Content Warnings

None this chapter.

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“El-pi-daaaaa! Hiiiii! Hi-hi-hi-hiiiii!”

The voice screeched from Pheiri’s cockpit speakers, external broadcast processed into raw audio.

“It’s you, it’s you, it’s youuuu! I can’t believe I found you again so quick and easy, but you just shine so briiiight. Ahhhh, I can’t help myself anymore! Look, look look look, I’m being a good girl for you, okay? I’m being a super duper extra good girl, all for you, okay? All those catty bitches and filthy sluts who’ve been sent to mess with you? I’m keeping them bottled up! That’s right, all by little old me! You can thank me later, any which way you want. And I think you know the way I want. Mwah mwah mwah mwah! Byeeeee!”

Lykke’s voice ricocheted off every surface in the cockpit, crackly with interference, bouncing and breathless. She signed off with a barrage of sticky wet kisses.

Elpida reacted to the facts, not the tone. “Kaga, can we pinpoint that signal? Can we establish encrypted comms? Where is she?”

Kagami was speechless. Sky was spluttering. Shilu said nothing. Atyle purred with wordless approval. Elpida resisted a brief urge to slap the arm of her seat; this was not the time for shock over her sexual mores.

Ha! Howl spat laughter in the back of Elpida’s head. They don’t get it, Elps. They never will. They weren’t like us.

Pheiri, thankfully, was unruffled by the enthusiasm of Lykke’s message. Trust another child of Telokopolis to understand. His screens and displays rapidly cycled through external views of the storm-torn city, overlaying the horizon with visual processing algorithms, sorting through the morass of broken concrete and black mold, searching for the source of the signal, for a human figure amid the chaos, for a bright spot of high-density nanomachines. Elpida’s eyes flickered back and forth across the screens, though Pheiri didn’t need any help. Lykke’s white dress would stand out like a shaft of sunlight in this riven landscape of grey-black sludge and disintegrating concrete, against the mountainous background of the graveworm.

One of Pheiri’s lower screens was still pulsing with the red-washed warning.

///ALERT
///nanomachine control locus detection POSITIVE

“Kagami!” Elpida snapped. “Focus. Can we reply? Yes or no?”

Kagami huffed, hard and sharp. “Return broadcast? No, no we can’t! Not unless you want everything else out there to hear us too. Pheiri can’t find her, there’s no sign of her, or any other Necromancers. The nanomachine control locus signal is … everywhere and nowhere, and fuck knows what that means for your doxy out there, Commander—”

“She’s in the network,” Shilu said. “Just beneath the surface.”

Kagami twisted in her seat, pulling at the straps, to glare at Shilu. “And what the fuck does that mean?! It’s not the fucking sea! She can’t poke a periscope up out of the waves!”

“That is exactly what she can do,” said Shilu.

Atyle purred. “A swimmer in the sea of souls, where all else sink.”

“Ugh!” Kagami threw both hands in the air, forgetting that she was wired into Pheiri with her left. She hissed with pain and thumped back into her seat. “What did that even—” She stopped with a hiss; a little red light on the comms console was blinking. “She’s calling again. Elpida? Do you want everybody to hear this one too, or should I keep this dribbling love letter for your ears only, hm?”

“Put her on speakers.”

Lykke’s voice filled the cockpit again.

“It’s a lot more difficult than I thought, Elpi! There’s seven of them, you hear that? I’ll repeat it, to make sure it gets through your big chunk of metal there. Seven seven seven seven! Count it, write it down, remember it in that perfectly formed skull of yours, whatever. I’m keeping them penned in, but there’s only one of me and I’m so delicate and easily bent these days, you made certain of that.” Lykke panted, rough and raw, like her throat was clotted with blood and mucus. Was that just a simulation of her emotional state, or a reflection of her condition within the network, fighting a one-on-seven battle? Elpida wanted to sigh; the intel was invaluable, but she had not asked for Lykke’s self-sacrifice. “I don’t know how long I can go like this, but I’ll go as long as I can, you know? Edge all these bitches until they’re ready for you to finish them off! Just don’t do them as good as you did me. I’ll get so jealous it’ll make me sick—”

Lykke’s voice cut off with a squeal of machine-sound, like a manual data connection ripped out at the socket.

One of Pheiri’s screens flashed red. The text refreshed with a rapid stamp of letters.

///nanomachine control locus detection POSITIVE
///nanomachine control locus count point: 2
///determine physical

One of the larger screens in the cockpit jerked to show a fresh viewpoint, about five hundred meters out, at Pheiri’s eleven o’clock, where several large chunks of concrete clung to a shattered skeleton of structural steel, perhaps a length of tower block that had fallen all as one when the hurricane winds had hurled it down. The mass of concrete and steel formed the highest point for quite a way around. Layers of black mold lapped at the base of the formation, creeping higher in lazy fronds and feelers of sticky sable.

A figure stood at the summit, outlined against the sky. Pheiri zoomed in on another screen, for manual identification, overlaying the image with nanomachine density and signal readouts.

A Necromancer, no doubt about it.

Too tall for a baseliner, delicate and willowy but expanded beyond human proportions, eleven or twelve feet of frame clad in a white dress, flawless and clean. Silver-blonde hair hung in a smooth and glossy wave, like a waterfall of shimmering mercury, untouched by the wind. Bare feet, taloned hands, slender forearms. The face had once been an expressionless mask, but bright green eyes gave away the truth, raw and red from hours of frustrated weeping.

“That’s her!” Sky spat. “That’s the cunt we fought, that’s her, that’s Lykke!”

“No,” Elpida said. “That’s Perpetua. That’s the Necromancer I met.”

The bitch came back for seconds! Howl laughed.

Kagami growled through clenched teeth. “So much for Lykke keeping them all penned in the network. Fuck! Pheiri, why aren’t we—”

Perpetua lifted one bare foot, stepping off the summit and into thin air, off her high ground, to plummet to the city’s new plain of churned concrete. Elpida opened her mouth, about to issue an order for Pheiri to move. This was it, this was the pursuit they’d all been preparing for; time to play chicken with seven Necromancers and see who could get closer to the graveworm without risking annihilation.

A white blur crossed the image and smashed into Perpetua’s side, like a meteor of sun-dappled sand.

Pheiri’s external cameras snapped outward to catch the redirected fall. Two figures were locked in a grapple, tearing at each other as they plunged toward the ground.

Lykke, bright blonde hair streaming out behind her, legs locked around Perpetua’s waist, grinning wide and gnashing her teeth, riding Perpetua to the grey concrete and flood-waters and black mold below. Perpetua’s face warped into a mask of howling frustration, hands hooked into talons, ripping at Lykke’s sun-kissed dress, trying to tear out her eyes. But Lykke was laughing and whooping and pushing Perpetua’s head down as if pinning her to the floor.

Lykke’s voice broke in again, screeching from the comms, blurred by the roar of rushing wind.

“Remember it’s all for you, Elpida! Don’t forget that I’m doing this! Don’t you leave me behind, you saucy little minx you, don’t you leave me behind, or I’ll come—”

Lykke and Perpetua hit the ground like a pair of pebbles cast into a pool of oil. No impact, no crash, no displaced matter. The pair of Necromancers just vanished, as if the concrete and water and black mold had swallowed them up.

///signal lost
///confirm zero zero zero

>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE

Pheiri’s alert flickered off. Red screens softened back to glowing green.

Silence filled the cockpit, broken by Kagami’s shaky breathing and the steady beat of Pheiri’s nuclear heart.

Elpida reached out with her left hand and patted an open space on Pheiri’s internal bulkheads, between one cockpit console and the next. “Hold. Everybody hold position. Well done, Pheiri.”

“Fuck did they go?” Sky muttered. “The fuck did they go?”

“Back into the network,” said Shilu.

“Yeah, but. Their … bodies?” Sky sounded offended.

“Nanomachine dispersal,” Shilu answered. “Their local matrices were formed from local materials, likely ad-hoc. Easy to disperse upon re-contact, with the right network permissions. Lykke just dunked her, pretty much.”

Sky sighed. “Great. Just add water, instant abominations.”

“Don’t need water,” Shilu said.

Sky sighed again, worse.

Kagami turned to look at Elpida, her face a thin mask of broken patience, eyes almost bulging. “Commander. Lykke, the Necromancer, and you. In the network. What exactly … what did you do?”

“I told you,” Elpida said. “She and I came to an understanding. She’s not quite on our side, not openly declared for Telokopolis, but she’s developed a personal attachment to me. I didn’t expect her to fight for us, not like that.”

In the back of Elpida’s head, Howl snorted, None of them are gonna settle for that, Elps. You gotta rip the bandage off.

We’re in the middle of a very delicate situation. If Perpetua got through, other Necromancers could do the same. We need to stay alert. Besides, it’s not important.

They’re blowing off steam, Elps. Goggling at their big pilot slut of a Commander. Let ‘em have some fun. Fuck, they’ll probably respect you more for it.

Right now?

No better time to bond than in battle, eh?

“Developed a personal attachment to you?” Kagami scoffed. “Is that what you called it, back in Telokopolis? ‘Developing personal attachments’ up in each other’s cunts? Am I the only one who heard that fucking broadcast?” She wrenched herself around in her chair, pointing at Sky, Atyle, and Shilu. “You aren’t all pretending to be deaf, are you? Are you? Don’t make me get Victoria up here.” She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned back to Elpida again. “Well? Are you going to call that what it is?”

Elpida opened her mouth to repeat the truth — she and Lykke had come to an understanding. But Howl grabbed her lips and tongue, and twisted her mouth into a grin.

“Elps fucked her brains out,” Howl said. “Nasty style.”

Sky burst out laughing. “You made her your bitch! That shape-shifting nightmare thing, and you made her your bitch! Holy shit, Commander. I knew there must be a reason everybody here follows you. Holy shit. Hahaha!”

Elpida sighed. Howl cackled along inside her head. Atyle murmured an approving noise.

Kagami stared, eyes bugging out. “You had … intercourse, real physical intercourse, with a Necromancer.”

“In the network,” Elpida said. “So, actually, no, it wasn’t physical. And it worked, didn’t it? She’s holding off seven other Necros for us, right now.”

Kagami threw up one hand and turned back to the bank of screens. “All right, fine! The Commander ‘did it’ with a Necromancer. Great. What do we do now?”

Elpida took half a second to clear her head.

She had not expected Lykke to do this. She had left enough slack to account for the possibility of Lykke’s intervention, but nothing specific. The turncoat Necromancer was a wildcard; Elpida had no way to communicate with her, let alone enough faith to rely on her, but Lykke’s personal fascination with Elpida was undeniably real. Elpida had not accounted for the possibility that Lykke might derail the entire plan without asking.

Irritating little thing, ain’t she? Howl growled. I think I like her more now.

“Shilu,” Elpida said. “Do you think Lykke can really hold off all those Necromancers inside the network?”

“Not indefinitely,” said Shilu.

“Then for how long? If you don’t know, your best estimate is fine. A rough guess, anything you can give me.”

Shilu drew in a deep breath, staring at Pheiri’s screens, her soft brown face tinted green beneath the scrolling data-reams. “One against seven is an impossible match-up between Necromancers, at least at the data level of the network. But Lykke was never normal, and whatever you’ve done to her—”

“Laid some pipe in her!” Sky cheered.

“—has disrupted her limitations and permissions, though I don’t get how.”

“Jailbroken that puss-aayyyyy,” Sky said. “Fuck me. Or maybe don’t. Don’t wanna end up like that, thanks. No offence, Commander, you just ain’t my type.”

Kagami jerked in her chair. “Will you shut the fuck up! Let her talk! Shut up!”

Sky raised her hands and rolled her eyes, still smirking.

Elpida decided not to intervene. After hours of creeping progress through the shattered ruins of the corpse-city, on the tail of all that time spent trapped in the tomb, everybody was on edge, desperate for the release and clarity of combat. Paradoxically enough, Lykke’s help had stretched that tension even further. There would be no pressure valve for the crew, not yet.

Maybe not at all, if Lykke was good enough.

Elpida waited a few seconds to let the silence settle. “Shilu, you were saying?”

“Lykke’s permissions and nature have been self-adjusted,” Shilu continued. “She may be able to hold off seven Necromancers within the network for some time, but they may adapt in the same way, by learning from her. We might have minutes. We may have hours. My personal estimation of Lykke is … not reliable anymore.”

Elpida nodded a thank you. “Right, thank you. Lykke has bought us time, but the plan remains the same. We hold position, wait for the Necromancers, hope Lykke weakens them. Kaga? Pheiri?”

Kagami snorted. “As if we have any other options. Fuck. Fuck this.”

“Everyone stay sharp, stay ready. As Shilu said, we may have only minutes.” Elpida keyed her comms headset; Victoria answered a moment later. Elpida quickly repeated her orders; Victoria passed the message on to the others, who had not gotten the full picture from Pheiri’s more limited information capacity back in the crew compartment. “And stay frosty, Vicky. We may have to move at a moment’s notice.”

“Right. Sure thing, Commander. Hurry up and wait, I can do that. We can do that all day.”

“Good. Call me if you need anything. I’ll check in every ten minutes.”

“Right, of course. But, uh … Elpi, can I … can I ask … ”

“Go ahead, Vicky. I know the question.”

“Did you really fuck a Necromancer? I don’t mean any offence or anything, I just didn’t think … I dunno, actually, I dunno what I was thinking.”

“For a given definition of fuck, sure, we fucked. There was a lot of violence involved.”

“Violence?” Vicky paused. Her mouth made a dry click. “You mean … simulated violence, right? In the network?”

“Yes.”

A sigh. Vicky sounded exhausted, but then she chuckled. “Well, uh. Well done, I guess. Get everybody into Telokopolis by any means necessary, right?”

“Vicky, focus.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course. Focus. You got it, Commander. Vicky out.”

Elpida terminated the connection.

“Alright,” she said. “Nobody get too comfy. This reprieve might lift at any second.”

Seconds ticked by, growing into minutes.

Elpida focused on the screens, watching Pheiri’s eyes from the inside as he scanned and re-scanned the landscape. He showed only a fraction of what he saw, purely for the benefit of the zombies tucked safely away inside his crew compartment, giving them a representative slice of his senses. He showed rotating views of the ruined city, the mile after mile after mile of pulverised concrete and slopping flood-waters, slowly being filled and covered and engulfed by creeping layers of black mold. Processing overlays ran constantly, tinting the video feeds with a dozen different colours, recording and measuring and packaging everything into raw data, scrolling by on Pheiri’s other screens.

The light inside the cockpit gave everybody a ghostly green pallor. Elpida glanced around at the others, as naturally as she could, trying not to draw their attention.

>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE

Kagami kept shifting in her seat, then started to wiggle one of her bionic legs, bouncing it up and down. She muttered under her breath, eyes following patterns on the screens that Elpida couldn’t see, or else patterns inside her own visual cortex, Pheiri’s data wired into her brain via the makeshift uplink. Shilu said nothing, face an unreadable mask, motionless as a statue. Sky started to chew her fingernails; a curious habit for somebody who had travelled in far more hazardous conditions than this, in spacecraft beyond earth’s atmosphere.

Atyle closed her eyes and went to sleep, or at least pretended to. Elpida let that pass without comment. There was no practical reason to keep everybody alert, only morale.

>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE

Minutes crept up into the double digits. Elpida focused on her breathing, kept herself sharp and ready — but for what? If Lykke’s gambit failed, Pheiri would be the first to know, and the first to react. In the back of Elpida’s head, Howl grumbled and growled to herself. Howl had never enjoyed waiting, not for anything.

Elpida caught herself cupping the stump of her right arm. The wound still ached beneath the fresh bandages. If she focused on regrowing it right then, would her nanomachine biology begin assigning resources to the process? If they were stuck here for hours, perhaps that would be a good use of time.

No, she needed to stay sharp. Pheiri might need her. She could not yet know how.

>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE

As minutes wore on, the black mold grew.

Whatever the stuff was, it was drawing on a vast amount of nanomachine resources, spread over a very wide area. The wet, shiny, sticky-looking mold kept growing until it covered almost the entire landscape of the shattered city; it never quite absorbed every scrap and sliver of concrete, leaving the view as a mottled grey-black hide of strips and stripes. The stuff flowed back and forth as it expanded, revealing patches of wet concrete here, stretches of twisted metal there, some of it half-digested, as if the mold was going to work on the material beneath. Thin rain, the final dregs of the storm, coated the mold in a layer of moisture, giving it a sheen like oil on water, snatches of purple-hued rainbow shimmering from the ruined corpse of the city.

When the mold reached any given high point — the tips of a ruined stretch of fallen skyscraper, or even just the highest humps of heaped rubble — it kept going, hardening and darkening as if flush with water and pulp beneath the surface, extending into horns and curls of blackened matter, twisting toward the sky in geometric spirals.

After thirty minutes of waiting, the tallest of the growths was at least eight feet high, and still going. A forest of high-ground mold-trees was sprouting on every side, like bamboo groves down in the buried fields beneath Telokopolis.

“I hate weird nanomachine shit,” Kagami hissed, “almost as much as I hate waiting.”

“Is it dangerous?” Elpida asked, keeping her voice low.

Kagami shrugged and gestured at one of Pheiri’s data-readout screens. “It’s literally just mold, Commander.”

Sky snorted. “Yeah, and we’re literally just flesh and blood. Not.”

Kagami clenched her teeth. Elpida made a mental note — Sky and Kagami were unlikely to get on well.

“Can we maintain this position?” Elpida asked. “If it keeps growing, will it interfere with Pheiri?”

“It’s not touching Pheiri,” Kagami grunted. “Not interested in him at all.”

One of Pheiri’s screens flickered with fresh readout data — moisture levels, cell measurements, chemical composition, nanomachine density. Elpida couldn’t understand all the details, but she got the general idea.

“Just mold, right,” Elpida said. “Thank you, Pheiri.”

“It’s staying well clear of his tracks,” Kagami said. She gestured with her right hand, seemingly at nothing. “And they don’t seem to be having any trouble with it either. Whatever else it’s doing, it’s not eating zombies.”

“Them? Kagami, explain.”

“You can’t— tch!” Kagami tutted and sighed, then twitched her left hand, the one plugged into Pheiri.

Two of Pheiri’s screens jumped to fresh views, seen from above and far away — real-time video from Hope, floating beyond the twitching corpse of the storm. The tomb dominated both views, far to Pheiri’s rear, back along the route they’d taken through the city. Tiny dots were swarming out of the tomb’s main entrance, spreading into the broken landscape beyond. A particularly thick and cohesive spear of collective motion was heading right toward Pheiri, perhaps an hour or two behind his current position.

Revenants. The zombies who had taken shelter inside the tomb, and the ones who had been armed and fed and protected by Elpida, by Pheiri, by Telokopolis.

Elpida frowned. “What are they doing? Are they trying to follow us?”

“Hope can’t get good enough resolution to tell,” Kagami said. “The last of the storm and the rain is still blocking her cameras, stopping her from getting close. But yes, Commander, it looks like we have an honour guard on the way.” Kagami’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Well done.”

“Shit,” Elpida hissed. “We don’t want anybody else getting caught up in this. Why? Why would they try to follow us?”

Shilu answered. “You gave them food, protection, and purpose.”

Elpida shook her head. This wasn’t part of the plan. Lykke’s intervention had thrown off all her assumptions.

“How’s Iriko?” Elpida asked. “At least tell me she’s still keeping clear.”

Kagami snorted. “Keeping clear and eating well.”

Another display filled with a new view of the city, another high-angle eye-in-the-sky shot from Hope, refreshing every half-second. This one was much better resolution; Iriko was much closer to Pheiri’s current position.

Iriko — visible as a massive blob covered in sheets of armoured scale, like a slug plated in mirrored steel — was gorging herself on the black mold, slurping up great masses of the stuff with every motion of her body, melting through the spiral stalagmites and swimming across slopping pools of inky muck. She flowed over the broken concrete, throwing massive chunks aside, burrowing through drifts of storm-water and twisted steel, chasing the choicest morsels of the strange growth.

“Good for her!” Sky cheered. “You go get filled up, blob-face. She’s on our side, right?”

“Right,” Kagami growled.

“That is good, yes,” Elpida said. She pointed at one of the forward views, the grey-black chaos of the city marching off toward the horizon, and the horizon rising like a mountain-range of matte steel, the graveworm like a wall at the edge of the world. “Kaga, are we close enough to the graveworm to get a clear image of it? Can we see worm-guard emerging yet?”

Kagami glanced at Elpida, eyes a touch wide. “No, Pheiri’s too far out. His cameras don’t have enough resolution. And the landscape is in the way, not to mention all this mold crap.”

“Not Pheiri. Hope. Ask her.”

Kagami swallowed. Shilu moved in her chair, made it creak; Elpida realised that was the first time Shilu had moved since Pheiri had stopped. Atyle opened her eyes and sat up.

“What?” Sky said. “What? What is it? You’re all acting like … ”

“We’ve not seen the graveworm up close,” Elpida said. “Only from a distance, like this. Kaga?”

Kagami settled back into her seat. She chewed on her lower lip. “Hope is repositioning. Give her a few moments.”

Shilu said, “I’ve never seen a graveworm up close. The worm-guard make it impossible.”

“Me, neither,” rasped a familiar metallic voice from the rear of the cockpit.

Elpida turned in her seat just in time to see Serin clamber from Pheiri’s spinal corridor, straightening up in the open space of the cockpit. Half a dozen pale, spidery hands anchored her to the walls and floor. Red eyes glowed above her metal mask.

“Serin, you’re meant to be strapped in,” Elpida said. “We might have to move at any moment.”

“Few bones to bruise,” Serin purred. She ambled forward, keeping herself anchored at multiple points with her hands, until she could lean over Kagami’s shoulder and peer at the screens. Sky leaned aside, away from Serin’s spindly bulk, wrinkling her nose at the fungal scent from beneath Serin’s tattered black robes.

Kagami spat, “I don’t care if you’re immune to fucking bullets, you walking mushroom. Sit down and strap in!”

“I prefer—”

“If you go flying and smash into my head, or one of Pheiri’s screens, I will personally sauté you. Sit down!”

Serin chuckled low in her throat, like meat clogged with metal. She eased back into a seat and looped four arms through the various straps and buckles. She cast a glance at Elpida, but Elpida just shrugged. Kagami was right.

“Hope is transmitting now,” Kagami muttered, eyes gone inward. “Here’s the … I don’t know what to call it. Foothills?”

The single largest display in the cockpit flickered to a new image.

A mountainside of metal filled the screen — dark grey like igneous rock, pitted and corroded and blemished in vast patches, as if rust had bloomed and faded in a quasi-biological process. The metal was ridged and spiralled and whorled in a dizzyingly regular pattern, with scoops and rises hundreds of meters deep, some of them filled with rainwater or pulverised concrete slurry, or even whole chunks of buildings, all the material which was swept up as the graveworm had moved through the city.

Scale was difficult to make out. A few shattered buildings lay in the foreground, dusted with the still-growing mold-stalks. This was the very base of the graveworm’s leviathan body, the point at which it met the ground. It towered over the ruins, up and up and up, taller even than the spire of Telokopolis.

Elpida felt the tiniest touch of dislocation. She clamped down on that feeling. “Kagami, how … how large of an area are we looking at here?”

“It’s just a tiny segment of the worm,” Kagami said. Her voice seemed very small. “Hope is having trouble getting a wide-angle shot of the whole thing, it’s … too big.”

“Fucking big ass motherfucker,” Sky muttered.

“Too big for anybody to control,” Shilu said. “With nanomachine forges on the inside. It has all it needs to rebirth the world.”

“Even your Central, Necromancer?” Serin purred.

“Exactly.”

“The seed of a new god,” Atyle said.

“Don’t,” Kagami snapped. “Just fucking don’t. It’s a machine. It’s a bloody big machine, that’s all. Here, this … ”

A fresh image snapped onto the screen, but it was almost meaningless with distance, taken from too high up, zoomed out too far. A vast mountain range of grey metal lay amid a plain of grey and black. At such distances size and scale meant nothing. The graveworm was a dark grey lozenge against a background of ruin.

Elpida’s mind snapped into sharp focus. Howl did the same, sitting bolt upright in the back of Elpida’s head.

Elps, shit, where—

“I don’t see any worm-guard,” Elpida said. “Where are they?”

Kagami shrugged. “Sheltering under the curvature of the body, I suspect. Hope can’t get the right angle to see them, but they’re probably—”

“The storm is over,” Elpida said. “Any danger to them passed over an hour ago. Where are they?”

“Ahhhhhh,” Serin purred. “A fly in the soup.”

“Oh shit,” said Sky. “Shit shit shit. That means your whole plan is fucked, right?”

Elpida held up a hand for silence. “Why would the worm-guard not emerge? Shilu, you’re the most experienced here. Why not?”

For a long moment, Shilu said nothing. Then, “Three options. One, the graveworm is deploying them against a greater threat. I don’t think that’s happening though, those high-angle shots don’t show any fresh worm-guard streaming away from the worm. Two, the worm is holding them in reserve in anticipation of a greater threat. Three, the worm is dead.”

“Is it dead?” Elpida glanced at Kagami.

Kagami spread one hand in a confounded gesture. “As if I can tell?!”

“Alright,” Elpida said. “We don’t know what’s going on. We need intel. Playing chicken might still work, but we can’t be sure, we need—”

One of Pheiri’s screens pulsed with warning red.

///ALERT
///nanomachine control locus detection POSITIVE
///nanomachine control locus count point: 1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 … 6
///signal return positive count
///ALERT
///ALERT
///ALERT

Pheiri’s screens tracked all six Necromancers as they surfaced.

They spun out of the ground like animated dirt, human forms pushing upward through a membrane of concrete and water, grey grit and black mold tightening and bursting as bodies stepped forth. One plunged upward from within a pool of storm-water and concrete slurry, as if diving through the water’s surface, filthy liquid streaming from a body sharp as a knife. Another straightened up on a high outcropping of twisted steel, as if disgorged by the fronds and stalks of black mold, heavy shoulders pushing into the open. A third stepped straight from a piece of upright concrete, the surface clinging to the edges of her body as she strode free, dress a concrete ghost, colours flowing into place.

Six Necromancers broke through Lykke’s efforts, out into the world. Every one was unique; each one glowed like a bonfire of high-density nanomachine activity on Pheiri’s sensors.

///nanomachine control locus count point: 7

Perpetua rose from the ground less than fifty feet from Pheiri’s nose. For a split-second she was made of concrete and mold, but then she was whole, herself, unmistakable. Her white dress was untouched, not a hair out of place. Her face was twisted with a lifetime of frustration and disgust, her eyes ringed red from crying, or worse.

Perpetua opened her mouth, to speak or broadcast or pass sentence.

Howl grabbed Elpida’s lips and tongue, reached out to slap the nearest of Pheiri’s consoles, and whooped at the top of her lungs.

“Engines to full, little brother! Straight ahead and straight down the middle! Let’s run this bitch right back into the ground!”

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It’s Lykke! She’s helping! Hooray!

Well. She helped, past tense. For a minute or two. Well done, Necromancer. Clearly she’s angling for some praise from Elpida. I mean, who wouldn’t be? Elpida headpats mm …

Behind the scenes, things are going very well. This arc might indeed end up a little longer than 10 chapters, but that’s okay, I think the wave is a good one for surfing, so I’ll let Elpida and the others handle it from here. But mostly Pheiri at the moment. Vroom vroom.

Also this week, I have some art from the discord! I have something very special, in fact. Remember a few arcs ago, when Iriko tried to talk to those stray zombies deep in the tomb? And she extruded a pseudopod, and tried to make it pretty? And the result was, shall we say, a little uncanny? Well. Iriko’s Pseudo Doll, (by cubey) captures that attempt perfectly. How fitting for the spooky month! (I love Iriko!)

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for being here and reading my little story; I am so grateful that you’ve enjoyed Necroepilogos so far, and I’ve still got so much more tale to tell! Couldn’t do it without all of you! Elpida has so many more miles to walk (ride?). Seeya next chapter! Until then!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Pheiri inched through the gates of the tomb, out into the teeth of the withering storm.

Elpida watched from inside the control cockpit. The screens and displays showed dozens of views from beyond Pheiri’s hull, via his external cameras, lighting the cockpit with ashen backwash, shot through by the dirty white of falling hail. Nobody spoke as Pheiri crossed the threshold of the tomb, as the howling wind rose to a screaming chorus and concrete grit crunched beneath his treads. Kagami had been counting down, following Pheiri’s own estimate displayed in softly glowing machine-text; but the text was washed out by the leaden light, and Kagami had trailed off long before zero. Her right hand was gripping the arm of her seat, knuckles white. Elpida held her breath as she felt the others doing the same. Even Howl was silent, a clenched jaw in the back of Elpida’s mind.

Pheiri flashed up his progress on a side-screen, in glowing green text — millimetres vanished in a blink, replaced by centimetres for a moment, then by meter after meter, ticking upward as his massive armoured form rolled from the tomb’s mouth. His exit was flanked by pressure readings, external hull integrity responses, traction estimates, and a dozen other low-level alerts which Elpida could not fully interpret.

The wind’s volume surged, suddenly close, roaring directly against Pheiri’s hull, whistling and warbling through his weapon mounts and the hidden abscesses in his outer layers, a banshee chorus held at bay by nano-composite bone-amour and sheer body weight. Sheets of lashing rain and the hammer-drum of hailstones passed across Pheiri’s skin in a humming staccato.

Pheiri paused. The cockpit rocked gently as his tracks settled.

They were out.

Elpida found herself speechless. She had thought she understood the violence of the hurricane. She had piloted combat frames down into the deep green, into environments so far beyond human norms and survivability that releasing footage to the public was considered a serious hazard. She had fought Silico monsters, giant killing machines, things that she and her sisters could barely describe, down there in the dark beneath the world. She had considered that as the most inhospitable place imaginable, where unprotected human life would be melted away in seconds. Nothing could compare, certainly nothing in nature.

But to feel the hurricane up close was like a god screaming itself to death four feet from her skull. Pheiri’s readings were all well within his tolerances — hull integrity was untouched, internal gyroscopes and accelerometers reported no movement beyond a slight swaying of his chassis, no need to activate his shields for the comparatively soft assault of fist-sized hailstones. Pheiri had been built to slay giants, his body and his armour were more than enough to withstand the storm. But Elpida felt vulnerable in a way she never had before, barely protected from a force no amount of skill or guts or Telokopolan genetic engineering could withstand, let alone defeat. Pheiri’s armour didn’t seem like enough. Venturing out into this seemed like madness. Braving the storm seemed to pull at something deep in her gut, deeper than training or pilot genetic modifications or her own determination, deeper even than Telokopolis. She felt an undeniable urge to order Pheiri back inside the tomb, to scurry away with her tail between her legs, to wait for clear skies that would never come. This was not a force for human beings to fight, no matter what they came armed with.

Could Telokopolis have fought a hurricane and won? Elpida doubted.

And this — the wind speed just beneath two hundred and thirty miles an hour — was the dying gasp of the storm. Elpida tried to imagine what it would have felt like when the wind speeds had topped over eight hundred miles an hour.

And the view—

Hop to it, bitch-tits, Howl snapped inside Elpida’s head. Stop gawking. Get moving. Move! Show them how!

Elpida did not need telling twice. She blinked hard and bottled her awe.

“Okay, we’re out! We are out the front door!” she called, raising her left hand to slap the nearest clear patch of metal bulkhead. “Thank you, Pheiri!” She whipped her eyes across the endless chatter of readouts and sensor data; many of the external camera views were rapidly encrusting with overlays, showing everything from estimated pressure changes to the nanomachine density in falling raindrops. False colour terrain maps unfolded on fresh screens, rain and hail cleared away by algorithmic image processing, accompanied by preliminary targeting solutions for hundreds of hypothetical hostile actions. “Kaga, what’s external wind speed?”

Kagami occupied the front-most cockpit seat again, the seat where a driver might have sat when Pheiri still needed human crew. She was wired into Pheiri’s guts via the cables from her bionic hand, strapped into the seat over the bulk of her armoured coat, straight-backed and wide-eyed as she stared at the view from outside. Her mouth hung open, but she didn’t answer. Her skin looked waxy with sweat.

Elpida reached over and grabbed Kagami’s shoulder, gave it a brief squeeze. “Kagami, focus. Give me wind speed.”

The question was unnecessary; Elpida could see the wind speed readouts perfectly well, scrolling by on an upper screen. But the repeated question dragged Kagami out of her own wondrous terror. She hissed, shrugged off Elpida’s hand, then gestured vaguely at one of the data-choked external views.

“Two hundred twenty five miles an hour,” Kagami snapped. Her eyes flickered back and forth across the screens, sometimes going glassy as she looked inward at the data-streams she shared with Pheiri, her face ashen grey in the reflected light. “Sustained average, mind you. Gusts measured at … thirty to forty mph in excess of that. And we’re sheltered right now, by all … this!”

Kagami gestured at the displays, at the external camera views, at what the storm had wrought.

Pheiri had paused just past the threshold of the tomb, with his entire hull exposed to the storm’s onslaught. Between the tomb and the corpse-city itself lay the tomb’s outworks — the layer of black metal bunkers and walls and bridges and killing fields, used to either trap freshly resurrected zombies or give them a chance to escape, whatever the original purpose.

The black iron tangle of infantry-scale fortifications was drowned and choked and buried in the storm’s debris, slopping with filthy grit-filled water, littered with drifts and dunes of concrete wreckage tossed from the city by the height of the storm. Spears of steel rebar taller than Pheiri stood swaying in the wind like stalks of grass. Chunks of concrete from tower blocks lay shattered across the black metal. Silt-flows of pulverized stone and asphalt poured back and forth under the wind’s voice. All of it was blurred by a never-ending haze of pounding rain and the white static of the hailstones.

But Kagami was right; the tomb’s outworks were relatively sheltered compared to what lay beyond. The last of Kagami’s forward scouts were out there now, a trio of bulky drones pathfinding the route ahead, sticking close to the ground, anchoring themselves with tiny gravitic engines, their black hides almost invisible beneath the torrent of rain and hail.

At least the direct route through the exterior wall was still open, not yet completely blocked by rubble and concrete slurry. Elpida had been prepared for Pheiri to have to blast his way out, but the debris-filled passageway looked just about navigable, at least for something Pheiri’s size.

Beyond the wall, the sky was a roiling cauldron of black tar. Pheiri’s internal clock said it was daytime, but Elpida couldn’t spot the usual ruddy red patch that indicated the sun’s position. Even that dying fire was choked off behind the hurricane.

“Understood,” Elpida said. “Danger to Pheiri?”

One of the screens at her elbow flickered with a fresh ream of green text.

///gyroscopic stability confirm POSITIVE
///pressure differential < expected maximum tolerance
///hull integrity standard output
>proceed

You heard him, he’s good to go, Howl purred.

Elpida almost laughed, surprised at the tension inside her head.

Kagami huffed and gestured at the screen. “I agree. Mostly. Winds are down low enough that nothing is going to pick us up and throw us around. Something might fall on us, but that’s what the shields are for.” Kagami added a mutter, “In theory.”

“Good to hear it. Anything else out there?”

Kagami hissed through her teeth, scanning the screens and data readouts. “Half a city, turned to pulverized concrete and gone airborne. What do you expect, Commander? Even Pheiri can’t see through this shit. I doubt I could see through it from orbit. Yes, there’s plenty of readings, take your pick, but good luck interpreting anything.”

“Nothing alive?”

Kagami went still and quiet for a long moment before she replied. “Nothing … nothing on nanomachine readouts. Nothing zombie-sized, not that we can see. There’s something … ” Kagami squinted, gaze turning inward. “Something big, to our left. Far away to our left. Getting further away.”

“Something out in the storm?” Elpida asked. “Necromancer?”

Another one of Pheiri’s screens flashed with green text.

>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE

“No, like he says,” Kagami muttered. “Just … big.” She tutted and shook her head. “Whatever it is, it’s leaving, heading for the edge of the graveworm safe zone. Thank Luna for that. Maybe it’s just sensor ghosts, noise from the storm, a big piece of concrete, whatever. But if it’s not, well … I’m glad we didn’t come out early enough to meet it.”

A mutter came from behind Elpida — Atyle, strapped into one of the cockpit seats further back. “A handmaiden to the gods, come to watch the hatching.”

Elpida twisted in her seat. Atyle was staring at a spot on the wall. Watching the departing giant?

A particularly strong gust of wind howled against Pheiri’s hull. The cockpit swayed, perhaps by half an inch. On the opposite side to Atyle, Sky was also strapped into a seat. She blinked hard, jaw tight, swallowing a flinch. Sky was coated in sweat.

Elpida twisted back to Kagami. “All good?”

“As far as I can tell,” Kagami grunted. “Pheiri isn’t concerned.”

“Alright, then we’re good to go. Are you pulling those final drones back in?”

“Yes, yes,” Kagami sighed. “They won’t be able to endure the wind beyond the outworks here. I’m reeling them in now.”

On Pheiri’s screens the blurry dark smudges of Kagami’s drones started back toward the tank, resolving as they ploughed through the rain and hail. Kagami pulled them in and tucked them into sheltered whorls and pockets on the exterior of Pheiri’s bone armour, sheltered from the storm but ready for quick redeployment.

While she waited for the drones to return, Elpida keyed her comms headset.

Victoria answered instantly, voice clear over the short-range connection. “Commander?”

“Everyone snug back there, Vicky?”

“For now.”

Elpida pretended not to hear the fear and tension in Victoria’s voice. They had a single screen back there in the crew compartment, a tiny window onto the storm outside.

“Everything’s going smooth,” Elpida said. “We’re about to get underway. Is everyone strapped in?”

“Right, yeah. Um, I mean, yes, everyone is strapped in. Confirmed.”

“Thank you. The line to the cockpit will be clear, in case anything happens,” Elpida said. “Keep in touch.”

“I uh … I will, yeah. I understand.”

“Good. One more thing. Tell Shilu to come up front and join us in the cockpit. I want our resident Necromancer expert within shouting distance, in case we spot anything.”

“Will do, will do. Shilu, okay. Will do, Commander.”

“Keep everyone’s spirits up back there, Vicky. I need you to do that for me.”

A swallow. Victoria’s voice firmed up. “Got it. I’ll do that. Thank you, Elpi.”

Elpida closed the line. The drones were safely tucked away. She eyed the screen that displayed the readout from Pheiri’s external necromancer-detection equipment. It was updating every two seconds, text refreshing letter by letter.

>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE

Shilu appeared less than a minute later, ducking through from the spinal corridor, still wearing her human disguise. She stepped past both Atyle and Sky, took a seat close to Elpida, then dragged the safety harness across her body.

Sky said, “Do you really need a seat belt, huh?”

“Do you?” Shilu replied.

“Yeah, but like, you’re made of metal beneath that, right? What does it matter if you bang your head?”

Shilu twisted to look at Sky, grabbed a pinch of her own cheek, and pulled it tight. “Is this metal?”

Sky shrugged and looked away.

Shilu sat back. “Elpida. You wanted me here.”

Elpida indicated the screen with Pheiri’s detection readouts. “I want your knowledge and expertise. The moment we spot a Necromancer, I want your assessment, whatever you can give us.”

“Mmhmm,” Shilu grunted. “If they’re going to attack, they won’t come right away. They’ll need the storm all the way down, enough to re-establish connection with the wider network.”

“Right. Kagami, if the storm keeps weakening at this rate—”

“Then we have about two hours until it’s nothing worse than a blustery day,” Kagami said. Her eyes were wide and bloodshot when she glanced at Elpida. “Are we going to sit here yapping, or run for the worm? If we’re all going to die, I’d rather get this over with.”

Patience, patience, Howl growled, deep inside Elpida’s mind.

“Patience,” Elpida echoed. “And we’re not going to die. There’s no sense in charging the worm-guard before our opponents turn up. But yes, let’s get underway. Let’s get as close as we can.” She patted Pheiri’s bulkhead again. “Take us away, Pheiri. And keep your eyes peeled, little brother.”

>y

Pheiri crossed the tomb’s outworks at a steady crawl, descending the stepped ramp into a soup of concrete dust and storm waters, five or six feet of fluid lapping at his sides. Internal pump systems inside his structure woke with a deep, solid glugging sound, flushing silt and grit out of his track-housing, sending up a spray of vaporised water on all sides. He mounted low dunes of wrecked concrete, tilting his structure so that Elpida and the others were pushed back into their seats. Loose scree and fragmented concrete was kicked out behind him as his whole body skidded and slipped amid the debris.

Reaching the gap in the exterior wall took only a few minutes at a gentle pace. The gap was less choked than the outworks; the walls reared up either side of Pheiri, black iron sentinels watching over the way out of the tomb, their depths clogged by six feet of water.

And then he was out on the far side, shouldering past a twisted tangle of steel rebar and shattered brick, out into the open, back in the corpse-city.

Nobody spoke; silence lingered for minutes. Pheiri pressed on, nosing his way onto what had been a road, picking a likely route through the deep drifts of rubble and ruin.

The city had been pulverised. The landscape was beyond recognition. A jagged plane of grey and black chaos — buildings torn asunder and knocked apart, steel bent and buckled, brick reduced to powder, glass tuned to grit, all by the sheer power of sustained winds beyond anything which should have been possible on earth. Skyscrapers and towers had been uprooted like rotten trees and tossed through the air, lying broken where they’d fallen, shattered leviathans scattered across roads and city blocks. Smaller buildings had been scoured from their foundations, walls turned to pulp, innards minced, mixed into a gritty soup of every imaginable material, spread out like brambles. Only the hardiest and mostly deeply dug-in structures had survived, and were only visible where they occupied natural high ground — a few bunkers and other squat, well-made buildings dotted here and there, scarred and gouged by flying debris. Undoubtedly most basement and subterranean levels were intact, choked by debris and drowned by water. But the rest of the city was a sea of grey ruin and serrated steel, cut through by rushing rivers of storm-water, still pounded by an unceasing barrage of hailstones. The corpse-city had been rendered down into bone shards and gristle.

“I told you it would be … ” Kagami muttered. “Would be like this … ”

“Fuck off,” Sky muttered from the rear of the cockpit. “You ain’t seen shit like this before. This isn’t hurricane damage, it’s fucking nuclear exchange aftermath.”

Kagami grunted a bitter little laugh as Pheiri mounted a gritty dune of concrete and steel, his tracks grinding as they found purchase on the hillside of shifting debris. “Ha. More like a round of atomics would solve our biggest problem here. That’s what I’d do, blast a passageway through this crap, and don’t stop til I see soil gone to glass. Wouldn’t even need that much!”

Kagami’s voice was shaking. Sky swallowed, loudly.

“Everybody relax,” Elpida said. “Pheiri’s got this, he’s more than capable. Concentrate on staying in your seats and not bumping your heads. Let Kagami focus on helping Pheiri. Kaga.”

“On it, yes, yes,” Kagami muttered through clenched teeth. “Eyes peeled, eyes up, all that crap, yes, fine.”

Pheiri pushed on through the sea of debris, keeping to the higher ground wherever he could, tracks grinding across the drifts and dunes of pulverised concrete. The ground was uneven at best, the chunks of buildings prone to slide and settle, slipping out from beneath Pheiri’s tracks. Whenever the high ground ran out, Pheiri forded the temporary rivers of filth-choked rainwater, his hull buffeted by floating rafts of debris and hidden reefs of twisted steel. He roared back out of the waters again and again, passing forests of rebar, sludge-pits of liquefied brick, and jagged monoliths of wind-torn concrete. There was no opportunity for Elpida or the others to leave their seats now, tossed sideways and jolted upright and pushed against their straps and belts by unexpected sudden lurches. Elpida checked with Victoria every ten minutes via the comms headset, to make sure nobody back in the crew compartment was getting hurt.

Elpida felt something she had rarely experienced before, but she knew well enough to recognise — helplessness.

She trusted Pheiri with their survival, and trusted Kagami to assist him however she could. She trusted Shilu’s advice about Necromancers, perhaps against her better judgement. She trusted that Victoria had stowed everything safely, and that the others were strapped securely into their seats. She trusted Howl to let her focus. But she, Elpida, the Commander, she could do nothing but watch and wait, sitting tight in her own seat. This was nothing like piloting a combat frame through the deep green; no matter how hostile that environment had been, this was worse.

She caught herself using her left hand to gently cup the stump of her right arm. She wasn’t worrying at the fresh bandages, but she knew this behaviour might lead to minor acts of self-harm, picking at the stump, at the wound beneath.

Elps, Howl said, in the back of Elpida’s mind. It’s not easy. Fuck knows it’s not easy. You gotta let go.

I’m responsible for everyone’s safety. I’m responsible for keeping us alive.

And that’s what you’ve done, right? Howl laughed softly. You made the call, you made the decision, now Pheiri’s carrying it out. Trust our little brother. He’s got this shit covered.

I do trust him. I just …

Can’t do everything yourself, Howl snapped. I thought you’d finally figured that out.

I did. Elpida sighed, and hoped the others didn’t notice. But that doesn’t make it any easier to accept.

You’re doing great. Sit tight. Howl lapsed into silence

“How are we gonna outrun these necro-fuck things in this?” Sky muttered after about half an hour of forward progress.

Kagami snorted. “This is nothing,” she called over her shoulder. “Pheiri can go much, much faster, even in this. The ride will get considerably more bumpy when he does. And it is ‘when’, not if. Hope you picked a seat with a working headrest.”

“Fuck me,” Sky spat. “This is worse than a fucking rock-hopper ship. At least you don’t feel the void.”

Kagami barked a little laugh. “Spaceships are smooth, sure. You don’t feel the bump when something goes wrong.”

Sky groaned. Elpida wondered about the nature of space-dwellers, that two people from so far apart in history could share the same gallows humour about crossing that starry void.

Pheiri kept his sensor net extended as far as possible, peering through the sheets of rain and the barrage of hail with more than just infra-red. The contours of the shattered city were laid out in false colour on one of his screens, the rubble and ruin picked out from beneath the rain, scanned constantly for any signs of greater nanomachine density, any signs of undead life. Every two seconds the same message refreshed, glowing green letters always the same.

>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE

Thirty minutes crept by, then forty, then forty five. Elpida counted, eyes on the screens, alert for anything shaped like a human being, anything moving that wasn’t loose concrete. Howl brooded in silence in the back of Elpida’s mind, doing much the same, for all the good it would do. If a Necromancer sprouted from the ground, Pheiri would know before anybody on board.

With the possible exception of Shilu. Elpida kept one eye on her too.

As the minutes crept by, the rain grew steadily less intense, the static easing off so slowly that it was hard to notice the decline from one moment to the next. The hail trailed off completely; Elpida heard the final audible hailstone tap against Pheiri’s armour at fifty five minutes and three seconds, though smaller pieces fell for several minutes longer. Without the white static of the hail, the outlines of the city rose from the dark grey murk, visible without false colour or Pheiri’s algorithms picking real details out of the chaos. The wind howled on without pause, but the stronger gusts dribbled away, then ceased at last.

Kagami announced as the sustained wind speed dropped. “We’re down below one thirty mph. Dipping toward a hundred. Pheiri’s reporting less buffeting on his hull. Still dropping.”

Howl took control of Elpida’s mouth. “Any idea when your friends are gonna show up, cheese grater?”

“No,” said Shilu. And she didn’t say more.

As the storm finally began to die, a layer of black mold crept up from between the cracks and gaps in the vast hummocks and ridges of broken concrete, as if the kinetic impacts of the hailstones had been keeping it from spreading. At first Elpida thought it was mere shadows, but then the mold began to thicken and climb, as if soaking up the rain, crawling higher all across the landscape of shattered debris. It started to clog the temporary streams, lying in thickened mounds over the floating masses. Pheiri’s tracks tore through it with ease; the mold did not cling to him or bar his way, but began to cover everything else. Pheiri highlighted the phenomenon on a single screen, scanning the material and showing readouts of the composition. Bio-matter, spongy with motion, thick enough to chew.

“What the fuck are we watching?” Sky hissed. “What is all this shit?”

“The miracle of life after death,” Atyle said. Sky shot her a look with bared teeth.

“She’s serious,” Elpida said. “I think we’re witnessing the city’s self-repair mechanisms. That stuff is growing fast, absorbing the buildings, processing debris. Kagami, what’s the nanomachine density inside that stuff?”

“Negligible,” Kagami grunted, reaching out to tap one of Pheiri’s screens. “Wouldn’t want to risk a mouthful of it.”

“How can it be repairing the city, then?” Sky asked with a little scoff.

“Shilu?” Elpida said.

Shilu shrugged. “I was a Necromancer. I did what I was told. I have no greater insights into the nanomachine mechanisms of the world. Though … I’ve seen this happen before, on a smaller scale. You’re probably right. Self-repair.”

“Huh,” Sky grunted. “Some fucking use you are, tin can.”

Elpida held up a hand for quiet. “The storm’s died down enough. Pheiri, can we see the graveworm?”

Pheiri answered by piping his best forward-facing external camera view to one of the largest screens, up and to Kagami’s right. The view was still choked with thick sheets of rain, but thinner than before, a mist that darkened as it marched toward the black horizon. The city lay like a ripped blanket dipped in liquid concrete, jagged with outcrops of steel, being eaten by black mold.

An uneven line towered over it all, barely visible through the rain against the tarry sky, like the shadow of a mountain range.

“There she is,” Elpida said. “How close are we?”

“Close enough,” Kagami hissed. “Another half hour at this pace and we’ll be within sight of the base. No worm-guard yet, but … ” She shrugged. “Who knows when they’ll come out to play.”

“Alright, Pheiri,” Elpida said. “Take us slow, creep us in. We want to see Necromancers before we sprint. This only works if we’re baiting them.”

Kagami let out a long, slow breath. “Commander— fuck!”

Elpida almost flinched. Sky jerked in her seat. Shilu looked up, eyes quickly scanning the screens. Atyle said nothing.

“Kaga?” Elpida demanded. “What—”

Kagami sighed. Elpida instantly knew this was not an emergency, nor the arrival of a dozen Necromancers. Kagami gestured vaguely with her left hand, the one wired into Pheiri. One of Pheiri’s screens jerked and flickered with a new camera view — a distant one, to the rear, with the black stepped pyramid of the tomb dominating the view.

An indistinct blob of familiar flesh was launching itself from the exterior walls of the tomb, then snapping wide like a glider shaped to catch the wind. The blob soared upward on the remaining scraps of the hurricane, taking wing over the shattered plain of the city.

“Ah,” Elpida said.

Sky started laughing. Atyle purred with approval.

“Iriko’s following us,” Kagami grunted. “Flying. For fuck’s sake! Fool will get herself torn apart if she’s not careful.”

“What does Pheiri say?” Elpida asked. She got an answer from one of Pheiri’s screens.

///tightbeam uplink re-established
///communication protocol standard
///warning ISSUE
///warning IGNORE
///overwatch NEGATIVE engagement distance
///advise non-contact
///tightbeam uplink maintain

“Good idea,” Elpida said, patting one of Pheiri’s consoles. “Keep her in the loop, but tell her to keep away. We don’t want her getting injured in all this.”

>y

Sky snorted, then said, “You can follow all that?”

“Just about,” Elpida said. “It’s how he talks. You’ll get used to it.”

Minutes and meters crawled past in unison. Pheiri entered a canyon formed from the fallen remains of several skyscrapers, their glass all pounded to dust, their steel frames twisted and broken, creepers of black mold climbing their remains. The rain slowly died away, until it no longer drummed on Pheiri’s hull; the wind did the same, dropping below a hundred miles an hour, then below eighty, then fifty, forty, still dropping. Pheiri emerged from the long canyon of dead buildings beneath a sky just a touch lighter than before.

Elpida looked for the tell-tale ruddy-red glow of the sun, the furnace trapped behind the ever-present black clouds — and there it was, off to Pheiri’s right, a red smudge in a distant corner of the sky.

“Suns out, guns out,” Sky muttered. Nobody laughed — except Howl, in the back of Elpida’s head.

“Maybe they’re not coming,” Kagami said, eyes glued to her screens. “Maybe Perpetua was lying. Maybe the plan changed.”

>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE

“Shilu?” Elpida said.

“The network may be taking time to re-establish connections. This is a wide area of damage. Assume nothing.”

“Assume nothing, right. Kaga, what about—”

Kagami slapped the arm of her chair and grinned wide. “We have Hope! She’s talking to us over tightbeam!”

“Haha!” Sky laughed. “I thought you were kidding about that? You fuckers really do have air support?”

Elpida breathed a sigh of relief — Hope, Thirteen Arcadia’s daughter-machine, a sub-orbital pseudo-satellite hovering several klicks up, had made herself scarce before the storm front had hit. They’d lost contact before entering the tomb. As another daughter of Telokopolis, Elpida was delighted to hear Hope was still up there.

“Can she send us aerial—”

“Already trying,” Kagami said, the fingers of both hands twitching as she sifted through Pheiri’s external comms. “She’s too far to the west to get us any good high-angle shots. Needs to stay out from beneath the storm. She’s got— Ah. Okay.”

One of Pheiri’s screens shifted, showing a single static shot of what looked like endless grey soup studded with rotten outcrops of broken material, sinking into a deeper substrate of black. A tiny dot in the middle was highlighted in red.

“That’s us?” Elpida asked.

“That’s us. Hope can see us.”

“Fucking hell,” Sky breathed. “This goes on for miles and miles. It’s … forever.”

“Telokopolis is forever,” Elpida said. “This is only local. Big, but local. Kagami, if we can talk to Hope, that means other things can talk too. Ask her to get us as many wide-angle shots as she can. Look for anything shaped like a person, anything moving, anything that might be a Necro—”

One of Pheiri’s screens turned red.

///ALERT
///nanomachine control locus detection POSITIVE
///advise immediate priority one procedure
///seal electromagnetic ingress
///raise external firewall
///retract communications pickup net

“That’s our first Necromancer!” Elpida announced, interrupting herself. Pheiri’s screens flickered and jerked, cycling through external views; other screens locked up as firewalls rose, narrowing his sensory range, closing off comms ingress. “Kaga, get those wide-angle shots from Hope, show us where it is! Pheiri, show me what we got, show us where—”

Kagami winced, eyes going wide, face turning grey. At the exact same moment, inside Elpida’s head, Howl said, Huh. That’s weird.

“What?” Elpida said out loud. “What is it? Talk to me.”

Exactly, Howl grunted.

What?

“Something is trying to access Pheiri’s tightbeam receiver,” Kagami said, voice tight in her throat. “And it’s not an attack, not a virus.” She turned to look at Elpida. “Something out there wants to talk.”

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Dare you answer the Necromancer’s call? Dare you hear the spooky, spooky words? What if the call is coming from inside the tank? Uh oh …

You know what? It’s a hell of a relief to finally get the cast back out of the tomb. A lot of the stuff while they were trapped down there was great, and I’m really proud of certain character arcs I was exploring back there, but phew, wow, I did not plan for them to be stuck in there for quite this long! It’s great to get back to the corpse city, to explore it once again, now reduced to this nightmare ruin. Hahaha!

Behind the scenes, I reckon arc 16 is actually going to be more than ten chapters now. I’ve just gotta let this sequence play out however it will, and ride the wave. I’m locked in with the crew, strapped to a chair inside Pheiri, and I would have it no other way!

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And thank you! Thank you for reading Necroepilogos, thank you for being here and enjoying it. I couldn’t do any of this without all of you, the readers! Even now, this deep into the story, I still feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of some things to come. I’m very excited that the cadre is on the move again, I have such sights to show you! Until next chapter. Seeya then!

Content Warnings

Self harm (very minor)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Victoria was making herself useful. She liked being useful; the alternative would drive her spare with anxiety.

Every loose object inside Pheiri’s crew areas needed to be stowed away, strapped down, or otherwise secured. Every last firearm, every plate of body armour, every piece of equipment, it all needed new homes, as quickly and cleanly as possible, wherever space could be found — up in the storage racks above the crew compartment, wedged into the little chambers and ducts and enclosed spaces along Pheiri’s spinal corridor, or just bundled up in spare fabric and roped to the walls of the bunk room. Permanent storage solutions with proper inventory and easy access could wait. Anything more stiff and bulky than a coat had to be made immobile; anything breakable had to be padded and cushioned; this whole process had to be complete before Pheiri finished his slow crawl through the guts of the tomb, back to the yawning dead maw of the entrance and the dying hurricane outdoors. Beyond that point, Pheiri’s usual smooth ride might get ‘somewhat bumpy’, as Kagami had scoffed. An unsecured handgun or a loose helmet could turn into a lethal projectile.

The Commander — no, everyone inside Pheiri, all Vicky’s new comrades — needed this job done before Pheiri hit the surface. After that, things were going to get rough.

Vicky had never set foot on a ship back in her mortal life, despite spending most of her teenage years well within range of the stench rolling off the toxic bacterial contamination of Lake Michigan. She’d never even been on a river boat, let alone served on one of the few gun-buckets that made up the GLR’s early excuse for a navy. But near the end of the long campaign to the east, when the fighting was over and the BosWash corridor oligarchies were all gone, Victoria had gazed out at the Old Empire aircraft carriers rotting in their graves off the Atlantic coast. Great humped masses of steel slowly breaking down in the salt air, corpses long since picked over by Euro-trash vultures and the braver of the coastal oligarchs. She’d seen pictures of Chinese carriers before, so she knew what they were — but those gleaming behemoths were half a world away. The dead giants in the Atlantic were too big, too real, too ancient.

She’d tried to imagine what it would be like to live inside one of those aircraft carriers, before the machines had been abandoned by the Old Empire. Always at the mercy of the sea, scurrying through those tight metal corridors, everything bolted to the floor lest a swelling wave brain you with your own coffee cup.

Now she imagined it was probably a little like this.

She had spent the last hour and a half — every minute since she had rolled out of bed and dragged Kagami after her — preparing Pheiri’s innards for the rough driving ahead. Boxes of spare ammo sealed and stowed, guns wrapped and racked deep in any spare space inside Pheiri’s superstructure, body armour bundled up and strapped to the mattresses in the bunk room. Every errant knife had to be accounted for, every stray boot, every hand-held doodad.

For the first half-hour of the job, before Pheiri had left the tomb chamber where he’d been parked, Vicky had plenty of the spare weapons taken off her hands, her task lightened. Serin, Shilu, Hafina, and Pira had been given the responsibility of carrying out the plan to arm and armour the near-helpless dregs who had sheltered beneath Pheiri’s protection. They had taken dozens of guns, plenty of fresh clothes, and more than a few bullet-proof vests and helmets.

Vicky didn’t resent that, not in the slightest. Pheiri’s crew had more weapons and armour than they would ever need, even with the addition of Eseld, Cyneswith, Sky, and Sanzhima. They could give away nine tenths of what they’d taken in the tomb and still be one of the most well armed groups in the corpse city — powered armour excepted.

Besides, Elpida was right. All those zombies back there with the crescent-and-double-line of Telokopolis freshly daubed and scribbled on their clothes, they were the real hope for any future beyond the cycle of cannibalism.

There was a good chance Pheiri was not going to make it through this.

No, Vicky told herself as she worked, don’t think about that. Don’t think about a horde of Necromancer super-zombies sprouting up from the ground like mushrooms after the rain. Pheiri is big and fast and more robust than a concrete bunker. He’s better armed than an Old Empire battleship. We’re going to get free and clear and play chicken with the worm-guard. We’re going to win. Elpida says we’re going to win. Has the Commander been wrong yet?

Victoria tried not to dwell on that.

Kagami’s ‘laboratory’ had to be carefully packed up, sensitive equipment secured in place. Protecting the meat-plant project itself had consumed the bulk of Victoria’s efforts, with Kagami supervising and Elpida helping. The three surviving meat-plants were beyond value, an ongoing embryonic miracle of nanomolecular engineering, to be protected at all costs. Victoria had strapped their containers down with steel wire and sealed them behind metal panels with air-holes in the top. By the time she was done, she was confident the compartment itself could collapse without harming the plants.

Then again, if parts of Pheiri were collapsing, protecting the plants was probably a fruitless endeavour.

Ha, fruitless.

She didn’t share that joke with Kagami or Elpida. Everyone was too on edge, though Elpida didn’t show it easily. Victoria had just dusted off her hands, said job’s a good’un, and carried on with the rest.

Do your job, focus on your role, on what you can do. Focus on what you can affect. Leave the rest to the Commander. To Kagami. To Pheiri. To Shilu?

If it came down to Shilu fighting off Necromancers hand-to-hand, they were all fucked.

Victoria didn’t say that out loud either.

Exhaustion was steel wool scratching behind her eyes, matched by the slowly increasing roar of the hurricane. The storm was dying away, dropping toward Kagami’s golden survivable number of two-hundred-thirty miles per hour — but the volume of the screaming winds and pounding hail and whipping rain was ramping up as Pheiri crept toward the outer layers of the tomb. The growing static made Victoria’s head ache and her stomach clench. She couldn’t stand the waiting. It was like being back in the artillery. Hurry up and wait, Vic, hurry up and wait! The infantry’s eternal curse.

Why did it bother her so much more than it had in life?

The exhaustion, clearly. A few hours’ sleep was not enough to banish the stress of the last day and a half.

Vicky concentrated on the physical things she could affect with her hands, tightening straps and closing hatches, locking armour plates together, making sure the buckles for the bench seats in the crew compartment all worked. She was tired, so what? She’d done worse things while more tired than this. She’d loaded and fired while tired, humped shells by hand, risked losing her fingers to the treacherous mechanisms of her beloved big guns. She’d slept in muddy holes, in the backs of trucks, beneath constellations of small arms fire. This was nothing. Do it tired!

It wasn’t as if she didn’t have plenty of help. All the others had chipped in where they could. Hafina had assisted with some heavy lifting, and even Pira had shown up to wait for orders. When other tasks had taken priority, Victoria had been left with Amina, Eseld, and Cyneswith to scurry about after her, laden down with armfuls of equipment and guns, taking her orders with gusto. Eseld and Cyneswith might be new, but they understood what was at stake, especially after Elpida had announced the plan to everybody. The new girls didn’t know exactly where to go inside Pheiri, but they worked without complaint, though Vicky wondered about the determined little frown on Eseld’s face, and the way she constantly watched Cyneswith as if the other girl might wander off at any moment.

Amina went above and beyond, squeezing herself into smaller gaps than Vicky could, clambering into the back of the storage racks to make sure everything was strapped down tight. Amina had taken to the job like a fish to water. If she was nervous, she didn’t show much. Perhaps she just wanted to feel useful too.

The others were all busy with their own jobs. Melyn had vanished through the hatch on the floor of the spinal corridor, down into Pheiri’s mechanical guts, for last-minute checks on the secret machinery of his nuclear heart. Kagami and Elpida were up front, plugged in and planning, respectively. Pira was back in the infirmary, double-checking Ooni and Sanzhima were both strapped down tight. Most of the others were up in the cockpit now, watching the screens as the hurricane’s wind-speed dropped, getting buckled into their seats as best they could.

Was it go time? Vicky wished she had a mission clock, something big and bold and objective, up on the wall. Or at least a wristwatch. The anxiety was like a rock in her stomach.

She was inside one of the cramped side-chambers off Pheiri’s spinal corridor, focused on strapping down a final plastic crate full of ammunition. Amina scurried into the compartment and past Victoria, wriggling into a narrow gap between the boxes of supplies, to test the straps Vicky had just secured. Amina’s face popped out of the gap a moment later, smiling and nodding.

“Good job, Amina,” Victoria said, flashing her a thumbs up. “Thank you.”

Amina hesitated, then copied the gesture, eyes asking a silent question.

“It’s a thumbs up,” Victoria said. “Means … yeah, sure, yes, good, and so on. It’s not rude. I promise.” She stood up and dusted off her hands, keeping her head low so she didn’t bump the ceiling.

Amina wriggled back out of the gap and bounced to her feet, flushed and wide-eyed, eager for more orders. They were both stripped down to shorts and t-shirts, the better to navigate through the smaller spaces inside Pheiri. Amina’s hair was swept back out of her face, tied up with a piece of rubber she’d found somewhere. It was the first time Victoria had seen Amina do anything different with her hair.

“What next?” Amina chirped. “What’s next? Vicky?”

Vicky gave her a broad smile; Amina had risen to the challenge with surprising clarity. “Good question. You tell me. What’s left in the crew compartment?”

“One suit of armour carapace, the one Pira stripped off when she came back in. Haf’s stowed hers already. Other than that it’s all blankets and clothes, soft stuff. Not dangerous, yes?” She blinked and swallowed, a flash of anxiety crossing her face. “Oh, and Illy’s shotgun. But I don’t think she would let us take that off her … p-probably … ”

Vicky chuckled. A few weapons and pieces of body armour were locked directly to the walls of the crew compartment — weapons that might be needed if the flight from the tomb ended in close combat.

Victoria’s chuckle died away. If it came down to close combat with a dozen Necromancers, no amount of small arms would matter.

Amina’s face was creasing with confusion. Victoria cleared her throat.

“As long as Illy straps her gun down in a seat or something, she can keep it close, sure. Can she walk properly yet?”

Amina shook her head, ponytail bouncing from side to side, the rest of her bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Not really.”

Vicky opened her mouth to reply, but a soft crackle interrupted, right in her ear. She was wearing one of the comms headsets, tuned for Pheiri’s own internal channels. Her gut clenched up, a hard fist in her bowels. Was it go time? She held up one hand to Amina, an apologetic look on her face, and toggled the headset speaker with one finger.

“Commander?” she said.

Elpida’s voice replied from the headset: “Vicky, how’s stowage coming?”

“Almost done. Ten more minutes.” She tried to keep the tension out of her voice, drawing a deep breath in through her nose. It didn’t work. “How close are we now? Are we there yet?”

“You’ve got time,” Elpida replied, slow and easy. “We’re taking it gently, giving the stragglers enough time to pull back as they hear the storm up ahead. I’m going to make another announcement on external loudspeakers, in five. Let everyone back there know, I don’t want anybody flinching and banging their heads. Understood?”

“You got it, Commander. Announcement in five.” Victoria took another deep breath. She tried to ignore that Elpida hadn’t actually answered her question.

“You’ve got time,” Elpida repeated. “As long as you need. You understand?”

Victoria swallowed. “Yeah. Yeah, seriously though, we’re pretty much done. One sec, Elpi.” Victoria covered the mic-bead and spoke to Amina. “Head back to crew, make sure Illy and the others are strapped in or getting strapped in, then stow that final suit of armour. If you’ve got time, do a final check of the bunks and the infirmary. Double-check Ooni and Sanzhima are both strapped down. Make sure Pira actually belts in, don’t let her sit loose. If she gives you any trouble, back off, tell me.”

Amina bobbed her whole body by way of salute, then darted for the hatch back to the spinal corridor. Vicky reached out and tapped her on the shoulder. Amina spun back, eyes wide for more.

“I almost forgot,” Vicky added. The steel wool behind her eyes was dragging at her thoughts. “Elpida’s gonna make another external announcement in a couple of minutes. Let everyone know. We don’t want anybody jumping too high.”

Amina nodded, then darted off again, ducking through the hatch and bouncing upright on the other side.

“And check for Melyn!” Victoria shouted after her. She sighed, then uncovered the microphone bead. “Commander. As I said, almost done.”

A moment of silence crept past, against the background of Pheiri’s nuclear heartbeat and the growing static of the storm. Victoria chewed on her lower lip, biting off little fragments of skin. She tasted a spot of blood, then forced herself to stop.

Elpida answered. “Actually, Vicky, if everything is in hand now, I’ve got another job for you. I want you to—”

A second voice cut in over the headset — Kagami, screeching. “No, we do not have another job for her! If those clowns want to get swept away like broken umbrellas, that’s their fucking business.”

“Kaga,” Victoria sighed into the headset. “Take a deep breath.”

“Don’t talk to me right now!” Kagami snapped. Her voice made the earpiece peak with static. “I’m choking on the forward drone scouts, I have enough to worry about without you as well!”

Vicky ducked through the opening back into Pheiri’s spinal corridor. She sealed the hatch behind her. “Elpi, what do you need me to do?”

Kagami hissed with frustration. “Let somebody else do it! Send Pira!”

Elpida’s voice cut back in. “Serin and Shilu are still outside, up on Pheiri’s hull. Haf’s back in, and she had the comms in her helmet. Serin switched her comms off, wants to ‘watch the storm’. I need somebody to poke their head out of the top hatch and call those two indoors. Or at least Shilu.”

Kagami shouted, “They’ll both scurry back in when they see the storm! They will! Elpida!”

Elpida actually laughed. “Kagami’s probably right, but I’d rather have us buttoned up ASAP. All you have to do is crack the hatch and call them home. If Serin refuses, that’s up to her. If you don’t feel confident, grab Pira.”

Victoria was already turning back to the crew compartment, picking her way through the tangle of Pheiri’s innards. “Pira’s strapped in next to Ooni, it would take too long. I’ll get my coat on and crack the hatch. No problem, Commander. I’m on it.”

“Good,” Elpida said. “Thank you, Vicky. Let me know when everybody’s secure.”

“Will do. Vicky out.”

Elpida closed the internal line with a soft beep. The headset crackled again two seconds later. Victoria reopened the line, suppressing a sigh.

“Yeah, Kaga?”

A moment of silence, full of storm-static and the soft mechanical noises from the cockpit. Then a sharp, stabbing sigh. Kagami hissed, “Oh, forget it.”

“I’ll be fine,” Vicky said. “I’m just cracking a window.”

“Don’t get your head blown off,” Kagami snapped.

“Sure thing, moon princess. You know us surface types. Heads made of iron.”

“Tch!”

Kagami killed the line, another soft beep. Victoria carried on toward the crew compartment.

“Love you too,” she muttered under her breath.

The crew compartment was clear of equipment and debris, lights turned up to full brightness, picking out every ancient scuff mark on the metal walls and floor. Half the crew was already strapped into the bench seats. Ilyusha sprawled, bionic legs and arms still ungainly after the ad-hoc reattachment process, her massive black-and-red tail coiled in the seat next to her, shotgun clutched to her chest; she looked as exhausted as Victoria felt. Eseld was helping Cyneswith get her own straps straightened out, then hopped into the next seat and pulled the safety belts over her own body. Hafina took up two seats by herself, with Melyn snuggled down deep in her lap, not strapped in but enclosed by several of Hafina’s massive muscular arms, snuggled beneath a blanket. Amina darted out of the infirmary and bobbed her head at Vicky.

“All good!”

“Well done,” Vicky told her, then gestured at Hafina and Melyn. “You two, you don’t wanna go up front? In the cockpit? Last chance if you wanna move.”

Hafina grinned, big and dopey, like an oversized dog. Victoria liked that, she grinned back automatically.

Melyn shook her head. “Pheiri knows best,” she said. “Knows best. Keeps us safe.”

“Right on he does,” Victoria agreed. “Amina, final checks, then get yourself strapped in.”

“What about you?” Amina bobbed forward again, as if trying to block Victoria’s path.

“The Commander wants me to call Serin and Shilu in, they’re up top. It’ll only take a minute. Get seated, Amina, go on.” Victoria clapped her on the shoulder, then headed for the bunk room.

She sounded so much more confident than she felt. Like she was channelling Elpida from up front. The Commander’s confidence and Kagami’s acid had briefly washed away her worries.

Of course they were going to survive this. They’d survived everything else so far, hadn’t they? And now they had Pheiri, more guns than the Old Empire, and a Necromancer on their side.

In the momentary privacy of the bunk room, Victoria dragged on her trousers, stomped into her boots, and grabbed her armoured coat off her bunk. The bunk room was even more cramped than usual, every bunk filled with spare equipment strapped to the walls or bundled up as padding. Extra tomb-grown clothes lay in unsecured piles, the lowest priority for storage.

As Victoria pulled the armoured coat over her shoulders, Elpida’s voice boomed and echoed from beyond Pheiri’s hull, amplified by the external loudspeakers, muffled by the metal of Pheiri’s skin.

“—do not attempt to follow us. I’ve told you this already, but I’m telling you again. You will not survive exposure to the storm at the current wind speeds. We’re leaving to draw danger away from you, not leaving you to your fate. Do not attempt to follow us. Wait until the storm subsides—”

Victoria checked the sidearm in her coat pocket — nothing special, just an automatic pistol. She couldn’t justify keeping her new grenade launcher loaded and slung over her back all the time. Right now it was strapped to the walls of the bunk room with everything else.

“—not attempt to follow us—”

But even if she was just cracking the hatch to shout at slowpokes, she couldn’t imagine going beyond Pheiri’s hull without a weapon, without a little armour between her skin and the world.

“—remember, Telokopolis is forever.”

If a cheer went up from the crowd of zombies who had tried to follow Pheiri, Victoria couldn’t hear it over the chaos of the storm. She shivered at the thought of that rain lashing against her, the hailstones drumming on her skull, even with the armoured hood of her coat up.

She almost laughed at herself. So reluctant to go outdoors, eh? When had she become such a homebody?

Home?

The word echoed in Victoria’s mind as she darted out of the bunk room and hurried into the narrow staircase that led to the top hatch. She cast a glance over her shoulder, to check that Amina was getting strapped in, then plunged upward into the darkness of the tiny stairwell. Her boots slammed against the metal steps as she turned the corner and groped for the hatch.

Was Pheiri her home now?

In life, Victoria had never known a home; the thought came like a hammer-blow to the centre of her chest. Her parents had done the best they could with the tent in the refugee camps south of Chicago, but even when she’d been a child, Vicky had known that was meant to be temporary. What about Chicago itself? The unconquered city, with the festering arcology at its core, the arcology that had never been cracked in Vicky’s own life? Of course not. The GLR had been home, and then the 18th Infantry, and then the artillery. The regiment was home. Her comrades were home. Always moving, always changing — is that a home?

Home had been the revolution, the road, the process. Victoria had always wanted to put down roots after the war. Change herself, after the war. Become something other than a grubby infantry brat. After the war. But she had ended before the war did.

Kagami’s knowledge of the future told her that the GLR had flowered into the best the revolution could have hoped for, but Vicky hadn’t gotten to see any of that. She’d been homeless all her life, just another pair of feet on the campaign for a better world. She’d won — they had won! But Vicky had died in Chicago’s mud.

And then this, an afterlife where everyone was homeless, where nobody could ever stop moving, where the roots were dead and the tree was rotten.

But Pheiri, this mobile bubble of safety and security. This was home now, right? In a way Vicky had never felt before, this was home.

Her hands brushed the control panel to open the top hatch. She muttered under her breath.

“Thank you, Pheiri.”

Elpida’s plan to play chicken with the worm-guard was bonkers, but it was the only way to protect home.

Victoria thumbed the hatch controls and yanked the lever. The seal popped with a hiss of pressure difference and the hatch rose an inch on smooth hydraulics. The roar of the storm rushed in — close now, a deafening static of hailstones and raindrops, echoing as if from the mouth of a cave, backed by the wind like the howling of a god. Victoria pushed and the hatch gave way, exposing a narrow slit of Pheiri’s outer deck.

Whorls of bone-armour stretched away toward his front, flanked by the craggy outcrops of gun emplacements and missile blisters and weapon domes, all lit by the soft blood-red glow of the external lights.

Victoria couldn’t see Shilu and Serin right away, they weren’t on the easily navigable part of the outer deck. Her stomach tightened; she hadn’t considered what she would do if she couldn’t contact them. She pushed the hatch wider, straightening up, the sound of the hurricane beyond the tomb roaring like some far-off monster. Fingers of wind plucked at her hair and the collar of her coat. She reached for the comms headset, to ask Elpida for further instructions.

But then she let her hand drop. Serin and Shilu were right there, next to the hatch. Serin was perched on a nodule of Pheiri’s bone armour, looking past the looming bulk of the turret at the tomb passageway to the rear. Shilu was standing upright, armoured coat whipping around her human disguise, staring straight ahead.

Victoria opened her mouth. Her eyes slid sideways, following Shilu’s gaze. The words died in her throat.

She saw the storm.

Pheiri was on the final approach to the mouth of the tomb, crawling at slow speed down the same long tunnel they had taken into the heart of the structure. The ceiling was three times Pheiri’s height, as if the tunnel had been made for worm-guard. Side passages vanished into darkness, briefly lit by the blood-wash of external lights as Pheiri crept past.

At this distance, the mouth of the tomb was no bigger than Victoria’s thumbnail — a void of roiling grey static cut into the black, split apart by the shadow of whirling debris and the visual noise of hailstones the size of fists. She stared, and did not so much see the hurricane as feel it in her guts, on her skin, behind her eyeballs. The storm demanded her attention, raw and unclothed.

Victoria felt her throat closing up. Her skin prickled with cold sweat. She felt a strange urge to draw her gun. She kept one hand firmly on the hatch, gripping so hard her knuckles hurt.

Elpida was right. A god had sent this storm — if not Telokopolis from inside the network, then something else. Vicky hoped it was Telokopolis. She didn’t want to meet the alternative.

“Quite something, isn’t it?” Shilu said.

Victoria swallowed and nodded, then forced down a deep breath; the air tasted moist and ashen. Elpida had given her a job. Whatever had sent this storm, they would beat it too.

“Elpida wants both of you down inside, ASAP!” Victoria shouted over the static. “Shilu, Serin, come on! We’re almost there!”

Shilu allowed a heartbeat to pass, then turned away from the storm. Her eyes were as calm as always, her face unchanged, despite the way the wind dragged at her hair and pulled on her coat. But she locked eyes with Victoria for a moment, then nodded. Victoria nodded back.

“Lead on,” Shilu said.

Serin hadn’t moved. She was staring the other way, back into the tomb. “Serin!” Victoria shouted. “Don’t make us leave you out here.”

“You’re leaving her out here,” Serin muttered from behind her mask, barely audible over the roar and crash from up ahead.

“What?” Victoria shouted back.

Serin unfurled from her outcrop of bone-amour, dozens of limbs shifting beneath her robes. She turned her moon-pale face toward Victoria, dull amusement in her eyes; the wind made her black robes snap against the jumbled form beneath.

She nodded sideways, back down the passageway. “Iriko. She follows us still. Follows Pheiri. She wishes to ride the storm. Ride it she will, I think, no matter what we or Pheiri say.”

“Can you send her a message, from me, right now?” Victoria shouted.

Serin’s eyebrows rose. “I can. But it will be more of the same, won’t it? Stay back, for your own safety. See you when this is over. We will—”

“Tell her we’re all going home. When this is over. Her too. Tell her she’s coming home with us.”

Serin blinked. A moment passed. The skin around her eyes crinkled with a hidden smile.

“She liked that.”

Victoria nodded down, into the hatch, and stood aside. “Now inside, both of you!”

Serin and Shilu slipped through the hatch. Victoria cast one last glance at the storm, then followed, sealing the hatch behind her. The noise of the hurricane cut off, muffled by Pheiri’s skin. She pumped the hatch handle twice, to make sure it was sealed.

She hurried down the stairwell, back into the crew compartment. Serin was bracing herself at the far end, half a dozen pale hands grabbing the walls and looping her thin and bony arms into spare straps. Shilu slid into a seat, dragging belts across her body. Amina was strapped in next to Ilyusha.

Victoria found a seat and yanked the straps over her chest. Then she keyed the comms headset.

Elpida answered a split-second later: “Vicky?”

“Everyone’s in, Commander. Serin too. We’re ready. Ready when Pheiri is. It’s go time.”

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Amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics. Vicky really shouldn’t disparage her own value so much. A good quartermaster is worth her weight in gold. Or bullets, as it were.

Anyway, it’s go time.

Behind the scenes, things are going great! The arc edges toward a chunky middle, sort of, and I’m very happy with how it’s all going so far! It’s been a while since we caught up with all these nooks and crannies of the cast, so it’s been great to spend a little narrative space on that.

And yes, I’ve once again got more art from the discord server! Just one this week: Ilyusha doing a pounce, with a particularly, um, ‘thick’ interpretation of her bionics, (by Elek-tronikz, commissioned by SoylentOrange). It’s always so flattering to see more fanart of my characters, thank you so much!

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for being here and reading my little story about zombie girls. As always, I could not do this without all of you, the audience, watching from inside the network. Seeya next chapter. Until then!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

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For the first time since her earliest resurrections, Eseld prayed to something other than God’s empty throne among the ashes of heaven.

She prayed to Telokopolis.

Eseld was alone in the bunk room, with only her own denuded skull for company; Cyneswith had departed some time ago, though Eseld was uncertain how much time had passed. She had been dozing for hours, lingering on the periphery of sleep. The meagre lights were turned down low. Each bunk seemed a vault of shadows, extending off into grey infinity. The confined air was filled with the soft sounds of slow breathing; the saint’s disciples filled the other bunks, doing their best to follow the saint’s commandment of rest before the trial ahead. Beyond their chorus of shared breath, beyond the hull, beyond the tomb, the hurricane still raged on. But Eseld no longer felt as if the storm wept inside her own head.

Her mind felt as empty as the naked skull pressed to her belly, like the world itself would be, once the storm had passed through and scoured clean the rot and the ruin, ready for the green shoots of a spring that would never come.

Eseld lay on her back, staring at the underside of the next bunk up, and filled her empty mind with prayers to Telokopolis.

Her petitions felt weak, no matter how she phrased them: ‘Please protect the saint and her disciples and myself through the flight we must endure’; ‘Armour us with your walls against the devils and demons who seek to hunt us’; ‘Grant this pitiful flesh the protection of your regard’; ‘Please, please, please, please.’

Eseld moved silent lips over the words of a dozen variations, but they all felt wrong, as if the thing to which she prayed did not speak her language. When praying to God, in her mortal life, she had done well enough by copying her parents, her priests, the words of others. But she did not know the proper form for addressing Telokopolis. A great lady? A high queen? A loving mother? None of those? Was it proper for Eseld to call Telokopolis the ‘Mother City’, even though she had not been born there, had never walked those streets, and had only the vaguest notion of what the city even looked like? Pira had told Eseld so much about Elpida’s long-lost city-mother, about what it now meant to be a daughter of Telokopolis, and about where the saint and true first-born of the city was taking them, both physically and spiritually. Pira had said we are all now children of Telokopolis, if we wish it so. Eseld did wish it, very much. The promise of Telokopolis was the promise of an end to the cycle of predation and cannibalism. It was the promise of reunion with her dead friends, with all that had been lost, and with that which she had never known she lacked. Eseld knew she should doubt, and she did, for this was not divinity as she had believed of in life — but the benefits were self-evident. The saint, Pheiri, the warmth in which she now reposed, the abundance of food, the banishing of Lykke, all of it!

But Pira had not spoken about Telokopolis in the way one might speak of a true god, so Eseld did not know the right words.

She could ask the saint herself, but her insides cringed and coiled at the thought.

There was little else she could do but pray. She and Cyneswith were still on the periphery of the group, not quite trusted, not quite with the disciples, not yet — but they had not been kept in the dark. Eseld knew what was coming. She had heard Kagami return to the bunk room some hours earlier, to join Victoria in her bunk; the two of them had shared soft whispers, and Eseld had not needed to overhear the words to recognise that Kagami was terrified. The others were catching what sleep they could, because as soon as the hurricane weakened far enough, this whole mobile fortress would have to move, and quickly, with scant hope of avoiding the coming assault.

A dozen things like Lykke. A dozen or more Necromancers. A score or more of demons, hunting this seed of Telokopolis.

So Eseld prayed — not to God, who was surely dead and gone, but to Telokopolis and her first-born daughter, the saint, the monster, the bloody teeth that had torn Eseld’s own flesh, and had her flesh and blood consumed in return. The Commander, the leader, the pilot Elpida.

“Telokopolis, mother city, shining spire,” Eseld whispered as softly as she could, little more than a breath. She tried to picture Telokopolis as Pira had described it, as the crescent-and-double-line symbol showed it — a needle of steel piercing the heavens. But she couldn’t imagine something so tall and grand, not when she’d spent lifetimes down here in the frigid ashes of the world. “Please protect us, please grant us speed and strength. Please gather us behind your skirts. Deliver us from the demons who are coming to hunt us. Please. Please.”

The prayer didn’t feel like it was going anywhere. Then again, prayers had always felt that way. Did Eseld trust Telokopolis? Better question: had she ever trusted God?

Did she trust the saint, Elpida?

She thought about that for a while, and found, oddly enough, that she did. Despite everything. Or perhaps because of everything? After committing the fundamentally necessary central sin that all zombies were bound to, Elpida had found Eseld again. She had found her, and apologised, and fought for forgiveness — or at least for redemption. Had any zombie ever before dared to dream of such a feat?

It was that realisation — not the promises of Telokopolis — which had lifted Eseld from her black pit.

Eseld rolled onto her side to face the back of the bunk, the metal wall touched with scraps of peeling paint. She lifted her own skull and stared into the shadows behind the eye sockets. Should she pray to herself, instead? To this relic of her previous body? Her fingers strayed to the other three skulls lined up at the rear of her bunk, touching the fleshless brows of Andasina, Su, and Mala. Should she pray to her old friends and her lost lover?

Eseld knew she was being ridiculous. If Telokopolis really did exist, then it was a machine-city, thousands of miles away, with a machine-mind that could not hear her praying in silence on her bunk. Or else it was a machine-ghost, lost yet found once again, hidden in the underside of reality forged by the tiny machines that made up the ashes of the world. If it was listening at all, then surely it listened first to its own flesh and blood.

But praying felt right regardless. Eseld closed her eyes and tried one more time.

She prayed to the saint directly, to Elpida, to intercede with her mother. She touched the wall and prayed for the departed. She prayed for Pheiri’s safety, and the safety of everyone within. Finally, she prayed for herself.

Good enough.

Eseld tried to sleep again, but she had slept too much already. She leaned forward to kiss Andasina’s skull, then wriggled out of bed and stood up in the narrow open space in the centre of the bunk room. She carried her own skull with her; she did not want to leave herself behind.

The bunk room was an unimaginable luxury that Eseld still could not quite believe was real — the mattresses, the blankets, the warmth, the security. It was small and cramped, two of the lowest bunks were crammed with equipment and body armour, and there was no question of privacy, but Eseld could not bring herself to care about any of that. She had not slept in true security for so many lifetimes. She had not experienced such abundance of resources since true life, since sunlight and grass and open skies. Here, within Pheiri, for the first time since her first resurrection, she was safe.

She was safe, among zombies who had once eaten her flesh.

The contradiction was impossible to resolve. She did not feel afraid when she looked at the others asleep in their bunks — Pira had made sure of that, had explained in detail — but she could not help seeing their teeth filled with her own meat.

They had killed her and eaten her, and now she was one of them.

Eseld crept the short length of the bunk room, peering at the other zombies. Victoria and Kagami were sleeping together, curtains tugged tight for privacy. Ilyusha and Amina were also snuggled up together, on one of the highest bunks; Ilyusha’s massive bionic tail hung over the side, out in the open, dangling in the air, red tip retracted inside the black bio-polymers. Atyle lay flat on her back on one of the lower bunks, sleeping in all her clothes. Melyn — the little robot with the massive eyes and grey-white artificial skin — was tucked up in a bunk of her own, covers to her chin, surrounded by spare pillows. Eseld had watched Victoria tuck Melyn in, coaxing the machine-girl to much-needed sleep. Those same gentle hands had once peeled Eseld’s former flesh from her abandoned bones, and stuffed morsels of Eseld into Victoria’s hungry mouth.

She looked at Victoria again, through a crack in the flimsy blue privacy curtains. She struggled to imagine that soft, kind, warm face, with blood down the chin from a mouthful of Eseld.

Her skull echoed, empty of hate or pain. The storm inside her had raged itself out.

Eseld didn’t feel the need to put on more clothes before she left the bunk room. She was perfectly comfortable in the tomb-grown grey t-shirt and shorts. Pheiri’s insides were warm as a hearth, the warmest she’d felt in all her afterlives. But she did grab a weapon — a combat knife in a black sheath. She stuffed it into her waistband. She didn’t stop to reason or question why she did that; she did not feel threatened, she simply wanted a knife close to hand.

She cracked the hatch to the crew compartment and slipped through the gap, then eased the door shut behind her.

The lights in the crew compartment were deep and dim, blood-red illumination for Pheiri’s internal night cycle. An irregular black lump was sprawled across one of the bench-seats, between the various pieces of armour and equipment and boxes of ammunition looted from the tomb armoury. The lump was topped by a sliver of pale flesh and a hard metal half-mask painted with jagged teeth.

The sniper — Serin? Eseld was doing her best to learn everyone’s names. She suspected her long-term survival might depend on it. But some of the crew were elusive, hard to know, or short with words. Serin especially.

Serin was either asleep or pretending. Eseld did not fancy waking her, not alone.

Eseld padded across the crew compartment and peeked through the open door to the infirmary, where the lights were harsh and bright. The wounded zombie — Sanzhima? — was still unconscious, perhaps in a coma. At the far end of the infirmary Ooni lay on the other slab bed, fast asleep. Pira sat beside her, holding Ooni’s hand, eyes closed, breathing softly.

An infirmary, here in the ash-choked afterlife. If Eseld needed more proof that this was the way, that Telokopolis was the way, then she could not think of any better sign.

But for now she retreated back into the crew compartment. Where was Cyneswith?

She and Cyn had not been confined to the bunk room, not formally. They had not been kept out of any part of Pheiri they wished to visit. But Eseld had not yet found any reason to explore further than these few chambers. Pira had described Pheiri’s layout, the central spinal corridor which led to a control cockpit, but surely Cyneswith would not have wandered off on her own, purely to explore? Then again, Cyn didn’t understand where she was. Her world-view seemed incompatible with the reality of the nanomachine afterlife. She attributed everything to fairies and magic. She didn’t get it. She was vulnerable.

Eseld ran through a short mental list of who was not present in this rear section of the mobile fortress, and felt a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach.

Eseld had not forgotten the way that Sky had treated Cyneswith, after their shared resurrection. She had not forgotten the possessive aggression, the strange sense of dominance, or the implicit threat that Sky had made so clear.

Perhaps Cyneswith was with the saint and Shilu, and that would be okay. But maybe she was alone in some tiny chamber with Sky, and that was not good.

Eseld fought against the urge to plunge into the darkness of the spinal corridor. She barely knew Cyneswith. Just another tomb-mate, thrown together by chance; if not for the saint and her disciples and the storm, Cyn would not have lasted fifteen minutes out there in the corpse-city. Perhaps Eseld would have killed and eaten her. Another victim, another bottom-feeder, another nobody who would be insane and naked and starving within days.

But the world was different now. It contained the saint and her chariot, and the possibility of more than mere survival.

Eseld pulled the sheathed knife from her waistband and stepped into Pheiri’s spinal corridor.

The passage between the crew compartment and the control cockpit was an overgrown forest path of dangling wires, ancient computers, broken seats, and jutting remnants of removed machinery, as if Pheiri possessed a hundred internal scars of organ replacement and bionic enhancement. Eseld clambered over a great hump in the decking, and beneath a ladder that led upward into the darkness of a gun emplacement. She passed open hatches that led into tiny compartments — some of which had seen recent occupancy — and other hatches firmly closed and bolted. Her only company on the short journey was the tick and hum of Pheiri’s body, the distant static of the weakening storm beyond the tomb, and her own empty skull hugged tight to her chest.

Eseld wriggled past a kink in the corridor formed by a bank of old computer terminals; sickly green light struggled through thick gloom from just ahead. Was that the control cockpit — this cavern of flickering shadows?

She slowed her footsteps and slipped sideways, into concealment, at the sound of a voice.

“—nothing strange about her body.” That was Shilu, with her flat affect. “I’ve examined her half a dozen times with everything I’ve got. She’s clean. Just another revenant.”

“Uh huh.” A grunt — Sky. “And she did come forward with this. Why tell you if she was trying to hide it?”

“True,” said a third voice, soft and knowing, full of steel. Elpida, the saint, the Commander. “But not until Shilu overheard her first. Cyneswith, can you explain why you didn’t tell us this before?”

Cyneswith replied, voice light and airy as petals on a breeze. “I didn’t think it was important. I don’t know your ways, it’s so hard to tell what matters and what doesn’t. I feel as if I barely know what is happening, even now.”

Eseld peered around the corner of a dead computer console, peeking into the green-washed glow of the control cockpit.

Cyneswith stood, delicate hands folded before her, wearing only tomb-grown greys. Her head was slightly bowed, as if in supplication. She was surrounded, a waif ringed by ogres. Shilu stood at her rear, blocking her exit. Elpida and Sky occupied two seats, haloed and flanked by tangled machinery, by dozens of screens, many glowing with faint green text or flicking through camera views of other places, scrolling and flowing with information from beyond Pheiri’s hull. The space was lit like a cavern in hell, a cold dark place full of unseen terrors.

The cockpit was a technological marvel, proof of the grand and bizarre machine in which the saint held her court. But Eseld could not spare a thought for awe, not when Cyneswith was being interrogated.

Sky spoke again, full of scorn. “I understand this place well enough, it’s not that fucking hard. Stop being obstinate, get your head around it already. We’re dead. We were dragged back from hard-copy engrams somehow. Zombies, Necromancers, so on. And in your case apparently, a direct line to the cunt in charge of this pyramid—”

Shilu interrupted. “That is not what she said.”

“Oh yeah?” Sky snorted. “She said she fucking woke it up. Didn’t she?”

“That could imply anything. Or nothing. We need more information.”

“I’ll imply your information, you big metal cock,” Sky said to Shilu. “Shouldn’t you be able to explain this, being one of their bloodhounds and all? Or are you holding back on us too, rust-head? I bet you fucking are, you—”

Elpida made a chopping motion with her left hand. “Stop.”

Sky gestured at Shilu. “I was just—”

Elpida turned to Sky and was not Elpida anymore, not the saint. Her expression was different. It was the other woman who lived inside the saint, the demon-grinning maniac miracle-worker who had beaten Lykke with nothing but Elpida’s fists, the one the others called ‘Howl’.

“You’re not impressing Elps with this act, you thirsty bitch,” Howl said. “Down, girl. Don’t make me muzzle you. Not yet, anyway.”

Sky eased back in her chair. She looked away, silent.

Elpida straightened back up. The grin vanished, along with Howl. When she spoke, she was Elpida again: “Besides, I think Cyneswith here has another advocate. You can come out, if you want. There’s no need to eavesdrop here, Eseld.”

At the sound of her own name, Eseld froze. She stopped breathing. She fought against the urge to burrow or flee. It was a hard won instinct; in every resurrection before this, to be noticed by well-armed, well-fed, well-augmented revenants was to invite the strong to cannibalise one’s flesh. Elpida’s purple eyes pierced the shadows, digging Eseld from her hiding place. Sky looked up and around, alert and predatory. Shilu just tilted her head, without bothering to look.

Eseld almost turned and ran; but then Cyneswith looked over her narrow shoulder, freckled face framed by feathery blonde hair, eyes wide and wet and very scared.

Eseld shot to her feet and stomped into the cockpit; it was like plunging into the ocean, surrounded by greenish glow from flickering screens. She jammed her knife back into her waistband, stalked past Shilu, and grabbed Cyneswith by the hand.

“Huh!” Sky grunted. “You. Maybe you’re the traitor here. Skulking about like a weasel. How much’d you hear, huh?”

Eseld showed Sky her teeth, nice and sharp. “I’ll bite your cheeks off. Gimme an excuse. Come on. Give me one!”

Cyneswith tugged on Eseld’s hand. She murmured, lips close to Eseld’s ear, “It’s okay, it’s okay, please don’t, please.”

Shilu and Elpida both said nothing. Sky held Eseld’s gaze for a moment, then smirked and made a vague gesture, as if parting cobwebs, looking away. That’s right, Eseld thought, avert your eyes. Sky might be big and strong, but Eseld’s teeth were many and sharp.

“Welcome to the cockpit, Eseld,” said Elpida. “I don’t think you’ve been up front yet, have you?”

Eseld had thought she might struggle to look at the saint, but she didn’t.

Bright purple eyes, long white hair, missing right arm, muscular body still partially encased in armour. Just a woman, a zombie, not glowing with divine power, not haloed by a light from beyond sight. The woman who had killed her, who had killed her friends, who had killed Andasina. The monster who had eaten her flesh and the flesh of her lover. The saint who had saved her, and banished a demon.

Pira had made it clear to Eseld that any attempt on Elpida’s life would not be tolerated. But now, standing before the soiled saint, Eseld felt nothing as clean as anger or the need for revenge. As the storm was dying outside, the storm inside her was already gone.

She had more concrete concerns.

Could Elpida be trusted to understand what was happening here, with Cyneswith and Sky? What would that even mean, to trust a saint with affairs of heart and flesh? To trust the avatar and instrument of Telokopolis, a goddess who Eseld did not yet know?

Elpida smiled. “I would say there’s to be no fighting between any of us, but that would be hypocritical of me. If you must fight, if you and Sky have a problem with each other, then — no teeth, no weapons, no permanent injuries. Understand? And you won’t need that knife, Eseld. I promise.”

Eseld tightened her grip on Cyneswith’s hand. “Of what does she stand accused?”

Elpida raised her eyebrows. “Cyneswith? Nothing. This isn’t a court or an interrogation. She was telling us about something that happened in the gravekeeper’s chamber, while you were first confronting Lykke, just before we arrived. Shilu and Sky didn’t notice it, but apparently you may have been close enough to see it happen. Perhaps you can tell us about it too.”

Eseld frowned. “What?”

Cyneswith tugged on her hand, eyes bright and shining. “Eseld?” she said. “Do you remember, just before Lykke summoned all those other people, when I touched the lady inside the coffin?”

“The gravekeeper’s interface,” Shilu supplied softly. “Just a corpse, wired up to the gravekeeper, so it can speak with a human mouth.”

Cyneswith smiled, almost a giggle. “She looked like a lady to me! Eseld, do you remember what happened?”

Eseld frowned harder, trying to cast her mind back. The fight in the gravekeeper’s chamber had been rendered into a nightmare by the work of remembering, between the stress and the panic and the terrible dark revelation of the saint.

Shilu said, “The gravekeeper would not respond to me. The interface wouldn’t even open its eyes.”

“But it did for me!” Cyneswith chirped like a little bird. “When I saw her face, she looked so lonely, like she was crying with her eyes closed! She looked like a girl I knew, somehow. A girl I’d seen in a dream. So I reached out and touched her! Eseld, don’t you remember?”

Eseld did remember.

Lykke had been gloating and boasting about how she was going to kill them all in such painful and humiliating ways. But Cyneswith had been distracted by the gravekeeper’s interface — that half-corpse of a zombie, plugged into the exposed guts of an upright resurrection coffin. Cyneswith had reached out and cupped the cheek of the interface.

“I … yes,” Eseld said. “I saw it too. Cyn touched the face. The eyes snapped open. It spoke. It said … ”

Cyneswith opened her mouth to echo the words, but Elpida clicked her fingers. “Cyneswith, let Eseld remember. Eseld, what did it say? From memory is fine, even if you don’t get it entirely correct.”

Could Elpida be trusted with this? Could the saint truly be a saint? Eseld saw no other path.

“Crowned and veiled,” Eseld said, dredging the words from memory. “Once again revealed. Do you wish this?”

The words floated upward, to join the lingering static of the hurricane beyond the walls, beyond Pheiri, beyond the world. The cockpit was silent for a long moment. Eseld glanced at the other zombies, clutching her own skull to her chest, and Cyn’s hand in her own.

“At least their stories match,” Sky grunted. “What the fuck does it mean?”

Elpida leaned forward in her chair. “Are you certain that’s what it said?”

Eseld nodded. She held Elpida’s eyes in her own; the saint looked tired, worn out, in need of a dream. “What does it mean?”

Elpida sighed and ran her left hand through her long white hair, like pale seaweed beneath the cockpit screens. “We don’t know. Cyneswith is just an ordinary zombie, like the rest of us. She’s not a hidden Necromancer, or anything else in disguise. Shilu and Pheiri have both attested to that. Why did the gravekeeper respond to her?” Elpida shrugged, then briefly waved the bandaged stump of her right arm, as if she had forgotten it was not there. “We don’t have enough intel.”

“More like why did she do it,” Sky grunted, nodding at Cyneswith.

“Cyn?” Eseld said. “Why did you feel you had to … touch it?”

Cyneswith shrugged. “The masters of time and space, I assume.”

“ … what?”

Shilu said, “Religious culture from her time period. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Cyneswith continued, her brightness undimmed by Shilu’s dismissal. “The masters of time and space! They stand above and beyond the world, and they watch over us, though most of the time they don’t really care. They just watch. I thought they had reached into the world and made me recognise the girl in the coffin. But … ” Cyneswith’s smile turned strange and sad. “I keep trying to remember who she is, and I can’t.”

Elpida opened her left hand toward Eseld. “It could be a meaningless coincidence. It could be that Cyneswith merely triggered the gravekeeper to speak by touching the interface, and the message was not meant for her. Or, Shilu, your suggestion, from earlier? Please repeat it, for Eseld.”

“Mm,” Shilu grunted. “It’s not impossible that the body for that interface was taken from somebody who Cyneswith knew in life, either before or after Cyneswith’s own death. A coincidence, but possible.”

Sky let out a low grumble. “I don’t like coincidences. They rarely are.”

Shilu looked at her. “In a system on this scale, it does happen. Wrinkles are inevitable.”

Sky snorted and looked away, folding meaty arms over her chest.

Eseld returned her attention to the saint, the only one who mattered. “Cyn isn’t under any suspicion, then?”

Elpida shook her head. “No. None at all. Shilu has checked, more than once. Cyneswith, Sky, and yourself, I’m satisfied you’re all just like us.”

“Good.” Eseld pointed at Sky with her own naked skull. “I don’t trust her.”

Sky sat up straight. “Fuck you! Alright then, I don’t trust you either, you little shit. Carting around a fucking skull. This is all a bit convenient for you, isn’t it? You two are already thick as thieves with each other. Now you cover for each other’s bullshit too?”

Eseld ignored Sky, spoke to Elpida. “She’s a killer. And more. She wants Cyneswith for herself.”

Cyneswith squeaked. “Don’t say that … ”

Elpida said, “We’re all killers here.”

Eseld stopped. Her insides went cold. At least the saint was honest.

“But,” Elpida added, “point taken.” She gestured at Sky, then at Eseld. “If you two have a developing personal problem with each other, you either steer clear, or you bring it to me. Understand?” She waited for nods and grunts of acknowledgement, then gestured at Cyneswith. “And Cyn, I’ll talk to you after this, alone.”

“Okay … ”

Eseld tugged on Cyneswith’s hand, drawing her a step away from Sky.

Sky sighed and rolled her eyes. “Why can’t we put these two in front of this ‘gravekeeper’ again? Have her touch it, see if it responds?”

Elpida shook her head. “Out of the question. We’re too close to our departure window to risk another expedition into the tomb. I will not run the risk of leaving people behind. Not again.”

Sky gestured at Shilu. “What if it’s just her. Maybe the blob thing out there too—”

“Iriko,” Elpida said.

“Yeah. Shilu and Iriko. They can take Cyn, have her touch this thing’s face again, then come straight back.” Sky looked at Cyneswith, but not at Eseld. She spread her hands in her lap. “No objections, right?” She looked back at Elpida before Cyn could answer. “Commander? You still opposed to that?”

Elpida did not answer right away, watching Sky’s face.

Hesitation? Or suspicion? Eseld couldn’t tell.

Cyneswith opened her mouth with a quiet click of her lips. Eseld knew exactly what she was about to say — she was about to volunteer. So easily swayed, so easily led. So easily eaten up by the big bad monsters who lurked in the dark, or the ones who sat in warm rooms and didn’t seem like monsters at first.

Eseld squeezed Cyneswith’s hand, hard and tight and sudden, to grind the bones of her fingers against each other. Cyneswith’s words died in her throat, strangled by a muffled gasp of pain. Eseld was careful not to look at her, not to give away what had happened. Sky and Elpida were too focused on each other. Shilu saw, but Shilu was wise and kind, Shilu had fought Lykke first, without the power of the saint to ensure victory. Shilu would understand. Shilu would say nothing.

Cyneswith glanced at Eseld with a sheen of tears in her eyes, a confused question on her lips. Eseld ignored her, loosened her grip, and prayed to Telokopolis that Cyn had gotten the message — or at least that she had been delayed for long enough for the saint to make the right decision.

“No,” Elpida said to Sky. “Once again, it’s too close to our departure window. We have under two hours, and that’s including the time to distribute surplus supplies and reach the gates of the tomb. No more expeditions.”

Sky raised her hands in easy, lazy, mock surrender. Cyneswith gently pulled her fingers from Eseld’s grip, rubbing them with her other hand. Eseld let her go.

“Now,” Elpida was saying, “you all need to go back to sleep. Get some more rest. It might be a long time until we can rest again, understand?”

Sky waved a lazy, two-fingered salute. Cyneswith nodded her fluffy head up and down, smiling at the Commander.

Eseld turned away from the saint, wondering why she had helped Cyneswith at all, wondering why she cared so much. She barely knew the girl — and Cyn wasn’t a girl, anyway. She was a grown woman, a few years older than Eseld by the lines of her face and around her eyes.

But something compelled Eseld, something she had not experienced in too many resurrections, too many pointless deaths in the churn of god’s leftovers.

She wanted to protect Cyn from Sky, from that predatory gaze and those grasping hands.

Eseld had to, because the saint seemed blind to it.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Been a while since we last saw Eseld! She’s a difficult little zombie, too many conflicting things in that there meat-filled skull. Now, if only she can do her best to keep the meat on the inside this time.

Behind the scenes, this arc is still looking like a longer one. At least 10 chapters, maybe more? It’s been a while since we’ve caught up with the nooks and crannies of the cast, after all. Though they better be quick about this, because the storm is dying away and it’s time to run, sooner than they might think.

Also, I have another piece of fanart this week, from over on the discord server! Another piece from the very talented and skilled cubey: Elpida dressed for the tomb, Howl’s distinctive grin on Elpida’s face, and a study of a submachine gun. I really love seeing my characters brought to life like this, it’s incredible. Thank you!

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for being here and reading my little story about zombie girls and the footprints they’re leaving in the ashes of the world. I couldn’t do this without all of you, the audience and readers! You’re the ones with the magic nanomachines, I’m just putting them all together from my hidey-hole inside the network. Onward we go, back out into the corpse city, very soon indeed. Seeya next chapter! Until then!

Content Warnings

Suicidal ideation
Grief

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

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

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

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

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

Except for Pira and Atyle.

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

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

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

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

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

“I think you should back up.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atyle’s grinned. “Is it working?”

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

Pira’s temper broke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atyle purred. “A challenge, then?”

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

Fucking zombies. Never simple.

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

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

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

“Are you going to go after Atyle?”

A pause. A deep breath. “No.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What was that?” Shilu asked.

“You’re too fast,” Pira muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pira frowned harder. “Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pira was on her feet. “No.”

“No?”

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

Shilu nodded. “All right. No Elpida.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Relief?”

Please be relief. Please be simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You were wrong?”

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

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

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

“You disgust me,” said Shilu.

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

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

“Did it not make sense? Don’t you—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pira said, “Necromancer?”

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

“What are our chances?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Doesn’t matter,” said Shilu.

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

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

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

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

Shilu nodded. “Right.”

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

“Thank you. Shilu.”

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

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

But she’d rather be telling them to Lulliet.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

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

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

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

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

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

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kagami?” she murmured. “Kagami?”

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

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

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

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

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

Elpida suppressed a smile. “Understood, Kaga.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Is this your domain now, Kaga?”

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

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

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

“Then I will take my armour off elsewhere.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bully for her,” Kagami muttered

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

“I could.”

Elpida raised her eyebrows.

Kagami cleared her throat. “With a drone.”

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

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

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

“All tuckered out, is she?”

“Exhausted. Like you look.”

Kagami tutted. “I’m fine.”

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

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

“Weird shit,” Kagami hissed.

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

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

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

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

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

“Tch!” Kagami tutted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But she still loves us,” Elpida added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sneaky cunts,” Kagami muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

>n

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

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

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

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

“I trust them,” Elpida said.

Kagami narrowed her eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mmhmm,” Kagami grunted.

“How long do we have?”

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

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

“Kagami,” Elpida said. “How long?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“The Necromancers.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The screen remained blank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Waterlogged.”

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

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

A screen flickered with the afterglow of dark green text.

>y

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

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

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

Elpida nodded. “That is correct.”

“Oh fuck.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kagami shot her a very dark look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Commander.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Correct.”

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

“We’re gonna run like hell.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sure thing, Commander. But can you win?

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

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

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

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