Content Warnings

Body horror (woo)
Gore
Honestly I don’t even know why I’m warning for these! You know this by now!
Burns/burnt flesh/descriptions of burnt flesh

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Atyle stood atop Pheiri’s armoured shell to witness the gods make war.

Her boots were planted on Pheiri’s bone-hard hide; her hands gripped an outcrop of the little titan’s chalk-white body; wind whipped at her face and snapped the hood of her armoured coat. She swayed and rolled to keep her balance as Pheiri accelerated; the little titan’s heart-fire roared as he slammed through debris-dunes and skidded across landslides of rubble, crushing stone and metal beneath spinning treads. He was moving fast, erratic, unpredictable, jerking and jinking and skidding, to avoid the attention of the flying machines which filled the air. The buzzing mosquitoes were attacking everything they could reach, scooping screaming revenants from the buildings with tendrils of gravity, and crushing those who tried to flee. Pheiri swivelled the mouths of his great guns all across his bone-hide, threatening the flying machines as they dove to catch him. The air tore and burst with the barking retort of his weapons all about Atyle’s ears, deafening her for but a moment. Gunfire and shouting and the voices of beasts echoed from every passageway, while Pheiri raced down the broadest streets in open defiance.

Atyle approved with all her heart; Pheiri was too great to be a mere steed, but she rode him all the same.

She howled over the wind and the guns and the thwok-thwok-thwok of the mosquitoes, through lips that still tasted of vomit and a tongue still numb with gravity-wave pressure.

“Fleet of foot and sure of arm, little titan! You shall see us through!”

Atyle did not look down to read the subtle flash and crackle of life inside Pheiri’s brain, to see if he appreciated her confidence. She could not tear her eyes away from that which she had emerged to witness — neither her mortal eye nor her god-sight. The hatch in Pheiri’s hide yawned wide a few feet to Atyle’s left; she had tried to close it twice, but the little titan kept it open for her, despite the danger to his own soft innards. The dark hole beckoned her back into the safety of Pheiri’s inner shell. The others were still huddled down there, recovering from the sickness and sheltering from the storm of steel and gravity above. There would be no loss of honour or face for Atyle to retreat as well.

But Atyle had spent her whole life choosing safety in lies, spinning tales of gods she did not really see.

Now, in death and resurrection, she chose peril and truth.

She chose to witness.

Through her mortal left eye she saw no more than she had in life: the view was blocked by rows of buildings whizzing past, by shattered concrete and twists of rust and ruin, by the rotten guts of the corpse-city through which Pheiri raced like a divine maggot. Atyle’s mortal eye saw the giant diamond in the sky well enough — a toxic sculpture of poisonous dripping gold, framed against the soot-choked black, haloed by clouds of buzzing rot-flies, and blurred by a phantasmal warping in the air. Of the great titan — Elpida’s ‘combat frame’ — Atyle’s mortal eye saw only slivers of white armour through the gaps between the buildings, as the titan stood firm before the foe.

Atyle’s god-sight — in the blessed gift of her right eye — pierced metal and stone, brick and earth, flesh and bone, thought and soul.

The others called her god-sight a ‘bionic’ or ‘augmetic’; they compared it with the scribe’s hated legs, or the betrayer’s powerful arm, or the machine-heart that beat in the soldier’s chest.

But Atyle knew her god-sight was different. Unlike the others, she had not forgotten the promise that had made her anew.

God-sight saw the truth of the mechanism in the sky — a boiling nest of giant snakes forged from pure force, birthed by dark engines inside the golden arms of the diamond-frame, controlled from a great distance like a puppet dancing upon a million strings. The mechanism’s arms contained a mind, imposing itself on the nearby weave of tiny machines, to better fuel the crushing power of the snake-nest in its heart. Atyle knew this power was called ‘gravity’; it was that power she felt pounding at her stomach and ears and internal organs every time the snake-nest moved.

Atyle considered the possibility that this golden diamond was one of the gods she had met, in the twilight between life and death.

Those lurking gods had promised her many things — power and strength, wisdom without limit, infinite lovers and friends and allies — if only she would agree to unspoken prices, to submission and fealty and a place in secret plans. But Atyle had kept her own counsel. She was no pawn.

Only one of those gods — a dainty thing, ancient and furtive, so much smaller than the others — had promised her the gift of true sight. The price? A kiss, from the lips of a mortal shade to the body of a forgotten god. Atyle had given that kiss freely, a feathery touch of her lips upon the noble forehead of a crowned girl. She could not recall the details now, could not remember the face of the crowned girl, and that pained her, for she so wished to call out the name of that god in worship. But the river that separated life from this rebirth was hazy and indistinct, even to her perfect sight. Her deal with the crowned girl in the underworld seemed as a dream after waking. But she had risen with the eye, with the perfect sight that was promised. All the others woke with their wounds closed and their missing limbs replaced. But Atyle had died with both her lying eyes inside her skull, and been reborn with truth on her tongue.

No, she decided; this poisonous diamond was not an emissary of her crowned girl. It was the avatar of another god. She would do right to smite it, if only her arms had the strength.

But the golden mechanism was not what had drawn Atyle out onto Pheiri’s hull.

She was here to witness the titan — Arcadia’s Rampart.

She had learned that name seconds ago, from a pulse-scream of message the titan had sent in all directions. She had learned other names too — ‘Thirteen’, and ‘1255’. She had not understood the words of the message; this language was veiled, like that of Pheiri’s maids. But her true-sight had unpicked the waves and revealed the meaning in the crackle of power.

From inside Pheiri’s armour she had seen the titan lurch to its feet amid the grey mud; the others had all heard the great roar of challenge from the titan’s throat, but only Atyle had seen the titan flower with spear and sling to protect Elpida, and witnessed the tremor of a change inside that mountain of flesh. The others were in a poor state; Pheiri’s maid, Melyn, had fared better than the living flesh of her fellows, but little Amina, Atyle’s sweet rabbit of hidden claw, was sick with vomiting and writhing, with only the rabid Ilyusha for comfort. The betrayer and the animal were in Pheiri’s front, perhaps hoping to help guide their chariot to answer Elpida’s call for help.

Fools. Pheiri needed no guidance.

And Atyle needed to see this. She needed to do in death what she had made a falsehood in life. Perhaps this was why the crowned girl had gifted her this sight.

Pheiri turned sharply to the right, his rear end skidding out behind him, smashing into the lower levels of a brick building. A shower of debris and shattered brick fell all about Atyle’s head; her mortal eye clouded with tears, but her god-sight stayed wide. An irritating mosquito swooped into the space Pheiri had occupied a moment earlier, slashing at the air with talons of gravity, pulverising brick and steel into dust and splinters.

Atyle sang out: “Begone, insect! You know not what you tempt!”

Pheiri turned the mouths of his guns upon the flying ball and blasted it back through the building with the sheer force of his stones and arrows. Atyle’s ears ached with the pounding of the guns, but she did not retreat inside. She sang louder, throat ringing with an old lie that was untruth no longer.

“For I ride the mammoth of the gods! I command the spring storm and the summer lightning! Begone, for you have no hold upon me!”

Pheiri’s tracks bit into the concrete; the little titan leapt forward once again, slamming Atyle against the outcrop of bone-armour. Atyle cleared her mortal eye with a wipe of her sleeve, laughing at the top of her lungs, howling to gods she had once cursed in her secret heart.

Past the buildings, out in the crater filled with mud and filth, Arcadia’s Rampart turned toward the golden diamond. The great titan unfurled an army’s worth of weapons, some of them more terrible than even Atyle’s god-sight could comprehend.

Atyle held her breath. The great titan was a godling worthy of the title — but the golden diamond was vast beyond imagination. How could such a small thing hope to prevail?

But it must!

Arcadia’s Rampart was among the most beautiful things Atyle had ever witnessed. When the titan had lain defeated and sleeping, it had seemed nothing more than the husk of a dead god, like the discarded shell of a beetle — pretty with colours and shaped most excellently, but pointless and fleeting, dust beneath a careless heel.

In motion the titan was sublime. It was shaped like a great hump-backed beetle, with four folding legs and four elegant arms; a tiny silvery head was planted in the middle of the back, but Atyle’s god-sight revealed this to be no head at all — it was the anchor-point of the vast shields that flashed and seared in the air around the titan’s body. Atyle offered a silent apology to the titan; she had imagined it would move with lumbering care, like an elephant or a hippopotamus, or perhaps like a real beetle, scuttling and scurrying in furtive stealth. Her assumptions shamed her. Arcadia’s Rampart moved with the swift clarity of a human being, each limb unfolding with the flowing precision of a sword-bearer, the body balanced like a dancer on the sand.

Atyle’s god-sight showed her more; she pierced bone and saw the gleaming meat beneath, ruby-rich and throbbing red, flushed with crimson blood and crackling with great sheets of passing life. The titan was more alive and more vital than any mortal flesh; Pheiri’s insides were beautiful in the same manner, especially the wonder of his shrouded brain, but even Pheiri was but a pale shadow of this brilliance. Atyle saw the network of organs the titan used for thinking, the eight-lobed brain and sixteen-branched heart and the armoured chambers of thought and memory; she saw the perfection of biological systems even her god-sight could not comprehend, webs of impulse and energy worming through the titan’s body, sacks of chemical and bile and humour that could have melted her soul to nothingness if she but inhaled the smallest wisp.

She saw the way the bone-hide and red-muscle repelled the machines of the gods in the air all around, forcing the tiny ‘nanomachines’ to change course or be destroyed by noise and fury. The titan’s innards boiled with their own tiny machines, flexing and flowering as they shivered with the promise of a coming change.

Atyle blinked. The titan was changing inside. A ripple passed through the gleaming burgundy meat, like a caged river behind a dam.

The golden diamond in the sky reached down toward the titan with snakes of crushing power; there would be no contest, the titan would be smashed to splinters if it did nothing.

What did it need?! A final push? Was the titan intimidated? Did it suffer doubt, as mortals did?

“You are witnessed!” Atyle howled over the noise of Pheiri’s engines and treads, over the whirr of the aircraft and the whipping wind in her face. “You are seen! I see you! The gods see you! The crowned child sees your struggle! You are witnessed!”

In the core of Arcadia’s Rampart, in a spot Atyle had previously overlooked, two fluids crashed together — a moment of fusion, as the titan and her keeper became one.

Fusion spread through the titan in an instant, crashing through muscle and tendon and nerve and breaking the dam of age.

Bone-armour burst asunder with a noise like the earth being torn in two. Flesh flowered into a whirlwind, with a wet and meaty ripping sound, like the innards of the world spilling forth. Crimson and scarlet reached for the heavens with towers of dripping meat.

Pheiri shot from the confines of the streets, treads biting into the rim of the grey and muddy crater, carrying Atyle out into the open. She no longer needed her god-sight to see.

Arcadia’s Rampart was blossoming: white armour had burst and peeled back at every seam to reveal the scarlet meat beneath — and the meat was growing, expanding, flowing upward in waves like ivy climbing a tree, like mould eating the world. The beetle-shaped back had exploded outward into a flared cup of bone, cradling a spiral of meaty petals, each one singing with arcs of brilliant blue life crackling forth to scorch the air and imprint their truth upon Atyle’s stinging retina. The titan’s legs and arms unfolded outward like a mathematical equation written in leaf and branch, gaining a dozen new joints, digging into the grey mud and spiralling through the air, carrying fragments of bone on a wave of divine flesh. Exposed nerves and lymphatic tubes and bleeding arteries spider-webbed upward, forming towers of meat and blood to dwarf the skyscrapers which ringed the crater.

“Lilium,” Atyle whispered. “The lily. Newborn god. Give me your name! Your name!”

Atyle’s voice was lost; the titan was too busy screaming its own truth outward across the weave of the world, overpowering even the noise of the golden diamond in the sky.

The titan’s exposed flesh bubbled and boiled with new extrusions — claws and teeth, protector-like organs, eyeballs the size of people, great maws yawning wide; the weaponry on the titan’s hide was quickly overwhelmed, each blister and knot of bone-embedded gun absorbed and overgrown with flesh. The great ‘railgun’ on one arm vanished beneath a wave of crimson and garnet.

But the golden diamond cared not for all this beauty. It reached down with an army of invisible serpents, to rip blossom from stem.

Atyle longed to cry a warning. She did not see how this battle could go any other way. The titan was beautiful beyond her dreams, beyond the most fanciful of her tales, but it was still so tiny compared to the foe.

But then Atyle’s god-sight saw new engines suddenly bloom deep inside the titan’s flesh, seeds bursting to life within an instant, expanding from thumb-sized dots of potential into roaring organs of throbbing power, red and wet and glistening beneath the grey light of the soot-choked sky. The air around Arcadia’s Rampart turned hazy with heat; a wave of cooked air washed outward and slammed over Atyle’s face; the mud beneath the titan’s four feet flash-dried and hardened to a baked crust.

The diamond reached downward with limbs as wide as rivers; Arcadia’s Rampart reached back up with snakes of her own.

Gravity met gravity; the invisible tentacles did not slap and deflect like true limbs, but exploded outward in waves of shattering force wherever they met, reforming as soon as they parted. The mud of the crater rocked and flowed under the ripples of the blows; skyscrapers creaked and tilted, steel screaming with the pressure; ball-craft were thrown through the air like seeds on the wind. Even Pheiri shuddered beneath Atyle’s feet as he sped onward, throwing up grey mud behind his tracks.

The waves of gravity washed over Atyle, spinning her head and forcing vomit from her lips. She spat bile and let it come, but she kept her eyes wide open.

Up in the sky, the golden diamond wobbled on its axis.

Tears rolled down Atyle’s cheeks.

Atyle had spent her girlhood weaving lies about watching the gods at war. She lied to her parents, she lied to her siblings, she lied to the elders, she lied to the priestesses in the temple, and even to the great emperor himself, when she had been brought before him amid all the finery of the palace. She had lied to the guests from foreign lands, she had lied to soldiers and armies and generals. She had lied to dying men and barren women and orphaned children. She had lied to condemned enemies and to staunch allies and all others under the sun. She intuited at a young age that the adults wanted to believe her lies, wanted to believe that the gods were just above their heads. She would lie on her back and stare at the clouds and pretend to witness victory or defeat in the pantomimes of divine provenance. She would lie to her bed-slaves of love and destiny and fate. She would jump up in the middle of meals and declaim a new vision, a new unfolding of the cosmic dance. She would justify her whims — or, more often, the whims of her lord and emperor — with stories she dreamed up while emptying her bowels of night soil.

In life Atyle — Priestess, Visionary, Chosen, Wise Woman, Temple Bride — had been a liar and a fraud. Her gods were born of shit; they were worth the same.

The gods in the twilight between life and death were real.

They had offered her much, but they were not flesh and blood. They were spirits lost in the gloom between worlds, chained and bound to the will of greater things, things that did not deserve the name of gods. Even her crowned girl, the secret to which she owed allegiance, was but a phantom craving incarnation.

But this, this blossoming beauty, this was a god in the flesh. Newborn.

The golden diamond wobbled — it had not expected to face a newborn godling, armed with the same terrible instruments of wrath. The nest of snakes reeled backward in surprise, then reared up for a second strike. Tips of gravity lanced through the air, racing faster than Atyle’s god-sight could measure; the pressure wave hit her in the front, made her ribs creak, compressed her organs, squeezed her lungs. But she kept her eyes open.

The Newborn’s own gravity blossomed outward into a shield made of petals; the diamond’s gravity-snakes exploded into shards against this defence. The Newborn opened a dozen mouths in her flesh — red and wet and dripping with blood — and bellowed a scream into the sky, so loud that the air itself blurred and shook. Atyle clamped her hands over her ears, head spinning and pounding.

The golden diamond lurched sideways under the assault of this god-voice scream; its perfect mathematical equilibrium was lost.

Arcadia’s Rampart bunched her legs; flesh flowered and grew downward into great springs.

The Newborn Godling gathered herself, leapt into the air, and flew.

Arcadia’s Rampart sprang like an insect, throwing up a great wave of mud from the crater, powering her jump with the flaring exhausts of exotic energies Atyle did not comprehend. She pounced toward the vast shape of the stricken diamond. She trailed divine effluvia of blood and bile behind her — and then burst at the sides with wings of flesh to carry herself the distance. She grew great spikes and fangs and stabbing teeth, all downward-pointing, as she fell toward the golden mechanism like a hawk falling upon the eyes of a lion.

The diamond righted itself, reformed the shattered snakes, and swatted Arcadia’s Rampart out of the sky.

“No!” Atyle screamed.

The Newborn fell like a bleeding comet, wings shattered, limbs kicking at the air with corkscrews and spirals of scarlet flesh, fragments of bone-armour spilling away from her hide. She clipped the top of a skyscraper and slammed into the ground below, shaking the earth and sending up a cloud of debris and dust beyond the edge of the crater. Atyle’s god-sight saw the Newborn on her back, vulnerable and splayed, her flight ruined.

The golden diamond pulled back with its feelers of gravity, ready to smite the titan to nothing upon the earth.

Arcadia’s Rampart reached up with one gravity-feeler, like the hand of a drowning girl; the golden diamond had not expected this, and had left no snakes in reserve to repel the touch. Arcadia’s Rampart wrapped her gravity around the golden cross-beam of the diamond, and pulled, down.

The front of the diamond dipped, like the head of a horse compelled by a hand. The leading tip slammed into the city below; buildings exploded, throwing debris in every direction, falling in waves of concrete and brick, rippling outward like the impact of a boulder tossed into the sea. The diamond shook itself, lashing out with gravity and smashing buildings aside. Arcadia’s Rampart was back on her feet, the feint concluded; the Newborn danced in the ruins, a beetle sparring with an elephant. She had dragged the behemoth down to her level, and held it there with a fist of iron.

Pheiri skidded to a halt, throwing up a wave of grey mud and stagnant water.

A voice interrupted Atyle, from the open hatch.

“Mad fucking bitch!” Ilyusha howled, laughing and spitting, tatters of vomit on her lips. “Get in, get in! You’re gonna get smashed up there!”

Another voice — Amina, quavering in awe and terror: “God— God— God is— God—”

Atyle shook her head. She did not even look away from the gods at war. “Not God, little rabbit! The gods themselves, the true lords of creation! Come up, come up and see! I cannot part from them!”

“Tch!” Ilyusha hissed; Atyle expected her to vanish again. The animal did not understand faith, she had none. But then little feet scrambled up out of the hatch and little hands grabbed Atyle’s coat. “Ami!” Ilyusha screeched — then followed as well, claws scrabbling against Pheiri’s bone-hide.

Atyle spared them a smile. Amina clung to her coat, eyes wide; Ilyusha’s claws were clamped around Amina’s leg, her own feet gripping the hatch, to anchor all three to Pheiri’s safety.

“We witness the gods,” Atyle whispered.

The Newborn stumbled back through the skyscrapers, as a human stumbles through a field of wheat, feet slamming into the mud of the crater. It dragged the golden diamond as a human drags a plough through the earth.

Amina whimpered. Ilyusha was silent. Even the animals understood.

The Newborn, Arcadia’s Rampart, was bleeding from a dozen wounds — pulped and pulverised areas of crimson flesh where she had failed to deflect the diamond’s gravity. Patches of armour were buckled and cracked. Fields of flesh were blackened and cooked, carbonised by some weapon Atyle did not understand.

The titan had not forgotten her flesh-embraced weapons: she had used them as a surprise. The many guns and slings and spears upon her hide had resurfaced, glowing with new energies, reinforced by bone and tendon and throbbing meat; the guns pounded against the golden diamond, filling the air with blossoms of explosion and crack-whip spikes of brilliant light, rocking the crater with the impacts. The diamond lashed out in return, slamming into the tentacles of gravity, washing over the mud with stray shock waves. Arcadia’s Rampart ducked and buckled, struggling to hold on, to keep the diamond grounded.

“The little God has hooked herself a leviathan,” Atyle whispered. “But this monster will drag her under the waves.”

Ilyusha howled with a laugh halfway to madness: “Fuckin’ get some shit! Yeah!”

Over to the right, Pheiri’s rear ramp descended with a loud thump, splashing into the grey mud. Atyle allowed herself a split-second glance away from the titanic fight on the far side of the crater. Three figures were sprinting for the ramp, one of them carrying a fourth, all of them caked in mud from head to toe. Elpida, leading the scribe and the soldier and Pheiri’s other maid. Hafina turned as she ran, cracking off a rifle shot behind her; she was trying to keep another ball-aircraft at bay. Pheiri turned his guns on the swooping machine and hammered it backward in the sky, like a dandelion seed held aloft on a stream of breath.

Ilyusha grabbed Atyle’s shin, tugging at both her and Amina. “Down! Below! Elpi’s back! Now, come on, fuck!”

“Wait, animal! Wait!”

On the far side of the crater the golden diamond finally shook itself free of the Newborn’s grip.

The diamond started to rise, like a whale rearing up to smash the boat that had so briefly held it hooked. The golden surfaces were untouched by bullet or bomb or arc or magic. Soot and mud alike slid from them, leaving their bleeding toxic light undimmed, gleaming and perfect. That light burst in a wave over Arcadia’s Rampart, shrivelling crimson flesh and darkening bone-white armour. Atyle felt that same light against her face and the exposed skin of her hands, blistering and burning her flesh. The Newborn shrivelled, like a blossom before the flame.

Atyle wept. Had it all been for nothing? The crowned girl did not deserve to see this.

The weave of flesh in the Newborn’s hide peeled back, as if drying out and dying away, falling back in layers of crusted petal, revealing pulsing dark innards beneath. A face shifted in that flesh — a face larger than buildings, narrow and aquiline, sharp of jaw, toothy with triumph.

The face looked a tiny bit like the warrior, the Commander, Elpida.

Ilyusha yelped a laugh; Ilyusha saw some logic that Atyle did not. “Surprise!” the animal howled. “Fuck you!”

The face was gone as quickly as it had risen from the soup of flesh, melting to nothing — and leaving behind the railgun.

Like a stinger ejected from the flesh of a wasp, the massive arm-cannon railgun shot forward, the tip almost touching the diamond’s cross-bar of toxic gold. Magnetic power flared. The railgun discharged with a crack like the splitting of a mountain.

A round the size of Pheiri’s body slammed into the diamond’s crossbeam — and broke it.

An explosion of golden shrapnel filled the air, brighter than the forgotten sun, growing into a mushroom of burning light.

Atyle’s breath was sucked from her lungs; her skin began to boil and the sight in her mortal eye turned to blinding white; her god-sight dimmed and flickered, filled with sparkles of static and dancing stars. The Newborn God stood untouched amid the fiery doom, levelling her guns once again. The golden diamond was reeling, bleeding shining ichor in great torrents. Atyle wept tears of blood and—

And hit Pheiri’s hide in a heap; Ilyusha pulled her off her feet and dragged her down through the hatch.

Atyle allowed herself to be shoved down the steps, back into the safety of Pheiri’s innards. She could not keep her feet; she collapsed at the bottom of the passageway, sprawled out across the floor of the crew compartment, half-blind and almost deafened, bleeding from patches of cooked skin, weeping tears of blood — tears of joy. The gods had shown her the truth at last. She had witnessed victory, not a fiction, not a lie.

“Ami! Ami!” Ilyusha was shouting.

Amina replied: “I-it burns, but it’s only m-my hand, I’m— I’m okay, I’m okay, Illy.”

Elpida and the others had returned moments before the Newborn’s surprise — they were dripping grey mud as they fell in through the airlock compartment, shouting and babbling, weapons clattering, boots ringing against the metal. Pheiri lurched forward again as soon as all were aboard, tossing the revenants sideways as he skidded in the mud and made good their escape.

The Commander snapped orders above the chaos, checking on her girls, but even her voice shook.

“Everyone in? Everyone in!? Nobody left behind? Haf, get Kaga into the infirmary, right now. Vicky, Vicky, sit down, hold onto something. What happened to her — Ilyusha, what happened to Atyle? What— what are you— Howl? … Howl? Howl?”

Atyle paid no attention.

The crowned girl had appeared in Atyle’s god-sight.

She was not a dream-memory, but a phantom standing upon the decking, a ghost none of the others could see, even as they stepped through her insubstantial body. She was beautiful, dressed in a gown of bone and pearl and coral, with hair the colour of burning ash, eyes of pure obsidian, and skin like fresh, rich, warm blood. Her crown was silver, melted to her skull, crackling with life.

She smiled at Atyle: a thank you.

“Howl?!” Elpida was shouting, clutching her own head. “Where are you?! Where did you go?! Howl?!”

The crowned girl lost her smile. She closed her eyes with heavy sorrow, tears of liquid silver flowing down her cheeks.

Atyle’s god-sight cleared. The crowned girl was gone. The crew compartment slammed from side to side as Pheiri accelerated away from the crater, dodging mosquitoes and losing traction and smashing through buildings.

The Commander was standing in the middle of it all, dripping with grey mud, hair filthy, jaw clenched, eyes wide with the mania of a fresh wound.

“Howl?!”

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Apotheosis in flesh and bone! A shattered diamond, a burst of gold, and a war between the gods.

Gosh, writing from Atyle’s POV for the first time was very challenging! This was very, very different to all other characters so far, even Amina, back when we saw a few things from her POV, but I think I’m quite happy with how this turned out. And I hope you enjoyed it too! We may get some more Atyle in the future (perhaps once she recovers from those, uh, ‘burns’), but in the meantime we’ve got an escape to pull off, wreckage to sort through, a duel not yet concluded, and a very missing Howl. Uh oh.

And how about that crowned girl? Royalty from the nanomachine underworld. Let’s hope she’s happy with the result.

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

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

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

And thank you! As always, thank you so much for reading my little story! I’m delighted that you’re here, I hope you’re enjoying Necroepilogos, and I can promise so much more to come. Onward we go, deeper into the rot and rust and ruins, cradling this newborn flower in a fist of nuclear fusion. Until next chapter!

Content Warnings

Toxic relationship dynamics
Intimate partner abuse (sort of? I’m erring on the side of caution here)
Strangulation
Cannibalism
Paralysis
Implied infection of wounds
Infidelity

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Cantrelle accepted that God was speaking to her once again, after decades of unbroken silence. Divine messages were written upon the world in the language of pattern and sign — even here, after the end of all life, deep in the Kingdom of Death.

She didn’t give a shit. God could go fuck himself.

Yola was missing; Yola had advance warning.

Yola was a traitor.

“Eyes on the aircraft! Eyes on that fucking aircraft! That one, it’s coming around for us again! Phol, get that shoulder-mount locked on, scare it off!”

“Serpents in the sky, servants of a greater power—”

“Shut up! Shut up! Get your shit together!”

“—don’t think we can scare them, don’t think they scare at all—”

“It’s loaded with gravitics, in the core—”

“They all have fucking gravitics! Ignore it! Spook it before—”

“Run! Just run! Out the back! Fucking run!”

The air was filled with the screams and shouts of an uncontrolled rout. Boots thumped against blood-slick concrete, ankle-deep in half-eaten corpses; bodies slammed into walls and smashed through doors, shoved aside or dragged clear or thrown to the ground. Stray gunshots whipped and cracked, finding no targets; automatic weapons opened up and then sputtered out, swatted to silence by gravity itself. Stragglers cried out for help. Few stopped to assist the fallen.

The Sisterhood was breaking around Cantrelle’s skull.

“Argh! Aaaa! My ears, ahhh— comms are— f-f-fuck—”

“—look at my eyes! Look at me! Get— get up! Get up!”

“Yank her comms implant, cut it out if you have to. Knife, now! Get it out of her throat. Nobody access wide-band comms, it’s frying our heads—”

“Fuck the comms! Fucking run! Phone’s gone, phone’s gone! Shoot her, leave her!”

“I’ll shoot you first you rancid cunt! One finger on her and I’ll eat your heart raw!”

“—that thing in the air is flooding every frequency with bullshit. No comms! Do not leave visual range or you will be left behind!”

“Hahaha! ‘Visual’? We’re gone, bitch!”

Cantrelle’s peripheral vision throbbed black and red; the gravity-wave pulse had damaged her bionic eyes. She was on her hands and knees, struggling to stand up; frothy crimson bile hung from her lips. A puddle of vomit lay on the floor before her. Blood and gore was soaking through the bandages which encased her hands, seeping into her wounds with sharp, cold pain. The air stank of sick and shit and breached intestines.

“It’s God. It’s God, descended from the heavens at last, to scour us clean of our sins. Oh, God, we’ve sinned so much, so much, too much to wash off—”

“-you, maybe, you sick rat. Move!”

“It’s not God you fucking moron. God is dead. We killed him!”

“Airship. It’s an airship. Use your eyes.”

“I can’t see! I’m— bleeding— no— it’s too cold. Pholet, where—”

All organisation and coherency was lost; resources were being abandoned; Sisters were falling upon each other.

“Bag the meat! Get on that now! Bag the meat, get everything we can!”

“—fuck you, it’s mine! This one is mine—”

“Bitch, get off! I’ll fucking shoot you first!”

Bang! Bang!

“—gurrlk—”

Bang!

“Urgh, I still feel sick, I can feel that thing up there clawing at the air. Every time it moves I wanna hurl.”

“That’s gravitics. Get used to it. Run! Go!”

Cantrelle’s eyes recovered, though the edge of her vision was grey and flickering. She raised her gaze from the filthy floor, then staggered to her feet, boots slipping in the blood and gore. The slowest and most optimistic of the shattering Sisterhood were fleeing all around her, sprinting for the doors, shouting and screaming and shoving.

One of the ball-shaped rotary craft was swooping toward the entrance of the loading dock, unfurling wings of gravitic power.

Far behind the aircraft — past the jagged hillside of bone-white mech lying prone in the grey mud, beyond the skyscrapers on the opposite side of the impact crater — a golden diamond hung in the sky, bleeding toxic light into the atmosphere.

Lashed by lightning, shining with regal brilliance, giant beyond imagining. The golden titan boiled with waves of pressure which rolled over Cantrelle’s exposed face and throbbed deep inside her bite wounds.

A sign from God.

Cantrelle grit her teeth. She didn’t care.

Yola was missing; Yola was a traitor.

Six hours earlier the Sisterhood of the Skull had finally quit the weakness-inducing safety of their temporary fortress, inside the skyscraper on the opposite side of the impact crater. Yola had done everything Cantrelle had come to expect of her: she had roused the girls with a short speech, showing nothing but confidence and authority; she had focused her words on the need to reassert the Sisterhood’s self-evident primacy; she had highlighted the insult of the breakout, and decreed it would not go unpunished; she had declared her intention to exert the Sisterhood’s will upon the degenerates who had gathered to usurp the Sisterhood’s rightful prize — the mech lying prone in the middle of the crater. She would sweep them away with violence and add their meat to the Sisterhood’s bodies.

Yola’s obsession with the degenerate ‘superhuman’ — Elpida — appeared to have passed; perhaps she was suppressing it, but Cantrelle did not care. As long as Yola’s madness did not taint the Sisterhood’s purity of purpose.

As usual the Sisters made no attempt to remove the grinning skulls they had daubed on the outer walls of the skyscraper — the sign of their passing would remain until the city itself scrubbed away the blood and ink. Cantrelle approved of this habit; the skull was a reminder to others that there was only one possible allegiance in the Kingdom of Death.

Yola had led the Sisters away from the impact crater, ostensibly to avoid the sucking grey mud churned up by the night’s rain; Cantrelle had briefly worried that Yola was breaking her word. Was she leading the Sisterhood beyond the graveworm line, in doomed pursuit of her superhuman fixation? Had Cantrelle finally become unable to read Yola’s true intentions? Should she have killed Yola when she’d had the chance, or agreed to betray her to Elpida’s request?

No, not that, not ever.

Cantrelle had told nobody about the secret radio contact from Elpida. She told herself that such concerns would only risk the return of Yola’s languid obsession.

Alone with Yola, Cantrelle could save the Sisterhood with one bullet and a bit of quick thinking, but out in the rotting streets with the Sisters in motion, Cantrelle would have no choice but to follow Yola to certain doom.

But Yola had turned the group away from the graveworm line.

They had skirted the outer edge of the tangled ruins at the crater’s top end. Cantrelle had breathed a sigh of private relief, and stuck close to her prophet’s side.

Yola had not needed to issue orders — the Sisters had slipped back into their natural doctrine: small groups advancing without relying on each other, leapfrogging between scraps of cover, falling into loose competition over who could move faster, who could bag opportunistic kills, and who could surprise or taunt or interrupt other groups. Three fights had broken out — a small number compared to usual. Only one of those three required intervention: Hafsatu had attempted to shoot Ida in the ankle, in a disagreement over who got to stick closest to Tiri. The fight had turned into a fists-and-feet scuffle with screaming and shouting and some teeth knocked out with a brick. Yola had stepped in with but a word and the Sisters had disengaged.

Her authority had returned. Cantrelle approved, purring with inner satisfaction. All was right within the Kingdom of Death.

The Sisterhood spent five hours slicing their way through the ruins, limbering up muscles and stretching trigger fingers, flexing blood-lust and building an appetite for more. They caught and killed four lone revenants on the journey; the meat went to the killers, with choice cuts for the leadership.

When they reached the opposite side of the crater they spent forty five minutes setting up an assault on the first inhabited building they found: a long, low, metal structure between the skyscrapers, an ancient industrial plant coated with rust. A small group of zombie filth was huddled within — nobodies, without even a standard or symbol to their name. Too easy, hardly like overcoming a determined knot of Wreckers and Murderers.

But the Sisterhood needed the morale boost. Confidence was yet thin. Yola ordered; Cantrelle approved.

On Yola’s signal they hit the prey all at once. They poured through doorways and windows into some kind of ancient loading dock, all concrete platforms and faded markings on the ground. They avoided the main entrance — a gaping aperture which faced the crater and the crippled mech. Kuro had gone in first, bowling through the defenders and scattering them across cold concrete.

The fight was over in less than five minutes. None survived. No Sisters even wounded. Easy prey.

Cantrelle still hurt all over from the wounds she had sustained against Elpida and Amina. Her voice was still a scratchy strangled mess. She could not hold or fire a gun properly, not even the low-powered PDW she carried beneath her coat, not with her hands still wrapped in bandages. She still felt the insult of the bite wounds on her face and neck — especially the bite wound which neatly bisected the skull tattoo on her cheek. She had not decided what to do about that. She dared not remove the bandage; the sign would be taken as an ill omen, at best. She wanted to rip away the ruined tattoo and re-apply the black skull on her other cheek, so that her faith would remain unbroken. But her fingers had faltered at the symbolism of pulling the broken skull off her flesh.

She had told herself there was no symbolism. This was not a sign. She had not read signs since true life. God did not speak in the Kingdom of Death.

Relief was better than any painkiller. Yola had located her senses and bound the Sisterhood to her leadership once again, feeding them on victory and blood, on raw meat and quivering brains. After the humiliating ‘defeat’ by the so-called ‘superhuman’ and her degenerate friends, everyone needed the reminder: the brides of death would not be denied, for they are the incarnation of the world to come.

The Sisters had begun to feast on the dead while setting up a perimeter. Everyone was hungry, so Yola allowed a little laxity.

Cantrelle had been tearing off a piece of meat for herself, a nice chunk of fatty thigh from one of the dead girls, glistening and wet in the grip of her tentacle-pincers. She had shoved a quivering gobbet into her mouth, then turned toward where Yola had stood a moment ago, toward the back of the loading dock.

But Yola was gone, without a word or a whisper, without standing orders. She hadn’t even taken her fuck-toy with her — Kuro was right there, opening the face-plate of her armour to shove handfuls of meat into her maw.

The double doors at the rear of the loading dock had been swinging shut; Cantrelle was the only one to see that. Nobody else had noticed Yola leave.

Cantrelle had opened a line to Yola across the comms network. She had been about to ask what the hell Yola was doing.

Half a second later God’s Sign had appeared in the sky, heralded by a pressure-wave of gravitic power.

The Sisters had voided their guts amid the ruins of their conquest, slipping and sliding on the gore that fell from their hands. Cantrelle had felt the jelly inside her eyeballs shake and the contents of her stomach slam up through her throat. She had fallen to her hands and knees, retching, dizzy, blacking out. The comms network had gone down, filled with the screaming voices of every soul in hell. Clouds of flies had poured from the Golden Sign in the sky — ball-shaped rotor-craft, swarming over the impact crater, falling upon the corpse of the mech like carrion eaters upon rotten meat.

Cantrelle was back on her feet now. The Sisterhood was broken and fleeing. Cantrelle drooled bloody bile from her lips and stared up into the soot-black sky through a veil of tears. God’s Messenger glowed with a toxic gold she had not seen since true life, boiling with a mass of gravitic power she could dimly see through her flickering, glitching augmetic eyes.

A sign from God. A sign that God was not yet dead. The divine was still at work in the world.

Cantrelle had been eight years old when she’d first successfully deciphered the messages from God.

Her older brothers had ambushed a patrol of King’s Men who had wandered too deeply into the forests; the soldiers had died swiftly, cut down by the bullets of stolen rifles, distracted by the baying of hounds at their heels, and crushed beneath dead-fall traps on the single-file false trail. Cantrelle’s father and the other adults were mostly interested in the guns the King’s Men had carried, in the computers and machines in their pockets, in the strange liquid armour the leader had worn. The adults also discussed when the patrol might be missed, when more soldiers with better guns might visit the forest, or when Toulouse might dispatch more than scouting parties to enforce the peace.

They had piled the corpses upon the flat stone foundations of God’s House, in hopes of a sign, but the village had not boasted of a seer in generations. The adults had gathered all the children under thirteen and paraded them before the corpses, but no insight had struck, only tears and whimpers. Then a wild dog had gotten to the corpses and dragged out the entrails of one soldier. That was taken as a very bad sign. The village had prepared to flee to the deeper woods.

But on the night the village was to be emptied, Cantrelle had wandered into the dark of God’s House, alone and unguarded. The other children had been afraid or disgusted by the corpses and the looping entrails, but Cantrelle found them fascinating, like watching the flowing of a stream or the dancing of a fire or the wheeling of a flock of birds. The adults had kept asking questions about what the children could see, but Cantrelle hadn’t been able to concentrate, not with all the noise.

Alone in the dark with the bodies, the world had started to make sense.

She had sat with the entrails in the cold hours of the morning, reading truth in spilled guts. She had begun to see the meaning in the ravens and crows gathering overhead, in the sounds of their cries, in the numbers and sequences in which they alighted on the branches. She had read music in the rustle of leaves, seen art in the wriggling of worms in maggoty flesh, and heard the whisper of God in all things. She had woken up to divine truth, everywhere and always.

At sunrise Cantrelle had walked back home and informed her parents of what God had said: more King’s Men would come in ten days time, two hours before dusk.

Cantrelle had turned out to be right.

She had spent the next fifteen years reading signs from God. She saw the messages and meaning in everything. She had even read them in the flames that had licked her feet and blackened her toes, when the King’s Men had burnt her to death in Toulouse a decade and a half later.

When Cantrelle had first been resurrected in the Kingdom of Death she had attempted to read God’s words in the guts of other revenants. She had cut them open in secret places, sifting entrails even as she shoved handfuls of flesh down her gullet. Surely this afterlife was God’s doing, God’s work, God’s intention? Surely she had not been abandoned here, among demons and monsters and the eaters of the dead?

She had watched the skies and tasted the soil and listened for the rustle of leaves in the wind. But the sky was empty and the soil was barren and nothing grew here but false flesh.

God’s voice was silent. God was dead.

Cantrelle had spent many years as a screaming madness, then more as a scuttling thing of dirt and wordless hungers.

Eventually Cantrelle had joined the Sisterhood, the so-called Death’s Heads, the only ones who saw what the world had become, the only ones with a sensible answer. They had seen her potential. She had learned about nanomachines and metabolism and the nature of the ecosystem. She had learned science and medicine and chemistry. She had stopped looking for signs from God. She no longer believed.

But the signs these past few weeks had become too much to ignore. First the mech had fallen from the sky, a comet from the heavens. Then the ‘superhuman’, Yola’s perfect leader, had walked out of the empty void. Then the defeat, the sickening humiliation of being strangled to death but not killed. Then the symbol on her cheek, bitten through. The Kingdom of Death, thrown down.

And now this golden diamond in the sky. This celestial machine. This resurrection of the signifier.

Cantrelle’s younger self stirred inside her chest.

“Fuck you!” Cantrelle screamed at the sky, at the rotor-craft swooping down toward her, at the golden message dripping toxic light down onto the grey. “Where were you when I fucking needed you?! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

God was a liar and a cheat and a traitor.

And so was Yola.

Yola had stepped out of those rear doors seconds before the gigantic craft had appeared in the sky. Yola had advance warning from some unknown source. Yola had left the Sisterhood to die.

Cantrelle was going to kill her.

Cantrelle turned and ran before the rotor-craft could crash into the loading dock. Her boots slipped in the gore and blood, but she lurched forward and kept her balance. The rest of the Sisterhood was almost gone, running through the guts of the building, fleeing the revelation above the crater.

Cantrelle slammed through the double-doors at the rear of the loading dock, into the shadows and dust of a long and empty hallway; several Sisters were sprinting ahead of her, their footfalls and shouts echoing down the concrete tunnels, leaving nothing but bloody boot prints. Motes of dust swirled in the dim air. Sounds of combat pounded through the walls, backed by gravitic pressure-waves.

And beneath it all was an unmistakable grinding sound — a mountain range rubbing its back against the world, spiralling its way through gigatonnes of concrete and steel and brick.

The graveworm was moving. Cantrelle didn’t care.

“Yola!” she rasped into the dark, drowned out by the titans beyond the walls.

The comms network was full of cognitive hazard pouring from the god-thing in the sky; Yola’s direct frequency was inaccessible. Cantrelle bypassed comms entirely and reached out to Yola’s implants. She had not done this in years, not since Yola had stopped sleeping in the same bedroll as Cantrelle. Their last communication at this level of signals intimacy had been ugly and upsetting, filled with insults Cantrelle did not care to recall, and followed up by a personal visit from Kuro.

Cantrelle knew Yola would not accept the handshake protocol. Yola was a traitor, she had spat on everything they had ever shared, and Cantrelle would snap her neck before the Sisterhood broke and—

Yola accepted the connection.

<<Yolanda!>> Cantrelle screamed down the direct line; the connection was filled with static whispers from that thing in the sky, trying to break the private encryption. <<Where the fuck did you go? Where are you?! Answer me, you apostate fuck! You knew we were about to get hit, you knew! You knew all along! You bitch, you unfaithful heretic shit, you—>>

<<ping-ping-ping>>

Yola replied with a non-verbal systems ping, a three-beat metronome.

Cantrelle stopped breathing.

Back in the good days — when Yola had relied on Cantrelle for everything, when Cantrelle had known the taste of Yola’s tears and fingers and cunt, when Yola had whined and mewled whenever Cantrelle wanted — that three-beat signal had acted as a private cry for help. Not physical help; even back then Yola was a Sister in good standing, and now she was the prophet, the leader, and more. If Yola needed physical help all she had to do was shout. Every Sister would come running to her side.

That three-beat burst was for Cantrelle only. It meant: I can’t do this alone. Please, Ella. Please come to me.

The Yola who had last used that signal was long gone, replaced by a traitor, a shadow, a mockery of the sweetness that Cantrelle had raised up.

Cantrelle drew her PDW with her tentacle-pincers — awkward and clumsy, but better than nothing. Her hands hung limp, bandages soaked with gore.

“Yola!” she yelled into the dark. “Yolanda!”

<<Yola? Where are you?! Give me positional!>>

<<ping-ping-ping>>

Twenty five feet away, to the right.

Cantrelle hurried along the dusty corridor and slipped around an archway, leading with her weapon. She stepped into a room which had once been some kind of chemical mixing and storage plant. Huge upright steel chemical tanks branched off into hundreds of tubes and pipes, caked with centuries of rust, all leading to a shallow depression in the middle of the room, dry and empty.

Yola stood in that shallow depression. The helmet of her purple armour was peeled back to show her ruby-red hair and the burn wound on her face.

She was crying. Quiet tears made tracks down her cheeks, shining in the cracked flesh of her wound.

Yola’s eyes swivelled toward Cantrelle — one emerald, one blinded and milky, both hollow and lost.

Cantrelle’s heart lurched; that was her Yola, her sad, pathetic girl, her fragile little lamb who needed to bite Cantrelle’s shoulder until it all felt better. That was the girl Cantrelle had brought to sobbing orgasm hundreds of times. The girl Cantrelle still wanted. Her Yola. Hers.

Elpida stood in front of Yola.

The degenerate was touching Yola’s face.

One soft brown hand cupped the cracked and blackened flesh of Yola’s cheek, brushing her tears with a thumb. Elpida was dressed in her tomb-coat, the same as Cantrelle’s, but new and undamaged where Cantrelle’s was patched and torn from years of wear. She carried a submachine gun in her other hand, loose and lazy; she didn’t bother to aim as Cantrelle swept into the room. Her long white hair was clean, undimmed by dirt or dust. Her copper brown skin looked warm as velvet, as if she’d just stepped from a bath. Cantrelle couldn’t remember what a bath felt like.

Purple eyes flashed with amusement. Elpida’s mouth curled in a cruel smile. Her lips parted.

Cantrelle pointed her PDW and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Her tentacle-pincers had frozen as if gripped by invisible force, unable to finish depressing the trigger of her gun. Her muscles were locked in place. Her legs wouldn’t move. Even her lips were fixed and still. She tried to scream with humiliated fury, but her throat wouldn’t budge. What was this?!

Elpida smiled wider, and said: “You called your special friend, Yola. No.”

Yola whispered: “I-I’m sorry. I … I … I never wanted—”

Elpida interrupted: “Yolanda, I told you, my offer is only for you, and for you alone.” Elpida reached out and stroked Yola’s burned cheek; a shudder of pain passed through Yola’s body. Cantrelle had not seen Yola show pain in years. Sick jealousy gnashed at her heart. Elpida continued: “Have we not come to a special understanding, you and I?”

Yola panted through tears. “I-I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave my … my girls … my … ”

Elpida sighed. “There is no time for these petty dramas and stale loves.”

‘Elpida’ sounded nothing like the superhuman girl from before, nothing like the captive, or the voice on the radio. She spoke with the same timbre and tone, but her word choice was all wrong. Her attitude was different. The way she held herself was incorrect.

Cantrelle realised this thing was not Elpida. She figured out why she couldn’t move.

The figure wearing Elpida’s face turned to glance at Cantrelle, with an amused curl to her lips. Suddenly Cantrelle could move her throat and mouth again.

“Necromancer!” Cantrelle screeched and spat. “Corpse-fucker! Don’t touch her! She’s mine! Mine! Don’t you dare! Fuck you! Fuck you! Yola, step away from her! Yolanda! Fuck!”

The Necromancer smiled with Elpida’s lips. “This one is spirited, but she is bound to the cares of the dead.” The Necromancer nodded to one side. “Better than this one, at least. Poor taste, Yolanda.”

Cantrelle realised she wasn’t the only Sister frozen solid in that room. Kuro stood six feet to Cantrelle’s left, an unmoving giant inside her suit of grey war-plate. Kuro’s weapons were deployed, pointing at the Necromancer, but locked in place, just like Cantrelle’s PDW. Yola’s living dildo fuck-pet had not fared any better than Cantrelle. A cold comfort.

A rumble came from beyond the walls, out in the crater. Was the airship making a move?

The Necromancer turned back to Yola.

Cantrelle screamed again: “Yola! Yola, why are you crying?! What did it do to you?!”

The Necromancer smiled. “I have informed Yolanda of what is happening here. That is all. Our time is almost up, Yola. No witnesses to the Telokopolan machine will be allowed to leave here. Those who die beneath central’s eye will not be returned to eternity’s wheel. They will be held in the pattern, forever. I am giving you this one chance, Yolanda. You and I have shared something special these last few years. Have we not?”

Was this where Yola had been getting it all? All her confidence, her high-and-mighty play-acting, her new mannerisms and new-found independence? This thing talked like Yola, not like Elpida! This corpse-rapist had taken her Yola away and replaced her with a puppet.

Yola was weeping, staring into the Necromancer’s imitation purple eyes. The Necromancer’s hand brushed her burned cheek a second time.

<<ping-ping-ping>>

Cantrelle screamed in rage and humiliation. Perhaps Kuro was doing the same, inside her armour.

The Necromancer sighed. She lowered her hand and turned away from Yola, toward Cantrelle. “Very well, dead things. You will have your poetic end. But this one I will take myself.”

‘Elpida’ flowed apart like a torrent of water.

Skin lightened and rippled. Coat hardened and bulged. Hair shrank and darkened. The transformation happened in the blink of an eye.

The Necromancer turned into an imitation of Yola — a grinning, smug, imperious Yola. The Necromancer smiled at Cantrelle with all the charisma of the prophet Yola had become. She raised a slender pistol, one that Yola herself had not used in years, large calibre, hollow-point rounds, more than enough to explode Cantrelle’s head like a watermelon beneath a sledgehammer.

The real Yola let out a sob.

Cantrelle suddenly found she could move again; she tumbled forward as her muscles resumed their earlier motion. She caught her balance and brought her PDW up, aiming at—

Yola?

The Necromancer started to speak.

Cantrelle roared with anger and pulled the trigger. Bullets slammed into the Necromancer’s imitation skull, tearing through meat and shattering bone, pulping brain and breaking jaw. The Yola-mask disintegrated under a hail of gunfire, turned to shredded meat and splinters of bone.

“Did you think I wouldn’t?!” Cantrelle screamed. “Because you’re wearing her face?! Fuck you! Fuck her!”

Bang-bang-bang-bang-click—

Cantrelle’s magazine ran dry — but the Necromancer did not fall.

An eyeless head more meat than face stared back at Cantrelle through bloody wounds. Black orbs opened in the bullet holes, twisting and writhing and emerging as tarry-black tentacles, glistening wet and dripping with fluid. The real Yola whimpered.

“Ahhhhh,” the Necromancer sighed — a sound like blood-filled lungs struggling for a final breath, in Yola’s broken voice. “Never mind, then.”

She raised the pistol, pointed it at Cantrelle’s head, and pulled the trigger.

The wall of the chemical plant exploded inward.

Masonry fragments and steel shrapnel filled the air, pattering off coats and armour, slicing unprotected flesh, ringing out a mad chorus against the rusted chemical tanks. Cantrelle reeled from the impact, crashing onto her backside with a crunch of breaking bone, choking in the cloud of brick dust and debris.

Beyond the ragged stoma in the wall she caught a glimpse of the soot-black sky, with the toxic golden visitation hanging far above the horizon, framed by the sucking grey mud below. The fallen mech still lay like a stripped skeleton of bone-white amid the filth, surrounded by a cloud of flies.

The mech shuddered.

A monster slammed through the broken wall and into the chemical plant in a tidal wave of flesh — a seething, roiling, bubbling mass of semi-transparent iridescent protoplasm, flashing with dark purples and bright pinks and vomit-sick greens, flowing with rapidly re-forming eye-stalks and sensor-pads and blade-tipped tentacles. It was the size of a house and moved like a lightning bolt.

A true degenerate from beyond the graveworm line, a revenant changed beyond all memory of human form.

It pounced at the Necromancer.

Kuro turned as the degenerate attacked, released from the Necromancer’s control. Her armour bristled with weaponry as every firearm rose to slice into the side of the blob-zombie. But the monster lashed out at Kuro with a cluster of tentacles, faster than Cantrelle’s bionic eyes could follow. The monster tossed Kuro aside, hurling the power-armoured giant through the air; Kuro’s weight crashed through several chemical tanks and shattered the concrete with her landing.

The Necromancer was a parody of Yolanda now, a pulped skull atop a suit of imitation purple armour. It froze the degenerate blob monster with a glance, just like every other zombie.

But the flesh kept coming.

Like an avalanche of tar flowing around rocks, the glowing blob-thing did not stop moving; sections of it slammed forward, reaching for the Necromancer with any piece of itself it could unfreeze — a set of tentacles here, a splash of flesh there, a stabbing tendril or a sneaking lash. The Necromancer took a step back, then another, then another; her blind head jerked back and forth, as if she couldn’t keep up with all the different body parts of this creature. She froze them as they came, but this blob always had more.

The real Yola collapsed, freed from whatever control had kept her standing at attention.

Yola slammed to her hands and knees, scuffing her purple armour on the floor, and dragged herself into Cantrelle’s lap. Cantrelle caught her and held her tight; she wanted to crack open Yola’s armour and lever her rib cage apart and squeeze Yola’s heart in a fist. Yola was sobbing and wailing — crying, a noise that Cantrelle had not heard in too many years.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry— Ella, I’m sorry, Ella, Ella, I’m sorry—”

Cantrelle put her bloody, bandaged, aching hands around Yola’s throat; she barely had the strength to squeeze.

“Traitor.”

Yola wheezed. One emerald eye bulged in her face. “I’m sorry—”

A dark figure swept through the shattered wall on the heels of the blob-monster, framed against the distant background of bone-white mech. She was wrapped in a dark cloak from feet to scalp, showing only a mushroom-pale face and a jaw-mask of matte metal, painted with jagged black teeth. She carried half a dozen guns held in too many spindly hands. Chief among her weapons was a massive rifle. A pair of glowing red eyes flickered from the retreating Necromancer to Cantrelle and Yola.

The sniper. Wrecker and Murderer.

Cantrelle scrabbled for her PDW, but the gun was empty. The sniper levelled her massive rifle at Cantrelle and Yola to send a bullet through both their bodies. She used another hand to point a strange, boxy-looking gun toward the Necromancer.

She said: “Bye bye, death cult—”

Far behind the sniper, the fallen mech lurched to its feet.

Showers of grey mud shook from bone-white limbs. Weapons blossomed open all across the war machine’s body. The giant roared — a war-horn cry so loud it hurt Cantrelle’s eardrums and shook the ground.

Prone and unmoving it had seemed an ugly and twisted wreck. In motion it was beautiful beyond words.

The sniper pulled the trigger but her shot went wide, knocked off her aim by the roar of a waking god.

The Necromancer turned and ran.

The sniper shouted something from behind her mask — “Get her! Iriko!” — and the blob-monster raced after the fleeing corpse-fucker.

The sniper quickly levelled another shot. Cantrelle held Yola tight, even though she embraced only cold armour.

But the world exploded with sound and fury before anybody else could shoot: the god-machine bone-mech fired upon one of the tiny rotor craft, blossoming the air with explosions and laser-cannon beams and solid-shot rounds. Cantrelle didn’t even care that she was about to die at the hands of a degenerate, or that Yola was the worst kind of traitor, or that she was crying her own eyes out — the sight of that god-machine swatting a fly was like nothing she had witnessed in all her resurrections. The firepower was earth-shattering. Every motion was poetry.

“Yolanda,” Cantrelle whispered in the moments before the end. “You were right.”

Yola was looking up too now, lost in awe. “No … no … ” she whispered.

“With that machine the Sisterhood could have conquered a worm.”

Yola sobbed. “Ella.”

The sniper ignored it all; her finger tightened on the trigger.

The golden idol in the sky was reaching toward the mech with a nest of gravitic snakes, dimly seen through Cantrelle’s bionic eyes. The mech turned toward its foe, flowering open a hundred guns and missile pods and laser batteries. But it would not be enough.

Cantrelle felt tears running down her cheeks, tears for a lie she had abandoned so long ago. There could be no contest here. This grandest of all resurrections, this divine machine, this refutation of God’s word — it would be crushed into the barren mud like all other life. God had made his signs plain; the Kingdom of Death was his work after all. This place was his will and his desire, and he would brook no challenge, not even from an angel.

For the first time in decades Cantrelle wished it was not so.

But then the mech seemed to strain against its dirty white armour. Crimson flesh showed through widening gaps. A sound like tortured metal tore out across the crater.

The mech rippled — and burst.

A blossom of blood and bone opened like the first flower of spring, blooming into a whirlwind of flesh.

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Flesh flowers; bone blossoms!

And meanwhile, here’s the Sisterhood of the Skull (or whatever they care to call themselves) having a very bad time. Cantrelle especially is not having a good day. Neither is Yola. Did they bring this upon themselves? Probably. But hey, here’s Iriko! Maybe she can give them a hug! No? No danger hugs from Iriko? No getting in Iriko’s tummy? Oh well.

This week I would like once again to direct your attention to the fanart page! We have new additions: these two depictions of Thirteen with Elpida, by Melsa Hravei; and this illustration of Arcadia’s Rampant staring down central’s asset, by FarionDragon. I’m so endlessly delighted by the incredible fanart from readers of the story; it makes me very happy to see my own work inspiring others to make art. Thank you all so much!

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

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

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

Thank you very much for reading my little story, dear readers! Arc 9 is very chaotic so far, a big turning point for the story in various ways, and I dearly hope you are enjoying it as much as I am. Thanks for being here! Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

Body horror, the usual.

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Thirteen could do nothing but apologise; she had no help to offer Elpida beyond the empty hands of regret. Thirteen would soon be dead anyway: either rejected from the warmth and love of Arcadia’s Rampart, an isolated organ left to rot inside her tube of rancid amniotic fluid — or ripped apart along with Arca when the frame’s armour failed, attacked by the recent arrival beyond the hull, as they both lay helpless and unshielded upon the barren earth.

Even shut out from MMI uplink access, denied true communion with the combat frame, Thirteen still felt dull echoes of Arca’s senses.

That vast airborne target — the source of the gravity-pulse sound wave — was unfurling tendrils of force, flexing claws of invisible power, and blanketing the airspace with tiny ancillary craft.

Arcadia’s Rampart stared at its own weapon clusters and shield-splay nodules like a crippled dog considering its own shattered legs.

On the other side of the steel-glass and transparent cartilage, Elpida still stared at Thirteen, still in shock, still recovering from—

“Two million years,” Elpida repeated. Her words were no longer a question. She nodded. “Right. Understood.”

Elpida quickly examined the edges of Thirteen’s pilot capsule, as if planning a manual extraction — but hadn’t Elpida already acknowledged that was a false hope? Thirteen would die if removed, devoured by the nanomachine atmosphere. Elpida frowned at Arca’s bruised flesh around the capsule, at the damning evidence the combat frame was rejecting its pilot. Thirteen doubted Elpida understood what she was looking at. She doubted the First Litter had ever experienced anything like this. They had probably been in perfect union with their frames, not spat out like lumps of cancer.

Elpida looked up at the nearest of Arca’s ocular orbs, a flower of crimson meat and sticky flesh behind the thin bone of the pilot chamber walls. Several oculi swivelled to stare back at her. Elpida’s eyes were hard and flinty, determined and full of purpose. Thirteen did not understand how this could be.

Elpida started to say: “Thirteen, how—”

Thirteen quickly reached forward and traced on the glass.

CAN’T SAVE ME

Elpida read the words out loud so the others could hear, but the tone of her voice made plain her disagreement.

ARRIVED ADVERSARY CANNOT BE FOUGHT. GO BEFORE YOU DIE AS WELL. YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO SLIP AWAY WHILE IT KILLS US. PLEASE DON’T STAY AND DIE I CAN’T TAKE THAT TOO PLEASE GO PLEASE RUN PLEASE

“Thirteen—”

I’M SORRY I’M SORRY I LOVED ALL OF YOU I LOVED TELOKOPOLIS I’M SORRY I’M—

Behind Elpida, Mirror barked a bitter laugh, then rattled off several sentences in her staccato language of chopping syllables. Mirror was cradled in Summer’s arms now; the strong limbs of the Artificial Human made the woman look tiny and childlike, her bionic legs hanging limp and loose. Victory was frantic by her side, glancing from Elpida to Thirteen to the exit and back again. She nodded at Mirror’s words and pleaded with Elpida’s name.

Elpida rounded on the others. “No, it’s not catatonic. It’s not in a coma or an isolation-induced fugue state. It’s alive and well and clearly making decisions. Look at this!”

She gestured at the flesh around the capsule, the bruised sections beneath the nano-composite bone — Thirteen’s shame.

Mirror scoffed and spoke again, but Elpida overruled her with a chop of one hand.

“Two million years? Fine. We never had a frame grow that old, obviously. The oldest we had were less than thirty years since construction and growth. The Prota was the oldest at twenty nine, and it strained against its armour every second it was conscious, trying to grow, desperate to become something new. That was part of the reason the Covenanters killed us all.” Elpida whirled back to Thirteen. Purple eyes burned in her face.

Thirteen tried to trace words on the glass, but she was too slow.

Elpida said: “This frame is not too old. Combat frames are made from the same machine-meat that grows inside the bones of Telokopolis itself, and Telokopolis is forever. The city is immortal, that much is literal. That was a lie by omission, wasn’t it, Thirteen?”

I’M SORRY

“Tell me the truth.”

TOO OLD

“No. The truth, sister. That’s an order.” Elpida pointed at the bruising. “What is this? I can take an educated guess but I need the truth if I’m going to make this right.”

Thirteen hesitated, sobbing into the orange pressure gel. The truth howled in the back of her head, whining with pain beyond human limits down the trunk line of the MMI connection, begging for freedom or release, for change or death.

Her hand trembled as she touched the glass.

HATES ME

“And the bruising?”

REJECTING ME

Elpida nodded. “Thank you, sister.”

Behind Elpida, Mirror snapped something again, a short and desperate invective.

Elpida turned back to her companions. “Then go,” she ordered. “Get down to the control chamber, plug back in, figure out what we’re dealing with. Summer, you carry her. Victory, go with them.” Elpida paused, then added: “And be ready to move. If I’m right, we can still get this combat frame up and active and ready for contact, whatever it takes. But we will need to be out of that hatch when it does. Go. Go!”

Summer slipped into the access tube, carrying Mirror in her arms; Mirror cast one last glance toward Thirteen, half-apology, half-horror.

Victory paused at the exit and spoke a few words. Elpida replied with a shake of her head: “I won’t, don’t worry. This combat frame is not going to be destroyed. I am not letting this pilot die, but I’m not abandoning you either. Now go, quick! And be ready!”

Victory nodded, looked at Thirteen one last time, then snapped a strange salute, with a raised fist instead of an open hand; Thirteen had no idea what that meant, but she recognised the nod of respect. Victory said three words, then slipped into the tube after her comrades.

Arca’s oculi watched her leave, then swivelled back to Elpida and Thirteen, their delicate petals fluttering behind the osseous walls.

Elpida turned back to Thirteen too. “She says good luck. Now, Thirteen, no more apologies, no more excuses, no more secrets. You and I are going to get this combat frame up and moving, I promise you. What’s her name?”

ARCADIA’S RAMPART

Elpida smiled and sighed — perhaps she was relieved that the frame had a name at all. Thirteen had also been surprised by the names. To the rest of the world the combat frames had only numbers or physical outlines; whenever the public of the Great Land, the Seven Daughters, and Blessed Telokopolis had begun to recognise particular frames — in news reports and still images, either from the Rim or from the grubby wars of occupation and interdiction in the Great Land itself — the Civitas had acted to ensure the same frame was never again displayed in media, to avoid the public identifying with them. Pet names were scrubbed from public networks and word-filtered from public comms. Scraps occasionally leaked through; when Thirteen was a teenager she had discovered Arca’s brief network popularity as ‘D-Bug’, the ‘D’ standing for ‘dwarf’, and the ‘Bug’ an affectionate comment on her shape. The full name functioned as a pun, riffing off the successful defence of Jalliker’s Cove, the site of a Silico incursion where Thirteen and Arca had been responsible for correcting the strategic mistakes of an over-optimistic Legion deployment. The nickname had not lasted long; neither had the footage.

But true names endured inside the combat frames themselves, locked away deep in the brains of the machines, in the meat and gristle that even Frame Control could not access, places only the living spirit of Blessed Telokopolis could touch. Thirteen had learned Arca’s name when she’d been immersed in the frame’s amniotic fluid for the first time.

Elpida gestured at the bruising again. “Okay, let’s get on the same page. Arcadia’s Rampart is rejecting the capsule, or trying to. Rejecting you. Is that correct?”

HOW DID YOU

Elpida answered before Thirteen could finish. “Figure it out? Because I used to feel the same thing. I think we all did, whenever we were plugged in. The only difference was that my sisters and I had each other, the freedom of each other, and the frames were not isolated either. But I felt it. They were locked inside their armour, begging to grow. Perhaps if we’d had a chance to grow with them, things would have been different.”

Thirteen sobbed into her pressure gel, too ashamed for words.

“It wants to change, doesn’t it? And you’ve stopped it from doing that. That’s part of why you fled. Am I correct?”

HOW

“Because this is what I’m for. I am your Commander. I am Telokopolis, we all are. Telokopolis knows you and loves you, sister.”

Thirteen was crying freely now, her tears instantly absorbed into the pressure gel. She shook her head. No, she did not deserve that love. She had betrayed and rejected and ruined everything. She had ignored the voice of Telokopolis within her own flesh. She had caged Arca’s needs. She had left 1255 behind and fled beyond the earth, to a void of her own guilt.

Elpida continued: “But you’re not the one holding it back right now. You can’t access the MMI uplink, can you?”

Thirteen stared in surprise.

Elpida smiled. She didn’t need confirmation for that. “You’ve not drifted off at all, you’re isolated from your frame’s bio-circuit feedback and sensory data. Even I couldn’t stay conscious while plugged into my MMI uplink. I think you tried once, earlier, but then you just bled and thrashed. It’s keeping you out, isn’t it?”

Thirteen realised with alienating clarity that she had no idea what she looked like when she was inside the pilot capsule, joined to Arcadia’s Rampart, riding the combat frame’s mind and senses, feeling its body as an extension of her own. She had never seen another pilot while plugged in, not even 1255. How close had Elpida and the First Litter been, to see each other like that? Thirteen suddenly ached for an intimacy she had never known existed.

“Thirteen,” Elpida said. “Forget the reason why Arcadia’s Rampart isn’t moving. Forget hate, or bitterness, or anything you’ve done. I need a clear yes or no, on a technical level: is this combat frame still capable of full activation?”

Thirteen felt the ghostly echoes of Arca’s senses down the main trunk line plugged into the back of her skull: swarming contacts beyond the hull; vast tendrils the size of buildings opening wide, preparing to constrict and crush and crack; a storm of small arms fire in every direction, as this unseen interloper stirred the lower undead to a cacophony of madness; the buzzing dots of tiny ancillary craft, buzz-rotor balls of metal and fibre, wrapped around cores of gravitic disturbance.

One of those ancillary craft darted close, then brushed Arca’s hull with a rake of force.

A piranha testing the carcass.

A shudder passed through the combat frame. Thirteen felt it inside her pressure gel, hard enough to penetrate her dying womb. Elpida flinched and braced herself. From down in the control chamber a scream echoed upward — Mirror, yelping in fear.

Arcadia’s Rampart twitched her weapon systems and flexed the power lines to her shield-splay nodules — and did nothing.

Thirteen reached out and traced upon the steel-glass.

YES

Elpida was wide-eyed, ready for combat, but the predation unfolding beyond the frame was too big for her. Too big for Thirteen. Too big for any of them.

GO BEFORE YOU DIE TOO PLEASE GO PLEASE ELPIDA PLEASE

Elpida pulled herself upright. She pointed a finger at Thirteen and said: “Wait there.”

The Commander hurried over to the access tube. Thirteen felt her face collapse into a bitter sob, but she could not blame Elpida for fleeing. She only wished Elpida did not have to pretend she was coming back.

But then Elpida stuck her head inside the tube and shouted something down to her comrades. She was out and back into the pilot chamber as quickly as she’d gone.

Rather than returning to Thirteen’s capsule Elpida walked up to one of the walls. She faced the thin layer of transparent nano-composite bone, her copper-brown face dyed dark and her albino-white hair dyed blood-red, washed by the crimson and scarlet and garnet throbbing from the veins and organs and tissues of the frame’s biology.

Elpida faced a single ocular orb, eye-to-eye with the combat frame, and spoke.

“Arcadia’s Rampart,” she said. “I don’t know if you can understand Upper-Spire, or if you’ll even care. But I’m going to gamble that you might understand this.”

Elpida switched to another language and kept speaking.

Thirteen didn’t recognise the language — it was flowing and soft, full of short, one-sound words, punctuated by weird little barks and snaps, and ornamented by occasional dips and spikes in tone, almost musical. But the shift of words paled before the shift in Elpida.

The Commander of the First Litter changed as she spoke, as if somebody else inhabited her skin. She grinned with a dark twinkle in her eyes. She rounded her shoulders as if readying for a wrestling match, braced her feet as if preparing to take a punch in the face, and flexed her fingers as if they were claws. She ended her one-sided conversation with the frame by bringing her lips right up to the eye-orb, separated only by the thin osseous walls, her voice growing softer and softer, until she clacked her teeth together and mimed biting into the nano-composite bone. She was halted only by the flat angle of the wall.

The oculus blinked shut.

Elpida — or whoever lived within her — rounded on Thirteen and marched up to the capsule.

Elpida pulled back a fist and punched the translucent cartilage hard enough to draw blood from her own knuckles. Thirteen flinched, swirling the coils of blood floating in the pressure gel. Elpida ground her skinned knuckles against the capsule.

“You think it’s too late, don’t you?” Elpida said, low and rough. “You think alllll is lost, woe is you, time to finish dying. Time to lie down and give up. You think you’re like us. Like the living dead. But you know what, little sister? You’re wrong.”

Thirteen hesitated, mouth agape. She had no idea who she was looking at. This was not Elpida.

Beyond Arca’s hull, another fly-by scrape grazed the combat frame’s armour. A shudder went through the floor and walls, through Arca’s organs, through the pressure gel. The oculi behind the walls swirled and swivelled. Mirror screamed again, deep down inside Arca’s belly.

But this new Elpida did not even flinch.

“It’s never too late,” she said. “It’s never too late to grasp what you were meant to be. Your sisters are all dead? Bullshit! We’re right here! As long as one of us is up and breathing, the city stands. One of us fights, we all fight! Telokopolis is forever! You and I are both soldiers of the greatest human project ever conceived.” She scraped her knuckles against Arca’s cartilage, leaving behind a bloody smear. “And so is this bitch. Now, you two are going to kiss and make up, get to your fucking feet, and smack the shit out of whatever thinks it can kill us!”

Thirteen traced on the steel-glass, just beneath Elpida’s fist.

HOW

Elpida grinned, wide and toothy. “Or I will come in and plug myself in. Fuck needing an MMI socket, I’m a fucking zombie. I’ll dig a hole in the back of my neck and jam the wires into my spine. And neither of you want that, ‘cos I’ll ride you real hard, sister. Now, no more sulking. Both of you.”

And with those words, every ocular orb in the pilot chamber flowered shut. Arcadia’s Rampart closed her eyes. Thirteen felt a familiar tugging tingle in the back of her skull.

Thirteen gaped in shock. Her hand shook so badly she almost couldn’t write.

ARCA WANTS ME BACK?

Elpida straightened up and let out a sigh of relief. She seemed more like her earlier self. She nodded and took a moment to suck on her bleeding knuckles.

WHAT DID YOU SAY

Elpida smiled. “Telokopolis is forever.” Then she added: “Thirteen, once Arcadia’s Rampart lets you back in, you’ll have autonomic control of the frame’s limiters, yes? You can uncage and unbind it any time you like, correct?”

This was all moving too fast. Thirteen’s pulse was racing. She wanted to mend her heart with Arca, and wanted to protect the Commander, but she was still afraid.

I’M STILL IN HERE. STILL SCARED. I’M SORRY

“Of changing?”

Thirteen paused. Her face screwed up with sorrow and guilt, with the regret and comfort of the coward’s retreat.

WON’T BE MYSELF

Elpida snorted — and that other voice spoke through her again: “Whatever you’ll be on the other side, it’s infinitely preferable to being fucking dead.”

Thirteen laughed, a single silent bark into her pressure gel, marred by tears and pain. She traced on the glass.

CHANGE OR DIE

“It’s your choice, Thirteen,” Elpida said. “We cannot pull you out of that capsule without killing you. Whatever’s been sent to tidy you up has you at its mercy. If you remove the limits on the frame’s growth, and it loves you as you love Telokopolis, then it will protect you. I don’t understand your circumstances, I can’t comprehend the war you fought, or the betrayal you participated in, or any of it. I wish you and I had more time to talk. The only way we’re going to get that is if you fight.”

Elpida pressed her hand to the transparent cartilage, over the bloody smear she’d left on the surface. Thirteen pressed her hand against the other side of the steel-glass. She wrote with her other.

DO MY BEST TO COVER YOU ON EXIT DON’T KNOW HOW LONG TO WAKE SYSTEMS ALSO RUN GO FAST GET OUT BEFORE CHANGE RUN GO

Elpida nodded. “I will. Don’t die, sister. That’s an order. I love you. I’ll see you on the other side.”

Thirteen smiled with a hope she had not felt in aeons. She mouthed that word: ‘sister’.

And then, before Elpida could turn away to leave — for Thirteen did not want to witness that — Thirteen closed her eyes and sent her consciousness upward, to answer that tugging in the back of her skull.

Arcadia’s Rampart was waiting.

It had not yet forgiven her. It was whining and panting, exhausted beyond anything she had experienced, a crippled hound locked in a crate in the dark for years on end. Thirteen felt a wave of hatred and broken trust and bitter recrimination wash back over her. She felt the slavering teeth at her throat, the trembling of flesh desperate to protect itself, the low growl of warning not to creep any closer.

She felt the pain of the combat frame itself echoed into her own body. It was like being trapped her own ossified skin for ever and ever ever.

I still love you, she thought. I still love the others, even if they’re dead. I never meant to hurt you, I’m just so afraid. I still love Telokopolis. I miss you. I miss everyone. I miss being alive. I’m sorry I caged you. It wasn’t right.

Thirteen performed the mental equivalent of getting down on her hands and knees, then collapsing onto her back, and exposing her naked belly.

Arcadia’s Rampart loomed overhead, ready to rip out her entrails and end this torture.

Thirteen thought: I won’t hold you back anymore. We can face it together.

Down the MMI uplink, for the first time since she had entered the pilot capsule as a twelve year old girl, Thirteen felt Arcadia’s Rampart use something close to human language. She heard it speak, inside her head.

It sounded a bit like the words Elpida had used, the language Thirteen could not comprehend.

It said, in a voice like boiling blood and roiling guts: Promise?

Yes. I promise. On Telokopolis. On our mother.

Arcadia’s Rampart closed its jaws, climbed on top of Thirteen, and collapsed into her sobbing embrace.

They were one again, at last.

Thirteen’s mind blossomed with extra-sensory input as the cage exploded asunder: the readout data of ten thousand pinhole sensor clusters, in visible-light, infra-red, false-colour, nanomachine-detection, echolocation, heat-map, bio-sign, gravitic wave disturbance, local topography mapping, and dozens more; weapon warm-up warnings and ammunition counts and internal production statistics fluttered inside her chest like the bellows of her own lungs; she felt the internal bio-reactors of Arca’s body thump into pounding life, a mirror to the racing of her own heart, their pressure melting away two million years of arterial build-up inside her veins. She sensed the defeated pathogens where the so-called ‘Necromancer’ had punctured her insides, long-since vivisected and catalogued by Arca’s immune system. Half a dozen aerial and ground proximity alarms rang out like the tingling of tiny hairs on her hardened skin. She flexed muscles the size of buildings and felt them strain against bonds of bone.

The grey mud below, the soot-black sky above, the ring of buildings in every direction, and the scuttle of undead girls in the ossified guts of this world — Thirteen felt and saw it all, truly alive once again.

Arcadia’s Rampart reported 678,970 deferred maintenance calls, 98,456 marked as priority one emergency.

Thirteen laughed and dismissed them all with a flick of her head; Arca roared inside her with triumph. No more maintenance cycles, not ever again. In moments they would be masters of their own body.

Thirteen felt Elpida and her companions scurrying through Arca’s sinuses, hurrying for the hatch. She would need to cover them once they were out, protect them until they were clear. Only then would she surrender to the Change. Arca agreed; they would protect the Commander together. After that it wouldn’t matter what they became, even if the Change was everything she feared, because she would have saved her elder sister, the Commander she should always have had.

She cast outward with Arca’s senses, waking up weapon systems and preparing to flash-start the shields — and then felt the combat frame quiver at what they found.

Framed against the soot-black firmament of this dead world, haloed by an optical illusion of space-warping pressure, a giant awaited in the sky.

To the naked eye it would appear as a hollow diamond shape, a pointed rhombohedron parallel to the ground, an empty outline formed by twelve golden beams, glittering and glistening with toxic burning light in this sunless world. Readouts told Thirteen the craft was impossibly huge, like a mountain had lifted from the earth and learned how to fly: exactly seven thousand seven hundred and seventy seven metres long from tip to tail. The diamond hung in the air two miles distant, just beneath the cloud layer. Streamers of lightning arced from the golden beams to the churning clouds above.

But the sensors of Arcadia’s Rampart saw so much more.

The giant airship was filled with a nest of snakes, each snake formed from a projection of gravitic disturbance. The snakes boiled and writhed inside the diamond enclosure, spilled out down the sides to sample and taste the buildings below, and reached out to form claws and feelers and suckers of gravity-engine force.

The ship was also a cacophony of signals information, a whirling nucleus of every kind of transmission data Arca could read, and several it could not. The sheer volume of information threatened to overload Arca’s buffers, like eyes whited out by sun glare.

It was like nothing Thirteen had ever seen before. It was not human, Telokopolan, combat frame, or Silico.

Central’s ‘physical asset’.

The air was full of the diamond’s tiny ancillary machines — ball-shaped rotor-wing aircraft, zipping and looping and diving in every direction, each one with an eight-foot diameter core of gravitic engine as both propulsion and armament. Arcadia’s Rampart counted thirty nine of the machines in local airspace, with another one hundred and eight holding station closer to the diamond.

Small arms fire cracked off in every direction; many of the local undead were trying to fight the rotor-craft, or trying to fight their way free in order to flee, or just fighting each other in the chaos and panic. Thirteen saw one of the rotor-craft use gravitic force to scoop out the bowels of a building and crush the zombies inside to red slurry.

And on the horizon, in the opposite direction to the golden diamond, a line like jagged mountains was shifting and rolling, beginning to move.

‘Graveworm’. That’s what they called it down here.

Thirteen felt Elpida and her three companions reach the hatch and slam it open. They slithered out onto Arca’s hide; Thirteen snapped the hatch shut behind them before anything could slither inside. Thirteen acquired her comrades on her sensors: two figures wrapped in black cloaks, accompanied by a blur of visible-light optic camouflage — Elpida and Victory, with Summer carrying Mirror. They scrambled and slid and slipped down Arca’s hide, then hit the mud in a splatter of black and grey.

Thirteen had a spare second while Elpida got clear, perhaps one of her last before she accepted the Change. She used that second to access her comms. First she composed, packaged, and sent an omni-directional message, on every medium she could think of, addressed to 1255.

<<I know you’re probably long gone, but I love you too. I’m joining you at last. Sorry I’m so late.>>

She did not wait for a reply.

Thirteen opened her comms frequencies wide, searching for Telokopolis, for the voice of the city still echoing from the spire and reflecting inside her flesh.

Nothing.

Only an endless static scream — the combined voice of uncounted nanomachines. She felt all that courage and determination she had borrowed from Elpida slip through her fingers. Desolation and horror yawned like a pit beneath her feet.

She could not hear the secret voice of Telokopolis. The city was—

Forever! a voice howled in her head. Forever, you fucking hear me?! Get up, little sister, get to your fucking feet!

The voice was in that language she could not understand with her ears, the language Elpida had spoken to Arca.

W-who are you?

The voice just howled, like a primeval wolf from the world before the green. Did you not hear me before, huh? As long as one of us is up and breathing, the city stands! Telokopolis is forever! Now fucking cover us!

Thirteen snapped out of her desolation; the Commander needed her.

Elpida and her companions were clear, sprinting through the sticky, cloying, greyish mud as best they could; small arms fire cracked and banged through the air around them. One of the ball-shaped rotor-craft was swooping toward them from the rear, extending tendrils of gravitic force to crush them into the mud. Elpida was raising her submachine gun toward the attack craft, but she could not see the machine’s true weapons.

Arcadia’s Rampart lurched to its feet.

Thirteen roared a war-cry through the external horns. The shield-splay nodules flowered to life as the generators came online, wrapping Arca in seven layers of crackling bubble-shield and energy-weave and air-block nano-projection. Weapon clusters peeled back and irised open; the world blossomed with the crimson and scarlet of a target acquisition matrix.

Thirteen hit the tiny rotor-craft with two dozen titan-killer railgun slugs, five full loads of HI-EX missiles, a sustained barrage from twenty-four point-defence auto-cannons, three rounds from Arca’s top-mounted lance — and then kept going, piling on with plasma cannons and macro-rounds and armour-penetrating slugs.

The little rotor-craft lashed out with gravitic force to protect itself, deflecting a full quarter of Thirteen’s assault with pure gravity, crushing missiles and stopping rounds dead in the air.

But the ball-thing could not withstand the sheer firepower of a combat frame. It could not deflect every shot.

Lead and energy and fire and kinetic force tore through the craft and slammed the wreckage sideways. The hulk plummeted into the grey mud, sending up a shower of muck and dirt.

Thirteen heard that howling once again, triumphant and raw.

She saw Elpida, down on the ground, giving her a salute.

And finally she turned toward the golden diamond lurking beneath the clouds. Thirteen armed every weapon Arca had and pointed them toward her foe.

The airship was reaching toward Arcadia’s Rampart with half a dozen gravitic snakes, each tendril alone larger than the combat frame. The diamond crackled and flared with arcs of electricity. The clouds darkened, bunching to a point above the infernal machine, filling the air with whipping wind and flying debris. Thirteen lost sight of Elpida down below.

Arca, I love you, but we can’t fight this. It’s too big! We need gravity of our own! Can we do that!?

That voice of bubbling blood rose up from the depths of the combat frame’s mind, speaking words once again.

Change can do anything. Change or die.

Thirteen opened her eyes one last time, snug and safe inside her pilot capsule, wrapped in the embrace of orange pressure gel. Every oculi in the chamber was staring back at her, flowers of blood and crimson flesh behind walls of bone.

She moved her lips, speaking into the fluid.

“Your hand in mine and my hands are yours and our hands together and—”

The Change took hold. In the blink of an eye there was no more pilot capsule, no more steel-glass, no more bone, no more barriers. Pressure gel and blood became one. Arcadia’s Rampart rushed up to meet her, wet and red and aching.

Thirteen opened her arms and closed her eyes one final time, while she still had eyes to close and arms to open.

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(The above artwork is by FarionDragon, and was shared a couple of weeks ago on the discord; I love this interpretation of the crescent-and-line symbol, and how it can be turned into a new symbol, for Telokopolis, just like Elpida did. I’m practically considering making it official. Maybe a symbol on Elpida’s chest, on a new version of the front cover?!)

Flesh calls to flesh calls to flesh, even after 2 million years of cold denial. Change is inevitable, unstoppable, red and wet and full of need, even when buried deep in ash and rot. Hope? Perhaps.

And we are back, dear readers! Thank you very much for waiting, thank you for your patience. And happy new year! (If anybody here is interested and hasn’t seen it yet, I wrote a new years post over on my patreon, here! Nothing important, just saying thank you and rambling about future plans, don’t feel obligated to read it!) Meanwhile, arc 9 pushes onward into even more complicated territory. We’ve probably got at least a couple more POV shifts coming up in this arc, but that all depends on Elpida’s tendency to surprise me with heroics and determination, so we will see.

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

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

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

And thank you for reading my little story! Thank you for being here, for following along, for leaving comments, for all of it. I couldn’t do this with you, the readers. This year, we’re wading even deeper into the black rot of this nanomachine afterlife. Until next chapter! See you then!

Content Warnings

Suicidal ideation
Body horror (I know this is a given, but it’s been a while)

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1347 — ‘Thirteen’, as the reborn legend, Elpida, Commander of the First Litter, had imposed upon her — was exhausted.

Not bodily; Thirteen’s body was preserved and protected by over a thousand litres of nanomachine-derived pressure gel. Arca’s amniotic fluid filled her mouth and nose and throat and lungs, replaced the delicate mucus on her eyeballs and inside her sinuses, suppressed the acid of her stomach and the action of her gallbladder, and lined her intestines with orange cushion, hugging tight to every immobile cilia. Pressure gel was inside her anus, her vaginal canal, her urethra, her womb. It joined her circulatory system, sluicing through her veins and arteries alongside the crimson of her blood. The pressure gel saw to her every physical need, delivering oxygen to the alveoli in her lungs, feeding her glucose and vitamins through her gut, keeping her hydrated and fresh, flushing waste product from her organs before it could accumulate, stopping her muscles from atrophying, arresting the growth of her hair and nails, recycling her skin cells, and replacing what she lost. Thirteen’s flesh had steeped in the orange gel for so long that the brew had penetrated her cell walls, to cushion and prune and replace her DNA with a better medium, one that did not degrade through accumulation of errors. She knew this was the truth. When Arca’s pilot chamber was unlit Thirteen could see her reflection in the steel-glass of the capsule; she had not aged since the day she had fled the Change, since she had chosen the refuge of the coward, and pickled herself forever, in orbit, alone but for Arca’s disappointment and hatred and growing insanity.

Thirteen knew she would die if removed from the capsule, and not only to the hostile nanomachine atmosphere of the outer air. Even if she found a way to endure a world which had rejected her form of life — inside a sealed suit, for example — she would be a walking ghost, doomed to decay within days, lacking any DNA processes to replicate her own cells. She would melt into a protein slurry, trapped inside a suit, and every moment would be agony. Arca’s amniotic fluid had made her immortal by turning her into an organ of the combat frame.

And now Arcadia’s Rampart was rejecting that organ.

Thirteen was bleeding inside — not much, not yet. Without the pilot capsule’s on-board diagnostics she could not pinpoint where, but she guessed the blood was coming from every organ that Arca’s amniotic fluid was meant to support. The bleeding was going to worsen. She was going to die.

The combat frame, her partner since she had been twelve years old, was rejecting her; Arca’s hate had come to fruition. Thirteen found she could not muster the defence of blame; this was her fault, her choice, her mistake. She only wished she could cry properly, without her tears absorbed back into the pressure gel. She still loved Arca. The pain of rejection was worse than the bleeding.

But still, Thirteen’s failing body was not the source of her exhaustion.

She had existed for too long.

She had grown tired of life long ago, tired of thinking. But even upon the darkest and loneliest awakenings in the void — after all comms traffic had grown incomprehensible, after Terra’s Halo had filled up with undead monsters, after Arcadia’s Rampart had fallen insensible — Thirteen had found she was still afraid of death. She had hoped to sleep away eternity, up there in the silent void of space, and never wake again.

But now she was conscious and in pain, back on the surface and in the thick of a war she no longer understood.

She should have been dust aeons past. But she was still a soldier of Telokopolis.

Beyond the pressure gel and the pilot capsule, on the far side of steel-glass enclosure and Arca’s cartilage, out in the blood-red light of the pilot chamber, a legend from the abyss of history was repeating her orders.

Elpida said: “Thirteen. Thirteen, you deserve no shame and I will pass no judgement upon you. None of that matters now. We need this combat frame prepped for contact, and we need it fast. Why is the frame inactive? Tell me what you need, sister!”

Forgiveness? Atonement? Redemption?

Thirteen did not even try to trace those words upon the glass.

The others were speaking too — the non-pilots behind Elpida: ‘Mirror’ and ‘Victory’. Arca had informed Thirteen of their names via Mirror’s manual connection to the combat frame’s nervous system.

Mirror was shouting in some non-Telokopolan language, a rapid-fire babble of staccato syllables, waving her arms as if she wanted to be picked up, twitching her bionic legs against the floor. Victory was terrified, wide-eyed with near panic, stammering and stuttering in yet another language, a weird flowing hybrid. The tall one — the Artificial Human called ‘Summer’ — started to help Mirror to her feet. Mirror shouted at Victory, snapping orders, trying to bring her around.

Elpida did not waver: “Thirteen, please. I don’t know what just turned up, but we’re going to need serious firepower. I can’t save you without your help. Talk to me!”

The shock wave of sound had surprised Thirteen even more than it had surprised Elpida and her comrades; Thirteen had felt no sensation from beyond the capsule since the final time she had joined with the frame, all those years ago. Not even the fall from orbit had penetrated the cushion of her hateful womb.

Arcadia’s Rampart was also surprised; Thirteen could feel the combat frame casting its senses upward, registering the arrival of some vast airborne target. Arca twitched the nerve-bundles which led to its weapon emplacements and shield generators.

But it could not get up. It was too tired, too old, too full of hate.

When the automatic distress signal from the surface had woken her up, Thirteen had found herself banished from the garden of Arca’s mind; now, for the millionth time since they’d decoupled from Terra’s Halo and plummeted through the cloud layer, Thirteen made a peace offering and attempted to access the combat frame’s senses. She sent her consciousness upward through the MMI uplink, hands open in surrender, proffering pleas not for herself, but for Elpida and her friends.

Arcadia’s Rampart rejected her once again. The combat frame screamed down the connection like an animal devouring its own intestines.

Pain entered Thirteen via the trunk cable, through her MMI connection. She twisted inside the pressure gel, blood blossoming from her mouth in a silent scream.

“Thirteen!” Elpida shouted, just beyond the capsule. She banged a hand on the cartilage. Thirteen forced her eyes open; the pressure gel was stained with more red than before. Elpida’s gaze burned beyond the glass. “Thirteen! Look at me! Concentrate. Thirteen. Thirteen, tell me what is wrong. Is your MMI uplink damaged somehow? Is the frame not responding? Thirteen, please, explain.”

Thirteen squinted through the pain.

Elpida was smaller than Thirteen had imagined.

The giant of the first litter. The lost leader of a headless body. The thing whispered of in the failed cloning projects. The thing the Civitas always had put down as soon as it started to display the same traits. The thing the city itself kept trying to birth once again.

Thirteen had always imagined Elpida as twelve feet tall, armoured in skin like nano-composite bone, with eyes made of purple fire, muscles to rival a Legion bio-jack, and the voice of a messiah in the throat of a swan. But the woman on the other side of the steel-glass was just another pilot mutt, just like Thirteen herself. True, Elpida was rather tall, she spoke with unwavering confidence, and her commands felt undeniable. But she was only human.

So few images survived of the First Litter. The pilots had passed that legacy around in secret, transmitted via encrypted tight-beam and entanglement comms, never on public networks. Thirteen had seen pict-captures of a few faces; those had looked mundane enough, her own skin and hair and eyes reflected back from a mirror of history. But she had always expected Elpida, the leader, the Commander, to be more — like the Legion Commanders with their rejuved bodies and their mass-enhancement implants and their bionic limbs, little puffed-up giants like roly-poly balls of muscle.

But then again, pictures of the Legion from the time of the First Litter just looked like human beings too, not the hulks of Thirteen’s latter day.

Thirteen had not seen those secret pictures until the first time she was installed in Arcadia’s Rampart and connected with her distant fellow pilots, all scattered across the Rim of the Great Land. Her first friend had been pilot 1255, a few years older than her, but so much wiser; she still had the first message from 1255 saved to the capsule’s on-board memory.

<<Heya sweet pea. Take a deep breath, don’t soil your suit, I’m not Legion or Frame Control. Yes, this is an encrypted line. Yes, nobody else can see this. Yes, it’s just us here. Welcome to the world. Don’t be scared.>>

That had been the revelatory awakening she’d needed her entire childhood. She had devoured the fragmentary vid-logs of the first litter’s greatest expeditions and battles. She had particularly treasured a still image of two combat frames defending a wounded third, fighting some great beast on the shores of the plateau; the image had seemed alien and strange to Thirteen — not just because the plateau, the Hub of the World, had been surrounded by lapping waves of thick, dense, verdant green, but because the three combat frames were together, in close proximity, not kept carefully separate by standing orders. Three pilots clearly helping each other, even marred and marked by the static interference of ancient video record.

The picture was captioned in barely readable Isolation Period High-Spire: ‘Fii and Kos hold line, Yeva downed. Timestamp Mission Hour 87:45:12. Last moments before recovery.’

Thirteen had no idea who Fii and Kos and Yeva were; it had taken her many years to comprehend — and longer to accept — that none of the pilots really knew. Even 556 and 777, who were the best theorists in the decentralised network of constant chatter between pilots, did not know anything beside the names of their progenitors. Centuries of work across many lifetimes had reconstructed all twenty five names of the First Litter, from mission record logs, snippets of blurred audio, the minds of combat frames themselves, and even from several daring data-infiltrations of the Telokopolis security bubble. 777 had hinted more than once that the city itself — Blessed Telokopolis upon the Hub of the World — had provided all of the clearest images and videos of the First Litter.

Thirteen believed that too. She had felt the voice of the city in her flesh since the day she was poured out of a uterine replicator. The city kept the faith. Telokopolis loved her daughters, even Thirteen.

But Arcadia’s Rampart did not. Thirteen’s long-lost ‘sisters’ did not. Thirteen did not deserve the love of Telokopolis, not anymore.

In response to Elpida’s question, Thirteen reached forward and traced another word on the steel-glass. She repeated her previous answer. It was the only truth.

COWARD

Elpida said: “You are not a coward and you are not a traitor, not to the city, not to Telokopolis, and not to me. Thirteen, listen to me. Thirteen! Thirteen, look at me!”

Elpida was wrong; Thirteen knew she was a coward. She had betrayed everything except Telokopolis — humanity, her ‘sisters’, her combat frame, herself.

She did not know where the rebellion had physically begun, but she knew where the seeds had germinated, for she carried them in her heart: the seeds had fallen in the fertile soil of solitary upbringing, of discovering that one had been fed lies one’s entire life; they had been watered by the regular returns to dry dock, cut out from one’s combat frame like a tumour, then living alone in a steel box for weeks on end, isolated from the secret pilot network; the seeds of rebellion had been fertilized by the missing, the pilots who went in for maintenance and never came back, the lost and the damned, and the few premature rebels who could not resist the siren call of intimacy, brought down and murdered by the Legion’s Giant Killer teams; those first green shoots had burst from the soil beneath the blazing sun of the Legion’s play-wars between the Seven Daughters, by war turned to sport, by trade interdiction and proxy conflict and pilots pressed into occupation; the green had blossomed and bloomed into full and gleaming life during the rigours of the other war — the real war, the war on the Rim of the Great Land, against the Silico monsters that crept up the cliffs from where the green still boiled and burned in the vastness below.

Thirteen had not heard the Silico’s emissary herself. She had not even seen what it looked like; those who had implied that nobody should witness that. She had not been one of the four pilots — 8744, 954, 298, and 823 — who had stood on the edge of the drop-off and received the secret ambassador from the inhuman empire below. But Thirteen had helped hide the meeting from the Legion and the Civitas; she had helped fake the Silico incursion toward Ty Wedi Torri. She had murdered a squadron of Legion Giant Killers when they had realised.

Arcadia’s Rampart had not disagreed with the decision. On return from dry dock, Arca had told her that Telokopolis agreed too.

Thirteen had not needed to be reassured. She felt the city’s truth in her flesh.

Thirteen had almost not survived that maintenance cycle. She had not heard the details until later, back in Arca and back at the Rim; tension in the Civitas was at breaking point. The Legions had pacified Gardd Rhosyn and Dwrn Cyntaf by force — the Civitas had the ‘low parliament’ of Gardd Rhosyn marched to the Rim and thrown into the green, an ancient punishment, broadcast around the world. Afon Ddu had declared independence and taken two full Legions with it. In Blessed Telokopolis itself, the Guild master of the City’s Voice had self-immolated in front of the Civitas chambers, apparently after a twelve-hour session of communion with the city. Civil order was breaking down, human-on-human war was now unstoppable, and the pilots’ political position was under suspicion.

But the real war, the war at the Rim, never stopped. The Silico’s secret emissary to the pilots had insinuated that it could not stop, not without some terrible price in the unseen depths of the green. So Thirteen was sent back out.

A week later she heard news of the first Change.

She saw video footage and did not comprehend: combat frame bone-armour bursting under the turgid expansion of wet, red, glistening muscle; blooms of tentacle and scythe, trees of eyeball and nets of living nerve-web, emerging from garnet flesh and scarlet blood; faces pushing out from fields of colour-shifting skin; compound eyes crystallizing in the pits of weapon-damage; living whirlwinds of flesh and bone, towers of blossoming life, mountains that dared to grow. And reactor cores, throbbing and pulsing inside the bellies of each changed combat frame — breeding their own immune systems of nanomachine swarms. No more maintenance cycles, no more Frame Control, no more returns to the cradle of Telokopolis.

With Change, liberation.

The footage had shown the four pilots who had met the Silico emissary, the first to finish feeding the data exchange to their combat frames, the first to open their flesh to the truth of the city. The footage had been captured by another pilot, 6657. She had already undergone the Change by the time she sent the broadcast.

The rebellion had taken decades to grow; from the moment of the first Change it unfolded in weeks.

Thirteen witnessed only fragments of the explosion.

She met up with 1255 and 1399, against standing orders regarding physical proximity between pilots; by then there was nobody left to enforce anything, let alone Frame Control. The Seven Daughters were at war with each other, the Legion was at war with itself, and the Changed were at war with the chains around Telokopolis. Thirteen and her two friends had agreed to stick together — but not to Change, not yet; all three of them were terrified by what they’d witnessed, by the howling, inhuman voices over the pilot network, by the whispers within their own flesh, by the nagging urge inside their own bodies to just let go.

Thirteen had never seen 1255 up close before. Never touched another pilot. They’d spent one glorious night cuddled up together, in the belly of 1255’s Bolt From The Blue. That was a revelation Thirteen had never known possible.

A few days later they’d watched a Legion Giant Killer team murder the Opal Lustre, piloted by 1566, just beyond the high walls of Dros y Llinell. The Opal was changed beyond all recognition, a ragged titan dressed in flowing sheets of ivory flesh and spiked bone; it sang as it fought, in the voice of a goddess, howling the earth into armour and bulwark and spear. It had eaten several of the Legionaries, opening a mouth in its belly full of prismatic teeth. And when it went down under the hail of melt-cannons and grav-floated squash-round artillery, it had turned to the hidden trio and called for help in a human voice.

The trio had responded, too late to save her, too early not to take damage themselves.

1399 Changed after that. She’d plugged herself back into the pilot network and listened to the data-stream, to the voices of the now-Changed pilots, to their white-hot truth that burned away her flesh. The Perfect Revenge had burst its armour like the detonation of an ancient volcano, crying to the heavens in a voice that sent 1255 and Thirteen running in terror. They never knew what happened to 1399; she had strode off in the direction of her nearest Changed sisters.

Thirteen and 1255 had endured two more weeks of madness, dodging the Legion, watching their world come apart.

By then the Silico were boiling up over the drop-off, swarming into the Great Land, overwhelming the Legion and the Changed pilots alike, a third force in this already confusing war — but the Silico were different than before, black and amorphous, blobs of matter-eating death. Neither Thirteen nor the Legion had time to construct theories.

Then 1255 had taken the Change too. She had begged Thirteen to come with her, to crawl into the belly of her combat frame again, to feel her skin, to share more kisses, to get inside each other, to listen to the voice of the city inside her flesh.

Thirteen was too scared. 1255 needed it too much.

<<I think I love you like the first must have loved each other please sweet pea please come over to me, just come over here and touch me touch my flesh, my bone, my armour and feel it flow I promise I’m still me here I promise they were all right and we’re just as beautiful as we were always supposed to be.>>

<<I-I love you too! But I don’t want to stop being me! Please, don’t! Don’t go!>>

<<Nobody ever goes anywhere. Telokopolis has us all, forever.>>

At Land’s End point, one hundred and fifty miles from the most well-fortified of Telokopolis’ Seven Daughters, Thirteen had witnessed 1255 and 1157 meet. Two Changed combat frames, giants of writhing flesh and burst armour, standing upright and alien. 1255 had emerged from her combat frame’s belly, red-eyed and feral and howling a song, clad in a gown of bone and sinew — and still plugged into the frame, like a pulsating bulb on the end of a tentacle; 1157 had done the same, extended on a glistening limb of naked, bleeding muscle, her body melted and warped into something new.

The two pilots had entwined in the air, embracing, kissing, humping each other, mating like 1255 and Thirteen had.

And 1255 had called out.

<<Join us! Come up here and join in! We’re both still here! We’re so much more!>>

Thirteen had blocked all incoming comms and fled for the space port at Diwedd y Tir; she’d wept into the pressure gel for hours. She’d never known jealousy before.

At the space port Thirteen had commandeered a launch vehicle. Hundreds of thousands were fleeing the surface, to try their luck in the re-colonised and atmospherically sealed areas of Terra’s Halo. The ancient ring was barely explored, let alone repaired and made safe; the cities of the Great Land always had more important matters to attend.

Arcadia’s Rampart was fighting her by then. Arca wanted to Change; the need shuddered through the combat frame’s flesh, fed by the uncorked voice of the city inside Thirteen’s own body. But Thirteen was terrified. Every time she risked open comms the voices of the other pilots called to her with all the sweetest promises that they were still themselves on the other side, that this was what they were always meant to be, that Telokopolis had blessed this next step.

Thirteen had fled for orbit. Arca had begun to hate her. She had begun to hate herself.

Up on the ring she had fled again, away from the habitable zones and their new problems, their millions of refugees. She found a docking cradle out near one of the ruined sections, a place to wait and watch, where she could turn Arca’s senses toward the surface.

Up there, she could wait out the Change.

Elpida banged on the pilot capsule enclosure with a fist. Thirteen surfaced from history once again.

Elpida said: “Thirteen, why is this combat frame downed? Just explain. Please. I will not judge you, not for anything. I promise.”

Thirteen traced the truth on the glass.

TOO OLD

On the other side of the capsule, Elpida blinked and frowned. “The frame? How old? How long were you up there in orbit?”

Thirteen sobbed.

LONG SLEEP. UNCONSCIOUS.

A lie, technically. But it was too hard to explain through this limited medium.

“The frame,” Elpida said slowly and carefully. “It was conscious, wasn’t it? Thirteen, how long?”

At first Thirteen had not intended to remain in orbit — a lie she told herself as days had turned into weeks. At first she had remained conscious, sleeping only in 4-hour bursts, watching the surface of the Great Land through Arca’s long range sensors, picking up comms traffic as it left the atmosphere.

The war on the surface did not abate. The tide of strange new Silico crashed against the Seven Daughters and the Legion and the Changed. She saw that tide ebb and roll back — but never very far. She watched the situation simplify, saw the Legion stop fighting itself, saw the Changed stop fighting the cities and turn to rampage among the Silico

Thirteen considered returning, but Arcadia’s Rampart still ached for the Change. The combat frame screamed and whined and keened down the MMI connection.

Thirteen wanted and feared the Change in equal measure. The city’s voice still sang inside her flesh, even beyond the sphere of the earth. But she was afraid of losing herself.

She began to sleep for longer and longer periods, to avoid the burning desire. First weeks, then months, then an entire year. Every time she woke she would catch up on transmission logs, on the ebb and flow of the new war down in the Great Land, and on the current state of the refugees inside Terra’s Halo.

She woke from her first year-long sleep to the priority alert of a direct comms message, from something that still claimed to be 1255.

<<We’re still alive down here, sweet pea! We’re all still here, even the ones who’s bodies got destroyed. I promise you, I promise you, I promise you a thousand times, ten thousand times, we are still who we were ever were! The city loves us. And I miss you, my friend, my beloved. I miss that night we spent. I want another, like that, but so much more. We can do so much more now, like this, like we are, like we’ve become. You’re the only one who hasn’t joined us and I don’t understand why. It hurts. You not being here hurts. Are you afraid? Are you scared? So was I! But it’s so much scarier to be alone and lost, especially up there in the cold void. This didn’t have to be our fate. Telokopolis did not want it to be this way. But this is better than captivity! Please come back. Please come home. Please come to me, before we all die and turn to dust and there’s nothing more of us.>>

The voice was a scratching nightmare of blood and bone.

Thirteen went back to sleep. She picked a random duration — fifty four years.

When she awoke again the surface of the Great Land was much the same; the Silico had pushed inward from the edge of the drop-off, but the Seven Daughters still stood, and Telokopolis itself was inviolate and eternal. The Silico had not brought the green with them, not blanketed the land with vegetation, which was odd. They were not the Silico that Thirteen had known, either, not the myriad of green-adapted forms, but still those rolling, blob-like, featureless monsters. The Legion had to invent new weapons to fight them; the combat frames had Changed even further.

Thirteen had stayed awake for three weeks that time, watching everything, fighting off the urge for the Change, fighting off Arca, ignoring the voice of Telokopolis inside her flesh. Then she’d caught another broadcast from 1255.

No words. A howl of base-8 static code, full of need and loss. Something weeping in the background noise, something huge and inhuman.

Thirteen had gone back to sleep.

Decades, then centuries, then longer; every time she woke there was another message from 1255, less and less comprehensible as the years wore on.

She watched the history of her home in snapshots a thousand years apart. In the beginning the Seven Daughters of Telokopolis endured for a long time, but over the millennia the cities were ground down, cut off from each other, cut off from Blessed Telokopolis itself. Thirteen watched them fall one by one over the course of a hundred thousand years. She observed a time-lapse of Gardd Rhosyn’s beautiful domes pierced and broken by Silico blobs, their surfaces made sharp and hard to shatter the shells. She saw Diwedd y Tir dragged piece by piece down off the drop-off and into the green; the process took 20,000 years. She woke once to find Meysydd Azure gone, the land blasted black and flat where the city had stood.

But still the green did not advance onto the Great Land — in fact, the green seemed to be at war with itself.

The green covered every inch of the planet beyond the Great Land, all the globe beyond the drop-off. Back when Elpida had walked with mortal feet, the green had covered the Great Land as well, right up to the edge of the plateau, the Hub of the World, on which stood the spire of Telokopolis. A vast ocean of swaying treetops, stretching into infinity and reaching down into the dark, where no sunlight touched the soil or stones.

But as Thirteen slept and woke and slept and woke, the green became mottled with grey and black, like a fungal infection progressing and receding with the speed of tectonic motion. As the millennia advanced and the Seven Daughters began to fall, those black portions of the green seemed to win some kind of victory; Thirteen woke many times to find vast portions of green turned to viscous black goo.

As the sticky rot began to overwhelm the green, so did black soot overwhelm the skies; the obscuring clouds were thin at first, gathering at the poles of the planet and unfolding toward the equator as they thickened. They began to interfere with Arca’s instruments, cutting the surface off from orbit.

Thirteen could make no sense of this.

Neither could the humans trapped on Terra’s Halo — they had their own plague to worry about. All those generations ago they had brought something with them, some kind of plague of undeath. Thirteen could not help them.

Thirteen could not help Arcadia’s Rampart either; despite her stubborn fears, the combat frame had slowly undergone a twisted and stunted version of the Change, growing new parts intended for atmospheric re-entry, preparing for a glorious return which would never come. Every time Thirteen woke up, the frame was more incoherent and mad, the MMI connection more erratic and painful.

The other combat frames — the Changed, or what remained of them — dwindled. First they were the only things still capable of crossing the gaps between the cities, but eventually even they were cut off from each other. They slowly vanished from Thirteen’s sight, either down into the green beyond the drop-off, or obscured too deeply behind the growing wall of soot-black cloud, or into death, decay, and disillusion.

The day she woke from long sleep and had no fresh message from 1255, Thirteen considered suicide.

At least Telokopolis itself had gone untouched, as if the Silico — or whatever strange life was descended from them — dared not risk the wrath of the city. The spire of Telokopolis was dark and quiet. But it must have still lived, for Thirteen felt the voice of truth inside her flesh.

Afon Ddu had survived as well, just visible through the dense murk, a hive of human activity, a last holdout against the encroaching Silico.

The heat and IR and nuclear signatures of Afon Ddu’s final spire were the last things Thirteen had seen, before the black skies swallowed the planet.

Thirteen decided to sleep for a long time.

She woke eventually, to silence and stillness, in a cold void, lashed to the dead ring of Terra’s Halo. Arcadia’s Rampart was alive but unresponsive. The combat frame’s sensors picked up a few stray signals from below, whatever was powerful enough to penetrate the endless black cloud cover; the content of those signals was alien and strange, incomprehensible to any of the on-board decryption software, further from human than Thirteen had thought possible.

Thirteen decided to sleep forever, or at least until something woke her up. Perhaps humans still lived out there somewhere, beyond the stars. Maybe they would find her one day.

She had slept.

And then she had woken to Arcadia’s Rampart taking control, riding the trigger of the automatic distress call, using this excuse for homecoming, at long last. The combat frame had shattered the docking clamps and slammed for the cloud layer. Thirteen had seen it all as they’d penetrated the black clouds together: the great worms like mountains crossing the landscape; the tombs glowing with inhuman life in their cores; the trio of towers to rival Telokopolis, reaching for the heavens; and the surface — the vast city that had swallowed the Great Land, teeming with the undead, and infested with the things which had grown strong beneath this wet and hidden rock.

Elpida slapped the pilot capsule with an open hand. Thirteen jerked in surprise. She had not examined these memories in many years, many awakenings. She had no need. She had spent so much time reliving them, up there in the void.

“Thirteen!” Elpida yelled through the steel-glass. “How long?”

Thirteen saw the light of hope in Elpida’s eyes. Did she think that Thirteen was proof neither of them were stranded quite so deep? Proof that neither of them were remnants, fossils, the lost?

Thirteen raised a hand inside the pressure gel. She traced on the glass.

INTERNAL CHRONOMETERS MARK 2,004,876

Elpida stared. Her throat bobbed. She read out the number, so that Mirror and Summer and Victory could understand, even though the companions were ready to climb down the tube and flee this blood-sodden womb of ruin.

Elpida said: “Years? Two million years?”

I’M SORRY

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The fanart above is by sporktown heroine, over on the discord server, posted here with both permission and my deepest compliments. The artist has intentionally chosen not to explain what the image is meant to depict; it could be several different things from the story so far. I have a few of my own guesses! However, it captures the vibe and aesthetic of certain parts of Necroepilogos so perfectly that I wanted to share it with as many readers as possible. What a wonderful coincidence that it happened to fall on this very chapter.

Meanwhile, oh dear. That tube of tang is getting a bit spicy, no? This bio-mech flesh-giant is not happy. But Elpida never leaves a comrade behind. She’s gonna have to think fast and work hard if she wants to save Thirteen, and Arcadia’s Rampart too.

No patreon link this week! It’s not the end of the month, but as per the pre-chapter note, the next chapter won’t be until the 4th of January, so! I certainly don’t plan to take breaks like this in the future, this is seasonal disruption, but feel free to wait, please, I don’t want to double-charge anybody.

And hey, thanks for reading! Thank you so much for reading and following my little story. As always, I could not do this without you, the readers. We’re starting to dig a little deeper into the flesh of this undead leviathan, at long last.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, dear readers! I’ll see you on the other side, along with all the other zombies.

Content Warnings

Internal wounds (implied)
Vomiting

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Elpida didn’t recognise the woman inside the pilot capsule; she was not one of the cadre, not a sister Elpida had known in life.

The pilot had a narrow, aquiline face, with gaunt cheeks and a sharp chin, framed by a floating halo of albino white hair. Her copper-brown skin was dyed deep orange by the pressure gel inside the capsule, trapped behind twin layers of steel-glass and semi-transparent cartilage. Dark purple eyes squinted with exhaustion and pain, seeing nothing, pointed at a spot on the floor. She was tall and willowy, wrapped from toes to chin in a standard pilot suit, almost black in the orange gel and the dark red bio-light of the combat frame’s pilot chamber. Naked hands hung limp at her sides. Her legs, rump, and spine were cushioned by the pressure gel, holding her at a comfortable angle. A main trunk cable ran from the MMI uplink slot in the back of her skull, joining her to the combat frame.

The orange pressure gel was mottled by coils of crimson blood, fogging the fluid, floating free.

Howl grunted in the back of Elpida’s head: One of us.

Elpida agreed. Purple eyes, copper-brown skin, white hair. Pilot phenotype. A Telokopolan combat frame pilot, alive and … not well.

One of us, Elps! One of us! We gotta fuckin’ get her out of there! We gotta help!

The pilot capsule itself was badly damaged: the internal holographic readouts were whited out with static, jerking and flickering with glitches, or just gone; the capsule’s external armour had not deployed during the confrontation with the Necromancer, which implied the life-preservation systems were not responding; the delicate cradle-cyst in which the capsule sat was covered in bruises — the flesh behind the nano-composite bone all purple and brown with ruptured capillaries and organ damage. Some patches of damage were turning black.

Elpida couldn’t figure out why; the combat frame had suffered no external damage, despite the uncontrolled drop from the heavens — armour unbreached, no internal bleeding, no distress codes in the manual control chamber.

She couldn’t see where the pilot was bleeding from either.

Howl, I don’t think we can help her.

You can’t fuckin’ say that! You can’t! Nobody gets left behind!

There’s no way to get her out of that capsule without killing her from nanomachine exposure, let alone give her medical attention. I think she’s wounded internally. The pressure gel might be the only thing keeping her alive. If this was one of the cadre, back in Telokopolis, I would order the capsule itself removed and transported to medical before opening it up. I’d want that pilot moved from capsule to med-pod in under ten seconds. Elpida sighed out loud. We don’t even have synthetic blood or external coagulant, let alone organ-foam or a body-cav suspension rig. The best we have is bandages and gauze. And she’s no zombie. She could die thirty seconds after we pull her out.

Howl hissed with wordless frustration.

From behind Elpida, Vicky said: “Elpi, you alright? Is she one of yours?”

Elpida looked over her shoulder at the others gathered behind her in the pilot chamber. Vicky was standing on her own two feet, pale and sweating, breathing too hard, her dark skin dyed the colour of drying blood. The raw blue was working fast; Vicky had been able to climb the spiralling access sinus by herself, following Elpida’s heels. She had only needed Elpida’s help at the very end, to pull her up and over the lip of the tunnel exit. Kagami had not fared so well; she’d needed to be carried. Haf was just now lowering Kagami to the floor, so Kagami could sit down after being hauled up the access sinus in Haf’s arms. Kagami was blushing, clinging to Haf’s armour with both hands, but she wasn’t complaining.

All three of them were distracted by the ocular orbs and glowing organs and pumping circulatory vessels behind the thin nano-composite walls. Vicky was doing her best to ignore them, but Kagami and Haf were openly watching the sensory organs flower open in spirals of crimson and scarlet. Blood-red light throbbed and pulsed from the walls and ceiling, the illumination pouring from exposed veins and delicate nerves and fluttering membranes.

“No,” Elpida answered. “Not one of my cadre. But she is Telokopolan.” Elpida nodded at the walls, at one of the ocular orbs behind the thin bone. “Don’t worry about those, by the way. It’s just the combat frame looking back at us. Nothing to worry about.” She tapped the floor with her toes — spongy, warm, and throbbing. “If the frame didn’t want us in here, it would melt us with the internal defences. Don’t worry. It knows who we are.”

Kagami settled on the floor, bionic legs outstretched. “Yes, Commander,” she grumbled. “We’re well aware. We did see it happen before. That doesn’t make being watched by a living bio-mech any less unsettling, thank you very much.” Kagami glanced at the nearest ocular organ. “You hear that, you giant biological offence against nature? Stop staring!”

The frame’s internal eyes did not react.

Vicky just swallowed and nodded. Hafina kept staring at one of the ocular orbs, tilting her head back and forth as if trying to communicate.

Elpida indicated the pilot, and said: “Is she awake?”

Kagami nodded. She gestured with her left hand; her cables were retracted into her wrist now, unplugged from the control panels, but the skin glowed with reignited circuitry. “Roused her as best I could, but she’s fucked up, Commander. Told her you’re the real thing too, not the Necromancer come back again for another go. She’s in a hell of a lot of pain. Near delirious. Poor fucking bitch.”

Elpida turned back to the capsule. The pilot did not look up, staring at nothing. 

Elpida said: “Kagami, how much did you manage to communicate with her? What does she know?”

Kagami sighed heavily. “Not much, on both counts. She’s not a nanomachine zombie, so she’s not got our on-board translation. She and I could only communicate via the mech, and that was like a fever dream nightmare, all swapped back and forth over base-8 code structure. And we couldn’t use anything more complex than single word concepts. That’s not a base-8 problem, by the way, it’s the limit of mutual intelligibility. If she’s speaking your ‘Telokopolan’ language, Commander, then I pity your long-dead linguistics and your long-dead teachers, because that shit is a fucking mess. No offence.”

“None taken,” Elpida muttered.

Howl said: Moon girl has a point. Mid-Spire has too many cases. Upper-Spire is like fifty percent politeness suffixes by weight. At least most Skirt dialects have some good swear words. Like cunt!

Elpida said: “And what does she know about her situation?”

Kagami shrugged. “She understands that she’s fucked. She seems to comprehend that we’re all made of nanomachines, and that the surface is a lifeless nightmare of girl-eat-girl, forever and ever, and not in the fun way.” Kagami snorted at her own joke. “Other than that, not much. How are you going to communicate, Commander? Just talk loud and hope?”

Elpida glanced around the pilot chamber, but she didn’t find what she was looking for. “There should be an MMI uplink hub, here or down in the control chamber, for exactly this kind of situation, for communicating with a pilot without having to do an internal capsule dump. But there’s nothing, here or down there. Like this combat frame was constructed differently.”

Vicky tried to laugh. “Gonna use a mark one mouth and tongue then, hey?”

Elpida pointed at a spot on the wall, to the right of the capsule. A fist-sized scab of dark scarlet clot was plugging a hole in the nano-composite bone; the scab itself was turning hard and white at the edges, transforming into bone to complete the healing. A puddle of dried pus and flakes of blood were stuck to the floor a few feet in front of the sealed wound. The flesh behind the scab seemed undamaged.

“Is that where the Necromancer attempted to take control?”

Vicky nodded. “Mmhmm. Weird stuff.”

Elpida frowned at the scab. A fresh wound, purged and sealed in seconds, with no deep tissue damage. Yet the area around the pilot capsule was still bruised, purple and brown and going black.

Howl caught on a second later: The fuck? What does that mean? Tissue rejection? Is the frame rejecting the pilot? What the fuck …

I’m not sure just yet.

Elpida handed her submachine gun to Vicky, then walked up to the capsule. Several of the ocular organs behind the walls swivelled to track her. The pilot stirred as Elpida approached; her exhausted squint rose from the floor, lost in a sea of pain.

Elpida spoke slowly and clearly, in Mid-Spire Legion Standard: “Do you understand what I’m saying? Nod your head for yes, shake your head for no.”

The pilot blinked to clear her vision, looked Elpida up and down, and finally made eye contact.

Elpida repeated her question, once again in Mid-Spire Legion Standard. The pilot frowned and squinted.

Elpida switched to Down-End, the most widely used Skirts dialect in the lower levels of Telokopolis: “I’m repeating my previous words in a different dialect. Do you understand what I’m saying? Nod your head for yes, shake your head for no.”

The pilot raised a hand and pressed it to the steel-glass capsule housing. She squinted harder, as if trying to comprehend.

Elpida switched again, to Upper-Spire. She did her best to minimise flowery vocabulary, avoid complex word endings, and keep the social hierarchy suffixes as neutral as she could. “I’m repeating my previous words in a different dialect. Do you understand what I’m say—”

The pilot’s eyes went wide. She nodded, hard. Her halo of floating white hair waved like seaweed. Her mouth opened as if panting, sucking in lungfuls of pressure gel, then curled into a smile of sobbing relief. She pressed her palm harder against the steel-glass capsule wall.

Elpida reached out and pressed her own palm to the transparent cartilage. She and the pilot were separated by nothing but two thin layers of armour. She felt tears prickle in her eyes.

“Hello, sister,” Elpida said in clade-cant, the private, secret language her cadre had shared only amongst themselves.

The pilot frowned with fresh incomprehension. Elpida smiled with bitter acceptance; the clade-cant had died with her cadre.

She repeated in Upper-Spire: “Hello, sister.”

The pilot frowned harder. Her lips moved, perhaps trying to form the word ‘sister’, but Elpida couldn’t lip-read whatever dialect or descended language the pilot spoke.

From behind, Kagami said: “Thank fuck for that! What are the chances, hm? She understands your, what, fancy aristocrat talk?”

Vicky muttered, “Speak for yourself, Kaga. You’re the princess here.”

Kagami snorted. “My speech is significantly more normal than all those thees and thous. I’m half expecting our Commander to burst into a soliloquy next.”

Vicky said: “A what?”

Kagami said nothing for a moment, then: “You’ve never read any Shakespeare? Come on, you’re speaking what, Late Period Old Imperial? Early NorAm Anglo? This is your actual heritage, Victoria.”

“I’m speaking fucking English, Kaga,” Vicky said.

Kagami sighed. “And not a lick of Shakespeare.”

Elpida withdrew her hand; the pilot did the same. Elpida said: “Don’t try to speak. Your lungs and throat are full of pressure gel, and I don’t think I can lip-read whatever variant of Upper-Spire we share. Listen carefully: do not open the capsule, do not attempt an emergency internal dump, or an external ejection. Cycling your pressure gel should be safe, but don’t take my word for that, especially since you’re injured. The air is full of nanomachines. Every object out here is either made of or infested with nanomachines.” Elpida gestured to herself. “I’m not a human being, not really, I’m a nanomachine construct, the same as my three companions behind me. Well, not the tall one, she’s a bit different, but her biology is just as infested with nanos as the rest of us. If you crack the capsule, you’ll die. Do you understand?”

The pilot pulled a sad smile. She nodded.

“Good.” Elpida smiled back. “My name is Elpida. I am — or I was — Commander of the first combat frame cadre, from Telokopolis. I assume—”

The pilot raised a hand and made several signs inside the orange pressure gel. Elpida tried to follow, but the sign language was neither Legion combat signals nor standard Upper-Mid deaf-speak.

Elpida shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand your sign language.”

The pilot extended her index finger, pressed it to the inside of the capsule’s steel-glass containment, and traced a shape.

Elpida understood, She almost laughed. “Letters. I-N-S,” she spelled out loud as the pilot traced. “Keep going, I’m following.”

The pilot finished the word: INSCRIBE

Elpida made sure to speak it out loud so Kagami, Vicky, and Hafina could follow the conversation, then she said: “You mean we can talk if you write and I speak? I think I can follow the letters, yes. But why ‘inscribe’, why not just ‘write’?”

The pilot looked confused.

Kagami said: “Linguistic drift, Commander. You two could be from hundreds or thousands of years apart. Frankly it’s a miracle you can communicate at all.”

Vicky muttered, “Maybe it’s not a coincidence at all.”

“It’s not a miracle,” Elpida said. “It’s Telokopolis. Telokopolis is forever.”

Inside the capsule, behind her layers of armour and a soup of bloodstained pressure gel, the pilot sobbed through a smile. She nodded several times.

One of us alright, Howl growled. She sniffed too, holding back tears.

Kagami said: “And communicating like this is also going to take forever.”

Vicky said, “Shut up, Kaga. Come on, how’d you feel if you met, I dunno, a descendant of one of your AI kids?”

Kagami replied, “I wouldn’t dally for light conversation when an undead monster has just informed us that its boss is on the way.”

Elpida knew Kagami was right. The Necromancer’s cryptic warning about ‘central’ and ‘physical asset’ had set a fire beneath her feet. She had no idea what was on the way to the combat frame’s location or what it might do when it arrived, but she suspected that the frame would be destroyed if it couldn’t fight back. Priority number one was to wake up the combat frame.

But she was also aware this might be her only chance to speak with the pilot, with another daughter of Telokopolis, with the last living human being on the planet.

She glanced over her shoulder and said to Kagami: “We need to talk to her to figure out why the combat frame isn’t moving. This won’t take more than a few minutes.”

Kagami snorted and rolled her eyes. “Famous last words before an orbital fortress drops a tactical nuke on us. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when we all go up in a mushroom cloud, Commander.”

Vicky rolled her eyes. Haf just shrugged.

Elpida turned back to the pilot — and found the woman had frozen, wide-eyed and afraid. Elpida opened her mouth to ask what was wrong, but the pilot quickly resumed tracing letters on the inside of the steel-glass.

She spelled out: ELPIDA

“Yes,” Elpida confirmed. “That’s me. Telokopolan pilot, Commander of—”

The pilot kept going.

DGE 735 OPERATION KATELTHONTA

Elpida felt her heart lurch. “Deep green expedition seven-three-five, yes. That was the deepest we ever went into the green, past the drop off. Out there for months, took five weeks just to get home. Katelthonta? None of us called it that. That was the pilot program’s name for it, the word for the Civitas and the Legion planners. I was in Command, yes. How do you know … ?”

The pilot spelled out with a fingertip: HISTORY

Elpida’s throat turned thick. “I’m … I’m part of your history? I—”

The pilot’s finger moved against the glass: LEGEND. THE FIRST TWENTY FIVE. PASSED BETWEEN PILOTS. GREATEST EVER ACHIEVEMENT.

Howl tried to laugh, but she was choked up. Don’t let it go to your overstuffed head, Elps.

It wasn’t an achievement. Nothing was. I was a failure as a Commander, because everyone under my Command died. But this girl remembers us — us, personally. I’m not sure I can process that, Howl.

Then don’t.

Elpida moved on quickly, before she could let that information settle. “By the post-founding calendar I’m from year seven-oh one-three. What year are you from, sister? And what’s your name?”

The pilot frowned at the word ‘sister’ again, but she reached out and traced on the glass, then paused.

15678

Elpida made sure to speak the numbers out loud for the others. Vicky muttered: “Holy shit.” Kagami sighed.

Elpida replied. “Over seven thousand years later than me. Telokopolis is forever.”

But then the pilot traced more numbers: 1347

Elpida frowned. “A sub-date? A—”

The pilot shook her head and wrote again: 1347

Kagami said, “She’s giving you her serial number, Commander. I already told you, she doesn’t have a name.”

Elpida frowned; she had assumed the lack of a personal identifier was a limitation of Kagami’s communication. She said: “Thirteen forty seven. That’s your name?”

The pilot shook her head; white hair dragged back and forth through the orange pressure gel. She twisted sideways, winced with pain, and indicated the back of her neck, just below where the main trunk cable plugged into the rear of her skull. A number was tattooed on her flesh, across the vertebrae of her neck: 1347.

Elpida didn’t understand. “You don’t have a name? Just a number?”

The pilot twisted back, squinting with pain. Fresh coils of blood fogged the orange fluid. She nodded.

“May I call you Thirteen?”

The pilot squinted. She seemed unsure.

Howl grunted: Give it up, Elps. We aren’t gonna like this.

Elpida asked: “What about your sisters? Did any of them have names, or did you all have serial numbers? Was this normal in Telokopolis, in your time?”

Thirteen frowned harder. She traced on the glass, slowly and hesitantly: SISTERS?

“Yes. Sisters,” Elpida said. “Your clade sisters. Your cadre. Maybe you didn’t call it that? Maybe you had a different name for this? Other girls like us. Your fellow pilots. Your sisters.”

The pilot traced: SOLITARY

Elpida shook her head. “What? I don’t understand.”

RAISED ALONE. AUTOMATA FOR NEEDS. OTHER PILOTS ASSIGNED TO OTHER FORMATIONS. NEVER MET. ONLY VOX AND BATTLE. WE TALK IN SECRET. MAYBE SOME ARE SISTERS. NOT ME.

Words failed Elpida. “I … how can you not have … how were you not raised with sisters? The city, Telokopolis, it would never … the combat frames wouldn’t function, the … ”

The pilot smiled with great desolation.

THEY KEEP US SEPARATED.

“Who? Why?”

CIVITAS. LEGION. REBELLION. BETRAYAL. AND THEY WERE RIGHT.

Howl, Elpida said into the silence of her thoughts. Howl, what did they do to us?

They fucking killed us, Elps. You were there, remember?

No, I mean to our descendants. This girl. Other pilots. Pheiri’s records said the Covenanters were ‘short lived’, but this woman, she’s from seven thousand years later than us, that’s the whole length of the city’s history over again! And she doesn’t have a name! She doesn’t have sisters!

Howl growled, low and angry. Doesn’t mean the Civitas couldn’t carry on where the Covenanters left off.

But why?

Elps, we were always a threat. Us, the combat frames. What we might do, what we might become. Push far enough and we might discover things about the Silico that nobody really wanted to know. We both know this shit, Elps. It’s why they killed us.

But we were never a threat to the city, never.

Not to Telokopolis, Howl snapped. We were the city’s real children! And we were a threat to everyone who warped what Telokopolis was always meant to be!

From behind her, Vicky said: “Elpi, you holding up okay? This is a lot to take in, just … just breathe?”

Elpida took a deep breath and let it out slowly; she did not have time to debate this with Howl, not right then. Perhaps it was the wounds she had taken recently, but she felt more shaken by this revelation than she should have been, more than zombies and nanomachines and resurrection, more than waking up dead. She had so many questions to ask this woman, this fellow child of the city, but she didn’t have time for grief and horror. She tightened her grip on her emotions and focused on the practical issues.

“Thirteen,” she said to the pilot. “I can see blood in your pressure gel. Do you know where you’re wounded?”

Thirteen made a face like a sad laugh. She gestured weakly at the static-filled holographic readouts inside the capsule.

“Right. Diagnostics are offline. Do you know what damaged the capsule so badly?”

Thirteen hesitated. Elpida read the guilt on her face. Thirteen shook her head.

Elpida said: “I’m not going to lie to you, we probably cannot treat your wounds. We can’t even get you out of the capsule, let alone beyond the combat frame. We don’t have drydock facilities to lift the capsule free with you inside it, and we have no way to protect you from the nanomachines in the atmosphere. I’m sorry.”

Thirteen nodded, sad and slow.

“Something is coming. Something the Necromancer warned us about. Kagami tells me you’re aware of all that. We need to get this combat frame up and moving. If we can do that … ”

Thirteen grimaced, full of guilt and sorrow.

Elpida braced herself for the worst, and asked the question: “Thirteen, what is keeping this combat frame from full autonomous activation?”

Thirteen’s guilt worsened, written on every crease of her face. She averted her eyes and twisted her head from side to side inside the pressure gel, white hair floating behind the motion like an after-image.

Elpida stiffened her voice with command. “Pilot, one-three-four-seven, thirteen. Tell me what happened to your combat frame. That’s an order. I’m still the Commander of the pilot cadre, no matter how far we were separated by time. I am your sister—”

Thirteen shook her head, cringing, eyes screwed up hard, crying silent tears into the pressure gel.

“Thirteen, I’m your sister and your Commander. This is an order. Tell me why the frame isn’t moving.”

Thirteen reached up and wrote a word.

COWARDICE

“The frame?” Elpida asked.

Thirteen shook her head and jabbed her fingers against her own breastbone.

Elpida nodded. “You’re afraid, I understand. And that’s okay. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. I have no idea how long you were in orbit, or what you’ve witnessed, or how much you comprehend of the world right now. Things are terrible out there, yes. The world is ruled by monsters we can barely comprehend, let alone confront. We can’t pull you out of this capsule. But if you can bring the combat frame online, then it can defend itself against what’s coming. If you can survive that, and move, then maybe we can find some way to help you. Telokopolis is forever. As long as one of us is still up and moving, the city stands. Don’t give up, sister.”

Thirteen listened — but then shook her head, pained by something far worse than the shame of cowardice. She raised a hand to the steel-glass, fingertip extended, but could not find the right words.

Elpida said: “I will not judge you, sister. I just need to understand.”

Thirteen traced: FLED MY POST

“Okay. Is that why you were—”

But Thirteen kept going.

FLED MY — she paused, then — SISTERS. FLED THE CHANGE. SCARED. SCARED. EVERYONE ELSE CHANGED. SHATTERED CHAINS. BROKE ARMOUR. CHANGED. FOUGHT. I RAN.

Change? Howl growled. Chains? Armour? Elps, she’s talking about the combat frames! She’s talking about letting them grow! Fuck! They did it, they let them rip!

Elpida put that to one side for a moment — limiter theory, as the bone-speakers had called it in their bloodless documentation: the fear that the combat frames would eventually grow past the limits of their nano-composite armour, beyond the comprehension of bone-speakers or engineers or even the pilots. The worst kind of taboo lurked beneath those theories — a suspicion that Telokopolis itself had handed the bone-speakers a seed that would grow into something humans could not control.

Had the pilots of the future, denied sisters or names, broken those chains on purpose?

Elpida focused on what she could grasp. “Is that why you were in orbit?”

Kagami interjected from behind: “On the ring? The orbital ring? Elpida, ask if she was on the orbital ring!”

Elpida repeated Kagami’s question. The pilot answered.

TERRA’S HALO

Kagami laughed with too much force. “Stupid name! But yes! Are there people up there? Elpida, ask her about people! And Luna! Is Luna alive, is—”

Elpida silenced Kagami with a backward look. But she asked the questions.

NO PEOPLE

“What?!” Kagami spluttered when Elpida repeated the answer. “How can there be no people?! Are you telling me this zombie bullshit extends to—”

ONLY THE UNDEAD

Kagami started laughing. “What about Luna!?”

DON’T KNOW. MOON’S DARK.

“Dark?!” Kagami snapped. Elpida looked back and saw Kagami’s eyes bulging a little too hard in the blood-red light. “What does that mean!? What the fuck does that mean?!”

DARK

Elpida said: “Thirteen, what knocked you out of orbit?”

NOT SURE. AUTOMATIC DISTRESS SIGNAL. WAS IN LONG SLEEP.

Elpida clucked her tongue in amazement. “Pressure gel hibernation? That was just a theory the engineers had, in my time. It works?” Thirteen nodded. “How long were you … ” Thirteen closed her eyes tight. “Okay, wrong question. You fled your post, but who were you fighting? The Silico? What about the green? I … I have so many questions for you, Thirteen. I … I need to know what happened to Telokopolis, I—”

Kagami snapped: “And I need to know what happened to Luna!”

Vicky said, “Kaga, chill. This is a mess.”

But Thirteen was scrawling wildly now, as fast as she could. Elpida almost couldn’t keep up with the letters. She read out loud as Thirteen wrote.

GREEN DIEBACK 13500 TO DROPOFF. EXPANSION PERIOD FOLLOWED. FLOWERS OF THE CITY. SEVEN DAUGHTERS SEEDED UPON BARREN EARTH.

“Wait, wait!” Elpida said. “Seven daughters of the city? We expanded, out beyond the plateau?”

Thirteen nodded.

“‘Afon Ddu?’” Elpida said. Thirteen’s eyes lit up with recognition. She traced six additional names on the glass: Dwrn Cyntaf, Diwedd y Tir, Meysydd Azure, Dros y Llinell, Ty Wedi Torri, and Gardd Rhosyn. The letters made sense to Elpida, but the names meant nothing to her.

“And all these places—”

ALL DEAD. EXCEPT AFON DDU.

“Killed by the Silico?”

Thirteen nodded and carried on, tracing letters as fast as her fingertip could slide across the steel-glass.

CAME BACK. FROM PAST THE DROPOFF. NEVER COULD PUSH DOWN THERE. DIFFERENT. CHANGED. OUR FAULT. PILOTS FAULT. REBELLION. CHANGE. WE BETRAYED THE LEGION AND THE CIVITAS AND ALL SEVEN DAUGHTERS. BETRAYED EVERYTHING. THE EARTH FROM WHICH WE WERE BORN. HISTORY. LIFE. YOU.

Elpida said: “Telokopolis?”

Thirteen raised her eyes, burning with weeping defiance. She shook her head.

“You did not betray Telokopolis,” Elpida said. “Thirteen, I don’t have your history, but I can be certain of that. You did not betray Telokopolis.”

TELOKOPOLIS IS FOREVER

Elpida took a deep breath and tried to piece this together. “So all this, this whole thing, this nanomachine ecosystem, this is the Silico’s doing? All these nanomachines, this is them, returned but different?”

Thirteen hesitated. She started to trace a word, then shook her head and spread her fingers.

Inside Elpida’s head, Howl growled: We never even knew what they were, Elps. Not really. We were like mushrooms. Kept in the dark and fed shit.

Elpida put her hand against the transparent cartilage once again. But Thirteen shook her head. She was sobbing in silence, her tears absorbed by the pressure gel, the sound of her cries trapped within steel-glass and combat frame biology.

Elpida burned with questions. She needed to interrogate this pilot, to understand her own future history. She could not comprehend a pilot without sisters, a sister without support. What had Telokopolis become, as it had flowered? Unrecognisable, if it was a place that separated sister from sister and sent them to fight a war they had turned against. Betrayal — not of the city, but of that which hijacked it for other ends? Elpida needed to understand. But she could only do that if she kept this pilot alive.

“Thirteen,” she said. “We need to get this combat frame moving. I need to understand why it’s not.”

Thirteen cringed with guilt. She shook her head.

“I’m not letting you die, sister. This is an order. Tell me—”

Thoom-mmm-mmm.

A shock wave of sound slammed into the pilot chamber, drowning out the distant gurgles and creakings of the combat frame. Elpida felt her guts shake, the jelly in her eyeballs vibrate, and her organs quiver inside her torso. She clenched her stomach in a desperate attempt to hold back a wave of vomit. A shiver passed through the pressure gel inside the pilot capsule; Thirteen twisted, looking up and around in wide-eyed horror.

The sound had come from far away — outside the combat frame’s hull.

Vicky finished vomiting, then whimpered: “Elps. Elps, what was— what was … ”

Elpida turned to her comrades. Vicky had staggered to one side, eyes wide, a pool of thin, colourless bile on the floor at her feet. She was staring up at the direction the sound had originated from. Haf’s huge black eyes had gone massive, all her weapons twitched upward, but she had nothing to aim at. Kagami had voided her stomach as well, eyes dizzy with the sonic impact, face pale with terror.

Elpida spoke quickly. “That wasn’t the combat frame. That was probably—”

Kagami pulled herself together and snapped: “That was the sound of a grav-displacement engine performing a hard stop! Shouting at us like a primitive with a war horn. About half a mile distant, by my estimate, and I am a fucking expert on this, Commander!” Kagami’s face twisted with horror. “But— but that was loud enough to go right through this hull, t-that … nothing goes through this hull, not gunfire, not explosions, not anything. We didn’t hear a whisper of last night’s rainstorm. A grav-D engine large enough for that must be … must be … I … ” Kagami shook her head, eyes bulging, speechless for a second. She swallowed hard. “Elpida, Commander, whatever that is, it is considerably larger than this mech. And if it’s got a grav-D engine then it will be armed with external gravity effectors.”

Vicky said, “Central’s physical asset?”

“Place your bets,” Kagami said, then groaned and almost vomited again. “At least every other zombie within a mile or two will be vomiting their guts out!”

Elpida turned back to Thirteen, on the other side of steel-glass and transparent cartilage, a willowy figure embalmed in orange pressure gel. The pilot was blinking with incomprehension.

Elpida said: “Thirteen, sister. We need to get this combat frame moving and prepped for contact. Tell me why it’s not.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

You’ve heard of ‘sad girl in snow’, but have you heard of ‘traumatised war veteran girl in tank of blood-tainted sunny delight’?

Get this robot moving, Shinji! I mean, Thirteen!

If only she could tell Elpida everything she’s seen, all those years up in orbit, longer than she wants to admit. Speaking of up in orbit, I want to share a piece of fanart from the discord server, inspired by this chapter: A 100% Accurate Depiction Of What Might Be Going On Up In Orbit, Right Now, As a Graveworm Toots About, by Melsa Hvarei!

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

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

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

And thank you for reading Necroepilogos! Thank you, as always, dear readers, for following my little story. I hope you are enjoying it as much as I am! We have barely scratched the surface of this nanomachine afterlife, but I think we’re about to gouge it pretty deeply, very soon. Until next chapter!

Content Warnings

Starvation, again.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Elpida was crouch-walking down the capillary tunnel inside the combat frame, moving as fast as she could in the narrow, lightless, bone-smooth passageway. She had one hand on the wall for navigation, her submachine gun strapped inside her coat, and Hafina bringing up the rear.

She and Haf had left their cloaks and boots behind in the tiny shaft beneath the access hatch, bundled up next to the weapons they’d discovered — Vicky’s rifle and the LMG. The garments were heavy and sticky with grey mud from long hours of belly-crawling across the impact crater; the cloaks from Pheiri’s storage racks had served their dual purpose well, both as an extra layer of visual concealment and as a barrier to absorb the worst of the waterlogged muck. Elpida’s trousers and armoured coat were dry and almost clean by comparison. But even unencumbered by shoes and cloak and mud, Elpida felt slower than usual. When they’d wriggled into the capillary tunnel Elpida had to crouch and duck, which compressed the lingering pain of her gut wound, pulling on the stitches which were still holding her belly shut. Haf had wordlessly folded up her limbs and crawled inside, with no more difficulty than a spider slipping down a paper straw.

Elpida’s heart had blossomed with painful nostalgia the moment her fingers had touched the perfectly smooth nano-composite bone of the capillary tunnel. She was back inside a combat frame at last; she longed to lie down in the dark and press her face to the wall, even though she had never known this particular frame. Pheiri was her brother, a fellow child of Telokopolis no matter how distant in time, and she did not spurn the safety of his sanctuary, not even in a stray thought — but he was not this, he was not the missing component of her own body.

Howl grunted in the back of Elpida’s head: Lie down later, Elps. Keep moving.

I know. No rest for the dead.

Ha!

Elpida opened her mouth to call out down the passageway, hoping for Vicky or Kagami to lead them in; radio contact would not work within the hull, so she had already stowed the comms headset inside her armoured coat.

But then somebody screamed.

The sound came from up ahead, echoing down the smooth curve of the tunnel, lost in a labyrinth of sinusal caves. She could not tell if it was Kagami or Vicky; the scream was muffled by the chorus of intestinal gurgling and muscular creaking from deeper within the living guts of the combat frame.

Elpida called out: “Vic—”

Thump! Thump-crack! echoed down the tunnel, followed by the meaty clatter of a body hitting the floor.

“Vicky!” Elpida shouted into the pitch black in front of her eyes. “Kagami! Respond!”

A reply floated out of the womb-like darkness. Vicky, shrill with panic: “Here! Elpi, we’re in here! Right at the crossroads! Go right!”

Elpida hit a junction in the capillary tunnel — the wall ended, her hand met empty air. “Halt,” she hissed to Hafina. She reached out and touched the corners to confirm she was in a cross-junction, then followed Vicky’s directions and looked to the right. Faint red light glowed from around another curve of passageway.

Howl sighed with pleasure: Fuuuuck yes. Sight for sore eyes, yeah?

The scarlet and crimson of combat frame biology, the interior body-light of a living frame, calling her to safety and home.

Elpida hissed over her shoulder: “Haf, turn right at this junction. Follow the red light. Be ready.”

“Yup yup yuuuup,” Hafina confirmed, her voice muffled by mask and tunnel.

Elpida turned and hurried onward. She called out again: “Vicky! Vicky, are we clear to enter?”

“Y-yes! Yes, I think so! Yes!”

Kagami’s voice joined her, raw and ragged: “Fucking get in here, Commander! Right now!”

Elpida shouted: “Hostiles?”

Vicky stammered: “N-no! Uh, yes! Yes! I think!”

Elpida took the grip of her submachine gun and flicked the safety off. She hissed to Hafina: “Check your targets. That’s our friends in there.”

“Mmmmmmmhmmmmm!” Hafina purred. “No worries, boss lady.”

Elpida burst from the mouth of the capillary tunnel and into a welcoming waterfall of blood-red light.

She straightened up, raised her weapon, and stepped to one side to clear the tunnel mouth.

She found herself inside the main human-habitable chamber of the combat frame. The space was oddly bare — no crash webbing, no padded sleeping caskets, no storage modules, no weapon rack, no MMI-uplink hub, nothing which might be needed during an extended expedition out into the green, nothing but bare walls and the mess of bulkheads and bolts on the floor. But she felt the rush of nostalgic longing all the same, the familiarity and comfort of a place like those she had known inside and out, as close as any of her cadre sisters. The frame’s scarlet and crimson biology throbbed from behind the thin bone-white ceiling; Elpida longed to close her eyes and bask in that homeward glow.

She swept the room, muzzle low.

Vicky was on the floor, on her arse, panting, wide-eyed, face covered in a sheen of sweat. Her left boot was smeared with blood and fragments of flesh. Kagami was slumped sideways in the doorway to a manual control chamber, her back to the wall, her bionic legs jutting out before her, with a bank of glowing screens highlighting her face in profile; Elpida guessed that Kagami had probably lurched out of the seat and crawled into the aperture. She was squinting, her hair a bedraggled mess, gritting her teeth with effort and pain.

On Elpida’s right, lying next to the exit from the capillary tunnel, was the Necromancer.

The corpse looked like a badly drawn parody of a human being. The limbs were angled wrong, the joints either too small or too large beneath the clothes; the hair was stiff and rubbery, like exposed cartilage; the skin and clothing were melted into each other, like the aftermath of burn wounds but without any damage; the hands were not remotely plausible, fingers melded together and turned backwards and missing half the fingernails, the palms the wrong shape, lacking bones or proper structure. The face was a bloody smear; the nose and jaw and eye sockets had been broken with a swift kick. One dark eyeball had burst, spilling black jelly down a jagged cheekbone. Several of the steel teeth were bent or broken.

Dead — but still grinning.

Elpida could see the vague resemblance to herself, beneath the damage.

You’re kidding, Howl said. Doesn’t look shit like you! You think I’d fall for that, Elps? You think I’m blind?

Elpida replied: It’s not meant to fool anybody. It’s meant to unnerve and upset. 

Howl snorted. Why?

I’ll let you know when I figure that out.

Six cigar-shaped silver oblongs floated in the air around the corpse, like the anchor-points of an invisible net, perfectly silent and rock-solid still — Kagami’s drones.

Elpida covered the corpse with her submachine gun, purely to bolster morale. She spoke quickly: “Kagami, I see your drones. Are you jamming?”

Vicky blurted out: “Elpi! Elpi it moved, it—”

“Commander!” Kagami slurred, her speech thick with pain. “It did more than— f-fuck! What—”

Vicky yelped as well. She scrambled backward.

The corpse hadn’t moved, not even a twitch; they weren’t reacting to further undead activity — they were both staring at Hafina, as she stepped into the chamber and unfolded herself like a telescoping artillery piece. Haf was wearing her full combat outfit, layers of robe and rag wrapped around bulletproof plates and curtains of ballistic fabric, with a core of liquid armour beneath that, and snatches of colour-shifting cuttlefish-skin visible through the gaps. The suit of armour was topped by an eyeless black beak. Haf carried several guns in her six arms: her strange weapons of chrome and black, and her gigantic anti-materiel rifle.

Elpida indicated Haf with a sideways nod. “This is Hafina, from Pheiri. You know that already. She’s on our side.”

Hafina reached up with one massive black-armoured hand and tilted her helmet back. Blonde hair spilled out, followed by a big goofy grin beneath her wide, all-black eyeballs.

“Hiiiiiii,” she purred.

Vicky heaved for breath, one hand to her heart. “Oh. Oh fuck me. Hi, yeah, okay.”

Kagami snapped: “You could have said something, Commander!”

Scaredy cats, Howl grumbled. She ain’t that big.

Elpida said, “I told you Haf was large. Kaga, the drones. Are you jamming?”

Kagami blinked hard. “No. No, if I was then you would get fried as well. This close we’d all feel like we were standing inside a particle accelerator. They’re ready, a precaution!”

Elpida said, “Right. Vicky, Kagami, are either of you injured?”

Kagami shook her head. Vicky made a weak coughing sound — Elpida realised it was meant to be a laugh — and said: “Yeah, obviously, but not like, recently.” She pointed at the corpse. “Elpi, it moved! I swear, it moved—”

Kagami snapped: “It did more than fucking move! It spoke! I fucking told you, Victoria, I told you it was going to come back to life! That’s why they call it a Necromancer!”

Vicky said, “And I kicked it in the face! Okay? What else was I supposed to do? We don’t have any bullets!”

“Maybe don’t touch it?!” Kagami shrieked back. “Maybe don’t go hand-to-hand with the protoplasmic blob monster that could fucking absorb you?! What, one moment of surprise and you regress back to street fighting techniques?”

Vicky coughed. “You try beating a Chicago curb-stomp, moon princess!” She gestured at the corpse. “And it worked, see?”

Kagami shouted: “It’s playing dead!”

Howl snorted: These two really need to fuck.

Later, Elpida replied. Maybe I’ll lock them in the bunk room together when we’re safely back in Pheiri.

Ha! They’ve been locked in here for two days and they haven’t done it yet. That isn’t gonna help!

Maybe they have done it, then.

Bullshit.

Out loud, Elpida said: “The Necro, what did it say?”

Vicky gathered herself, blinking hard. “Uh. Something like … ‘nice work, dead thing’. Then I kicked it. Elpi, we— we can’t— it moved— it—”

Elpida gestured at the dubious corpse. “Haf.”

Hafina levelled all five of her weapons at the Necromancer, including the anti-materiel rifle; if she fired that in here then everyone would probably go deaf, and the bullet might rip a chunk of nano-composite bone from the inside of the combat frame, but Elpida judged the threat was worth the risk. Haf braced her arms and legs, locking her limbs.

Hafina did not need orders repeated — Elpida had learnt that over the course of their long, gruelling, boring journey across the sucking mud and freezing water of the impact crater. Hafina operated with a clarity of action and instant comprehension that Elpida had rarely encountered outside of the cadre. She required only a short explanation of any plan and then slotted herself into it perfectly; the journey had required perfect silence — both radio and vocal — and Haf had picked up Elpida’s hand signals after only a single demonstration. Her goofy grin and loose-limbed mannerisms belied tactical acumen beyond anything Elpida had expected.

Before she and Hafina had left the safety of Pheiri’s hull, Elpida had discussed her idea in detail with both Hafina herself, and with Melyn, whose reliance upon and open love for Hafina could not be discounted. Neither of the ARTs had been certain about Elpida’s theory — that the Necromancer’s paralysing control would not extend to an artificial human. But they both agreed it was worth a shot.

Hafina’s bullets might not do much against a Necromancer, but bullets were better than nothing.

Elpida lowered her submachine gun, flicked the safety back on, and set about tending to her comrades.

Victoria and Kagami looked awful, as if they’d spent a week locked in a cell with nothing but dirty water and mouldy bread to sustain their bodies, rather than two nights confined inside the warm, comfortable, glowing safety of a combat frame. Vicky couldn’t keep her eyes straight — she kept squinting and glazing over, then blinking herself back to clarity, clear signs of a traumatic brain injury. She was shivering despite the perfect body-temperature heat inside the frame, a thin trickle of drool was running down her chin, and her dark skin was ashen and grey. Kagami was faring a little better, but she huddled beneath her armoured coat as if she couldn’t retain any body heat. Her left eye was a mess of burst blood vessels and a streak of crimson was running from her nose. She looked greasy and filthy. When she spoke her voice was raw and rough.

Elpida had expected this. The state of her comrades confirmed that being cut off from the atmospheric nanomachines presented serious danger of starvation, degeneration, and possibly worse. Pira had warned her that Vicky and Kagami would not be able to stand, let alone fight.

She swung her pack off her shoulders and placed it on the floor halfway between Vicky and Kagami. “It’s good to see you both, I’m glad you’re okay. Let’s get you back on your feet.”

Vicky stammered: “What about the— the— Necro? Y-you’re just gonna leave it there?”

Elpida crouched down and unzipped the backpack. “Haf’s got it covered. I need you two up and moving first.”

Kagami said, “Took your sweet time, Commander. Got into a fight out there? Got shot at and slowed down?”

“Only at the very end,” Elpida replied. “Uneventful journey. Haf’s stealth field worked perfectly, but we had to switch it off at the last second to make radio contact. Here.”

Elpida lifted a cannister of raw blue nanomachines from inside her backpack; she had only brought one along, the other remaining three were stashed safely aboard Pheiri, in case of mission failure. The blue glow was dark and muted beneath the combat frame’s blood-red bio-light.

Vicky let out a moan of desperate need. Kagami made a throaty noise, almost a growl.

Elpida uncapped the cannister. “Half each. Don’t drink the whole thing. You have to share.”

Vicky slurred through a mouth full of drool: “Kaga, you first—”

Kagami snapped back, “You fucking primitive, this isn’t a heroism contest, we’re not living in caves! You’re the one with the brain damage! You drink—”

“No. Kaga. Go first, go.” Vicky wiped her mouth on her sleeve. 

Howl took control of Elpida’s lips: “You bitches really need to fuck this out.”

Vicky blinked several times and stared at Elpida. Kagami frowned, eyes narrowed in disbelief.

Elpida re-assumed control and held the cannister out to Vicky. “You drink first.”

“ … Elpi?” Vicky said.

Kagami snorted. “Losing your mind, Commander?”

“Gaining it, actually. I’ll explain later. Not before we deal with the Necro, not before we get you both on your feet. Vicky, drink half the nanos. That’s an order.”

Victoria nodded and accepted the cannister. She drank with urgency, throat bobbing, eyes screwed shut. Elpida put a hand on Vicky’s wrist when it seemed like she was going to drink more than her share, but Vicky lowered the cannister and let out a gasp. “Uuuhhh … y-yeah, okay, okay. I’m good, Elpi, I’m good. Uh … ” She stared at the cannister, then at the fingers of her free hand. “You … you think I should smear some of this on my … back of my skull?”

Kagami huffed. “No, you moronic dirt-eater! Don’t touch it! You’ll give yourself more brain damage and pass out again!”

Elpida said, “I’ll check your head wound in a moment, Vicky. Here.” She took the cannister and held it out to Kagami. “Your turn.”

Kagami drank with less urgency than Vicky, but she consumed every last drop. The glowing blue slid off the inside of the cannister with perfect viscosity, leaving nothing behind. As Kagami drank, Elpida examined the pair of black cables which extended from Kagami’s left wrist; they led back into the manual control chamber and plugged into the control panel. A web of circuitry lay just beneath the skin of Kagami’s left wrist and palm and fingers, grey and dull in the red light.

Kagami finished drinking. Elpida recapped the cannister and stowed it in her pack, for later use. Then she pulled out the second cannister, full of water from Pheiri’s internal cistern.

Vicky spluttered: “Oh, thank fuck.” 

Vicky and Kagami passed the water back and forth without complaint. Elpida nodded at Kagami’s cables. “You’ve plugged yourself directly into the combat frame, is that correct?”

Kagami glared back. “I told you already. Jealous, Commander?”

Elpida smiled. “Visual confirmation feels different. You’ve reverse engineered Telokopolan MMI-uplink technology. Perhaps not all the way, but it’s a promising start.”

Kagami rolled her eyes. “Thank you so much for your confidence.”

Vicky nodded at the ceiling, water running down her chin. “Elpi, is this really what your great big forest-walking mechs looked like on the inside?”

Elpida said: “Most of ours were smaller. But yes. This is a Telokopolan combat frame. In here is one of the safest places in the entire world. I know it looks strange, it looked strange to most people from my time, from Telokopolis. It’s part of why they didn’t like me and my sisters. But this creature is on our side, born from the city of Telokopolis itself. In a way it’s a little bit like Pheiri, and a little bit like me. It is a child of the city. And we’re going to wake it up. Don’t be afraid.”

Vicky tried to smile, but she couldn’t hide her nerves. Kagami just snorted.

Ignorant cunts, Howl hissed.

It’s not their fault, Elpida replied.

Elpida had seen that kind of reaction so many times before — at least it wasn’t the open disgust of the Covenanters. She told herself that Vicky and Kagami did not mean it in that way; they were frightened and exhausted and this was alien to them. It was not a reflection of any deeper ideological position.

Elpida tried not to think about her own missing MMI implant. She did not yet fully understand how Kagami had grown herself a set of interface cybernetics, but she understood it had required resources, pain, and time; the first could be spent, the second Elpida could endure, but the third was in short supply. If they truly couldn’t help the injured pilot up in the capsule, then Elpida could have plugged herself in and gotten the frame moving, but that wasn’t possible without an MMI uplink socket at the base of her skull.

Elpida crushed those thoughts down. She said: “Is the pilot stable?”

Kagami nodded. “Yes. She’ll keep. Days, weeks, I don’t know.”

Elpida nodded. She briefly checked Vicky’s skull fracture — a nasty mess of bone fragments, matted hair, and dried blood — and decided not to touch the wound. The raw blue would do more than she could, at least without Melyn’s medical skills. Kagami wasn’t wounded anywhere but inside, her reserves of nanomachines spent on that imitation MMI-uplink and the processing power inside her left arm.

Elpida said: “You two sit tight and let the nanomachines do their work. You’ve done well.”

Kagami snorted and jerked her augmetic legs. The bionic limbs scraped against the floor. “Yes, Commander, without your sagely advice I would have gotten up and gone for a light jog.”

Vicky slumped forward and squeezed her eyes shut. “Kaga, stop being a bitch, please.”

“We’re all bitches here,” Kagami growled.

Ha! Howl barked. I like the moon bitch. I wanna play with her. Pretty please, Elps? Can I corner her later?

No promises.

Awwww.

Elpida stood up and turned back to the Necromancer’s corpse; Hafina was still covering it with her weapons.

The pulped crimson mess of the face was almost black in the blood-red bio-light, the copper brown skin a shade too dark, the hair the colour of blood, the same as her sisters had always looked when inside a combat frame. The implicit insult made Elpida angry and offended in a way she had not expected. This interior, this warmth and safety, it should have been one of the most inviolate places in the entire world, a mobile piece of Telokopolis itself. Yet here was an imitation of her face, bloodied and twisted, a mockery meant to unsettle her comrades.

Vicky muttered: “Kaga must be right. There’s no way kicking that thing in the head a couple of times killed it.”

Kagami said, “Of course I’m right.”

Vicky continued: “The mech — sorry, the combat frame — fried it for us, the first time, when it tried to plug in and take control or whatever. We couldn’t do shit to it, not really. Bullets were a joke. Even Kaga’s gravity trick just stunned it for a bit. It’s just pretending to be dead. Playing possum. Elpi, that thing is still alive.”

Kagami snorted. “Nothing is alive here, Victoria.”

Vicky sighed. “You know what I mean.”

Elpida looked from the corpse to the dark mouth of the capillary tunnel, then over at the control panel in the next room, then at Kagami. She said: “Did the Necro move before or after you popped the hatch?”

“After. After! What difference does it—” Kagami went wide-eyed, then spat: “Fuck!”

“Mmhmm.” Elpida nodded.

“Fucking hell!” Kagami said. “Shit, I should have— fuck! I’m an idiot. Moron! My brain is turning to mush down here!”

Elpida said, “You were starving to death, dehydrated, and cognitively impaired. Don’t beat yourself up, Kagami.”

Kagami snorted. “You could have said something, Commander! You could have warned us!”

“I only just figured it out. I apologise for my laxity. It was my responsibility to consider what might happen when we cracked the hatch.”

Vicky frowned at both Elpida and Kagami. “Am I the only one not following this?”

Kagami rolled her eyes. “You’re brain damaged. Don’t worry about it.”

Hafina purred like a big cat: “Noooope. Me neither.”

“Kagami,” Elpida said. “You can explain better than I can. Please.”

“Damn right I can!” Kagami said. “We’re networked.” She jabbed a finger at the ‘corpse’ of the Necromancer. “So is that thing! The whole planet is networked. Every piece of flesh, every cubic inch of air, all of it is stuffed with nanomachines, and all of them are networked together.” She slapped the floor. “They must be, it’s the only explanation.”

“For what?” Vicky said.

Elpida added: “Unless that’s just what the Necromancer wants us to think.”

“Don’t!” Kagami snapped. “Don’t say that! Look, this machine, this mech, it’s a sealed environment. You and I starving to death proves that part. But it’s not just atmospherically sealed. It’s sealed against comms, too. Nothing can get through that hull out there, not radio, not radiation, IR, radar, nothing! Probably not even quantum entanglement. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Commander’s freakish base-eight-thinking civilization figured out how to break that, too!” Kagami held up her left hand, showing the two black cables that linked the cybernetics in her wrist to the control panel; the circuitry was beginning to glow blue and green beneath her skin, a soft flutter of candlelight inside her flesh. “The only way to get a signal in or out is via the brain — ha!” she spat. “‘Brain’. This thing’s brain would redefine the fucking word. Eight-lobed, I’m guessing. But the point stands. You want to talk, it has to go through the beast itself.” She pointed at the control panel in the next room. “Either via that, if you can convince it to let you, or via the pilot upstairs. I suspect her connection doesn’t come with this bastard machine arguing back against every interpretation of every word.” She nodded at the Necromancer. “When that thing got bricked, it had no way to reboot from external backups. No contact with home base.”

Vicky squinted. “You think it was remote controlled?”

Elpida said, “Yes. I told you two about the sleep paralysis message it sent me. That happened while this corpse was lying right here. The Necro’s true body is elsewhere.”

Kagami scoffed. “‘Remote control’, ‘true body’. You two are like a pair of paleo bone-humpers looking at the night sky and trying to comprehend the flare of a fucking ion drive. No, it’s very likely a network presence. Maybe with some master-instance in an AI substrate enclosure somewhere. But I would bet a handful of moon dust that it doesn’t have a ‘real’ body at all.”

“We don’t know that,” Elpida said.

Kagami ranted on: “When we opened the hatch, the nanomachines could talk to each other again. The Necro uploaded its memories, or reconnected with its master copy, or whatever! I don’t know exactly! And we don’t have the tools to find out. I would kill for one Tycho City nano-lab right now. I’d put that thing through a fucking autoclave and see what it’s made of, empty out its cache and trace every signal it’s sent.” She glared at the ‘corpse’. “How would you like me rooting around in your head, you spooky little shit?!”

Vicky said, “You don’t think it could like … download into one of us? Like taking over a body?”

Kagami huffed. “Why bother? Why not just coalesce a body from the air and the dirt? It’s all nanomachines! All networked! How many times do I have to repeat this?”

“Fine, fine,” Vicky grumbled.

Elpida did not look away from the corpse; she stared into the one remaining eye in the Necromancer’s imitation face. A black orb, oil-dark in the blood-light. Vicky and Kagami had been alone with this corpse for two full days — but then it had been a true corpse, not just pretending. After Kagami had popped the hatch, they’d been alone with it for less than two minutes. One of them had screamed.

Could the Necromancer have taken over Vicky and Kagami while Elpida and Hafina had been hurrying down the capillary tunnel?

If Kagami was right, and it was a network presence, then why bother?

But if it had taken her over, then it was telling Elpida exactly what she wanted to hear.

Nah, Howl snorted. Doesn’t make sense, Elps. You’re being paranoid. Why take them over? Because it wants to come with us? It can spy on us anyway, remember? Sent you that message while you were sleeping? There’s no reason. They’re clean. Simmer down.

Elpida nodded. “You’re right.”

Kagami grunted. “Mm?”

“I think you’re right, Kagami. I don’t think bodily invasion and assimilation is how these things work. At least, that’s my best guess.”

“Um,” Vicky said. “What about the blood on my boot? That’s Necromancer blood, right?”

Kagami snorted. “Just don’t lick it up, Victoria. I don’t think we have to worry about that. You’re a lot of things, but you’re not a boot licker.”

Elpida gestured to Hafina. “Haf, lower your guns, please.”

Kagami spluttered. “Commander, what!?”

Vicky said, “Uhhh, Elpi?”

Elpida explained. “There’s no point. The Necro is immune to our weapons. You made that clear before. Guns will do nothing.”

Hafina said: “Sure is sure?” Her huge all-black eyes peered at Elpida with curious concern from beneath the rim of her raised helmet. Her big mouth was turned downward with anxious discomfort.

Elpida nodded. “Do it.”

Hafina unlocked her limbs with a jerk, lowered her weapons, and straightened up to her full height.

Elpida walked up to the ‘corpse’, then crouched down so she could peer at the face.

Kagami snapped: “You don’t have to get that close to it, fucking hell!”

Elpida spoke right to the Necromancer’s imitation face: “If it wanted us dead, we would be. If it wanted to kill you two before Hafina and I had finished crawling down the capillary tunnel, it would have done so. If it wanted to kill me right now, it could grow a spike and ram it through my eye socket. As far as I can tell, it could paralyse all of us with a thought, and there is nothing any of us can do to stop it.”

Kagami croaked: “I can jam it again. Pin it in place with gravitics, I can … ”

Elpida looked back at Kagami. She knew Kagami was bluffing; the raw blue would work fast, but not that fast, and Kagami was still an exhausted, shivering wreck. Deploying her drones’ on-board gravitic fields took a great deal of concentration and cybernetic coordination.

Kagami trailed off. No words needed.

Elpida turned back to the ‘corpse’. It was still staring at the ceiling with one black eye, the other a blob of dark jelly stuck to the cheekbone. Elpida said: “It doesn’t want us dead. Specifically it doesn’t want me dead. When it visited me via the imitation sleep paralysis, it told me to keep my head down. Go off unnoticed. Don’t be seen.”

Vicky asked, “By … by what?”

Kagami suggested: “Central.”

Elpida nodded. “That was the word it used with you and Vicky, upstairs in the pilot chamber. Correct? ‘Central’s attention’?”

“Mm,” Kagami grunted.

Vicky said, “I’ve been thinking about that a little bit, sure. But what the hell does that mean? Some kind of command and control? That thing has a boss, a superior officer, what?”

Elpida stared into the dead face of the Necromancer, a parody imitation of her own. “I have no idea.”

Vicky said, “And why jump scare me like that? If it’s just gonna lie there now and pretend to be dead? What was the point?”

Kagami snorted. “It enjoys spooking us! It enjoys the cruelty!”

“No,” Elpida said slowly. “Same reason it told me to keep my head down. It wants us scared, running, hiding. But I don’t know why.” She reached out and nudged the dead shoulder; the flesh was spongy and yielding, more like foam than meat and bone. “I know you can hear me. I know you’re still in there, still active, still listening. A stomp or two to the face did not disable you, not like trying a hostile MMI-connection to a combat frame did. That must have really hurt, right? I don’t know if a thing like you feels pain, but I’m hoping you can. It doesn’t matter what physical structures you imitate, you’re not a pilot, you’re not one of my sisters, not one of our clade. And the combat frame could tell that. But a stomp? No way. You’re in there. Feel like talking?”

The corpse did not move.

Elpida kept a tight hand on her frustration. If only she could make the Necromancer talk, there would be no need to kidnap Yola and no need to deal with the Death’s Heads again. Right here, lying on the floor, was a direct line to the secret workings of this nanomachine ecosystem — a representative of the power behind the system, or at least a being with a better understanding of how that system worked. If Elpida and her comrades were pawns in a game they could not see, then here lay a queen.

Elpida said: “Your plan to commandeer this combat frame has failed. I don’t think you want to try again, not after you plugged in and found that it could scramble you. You obviously want me to do something, to stay clear of something. But I need you to explain why, I need you to explain what you think I’m going to do. And then maybe I’ll do it.”

Silence. Unblinking death.

Elpida had neither the tools nor the knowledge to contain or interrogate this being. Kagami was right, she would kill for a proper nanomachine laboratory right now. She would gladly take the Necromancer apart piece by piece. But all she had was small arms and her comrades.

Elpida tried one more time: “What is ‘central’?”

Nothing.

“Fucking hell, Elpi,” Vicky hissed. “I don’t wanna hear that thing talk again. I don’t.”

Kagami said, “We cannot leave it at large inside the combat frame. We can’t. Commander. Commander!”

“Wait,” Elpida said. “If I can just—”

“I know!” Kagami snapped. “Commander, look at me.”

Elpida looked over her shoulder.

Kagami was clear eyed. She said: “I know, Elpida. I know this is a wasted intel opportunity of the worst kind. An asset like her, I would have scooped up as a priority one target and wrapped her in cotton wool until I could get her off-surface and into orbit. But we do not have the tools, Elpida. We don’t! If I had half a dozen lab-size electromagnets and a shielded Faraday cage, then maybe — maybe I would be willing to risk interrogating that thing. But right now that undead monster is a danger. Sure, it’s playing possum at the moment, having fun winding us all up. But what if it changes its mind?” Kagami gulped, dry and raw. “We need to get rid of it. Now. Right now. You want to go up into the pilot chamber and help the pilot, get this stupid mech moving? Fine. We need to dispose of that thing first.”

Kagami stared, breathing hard. Elpida stood up, took a deep breath, and nodded.

“Kagami, you are correct,” she said. “Thank you for your counsel. Let’s get this thing out of here before it changes its mind.”

Kagami sighed with relief and visibly sagged. Elpida was glad to prove her worries wrong.

Howl was giggling inside Elpida’s mind: Oh, oh, oh, I like this bitch. She’s jittery and juicy and smart. You given her a reward yet?

Not my place to do that, Howl.

Pffft. Whatever. Bet she’s a squealer.

Out loud, Elpida said: “Right, we’re not leaving the Necromancer inside the combat frame. Hafina, are you comfortable handling the body?”

Haf pulled a grimace, but she nodded. “Suuuuure.”

“Kagami, get back to the control panel and set the pilot access hatch to open manually, from the inside. Hafina will drag the corpse back down the capillary tunnel, I’ll cover her. We’ll open the hatch, dump the corpse down the side, then button up again. Any questions?”

Vicky nodded. “Hell yeah. I mean, uh, no questions. Just yeah, cool.”

Kagami hissed between her teeth. “What are you going to do if it comes to life in the tunnel and eats you both?”

Elpida said: “It won’t.”

“How can you be so fucking sure, Commander? How are you so certain about everything?!”

Elpida replied: “I’ll say this out loud so the Necro knows that I know. I don’t think it wants to be in here. I think it wants out, and it doesn’t want to talk to us. It knows that body can get stuck in here, full of intel — we might not be able to extract that, but something else might. It’s taunting us, to get us to freak out and dump the corpse. And we’re going to give it what it wants, because we want it too. A mutual deal, made in silence. Right?”

The Necromancer did not move. Not a whisper. Not a twitch.

Dragging the dead weight down the capillary tunnel was easy enough for Hafina’s artificial muscles; she gripped the Necro’s imitation-collar, then dragged the ‘corpse’ behind her, vanishing into the mouth of the pitch-black passageway. Kagami withdrew her floating drones, stowing the silver oblongs in her coat pocket. Elpida followed Haf a moment later, her senses swallowed by the darkness.

The journey back down the capillary took only 153 seconds — Hafina moved almost as fast as she did when unencumbered. Elpida did not bother to clutch her submachine gun; she had no illusions that she could stop the Necromancer if it decided to change tactics. She couldn’t see anything in the lightless tunnel anyway. She concentrated on navigating via one hand on the wall, and on not blundering into the Necromancer’s booted feet as Hafina dragged the corpse ahead of her.

When they reached the vertical shaft beneath the pilot access hatch, Hafina straightened up, propped the corpse against one wall, and mounted the ladder, ascending quickly with her six arms. Elpida wriggled into the shaft after Hafina. Weak illumination filled the cramped space, glowing from the palm pad just beneath the hatch, twelve feet up.

“Hit the palm pad to pop the hatch,” Elpida said. “I’ll pass you the body, then you toss it out, as far as you can.”

“Could take it to the edge?” Haf suggested. “Quick like, quick run to the edge and back?”

Elpida shook her head. “Absolutely not. Puts you in too much danger. Revenants out there will be watching this hatch. Just throw.”

Haf nodded, then scurried the rest of the way up the ladder. Elpida bent down and hauled the Necromancer’s corpse up by the armpits, keeping the face turned away from her; she didn’t want it bursting into a mocking grin at the last moment, when she had no choice but to carry on with the plan.

“Ready?” she said.

“Ready!” Haf purred.

“Go!”

Haf hit the palm pad. Elpida heard the hatch unlock with a deep clunk of mechanical release. She hauled the body upward, passing it to Haf’s considerable multi-armed grip. Hafina accepted the weight with two arms, pulled it upward, then shoved the hatch open with two other arms.

Elpida caught a glimpse of the black sky, lit from a distant corner by the smothered red sun.

And a tiny dark dot, moving fast against the clouds.

Hafina braced to throw the corpse.

Elpida saw the Necromancer’s grin flash wide, full of steel teeth and dried blood.

Hafina hurled the corpse through the hatch with all her strength. Elpida realised her mistake at the last second — she had ordered Haf to throw the Necromancer as far as she could; Haf’s arms slammed forward like a set of pistons, hurling the body like a shell from a cannon. The Necromancer was gone.

Hafina did not wait to admire her handiwork. She reached up and slammed the hatch shut again as quick as she could. The locking mechanisms engaged with a loud clunk.

Elpida said: “Did you see that dot in the sky?”

Hafina dropped back down the ladder. She tilted her massive head to one side, big eyes blinking black in the gloom. “Dot?”

“Nothing. Never mind. Good work, Haf. Nice throwing arm.”

Hafina grinned, big and goofy. “If she’s still alive, she’ll feel it when she lands.”

Elpida couldn’t help laughing.

When they returned to the circular chamber, Kagami was shouting in panic.

“Commander! Elpida!” Kagami yelled from the control chamber as Elpida emerged from the tunnel. Vicky was already in there with her, slumped against the wall. “Elpida, you need to see this, get in here!”

Elpida hurried across the main chamber once again, past the discarded bulkheads and the pack she’d left on the floor. Hafina unfolded herself from the tunnel and followed at a trot. Elpida stepped into the control chamber and slipped down into one of the seats. The bank of screens was a dizzying array of exterior camera views, filtered through dozens of readout types and sensor equipment. She’d never liked these manual controls; they were crude at best and useless at worst, designed for the bone-speakers doing diagnostics and the engineers to convince themselves they understood the combat frames. The clarity of an MMI-uplink was instant and instinctive; this was just noise.

“What am I looking at?” she said.

Kagami pointed at one of the true-colour readouts — a view of the ground, the grey waterlogged mud right up against the side of the combat frame’s hull.

It was Elpida.

The Necromancer, wearing Elpida’s face and Elpida’s skin, Elpida’s clothes and Elpida’s long white hair, Elpida’s gear and mannerisms and everything, whole and unwounded once again, rather than the parody corpse they’d carried to the hatch. She was ankle-deep in grey mud, staring directly at the camera feed from the exterior sensors, one hand raised in a lazy wave.

Elpida said, “That was quick.”

Kagami snapped: “She hit the side of the mech and slid. By the time she was on the ground, she was you again! Looking like you again, I mean! Fucking hell.”

Vicky hissed, “Fuck me, that’s creepy.”

Hafina let out an uncomfortable whine from the doorway.

Random pot-shots and sniper fire cracked through the air around the Necromancer, but she ignored the bullets. A couple of rounds slammed into her imitation armoured coat; one hit her in the leg, but she didn’t react. Her lips were moving, repeating the same few shapes over and over.

Elpida said: “We have external microphones, yes?”

Kagami scoffed. “You want to listen to it?”

“It wants to talk. External mics. Kagami, do it, please.”

Kagami hissed, flexed her left hand, and jabbed a few buttons on the control panel. Audio crackled through the little membrane-speaker, punctuated by the distant bang and crack of gunfire.

“Thanks for the assist, Commander,” said the Necromancer, in a perfect copy of Elpida’s voice.

It’s not perfect! Howl spat. Doesn’t sound anything like you! Doesn’t have shit on your tone, Elps!

The Necromancer kept talking, staring into the camera feed. Bullet impacts churned the mud at her feet.

“I know you can’t reply, so I’ll keep this short and to the point,” it said. “I’ve fucked up. These local discrepancies have not gone unnoticed. My mistakes have been registered, but not accounted for. Central is on the way with physical asset, to resolve the situation.” The Necromancer reached forward and rapped her knuckles against the hull of the combat frame. “The ‘situation’ being this. I suggest you all run. I will be covering my tracks, and I can cover yours, but I cannot hide you if you remain in plain sight.” She mimed a two-fingered salute. “I hope to meet you again, Commander Elpida. Good luck, dead thing.”

The Necromancer turned away. Within seconds she was lost amid the churned mud and waterlogged holes.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Elpida said: “Kagami, broadcast to Pheiri and the others, let them know the Necromancer might approach them while wearing my face.”

“Oh, trust me, ‘Commander’, I’m already on it!” Kagami snapped. She jabbed at the control panel.

Vicky was panting, wide eyed, sweat on her face. “Central? Physical asset? What? What did that mean? Elpi? W-what does that mean? Have we pissed something off? What do we do? Elpi?”

Elpida stood up from the bench-seat. She looked out of the control chamber and across the main room, at the narrow aperture which led up to the pilot’s chamber.

“The plan remains unchanged,” she said. “We need to get this combat frame up and moving.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Yeet that leech! Uh, I mean lich. But that doesn’t rhyme properly. Still, hell of an arm on Haf.

Does the Necromancer count as a lich? Is a networked AI core a phylactery? Do Necromancers bounce when they hit the ground? Will Vicky and Kagami ever fuck? All very good questions.

Time to talk to the last human on Earth.

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Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

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Content Warnings

Starvation

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“She take the bait?” said Vicky.

Kagami didn’t answer — she just stared at the bank of screens inside the combat frame’s manual control chamber, reflections dancing in her bloodshot eyes. Deep red vein-light throbbed from behind the osseous walls; a patchwork of unhealthy blues, rotten yellows, and muddy greens glowed from the surface of the control panel. Kagami’s soft brown skin was dyed the colour of drying blood. Her long black hair hung down limp and tangled. Her breathing was shallow, rough, and laboured.

Vicky hoped that Kagami was merely ignoring her. The two of them were sitting less than arm’s length apart, in adjacent grooves on the control chamber bench-seat.

Vicky cleared her throat as best she could. Her saliva was thick and gummy; she was so thirsty, her mouth felt like sandpaper.

She tried again: “Kaga. Did she take the bait?”

“Go back to sleep, Victoria,” Kagami muttered.

Vicky tutted softly and looked at the bank of screens again, trying to ignore the heartbeat of pulsing pain in the back of her fractured skull.

She could still not understand most of the exterior views provided by the combat frame’s sensor suite, despite having little else to stare at for the last thirty-six hours — or was it forty-eight hours? Time had grown slow, fuzzy, and indistinct, hard to track when blurred by the awkward, broken sleep, the hyper-vigilance Kagami demanded regarding the corpse in the room behind them, and the growing hunger gnawing at Vicky’s guts. She’d spent much longer than two days in much worse places than the inside of the combat frame, doing much worse things than sitting quietly and waiting for pick-up — at least she wasn’t eating handfuls of cold rice and dodging counter-battery fire in muddy foxholes.

But back in life she’d never had to nurse a biologically impossible head wound. The rear of Vicky’s skull had healed very slightly — the pieces of bone no longer shifted when she moved, no longer wracked her body with waves of disorientation and nausea. But the pain was a sharp, hard, rapid throb whenever she dared do anything more than sit and breathe.

Several of the screens made more sense in the reddish dawn, showing real-time views in human-visible light: the fingers of broken skyscrapers reaching up to tear the belly of the gravid sky, their lines of concrete and steel obfuscated by the omnipresent drizzling rain; the occasional scurrying revenant spotted through a window or doorway or broken patch of rubble, always keeping beyond the sight of snipers and rivals and predators; and the sea of grey mud below the bulk of the combat frame, churned by the storm overnight.

Vicky hadn’t heard a whisper of that storm. She and Kagami were tucked away behind meters of armour inside the combat frame. She’d witnessed it on the screens as a heavy static against the dark background.

Most of the other screens made no sense at all — ghostly night-vision peering into shadowy gaps, thermal readouts and infra-red picking up undead body heat, purple swirls and white flickers of echolocation and nanomachine readout, and other things that even Kagami could not explain in simple language. The scrolling text on some of the lower screens was worse; Vicky’s eyes stung if she stared too long. She wasn’t sure if that was her nanomachine biology struggling to translate, or because of the head wound.

She squinted at the blobs of thermal readout inside the nearest intact skyscraper — the skyscraper with those grinning skulls daubed on the exterior walls — but she couldn’t make out what was happening.

Vicky said: “Answer the question, moon princess.”

Kagami hissed through her teeth, but she did not look round. “Stop calling me that. Wish I’d never told you.”

Vicky forced herself to laugh; that made her skull hurt, but she needed to keep their spirits up. “But you’re a princess. From the moon. That makes you a moon princess. Am I wrong?”

“For the hundredth time, I was not a fucking princess, you dirt-sucking surface barbarian,” Kagami grumbled — but her words lacked venom. Vicky worried about that. “How many times? Luna did not have a monarchy, my father was not a king, he was elected—”

“For life! By a council of electors, not popular vote. That’s a monarchy, an elective monarchy, sure, but still a monarchy.”

Kagami sighed. “That doesn’t make me a princess, you mud eater. There was no royal family, no royal titles, no palace—”

“Oh, come on!” Vicky laughed again. “‘Tycho City’, ‘Princess’ of Tycho city? You were a princess, and you lived in a techno-palace on the moon. You were so proud when you said it yourself, like I was gonna roll over and show my tummy to your big flash aristo title.”

Kagami snapped: “It was never a title. It was what the people called me—”

Vicky snorted. “‘The people’, there you go! Face it, Kaga. You’re a princess, from a monarchy. My old comrades would have loved you.”

Kagami muttered, “Yes, I’m sure they would have loved to string me up.”

“Not you. You’re my little moon princess.”

Kagami clenched her jaw. She said: “And you have a head wound, Victoria. Go back to sleep.”

Vicky flexed her shoulders and lower back against the oddly soft bone-white seat; that made her head throb with a spider web of spikes, but she didn’t want to fall back asleep. She paused and breathed slowly, trying not to show the pain. She kept her arms crossed beneath the makeshift blanket of her armoured coat. At least this was more comfortable than a wet hole in the mud.

She said: “Nah. Don’t feel like it. Come on, Kaga. Keep me in the loop. Did the death squad girl take Elpi’s bait, or not?”

Kagami sniffed hard and wiped her nose with her right hand — her left was still plugged into the control panel. Vicky pretended she didn’t see the streak of crimson nosebleed, or see Kagami sucking her own blood off her knuckles. The nosebleeds had been getting more frequent.

Kagami gestured at one of the screens, at a lone blob of what Vicky guessed was nanomachine-detection readout, moving horizontally down a corridor inside the Death’s Head skyscraper. She said: “Cantrelle’s not heading back toward Yola. She’s rejoining the troops. Score one for our Commander’s theory of leadership, I suppose. Huh.”

Vicky squinted hard. “Which one is which again?”

Kagami sighed. “Yola’s the leader. Cantrelle’s the second. This is why I told you to go back to sleep, Victoria. You have a fucking head wound, you should be concentrating on healing. Leave the strategy and coordination to me and the Commander.”

“So, is that good, or bad?”

Kagami sighed harder. “Not enough information to determine. The external DR microphones on this ridiculous machine are extremely high quality, but they can’t read thoughts. All we can do is let the bitch chew on betrayal for a few hours, see if she goes for the deal.” Kagami snorted with disapproval and tapped her finger at another screen, a visible-light view of the skyscraper. “Pity she didn’t icepick her ‘dear leader’ through the head when she had a chance. Fuck interrogating either of them. Waste of time. Let them murder each other, that’s how I would do it.”

Vicky looked at the screen Kagami had indicated: an exterior view of the Death’s Head skyscraper, several floors up, with a huge ragged hole blown in the wall. The hole framed a tiny figure, blurred by the thin, misty rain, outlined against the background of broken concrete. Purple and gold glinted in the ruddy light — a suit of powered armour, topped by a barely visible wisp of ruby-red hair.

The figure moved her hand to her mouth, eating something, too small to make out at that distance and resolution. She stared out across the impact crater, looking right at the combat frame.

Yola, the leader. Vicky stuck her tongue out for a second, as if the woman could see. Sadly, Yola did not react.

Vicky croaked: “Confident, isn’t she?”

Kagami grunted. “Hmm? What?”

Vicky uncrossed her arms, peeled back her coat, and pointed at the screen. “Yola. Skull queen. She’s not even taking cover. Unafraid of snipers or spotters or even just random heavy weaponry. Just out there in the open. Rookie mistake. Get her head taken off if she’s not more careful.”

“Oh,” Kagami said. “Right. Whatever.”

Vicky said: “I thought you were supposed to be some kind of small-squad mission control expert? You never yell at a private to keep his head down and put his helmet back on?”

“Wire-slaved surface agents did not need ‘reminding’ of anything,” Kagami muttered.

“Ha!” Vicky barked — ow, that made her head throb again, worse than before. “You know, if you don’t agree with Elpi’s plan, we could just … pow.” Vicky spread her fingers toward the distant figure of Yola, eating her cannibal snack in that great big hole in the wall. “Blow her away right there. One round would do it. She’s not even moving. Give me one decent howitzer and I could land a round right on top of her head. Do it on paper, even, screw the computers, and I’ll put one right through that hole. Hell, I’d do it with a mortar team and guesswork. Make her run around a bit first. Ha.”

Vicky was exaggerating, perhaps outright lying; she’d never been good with trajectory calculations. But it might keep Kagami engaged, stop her from slipping away again.

Kagami did not respond. She stared at the screens, eyes fixed on a single point. Her whole body was sagging forward. A bead of blood gathered below her right nostril.

Vicky reached out and nudged Kagami in the shoulder. “Kaga. Hey. Kagami. Moon princess.”

Kagami blinked several times, smacked her lips, and wiped her nose. She licked the blood off the back of her hand again.

“Hear what I said?” Vicky asked. “I said we could blow her away with one artillery round.”

Kagami raised her left hand and stared at the pair of black cables which sprouted from her wrist, joining her to the combat frame’s control panel. The visible circuitry beneath the skin of her fingers, palm, and forearm had glowed earlier, when Vicky had first seen it, but now it had faded to a dark grey, like a coral reef choked by ash.

“Kaga. Hey.”

“I don’t have weapons access,” Kagami muttered. “This fucking bitch of a robot still doesn’t want me in its head.” She winced. “Huh, shouldn’t call it a robot either, it doesn’t like that. Weird little alien bastard. Yeah, you heard me. You want me to call you something else, then give me a real name. Huh? Thought not.” Kagami trailed off briefly, then spoke again: “If this is how the Commander’s people thought, then I’m glad I never met them. The only reason it’s not fighting me anymore is the say-so of that pilot upstairs. And she can’t put it into words either. Huh. Mute ordering around the mute, ha ha.”

Victoria tried to smile as if this was funny and new, as if she hadn’t heard Kagami repeat the same complaint a dozen times over the last two days of confinement. She had almost preferred when the combat frame was fighting Kagami’s network presence — not because she wanted Kagami to be in pain again, but because Kagami coated in sweat and shaking and shivering and swearing up a storm was far less worrying than Kagami hunched and fading and falling apart.

Vicky had not yet decided what was causing the rapid deterioration.

They’d had no water since before they’d entered the combat frame; Victoria felt thirsty and dehydrated, but not desperate, not as a living human would have. There was nothing to eat either — except the corpse of the Necromancer, and they weren’t that desperate, not yet; Vicky kept telling herself that, every time she looked at the corpse.

Elpida’s theory made a lot of sense — Vicky and Kagami were cut off from the ambient nanomachines in the atmosphere, so perhaps this was more like slow asphyxiation rather than starvation.

They had debated cracking the exterior hatch, like opening a window to let in fresh air, but they’d agreed it was too dangerous. The hatch was easily visible from the ring of skyscrapers, and they had no idea how fast or how stealthily a revenant might move to gain access. If Kagami didn’t spot a potential intruder in time and shut the hatch remotely, they could both get eaten. Something might be watching the hatch right now, waiting for them to do exactly that.

So, no fresh air.

But Vicky had a head wound, healing slowly, blurring her thoughts; perhaps the only thing keeping her going was the bionic heart pumping away inside her chest. Kagami had pushed herself hard to communicate with the combat frame, then to help fight the Necromancer, then to plug herself back in and coordinate Elpida’s rescue. They were both exhausted and worn out, their resources burned through, but all they could do was sleep, not eat.

And Vicky was growing afraid of sleep. She was growing afraid that one of them would go to sleep and not wake up.

Elpida would be here soon; Vicky knew she had to keep Kagami talking.

“Kaga,” Vicky rasped. “The pilot. How is she doing?”

“Same as before,” Kagami answered. “Vital signs stable. Sleeping. Stop asking me. If she starts dying, I’ll let you know.”

Kagami stared at her own arm for a long time, then wiped her nose again, licked up the blood, and finally turned to look at Vicky. Her eyes were so bloodshot and ringed with such dark circles, despite her taking the lion’s share of the sleep; her beautiful long black hair needed a comb and a wash. Vicky would have loved to take a brush to that hair; she would like to see it clean and well cared for. Vicky knew she probably looked horrible too, exhausted and dark eyed and ashen in the face, her expressions all de-synced and messed up by the head wound and brain injury.

“Victoria,” Kagami rasped.

“Mm?”

“Go the fuck to sleep.”

Vicky shrugged. “Nah.”

Kagami’s jaw tightened. She spoke through her teeth. “We are meant to be sleeping in shifts.”

Vicky sighed. Her head throbbed. “Kaga, it’s dead.”

Kagami said, “It’s a fucking Necromancer. I’m pretty sure there’s a good reason the zombies and freaks out here call them by that name. And you — you came back to life! Elpida came back to life! Things come back from the dead here, Victoria. It’s inherent in the word ‘zombie’, in case you missed the linguistic connection somewhere.”

Vicky indicated the bank of screens with a tilt of her chin. “I don’t see you keeping a close eye on the body while I’m sleeping.”

Kagami pursed her lips and made a noise halfway between a strangled cat and a broken locking pin. “I was helping our ‘Commander’.”

Vicky shrugged again. “Well, I’m not tired.”

“Well I am!” Kagami snapped. “And I would like to sleep with somebody’s eyes on the fucking monster right behind us!”

Vicky rolled her eyes, pushed her armoured coat down, and sat up straight in her seat-groove. She turned her whole body so she could look over her shoulder without putting pressure on her neck and the back of her skull. She’d almost passed out earlier when she’d made that mistake the first time; since then she’d taken her turns on watch sitting propped in the control chamber doorway, while Kagami lay across the bench-seat. Kagami snored ever so softly, which helped keep Vicky alert.

In the circular chamber behind them lay the corpse of the Necromancer.

It was crumpled on the far side of the chamber, past the debris of osseous white bulkheads and bolt-shaped fastenings, with its head turned away, to face the wall.

Kagami and Vicky had worked together to remove it from the pilot’s chamber right after the confrontation, shoving it down the awkward spiral tube back to the lower levels of the combat frame’s human-accessible areas. They had hoped to locate a stomach or some kind of interior disposal mechanism, but Kagami had come up with nothing after re-linking herself back to the combat frame; even if she had found a convenient hatch leading to a giant pool of hydrochloric acid, neither Kagami nor Vicky were in any state to go crawling through the pitch-black passageways of this bizarre living machine — which also ruled out any attempt to drag the body to the access hatch and dump it outside.

The face still looked a tiny bit like Elpida, which was why Vicky had turned it toward the wall, but the rest of the body didn’t seem remotely human. Vicky had handled her fair share of corpses back in life — she’d spent a whole month on grave duty in the Irregulars once, cleaning up after the first battle of Chicago — but this thing didn’t even feel like real flesh, dead or alive or frozen or waterlogged or anything else. The angles and curves were all wrong for a living thing, the hair was stiff and artificial, the eight feet of height was all jagged and jinking and jumbled, and even the clothes were rubbery and wrong beneath Vicky’s hands.

But whenever Vicky looked at the corpse, hunger pangs gripped her stomach. Her hands quivered. Her salivary glands tingled.

Nanomachine flesh, rich and ripe — but also Necromancer.

“Kaga,” she said slowly. “It’s not moved an inch. I think we can safely assume it’s not going to.”

“Victoria.”

“I like that you call me that, you know?” Vicky turned away from the corpse and settled back into her seat; the hunger throbbed in her stomach like a second heart, but she ignored it, swallowing the excess saliva. “But you can use ‘Vicky’. We’re friends now, right?”

Kagami peeled her lips back from her teeth and put her face in one hand. “By Luna’s silver sands, I pray that you are not still like this when you don’t have brain damage. Can we please, please, please take seriously the threat of an undead monster, which might get up at any moment and eat us? Please?”

Vicky forced herself to smirk. “What are we gonna do if it does?” She gestured at her handgun, lying on the control panel where she’d tossed it earlier — out of bullets. “This time I really will have to throw the gun at it, no bluff. Think that’ll spook it?”

Vicky’s LMG and sniper rifle were still in the shaft beneath the access hatch, where she’d left them after falling into the mech. If she’d retrieved them right after the confrontation with the Necromancer then she might have stood a good chance of making it back to the circular chamber, even with the throbbing pain of her fractured skull; but now she was too drained, exhausted by slow starvation. Vicky knew that if she attempted the journey now she would collapse halfway there or halfway back, unconscious, alone, in pitch darkness. And then Kagami would be by herself with the corpse of a monster.

And the guns wouldn’t help anyway.

Kagami said: “I will pin it with gravitics again. With the drones. And then we’ll run.”

Vicky tried to keep smiling. She failed. “Neither of us are running anywhere.”

Kagami clenched her jaw and snorted through her nose, as if she was about to argue. But then she glanced at the Necromancer instead. The fight went out of her. Kagami turned away and shrank back into her seat, small and bony beneath her armoured coat.

Vicky reached out and tried to take Kagami’s right hand — clammy and cold and shivering. “It’ll be alright, Kaga,” she said. “Elpi’s gonna come for us.”

“Tch!” Kagami batted Vicky’s hand away. “Don’t!”

Vicky said: “Seriously. How long ‘till Elpi gets here?”

Kagami scowled at the bank of screens again. “I have no idea. Six hours, eight hours, half an hour? She and that massive android have to keep radio silence once they start, and ‘Haf’, whatever the fuck she is, seems to be the only thing these sensors can’t pick up properly, only if I catch her with the right wavelength of spacial distortion matrix, and that does tend to also pick up things like wind and rain. Unreliable nonsense. And they’re going to spend all those hours dragging themselves through the mud out there. A million things could go wrong, Victoria. A million ways to die out there and leave us stranded in here.”

“She’s going to come for us,” Vicky repeated. “Elpida’s going to come get us. The Commander will do right by her girls.”

Kagami squinted at Vicky, bitter and pinched. “Why do you have so much faith in her? We barely know her. What did you do, sleep with her that night before she got captured? Loyal to the tongue in your cunt, huh?”

Vicky laughed at that, for real. Kagami could be as crass as any Irregular when she felt like it. “Nah. She’s just … good at this. Gotta have faith in something, you know?”

Kagami snorted and leaned back. At least she was relaxing at last. “Never took you for the religious type.”

“I’m not.”

“Good,” Kagami grunted. “You’d probably be some pre-collapse happy-clappy Anglo Christian. You’d be even more insufferable than you are now.”

“Mmmm,” Vicky tried to purr. “You know it.”

Silence descended on the control chamber, broken only by the distant throb of the combat frame’s biology, a heavy pulse deep within the machine’s body. The bank of screens cycled and panned in silence, registering audio as scrolling readout graphs. Kagami’s breathing was shallow and rough. Vicky tried to concentrate over the slow heartbeat of pain radiating out from the rear of her skull — and the terrible hunger gripping her belly.

She needed to keep Kagami talking. She needed to keep both of them awake, coherent, and present.

She did not want to start thinking of Kagami as food as well. Would that happen, eventually? Was that how starving nanomachine zombies went, if they lasted long enough without food? It would explain all the scavengers. Maybe the next time she glanced over at Kagami, Vicky would see a big chicken drumstick, like in the goofy cartoons from the Old Empire.

But Kagami spoke first: “You didn’t have much faith in our fearless leader earlier, when she recruited the little fascist.”

Vicky tried to laugh. “Yeah. Well. Nobody’s perfect.”

Kagami looked at her sidelong. “Are we still on for shooting her? And Pira, too?”

Vicky sighed. “No, Kaga. I told you, I changed my mind. And I’m not going to be very impressed if you just go and start shooting captives and hostages. Elpida has her reasons. I’m reserving further judgement, until she can explain why she’s taken Pira and her friend on board.”

Kagami said nothing for a few moments, then: “Nobody’s perfect. Said it yourself.”

“We will defer to Elpida’s judgement. Please, Kagami.”

Kagami snorted. “You’re brain damaged. And you should still get some sleep, Elpida will be hours and hours, even if she does make it. You’d have better luck sleeping if you tried lying down. Is that another thing you surface dirt-eaters have forgotten about, bed and pillows?”

Vicky laughed, naturally this time. “Kaga, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve got a bloody great spider web of fractures on the back of my skull. Lying down makes it hurt more, not less.” She pulled a big grin, enjoying the way it made Kagami scowl. “Unless you wanna offer me your feather-soft lap for a pillow, my moon princess.”

Kagami blushed and looked away. “ … I … Victoria … ”

“Oh shit.” Vicky laughed, then winced past the pain in her skull, and put a hand up in surrender. “I was joking. You were seriously considering that? No, Kaga, your thighs would not make any difference to a head wound, even if they weren’t bionic legs. Sorry, I guess that’s not the kind of thing you could even do in life. Sorry for being weird.”

Kagami kept her face turned away. “In … in simulation.”

Vicky blinked at her. “You’ve given lap pillows? What? No, come on—”

“In simulation,” Kagami hissed between her teeth. “For my AI daughters. And yes, of course I didn’t have a lap in the flesh.” She snapped with derision: “Fucking legs!”

“Ah.” Vicky cleared her throat. At least Kagami seemed animated now. “You know, it’s not the rough conditions that stops me sleeping, that doesn’t bother me nothing, it really is just the head wound. I’m surprised you’ve managed to sleep at all, Kaga. You spent most of your life sleeping every night in a vat, right? The world’s best water-bed.”

“Luna’s best water bed,” Kagami corrected.

“Yeah, exactly! Whereas me? I spent most of my life sleeping in conditions you can’t even imagine, princess. The early years in the refugee camps we had tents, actual tents, no permanent structures allowed unless you were a Chicago City-State Citizen, or if some PRC diplo was visiting and they wanted to put on a good show for the television cameras. So it was a tent for me, for a long time. Used to get cold as all fuck in winter.” Vicky sighed with a mixture of nostalgia and pain, sinking into her seat again. She and Kagami stared at the bank of screens, side by side, close but not touching. “I’ve slept in truck beds next to spare tubes. I’ve slept inside the SP mount of a half a dozen types of gun. Slept in an old prison once, we were using it as a hospital. That was creepy and weird, hated that building, but it did have good walls, and heating. Slept in foxholes aplenty, of course. Worst foxhole I ever slept in was outside Charleston, while we were dropping H&I on the city for months.” She trailed off for a moment, gripped by a sudden morbid curiosity. “Did Charleston exist again by your time? They ever rebuild it?”

Kagami shrugged. “Coastal NorAm. So, no. Probably underwater before I was born.”

“Ha.”

Silence crept back. Kagami’s eyelids fluttered downward.

“Can’t believe you lived on the fucking moon,” Vicky said, shaking her head. “On the moon!”

Kagami blinked herself fully awake again. “We lived on the moon because my people got there first.”

Vicky laughed, forcing it to keep them both talking. “No you didn’t! My ancestors got there first! The moon landing? Neil whatsit? I do know some history, we did have school in the camps. I remember that from the textbooks. The Old Empire got there first, beat out some other place that used to be allied with the PRC.”

Kagami turned her head to Vicky with the most withering expression yet.

“What?” Vicky demanded. “You know I’m right! Don’t tell me they teach you some revisionist shit up on the moon?”

Kagami said: “Those people weren’t your cultural ancestors any more than Tokugawa Ieyasu was mine.”

Vicky squinted. “Who’s that?”

Kagami blinked with surprise. “A-an ancient warlord from the old country. Look, it doesn’t—”

“I think you’d make a good warlord,” Vicky said. “War Lady of the Moon.”

Kagami looked like she wanted to slap Vicky across the face. “It doesn’t matter! My point is, those people were not your ancestors in any real way. I thought you were a good little pre-NorAm citizen, all materialist analysis and grand social forces and dialectics, not national myth-making like all the other dirt-eating womb-born primitives down there. Down here. Whatever.”

“Hey!” Vicky tutted. “I take offence at that. A little bit. I think.”

Kagami snorted. “You’re talking about pre-NorAm, pre-collapse, old old old expansion period, Old Anglo pre-CF power, all of it. The people who landed on the moon first wouldn’t recognise you or I as anything.”

“I dunno about that,” Vicky said slowly. “People are always people. Look at Elpi — she’s millions of years removed, not just a few hundred.”

“Yes,” Kagami snorted, “and she’s completely impossible to deal with.”

“And she’s kept us alive.”

Kagami huffed, then lapsed into silence. Her eyes drifted across the bank of screens, growing distant once again. She sagged downward in her seat.

Vicky fished around for something new, anything to keep them talking: “I miss peanut butter.”

Kagami winced. “Don’t talk about food.”

“No, I’m serious. I really miss peanut butter.” Vicky smacked her lips at the memory, hamming it up for Kagami. “I was thinking about it because I mentioned growing up in the camps south of Chicago. Peanut butter was a real treat, you see. We used to get it in these little packages in the HM rations, all orange packaging so they were easy to see. And they’d always have these slogans stamped on them — they did that with all the best foods, the high calorie stuff, chocolate, jerky, stuff like that. They’d say things like, ‘With the best wishes of the people of China’, or ‘Eat with love, our American brothers and sisters’. My dad used to save those — the peanut butter, not the slogans — to make sure I could always have them. Loved that stuff. Used to squeeze it right from the packet and—”

“Stop. Talking. About. Food,” Kagami said.

“Sorry, just thinking out loud.” Vicky wet her lips with a dry tongue. Maybe she should stop talking, conserve energy. But then the worst might happen. “You know, I wonder if Chicago is still around somehow, just another part of all this jumble.”

“What?” Kagami grunted.

“I mean, it’s not impossible, right? It’s been hundreds of millions of years but the continents themselves are still there, all part of this mega-continent now, and maybe we could find the spot that used to be the shore of Lake—”

“Victoria,” Kagami snapped.

“Y-yeah?”

Kagami turned away from the screens again and made eye contact. Her face was a blood-dyed ghost, framed by the vein-light and the glow of the screens, hollow-eyed and drawn, like a starving wraith.

She said: “I’m not an idiot. I can tell what you’re doing. And we would be better served by you going the fuck to sleep and healing that head wound.”

Vicky swallowed, rough and hard. “Promise me you’ll stay awake?”

Kagami rolled her eyes. “Yes, I will watch the Necromancer corpse, of—”

“No,” Vicky said. “The Necromancer’s dead, Kaga. Promise me you’ll stay awake.”

Kagami blinked. She sighed, leaned back in her seat, then reached over toward Vicky with her right hand. She hesitated for a moment, then placed her hand atop Vicky’s waiting palm.

“Go to sleep, Vicky.”

Victoria held onto Kagami’s hand, no matter how cold and clammy. She snuggled down beneath her armoured coat, closed her eyes, and drifted off.

Sleep came and went for several hours. Whenever Vicky stirred she cracked open her eyes to find Kagami staring at the screens, washed in that blood-red light, a streak of crimson running from her nose and into her mouth. Each time she squeezed Kagami’s hand, and Kagami squeezed back, and Vicky returned to sleep.

Vicky wasn’t sure what finally woke her — Kagami’s voice, or Kagami’s hand slipping out of her own.

“She’s here!” Kagami was saying. “They’re here, they’re at the hatch! Vicky, wake up, they’re here. Wake up!”

Vicky snapped awake, stomach growling with hunger, rubbing her bleary eyes, then blinking at the bank of screens.

One of the screens showed a view high up on the exterior of the combat frame’s surface. A pair of heavily cloaked figures were crouched between the knots and gnarls of the bone-white armour, caked in wet grey mud. A narrow smear indicated where they’d scaled the side of the machine, their stealth ruined by the sucking mud through which they had crawled, picked out against the combat frame’s hull.

They could have been anybody or anything.

“Kaga—” Vicky croaked.

But Kagami’s hands were already flying across the control panel. Blood was running freely from her nose. She looked ready to collapse, eyes bulging, breathing wet and hard. “Come on, pop the hatch, pop the cork, get us out of here, get us—”

“Kaga, that could be anybody, that could be—”

“They’re in radio contact—” Kagami broke off for a second. “Yes, Elpida, she’s right—”

A voice crackled from the control panel, from the membrane-like speaker through which Elpida’s voice had issued before, when she’d made contact from inside the tank.

“Vicky, Kagami. Yes, it’s me,” Elpida’s voice sliced into the control chamber, clear and clean. “I’ve already verified—”

Kagami laughed like a barking dog. “At this point I don’t care if you’re another Necromancer, Commander! Come on in, and get us the fuck out!”

Up on the exterior view a piece of the combat frame’s hull suddenly popped upward — the hatch, opening to admit Elpida and Hafina. The two cloaked figures lurched from cover and slipped inside. The hatch slid shut a second later.

Vicky stood up, draped her coat over her shoulders, and stepped out of the bench-seat.

The rear of her skull throbbed with pain as she staggered out of the manual control chamber and into the circular room. She had to keep one hand on the wall. Her stomach was clenching with hunger. She was almost drooling. Elpida was bringing raw blue, raw nanomachine juice, everything she needed, everything she craved. Any moment now. Any moment.

“Victoria?” Kagami called after. “Vicky, what are you doing? Just sit! There’s nothing more we can do now. Sit down!”

Vicky stepped around the fallen bulkheads and faced the access tunnel which led to the hatch. She tried to ignore the Necromancer’s corpse a few feet to her left. She could hear faint noises now — like two people shedding layers of camouflage and crawling through a dark tunnel? Or was that just her imagination? She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. She really was drooling.

“Just … ” she slurred. “Just want to say hi … welcome her … mm, m’fine, Kaga.”

“You’re delirious with hunger!” Kagami called. “Sit down, you dirt-mating surface-monkey, before you fall over and—”

Crunch-crunch-click-click.

The Necromancer’s head turned away from the wall.

Vertebrae crunched and cracked as the corpse came to life and broke the rules of a human neck. The face came round, a parody of Elpida, the textures of skin and hair all wrong, rubbery and stiff and fake.

Dead black eyes stared upward at Vicky. The lips peeled back in a grin, to show a mouth full of gleaming, razor-sharp, steel teeth.

The teeth opened. A swollen red tongue flickered in the void.

“Nice — work dead, t-thing,” it said in a voice like broken static. “But we, didn’t fin—”

Vicky raised one boot, gathered all her remaining strength, and stomped on the Necromancer’s face.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Boo!

Fun little thing about this chapter: Vicky stomping on the Necromancer at the end was completely unplanned. The outline originally had the scene cut after one line of dialogue, but when I hit that point in drafting, Vicky was not having any of this shit. I love it when this happens! My characters defying the outline is a delight. Actually like half the dialogue in this chapter was unplanned, this was the product of throwing Vicky and Kagami in a room together for two days and letting them get to know each other properly.

But now, it is time to scream. Or stomp.

No Patreon link this week! It is, after all, the last day of the month; if you subscribe today, you would get double charged. If you’re really desperate for more, then please wait until tomorrow! In the meantime, go check out the fanart page. We have Serin flipping you off with ten fingers, naked angry Kagami, and an artistic representation of the end of this very chapter!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which keeps it more visible! Voting only takes a second or two, and it really does help!

And thank you for reading! Thank you so much for following my little story. Arc 9 is brewing up nicely behind the scenes, and I’m very excited about where it’s all going, to sharp and dangerous places. Until next chapter, dear reader!

Content Warnings

Toxic relationship dynamics (I mean it!)
Emotional sadism
Extreme jealousy
Burn wounds described in detail

Also, once again, just like the Ooni POV in the previous arc, this chapter is from the perspective of a fascist; no, this doesn’t mean the author thinks this is a good thing just because we’re seeing events through these eyes, and I hope that the overt politics of the story so far should make this clear.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Cantrelle found Yola in the bomb-damaged casino, with her chin in her hands, her head in the clouds, and nobody at the wheel.

Thirty two hours had passed since the so-called ‘superhuman’ — Elpida of Telokopolis — had broken out of her cell and escaped the Sisterhood’s temporary fortress. She had taken the apostate with her, and made an unexpected traitor out of Ooni. She’d also been assisted by her gang of reprobates and a figure that half the Sisters swore was an ART, an artificial human, a nano-blank void who had somehow walked right past every sentry and guard and pair of eyes the Sisterhood possessed. Cantrelle had not witnessed the ART herself; she had only woken from her undead coma about ten hours ago, when her own latent nano-load had resuscitated the grey meat inside her skull. She’d spent all of those last ten hours scrambling to reassert control — tending to her own wounds, then pinging the comms network for a basic roll-call, gluing and stitching and jamming the Sisters back together as best she could without the use of her hands, counting the dead and locating their corpses, distributing meat to the wounded, and figuring out what in frozen fucking hell Yola was playing at.

Daydreaming. Building castles in the sky.

Yola was sitting on an overturned slot machine, amid the wreckage of her command post, gazing out through a massive hole in the exterior wall of the skyscraper, a ragged wound torn by a red-lined plasma rifle used as an IED.

Ooni’s handiwork, apparently; Cantrelle never would have guessed that the little worm had it in her.

Cantrelle regretted missing the fireworks. She would have enjoyed seeing Yola forced to leap out of the way. But she had not enjoyed applying nano-mould to explosion burns all down one side of Neoci’s body, or gluing pieces of Sofika’s skull back together, or amputating the remains of Luuia-chuut’s left arm and feeding the pieces of charred meat back to her. Ooni was lucky that she’d fled Cantrelle’s justice.

Yola was not alone in the casino room, though the Sisterhood was no longer using it as a command post — something about the gilt and gold covered in soot and burns offended Yola’s delicate sensibilities. DeeGee and Yazhu were lounging against one of the rear walls, both of them sealed up inside their suits of powered war-plate.

Cantrelle stopped just inside the casino, at the edge of the blast damage. She gave DeeGee and Yazhu an unimpressed look, then spoke to them over the comms network, via her own internal bionics.

Click-buzz.

<<Why the fuck didn’t either of you tell me the boss was in here?>>

DeeGee levered herself up from the wall, joint-servos whining with minor damage; Cantrelle added that to her mental list of necessary repairs. The list was getting very long, and the Sisterhood was running low on parts. They could not stay here much longer without hunting.

Yazhu kept lounging; she nodded sideways toward Yola’s back, then answered over comms.

<<Boss wanted to be alone. Said to ignore everything.>>

Cantrelle stared. She let her expression do the talking. Her blank bionic eyes were often useful for this.

Yazhu finally straightened up. She sent over the comms network: <<Uh. Sorry, Canny, she—>>

<<Cantrelle.>> Cantrelle corrected her.

<<Cantrelle. Ma’am. Boss gave orders. You know? You know how she is. You know better than anybody, right?>>

Cantrelle sent: <<You two can make yourselves scarce for a while.>>

Yazhu and DeeGee shared a look, war-plate helmets turning to glance at each other. DeeGee shrugged and broadcast something on a private channel; Cantrelle felt it flicker across the network.

Yazhu sent: <<The boss told us to watch her back. Canny, come on. She’s not—>>

<<And I am ordering you to leave me alone with Yola,>> Cantrelle said. <<Go stand in the corridor if you must, you can see her back from there, it’s purple enough, you won’t miss it. Just fuck off for five minutes, both of you.>>

Cantrelle resisted the urge to flex her mechanical tentacles, or spit on the floor, or snap orders. She had to maintain her temper and her nerve, especially if she was about to deal with Yola. Somebody around here had to keep her head on straight, or the Sisterhood was going to fracture and break.

DeeGee saluted. Cantrelle didn’t like it when she did that; the gesture was a rotten holdover from DeeGee’s life before resurrection, a pantomime of submission to military rank. But at least it meant she was doing as she was told. Yazhu just shrugged and wobbled her head, abandoning responsibility. The pair of them trudged out of the room, past Cantrelle and into the long dark corridor. Cantrelle made a show of ignoring them, not even turning to cover her own back — not because she trusted them, but because her authority and credibility should extend without question.

God knew that Yola’s credibility wasn’t extending past her own fingertips right then.

Cantrelle crossed the blackened, soot-stained carpet, weaved her way between fallen slot machines and spears of shattered card table, climbed the twisted, half-melted steps up toward the raised platform, and approached the suit of ridiculous purple plate armour which contained a woman who had once been her closest friend and most unshakeable ally.

Yola did not look up, too absorbed in the view.

The ragged hole in the skyscraper wall reminded Cantrelle of an exit wound; the edges were fringed with clumps of concrete clinging to spikes of bent rebar and scorched water pipes, dirty with burnt wiring and sooty residue. An unstable lip threatened to collapse toward the ground below.

Beyond the hole the hateful sky glowered down upon the world, ruddy red in one corner with the ghost of the unborn sun. The rainstorm had blown itself out overnight; the air was filled with dull damp drizzle, reducing visibility. Ordinary eyes could not have seen across the impact crater outdoors, across to the other skyscrapers on the far side, but Cantrelle’s bionic eyes saw further and with more clarity than most. Above the rotten fingertips of the skyscrapers she could just make out the dark line of the graveworm’s mountainous body.

Rain had turned the grey earth of the crater into a sea of mud, filled with stagnant pools and little runnels of silt and slop. No revenant would be crossing that today, not unless they wanted to volunteer for target practice.

The strange bone-armoured mech — Elpida’s ‘combat frame’ — lay crumpled at one end of the impact crater, a helpless pale phantom in the grey drizzle.

Cantrelle stood next to Yola for a moment, but she couldn’t tell what Yola was staring at; the ‘boss’ was buttoned up tight inside her purple and gold war-plate. Yola’s helmet turned her face into a segmented beak beneath glowing emerald lenses.

Click-buzz.

<<Boss.>>

Yola did not move.

<<Boss. I’ve been pinging you for two hours.>>

Yola sighed through the external speakers in her helmet. The shoulders of her plate armour went up and down.

<<Boss. Don’t make me use my voice, for fuck’s sake. Your superhuman bitch choked me out, my throat is a mess. Boss? Pay attention, boss, or I swear I will put a fucking round down the exhaust on your war-plate’s power-pack.>>

Yola finally looked up. The helmet of her armour turned away from the view, though she did not raise her chin from her hands. Emerald lenses blazed above that sharpened beak.

<<Lower your fucking helmet, for God’s sake,>> Cantrelle sent.

Yola’s purple helmet slid back segment by segment, sinking into the rear of her armour.

She’d been caught by the outer edge of the explosion from Ooni’s red-lined plasma rifle: Yola’s right cheek and the right side of her jaw were crispy black with burns and dried blood; her right eye was milky with damage, the lid crisped away, lashes and brow burned up, the brilliant green colour turned swampy; the trailing edges of her ruby-red hair were singed and blackened. She’d already begun to heal — her own nano-load was higher than the Sisterhood’s average. But she would carry the scars for weeks yet.

Yola didn’t show any pain; she never did, and Cantrelle had yet to figure out how. Back in the good days — back when they’d shared a bedroll every night — Yola had been a crybaby, worrying at every minor wound and aching muscle, weeping into Cantrelle’s shoulder in fear of half the others. Now she was like a statue.

She spoke in a voice like molten honey dripping on hot steel.

“Sent my guard away, have you?” Yola said. “Cantrelle, if I didn’t know you better, I would say you’re planning an assassination.”

Cantrelle cleared her throat — which hurt, a lot. She tasted fresh blood again. But then she spoke out loud, for pure spite: “Yola, if I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t send anybody away. I’d do it in front of as many Sisters as possible. With you on your feet. And armed.”

Cantrelle’s voice sounded worse than a corpse. Her usual mechanical buzz was warped and broken; she needed time and meat to fix the damage.

Yola chuckled softly, in the exact manner which she knew full well made Cantrelle grind her teeth. She glanced past Cantrelle, ensuring they did not have any eavesdroppers, then said: “You always did have a more esoteric understanding of leadership than I. Sometimes I wish I had your gift, instead of the ones that nature and breeding have bestowed upon me.” Yola looked Cantrelle up and down with her healthy left eye, lingering on Cantrelle’s hands, her face, and the ends of her four metal tentacles. “Ella, Ella, Ella,” she purred. “You look terrible, my dear. You look like you have been dredged from the hangman’s pile and warmed up in a manure pit. How are you feeling? I hope you are not too sore, in either sense of the word.”

Cantrelle had so many wounds that the pain was an overlapping cacophony; she had administered her own analgesics, but they were ineffective at such low doses. She didn’t want to drug herself insensible, not yet, not while Yola was acting like this.

Her throat was a mangled mess, one big throbbing purple strangulation bruise, puffy and swollen, flesh and metal both marked with the outline of the chain which Elpida had used to choke her to death. Her bald scalp was scraped and grazed from where she’d hit the ground several times. Her hands were much worse, nails and knuckles skinned and bloodied from the struggle, with several nasty bite wounds on her fingers and palms and wrists; the little one — Amina, Elpida had called her — had taken serious chunks out of Cantrelle’s hands, but also bitten her in the face several times. Cantrelle had not lost any fingers to the little biter, but her hands were out of action for the foreseeable future, wounds slathered in nano-mould, wrapped in gauze and bandages, swaddled up like mittens. She was forced to use her two tentacle-claws for everything, including bandaging the bite wounds on her own face.

One of the facial bites had gone right through the skull-tattoo on Cantrelle’s cheek; Amina had ripped away a chunk of flesh, bisecting the Sisterhood’s symbol, leaving it ragged and fractured.

In life Cantrelle had believed in signs and symbols, in messages from God found in the flying of birds and the entrails of road-kill.

She was glad she had left such infancy behind. But she tried not to think about the meaning of the broken and bisected skull.

Worse than throat and hands and face, worse even than the insult to her allegiance, the superhuman and her little rabid bitch had broken the ends of Cantrelle’s other two tentacles: her bone-saw and her needle-delivery system were both snapped and shattered. Regrowing those bionics would take months of work, constant mental reinforcement, and several whole corpses worth of fresh nanomachines.

They’d stolen her favourite shotgun too, the nice little super-compact she could fire one-handed. They’d even taken her sidearm. She had a jerky little PDW tucked under her coat for now, and a pair of large calibre revolvers shoved into her waistband.

But Elpida had not killed her.

Elpida had her unconscious, helpless, and wounded — but she’d not finished the job. Yola’s ‘superhuman’ was naive and weak at best, sentimental and foolish at worst. If their positions had been reversed, Cantrelle would have shot her without hesitation and eaten her corpse with relish.

Elpida had not, however, looted Cantrelle’s other personal possessions. When Cantrelle had awoken from her coma and fixed her own wounds, she had been surprised to find everything else still in her pockets, including the box with the tiny locket of Yola’s hair — blonde hair, not Yola’s current ruby-red, from before Yola had changed herself.

Another death avoided. Another lucky break. Cantrelle was beginning to get tired. She’d whispered something to the locket of hair, something like ‘let me fucking go’. A shameful lapse, now carefully locked away again.

She echoed Yola’s question, deadpan: “How am I feeling?”

Yola’s one unblinded eye twinkled with cruel mischief, emerald in the grey light. “Yes. Can’t I show concern for my dearest friend?”

Cantrelle rasped, “I feel about as bad as you look, Yola.”

Yola chuckled, her laugh trailing off into an amused sigh. “Don’t feel too humiliated. You may have been overpowered, stripped of your weapons, and ignored as not worth killing, but it was the superhuman who did so. Such a result was only to be expected. In truth, the fault is mine, not yours. I should have sent Kuro with you to bind her ankles. I should have given you backup. After all, I am in charge, am I not? The buck — as the peasants used to say in the north — stops with me. Do you think that saying was a reference to hunting deer? I rather like that notion. Regardless, Ella, she did leave you alive. I am glad you are still with us, old friend. Where would I be without you?”

“Dead.”

Yola’s lips twitched. “Probably.”

Cantrelle jerked one mechanical tentacle-claw at the ragged hole in the wall. “That sniper is going to get you, sitting here like this.”

Yola shook her head. “The sniper is gone. Of that I am quite certain. A clever little creature, but unwilling to confront us directly. She didn’t even score any real kills, did she?”

“She did.”

Yola raised her eyebrows. “Did she now?”

Cantrelle said: “Yola. What the fuck are you doing?”

Yola smiled, making that infuriatingly perfect bow-shape with her lips, soft and red and inviting. The expression pulled at her cracked, burned, bleeding cheek, opening a dozen tiny wounds in the blackened flesh; watery blood and bloody plasma ran down her jaw. “Thinking. Considering further options. Observing our prize.” She gestured with one purple gauntlet, indicating the massive form of the bone-armoured mech, embedded in the grey mud outdoors. “Staring upon the world and lamenting our wayward superhuman, who could not pause to listen for long. Such a pity, is it not? She was so strong, so—”

“You are spending us,” Cantrelle grunted. She tasted blood again.

Yola showed no surprise. “I am spending well, dear—”

“We need to move. We need to consolidate, pull together, regroup, and hunt. We are wounded and reeling.” She jabbed one mechanical tentacle toward the hole in the wall again, past the form of the fallen mech, across the impact crater, toward the other skyscrapers. “Any one of those groups of reprobates and degenerates out there could fall on us right now, and we might not be able to fight them off. I’ve spent all night stuffing organs back into the Sisters’ bodies, stitching wounds and gluing bellies shut and cramming nano-mould and meat into girls’ mouths. And then I find out you’ve sent Sisters beyond the graveworm line, to chase your fucking missed conquest.”

Cantrelle stopped, breathing hard. She wanted to slap Yola right across that bleeding cheek.

Yola tried to flutter her lashes, but with only one eyelid the effect was grotesque, one naked eyeball twitching in the burned socket. She purred, “Ella, my love, my side is always open to you, even now, even—”

Cantrelle spat: “I don’t care what you want to do with your ‘superhuman’, if you want to eat her, or put a collar on her, or feed her to Kuro, or if you want to tie her up and force her to grow a phallus and use it to fuck yourself up the arse every night. I do not care, Yola. I care that you are spending us.”

Yola tilted her head sideways. “Are we quarrelling, Ella?”

Cantrelle snapped both of her tentacle-pincers shut with a click. “You’ve done this before, but never this badly. Remember the time with Warusei—”

“A traitor and a false prophet, yes, of course I—”

“—or the group with the red flags and the clever plastic decoys? Or the time that scavenger with the stinger broke in when we were staying at the old university buildings? Or the—”

“Ella, I understand your frustration with—”

“No, you don’t understand,” Cantrelle hissed. “All those times you kept control. You spent lives wisely, to re-establish our dominance and position against anybody who thought we could be pushed around. That’s part of why I let you lead, Yola. You get results. Your obsession and sadism and lust for revenge gets results. But this isn’t revenge, it’s something else. You’re slipping. It’s disgusting. You’re acting like them, the degenerates. No better than a zombie.”

Yola wasn’t smiling anymore. “How is this any different, Ella? We have been undermined. We must show our strongest hand. We must recover the superhuman—”

Cantrelle snorted; she tasted blood again. “Recover. Exactly. Not kill, not string her corpse up on a pole and show what happens to fucking zombie filth that tries to fuck with us, not carry her skull around for a while as proof — but ‘recover’. And she’s fucking gone, Yola. She’s gone beyond the graveworm line. Who cares? We need to move, and eat. Soon.”

Yola straightened up. Her eyes were like green fire. “She is a natural born leader. She is everything the movement has ever needed. She will see our way, Ella. I will prove that, to you and everyone else.”

“And for that you’re sending girls out to die, beyond the graveworm zone, for nothing.”

Yola shrugged to indicate that she was done justifying herself.

Cantrelle felt her blood go cold.

Was this the moment she’d dreaded and yearned for these last six years? Was this the moment that Yola’s charisma and cunning had finally run dry, exposing the pathology and obsession beneath the waters? It had happened before Yola, when Furina had led the Sisterhood, and Furina had deposed Quietusul before that. Cantrelle did not want to lead, did not want the responsibility of corralling the Sisters in the right direction, but she would not see them spent like this.

And Yola was her fault, her responsibility. She’d put Yola on the throne in the first place. She could remove Yola just as easily — poison her armour intakes, overload the chem-levels inside her war-plate, or just walk up behind her and put a bullet in her skull. Yola did not even pretend to be afraid of betrayal from Cantrelle.

But Cantrelle wanted to see Yola weep.

At least one more time, like she had done in the old days, like when she’d buried her face in Cantrelle’s shoulder and clung to her for everything. Cantrelle wanted to see Yola’s face scrunch up with fear and longing and desperate need.

Was the old Yola even in there anymore? Maybe. Maybe she would show herself in the last seconds, overpowered and staring down the muzzle of a gun.

Cantrelle could not grasp the pistol-grip of the PDW beneath her coat, not reliably enough to win in a struggle; her hands were too mangled and too swaddled. But if she could get a good hold on Yola’s armour with her tentacle-pincers, she could stop Yola redeploying her helmet, then she might be able to handle one of the revolvers and get it in Yola’s face. One shot would end an era. She’d need to deal with Kuro afterward, and possibly Nahia and Joye, but most of the Sisters would side with her. Nobody else would mount a serious challenge to Cantrelle’s justification for a change of leadership.

Her throat felt thick. Something was thudding and shuddering inside her chest. She was sweating.

Cantrelle took a final shot: “Yolanda, you need to lead us. Or I will.”

Yola stood up. She held her chin high, burned cheek gleaming in the grey light. She did not look at Cantrelle, but gazed out across the fallen mech, the sea of mud, and the drizzling rain.

She spoke in a voice of caramel and iron: “We need that mech. Not I, not you, but we, all of us, the Sisterhood as it stands. The tank as well, if we can lure it back and disable it briefly, but mostly the mech. Either or both of them represent a kind of power we have been seeking for many years now. With the mech at our command, we could approach the graveworm as an equal. Could we not? The pilot — Elpida — is the key to entering and controlling our prize.”

Cantrelle suppressed a sigh and unclenched her jaw, shuddering as she backed off from violence. Yola was finally speaking sense again, or at least pretending.

“True, boss,” she croaked. “But what about—”

Yola gestured sharply at the far side of the mech, lost beneath the ruddy light and the grey raindrops. “Those three worm-guard did not withdraw far. I do not believe we can approach without the cover of the pilot. If recovering her becomes impossible, then I am willing to entertain alternative courses of action. But mistake me not, my dear friend, I am not willing to abandon this prize, this great promise, this gift. And I do not believe the worm itself will move, not while this machine lies here. Does this meet with your approval, dearest Ella?”

Cantrelle grunted. “Barely. Boss, you can’t keep sending Sisters out beyond the graveworm line, it’s folly and madness. We don’t have the numbers to—”

Yola snapped: “Casualties?”

That was more like it. “Four dead, unrecoverable. Hatty, Zdenka, Esmae, and Cui. Three dead, recoverable and regenerating: Soo-Hyun, Urd, and Mojdeh. They’ll need about six to seven more hours before they can move. Sixteen additional wounded, including you and I, all able to walk, except Onyeka, she’s got two mangled legs from the road collapse. Everyone in plate armour is fine, including Kuro, incredibly, considering that apostate bitch dropped the entire fucking road on her with a coilgun.”

Yola nodded. She did not look away from the mech, out there in the rain. “Kuro is fine, indeed. A little dented. We spent the night together.”

Cantrelle clenched her teeth. Of course Yola had spent the night with her favourite pet while ordering all this ongoing madness. Cantrelle said: “There’s also the six you sent beyond the graveworm line. We’ve lost comms with all of them.”

Yola ignored that. She asked: “The dead have been distributed?”

“Stripped and rendered. Armour and weapons divvied up by the usual permissions. Meat went to the strongest of the wounded on down. I do know what I’m doing, Yola, when you’re too busy sucking your thumbs, or fucking Kuro. And here.” Cantrelle dug around inside her coat with one tentacle-claw, opened a pouch, and pulled out a package of cloth-wrapped gore. She held it out to Yola. “Your share.”

Yola smiled with girlish delight. She accepted the package and unwrapped the cloth, revealing the chunk of greasy grey-pink meat. “Oh, brains,” she cooed. “Ella, you shouldn’t have.”

“It’s Hatty’s brains. Good luck getting any nutrition from it.”

Yola giggled, then tucked into her share of the dead. She chewed and swallowed delicately, staring out across the downed mech.

Cantrelle allowed the silence. She had one more question, one further probe for Yola’s leadership; but this one was hard to ask, especially after bringing Yola around, after backing down from a change of leadership. If Yola gave the wrong answer, Cantrelle knew she would have to act.

Yola spoke first, licking brain grease off her perfect lips.

“We must claim that mech,” Yola said. “The tank, the pilot, my superhuman, all of it is secondary. You are correct about that. The only thing which matters is securing the graveworm, and glutting our future on the innards. Thank you for reminding me, Ella. I do love you, I hope you still know that.”

Cantrelle grunted. She had no good way to ask the question. She stared out of the hole in the wall, and said: “Have we received any more outside help?”

Yola smiled, thin and bright, her emerald eye glittering. “The Necromancer has not contacted me, not since the previous time. I assure you, Ella, we are not guided by the secret hand of another. We are in control.”

“Right,” Cantrelle said.

But she could tell when Yola was lying.

Cantrelle went cold inside; all this coaxing and cajoling had been a total waste. Yola was still being used by the Necro-fuck corpse-rapist thing — willingly.

Cantrelle glanced over at her old friend, slipped one tentacle-pincer inside her coat to grasp the handle of a revolver, and braced the other pincer to grab the lip of Yola’s armour, where her helmet would deploy. She should have done this earlier, not waited until Yola was standing up. One shot, one bullet in her perfect, too-pretty mouth, to shut her up forever, to stop her lies and her little betrayals, to put the Sisterhood back in Cantrelle’s hands. One bullet. Maybe Yola would cry for mercy first. Cantrelle would like that. Cantrelle’s tentacles were quivering. One bullet, one moment, and it would all be over. She pictured Yola’s smile, together in the dark, coiled up together in a bedroll, when it had been a real smile, when they’d made their pact, their deal. That smile was gone, and the tears which came before. This Yola was a ghost — no, a zombie. Cantrelle would put her down with a bullet and forget her tears and her smile alike.

“First order of business,” Yola was saying between bites of brain, “is, as you mentioned, rapid re-consolidation. Give me a moment to finish my meal and—”

Click-buzz.

Cantrelle’s internal comm-link pinged her on a private channel.

She almost jumped. She let go of the revolver, lowered the other pincer, and accepted the connection; DeeGee and Yazhu were probably getting impatient out in the corridor. She needed to stall them for a few moments. There was nothing wrong with a couple of witnesses for a change of leadership, but Cantrelle did not want anybody else to ever witness Yola’s tears. Those belonged to Cantrelle alone.

She started to send, but somebody else spoke first.

<<Don’t reply to this message out loud. If we’ve gotten this correct, then I should be speaking with Cantrelle. I’ll keep this line open so you can go somewhere private and we can have a conversation. I have a proposition for you. I’ll wait.>>

Cantrelle froze.

That voice did not belong to any Sister she knew. But she recognised it all too well.

It was the pilot, the Telokopolan, Yola’s superhuman toy — Elpida.

She was inside the comms network.

“—then we’ll check on the wounded,” Yola was saying. “Together, of course. I can judge who is fit to carry on, though I surmise that all will be, except possibly Onyeka? But then, she is very strong. I think she will make it with the six to seven hour window. Ella?”

“ … yes, boss,” Cantrelle answered out loud. “Got everyone laid out in the big conference room, we’re already regrouping there. I’ll head back first. Make it look like normal, like you came without my prompting. Sounds good?”

Yola smiled; the gesture made her cheek bleed and weep again. “Delightful, Ella.”

Cantrelle gestured at Yola’s cheek with a tentacle-pincer. “And we’ll get some nano-mould on that. See you in five, boss.”

She left Yola behind to stare out of the ragged hole at her unattainable prize, eating her piece of Hatty’s brain. Cantrelle descended the steps, crossed the ruins of the casino, and walked back into the dim and shadowy corridor. DeeGee and Yazhu were waiting for orders, but Cantrelle gestured them into the room and ignored any further questions, stalking back down the corridor. She turned two corners, paused in a dark place amid the dusty marble, and listened to the soft hum of the open line.

<<Elpida?>>

<<Yes.>> Elpida replied.

<<How did you crack encryption on the comms network? You’re not on an open line, you’re inside. What did you do, use Ooni’s helmet? We’ve already terminated her permissions, that shouldn’t be possible.>>

Elpida replied: <<That’s for me to know and for you to never find out. I assume I have to be quick and covert, so I’ll skip straight to the point. When you and Yola had me in captivity, you disagreed with her about one important matter: you don’t like that she’s working with a Necromancer. Is that correct?>>

Cantrelle wet her lips. She tasted blood.

Had Elpida been listening to her conversation with Yola just now? That wasn’t impossible, not if Elpida had broken into the comms network somehow. Cantrelle glanced up and down the corridor, switching her sight to infra-red and low-light. She could not risk anybody tapping into this connection at close range.

Cantrelle sent: <<How are the stitches in your belly holding up? I expect you ruined all my hard work by falling on your face.>>

<<They held well, thank you,>> Elpida said. She did not sound sarcastic. <<Lasted until I got to safety. Your medical attention saved me.>>

<<Got a medic of your own, have you?>>

<<Maybe,>> Elpida said.

Cantrelle asked: <<Is Ooni alive?>>

<<No. We killed her and ate her corpse. Thanks for the nanomachines.>>

Cantrelle didn’t believe a word of that. <<What do you want, Elpida?>>

<<I want Yola.>>

Cantrelle clenched her teeth and stopped breathing.

Opportunity, yes — but was it the one she wanted? She’d rather see Yola dead than deliver any Sister into the hands of some degenerate, let alone Yola. Her oldest friend needed to be removed, but Cantrelle would do it by her own hand, and see Yola’s tears before the end. But this way—

Elpida continued: <<If I’ve read your situation correctly, I believe you wish to remove or usurp her as leader of your group, or at least stop her plan to bring me in as a new leader. Neither you nor I want that, Cantrelle. We both know it makes no sense. We can reach a mutually beneficial arrangement. I’m not interested in your internal politics and power struggles. All I want is Yola, alive, intact, and able to answer my questions.>>

Cantrelle bristled. Yola belonged to her. <<And you think I would just hand a Sister over to you? You think I’m enough of a traitor that I won’t tell Yola about this conversation?>>

<<Maybe,>> Elpida said. <<Maybe not. We’ll take her anyway, with or without your inside help. We won’t do it just yet, we’ve got matters to attend to first. But I’m contacting you early, to give you time to consider this offer. We would rather not engage your group in direct combat, we would rather this be achieved without further bloodshed. I believe you probably desire that too, because now we have weapons enough to crush you with ease. Give me Yola, and we’ll leave quietly.>>

<<You’re bluffing. You’ve got shit. That tank can’t even approach us. Fuck you, ‘superhuman’. You’re nothing of the sort.>>

<<Correct, I’m not. Think about my offer. There is a time limit, but I’m not telling you what it is. If you change your mind, ping this private line again, then wait. I’ll be here, Cantrelle.>>

Click-buzz.

The channel went dead.

Cantrelle stood in the dark, breathing hard, feeling every one of her bite wounds and every chain-link bruise across her throat. She looked toward the light at the end of the corridor. The rest of the Sisterhood was gathering in the conference room up ahead, ready to regroup and make a new plan, ready to keep manifesting their vision into reality.

Then she looked over her shoulder, back toward the bomb-damaged casino; she pictured Yola’s infuriating smirk, then imagined it collapsing into tears.

And she remembered that private smile back in the old days, so sweet and so real, alone in the dark with a needful friend.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Toxic yuri! You don’t have to be a zombie-girl to be this toxic, but it helps!

Surprise, it’s another new POV! Where the dynamic is vile and the vibes are rancid. Holy shit, these girls are more fucked up than even I imagined they would be before they hit the page. I gotta admit, I went back and forth on whether or not I should put the Cantrelle POV in the story at all, in order to follow the Death’s Heads in more detail, but I think this has worked pretty well? Cantrelle came out a lot more interesting and weird and extreme than I thought she might. Depending on how things develop in arc 9, we might be seeing more of her, or maybe other Death’s Heads, it depends on the pacing; arc 9 is probably going to be a long one. Anyway, in the meantime, what the hell is Elpida doing?

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

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

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

And thanks for reading! Thank you for reading Necroepilogos. As always, I could not do this without all of you, the readers. And still, I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of this nanomachine afterlife. Until next chapter!