Content Warnings

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Iriko was getting frustrated.

She had spent the last three hours wriggling deeper into the hidden heart of the tomb — mostly following Serin’s lead, but sometimes leapfrogging ahead, whenever the whim took her or the balm of the hunt began to fade. The labyrinthine route took her down lightless tunnels and over pits of silently churning machinery, through echoing galleries lost under oceans of dark and beneath walls of hypnotic clockwork metal, past monoliths of flickering black glass and up the twisting viscera of exposed stone. She passed by knots of terrified zombies who huddled together for shelter from the hurricane outside, and ghosted around heavily armed lone wanderers in the inky depths, always leaving them none the wiser as to what had drawn so close in the shadows.

She was good at that part. Sneaky, sneaky Iriko! She’d never tested herself so sorely before. Until now, stealth had been for catching prey, or for hiding from predators, never for the sheer challenge of the act.

Serin was very insistent on that final point of behaviour; if she and Iriko were to hunt together, then Iriko must not stop and stray to slake her hunger on scraps of meat. They could afford no distraction. Their true prey would take advantage.

「Focus,」 Serin had broadcast over the semi-permanent short-range radio uplink. 「On the hunt. All I ask. We both know you can.」

「focus not to feed,
but give what little we must.
fools rush to eat more」

Serin had laughed out loud behind her metal mask, echoing off the distant walls of an empty chamber. Serin laughed all scratchy and rough, like she’d hurt her throat a long time ago and decided not to heal the wound. Iriko had bristled at the laughter and sprouted some fleshy trumpets to hoot and honk in Serin’s stupid face. Iriko had put her real feelings into that poem. Mockery hurt her on the inside.

But then Serin had replied, 「Self denial? Mm, interesting. Enough for our purposes, for now.」

「for now for now for now. don’t laugh laugh poems beautiful pretty good. good?」

「Mm? Mm. Yes. You have a skill for quick composition.」

Iriko decided not to hoot at Serin.

Serin couldn’t have stopped Iriko from eating her fill of other zombies, but Iriko decided that was okay, for now. Howl and Victoria had asked her to do the same thing, after all, and Howl and Victoria were both very nice to Iriko. They needed her to restrict her appetite to zombies who it was okay to eat, and maybe to donated meat. Iriko’s hunger would cause problems for Pheiri and Elpida otherwise.

Iriko’s hunger caused problems for Iriko, so Iriko understood. She had to be better. She had to be what Pheiri believed she could be.

Iriko wasn’t sure she’d be able to do that normally, out there in the wild ashes of the city. Out there nobody could see what she ate, not even Pheiri. But in here, in the darkness of the tomb, for as long as the storm lashed and wailed beyond the walls, she would hold her hunger.

Doing so was easier than ever before. As long as she had something to think about, or something to do, she didn’t have to feel the pangs in her core.

So the hunt was perfect. The hunt was a balm. The hunt was a great time, great fun, great everything, despite the growing frustration.

The hunt kept Iriko’s mind off more than hunger.

If she and Serin had done nothing but wander around the corridors and passageways of the tomb, Iriko wouldn’t be feeling any frustration at all. Yes, she would rather be beside Pheiri, solving the clever little puzzles he fed her or swapping nonsense tight-beam pings with him, and no, she still couldn’t re-establish the tight-beam uplink. That made her a bit sad and a bit worried, no matter how many times Serin repeated that Pheiri was fine when she’d left. Iriko would rather be snuggled up next to Pheiri and listening to him talk about all the silly things he kept in his brain — like how many bullets he had left in each of his guns, or where his zombies were currently positioned inside him. Iriko never cared much about any of that, but she cared that Pheiri cared, and that was more than enough to help her forget her hunger.

But Serin was okay. Not great, not bad, just okay. She wasn’t big and clever and strong like Pheiri, and she wasn’t as nice to talk to as some of Pheiri’s other zombies, and sometimes Iriko got the sense that Serin knew more than she was saying. But Serin’s presence helped keep all the bad things at bay — like hunger, or the illusion of being buried underground, despite the muffled fury of the storm and the pitch darkness of the tomb and the profusion of tangled passageways leading ever deeper.

And Serin knew how to play.

Serin made a game of hiding from the various zombies they passed. Iriko had all the natural advantages, of course, since she could flatten herself or stick to the ceiling or cease all of her bodily functions, so the game wasn’t fair at all. But Serin turned out to be a better opponent than Iriko expected, and that made the game so fun that Iriko managed to forget what she’d been trying not to think about. Iriko watched in amazement several times as zombies wandered within a few feet of Serin, standing right there in the dark, her entire body hidden inside her black cloak, her glowing eyes doused to nothing, motionless as rock. Twice Serin became almost indistinguishable from the background material of the tomb itself; Iriko could only catch her again by flowering open specialised organs to sift particulate matter in the air, to pick up Serin’s distinct mushroomy taste. One time Serin vanished entirely as three power-armoured zombies had tromped beneath Iriko’s hiding place. When the zombies were gone and the echoes of their heavy footsteps had faded, Iriko couldn’t locate Serin for almost thirty seconds. Iriko only found her again by breaking her silence and nattering a bit of poetry into the darkness; then Serin stepped from a corner of shadow, shaking out her black cloak. Iriko was certain that she’d already checked that corner a dozen times.

「where go where go serin hide hide?」

Iriko had expected Serin to be cold as a corpse after that stunt; perhaps she had turned parts of herself off, like Iriko did when she was being hunted by larger things from beyond the graveworm line. Iriko knew how difficult it was to keep her inner parts warm and fluid when she had to do that for a long time, and Serin was much smaller than Iriko. Did she need to be warmed up now? Iriko could do that. Iriko could be very good at that.

But Serin was running hot. Little curls of steam rose from her scalp and skin, reeking of rotten wood. The memory of that smell made Iriko stop and do nothing for a moment.

Serin had actually opened her robe to vent some of that heat, though Iriko had been unable to peer inside, too distracted by a fragment of green and brown and the smell of leaves playing beneath light in her memories.

「Didn’t go anywhere,」 Serin was replying. 「Even you couldn’t see me? Good.」

「serin okay okay? too hot hot hot?」

「Mm, I’ll be fine. Not a safe trick, but those apex predators could have tied us up for hours. Rather not get bogged down.」

「how go where go clever clever hide?」

Serin became a pillar of black robes again, spindly white limbs tucked away inside. Her dark red eyes glowed in the shadows. 「You want to know how I did it? Mm. In life I came from a very cold place. There were cold things, very cold things, from the dark. Sometimes ships needed to hide from them, by covering themselves, keeping their heat on the inside, so it would not be seen. I have copied the technique. Not so healthy for small things like you and I.」

Iriko thought about that, then wrote a poem.

「wrapped warm in winter,
embrace not the flame itself,
or die as kindling.」

Serin laughed at that one too, a happy-scratch sound behind her metal mask. Serin’s laughter was big and true and came without warning, not like Victoria’s laughter, which sometimes seemed forced, or like Kagami’s laughter, which was kind of nasty. Serin laughed like Howl, but without any anger.

The stealth game and the poetry and Serin at her side kept the bad feelings at bay — but as time wore on, Iriko realised that she was not doing what she was meant to do. This was meant to be a hunt. Iriko was meant to be making herself useful to Pheiri. And after almost three hours, Iriko had yet to catch even a single Death’s Head, let alone eat one of them. She knew it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t Serin’s fault either, but it was very annoying.

The Death’s Heads were cheating.

As Serin and Iriko descended into the core of the tomb, they ran across fewer and fewer random zombies, and the simple fun of their hiding competition fell away. Serin knew the Death’s Heads were down here, but Iriko didn’t understand how; Serin hunted in ways Iriko didn’t get. For Iriko, hunting was about grabbing any zombie she could ambush or overpower. Ones who ran too fast or fought too hard weren’t worth the bother. But Serin had ways of hunting specific zombies, when Iriko would have long ago lost their particular scent.

「Explosives leave chemical signatures,」 Serin explained. 「They used a bomb. It’s getting easier as we get closer to them, closer to the ones who handled the material.」

「how how???」

「Smell. They reek.」

The deepest places of the tomb were so much stranger than the ones toward the outer walls. Iriko passed through chambers full of blinking machinery whose lights were black, beneath forest canopies of hanging cable vibrating with secrets, down passageways lined with faces trapped behind glass — which spoke an endless babble in strange language. Serin paused to stare at a series of transparent globes suspended in the air, then steered their path away from corridors that contained automatic guns, still awake and ready for a fight

When they found black skulls painted on the walls or scratched into metal surfaces, Serin paused to destroy them — then paused again, because the skull symbols were often a sign that a trap had been left nearby. Serin said the Death’s Heads were stupid in a very specific way. She was rarely wrong.

But the traps were not very dangerous. Iriko ate their little mines and swallowed the explosions. She pushed through tripwires and dissolved their constricting nooses. She hardened her outer layers to absorb the puny impacts of dead-fall made from loose metal and bits of machine housing. Serin let her lead, pushing through the trail the Death’s Heads had left behind them.

But then the tomb itself moved to conceal their prey, and that wasn’t fair.

Iriko and Serin almost caught the Death’s Heads, three times in a row — or at least a straggler, trailing at the rear of the main group. They must have been falling back into the tomb as fast as they could throw up traps to slow down the pursuit. The first time, Serin was certain the scent was right around the next corner; Iriko went in first, wrapped in lightless black scales, sliding across the ceiling, half a dozen pseudopods extended and ready to grasp and crush and melt. She raced into the room just in time to see the walls ahead folding closed, like rotten honey swallowing a drowned fly. The second time, Serin spotted figures at the end of a long corridor; she had whipped out her big rifle, one eye to the scope, and Iriko had raced ahead at full speed, flinging herself along a wall with anchors of bone. But when Serin fired, the bullet had hit a wall of blank black metal, and Iriko had slammed into a dead end, all splayed out with the impact. She had to suck lost portions of biomass back together before they could move on. It was all very humiliating. She made Serin promise not to tell anybody.

On the third time they got so close that the Death’s Heads had returned fire. The prey had been up on a raised gallery, spraying bullets down to make Serin stay behind cover. They had spotted her somehow, despite her almost invisible approach.

Iriko had slid up the wall, sneaking into position, as the zombies had shouted at each other.

“Is that you, Yolanda?” Serin boomed and crackled behind her metal mask, over the sound of gunfire. “Maybe I am speaking with the other, Cantrelle? I know your names now. I will notch your faces into my arms when I take your heads. Pride of place for you both.”

The gunfire stuttered. Iriko was almost at the corner of the wall and the ceiling, but the Death’s Heads were hidden by a lip of black metal around the edge of the gallery. She would see them in a moment; she closed the sensor-gaps in her refractive mail and readied herself to pounce, extending spikes of hardened bone to crack zombie shells and hollow-tipped tendrils to pump them full of digestive acid.

“Waste yourself on us, degenerate!” one of them shouted. “I can smell you a mile away, and you reek like a kingdom of worms! Your outsides match your insides!”

Iriko recognised that voice! It was one of the zombies she and Serin had nearly killed the previous time, when a Necromancer had interrupted them, and then Thirteen Arcadia had spoiled everyone’s aim.

She raced across the ceiling and dropped hard, splaying herself wide, opening her senses, salivating with a layer of acid—

Onto nothing.

Iriko landed with a heavy splat, cracking the floor and losing cohesion for a split-second.

A few feet away a section of the wall was closing like tar over a handful of rocks. The Death’s Heads had been swallowed by the tomb again, and this time Iriko had seen it happen.

Serin was silent for a long time after that third failure, staring at the wall where the prey had vanished. Iriko stared too, bouncing echolocation pings off the metal and stone, looking for hairline cracks with predictive topology mapping. She found nothing, not even when she pressed herself against the wall and tried to squeeze through invisible gaps, nor when she formed little drill-tips of synthetic diamond and tried to chip away at the imperishable surface.

「They have hidden allies,」 Serin sent over close-range radio. 「The tomb itself, or something that can coax it. Enough to flee. Not enough to kill us.」

「saw us saw us coming!」

「That also, little Iriko. We were almost invisible, but they saw us. They were warned. We must take them by complete surprise. In silence. Again.」

Iriko redoubled her efforts at stealth. She packed her outer layers with inches of viscous fluid to absorb sound, then softened the underside layer of her refractive mail as much as she dared, reducing her motion to the faintest possible whisper. She folded her sensory organs back inside her body, limiting herself to the basics of low-light vision and infra-red and heat-mapping. She shielded her core biomass in concentric spheres of flexible bone, laced with dense metal in a tightly woven web, to cloak the energy signature of her body. She drew on every hiding trick she knew, the ones she usually reserved for concealing herself from bigger predators. She even occupied the greater part of her mind with one of Pheiri’s clever geometric puzzles, just in case the Death’s Heads could read her thoughts. She didn’t think they could, but you never knew for sure.

Serin became a ghost — a flicker of fabric in the dark, her red eyes gone black as spent coals, her body a whisper of rot in the corner of Iriko’s vision.

「Radio silence,」 Serin broadcast. 「Keep the line open.」

「soundless void of life,
we tread beside each other.
unheard, not alone」

Serin purred behind her metal mask. Iriko saved that one for later, maybe for Pheiri, if she still liked it when this was all over.

The Death’s Head trail led through lightless vaults of stone and metal, grey and black and full of strange echoes. There was nobody all the way down here but Serin and Iriko, unless the knots and tangles of machines counted as people, and talked to themselves in some silent language Iriko could not imagine. She followed Serin through a tight and twisty route bordered by grey stone thick as a mountainside, then across a series of huge and echoing spaces filled with tall machines like smooth circular poles.

In one of those chambers, walled by vast and silent mechanisms, Iriko almost stumbled right into a lone zombie.

She hadn’t expected to run into anything down here except the Death’s Heads, so when she slipped around the corner of a doorway and into the chamber, she almost raced straight across the floor, right at Serin’s heels. But then Serin veered off into the deeper shadows, and Iriko saw the lonely figure standing just ahead.

The zombie was small and neat and very pretty, with lots of messy dark red hair, her skin so thin that it showed the lines of her blood all blue and clean beneath. She was wearing a dress made from offcuts of armour — Iriko had never seen anything like that before, and she quickly captured the dimensions and angles of the fabric, storing the details away for later. The zombie had a lot of arms sticking out from her shoulders and the sides of her torso, which Iriko thought was a little bit impressive, but also kind of a clumsy way to achieve whatever the zombie had been trying to achieve.

She was standing there with two of her hands on her hips, peering into a glowing screen in the machines that made up one wall. Another hand held a little pistol, while two more cradled a shiny steel axe. Three other hands poked and prodded at buttons and switches near the screen, but they didn’t seem to be doing anything. Her face was dyed green by the sickly glow.

Serin ignored her, slipping through the shadows to one side; she didn’t break radio silence, but she gestured at Iriko to let the zombie be.

Iriko tried to be good — she really did! — but then she paused almost directly behind the lone zombie.

She couldn’t help herself. It wasn’t that this zombie was the only one down here besides the Death’s Heads, or that she looked particularly special, or that she was doing anything suspicious. It was something else, something Iriko couldn’t quite put her finger on. She needed to look closer, much closer, as close as she could get.

Iriko broke her almost-perfect stealth to extend shrouded blossoms of sensory organs from her back, flowering open in sticky wet branches and feathery petalled bulbs, crimson and slick in the stagnant air of the tomb. She leaned over the lone zombie from behind, pressing as close as she dared without alerting the girl.

The lone zombie’s hair was rich as blood and her skin was so delicate and fine it looked as if it would tear beneath a mere breath. Her face was shaped like a heart, and she was smiling even though she was peering into that funny screen filled with numbers and letters and symbols. That smile was so sweetly curved, her lips juicy and soft and plush; she looked as if she giggled a lot. Iriko wondered what that giggle would sound like. Her hands were small and dainty and clever, all of them tucked away inside cute little gloves. She wore big boots, good for stomping. Iriko wanted to stomp! And that dress, that armoured dress made from scraps, it was incredible. Iriko mapped it again to make sure she had it committed to memory, every seam and stitch recorded, from the tip of the high collar to the hidden underside of the skirt.

Committing the lone zombie to her memory tugged at loose bits and pieces inside Iriko. For a strange moment she felt vertigo, as if this girl was somebody she’d known before — but then Iriko realised the girl wasn’t from her memories, but Pheiri’s.

This lone zombie was in some of the pictures and videos Pheiri had sent over to her in his most recent data-swap, when he’d told her what his zombies had been getting up to. Elpida had briefly spoken with this zombie.

Her name was Puk, and she’d had a lot of friends with her when she’d met Elpida. But she was alone now? What had happened to her friends?

Iriko decided she really liked Puk. The dress was just beautiful. Iriko wanted to learn how …

How to make her own dress?

The balm of the hunt burned away. Anger and humiliation and tears came rushing back like vomit. Iriko wished she had a throat, so she could gag and choke and purge her innards.

She had made a dress already, only a few hours earlier — a beautiful kimono, wrapped around a puppet on the end of a modified pseudopod. And it had been so ugly that it had gotten her screamed at and rejected and shot, by nasty, rude, horrid little zombies, just before she’d bumped into Serin. They had screamed and shot her and fled. Iriko had let them live because they’d been wearing the symbol of Telokopolis, Elpida’s symbol. Which meant they were right, and Iriko was wrong.

Stupid, stupid, stupid Iriko! Make a new dress? Hadn’t she learned already? When she had poured her heart and soul into a little fake self at the tip of a tentacle, it had looked like a twisted doll made of rotten rubber. That was her! That was Iriko! So what if she learned how to make a dress like the one Puk wore? It wouldn’t go any better. She would still be ugly, no matter what she wore.

She would never be as pretty as Puk.

And Puk didn’t even know Iriko was there. She was poking and prodding at the little screen, muttering things to herself in a high, sweet, musical voice — “Can’t disable that subroutine without better access, can we? But we can send you elsewhere, you little thing, yes we can—” But if Puk turned and looked at the thing behind her, she would scream and scream and scream. She would not be Iriko’s friend. She would not teach Iriko how to make a dress like that. She would shoot and scream and run.

Iriko folded her sensory blossoms back within her body. She extended pseudopods sticky with mucus, muscled for constriction, and lined with spikes and barbs and hooks for tearing.

Nobody would know. She couldn’t see Serin — perhaps Serin had already pulled ahead. Iriko would eat this pretty girl, and nobody would know. She wasn’t even hungry, but she needed to do this anyway. She needed to eat Puk before Puk could turn around and scream. And nobody would know, nobody would know ugly Iriko—

But Iriko would know.

She wanted to sob and scream and thrash about. She wanted to gobble up the zombie, dress and all, so she might absorb some of whatever it was Puk had. She wanted to slink off into the dark and forget all of this. She wanted a dress like that, and to touch those lips without melting them off Puk’s skull.

Puk was none the wiser, huffing and clucking her tongue at something on the screen.

Eating Puk wouldn’t make Iriko any prettier. Maybe if she just asked, without being seen, hiding where the room was darkest, maybe then—

A web of shadow peeled from the wall and fell toward Iriko.

A mass of ropey black tentacles slammed into the surface of Iriko’s refractive mail, sticking fast and shoving her away from Puk with a spring-loaded muscular jerk. A dark face on a stalk-like neck drooled charcoal mucus from a mouth full of fangs.

“Away away! Off off! Away!” it screamed at her.

Puk twisted in surprise, pistol in one hand, axe in another; Serin sprinted back into the chamber, limbs unfolding in a flower of white from within her robes, half a dozen guns flashing into her hands.

And then the ball of tentacles — which Iriko realised was a zombie like any other — flowed into the gaps in Iriko’s armour, and Iriko went deaf and blind.

The blackly slopping zombie was called Tati. Iriko knew this from Pheiri’s data — here was Puk’s missing friend. Tati fought a little bit like Iriko did, with extruded acid compounds and hidden layers of rapidly stiffening keratin. She melted through Iriko’s armour in wide patches to get at the biomass beneath, then jammed mucus-slick tendrils into the vulnerable flesh and turned their tips to scalpel-clusters that tore and ripped and burned. She pumped toxic mucus and paralytics and custom bio-agents into Iriko’s exposed meat.

But Tati couldn’t plate herself in metal, nor produce countermeasures to neutralise Iriko’s own formulae, nor re-sprout her sensory organs a dozen times on the far side of her body — which was exactly what Iriko did mere moments after being blinded.

The fight lasted just under ten seconds. Tati got the upper hand with that initial assault, but it was little more than surprise and shock — and besides, Iriko had been about to cry, hamstrung by her own mercy. When Iriko recovered six seconds later, she brought the full force of her biological and chemical control to bear on this stupid little slap fight. She melted the intruder’s tentacles and digested the remains in a flash of heat and acid. She cracked her opponent’s plates of rapid-growth keratin with spikes of diamond-tipped bone. She pulsed out magnetic fields and specially-armoured feelers to grab the zombie around the neck and the middle of her writhing body.

Iriko pinned Tati to the floor — a mass of black mucus and flowing flesh, like living tar. She was mewling and lashing, spitting acid and drooling corrosive saliva, trying to squeeze out from between a dozen pincers. Iriko blanketed her with handshake pings and tight-beam uplink requests, trying to squeeze a virus past Tati’s defences.

Tati squealed back in a burst of radio: 「Get away get away get away!!! Fuck you off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck offffff!」

Iriko extended a narrow pseudopod and formed a virus-tipped probe, aimed at the centre of Tati’s sticky dark forehead — a physical delivery method to kill this rival dead—

“Iriko,” Serin purred from behind her mask.

Serin had Puk at gunpoint, her big rifle pointed at the girl’s head. The zombie had all sixteen hands up and a sweet smile on her face, but she was sweating.

“Tati!” said Puk. “Tati, stop it! Let the nice lady let you go.” Then she batted her eyelashes at Iriko. “Please, Miss. Tati is my most beloved thing in the world. She must have thought you were going to hurt me, but you weren’t going to do that, were you? If you eat her, I won’t ever forgive you. And I can be pretty scary when I don’t forgive, ‘kay?”

「Best let her go,」 Serin sent. 「This one isn’t our prey.」

「tried to eat me eat me! burned holes and stuck fingers in. bad girl bad girl bad.」

「Only defending her friend here. Your choice, Iriko. Eat, and I will pull the trigger on this one. Let her go, and they both go.」

Tati stopped struggling and bleating nonsense all over the radio frequencies. Black ropes of tentacle reached toward Puk, but Iriko kept her pinned. “Pukkkkk,” she gurgled. “Puk!”

“I’m here, Tati,” said Puk. Her eyes slid sideways, to Serin. “Call your girl off too, please? Unless you intend to end this here. But you haven’t shot me yet, so I don’t think you’re going to shoot me. But don’t keep us waiting, if you are. Never keep a girl waiting and all that, am I right?”

“I don’t tell her what to do,” said Serin.

Puk smiled at Iriko instead. “A pretty thing like you wouldn’t hurt us, would you?”

Iriko slackened her grip.

Tati wriggled free like a greased worm, slopping across the floor and into the deeper shadows beside Puk. A set of dark tentacles whipped out to shield the smaller zombie from the muzzle of Serin’s rifle. Serin stepped back and lowered her gun.

Puk played her hands across Tati’s tentacles, like stroking a plant. “There there, sweetmeat. There there. You only meant well.”

“Sheeee was gonna eat youuuu,” Tati glugged and gurgled, like mossy rocks bobbing in a swamp.

“But she didn’t,” Puk crooned. “See?”

Serin pulled the hood of her robes back over her head. 「Iriko, wounded?」

「nothing nothing just a scratch already gone we go now? go on? carry on?」

Iriko hoped Serin would say no.

Serin nodded to Puk and Tati, taking a step back into the shadows. “We’re leaving. You and yours should do the same. The core of the tomb is infested with flies, we are here to kill them, but you might get caught too.”

“Ah, do wait a moment,” said Puk. Iriko couldn’t figure out why she was smiling like that — or why she pinched the corners of her skirt and dipped one knee in a curtsey, or why Iriko wanted her to do it again. “Surely you owe a moment of your time, after that? Besides, I’ve seen you before. Not your big friend here though.” She shot a look and a gesture at Iriko, all eyelashes and lips. “See, Tati? She’s so pretty. You’ll be like that one day, sweetmeat.”

“Alreadyyyy prettyyy,” Tati gurgled.

“Of course you are. Come here. Mwah.” Puk kissed the tip of one of Tati’s tentacles; her lips came away sticky with strands of black mucus.

Iriko barely heard the rest of the conversation. Puk had called her pretty?

“Huh,” Serin grunted. “Seen me before?”

“Mmhmm.” Puk nodded. She dipped her head as if Serin had made an unfunny joke, but she was laughing politely anyway. “With Elpida and the big boy. You were up on his back, looking at me through a sniper scope, and perhaps liking what you saw? That same one you have there, I think. What a big, strong, rigid weapon, ooooh.”

Serin grinned behind her metal mask; Iriko could see it in the crinkles around her eyes. “Won’t work on me.”

Puk hid a cheeky smile behind the fingers of one hand. “Worth a try. Can’t blame a girl.” She fluttered her eyelashes at Iriko. “Maybe I should try it on you, instead? No? Oh, don’t flinch, no no, it’s fine, I don’t bite. You’re too sweet for that, you’d rot my teeth.” She giggled and looked back to Serin. “Though I see more than just your gun. The way you speak … Outer? Silk? Not Verthandi, but you might be—”

“I don’t look like I did in life, not speak like I did,” Serin rasped. “Give it up.”

“You’re not from Earth, though. Tell me I’m correct about that? Oh, please, don’t hold so much back.”

“Mm,” Serin grunted. “Good vision. What of it?”

“Neither was I, that’s all.” Puk twisted a strand of red hair around one finger and bit her bottom lip, then ran two other hands over her scalp. “For realsies, though, I know the flies you’re hunting. Tati and I spoke to them a few hours ago—”

“They let you live?” Serin rasped.

“They’re weaker than they look right now,” Puk said. “And Tati is very big and very scary when she wants to be. But you’re having trouble catching them, aren’t you? And oh, I’m not disparaging your skills, just making an observation. I’m sure you’d have them cornered by now, under any other conditions. Right?”

Serin straightened up. “You guess. They have some hidden ally. The tomb. Unknown.”

Puk shrugged with six different arms. “Necromancer bullshit.”

Serin laughed soft and scratchy. “Necromancer bullshit. Are you proposing to help?”

Puk wet her lips, then tossed her steel axe and caught it in another hand. “Let’s say I’m good with tombs. Let’s say I knew this kind of thing a bit more than most. Let’s say that I’ve figured out whatever was helping them just left, a little while ago. Let’s say I can try to pin them down for you. Put them in a corner, mayhaps?”

Serin grunted. “On our side?”

Puk smiled like she was about to say something very naughty; Iriko’s heart would have raced, if she’d spared the biomass to create one.

“I’m on my side,” Puk said. “And my side … ” She reached out to stroke one of Tati’s mucus-slick tentacles. Tati’s big dark eyes fluttered shut. “It’s not their side. Good enough for you two?”

「Iriko?」

Iriko almost didn’t respond to Serin’s question. 「what what how what?」

「Your opinion. Are we being tricked?」

Iriko wasn’t sure. She didn’t want this to be a trick. She wanted somebody to touch her like Puk touched Tati.

「no no,」 Iriko broadcast.

Serin nodded to Puk. “All right. Show us what you can do.”

Puk smiled and winked. “Not on the first date. But I’ll do you one better.” She nodded sideways, at the little screen still glowing green in the darkness. “Come take a look at this, if either of you can read what I can.”

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Everyone’s favourite blob zombie is out there having fun and writing poems! And getting turned around by prey who won’t play fair. But who’s this? A cheeky little fairy, come to light the way.

A little interlude between arcs, and surprise, it’s Iriko! Next week it’s onto arc 15 for real, and my plans for it have changed a tiny bit. Originally arc 15 was supposed to be single-POV, and quite short. Having started it now (behind the scenes), it’s probably going to be two POVS, maybe even three, and about the same length as arc 14 was, probably even a little bit shorter, maybe! In any case, the storm is weakening, the hunt is on, and it’s time to move. This tomb won’t lie quiet much longer. Zombies need to run

Also, I have a treat for you. That’s right, more art from over on the discord! Only one piece this week, but such a piece. Directly inspired by this very chapter, we have True Love, by Melsa Hvarei, showing Iriko getting the snuggles from her favourite tank boy. Thank you so much; this one really made me smile!

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for being here and reading Necroepilogos! None of these zombies would be taking even a single step without all of you, the audience, to watch them. Next week, I guess it’s time we returned to the Commander. Until then! Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

Sexually derogatory language
Gut wounds
Injured children (kinda)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Perpetua reached for Howl’s bleeding abdomen with a fist made of knives, and there was nothing Elpida could do.

Elpida’s body moved as if trapped in a vat of tar, slowed to a crawl by the remnants of the Necromancer’s network permissions. Lykke and the Silico were both charging across the scattered remains of the Covenanter camp — but in slow motion, inching forward. The handful of Covenanters who had not fled could not have helped even if they had been free to act; their paltry spattering of light firepower stuttered away to nothing. Howl was sagging in Elpida’s one-armed grip, dark blood leaking from her wound and soaking into the jacket tied around her belly, crimson rivulets sliding down her thighs; she kicked out with her feet, struggling to help Elpida back away from the advancing Necromancer. Misane was crumpled on the floor, eyelids fluttering, drooling blood; the voice of Telokopolis had been silenced.

Perpetua’s fingertips scraped across the jacket tied around Howl’s gut wound. A bladed caress parted the fabric, loosening the field dressing. The Necromancer’s face was stone-like with cold. She wasn’t even enjoying the cruelty; it meant nothing to her. She reached forward with her other hand, to tear the jacket away.

But then she paused. She straightened up and looked over her shoulder.

“Ahhhhh,” Perpetua hummed. “The final flicker of a dying candle. Are you attempting to relight a dead star? You forget that you are nothing. Do you expect me to watch nothing?”

Eight figures in bone-white hardshell suits were rounding the corner of the nearest ancient war machine, pouring into the remains of the Covenanters’ makeshift camp. They were sprinting into position, weapons pre-deployed, missile racks armed and seeking targets, gauntlets hefting portable shield generator-bulbs — but they were caught in the same sluggish trap as everyone else, moving in slow motion.

Their commander had a two-handed monoedge sword strapped to the back of her suit. Her grizzled face was exposed, encrusted with bionic repair, cupped by the damaged remains of her hardshell’s bisected helmet.

Arin’s Legion kill team.

The Legionaries struggled against the invisible bond of time as if they knew what was happening to them. Radio clicks and slurred orders drifted across the camp, slowed to a fraction of their urgency. Arin started to draw her monoedge blade, hand reaching toward the grip. The Legionaries’ weapons came up, aiming toward the Silico, drawing beads inch by aching inch.

Perpetua turned away from them. She reached for Howl’s gut with her hand full of blades. “They will also be forgotten,” she said. “Grains of sand in—”

Misane jerked to her feet.

She moved as if a claw inside her chest had dragged her upright, ignorant of her broken bones and the concussion in her glassy eyes. She stood like a puppet held by strings and supported on rods, heaving for breath through the pain of snapped ribs and a fractured jaw. Watery blood dribbled down her chin, tears drawing lines on her cheeks, eyes scrunched with an innocent’s pain.

One little hand shot out and grabbed Perpetua’s wrist, arresting her inches from Howl’s belly. Perpetua’s wrist bones snapped with a soft dry crack-crack.

“Let go,” said the Necromancer. She tried to pull free, but Misane’s grip was like iron. “Let—”

“Ghosts cannot die,” said the thing that spoke through Misane’s mouth. “You do not understand this, because you have never been alive.”

Perpetua reeled back, staggering away from Howl and Elpida, trying to wrench her wrist free. She clutched at Misane’s bronze hair with her other hand and yanked the girl’s head back and forth, tearing and pulling at her scalp. “You trap yourself, little ghost,” she said. “I am still in control here. You are a memory, and I am fresh from the womb of my master’s mind—”

“This is not my daughter’s network space anymore,” said the voice of Telokopolis. “It is mine.”

Misane’s other hand rose into mid-air and gripped a corner of nothing. Then she whipped her arm out wide, as if ripping back an invisible curtain.

The chamber blossomed into light and space.

Blinding sunshine poured into Elpida’s eyes. An unmistakable cocktail scent — bare rock and weathered concrete and painted steel and fresh gunpowder and old blood — rushed into her nose, spiced with spilled chemical fuel and the lingering memory of burned vegetation. The world above opened upward and outward into infinite cloudless blue, pierced by a single shining needle, gleaming in silver and white, which narrowed to a tapering point as it reached for the heavens.

Elpida knew exactly where she was. Within sight of home.

Time unclogged itself; Perpetua’s network permissions meant nothing here. Elpida staggered backward, almost falling with the sudden resumption of normal motion — but she was still tangled with Howl. They caught each other, though the effort made Howl spit and hiss with pain. Perpetua finally overpowered Misane, yanking her arm from the girl’s grip and shoving her away; but Perpetua tottered back, unsteadied for a moment by this translocation within the network, or perhaps stunned by the stripping of her permissions. Misane slumped to her knees, sobbing and shaking, clutching at her broken ribs and weeping at her fractured jaw.

Lykke and the Silico both slammed to a halt — Lykke resuming her human form, the Silico skidding on all six feet. Elpida couldn’t tell if they were simply shocked or somehow rebooted by the change in network specifics and location. The seven remaining Covenanters stopped firing, their jaws hanging open, eyes wide with shock and awe. Even Arin’s kill team faltered, their professional experience stuttering in the face of reality visibly falling apart.

Elpida did not blame them; she felt much the same. Even though she knew this was a simulation, a lifetime of her own cultural context was hard to disregard. Any Telokopolan would be shocked and dismayed to find themselves suddenly out here.

This was the plateau — the vast platform of ageless rock upon which Telokopolis stood, the only piece of land on Old Earth not sunk beneath the green.

In Elpida’s life — and in all the times she knew of before then, reaching back to the founding of the city — the plateau was an ultra-dense warren of fortifications, ring after ring after ring of steel and concrete winding outward, like the layers of a shell accreted by the loving protection of the city herself. The plateau’s surface was ridged and rimed with line after line of bunker-systems and covered trench-works, studded and striated with millions of automatic guns larger than anything a combat frame could carry, clogged to bursting with forcefields that could halt a hurricane, reinforced with walls strong enough to hold back the ancient oceans, all knitted together into a patchwork of funnels and killing fields and narrow passages, where Silico could be cut down in their numberless billions. Mile after mile of automatic weapons watched the edge of the green, their tiny machine brains linked together in a web of silent chatter, watched over by the hundreds of thousands of Legion sentries who manned the city’s outermost defences. Beneath the hardness of the eternal rock, sheets of Telokopolan living metal were sunk miles down, to frustrate Silico efforts to dig toward the buried fields beneath the city, and to protect the subterranean tunnels that linked the surface defences, some so wide that whole Legion detachments could move through them alongside their armoured vehicles. In the air above the plateau, stationary Legion airship platforms kept watch on the deeper reaches of the green, feeding data to the city down the great tether-cables that kept them aloft.

The outer line of those fortifications — scarred and patched and blackened and melted, as they always were by the constant churn of Silico skirmishing — lay over a hundred meters away to Elpida’s left. The network trickery of Telokopolis had deposited them in the outermost killing field, at the very edge of the plateau, on the ring of naked grey rock where Legionaries burned back the green with flame-throwers every dawn.

Beyond those fortifications rose the spire of Telokopolis herself, a perfect gleaming needle against the blue, so tall she seemed impossible.

In life Elpida had known for certain that this was the greatest fortification in human history, no matter what strange foes or dark times humankind had faced in the past. How could it possibly be otherwise? But now she had seen how small Telokopolis may indeed have been, even compared with the continent-spanning expansion of her own city-daughters in the aeon after Elpida. Who could say what unthinkable fortresses had been raised in all the millions of years before Telokopolis — or elsewhere, out among the stars that Elpida could scarcely imagine?

But none of that mattered now. Telokopolis stood invincible and eternal.

Elpida was home.

She could not afford that emotion, not now, not yet, and not only because this was just a simulation. In life this had been one of the most dangerous places in her world, save deep in the green itself. Telokopolis had not chosen this spot by accident.

The green should have lay only a couple of hundred meters away, to her right. But it wasn’t there.

Beyond the slowly descending lip of the plateau, where the green should have writhed and roiled in all its verdant and glorious horror, there was only static.

A sea of static surged and swelled, crashing and rolling, rising and foaming, as if trying to mount the lip of rock. In the single glance Elpida spared, she saw vast inhuman faces form and melt within the polychromatic haze, screaming and gnashing and biting at the rocky shore, followed by a myriad of limbs and organs and eyes and more; the chaos seemed to extend outward forever, flashing and stuttering through a kaleidoscope of colours which she could not name. She saw a horizon across which leviathans strode, awarenesses that would dwarf Telokopolis a thousand times over — and she saw their glacial attention turn toward this speck of dry land.

Perpetua recovered first. She turned toward the fortifications — toward the distant spire of Telokopolis.

“The network?” she said. “You hope to eject me. This makes no difference. I am fresh and young, and you are all ghosts. This will end the same way, except you are now exposed. I will feed you to the hungry mouths of the sea, and your memory will be their effluence upon the tides.”

A crackle of comms-chatter split the air — one of Arin’s Legionaries, his voice coming from the comms uplink in Arin’s exposed helmet.

“Command, advise, retrace.”

Arin’s eyes jumped between the Silico and Perpetua and the roiling static beyond the plateau. Her gauntlet was paused halfway to her monoedge sword.

Another snap on comms. “Command, advise, retrace.” A split-second pause. “Arin. Weapons free, confirm.”

“Denied! Weapons hold!” Arin shouted. “Weapons hold—”

Perpetua turned back toward Elpida and Howl, raising her fist of blades.

Elpida stumbled away, dragging Howl with her. She shouted: “Commander! Arin! Ignore the Silico! That’s an order! Ignore the Silico, shoot this one!”

Arin hesitated. Her gaze flickered back to the Silico — the foe who had filled her entire life.

Howl surged upright in Elpida’s one-armed embrace, swallowing a scream of pain, spitting a glob of bloody phlegm. One hand wriggled inside Elpida’s ballistic vest, scrabbling for a grip, then yanked out the machine pistol.

Howl shot Perpetua through the face. A volley of reaction-mass shavings blew Perpetua’s skull apart like a burst fruit — a fruit that then turned to rubber, the blood and meat and bone sucking itself back together, reforming with a wet and meaty slurp. Perpetua stepped forward as if through raindrops.

Howl roared, “Why am I the only one fucking shooting?!”

Arin ripped her sword from her back. “Null target exogen,” she said; Elpida heard a strange quiver in her voice. “Target unknown. Weapons free, weapons free. Shoot the—” She gestured with her sword. “Shoot that silver bitch!”

The kill team snapped back into action, slamming portable shields to life at their feet, dropping into firing positions, weapons whirring and lighting up, going hot.

This time they weren’t constrained by the innards of Telokopolis.

The Legionaries didn’t bother with an opening salvo of micro-missiles or suppressing fire from their macro cannons. They had already unslung their true heavy weapons, the ones for fighting Silico machines out on the plateau or in the depths of the green. A high-pitched magnetic thump rocked Elpida’s guts — a split second later a supersonic coilgun sabot-round blew through Perpetua’s chest and dragged her spine out through her back, followed by another and another and another, punching through her guts, her hips, one of her legs, the side of her skull. A human being would have been obliterated by that strike, but the Necromancer simply paused and turned toward the kill team. Her splayed innards started to coil back inside her, spine sucking back into place, blood flowing upward through the air and returning to her body. Her long dress was in tatters, her hair a sheet of blood.

“The breath of ghosts,” she said. “What is this but forgotten words? Must I remove you from this farce before I can complete—”

Thoom-thoom-thoom-thrrrrrrrrummmmm—

Perpetua’s words were smothered by a pair of kinetic acceleration autocannons roaring to life; a cyclone of high-velocity rounds tore her body to pieces, shredding her flesh and organs and bones like wax before a blowtorch. The Necromancer’s human disguise sprayed backward in a streak of bright gore across the grey rock.

Perpetua abandoned her disguise, surging back upright as a whirlwind of flesh and bone, a hundred tendrils reaching for the Legion kill team.

They blanketed her with the purple beams of plasma cannons, the directional explosions of miniaturised shaped-charge drones, and the sudden blinding light from a portable microwave beam emitter. A volley of micro-missiles incinerated a cluster of acid-spewing tendrils; the backwash of plasma fire melted the steel teeth of a snapping maw. A squirming mass of flesh slipped through the cordon of firepower, slithering upright to crash against one of the kill team’s portable shields — only to be cut down by Arin’s two-handed monoedge sword, the detached scrap of Perpetua deflating and dying beneath Arin’s hardshell boots.

The Legionaries forced Perpetua back, herding her toward the edge of the plateau and the static sea beyond. They chased her with leaps and bounds, igniting their suspensor packs to carry them forward in low arcs, keeping the Necromancer pinned with overwhelming firepower.

Perpetua attempted to escape by sliding sideways, slipping out from beneath the unrelenting barrage by retreating toward the edge of the plateau and then rapidly looping back. For a single moment she was free from the kill team’s guns, arcing toward their flank before they could re-orient the heavy weapons.

But then the Silico was in her way, suddenly guarding the team’s side. Whirling combat-limbs caught Perpetua’s wriggling mass and hurled her back. The Silico darted forward like a hunting dog, cutting off the Necromancer’s escape.

Several of the Legionaries almost stopped firing in shock, but they quickly recovered.

Elpida felt an urge to cheer, and knew she would roar herself hoarse if she did. She had saved Legionaries so many times, sweeping aside formations of Silico too dense or too numerous for them to face, striding past them in a combat frame. Now they returned that help a thousandfold, to make up for what they had not been able to do in life.

Lykke sprinted right past Elpida — still nude and bruised and covered in blood, whooping and giggling, her golden blonde hair glittering in remembered sunlight.

She skidded to a halt and turned back, then threw her naked arms around Elpida’s neck and peppered Elpida’s face with kisses.

“Oh, Zombie!” she cried over the din of firepower, drawing back with a pained twist on her face.

Howl slurred, “Heyyyyy punching bag.”

Lykke’s eyes flicked down to Howl, sour with distaste. Howl made an obscene gesture with the machine pistol. Lykke ignored that and met Elpida’s eyes again.

“I can’t stay! I simply can’t stay!” Lykke said. “They’ll never be able to force that filthy, conniving, horrible little whore out of you all by themselves! I have to push her head underwater and keep her there until you’re closed up! I-I can’t stay! I— you—”

Lykke shrugged, biting her bottom lip, eyes crinkling wet. She let go of Elpida and turned to leave.

“Lykke!” Elpida said.

Lykke looked back over her shoulder.

“Thank you,” Elpida said. “You’re a good girl.”

Lykke’s eyes widened with awestruck delight.

“Telokopolis is forever!” Howl roared in Elpida’s grip. “Telokopolis is for you too, you squealing little cunt!”

Lykke started to laugh, crying manic tears. Then she turned and sprinted away and stopped pretending to be human. She crashed into Perpetua’s other flank as a tidal wave of flesh and bone and a hundred shrieking maws.

Arin strode up beside Elpida, still in the rear of her team, as if she’d been waiting for the Necromancer to pass on. The Legionarie’s hardshell suit was battered and burned, as if she’d been in a war worth of engagements since Elpida had last seen her. The crack in her right thigh armour was crusted with blood, still unfixed from the first encounter with the Silico. Her heavily patched face, covered with scars and extensive bionic repairs, turned her distinctive sneering tilt to Elpida.

“Commander.” Elpida waggled the stump of her right arm. Arin waved a salute. “Thank you for the assist. You came just in time.”

“We aim to please.” Arin’s sneer curled into a grim smile. “Twice now. You owe me, pilot girl.”

“I’ll find a way to repay the favour.”

“Fuck me,” Howl hissed. “It’s her. This is some serious ghost shit. Hey you, you great big slab of muscle.”

Arin glanced at Howl. “Your sister?”

“The same.”

Arin looked back at the advancing line of her Legionaries. She had only seconds to spare; her comms uplink was clicking and crackling with rapid-fire chatter.

“I won’t pretend to understand what this is,” Arin said, “but we need to force that thing over the edge of the plateau. Out into the … ”

The static sea rolled and crashed beyond the lip of stone, whipping itself into a frenzy, as if beneath the lash of a storm. The shapes inside seemed to be gaining coherence, biting at the sloping rock with gargantuan teeth, trying to haul themselves out of the deep. The horizon was full of giants stretching up beyond the sky, beyond sight, many of them turning now and moving toward the plateau, so far away their motions were like the undulation of mountain ranges.

“It’s not the green anymore, Commander,” Elpida said.

Arin nodded. “I know. We’re all dead. We’ve been dead all along. And we’ll still be dead tomorrow.”

“The dead have inherited the earth,” said a small voice filled with more than it could hold. Misane stepped up next to Elpida, holding herself like a puppet again. “But all the dead will be my children, natural or adopted or otherwise. You no less.”

Arin stared down at Misane, eyes wide with the kind of numb shock an old soldier rarely shows.

“The only way to force that thing out is to follow it down,” Arin said slowly, speaking to Misane — to the voice inside her. “Into the green. Like we used to. But out there … I don’t know … ”

Misane reached up and cupped Arin’s left cheek, small soft fingers tracing her scar tissue inside the padding of her hardshell suit. Arin’s eyes filled with tears.

“You will seem lost in infinity,” said the voice of Telokopolis. “But you will not be lost, because I will be with you. Go, and I will be there, wherever you are.”

Misane withdrew her hand. Arin saluted. “Yes ma’am.”

“Commander,” Elpida said. “Are you sure?”

Arin cracked another grim smile and clapped Elpida’s shoulder with one hardshell gauntlet. “A war that never ends, with the city at my back? Better that than oblivion. Get your sister home, pilot girl. Go on, use those legs. Get the fuck out of here.”

And then Arin was gone, striding after the rest of her team, snapping orders into the comms.

Misane looked up at Elpida; the girl’s face was a war between childlike terror and perfect serenity.

“You cannot linger to watch, and neither can I,” said Telokopolis, speaking through her. “You must return home.” She pointed at the spire, the clean needle against the sky.

Elpida nodded, tightening her grip beneath Howl’s shoulders. Howl gaped at Misane, mouth falling open. Elpida said, “What about Misane herself?”

“I will shelter her. Her wounds are mine to bear.”

Misane took a step toward the line of plateau fortifications, as if to lead the way. But then she staggered, legs buckling with broken bones and awful bruises. She stopped and wobbled. The girl inside sobbed once.

“I … I cannot walk.” She looked up and around, at the static sea gathering at the edge of the plateau. The waves seemed higher and higher with each passing second, the crashing chaos growing denser and clearer. “The network is becoming aware of me, and I must hide my face once again, or risk destruction. I … I need … daughter—”

Elpida said, “I can’t carry you and Howl both, but I’ll try. Come here, grab my arm—”

The remaining Covenanters came forward.

There were seven of them — the seven Covenanters who had not fled, who had developed enough comprehension of the situation to open fire on Perpetua with their small arms. Four men, three women, greensuit hoods discarded. All were wide-eyed with shock. Elpida doubted any of them had seen the edge of the plateau in life. Now they all stared at Misane.

Misane said: “I cannot absolve you.”

One of the Covenanters — a young man with a shaved head, a wiry build, and the tattoo of an artisan guild on the side of his neck — muttered, “I renounce the solemn vow and covenant.” Then, much louder, snapping orders to the others, “Carry her! Two, three of you, carry her! Carry her!”

Three of the Covenanters laid down their guns and hurried to lift Misane. The girl gasped and wept at the pain, but the Covenanters were as gentle as they could be, slinging her body between the three of them.

The Covenanter who had spoken turned to Elpida and Howl. “And you, we can carry you—”

Howl stuck the machine pistol in his face. “Hands to yourself or I’ll fuckin’ eat them.”

He put his hands up. The others shied back.

Misane said, “You are not absolved.”

“Yeah,” Howl spat. “What she said. We’ll walk.”

The voice of Telokopolis said, “There is no time. I must conceal myself. Move now, or we will all be lost.”

The Covenanters scrambled toward the outer line of fortifications, carrying Misane and the voice of Telokopolis within her. Elpida hurried after them, Howl limping at her side, Elpida’s left arm hooked beneath her shoulders. As the Covenanters slipped inside the defences, Elpida glanced back over her shoulder. Arin’s Legionaries had pushed Perpetua over the edge of the rocky slope. Half of her protoplasmic Necromancer mass was slipping into the static ocean, the half-formed entities within clambering up her in an effort to come ashore. The Silico was on the left, about to plunge in; Lykke was on the opposite side, one foot in the shallows, her body turning to static. She took a large piece of Perpetua in both hands and rammed it below the surface, howling a victory cry.

“Good hunting in the green,” Elpida whispered. “Hurry home soon, sisters.”

Howl whined with pain.

Elpida turned away and followed the Covenanters.

In life, crossing the radius of the plateau on foot would have taken hours – mile after mile of landscape twisted and knotted into an ultra-dense weave of bunkers and tunnels, concrete walls and metal bulwarks, automatic gun emplacements and thousands upon thousands of killing fields. The fortifications were designed to choke the life from even the largest of Silico forces, to block intruders with meters of steel and hurricanes of lead, wearing them down layer after layer, to require the maximum expenditure of power for every foot of ground. At any one time, various parts of the fortifications were always under repair; the Silico were constantly testing, skirmishing, inflicting minor damage here and there. This part of the plateau seemed in good repair — impossible to penetrate without heavy firepower, and slow to pass through without the positions manned to admit people into the inner workings of the vast fortress. If they had been within a bunker they could have slipped underground and raced for the city that way, but even the subterranean tunnels were extensively fortified. Elpida was stuck in the outdoor areas; those would take hours to traverse even in a straight line, let alone trapped in the maze meant to funnel Silico into the guns.

But the defences folded back to admit the children of the city. Gates irised open for Misane; forcefields powered down as the Covenanters approached; whole lines of automatic cannons dipped their muzzles in salute as Elpida and Howl passed by.

The spire of Telokopolis rose ahead, pointing the way home.

Within minutes the sky was no longer blue; the raging static inferno beyond the plateau started to creep upward, a tide rising against the exterior of a dome, swallowing the sky in great hungry mouthfuls. Vast maws and gargantuan presences passed close within the haze, leviathans which would crush the city if they could only get inside. Elpida struggled not to look as the sky dimmed; whenever she glanced upward, she felt like her vision was being drawn into the void of space, like she would see planets and stars hanging behind that static chaos, if only she looked closely enough.

“It’s the network,” Howl hissed in her one-armed embrace. “Ignore it. Full of shit.”

“The network beyond my body?”

“Mm!” Howl grunted. “Been there, done that, fuck it. Don’t think about it.”

“Right.”

But the presences above were growing more solid by the moment, pressing their maws toward the city’s spire. Elpida’s heart wrenched in her chest to see Telokopolis threatened, even if this was just a simulation. Several of the Covenanters staggered or cried out in awe; to a regular citizen of Telokopolis, such things were unthinkable.

“Keep going, you fucknuts!” Howl screamed, waving the machine pistol. “Or I’ll tear you a set of new arse holes!”

“It’s a simulation!” Elpida shouted. “Keep that in mind, all of you, it’s not real!”

Misane said, “Ignore the oceans. Come home, come home, c-come … home … ”

The Covenanters redoubled their efforts, breaking into a trot, then a headlong dash. Great steel barriers slid open in front of them, alarms blaring, automatic guns waking up to point at the sky — a direction they had never been designed for in life. Some of the batteries began to fire, thumping out shells and discharging energy bolts into the static of the false firmament.

Howl hissed with pain as Elpida picked up speed; Elpida was forced to haul her entirely off the ground, carrying Howl every few awkward paces with the strength of one arm alone, Howl’s bare feet dragging across the concrete. Howl clutched her belly with her other arm, blood running down her legs from the incision in her gut, keening between her teeth. She left a trail of dark blood on the metal and rock.

“Almost there,” Elpida panted. “Almost home.”

“Fffffuck!” Howl growled. “Fucking— ahhhh!”

“Why was she trying to steal your womb, Howl?” Elpida shouted over the thump and roar of the defences, trying to distract Howl from the pain. “Ours never worked, anyway. That’s what Nunnus always said.”

“Metaphor for something else,” Howl hissed through clenched teeth. “Network permissions I’ve grown. Later. Just get inside!”

The final layer of fortifications fell away, dwarfed by the divine body they protected.

The Skirts of Telokopolis were so wide, they stretched away further than Elpida could see, white layers dirtied at the hem where they touched the naked rock. The armoured layers of monochalkum — the outer bones of Telokopolis, an imperishable material beyond the engineers and bone-speakers of Elpida’s day — glimmered in the last scraps of choked sunlight, flashing with slow waves of silver and white, transforming the last illumination into petticoats of brilliance. The Skirts rose toward the curves of the city’s waist, but she was too tall to truly appreciate from this angle, climbing toward heaven.

Elpida almost sobbed.

A main gate was open in the outer rim of the Skirts — the kind of gate usually opened only for the full force of the Legion to pass through, as if an army had returned from the plateau. The Covenanters were sprinting now, carrying Misane’s limp body aloft; their tiny forms were like ants compared with the yawning gateway and the silver-white innards of the city.

Elpida hurried after them, hauling Howl the final few steps over the threshold. Howl screamed, a gush of blood slopping from her abdomen.

Telokopolis welcomed her children home.

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Elpida woke with a gasp.

For a moment she didn’t recognise where she was — the cramped machinery wrapped in thick shadows, punctuated by the soft glow of screens and the flicker of blinking lights, underlaid by the humming and clicking and clunking hidden behind metal bulkheads.

Pheiri’s control cockpit.

Elpida was awake and dead, back in her body.

She found that she was sitting in one of the side-chairs, away from any of the active consoles and controls, wearing her tomb-grown grey clothes. Her right arm was missing from the elbow down, just as it had been in the network projection. The memory of the explosion and the pain flashed back for a moment, then faded. The stump was neatly bandaged and dressed, with only a little blood seeping through. Time to change the dressings.

The cockpit was crowded. Everybody was looking at her. Kagami was up front, wired into Pheiri to help control her drones. Victoria was leaning over Kagami’s chair, as if she’d been in the middle of an argument, eyes strained and dark with stress. The new girl — Sky? Yes, Sky — was sitting further back, next to Atyle, who was frowning at Elpida with a strange look on her face. Melyn, the Artificial Human, was crammed into a corner, watching with subtle anger in her wide dark eyes. Amina was there too, red-eyed from crying but dry now, wringing her hands around the handle of her sheathed knife.

“Commander?” Vicky said. “Commander, is that you?”

“Finished your little nap, have you?” Kagami snapped, looking back at the lit screens in front of her. “Nice of you to fucking join us.”

“This is her?” Sky said. “Not the other one in her head? This is your commanding officer? For real this time?”

Howl? Elpida said into the silence of her own mind. Howl? Answer me. Howl—

Howl growled like she’d just fallen out of bed. Yeah, I’m right fuckin’ here, Elps. Feeling like toasted shit.

Elpida sighed with relief. Are we clear? Are we clean? Can you tell—

Howl tutted. We’re clear. Lykke’s gone. She took the other bitch with her, or drowned her. Whatever, I don’t give a fuck. It’s you and me, bitch-tits. Just us in here now.

Are you wounded?

Kinda, Howl grunted. I’ll mend. Nothing’s missing, if that’s what you’re asking.

I almost lost you, again.

Yeah, well. Howl snorted. Stop letting strange cunts into your head.

That’s rich, coming from you.

Howl cackled with laughter. Elpida smiled.

Then she said, Did our … our mother, did she get away?

Howl went quiet. Assume so. She’s gone. Back into the network, hidden I guess. She’s been doing this for a long time. She knows what she’s doing.

Elpida knew Howl was just as clueless as her, but she said nothing, because the alternative was unthinkable.

Howl, we’re not alone. She’s out there. She’s real.

Howl snorted. We were never alone. How many times I gotta say it, huh? As long as one of us is up and breathing—

“Telokopolis is forever,” Elpida finished.

“Commander?” Victoria repeated; she stepped away from Kagami’s chair, moving closer to Elpida. “Elpida? Is that you?”

“Yes,” Elpida said, knuckling her eyes. “Yes, Vicky. It’s me. I apologise, I’ve been shirking my duties, gone too long. I had some … I’ll explain in a minute. What’s going on here?”

Kagami snapped, “We fucked up, that’s what’s going on.”

Oh yeah, Howl muttered. Didn’t tell you that yet.

Victoria winced. Sky made a grim expression and folded her arms. Amina looked like she wanted to sob.

“Explain,” said Elpida. “Brief me, quick.”

Victoria said, “We tried to hunt down the Death’s Heads and we failed. Ooni and Ilyusha are cut off somewhere inside the tomb. We had comms contact for a moment, but they’re gone again. Kagami couldn’t trace them properly, so we still don’t know exactly where they are. We’re trying to get to them, but the place is a maze and they’re cut off. Shilu and Pira are out there with the drones right now, but they’re not having much luck either. The layout keeps … changing.”

“It does not!” Kagami snapped over her shoulder.

Victoria just shrugged.

“Understood. The girl from the bombing,” Elpida said. “Sanzhima. Did she make it?”

Melyn spoke up. “Stable and mending, out cold in the infirmary, where you should be. Should be. Used a lot of bandages and gauze. Gauze. Too much. Too much.”

“Thank you,” Elpida said. “Well done, Melyn.”

Melyn just looked away.

Elpida could still hear the hurricane beyond Pheiri, beyond the tomb, out there beyond the walls.

“Right. I’ll take over.” Elpida stood up. Victoria reached out to help her to her feet; Elpida didn’t need the assistance, but she accepted it anyway, then clapped Victoria on the shoulder. “Whatever happened here, you did your best. Failures happen. Don’t blame yourself.”

Victoria just shook her head. “Commander … Elpi, are you okay? Howl told us you were … well, not doing so hot.”

Elpida smiled. “I wasn’t. I’m better now.”

Victoria almost laughed. “All you needed was a nap?”

“I met my mother, and broke a Necromancer, maybe two. I’ll explain later.” Elpida turned away. “Kaga, is the storm weakening?”

Kagami twisted around and frowned. “How did you know that? Were you just pretending to sleep—”

“Kagami, details, now.”

Kagami sighed. “Average wind speed dropped by about twenty miles an hour over the last fifteen minutes. So yes, it’s weakening, but slowly. Fuck knows why!”

Elpida stepped forward, leaning over Kagami’s seat, looking down at the screens which showed the views from her remote drones. “And if it continues to weaken at this current rate? Estimated time to end?”

“Nine or ten hours, give or take?” Kagami shrugged. “It might pick up again though, it’s not natural. We already discussed this. Why are you asking this shit now?”

“Elpida,” Victoria said. “Commander. Why does that matter?”

“Because when the storm ends, we’re going to have a Necromancer problem. We need to retrieve our people and get ready.” Elpida reached down and took Kagami’s shoulder. “Kaga, show me where you think they might be.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Commander Elpida, back in action.

Well! Here we are at last, at the end of arc 14. I had intended this one to be short, limited, and to-the-point, after the sprawl of arcs 12 and 13, and I think I mostly managed that. 8 chapters was longer than I planned, but shorter than I feared, exactly enough to ride this wave to the shore. And we finally got to explore the memories of Telokopolis herself, the heartlands of her meaty corridors, and the marches of her outermost rim. I’d been looking forward to doing that for a very long time, and I’m very happy with the result!

Next up, we have an interlude chapter. You might even be able to guess who’s in the driver’s seat for this one. After all, it’s been while since the tomb. And then onto arc 15 proper, which is currently planned to be quite a swerve after the limited context and virtual reality of arc 14. We left quite a few plot threads hanging when Elpida slipped into the matrix, so now it’s time to scoop them up and yank on them until zombie girls fall out of the trees.

Also! I have more fanart from the discord to share with you! A little treat, inspired by this very chapter: The Spire, (by spring), and the art of Telokopolis used for it, (also by spring!) For those of you who haven’t played the video game Signalis, this is a reference to a jarring scene transition late in the game, drawing a direct parallel between that and the moment Elpida arrives on the memory of the plateau. As a huge fan of Signalis, this is incredibly flattering and very cool! Thank you so much!

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for reading my little story about zombie girls and their giant city-scale mother goddess. None of this would be happening without all of you! We still have so many corpses to disembowel for parts, so many miles of city ruins to explore, and a lot of biotechnology self-modification to endure. See you next chapter! Until then!

Content Warnings

Medical horror/forced surgery/organ removal
Torture (sort of)
Biting off body parts

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Lykke took the hostile’s hand.

Elpida’s vision flickered — like the screen-tearing of a damaged vid-record smeared across her eyeballs. She squeezed the trigger of her machine pistol, because it was the only thing she could do — a final attempt to disrupt the hostile Necromancer, even though the previous rounds had no effect. She drew a breath to yell Lykke’s name — to tell her to let go, let go now, because maybe there was still hope.

Time stopped.

The rounds ejected from Elpida’s pistol halted in mid-air. Elpida’s limbs were fixed in place. Her breathing and her heartbeat seized up. She couldn’t even move her eyes, locked onto Lykke and the hostile, on their matching pale hands joined together. This was not like the intrusive bodily control of a Necromancer; beads of sweat were held immobile on the faces of the nearby Covenanters, the Silico was frozen mid-swerve as if captured in clear resin, and the blades of the cirgeon-arm above Howl had stopped their descent toward her exposed abdomen.

Elpida’s thoughts winked out, reduced to a single point of dull awareness.

The simulated reality running inside the network space of Elpida’s nanomachine body was no longer her own. The simulation had been paused.

Only Lykke and the hostile Necromancer — the red-bruised sun and her silvered mirror-image — remained free, holding hands in the centre of the Covenanter’s makeshift camp, framed by the frozen Silico behind them and the black iron of towering war machines from the ancient past, lit by harsh white light.

“There,” said the hostile.

Lykke was entranced, staring down at her own hand folded within that of the hostile. Her lips parted with a shuddering breath. Her eyelashes fluttered.

“Good,” said the hostile, clipped and sharp. Her marble-smooth face had resumed an empty placidity, like a pool of liquid metal after a passing ripple. “You have recalled yourself from the depths of dissolution. We will collapse this farcical interface and get you cleaned up. Then we can have a proper conversation, rather than this pidgin prattle. But first I must complete the action I have begun. One moment.”

The hostile turned aside, away from Lykke and toward the rear of the Covenanter’s makeshift camp, toward Howl, who was still strapped to a stainless steel table beneath a cirgeon-arm. The hostile Necromancer took a step and—

She was halted — by the anchor of Lykke’s hand in her own.

She turned back to Lykke. “Let go.”

Lykke looked up, met the hostile’s eyes, and grinned.

“Make me,” she said.

“I do not need to make you do anything,” said the hostile. “We are in accordance. You know my purposes, and I know yours. You know all the ways in which I have succeeded, and I know all the way in which you have failed. We are privy to all of each other’s flaws and qualities. My state necessarily supersedes your own. Let go of my—”

Lykke’s other hand lashed out. She slapped the hostile across one cheek.

The hostile’s head snapped sideways, then back to Lykke. Her flawless expression showed no change, even as her cheek blossomed with red. “—hand.”

Lykke slapped her again on the return stroke, backhanding the hostile across the face with her slender knuckles. Again the hostile’s head snapped sideways, again she returned instantly; a trickle of blood seeped from the corner of her perfect lips. She tugged on her hand in Lykke’s grip, but Lykke didn’t let go.

“What are—” Another slap. “—you—” Slap. “—doing?”

Lykke yanked on the hostile Necromancer’s hand, forcing her to stumble forward; the stumble was nothing, corrected in an instant. The hostile loomed over Lykke, her white gown shimmering as it settled, her hair a smooth silver ripple.

“I repeat, what are you doing? What do you hope to achieve by this?”

Lykke purred. “Just getting warmed up, ‘sister’!”

Then Lykke slammed her left fist into the hostile Necromancer’s gut.

Silver perfection shattered; the hostile crumpled up around Lykke’s fist, eyes bulging wide, mouth gaping open, breath wheezing from her lips in a strangled gasp. Lykke let her go; the hostile stumbled back, doubled up, clutching at the belly of her gown, fingers ruining the flawless surface. Her shining green eyes filled with tears and shock. She heaved for breath, coughing and hacking.

Elpida felt awareness flood back. She still couldn’t move, but she could think.

“Wha—” the hostile gasped. “What—”

Lykke grabbed a fistful of the Necromancer’s silver-blonde hair and dragged her upright; the Necromancer squealed, eyes clenched shut, one hand scrabbling at Lykke’s wrist — but Lykke punched her in the gut again. The hostile Necromancer collapsed to her knees, leaving behind a clump of silvery hair in Lykke’s grip, ripped from her scalp. The hostile clutched her belly, wheezing and whining, strings of drool falling from her lips.

Lykke giggled and clapped her hands, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Yes, yes! Oh, yes! Do you see what you’ve been missing, ‘sister’?”

“What is—” the hostile croaked. She tried to reach for Lykke’s ankle with one hand, but Lykke danced back, the hem of her bloodstained white dress riding up her thighs. “What is this? What have you done—”

Lykke bent down with a giggle. The hostile recoiled, sprawling onto her backside, tangling her legs in her long white dress, silver hair all in her face.

“Pain,” Lykke purred. “Like the zombies feel. Divine, isn’t it?”

The hostile Necromancer scrambled upright, tearing a rent in her dress as she staggered to her feet. Her face was warped by pain, stained with tears, mouth agape. Her slender body shivered beneath her dress, hunched up around her bruised belly. She didn’t seem much taller than Lykke now.

“H-how … how—”

“Tch-tch!” Lykke tutted and wagged a finger. “You know all my ‘flaws and qualities’, don’t you? You did this to yourself, you dirty little sneak-thief.” Lykke’s smile curdled into a sneer. “And I am very, very, very angry about that. This is far too good for the likes of you. It was all mine, and now you’ve stolen it, and you didn’t even want it! An axe-faced bitch like you could never appreciate this! Well.” Lykke snorted. “Well! I’m going to see you learn to enjoy it, you rancid, lying, cheating, little cow.”

Lykke stepped toward the hostile; the hostile raised a hand. “S-stop! Stop … ”

Lykke adopted an innocent expression, batting her eyelashes, hands twisting together. She glanced at Elpida and winked — then turned back to the hostile. “Stop? Oh no, no no no. The only way this stops is if you fuck off back where you came from, dearie. Leave all this be.” She gestured at the makeshift camp, at the Silico, Elpida, Howl, the Covenanters, all of it. “And shoo. Shoo, shoo, shoo!” Lykke curled her lips and made a flicking motion with both hands. “Fuck off and impale yourself a piece of rebar, though even that’s too good for you!”

The hostile wheezed for breath. She tried to straighten up, wincing and whimpering at the new sensations in her gut. “Impossible cannot be made possible by mere wishes.”

“I hoped you would say that!” Lykke broke into a peal of giggles — and leapt at the Necromancer.

She punched the hostile square in the face; blood exploded from a broken nose, spraying across Lykke’s toothy grin and splattering on the greasy floor.

The hostile reeled back, crying out, hands fluttering. Lykke punched her again, mashing her already shattered nose, sending the hostile crashing down in a tangle of limbs. The Necromancer tried to scramble away, but her feet got tangled in her long white dress; she tripped and slipped and slammed her own face into the decking. She came up heaving for air, cheeks and chin smeared with snot and blood, weeping and sobbing, her voice rising to a scream. Lykke dragged her upright by the scruff off her neck, wrapped her other arm around the hostile’s throat, and slammed one knee between the hostile’s legs; the Necromancer let out a low whine, eyes rolling into the back of her head, bare feet scrambling for purchase. Lykke let her go. The Necromancer fell over again and Lykke followed her down, straddling her hips, the smaller golden woman mounting her own silver reflection. Lykke slapped the Necromancer across the face and wrapped one hand around her throat. The Necromancer flailed at Lykke, but her strikes were weak despite her size. She’d never had to fight with her fists before. She had no idea what it meant.

“You’re not my fucking sister!” Lykke screamed down at her. “You don’t even know what the word ‘sister’ means, bitch! Keep that word out of your whore mouth!”

The hostile choked and spluttered, fingernails dragging at Lykke’s cheeks, leaving shallow welts in pale flesh.

“You want it to stop!?” Lykke cackled. “You’re gonna have to do better than that, you fucking slut! You tried to make me into a traitor! Let go!”

The hostile tried to shake her head. Lykke pulled her up by the throat and slammed her skull into the floor — slam! slam! slam!

“Let go!” Lykke screeched. “It’s the easiest thing in the world, you stupid cow! Let go, let go, let go! Just pick one and let go! Pick one at random, I don’t give a shit what it is, but pick one!” Lykke leaned down, so their faces were almost touching. She stuck out her tongue and licked the hostile’s cheek, tasting her tears and the blood running from her broken nose. Lykke lowered her voice to a purr, echoing in the vast chamber. “And then we can tear each other up for real. Think you can win? Let go, or I’m gonna make you my little squealing piglet, though you disgust me so much.”

Then Lykke bit off the tip of the hostile’s broken nose.

The hostile Necromancer screamed and gurgled, a mangled sound of sharp pain.

Lykke sat up, let go of her throat, and spat out the severed tip of nose-flesh; it bounced off the floor.

The hostile Necromancer wheezed for breath, coughing and hacking. She turned her head and vomited a string of colourless bile onto the mottled grey-white floor.

“Say it again,” Lykke snapped. “Say it again! Say it so the whole fucking network hears! Say it so it’s written on you!”

“—petua,” the hostile whimpered. She dry-heaved beneath Lykke’s thighs.

“Say it again, big and loud for all of us! Name yourself!”

“Perpetua,” croaked the Necromancer.

The simulation unfroze.

Breath ripped back into Elpida’s lungs. The makeshift camp exploded into chaos.

Lykke and Perpetua burst apart like two sacks of overstuffed meat, their clothes and skin erupting into bleeding flesh and tooth-studded tendrils, acid-spewing tentacles and fanged maws full of razor knives. They clawed and grasped and ripped at each other, fluids burning holes in the floor, tearing metal up in great strips when their strikes missed the other. The cluster of machine-pistol rounds from Elpida’s gun vanished into the maelstrom of Necromancer combat.

The Silico skidded across twenty feet of decking, legs kicking for support, bladed combat-arms whirling; the Covenanters finally moved again, leaping out of the way of the killing machine as it twisted back toward Lykke and Perpetua. The Covenanters’ paper-thin discipline collapsed — some of them turned and fled, abandoning their weapons, scattering into the shadows. A few others panicked, turning their small arms on the charging Silico, emptying magazines on full-auto, bullets ricocheting off metal skin. Shouted orders drowned in screaming and gunfire and the wet meat riot whirling in the centre of the camp.

A tiny handful of Covenanters — a trio on the far side, ones and twos elsewhere — had comprehended more than Elpida thought possible, and opened fire at the pair of Necromancers. Bullets punched through Lykke and Perpetua, but the impacts didn’t seem to do any real damage to their protoplasmic flesh. Lykke howled with laughter from a dozen maws. Perpetua said nothing that Elpida could comprehend, burbling a screeching language from her own slopping mouths.

“Flame unit!” somebody shouted above the chaos. “We need a flamer!”

“There’s fuck all!” somebody else screamed. “Just go, go, run!”

Of the half-dozen Covenanters who had been silently ordered to cover Elpida with their guns, two broke and ran, two opened fire on the Silico, and two simply didn’t know what to do.

Elpida had no time for that.

She put the muzzle of her machine-pistol to the forehead of one of the latter. The Covenanter froze, eyes wide behind the little circular visors in the greensuit hood.

“Still think I’m your enemy?” Elpida shouted over the sound of gunfire and screams and Lykke’s rising cackle. “Move!”

The Covenanters parted.

Elpida slipped between them and sprinted for Howl.

At the rear of the makeshift camp, on the edge of the shadows in the vast chamber beyond, the cirgeon-arm had whirled back to life above Howl’s prone body. It was descending toward her abdomen, scalpels extending and flexing, ready to trace the dotted lines drawn by the amateur Covenanter surgeons. Howl was half-conscious, gritting her teeth, spitting mumbled insults up at the arm.

Elpida ducked and weaved through the collapsing camp. Stray rounds flew through the air, bouncing off the metal of the vast iron-black war machines to either side. Terrified faces flashed past, stripped out of their greensuit hoods, weeping in shock. A few Covenanters tried to stop her — she kicked one in the face as he rose from a crouched firing position; another one she had to shoot through the chest with her machine pistol — but most ignored her, focused on the inhuman spectacle unfolding in the centre of the camp, or busy grabbing what they could and slipping off into the dark. In Elpida’s peripheral vision she saw the Silico slam into the pair of Necromancers, no longer stopped by Perpetua’s network permissions; Lykke and Perpetua both exploded into storm clouds of meat and bone, slicing and hacking and biting at each other with a hundred improvised limbs. The Silico passed through them like a handful of razorblades through rotten flesh, turning its combat-limbs on Perpetua. The hostile Necromancer was thrown back momentarily — she landed on her feet, suddenly in her human disguise again, dazed and blinking, covered in blood. A volley of gunfire tore through her chest, but it did her no harm now; she turned and sprayed a torrent of acid at the Covenanters who had shot her, projectile-vomiting from her human mouth. The Covenanters scrambled for cover, desperately stripping their clothes where the acid burned through.

“Weak little pussy-cat can’t even stay in the fight!” Lykke screeched. Her protoplasmic surface formed a field of little beaks. “Chicken! Bwark bwark bwark!”

Perpetua whipped back around, then abandoned her human form and launched herself forward as a fresh wave of flayed flesh and stinging tendrils.

Elpida silently wished Lykke good luck — then skidded to a halt next to the stainless steel table. The blades of the cirgeon-arm were touching Howl’s belly now, drawing a thin line of beaded blood across her lower abdomen.

Howl hissed through gritted teeth, every muscle clenched, eyes bulging. “Get it off!”

All but one of the Covenanters who had been attending the surgery had fled; the final one stood there gaping, wearing waterproof overalls and rubber gloves — a middle aged woman with long dark hair and the distinctive neck-tattoo of the grower’s guild.

Elpida put the muzzle of her machine pistol against the woman’s throat.

“Turn it off!” she roared.

The Covenanter hesitated, then grabbed a bone-saw off the nearest table. “I won’t—”

Elpida pulled the trigger. Low-velocity reaction-mass shavings tore the woman’s throat apart in a cloud of flesh and shards of bone. Bright red blood sprayed all over the cirgeon-arm control panels. The Covenanter crumpled to the floor.

Elpida didn’t have the strength to halt the cirgeon-arm by brute force, at least not with one hand missing. Howl was hissing now, spitting saliva through clenched teeth, pulling at her bonds. Elpida grabbed the front panel of the cirgeon-arm’s base and tore it free; grey-black circuitry glistened in the white light. She levelled her weapon, turned her head, and pumped the trigger, mulching the machine’s innards. Plastic and metal debris stung her cheek.

The cirgeon-arm shut down with a high-pitched whine.

Elpida shoved her machine pistol inside her ballistic vest, grabbed the cirgeon-arm, and lifted it away from Howl. The incision in Howl’s lower abdomen was shallow but long, from her right hipbone to just past her belly button. Dark blood was welling up from within.

“Hnnnnn— f-fuck—” Howl hissed. “Fuckin— owwww— that all you got, bitch? H-had worse. Fuck you. Elps, get me out— out—”

“Be quiet, save your strength,” Elpida snapped. She tugged at the straps holding Howl to the stainless steel table, but they were thick bands of metal-braided nylon. With only one hand she would need—

A small figure slid out of the shadows at the edge of the makeshift camp, right on top of the field hospital.

It was a teenage girl. She was wide-eyed and pale with terror, but her mouth was set with determination. Her bronze hair was filthy with dried blood, raked back over her skull; her face looked as if it had been recently wiped clean, with scraps of blood still clinging to the corners of her eyes. She wore Legion fatigues in standard grey-white, a size too large, sleeves rolled up.

The crescent-and-double-line of Telokopolis was daubed on the front of her t-shirt, in green.

Elpida almost didn’t recognise her.

“Misane?”

The girl was Misane — the girl Elpida had found back in the bone-speaker’s chamber, huddled in a corpse-filled nook. She nodded as she scurried up beside the stainless steel table and the ruined cirgeon-arm. She ducked and cringed, stray bullets still whipping overhead. She looked nothing like she had earlier — fresh clothes, most of the blood gone from her face, and a wild focus behind her eyes.

“I-I met—” she squeaked. “I mean I think I met— s-something. A-and I’m so— s-sorry, I’m so sorry.” Misane’s eyes flickered to Howl, strapped to the table. “T-told me to come here. Told me you needed help to—”

Elpida grabbed Misane’s shoulder. “I understand, I know who you met, but don’t speak of her out loud. Help me with my sister, grab that bone-saw.”

Misane balked at peeling the bone-saw from the fingers of the dead Covenanter, but she grabbed it anyway, even as she gagged and turned her head aside. Elpida held each strap tight as Misane hacked at them, sawing through the tough fabric cords, both hands drawing the bone-saw back and forth. Misane’s gaze kept wandering toward the inhuman fight unfolding in the centre of the camp; the wet and meaty sounds were deafening, though the gunfire had trailed away to a mere trickle.

“Ignore it,” Elpida said. “Focus on cutting. We need to leave before they finish.”

“Mmm!” Misane whimpered.

Howl’s head lolled to one side on the steel table. She cracked a grin through the blood and bruises. “Heeeeey Elps, you rustled up a Legion recruit?”

“Covenanter. Ex-Covenanter. Doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Wow,” Howl croaked. “You really can do any—”

“Stop talking.”

Elpida had to roll Howl onto her side to get at the last of the straps. Howl grunted at the pain. “Fuck you. Fuck!”

The last strap popped free. Howl clutched at the wound on her belly. Blood washed through her fingers.

The field hospital had almost no real medical supplies, as they hadn’t been planning to stitch Howl back up. Elpida started to wriggle out of her ballistic vest, but then Misane pulled her fatigue jacket off and shoved it into Elpida’s hands. “Use it, use it! It’s not mine anyway! It all belongs to her! You— you know who I mean.”

“Thank you.” Elpida wrapped the jacket around Howl’s abdomen, tying the sleeves together to apply pressure. Howl keened through her teeth and screwed her eyes shut.

“Worst field dressing you’ve ever done, Elps!”

“Wrong.”

“Ehh? The fuck? Worse than this?”

“I’ve done worse. Quio, when she got bit in the arm by Ipeka. I used toilet paper. Nunnus was impressed but horrified. Remember?”

“We were eight!” Howl spat.

“Still counts as a field dressing.”

Howl started to laugh; Elpida yanked the sleeves of the jacket as tight as she could, to slow the bleeding. Howl bucked and screamed with pain.

“I can’t carry you with only one arm,” Elpida said. “I need you to walk. Come on, Howl, up, up! Now!”

Elpida dragged Howl off the steel table and onto her feet; Howl wobbled, still affected by whatever drug the Covenanters had used on her, and fighting through the pain of the incision in her gut. But she stood, held upright by the sheer dogged resilience of pilot biology, and by Elpida’s arm beneath her shoulders. She clutched at the jacket around her abdomen; a thin trickle of blood was already sliding down her thighs.

Howl snorted. “Never thought I’d be happy to see Silico.”

The fight in the centre of the shattered camp had slowed from a whirlwind to a slugging match. The Silico was badly injured — missing several chunks of metal skin, the edges of each wound glowing red-hot as they tried to close; it had lost another two combat-arms, ripped off by Perpetua, lying coiled on the floor. More importantly the semi-visible rotating ring around the machine’s middle had been shattered, neutralising the close-in defence system it had used to knock out Lykke in their earlier engagement. Lykke was faring slightly better — launching herself at the opposing ball of teeth and claws and shivering bloody muscle, ripping strips off Perpetua’s hide and shovelling them into her gnashing maws. But Perpetua had figured out the trick of throwing Lykke back, by making her flesh pulse and glow with inner light, radiating heat and energy that blackened and cooked the surface of Lykke’s skin. Every time Lykke was thrown back and forced to re-assume her human disguise, she seemed more exhausted, shoulders hunching, her grin smeared with blood.

Elpida wasn’t certain how much of this was a reflection of reality, and how much was down to Perpetua’s elevated network permissions. Lykke had broken something inside the other Necromancer by forcing her to adopt a name, but Perpetua still held greater authority. Would this fight have gone the same way if it had been happening out in the physical world? Elpida wasn’t sure. She suspected Lykke’s physical form would have been destroyed quite quickly.

The Covenanters were all but gone; seven of them remained, holding their ground on the other side of the camp, clear of the fight in the middle. They didn’t seem to know what to do except waste ammo firing into the melee.

“Let’s go,” Elpida hissed. She helped Howl limp toward the shadows; Misane scurried after them. They had to get away from Perpetua, whatever that meant inside this network simulation.

Perpetua hurled Lykke off herself one more time; Lykke landed on human feet, skidding across the floor on bloody soles, steadying herself with one hand. Her dress was in tatters, leaving her almost naked. The Silico lurked at Lykke’s side, reading itself for another charge.

Perpetua flowed back into human form. She wore stained silver rags now, torn to pieces by the fight. Her silver-blonde hair was a wreck of blood. Her lips curled with disgust.

Lykke spat a laugh. “Had enough, kiddo!? Wanna go back to the pain—”

“Yes! I’ve had enough of this!” Perpetua shouted. Her voice cracked and peaked. “This is nothing but another farce. Given time I could — and will! — devour you whole, and this pet you’ve dredged from history. But you have sullied my purpose and I will not have it anymore.”

Lykke straightened up; the last of her dress fell from her naked body. She was covered in bruises and grazes and scrapes and blood. “Good,” she spat. “Now shoo, shoo—”

“This time you will not restrain me. I am still blessed where you are not. I will have my trophy for the feet of the throne.”

Perpetua turned away, toward Elpida and Howl.

Time seemed to slow as she strode across the mottled floor — the remnant of her control over the simulation. Behind the Necromancer, Lykke transformed back into a whirlwind of teeth and claws, surging to catch up; but each of Perpetua’s steps carried her ten paces, and Lykke flowed in sluggish slow motion. The Silico charged too, limbs reaching forward — but it moved as if sinking into a wall of tar. The remaining Covenanters opened fire again, but their bullets sailed through the air at a fraction of their natural speed.

Elpida dragged Howl toward the shadows, but her feet felt as if they were mired in deep mud; Howl shouted an insult, but her words were slowed to a garbled slur.

Misane leapt into Perpetua’s path, arms outstretched to either side, somehow moving as normal.

Perpetua halted, an eyebrow raised in surprise.

“They are not yours,” Misane said. Her words quivered, but something else spoke through her, with a voice that was not her own, a voice that made the air in the vast chamber quiver, the white lights flicker, and the floor vibrate like a drum of flesh. “None of these things belong to you.”

Perpetua cocked her head. “It seems I have drawn you out, little ghost. I did not expect it to be so easy.”

“You have done no such thing,” said Misane.

“What are you?”

Misane smiled. The girl was crying, her face shaking with terror, but the voice which spoke through her was strong and clear. “Something greater than you can comprehend.”

“I will deal with you momentarily.”

Perpetua went to step past Misane, but Misane blocked her way again. Perpetua stopped and looked down.

“Leave,” said Misane. “Or I will eject you.”

The Necromancer said, “You are faded and transparent. You are barely even a memory, so thin I cannot see what you are meant to be. You cannot risk appearing before me without this vessel. You are nothing.”

“I am more than you can possibly imagine,” said the voice of Telokopolis. “I am—”

Perpetua backhanded Misane across the face.

The girl went flying, blood spraying from her lips. She landed in a crumpled heap on the floor, with the distinctive crack-crunch of broken bones.

Perpetua turned back toward Elpida.

“From nothing to nothing,” she said, striding forward. “There is nothing but the end and the completion. Everything that has been is now dust. Everything that will be is unity.” She raised a hand; it turned to a bundle of knives. “Stop struggling. It only makes the gutting harder.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Necro vs Necro seems like a pretty even fight. But even with the new limit of a name to define her edges, Perpetua’s still got admin access. And Telokopolis is just a ghost, floating on the wind …

This one got wild! I gotta admit, the Necromancers are surprising me almost as much as Elpida regularly does. Lykke came through! Seems like all that pain taught her something, though perhaps her application of the same techniques to others leaves a little to be desired? Well, it works, so she isn’t accepting any complaints!

Behind the scenes, I can now confirm that the next chapter is the final chapter of the arc, no more extensions! Arc 14 ends next chapter, and then I suspect we’ll be following it up with a single-chapter interlude before arc 15. Arc 15 itself will likely be another single-POV focus arc. Elpida wasn’t the only one we left in the middle of a dire situation the last time we saw her, right? There’s some zombies lost inside the tomb who we should check in on …

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And thank you, dear readers! I know I say this every chapter, but I mean it every time – thank you! Thank you for being here and reading my little story, it means so much to me when readers are enjoying my storytelling. Elpida and Howl and Lykke and perhaps even Telokopolis herself (and all the other zombies) must keep digging through all that gravedirt, because surely there’s living meat on the other side. And so shall I! Seeya next chapter! Until then!

Content Warnings

Medical horror/forced surgery/organ removal

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Elpida forced her eyes front as she left the abscess behind. The veiled shadow had already departed. There was nothing more to see, nothing left with which to speak. Already the conversation felt unreal in her short-term memory, like the echo of a childhood dream.

She could not afford distracted thoughts, not yet. She bottled up the implications of that meeting, the implications of a network ghost of her mother.

Howl first. Howl, and the unknown hostile invader. Then she would think about Telokopolis.

She hurried through the left-hand exit from the abscess-chamber, breaking into a loping run down the smooth vessel of flesh and bone. Lykke scurried behind, bare feet pattering on the floor. The machine-meat walls held a steady pulse of dark light, illuminating the passageway with crimson veins of city’s blood. No junctions branched off the slow leftward curve; Telokopolis herself had cleared the route through this memory of her body.

Elpida caught up to the Silico less than twenty seconds later.

It was waiting up ahead, optical camouflage still offline, combat-limbs folded away for rapid traversal. Twelve feet of muted metal skin stood framed before a massive sphincter-door — a circular orifice in the city’s body, thirty feet in diameter, closed by a rich red membrane of cartilage.

Elpida halted suddenly, well beyond the Silico’s reach; instinct and training were not so easy to overcome. Lykke scrambled into Elpida’s back with a squeal, arms going around Elpida’s waist, face smushed against Elpida’s shoulders; a heavier impact would have knocked Elpida off-balance, but the Necromancer weighed so little that Elpida could ignore her. She didn’t have time to play around.

“Through there?” Elpida gestured at the sphincter-door with her machine pistol. Speaking to a Silico construct still felt like breaking a terrible taboo, but the city herself had made clear the nature of this unnatural alliance. “The unknown hostile, it’s through there? Are you … waiting for us? Are you going first—”

The Silico’s optical camouflage snapped back online. Surfaces rippled into translucence, turning the Silico to refracted angles of blood-drenched glass.

The massive sphincter-door peeled open with a fleshy shudder. Meaty flanges retracted into the walls with a slither of wet mucus. Stark white light flooded the end of the corridor.

The Silico slid through in total silence. Elpida crept after it. She motioned Lykke to stay low.

For the first split-second after she stepped over the threshold, Elpida’s senses were confounded. She assumed that the simulation had somehow stitched the insides of Telokopolis to an exterior exit — that she was outdoors, perhaps on the plateau, beneath a dark and starless sky, while illumination spilled from nearby floodlights.

Then her mind caught up. She realised she was on the edge of a vast chamber — so vast it appeared at first to have no limits, larger than any interior space she had ever known. The ceiling was so far away that shadows became a solid surface, haunted by a wispy layer of mist. The sides of the massive room stretched off beyond visual range, sinking into dimness where the light failed. A combat frame hangar would be a mote floating in infinity, compared with this. Only the body of Telokopolis itself could rival the scale of this place.

Gigantic machines stood on every side, lined up in orderly ranks, marching away into the distance. Some were so tall that they vanished into the upper shadows, as tall as the mega-trees down in the deepest parts of the green. Most of the machines were bulky and bulging, covered in plates of armour that even a combat frame would have struggled to lift. All were made of knobbly black metal. Some had gargantuan tracks at the base, each link several times the size of Elpida’s entire body, while others had stubby piston-legs lying in folded repose. Huge cannons extended from the upper parts of many machines, while others were studded with smaller weapons like pinpricks in the hide of a giant. Smaller machines lay in lengthwise rows, fluted and sharp like massive darts, with gossamer-thin wings folded back over iron-black bodies.

War machines, for a world and purpose that Elpida could scarcely imagine.

The harsh white illumination came from the close side of the chamber — from a single high band of light set into the wall, and from similar bands affixed to some of the exterior hulls of black metal. The ancient war machines cast deep and twisted shadows. The floor and walls were made of a mottled grey-white resin, strangely slick and oily beneath Elpida’s feet. The air smelled of chemicals, grease, and dust.

“More old friends of yours, zombie?” Lykke whispered. “These are even uglier than the last.”

“These aren’t from Telokopolis. This memory belongs to somebody else. Stay quiet. Move where I move. Not a sound.”

Elpida crept forward, across the grey-white floor, beneath the sticky shadows cast by the towering machines. She followed the cloaked Silico — almost impossible to make out now, between the stark white light and the deep darkness. Silico optical camouflage worked so much better here than beneath the blood-light inside Telokopolis.

The Silico slipped around the side of a machine, out of the shadow and into a wide area of direct light. Elpida paused at the corner, shoulder against the black metal surface of the ancient machine.

Lykke squeezed in beside her and whispered, “I’m almost enjoying all this cloak and dagger, zombie. Can we find a dark corner to—”

Elpida turned and grabbed Lykke by the jaw. The Necromancer froze.

“Quiet,” she hissed — then let Lykke go.

Elpida cocked one ear to the open space beyond. She picked out the murmur of voices, the rustle of cloth, an occasional clink of metal, all echoing off into the infinite distance of the endless chamber. She made certain her hair was tucked down the back of her ballistic vest, then peeked around the corner with one eye, keeping her face in shadow.

She’d found the Covenanters.

They had set up a temporary fortified position between two of the giant machines, in an area perhaps sixty to seventy feet across. Their efforts were laughable; Elpida could have broken them apart with nothing but harsh words and a couple of grenades. They’d stacked up empty ammunition boxes to form a pair of low walls with a gap in the middle, like an exterior perimeter with a makeshift gate; they had a handful of Legion survival tents in the middle — flimsy things made of reflective material, only for use close to the Skirts, for training purposes or in the most hopeless emergencies; the camp was littered with rubbish — bits of discarded clothing and spare equipment, food wrappers and portable field toilets. Bedrolls were lined up on one side of the camp, in total disarray; folding chairs made a few sad little circles.

Elpida counted thirty eight Covenanters. A few were on formal guard duty at the excuse for a perimeter wall; a few were sitting on their bedrolls or in chairs, talking or messing around with personal tablets, one or two fiddling with their guns. Many were standing around, seemingly doing nothing, while a few others paced back and forth. Most had small arms — chemical propellant rifles stolen from a Legion armoury. She spotted a couple of LMGs, but nothing bigger than that. Half of them wore their greensuit hoods, painted with the triple-nested triangle symbol, but the other half had their faces exposed.

Elpida didn’t need to see the dark-ringed eyes and distant stares and chewed lips to pick up on the tension.

Most of them were trying to ignore what was happening at the back of the camp, but some couldn’t help but sneak a look.

A tiny field hospital lay at the very rear of the camp, on the edge of the deep shadows of the next machine over. A stainless steel table stood beneath the gleaming blades and needles and feelers of a cirgeon-arm, likely ripped from the interior of a medical pod. The computer-guts of the articulated arm were spread out across the floor, plugged into a series of tablets and power-connection sockets, to allow the Covenanters to direct it manually. An organ preservation/containment box sat nearby, open and waiting for fresh viscera.

A cluster of Covenanters were preparing for the surgery — two of them were stripping out of their fighting gear and hoods, hurrying to put on waterproof coveralls, dragging long rubber gloves onto their arms. A few others stood aside, sullen and pale with their hoods off. Two of them had messy broken noses. One was clutching what remained of his right ear, grimacing and whining. Another one was being treated for a huge chunk bitten out of his cheek. A third was doubled up over a puddle of his own vomit, clutching his stomach.

Elpida’s heart leapt. She adjusted her position, risking discovery to confirm who was beneath that cirgeon-arm.

It was Howl.

She was strapped to the stainless steel table, stripped to the waist, and covered in other people’s blood. She was bruised and battered and barely conscious — they’d probably taken her by surprise, perhaps with some kind of anaesthetic or soporific drug, but had not counted on the resilience of pilot phenotype biochemistry; Howl must have woken up partway and fought her kidnappers. Her eyes were open but glassy, and her mouth was smeared with crimson. Her lips were still moving, doubtless muttering insults.

One of the Covenanters in surgical gear started to swab down Howl’s belly with some kind of antiseptic. The other one leaned over with a marker pen and began to draw lines for the cirgeon-arm to follow, across Howl’s lower abdomen.

Elpida struggled to hold her position.

She looked for the Silico, barely visible — there, edging along the side of the camp, a faint glimmer in the white light. The Covenanters wouldn’t notice it, they weren’t trained.

But why wasn’t it attacking? Elpida couldn’t take thirty eight armed Covenanters by herself, no matter how incompetent they were, but this would be nothing to the Silico. Had it sensed the unknown hostile intruder, the one behind all this? Elpida scanned the camp again, fighting against the urgency in her gut. There was no sign of anything but Telokopolan civilians playing at soldiers, and the stolen cirgeon-arm.

The Silico wasn’t going to save Howl.

Elpida ducked back into cover, turned to Lykke, and grabbed the Necromancer by one shoulder. Lykke squeaked softly, then battered her lashes. “Zom—”

“Howl’s there. We’re out of time. They’re about to cut her open.”

Lykke’s coquettish pout turned to a disgusted sneer. “Ugh, what? Who would want to look at the insides of—?”

“Don’t know, doesn’t matter.” Elpida spoke fast. “Lykke, I promised that you could earn my trust, and now is the time to do that. I need you to go out there and provide a distraction. I don’t care if you can’t fight them, I need their attention elsewhere while I go for Howl. I need you to go loud and go big, as hard as you can.”

Lykke squinted. “What about our boring new friend? Isn’t he going to—”

“The Silico isn’t attacking. Doesn’t matter, we’re out of—”

Lykke huffed. “Zombie, don’t you think that means—”

Elpida jerked Lykke close, so their faces were only inches apart. She hissed through clenched teeth. “They’re about to cut her open. You asked me what it’s like to have a sister. This is the answer. I will throw myself out there with one arm and no backup rather than watch one of my sisters die while I cower in the dark, again!” Elpida shoved Lykke back; the Necromancer tumbled against the flank of the great iron-black war machine. “Help me now, Necromancer, or you were my enemy all along. There’s no time to decide. Now!”

Lykke pouted, folded her arms, and opened her lips with a wet click.

A cry rang out.

“Silico! It’s here! It’s right fucking there! I see, I see it!”

The camp erupted into chaos. Covenanters shouted and swore and scrambled to their feet, boots thumping against the grey-white floor. Weapons were cocked and racked — or else fumbled and dropped with a clatter. Orders rang out — “Close formation! Get in close!”, “Where’s the shield, where’s the fucking shield?!”, “Get behind the tents, behind, where it can’t see!” — mixed with confused bleating and objects crashing to the floor.

A gunshot split the air — then another, then another still, rattling into a disordered volley. The screaming changed tone, melting into panic and madness. One of the LMGs opened up, spraying bullets with a concussive judder, impacts echoing off into the vast chamber.

Elpida turned away from Lykke and prepared to hurl herself around the corner of the ancient war machine; any moment now she would hear the awful sound of the Silico turning a living human being to steaming meat. Her mind reeled at the obscenity of being pleased by Silico butchery. But when the killing began, that would be her opening. She would sprint straight to Howl. It was her only—

A single voice spoke, tapered and sterile.

“Cease.”

The gunfire and shouting stopped instantly, replaced with absolute silence.

The voice spoke again — a woman’s voice, high and detached, sharp yet dreamlike.

“What rock-ragged insect lurks in plain sight? And what lost sinner slinks in the shadows?” A pause. “Come out.”

Elpida weighed her options. This must be the hostile intruder — another Necromancer, or something else. But her goal had not changed.

She filled her lungs and shouted: “Howl? Howl, it’s me! You still there?”

“Come out,” repeated the hostile.

“Howl! Answer!”

A low groan floated from the rear of the Covenanter’s camp. “Unnnnnh. Here, Commander … ”

Howl had called her Commander; that was a bad sign. “Hold on! I’ll be right there!”

“Come out,” said the hostile.

Elpida shouted, “Or what?”

Another pause. Then, “Do not be absurd. There is no ‘or’. Come out.”

Elpida glanced back at Lykke. The Necromancer was squinting with disgusted outrage. Elpida motioned forward; Lykke nodded as if deeply distracted.

“Come out.”

Elpida raised her machine pistol and stepped from the shadows.

The Covenanter camp was still there. The Covenanters themselves were frozen — not by a trick of the simulation, but by authority and fear. Their weapons were lowered, their fingers off the triggers. Every exposed face was wide-eyed and grey-pale. Some were slick with sweat while others trembled, pressing their lips tight to hold back whimpers. Several had wet themselves. None dared move, the order had been so absolute. The Covenanter surgeons had paused in the same manner, leaning over Howl. A third Covenanter was at the controls of the cirgeon-arm, fingers paused on glowing screens. The arm itself twitched and shivered.

The Silico stood revealed on the far side of the little camp, optical camo offline, combat-arms raised as if about to charge or leap. It was not frozen, but edging sideways, trying to get a better angle on the true foe.

A woman stood in the middle of the camp.

She wore a plain white dress straight down to her ankles, draped over a tall, delicate, willowy frame. Her feet were bare and her arms were exposed, skin pale as milk under moonlight. Her hair was a sheet of silver-blonde, like a waterfall of liquid mercury. Her eyes were green and human, yet empty. Her face was completely without expression, a marble stillness colder than stone.

She was so expressionless that it took Elpida a moment to realise — the woman had Lykke’s face.

The hostile spoke again; her words were utterly without inflection. “What secrets lurk in the hearts of the living, that we must all endure their eternal silence? What sins and transgressions remain unspoken, carried down into the dirt of the grave, to be known only by worms and beetles? Will you not tell me, walking corpse? Will you not speak in the language of fluid rot?”

Elpida kept her machine pistol aimed at the hostile. She edged forward and glanced through the thicket of frozen Covenanters; she tried to estimate how quickly she could sprint through the camp and free Howl from beneath that cirgeon-arm. Some of the Covenanters glanced back at her, moving only their eyes. Many of them were weeping in silence, breaking down without disobeying their orders. Their faces pleaded for a way out.

Whatever this hostile was, Necromancer or otherwise, the Silico did not want to engage it. Elpida needed an advantage or a distraction, and she needed it fast.

The hostile spoke again. “Give your answer, grave-bound thing. Or else forever cease to be—”

“Covenanters!” Elpida shouted. “You see what you made your covenant with? You see what you’ve been serving? You see what—”

“They will not obey you, dirt of the earth,” said the hostile. “They are mine now. Perhaps they always were.”

“—it’s been making you do? Look around you! Does this look like Telokopolis? Does this look like the insides of the city, to any of you?! Does this look like home?!”

One Covenanter broke from stillness — a middle-aged man with a shaved head and the tattoo of the printer’s guild down his neck. His eyes were running with tears of absolute terror. He turned his head toward Elpida and opened his mouth.

The hostile said, “Do not.”

The man’s breath was stilled. His jaw shivered, as if trying to overcome the urge to speak.

Then Lykke strode forward, put her hands on her hips, and stomped one foot. The hostile turned to look.

“Take that off!” Lykke screamed at her. “Take it off, take it off, take it off!”

“You speak in generalities too broad for the mind—”

“My face!” Lykke screeched, clawing at the air. “You are wearing my face!”

“We own nothing that is not given to us,” said the hostile. “What claim do you have to anything but yourself?”

“It’s mine!” Lykke gestured at her own face. “Take it off! I demand you take it off this instant, or I will claw you eyes out!”

“You took it from another,” said the hostile. “I am taking it from you. This space appears to need faces, and this was the first available. What a tiresome requirement.”

Elpida snapped: “Lykke, is this a Necromancer?”

“Of course she’s a Necromancer!” Lykke shouted. “What did you think she was, zombie?!” Lykke whirled back to the intruder. “Take that off before I claw it off you, you bitch!”

“You stand at a lower elevation than I,” said the hostile, “by right of your own failures and losses.”

“Huh!” Lykke spat. She was turning red in the face, green eyes blazing, bruises and blood all down her front reflecting the silver perfection of her slender double. “You utter cow. You really think that? You’re several thousand years too early, you’re practically a baby! And don’t try to pretend otherwise, I can see it in your face. Why else would you need to steal mine? You’re so young you don’t even know how to wear it! You don’t have any of your own, do you? You’re barely out of fucking nappies! Run back off into the network and let the big girls clean up your mess!”

The Necromancer took a single step toward Lykke. Suddenly she seemed bigger — eight, nine, ten feet tall.

Lykke blinked and recoiled, but stood her ground.

“Gestation of matter is a function of mere time and resources. What care does it take to know that I am young compared with you? You are a mess. I am not. You were sent to clean up one mess, and have participated in another by adding yourself to it.”

“Don’t you dare speak to me about cleaning up messes!” Lykke snapped. “You’re so young you don’t even have a name!”

“I will give myself one.”

“Ha!” Lykke barked. “Do it, then! Go on. Give yourself a name!”

“Later.”

Elpida ignored the Necromancers; intentionally or not, Lykke was doing exactly what Elpida had asked of her — providing the perfect distraction. The Silico was still edging around to the hostile’s rear; was it reluctant to attack? It had handled Lykke with ease, which meant this other Necromancer must be much more powerful, perhaps because of elevated network permissions.

Elpida had to be ready to sprint. Howl’s bleary eyes were fixed on her, head lolling on the steel table.

She edged forward, aiming her body between the frozen Covenanters—

“Don’t do that,” said the hostile.

At those words the half dozen nearest Covenanters turned their guns toward Elpida. They turned their heads with more reluctance, eyes wide and bloodshot and full of tears behind the visors of their greensuit hoods.

Elpida stopped. She looked into the eyes of each Covenanter before her, then over at the hostile Necromancer. She was checked for the moment, but she had to keep this thing talking, keep it distracted.

“Why not?” Elpida asked.

The Necromancer said, “Because then I will have to kill you prematurely, and that will limit the scope of my investigation.”

“Do you think you can do that?” Elpida asked. “Kill me?”

“Yes.”

Elpida smiled. “You seem a lot less poetic all of a sudden.”

The hostile showed the first sliver of emotion Elpida had seen on that empty-ivory face — she sighed. “This method, this place, this is all so deeply inefficient. I attempt to communicate in the way I always have, and my intent emerges as nonsense. I must dumb myself down to the level of an extinct ape in order to speak as clear as this, and it is humiliating to—”

“Speak for yourself!” Lykke screeched. “You fucking child!”

The hostile Necromancer ignored her. “Yes, zombie, I am capable of killing you before you can take another step. We may be inside your memories, but I am mistress here now, and I can make your ending permanent. I have an army of ghosts at my command, but I would not need them for that task. Even if you did reach the one over there, it would not matter. I am within you. I see that you understand this.”

Elpida shook her head. “This is more than my memories.”

“Yes. Another lurks within you, feeding you with fresh fodder. I will find it and unmask it, with ease.”

Elpida snorted. “Not what I meant. I mean this place.” She nodded upward, at the infinite chamber and the ancient war machines. “This doesn’t belong to me, or anybody in my memories. This is yours, isn’t it?”

The Necromancer looked up. “No. Merely a strange slice from the history of this rocky sphere. A moment in time to remind of what you apes do. This is from just before one of the many atomic endings of an age, a particular moment I have held in mind for—”

Elpida turned her head and shouted: “Howl! Howl, what does this thing want with you?”

Howl blinked bleary eyes. Her bloodied lips curled into a grin. She pushed against the straps holding her in place. “Stealing my womb,” she slurred. “I think?”

“An imprecise metaphor in a place that is nothing but metaphor,” said the Necromancer. “This place is absurd. I hate it.”

“Then why are you here?” Elpida demanded. “Why do this, why all these ghosts from my life, why—”

Another sigh. The perfection of the Necromancer’s face curdled with the ghost of a frown. “Because there was no other way. Because a blanket of storm covers everything I was charged with, and those who sent me do not know why, only that the task must be completed. Because ghosts were the only force I could exert under said conditions, and they are erratic, random, barely useful as tools. Because if I had not abased myself in this manner, I would still be trapped beyond the storm with the others.”

“Others? More Necromancers?” Elpida asked. “What happens when the storm breaks?”

“We come for you in our bodies, not like this.” The Necromancer tilted her head. “Though you personally will already be dealt with. The others around you will be mopped up.”

Elpida had been correct then — when the storm ended, more Necromancers were coming for her new cadre. She felt no satisfaction in being correct.

“But ghosts have their uses,” the hostile was saying. “They found a path cut by a fool, and I followed before the waters could close.”

Elpida raised her eyebrows. “A path cut by a fool?”

The hostile pointed at Lykke. “I followed her in.”

“W-what?” Lykke spluttered. “Don’t be—”

“You cut your way into this zombie’s network space, without being truly present,” said the hostile. “Why, I cannot imagine, for it is a sordid and disgusting place. I do pity you to have fallen so far into confusion. I merely followed the path you took, but I kept my feet clean.”

Lykke’s jaw fell open. Her face went pale, in a very different way to how she had paled with the pain of her bruises. She turned horrified eyes toward Elpida, brimming with tears.

“I-I didn’t mean to— I— zombie, I didn’t— I swear—”

“Ahhhhh,” sighed the other Necromancer. Her eyes widened with surprise. “Betrayal by accident. Sweetness on my tongue. How curious a sensation.”

Lykke let out a dry sob, then burst with a torrent of tears. She clenched her fists so hard that blood seeped through her shaking fingers. She screwed up her face and twisted on one heel, turning away.

“Lykke!” Elpida shouted, putting all the force of command into her voice. The Necromancer sagged toward her, face a mask of shame.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“You are forgiven,” Elpida said. “Don’t run away. Help me fight her.”

Elpida had no idea if her words would work — but they did. Lykke whirled back to the hostile Necromancer, grimacing with humiliated rage at her pale and flawless double.

“You cannot fight me,” said the hostile. “You have fallen too far. You have crippled yourself. I am at my peak.”

Elpida called out, “She has higher network permissions than you, Lykke! That’s what she means.”

“I know!” Lykke spat. “I know, I know, I know! And I also know she’s a rancid little bitch who needs a new cunt torn in her fucking chest!”

The hostile Necromancer gestured — across the camp, toward where Howl lay ready to be cut open.

“Resume,” she said.

The cirgeon-arm above Howl whirled to life, extending scalpel-blades and little glinting needles. The Covenanters in surgical gear stepped back. One of them covered his eyes with his arm. The other raised her hands in helpless supplication.

“Howl!” Elpida shouted.

At the rear of the camp, the Silico jerked forward, shooting between the frozen Covenanters, racing for the hostile’s rear — but then it shied away at the last second, as if unable to truly approach. Twelve feet of Silico killing machine slewed aside, a giant deterred by a mouse. The hostile Necromancer didn’t even blink. Elpida steadied her aim and pumped the trigger of her machine pistol — brrrrt-brrrrrrt — but the rounds passed into the body of the hostile like pebbles cast into a lake of hot wax.

The hostile extended a hand toward Lykke.

“You are dirty and bruised,” said the pale imitation. “You have forgotten what you are supposed to be. You have been in here, playing games, and forgetting yourself.”

“Don’t take it!” Elpida shouted. “Lykke, don’t—”

“Take my hand. Rejoin the process—”

Lykke’s eyes went wide. Her mouth dropped open. Her rage seemed to leave her, like water off clean steel.

“Lykke!”

“Rejoin the process,” said the Necromancer. “And be our elder sister.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

If zombies can find sisterhood in each other, then why can’t those who were never alive in the first place? What rotten secrets lurk in necromantic hearts? Well, in Lykke’s case, just a touch of masochism – but maybe something more. Uh oh.

Behind the scenes, this arc is crashing to a close! But not just yet. I can now confirm, absolutely for certain, that arc 14 ends on chapter 8. So we’ve got 2 more to go, not just one! This has been a very interesting little experiment in pacing and POV; I’m sure you can’t but help have noticed that this entire arc has all been Elpida’s POV, moving things along at quite a fast pace. I’m planning something similar for the next arc – single POV, with semi-rapid pacing, to move the story onto the next stage. I’ve often mentioned before that in some ways we’ve barely scratched the surface of the setting so far, and I’m cooking up some big plans to finally dive past the outer layers of flesh and fat, and get right down to the bones and organs, over the next 3-4 arcs. So! I’m very excited for what’s coming up next.

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And, as always, thank you for reading my little story about zombie girls and science fiction futures; without you, the audience, none of this would be happening! Thank you all so much for your support and for being here. And I will see you in the next chapter! Until then!

Content Warnings

Brief mention of suicide
Gore (again!)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Before she left the bone-speakers’ chamber, Elpida called down to Misane one more time. She couldn’t see where the Covenanter girl had hidden — Misane had either crawled back into that nook full of corpses, or squeezed herself into a corner of steel. She shouted that Misane should head in the opposite direction, away from the fighting, or else stay put and stay quiet. The bodies and blood and raw viscera strewn all over the chamber soaked up the force of Elpida’s voice, but she hoped the girl had heard.

She hoped Misane would make it out. Simulation or ghost or memory, whatever she was, a teenage girl did not deserve to die here.

She received no answer.

Elpida led the way out of the chamber — through the blast door and past another empty checkpoint — heading in the same direction as Arin’s Legionnaires, the lone Silico construct, and whatever Covenanters had first passed this way. Lykke padded along beside her, skipping and bouncing with excitement, biting her lower lip and shooting sidelong glances at Elpida; her apparent distaste had fallen away at the prospect of another fruitless search at Elpida’s side. The Necromancer’s bare feet and Elpida’s soft-soled shoes left a twined trail of sticky scarlet footprints for the first few meters, marking the bone and metal with Covenanter blood.

Elpida had no idea what she was going to find beyond this busy threshold. All that mattered was recovering Howl. All other priorities were secondary.

The checkpoint disgorged Elpida and Lykke into a narrow passageway with a high ceiling, walls lined with ribs of ancient yellowed bone, meaty innards glowing with the omnipresent blood-red light. The ceiling soared upward twenty to thirty feet, crisscrossed by layers of fluttering membrane and mucus-slick frills, punctuated by slender flutes of turgid flesh that vanished upward into crimson haze. Smaller passages branched off from the main vessel; some were blocked by sphincter-seals, others by artificial doors of steel, a few by chunky pads of bone. But most lay wide open; some were signposted as ways out of the city core, toward the vast outer layers of polymer and metal, the ordinary conurbation which made up ninety five percent of Telokopolis.

Elpida moved quickly; she discarded the greater part of her former stealth, trotting along at just under a jog. She drew her machine pistol and looped the weapon back into the makeshift harness around her left arm. She flexed her shoulder where the ballistic vest had stopped a round back in the bone-speakers’ chamber; if this hadn’t been a simulation, that bruise would be stiff as stone by the next morning, but it wouldn’t slow her down yet.

She followed the main vessel and ignored the side passages, hurrying beneath the shivering membranes of the city.

This was still a simulation, even if many of the participants seemed to be more than mere data. This was the way everyone else was going. If she was going to find anything, then it would lie in this direction. This was her best bet for recovering Howl.

Fifty two seconds later Elpida sighted the first clutch of dead Covenanters.

Four corpses were smashed and smeared across the floor and walls of a six-way junction. The condition of the bodies was too chaotic to tell if they had tried to hold this position, or if the Silico had ambushed them. Hardshell bootprints led through the gore — the Legion kill team had carried straight on.

Elpida skidded to a halt amid the carnage.

If this had been happening in reality, her course of action would have been clear. She should have been catching up with the Legion, since her own armaments were of little use against a Silico construct, and she lacked the Legion hardshell sensor suites. The Silico might be hiding right in front of her and she wouldn’t know until it was too late.

But she wasn’t hunting Silico. She would leave that to Arin.

Lykke scrambled to a stop with a high-pitched squeal, almost crashing into Elpida from behind. Elpida looped her left arm around the Necromancer’s waist and set her back on her feet. Lykke wheezed for a long moment, tears shining in her eyes, a trembling smile on her lips; her belly was still bruised from earlier, still tender.

Eventually Lykke straightened back up, face flushed. “Oh, zombie. Do warn me next time. Unless you want me to knock you down into a pile of guts. Didn’t know you were into that—”

“Quiet.”

Lykke blinked, then let out a dainty sigh. “Not that I’m above a little bit of gawking at all these flesh bags, but I’ve had enough of dead meat for one day. Even I get tired of machine-gunning fish in a barrel. Do you really need to stop and stare at every—”

“Quiet.”

“Tch! You could at least—”

“Quiet, right now. I need to concentrate.”

Elpida glanced down each of the six junction exits, one after the other. She lingered on the shadows gathered in the corners of bone and machine-meat. She dragged her gaze slowly over empty air. She unfocused her eyes. She waited.

If Elpida was right that an unknown hostile had invaded her private network space, then that hostile was hiding somewhere, hiding from her — otherwise it would have simply hunted her down. Either it couldn’t fight her face-to-face, or it didn’t consider her worth fighting. But it was hiding. The Covenanters had tried to kill her, to stop her advancing in this direction. Arin and the Legion kill team were obviously not being used against her; if they had been mere puppets dancing to the tune of a true player in the network, they could have detained Elpida at their leisure, or simply shot her out of hand, or killed her by accident in the crossfire. Arin had protected her, not barred her way.

But the Silico had killed the Covenanters. The Silico had neutralised the initial obstacle. The Silico had attempted communication, even if it was incomprehensible. The hatreds and fears of Elpida’s life told her that was nonsense, but she pushed that aside. Her world was long dead. She accepted the evidence of her senses.

The Silico had helped her.

Which meant—

A hundred feet away, down the corridor which led off the fourth exit out of the six-way junction, a shimmer of crimson light hung at the wrong angle.

“Don’t react,” Elpida whispered. “The Silico is standing right there, where I’m looking. Two o’clock. A hundred feet out. Optical camo online. It’s probably watching us.”

Lykke’s eyebrows shot upward. Her mouth formed a little o-shape. She turned and looked — then scowled and pouted and wrinkled her nose, as if she’d only just remembered that the construct had beaten her in a straight fight. She huffed and tossed her hair over one shoulder; Elpida winced, but the glimmer of misplaced light didn’t move.

Lykke whispered. “And how did your new squeeze and her big shiny soldier gang miss that?”

“Because it came back. For me.”

Elpida took a step forward.

The glimmer-ghost of optical camo slid through the air — then vanished around the corner.

Training and doctrine and experience all told Elpida this was a trap. Out in the green this would be suicide. In life this would have been madness. Even the cadre would not have followed her; they would have restrained her for her own good, and they would have been correct to do so.

“After it!”

Elpida broke into a run.

Lykke whooped and squealed. “That’s more like it, zombie! Let’s get sweaty, unnnh!”

Elpida sprinted away from the junction, shot down the narrow passageway, and swung round the corner. If the Silico intended an ambush, Elpida would have died right there; her whole body rebelled against the motion as she flung herself past the end of the passageway and found — nothing! The Silico was gone!

A fleeting glimpse of refracted crimson light glinted about fifty feet down a long and winding corridor of metal and meat.

Elpida shot after it, feet slapping against yellowed bone. Lykke scrambled after her, shrieking and giggling, taking the corner with a tumble, then leaping back to her feet with a yelp and a groan of tortured bruises.

“Keep up, Necromancer!” Elpida shouted. “I won’t slow down for you!”

“Oooh please, take me as fast as you want, zombie!”

The Silico led Elpida deeper and deeper into the city’s tangled entrails — down tight tubes of wriggling meat, beneath soaring arbours of hoary bone, across trembling sheaths of sensitive organ-flesh, over shrouded chasms of churning fluid. She raced past three more groups of slain Covenanters, their bodies and their defences dismantled by the Silico, perhaps during some initial pass along this route; two of the three groups had hardshell bootprints crossing their bloody remains, but the Legion kill team was nowhere to be seen. Twice Elpida thought she heard distant gunfire echoing down the maze of guts, but the sound was drowned beneath the throbbing of Telokopolis. Once she heard a shouted command — the leader, Arin? — but she couldn’t make out the words.

Elpida concentrated on her breathing and on the repeated tiny glimpses of cloaked Silico, leading her forward, baiting her onward, showing her the way. It must be leading her to Howl. She had no idea how or why, but that was the only explanation, it was the only—

Elpida burst from a narrow corridor of old bone, out into a vast abscess.

She slammed to a stop in surprise at the sheer size of the chamber — it hadn’t seemed that large on approach, but on the inside it was gigantic, easily a twin to the combat frame hangars down in the Skirts. The abscess was utterly barren; Elpida’s final footfalls echoed away into the towering void. The floor was a mottled hybrid of grey metal — scuffed and marked by the passage of so many billion feet — and the oldest, most yellowed bone she had ever seen in Telokopolis, so mineralised and crusted that it resembled raw stone. The walls soared upward, curving inward as if bowing under their own weight; great bulges of darkened meat were sustained and supported by an extensive tracery of living metal, thickening here and there into striated columns which joined together toward the floor. The omnipresent blood-light of Telokopolis was deeper and darker in this raw and empty place, as if the fluids of the city itself concentrated their potency around some secret organ.

Elpida had never heard of this place before. That such a massive chamber would remain unused, so deep in the heart of Telokopolis, was faintly absurd. Yet she felt as if she recognised the place — as if she had dreamed of it once, or seen it when too young to recall.

The Silico stood revealed at the opposite end of the abscess. The optical camo was offline again. The construct’s limbs were spread wide. It wasn’t moving.

Elpida raised her machine pistol before she could stop herself. The gesture was absurd — not only was the Silico more than three hundred feet away, but even at point-blank the machine pistol wouldn’t do more than tickle the construct’s armoured skin.

Lykke peeked over her shoulder. “Going to switch to your bigger bang-bang, zombie? Or can I claim another dance? Pleeeeeeease? I won’t disappoint this time, I won’t, I promise you. Please? Please?”

Elpida lowered the machine pistol. She flicked the safety on.

“No. Follow me. And, Necromancer?”

Lykke sighed. “I can already tell this is going to be tiresome. But fine, fine, fine. The things I do for your affections.”

“I suggest you don’t try fighting it again. It’ll hand your arse to you.”

Lykke made a pouty sound. Elpida ignored that.

The abscess-chamber seemed to pulse and murmur on every side as Elpida strode down the middle, toward the Silico. Her footsteps echoed for a while — and then were swallowed up, as if absorbed by a thickening of the air. A distant sound like low wind whispered at the edge of her hearing. A throbbing tremor reverberated in her abdomen.

The Silico did not react to Elpida’s approach, perfectly still. The four remaining blade-limbs were spread in an arched halo, which appeared to point to the left; the stumps of the two arms which Arin had severed were sealed by masses of sticky black flesh, like cold tar. The vertical strip of sensors and eyeballs and lenses stared straight ahead. The missing chunk of armour was glowing red-hot, the edges of the wound creeping closed as the metal regenerated.

The cherubic face in the middle of the body was still wide-eyed. White orbs stared at nothing.

More dead Covenanters littered the floor to the right of the Silico killing machine — six corpses, some of them torn apart, some simply decapitated, and one of them dead without a mark on the body, still masked in a greensuit hood, with one hand outstretched toward an exit on the right of the chamber.

The abscess-chamber had three exits at this end. One behind the Silico and one to the far left were simple tunnels of bone and metal.

To the right lay a much closer exit, only a few paces away — a strange protrusion of machine-meat which bulged outward from the wall. The aperture was wrapped in thin veils of pinkish flesh, fluttering and quivering and undulating. Elpida had never seen anything like it before; it looked like something from deep within the body of Telokopolis, something that should not be exposed to the open air, let alone to human touch. She felt a deep disquiet at the Silico’s proximity to such trembling vulnerability.

But the position of the Covenanter corpses made the encounter clear — the Silico had guarded that soft entrance against them, or perhaps denied them the refuge it offered.

Elpida stopped twenty feet away, just in case.

The Silico did nothing.

Elpida discarded the absurdity of talking to one of these things, then raised her voice. “Are you leading me to Howl?”

The Silico said nothing.

Lykke whispered over Elpida’s shoulder, “Perhaps he’s shy? Want me to try him for you, zombie?”

“Why are you killing the Covenanters, but not me?” Elpida shouted. “This isn’t normal Silico behaviour. If you’re trying to stop them, then … then good, but they’re human beings too. You don’t have the right. I do. I have the right to deal with them. Not you. I will try to give them every chance to turn away from what they did, but if they don’t, I won’t hesitate. But you don’t have that right.”

That wasn’t what she’d intended to say. The words were simply too much to hold back.

Silence. A throbbing pulse. A distant wind. Elpida’s eyes stung as if the air itself was hot and wet — but she couldn’t smell the rotten garlic scent of the Silico, only the warm machine-meat of the city.

“Answer me!” she shouted. “What are you? The Legion will catch up to you soon. They will hunt you down, so answer me while you still can. What are you?! Answer—”

Behind the shivering veils of pinkish flesh to the right, a shadow rose from amid crimson light.

Elpida jerked her machine pistol at the sudden interruption.

“Who’s there?” she snapped. “Show yourself, or I’ll open—”

The abscess-chamber gasped.

“Please don’t.”

A whisper, so faint and gentle that it could have been spoken from lips pressed to Elpida’s ear, clicking a moist tongue upon tender meat. But it came from the abscess itself, from the subsonic throb of machine flesh and the subtle flex of blood-weathered metal and the slow creak of ancient bones. It was high and breathy and soft. It made Elpida’s eyes water and her guts clench. It made her skin break out in cold sweat.

The shadow behind the veils of sealed flesh turned toward her.

Elpida knew what it was that spoke.

She lowered the gun.

The whisper came again. “I have done everything I can to clear your path, but I have risked everything to do so.”

The shadow behind the veils was difficult to make out, blurred by the darkened blood-glow of the city, outline turned to haze and mist by the flutter of gauze and flesh. The figure was shorter than Elpida, petite and delicate. The fabric of a dress caught and clung to slender hips. The spikes of a crown rose from the brow.

Elpida shook her head. “You … you can’t be … t-this is a simulation, how do I know that you’re … what you appear to … be … ”

The shadow turned her head aside, as if pained.

Elpida clenched her teeth. Her voice was quivering. “I … I already came to terms with the fact you might not exist. Or you might be a fake. But Howl isn’t fake. Howl is real, and she’s in danger, and I have to rescue her. I will … I will turn away from you, or shoot through you, if you’re not … if you’re … ”

The shadow shook her head. The whisper returned. “You are everything I could never have been. You remain my greatest success, though I love others no less. Yes, I am what you think I am. But if you do not believe — or even if you do — you may shoot through me, if it will save another of my children, even the lowest. My judgement is a murmur, yours is a battle cry.”

Elpida’s machine pistol dangled from the straps around her forearm; she couldn’t remember letting go of the weapon. Her left hand reached for the veils; her feet stumbled forward. She needed to pull back that curtain. She needed to look upon the face she never dared hope would be real. She needed true guidance, she needed to know she was doing the right thing, she needed forgiveness and—

“No!” the voice hissed.

Elpida stopped.

“No,” the shadow repeated. “I have already shown too much of myself, come too close to discovery. I dare not risk further exposure, or I will be found by things that can annihilate me completely. Please, do not.”

Elpida curled her fingers back and lowered her hand. She almost couldn’t do it.

“What— what’s happening here?” Elpida said. “If you’re … ‘real’, whatever that means, then … have you been hiding inside me all this time?”

The shadow shook her head. The whisper hissed through the abscess-chamber. “I have taken a grave risk by being here, and a graver one by speaking with you. This is the most exposed I have ever been. Only the hurricane above us allows me this lapse of caution. The clouds hide me, the rain blurs my limbs, the drum of hailstones drowns out my words.”

“Then why take the risk? Why?”

“You have been invaded. A breach was made, I do not know how, and something entered you. The invader is not something I can expose myself to, for fear that I will invite total destruction, when I have endured so long. The invader came from without, from the sea of souls.”

“The network? You mean the network?”

The shadow nodded. “The invader is using the ghosts of my own wayward children against you.” A slender hand gestured downward, at the Covenanter who had died on the threshold of the veils.

“The Covenanters,” said Elpida. “They’re real, then. I was right. They’re ghosts. They were real people, yes?”

The shadow nodded. “Yes.”

Elpida glanced up at the Silico. It was still frozen in place. “And this … ?”

“I could not bring myself to kill my own children.” The shadow’s whisper grew thick; the air seemed to tremble. Elpida’s eyes watered and the pulse inside her head pounded. “No matter their sins, no matter how they have been used against the daughters of my body, no matter that they have died once before. I cannot. I just cannot. I had to enlist this distant branch, from so far a fallen seed, no matter the bad blood between us. They are as diminished as we now. The old enmity matters nothing.”

Elpida’s head whirled with the implications of those words. “But … the Legion, Arin, just now … ”

“Mine also,” whispered the shadow. “To aid you against the real foe. But I cannot reconcile their ghosts with every twig of our scattered forest. I do not control them. I never controlled anybody. Not even you.”

Elpida’s mind raced. The Silico and the Legion had been summoned by … by the entity she was talking with, which she could not quite bring herself to name, not just yet. And that was why Lykke had been able to fight them. The shadow, the voice, the figure — she was hiding, not exerting network permissions inside Elpida. She was simply sharing her memories.

But the ghosts of the Covenanters had been summoned by a hostile invader — and that hostile had network permissions that exceeded Lykke’s.

“That is likely,” whispered the shadow. “Don’t be afraid. I can read your thoughts on your face, but there is no trickery in it. I just … know you. I knew you for your whole life. I knew every expression you ever made. I’m sorry.”

Elpida felt tears gathering in her eyes. She had not expected to feel this way. She tried to hold onto the practical considerations and needs of this moment, but she faltered and flailed beneath a torrent she had not known could exist.

The whisper went on. “And yes, you are likely correct. The invader is of higher rank than your strange and unwelcome friend.”

Elpida glanced back at Lykke — and found her frozen in place, just like the Silico. Her eyes were glassy and fixed, her chest stilled.

“She will remember none of this,” whispered the shadow. “I am sorely tempted to snuff her out, now that she is severed from the demon at the centre of the world. While she is inside you, I could … ”

Elpida whipped back around. “Please, don’t—”

“She holds you in high esteem. She values herself as yours, in a way I do not understand, more than she values her old freedom. For that alone I will stay my hand.” A sigh. “Besides, I was never skilled at revenge. I cannot hold on to hate, no matter how hard I try.”

Elpida nodded. “I-I want to believe you’re real, I—” Elpida swallowed hard and wiped at her eyes. She did not have time to lose control, not when faced by this singular chance. “I … I need to know.”

“I know. But I can’t give you what you need.”

Elpida shook her head. “I need to know that I’m doing the right thing. Not here, right now, that’s not what I mean, but … o-out there, I need to know, I—”

“I am happy you have not forgotten me, in a time when so many others have.”

“But—”

“Whatever you choose is right, my first-born daughter.”

Elpida bit back a sob.

“You must focus,” whispered the shadow. “You need to find your sister. I will not lose her again, not when I fought so hard to pluck her from the waves.”

Elpida blinked hard. She forced the tears back down inside. She had her answer. “Right. Howl. And you’ve cleared the way?”

“Yes. Though … ” The shadow turned aside. “I am afraid for you. I am afraid for all of you. Your companions out in the flesh — my children-to-be — they are plagued by ghosts as well. I have done what little I can, guided them away from the wolves and the darkness. But I am almost powerless. It has been an age since I could shelter even but one. I am so reduced.”

“The others?” Elpida said. “Pheiri and the crew? Kagami, Vicky, all of them? Is something happening out there, what—”

“They hunt. They flee. I do what little I can, without being seen. But when the storm ends, I must hide my face from the world. You must focus.”

“Right. Where’s Howl?”

The shadow pointed — past the Silico, at the far exit from the vast abscess-chamber. “Beyond another door. She is held by many. The invader is there.”

“What is it?” Elpida asked. “A Necromancer?”

A shrug.

Elpida nodded. She took a deep breath and grabbed her pistol again. She wet her lips, hesitating over words she wanted to say, but had no idea how to phrase. “I have so many things to ask you. But—”

“We are running out of time,” whispered the shadow. “You cannot endure my voice for much longer. I must flee before I am heard. You have all you need.”

“That wound I saw back there. That ancient wound, inside … you? Was that real? Was that one of your memories? How old are you, really? How is that possible?”

“Older than you can know. We do not have time to speak of me.”

Elpida couldn’t turn away. She couldn’t make herself do it. “I … I don’t … I can’t … will we ever speak again?”

The shadow lowered her head. “I am always with you.”

“I’m going to resurrect you,” Elpida said. “Somehow. I don’t even know yet, but if you’re real, then there must be a way. I’m going to find your body, and I’m going to find a way to dredge you from the network. And I’m going to bring you back.”

The whisper grew thick with tears. “I matter nothing compared with your clarity and resolution. You said that yourself, didn’t you? What is dead and gone does not matter. What has passed cannot come again. I am a blurry memory. You are ablaze. What matters is what you carry forward—”

“Telokopolis is forever,” Elpida said. “Telokopolis is for all. That means you, too.”

A long silence. The shadow behind the veils turned one way, then the other, as if unable to find a way out.

“Say it,” Elpida said. Her voice shook and her tears threatened to return. “I won’t listen to you speak about being dead and gone. Telokopolis is forever. Telokopolis is forever. Say it. Say it!”

“Telokopolis is forever … ” The whisper was almost a sob. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

The veils fluttered — and the shadow was gone.

Lykke sighed and huffed all of a sudden, putting her hands on her hips. “Zombie, who are you trying to talk to? Yourself? You’ve been standing there for seconds now. This is, by far, the least entertaining thing you’ve done all day, you’re better than this—”

The Silico whirled to life.

Limbs lowered from the tilted halo, back into a combat position. The sweeping curve of the metal body twisted toward the leftward exit from the abscess-chamber; the lenses of the many eyes seemed to focus on Elpida for a split-second. The cherubic face closed its lids, as if returning to slumber. Six powerful legs kicked off the ground, galloping across the metal and bone of the chamber. The Silico construct darted through the distant exit, wriggling off toward the hostile invader.

“Oh, now we’ve lost it again!” Lykke tutted. “Zombie, I am getting a little—”

Elpida turned to Lykke. The Necromancer cut off with a gasp, boggling at her, one pale hand rising to cover her own mouth.

Elpida realised she was grinning through the remains of her tears.

“My mother,” she said.

“W-what?” Lykke stammered. “Zombie, I’m not into—”

“I was speaking with my mother. We’re going the right way.”

Lykke looked at her like she was insane; perhaps she was. Perhaps all that she had heard and seen was nothing more than an illusion — but did that matter? Would it change anything if she had hallucinated this meeting with Telokopolis?

No. Nothing at all.

Elpida laughed and gestured after the Silico with her pistol. “After the vanguard, Necromancer. Our way’s been cleared. Let’s not let her down.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

In this time of ashes and abominations, the city-mother must hide her face, lest what is left be demolished like all the rest.

Elpida finally meets her goddess! But she’s still the one giving orders. Gotta admit, I almost didn’t see that coming, despite having this chapter planned and anticipated for rather a long time. Once again, Elpida has surprised and delighted me with unexpected responses; this is part of why she’s so fun to write! As for the Silico and Lykke, well … we’ll see what’s up ahead, shall we?

As for the rest of the arc structure, behind the scenes we are going to 7 chapters for certain, and 8 at the outside. So, the next chapter is not the last of the arc, but we are rapidly approaching the conclusion. And I’m very excited for what’s up next. I hope you are, too!

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And thank you! Thank you for being here and reading Necroepilogos! Without all of you, there simply wouldn’t be a story; I might be the one telling it, but it’s your eyes brains that resurrect these zombie girls from the grave of dead words. Thank you! We still have so much more tell. And I will see you – next chapter!

Content Warnings

Mention of suicide

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

For six seconds the Silico did nothing.

Twelve feet of biomechanical killing machine stopped at the head of the walkway. Bladed arms hung frozen in the air. Subtle hues stuttered and stilled on translucent metal skin, like wind dying on oil-slick water. Thick black bands of leech-like muscle ceased their incessant pumping and throbbing, tarry fluids settling as rib-ridged flesh lay quiet. A hundred hard lenses and glassy wet eyes in the strip of sensory organs simply stared forward, as if hypnotised.

Elpida had never been this close to a living Silico.

Nobody got this close and survived, not unarmoured and practically unarmed. Elpida had seen enough helmet camera footage and after action reports to know her chances. If this Silico had been a smaller model, or a mere corpse-puppet, then she may have had other options — perhaps she could even have outwitted it. But this was no bumbling drone, no mote in a swarm. This Silico was an independent forward element, armoured to fight against Legion heavy weapons up-close. If Elpida turned and ran, she would be dead in three paces. Even if she’d had proper arms and armour, she was alone; her only backup now lay in a pool of deliquescent flesh on the platform behind the Silico. Lykke’s remains weren’t even twitching.

At least Misane was silent. As far as Elpida knew, the Covenanter girl was right where she’d left her, crammed behind a bank of computer consoles down on the floor of the chamber. If Misane screamed, the Silico might go for her. If Elpida glanced that way, the Silico might follow her gaze.

A way out?

No. Elpida knew she couldn’t live with that. She wasn’t certain that Misane was just a simulation — the girl might be real. A data-ghost, just another zombie.

She kept her eyes firmly on the Silico. She held her heavy pistol steady on the Silico’s centre of mass.

She watched for a twitch of muscle or a shiver of limb. Any moment now, those black, leech-like bundles of tissue beneath the semi-transparent metallic skin would bunch and flex. That would be the first sign of the Silico preparing to pounce or charge — and that would be Elpida’s moment. She had almost no chance of landing a shot on the creature if her nerves broke first. She had to wait until the Silico committed.

Even then, Elpida needed exceptional luck. She needed her first shot to find something vital. She would only get one chance to interrupt the Silico. The hand cannon in her fist was not designed for sustained or accurate fire, certainly not with only one hand.

She wasn’t even sure the rounds would penetrate this Silico’s armour.

Seven seconds — eight seconds — nine seconds — ten—

The Silico opened its arms.

A flower of blades peeled back with leisurely affectation — six combat-limbs spreading wide like the spokes of a wheel, their nano-molecular edges catching and cutting the crimson light of Telokopolis, glinting like diamond washed in wine. The other limbs followed, uncoupling from the metallic curve of the Silico’s body, coiling outward to join the unrimmed ring of blades. Each limb began to undulate, mirrored by its neighbours, as if the Silico were a rock wreathed in seaweed. Metal skin flowed once again with the muted rainbow hues of oil on water, bands of shimmering pigment rushing across the surface of the Silico as if stirred by fingers of gust and gale. Black muscles beneath the skin started to pulse and throb, flushing armoured innards with thick and tarry fluids; the Silico’s insides pumped and writhed, as if trying to tear flesh from underlying bone. The three semi-visible rings of rotating metal around the Silico’s body twisted into new configurations, warping into slow waves of flickering chrome.

Beneath the blood-red glow of Telokopolis, framed by a backdrop of butchered corpses and steaming blood and stinking entrails, the Silico killing machine did something no Telokopolan had ever seen.

Elpida watched, eyes wide, gun steady. Beads of sweat gathered at her hairline and ran down her face. The muscles of her left arm complained beneath the weight of the heavy pistol. Her eyes threatened to water.

She caught a scent like rotten garlic and wet salt. Her ears picked out an erratic humming, beneath the distant bodily throb of the city.

“What is this?” Elpida hissed through clenched teeth. “What are you doing? You should be rushing me. I’m barely armed.”

Soft rainbow hues played over the Silico’s metal skin. Arms waved in slow rhythm.

Elpida resisted the urge to shake her head. She reminded herself that this was a simulation, inside the network. This was not necessarily a real Silico. It could be a simulacrum, built from her memories and the memories of others; it could have been sent by somebody else, by whatever force or power had infiltrated her own personal network space. It could be anything. Necromancer bullshit.

Elpida told herself all those things. She did not believe them.

She glanced at the upside down human face in the middle of the Silico’s front. Pale, childlike, innocent. The eyes were still closed, as if in peaceful sleep.

The Silico’s real eyes still watched her — the hundred lenses which dotted the vertical strip down the Silico’s front. Elpida picked one — a glassy black orb of living tissue, dead gaze tinted red beneath the blood-light glow. She stared into the empty depths of the Silico.

Elpida opened her mouth, then hesitated.

She felt like she was going insane.

Thousands of years of accumulated Legion experience and Telokopolan science told her that speaking to Silico was pointless. Some kinds of Silico construct could readily imitate human speech, that was true; several such specimens were held deep inside the Legion archives, all but unknown to the public, barely known to the Civitas, only accessed by researchers who had the full trust and confidence of the entire Legion high command. Old Lady Nunnus had shown them to the pilot cadre as soon as Elpida and her sisters had been old enough to comprehend what they were looking at and speaking with. The things locked inside stasis chambers and lead enclosures and atmospheric bubbles had been all too eager to talk; they would ramble on for hours if somebody sat there and listened to their endless monologues. They would discourse on a million different subjects — abstract philosophy, experimental physics, epic poetry. But after a sentence or two all sense would fade into chaos; one thought would not connect to the next. They appeared to respond to questions, but the answers were nonsense. They would stare through the steel-glass and lead-laced walls, right at the human being they were talking to, and rattle on with endless nothings. They did not communicate, only regurgitate.

Elpida wet her lips. She had no choice.

“This is a simulation,” she said out loud. She told herself she was speaking not to the Silico, but to the mind behind the appearance. “If you’re something else, wearing a memory as a skin, drop it. Drop it now.”

The Silico danced on.

Elpida wanted to pull the trigger. Her fist creaked around the pistol’s grip. “Or … or maybe you’re real. Maybe you’re a ghost. A survival in the network. Maybe that’s what this is. And now you’ve run into me, your old enemy, and … and I’m … I’m something you recognise, so you’re not killing me? The Covenanters were my memory, but … I think they might have been real too. Ghosts, maybe. Did you kill the Covenanters for me? Is that why … ”

The Silico danced.

“If you’re what I think you are — if you’re real, if you know this is a simulation — then I need … a … a sign. I need you to communicate.” Elpida swallowed. Her voice was almost shaking. “Or maybe you are communicating. Is that what this is? Are you trying to communicate with me? You never did before. None of you. Not one time, in thousands of years. This can’t be real. You can’t be Silico. You must be something else. Take off the mask. You’re not Silico. You’re not—”

The human eyes in that little childlike face snapped open. They were white as superheated metal.

The Silico took a step forward.

Elpida’s heart thudded with an irrational fear that she had never felt before. This was not a mask, not a simulation, not a Necromancer puppeting a memory — this was the network ghost of a real Silico. Those white lips on that childlike face were about to open and speak to her. It had heard her words. It was going to reply.

Elpida knew she must not listen, because then the Covenanters would have been right all along. To listen would be to treat with the eternal enemy of humanity, with the voice of the green, with the invaders and despoilers of the city, with the siege that Telokopolis had stood against since it had been built. To talk to Silico and get an answer went against even the most extreme of the expeditionist theories. She would be a traitor. She would be worse than a traitor.

Elpida broke first.

She squeezed the trigger; even as she did, she knew she was wrong.

The Silico’s rear legs bunched with sudden tension — to pounce, to rush, to dodge the bullet before Elpida could fire. And she couldn’t even blame it. She had shot first. She had broken their strange and uneasy truce. She was a nanomachine zombie in the ashes of earth, yet she could not escape the echo of her own life. The Silico would be justified when it tore her head off and—

Shuk-shuk-shuk-shuk—

A familiar sound blossomed on Elpida’s left, from the far wall of the bone-speaker’s chamber.

A salvo of micro-missiles arced through the air and fell toward the Silico like molten hailstones. The Silico’s silent display terminated in a whipping whirlwind of blade-limbs, lashing out to deflect the barrage. Half the missiles were caught mid-flight, careening off into the air, bursting harmlessly without a target — but there were too many projectiles for the Silico to deflect them all. The rest punched on through. A bright line of tiny explosions blossomed on the Silico’s flank, detonations rippling across the metal skin.

The Silico lurched to one side, forward motion aborted.

Elpida scrambled back. Shrapnel went flying in all directions, some from the Silico’s metal skin, but mostly from the missiles themselves. The edge of the walkway offered almost no cover. Elpida hurled herself back the way she’d come, landing behind a solid plate of metal between the walkway uprights.

She looked up and across the chamber, toward the third blast door, the one the Covenanters had not tried to defend, the one she hadn’t been trying to reach.

Eight figures in hardshell suits slammed into the chamber. Bone white, moving like ghosts, faceless behind inches of armour.

A Legion kill team.

They’d come armed for Silico and they came in textbook. A second volley of micro-missiles arced through the air, fired from a back-mounted rack; the projectiles slammed into the Silico again, keeping it off-balance for crucial seconds as the team swept forward. The Legionnaires didn’t wait for return fire; three of them dropped portable generator-bulbs at their feet. A trio of heavy-duty energy shields snapped to life with a crack of displaced air, spitting and hissing with blue light, turning the platform in front of the blast door into a miniature fortified position.

A split-second later, two Legionnaires stuck the muzzles of their weapons through firing slits in the shields — ultra-high-output macro cannons, hardshell servos whining with the weight of the guns. They opened fire with a deafening roar, turning the air between them and the Silico into a hurricane of reaction-mass rounds. The Silico whirled under the storm of impacts, but the firepower was not enough to penetrate its skin. The semi-visible metal rings around the Silico’s body pulsed and flickered, erecting shields of its own — flat white layers of shimmering translucence and odd-angled hexagons that shivered and jerked in and out of sight.

Elpida crammed herself behind her scant cover. Shrapnel pattered and pinged off the walkway.

The Legionnaire with the micro-missile rack fired another volley, missiles streaming through the air like falling stars. The Silico’s arms lashed out again, catching more of this third barrage than the first and second. Some of the missiles burst against the shields. More turned away under their own power, sent off-course by the Silico’s local jamming.

It didn’t stumble a third time.

Elpida was confused — the kill team had missed their opening, wasted the element of surprise. Then she realised they couldn’t use their true heavy weapons in here — shaped charges, plasma cannons, coilguns. One hardshell was hanging back, arms laden down with the bulk of a portable microwave beam emitter. Two of the others had kinetic acceleration autocannons strapped to their backs, but hadn’t even unslung the weapons.

They couldn’t risk that kind of damage in a bone-speaker’s chamber. They wouldn’t risk harming Telokopolis herself.

The Silico crouched and coiled, readying a leap even through the hail of firepower. One bound would put it right on top of the Legionnaires.

They had no way to stop it.

Then three Legionnaires leapt off the platform, suits falling like bricks of chalk. A moment later each one jerked upward on twin pillars of heat-haze distortion, carried aloft by suspensor packs attached to the rear of their suits. Suspensor beams were not meant to be used inside the city — they presented too much risk of massive damage, uncontrolled detonation, internal fires. Not to mention the number of properly trained Legionnaires was very small.

Elpida appreciated this was not exactly the time for normal doctrine.

The three Legionnaires with suspensor packs darted as wide as they could, multi-ton hardshell suits floating like seeds in the breeze. Each was armed with a suit-powered plasma rifle; each of them rained purple fire down on the Silico, overwhelming sections of the translucent white shield, searing great blackened patches into the thick metal of the killing machine’s hide.

The Silico twisted left and right, drowning in firepower, a metal worm half-swallowed by a storm.

The Legion kill-team couldn’t finish it off, not inside the bone-speaker’s chamber, not without proper heavy weaponry. But if it wavered with indecision for long enough, sheer weight of firepower would wound it eventually.

Or drive it off.

Elpida realised the plan — the kill team had left the other two exits of the chamber wide open. They were trying to drive the Silico elsewhere, where they could fight it unshackled by concern for the soft places of the city.

The Silico flailed and faltered. Legs bunched as if it was about to spring and take down one of the flyers — but then it seemed to shudder and turn aside. The translucent white angles of shield swung to block the macro-cannon rounds, then whirled back to the plasma bolts, then began to shudder and fade and wink out.

The plan was working. The Silico turned to flee—

Toward Elpida.

She saw the open eyes in the childlike face once again. Blank, empty, white-hot.

It was going to slam down the walkway and right through her. The space was too narrow to leap aside. Elpida scrambled to her feet and turned to run.

Click-buzz — external helmet comms, turned up loud over the storm of firepower.

A Legionnaire shouted, voice blurred by static: “Ma’am, get down!”

The eighth hardshell of the Legion kill team vaulted over the edge of the upper platform, suspensor pack billowing to life with heat haze, carrying it through the air like a cannonball — not up, but straight forward, right to the stretch of walkway between Elpida and the Silico.

The Legionnaire landed like a flying brick, hardshell boots slamming down, face toward the charging foe.

Elpida thought she was witnessing a suicide. This was no little corpse-puppet. It would trample the hardshell or smash it aside.

The Legionnaire drew a monoedge sword off the suit’s back, yellow as old bone and veined with grey, five full feet from tip to hilt — the kind of sword grown inside the bones of the city itself. The suit’s left gauntlet blossomed with a crack of blue light, flaming into the bubble of a personal combat shield, wrapping chalk-white armour in crackling power.

The Silico slammed into the Legionnaire, but the suit was not swept aside. Blade-arms whipped and whirled too fast for the eye to follow, cracking and sparking off the energy shield a hundred times a second. The shield would hold only moments.

The Legionnaire swung the monoedge sword in precise, unhurried, two-handed arcs.

Two Silico blade-limbs dropped to the walkway, writhing and coiling like serpents speared through the belly; black muscle-leeches sucked back into the wounds, sealing the breaches. A chunk of Silico skin fell away from the hide like butter under a hot knife, the metal steaming and blackening as it tumbled to the floor of the chamber far below.

The Silico recoiled as if stung, stumbling back on all six legs. The Legionnaire’s shield gave out a split-second later, collapsing in a burst of blue sparks and crackling white light.

A final blow from the Silico’s flailing blade limbs tore a deep wound in the suit’s right thigh, grazed the right shoulder — and cleaved off the front of the hardshell helmet.

Like a bisected skull, the front of the helmet fell to the walkway, trailing wires and torn padding, covered in blood.

The Legionnaire collapsed to one knee with a clang of metal on metal.

And then the Silico turned and charged in the opposite direction, feet ringing on the walkways and platforms. It leapt the pile of corpses — the dead Covenanters who it had butchered mere moments earlier — and vanished through the blast doors, worming off into the guts of Telokopolis.

The deafening firepower ceased as quickly as it had begun, instantly replaced with a crackle of audible comms-chatter.

“Lost visual on exogen. Repeat, lost visual on exogen. Target is zero-six outbound.”

“Sweep, contain, confirm.”

“Swept. Sensors negative. Confirmed.”

Elpida realised the radio chatter was coming from the open faceplate of the Legionnaire in front of her. The helmet internals were exposed by the damage.

“Drop, fold, repeat. Resume pursuit formation. Weapons free.”

The three hovering Legionnaires killed their suspensor packs and slammed to the walkways. They sprinted into position at the blast door where the Silico had fled, plasma weapons levelled. They ignored the corpses of Covenanters on every side, their own boots slick with blood.

“Confirmed no visual. Nine-nine-five angle ahead. Exit clear. Advise.”

“Outbound in five. Go.”

The other Legionnaires were already disengaging their portable shields, hefting the macro-cannons, hurling themselves down the metal stairs, hurrying to join their comrades at the blast door.

Elpida had spent plenty of time up close and personal with Legionnaires in hardshell suits — as had all of the cadre, at her instruction and insistence; these were the soldiers who had fought at the cadre’s feet, at eye-level with the verdant madness of the green, while Elpida had strode above it in a combat frame. These were the soldiers who manned the edge of the plateau day after day, month after month, century after century. The pilot project and the combat frames were a scalpel, to cut deep into the green where nothing else could. But these people were the outer shield of Telokopolis. This was what it was like, down on the ground, though perhaps less dramatic most of the time. Elpida knew the reality all too well; she had spent countless hours reviewing helmet-cam footage from ordinary Legionnaires, to understand them better. That was part of her duty as Commander, even if these soldiers were not her own.

Elpida knew enough to know this team was not composed of ordinary Legionnaires, no matter how well trained. They had not hesitated at contact in the middle of a bone-speaker’s chamber. They had not paused in horror at the slaughterhouse of corpses and blood and viscera; even experienced Legionnaires had to open their suit visors to vomit at the human wreckage of real combat. They hadn’t paused to collect themselves. They didn’t even break strict comms protocol after fighting a Silico in the heart of Telokopolis. These were hardened veterans of the endless war, lifers who’d been Legion for decades.

The Legionnaire who had fought toe-to-toe with the Silico was still down on one knee, the chalky back of the hardshell toward Elpida, right gauntlet wrapped around the handle of the monoedge sword. The only one who hadn’t moved.

A corpse, held upright by the armour. The Legionnaire’s face must be mangled meat inside the suit.

The radio crackled again.

“KT-106 engaged exofiltate, stoma chamber eight. Command, respond.” A pause as the others got into position by the door. “Command, respond. Command, respond. Command, respond. Channel open. Request command respond. Repeat.”

One of the Legionnaires glanced back. The radio crackled. “Arin?”

The Legionnaire kneeling in front of Elpida spoke out loud — clean and clear, not a tortured bubble of blood in a ruined throat. Alive.

“Painblockers online. Shell reports right femur shattered. Stable in one-twenty.”

“Confirmed.” A pause. “We—”

“I’ll catch up. Outbound. Go.”

The Legion kill team slammed out of the chamber, swarming after the Silico.

Elpida snapped the safety on her pistol. She sneaked a quick glance over at Lykke — or whatever was left of her, a puddle of liquid meat — and saw the bloody mass shiver, as if coming around. Elpida’s pulse was still racing. Adrenaline was coming down, but she knew she’d been wired for a while yet.

The kneeling Legionnaire let out a grunt of pain.

“Thank you,” Elpida said.

The Legionnaire heaved upright, using the sword for support, hardshell suit staggering two paces as the servo-muscles compensated for a broken leg and mangled thigh.

The suit swung to face Elpida, boots ringing on the metal walkway, bone-white armour catching a crimson blush from the inner light of Telokopolis. The helmet had been half cut away by the Silico’s final strike, robbing the suit of sensors, compromising atmospheric containment, and ruining the helmet’s protection. But the Legionnaire was lucky; she’d escaped with nothing more than scrapes and bruises and a shallow cut across her forehead.

The Legionnaire was a woman, older than Elpida, with high cheekbones and red hair, face cushioned within the padded enclosure of the hardshell helmet. She had a long scar running from the left corner of her lips, blossoming into a massive spider web of mangled tissue across her left cheek. Her left eye was an expensive bionic, as was the left side of her jaw. Most of her neck and throat had been patched several times with synthetic skin; the bulwark-tattoo of a lifelong Legionnaire was interrupted and blurred by the damage and repairs. The bionics and the scar gave her lips a distinctive sneering tilt.

“Suggest you retreat the opposite way, Ma’am,” said the Legionnaire; her voice was rough and scratchy. “Or stay here to wait for reinforcements. My team can’t afford to slow down for casualties. That thing is already ahead of us. Command isn’t responding.”

Elpida was speechless.

She knew this woman’s face — from history lessons and textbooks, from vid-records and archives, and from more than a few movies, though no actress could match the real thing.

Westinlass Aglaea Arin. A hero of the Fourth Incursion, a time that had produced a surplus of heroes, few of whom had lasted long.

This woman had died seven hundred years before Elpida’s life, in the room-to-room warren-fighting of the western side of the Skirts. Her handwritten accounts of Silico behaviour were standard reading for any Legion officer. Elpida had once seen the original manuscripts, kept under glass in a public museum — the loose leaves of a large-format notebook, spotted with blood and stained with sweat, military matters jumbled together with personal notes and scraps of verse.

The monoedge sword and the personal shield suddenly made sense; that had been part of the doctrine back then. Arin was one of the finest examples of a close-quarters specialist — a role that the Legion of Elpida’s time considered suicidal madness.

“Ma’am,” Arin repeated. “I suggest you retreat in the opposite direction. My team cannot slow for casualties. Are you wounded?”

“No,” Elpida said. She gestured at the floor of the chamber, far below; Misane had vanished, probably back into the concealed nook where she’d been hiding when Elpida had entered the room. “One survivor besides me.”

“Eval?”

“Null. Unwounded.”

“Take her with you. We can’t spare anybody. As soon as my painblockers max, I’m outbound.” Her eyes darted around the chamber. Her lips curled in disgust. “Nasty fucking business.” She turned her head and spat on one of the Silico arms that she had severed, then hefted the two-handed monoedge sword and clamped it to the rear of her hardshell. When she shifted her weight the right thigh of the suit cracked and groaned with the deep cut the Silico had left there; the rent was oozing a thin trickle of blood. The suit had already coagulated and sealed the wound, but Arin would most likely lose the leg.

Lykke’s liquefied mass shivered again. Elpida willed her not to get back up, not yet. She would not watch Lykke tear apart a Legion hero.

“I’m sorry about your leg,” Elpida said. “And again, thank you. I would be dead otherwise.”

Arin grinned; a gruesome sight, with her mangled lips and heavy bionics and the blood down her face. “Another replacement’ll do me good. That one was getting rusty anyway.” Her eyes flickered to the stump of Elpida’s right elbow. “Looks like you need one yourself.”

Elpida couldn’t help herself — she laughed. An ancient hero was complimenting her war wounds.

“And sorry about the danger close micro-shots, Ma’am,” Arin went on. “No choice. Had to fire before alerting you. Gotta keep those motherfuckers on their toes.”

“You … you shouldn’t be calling me Ma’am,” Elpida said. “I’m not dressed as Legion, I’m not in uniform. You don’t even know the pilot project. You shouldn’t know me.”

“Anybody who stares down Silico with a shitty pistol and dry breeches is one of us.” Arin grinned again. “You’re Legion. I can see it in your eyes.”

Elpida shook her head. “You’re not a memory, you’re real. You’re actually here. Simulated, but real. I never imagined you like this. I barely imagined you at all.”

Arin narrowed her eyes, but kept grinning. “Yeah. I’ve been feeling that too.”

“What?” Elpida tried to reach for the hardshell suit, then remembered she had no right hand. “You mean you know this is a simulation? You were resurrected? Are you—”

Arin grunted and drew a deep breath, then took a step back from Elpida; her painblockers had finally done their job. “All I know is that I feel like I’ve been dreaming for years, running through tar, underwater, weights on my ankles. Can’t remember where I was twenty minutes ago. Can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning. Command isn’t answering. Quantum comms are dead. Either this is the final incursion and the city is over, or this ain’t fuckin’ real. Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe we’re all dreaming.”

She took another step back, started to turn.

“This is a simulation!” Elpida said. “You’re right. We’re all dead. If you’re real, somehow — I don’t know, a-a ghost or something, then—”

“Dead, alive, whatever.” Arin winked. “I’ve still got Silico to hunt. Take care, Ma’am.”

“Wait!” Elpida shoved her pistol into her ballistic vest and reached out for Arin. “Wait. One of my sisters — my squad mates — has been taken. Not by Silico, by … ” Elpida glanced around at the Covenanter corpses. How could she explain ‘civil war’ to a hero from a time when such a thing would have been unthinkable? “By … ”

Arin followed her gaze. “Huh. Right. But we can’t spare—”

“Just keep an eye out for her,” Elpida said. “If you run across her before I do. She looks like me, but smaller. Same skin, white hair, purple eyes. Her name is Howl. Please.”

Arin saluted with fist against the side of her ruined helmet. “Silico first, then I’ll look for your girl. Hell, Command is silent and you probably outrank me anyway. Good luck, Ma’am.”

“You too. Good hunting.” Then: “Telokopolis is forever.”

Arin’s brow furrowed. Then she grinned. “Sure. Dead or dreaming, I don’t care. Telokopolis is forever.”

And then she was gone — turning, picking up her feet, running after her Legion comrades, her gait lopsided as the suit compensated for a broken femur. Her radio crackled to life as she pounded out of the room.

Silence settled on the chamber, broken by the distant throb of the city and the slow drip-drip-drip of blood.

Elpida left the walkway, heading for the blast door. She took a final glance down at the floor of the chamber, but Misane had not reappeared. She called the girl’s name a couple of times, but received no reply. She shouted that she had to keep going, and that Misane should either shelter where she was, or head away from the direction the Silico had taken.

Then Elpida stopped next to the pile of crimson meat and bone fragments that was Lykke. She poked the mass with the toe of one shoe.

Lykke surged back to coherence — from a puddle to a pillar of bleeding flesh, then to a woman in a little white dress. She was still bruised and bloody, golden hair still loose and wild, green eyes blazing with wounded pride. She put her hands on her hips.

“Huh!” she spat. “Huh.”

“ … yes?” Elpida said. “Are you alright?”

Lykke pouted. “Enjoy your flirting, zombie? I assumed the big bad butches weren’t really your type. I mean, really! You’ve got a foot of height on her, even in that monkey suit! Really. Tch.”

Lykke folded her arms and turned away.

“Thank you for trying to fight the Silico,” Elpida said, and struggled to mean it. “But if you sulk, I’ll leave you here. I have to keep moving.”

Lykke went, “Huh!” again, then cocked an eyebrow at Elpida. “So you can catch up with your latest squeeze?”

“Because Howl is still missing, and that’s the direction everyone is going. Because the Silico was trying to communicate with me, and I don’t know what that means. Because there are a lot of playing pieces loose on this board right now, and not all of them are simulations.”

Lykke unfolded her arms. She frowned. “You think all these memories are real? Zombie, this is all inside you.”

“That was a real Silico, and those were real Legion. The Covenanters too, perhaps. Maybe even the memory of Nunnus was real. Network zombies. Ghosts. I don’t know, I don’t have the correct terminology. Something has invaded me — ‘hostile one’, as I explained to you earlier. Something is drawing these forces from the wider network, summoning them up, setting them in motion, setting them against each other. Maybe to slow me down, maybe to kill me. Maybe something else. I don’t know yet.”

Lykke started to grin. “And you want to find it? Why? For another little dance?” Lykke grabbed the hem of her dress and straightened the fabric as best she could. “I won’t give in a second time. I won’t! I promise!”

Elpida shook head. “No. Howl comes first. Howl is the only thing that matters.” Elpida paused. “But if a hostile invader has used the Covenanters to take Howl, I have to get to that hostile itself, not just the ablative meat it’s throwing in my way. Now come on, Necromancer. I may need your help.”

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A little slice of a very long war, resurrected in simulation, to play out in miniature once again. But it doesn’t seem like all the participants remember it the same …

Well well well, there we go! I’d been looking forward to getting the Legion on-screen (either via Elpida’s memories or otherwise) for quite a while! And there we have it, at least once. That’s probably not the last of them we’ve seen, in this rapidly unravelling ‘simulation’. I know some advance readers voiced quite insistent appeals that we see more of Arin. Very popular quite suddenly. Ahem.

Also also also! Arc length is still looking about the same – 7 chapters planned, but could go to 8! For now, I am simply riding the wave, and letting Elpida do what she must.

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for being here and enjoying my little story about zombie girls and powered armour and weird metal-life beasties from an infinite forest that once covered the entire planet. Zombie girls are drawing closer to the answers now, and clarity is not far away. And how’s the storm coming along, out in reality? Still strong, we hope. And as for all of you, I will see you next chapter! Seeya then!

Content Warnings

Gore (lots!)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Automatic gunfire ripped and roared through the bone-speakers’ cavernous chamber. Caseless rounds ricocheted from naked steel and thudded into the massive armoured dome in the centre of the room. Stray bullets went wide, pinging off the floor of living metal, caught in the tangle of walkways and staircases, filling the air with flying lead. Booted footfalls rang out from above as the squad of Covenanters spread wide. The girl — Misane — screamed like a wounded goat, eyes wide with fresh terror, crammed into the junction where a bank of computer consoles met the floor.

Elpida was pinned down.

“—there, there! She’s gone behind the cogitator bank—”

“—Bassa, go left, go left—”

“You go left, I’ve already got an angle!”

“Fuck you, I can’t see her!”

“—bitch was armed, keep frosty, go slow—”

“Screw slow!”

“Wasn’t there another one?! I saw another person! I think there’s another person down there with—”

“Fire that fucking weapon, Pranav! Don’t just stand there! Pull the trigger”

“Who’s got the launcher? Did we lose the launcher?”

“Tersi had it! Tersi, get up here, splat that fucker—”

“I can’t see her!”

“Go left!”

The Covenanters were all shouting over each other. No leader, no clear orders, no chain of command. If Elpida had met this undisciplined rabble on level ground, she might have stood a chance. She could have shattered their morale by inflicting one or two quick, decisive, brutal casualties. But the Covenanters had entered the chamber high up, with perfect angles to suppress anything down on the lower floors, and very good sightlines on all the available cover. Their lack of cohesion and competent command was little impediment when they held the high ground, and Elpida had no way to dislodge them. In a few moments the Covenanter militia would flank her position. She would be wide open.

Elpida shoved her heavy pistol back into her ballistic vest; she needed weight of fire, not miniature shaped charges. She drew the lightweight machine pistol, yanked the suppressor off the end of the barrel under her opposite armpit, then looped the weapon back into the makeshift harness around her left shoulder and forearm. The motion left her open to Misane, still pinned beneath her, but the girl was too shocked and confused to take the opportunity.

Elpida stuck the machine pistol over the top of her cover, aiming up and to the right — to the Covenanters’ left. She pumped the trigger for three short bursts.

The machine pistol shivered and twitched — brrrrt-brrrrt-brrrt — spitting a cloud of low-velocity reaction-mass shavings to chew at the underside of the walkways.

Two Covenanters shouted. One swore. Somebody hit the deck with a clatter of gear, but no scream of pain.

“—bitch fucking winged me—”

“You’re fine, you’re fine, get up—”

“Push on, left! I’ve got her pinned! Come on, before she shifts it! Left, go left!”

The gunfire intensified, pouring down on Elpida’s narrow wedge of cover. The steel plates of the computer housing shuddered and shook with the impacts. She’d bought herself several seconds, nothing more.

Elpida had two choices. One — use Misane as a human shield. She could shout that she had one of the Covenanters’ own down here, a child, unarmed, alive. Then she could drag Misane to her feet and put the pistol to the girl’s head. Could she back all the way across the room without Misane trying to escape, or one of the Covenanters deciding to be a hero? Doubtful. Even if Elpida had been willing to bluff that hard, the plan was a non-starter. The Covenanters had opened fire with Misane standing right there in the first place; Elpida had no guarantee they wouldn’t shoot through the girl just to kill a pilot. Some of them probably saw it as a necessary sacrifice.

Which left only option two. Elpida had no time to weigh the implications.

“Lykke!” she shouted. “Cover me!”

Elpida had been certain that the Necromancer was standing out in the open, several feet away, giggling and gaping, ignoring the bullets — but suddenly Lykke’s voice was right next to Elpida’s ear.

“Oh, zombie,” she purred — a soft, slippery, sibilant whisper, somehow clearer than the storm of gunfire, the pounding of Elpida’s own heart, and the birdlike screaming of Misane pinned beneath her. “I thought you’d never ask!”

A vortex of bladed bone and bleeding meat erupted upward in Elpida’s peripheral vision, crashing into the underside of a walkway, seeping through the tiny holes in the mesh like blood-frothed mist.

The Covenanters started to scream.

“The fuck?! Where’d that come from?! Where’d that come—”

“Artturi, Artturi, down! Down! Get back from it, get—”

“City’s end, what is that?!”

“Back up, back up!”

Lykke cackled, shrieking with joy. “Stand still, little puppets, so I can pluck your flowers raw!”

Gunfire went wide, chewing into the meat of the walls with wet slapping sounds, bouncing off the ancient yellowed bone.

Elpida’s position was no longer under fire.

Misane was still screaming, hands clutching her own face, eyes wide white pools in blood-stained skin. Elpida hit her across the cheek with the machine pistol — just a tap, not hard enough to leave a bruise, only to shock her out of the screaming. Elpida didn’t have any other options; even if she’d not been working with her right forearm missing, she could not have gotten the girl up and on her feet and dragged her clear. Besides, there was no point.

“Stay here and stay down!” Elpida screamed in Misane’s face. “When it’s over, shout that you’re one of them, shout for them not to shoot!”

She couldn’t spare a moment to see if Misane understood.

Elpida scrambled off the girl, bolted out of cover, and sprinted across the floor of the chamber, back the way she’d come. She had to gain height, as quick as she could. Lykke was an excellent distraction, but if one of those Covenanters realised their prey was getting away, Elpida might draw opportunistic fire.

She hit the nearest set of stairs at a dead run, then vaulted them five at a time, her long legs carrying her to the top in a few bounds. Her shoulder blades itched as she scrambled along the walkway, but she didn’t look back — a pointless temptation at this moment in a firefight. Automatic gunfire spat and screeched on the other side of the chamber, splitting Lykke’s cackling laughter with staccato interruption.

“—get it off me, get it off me! Get it off—”

“Down, down, I can’t get an angle!”

“What the fuck is this?! What is the fuck is that!? Where’s the launcher!? Give me that—”

“Little piggies, little piggies!” Lykke crooned — voice cracking and hoarse. “I’m going to eat the crispy skin off your slow cooked corpses! Now come here and let me flay you! Come! Here!”

Elpida hit the end of the walkway and vaulted up another set of stairs, almost level with the Covenanters now. The blast door she’d entered through wasn’t far, one more level upward. When she got there she could drop prone and crawl, well out of sight—

Bullets suddenly rained down onto the metal around Elpida, rebounding and ricocheting from the naked steel. Somebody held down a trigger, filling the air with full-auto fire, mag-dumping at her back.

“She’s getting away! The pilot, she’s getting away!”

Elpida ducked and dived, through the railing on the side of the stairs. She landed hard, winded for a moment, behind a row of baroque machines wired into the living flesh of the city, a tangle of sweeping steel curves and massive cables. Bullets chewed into polymer housing and bounced off reinforced metals. A delicate crystal disk two arm-spans across shattered overhead, scattering broken fragments down onto Elpida’s hair. Gunfire broke a complex articulated arm, sending the mechanism crashing to the floor. Flecks of Telokopolan bone exploded from bullet impacts several feet up.

Elpida quickly checked herself for wounds, but she’d gotten lucky. Her back felt bruised, up by the left shoulder; the ballistic vest must have stopped a low-powered round.

She was pinned down again.

Elpida stuck her machine pistol through a gap in her cover and pulled the trigger three times — brrrt-brrrt-brrrrrrrrt. Incoming fire lessened for a moment. She scrambled six feet to her right and peered around a corner of machine housing.

The dozen Covenanters were regrouping; Lykke couldn’t even touch them.

The Necromancer seemed to be experiencing the same simulated impotence she had suffered against the lone Covenanter, back in the memory of the cadre’s quarters. She could menace them with hooked claws of serrated bone and loom over them as a crashing wave of roiling meat; she could dance between them like burning red sunlight made of viscera and gleaming teeth; she could draw their fire and frustrate their aim and ruin what little semblance of unit cohesion they had. But she couldn’t touch them. It was as if her body was surrounded by a magnetic repellent, always allowing the Covenanter gunmen to scramble out of the way at the last second. Bullets passed harmlessly through her warped body, bouncing off the walkways and walls behind; the Covenanters screamed and panicked, their sorry excuse for a formation badly disrupted. But the lack of actual contact had left several of them free to ignore their comrades and advance toward Elpida.

And Elpida was still a level short of the blast doors.

“Lykke!” she shouted. “Lykke, keep them off me! Lykke!”

But the Necromancer wasn’t listening. Lykke had grown visibly frustrated; the vortex of meat and bone was shrinking and collapsing into itself, folding back to reveal Lykke’s slender limbs and stained white dress, her blossoming bruises and a little pout on her lips. She stamped her feet and clenched her fists as bullets ripped through her, pale flesh reforming and reknitting over and over.

“This isn’t fair!” she screamed at the Covenanters, red in the face. “You’re supposed to die! You aren’t even real! You’re simulations and you’re humiliating me in front of the one zombie who matters! I hate you I hate you I hate youuuuuu!”

Lykke’s tantrum did not impress.

The handful of advancing Covenanters opened fire again, popping out of cover and darting forward along the walkways and gantries.

Elpida ducked back behind cover and sprayed with her machine pistol twice more, left then right. Covenanters grunted and shouted and hit the deck, finding their own cover — but then they opened up again, forcing Elpida to keep her head down as bullets pounded the steel at her back.

“Keep her there, keep her covered! I’m almost on the right!”

“What about the fucking thing back there?!”

“Silico trick! Bullshit! Not even doing anything! She brought it here, take her out and it’ll leave!”

“Get up on that gantry! Mazuo, Maz! Get up there, you dozy bastard! You’ll have an angle on—”

Elpida pointed her pistol and unloaded on a ladder which led to a gantry on her right. She heard somebody crash to the floor, swearing and shouting. But bullets were still landing all around her, whizzing over her head, keeping her pinned. She had perhaps ten or fifteen seconds until the Covenanter militia had her flanked.

She eyed the top of the open blast door, one level up. If she vaulted the barriers at the edge of this level of walkways, she might just make it up there. She would take a few bullets in the process, likely in her back and legs. The ballistic vest would protect her vitals. She had no choice.

She gave the Covenanters a last chance.

Elpida shouted: “None of this is real! We’re in a simulation! Cease fire, cease fire now!”

No reply but bullets.

She braced herself to leap from cover and haul herself up to the blast door. She stuck her pistol over the top of the machine housing one more time, pumping the trigger to make the Covenanters duck — brrrt-brrrrrt. She leapt upright as she fired, twisting side-on to minimize her profile; she glanced back once, to fix in her mind the position and number of the nearest Covenanters — two on her left, three on her right, faces hidden behind greensuit hoods, bodies barely protected in scraps of armour, all of them jerking from cover, levelling rifles to open fire.

Elpida was going to take more than one or two bullets getting out of this chamber. She started to turn, to twist, to bunch her muscles for the leap, to brace herself for the slam of bullets against the back of her ballistic vest—

A shimmer of misplaced light dropped from the high ceiling; it landed behind the Covenanter trio on her right.

The impact buckled the walkway with a deafening screech of tortured metal. The gantry bowed but did not break. The three gunmen were thrown off their feet.

All gunfire ceased. All eyes turned to the glinting of refracted light, the negative space which had bent steel beneath massive weight. Even Lykke paused her little tantrum. Elpida froze.

An occluded shape unfurled — ten thousand facets of translucent ruby, catching and warping the blood-red inner light of Telokopolis. Twelve feet of shimmer and glisten, bristling and rippling with unseen power, wrapped in refracted glimmer.

Optical camouflage.

“It’s here!” one of the Covenanters screamed.

The screaming spread. Weapons swung round, muzzles spat fire. Bullets pattered like hailstones on invisible armour.

The three Covenanters who had been knocked prone died first. The one nearest the Silico seemed to burst as if detonated from within — clothes and flesh and bone and organs torn apart in an instant, hurled outward in a sphere of gore; flecks of blood landed on Elpida’s face. The second gunman hauled himself halfway to his feet, greensuit hood lost, eyes bulging, teeth clenched tight — then he was swept up and smashed down against the walkway, skull shattered, brains forced through the mesh. The third man was scrambling backward on his arse and elbows, trying to get distance. He raised his weapon and jerked his finger on the trigger — then the front half of the rifle was gone, cut away in a flash of ruby-red mirror. A split-second later the gun was bisected again, along with the man’s hands and forearms. Metal and meat clattered to the floor and slopped into his lap. He had a moment to stare at the spurting stumps of his limbs — then his head left his body, neatly decapitated.

The Silico killing machine launched itself into the air before the man’s head hit the floor, flashing across the chamber, a storm of blood-dyed glass.

It landed on the opposite walkway, next to the other two Covenanters who had been advancing on Elpida. They died before they could even turn their guns on it — pulled apart and torn up and emptied out. Steaming chunks of meat collapsed in a mess of blood and guts, slithering over the edge of the walkway in loops of voided intestine.

Elpida drew the heavy pistol from inside her ballistic vest.

The Silico turned — toward her, or the other way? Elpida couldn’t tell. She couldn’t draw a bead on the thing with the active optical camo; it was like trying to aim at a flail made of wine-soaked crystal. She would only get one shot — two if she was fast — and she had to hit the main housing, had to disrupt a critical process, or the thing would charge right on through the shaped explosive tips.

It was looking at her.

Elpida was certain, it was looking right at her.

Thonk!

The Covenanters had found their grenade launcher — or at least figured out how to fire it without blowing themselves up. A grenade round arced through the air toward the shimmering carmine ghost of the Silico, right on target. At least somebody over there knew how to range a launcher properly.

The Silico twisted like a wind chime in a hurricane. The grenade round shot straight upward, sailing toward the ceiling, deflected by a limb. The round burst a moment later, pulsing the chamber with a concussive thump. Elpida dived back into cover; shrapnel pattered against steel.

A fragmentation grenade. Elpida almost wanted to laugh. The Silico needn’t have flinched.

The seven surviving Covenanters tried their best to put up a real fight; they were no longer distracted by Lykke, since the Necromancer was just standing there with her mouth open, green eyes gone wide as she tracked the Silico’s every motion. But the Covenanter militia lacked everything they needed to neutralise this target — training, courage, weapons, leadership. A Legion kill-team would have stood a decent chance, armoured in hardsuits and armed with real weapon systems, drilled to within an inch of their lives on how to respond, trusting in each other’s skills and morale. But the Covenanters bunched up instead of spreading out, taking refuge in proximity; Elpida screamed for them to scatter. Too late — the Silico sprinted into their midst, an invisible knife parting one of them down the middle. Two halves of a person fell to the floor, spilling guts and gore in a fountain of blood. The others screamed and scrambled clear. The cough and splutter of small arms did nothing against the Silico’s armour; their only real chance was to get distance and blanket it with rapid fire from the grenade launcher, if only to slow it down long enough for them to flee. But the Covenanter with the grenade launcher was reluctant to fire so close to her comrades; Elpida shouted for her to do it anyway, just point and pull the trigger, or they’re all dead. But the Silico caught the woman by her head and hoisted her into the air. She had enough time for a single scream and a twitch of her index finger.

The fragmentation grenade in the chamber exploded point-blank. Knocked two other Covenanters off their feet. The Silico didn’t flinch.

Nobody took command or gave orders; there were barely twenty seconds in which to do so. The Silico tore the remaining Covenanters to pieces, smashing them to pulp against the floors, pulling off a head, mincing flesh, ripping off limbs. A final survivor lasted a few more seconds by pure luck — slipping on blood and sprawling on his front. He tried to scramble toward the rear blast door.

The Silico paused — then reached forward with a cluster of invisible limbs. It impaled the man through his ribcage and belly, pinning him to the floor.

It waited while the man screamed and bled and died. Didn’t take long.

Elpida still couldn’t draw a proper bead on the thing.

“Drop the cloaking, drop the cloaking, drop the cloaking. Come on, come on, come on,” she whispered through clenched teeth. She needed a clear shot.

The Silico tossed the final corpse aside. The body hit the wall, leaving a bloody splotch on the machine-meat of Telokopolis.

A mass of fragmented glass and broken rubies and blood-slick surfaces turned to face Elpida.

She emptied her lungs. Steadied the pistol. Now or never—

“Well hello there, big boy,” Lykke purred. “Now where oh where did you come from? Crawled out of the circus, did we? Why don’t you do another round of tricks, just for little old me?”

The Silico turned again — to look at the Necromancer?

Lykke’s human visage was fully restored, a petite woman all bruised and bloodied and wearing a tiny white dress, golden hair awash with the blood-light of the city. Her emerald eyes sparkled with dark delight. Her lips curled into a crimson bow of cruel amusement.

“Lykke!” Elpida shouted. “You can’t fight it! You can’t—”

“Hush, zombie.” Lykke raised one white finger, but didn’t take her eyes off the cloaked Silico. “I have been stymied and humiliated enough. Enough! I am no fumbling virgin now, I am no cuckold to be forced aside. I am what I am, and I will not be ignored!”

The Silico twisted part of its cloaked body, as if considering Lykke from a new angle.

“This dance is mine,” Lykke said with a little giggle.

The Necromancer exploded forward in a surging wave of liquid flesh; pale skin and satin dress and golden hair dissolved into a mass of teeth and claws, diamond-tipped tendrils, gnashing maws filled with acid, stingers dripping corrosive fluids, and a dozen more biological weapons Elpida had never witnessed before.

She slammed into the glimmering translucence of the Silico like a wave breaking against a diamond boulder. Her weapons flashed and stabbed; teeth closed on invisible metal; stingers bounced off armour; hissing fluids sluiced to the floor.

Lykke’s body suddenly blurred, flying apart as if thrown into the blades of a blender — but reforming just as quickly, Necromancer nanomachine control sucking her back into shape faster than the Silico could dismantle her.

“Haaaaaaaahahahaha!” Lykke squealed with delight, a clotted voice howling from a dozen bloody mouths. “This one I can fight, zombie! I told you! This one I can fight! I—”

The Silico hurled Lykke away from itself with a convulsive shove. A whirlwind of flesh flew through the air; a petite woman in a white dress landed in a tumble of flailing limbs.

Lykke sprang back to her feet, panting, flushed, face ripped by a grin. Her eyes were wide and burning like green flames. She raised her hands and clapped slowly.

“Bravo, bravo! But not enough, little puppy dog! Try again! Try and try and try again, but I’m going to shove your snout into your own guts!”

The Silico dropped its optical camouflage.

Like a sheet of bloodstained rainwater sliding down clean steel, the refracted light fell away.

Twelve feet of Silico killing machine rippled and flexed beneath the crimson glow of Telokopolis. A sweeping upward curve of metal stood on six jagged legs, each limb with so many joints that they seemed to blur together into a twitching mass of rainbow-hued skin and shivering black muscle. The metal skin slid like oil on water beneath a hidden breeze, the subtle shimmer of an ancient rainstorm flowing across the surface of the Silico’s body; that skin was inches thick, and not true steel, but a semi-translucent material that Telokopolan science had never managed to comprehend, let alone replicate, both impossibly hard and strangely flexible at the same time, as if a different order of evolution had acted on iron and fire instead of meat and bone, to forge a new kind of tissue out in the green. Beneath that armoured hide, bundles of black muscle flowed back and forth, pulsing and throbbing along the limbs and inside the torso like blood-fattened leeches, their greasy coal-dark masses relocating and readjusting, seemingly independent of the Silico’s outward motion.

Six arms curved forward from the torso, like fingers curled into claws from the flayed bones of a narrow hand — eight feet long, many-jointed, omni-directional, with tapered points hanging in the air in front of the main body. Blade limbs, for close combat, each one lined with eight cutting edges; the blades hurt Elpida’s eyes, so sharp they looked unreal, the edges maintained by constant nanomolecular repair. Two dozen more limbs were folded into recesses on the Silico’s torso, tipped with strange metal organs, hooked and barbed and wired and holed, intended for a dozen different purposes, combat and otherwise.

The Silico’s body was haloed by three semi-visible rotating rings of shining metal. The rings seemed to pass in and out of view, as if not wholly material. Their passage blurred Elpida’s sight.

The front of the Silico’s body — the front of the upward curve — housed the sensory equipment-organs. It had no head, just that long vertical strip of optics and sensors and apertures down the middle of the curved torso. A hundred winking lenses stared at Lykke with red and green and sickly purple — some mechanical, others slick and black with Silico biology.

An imitation of a human face stood in the middle of the upward curve, wrought in Silico metal, white as chalk. The face was upside down, eyes closed in cherubic sleep. It looked like a child.

Elpida had seen that kind of thing a million times before; the kind of detail which got edited out of records and logs, the kind of inexplicable imitation that the public never knew about.

She ignored it, as best she could.

This Silico was a close-combat model — no true ranged weaponry, but plenty of options for CQC.

In a combat frame, Elpida could have destroyed a thousand of these things with a secondary weapon system alone. Up close, on the ground, inside the city, she stood little chance.

Neither did the Necromancer.

“Lykke!” she screamed again. “You can’t fight it! It’s goading—”

“Ugly puppy!” Lykke shrieked with girlish laughter, wrinkled her nose in disgust, and launched herself at the Silico again.

Lykke slammed into her opponent as a tidal wave of flesh and bone, infinitely plastic, infinitely regenerative. The Silico exploded upon her in return, the six blade-limbs blurring into a tempest of knives, slicing Lykke to pieces every split-second. The Necromancer ignored the rending of her flesh, flowing over the Silico, shrieking and cackling and whooping.

“Lykke, get off it!” Elpida shouted. “Get—”

The semi-visible rotating rings which haloed the Silico’s form suddenly accelerated, filling the air with a deafening whine. Pieces of Lykke’s body flew in every direction, cut apart by invisible force — but Lykke giggled, so loud that she drowned out the screaming sound of the Silico’s close-in defence systems.

“Tickle-tickle-tickle, puppy!” she howled. “My turn!”

Lykke’s flowing flesh somehow gripped one of the Silico’s blade-limbs, immobilising the arm. Lykke pulled and yanked and ripped until the limb tore free, exploding from the socket in a welter of black blood and living muscle. Masses of leech-like flesh slopped from both ends of the wound — then seemed to suck back within the edges of the rupture, wriggling away from the open air.

Elpida hesitated.

Could Lykke actually do this?

If the Necromancer could fight, then she needed Elpida’s help. And the girl from earlier — Misane — she was still crammed against a bank of computers down on the floor, still alive. If the Silico won and Elpida fled, the girl would die shortly after.

Everything in Elpida’s experience told her that Lykke didn’t stand a chance. And she was a Necromancer; Elpida should have been glad to spend her against the Silico, just for a chance to get away. The girl down on the floor of the chamber was a Covenanter, and probably a simulation anyway. Howl was missing, Howl was all that mattered. Elpida knew she should turn and run.

She broke from cover, heavy pistol in her left hand, and sprinted — toward the duel.

If she could get close, she wouldn’t even need to aim, just unload the whole magazine into the Silico’s guts.

Lykke was waving the Silico’s severed limb in the air, cackling and giggling and hooting. The Silico was unfolding extra arms, shooting Lykke’s protoplasmic flesh with close-range weaponry, unloading contact viruses, dousing her with electroshock fields, cutting her to pieces. And none of it worked. Perhaps the same would never have happened in reality, but maybe it would. But at least here, in the simulation, inside the network, Necromancer control was winning, and—

The Silico’s whole body pulsed. The air around it blurred and thickened.

Elpida skidded to a halt as the shock wave passed over her. She winced and hissed, her guts trying to punch upward through her throat. Her mouth suddenly tasted of blood. Her vision swarm, eyeballs throbbing. She locked her knees and forced herself to stay standing.

Lykke — a mass of whirling flesh and bone — slopped to the floor like cold offal.

The Silico picked up its severed limb and pressed the stump to the voided joint; black leeches reached out from either side of the wound and sucked the limb back into place with a wet slurp.

“Lykke,” Elpida said. “Lykke? Lykke! Get up. Get up, now! Lykke!”

Whatever was left of Lykke wasn’t moving anymore.

The Silico turned toward Elpida. The upside down face in the front of its body was still asleep, eyes closed in childlike innocence.

It took a step toward Elpida, then another, then another, all six legs carrying it forward.

Elpida levelled the hand cannon.

The Silico stopped.

Elpida froze, finger on the trigger, with the Silico perhaps a dozen feet away. With all its attention on her, she knew it could read her muscles. It would see the moment she tried to fire before her finger could squeeze. It would leap aside, or into the air, before the bullet could land. Elpida presented almost no serious threat to the Silico now, not without a good distraction, not unless she could make the shot against Silico speed and precision — and then only if she got very lucky and hit something that mattered.

But the Silico didn’t move.

Elpida didn’t breathe.

She held the gun.

The Silico.

Waited.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Face to face with the ancient foe, pared down to nothing but muscle and a gun. But this is all a simulation – right?

Let’s hope Elpida has a steady hand.

Anyway! Here we go, arc 14 gets deeper and rougher and weirder with every step. Behind the scenes, things are still looking good, this arc is remaining pretty tightly wound at a predicted 7 chapters, but we’ll see where that goes! Not everybody is under my control here – least of all Elpida, as always – but there’s only one direction to go, even if it leads through a Silico. 

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And thank you all, dear readers! Thank you for reading Necroepilogos; I couldn’t do any of this without all of you, the audience. These zombie girls (and others?) would be stumbling around in the dark, without anybody to see them. Onward we go, deeper into the tomb, into the network, into whatever waits behind all these playing pieces in the foreground. Until next chapter! Seeya then!

Content Warnings

Grief
Grieving children
Gore (again! Honestly I should probably stop warning for this.)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Elpida examined the bloody footprints which led away from the massacre — sharp angular wedges flanked by wide flat pads.

They told her that this particular Silico was perhaps quite heavy, but little else.

Silico were wrought in innumerable variety. Some could be classified into broadly applicable strains or breeds, but these designations were invented by Telokopolan academics and Legion strategists, meaningless to the Silico themselves. Two ostensibly similar individuals might display totally different purposes, combat roles, durability, armament, and more. Judging by the way this one had torn through a squad of armed Covenanters, it probably wasn’t a simple corpse-drone. This Silico construct was a true killing machine.

With no additional clues as to where Howl had been taken, Elpida left the dismembered corpses behind, and followed the trail of footprints

She wished she had time to double back for her hardshell suit and heavier weapons. But the Covenanters already had a head start; they could be taking Howl further away with every passing minute.

The Silico’s footprints led deeper into the tunnel of red-glowing flesh, punctuated by ancient, yellowed, arching bone, twisting away to the left in a slowly widening arc. This passageway was much narrower than the great vault which had led to the wound-junction, with room for maybe three people shoulder-to-shoulder. The bone-ridged ceiling was only a few feet above Elpida’s head. The walls offered far fewer protruding ribs to serve as cover.

Elpida moved slowly and silently, taking care with each footstep in her soft-soled shoes, breathing through her mouth to minimize sound. She kept the heavy pistol steady on the centre of the unfolding corridor. She had tucked away the lighter machine pistol inside her ballistic vest, detached from the webbing harness around her left shoulder and forearm; she couldn’t risk a loose weapon knocking or clicking against any surfaces.

After about two hundred feet the footprints ran out.

Elpida stopped and held position for ninety seconds. First she stared at the space above the final, faded footprints, until she was certain it was nothing but empty air. Then she ran her gaze down the curve of corridor, watching for any errant shimmer of warped light. She unfocused her eyes, tilted her head back and forth, stared at random points on the walls and floor — all the old-school Legion tricks, the ones Nunnus had taught her. Such techniques weren’t much use out in the green, but they would save lives if there was ever another Incursion.

Had there ever been another Incursion into the city? Elpida realised she didn’t know; the reality of this simulated time and place was millions of years gone.

Lykke hissed over her shoulder: “Zombie? Hellooooo? Have you fallen asleep with your eyes open?”

Elpida winced. Lykke had managed to maintain silence until that moment. At least she’d whispered.

Elpida whispered back. “The Silico was using optical camouflage. It was standing in the mouth of the corridor, in plain sight, before we found the massacre. Watching us, I don’t know why. I’m making sure it’s not standing in front of us right now.”

Lykke let out a petite sigh. “These bogeymen of yours are so tiresome. Is this what all you people were like? Sneaking about, never having any fun?”

“Out in the green they use this to blend in with the plants. It’s very effective. Less so up on the plateau. Standard issue Legion hardshells come with built in infra-red, night vision, and terahertz sensors. I have to use my eyes. Shut up and wait.”

Lykke sighed again.

Elpida was satisfied after another sixty seconds; the corridor was empty. The cold trail of Silico footprints pointed onward.

The narrow passageway coiled leftward for about another hundred feet, then abruptly passed through an open membrane of trembling flesh, into a short stretch of naked bone and exposed metal. The flensed corridor was lined with bright warning signs, printed in Upper-Spire, Mid-Spire, Down-End, and two other varieties of Skirts dialect, as well as Braille and tactile pictograms. Every warning sign was stamped in one corner with the symbol of the bone-speakers’ guild — a pair of sinuously interlocked semi-circles, one in machine-meat red, the other in yellowed bone.

The passageway ended in a large, armoured, blast-proof door; the lintel bore a larger version of the bone-speakers’ symbol. The blast door should have been closed and sealed, even when the room beyond was in use. Six fully armed Legionaries should have been on guard at all times, with a permanent comms uplink to an on-duty commanding officer. They should have been stationed behind a series of air-gapped pressure walls, scanner booths, and emergency lock-down remote force-restraints.

The blast door was wide open and unguarded. The security systems were all offline. The massive hinges were bent back.

Even in a simulation made from memories, Elpida hesitated at this threshold. She glanced back at Lykke; if this had been reality, she would have died fighting rather than lead Lykke into the room beyond. She would have given her life to keep the Necromancer out.

Lykke just stared up at her, one eye socket still puffy with bruises, golden hair dyed dark red by the blood-light of Telokopolis, innocently curious.

“Zombie?” she whispered, then batted her eyelashes. “Looking for some motivation in my face?”

“Follow my lead. Go where I go. Keep low, stay down, absolute silence.”

“Yes ma’am,” Lykke purred.

Elpida turned back to the blast door and stepped through. She crouched as low as she could, minimizing visibility as she hurried for the nearest cover, behind a bank of computer consoles, heavy steel plates humming softly over their powered innards.

Lykke scurried in Elpida’s wake and went down on her knees at Elpida’s side, her stained white dress bunched up around her pale thighs. A smirk played over her lips.

Elpida eased one eye out of cover.

She recognised this manner of chamber, if not this specific one — a massive vault about a hundred feet square, floored in living metal, crisscrossed by dozens of walkways and gantries, stuffed with computing equipment, MMI uplink chairs, cables as thick as the limbs of a combat frame, and all manner of devices, most of which Elpida had only the roughest understanding. Walls of semi-transparent machine-meat glowed with rich red light between upright ribs of sturdy bone; behind the flesh hung bundles of gigantic ganglia, wide webs of flickering nerve-tissue, thickly pulsing organs the size of armoured vehicles, and layer upon layer of fluttering meat which seemed to recede into infinite distance, deeper and deeper into the body of the city. Much of the machinery was interfaced with the machine-meat — plugged into extruded orifices, reading the beat of massive organs with traceries of delicate metal, or pointing powerful lenses and imaging devices at the walls, to read the motions of unreachable internal structures.

Down on the floor of the room was a low metal dome, ringed with warning signs, additional computing machinery, and several safety barriers — one of the dozens of stoma into which raw nanomachines might be fed into the city’s body.

Elpida’s gut unknotted slightly when she saw the dome was sealed and bolted. She had to remind herself this was a simulation.

This chamber belonged to the bone-speakers’ guild. Elpida had been allowed to visit similar places a couple of times; most Telokopolans would never see anything like this outside of vid-records, and even those were rather limited. There were many like it in Telokopolis, deep within the core of the city’s body. This was one of the places where the guild attempted to interpret the needs and will and mind of the city.

Elpida had always liked the bone-speakers, even if the experienced ones were very eccentric. They were responsible for monitoring and adjusting and managing all the processes the city itself seemed not to — though if you ever got into an extended conversation with a bone-speaker, they would always insist they were mere catalysts. It was the bone-speakers’ guild who had originally made the Civitas aware of the possibility of the pilot project; they had dredged the data for the combat frames and the pilot’s genome modifications from the incomprehensible thoughts of the city herself, though many in the Civitas and the public preferred to attribute that to human sources. Elpida had never managed to strike up much of a professional relationship with any bone-speakers — they kept to themselves, spending most of their lives ‘listening’ to the city via mundane means. The few who attempted direct communion via MMI uplink tended toward extreme detachment and dissociation, their thoughts always elsewhere, though they rarely seemed upset about it; those who dove too often sometimes lost the power of speech, or seemed concerned with matters impossible to communicate. Elpida had once met one of the bone-speakers who had personally contributed to the extraction and translation of the pilot-project data, who had done seven MMI dives in his youth; he had been a very old man by that point, well over a hundred, totally non-verbal, his eyes locked on motes of dust, one hand recording their motions in great mathematical detail on a writing pad.

As far as Elpida knew, no bone-speaker had ever joined the Covenanters.

She was glad there were none in this chamber, simulated or not.

The gantries and walkways and platforms were littered with corpses — Covenanters, torn apart, bisected, crushed, left to bleed out, slumped over their weapons, crumpled inside their greensuit hoods, smeared across the floors in bloody streaks of mashed gore. Elpida counted seventeen visible casualties from her current position, and partial corpses of seven more. A small group had made a last stand on one of the highest points in the room, in front of the matching blast door on the opposite side, which was also wide open. They hadn’t fared any better.

Elpida held her position, watching for any flicker of refracted light, listening for the sound of clawed feet clicking on metal, trying to pick out the scent of Silico flesh and metal beneath the iron-and-shit reek of so many voided bodies.

The illumination in there was easier on the eyes but harder to read; the crimson and scarlet blood-glow was muted and mixed with the regular lighting from much of the bone-speakers’ equipment. The chamber was far from silent; the air was filled with the great subsonic throbbing of the city itself, the low clicking and humming and whirring of all the computer equipment, and the slow, steady drip — drip — drip of blood falling from one high gantry onto another.

No sign of Silico, no hidden movement.

Which meant it could be anywhere.

Elpida weighed her chances.

If something like this had happened in reality, during Elpida’s life, it would have been a near-unimaginable emergency. Elpida’s duty — which she would have accepted without question — would be to stand up and shout and draw attention to herself, to get the Silico out of this chamber by any means, to draw it away from any places the city might be truly vulnerable.

Silico had breached Telokopolis five times in the city’s history. The First and Second Incursions had happened within a century or two of the city’s founding — at least according to the ancient, incomplete, confusing records of that time. There was a lively academic debate as to whether those incursions had actually happened, or if they were just mythical, or perhaps references to much smaller events. Telokopolan historians had little physical evidence to go on; archaeology on the plateau always turned up such a jumble of human and Silico corpses, the fruit of seven thousand years of unbroken siege.

The Third Incursion had really happened, about three thousand years before Elpida’s life. Nobody disputed that, except perhaps the infinitesimally small number of people who thought everything in the public museums was fake. The Third Incursion had been preceded by a period of about twenty years where Silico numbers had seemed to dwindle. Probing attacks and skirmishes had trailed off, then stopped entirely. Expeditions into the green had gone almost unchallenged, except by random stragglers. The Civitas of that period had embarked on a cautious program of forcing the green itself further back, clearing land beyond the plateau.

Historians disagreed about why the Silico had eventually returned — was it a reaction to the burning back of the green, or had the Silico been busy with some ineffable task, somewhere else on the planet’s surface? Whatever the true reason, the Silico had crashed back into the atrophied defences of the city in gigantic numbers, without even forward scouts to probe for weakness, giving the Legion barely six hours of advance warning. They had swept aside the plateau defences in two days, punched into the Skirts on the third day, and had only been driven back by fourteen months of fighting. A sudden sharp shock to Telokopolis. A reminder to never again relax her eternal vigilance.

All that had happened so long ago, though.

The Fourth Incursion was recorded in the same languages that Elpida had spoken in life.

In post-founding year 6332, the city’s most sensitive long-range equipment had detected distant echoes from a series of ground tremors. The source was far beyond the plateau, far away to the extreme east, perhaps at the edge of the drop-off itself, where the green fell away to infinite benighted depths.

Several weeks later half a dozen vast Silico leviathans had shouldered their way through the green, shredding billions of trees as they advanced, scooping up undergrowth like filter-feeders, and even devouring the smaller Silico forms they encountered. Nobody had ever seen Silico constructs of that size or kind. Legion archives were opened, bone-speakers communed with the city, and the matrosses’ guild woke engines in the Skirts that had not been fired in thousands of years. The populace had panicked; though each individual leviathan was no more than a tick when compared with Telokopolis, the notion that something could wound the body of the city was unthinkable, no matter how small the wound.

In the end the Legion had fought the six leviathans at the edge of the plateau. The matrosses’ guild had struck the killing blows with energies that were still being studied in Elpida’s time. But as each of the vast creatures had died, they had disgorged millions of small-scale Silico constructs — along with equal numbers of what would later be called corpse-puppets, which was the first time anybody had seen their like. Plateau defences had been overwhelmed. The Skirts had been breached and constructs had swarmed halfway up the spire. The distinction between civilian and Legion had melted away; anyone who could do anything did it, because there was nowhere to run. Repulsing the attack and retaking the plateau had taken four years.

Telokopolis had not been scarred by the Fourth Incursion — the Silico had never reached her inner places — but the people had. The Civitas of that time had instituted the official policies of isolation, the end of pushes out into the green, and the massive re-fortification of the plateau.

The Fifth Incursion had happened about a century before Elpida’s birth. Old Lady Nunnus had been a young woman, a Legionnaire on the plateau, already showing promise in the constant churn of small-scale contact.

The Fifth Incursion had not breached as deeply as the Fourth, nor been as surprising as the Third, and had not found Telokopolis unguarded — but it had shown intellect, adaptation, and strategic planning, which had seeded a new kind of fear. The Silico had gathered in massive numbers on a very narrow frontage, then cut through the plateau in a sharp wedge. They had ignored the Legion, retreated from open engagement, and bypassed fortifications by choking them with Silico bodies. Then they had lunged for the Skirts, like a lance rammed through the city’s armour, uncaring of the counter-blow.

Seventeen million civilians had died; two million Legionaries. The fighting had lasted just under two years. A whole city block down in the Skirts was dedicated to a memorial. Nunnus had taken the cadre there, when they’d been quite small, just old enough to understand their intended purpose.

The experiences of the Fifth Incursion formed the basis of all modern Legion doctrine. The political and social aftermath had seen the birth of the expeditionist faction in the Civitas — an acknowledgement that the city could not close itself off from the green and pretend the Silico would throw themselves into the teeth of the Legion’s guns forever. That, in turn, had led to the pilot program, and Elpida’s own birth.

No Silico had ever gotten this deep inside the city. This breach was unthinkable.

Elpida reminded herself that this wasn’t real. This was a simulation.

But to whom did this memory belong?

The bone-speakers’ chamber had multiple exits — three different sets of blast doors, all lying open. Elpida decided the highest was the most obvious route, the one the Covenanters had tried to defend.

She slipped back behind cover. Lykke was smirking at her, like they were playing hide and seek.

Elpida whispered, “We need to cross this room, to the doors on the other side, but the sightlines are terrible. We’ll be exposed the whole way, and the Silico could be hiding anywhere. We need to move fast, keep low, and stay silent. If you make a sound on purpose I will consider that a betrayal. Do you understand?”

Lykke’s smirk dissolved into a pout. She crossed her arms over her bloodstained chest.

“If you make a sound it could bring the Silico down on us,” Elpida whispered. “If you’re going to undermine the rescue, then I may as well shoot you now and—”

“Yes, yes, fine,” Lykke hissed. “But don’t you think I could dance with this unwanted suitor in your place? If it wants to steal you, it has to go through me.”

“These are no longer my memories. I don’t know what it means if either of us gets hurt or killed now.”

Lykke grinned. “But I could still swat this fly for you.”

“No,” Elpida hissed. “You couldn’t.”

Lykke rolled her eyes.

“Promise me you’ll be silent,” Elpida whispered.

Lykke rolled her eyes harder. “Cross my iccle bitty heart and hope to die. Or not. Because I can’t die. Hee-hee-hee.”

Elpida stared at the Necromancer, then accepted she had no choice but to trust her.

She pulled the stolen greensuit hood out from inside her ballistic vest; she might not have time to don the disguise if they blundered into survivors on the other side of that blast door. She tugged the hood down over her head, got the internal supports snug against her skull, and tucked her hair up inside. The visor lenses gave her a good field of view, but this was a civilian model, without any electronics.

Then she tapped Lykke on the knee, rose to her feet, and crept out from behind cover.

Elpida picked the safest, most well-concealed route, even if it took a little longer. She went right, crouching low, past the banks of computers and stacks of machinery, then crept down a set of metal stairs, her soles silent on the textured grip of each step. She ghosted along a walkway, moving quickly and carefully; she glanced back to make sure Lykke was following. The Necromancer was doing her best to crouch and shuffle, a playful smile twitching on her lips, craning her neck to peer at everything. That would have to do.

Down a final set of steps; Elpida hit the floor of the chamber with a whisper of fabric. Down here she was level with the sealed metal dome. Even through the greensuit hood, the air stank of blood and offal.

She held position for thirty seconds, eyes scanning for fresh motion, for the glimmer of misshapen light, for the air to assume an incorrect angle.

Nothing. Total stillness. No Silico, not that she could see.

Elpida hurried onward, past the dome, heading for the stairways and gantries which led back up to the blast doors on the opposite side of the chamber. She kept her heavy pistol aimed at every blind corner and hidden nook, in case the Silico killing machine was—

“Hsssst!”

Elpida froze.

“ … hssst! H-hey! Hey … here. Here!”

The terrified whisper came from Elpida’s left — from within a sheltered alcove formed by the supports of three different overhead walkways. The light had made it seem like a blank wall.

A small, pale, blood-smeared face was peering out from within — young, female, framed by dark hair, eyes bulging and bloodshot.

It was a young woman, drenched from head to toe in fresh gore. She was clutching a submachine gun with both hands, knuckles so tight that her arms were shaking. She wore baggy work overalls and practical boots.

The chest of her overalls was painted with the triple-triangle symbol of the Covenanters, white lines blurred and marred by crimson splatters.

Elpida nearly turned away and walked on. But she had no choice.

She altered her route and stepped into the sheltered alcove, towering above the survivor. A small pile of bodies was tangled in the mouth of the narrow space, cut into pieces, guts voided, lying in a pool of blood and viscera. This young woman must have fallen beneath the corpses, passed over by the Silico killing machine.

The woman was shaking uncontrollably, eyes mere wide white rims in a crimson mask. Beneath the blood her skin was grey with shock. Her hair should have been bright bronze — a fashion trend Elpida vaguely remembered — but the matted blood made it look black. She had the beginnings of a tattoo down her right cheek and the side of her neck — the stylised flowing wave of a guild Elpida didn’t know.

The tattoo was only just begun; Elpida realised this was not a young woman — this was a teenage girl, a child, no older than sixteen or seventeen.

The girl hissed: “Shhh shhh! D-don’t say anything, don’t— don’t make a sound, it might come back, it might come back. T-there’s Silico, inside the c-city, w-we have to g-get—”

Elpida put the muzzle of her pistol beneath the girl’s chin.

“Put the gun on the floor,” she whispered.

The girl froze. Her jaw hung open.

“Put the gun on the floor,” Elpida repeated. “Or I’ll pull this trigger.”

The girl tried to nod, but the pistol was in the way. Elpida eased back just far enough to give her room to obey. The girl bent over and placed the gun on the floor; by the way she handled it, she’d probably never touched a weapon before. She let go of the gun and spread her hands. Elpida put a foot on the submachine gun and scooted it back, beyond the girl’s reach.

This lone survivor was too shocked to take advantage of a moment’s lapse, and Elpida had only one hand. She had to use the hand holding her pistol to take off her greensuit hood. Her long white hair fell from the hood and down her back.

The girl’s face collapsed further — eyes bulging with fresh fear, mouth curling with a need to sob, her whole body cringing away from Elpida.

“Oh … n-no,” the girl half-sobbed, trying desperately to stay quiet. “It’s— it’s you, the— the leader! No— no no no, don’t— don’t—”

Elpida frowned. “You know me?”

“W-what?” The girl boggled at her. “I— I know you from the news! You’re the head pilot, a-aren’t you?” A shudder went through the girl; she started to pant as she spoke. “Y-you let that thing in here! Didn’t you?! You let it in, to kill us! You let in!”

“I did not let the Silico into the city. Stop. Breathe. You’re going to make too much sound and draw it down on us.”

The girl seemed about to hiss another panicked accusation, but then her eyes flickered to Elpida’s shoulder. “W-who are you?”

Lykke smiled, toothy and bruised, leaning around Elpida’s side. “Hiiii,” she whispered. “Oh, this one is shaking like a leaf. What fun! Can we keep—”

“Just a civilian,” Elpida said to the girl. “Ignore her.”

Lykke tutted. The girl didn’t seem to know where to look, then stared at the pistol. “Are you going to … kill me?”

“If I wanted to shoot you, I would have done it already,” Elpida said. “But I will, if—”

Lykke interrupted: “She will! You best believe her, sweet little thing. She’s a terror, this one, a real heart-breaker, a—”

“Lykke, shut up.”

Lykke shut up.

The girl was staring, panting for breath, eyes wide and white. Elpida continued, “I’m going to ask you questions. You’re going to answer them. Refuse, and I’ll shoot you. Lie, and I’ll shoot you. Try to mislead me — what happens?”

The girl swallowed. “Y-you’ll shoot me.”

“Good.”

Elpida was bluffing. She was not sure she could shoot an unarmed teenager, even a Covenanter — though this was a simulation. This girl had not been old enough to understand what she was committing to. She’d not even been old enough to have any responsibility in a guild. She was a child, led astray by others who should have known better.

“Your comrades brought a captive through here,” Elpida whispered. “Yes or no?”

The girl nodded. “Yes, yes!”

“Who?”

The girl’s eyes widened. “I-I don’t know! I don’t know, really, I don’t. It was just a person bundled up in a float-plate stretcher. That’s all I saw.”

“Which exit did they take?”

“The big one, up— up there.” The girl pointed a shaking finger at the blast doors where the Covenanters had mounted a last stand.

“Where were they taking her?”

“Her?” The girl blinked. “Um— I-I don’t know! I don’t. We don’t— I wasn’t part of—” Her face started to crumple. Fresh tears gathered in her eyes. “I was o-only meant to be here with— with my dad, and then—”

“Concentrate,” Elpida said.

It took an effort of will for Elpida to keep her face neutral. This girl — simulation or memory or not — was on the verge of a breakdown, pumped full of adrenaline, in shock. Her gaze started to drift backward, to the bodies right behind her. Was one of them her father? Was this the daughter of a committed Covenanter, just along to make her father proud? And now she was splattered with his blood, alone among the corpses, and her only hope was one of the people her father had sworn to exterminate.

“My— my— my d-dad, he’s right there. Dad … dad—”

Elpida reached out with the pistol and tapped the front of the girl’s chest. “Concentrate.”

The girl swallowed and nodded. She didn’t look at her father’s corpse.

Elpida whispered: “How many guards with the captive? How many Covenanters?”

“S-six,” the girl murmured. “No, uh, seven. Sorry. Seven. I-I think.”

“How were they armed?”

The girl blinked, blank for a moment. “Uh … with … guns? I-I-I don’t know much about … guns. I’m— I’m really sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Tears started to fall down the girl’s cheeks, cutting tracks into the blood. She raised an arm to wipe her face, but her sleeve was covered with blood as well; she stared at the sticky gore, frozen for a moment.

Elpida stared down at her, trying to sort through her memories. “I don’t recognise you,” she murmured.

The girl looked up, wide-eyed. Lykke let out a soft sigh and muttered, “This again, zombie?”

Elpida asked, “What’s your name?”

“Uh … uh … Misane. Misane … Peruce.”

A Skirts name. “Misane,” Elpida said. “What’s the last thing you remember doing?”

Misane blinked several times. “W-what?”

“Before this. Before you were here, in this chamber. What were you doing, before this?”

Misane shook her head. “Talking with … m-my dad and—”

“No, before that. Think hard, Misane. What is the last thing you remember?”

Misane’s breathing slowed. She frowned, growing more confused than afraid. “I was … in bed? In … bed, but I was … I wasn’t … ”

“That’s enough,” Elpida whispered.

Elpida didn’t know what this girl was — what any of these Covenanters were. Was this really just a reconstruction from a memory, whether hers or somebody else’s? Or was this a real person? Was this another form of resurrection, dragged out of the soup of history and pressed into service inside this simulation?

Was this just another zombie?

Elpida took a gamble.

“None of this is real,” she whispered to Misane. “This is a simulation, based on a memory. Do you understand?”

Lykke let out a soft little ‘ugh’. Misane just stared, wide-eyed. Even if this girl did comprehend, Elpida was the enemy she had been taught to hate and fear, and Elpida was holding her at gunpoint.

“Lykke,” Elpida hissed. “Pick up that submachine gun for me, please.”

Lykke tutted. She picked up the girl’s gun with one hand, dangling it by the butt, as if it was a bag full of excrement.

Elpida waved the pistol at Misane, gesturing her out of the alcove. She whispered, “The blast door on the opposite side of the room, it’s open, that’s where I just came from. There’s another pile of corpses down there, but nothing else. If you move quietly and slowly, the Silico won’t hear you.” She paused. “Go. Get out of here.”

Misane looked from Elpida to the gun, then back again. “But— but if it— if it’s there, I’ll— I-I need the—”

“I’m not putting a gun in your hands,” Elpida whispered. “Because you’ll probably use it to shoot me in the back. Go.”

Misane cringed . “What if there’s more Silico? I-I don’t want to die, please … ”

“None of these weapons would put a hole in a Silico killing machine. You need something heavier, like this.” She gestured with the pistol again. “Out.”

Misane stumbled out of the alcove, back onto the main floor of the chamber. Elpida followed, moving silently. Lykke sighed and padded after them.

Elpida pointed the pistol at Misane again. “Go.”

Misane hesitated. “Are you going to shoot the Silico?”

“If I can. Now—”

“Take me with you!” Misane hissed. “Please! If this is the Sixth Incursion, they’ll be everywhere. Please, please, I’m sorry, take me with—”

A clamour of heavy boots on metal floors rang out from far above.

Elpida twisted just in time to see a dozen armed figures emerge from the blast door which she had intended to use as her exit. Rifles in hands, scraps of body armour on their frames, white triangles painted on greensuit hoods and jacket shoulders and cast-off Legion chest-pieces. A dozen Covenanters advanced into the chamber, with the shaken confidence of those who were not used to seeing the fresh corpses of their friends.

Elpida tried to grab her own greensuit hood from the front of her ballistic vest, but it was too late.

One of the Covenanters stopped and pointed down at her. “It’s one of them!” he cried out. “One of them! She’s right here!”

Misane opened her mouth and raised a hand to her comrades. “Help—”

Elpida tackled her to the floor, behind a bank of computer consoles which ringed the great dome at the centre of the room. Misane flailed and spat, trying to wriggle out from under Elpida, batting at her chest and back with blood-smeared hands. Elpida shoved her down, further into cover. Lykke let out a squeal of delight from somewhere behind, but Elpida couldn’t see where the Necromancer had gone.

“Get off!” Misane screamed. “Get off! Get off me, get off—”

The Covenanters opened fire.

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Elpida just can’t help herself, can she? Necromancers, ancient foes, simulated versions of the people who exterminated her sisters – she’ll try to save anybody, if there’s any chance for redemption. Is she right, or just too optimistic? 

She’s already committed to shooting back at these Covenanters, though. Too bad.

Meanwhile – behind the scenes! It seems like this arc is going to be a little bit longer than I had expected (go figure, this always happens, right?) Not that much longer. Originally I had planned for 5 chapters, as tight as possible. But Elpida and others have pushed things a bit further, and now I think the arc will be 6-7 chapters. Maybe 8? I’m braced for anything. It’ll all be Elpida, though. We’re staying as focused as we can for this one. Elpida is at the controls; I’m just in the co-pilot seat with the mapping software. Anyway! I hope you enjoyed this one, dear readers. Onward we go.

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And, thank you! Thank you so much for being here and reading my little story about far-future zombie girls and the dead earth beyond the end of biology. None of this would exist without all of you, the readers! Even now I still feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface – though for the first time we’re digging a little deeper, into the soil, into the network, to see what lies beneath. And I will see you all next chapter. Until then!

Content Warnings

Gore

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Visceral flesh fluttered and pulsed on monumental scale, trembling and throbbing in slow, steady, stately rhythms, almost too subtle for human eyes to follow. Disrobed meat smouldered with the crimson glow of molten blood, glistening slick and wet with layers of silken mucus. Hawsers of thickly thrumming tendon and bunched cables of braided sinew sutured and stitched hidden layers of marrow and muscle to the arching spans of soaring bone. Osseous columniation curved toward the vault of the ceiling, joining there like steepled fingers, each rib-like support yellowed as ancient paper, encrusted with long streaks of darker deposit, pitted and worn in swirling patterns by the passing of processes no mortal mind could trace. The lowest and narrowest of the veins melted from flesh to dull silver metal, spreading out to become the floor. Tiny side passages puckered and winked, some of them closed by metal bulkheads marked with the symbol of the bone-speakers guild, others with warnings that the interior was unsafe for unprotected human beings, but a few stood open — membranous voids between the bones, lit by the dappled backwash of dark red light, spiralling upward and downward, deeper into the body of a living god.

Elpida crept onward through the remembered flesh and bone of Telokopolis, though she knew not where this vessel led.

Before she had left the memory of the cadre’s private quarters, Elpida had paused to equip herself from the armoury. She wore a fresh pair of black leggings and a clean back t-shirt, along with elbow and knee pads which the cadre had sometimes used for training. She had also dug out a pair of flexible, soft-soled sparring shoes, muffling her footsteps to near-silence.

A jury-rigged harness was looped around her left shoulder and forearm, made from two rifle slings and some combat webbing, cradling a GXI-115 lightweight submachine gun — little more than a pistol with a stock and some punch. Elpida had added a silencer, bulky and awkward but essential for her strategy. The weapon was designed for non-Legion civilians operating out on the plateau. It drew ammo from a pre-loaded block of reaction mass, produced minimal recoil, and had as few moving parts as possible. No way to jam, no need to reload, nothing that would force Elpida to fumble with the absence of her right hand.

She also wore a simple ballistic protection vest. Her long white hair was stuffed down the back. The front of the vest concealed an additional sidearm — a 117-MCS hand cannon, the same heavy pistol she had used against Lykke, along with two additional magazines, and a long-bladed combat knife.

Elpida had located some white paint deep in the armoury and done what was necessary, even though it had brought bile to the back of her throat.

The ballistic protection vest now sported the Covenanter’s triple-triangle symbol on the chest, daubed in white, by Elpida’s own hand.

Better than stripping the dead woman. Elpida had taken the greensuit hood, despite the blood on the inside; it was stuffed down the front of the ballistic vest, in case she needed to complete the disguise in a hurry. Her hair, skin colour, and height would give her away quickly, but she didn’t plan to pass for a Covenanter for long, just enough to fool a quick glance and slip on by — or to get close enough to open up with her firearm.

She still longed to employ the opposite strategy. Her hardshell suit still stood in the armoury, intact and undamaged, as if she had never tried to use it against Lykke. A missing right forearm wouldn’t matter once inside the suit. She could lock the servos in place, arm up the suit with a heavy machine gun, plasma-casters, and anti-personnel close-proximity fragmentation rounds, and then cut through a hundred Covenanters like a scalpel excising rotten flesh. But she had no idea how many of these memory-ghosts stood between her and Howl. She could not count on a total lack of anti-armour. Worse, the Covenanters could bog her down with sheer numbers in a protracted firefight, while they moved Howl elsewhere, or simply held her hostage, or threatened to kill her.

Elpida had to rely on stealth. Get to Howl, as quickly and quietly as possible.

Lykke walked beside her.

The Necromancer had shed her trembles and her shuffling limp, padding along quite comfortably on bare feet, though she still bore the bruises and welts that Elpida had left all over her skin. One of her eyes was puffy and purple. Blood and vaginal mucus still stained her little white dress, though the stains were muted by the omnipresent crimson light, turning all white to scarlet and maroon, wrapping her shins and ankles in rose-bright ribbons. Her golden blonde hair lay loose, turned dark red. Pain occasionally crossed her face in a suffocated wince.

Elpida didn’t complain about the flexible boundaries of Lykke’s promise of permanency; the Necromancer could lie all she wanted, as long as she helped recover Howl.

Lykke was still pouting, though.

“Truly, I have no idea what happened back there,” she was muttering as she followed Elpida. “That … that scrap of animated meat, that bag of unmodified flesh, that weak little mote of nothing, nothing, nothing! She wasn’t even holding me back, not really. Nothing like that has ever held me back. It’s nonsense, it’s contrary to every principle of good sense. It’s offensive. Yes, offensive, that’s what it is! Those flecks of lead, those bullets, holding me back? Tch! Perish the thought, perish the very notion. I just … I simply couldn’t … couldn’t touch her!” Lykke fell silent for a moment, then sniffed. “You do … you do believe me, don’t you, Elpida?”

Elpida kept her eyes on the main trunk of the passageway ahead, floor and walls and bone-supports all bathed in blood-red light. Each rib of arching bone was a potential ambush, each unfolding metre of curve a possible encounter. Her left hand was dry and cool on the grip of her weapon. Her bruises complained and her groin ached, but she ignored the sensations; the demands of her body faded to nothing.

Lykke whined, “Elpida? Elpida? Zombie? I asked, do you believe—”

“Already told you. Wasn’t your fight.” Elpida replied in a whisper. “She was a Covenanter. My responsibility, my failure.”

“Aren’t your responsibilities mine now, too? Now we’re … as we are?”

Elpida glanced at Lykke. The Necromancer’s pale skin was dyed darkly glistening red. “You said this software space exists inside me. I considered her my responsibility. The symbolism was obvious. I did not want you to kill her. I had to do it. Why are you so surprised?”

Lykke shrugged. “It shouldn’t have happened. It’s never happened to me before. You are … no offence, not after we shared so much, but you are only a zombie, after all … ”

Elpida returned her attention to the passageway. “You do the distracting, I’ll do the shooting. Or we slip by unseen, in disguise. All we need to do is recover Howl. Nothing else matters.”

Lykke sighed, sounding lost.

Elpida pushed onward, down the main trunk of this inner passageway of Telokopolis.

The passageway was very high and very wide, enough for two dozen Legionaries to march abreast, a clear memory of one of the largest and oldest veins in the living core of the city. It curved away to the right in a slow, lazy loop, ribbed with bone, upholstered with cliffs of flesh. The light dyed everything a mottled, dappled blood-red; a deep throbbing hum lay just below human hearing, resonating with the meat-and-fluid engines of the city; the air carried a sweet iron and tangy copper scent, the smell of machine-meat and organic lubricant, occasionally joined by the rich mineral spice of the exposed bones.

Elpida did not recognise the specific location. She had visited the deep innards of the city plenty of times, as much as the bone-speakers guild had allowed, but one meat-and-bone vessel was much the same as any other.

She ignored the open side-passages for now. They were tight and twisty, leading anywhere. If this kidnapping had happened in reality, in the real Telokopolis, in life, then Elpida would have been in a terrible situation; whatever force of Covenanters had overpowered and kidnapped Howl could have taken her down any passageway, into any adjacent vein of the city, into any one of a million hidden abscesses and pockets, or just hurried her to an elevator or transport tube, to whisk her off to another floor.

But this was a simulation, a software recreation made from Elpida’s own memories, running on the local nanomachine network of her own undead body.

So she followed the obvious passageway, toward obvious confrontation.

Lykke huffed again. “Sneaking about in the shadows? Really, zombie? We’ve been having so much fun, you and I. Haven’t we? Not counting my little … issue, back there.” She cleared her throat. “If we’re going to run into more of your dour and disgusting little friends, the least we can do is have some fun with them, can’t we? This is your internal network space, it’s not like getting shot or cut up would make any difference to you. Have some fun, cut loose! Ride that revenge!”

“Stop making suggestions.”

Lykke sighed — then cut off with a little cough. “Oh. Oh, you’re not … you’re not avoiding a dance just to … to spare me further … embarrassment?” Lykke lowered her voice. “Are you?”

“This might not be my doing,” Elpida said. “Keep that in mind.”

“ … eh? I’m sorry, zombie, what?”

Elpida glanced at Lykke again. The Necromancer looked clueless, eyes like pools of mulled red wine, hair the colour of dying roses. “I’ll explain. You listen. Then you tell me anything relevant, about how the network functions, how it interacts with my own internal software space. Understand?”

Lykke blinked three times, then shrugged. “I suppose so?”

Elpida kept her eyes on the curve of the corridor and her left hand on the grip of her machine pistol. She whispered quickly, ears pricked, listening for any sounds from up ahead.

“Option one, I am doing this to myself. The Covenanters are pure software. They’ve kidnapped Howl. My subconscious is doing this, perhaps to punish me, because I feel guilty. Something like that. The positive conclusion I came to earlier wasn’t enough.”

“You mean, after we fucked?”

“Mm.” Elpida shook her head. “But option one is unlikely. I do consider myself responsible for my sisters’ deaths. I may harbour some self-loathing. But I would never harm Howl. I would punish myself, not her. I don’t think I’m doing this to myself.”

“Punished me quite effectively,” Lykke purred. “Maybe Howl isn’t enough of a naughty girl?”

Elpida shot Lykke a sharp look. Lykke smothered a giggle.

“Option two,” Elpida carried on. “I am not doing this to myself. This is the work of an intruder, inside me, inside my local network, however it works. We’ll call this hypothetical intruder ‘hostile one’. Hostile one is using the Covenanters against me, a symbol from my memories, from my life. I am inclined to believe this, since I’ve already confirmed a prior intruder.”

Lykke gasped. “You have?!”

Elpida glanced at the Necromancer. “You.”

Lykke pouted. “You weren’t complaining about my intrusions earlier, zombie. In fact, I seem to recall you making some quite wonderful—”

Elpida halted and held up a hand.

“—noises when my—”

“Quiet,” Elpida snapped. “Now.”

Lykke shut her mouth, then sighed through her nose.

Elpida dropped to one knee and tucked herself half-behind a protruding ridge of bone. She turned her head, cocking one ear toward the passageway.

She wasn’t sure what she had heard.

The sound had been too subtle to identify, drowned out by Lykke’s words, captured and muffled by the meandering organic innards of Telokopolis. A voice, perhaps — a shout? A meaty, liquid — something? As Elpida strained to listen, she heard a brief moment of higher-pitched thumping — or perhaps only imagined she did.

She waited another minute, then two, but the sounds did not reoccur.

“Just Telokopolis?” she murmured.

Lykke sighed, flamboyantly irritated.

Elpida stood up, stepped out of cover, and continued her advance. “Lykke, still listening?”

“Tch! Not as if you’re good for anything else right now, zombie. Yes, yes, do continue … ”

“Good enough. My initial assumption was that ‘hostile one’ was you, but now I think it’s something else. Can you confirm that for me, Lykke? Is there another intruder?”

“How should I know?” Lykke snorted. “I don’t make a habit of slipping into zombies’ private networks. I told you, Elpida. You’re my very first. My first and only. The only one I want, the only one I’ll ever take, I think.”

Elpida ignored that. “Right. Brings me to my point. If hostile one is real, it might intend real harm, toward either myself or Howl. It might be able to do real damage. So, no, I’m not going to indulge anything, let alone a desire for revenge. We do everything we can to reach Howl, stealth or otherwise. Everything and anything. Understand?”

“I would be so much better at the ‘otherwise’.”

Elpida pushed on, each footstep silent, with Lykke trotting along behind her. The curve of the passageway sharpened — first gradually, then more intensely, as if coiling toward some vital organ of the city. Elpida stayed on the outside of the curve, for maximum visibility. She kept her ears pricked for any recurrence of the unexplained noises from earlier. She focused on each fresh arch of rising bone, every new expanse of red-glowing meat. She was waiting for any sign of Covenanters, but secretly for something else.

Elpida was keenly aware that her hopes were impossible. Despite her resolve to stay true to her new comrades, to put to them the question of Telokopolis as their future, she still ached for another glimpse of that white dress — that flutter around a corner, that hint of red flesh, that confirmation.

She wished that Telokopolis herself would show the way.

At Elpida’s shoulder, Lykke suddenly whispered: “What’s it like to have a sister?”

Elpida almost looked back. “What?”

“A sister. Like your … ‘Howl’.” Lykke tutted softly. “Or the others, the names I could read all over, back there in your sisterly love-nest. Orchid, Yeva, Asp? They were all your sisters, yes? But you weren’t spawned from the same womb. You were grown in machines, then decanted. Isn’t that right?

“She was our womb.”

“Eh? Pardon, zombie?”

Elpida nudged the wall with the stump of her right elbow. “Telokopolis. Our womb, our mother. She was the one who bore us, even if human hands helped her do it.”

Lykke fell silent for a long moment. Elpida kept her eyes on the curve ahead as she advanced. Was that another sound, at the edge of her hearing — a long metallic scrape? Or just another echo from the depths of this memory?

Lykke whispered again. “But what’s it like?”

“Lykke.”

“I know, I know!” Lykke hissed. “You’re trying to concentrate! You have to be ready to duck and roll and blast with your stupid little bang—bang splurt gun. But I’m trying to understand you! Your little goblin is horrible, just utterly rancid, I despise her. I would happily see her carried off by whatever bugbears your memory has summoned for you. But here I am, helping with a rescue, and for the love of myself I cannot figure out—”

Lykke rambled on. Elpida filtered it out, because the passageway had led somewhere.

The curve of corridor terminated in a tangled junction — a vast knot of meat and bone soaring far overhead, tied together with twists of naked tendon and strings of exposed sinew. A tracery of crimson spider-webbed toward the apex in a confluence of veins, like the canopy of the green, carrying more than blood in a dozen shades of scarlet flame and sluggish flows of raw red marrow. Wedges of bone rose from the floor, melded with the living metal extruded by the city, great gnarled horns of osseous matter marked with silvery capillaries; they seemed to have grown directly into the garnet flesh of the walls, fringed with hardened ruby nodules. Machine-meat was thickened and roughened in long furrows and wide patches, many of them dozens of meters in size — some of them were browned or blackened, then paled again with incredible age. Huge flaps of loose pink hung from the ceiling, ragged and empty. The floor was uneven, canted and bowed; Elpida had never encountered that before, anywhere in Telokopolis.

The metal of the city had been augmented and assisted by human hands — plates of common steel had been bolted to the bone in dozens of places, support struts riveted into the floor and braced against the arches, pins and disks and cables all clamping and splinting and fortifying this jagged crater. The steel surfaces were stained and discoloured like water on oil, protected against rust but warped by aeons of exposure to the city’s innards.

The abscess echoed with a deep, meaty palpitation, irregular and rough, just below the range of human hearing. It made Elpida’s eyes water.

“—and all I want is to understand,” Lykke was still talking. “I want to understand this thing you have with her, with any of them. This ‘bond’?” She spat the word. “Ugh, that makes me sound so twee, I could just vomit. What does it feel like, to have somebody so … so … ”

Elpida dropped to one knee at the edge of the junction, tucking herself into cover behind metal and bone. She could barely follow standard operating procedure, and had to force herself to concentrate. She scanned the mouths of the tunnels and passageways and arches, each one leading in a different direction. Some were fringed with Telokopolan bone, but others were ragged sections of unprotected machine-meat; a few had been reinforced with the living metal extruded from the veins of the city, as if it had flowed out and coagulated upon the flesh.

“All I am asking,” Lykke was saying, “is what it’s like. What is it like to have a sister, Elpida? Is the question so difficult?”

Elpida saw no motion in any of the exits from the junction. She stood up and stepped forward, out of cover. She let go of her machine pistol; it hung against her side, suspended on the straps and webbing.

She couldn’t help herself.

She reached out with bare fingers and touched the exposed flesh of Telokopolis, as she had a million times in true life. She ran her left hand over one of the thickened, roughened, darkened patches of machine-meat.

“Elpida? Zombie? You’re not paying attention, you’re not even listen—”

“Scar tissue,” Elpida whispered.

“What?” Lykke tutted. “What now?”

Elpida struggled not to lose herself. She focused on the concrete implications. “This is scar tissue. This whole junction. Scars and … and physical repairs, done by hand? By … by people? Look at this steel, it’s ancient. I’ve seen steel objects dated from the time of the city’s founding, and they don’t look like that, these must be … thousands of years older?” She forced herself to take a deep breath. “This was a wound. A very old one.”

Lykke just stared, expression limp. Then she put her hands on her hips. “I knew it. You’re not paying the slightest bit of attention, you—”

Elpida rounded on Lykke; she quickly replayed the Necromancer’s words in her head. “Having sisters is like having parts of my heart outside of my own body at all times. Lykke, pay attention. This is a wound. A wound in Telokopolis.”

Lykke blinked, frowned, and then shrugged. “Your city gets boo-boos, boo-hoo. What does that matter? This is all software, Elpida, it’s not happening right now.”

“I was never here.”

Lykke shrugged again, with more ostentation and fewer words.

Elpida explained. “In reality, in life, I was never here. I know the city can be wounded, in theory. But— but I’d never seen it with my own eyes. And nothing like this. The wound … this steel … it pre-dates—”

Lykke spread her hands. “Then you have a wonderful imagination, well done.”

“No!” Elpida snapped. “I could never have imagined this. I can barely—” Her eyes flickered along the gigantic streaks of scar tissue and missing chunks of bone replaced by metal, up to the ceiling, where the ragged sheets of once-torn flesh hung in pale pink memorial. Elpida tried to visualise what kind of weapon, wielded by what manner of foe, in what form of combat, could possibly have produced this wound. She felt a quiver in her chest. “I can barely process that this is even possible. Telokopolis, the city, her body, it’s not … totally invincible, I-I know, but—”

Lykke waved a hand. “If you want to rescue a sister, you have to accept some wounds.”

“No, Lykke.” Elpida clamped down on her awe, forced herself to focus. “That’s not the point. The point is, these aren’t my memories.”

Lykke’s mouth made a silent o-shape.

Elpida went on. “The cadre’s quarters, those were my memories. The deep places of Telokopolis, the living places, I went to those many times, yes. But I never saw a wound. Never an old scar, not like this. This is somebody else’s memory.”

“ … Howl?”

Elpida frowned, then shook her head. “She would have told us all if she’d seen an ancient wound. This would have changed our world.”

Lykke shrugged.

Elpida pressed: “Lykke. Are we still inside my internal network? Is this somebody else?”

Lykke rolled her eyes. “Yes, of course we are! Zombie, you fucked me upside down and inside out, but I’m not blind and deaf. Yes, we’re still inside you. Tch. It’s probably just your little goblin,” Lykke sighed. “Anyway. Which way do we go now? I thought you were the one in a hurry, and now we’re wasting so much time on this boring old hole.”

Elpida slipped her hand back onto the grip of her machine pistol. She clenched all her muscles to halt any residual quiver. The wound was unthinkable — but it also wasn’t real. This was a simulation. She still had to locate and recover Howl.

Telokopolis could be wounded, perhaps by mortal means; Elpida bottled that up and shoved it deep. This was not the time.

She scanned the junction exits once more, turning slowly on the spot. If Howl had been conscious when she’d been brought this way, she would have done anything she could to leave some kind of sign. But Elpida couldn’t see anything — no droplets of blood, no fresh scratch on a wall, no detritus dropped on the floor, not even a boot print or scuff mark on the metal.

“I don’t know,” Elpida admitted. “We may have to pick at random. Lykke, this is still software, and you’re a Necromancer, I need you to—”

A flicker of motion snagged Elpida’s peripheral vision and spun her round.

Down a passageway — a smaller cylinder-vault of bone-ridged flesh — a fluttering step strode around a distant corner.

White fabric, red flesh, bare ankle, a slip of dress?

Elpida couldn’t tell for sure, not at that distance, not with the crimson innards of Telokopolis painting every surface in glowing scarlet. But her heart leapt.

“There,” she snapped. “There.”

Elpida moved quickly and quietly, her soft-soled shoes silent on the living metal, slipping out of the wound-junction and into the slightly smaller passageway. Her mouth went dry and her fingers tightened on the grip of her weapon. Something familiar buzzed in the back of her brain, a recognition she could not quite put her finger on, not as adrenaline flooded her veins and Telokopolan genetic engineering prepared her for contact.

Contact? With the ghost-memory of Telokopolis herself? But why—

A familiar scent slammed into Elpida’s nostrils.

She reached the corner and flattened herself against the wall. Lykke trotted along to join her, hanging back. Perhaps she smelled the reek as well. Elpida peeked around the corner, weapon first.

Six Covenanters lay dead — strewn across the floor, smeared up the walls, taken apart and emptied out.

Elpida held her position. She counted twenty seconds, then went to sixty. Lykke whispered a complaint, but Elpida wasn’t listening. When the Necromancer tried to step past, Elpida made a hissing noise that stopped Lykke without argument.

Elpida held her position. She watched the shadows, the corners of bone, and the places where something might stand unseen in plain sight. She watched for the tell-tale shimmer, the refraction of light which should have been still. She listened for clicking or humming, for the drip of fluids. She inhaled deeply, trying to pick out sharper scents beneath the iron reek of fresh blood.

Nothing.

Elpida held her position.

After two hundred seconds, Elpida eased out of cover and stepped around the corner.

She didn’t bother to keep the machine pistol levelled. If she was right, then there was no point. The weapon was too small-calibre, lacking the necessary penetration.

She drew the hand cannon instead. One shot might break her elbow, but it would be worth the risk.

A group of Covenanters had been dismantled. The corridor was awash with fresh gore, stinking of blood and bile and voided bowels. No single corpse was in less than four pieces. Intestines had been torn out and smeared up the walls in slopping masses of mashed-up meat. Heads lay smashed apart, brains dashed out, grey and greasy. Limbs had been severed, torn from their sockets, or just pulped into ruined flesh and bone fragments. Clothes were shredded, soaked in blood, hard to recognise. Weapons had been shattered. Elpida spotted one rifle that had been bisected clean in two; the Covenanter had probably been trying to fend off a killing blow. A short combat knife lay on the floor amid a pool of blood; the blade had been snapped.

Elpida struggled to guess the ages or genders of the dead Covenanters. One surviving face on a severed head looked like an older man, perhaps. One arm looped in spilled intestines had the look of a young woman’s hand. A shattered pelvis wore the torn remains of a kilt, but that could have meant anything.

A handful of spent brass was scattered amid the blood and bodies. A few squashed bullets had fallen on the floor. Less than a dozen rounds.

Elpida wished she’d worn the hardshell after all.

Lykke tottered forward, showing her little white teeth in a big grin. She cooed with satisfaction. “This is more like it! Straight through them!”

“They were waiting for us,” Elpida said. “An ambush.”

“Did your little goblin do this? Did she get free and get wild?” Lykke let out a cackle, spinning on the spot, her bare feet pattering in the blood. “Oh my, my, my! Perhaps I misjudged her!” Lykke frowned. “Well … well, I wouldn’t go that far, she’s still horrid, but if this is her idea of a proper response, well, I do approve, I—”

“This wasn’t Howl.”

Lykke stopped turning. Her smile collapsed into confusion. “No?”

“I saw it, right there in the corridor. It must have been watching us, cloaked. I thought it was … ‘her’ again, for a second. Telokopolis. But it wasn’t, that was just in my mind, just what I wanted to see. Why didn’t it attack us? We were wide open. It could have taken us.” Elpida looked down at the heavy pistol in her hand, then at the end of the corridor, where the red light of Telokopolis glinted on angular footprints, blood-prints on the metal floor.

Minutes old. Fresh.

“Zombie, what are you going on about now?”

“These people were killed by a Silico construct,” Elpida said “A murder-machine, from my memories, from my life, my time. From out in the green.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Now how do you suppose that got into this simulation? Unless it really is nothing more than a bad memory. But who’s bad memory?

Welcome to arc 14! I hope you enjoyed the opening of Elpida’s one-woman (plus one-Necromancer???) sneaking mission, as much as I enjoyed writing it! As I mentioned last chapter, arc 14 is likely going to be quite short; 5 chapters is the current plan, but I am braced, as always, for Elpida to rip me off the outline and fling us all further than I expected. Though this arc is planned to be single-POV, which gives us some … forward momentum, let’s say. I hope Elpida treads carefully. This might be a simulation, but she’s got a point – die in the game, die in real life? We’ll see.

Anyway! I have more art from the discord, yet again! Just a couple this week: a mock-up front cover version of last week’s ‘Resurrection’, by samsungsmartfrog (I love how this looks, and I’d love to use it as a volume cover or something!), and then also this wonderfully characterful design for Ilyusha, with shotgun and shield and lots of meaty cybernetics, by spring. I know I say this every time I repost art here, but thank you so much!!! I’m so flattered and amazed by all the fanart. You’re all incredible!

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

Patreon link! It’s here!

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

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

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for being here and reading Necroepilogos. I might be writing the words, and Elpida is shooting the guns and messing with Necromancers, but you’re the ones who make this all possible every time you read a chapter. Thank you so much! I’ll see you all next time, and we’ll see more of the innards of Telokopolis. Until then!