Content Warnings

Gore
Torture
Suicide bombing (again!)

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Elpida knew she could not let this girl die.

She could not fail this test; she could not fail Telokopolis.

It didn’t matter who Sanzhima was, what she had done in the past, or what she might do in the future. It didn’t matter that this trap was engineered to make Elpida responsible for the outcome of a no-win situation. It would not even matter if Sanzhima really was one of the Death’s Heads, tortured and cast out and turned into a weapon. Sanzhima had thrown down her wounds at the skirts of Telokopolis, pleading for aid. What worth would Telokopolis amount to, if it could not rescue a single girl in need?

Elpida could not afford failure. Not here, not now, not this.

She had known this test would come, but she had expected it weeks or months or years in the future, after structures had been built, after the responsibility had begun to pass from her hands. She had not expected it to arrive so soon, not in the form of a bomb-vest strapped to human wreckage. She had not expected it to come from the Death’s Heads, beneath the raging hailstones of the hurricane, deep in the dark of the tomb.

But here it was, in front of the most volatile audience.

The shadows of the tomb chamber were filled with revenants — bottom-feeders, high-tech cyborgs, bio-modded predators, naked scavengers, power-armoured soldiers; all of them stood or slouched or squatted in close proximity to each other, not quite shoulder to shoulder, but closer than any zombies ever got out in the ruins, unless they were grappling for survival in close quarters combat. All of them had full bellies, some for the first time in years, and none of them were fighting over the gore-streaked prize of each other’s flesh. Some of the revenants out there had already slipped away, hurrying back into the dead veins and ossified abscesses of the tomb; Elpida couldn’t blame them for being spooked by the bomb, or the threat carved into Sanzhima’s back. But dozens of faces still watched from beyond the fifty-meter minimum safe distance line, marked by a sharp crimson light cast from up on Pheiri’s hull. Armour and weapons and naked skin were dyed scarlet and garnet by the bloody red backwash. Those zombies out there had accepted meat from Elpida’s hands and listened to the words from Elpida’s mouth; all of them had already accepted the promise of Telokopolis, at least in some embryonic form, even if most did not yet comprehend what that promise meant.

Dozens of zombies, starving yesterday, fed today, their eyes glued to this trial of Elpida’s trust.

Some of the bottom-feeders had begun to paint their clothing with a crude version of the crescent-and-double-line symbol, copied from Elpida’s own chest. How long would that symbolic identification last if they watched Sanzhima die? One of their own, made into a weapon aimed at the promise of Telokopolis, then reduced to greasy ash and charred meat.

Elpida could not let that happen.

For her comrades too, her new ‘cadre’, she could not allow herself to falter. Vicky and Kagami and Pira and Ooni and Pheiri and all the others, none of them would abandon the cause, of course. Even Shilu and Serin were committed now, each in their own esoteric fashion. None of them would blame Elpida if her failures ended in Sanzhima’s death. Death was simply the way of things in the nanomachine afterlife. Death was less than cheap. It was meaningless.

Elpida rejected that. She had to reject that, or the promise of Telokopolis meant nothing.

And then there was Sanzhima herself — a sagging corpse impaled on steel, tortured to within an inch of death. Between the bruised face, the hollow eyes, the massive blood loss, and the awful wounds in her chest and belly, Sanzhima looked truly undead. A body hijacked against the purposes of the mind within. Only the invisible miracle of nanomachine biology kept her on her feet.

Every time Elpida looked at Sanzhima’s face she saw all the others she had failed — her twenty four cadre-sisters, dragged off into the dark to be executed alone; Eseld, the first time they had met, struggling for life beneath Elpida’s own hands; the revenants she had not even known, the ones who had left her resurrection chamber before she had awakened; the ones from this very tomb, the ones she had been too slow to save, who had died where Shilu’s handful had survived.

Sanzhima was all Elpida’s failures, staring out from behind matted hair and a mask of half-dried blood, trapped in glassy, pain-blind eyes.

Elpida had received so much covert assistance, so much help from a hidden hand inside the network; what else could explain Eseld’s return, Shilu’s appearance, and the hurricane overhead — not even to mention the smooth and easy conditions of her own resurrection, or the descent of Thirteen Arcadia from orbit. Something beyond her sight and senses had poured faith and hope and love into her.

Failure here would fail Telokopolis. Failure here would waste everything she had clawed back since Eseld’s murder. Failure here would plunge her deeper into a despair she had only just crawled out from under. Failure here was not an option.

Fuck sake, Elps, Howl hissed in the back of her head. Stop it! Just stop!

Stop what?

You know what! Treating yourself like this, like shit, like any of this bullshit is down to you! Nobody can take this pressure, not even you, you dumb fuck bitch! I wasn’t your fault! Eseld wasn’t your fault! Random zombies aren’t your—

None of that matters. I can’t fail here, not with all these revenants watching. You know that.

You mean ‘we’ can’t fail here. What, you think you’re fuckin’ alone in this? All you, all Elps, boo-hoo-boo, Command is so lonely, it’s tough at the top? Fuck you, Elpida! You’re burning yourself out, I know you are, you—

I’m biochemically immune to panic attacks, hardened against all sorts of anxiety, and I’m pretty sure the pilot phenotype cannot suffer ‘burnout’. You know how this works for us, Howl. I’m fine. I can handle this.

Oh yeah? Look down, bitch. Your hands are shaking.

Elpida glanced down at her right hand. It was not shaking.

Kagami’s voice crackled in Elpida’s headset: “Five minutes and twenty seconds to detonation. Ooni and Victoria are descending Pheiri’s side right now. Commander, if you’ve got a plan, you better put it into action, and quickly! Preferably before the bomb goes off, yes? If it’s not too much trouble for you.”

“Understood,” Elpida replied. “Give us updates at every thirty second mark. Repeat that order back to me.”

“Updates at every thirty seconds, yes! My ears work fine, thank you!”

In front of Elpida, Sanzhima let out another blood-choked sob. Her breath wheezed through the holes punched in her rib cage. She was quivering all over.

“Plea— please, l-let it … let it happ-en … please— plea— just let me … ”

Ilyusha hissed between clenched teeth, tail lashing back and forth. Atyle was eyeing Persephone’s group — barely twenty feet to Elpida’s left, half of them grinning, the other half stony-faced; Persephone herself observed with folded arms and an unreadable expression on her blue-black polymer face. Shilu’s eyes were glued to the explosive vest, flicking back and forth over the tightly wrapped bundles of explosive payload and the bars of welded steel wrapped around Sanzhima’s torso.

“P-please,” Sanzhima whined again. “Just kill me … ”

Elpida extended her right hand, steady as a rock. “Here, Sanzhima, take my hand.”

Sanzhima stared at the hand.

“Take my hand,” Elpida repeated, slow and soft. “With your left. Just put your hand in mine. Take my hand, and I’ll do the rest. All you have to do is follow what I say. Come on, be a good girl, that’s it. That’s it. You can do it. There you go.”

Sanzhima did as she was told, though with great difficulty. Her hand was small and cold. She had no grip strength.

Elpida held on tight. She raised her other hand, made a fist, and signalled a withdrawal. “We’re pulling back behind the picket line. Haf, you peel back first. Atyle, Shilu, get inside. Illy, cover us.”

“Right on, boss!” Illy snapped. She whipped her shotgun up and swung her ballistic shield out, sneering at Persephone’s zombies.

Elpida led Sanzhima back through the picket-line of drones, following Shilu and Atyle, passing by Hafina as the Artificial Human stepped to one side. Sanzhima could barely walk, stumbling and lurching, eyes glazed over, drooling a loop of thin and bloody mucus from slack lips. Elpida would have picked her up and carried her, or perhaps ordered Hafina to do the same, but putting pressure on Sanzhima’s torso might tear those wounds even wider — or set off the bomb.

The picket line of drones closed up as Ilyusha slipped inside; Elpida and her team were bracketed between the drones on one side and the bone-white wall of Pheiri’s hull on the other, bristling with weapons. From fifty meters away, dozens of eyes watched the show, many revenants going up on tiptoe, some climbing the walls for a better view. Persephone watched from much closer, bright bionic eyes burning with sceptical light. Persephone’s girls adjusted their footing, as if preparing to flee before the detonation.

Let them panic, Elpida told herself. She would show them that Telokopolis does not fail even the most hopeless of cases.

Hafina spoke over the comms, her voice heavy and slow inside her helmet: “Elpida. Maybe we should take her round the back? Everyone can see, out front, up here.”

“Negative, Haf,” Elpida replied. “We’re going to do it here. That’s the point. They need to see that we won’t fail them.”

Hafina adjusted her six limbs, guns pointing far over the heads of the crowd.

Elpida left the other half unspoken; if they did fail, the breakage would be instant and complete. The promise would be ruins, gone in the explosion of Sanzhima’s flesh. No going back. No excuses. No second chances.

Howl hissed: I told you, your hands are shaking. Stop doing this to yourself.

They’re not.

They fucking are!

Kagami said: “Five minutes, Commander.”

Before Elpida could reply, two figures burst from around the opposite corner of Pheiri’s hull — Ooni in front, Vicky trailing behind in her heavier armour.

Persephone shouted: “What is this, Elpida? More of your girls to get blown up?”

Vicky spared the giant cyborg only a single sideways glance, but Ooni almost skidded to a halt. Elpida shouted, “Ignore her! Ooni, here, now!”

Ooni jerked as if shot, then picked up her feet and carried on. She stumbled to a halt just shy of Elpida and Sanzhima. Vicky came trotting up behind, grenade launcher held low, eyes darting back and forth, sweating beneath her helmet.

Ooni panted, “Commander, I—”

“Ooni,” Elpida interrupted. “Repeat what you said over the comms, so everyone can hear. Then indicate where you think it’s happening.”

Ooni nodded, dark eyes wide and eager. “I think I know who made the bomb, it must be Kuro. This is her style. She’s booby-trapped corpses with this technique before. She runs a tiny electrical current through parts that don’t seem like they’re important to the explosive, and then makes it so if they’re cut or broken, the bomb will go off. You can’t cut the wires or try to remove the explosive, either. It’s a trap!”

“Shit,” Vicky grunted. “That’s some messed up—”

Elpida silenced Vicky with a sideways snap of one hand. “Ooni, where do you think she would run this electrical current?”

Ooni glanced at Sanzhima’s torso, then went pale and still. “Um … all of them? T-the metal bars, I mean. It could be all of them, or one of them, or—”

Shilu said: “It’s all of them. She is correct.”

“You’re certain, Shilu?” Elpida asked. Shilu was staring at the explosive vest. “You didn’t say anything before.”

“I didn’t expect to see it before,” said Shilu. “The trickle of current is tiny, no more than a few microamperes. I missed it because I was examining the structural composition of the cage and the explosives, looking for weak points where the steel could be broken.” Shilu blinked. “My apologies, Telokopolan. These ‘Death’s Heads’ almost bested me.”

Kagami snapped in Elpida’s ear: “Our paleo princess with her bionic eye should have spotted that too! That means you, Atyle, you blind bat! It took the fascist coward to point it out!”

Atyle smiled. “I see the machines of the gods, but I do not know all their ways. All your learning availed you nothing, either, Moon Princess.”

Kagami snapped: “Four minutes, thirty seconds! Hurry up!”

Ilyusha opened her mouth, probably to insult Shilu, or tell Kagami off.

Elpida swiped one hand through the air, hard and sharp; Ilyusha, Ooni, and Victoria all flinched. “Sound off, all of you, unless it relates to disarming this bomb.” She did not wait for a response. “I need a solution and I need it quickly. Ideas?”

Vicky said, “We could … run our own current through …” She shook her head. “Nah, sorry, that doesn’t help, forget it.”

Ilyusha spat on the floor. “Cut her arms and legs off? Peel her out of it. Sucks shit, but she’ll live. Grow new ones after, whatever.”

“That will not work, little scorpion,” said Atyle. “The rods of iron pierce her body, we would have to dig her apart. There would be nothing of her left.”

“Is there some way we can stop the timer?” Vicky said. “Pause the whole thing, give us time to do, like, surgery on her?”

Ooni said, “Pheiri could—”

Kagami’s voice cut in over the comms. “No bombs inside Pheiri. I’m sorry, he’s very clear on this matter. And he’s already poked at the circuit itself, it’s just a timer and wires and a radio receiver, there’s nothing he can interface with or interrupt except jamming the detonation signal, and he already pulled that off. They kept the bomb as dumb as possible, probably to stop us shutting it down.”

Elpida looked at Ooni, at her wide dark eyes and the greasy sweat on her face, lit from above by the bloody red backwash of Pheiri’s illumination. “Ooni, you know how the Death’s Heads think. Is there a way out of this bomb? Yes or no?”

Ooni shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s just meant to hurt us, whatever we do. C-commander, you can’t— you can’t let her die, please, please—”

Shilu said: “I can do it.”

Elpida replied, “Explain, quickly.”

“I already told you I can cut the steel bars with my hands. I can cut her out of the vest, including the welds over her shoulders and beneath her groin, they’re all low quality. I’ll be covert, nobody will see it happen. If I’m touching the vest at the right spots, I can continue to generate and pass a current through the metal, so the bomb won’t detonate.”

“Can you halt the timer?” Vicky asked.

“No,” said Shilu. “I don’t have the network access for that.”

“Shit,” Vicky hissed.

Ilyusha snapped, “Some fuckin use you are, reptile!”

Kagami’s voice cut in again. “Four minutes. And yes, the Necromancer’s plan still leaves us with a bomb that detonates the moment we pull the vest off the victim! What then, huh?”

Elpida said, “Kagami is correct. To get the vest off, we’ll have to pull the rods through Sanzhima’s body. You’ll have to let go for that, Shilu. The bomb will go off.”

Shilu said, “I can’t halt the timer, but I can slow down the detonation process. Perhaps for one second. Maybe two. No longer than that.”

Elpida nodded. “I can throw pretty far in one second.”

Vicky let out a huge sigh, rubbing her face with a hand. Ilyusha grimaced and spat on the floor again, tail quivering, red spike-tip going in and out. Ooni bit her lower lip, staring at Sanzhima. Kagami hissed over the radio — “Great, fucking great. One second to pull the whole assemblage free, and then it blows up anyway. This is our best plan, this is what we’ve got? You’re going to yell ‘fire in the hole’ and rely on your award-winning elbow?”

Another voice cut in over comms — Serin. “Coh-mander. I can make it quick. One bullet. She won’t suffer.”

“No, Serin. We can’t fail here.”

“Mercy is often as good as salvation.”

“No,” Elpida repeated. “No more casual acceptance of death. No more allowing this to happen. If the Death’s Heads get what they want here, then I’ve broken my promise. We are going to save this girl. That’s final.”

Sanzhima shook and whined, her eyes crammed shut, tears leaking from beneath the lids, drawing bloody tracks down her cheeks. Her left hand was still cradled in Elpida’s grip.

Elpida glanced up at Pheiri, then at the floor, then at the cage-vest welded shut around Sanzhima’s torso. Her mind worked fast, drawing on the available tools.

Howl hissed in the back of her head: Elps? Elps, what the fuck are you thinking?

It’s the only way.

It’s gonna get you fucking blown up!

It’s not. Nobody will get hurt, not if I get it right. And it’s the only way.

You’re not nobody, Elps! For fuck’s sake! I saved you when you acted like an idiot and let Eseld put a gun to your head, but I can’t save you from the shock wave of an explosion, you stupid fuck! Don’t—

I thought you said Telokopolis abandons nobody, Howl? I’m not letting this girl die. You stood up for that principle a few moments ago. You threatened to fight Persephone for it. Why are you questioning it now?

I’m questioning your fucking sanity! You don’t need to sacrifice—

Elpida spoke over Howl, into her headset: “Pheiri, I need a line on the floor showing the exact limit of your shields. Can you do that for me?”

Up on Pheiri’s hull, floodlights flickered and blinked; a sharp crimson line cut across the floor of the tomb chamber, halfway between Pheiri’s hull and the picket line of drones, about three paces to Elpida’s right.

“Thank you, Pheiri,” she said, then raised her voice. “Everyone else, whatever happens, stay outside that line — outside the shields. That’s our fire pit for the bomb, the shields will protect us. An explosive on this scale is no threat at all to the front of Pheiri’s hull. Sanzhima? Sanzhima, I need you to move two paces to your left. Come on, one, two … well done, that’s it, right there. Good girl, you stay right there.” Elpida repositioned Sanzhima and herself right next to the crimson line on the ground. With one hand she lifted her submachine gun off her shoulders and handed it to Ilyusha. “Illy, hold onto this for me, I can’t risk getting tangled. Shilu, get into position behind Sanzhima and get ready. You’re going to cut from the rear, I’m going to brace from the front, where the payload is. Vicky, Ooni, I need you to hold Sanzhima by the shoulders and arms, firmly enough that she won’t squirm, and—”

Sanzhima opened her eyes, breath hitching in her throat. “N-no,” she croaked. “Please, p-please just shoot me, just—”

“Never,” Elpida said. “Shilu, Vicky, Ooni, in position, now.”

“Three minutes thirty seconds,” said Kagami. “Work fast, all of you! Victoria, move your arse!”

The others got into position. Shilu stepped behind Sanzhima, ready to start cutting the vest; Ooni and Vicky both looked terrified, though Vicky was handling it better. They gingerly took Sanzhima by the arms and shoulders, one on each side, trying to brace her against the inevitable pain.

Sanzhima suddenly whined louder, panting for breath, eyes darting left and right. Was this how the Death’s Heads had held her down when they’d strapped the bomb to her?

“Sanzhima, look at me,” Elpida said, clicking her fingers to get the girl’s attention. “Look at me, look at me, not at them. Look at me! Look at my eyes. There, good girl. Sanzhima, we’re going to get you out of that vest. This is going to hurt, but I promise you, we’re going to get you out. I need you to stay still, as still as you can. Try not to move. Can you be a good girl and stay still for me? I know you can. You can do it. I believe in you.”

Sanzhima screwed her eyes shut, tears running down her face, wheezing a rapid high-pitched whine. She jerked her head — a nod? Good enough.

“Good girl.”

Elpida let go of Sanzhima’s hand, preparing to grab the front of the bomb vest — but Sanzhima groped the empty air, eyes flying wide with panic. Elpida caught her hand again and squeezed it hard.

“D-don’t—” Sanzhima whined. “Don’t l-let go—”

Elpida pressed her lips to the back of Sanzhima’s palm. She tasted blood. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to be right here with you, all the way.”

“ … why?”

“Because you’re a child of Telokopolis too, even if you don’t know it yet.”

Sanzhima’s eyes glassed over. She let out a wet, ragged, bloody sob.

Elpida let go of her hand again and put both of her own on the bomb vest, searching for a good grip. She settled on one hand either side.

Kagami hissed: “Three minutes. Hurry up, Commander! Do not make me scrape you all off the floor!”

Vicky muttered, “Shut up, Kaga. This is stressful enough without you—” Vicky cut off and winced; Kagami must have sent her a private reply.

Elpida raised her voice and spoke quickly. “Listen up! Here’s what’s gonna happen! Shilu is going to cut the bars one by one. On the final bar she’s going to have to hold the vest to maintain the current. Shilu, is that correct?” Elpida received a nod in reply. “Good. When Shilu is done, she’s going to signal to me. Ooni, Vicky, you’re to hold Sanzhima as firmly as you possibly can. We’ll have a count of three, then Shilu lets go, and I pull the vest off. I’m going to throw it to my right, over Pheiri’s shield line. Pheiri will light his shields on three, so they’ll be active to catch the blast. Any questions?”

Ooni and Vicky both shook their heads. Shilu said nothing.

Ilyusha hissed, “Fuuuuuck this. Fuck. Hate it.”

Atyle stepped back and stood next to Hafina; neither of them said anything.

Howl snapped, Yeah, you know what, I’m with our little puppy down there. Elps, you know this is going to blow off your—

I don’t care. How many times, Howl? Failure is not an option. I need you to back me up, right now. I need you on this. I love you, Howl. I need you by my side for this. I—

Fuck you, Elps. Fuckin—

Howl! Elpida felt a dam break. I … I can’t do this alone. I can’t … I can’t fail here. I can’t. I think I might die if I do. I can’t go down into that despair again, like after Eseld. I … I can’t. I need your help. I can’t fail here. I can’t!

Silence.

… Howl?

Howl snorted. I’m always by your side, you know that.

Then back me up.

I am.

“Alright,” Elpida said out loud. “Shilu, ready?”

“On your mark, Telokopolan.”

“Go.”

Behind Sanzhima’s back, Shilu worked quickly — Elpida could not see if she transformed her hands into bladed scissors, but Ooni squeezed her eyes shut at whatever Shilu did, while Victoria stared in muted horror. Shilu sliced through the shoulder-welds first, then the weld beneath Sanzhima’s groin; the whole cage-vest structure sagged forward with the change in weight. Sanzhima gasped as if gut-shot.

“Sanzhima, concentrate on the sound of my voice,” Elpida said. “Just focus on my words. I’ve got you, I’m right in front of you, I’m here with you. This will be over in a few moments, the pain will be over, I promise you we are going to—”

The first metal rod popped free with a soft metallic snick; Sanzhima started to pant, mouth wide, blood trickling from the corner of her lips.

She was Eseld. She was Howl. She was all of Elpida’s sisters, everyone she had ever failed to save.

“Sanzhima? Sanzhima, stay with me. Sanz—”

Elpida’s headset crackled in her ears. “Commander,” said Kagami. “There’s a … a call for you.”

“What?” Elpida snapped. “Explain.”

The second rod came free with a little snick of severed metal. Sanzhima jerked and gasped; Elpida felt her heart spasm.

“Incoming radio signal,” Kagami said, “from the frequency we took from the victim’s pocket. It doesn’t say anything, except that they want to talk to you, personally.”

Ilyusha growled. Vicky sighed and muttered, “Egotistic bastards.” Ooni went wide-eyed with fear, mouthing ‘no no no.’

Shilu cut the third metal bar; Sanzhima flinched and jerked, like dead meat under an electrical current.

Elpida said: “We have their signals jammed, correct?”

“Yes!” Kagami snapped. “Yes, of course we do. They can’t trigger the bomb now, unless one of them is going to run in here and drop-kick you.”

Vicky muttered, “Don’t jinx us, Kaga.”

“Put it through,” Elpida said. “I want them to hear.”

Kagami said, “Hear what?”

Shilu cut the fourth steel crossbar. Sanzhima didn’t even react, just whining for breath as if her throat was clogged with blood.

“My voice,” said Elpida. “The voice of Telokopolis. Put them through.”

Kagami sighed. “Fine. Have fun, Commander. Here it is.”

Elpida’s headset clicked once, then filled with a distant static.

A voice trickled out of the darkness.

“How did you like our little present, ‘Elpida’?” it said, rough and scratchy, raw with damage, dripping with venom. “Did it go off in the middle of a crowd, or did you manage to—”

“Cantrelle,” Elpida said.

The voice was unmistakable. Elpida nodded at Shilu to go ahead and cut the fifth and final crossbar.

“Huh,” Cantrelle grunted. “it really is you. I suppose you survived the blast, then, and—”

“Cantrelle,” Elpida said, staring into Sanzhima’s glassy eyes as Shilu cut the final steel bar. The whole cage-vest assemblage slid forward; Elpida held it in place with her body weight. Sanzhima was insensible, mute and empty, even her tears gone dry. “I need you to understand,” Elpida said. “I am going to deal with you how I should have dealt with the Covenanters.”

“The who? I don’t care about your—”

“I suggest you run and hide,” said Elpida. “Find a very deep, very dark hole, and stay there. Because for this, I am going to hunt you down. That’s all. Kagami, cut the line.”

Elpida’s headset went click-click. Connection terminated.

Ilyusha spat: “Fuckin’ ‘ey!”

Atyle purred, “Noble intentions.”

Vicky nodded. “Well said, Commander. Fuck them. We’ll get them for this shit. We will.”

Ooni said nothing. She’d gone pale as fresh bone.

Elpida said, “Shilu, is that all the bars cut?”

“All five. I’ve got my hands on the connections, providing current. On your mark.”

Elpida tested the cage-vest. The bars slid and raked inside Sanzhima’s torso. Sanzhima wheezed; she had nothing left to give. Elpida said: “Kagami, you’ve got Pheiri’s high-res scans. I need to know for absolute certain these bars are not going to snag on a rib when I pull.”

Kagami snapped: “Yes! Yes, Commander, you’re clear! And you have forty seconds!”

“Elpi!” Vicky almost shouted. “Elpi, we do it now or we don’t do it at all! Come on!”

Ooni had her eyes wide open, lips moving rapidly in a hushed prayer.

Elpida said: “Ooni, Vicky, you hold onto her — and you hold on hard! I need leverage and I need it instantly. This comes free in one pull, you understand? Understand?! Shout it for me, both of you!”

“Yes, Commander!” Ooni almost screamed.

“Do it, Elpi!” Vicky shouted. “We’ve got her!”

Elpida spoke into her headset: “Pheiri, ignite your shields on three. Ready?”

A sharp little acknowledgement ping sounded in Elpida’s ears.

Elpida raised one booted foot and planted it against Sanzhima’s right thigh; if the girl felt the boot, she gave no indication.

“On three.” Elpida glanced rapidly between Ooni and Vicky. “One.” She swallowed, trying not to feel Howl bracing in the back of her mind. “Two.” Elpida’s heart rate spiked — the heritage of Telokopolan genetic engineering, preparing her body for one lightning-fast second of action. She flexed her shoulder muscles, relaxed her arms, and exhaled.

She would not fail.

“Three!”

Elpida pulled on the cage-vest with all her strength. Five severed steel bars slid forward through Sanzhima’s flesh, scraping against broken ribs and ripping past the ragged wounds in her ruptured belly.

Sanzhima threw her head back and screamed. She thrashed and kicked, foaming at the mouth. Ooni screamed with her, but held on tight. Vicky gritted her teeth, eyes winced shut.

The bomb-vest tore free in a fountain of blood and bile and excrement, spraying stinking crimson mess into Elpida’s face. She ignored the burning in her eyes and kept them open — she could not afford even a split-second of distraction. Two steel bars popped free from between Sanzhima’s ribs, slick with blood, vibrating as they burst forth. Two of the three in her belly came out clean — but the third dragged out a loop of intestine as it came, snagged on a coil of Sanzhima’s guts.

Elpida felt the world stop.

She had failed.

She could not throw the vest, not without unravelling Sanzhima’s innards and hurling half the victim after the bomb. All this work had been for nothing. All these children of Telokopolis were about to watch Elpida kill another helpless zombie, watch her fail to render aid, watch her rip out the guts of an innocent—

Ilyusha’s right hand darted across Sanzhima’s belly. Bionic claws slid from black fingertips and severed the loop of intestine.

Sanzhima screamed even louder. But the bomb-vest slid free.

For a split-second, Elpida was paralysed. She had failed. She felt herself sliding down into a pit of despair, like a mouth opening beneath her feet and—

Come on, bitch tits! Don’t get lazy now!

Howl took control of Elpida’s limbs — just a twitch, a jump-start, to get her moving once again.

Elpida let go of the vest with her left hand and hurled it sideways with her right.

Pheiri crash-started his shields right on cue — a shimmering wall of electric blue burst to life two feet from Elpida’s face, an interlocking mail-matrix of hexagons, backed by sheets of hissing energy and a smooth dome-curve of shining white, drowning the shadows in the tomb chamber with blinding light.

Elpida’s arm passed harmlessly through the shields — pre-approved low-velocity penetration — hauling the vest and the explosive payload over the line.

She opened her hand to drop the vest, reeling back to extract her arm before—

The bomb detonated.

Pheiri’s shields absorbed the blast; the explosion flowered right in front of Elpida’s face. A vortex of fire and shrapnel smeared across the concave interior of the shields. Shrapnel pinged and plinked off Pheiri’s front armour. Debris whizzed through the air, sparking and flaring against distant corners of the shield-dome. Larger chunks of metal rained to the floor amid the floating cloud of greasy soot and dark smoke, clang-a-clanging against the tomb’s black surface, tumbling across the ground, spiralling away like iron raindrops.

Elpida felt the pain-blockers flood her bloodstream before the explosion died.

Smoke parted. Soot settled. The blossom folded up.

Elpida’s right forearm was gone. Her elbow was a ragged stump.

The twisted remains of the bomb-vest lay on the floor — a few snatches of blackened steel, splattered with a wide smear of dark blood, several chunks of steaming, charred meat, and a few recognisable fragments of bone.

Pheiri extinguished his shields with a soft thunderclap of collapsing energy. The sound of the hurricane rushed back into the silence, filling Elpida’s ears with a storm of static.

“—mmander! Commander! Respond! You’re bleeding! Elpida! Somebody grab her before she—”

Elps! Elps, fuck! Focus! Elps! I can’t— what are you doing, I can’t take—

Elpida took a step back. Her stump followed, blood trickling to the floor.

She turned away from the remnants of the bomb. Vicky and Ooni were down on the ground, cradling Sanzhima as she bucked and jerked in a spreading pool of her own blood. Ilyusha had her hands over the girl’s belly, trying to stuff her intestines back inside.

Beyond the picket line revenants were rushing forward, the fifty-meter safe distance no longer relevant. Faces whirled, crowding the shadows, dyed darker than crimson.

Somebody grabbed Elpida’s stump. A sudden, sharp burning sensation overpowered the pain. She jerked back, away from — Shilu?

Shilu held up one hand, rapidly fading from red-hot back to the light brown of her human disguise.

“Cauterization,” said Shilu. “Telokopolan? Are you there?”

Elpida looked down at her stump. It was no longer bleeding; the flesh was blackened and charred, the wound sealed with heat. The pain was closer now — it made her break out in a sheen of cold sweat, made her stomach clench and her ribs creak. But Telokopolan painblockers did their work. She was coherent enough.

Elps! Howl snapped. You’re … fuck, this isn’t shock, you haven’t lost enough blood for that. And I can’t take over! What are you—

Victory gave Elpida all the strength she needed.

The others were still shouting at her — Kagami over the comms, Howl inside her head, the others down on the ground. But Elpida knew what she needed to do.

Elpida turned back around and stepped toward the steaming remains of her own right forearm. She almost fell over, stumbling and staggering; had she taken more damage than she realised?

“—for fuck’s sake!” a voice howled in her ear. “Howl?! Howl, are you in there? Stop her! Haf, Haf, grab her before she faceplants on—”

Hafina came for her, but Elpida ducked and weaved. Even seriously wounded, an Artificial Human was no match for a Telokopolan pilot. She slipped around Haf’s six arms, went down on one knee, and scooped up a chunk of blackened meat from amid the debris of the bomb. Elpida lurched back to her feet and turned around, then walked the few paces to where Sanzhima still lay.

She held up the bleeding nugget of her own burned and blasted arm. She showed it to the crowd beyond the picket line.

“Meat!” she roared to the onlookers. “My meat! All of you, understand this! What I did here, Telokopolis does for all of you! No one is left outside, nobody is abandoned! Those who send weapons like this against us, they have nothing, nothing which can truly touch us! Telokopolis cannot be killed, not in any way that truly matters!”

Elpida fell to her knees beside Sanzhima. The girl was insensible behind a mask of agony.

“Look at me,” Elpida croaked. Hands were trying to grab at her shoulders and pull her up, but they had no strength compared to victory and vindication. “Look at me, sister— I mean, Sanzhima. Sanzhima. Look at me.”

Sanzhima made eye contact. Elpida reached out with the gobbet of her own charred flesh, and pressed it past Sanzhima’s lips.

A cheer went up — a wild howling from the crowd of the undead.

Or maybe that was the blood pounding in Elpida’s ears.

She looked down at her left hand.

It was shaking.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Undead flesh is not immune to explosions. But Telokopolis is.

Sadly, Elpida’s flesh is not of Telokopolis.

Well well well! There we go! Arc 12 goes out with a bang, quite literally, at the end of Elpida’s arm. Is this a victory, a success, a proof of her words? Or is this something more ambiguous, the beginning of a longer process? Whichever it is, she’s saved a zombie, lost an arm, and gotten the shakes. And yes, this is the last chapter of arc 12! This arc didn’t end up quite as long as I expected, coming in a bit shorter than the projected 15 chapters, but hey, I’m rarely the one in charge anymore! Arc 13 is up next, without an interlude, and that’s gonna be … maybe about the same length? Maybe a bit shorter? There’s plenty of things to hunt, down there in the deep places of the tomb. Off we go …

Also! I have more fanart, fresh from the discord server! First up is this doodle of a bunch of zombies out there in the wastes, along with their … transport(???), and second is this two-page comic of some original characters getting into trouble (both pieces are by the very talented sporktown heroine!) I am delighted almost beyond words to see readers making their own original characters in the setting; it is one of the greatest possible compliments of the world I’ve created with Necroepilogos! Thank you so much!

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 6k words. Behind the scenes I am still very much trying to build up some kind of a backlog of chapters, and when I do, I hope to share more advance chapters with patrons!

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

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for reading my little story, and having so much fun with Necroepilogos. I couldn’t do it without all of you! Neither could Elpida. Here in this second major movement of the narrative, things are really getting underway now. I’ll see you next chapter! Until then!

Content Warnings

Suicidal ideation (MAJOR)
Suicide bombing
Torture
Gore

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Sanzhima was in agony. She wanted it to end.

By the time she dragged herself into the tomb chamber full of revenants, she could barely walk. The pain was a flood, drowning everything but itself, scouring her insides raw and hollow. Every lurching step and wheezing breath chafed her naked skin against the cage-vest of bare metal, welded shut around her shoulders and groin. Every wince and flinch harrowed her with the metal rods which skewered her body — creaking against her broken ribs, scraping the ruptured tissues of her belly, grinding against her intestines with a squeaking, rubbery, slick sensation. She wanted to pull herself open, just to make it stop.

The right side of her face was covered with bruises, still blossoming into the fullness of their throbbing torment. Her right eye was half-blind, her vision mashed and blurry. Her scalp stung from where she’d tried to escape, leaving behind clumps of hair in armoured fists. Her lips and nose and left eye were sticky with dried blood, rat-tails of hair stuck to her face. Her right hand hurt so much it had gone numb, a dead limb stitched to a lump of metal. The coat in which she had been wrapped was glued to her back. She’d left a trail of crimson in her wake.

The Death’s Heads had used her body as a canvas of torture. Sanzhima wished they’d simply killed her — or eaten her alive. Simple cannibalism would have been less cruel and insane than this.

Sanzhima had tried to shoot herself, with the pistol her tormentors had pressed into her hand. But the gun had gone click click click. No bullets, no way out. The Death’s Heads had roared with laughter.

The giant in grey power armour had repeated her instructions, then gently turned Sanzhima around and nudged her toward the tomb chamber.

Sanzhima was no fool. She’d never seen a bomb before — neither in her twenty-seven years of biological life, as game warden and wildlife expert, nor across the dozen screaming resurrections in this cannibal madness at the end of time. But she knew what the Death’s Heads were using her for, she knew what they had strapped to her body and concealed beneath a high-quality tomb-coat. They had turned her into a murder weapon, to assault other hell-bound undead, the few who had found the courage to venture into that dark, echoing, blood-lit chamber, where the monsters from inside the big bone-white tank were handing out ‘free meat’.

The more things change the more they stay the same; that was what Sanzhima told herself, as she lurched through the darkness. The biosphere is dead, everyone’s a fucking zombie, but people still find reasons to blow each other up. Typical human beings. Animals don’t do this kind of shit to each other. Animals are less inhuman than the humans.

Sanzhima had heard others shouting about the free meat, but she had decided it was nonsense, some kind of trick, another undead obscenity in a world of undead obscenities; besides, she had found it difficult to care. She had lost Tsering and Kirke in the chaotic running battle outside the tomb, the desperate rush to outrun the hurricane. Her companions of the past few months were lost to her, probably torn apart by the storm and the hail, or drowned by the floods. The only companions she had ever found in this roiling grey-goo afterlife, the only other people she’d touched in what felt like years, and they were gone, just like that. She hadn’t seen much point in carrying on, so she had crammed herself into a dark corner to cry bitter tears, until either the storm passed or the tomb was crushed or somebody killed her and ate her. She didn’t care which. Any end was an end.

But then the Death’s Heads had found her, lured her out with a bit of meat, and imposed a new purpose upon her body.

She had considered lying down to die; she would bleed out sooner or later. But the Death’s Heads had forced handfuls of meat down her throat, jabbing at her wounds until she swallowed. Her belly was full enough to give her quite a nanomachine buffer, to keep her alive and in agony for many hours yet. Death would take a day or more.

Pain drove her to impossible hope — what if the Death’s Heads weren’t lying? What if the revenants in the tank really could help her?

Or perhaps the horde of zombies would tear her apart, or somebody would shoot her dead, or set off the bomb. At least then the pain would end.

Sanzhima had limped and stumbled down the lightless corridors of the tomb, careening from one wall to another, panting between clenched teeth, leaving a trail of blood in her wake. She followed the scent of raw meat and the murmur of talking and eating, just about audible over the omnipresent static haze of the storm outdoors. Eventually she burst into the echoing vault of the tomb chamber and plunged into a sea of blood-red illumination, flanked by dozens of twinkling eyes and wide mouths streaked with gore.

She reeled away from the corridor, weaving between the huddled groups of zombies. Faces looked up at her, hungry and bloody and full of teeth. Sanzhima was in too much pain to feel any fear. She stared back into the most inhuman and modified of the whirling visages, daring them to rip her open and end this torment. Dark crimson light poured down from the great bone-white armoured vehicle which occupied the rear of the chamber. Sanzhima staggered to a halt, staring up at the machine. She’d glimpsed it a couple of times over the last few weeks — a distant hump of gnarled and pitted bone, covered with high-tech weapon systems and rocket batteries and directed-energy shielding, pushing its way through the corpse-city like an osseous tumour embedded in desiccated flesh. She’d thought of the machine as a ‘tank’ — just a larger and more boxy variation on the sleek carbon-mail fighting vehicles of her own time, simply lacking hover plates and any concession to proper aesthetics. A big ugly beast, covered in guns.

But up close, maddened by pain, with one eye clouded by blood and blur, Sanzhima felt as if she stood at the skirts of some star-spun god-thing.

She had not felt such a sensation since true life, since looking up at the Primorsky mountain range as a child, or the heady wonder of climbing Belukha Peak. Her pain momentarily ebbed away, routed by awe.

This was no tank — it was a temple, encrusted with living bone, like the skull of some fantastic creature from the depths of the oceans, or the herald of alien life from far beyond the solar system. Perhaps it was. Perhaps this armoured god-thing stood outside the madness and the cannibalism and the cycle of death.

Sanzhima stared up into that scarlet light. She tried to say, “Help” — but she could produce only a cracked whisper.

She gathered all her remaining strength and staggered forward a few more paces, toward a thin band of half-naked zombies sitting and sprawling and squatting on the ground, before a line of combat drones — boxy dark shapes bristling with weapons, winking with little crimson running lights. Some of the revenants began to stand up, or shuffle back, or draw weapons. One or two called soft words to her, drowned out by the storm of blood pounding in her ears.

“H-help,” Sanzhima croaked. Metal scraped against her ribs. “ … help … They told me come here f-for help, for … help—”

A clean glimmer flashed high up on the tank’s forward armour — the glint of a rifle scope.

Sanzhima closed her eyes and shuddered with relief. The pain would be over in a moment. She whispered a final farewell to Tsering and Kirke; perhaps she would meet them again, a thousand years from now in—

A voice boomed from the tank, crackling with the squeaky backwash of external speakers.

“You!” it roared. “The zombie who just walked in! Stop, stop right where you are! Stop right there or we will open fire on you! Do not fucking test us!”

Sanzhima opened her eyes again, blinded by tears. All around her other zombies were jumping to their feet and scrambling away. A ring of bright red light had blossomed around Sanzhima’s feet, projected from somewhere high up on the tank, marking her out from the crowd.

“N-no,” she wheezed, staggering forward another few steps. “P-please, shoot—”

A second voice rang out across the chamber — not from speakers, but out on top of the tank.

“Come on, don’t do it!” the voice screamed. “Don’t make us shoot you! Just stop, please, please stop! And we— we can help you! We can! She can! The Commander can save anybody! It doesn’t matter what they did to you! She can make you clean again!”

That second voice was so desperate and earnest. Sanzhima lurched to a halt.

“Please … ” she whined. “Please.”

Other zombies were scrambling back, drawing weapons, swapping hisses of alarm, and dragging half-eaten corpses after themselves. Mutters passed through the retreating crowd — low voices questioning who or what she was, snapping warnings about “cyborg mimics” and “Necromancer bullshit”, and what hidden secrets may have been exhumed from the depths of the tomb. The only group not fleeing was about twenty feet to Sanzhima’s right; they were levelling heavy weaponry at her. She stared at the contact-point explosive-tip of an anti-armour rocket, pointed right at her face.

“J-just,” she whined. “Just do it—”

The booming voice rang out from the speakers again: “And the rest of you down there, if any of you open fire, Pheiri will respond in kind! Understand?! Anybody starts shooting, you will be a smoking hole in the fucking ground! Persephone, that means you and your girls! Weapons down, or by Luna’s blessed soil we will put you down! I don’t care if you’re from the core of fucking Jupiter, I will turn you into paste!”

The leader of the group with the heavy weapons — ‘Persephone’ — looked upward, toward the tank. She was a true cyborg terror, eight feet of shining chrome and smooth bio-polymers, with a face cast in blue and black like a ghost from between the stars, wearing a halo of golden hair.

She shouted in a buzzing machine-voice: “What is happening? Elpida! Answer me! Your response will address me as—”

“Weapons down!” the booming voice shouted over her. “Now!”

Sanzhima swayed where she stood, ten feet from one of the darkly twinkling drones. Blood pooled at her feet, dripping from beneath the coat. The crimson light from the tank — Pheiri? — dyed her blood almost black. Persephone must have lowered her weapons, because the chamber did not explode into violence and gunfire.

Moments later, five revenants came trotting past the front of the tank, behind the picket-line of drones.

One of them was extremely tall, dressed in shimmering armour which blended in with the crimson shadows and half-light of the chamber; she held a small arsenal of guns in six long arms. Three others were unremarkable — two of them unarmed, one a mid-grade cyborg carrying a ballistic shield, her bionic tail lashing at the air.

Their leader strode at the front of the group, long white hair swaying with an easy, rolling gait, one hand on a submachine gun at her waist, eyes fixed on Sanzhima.

Persephone shouted again as the group passed. “Elpida! We demand to know—”

“You’ll know in a moment,” said ‘Elpida’, without breaking her stride. “Get your people back.”

Elpida and her companions halted opposite Sanzhima, on the far side of the drone-line, framed by the bone-white bulk of the tank. The tall one in lots of armour didn’t seem to be looking anywhere in particular, but the other three and Elpida herself all stared at Sanzhima. The petite cyborg was trying to cover Elpida with the ballistic shield. The other two, both unarmed, both in tomb-grown coats, seemed oddly unconcerned.

Through Sanzhima’s blurry, bloody, pain-wracked vision, she realised they were all wearing a symbol — a pair of lines haloed by a crescent, daubed in green.

Mountains against dawnrise. Battered hope flickered in Sanzhima’s chest.

Elpida muttered something into a headset microphone.

The booming voice spoke from the tank’s speakers again: “The zombie who just walked into the chamber is wearing a bomb vest. We strongly — very fucking strongly! — suggest you all wind your necks in as far as you can get! Fifty meters, ladies, fifty meters! Get moving!”

Up on the tank, the blood-red lights flashed and shifted. Sanzhima saw a red line flicker to life in her peripheral vision — minimum safe distance, presumably fifty meters to her rear. The crowd of revenants scrambled back, hissing, shouting, jeering. Sanzhima saw some of them start to peel away to leave the chamber entirely.

The group to her right, led by the big cyborg, Persephone, stayed right where they were. One of that group shouted, “Fifty meters? Not much of a bomb, is it?”

Sanzhima closed her eyes again, shaking with relief, prepared for the bullet. Once they had the others cleared out, they would put a round in her and—

A voice cut through her pain, calling cool and clear as cold water.

“Open your eyes and look at me, please.”

Sanzhima opened her eyes.

Elpida — still on the far side of the picket line — had one hand raised to catch Sanzhima’s attention.

“Can you hear me?” Elpida called. “If you can’t speak, nod for yes.”

Sanzhima wheezed, trying to comprehend through the pain. She nodded. “Y-yes … ”

“Good. My name is Elpida, these are my comrades. What’s your name?”

Sanzhima blinked. Thinking was almost impossible. When she’d been limping and lurching toward the chamber, the pain had dribbled out behind her; but now, standing in one spot, the pain was pooling inside her, overflowing through the wounds in her belly and chest, bubbling up her throat to drown her brain. What did her name matter now? She was dead, she would be chunks of steaming meat in a moment, why did this zombie want—

“What’s your name?” Elpida repeated. “Give me your name, please.”

“ … S-Sanzhima … Tyumed … ”

“Alright, Sanzhima,” Elpida called. “The first thing I need you to do is drop that pistol. Throw it ahead of you, slide it along the floor.”

“ … can’t … ”

Sanzhima raised her right hand, to show why she could not let go of the gun.

The drone directly ahead of her squawked with the same reedy voice that had boomed out from the tank: “Throw the gun away, you moronic—”

The voice cut off.

Blood slid down Sanzhima’s hand and wrist. The meat of her palm was bound to the pistol’s grip with a length of wire, metal knots rammed between her metacarpals and wrapped around the weapon.

A moment of silence was filled with the furious static of the storm.

Elpida called out again: “Alright, forget the gun. I’m gonna need you to take off that coat, get on your knees, and put your hands in the air. Do you understand?”

Sanzhima shook her head. She’d been following along so far because Elpida’s voice was so reassuring, the kind of voice you just wanted to obey, the kind of voice which would make everything right again. Elpida’s voice was like listening to the rustle of trees in the forests, or the gentle winds coming down a mountain, or the distant murmur of deer; Sanzhima knew this was delusion, brought on by pain. But now she realised that Elpida wasn’t going to shoot her.

“No,” she wheezed. “N-no, just … ”

“We can help you,” Elpida called. “But you have to help us. If you can’t get the coat off, at least open it up, show us the bomb. If you can’t drop to your knees, just put your hands—”

“Shoot me,” Sanzhima croaked. “Shoot me!” Louder: “Shoot me!”

She stumbled toward the picket line of drones, toward the revenants, toward Elpida, trying to wave the gun. Several of the nearest drones twitched around, taking aim at her with their on-board weaponry. The little cyborg at Elpida’s side hissed a warning and produced a shotgun from behind her ballistic shield. The big revenant in armour suddenly swung her guns down to cover Sanzhima. High up on the tank, somebody shifted their position. A weapon went ca-clunk.

“Please!” Sanzhima wailed. “Just shoot—”

Elpida’s voice whipped the air. “Look at me! Sanzhima, look at me!”

Sanzhima halted. Purple eyes burned in the crimson shadows.

Elpida said: “I will clear this whole chamber and withdraw, rather than shoot you. Do you understand?”

Sanzhima closed her eyes and began to weep. The pain was too much. She shook all over, barely able to stay on her feet. She felt metal grinding inside her chest and belly with every sob. She would never get it out, never be rid of that sensation.

“Sanzhima, stay right there. I need you to listen to my voice and follow my instructions. You can keep your eyes shut if you want. It’s just you and me in here, Sanzhima. Nothing else matters. Just you and me. Just listen to my voice. I need you to take the coat off. Can you do that for me? Nod for yes— okay, good girl. That’s it, just move your arm away from your belly. Good, now lift the arm from the sleeve. Well done, you’re doing great. We’re going to get you out of this. Roll that shoulder back, let the coat fall from your shoulder. Good girl, you’re halfway there. Now raise your left arm, reach back, and tug the coat to your right. Sanzhima? Can you still hear me?”

Sobbing, shivering, shaking apart, Sanzhima did as Elpida ordered. Elpida’s voice was so easy to follow. Obeying her instructions made everything so simple, even through the pain.

But the last instruction was impossible. The tomb-coat was stuck to Sanzhima’s back, adhered to her naked skin with a thick layer of half-dried blood. She stood there for a long moment, quivering and crying, until eventually the weight of the armoured fabric dragged the coat downward, peeling it away with wet rasp. The coat snagged on the gun stitched to her right hand, then finally slithered to the floor.

Sanzhima stood naked, except for the bomb. Barefoot, covered in blood, shaking like a leaf. Dark, dank, dripping air caressed the fresh blood on her torn flesh, and slipped fingers of ice into the wounds on her belly and chest, chilling her deeper than any living biology could feel.

Behind her, a murmur passed through the crowd of zombies. A few shouts and snarls echoed off the ceiling. Somebody else started crying. A wail went up.

Elpida kept talking: “There you go, good girl. Well done, you’re doing great. Keep breathing, keep listening to my voice. I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere.”

Sanzhima nodded, eyes screwed shut against the pain and the indignity.

“I need you to open your eyes for me, Sanzhima. Can you do that?”

Sanzhima opened her eyes. She could barely see, vision blurred by tears, dyed red in the bloody backwash from the tank. Her body was a ruin wrapped in jagged metal, a darker smear of crimson amid the bloody shadows.

Elpida was a beacon of white hair on the far side of the drones. She said, “Sanzhima, I need you to raise your hands. Up, up, that’s it. Outward, away from the vest. That’s it. Hold them there. Stay as still as you can, don’t move. We’re going to approach you now.”

Keeping her hands raised was another pain, another tally on the list of tortures. The weight of the pistol tugged at the flesh of her palm, but Sanzhima tightened her grip. For that angelic voice, she would try her best.

Two of the drones in the picket line moved aside and floated forward, as if adjusting to engulf Sanzhima. Elpida strode through the breach. The little cyborg scurried along at her side, ballistic shield raised, chunky tail standing straight up. The two unarmed revenants came behind. The giant with lots of guns followed last, then stood astride the break in the picket line, as if holding the rear.

Elpida stopped about two meters from Sanzhima. She was so tall, muscled lithe and tight like a gene-modded soldier. The little cyborg glared and grimaced, eyes running up and down Sanzhima’s body, bionic tail quivering. One of the unarmed revenants — the shorter one — stopped by Elpida’s side; up close, something about that revenant’s dead-eyed look gave Sanzhima a feeling of creeping dread, even over the pain. She did not wish to be naked and vulnerable before those eyes.

Elpida said: “Sanzhima, we’re going to get you out of this. The bomb has a timer, but it’s not been activated. We’re going to figure out how to cut you free.”

Sanzhima just shook her head, wheezing and speechless with pain.

The other unarmed revenant was tall and confident, topless beneath her tomb coat. She strode around Sanzhima’s side to peer at her back.

“Atyle?” said Elpida. “Talk to me.”

‘Atyle’ said: “The Moon Princess is correct. Words are written on her skin. I quote the foulness, it is not my own — ‘The fate of all degenerates.’”

Elpida did not look away from Sanzhima. “The Death’s Heads did this to you, didn’t they?”

The little cyborg snapped, “Fuck. Fuck! Snatched her? Fuuuuuck!”

“Probably,” Elpida said. “I would almost respect them if they sent one of their own. But they don’t have that in them. Illy, check the coat.”

The scorpion-like cyborg — ‘Illy’ — darted forward, shotgun trained on Sanzhima’s face, ballistic shield angled to catch the blast if the bomb detonated. She grabbed the armoured coat with one clawed foot, dragged it away, then scurried back to cover Elpida again. She rummaged through the pockets, produced a scrap of crumpled paper, sneered with disgust, then held it out to Elpida.

“Radio frequency,” Elpida said, speaking into her headset mic. “Kaga, you listening?” Elpida rattled off a sequence of numbers. “Get to work on breaking that, but don’t contact them, don’t let them know we have it. Contact might be their signal to detonate.”

Atyle stepped back and peered at Sanzhima with a high-grade bionic eye, peat-green in the darkness. “An offering,” she said. “Incinerated on the altar of violence. Ready for the maw of the gods.”

The other unarmed one, with the dead eyes and the too-clean skin, said: “Terror tactics. She’s been turned into a weapon.”

Atyle said, “Incredible that she has not been bled white getting here.”

The other one replied, “Her nanomachine load has a transitory boost. She’s digesting a lot of meat. They force-fed her, to keep her on her feet.”

Illy sneered and spat, tail-spike jerking in and out.

Elpida said, “Shilu, Atyle, hold your observations for now.” Then she spoke into her headset: “Kaga, are you certain there’s no— okay, yes, understood.” She looked at the others. “We’re in the clear, Kaga’s jamming any incoming signals, and the detonator isn’t—”

“P-please … ” Sanzhima murmured. “Please, just shoot me, please … i-it hurts so—”

Elpida stepped forward, grabbed Sanzhima by the chin, and forced her to look directly into those glowing purple eyes.

“I’m not going to let you die this kind of death. Understand? I am going to cut you out of that vest. Now—”

Elpida flinched. So did Illy and Atyle. ‘Shilu’ just blinked. The six-armed revenant in the rear twitched once, as if she’d spotted a target and then reconsidered.

“Fuck! Fucking shit!” Illy shouted.

“Ahhhh,” purred Atyle. “The stinger beneath the lid.”

“They must be observing from a distance,” said Shilu. “It’s what I would do.”

“Kaga—” Elpida said, raising a hand to her headset. “Okay. Okay. Yes! Well done, thank you. Understood. How long do we have? Alright, that’s plenty.” Elpida met Sanzhima’s eyes again; suddenly she seemed a little less in control. “The people who put that vest on you just sent a remote detonation signal. We jammed it, but they set up a fail-safe timer. We have seven minutes to get you out of that vest. Do exactly as I say. Do you understand?”

Sanzhima closed her eyes and started to cry. “Shoot me, please. Please. Please!”

Shilu said, “We cannot afford it, Telokopolan. Not with so many eyes on you.”

Illy spat, “Yeah, no shit!”

Elpida said: “Kagami, talk to me, what am I looking at here? I see a detonator on the front and a lot of wires. There’s four distinct packs of explosive attached to this metal vest. Five bars of metal going through her body, two in the chest, three in the abdomen. Atyle, do those connect to the back?”

“They do, Commander. The cage is seamless.”

Shilu spoke. “The wiring is very high quality. All the lines would need to be severed at once to avert a detonation. This is expert work.”

Illy growled, “Fucking reptile shit. Fuck, fuck!”

“Illy, focus,” said Elpida. “Kagami, you too, stop muttering in my ear. We need ideas and we need them quickly. We need to cut through the metal supports on the vest itself and pull the whole thing off her. Those bars are almost an inch thick. What do we have in the way of cutting tools?”

Sanzhima didn’t care anymore. She just wanted the pain to end. She wanted Elpida to put the muzzle of her submachine gun to Sanzhima’s forehead and end this. Perhaps if she jumped for one of them, or lowered her hands to the box of wires on the front of the vest, they would all just shoot her and let her die already.

But in the back of her mind, Sanzhima was already elsewhere. The pain had washed everything else away and turned her into a lightning rod for her own thin and watery memories, sending her back to places she had not been able to fully picture in years. She was hiking up a mountainside, fresh snow crunching beneath her boots, a hiking pole in each hand, snow goggles pressing into her face. When she turned and looked over her shoulder, she would see the dark green forest stretched out for mile after mile, and the glimmer of the Baikal Rift on the horizon, diamond-clear waters flowing for thousands of miles in a dark blue ribbon all the way to the Arctic. Her hike was almost over, she had almost reached the peak. The overhead monorail lines would fly her back to the Irkutsk Arcology-Sprawl in a matter of minutes, after the long, gruelling hours of hauling herself upward through freezing temperatures, all alone, with only the radio for company. A familiar challenge, a familiar victory, a routine she had kept since she’d been a teenager old enough to take this route all by herself. She travelled light, without even a tent or a sleeping bag, for this would be over in a single day.

But she did not turn and look back; she kept her eyes focused on the dark peak, denuded of snow, which made no sense. When she reached the summit, she was not going to call a rail car. She was going to keep going, over the top and down the other side, into darkness and shadow, to lose herself beyond.

She was going to give up, by carrying on to the place she should have gone all along.

Out in the wavering veil of reality, the revenant called Shilu spoke very softly: “Telokopolan. Elpida. I can cut the metal with my hands. I can be covert.”

“Alright, Shilu,” said Elpida. “Get behind—”

A shout cut in from Sanzhima’s right — a buzzing machine-voice, the tall cyborg called Persephone.

“Elpida! This one is wounded beyond help! One slip and your people will be paste. This is foolish, ‘Commander’. I am not impressed. Charity is one thing, insanity is another. Stand back if you cannot do it yourself. Let me. She will go quick, if it bothers you so much.”

Sanzhima opened her eyes, shuddering behind a torrent of tears, and looked toward the metal-clad cyborg. “P-please, yes, please just—”

Elpida whirled toward Persephone, face twisting with a wild-eyed grin, as if another person was looking out from inside her skull.

“You accepted our meat, you giant metal cunt!” Elpida shouted, pointing right at Persephone with her submachine gun. “Right now, you’re in Telokopolis. You’re on my ground, bitch, my home, my turf. And so is she!” Elpida reached out and grabbed Sanzhima’s face. “Nobody gets left outside, understand?! No matter how hopeless! If you can’t get that into your head, you can fuck off and eat rocks!”

Persephone’s girls shifted, hefting their heavy weapons, eyeing Elpida’s group with frozen eyes. The big zombie with the shimmering armour openly turned her guns toward Persephone. The line of drones adjusted, acquiring targets, pulling into a combat formation. Illy thumped her shield with her shotgun and hooted at the top of her lungs. Up on the tank, a tiny figure stood up and levelled some kind of launcher.

The tank itself flickered those blood-red lights, throwing a ring of crimson down upon Persephone and her zombies.

“Well!?” Elpida yelled. “Yes or no, bitch? Wanna fucking step up, or step down? Try me!”

Sanzhima prayed for gunfire.

Persephone tilted her golden-haloed head to one side, smiled the thinnest of bionic smiles, and made a lowering gesture with one hand. Her girls stood down, though they didn’t look happy about it.

“Be my guest,” she buzzed.

Elpida blinked three times; the rage-filled grin left her face as if it had never been there. She turned back to Sanzhima and let go of her chin.

“Shilu, get behind her,” Elpida said. “I’ll hold the front. Snip them as fast as you can, count them off. When they’re clear, I’ll grab the vest, you grab her shoulders.” Shilu stepped away from Elpida’s side; despite the pain, Sanzhima’s skin crawled at the proximity of that dead-eyed revenant. But Elpida kept talking: “Sanzhima. Sanzhima, look at me. This is going to hurt you, it’s probably going to hurt a lot, but once we’ve cut—”

Elpida halted, eyes going to the side, listening to a sudden tinny voice from her headset. The others halted too, even Shilu, the only one not wearing a headset.

“Fuck!” Illy snapped.

“Ooni,” Elpida said. “Ooni, slow down. Repeat that.” A pause. “Are you certain? Okay, then get down here, show me. Vicky, escort her. Both of you get down here as fast as you can. Go, now.”

Elpida made a chopping gesture at Shilu and shook her head. Plan aborted.

“Telokopolan?” Shilu said.

“Ooni says she knows who designed this bomb. She says the crossbars through the victim’s body are a trap. It’ll detonate if we cut them. The whole thing is meant to present us with a no-win situation.” Elpida turned her burning purple eyes and met Sanzhima’s gaze again. “But I refuse to accept that. There’s no such thing as a no-win situation.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

If there’s anybody who can get Sanzhima out of this, it’s Elpida. Right? She better pray our Telokopolan supersoldier can think fast.

Well! This one was incredibly dark, possibly the most harrowing chapter I’ve written so far. It felt like quite a gamble, writing this from the POV of the victim herself, but Sanzhima surprised me. She rose to the challenge, and she’s certainly made me hope that she survives the next 6k~ words. That’s all down to Elpida and her crew now though. Good luck, zombie. You’re gonna need it.

No Patreon link this week! It’s the last chapter of the month, and also the last day of the month! I never like to risk double-charging anybody. If you really did want to subscribe right away, feel free to wait until tomorrow! And, as usual, just a quick reminder that Necroepilogos is on the regularly scheduled break next week, so I will see you again two weeks from now!

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

And thank you for reading my little story, dear readers. I know, I say this every chapter, but it’s true! I couldn’t do this without all of you. Elpida would never have been resurrected without an audience. And! And and and! Happy Halloween! How fitting, to publish a chapter of a story about zombie girls, on the spookiest day of the year. Hope you enjoyed it! Seeya all next chapter!

Content Warnings

Discussion of eugenics and genocide
Suicide bombing

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Pheiri’s control cockpit left much to be desired — too many hard edges and sharp corners, not enough foam cushion left on the metal crew seats, and the seats themselves creaked with every little adjustment of one’s body; half the screens and displays were awkward bespoke resolutions, while half the rest were impossible to adjust, reflecting the inside of the biomechanoid tank’s base-8 mind, rather than anything useful to his crew. Most of the manual consoles and human interface surfaces were practically useless, despite the incessant humming and clicking and buzzing of microprocessors and memory banks and the endless strata of integrated circuitry. Their original intended functions had long ago been assumed by Pheiri himself, now inaccessible even at the software level — not that software access was remotely feasible either, not without passing out in a pool of one’s own blood-laced vomit. Wading through the soup of Pheiri’s base-8 peripheral-code was enough to give even the most skilled of Logicians a blinding migraine, aggravated by the flickering and jerking of dozens of screens, nauseated by the omnipresent sickly green glow of scrolling text.

The control cockpit was a sad substitute for the dreamy disconnection of a sensory suspension tank, nestled in the heart of Tycho City, seeded beneath blessed silver soil, guarded by all Luna’s imperishable might.

But it was the closest thing Kagami could get.

At least she was warm, dry, and safe. Nobody was bothering her with stupid questions, nor asking her to pilot a drone face-first into nine-hundred-mile-an-hour hurricane winds. Several feet of armour and an arsenal of big guns stood between Kagami and the zombie horde outside, enjoying their hideous cannibal repast in the tomb chamber. Kagami acknowledged that those thoughts made her a hypocrite — she was a cannibal ghoul as well, her own biology just as dependent on a steady diet of reanimated human flesh. But at least she didn’t rip bloody muscle off the bone with her bare hands and stuff it into her mouth, crimson streaks running down her chin and staining her clothes, gibbering and snorting like an animal. Some of the worst-off ‘zombies’ out there made themselves entirely worthy of the silly anachronistic name — gorging themselves on flesh like the feverish, starving monsters they were. Kagami had no idea how the Commander and Victoria and the others could sit up there on the outer hull, having a polite conversation about political theory, with all that gnawing and cracking going on sixteen feet below. Not to even mention the bristling forest of weaponry down there.

Actually, that was a lie. Kagami knew exactly how the Commander and Vicky endured it: insanity. The Commander was a madwoman. Victoria — whipped dog that she was — would follow any orders from Elpida, no matter how unhinged or unwise. Go out into the tomb again! Carry a grenade launcher! Interrogate a Necromancer! Hand out corpses and fresh meat like we’re serving up an all-you-can-eat charity buffet!

None of that for Kagami, not anymore. The next time Elpida requested she drag herself out into the tomb to expose herself to danger, Kagami was going to use one of her drones to slap the Commander across the face. She was wasted out there, anyway. This was the kind of place Kagami belonged — commanding her drones, orchestrating forces, protecting her squishy, vulnerable, moronic human agents, far away from any bullets and bombs and sharp teeth.

At least in here Kagami could watch the backs of those too stupid to watch their own. The Commander might be insane, but she’d seen them through this so far. Victoria might be infuriating and borderline unfaithful, but the idea of her being out there unprotected made Kagami feel—

“Humph,” Kagami grunted.

She adjusted her body weight in the chair again; the metal creaked beneath her weight. Her hips ached where her bionic legs attached to her flesh. Pheiri’s screens flickered before her, cycling steadily between dozens of exterior views of the tomb chamber, augmenting the drone-feeds and data-streams in Kagami’s peripheral vision.

Yes, this was the place she could do the most good, providing overwatch for Elpida’s bravado and Victoria’s naivety.

Besides, Kagami rather liked Pheiri.

Base-8 mind, impenetrable software layers, and a tendency for cheek and sarcasm which Kagami wasn’t sure the others always picked up on, mostly because it was delivered in his impudent ‘y/n’ style, all green text and implication. But all of that was forgiveable and acceptable — perhaps even laudable from one of Pheiri’s complexity and skill, on the same level as Kagami herself. And because right now he was assisting Kagami with the drone-command processing load.

He had allowed Kagami to plug herself in.

Kagami was sat near the front of Pheiri’s cockpit, where the space narrowed into tighter confines and a dozen screens stood within arm’s reach — the closest she could get to the feeling of sim-space immersion. Her left arm lay limp in her lap, coat peeled back and sleeve rolled up, exposing the greenish-blue glow of circuitry beneath her skin, all the way to her elbow. Her pair of data-uplink cables were unspooled from the socket in her wrist, looping across her thighs in coils of thick black bio-plastic, still slick with the colourless internal lubrication from inside her flesh; their opposite ends were joined to a pair of universal-connection sockets deep within the jumbled mess of Pheiri’s consoles and computers. Kagami had used one of her six gravitic drones to root around for the sockets. Even for Pheiri she wasn’t about to go crawling around on her hands and knees.

Extending the data-uplink cables had hurt. Yanking the lines from her flesh was like pulling on her own veins; she’d felt the cables sliding against her innards all the way up inside her shoulder. But peripheral load-sharing with Pheiri’s systems allowed her to supervise that picket-line of heavy drones out in the chamber, without chucking her guts up every five minutes, or curling up into a ball with her eyes crammed shut and her ears stuffed with cloth. Her own high-density connection processor was not enough to manage the entire picket line, not alone, not with the level of attention necessitated by the zombie horde out there.

With Pheiri’s help, the nausea was reduced to background queasiness, the pain in her arm was a distant tingle, and the bodily exposure of her unspooled lines was at least not an embarrassing vulnerability.

Between her drone-feeds and Pheiri’s own external cameras, Kagami enjoyed near-complete vision of the tomb chamber, at the low price of a thin and watery headache.

The most important views were up on Pheiri’s displays — some in visible light, mostly just for calibration, all shadows and darkness dyed red by the backwash of his bloody illumination. The majority of useful visuals were displayed in ghostly-green night vision and the flicker-step phantoms of low-light enhancement, accompanied by infra-red, heat-mapping, nanomachine density readouts, and even the occasional ultrasonic echolocation ping, just to make sure no sneaky revenants were hiding in plain sight. Pheiri kept a constant eye on the ends, centre, and anchor-points of the heavy-drone picket line; on three different views of the ‘larder’ of corpses and the idiot zombies who were so desperate to steal all the food; and on individual views of the most heavily-armed and dangerous groups of zombies, with their heavy weapons highlighted in warning-red and caution-yellow, often through the cover of their armour and their bodies.

Additional data scrolled across other screens — audio logs, analytic algorithms, viruses splayed out like dead insects on an autopsy table. Kagami had access to ambient nanomachine density in the air, moisture readings to track the breathing of all those zombies, and flickering green text showing the number of weapons and bodies in the chamber, constantly updating to reflect Pheiri’s latest observations. One screen contained Pheiri’s ongoing recordings and measurements of the hurricane; he used sound to estimate wind speed and rainfall and hailstone density, scrubbing the ever-present static hissing and the distant howling of the wind to arrive at the same answer every few seconds — stepping beyond the tomb would get your flesh flayed from your skeleton, assuming you were not first picked up and throw into the wind like a leaf.

Kagami’s own peripheral vision was occupied by a ring of drone-feeds from the picket line, a few extra feeds piggy-backing off Pheiri’s cameras, and a big scrambled up mess of drone command interface on her left.

Pheiri handled the heavy lifting, so Kagami could attend to the details.

In theory she could have handed Pheiri total control of all the drones; she knew that Pheiri could easily wrench the machines from her grasp if he really needed to. Kagami would never have said so out loud, certainly not within earshot of either Elpida or Victoria — and certainly not scum like Pira or Ooni — but she knew full well that the lumbering biomechanoid tank was more than capable of handling overwatch duties all by himself. Kagami could have slunk off to her bunk and taken a much needed nap. When was the last time she’d slept? A day ago? She’d lost track.

But Kagami also knew that she would not be able to sleep, not until the away team were safely back inside. One never knew what fresh stupidity the Commander would get up to next, or what kind of needless risk Victoria would take if Kagami was not there to shout in her ear.

One of Pheiri’s screens — just ahead of Kagami, slightly to the left — showed a view from one of Pheiri’s external cameras, high up on his main turret. The camera was focused on the ‘designated observation post’; Victoria had come up with that title, and Kagami hated it. Kagami had spent most of the last two hours focused on that screen, keeping a careful eye on Ooni and Victoria as they sat on watch, making sure that Shilu didn’t sneak up behind them to pull their heads off.

But now the Commander had returned and instigated an impromptu struggle session with the Necromancer. Kagami had added several additional views of the observation post to her augmented vision, jacking Pheiri’s cameras right into her own brain stem.

Shilu was framed against the white bone of Pheiri’s hull, wearing her human disguise, trying and failing to answer Elpida’s question.

Her voice crackled in Kagami’s ears and out loud from the cockpit speakers, carried across Pheiri’s local comms network.

“I probably can’t tell you the things you really want to know,” Shilu was saying. “Central is not easy to describe, and my best efforts would be meaningless. I don’t pretend to understand how Central really works, or where it came from, or even what it is. All I know is that Central is the hub, or core, or heart, of the entire nanomachine network and ecosystem. Don’t ask me how I know that, because I don’t understand how I know. I simply do. I knew it from the first time I met Central, on a level that did not require intellectual comprehension or external explanation. It was like how the body knows the difference between hot and cold, or how you know that the colour blue is the colour blue, or how you know your own hand belongs to you. It was instinctive, automatic. I was looking at the core of the world, though the core is not necessarily in control of every little detail.”

The Commander merely listened, squatting a few feet from Shilu, her white hair dyed dark-flame red in Pheiri’s floodlights. The others were gathered about her like paleo primitives around a fire in the mists at the dawn of time. Ilyusha looked like she wanted to spit at Shilu’s feet. Atyle and Hafina were both equally unreadable in their own different ways. Ooni seemed like she would rather be anywhere else, specifically somewhere she could shit herself with anxiety. Kagami snorted.

Only Victoria — her stupid, bumbling Victoria, wrapped in all that armour like a bomb disposal agent — was foolish enough to press the question.

“Wait, wait, Shilu,” Victoria said, voice crackling up the comms-link. “You mean to say you’ve actually met this thing? Like, meeting a person?”

Shilu stared at Victoria, all wide dark eyes and perfect glossy black hair and flawless dusky skin, like she had not spent thousands of years eating human flesh like everybody else. Kagami felt filthy and greasy compared with this murder-doll nano-android. She wished Victoria would point her oversized grenade launcher at the Necromancer, to teach her some manners.

After a moment, Shilu said: “‘Met’ is an inadequate word. I’m trying to describe something which happened inside the network, which was itself a simulation or representation of another process. I was brought into the presence of an entity, or perhaps merely made aware that entity already existed, all around me, all the time. There was a connection established, between it and I. There was communication, mostly in one direction. It knew what I was going to express before I expressed myself, because I was already a part of it, my thoughts already belonged to it. Central made judgements and decisions, but it felt as if those things had been decided long before my input or questions or curiosity. Then I was ejected again, back into the network. Each meeting was basically the same, they always followed that same pattern.”

Elpida said: “What did Central look like?”

Kagami rolled her eyes. The Commander’s ‘Telokopolis’ had been such an advanced society, yet Elpida lacked even the most rudimentary understanding of sim-space or software representation. It was enough to drive Kagami up the wall.

Shilu stared at the Commander for a long moment. Kagami almost felt sorry for her.

Atyle spoke. “The slave reveals not the master’s secrets?”

Shilu sighed. Kagami almost laughed. Welcome to the nut-house, Shilu, this is what it’s like all the fucking time.

Shilu said, “That’s a meaningless question. You’re talking about a network entity.”

Elpida shrugged. “I understand that, Howl has explained to me how that works. But I still want to know how Central presented itself. What did it choose to look like?”

“A ring of burning eyes wider than a continent,” Shilu said. “A black pyramid a thousand miles across. A bank of fog stretching between two moons in the void. A wall of flesh beneath the surface of the world. A star pulsing in and out of supernova collapse a million times a second. A child made of blinding light and deafening trumpets. A tiger always in mid leap, the size of a gas giant, on fire. A billion needles embedded in a wall of marble. Do you want me to go on? Because I can. We’d be here for hours. Do you want to write it down?”

Ilyusha lashed the air with her tail. “Step off!”

Elpida narrowed her eyes. Victoria let out a big puff of breath. Ooni looked even more pale than before.

Elpida said, “You’re not exaggerating.”

“I’m not,” said Shilu. “These are all things Central has appeared as, in the heart of the network. I don’t know what any of them mean. And yes, before you ask, I found them just as fucked up as they sound.”

“Ha,” Ilyusha barked. “‘Least you can swear.”

“I can swear a lot.”

Victoria shook her head. “I still don’t get it. What is it?”

Kagami sighed, tuned into the general channel, and spoke into the microphone of her own headset. “She’s talking about sim-mediated AI self-image. The thing she’s talking about is not human, did not begin life as human, and was probably not even raised by humans. It can look like whatever it wants, and what it wants is utterly incomprehensible to us.” Kagami tutted. “Need I remind you all of what we’ve already seen? The gravekeeper, an AI substrate large enough to achieve self-bootstrapping. If there’s something in control of all this, it must be exponentially larger and more inhuman. She’s talking about an AI completely unmoored from mortal expectations. Frankly I don’t want to know what any of those self-images meant to it. Knowing would drive us all mad. Stop fucking asking.”

On the screen, Elpida nodded along. Victoria looked pale and lost, throat bobbing with a swallow. Ilyusha made her claws go in and out. Shilu tilted her head and raised her eyebrows — she didn’t have a headset of her own, but she could probably hear the voice from everyone else’s sets.

Elpida said: “Thank you, Kagami. I appreciate the additional context.”

Kagami snorted, then muted herself again.

Elpida went on. “Okay, Shilu, I accept that you don’t comprehend Central. But you still have more experience than any of us, which isn’t hard, because the sum of our experience is nil. You’ve stood in Central’s presence and communicated with it. What do you think it is? In your own words, your own judgement, your own metaphors. I don’t care if it’s objective or true or anything like that. I care what you think about it. Please, go ahead.”

Shilu stared into the dark for a long moment before she answered.

“You, Telokopolan, Elpida. You came from a time with no nation states, neither ethnostates nor civic nationalism. Your Telokopolis was a civic state, with a common civic identity, but it was the only one you knew, so you lack the concepts and the vocabulary to understand what you lived within. I believe this is the position occupied by all of us, in relation to Central. We live within the nanomachine ecosystem, within the physical expression of the network, within its constraints, and what it does. Central is the core of all of those things, but we cannot understand it, because we cannot describe it, because we are within it. Central is the pure expression of the post-human. It is beyond us, as a body is beyond a cell, or the sea is beyond a fish. We are inside the belly of the beast.”

Elpida frowned, running her tongue along her teeth behind her lips. Atyle murmured some inane nonsense about gods. Ilyusha snorted and muttered, “Real fuckin’ useful, reptile.”

Kagami sighed. She was the only one with the education to understand what the Necromancer was talking about.

AI metastasis, ‘unguided post-human substrate evolution’, self-bootstrapping rampancy, Synthetic Inevitability, ‘hollow man’ paradigm — during Kagami’s true life, Luna’s greatest minds had possessed plenty of names for the theory, the apocalyptic fear that some foolish dirt-sucker down on old Earth’s continents would one day gift an embryonic AI mind a substrate big enough to bootstrap itself beyond human comprehension. The dirty little arms race between the Anglo Rim and the Republic might produce a nightmare worst-case scenario — a thinking machine without even the most basic of empathy or comprehension of life, raised like slime mould or fungus, plugged into a nano-forge production network, armed with the entire industrial output of a nation-state, beyond anybody’s control and any human protest.

The fear was not completely unfounded. Kagami knew that better than anybody, as Heroine of the L5 Machine Plague when she’d been only thirteen years old. But that war had been fought nineteen million miles from the Earth-Luna system, out in the cold and dark of the interplanetary void. Young Kagami and Luna’s other Logicians had fought with remote drone swarms, and without the risk of incinerating a fragile biosphere. They’d blanketed the void with nuclear explosions, neutron bombs, electro-magnetic wave-pulse weapons, and computer viruses reverse-engineered from the scraps of captured AI madness held in containment cells. Whatever the void-touched space colonists of the L5 Station-Shoal had given birth to, it had burned to death in a nuclear carpet-bombing delivered from a stand-off distance of half a million kilometres.

Luna alone understood the risks, because Luna alone had shouldered the responsibility of sterilising the infection. Common wisdom held that the womb-born masses of Earth’s surface were stupid enough to try again, because half of them did not believe the vid-captures and high-res pictures of what had roiled within the ruins of the L5 Station-Shoal, prior to the final extermination.

Kagami had always agreed with the latter point — dirtsiders were fools who had already risked cooking the planet once before. But she also held that such a feat was more difficult than it seemed. She had raised fourteen AI daughters with her own hands, weaved their tiny minds into life and watched them grow, delighted at every new connection and comprehension, showering her beautiful progeny with praise and preparation in equal measure. She knew with first-hand experience that raising an AI was not simple or easy; these things were not like human children, who would continue to grow even if neglected. They could not be made by accident, and could be unmade with ease. They needed pruning and shearing, required the right kind of intellectual and emotional soil in which to blossom; true, place an AI in too much substrate and it would turn inhuman and incomprehensible — but it would also turn inward, like a plant collapsing into a mass of cancer, still alive but unrecognisable, unable to carry out the basic functions of cognition. Up on Luna and down in NorAm, the birth and growth of AIs was strictly regulated. Poor parenting was simply illegal, punishable on Luna by life imprisonment, and down in NorAm by some predictable rehab measure. But even in the Republic or the Anglo Rim, Kagami doubted society as a whole possessed the necessary level of inhumanity required to replicate the mistakes of the L5 Station-Shoal. One had to apply sustained abuse and uncontrolled madness to a growing AI with a ruthlessness and single-minded focus that was almost impossible for anybody, Lunarian or Dirtsider.

The L5 spacers had been going collectively insane for four centuries by the time Kagami was born, burning out their minds by staring into the sun. The AI nightmare they had birthed was the product of a depraved culture, starving itself to death in the cold and the dark. And it wasn’t space which did it to them — the L4 Station-Shoal was certainly weird enough as well, the way they kept grafting more arms onto themselves and leaving gravity behind entirely, not to even mention the more extreme horizons being explored out there beyond the limits of the Earth-Luna system and the Lagrange Point Colonies. But the L4 limb-maniacs and the Titan bio-suit cold-weather mods and even those freaks aboard ‘Heavenly Point’ in Venusian orbit, none of them had committed civilizational suicide via AI.

Kagami had witnessed only a handful of L5ers in the years before the Plague had destroyed them — tall, ghostly pale, their genetic ‘perfection’ achieved via a winnowing process begun 400 years earlier, started by tossing people out of airlocks, culminating in the clinical butchery of gene-editing and eugenics.

The L5 culture had reduced itself until it had become nothing more than the reproductive organs of the AI abomination it had given birth to.

So, Luna understood the risks. And Kagami understood what Shilu was talking about.

She understood just enough to know that she knew nothing.

Compared against Central — with the nanomachine ecosystem and the miracle technology of resurrection — the L5 Machine Plague had been the equivalent of a neolithic primitive burning her hand on an open flame. Compared with this, Luna was akin to an ancient alchemist grasping a handful of saltpetre and sulphur, trying to envision an atomic bomb.

Kagami shivered in her seat, picking at the armrest. Shilu’s words made her feel as lost and small as any paleo dirt-eater cowering in a cave.

“Then why did you follow it?” said Victoria, her voice hissing from the cockpit speakers. “Why follow something you can’t understand?”

Kagami drew herself back up. Bless Victoria’s stupid little heart. But Shilu was just staring at her.

Kagami opened the private line back to Vicky, and said: “Because it offered her a way out of this. Use your head, Victoria.”

Victoria’s sigh was caught from three different angles. Kagami watched them all, a smirk creeping across her face.

A voice from behind made Kagami jump.

“We shouldn’t follow any Gods,” it said. “Not here. Not anymore.”

Kagami looked over her shoulder. She had forgotten that she was not truly alone in the control cockpit, but had allowed herself to embrace the illusion, because she had thought the others were both sleeping.

Melyn was curled up in a seat over on the left, a blanket tucked around her tiny, petite body, pale grey skin tinted sickly green by the backwash of light from the text on Pheiri’s screens. Melyn was still fast asleep, head lolling against the seat. Amina was perched in a seat on the opposite side; she had been asleep as well, last time Kagami had checked. Amina had grown tired of watching her murderous borged-up ‘special friend’ on the monitors; Kagami knew that Amina and Ilyusha had developed somewhat of a special relationship, though she didn’t want to know the messy details of what they got up to together in the top bunk. But now the little psychopath was awake again, a little bleary-eyed, hugging herself through her armoured coat.

Amina met Kagami’s eyes — so faux-innocent in that brown little face.

Kagami covertly floated one of her six gravitic drones out from within a pocket, in case she needed to protect herself. Amina made her skin crawl.

Kagami cleared her throat, and said, “Quite. I … I agree.”

Amina smiled a little. “Do you think Illy and the others are coming in soon?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. I think they’re having a very … in-depth … conversation. That’s all. Maybe you should go back to sleep, hm?”

Amina nodded, looking a little sad, eyes drifting back to the monitors. Kagami did her best to return the smile; the expression made her cheeks hurt. She turned back to the screens as quickly as she could, leaving the gravitic drone on-station behind her. Hopefully Amina would take the hint. If Amina crept up to the seat and leaned over Kagami’s shoulder, Kagami felt she might scream.

On the screens, the Commander and the others were already rattling on again.

“Vicky has a point,” Elpida was saying. “Central — or whatever other faction sent you to assassinate me — has something on you, don’t they? Some kind of leverage, something they can use against you, or threaten you with. Why else would they send you, instead of another Necromancer, like Lykke?”

“Because I’ve been dead for a long time,” Shilu replied. “I already explained, there is a war in heaven. There must be. And I’m not aligned with any side.”

“Right,” Elpida said. “Whatever faction sent you, I don’t think they had any better options. If they did, they would have opened with a dozen Necromancers like Lykke, or simply flattened me and my cadre here with one of Central’s physical assets.” Elpida shook her head, white hair swaying in the bloody shadows up on Pheiri’s hull. “No, you were selected because they needed to do this quietly, without being noticed by some other faction or element within the network. And because they, whoever they are, do not have access to Central’s full resources. Or, Central doesn’t have access to the resources it should, because it’s already losing the ‘war in heaven’. Good phrase, by the way.”

“Thank you,” said Shilu.

“But that still leaves the question, Shilu. Why you? They have something on you. They must do.”

Shilu said, “With a war in heaven, nobody is safe, not even the dead. But ‘they’ do not have anything on me, not anymore. That’s all I can say.”

Victoria snorted. “So what, you’re one of us now? Just like that?”

Elpida put out a hand. “If she wants to be, Vicky. If she wants to be. Telokopolis rejects nobody. Telokopolis is for all. Telokopolis is forever.”

Victoria sighed. Ilyusha hissed an echo of the new motto — Telokopolis is forever. Kagami resisted the urge to mouth the words.

Shilu said: “It was already decided for me.”

Elpida squinted at Shilu. “What does that mean?”

Atyle spoke for the first time in a while. “The gods choose for us, we puppets and slaves. We dance on their strings, but sometimes we enjoy the dance.”

Shilu turned her face to look up at Atyle. “Elpida,” she said. “Did Telokopolis have slaves?”

“Never,” said Elpida. “The concept is a little difficult for me.”

“Then I am slave no more,” said Shilu.

Atyle broke into a stupid grin. Kagami rolled her eyes and sighed. She hated this cryptic sisterhood bonding nonsense.

Kagami zoomed her central view onto Victoria’s face and lingered for a moment. The contours of Vicky’s face caught the backwash of Pheiri’s illumination reflected off the distant walls and faraway ceiling of the chamber. When Vicky was thinking she would scrunch up her brow and press her lips together. When she was sceptical she would get halfway to rolling her eyes before stopping herself. Right then she was alert and curious, but neither thoughtful nor sceptical. Kagami switched to one of the heat-map cameras; Victoria was a little chill, even with all that armour on. If Elpida didn’t wrap this up soon and come back inside Pheiri, Kagami was going to start shouting.

“Shilu, I need to ask about the towers,” Elpida was saying. “Pira told us about a trio of towers, deep in the interior of the continent, which the graveworms never approach. Is that accurate?”

“The towers exist. I have never been allowed near them.”

Victoria smirked — not a good look on her, Kagami thought. “Then how do you know they exist, huh?”

Ilyusha barked, “Ha, yeah! Good one!”

“Because they have a clear network presence,” Shilu answered. “You can see them from within the network, if you know where to look.”

Elpida nodded. “What’s their function?”

Shilu had no idea, of course; Kagami had some theories, but she couldn’t be bothered to share them right then — network hubs or relay stations or storage buffers. She filed those ideas away for later, when she could speak with the Commander without constant sarcastic interruptions.

Kagami consigned that screen to her peripheral vision, half-listening to the rest of the conversation. She selected a drone-feed down on the picket line, staring out at the gathered crowd of zombie refugees.

She lingered on an eye-level view of ‘Persephone The Magnificent And Most Merciful’, standing at the forefront of her group, all heavily armed and puffed-chested with confidence. Persephone’s girls were armed with some nasty shit even by the standards of other well organised revenants — so many heavy weapons, anti-armour weapons, rockets and explosives. One of them was laden down with enough HEAT and shaped-charge rounds to make quite a crater in the floor if somebody was foolish enough to touch a lit match to her arse. At least that zombie seemed to be handling herself properly, and well-guarded by the others. Persephone’s group was standing right up at the picket line, as if daring Pheiri to fire on them.

Kagami’s attention was drawn to Persephone herself — a prime example of a borged-up monster, eight feet of flesh crammed with so much cyborg enhancement she was more metal than meat. Her face was a smooth mask of bio-polymer cast in a mixture of black and dark blue, sculpted with high cheekbones and a perfect jaw. Her eyes were yellow bionics the colour of the long-smothered sun. Her hair was too fine and floaty to be real, individual strands of gold dyed dark in the bloody red backwash from Pheiri’s lights.

Persephone stood with her feet braced, arms crossed over her armoured chest, staring up at Pheiri. Her body bristled with weapons, and a heavy rifle dangled from her shoulders. Every few minutes she lowered her gaze and ran it along the line of drones, golden eyes meeting each camera view in turn.

Kagami followed that sweep along, staring back into the giant’s eyes.

She had listened in on the earlier conversation between Elpida and Persephone, but Kagami wasn’t sure what to make of what the revenant had said. Persephone claimed to have lived her true life on a space station — ‘Eden’s Cradle’, but had not provided any further information Kagami could use to identify where she really meant. Names change in millions of years, after all.

Kagami itched to know more. She glanced aside at one of Pheiri’s screens, the one which tracked radio networks and comms signals out there in the chamber. Persephone was broadcasting an open and unencrypted channel identifier, as if awaiting communication.

Elpida and Shilu were talking nonsense — about hope and trust and how maybe Shilu herself was sent by Telokopolis. The Commander was quietly working herself up to believe that her dead city had sent her a pet Necromancer. More messianic bullshit. Kagami sighed. She couldn’t fight it — this was the stuff which kept them alive thus far.

Kagami spoke into Pheiri’s comms network, on the open channel.

“Ask her what’s on the Moon,” she said. “Commander, ask Shilu about Luna.”

Elpida paused, then smiled with indulgence. Victoria sighed and rolled her eyes. Ilyusha let out a little snort, tail lashing back and forth. Ooni knew what was good for her, and did not react.

Kagami clenched her jaw and felt a lump in her throat. She opened her mouth and—

“You mock her,” said Shilu.

Victoria frowned. “Sorry, what? Hey, it’s Kaga, for fuck’s sake. And you don’t know her—”

“She asks after her home, as lost as yours, and you mock her,” said Shilu. “Come on. I’ve been dead for a long time, but I’m not an idiot.”

Victoria blushed and shut her mouth. Ilyusha bared her teeth.

And Elpida said: “You make a very good point. Kagami deserves an apology for that. For now, I’ll ask the question. Shilu, do you know what’s become of the Moon — of Luna?”

Shilu shook her head. “I do not know what is on the Moon. I’ve not seen it since true life. I’m sorry.”

Kagami relegated all the views of the away team to the very edge of her vision. She shoved Victoria off the side completely, into a drop-down menu.

Victoria’s voice hissed across the comms in a private whisper: “Kaga? Kaga, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh at—”

Kagami snarled. “Perhaps I’ll spend my time with the Necromancer from now on, Victoria. And do shut up. I’m busy keeping watch to make sure that swarm down there doesn’t scale Pheiri’s face and eat you all. The last thing I need is you rattling on in my ear. Over and out.”

She soft-killed the connection and stared straight ahead, into the green-lit flickering glow of Pheiri’s systems and interior bulkheads. The conversation still hissed on at the edge of her hearing. Victoria did not try again.

After a few moments and several deep breaths, Kagami directed her attention elsewhere.

First she examined a number of the bottom-feeder zombies and terrified waifs who had gathered close to her picket line, sheltering in the lee of Pheiri’s guns. She found that rather depressing; she could only stare into shrunken eyes and half-starved faces for so long, no matter how many of them seemed to be gathering into greater numbers and muttering to each other in hushed voices. Kagami could pick up audio of their conversations if she wanted, but it was all inane — clueless zombies lost in hell, trying to figure out why the world was shaped this way, clumsily swapping stories of where they’d lived and died. A few of them had daubed crude imitations of Elpida’s new insignia on their clothes — the crescent-and-double-line of Telokopolis, scrawled in blood.

Kagami wasn’t sure if she approved of that. The crescent reminded her too much of moonrise, seen from Earth’s surface through the eyes of a wire-slaved agent.

She left the bottom-feeders behind and adjusted her focus, peering through the shadows and the backwash of red illumination, switching to the ghostly green of night vision, to examine the two highly dangerous groups at the rear of the tomb.

The ones in the right corner — the identical freaks carrying nothing but knives — bored her immensely. They didn’t even talk, communicating via some kind of bespoke sign language. Pheiri was still working on translating that. Kagami was certain it would reveal nothing interesting.

The group in the left corner was more to Kagami’s taste. Heavily armed and all in powered armour, bearing the fruit from dozens of raided tombs. They’d said nothing when the Commander had offered them meat — just taken it and backed away, then harassed Pheiri with their shitty little viruses over their shitty little tight-beam frequencies. Kagami had cackled with laughter when Pheiri had demonstrated a willingness to blow all their heads off, though she had been less pleased that incident had unfolded with Victoria out beyond the hull. The group had settled down after Kagami had shouted at them over the loudspeakers, but now she felt a sadistic urge to start messing with them again. Surely they would try their luck a second time, sooner or later?

There were eight of them, all in powered armour, standing in a quarter-circle with their backs pointed into the corner. They had weapons ready and drawn, held by external servo-arms and shoulder-mounted racks. Most of them ate through feeding ports and nutrition-lines, shoving handfuls of corpse-meat into metal grilles and stuffing it into bags hooked up to their armour. True paranoia, unwilling to even take their helmets off. The distant backwash of Pheiri’s illumination glinted off their visor-plates and the optics on their plasma rifles.

Kagami had already partially broken the encryption on their comms network. She tuned into their common channel via Pheiri’s uplink.

<<—reminds me of the battle of the ultras,>> one of them was saying. <<It was in the seventh year after—>>

<<Not this fucking shit again, Urotua,>> another interrupted. <<How many times have we heard this story? Over and over and over. You’re like an old drunk in a mead hall.>>

A third voice chuckled. <<Seventeen times. This will be the eighteenth. You gonna stop her, Wise? Give it a shot? Get your head cracked open?>>

<<I’ve half a mind to,>> said the complainer.

The first revenant spoke up again. <<You want to challenge me, here? In the middle of this feeding ground?>>

A fourth girl spoke up, with a whip crack of authority in her high-pitched voice. <<No fighting, physical or networked. We’ll be eaten alive the moment we step out of line here.>>

<<Tank fuck over there ain’t gonna stop us,>> said the second voice again — ‘Wise’.

<<You want to wager your flesh on that? Be my guest,>> said the one in authority — the one Pheiri had grazed with a single bullet.

The bickering went on and on, cycling back round to some story they’d all heard before; they showed no outward sign of their inner turmoil.

Kagami tuned out again, unimpressed. The conversation between Elpida and Shilu filtered back in — no more interesting than the fools in the corner. Elpida was asking about what might happen when the storm passed, sharing her theory that many Necromancers may come after her, because of Shilu’s failure to carry out her assassination.

Shilu replied: “The faction which sent me want you dead. However, they did botch my insertion, or they were interrupted, or stopped somehow. Lykke was sent to stop me, but she didn’t care for protecting you. More Necromancers may arrive to kill you, you may be right. Or nothing may happen. I cannot say for sure.”

Victoria sighed. “Wish we hadn’t let that bitch get away.”

“Lykke?” Shilu asked.

“Mm,” Elpida grunted in agreement. “Lykke’s escape did deny us potential intel. Not that we could have held her, though.”

Ilyusha hissed. “Fuckin’ try again next time, bitch. Pin that reptile fuck with a stake.”

Elpida smiled. “There is always a next time, Illy, right. However, there is one possibility we haven’t considered. Shilu, what do you think of this? What if the faction which dispatched Lykke didn’t actually know what you had been sent to do, only that you had been sent to do something?”

Shilu blinked. “Hmm. Maybe.”

Kagami rolled her eyes at all this useless speculation; Shilu had a point — all this was maybe, maybe, maybe. They’d know nothing until the storm ended, and then they might all die to a horde of unstoppable Necromancers.

Kagami turned her attention to the screen at her left elbow. Static green text glowed in the shadows, showing the result of Kagami’s analysis of the viruses used by the heavily-armoured revenants in the rear corner of the chamber. She’d already picked the code apart and found it terribly wanting. She scrolled the data back and forth, making a few adjustments, listening to Elpida and Shilu talking about Necromancers and capabilities and how to respond if Elpida was right. Kagami tried not to think about any of that. She’d struggled to pin Lykke with gravitics and electromagnetics — in perfect conditions, with their own pet Necromancer to help. She had just about managed that. But against a dozen of the things? Kagami shoved the thought away. She should not feel fear. The Seventeenth Daughter of the Moon should not fear any metastasised AI.

Kagami focused on the virus code. Eventually she was happy with her work. She toyed with the notion of broadcasting it right back at that tomb-raiding group out there. She’d already broken their encryption after all, maybe she could—

The text cleared itself with a blink. Fresh green letters printed themselves across the screen.

>n

Kagami sighed. “Pheiri, I wasn’t being serious. I’m not going to attack them. If I thought they needed dealing with, I would ask you to shoot them.”

The text refreshed with a blink.

>remote weapons access DENIED

Kagami sighed again, harder. “I’m not asking for fire control. That was a joke! A nothing comment. I’m just … ”

>bored

“Frustrated,” Kagami hissed between her teeth. She tried to keep her voice low, so Amina would not overhear. Heat prickled in her cheeks. Her palms itched. Why was she talking to Pheiri like this? Why was she revealing her dissatisfaction? “Frustrated by … Victoria. She doesn’t … I can’t … I don’t know what to do, how to make her … ”

Kagami trailed off. She did not know what to say. Pheiri’s empty green cursor blinked on the black screen.

>

>

>

Kagami took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She longed for her sensory suspension tank, for dissociation, for the oblivion of sim-jacked sleep, not the groggy inelegance of the real thing. She needed to focus on her role, on what she felt comfortable with — human overwatch control, despite Pheiri’s flawless multi-tasking. She tore her eyes away from the blinking green cursor, putting her anger from her mind, and glanced back at the eight-strong group of power-armoured revenants. They weren’t causing any trouble yet, she supposed, so they could—

They were nine.

An additional figure had joined the eight, standing behind all their gathered backs, shorter than their power-armoured height, slighter than their power-armoured bulk.

A single figure, wreathed from head to toe in shapeless black robes.

For one dizzying moment, Kagami thought it was Serin, carrying out an unplanned, deeply inadvisable, astoundingly stupid covert op. But the figure was too short for Serin. And it had no face — nor anything else.

Kagami’s eyes darted across the screens, redirecting sensor clusters, zooming in on the figure, gathering data. Something was wrong — the robed figure was black, all black, the darkest possible shade against the shadows in the corner, even in visible light, untouched by Pheiri’s red illumination, like a sensor-ghost or a glitch in Pheiri’s systems. It appeared black in night-vision, colourless and cold in infra-red, invisible to nanomachine-density readouts. An echolocation ping turned up empty space. It was simply not there.

It had one arm raised, nothing but black robe with no hand visible inside the sleeve. It was pointing beyond the ring of powered armour.

“Pheiri … ”

Kagami blinked. The figure was gone.

She sat very still in her seat for several seconds, not breathing, heart gone cold. Then she pulled up the footage from her drones and Pheiri’s external cameras, rewinding and reviewing two dozen different feeds. But there was nothing — no figure in black robes, no software ghost, no unexplained smear on a camera lens. All the different feeds agreed. Nothing had been standing there.

“Pheiri,” she said. “Did you see that?”

>?

Kagami could not be corrupted by Necromancer interference, it was impossible. Pheiri’s systems for detecting such things were fully functioning. Elpida had checked them herself with Pheiri’s help, in order to rule out future false positives from Shilu’s proximity. Kagami’s own eyes were functioning properly. She was not crazy or hallucinating, surely? But she had seen something which was not there. Was she going insane, losing her mind? She’d been awake for far too long and now she was—

“I saw it,” said Amina.

Kagami twisted in her chair. Amina’s eyes were wide with fear.

“I saw it too,” Amina repeated. “I saw it. A ghost?”

“A sensor ghost!” Kagami snapped back. Amina flinched. “A glitch, an error! That was nothing. We need to get Victoria to take a look at Pheiri’s eyes.”

Glowing green text scrolled across the screen at Kagami’s elbow.

>n

“Well, explain what we just saw!” Kagami snapped again, gesturing at the screens. “Apparently nothing, and it’s not in your on-board logs either! And what was it pointing at, you … ”

Kagami answered her own question; her eyes followed the angle at which the unexplained figure had been pointing, assisted by scan-lines and trajectories drawn by Pheiri. He was trying to help answer the mystery.

The figure had pointed at the right-hand entrance to the tomb chamber, where Pheiri’s floodlights were blocked by the corner of the corridor.

A zombie was stumbling into the chamber.

The revenant was wild-eyed beneath a tangle of dark hair, matted to her scalp and face with dried blood. Thin and gangly, dressed in scraps of armour and a long tomb-grown coat clutched over her front, there was nothing remarkable about this zombie. She looked as if she had recently been assaulted and beaten — one half of her face was puffy with bruises, several clumps of hair had been torn out, and she walked with a rapid, swinging limp, clutching her free hand across her belly as if wounded, blood dripping from beneath her coat. She was armed with only a pistol, dangling from her fist, but Pheiri’s initial rapid scans showed the weapon was empty.

Up on Pheiri’s hull, Elpida and the others had taken notice, preparing to head down and greet this newcomer. Victoria and Ooni had turned to re-assume their position at the observation post. Vicky’s grenade launcher glinted red in the darkness.

Another mouth for more meat; at least this one was alone, all she’d need was a leg or an arm.

Pheiri’s initial scans also showed—

Kagami re-opened the general comms channel. “Commander! Commander! Do not approach that revenant! Elpida, acknowledge me!”

Victoria sighed. “Kaga—”

But Elpida put up her hand, halting the group. “Kagami, talk to me.”

The zombie stopped far short of the picket line, between two groups of revenants who were still eating. A few eyes turned to her, but there was nothing remarkable about another undead girl in distress. She stared up at Pheiri, up at the red lights reflected off her wet and shining eyes.

Her lips moved. Tears ran down her cheeks.

She was mouthing ‘help’.

“Kagami,” Elpida repeated. “Speak to me. What am I looking at?”

“I, uh … I … I don’t know where to … to start … ”

The warning-red and caution-yellow of Pheiri’s deep scans showed high-explosive charges packed beneath the zombie’s coat, wrapped in shrapnel-jackets of jagged metal. The infernal assemblage was strapped to her torso with a metal cage, welded shut around both arms and beneath her crotch, with several cross-bars of metal piercing her gut and chest, to make the vest impossible to remove. Wires were connected to a box on the front of the vest. Pheiri showed electrical activity inside the box, a cluster of circuits, and a radio receiver.

“Kaga!” Elpida shouted.

“She’s wearing a bomb vest, Commander. That zombie is wired to blow.”

The ragged revenant stumbled closer to the picket line, closer to the bottom-feeders. More of them looked up.

“H-help … help … ” she stammered. Kagami could hear her on the drone audio pick-ups now. Her voice was scratchy and broken, as if she’d been screaming for hours. “They told me come here f-for help, for … help—”

Vicky spluttered. “What?! Why? It’s not like she’s gonna put a dent in Pheiri, we can see she’s right there.”

A new voice crackled across the comms channel, muffled by metal — Serin. “I can put a round in her head, Coh-mander. Say the word and I’ll do it clean. One shot. No—”

Kagami shouted into her headset: “She’s welded into the bomb-vest! And she’s pleading! Listen!”

Kagami routed the zombie’s audio into the general channel.

Shilu stood up, slowly and carefully. Ilyusha spat and hissed, a nasty scowl on her face. Ooni went white and wide-eyed with fear.

Elpida took off at a dead run, heading for Pheiri’s flank, heading for the chamber floor.

“Commander!” Kagami screeched. “Did you not hear what I just—”

“She’s not here to hurt Pheiri,” Elpida replied over the comms. “She’s here to blow up the people we’re feeding.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Izumi Kagami is a complex lady, isn’t she? Beneath that arrogance and spite and those layers of toxicity, she might actually be more experienced than Elpida, at least in matters of large-scale void-warfare. And don’t forget she’s technically a mother, too. Pity her talents and experience aren’t much use here, not without significantly more drones and a few spare nuclear warheads. And Pheiri’s better at that anyway. Anyhow, here’s a bomb.

Wheeeeee, okay so this chapter is actually the longest Necroepilogos chapter so far! Kagami’s context just kept unravelling and unravelling, and I had to let her do it, I wasn’t going to insert an artificial cliffhanger earlier than I had already planned. So! Looks like arc 12 is still on track to hit about 15 chapters, and then we might have a little interlude chapter, I’m not sure yet!

Meanwhile, for those of you who don’t go to the discord, I have, yet again, some very amusing art to share. This time, it’s emotes! I meant to share these weeks ago but I kept forgetting to upload them. We have a matching pair, probably recognisable to anybody who has spent too much time online over the last decade – Elpida, Clueless, and Elpida Going Hmm (both edits by sporktown heroine!) Thank you so much! These made me giggle.

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I am still very much trying to build up some kind of a backlog of chapters, and when I do, I hope to share more advance chapters with patrons!

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

And thank you! As always, dear readers, I could not do this without all of you. Thank you so much for reading my little story about time-marooned undead girls bristling with guns and explosives. Maybe a little more of the latter, more soon than anybody expected. Let’s hope Elpida moves real fast. Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Ooni followed her orders with all her martial diligence; she kept her eyes open, her head up, and her gun down.

The first order was easy, but the second and third were much more difficult. Even as a beneficiary of more protection and comradeship than she had ever experienced before, Ooni still wanted to run away.

But she didn’t. Trust and faith kept her at her post. She would not betray the Commander, nor let her down.

Ooni was out on Pheiri’s exterior deck, sitting on a long white whorl of bone-armour, peering over the low wall of knots and humps and the crest of frozen waves, down the front of his hull. This makeshift parapet of Pheiri’s armour was infinitely more secure than the sharpened wooden stakes of any fort Ooni had seen in true life — though her memories of those were thin and grey. The designated observation post on Pheiri’s back was placed as far forward as possible, less than a foot from where the armour began to slope down to the ground in a long skirt of white bone, punctuated by weapons and pin-hole lights, terminating in Pheiri’s great articulated forward ram-prow. Pheiri’s main gun loomed overhead, casting distended shadows across the deck amid the blood-red backwash of his floodlights. The bulk of the turret formed a reassuring presence to Ooni’s rear, and offered superior cover in case the worst should happen. To the left and right, Pheiri’s many weapon emplacements rose from the hull like a forest of bone-encrusted stalagmites. Autocannons tracked slowly back and forth like flowers in a breeze, their mechanisms whirring far beneath Pheiri’s skin; point-defence guns stood erect and ready for use, almost quivering against the blood-red shadows; missile pods lay sleeping with one eye open; flame-throwers and chemical-discharge nozzles pointed down the sides of Pheiri’s hull, highlighted in bright and burning red, so that none would tempt their use.

Ooni herself was also clad in armour. She wore plates of grey-black carapace and bulletproof equipment taken from the tomb armoury — a helmet, a gorget, and a long bulletproof vest with additional protection for her groin and thighs. A comms headset was nestled beneath the helmet, her link with the cockpit and with Pheiri himself. A pair of tough and flexible gloves encased her hands. Fresh boots on her feet lent her stability. She was warm and dry and secure.

Despite all that effort, Ooni still felt terrified.

Beyond the vantage point up on Pheiri’s armour — beyond the blood-red pool of illumination which frilled his skirts and spilled onto the floor, beyond the thirty-feet of buffer zone, beyond the picket line of Kagami’s heavy drones twinkling with bright warning lights — the tomb chamber was full of zombies.

All of them were armed, most of them were eating, and many of them were casting occasional glances in Ooni’s general direction. She knew their interest was not in her; who gave a damn about some random revenant, next to the spectacle of Pheiri? He was the force keeping them all honest. His guns kept them from each other’s throats. His power kept the peace. Ooni was irrelevant.

But the sight of so many revenants out in the open made Ooni’s heart race, made her throat constrict, and her mouth go dry.

Every kind of revenant was represented in the chamber by then — except perhaps the most extreme of predatory cyborgs. Ooni’s orders did not include keeping headcount, but she had attempted one anyway, to keep herself alert and aware. She had given up over an hour ago, though no additional zombies had arrived in the last thirty minutes or so.

Long-limbed and sharp-clawed successful scavengers sat in a ring, ripping handfuls of meat off a donated corpse — only a dozen feet from a terrified, wide-eyed huddle of borderline freshies, carefully cutting strips of dead flesh from their own meal. Statues in powered armour watched over their less well-equipped companions, doffing their helmets to partake of the meat only when convinced this unnatural truce was holding steady. Heavily modified bionic chimeras settled down on four or six or even more legs, folding back shimmering plates of armour and glistening beetle carapace, lowering stingers and lances and electric prods, allowing their mounted companions to step to the ground to accept the bounty of blood-rich flesh. Blind and twitching predators swayed back and forth in silent communion with each other, spooking those who were unlucky enough to find themselves as temporary neighbours. Girls grown large claimed more space for their own groups, vying with others in a silent conflict where neither could risk a bullet or a blade, not beneath Pheiri’s unwavering gaze.

Some groups sat with their collective backs to the black metal walls, weapons armed and ready even as they ate one-handed; others slumped where they had staggered and fallen, in exhaustion and starvation — or perhaps in wordless awestruck relief, now gorging themselves on the Commander’s gift. Some sat in circles, others faced outward with their backs together; a few cared not to rest their legs, wandering in a daze, or stalking in the habit of predation, even if they dared not strike at unprotected bellies. A few of the most fresh and bewildered stared about with open mouths. Singlets sat alone, struck dumb and terrified even as they ate their ration of severed limbs; some of them were beginning to gravitate toward each other. Some of the more confident — or more exhausted — had nodded off; Ooni counted four of those, at her last attempt.

The two far corners of the chamber were occupied by the most paranoid and sceptical. One was a group of heavily-armed, highly-developed, experienced tomb-raiders, all of them clad in high-end gear ripped from the guts of so many tombs, sporting plasma rifles and articulated servo-arms and body-locked powered armour; they had accepted the gift of meat without thanks, retreated with weapons drawn, then spent several minutes throwing hostile active scans at Pheiri. That had ended when Pheiri had grazed their leader’s helmet with a single round from one of his point-defence cannons; Kagami had shouted over external loudspeakers to prevent that turning into a general panic. The other corner was occupied by a seven-strong group-mind of identical girls in long robes; Pheiri’s own scans had shown the girls weren’t truly identical, but had undergone — or were currently undergoing — nanomachine self-modification toward the same ideal of silver hair and flawless white skin and sharply pointed features. They didn’t seem to carry any weapons except short blades made of light-drinking steel. Everyone gave them a very wide berth. They had accepted their share of the meat with wordless silence.

A few groups sat very close to the outer picket-line of Kagami’s drones — both the very boldest and the most afraid.

Several of the latter groups had stuck around and settled in after they’d finished eating, finally allowed to relax their hypervigilance beneath the watchful firepower of Pheiri’s guns. With the constant terror abated for the first time in their undead afterlives, some of those bottom-feeder unfortunates were beginning to talk to each other. Different groups were mingling. Singlets were drifting in, finding they were not so alone. The fear was breaking down.

That had brought a smile of triumph to the Commander’s face. Ooni had felt her own chest fill with pride. She’d helped make this happen.

The former groups were not so gratifying.

Only two of those extra-bold packs were lurking close to Pheiri. One of them was standing all the way over to the right, every single revenant staring at the open larder of additional corpses still laid out on the floor, toothy jaws hanging open, clawed hands flexing with need. The ‘larder’ was guarded by a double-thick duty of Kagami’s drones, and marked off by a series of blood-red lines projected onto the floor from Pheiri’s lights, complete with a big red warning ‘X’ and a battery of auto-cannons pointed at the final step before the corpses.

That group was at least predictable — hungry and greedy, not genuinely dangerous. Pheiri had been forced to flash warning lights at them twice so far, but they just backed up and made rude gestures at him. The second of the bold groups was much more worrying — they were sprawled within ten feet of the picket line, directly in front of Pheiri, watching his hull with sullen eyes. Their leader was an eight-foot slab of cyborg metal, festooned with guns, her girls armed with heavy weaponry and twitchy point-defence equipment of their own, mounted on shoulder racks and portable back braces.

That leader had spent the last fifteen minutes arguing with the Commander. Ooni couldn’t hear the words over the roar and crash of the storm outside, but she could see the jutting jaw and bared teeth and threatening gestures. How the Commander stood down there so serene and calm, Ooni could not understand. How she didn’t let Ilyusha or Hafina tear into the cyborg bully, Ooni would never comprehend. But there was much Ooni did not comprehend; she knew the Commander was right.

Still, Ooni couldn’t bear the roiling in her guts.

Everything she had learned during her long years among the Death’s Heads told her this situation was volatile beyond belief. All these zombies in one place would erupt into violence sooner or later, even if just to establish a pecking order of cannibalistic opportunity — probably sooner, probably at some tiny slight or a moment of underfed hunger or an imagined flicker of hostility. Every instinct told Ooni to flee, get back down inside Pheiri, and hide from the carnage that must logically unfold. Her headset was quiet — nobody spoke to her very much — but at any moment she could whisper a plea to Pheiri himself to unlock the top hatch and admit her back inside. She could abandon her post and stumble away and slip back down into her bunk, and Pheiri would never judge or reject her for that. Worse — neither would the Commander. Elpida, in all her grace and wisdom, would not chastise Ooni for any depth of cowardice, as long as Ooni kept the faith. Ooni could run, and it would cost her nothing.

But she didn’t.

Ooni stayed at her post, because the Commander had given her orders, and Ooni wanted to be a good girl. She wanted to be useful. She wanted to be true. She wanted to be worthy of the symbol she wore.

The symbol daubed on the chest of her bulletproof vest helped more than the armour itself — a crescent intersected by a pair of lines, like a great spire silhouetted against a verdant moon. The symbol of Telokopolis.

Elpida had drawn that herself, with a stick of green camo paint. At first Ooni had tried to refuse — she didn’t feel worthy of that, not yet, not her, not when she had not proven herself worthy of anything — but Elpida had not given her a choice. Everyone else who ventured beyond Pheiri’s armour also wore the symbol. The Commander had clapped Ooni on the shoulders and told her that she was no exception.

Telokopolis rejects nobody, she had said. You’re one of us now, Ooni. You’re one of my girls, one of my cadre, and you’ve accepted a place within Telokopolis. If you won’t draw it yourself, I’ll do it for you.

The submachine gun laid across her knees also helped.

Ooni kept her hands on the weapon, burning nervous energy by running her fingers over the cold metal and smooth polymer. This was the first time she’d been allowed a loaded gun since the Commander had claimed her for Telokopolis, since the Commander had washed clean her Death’s Head past. Not that Ooni couldn’t have taken a gun for herself at any time, but she simply never had. She had received this weapon from the Commander’s own hands, and that was what mattered.

Ooni was not going to let Elpida down.

“You sure you’re still up for this?” asked Victoria.

Ooni almost flinched.

Victoria was sat to Ooni’s left, far enough for legroom, close enough to bundle each other to the floor if one of the zombies down below started shooting. Victoria hadn’t said anything for the last fifteen minutes, too focused on the Commander and the Cyborg down at the picket line. She seemed so much more relaxed than Ooni felt; Victoria lounged in that heavy armour, her grenade launcher resting easily on a lip of bone-white armour. Victoria looked like a real guard, on real watch, with real courage. Victoria was entirely worthy of the crescent-and-double-line daubed on the chest of her own armour.

Ooni nodded. “I’m … yes, thank you. I’m holding up fine. I can do this.”

Victoria eyed her for a long moment, expression hard to read between gorget and helmet. “You sure? You’re sweating, it’s on your face. You look jumpy.”

“I’m … fine. I don’t need to go back. The Commander said two hours. We’re not done. Not yet.”

Victoria sighed, then offered Ooni her cannister of water; Ooni politely refused, so Victoria shrugged and took a long swig herself, then said: “If you say so. Look, the best thing to do on this kind of job is just don’t think about it too much. You don’t need perfect vigilance, that’s why you’re not alone up here. And hell, you don’t need vigilance at all. We’re just for show. Pheiri’s a better spotter than all of the rest of us combined. And he doesn’t get distracted.”

“I suppose so,” Ooni said. The notion of letting her attention lapse made her uncomfortable.

“We can swap you out any time you like, you know? No shame in it, Ooni. We don’t even have to be up here, after all. We’re just for show, like Elpi said, to put the human face on all this.” Victoria nodded out at the chamber. “They know that too. Nobody cares about us up here, trust me. They’re all ogling Pheiri.”

Ooni nodded along, smiled politely, and said nothing.

Victoria was Elpida’s second in command. Victoria was a favourite of Kagami, and of Pheiri, and well-regarded by both Ilyusha and Amina, both of whom still terrified Ooni. Victoria even got on with Leuca, and had a good — though awkward — rapport with Serin. Atyle, well, she didn’t get on with anybody. Melyn and Hafina were hard to understand, but Melyn seemed to like Victoria. Everybody liked Victoria. Ooni was not about to argue with her.

To be fair to Victoria, Ooni quite liked her too, because she was a comrade.

Ooni had never really felt like this before. Sitting beside a Sister in the Death’s Heads was a dangerous affair, unless one had somebody else to shoot at or mock or insult. In the Death’s Heads Ooni had to worry if the Sister at her shoulder was going to put a knife in her back — if not literally, then socially. Mockery was a slippery slope to being abused. A joke at one’s expense was a dangerous price. Constant vigilance was essential to survival.

But here, despite Victoria’s obvious lack of faith in Ooni, she wasn’t going to cuff Ooni over the back of the head, or pull seniority to have her do something degrading, or loudly insinuate that Ooni should be dismembered and eaten as a weakling.

Ooni felt secure, in a way she could barely remember since true life.

“The show is doubly important,” said a cold and impassive voice from beyond Ooni’s back, “when the audience knows it is a show.”

Ooni flinched. Victoria shuddered.

Ooni couldn’t help but glance back over her shoulder, though she knew exactly what was sitting behind her.

Shilu — Necromancer, Corpse-Rapist, Monster, Central’s Slave, Black-Iron-Scarecrow Nightmare-Thing — was sat cross-legged on the surface of Pheiri’s hull, about ten feet back from the parapet.

Shilu no longer looked like a giant walking torture device; she had re-assumed the disguise she had worn when the Commander and the others had first met her — soft brown skin, wide dark eyes, delicate facial features, and a long straight wave of glossy night-black hair. She was slender and slight and looked incapable of throwing a punch. No bionics or modifications, just baseline humanity. She wore clothes in addition to the lie — tomb-grown gear from the cadre’s own stores, her petite form wrapped in grey beneath the comfort of an armoured coat.

Ooni offered her a polite smile.

Shilu stared back without expression. Ooni felt sweat prickle on her skin.

“Hey, hey,” Vicky hissed. She tapped Ooni’s shoulder. “Eyes forward. The big ‘borg down there’s all done, finally. Elpi’s on her way back.”

Ooni turned away from Shilu and straightened up; the earpiece of her comms headset crackled once, but remained silent. Kagami must be chattering with Victoria, but Ooni wasn’t privy to that.

Down at the edge of Pheiri’s blood-red illumination, Elpida’s away team was stepping back through the picket line of heavy drones. The discussion with the leader of the sullen band of heavily-armed zombies was concluded; the eight-foot cyborg was staring up at Pheiri with surly interest. Elpida’s group made their way around Pheiri’s side, beyond Ooni’s line of sight.

Vicky muttered into her headset: “Yeah, she’s right next to me. Yeah.” Then, louder: “Ooni, trigger discipline. Those are our friends coming up.”

“Understood,” Ooni said — and refrained from pointing out that she didn’t even have her gun raised, let alone her finger on the trigger.

Her headset crackled again. A low metallic rasp trickled into her ear — Serin.

“Don’t take offence, convert. They trust you. But not your judgement.”

Ooni broke out in a cold sweat. Serin never spoke with her; Serin terrified her. Serin was an open Wrecker and Murderer, and a skilled one at that, the kind of assassin and hunter that would have killed her on the spot if she’d remained a Death’s Head.

Then again, Ooni was a Wrecker and Murderer too now, as far as her former Sisters were concerned.

When she didn’t reply, Serin’s voice rasped again. “Wondering how I can see?” Serin asked. “Because I’ve got one eye on you.”

Ooni swallowed. She glanced sideways, but Vicky wasn’t reacting. That broadcast had been just for Ooni. She knew Serin was nestled down in a hollow on the front of Pheiri’s armour, watching the flock through her rifle’s scope.

She decided not to answer. She wore the same symbol as Serin now. Distrust did not matter, not to Telokopolis, not to the Commander.

Several minutes passed with only the static of the storm-rain and the distant howling of the wind to break the silence. A hundred whispers rose from the shadows of the tomb chamber, washed with Pheiri’s blood-red illumination, punctured by the sounds of chewing and the mash of meat between teeth, all but drowned in the storm beyond the tomb’s walls. Ooni strained her ears to hear the subtle noises of Elpida and the others climbing the side of Pheiri’s hull, but she couldn’t make out anything.

Ooni’s headset crackled.

“Commander to watch team,” said Elpida. “Be advised, we’re coming up on your left. Four strong. Count us off.”

Victoria hissed back, “Sure thing, Elpi.”

“Yes, Commander,” Ooni added.

Victoria and Ooni both looked to the left. Ooni didn’t dare raise her gun, but Victoria shouldered her grenade launcher, aiming high, finger off the trigger, safety on.

A few moments later the away team emerged from the gloom, striding out from amid the gnarled forest of Pheiri’s secondary weapons and sponson-blisters and knots of bone-armour.

Elpida led them, boots thumping against Pheiri’s hull, submachine gun hanging loose at her waist. Ilyusha darted along at Elpida’s side, sharp red claws going click-clack on the hull, massive black-red tail lashing back and forth, quick little head on a swivel, still keeping her ballistic shield raised as if a distant sniper might take a pot-shot at the Commander. Hafina strode behind, wearing her full complement of armour, head a beak-shaped helmet, shimmering like a pillar of reflective black oil; the Artificial Human was heavily armed enough to take out half the chamber by herself, and bowel-clenchingly tall. Last came Atyle, half-naked, sauntering along at the rear of the group, empty handed as usual.

Vicky counted them off as they arrived and dropped into cover, eyeing the shadows behind them, keeping her grenade launcher high.

Elpida fell into a loose crouch alongside Ooni and Victoria, her armoured coat pooling beneath her, followed by the long white waterfall of her hair. Hafina folded herself up, losing half her height as limbs retracted and guns tucked close to her multi-armed body, assuming a low and simian squat. Ilyusha scurried forward to grip the edge of the parapet with her claws, shotgun stowed, shield held high to cover Elpida, her leaden grey eyes peering down at the room full of zombies. Atyle stopped a few feet from Shilu, standing tall, eyes elsewhere.

Ooni attempted to copy Victoria’s strict attention, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off her new comrades. Everyone — with the exception of Shilu — wore the same green-crescent and double-line symbol. Everyone wore the symbol of Telokopolis now.

In the past, wearing the grinning skull of the Death’s Heads had made Ooni feel powerful. Even when the Sisters had been eating each other, even when Ooni had found herself at the bottom of the hierarchy, always at threat of being used for somebody else’s amusement, that skull on her flesh and her armour had sent bottom-feeders running and experienced zombies fleeing in fear. The Death’s Head skull had been a statement that she was not to be fucked with.

But the symbol of Telokopolis filled Ooni’s heart with clean pride.

Elpida clapped Vicky on the shoulder, then did the same for Ooni. “At ease, both of you,” she said. “You’re doing a very good job up here. Well done.”

Ooni nodded and tried to say ‘Thank you, Commander’, but managed only a little “Mm!”

Vicky lowered her grenade launcher. “You’re sure you weren’t followed, Elpi? Absolutely certain? ‘Cos if even one of those zombies down there slips through—”

A voice crackled in Ooni’s headset — in all the headsets. Kagami snapped: “I have eyes in every drone, thank you. We’re perfectly secure, despite the utter insanity of playing loaves and fishes with human meat. Drop the paranoia, Victoria. I have more than enough for all of us, remember?”

Victoria sighed. Elpida cracked a knowing smile. Ilyusha hissed a nasty little snort — and shot a lead-eyed look back at Ooni, full of suspicion and spite.

Ooni tried to smile back; Ilyusha hissed and looked away.

Another headset crackle, but Ooni heard no words. Elpida spoke into her microphone: “Negative, we’re not withdrawing just yet. I want eyes on the chamber for a while longer. Keep the hatch locked for now. Mmhmm. One question for Pheiri: what’s Iriko’s current location?”

Kagami’s voice replied. “Right where we left her. Still digesting, if we’re lucky.”

“Thank you, Kaga,” Elpida said.

Silence settled over the forward watch post, broken by the wrath and rage of the storm. Elpida peered out at the zombies below, eating precious meat by the handful.

“So,” Vicky said, nodding over the parapet, down at the group Elpida had been speaking with. “What did tall dark and encrusted with metal want with you?”

Elpida raised her eyebrows. “The leader of that group?”

Atyle spoke up. “Tell them her name, Commander. It is such a glorious name.”

Elpida smiled a bit too wide. Ilyusha snorted something which might have been a laugh.

“Her name,” said Elpida, “is Persephone The Magnificent And Most Merciful. She has about a dozen other titles, but we only got the full string once. She was very insistent on the first couple, though. She won’t acknowledge any words addressed to any mere ‘Persephone’.”

Kagami’s voice crackled across the comms again, dripping with sarcasm. “As is her right.”

Vicky’s eyebrows drew together with confusion. Ooni said nothing, fascinated by this exchange.

Elpida explained. “Persephone The Magnificent And Most Merciful, etcetera etcetera, claims to have lived her true life in a ‘space station’. I have no way of verifying that, but … ”

“Ah,” Vicky grunted. “What is this, Kaga, spacer solidarity?”

If Kagami replied, the reply was not for Ooni.

Elpida went on. “As for what she wants, she’s requested a tour inside Pheiri.”

Vicky’s eyebrows shot up, eyes going wide. She glanced back down at the tomb chamber floor. Ooni frowned with instant disapproval, try as she might to keep the look off her face. Ilyusha’s tail lashed back and forth. Even Shilu made a noise, a little ‘hmm’.

Ooni said, “C-Commander—”

Vicky interrupted. “You can’t seriously be entertaining that request, Elpi. Fuck no.”

Elpida grinned — Howl, grinning through her face. Howl said: “On conditions. Stripped of guns, stripped of armour, buck fucking naked, and muzzled.”

Vicky chuckled, low and dark, laughter lost in the rainstorm static. Ilyusha grinned without looking up. Ooni let out a nervous laugh. Atyle said, “As the day she was born.”

Elpida blinked, and was herself again. “She is seriously considering the offer.”

Vicky stopped, no longer amused. “You’re joking.”

“No joke.”

Vicky let out a low whistle. Ilyusha made a growling noise which made Ooni flinch. Hafina adjusted uncomfortably, as if stretching her folded-up limbs.

Ooni wanted to ask so many questions — would Elpida allow such a thing, was that wise, would it be safe? What precautions would they need to take? What if the ‘tour’ went wrong? What were the cyborg’s stated motivations, and what were her true motivations? Was Elpida suggesting they trust this unknown, or merely entertaining the notion for a lark?

But Ooni kept her mouth shut. She did not want to draw the ire of the others — and she knew that by not speaking, she was not putting herself in danger. In the Death’s Heads she had to show her own initiative at every turn, fawning on superiors or dominating those beneath her. But the symbol of Telokopolis on her chest did not compel her to speak. She did not have to worry about others considering her an easy target if she did not contribute.

“And before any of you ask,” Elpida went on, “it’s not my decision to make. It’s up to Pheiri, and possibly Mel and Haf.”

Vicky said: “Is that what you told, uh, ‘Persephone’?”

“Mmhmm. For now.”

Vicky puffed a doubtful sigh and leaned over the parapet again, peering down at the big sullen cyborg below. “Hell, Elpi, I’d love to get that whole group disarmed. Half their big guns look like anti-armour equipment to my eyes. I spot at least three things down there which could put a hole the size of a bathtub in Pheiri’s face. And Persephone herself, you see those tube structures strapped to her back? Either those are top-attack ATGM launchers or I’m a sailor. She could hit this watch post from down there, let alone Pheiri.”

“Unnn!” Ilyusha added, swishing her spike-tipped tail back and forth.

“Vicky,” Elpida said. “Relax. Pheiri can flash-start his shields faster than any of them can take aim.”

“Still, Commander,” Victoria said. “I don’t like the look of them. And I don’t like the idea of her anywhere near me.”

Shilu spoke, from ten feet behind everyone else.

“You may have to accept allies you find distasteful, if they accept your coin.”

Ooni could not read the glance with which Elpida regarded Shilu; she recognised curiosity, caution, hard-eyed challenge — and deep fascination.

Shilu did not elaborate. The others regarded her with wary suspicion, open hostility, or blank-faced stares.

The Necromancer and the Commander had been engaged in conversation about Telokopolis, when they had been interrupted by the arrival of the first zombies looking for a handout of fresh meat. They had broken off mid-debate, and had allowed Shilu up onto Pheiri’s hull. The Commander had spent the last few hours handing out corpses, attempting to speak with as many of the groups of zombies as she could, and showing her physical presence among them. Pheiri’s guns kept the peace, but Elpida’s face was the one above the crescent-and-line symbol daubed on her t-shirt.

Ooni had not seen the debate with her own eyes, but she had heard all the details from Leuca and the others; news travelled fast inside Pheiri.

Elpida turned back to Victoria. “Vicky, how many revenants do we have in the chamber now, please?”

“Sixty three,” Vicky said, then paused. “Kaga says Pheiri agrees on the count.”

“How many of them left before eating?”

“Fifteen.”

“And how many left after eating?”

“Without returning? Seven.”

Elpida nodded. “How many corpses do we have left in the pile?”

A reply came across the headsets. Kagami said: “Seventeen. Not including the ones on board, for our personal use. Do not dip into that, Commander. We need those.”

Elpida broke into a smile. “Understood, Kagami.”

The Commander straightened up out of her crouch, stepped forward, and planted one boot on the parapet, looking out across the chamber. Her long white hair caught the backwash from Pheiri’s blood-red floodlights, visible from even the furthest corners of the room. Purple eyes seemed to glow in the dark, set in that golden-copper skin. Every zombie out there would see her standing tall on Pheiri’s hull, see the symbol on her chest, and know this bounty of meat had come from the Commander’s hands.

Ilyusha swished her tail, claws flexing in and out, then wrapped the appendage around Elpida’s leg. She did her best to cover Elpida with the ballistic shield.

“Those are very good numbers,” Elpida said. “Better than I had hoped.”

Ooni felt her heart fill with pride.

Shilu said: “This doesn’t scale.”

Ilyusha looked back with venom in her eyes. Ooni felt herself bristle.

But Victoria spoke up before anybody could take offence. “She’s, uh, she’s got a point, Elpi,” Victoria said. “We can’t sustain this for more than another two to three days, at most. We’ve been handing out minimal rations, sure, but we’re gonna run out eventually. Kaga had a point with her loaves and fishes thing, we can’t just magic up more meat. When we run out, those girls out there are gonna get hungry. And then they’ll start tearing into each other again.”

“Yes,” Elpida said. “They will.”

Ooni’s heart curdled. “Commander?” she whimpered.

“Shilu is correct,” Elpida said, still gazing out across the chamber. “In its current form, this technique does not scale. We cannot stop these revenants from attacking each other again when the food runs out. That is sadly inevitable. I have to accept that. We all have to accept that. There is nothing we can do, not yet, not until the meat-plant project bears fruit.” Elpida drew in a deep breath. “But they’ll remember this.”

Ooni shivered. Ooni knew, once again, why Leuca had decided to follow this woman.

Ooni knew, deep in her heart, that she should feel terribly jealous and spiteful toward Elpida the woman, however she felt about Elpida the Commander. Leuca — Ooni’s beloved, Ooni’s one and only, the girl who Ooni would cross any abyss of time to find again — drank blood from this woman’s hand, like a hound at her ankles. Ooni knew that Leuca and Elpida had shared something special, something that Ooni’s mouth on Leuca’s cunt could never quite replicate, however often she tried. But Ooni understood. When Elpida spoke, Ooni heard truth and clarity.

Shilu interrupted Ooni’s clean thoughts, dragging her back down into the shadows of the tomb.

“What are you trying to achieve here, Telokopolan?” said Shilu.

Elpida let out a sigh, almost contented, and finally climbed back down from the edge of the parapet. She turned around and squatted opposite Shilu, staring back into the wide, dark eyes of the Necromancer’s disguise. Ilyusha followed, hovering about Elpida like a dog waiting for the command to bite.

Elpida said, “What do you think I’m doing, Shilu?”

“I don’t know. Enlighten me.”

Victoria hissed, “Couldn’t we all have this conversation indoors, you know? Talk politics inside Pheiri’s hull, perhaps?”

Elpida answered without looking up. “I need to be here if any additional zombies arrive. Vicky, I need your eyes for that. Shilu and I are just passing the time on watch, that’s all.”

Vicky let out a big sigh. “Fair enough. You good too, Ooni?”

Ooni almost flinched again, surprised to be addressed. “Y-yes. Yes, I’m good. Thank you. Yes.”

Elpida was speaking; Ooni wanted to listen.

“I’m sowing seeds, Shilu,” Elpida was saying. “I’m sowing as many as I can. Some will wither, some will be eaten by animals, some will shrivel up for want of water. But some will sprout and grow, even if we can’t see them, even if we can’t sit in their shade for a very long time. Even if we never do.”

Shilu sighed. A human expression finally crossed her face — mild irritation. “Spare me the tortured metaphor.”

Elpida laughed softly. “Alright, my apologies. Every girl down there who’s eating one of those corpses, she’s eating a meal she hasn’t had to kill for, a meal that she hasn’t got to drag back into a hole lest some other scavengers take it from her. For some of them, that’s the first time in a very long time they haven’t had to fight to fill their bellies. For some it’s the first peaceful meal since death. And those corpses, that meat, it doesn’t come from an abstract place, it comes from me, and you, and the whole cadre, and Pheiri. It comes from Telokopolis. That’s the message I’ve been spreading down there.”

“Mmhmm,” Shilu grunted. “And why do it?”

“It’s what Telokopolis would do, so it’s what I’m doing.”

“Is it sustainable?” Shilu asked.

Elpida shook her head. “I’m not delusional. The only reason we can do any of this is because of Lykke’s hounds, because she practically fed them to us. We’re unlikely to have a windfall like this again. But like I said, every girl out there will remember this. It makes the next steps — months, or even years from now — that much easier.”

Shilu closed her eyes briefly, as if thinking. Atyle tilted her head, as if she could see Shilu’s thoughts. Shilu opened her eyes again; Ooni thought she looked rather tired.

“So,” Shilu said. “You don’t have a plan.”

“Hey!” Ilyusha snapped. “Reptile fuck!”

Elpida raised a hand. “Illy, it’s okay. She’s allowed to critique. And she’s right. I don’t have a specific plan, and I’ve been completely open about that. What I’m doing is creating as many opportunities and openings as possible. Some of them won’t pan out, some will have to be abandoned, some — like feeding those fools who kept pinging Pheiri with their low-grade viruses — we’re having to entertain just to show good will to others. But some of them will work, and we can pursue those in the future. Reinforce success, where we find it.”

“Interesting doctrine,” said Shilu.

Elpida smiled. “I was taught by the best.”

“And now you’re applying that doctrine to change the world.”

Elpida nodded slowly. “I’m trying to find the fulcrum on which the world can be turned. Can I change it? I don’t know yet. But I know Telokopolis can.”

“By re-inventing agriculture,” Shilu said. “Your meat-plants. Your little miracles. That’s how you hope to scale this up, right?”

Elpida puffed out a sigh. Vicky winced slowly. Ooni could hear the crackle of voices on the headsets, but whatever Kagami was saying was not for Ooni’s ears.

“In theory,” Shilu answered for the cadre. “All you have is theory.”

Elpida nodded. “In theory. The plants are a challenge, and they’re not ready yet. We can only do preliminary work for now. I want to tell as many zombies as I can, but—”

Kagami’s voice snapped over the comms. “But you are fucking well overruled, Commander! None of it is ready! Telling them we can feed them now, it’s a lie!”

Elpida just smiled.

“No spreading the good news, then?” Shilu asked.

“There is none,” Elpida answered. “Yet.”

Shilu and Elpida both fell into silence for a moment, washed over by the distant sound of the terrible storm beyond the walls. Ooni glanced away, casting her eyes over the zombies assembled beyond Pheiri. Ilyusha kept going click-click-click with her claws on the hull. Hafina hummed a tuneless melody. Atyle stared up at the distant ceiling, lost in dripping shadows.

Victoria cleared her throat, and said, “Big Man economics.”

When Ooni looked around, Victoria seemed almost bashful. The others were all staring at her.

“Please go on, Vicky,” said Elpida. “What does that mean?”

Victoria cleared her throat again. She seemed to be having trouble meeting anybody’s eyes. “It’s a uh, theory term. I never did university or anything, never was really big on theory at all really, I wasn’t good at it, but this is something I remember pretty well. The sort of thing the place I came from — the Great Lakes Republic, I mean — the sort of thing everybody knew. I think there’s more accurate technical terms for it, too, but I’m no good with those. ‘Single-point resource centralisation’. Something like that? But I always remember the ‘Big Man’ metaphor. Big Man Economics is when you have like, a local ‘Big Man’ — you know, somebody important, somebody with power, or a stand in for that, like a religious figure, or a institution, or maybe even something that isn’t a person, like a ring of standing stones in some ancient world tribe, or … you … you get the idea, right? Is this making sense?”

Ilyusha tapped Pheiri’s hull with her claw-tips, and grunted, “Uh huh!”

Ooni was surprised; Ilyusha seemed absorbed.

Vicky went on. “Well, in those kinds of economies, everything goes through the Big Man. Everyone gives the Big Man their harvest, or their cattle, or whatever it is they make. And then the Big Man goes like ‘hey, I don’t need all this stuff, I’m just one guy.’ Or if the ‘Big Man’ is the gods or an idol, well, gods don’t eat. So the Big Man parcels it out to everybody else. That way, everyone knows like, hey, that’s the family who grows all the beans or whatever, that’s the family who makes all the cheese, and so on and so on. Any disputes go through the Big Man, instead of with each other. The Big Man commands all the soldiers and warriors, so he keeps the peace. That’s … kinda like how you’re trying to act, Elpi. Like that’s what you’re trying to make us into. At least here. In this chamber. For a bit.”

Silence fell, filled with rainstorm static.

“Palace economy,” said Shilu, and she did not sound impressed. “You are describing a god-king palace economy.”

Elpida said: “Shilu?”

“Not only are you trying to reinvent agriculture,” Shilu said. “You’re reinventing the bronze age. That is far too slow and far too primitive for your aims.”

Atyle smiled. “Primitive is relative, faithless slave.”

Vicky huffed. “Well excuse me, Necromancer. Sorry for coming up with the best analogy I could think of. You got a better one?”

“Yes,” said Shilu.

“Huh!” Vicky laughed, rather unkindly. “Well come on then, let’s fucking hear it, you—”

Elpida raised a hand. “Yes, Shilu. Let’s hear it. I want your input. You’ve got a much wider reference range than us. What are we getting wrong?”

Shilu stared for a moment, as if trying to decide if the question was genuine.

“During my true life,” Shilu said eventually, “in the place where I lived and died, there was an ancient political concept, about two thousand years old by the time I was born. It drifted in and out of fashion from one century to the next. I was never a very diligent student of history, so I can’t remember the exact origin. This concept was called the ‘mass line’.”

Victoria squinted, as if she understood a little of what Shilu referred to. Elpida gestured for Shilu to continue.

Shilu said, “This was a methodology for combining leadership and mass action. I’m not a political philosopher, I can’t explain the underpinnings. The basic form goes like this: you make a plan, a theory, and you are busy implementing it; while you do that, you need to ask those on whose behalf you are working what they think of the plan and the theory. You need to ask what they need, what are their concerns, what you can do better. Then you take those responses and use them as the fuel to improve the plan and the theory, as it is being implemented. This forms an endless cycle.”

Elpida nodded. “Right. That’s what I’ve been doing, talking to the revenants down there.”

“Saying what?” Shilu said. “Asking what?”

“If they’re willing to stay in the chamber beneath Pheiri’s guns, if they’re willing to renounce infighting and predatory action, as long as there’s a source of food. Telling them about Telokopolis, about the possibility of something different to all this.”

Shilu shook her head. “Go back down there and ask better questions, Telokopolan.”

“Like what? I’m serious, Shilu, what are you trying to suggest?”

Vicky cleared her throat. “She means ask them what they need, not what they’re willing to follow. I … I think.”

Shilu leaned to one side, thinking. It was the most human gesture Ooni had seen from her yet.

“What will they do when the meat runs out?” Shilu said. “Not as a rhetorical question, but a practical one. Ask them what they plan to do. Who will they attack? Who will they trust, after spending time in this chamber together? When this storm passes and this truce ends, will they follow Pheiri, and seek safety under his guns? Or will they run, because they suspect they’re next? What do they want from us? What do they believe is possible? Do they trust your intentions? Do they think you will supply more meat? Do they believe you? How many of them know what ‘Telokopolis’ means now — and how many only think they know?” Shilu paused, as if done, but then surged on ahead, voice threatening real emotion in her urgency. “There are several hundred zombies in this tomb right now, enduring unprecedented conditions. The storm has shocked them, created an opening for dialectical synthesis. You know this, but you’re slow and cautious. You need to take that opening, before they turn back.”

Ooni heard a crackle over the radio — Serin, laughing softly, rough and scratchy behind her metal mask. None of the others seemed to react. Another broadcast for Ooni alone?

Elpida nodded slowly. “And will you help me do that, Necromancer?”

Shilu’s lips twitched — the corpse of a smile. “I’m no good at that, Telokopolan. That’s not my area of expertise. I’m no political officer.”

Elpida leaned back and almost grinned, as if Howl was trying to peek through her skin. “Fair enough, Shilu.”

Vicky snorted. “Yeah, you can say that again.”

Ilyusha made her tail spike go shick-shick — but slowly, staring at Shilu in silent contemplation.

Elpida said: “Speaking of your areas of expertise, we got interrupted before we could continue our conversation, earlier. There are things I need to know, Shilu.”

“I have little else to tell.”

“Tell them anyway.”

Shilu raised her eyebrows. “Here?”

“Why not?” Elpida dipped her head and spoke into the comms network. “Kagami, keep us updated on any changes in the crowd downstairs. Watch the entrances, too. Don’t hesitate to interrupt me if more zombies turn up, that’s why we’re out here in the first place.”

Kagami’s voice crackled in Ooni’s headset. “I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job, Commander.”

Victoria rolled her eyes. Ilyusha snorted a laugh. Atyle was paying no attention at all, staring at a blank section of metal wall. Hafina was staring off at something on the far side of the chamber as well, eyes hidden behind her angled mask.

Elpida smiled. “Thank you, Kaga. Now, anybody else want to head back inside? Ooni, Vicky, you’ve got another twenty minutes on watch, but you could cut it short. We can keep an eye on things now.”

“I’m good,” said Victoria.

Ooni shook her head; she wouldn’t miss this for anything, except perhaps Leuca.

“Alright then,” Elpida said. “Good job, Ooni. Keep your eyes peeled.”

“Yes, Commander,” Ooni said. “Thank you.”

Elpida returned her attention to the Necromancer. “Now, Shilu,” she said. “Tell me about Central.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Not all those who are lost are beyond help; not all the undead are condemned to darkness, even for the weight of all those sins. Even Ooni can wear the symbol of Telokopolis, because Telokopolis is forever.

Well well well, this chapter was extremely long and so is the next one! I appear to have somewhat lost control of chapter length lately. There’s just so many little details to include, so many different POVs worth visiting in this temporary shelter beneath the storm. It’s great to return to Ooni after some time and see how she’s doing, and she’s doing … okay, at best. Kind of a mess! Poor thing. At least she’s safe, for now. And at least Pheiri is nice and comfy, tucked deep down in the tomb while the storm rages on outdoors. Now if only the zombies would stop bickering …

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I am still very much trying to build up some kind of a backlog of chapters, and when I do, I hope to share more advance chapters with patrons!

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

And thank you, dear readers! Thanks for reading my little story;  I hope you are having as much fun reading it as I am writing it! I cannot get enough of these undead disasters, they’re such a delight on the page, no matter what they’re up to. Unseen dangers lurk in the darkness of this unexplored tomb, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing them very soon. Until next chapter! Seeya then!

Content Warnings

Sexually derogatory language
Extremely toxic relationship dynamics (guess who!)
Borderline abuse
Ableist language
Intimate partner violence
Fascism

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“They’re handing out corpses,” repeated the airhead degenerate. “Simple as that. I’ve really got nothing else to tell you. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Storm-static filled the silence after the absurd little whore-zombie stopped speaking. The roar of the deluge and the howl of the hurricane penetrated deep into the tomb, down through layers of black metal, down into the warren of shadow and echo, down into this semi-secure refuge, this dark little chamber, this shameful hole deep in the heart of the undead mausoleum.

Cantrelle knew the storm-static was a pattern, filled with signs from God. But she refused to listen. She had a better source of divine truth now, right by her side.

She kept her eyes forward for the moment, focused on this band of degenerates.

The leader stood framed beneath one of the two archways into the room; she had strode forward as if totally unafraid, rather than warded off by the black and grinning skulls daubed either side of the entrance. She stood ahead of her companions, as if she was vanguard to the dozen or so zombies lurking in the darkness behind her narrow, reedy, weak little shoulders. Her ridiculous armoured dress made her look frivolous at best, a slut at worst. Her multitude of stolen limbs flailed about with every word, expressing everything, signifying nothing. If a zombie such as this had presented herself before the former full and glorious strength of the Sisterhood of the Skull, with that mocking look on her face, Cantrelle would have ordered her skinned and gutted.

A far more extreme example of subhuman degeneration hung from the archway above the leader’s head — a mass of tarry black flesh, writhing with loops of glistening tendril, dripping oily mucus from the delusion of her nanomachine-modified body. There was one well on the way to dissolution and collapse.

The leader called herself ‘Puk’; the subhuman mistake above her was called ‘Tati’. Absurd names for absurd creatures.

None of the dozen zombies behind Puk had given their names, nor exhibited visible signs of advanced degeneration, nor advanced one boot-toe into the light. Cantrelle’s bionic eyes could see something was wrong with the group, as if they were using cloaking devices, or perhaps employing powerful infantry-scale shields to obfuscate their outlines, but she couldn’t pinpoint exactly what was going on. She didn’t care enough to find out. The state of their leader and her pet was evidence enough of their degeneracy.

Cantrelle worked to keep the disgust off her face, but she didn’t work too hard.

Silence dragged on, filled with storm.

Click-buzz.

Cantrelle spoke over the Sisterhood comms network, via her internal bionics, on a heavily encrypted private line.

<<Yolanda,>> she said. <<Dead air.>>

Yola replied in a rapid little rush. <<I— I know! I … I don’t know what to say to her. Ella, Ella, please, what should I—>>

<<Calm down. Listen to me. Do as I say.>>

<<Yes … yes, always, yes.>>

<<Demand context. Demand details. Make her explain.>>

Yolanda Araya Calvotana — Yola, Cantrelle’s divine messenger, her twice-lost once-regained perfect little lamb, former leader of the Sisterhood of the Skull, current leader apparent of these pitiful remnants, prophetess once again though she knew it not, and Cantrelle’s forever-bedmate, mouthpiece, and pawn — was sitting to Cantrelle’s left, upon the best throne-like chair the The Sisterhood had managed to scrounge up inside this mouldering old tomb. Yola was resplendent in her purple armour, polished to a high gleam despite the gritty rain and the tomb’s darkness, with her helmet retracted, her long red hair loose, and her noble chin held high. She was flanked by Cantrelle sitting on one side and two Sisters standing to attention in war-plate on the other. Kuro loomed behind her, a grey giant in the gloom, bristling with weapons.

Cantrelle did not need to glance at her beloved little lamb to know that Yolanda’s face betrayed none of her internal doubt and hesitation. Yola was like rime ice on stainless steel, no matter the shuddering mass of tender flesh beneath the surface. Yola had lost much, but she was still a near flawless actress.

Yola opened her lips with a wet click, and addressed the degenerate slut: “I don’t quite understand.”

Cantrelle suppressed a wince.

Yola’s voice had not lost any of its honeyed texture or cast-iron power. She still spoke with the same certainty and confidence which she had possessed as true leader of The Sisterhood of the Skull — prophet and ruler, commander and captain, the living embodiment of the ideology and inevitability of The Kingdom of Death. But Yola’s words themselves no longer carried clarity of meaning, let alone charisma. Despite all of Cantrelle’s coaching and coaxing, Yola’s oratory skills had not recovered. Those skills had been false all along, nothing more than a Necromancer’s hand up Yola’s unfaithful cunt.

Cantrelle’s little lamb needed words fed into her ear, lest she sound like the holy fool she was.

Puk actually grinned, the vile harlot. She pantomimed a shrug with half her stitched-on limbs. “What’s not to understand?” she said, almost laughing. “Do you need me to say it slow and loud? Write it out in big-font print? Draw a picture on the wall? Maybe you should put your helmet back on, you’ll see better that way.”

On the other side of Yola’s makeshift throne, DeeGee and Yazhu took offence. War-plate servo motors whined as DeeGee twitched her plasma rifle and Yazhu braced to take a step forward.

‘Tati’ — the black mass of degenerate flesh hanging from the archway — uncoiled in response, glistening tentacles lowering from the ceiling, a toothed maw opening in a circle of dark flesh.

Cantrelle switched to the all-Sisterhood channel on the comms network.

<<Guns down!>> she snapped. <<Guns down and stay where you are, you fucking insubordinate cretins! I ordered you when this started, no provocations, no threats, no firing!>>

Yazhu stuttered back. <<B-but Canny, she’s disrespecting—>>

<<That degenerate jezebel has six friends at her back in powered armour, and four more with heavy weapons. I know my eyes are better than yours, Yazhu, but you’re not blind, not inside that suit. Weapons down! Now!>>

Both Sisters obeyed, straightening up, stepping back, and making a point of taking their hands off their guns. ‘Tati’ retreated back up to the shadows of the archway, gurgling like an open drain. Puk waited with a moronic smile on her face, pretending she hadn’t witnessed the silent exchange.

DeeGee whined over the comms. <<I can’t believe we’re letting them get away with that.>>

Cantrelle bit her tongue. These twitchy fools were going to get the ragged remnants of the Sisterhood obliterated in a meaningless confrontation with a gang of nobodies.

<<All filth will get what’s coming to it,>> she broadcast. <<Show patience. Follow your orders.>>

Cantrelle switched back to Yola’s private channel; the silence had dragged on too long.

But before Cantrelle could supply a suitable line, Yola improvised: “I require neither diagrams nor help with my hearing. Little zombie, you must understand, it is very difficult for us to accept that anybody out there is giving up fresh meat. That simply does not happen. This stinks of a trap, or perhaps some kind of nasty joke at our expense. I do not like jokes at our expense. We are not to be joked about. Such matters must be rectified by serious correction of mistaken attitudes. Surely you must see that? We require additional proof of your words, or at least some kind of explanation. Will you not meet us in the middle on this matter? We are being gentle and contemplative, engaging in dialogue. Please, engage us in return.”

Cantrelle relaxed.

<<Good girl,>> she said to Yola.

The others couldn’t see the delightful little tightening of a smile around Yola’s eyes, her internal preening at Cantrelle’s compliment. Even if they could see it, they wouldn’t know what it meant.

Puk did a sickening little curtsey with her armoured dress. Cantrelle tried not to sneer.

“Mmm, an explanation?” Puk said, pouting her lips, putting a finger to her chin. “Fresh meat, still on the bone! They’ve got more raw corpses than they know what to do with, that lot. They’ve been at it for a few hours now, passing out corpses to anybody brave enough to approach their big old tank. It’s like a canteen or something. Girls just sitting around, chowing down. I saw a couple of fights almost break out, but that big tank, oh he’s sooooo biiiiig, nobody keeps fighting when he shows off his guns. What a novelty, right?”

“A novelty,” Yola echoed. “Certainly.”

“Certainly!” Puk echoed back, giggling.

Cantrelle said to Yola, over comms: <<Ask her if they’re demanding anything in return.>>

Yola said, “But surely they demand some kind of payment, something — anything — in return for all this meat?”

Puk shook her head. “Nope. Nothing. Just that we spread the good word, as it were. Pass the message around.”

“How curious,” said Yola.

<<Tell her to describe the tank.>>

Yola replied over the private channel. <<But it can’t be anything other than the one we saw, can it? There can’t be two—>>

<<Tell her to describe the tank, Yolanda. Be a good girl, do as I say.>>

Yola gulped and shivered in Cantrelle’s peripheral vision, so subtle that none other would recognise the response. Cantrelle suppressed a nasty grin of her own, filing that token flicker of defiance away for later. This was nothing more than play, regularly expected. Yola had earned herself another sobbing orgasm at Cantrelle’s hands with that, and Cantrelle would read divine truth in Yola’s pleading tears.

God could go fuck himself with his signs and portents. Cantrelle had found something so much better.

“This ‘tank’,” Yola said, ejecting the word as if it was offensive to her tongue. “Would you describe it for me, please?”

Puk smirked, lips pressed together. The dozen heavily armed revenants in the shadows behind her and Tati shifted and whispered amongst themselves.

“It’s a tank,” said Puk. “You know. Big metal box.”

Cantrelle lost her temper with this puerile little slut.

“Describe the tank,” she said out loud.

Puk’s beady eyes flickered to Cantrelle. The degenerate’s amusement lost its edge.

Cantrelle knew she looked and sounded awful, especially compared against Yola and the others. She stared back at Puk, daring her to ignore the truth.

Yola still wore her immaculate purple war-plate, despite her shattered charisma; DeeGee and Yazhu had survived the Golden Diamond and the shattering of the Sisterhood mostly intact, their suits dinged and dented but still whole and hearty. Kuro’s suit of powered armour had taken a beating during the confrontation with the Necromancer and the blob-monster, but her on-board power plant was still humming along like always, with a little help from Cantrelle’s medical and mechanical expertise. The other seven remaining revenants of the Sisterhood were over at the other end of the shadowy room, in various states of disrepair and slovenly disorder, but none of them were visibly wounded or openly crippled.

Cantrelle’s wounds — the ones inflicted by Elpida’s fists and the teeth of Elpida’s little runt — had refused to heal.

Cantrelle’s hands were still almost useless, resting limp in her lap, marked by the improperly-healed semi-circles and ragged sores of the deep bite wounds she had taken during the struggle; she’d broken her own metacarpals multiple times to get everything sorted out, but she still could not hold a gun, and could barely squeeze Yola’s delicate throat with all the strength she could muster. The sensible option would be to cut them off, eat her own useless flesh, and regrow new hands from scratch. But Cantrelle was reluctant to take that final step — and not only because the necessary investment of nanomachines was very difficult for the broken remnants of the Sisterhood.

Her mechanical tentacles were a little better. She had adapted her pair of pincer-tentacles for better manipulation, adding greater articulation and dexterity, to compensate for her crippled hands. The two tentacles which Elpida had snapped off were in the middle of a slow and painful process of regrowth — sprouting delicate cores of copper-wrapped flesh from two ragged stubs, waving in the air to gather ambient nanomachines.

But Puk didn’t stare at those. She stared at Cantrelle’s face, at Cantrelle’s blank and screen-like eyes, Cantrelle’s bald skull and bionic jaw. Most of all she stared at the strangulation bruises on Cantrelle’s neck — the chain-link marks still engraved on Cantrelle’s throat, the bruises unfaded as black and purple ink.

Puk’s eyes lingered on that detail, then upon the bisected tattoo on Cantrelle’s cheek; Cantrelle had learned to tell when somebody was looking at the ruined and shattered symbol on her flesh.

The titular symbol of the Sisterhood of the Skull, the black tattoo of the grinning death’s head, broken in half by a zombie’s bite.

The new skin was raw and thin, red and sensitive, and had not healed any further.

Cantrelle wore her unhealed wounds with pride. At first she had been afraid to remove the bandage from her cheek and reveal the bisected skull — the rest of the Sisterhood would undoubtedly take that as a terrible omen. When her various wounds had stopped healing, she had grown frustrated; something had gone wrong with her nanomachine biology, and all her medical skills could not solve the puzzle. Zombies did not suffer lingering wounds, as long as they ate plenty of meat, and Cantrelle was not starving. She had fallen into rage and despair. Was this also a sign from God, written upon her own body? Was this the punishment for her moment of heresy?

Because she was a heretic now, in a way she had trouble untangling.

Cantrelle had abandoned faith entirely after resurrection and undeath, consigning faith and God and divine signs to the sunlit days of true life. But then God’s works had burst back into the Kingdom of Death with the Golden Diamond, and Cantrelle had felt only hate. God had not been there when Cantrelle had needed him. God had not been there when the Sisterhood had needed him. He had not protected them from his wrath, nor spared them his vengeance. The Kingdom of Death was his, not theirs, and Cantrelle spat in his face at this insult. God had allowed Yola to stray. God had brought Cantrelle to the brink of defeat. And it was not God who had saved Cantrelle and Yola in the end, not physically, nor spiritually.

The mech had saved her, and remade her faith anew.

Cantrelle had witnessed that moment of beauty, that blossom of new life amid the rot, with her own two eyes. The flesh-storm blooming of the mech, a triumphant birth of new possibilities. She and Yola had been such fools, thinking of that downed mech as nothing but an instrument of worldly power.

The mech — the new life — had smashed God’s Sign into the dirt, and strode free.

In that moment of awe, Cantrelle had rejected the Kingdom of Death. She was certain now — that was when her wounds had stopped healing. That was when something had changed inside her.

Eventually she had come to the obvious conclusion. She found comfort in defiance, and pride in her afflictions.

Cantrelle’s wounds were a reflection of the shattered Sisterhood, a sign of the broken promise from an absentee God. She would only heal when the Sisterhood was whole once more, stronger than before, stronger than ever. Then she would wrest the Kingdom of Death from God’s hands, and install her perfect little lamb on the throne. They would find that new life, that blossomed biomechanoid, and learn truth at her divine feet.

But that was for the future.

For now, Cantrelle was wounded, wracked by chronic pain, huddled in the dark beneath a storm, treating with degenerates.

Puk broke back into a smirk. Her eyes flickered across all the other black and grinning skulls among the Sisters — on Yola’s shoulder pads and armoured abdomen, on Kuro’s chestplate, on DeeGee and Yazhu’s armour.

Puk said: “And what will you do if I don’t describe the tank for you, Death’s Head?”

Click-buzz. Cantrelle spoke over the general channel. <<Do not rise to her insult. Nobody move. Nobody reply.>>

Out loud, Cantrelle said: “We make no secret of what we are, degenerate. Do you have the courage to open fire on us, or are you going to answer the question?”

Puk raised her eyebrows and put her hands together, as if praying. “And why don’t you open fire on us first, Death’s Head? Out of bullets?”

“We will not be first to initiate hostilities,” Cantrelle drawled. “We never are. Now, answer Yolanda’s question, or fuck off back into the tomb, you rancid little whore.”

Above Puk, Tati uncurled from the archway and made several rude gestures in Cantrelle’s direction.

Click-buzz. Yola spoke on the private channel. <<Well done, Ella. You’re always so stirring. Well don—>>

<<Be quiet, Yola.>>

Puk made a big show of sighing and looking behind her, past her dozen shadowy companions and down the tomb-corridor outside. The storm-rain and hurricane-winds howled and raged in the silence. Tati kept gesturing. Cantrelle wanted to spit on the floor.

Puk turned back with a lazy shrug. “The tank. Ummmm, it’s big?” she said. “Bigger than a house, for a given value of house. White armour, and very thick, very heavy. Lots and lots of guns, more than any group of us ickle zombies could carry. One turret, big cannon, all purple and distended and thick. A rear ramp, I think? Not sure what else I can tell you, skull fucker. Not sure I want to, either.”

Puk ended with a big grin. From the archway above, Tati gurgled: “Skullll-fucker!”

Cantrelle leaned forward in her chair and spat on the ground.

Yola said: “Among their number, was there one by the name of ‘Elpida’?”

Cantrelle’s veins filled with ice.

She glanced at Yola, but Yola was looking straight ahead.

That was a serious transgression. Speaking out of turn or questioning Cantrelle’s instructions, that was expected, almost playful, a regular occurrence which Cantrelle would transmute into Yola’s own sobbing orgasms and shuddering tears. But this? Asking after the so-called ‘superhuman’ with whom she had been obsessed? The ‘superhuman’ whose face the corpse-rapist Necromancer had worn to seduce Yola? The object and focus of Yola’s infidelity and betrayal?

“Mm!” Puk smiled. “Elpida, that’s right. She was the one who talked to us. The leader, I reckon. Maybe. Who knows for sure? Not me!”

Yola nodded. “Thank you.”

Cantrelle would make sure Yola never spoke that name again.

<<Yolanda. Ask them about the apostates.>>

Yola said, “And were there two others among them, called by the names ‘Ooni’, and ‘Pira’?”

Puk shrugged. “Dunno. Didn’t see many of them. Why don’t you go take a look for yourselves, hey? Maybe you could nab a corpse or two. You girls look like you need it more than we did. Hungry hungry skull-faces!”

Cantrelle sighed. Yazhu snorted from inside her armour. DeeGee didn’t make a sound, but Cantrelle saw the old soldier shaking her helmet. The others — strung out at the other end of the chamber — added some bitter laughter to the chorus. Everybody knew that was a joke. No Death’s Head would survive walking into a room like that, not when reduced to such paltry numbers. They would be torn apart and eaten alive.

Cantrelle opened the private channel again, but Yola opened her mouth first.

Yola said: “Little zombie. Miss ‘Puk’, thank you for your gracious sharing of so much information, but I believe there is something you are holding back. I am a very good judge of emotions and character, you see. And I can tell that you are lying about something. Perhaps this is merely by omission, without intention, and I would like to believe so. But you are lying to us. And this I do not like.”

Puk raised her eyebrows. From the archway above her, Tati spoke in a wet, bubbling voice: “Bah! Bah bah bah. Not tricking. It’s not a trick.”

“Ah,” said Yola, fluttering her dark lashes. “So there is some additional matter to share?”

Puk mimed a wobbling motion with several of her stitched-on limbs. “Kinda. Kinda not.”

Cantrelle snapped, “Spit it out, gutter-trash.”

Puk shrugged. “The first time we visited the tank people, they had this other girl, this … thing, sat out a ways in front of the tank.”

“Thing?” Yola said. “Please, be more specific. There are many ‘things’ in this world.”

“Like a super high-end cyborg,” Puk said. “All black metal, covered in spikes and blades. Big white face made of plastic. They were going to interrogate her or something. Only, see, when we went back a couple of hours later to see how they was all getting on, the cyborg was gone. Nowhere to be found. She didn’t look normal that first time, you know? Even for a zombie like you and us, like. And, hey, you know what I think?”

“I couldn’t possibly imagine,” said Yola. Cantrelle almost grinned — there was a touch of that old Yola sarcasm.

“I think it was a Necromancer,” Puk said.

Yola raised her eyebrows and nodded, politely and graciously. Cantrelle watched Yola in her peripheral vision, watching for hope or excitement.

As far as Cantrelle knew, Yola’s Necromantic benefactor had not attempted further contact. The rejection beneath the Golden Diamond had marked the end of Yolanda’s infidelity. But Cantrelle took no chances; these days she never let Yola out of her sight. They slept together, ate together, pissed together. Cantrelle held the encryption keys to Yola’s internal comms uplink, and the maintenance codes to her powered armour. At any given moment Cantrelle could remotely access the diagnostics of Yola’s war-plate, to read off her heart-rate, the electrical activity in her muscles, or the arousal down in her crotch. There was no possible opening for further betrayal.

Still she watched for interest in Yola’s face, and saw none. But Yola was a liar and a cheat and a traitor, and a very good actress. Her face would only show truth while sobbing and pleading, while Cantrelle’s hands closed around her throat.

Was this black metal creature the same Necromancer who had seduced Yola? The same Necromancer who had gifted Yola her powers of oration, her immunity to pain, her supreme self-confidence?

Cantrelle doubted that very much. But she had to remain vigilant, or wolves would steal her little lamb again.

“Thank you very much for this information,” Yola said. “You have given us much to consider, Miss Puk.”

Puk did another curtsy, with a sickening smile on her face.

Cantrelle fed Yola a line: <<Tell them they can go.>>

Yola raised a purple armoured glove from the armrest of her metal throne. “You may be on your way. Go unmolested, with our blessing.”

DeeGee and Yazhu glanced at each other, chattering on a private channel. Some of the other Sisters grumbled and frowned. Cantrelle resisted the urge to chastise Yola for improvising. What worth was the blessing of a Death’s Head?

Puk curtseyed and backed away, out of the arch, skirt held out to either side. Her vile pet followed, sliding across the ceiling and retreating into the corridor, departing with a wet raspberry noise from her mutated maw. Puk and Tati’s friends went with them, receding into the shadows of the tomb corridors beyond.

“Smell ya later, alligators!” Puk called, waved half her hands, and was gone.

<<Hold,>> Cantrelle sent over the open channel. She waited until the booted footsteps were swallowed up by the sound of the storm, then said: <<Check she’s clear. Nothing by the entrance?>>

<<Nothing there, Canny,>> DeeGee radioed back. <<Entrance is clear. We’re alone again.>>

<<Alright. Stand down. Theo, Hems, you’re to remain on watch by the other archway. DeeGee, Yazhu, you take this one. I don’t want any surprises coming out of the dark. Stay awake. No fucking around.>>

Acknowledgement pings filled Cantrelle’s on-board comms. Sisters moved to obey her orders.

Cantrelle closed her eyes for a moment. She listened to the roaring rain and howling wind of the storm. That hurricane could only be sent by God, filled with patterns in the chaos. Cantrelle concentrated in hope of discerning a message, so she could do the exact opposite of God’s wishes, and spite him to his face. But try as she might, she could not discern anything in the noise, neither truth nor lies, no sense in the madness. God was silent. God was testing her.

<<Fuck you,>> Cantrelle sent on an unencrypted channel, off the comms. <<I hope you’re listening. We will tear you from heaven and feast on your guts.>>

A whisper replied — Yola, listening in. <<Ella?>>

<<Nothing.>>

Cantrelle opened her eyes again and turned to Yola, to the little group which had gathered to receive the unexpected degenerate visitors. DeeGee and Yazhu were still standing on the other side of Yola’s makeshift throne. Kuro was planted behind Yola, like a statue in grey slate.

Cantrelle spoke out loud. “I thought I told you two to watch the door. Are your comms malfunctioning?”

DeeGee answered, voice muffled by her war-plate helmet. “Negative. Canny, we just thought—”

“Then you thought wrong,” Cantrelle rasped. “Go watch the door. Up close.”

Yazhu said, “Why?”

Cantrelle glared at Yazhu, at the little lenses in her helmet. “Because I give the orders and you obey them. Do we have a problem?”

DeeGee said, “Yaz, come on. Boss says we shift, so we shift.”

Yazhu looked down at Yola, who was pointedly ignoring this exchange between an actual subordinate and a fake subordinate.

Yazhu said: “Canny’s not the boss. Yola, boss, what do you say?”

Cantrelle broadcast to Yola: <<Answer her.>>

Yolanda looked up as if stirred from deep thought, green eyes flashing in the gloom, a gentle smile on her bow-shaped lips. “Do as Ella orders, please. Her words are my words. Her will is my will. We are all friends and allies here. I wish no strife inside the Sisterhood.”

DeeGee saluted. Yazhu shrugged. Both Sisters stomped over to the archway and assumed relaxed watch positions, fixing their attention on the corridor. They were well beyond earshot over there.

<<Good girl,>> Cantrelle said.

<<Ella, I’m … I’m afraid,>> Yola said. <<Everyone is so on edge. And this storm, it’s … it’s just impossible. What’s happening to us, Ella? What’s happening to the world?>>

Cantrelle sighed. She glanced over at the other end of the room, where the ragged remnants of the Sisterhood were gathered in the gloom.

Seven other stragglers sat around the chamber, cleaning their guns, watching the doorways, listening to the storm. They muttered together in low voices, sullen and sulky. Several fights had broken out earlier, tempers fraying, fears ignited by the impossible storm and the rush to flee inside the tomb.

After the shattering beneath the gravitics and aircraft of the Golden Diamond — and the private confrontation with Yola’s Necromantic seduction — The Sisterhood of the Skull had been scattered amongst the ruins, no stronger or more unified than any roving cannibal degenerates. In the wake of the awe of the biomechanoid’s blossom, Cantrelle had dragged Yola to safety; she still wasn’t sure how they had survived the attack by the sniper — the tall zombie who openly wore the crescent-and-line symbol of the Wreckers and Murderers. But they had survived, scrambling away in the confusion. Cantrelle had dragged Yola out before the nuclear storm had consumed the fight behind them.

At first she had been alone with Yola, sleeping in holes at night, scurrying along like rats in the day. Cantrelle had come very close to strangling Yola to death, once, twice, then three times.

Yola’s betrayal hurt, worse than unhealed wounds, worse than the indignity of starvation.

All Yola’s confidence and power had come not from Cantrelle’s support and protection, but from the Necromancer who had wormed into Yola’s heart beneath Cantrelle’s notice. The Sisterhood of the Skull owed their prophet not to truth or correct thought or victory, but to some corpse-rapist monster.

So Cantrelle had squeezed Yola’s throat until Yola had begged and pleaded. She had called Yola a traitor and a heretic, a slut and a bitch, an unfaithful rutting animal no better than the degenerates they had once slaughtered together. But Yola never fought back, despite Cantrelle’s weakness and wounds. She never raced ahead and left Cantrelle behind for the scavengers. She never drew a gun and put it to Cantrelle’s head and told her to stop.

Cantrelle had tasted Yola’s tears and decided they were true. She had fucked Yola until there was nowhere her little lamb could hide anymore secrets, no place for Yola to turn to ignore her betrayal.

And in Yola’s tears and Yola’s pleas and Yola’s body, Cantrelle had rediscovered a medium far more real than any of God’s messages.

This was the lamb who should sit on the throne. Victory would make her clean.

Kuro had found them eventually. Kuro was a good hound to Yola, even Cantrelle had to admit that. Kuro had been there during that confrontation with the Necromancer, and Kuro had heard every word, and Kuro had not abandoned Yolanda. Cantrelle felt far less jealous about Kuro these days, not least because she knew Yola wasn’t bouncing up and down in Kuro’s lap anymore. Kuro’s fuck-pet days were over.

Cantrelle had spent the long, gruelling weeks of starvation and scavenging since then rebuilding what she could of The Sisterhood. She’d located DeeGee and Yazhu — not too difficult, as their powered armour gave them a survivor’s edge — and swept up whatever other stragglers she could find. By the time the graveworm had approached this fresh tomb, Cantrelle’s efforts had amounted to no more than seven other revenants recovered. Only Yola, Kuro, DeeGee and Yazhu had powered armour. The others had scraps and clothes at best. They’d lost all the drones, large quantities of advanced equipment, and most of their big guns.

Worst of all, they’d lost confidence. Morale was non-existent. They lived no better than the degenerates now.

But the ones who had survived were tough, those who could make it even when cut off from the group. Cantrelle saw the silver lining in this process of winnowing. The dead weight had been cut free. The Sisterhood was lean now, and would be strong again.

Death’s Heads always came back; Cantrelle had been around enough times to know that. The Kingdom of Death could never be truly stamped out. It would always rise again.

Yola, however, was worse than dead weight — she was a lie.

Cantrelle knew she was holding these remnants together through the sheer force of her own willpower, but she still needed Yola’s status as a figurehead. All those pretty words and that prophetic ideology had turned out to be seeded by a Necromancer, but Cantrelle did not have the reputation or charisma to command this flagging gang by herself, not without victories.

She needed to give them triumph, and soon.

Cantrelle turned away from the seven other stragglers and back to Yolanda. Kuro still loomed behind the makeshift throne, close at hand, but she could stay. Kuro knew the truth already, that the prophet had been a fraud.

“Ella?” Yola said, from up on her throne.

Unlike Cantrelle, Yola had fully recovered from her wounds. The burn mark which had marred half her face was gone, leaving only perfect amber-bronze skin over sharp cheekbones and an elegant jaw. Her bright green eyes were unclouded by blindness or damage. Ruby-red hair fell about her face in a rich wave.

But Cantrelle saw the uncertainty in those eyes, the hesitation in the lips, the flinch in the muscles when Cantrelle stared too hard.

“You asked about Elpida,” Cantrelle said.

Yola’s eyes widened slightly; beyond earshot of the others, the mask of the actress slipped away. “I … I thought it pertinent to … our … plans … ”

Cantrelle reached out with one set of tentacle-pincers and laid the cold metal against Yolanda’s cheek. Yola went very still and very stiff. Cantrelle slid the tendril-limb down the side of Yola’s throat, then wriggled it past the neck-seal of Yola’s armour.

Yola swallowed. “ … Ella?”

“Nobody cares. They know we fuck.”

“But—”

“Be quiet.”

Cantrelle forced the pincers lower. She dragged the hard edges over the soft flesh of Yola’s proud chest, then down across her quivering belly, then settled the flexing mass between Yola’s legs.

None of the Sisters could see what she was doing. Only Kuro, and Kuro never complained.

Cantrelle said, “Never speak that name again.”

Yola nodded.

Cantrelle withdrew the tendril — slowly, dragging it back up across Yola’s belly and chest and collarbone — until it popped free from the armour’s neck seal. Yola swallowed and panted, placing one armoured glove against her own throat. Cantrelle pulled the tendril back toward herself, then shoved it into her coat and awkwardly pulled out her PDW. She pointed the gun off at the floor and slid out the magazine, checking the bullets.

“We’ll talk about this more later on,” she said. “First we have to decide what to do about Elpida’s band of degenerates, and their tank.”

Kuro spoke from inside her armour, a high-pitched garble of static: “Can’t do anything about them.”

“Mm,” Cantrelle grunted, trying to think, looking down the sights of her gun. It was so difficult to form coherent thoughts beneath the pounding noise of the storm beyond the tomb. She looked up at Yola’s face and pictured her tears; that cleared her head. “We’ve lost all the heavy weaponry except what you’ve got built into your armour, Kuro. We can’t mount an effective attack on them physically. We can’t scratch that tank. Fuck.”

Yola cleared her throat gently. “Why must we assault them? Surely we can simply stay out of the way, avoid contact, and go unnoticed.”

Cantrelle sighed at Yola’s idiocy — but she didn’t snap. This was her little lamb, true and real. An empty-headed fool. A holy vector.

Cantrelle said, “What do you think she’s doing, Yola? Why do you think she’s handing out corpses to any random zombie who shows up?”

Yola wet her lips. “To buy their allegiance.”

Cantrelle nodded. “Right. Good girl, well done. Yes, she’s growing the size of her group. Buying pawns and ablative meat, with meat.” Cantrelle snorted. “How ironic. Meat for meat.”

Yola frowned delicately. “Whatever for? What task will she use them for?”

“To finish off her enemies.”

Kuro crackled: “Us.”

“Oh,” said Yola. She blinked several times, batting those dark lashes, then fell silent. She looked so regal and contemplative, as if her strategic genius mind was chewing on the problem, but Cantrelle knew that head was almost empty. Cantrelle stared off at the archway into the rest of the tomb, listening to the storm. Maybe if she—

Yola spoke again. “May we not take advantage of this situation, as other revenants have done so?”

“Pointless,” Kuro squeaked.

“Quite,” Cantrelle drawled, returning her gaze to glare at Yola. “We’d be seen and known — not least by Elpida and her arch-degenerates. If the apostate is still with them, it’ll be even worse. Ooni will know us instantly. If they haven’t eaten her already. We’ll be noted, hunted down, and wiped out. We need other options, other ideas.”

“The tomb,” Kuro said, voice full of static.

“What?” Cantrelle snapped.

“The tomb itself,” said the big dumb giant. “Full of secrets. Astrometrics. Communications hubs. Topographical maps. Other stuff. We might find something good.”

Cantrelle frowned with sudden sharp concern.

Kuro had been showing more intelligence and initiative since the shattering of The Sisterhood, as if regular playtime with Yola had been draining her already residual intelligence. She had spent some time exploring and patrolling the nearby rooms, dragging pairs of the other Sisters along with her, and also carefully checking the tomb’s armoury — already stripped by Elpida’s group. Cantrelle had assumed she was trying to be helpful, but this new level of comprehension was potentially dangerous. She wished Kuro would open her armour so Cantrelle could read her expressions.

“We lack the technical skills for that,” Cantrelle said carefully. She sighed and raised her eyes to the ceiling, dripping with shadows, echoing with distant rain. “And therein lies our answer. There may be others in the tomb, others formerly of The Sisterhood, who also made it in here before this blasted storm hit. We may be able to make contact. We need to grow our numbers again. But we’ll need meat in the meantime, that much is true. Perhaps we can steal it rather than beg.”

“Ella,” said Yolanda. “We should take advantage of this.”

Cantrelle sighed and glared at Yola again. “Stop repeating yourself. The idea has already been—”

“Ella,” she hissed. “I want to be useful, and—”

“Be quiet.”

<<Ping-ping-ping>> Yola sent. A non-verbal systems ping. The old cry for help.

Cantrelle was stunned into silence.

Yola followed up: <<You’re not listening, Ella!>>

Cantrelle blinked. That was true defiance. Yola needed more than discipline, she needed reminding. Cantrelle steeled herself for the task once the others were asleep.

Yola must have taken Cantrelle’s shock for acquiescence. She hurried on, hissing words into the darkness.

“Ella, we should take advantage of this opening. What if we disrupt the process, disrupt their sharing and redistributing of meat? And I don’t just mean disrupt the physical process — I mean disrupt the very fabric of what El—” She caught herself, gulped with a touch of fear in her eyes, then carried on. “Of what the degenerate is trying to achieve. Don’t you remember all the things she said when we held her captive? She holds to this very specific nonsense and foolishness. What if we could show that it was foolish nonsense? Not just to her, but to those whose hungry mouths she is feeding with lies?”

Yola’s emerald eyes burned with a light Cantrelle had not seen in a very long time.

“Disrupt it?” Cantrelle said slowly. “With that tank on overwatch? We’d never get anywhere near them. What exactly are you suggesting, Yolanda?”

Yola began to smile. “We use a pawn.”

“A hostage? They’d blow right through a hostage, Yola. Don’t be stupid.”

Yola’s smile blossomed. “What if we want them to?”

A shiver went up Cantrelle’s spine.

She hadn’t seen Yola this way in forever — a clever little nightmare with a dark plan and a taste for cruelty. For the first time in far too long, she knew exactly what was Yola was thinking.

“Yolanda?”

“Yes, Ella?”

“Are you thinking what I assume you are?”

Yola bit her lower lip.

Yola the Prophetess had never bitten her lower lip. Yola the Prophetess had never cried or shivered or moaned beneath Cantrelle’s hands. This Yola was Cantrelle’s Yola, the one she had been trying to coax back out for much longer than the last few weeks of desperation. This was Yola’s initiative, Yola’s idea, Yola’s pretty little mind finally slipping into gear, oiled and warmed by Cantrelle’s hands.

Cantrelle spoke into the comms network: <<Cerybe, Francka, over here.>>

On the other side of the room, two Sisters clambered to their feet and walked over to the throne. Cantrelle glanced up at Cer and Franny. Both of them were a mess, wearing patchwork bits of armour carapace, carrying guns strapped over their backs. Cerybe had long blonde hair tied in a braided ponytail. Franny was grey and ragged with some kind of attempt to grow herself iron-impregnated skin.

These two had been responsible for preserving most of the supplies which The Sisterhood now possessed. They were capable and cautious and knew when to play it safe. They were survivors, and they took orders well.

Cantrelle said, “Both of you are going to strip off any parts of your armour or clothing which shows our symbol. No skulls. Understand?”

Cer raised her eyebrows.

Franny shrugged. “Okay, sure. What for? We doing some covert ops shit?”

“Yes,” said Cantrelle. “You two are going to request a corpse from the degenerates. Pretend you’ve never heard of the Death’s Heads before. Take the body cam we have, and keep your radios open. We need as much information about their process as we can get. We need to understand their procedures, how they’re sharing out the meat, who they have in the open, all of it. Take note of how many revenants there are in that room, their positions, how well-armed they are, and so on. I want details, details, details.”

Cerybe pulled a grin. “We eating in or taking out?”

Cantrelle snorted. “Bring the corpse back here. We’ll partition it out. But that’s not the purpose of this operation.”

“Right, right, understood,” said Francka. “So what’s step two?”

Yola spoke before Cantrelle could answer. “You won’t be responsible for that part.”

Cantrelle glanced back at her. “We’re going to need a ‘volunteer’ for the follow up. Yola, do you have a plan for that?”

Yola wet her lips with a flicker of tongue. “How about little Puk?”

Cantrelle shook her head. “No, too dangerous. She’s too experienced, too well protected. We need a freshie, a fool, somebody scared.”

Yola shrugged. “I’m sure we can rustle that up.”

Kuro squawked through her cloud of static: “I will.”

Cantrelle nodded. A dark grin grew on her face. “We’ll need all the explosives we can muster. Cer, how much do we have?”

Cerybe blew out a breath. “I haven’t taken stock in a while. Grenades, plastics, enough to make a pretty big boom. But I doubt it’s enough to punch through the side of that tank. Canny, that ain’t gonna work.”

Yola smiled wider. “That is more than enough. We are not aiming for the tank, after all. We also need metal, a welding tool, and radio equipment enough for remote detonation. A timer would be acceptable, but remote would be better. Something that can’t be jammed, either. Can we do all that, Cerybe, my dear expert?”

Cerybe frowned, then raised her eyebrows in realisation. “Uh, yeah. Yeah we can, boss.”

“Holy shit,” Francka said slowly. “What have you cooked up, Canny?”

Cantrelle felt a grin rip across her face. “Not me. This plan is Yolanda’s baby.”

Yola beamed — at her subordinates, then at Cantrelle.

Cantrelle’s heart skipped a beat. Yola was only usually this beautiful when she was crying.

“Our baby, I think,” Yola said. “Now, Ella, Kuro, let’s go find us a ‘volunteer’.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

If somebody had told me two years ago that I would eventually write a scene where two fascists (or one lapsing fascist and one pretending fascist??? I’m not even sure what’s going on with Yola and Cantrelle anymore) repaired their flagging relationship by bonding over planning a terrorist attack, I would have been, to put lightly, a wee bit confused.

Anyway! Here’s the most toxic relationship I’ve ever written! These girls are rancid, the vibes are rotten, and my gosh Cantrelle is an amazing mess. This zombie needs to lie down. I’m done, I’m out, I’m leaving her to her own devices! (Not really, because I’m sure we’re about to see her again soon.)

Also! A quick reminder that once again, next week Necroepilogos is on the regular scheduled break! If you’re ever in doubt, check the Table of Contents page!

In the meantime, for those readers who do not frequent the discord, I have two absolutely incredible pieces of fanart to share with you, both by the very talented Carterwjessup: first up we have Kagami, Smug Princess – Kaga proving that sometimes she is capable of exuding intense confidence, at least when she’s got her drones set up for a good float, before a projection of her beloved Moon. And then we have simply Elpida herself, holding a perhaps familiar skull, dressed for that ill-fated ‘interrogation’ with Shilu. I’m delighted by these pieces, they’re amazing! Speaking of which, watch this space, because sometime over the next few months, I think it’s finally time for new cover art!

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I am still very much trying to build up some kind of a backlog of chapters, and when I do, I hope to share more advance chapters with patrons!

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

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for reading my little story! Couldn’t do this without you! I hope you are having as much fun with Necroepilogos as I am; even now, I still feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface. There are so many zombies with tales to tell. Seeya next chapter! Until then!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“Telokopolis was a city,” said Elpida. “The city where I was born, where I lived my whole life, and where I died, for a cause I did not fully understand at the time, but which I see now with perfect clarity.”

The Commander paused.

The roar and rumble of rain-static rushed back into the echoing vault; the whip and wave of divine wind washed the silence clean. God-storm raged on, beyond the sepulchral darkness.

Shilu stared out from behind the wall of her bone-pale mask, floating in the oily black of the tomb chamber. Her face was tainted red by Pheiri’s tomb-light glow, matching the crimson dye of Elpida’s long white hair. She was like a single rose petal in a basin of pitch, on a stem of black iron studded with razor thorns.

Atyle watched that bleached visage with great interest.

This so-called ‘Necromancer’ — this raiser-of-the-dead — she was more passive than any self-claimed wizard or magician Atyle had known in life. Atyle had known far too many of those, littering the hallways and colonnades of the palace; she had known them all to be frauds, no different to herself, before her death and rebirth beneath the truth of real gods.

Shilu said, “That tells me very little.”

The Commander smiled, knowing and wry, yet unaware she had already won.

Atyle was not going to divulge her secret knowledge — that the conversion of this enemy was already complete. This conversation may be mere formality, but Atyle knew that formality and ritual were essential to power. The Commander must wield power, be seen to wield power, and have that power acknowledged. To interrupt would be to deny this opportunity.

“Yeah,” Elpida said. “That’s the short answer, and it tells you nothing useful. Shilu, I’m going to have to demand an explanation first. You’ve seen Telokopolis, you’ve seen the city? What do you mean by that?”

Shilu said, “Right now that claim of prior knowledge and information is my only leverage. I will withhold it until I have heard your full answer, and your ‘promise’.”

Elpida’s smile widened. “Keeping me honest?”

“Exactly.”

Elpida nodded, allowing that she was impressed. Victoria puffed out one of her big sighs, the ones she gave breath to when she felt out of her depth. Atyle just watched.

“So,” Elpida said. “I’m going to have to give you a very long answer. Are you prepared?”

“We have nothing but time,” said Shilu.

The Commander’s smile brightened. “We have so much more than time. That’s what I’m promising.”

Victoria cleared her throat. “Elpida, Commander, um. Not to throw a wrench into the works here, but … are we absolutely sure that we can trust her with sensitive information? We’re not giving away intel here, are we? No offence or anything, Shilu, but you are a Necromancer. This is kind of fucked up.”

An interruption crackled in Atyle’s left ear — voices floating across the void of space, speaking through the headset. Kagami hissed over the radio: “My question exactly. Thank you, Victoria. I am glad to see that somebody still has a brain between their ears.”

Shilu said, “I take no offence. I would be more worried if you didn’t show caution.”

Elpida raised her head and raised her eyebrows. “Atyle, your assessment again, please?”

Wizards, magicians, mages, diabolists, shamans, soothsayers, from the native shores of the great river or from dusty foreign hills, they were all the same in Atyle’s experience. They all fancied themselves masters in their secret hearts. That was why they ended up at the palace, for any chance at the ear of the Emperor.

But Shilu was no master; this slave-puppet had no dreams. Atyle could see that with her mortal eye, plain as mud.

God-sight showed her the truth of Shilu’s isolation.

Atyle said it out loud. “She is a puppet and a slave, but with her strings cut and her chains broken. No master’s hand lies on the collar. No steps are woven for her to dance. Lykke was the dog of meagre gods. She dripped with umbilical cords and cancerous growths, all joining her to the greater whole. But this one? No. She is alone.”

Kagami hissed over the radio, “Technical details would be preferred over shitty poetry, thank you very much. But I concur.”

Elpida nodded. “Thank you, Atyle. Well, there you go. Shilu’s cut off from network access. So either we make the decision to trust her, or we don’t.”

Victoria and Elpida exchanged additional formalities about trust. Kagami’s voice crackled over the radio, joined briefly by Ilyusha, likely leaning over the Princess’ shoulder.

Atyle ignored the empty words. She stared at Shilu’s body.

The inside of that black metal shell was very beautiful. Beneath her thorns and barbs and hard exterior, Shilu’s muscles glowed like divine meat, little hives of activity of the tiny machines of the gods. Shilu’s viscera did not look like that of any other revenant — multiple heart-muscles, stacks of bacteria, no true stomach. Her brain was like a little star, more machine than flesh.

And all without a master to show her the way.

Would she place the end of her broken chain in the Commander’s hand?

Atyle had no doubt of Shilu’s new-found allegiance, for she knew Shilu had seen the Crowned Girl — the secret, furtive, hidden god of Atyle’s death-dreams.

Atyle had glimpsed the exchange through the god-sight of her right eye, but she had only caught the briefest flicker, as if it had all happened too quickly. The Crowned Girl had stepped through Atyle, crouched in front of Shilu, and touched her face.

Atyle had dearly wished for another visitation from the Crowned Girl; she had not seen the little red-and-white god since the birth of the Newborn Thirteen Arcadia. She harboured no real jealousy toward Shilu for this favour, for she suspected that the Crowned Girl was the one responsible for cutting Shilu’s strings in the first place, and the masterless slave was now at the Commander’s disposal, as she should be.

This fight was already won. All else was formality.

But Atyle liked to listen to the Commander speak. Oration was also a gift from the gods. It was good that the Commander had found her missing faith, the clarity and truth she had misplaced during the long weeks which had followed the cannibal feast on the flesh of Eseld and her friends. The Commander’s eyes were bright now. Atyle wished to hear that faith flower once again.

The debate ended. Elpida focused on Shilu.

“I am to be trusted?” Shilu asked.

“This much, for now,” Elpida said. “Telokopolis, then.”

“Telokopolis.”

The Commander continued.

“When I was alive, during my era of human history, Telokopolis was the only city — the last city, the last redoubt of humankind. She sheltered and cradled a population of approximately nine hundred million, though I believe that number may have been larger in the ages before my own birth. By the Post-Founding calendar I was born in the year seventy thirteen. That’s meant to be the number of years since the city was built, but in truth I suspect she was much older than that. Our records of earlier ages were spotty and confused at best, myth and legend at worst. I don’t know exactly how long she stood before the year of my birth, but certain academics claimed that more people had lived and died within her arms than in all prior ages of humankind.”

Shilu interrupted. “May I ask a question?”

“Of course. Go ahead.”

“Do you truly believe that final statement?”

Elpida smiled and shrugged. “Yes, but perhaps not for the literal reason.”

Shilu fell silent, apparently satisfied. Elpida continued.

“Telokopolis was situated on a plateau — ‘the plateau’, we called it, because it was the only exposed plateau we knew of. Telokopolis and the plateau were surrounded by a forest, a kind of jungle, which we called the green. As far as we could tell, the green covered the entire remainder of the earth’s surface.”

Elpida descended briefly into technical details. She told Shilu about the green and the Silico, about how deadly it was to unprotected humans, about how it grew so rapidly it had to be burned back, lest it find victory in creeping vines and flesh-eating moss. She told Shilu about the many forms of Silico life, about how they flowed up and out of the endless jungle as if disgorged on purpose by some greater mind, bred in alien depths. She told Shilu about those depths also, and the strangeness Elpida and her cadre-sisters had witnessed down there in the dark beneath the world.

Shilu listened in silence, a mask floating in oil. She held her body of black metal thorns perfectly still. No chatter came across the radio. The god-veil storm raged on beyond the tomb, but Atyle fancied even the great hurricane hushed itself before the Commander’s words.

Eventually, Shilu said: “A nanomachine plague.”

Elpida nodded. “In retrospect, probably yes. In fact, I have reason to believe that our conflict with the green is the root of everything we see here today, this nanomachine plague, this afterlife, us.”

“Why?”

“Several reasons. I’ll get to that later. But for now I’ll tell you that we’ve seen images of the edge of this supercontinent, and the ‘ocean’ beyond. Some of the green seems to persist, locked in a process of destruction and creation, against some kind of viscous black goo.”

Shilu blinked. “You’ve seen the shores?”

Elpida smiled. “We have. You haven’t?”

“No. How?”

“We’ll tell you all about it, when you’ve earned a bit more trust.”

Kagami hissed over the radio: “Good choice, Commander. Right answer. Don’t trust her act.”

Shilu paused, totally still, then nodded. “Very well.”

Elpida continuned once again. “So, Telokopolis was under siege, for centuries or perhaps millennia before I was born. But that doesn’t tell you anything about what she really was. Telokopolis, the city herself, she was built in the shape of a spire. There were wonders in the ages before my own, I know that now, things we in Telokopolis did not have access to — space-flight, nanomachine-guided body modification, virtual realities, and more — but Telokopolis herself was taller than any human-crafted object on the face of the earth, at least before her. She was, I believe, the single greatest engineering and architectural marvel in human history. And yes, that includes whatever is going on now, it includes Central’s ‘physical assets’, or whatever else has been built out there — the towers, the orbital ring, all of it. I don’t care what marvels are claimed by the nanomachine ecosystem — Telokopolis was, is, and will be greater than them all.”

Kagami hissed frustration across the radio, complaining about the Commander giving up intel, letting the enemy know what we know. But Atyle merely smiled. The Commander was flexing her muscles, showing Shilu the range of her power.

Shilu didn’t react outwardly to the mention of the towers and the ring or the physical assets, but Atyle’s god-sight saw the tensing of tiny muscles behind her mask, and the flicker of an electrical soul inside the meat of her brain.

Elpida went on: “Images of the city abounded in our culture, but very few people ever got to see her from a distance, with their own eyes, apart from Legionaries patrolling the plateau. But even at the plateau’s edge, one would have to crane their neck to look up, and up, and up, and one could not take in the full beauty of the spire from so close. Most of the distant images we had of her were taken in prior ages, when powered flight still worked.”

Elpida paused. Atyle saw the Commander overcome with emotion, then control herself with an iron fist.

“Telokopolis was beautiful beyond comparison. The Skirts, her lowest levels, rising up in armoured layers, like the foothills of a mountain, or the frills of a real skirt. The monochalkum layer, her outer bones, they would catch the sunlight in glimmering waves of white and silver, as if soaking up the light and transforming it into something else, solid and gleaming.” Elpida raised both hands and gestured as if cupping a pair of hips, encircling a slender waist with her fingers; her voice pushed back the rain and wind of the god-storm with molten passion. “The Skirts gathered together as they rose, narrowing into the thick curves of the middle Spire. Her body climbed toward the heavens, relentlessly. Have you ever seen something like that, Shilu? Something which just keeps going up, and up, and up, and it never seems to end? Because I don’t think you have. I’ve seen these ‘skyscrapers’ out in the corpse-city, and they aren’t worth the name.”

Shilu said nothing.

Elpida took a deep breath; for a moment the winds beyond the tomb seemed to inhale with her.

“But there is an end, eventually. She comes to a point, sharper than a blade. The upper spire ends in the needle-point, aimed at the sky. The needle amid the green. And when you’re out there, lost in the green, you can see her from so far away. She is the unifying point. A mother, calling all humanity home.”

Elpida stopped at the obvious conclusion.

Shilu said: “Very stirring.”

Atyle bristled; the sarcasm in Shilu’s voice was an insult and a question. How could she still doubt, after being visited by the Crowned Girl?

But the Commander merely smiled, more than a little sardonic herself. “I know what you’re thinking, Shilu. You’re thinking I’m a … ” She gestured to Victoria. “Vicky would call it ‘nationalist’, as if I’m extolling the virtues and natural superiority of my ‘country’.”

“Are you not?” Shilu asked.

Kagami’s voice hissed over the trio of headsets: “You do sound a bit like that, Commander. You can’t blame her.”

Vicky tutted, turned aside briefly, and whispered: “Kaga, shut up.”

“It’s fine, Vicky,” Elpida said, without once taking her eyes from Shilu. She reached up and tapped her own headset. “One of my cadre just said that she can’t blame you for that reaction. And she’s right, I can’t blame you for it either, because I don’t comprehend it. In my time we didn’t have such things as countries and nations. I’ve only learned those concepts after death, from people who lived in other times, and they’re still alien to me. It seems no decent way to organise humankind, to divide us against ourselves.”

Shilu said: “I tend to agree. But that is impossible to avoid.”

Elpida shook her head. “The greatest home-machine ever built by human love and human labour, crystallised into the foundations and returned for eternity, refreshed with each generation of effort, from all, to all, for all. Those aren’t my words, those were words learned by every child in the city. And we — the human beings inside Telokopolis — we did not always live up to that ideal, to her, to the city itself. We were capable of failing her. I’m the first to admit that, because that’s why I died. It’s why all my sisters were murdered.”

Elpida went off on another tangent — she told Shilu about the hated ‘Covenanters’, the civil war inside the city, the disagreement over the green, and the basic outline of her own death. Faith and fury burned behind her purple eyes, holding back the sorrow that Atyle had seen up close.

“But Telokopolis,” Elpida finished. “She never failed us. She never failed a single person. Not even me. She did everything she could to protect me and my sisters, despite the way we ended.”

“You are growing abstract,” said Shilu.

“No, I’m not. You think I am, because you can’t imagine it. But I am being literal, Shilu. I am talking about actual, physical events.”

Shilu narrowed her eyes in silent scepticism.

Elpida said: “Telokopolis was built to house many, many more than nine hundred million people. In my time that was the sum of all humanity, but I’ve since learned that in some prior ages there were billions of people, and I believe every single one of them could have fit comfortably within the walls of Telokopolis — and not merely in a little box, stored away and apartmented out, but truly welcomed within the city. Because that’s what she was for, that’s why she was built. The interior of the city was endless, as long as she was fed fresh nanomachines every century or so. Any person, any human being, could walk up to a wall and request space. Rooms, food, the necessities of life, Telokopolis herself provided, coaxed and cared for by us in turn. She nurtured us and cradled us and gave us space and safety in which to grow. Her veins and arteries ran with power and water and light. Her innards and guts were filled with public spaces and public canteens and all the warrens of human life. Her bones surrounded us, her flesh cushioned us.”

“This is a tiresome metaphor,” Shilu said. “Cities do not do these things by themselves. People do them. Cities are just agglomerations of people and labour.”

“I’m being literal, Shilu. The city did these things herself.”

Shilu frowned.

Victoria spoke up: “She’s being literal, yeah. She’s been over this with each of us before. I know, it’s hard to believe, and she doesn’t do the best job of explaining it, but she’s telling the truth, at least as far as she knows it. Telokopolis was a living city.” Victoria gestured over her shoulder, at the little titan to the rear. “Same technology as Pheiri, just scaled up a billion times. He’s one of her descendants, kind of.”

Shilu’s eyes flickered away from Elpida for the first time in several minutes. She stared at Pheiri, then back at Elpida.

“The city … provided?”

Elpida nodded. “Telokopolis is home, for all humanity. Vicky has explained a concept to me, called ‘homelessness’. This had no place in Telokopolis. It would be like leaving somebody out in the green.” She snorted. “Even the worst elements of our society would never have countenanced that, even the ones who divided us against ourselves and murdered my sisters. It would be like spitting in the face of every human being ever.”

Shilu said, “Is this a joke?”

Vicky sighed. “Nope. She’s being serious.”

Shilu said, “And how was this utopia achieved?”

Elpida smiled. “Telokopolis was alive. Nano-composite bones, machine-meat innards. A body, a mind, even a soul.” She shrugged. “I don’t pretend to understand how it worked, how the city was given life. By my time, we didn’t comprehend her. She was a marvel of engineering beyond us. The Builders, the founders, the ones who constructed the city, they built a miracle. They were smarter than us, in ways I can barely express. They made a home, for all humanity, and rejected nobody.”

Elpida fell silent. Shilu did the same. The darkness of the tomb chamber filled with the static of pounding rain and the distant howl of god-storm’s wind.

Eventually Shilu said: “This is the promise?”

Elpida nodded. “Telokopolis was more than a city. She was an ideal made flesh and bone, gifted with a mind and a soul. Even thrust forward in time, into this nanomachine afterlife, I believe that Telokopolis was and is the most glorious concept and machine human love has ever made. A home for all humanity, no matter the difficulty, no matter the cost. None are left behind, none are rejected — not traitors, not Silico, not Necromancers. The principle is just as applicable now as it was then, as it was always. From all, to all, for all.”

“There have been countless eternal cities,” said Shilu. “Shining cities on their hills. Beacons of civilization. All considered themselves necessary, indispensable, without peer. All are rot and ruin and forgotten now, except in the brains of zombies. What makes yours any different? Telokopolis had civil wars, internal strife, discord and dissolution. It fell, like all the others.”

A grin ripped across Elpida’s face, toothy and triumphant, no longer Elpida.

Howl said, “Because we’re still here, bitch! Telokopolis is forever!”

Shilu blinked.

Elpida lost the grin. “As Howl said, we’re still here. I accept the possibility that the physical bones of Telokopolis may lie cold and abandoned now. But that doesn’t matter, because she is more than that. As long as one of us is up and breathing, the city still stands.”

“One of ‘us’?” Shilu echoed.

“I was a pilot — I had no mother, no father, I was grown in a uterine replicator, as part of a project to develop human beings who could explore the green. My sisters and I were developed with help from the city herself. I don’t think the people who made us understood that they were doing the bidding of Telokopolis, not the Civitas or scientific enquiry or anything else. They were her instruments, however flawed, planting seeds and quickening her daughters. That’s what I am, a daughter of Telokopolis, in blood. I have been resurrected, and she along with me. I am Telokopolis, her avatar, her daughter, her hands, her feet, her voice. And I will continue my mother’s work. From all, to all, for all.”

“A lofty goal. For one person.”

Elpida grinned — and was not Howl this time. “I accept the possibility that Telokopolis, the physical city, may be dead. She may endure as a network presence, or she may not. But I’m still here. Howl is here. Pheiri is here, and he’s a blood child of the city too. More importantly, each and every one of my comrades is within Telokopolis now, and they are also children of the city, even if they never knew her in life. Eseld, who we wronged, can be a child of Telokopolis as well. So, when I say ‘one of us’? I mean all of us. If I fall, Telokopolis does not die with me. My cadre carries it on. That’s why I accepted Eseld into our group, even though we ate her. It’s why I would parley with scavengers, and feed them our own resources. It’s why I’m having this conversation with you, a Necromancer. It’s why I’m doing anything. I see a world in as much need of Telokopolis as the one in which I died. She is necessary, and I will rebuild her. That’s the promise. Even if I die and resurrect a hundred times. Even if I take a thousand years — or a million — to build Telokopolis again, she will be rebuilt, in spirit, in principle. She is already here. You’re looking at her. Telokopolis is forever.”

Vicky echoed those three words. Atyle murmured them too. A whisper came from the trio of headsets, those words murmured in yet more throats.

Shilu said: “Hope never dies?”

Elpida smiled. “Is that something you can imagine yourself fighting for, Shilu?”

“Everything dies,” said Shilu. Then, after a moment’s pause: “Perhaps. It is too abstract for me.”

Atyle was not stirred to faith by the Commander’s words, as most of the others had been. She recognised their basic validity in a different way; the Commander had been chosen by the same occulted god as Atyle, by the hidden kiss of the Crowned Girl, though she knew it not. Atyle was bound to this task, to this monumental quest, by the deal she had made in the underworld between life and death.

Still, the Commander was a beautiful orator.

Her stories of Telokopolis in life made Atyle think of the cities she had known, of finery and squalor placed alongside each other. The cities of Atyle’s life had been dirty and hypocritical, full of perfumed rot, the palace a jewel ridden with worms, the corridors peopled by lies.

She liked the sound of Telokopolis. She would like to live within a god.

“I have additional questions,” said Shilu. “Before I explain myself.”

“Ask away,” Elpida answered with a little chuckle. “It’s not as if we’re going anywhere, not with that storm outdoors.”

Shilu began to ask many questions; Elpida began to answer. The Commander explained much, about many things that she had told the others many times before, from the outlines of the ‘pilot program’ and the ‘combat frames’ — the titans of old — to the details they had gleaned from Thirteen Arcadia and Pheiri’s memories. She told Shilu about the re-flowering period where Telokopolan culture had flowed out over the supercontinent once again, while the city herself had lain chained by human arrogance and lack of faith. The Commander told Shilu about Pheiri, about Thirteen Arcadia, about Melyn and Hafina, the maids to the little titan. She told her about Central’s physical assets, about Ooni and Pira, about the original meeting with Eseld. She spoke of Howl and hidden presences deep in the network. She told Shilu everything.

Atyle’s mind wandered off. Her eyes followed.

To Atyle’s mortal left eye the tomb chamber was a pit choked with sticky black darkness. A coffin filled with rot, tucked beneath the earth. Elpida’s heroic band were reduced to bugs scurrying beneath a damp rock.

But to the blessed god-sight of her right eye the tomb was a warren of potential.

Several hundred revenants were scurrying through the corridors, the soft, wet, pinkish machines of their bodies pumping away with electromagnetic activity, little hives of the machines of the gods. Each group kept clear of all others, afraid of contact, terrified of combat in these rabbit-warren tunnels. Many were paralysed with indecision, or desperately searching for rooms with defensible exits, places to hunker down and wait out the gods at war above their heads. They were ripe for the plucking, all of them, but wait too long and the fruit would fall and burst.

Through several black metal walls to the left, Atyle saw the figures of Puk and Tati, those clever little scavengers who the Commander had used to start an irresistible process. Atyle watched them for a while. Puk led the way along the floor while Tati followed, carrying the donated corpse in loops of tarry flesh, clinging to walls and ceiling as she went.

Atyle stood up, indicating to Elpida that she was merely stretching her limbs; she was perfectly safe beneath the aegis of Pheiri’s guns, after all. Victoria followed her example, rising to her feet and rolling her shoulders, though she clutched her weapon and darted nervous little glances at the dark mouths of the passages which led from the chamber. Atyle looked at Victoria with amusement; the soldier was so heavily armoured she could certainly not run away. Her weapon was most interesting though, little frozen explosions cradled in metal eggs.

Atyle returned her attention to Puk and Tati, while Elpida and Shilu spoke on.

As Atyle watched, the distant pair finally blundered into another group, in a dark tangle of corridor junctions and narrow archways. Squeals split the distant air, heard in the tomb chamber as less than whispers; weapons were raised and brandished, claws slid from sheaths, threats and warnings screamed and shouted above the din of the god-storm.

Victoria stepped close and peered at Atyle face’s, then followed her gaze to the blank wall of the tomb chamber. After a moment she whispered: “Atyle? What are you looking at?”

“Change.”

A stand-off had ensued. Tati repeated the trick she had attempted to pull on Elpida — growing the shadows and shapes and whispered voices of other revenants from the tarry mass of her body, to make it seem that her beloved little Puk had many friends, rather than just one. Shadowy guns menaced, shadowy amour lurked in the darkness, shadowy tricks forestalled a fight.

Tense conversation passed between Puk and Tati and the ones they had surprised. Atyle’s god-sight saw the vibrations of the air, but she was too far away to read the words.

After a while, Puk and Tati went on their way. The other group peeled back to let them pass, gun-mouths following them the whole way.

But then those others — a ragged band of five — began to move cautiously and circuitously through the corridors, making for Pheiri’s tomb chamber, following the scent of meat.

Atyle smiled. A rock had been cast. The avalanche was not far off.

She turned her eyes upward and outward next, toward the ceiling of the tomb chamber, toward the dozens of ceilings past that one in turn, into the depths of the grave itself. Atyle did not understand the purpose of the millions of mechanisms moving inside the walls of the tomb, but if she paused and concentrated she could see the beginnings of a pattern, like a mandala or an optical trick woven into a rug. Power and knowledge crackled back and forth across sheets of metal. Gears and wheels and tiny mechanisms turned and joined and counted time. Rods and sparks and plates moved in a dance too fine to follow.

The previous tomb, the one in which she had awoken, had not been performing this dance.

Atyle looked beyond, into the swirling vortex of the god-storm.

Kagami, Foolish Princess, believed she understood the ‘hurricane’. She could measure the speed of the tearing winds and the depths of the shredded raindrops, but she could not comprehend that this storm was the veil of the gods. The gods were at war; this much Atyle had known in the space between life and death, before bodily resurrection. But here, the weight of the storm had hidden and veiled that war, forcing the gods to play other hands and attempt other techniques. Shilu was one such move on the board, her arrival concealed beneath this blanket across heaven.

Atyle looked to the right — to the east — almost as an afterthought, and confirmed the continued presence of one other thing Kagami could not see.

The Leviathan was still standing there, beyond the tomb.

Atyle’s god-sight had been unable to pick out the Leviathan against the backdrop of the storm until it had drawn close. The storm was simply too dense with debris, even for her. The Leviathan had made plenty of noise, roaring as it had approached, but now it had fallen silent. It stood well beyond its own arm’s length from the tomb, enduring the world-breaking wind with many cubits worth of steel-shod skin and bones of something stronger than iron. Its back was hunched against the storm, its legs anchored into the ground with claws of burning pitch and bubbling acid. Something like this could never have drawn so close without the storm to pin the worm-guard beneath the graveworm’s bulk.

And all it did was stare down at the tomb with a hundred eyes.

This Leviathan was yet another hand played in the great game of the gods, though Atyle knew not by who, or for what purpose.

Elpida and Shilu drew to a close. Atyle returned her attention to the conversation, returned her feet to Elpida’s side, and dropped into a squat. Victoria followed, sitting back down after casting one last nervous glance at the edge of the chamber.

Shilu stared, her white mask floating in the darkness, her thorn-studded body washed blood-red by Pheiri’s lights.

Elpida waited until both were seated, then said: “I’ve kept my end of the deal, Shilu.”

Shilu nodded. “I’ve seen the spire of your Telokopolis. I saw it from a great distance. Only once, a very long time ago.”

The Commander’s face could not contain her hunger. She leaned forward. Vicky blew out a big sigh. Whispers of warning crackled from the headsets, but Atyle paid them no mind.

“You’re certain?” Elpida said. “You’ve seen the physical city, you’ve seen Telokopolis?”

Shilu nodded again. “Yes. I believe I did. You told me the truth, and I needed to verify that truth. It stands on a wide plateau, just as you described. It is extraordinarily difficult to access. Graveworms do not venture within five hundred miles. No tomb stands within a thousand miles. The city — not Telokopolis, I mean, but the nanomachine city, the corpse we live within — does not colonise the plateau itself, and struggles to grow within about a hundred miles of the edge. I don’t know why that’s the case, it’s only what I saw with my own eyes. And … you did not exaggerate.”

Elpida’s lips stood parted, her purple eyes gone wide, her breath desperate for this morsel. “Exaggerate what?”

“She is beautiful. It has been a long time, but I remember that.”

Elpida burst into a smile. “I told you.”

“And she is dead.”

Elpida’s face wavered.

“I am sorry,” said Shilu. “But you were correct. Whatever the mega-structure is, it lies silent and empty. All I beheld was cold bones. As I said, nothing goes there. It is a dead zone.”

Elpida fell silent. Vicky placed one gauntlet on her back. Whispers came from the trio of headsets — “Commander? Commander?”

Then Elpida wet her lips and composed her face. “I suspected as much. Thank you for your honesty, Shilu.”

“You are taking this very well.”

Elpida smiled. “I won’t lie, confirmation hurts. But perhaps you were mistaken—”

Vicky hissed, “Elpi … ”

A tut and a snapped word came from the radio in Atyle’s ears.

But Elpida carried on, undeterred. “The city may be dormant, or in hibernation, or merely waiting. Or perhaps her body is dead, and she lives on only as some kind of network presence. I don’t know for certain, I can’t know, but as I already explained, it doesn’t matter. As long as one of us is up and breathing, the city still stands. Her physical shell is not redundant, but it is not necessary. And perhaps her body can be resurrected, like ours. Now, Shilu, I need to ask, how did you—”

Shilu interrupted. “You are right to place faith in your Telokopolis.”

Elpida paused. “You agree with me now? You accept the promise?”

Shilu’s eyes seemed harder than before; Atyle watched closely.

“The network is full of ghosts,” Shilu said. “Most of them are below Central’s conscious notice, because Central is not conscious, not in the way we understand it. One such ghost very well may be the memory or imprint or mind of your city. I cannot say for sure. But we have been brought together by some design, you and I. Larger powers than us are at work here.”

Atyle said: “We merely glimpse their passing, do we not?”

Shilu turned her head and made eye contact.

Atyle knew she could not speak of the Crowned Girl, even if she wished so. This was a secret, between her and a furtive god, one who must remain hidden at all costs. That secret was inviolate, sacred, and real. If she dared break faith, her lips would be sealed by fire.

But she could share this silent moment with another agent of the beautiful ghost who had kissed her forehead.

“Are you still a slave and a puppet?” she asked Shilu.

Shilu did not answer.

Vicky sighed, then said, “Larger powers than us, sure. A design, and we’re all just rats in a maze. Love it. Did you just find religion, Shilu?”

Shilu looked at Victoria instead. “No. It’s not so different to being a counter-intelligence agent. I do what greater powers require of me. I always have.”

Vicky’s lips curled with distaste. “Shit. Right.”

“Shilu,” Elpida said. “I need to ask you questions, a lot of questions, about Central, about the trio of towers out there on the supercontinent, about the network, Lykke, Necromancers, everything you know. But first, why did you have a chance to see Telokopolis, and how can we reach the plateau? How—”

“Because I hunted one of you before,” said Shilu.

The rain-static and storm-winds filled a brief silence.

“One of us?” Elpida asked.

“One with your skin colour, your white hair, your purple eyes. A pilot, a ‘Telokopolan’, though she never used that word. That was why I had the rare opportunity to see the city’s corpse. She was a Necromancer, not human-derived, but a post-human feedback loop. She wore the face of the ‘pilot phenotype’, as you call it, among many other faces. But when she went rogue, she went for the city’s bones, as if the Telokopolan face had become real. I was sent to hunt her down. I never learned her real name, but she called herself ‘Hope.’”

Elpida just stared. Vicky muttered ‘fuck me’. Kagami, over the radio, started laughing, low and bitter.

Elpida swallowed. “What happened to her?”

“I caught her on a mountainside, within view of the city. She fought very well, but I won, and I returned her to the network. I don’t know what became of her, either archival or storage or deletion. Central’s subroutines demanded I purge all memory of the sights of the spire. But I did not.”

Elpida stared. “And you’re the one who was sent to assassinate me. The one Necromancer with solid prior proof that Telokopolis still stands.”

“I am sorry,” said Shilu. “That is the short answer, and the long answer, and it tells us both nothing useful.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Telokopolis is even for you, Shilu, no matter what you’ve done. I’m not sure Elpida is going to feel good about that little revelation, though.

It’s been a while since the first Atyle POV chapter, and here she is again! She has access to so much information, sees so much compared to all the other characters, and uses 99% of that insight to be very smug inside her own head. Writing her is a blast, especially when she’s doing … I don’t know exactly, but whatever it is, she’s doing it here. Elpida got to bust out the full-length ideological conversion spiel (albeit tested on somebody who was already on-board), and Vicky is increasingly nervous at being outside Pheiri’s hull. Anyway! We’ve got plenty more POV shifts coming up in this chapter, along with some, shall we say, heightening of the stakes. We’ll see, very soon! (The next chapter is mega long, for those who might want to know.)

No Patreon link this week, as it’s the last chapter of the month, and I never like to risk double-charging any new patrons! If you were about to subscribe, feel free to wait until the 1st. In the meantime, have some Telokopoloss (I’m so sorry.)

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

And lastly, thank you all so much for reading my little story! I couldn’t do it without all of you, the readers and audience! I’m still endlessly amazed that Necroepilogos has come so far, and I still feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface. There’s so much more corpse-meat in the meal, with the juiciest parts yet to come. Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

Suicidal ideation
Mind control / mental violation

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“Shilu?”

Shilu terminated her meditation, rejoined the present moment, and reopened her eyes.

Still alive. She acknowledged a dull pang of disappointment.

Shilu was once again faced by the interior of a tomb — black and grey metal, punctuated by blind portals and winding passages like the ossified innards of a beached leviathan, echoing with hushed whispers and muffled footsteps like the worming and gnawing of carrion insects in barren flesh, all drowned in darkness so deep that even her multispectrum vision struggled to penetrate the gloom.

Shilu had known so many tombs, they all blurred together. But this one offered something new — a blanket of storm-rain static and the distant howl of hurricane winds.

A lake of blood-red illumination pooled on the black metal floor of the nameless chamber, lapping at the bone-white skirts of the great armoured machine — the tank, the anomaly, the unaddressed breach in normal system operations. The backwash of crimson light picked out irregularities in the bone-armour, snagging on humps and whorls and abscesses, turning the hull into a landscape of blood-dappled shadow, glinting and gleaming upon the stubs and cylinders and lances of cannons and missiles and big guns.

He called himself ‘Pheiri’.

Shilu re-counted the number of weapons systems aimed at her: still sixteen, four of which could obliterate her current physical form before she would make it seven paces in any direction.

She was confident in those seven paces. Pheiri was a glorious example — perhaps the very pinnacle — of the art of the armoured fighting vehicle, lost now to the aeons before Central and the nanomachine ecosystem; Shilu felt a faint glimmer of awe, as her ancestors must have done at the genetic reconstruction of Mammuthus primigenius or Gigantopithecus blacki. Pheiri was a titan from a prior age, and quite beautiful.

But he wasn’t perfect. Even with rounds chambered in his autocannons, and the irises of his missile pods peeled back over the high-explosive tips, Shilu would still survive a handful of seconds in a firefight against Pheiri.

While meditating, Shilu had allowed her subconscious mind to chew on many subjects; she had learned this technique in her true life, in a world of sunlight and rich soil, and had preserved the habit down the millennia more by chance than intent. One current subject of consideration was how exactly Pheiri could be defeated, in theory. She had concluded that any attacker like herself would necessarily have to begin the fight inside Pheiri’s body. Even then the challenge presented a problem; Pheiri’s brain — the machine-meat globe-seat of his consciousness — was one of the most heavily armoured objects Shilu had ever witnessed, sealed behind layers of material her eyes could not analyse, similar to his bone-armour, no matter which spectra she used for examination. Her only option would be to cut her way down to his lower decks and destroy the nuclear engine tucked deep in his mechanical core. Doubtless Pheiri had ways of stopping that.

Shilu had not yet attempted communication with Pheiri, despite her awe. Shilu was cut off from the network — and Pheiri was not part of the ecosystem, not constructed from the ecosystem’s nanomechanical components, so was not on the network anyway — but she did have a short-range comms set-up running on the nanomachine-meat of her own brain.

Pheiri, however, was not in charge. Elpida was in charge, and Shilu did not wish to pre-empt Elpida’s next move. She was content to wait and see. She wanted to observe and understand this ‘Commander’, in order to make her judgement.

Shilu needed to know if Elpida could ensure the sanctity of Lulliet’s grave.

One additional weapon system was also aimed at Shilu, with far less accuracy than Pheiri.

The zombie who went by the name ‘Serin’ was curled up inside one of the shadowy abscesses in Pheiri’s frontal armour. Her sniper rifle rested on a lip of white bone, cradled in a quartet of mushroom-pale arms, tucked against a cloaked and spongy shoulder. Serin had briefly re-targeted when Elpida’s trio had moved to speak with the other zombies, but now that conversation was over, and Serin had returned her scope to aim directly at the centre of Shilu’s skull. Serin’s pose and stillness marked her as a seasoned professional; her aim was disrupted by neither breath nor heartbeat. Shilu respected that professionalism, despite the futility; Shilu saw the millions of tiny motions in Serin’s body, of which Serin was unaware. She saw the chemical signals in the customised fungal meat of Serin’s arms, and the subtle impulses running down her mycelium-analogue nerve fibres. Shilu calculated the flaws in Serin’s firing plan, just because she could. If Shilu rushed at Serin — assuming Pheiri’s non-involvement — then Serin would achieve perhaps eleven or twelve shots, and miss every one, before Shilu could cover the distance, reach Serin’s firing position, and rip the sniper rifle out of her hands. Serin had many backup weapons and concealed systems beneath her black robes, but Shilu was confident at close range; her blades would bisect that mushroom-flesh before Serin could—

“Shilu?”

Shilu raised her eyes.

Elpida — the ‘Commander’ — was standing exactly six paces away, flanked by two subordinates. Three dark outlines were backlit by Pheiri’s blood-red illumination, framed by the ghostly bone-white giant of their armoured home, backed up by a loose ring of heavy drones hovering in the gloom.

Shilu was impressed. A cheap trick, but an effective one.

Shilu was beyond any intimidation, of course; Elpida must have known that, yet she still paid attention to the details, to the need for proper presentation. Shilu would have done the same if their positions had been reversed. A display of power and intent. That was a good sign.

She had paid close attention to Elpida’s other displays of power and intent, not least the negotiations a few minutes earlier, between Elpida and the two hungry opportunists — ‘Puk’ and ‘Tati’ — who had crept close to plead for a spare corpse. Shilu had listened with great interest; was Elpida everything she appeared to be, or was this all just a surface of lies, like so many other prodigal undead? Shilu had been impressed when Elpida had offered the corpse freely, a display of wealth and magnanimous charity, and then was impressed a second time when Elpida had leveraged her donation into the beginning of resource dependence and an information network.

She had heard Hafina — another unaddressed breach in normal system operations, an Artificial Human — return to Pheiri’s rear ramp. She had listened to Puk and Tati scurry back off into the tomb. She had heard the approach of Elpida’s trio across the black metal floor.

And now the Commander was making her move.

Elpida’s fireteam were dressed to intimidate and impress. Elpida wore her hair loose and long, the white dyed to a deep crimson by Pheiri’s bloody illumination — another statement of power. Her right sleeve was rolled up, a bandage wrapped around the bite wound. Victoria, on the right, was dressed like a little tank herself, with a grenade launcher slung over her belly; another kind of power, blunt and less subtle. Atyle, on the left, was half naked beneath her coat. Shilu felt a glimmer of ancient discomfort at that, but did not disapprove. That, too, was power.

All three wore short-range communication headsets. Shilu saw the electromagnetic crackle of tight-beam radio contact with Pheiri. The other zombies — Elpida’s comrades — were watching, perhaps to provide additional input.

Coordination, teamwork, skilled operations.

Shilu felt an ancient ache in her chest, and recognised it as hope. It was distant and far away.

She crushed it in a cold metal fist; she did not yet know what to make of Elpida, she did not know if this revenant was the answer to her dilemma. Hope was premature and dangerous. She reasserted precise self-control.

“Yes?” she said.

Elpida didn’t smile. “Are you ready to talk?”

“Yes.”

“May we sit down?”

Asking permission was another cheap trick. In Shilu’s experience this was often effective, but far less impressive. Shilu had used this technique herself too many times to fall by accident into the desired pattern. She decided not to play along; she wanted to see what Elpida would do when faced with intransigence.

“Why do you need my permission to sit?” she asked.

If their positions had been reversed, what would Shilu have said next? She attempted to cast her mind back to one of her own countless sessions in dingy little interview rooms, in true life, before her first death. But the memories were all blurred static. The faces blended together, obscured behind one-way glass, warped by tears and bruises and broken teeth.

Shilu decided she would have smiled, and claimed that she was just being polite. She would have insinuated that she could stop being polite. She would have veiled a threat behind custom and normalcy. Would Elpida do the same? Shilu needed to know. Veiled threats without weight would be a poor sign of a good steward.

Elpida still did not smile. “I don’t need permission. I want permission.”

Atyle tilted her head to the side, one peat-green bionic eye fixed on Shilu. Victoria seemed much less comfortable; her heartbeat was racing and her skin was damp with sweat. A curious pair to bring along to an interrogation.

Shilu said: “What will you do if I refuse to give my permission?”

Elpida shrugged. “Then I won’t get what I want. We’ll stand, right here.”

“And if I refuse to stand as well?”

“Then we’ll talk like this. I’ve got strong legs. Vicky, you got strong legs?”

“Sure do, Commander,” Vicky said.

“Atyle, how about you? Strong legs?”

“As trunks in a forest,” Atyle murmured.

“There you go then,” Elpida said. “If you’d rather we not sit down, we’ll stand right here.”

Shilu cycled her eyeballs through several visual spectra, examining Elpida in visible light, infra-red, heat-mapping, nanomachine-density, and more. She counted Elpida’s heartbeat and tasted the chemical composition of her sweat. She measured the microexpressions on Elpida’s face and the oils on her skin. She stared into those dark purple eyes, and tried to read the lie.

Shilu’s eyes were one of the few Necromancer techniques she had not been denied by her unexpected network severance. She saw the world in multispectrum detail, with no greater effort than small adjustments of focus, and was able to overlay multiple visual spectra with relative ease, though the processing power did strain her network-isolated nano-meat brain, limited to the capacity of her own body. She could see through Elpida’s clothes and armoured coat to directly examine the flex and pump of her heart muscle. She could measure each line of Elpida’s face to read the hidden meaning in her expression. She could stare directly through the distant walls of black tomb metal, into the secret mechanisms and circuits and systems hidden within, waiting for the turn of some esoteric key. She could see the zombies scurrying about in nearby passageways, drawn by the smell of fresh meat, still warded off by Pheiri’s big guns.

Shilu felt a faint rush of surprise as she finished her examination.

The Commander was perfectly calm and fully confident. She was not lying or exaggerating. She would, if needed, stand there for hours.

Either Elpida was in total control, or she was mad.

Shilu considered which of these would be preferable; would she trust the sanctity of Lulliet’s grave to a woman who had everything under control? No. Nobody was ever in total control. The fantasy was unattainable.

Would she trust a madwoman?

Perhaps she would. Once she had believed that only the insane could prosper in this nanomachine infinity.

“You have my permission to sit,” said Shilu.

“Thank you,” Elpida replied.

The trio sat down; the picket line of drones behind them held position. Pheiri kept Shilu in his sights.

Victoria shot several uncomfortable glances at her Commander, but received only a wordless nod in reply, then awkwardly lowered her armoured bulk to the floor. Atyle dropped into a low squat, never once breaking her unblinking stare. Elpida sat cross-legged and straight backed, mirroring Shilu’s own pose; she took two pistols out of her waistband and laid the guns on the floor, then rested her exposed right arm across her right knee. Between the red light and the deep shadows, Elpida’s copper-brown skin looked like blood-rich meat.

Shilu kept her hands in her own lap, non-threatening, unmoving.

She felt that dangerous emotion again — a light in her chest, hope taking spark. Elpida was acting how Shilu would have acted.

Elpida gestured left and right. “This is Atyle,” she said; Atyle smiled. “You’ve met her already, back in the gravekeeper’s chamber. This is Victoria, or Vicky.” Victoria nodded, tight and tense, then attempted to conceal a swallow; her hands gripped her weapon. “She’s not formally my second in command, since we have no official hierarchy, but she’s the closest thing I have.”

“I know.”

Elpida raised her eyebrows. “You know?”

“I can overhear most of what you say,” said Shilu. “Though not through Pheiri’s armour. I know your names, or at least the ones you’ve discussed amongst yourselves.”

Elpida nodded. Vicky hissed through her teeth. Atyle didn’t react at all.

“Thank you for being up front about that,” said Elpida. “I appreciate the honesty.”

Shilu examined Elpida’s microexpressions again, and decided she wasn’t lying, wasn’t angry, wasn’t even surprised or knocked the slightest bit off-kilter by this information. Framed by the dark of the tomb, by the red-dyed moonscape of Pheiri’s armour, and by the howl of the hurricane beyond the walls, Elpida showed nothing but absolute confidence.

Yes, Shilu decided. Mad.

“So,” Elpida carried on, “Shilu. Let’s start with the basics, so we’re all on the same page. You’re a Necromancer, is that correct?”

Shilu considered the purpose of this question. Was Elpida calibrating, or gathering more information? The former, Shilu decided; Elpida had Howl, which meant she had more information on Necromancer definition than Shilu herself actually knew. Shilu used the opportunity to test Elpida again.

“That depends on how you define the term ‘Necromancer’,” she replied.

“An entity with network access.”

“Then I am not currently a Necromancer.”

Elpida smiled. “And you expect us to just believe that?”

She gestured with her exposed right arm — the arm which had heralded Howl’s arrival, the arm which had beaten Lykke to a bloody pulp and sent her scrambling back into the network. The threat was plain: don’t play games, Necromancer.

Hope grew. Shilu crushed it again.

“By your definition,” she said.

Victoria cleared her throat. “Yeah, no. Elpi, she’s like us now, isn’t she? She can’t escape into the network, she can’t freeze us or mess with our bodies or anything like that. She’s gotta eat, too, isn’t that right? She’s trapped in that one body, just like us. You’re a zombie now, aren’t you, Shilu?”

Shilu didn’t bother to answer. The question wasn’t really for her. She knew this pattern.

Elpida nodded slowly. “Perhaps we need a different definition of Necromancer. Shilu, how would you define ‘Necromancer’?”

“I do not care to do so,” said Shilu.

Elpida raised her eyebrows, and waited.

Shilu decided not to play along; Elpida was an enigma, radiating absolute confidence and competence, not lying, not concealing anything. Elpida and Victoria were playing the opening moves of a red-face white-face dynamic, a dance Shilu knew all too well. They held Shilu at arm’s length, desperate for information, balancing her on the edge of a conversational knife, yet ready to kill her if she should prove other than what they expected.

Shilu approved. Shilu was impressed. Hope was like old fire in her chest; she stamped it out. She needed to test this woman, this ‘Commander’.

“Alright,” Elpida said eventually. “Let’s reword the question. What are you, Shilu?”

“I am an agent of the system, of the nanomachine ecology, of Central. I have — or I had, until very recently — a stake in the continued operation of the system. But I started like you. I was born human, then I died. Then I was resurrected as a zombie. I have sat where you are.”

Vicky grunted. “Mmhmm. But not all Necromancers are like you, right? We’ve met others. Before Lykke back there, I mean. The first one we met couldn’t even pretend to be human, she didn’t get it, but you seem about right. I’m willing to accept that you used to be one of us.”

“Most Necromancers began as post-human recursive feedback loops.”

“Fuck.” Vicky puffed out a big sigh; that sounded genuine too, she was not good at dissembling. “The hell does that even mean?”

Shilu did not bother to answer. She had already given the answer.

Vicky said, “Okay, wait a sec, how did you become a Necromancer?”

“I climbed a metaphorical ladder, by stepping on the heads of those below me. I consumed other revenants and rose as high as I could. I looked for somebody in control, somebody at the centre of the world, because I knew only that would have the power to grant me rest. I looked for release from all this. To be dead, and stay dead.”

Victoria and Elpida shared a glance.

Shilu examined Victoria for a moment. She adjusted the penetration of her eyes to observe the signs of stress inside Victoria’s bloodstream, in the beat of her heart, and the chemical signals in her flesh. She discovered that Victoria had a bionic heart — a powerful piece of cybernetic enhancement, a much smarter choice than the ostentatious cybernetics chosen by so many revenants. A bionic heart made the user more efficient in all ways.

Atyle finally spoke: “You see much, little slave.”

Shilu reverted her vision to basic visual light. The darkness of the tomb chamber crashed back down like a wall of oily rain and melted resin.

She turned to stare at Atyle. The revenant smiled back, face lit by blood-red backwash, peat-green eyeball rolling in the socket.

Elpida said: “Atyle?”

Atyle explained. “The little slave here has good eyes. Not as good as a gift from the gods, but still, she sees much.”

Shilu said: “Slave?”

Atyle nodded. “You slave away at the feet of a thing that sees you not.”

Elpida raised her eyebrows. “Shilu, is that true, about your eyes?”

“Yes.”

Elpida nodded. “So, you’re cut off from the network, but you’ve still got some tricks up your sleeve. Are you willing to share those with us?”

“What do you mean?”

Elpida gestured with her right arm again. Threat, or statement of intent? The power was obvious, the statement loud and clear. Shilu felt a quiver deep down inside her belly — hope mixed into a cocktail with something deeper and darker, something she no longer recognised. She quashed that too; this body made it easy to murder passion with cold metal.

Elpida said: “I think you know exactly what I mean, Shilu. Enough wordplay, enough games. I want to know what you’re capable of. Tell me, please.”

“Why should I do that?”

Elpida paused, then broke into a grin — wide and toothy, full of menace, ready for a fight.

Howl.

“Because, you bitch-cake cheese-grater cunt,” Howl said, “you’re still a Necromancer. Let’s drop all the pussyfooting about with big definitions and clever words. We both know nobody gives a shit about that. You decided not to shank Elps in the back of the neck, but we trust you about as far as we can throw you. You gotta lay out those cards. Show us your hand. Tip them aces, bitch — then hand ‘em over. Or I’ll fucking bite your fingers off to get at them.”

Shilu was beyond intimidation, but she liked Howl’s style.

“Why?” she repeated.

Howl vanished. Elpida blinked, and said, “Because you’re a threat to my cadre, and I can’t ignore that or pretend to trust you, Shilu. But also because I want to believe you’re not a threat. Because I would like to make a friend and ally of you, if I can. Because I think you can help us.”

“Help you to do what?”

Elpida grinned — and this time she was not Howl. “To find the fulcrum on which the world can be turned.”

Shilu didn’t answer; she was too busy stomping out the flame of hope inside her cold metal breast. It had grown too large. She was losing control.

“Now,” Elpida went on, “if that makes sense to you, I would like to know what you’re capable of, what control you have over your own body, all the tricks and techniques you still have access to.” She raised her right hand. “And Howl will help me verify, before we go on.”

Shilu considered leaping forward, into the promise of Pheiri’s guns.

“Shilu? Are you considering your answer?”

Shilu was considering death.

Elpida was everything Shilu had hoped for — and more than she had dared predict.

Back in the gravekeeper’s chamber, Elpida had dodged Shilu’s blade and proven that she was no common zombie, no mere revenant, but a network presence in her own right. Elpida’s followers had fought Lykke with drones, with gravity and electromagnetic jamming — that was nothing new, but when they had inevitably failed, Elpida had fought Lykke toe to toe, with nothing but fists and teeth. And she had won.

A revenant, a scrap of undead flesh, had fought and banished a Necromancer.

What a breach of system integrity — new, novel, different, after thousands of years of the same patterns and cycles repeating themselves over and over. Whatever Elpida was, she was a revenant unbeholden to Central. That had planted the seed of rebellion in Shilu’s own mind.

But this?

“Shilu? Still playing games? Alright then, let’s try something else first. Tell me who sent you to assassinate me, tell me who our mutual enemy is, who your boss is — or was.”

A faction of the war in heaven. But which faction? Shilu did not even know what the factions were, or what the war was about, let alone on which side she had been forced to stand.

All she knew was the threat she had received, in that simulated mockery of her grandmother’s home, delivered by a Necromancer wearing a dead woman’s skin. If Shilu did not follow orders, then her beloved Lulliet would be pulled from Central’s archives, dragged from the watery grave which Shilu had worked so hard to ensure would go unviolated — and then resurrected again, somewhere far away from Shilu’s protection. True death, a final end, release and relief and rest, would be denied once again.

But without a map of the war, how could Shilu know on which side she fought? How could she know which side truly held Lulliet’s grave? How could she ensure anything?

By seeking one who could overthrow the whole system, and kill it all, forever.

“Or how about this — why did you give up on the assassination? Why did you decide not to kill me? Start there, if you’d prefer.”

Why? Because there was no reason to carry out her mission anymore.

Upon arriving in the tomb, stripped of network access, Shilu had no way to verify that promises would be kept or threats would be rescinded. Would following orders ensure the quiet of Lulliet’s grave? Maybe. But maybe not. And then Lykke had turned up; if a faction of the war was willing to send Lykke to stop her, then they would be willing to dangle that same threat of exhumation over Lulliet’s grave. Fight, or not fight, it made no difference now.

Not killing Elpida left Shilu with more options.

Now Shilu realised too late that Elpida represented so much more.

The Commander was not merely a powerful network presence unbeholden to Central. The zombies to her left and right were not mere subordinates. Their daring plunge into the tomb was not just a rescue mission for fresh meat or nanomachines. The meeting with Eseld was not drama or futile gesture; some power had reached through the network to arrange that impossible coincidence, to put Elpida on the path of accepting as comrade one she had consumed as meat. Pheiri was not just a tank. This group of zombies was not just flesh and bone. Elpida’s commands were neither guile nor lies. Those purple eyes saw further than Shilu.

She was not dealing with Necromancers now, or with inscrutable network presences at Central’s feet, or even with a shard of Central itself. Everyone and everything had lied to Shilu for so long. Even Central had lied in the end, and allowed her to be woken from the archives. Central had failed her.

Elpida was not lying; Elpida was temptation.

The temptation was greater than Shilu had ever experienced. She knew why; she had attached herself to the most powerful entity she could find — Central — in order to pursue her own goals. She had done the same thing in true life, with the Service, and the State, and the power it gave her. Now Central had failed her, had allowed her to be resurrected, and put Lulliet’s grave at risk. Without the guarantee of protection, she had no loyalty to anything.

So she was attaching herself again, to a promise of future power.

That was why she’d been sent, wasn’t it? Because some faction feared this woman, this ‘Telokopolan’, and the power she was growing.

Shilu decided they had good reason for fear; this wasn’t a zombie, this was a seed.

Elpida, Pheiri, all of the zombies at her sides; the tomb, the hurricane, Eseld — even Lykke. Something had reached through the network and placed these elements in concert. Some side on the war in heaven, some player of a great game, had brought all this together.

Which included Shilu herself; she had been selected with such precision.

Shilu’s heart burst with hope — rancid, rotten, already ash. She could have extended a hand and given Elpida the help she needed, become part of the soil and water and sunlight in which to grow — into what? Revolution? Upheaval? Destruction, final and total and without a single lie? The peace and quiet of the grave, at long last, at least for Lulliet.

But whatever Elpida might become in the future, she could not yet offer Lulliet’s grave any true protection.

A quick death was more certain.

Shilu had to die.

Shilu knew she was panicking; the cold metal logic of her body was not enough to hold it back. If she’d had network access she could have slowed herself down, offloaded her own emotions, and approached the problem with calm and simple logic. Perhaps there was a way through this thicket, but she could not see it from this level.

Her best move — the only move with any certainty — was to make herself useless to any and all factions. Only then would Lulliet’s rest be assured.

The trio of zombies were chattering questions now. Elpida was gesturing with her naked right arm. Vicky was mouthing platitudes. Atyle watched.

Shilu bunched the carbon fibre muscles inside her black steel legs. She prepared her arms for transformation into blades. She would lunge at Elpida, and make it as real as she could; Pheiri would knock her back with a storm of autocannon rounds, then obliterate her with something more powerful. If she was resurrected inside the network, she would have all the excuses she needed.

They would send her back, of course, whoever had sent her the first time. They would send her again and again and again. And she would obey, over and over, to keep her beloved safe in the grave. And she would ensure her own failure, time after time. She would protect this seed in her own way.

Shilu smothered her emotions beneath cold metal. She could afford no tremors now.

She focused on Elpida’s trio one last time; she cycled through different visual spectra, examining the tiny tells and microexpressions on Elpida’s face, regretting that she would not have more time to get to know the Commander. She stared into Elpida’s bloodstream, read the pulse and beat of her heart, measured the oil on her skin and the hormones in her flesh and the salinity of her sweat. Then she went deeper, reading the nanomachine density of Elpida’s meat and bone, tracking the flare and flash of synaptic action inside her undead brain. She ran her eyes across the delicate tracery of metal embedded in Elpida’s grey matter, as if touching it with her fingertips. What a curious implant. Perhaps Shilu could develop a way to warn Elpida of her next coming; she would have to be clever. She could never let any others know.

Elpida would have protected Shilu’s beloved, if she’d been able. But that arrangement could not be.

Shilu readied herself to leap, then—

Her vision glitched.

A flicker of static jerked from right to left, blooming across her eyeballs. For a split-second the darkness in the tomb chamber flared brighter than day, glowing like a crimson ocean over nuclear fire.

The glitch passed.

A fourth figure had joined Elpida’s trio, standing behind Atyle.

A young girl, dressed in a gown of pearlescent bone. Her hair was ash and flame. Her eyes were black and old, charred and ruined. Her skin was blood, bright and burning. A crown of silver sat atop her head, melted to her skull.

Shilu was paralysed.

Elpida was caught in the moment between one word and the next, her right arm frozen mid-gesture. Her subordinates were frozen too, Vicky’s lips caught on a sound, Atyle unmoving on her haunches. Serin had stopped twitching like a mushroom sprouting in the dark; Pheiri’s guns were dead, his mechanisms paused, his brain empty. Even the black shadows of the tomb stood still. The hurricane beyond the walls had fallen silent. The wind held its breath.

Shilu had experienced this before, in Central’s presence. None of this was happening in physical space, but running directly on Shilu’s mind, so fast that no time appeared to pass.

Network intrusion, on a level no mere Necromancer could hope to achieve. A gravekeeper could do this. Maybe a graveworm. But this was neither.

She — the Crowned Girl — stared at Shilu with cold and quiet fury.

Whatever this thing was, it was a network presence of such power that Shilu felt an emotion she had considered herself beyond — a crawling in her gut, a pressure in her chest, a tightness in her throat.

The Crowned Girl spoke without moving her lips. Shilu heard the message inside her skull, in her own internal voice.

No, said the Crowned Girl.

But I want to be dead, Shilu thought, the words ripped out of her mind. She could not stop herself. Her innermost secrets were peeled from her core like dripping slices of skinned fruit. She grasped at them, but she could not resist the extraction. She felt her metal body cracked open, her organs scooped out and examined, her brains burned down and the ashes sifted by a great and bloody hand. Elpida is not what I expected. She cannot protect my Lulliet, not yet. She is more than I hoped. This is the beginning of something new, but I cannot be part of it. She cannot ensure Lulliet stays dead. And I—

No. You are cursed to live.

Shilu rejected that. She tried to turn away, but she could not.

The Crowned Girl stepped through Atyle, a network ghost without flesh of her own. She crouched before Shilu, gathering her skirts of bone about her knees. She stank of blood and fire and melted flesh, of ancient ashes and charred entrails and far worse.

She cupped Shilu’s face in both hands. Her touch burned. Her eyes were black voids, full of stars.

Live. Help. And I will shelter your beloved beneath my skirts.

But what if I don’t? Shilu thought. What if I say no, or I fail, or I can’t—

Then I will shelter her all the same, until the end of time.

But what if you fail too? What if you are overwhelmed, or you lose? What if they come for her, and resurrect her again, and again, and again, and—

I will end her, said the Crowned Girl. I will give her a truer death than any before.

Shilu felt moisture and heat prickle in her eyes. She could barely recall the sensation, and now it was forced upon her. The violation was complete and total.

She wept into the hands of the Crowned Girl. She felt her tears scooped up and pressed to bloody lips. She felt herself claimed.

She surrendered.

“—Shilu? Shilu?”

“She’s not listening. She’s gone off inside herself, or something. Elpi, are we sure she’s, like … here?”

“The slave is present. Of that I am certain. See? She blinks.”

Shilu blinked again.

The Crowned Girl was gone. The network intrusion was over. The darkness of the tomb chamber was back. The roar of the hurricane had resumed.

Shilu raised a hand to her eyes. Dry as a bone.

The network encounter had the quality of a dream — intense while active, sensations now rapidly fading. Shilu had been forced to feel emotions she had not experienced in longer than she could recall; they felt like echoes, irrelevant and absurd to her current situation. But the network intrusion was real, that had really happened. Shilu had been contacted directly by a primary participant of the war in heaven, who had offered to protect her one personal fulcrum.

Shilu glanced around the tomb chamber, into the dark and black, but there was no sign of the Crowned Girl.

Elpida was speaking. “Shilu? I need you to answer our questions. Or just one of them. I need you to give us something, somewhere to start. You’ve got to work with us. You seemed willing to work with us earlier. You mentioned that you had questions of your own, too. I would be willing to trade information, if that’s what you require.”

Shilu tried to open her mouth and ask about the Crowned Girl, but found she could not.

Had her network permissions been rewritten? Only in that one respect. An answer floated upward from her subconsciousness, planted there by the network presence. The hurricane functioned as protection, brief as it was, from the prying eyes of Central. The Crowned Girl had taken a great risk in direct communication. She had to remain hidden. She must not be spoken of, even to her greatest champions.

Shilu acquiesced to this need.

“Are you even listening to us?” Elpida was saying. “Are you—”

“What is Telokopolis?” Shilu asked.

Victoria blinked. Atyle broke into a smile, eyebrows raised in pleasant surprise.

Elpida laughed softly. “Am I interrogating you, Shilu? Or are you interrogating me?”

“This is meant to be an interrogation?”

Elpida shrugged. “Perhaps. Interrogation. Debriefing. Friendly conversation. Armed negotiation. Call it whatever and whichever you prefer, as long as you—”

“You don’t have the capacity to interrogate me,” said Shilu.

“Oh?”

“You suspect me of many potential things. I am — or was — an agent of Central. This is a reasonable suspicion. I would suspect the same in your position. You and Victoria are attempting the beginnings of a red face white face dynamic — sympathetic and threatening, safety and danger — but you lack the necessary resolve.”

Elpida frowned. Victoria muttered, “She means the good-cop bad-cop thing. She’s rumbled us there, Elpi.”

Elpida nodded. “What makes you say I lack resolve?”

“Everything,” Shilu answered, then turned to Vicky. “You are supposed to be the red face, to offer me sympathy. But you can’t, because you are terrified of me. Don’t lie, I can see it in your eyes and your pulse, and read it on your face. You would rather stand a hundred paces back and blow me up with that grenade launcher. I don’t blame you.” She turned back to Elpida before the trio could muster a response. “And you’re meant to be the white face, the threat. But you are uniquely unsuited to the role.”

Elpida said, “Why’s that?”

“Because you don’t believe in it. You naturally default to the other role, that of the sympathetic. But in that you are an abject failure.”

Vicky growled, “Hey now.”

“Vicky, hold on,” Elpida murmured. “I want to understand where she’s going with this. Shilu, please, continue?”

“You cannot be the red face either,” Shilu continued. “Because the role of the ‘good cop’ is to lie. You offer sympathy and understanding, while leading the subject deeper into self-recrimination. You offer identification with the agent of the institution, while the institution sharpens the knives on the subject’s own emotions and statements. You offer a human face on an inhuman process. But you, Elpida, you are not lying. You mean it. You are too real. You are offering something else.”

Elpida chuckled. “And you see through all that, do you?”

“I do.”

Victoria burst out laughing, then sighed and slapped her armoured knee. “Sorry, Elpi, but yeah, she’s got a point. We don’t know what the shit we’re doing.”

Elpida sighed as well, staring directly at Shilu. Atyle just smiled, as if she had expected this outcome from the start. Radio contact crackled back and forth, but none of the trio answered the voices in their headsets.

Shilu said, “I have sat where you are a thousand times, in true life. I know how this works, and you’re failing. But that’s not an insult.”

Elpida nodded. “Alright, fair enough. What were you, in life, before all this?”

“I was a counter-intelligence agent.”

Vicky’s eyes went wide. “You were a spy?”

“I hunted spies.”

Vicky let out a low whistle. Elpida frowned, not quite comprehending; Vicky muttered, “Imagine somebody who’s whole job was hunting traitors and moles, kinda.”

“Yes,” said Shilu.

“And you were good at it, huh?” Vicky asked. “Hunting spooks?”

“Very.”

Elpida gestured for Vicky to continue. Vicky said, “For who? I mean, where, where did you live?”

Shilu opened her mouth — then stopped. Her memories of true life were hazy at best, drowned beneath so much meat and blood and raw bone marrow. For a moment of vertigo she realised that she could remember her home on the coast, and her grandmother’s house in Hailin, and even recall her parents’ faces — though with some difficulty and much bitterness. But the name of her country was lost to both her and history.

Perhaps it had never been that important.

She answered with something she did remember. “The Interior Service of State Security.”

Vicky frowned. “Yeah, but like, for who?”

Shilu shook her head. “It’s been too long. I don’t remember.”

Elpida said, “And you’ve run interrogations like this before?”

“I can run rings around you.”

Elpida laughed. Vicky shrugged. Atyle finally stopped squatting, moving to a cross-legged sitting pose.

Vicky said, “So what, we’ve just gotta accept you, as is? Little miss ‘death to spies’, and that’s that?”

“I don’t think you have a choice.”

Elpida said, “We could solve this my way.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Vicky.

“Shilu and I could beat the shit out of each other until we reach mutual comprehension.”

Shilu almost sighed — Elpida was a seed of power, but she wasn’t perfect, not yet. “I can tell you whatever you want to know,” she said. “But I think you should stop trying to interrogate me. You’re very bad at it. And answer my question first — what is Telokopolis?”

Elpida said, “Why do you want to know that?”

“Because I’ve heard you discussing it. I heard what you said to Eseld, and I’m not a fool, I picked up the context and your relationship to her. You told her that you are a promise, and that promise is called Telokopolis. I wish to hear that promise too. I need to know who and what I’m fighting for. I need to know … ”

Shilu needed to know that Lulliet would stay dead, and that Elpida would pour concrete on her tomb.

Elpida nodded slowly. “Fair enough. Telokopolis rejects nobody, even a Necromancer. Alright then—”

“And,” Shilu added, as part of a trade she had not realised she was making. “I suspect I’ve seen it once before.”

Elpida froze. “Seen what?”

“Telokopolis,” said Shilu. “I’ve seen Telokopolis once before.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Shilu finally speaks, but not for long, interrupted by the voice of a god inside her head. And who can resist the promise of divine salvation? But what is salvation, to a zombie? To the undead, for whom eternal life is an imposition, an unasked-for awakening from a grave aeons cold? Is that answer Elpida’s to give? Perhaps.

Ahem! Anyway, hello! We’re back once again, dear readers! This chapter has been rather a long time coming, all the way since Shilu’s intermission. Seems like with this, she’s finally part of the main cast; the Crowned Girl has certainly bought her for Elpida’s side, though Shilu herself remains as-yet unconvinced intellectually, even if she’s not really been given a choice. Perhaps we should hear a real answer from Elpida’s mouth. Even then, a Necromancer always has options …

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

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Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I am still very much trying to build up some kind of a backlog of chapters, and when I do, I hope to share more advance chapters with patrons!

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And thank you so much, dear readers! Thank you for being here and enjoying my little story about undead girls and lots of guns and living tank-boys and spooky places. I dearly hope you are having as much fun reading this as I do writing it, because Necroepilogos is always a blast to write. So, thank you! Seeya all next chapter!

Content Warnings

Dissociation/depersonalisation/catatonic state

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Eseld stared into the empty eye sockets of her own denuded skull, lost in the static of the storm.

She was curled on her side, lying on a thin mattress, facing a wall of peeling cream-white paint and dull grey metal. Her naked skull was cradled in her arms; it weighed much less than she had expected, robbed of skin and muscle and brains. She ran her fingertips across the osseous texture of exposed bone, stroking her own parietal and frontal plates, cupping the gentle curve of her cheek, caressing the teeth still in their sockets above the subtle sweep of mandible, the jaw fixed in place with metal pins. She ran a thumb around the twinned orbits where zygomatic and maxilla had once held the soft jelly of her own eyeballs.

She was not alone. Su and Mala were here too. So was her beloved Andasina. Their skulls sat in a little row of three, propped against the wall of dull metal and peeling paint.

Eseld had cradled Andasina’s skull first, before embracing her own. She had left wet, salty stains on the bone. She had made terrible noises, howling and screaming and sobbing into a thin and lumpy pillow.

Eseld’s chest was a void. Her lips were slack. Her head was empty as the skull, both filled with storm-fury from beyond the walls. Her eyes felt raw and dry; she had cried for a very long time, when her sobs had matched the hurricane. At first she had wept hot and hard and urgent, when the tears had mixed with the taste of saint’s blood. But then the disciples had pried her jaw open and left her empty; her tears had turned cold and weak and slow, until she was flayed and de-boned and laid out with nothing left to give.

The storm raged on, pounding the exterior of the tomb with rain and hail and hurricane winds, beyond Pheiri’s hull, inside Eseld’s head.

Eseld envied the storm. She wished she could keep crying.

She stared into her own empty sockets, into a void where once had been meat and brain and life.

She did have a vague notion of where she was; she had been placed on a bed in the ‘bunk room’, inside Pheiri, which was the name of the huge armoured vehicle that the saint and her disciples called home. She’d been there for — some hours, at least? Time had ceased to mean anything. A hollow space could not keep count; the echoes multiplied any attempt.

“—winters too, they are most terrible and dark where I come from. They go on for months and months, with so much snow you can barely walk through it after more than a few days of the coldest weather. Sometimes the snow comes down mixed with ash, and nobody can go outdoors for days on end, or they get awfully sick. That’s when we use the tunnels between the houses, you see? Everybody stays indoors, where it’s nice and warm, and we do all our visiting without setting foot outside! Do you really not have proper winters where you’re from?”

That was Cyneswith, still chattering on. Her voice rose from somewhere past Eseld’s feet.

A reply came, hesitant and halting. “Oh. Um, I misspoke. We do. We do have snow. Especially in the mountains. Just not that much.”

That was one of the saint’s disciples. Their names had flowed over Eseld’s mind like water over heavy rocks.

Amina, perhaps?

“Mountains!” said Cyneswith. “Oh, what a delight! Real mountains? I’ve seen pictures of mountains in books, but we had nothing of the sort. Just the forested hills, and they don’t go up too far. Even a young girl like myself can climb those pretty easily. Not that we did much of that, not off the roads. All sorts of dangerous things live deeper in the forests.”

“Mm,” Amina grunted. “Mm, yes. Real mountains.”

Cyneswith giggled. “I know you say you’re not really a fairy, Miss Amina, but it’s very hard not to consider you as one regardless. Oh! Oh, I’m so sorry, I see I’ve made you embarrassed. Think nothing of it. I shouldn’t have shared that thought. Please, don’t blush on my account. Though you are very pretty when you blush.”

Rainstorm waves passed across metal walls; hailstones drummed like thunder. Tiny mechanical sounds whirred and hummed inside the tank — inside ‘Pheiri’ — joining the static haze inside Eseld’s head.

Eseld curled two fingers around her own left eye socket. The bone was dry and hard and empty.

Amina whispered: “Did she just … ?”

Cyneswith moved. The pressure on the foot of the bunk adjusted. “Miss Eseld? Miss Eseld?”

Eseld considered opening her lips and moving her tongue, but she knew that she would speak only soulless static.

She stared into empty bone.

After a moment, Cyneswith’s weight adjusted again.

Amina said, “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s had a terrible shock,” said Cyneswith. “But I think Miss Eseld is going to be alright. I have to hope she will be. She was so very brave, back in that awful mausoleum full of coffins, the way she threw herself between us and that terrible monster. She is a very brave lady. But even the brave have to rest. Give her time, and I am confident she will be restored to us.”

Eseld considered laughing, but she did not, for she would merely vomit forth the sound of the rain and the hail, insensible to mortal meat.

After a moment, Amina said: “She ate a little bit. That’s good, I think.”

A dry swallow from Cyn. “A little … human flesh, yes.” A forced laugh followed, a single exhalation of breath. “Forgive me. This is why I struggle to fully believe you are not all fairies.”

“You’re the same as us,” Amina said. “We’re all the same now. Except Elpida.”

“Yes. Quite.”

Eseld barely remembered eating, but she did recall the taste of human meat. Somebody had dangled a strip of bloody flesh before her face. Appetite had betrayed sorrow, and she had crammed it into her mouth, then licked the gore off her fingers, so as not to soil Andasina’s skull. Even storms needed fodder.

Amina sighed. Eseld heard a smile in that sigh, mixed with tension and worry, and a distinct desire to be elsewhere.

The saint’s disciples did not trust Eseld or Cyneswith, and they were not subtle in their distrust. They didn’t trust Sky either, but Sky was unconscious, laid out on a medical bed in some other room; Eseld had a vague memory of being carried through the main compartment of Pheiri’s innards, and glimpsing Sky’s limp, unconscious, armour-clad body carted off into the ‘infirmary’.

Eseld and Cyneswith had not been left alone since they had been brought inside Pheiri. Eseld had been frisked and stripped of the weapons she had taken from the tomb armoury, left helpless and unarmed, just like before, wearing only grey layers and the heavy wrap of her armoured coat. She had not been capable of resistance — sobbing and whining with her teeth buried in the saint’s flesh. She did not recall exactly what had happened, or when precisely she had allowed her jaws to be parted and the saint’s arm removed, or when the saint had brought the skulls of herself and her friends, and said ‘these are yours’. All was a jumbled blur of screaming and tears and blood in her mouth.

At first several people had tramped in and out of the room, talking at her, trying to get her to talk back, growing frustrated or angry. The saint had cleared the others away for a while. Then another person had checked her over in near silence, feeling for wounds with firm little hands, pressing strange instruments to parts of her flesh, and finally pronouncing her uninjured. Cyneswith had talked at great length, with both the saint and some of her disciples, to tell them the story of her resurrection and their journey through the tomb alongside Shilu.

A long time had passed. The saint and others had gone out of Pheiri, then returned; Eseld knew this by the sounds of their voices, and the sound of Pheiri’s ramp going up and down. Others visited the room, but she paid them no attention. She sank deeper into the storm and into the sockets of her own skull.

Eventually the saint had led another group out into the tomb. Eseld had overheard urgent words, angry words, but they meant nothing to her. All she knew was that the disciples were tense with expectation.

Down at the foot of the bunk, Cyneswith let out a matching sigh.

“Miss Amina?” she said. “You may as well sit down too. It’s not fair that you have to stand there in the doorway all by yourself.”

“I’m … um … I’m fine,” Amina replied. “The— I mean, I’m supposed to— I—”

“You want to join your friends, but you’re supposed to watch us,” Cyneswith said. “Ah! No, no, don’t blush, please. I take no offence. It’s obvious, you see? You don’t trust us, and that’s okay. It’s just, if we’re going to sit here and have a chat, we may as well settle in for—”

Boom-boom-boom!

A cannon roared and rocked just beyond Pheiri’s hull. Vibrations shook the bunk room.

Cyneswith yelped, jerking so hard that Eseld felt it through the mattress; Amina flinched and let out a small gasp. Mechanisms inside Pheiri went clunk-clunk, cycling fresh rounds into the great guns up on the hull.

Eseld stared into her own empty eye sockets. Storms were not moved by gnats and flies.

Cyneswith stammered, “W-what, what—”

“It’s okay, it’s okay!” Amina said quickly, almost embarrassed. “It’s just warning shots. Elpida said Pheiri might have to fire warning shots. It’s okay. It’s just warning shots. U-unless there’s any more … ”

Two pairs of startled lungs filled the bunk room with rapid panting. A swallow — Amina — and then a little forced giggle — Cyneswith. Silence stretched on, drowned beneath the distant whip and whirl of hurricane winds.

Amina blew out a long breath, then spoke strong and clear: “Thank you, Pheiri.”

Cyneswith said, “Is that the custom, here?”

“Y-yes. Pheiri’s keeping us safe, after all. Melyn and Hafina do it, and they’ve been here longer than us, so … ”

Cyneswith cleared her throat gently. “Thank you, Pheiri!”

Both zombies fell silent. The howl of the storm and the drum of the rain rushed back to fill the space. Tiny mechanical sounds ticked and hummed inside Pheiri’s body, purring and glugging behind bulkheads. Awkward feet shuffled on the decking.

Cyneswith said: “I would tell you to go join your friends. But I know you can’t, and I’m not in charge of you, anyway. They’re all watching your leader, aren’t they? She’s gone out to speak with Shilu?”

After a moment, Amina muttered, “It’s okay. Elpida will be okay. I don’t need to watch.”

“Did they leave you here because you’re the smallest?” Cyneswith asked.

“Oh. No.”

Eseld cupped the rear of her skull, pressing her palm to the thin plate of occipital bone. All her machinery was gone, her soft mechanisms of grey matter and electrical impulse, the seat of the soul ripped out and eaten up.

Where had her soul gone? Had it fled her skull and entered this new body — or was she a husk, filled with wrathful storm? Perhaps no zombie had a soul after all. Perhaps she had been wrong all along, and God had not died or been murdered, but had absconded from the world with all the souls of all the peoples of earth, leaving only this dead and empty meat behind, to gorge itself upon itself for the rest of all eternity.

Eseld was exhausted, but sleep was impossible. Her eyes hurt too much. Besides, storms did not sleep.

She stared into her own corpse and considered cursing God.

After a long time — minutes or hours, Eseld couldn’t tell — a pair of feet approached the bunk room door, tentative and light but without attempt at stealth. A third voice spoke from the doorway.

“H-hey,” said — which one was that? Eseld didn’t know. “Hey, Amina. Hi. I’m to, er … take over, if you want to go forward. Into the cockpit, I mean.”

“Mm!”

Eseld heard Amina fly across the decking, feet hopping out of the bunk room and into the larger compartment beyond. She chattered back, suddenly breathless: “I’ll see you later, Cyn. Sorry, sorry, but I have to go see! I do! You were right! Later!”

And then Amina was gone, the sound of her feet swallowed up by Pheiri’s innards.

A long, heavy sigh fought in vain against silence and storm, followed by an awkward swallow, both from the new arrival.

Cyneswith said: “Do I get the impression that Miss Amina doesn’t like you very much?”

“S-sorry?” said the new arrival. “Um, uh, yeah. Yes. I mean, I think so. Amina and I don’t talk much. Or at all, really.” Cloying silence crept back in, washing the air with waves of rain. Eseld expanded to fill the room. Then the disciple spoke again, with halting desperation: “I’m Ooni, by the way. If you didn’t catch my name before. Hello.”

“Mmhmm,” purred Cyneswith. “I remember you, Miss Ooni. I’m very good with names. Or at least I like to think so.”

Ooni walked into the bunk room, much deeper than Amina had ventured, clumsy footsteps thumping across the deck. Eseld heard her sit down on the opposite bunk with a creak of metal and a little pop of one knee joint. The room was very narrow and cramped; when Ooni spoke again her voice was close, pitched low and soft, as if Eseld were merely sleeping and should not be awoken.

“How is she?” Ooni asked. “Eseld, I mean, not Amina. Did she sleep at all?”

“No change,” said Cyneswith. “I believe she may have drifted off for a small nap, for a little while, but I cannot be certain.”

Silence, perhaps beckoned by a nod. Storm crashed and raged inside Eseld’s skull.

Ooni said, “Is she … alright, with those skulls?”

“Your leader said not to take them from her.”

Ooni sighed. “Yeah. They are hers. S-shit, uh … do you need to sleep? You seem kinda … ”

“I’m fine, thank you. Somebody needs to watch over Eseld. But I am curious. How do I ‘seem’ to you, Miss Ooni?”

Ooni let out a strange laugh, hesitant and awkward. “Like you’re not afraid.”

“Should I be afraid?”

“Well, no,” Ooni said — and seemed surprised at her own answer. “No. No, you shouldn’t. You’ve fallen into good hands. I-I think.”

Eseld heard the smile in Cyneswith’s voice: “Did you volunteer to come and tell me that?”

Ooni was silent for a moment. “W-well, sort of. I thought you might be afraid. But, oh, uh, this is your first time around, isn’t it? You’re a real freshie. You and Sky both. Not like Eseld.”

“I don’t know the true meaning of so much fairy-speak,” Cyneswith said. “But I think I understand your meaning, yes. I died, and now I am here. This is my first trip to the realms of faerie.”

Awkward silence settled deep and hard, broken by storm’s rage. Eseld wanted to rear up and grab Cyneswith by the shoulders, to shake her until her teeth chattered. Enduring Cyn’s lack of comprehension back in the tomb had been one thing, but now Eseld’s own metaphor for the world lay in ragged tatters — angels had become demons, demons had metastasised like cancer, and her belly was warm with the blood of a saint. She could not stand it any longer. She had listened to several of the saint’s disciples explain to Cyneswith the nature of the world, some of them with great patience. But Cyneswith did not seem to accept the reality of undeath and nanomachines and obligate cannibalism.

But Eseld could not do any of that. She stared into empty sockets.

Hurricane fury drenched the air with static haze. Wind howled like the voice of God pouring forth a deluge of air to blast the tomb flat. Pheiri hummed and murmured, like a mechanical cocoon. Eseld became all these things, emptied out and refilled over and over and over again.

A stealthy tread crept up to the bunk room door; the creeper — whoever she was — thought she was being clever and quiet. Perhaps she was, for her footsteps were very gentle. But Eseld had a hunter’s ears, tuned to rabbits on the open heath or foxes on the forest floor. The eavesdropper stayed silent, and did not interrupt.

Cyneswith said, “Miss Ooni? Pardon my presumption, but your face makes it plain that you have something to say.”

“They took me in, too,” Ooni answered, very softly.

“ … yes?”

“Elpida, I mean. The Commander. All of them. Pheiri, too, in a way. He makes decisions as well. Them … all of them. I wasn’t here with them at first.” Ooni’s voice grew in confidence as she spoke, then faded as quickly as it had rallied. “I was … I was an enemy, I suppose. And I thought maybe you might … maybe I could help … if you were afraid, I mean.”

“That’s very sweet of you, Miss Ooni,” said Cyn.

Ooni swallowed, dry and hard, then said: “Elpida ate a piece of me, too.”

Eseld blinked.

After a moment, Cyneswith said: “She did?”

Ooni swallowed again. “Yeah. Not for nutrition, though. It was a … a symbol I had tattooed, right here. Here, see?” A rustle of cloth followed. Cyneswith made a little sound of acknowledgement. When Ooni spoke again, her voice was tight and strained. “It was, uh … a bad thing, um … it was a … a symbol … uh … ”

“Miss Ooni,” Cyneswith said, “you don’t have to explain. I wouldn’t understand the intricate details of these fairy matters, anyway.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course. I just … I-I wanted to help, but I-I can’t explain it. I was a … I was in another group, and they were … difficult … people. And Elpida, the Commander, she should have had me shot. She should have killed me and eaten me. She had me, dead to rights, and it’s what we would have done to her. She could have killed me. She should have!” Ooni was almost panting now. “But she didn’t. It took me a long time to see, to understand what she did, and why she did it, when she took this piece of flesh off me. She … she … made me … clean.”

Ooni sobbed the final word, then heaved for a while, sniffing back tears. The bed creaked beneath Eseld — Cyneswith, reaching forward, perhaps to pat Ooni on the knee.

A little while later, Ooni spoke, voice firmed up once again: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cry. I hadn’t spoken to anybody about that. Hadn’t realised it myself. I … um … I meant to come here and help you. But, thank you.”

Cyneswith said, “You’re welcome, Miss Ooni. I had no idea that fey creatures could suffer such.”

A moment’s silence. “Uh, right. Anyway, I was trying to say that Elpida, the Commander, she made me clean. So now it’s my job to do the right things, to stay clean, to justify what she did for me, to … make her proud, I suppose. I … I don’t know if that helps you, or … or Eseld?”

Cyneswith said: “I’m sure it warms her to hear you speak of it.”

Eseld stared into her own eye sockets, lost far away amid the storm.

Ooni’s situation had nothing in common with her own. Another disciple at the feet of the saint. But why had Ooni been spared, when Eseld’s friends had not? Eseld wanted to surge to her feet and punch Ooni in the jaw, to pull her apart with hurricane winds and fling her naked bones to the sky. But she could not find the energy or the motivation, not even to blink a second time.

Ooni puffed out a big sigh. “Anyway, I’ve gotta stick around in here for a bit. The Commander’s outside, and everyone’s watching her talk to Shilu. We have a couple of packs of cards, kept by Mel and Haf. Do you know how to play cards? I didn’t know, but—”

Those stealthy footsteps from before suddenly announced themselves with a smart little stomp; another zombie entered the bunk room.

Ooni cut off and rose to her feet with a creak from her bunk.

“Leuca!” Ooni said. “I didn’t hear you coming, were you meant to be in the … control … ”

“I was listening,” said ‘Leuca’. Her voice was dead and flat, with nothing in it for the storm to drown.

Cyneswith cleared her throat. “Leuca? I’m terribly sorry, but I thought your name was Pira. Am I mistaken?”

A beat of silence. “Pira, to you.”

“Lady Pira,” said Cyn.

“Just Pira.”

“Very well, Miss Pira.”

“Mm.”

Ooni said, “Leuca, is everything—”

“The away team is fine. Nothing is happening. They’re talking to the Necromancer right now, but it’s all preliminaries and I don’t care.” A pause. “You.”

Silence.

“She’s got battle shock,” Ooni said. “She doesn’t respond to anything. Just strokes that skull.”

“Can she hear us?” said Pira. “Does she know we’re talking?”

Cyneswith answered, her voice gone carefully polite. “I believe she does, yes, Miss Pira. She responded when we gave her food. And she is currently awake. Her eyes are open.”

A heavy tread crossed the cramped space of the bunk room in three short strides; a lighter tread backed away into the corner — Ooni, making room for Pira. A rustle of cloth moved just behind Eseld’s head, like a piece of storm brought close. A weight pressed on the edge of Eseld’s bunk. A shadow fell across the yellow-white bone of her naked skull.

Pira was crouched behind her, peering over her shoulder, peering into those same empty sockets.

“Your skull?” Pira said.

Eseld didn’t see any reason to answer.

“Your skull,” Pira repeated. “I’ve never held my own. Must be a strange experience.”

The storm returned to fill the gap left by such inane words, rain-static flowing into the bunk room, hailstone drumming drowning out—

“I watched the Commander remove the flesh from all four skulls. I watched her clean them. Brush them down. Rinse them. Sanitise them. Before that, I watched her remove the flesh from your body, and from those of your friends.”

Ooni hissed, “Leuca—”

“I’m talking to Eseld,” Pira said, in the same dead, flat tone. “Be quiet or go away.”

Ooni decided to be quiet.

A moment passed before Pira spoke again. “Elpida killed you and your friends. We all did. We all held the guns, all pulled the triggers, all ate the meat. We have collective responsibility. Melyn and Hafina are exceptions, because they’re not zombies, not like us. They don’t eat meat. I’m a zombie too, just like you. But I didn’t eat. Do you know why?”

Eseld didn’t care.

“You don’t know why,” Pira said. “So I’ll tell you why.”

Pira leaned over Eseld’s body. A periphery of flame-red hair floated like a forest fire on the horizon, framing a sliver of pale skin, dusted with freckles. Pira murmured into Eseld’s ear.

“I know what it feels like to press a gun to Elpida’s flesh.”

Eseld blinked.

“I know what it feels like to pull the trigger, and want her dead, and mean it.”

Eseld blinked again. Her throat bobbed; her mouth was so dry, she could barely swallow. How had she not noticed that until now? Her chest was quivering inside, as if her heartbeat was struggling to match the storm. She was coated in sweat and tired enough to die. She could not keep this up. She would cease to exist.

“I dumped the entire magazine of a submachine gun into her belly,” Pira said. “Three bullets made it past her armoured coat. Chewed her up with a gut wound, would have killed any other zombie. Left her torn open, bleeding out. And I meant it. I meant it more than you meant that round aimed at her head.”

Eseld stirred.

For the first time in hours, she moved her neck. Her muscles felt like rock. She turned to look at the face of one who would wound a saint.

Pira was beautiful, in the way a forest fire was beautiful — how had Eseld not noticed before? A cold, sharp, fire-hardened expression, wrought on a face like pale wood, framed by hair the colour of grass aflame. Celestial blue eyes left nothing concealed.

Eseld opened her mouth, and rasped: “You shot her?”

“Yeah, I shot her. She bleeds just like everybody else. Do you know what she did to me in return?”

Eseld shook her head.

“She came back for me. She counted me as one of her own, one of her comrades, even though I’d put three bullets through her belly. She called herself my Commander. And she’s right, she is my Commander. She feeds me mouthfuls of her blood, every few days, to keep me from starving, because I don’t eat, I don’t cannibalise other zombies. She does it with her hand, so I can drink from her palm. I am hers.”

“ … why … why are you telling me this?”

Pira eased back, giving Eseld some breathing space. The bunk room opened up either side of this flame-sprite forest spirit, with dull grey walls and peeling paint and thin blue blankets on narrow mattresses. Pira stood up; she wore tomb-grey trousers and a matching t-shirt, with heavy boots on her feet. She carried a pair of pistols in a holster around her hips, and a machete strapped to one thigh.

“Get up,” said Pira. “You’ve been lying there for hours. Any longer and you’re going to get bedsores. You’re undead, not invincible.”

“B-but—”

“Get up.”

Eseld wanted to coil back around her own skull and press herself against the wall, to sink into the static of the storm; Pira’s blunt intonation did not intimidate her, because she didn’t care anymore if she lived or died. The saint might eat her, or the disciples might tear her apart, or they could leave her here to rot into the blanket. It made no difference, changed nothing about the outcome, and would not grant her any clarity or truth, for she was nothing except soulless meat, powerless before the angels and demons and monsters which still stalked the world in God’s absence. Meat, was all she was good for, all she would ever be, and—

“Stop that,” said Pira.

“Stop what?”

“Retreating inside yourself. Pay attention to me. Get up.”

Eseld was still not intimidated — but Pira had already cracked her shell and drawn her forth like a morsel of wriggling meat. The storm seemed further away every second, just noise beyond the walls. Resistance was more bother than acquiescence.

Eseld sat up, slowly and painfully. She discovered that many of her muscles had gone stiff and sore with long stillness; how long had she really been lying there? She winced and hissed as she moved. She eased her legs over the side of the bunk until her socks touched the cold decking. She brought her skull with her, cradling it in her lap.

Cyneswith was sitting a few paces to Eseld’s left, eyes wide with shock, mouth covered with one hand; she looked so small and dainty in tomb greys. Ooni was at the opposite end of the bunk room, up on her feet, eyes darting between Eseld and Pira as if a brawl was about to break out. Ooni was not like Eseld had expected — she was dark-haired and green-eyed, willowy and gangly.

Pira stared down at Eseld’s disrobed skull.

Eseld swallowed to clear her throat. “I’m not leaving me behind.”

“Mm,” Pira grunted. “You would fight me for it, yeah. I can see that. Keep it, it’s yours.”

Pira sat down on the opposite bunk, so that she and Eseld were face to face. Eseld said nothing — she was still numb and exhausted, even if she had finally torn her eyes away from her own skull and her soul from the gyre of the storm. She felt the pull all the same, eyes dipping back down toward the bony plates of her own cranium. She started to caress the orbit of the left eye socket with two fingers.

“Why are you doing that?” Pira asked.

Eseld looked up. She could not think of an answer.

“You must have a reason,” Pira pressed, her voice flat and dead.

A nasty impulse bubbled up from within Eseld’s chest, hotter than rain, harder than hail.

“Because,” she spat, ramming two fingers through the eye socket so the tips brushed her own fleshless sphenoid bone. “I’ve already been skull-fucked to death. I may as well jam my own fingers in there too.”

Pira smiled.

Eseld almost choked. That smile was nasty.

“The Commander,” Pira said. Her smile died as quickly as it had blossomed. “Elpida. She bleeds like anyone else. She’s not a saint, or a demon, or an angel.”

Eseld blinked rapidly. “How did you know—”

“I listened to you,” Pira said. “You’ve been muttering for hours, on and off, especially earlier. The others tried to talk to you, but I listened, and I understand what you’re thinking. But you’re wrong. She’s not an angel, or a demon, or a saint. Though that last one is a good word for what she might become one day, eventually, if she’s right, if she’s setting us on the correct path.”

Eseld shook her head. “She ate me.”

Pira nodded. “She did.”

“You … you all ate me. Me and Andasina. And Su and Mala. You hunted us and you ate us.”

“We’re all zombies,” said Pira. “We’re all no different.”

“No,” Eseld murmured. Then stronger: “No. No. She’s different. She is a saint. She is. Even if she’s … rotten, or … I don’t know. I could taste it in her blood. She’s different.”

Pira nodded again. “Mmhmm. She is. Do you know why? Do you know what she’s got, which we all lack?”

“Divine grace.”

“Ideology. Purpose. Clarity.” Pira stared, unblinking as a skull. “And I believe in her. I believe in what she has chosen to do. She’s made me believe. But she’s only human. Or only undead. She’s not perfect, she makes mistakes, she fucks up, and sometimes she gets herself shot in the stomach. So you — you could have landed that bullet, and it would have killed her, because she’s not a saint. She’s not invincible. She would have returned to the resurrection buffer, and waited out another ten, or ten hundred, or ten thousand years, just to try again. Do you understand?”

Pira’s cold blue eyes finally sent a shiver up Eseld’s spine.

“Are you—”

“Threatening you?” Pira said. “Yes. I am.”

Ooni whined, “Leuca—”

Pira raised a finger and Ooni went silent. The sound of the hurricane beyond the tomb rushed into the gap, roaring in Eseld’s ears. She stared into those eyes of celestial blue, empty and cold as winter skies.

“If you make an attempt on the Commander’s life,” Pira murmured. “I’ll kill you myself, if the others don’t get to you first.”

“Hypocrite,” said Eseld.

“Yes.”

Eseld found that she was not afraid. “Fair enough.”

Pira took a deep breath; something unclenched in her face, behind her expression. A smile leaked into her eyes, but did not touch her lips.

“Good. Now we understand each other. I’m not going ask to you to believe in her, not yet. It took me lifetimes of failure and pain to understand, and I still barely just have enough faith left for the Commander. But I do have it, and I’m not going to ask you to share it.”

“Then why talk about all this?”

“Because despite all that faith, she’s just another zombie. And I’m going to tell you—” her eyes flicked to Cyneswith, still silent behind her own hand “—both of you, all about just how badly she can screw up, the kind of mistakes she can make, the errors of judgement, the flaws in her thinking.”

Eseld frowned. “Why?”

“Because the Commander has been unwell. And for some reason your presence has healed her. I think it’s best if you understand why. I think it’s best if somebody other than her explains to you where we’re going, where she’s leading, so you can make your choice.”

“You’re going somewhere? Where?”

Ooni said: “Metaphorically speaking, she means.”

“Thank you, Ooni,” Pira said, without looking up at her.

Cyneswith spoke. “And, Miss Pira, where is your Commander leading you?”

“Telokopolis.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Poor Eseld. Now there’s a feeling only a zombie can experience – holding your own skull, and knowing the flesh and brains has passed through the collective mouths and guts of your new ‘friends’. At least Pira is using her ill-gotten skills for good, for once. And Cyneswith sure does seem friendly …

Well well well! Arc 12 is going places, lots of places, in a big overlapping mess of complexity that I’ve had to physically draw up on a whiteboard. No, I’m not exaggerating. There’s gonna be many more POVs shifts yet. Elpida hasn’t even gotten started on talking with Shilu, and the zombies out there in the tomb are going to be getting ideas. Soooo yeah, arc 12 is probably going to be just as long as I had predicted, perhaps even more so! We’ll see!

A small heads up/reminder – there is no chapter next week! I’m not yet 100% sure how to indicate this new schedule, other than by pointing to the Table of Contents page, which I will be doing my best to keep updated with the all the planned publishing dates for upcoming chapters. Necroepilogos will be resuming as normal the week after, as before!

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I am still very much trying to build up some kind of a backlog of chapters, and when I do, I’ll be sharing more chapters ahead with patrons. I hope!

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

And thank you! Thank you for reading my little story, dear readers. I couldn’t do any of this without all of you, the audience, and neither could Elpida. She’s got her work cut out for her this time, between stray zombies and undead wreckage and the mysteries of the tomb. Let’s hope she’s keeping it together. Or Howl can do it for her. Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Pheiri’s rear access ramp unsealed with a clunk-clunk-clunk of bolts drawn back, then descended with a deep mechanical purr. Bitter cold rushed into the airlock chamber, bearing a mingled reek of dark metal and congealed blood. The static hail-haze hurricane-murmur grew louder, no longer muffled beyond bulkhead and armour, drumming against the distant walls of the tomb.

“Stick to the plan,” said Elpida as the ramp opened, voice undrowned by the storm. “Remember, we are completely safe beneath Pheiri’s guns. If anything unexpected happens, retreat to the airlock. No heroics. No surprises.”

“Quite,” replied Atyle, with a worrying smile on her lips. “No heroes left in the grave.”

Elpida prompted, “Vicky?”

“Uh, yeah,” Vicky said. “Yeah, of course. Understood, Commander.”

The ramp yawned wider; a red-lit wall loomed from the Stygian gloom. The ramp-edge touched the floor with a sharp click of bone on metal.

Elpida took the lead, boots thumping against the ramp, her long loose white hair a beacon in the dark. Atyle sauntered after her as if beneath a summer sun. Two of Kagami’s new drones were already on-station, holding position just to the left of the ramp — thigh-sized oblongs of matte black, picked out by the steady red points of their own running lights and forward sensors.

Vicky took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the stale stench of old blood and older metal. She tried not to grimace, then walked down the ramp.

She strode with a display of false confidence, just as Elpida had ordered; head up, shoulders back, hands resting casually atop the automatic grenade launcher now slung over her belly. Confidence was key for this mission, so Vicky put on the act as best she could.

She wasn’t going to give Kagami the satisfaction of being right.

The tomb chamber opened out to either side and soared high above Vicky’s head as she descended the ramp. The ceiling was wreathed in darkness, dripping down the metal walls, barely beaten back by Pheiri’s crimson red external lights. To her left, past the pair of drones, the corpses of Lykke’s ‘hounds’ were laid out in rows, most of them still in their armour, though some of them in several pieces. That was the source of the blood-and-meat stench hanging in the air.

Vicky stepped off the ramp; her footsteps clicked on the black metal floor, echoing off into the dark.

She suddenly felt very small and very vulnerable, surrounded by the great yawning emptiness of the chamber, despite the additional protection she wore; Vicky had ‘up-armoured’ with part of the haul from the tomb armoury, also at Elpida’s suggestion. A thick bulletproof vest lay beneath her armoured coat, with additional padding and plates covering her throat, groin, and upper thighs. She wore knee-pads and shin-guards, a silent statement that she was ready to drop into position, shoulder her weapon, and take aim at a moment’s notice. A lightweight helmet of black polymer protected her head; a headset with earpiece and microphone completed the look.

And it was a look; all for show.

Elpida was back in her armoured coat. She wore nothing beneath except a grey thermal t-shirt and matching trousers. Her right sleeve was rolled up to expose the bandage around her bite wound, showing off the limb with which she had defeated Lykke — another statement. A freshly cleaned and oiled submachine gun hung from one shoulder, while a pair of heavy pistols jutted from her waistband, out in the open rather than sensibly tucked away in pockets or holsters. She also wore a headset, to keep the team linked with Pheiri — and by extension, with Kagami, on overwatch in Pheiri’s cockpit, managing the drone escort.

Atyle wore a headset too, but she was naked from the waist up, with her coat hanging over her shoulders like a cloak, empty-handed and unarmed. Vicky wasn’t quite sure what statement that made, but Atyle made it very loudly.

The AGL, the pistols, the nudity, the drones, all of it was for show. Pheiri provided the real protection, from other zombies or from Shilu. One wrong move from the Necromancer, one unexplained shadow on the chamber walls, and half those big guns would burst everyone’s eardrums and turn the offender to a smear on the floor.

The low red glow of Pheiri’s external lights dyed Elpida’s hair a sticky blood-red, shading her purple eyes to black; Atyle’s naked belly and chest writhed with crimson shadows.

Vicky wondered if she looked intimidating too, dressed in armour, carrying explosives. She didn’t feel it. She felt awkward and clumsy.

Once all three were clear of the ramp, Elpida signalled back into the airlock with a raised fist. Hafina was waiting by the manual controls inside; the android was fully armed and armoured — emergency backup in case something unexpected went horribly wrong. Hafina answered with a raised fist in return.

Elpida whispered, “Vicky? Atyle? Are we good to go?”

“Of course, Commander,” Atyle whispered back. Her eyes were elsewhere, already roving across the chamber.

“All good,” Vicky hissed. “Good to go.”

Elpida spoke into the microphone of her comms headset: “Kaga, we’re clear. Pheiri, button up.”

Pheiri’s ramp rose with a mechanical hum. It sealed with a clunk-clunk-clunk of bolts, closing Pheiri and the others back inside the thick layers of metal and bulkheads and bone-white armour.

“Vicky,” Elpida said. “It’s time. Get yourself loaded.”

Vicky nodded, then crossed to one of the armoured pockets on Pheiri’s rear — a series of projecting abscesses in his armour, large enough to climb inside, each one capped by a heavy plate of bone. All but one pocket was currently empty, all of them remotely locked by Pheiri himself. Vicky had to use both hands to lift the lid, then extracted a string of sixteen slender cylindrical grenades — flashbang-EMP combination rounds, perfect for scrambling cyborgs and zombies. She replaced the pocket lid, opened the drum-mag on her launcher, and loaded the grenades. She double-checked the safety was on, then rolled her shoulders and tried to resume a casual stance.

“Ready,” she hissed.

Elpida said, “Vicky, relax.”

“Right. Yeah. ‘Course. ”

“Relax. That’s an order, soldier. Just follow my lead.”

Vicky took a deep breath and patted the AGL. “Sure. Relax. Cool as a cucumber, that’s me.”

“Remember, whatever happens, Pheiri’s got our back.”

A soft acknowledgement ping chimed in Vicky’s headset — Pheiri, agreeing. Vicky managed a smile. It was true, Pheiri had her back. She trusted the old boy more than she trusted her own nerves.

Atyle was already stepping around the right-hand corner of Pheiri’s rear armour, striding out into the chamber. Elpida glanced after her, then shot a wry look back at Vicky. “Come on, let’s not get left behind.”

Vicky followed Elpida out from behind cover. They walked beside Pheiri’s flank, trailing Atyle along the cliff of bone-white armour, staying well within the fifteen-foot radius of Pheiri’s low red external lights, pooling in a bloody puddle about his armoured skirts. Pheiri’s armour seemed the only landmark in the featureless black and shadow of the tomb chamber, studded with the bulges and knots of sponson mounts and weapon turrets. His bigger guns loomed overhead, tracking slowly back and forth across the distant walls.

Atyle waited for them at the forward corner of Pheiri’s hull, one dark hand resting on a knot of bone. Elpida and Vicky halted beside her.

The tomb chamber was a black cavern, the ceiling lost in dripping shadows, the far walls barely visible. Four passageways opened in those walls — one to the rear, through which Pheiri had entered, then one each to the left and right, and one straight ahead. The rear passageway was wide and smooth, designed for vehicle access, but the other three rapidly split and narrowed into a tangle of twisty little tunnels.

Shilu still sat thirty feet from Pheiri’s front — cross-legged, straight-backed, eyes closed in her ghostly face. Red backwash from Pheiri’s lights snagged on the sharp angles and cruel spikes of her black metal body. She was the same shade as the tomb.

Half a dozen of Kagami’s new drones hung in a rough picket line further out; running lights winked red in the dark.

Vicky tried not to shiver at the chill and the gloom; she was undead, immune to the cold, the effect was all in her head. She could see in the dark well enough, but somehow the darkness inside the tomb seemed different. It was like damp seeping upward from the black metal floor combined with tar dripping downward from a leaky roof, filling the room with a layer of tarry dark oil. The shadows and the metal amplified every footstep into a myriad of echoes, interrupting the whisper of hushed voices, all drowned out by the distant static haze-hum of hurricane hailstones and torrential rain.

Elpida and Atyle ignored all of that. They were both more experienced in combat than Vicky, more able to focus past the nerves, less twitchy and jumpy; they were both looking past Kagami’s picket line of drones, into the shadow-choked mouths of the three passageways ahead. Vicky forced herself to do the same, ignoring the sweat beneath her armpits and the churning in her belly. She could do this. She was up to this challenge. Kagami was wrong.

Dark shapes and hunched figures clustered in the passageways.

The distant backwash of Pheiri’s low red light picked out a face there, a shoulder of armour plate here, the dull glint of a rifle held in loose hands, the reflection of a pair of bionic eyes, and a hundred other details sunken in the gloom. Little oval faces peered around the corridor corners, bisected by peeking from makeshift cover. Feet stirred and fell silent against the metal floor. Occasional whispers ghosted forth, only to be swallowed by the fury of the storm.

Vicky raised her grenade launcher and looked through the sight; night vision swept aside the darkness, but revealed only a confused jumble. The passageways ahead were broken up and complex, with natural barricades and barriers built into the floors and walls, studded with nooks and crannies, pockmarked by side corridors and empty rooms.

Dozens of faces peered back at her, some naked, many masked or helmed, matched by an equal number of guns held at the ready.

Vicky lowered the launcher and swallowed hard; she couldn’t help it, her mouth was so dry. “Shit. Shit me, that’s a lot more of them than I expected. Are they still coming?”

Elpida whispered, “Hold steady. Pheiri’s got us.”

“Yeah, but why?” Vicky whispered. “Why are they here?”

Atyle chuckled. “To watch the show, perhaps?”

“Interrogation is not a show,” Elpida said. She raised two fingers to the earpiece of her headset. “Kaga, give me a headcount.”

Kagami’s snort crackled over the short-range uplink, broadcasting to all three headsets: “Too many, Commander. Too fucking many—”

“Numbers, Kaga.”

Kagami huffed; Vicky could practically see the rolling eyes. Kaga said: “Pheiri reads thirty seven revenants straight ahead, twenty in the left hand corridor, and seven in the right.”

Vicky swallowed again. She was not used to this — seeing the eyes of her opponents up close; give her an artillery park under drone attack any day, not this face-to-face over no man’s land. She kept her eyes peeled, hands on her weapon; pointless with Pheiri’s guns at the ready, but it helped her heart.

Elpida said: “Can you identify separate groups?”

Kagami huffed again. “How should I—” Then she paused and tutted. “Yes, fine. Pheiri estimates five separate groups in the corridor straight ahead. Might be six, they’re gathered close but they’re keeping their distances from each other. Left hand corridor, four groups. Right corridor … they’re all too close to tell, maybe just one group. Maybe one group and a single.”

“Are they all bottom-feeders and scavengers?” Elpida went on. “Anybody out there with powered armour, high-level cybernetics?”

Vicky whispered: “Saw plenty through the scope, yeah.”

Another voice butted in, crackling across the comms uplink with a metallic rasp — Serin: “I spy all kinds, Coh-mander. Everyone is at the watering hole, but nobody is feeding.”

Vicky glanced up and to the left, trying to see onto the front of Pheiri’s armour, where Serin was crouched in her unblinking contest with Shilu. But the black-clad zombie was tucked too deep into a whorl of Pheiri’s armour, hidden with too much skill. Vicky was glad Serin was on their side.

Elpida said: “No violence? There’s been no fighting among them? Is that correct, Serin?”

“Correct,” Serin said. “Not that I have spied.”

Vicky whispered into her headset. “Serin, have you ever seen anything like this happen before?”

“No,” Serin replied. “But then again, I have never seen a storm like this before, nor heard roaring like that voice outdoors. The fools and cannibals are shocked. Perhaps they think the world is ending.”

Atyle said brightly: “Perhaps they are right.”

Revenants had begun to appear in the passageways about thirty minutes earlier, while Vicky had been deep in conversation with Kagami and Elpida in the lab, discussing how exactly they were going to interrogate Shilu.

Vicky had wanted to postpone the interrogation until after everybody had a chance to rest. She wanted to prioritise the new arrivals — Eseld, Cyneswith, and Sky. She also wanted a chance to talk with Kagami in private; they needed to discuss what was going on with Elpida, the return of her confidence after Eseld, the renewed light in her eyes, the clarity of her command decisions. Vicky trusted Elpida’s intentions and judgement, even when clouded, but this change was sudden and sharp, after her long weeks of brooding over sins and skulls. She was back to her usual self. The Commander had pushed to carry out the interrogation right away, in case the storm should begin to pass, or the other Necromancer — Lykke — should find some other way to return. Vicky and Kagami had been on the verge of presenting a united front; they had almost convinced Elpida to at least take a nap, but then the gathering revenants had forced the issue.

Ooni had come blundering down Pheiri’s central corridor in a fright when the zombies had started showing up on Pheiri’s sensors, not knowing what to do without command direction. Up until now the other revenants who had managed to take shelter inside the tomb had avoided Pheiri completely, scurrying away in fear whenever they’d happened to spot him down one of the corridors. This change in behaviour had no explanation.

Vicky knew she shouldn’t really be out here; she should be in Pheiri’s cockpit beside Kaga, or deep in Pheiri’s guts, oiling up machinery and looking after her new home. Her place was behind the big guns, not in front of them. But Elpida had insisted the interrogation had to go ahead, especially if the revenants were gathering because of Shilu.

Others had wanted to come too — especially Ilyusha, because of the potential for a confrontation. That almost made Vicky chuckle. She liked Illy a lot, and could always rely on her to be ready for a good scrap, in exactly the way Vicky never was.

But Vicky wasn’t out here to be a grenadier, despite the weapon in her hands; this was all for show, all to shift the unwanted audience, all to strike the right tone for their little chat with Shilu.

Kagami had not approved.

As the others had been getting ready, Kagami had pulled Vicky aside and hissed in her face. Kaga had said that Vicky was an idiot and a fool. Kaga had called her a fascinating new variety of obscure Moon insults, some of them very scatological, one of them so sexual that Vicky had laughed — which had not gone down well. Kagami had told her in no uncertain terms that she was to stay put, she was to let Elpida jump the gun if she wished but Vicky was to sit her pretty little backside back down in the cockpit where Kaga could keep an eye on her, because Vicky was not cut out for this, Vicky was not to be risked so carelessly like this, and Vicky was a fucking idiot to trust the Commander’s badly impaired judgement like—

Elpida spoke into her headset again: “Pheiri, you ready?”

Vicky flinched and silently chastised herself. The argument with Kagami lay heavy on her mind, but she could not afford distraction, not while she was on duty, out here, beyond the hull.

Pheiri responded with an acknowledgement ping.

“Let them know they’re spotted,” Elpida said. “Hit the lights.”

Three narrow cones of blood-red floodlight lanced outward from atop Pheiri’s hull, blooming across the three passageway mouths in bright splashes of bloody illumination.

For a split-second many zombies were caught unaware, frozen in the sudden revelation of crimson, standing with mouths agape and weapons held loose, or pressed tight to the walls in what had been sure hiding places a moment earlier. Serin was correct — all kinds of revenants were represented among the scatter-shot audience. A clutch of predators with maws full of sharp teeth and limbs twisted into bone-spears were poised in uneasy truce right next to a squad of heavily-armoured, full-helmeted, black-clad cyborgs, bristling with shoulder-mounted weaponry and heavy guns. A group of naked bottom-feeders huddled around a low barricade, flanked on one side by a towering giant of gleaming chrome and black bionics, and on the other side by another group all wrapped in heavy rags, carrying a mixture of long blades and short pistols. Three robe-clad zombies held hands in a little ring, their eyes all pointed in one direction together, right next to a gang of fang-mouthed predators with bionic tendrils waving from their shoulders.

Then the zombies broke and fled, swarming backward in a wave; everyone scurried for deeper cover.

Vicky watched through her scope, braced for return fire, pressed to Pheiri’s armour, ready to hit the deck. Many of the opposing groups veered too close to each other as they retreated, snapping words lost in the storm-haze, brandishing weapons and waving guns, flashing insults and baring teeth; one or two even shoved and pushed each other.

But then the moment passed without conflict. The audience assumed new positions; they had not left, but only retreated as far as they had to, just beyond Pheiri’s light.

Atyle chuckled. Vicky turned a sigh of relief into exasperation. “Not gonna make it easy for us, are they?”

“Round two,” Elpida said, then spoke into her headset: “Pheiri, give me external audio for one sentence, seven words, then cut.”

An acknowledgement ping sounded in the headsets.

When Elpida spoke again, her voice was projected from Pheiri’s external loudspeakers, echoing off the dark metal walls of the tomb chamber.

“Disperse,” Elpida said, “or we will fire on you.”

The zombies in the passageways shifted and stirred, beetles and grubs squirming at the edge of Pheiri’s blood-red light. Vicky sighted down her launcher again, into the green-grey night-vision gloom.

“Doesn’t look like anybody’s moving,” she muttered.

“Kaga,” Elpida said, her voice reduced back to normal. “Do you see any takers out there?”

Kagami’s voice crackled into Vicky’s ears: “A few. Not many. Most are content to stay put.” She sounded so smugly satisfied, Vicky almost tutted; she couldn’t tell if Kagami was taking more pleasure in being right or in the opportunity to scare the shit out of Vicky. Kagami continued: “You do know, Commander, that if you don’t back up your threats, nobody’s going to believe you or take you seriously. I suggest you put our guns where your mouth has led us.”

Vicky hissed: “Kaga—”

Skeeeert-squeak!

Vicky winced. A rejection ping, for her ears only. Elpida and Atyle did not seem to have heard it. Kagami could not chew her out or insult her right now; the control cockpit was probably full, everyone watching the action on Pheiri’s screens. So a nasty little noise was the best Kagami could muster.

Elpida said: “Agreed. Pheiri, put warning shots into all three passageways, please. One round. Aim high. No casualties.”

A voice echoed down the comms link, probably over Kagami’s shoulder: “Fuck ‘em up!”

Illy, cheering; Vicky smiled.

Kagami sighed. “Commander, for a—”

An autocannon on Pheiri’s hull opened up with a trio of single shots — boom! boom! boom! — splitting the static haze of the hurricane and slamming through the shadowy innards of the tomb, tracking from left to right. On the left a corner of wall exploded into a puff of pulverised metal; dead ahead a distant crack-crack of shattering steel announced the round’s impact; on the right a deep crump-crunch indicated the round had penetrated the metal, then stopped dead on a more dense inner layer.

Revenants fled, scurrying down the corridors and vanishing into the depths of the tomb. Shouts and screams and squeals echoed back — but no gunshots.

Within seconds, the passageways stood empty.

Vicky let out a sigh of relief. “What was that all about? Seriously, what were they gathering like that for?”

Atyle said: “To witness. To witness us. To witness Pheiri. To witness the Necromancer with her wings clipped and her strings cut.”

“Food,” said Elpida.

Vicky squinted. “Eh? Sorry?”

Elpida sniffed the air. “Food, Vicky. Take a whiff.”

Serin’s voice cracked from Vicky’s headset, laughing. “Haha! The Coh-mander is correct, I believe. The stench of corpses brings many hungry mouths.”

Vicky blinked several times, then almost laughed as well. The smell of blood and meat was so heavy in the air that she’d not considered it abnormal. The kills from the gravekeeper’s chamber — Lykke’s ‘hounds’ — were attracting the zombies who wanted to eat them.

“We can address that later,” Elpida said. “Now, Shilu—”

Kagami’s voice suddenly cut in on comms: “Commander, we have some reluctant stragglers.”

Elpida said, “Explain.”

“All the others turned tail and ran away, as they should have done, but there’s still seven zombies in the right hand corridor! All seven of them!” Kagami huffed. “They haven’t even moved. Are you going to pussy-foot around with more warning shots, or are we going for a kill?”

Vicky sighted down her launcher’s scope, into the mouth of the right-hand corridor; a cluster of figures remained in the shadows beyond the crimson light, ghostly night-vision smears in Vicky’s sight. They weren’t even in cover, just standing out in the open.

“What the hell?” Vicky murmured. “They’re just standing there.”

Elpida said nothing for a long moment.

Kagami’s voice crackled down the comms uplink: “Commander! They’re clearly planning something. We have to open fire, for real, for—”

“Serin,” Elpida said. “Are any of those zombies carrying heavy weapons? Anti-tank weapons? Anything which could hurt Pheiri?”

Serin rasped: “No, Coh-mander. I can see their leader from here. Her head is in my scope.”

“They have an obvious leader?”

Serin chuckled. “She is in front and unarmed. She is leader, or bait. I can kill her now.”

“Negative, Serin,” Elpida said — with a strangely satisfied smile in her voice. “Don’t take that shot. This is a positive development. This is good.”

Serin purred a wordless question.

Vicky realised a second before Elpida answered. She spoke first: “Elpi? Elpi, were you hoping this would happen?”

Elpida took a deep breath. “Did I hope? Can’t say for sure. Did I speculate? Certainly. But I didn’t want to get anybody else’s hopes up, or cloud our purposes. This is a happy accident, for now. If I’m correct.”

Kagami snapped down the comms link: “Commander, what the hell are you talking about? Are these friends of yours?”

“Not yet.”

Vicky hissed, “Elpi?”

Atyle laughed. “The Commander has so many plans even she cannot account for them all.”

Elpida said, “All the revenants who made it into the tomb are under a general truce, brought on by shock. Nobody planned this or made it happen. The hurricane has caused a sudden outbreak of peace, that’s all. And that applies to us too.” She gestured at Shilu; Vicky couldn’t help but notice the Necromancer’s eyes were still closed. Shilu had still not moved a muscle, despite the booming noise of Pheiri’s guns. “Shilu can wait a bit,” said Elpida. “I’m going to cross the chamber and talk to that group who didn’t retreat. I want to ask why they’re not running. Atyle, Vicky, you don’t have to come with me, but—”

“I am with you, Commander,” Atyle said. “I am curious, too.”

Vicky almost laughed. “I’m not letting you go alone, Elpi. I’m—”

Kagami’s voice hissed into Vicky’s ear on a private-channel: “Victoria, do not! You think she’s gotten over her death wish so soon? Do not—”

“—with you too,” Vicky finished.

Elpida nodded. “Good. Thank you both. Atyle, stop when I stop. Vicky, safety off, present a credible threat, but don’t fire unless I do. Serin, keep eyes on their leader, but please don’t shoot. Kagami, swing those drones in behind us. Pheiri, point some more guns at them, make it clear we’re not letting our guard down.”

“Gotcha,” Vicky whispered. She disengaged the safety on her AGL, then placed her index finger in the ready position, well clear of the trigger. Up above, she heard Pheiri’s guns rotating in their turret-mounts and armour-bulges, and the distinctive iris-flicker of missile pods opening like flowers.

Elpida said: “Let me do the greetings, but speak if you want to. This is entirely speculative. I don’t know what to expect, but we have to try.”

Kagami’s voice spat over the headsets: “Try what, Commander?”

“Making friends.”

Elpida led the way across the echoing immensity of the tomb chamber, striding out in front of Pheiri, cutting between him and Shilu; Atyle trailed to her left while Vicky took up position her right. Vicky kept the AGL stock tucked tight against her shoulder, eyes scanning the passageway mouth for unexpected movement. Several of Kagami’s drones detached from the picket line and moved in behind, winking red in the black. Their footsteps echoed off into the vault of the tomb.

Shilu’s eyes opened as the trio passed by, turning her head to watch as they left the circle of Pheiri’s blood-red illumination. Vicky met her gaze for a moment, but tried not to react.

The passageway mouth loomed ahead, twice as tall as Pheiri and three times as wide; the floodlight lit only the first few feet, caught on the projecting angle of the wall. Side-passages and stairways climbed and clambered off in the deeper darkness, turning the passageway into a nightmare warren, the perfect tunnel-fighting environment, impassable to Pheiri. Vicky did not want to step down there on foot, not even inside a suit of powered armour, not for all the nanomachines in the world. Her heart caught in her throat just peering into those tangled shadows.

Elpida stopped a good twenty feet short of the passageway. She planted her boots wide, raised her chin high, and hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her trousers, framing the pair of pistols already on display. Vicky would have rolled her eyes, but she understood the purpose of the show.

Atyle stopped at Elpida’s side, peering into the dark with her bionic eye. Vicky pulled up short, ready to raise her grenade launcher, feeling clumsy in her heavy body armour.

A cluster of seven figures lurked just beyond the boundary of Pheiri’s bloody light; the closest one, up front — the leader? — was short and oddly shaped, her outline flaring wide. Behind her stood the hard angles of two zombies in heavy armour, their weapons a matte threat in the dark, one of them with greenly glinting eyes set deep in a solid helmet. Behind them was a trio of smaller figures that Vicky couldn’t quite make out, not without pointing her AGL at them, and she did not want to do that so close, where she might present a direct threat.

Attached halfway up the right-hand wall was a mass of ropey tentacles and loops of tarry black mucus, hanging over the short one in front. A face peered out of that mucus-mass on a stalk-like neck, blinking eyes too large to be human.

Elpida raised her voice, and said, “Why didn’t you retreat?”

The short one stepped forward alone, into Pheiri’s blood-red light.

She was petite and compact, perhaps only a teenager in life; a heart-shaped face was so pale her skin was almost translucent, with a stark tracery of blue veins beneath the surface, framed by a messy mass of dark red hair — probably darker beneath Pheiri’s lights. She wore a patchwork dress in tomb-grown grey, once an armoured coat, now modified and sewn back together from scraps and offcuts. She was covered from chin to knees, throat cupped by dark fabric, leaving only a pair of heavy boots exposed beneath the ragged hem of her dress.

She sported sixteen arms. Some of them clustered together on her shoulders, making the bones bulky and lumpy where they attached, while others sprouted from her flanks as if fixed directly to her rib-cage. Every arm was sleeved inside her modified dress, with each hand either gloved in black and grey or tucked away inside the sleeve. She showed no skin but her face.

Vicky quickly scanned the girl for the tell-tale grinning skull of the Death’s Heads, just in case, but she saw no symbol or sign of any kind.

Plush lips curled into a knowing smile, beneath a pair of eyes without iris or whites, just blank orbs of unbroken black.

“Why run from warning shots?” said the many-armed revenant.

Elpida nodded slowly, lips barely moving; Vicky heard her orders over the headset: “Kaga, talk to me. What am I looking at?”

Kagami’s voice murmured a reply. “Regular zombie, expected nanomachine density. Lots of internal bionics. She has a couple of guns tucked away inside that ridiculous dress. And an axe? An axe, yes. Nothing special. She’s clean — ha! As much as any of us undead can be ‘clean’.”

Elpida said out loud: “Are you the leader of this group?”

The many-armed revenant shrugged with half her arms — an undulating motion of too many bones in her shoulders. “Guess I am.”

Elpida smiled. “What’s your name?”

The many-armed girl raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you supposed to, like, give your own first before asking for another?”

“Elpida,” said Elpida, then gestured. “Vicky, Atyle.”

“There’s more than three of you.”

“Correct.” Elpida thumbed over her shoulder. “He’s called Pheiri.”

The many-armed girl’s eyes flew wide in surprise. “He?”

“That’s right.”

The girl gestured at Shilu. “And her?”

“She’s none of your concern,” Elpida said.

The girl smiled, showing too many teeth, then giggled — a little scratchy, but not inhuman. Her many arms and hands all gestured at once, some shrugging, others wiggling gloved fingers, one pointing at Elpida, another two indicating herself.

“Puk,” she said. “That’s me.”

“Hello, Puk.” Elpida nodded. “And what about your friends?”

Puk smiled and laughed. “They’re all too shy. Sorry!”

The other zombies behind Puk shifted in the shadows. Vicky twitched her grenade launcher, but held her nerve; she needed to stay steady.

Suddenly the black mass of ropey tentacles attached to the wall jerked downward, as if she’d let go of her perch, sliding down the wall. Two mucus-dripping tendrils dipped into the red light, sheltering Puk.

“ … n-no,” the wall-climber gurgled, her voice high-pitched and girlish. “You! With the grenades! No! No!”

Elpida gestured low and easy. “Vicky, barrel down.”

“It is down,” Vicky hissed. “I didn’t even take aim.”

Atyle let out a gasp of wonder and delight, staring upward at the blob of black goop stuck to the wall. “Oh. Oh, you are quite beautiful, little one. What is your name?”

The mass of ropey tentacles withdrew slightly, waving her head-on-a-stalk as if confused.

Puk spoke upward without looking away from Elpida: “It’s alright, Tati. We’re all being friendly here. Aren’t we, Elpida? Tati’s a bit nervous about my safety, that’s all.”

Elpida said: “That’s very sensible. We won’t open fire if you don’t.”

Puk spread her many arms. “Bit late for that, isn’t it? You already did.”

“Warning shots,” Vicky said. “You didn’t take the warning.”

Up on the wall, Tati gurgled again: “Piss off!”

Puk smiled. “Tati, dear sweet. Let’s us just talk, ‘kay?”

Tati fell silent, pressing closer to the wall, withdrawing her dripping black feelers. The other revenants in the dark exchanged a few whispers.

Elpida said, “Those arms, are those all you? Did you grow them all?”

Puk giggled and put a finger to her lips, then winked as if on stage. “Oh, you know, it’s easier to steal than sow — so you can ‘sew’ yourself together. Haha!”

Vicky swallowed. “You stole all those arms? From other revenants?”

Puk shrugged. “I’ll leave that to your imagination.”

Elpida said, “Let’s not get lost in the weeds. I’m going to ask my question again, and I’d like a proper answer, or we’ll just turn around and return to what we were doing before. Why didn’t you run from us? Why didn’t you run from Pheiri? How can you be so sure we won’t kill you and eat you?”

“Mmmmm,” Puk hummed. “This is unusual, isn’t it? For me, too!”

“Very,” said Elpida. “A truce. Why?”

“Everyone’s spooked. Scared shitless. The storm, and that roaring noise! Nothing like an external foe to unite the squabblers, right?”

Elpida shook her head. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

Puk paused. Vicky found it very difficult to tell where the girl was looking, without any whites to her eyes. It was like talking to Atyle but a hundred percent worse, with both eyes an enigma rather than just one.

A gentle whisper came from behind Puk, from one of her companions. The ropey girl hanging off the wall said something as well, soft and gloopy and wet, which Vicky couldn’t make out.

Puk licked her lips, then said: “We didn’t run from you, because we’ve seen you around before.”

“What do you mean?” said Elpida.

Puk shrugged again. “Everyone’s seen you around. Your tank, I mean. Pheiri? You don’t prey very often, or at least not openly. You don’t go off shooting unless somebody tries it on with you first. You don’t make a habit of chasing down kills. So, you’re probably safe to approach.” She spread her many arms and opened her gloved palms. “Empty handed, of course.”

Vicky snorted. “Why? What for? Why would you risk it?”

Puk smiled, sniffed the air, and made a noise of anticipation. “Meat, of course.”

Vicky grunted. Atyle nodded. Elpida said, “Everyone can smell it, right. And that’s why you’re here?”

“You’ve got so much of it just piled up over there, all going to waste.” Puk dipped her head, pinched the hem of her patchwork dress, and sketched a half-decent curtsy, smirking as she did. “Spare a corpse or two for a poor little orphan girl and her friends, madams and misses?”

Elpida opened her mouth to answer — but before she could get a word out, Kagami’s voice cut in over the comms uplink.

“Commander! No!” Kagami snapped. “Absolutely do not agree to that! No, no, no! You give out one corpse to one group and then the next thing we know we’ve got hundreds of them battering down Pheiri’s doors, crying out for more meat! We cannot start giving it out. Commander? Elpida? Answer me, say something! Vicky, Vicky, back me up. We cannot start giving—”

Another voice interrupted Kagami, from somewhere back in the cockpit. Pira, exasperated: “Kagami, stop, please.”

“And you can shut up!” Kagami’s voice whirled away from the microphone. “As if you have any right to—”

Elpida said: “Pheiri, sound off, please.”

The voices cut out.

Puk — who had been waiting so patiently — said: “That was somebody back inside your Pheiri, wasn’t it? Probably telling you that you shouldn’t start giving out charity, or else everybody will be wanting some. Well, I’m not going to argue with that.”

“You’re not?” Elpida said.

“Mmhmm!” Puk smiled. “That is exactly what will happen, yes. And I think you should do it anyway. I think you should give it out. All of it.”

Vicky snorted. “To you, right?”

Puk shook her head. “No. To everyone.”

Elpida held up a hand to forestall another comment from Vicky. She said to Puk: “Why do you care if we share with other zombies or not?”

Puk sighed wistfully, eyes going up and away, twisting one foot in a girlish gesture. “Weeeeeell. There are somewhere between two to three hundred zombies stuck in this tomb right now. More than three hundreds, actually, I thinks. All of us, packed into a very small space. Everyone who didn’t run when that storm started up. All tense and tight, shoulder to shoulder in here. Noooooot good. Not good. War will break out sooner or later. All these tunnels, these close conditions. Nowhere to run. It’s going to be very, very bad when everyone stops feeling so scared and confused.”

“I agree,” Elpida said. “But that’s not an answer. Why do you care?”

Puk burst into a peal of giggles. She raised her arms, toward the ceiling, toward the storm. “Because the world is going mad. Do your ears work? Hurricanes, giants, where do I begin? The rules are rapidly flying out of the windows. Not that I’d want to fly, in this storm.”

Elpida nodded. “You think a supply of meat can extend this ad hoc truce?”

Puk lowered her arms and shrugged. “I don’t know. I think this weird little peace can hold a little longer, maybe. If we’re lucky, and if you’re clever. And if it holds long enough … maybe we can make it ‘till the storm passes, hey?”

Elpida said, “Alright. And what’s it in for us?”

Vicky hissed, “Elpi?” But Elpida just flicked her fingers — go along with it for now.

Puk shrugged again. “I don’t know. What’s in it for you?”

Elpida smiled. “Changing the world.”

Puk snorted. “World’s already changing. Weird things have been happening all over ever since your Pheiri turned up, you know? That thing fell from the sky a while back. Those huge monsters turned up, that big gold diamond, then the ball. And now this storm, and that thing roaring outdoors earlier on. Is this all your fault, Elpida? You changing the world around us?”

“Not yet,” Elpida said. “Not like that.”

“Well, good luck. But me and mine, we’re just interested in lasting through the storm. Are you going to spare a corpse, or not?”

Kagami’s voice broke back in over the comms; she was calm now — calm and cold. “Commander, she is just trying to score a meal off us. She doesn’t share your vision and she’s not going to be convinced by a mouthful of meat.”

Vicky hissed, “Kaga, shut up.”

Elpida spoke out loud, eyes locked with Puk. “Maybe not. But she’s also not wrong. Puk, we have a favour to ask in return.”

“Mm?”

“Keep the peace, if you can. If there’s a truce, hold to it. Tell the others we’re sharing our meat. But only with those who don’t break the truce.”

Kagami sighed down the comms link, beyond exasperated.

Puk curtseyed again. “No promises! ‘Truce’ is a bit much, this is all unspoken. But we can spread a word or two. Allllllso,” Puk added, almost shy. “There’s a blob monster upstairs. We know she’s with you, everyone knows that. Can you keep her from eating her way through everyone in the tomb?”

“Iriko?” Vicky muttered.

“Yeah,” Elpida said. Then to Puk: “We’ll try. She needs feeding too. Some of these bodies are earmarked for her.”

“Fair dos!” said Puk.

“Wait there a second.” Elpida raised two fingers to her headset, and said: “Pheiri, put me through to Hafina and get ready to lower the rear ramp. Haf? Haf, I want you to come out, head down the ramp, and grab a corpse from Lykke’s soldiers. Pick one we haven’t stripped of meat, but don’t leave any weapons on the body. Then bring it over here. Thanks.”

A moment later, Vicky heard the distinctive whirr of Pheiri’s rear ramp opening wide.

Puk smiled, twirling the hem of her dress back and forth where she stood. Elpida just stared at her, waiting for Hafina to arrive. Vicky took deep, slow, steady breaths, flexing her hands around her grenade launcher, trying not to stare at the dripping mass of ‘Tati’ stuck halfway up the wall. Tati stared at her regardless, massive eyeballs glowing faintly in the dark. Puk’s other companions stayed very still.

After what felt like several long minutes, Hafina’s massive armoured form stalked out of the darkness on Vicky’s right, flanked by a trio of Kagami’s larger drones. She was carrying a big corpse in four of her arms, stripped out of armour, wearing only grey clothes.

Puk lit up with a smile. “Thank you kindly, kind ma’am.”

Elpida put out one hand, indicating Hafina should halt. “Wait a moment, Haf,” she said. “One more thing, Puk, before we hand over the meat.”

“Ahhh?” Puk puckered her lips. “A catch? Oh dear. Really?”

“Not a catch, just a question. Are there any Death’s Heads in the tomb? Any of them make it in here before the storm hit?”

Puk’s expression went sober; her companions stirred behind her, swapping whispers. Up on the wall, Tati let out a messy gurgle.

“Yeah,” said Puk. “A few. I think. Maybe. Who knows for sure?”

“Where?”

Puk giggled and shook her head. “Sweetheart, I’m not about to go looking for them, not for all the meat you’ve got laid out over there. You can truce with some, and this one’s holding like nothing I’ve done before, but with them? Nuh uh. If anybody breaks this first, it’ll be them, with a knife in somebody’s back.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

What tales of the undead are unfolding even now, out there in the storm-wrapped darkness of this temporary sepulchral refuge? Too many for Elpida to save single handed, too many to feed even with all that meat. But maybe she can make a dent, and keep the peace; or perhaps she’s just too hopeful, and it all ends in blood and teeth, like always.

Amazing how Kagami and Victoria managed to keep bickering even over the comms, right? I didn’t actually plan that, they just … kept going!

As for Puk and Tati, perhaps we’ll be seeing these two again soon enough. As long as they don’t run into any Death’s Heads. We haven’t heard from Cantrelle in a while; wonder if she made it into the tomb?

No Patreon link this week, as this is the last chapter of the month, and I never like to risk double-charging new Patrons! I am going to be switching to the other billing method soon (it’s being forced on us, boo), so this might be the last time I have to exclude the link, but for now, if you were just about to subscribe, feel free to wait until the 1st of September!

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

And thank you for reading Necroepilogos, dear readers! I couldn’t do this without all of you, there would be no story, no zombies, no tomb, without all of you reading along! Thank you so much for being here! Next week, the darkness of the tomb yawns wider, and even Pheiri is a very small lad compared to this immensity. What’s hiding in the nooks and crannies of grave dirt and rotten flowers?

Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

Vague reference to sexual coercion.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

When Victoria stepped into the lab, she found Elpida and Kagami waiting in uncomfortable silence, wrapped in static storm-haze from beyond the tomb.

Kagami’s laboratory occupied the compartment which contained Pheiri’s ART charging cradles — a long, cramped, tight space, accessed via a sturdy steel hatch off the left-hand side of the spinal corridor.

When they’d first converted the compartment for the scientific and engineering needs of the meat-plant project, Elpida had referred to it as Pheiri’s very own ‘buried fields’, in comparison with her long-lost Telokopolis. Atyle and Serin had both taken to calling it ‘the greenhouse’; that name had caught on with Amina, Ilyusha, and Ooni, but only until the failure of Kagami’s first few nano-engineered meat seeds, the ones which had to be thrown out and burned. Vicky didn’t like to think too much about those, the way they had twitched and spasmed as if trying to scream, and their awful rotten-egg reek. Ilyusha had started calling it the ‘shit pit’ after that, which worried Vicky. It wasn’t Kagami’s fault the nanomachines were so difficult to work with. Kaga was performing miracles in that little room — a combination of biology, physics, botany, and nano-engineering, which had probably never been attempted before, at least not by anything smaller than some god-like room-sized AI-brain.

Vicky had insisted on calling it just ‘the lab’, never ‘Kagami’s lab’. She was determined not to let Kaga treat it as her private domain and private responsibility. There was too much risk of Kaga retreating inside, barring the door, and refusing to ever come out again.

Eventually the name had stuck, especially once the project had started to work.

Five of the six ART charging cradles — the person-sized android self-repair and recharge stations — were laid down on their sides to form a workbench against the rear wall. Elpida and Vicky had checked with Melyn and Hafina before disconnecting the cradles; would the Artificial Humans ever need these again? Hafina had said a simple ‘no thanks’, then refused to elaborate; Melyn had disliked the question so much that she’d dropped into a non-verbal state for the following twelve hours. Consulting Pheiri had confirmed Victoria’s deduction; Melyn and Hafina had long since left behind any need for the charging cradles, except in extreme emergencies. They would be fine as long as they kept eating and drinking from Pheiri’s on-board manufactories. Elpida had eventually elected to keep just one of the charging cradles in the upright position, wired into Pheiri’s systems, ready to go, just in case Haf or Mel ever got seriously wounded.

A long flat sheet of metal scavenged from the city served as a work surface, laid across the top of the cradles. Two seats had been commandeered from Pheiri’s spinal corridor; one sat before the makeshift workbench, stuffed with spare blankets — Kaga’s comfy throne. The other stood near the lab’s entrance, skeletal metal with some remnants of foam still clinging to the bones.

At the far end of the compartment was a little nest of bedsheets; Vicky knew from experience that Kagami sometimes slept here when she wanted to be alone, or when she couldn’t be bothered to walk back to the bunk room. The nest currently cradled a pair of matte black drones, each about the size of Vicky’s forearm — two of Kagami’s new acquisitions from the armoury.

One end of the workbench was cluttered with Kagami’s equipment and instruments: a powerful microscope; a set of containers full of various murky liquids and assorted sludges; a single glass cannister which contained less than one mouthful of precious raw blue nanomachines — inert now, allowed to quieten and die as a sacrifice to the scientific process; and a whole mess of circuit boards and exposed wiring, hooked up to tiny screens, dials, and switches. Beyond that lay the more esoteric machines, built by Kagami herself from the cannibalised innards of one of the ART charging cradles — an ‘electro-stimulation nerve-jack’ which just looked like a cattle prod, a ‘bio-res flesh-inhibitor’ like an inverted cup made of mirrors, and a weird set of metal prongs which was apparently called a ‘growth-provoking pulse delivery system’.

Three meat-plants occupied the rest of the workbench, dominating the space, growing from sloppy grey soil in big shiny steel basins.

The soil had been scraped from between cracks in the city streets, then mixed with almost a full pint of blood — mostly Elpida’s donation, though everyone else had given a little of themselves to the project, even Serin. According to Kagami the soil was merely a ‘nano-stabilising medium’, not the source of the meat-plants’ growth; that was provided partly by the electrodes and probes sunk into the soil and hooked into Pheiri’s power supply — a poor substitute for photosynthesis, apparently. But the primary engine of growth was the internal nature of the seeds themselves.

Kagami had tried to explain this to Vicky, once, but she had quickly descended into technical jargon far beyond Vicky’s comprehension — ‘proton self-stimulation’, ‘nanomachine nucleo-germination’, ‘matter translation via quantum foam impression reproduction’.

The bottom line, boiled down so that any old artillery officer or Medieval peasant or ‘paleo’ primitive could understand, was that Kagami had figured out how to make the nanomachines copy themselves. This process was slow, awkward, and prone to awful fail-state mutations — not to mention incredibly primitive and disgustingly messy and beneath even the lowliest of Luna’s technology. In a non-nanomachine biosphere this would risk the worst kind of ecological destruction, a true grey-goo scenario, the eradication of all biological life, and so on and so on and so on, as everybody had heard a dozen times over, whenever Kagami got started on the topic. Good thing the biosphere was dead already and the world had filled up with zombies. No danger playing with the ashes when there was nothing left to burn.

The meat-plants were miracles, little hijacked pieces of the nanomachine ecosystem itself.

If Elpida was even half-right about the purpose of this whole nightmare afterlife, then these meat-plants were revolutionary praxis. Sustenance without predation. Food for all, given enough time and further success.

Vicky always tried to keep that in mind whenever she stepped into the lab, because the plants themselves gave her the creeps.

They’d been alright when they were little nubs of crimson flesh nestled in craters of grey soil, and they were much better than the failures which had twitched and shivered and stank like rotten eggs, but as they’d grown they had looked more and more like what they really were — living meat.

Each plant was almost three feet tall now, supported by a tracery of vein-like roots throbbing and pulsing under the grey soil. Each ‘trunk’ was a thick wedge of skinless muscle, glistening in garnet and crimson, forever weeping a pinkish froth which moistened the soil beneath. Fronds and frills sprouted from the trunk at mathematically precise intervals, like fern-leaves crossed with the inside of a healthy human lung, always shivering gently, though there was no air-flow in the lab. Each leaf was coated in a thick layer of viscous mucus, collecting at the tips of the ferns and dripping onto the soil like tar. The lowest of the ‘leaves’ were a good foot wide now, growing gravid with heavy buds on their undersides. The buds were identical to the seeds from which the plants had grown, the seeds Kagami had engineered from raw blue and fresh blood and electricity.

Fruit — to be planted or eaten. But not yet ripe. The project had weeks or months to go.

Kagami was currently sprawled in her comfy throne. Her six silver-grey drones lay on the workbench next to her. As Vicky entered and straightened up, Kagami looked at her with a pinched and offended frown. No improvement since she’d left Victoria behind in the control cockpit.

Elpida was examining the meat-plants, her back toward the door.

Kagami spoke before Vicky could open her mouth, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Well done, Victoria. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now, shut the door and sit down, don’t just stand there glaring. What are you waiting for? A doggy treat and a pat on the head? Want me to call you ‘good girl’ again? Huh!”

Victoria returned a silent stare.

The fury of the hurricane filled the air, wind whipping around the distant corners of the tomb.

In the corner of Victoria’s eye she saw Elpida turn away from the plants, but Elpi was smart enough not to intervene.

Kagami spread her hands. “What? For fuck’s sake Victoria, what now?”

Vicky spoke slowly and carefully. “You can get away with one little ‘woof woof’ at me. I’ll let that slide. Maybe I even deserved it. But if you keep talking to me like that, I’m off.” She thumbed over her shoulder, at the open hatch. “I’ve got plenty to be getting on with. Sorting all our new equipment, checking on the newbies, or just, fuck it, jilling myself off in my bunk. You’re not my commanding officer and this isn’t my old regiment. If you want to mess with me, Kaga, you’re gonna have to throw hands. And I guarantee I will make you bark first.”

Kagami’s face exploded with incandescent blush. Her jaw shivered, then clamped shut. She looked away.

“Drop the dog jokes,” Vicky finished. “Thanks.”

Storm-tossed hailstone-haze and howling wind filled the silence.

Elpida cleared her throat. “Vicky, good morning. Good to see you.”

“Elpi, hey. Is it really morning already?”

“Technically.”

Elpida smiled, a little wry; her purple eyes showed no sign of fatigue. She had stripped out of her coat and trousers, leaving her long brown legs exposed, barefoot and unarmed in only underwear and a skintight tomb-grey t-shirt. Her right forearm was bandaged over the deep bite wound she’d taken from Eseld. Her long white hair hung loose, swept to one side.

She looked — good, Vicky realised. Too good. The brooding cobwebs of the last few weeks had been swept away without a trace.

Elpida took a step forward and clapped a hand on Vicky’s shoulder. Victoria felt herself stand up a little straighter, breathe a little easier, think a little clearer.

“How are you holding up, Vicky?”

“I’m good, thank you, Commander.” She bit back a return question — and you?

Elpida raised her eyebrows. “Really? Are you sure about that?”

Vicky hesitated. “Uh … ”

“Between the hurricane, our current position, and the encounter with the Necromancers, morale is weird. Not bad, exactly. We did win, after all. Bellies are full, bullets are plentiful, we’re all safe. Just … weird. I can tell, it’s in everyone’s eyes. Yours too. So, Vicky, I’ll ask again. How are you holding up?”

Vicky puffed out a big sigh. “Rattled, I guess. This is weird, yeah, you’re right about that. And Shilu is giving me the creeps. I think she’s giving everyone the creeps, just waiting out there like that. We should hunker down and prep, I think I’d be more comfortable if we focused on that. Pheiri needs maintenance. We’ve got lots to stow. That kinda thing. We should talk about stuff too, Commander. Important stuff, I mean.”

Elpida nodded. “I agree. And how about physically? You alright?”

Vicky laughed. “I’m good. Maybe a little tired. But hey, it’s not like I was doing much.”

“Don’t minimise your contributions,” Elpida said. “Thank you, for running mission control here in Pheiri. It’s very important.”

“You’re welcome. And thanks, Elpi.”

“And how’s my little brother himself doing? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Pheiri’s fine, everything’s normal. I left Ooni up in the cockpit for now, keeping an eye on the screens. She knows to watch Shilu carefully, I reminded her of that.”

“Good job, Vicky, thank you. And Shilu still hasn’t moved?” Vicky nodded. Elpida let out a curious ‘mm’ sound, then stepped back. “Well, like Kagami said, go ahead and shut the door, please.”

Vicky hesitated. “What is this all about?”

Elpida’s expression was suddenly unreadable. “Shut the door, please. This needs to be private.”

Victoria did as she was asked, but her heart skipped a beat. Kagami was eyeing her with bitter embarrassment and smouldering recrimination — worse than usual, like something terrible had happened. Elpida was unreadable, professional, back in command, with all the rough edges of the last few weeks suddenly filed off and folded away. Had her encounter with Eseld really fixed her that quickly?

The distant roaring of the storm filled the compartment, muffled beyond so many layers of dark metal and shadowy void.

Had Kaga and Elpi — with each other?

Upstairs, in the dark, during their expedition? No, no, there was no way! Kagami wouldn’t have the guts, and Elpida knew that Vicky and Kaga had a thing going on. Elpida wouldn’t, she wouldn’t — but then again, Elpida and her cadre back in life, they’d all been one giant happy polycule together, hadn’t they? To Elpida, physical intimacy was just another interpersonal tool. She was used to being close to her comrades — skin-close, casual sex close. Right? Kagami had mentioned ‘betrayal’, but not Vicky’s betrayal, whatever that had meant. Vicky had chalked it up to Kagami’s usual spleen, but had Kagami meant her own betrayal? Had she — with Elpi?

Was this Elpida’s way of trying to mend the rift between them? Or of shoring up herself, her own psyche?

No, no, this was all wrong! This wasn’t what Victoria wanted at all! She was treating Kaga gently, giving her time and space and—

Kagami snorted. “I can’t believe you brought that bloody talisman with you.”

“A-ah?” Vicky blinked. “Sorry, what?”

“That!” Kagami jabbed a finger at Victoria’s automatic grenade launcher, strapped over her shoulder with the weapon’s heavy sling. “I don’t know why you’re carrying it around. You’re not likely to encounter an occupied enemy trench in here, are you?”

“Uh … yeah, I just— I didn’t want to leave it with Ooni.”

“Ha!” Kagami laughed. “I thought you trusted the little ex-fash goblin.”

“I do!” Vicky sighed. “Kaga, don’t make this any more difficult than it already— I mean— I mean, yes, of course I trust her. Trust had nothing to do with it. I just don’t want her to fiddle with the components.”

Elpida said: “That’s from the tomb armoury?”

“Yeah,” Vicky said, turning to show the weapon. “AGL. Automatic grenade launcher.”

“Very nice. And you’re familiarising yourself with it?”

Victoria nodded. “Stripping and checking the parts. If I’m gonna use it, I don’t want any risk of a jam. And don’t worry, it’s not loaded.”

“I know,” said Elpida. “I’m not worried.”

Vicky tried to swallow her own heart. “Seriously, what’s all this about? Don’t keep me on the edge of my seat here, you know? Heh … ”

Elpida leaned back against the workbench, stretching out her bare legs. Her white hair was framed by the shivering blood-red fronds of the meat-plants. She crossed her arms, raised her chin, and said: “Are you ready, Kaga?”

Kagami huffed, rolled her eyes, and looked away.

Victoria’s pulse pounded in her ears. She wasn’t ready for this either. Was Kaga embarrassed, or upset? Had Elpida coaxed Kagami into something she hadn’t really wanted? Had she used Kagami’s needs to feed something within herself? Was that why she seemed so much better, so much more present? Or — no, no, Victoria told herself that was madness. Elpida had been deeply affected by the fight with Lykke, surely, or by Eseld’s recovery, not — not secret things with Kagami.

Victoria felt out of her depth. She couldn’t read this situation, the whole thing felt wrong.

She blurted out: “Is this really the time for this kind of conversation?”

Elpida raised her eyebrows. “Why’s that?”

“I mean … we’ve got so much to do. All the new weapons and equipment still needs sorting and stowing. All those corpses out there need stripping, for parts, and— and meat, of course, right. We need to make sure the newbies are okay. Eseld is barely there. Sky’s out cold. We need to be working on a plan, to either get out of here or weather the storm. Isn’t Kaga supposed to be figuring out how to plug herself into the tomb? And— and somebody has to interrogate Shilu. And … uh … ”

“This is all part of that,” Elpida said. She glanced at Kagami. “Did you tell her—”

“Nothing!” Kagami snapped. “Nothing!”

Victoria took a step back. Her ankles bumped the hatch. “I … just … uh, if you two … um, I don’t want to—”

Don’t want to know?

Don’t want to get in your way?

Yes, that was it. Victoria decided that was best, even though it made her feel sick. She didn’t want to get in their way.

She should have expected this, after all. Elpida — so tall and strong, confident and commanding, experienced and worldly; she was always going to open Kagami first, get her comfortable, crack that spiky shell. Victoria hadn’t failed, she’d just not moved fast enough; and how could she ever have hoped to? Elpida was a super soldier from the future, bred for this, one of a pack who bonded with sex and intimacy and comradeship beyond anything Victoria had known in life. Or perhaps Vicky had misunderstood the situation in the first place? Maybe she wasn’t what Kagami needed at all. Maybe she’d gotten it wrong from the start. Maybe she should have kept to herself, kept out of the way, kept her disgusting thoughts in private. Vicky wanted to melt away, go back to her maintenance work on Pheiri’s innards, hang out with the others, and leave these two to whatever intimacy they’d discovered. Step back, let them have it, get out of the way, pretend she never wanted it in the first place and—

“Victoria?” Elpida said, frowning softly. The meat-plants shivered and throbbed either side of her head. “Relax. Nothing is wrong. You’re here because Kagami trusts you more than anybody else. That’s why we wanted to talk to you first.”

“Y-yeah,” Vicky said. “I-I respect that, but—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Kagami snapped, blazing bright red in both cheeks. “This is pathetic! Victoria, whatever sordid little fantasy has entered your primitive head, stop it! Stop thinking it!”

Victoria gaped at Kagami. “Wh-what—”

“Ha!” Elpida suddenly barked — no longer Elpida. Kaga and Vicky both flinched.

“Hahahahaa!” Howl cackled at some private joke, wide-eyed and grinning in a way Elpida never would. “You two! You two, holy fuckin’ shit, girls! You — Vickyyyyyy, come on, you thought Kaga and Elps had done the nasty, out there on the fuckin’ ground? Ha!” Another bark. “You two really need to fuck before you end up killing each other!”

“What?!” Vicky spluttered. “I didn’t—”

“Shut up!” Kagami snapped. “Shut up, shut—”

“Stop!” Elpida said, with Howl packaged back away behind her face. “Both of you, stop.”

Kagami clamped her mouth shut, fuming in silence. Victoria stood to attention; she felt the knot in her throat slowly give way. Her worst fears — ones she had not even considered fears until a few minutes ago — faded away.

“Commander,” she said.

Elpida waited a moment, then said: “I’ve half a mind to lock you two in here together until you work this out. With or without Howl’s specific suggestion.”

Kagami hissed: “Absolutely not—”

Elpida raised her voice. “But unfortunately I need both of you on point for this next move.”

“What move?” Vicky asked.

Elpida said: “Vicky, more often than not, you are functionally my second in command. That’s why I’m bringing you in on this as quickly as I can. I didn’t realise you felt any jealousy towards me. I hope you know there’s no cause for that.”

“I- yeah! Yeah, of course. Fuck, Elpi, I’m sorry. I just— my mind was running away with me. Sorry.”

“Apology accepted, but also there was no need for it.”

“Ha!” Kagami laughed. “Did you know that I’m both cynical and paranoid? Did you know that, Victoria? Apparently ‘suspicious’, too. What wonderful qualities I have!”

“What?”

Elpida sighed. “Kaga, that was nothing but a compliment. You have skills that I lack. And you’ve proved it.”

“But you, Vicky?” Kagami went on, ignoring Elpida. “Oh no, you’re so pure-hearted that it was just a little lapse of judgement, instantly forgiven. How lucky for you, you—”

“Kagami,” Elpida snapped. “Just switch on the privacy field so we can talk properly.”

“Fine, fine!”

Kagami flicked her left hand. Her six silver-grey drones rose from the workbench and floated outward — four to the corners of the floor, and the final two upward to the far ends of the ceiling, to form a hollow prism which filled the room. A crackle of soft static tickled Vicky’s ears. The iron tang of blood touched her tongue, quickly swallowed. The fury of the distant storm faded behind invisible electromagnetic walls.

“Thank you,” said Elpida. “You’re certain this works, inside Pheiri?”

“Absolutely,” Kagami snapped. “I tested it earlier. Our bodies are currently isolated from the nanomachine network. Nobody can listen, not even Pheiri. And yes, before you bleat about it, I have warned him. He knows what we’re up to.”

“Good,” Elpida said. “Now, Vicky, we’ve figured something out. Or, to give credit where credit is due, Kagami figured it out. All I did was ask the right questions. She’s the one with the relevant experience and skills. We want to bring you in on this, quietly.”

Vicky laughed. “Fuck me, Commander. You two couldn’t have been more cloak and dagger about this if you ambushed me in the dark. Isn’t this all a bit, I dunno, over the top?”

Elpida grinned — Howl, grinning through her. “S’what I said.”

Vicky said, “Why go to these lengths? What’s going on?”

Elpida blinked; Howl was gone again. “Kaga, this is your operation.”

Kagami sat up straighter in her chair. She raised her chin. Narrowed her eyes. “Victoria. All this was entirely necessary, yes. Why? Because there is a traitor among us.”

The crackle of the privacy field hummed in the air, almost inaudible beneath the distant howl of the storm. The meat-plants shivered and throbbed. Elpida took a deep breath, then sighed.

Vicky cleared her throat. “Okay? What, so, like back when you figured Pira for a traitor before the rest of us did?”

“And I was right about her!”

“Yeah, of course you were, fine.” Vicky sighed. “I wasn’t challenging that, I was agreeing with you. What’s happened now? Who is it?”

Kagami hesitated. “It’s … complicated.”

Vicky tried not to laugh “Yeah, I bet.”

Elpida said, “May I make a suggestion?”

Kagami huffed. “Yes, yes, fine.”

“Start the same way you did with me. Start with the storm. You convinced me, and Illy, and Atyle. You can convince Vicky, too.” Kagami kept her eyes averted, so Elpida carried on, now to Vicky: “I was having trouble figuring out our next moves. The storm, our new arrivals, Shilu, all of it wasn’t sitting right with me. Shilu is the obvious part, but she’s too obvious. I could get that far, but I struggled with the next step. I don’t have the skills for this kind of intrigue. Kagami does, so I turned to her, and she put the pieces together faster than I could.”

“Fine!” Kagami snapped. “Fine, I’ll do it, just … stop that, Commander. Stop treating me like I’m your court spymaster.”

Elpida shut her mouth; a smile lingered.

Kagami turned an insulted gaze on Vicky. “Are you going to sit down, Victoria? Or are you going to make me talk at you while you stand there cradling your grenade launcher?”

Vicky took the other seat and laid her AGL across her knees. “Alright, okay. Go ahead, Kaga. I’m all ears.”

Kagami took a deep breath. She closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, she wore a clear expression beneath a focused frown, framed either side by the messy dark of her hair. Victoria struggled not to smile; she found Kagami in her element very attractive.

“This hurricane makes no sense,” Kagami began. “And I don’t mean the mechanical properties, though those are absurd enough. This cannot possibly be a natural phenomenon. Hurricanes do not sustain themselves hundreds or thousands of miles inland, certainly not without seas from which to draw water, and not at nine hundred miles an hour. They also don’t pause overhead for hours on end, let alone for days or weeks, and yes, I strongly suspect this storm will last for weeks. There is no reason for the nanomachines to do this, no informational content or ecosystem direction within the storm itself. Atyle’s observations back that up, though I’m loathe to interpret her ramblings as data.” Kagami snorted. “Pira, Ooni, Serin, Ilyusha, they’ve all been around before, and none of them have seen anything like this. Pheiri has no records of hurricanes either, and he’s been around long enough to know. This is not chance, or process, or regular occurrence. Something is doing this, on purpose.”

Vicky nodded along. “It’s artificial, right. I get that much.”

Kagami jerked up a hand; she did not want interruptions. “It’s artificial, yes. Summoned via the network. But — and I want you to think about this question — who sent it?”

Victoria narrowed her eyes. “You’re doing a trick question on me, aren’t you?”

Elpida’s face split with a very un-Elpida-like grin: Howl again. She said, “You’re getting it gentle. Kaga was much rougher with us. Selfish!”

“Shut up!” Kagami snapped. “Let me walk her through this without the obscene peanut gallery.”

Howl slipped back behind Elpida’s expression. Elpida dipped her head.

“It’s a trick question,” Vicky repeated. “Right?”

“Just answer it,” Kagami said.

“Central, obviously. Central sent the hurricane.”

“And why? For what purpose?”

“To kill us, what else?”

Kagami smiled, with far too much satisfaction. “Wrong.” Victoria restrained a sigh. Kagami went on: “Central sent the physical assets after Thirteen Arcadia, but they always ignored us, and they ignored Pheiri. We’ve all seen the logs from Thirteen’s journey. If Central — whatever ‘Central’ really is — wanted us dead, we’d all be dust. Pheiri could not have fought off any of those things which hunted Thirteen. No, I don’t buy it. This hurricane was not sent to kill us, not by Central.”

Victoria shrugged; she tried not to pay too much attention to Elpida’s hidden smile. “Okay, sure.”

“We cannot know who sent this hurricane,” Kagami went on. “Shilu claims there is a ‘war’ inside the network, but she doesn’t know the sides, doesn’t know the forces, doesn’t know what the conflict is about. Perhaps another faction in that war sent the storm. But perhaps not. Maybe Shilu is lying. We can’t verify any of this. So, let us move upward a conceptual step — why was the hurricane sent?”

Vicky shrugged again. At least Kagami seemed to be enjoying herself for once.

“If it was sent to kill us, that’s a very inefficient method,” Kagami said. “Certainly not one I would use. A vast amount of energy, over a very wide area, with no way of confirming a kill. Pheiri could probably have outrun the storm, if we’d turned tail as soon as we saw it coming. So, what else did the hurricane achieve? I’ll tell you. It forced the graveworm to retract the worm-guard. That, in turn, allowed us access to the tomb. Without the hurricane to clear the way, we would not have made it in here. Do you see where I’m going with this, Victoria?”

Kagami paused, dark eyes blazing, chin high.

Vicky squinted. “You’re saying this was sent to help us?”

Kagami chopped the air with one hand. “Not necessarily. I believe it may have been sent to clear the way for us to access the tomb, to pull off a ‘tomb raid’, to reach the fresh meat before the predators did. And what did we find here?”

Victoria nodded. “Shilu. Right.”

“Wait, wait, wait!” Kagami held up both hands. A real smile danced on her lips now. Victoria’s heart leapt to see that. “Shilu is only one possibility. Don’t jump too far in one leap. Focus on what we found. What did we find?”

“Two Necromancers, having a fight,” Victoria said; Kagami nodded with excitement. “Three newbies, fresh zombies. One of whom was Eseld, which is, yeah, really suspicious, right, I think I see—”

“Right, right,” Kagami interrupted, hands in the air again. “So, the storm gets us to the payload — either Shilu or Lykke or Eseld, or all of them together, I’ll get to that in a moment. But then? Then it stops!” Kagami punched the air. “It stops overhead, and stays there. Why?”

“To kill us?”

“No. No! Come on, Victoria, think! You are much smarter than you give yourself credit for. You are an engineer. You— She—” Kagami pointed at Elpida “—she couldn’t get it! But you can see this. I can’t be the only one around here with basic powers of social deduction. Think. Don’t make me do this alone.”

Victoria chewed her bottom lip. She really did want to justify Kagami’s belief in her.

“Because … because whatever the storm was sent to assist with, it’s not done yet.”

“Yes!” Kagami leapt upright in her seat, teeth together, eyes wild. “Yes. Exactly.” She took a series of deep breaths and subsided back into the blankets, panting, flushed in the face. “Whatever purpose the storm was dispatched for, it has not yet been completed. It is still in progress. Still ongoing.”

“Which is?”

Kagami wet her lips. She hesitated, losing some of her steam. Victoria clenched her hands together and stayed very still.

“I have two hypotheses,” Kagami said. “They may both be valid, they’re not mutually exclusive. Option one — the storm was sent to assist an attempt to disrupt us in some manner.”

“Shilu’s assassination attempt,” said Vicky. “And then she decided not to make the kill, right. So—”

“Yes, yes, but it could be something else,” Kagami snapped. “It could be part of an attempt to insert a spy, or a saboteur, or something else, within our ranks. I don’t know, and we cannot be sure. Not yet.”

“You think Shilu is a spy?”

Kagami shook her head. “No, not her. She’s too obvious.”

“Eh? Kaga, she’s a Necromancer.”

Kagami huffed and rolled her eyes. “Sometimes I forget you were limited to books and the occasional televisual broadcast, down there in your pre-NorAm rust and muck. This is basic drama sim writing! Think it through! We come bursting into the tomb on a rescue mission, and what do we find? Two Necromancers, one a practically cartoonish abomination, the other one a little bit weird, but no more than any other zombie. One is trying to kill the fresh meat, the other is protecting them. One helps us fight the other, thus winning the thinnest sliver of our confidence. It’s too obvious! Lykke was the bait, the jobber, the designated monster to get us on Shilu’s side. A child would know not to trust her. Amina knows not to trust her!”

“Hey, come on.” Vicky tutted. “Amina’s not stupid. Don’t use her like—”

Kagami wasn’t listening. “Ironic, really, isn’t it? The stupidity of that plan cancels it out. No, it’s not Shilu.”

“ … wait a sec, Kaga. You trust her?”

“Ha!” Kagami barked. “No. But I trust that she trusts herself. I think that full-borg combat doll out there is exactly what she appears to be. A reluctant assassin who refused her mission.” Kagami glanced at Elpida. “Though I can’t see exactly what convinced her not to go through with it, seeing as our Commander is a moron with a death wish.”

Elpida nodded a silent thank you.

Vicky said, “Hold up. If Shilu was a spy, or a saboteur, sent by Central, would she even have to know it herself?”

“Yes!” Kagami clicked her fingers and pointed at Vicky. “Yes, exactly. If Shilu is a mole, she wouldn’t even have to know it. In fact, that would be the perfect insertion method. Set her up against Lykke right in front of us, have all our suspicions out in the open, but then she herself doesn’t even know what she is. That is exactly how I would do it if I was Central, or if I was trying to get an agent inside a closed network. But, no.” Kagami shook her head, her animation subsiding. “Shilu is not connected to the network. Whatever or whoever sent her, she’s not passing back information.”

Vicky raised her eyebrows. “You confirmed that?”

Kagami sighed. “Atyle did, in her usual interminable fashion. But … ” She gestured vaguely.

Elpida spoke up. “Howl says the same. Shilu’s not networked, not like Lykke was. She’s embodied like us, just matter. All she’s got is the shape shifting trick. Very durable though. I wouldn’t want to go toe-to-toe with her up close, even in a hardshell.”

Vicky leaned back in her chair, hands on her AGL. “You think it’s one of the other three?”

Kagami raised a reasonable hand. “Eseld is also too obvious. You said that yourself, it’s plain to see. She’s been placed in our path, on purpose, perhaps to play on our Commander’s personal sympathies. Of course we would be suspicious of her resurrection. She’s a very poor choice for a spy. And her mere presence raises … further questions.”

“Yeah?” Vicky glanced at Elpida, worried about the Commander’s mental state. But Elpida seemed perfectly relaxed.

Kagami cleared her throat. “She may have been selected to sow internal division and distrust.”

“ … wait, what?”

Kagami seemed on the edge of snapping, but forced herself to speak slowly and clearly. “Think about it. Her resurrection, right in our path, implies that something or somebody is already watching us, perhaps literally, perhaps through the network. Even if it’s just ‘Central’.”

“Oh. Shit. Right.”

Vicky eyed Elpida again, openly this time. How could Elpida be so calm, when she’d been so obsessed with that girl and her unknown companions for weeks? Elpida had spent hours flicking through the images of that fight — that slaughter — and staring at those four fleshless skulls.

“Uh, Elpida, Commander, are you … okay with this?”

Elpida smiled. “I’m fine with this line of thinking, yes. This is why I came to Kagami in the first place. I’m not sure I could have made that leap myself. Eseld may be compromised. I’m willing to accept that.”

“Okay. That’s good, I guess.”

Elpida went on. “She may also have been sent to help us. She may be a sign, intended to snap me out of the state I’ve been in lately.”

Kagami clenched her teeth, visibly biting back a comment.

Vicky said, “Uh, good? Good. I mean, I’m glad you recognise it. But, sent by who?”

Elpida smiled with a relief Vicky had not seen on her in weeks. Elpida said: “By the same network entity who helped Howl. Telokopolis.”

Vicky nodded, but said nothing, afraid that the wrong word might shatter Elpida’s disposition. She shared a glance with Kagami and saw a mute warning reflected in Kaga’s eyes — don’t set her off. We’ll deal with this later. The Commander is more fragile than she looks.

“Uh,” Vicky said, trying to move on quickly. “So, what about Sky?”

Kagami recovered herself with a snort. “Also far too obvious. She took a beating at Lykke’s hands, and got physically compromised, to put it lightly. She may still be compromised, so of course we’re going to be watching her closely. No. Too unsubtle. The tactic of a fool.”

“Cyneswith?”

Kagami spread her hands. “She’s the only one left, the odd one out. Very ‘innocent’, with no comprehension of her situation. Again, too obvious! They’re all too obvious. All of them are suspect. None of them are safe, not for us. That’s why we’re using the privacy field. That’s why we’re keeping this quiet. We don’t want any of them to realise we’re going to make this move.”

Vicky sighed, then chuckled at how silly this felt. “So, we’re right back where we started?”

Elpida answered. “Not at all. Kagami’s deductions give us somewhere to start. We need to interrogate Shilu, and debrief the other three, to see if there’s anything we can glean.”

“Great.” Vicky sighed. “What do you suggest, Kaga? What would you do, if all this was happening back on the Moon?”

Kagami raised her chin. “Shoot all four of them.” Then she sighed. “But we’re not allowed to do that, are we, Commander?”

Elpida shook her head. “No executions. No killings. Not unless we have to.”

Vicky said, “Wait a sec, Kaga, you said you had two hypotheses about the storm. What’s the second?”

Kagami paused, suddenly uncomfortable. She swallowed. “I believe the storm may also be acting as an anti-access area denial weapon.”

“Which means … ?”

“The hurricane may be protecting us from Lykke’s return. Or from the arrival of additional Necromancers.”

Vicky went cold. “Necromancers? As in, more than one?”

“Yes.” Elpida nodded. “I’m inclined to agree with that assessment.”

Kagami spoke with her eyes on the wall. “If Shilu told us the truth about her encounters with Lykke, then whatever force was trying to stop Shilu, whatever force sent Lykke, it was trying to achieve this quietly and quickly, before we could arrive. The plan was probably to kill Shilu, kill all of the zombies in this batch, and then vanish before we turned up.”

“Which would have meant no Eseld,” Elpida added softly. “I never would have met her again. I think it all adds up.”

Kagami sighed. “Yes, fine. And, keeping this quiet?” She gestured at the ceiling, at the storm beyond the tomb. “That’s not an option anymore. If the storm is protecting us, then when it ends, we may find ourselves neck-deep in Necromancers. Ha!” Kagami barked a laugh, surprised at herself, but there was no humour in her voice. “Pun not intended. Not intended at all.”

Vicky swallowed. “Shit. Uh. Wait, I don’t … ”

Elpida cleared her throat. “If Eseld was inserted by Telokopolis, perhaps with the aim of helping to deflect Shilu’s assassination attempt, then Lykke was sent to stop that, to stop us linking up. When the storm passes, whichever player sent Lykke might decide to drop any pretence of subterfuge, and throw everything they have at us. We need to be prepared for that.”

Kagami let out a tight, shuddering sigh. “We don’t know this for certain, Commander! Vicky, we don’t know this for certain. At the moment all of this is conjecture, theory, hypothesis.”

Vicky tried to take a deep breath, to keep all this in perspective. “Alright. Okay. So, why are you telling me all this? Why now? Why me alone?”

Elpida grinned, not Howl. “Because we’re going to interrogate Shilu, and we need you to play along. I need your eyes and ears, and your judgement.”

“Me?”

Kagami said, “You make one hell of a ‘good cop’, Victoria. You don’t even have to try. That’s going to be your role.”

“Good cop bad cop?” Vicky laughed. “Against a Necromancer? Seriously? Commander, I’m a grease monkey, I don’t know anything about this.”

Elpida straightened up, framed by the crimson fronds of the meat-plants behind her head, like a halo of blood playing over her white hair.

“I don’t understand the terminology ‘good cop bad cop’,” Elpida said. “But Kagami explained the principle to me, and I recognise it well enough. Howl and I can force Necromancers back to the network, with a little bit of physical bullying. Shilu saw that herself, up close, so that makes me the ‘bad’ one, the threat.”

Vicky interrupted. “I thought you said you wouldn’t want to fight her?”

Elpida broke into a grin. “I don’t. And I can’t.”

“ … what?”

“Howl doesn’t think she can strip away Shilu’s shape shifting. It’s not something we can touch. I’m going to be bluffing.”

“Oh,” Vicky said, a sinking feeling in her stomach. “Oh shit, Elpi.”

“Oh shit is right,” Kagami grumbled.

“It’s the only leverage we have,” Elpida said. “But I’m hoping we won’t have to use it. This is where you come in, Vicky. You’re my second in command, and I mean that. You’re my right hand for this, the most reasonable and personable member of our cadre. You and I, and maybe a couple of others, with Kagami on overwatch. We’re gonna go figure out if Shilu is lying.”

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Vicky and Kaga are such messy bitches, and I just cannot get enough of them. Howl has a point; a good fuck would fix a lot of their problems. Or hey, maybe it would make everything much worse! Also an acceptable outcome. But none of that is going to help with interrogating a Necromancer, is it? Tut tut.

Aaaand we are back! Thank you so much for your patience, dear readers. For anybody who missed the note above last week’s chapter, or the patreon post I made, I’ll leave a quick link here to avoid repeating myself again. I’ll be keeping the Table of Contents page over on the Necroepilogos site up-to-date from now on, to avoid any confusion about the publishing schedule!

As for arc 12, behind the scenes this is developing into a looooong one, as I had planned for! There’s just so many overlapping schemes and shufflings out in the echoing shadows of the tomb. We might see a couple of unexpected POV shifts, and maaaaybe a new POV soon-ish, hard to tell! But first, it’s time to ask Shilu some difficult questions.

Also I have more art to share, from over on the discord server! A fan-made mockup cover for Necroepilogos! That’s Telokopolis on top, and a tomb down below (by the very hard-working and skilled FarionDragon.) Thank you so much for this, it’s incredible! And it’s reminded me that I’m about to start the pipeline for some new cover art, very soon …

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I am still very much trying to build up some kind of a backlog of chapters, and when I do, I’ll be sharing more chapters ahead with patrons. I hope!

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

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you so much for having fun with my little story! The tomb is deep and dark, and even Pheiri is so very small in these echoing halls, trapped beneath the raging storm. Zombies are hatching plots in the dark. Let’s hope they don’t dig too deep. Until next chapter! Seeya then!