Content Warnings

Suicidal ideation
Grief

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Shilu had to break up the fight in the infirmary. The other revenants were all asleep, and the Commander wasn’t there to help.

She realised a physical altercation was imminent long before either of the participants did. In the past, back in the dimly remembered primordial soup of her true life, she would have attributed this to gut instinct, to some kind of animal sense for when violence was about to go down; she had been very skilled at reading such situations during her time in the Interior Service, though the specific memories were a jumbled mash of half-digested leftovers. She had saved a partner once, warned a superior, pulled her sidearm on a suspect before he’d had a chance to draw a gun. The context of all those memories had long since washed away in the sea of blood that was her afterlife, but the impressions remained.

As an instantiated Necromancer — or whatever she counted as now, with her crippled network permissions and semi-permanent body — Shilu knew the details in the data which formed that gut instinct.

Tension in the cramped infirmary had been steadily rising for almost an hour. After Melyn had finished tending to Ooni, Victoria had gently encouraged Melyn to leave Ooni to rest. They were all putting too much pressure on the android as their sole medic; Shilu approved of the Commander’s attempts to ease that pressure. Elpida had set an example by heading up front to the control cockpit. The others had dispersed shortly after — back to the bunk room or the crew compartment, or to one of the half-dozen tight little chambers hidden off Pheiri’s spinal corridor.

Except for Pira and Atyle.

Pira sat by the narrow slab bed, planted on one of the fold-out metal seats, gazing at Ooni’s fitful sleeping face. Pira wore an expression that Shilu did not care to analyse too closely. Atyle lounged at the opposite end of the infirmary, near the hatch, though the room was so small it made little difference where she stood. She was open-faced with fascination, locked into her own penetrating look, her high-spec bionic eye blurring inside the socket as the internal components adjusted hundreds of times per second. Neither of them bothered to look at Sanzhima, the unfortunate revenant still laid out on the other slab bed, shrouded in bandages after her encounter with the Death’s Heads’ improvised explosive device. Neither of them paid any attention to Shilu beyond an initial glance. They were both too busy staring at Ooni.

Perhaps the fight would not have happened if they had maintained their positions, but Atyle had insisted on a closer inspection.

The first time Atyle came forward, she angled her bionic eye to peer at Ooni’s closed lids, then stared intently at where her heart lay beneath her ribs. Pira did not approve of this.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Low, angry, confused.

Atyle hadn’t even looked up. “Searching for marks on more than her flesh. For signs she was touched by a god. She already tells us she was. Why not look for the fingerprints? Pressed into her bones, her fluids, her soul. Do you think we will find them?”

“I think you should back up.”

Atyle smiled at Pira’s slow anger, then raised her hands, and took the advice.

The second time she came forward, Atyle moved slowly, watching Pira’s face, like a cat which knew it was doing something naughty, but was going to do it anyway. Pira watched her approach, arms folded, a glower growing behind her shuttered face. Atyle came close, then leaned down to examine Ooni’s burned hand and forearm, now encased in bandages and ointment.

Pira endured this with the patience of a statue, until Atyle reached out to lift the arm by Ooni’s wrist. Then Pira was on her feet. Atyle put her hands up and backed away again, smiling all the while.

“Calm yourself, officer of the watch,” Atyle said. “I am no grave robber, and this is no grave. We are all on the same side, are we not?”

“Stop trying to fuck with her,” Pira said. “You can talk to her later, when she’s awake. Go somewhere else.”

“I will go right here, I think.” Atyle resumed her position by the hatch. Pira glared for a while, then gave up and looked back down at Ooni’s sleeping face.

Shilu did not care about this interpersonal conflict. She was sitting at the other end of the infirmary, because the Commander had asked her to. Elpida did not want Sanzhima to wake up alone, or with only Pira and the unconscious Ooni for company. Elpida needed somebody level-headed, somebody who didn’t need to rest. Besides, Shilu’s mind was busy; she was considering a number of gentle questions put to her by Amina, concerning Shilu’s current state and the nature of her body. Amina’s unfailing politeness and obvious fascination had inclined Shilu to answer seriously, but she had to think about the questions. They were not problems she had considered in a very long time — “Do you look like that because you enjoy it?”, “Which is the real you, the metal body, or the human one?”, “Did you always want to be this way?” Dredging the answers to these questions was uncomfortable and difficult, so Shilu had asked Amina to wait until later.

The third time Atyle drifted forward to examine Ooni, Shilu saw this would be the last. Her optics picked up all the signs of sudden violence, magnified and highlighted: the tightening of Pira’s muscles; the way she braced herself in the little seat: the deep, slow, steady breathing; the widening of her pupils; the sweat breaking out on her face. Atyle would not stop either. Shilu did not need to analyse and record the little smile on Atyle’s lips to know what it meant. She would goad until she got a response.

Pira rose to her feet and stepped around the slab, blocking Atyle’s path. “Stop.”

Atyle peered down at Pira; she had the height advantage. “Stop what, ex-traitor?”

“Call me whatever you like, but stop. Ooni needs to rest. You can talk to her later, when she’s conscious. Don’t try to touch her again.”

“What happened to this little lost lamb was the will of the gods,” Atyle said. “And I am going to interpret the message written on her flesh. Do you not wish to know it too? She is your lover, isn’t she? Or is she a mystery to you?”

Pira tucked her chin. “I know you’re doing this to piss me off.”

Atyle’s grinned. “Is it working?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. Atyle stepped past Pira, arms brushing in the close confines of the infirmary.

Pira’s temper broke.

It wasn’t much of a fistfight. Despite her pretensions to airy detachment, Atyle knew exactly what she’d been doing; she was ready for Pira’s first punch, clumsy with anger and exhaustion and a cousin to grief. She was less ready for the second, third, and fourth blows, because they came faster than she expected; Pira fought for pure practical advantage, no flair and no show. Atyle still managed to block the impacts with her arms, grinning through the gap, losing her footing. She was entirely unprepared for Pira’s knee in her gut, though she took the strike with admirable game, and cuffed Pira on the side of the head. But Pira was not slap-fighting, she was going for the real thing. Pira didn’t falter, she came on with both fists, hammering for Atyle’s face. She broke through Atyle’s guard and socked her hard in the jaw, but the punch didn’t shake Atyle’s grin.

Shilu had seen this sort of fight before. Messy, ugly, ill-considered. Pira would get Atyle on the floor and do her a serious injury, then regret her rage. If Atyle was anybody else, she would be crying out for help. But she just took it, as if the whole of her intent had been to bruise Pira’s knuckles on her own face.

Shilu considered letting events unfold. These revenants had known each other much longer than she had known them. She was only inside Pheiri’s hull under a kind of sufferance. The trust placed in her was highly conditional. She had no formal rank or authority among the crew. Her allegiance to Elpida’s offer of Telokopolis had been cemented by the network ghost of the lady herself, but the revenants were a different matter. If she got in the way, they might turn on her instead — though they could do little physical damage. More importantly, Shilu had no patience for drama.

But the Commander had asked her to watch over Sanzhima, and this was technically happening ‘over Sanzhima’.

Shilu told herself that was the reason she intervened; it had nothing to do with the look on Pira’s face as she had gazed down at Ooni.

Shilu was out of her seat and across the infirmary in a blink, vaulting over Sanzhima’s slab bed, discarding her human disguise in mid-air. She dropped next to the scuffle, all black metal again, strong enough to be unstoppable. She grabbed Pira by the scruff of her neck, fingers bunched in fabric, and dragged her off Atyle. Her other arm shot out, an black iron bar, and shoved Atyle back.

Atyle ignored Shilu, as if she had expected this all along. She put her hands in the air and backed away, still smiling at Pira. The shine of a nasty bruise was dawning on her jaw. Pira flinched hard at Shilu’s sudden proximity, at her black metal body glinting beneath the harsh infirmary light — and then showed her teeth, tried to pull away, and turned her cold scowl back to Atyle.

“Get out,” Pira said, calm as a stone. “If you come near Ooni again while she’s unconscious, I’ll break your jaw.”

Atyle purred. “A challenge, then?”

Shilu didn’t think Pira was bluffing; she didn’t need her on-board processing power to analyse the tone of Pira’s voice and the sweat on Pira’s face and the heaving of Pira’s lungs. Pira would do it, no doubt. Pira would do worse. Pira was angry, and Atyle was making herself a target, on purpose.

Fucking zombies. Never simple.

Shilu looked at Atyle. “I suggest you leave the room.”

Atyle’s gaze drifted to Shilu, like she was looking at a piece of furniture, or a talking machine, then back to Pira. She straightened up — taller than both — then turned with a tight, precise motion. She left the infirmary with a languid wave over one shoulder.

Pira’s eyes found Shilu. Pinched, tight, tired. “Let go, Necromancer.”

“Are you going to go after Atyle?”

A pause. A deep breath. “No.”

Shilu let go. Pira stepped back, smoothing out the collar of her greyish tomb-grown t-shirt. She considered Shilu with sullen eyes; it was like staring at a wild cat kept in a cage.

Ooni murmured in her sleep, a mushy snore of drowsy pain. She shifted beneath the scratchy blue blanket draped over her torso, turning her left foot to one side. Her lips tried to form a word, then gave up. Pira’s eyes left Shilu, returned to Ooni.

“My apologies,” said Shilu. She didn’t really mean it. Pira and Atyle should both have known better. But a touch of humility cost her nothing. “I assume the Commander would not want any fighting in—”

Pira darted forward from a standing start, using her leg muscles to launch, ducking low to avoid Shilu’s out-flung arm, firelight hair flowing in a wave against the grey walls of the infirmary. Pira was fast, and skilled, and she might have gotten clean past Shilu back in life, when Shilu was limited by human reaction times and the fragile angles of a human skeleton. But Shilu the Necromancer could move in ways no human or baseline revenant could — taking a diagonal step that would have sent any zombie tumbling on their arse and snapping both knees. She blocked Pira’s path, caught a fistful of fabric at Pira’s throat, and hauled her upright. Before Pira could recover, Shilu took three paces and slammed Pira into the back wall of the infirmary.

Pira didn’t fight. She hung there, sullen and sulky, eyes like the sky after a snowstorm.

“What was that?” Shilu asked.

“You’re too fast,” Pira muttered.

“No, not that,” Shilu said. Inwardly she sighed. She had no patience for these games. She’d done this kind of thing a thousand times before, a thousand times over, in a thousand different configurations — sometimes with revenants, sometimes with other Necromancers, sometimes before her false apotheosis within the system, sometimes after it. Her memories were a silt-bed of revenant lifetimes, so many of them filled with brushes against the drama of others, with cries of jilted jealousy or lost lovers, or just the endless hungry feasting on the flesh of one’s companions. She didn’t wish to re-run any of them. “If you had made an excuse and stayed calm, you probably could have walked past me. Either you wanted me to stop you, or you’re too angry for self-control. I don’t care which. Don’t make me do this again.”

Shilu let go, stepped back, gave space. Pira stared for a moment, then slumped down into her seat. She returned her gaze to Ooni, forgot Shilu was even there. Moments passed. Pira’s face slowly resumed her former expression.

Shilu turned away before she caught too much of that, but it was already too late.

Pira’s face echoed in her mind. The hollow space behind her eyes, the way her gaze seemed sunk inside itself, the fragility of her mouth, the desperate yearning that could not be put into words. Or maybe Shilu was imagining it; maybe all she had seen was a very old mirror. For such a long time her emotions had been dry as dust, so ancient that she recognised them only by their outlines and their relation to each other. The unexpected visitation from Telokopolis — which had won her to Elpida’s cause — had also awakened the buried streets of her heart, stirred her memories like fresh wounds, memories of Lulliet as more than just a corpse in the universal grave.

She knew she shouldn’t, not only for her sake, but also because Pira might try to start a fight again, but Shilu couldn’t help herself. She slid back into her human disguise, dropped the metal, the sensors, the internal processing, all off it. She turned back around, to examine Pira through human eyes.

The infirmary was silent, apart from the tiny sounds inside Pheiri’s body, and the distant wash of the hurricane against the exterior walls of the tomb. The storm was easing off, but the difference was still too subtle to hear with human ears. The static only made the silence more clear. The light was too stark, revealing every secret of every surface, washing it of colour — except where it touched Pira’s fire-bright hair. Pira had bags under her eyes, a warp to her mouth, a heaviness in her cheeks, all so familiar to the jumbled matrix of Shilu’s memories.

Pira looked up, met her eyes, frowned. “Not you as well. No. Talk to her later.”

“I’m not looking at Ooni,” said Shilu. “I’m looking at you.”

Pira frowned harder. “Why?”

“ … because you remind me of myself. The way you look at her. I’ve sat where you sit now.” Shilu almost sighed out loud. What was she doing? Being sentimental. She should have left that behind long before the grave. Sentiment does nothing to protect Lulliet’s peaceful death.

Pira leaned back and crossed her arms over her belly. “What would you know about that, Necromancer?”

Shilu considered not answering the question. What were either of them getting out of this foolish conversation? This was hardly a balm for pain, either ancient or fresh. But Shilu found her mouth was moving anyway.

“I was human. Then I was a revenant. Her name—”

Shilu paused. She had not spoken Lulliet’s name to Elpida, only to the network presence of Telokopolis, to the promised protector of her beloved’s grave. And even then, she had not used her lips to speak. Speaking Lulliet’s name out loud would give her a kind of life once again, in Shilu’s own breath. Wasn’t that the very thing Shilu was trying to avoid? Would speaking about Lulliet force her into a new kind of resurrection, just as painful as the physical ones?

Pira’s face twitched; any other face would have twisted with a sneer. “Forgotten her, eh?”

“Never,” Shilu said. “Her name was Lulliet. She is dead. Truly dead, in central’s archives, not to be resurrected. I put her beyond suffering.”

Pira’s face went cold. “You killed her?”

Shilu turned colder. Pira blinked. “No,” Shilu said. “I ascended to Necromancer. She came with me. She grew tired. We both wanted … an end.”

And now I’ve made her live again, thought Shilu, by speaking her name. The pain was so old it was scar tissue turned to bone, but it tugged at something that was no longer a heart. The static of the distant rain and hail drummed onward beyond their shadows, but it was fading now, hour by hour. Shilu told herself she did not understand why she was telling all this to a revenant, a zombie, even a daughter of Telokopolis, when she had not shared this detail with Elpida. This was selfish and imprecise. It was exactly why she had not wished to be resurrected. A piece of Lulliet lived with her, and would live as long as she was out of the grave.

Shilu turned away. “You need the Commander. I’ll go fetch her.”

Pira was on her feet. “No.”

“No?”

“No. Please, not … not Elpida, not right now. I can’t … I can’t deal with that. With her. Please don’t.”

Shilu nodded. “All right. No Elpida.”

Pira eased back into her seat. She placed both hands on the edge of Ooni’s slab bed, and stared at the contours of Ooni’s sleeping face, pinched with pain and exhaustion, but still there, still warm inside. Her fingers twitched. Shilu did not need on-board processing and analysis to guess that Pira wanted very badly to reach for Ooni’s hand, or face, or heart.

But Ooni went untouched. Pira eased back and closed her own eyes very tight.

“Maybe you do understand,” Pira whispered. “Maybe you’re the only one who would get it.”

Shilu wasn’t sure she wanted this — connection with another revenant, something more personal than following a commander or pledging herself to a lost goddess. Those were abstract relations, directly concerned with the sanctity of Lulliet’s grave, and her own potential future rest. But this conversation in a bloody infirmary, over the sleeping form of another revenant, this was a concrete moment, about her. She did not want this. She wanted to leave. She wanted to sit in stillness and not think about Lulliet too much, because the old scar tissue was growing sore.

“I doubt I would,” she said. “You need another, not me.”

But Pira spoke anyway, as if she hadn’t heard. Her eyes were still screwed shut. “A few hours ago I was advocating that we leave Ooni behind. Now she’s back with us. Despite me. I feel … ”

“Relief?”

Please be relief. Please be simple.

Pira opened her eyes and slowly shook her head, staring down at Ooni’s face. “When she and I … when we were first together … before The Fortress, before all of that, she was so strong. She didn’t understand it, but she was. Ooni was an optimist. An optimist, here. Even as a bottom feeder, half-naked and grubbing for a single mouthful of meat, Ooni was an optimist. She wouldn’t have appeared so, not to anybody else. But she was. I never told her how much I admired her strength, because I didn’t understand it at the time.” Pira paused, took a deep breath, voice firming up. “When I joined the Death’s Heads, I understood it was an act of weakness. When I left them, I acknowledged that weakness. Everything I have done since then is with the aim of never letting that weakness in again. Never. Never. And then when we found Ooni, she had joined them as well, a different group, but the same underlying beliefs. I never imagined she could be so weak.”

Shilu reconsidered. Perhaps she could not understand this. “The same thing happens to all revenants. It’s the nature of the ecosystem.”

Pira looked up, eyes blazing with sudden anger. “No. No it doesn’t. It’s a fucking choice. And she made it. I made it. We both did.”

Shilu shrugged. “The ecosystem produces Death’s Heads. It’s an inevitable emergent property of—”

“It is not inevitable. It is always a choice.”

Shilu said nothing. She wouldn’t win this argument, and she didn’t really care. Pira slowly looked back down at Ooni, eyes creasing at the corners with distant pain.

“Ooni was weak,” Pira said. “She was weak in ways I never expected her to be. I’d never realised until then, I always thought she was … better than me. But then I met her again, and I was wrong. She was worse. Maybe it was the optimism, it made her weak and vulnerable, made her a good target. And then, after we got her back here, nothing changed. She kept being weak. Elpida saved her, and the weakness did not go away. She healed, she was forgiven, she left the Death’s Heads behind, and … and she kept being weak.” Pira’s voice crackled with the broken edges of hatred. “I didn’t love her anymore. It was like loving a ghost. I was disgusted by this thing with her face and her voice, but it wasn’t the girl I’d loved. It was a … remnant. Not her.”

Silence drifted down, lost in the distant static of the hurricane outside.

Pira drew a shuddering breath. “But now … I didn’t see it for myself, but I’ve been told what she did out there. Ilyusha told me. Elpida told me. I want to talk to Serin as well, I want to hear … I want to know … how she drew on people who had her captured. I … I was … ”

“You were wrong?”

Pira shrugged. “I don’t know. Was I wrong all along? Have I been ignoring Ooni, mistaken all this time, when she was already strong? When she was already herself again? Or did she just return, today, out there, in some kind of crucible? I don’t know.” Pira almost laughed, a twitch of her lips and a puff of breath. “It’s like she’s back from the dead, for real this time.”

Shilu said nothing, because she had nothing good to say.

Eventually Pira raised her eyes, shining with a layer of tears. “I don’t know what to do. You said you’ve been here before. You—”

“You disgust me,” said Shilu.

Pira blinked. Wiped tears from her eyes. She looked confused more than angry.

“I didn’t mean to say that,” said Shilu. “But you insisted on explaining. And you were wrong, about me. I can’t understand this. I can’t understand whatever hesitation or conflict you’re dealing with now. It’s nonsense.”

“Did it not make sense? Don’t you—”

“The girl you love is right in front of you.” Shilu pointed at Ooni’s body, laid out on the slab. “She wants to live. She might not be alive tomorrow. Love her now, or regret it forever.”

Pira stared for a long time. Her eyes refilled with tears, then returned to Ooni, softer than before. She reached out, for hand or face or heart.

Shilu turned away. She felt the prickling of tears in her own eyes, so she cycled her body away from the human baseline, adjusting the nanomachine matrix to augment her vision, her hearing, her data processing. But that didn’t help. Tears gathered unbidden, slid down her cheeks. Lulliet’s face floated to the surface of her memories — smiling, close, smelling of cold skin, old sweat, greasy hair. Shilu blinked hard to banish the phantom, then almost gasped as Lulliet left. The space she vacated hurt like an old fracture.

Shilu listened to the rain beyond the walls, but Lulliet’s voice whispered in the static. She listened to the tiny sounds of Pheiri’s body, but they couldn’t drown out her insides. She focused, listening to somebody muttering in the crew compartment. Cyneswith, repeating some kind of mantra to herself.

Hadn’t she been asleep? Shilu sharpened her hearing.

“—and the masters of time and space and space and time, I still hew to you, please hear my call, I still hew to you, I beg you appear before me again, appear before—”

Pira said, “Necromancer?”

“Yes?” Shilu tightened her hearing up again, but made a mental note. Eseld and Sky were both in the clear, according to the Commander. But Cyneswith? She warranted further investigation. A good distraction, if nothing else.

“What are our chances?”

Pira wasn’t crying anymore. She was a little red around the eyes, but she seemed to have moved past it already, or perhaps bottled it back up. Shilu wasn’t sure which she preferred. Ooni was still unconscious, lying on the slab bed. Her dark hair had been brushed away from her eyes. Shilu’s augmented sight picked up the impression of lips in the sweat on Ooni’s forehead.

Shilu shrugged with one shoulder. “Impossible to know.”

“Does ‘Central’ do this? Send multiple Necromancers to mop up a problem?”

“No,” Shilu said. “Central sends individuals. Agents or assets. The scalpel or the sledgehammer.” She decided to answer the obvious follow-up question before Pira asked it. “If ‘Perpetua’ was telling the truth, then a group of Necromancers will be arriving. That’s not normal behaviour. So, yeah. It’s probably something other than Central. Another side of the war in heaven, the war in the network.”

Pira glanced at Ooni, but her face did not crease with difficulty this time. Her eyes hardened.

“You want to protect her,” said Shilu. “Then take the Commander’s advice, get some rest.”

“Not as if I’ll be able to do anything against a Necromancer,” Pira muttered.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Shilu.

Pira looked up at her again, eyes full of something too close to envy, a resentment deeper than bone. “Easy for you to say.”

“If you can’t do anything else, you can always keep living.” Shilu pointed at Ooni. “If not for yourself, then for her. For the Commander. For Pheiri. For the ones who are going to fight. Otherwise, what’s the point? How do you think I became a Necromancer? I kept living, for Lulliet.”

Shilu hadn’t meant to say any of that. The words just poured out of her. She lowered her arm and turned away. She didn’t want to have this conversation any more.

Pira shifted in the tiny fold-out seat. “I’ll take a nap right here. Get myself rested for … for the waiting.”

Shilu nodded. “Right.”

A long moment of static and silence passed overhead. Pira’s mouth opened again with a soft click.

“Thank you. Shilu.”

But Shilu was already leaving. She headed for the hatch, out into the crew compartment. If she heard Sanzhima wake, she would come right back. She told herself she was going to speak with Cyneswith, not to accuse, but just to listen, to gather intel. It was time she started scraping the rust off all those skills she had honed back in the Interior Service.

She was telling herself a lot of things since she’d been dredged from the archives.

But she’d rather be telling them to Lulliet.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

You’re not dead anymore, Shilu. Get your head out of the grave.

Well well well! Behind the scenes, things are still shaping up pretty much how I expected; this is going to be a long arc, and we are going to be accelerating out into the stormy dark any moment now, after our zombie girls have had a little more time to dream. Gotta sort out this big mess they’re all sitting in, right? Even Shilu, and she’s not technically a zombie, even if she is undead.

Also, once again, I have some art from over on the discord! This week I’ve got a series of emotes – Vicky being silly, Howl grinning in a very satisfied way, and Kaga doing her best evil laugh, (all by cubey!) These are wonderful, it’s so great to see the essence of a character captured in a single expression. Thank you so much!

Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I’m plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!

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!

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for being here and reading Necroepilogos! As always, I could not do any of this without all of you, the readers and audience. Thank you so much! I’m sure Shilu would feel the same, if she could look over her shoulder and look you in the eye; uh, don’t stare too close at the Necromancers, you can never be sure if they’re watching. Anyway! Until next chapter! Seeya then!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Elpida stepped from the darkness, into the quiet greenish glow of Pheiri’s control cockpit.

She paused to relish the moment of relative peace; it might be one of the last she’d get, for quite some time.

The cockpit was just as she’d left it, a grotto of secluded shadows tucked between the banks of softly flickering displays and dimly lit readouts, tiny lights winking to themselves in the enclosed gloom, consoles and control surfaces studded with switches and buttons catching the edge of the electric illumination. The crew seats drowsed before their stations. The tiny viewport up and to the right was sealed and blinded by an exterior curl of armour. The internal sounds of Pheiri’s body — the humming and clicking and soft whirr of computers and machines and systems behind his sturdy inner walls — was almost enough to drown out the distant static of the hurricane.

The cockpit was sparsely occupied, as Elpida had expected. Sky, one of the new girls, was fast asleep in a side-seat, muscular arms folded over her chest, mouth drooping open, a thin trickle of drool making its way down her chin. Kagami was in the very front of the cockpit, huddled deep in her seat, visible only as a glimmer of black hair beneath the sickly green light of several dozen displays.

Elpida resisted a sigh. She had left the most difficult to the last. She knew she should not be the one to peel Kagami away from her post — that was Victoria’s role. But this was about more than caring for her new cadre.

She crossed the control cockpit, quietly enough to leave Sky undisturbed, but without any real stealth.

“Kagami?” she murmured. “Kagami?”

Elpida stepped into the greenish glow from the semi-circle of active screens in the tip of the cockpit, into Kagami’s halo of data and feedback and camera-views. Kagami looked up and around, her neck a sluggish swivel, attention glued to the displays; when she finally lifted her gaze, her eyes seemed glassy and clouded, lost far away, still focused on the internal readouts and drone-feeds piped up her optic nerve. Her right arm was folded deep in her lap, as if she’d been masturbating, and her left was lying flat on the arm of the chair, her twinned uplink cables spooled out of her wrist, their other ends sunk deep amid the machinery crammed into the tip of the cockpit.

Kagami looked strung out. Petite body wrapped in her armoured coat, dark skin gone waxen with sleepless stress, heavy bags under her eyes. Elpida silently chastised herself. She should have had one of the others drag Kagami off-station the moment everyone was safely inside.

“Kaga? Kagami?” Elpida whispered. “Pheiri, can you bring her round—”

Kagami forced a tight hiss through clenched teeth, then blinked hard, three times. Her eyes focused and cleared. The lucidity didn’t help, it made her seem even more exhausted.

“I’m right here, Commander,” she growled, “and I can hear you perfectly well. I am an expert at subjects you will never comprehend, but even I can’t sleep with my eyes open.”

Elpida suppressed a smile. “Understood, Kaga.”

Elpida lowered herself into an adjacent seat. Kagami looked her up and down. “No time to dress for dinner, I take it?”

“Too busy,” Elpida said. “I’ll strip down in a minute.”

Most of the carapace suit Elpida had worn out into the warren of the tomb still hung from the straps and buckles of the armour’s under-layer, fastened around her hips and chest. Several of the plates were stained with gritty black smears from the airborne glass-dust which Ooni had released with her explosive gambit. Elpida had been back inside Pheiri for the better part of an hour — forty seven minutes and sixteen seconds, according to her internal clock — but she hadn’t found long enough to slow down and strip off the rest of the carapace, despite Amina’s dutiful attentions. Amina had managed to get her pauldrons and gauntlets and greaves off, but the rest had required her to stop and sit down.

Kagami frowned. “Not right here you won’t. You leave all that armour all over the floor in here and I’ll … I’ll … ”

She trailed off and made a dismissive gesture with her right hand, turning her eyes back to the flickering screens of exterior camera views and scrolling green text.

“Is this your domain now, Kaga?”

Kagami’s frown turned into a scowl. “And why shouldn’t it be?”

“No sarcasm intended,” Elpida said. “If this reminds you of your life, and you’re good at it, then why should I object? I know we can rely on you in this role. I know you’re the most skilled, the most suitable, the most experienced, the best suited to act as our mission control, to interface with Pheiri, and to command the drones we’ve picked up. It’s a serious question. Is this your domain now?”

Kagami gave Elpida a sidelong look, then returned to her screens. “Sometimes.”

“Then I will take my armour off elsewhere.”

Elpida followed Kagami’s gaze, glancing at the multiple vantage points from high up on Pheiri’s hull, the dozen different views of the revenant crowd out in the tomb chamber. She gestured at the screens, about to ask a question — but then felt a spike of pain shoot from her elbow to her fingertips, lingering there like pins and needles.

She had tried to gesture with her missing right forearm. Phantom pain tingled in empty space. For a moment, Elpida was speechless, staring at the place her right hand should be.

“So,” Kagami drawled with a dry throat, without taking her eyes off the displays. “How is our lady of the hour?”

Elpida blinked hard. She needed a moment to recover. “ … you mean … Ooni, yes?”

Kagami shot her another sidelong look. “Who else?”

“You might have meant Ilyusha. She was out there too, went through most of the same. Worse, by some definitions. Had all her limbs removed and then re-seated. She can barely walk.”

“Bully for her,” Kagami muttered

“Or Iriko. Without Iriko in the lead, we would have lost Ooni, no doubt about it. Without Iriko’s self-control we would have nothing to bring back. She melted every scrap of armour and clothing off Ooni, but didn’t even touch the scabs on her wounds. I think we’ve all underestimated Iriko. Or maybe you meant Serin. She made a hell of a hard shot to get Kuro off Ooni, and she did it first time. I couldn’t have made that shot.”

“I could.”

Elpida raised her eyebrows.

Kagami cleared her throat. “With a drone.”

“Ah. I’m sure you could do, yes.” Kagami gave her a sharp glance, so Elpida added: “I wasn’t being sarcastic.”

“Right, of course you weren’t,” Kagami grumbled. “You wouldn’t know how. Did they engineer that out of you as well? Is it a side-effect of the height and the musculature? Or was your Telokopolis just like that? A whole culture with no such thing as sarcasm. I’d be climbing the walls by day three.”

“It’s a me thing, nothing else. Howl can be sarcastic. But lucky for you, Howl is asleep.”

“All tuckered out, is she?”

“Exhausted. Like you look.”

Kagami tutted. “I’m fine.”

Silence descended against the black static backdrop of the distant hurricane, broken close at hand by the gentle sounds of Pheiri’s body. Elpida waited, curious if Kagami would repeat her question, or move onto the one she actually wanted to ask, but Kagami just shifted uncomfortably in her seat. A small grimace crossed her face as she adjusted her left arm. The circuitry inside made her skin there look pale and thin, a sheath of flesh over metal.

“Ooni’s in the infirmary,” Elpida said. “She’ll be out of action for quite a while, even if we pour a whole cannister of blue down her throat. Which, before you say anything, we’re not going to do. She’s safe, she’s got medical attention, she’s going to be fine. She drifted in and out of consciousness for a while, but she’s sleeping now. I’m proud of her. We should all be proud of her. She pretty much broke what was left of the Death’s Heads, mostly by herself. Iriko and Serin just mopped up the remains. I have no idea how she kept going with all those wounds. Broken ribs, bad compound fracture on her left wrist, head wounds, maybe a skull fracture, concussion, cuts, abrasions, so on. And that burn on her right hand, it’s … ”

“Weird shit,” Kagami hissed.

“Mmhmm. You already know about it, then?”

“Drone cameras have good resolution. Good microphone pick-ups, too. I was with you practically the whole way back, listening to those two explain it.” Kagami paused, then twisted her lips as if she wanted to spit. “And what happened out there does not give me a lot of faith in the predictable stability of anything we try to do here, Commander.”

“We know what happened. Or at least I can make a good guess. Telokopolis helped Ooni, when she most needed it, via the network.”

Kagami twisted to face Elpida, suppressing a wince of pain. “We should not have to rely on ghosts!”

Elpida smiled; she couldn’t help it. “Ooni and Ilyusha would be dead without that help.”

“Tch!” Kagami tutted.

“Telokopolis is forever,” said Elpida. “She’s real and she’s out there, in the network. I’ve met her. We’re not alone. We are more than just undead orphans.”

Kagami turned back to the bank of screens. For a long moment she said nothing. Elpida let her stew. Then Kagami said, “That doesn’t mean we can rely on a network ghost for operational stability. We won’t always have a god in the machine looking out for us.”

“On the contrary, I think that’s exactly what she’s doing. She’s looking out for us, always—”

Kagami twisted to face Elpida again, quicker and harder this time, biting down on the pain of moving her left arm too much while wired into Pheiri. Her exhausted eyes were pulled wide, bloodshot whites gleaming sickly green in the backwash from the screens. “Fine, fine!” she hissed. “Even if I accept the ghost of your city-mother is always watching out for us — and for the record, I don’t, not yet — that doesn’t mean she’ll always come through. We cannot rely on any of this.”

“I know that.” Elpida took a deep breath. “I know Telokopolis is not infallible. In life she failed me, totally and completely. She failed me, and all my sisters.”

Kagami came up short. She shut her mouth, but couldn’t look away, as if hypnotised by Elpida’s eyes.

“But she still loves us,” Elpida added.

Kagami cleared her throat. “Right. Sure. Fine. But she can’t always help. Especially once this hurricane passes, yes? You said that yourself, it’s only the storm that’s letting her act with impunity.”

Elpida smiled again, a little sadder. “That’s correct. Once the storm is over, I believe she must return to hiding.”

“Well then,” Kagami hissed. “Well then.”

She turned back to her screens, but that didn’t last. A second later she glanced at Elpida again. “Besides, what about the force in the tomb that was slowing Howl down, hm? Or that second gravekeeper interface in the chamber where Ooni and Ilyusha ended up? Your network mommy doesn’t explain both of those, does she?”

Elpida nodded, this was a fair critique of her theories. “Perhaps those actions were unrelated. Not her doing.”

“Right.” Kagami nodded too, apparently more comfortable with this line reasoning. “From everything you’ve said the network is full of ghosts, memories, monsters. A veritable underworld right beneath our fingertips. Huh! I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more powers down there trying to influence events while this storm is covering their actions.”

Elpida shrugged. “Or perhaps it was her, but we just don’t know why she chose to do it. We can’t know her mind, we’re talking about Telokopolis, after all.”

“Don’t you dare,” Kaga hissed. Her voice dropped low and sharp. “Don’t you dare say ‘god works in mysterious ways’.”

Elpida paused. “Is that a set phrase? From your culture? From Luna?”

“Ha,” Kagami grunted. “Not Luna, no. Just more paleo bullshit. Don’t you dare, Commander. Don’t you dare start going all religious on me.”

“It’s not religion.” Elpida almost laughed. “Telokopolis is out there, she’s in the network, I met her, I—”

“And that doesn’t fucking matter,” Kagami hissed. Her exhausted eyes were stretched wide, her teeth clamped tight. “You can build religion on damn near anything. I’ve followed you, we’ve all followed you, because you’ve kept us alive and made the right choices. But if you start making choices based on faith, I swear I’ll shoot you in the back with a drone. I’ll do it myself.”

Elpida considered Kagami’s expression carefully, and decided that Kagami wasn’t joking. She controlled her earlier moment of near-laughter.

“It’s not faith,” Elpida said. “It’s knowledge. I’m not proposing to make decisions based on anything but that knowledge. I know Telokopolis won’t be able to extend any help beyond the network, once the hurricane ends. I know that. I’m not deluding myself otherwise.”

Kagami slowly relaxed again. She ran her right hand through her long black hair, glistening in the greenish light, and settled back into her seat. She sank slowly, looking more exhausted than when they’d started this conversation.

“Don’t make me distrust your motives, Commander,” she muttered.

Kagami’s profile stood stark against the shadows, picked out by the glow from her screens, eyes dark pits of exhaustion. Elpida wasn’t certain what had just happened. Was Kagami worried that Elpida’s judgement had become compromised by religious belief? If she didn’t believe that Elpida had met Telokopolis — the real Telokopolis, the memory-ghost of the city’s mind, a maiden in the machine — then she might be concerned that Elpida was going to base command decisions on a delusion.

Elpida made a decision. Trying to convince Kagami by argument would not work. Only action and results would matter.

“My motives are us,” Elpida said. “All of us. Telokopolis is how I express that, you know that. Telokopolis is forever.”

Kagami cleared her throat softly, then muttered an echo. “Telokopolis is forever.”

A long moment of silence settled over the cockpit. The screens cycled through several different exterior views, some from Kagami’s loitering drones, one from far back on Pheiri’s hull. Elpida caught sight of a familiar dark shape up there on the hull, tucked into a curl of Pheiri’s armour.

“Where’s the rest of we ‘orphaned undead’ then?” Kagami asked.

Elpida suppressed a smile. She knew that Kagami wanted to ask after Victoria, but her pride would not allow that. “Everyone’s either in the infirmary, the crew compartment, or the bunk room, as far as I know,” Elpida said. “Except Hafina, who’s still up on the hull. Serin’s out there too, right there.” She gestured at one of the screens, before the view cycled away. “Iriko is lurking far away enough not to spook our crowd out there, but she’s close by now.”

“Mm,” Kagami grunted. “I know that last part. She and Pheiri have been chattering. What about Serin’s mysterious duo?”

“Ahhh. Puk and Tati,” Elpida said. “They vanished after giving Serin directions, apparently. Haven’t seen any trace of them.”

“Sneaky cunts,” Kagami muttered.

Elpida waited to see if Kagami would narrow her request. When she didn’t, Elpida said, “You know where everyone else is, right? You’re plugged into Pheiri’s senses right now.”

Kagami gestured vaguely. “Pheiri doesn’t have internal cameras. He has … well, internal sensors of a kind, buried behind his walls, but they’re not … ” Kagami sighed and closed her eyes. “Not easy to translate into human-readable data.”

Elpida raised her eyebrows. She understood enough to know that was a big deal for Kagami to admit. “Really?”

“Really.” Kagami grumbled. “Base-8 bullshit. I could, but it would give me a headache powerful enough to pop my skull like a grapefruit. I’d rather not. Though it would be useful to know. Internal tracking and all that … ”

One of the many inactive screens in Kagami’s semi-circle of displays flickered to life. A fragment of glowing green text scrolled across the black.

>n

Elpida laughed. “Seems like Pheiri doesn’t want you in that part of his head anyway.”

Kagami tutted and rolled her eyes. “The feeling is mutual.”

Elpida relented. “As far as I know, most of the others have managed to go to sleep by now. Victoria was helping Melyn with tending to Ooni, didn’t want to let her do all that work alone. Amina and Ilyusha are together in the bunk room. Atyle was staring at Ooni, last I checked. Pira was in the infirmary too, for a while, but then she went off somewhere, I want to let her be alone, if that’s what she needs. Shilu was talking with Amina, oddly enough. The girl we picked up, Sanzhima, she’s still out cold. I’m not sure if she’s going to wake up any time soon. Eseld and Cyneswith are … actually, I have no idea where they are.”

Kagami twisted in her chair so she could glance back at Sky, who was still fast asleep. Then she turned back around and gave Elpida a silent look.

“I trust them,” Elpida said.

Kagami narrowed her eyes.

Elpida held up her left hand. “Howl vouches for Sky. They had a talk. I vouch for Eseld, for hopefully obvious reasons.”

“And Cyneswith?” Kagami hissed. “She talks like she’s in a fairytale.”

“I’m not sure about her yet. We’ll deal with that bridge soon enough. But not just yet. We have bigger things to deal with.”

Kagami stared for a moment, then eased back into a comfortable position in her chair. She let out a long, slow, rough breath. Her eyes flickered back and forth over the readouts and screens, soaking up the data. Elpida followed her for a moment, tracking the number of zombies out there in the tomb chamber, the relative position of active suits of powered armour, the number of weapons visibly displayed. She peered at the direct drone-feeds piped to Pheiri’s screens, from what was left of the reduced picket line. Victoria and Kagami and the others had already distributed what had been left of the transitory ‘larder’ of corpses, so there was no longer any reason to guard that side of the chamber. The last of the meat had been shared out among the needy; even the bottom-feeders were well-fed, for now.

Not armed though, not yet; Victoria had been planning to do that at the latest possible moment, to reduce the potential for conflict. Better that the bottom-feeders got guns right before they had to flee, rather than with time to spare to feel the pangs of hunger growing strong again.

Elpida took a deep breath. “We’re both stalling.”

“Mmhmm,” Kagami grunted.

“How long do we have?”

Kagami sat up straighter. The chair creaked beneath the weight of her bionic legs. She glanced at a blank screen; the black expanse flickered into life, filling with scrolling green text, numbers and equations and measurements that Elpida couldn’t read.

“Wind speeds are down to just below six hundred miles an hour,” Kagami muttered. “It’s not a steady drop, they sometimes spike back up and hang there for a while. Hailstones, I’m not sure about the size, Pheiri’s analytics are having trouble estimating from the sound alone, the acoustics of the tomb are fucked, for want of a more technical term. But they’re probably still too dense and numerous and fast for any shielding to hold up for long, not to mention the flying debris out there.”

“Kagami,” Elpida said. “How long?”

“Until total cessation? Six or seven hours? Maybe? I’m not clairvoyant.”

“Until Pheiri can leave the tomb. How long? I need your best estimate. Please, logician.”

“Logician Supreme, technically,” Kagami murmured, then fell silent. She sucked on her teeth, narrowed her eyes, and whispered under her breath. Another blank display flickered to life, this one showing a simplified version of Pheiri’s external layers, his shield projectors and generative capacity. Some of the shield diagrams flashed red, simulating future load stress.

“No, you fucking … overconfident … no … ” Kagami muttered, then drew a deeper breath. “Pheiri insists he can withstand anything up to three hundred mile an hour winds, but he can’t account for flying debris. His shields won’t hold up to an entire concrete tower block dropping on his head. My estimate? I think we can make it out, intact, undamaged, with shields up, as soon as the winds drop below about two hundred and thirty miles an hour. That’s our maximum upper limit.”

“Which gives us how long until we can leave?”

Kagami blinked hard. “Assuming that the storm continues to weaken at the current rate? Four hours. Maybe.”

“All right. Thank you, Kaga.” Elpida leaned back against her chair’s headrest, metal supports creaking amid the quiet hum of Pheiri’s screens. “Four hours, then.”

Kagami’s chair creaked too. She grunted with obscure pain, flexing the fingers of her left hand. “That doesn’t mean our hangers-on out there can follow. For those on foot, wind speeds will need to be significantly lower, not to mention what they’re going to be wading into. You do understand that, yes? Unless you’re planning to cram several dozen extra zombies in here with us.”

Elpida raised her head again and fixed Kagami with a slow, steady, silent look. Kagami’s eyes went wide. The colour drained from her face.

“Fuck no, Elpida,” Kagami hissed. “You are not inviting that entire crowd of zombies inside Pheiri. We can barely fit what we’ve picked up!” She gestured at Sky. “You can’t, I will refuse. And Pheiri will—”

Elpida held up her left hand. “Calm down. I’m not suggesting that. I did consider allowing a small handful to ride out on Pheiri’s hull, but … no.”

Kagami squinted. “That’s not like you. You’re suggesting that we … what, we go first, leave first?”

“Yes.”

Kagami shook her head slowly. “You’re going to arm that crowd out there, and then withdraw Pheiri’s overwatch early. They’ll turn on each other. They’ll eat each other. Getting half of them to stamp themselves with that moonrise symbol of Telokopolis doesn’t fill their bellies. Even you must be aware of that. You know all this already. You don’t need me to tell you. Do you?”

Elpida nodded. “It’s a risk. But if we tell them the truth, we warn them in advance, and we give them a timetable for their own exit, I’m hopeful that can keep any infighting to a minimum, at least until they have time to scatter.”

Kagami snorted. “This isn’t like you at all. You should be arguing for cramming them all in here, shoulder to shoulder. What am I missing?”

“The Necromancers.”

“Plural, eh? As if anybody could forget about that. I don’t follow. What the hell is your plan here?”

Elpida took a deep breath. “We have to get out before the protection of the hurricane is lifted. Perpetua — the Necromancer I met inside the network — she knows we’re here. Lykke knows we’re here as well, and she may have been compromised. If Perpetua was telling the truth, and there’s others coming for us, our best chance is to run.”

Kagami stared for a long time. The derisive gloss fell away from her expression. She swallowed, glanced at her bank of screens, then at nothing, at the shadows.

“I assumed you were going to argue that we should stand and fight,” she murmured.

“We can’t,” Elpida said. “We can stop one Necromancer, under perfect conditions, at close-quarters, with the element of surprise, your gravitic drones, and Howl’s network permissions. And even then we only contained Lykke because Shilu was there. A wild card element. One Necromancer, again? Maybe. If we’re lucky. Two? Three? Half a dozen? More? No. They’ll dismantle us.”

“They can’t freeze Pheiri,” Kagami said, but her voice seemed smaller than usual. “He’s not part of the ecosystem.”

“Exactly. Which is why we can run. Without Pheiri, we’d be stuck.”

Kagami raised her face, as if revived. “But this is what Pheiri was made for! Armed for! He’s quite literally armed for Necromancer, he— Pheiri!” Kagami tapped a blank screen. “Tell the Commander what I’m saying!”

The screen remained blank.

Elpida reached out and laid her left hand against one of Pheiri’s consoles, flat against a stretch of blank metal covered with scraps of flaking paint. She hoped that he could feel it, in his own way.

“Pheiri was built to fight the ancestors of these Necromancers. Probably, but we can’t even be sure of that. His armament is impressive. I have no doubt about his capabilities against almost anything else short of Central’s physical assets, or maybe a combat frame. But every single Necromancer has perfect physical control of their own body, and permissions over the entire local nanomachine network. If I can get to one of them, with Howl’s permissions, then I can disrupt them, sure, but not in the ways we would need to kill half a dozen of them, not reliably. I will not ask Pheiri to risk—”

“The particle beam emitter!” Kagami hissed. “His main gun! Elpida, what about—”

“Firing the PBE puts extreme strain on his systems. We can get one, maybe two shots, and then his reactor is overloaded and he’s limping. Maybe we can disrupt a Necromancer’s physical body, but we have no guarantee that will matter. We can’t fight this, Kaga. We can’t.”

Kagami opened her mouth again, then closed it, then swallowed.

“We run,” Elpida said. “With a little luck, we can draw the Necromancers away from the tomb, away from the revenants we’ve protected here, to give them the best chance of survival. Iriko won’t be able to follow, so she can stay behind too, hopefully stay beneath their notice. If we’re especially lucky, if the Necromancers are bound by some kind of location-based download for their bodies, or limited in the spaces they can traverse once instantiated, then we can outrun them. I’ve discussed this with Shilu, she thinks it might work. She says it depends on what’s happening inside the network, on who’s sending them after us.”

Kagami tried to laugh, a bitter little chuckle. “Do you have any idea what the landscape out there is going to be like, after the hurricane?”

“Waterlogged.”

Kagami scoffed. “Fitting. A superhuman level of understatement for a super soldier bull-dyke. You have no fucking idea. You’ve never seen a hurricane, have you? I have, plenty of times, from orbit. And none of us have ever seen the aftermath of what’s going on up there right now.” Kagami pointed at the ceiling, finger shaking. “The city was bad enough before. But now? Flooding, dozens of feet deep in places. Miles of rubble, fallen buildings, pulverized concrete. Entire dunes worth of debris.”

“Pheiri can manage that.” Elpida patted the metal beneath her left hand. “Can’t you, Pheiri?”

A screen flickered with the afterglow of dark green text.

>y

Kagami let out a low, humourless huff. “And what if you’re wrong? What if we can’t run? What if the Necromancers can just fucking teleport themselves through the network and reappear right on top of us? What if we reach the edge of the graveworm safe zone and they’re still coming?”

“We’re not going to flee toward the edge.”

Kagami stared. “You want to run … toward the graveworm?”

Elpida nodded. “That is correct.”

“Oh fuck.”

Elpida shrugged. “It’s a gamble. A game of chicken. That’s how Victoria described it, when I told her a little while ago. The worm-guard will respond to intrusions, to repel anything that tries to get too close to the graveworm’s body. So, who peels off first, us or the Necromancers?”

“Fuck me.” Kagami’s voice shook. “Elpida, this is not much of a fucking plan.”

“It’s the best we’ve got. It’s our best chance of survival, if Perpetua was telling the truth. If she was lying, then we give Pheiri’s engines a workout for no reason, and we’ll stop long before we get anywhere near the graveworm.”

Kagami looked away, lapsing into a long silence. Elpida let her chew that thought for a while, leaving an open space for any questions. But Kagami said nothing, frowning at her many screens, face washed by the green glow. She looked sick.

“And,” Elpida added eventually. “That’s why I want you to get some sleep. Reel in the rest of your drones, get them stowed, then go lie down for a few hours.”

Kagami hissed between clenched teeth. “Somebody needs to be here, Commander. Somebody needs to be right here.”

“Pheiri can handle overwatch by himself for a while. And he won’t be alone, I’ll stay.”

Kagami snorted. “You? You can’t interface with this.”

“Kagami, listen to me. When it’s time for us to run, I’m going to need you in that seat, and I’m going to need all your wits. We may need the drones, we may need additional fire control, I don’t know. You’re the only one who can do that, so I need you rested and sharp. Go get some sleep. That’s an order.”

Kagami sighed. “On Luna I could go thirty six, forty eight, seventy two hours of continuous attention for an operation. Just pump my tank with the right nutrient mix and I’d go all night, no trouble, not even a hint of exhaustion. Here? We don’t even have caffeine, let alone amphetamines. Fucking ridiculous. That’s next on the wish-list after vat-grown meat. Meth or coffee. Preferably both.”

“Sure. But right now, either you unplug and get yourself to sleep, or I’ll go call Victoria to carry you there.”

Kagami shot her a very dark look.

Elpida raised the stump of her right arm. “I’d do it myself, but I’m short on leverage.”

“And what about you, Commander? Don’t you need sleep, or is that something else they gene-jacked out of you?”

“I’ve had enough sleep for a while,” said Elpida. “Now get going.”

Kagami grumbled a lot, but she obeyed the order. One of her silvery grey gravitic drones nosed out from within the pockets of her armoured coat, floating through the air; it followed the wires from her wrist, vanishing down into the tangled machine-guts in the nose of the cockpit, to unplug the hard-line. The wires came free with a dull double-click sound. Kagami hissed and winced and swore softly as the shiny black cables slowly retracted back up inside her wrist, pulling at the flesh, reeled into the mass of her bionic modifications. She took a moment to recover, then used two more of her gravitic drones to lever her own body out of the seat.

“Sleep. At least three hours,” Elpida said to Kagami’s retreating back as she floated across the cockpit, toward the entrance to the spinal corridor.

Kagami flashed her a rude gesture, a Luna gesture. Elpida committed it to memory. Howl might like that.

After Kagami had departed, Elpida relocated herself to Kagami’s chair. The seat was still warm.

The semi-circle of screens flickered and hummed with dozens of exterior views, some in low-light enhancement, others with the glow of traditional night-vision, a few with infra-red or heat-map readouts. A handful showed true colour, bathed in the deep red of Pheiri’s external floodlights. Others displayed the raw data feed of Pheiri’s estimated readings of the hurricane, or complex echo-analysis algorithms with which he watched beyond the limit of the chamber. The data readouts were impenetrable, but the camera views were clear enough. Elpida spent a few moments watching the zombies down in the tomb-chamber, picking out the ones who had drawn or daubed or cut the symbol of Telokopolis into their clothes. A few had done worse with their skin directly; Elpida hadn’t wanted that, but it was better than nothing. She located Persephone among the crowd, still lingering near the front, close to Pheiri, along with her group of heavily-armed cyborgs. They wouldn’t need any help surviving what was coming, but others might.

Elpida weighed the possibility of speaking with Persephone directly. Giving her advance warning. Expecting reciprocation.

She stared at Persephone’s group, looking for even one of them who had adopted the symbol of Telokopolis, but she couldn’t find it anywhere.

Elpida sighed. She reached out and patted Pheiri again. “Just you and me for the next few hours, little brother. We’ll get through this. You can do it, I know you can.”

“Commander.”

Elpida looked over her shoulder. Sky was awake, eyes open, though her pose was otherwise the same, muscular arms folded across her chest, large frame sprawled in her seat.

“Sky. You don’t have to call me Commander,” Elpida said. “You’re new, I don’t really know you yet. You’re not one of us by default, not unless you want to be.”

“Hmmm.” Sky grunted. “Be one of you lot, or take my chances out there? No thanks, Commander.”

Elpida smiled. “Alright. How much of that did you overhear?”

“Most of it. I was asleep at first. Then it seemed … I dunno, more polite not to interrupt.”

Sky uncoiled from her sleeping position. She sat up and leaned forward, rolling her stocky shoulders and stretching her long legs. She cracked her neck by turning her head from side to side. Beneath the tomb-grown clothes, she was a powerfully built woman. Elpida felt a twinge of pain in her missing right forearm; if she had sparred with Sky right then, she might have lost, despite Sky’s lingering bruises.

“You have questions? Or suggestions?” said Elpida.

Sky took a deep breath. “There’s lots I don’t get yet. Graveworms, worm-guard, Necromancers. Actually no, that last one I get. That was Lykke, right? She was a Necromancer? That’s what you’re up against? You and this brain-box tank?”

“Correct.”

“And we’re about to have a whole platoon of those shape-shifting buggers up our collective cunts, when the storm ends. And we’re gonna run?”

“We’re gonna run like hell.”

“Through post-hurricane flood waters?” Sky shrugged. “Super-hurricane flood waters, whatever.”

Elpida nodded. “That we are. Pheiri can handle it. He’s big enough.”

Sky smiled in a way that Elpida recognised, and was surprised to see. She’d seen it before, always on experienced Legionaries, never on raw recruits, never on her sisters. That was an old-timer look, a lifer’s look, a dirty little grin that knew better, and had been taught via pain.

“With all due respect, Commander,” Sky said slowly, “I don’t think we’re gonna make it a hundred fucking yards, let alone all the way for a game of chicken with those giant robots out there. What then? What if we’re beached? What’s the plan?”

Elpida felt a grin take her; she didn’t need Howl for this. It came without warning, and it made Sky blink.

“What do you think we’ll do?” she asked.

Sky almost grinned as well. “Turn and fight, huh?”

Elpida nodded. She knew the best chances for survival, she knew fighting Necromancers in such numbers was hopeless. But her experiences in the network, her time with Lykke, and the confrontation with Perpetua, it had all left her needing a resolution, one she couldn’t get by merely forcing Necromancers to retreat. She would not risk Pheiri and her comrades, she would not risk Telokopolis, not for petty revenge. She would run, and try her best to get away.

But if she couldn’t run? If she could prove it was possible to take out a Necromancer, with Pheiri’s firepower and a little network trickery from Howl?

“Correct,” Elpida said. “In that case, we turn and fight.”

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Sure thing, Commander. But can you win?

Well then! Welcome to arc 16, dear readers! Looks like our zombie girls are in for a little breather, a much-needed few hours of rest – but not for long, because that hurricane is going away, and then it’s time to run. I think I mentioned this last chapter, but arc 16 is gonna be a longer one, and behind the scenes it’s already shaping up to match those expectations. As for POVs, we’ll probably be jumping back and forth a bit, but not as much as prior to arc 14. Don’t want to let things get fragmented again.

Also, I’ve got more art from over on the discord! This week we have Mobile Artillery Victoria, (by cubey!) featuring Vicky suited up and ready to rock, with the symbol of Telokopolis on her armour and a religious experience in her hands. We also have a little extra (possibly from the making of this picture???) Silly Vicky, (also by cubey!) It’s wonderful to see so much fanart of the characters, thank you so much!

Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I’m plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!

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!

And as always, thank you! Thank you for being here and reading my little story; I couldn’t do this without all of you, the audience! Elpida would have nobody to watch her, only the silent echoes of a dead world. Are we the real Necromancers, meddling with these zombies? Perhaps not, that metaphor is too tangled. Anyway, until next chapter! Seeya then!