Content Warnings

Bullet wounds
Death

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Elpida had made sure that every member of the cadre was trained in close-quarters combat — unarmed or otherwise. Even the few who had no natural aptitude, like Bug, or Shade. At thirteen years old she’d spent six painstaking months personally coaching Shade every day, both of them black and blue all over, sleeping together in each others’ scent, until Shade could last five minutes against Elpida herself. The cadre hardly needed help to work together — they had proven that with their first group kill at six years old. But one-on-one was different. Elpida knew that every vat-born pilot must be able to match a Legion soldier on the sparring floor mat.

For respect, Old Lady Nunnus had explained once. The Legionaries will look down on you, or worse. But you rely on their support, and we all rely on what you girls are going to do. Don’t let them see you as science experiments. Go to the sparring chambers, take the duels. Even if you all lose, every time, enter in the spirit of honest competition. Let them see that you’re just people.

Most of the cadre’s real combat time was spent cradled inside pilot capsules, slotted into the sockets of their combat frames, linked to the organic constructs through the mind-machine interface. Close-quarters training was a kind of vanity; bare knuckles meant nothing against Silico. But Elpida wanted every one of her clade-sisters to feel comfortable holding a monoedge sword, through the gauntlets of a hardshell. Just in case.

Elpida did not have a monoedge sword, or a fighting knife, or even a big stick. She had no hardshell. She had naked skin and two fists.

The four-armed cannibal girl cartwheeled toward Elpida, howling bloody laughter from a gore-streaked mouth; her movements made no sense — no torso, nothing below her clavicle except a thick knot of spongy flesh to anchor her extra pair of arms. Those arms were five feet long, heavily muscled, bristling with white fur. She put all her weight on one arm and lifted the other into the air, then slammed it down toward Elpida’s skull, piercing the air with claw-tipped fingers.

Elpida hopped backward on the balls of her feet.

Training told her that a dodge would create an opening; a lunge like that should leave her opponent overbalanced, open to a grapple, or a punch to the solar plexus, or a kick to the groin.

But the cannibal’s lower arm did not possess a shoulder to anchor a grapple. She had no solar plexus: no lungs, no diaphragm, no phrenic nerve. And no groin. Elpida hesitated. The half-eaten corpse on the floor of the atrium was a bloody red testament to the power of the cannibal’s arms and claws, the damage she could inflict. Elpida knew she couldn’t just tackle the girl and bounce her head off the floor until she gave up; she’d get her face clawed off. This was more like fighting a Silico construct than a human being — but even the most inhuman Silico creatures still required a circulatory system of some kind. Even the ones that ran off reactors still had to breathe, or take in water.

Hesitation saved Elpida’s life.

The four-armed cannibal broke all the rules of human locomotion. She did not overbalance with the missed strike, but followed through: she slammed that hand into the floor to take her weight, then span the other heavy-set lower arm around in a horizontal swipe, aiming to break Elpida’s ribs and pierce her lungs. Elpida ducked back, light-footed — but she almost slammed into the others behind her.

“You don’t need all that meat, freshie!” the cannibal said. “Gimme!”

The atrium was large enough for Elpida to dodge around forever. The six silver-grey columns might provide some cover, give her some kind of opening. But the four-armed cannibal was too fast. Elpida was backed against the others, backed against the entrance. She would have to dive to the side, and then the others would be exposed. Ilyusha was still slumped against the pillar where the cannibal had thrown her, dazed or concussed. The others had not turned and ran, too shocked or stunned.

Greasy light caught the cannibal’s rose-blonde hair, made it dance as she rolled forward, bouncing, loping, laughing.

Elpida filled her lungs to shout a retreat. She would have to throw herself at the cannibal. She might be able to pin one set of claws, buy time for Ilyusha to get up.

And then Pira stepped out from behind the nearest column.

Flame-red hair and cold blue eyes, like sunset in an empty sky. Pira had lost the grey jumpsuit and dressed for combat: a flak jacket with armour plates under the fabric, a protective vest, a tight black under-layer, webbing, and lots of pouches; plain trousers, heavy boots, fingerless gloves, and a visored helmet strapped to her belt. All in black and grey, camouflage for that city-corpse outside. She must have entered the atrium from one of the rear openings and stepped behind a pillar to close the distance. Elpida was impressed.

Pira held a firearm in both hands, a snarl of black metal tucked tight to her shoulder and pressed to her cheek.

She took one step into the open, levelled the submachine gun at the cannibal, and squeezed the trigger.

A storm of bullets flung the cannibal girl sideways, jerking her with impacts of lead in flesh. Pira held the trigger down. The sound was deafening in the atrium. One of the others behind Elpida screamed. Little puffs of blood filled the air as the cannibal staggered under the hail of gunshots.

But she didn’t fall. Reeling, staggering, her dirty cloak streaming with blood, she endured the bullets until Pira’s gun went click. A dripping red nightmare stood, full of bullets but unbroken, grinning with exhilaration.

“Haaaaaa!” she howled at Pira, drooling blood. “You’re fast! You get the—”

Pira ejected the spent magazine. It clattered to the floor. Expert hands plucked another from her webbing, slammed it into the gun, cocked the charging handle, and squeezed the trigger again.

This time Pira walked forward as she unloaded the gun into the cannibal. Her eyes showed no emotion, only focus. The cannibal jerked and twitched, then went down in a tangle of bleeding limbs.

Pira’s gun went click a second time.

The cannibal was still alive. She gurgled, heaving for wet and ruined breath — but how? She had no lungs. Her voice was pulped and broken, but she still grinned.

“No— Cinney— hey? Hey? You know— Cinney?”

Pira ignored her, reloaded the gun again, and emptied the entire magazine into the girl’s face. Elpida had to look away from that. The cannibal did not speak again, red and steaming.

Pira ejected the spent magazine and reloaded the gun a fourth time.

The others were in shock, panting or silent. Ilyusha was coming round, struggling to sit up, shaking her head. Somebody was sobbing hard — Amina, if Elpida had to guess. But she dared not look back to check.

In that bloody aftermath, Elpida made a split-second decision: she stepped toward Pira.

“Hey,” she said, “hey, thank you. Pira, thank you.”

Loaded and cocked, the gun came up.

But then Elpida was close enough to reach out and touch the weapon, close enough to catch those empty blue eyes. Pira met her gaze and halted the arc of the gun, flicked the safety on, and stepped back.

“Thank you,” Elpida repeated. “Pira, thank you.”

Pira looked her up and down, then stepped away to retrieve her spent magazines, jamming them back into her pouches and webbing. Elpida noted she was carrying more than one weapon: Pira had a sidearm at her hip and a long combat knife strapped to one thigh, as well as several more lumpy bulges inside her flak jacket. A gas mask poked from a pocket. A cannister of faintly glowing blue peeked out from inside her flak jacket, the same colour as the mould-and-radiation blue from back in the resurrection chamber.

“Excuse me,” Vicky said from the rear of the atrium, voice shaking with adrenaline, tightly controlled. “But I think I speak for all of us when I say what the fuck was any of that? What the fuck was she? What the fuck.”

Kagami spoke up too, sagging from Vicky’s arm, slick with cold sweat. “I have a better question. Where did you get those guns?”

“Oh yeah,” Vicky muttered. “I like that question too.”

Atyle was entranced by the pair of corpses. Her peat-green bionic eye clicked and whirred silently inside the socket. Amina was sobbing, wet and terrified, as Elpida had expected. But the younger girl tore her eyes away from the ruined meat on the floor and staggered over to Ilyusha instead. Shaking, hesitant, still crying, she sank to her knees and tried to help the dazed, stunned cyborg to sit up straight.

Pira didn’t answer. She was refilling one of the magazines from a pouch of loose bullets in her flak jacket, fingers flicking fast over the rounds. Elpida closed the distance between them and lowered her voice.

“Thank you, I mean it. I don’t think I could have fought her off. She wasn’t Silico, I can see that. She was a human being. No matter how altered, that was a human being. What was she?”

Pira answered without looking up. “One of us.”

“Us. What does that mean? Pira, please. You understand what’s going on here, I don’t. How did you get here so quickly, get so far ahead, get all that gear?”

“I ran.”

“But you knew where to go. So did the others from the coffins, the ones who left before we woke up. You all took the exact same route, you’ve been here before.”

“Each tomb always has the same layout. You learn it. Or not.”

Vicky raised her voice. She had stepped closer, dragging Kagami with her. “Why did you shoot that girl in the face? You’d already won, she was dying, she … Why’d you do that?”

Elpida did not like the glassy look in Vicky’s eyes, or the way she was panting. She raised a placating hand toward Vicky, and said, “She would have killed us. I know it’s hard, she was a human being, but she was going to kill us.”

Kagami snorted. “Human being! Illegal gene-mod quaddie, more like. Meat-fueled clockwork.”

“Human being,” Elpida repeated, harder. “That’s not Silico. That was a person. And it’s a shame she had to die.”

“She’s not dead,” said Pira.

Everyone stared at the red-haired girl, all except Ilyusha and Atyle. Ilyusha was too busy rubbing her own head.

“Yes,” Atyle said slowly, enraptured by the corpse on the floor. “The artifices of creation will not allow it. They cling to the meat.”

Vicky gritted her teeth. “She looks pretty fucking dead to me.”

Pira spoke, cold and empty as she loaded bullets into a magazine. “Wounds like that? No. She’ll be up again in a week on ambient alone. Quicker if she’s got friends nearby to feed her. And she probably has.”

Elpida could take no refuge in ignorance. Her mind worked too well for that. She soaked up each scrap of information, already three paces ahead, accepting and assimilating. There were others like them; resurrection was not one-time; Pira and probably Ilyusha had done this before; the dead cannibal on the floor was real functioning flesh.

“What about the other girl?” Vicky asked. “The one she was — eating?”

“Dead,” Pira said. “Brain’s gone. Too much biomass lost.”

Elpida had to know. “We saw people out in the streets, moving toward this structure. Do you mean she was the first of them?”

Pira finally looked up. “From which direction?”

Elpida’s sense of direction was perfect out in the green, but there was no sun in the smog-suffocated sky, only a vague red patch which grew more indistinct when she looked at it directly. The atrium skylight was useless, the dead black sky told her nothing. Cardinal directions lacked meaning. Instead she pointed with a hand, indicating one side of the atrium wall. “That way.”

Pira thought for a moment, then finished loading her magazine and slipped it into her webbing. “We were too slow to wake. Carrion eaters are already here.”

“What about the other three?” Elpida nodded at the other corpse on the floor, the girl the cannibal had been eating. “Was she one of them?”

Pira was staring at the wall. “Maybe. Other two are already gone. Up first. Probably sabotaged our caskets so they could get a head start, give any early risers a slow-moving meal. You don’t want to run into them.”

Pira turned away, heading for the rear of the atrium without another word. Elpida realised she was leaving.

“Hey! Hey, you wait.” Elpida darted around her side, threatening to block her way out. “You’re the only one who understands what’s going on. You wanna leave by yourself, shoot me first.”

Kagami sighed. “Please don’t.”

Pira stared back at Elpida. “We’re probably all dead already. Too slow to wake.”

Behind them, Ilyusha had finally gotten back to her augmented, claw-like feet. She was wincing hard with one side of her face, still in pain. Amina helped her to stand. The younger, pudgy girl seemed terrified of touching Ilyusha’s black-and-red bionic replacements, but she held her up anyway. Amina eyed that thick bionic tail, flinching every time it moved. Ilyusha staggered over to the shattered corpse of the cannibal. Amina really didn’t want to get anywhere near that altered human, but Ilyusha dragged her. When they were close enough, Ilyusha spat on the body.

Amina allowed Ilyusha to stand unsupported, then surprised everybody by kneeling next to the bullet-riddled corpse and reaching out to gently close what remained of one eyelid.

“Who was Cinney?” Amina asked in a wavering voice. “She was asking for ‘Cinney’.”

Pira shrugged. “A lost friend. Some come looking for that every time a tomb opens. Maybe the girl she was eating. Some get like that.”

Elpida’s mind leapt to keep up. Even her usual breakneck pace of information assimilation was struggling. Pira’s ice-cold eyes had thawed by a single degree, but she was looking at the rear exit from the atrium, still thinking of leaving.

“That woman had no lungs,” Vicky was saying. “No heart. No stomach. Why was she eating with no stomach? I don’t understand. I don’t. I just don’t.”

“I know,” Elpida said. “Vicky, don’t think about it. Not yet.”

Pira muttered: “Good advice.”

Ilyusha rolled her neck, cracking joints, still fuzzy-eyed. “Saw a grave worm.”

“Yes,” Pira said. “Dormant stage. Post-partum. Ignore it.”

“We’re fresh,” Ilyusha said. Then she laughed that terrible lost laughter, teetering on the edge of her own sanity.

Amina shuddered at the laughter, stood up from the corpse of the cannibal girl, and crossed to the bloody ruin of her victim. That body had no eyes to close. Amina worried at the corner of her jumpsuit cuff with her teeth, then pulled off a long strip of grey and laid it over the corpse’s face. Perhaps Elpida had underestimated the terrified younger girl. Few would show that initiative alone. Amina closed her eyes and began to mutter a prayer over the body. Atyle sighed with derision and turned away from the grave spectacle.

Elpida wet her lips, surprised to find her mouth had gone dry. Her brain was overheating. “Grave worm. Is that a technical term? What was that thing? I thought it was a mountain at first. And there’s no green, which is impossible—”

Pira swung her gun up to cover Elpida and the others, flicking the safety off and stepping back.

“Whoa, whoa, fuck!” Vicky shouted.

Kagami joined in, bionic feet slipping on the floor as she tried to get her weight under her: “Point that thing elsewhere!”

Ilyusha pushed herself upright, flexing the naked red claws on one hand, showing Pira her teeth. Her tail lashed the air, stinger smeared with the cannibal’s blood. Amina froze, still down on her knees, the only one outside the potential firing arc. Atyle didn’t seem to care, watching the gun as if she was not looking down the barrel.

Elpida froze, arms wide, palms open; she locked her gaze on Pira’s centre of gravity. Pira did not have her finger on the trigger. Good discipline.

Pira backed away another step. Her eyes had frozen over. “I’m gone. Would say good luck, but you’re all—”

“Coward,” Atyle said. She spoke from the diaphragm, a room-filling voice.

Elpida took the opening: she strode forward three paces, eyes glued to Pira’s, but she kept that trigger finger in her peripheral vision. Pira pointed the gun at Elpida’s chest.

“Stop,” Pira said. “You’re dead already.”

But Elpida was taller, her stride longer, her reach greater. As Pira tried to back up again, Elpida reached out and grabbed the barrel of the gun.

Pira’s finger slipped onto the trigger. Elpida held the barrel level with her chest and made no attempt to move it away.

“Let go,” Pira said.

Elpida knew the red-haired young woman was not going to pull that trigger. She’d seen this kind of behaviour hundreds of times before, in the days when the cadre had all been going through puberty together, though never with a loaded solid-slug firearm. Pira was defensive and avoidant, not switched on for murdering the rest of them. And she’d just intervened to save their lives.

“I need an explanation,” Elpida said. “You know what’s going on. Explain, or shoot me. You’re not getting out of this room any other way.”

Pira’s mouth twitched with irritation. “We’re all back from the dead. Welcome to the aftermath. That’s it. I start to explain more and we all sit here for the next three hours while you ask questions. Then we all end up like her.” She jerked her head toward the half-eaten corpse on the floor, the cannibal’s victim. Elpida did not fall for the trick, did not look.

“We’re back from the dead, yes.” Elpida was surprised by the tremor in her voice. “We’ve been resurrected. What are we supposed to do? What does that mean?”

“Nothing. It means nothing. We mean nothing. Move or die.”

“You’ll have to shoot me.” Elpida pressed the barrel against her breastbone. It was not courage.

Pira scowled. The ice over her expression shattered. “You’re the only one who knows if that means anything.”

Elpida blinked. “What?”

“What deal did you make?”

“Deal? With who?”

Atyle spoke up again. “One warrior accepts not her death. The other speaks in riddles. Truly we are favoured by the gods with this pair. We will prevail against jesters and clowns alike.”

Kagami muttered in agreement. “Pair of fucking morons. Badly written NPCs.”

Vicky spoke up too. “Hey, actually, I agree with Elpida. We need to know what this all is. We’re back from the dead, that’s not … that’s not something I can take in stride. Gimme something to work with here. Pira, right? Please. Come on.”

Pira dropped her voice to a whisper for Elpida alone: “I’m not staying to die. You’ve got a chance if you’re quick. Come with me if you can keep up.” She glanced at Ilyusha. “Her too, maybe. She’s obviously been around before.”

“Resurrected before, okay. But she’s not all there. PTSD maybe.”

“Most are.”

Elpida raised her voice. The others needed to hear. “My answer is the same as back in the resurrection chamber. I’m not leaving anybody behind. At least tell me where you got those weapons. Give us a fighting chance.”

Pira’s expression iced over again, shuttered and locked. Her finger slid off the trigger and flicked on the safety. Elpida let go of the gun. Pira lowered the barrel and took a slow step backward. She pointed behind one pillar without taking her hands off the weapon.

“There’s a service lift into the core of the tomb. Armoury, labs, the gravekeeper. If you want a fighting chance, follow me and leave the others behind. If you want the illusion of security, go to the armoury.”

“Gravekeeper,” said Vicky. “Oh I really wanna meet something here called a ‘gravekeeper’. Cool.”

Kagami snorted. “Fancy fictional word for a local AI node, probably.” She spoke upward, to the glass ceiling and the greasy light. “Poor writing, father. Pedestrian! I see through all your pretentious nonsense. Just call it a mind or a construct, drop the shitty poetry.”

Pira ignored that. She spoke to Elpida. “If you want answers, go to the labs and talk to the gravekeeper. But you won’t like the answers. You’ll sit there trying to deal with it, and then you’ll die. Again.” She shook her head. “Every fool has to do this once.”

Elpida nodded. “Thank you, Pira. You’re sure you won’t come with us? There’s always better safety in numbers. Lone wolves die where the pack survives.”

Kagami was talking to the air, or to herself. “Okay, alright, find this computer core and see what answer father wants me to hear, then this absurd and vile sim can end.”

“Guns!” Ilyusha barked, then laughed a nasty little cackle. Amina flinched at the sound.

Vicky agreed. “Yeah, armoury sounds radical. Let’s do that.”

“Agreed,” said Elpida. “Pira, how long do we have until this place is overrun?”

Pira shrugged. “Two, maybe three hours.”

Atyle strode into Elpida’s field of vision and peered down at the cannibal’s corpse with her bionic eye. She poked the body with a naked foot, uncaring of the blood. “This one was inside already. Your timing is poor.”

“Four arms,” said Pira. “Good at climbing. There’s always holes.”

Elpida pressed. “What options do we have? Is a breakout the only way?”

A sharp sigh from Pira. “It’s not impossible to hide, but I wouldn’t recommend it. They’ll be crawling all over the tomb, stripping it for everything, especially after a grave worm.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“Girls like us. The reluctant dead. Ones who’ve been up longer. Some looking for old friends.” Pira took another two steps back. “I’m gone.”

“Hey, hey,” Elpida said, hands out, palms up. “Share a weapon. If we run into another like her, I need a weapon.”

“The service lift is only fifty feet away. Go to the armoury.” Pira’s eyes flicked to Ilyusha. “You’ve been around before. You know these people are dead. Last chance. You coming?”

Ilyusha’s claws clicked on the metal floor. She placed one taloned foot on the thigh of the bullet-riddled cannibal, leaned forward, and spat at Pira’s feet.

“Fuck you, reptile!”

Elpida suppressed a silent sigh of relief.

Pira said nothing. She backed away until she reached the arch of the corridor, then turned and set off at a jog, submachine gun cradled to her chest.

“Armoury,” Elpida said. “Let’s move.”

Kagami snorted. “First thing anybody has said which made any sense.”

“Yeah,” Vicky agreed. “Let’s go get some fucking guns.”

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Impossible cannibals, taciturn zombies, mysterious gravekeepers. Yeah, I’d want a firearm too. Maybe Elpida can learn more, down in the depths of the tomb.

Still on a Thursday update schedule! Still longer chapters than expected! Still enjoying this opening!

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Thank you for reading; I am enjoying this immensely and I hope you are as well. More very soon.

Content Warnings

Cannibalism

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Tracking Pira was easy; Elpida followed the trail of dried-out slime.

The corridors beyond the resurrection chamber were made of uniform, seamless, silver-grey metal. Cold, windowless, and impossibly clean, without a single particle of dust. Flakes of dried slime stood out on the metal floor, scraps of crumbly translucent biomass caught in searing white illumination, from lights recessed behind thick plastic in the ceiling. Pira must have shed the flakes as the slime had dried on her skin, but the trail was too thick for just one person. The three missing revenants, the absent three who had woken first and left behind their empty coffins, must have all taken the exact same route.

Landmarks dotted the trail: a leaf-shower of flakes, a crescent of delicate powder, a greasy hand-print on the wall. Pira must have paused to drag on that grey jumpsuit, sloughing off snake-skin quantities of dry slime. Hair had been shaken out, dusting the metal with the remains of the thin, sticky fluid. A stumble, a smear down one wall, proof that somebody had struggled to keep their feet.

Elpida and her coffin-mates added their own afterbirth moltings as they went.

Elpida took point. She kept her footsteps light and peeked around each curving corner. If they ran into a Silico construct there was nowhere to hide; their only option was retreat, then diverge from the breadcrumb trail of flakes, into one of the slender, branching paths which radiated outward from each stretch of corridor.

She hated that idea. It was good tactics but they had neither the equipment nor the cohesion to succeed. The main arterial corridors were wide enough for six abreast — wide enough for six young women to flee without tripping over each other. The side passages were so narrow that a single soldier in a greensuit hardshell could hold off a dozen assailants. But Elpida had no greensuit, no hardshell, and no weapon. She wasn’t confident that she could hold anything at the mouth of a passage, if the others had to run. A Silico murder-machine would go right through her, training and gene-engineering and all.

And Elpida did not want to leave that trail of skin-shed flakes. Pira obviously knew where she was going.

Stealth was the only viable strategy. But the others were terrible at it.

Ilyusha — the heavily augmented girl teetering on the edge of mania — had fallen in behind Elpida, happy to let her lead. Her black-and-red bionic hands were smeared with gore and her face was sticky from slurping up that blue gunk, but she slipped in behind Elpida without a word. She stayed quiet, moved quickly and cleanly, and covered Elpida’s rear every time they passed the mouth of a side-corridor. Her spike-tipped tail cut the air in silence. She didn’t need hand signals or whispered commands. She watched Elpida’s body language with those fire-lit grey eyes, flame behind slate. She didn’t seem to care about her own semi-nudity; she had accepted one of the grey jumpsuits, then tied the uncomfortable polyester around her waist, like a skirt of dead skin.

But her clawed feet clicked on the metal floor with every step. After an initial moment of frustration, Elpida realised that Ilyusha couldn’t help it.

Kagami’s augmetic footsteps were softer, cushioned by proper bio-plastic soles, but she still couldn’t walk by herself. Vicky had to half-carry her, Kagami’s delicate and doll-like physique anchored over one shoulder. Kagami kept smothering gasps of pain, panting with the effort of moving her legs, her long black hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. Vicky did her best to move quietly, but she struggled with the burden. Kagami had rejected a jumpsuit as they had left the resurrection chamber: “How am I supposed to get that on with these fucking things attached to me?” Victoria had accepted a jumpsuit, hesitated, then stepped into it and zipped it up.

Elpida made a private plan: if they had to run, she would scoop up Kagami herself, over her shoulder, dignity be damned.

Amina stayed silent. In terror she understood stealth. She had accepted a grey jumpsuit too, wriggling inside it with desperate relief, clutching herself as she covered her nudity. She crinkled as she moved.

Atyle refused to stay quiet. She strode, head high, dark skin glistening with sweat. She had rejected a jumpsuit with a snort. Every time Elpida looked back, Atyle wasn’t even paying attention, studying the walls, or the other girls, or her own hands through her bionic eye. Whenever they stopped to check a corner, she folded her arms and sighed.

Elpida hadn’t bothered with a jumpsuit either. Range of motion was more important than tissue-thin protection. And she didn’t feel cold.

The trail of slime-flakes led to a downward ramp. The ramp disgorged Elpida and the others onto an identical floor of arterial corridors and branching capillaries. This process repeated six more times, following the thinning trail of flakes, going down.

Rooms began to bud off between the narrow branch-corridors. Elpida paused at the first few, to peer in through the long windows in the wall, but the contents were incomprehensible.

One room held gigantic tanks of soupy grey slop, like watered-down industrial run-off. Another was filled with rows of those same black glass blocks from the resurrection chamber — but these ones were still alive, blinking and flickering with electric life. Yet another room contained a mat of living flesh the size of a sparring field, skin stretched over pulsing meat. Others held cubes of grey metal suspended in a lattice, or vats of cold, still, copper-coloured cream, or upright tubes full of green fluid, hanging from the ceiling.

Each room had an autodoor for access. They did not open at Elpida’s approach. Some of the rooms also contained human-scale control panels, similar to the one back in the resurrection chamber, studded with switches and buttons and dials. The doors and controls did not match the surroundings.

A Silico hive — colonised by human beings? Elpida couldn’t figure this out. This space was not meant for human habitation, or even human presence. Human hands had intruded on the design of some other mind.

After six ramps they hit a security checkpoint.

The final ramp spat them out in front of a collection of metal detector arches, body-scanner booths, and computer screens. All of it was dead and dark, just as impossibly clean as the smooth corridors behind them, but this space was recognisably human. The floor turned to tiles, the walls had joints and seams, and little orange cones stood on the far side of the checkpoint, to indicate where people should queue.

The intermittent trail of flakes led through this fossilised checkpoint and out the other side. On the left there was a grey desk with a slender computer screen attached to a core underneath, long dead. On the right was a waiting area, with a metal table and a few chairs bolted to the floor.

And a window. Floor to ceiling, fifteen feet long.

Elpida lost control of the others. She lost control of herself. They slumped and stumbled through that dead checkpoint, entranced by that window. She retained just enough sense to notice that Ilyusha alone was not shocked, though the heavily augmented girl still hurried to look, bounding forward and pressing her face to the glass.

All her life, Elpida had known only one possible landscape. Look out of any window in the exterior wall of Telokopolis — past the blasted, flat, burned-clean scar of the plateau; past the automatic air-defence guns; past the bunkers full of Legion sentries and rookies doing their first tours outside; past the supplementary walls, the forcefields, the ditches, the mines, the alarms, the fire-breaks of concrete and steel; past the outer ring of fortification with its pockmarks and wounds forever being refilled and patched; past the hanging miasma testing the city’s defences with tendrils of spore and rot; and past the inevitable Legion teams stomping along in hardshells, cradling flame-throwers, burning back the ragged edge of plant life — and you would see the green.

An endless rustling sea of jungle, overgrowth climbing itself in waves of expansion, dying back in ebbs of vegetable decay. From horizon to horizon, hundreds of feet deep from canopy to ground, licking the edge of the plateau, the green stood always ready to engulf the walls of the city. Giant fern-fronds, bristling needle-trunks, strangling vines, carnivorous traps. The green was catalogued, recorded, laid down in a million doctoral theses, explored in more fiction than anybody had time to consume.

Beyond Telokopolis, the green was the world, and the world was green.

Elpida and her vat-grown cadre had been bred to walk those depths, the secret dark beneath the canopy, the domain of Silico, of artificial life.

Beyond the window there was no such colour as green, only black and grey.

The corpse of a city filled the world.

Elpida assumed it was a city — structures were spread out to the horizon, like a tier of Telokopolis unrolled and laid flat on the ground. Skeletal survivals like fleshless corpses, empty shells like dead turtles, collapsed ruins like stripped cadavers. Choked with ash, caked in smears of black, damp with mould. The buildings were all shapes and sizes, from the great monuments of thick-bottomed towers to the low sinking barrows of tenements, webbed by the necrotic circulatory system of roads and railways.

The corpse was riddled with carrion eaters, but Elpida wasn’t sure if they were alive; bulb-shaped creatures clung to the exterior of some of the tallest ruins, reddish-brown, five-legged, perfectly still, each one as large as a combat frame.

A flat line of segmented grey cut across the horizon, far away, taller than any building. It took Elpida a moment to realise that she was looking at a mountain range. She’d never seen a naked mountain, unclothed in green, outside of a few ancient pictures.

The sky was black, solid, and still. A patch of dim red may have indicated the location of the sun, or might have been Elpida’s imagination.

A city-sea of rot. Elpida’s mind groped for meaning, found none, and fell back on training. She dragged her gaze downward. From their vantage point she could see the building they were inside — a stepped pyramid of black metal. It was a long way to the ground. The lower steps of the pyramid were studded with gun emplacements, shiny and black, much cleaner than anything else beyond the window, but still dirty with ash. The base of the structure was a jumble of funnels and walls and bridges of black metal, leading out onto a wide ring of open ground. Other city-buildings had been swept back in a tangle of rubble.

Elpida recognised the purpose: a perfect breakout position, paired with the cleared space of a killing field.

Kagami was first to recover her voice. It shook. “I am not supposed to be down here. I always knew you people would blow yourselves up in the end.”

Vicky tore her eyes from the black ruin. She shot a tight frown at the girl she was still supporting. “What do you mean, you people?”

“Dirtside throwbacks. Breeders. C-zombies. All of you gagging to nuke each other, whenever one of you is ever so slightly less than perfectly devoted to the fucking beast you all choke on.”

Vicky spoke with quivering calm. “I don’t think nuclear weapons grew those things on the skyscrapers. Do you?”

“Demons,” Atyle whispered, but she didn’t seem upset.

Kagami looked like she’d eaten a lemon. Vicky was too calm. Elpida knew they were both compensating for fear, and knew it could come to blows very quickly. She had no doubt who would win; Kagami couldn’t even walk unaided.

“Hey, no.” She made her voice sharp with command. “We’re all shocked, we’re all reeling. Do not turn on each other. Stop, now.”

Vicky swallowed and looked away. Kagami snorted, then attempted once again to stand on her own. Vicky let her go. Kagami wobbled on her augmetic legs, wincing with every step, making a difficult journey toward the office desk opposite the window. Her eyes were glued to the dead computer screen.

“Hey,” Elpida said. She reached out as Kagami jerked past. “Sit down if you need.”

Kagami ignored her and staggered over to the metal desk. She had to grab the edge to steady herself. She jabbed at the buttons on the monitor but the machine didn’t wake. She half-fell into the metal chair and reached below the desk, pulling at the side-panels on the computer core, then yanking out bits of wire and frowning at them.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” she said. “None of this is real. None of you are real. This is all a sick joke. Let me out! Pull me out of this!”

The others were faring worse. Atyle’s mask of satisfied contempt had slipped. She stood with her arms crossed, face composed in blankness, peat-green bionic eye flickering over the ruined landscape. Amina chose not to look at all: she had squeezed her eyes shut, linked her fingers together, and whispered a private prayer under her breath. Ilyusha was pressed to the glass, craning her neck, trying to get a better look down at the ground. Vicky was hugging herself, shaking inside the uncomfortable fabric of the grey jumpsuit, staring out but seeing nothing.

Elpida should have already recovered. The genetic engineers of Telokopolis had made sure the vat-grown girls were biochemically immune to panic attacks. But Elpida felt the shadow of a weight on her chest.

Telokopolis must be out there, somewhere beyond that impossible ruin. But where was the green? This undefended ground should have been consumed in hours, the mould populated by sprouting spores, verdant life crawling up from the rot. But this corpse was old, dessicated, abandoned.

“Ilyusha,” she said. “What are you trying to see out there?”

“Friends,” Ilyusha said, pouty with disappointment. That made even less sense. Elpida’s head swam.

She did the only thing she could: she stepped forward and took Vicky gently by the arm, drawing her a few paces away from the others.

“Vicky,” Elpida said. “I need you to hold it together. If we run into something, I suspect Ilyusha and I are the only ones capable of fighting bare-handed. If that happens, your job is to lead the others away. Understood?”

Vicky’s pupils were dilated too wide. Her dark skin was breaking out in cold sweat. Her thickly toned muscles were clenched tight.

“Hold your breath,” she said.

“What for?”

Vicky checked back over her shoulder to make sure the others had not heard. Kagami was rummaging in computer guts. Amina was still praying. Ilyusha had slid a few paces further along the window, trying to get a better view of something down below. Atyle was too engrossed in whatever she saw through her bionic eye, the flush of haughty confidence returning to her face.

Vicky kept her voice low. “I did it earlier. When we were moving through those corridors. I didn’t mean to, I was just trying to stay quiet. I didn’t notice until then.”

“Notice what?”

“Do it with me. Hold your breath.” Vicky took a sharp little breath, then held it. Curious and confused, Elpida copied her.

They stared at each other with stilled breath. Elpida felt no pressure, no instinctive urge to cycle the contents of her lungs. She waited, and waited, and did not feel light-headed.

“See?” Vicky whispered. Her voice quivered at the edge of madness.

“I’m breathing now,” Elpida said. She took a deep breath to illustrate her point, re-filling her lungs with the taste of stale air. “So are you.”

“But we don’t need to. And look at us. We’re not shivering from the cold. Not really. You’re naked and you’re not shivering. What does that mean?”

Elpida slipped her hand over her own heart. She felt the beat, steady and strong. The view through the window was shocking nonsense, but the lack of breathing didn’t bother her. Her skin was warm. Her heart pumped. Her limbs moved. Vicky copied her, face flickering with confused relief as she felt her own heartbeat.

“Don’t tell the others,” Elpida said.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Vicky bit her lower lip, trying to cling to a very narrow ledge.

“We still have to keep moving,” Elpida said. “We still need to get out of here, whatever here is. We need clothes, weapons, food, and water. You’re still my second, if we get separated. Victoria, Vicky, can you hold it together?”

“I don’t know. Are we alive? Are we dead?”

Elpida pinched the meat of Vicky’s upper arm, not quite hard enough to hurt. “Feels alive, right? Let’s keep it that way.”

Vicky forced a laugh. “Okay. Okay, point. I’ll try.”

“I believe in you,” Elpida told her.

That forced laugh again. “You don’t even know me.”

Elpida opened her mouth to say We’ll change that back in Telokopolis; Vicky looked like she would make a good sparring partner, like a raw Legion recruit without any bluster, enough humility to take a loss and learn from the experience, to enjoy the one-on-one process. Elpida wanted to get to know her by how she fought.

But then, in the corner of her eye, on the horizon beyond the city-corpse, the mountain range moved.

A shudder. A shift. A minor rotational adjustment of one segment.

Elpida whipped round. She realised it was not a mountain range at all. Vicky stared out of the window in awe. Atyle froze, natural and bionic eyes both gone wide. Amina had not noticed, deep in private prayer, and was spared the sight, blinking around at the others’ shock. Over by the computer on the desk, Kagami’s mouth had fallen open. She swept long dark hair out of her face.

“Grave worm,” Ilyusha said. She alone did not seem surprised, attention still glued to the ground below.

Elpida’s training overrode the awe. She spoke up. “Whatever it is, it’s miles and miles away. And it only twitched. Nothing for us to worry about.” She clapped Vicky on the back. “Silico creatures on that scale don’t hunt humans on foot. We have to keep our attention on things our own scale, that’s the threat.”

Elpida didn’t say that thing must be bigger than the largest of Silico war-machines. It was like Telokopolis itself had stood up and walked.

Atyle was staring past Ilyusha, down at the ground. “I do believe you are right, warrior-fool. Your animal here has found company.”

Ilyusha craned round at Atyle with a stare like hot death, red claws shick-shicking free from the tips of her fingers. Atyle didn’t even notice. Elpida quickly stepped between them, placed a hand on Ilyusha’s bionic shoulder, and met those burning grey eyes.

“She’s not worth it,” Elpida whispered. “I need you more.”

It was an old technique, one she’d used on Howl before. A cheap trick. Unfair, but true. Elpida barely knew this girl, but she also knew that if she had judged wrong, she was about to get her guts knocked out of her belly by a handful of augmetic claws.

Ilyusha bared her teeth. Her eyes brimmed with sudden tears, which Elpida had not expected. Then she turned back to the window and tapped her claws against the glass.

Figures were streaming toward the base of the pyramid.

Scuttling through the ash and the rust, over the black-draped ruins, darting between scraps of cover. They moved in little groups, a few of them alone. Elpida quickly counted thirty four distinct scraps of motion, with more vanishing behind twists of dead building. Too far away to make out clearly, they could have been human or Silico, no way to tell. One group of ragged dots stopped and hunkered down. Little puffs of pulverised material filled the air around them. Gunshot impacts.

A glint in the shell of a nearby building caught Elpida’s eye: a piece of glass reflecting the sun’s death rattle. Clean, polished glass — a telescopic sight.

“Away from the window,” Elpida ordered. “Now!”

Vicky didn’t need telling twice, scrambling backward. Amina stood there in confusion until Elpida dragged her away. Atyle followed, but only with great and grand reluctance, head held high. Kagami had half ducked below the desk and struggled to stand again, whining pain as her augmetic legs unfolded.

Ilyusha didn’t care. She pressed her face against the glass, watching the action down below, and only came when Elpida called her name.

==

Beyond the security checkpoint the inside of the pyramid was sparse and utilitarian. Elpida led the others past echoing chambers of grey metal, long flat spaces re-purposed as meeting rooms, divided into holding cells, or full of abandoned medical and laboratory equipment she did not pause to examine. She kept an eye out for weapons but saw none, not even a stick or a club. Stairs led downward, baited with the trail of dried, flaking slime.

Elpida kept telling herself that Telokopolis was out there.

Kagami had the right idea in trying to get computer equipment working, but she was thinking too small. Rebuilding and booting up an ancient personal terminal would not give them access to entanglement comms, or radio, or anything else. They needed to find the nerve centre of this place — before that crowd down in the streets got inside.

Or was that their rescue party? Elpida was tight with purpose but her world was falling apart. This was not a Silico hive. The green was — gone. And this place was empty, dead, silent as a tomb.

She focused on leading the others. On keeping them moving. She knew how to do that.

The trail of flakes led them into an atrium — a wide open space with a high ceiling held up by six pillars of silver-grey metal. Other exits led away, behind the pillars. The roof was a single piece of filthy glass. The black sky made the light feel greasy on Elpida’s skin.

In the atrium was a corpse.

A full stop at the end of a long smear of blood on the floor, limbs crumpled and broken, wearing a shredded mass of crimson fabric which had once been a grey jumpsuit. It might have been Pira — the face was a ruined mess, half gnawed away. The hair might be flame-coloured, but it was stained carmine and scarlet. Ribcage cracked and levered open, skull unscrewed and brains scooped out, great handfuls of flesh torn off her thighs. She lay in a spreading pool of blood. She hadn’t been dead for long.

Another girl was crouched over the corpse, eating.

It was too late to turn back and slip away in stealth. Elpida froze, ready to spring forward, eyes flicking over the pillars for a hidden ambush. Vicky and Kagami stumbled to a stop, entangled together. Atyle didn’t say a word. But Amina whimpered in terror and clamped her hands to her mouth. She scuffed and stumbled as she tried to back away.

Ilyusha stomped forward three clicking steps, tail lashing the air, and shouted a wordless challenge. “Aaah!”

The ghoul paused in her feast and looked over her shoulder.

She was human, with a human face. Bright green eyes, wide with fascinated madness; rose-blonde hair falling about cheekbones of hummingbird-wing delicacy; and a smear of bloody meat all around her lips. She straightened up from her kill and turned around to face Elpida. The cannibal was wrapped in a single piece of thick, pale, filthy clothing, a cloak which hung a few inches from the ground, concealing her feet, leaving her arms free. Her hands were smeared with gore. Each finger was tipped with a talon of bone.

“Nnnnn!” Ilyusha grunted at her.

The cannibal lit up with joy. “Freshies! Little bitty freshies!” Her eyes bounced between Elpida and the others, then went past them. “Cinney! Cinney? No Cinney? Never any Cinnery!”

Amina almost lost control, stumbling back. “Oh God, oh God, please, no—”

“God?! God!” The cannibal cackled. She took a step forward — loping, bouncing.

“Fuck off!” Ilyusha screamed at her.

Elpida stepped forward too, level with Ilyusha, ready to intercept or dodge or leap at the cannibal — the girl didn’t look like she weighed much, but she probably had a weapon under that cloak. Elpida raised a hand, palm out, authoritative. “Back up, right now.”

“Orrrrrr?” The cannibal girl jerked and wobbled like she didn’t have enough bones in her body. She made those green eyes extra wide. “Or what? Or you’re gonna eat me?” She burst into a cackle. “Early bird gets the little wormies! You don’t have to outrun me. You only have to be faster thaaaaan … ” Her eyes flickered back and forth, then settled on Kagami, still half-clinging to Vicky’s support. The cannibal pointed one gore-streaked bone-tipped finger. “Her!”

“What.” Kagami sounded numb.

Vicky hissed: “I won’t drop you, dumb-ass. Hold on.”

Elpida took a step toward the girl, palms out, watching for a tell-tale twitch of motion. “There are six of us and one of you. Back away, right now, or I’ll—”

“Ready or not! Here I come!”

The cannibal girl rocked back to pounce — and Ilyusha hit her like a threshing machine. Metal claws sliced cloth and raked pale flesh. Her tail whipped and stabbed, slamming through the meat of the cannibal’s torso. Ilyusha snapped and roared and bit down on a hand. The cannibal girl cartwheeled backward in a motion that seemed impossible, and kicked from an angle which made no sense.

Ilyusha went flying. She slammed into one of the pillars and slid to the ground, stunned and dazed.

The cannibal girl howled with laughter. “How many times you been round, huh? Fucking metal?! Weak shit!”

Elpida raised her fists and prepared to take the inevitable charge. But she didn’t understand what she was looking at.

Beneath the cloak the cannibal girl did not have any legs. She did not have a proper torso. Her chest cut off beneath her collarbone, no space for lungs or stomach or heart — unless her organs were packed into the two massive, white-furred, muscular arms which sprouted from that truncated rib-cage, serving for locomotion. Instead of feet, she had two huge simian-like hands, tipped with spikes of bone just like her fingers.

Grinning red and bloody, she cartwheeled forward to pull Elpida’s head off her shoulders.

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The world makes no sense; it’s been dead too long. Now it’s full of worms.

My gosh, okay, this chapter is 4.3k words! I don’t mind though, I’m having a blast with this! And I hope you are too!

So! I am switching Necroepilogos chapter uploads from Saturdays to Thursdays; almost all Necroepilogos readers are also readers of my other story, Katalepsis, and several long-time readers have suggested/requested that I upload chapters on different days, since both stories dropping chapters on Saturday morning is a bit much. This is hopefully also a bit easier for me, too!

Chapters are also still much larger than I expected, closer to 4k than 2.5k, so we’re still at once a week, for now! I’m going to continue letting chapters fall at whatever size feels right for the narrative.

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

Patreon!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 3.7k words.  Please, do feel free to wait until there’s plenty more to read!

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Thank you so very much for reading. More soon!

Content Warnings

Implied cannibalism

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

The machine womb was dying.

Elpida saw it when she turned away from the door and the row of lockers — and away from Pira, who was plunging on alone into the depths of what could only be a Silico hive out in the deep green, the kind of structure that the best alienists in Telokopolis had only guessed at. Pira had also taken the only weapon: the lockers did not contain a second stun-baton, only several more grey jumpsuits. Elpida wished Pira good luck; a Silico construct wouldn’t flinch from a cattle prod. But she couldn’t follow. Duty, training, and the weight of her dead cadre pulled her back toward the helpless, the injured, and the terrified. She jogged back toward the rectangle of stainless steel in the centre of the room, the dozen open metal coffins, and the five other girls, still shivering and naked.

All around them, the resurrection chamber was shutting down. The floor-to-ceiling display of living metal on the back wall had gone still, the scrolling numbers and figures and lines of code slowed to a ticking crawl. The rows of black glass blocks were going dark, the pin-prick lights winking off, the circuitry burning out. Thin fluid had ceased to drip from the vast nozzles attached to the ceiling. The smears of faint blue glow inside the oblong tanks had turned pale and dull. A necrotic shadow was falling across the machines.

Even the antiseptic white light was growing dim. Unaltered human eyes would not have detected the drop in luminescence, not yet, but Elpida had the genetic engineers of Telokopolis to thank for her excellent vision.

Elpida looked down at her own body as she jogged back toward the other girls. She felt fine, but she’d been mainlining adrenaline since before she’d kicked her way out of her own coffin; she might have missed something, she might be walking wounded, she might be a liability to the group.

Beneath the drying, flaking slime, her skin seemed as clean as if she’d just scrubbed down in the shower, her usual healthy pale copper-brown. She could no longer feel the sticky fluid coating her mouth and nostrils and eyeballs, as if absorbed into her body. The soreness was passing and she felt fitter than ever, lung capacity even higher than her enhanced baseline, vision sharper, reaction times faster, muscles supple as butter. She couldn’t find any wounds, but the old scars were present and correct: the medical incision low on the right side of her belly, from childhood, because even gene-edited little girls still risked appendicitis; the shallow, jagged strike across her left forearm, the only duelling scar she’d ever taken; and the bite mark near the base of her ribcage. Her fingers lingered for a moment near the impression of Howl’s teeth.

She ran her hand through her hair to rake out the drying slime — artificial white, melanin-blocked, the same as the rest of her vat-grown clade, selected by their makers so that none of them could ever be mistaken for natural human beings. Elpida wore her hair long, a statement and a challenge and a kind of camouflage; plenty of Legion rookies had fallen in sparring matches after assuming that her hair offered a weakness, a handhold, a ceremonial mistake.

She probed the base of her skull as she had inside the coffin. But her mind-machine interface socket was gone.

That was impossible. Surgical removal of an MMI implant would have killed her.

No, the Covenanters had done that with a bullet.

Elpida couldn’t process this loss. She would never again interface with a pilot suit or a combat frame. Or the others of her cadre — but they were all dead and gone. She would never even see them again, let alone be part of the same shared interface link.

She didn’t have time to let that feeling sink in. As she reached the other girls still clustered between the open coffins, she finally noticed her own bionic addition: her upper right arm.

Elpida stared in shock. From shoulder to elbow her right arm had been replaced with polymer and metal, artificial muscle fibres bunching beneath plates of flexible bio-plastic. It looked expensive and cosmetic. It felt natural to move. It matched her skin colour. Her own natural flesh resumed at the elbow, all the way to her fingertips, which was impossible.

Pass-through bionics? She’d never seen anything like it before.

A plug of memory sloshed free inside her skull — her final minutes, when the Covenanter soldiers in greensuit hoods had come to take her away for execution, last of her kind. She’d fought. She’d torn one man’s eye out. They’d had to break her right arm, pin it behind her back to get her cuffed. She’d kept yowling and kicking. She’d pinned one of them down with nothing but her body weight and bitten off two of his fingers. She’d almost strangled another with her broken arm.

She’d fought all the way down to the bullet.

“Why is she doing that?” somebody was saying. “Why is she doing that?”

Elpida looked up, jolted out of memory. It was Vicky, the compact, well-built young woman with the messy dark hair. She was still supporting the slender, doll-like girl who couldn’t work her augmetic legs, clinging to Vicky’s shoulder with one arm.

Vicky was talking about Ilyusha: the petite and heavily augmented girl was still slurping up handfuls of blue slime, scooping it from within one of the coffins which contained a half-melted corpse.

“Why is she drinking that?” Vicky demanded, voice quivering. “That’s a dead body. That was a person. Why are you doing that? Stop!”

Ilyusha’s eyes burned hot and grey over her own cupped hands. The blue slime on her chin contained thin traces of blood. She kept drinking.

“She’s eating a corpse!” Vicky said.

Ilyusha lowered her red-and-black bionic hands. “Opposite,” she said.

“Stop it!”

Elpida stepped between them and raised her voice, speaking command. “Slow down. None of us know why she’s doing that. None of us know each other. None of us know what’s going on here. Slow down.”

Vicky bit her lip. Ilyusha resumed drinking her handful of blue slime, but did not scoop up another. Her bionic tail waved back and forth, red-and-black more difficult to distinguish in the dimming light. The doll-like girl with the augmetic legs was clenching her jaw with suppressed pain. The tall dark Up-Spire lady wasn’t paying them any attention, still lost in the power of her new augmetic eyeball. The younger girl on the floor was rocking back and forth, whispering a prayer.

Elpida took charge. “The girl who just left, her name is Pira. I’ve never met her before. She said we need to move or we’re dead.” A necessary lie; Pira had actually said If you move fast you might have a chance of getting out of here before the vultures arrive. Elpida pointed upward. “And this room is shutting down. Whatever it’s done to us, it’s finished. We need to move before something comes to collect us, or to check on the malfunction. Are we all agreed?”

Vicky nodded, hesitant first, then firm. “Sounds good.”

None of the others answered. Ilyusha licked blue gunk off her face and fingers.

Elpida had to pull these people together, and fast. They wouldn’t last five seconds if a Silico construct came through that door. She pointed a knuckle at Victoria. “Vicky, right? We shared names earlier.” She tapped her own chest. “Elpida.”

“I remember,” said Vicky. She looked nervous but she didn’t freeze up. “Victoria Monaghan.”

Elpida pointed again. “Vicky, Ilyusha. Ilyusha, Vicky.”

Ilyusha acknowledged this by showing her teeth.

Elpida made eye contact with the doll-like girl still clinging to Vicky’s shoulder. Long black hair was plastered to the thin muscles of her neck and back. There was pain there, and humiliation, and wounded pride. “Hey, how are you holding up?” The girl didn’t answer, frowning harder. “What’s your name? You’ve already heard ours.”

“You may refer to me as Kagami,” the doll-like girl said. Curt, clipped, and cold.

“Kagami. Can you walk?”

Kagami looked away and did not answer. Vicky repeated her name too, but Kagami didn’t acknowledge that either.

Elpida turned toward the Up-Spire lady, tall and willowy, still lost in her private rapture, “Excuse me ma’am, may I have your name, please?”

The woman finally dragged her gaze back down to floor level. Her peat-green bionic eye contained no visible iris or pupil. Her high-boned, noble face and naked black skin was covered in a sheen of sweat, sticking the remnants of the coffin-slime to her flesh.

“Have?” she echoed, airy and haughty. “What will you do if I refuse, warrior? Will you threaten me? Beat me? Kill me?”

“Of course not. I’m trying to get us out of here. If you don’t want to give a name, give us something to call you.”

“What are names here? We are reborn, rebirthed again, remade in truth. My whole life was a lie, in service of a sight I did not possess. And now it is real. You cannot harm me anymore. You cannot even touch me. The gods will remake me again, as many times as I need. They have promised me that.” She slid a hand over her natural eye and stared at the others through a ball of peat-green. “I see the artifices of creation, everywhere. I see the craft-works in the air itself. I see the writing of the gods.”

Kagami spoke to nobody in particular: “Some fool put a bionic eye in a paleo dirt-eater. Sick.”

Nobody liked that. Elpida wasn’t certain what it meant, but Vicky gave Kagami a look of disgusted disbelief. Ilyusha perked up, staring hard at Kagami, flexing her claws on the ends of her fingers.

The paleo dirt-eater in question shot Kagami a deeply offended look and took a step toward her.

Elpida stuck out one hand. “No. We stick together. You two can settle your differences back in Telokopolis. You can duel to the floor for all I care. But if you fight here, you fight me first, and you won’t fight anything else after that. Look at me, you know what I am.”

The Up-Spire lady looked at Elpida. Lenses flickered in the peaty depths of her right eye. “I have no idea what you are. But I am not yours to command.”

“Name,” Elpida snapped. “Pick something.”

“Atyle.”

“Atyle,” Elpida repeated. “I’m not leaving anybody behind. So don’t make me drag you. No fighting.”

Atyle crossed her arms and looked down her nose at Elpida, but Elpida knew when she had somebody under control, for now. She turned away, toward the praying, shivering, terrified girl down on the floor. Younger, soft and pudgy and fragile, crying slow tears from squeezed-shut eyes, murmuring a repeating prayer to her god. Elpida crouched down right in front of her and made a conscious effort to soften her heart and her tone.

“Hey there,” she said. “I’m Elpida. Can you open your eyes and look at me? Can you do that for me? Please. Do that for me now. I need you to open your eyes for me.”

The younger girl snorted back a wad of mucus, then opened red-rimmed, dull green eyes. Her prayer trailed off. “God is merciful, God will show mercy to me, God is merciful, God will show mercy … ”

Elpida smiled. “Hey. My name is Elpida, what’s yours?”

The girl’s lips quivered as she answered. “Amina.”

“Amina. I knew another Amina, once. She was brave, and clever, and beat me in a fight one time. Amina, I’m going to get us out of here. That’s my job and I’m good at it. I’m Legion, I know what I’m doing, and I’m not going to leave you behind. Here.” She offered a hand.

Amina did not look at the hand. She stared into Elpida’s eyes, terrified beyond death. Something inside her was broken in a way Elpida did not recognise. “Where … where can you go, when you’re in hell?”

“Can you walk? If you can walk, I need you to walk. I need you to get to your feet, Amina. Can you do that for me? Do that for me, please. Take my hand. That’s it, yeah. You’re doing it, good. On your feet, there we go. Good!”

Amina stood, shivering, trying to cover her nudity with her arms. Elpida watched her look up at the dying, darkening resurrection chamber around them, and at the half-melted corpses in the two coffins Ilyusha had cut open, and then down at the last remaining source of strong light — the rim around the human-scale door at the far end of the room. Amina whimpered and lowered her eyes.

“We’re gonna get out of here,” Elpida repeated, then turned to the others. “Okay, listen up. Here’s the plan. If we’re in a Silico hive somewhere, we need to get out, into the green. I know that’s not great, but it’s better than staying in here. This place is probably crawling with Silico constructs.”

Elpida didn’t mention the uncomfortable truth; with her genetic immunological hardening she might last several weeks exposed out in the green, but without greensuits the others would have days at most. She’d cross that bridge when they reached it, find a way to communicate with Telokopolis, somehow.

“Silico?” Vicky echoed, then shook her head. “I don’t know that word. What are you talking about? You know what this place is?”

Elpida faltered, flat-footed. “Silico. The machines. Artificial life. You — you know this, every child of the city knows this.”

“What city?”

Elpida’s blood went cold. “ … Telokopolis.”

Vicky shook her head. Amina looked blank and terrified. Atyle shrugged. Ilyusha lost interest, dipped her taloned hands into one of the coffins again, and resumed drinking another helping of blood-laced goo.

Pira’s words whispered inside Elpida’s head: “Wherever you’re from, tribe or city, it is dead and gone.”

“Telokopolis,” Elpida repeated. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Her gut clenched. She broke out in cold sweat. “The city. The last city. The needle amid the green. The great pyramid. The cradle of all human life. You … did you … what, grow up in the Skirts, in a slum? Never taught about what you live inside? Even the meanest of the Skirt slums has access to the networks, education, libraries, everything. Silico! You know what Silico are!” She pointed at Atyle. “You’re speaking Upper-Spire, don’t tell me you’re not.”

“Our consecrated warrior is confused,” Atyle said. “She doesn’t know she’s dead. We are all speaking the language of the gods, no?”

“Calm down, yeah?” Vicky said gently. “It’s okay. I’m sure your home is safe.”

“Of course it’s safe!” Elpida snapped. “It’s impregnable. Telokopolis is the greatest machine ever made by human hands. Telokopolis is forever.”

Kagami spoke without looking at anybody. “Miss rooty-tooty five rounds rapid is probably talking about a surface arcology. Not that anybody here except me knows what that word means.”

“I know what an arcology is,” Vicky said, suddenly frowning at Kagami. “I see one every fucking day.”

Kagami finally looked at her, lips curled in distaste. She wriggled her arm off Vicky’s shoulders and staggered free, trying to stand on her unfamiliar augmetic legs, gritting her teeth in pain. Vicky moved to offer more support, but Kagami hissed through her teeth and brushed her away. Angry and defiant, the doll-like young woman tried to straighten up, but she couldn’t hold her hips right. She was like a fawn who’d never walked before.

She jabbed a finger at the others in turn. “Arcology? You? You? What about you? No? Okay, start smaller. Electricity? You know what that is?”

Elpida nodded. So did Ilyusha. Atyle and Amina had never heard the word.

“Space flight? Nuclear fusion? Nanomachinery?” Kagami spat the words one after the other, too fast for the others to respond properly. Vicky and Elpida both nodded at most of them, but not ‘fourth-dimensional rotation theory’, ‘sub-surface borehole’, or ‘dead zone point occupation’. Ilyusha got a few, but not many.

Elpida interrupted, raising her voice. “What’s the point of this? We need to move.”

“We’re out of time,” Kagami said.

“Yeah, I agree. This room is going dark. The longer we wait, the greater the risk that something comes for us. We can talk later, once we’re out.”

“No, you barbarian mud-sucker. We’re out of time. Cast adrift. What year are you from?”

“Seventy one-three.” Elpida obeyed the order on reflex. In Kagami’s irritation she spoke a little like Old Lady Nunnus, enough to command for a moment.

Kagami clicked her fingers. “By what measurement?”

“Post-founding, obviously. Seven thousand and thirteen years of Telokopolis. What other measurement is there?”

“Useless!” Kagami threw her hands up in frustration. The motion cost her balance and almost sent her crashing onto her backside, but Vicky caught her. She didn’t get much gratitude. “Off me! Off! Fuck!” Kagami flailed at the other girl until Vicky retreated, hands up. “This can’t be real. No, this is some sick joke by my father. This isn’t real. This is a sim with the controls locked out.” She clicked her fingers on both hands and swiped her palms through the air, as if clearing cobwebs. “And why do I have these legs?! This is spitting in my face! Are you listening to this, you sick fuck?” She spoke to the air. “Put me back in my tank! Switch this off!”

Vicky said, “I don’t think this is virtual reality, or anything like that.”

“We are beyond death,” said Atyle. She was staring at Kagami, hand over her natural eye. “And we have been given gifts. You had no legs, in life?”

“Obviously!” Kagami spat.

Elpida’s mind was already jumping ahead three links in the chain of logic. She had been gene-selected for that: acceptance, adaptation, and action. Integrate information, assess battlefield conditions, never wallow in shock. Kagami’s hypothesis was not lost on her. These young women were not all from the same slice of human history. They were from before the city. Unthinkable.

How — she could not answer. This was beyond any science of the last human city.

Why — that was a relevant question. Why would a Silico hive resurrect a group of ancient human beings? Why her? For what purpose?

She glanced at the twelve open coffins. Between herself, Pira, and the others, that made seven. Two more had died unborn, the resurrection process incomplete; perhaps that’s what the alarm had been about. That left three remade people unaccounted for, with three trails of sticky slime leading toward the human-scale door at the far end of the dimming chamber.

Howl would have left the room, if she’d been first out. Howl would have pulled a Silico war-monster apart with her bare hands.

Elpida clung to an impossible hope.

But if Kagami’s conjecture was right, then the chance of that was next to nothing.

“I did not have the sight in life,” Atyle was saying. “It was all lies, every word, ever since I could speak. I lost all faith in the gods, and in the end they took my life for my transgressions. But now I see everything I was meant to. I see the roots of your metal legs inside your hips. I see the sparks they send up your spine. It is beautiful.”

“Atyle,” Elpida said. “Do you see a neural lace inside my skull? It should be a web of material embedded in my brain and spine.”

Atyle turned her peat-green bionic toward Elpida. “Yes. You have a long-tailed spider inside you. How curious.”

Elpida sighed with a relief she refused to feel. The MMI socket was gone, but the lace remained.

“What about me?” Vicky asked, voice too tight. “Do you see anything inside me?”

Atyle considered the compact, well-built girl for a moment. “Your heart is artifice. It pumps doubly as strong.”

Vicky’s hand went to her chest. The colour drained from her face, mouth hanging open, eyes far away. “We were crossing Woodward”, she murmured to herself. “An ammo run. Jess went down but I didn’t hear a thing. Too much rain. Then I … ” She raised her eyes to a vista only she could see. She clutched herself over the heart. “There was a sniper.”

“We are reborn,” Atyle said.

“We’re in hell,” Amina whimpered. She was trying not to cry, failing badly. “It’s true. We all died. I remember it.”

Kagami looked furious. “They flushed me. They fucking carted me to an airlock and flushed me onto the surface! I’m valuable! I’m supposed to be ransomed! I’m a fucking logician, they could have used me!” And then: “No, no no no, this isn’t real. This isn’t real.”

Elpida raised her voice. “We were all backed up somehow. Brought back. Reconstructed.”

Kagami turned on her. “Yes, you fuck, you and me perhaps! Maybe her too.” She jabbed a finger toward Vicky, almost unbalancing on her new legs. She grunted in pain to keep her feet. “But the paleo, and whatever she is? Explain that!”

“That doesn’t change the fact we should get out of here,” Elpida said. “There’s one door out, there’s no other route. We stick together.”

The antiseptic white light had dimmed to silver on every surface. The liquid metal screen was inert and blank. The banks of black glass blocks were opaque and lifeless, burned out, spent. The blue glow from the tanks and the coffins themselves had vanished completely, dried up, gone.

“I died,” Vicky said to herself. “We failed. We all failed. The revolution died, it must have died.”

“There’s nothing else,” Amina squeezed out. “There’s nowhere else. We’re in hell. We’ve all betrayed God. There is nowhere to go.”

“This isn’t real,” Kagami snapped. “None of you are real. Shut up!”

Elpida raised her voice. “There’s always somewhere to go. There’s Telokopolis. I don’t care where or when this is. The city will endure forever. A hundred years, a thousand, it will be there, and it will be there for us, for every human being. It will live until heat death or the close of the universe. And if you don’t know that, I’ll show you. We are all getting out of here. Now, Vicky, you help Kagami. Atyle, pull yourself together and take Amina’s hand. I’ll—”

A wet tearing sound interrupted her.

Ilyusha had reached inside one of the coffins, one that held a miscarried rebirth. She had torn free a chunk of bloody, melted flesh with her razor-tipped red fingers.

Elpida braced herself to watch the girl cram the unformed meat into her mouth. But Ilyusha stared back at them, leaden eyes dull and tired, the fire gone out. She snorted, tail lashing, then dropped the gobbet of gore onto the stainless steel floor with a wet splat.

“Getting dark in here,” she said.

She turned and stalked away toward the human-scale door, just like Pira had done, licking the blood and slime off her augmetic fingers.

Elpida wasn’t going to let this happen twice. She jabbed a finger at Vicky, then at Kagami. She grabbed Amina’s hand herself, and give Atyle a sharp look. They all followed after a fumbling moment, heading for the thin rime of light beyond the only way out.

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Dialogue sheds light, but opens the abyss of time. Out into the green, I suppose, praying for the city.

This chapter is also a big one again, 4k words! And so is the next! My goodness, I really am going to have to change the plans I had regarding chapter length. I don’t think that’s a bad thing though. It’s letting me get this story underway with some bigger, juicier chunks of meat than I first thought I would.

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

Patreon!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4k words.  Please, do feel free to wait until there’s plenty more to read!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! If you like the story, go click button, and more people will see it!

Thank you for reading my little story! As always, more soon!

Content Warnings

Body horror
Corpses
PTSD

The first two are genre-typical and this is the only time I will warn for them. Please be prepared for a lot of body horror in this story.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Elpida scrambled out of her coffin and landed on cold metal. The drop to the floor was a greater distance than she’d expected, her joints were stiff as fresh-drawn wire, and her soles were slicked with that thin, greasy fluid. Lances of red light strobed and stabbed, a flicker of electric blood in the air; the alarm pulsed out a moaning dirge; voices screamed in terror and pain, sobbed deep and hard, and laughed on the edge of loss.

Training took over. Elpida’s body became a coiled spring, fists raised for contact, eyes darting for a weapon or an enemy. She ignored the confusion, the screaming, the pain — and found nothing to fight.

There was no Silico war-monster dismantling victims bone by bone. No Legion soldiers pointing guns into a shivering huddle of bodies. No apparent threat for all her training to unleash itself upon.

Just four other girls, disgorged from metal boxes just like her. Naked, shivering, red-glazed flesh in the pulsing light.

“Last out!” howled the laughing voice.

The alarm died with a metallic screech. The red emergency light guttered out, clearing the blood from walls and floor and skin, leaving behind antiseptic white glare. Elpida just stood, mouth agape.

Hospital ward, reactor core, machine womb — the room was a nightmare.

And it was not Telokopolis. Elpida knew her city’s hidden guts: she had walked across the buried fields and over the shielded fusion generators below ground level; she had witnessed a combat frame under construction, the unspeakable machine-meat implanted as physical seeds; Nunnus had once shown her the heavily guarded forges where nanomachinery was bred in soupy grey vats, spied through armoured glass, because to enter would mean agonising death. She had visited both the gleaming tip of the spire and the ragged edges of the skirts. As Commander of the special project cadre, she had known all the city’s dirty secrets.

And this place wasn’t home.

The resurrection chamber was a cavern of metal, easily as large as a combat frame hanger, the ceiling hundreds of feet above Elpida’s head, lost in a thick tangle of tubes and cables and cross-beams. The floor was dense with machinery: banks of black glass blocks marched off toward distant walls, glowing inside with pinpoint lights and burning circuitry; oblong fluid tanks squatted at regular intervals like gigantic dead toads amid a field of petrified trees, empty now, but their insides were smeared with a faint glowing blue residue, the colour of Cherenkov radiation, of rampant mould, of unbounded electricity; curved nozzles of sweeping tunnel were attached to the ceiling, reaching almost to the floor, thick as trees, wrapped with torn plastic membranes and stress-torn wiring, their gaping dark ends dripping with that same faint bluish glow, like umbilicals freshly detached from some monstrous birth; the whole of one wall was taken up by a rippling, bubbling, leaden surface, like a computer readout made of living metal. Numbers and nonsense scrolled upward on that gigantic display, so fast that Elpida’s eyes rebelled and tore themselves away from the sight.

Once, out in the deep green, Elpida and three members of the cadre had brought down a large-scale Silico war-monster by tearing its skull open. They’d stood and watched the brain die, fascinated that something so seemingly alien was grown here on earth, cloned from terrestrial matter. Just like them.

This room was worse. It was like nothing she’d ever seen.

All of this machinery was focused on the centre of the room — on a wide rectangle of stainless steel flooring, freezing cold against Elpida’s bare feet. The rectangle sloped a little toward a drain grille, just off centre. At one end stood a human-scale control panel: a slab of esoteric metal and opaque plastic, banks of tiny screens and rows of buttons, thousands of switches and dials and toggles, tiny orange and red warning lights. None of it was labelled. Hundreds of braided wires, thick bundles of cable, and high-throughput fluid-lines led inward from the edge of that stainless steel rectangle, to the undersides of twelve identical coffins.

Two rows of six. Each coffin was raised on a plinth, like an operating table, or a sarcophagus.

Elpida’s box lay at the end of one row, nearest to the control panel. Of the twelve metal containers, seven others stood open: six lids had slid upward on smooth hydraulics, not failed like Elpida’s. A seventh box had been torn open from the inside, the lid hanging in loose twists of ruined metal. The remaining four coffins were still closed.

Three tracks of slick amniotic slime led away from the seven open boxes, in the opposite direction from the control panel. Across a hundred feet of bare metal, past dense-packed alien machinery, the slime trails resolved into jumbled footprints, then dried out. A human-sized door stood beyond the footprints, flanked by a set of lockers.

Four other human beings shivered in this steel cradle, all naked, all in shock, all coated in that oily transparent fluid from inside the coffins. Exposed to the air, the goo was rapidly drying, starting to crumble away in big soft flakes; the white light revealed a faint blue tint in the drying slime.

Elpida could feel it in her mouth, coating the inside of her nostrils, the tube of her throat, the orbs of her eyeballs. It tasted bitter and organic, like raw plant matter.

Furthest from Elpida, at the end of the row of coffins, was the girl who’d been crying in deep sorrow. Flame-red hair slicked to her neck and shoulders, skin pale and white, freckles thick on her face. Athletic, lean, maybe the same age as Elpida. She was down on her knees, cradling the chrome-and-matte of a brand new bionic right arm in her lap. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying, but by the time Elpida recovered from the shock of the room, the red-haired girl had brought herself under strict control. She watched the rest of them with empty, cold eyes.

Two coffins closer was a young woman up on her feet. Slender and slight as a sapling, tall and elegant and darkly brown, with something of severe nobility about her face and her short-cropped dark hair. She was no older than Elpida either. Her right eye had been replaced with what Elpida guessed was a full-spectrum bionic: a solid ball of peat-green, innumerable tiny lenses flickering and dancing behind a layer of bio-plastic. She was in rapture, both eyes wide, mouth hanging open, staring at the machinery around them.

Down on the floor right next to Elpida was a third girl, equally brown but much smaller, built compact and hard like a boxer. Messy dark hair — visibly in need of cutting even despite the weight of the sticky fluid — neat little nose, bright dancing eyes. She was also lost in awe, staring down at her own body with sick relief. She was whole. No bionics.

The fourth girl was more metal than flesh.

Standing by the control panel was the single most heavily augmented human Elpida had ever seen, worse than any grizzled Legion veteran.

Her skin was pale-peach, similar to the now-sober redhead, her build petite and tiny. The slime in her dull blonde hair had nearly finished drying, leaving it clumped and sticking up. Her delicate-boned face was alight with manic energy, grey eyes like burning lead. As Elpida met those eyes, the augmented girl started laughing again, hysterical and broken by hiccups, almost hyperventilating.

Her legs and arms were both bionics. Sweeping curves of solid black and warning red, no concession made for cosmetic humanity. Each finger terminated in a hooked red claw. The girl retracted and extended these claws with a shick-shick noise as she laughed. Her feet were similar, more like raptor talons than simian digits, and they did not retract. She clicked on the metal when she moved.

A black and red tail curved from the base of her spine. Armoured, segmented, matching her bionic limbs, six feet long and thick as four of her arms combined. The structure was tipped with a red spike. A stinger.

Elpida had never seen anything like it before: non-human body plan bionics on a human being.

Two voices were still screaming — from inside their coffins.

Directly opposite Elpida, and two coffins down from her, a pair of voices were still confined inside cold metal. The one opposite sounded like she was in terrible pain. The one two down sounded so afraid she was going to tear her vocal chords.

Nobody was moving to help.

Failure glued Elpida’s soles to the freezing steel floor. Two dozen pairs of ghostly hands sealed around her ankles. Her dead cadre held her back.

Lead from the front, Old Lady Nunnus’ scratching voice echoed in memory. Lead by example. They’ve filled your head with nonsense, you were not born to lead. Nobody is. You earn it, and you earn it by the act.

Elpida had already led from the front, even before those words. Right from when the cadre was six years old, the first time they’d worked together to bring down something bigger than any single one of them, their first fight, their first kill. Elpida hadn’t planned it, but she’d brought the planners together. She hadn’t been the most aggressive girl, but she’d guided the aggression of Howl and Metris in the right direction. She hadn’t landed the killing blow, but she’d aimed it, permitted it, and taken responsibility for it. The cadre was her and she was the cadre. And she’d never left anybody behind, not even a corpse.

And now they were all dead, because of her mistakes. What right did she have to lead?

In the end Elpida moved only because she knew no other way of existing.

In three strides she was next to the coffin opposite. She banged on the lid.

“Hey! Hey, you’re not alone!” she called through the unyielding metal. “I’m gonna get you out!”

A yowl of pain answered. It might have been a word.

Elpida scrabbled at the coffin, searching for an external control panel, finding none, and then trying to jam her fingers into the seam of metal between lid and base. Now she’d been out of her own box for a few moments she felt as strong as ever, muscles taught and bunching, despite the aching soreness deep in her bones. She strained to shift the lid, but it wouldn’t give. The pained screaming had subsided. She pressed her ear to the lid in panic and heard panting from within.

She slapped the metal twice. “I can’t get it open! Is there a control panel in there? Try the buttons. Press something. Anything.”

“Surigu?” came a reply. Not a word Elpida had ever heard. Some Upper-Spire isolate dialect?

The other four girls weren’t moving. The tall noble had covered her natural eye with one hand, in rapture at whatever she saw with her bionic. The un-augmented boxer was still lost in the sight of her own body. The cold redhead watched Elpida’s efforts with curiosity but no interest. The laughing cyborg was struggling not to start hyperventilating.

Elpida dropped her tone. Battlefield command. “Somebody help me, right now.”

The redhead didn’t move and the laughing girl didn’t react, but the other two did. The tall, willowy woman looked at her as if offended. The compact and athletic girl who’d been marvelling with numb awe over her own body, she looked up at Elpida as if coming out of a dream.

“You, hey,” Elpida said, clicking her fingers once and pointing at the girl. “What’s your name?”

“My name?”

She spoke Mid-Spire. Shocked and numb. Good enough.

“I’m Elpida. Your name, now.”

“ … I don’t … ”

“Name. Now.”

The compact girl blinked as if trying to decide. “Vict— Victoria. Vicky.”

“Vicky,” Elpida said, trying not to react because that wasn’t a name. ‘Victoria’ wasn’t like any name she’d ever heard in any language spoken on any tier of Telokopolis. She pointed at the other coffin, the one with the panicked screaming inside. “Vicky, bang on that box and tell her we’re coming. Then get over here and help me get this lid off. I think this one’s injured.”

Vicky didn’t waste time asking why. She clambered to her own naked, slick feet and did exactly as Elpida ordered. The terrified screaming did not abate after she banged on the lid, but she ran over to join Elpida by the other coffin.

“Both of us on the same side,” Elpida said, holding Vicky’s numb gaze to keep her here. “Lift with me on one. Three, two, one.”

Vicky was almost as fit as Elpida, with wiry muscles and a desperate strength, despite being a whole head shorter. But even with both of them straining, the lid refused to budge. The voice inside had faded to a whimper of pain.

The augmented girl was watching them, laughing like she was trying not to cry. Elpida caught her eye.

“Hey, hey there, you got my box open, didn’t you?” Elpida said. “You tore open your own box too, right? That was you? Help us, please.”

The laughing girl made a pitiful keening noise through her teeth, turning her head up to the ceiling and wailing a peal of laughter. Her bionic tail lashed downward and struck the floor. Then she just panted, right on the edge of personal madness.

“How many times?” said an empty voice.

Cold, calm, collected — the redhead at the far end of the row. She’d gotten to her feet, flexing her own bionic arm to test the fingers. She had addressed the augmented girl, but didn’t get a response. The augmented girl crossed to Elpida and Vicky on clicking feet, then jammed one blood-red hook-claw into the seam of metal. The coffin went pop as a seal was breached. Vicky grabbed the lid and pulled it upward, slowed by the hydraulic release.

The augmented girl turned away, already moving for the screamer in the other coffin.

Elpida and Vicky pulled a fifth arrival out of her near-stillbirth, lifting her from the coffin and setting her on her feet. The girl who’d been screaming in pain was like a porcelain doll, small and slender, muscles of a scholar, skin a dusky soft light brown, hair long and straight and black and stuck to her back, eyes huge and liquid in a moon-like face.

She was hissing and cringing with pain, fingernails digging into Elpida’s shoulder hard enough to draw blood. Both of her legs were fresh augmetics, high-spec chrome and artificial skin-coloured polymers, right up to her hip bone.

“Where does it hurt?” Elpida asked. “Hey, hey, look at me, focus. Where does it hurt?”

“Nasas ungor. Faaa!” The doll-like girl spat a very un-doll-like word. She wriggled a slime-slick arm off Vicky and hung from Elpida alone.

“I don’t know what she’s speaking,” Elpida said to Vicky. “Do you?”

Vicky looked even more lost, struggling to keep up. “N-no, I—”

The doll-girl winced with a sudden spike of pain. “Of course they’re not going to understand me, they’re meant to be womb-born simpletons,” she said.

“Oh,” said Vicky.

“Coming through loud and clear now,” Elpida said.

The doll-girl blinked at them in shock, looking offended and wrong-footed. She raised her free hand and clicked her fingers in the air, twice. “End! Computer, end! This is perverse. Where are my controls? End! End!”

“It’s not a simulation,” said the cold redhead. “It’s not virtual reality.”

The doll-like girl stared at her, then down at her own bionic limbs. “I’m not meant to have legs,” she murmured in disgust. “What is this? What— where— end! End!”

In the other row of coffins the augmented girl had sliced open the seal for the other difficult rebirth. The lid raised by itself on stiff hydraulics. A bundle of slime-streaked shivering flesh tumbled out onto the cold steel floor. Elpida crossed to her quickly, leaving Vicky to help the doll-girl stay standing. But she wasn’t fast enough. The girl who’d been screaming in fear was younger than the rest of them, only a teenager, plump and awkward and mousy, with hair the colour of wet sand and eyes red from weeping. She took one look at the augmented nightmare of red and black in front of her and cried even worse, screaming and cringing, clutching her arms across her naked body.

“Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay!” Elpida went down on her knees and tried to catch the girl’s eyes. “It’s okay, nobody’s going to hurt you. I don’t know what’s going on either. My name is Elpida, what’s yours?”

But the terrified girl scrunched up her eyes and withdrew into herself, repeating a whisper over and over. “God is great, god is merciful, god is great, god is merciful, god is great, god is merciful. Please, please, oh lord please, forgive me, please. God is great, god is merciful. God is—”

Elpida didn’t have time to peel this one out of her fear. Two more coffins still lay shut, but there was no screaming.

“Can you open those two boxes?” Elpida asked the augmented girl. “I think you’re the only one who can.”

That delicate face, bright with madness, looked up, a full head and a half shorter than Elpida’s gene-engineered height. She wasn’t laughing now, only panting.

“No point,” she said, voice a high and scratchy quiver.

Elpida had seen combat fatigue before, post-traumatic stress disorder, the blank stare and emptiness of a Legion soldier who’d seen too much, fought for too long, been spread so thin that the person was tucked away inside layers of protective callus. This girl was so far over the edge that Elpida didn’t know how to bring her back. But she had to get those coffins open.

“What’s your name?” Elpida asked gently. “I’m Elpida.”

The augmented girl started laughing again, hard and painful. “Name?” she screeched. Then she threw her arms into the air, claws extended, tail stiff and stinger gleaming. “Ilyusha!”

She roared her own name like invoking an ancient god, then clicked over to the other two coffins and cut them open.

There was nothing alive in there.

Both coffins held a soup of dull blue slime around a half-formed mass of flesh, the vague outline of a human body. Melted eyeballs, mulched organs, exposed spars of unfinished bone. Elpida curdled inside and had to turn away. Ilyusha cupped her clawed hands, scooped up the blue fluid, and started noisily drinking the stuff.

“Where is this!?” demanded the doll-like girl. She still couldn’t work her augmetic legs, one arm clutched over Vicky’s shoulders. “Who are you people? I demand to be returned to my family’s … my … my … ” Her eyes went wide with horror, staring at nothing.

The shivering brown lump, the terrified girl huddled on the ground, broke off from her prayer. “It’s hell,” she murmured.

“Hell?” echoed the tall dark confident one. She spoke with a posh, Upper-Spire accent. She was still playing with the sight of her own bionic eye, barely looking at the other girls. “It is everything I was ever promised.”

Vicky blew out a deep breath. Elpida knew the look of a strong person struggling to hold it together. “I don’t understand this either. Does anybody?”

“Ha!” Ilyusha barked, chin wet with blue slime.

Elpida held Vicky’s eyes and said, “We’re gonna be fine, whatever this is and wherever we are. I’m Legion. Well, only technically, but I’m trained. If we’re inside a Silico facility or something, we need to get out. I know we won’t last out in the green without suits, but anything is better than waiting in here.”

Vicky looked at her like that made zero sense. So did the doll-girl.

“You are in charge of nothing,” said the tall Up-Spire woman, talking to the ceiling and the machines.

The cold redhead was stalking away, striding toward the human-sized door in the far wall, flexing her new bionic arm.

“Hey, stop!” Elpida called, then jogged after her. She turned back to the others and said, “Don’t go anywhere, don’t touch anything.” She pointed at the shivering, terrified girl, who had lapsed back into her prayer. “Somebody help her up.”

When Elpida caught up with the redhead the other girl didn’t stop walking.

“You seem to know what’s going on,” Elpida said as she drew level. “You said this isn’t a simulation. Where are we?”

“I don’t know,” the redhead said, cold and clipped. She didn’t spare a look for Elpida. They were almost to the door and the lockers.

“Hey, stop and explain.” Elpida grabbed the other girl’s arm and forced her to stop walking.

The redhead girl stopped, but her posture said she was about to punch Elpida in the face. Her posture said she knew how to fight, even with a brand-new artificial arm. Her posture said she was going to put several pounds of bionic metal through Elpida’s skull. Elpida brought her free hand up to block, but the other girl aborted the motion.

“Please,” Elpida said. “I’m sorry to lay hands on you but we’re all defenceless. One of those girls can’t walk and one is terrified out of her mind. The Upper-Spire lady, I don’t even know what’s going on with her. I need to know what’s happening. I’m Legion, and I don’t think you are, so unless you outrank me, that puts me in charge here. But you move like a soldier, you know how to handle yourself. Don’t leave me hanging.”

Ashes in her mouth. Commander of a dead cadre. Anybody else would make a better leader.

“It doesn’t matter,” the girl said. “Get moving or you’re dead.”

Elpida sighed. “What’s your name? I’m Elpida. Commander Elpida, technically.”

She could have choked on that word. Commander.

The girl paused, then studied Elpida between one blink and the next. Her eyes were the blue of an empty sky. “Pira.”

“Pira, great. You—”

“You’re military of some kind,” said Pira.

“Yeah. I said, I’m Legion, I’m—”

“If you move fast you might have a chance of getting out of here before the vultures arrive. Follow me.”

Pira slipped her wrist from Elpida’s gasp and turned toward the lockers.

“What about the others?” Elpida said. “I’m not leaving anybody behind. Nobody gets left behind.”

Everybody ends up dead.

“They’re dead,” Pira said. She banged open one of the lockers and pulled out a grey jumpsuit, tossed it over her shoulder, then reached back inside and hefted a weapon with one hand: some kind of electrical stun-baton. “Move.”

Elpida reached for her wrist again but Pira put the baton in the way. Elpida put her hands up.

“You’ve been through this before,” Elpida said. “You know what all this is, right? Where are we? I … I died.” Her voice threatened to break. “I remember dying. How is that … possible? And we’re not in Telokopolis.”

Pira held her gaze. “Wherever you’re from, tribe or city, it is dead and gone.”

“Telokopolis is forever.” Elpida said it in reflex.

Pira sighed. “You all say something like that.”

“It’s true. The city is eternal. The walls are impossible to crack. They’ll last thousands of years. Why are you saying this? Why would you say something like that?”

“The quicker you deal with it, the better your chances.” Pira stepped toward the door and it slid open with a mechanical hiss. She covered her retreat with the baton as she shot a final look at Elpida. “Follow me or stay with them.”

“Nobody gets left behind.”

Pira stepped through the door. It hissed shut as she turned away. “Your funeral.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Now we truly get underway. Shambling and moaning. But not that type of zombie?

This chapter (and the next!) is almost 4k words, which is double what I was expecting/planning for this story. Which is good! I might have to revise upward my original estimate of 2.5k words max for each chapter. We’ll see. Still only Saturdays for the moment.

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

Patreon!

At current, this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4k words.  Please, do feel free to wait until there’s plenty more to read!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry now, hooray! If you like the story, go click button, more people will see!

And as always, thank you very much for reading. More soon!

For content warnings covering the entire story, please see question 2 in the FAQ. Content warnings per-chapter will be found at the beginning of each.

Content Warnings

Claustrophobia
Choking/suffocation

A blossom of alchemical fire grew in quiet flesh; a spark took hold in the wet crimson darkness of muscle and marrow and memory.

And Elpida choked back to life inside her own coffin.

Blank grey steel, inches from her nose. Eyes aching like spent coals, lids rasping like sandpaper. A shallow layer of cold, greasy fluid clung to her back, her buttocks, the undersides of her legs. Hair slicked to her skull and stuck to her neck. A faint blue glow came from left of her head, illuminating her naked shoulder and the side of her ribcage. All she could see was the walls of the container.

She’d awoken sealed in a metal box.

Trapped in a space too small to even wriggle on to her side. No control surfaces floated in front of her eyes, no communication uplink waited in the back of her head, no familiar subconscious acknowledgement came from the rest of her cadre.

Panic overpowered a lifetime of training.

Elpida tried to slam her hands against the inside of the lid, but she’d woken with her arms by her sides, soaked in that viscous cold grease. With so little room to move she only scraped her knuckles painfully across the raw metal, then fumbled to bring her hands up toward the faint light near her head.

She tried to draw a breath, to scream, then discovered she couldn’t. Her throat was clogged. She hacked and coughed and heaved until she spat out a plug of mucus and clotted blood. A mass of wet snot and the taste of iron dribbled down her cheek to join the thin layer of sticky fluid she was lying in, like a drowning rat in a stagnant puddle.

That stalled the scream. Long enough for her to slam her palms against the unyielding metal.

Had the Covenanters drugged her, left her to die in an unpowered capsule?

Elpida had undergone claustrophobia acclimation training inside an unpowered pilot capsule, years ago with the rest of the cadre. But even unmounted from a combat frame and cut off from Telokopolis, a capsule would have cradled her like a fetus in the womb, a precious core of pliant flesh wrapped in layers of machine protection and intelligent armour. A capsule would have cushioned her muscles, braced her legs and spine and skull, flooded her lungs and sinuses with pressure gel, fed her oxygen and glucose, kept her senses dull and brainwaves calm, to wait for rescue. A capsule damaged beyond recovery would have spun her up like an engine, with adrenaline and combat stims and an on-foot extraction plan squirted into her mind-machine interface, to get her up on her feet and moving toward the nearest of her cadre.

But this metal box was no pilot capsule ready to be loaded into the crew slot of a combat frame. Elpida couldn’t see anything but blank metal. She wasn’t even wearing a pilot suit. A downed capsule would have kept her in touch with Telokopolis via anything left functioning, even radio if entanglement was interrupted. A capsule would at least have reached out to the rest of her cadre. A capsule would have felt like a piece of home, even when dead.

Instead she was naked and cold, alone in the dark.

Was this her punishment? A final humiliation for keeping the cadre out of the last two years of politics. For keeping her sisters above the division and conflict in the Civitas. The Covenanters had never liked the program; they’d always voiced suspicion of far-ranging patrols, of the experimental combat frames — not to mention the process of creating the cadre in the first place. No Covenanter had ever called Elpida unnatural, at least not to her face, but it took a fool not to notice the tone of debate in the Civitas. And that was before the coup.

She didn’t care. None of the cadre cared about politics, except maybe Howl. Stupid, beautiful, impossible Howl.

Was the Covenanter victory not complete until she and the rest of the clone-litter were interred underground, not even afforded a proper trial? Was this her execution?

Execution — the word stung like an electric shock.

Memory flooded back like a branding iron inside Elpida’s chest: the long weeks confined in a spire-cell; being marched down a corridor by men who kept greensuit hoods on, as if they were beyond the city walls, as if the war had come home; kneeling; a cold muzzle against the back of her head.

A flare of red pain. Then nothing.

Elpida stifled a second scream by biting the meat of her own hand. She drew blood, hot iron on her dry tongue.

This didn’t make any sense. How had she gotten here? This wasn’t a medical pod, there were no cirgeon-machines, only this greasy amniotic gunk clinging to her skin.

She felt as if she’d surfaced from that cold fluid, risen from deep dreams she couldn’t recall.

And the others, the rest of her cadre, her pack-mates and comrades, where were they? The other two dozen vat-grown girls she’d grown up alongside and shared everything with, her responsibility and her purpose, her co-pilots who knew each other inside and out, whose bodily smells she knew better than her own — where were they? Silla, Metris, Howl, where were they? Her closest, her partners, her lieutenants, where were they? Howl – where was Howl? She needed help more than ever, she needed to scream at the top of her lungs and hear her closest council scream back. She needed to hear the private clade-cant the Civitas and the Legion and even Old Lady Nunnus had always tried to stop them using. She needed the animal noises from their shared childhood, the private noises nobody outside the cadre knew about.

When the Covenanters had turned a spire seeing-room into a cell, the cadre had huddled together in a corner, sleeping in a tight-knit pile for warmth and comfort, like back when they were children. Elpida had tried to keep order, keep their spirits up. She’d posted a guard, had the cadre sleep in shifts, even tried to keep up a sparring schedule. Everyone had still looked to her for leadership.

Despite everything, they had still called her Commander. Even Howl had followed her lead without complaint at long last, and slept in her arms, right there in front of everybody else.

But one by one they’d all been taken away before her, marched out of that cell and off into the dark to cement the rule of the new Civitas. And she’d known. When those men had pressed a muzzle to the back of her skull, she’d known that everyone else had gone on ahead.

Elpida bit into the flesh of her own hand and howled a wordless sound which could never encompass all those names. She came within a hair’s breadth of madness.

Then the screaming started.

Not her own — that choked off before it could be born, mad grief dying on the vine. From beyond the walls of her new prison came a high-pitched cry of pain, a young voice lost in the dark, followed by the unmistakable sound of flesh crumpling against the floor. A second voice joined the first, wailing in urgent panic. Then a third: a deep, hard sobbing. A fourth voice started laughing the hysterical laughter of the void, laughing so as not to scream, broken by hiccups and heaving breaths.

An alarm shrieked, as if the screaming had woken a machine, pulsing out a wave of sound. But it couldn’t smother those voices.

Elpida’s sisters, her cadre, they were all gone. She knew their voices too well to mistake anybody else for them, from Howl’s habitual cackle-bark to Arry’s cold and measured whispers. She knew that wasn’t them screaming out there.

But it was screaming, all the same.

Elpida’s training dragged its vestments back on, tattered and torn into a new and unfamiliar shape. The Covenanters had taken everything from her, Telokopolis had turned more hostile than the worst of the green deeps beyond, and Legionaries with guns had become more dangerous than any Silico construct. She had died, she had felt death shatter the back of her skull, burning red. But yet, she lived.

This time she would not die whimpering in a metal box while somebody else screamed for help.

Elpida took a deep breath and filled her lungs. The coffin could only contain so much oxygen, but she needed to think. She wasn’t even wearing a pilot suit, let alone a proper greensuit and hardshell. She was unarmed, empty-handed, naked. She wouldn’t last five seconds on foot against some Silico monster from beyond the walls of Telokopolis, but she had no other plan. At least she’d die on her feet.

First she had to get out of this box. She pulled one fist back as far as possible, dipping into the layer of cold slime. If she banged on the lid then perhaps one of the people out there would hear. Perhaps they could reach a release mechanism before they were overwhelmed by whatever they were screaming at.

But as she pulled back her fist, Elpida found the source of the faint blue glow; an analogue control panel was set into the metal to the left of her head.

It was tiny, a waterproof eight-button keypad beneath a miniature screen the colour of lead.

The symbols on the keypad and the words on the screen were not in a language she knew, neither Upper-Spire nor Skirts. She didn’t recognise the script. Some kind of Silico writing? But then a spike of pain bloomed inside Elpida’s eyes and head, forcing her to squint and blink.

When she opened her eyes, the keypad was a standard base-8, with numbers she could read — and the words on the screen were legible.

‘A soldier? Don’t make me laugh, dear. At my age, laughing hurts like hell. You’ll eat each other before the end, like all the rest.’

Elpida blinked. The words changed.

‘Good luck, dead thing.’

Another spike of optical pain. She screwed up her eyes, blinking away flakes of dried slime. When she cleared her vision and the pain faded, the words on the screen said ‘cycle complete’. They did not change again.

Compromised, or hallucinating? Neither was good news. If Elpida survived the next few minutes, she knew she had to get her mind-machine interface linked to a clean bank, to flush out any unwanted passengers. She wriggled a hand into the greasy slime behind her neck, following an old reflex to feel for the uplink slot at the base of her skull — but she couldn’t find it.

The Covenanters had shot her in the head, shattered her skull. Why would the uplink be there any more?

That idea was too much to process, threatening to drag her back down into screaming madness.

Practical concerns first.

Elpida couldn’t move her left arm at the necessary angle to hit the keys, so she had to work her right arm over her body. Something cold and hard dragged across her belly as she did, a sensation like metal moving inside her flesh. She gritted her teeth to keep from screaming, focusing on the cries from beyond her metal box. Check the arm later.

She mashed the keypad at random, fingers slipping in the oily slime, hoping to force an emergency release or reset function. The keys yielded, soft and sticky, but nothing happened. The words on the tiny screen did not change. The lid of the coffin stayed shut. The voices outside continued to scream and sob and laugh.

Plan B: shout for help. She filled her aching lungs with a deep breath — but if she made noise then she might attract unwanted attention as well. If she was to make any difference here, wherever here was, she had to be unexpected and quick on her feet. The cry for help died on her lips.

Howl would have known she needed help, without having to ask. Howl would have been at her back, to hold her up. Howl was dead.

Elpida finally screamed at the lid of the coffin, rage and frustration and loss. She slammed a fist against the metal.

And somebody answered. From outside her metal box somebody thumped back, or stumbled against a corner, or just banged the container in passing. That awful, lost laughter was suddenly close, as if the source was right over the lid of her coffin. Then it danced away again.

A heavy mechanical clunk ran through the metal. Elpida froze, heart soaring with relief, then racing with adrenaline. She needed to be ready for a fight, bare-handed. She flexed her muscles in sequence and found them aching, sore, and stiff, as if she’d run a marathon a day earlier.

The lid of the metal box lifted away from her face with a slender hydraulic hiss. A rim of dark red light stabbed beneath the rising lid. The pounding pulse of the alarm filled her ears. The screaming was suddenly raw, close, no longer muffled by metal walls. Elpida braced herself to leap out as soon as the lid was clear.

But then it stopped. Barely twelve inches of gap between the lid and the sides of her metal prison. Hydraulic mechanisms creaked and spluttered.

Stillborn, trapped in the womb.

Elpida pulled her knees up to her chest, the joints screaming as if she’d been kneeling for hours, and then kicked the underside of the lid with both feet.

The metal shuddered like a cracked bell, but refused to shift. Elpida roared at the top of her lungs and kicked again, and again, and again, using her body like a battering ram until her heels ached and her legs muscles were on fire. She lost count by the time she kicked the lid off.

It fell to one side and crashed to the floor with a clatter loud enough to wake the dead.

Elpida grabbed the sides of her coffin and leapt out into a cacophony of living machinery and naked flesh.

Next Chapter

Welcome to Necroepilogos!

I don’t have much to say yet, except that I very much hope you’re enjoying this opening. There’s lots more to come. Each chapter of this story will be roughly 2k-2.5k words, released on Saturdays. As soon as I’ve got some decent backlog and I’m up to speed, I aim to start releasing chapters on Saturdays and Wednesdays.

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

Patreon!

At current, this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 3.5k words. This will increase! I don’t really expect anybody to subscribe to this yet; feel free to wait until there’s a nice big backlog to read for subscribing.

There’s no TopWebFiction link or anything yet, since I haven’t submitted the story for approval. It’s a bit early for reviews, too. But feel free to leave a comment if you like! Thank you for reading, I hope you return for more.