elpida as if it were a holy relic and Elpida an idol.

“Thanks,” Elpida croaked.

She checked the chamber to make sure the weapon had a shell loaded. She flicked the safety on, then off again. Then she held both pistol grips and pointed the barrel at Cantrelle’s skull.

Nanomachine zombies did not die easily; Elpida herself was proof of that. She’d seen severed heads still moving, twitching the muscles and trying to roll their plucked-out eyes. Cantrelle was ‘dead’ — but for how long?

Destroy the brain, and the zombie goes back to the resurrection buffer. See you in sixty years.

Elpida put her finger on the trigger — and hesitated.

Amina whispered: “Did- didn’t we … k-kill her?”

“Yes and no,” Elpida croaked. She stared into Cantrelle’s empty disc-eyes. “These revenants— they’re more advanced than us. Much more. Probably loaded with nanomachines far beyond us. I already reanimated once, back in the bunker. She might … spring back up … any second.”

Elpida clenched her teeth. She did not want to kill Cantrelle; she wanted to kill the Death’s Heads. She wanted to pull the trigger — but if she did that, the gunshot might bring reinforcements running, and ruin the escape. Was one defeated Death’s Head — one Covenanter — worth failure? She was in too much pain to tell where misguided mercy ended and sensible tactics began.

“Fuck,” she hissed — and lowered the shotgun.

Amina was staring at her, wide-eyed with incomprehension and horror, crying softly. She didn’t have the context to understand any of this.

Elpida reached out and put one hand on Amina’s head. “You did really well, Amina,” she croaked. “Well done. You’re a good— girl. You’re a very good girl. We’re going to— get out of here now.”

Amina’s face scrunched up. She cried harder, but she didn’t sob, careful to stay quiet. She panted through her nose. “Okay. Okay. Okay. I— I— can— can—”

“Stay close to me. Do everything I say.”

Amina nodded. “I promise! Here!”

Amina held out her bloody hands — Elpida’s blood, from earlier, rapidly drying on Amina’s palms and fingers, smeared by the struggle with Cantrelle.

“For the nanomachine content, right,” Elpida said. “Amina— it’s not much. We don’t have time to—”

“It’s yours! It’s yours!” Amina hissed, her voice filled with panic. “And you’re more hurt! Take it back! Take it back, I don’t deserve—”

Elpida took one of Amina’s hands and pressed it back toward her. “Yours now. I got the raw blue— right? Lick your fingers clean. That’s an order, Amina. Follow your— orders.”

Amina stared — then nodded and obeyed without further hesitation. She shuddered in rapture as she licked Elpida’s blood off her own hands.

Elpida led Amina over to the door. Elpida’s boots were waiting there, untouched by the fight. She had Amina pick them up first and shake them out, just to make sure the Death’s Heads hadn’t left any nasty surprises inside. She stepped into the boots, then stepped back to examine the bio-tech lock on the door.

She hadn’t seen anything in Cantrelle’s pockets which looked like a near-field transmitter to operate the lock. She attempted a quick experiment: she picked up a piece of shattered glass from the row of once-grand mirrors, and poked the blob of tarry black goo.

The blob ate the glass, dissolved the material into more of itself, leaving behind a thin trickle of greasy smoke.

She said: “Okay. Amina, don’t touch that.”

“Mm!”

Perhaps the lock operated on the nanomachines themselves, keyed for the Death’s Heads, or for particular individuals. Elpida glanced back at the corpse; Amina wouldn’t be able to lift it and carry it over here, and the muscular effort might rip open Elpida’s belly for real. They could try cutting off a hand, but the only cutting tool they had was Cantrelle’s saw — and Amina had snapped that in half. How about severing a finger?

They were burning time; if a finger didn’t work then they would have to cut through a hand, then an arm, then what? That could take ten or fifteen minutes. They might be discovered. Or it might not work at all.

Elpida pointed the shotgun at the door frame below the lock

A bad option, but at least they would be out and moving in a few seconds, running for an exit.

“Amina,” she panted. “When the door opens, stay close. We have to— run. Don’t lag. I can’t— probably can’t carry you— like this. Not leaving you behind. Understand?”

A small hand closed around a corner of Elpida’s coat. “Yes.”

“Okay. Cover your eyes, there might be—”

A shimmer passed over the tarry-black bio-tech lock — like an optical illusion — and then the lock parted in the middle, as if sliced by a blade from top to bottom.

The lock went inert and fell to the floor, shattering into tiny fragments with a tinkling like glass beads.

The door swung open.

Elpida jerked the shotgun upward and shoved Amina behind her, out of the line of fire, falling back, ready for—

Nothing.

Nothing stood in the doorway. Pale marble corridor yawned beyond, dusty and dirty, completely empty.

No — a shimmering passed through the air; like a sculpture made of translucent glass, heat haze in a cloudless sky, a sheet of falling water in perfect laminar flow.

Something invisible stepped into the room.

Eight feet, nine feet — or ten feet tall? Elpida could not be certain; the optical chameleon effect confused her estimate of height. The intruder straightened up from ducking through the doorway. A giant, no doubt about that. Multiple limbs shimmered and blurred against the background of the door frame. Armour plates — or clothing? — refracted the light at strange angles. When it stopped moving the figure became truly invisible — all except a head, a blurred shape of helmet tacking back and forth.

Elpida retreated, shoving Amina behind her. The stubby shotgun in her hands seemed an inadequate weapon for this target.

But she raised it anyway, aiming at the just-visible shimmer of the head.

A voice hissed: “Still your blade, warrior.”

Another semi-visible shape stepped around the door frame; this second figure was not truly invisible, but merely blurred like a smear of oil on canvas, cloaked in shadow, obscured by a long coat, with the hood pulled up.

Elpida lowered her shotgun and burst into a smile. “Atyle?!”

The blurring effect switched off; Atyle stood revealed before Elpida, dressed in the armoured coat taken from the tomb. Tall and proud, dark skin made darker by the shade of her hood, Atyle looked completely untouched by the battle. Her biological left eye twinkled with mischief; her peat green augmetic right eye spiralled and flickered with a hundred hidden lenses. She cradled the cyclic sliver-gun in her arms.

“You did not think we had forgotten you, warrior?” she whispered.

Elpida could have laughed. She could have hugged Atyle. She panted through the pain. “How do you keep— doing this, returning exactly— when we need you?”

Atyle grinned. “Perhaps I am a Necromancer.” She raised her chin, indicating the rest of the room behind Elpida and Amina. “We attempted to join you before your hasty duel, but stealth is harder won than it appears. Well done, warrior.” She glanced downward, at Amina peeking out around Elpida’s side. “And well done, little rabbit. Your claws grow ever sharper.”

Amina let out a strangled whimper.

Elpida eyed the now-unmoving ten-foot waterfall-shimmer at Atyle’s side. She hissed: “We?”

Atyle glanced at her almost-invisible companion. “A friend. She serves the small titan who joined us in the battle. Her name is Hafina.”

Elpida struggled to keep up; the pain was fogging her intellect. “Small titan? You mean the crawler? The— tank?”

Atyle nodded. “She cannot speak to us, but she comprehends. The small titan translates our speech for her. He waits at range, ready for the charge, ready to accept us into his belly.” Atyle glanced left and right, then up and down, then over her shoulder, rapidly covering all angles with her augmetic eye. “We must be quick now, warrior, and little rabbit. We must be quick and quiet and not be seen. These beasts are bigger than we. They see through walls, too.”

“Wait,” Elpida hissed. “Is anybody coming— right now?”

“Not yet, warrior.” Atyle grinned again. “You have other plans?”

“Where are the others?” Elpida whispered. “Us, the rest of us?”

Atyle dipped her head. “Kagami and Victoria entered your god of war—”

“The combat frame! But there was a Necromancer, it stopped me—”

“They felled the shape-shifter and cast it down. They are safe in the belly of your god, for now.” Atyle reached up and tipped back one side of her armoured hood; she was wearing an earpiece and headset. “The scribe lends us the eyes of your god, and tells me where not to tread. She sees not with my clarity and depth, but she sees further and wider. She speaks with the small titan, also. She is our watcher from the other side.”

Elpida ached to ask questions, but they didn’t have time. She had to stick to the bare essentials. “Kagami’s running mission control— for us? Got another headset, for me?”

Atyle shook her head. “No spares.” A pause, then a smile. “The scribe calls you a fool for damaging your stitches. She calls you many things.”

Elpida sighed. “We really need proper short-range communications. And the rest, the rest of us?”

Atyle shrugged. “Ilyusha is nowhere. Pira … ” Atyle turned her head down and to the right, staring through brick and steel. “Sits in a cell of her own, though less well chained than you. With a friend. She is unwell inside.”

“She betrayed us,” Elpida hissed. “But then she—”

“I saw, warrior.” The depths of Atyle’s peat-green bionic eye flickered and rotated. “I was watching. Now, do we rescue Pira, or not?”

Elpida said: “You’re asking me? I’m not in command— right now. You and Kagami—”

“It is you she betrayed, and you she saved. Would you have won your duel if she had not delivered to you the magic potion?” Atyle took one hand off her cyclic coilgun and gestured at Elpida’s belly. “To the wronged, the choice of justice.” She grinned. “And I wish to see what you choose, warrior.”

For a split-second Elpida considered the possibility that Atyle really was a Necromancer.

Didn’t matter; she was breaking Elpida out.

But the choice was impossible. Elpida still could not fully process what betrayal meant; she had wrestled Pira to the ground in a fistfight that felt just as intimate as any cadre sparring match. She had fed her with blood, she had trusted her, she had listened to Pira’s reasons and respected her choices. And Pira had shot her through the stomach in a moment of confusion and panic.

Telokopolis rejects nobody, Howl whispered inside Elpida’s memories. Bitch.

Did that mean welcoming a traitor back into the cadre?

But a member of the cadre could never betray.

Elpida’s head went around and around; she was in too much pain to make this decision. Pira had chosen the Death’s Heads — no, Pira had chosen her old friend. And then chosen to betray them in secret to help Elpida; without the raw blue, Elpida would be unconscious, or maybe dead.

Betrayal, then salvation. Which was the truth?

There was no time for this.

Elpida said: “Where’s our coilgun? Did they take that off me, too?”

Atyle raised her eyebrows in surprise, then glanced downward, through the floor. “Not too far from the betrayer. Inside their war council. Our exit is just beyond. Our path takes us past both.” She paused, then chuckled. “The scribe is not happy about this change of plans. She suggests we jump out of a window instead, to save ourselves the effort of getting killed.”

War council? Yola had said ‘command post’ earlier. Elpida hissed in frustration.

Atyle whispered: “Your other weapons are there too, warrior. Perhaps they hoped to return them to you, once you joined their war party.”

Elpida snorted. “Maybe. What does Hafina think?” Elpida glanced up at the almost-invisible shimmer.

The shimmer — Hafina — nodded once.

Atyle whispered: “She will help. The beasts here are looking outward, stirred up by more than us alone. We are not the only distraction.”

Amina whispered in a tiny voice: “Is m-my knife there, too?”

Atyle tilted her head. “We will see, little rabbit. If not … ” Atyle reached inside her coat and pulled out a sheathed combat knife, one of the blades they had taken from the tomb armoury. She flipped it around and handed it to Amina. Amina’s eyes lit up with trembling gratitude. She slid the blade away inside her coat. She tried to whisper a thank you, but her voice was shivering too hard.

Elpida made a decision: “We retrieve the coilgun — if we can do so without being seen, on our way out. If that takes us past Pira, then she gets one chance — her friend, or us. If she says no, or hesitates … ”

Atyle raised her eyebrows, quietly amused.

Crack!

A single high-powered gunshot rang out — from beyond the walls of the skyscraper, splitting the nocturnal quiet. Every head looked up — ‘Hafina’ included, a whirl of mirror-shimmer translucence.

Elpida hissed: “That rifle. That’s Serin.” Then—

Boom-boom-boom, even more muffled, somewhere down in the guts of rubble and ruin.

Atyle grinned. “Our own little beast returns, hm? The perfect distraction.”

“Illy!” Amina squeaked. “That’s her gun! That’s her gun!”

Elpida panted: “Coilgun, Pira, exit. If Illy needs help— the first two— priorities— can be discarded. We go, now.”

Atyle grinned and turned into an oil-streak blur against the marbled hallway. She raised a hand and tapped the side of her hood. “Lead on, Hafina. Guide us true, scribe.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Zombies sure are hard to kill; is Elpida being merciful, or merely practical? Also, hey, Haf is big. And quiet, for now. The strong, silent type, or maybe just shy? Meanwhile-

Oh, wait, my apologies, I’m getting a special announcement from Kagami, at volumes too loud for the human ear to endure.

IM HERE TO MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT. THE DEATHS HEADS ARE BITCH ASS MOTHERFUCKERS. THEY STOLE MY FUCKING COMMANDER. THATS RIGHT. THEY TOOK OUT THEIR FUCKING, SKULL WOMB TATTOOS, AND STOLE MY FUCKING COMMANDER. AND THEY SAID “WE ARE THE INHERITORS BLAH BLAH BLAH” AND I SAID “YOU DIRT EATING WHORES”, SO IM MAKING A CALLOUT POST ON THIS MECHS LOUDSPEAKERS. DEATHS HEADS, YOU HAVE INSANE ARGUMENTS. THEIR AS INSANE AS AMINA BUT WAY DUMBER. AND GUESS WHAT? THIS IS WHAT MY ARGUMENT LOOKS LIKE! THATS RIGHT! NO WORDS NO REFUSAL ALL MAGNETS. LOOKS LIKE TWO RAILS AND A FERROMAGNETIC SLUG! THEY STOLE MY COMMANDER, SO IM GOING TO SHOOT THEM! BUT IM NOT GOING TO SHOOT THEM, IM GOING TO SHOOT HIGHER! IM SHOOTING THE GRAVEWORM! HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT SERRIS, I SHOT THE GRAVEWORM YOU IDIOT. YOU HAVE 23 SECONDS BEFORE THE WORM GUARD KILL US ALL. NOW GET OUT OF MY SIGHT, BEFORE I KILL YOU TOO!

(Courtesy of Lotus, from the discord! I asked permission to include it here, since it had me laughing too hard not to share.)

In the meantime, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters in the future, or even more. I got a request for 5 chapters ahead, so … gonna try!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And thank you. Thank you for reading my little story! I know I say this literally every chapter, but I seriously cannot thank you all enough: readers, supporters, everyone who leaves comments, all of you. I could not write this story without you, and I am flattered and delighted that you’re enjoying it so much. Onward! To escape, to coilguns, and more zombie weirdness.

Content Warnings

Emotional abuse

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Elpida echoed Yola’s words; she kept her voice neutral.

“You want me to join you?”

Sitting in her little wooden chair, on the filthy floor of a ruined public toilet, her undead flesh wrapped inside layers of purple-gold steel, ceramic plating, servo-motor muscles, and bio-uplink sensor surfaces, Yola nodded. She stared upward at Elpida, laid out on the tilted surgical table, chained to a metal spike rammed into the floor. Yola’s bright green eyes burned with fascination and faith.

“Oh yes, superhuman,” she began to repeat herself. “You are so very b—”

Elpida croaked: “What does that mean, exactly, in practical terms?”

She did not want to hear Yola call her ‘beautiful’ again; Elpida doubted that she and Yola shared a compatible definition of beauty.

Yola’s smile turned shrewd. She leaned back in her chair; the wood complained with a tortured creak — not strong enough to support the weight of all that powered armour for long. Wooden furniture was obscene enough — such an object would have been prohibitively expensive in Telokopolis, a rare thing to extract from the botanical stock in the buried fields beneath the city — but to abuse it to breaking point was a statement of careless power.

Or perhaps Yola didn’t mean it that way. Perhaps no object or artifice or art mattered anymore; it was all nanomachines in the end.

Yola purred, her lips slick and wet and clicking on the syllables: “In a way you are already one of us, by definition. You simply need to be shown how. The rest will come to you naturally.”

“And you propose to teach me?” Elpida said. She could not fully mask her scepticism.

Yola said: “This world, this obscene lie, it is all very confusing. Even for one as resourceful and tenacious as yourself. I know. We all know, we have all been through it, some of us for years, for many rebirths. But I promise, we can make it all make sense.”

The other two Death’s Head revenants — the medic, Cantrelle, with her perfectly bald head, her mechanical tentacles, and her long, equipment-stuffed coat, and Kuro, the taciturn giant in the faceless grey powered armour, built like a tank, bristling with weapons — reacted to this little speech with a shadow of Yola’s own rapture.

Cantrelle tilted her head back and briefly closed her flat, disc-like eyes, the tiny screens going grey and empty. Kuro didn’t move, but the fluttering air-intake sound of her back-mounted reactor whirred with sudden increased throughput, then subsided again.

And Amina went: “Mmm! Mm!” through her metal gag.

Kuro’s faceless grey visor twitched down to stare at Amina; the giant took a step toward her, heavy armoured boot slamming into the floor tiles. Amina squeaked behind her gag and tried to scramble away, panting with sudden panic, metal chain scraping against the floor. She raised her bloodstained hands, still slick with Elpida’s own drying gore.

Elpida tensed her shaking legs and her quivering core muscles — and sat up.

Her gut wound scoured her intestines with burning flame, bursting past the lingering anaesthetic; her face streamed with sudden flash-sweat; she heaved and choked and gagged for breath through clenched teeth; she grunted or screamed a little — she couldn’t be sure, the moment was a blur of agony. But then she was sitting upright on the tilted surgical bed. She raised her cuffed hands, her own chain clanking as it rose from the floor.

Kuro stopped. Elpida stared into the blank grey faceplate.

“Come near— her,” Elpida panted, “and I’ll kill you— with just this chain. Gut wound or— not. Powered armour won’t— save you.”

Elpida felt a string of bloody drool sliding down her chin. She’d never bluffed so hard before.

Yola burst into a delighted smile, showing all her sharp little teeth; her eyes lit up. She touched two fingertips to Kuro’s armoured thigh.

“Down, Kuro,” she said, without looking away from Elpida. “Leave the little one alone. Take no offence. She may babble and warble as the superhuman pleases.”

Kuro made a click-buzz of closed radio transmission.

Yola said, sharper: “Kuro.”

Another click-buzz from Kuro. The giant spoke out loud, in a high-pitched, girlish voice, muffled by deep static: “This is an indulgence.”

Yola sighed fondly. “Of course it’s an indulgence. I really do think she could kill you, Kuro. I love you too much, puppy. Down.”

Kuro stepped back, slowly. Amina buried her face in her arms, sobbing silently through her gag.

Cantrelle hissed at Elpida: “Fucking hell. Sit back down! Sit back down before you open all the fucking stitches I just put in you!”

Elpida stared Kuro down for another ten seconds, searching that blank faceplate. Then she let the chain clank back down to the floor. She lay back on the metal surgical bed. She returned her cuffed hands to her chest. She focused on not showing the searing pain in her belly.

Cantrelle sighed and turned to Yola — gesturing at Amina: “Boss, come on. The little one is unstable. Prey. Eager to get eaten. You’ve seen that look enough times to—”

Yola raised a hand. “We’ll put her with the tyke squad.”

Cantrelle frowned. “What? Fuck no. Fuck—”

“From what we saw earlier, she could make a very good close-quarters fighter. A little berserker. Like Gulba.”

Cantrelle made a face like she wanted to spit on the floor. But she turned away and folded her arms.

Yola said to Elpida: “You and your companions will not be harmed — that is not my intention.”

“Yeah?” Elpida croaked.

Yola nodded. “Yes. You have my word. If you can convince your former companions to surrender their weapons, you and they will be under my protection. Our protection.”

“You were doing a— a lot of shooting at us— earlier.”

Yola composed her face into a sombre look and bowed her head. Her ruby-red hair fell about her cheeks in artful disarray – but then seemed to spring back into place when she looked up again.

“And I apologise for that,” she said. “Between the trio of worm-guard—” Cantrelle shuddered at the mention of the machines; Kuro went clonk inside her armour. “—and that degenerate tank, armed engagement became a necessity. Our intelligence was confused and incomplete. We were not aiming at you. Except for Leuca — or Pira, to you — and your little friend here, we have not recovered any of your other companions, alive or dead. If I had bodies, I would present them to you, with deepest apologies.” She bowed her head again. “We have gotten off on the wrong foot, superhuman. I don’t wish to exacerbate that. After all, we may be working together for decades. I am your friend, Elpida; that I promise.”

Elpida didn’t have an answer to any of that; she couldn’t know if Yola was lying.

But she was certain of one thing — this woman was not her friend.

Elpida gestured at Kuro with her eyes. “Yeah? Then why’d she go for Amina just now?”

Yola smiled with fond indulgence. “Kuro here is a little overzealous when it comes to my pronouncements — that’s her way. There are many ways to be one of us. One core, one set of principles, but many expressions. After all, it is nearly impossible to achieve perfect synchronicity and continuity across so many separate resurrections, all of us drawn from different peaks in the sine wave of human history, different expressions of perfection. Kuro regards me as a prophet. Others think of me as simply the current leader of this one group. Some have been with me for many years, and trust me to lead well.”

Elpida croaked: “And what do you think of yourself?”

Yola’s eyes lit up with that inner fire again, the green burning beneath white-hot sunlight. Her lips made a wet click. “A cutting question, thank you. I consider myself a place-holder, a seeker, an imperfect leader waiting for the true leader — whether she has been resurrected in times before and we are simply trying to locate her, or if she is yet to be reborn to us, or … ”

Yola trailed off, staring at Elpida, smiling in delight.

Elpida almost retorted out loud: she was not born to lead. Old Lady Nunnus and Howl and every one of her sisters had made that clear in a million little ways. Elpida had been Commander of the cadre because they had chosen her to lead, not because the genetic engineers had made her a leader.

Nothing made her a leader. She led because she acted and others followed.

Yola saw something else.

Elpida was used to being looked at without being seen — all the cadre had been. First by the genetic engineers and biologists and sociologists and bone-speakers and the Silico studies experts from the Legion, all the clean staring eyes of the pilot project; they saw only their little soft machines. Then Old Lady Nunnus, for all her kindness and humanity, had seen Elpida and the cadre as a means to an end, the perfect expression of the expeditionist position on the green; at least she hadn’t pretended otherwise, even if she was the human face over the expeditionist factions after they took control. Civilians saw impossible semi-human beauty, little angels in their midst, always out of reach; Legionaries saw unpredictable, wind-up weapons, too young and inexperienced to be real soldiers — and then later, after the cadre had proved themselves, the Legion saw saints, saviours, striding through the green. The Civitas had seen a problem or a political bargaining chip or a promise to sell to the masses. The Covenanters had seen—

Subhumans.

Yola had used that word, when she’d gotten too excited, when she had started describing the Death’s Head philosophy too early.

Elpida had never heard the word before; it made no sense to her, just like that word Vicky had used back in the bunker when they’d been getting to know each other — ‘homeless’. ‘Subhuman’ — the linguistic components made sense, but Telokopolan culture had no equivalent. How could anybody be ‘below’ human when the city responded to all human beings? Telokopolis would even respond to those who couldn’t speak and couldn’t use sign language, though the process could become clumsy and prone to errors. Certain branches of philosophy entertained a thought experiment of a theoretical human being to which the city would not respond, but the idea was too academic to penetrate popular culture. What was the point?

But the Covenanters had invented plenty of colourful language for the cadre: inhuman experiments, bodies without souls, pure cyborgs dressed up in flesh.

Subhumans.

And now Yola looked at Elpida with just as much projection as any Covenanter fanatic.

Elpida tried not to let the disgust show on her face. She had very few options; her best bet was to buy time for her gut wound to heal, to buy trust in search of an opening, and to keep Yola talking. The more she talked, the less likely she was to separate Elpida and Amina — or just have Amina killed.

Elpida said: “You still haven’t answered my question. What do you mean exactly by ‘join you’?”

Yola relaxed her smile. “Forgive me. My words run ahead of my thoughts. Let me start at the beginning.”

Cantrelle had been staring at Elpida — frowning at her belly, as if a good glare might keep her stitches in place; but she turned her frown on Yola. “Boss, seriously? Have we got time for this?”

Yola smiled with faint amusement. “Of course we have time, Ella. We’re not going anywhere without that mech — and neither is the graveworm, I think. Besides, it’s the middle of the night. What better time for a bit of girls’ talk?”

Cantrelle glanced at Elpida, then back at her boss, then tilted her head with silent meaning. Yola raised her eyebrows a fraction, as if saying ‘yes, and?’ Cantrelle sighed and shrugged. She made no attempt to conceal her irritation.

Elpida croaked: “Something wrong?”

Yola smiled at her. “There are always things wrong in this world. We are at the very edge of the graveworm’s halo. Vulnerable to degenerates from the empty places of the city. We can repel almost anything, of course, but we must be vigilant. Now, Ella, you don’t have to stay for this.”

Cantrelle said: “I’d rather hang about, cheers.”

Elpida decided something was wrong — something they didn’t want to tell her. It wasn’t one of her comrades; if it was, they would be using that against her. Some kind of tactical problem they were having? A flaw in their current position? Something to do with the combat frame, perhaps? She studied Yola’s face, but she couldn’t see any hints. The Death’s Head commander was sculpted like a mask.

Yola lay her armoured gloves on her armoured thighs, purple on purple, laced with gold. She sat up straight and said: “As I said, I will begin at the beginning. Have you divined the purpose of all this? This nanomachine ecosystem, this undead afterlife, us revenants, the graveworms, the tombs — all of it? Have you taken a guess, or built a theory? You have not been out of the tomb for long, but your mind must be sharper than most.”

Yola waited for an answer.

“Maybe,” said Elpida.

Yola apparently didn’t care if that was an evasion. She smiled all the same.

She said: “Evolution. Survival pressure — survival of the fittest. Darwinism.” She allowed that last word to linger for a moment, then said: “Did you have those concepts in your culture?”

Elpida frowned; ‘evolution’ was straightforward — that just meant how organisms changed over millions of years, via random mutation and selection pressures on breeding. Telokopolan science held that humans must also have been the product of evolution, many hundreds of millions of years ago, entire epochs of time before the city, in some environment none truly understood. A radical counter-position held that perhaps the city had always existed, or been built by some kind of creatures other than humans, and humans had ‘evolved’ out in the green, developing hands to move the city’s levers and speech to communicate their needs to the city’s innards. Elpida had always found that idea ridiculous.

Yola nodded gently. “I see you did, but you do not fully comprehend my point.”

“I don’t, no.”

Yola said: “The biosphere is dead. Humankind is dead. No natural reproduction is possible, no way to ensure the continuation of our race, or nation, or culture, or anything. There is no human race. The worms and the tombs resurrect queens and chattel alike, and cast us out into the wilderness, naked and confused, with no answers — why?”

Elpida took a gamble. She said: “To eat each other.”

Yola broke into a sunburst smile. She slapped her thigh, metal on metal. “Yes! Yes! You see, Ella? Kuro? I told you! The superhuman already understands. She comprehends at the lightest touch. Her mind is like a steel rapier. She is already one of us. Yes, Elpida. To eat each other. To contend. To fight for survival — and through survival, to grow.” Yola relaxed, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. She closed her bright green eyes for a heartbeat. “In all the past ages, evolution was a slow process, too vast to be glimpsed in a single lifetime. But now?” She raised one hand. “The best may eat their fill and grow ever stronger.”

Pira had explained all this before, but in very different terms.

Elpida said: “You mean the revenants who consume enough nanomachines to leave the graveworm safe zone?”

Yola shook her head, smiling with indulgence. Cantrelle snorted out loud.

Kuro went click-buzz, and said: “No longer human.”

Yola gestured at the giant in the grey powered armour. “Kuro speaks wisdom, yes. Those who change far enough that they can leave a graveworm safe zone — leave for the wastes of the city, or for the empty west — they are no longer human. They may believe they are the next step in evolution, or that they are ascending, or fulfilling the graveworm’s intentions — but they are merely choosing to abandon any cause at all. They are leaving behind the echo of humankind. Useless navel-gazing. They chose degeneration. We — us, the people, the ones you call ‘Death’s Heads’ — our intention is very different.”

“And what about everyone else?” Elpida took a calculated risk. “The ‘subhumans’?”

Yola smiled. “You are troubled by the implications. Elpida, why do the graveworms resurrect both queens and peasants? Masters and chattel? The finest examples of the human race—” She gestured at Elpida, then at herself — and then at the wall, vaguely outside. “And worthless mud that mewls and dies at the first obstacle?”

Elpida couldn’t keep the frown off her face. Yola sighed gently.

“A figure of speech,” she clarified. “I mean the monsters who eat each other in mindless orgies. I’m sure you’ve seen them? The inelegant predators who live alone in dark holes and stop thinking for years on end. The mad religious fanatics who decide this is all a dream, or hell, or something else, and talk in riddles. The ones who lose themselves completely, letting their body plans melt into plastic goo, or turn themselves into something alien. Why does the graveworm resurrect them too?”

Elpida frowned harder. “I saw plenty of nanomachine modifications among you people.” She glanced at Cantrelle’s metal tentacles. “Right there.”

“Oi,” Cantrelle grunted.

Yola sighed again, a little less patient. “Look at me,” she said. “I am human — or at least humanity’s echo. Heavily modified, but still a human being. I am having a conversation with you, not trying to bite your face off, or melt you in acid, or lay eggs in your belly. I am not a twenty foot insect, or a bag of gas, or a blob. Cantrelle fixed your stomach. Kuro is quiet and scary and big, but I promise you inside that armour is a human being, however difficult.”

She reached out to pat Kuro’s leg. Kuro didn’t move.

Elpida couldn’t hold back. She said: “You’re zombies, like the rest of us. We’re all zombies now.”

Yola’s face went stiff with matronly indulgence. “Do not use that word to refer to us — or to yourself. We are not zombies. Subhuman, zombie, same concept, slightly different mode of expression.”

“But what does it mean — to you?”

Cantrelle was frowning harder now. Kuro was perfectly still, a grey statue. Yola opened a purple gloved hand toward Elpida.

“Take yourself as an example, Elpida. What did you do when you were rebirthed in the tomb? You did not curl up and cry, and wait for death, like cattle. You did not wait for another to lead you, or wait for somebody to come fetch you and explain the situation. No, you did none of those things.”

Elpida recalled her first moments in the resurrection coffin; she’d almost gone mad with grief, before she’d heard the others screaming in pain and terror, before they’d given her something useful to do. To lead them. Yola had no idea.

Yola was already saying: “You rallied a group of girls who had no right to survive as long as they have done. And you led them out. Some people are born to lead, others are born to be led. Those who are led are necessary, of course, they are still of us, those who see the point in this system and have the willpower to remain human. But not all are capable of survival. That is the point of competition.”

How would Yola judge the others? Vicky, with her fear and her need for a leader. Kagami, with her malfunctioning legs. Amina, scared and mousy. Atyle with her unique view of this world, full of gods and their mysterious works. Ilyusha, with her hatred of these people. Or Pira, with her refusal to engage in cannibalism.

Pira’s refusal to eat human meat suddenly clicked into place; she had been a Death’s Head. She’d believed in this. And then she’d turned against it; no more cannibalism.

“We are humankind’s echo,” Yola was saying. “And we will roar once again. None of these monsters will triumph over us. But again, Elpida, I pose you the question — why do the tombs resurrect all, without distinction?”

Elpida struggled to maintain the facade. “I don’t know.”

“Because the systems are searching for the best — and the systems themselves are blind. And we will show them that the best are those with the will to continue being human. Those who were true humans in life, who can resist the urge to fall into bestial degeneration, and who can grasp the potential of this nanomachine ecosystem. That is what we’ve been put here for. The others, those who have chosen other paths, they seek to drag us down. To supplant this second rebirth of human potential with something else. Something alien. Through the deaths of others — who have abandoned their humanity, or never had it in the first place — we can grow forever, into true superhumans. That is the true purpose of the tomb system.” Yola inhaled a deep, cleansing sigh. “If only those who built it understood that not all homo sapiens have what it takes to be people; but their mistake is to our benefit. We may feed on their mistake, forever.”

Elpida grunted, trying to control her reactions. She said: “Why is it only women?”

Yola frowned.

Cantrelle sighed, and said: “We don’t know. We—”

Yola said with a slick-sharp click: “Ella.”

Cantrelle looked surprised. “Boss? She—”

“We do not know why the tombs only resurrect women,” Yola said, raising her chin. “We do not know why humankind died out, or who exterminated them — it doesn’t matter. What we do know is that we are in the greatest crucible ever made. An eternal conflict in which we will be the victors, no matter how deep or how wide the ashes.” She smiled again, eyes burning with belief. “And now the tombs have finally happened upon a true superhuman. Pre-nanomachine. Your potential is unrivalled. I believe you are what we have been searching for, for so long.” A single tear rolled down one of Yola’s too-perfect cheeks. “A true leader. Born for the role. History has generated you. And now you are here.”

Elpida had heard enough.

Perhaps it was the pain in her gut. Perhaps it was pure recklessness, or the memory of being captured and bound once before. Perhaps it was how Yola’s tone and expression reminded her so much of the Covenanters, even if the exact language was so different.

Elpida had heard plenty of Covenanter speeches on the floor of the Civitas chamber; they weren’t shy or secret about their policies. No more expeditions into the green. No more bringing back materials for study — and certainly not Silico, dead or disarmed or otherwise. No pushing deeper. No search for truth. The plateau was to be re-fortified with ten times the number of Legionaries. Telokopolis was to be sealed and inviolate and perfect, as it had been in the earliest ages of the city. No more bone-speakers, no more deep communion, no more pulling data from the city itself; no more growing what it requested or feeding it excess nanomachines — that was human meddling in something best left to nature.

And no more pilot program; the pilots were unnatural, not human, a step toward something else.

Silico. Like the ‘zombie’ Elpida had fought at the tomb. Zombie. Not human. Degenerate. Subhuman.

Eat your own kind, grow strong — but never change, never leave, never go out into the green, never discover the truth.

Elpida knew she was getting the palatable version of the Death’s Head philosophy; this was only the introduction, and they were already trying to sell her on cannibalism without end.

“So,” Elpida croaked, staring down at Yola. “The subhuman failures. They die. Get eaten.”

“Exactly.”

“And those who eat — they win. Humans. People.”

Yola nodded.

Elpida said: “Self-fulfilling, isn’t it?”

Yola smiled and tilted her head. “A common enough critique. But that is the point of competition, of the fight for survival. You have already proven that you are—”

“You’re working with a Necromancer,” Elpida said.

Yola froze. Cantrelle hissed between her teeth as if stung, turning away and raising both hands, done with this.

Kuro went click-buzz, and said in her weird, static-filled, high-pitched voice: “Needs means any allies are acceptable. Don’t criticise what you don’t understand.”

“Kuro,” Yola said gently. “Allow me to explain, please. Elpida, you’ve met the Necromancer as well, then? I presume it was the same one. Guiding us to meet each other. She has been assisting us with you.”

Cantrelle was muttering: “It’s not fucking real, it’s not fucking real, it’s not fucking real.”

Elpida shrugged — which hurt, but the display was important. “Lucky guess. Only way you could know my name.”

Yola smiled again. “We can put nothing past you, superhuman.”

“Mm. Why do you want the combat frame?”

“The mech?” Yola raised her eyebrows. “Who would not? It is one of the greatest opportunities that has ever fallen into our collective laps. I want to use it, to capture and control a graveworm.”

Elpida blinked. The graveworm was the size of a mountain range. The combat frame was big, but not that big.

Yola must have misinterpreted her expression, because she smiled with playful delight. “You see, yes? Many of us have been working toward this goal for decades — centuries in some cases. We’ve tried so many different methods, but the worms are unassailable. But now, this mech, this is new. This is power. I believe it is all connected. The systems chose you somehow. Perhaps they knew we were here, knew we were ready for your leadership. Perhaps they drew the mech from orbit somehow. And now the worm is within our grasp. And you, your companions too, you would not be denied the spoils either. If you cannot yet believe in us, surely we can come to a—”

“Why?” Elpida said. “Why control the worm?”

Yola blinked. “You understand what it is, yes? A gigantic nanomachine factory?”

Elpida nodded. “Mmhmm.”

“It is the ultimate competitive advantage. Infinite resources. We could go from grubbing the dirt for survival, getting smashed apart every few years or decades — into true ruler-ship, in one leap. A rebirth of civilization. A nation. The evolutionary processes could be accelerated a hundredfold. We would control who was reborn and who was not! We—”

“Boss,” Cantrelle grunted through her teeth. “She’s so not into it.”

Elpida said nothing; her plan was falling apart, but she couldn’t help it. The disgust was like a twin to the pain in her gut.

Yola took a deep breath. “I know that some of the things I’ve said are shocking, or wrong to your sensibilities — but your experiences here so far must have shown you the truth. I don’t expect you to believe me straight away. Accepting our position, as human beings, is a difficult road.” She spread her armoured hands, purple and gold glinted amid the filth. “But we have plenty of time. I don’t believe this graveworm is moving any time soon.”

Cantrelle turned on Yola, suddenly angry: “Did the fucking Necro corpse-rapist tell you that too, huh?”

Yola’s face went hard as ice. “Ella.”

“Fuck you, Yola! You’re doing deals with a fucking monster. You trust that thing? You’re more of an idiot than I thought.”

Kuro stepped forward, looming several feet taller than Cantrelle. Click-buzz: “Stop it.”

But Cantrelle jabbed a tentacle at Kuro’s breastplate. “You shut the fuck up. The only reason you’re still breathing is because Hatty and Paaie like you so much. You think I won’t adjust your fucking intake levels and choke you in your own blood? Fuck you. And you know I’m right. A Necro would go through you like nothing.”

Yola stood up, interposing herself between her subordinates. “Ella. Kuro. Stop, now. We are not having this conversation in front of the superhuman. She … she … Elpida?”

Elpida lifted her cuffed hands from her chest and reached down toward her bandaged gut; the angle was difficult, but she managed to dip a fingertip into the crimson mess leaking through the clean white fabric. Then she raised her hands back to her chest and did her best to smooth out the bunched fabric of her grey thermal t-shirt.

Yola’s eyes went wide. Her mouth hung open, lips trembling. She held out a hand to shush the other Death’s Heads.

Elpida paused. Draw a skull on herself, or not?

She knew she should play along. Pretend that Yola had convinced her. Go along with this for now, and then turn on them at the first opportunity, just to get these cuffs off and escape. But these people were going to keep her chained up for days, or weeks, or months — they weren’t stupid, they knew she was not going to be convinced in a single conversation. They would use her to bring her companions in — and then they would kill them, one way or the other.

She’d played along with the Covenanters. She’d played nice in the Civitas. And the Covenanters had murdered all her sisters and shot her in the back of the head.

And here were their descendants, in philosophy if nothing else.

Elpida made a new plan — and told the truth.

She daubed a symbol on the chest of her t-shirt, in her own blood. The lines were wobbly, poorly balanced, and she ran out of blood toward the end, the symbol trailing off. She didn’t know what it meant, or how it was supposed to be displayed, or where it came from. But she got the shape right.

A crescent, intersected by a line.

The symbol which Ilyusha had daubed on her own t-shirt in camo paint. The symbol which Serin had tattooed on one of her many arms. The symbol that said she belonged to the people who hunted the Death’s Heads.

Yola sighed and closed her eyes. She looked genuinely pained. “And where did you learn that?”

“Telokopolis is forever,” said Elpida.

Cantrelle said, “She probably picked it up from some rat—”

“Telokopolis is eternal.”

“Ella, stop,” said Yola. “Let me think.”

Elpida chanted Howl’s words, from the dream that was not a dream: “As long as one of us is still up and breathing, the city stands.” But then she added, in a moment of pain-fever defiance: “I am a child of Telokopolis and I will never abandon my mother.”

Where had that come from?

Yola was saying: “I would like to know where she learned that. If there’s an apos—”

Elpida interrupted, dry and croaking: “From somebody who helped me and my comrades. She’s probably hunting you right now. She’s a good shot. I’d be careful around the windows if I were you. Bang bang.”

Cantrelle and Yola glanced at each other. Cantrelle said, “Shit. The sniper, earlier. You think—”

“Shut up,” Elpida snapped. She raised her head so she could look at all three Death’s Heads. “Stop giving me the bullshit version of your philosophy, Yola. What do you people really believe? If you think I’m going to be your leader, give it to me without the mask on.”

Yola opened her mouth — but Cantrelle stepped forward.

“You’re never going to lead anything,” she said.

Yola said — surprisingly gentle: “Ella … ”

Cantrelle ignored her. “All the natural cycles are abolished. Birth, growth, mating, death. All of it. We are conquered by death, undone by death, remade by death — and we live it, we wield it, we use it. We become it. No race or realm in all of history has been able to shed dead weight as quickly as the Kingdom of Death. The only answer to all this is to join with death, in victory. For ever and ever. We will glut ourselves on the worm, cease all further rebirths except our sisters, and then consign everything else to death.”

Elpida nodded. There it was.

Yola tapped her hands together in gentle applause. “Ella, Ella, Ella, what would I do without you?”

“Die, probably,” Cantrelle grunted. “Now, can we—”

“Graveworm,” Elpida said. She tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling. “Graveworm? I hope you’re listening. Hope you heard all that. Send one of your guard in here.”

The Death’s Head trio stared at her — Cantrelle wide-eyed, her screen-eyes enlarged and dark, Yola with a delicate, feminine frown, Kuro just blank behind her visor.

Another bluff. Keep them guessing. Disrupt their plans.

Cantrelle forced a laugh: “She can’t broadcast. That thing in her head is receiver only. Stop bluffing, you—”

Kuro suddenly twitched around, staring at the closed door. Yola’s segmented purple helmet clicked upward from its stowed position in the collar of her armour, stopping halfway so it enclosed her neck and ears. The click-buzz of radio transmission came from within. Yola frowned.

Cantrelle stared at the others, then at Elpida. “Fuck no. No way. Fuck.”

Yola raised a hand, calm but serious. “It’s not that. It—”

The door of the public toilet slammed open with a wet ripping sound as the lock disengaged. A short, stocky revenant darted inside, dressed in a suit of ragged black armour plates. She had too many eyes and a weapon grafted onto one arm, crawling with tiny spider-like machines.

“Boss! Yola!” yelped the newcomer. “There’s an ART!”

She said it ayy-are-tee, an acronym.

“Yes,” said Yola, smooth and collected. “I can hear the reports. Pholet had eyes on it?”

The stocky newcomer nodded. She glanced at Elpida and Amina quickly, but then ignored them. She said: “It came out of that tank. There and then gone again. Pholet thinks it’s optical camo, but we can’t see through—”

Yola put one hand on the newcomer’s shoulder, quickly. “That’s enough, Nahia. You go relieve Pholet, tell her to come straight to me — we’ll be back in the command post. Understand?” Nahia nodded. “Good. Now go.”

Nahia turned on her heel and shot back out of the room, racing down the corridor. Kuro reached out and held the door open.

Cantrelle and Yola turned back to Elpida.

Cantrelle said: “It’s not her, boss. That thing in her head is receive only.”

Yola frowned delicately. “Still. Curious. Was that you, superhuman? The tank is yours, is it not?”

Elpida smiled. Keep bluffing. Let them think she was masterminding her own rescue.

Her own rescue — did this mean the others were coming?

Cantrelle stomped forward a few paces, her patched coat swaying. She jabbed a finger and a tentacle at Elpida. “That tank won’t come anywhere near us. If you’re hoping for it to pull you out, then you’re fucked, and so are your mates.”

Yola said: “Ella. We’re not going to harm them.”

Cantrelle pointed back over her shoulder — at Kuro. “You see that plasma cannon on Kuro’s back?”

Elpida squinted at the folded-away heavy weapon, mounted on articulated arms, powered down. It looked formidable, whatever it was.

“Two shots,” Cantrelle said. She raised a finger. “One to bring down the shields. That tank took a hell of a beating from the worm-bitches, and I know how those kinds of shield capacitors work — it needs days to recharge. So, one shot for the shields.” She raised a second, v-shape, pointed at Elpida. “Then a second round goes through that armour and into the hull, and fries the crew. Understand? Wanna broadcast that to your friends?”

Elpida said: “Thanks for stitching up my stomach.”

Cantrelle gritted her teeth and looked like she wanted to spit — but then she turned away and stalked towards the door.

Yola’s bright green gaze lingered on Elpida. She said: “Superhuman, you will join us. You will come to understand our way of seeing this world, the opportunities we offer, the truth of our vision. But for now — we will not harm your companions.” She glanced at Cantrelle. “Ella, fetch another pair of cuffs and bind her feet. Kuro, command post, with me.” She glanced at Elpida. “We will speak again later, superhuman.”

“Telokopolis is forever,” Elpida said.

Yola smiled. “Of course it is.”

The Death’s Head trio swept out of the room. The door slapped shut behind them.

Elpida allowed herself three seconds of rest. She put her head against the metal surgical table and closed her eyes. One, two, three.

Then she stood up.

She almost didn’t make it to her feet; her gut wound burned like pieces of molten metal lodged deep in her flesh, searing away her nerve endings and turning her thoughts to blank white fire. Her legs shook with pain and her knees refused to lock. She streamed with sweat and heaved through her teeth.

But then she was on her feet, standing next to the surgical table, socks in the filth and blood, shaking all over and panting for breath. Her cuffed hands weighed her down. Her chain slid across the floor as she staggered sideways.

The Death’s Heads were going to regret giving her enough slack to stand up.

Amina uncurled from her protective ball. She looked up at Elpida with wide eyes. She held out her bloodstained hands.

“Mmm? Mmmm?” she went.

Elpida nodded. “Yes— the medic— coming back to cuff— my feet—”

“Mmm?”

Elpida looked at the door; her boots stood next to the door frame. Yola had left the wooden chair behind.

A grin split Elpida’s face. This time there would be no Covenanter bullet in the back of her head. This time she would fight early, when she still had her sisters by her side.

“They took the bait,” she said. “Right. Amina. Let’s get that gag off you. Time to use those teeth again.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Even caged in the kingdom of death, hope still means something – even if you do have to daub it on your own chest with tainted blood. Elpida’s made her choice, and baited the hook; she knows how these kinds of people think, and knows she can’t stomach playing along all over again. But let’s hope the cavalry’s on the way, right?

This was the longest Necroepilogos chapter so far, at over 6k words! I have truly lost control of these zombie girls. I’m just along for the ride. (I think I may have said that before?)

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters. It’s … it’s going!!! Maybe! We’ll see!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And thank you! Thank you so much for reading my little story! I cannot express my amazement and gratitude that so many readers are enjoying this, and where I’m taking it, and all the gruesome, weird, themes we’re getting into. I couldn’t do this without you! Until next chapter, dear readers!