Content Warnings

Memory degradation/dementia

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Melyn woke to the familiar sound of firearms discharge.

Low and deep and crunchy: crouf crouf. The gunshots were muffled by the thick walls of her cocoon — safely beyond of layers of exotic metal, hardened polymer, and self-regrowing composite ceramic armour — but also by the blankets in which she had wrapped herself for sleep, and by the fluttering sound of Hafina snoring next to her.

Pheiri was shooting at something.

This was normal, expected behaviour. Her notes recorded three thousand seven hundred and sixty two instances of Pheiri shooting at things with small arms. She’d given up adding more instances some time ago. She couldn’t recall when.

Melyn lay awake in the dark for a long time, snuggled down against Hafina’s side. She did not want to peel herself out of the blankets to see what was going on. There was no point. The engines remained on standby, a deep-belly hum down below Melyn’s range of hearing, a comforting full-body heartbeat transmitted up through the floor of the crew compartment, where she and Haf made their bed; the hull wasn’t ringing with impacts or dinging and pinging as small-calibre rounds bounced off the dirty white exterior; nothing was scratching against the rear access ramp or the top hatch; whatever Pheiri was doing did not involve the main turret, the rail-lance, or turning on all the lights and flashing alarms and generally having a tantrum. Melyn decided the noise would probably stop soon. She wanted to go back to sleep. Haf’s flank was nice and warm. Her body said no emergency. The screen of her mind was quiet and still.

But the crack-thump of weaponry went on and on. Timers started inside Melyn’s head, counting seconds, then minutes, then a quarter of an hour, until she was not only awake, but very irritated.

She left the halo of Haf’s body heat and rolled onto her back.

The crew compartment was the single largest space inside Pheiri — the only space large enough to bed down for the night, even if the benches were often covered in junk and clothes and pieces of Haf’s rifle and side-arms; Haf liked to take the guns apart and cover them in grease and put them back together again. Melyn didn’t understand why. Sometimes Melyn slept in one of the seats in the control cockpit, or wriggled into the cramped storage racks above the crew compartment. She had vague memories of once sleeping inside Pheiri’s turret, though those memories hurt if she touched them for too long; perhaps she had been unwell. But the crew compartment was the only place she and Hafina could lay down blankets and stretch out together. Sleeping together was always better than sleeping alone. Melyn didn’t enjoy sleeping alone, not unless she could wedge herself into the smallest space possible.

White and gunmetal, Pheiri’s guts flickered and danced with the backwash from the control cockpit up front, from a constellation of LEDs and readout screens and blinking lights, like fireworks in a moonless night sky.

Melyn had never seen ‘fireworks’ or ‘the moon’. She wasn’t sure what concepts those words referred to, but they scrolled across the screen of her mind regardless. She dismissed them with growing irritation.

Pheiri was still shooting: crump-crump-crack. Then came a long pause. Then another trio of shots. A long series of whirs and clicks and deep-tissue clunks followed: fresh rounds cycling into chambers from Pheiri’s growth-organs. Three more shots. Another two. One. Silence reigned just long enough for Melyn’s eyelids to droop. Then a barrage of slam-bang-crack jerked her into awareness again. Her mind was counting minutes and seconds and shots and time between shots and predicted distances and trajectories and targets. Sleep was hopeless. She extracted her arms from the covers and frowned toward the control cockpit.

Hafina snored on, oblivious.

Melyn told herself she was not jealous of Haf’s ability to sleep through anything, but she was. She was jealous of Haf’s larger body, Haf’s extra-fluffy blonde hair, Haf’s strength and stamina, Haf’s blind faith in Pheiri, and Haf’s unerring accuracy with the rifle. She was more ambivalent about Haf’s big goofy smile and Haf’s unreserved hugs and Haf’s big stupid eyes and big stupid arms.

But Haf wouldn’t understand the lights in the cockpit. The flickering patterns called to Melyn, made her head hurt, suggested she might decipher them into ammunition levels, heat readouts, IR feedback. But Haf would just shrug. To Haf they were just patterns in the dark. Waking Haf was pointless.

Melyn poked Haf in the side, hard.

“Wake up,” she hissed. “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”

Haf grumbled. She wedged her large frame further into the corner between crew compartment floor and crew compartment bench. The pose looked deeply uncomfortable, but Haf liked it; Haf liked to have her back against solid surfaces. That was why Melyn always got the middle of the floor.

“Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Haf, wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Haf. Haf. Wake up.”

“Mmmmmnnnn,” Haf grumbled again. Big eyes stayed firmly shut. Her blonde hair was all mashed into her face. She snuggled her head down further onto the bag she was using as a pillow. “How about no?”

Melyn sat up, dragging half the covers off Haf’s front. “Can’t you hear that? Haf, listen. Listen. Listen.”

Firearms discharge cracked and thumped, on and on, into the night.

Haf frowned without opening her eyes. “It’s raining.”

Melyn tutted. “That’s not rain. That’s guns.”

“Yeah, but there’s rain too. I can hear it on Pheiri. Plink-plonk-plink. You listen.”

Melyn was about to poke Haf in the side again, harder — but then she cocked her head and realised that Haf was correct: it was raining. Big fat drops raised a wall of static against Pheiri’s exterior. The screen of her mind supplied estimated raindrop density and liquid precipitation measurements, then demanded she drink some rainwater to test the chemical composition. She made that demand go away.

“Okay,” Melyn huffed. “It’s raining, fine—”

Haf said: “I was right. Go on, tell me I was right.” Her grin split the darkness of the crew compartment, big and toothy.

“No.”

“But I was right!” Haf sounded a little offended.

“That’s not important right now. Haf—”

“It’s always important when I’m right. Come on, tell me I’m clever, Mely. Pleeeeease, tell me I’m clever. Tell me I’m clever or I’ll go back to sleep.”

Melyn sighed. “You’re not more clever than me. Stop playing. Stop. Listen. Pheiri’s doing something.”

Hafina listened for a moment. Then she said: “Pheiri’s always doing something.”

“Yes, but we aren’t moving. And it’s not stopping.”

Haf shrugged beneath her ruined blanket cocoon. One huge naked shoulder went up and down. Her mouth twisted with grumpy sleep-desire. “So?”

“So, we’re not moving through anything. What’s he shooting at? Why’s it going on so long? Why now? It’s the middle of the night. That doesn’t make sense. And it’s not stopping. Not stopping. Not stopping. We have to check. I have to check.”

The slow crump-crack of gunshots continued, muffled beyond Pheiri’s hull. Melyn let the sound speak for itself. Eventually Haf sat up, too big inside the crew compartment, beautiful in her ungainly motions; the flickering cockpit lights glazed her naked shoulders and collarbone and chest. The screen of Melyn’s mind measured Haf’s visible muscles against every previous measurement of Haf’s visible muscles, then informed her that Haf had lost an estimated sixty pounds of muscle mass over the last twenty five thousand hours. Melyn’s mind suggested several sources of high-calorie intake, but she didn’t know any of the words, so she made the suggestions go away.

Haf opened her eyes and watched the ceiling. She said: “Pheiri knows what he’s doing.”

Melyn hissed, “Yes, but we don’t know what he’s doing!”

Haf shot her one of those big stupid smiles, the kind which made her soft and funny and red in the face. “Then go look? Want me to stop you? Is this just a roundabout way of waking me up for a fuck?”

Melyn punched Haf in the shoulder. Haf laughed and tried to elbow her in the side, but Melyn was already squirming out of bed.

She kept her head low as she left their blanket nest, so she didn’t bang it on the crew compartment ceiling; Melyn was much smaller than Haf, with slender limbs and fewer sticky-out bits to bruise on Pheiri’s innards, but she still had to be careful. She curled her toes against the cold metal floor as she rummaged in the equipment bags on the bench, pushing aside her helmet and old body armour and too many pairs of gloves.

Haf sat up straight all of a sudden. Her eyes went three times larger. Her skin cycled from reflective-pale to night-combat black. “Mel? You’re not going outside, are you?”

Melyn found her big grey jumper and dragged it over her head. She pulled her dark hair back into a ponytail. “Nope.”

“But what are you doing?”

“Don’t feel like being naked right now.” Melyn scooped up her notebook and a pen from the bench. She refused to look at Haf.

“Awwww, hey,” Hafina whined. “I didn’t mean to make you mad. Mely, what’d I do?”

“You’re fine.”

Melyn went to the front of the crew compartment and jabbed at the dispenser controls until Pheiri disgorged a food-stick. She stuck one end in her mouth, tucked her notebook under an armpit, and ignored Haf whining her name.

“Melyyyy, Melyyyy, Melyyyyyyyy.”

Melyn squirmed through Pheiri’s innards, over branching tubes and past bunches of wiring, lifting her naked legs to scramble over the bare metal of the reserve communication officer’s seat, the secondary gunner’s position, the access hatch for the engine, and the bulge of super-heavy armour over Pheiri’s brain. She had no idea what a communication officer or secondary gunner was, or what they needed all those extra buttons and switches and dials for. Nothing back there had lit up in a long time. But the words scrolled across the screen of her mind anyway, along with the time since last activation of the respective systems: five hundred twenty six thousand three hundred and two hours.

She wriggled past the rungs of the turret-ladder and could not resist the urge to glance upward, at the control-helmet which hung in the dark, inside the turret. She suppressed a shudder, but she didn’t know why.

Melyn popped free into the control cockpit. The screens and buttons and dials were all trying to tell her things, too many things, all at once. Melyn ignored them. She crouched on the shapeless ancient stuffing of the auxiliary manual input seat, then took a moment to chew the food-stick and lick greasy crumbs off her fingertips. She flipped open her notebook and started to cross-reference the symbols on the screens against her previous records. The screen of her mind kept making useless suggestions with words she didn’t know.

Her eyes flicked up and down. Her fingertips traced her notes. Her lips moved in silence.

Haf called out, still worming her way through Pheiri’s guts: “Is he okay? Mel? Mel? Is he alright?”

Melyn tutted under her breath. “Of course he’s alright. Don’t be stupid.”

“Mel!”

Hafina emerged into the control cockpit a second later and banged her head on the roof. She had pulled body armour over her naked top half, arms sticking out, hands clutching her rifle. Her eyes were huge in the darkness. Her skin glistened white-grey as it tried to match the metal behind her.

Melyn raised an eyebrow. “Haf, what are you doing?”

Haf said: “Is there something wrong with him!?”

“ … no. Haf, why are you carrying the gun?”

Haf looked down at the polymer-and-metal firearm in her hands. “Seemed like the right thing to do?”

Melyn sighed. She pointed at a seat on the other side of the control cockpit. “Sit. Wait. Let me read.”

Haf sat and waited. She was very still.

Melyn found Pheiri’s information harder to comprehend than usual; there was a lot of data that she’d never seen before, not recorded anywhere in her notes, indicated on readouts which she’d never seen lit, or at least not lit in those specific ways. The screen of her mind kept supplying things about atmospheric nanomachine density, orbital re-entry disturbance, relative time displacement, and flashing her with priority interrupts. She made all those go away because they weren’t helping.

One screen she did know: a landscape of green ghosts washed with ash and acid rain. That was a front view from Pheiri’s cameras. Lights blinked on a console just above her head: green for ready, red for reloading. There were a lot of reds, taking a lot of time to cycle back to green. At least she assumed that’s what the lights meant, because she’d never seen those particular ones lit before. Lots of the usual ones were green and not changing to red.

“Different … weapons?” she muttered. Hafina sat up straighter. “I’m not talking to you, Haf. Settle down. Pheiri is fine.”

Melyn pressed some of the buttons by the side of the display screens, the ones she knew from experience, the ones that would change the colours of the display or tell Pheiri that she wanted to look in different directions. But all the readouts showed her the same information, nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary, just the city, haunted by image-ghosts as zombies slipped away into the ruins. The readouts shook very slightly every time Pheiri fired another hull-weapon. Melyn couldn’t see what he was shooting at.

Haf leaned forward to get a better view, then stood up. She left her rifle behind. Her eyes were normal size again. She got behind Melyn and slowly hugged her from behind, chin on Melyn’s shoulder, crouching and bracing herself against the cramped metal confines of the forward compartment.

Melyn said: “You’re warm.”

“And you’re cold. Brain’s doing too much.” Hafina squinted hard at the third screen above Melyn’s head. “Act— act … ive? Active! Active crew … pro— prot—”

Melyn sighed. She read the glowing green text in a single glance. “Active crew protection ballistics online.”

“Ooooh, right.” Haf lit up. “What does that mean?”

Melyn frowned. “It’s right there, that’s what it means. Active crew protection ballistics online.” She tapped the screen with the end of her pen. “Right there.”

Haf pouted and blew a raspberry against the side of Melyn’s head, which turned into a brief struggle for dominance. Melyn won – she already had the chair, her hands were quicker, and Hafina’s strength was limited against non-lethal targets. After a quick cuff round the head, Haf settled back into place with her chin on Melyn’s opposite shoulder.

Haf said: “Teach me.”

“Active,” Melyn began. “So, opposite of passive. That means Pheiri is doing something.”

Haf snorted. “We know that already.”

“Yes, but this means Pheiri wants to tell us. And, ‘crew’, that’s … ”

Haf squinted. “Like the crew compartment?”

“Yes. So … let’s skip that for now.” Melyn tapped the next word. “Protection. Pheiri always protects us, so that must be right, I don’t think he’s doing anything bad.” Melyn stopped and stared for a long time at the next word. The firearms crumping and cracking from outside kept interrupting her thoughts with useless data.

The moment stretched too long for Hafina’s patience. She whined. “Ballistics?”

“I don’t know,” Melyn admitted.

“You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I don’t know every single word, okay? I don’t know what it means. Stop that. Stop nibbling on me.” She elbowed Haf in the ribs, which did nothing to stop Haf chewing on Melyn’s ear.

“Mmmmmmm. But you read the books. Don’t they have all the words?”

Melyn sighed. “They have lots but not all. You can’t have all the words in a single book, it doesn’t work like that. You put certain words in certain orders to say certain things, you don’t just jam them all together.”

The screen of Melyn’s mind said: Dictionary. She dismissed that.

Hafina made a dissatisfied noise.

Melyn went on: “Anyway. Ballistics. Now I’ve had a moment to think, I think it means guns. Firearms.”

“See!” Haf laughed. “You did know! Fuck it, Mel, you’re so fucking smart. I love you.”

“And you’re dumb as a brick, but I love you too.” She tapped the last word in the sentence. “Online. That means it’s on, or it’s working, or it’s connected. So Pheiri is doing something active, which is on, to protect us.” She finished, nodded, and smiled to herself. That felt good. All the things in her mind lined up for once. “He’s shooting at stuff.”

Hafina laughed. “We knew that from the start.”

Melyn nodded. “Yes. But this way is better.” She flicked back through her notes, reading by the light from the screens and LEDs. “He’s done this before. My notes say we’ve read this line before. Three hundred and eighty times in this notebook alone. This one alone.”

“That’s a lot.” Hafina sounded impressed. “Go Pheiri. Bang bang.”

“Mm.”

Hafina smacked her lips. “Doesn’t sound right though.”

“Yes,” Melyn said. She reached up and tapped the screen again. “This next line is new. More interesting. Not seen before.” She read out loud for Haf’s benefit: “Anti-personnel munitions insufficient for penetration. Escalation to HE-tip rounds authorised.”

Hafina whistled. Melyn frowned: did Haf understand what the words meant? But Haf was already asking: “He done this before?”

Melyn flicked back through her notebook again. “Mm, yes. Here. And here. And once again, here. I think we forgot. We forgot. Forgot. We forgot.”

Haf squeezed Melyn’s shoulders, nice and tight and hard. “It’s okay,” she said.

“Yes,” Melyn said. She stared at her notes.

Hafina nuzzled her neck and said: “As long as you don’t forget me.”

“How could I?” Melyn straightened up. “You’re too large to forget. You always get in the way.” Haf made a sad face, peering around Melyn’s shoulder. “What? What? What?”

Haf said, “Doesn’t that imply I might forget you?”

“Why? Why?”

“‘Cos you’re kinda small.”

Melyn rolled her eyes. “Don’t be stupid.”

Haf smiled, pretend sadness turning back into a grin.

Melyn went on: “If you forgot me, I’d beat you up.”

Haf laughed. “You wouldn’t be able to beat me up!”

Melyn turned slightly in her seat. “If you forgot me, you couldn’t use your muscles at their maximum. Therefore, I would beat you.”

Haf pulled a thinking face, then shrugged her big naked shoulders beneath her loose body armour. Her skin cycled back to its usual resting reddish tint. “Can’t argue with that, I guess.” She looked up at the screens again. “So, like, what’s Pheiri shooting at?”

Melyn didn’t answer right away. She looked up and to the left, at the portion of the forward compartment that projected upward, where the observation seat hung unoccupied. Set in the metal in front of the seat was a sliding wedge which covered a thick pane of reinforced steel-glass.

They both stared.

Melyn felt her heartbeat quicken. She wormed a hand under her grey jumper and pressed her palm to her ribs. Haf just chewed her bottom lip, then bit off a chunk of flesh and swallowed it. Melyn swatted her on the legs. Haf shouldn’t eat bits of herself. Recycling was inefficient.

“Pheiri,” Melyn said. “What are you shooting at?”

Green text scroll-printed onto a nearby screen, replacing a meaningless stack of data.

“Nanomachine conglomeration #813576,” Melyn read out loud. “Estimated sapience high-value target. Damage to outer shell negligible. Damage to core negligible. Percentage of body mass lost zero-point-zero-zero-zero-three. Estimate disengagement at eighty seconds ongoing. Recommend no pursuit of target.”

Hafina snorted. “Pheiri, we’re not gonna chase it?”

The green text re-printed itself: Recommend no pursuit of target.

“Why not?” Haf asked. “I mean, sure, you do you, but why—”

Recommend no pursuit of target.

“Why not?” Haf repeated.

Melyn said: “It’s probably bait.”

“I’m going to look,” Hafina announced. She clambered over Melyn and up into the observation seat.

“No!” Melyn whispered. “Don’t! You don’t know what Pheiri’s shooting at! Stop it!” Melyn grabbed Haf’s ankle, but Haf shook her off.

Melyn didn’t understand why she was whispering; it wasn’t as if anything outside could hear them through the inches and inches of Pheiri’s hull armour. She also didn’t understand why she was afraid. The screen of her mind was covered with terminology she didn’t understand: ‘cognitive hazard’, ‘visual spectrum infection vector’, ‘LOS resolution blocker’, and a dozen other pieces of useless nonsense that she shut down or shooed away.

Haf ignored her panic and craned forward in the observation seat. She slid the wedge open with a clack. The little steel-glass window was too high for either of them; Melyn always had to stand on the seat to see anything, but Hafina only had to strain upward and press her face to the transparent surface.

Melyn pulled her jumper over her head and huddled down in her seat. Haf stared into the dark beyond Pheiri’s hull. Raindrops blurred the world.

Moments passed. Timers counted down inside Melyn’s head. Haf didn’t make a sound. Melyn peeked out from inside the collar of her jumper, then lowered it to uncover her mouth. Haf was unmoving. Her eyes were very large.

Melyn said: “What do you see?”

“Eh,” Haf grunted. “Too dark. Too much rain. Can’t see anything.”

Melyn huffed and rolled her eyes and got out of her seat. She settled her jumper so it fell past her knees, then set about crawling around the inside of the control cockpit so she could write down all the different things Pheiri was trying to tell them. She noted the position and colour of LEDs, which ones were lit and which ones were dark; she sketched the contents of all of the screens, numbering and labelling them as she went; she wrote down all the numbers she could find, especially the ones she hadn’t seen before.

“Neural lace echo signal detected,” she read off a display, because she’d never seen the words before. “New course entered. Priority override: recovery of pilot.”

Haf peered down at her from the observation seat. “What’s that mean?”

Melyn shrugged, writing the words in her notebook. “No idea.” She frowned through the following sentences, but there was nothing interesting, just lists of numbers and directions and speeds. But then: “High risk advisory: projected course intersects nanomachine output facility footprint; crew advised to stay within atmospheric sealed compartments for approx three hundred hours. Check atmospheric seals. Check atmospheric re-processors.”

Haf went all stiff. Her eyes blinked in the dark, big and shiny-black. “Pheiri wants to go near a worm?”

“We’re nowhere near one,” Melyn said. “Nowhere near. Nowhere.”

“Yeah we’re pretty deep, right?”

“Nowhere near. Nowhere near.”

“What’s he thinking?” Hafina clacked the cover back over the observation window. “Hey, Pheiri, what you thinking? We don’t wanna go near a worm.”

“Priority override,” said Melyn.

“Eh?” Haf slithered down from the seat, huge and tight in front of Melyn. Her skin was turning grey-white again, trying to blend in with the cockpit.

“It means we don’t get a choice. It means Pheiri has to do it, and we have … to … ” Melyn looked up. “Oh. It stopped.”

“Eh?”

“Shhhhh. Listen. Listen.”

The shooting was over. No more guns going off. The lights, the ones which had been red and green, were now all dark. The message about active crew protection had wiped itself off the relevant screen. The ash-and-acid ghosts on the night vision monitor had vanished.

Haf broke into a grin. “Thank you, Pheiri!”

“Thank you, Pheiri,” Melyn echoed in a soft purr, matching the faint hum of Pheiri’s engine. She reached out and stroked the nearest piece of bare metal.

She and Haf looked at each other for a moment, then broke into a shared giggle. Haf sat down in one of the forward seats. Melyn climbed into her lap. They wriggled to get comfortable, heads together, all six of Haf’s arms around Melyn’s much smaller body. Haf fell asleep first, snoring softly. Melyn waited longer, listening to the rain, watching until all the little lights inside Pheiri had gone out.

“Priority override,” she whispered to the dark control room. “You sure? Sure?”

A single screen blinked on. Green text print-scrolled: No. Uncertain.

“Why?”

Signal corruption. Orbital re-entry interference. Elevated levels of nanomachine construct activity. Risk to crew. Damage to armour plating sub-layer in locations: A453, A927, A33820, B89263, B98762, C7830387, D2387, M2223, O233321, Y2871, Y778201. Risk to crew. No pilot. Risk to crew. Fusion containment replacement required. Risk to crew. Maintenance overdue by 99999999 ERROR hours. Risk to crew.

“Are we going to do it anyway?” Melyn whispered. “Do it anyway? Anyway?”

Risk to crew.

“Okay. Okay. Do it anyway?”

Risk to crew.

The screen blinked off.

Pheiri had nothing more to say. Melyn closed her eyes, held her breath, and listened to the nuclear heartbeat below her feet.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

An interlude! Something a little different. A glimpse into elsewhere. Next chapter it’s back to Elpida and her comrades, but this certainly isn’t the last we’ve seen of Melyn and Hafina, or of Pheiri, whatever he is. This was an interesting narrative experiment and I hope it went down well, because we might be doing more POV shifting in the future. Hope you enjoyed reading! Onward, to arc 4.

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

Patreon!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 3k words.  Please, do feel free to wait until there’s plenty more to read! I’m still trying to somehow put out more chapters ahead, maybe soon!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry, for voting. Voting makes the story go up the rankings, which helps more people see it!

Thank you so much for reading my little story. More soon! Lots more to come.

Content Warnings

Grief
Discussion of child soldiers
Implied incest (sort of)

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The tears wouldn’t stop; burning hot behind her eyes, blurring the exterior world beyond a veil of pain, running down her cheeks in twin scar-lines, invading her mouth with the taste of bitter salt, dripping from her chin to stain the cold concrete floor and pool in the crinkling plastic of the emergency blanket. She made no effort to wipe at the tears — could not have done even if she had wanted. Heaving, shaking, suppressing each great wracking sob, grinding the broken glass inside her lungs. She gritted her teeth and screwed her eyes shut, but the tears could not be dammed up. The pain was too large for her body, with nowhere to go. She would burst, explode, fly apart. She wanted to keen and wail and howl through her teeth; she wanted to scream until her lungs ruptured; she wanted to tear handfuls of concrete from the floor and crush them to dust, hurl them at the walls, force them down her throat, smash them against her own skull, open herself up until blood and viscera and bone marrow ran free and released her from this pain.

But she didn’t. She didn’t want to wake the others — Kagami, Ilyusha, Amina. They were exhausted. They needed rest. She swallowed each sob, feeling her heart tearing at itself.

Elpida wept without end.

After minutes or hours — she wasn’t sure — she felt a hand grip her upper arm, firm and strong.

“Come on,” Vicky hissed. “Come on, Elpi. Up you get. Come on. On your feet, super-soldier girl. What do I have to say? Attention? Time to move out? On the double? Come on. Come on, get up, ‘cos I can’t lift you.”

Elpida choked out: “Your— arm—”

“Fuck my arm. Forget about the arm. On your feet. With me.”

Elpida wasn’t sure how she managed to stand, but she did. Vicky’s hand was sweaty and grimy in her own. Vicky led her out of the bunker’s main room, through the tiny dark corridor, and into the room at the opposite end, with the concrete block-seat and the cistern of water and the closed slit window. Vicky made Elpida sit down on the concrete block. Elpida could barely see through the tears. Her muscles felt like overstretched steel cables. She couldn’t stop sobbing. She wanted to smash her head into the concrete wall so the cold air would take her brains.

“Elpi,” Vicky was saying in a croaky voice. Her hand was squeezing Elpida’s shoulder. “Elpi, I’ll be back in less than sixty seconds. Okay? Can you hold on for sixty seconds for me?”

Elpida nodded.

Vicky left the room. Greasy raindrops drummed on the concrete roof, drowning Elpida in black static. Low voices came from the other end of the bunker. Then Vicky returned, with the dead-blue light of a glow-stick. She joined Elpida on the bench and put her one working hand on Elpida’s shoulder.

“Let it out,” Vicky said. “Just let it out, Elpi. You gotta. You gotta let it out. You’re not gonna wake anybody up, I’ve warned them. You’ve been going and going and going since we woke up — since we came back to life, whatever. You were on your feet from the word go. You were the only one who did that. Come on, Elpi, let it out, let it—”

Elpida screamed. She screamed through her teeth until her throat was raw and bloody. She keened and spat and howled so hard she thought the concrete might crack; she leaned forward and screamed at the floor; she stamped and kicked and wept till she drooled bloody saliva.

She did what she couldn’t do yesterday — a million years ago — for each of her lost clade-sisters.

In the spire-cell where the Covenanters had incarcerated the cadre, up near the very tip of Telokopolis, she’d had to be strong. Elpida had to be the Commander, had to keep the others sharp, give them hope. She had kept them organised, made certain nobody fell into despair, or felt separated from the others. She had never given up on any of her sisters, all twenty four of them. Right down to the final day, with only herself, Kos, and Orchid left, when she’d become certain that the Covenanters were executing them, Elpida had to be strong. Yesterday.

The genetically engineered pilot-clade were hardened against panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, combat fatigue, anxiety issues; they had been grown with a host of minor but important tweaks to their emotional regulation, hormone production, and neurochemistry. But they could still cry. All of Elpida’s clade-sisters had been able to feel the full range of human emotion, even those who stood at the extremes of the project’s genetic tweaking. As Commander — or perhaps because of Old Lady Nunnus — Elpida had been allowed to see the pilot project design documents. She had read the reports on what had come before the cadre. Previous versions of the pilot project had tried to create perfect little automatons, human beings without needs; the result was flesh without soul. The first pilot project design team had been removed from their posts and barred from Civitas work for life. The cadre was the compromise: people, but selectively muted.

Except it hadn’t worked. The project had not predicted what the girls would become, the group-logic which bound them together, the intense need for each other’s company and touch and regard and love. And by the time that had become apparent, the cadre had been ready to force their hands.

But Elpida had never been taught how to deal with grief. She’d never lost a sister. She had no idea how to mourn.

So she screamed and screamed and screamed for her sisters, until she had nothing left inside.

The pain did not ebb, did not lessen, did not go away.

Eventually, only aching silence was left.

“Here,” Vicky croaked. “To … to wipe your eyes.”

She pressed one of the spare grey thermal t-shirts into Elpida’s hands. Elpida used it to wipe her face, to clean up the drool and dried tears. She stared at the concrete wall in the blue glow-stick light. She listened to the rain above her head. Vicky got up again for a moment and left the glow-stick on the concrete seat; Elpida heard the glugging of water. Then Vicky returned and held out one of the nanomachine cannisters they’d taken from the tomb, one which had already been drained of the blue nanomachine slop. She’d filled it with brackish water from the cistern.

Vicky said: “Try to drink some. Sorry, this is the only container we’ve got. S’probably got some trace leftover nanomachines in it, but hey, that’s supposed to be good for us, right? Like nano-squash. Heh.”

Elpida nodded. Her face was sore. She coughed. She drank some stagnant water, then handed the cannister back. Vicky drank as well, stiff and slow next to Elpida on the concrete seat. Raindrops drummed on the roof, washing the air clean with black static. They passed the water back and forth for a while.

Eventually, Elpida said, “How long was I crying?”

“About an hour, I think. You went quiet in the middle for a bit, then there was some more. If you need to keep going, that’s okay too.”

“I made a lot of noise.”

Vicky cleared her throat gently. “Kaga’s awake. I asked her to come get us if she sees anything moving toward the bunker.”

Vicky looked uncomfortable; she had to sit bent forward to cradle her reattached arm in her lap, and the looted green coat was pulled tight over her left side. Her dark face was lined with exhaustion, deep brown eyes soft with care. Her hair looked like she’d been running her hand through it over and over.

Elpida told her: “You need sleep.”

Vicky pulled a rueful smile. “Elpi, it’s a lot to deal with, waking up after the end of the world. With everybody gone. Dead, I mean. I cried too, earlier, while you were, um, dead. Kaga went off to cry by herself. Amina can’t stop crying. We’re all fucked up by this. It’s okay to let it out. Like I said, you’ve been in go mode since you jumped out of that coffin. Nobody’s gonna blame you for breaking down a bit.”

Elpida shook her head. “It’s not that. I wasn’t mourning the world. I’m not in shock.”

Vicky raised her eyebrows. “Oh yeah?”

Elpida stared at the concrete wall. “Yesterday — a million years ago — I was in a cell. With my cadre.”

“Cadre. Right. You called yourself ‘Commander’ earlier. You led a squad or something? A—”

“The cadre. My clade-sisters. The pilot-program clone litter. My family, my lovers, my responsibility.” Elpida spoke the words even though she knew Vicky would not understand all the meanings. “All of us. We were in that cell for almost two weeks. Every day the Covenanters would take one or two of my sisters away, and shoot them. I was the Commander, and I couldn’t do anything. They kept me for last. Probably because the Civitas was demanding they hand me over. Maybe I was a bargaining chip. Maybe the executions were political theatre. I don’t know. But at the end it was just me in that cell, alone for the first time in my life. And then they came back and shot me too.”

Vicky was silent. Elpida turned to her, and found Vicky staring in mute horror.

“ … E-Elpi, are you … you … ” Vicky swallowed. “Grief like that doesn’t just pack itself away. Do you … do you need—”

“I was made for this. I still feel it, but it’s dulled now. That’s just how I was designed.”

“What, they made you so you can’t even grieve?”

Elpida told Vicky the basics — about the pilot program, the cadre, the genetic engineering, the Civitas, the Covenanters, the endless political division over isolation and expedition, the ‘green question’ — and then about the end, the spire-cell. Vicky listened without asking questions. Elpida skipped unimportant details; the details did not matter.

“And, Howl?” Vicky asked gently. “That was a name. Was she … ?”

Elpida’s throat tried to close up. She stared at the blue-lit concrete, and recited:

“Howl. Metris. Silla. Vari. Third. Kit. Daysalt. Shade. Orchid. Arry. Bug. Ipeka. Velvet. Kos. Fii. Snow. Here. Dusk. Scoria. Yeva. Try. Asp. Quio. Emi.”

Black static washed away the names. Elpida repeated them a second time, under her breath. She reached up and cupped the back of her neck, where her MMI slot should have been.

After a long moment, Vicky said: “Those were their names?”

Elpida nodded. “Mmhmm. Howl was my … closest. Second-in-command, sort of. We didn’t really have ranks, not really.”

“But you were in charge?”

Elpida shrugged. “The Legion had ranks, so we had to maintain some semblance of command structure, even if just for appearances. I was the Commander, but not because of rank, and not because of anything the project bio-engineers intended. I was Commander because the others followed me. Silla, Metris, Howl, they were my lieutenants. But Howl was … ” The tears threatened to come back. Elpida took a deep breath. “Howl was special.”

“Your … lover?” Vicky sounded a little uncomfortable. Elpida was used to that.

“We all loved each other. In all different sorts of ways. Born together, raised together. But with Howl and me, it was always very intense. She was impossible.” A smile pulled at the corners of Elpida’s mouth. “She would always push me, always question me, challenge me in front of the others. We beat each other black and blue in sparring. But she’d always want to get in private, too, just the two of us. She loved me, more than the others, I think, though that’s impossible to quantify. And I relied on her in a way I never understood, not until … ” Elpida trailed off, looking down at her hands. “We were very close. Slept together a lot. I knew her body better than I know my own.”

Vicky didn’t say anything for a long moment, so eventually Elpida looked up — and found a very familiar expression looking back at her: incomprehension, caution, concern. She straightened up.

“Elpi,” Vicky started to say. “I don’t know what to—”

“Don’t.”

Vicky froze. “ … Elpi?”

“I’ve seen that look on your face a thousand times before.” Elpida kept her voice level and calm, but she was surprised — by anger. She’d never given vent to it before, not to a Legionnaire, not in the Civitas, not to Old Lady Nunnus — not to any outsider beyond the cadre. “You don’t understand what I’ve told you. You don’t understand us. You don’t understand the bond we have or what it means; because you don’t think it’s real. You see a genetic experiment that doesn’t really think or feel like a—”

Vicky raised her good hand. “Elpi, whoa, no—”

“We were never approved of. First we were a bunch of soulless freaks, raised in antiseptic rooms, prodded and poked and experimented on—”

“Elpi! It’s okay, you’re—”

“Until we killed one of our handlers at six years old!” Elpida snapped in Vicky’s face. Vicky shut up. “I led that. I led the others in a murder. I made the decision, I approved the plan, I took responsibility. Because I could see what would happen if we didn’t. Genetic engineering had gifted me enough intelligence that at six years old I could see the project was going to split us up.”

Vicky nodded. “Okay. Okay.”

“They called us clones, but we weren’t identical. Not from identical genetic stock. Each of us was selected and built differently. That was part of the experiment. And they were going to split us up, use some of us to breed more, discard others as failed — not kill us, but just into the civilian population. They wanted to split us up. So we killed a fully grown man at six years old. We trapped him, cut his hamstrings, and broke his neck. We showed the project what we were capable of. And it worked.”

Vicky swallowed.

Elpida continued: “And then we were still freaks, but we were something else too. Nobody ever approved, no matter how successful we were, no matter that we finally got the combat frames to respond to a human MMI link. No matter how deep we went into the green. No matter how many Legion operations we saved. Did we have souls? That was up for debate. Could we feel? Probably, but maybe not. Old Lady Nunnus believed us. When she took over, she treated us like human beings, because she believed in the purpose of the project, she was an expeditionist — but even she didn’t want to know what was inside our heads. Legion Commanders found it weird that we all slept together, that we were so close, that we fucked.” Something caught in Elpida’s throat. “We fucked.” She took a deep breath and looked at the ceiling. “It feels good to say that. I’m sorry, Vicky. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to feel these things.”

Vicky touched Elpida’s shoulder with cautious fingertips. “I don’t know what to say. Elpi, I’m so sorry.”

Elpida just nodded. The pain was still there, tender and raw. Her heart lurched and she coughed again. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I saw something in your face which wasn’t really there. Projecting. You didn’t deserve that.”

“Apology accepted. It’s no problem. You’ve been through a lot. Shit, that feels like an understatement alright.” Vicky fell quiet for a long moment, then said: “Do you think—”

“We were just casualties in a bigger conflict,” Elpida said quickly. “In the end we just didn’t matter. Most people who live in Telokopolis will never see it from the outside, from the exterior. If they do, then it’s from up close, from just down on the plateau. The Legion, they never go that far into the green. They can’t. A few miles at most, then the green itself and the Silico push them back. But us?” Elpida smiled, tasting bitter salt once more. “We saw the city from half a world away. You know what it looks like? A shining needle. Touching the sky. It’s beautiful.”

Slow tears rolled down her cheeks, for something other than her sisters.

Elpida added, “Telokopolis killed all my sisters. And Telokopolis is eternal. And it’s not theirs. It belongs to all of us.”

And if any of my sisters are up and breathing in this afterlife …

Elpida let that thought trail off. She left it unspoken. Pira had warned, that way lay madness.

Black static filled the silence. Minutes passed. Elpida dried her eyes again. She moved her lips in a silent mantra, repeating once again the names of all her clade-sisters.

Vicky waited for her to finish, then said: “You know, Elpi, when I called you super-soldier girl, I was kind of joking.”

“You weren’t wrong.”

Vicky let out a very awkward laugh. “Yeah, but you were also a child soldier. That’s no joke. Sorry.”

Elpida said, “It was worth it. The project was correct. The Covenanters were wrong, the isolationists were wrong. This future proves that, if nothing else. We were correct.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t justify child soldiers.”

“Without the project, my sisters and I would not have existed.” Elpida nodded to Vicky. “I came to terms with that long before death. I just wish they were here. I’m not supposed to be alone.”

“None of us are,” Vicky said. “And hey, we’re not, are we?”

“I suppose not.”

Vicky smiled a grim smile. “Hey, no judgement or anything. Technically I was a child soldier too. I thought it was pretty justified at the time.”

Elpida gestured for the cannister of water. Vicky handed it over. Elpida drank, then handed it back again, and said: “Tell me about Houseman Square.”

Vicky blinked, dark lashes catching glow-stick light. “W-what? I mean, pardon?”

“Back in the tomb, when I asked if you’d ever been in a firefight. You said nobody would even remember what the battle was about, or why it mattered. I said you could tell me about it later. I was the only one who knew the names of all my sisters, but now you know as well. So, tell me about Houseman Square. Then I’ll know.”

Vicky let out a big sigh, then almost laughed. “Fucking hell, Elpi.” She cast around the concrete room as if looking for a way out. “Gonna need a stronger drink than stale water for that. I’m not really sure you wanna know, not after what you told me. Houseman Square was heavy shit.”

“Vicky, look at me.”

Vicky looked, and looked troubled.

“I’m alright now,” Elpida said.

Vicky looked very sceptical. “Uh, sure.”

“I don’t mean that I’m not in pain. I think I’ll always be in pain. But I’m calm. I’m present. This is what I was designed and trained to do: be calm and present so I can make plans and lead my cadre. Please, tell me about Houseman Square.”

Vicky pulled an apologetic grimace. “If you say so.” She took a deep breath. “Houseman Square was a prison. An unofficial prison, but the sort everybody knows about, you know? Torture, gruesome stuff. People went in and didn’t come back out. Or came out missing pieces. Used to be this police precinct building, old-city stuff. Um. The battle was, uh, well.” She shook her head and looked away. “Sorry, Elpi, this is complicated stuff.”

“I can keep up.”

Vicky didn’t look at her. “Opening the prison was the GLR’s excuse to cross the border into Chicago. Hell, they didn’t need an excuse by that point. It’s why I joined the irregulars, for that fight. Lied about my age.” She let out a sharp sigh. “Look, Elpi, none of this is going to make sense to you. You don’t have the context for the GLR, the revolution, any of it. I don’t think I’d make sense in your world. Future. Whatever.”

“You can tell me anyway. I’ll still listen.”

Vicky snorted. “Yeah, I guess you will.”

“You lied about your age? Why?”

Vicky’s sad smile turned almost to a grin. “So they’d let me fight. Told ‘em I was sixteen. I was actually a week shy of fifteen. Don’t think they were convinced, but the GLR covert guys already inside the city, they didn’t give a shit. They wanted rifles in hands and red flags in the air. Fuck it, I would have turned up even if they’d said no. Somebody I knew was in Houseman Square, that’s why I joined.” She sighed deeply. “I didn’t even hear Borzman’s ‘no more masters’ speech until three years later. Didn’t read any theory, didn’t give a shit. I just wanted my dad out of that prison. The GLR were the only ones trying.”

“Your father.”

“Mm.” Vicky fell silent. Her fingers hovered toward the exposed muscle of her reattached arm. “He was dead though. Way too late. Died weeks before the revolution came to Chicago.”

“I’m sorry.”

Vicky shook her head. “Twenty years ago, now.” Then she laughed, just once, eyes far away. “Two hundred million years, actually, I guess. Twenty subjective years. Weird.”

Elpida studied Vicky’s profile, her dark skin and full cheeks and sharp nose: Vicky — Victoria — did not look thirty-five years old. She looked twenty.

Elpida weighed her options, then said: “You don’t look thirty-five.”

Vicky froze. She glanced at Elpida, as if caught in a lie. She swallowed, then smiled, intensely awkward. “Yeah. I noticed. Something to do with the nanomachines, maybe. I guess.”

Elpida considered the possibility that Vicky was a necromancer, as Pira had described. Perhaps Vicky was wearing a body and a history not truly her own, and was having trouble keeping her story straight. Vicky had taken wounds, covered Elpida’s back, struggled alongside her. Pira had suggested that Elpida might be a necromancer, ‘role-playing’ a revenant for personal pleasure.

Elpida considered the possibility — and decided that it didn’t matter, either way.

“Chicago,” Elpida echoed the name-word Vicky had used. “Is that where you come from?”

Vicky took a deep breath, visibly relieved. “Sort of. The Chicago city-state. Used to be part of this big empire like a hundred years before I was born. Then part of a smaller empire, but nobody called it that. Everybody just called us Chicago.” She shrugged. “But now I’m … or I was … ” She shook her head and straightened up with sudden pride. “Nah, not was. I am still a citizen and soldier of the GLR. The Great Lakes Republic.” She smiled suddenly. “Fuck Chicago. I hope the GLR eventually finished the job and burned the arcology to the fucking ground.” Then she laughed. “I’m not supposed to say things like that. We’re not supposed to wish that. We were meant to take the arcology, no matter how long it lasted. Borzman and Merla themselves both said that. At least if the bastards didn’t nuke themselves first. Ha. Ahhh, Elpi, you don’t even know what half of this means, do you?”

Elpida smiled back. “Doesn’t matter.”

She had no idea how Vicky’s world fitted together; half the ideas Vicky implied were alien — the word ‘revolution’ reminded her too much of the Covenanters. But Elpida recognised that pride, that identification, that straightening of the spine. She felt the same thing when she thought of Telokopolis.

“Houseman Square, then,” Elpida said. “Do you want to tell me about the battle itself, or does that not matter in the same way?”

Vicky didn’t answer for a moment. She looked down at her hands, a nervous twitch in her face. Then: “Elpi, I’ve got a secret to tell you. About me. About my body.”

Necromancer? “Go on.”

Vicky was almost shaking. She looked up at Elpida’s eyes. “When I woke up in the tomb … I … I didn’t mean to … I had nothing to hide, I just … ”

“Vicky, it’s okay. Whatever it is.”

“Vicky’s not even my real name,” said Vicky. Her voice was stretched thin. Her eyes were wide with private panic. “I picked it. On the spot, when you asked me in the tomb. I picked it. It’s not real.”

“My name is real,” Elpida said.

Vicky halted whatever she was about to say. “What?”

“I picked my own name. All of us in the cadre did. Nobody named us. They gave us numbers.”

Vicky stared, blinked several times, and then laughed once, sad and confused. “Right. Right.”

“It’s no less real because you picked it yourself.”

Vicky nodded, but she was still on the edge of a strange panic.

Elpida said: “Vicky, are you a necromancer?”

Vicky laughed again. “No. No, that would be simpler. Elpi, this.” She held up her good hand. “This isn’t my body. I mean, it’s my face — I know it is, I’ve checked, I spent like two hours staring into the surface of one of these stupid space blankets. It’s my face, it’s my skin, it’s even my fingers and my scars and … and … but it’s not my body.” She shook her head. “For a start it’s almost twenty fucking years younger.”

“But you’re in it,” Elpida said. “It’s yours.”

Vicky laughed. “Yeah, but—”

Uneven footsteps tapped into the tiny corridor which connected to the main room of the bunker. Vicky jumped, good hand to her mouth. Elpida just looked round and waited.

Kagami’s voice called a moment later: “Are you two decent in there? I am not walking in on zombie sex, not on day one. Day two, whatever this is now. I would prefer never.”

Vicky huffed: “We’re not doing that, Kaga.”

Elpida just said, “We’re decent.”

Kagami shuffled into the room, peering around the doorway with her doll-like face. She looked tiny and huddled inside her armoured coat. The auspex visor across the top half of her face made her look like a giant insect, recently emerged from her cocoon.

“Kaga,” Vicky said, “were you listening to us? Did you—”

“I do not give a fig whatever you were talking about,” Kagami grumbled. “I don’t care. Shut up.”

Elpida said, “We have company.” It wasn’t a question.

Kagami nodded. She pointed, up and to the left, staring through her visor, seeing through concrete and steel and empty air. “I spy with my large and high-cognition-load eye — a single revenant, crouched in a building, two or three floors up.”

Elpida stood up. Her heart lurched. She coughed. “Alone? Just one?”

“Alone,” Kagami confirmed. “And pointing something at the bunker — something glowing like a red-hot poker. I think we’re about to be cracked open.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Nanomachines can fix the body, heal the heart muscle, and plate the ribcage with steel – but some wounds run deeper than flesh. Will Elpida ever be whole without her cadre? She’s going to have to keep walking, even if she’s dead, if she wants these new comrades to survive. In the meantime, there’s always hope. And I hope you have enjoyed this arc, because next week … well, I would say next week we’re onto arc 4, but it’s actually going to be a single-chapter interlude. Something very different indeed. Only one chapter though! And then arc 4, and whatever beasts and rascals lurk beyond Elpida’s flickering firelight.

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

Patreon!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Please, do feel free to wait until there’s plenty more to read! I’m still trying to somehow put out more chapters ahead, maybe soon!

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Thank you so much for reading my story! More soon!

Content Warnings

Mention of cannibalism
Slurs

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“Necromancer?”

Elpida echoed the word, enunciating with great care, swallowing a cough as her heart lurched.

Pira stared back, blue eyes like an electric arc burning across molten skies, face half in shadows cast by the weak illumination from the pair of glow-sticks. She was shaking very slightly with muscle tension. Her face was hard, sweat beading on her forehead, as if waiting for Elpida to charge at her. Cold wind scraped across the roof of the bunker.

Elpida shook her head. “I recognise the word, but it means nothing to me in this context.”

Pira barely breathed: “Are you sure about that, zombie?”

Elpida opened her hands, slowly and carefully. She held them palm-outward, away from her sides. “Pira, do you need me to put my firearm on the floor?”

Vicky coughed. “Whoa, whoa, what? What’s happening? Did I miss a step?”

Kagami snorted, forcing a laugh. “Our saviour suspects that little Miss Commander here is more than she appears.”

Atyle spoke up too: “We are all more than we appear.”

Elpida maintained eye contact with Pira, and repeated: “I can put my firearm on the floor if you need me to.”

Pira said, “Why would you do that?”

“Because I can tell that you’re bracing for me to shoot you, or planning to shoot me first, and I have no idea why. I can put my gun down, or you can take it off me, or—”

Ilyusha surged to her feet.

Throwing off the spare coats, pushing Amina clear with a yelp, slamming red-tipped claws into the concrete floor; teeth bared, hands wide, eyes burning hot-steel grey. Elegant black-and-red bionic limbs glinted darkly in the glow-stick light. Her tail whipped upward, poised for a strike, spike extended, aimed at Pira’s skull.

“Fuck you!” she screamed. “Fuck you!”

Pira flinched — but she didn’t reach for her weapon.

Elpida shouted: “Illy! Illy, no, please! Ilyusha, Illy, don’t!”

The others joined in: Vicky was croaking, “Illy, Illy, it’s okay”; Kagami was huffing and puffing curses, calling Ilyusha a primitive fool, a ‘chem-jacked bitch’, a ‘borged-up retard’; Atyle merely clicked her tongue; Amina, down on the ground at Ilyusha’s feet, wrapped her short pudgy arms around one of Ilyusha’s black-red bionic legs.

Ilyusha just panted through her teeth, daring Pira to go for her gun.

Pira looked at Ilyusha like none of this mattered. “Don’t be stupid. I’m not going to take her weapon and I’m not going to shoot her. What would be the point?”

Ilyusha screwed up her face in disgust. “She’s not a necromancer! Fuck you!”

Pira said nothing. Ilyusha turned away and flung herself back down into the nest of spare coats, sulking into Amina’s shoulder. The younger girl was too shocked and confused to do anything but awkwardly pat Ilyusha’s back.

“Necromancer,” Elpida repeated. “Pira, what does that mean?”

Vicky cleared her throat, then spoke a little too fast, “Yeah, I know that word too. Or I know the meaning, it’s not weird or archaic or anything. We’re all speaking our own languages and the nanomachines are auto-translating, right? I know I’m speaking English, to my own ears—”

Kagami scoffed: “Fucking hell.”

Vicky carried on, “Or we’re speaking some kind of shared polyglot, I dunno, and the nanomachines are fixing it up with some post-processing. Yeah? Right? Okay? But ‘necromancer’, the word makes sense to me. Kaga? Atyle?”

Atyle echoed, “Necromancer. Quite.”

Kagami sighed. “It’s meaningless.”

Pira was still staring at Elpida as if trying to decide between pointless resistance or acceptance of her own death — as if Elpida was the only one carrying a gun. Elpida knew that look all too well; she’d seen it on the faces of Legion soldiers and Covenanter fanatics alike, directed toward her; she’d seen it on the cadre’s early handlers, the project men with their check-lists and protein cubes and taser-prods. She’d seen it on the face of the cadre’s first kill at six years old, when they’d cut his hamstrings and pulled open his clean-room gear and broken his neck and eaten part of his corpse. She didn’t want anybody to look at her like that. She would have preferred if Pira had tried to shoot her.

“Pira,” she said slowly. “Whatever you think I am—”

“You’re not.” Pira took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. The combat-ready tension went out of her shoulders. She closed her eyes and rubbed them with thumb and forefinger. Elpida relaxed too, slowly, with no sudden movements. Pira continued: “You’re not a necromancer. Probably.”

Kagami huffed. “Your paranoia would be a lot more relatable if you would explain yourself. I have plenty of my own questions about our oh-so-brave Commander here and her direct line to the giant fucking worm machine out there, but right now I’m inclined to side with her and the—” Kagami paused. “Ilyusha over there. Elpida got us out of that fucking obscenity where we woke up, and killed the munitions cyborg. We’d be dead without her. You ran off by yourself, bitch.”

Elpida said: “Kagami, thank you. But Pira’s one of us, too. She came back for me.”

Kagami huffed again and flapped her hands. “Whatever.”

Pira looked Elpida up and down, then turned back to the map she’d drawn on the wall.

“‘Necromancer’ is just a word,” she said, low and quiet. “Like ‘zombie’. It’s a shorthand among the revenants, for the civilization that came before all this. For the people who did this.”

Kagami said, “Too much experimenting with nanotechnology and AI? Are we in the aftermath of a grey goo problem? Morons at the end of the tech tree? Explain.”

Pira shrugged. “I don’t know. We’re their waste, their aftermath, their pollution.”

Elpida said: “But you think there’s some of these people left?”

Pira didn’t respond for a long moment. She stared at the map she’d drawn on the wall in black camo paint. She touched one of the triangles labelled ‘tower’.

Kagami snapped: “How do you know any of this?”

Pira turned back to them. The steel had gone out of her face. She seemed exhausted. “People blame all sorts of things on the necromancers. Whenever something weird happens, or a graveworm does something unexpected, or something particularly horrible walks out of the wilds beyond the safe zone — must be a necromancer nearby. Must be a way to explain it.” She shook her head. “Almost never is.”

Kagami pressed: “But how do you even know—”

“Because rarely — very rarely — somebody meets a necromancer for real.”

Elpida said: “Have you met a necromancer?”

“Yes.”

“And you think I’m one of them?”

“I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and I’ve met a necromancer once. Once. A very long time ago.” Pira stared at the floor next to Elpida’s feet. “They can disguise themselves to look like us. If you were a necromancer, you wouldn’t have died fighting that zombie. You wouldn’t have died at all. You wouldn’t have needed raw blue to bring you back, and you wouldn’t have needed me to smear it on your pulped heart muscle. You wouldn’t care about me shooting you, because you would have perfect control of the nanomachines in your body — and in ours, too. You could freeze us in place, stop our hearts, turn us into sludge. Whatever you wanted.” She finally looked up at Elpida, her eyes gone flat. “If you were a necromancer, then your body wouldn’t be real, just somebody else’s face and form over a compacted mass of nano-sludge. Whoever they were, they gave up being human long before they ended all biological life.” She let out another sigh. “Or maybe you are a necromancer, and you’ve decided to really commit to the illusion.”

Vicky said, “Hey now, Elpi woke up with the rest of us. We were all in that tomb together. She was right there, you saw her. We all saw her.”

“Did we?” said Pira.

Elpida nodded. “I understand your suspicion. I would think the same in your position. It’s only sensible caution.”

“You spoke to a graveworm. Necromancer or not, I don’t know what you are.”

“I’m a soldier of Telokopolis.”

Pira nodded. “Don’t tell anybody else about speaking to the graveworm. If we take on others, or become part of a larger group, or even just meet one without fighting, don’t tell anybody.” She pointed at Vicky. “She has a point. I saw you in the tomb. You got these people together and you got them out. I don’t know how you did that, but you did. Fine. I don’t care if you are a necromancer, role-playing as a revenant for fun. But nobody else will see it that way. You let on, you’ll get a bullet in the head, and they’ll burn your corpse.”

Silence fell over the bunker room. Elpida took a deep breath and nodded. Vicky muttered, “Fucking hell. Fuck me. Fuck all of this.” Kagami snorted a wordless dismissal, turning away in disgust. Atyle just closed her eyes and straightened her back. Amina and Ilyusha were absorbed in their private refuge. Pira turned away and looked at her map again.

At length, Vicky said: “Are … are the necromancers all women, too?”

Pira turned back. “What?”

“All women. All the revenants, us, earlier. It was all women. Is that true for the necromancers, too?”

Pira said, “I don’t know.”

“Are the revenants all women?”

“As far as I know.”

“But why?”

Pira sighed. “I don’t know.”

Vicky was shaking her head. “So that’s it? That’s Earth now? There’s no human beings left, except us?”

“None would survive the nanomachine atmosphere, anyway.”

Kagami spat: “We’re not human beings! We’re not even our original selves, we’re copies, we’re pollution. We’re pure externality. Didn’t you hear her?” She pointed at Pira. “And you. Are these hypothetical bone-lords extinct, or not? You contradicted yourself, you know that?”

Pira said, “Maybe. Maybe not. The few among the revenants, I think they’re just leftovers. Like us. And maybe they’re all gone by now.”

Elpida said, “But you want to reach the towers, to see if there’s any left?”

Kagami scoffed before Pira could answer: “She already said. A global control system for the nanomachinery. An off-button for this zombie shit-world.” She let out a high-pitched laugh, scratching along the edge of hysteria. “You’re telling me that the last human civilization — no, last post-human civilization, they did what? They killed the biosphere, drowned the fucking planet in nanomachines, gave birth to AI obscenities, and then — died out? They fucked off and left behind their mess?”

“Pretty much,” said Pira.

“Ha!” Kagami barked. Her doll-like face had gone pale. Cold sweat plastered her black hair to her forehead.

Vicky said, “Kaga, hey, cool down.”

Elpida added, “Kagami, look—”

“No,” Kagami snapped, pointing a finger up at Elpida. “You shut up for a second.” She addressed Pira again: “How long has this been going on? This doesn’t even make sense.” She rapped her knuckles against the concrete floor. “This bunker is practically untouched. We saw skyscrapers from the window in the tomb. Skyscrapers, glass and steel, it doesn’t last! This city isn’t two thousand years abandoned, and it’s certainly not thirty thousand years—”

“The necromancers didn’t build the city,” Pira said. Her voice seemed so very tired. “They only built the towers. Maybe the ring. The city was here before them.”

“That makes even less sense!”

Pira said, “The air is full of nanomachines. The soil, the water, all of it.”

“So?”

“The city regrows.” Pira nodded at the door into the tiny corridor. “Those corpses in the bunk-room, they’re really corpses. The nanomachines regrow them, and a billion others, based on a pattern from a hundred thousand years ago. Or more. I don’t know how long this has been going on.” Pira poked the floor with the toe of her boot. “The concrete, the asphalt, the glass, the brick. All of it. It all regrows, crumbles, rots, and regrows again. If we wait here long enough, those corpses in the bunk-room will eventually stand up. But they wouldn’t be human beings. They wouldn’t even be like us. Just another type of zombie. Stuff rises from the nanomachine soup, but none of it is alive. There is nothing left alive.”

Kagami stared in stunned silence. Vicky swallowed loudly. Amina was crying again, in wide-eyed silence.

Elpida said, “We’re alive.”

Pira held her gaze for a moment. “That’s all I know. Welcome to the end, zombie.”

“I’ve got more questions,” Elpida said.

“Y-yeah,” Vicky stammered. “So do I.”

Pira said, “I’m sure you do, but we’re running out of time. We need protection or firepower before the graveworm starts moving. We need to get that cyclic coilgun, it’s the best bet we have.”

Elpida asked, “How long until the graveworm moves?”

Pira shrugged. “Could be months. Could be hours. Could start in five minutes. The graveworm is still post-partum so I would estimate a few days.” She looked down at Atyle. “You, bionic eye.”

“Atyle,” said Atyle.

“You ready?”

Atyle opened her eyes. Peat-green bionic whirred and spun in one socket. “You and I, mysterious stranger?”

“You and me,” Pira said. “How far away is the scavenger group?”

Atyle cocked her head. “Two hours travel. Perhaps.”

“How many of them?”

“A dozen. Some of them are … beautifully changed. I would have asked for a closer look, but I do not wish to have my eye plucked out.”

Pira said, “You guide me or this doesn’t happen.”

Atyle got to her feet, tall and willowy in her own long black armoured coat. Pira slung her submachine gun and looked Atyle up and down. “You’re not armed.”

Atyle showed her teeth. “Is that not your purpose, warrior?”

“Fine. Let’s go.” Pira met Elpida’s eyes. “You’re not coming.”

Elpida nodded. “I know.”

Pira blinked in surprise.

Vicky croaked, “Wait, what?”

Kagami laughed, a horrible lost sound. “I assumed our hero of the hour would be in high demand.”

Elpida took a deep breath. Her back felt cold where the exit wounds wheezed and sucked. Her heart spasmed in her chest. She coughed. “I doubt I can run while my heart is healing. You’re going to rely on stealth, and I can’t stop coughing. I would be a liability to you. I would be a terrible Commander if I put you two at further risk for the sake of my own vanity. That’s not how we did things in—” Telokopolis? No. “In the cadre.” She held out her hand to Pira, and spoke words from a million years ago: “Good hunting in the green, but do not stay from these doors too long. Hurry home to us, sister. Hurry home soon.”

Elpida’s eyes prickled with heat. Her throat tightened.

Pira stared for a long moment, then clasped Elpida’s hand. Elpida repeated the words for Atyle; the tall dark woman took Elpida’s hand without pause, and gave her a smile too.

“Bar the door behind us,” Pira instructed. “Whoever shot at the worm-guard earlier might still be watching this bunker, if the worm-guard didn’t get them. Anybody knocks, power up the coilgun and shout for them to go away. Don’t pretend you’re not here.”

Vicky asked. “What if the graveworm starts to move?”

“Then we’re all dead. No sense worrying. Get some sleep.”

Elpida accompanied Pira and Atyle up the short flight of concrete steps. The shadows were thicker up by the door. She readied her weapon to cover their exit, though Atyle assured them nobody was around. Elpida whispered “Good luck,” then unbarred the door and opened it just wide enough for the pair to slip out into the red-tinted twilight of frozen black.

Pira loped out across the empty concrete basin, moving with the ease of long practice, covering every angle with the muzzle of her submachine gun. Atyle strode on, head high, uncaring of what she could not see. Elpida cast one last look up at the towering mountain range of the graveworm in the distance. Then she shut the door and sealed herself inside.

By unspoken agreement the others followed Pira’s advice to get some rest; Elpida knew it was more from exhaustion than prudence.

Kagami curled up on her side beneath another spare coat, with a folded sleeve as a pillow, grumbling a bitter curse under her breath. She looked tiny and fragile, facing the wall in sullen silence until her breathing grew slow and soft. Amina and Ilyusha went into the other room together for a few minutes; Elpida heard the sound of water falling from cupped hands, and Ilyusha’s muffled giggle. They returned arm-in-arm and snuggled back into their corner, though Ilyusha took a moment to pat Elpida on the flank. Amina looked distant and shell-shocked.

Vicky gave Elpida an awkward smile.

“Gonna sleep?” Elpida asked softly.

“May as well try,” Vicky croaked. She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes, cradling her reattached arm in her lap. “Can’t really lie down. You?”

“In a minute or two. I’m going to check the other rooms first, make sure we’re secure. Do you want water? I could use one of the empty nano cannisters.”

“Nah. Not thirsty. Thanks, Elpi.”

Elpida went into the tiny corridor, alone. Her body moved automatically, taking her into the little bunk-room so she could stare at the skeletons and mattresses embedded in glistening black goo. The bones did not look like they would stand up any time soon. Then she went into the room at the end of the corridor, with the cistern of water and the open slit-window in the wall.

She stared out of the slit for a while, at the black sky and the rotten teeth of crumbling buildings, trying to feel anything about what Pira had said, about necromancers and zombies and the aftermath of biological life. But nothing came to mind. Rest was a sensible plan. The right plan. Correct.

Raindrops began to fall, speckling the ruins. Fat, heavy drops drummed faintly on the roof of the bunker. The rain looked black and greasy. A gunshot echoed from somewhere far away. A shout carried on the wind. The worm-guard had left no mark on the concrete. Elpida closed the metal shutter over the slit-window.

She drank several mouthfuls of water from her own cupped hands, then looked up at the ceiling, and said: “Graveworm?”

No reply.

“Howl?”

When Elpida returned to the main room of the little bunker, the others were asleep. Vicky’s eyes were closed and her breathing was regular, her body dark and muscular against the wall. Kagami was curled up, tight and secure, shoulders small and slender. Ilyusha and Amina were burrowed down together, wrapped in each other’s arms.

Elpida attempted to lie down on the coat where she had lain as a corpse, but getting into a sitting position was difficult enough. Even with pain-blockers flooding her bloodstream, her chest felt like it was made of shattered glass. Her heart kept jerking and jumping. She had to swallow a cough — didn’t want to wake the others. The thermal blanket crinkled beneath her coat every time she moved. Eventually she managed to lie on one side, facing toward Vicky.

The morbid association did not bother her. Neither did sleeping in a room full of people; the cadre had always slept together, right from the start, in a big pile when they were younger, with more space as they got older, sometimes in twos or threes, but always in the same room. Any attempt to separate them was dangerous. Their early handlers had learned that the hard way; the cadre’s own actions had turned it into official policy, though they hadn’t known so at the time. Elpida had not slept alone a single night of her life, not until—

Yesterday? she thought. Yesterday was a million years ago. She’d been last to leave, last out, alone in that spire-cell, yesterday.

A strange pressure squeezed Elpida’s heart. She stared at the toe of Vicky’s boot. Her eyes burned.

“Howl,” she mouthed. “Howl?”

The black rain drummed static on the bunker roof. Elpida’s chest tightened.

Vicky’s lips parted with a click: “Is that a name?”

Elpida blinked moisture out of her eyes. “Pardon?”

“‘Howl’,” Vicky whispered. “You said it earlier, too, when you … came back. And in the tomb, I think. Is that a name?”

“Yeah.”

Elpida didn’t feel like expanding. Vicky didn’t ask her to. Minutes passed in black static.

Then, Vicky whispered: “I can’t sleep. Pain’s too much. You?”

“I’ve got pain-blocker glands. Genetically engineered,” Elpida whispered back. “But I don’t think I’m going to sleep either.”

“Misery loves company.” Vicky puffed out a little laugh. “What do you normally do when you can’t sleep?”

“Exercise. Sparring. Sex.”

Vicky blinked open her eyes and stared down at Elpida, eyebrows raised. “Wow. Well. Probably can’t do any of those right now. Here we are, denied the chief nourisher in life’s great feast, which is ironic, on account of being undead and all.” She smiled painfully. “You get that one? Shakespeare made it to your future?”

“Shakespeare?”

“I’ll take that as no, then.” Vicky frowned. “Elpi, are you okay?”

Elpida sat up on her makeshift bed. “Yesterday I was in a prison cell. A million years ago. But also yesterday.”

Vicky smiled. “I’m kinda in shock too,” she whispered. “How can anybody sleep after all that stuff from Pira? Hey, for the record, I don’t think you’re a necromancer or whatever. Even if you are, I don’t care. You saved us. More than once. Pira’s paranoid. How long do you think she’s been doing this?”

“A long time.” A lump formed in Elpida’s throat. “I’d like to ask her that, when she and Atyle return.”

“Yeah,” Vicky said. “Hey, I expect you’ve slept enough, anyway, right?”

Elpida said: “We both need to heal. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

Vicky shook her head. “It’s just the pain. I’ve slept in much worse places than this. At least there’s a door, and no drafts, no rats or cockroaches, or shit on the floor. I’ve been homeless before, this is practically luxury compared to that.”

“Homeless?”

“ … yeah? Like, homeless. Nowhere to live. Sleeping rough.”

“Home … less.” Elpida split the word into its component parts. She shook her head. “The concept makes no sense to me. Maybe translation isn’t working.”

Vicky frowned. Elpida was surprised to see a glimmer of sudden hostility in Vicky’s dark face. Vicky murmured: “Oh. Right. No homeless people in your shining city on a hill, huh?”

Elpida shook her head. “Telokopolis is home. And it’s on a plateau, not a hill. Vicky, what’s wrong?”

Vicky lifted her head and sat forward slightly. Her expression took on a hint of suspicion. “Alright, in your Telokopolis, what happens to people who can’t afford their homes anymore?”

“They … find another one?”

“What if they can’t afford anywhere?”

Elpida frowned. “I don’t understand. I’m sorry.”

“Just humour me,” Vicky whispered. “What happens if somebody can’t find a place to live? Poverty. Can’t afford anywhere. What happens?”

Elpida shrugged. “They’d have to go down a floor. Maybe a lot of floors, but there’s always open space in the Skirts. Up-Spire people think the Skirts are slums, but they have the same network access as anybody else. Telokopolis responds to the meanest Skirter the same as any Up-Spire noble. And even Up-Spire there’s public dormitories, canteens, things like that. Nobody can stop the city from making them.” Elpida almost laughed. “Even the Civitas can’t defy Telokopolis itself.”

Vicky frowned. “What do you mean, ‘stop the city from making them’?”

Elpida shrugged again. “Telokopolis provides. Any Skirt dweller can stand by a blank wall and request a room. The city responds to any human.”

Vicky’s frown turned from hostile suspicion to amazement. “Okay. Alright. What if there’s no free space to make a room?”

“Go down a floor.”

Vicky sighed. “And what if there’s no space on any floor? What if somebody else has taken it all?”

Elpida laughed softly. “Telokopolis has space for ten times the current population. That’s what the last surveys said.”

“You survey your own city? Wait, ten times? How big did you say the population is again? Or … was. Sorry.”

“Nine hundred million.”

Vicky bit her tongue, then said: “You had slums and nobles, but infinite replication technology. I don’t get it. And your city grows rooms? When people request them?”

Elpida nodded. “The monochalkum layer can’t be expanded, but the interior of the city is endless as long as it’s fed nanomachines every century or so. Not nanomachines like we’re made of now, I think. Ours were different. But yes, there’s always somewhere to live. The city extrudes new spaces as required. The Builders, their generation, they were … beyond us, the people in my time. They made a miracle. Telokopolis is home, for all humanity.” She sighed softly and recited: “The greatest home-machine ever built by human love and human labour, crystallised into the foundations and returned for eternity, refreshed with each generation of effort, from all, to all, for all.” Elpida pulled a self-conscious smile. “Not my words. That’s just a piece of history every schoolchild learns.” Her turn to frown at Vicky. “‘Homeless’ would be like … like … leaving somebody out on the plateau, or in the green.” She uttered a tiny, bitter laugh. “Even the Covenanters wouldn’t do that. In your time, people were left out in the green?”

Vicky smiled back, though still a little suspicious. “Yeah. You could say that.”

Elpida shook her head. “Telokopolis is for all. For you too.”

But not for us, she thought. Not for me, or Howl, or Silla, or Metris, or all the others. Telokopolis was not for Elpida. She had been cast out, into death.

Vicky was laughing softly. “Thanks, super-soldier girl. Sounds like you had a good time. Sparring and sex, hey? You … Elpi?”

Elpida couldn’t see clearly. Her vision was blurred. “My cadre. my clade-sisters. My— Howl. Howl. You asked who— Howl was my second. Howl was my … ”

Elpida felt tears running down her cheeks.

The dam broke.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Necromancers and revenants and zombies, giant worms and unspeakable monsters and self-regrowing cities, and … wait, was this science fiction, or fantasy? Well, whichever it is, I dearly hope you are enjoying reading it as much as I am writing it, because I am loving this story and where it’s going. I have such sights to show you! Oh, poor Elpida. She’s rather tightly wound, shall we say.

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

Patreon!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Please, do feel free to wait until there’s plenty more to read! I’m still trying to somehow put out more chapters ahead, maybe soon!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry, for voting. Voting makes the story go up the rankings, which helps more people see it!

Thank you so much for reading my little story. More soon. Lots more.

Content Warnings

Suicidal ideation
Discussion of suicide
Discussion of cannibalism

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Elpida held her breath — then remembered she didn’t need to breathe.

The sensory assault from the worm-guard — as Pira had called it — intensified. Elpida’s eyes watered; her nose ran with mucus. The tips of her fingers and toes started to go numb; her skin tingled all over, her jaw ached, and her throat tried to close up. Her heart jerked and spasmed, desperate to draw a cough from her lungs. A high-pitched ringing grew louder and louder inside her skull. White flecks danced in her peripheral vision, speckling the dim glow-stick illumination on the walls of the concrete bunker.

Active scanning. Perhaps a high-powered electromagnetic field. Likely beyond Elpida’s understanding.

Pira stood frozen, face gone grey-pale, moving only her eyes. Vicky was gritting her teeth, her muscular frame clenched tight. Kagami’s face was scrunched in a frozen scream. Down in the corner, Ilyusha clamped a black-red bionic hand over Amina’s mouth and nose, smothering her hyperventilating panic. Amina struggled briefly; Ilyusha coiled around her like a snake, pinning her limbs and cradling her skull until Amina could only twitch and whimper. Atyle suffered in rapt silence, cross-legged and straight-backed, tears and snot running down her face as she stared at the wall behind Elpida.

Clink.

A claw tapped the concrete — on the exterior wall behind Elpida’s head. Tink — tink — tink went those taps, climbing the bunker and mounting the roof in three steps. Click against the left wall, clack against the right; the worm-guard had a long reach.

Pira’s eyes followed the sound, then jumped to the barred door.

Tap-tap, tap-tap. The worm-guard probed the door-frame — then pressed: creeeeeak complained the metal. The door flexed inward.

Amina whined in Ilyusha’s grip. Kagami swallowed too loudly. Vicky breathed an inaudible curse.

Elpida looked down at the coilgun through a haze of stinging tears. How quickly could she grab the receiver and power up the magnetic containment? Fast enough to shoot whatever was about to burst through that door? She flexed her numb fingers and prepared to leap.

Creeeeak went the metal — and then stopped.

The door stayed shut. The worm-guard lost interest. Tap-click went claws against the roof, once, twice, three times, and then the worm-guard stopped moving.

Nerve endings quivered. Skin tingled and itched. Joints burned. Eyes watered. Seconds dragged out in perfect silence and imperfect stillness. Nobody breathed. Even Amina managed to stop whimpering. Ilyusha’s face was buried in Amina’s shoulder. Elpida swallowed a cough. But the worm-guard did not go away.

Elpida moved her lips, no sound: “Pira. Pira.”

Pira looked. Elpida indicated the coilgun with a flicker of her eyes. Pira shook her head by less than an inch.

Elpida counted the seconds: sixty, one-twenty, one-eighty, and still the worm-guard did not move on. Vicky was shaking with muscle tension, eyes screwed shut. Kagami looked like she was about to suffer a full-blown panic attack, face completely drained of colour, pupils dilated, mouth hanging open, skin caked with sweat, staring upward at the roof of the bunker. Amina had gone limp and dead-eyed in Ilyusha’s grip. Ilyusha seemed almost the same — slack and shut down.

Elpida mouthed again: “Pira. We can’t stay like this forever.”

Pira was drenched with sweat as well. She whispered just loud enough to carry, “It’s not moving. It should be moving. This isn’t normal.”

“Coilgun.”

Pira shook her head again. “Don’t touch the gun.”

Elpida looked at the concrete ceiling and whispered: “Graveworm?”

No reply.

Pira whispered, “Yes, worm-guard. Our only chance is to stay beneath its threat targeting threshold. Do not touch the coil—”

Dark red light suddenly stabbed through the half-open door to the bunker’s tiny corridor; a flicker-wash of active scanning equipment moving over the room at the other end. The worm-guard had entered the bunker through the open slit-window in the other room, the one Kagami had been looking through earlier.

Elpida saw a mass of pale tendrils fill the corridor, rushing toward them.

She dived for the coilgun.

Rrrrrrr — peng!

A deafening noise ripped through the air and the bunker walls alike: engine-discharge, electric crackle, and cannon, all in one.

Pira stumbled and winced. Kagami cried out and covered her ears. Vicky grunted, sagging. Amina screamed into Ilyusha’s hand, and Ilyusha hissed and slapped the wall with her tail. Even Atyle bowed her head in pain.

And Elpida came up with the coilgun receiver. She thumbed the power-tank activation and aimed at the half-open door — but the pale tendrils were gone, whipped away in an instant, followed a split-second later by a rapid tink-tink-tink-tink of the departing worm-guard.

The sensory assault lifted. Elpida coughed hard. Her chest and heart ached and burned; the dive had cost her. She killed the coilgun power and gently placed the receiver on the floor, but she couldn’t stand up yet. Her head was ringing, her half-closed wounds were screaming, and her vision was wavering.

Pira took several slow, deep, deliberate breaths. Ilyusha uncoiled from around Amina. The younger girl was crying softly as she hugged her knees to her chest.

Kagami panted: “What— the fuck—”

“I told you,” Pira said. “Worm-guard.”

“No, what—”

“Somebody shot it.” Pira pulled herself upright and wiped tears and mucus on her sleeve. “Long range, high-powered, enough to classify as a threat. That sound we heard, that was the worm-guard’s anti-ballistic countermeasures.”

Elpida pushed herself up to her feet. She coughed blood into a hand. “Whoever it was just saved us.”

“By accident,” said Pira. “Lone worm-guard, this far out, that’s a lot of nanomachines. If you can ingest them.”

Kagami snapped, “No! No, I mean what the fuck was I looking at!? What the fuck was that!? That wasn’t biological or mechanical or anywhere in between.” She pulled the auspex visor off her face and waved it in the air. “This was throwing up errors like I was staring into a fucking quasar. What was that!?”

Vicky made a pathetic attempt at a laugh. “Ow. Said it before, didn’t I? Sufficiently advanced technology, indistinguishable from magic. We just got buzzed by a dragon.”

Pira said, “I told you. Worm-guard.”

Atyle breathed as if coming down from an orgasm. “The machinery of the gods.”

Elpida swallowed another cough. She tasted blood. “Pira, are we safe now? Do we need to move?”

Pira answered: “We’re never safe. But moving would be worse. This group won’t have any chance in the open, not as we are now.”

“The worm-guard won’t come back?”

Pira shrugged. “No reason to.”

Kagami spat: “No reason?! That thing was hunting us! It crouched up there like it was fucking playing—”

Pira spoke over her, calm and cold. “It knew we were here before it arrived. We were not hiding from it. If it wanted to, it could have cut the roof off and fished us out, or cooked us through the walls without damaging the concrete. We stayed below the threat acquisition threshold, that’s all.” She nodded at the coilgun. “If it does return, grab that, aim somewhere, and pray. But I’ll be gone.”

Kagami hissed in frustration. She slapped her auspex visor into her lap.

Elpida said, “Everyone take a moment. Catch your breath. That was stressful and frightening, but we’re safe now. Vicky, are you okay?”

“No,” Vicky croaked. She laughed once, then winced, reaching toward the exposed red muscle and meat of her reattached arm. She weakly pulled the looted coat a little tighter over her shoulders. “I mean, yeah. I guess. I’m not hurt. That just sucked.”

Elpida said, “Ilyusha? Amina?”

Amina was crying, face buried in her knees, half-burrowed beneath the spare coats she’d been sleeping in. Ilyusha was leaning gently against her side. The heavily augmented girl looked drained and withdrawn; the fire had gone out of her lead-grey eyes. Her tail lay against the floor, unmoving. She gave Elpida a limp thumbs-up.

“Good job comforting her,” Elpida said. “Amina? Amina, we’re going to be safe now. We’re safe now.”

Amina whined into her knees: “No, we’re not.”

Everyone took a while to recover their composure. Kagami stewed in silence, chewing on a fingernail. Elpida paced to the stairs and back, testing her heart and chest muscles. Pira closed her eyes in silent meditation. Atyle just wiped her face, none the worse for wear.

After a moment, Elpida realised that Vicky was watching her. Elpida stopped pacing and stared back. She knew what was coming. She took a deep breath, coughed, and let it happen; if none of the others had spoken up, she would have said it herself.

Vicky said, slowly: “Pira, you mentioned that wasn’t normal behaviour? From the ‘worm-guard’, I mean?”

Pira opened her eyes. She glanced at the diagram she’d drawn on the wall, with the two circles around a graveworm. “We’re firmly in the safe zone. Worm-guard don’t come out this far unless they’ve picked up a threat. They don’t hunt us, not unless we’re threatening them or getting too close to the graveworm.”

Kagami pointed at Atyle. “Did she lead it back to us?”

Atyle shot Kagami a stony look.

Pira shook her head. “No. She was in the open for a long time. It would have caught her.”

Atyle said: “It would not.”

Vicky swallowed and said, “The logical conclusion is that it was after us. Specifically, I mean.”

Pira said, “No reason to. We’re not important.”

But Vicky and Kagami both looked at Elpida. So did Atyle. Pira followed their combined gazes. Ilyusha pulled a sneer and looked at the floor.

Vicky said, “Sorry Elpi. But you did talk to the thing.”

“Yes,” Kagami snapped. “You did, didn’t you?”

Pira frowned, confused rather than hostile. “You did what?”

“That’s correct,” Elpida said. “I spoke with the graveworm. More accurately, it spoke to me, and I responded.”

Pira’s stare was unreadable, but open. “Explain.”

“Down in the tomb, we entered the gravekeeper’s chamber. The interface — the corpse — it spoke to us, but it was speaking in riddles.”

“Poetry,” said Atyle.

Kagami snorted. “AI nonsense. It wasn’t speaking, not really. Just regurgitating. May as well have a conversation with a linear algebra equation.”

Pira said, “Yes, I’m familiar with that. Elpida, go on.”

“While the gravekeeper was speaking, a second voice spoke over it. But only to me. I have a brain implant called a neural lace.” Elpida tapped the back of her neck and felt once again the strange absence of the socket. “It’s meant to be paired with a mind-machine interface slot, but when we were resurrected, that was … missing. The neural lace is for direct machine communication, and mind-to-mind communication across a private noosphere. I don’t understand how, but something sent a broadcast directly into my neural lace. This voice heavily implied itself to be the graveworm.”

Pira looked around at the others. Kagami and Vicky both nodded. Kagami added: “She was speaking to a voice we couldn’t hear. That much is accurate.”

Vicky said, “She didn’t hide it or anything. Elpi, really, no offence.”

“None taken,” Elpida said. “Don’t worry.”

“You,” Pira said, nodding to Atyle. “Your eye, it’s high-spec enough for flesh-work. Does Elpida—”

Atyle said: “A metal spider cradling her head and spine, yes. She speaks truth.”

Elpida waited. The cross-examination didn’t offend her. The stakes were too high. Pira addressed her again: “What did it say?”

“It seemed amused,” Elpida explained. “It made comments which implied it was watching our progress through the tomb. It joked about acting as my ‘mission control’. It was surprised I could hear it talking; I think it wasn’t broadcasting on purpose, just speaking to itself, at first. But then it was disappointed that I wasn’t somebody else, somebody specific, as if it was looking for a particular person. It recognised Telokopolis — the name of my city. Then it seemed confused. Then stopped. It spoke again when we exited the tomb, with a warning about the Silico — the zombie. Then when the Silico arrived, the graveworm seemed resigned. It hasn’t spoken to me again.”

But Howl did, didn’t she? Elpida kept that fact to herself; that was just brain chemistry, yearning for love on the verge of death.

Pira looked Elpida up and down.

Kagami snorted. “You fucking called that thing after us.”

Elpida nodded. “Maybe I did.”

Commander, you doom us all, she thought. Same as with the cadre. If Kagami was right, Elpida should walk out of that door and into the dead city, alone, right then; she should have been left for dead, for the scavengers, for the ‘black rain’ of oblivion once again. If she was calling Silico monsters down on her comrades then she was a liability. She was no use at all. She was death for her sisters and comrades and cadre, all over again.

Kagami blinked at her. “I-I didn’t mean … I … ”

Elpida said, “It’s okay. You may be right.”

Pira sighed sharply. “I already explained. If that worm-guard wanted to kill us, we would be dead.”

Vicky croaked, “You don’t think it was protecting us, do you? Protecting Elpi?”

An uncomfortable look circled the bunker room. Ilyusha finally raised her eyes from the floor; she was grinning at that. Her tail stood up, waving slowly.

Atyle said, “Favoured of the gods.”

Vicky let out an uncomfortable, forced laugh. “Friends in high places.”

Elpida said, “We have no idea what was happening. And the graveworm hasn’t spoken to me again. Pira, you’ve never heard of somebody communicating with a graveworm before?”

Pira stared at Elpida for a very long moment, her eyes like lightning-washed skies in her pale, freckled face. Her flame-red hair was too dark in the dim light from the glow-sticks in Vicky’s lap. Elpida could read her without too much difficulty: Pira was trying to decide if Elpida could be trusted.

“No,” Pira said. “Never.” She glanced at Ilyusha too; the heavily augmented girl just shrugged.

“Have you ever met another person with a neural lace?” Elpida asked. Pira shook her head. Elpida’s heart lurched. She coughed. “Anybody with my phenotype? White hair, copper-brown skin? Wouldn’t be as tall as me, different facial structures, not true albinism, but—”

“No.” Pira shook her head. Then she added: “But I don’t know everything.”

Elpida forced herself to contain the disappointment. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Hope.”

Pira sighed. “Hope is a dangerous thing, here. Your world is gone and everyone you knew is dead. The chances of running into somebody from your own time period is almost nil. The quicker you accept that, the easier it will go for you.”

Elpida forced herself to smile. “Thank you all the same. Pira, do you think that really was the graveworm, speaking to me?”

Pira said nothing. But her face was not quite as closed as before.

Kagami said, lemon-sharp: “Before we get distracted by morose philosophy or whining about the hopelessness of existence, Pira, you were explaining this absolute bullshit to us.” She gestured at the map and the diagram on the wall. “And you were avoiding a question. Or am I the only one who remembers?”

Elpida said, “No, I recall as well.”

Vicky said, “Oh, yeah, right. Beyond the graveworm line, right?”

Pira just stared at Elpida, as if still trying to make a decision. Then she glanced at the others, one by one — lingering perhaps a little longer on Atyle. Then she let out a long sigh and tapped the graveworm diagram again, on the worm itself.

“Everyone wants to get inside a graveworm.”

“Why?” Elpida asked.

“I already told you why. The graveworms are giant nanomachine forges. With enough nanomachines, you can do anything.”

Ilyusha barked. “Ha! Sure can.”

“The more nanos you consume, the more you can modify your body.” She nodded briefly toward Ilyusha, toward her non-human bionic limbs, her extendible claws, and her tail, which was now wagging in the air. “You can heal faster, move faster, endure more, change more. But there’s only so many ways to get large quantities of nanomachines.”

Kagami said, “Like eating each other.”

“Cannibalism is popular, yes. Especially on fresh resurrections. But we’re not the only fresh source each time a tomb opens. There’s the raw blue we took from the armoury, but also there’s machinery in the top floors of each tomb, manufacturing bionics, replacements, additions, specialised substances, experiments. That’s why everyone fights to be first in, to claim the resources and get back out again.”

Vicky scoffed. “Fucking hell. No solidarity? No banding together? This is it? The war of all against all. Barbarism.”

“Dog eat dog,” Kagami spat.

Ilyusha snorted: “Reptiles.”

Pira shrugged. “You can just stick close to the worm, absorb the ambient. You’ll survive, but it’ll never get you far enough.”

Elpida said: “Far enough to leave. Am I correct?”

“Beyond the graveworm line,” Vicky said. “Shit.”

Pira stared at Elpida for another long moment, judging or deciding. Then she nodded. “There are revenants who live beyond the graveworm safe zone, but not many. I already told you: only the most heavily augmented can survive out there.”

Kagami waved a hand at Ilyusha. “Like her?”

Ilyusha cackled. “Like meeee!”

“Not even close,” said Pira.

Elpida said, “I see the logic here and I don’t like it.”

Pira nodded. A moment of understanding passed between them.

Elpida said, “Anybody who ingests enough nanomachinery to leave the graveworm is either skilled at securing resources from the tombs, or a successful cannibal. Or both.”

“Yes,” said Pira.

“Fuck me,” said Vicky. “Oh, fuck. Great.”

Amina sobbed into her knees. Ilyusha put an arm around her shoulders. Vicky was shaking her head in horror.

Pira said, slowly, staring at Elpida: “But if you could get inside a graveworm … ”

Elpida asked, “Has that ever been done?”

Pira shrugged. “There’s rumours.”

Elpida already saw the logic: there would be no trek to Telokopolis — standing or ruined or dead or otherwise — while bound to the route of a graveworm. But she had spoken with the mountain-sized construct. Was Pira perhaps thinking the same thing? Elpida had no idea what Pira’s agenda was, but Pira had saved her from death before knowing any of that. Perhaps they had a goal in common, perhaps Pira could be trusted. Elpida wanted to trust her.

Kagami snorted a humourless laugh. “This world is a joke. This future is a joke. Who would make this? Who would allow this to continue?”

Ilyusha barked: “Us!”

Atyle spoke up, unconcerned. “We were reborn with our flesh already blessed by the machinery of the gods.” She gestured toward her bionic eye. “Why?”

“Yes,” Kagami hissed. She rapped her knuckles against one of her augmetic legs. “And it’s fucking perverse.”

Pira said, “The tombs tend to repair the parts which were missing in life. Original life. Sometimes you get reborn with your stock of nanos, too, but more often not. Permanent additions tend to stay.”

Vicky said, voice quivering: “Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got a bionic heart, right? You said that, Atyle. Bionic heart. I died with a chest wound. That fits. It fits.”

Elpida asked, “What happens when a revenant dies?”

Kagami snorted, “Aren’t you the answer to that, you zombie twice over? No offence.”

Pira said, “Killing one of us for real is not so easy. Destroy the brain, or remove enough biomass. With the latter, a revenant can still wait for a very long time, regrowing on ambient. But … ” She shook her head. “That’s a bad way to go insane. Better to give up.”

“Give up?” Elpida asked.

“Give up. Go back to the tombs. Make a deal.” She continued before Elpida could ask the obvious question: “The initial resurrection, like you right now, that’s free. The machines just do it, and no, I don’t know why. But from then on you have to have a reason.” She shrugged. “It seems to be different for every person who keeps coming back, but you have to give the machines a reason — the gravekeeper, or something behind the gravekeepers, it’s … ” She trailed off, sudden and hard. “It’s difficult to describe what it feels like. But you have to give them a reason. You have to make a deal.”

Kagami hissed: “So there is an exit button. Just die and choose to stay dead. Hooray.”

Elpida glanced down at her. “Kagami.”

“Alright, alright. I won’t blow my brains out. Yet.”

Vicky said, “What kind of reason?”

Pira answered. “Like I said, different for everyone.”

“Such as?”

Pira shrugged. “Looking for another person. Returning to a group. It can get very abstract.” She looked at Kagami. “And it’s not as simple as choosing to stay dead. It’s not the same, when you’re dead. It’s not the same. You’ll make the decision to come back. You will.”

Pira’s voice was quivering; Elpida spoke up, quickly, changing the subject. “Pira, how long does it take to come back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Months? Years?”

“I don’t recommend testing it.” Pira crunched the words out; wrong question, Elpida decided.

“Okay. Pira, what—”

“If you lose somebody, don’t count on finding her again.” Pira swallowed. “It’ll drive you insane as sure as lying in the same place for fifty years trying to regrow your own head. Give up.”

Silence fell over the little bunker room. Ilyusha scratched a claw against the concrete. Amina sobbed quietly into her knees. Kagami looked away. Pira blinked; Elpida wasn’t sure if she could see tears in her eyes. Maybe it was just the dim light.

Vicky cleared her throat, then winced with pain. “Can I ask a really weird question? I mean, yeah, all of this is weird. Too weird. But hey, this is the weirdest shit so far. How is this whole thing resurrecting people from earlier in history?” She gestured at herself with her good hand. “We had brain scanning technology. Or at least the Chinese did, not us in the GLR. But I never sat in a jack chair and had my brainwaves recorded or anything. How am I here?”

Pira said, a little hoarse: “I don’t know.”

Ilyusha went, “Pfffft.” Then: “Fuck the future. Future sucks.”

Atyle said, “Souls dragged from the well.”

Kagami grunted. “The paleo has a point. No offence, high priestess,” she said, dripping sarcasm. “In theory — in theory — it should be possible to rotate a consciousness into view from the impression left behind in the quantum foam, based on the entire life of that consciousness. But bodies, likenesses, actual human memories? Nonsense.” She mimed spitting on the floor. “The best you’d get is quantum data, but it would be mostly noise. The technology should be impossible to build, but, pah! We’re made of picomachines. Yesterday we had a conversation with an AI substrate enclosure that may as well be a man-made god. I’m about ready to believe rotation theory is fully capable of accessing the foam layer and extracting more than background noise.”

Everyone stared at her. Even Amina raised her tear-stained face.

Vicky said, “I think our automatic translation technology is struggling a bit.”

Kagami huffed. “Oh fuck you, womb-born.”

Vicky laughed and then winced in pain. “Fuck you too, spacer head.”

Amina spoke up, peering over her own knees: “God put our souls back. That’s all. We’re not meant to be here. We’re meant to be dead. God hates us all. God hates me.”

Ilyusha bumped her head against Amina’s shoulder. “Naaaaah. God’s a bitch.” Amina did not seem comforted.

Elpida considered the map on the wall, the tombs and the worms — and the other elements labelled in Pira’s hand, the ‘towers’ and the ‘ring segment’. She said: “Pira, you mentioned there’s two systems in operation here. What’s the other?”

Kagami said, “Yeah. Get on with it. Before the worm-guard comes back and we have to meet up with you again in a year’s time after we all get turned to paste.”

Pira stared at Kagami for a moment. Not a funny joke. Then she tapped the map on the wall. “The second system is the towers — there’s three of them in the city — and the segment which fell from the orbital ring, out to the west, beyond the city.”

Kagami’s eyes widened. Her jaw dropped. “Orbital ring? Did I hear that right?”

Vicky muttered, “Whoa. Okay. Spacer head shit got serious.”

Pira nodded. “Most of it’s still up there, as far as I’m aware. The fallen segment has been down a long time.”

Elpida said, “What’s an orbital ring?”

Kagami huffed. “An orbital ring. Geostationary space station around the whole planet. Probably where that mech dropped from.” She turned back to Pira, eyes alight. “When was it built? Do you know? We were trying to get a ring project under-way, but it can’t be ours, that would be a hundred million years old. More! Even our systems wouldn’t last that long, sadly; I’m not that arrogant, Luna wasn’t populated by gods. Is there a space elevator? A needle?”

Pira shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Tch! Have you ever been out there? To the fallen part?”

“Not myself. All this is second-hand information.” She glanced at Elpida, as if Elpida might understand a hidden meaning. “I’ve never been to the towers either. The worms never go near enough to reach them. I’ve tested. The only way to reach them would be to leave the graveworms behind.”

Was that what Pira wanted? To leave the worms behind, to journey to one of these towers? Elpida held her gaze, but Pira didn’t say it openly. Pira was watching her in return, with something in her eyes that Elpida did not recognise. Suspicion? Wariness? A kind of longing and curiosity? Elpida wanted to get her alone, talk to her alone, open her up.

“Still,” Kagami said. “A ring. Fuck.”

Pira continued. “All I know is the towers and the ring — or what’s left of it — are components of a global control system for the nanomachinery. Or they were, at one point.”

“Wait,” Vicky said. “How do you know this?”

“I said, all this is second-hand information. The worms and the tombs are an emergent system, I think. Nobody designed them. But the towers and the ring, those were made by people. The people who came just before this.”

Elpida said, “What are the towers for? What’s inside them?”

Pira stared at her, burning holes in Elpida’s face. “You really don’t know?”

“No. Why would I?”

“A graveworm spoke to you. And you don’t know. Really, zombie?”

“Pira,” Elpida said. “I don’t know. I’ve told you the whole truth. What’s in the towers? You want to reach them, don’t you? What’s in there?”

Pira said, “By now? Nothing. Wishful thinking. Dust and echoes.”

Kagami snorted, “Stop being a cryptic bitch.” But her tone was strained. Pira radiated hostility.

Elpida just said, “Pira?”

Pira was shaking as she spoke, very slowly: “If there’s any of them left, that’s where we’ll find a necromancer.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Everyone wants that blue girl-juice, that frosty Mountain Dew, that power-up goo to grow new limbs and extrude weapons and leave the worms behind. But for what? Empty towers and broken rings? Or necromantic secrets from beyond the grave? Is there really nothing left, in this dead world?

There are now two pieces of fanart over on the Necroepilogos fanart page! One of Ilyusha, and one of the Silico/Zombie from the end of Arc 2! There’s also a memes page, with a few surreal offerings, growing rapidly … 

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

Patreon!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Please, do feel free to wait until there’s plenty more to read! I’m writing as much as I can, every week! Still hoping to hit that magical 2 chapter/week number, somehow.

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry, for voting. Clicky button makes it go up the rankings, where more people might see the story!

Thank you for reading! Hope you enjoyed! More next week!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Thump thump thump came a knocking at the bunker door.

Pira surged to her feet, submachine gun in her hands. She racked the charging handle, flicked the safety off, and tucked the gun tight against her shoulder; she aimed the weapon up the short flight of stairs, at the barred metal door.

“Hold!” Elpida hissed. “Everyone hold!”

Down in the nest of coats in the corner, Amina choked out a gasp and covered her mouth. Her eyes were wide and shining with sudden tears in the dim illumination from the glow-stick. Ilyusha snorted and stirred next to her, squinting awake and working her jaw, tail scraping across the concrete floor. Kagami let go of Elpida’s arm and slumped against the wall; she scrambled with her auspex gear, pulling the visor back up over her eyes.

Vicky started to get up, cradling the skinless muscle of her reattached arm, wincing through her teeth.

“Vicky, stay down,” Elpida whispered. She shouldered her own submachine gun. Her heart jerked and fluttered. Her chest felt like it was full of glass. She kept coughing.

Vicky wheezed: “But I can—”

“Stay down, your job is to rest.” There was no other exit from the bunker, no retreat. Elpida whispered, “Kagami, can you tell us what’s out there?”

“Shit, no I can’t! It takes time to boot this up, I need time! Fuck!”

Ilyusha shook her head like a wet dog, still waking up, throwing the coats off her augmented body and hopping to her feet.

Elpida hissed: “Everyone hold, hold still until Kagami—”

Pira raised her voice, shouting up toward the metal door: “We are heavily armed and wide awake. And we’re not the fresh resurrections from the tomb. Go elsewhere.”

Silence. Ilyusha’s claws scratched against the concrete. Amina panted through her nose. Elpida choked down another cough. Cold wind scraped across the exterior of the bunker.

A voice called through the door: “A foul wind blows, warrior. I require a redoubt. Or am I exiled for my transgressions, cast out into the wilderness with the beasts of the field?”

Vicky croaked, “Atyle! That’s her!”

“Sounds like her,” Elpida said. Silico could imitate human speech; some kinds of higher-order combat drones were designed for such tricks. Some of the rarest kinds of Silico — the most complex and difficult ones — even seemed to understand what they were saying, sometimes. “Kagami?”

Kagami was frowning through her visor. “Big mess of nanomachines in the shape of a person, right outside the front door. Just like us, like all the others. It’s one of us. Big power signature though. Non-nuclear. Fuck, it might be her. What the fuck has she been doing all this time?”

Ilyusha squawked: “Crawling back!”

Pira didn’t move, weapon aimed at the door, sky-blue eyes flat and cold, flame-red hair tucked over one shoulder.

“Pira,” Elpida hissed. She coughed again. “Expert opinion.”

Pira said, “Probably is her.”

“Is it safe to let her in? Is it safe to open that door?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She may have joined another group. She may have friends we don’t know about. She may be planning to kill us all to steal the nanos you took from the tomb.”

Ilyusha snorted, “Fucking reptile. Fuck you.”

Elpida put one hand out to hold off Ilyusha. “We’re not leaving her out there.”

Pira said, “You don’t even know that woman. How much do you trust her?”

“Nobody gets left behind. Telokopolis denies nobody. Kagami, is she alone?”

Kagami craned her head to look in all directions, left and right, even up at the ceiling of the concrete bunker. “Nothing else I can see.”

Elpida said, “We’re opening that door.”

Pira let out a tiny sigh and jerked her gun down. She pointed at Vicky. “Hold that light up.” Then to Elpida: “I’ll get the door, you cover me. Safety off. Don’t hesitate.”

Elpida nodded. “I’ve got your back.”

They climbed the steps together. Ilyusha trailed after them, claws clicking, tail swishing, stretching sleepy muscles. The shadows lay thick at the top of the steps, even with the glow-stick held up high in the room behind them. Elpida levelled her weapon and swallowed a cough. Pira lifted the bar out of the way, turned the handle, and flung the door open.

Beyond the door was a shallow-sided concrete basin, damp and dirty, clogged with puddles of stagnant water; the rotten city reared behind, like a row of teeth in the mouth of a skull. Far away to the right — the north? — a slow plume of black smoke was rising between the necrotic buildings. An uneven false horizon towered over it all: the graveworm, distant and still. The cloud-smothered sky brooded overhead, glowing dim red in one forgotten corner.

Atyle stood tall and dark in her armoured coat, bare head held high, a smirk on her lips.

The coilgun power-tank was strapped to her back, the aim-assist rig secured around her slender hips. She held the receiver in both hands — muzzle pointed at Elpida.

“Warrior!” she said in greeting.

Elpida coughed. “Shoot me or get inside.”

Atyle’s smirk widened. She awkwardly lowered the coilgun receiver and sauntered through the bunker door. Elpida realised that Atyle didn’t know how to stow the receiver in the rig; the coilgun wasn’t active or charged, and the rig wasn’t properly situated — the straps were knotted together to keep it from falling off. Pira slammed the door shut and got the bar back in place. Atyle paraded down the steps, glanced around the bunker, and took a bow as best she could with the coilgun strapped to her back.

Vicky laughed from down the floor: ““Welcome back, hey!” Then she winced. “Ow! She comes back with heavy weapons, though. Worth it.”

Amina was saying, “Oh, oh oh,” over and over again.

Ilyusha cackled. “Score!”

Elpida approached Atyle. “I don’t know how you did this, but well done. You want a hand taking that off? I know how heavy it is.”

Atyle turned narrow eyes on Elpida; she was brimming with self-satisfaction. “Undress me, warrior.”

Elpida took the coilgun receiver from Atyle and locked it properly to the aim-assist rig, then went behind her and supported the power-tank while Atyle untied the knots and shook the rig free. The position made Elpida’s ribs scream, but she endured the pain, coughing hard until she could lower the power-tank and the rig to the concrete floor.

Kagami was saying: “It’s been over twelve hours. How the hell did you survive by yourself? What were you even doing?”

“Waiting, mostly. With a brief period of enjoyment.”

Vicky asked, “Have you slept? Eaten?”

“No. Your arm is reattached. That is beautiful.”

“Ha,” Vicky said. “I wish.”

Elpida said, “You don’t seem surprised to see me alive.”

Atyle answered by making her peat-green bionic eye whirr and flex inside the socket. She looked down at Elpida’s blood-crusted chest, at the holes in her grey underlayers, at the stained emergency blanket beneath the coat draped over her shoulders. “I saw you through the walls, warrior. And I knew you would rise again. You have proven yourself. The gods have chosen you, and closed your wounds.”

Vicky muttered, “Pira did that, actually.”

Kagami pulled the auspex equipment off her face. “That’s how you found us again, isn’t it? That bionic eye. Fucking hell, I may as well be using a sextant by comparison, navigating by the fucking stars.”

Atyle nodded.

“Hey,” Vicky croaked, “thanks for coming back. Thanks for bringing the firepower, too.”

Ilyusha slid up and elbowed Atyle in the ribs, grinning with all her teeth. Atyle’s smug satisfaction curdled only a little when she looked down at the heavily augmented girl.

Elpida asked, “Why did you come back?”

Atyle looked right at her, one eye bright and sparking, the other a ball of green bio-plastic without pupil or iris. “Slayer of monsters, you are not nothing without your spear, for it was not with the spear that you landed the blow. But it is more entertaining to see you with a weapon in your hands.”

Elpida laughed. Her heart jerked. She coughed.

Pira said, sudden and sharp: “How did you recover the coilgun?”

Atyle got smug again. “Battlefield ravens strip the dead for choice parts. I found their nest and crept inside and took what is ours. I see as midday in the dark, I see through stone and metal and flesh, I see the wave of thoughts inside the skulls of the living. I am everything I was always meant to be. This was nothing. A trifle. A pleasure.”

Pira pressed. “Another coherent group? And they didn’t catch you? Didn’t even see you?”

“I walk as a ghost walks.”

Vicky said, “Hell yeah. Sneaky bitch. And hey, I mean that as a compliment.”

Ilyusha laughed. “Biiiitch.” She flung herself back down next to Amina in a clatter of bionic limbs, snuggling against the younger girl. Amina seemed completely lost.

Pira asked, “Did they strip the zombie? Did they have the cyclic coilgun?”

Atyle raised her eyebrows at Pira. “They did take the weapon from the monster. Alas, I could not carry that as well.”

Pira’s eyes flicked back up the steps, to the barred metal door. “How many of them are there? Where exactly? How are they armed?”

Elpida placed a gentle hand on Pira’s shoulder. “Hey. We still need to talk. Don’t go running off alone. I said you’re under my protection if you stay. I mean that.”

Pira blazed with a sudden frown. She spoke quick and hard: “This group is too large and carrying too much dead weight to move around without being noticed, but too small, too unaugmented, and too lightly armed to present a credible deterrent. The first pack of predators will eat us alive. One revenant from beyond the graveworm line would go through us in thirty seconds. We need an edge. Portable heavy weapons are the easiest choice.” She jabbed a finger at the coilgun. “That’s a start, but it’s not good enough. We want that cyclic coilgun before somebody attaches it to themselves or it gets traded away.” She paused. “That, or somebody is going to have to drink all the nanos and accept the consequences.”

Elpida nodded. This didn’t sound like a ploy to leave the rest of them behind; this was Pira trying to help. Elpida said, “Atyle, did that group look like they were going to move any time soon?”

Atyle shrugged.

Pira said, “The graveworm is still post-partum, nobody’s going to be moving far, but things can shift quickly in the period after opening a tomb. They move, we lose them, we lose the gun.”

Atyle snorted delicately: “I lose nothing.”

Kagami sighed. “Yeah, I bet you don’t — you can’t. Not with that eye.”

Atyle smirked. “Jealous, scribe?”

“Yes,” Kagami grunted.

But Elpida was more interested in Pira. “Post-partum,” she echoed.

Vicky added from down on the floor: “This shit is too weird for me right now.”

Pira sighed. “The period after restocking a tomb. It’s complicated. Explaining will take time.”

Elpida nodded. “Pira, tell us what you know first, then we’ll go get the cyclic coilgun. Please, don’t risk leaving us in the dark.”

Pira stared back with eyes like the sky over the green. Then she pulled away and returned to her spot. She sat down, folded her arms, and closed her eyes. “Fine. But don’t make me repeat myself.”

Elpida assisted Kagami with sitting down on a folded coat; the petite, doll-like girl was more capable of manipulating the knees and hip-joints of her augmetic legs now, but she still hissed and winced with pain whenever she had to push against her range of motion. Amina burrowed back down in her nest, big eyes staring out at everybody else with barely suppressed fear. Elpida showed Atyle to the cistern with the brackish water, at the other end of the bunker. Ilyusha bounced back up to her claws and followed, clicking across the concrete and through the cloying darkness. Atyle drank from her own cupped hands, uncaring of the stagnant taste.

Ilyusha stared up at Elpida, waiting. Her tail was wagging.

Elpida said: “You don’t seem surprised to see me alive, either. You’ve seen this happen before, haven’t you? Many times?”

Ilyusha nodded, hissing a laugh through her teeth.

Elpida said, “Ilyusha—” Then she stopped.

Earlier, Vicky had called Ilyusha ‘Illy’, but Elpida wasn’t certain if she could do that. Nicknames had been for the cadre. The cadre was gone, Howl was gone, they were all gone. But she had promised inside her own mind that she would praise Ilyusha. Her throat grew thick. She coughed as her heart spasmed.

“Ilyusha,” she tried again. “Vicky called you Illy. May I—”

Ilyusha nodded. “Mm!”

“Illy, then. Illy, you did really well back there, with the Silico — with the zombie. And before, with the retreat from the tomb. You did great work. Thank you for covering my back; we wouldn’t have survived without you. I owe you. Thank you.”

Elpida reached down and squeezed Ilyusha’s shoulder, where black-red bionic met pale flesh. Ilyusha laughed, happy and grinning, and bumped her head against Elpida’s forearm. Her tail tapped on the concrete floor. One red-clawed bionic hand closed around Elpida’s flesh, the claws naked and sharp but not cutting through clothing or skin. Ilyusha tightened her grip just enough to scrape — then she let go. She was bouncing on her clawed feet.

Elpida’s heart ached. Too much like Howl, though Howl would never have reciprocated the physical in front of another person; Atyle watched the exchange without comment. Elpida had to swallow another cough.

“How’s your wound?” she asked.

“Gone!” Ilyusha barked. “Blue shit’s good, yeah? How’s yours? Lots!”

“Painful,” Elpida said. “But I’ll live.”

Ilyusha laughed. “Ha!”

They returned to the others. Vicky had been in the middle of saying something to Kagami, but she trailed off. Atyle took a corner for herself, sitting cross-legged and straight backed on a spare coat, a subtle smile on her darkly sharp face. She looked untouched by her lonely mission. Ilyusha burrowed back into the nest she shared with Amina. Elpida did not try to sit back down on the coats where she had lain while dead; she wasn’t sure if she would be able to stand back up again. Her chest felt like it was made of bone shards and hot ashes. Her back still felt cold whenever she inhaled. She leaned against a wall instead, coughing into her hand.

Amina was staring at Elpida, eyes wide in her little brown face. Elpida smiled back and said, “I’m alive. It’s okay.”

Vicky spoke gently through her own pain. “Hey, Amina, honey, it’s fine. Elpida’s all better. She died, but she’s back again. Not so different to what happened to us up in the tomb, right?”

Amina murmured, “What was it like?”

Elpida said: “Being dead?” Amina nodded. “I don’t remember anything. I’m sorry, Amina. Maybe I wasn’t really dead.”

Amina said, “You were. You were cold.”

Pira was still sitting against the wall, eyes closed, arms folded. Elpida said her name. “Pira?”

“Yes?”

“Tell us everything you know.”

Pira was silent for a moment, then: “If I do that, we’ll be here until the graveworm starts moving.”

Kagami tutted. “What does that even mean? What does it serve you, being such a cryptic bitch? Do you get off on this? Are we being hazed?”

Pira opened her eyes, dispassionate and distant. “It means I’ve done this for so long that I don’t know where to start. And I don’t have any real answers. What do you want to know?”

Elpida shared a look with the others; she wanted to let them go first, establish a baseline, hold her own questions in reserve for the moments Pira seemed most open. Vicky was frowning, chewing her lip, cradling her skinless arm in her lap. Kagami looked angry and offended. Atyle seemed like she didn’t really care, watching the moment unfold with detached dignity, her bionic eye glinting in the blue glow-stick light. Amina was bewildered. Ilyusha just snuggled down next to the younger girl; her naked red claws curled against the cold concrete floor.

Kagami huffed. “We all saw the satellite pictures down in the gravekeeper’s chamber. And by the way, fuck you for pointing us toward that thing. A massive AI substrate enclosure, really? Thank you for the total lack of fucking warning. If you hadn’t come back for us out there I would have assumed you were trying to get us all killed, you insufferable cunt.”

Elpida put out a hand. “Hey, Kagami. Cool down.”

Kagami threw up her hands. “Yes. Fine. I’m just getting us all on the same page. We saw the satellite pictures. Me, her, and her.” Kagami indicated herself, Elpida, and Vicky. “We understand what we saw. These two don’t.” She pointed at Amina and Atyle. Then at Ilyusha. “Her I have no fucking idea. No offence, you … whatever you are.”

Ilyusha cackled. “Ilyusha!”

Pira listened, but said nothing.

“So,” Kagami spat. “When is this? What’s the date?”

Pira shrugged. “I have no idea. Late.”

Vicky laughed, but there was no humour in it. “Late. Right.”

Kagami took another shot. “When are you from? What era? What year, by your calendar?”

Pira blinked. “A while before all this.”

Kagami barked a laugh. “That could mean anything. We’re all from before this. What is going on, hmm? Why were we brought back from the fucking dead? Because I remember dying. I think we all do.” She glanced around the bunker. Elpida nodded. Vicky took an unstable breath. Amina whimpered. “What’s doing this to us? And why?”

Atyle said, “The gods do not explain themselves to mortals.”

“Pah!” Kagami spat.

Pira glanced sidelong at Atyle. “That’s as good an answer as any.”

Kagami swallowed, blinking rapidly. “You’re joking. You have to know something. There has to be a reason for this. Why are we here? What for? What is in command of all this?”

Pira just stared.

Kagami went on, breathing too hard: “Alright. Some runaway AI process is doing this. There’s no purpose. No meaning. None of this means anything. You just exist. We’re all here just to exist. Great. How the fuck are we being resurrected, huh? How is this madness bringing back cave-people?” She waved a wave toward Atyle. “Explain that!”

Elpida spoke up before Kagami could panic further. “Pira, how long have you been doing this for? How many times have you been resurrected?”

Pira blinked slowly. “Do you have anything to draw with?”

They did; Ilyusha had taken several sticks of camo paint from the tomb armoury: green, brown, grey, black. Pira accepted a stick of black, then stood up and started drawing on the concrete wall. Vicky held the glow-stick up higher. “May as well crack another,” said Pira. Vicky did, doubling the sickly blue light lying still and soft over Pira’s back as she worked.

“This is what I know,” said Pira. “There are two distinct systems in operation. One system is comprised of the tombs and the graveworms.”

She stepped to the side so the others could see the drawing on the wall: it was a very rough version of the map they’d seen down in the gravekeeper’s chamber. The world — a single landmass — was represented by a lumpy circle, gnarled at the bottom. Pira had separated the landmass roughly down the middle with a dotted line, and labelled the right half as ‘city’. Several tiny stepped pyramids were dotted throughout the city: the tombs. A number of wiggly lines were labelled ‘worms’. Three tall triangles sat at equidistant points within the city, forming a larger triangle; each of these was labelled ‘tower’. A single massive curve of black on the left of the map — to the west — indicated something beyond the city; Pira had labelled this as ‘ring segment’.

“Oh shit,” Vicky croaked. “Names and all. Good sign or bad? Heh. Uh, poor joke. Sorry.”

Ilyusha laughed. “Worm’s too small!”

Kagami muttered, “Yes, considering what we saw earlier. That thing is the size of a mountain. Worms? Plural?”

Pira nodded. “Yes.”

Elpida asked, “How many graveworms? How many tombs?”

Pira glanced back at her rough map. When she spoke, her voice was dead and flat. “I know of sixty two tombs across the east of the continent — in the city — but I stopped counting. Graveworms, I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. More than two. A dozen. Maybe. The graveworms move on circuits between the tombs. A worm reaches a tomb, restocks it with nanomachines, then the tomb spits out more of us.”

“Why?” Kagami said. “Why! Why us, specifically?”

“I don’t know,” Pira said. Kagami shook her head.

“But what’s the graveworm?” Vicky asked, frowning. “The gravekeeper, that was an AI, right? Is the worm the same?”

“I don’t know,” Pira said. “The gravekeepers run the resurrection process. The worms restock. I don’t know why. I don’t know what the purpose is. I don’t know. Anybody who tells you they know … ” Pira trailed off, jaw tight. She swallowed. “Nobody knows. Not for sure.”

Vicky said, “Why do you call them ‘graveworms’? Odd word choice is all.”

“I picked it up from somebody else, a long time ago.”

Elpida asked, “What’s inside the graveworms?”

Pira stared at her, through her, then blinked. “The graveworms are giant nanomachine forges. They produce raw blue in vast quantities. It takes a lot to resurrect one of us from scratch, in the tombs: somewhere over a million gallons of the stuff per revenant.” She shook her head. “But you can’t get inside them. You can’t get anywhere near them. Here.”

She turned back to the wall and drew a second diagram: the graveworm seen from above, represented by a pair of wiggly lines joined at one end, with a blank circle for a head. Then she added two concentric rings around the worm. She labelled the space closest to the worm as ‘danger’, the middle area as ‘safe zone’, and the area beyond both rings as ‘wild’. Then she tapped the innermost ring, closest to the worm.

“Too close to a graveworm and you run into the worm guardians, the machinery it maintains to protect itself.” She nodded at the coilgun. “We could probably kill one with that, but there’s always a lot of them. If we ever seem like we’re getting the upper hand, the graveworm can escalate. It can manufacture infinite guardians for itself. We can’t.” Pira tapped the area outside the rings. “Too far from the worm, that’s wilderness. That’s where the zombies wander. The nano-shit and the necromancer leftovers, things like the zombie back at the tomb. Things you wouldn’t believe. But the graveworm’s defences means they never come too close.” Then she tapped the space between the two rings, the ‘safe zone’. “This is where we — revenants, people from the tombs — this is where we’re relatively safe. In the shadow of a graveworm. But not from each other.”

Kagami started laughing, sad, slow, pained. “You’re joking? You’re joking. What is this? What is this bullshit?”

Vicky swallowed. “Like extremophiles around a hydrothermal vent. A goldilocks zone.”

Pira nodded. “I’ve heard that comparison before.”

Amina was saying in a tiny voice: “I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I-I’m sorry, I don’t … ”

Ilyusha whispered something directly into Amina’s ear. Amina swallowed and stared at Ilyusha. The heavily augmented girl just laughed and nodded back. Atyle was taking all this in with serene detachment; perhaps she already knew.

Kagami said, “You can’t venture away from one of these nanomachine sludge monsters? You live around while it moves? What do you do, build fucking shanty towns?”

Pira shrugged. “Only the most heavily augmented have any chance of surviving beyond the graveworm. That zombie, earlier? That was nothing.”

Elpida muttered, “Silico drone. I agree.”

Pira went on, “Normally a creature like that wouldn’t come so close to a graveworm. That’s why everybody was surprised. Something drew it in close, made it take the risk. If we hadn’t killed it, worm guardians would probably have responded in an hour or two. Too late for us.”

Elpida was struggling to absorb this information. She had no idea what a hydrothermal vent was, but she could see the logic. Pira’s diagram on the wall was so simple, so straightforward, though the elements it described were as big as mountains; all these resurrected human beings, crammed into a narrow strip of life around a giant machine. All the genetic engineers of Telokopolis could never have prepared her for this. But Old Lady Nunnus had done a good job of making Elpida flexible. And her cadre had kept her focused on what really mattered. Her mind hungered for more information; she could tell this was not yet a complete picture.

“How wide is that safe zone?” she asked.

Pira said, “About a mile. The edges are fuzzy, not exact.”

“How often does a graveworm move? How fast?”

Pira shrugged. “It depends. Sometimes they don’t move for days, or weeks, or longer. I knew one which stayed in place for six years. Heard tell of another which didn’t move for five decades. Mostly it’s days. Sometimes hours. As for how fast, not much. They stop and start. There’s time for sleep and rest.”

Kagami snorted. “That sounds designed. There’s a mind behind this.”

Pira answered without looking at her. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t know.”

Elpida kept going, pressing for useful intel. “How many of us are there? People from the tomb, revenants?”

Pira said, “Around this worm, considering the size of it, maybe a couple of thousand.”

Vicky said, voice shaking, staring at the black drawings on the wall: “This is it? This the entire world now? Giant machines and the undead crawling around their feet? That’s it? There’s nothing else out there?” She was hunched forward slightly, cradling her wounded arm, breathing too fast.

Elpida said, “Vicky, it’s okay. Vicky?”

Pira sighed and closed her eyes briefly. “There’s plenty out there.”

“What?” Vicky demanded. “What, then?!”

“Zombies. There is nothing left alive, not in the traditional meaning of ‘alive’. Even the moss and lichen are nanomachine based. Everything is dead.” Pira sighed. “I’m … sorry.”

Vicky laughed a laugh that was more like a sob, wincing in pain. “That’s it? That’s the world. Why was everyone fighting at the tomb, then? Why aren’t we all banded together? What are we doing alone in this bunker?”

Amina said, “We’re in hell. I told you. It’s hell.”

Elpida raised her voice, though it made her lungs hurt: “We’re not in hell. Pira, something you said earlier has stuck in my mind. You said ‘One revenant from beyond the graveworm line would go through us in thirty seconds.’”

Pira held her gaze, cold and exhausted.

Elpida explained. “You’ve consistently used the word revenant to describe us, and only us. Everything else is zombies. How does one of us come from beyond the graveworm safe zone? You said only the most heavily augmented have any chance of surviving out there. Are there people out there, like us?”

Pira said nothing.

Vicky said, “Her story’s gotten mixed up. Can’t keep it straight, can you?”

Kagami hissed, “Wait. Back up. How do you know what the giant worm-construct makes if you can’t get inside?”

“Deductive reasoning,” Pira said. “They restock the tombs, it’s the only way. And the ambient nanomachine levels in the air are higher around the graveworm. It’s another reason to stick close. You heal faster and you won’t starve to death.”

Elpida said, “You said we didn’t need food.”

“We don’t.”

Ilyusha was smirking up at Pira, as if this was all silly or irrelevant. Elpida said, “Illy, you’ve been here before as well. Have you—”

A high-pitched whine cut in at the edge of Elpida’s hearing; her heart lurched and fluttered; her head rang from the inside; her eyes watered; her stomach roiled. She thought she was having a medical event, another step of the nanomachine-accelerated healing process — but the others winced and blinked as well. Amina whimpered in shock. Ilyusha’s claws flicked in and out. Somebody said, voice muffled: “What— ow— what—”

Pira turned grey. Her eyes went wide. She didn’t reach for her gun.

Elpida said, “Pira, what—”

Pira hissed through clenched teeth: “Nobody move. No sound. Don’t breathe. That’s worm-guard.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Graveworms and revenants, an ecosystem of the not-really-living. And zombies beyond the flickering light. I must admit that I have had an incredible time crafting this setting, behind the scenes, and this is only a tiny glimpse. Pira doesn’t know everything, after all, as she is at pains to repeat. Hope you enjoy where this is going, because I sure am!

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Thank you all so much for reading my little story. More soon!

Content Warnings

Choking
Reference to terrorism
Discussion of suicide/suicidal ideation
Slurs

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Life roared back, cold and wet and aching, somewhere in the dark.

Elpida sat bolt upright and retched clotted blood into her own hands.

She coughed and choked and drooled crimson mucus, wheezing to draw breath through a clogged throat. Her heart beat with an arrhythmic flutter, making her jerk and gasp. Her lungs heaved with stabbing pains; her skin was coated in freezing sweat and burning heat. Her head pounded worse than the time Howl had learned a new trick, and bounced her off the training mat over and over until Elpida had put Howl in a choke-hold.

Howl!

She’d heard Howl’s voice, in her dying moments.

“How— Howl?” she tried to say, but managed only a strangled hiss. She leaned forward and brought up chunks of gristle, thick mucus, dried blood. She croaked, “Howl? … Howl?”

But Howl was dead. Elpida had heard only her own brain chemistry on the edge of oblivion.

A stained and raspy voice breathed in the dark: “Now that’s a miracle.”

Elpida pulled her head up.

She was in a small concrete room, like one of the box-bunkers down on Telokopolis’ plateau: bare walls, gritty floor, low ceiling. A metal rectangle covered a narrow slit window. Concrete steps on the right led up to a stout metal door, closed and barred. Another metal door stood half open behind her. Humped figures hunched against the walls. Elpida blinked her eyes to clear her vision, but the world was dark and blurred.

“Elpida?” said Vicky.

Elpida coughed up bloody mucus when she tried to speak. She spat on the floor, focused on breathing slowly and smoothly, and then tried again. “Yeah. Yes. Vicky.”

“Don’t force it,” Vicky rasped.

“I’m here,” Elpida forced. “I’m … I’m up.”

“Take it slowly, okay? You had a nasty wound.”

If her lungs hadn’t hurt so much, Elpida would have laughed. “I took a bullet through the heart.”

The Vicky-lump shifted in the darkness. “Sorry, let me get the light. Last one burnt out hours ago. I think we can see in the dark, a little bit, but it sucks. Let me just … ”

Snap; a cold blue light crept outward to fill the concrete bunker, from a glow-stick in Vicky’s left hand.

“Fuck me,” Vicky breathed. “You really are alive.”

Vicky looked awful; her dark skin was grey-pale with stress, eyes red and ringed with pain. She was sitting on a makeshift bed of spare coats. She’d been stripped to the waist and half-wrapped in an emergency thermal blanket. The crinkly material reflected the sickly blue light from the glow-stick. An unfamiliar fur-trimmed green coat was draped over her shoulders.

Her right arm lay in her lap — attached to her shoulder by a stringy mass of exposed muscle, glistening red and wet. White bone was visible through a split in the meat. Strips of skin grew across the gap as if reaching toward each other.

“I know, right?” Vicky hissed. “Wild.”

Elpida struggled not to cough: “I got you shot. You followed my orders and I got you shot. I’m sorry.”

Vicky shrugged with her left shoulder. She placed the glow-stick in her lap, next to the unmoving fingers of her right hand. “You slew the monster. And hey, I’m good as new.”

“Really?”

Vicky swallowed hard and tried to smile. “No. It hurts like a bitch and I can’t move it right. Reattaching it made me scream so loud I thought my lungs would burst. Apparently that’ll improve.”

“And your ribs?”

“Better than the arm. Stings when I breathe. How about you, Elpi?”

Amina and Ilyusha were huddled beneath a nest of spare coats in the corner, heads together, fast asleep. Ilyusha’s bionic tail poked out of their makeshift bed. A pair of ballistic shields stood against the wall, one intact, the other with a chunk missing from an upper corner. Three backpacks sat on the floor, one of them looking less plump now it had been raided for coats and emergency blankets. Elpida’s own armoured coat sat in a sad pile, covered in blood, holes in the back, along with some shredded grey underlayers from Vicky. Guns were laid out, including Vicky’s heavy machine gun and all the equipment Elpida had been carrying. But no coilgun.

Three empty cannisters stood in front of one of the backpacks; one had a couple of mouthfuls worth of blue slime left at the bottom.

“Did it stay down?” Elpida asked. “The Silico.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you fucked it up real good, Elpi. You saved us. Seriously. Whatever, you got me shot, whatever. I don’t care. You knew what to do, you saved the rest of us.”

Vicky was panting softly, speaking too fast, blinking as if concussed. Elpida couldn’t straighten up without pain, but she knew she needed to change the subject.

“Nice coat,” she said.

Vicky blinked several times, then laughed, then winced. “Ow. Spoils of war. Illy grabbed it from the battlefield, before we took off. Said it looks cool. Elpi, how are you feeling? You were … ”

Elpida examined herself. Her hands and arms worked without issue. She straightened up, ignoring the pain in her chest, struggling to suppress the cough. She was wrapped in a thermal blanket as well, crinkling beneath a fresh armoured coat draped over her shoulders. But her grey underlayers hadn’t been changed: her own blood had dried around three ragged holes in the fabric. She worked one hand up inside the shirt and found three areas of tender, spongy flesh, little throbbing craters in her front, sealed but wet. Her fingers came away covered in plasma and blood, almost black in the blue glow-stick light. Her whole chest felt like it was full of glass. Her heart spasmed. She coughed.

“You were dead,” Vicky was saying. “I mean, sure, we’re all dead, or undead, or whatever. But you were dead dead. You weren’t breathing — oh hell, none of us need to breathe. But you were cold and you were limp. No rigor mortis, I guess. You were dead, Elpi. You were fucking dead.”

“Do we regenerate? Come back to life?”

Vicky shook her head. “We used two cannisters of nanos on you. The blue goo stuff. Had to get it in there and pour it into your heart. Smear it on the damage. Thought I was gonna be sick. Same with my arm. That was weird, with so much of it missing and … and … the flesh was reaching … like … ”

“Ilyusha?”

“What? Oh. No, she’s fine. Flesh wound. Popped it right out. She did regen, for real, I think. Amina’s untouched. Lucky kid.” She pointed at the leftover nanomachine slime in the third cannister. “Supposed to tell you to drink the stuff when you wake up. Couldn’t make you swallow while you were … dead.”

Elpida couldn’t stop coughing. Her heartbeat was wrong — presumably healing. She hadn’t felt such an invasive sensation since twelve years old, when she and the cadre had undergone the wide-awake operations to install their mind-machine interface and neural lace. Her ribs ached where the Silico’s sabot-rounds had punched through her chest. Her back hurt like one big pulled muscle, crusted with blood from the massive exit wounds. Something back there felt cold when she inhaled.

She couldn’t process this second resurrection. Elpida’s mind was crafted and honed to absorb information without shock, but this was more than information. She had used her own death to buy the lives of her comrades — the way it always should have been back in Telokopolis, for Howl and Metris and Silla and all the others. She should have walked into the Civitas chambers with a bomb strapped to her chest years ago, should have marched up to the Covenanters when they were still playing politics, and turned them all into bloody meat and greasy carbon. She had sacrificed herself in the way she always should have done. She had corrected her mistake. Would Old Lady Nunnus be proud? Probably not. But Howl would be. Elpida had saved everyone. Howl grinned in her memories, bright and shining and right.

But still, she lived. Elpida drew in a wheezing breath and coughed blood into her hand. She said: “You … you came back for me? You carried me?”

“Not me.” Vicky turned her head and nodded. “Her.”

Pira was sitting against the wall, behind Elpida. Eyes closed, arms folded, back straight — maybe asleep or maybe pretending. She’d washed most of the blood off her pale, freckled face, and cleaned up her torn body armour. Her submachine gun lay in her lap. A twist of flame-red hair was tucked over one shoulder.

“She came back for me,” Elpida said. “At the end. She hit the Silico.”

Vicky nodded, panting softly. “Yeah. Came out of nowhere. Sneaky little bitch.” She laughed softly, then winced again. “I mean that with affection. Sorry. Pain is fucking me up. Wish we had some morphine, or even just some tylenol. Pira told us how to use the nanomachine goop. She smeared it on her fingers and got right into your chest with it. Knew exactly what to do. Said you’d probably come back, given time. But maybe you wouldn’t. But you did. So, yeah.”

Elpida stared at Pira’s sleeping face. Even in rest she looked taut.

“Pira. Are you awake?”

No reply.

Vicky said: “She doesn’t talk much. Not to me, at least. I’ve been sleeping.”

“How—” Elpida coughed again. “How long have I been out?”

“Don’t know. Twelve, sixteen hours? Kaga’s got a clock, I think.”

Elpida’s mind sharpened through the pain. She glanced around the concrete box. “Where is Kagami? And Atyle?”

Vicky nodded at the half open metal door and the concrete corridor beyond. “Kaga’s down that way. There’s a couple of other rooms. A cistern, water. Vile, but we can drink it. Bunk-room too, but … nah.”

“Atyle?”

Vicky grimaced. “She walked off. When we were bugging out. I was screaming, too much pain, lost track of her. Kaga says she just turned away from us and walked, like she knew exactly where she really wanted to be.”

Elpida sighed. That hurt in a new way. “Damn.”

“Yeah.”

One lost. One was too many. Elpida clenched her stomach muscles to stop from coughing again. “Did somebody recover Zeltzin’s corpse, like me?”

“Uh, maybe. I think I saw Lianna, the big spider woman. Scooped her up? I couldn’t say for sure.”

“Where are we now?”

Vicky said, “Only about a hundred feet from the tomb pyramid. First safe spot we found. Went to ground. Barred the door. You weigh a ton, apparently. All that height and muscle, heh. Ah, ow.”

“Vicky, take it easy. Rest. You did well. Your job now is to recover and heal, so you focus on that. We’ll get that arm working again.”

Vicky pulled a grey grimace. “I didn’t do anything. I got shot. Couldn’t even carry my own arm.”

“That was my fault, not yours. You are not responsible for my mistake. Rest, relax, recover. That’s an order.”

An order. As if Elpida had the right to give any orders. But Vicky nodded.

Elpida stood up.

Her heart fluttered and jumped in strange directions. Her head flushed with blood, then drained out. Her whole body shook with weakness. She coughed several times. She peeled the thermal blanket open and stared down at her wounds — knotty twists of red muscle, wet and soft, holes sealed by nanomachine miracles. The skin was closing up, but too slowly to measure with the naked eye; Elpida understood that technology, at least. Skin-repair was well within the abilities of any hospital in Telokopolis. A Legion medical team or a pilot capsule could have kept her alive with a shattered heart and punctured lungs — but not on a bare concrete floor, with no equipment except bare hands and raw nanomachine sludge.

And she hadn’t been kept alive. She’d been dead.

Vicky rasped, “Elpi, you take it easy too, please.”

“I can stand.” The pain in her chest was incredible, but Telokopolis gene-engineering work was already dumping pain-blockers into her bloodstream. She nodded at the metal cover over the slit window. “Safe to open that?”

“Pira says no, not with light showing. And hey, I agree with her. We’re wounded and slow. We don’t want attention.”

Elpida looked down at Pira again. “Pira, are you awake?”

“No,” said Pira.

Elpida knew what it felt like to be saved. The cadre had defended each other in combat again and again, year after year. Howl had saved her life in more than a physical way. But this felt different. Pira was not her clade-sister, not one of her cadre.

“You came back for me,” she said.

Pira grunted. “Mmhmm.”

“Why?”

“We’re fresh. Still in the rapid regen period after resurrection. Knew you’d come back in a day or two. Leaving you there would be a waste, you’d just get eaten by scavengers. Depending on your deal, you’d have woken up in another tomb, weeks or months or years from now.”

That wasn’t an answer, but Elpida let it go. She said, “You came back and shot at the Silico. I wouldn’t have hit it without your support. Pira, thank you.”

Pira said nothing. Didn’t even open her eyes.

Vicky said: “Why do you call that thing ‘Silico’?”

Elpida shrugged. The gesture made her back and ribs scream with pain. She coughed. “Because that’s what it was. A Silico drone, from the green. Made of spare parts and stolen corpses. It wasn’t exactly like the ones I’m familiar with, but the principles were the same.” She nodded at the weapons on the floor. “Kind of like our guns. Same principles. Different eras.”

Pira said, “That was late era necro junk. Nothing more. Whatever your time was like, everything from it is gone.”

“That was a Silico construct. I recognised the principles.”

Vicky asked, “Did that thing used to be a person, like us? Lots of those girls back there had bionics. Was that just one of us, gone too far?”

“No,” said Pira and Elpida, both at the same time.

They paused. Elpida waited.

“No,” Pira repeated. “Just something still up and walking around. A zombie.”

Vicky puffed a tiny laugh. “Aren’t we zombies?”

Pira opened her eyes. Sky-blue and shining, even by the dead light of the glow-stick. She stared at Vicky for a long moment, as if considering the value of the question.

“Silico,” Elpida croaked. “It was Silico.”

Pira spoke to Vicky. “Zombie is a contextual word. Applied to one of us — revenants, from the tombs — it’s usually an insult, but it can mean affection. If somebody calls you ‘zombie’, they’re denying you’re a person. Or they’re your best friend, expressing solidarity.”

“Huh,” Vicky grunted. “Okay.”

“But usually it refers to everything other than us — the relics, the robots, other kinds of undead. Shuffling corpses, necro-era cyborgs like that thing back there. Leftovers, worm guardians, hunter killers, the nano-shit and monsters and all the rest. Even the occasional true necromantic construct. All the other weird shit out there. All of it is zombies.”

Vicky swallowed. “Shit. I think I liked you better when you weren’t talking much.”

Elpida asked, “You have categories for different classes of Silico? And other creatures?”

Pira snorted and closed her eyes again. “Good luck with that. I tried it before. Waste of time.”

Vicky and Elpida shared a look. Numb terror swam just beneath Vicky’s grey exhaustion. Elpida made an ‘ease down’ hand gesture, and said, “Vicky, it’s going to be alright. Pira, do you have any idea where Atyle might have gone?”

“The tall one with the bionic eye?” She shrugged. “Take your pick. We’re in the graveworm shadow, right after a tomb opened. Miles around will be crawling with revenants for days.”

Elpida asked, “We lost the coilgun?”

Vicky said: “Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Vicky. You only had one arm, right? Better the arm than the coilgun.”

Pira said, “Lost it in the retreat. Didn’t have enough hands.”

Elpida suppressed a sigh of disappointment. “That was a powerful piece of equipment.”

Pira snorted. “Wouldn’t have availed us much if that zombie had been something worse. Coilgun round would probably go through a worm-spawn shell, but wouldn’t do much more than tickle a necromancer machine.”

“Where’d that combat frame come down?”

Vicky said, “Combat frame?”

“The falling star.”

Pira replied, “North a ways, I think.” She frowned without opening her eyes. “That was rare. Not seen anything fall from orbit for a long time.”

Elpida nodded. Pira fell silent. Vicky looked down at the bloody mass of her healing arm. The concrete bunker walls were thick and sturdy; Elpida could hear the occasional muffled gunshot far away, and the scrape of cold wind across the roof. She took a deep breath to mirror the quiet, feeling her lungs ache and her heart lurch. Her vision wavered, then settled. She coughed.

“How long will it take for my heart to finish healing?”

Pira said: “A day? I don’t know. Chug the nanos, it’ll help.”

Elpida stepped over to the backpacks, squatted down, and poured the remaining nanomachine slime down her throat. It tasted of nothing, coated her mouth, and sat heavy in her stomach. She unzipped Ilyusha’s backpack and found plenty more of the cannisters still inside, faintly glowing blue. “Should I drink more?”

Pira replied in a disapproving tone. “If you want.”

“Bad idea?”

Pira sighed, very slightly. She nodded toward Ilyusha and Amina. “Your bionic friend sleeping in the corner? She pulled shrapnel out of herself and healed up so fast she was risking cancerous growth. She drank several cans before the fight, didn’t she?”

“She did.”

Pira snorted and shook her head. “It’s valuable. Don’t waste it. You get into another fight like that in a week or two, you won’t be fresh, you won’t heal so fast. And you won’t survive having your heart turned into mince.”

Elpida zipped up the backpack. She could endure the pain. “Do we need to eat? I don’t feel hungry. At all.”

“Get used to that,” said Pira.

“Do we need water?”

“Mmhmm.”

“What about sleep?”

“Hm?” Pira opened her eyes again.

“Biologically. Do we need sleep?”

“ … no. But I wouldn’t recommend going without sleep. You’ll go insane, and quickly.”

Vicky laughed softly, then winced. “Same as it ever was, then.”

Elpida turned without standing up; she wanted to be eye-level with Pira for this. “Pira. Thank you for carrying me. Thank you for rescuing me. If you stay by my side, then you’re one of us. I will do my utmost to protect you. Thank you.”

Pira just stared, her eyes a flat and infinite blue. She said nothing.

Elpida said, “I need information. Answers. The lay of the land. Who’s out there, why are we—”

“I know what you need,” Pira said. “And I don’t have any real answers. I can’t point you toward salvation, because there is none. We’re here for nothing. You’re going to die, again and again, and there’s no meaning to any of it. The world is full of dead things, the machines have all gone mad, and there’s nothing left. Welcome to the end of the world.”

“Then why did you save me?”

Pira sighed. “And I’m not going to repeat myself four times. We’ll talk when your friend with the wonky legs gets back from sulking.” She nodded at the half-open door, then at Ilyusha and Amina. “And when these two wake up.”

“Kagami? Sulking?”

Vicky pulled an awkward smile. “She’s down in the room with the water. Probably. And she wasn’t sulking, she was crying.”

Elpida scooped up her own submachine gun, checked it was loaded and the safety was on, then put the strap over her shoulder. She stood up. “I’ll go get her. Be right back.”

Vicky called after her as she shuffled through the half-open door: “Be gentle, Elpi! On yourself, too!”

The concrete bunker was nothing more than three rooms connected by a tiny T-shaped corridor, bathed in subterranean darkness. Vicky’s speculation was correct: Elpida could see in the dark, but only a little. She peered into the open door on the right and found a room with two metal bunk beds. All four mattresses were black with rot, skeletons lying on top, filthy bones embedded in glistening black goo. She backed up and took the other door instead.

This end of the bunker was similar to the other: a square concrete room with a slit window. At one side of the room was a concrete trough full of dirty water. No stairs and no exit; the slit window was lower; a long concrete block served as a seat and firing position in front of the aperture.

Kagami was sitting on the block, staring out of the open slit, a tiny delicate figure wrapped in a coat too large for her frame. Her visor and auspex gear hung loose around her neck. Her long black hair looked lank and greasy.

“Hey,” said Elpida.

Kagami looked round. Her eyes were red-rimmed in her soft brown face. “Ah. There she is. The prodigal daughter. Rolled the rock away from the tomb and rose on the third day, did you? Good thing you didn’t actually take three days, I would have drowned myself in the water tank.”

She turned back to the slit window. Elpida walked over and ducked her head to see.

Nothing but black sky, thick with choking clouds, and the distant teeth of the dead city drowned in shadows. The furnace-light of the dying sun had vanished again, replaced with a dim red glow from one corner of the sky.

Elpida straightened back up and looked at the water. “That’s what we’re drinking? It looks filthy.”

Kagami shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I doubt we can get sick, not in the traditional sense. Pira says so, anyway. Fucking cryptic bitch thinks she knows better than a logician. Dealt with her kind before.”

Elpida stepped over to the water trough and drank some of the cold liquid from cupped hands. It tasted brackish and stale, but it quenched her thirst.

She said, “You don’t seem surprised that I came back from the dead.”

Kagami didn’t look around from the slit window. “Didn’t you hear the Christ joke? Fuck, you probably don’t even have Christianity.” She laughed, bitter. “I’m treating you like some Anglo-Rim visitor, some barbarian cunt trying to argue us out of dropping a rod on your stupid head. What do you believe in, huh? The eightfold path? Kami and spirits? Ganesh and all that? Or did the republic win, are you all good little atheists in the Pangaea Proxima future?”

“I believe in Telokopolis,” Elpida said.

Kagami snorted. “Great.”

“I’m not religious. Some in Telokopolis are. We—”

“Stop. Please. I don’t actually want the cultural exchange spiel. I was shitting on you.”

“Kagami, are you alright?”

Kagami looked around from the window again. Her lower lip was shaking. Her eyes were tight. “You and I both understand just how fucked this all is. I envy the fucking paleo and the bionic monster back there, I really do. I even envy Vicky. Poor fucking pre-contraction throwback. I’m not surprised you’re on your feet, no. You know why? Because we’re made of nanomachines. We’re not life. I’ve seen nanotech pushed past all legal and sane limits, and we’re way past that. I’ve seen the abominations it can create, the kind of things that can’t die properly. Death would be a mercy. I’ll bet killing any one of us would be extremely hard. And you know what? That’s a bad thing. That’s a very fucking bad thing.”

“Kagami, thank you for helping me kill the Silico. I only knew where to hit it because you told me the locations of the reactors. You did that. You did well. Thank you.”

Kagami shook her head. “What difference does it make?”

“It kept us alive.”

“For how long? In what kind of state? The weird little nun was right, this is a kind of hell.”

Elpida took a deep breath. Her ribs and back burned with skin regrowth. Her heart spasmed and made her cough. “That’s up to us. And Telokopolis is out there. I’m glad you didn’t get hurt during the fight. How are your legs doing now?”

Kagami sighed. “I can walk without tripping. They still feel wrong.”

“That’s good.” Elpida paused, then decided. “Kagami, you’re unarmed. Please don’t go off alone like this. Go armed, even if you’re not going far.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Kagami huffed. “I can’t shoot anything anyway. I’d just turn the gun on myself if I thought it would work.”

Elpida nodded. “Please never do that. I understand, but please don’t.”

“Aren’t you going to give me an order?”

“Do you want me to?”

Kagami held her gaze, then looked down at her lap.

Elpida said: “Don’t shoot yourself. That’s an order. Now, I can help you get back to the others, if you need a hand. Pira’s going to tell us what she knows.”

“What she knows.” Kagami snorted, amused. “Oh, lovely. Fucking hell. Alright, fine, give me your hand then.” Kagami stuck her hand out. “Hips are fucking stupid. I hate this.”

Elpida helped Kagami get to her feet and over to the open door. Kagami used one hand on Elpida’s arm in a clumsy vice-grip, but Elpida didn’t mind.

“Kagami, what was that thing which fell from the sky? It reminded me of a combat frame.”

Kagami answered as they shuffled into the corridor together. “Re-entry suit of some kind. Orbital deployment mech. Sloppy work, slow as a brick. Could have been floating up there for millennia. I highly doubt it’s from your time, you don’t even know what satellites are.”

They returned to the room with the others. Pira and Vicky were sitting in the same positions as before, but Vicky had peeled off her looted coat and looked a bit more awake. Ilyusha was still sleeping, but Amina was blinking and rubbing her eyes. Pira looked up, cold and empty.

“We need to talk,” Elpida said. “Kagami, do you want a coat for—”

“Sitting, yes, yes, fine. Sure.”

“I’ll get one,” Vicky said, reaching over to the bags with her good left arm.

Elpida said, “No, let me. You rest, Vicky, that’s your job—”

Clang clang clang.

Three knocks rang against the metal door, up the concrete steps, from the dead world outside.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Manmade horrors beyond our comprehension; maybe Kagami is right, maybe death would be a mercy compared to the consequences of this unlife. Elpida would disagree, she’s on her feet and still drawing breath and that’s what matters. Meanwhile, something knocks at the chamber door, but these are far from the last girls on earth.

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