Content Warnings

Bullet wounds
Chronic pain
Self harm

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Elpida stowed the coilgun receiver in the aim-assist rig strapped around her hips, knelt down next to Kagami behind the concrete wall, and accepted an extendible earpiece and throat-mic from the auspex visor. Kagami’s left hand shook as she pressed the earpiece into Elpida’s palm. The others looked on in confusion and alarm: Ilyusha showed her teeth and spat on the ground, while Amina huddled next to her, face blank with incomprehension; Vicky was clenching her jaw and clutching her weapon; Pira looked tight as a piano-wire, tucked into the corner between concrete wall and paving slabs. Atyle stood tall, uncaring of cover.

“Kaga,” Elpida said. “What did they say about something behind us?”

“There’s nothing there!” Kagami snapped. “I looked, there’s nothing. Now talk to them before they light us up with a fucking plasma rifle!”

Atyle agreed: “Nothing pursues us, warrior. We are alone.”

Elpida nodded. “Right. Vicky, Pira, watch our flanks, in case they’re trying to ambush us. Atyle, eyes on the skyscraper, keep me informed of movement.” She lifted the earpiece.

Pira hissed: “Don’t.”

Elpida paused. Pira’s eyes were like lightning in blue skies. “Pira?”

“Don’t talk to them.”

Kagami huffed. “It’s just radio! It’s not like they can transmit a mimetic brain-virus over radio. What are you afraid of, huh? Afraid your friends want to say hello?”

“Kaga,” Vicky snapped. “Not now.”

Pira said to Elpida: “They will lie to you. They will lie. Be careful. Trust nothing.”

Elpida nodded. “Understood. Thank you, Pira.” She raised the earpiece and hooked it around the cup of her right ear. Then she extended the attached laryngophone and pressed it to her throat.

Kagami adjusted a setting on the auspex visor’s arm-mounted control board. Then she nodded rapidly, eyes wide, face pale and sweating.

Elpida said out loud: “Commander, actual. Identify yourself.”

A flicker of radio bands; a passing ghost of static; from across the road there came an audible click of transmission equipment, loud and heavy. Atyle frowned and pointed, tracking something inside the skyscraper.

A voice spoke to Elpida.

“I said I want to speak with the mech pilot,” it purred. “Not your leader. Unless you are one and the same?”

The Death’s Head voice was amused and rich, spiced honey poured over steel, wet clicking of lips and tongue distorted by the radio signal.

“Commander, actual,” Elpida repeated. “Identify yourself.”

“You first, commander.”

“What makes you think we have a pilot for that combat frame?”

A moment of silence. Thinking fast, Elpida guessed.

Then: “Call it an educated guess. Am I speaking to the mech pilot, or not?”

Another loud click-buzz echoed out over the empty street, from the occupied skyscraper opposite. Atyle was still pointing.

Elpida made sure her armoured hood was in place, then risked a glance around the edge of the concrete wall.

Across the pitted and potholed tarmac, beneath the filth-streaked flames of the dead-sky sun, the windows of the skull-marked skyscraper were as still as empty eye sockets.

But one window was now occupied, the one Atyle was pointing at. A figure stood exposed from the waist upward, up on the second floor, uncaring of opportunistic pot-shots or sniper fire. The figure wore a full-body suit of carapace battle-armour, dirty grey plates scuffed and soot-marked, dyed dark by the ruddy sunlight. A full-face helmet was punctuated by a pair of dark eyepieces and a sealed rebreather grille. The figure cradled an exotic rifle in her arms — plasma weapon perhaps; Elpida couldn’t identify the type. The chestplate of her armour carapace was marked with a grinning skull in black paint, tongue extended in playful mockery.

Elpida ducked back into cover. Pira had taken a quick look as well; she was frowning hard.

Elpida pressed the laryngophone to her throat again. “Is that you I see on the second floor?”

“The sentry?” the Death’s Head purred with amusement. “No. She’s just interested in what she can see. Pardon her curiosity. Now, commander, are you the mech pilot, or not?”

Elpida glanced at her companions. They were all watching her, holding their collective breath. She’d brought them this far, given them hope and purpose. She couldn’t be drawn into compromise now, not with people who she had no reason to trust.

She stuck to the plan.

“Listen carefully,” Elpida said to the Death’s Head. “We are heavily armed. We have a coilgun, and a cyclic sliver-gun taken from a zombie. I killed the zombie myself. If you can see us down here, then you can probably see the power signatures too. We want passage alongside your building, through to the combat frame. If you open fire on us then we will open fire on you.”

Silence. A brush of static. A click.

“I’m sure you will,” said the Death’s Head. “Bully for you.”

A strange turn of phrase. Inaccurate translation? Elpida put it to one side for now.

“This coilgun alone will punch through several layers of wall with a single sabot. I will not hesitate to pull the trigger. You can stop me, yes — but I’m well armoured and I will kill several of you before you can bring me down. You will give us passage or I will open fire.”

The Death’s Head made a wet sound — lips parting in a smile. “Interesting cavalry you have on the way. That is yours, I assume?”

Elpida had no idea what the Death’s Head was talking about. She gestured for Atyle to look behind them again. Atyle did as ordered, then shook her head. Nothing there.

Elpida bluffed: “We have more backup than your group can repel. Let us pass, or die.”

Elpida’s heart hammered hard. Her bloodstream flushed with adrenaline. Her senses opened, combat-ready. Everything else shrank to insignificance. This was it, this was the moment, all in, all or nothing.

“Very well, mech pilot,” purred the Death’s Head. “We have higher priority targets than you. Enjoy your moment in the sun. Break a leg, darling.”

Click. Silence. Connection terminated.

Elpida pulled the earpiece off and handed it back to Kagami. “They’re letting us pass. Kagami, are they—”

“They’re not moving weapons, no!” Kagami snapped. She looked back through the concrete with her auspex visor. “They’re not moving to stop us. Fucking hell, ‘Commander’, could you bluff any harder?”

Atyle shrugged. “Small fish pass unremarked when a shark threatens. No?”

Vicky was hissing, “Elpi? Elpi, do we go? Do we go?”

“We go!” Ilyusha snapped. She banged a black and red bionic foot against the floor, scraping concrete with crimson claws, tail thwapping against the wall. “We go! We can! We can! Go! Go! Go!”

Pira was frowning hard, emotions unshuttered. “They’re scared of something — not us. They have no reason to let us pass.”

Elpida said, “Pira, do you think this is a trap?”

“No. But there’s something we’re not seeing.” A pause. Then: “But this might be our chance. I’m behind you whatever you decide. Commander.”

Elpida stood up, unhooked the coilgun receiver, and made her decision.

“We go. Plan is the same as before. Atyle, on me, up front. Everyone else in behind. Amina, Illy, keep hold of those ballistic shields. Vicky, stay close, I may need you on me. Pira, don’t drop Kagami. Whatever happens, keep moving, keep going, and do not stop.” She reached down and slapped Vicky on the shoulder as she rose, then squeezed Pira’s elbow, and briefly patted Ilyusha’s head. Illy grinned and cycled her shotgun. “I believe in all of you; we can do this, we can make it to the combat frame. All ready? Good. We move on three — one, two, three!”

Elpida swept out of cover and into the middle of the street at a rapid combat walk, hood up, armoured coat pulled tight, coilgun receiver held in both hands and tucked against her shoulder. She swept her aim across the second floor of the Death’s Head skyscraper, flicking the barrel back and forth from empty window to empty window. The revenant in dirty grey armour carapace didn’t flinch; she turned her head to watch.

Atyle strode at Elpida’s side, head high and uncovered, eyes sliding sideways to smirk at her assumed audience; she walked as if she owned the city, holding the sliver-gun so as to show off the multi-barrelled weapon.

The others scurried from cover in Elpida’s wake, trailing a few feet behind, moving quickly in a tight group, half-sheltered behind the mobile cover of the two ballistic shields. Kagami hissed and panted. Vicky was breathing too hard. Ilyusha growled and waved her weapon. But Elpida could not spare the attention to look back. She had to make the threat credible, keep her eyes on the windows, her finger on the trigger.

They plunged into the narrow alleyway between the Death’s Head skyscraper and its burnt-out neighbour to the left, heading for the soot-stained giant of the combat frame.

Curious faces began to appear in the skyscraper windows on their right: armoured or visored, mirrored or matte-black, eyes hidden behind dark circles of steel-glass or the slits of ballistic masks. Weapons lounged in gloves and gauntlets, at the ends of articulated mechanical tentacles, plumbed directly into fleshy appendages, or attached to shoulder mounts — but nobody aimed down at Elpida and her companions. She focused on those weapons, on their positions and where they were pointing; she ignored the visible evidence of extensive bionic modifications, the slips of mechanical tendrils, the additional limbs, the compound eyes, the bizarre structures running from the backs of skulls, the skittering and sliding motions as the revenants followed her progress. She did not have attention to spare on irrelevant details.

The Death’s Head revenant in the grey armour carapace kept pace with them, moving from window to window, shadowing their progress.

On their left, in the chewed-up ruins of the next-door skyscraper, one of the Death’s Head drones was also dogging their footsteps. Elpida couldn’t see it — even when she risked a quick look over her shoulder — but she could hear articulated machine-legs crunching through broken glass and shattered concrete, creeping along just out of sight.

“Keep moving,” Elpida said. “Keep moving. Call out if you fall. Ignore the revenants. Keep moving. We can do this.”

Traversing the alleyway took about one hundred and sixty seconds. The gnarled and knotted bone-mesh armour plates of the combat frame reared up beyond the alley mouth, higher and higher as they drew close. Elpida’s chest stirred with nostalgia. She refused to look.

Less than thirty meters from the mouth of the alley, Kagami hissed: “Elpida! Elpida, there is something following us! I can see it now!”

Elpida hissed back without looking: “Kagami, what is it? Speak to me.”

“I don’t know, but— oh, fuck me, it’s big, and I can’t— I can’t see through it, like it’s armoured or— oh, fuck! Fuck! It’s coming up on the rear of the alley, and fast!”

Atyle said: “The scribe speaks truth, warrior. We are pursued.”

Vicky said, “Was it cloaked before? What the hell?”

Elpida strained her concentration. Kagami was right: she could hear a rumbling far to their rear — a distant smashing aside of concrete walls, heavy weight ploughing through ruined brick, churning broken asphalt beneath metal tread.

She said: “Focus on the target. We’re almost there. We get inside the combat frame and it doesn’t matter. Alley mouth — now! Everyone down! Pira, count three seconds, then go!”

Her companions halted at the very end of the alleyway, clustered together, hunkered down momentarily behind ballistic shields — all except Atyle, who stood tall and proud, smiling upward at her audience of revenants, showing off her weapon, her height, and her peat-green bionic eye.

Elpida slammed the coilgun receiver into the aim-assist rig around her hips, then burst from the alley at a dead sprint.

She was inside the ring of skyscrapers now, their broken tips scratching at the rotten underside of the black sky. Legs pumping, head down, she sprinted for the combat frame. The ground beneath her boots was churned and burned, charred and broken, grey soil cooked to carbon and ash in the wake of the combat frame’s orbital impact. The weight of the coilgun on her back turned a four-second sprint into a seven-second slog. She raced for cover, kicking up puffs of black ash behind her. Her shoulder blades itched; a hundred pairs of revenant eyes must have been turning to look at her, scopes picking her out in infra-red or high-mag, hand-held plasma and missiles preparing a lock on the energy signature of her coilgun power-tank, undead heads shaking in laughter at her suicidal sprint.

Elpida had to trust that her companions were already following — a tight cluster of slower-moving targets, less interesting than the high-energy signature of a coilgun strapped to a mad woman sprinting across open ground. A terrible gamble, but the best one she had.

A few pot-shots rang out across the circle of skyscrapers; for a moment Elpida feared the worst, that the threat of antagonising the worm-guard was not enough to dissuade other revenants from opening fire.

But then a deep, hard, rat-a-tat-a-tat of heavy machine gun fire cut through the air — and Elpida realised that the firing had nothing to do with her. It was somewhere else, coming from higher up a nearby skyscraper. Had a skirmish broken out?

She hit the leg of the combat frame at a sprint. She didn’t stop to take cover or turn to check on the others, or to caress the rough texture of Telokopolan-made carbon bone-mesh, so familiar to her hands. Elpida mounted the sloped armour of the combat frame’s leg, hurling herself over pits and whorls, hauling her body past a dozen pieces of useful cover, scrambling up on knobbly handholds before planting her feet on the gentle incline of the fallen god-machine.

Combat frame hull stretched out before her — the rest of this left foreleg, then the main body — soot-covered white plates grown into knots and curls with age and scars, studded with recessed weapon-pods and shielded domes, awaiting the touch of a pilot to bring them roaring to life. Three more legs lay limp across the broken ground to Elpida’s left, trailing out into the grey dirt. The head of the combat frame was a single silver orb in the middle of the body, almost two hundred metres away across the hull. The main armament — the railgun — stuck straight up into the air, as if trying to penetrate the black sky above.

The manual pilot access hatch was situated beneath the silvery orb of the combat frame’s head. Recessed controls lay next to the hatch, protected by an overhang of armour: a palm pad and a lever.

The trio of worm-guard were crouched in a loose ring just beyond the hatch. Elpida’s peripheral vision jumped and flickered with interference, glitching and jerking to conceal the worm-guard machines. Up close the effect made her eyes water and ache. Their position had not been so obvious from sixty floors up: they were guarding the hatch. Elpida would have to close to within ten metres of them to get inside.

She paused for one second. She forced herself to watch the worm-guard.

They didn’t move. One second passed and Elpida was not a streak of gore smeared on the combat frame’s leg.

Her heart roared, so close to victory and vindication. Was she correct? Were the worm-guard really waiting for her to claim the combat frame? To claim the inheritance of Telokopolis in this nanomachine afterlife?

Wait for me, Howl!

Elpida spread her arms and filled her lungs; the next step of the plan was to shout as loud as she could, to shout that the worm-guard were protecting her, expecting her, waiting for her. That wild shout would distract attention from the last few moments of her companions scurrying into cover.

And then, from behind a twist of combat frame bone-mesh armour, less than five feet from one of the glitching worm-guard trio, a figure stood up.

Long white hair, copper-brown skin, purple eyes; tall and graceful, lean and muscular; dark armoured coat, hood bunched around her shoulders, submachine gun loose in one hand.

Cadre phenotype — Elpida’s phenotype; but this was not one of her cadre. Elpida knew every single member of her cadre: by sight, by smell, by touch, by the sound of their voices and the movement of their bodies. She knew mannerisms and musculature, body weight and bone shapes, habits and flaws and tics and all. She would have recognised any of them instantly — not just Howl or Silla or Metris, but any of her sisters.

The figure was not one of Elpida’s cadre.

It was her.

It was Elpida. Like looking in a mirror.

The mirror-Elpida met her eyes, expression blank and empty; that one glance stilled Elpida’s lips, stole Elpida’s breath, and froze Elpida’s diaphragm. Elpida told her legs to sprint at the mirror-copy of herself; she told her arms to grab the coilgun receiver, to aim and fire; to reach the hatch first, to banish this impossible apparition with violence or truth.

But she couldn’t move a muscle.

Her nanomachine physiology was locked in place; paralysed, no matter how hard she strained. She was a machine, switched off in mid-motion, held mid-operation.

For several crucial seconds, Elpida’s body was not her own.

Elpida watched helplessly as her mirror-self crouched next to the pilot access hatch and pressed her copper-brown hand to the palm-reader. A deep clunk of machinery sounded from inside the combat frame’s hull. The mirror-Elpida grabbed the lever and twisted. The pilot access hatch swung upward, just wide enough to admit a single person; the inside was clean white, untouched by soot or dirt.

The expressionless double looked back at Elpida. Her lips moved. Elpida heard words inside her head, transmitted through her neural lace.

“Well done, dead thing. Didn’t think you’d make it this far. Good luck.”

The mirror-Elpida stepped through the hatch. The tail of her coat whipped after her. Gone.

Elpida blinked and breathed. Her muscles were her own once again.

She lurched toward the hatch — she had to get inside, after that thing wearing her face, that thing which had locked down her body with a look.

Necromancer!? her thoughts raced. Did I just get temporarily shut down by a Necromancer? And now it’s inside the combat frame, with my face, my phenotype, my body!

But then:

“Elpida!”

Kagami, screaming from below.

Elpida turned and looked down: her companions were crammed into cover against the twisted leg-armour of the combat frame, tucked into pits and cubbyholes among the twists and turns of the aged and overgrown armour. Atyle and Kagami were both staring back toward the mouth of the alleyway. Vicky was clutching her heavy machine gun, wild-eyed with panic, staring up at Elpida, with Amina clutching the side of her coat. Pira was tucked in tight, weapon ready, prepared to repel an attack. Ilyusha was up on her claws, readying her shotgun, aiming at the front of the Death’s Head skyscraper.

A rumbling, roaring, ramming noise was racing toward them.

“It’s here!” Kagami screamed. “Elpida, what the fuck are you doing?! Get in our fucking robot!”

Elpida turned back to the hatch. Too late.

A machine burst from the mouth of the alleyway in an explosion of shattered concrete and pulverised asphalt, roaring into the impact crater like a meteoric blast wave

Wrapped in treads and tracks, studded with weapon systems like an overfilled pincushion, with a central turret mounting a swollen weapon like a lance, which was glowing purple and red like a prolapsed organ. Active shielding crackled and flashed as debris arced off sheets of electric blue and curves of burning white. Point-defence systems and coaxial weapons twisted and turned to acquire targets; boxy missile-pods split open and sprouted mushroom-tips of high-explosive. Encrusted with bone-white armour plates overgrown in a profusion of horns and curls and humps and coils; Telokopolan carbon bone-mesh armour, alive and mobile.

A crawler. A ‘tank’. An armoured box on flimsy treads. Like the Legion had used on the plateau around the base of Telokopolis.

Except this little crawler had become so much more, out there beyond the graveworm line.

Elpida had only a split-second to absorb this sight. As soon as the new arrival rocked to a halt on the edge of the impact crater, the trio of worm-guard turned and opened fire upon the crawler.

High-powered energy discharges shrieked through the air; purple bolts exploded off the crawler’s forward shields with flashes of blinding light; the super-frequency whine of rotary weapons with inhuman rates of fire throbbed against Elpida’s eardrums as the worm-guard switched to solid-slug ammunition; thousands of rounds of metal flared against the crawler’s shielding as it was overwhelmed — then plinked and churned as it chewed into the bone-mesh armour beneath. Telokopolan engineering held; the crawler roared forward.

Elpida’s training suggested that she find cover.

She ducked and slid, scrambling down the combat frame’s armour plate, overbalanced by the coilgun power-tank strapped to her back and hips. She slammed to the grey dirt and fell into cover — shoulder-to-shoulder with Pira, wedged into a curl of combat-frame leg-armour. Everyone had their heads down, tucked inside similar angles of protective plate, hunkered down and split up along several bits of cover formed by combat frame armour. Kagami was screaming. Amina was curled into a ball and crying somewhere nearby. Vicky was courageously trying to point her machine gun somewhere useful. Atyle was standing tall and staring at the titanic clash, enraptured, exposed, about to take a bullet.

The crawler’s shields flickered back to life; it returned fire at the worm-guard with a salvo of missiles and solid shot and anti-materiel slugs and a dozen other weapon systems barking and thumping and coughing.

In her peripheral vision, Elpida saw one of those glitch-flicker blobs lurch and stagger.

Revenants were pouring out of the skyscrapers now — Death-Heads and others — bringing heavy weaponry to bear on the worm-guard trio, or on the crawler, or on each other. An opportunistic orgy of firepower was erupting on all sides. Flashes of plasma weaponry arced across the ground; machine guns opened up with the crackle and slam of charged shot; shouts of pain and anger and the click-buzz of transmission were drowned out by the earth-shattering noise of the fight between crawler and worm-guard.

The hundred metres in either direction was rapidly turning into a true battlefield. Elpida couldn’t process anything that had just happened — but she knew what to do.

“Pira!” she shouted, grabbing Pira’s shoulder. “Pira, we have to get out! Up onto the combat frame, together! What can—”

Vicky’s voice rose from nearby, behind another turn of armour plate: “Elpi, it’s covering us! Look!”

Vicky was correct: the crawler was positioned as if it was trying to defend them from the worm-guard, as if it was their extraction, their ride out. It rocked forward another dozen meters, shields flickering in and out under the incredible firepower of the worm-guard, bone-mesh hull pounded by random shots from revenants with anti-tank guns and scorching plasma bolts. But the crawler’s strange turret-weapon lay quiet — even as one of the worm-guard lashed out with a whip of black crackling force and left a smoking scar across the crawler’s armour.

Elpida lifted the coilgun receiver and glanced around for Atyle. “Atyle!” she shouted. “Open up on the left, lay down fire! I’ll do the right! Clear a space, then follow me up! Atyle! Atyle!”

But Atyle was lost in the duel between ancient gods — then lost behind clouds of dirt and smoke and hails of gunfire.

Kagami screamed from somewhere nearby, but Elpida couldn’t see her: “What happened to your fucking mech, commander?!”

“It’s a no-go!” Elpida shouted back. She hesitated; how could she make sense of what she’d seen, the way she’d been physically paralysed? “Not pinned down like this! And there’s a hostile in—”

“Fuck you all, you fucking morons!” Kagami screamed. “I’ll do it myself!”

Kagami lurched to her feet from within a nearby abscess of combat-frame armour plate — exposed, about to get shot. She was too far away for Elpida to reach out and grab her. She was white with fear, eyes wide and bloodshot, grimacing hard against incredible pain.

Kagami made a throwing gesture with her left hand, as if scattering grains of rice into the air.

Six silver oblongs arced upward — then back down, taking station around their mistress.

Kagami’s smart-drones were online; Kagami herself was screaming, wrenching at her own left hand in agony, banging her fist against her own forehead.

Elpida shouted: “Kagami! Kagami, stay down! Down!”

Vicky wailed: “Kaga!”

Kagami lurched upward onto the combat frame’s armour plating, bionic legs kicking for footholds — but she was helped by gravity effectors inside one of the hovering drones. Stay shots bounced off an energy field deployed by another drone. A third opened fire on nearby revenants with some kind of tiny micro-weapon, energy pulses punching through armour and shredding flesh.

“Kagami!” Elpida shouted. “Stay together! Kaga!”

Kagami hurled herself up the slope of the combat frame’s hull, dragged by her drones more than her own muscle power, going for the pilot access hatch. Her sextet of drones swarmed around her.

Elpida could just see the hatch from her current position — and it was closed again? Kagami would never get inside, not without a valid pilot, or a copy.

Too late: Vicky was already scrambling up after Kagami, the only one close enough to follow, hurling herself from scrap to scrap of cover.

“Vicky! Vicky, no!”

Gunfire was pouring onto their position now, bullets chewing into bone-mesh plates, exotic weaponry scorching and burning and ricocheting in all directions; the Death’s Heads had reached the leg of the combat frame, ignored by the crawler-tank, trying to exploit the angle to pin down Elpida’s group.

Up on the hull of the combat frame, Kagami reached the hatch; Elpida was too far away to see what happened, but she heard Kagami’s blood-curdling scream of pain and anger — and then the hatch swung open.

Kagami dropped through, into the combat frame. A moment later Vicky turned back, eyes wide with horror as she realised that she had left Elpida and the others pinned down.

“Elpi!” Vicky shouted. “Elpi, you can— come on! You can make it! You can—”

One of Kagami’s tiny silver combat drones whirled in front of Vicky and nudged her in the chest with a gravity effector. She fell into the hatch.

Elpida had lost control of the combat situation.

The Death’s Head revenants were pouring suppressing fire at what remained of her comrades; she had to keep her head down, tucked into a pit of armour plate. The coilgun power-tank was humming on her back, ready to fire — but fire at what? If she broke cover and pulled the trigger, could she force enough of the revenants back to make a break for the pilot hatch?

She could no longer see the crawler tank or the worm-guard, only hear the whirr and crackle of weapons. She had no idea where Atyle had gone — walked off into the battlefield. She could hear Ilyusha somewhere further off, shouting and spitting and howling insults at the top of her lungs, shotgun going boom, boom, boom. Amina was whimpering close by, to Elpida’s right. Her left shoulder was crammed against Pira.

“Illy!” she shouted. “Illy! On me! Illy!”

Nothing.

“Pira,” she said. “I’m going to break cover and fire the coilgun, we have to link up with Ilyusha. I need you to … Pira?”

Pira had her head cocked to one side, listening for something above the din of the firefight. Her eyes were wide with shock, her mouth hanging open, her face drained of all colour.

“Pira?”

Suddenly a dirty grey form vaulted over the lip of their cover: a suit of armour carapace, filthy with use, chestplate painted with a grinning skull, tongue hanging loose.

The Death’s Head revenant crashed down hard on her backside, plasma weapon cradled in her arms.

Elpida raised the coilgun receiver and slipped her finger over the trigger.

But then Pira reached out, grabbed the coilgun barrel, and slammed it to the ground. Elpida pitched forward, thrown off balance.

“No,” Pira said, hollow and horrified, staring at the new arrival. “No.”

The Death’s Head revenant quickly removed her own helmet. Long dark hair flowed free. Olive skin was covered with a sheen of sweat. A manic smile reached up into bright green eyes with laughing delight and loving disbelief.

“Leuca,” said the Death’s Head. “I’ve been calling your name, Leuca. I couldn’t believe it was you.”

Pira looked like she’d seen her own ghost.

Elpida tried to free the coilgun receiver from Pira’s grip — but Pira wouldn’t let go. Elpida hit the release clasp on the aim-assist rig instead. The coilgun power-tank slid off her back. She shrugged out of the harness and scrambled for her submachine gun.

Pira said: “You joined them.”

The Death’s Head revenant smiled wider, with relief and release. “Only because you did first, Leuca.”

Elpida ripped her submachine gun free from inside her coat. She thumbed the safety off and pointed it at the Death’s Head revenant. She got her finger over the trigger and—

Pira turned, weeping silent tears; she put the barrel of her own gun against Elpida’s belly, and pulled the trigger.

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Three twists, a tank, and a betrayal. Our zombies are scattered, damaged, and herded by powers beyond their comprehension. And somebody’s coming away from this with a gut wound …

Well! There we go! End of arc 6, and a massive cliffhanger. In light of how this one ended, the next chapter will not be an intermission – we will be launching straight into arc 7, to answer some questions and see who’s still standing.

If you’re interested in behind-the-scenes stuff, this chapter actually went through a little bit of post-publication editing, which I almost never do; some of the patron readers interpreted Elpida’s Necromancer(?)-induced paralysis as emotional shock, rather than, you know, being locked down because she’s made of nanomachines, so I had to go back and edit that, twice, to make it extra clear. Hopefully it comes across correctly, now that’s it’s going out to public readers too!

No patreon link this week! It’s almost the end of the month and I never like the risk of double-charging readers. Feel free to wait until Saturday if you want to read the next chapter early!

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

And as always, thank you so much for reading my little story. Couldn’t do this without all you readers. I am having blast with Necroepilogos, there is so much more to come, and I hope you’re enjoying the ride as well. Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

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That night, when it was her turn on watch, Elpida sat before the wall of penthouse windows and contemplated the combat frame.

Black sky and city-corpse blurred together; skeletal skyscrapers sank their tips into the sagging underbelly of the burned-out heavens. Windows both broken and empty flickered with occasional light sixty floors below — electric light, weapons discharge, chemical glow. Combat frame bone-mesh armour plate faded from white to grey, with no dying sunlight to wash away the soot and filth. The trio of worm-guard machines melted into blobs of searing static, a migraine aura in Elpida’s peripheral vision — not that she had ever suffered a migraine. Telokopolan genetic engineering had improved the cranial nerve and blood-flow issues which supposedly caused such symptoms. But she’d seen artistic representations.

On the far side of the impact crater, past the combat frame’s rear left leg, the dark had almost hidden the grinning black skulls daubed on concrete and stone.

Elpida gave free reign to her training.

She ran through the details of her plan over and over. She estimated distances and times, double-checked them with re-observation, then triple-checked them again with the assumption that she was incorrect. She looked past the ring of skyscrapers and attempted to map the route through the depths of the city — though Kagami had done that earlier, with the advantage of proper comprehension of the auspex visor output. Elpida memorised the stretch of open ground between the alleyway and the combat frame, committing every bump and pothole to memory. She counted and catalogued every hand-hold and open stretch of armour plate on the combat frame’s hull between the predicted point of contact and the pilot access hatch. She re-examined that hatch with the detached scope of Vicky’s sniper rifle, then with Kagami’s auspex visor, then with her naked eyes.

She checked all the weapons, then stripped and cleaned the chemical propellant firearms — Vicky’s heavy machine gun and the sniper rifle, the submachine guns and all the pistols, including the ones they’d taken from the defeated ambush. The only guns she did not clean were Pira’s personal armaments — Pira slept with her gun in her lap — and Ilyusha’s rotary shotgun, which never seemed to leave Ilyusha’s possession. She did what little she could for the coilgun and the cyclic sliver-gun, powering them on and making sure their auxiliary systems worked. But she had neither the tools to service the former or the knowledge to service the latter. She secured the coilgun’s aim-assist rig around her hips, tightened all the straps, and spent twenty minutes testing her range of motion.

She examined the structural integrity of the two ballistic shields. She counted the remaining cannisters of raw blue nanites — thirteen bottles, no fewer than previously, no secret midnight snacks. She left seven cannisters on the counter-top in the penthouse kitchen, for the morning.

She broke the silence only once, to whisper the twenty four names of her dead cadre.

Elpida’s companions had spread out into the compact warren of the dusty penthouse; nobody was further away than a raised voice, but it was the least coherent the group had been since the resurrection chamber. Pira had stayed close — she was within visual range, fast asleep, sitting straight-backed against a stretch of wall over by an ancient entertainment centre and a long-dead televisual screen; her flame-red hair was the colour of dead embers in the dark. Atyle was stretched out on the floor closer to the door, beyond earshot, wrapped in shadows, sleeping flat on her back like a corpse. Ilyusha and Amina had slipped away to one of the bedrooms, curled up together beneath scavenged blankets; one of them was snoring softly. Elpida found the noise comforting. Vicky and Kagami had done the same, wandering off to find somewhere more comfortable to sleep — though driven primarily by Kagami’s vocal complaints and physical exhaustion.

Elpida was not surprised when she heard the near-silent rustle of sock-clad feet approaching her from behind. She looked up from the combat frame and around from the window.

It was Vicky, making no attempt at stealth, framed by the thick shadows of the penthouse and the pale wood of the walls.

“Elpi,” she whispered. “Hey. Mind if I … ?”

Vicky nodded down at the carpet next to Elpida.

She looked unwell. Her dark skin was pinched and tense around her bright eyes. Her shoulders were hunched beneath the comfort of her large fur-trimmed coat, the one they’d looted from the fight outside the tomb; she wore one of the armoured coats as well, draped over the top like a cloak. Arms folded, neck bent forward, lips creased from chewing. Elpida did not need her training and experience to know that Vicky wanted company.

Elpida whispered: “Of course I don’t mind. Sit with me, please.”

Vicky shuffled forward and sat down next to Elpida, so close that their knees touched. She winced as she forgot to avert her gaze from the trio of worm-guard, then frowned down at the combat frame. She hunched tighter inside her double layer of coats.

“Can’t sleep?” Elpida prompted.

Vicky nodded. “Can’t sleep. Right. I feel … cold, sort of. First time feeling cold since … well, since we all came back to life inside the tomb, I guess. Since resurrection. Thought we couldn’t get cold, us zombies, not really. It’s not making me shiver, though. Feels weird. Reminds me I’m a dead thing. Not really alive. We’re all just ghosts, echoes, copies. Right?”

“Pre-op nerves.”

Vicky blinked rapidly and gave Elpida an amused look. “Sorry, what?”

“Pre-op nerves. Pre-mission jitters. We have an operation planned and scheduled. Of course you’re nervous. That’s normal. We all deal with it in our own ways. Insomnia happens.”

“Oh, right.” Vicky laughed softly and shook her head. “You still get nervous, super-soldier girl?”

Elpida nodded. “Genetic engineering can’t edit the human out of the soldier. The result would be too close to Silico.”

Vicky said: “I meant like, experience. You’ve gone into combat a lot, right? Even if you were piloting a big machine or whatever. How do you deal with the anxiety?”

Elpida ran her fingers through her long mane of white hair to give herself a moment to think. She considered telling the truth.

“If you hadn’t shown up,” she said. “I would probably have started counting all our bullets. Then counting them again. Then again.”

“Ah.”

“Mmhmm.”

They lapsed into silence. Sixty floors below, a muzzle-flash briefly lit a window in one of the skyscrapers opposite. Something dark and whirling passed by an open doorway. A drone twitched high-up on a wall.

Elpida said: “That was a lie.”

“Ah?”

“A lie by omission,” Elpida continued without looking around at Vicky. “I didn’t answer your question. I apologise. I dealt with pre-mission nerves by spending time with my cadre, my clade-sisters. Argue and fight with Howl, perhaps. Get into tactical details with Silla and Metris. Make sure Fii and Yeva aren’t getting up to anything they shouldn’t be. Check everyone’s pilot suits. Force my way into any currently unresolved problems. Probably have a lot of sex. Talk a lot. Think together. That’s what we did. That’s how we did it.”

Vicky murmured: “I’m sorry, Elpi.”

“It’s fine. You asked. And I owe you the truth.”

The whole truth, yes. Tell her why you’re going to get her killed.

Vicky sat up straighter. She peered out of the penthouse window again. “Much action down there?” she asked. “Zombies going at it?”

“Not really,” Elpida said. She gestured at Kagami’s auspex visor, which lay just to her other side. “I can’t easily interpret the output from that, not like Kagami can. As far as I can tell it’s pretty quiet down there. A few pickets and sentries do shoot at each other now and again, but it’s opportunistic pot-shots only, no pushes or major shifts in power. Some of them are sleeping, some aren’t.”

Elpida refrained from relating the interpersonal violence she had witnessed through the auspex visor; she couldn’t be sure of the output, but some of those groups in the skyscrapers were using the downtime to fight or fuck — or worse, things that Elpida couldn’t identify.

Vicky nodded along.

Elpida asked: “Is Kagami asleep?”

Vicky winced. She tried to conceal the expression, but Elpida caught the involuntary twitch. “Yeah. I think so. She’s given herself a … headache.” Vicky enunciated the word with great care, concealing a greater truth. Had they fallen out? Was that why she couldn’t sleep? Was ‘headache’ part of Vicky’s cultural vernacular for something else? “She wrapped herself up in spare sheets in one of the bedrooms back there. Dunno how she can breathe in all that dust.” Vicky forced a little laugh.

“Thank you for looking after her,” Elpida said. “She needs it. You’re doing the right thing.”

That time Vicky made no effort to conceal the guilty wince. “Elpi, are you, uh, really alright with us being all spread out like this?” She nodded back into the depths of the penthouse. “You’re not worried about another ambush or anything?”

Elpida shook her head and gestured at the auspex visor again. “There’s very little out here besides us and the coherent groups around the combat frame. We could probably have dispensed with a proper watch tonight.”

Vicky nodded slowly. “Right, ‘cos I just thought—”

“But no, I’m not really alright with it.”

“ … Elpi?”

Elpida’s heart ached briefly. “I’m used to everyone sleeping together in the same room. I’m used to listening to the breathing of twenty four other sets of lungs. When times are bad, I’m used to sleeping practically on top of each other. That’s how I would ideally deal with pre-operation nerves.”

“Oh, Elpi. I’m sorry.”

Elpida smiled for her. “Don’t be. You’ve got nothing to apologise to me for. I’m glad that you and Kagami haven gotten close. Go sleep with her.”

Vicky sighed. “Easier said than done. Like I said, I—”

“Have you and she fucked?”

Vicky spluttered, then stared at Elpida. “What?! No. Elpida, what?”

“I thought maybe you had done. If you haven’t, then … ”

Maybe you should, Elpida thought, because it might be your last chance.

Vicky gave Elpida a grimacing grin of amused scepticism. “No, Elpi. Damn, girl. Not everyone comes from a super-soldier sisterhood polycule, okay? Kaga just needs somebody to hold her up and slap some sense into her, not … that. I don’t think so, anyway. Damn.”

Elpida shrugged. Guilt was twisting her thoughts in unhealthy directions, clouding her judgement, making her project onto her companions. She tightened her grip on her emotions.

Vicky frowned harder, then glanced over her shoulder at Pira, unmoving and silent on the far side of the room. She turned back to Elpida and hissed: “What about you and Pira? Did you have sex?”

“No.” Elpida paused. “Well.”

Vicky’s eyebrows climbed. “ … well? Well what?”

“Almost. Sort of. Hard to explain.” Elpida sighed. “You’d have to be one of us — one of my cadre — to understand.”

“When you and her beat each other up?”

“When she and I beat each other up.”

Vicky lapsed into a long silence, chewing her bottom lip, eyebrows expressing a mixture of amazement and curiosity. Elpida stared down at the combat frame. Eventually Vicky followed her gaze and hunched her shoulders tighter again.

“It’s like whale fall,” Vicky murmured. “Gathered round to pick the bones.”

Elpida said: “Whale fall?”

“Uh, you didn’t even have oceans, did you? A whale — big sea mammal, really big, biggest things on the planet — dies and sinks to the ocean floor. Lots of blubber, lots of meat, resources, falling down into a place where there’s not much, usually. A miniature ecosystem forms around the corpse, all sorts of different things come to feed. Supposed to last for years and years, until the body is all used up.” She nodded at the combat frame. “Whale fall.”

Elpida considered the metaphor. Her chest tightened. “I dislike that comparison.”

Vicky gave her a wary look. “Oh-kay. Okay, Elpi. Lose the scowl, okay? I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Elpida relaxed her face. “Sorry. It’s Telokopolan, the combat frame. That’s all. I don’t like the idea. Sorry, Vicky. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Vicky blew out a big sigh, staring down at the fallen machine where it lay scrunched against the skyscrapers into which it had slid. At length, halting and uncertain, she said: “So, Elpi, that’s the kind of thing you piloted, yeah?”

“Yes, though that combat frame is much larger than anything which was manufactured during my life. It may be from later.” Elpida tried not to think about the implications of that — had the pilot program survived? She focused on the technical details. “That combat frame down there is at least three times the size of a regular Incisor type frame. It’s got four legs, like the Burning Sword, but without the close-combat capability. And it’s much more well armed than the Arclight Eternal — that was the heaviest and largest combat frame we had access to during the life of the pilot program. Heavier, faster, better frames were in development when the … well, when I died.”

Vicky was frowning at her. “Say that name again?”

“Which one?”

“The most heavily armed frame.”

“The Arclight Eternal?”

Vicky’s frown deepened. “Translation software is struggling with that one, I think.” She shook her head, then gestured down at the combat frame again. “Elpi … that thing down there is weird as fuck. Like, do you not see it? Sorry if I’m offending you again, I don’t mean to insult your home, but I have to say it.”

Elpida nodded. She understood. She’d had a similar reaction to combat frames herself — to seeing them for the first time, to witnessing the machine-meat innards and the soft wet membranes for pilot-capsule interlock. They seemed bizarre to an uninformed observer: the way the carbon bone-mesh armour plates grew outward into gnarls and knots as each frame aged; the way the machines twitched and quivered when awake, straining against the rigidity of their shells; the subtle rumbles and growls and grinding from their muscles and tendons. All that was visible to any non-pilot. But she knew what it felt like to link up with the mind of the machine.

“Combat frames were a strange invention in Telokopolis,” she said. “Controversial, to say the least. The technology was dug out of the city’s own central archives, not from human writings but directly from Telokopolis’ own superstructure. It taught us how to make them.”

“No, I mean … ” Vicky sighed sharply. “I’ve seen military walkers. China’s got—” She tutted and corrected herself: “China had these great big land-crawler things for crossing the Himalayas. I’ve seen pictures. And I know the old empire had walkers — the Chicago Arcology still had one. They used to show it off in parades, try to scare everyone.” Vicky’s mouth flickered with the ghost of a smile. “Didn’t last long in combat, fucker got cut off at the ankles with a shaped charge. Turned out they didn’t have the ammo for any of the rockets or nothing. But, look, Elpi, they were machines. That down there? That doesn’t look like a human machine to me. That looks like a space alien. It looks … alive.” Vicky forced a little laugh, as if to soften an insult.

“It is,” Elpida said. “And it’s on our side.”

The combat frames had always been on the cadre’s side — but when the Covenanters had made their move, the frames had been dry-docked and nerve-locked, temporarily lobotomised, placed beyond contact. Pilotless and helpless.

Vicky didn’t look reassured. She tried, and Elpida appreciated the effort. “So who sent it?” Vicky asked. “Or dispatched it? It fell from orbit, right? There’s a ring up there, an orbital ring — Pira said so. You’re thinking it fell because of you? Sent because you came back from the dead? Maybe your people built the ring?”

Elpida shrugged. “We’ll have to ask the combat frame.”

Vicky shivered at that. She drifted off for a couple of minutes, looking out into the dark. Slowly, she let her knee brush against Elpida’s leg.

“So, Elpi,” she said eventually. “What’s your plan for getting past the skull weirdos?”

Elpida didn’t answer for a long moment, not until Vicky looked at her. Then Elpida frowned and said what was truly on her mind: “Vicky, I might get you killed tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“I’m serious. I said it all earlier. My plan is terrible, our chances are—”

“Elpi, I know. I know.” Vicky’s eyes bored into her, too bright, too believing. “But you’re right, hey? What are the other options?” Vicky chuckled softly, but she wasn’t amused. “Elpi, this place is a fucking nightmare. I spent most of my life — all my adult life — fighting for the principle of a better world, that better things are possible. Didn’t get there while I was alive, sure, but I still believed it. Still want to believe it now. I was never good with theory, but that belief kept me going. And this? This place? This future?” Vicky chuckled again, darker than before. “This is a nightmare. Worse than the worst case I could have imagined. Screaming fever dream. Sometimes I think it’s not real.” She pointed down at the combat frame. “So if that — that weird thing down there, if that represents the smallest chance that better things are possible, I’m taking it.”

Elpida held her gaze. “What if I have my own selfish motivations?”

“That doesn’t make you wrong, you fucking dumbass.”

Elpida blinked.

Vicky continued. “Sure you’ve got selfish motivations. You wanna meet the graveworm, right? I’m not asking why. Or maybe you really are a ‘Necromancer’ or whatever, slumming it down here with us zombies. Who gives a shit? You’re still right! Everything you said about this place, you’re still right. Don’t try to convince me otherwise.”

Elpida nodded slowly. Then she reached over and took Vicky’s hand, which was sweaty and hot and burning with fear. She squeezed. Vicky stared at the contact, swallowed hard, and then leaned softly against Elpida’s shoulder.

“So?” Vicky repeated. “What’s your plan if the skull people don’t want to let us pass? What if they shoot at us?”

Elpida smiled. She leaned in close to Vicky’s ear, driven by nostalgia and assumption.

“We shoot back,” she whispered.

Two hours later dawn threatened the horizon with embers smothered beneath a lake of tar. Elpida made sure that Vicky returned to Kagami before she started waking the others; she didn’t want Kagami roused to silent jealousy by discovering Vicky dozing in Elpida’s lap, Elpida’s fingers stroking Vicky’s dark hair back over Vicky’s scalp. Never a good idea to mount an operation with sour emotion lingering in any hearts.

The others woke quickly. Ilyusha gave Elpida a surprisingly urgent hug, bumping her head on Elpida’s ribs, strong bionic arms going around Elpida’s middle; Amina seemed like she wanted to mimic the gesture, but she settled for a bobbing bow and a whispered mantra. Atyle and Pira both had little to say, though Pira gave Elpida a long look and a single nod. Vicky was still nervous, but strengthened by Elpida’s affections in the night. Kagami looked pale and grumpy; she uttered creative curses as she dragged the auspex visor back over her squinting eyes.

They shared a meal — a breakfast of brains, to fortify their bodies with nanomachines and reduce the weight of their gear. They ate all they had left.

Then, armed and armoured and ready to depart, without prompting or explanation, they gathered around the seven cannisters of raw blue nanites which Elpida had lined up on the kitchen counter. Unnatural hunger drew them to the blue glow in the still-dark apartment.

“One each,” Elpida explained. “Drink it now, and it’ll keep us all in rapid-regen for about twenty four hours. More than enough time to reach our target. It’ll give us an edge if anybody takes any wounds.”

Kagami said, hollow voiced: “Using up the last of our fuel, eh, commander? Time to burn the boats?”

“No. We have six more cannisters.”

“Bottoms up,” Vicky said. She uncapped her cannister and drank it like she was pouring alcohol down her throat. Everyone was surprised, even Pira.

Ilyusha drank with a glugging motion, then encouraged Amina to drink as well. Atyle needed no prompting. Pira treated it like medicine, down in one smooth motion without fuss. Kagami took little sips, wincing and blinking through the leftovers of her headache. Elpida drank her own and felt a strange satisfaction fill her belly and abdomen, similar to eating the brains, but stronger. She wanted more. They all wanted more.

Sixty floors down through the dark skyscraper, then out — into the corpse-city still shrouded in night.

Elpida kept the group formation tighter than before. They had less need for Pira as a trailing rear-guard, or for Ilyusha to cover the flanks with her rapid circling. There was almost nothing this close to the edge of the graveworm safe zone except for themselves and the highly advanced groups of revenants clustered within the ring of skyscrapers. Elpida’s primary concern was to keep well clear of those dug-in weapons, to give the revenant scavengers no excuse to break ranks and come after her companions.

They plunged into the canyons between the towers, scurrying from concrete bolt-holes to abandoned shop-fronts, from drainage ditches to the lee of ancient and rusted ground-cars, from brick walls infested with black mould to overhangs of concrete colonised by giant immobile leathery pods. The corpse-city threw deep shadows as the choking dawn throbbed into unlife in the sky above, great fingers of cold darkness cast by the rows of skyscrapers across their own rotten roots.

They worked their way counter-clockwise around the fallen giant of the combat frame. For most of the journey their target and reference point was hidden behind the kinked layers and skeletal remains of crumbling buildings. But now and again a flash of soot-stained white reared up at the end of a valley, the frame signalling to Elpida: I’m still here, still waiting, come help me.

The only constant, no matter how deep they delved, was the distant jagged grey line of the graveworm — far behind, and getting further.

There was sadly no chance of attempting to link up with Lianna and Inaya — the giant spider-woman and the star-prophet who rode upon her back. They were too far in the opposite direction, clockwise around the impact crater. Taking that route would add an additional dozen hours to the journey.

“Real pity,” Vicky whispered when reminded. “We really could have used those big armour plates when we reach the skulls.”

Kagami tutted. “We need proper comms. Hi-band. Sat links. Anyway. Fuck me, I’ll settle for radio. Like a real primitive.”

“Quiet,” Elpida murmured. “Eyes up. Concentrate.”

Elpida worked hard to maintain her attention, to avoid the false sense of security implied by the relative quiet of the ruins.

Her caution was vindicated — first, less than an hour into the journey, then twice more as they swung wide around the opposite side of the impact crater, creeping into the liminal and blurry boundary of the graveworm safe zone.

Three times they crossed paths with entities which Elpida dared not engage.

The first was a Silico murder-machine — similar to the true zombie which had assaulted the groups gathered outside the tomb. A corpse-core festooned with implanted weaponry, skin stretched paper-thin over batteries of chemical and biological deployment systems, torso mounted on multi-jointed legs of chrome, the head nothing but a block of sensor equipment. They spotted it far off — Kagami first — at the end of a canyon of buildings. Then they spent over an hour worming their way through the tangled guts of a skyscraper to avoid the machine’s predicted route.

The second and third encounters were less comprehensible.

As they rounded the outer edge of the impact crater — the furthest point from the graveworm they had yet travelled — they were forced to cross a wide trail of glistening purple slime. The slime smelled like vomit and made everyone’s boot soles smoke for a few seconds. Elpida assumed this was simply more of the city-wide background nanomachine activity of decay and regrowth. But the slime trail led off between the ruined buildings, in their direction of travel.

Kagami spotted the source about half an hour later, on her auspex visor.

“It’s the size of a tank,” she whispered. “Big and weird and … and if I’d seen something like that on the surface I would have dropped a nuclear bomb on it.”

Vicky sighed. “That’s your solution to everything.”

“Fuck you. Take a look for yourself! You’d do the same!”

Atyle spoke without amusement: “I concur with the scribe. Fire and salt.”

Elpida said, “We go around. Stay quiet. Kagami, alert me if it starts moving toward us.”

“I will scream my head off, commander, believe me.”

The detour added another hour to their travel time. Nobody complained.

The third run-in with an entity from beyond the graveworm line came when they had almost reached their target, as the group was turning back toward the impact crater itself, as they were preparing themselves for the potential confrontation with the Death’s Heads.

As they were passing down a narrow alleyway between two large steel-and-glass buildings, a figure stepped out behind them, from a doorway they had passed moments earlier. A doorway which had been empty, showing nothing deeper than a blank cubby of damp concrete. The figure was wreathed in black robes thick as the shadows themselves, from head to toe, nothing but a cut-out of darkness which filled the alleyway.

All it did was watch. It did not react when Pira and Ilyusha both put rounds through its middle. The bullets passed through and chewed into the concrete behind. It didn’t care when Elpida brandished the coilgun. It just stood and watched while she covered the others, while they scurried out of the alleyway and away from the apparition.

“What the fuck was that?!” Kagami spat when they were certain they were clear. “Was that one of your fucking Necromancers?!”

Pira shook her head. “No. I have no idea what that was.”

“You must have some—”

“I don’t.”

After six hours travel, four pauses for rest and reorientation, and three encounters with things better left alone, they reached Elpida’s target.

The skyscraper occupied by the Death’s Heads was bracketed by a single alleyway which ran straight from one main street and out into the impact crater, almost right next to the combat frame itself. The soot-stained white armour plates caught the dim and ruddy sunlight in the gap between the buildings. The bottom floors of the building to the left of the occupied skyscraper had been reduced to rubble and naked steel frame — there was an autonomous drone crawling about somewhere in there; on the right was tangled steel and heaped mountains of concrete, the result of the combat frame’s impact.

Elpida moved the group as close as she could get without breaking cover, behind a series of large concrete walls on the far side of the street, too heavy and thick to penetrate even with exotic weaponry and high-energy rounds. They huddled on cold paving slabs. Kagami squinted through her auspex visor and hissed soft curses. Ilyusha kept her head down for once, though she gritted her teeth. Amina stayed close to her side, holding onto a corner of Ilyusha’s t-shirt. Atyle stared through the concrete, frowning with curiosity, cradling the cyclic sliver-gun, refusing to properly crouch. Vicky held her heavy machine gun as if preparing to lay down covering fire. Pira just waited, back to the wall, watching Elpida.

Elpida peered around a corner, armoured hood up, exposing as little of herself as possible.

The occupied skyscraper was buttoned up tight: ground floor windows were covered with metal and the two doors on this side were blocked with heavy furniture; the second floor windows were open, most of them missing their glass; she couldn’t see any visible sentries.

Grinning skull symbols were daubed on the concrete at irregular intervals, as large as Elpida was tall.

Most were in black paint. One was in dried blood. One was in something unidentifiable. Excrement, perhaps.

Elpida whispered: “Kagami?”

Kagami broke into a rushed answer: “Yes! Yes, commander, they know we’re here, some of them are looking right at us, they— fucking hell some of them aren’t even human beings anymore.”

Elpida ducked back. Kagami was staring through the concrete, white-faced and wide-eyed. “Kagami, focus. Weapons? Are they moving?”

“No, no, they don’t give a shit. They’re not rushing to the defences or anything. Lots of chatter, though! Oh, yes, lots of chatter. Lots of encrypted chatter. They’re so very interested in us.” She swallowed, rough and hard. “Oh fuck, I hate this.”

Vicky reached out and took Kagami’s arm. Kagami did not shake her off.

Pira said: “Elpida.”

Elpida nodded. She felt her bloodstream flushing with adrenaline, her stomach muscles tight with anticipation. There was nothing else to do but put the plan into action. She said: “Atyle, are you ready?”

Atyle didn’t look at Elpida, but she smiled, thin and dark. “Ahhhh, warrior. These ones are worthy of attention.”

“Remember, don’t duck, don’t crouch,” Elpida said. “We need to project absolute confidence.”

Atyle gave her a look as if this was self-evident. “I do not cower.”

“Everyone else, be ready to follow. Amina, you hold onto that ballistic shield. Kagami, do not reject Pira’s help, we can’t afford any interruptions. Vicky, ditch the machine gun if you need to keep up. We need to do this together, in one go, without hesitation. Ready?”

Nods all around. Ilyusha bared her teeth and clicked her claws against her shotgun. Pira closed her eyes. Vicky swallowed. Amina was praying under her breath.

Elpida unlatched the coilgun receiver from the aim-assist rig and held it in both hands. The power-tank hummed to life on her back; she hoped the Death’s Heads could see the power signature. That was part of the threat, part of the plan. Atyle tilted her chin up and lifted the cyclic sliver-gun too, as if to show it off the moment she stepped from cover.

The plan was simple: mutually assured destruction.

The Death’s Head revenants were highly developed, heavily armed, and dug in deep. But a direct hit from a coilgun sabot-round would still blow one of them to pieces. The cyclic sliver-gun would cut a suit of powered armour in half. If Elpida pointed the receiver at the skyscraper and held down the trigger, she could punch holes in the walls and shred anybody who got caught in the blast. Yes, she would die too, moments later, when one of them fired back — but she had a good chance of taking half a dozen of them with her.

The revenants were high-end, the result of years of nanomachine consumption and development. Elpida was barely fresh from the tomb. They had her beaten with exotic and high-powered weaponry, yes — and they would die too.

But she didn’t yet know if they would care.

Time to find out.

“Atyle,” she said. “We step out on three. Then I’ll shout. Okay? One, two—”

“Wait!” Kagami hissed. She held up a hand. “Wait wait wait! Fuck, what?”

She looked over her shoulder quickly, the way they’d come, back between the tangle of buildings, eyes wide and staring through the surface of her auspex visor. Then forward again, at the skyscraper. She squinted hard, concentrating on something only she could see.

“Kagami?” Elpida demanded.

Atyle said: “I see nothing, warrior.”

Kagami hissed for quiet, chopping the air with one hand. “They- they’re talking on unencrypted radio, they … they say there’s something—” She looked back again, behind, as if something was creeping up on Elpida and the others from the rear. Then she whirled back again, panting, wide-eyed and pale. “No, that’s not … they’re talking to us? They’re talking to us. They’re talking to us!”

“Kaga?” Vicky said. “Kaga? Hey?”

“Kagami,” Elpida snapped. “What are they saying?”

Ilyusha hissed. “Bullshit!”

Kagami looked up slowly, from the concrete wall to Elpida’s face.

“They want to talk to you, commander,” Kagami said. “They want to talk to the ‘mech pilot’.”

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A quiet moment between the doomed and the damned, and then once more into the wilds of the afterlife, among those things which have wandered too far from mortality. And now, a moment of unexpected communication, with those who have embraced predation.

Last chapter of the arc next week! We’re almost there. Elpida’s plan is about to succeed or fail, one way or the other, perhaps in ways she’d didn’t expect. I hope you’ve enjoyed this ride so far, because my gosh I’m having a blast writing this. I am so excited for the next few arcs as well, all the places the story is about to go! So, there might be an intermission chapter between arcs 6 and 7, I haven’t 100% decided yet; I don’t want it to be a complete surprise this time, so I thought I would mention it now.

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

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters, or more.

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

Thank you for reading my little story! Elpida and her comrades have come so far already, but there’s so much more story to tell, I’ve got so much to unfold here, and I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am! Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

Mentions of suicide
Grief
Slurs

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“There are two possible directions from which to approach the combat frame. The first is directly across the impact crater, over the open ground, a straight shot from our current position.”

Elpida placed the edge of her hand against the cold glass of the penthouse window, indicating a line across the broken grey earth sixty floors below. Her fingertips brushed the sharp feet of the combat frame itself; her palm ignored the ring of soot-stained skyscrapers and the revenants lurking within. She kept her eyes off the baleful glitch-flicker of the worm-guard trio crouched atop the combat frame’s filthy white armour.

The others had fallen silent after Elpida’s declaration of intent; now she was explaining the plan. She kept her voice calm and selected her words with care.

She almost convinced herself.

Kagami laughed, hysterical and hollow. Her eyes were too wide, her black hair stuck to her scalp with sweat. “You’re joking. You’re mad.”

Vicky sighed. “Kaga, just— just let her try.”

“She’s joking! This is a joke! That would get us all killed!”

Pira agreed: “A suicide run.”

Elpida nodded. “Yes. That’s close to a thousand metres, maybe even over a kilometre, without any effective cover, crossing broken, churned-up earth, exposed to dozens of elevated sight lines from the surrounding buildings.” She waved a finger at the towers, at their thousands of windows, their broken tips scratching at the black sky. “Any group trying to cross that open ground will be under constant fire. At night, taking it very slowly, wearing heavy armour?” Elpida shrugged. “Maybe I could make that work. Maybe. But as far as I can tell we all have extremely good low-light vision. We revenants, I mean. All of us in this room can pretty much see in the dark. There’s no reason to believe other revenants can’t do so as well. Night will provide little advantage. No. Crossing the open ground is impossible.”

The others did not look reassured by her comprehensive dismissal; huddled together in the dim and dusty shadows of the rotten penthouse apartment, framed by pale wood and thick carpets and fake marble, six pairs of eyes regarded her with varying levels of concern and discomfort.

Pira just nodded. She sat nearby, to examine the vista alongside Elpida, unafraid of snipers. Ilyusha snorted, neither agreeing nor arguing, while Amina looked on with open incomprehension; they were both still sitting in the little kitchen area, on hardwood floor, half-sheltered by the counters and cupboards. Kagami ground her teeth — she had retreated away from the window, taking shelter by Vicky. Vicky herself watched as if Elpida had gone mad but she was too polite to point it out. Atyle offered nothing, sitting straight backed and cross-legged, far back on the plush carpet, still staring directly at the worm-guard.

Sitting on the floor and briefing her cadre; Elpida tried very hard to suppress that nostalgia. These were not her sisters.

But she had to make them believe.

She continued. “Option two: get as close to the combat frame as possible prior to breaking cover. That means travelling all the way around the clearing, around the impact crater, on a route that doesn’t intersect with the groups of revenants down there.” Elpida traced a line on the glass, hundreds of metres back from the skyscrapers, plunging through the depths of the city.

Vicky forced a chuckle. “Elpi, you seriously think all those big nasty zombie girls down there are gonna leave us alone?”

Ilyusha barked: “We’re big! Nasty! Zombies too!”

Elpida nodded. “Yes, Vicky, I think they will. And thank you, Illy. All those groups down there are competing for positions closest to the combat frame, for the best chance of seizing it when the worm-guard move on. If somebody breaks from that ring and enters the killing ground, I’m certain they’ll come under fire, yes. But most of the heavy weaponry down there is focused on the flanks and rear of each group. They have to protect their positions — from each other. I think there’s a good chance they won’t sortie out to engage me if I’m a couple of hundred metres back, deep in the buildings, and not bothering them.”

Vicky frowned. This conversation was taking a visible toll on her; this morning she had looked strong and healthy, bolstered by the nanomachines from the meal of brain matter. But now her dark eyes were scrunched with concern, her stolen fur-trimmed coat pulled tight around hunched shoulders, her scoped rifle clutched in her lap.

Kagami snorted. “‘Good chance’,” she echoed. “Best you can do, commander?”

Elpida said: “Kagami, am I right about weapon positions down there in those buildings?”

Kagami rolled her eyes behind her auspex visor, but she nodded. Her dusky brown skin was waxy with stress. “Yes, yes, you’re right, fine. They’re all dug in. Watching their collective arses. Well done.”

Pira added, “We’re on the edge of the graveworm safe zone. Things will be out there, hunting for strays. Worse revenants. Real zombies. We risk running into them if we go much further out.”

Amina said in a tiny voice: “Demons.”

Kagami shivered. “Fuck. Great.”

Elpida nodded to Pira. “I consider that an acceptable risk. Better than crossing the open ground. Pira, thank you for the warning.” Pira nodded once, eyes locked on Elpida. “Now, see where the combat frame is positioned?”

Elpida pointed through the penthouse windows, down at the filthy white plates of the combat frame. The great machine lay twisted and prone against a wall of skyscrapers, where it had come to rest after ploughing through thousands of tons of dirt. It looked like a person who had slid into a wall head and shoulders first, legs sticking out at the other end, limp across the churned ground. The railgun stood tall, pointed at the sky, glinting in the ruddy light.

Kagami snorted. “Oh, no, I’d missed it until you pointed it out. It’s so very small, after all.”

Vicky grunted. “Kaga, fuck’s sake.”

Elpida ignored the sarcasm. “The buildings to the rear, the ones it’s leaning against, the ones it hit — those are impassible. A tangle of rubble and melted steel. Even with proper tools and a trained team, it would take days to cut through all that. And I might fall into an opening, break both my legs, or something similar. So, do you see that gap between the intact buildings, right there? Right next to the end of the combat frame’s leg. That’s the target. Circle the crater, then take a straight line back in, down that street.”

Pira stared, expression closed. Ilyusha spat on the floor. Atyle blinked slowly, peat-green bionic eye whirring inside the socket.

Vicky said: “Right next to the death cult people.”

Elpida nodded. She wasn’t trying to conceal or downplay the danger of her plan. The intact skyscraper closest to the combat frame was the one daubed with that grinning skull symbol: the death’s head.

Behind the walls marked by that morbid icon was the single largest group of revenants gathered around the combat frame — thirty three individuals, with nine suits of powered armour, as counted through Kagami’s long-range auspex. Heavily armed, with exotic weapons guarding their rear and flanks, and a pair of loitering drones clamped high up on the front exterior wall of their temporary fortress. The specifics of their bionic enhancements and self-modifications were impossible to tell at that distance, but every single member of the group lit up Kagami’s auspex with nanomachine density warnings and high-energy readout spikes.

They had reduced the lower floors of the neighbouring skyscraper to burnt-out ruins, cover chewed to nothing but naked steel beams, littered with mines and improvised explosives, patrolled by another pair of semi-autonomous drones. The next nearest group had given them a wide berth. Their other flank was covered by part of the tangled mess of rubble from the combat frame’s impact. Dug in deep.

“Yes,” Elpida said. “Illy, Pira, you’re the only two with direct experience here. What do you think?”

Ilyusha flicked out her red-metal fingertip claws and made her bionic tail arc upward in mock threat. “Fuck ‘em up! Reptile cowards’ll run!”

Pira didn’t answer right away. She stared at Elpida for a long moment, eyes blue and distant as the lost skies. Her flame-red hair was tucked down into her body armour. Her freckles caught the light. She shrugged. “I told you already, I’ve never met this exact group before. I don’t know.”

Elpida said, “Right, thank you both. Materially they don’t seem too different to any of the other groups down there.”

Vicky’s let out another sad laugh. “This is a big fucking gamble, Elpi.”

“Yes, it is,” Elpida said. “But it’s a calculated one. Their deployment strongly suggests they care about other groups jockeying for position, not lone revenants wandering forward. I would prefer to avoid them, but the next alleyway along would add an extra two hundred metres to reach the combat frame. That alleyway, by the death’s heads, gives me barely fifty metres to sprint for the combat frame. I can make that in just over four seconds.”

Vicky laughed, shaking her head. “You super soldier miracle girl. This is crazy. You can’t outrun bullets.”

Kagami scoffed. “You’d be under fire the whole time! Fifty metres or five hundred, it makes no difference! You still have to climb the mech and get the hatch open. Under fire! I’m not stupid, I’ve directed worse — and failed, because it’s stupid.”

Ilyusha grimaced. She was no fool either.

Elpida hesitated. She could not afford to show anything but confidence. If she was going to convince her comrades, they had to believe.

She looked Kagami in the eyes and said: “Not if I’m right.”

“No,” said Pira, softly, with a touch of awe. “She thinks the worm-guard are going to cover her.”

Elpida shook her head. “No, that’s not what I think.”

But Vicky was already biting her lower lip, Kagami was laughing softly, and Ilyusha was staring in teeth-gritting worry. Only Atyle and Amina seemed swept up in the same assumptions. Both of them regarded her with two different types of silent approval, one curious, the other devoted. Pira just stared, unreadable, waiting for more.

“The worm-guard will not cover me,” Elpida repeated. “That’s not what I mean.”

Kagami spluttered. “That’s not what you said earlier! You said they were waiting for you! Like you’re the world’s own special little girl and everything here is designed just for your edification. News-flash, vat-grunt: we’re all meat now!”

Vicky put one hand on Kagami’s slender forearm. “Kaga, chill.”

Elpida said: “I believe they are waiting for a pilot, yes. The graveworm clearly doesn’t think like we do—”

Kagami laughed. “Oh, you think?! Good deduction, commander.”

Vicky reached over with her other hand and took Kagami’s chin, much to Kagami’s apparent surprise. She forced Kagami to look at her. Kagami just blinked in shock. “Kaga. Shut up. I need to hear this.”

Kagami shrugged off Vicky’s hands and hissed through her teeth. “Get off me, Victoria.”

Elpida swallowed before she continued. This was harder than she had expected. “If the graveworm wanted me personally inside that combat frame, then the worm-guard would have shepherded us here. Or one of them would be crossing the impact crater right now to escort us.” That made Vicky shiver and Ilyusha shake her head like a wet dog. “I don’t believe they’re waiting for me personally. I don’t believe I’m special, or more important than any other revenant. What I believe is that they won’t fire on me.”

Kagami started to say something. Vicky started to interrupt her.

Pira said: “On what basis?”

“Because the graveworm is interested in me.”

Lies. Half-truths at best. Leaving so much unsaid. Elpida could never have lied to her cadre like this. Howl would have smelled it minutes ago and challenged her to a fight. But Elpida needed them to believe.

“Picture this,” she said. “I reach the combat frame, standing on the armour plates themselves, walking toward the access hatch, upright, unshielded, out of cover. The worm-guard aren’t attacking me. In fact, I’m approaching them. Would you take a shot at me, and risk drawing the attention of those machines?”

Elpida pointed out of the penthouse window, at the trio of black scribbles in her peripheral vision, the visual glitch which concealed the worm-guard from her senses.

Atyle said, “What if you are challenged, warrior? What if the resurrected release their slings and arrows regardless?”

“I’m going to shout it at the top of my lungs, when I reach the combat frame. I’m going to declare that the worm-guard are protecting me.”

Pira took a long, slow breath. Kagami laughed without humour, shaking her head. Ilyusha bared her teeth, nodding along, pumping herself up with forced enthusiasm. Atyle just smiled. Amina looked starstruck.

Vicky sounded grief-stricken: “Elpi. Elpi this is insane. Surely you can see that?”

Kagami laughed: “Your super-soldier bitch believes she’s the most special girl in the world. Face it, Victoria. She’s not yours.”

Ilyusha barked, “She’s fuckin’ right! We can do it!”

Vicky said, “I don’t think we can. Elpi, this is too many assumptions. What if you’re wrong about the worm-guard?”

“Then I’m wrong,” Elpida said.

“Elpi … ”

“I’m taking an educated gamble, yes.”

Kagami snapped, “It’s ‘educated guess’, you suicidal drone. I thought commanders and squad leaders were supposed to be grown with more self-preservation than a fucking roid-hopped grunt. Or has that obscene mech down there gotten into your head, huh? Is that thing broadcasting a signal to your brain implants? Luring you in? Wouldn’t be surprised. It looks like a fucking trap. Freak-grown illegal technology, it looks like something out of the worst AI-driven experiments, something I would have melted with a thermonuclear weapon. And that’s your saviour? Ha!”

“Linguistic drift,” Elpida said. She forced herself not to react to the insult against a fellow child of Telokopolis.

Kagami squinted. “What?”

“Educated gamble, educated guess. We’re all hearing translated versions of each other’s languages. You know what I meant.”

Vicky said: “Guesstimate.”

Kagami pulled a face. “Ugh!”

Vicky looked at her, “What?”

“That’s vile. You people always did love your disgusting neologisms.” She huffed and looked away, trembling fingertips pressed against one high cheekbone.

Vicky sighed a long, shaking sigh. “Portmanteau, not neologism.”

Atyle said, “We are all speaking in the tongue of the gods. Our roots replaced, written over. There is no history in these words. But there may be poetry.”

Ilyusha grinned at Atyle and moved her lips without making a sound; perhaps that overcame the translation software. Ilyusha snorted at her own joke while Atyle just watched.

Elpida let the others go through the motions, allowing them to distract themselves from unpleasant thoughts. This was the first step of detachment, of acceptance, of believing that she believed.

Only Pira stared at Elpida, unwavering. Did she see through the lie?

Vicky pulled herself together and said: “Elpi, you kept saying ‘I’ during all that. What happened to ‘we’?”

“Ahhhhhhh,” Atyle purred. “Yes, the twice-hidden soldier asks the question we all think. I heard the warrior’s unspoken meaning as well. She intends to go alone.”

Ilyusha perked up, tail gone stiff. “What? No! No! Elpi, no!”

Elpida raised both hands. “I’m glad you noticed. Everyone, please, let me explain.”

Elpida’s training told her to relocate the group, to move away from the floor-to-ceiling penthouse windows, to retreat deeper into the once-luxurious apartment. The whole place was covered with dust, no seat or sofa or stool was worth sitting on, there was nothing here but rot and ruin. But now she’d finished illustrating her plan, she should have moved away from the windows — away from the brain-scratching glitch of the worm-guard, away from any potential spotters or snipers.

But she couldn’t bring herself to care.

Elpida stood up, settled her heavy armoured coat on her shoulders, and shook out her long white hair.

She was framed from behind by the grey dirt of the impact crater, the skyscrapers of the dead city, and the white shell of the fallen combat frame. Dying firelight glow from the black sky blessed her with a halo. She needed the drama, needed to radiate charisma. She knew how, even if her cadre would have seen through it in an instant. Howl would have laughed and heckled. Howl would have followed her regardless.

She half-hoped a sniper would see her and take off her head. Perhaps Kagami was right. Perhaps Elpida was going mad. She’d never felt like this before, never casually put herself in danger for so little reason.

She looked at the others one by one.

She had only known these women for a few days. The blur of nanomachine afterlife made it feel like much longer. Some of them she had grown to know a little better — Vicky, Ilyusha — while others were still a mystery — Atyle — or kept themselves back — Pira. She had died for them once, fighting a Silico murder-machine, the kind of fight she had trained for all her life. Why did they follow her? Her cadre, her clone-clade sisters, her vat-grown family, had chosen to follow her because she was the best option out of twenty-five genetic experiments, the best chance to keep the cadre unbroken; they had been raised together, fought together, loved together, for years and years. But these six women — these six nanomachine revenants — they were not her cadre. They followed her because she had kept them alive.

If they followed her any further she was going to get them killed.

The lie hovered on her tongue: I know what I’m doing, the worm-guard won’t fire on me, I think this is our best bet.

She didn’t know that. She hoped — prayed to Telokopolis, eternal shelter for all — that the worm-guard would know her and welcome her. That the graveworm would know her by her touch.

But she could not be certain that she was not going mad with grief.

Tell them the truth! she screamed at herself. Tell them why you have to do this!

“This is the worst plan I’ve ever made,” she said out loud.

She could have added comparisons, but they would mean nothing to her audience: this plan was worse than the time she and Howl had decided to spend an entire week refusing to communicate with the Legion in anything other than cadre clade-cant, to make a point about organisational interdependence; worse than when she’d engaged Old Lady Nunnus in a philosophical debate on the merits of self-sacrifice; worse than the duel with Aronus, the Legion Colonel who’d blamed thirteen-year-old Elpida for the loss of a hundred men beyond the edge of the plateau, when she’d won the duel by breaking both of his legs but misunderstood the point of letting him win with a minimum of violence; worse than not murdering all the Covenanters when she’d had the chance; worse than making Howl cry.

Vicky started to speak. So did Kagami, and Ilyusha, barking over each other. But Atyle snapped her fingers for quiet — hard and sharp in the dusty silence.

Elpida held her external composure. “Yes, this is a significant gamble. In truth—” Tell them the truth, the real truth, not this bland excuse. “—I’m making dozens of assumptions — about the behaviour of the other revenants down there, about the aims of the death’s head people, about how they may react to me reaching the combat frame. I’m assuming the worm-guard won’t kill me. I’m assuming I can get into the combat frame, that it will recognise me, accept me, respond to me as a pilot. I’m assuming a lot of things. And if I’m wrong then I will die.”

“Then why do it?” Vicky asked in a distraught warble.

Kagami snorted. “Because she’s fucking mad. Death-wish bonkers. This place has gotten to her. Or that mech down there is broadcasting to her cranial implants.”

Atyle said, “She does it because she must.”

Pira just stared. Ilyusha waited, showing her teeth, desperate for anything.

The truth was a heart-wound inside Elpida’s chest.

When she had fought the Silico murder-machine outside the tomb, when it had shot her through the heart a split-second before she had killed it, when she had lay dying, bleeding out onto the cold ground, she had heard a voice. In her last moments of consciousness, she had heard Howl’s voice.

Love you too.

Brain-echoes on the verge of biological shut-down — or a broadcast from the graveworm?

The sight of the combat frame had made it real once again, impossible to ignore. That lost child of Telokopolis deserved her help in its hour of need, yes, but far greater was the desire to stride back to the graveworm, eye-to-eye with the mountain range, and demand answers, demand Howl’s voice again. She wanted the graveworm’s attention. She had no idea if the worm-guard were waiting for a pilot — or if they would turn her into meat-slurry on the concrete ground.

Say it! she admonished herself. Tell them that you think the giant worm-machine might be your dead clade-sister, your closest, your lover, your Howl. Tell them you’re mad! Then they won’t follow you. Then you won’t get them killed. Then they won’t end up like your sisters.

Elpida said, “Because I don’t see any other options.”

Vicky said, “What do you mean, no other options? There’s plenty of other options, we could … we could … ”

Elpida shook her head. “This plan is stupid and dangerous, but it’s our only option to secure the combat frame. We won’t stand a chance against all those other revenants once the graveworm starts moving and the worm-guard depart.”

“But … but we … ”

“There is another option,” Elpida said slowly. “Turn around and walk back into the safe zone. Become part of the ecosystem of nanomachines and predatory hunting, join … this.” She allowed her eyes to flick up and around, indicating the corpse-city, the nanomachine-afterlife. “This infinite cannibal machine which has resurrected us. Forever. Until you lose hope and choose not to return. That’s the other option.”

Abandon hope. Give up on her sisters, plunge into this nightmare of eternal afterlife, eating and dying, eating and dying. Accept that she and her cadre died a million years ago.

Everything she had said made perfect sense. But she could not tell where strategy ended and desire began.

Ilyusha spat again. Pira looked stone-cold. Vicky looked like she wanted to cry.

Elpida took a deep breath and said: “I’m not going to ask any of you to come with me.”

Kagami tried to laugh. “What about ordering us, ‘commander’?”

“I’m not your commanding officer. We’re not in a military. But we’re not civilians either, we’re … I don’t know what we are.”

Kagami swallowed.

Elpida said, “If I’m wrong, then anybody who comes with me is going to die. If I make a mistake, or I’m incorrect about the graveworm, or the worm-guard, then we all die. If anybody wants to stay behind, right here, then you can do that. You’ll get a share of the equipment, weapons, the raw nanomachines, and the remaining food — the brains. If I’m successful and I activate the combat frame, then I’ll come back for you. I will not abandon anybody for not wanting to take this risk. I will not abandon you. I promise.”

Amina said, in a tiny voice: “What if you don’t … ”

Elpida smiled for her. “If I don’t make it, then I hope we’ll see each other again, eventually.”

Dull amber fire filtered down through the window-skylight of the fossilised penthouse: eternal sunset in an empty black sky, brushing the skeletal fingers of the cupped skyscrapers, cradling the combat frame in the palm of a corpse’s hand. Dust motes swirled and eddied in the stale air. Elpida looked up from the others and looked over her shoulder; she fixed her eyes on a corner of white armour, dirty and soot-stained, perfect and untouched beneath the grime.

Telokopolis, fragmented and lost and alone.

She prayed to the memory of her city that the others would not come with her. Her plan sounded insane enough without confessing what she really thought.

She spoke quickly, lest any minds change: “I’ll be leaving within the hour. The graveworm may start moving at any time, and then it’ll be too—”

“We don’t have enough hours of daylight for that journey.”

Pira stood up. Elpida felt like screaming, or throwing a punch, or grabbing her weapons and running.

“If we leave now,” Pira said, “then we’ll reach the death’s head position with almost no daylight left. If there’s an engagement, they’ll have the advantage. We all have low-light vision, but it’s not perfect. They’re all highly augmented. I guarantee most of them will see more than just in the dark.”

“Infra-red? Heat signatures? Echolocation?” Training took over, gathering intel, focused on practical matters.

Pira shrugged. “Those. More. Maybe like her.” She indicated Atyle. “We should rest for the night, depart before sunrise. That will also avoid passing through the edge of the safe zone as the sun is going down. May as well give ourselves a fighting chance.”

“You’re not—”

“Yes,” Pira said. “I’m coming with you.”

Elpida’s training and experience told her not to ask the question. “Why?”

“Because I believe you’re right.”

Vicky stood up as well. “I’m coming too. Elpi, I’m coming too.” Her eyes were wet. She shrugged. “What else is there to do? What else is there? You’re right. We do this or we … trail off. Purgatory isn’t enough.”

Ilyusha bounced to her feet, claws scraping holes in the wood of the kitchen floor. She raised her shotgun in the air one-handed, tail lashing back and forth. She howled a wordless cheer of agreement; for a moment Elpida thought Ilyusha was going to fire into the ceiling, but she refrained. Amina scrambled up after her, eyes wide and staring, nodding and rocking and murmuring a prayer under her breath.

Atyle stood slowly. Her smile was slim and amused — did she know the truth? “If we die, warrior, it will be an interesting death. And the gods will answer me regardless.”

Kagami looked terrified and betrayed, at Elpida and Vicky respectively. She took several breaths, almost panting, long black hair stuck to her forehead.

Elpida spoke before the doll-like woman could panic: “Kagami, you do not have to come with me. You can stay here, well armed, and I will come back for you. Do you understand? I will come back for you. This is not your responsibility.”

Vicky said: “Oh shit. Kaga, hey, no, you don’t—”

“Shut up, both of you!” Kagami snapped. She demanded Vicky’s hand with her own. Vicky helped pull Kagami to her feet. Kagami huffed and scowled and said: “It’s not like I have any choice, is it? Being left alone isn’t any choice at all. Plus you need my eyes.” She jabbed a finger at Atyle. “She might have higher specs but she’s a nut-case primitive.” Atyle gave Kagami a look full of ice, but Kagami ignored that. “Looks like I’m coming too, ‘commander’.”

Guilt tore at Elpida’s heart. She tried to speak the truth.

Elpida said: “Kagami, I’m serious, you don’t have to follow me. I haven’t been tru—”

“Shut up, you jumped-up oversexed gene-jack job. I’ve wiped up dozens of your kind before breakfast.” Kagami snorted. “What, are you going to ‘discipline’ me for insubordination now?”

Elpida couldn’t help it. She smiled. “I already told you, I’m not your commanding officer.”

Leave first, by herself, or slip away during the night? Both options were rapidly slipping through her fingers. Pira would not lead, not without Elpida to sharpen her purpose. Vicky would not understand. Ilyusha would feel betrayed, abandoned. Elpida’s comrades believed in her too much. They needed her to lead them. They needed a Commander, even one unworthy of the rank, the role, the responsibility. Even one who was going mad with repressed grief. Even one who believed the dead were talking to her.

She was going to get her cadre killed, all over again.

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Trapped between the true meaning of leadership and using her powers for evil. Elpida tried here, she really did, she told them it’s basically a suicide mission, and they listened, and they’re following her anyway.

Gotta be honest, I did not expect Elpida to go as hard as she did here! My notes for this chapter went something like “1k words: Elpida explains the plan. 2k words:(spoilers), 3k words (approaching climax of arc!)” But instead she just took complete ownership of this plan and every aspect of it. This is her show right now, I’m just the messenger. To be serious though, at the time of writing this note, the arc is currently going to 10 chapters. Good luck to her, she’ll need it.

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

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters, or even more. Soon!

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

And thank you!!! Thank you for reading my little story. I am having one hell of a good time writing Necroepilogos, and I hope you are too. I couldn’t do this without all the readers. That means you! Thank you! Until next chapter.

Content Warnings

Cannibalism (again!)

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Dawn broke, a streak of dirty rust on the edge of the black iron sky; the undead woke beneath body armour repurposed as bedding; muscle stirred and stretched in the grey haze, mirrored by artificial fibre bundles and bio-plastic skin; nanomachine metabolism demanded mouthfuls of brain matter to quench unslaked hungers.

Elpida watched her companions closely as she ate her own share of the remaining meat.

Ilyusha seemed back to normal. Her wounds had healed and her sulky mood had lifted. She greeted Elpida by bumping her head against Elpida’s shoulder and covertly raking a pair of exposed claws across Elpida’s back, too gentle even to snag on her clothing. Her red-and-black bionic tail wagged when Elpida patted her blonde head. Amina followed in Ilyusha’s wake, blinking and bleary, tiny and plump, brown skin flushed from unbroken sleep. She accepted her portion of breakfast from Illy’s claws, and said in a tiny, whispering voice: “Good morning, Elpida. Good morning to you. Good morning, good morning, good morning.”

She bowed her head in rhythm with her words, rocking her upper body.

“Good morning to you too, Amina. I hope you slept well.”

The reply drew a smile onto Amina’s face. Her knife was tucked into her waistband, out in the open.

Atyle appeared uncaring, serene, distant. She was already awake when Elpida had risen, finishing the end of her shift on watch. During the night she had stripped down to underwear and thermal t-shirt, leaving her willowy dark limbs on display, her graceful movements unhindered as she unfolded herself. She cut her share of brain matter from what was left, licking fatty grease off her fingertips, then sat a few feet from Elpida as she ate, openly staring at Elpida in naked contemplation. Elpida stared back.

After eating, Atyle sat in a meditation pose, straight backed and very still. She held her peat-green bionic eye wide open, flicking over the walls, seeing beyond.

Elpida asked her, “Do you see anything of note out there?”

“Of note?” An amused purr. “Yes, warrior. The engines of creation writhe and multiply inside every marriage between metal and stone and wood. If I could read their script I would possess the secrets of the gods who made us.”

Elpida resisted the urge to sigh. She had thought Atyle was cold and haughty at first — and perhaps she was, but this creative non-answer reminded Elpida too much of certain cadre-sisters: of Third, and Here. Both Third and Here had revelled in similar linguistic games, Third for sheer cheeky playfulness, and Here for the paradoxical pleasure of strict literalism over a core of absurdist humour.

Third and Here had always made Elpida laugh, even when she wasn’t supposed to.

Third and Here had died a million years ago — a week ago.

Elpida didn’t feel like laughing.

She clarified: “Anything of note other than ambient nanomachine activity?”

Atyle blinked. “We are alone out here, warrior. The jungle has fallen quiet.”

“No sign of Serin?”

“Our benefactor hides better than she argues.”

Kagami and Vicky had grown closer in the night — both emotionally and physically. The latter was plain for all to see: Vicky had moved her sleeping spot right next to Kagami, and slept with one arm wrapped around the waist of the doll-like woman, while Kagami was curled up tight, on her side, with her slender back pressed against Vicky’s front. Vicky woke first and made no attempt to pretend she hadn’t been snuggled up with a comrade, though she blushed and looked away from Elpida, awkward guilt shadowing her eyes.

Elpida said, “Vicky, well done for looking after Kagami. Don’t be ashamed.”

Vicky muttered something, but she didn’t argue.

Kagami didn’t even bother to look. She sat up and stared at her hands.

Elpida wasn’t sure if they’d actually had sex. She guessed not, the noise would have woken somebody. But part of her hoped they had.

The emotional change was more subtle, but Elpida recognised the signs: once they were both up Vicky kept shooting attentive glances at Kagami, with an undercurrent of concern at Kagami’s exhausted eyes and sluggish movements; Kagami didn’t complain when Vicky all but fed her breakfast, and once or twice Elpida caught Kagami reaching out to touch Vicky’s arm or shoulder. They exchanged hushed whispers, then Vicky looked at Kagami as if trying to extract a promise from her, or get her to commit to something. But Kagami looked away.

Whenever this kind of development had happened in the cadre — and it had, often, repeatedly, in endless recombination — Elpida had always given her sisters a day or two to adjust, to figure out the emotional shapes they were attempting to fit together, before she would risk intervention to ensure there was no rift. But now, here, she could not risk additional friction within the group.

On the other hand, Vicky and Kagami were not hers to command. They were not her sisters. Her sisters were all dead.

Elpida asked: “Vicky, how’s your reattached arm feeling?”

“Oh, uh. Much better. Pain’s almost gone.” She held it up, skin unbroken. “Um … better, yes. It’s a lot to admit, but cannibalism seems to have done the trick.”

Elpida switched over: “And Kagami — how are you?”

Kagami snorted. “Among the living. Not.”

Kagami’s strange fever and weakness appeared to have passed. Her bite wounds had closed, leaving behind nasty scars which would presumably fade. She stood and stretched with the rest, tutting at her bionic legs, raking out her long black hair so it lay straight down her back. Elpida estimated that Kagami was concealing some kind of headache. It was plain in the microsecond mistiming of her eyelids when she blinked, in the way she squinted, and moved her neck, and pretended she was not in pain.

Amina came over and hugged Vicky, which drew a horrified sidelong look from Kagami.

They exchanged more hushed whispers; Vicky even sneaked in another guilty look toward Elpida. Elpida had to resist the urge to laugh. Perhaps this kind of social complexity wasn’t unique to her cadre at all. She’d have to watch Vicky — she didn’t want guilt to cloud her conscience. Intimate comfort between comrades was no cause for guilt.

Pira had healed in the night, though less so compared with the others. Her pale skin was clear, freckles standing out in the dead sunlight. She was still bruised from the fistfight, doing her best to conceal the stiffness when she rose. But the worst of her wounds — the lingering bullet-hole in her flank — seemed to no longer bother her.

“Pira,” Elpida said. “If you need more of my blood, I want you to tell me.”

Pira just stared, expression closed. “I’m capable as I am.” Then, after a pause: “Thank you, Elpida.”

Elpida judged the group was ready to move. One more day’s travel, one more push, and then the combat frame. She said this to the others, and asked them one by one if anybody felt incapable of continuing.

“Everyone has a veto,” she said. “If you don’t feel ready, tell me now, and we’ll rest for another day. Nobody gets left behind. Nobody gets shamed for needing to rest.”

Ilyusha grabbed her shotgun and grinned. Pira just armed up, loose and ready. Atyle took up the cyclic sliver-gun once more and gestured for Elpida to strap on the coilgun’s heavy power-tank. Amina said out loud, in a wavering voice: “I am ready for you.” Vicky blew out a long breath, then nodded.

“Kagami?” Elpida asked. “How are your legs?”

“Stupid. Obscene. Unwanted.” She smiled, pinched and sarcastic. She was playing with one of those inert silvery drones in her left hand. “But I’ll walk if you order me to, Commander.”

“No orders. If you’re not ready, we rest.”

Vicky sighed. “Kaga, please.”

Kagami tutted. “Yes, fine. I’m ready.”

Elpida led the others down and out, through the dim and shadowy corridors of their temporary refuge, back into the petrified guts and gnawed bones of the eternal corpse-city.

They crept beneath towering skyscrapers, scurried along boulevards of broken concrete, and skirted the mouldering sores in the city’s hide — the suppurating masses of nano-rot, the mats of sticky grey mould, the half-alive flesh-beast tics and fleas embedded in the sides of buildings. Above their heads the suffocated black sky glowed in one corner with sputtering fire. They kept the same formation as previously: Elpida and Atyle in front with the heavy weapons, Vicky and Kagami just behind — Vicky so attentive and careful with Kagami now. Next came Amina, pressed in close to keep her protected. Pira took the rear, alert and experienced, while Ilyusha made herself a mobile asset, skipping back and forth, circling the group on clicking claws to scout their flanks.

Elpida pointed them toward the now not-so-distant plume of smoke where the combat frame had come down; that smoke had dried to a trickle — or rather several distinct skeletal fingers, reaching for the coffin-lid of the sky, evidence of separate fires started by the orbital impact.

The graveworm loomed on the horizon far to the left, a jagged grey mountain range cutting through the black.

Despite two days travel the graveworm did not look any smaller, but Elpida knew they had not actually moved very far since the tomb and the bunker; travel through this corpse-city was a jarring stop-start motion, interrupted by confrontations and detours, stand-offs with other revenants too dangerous or curious to engage directly, long ways around things they did not want to meet, and long silences in hiding from things whose attention they did not wish to attract. Elpida’s mind automatically settled in for a long day on the bleeding edge of tension, watching out for her comrades, watching every corner and window and road junction, and watching herself for signs of fatigue.

An hour later the discrepancy was too obvious not to mention.

“The streets are dead,” Elpida whispered to the others when they paused in an empty, unroofed shell of tumbledown brick.

Atyle replied: “And the sky is black, warrior.”

Vicky huffed, “You know what she means, don’t be stupid. It’s too quiet, there’s nothing around. City’s empty all of a sudden. Giving me the creeps.”

Kagami spoke through gritted teeth: “I would hardly call it empty, Victoria.” She gestured with her head, with the auspex visor over her eyes. “Try seeing what I see for five minutes. Every tenth building has some bottom-feeder scurrying away from us, or some lout lounging around in powered armour, staring back at me with some plasma weapon set-up that could turn us all into a bloody smear on the pavement. It’s a miracle we haven’t been assaulted yet! We’re making enough fucking noise.”

Elpida said, “Exactly. This is so much less than we were dealing with before. We’re not even being followed.”

Kagami huffed. “Oh trust me, ‘Commander’, we are — just not by much. That thing following us for twenty minutes back there, that wasn’t remotely human.”

Pira said: “We’re nearing the edge.”

Everyone looked at her.

Ilyusha grinned, nodding. “Yeeeeeah.”

Elpida asked, “The edge of the graveworm safe zone?”

Pira nodded. “It’s not a clear demarcation, more of a fuzzy boundary. Entities from beyond the safe zone will find it easier to prey on revenants who stray too close to the edge. The only revenants out here are the most desperate scavengers, or the ones very confident in their protection and bionic modifications. The mech fell right at the edge.”

Uncomfortable glances criss-crossed the group — doubt and fear. Elpida didn’t blame them, but she stepped in quickly. She said: “We’re heavily armed and we have very good intel gathering; we have Kagami’s auspex and Atyle’s bionic eye. We can fend off revenants wearing powered armour and Silico monsters alike, and I will not lead us into danger without looking first. We can do this.”

Ilyusha clicked her claws against the metal of her shotgun, bobbing her head and tail. “Yeah! Tell ‘em!”

Kagami snorted a fake laugh. “At least the bloody mech itself won’t be swarming with zombies.”

Vicky grimaced. “Kaga, don’t jinx us.”

Pira said, “I would not count on that.”

“Pira?” said Elpida. “Do you have a prediction?”

Pira went still for a moment, then shook her head. She pulled her flame-red hair back and tucked it into her armour. “Not one I’m confident about. If it’s just beyond the safe zone, that’s one thing, that means venturing out. But if it’s still inside, I think we’ll be out of luck.”

Kagami squinted from behind her auspex visor. “Oh yes? How do you figure that, no-brains?”

“Kagami,” Elpida warned — which made Kagami flinch.

Pira answered. “If it’s inside the safe zone, it’ll be accessible. Fallen technology, from orbit?” She shook her head. “I don’t want to meet the sorts of revenants who might be interested.”

Ilyusha laughed again. “Like us!”

Elpida nodded. “We find the combat frame, assess the situation, and make a plan from there. Everyone rested? Yes? Amina, are you okay? Good. Let’s move.”

Reaching the site of the orbital impact took another four hours of worming their way through the ossified intestines of the city, taking detours around impassible collapses in once-sweeping monorails and ground-car roads, pausing to wait while strange scavengers dragged themselves into shadowy burrows, and skirting the still-active infra-red eyes of machine-sentinels mounted on fortress walls.

Elpida knew they were close when the tiny tails of smoke were almost overhead, visible through the gaps in the towers.

This area of the city climbed toward the choking black overhead, encrusted with the rotten grave-fingers of many skyscrapers. Elpida and her companions passed down the canyon floors lined with fallen masonry and clusters of abandoned vehicles. Their view of the impact site was blocked by the vast towers; in a way, the city was not so different to the green, after all.

Atyle and Kagami reacted at about the same time; Elpida estimated they were only a few hundred meters from the edge of the impact site.

Atyle just stopped, staring up and ahead, through the layers of buildings which still separated the group from their goal. Her lips parted in soft awe. She exhaled in rapture. Elpida held up a fist for the others. All stop.

Kagami went pale and broke out in cold sweat, head panning left and right. “Oh fuck. Fuck me. Fuck all of us. Pira was right — it’s teeming. There’s … what’s that?” She looked up, following Atyle’s gaze, then winced and clutched her face. “Ow, ah.”

Vicky said, “You jinxed us, Kaga.”

“This is not my fault. Fuck you, it’s not!”

“Up!” Elpida snapped. “Up, now! We need high ground.”

Climbing a skyscraper for a vantage point took them an additional ninety minutes. Sixty floors up, with Kagami and Atyle checking through the walls and ceilings for lurking revenants, going slow and methodical up the dark staircases of metal and plastic. Atyle kept staring out through the exterior wall. Kagami clutched one of Vicky’s sleeves. Elpida kept them moving.

Nobody complained.

They reached the top floor, the best possible vantage point. Elpida led them out of the dark stairwell and into the mummified corpse of an opulent apartment, furnished with pale wood and plush cream carpets, covered in stains and rot and decades of dust. One wall was curved upward toward the ceiling, all made of glass, both window and skylight in one. This rambling ‘penthouse’ — a word Vicky quickly taught to Elpida — enjoyed a bird’s eye view of what had probably once been a park ringed by tall buildings, but was now an impact crater smeared across the city’s necrotic flesh.

The combat frame must have struck the earth at a shallow angle, carving first a narrow incision, then crashing through buildings, knocking towers to rubble, throwing up mountains of dust and dirt before slamming into a wall of skyscrapers. Fires had burned themselves out in the blackened and cracked ring of structures around the impact — the source of the smoke trails in the sky.

That ring of ruin was now occupied.

Fighting positions had been dragged together from chunks of concrete; concealed drones hovered against blackened walls; the muzzles of heavy weaponry poked from high windows. A few corpses lay exposed on the open ground churned up by the impact. Tiny figures crouched on rooftops, giants in powered armour or with telescoping limbs, nightmares of blade and tooth coiled tight and ready to pounce. Symbols were daubed on walls with paint or blood or worse — circles and animal-heads, bird wings and geometric shapes; the lower floors of the intact skyscraper closest to the combat frame itself were dotted with a familiar design — a grinning skull.

Occasional gunshots echoed upward from the clearing, but the conflict was frozen, awaiting a thaw.

The combat frame itself was everything Elpida had imagined — but also more.

A titan of sharp white plates, armoured like a god of the ancient world, scorched by atmospheric re-entry and filthy from impact, but still unbreached and whole. Elpida could see no burgundy gleam of machine-meat wounds. Four arms and four legs, half of them folded beneath the weight of the fallen machine as it lay on its side, crushed into the grey dirt, squeezed against the skyscrapers which had halted its slide. The body was covered in retracted weapon-pods and shielded armament domes, no doubt full of beam emitters and rocket systems and auto-cannons awaiting activation. The head was all eye, a single silver orb in the middle of the body. One arm stuck straight up — almost clean: the main armament, a railgun.

Had the pilot protected the weapon on purpose?

Was the pilot alive?

The sight threatened to overwhelm Elpida’s training, to paralyse her with awe and the pain of familiarity. But she could not afford that yet, partly due to the danger — but mostly because of the three eye-searing static blurs which crouched on top of the combat frame.

Somehow, without being told, she knew exactly what they were.

Elpida forced herself not to react to the sight — not to the revenants, or the combat frame, or what perched upon it. She compacted her emotions. She crouched next to the rotting carcass of a sofa and put a commanding whip crack into her voice.

“Nobody get too close to the windows, stay below the sight lines of the other buildings. Illy — Illy, get Amina behind that kitchen counter. Vicky. Vicky!”

Vicky was just standing, rifle limp in her hands, staring at the trio of static blurs on top of the combat frame. “Elpi, what are— what is— ah, ow, oh that hurts my eyes, why can’t I—”

Pira said: “Don’t look directly at the worm-guard. Stop looking.”

Vicky managed to look down, at her weapon. She was almost hyperventilating.

Atyle sighed with god-touched pleasure. “Ahhhhhh. The machines of the gods. They are perfect, are they not?” Her bionic eye was wide open and whirring. Her organic eye was scrunched tight with pain, crying freely. “And this … this is the warrior’s steed?”

Kagami was laughing softly, looking through the interface of her auspex visor. “Worm-guard? You’re worried about your mythical dragons? There’s dozens of revenants down there. A hundred! I count twenty-five suits of powered armour in those buildings. More, even! I don’t even know what half those weapons are. What is that? What is that smear on the concrete all the way over … oh, oh fuck, that’s still alive. That’s still active, it’s—”

Elpida snapped: “Kagami!”

Kagami flinched hard, almost flailing.

Elpida tapped the floor. “Here, now. Next to me. Pira, get Atyle down. Bundle her to the floor if you have to. Vicky—”

Kagami spluttered. “Next to you? You’re joking, Commander.” A nasty little grin spread across her lips. “I’m not going anywhere near—”

“I need your auspex. I need to know what we’re looking at. And I need you to interpret the readout. Here, now.” But Kagami just stood and shivered. “Vicky, help Kagami. Vicky!”

“Right. O-on it, Elpi. I’m on it. Kaga, come on. If Elpi says it’s safe—”

“Go fuck yourself, Victoria,” Kagami sneered.

But Kagami consented to be led by Vicky; they both joined Elpida in her pitifully concealed position by the sofa. Kagami was covered in cold sweat, shivering softly, and holding one of Vicky’s arms in a vice-like grip. Pira did not bundle Atyle to the floor, because Atyle gave her a withering look, then sat down cross-legged so she could continue staring at the objects of her fascination, no matter how much it hurt her organic left eye. Ilyusha cringed and ducked away from the things crouched on top of the combat frame, but she did as Elpida asked, helping Amina behind the cover of the kitchen counter.

Pira joined Elpida as well. “Don’t look directly at the worm-guard.”

Elpida nodded. “I won’t. Kaga, I need your eyes. We’re going to assess what’s happening here. Step by step. Let’s start with the buildings.”

Kagami laughed, humourless and hollow. “How about starting with the giant fucking mech?”

Vicky swallowed loudly. “Can the worm-guard see us? Pira? Can they see us?”

“Of course,” Pira replied. “They can see everything.”

“B-but if we look at them, they’ll see us looking and … right?”

Pira said: “They know we’re here and they know we’re looking. If they cared, we’d be dead.”

Vicky stared at Pira. “Then why shouldn’t we look?”

“Because it hurts.”

Elpida spent almost an hour cataloguing everything they could see from their vantage point. She had Kagami count the number of revenants in the buildings around the impact crater, spying them through the walls: one hundred and three, with an additional nineteen dead, and seven partially consumed or dying. Fifteen autonomous or semi-autonomous drones of varying sizes and armament. Twenty nine suits of powered armour in various states of repair, many of different designs, some outputting signatures of back-mounted fusion power plants, others drawing directly from nanomachine uplinks to their wearers, or blocks of ultra high-density fuel embedded in their plating. Weapon systems were more difficult to catalogue, far more advanced and lethal than a coilgun, or even a cyclic sliver-gun looted from a dead Silico monster.

“Lots of plasma,” Kagami said. “Lots of energy weapons. I don’t even know what that one is — a microwave gun? For melting tanks? Heavy machine guns galore. Half this lot are ready for Twen-Cen trenches but with energy-charged rounds. The other half are— fuck me, that’s a gravity effector. Hand-held? Ugh. I feel like being sick.”

“Focus,” Elpida told her.

The revenants who were gathered to pick at the corpse of the combat frame were almost all of very high level biomechanical and nanomechanical complexity — extra limbs, implanted weapons, rambling biological additions. Most of it was impossible to make out at such a distance, even with the auspex, not in any further detail than a glow of nanomachine readouts.

“Lots of comms,” Kagami said. “This lot are talking, constantly. Almost all of it heavily encrypted. Radio, actual radio. Hah. Other mediums too. I can tap into some of them.”

Elpida shook her head. “If we can tap into unencrypted communications, others can as well. They’re not stupid. Anything we can overhear may be misdirection.”

“Smart,” said Pira.

At the very far end of the impact crater was a long bloody smear, so wide and so crimson that it was visible with the naked eye, even sixty floors up. Vicky and Elpida both peered through the rifle scope at the twitching chunks of machine-gore. Kagami confirmed it was still alive.

Pira explained: “From beyond the graveworm line. Something which got too interested. Revenant once, maybe. The worm-guard neutralised it. Probably why they’re here.”

Kagami said, voice floating away: “I don’t want to be within a hundred feet of anything down there.” She clutched one of the silvery drones in her left hand, turning it over and over; Vicky kept glancing down at the unpowered machine. “Wait. That’s—” Kagami paused, squinted down at the buildings, and burst into laughter. “It’s the spider-cannibal! So big I’d recognise the giant bitch anywhere.”

“Serin?”

“No, no, the one from the tomb. The armoured spider. With the plates, and the idiot on her back.”

Vicky supplied the name: “Lianna?”

It was Lianna. Elpida had Kagami confirm that, describing the outputs until they could form a picture: the orange-plated spider girl crouching half-asleep in some burned-out building. Inaya was dozing on her back, her face still encrusted with machinery. A bundle of bloody sheets was snuggled up against one side of the star-prophet.

Zeltzin? The swordswoman who had been cut in two by the Silico, back at the tomb?

“Keeping her around as rations, maybe,” Kagami suggested in a hiccuping laugh.

Elpida and Vicky spent some time confirming the symbols on the intact skyscraper closest to the combat frame; Elpida had Kagami take some close-up zooms with the auspex readout too, just to be certain. There was no mistake: it was the same symbol as on the human-skin banner outside the tomb, and stamped on one of Serin’s arms, crossed out as a kill tally.

A grinning skull.

“Serin called them the ‘Death Cult,” Elpida mused out loud. “Inaya and Lianna, back at the tomb, called them ‘Death’s Heads’.”

Ilyusha spat on the floor. “Reptiles”

Kagami swallowed loudly. “Reptiles or grim reapers or whatever, they’re just as heavily armed as everyone else down there.”

Elpida voiced what she’d already summarised: “None of those groups are moving. There’s very little gunfire, very little contact.”

Vicky suggested: “Improvised truce? ‘Cos of the … worm-guard?”

Pira said, “They’re waiting for the graveworm to move.”

The others all looked at her. Elpida nodded for Pira to continue.

Pira gestured at the trio of static blurs atop the combat frame. “The worm-guard have responded to the mech, probably because it’s very advanced technology. They recognise it as a threat to the worm. They’re keeping anything from claiming it. But when the graveworm moves on, so will they. When they depart, the revenants will fight over the mech. But they’ll have a very short window, because the safe zone will be leaving them behind.” She shook her head. “Whoever’s closest probably has the best chance of claiming it. Assuming anybody can even use the thing.”

Vicky said, “And only the most heavily armed would try, right? Huh.”

Elpida chewed on this thought; the idea of vultures fighting over a combat frame — a child of Telokopolis, in its own way — made her feel indignant and insulted. None of them could pilot it anyway, not without an MMI uplink. The frame’s own autonomous biological systems would refuse manual control, not unless it felt the touch of a trained pilot — a pilot, from the cadre.

The design of the machine stirred recognition in Elpida’s soul — but also alienation and doubt and more questions than she had time for. She did not recognise the type, let alone the exact model; this frame was so much larger than anything Telokopolis had manufactured during her life, never mind the addition of orbital manoeuvre equipment. But the lines of the body, the shape of the legs, the way the weapon-domes sat — she knew it all.

“I can pilot it,” she said.

“You’re sure?” Pira asked.

Elpida nodded. “The machine is of Telokopolan design. Perhaps … perhaps after my time. Or … before?”

Vicky swallowed loudly. “Elpi, this is like the thing you piloted? This … it’s a … it’s giant.”

Kagami hissed: “Yes, Victoria, your super-solider girl was a mech pilot. I’m sure she had fun crushing non-combatants with those feet.”

“Kaga, shut up.”

Pira said, “You have to be sure.”

Elpida said, “If I can reach the hatch, beneath the head. See? Right there, there’s handholds and an access panel. I don’t have an MMI uplink implant anymore, so I can’t link to a pilot capsule.” Her hand wandered the back of her neck, smooth and empty. “But if I’m right and the combat frame is of Telokopolan manufacture, I should be able to interface with the manual controls. Clumsy and slow, it’ll be like piloting while blindfolded and gagged. But it will recognise me as a pilot.”

Or it might not.

What if it was built by the Covenanters, centuries after her death — but no, that made no sense, what use would Covenanters have for machines to walk the green? Or what if it was from pre-history, the birth of her city, and would not know her as a pilot?

But Elpida had no other choice. She had to try. And she could not voice her doubt, not in front of companions who needed to believe she had something to offer other than illusory hope.

Pira just stared. Vicky gulped. Kagami said nothing, eyes staring at the machine.

Ilyusha scooted out from behind the apartment’s kitchen counter, and said, “Got one already? Came down by itself?”

“Good question,” said Pira.

A living pilot. Elpida couldn’t think about the implications of that. She shook her head. “If the pilot was alive and conscious, the combat frame would be up and moving. Kagami, are there any signals from inside?”

“No. It’s dead. And the damn thing is armoured like a nuclear bunker. I can’t see through it.”

“Right. Yes. Composite nano-grown carbon bone-mesh.”

Vicky let out a nervous laugh. “So, what? You’re just gonna walk up and take the key from under the welcome mat? With a hundred revenants watching? And those three- ow, dammit, I looked again.” Vicky winced and clutched at her eyes.

Atop the combat frame, with a commanding view of every approach, crouched three worm-guard. The same type of machine that had visited and investigated Elpida and the others just after she had risen from the dead a second time. Back then, protected by the concrete bunker, they had not seen the worm-guard with their eyes, only felt it as a sensory overload.

But now the worm-guard were static blurs of black scribble and visual interference — painful to look at, impossible to examine.

Pira explained: “Target acquisition countermeasures. Don’t try to overcome it. If you do, they’ll probably upgrade you to a threat worth engaging.”

Vicky said, “They’ll shoot anything that gets close. Right?”

Ilyusha grumbled, hissing between her teeth. “Rrrrrrr. Right.”

Atyle said, “The machines of the gods wait for us to try their patience.”

Elpida said: “Atyle has a point.”

Kagami barked with laughter. “Shoot? Ha! More like obliterate. You can’t be serious, ‘Commander’. We’re fucked. Turbo-fucked. Reamed six ways to Sunday. Is that how you surface bitches say it? That trio of fucking nightmares over there is holding off over ten times our number in zombies, by sheer threat alone. You want to wait until they leave? We’ll get minced, and eaten. Literally! The things down there aren’t even human anymore — neither are we!”

Vicky swallowed. “Yeah, Elpi. Come on. This is … this is beyond us. We don’t have the firepower. Or anything.”

Pira watched, still and unmoving.

Elpida said: “No. It’s not beyond us.”

The others raised their voices. Ilyusha snorted, looking sick. Atyle called out something about talking to the gods. Vicky stammered and Kagami spat and Amina watched with huge, silent eyes full of faith. And Pira said nothing.

Elpida raised her voice: “Nobody else can pilot the combat frame. It’s useless to everyone down there. Why would the worm-guard be keeping them off it? That worm-guard which visited us before, it didn’t harm us. It checked up on us. It came to see if I was alive. You all know I’ve communicated with the graveworm itself, it spoke to me. All this has a logical conclusion.”

Vicky frowned. “Oh no, Elpi. That’s a hell of a gamble.”

Ilyusha perked up, grinned, and tapped the wooden floor with her tail. “Ours!”

Pira took a deep breath.

“Oh, right!” Kagami sneered. “So we just walk out in front of the brain-scrambling machines, is that it?”

Elpida held Kagami’s eyes until Kagami blinked. Then she cast her gaze around the others.

“Yes,” Elpida said. “Because I think the worm-guard are waiting — for us. For me. For a pilot.”

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Elpida. Elpida what the fuck are you talking about? Oh, she’s serious. Oh no. Really? Looks like this zombie’s lost it …

Longest Necroepilogos chapter so far! This one was well in excess of five thousand words and completely out of control. I had a lot of fun with the imagery, maybe a little bit too much fun. But we’re approaching the climax of arc 6. I think it’s going to be ten chapters in total. Maaaaybe 9, but more likely 10. Well, I mean, if Elpida doesn’t get blown off her feet in the first five seconds of contact.

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

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters, or even more. Soon!

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

And hey, thank you. Thank you for reading my little story! I am having an absolute blast with Necroepilogos and I hope you are too. Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

Chronic pain
Sexual slurs
Body horror (the whole story is body horror and I know I’m not going to warn for it every time but really, really. Body horror.)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Kagami’s left hand was on fire.

Fevered flesh burned with trapped flames; searing and scorching and sizzling and shrivelling, unceasing and terrible and merciless. Every time she sneaked a glance at her fingers and palm she expected to find the meat cremated, the fat rendered down, her metacarpals and phalanges charred bones held together by cooked gristle. The pain radiated up her arm in a standing wave, jabbing and stabbing and slicing into her shoulder and chest, sapping her strength and focus, grinding her thoughts to grit and dust and powder, leaving her drained and lethargic and slow. The medical machinery of her sensory suspension tank in Tycho City would have flushed her body with painkillers and antibiotics and steroids, then followed up with a regimen of stem-cells and protein isolates to repair the damage, while she — Princess and Daughter and Logician Supreme, above this undignified grubbing in the flesh — could have floated off into sim-space until the work was done.

Here, down in the dirt with a belly full of brains, she couldn’t even hope for a bucket of ice to ease the agony.

She couldn’t even cry; that would give her away.

The pain had begun in the night, an hour or two after she had gorged herself on the raw blue nanomachines. At first the tingling pins-and-needles had filled Kagami with hope; she had flexed her fingers and massaged her palm; she had envisioned a data uplink port in her wrist, near-field electronic interfaces in her fingertips, and a high-density connection processor inside her palm, wired into her brain-stem via her own nerves.

Perhaps modifying one’s nanomachine biology was as simple as drinking a potion and making a wish. How hard could it be? It wasn’t as if she could die; those pitiful severed heads had proven that.

But then paresthesia had turned to pain.

Her hand had burned all morning, stuck in that tiny concrete room, hiding the evidence inside her coat; it had burned when Elpida had gone exploring, and it had still burned when Elpida had returned. It burned during the move upstairs, burned when Kagami had slumped alone against a wall, burned when the others had spent their time playing juvenile board games, burned when she had gripped the silvery drone, burned and burned and burned and burned and burned and burned and burned—

And then Elpida had taken her out into the corridor, for ‘discipline’. As if a jumped-up gene-jacked roid-bitch had any right to ‘discipline’ one of humankind’s greatest Logicians.

But the pain had ebbed; the more Kagami felt threatened, the more the pain fled. Relief had come from silently daring Elpida to strike her. And when Serin had turned up — a true nightmare of nanomachine potential — the pain had vanished.

Serin — a vision of her own future? — had smelled that feverish flesh and sniffed her out, like a dog on the scent of charred meat.

Relief had struck again when Elpida had pinned her hand to the wall; Kagami’s head had swam, her heart racing, her skin prickling with sweat. But no pain. Humiliation and outrage and shame and a twinge in her guts. And no pain.

But relief was fleeting. Flesh was inescapable.

Pain had returned in inevitable throbbing waves as Kagami and the others had eaten their meal of brains — of ‘high-energy nanomachines’, what a coldly stupid euphemism. Call it what it was! Brains! Kagami had hoped and prayed to distant Luna itself that the brains — brains! like real zombies! — would help. Maybe all she needed was more raw materials. Maybe the process was stuck, incomplete, and the pain was a message.

The coating of fatty flesh in her mouth was filthy and greasy and unclean. Her salivary glands ached for more. Brains, like scrambled eggs, or bad tofu, or protein blocks for toothless babies — it churned in her stomach as she fought down the urge to vomit it all back up.

Pain fled again when Pira decided to mag-dump her gun into a wall downstairs. Elpida and Ilyusha had rushed out of the room, leaving the rest of them to scramble into their armour, ears pricked, fingers on triggers, waiting to die.

But no pain.

That confirmed her hypothesis: her left hand was changing in response to the cognitive plan she had provided; her nanomachine physiology was growing new parts; but it would suppress the process when she was in danger.

It did not suppress the process in response to stress or pain alone — or silent mental begging.

Danger passed; Pira wasn’t fighting zombies, she was going trigger-happy.

So the pain came roaring back.

Kagami did her best to hide her condition from the others; she resisted the urge to press her burning palm to the cool plastic of the floor, or to blow on her own skin like she was a bowl of overcooked porridge. She could not let the others know.

Especially not Pira or Elpida — especially not after they returned bloody and battered and bruised, stinking of each other, wet with each other’s juices.

Kagami was no fool. She’d perused enough low-grade gutter-fiction sim-space romance plots to recognise the spark between the traitor and the so-called ‘Commander’. The pair of dirt-eating animals had beaten each other up, enjoyed every second of flesh-on-flesh, and then probably rutted afterward. Pira was a traitor; Elpida was too stupid to understand that — too much of a rampant bitch to resist having her judgement clouded by a pair of fingers up her cunt. Kagami had hoped to get through to little miss clever Commander — even after Elpida had pinned her against the wall and humiliated her, made her quiver and shake inside. But that was a dead end now.

Elpida had made her choice, and Kagami was not it.

The others swarmed over the disgusting post-coital pair as soon as they tramped back into the room, all shouting questions and recriminations, blaming one or the other for unwarranted violence.

Elpida stood tall and explained what had happened — a carefully edited version of events, no doubt, leaving out the part where she and Pira had sucked at each other’s faces and rubbed their groins together. She mouthed platitudes about choice and respect, while Pira sat in the corner and massaged aching tissues. Questions and complaints and blame flew back and forth: Vicky was oh-so hurt that her precious Elpida had gotten sweaty and intimate with somebody else, while Ilyusha sulked and scowled, probably sour at being left out. They both phrased it as concern, of course, as worries about Elpida and Pira having a punch up, as questions about how Pira would heal if she wasn’t eating, as conditions that Pira had to fulfil if she was to be trusted again.

Elpida shut that all down: “Pira is one of us. This was just something we had to work out, between me and her. Pira had her gun the whole time . If she wanted to really hurt me she could have easily shot me. And look, I’m already healing — Serin told us the truth, the brains are doing us good.”

Vicky huffed like an old matron. “Yeah, sure, but what about her? She’s not healing. Elpi, you’ve beaten the crap out of her.”

Pira croaked: “A draw.”

Elpida said, “Pira has other options. She’s ingested some nanomachines directly from me, from my blood. She’s not going to eat the brains, and I’m asking everyone to respect that.”

Kagami had almost snorted. ‘Blood’ — was that what they were pretending?

Besides, Kagami was barely listening.

If Pira figured out that Kagami had begun the process of self-modification, what would the traitor do? Kagami was not in a hurry to find out. Elpida — the stubborn fool — had actually gripped Kagami’s left hand earlier, burning-hot and aching-hard. Had she figured it out? Serin had made clear that she knew what Kagami was up to, but perhaps Elpida was too stupid to have understood the zombie’s words.

Atyle must have known. That high-spec bionic eye probably showed Kagami’s left hand as a miniature star, burning and melting. But she wasn’t saying anything to anyone. Could the paleo be trusted? Kagami spent much of that conversation watching Atyle out of the corner of her eye. The primitive was playing her own game amid all this, but Kagami could not guess what it was.

No. She couldn’t trust any of them.

Elpida still spoke like she was in charge: “The plan hasn’t changed. We need to rest and recover from our wounds, for at least the remainder of today and tonight.”

Pira said, “One day’s travel.”

“Pira?”

“One day’s travel, based on our speed so far. That’ll put us right on top of your orbital mech. Combat frame. Whatever you want to call it.”

Vicky shuddered. “Then we’re close. Almost there.”

Elpida nodded. “Good.”

Pira said, “Likely it’ll be swarming with revenants. Maybe worse.”

“Right,” said Elpida. “We should try to consume as much of the brain matter as we can, try to keep eating, get our strength up. Pira’s portion is now to be split six ways, among the rest of us. In the morning we’ll reassess if we’re ready to move.” She took off her coat, put down her firearm, and shook out her long white hair — putting on a big performance for the gaping audience. “We need sleep tonight, real sleep; I suggest everyone do what they can to relax. Illy — that board game you were playing with Amina and Atyle, will you teach me how to play?”

The remains of the day dissolved into a sick domestic pantomime.

Elpida joined in the ad hoc board game, which made the demented little cyborg a touch less grumpy, bumping her head against Elpida like a cat marking her territory; too late, Kagami thought to herself — your ‘Commander’ has already been claimed. Try sniffing her crotch to find out.

Vicky made a few attempts to come talk with Kagami.

“How are you holding up?”

…

“Kaga, you feeling okay?”

… the pain built.

“Bite wounds are looking much better. You should eat some more, too.”

… burning and churning and flensing and filleting. Eat brains? Eat the flesh off her fingers instead.

“Sure you don’t wanna join us? Just come sit by me. You don’t have to play or anything.”

… pain.

“Don’t just grunt at me, Kaga. Use your words.”

… p a i n.

“Alright, suit yourself. You comfy sitting against the wall like that?”

shut up shut up shut up go away go away

“Look, Kaga, if you change your mind, I’m here. Elpi’s here too.”

Didn’t Vicky have better things to do, like a threesome to insert herself into, perhaps? At least Elpida didn’t try to draw Kagami into another private conversation as well; the Commander would probably try to rut with her, too.

Kagami cradled the burning agony of her left hand — and now arm, and shoulder, and left lung, and the side of her neck. Pira sat in the opposite corner, cleaning weapons, watching the others, watching Kagami. Kagami pretended she wasn’t there.

The others all played together, good little children around the jolly camp-fire.

Except that every now and again somebody would get up and go over to the fat-stained t-shirt where they were keeping their ‘rations.’ Vicky brought Kagami’s share over to her. Everyone ate. Except Pira.

That night, when the dirty red sunlight died away and left behind grey static haze deepening into lightless black, Kagami could not sleep.

The others curled up beneath coats, stretched out on the floor, or slept in their armour and boots, with guns cradled in laps. They organized a watch rotation — Elpida, Pira, Vicky, and Atyle, in that order. Kagami knew she looked too sickly and feverish to be trusted with guarding the collective. She’d fallen so far from Luna’s nuclear sentinel.

Sleep was impossible; the burning pain in her left hand suspended her consciousness on the precipice of dreaming. One moment she thought she was back in her suspension tank on Luna, surfacing from a particularly rough sim-space experience, a story written by a sadistic moron — and then she was shifting her back against the cold ground, a soft moan escaping from her throat as spears of pain ran up the inside of her arm.

One moment, infinity and home — the next, dirt and torture.

She tried curling tight inside her own spare coat, then lying spread-eagle on the floor, then tucking her throbbing arm beneath her own body to cut off the blood supply. No position provided relief.

For the first two hours she felt desperate and afraid. She had never suffered insomnia in life, but she had run the simulations, watched the effects on herself in sim-space, or on her wire-slaved surface agents during assignments gone over-time. What if Elpida insisted on moving the group tomorrow? What if Kagami was exhausted, delirious, weak? She had to sleep, she just had to sleep. Pira might convince Elpida to leave her behind. Barring that, the others were relying on her auspex for intel and early warning; would she be too slow on the uptake, her thoughts fogged and sluggish? She had to sleep! She needed sleep! Maybe sleep would finally make the pain go away. Please, please, sleep!

She bit at her tongue, at the inside of her own mouth, and at pieces of her coat, gnawing and chewing, whining in muffled privacy.

Fear went sour, fermented into rage — at her own body, at this obscene nanomachine physiology, at the inefficiency of this process.

The burning, itching, feverish pain in her hand was so bad that it blotted out the ache in her augmetic legs and bruised hips; she hadn’t thought about that pain for hours and hours, not for most of the day. Was this how every other revenant had obtained bionic parts? Had Ilyusha lay insensate and screaming for days on end while her legs and arms had transmuted into metal and bio-plastic?

Or had Kagami made a mistake?

Had she done this wrong?

Had she fucked up?

She gave up after about three hours of trying to sleep. Elpida was still on watch, a dark silhouette against the open door of the room. The others were breathing softly. The borged up midget and her psycho friend were snuggled down together. Atyle slept on her back, ramrod straight. Vicky was almost snoring. Pira’s eyes were closed, her gun in her lap, her back against the wall.

Kagami stared at her left hand beneath her coat, hidden in the dark.

She tried to take it back: she thought ‘Halt!’, ‘Stop!’, and ‘Reverse!’ But nothing happened, not even after minutes of concentration. The pain did not ebb. She wanted to sob. She shouldn’t have reached so far, she should have tried to fix her stupid, obscene legs first — slough off the machines and grow something better in their place, even just real flesh and bone. At least that wouldn’t hurt.

But then she strangled that thought, terrified; she begged her body, her nanomachines, not to do that. If her legs started to hurt like her left hand, she would go insane.

She buried her face beneath her coat and chewed on the armoured fabric. She longed to cry out, to be heard.

Maybe Elpida was still reachable — maybe she would understand?

But Kagami had spent too long trying to sleep, stewing in her own pain. When she found the courage to push her coat down and stare at Elpida’s back, Pira was already stirring, for the change of the watch.

Kagami burned in private silence as Pira and Elpida sat together for several minutes, a pair of dark shadows outlined by the doorway. She couldn’t tell if they were whispering to each other — vying for sexual dominance again. Or worse: plotting. They wouldn’t keep the watch, Kagami was certain of that. The pair of them would slip off next door to fuck, any moment now, leaving her and the others exposed.

But then Elpida patted Pira on the shoulder, rose from her spot on the floor, and went to bed down, next to Vicky.

Pira sat in the doorway, her back to Kagami, watching the corridor.

The Commander still had a sense of responsibility after all. Not quite a slave to her libido. But Kagami had missed her chance.

She made another attempt to sleep, burrowing back down inside her spare coat, lying on her side so she could stare at Pira’s shoulders, daring her to turn around and see Kagami looking. She tucked her left arm against her chest, cradling it close. But the pain was getting worse — or was that just her imagination? Deep-tissue pulses crawled up her muscles; bone-ache settled into her wrist and elbow, chewing at marrow; the flesh of her fingers felt like it was peeling off. She wanted to scratch and bite and gnaw at her own flesh.

She sobbed; she couldn’t help it; she muffled the sound with her coat, tears soaked up by armoured fabric. The Seventeenth Daughter of the Moon did not weep — at least, not in front of surface dwellers, reanimated cannibals, and degenerate oversexed soldier-drones.

The pain climbed and climbed. Surely her flesh should be blackening and smoking? But when she looked, it was brown and pale and soft, just her own arm.

Her finger joints felt stiff and gritty; when she held them up to her ears she could hear them grinding inside, as if the cartilage was full of iron filings. She pressed her palm with her opposite thumb and had to bite her lips to stop from crying out; the bones felt sharper, harder, larger. An edged lump was growing beneath the heel of her hand, an aching tumour — of metal?

Silent tears running down her cheeks. Hand in her pocket, fumbling for one of her inactive, dead, power-drained drones. Grip it in her left hand. Harder. Squeeze.

Pira’s back, floating in the doorway. If she got in a fight with Pira, would her body suppress the pain?

Three times Kagami began to stir herself, with a half formed plan of thumping Pira on the back of the head, or burying her teeth in Pira’s scalp, or just standing up and screaming until the others bundled her to the floor.

But the pain did not go away. She had to mean it. Had to feel real danger. Real threat. Feel anything but pain.

By the time Pira’s watch ended, Kagami was lying on her side, vision blurred, arm twitching, drooling onto the floor.

Vicky appeared in the shadows of the doorway, to take over from Pira. Pira did not stick around to chat, not like Elpida had. She got up and returned to her spot. Vicky took the doorway. She slumped against the frame. She sighed into the corridor.

Shadows, unmoving, thick. Flesh, throbbing, burning, dying. Darkness, an undifferentiated soup of thought and pain and fragments of self, smeared across the ground like pink-grey fatty brains from a shattered skull. Vicky’s skin: dark and shiny with faint sweat, shaking slightly, in shadows. Vicky stood up and went over to the rations — brains! — wrapped in a stained t-shirt.

Naughty naughty, taking more than her share? Oh, no, actually, Vicky was a good girl, carefully measuring how much was still hers. Knife went — well, knife didn’t make any sound at all, not even a squelch. Brains were like that, Kagami had learned. Soft, pliable, easy to chew. Melt-in-the-mouth.

All zombies now!

Why must zombies feel pain? Why had her nanomachines not unplugged her nerves?

Vicky returned to the doorway and sat back down to resume her watch. Kagami moved only her eyeballs. She watched Vicky watching, and watched Vicky chewing, and swallowing, and smothering a soft retch. A hand shook, raised another piece of brain to a hungry, drooling, panting mouth. Another retch, the sound of a stomach, rejecting. Vicky hunched. Panting.

Kagami stood up. Clumsy and slow. Legs hurt — didn’t matter. Lips slack, drooling. Eyes ached. Left hand — still there? Still there. Felt like wire and ruined and flayed muscle.

Coat on shoulders. Auspex visor hanging loose around neck. Noose, around neck. Ha ha.

She shuffled over to the doorway.

Vicky turned and looked up, a dark face framed by darker shadows. “Kaga?” Her eyes went wide. Hands reached upward to catch. “Kaga, are you okay?”

“Mmmno.”

Kagami slumped to her knees. She groped for Vicky’s shoulder, but couldn’t find it. Vicky steadied her; strong hands, firm hands. Warm and hard.

“Kaga, are you— h-holy shit, Kaga, you’re burning up. What—”

“Don’t,” Kagami hissed. “Don’t vomit.”

Vicky blinked. “What?”

“Vicky. Victoria. Is that— full name? Victoria. Really English. You’re not English though. NorAm, something. Canadian? All went NorAm in the end. You’ve got their spirit, fucking never give up, Leveller cunts. Never stop. You’re them, a hundred years too early.”

Kagami knew she was talking nonsense. Pain made it not matter.

Vicky’s throat bobbed. She glanced back at the others, still asleep. “Kaga, are you ill? What’s happening to—”

“Shhhhh. Shh-shh.” Kagami pressed a finger to Vicky’s lips. Greasy with brains. “No. No, Vicky, you’re the only one I can trust. You’re the only one without a head full of bullshit. Would have defected to your lot myself. Easy. Give me a NorAm sex commune, please. Don’t vomit.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You were!” Kagami hissed between her teeth. Spittle landed on Vicky’s cheeks. “You feel guilty about eating, huh? So do I! But you can’t vomit. Don’t you dare. You waste it, you’ll get weak. Make us easy pickings for Pira. If you vomit it up, that’s wasted nanomachines. Somebody will have to eat the sick, and it won’t be me. I’ll push your face in it and make you eat your own sick, you— you— you … ”

No more energy. Kagami let herself slump into Vicky’s grip. Cheek to cheek. Vicky’s skin was so soft, smooth and warm, like sun-kissed silk.

Kagami had not ever hugged another human being, not outside of sim-space. In simulations, hugs were perfect; bodies fit together like puzzle pieces, with notches for chins and elbows and hips, plush pillowy flesh like upholstery, muscles sculpted for her hands and head and belly to touch. But Vicky was hard-muscled and bony in all sorts of places Kagami did not expect. Her hands were clumsy and awkward. Her head got in the way. She reeked of sour sweat, dried blood, and fatty brain matter.

But Kagami stayed there for several hours.

Or two minutes?

Or ten seconds.

Eventually Vicky eased Kagami back and met her eyes. Vicky looked alarmed. Scaredy-cat. NorAm commune bitch. Or — or, pre-NorAm. Hard living bitch.

Vicky whispered: “Kaga, what the hell is wrong with you?”

Pain. Cell damage. Nerve signals all jammed up and backed up and fucked up. Kagami didn’t bother trying to answer, she just fumbled with her auspex gear — with her right hand, which was still working — and got the visor over her eyes. She fiddled with the controls, blinked a few times, and then looked down at her own left hand.

Glowing. Dark red, bright red, warning red all over. Nanomachine activity beyond maximum readout density; incompatible with biological life; seek shelter and don full-body NNBCIM suit; avoid, avoid, avoid.

Kagami laughed. “Stupid thing doesn’t know I’m a zombie.”

Vicky hissed: “Kaga, for fuck’s sake. Right, that’s it, I’m going to wake Elpi.”

“No,” Kagami grunted. “Wait.”

She refined the auspex settings, forcing the device to ignore raw nanomachine activity. That was difficult, the auspex didn’t want to do that; she had to override safety settings and dump readout information straight into the visor without processing, but—

There. Metal tracery in her fingertips, like blooms of fungal infection. Processor cores in her palm, woven into the tiny muscles, leeching blood and lymph away from tissues. And a nice thick data-cable running down her wrist and into her arm and shoulder — plastic and steel mated with nerve and bone. Her flesh ran wild with circuitry. The systems were embryonic and unfinished, but undeniably present.

Kagami almost vomited; she wanted to dig it all out with her fingernails, rip her flesh open and make it clean again. She pulled the auspex visor off and panted for breath.

“Kaga, what the fuck?”

She staggered to her feet and yanked on Vicky’s hand. “Come with her. With me, I mean. Me. Come on, Vicky.”

Vicky resisted. “What? Where? Kagami, I’m on watch. What—”

“I have to piss.” Lies, easy in pain-haze. “Gotta pee. Come watch me piss, NorAm pervert.”

Kagami dragged Vicky away from her post. She staggered and pulled until they reached the next room along the corridor — a sordid little office. One of the desks was covered in skull fragments and skin, bits of lip and ear and face. Elpida’s butchery.

Kagami let go of Vicky’s hand and faced her in the private darkness.

“I’ll show— show you what I’ve done,” she slurred. “But promise not to tell Elpida.”

Vicky gaped like a moron. But she was better than that, Kagami knew; Vicky was pre-republic, pre-NorAm stock. Her people had gone on to found the one state Kagami could never truly run rings around. She willed Vicky to trust her. Vicky moved as if to look over her shoulder, for help, but then she wet her lips and said: “Why? Kaga, what are you even talking about? What do you want me to keep from Elpi?”

“She’s with Pira. She’s been corrupted. Seduced. Or wanted to be! It’s the only explanation. I tried to warn her!”

“Kaga, slow down.”

“Pira is a traitor. T-r-a-i-t-o-r.” She spelled the word — then explained what she had observed about Pira’s behaviour, back during the ambush. “And Elpida — ‘Commander’ — is too stupid to see it. They fucked, earlier. They had sex. You must have figured that out! When they came back, covered in each other’s blood and—”

Vicky sighed loudly. She rubbed at her eyes. “They fought. They had a fight. It was immature and stupid, and I’m not impressed by it, but they didn’t have sex. Don’t be silly. As if they had time for that.”

“They did! They did! Look at them! And Pira’s a traitor!”

“To what? To a bunch of girls who came back to life together? I don’t think we constitute something coherent enough to betray.”

“Yes!”

Vicky sighed again, but Kagami could see the cracks.

Kagami hissed, “She’s a traitor. Aligned with some cannibal ideology, or the skull-people, or fucking monster zombies out there in—”

“Kaga. Please.”

“We need to be ready for whatever happens when we reach that mech! If she doesn’t betray us — fine! But if she does, I want you with me. Vicky, please! I’ll show you what I’ve done. But promise — don’t tell. I won’t turn on Elpida, fine, yes. But I want you with me. If we need to. Promise me you won’t tell.”

Vicky nodded, slowly. “Okay. Show me.”

Kagami extracted one of the silvery drones from her coat pocket. She held it in her left hand — the pain was incredible, making her sweat and shake and shiver. But she held the drone up, flat and level.

She hadn’t thought this far ahead. Should she have specified that she needed a visual HUD for activation? Or would this all be instinctive, like flesh and enzymes?

Near field electrical charging and activation-imprinting was enough. She didn’t need the drone on permanent station, not yet. She just needed to prove that she could wake it.

She concentrated on that thought.

A hot pulse passed through her arm, into her hand, tingling on her fingertips. She suddenly felt light-headed. Her vision filled with star-burst brightness.

The silvery cigar-shape in her hand twitched — then lifted six inches off her palm. Silent. Steady. Still.

“Yes—” she panted. “There it— goes— mine!”

“Oh damn,” said Vicky. “It worked. You powered it up?”

“Ha— ah— y-yes, I—”

Kagami’s vision exploded with red.

A burst of boot-up code scrolling down the inside of her left eye: user registration and uplink protocol specification, energy-transfer normalisation and weapons-recognition IFF requests, spatial scanning feedback loops and pings for pairing with local swarm and satellite uplink and nano-fuel processing subroutines and standard guard operation timings and station-keeping orders and—

Kagami’s eyes and brain were not set up for this.

She crumpled, limbs going slack, eyes rolling back. The drone clattered to the floor as the pain blossomed like a supernova inside her head.

Izumi Kagami felt one final thing before the seizure took hold — Vicky’s arms, catching her, cradling her, stopping her from biting through her own tongue.

Defector at last. In the arms of the enemy.

If only they had been on Luna.

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Oh Kagami. She’s such a mess. Such a glorious mess, a pampered princess missing her moon. At least we (kinda???) know how nanomachines can be used to change revenant biology now. Kind of. Unless she really did get it wrong? In other news, Kagami is incredibly fun to write, I cannot get enough of this twisted up sourpuss.

In other other news, a reader elsewhere has provoked yet another new tagline for Necroepilogos: CGDSUTT, or “Cute Girls Doing Small Unit Tactics Things”. I think I need to catalogue all of these and put them in the blurb somehow, along with “Infinite Fortnite with undead lesbians”, and a couple of others.

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

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m currently trying to make time to write a few more chapters ahead, but I can’t promise anything on a specific schedule yet, as you can probably tell from my repeated efforts. I’ll get there eventually though!

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

And more importantly than any of that: thank you! Thank you for reading my little story. I’m delighted at all the readers who’ve been enjoying it so far. Until next week! More on the way soon!

Content Warnings

Discussion of cannibalism (let’s be honest this is pretty much constant now)
Lots of blood
Blood drinking
References to genocide
Sexual violence (this is very edge-case but I’m warning for it anyway)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“Everybody up! Grab our gear, stow the food, be ready to move. Vicky, Atyle, stay here with Kagami and Amina. Get in the doorway and watch the ends of the corridor, don’t get pinned down. If something happens, make your way to the ground floor, to the front, where we came in. We’ll regroup there. Illy, with me!”

Elpida leapt to her feet, grabbed her submachine gun, and bolted out into the corridor. Ilyusha’s talons scrabbled against the floor, then followed with a rapid clicking of metal.

-rrrrt!

The distant sound of gunfire cut out. Elpida kept moving at a rapid combat walk, weapon tucked tight against her shoulder, muzzle panning over every doorway and shadow. Ilyusha took her lead without the need for orders, covering Elpida’s brief blind spots with her rotary shotgun.

Pira was shooting; Pira needed backup. Elpida would respond — but she was hyper-aware of potential ambushes, of tricks and traps to draw her out.

She would not fall for that again. Her senses felt sharp and clear, her belly full of meat, her body re-energised by the grisly meal of cold grey matter.

Brrrrrrt!

Another burst of gunfire. Ground floor. At the rear.

Elpida hit the stairs. Tall windows flooded the stairwell with gloom-thick light. She hurried down, leading with her gun at the corners, boots slapping on the plastic flooring, echoing down into the empty reaches. Ilyusha leapt the bannister, sticking her gun into doorways, sometimes a pace ahead, other times a pace behind, always turning and watching and twitching. Elpida was relieved that even after the terrible revelations and arguments about feeding, Ilyusha did not hesitate.

The ground floor of the structure was dimmer and darker than the upper two floors, sunk in the shadows of the neighbouring buildings, graced by only a few stray slivers of choking red. Elpida hurried past yawning nooks, plunging along umbral corridors, passing through shafts of bloody sunlight.

She hissed, over and over: “Pira! Pira! Answer me! Pira!”

The rearmost area of the ground floor was semi-ruined: corridors lay collapsed in jumbles of breeze block and clinging bio-film mats of black nano-gunk. These passages had once led into a large two-story one-room extension at the rear of the structure — perhaps some kind of sports hall or religious gathering space or sparring ground. Elpida had ignored the ruined section when she had scouted the inside of the building; the jumble of fallen masonry, twisted metal girders, and shattered roof sections was impassible. But a small section of it was still accessible and intact, beyond a pair of double doors at the end of a long corridor.

Elpida signalled for Ilyusha to pause at the doors. She eased one side open, hinges creaking in the silence; she peered through, muzzle-first. Nothing moved. Red sunlight trickled down from the fallen roof above. She slipped through with Ilyusha at her heels.

The ruined hall was a huge space. Most of the roof was gone. Fully half of the walls had collapsed into a tangle of metal and shattered breeze block. Barely twenty feet of clear ground lay between the double doors and a near-impassible hill of rubble and razor-sharp scrap.

Brass casings littered the crescent clearing — two whole magazines worth, if Elpida had to guess.

And standing in the middle of the space, facing away from the doors, calmly reloading a magazine from the pouches on her webbing, was—

“Pira,” Elpida said. “We heard gunfire. What’s happening?”

Pira’s flame-red hair caught in the dark light, dyed umber and bronze. The black and grey of her flak jacket and bullet-proof vest blended her with the rubble and ruin. She grabbed another handful of bullets. Her fingers slid them into the magazine: click-click-click-click.

She did not turn around.

“Nothing.”

Ilyusha stalked forward, tail rigid, hands swinging her shotgun left to right. She grimaced. “Reptile cunt’s lost it.”

Elpida kept her hands on her own submachine gun. She scanned the rubble. There was nothing. “Pira, what were you shooting at?”

Click-click-click-click went the bullets into the magazine. Pira shrugged beneath her body armour. “Driving off a curious scavenger. Nothing important.”

Ilyusha gave Elpida a look, peeling back her lips and shaking her head, blonde hair waving in the faint wind through the ruins. Elpida chopped sideways with one hand — no. If Pira was having some kind of emotional breakdown, Elpida did not want Ilyusha to be the one voicing concern or provoking a reaction.

Elpida spoke slowly and clearly: “Pira, you said we need to maintain stealth, and I agree with you. Gunfire may have attracted attention. If you were warning off another revenant, then good work, good job. We may need to move now. How many—”

Pira turned around. Stone-faced, eyes the blue of a frozen sky. Her fingers flickered — click-click-click-click. “A scavenger came through the ruins. I shot at her. She left.”

Ilyusha snorted: “Lotta fuckin’ bullets.”

Two full magazines? Ilyusha had a point. Elpida didn’t say it out loud, but Pira wasn’t stupid; she must have known her half-truth would not stand up to examination. Had she shot at nothing in a fit of pique — or unloaded more than necessary on a single brief target? Venting frustration — or baiting a challenge?

If one of Elpida’s cadre had acted like this, she would have called out the challenge for what it was, and put the offender flat on her back, with Elpida’s hands on her throat and groin.

Her heart leapt. Sweat broke out on her back. She coughed once.

Pira was not one of her sisters.

“Alright,” Elpida said. She had to take a deep breath. “Good job. Thank you, Pira. We may need to relocate. We should head back—”

“I reacted with instant violence the moment I saw her. She has no reason to believe there’s anything here but another lone revenant, with nothing but a gun. She won’t be back.”

“Still, I’d rather take the precaution. We—”

“What’s the point?”

Pira clicked the final bullet home, slammed the magazine into her weapon, racked the charging handle — then clicked the safety on and let the gun hang from the strap. Her eyes bored into Elpida.

Ilyusha hissed, rolled her eyes, and let the muzzle of her shotgun drop. Elpida held out a hand to stall any further reaction, and said: “Pira, let’s at least get out of the open. We can talk inside.”

“The rubble blocks all the sight-lines from the nearby buildings. The hole only reveals the sky. I’ve yet to meet a revenant who can fly.”

Pira was correct — but her stare did not waver.

“Pira,” Elpida said. “If you discharge your weapon, I’m going to come running to help you. That’s what I’ve done right now. If you have a problem, we can discuss it.”

“What’s to discuss?”

Ilyusha said: “Fuck’s sake. Fuckin’ bitch. Say what you mean!”

Elpida gestured to Ilyusha. “Illy, stop, please. Pira, what’s wrong?”

Pira just stared.

Ilyusha snorted, “Knickers in a twist ‘cos we’re not perfect, huh?”

“Illy,” Elpida said. “Please. Pira? I can’t solve a problem if you won’t voice it.”

Pira spoke soft and slow: “You’ve eaten those brains, haven’t you? You’re visibly sated. Both of you.”

Ilyusha stamped one clawed foot, red talons raking the floor with a rasp of metal. “Better we all fuckin’ die, huh?! Starve so we’re not like them?” Her red-tipped tail jabbed toward Pira. “Stab your fucking guts out for a ration card instead? Is that better, fucking reptile shit!”

Pira didn’t flinch.

Elpida stepped forward and grabbed Ilyusha by the shoulder before the situation could deteriorate. Black and red bionic muscles twitched beneath her grip. “Illy, stop. Please. For me. Illy, please.”

Ilyusha spat on the floor, then twisted away, ripping free of Elpida’s hand. She stepped back, glaring at Pira. Her tail lashed back and forth. Her fingertip claws clicked against her shotgun.

Pira said: “I’m not claiming to be better than you.”

Her voice quivered. So very gently. Perhaps undetectable without genetically augmented hearing. She was addressing Ilyusha — but Ilyusha just snorted.

“Pira?” Elpida pitched her voice soft; Pira was in a hole and she needed digging out, not burying. “Pira, if you need—”

“I thought you were different.” Pira’s gaze flickered back to Elpida, blue eyes burning bright, backlit by the bronze furnace of the undead sun in the necrotic sky. The outline of her body was blurred by the black-and-grey camouflage. “I thought maybe you would be different. After so many tries, so many failures, so many deaths. Maybe I’d finally found somebody worth following again.” Her voice dropped, hushed and raw. “I’ve never seen a fresh revenant take charge like you did. So quickly, no hesitation. The way you killed that zombie outside of the tomb, for a bunch of girls you’d known only for a few hours.” Pira’s throat bobbed. “Nobody does that. People who were leaders in life, great leaders, chieftains, priestesses — you think they’re anything, here? If you remove a human being from their social context, they are nothing. The greatest leader, the smartest thinker, the strongest warrior, the cleverest soldiers — none of it matters, here. We have no context. We are nothing. Meat.”

Elpida nodded. She focused on Pira’s eyes, to show she was listening.

“But you?” Pira almost whispered. “Commander? You kept going. You died, you came back. And then you pushed on. You won’t even stop and hide. It’s madness, and it’s working.” She shook her head. “But like all the others, you have to eat. In the end, like everyone else, you eat. I wanted to believe … maybe … ” Pira’s voice cracked. “Maybe you were different.”

Ilyusha barked: “She is!”

Pira said, “She’s not. You’re not.”

Elpida spoke quickly. “Illy, I need you to do something for me. Head back to the others and let them know everything is okay, but stay armed and be ready, in case we’ve attracted any attention.”

Ilyusha pulled a very unimpressed face. Her tail flicked at the air. “Serious?”

“I’m serious, yes. Illy, it’ll be okay. I would like to talk to Pira alone. But I need you to inform the others.”

Ilyusha shot a suspicious look at Pira, and said: “Don’t try shit.”

Elpida said, “It’ll be fine. I’ll be fine. Please go tell the others.”

Ilyusha bumped her head against Elpida’s shoulder, then slipped back through the double doors. Her claws clicked against the floor for a few paces, then vanished into the depths of the structure.

Elpida was not certain about the expression on Pira’s face — the bitter frustration, the unwillingness to express herself in clear terms, the old pain and open-wound traumas behind her eyes. But it reminded her of a specific look she’d seen before, only a few days earlier — a million years ago.

Pira’s look of resigned anger and wounded hope reminded Elpida of some of her sisters as they had waited for death together. But without the companionship, without the solace, without the warmth of each other’s bodies.

Elpida stepped closer, close enough to reach out and take Pira’s shoulder, if the gesture seemed right. The sky smouldered beyond the remains of the metal roof.

“Pira, what you said earlier about cannibalism, I was listening. I won’t force you to eat human flesh. I will stand in front of the others and make them respect your choice. You don’t have to leave the group. I’m touched by your desire to believe in me, thank you — and I won’t let you down.”

Lies. She’d already let down everyone. Twenty four sisters, all dead. Elpida almost choked when Pira said:

“You already have.”

“Why?”

Pira blinked — no tears, just a ghost. “I’ve done things I’m not proud of. Been part of things I’m not proud of. I’m not pure, or clean. I’ve eaten human beings, human flesh, and brains, and done worse — far, far worse. All sorts of people think they have the answers, here.” She gestured up, out, at the world. “Ways to make sense of it. To make something out of it. To drag meaning from this.” She shook her head. “No. Not again. Not again. I’m not participating anymore. I’m not better than you because you eat and I don’t, I’m just not participating.”

“And I’m telling you that you don’t have to. I won’t make you.”

“But you are participating,” Pira said. “The others are participating. I thought maybe you might be different — in charge, really in charge. The others would have listened, they would have followed. But you’re going to be like all the rest.”

Elpida put real belief in her voice. “I am in charge. Eating the brains is not a slippery slope. I won’t kill to eat. And I won’t let the others do so, either. Pira, I promise. You can hold me to that. If I go back on my word, kill me.”

Pira shook her head. “You’re not in charge.”

Elpida spread her hands. “Then challenge me.”

“The nanomachines are in charge. They have you by the belly. You’re part of it now, like everyone else. The system will force you to eat other people. And you’ll do it, because you have to live. And that erodes you. You eat yourself every time you eat another. You’re not exempt. You’re not special. I was wrong about you.”

Pira’s face was unshuttered now, more so than ever before. She did not cry, but her eyes were hollow and empty.

Elpida spoke very gently. “Pira, it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“It is. You can’t change it.”

Elpida tried a different track: “What you told us about the graveworm, was that the truth? It’s really a giant nanomachine factory, with more than enough raw blue for everyone?”

Pira blinked and sighed. “As far as I know.”

“And that’s your aim? Getting inside it? Co-opting part of … all this?”

Pira’s eyes searched Elpida’s face. “You’re going to tell me that the ends justify the means.”

“If the end result is freedom from mandatory predation on each other, then yes, that end does justify eating human flesh and brains. I will eat as many kills as I need to, in order to keep this group together, alive, and get us to the combat frame.” Pira opened her mouth, but Elpida kept talking: “Pira, I understand your goal. It’s the right thing to do. And maybe it can be achieved by living on ambient nanomachines alone — but equally maybe it can’t. If we have to scavenge the dead and eat those who try to kill us, then I will do that — but I promise you two things. One: I will follow your goal of getting us into the graveworm. Not just because I can’t see any other goal, but because it makes sense to me. You’ve convinced me. I’m with you. And two: I won’t resort to predation, I won’t kill to eat. The others will follow my orders.” She extended her hand. “Will you?”

Pira stared at Elpida’s hand, then looked away, at the rubble.

Elpida read the shift in Pira’s posture and felt a thrill deep in her chest and down in her belly. Perhaps Pira thought she was being subtle. Or perhaps she was, and Elpida’s gene-altered senses and lifetime of close combat training was giving her an advantage. Or perhaps Pira wanted her to see.

Did Pira want to be forced?

Elpida decided to give Pira the opening. Perhaps she wanted to lose; Elpida would make it quick.

She dropped her hand, then sighed and smiled at the same time. “Okay, so you don’t believe in me. That’s fine too. Listen, we can still head back to the others.”

Elpida turned her head to glance back at the double doors.

Pira drew a combat knife from within her body armour and lunged for Elpida’s throat, in one unbroken fluid motion.

Quick, for a baseline human; Elpida had to give her that.

Elpida was ready — she jinked out of the way, caught Pira’s arm, pinned it against her own side, then used Pira’s own momentum to drag her forward and slam her into the floor. The flame-haired girl landed with a crash, the air forced from her lungs, head bouncing off the ground with a nasty snap. Elpida twisted Pira’s arm as she went down; fingers loosened, knife clattered free. Elpida kicked it away.

Pira tried to break Elpida’s grip with a boot-heel to the elbow — but Elpida just let go. She stepped back, hands wide, heart pumping. She was enjoying this far too much.

Pira jumped to her feet, panting for breath, shaking her head to clear her senses. She raised her fists and dropped into a crouch.

Elpida almost laughed. “Why not just shoot—”

Pira’s fist crashed into Elpida’s jaw.

Elpida went reeling. She shook her head and coughed, heart leaping and lurching, blood surging. This feeling, this kind of combat — she knew this, inside and out, she knew it like she had known every one of her sisters.

She knew what Pira wanted.

Elpida straightened up in time to block Pira’s follow-up punch, but not in time to stop Pira kneeing her in the gut. She grunted and heaved and slammed a fist into Pira’s throat. Pira’s eyes bulged in shock — but zombies didn’t need to breathe through bruised windpipes; she punched Elpida in the face again, then again, then again, pistoning her arm, smashing knuckles into mouth and nose, knocking blood from burst lips, forcing Elpida back.

Elpida’s bloodstream flooded with painblockers — an unfair advantage. She spat blood in Pira’s eyes and got a fist into her gut, driving the breath from Pira’s lungs and making her double up. Elpida scrambled to get a hold of Pira’s arms, get them behind her back, pin her somehow — but Pira was too slippery, too quick. She slammed into Elpida’s hips, arms around Elpida’s waist, and sent both of them tumbling to the floor.

They rolled together, coat and armour grinding on concrete, guns forgotten in the melee, each trying to pin the other. Elpida was taller and stronger, with a longer reach and more experience. Pira had that single full bionic arm, which hit like a brick and whipped like a snake, and she struggled like a weasel in a sack.

Elpida hadn’t fought like this in years. This wasn’t anything like the carefully delineated matches on the sparring room mats, even the most emotionally charged and important ones, the ones to establish pecking order or prove herself to some Legion onlookers who’d never seen the cadre before.

This felt like the old days. Like being thirteen years old again and discovering that she and Howl could beat each other black and blue for hours without stopping. Like the inevitable night afterward. Like fighting because it felt right and good, hot and wet and urgent.

Elpida found herself pinned. Pira slammed her shoulders to the ground, fist raised in threat.

And Elpida laughed, blood singing, loins burning.

She wanted to fuck Pira. Very badly.

Pira had been about to say something — but then she frowned and paused. Perhaps she saw the need in Elpida’s eyes.

Her mistake.

Elpida bucked her off. Pira tried to cling on, but Elpida slammed a fist into her gut and a knee into her groin. She swarmed over Pira, got her fingers into that beautiful flame-red hair, and straddled her belly, pinning Pira’s arms to her sides beneath Elpida’s iron-muscled thighs. She held Pira’s head to the floor.

“Yield,” Elpida panted.

“No,” Pira spat.

“Yield. I’m stronger. Have you pinned. Better at this. I win—”

Pira jackknifed her entire body. She kicked her feet and reared up. Head-butted Elpida in the face. Nose bone went snap; blood exploded everywhere. But Elpida held on and slammed a fist into Pira’s sternum. Pira wheezed, whining with shock.

“Ahhhhhh,” Elpida groaned, shaking her head. Her nose felt loose. Blood splattered down onto Pira’s face. “I win. Yield. Give. Give!”

Pira went limp. “Win. You win. A-alright. But no— no flesh— no—”

“Don’t have to. Told you. Won’t make you. Shoot me. If I do. Shoot me.”

They both panted for breath, bruised and sore and bleeding. Elpida began to reach back behind her, one hand going between Pira’s legs to grab and squeeze and knead—

Elpida stopped herself before making contact. This fight did not mean the same thing to Pira as it did to her. With any member of her cadre — yes! But Pira was not of the cadre.

Quivering with repressed desire, Elpida let go. Pira just lay there panting beneath her. Elpida’s blood dripped onto Pira’s face.

Pira’s tongue emerged, pink and soft. She licked at the blood on her lips.

“Blood,” Elpida croaked.

Pira blinked slowly, clearing her eyes. “Ah?”

“Blood. Nanos. Are there nanomachines in our blood?”

Pira blinked again. Her tongue retracted back into her mouth. She swallowed. “Of course.”

“Drink up.”

Pira huffed. She rolled her eyes. And she licked her lip again.

Elpida rolled off Pira. She lay on the floor, exhausted, humming, ready for more — for more than Pira could give. Pira licked the blood off her lips, then used her fingers to wipe her face, licking them clean. Slowly, numb, conquered.

After a moment, Elpida said: “I’m serious. Drink my blood. You don’t wanna eat, drink me.”

“That’s still participation. Being part of the cycle. The system.”

“Won’t let you starve.”

“Mm.”

Elpida sat up first. Pira followed. They were both bloody and bruised. Elpida could feel her wounds throbbing, black eyes and an aching jaw and a broken nose — but less and less with every minute. The meal of brains had done her good; her flesh was healing, faster than before. Pira had Elpida’s blood all over her face. She stared at Elpida, open-faced at last — and more bitter and sullen than ever.

Elpida told her: “Kagami thinks you’re a traitor. I don’t. I think you’re with me.”

“Pira isn’t my original name.”

Elpida shrugged. “It’s the name you use. That makes it your name.”

Pira shook her head. “It’s a zombie name. A here-name. I use it in front of you people — all of you. All descendants of the culture which murdered mine. All of you did this, created this. All your cities, all your teeming millions. You all did this.”

Elpida said, “If you want to share another name with me, you can. I won’t tell the others. Or the name of where you came from, or—”

“It would mean nothing to you. They erased us.” She shook her head. “Being here, over and over, has erased who I was. I told you before, it’s like asking me to share who I was in the womb. It means nothing.”

Elpida said, “Telokopolis is eternal. And Telokopolis has a place for all, whoever you are, and wherever you came from. I promise you, Pira. You’re human. You’re one of us. I won’t know about your people, because Telokopolis made us all one.”

Pira smiled, sour and beaten. “You really are one of them.”

“And you’re one of us.”

Pira swallowed. She shuddered once, then raised her head. Her eyes were shining and vulnerable. “I’ve been dead a hundred times longer than I lived, but I still believe in one thing, I remember that I remember: I shit on the memory of Caesar. I shit on all Caesars, all they build with ash and blood, and all the flesh they gorge upon.”

Elpida waited, but that was all; what a strange name Pira had uttered.

She reached out, gripped Pira’s arm, and said: “Pira. I don’t even know who ‘Caesar’ was.”

Pira stared — then laughed. Just a little huff through her nose. Bloody-mouthed and bloody-toothed. But real. “Okay.”

“Pira, I’m with you. Are you with me?”

“I can smell brains on your breath.”

“But are you with me?”

Pira sighed. “You win.”

“Good enough. I’ll get us to the combat frame. And then, the graveworm.”

Pira looked down at herself. “We’re a mess. You and I.”

“Mm.” Elpida rubbed at her own face. Her nose crunched. She tried to set it straight.

“What are we going to tell the others?”

Elpida stood up, slow and aching. “Tell them we fucked.”

Pira blinked. “What?”

“It would make sense if you were one of mine.” She offered her hand to Pira, to help her up. Pira stared, then accepted, but with a frown.

“One of your what?”

Elpida shook her head. “One of my sisters. Never mind. Come on, Pira. Let’s go rejoin the others.”

Pira stayed where she was as Elpida turned to leave. She said: “I still don’t think you’re any different.”

Elpida said, “Maybe. Maybe not. Shoot me if I fail. Are you willing to let me try?”

Pira picked up her fallen combat knife. She held it for a moment, staring at Elpida. She raised it — then slid it away, inside her body armour.

“For now.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Nothing like a good fist fight to get the blood pumping, eh? Elpida certainly thinks so, though this act means more to her than Pira could even guess. A slippery slope, perhaps? And what about Pira? She certainly doesn’t seem like a traitor, in the heat of the moment, pinned beneath Elpida’s thighs. Gosh! This chapter turned out much, much more horny than my initial outline suggested, but I am extremely happy with it. And so is Elpida. Perhaps she can finally get this lot moving. Unless … there might be a little surprise, next chapter.

No patreon link this week! Why? Well, because it’s the end of the month! In the meantime, check out this incredible fanart of Serin, by the reader sporktown heroine, over on the fanart page! I absolutely love this one, so much. Just look at her! Perfect.

No TWF link either. Why? Because this week I’d like to do a shout-out to one of my own favourite stories.

Feast or Famine by VoraVora is a wonderfully dark work of psychological horror, full of wit and introspection and philosophy, and also incredibly funny. The setting is deeply bizarre in the best of ways, the protagonist is unique and normal terrifying very normal! And, as Vora herself has told me, the story is explicitly influenced somewhat by the first parts of my other web serial, Katalepsis. If this sounds at all interesting to you, I highly recommend giving it a read! Great time to catch up with it too, since it’s on a short break.

And finally, thank you! Thank you so much for reading my little story. Necroepilogos is going so much better than I could ever have hoped for, and I hope you are enjoying the ride. Until next chapter!

Content Warnings

Cannibalism, so much cannibalism
Brains
Butchery of humans
Reference to domestic violence
Ableist slurs

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Serin left, a hunchbacked giant melting into the red-tinted gloom.

Elpida turned and hurried back to the refuge — too late; by the time she stepped through the door the argument was raging beyond control.

“—lied to us!” Kagami was spitting at Pira, words clenched between her teeth. “What else have you lied about?! Feel like confessing? Filling us in on all the rest of the sordid details you oh-so-conveniently left out? But you won’t, will you? Because you’ve got other plans for us.”

Vicky moaned softly: “Kaga, stop. Please, just stop.”

Nobody had done as Elpida had ordered. Kagami was still on her feet, sagging against a wall; Atyle had not helped Vicky — she was just sat there watching the show; Vicky was doubled over, stringy bile hanging from her lips, staring at Serin’s gift; Ilyusha had not covered the severed heads with a spare coat, but was clutching Amina, her eyes downcast and defeated.

Pira faced Kagami, arms folded, face shuttered. “I have not lied about anything.”

“By omission!” Kagami snapped. She pointed at Pira, punctuating her words with jabs of her finger. “Look! Look at her! Think about it! Everything we know about our situation comes from her mouth, from what she told us. The rest of us have no idea what’s really going on. She could have spun any tale she likes to keep us from asking too much.”

Elpida stepped forward, commanding the space and raising her voice: “Kagami, stop, right—”

Kagami raged on. “All that shit about graveworms and safe zones, all of it could be so much bullshit. We have no way of knowing — except you.” She sneered — at Ilyusha. “And you’re not telling us anything useful either, you brain-damaged borged-up berserker cripple!”

Ilyusha raised her head and showed her teeth. One red-clawed foot stamped on the floor, puncturing the plastic. “Fucking reptile! Say that again!”

Vicky moaned, “Please, please stop, we can’t—”

Elpida raised both hands and risked a shout: “Ilyusha, down, now. Kagami, stop—”

Kagami pulled a silvery oblong from one coat pocket and brandished it in her left hand; it was one of the inactive drones she’d taken from the armoury.

“I’m not fucking afraid of you!” she shouted, red in the face and spewing spittle. Then to Ilyusha: “You either, you fucking midget!”

Ilyusha let go of Amina and clicked forward on her claws. Her tail arced up, cutting the air with that sharp red tip.

Elpida moved fast: she closed with Kagami in two paces, pinned her left wrist against the wall with a sharp slap of flesh on concrete, and tore the inactive drone from her fingers. Kagami was too shocked to resist, recoiling and gaping. Her knees threatened to give out — but before she could slip to the floor, Elpida caught her under the chin and forced Kagami to look up at her.

“Stop. Or I will discipline you.”

Kagami just panted. She was so tiny compared to Elpida’s height and musculature. “Uh— uhh— uh—”

“Will you stop?”

A jerky nod.

“Kagami, breathe. Breathe in, then out. There you go. Now, sit.”

Elpida let go. Kagami slid to the floor, clutching her bruised wrist and panting for breath, her long black hair all matted to her forehead and face. Elpida resisted the urge to look over her shoulder at Ilyusha; it was always better to give the impression that she did not doubt her comrades for a second. She trusted Ilyusha at her back. She would not suggest otherwise.

“Kagami,” she said. Kagami flinched. “Follow my orders, or I will make you follow my orders. Do you understand?”

The words tasted like ash, spent long ago; Elpida was not Commander to her companions. Commander Elpida would only get everyone killed, just like her cadre. But right now she wielded the authority, however rusted and ruined, to avert worse outcomes.

Kagami nodded.

Elpida held up the drone. It was heavy for its small size. “Have you figured out how to activate these?”

“N-no. No. But I … I might.”

“If you can power it up, will you use it against us? Will you use it against Pira?”

Kagami swallowed. Her eyes darted from Elpida’s face, across the room, searching the others.

Elpida put a whip crack into her voice, “Answer the question.”

Kagami flinched. “Pira is a traitor.”

“Wrong answer.”

“She—”

Elpida crouched so she was eye level with Kagami. “Promise me you will not point a weapon at any of your si—”

Sisters. The word almost slipped out. But they were not sisters — not like her cadre.

Kagami frowned. Elpida tried again: “Promise me you will not point a weapon at any of us.”

Across the room, Atyle chuckled softly. “Promises, warrior? Words are wind, flowing and gone.”

Elpida ignored that. She knew Kagami’s type. A real promise would carry weight. “Kagami. Promise me.”

Almond-shaped eyes burned with wounded humiliation. Elpida saw she needed to go deeper. She leaned in close; Kagami flinched, but there was nowhere to retreat except through the wall. Elpida allowed cheek to brush against cheek.

She whispered: “Kagami, I would like to trust you. I know you drank three cannisters of the raw nanomachines, last night—”

Kagami whimpered. “No … ”

“I’m not angry. I’m confused. I gave you permission to do that, to drink what you needed. There was no need to hide it. But I want to trust you. If you have doubts about Pira, we can discuss them. But you cannot do this in front of the group, not when we have to deal with issues of survival. I need to deal with those severed heads — to secure our resources, quickly. Not get bogged down in discipline issues. Do you understand?”

Kagami hiccuped softly. Then she nodded.

Elpida added: “Promise me.”

“F-fine. Fuck you, Elpida. I promise. No pointing guns. Get off me!”

Elpida leaned back. She pressed the silvery drone back into Kagami’s left hand. Kagami tried to flinch away from the contact, but Elpida made a point of holding Kagami’s grip for a second; her hand was hot and sweaty. Then Elpida let go and stood up.

Ilyusha was watching, head tilted to one side, sullen and dull-eyed. Her tail was down, her claws retracted.

Elpida said: “Illy, I need you to do something for me. Are you comfortable handling the severed heads?”

Ilyusha shrugged. “Guess so.”

“I need you to wrap them in a coat or a spare t-shirt, then take them into the next room — the first door on your right when you exit into the corridor. It’s a much smaller room with a couple of desks. I need you to put the heads on one of the desks. Leave them wrapped up. Can you do that for me?”

Ilyusha snorted, but she did as Elpida asked: she crossed to the backpacks, extracted a spare coat, then wrapped up the heads and their string-net bag in a loose bundle. Amina followed at her heels, but avoided looking directly at Serin’s gory gift.

When Ilyusha left the room, Kagami almost laughed, and said: “Don’t sneak a bite.”

Elpida turned back to the others. “Vicky, sit down. Take one of the chairs. That’s an order.”

“O-okay. Sure. Sure thing, Elpi. Sure.” Vicky sat heavily, hunched forward, hanging her head. Then she mumbled: “Oh God, oh God, I’m … I’m hungry. Why am I hungry? Uh … ” She made a soft retching sound. Her dark skin was shiny with sweat.

Elpida filled her lungs to give herself a moment to think. She felt that clenching hunger as well, the tingle of salivary glands and the desire to bite into soft, yielding protein. Necessary cannibalism was not a shock for her — but for the others that hunger and its inevitable solution might undermine their morale to the point of destruction. To leave each of her sisters — her comrades, she corrected herself — to their own decisions or actions would invite a dozen different kinds of potential disaster. She had to shepherd them through this, to one end or another. Together they might endure. Left alone with hunger and choice, they may shatter.

She put the confidence of command into her voice, though she felt little: “I won’t repeat what Serin has already said. I’m going to take personal custody of her gift, and—”

Pira said: “Of severed human heads. Call them what they are.”

Vicky groaned.

Kagami laughed. “Brains.”

Elpida stayed calm. “I am going to take custody of the gift. I have the strongest constitution when it comes to dealing with human remains, so I will take the responsibility of preparing them.”

Vicky moaned: “Why am I hungry? Oh fuck— fuck, I’m—” Her stomach rumbled. She made a slurping sound. “I’m d-drooling … no … ”

Across the room, another stomach rumbled: Atyle. She laughed softly. “It seems the gods have given me hunger, too. Flesh presents, and moves other flesh.”

Pira said, “I refuse to participate. Vicky, you don’t have to do this, you don’t have to be part of this. Atyle, you as well. I’m going for a walk. Come with me.”

Atyle just watched, amused at the corners of her mouth. Vicky looked up, wide-eyed and panting. “What? Sorry?”

“I’m going for a walk,” Pira repeated. “Come with me.”

Elpida said, “Wait, Pira. What do you mean, a walk?”

“A walk.”

“Where?”

“Around. Vicky, come with me.”

Vicky glanced at Elpida, confused and blinking. “I-I don’t—”

But Kagami spoke first: “Don’t listen to her! Pira is either a traitor or an idiot who refuses to survive. Go with her and she’ll probably gut you herself.”

Vicky shook her head. “I don’t— Kaga, stop, please.”

Kagami said, “Stay right there!”

Pira was already slinging her submachine gun and walking to the door. She ignored Elpida’s protest and Vicky’s stammered question. As she slipped out into the corridor, Elpida went after her. A flicker of flame-red hair flowed in the gloom.

“Pira! Pira, where are you going?”

Pira paused, very still with her back to Elpida. “For a walk.”

“Are you leaving the group?”

Pira said nothing.

Elpida repeated herself: “Pira, are you leaving the group?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Will you talk to me and argue your position? If there’s something I don’t yet understand, some intel I’m lacking, some reason we shouldn’t eat those brains, I will listen.”

Pira spoke low and soft: “It always starts with carrion. You tell yourself you have no choice. They’re already dead. You need to survive. And you’re right — those heads aren’t really alive. Their occupants have long since fled. The twitching is just electrical ghosts. But then you get the taste. The habit. It becomes easier.”

“Pira. Listen to me. I won’t kill to eat. I won’t be a predator. We need to get everyone through this, we need to stick together. If we can reach the combat frame—”

“The only option is not to participate.”

“I respect that. I won’t force you to do anything. Will you come back?”

“In a bit.”

“Stay away from the windows. Be safe, Pira.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

Pira walked off in near silence. She slipped around the nearest corner and vanished into the depths of the building.

Amina and Ilyusha watched from the next doorway along, a pair of pale little faces. Amina bit her lower lip, clinging to Ilyusha’s side.

Ilyusha snorted. “Just another kind of reptile.”

Elpida took personal custody of the severed heads — alone, separate, in private.

She left the others together in the refuge, now that she was reasonably sure the argument had been defused. She asked them to wait a few minutes while she dealt with the grisly necessities. Her plan was half-formed and poorly communicated, her thoughts blurred by the pain of healing wounds and the pangs of hunger in her belly; but this task could not wait, this question could not be left to fester unexpressed in fearful minds.

This way, the others would not have to see the worst of it, and there would be privacy for those who wished; Elpida would be present for anybody who needed company. It was all she could do.

They needed to eat, and they needed to do it now, more for psychological than physiological reasons.

The room next to the refuge was tiny, with layers of ancient paint on the walls and two desks crammed in back-to-back. One desk held the gutted shell of a personal computer terminal. The other held the coat-wrapped bundle.

No windows; when Elpida closed the door she was plunged into darkness. Her eyes adjusted instantly.

Elpida sat down at the desk. The chair creaked beneath her weight — wood. Another obscenity.

She peeled back the coat and laid out the severed heads.

Eyeless, jawless, their tongues removed. Gaping raw holes stared at nothing. Scraps of hair clung to their scalps. They didn’t bleed from the ragged wounds of their necks; the blood was already dry and sticky. They twitched and flexed what muscles they had left in their faces, but they did not seem to respond to Elpida’s touch. Perhaps Pira had told the truth — the inhabitants of this meat had already left.

Elpida tucked her long white hair down the back of her armoured coat. She selected a head and put the others to one side. She drew her combat knife. She hoped that the blade from the tomb armoury was up to the task — carbon steel, perhaps better. If not, this work would ruin the weapon.

She picked up the head and whispered into its left ear: “I’m sorry this has happened to you. Hurry home to your sisters. Hurry home soon.”

The head — the revenant, what was left of her — did not react.

Elpida got to work.

She used her knife to cut the soft palate and split the hard palate from below, punching through thin bone with all her strength; her fractured wrist made the task more difficult. She used the hilt to crack the cranium, the forehead, and the delicate bones of the face; the popping, crunching sound echoed in the tiny, dark room. The head stopped twitching. The scalp barely bled at all, slow and sticky. She levered the skull apart, first with blade, then with fingers. The bones cracked. She cut the meninges and the cranial nerve attachments. She used her bare hands to extract the prize.

A pinkish grey blob, wrinkly and still warm. She placed it carefully on a spare t-shirt. The air smelled of fat and blood. Elpida’s mouth watered. Her stomach cramped.

Was the brain still alive? How were these heads still twitching with activity, when she had died at the Silico’s hands outside the tomb? Was it density of nanomachines, or something else which kept them going? If she had let go while dead, would her body have writhed like these severed heads?

Elpida repeated the process with the other four skulls. She whispered the same cadre prayer to every one of them. She lined up the bone fragments as she went, keeping them together.

As she worked, Elpida heard a pair of distant gunshots — far away, beyond the walls, beyond other buildings. Serin’s rifle. Was she hunting, too? Elpida hoped she was not shooting at Pira.

When she was done she had five fresh brains, liberated from their former owners.

Her hands were covered in sticky red gore. Her mouth was watering so much she had to keep swallowing to save from drooling; her nanomachine metabolism had woken up, asleep since she had climbed out of that metal coffin in the tomb.

She felt very far from that resurrection chamber now — from the clean metal, her own fresh skin, and the blue glow of nanomachine miracles. Now she was cutting up brains with a combat knife, in a tiny dark room, her hands covered in greasy blood, her ears filled with the cracking of bones, her stomach rumbling for obscene meat.

But it was all part of the same process, the same system, or ecosystem. She saw that now. Tombs and graveworms full of nanomachines, more than any one revenant could ever need. These dead women she had just filleted, they had also been reborn in those machines, against their will. And so many like them were scuttling in the ruins, eating each other for scraps.

Born to live, to eat, to feel this hunger for each other’s flesh, to … want?

To want.

The gravekeeper’s self-designation. Want.

Philosophise as much as she liked, but Elpida could not ignore her hunger.

She licked her fingers clean. She couldn’t taste much except the muted iron tang of dry blood. Her hands were trembling. It was not enough.

Elpida picked up her combat knife again and cut a small chunk of pinkish-grey meat from one of the brains. She raised it toward her mouth on the tip of the blade. Drool ran down her chin. She was panting. The smell was intoxicating — meaty-creamy, rich and dark, blood-red and hot and—

“Found your rations at last, wind-up soldier?”

Elpida froze. The voice was inside her head, amused and laughing, but devoid of tone and timbre.

“Graveworm? Graveworm?” Elpida’s rasping breath filled the cramped darkness. “Graveworm!”

“Trying to get my attention like this. That’s what she would have done. What she always did. Too aggressive for most girls. It’s been so long.”

“Graveworm, I can hear you. Are you talking to me?”

“Not really. It’s not as if you’ll commit. Promise me flowers but treat me like a mushroom. But you never did that. Wait, no … I … ”

“Graveworm, what’s your name? Mine is Elpida.”

A long pause. Darkness. Hunger. The smell of brains and blood.

Then: “Elpida? No. You’re not.”

“Graveworm? What’s your name? Graveworm? Graveworm?”

Silence.

Elpida thought she might go mad, but she said it anyway. She whispered it.

“Howl?”

Nothing.

She waited for several minutes, but there was no further reply. She lowered the combat knife and the quivering morsel of brain; she exerted her will upon her trembling body.

Eating alone, in the dark, driven by darker desires. Howl would be ashamed of her. Howl would tell her this plan was nonsense. Howl would be correct.

Elpida wrapped the brains in the t-shirt. She picked up the greasy wet bundle in one hand, carried her combat knife in the other, and returned to the refuge.

Everyone looked up when she entered. Kagami was slumped where she had fallen, but Vicky had moved to sit next to her; they had been in the middle of talking in low, private voices. Ilyusha and Amina sat not too far away — Ilyusha was sulky and quiet, Amina nervous and clutching her friend’s clawed bionic hand. Atyle was serene and distant, straight-backed, relaxed.

Vicky said: “Elpi? I thought you said you were gonna call us, thump on the wall, or … oh, oh fuck.”

Kagami hissed: “Look away if you have to, you idiot.”

Elpida sat down and laid the t-shirt on the floor. She peeled it open. Vicky looked away, but Kagami stared, dead-eyed and drawn. Ilyusha snorted without humour. Amina bit her lower lip. Atyle watched, curious and detached

Elpida lifted her combat knife and ate the chunk of brain matter.

It was soft and creamy, more like firm scrambled eggs than meat. The taste was savoury, bloody, and raw. She chewed and swallowed. Her hunger craved more. She put down her knife.

“In my cadre, with my sisters, we ate together. We transgressed together. I had thought that privacy would be easier on all of us — us here, I mean. Now I believe that was a mistake.” She gestured at the brains. “If this is necessary for survival, I will not be ashamed of it.”

Kagami started laughing softly. Vicky made a nauseated sound. Ilyusha groaned something under her breath.

Elpida went on. “No, I’m serious. These people were already dead — or at least as good as dead. I will not kill to eat, but I will eat to live. If this is what we have to do to survive, then that is a choice each of us will have to make. You don’t have to eat here. You don’t have to eat at all. If you want to go next door and eat in private, you can. Nobody is going to stop you. If you wish to take Pira’s route, you can do that as well.” Elpida took the gamble: “But I would prefer that you all eat here, together, in front of each other. There will be no judgement. No snide remarks. No insults.”

Ilyusha made a soft ‘pffft’ sound with her lips.

Vicky said, voice shaking: “Fucking hell, Elpi. It’s human meat. How can we do that and keep being ourselves afterwards?”

Elpida put real confidence into her voice. It was her only handhold.

“I intend to reach the fallen combat frame. I intend to pursue Pira’s quest of accessing the inside of the graveworm. Whatever is really happening here, whatever this system of nanomachines is set up to achieve, it is making us eat each other. Breaking into a graveworm, finding the Necromancers in the towers — maybe that’s a way to end it, or to change it somehow. I don’t know. Vicky, I won’t pretend to know for sure. But I think that is a good reason to eat, to stay alive, and to keep going. If this necessary cannibalism disgusts you, then I promise: one of my goals will be to end it.”

Elpida felt relief as she saw the stiffening effect her words had on the others. Ilyusha looked a little less ashamed. Kagami sighed, resigned. Vicky nodded, even if slowly.

Fine words for a fine intent. But for now they were just seven — no, six girls, sitting on the floor in a dim room in a ruined city full of walking corpses, eating brains.

Ilyusha and Amina ate first, with little trepidation. Ilyusha guided Amina to the t-shirt on the floor, then ate with one hand, gouging chunks of pink-grey meat from the brains with her red claws. She didn’t look up as she chewed.

“Illy,” Elpida said. “There’s no shame in survival.”

“Mm.”

Amina used two fingers, pinching carefully as if the meat was dirty, eating only what Ilyusha passed to her. She ate little — but she did eat, without disgust. Whenever she paused Ilyusha nudged her to keep chewing.

“There’s five brains and seven of us,” Elpida explained. She took her own share slowly, with the point of her knife, taking care to pay attention to her hunger and how fast it was sated. “That’s approximately a seventh of a brain each.”

Kagami snorted. “What about Pira? She’s ‘one of us’, yes? She doesn’t want her share. Made that clear enough.”

“A seventh of a brain each. For now.”

Atyle ate with amused dignity, showing no hesitation at consuming human flesh. She pared pieces of brain off with a spare knife, eating it like fruit, licking the juices from her fingers with little pops and slurps. She sat across from Elpida and watched her in return.

Kagami cut tiny pieces at arm’s length, placing them in her mouth with shaking hands and swallowing without chewing. She kept sneaking little glances at Elpida.

But Vicky had a problem. She just stared.

Elpida did not let her suffer alone. “Vicky? You don’t have to eat if you don’t want to. You don’t even have to watch.”

Vicky slurped down a mouthful of her own saliva, then wiped her chin. “It’s not that. This … this isn’t my first rodeo.”

Kagami snorted with laughter. “Really? You really are pre-republic, aren’t you?”

Elpida asked: “Your first what?”

Vicky swallowed more saliva. Her stomach rumbled. She answered in a halting voice, staring at the grisly meal: “This isn’t the first time I’ve eaten human being.”

Elpida glanced at the others. Atyle was listening in alert curiosity. Ilyusha had tilted her head too. Kagami was no longer laughing.

“Vicky?” Elpida said. “Do you want to share?”

“When I was little. Nine, maybe ten, I don’t remember.” Vicky’s voice was very far away. “When we were in the first camp, south of Chicago. There was a famine, I guess — well, they called it a famine, but there was plenty of grain coming up the Mississippi, up the canals. Everybody knew it. The arcology, they had their ‘humanitarian nutrient blocks’, but oh no, no no, that was only for citizens.” She shook her head. “And you weren’t no citizen if you didn’t have your papers. Nobody in the camps had papers. My family had been there since before the old empire, as far we knew. But no papers.” She swallowed hard. “I got sick that winter. Flu, or something. Parents didn’t have much food, just thin gruel, shitty oats. People died in the camp all the time, got forgotten in their tents. Or got murdered. Plenty of meat there. I remember them arguing — my parents, I mean. Badly. Dad won the argument. Mum had a black eye.” Vicky took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “But then the next day there was meat in the gruel. Not much. They didn’t eat it. Saved it all for me.”

Elpida reached over and squeezed Vicky’s shoulder. Vicky looked down at her lap.

Vicky said, “They never told me, later. Figured maybe they thought I’d not remember. Happier not remembering.”

Kagami hissed: “You fucking moron.”

Vicky looked up, blinking. “W-what? I—”

Elpida jumped in. “Kagami, no—”

Kagami snapped, ignoring Elpida. “Never be ashamed of survival. You pre-republic animals did what you could. Like being ashamed of living in the dark ages, huh!” She jabbed a finger at the brains. “Now, you going to eat or starve? Come on. Make a choice.”

Vicky ate. Slowly, at Kagami’s urging, she ate. She wretched once, but kept it down.

As Vicky chewed and swallowed, Atyle spoke up. “The reluctant one here is not the only habitual cannibal among us. I too have tasted the flesh. Twice ever.”

Elpida frowned. “As have I. That makes three of us, out of seven. Is that a coincidence?” She looked around at the others and caught the haunted spark in Ilyusha’s flat grey eyes. “Illy?”

Ilyusha’s lips curled in disgust. “Gotta eat to live.”

“But, before this? Before being resurrected for the first time?”

Ilyusha looked at the floor. She didn’t want to talk about it.

Atyle purred: “Aha. That makes four. And the little rabbit?” She gestured toward Amina. “I would wager a fifth. What of you, moon spirit?”

Kagami scowled back. “I was raised on solid food, grown in real soil. I was not pipe-fed on recyc tank slurry. No, you dirt-mated womb-born, I’ve never eaten human flesh before.”

Atyle smiled. “Can you be certain?”

“Yes. I—”

“Did your guardians and attendants never lie to you, not once? Your mother? Your father?”

Kagami paused. Her eyes wandered down to the brains. “No. No, he would never. I was never fed recyc. Never, never … ”

Atyle looked at Elpida. “Coincidence, warrior?”

Elpida shook her head. “That seems unlikely. What about Pira? If she’s the odd one out … ”

All cannibals in life, at least briefly. Elpida could not imagine what that meant. Selected for likelihood they would survive by preying on others? Or was this just a quirk of this single group, some criteria that had no greater meaning?

Kagami snorted. “We’re all zombies now. That’s all it means. If Pira wants to fu—”

Brrrrrrrt.

From deep in the belly of the structure: the sound of a submachine gun discharge, full-auto, trigger down.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Munch munch munch chomp chomp chomp yum yum yum. The research I had to look up for this chapter has almost certainly put me on some kind of ‘potential cannibal’ government watchlist. GCHQ, I swear, all these guides about cracking skulls with minimal tools, they are for a story! Look, here it is! Anyway, Elpida and the others are finally fed, except for Pira, who is fed up. And apparently shooting at something.

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

Patreon! Lookie, it’s a link.

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m currently trying to make time to write a few more chapters ahead, but I can’t promise anything on a specific schedule yet, as you can probably tell from my repeated efforts. I’ll get there eventually though!

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

And! Thank you! Thank you for reading my story! I’m so happy with how Necroepilogos has been going so far, having a lot of fun with where this is headed, and excited for the next few arcs (and beyond!) I hope you are too. Until next chapter!

Content Warnings

Carnism/discussion of meat eating (I’m serious, if you’re vegan or vegetarian this one might be rough)
Cannibalism
Discussion of cannibal philosophy
Severed and reanimated body parts
Vomiting
Abortion metaphor

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“Starving.”

Elpida echoed Serin’s choice of word — but it wasn’t a question.

Elpida had suspected the truth of their metabolic needs since Pira had explained the nanomachine mechanics of their undead bodies. She was not good at denial, or pretend lack of comprehension, or learned helplessness; Elpida’s mind had already found the logical conclusion. She had not thought about it very much; she had hoped that Pira was correct about the ambient nanomachine particulate in the atmosphere around the graveworm. But now she was wounded, and slow, and her body needed fuel.

Serin said, “Starvation. Tends to happen. When you don’t eat.”

Serin’s blood-red eyes crinkled at the corners: she was smiling behind the black teeth painted on her metal mask. She towered over Elpida and Kagami, deep in the tar-thick gloom of that filthy corridor, hidden from the midday twilight of the undead sun in the grave of the sky. The hulking revenant stank like wet wood and meaty fungus.

Kagami was clutching the sleeve of Elpida’s armoured coat. She panted as she spoke: “She m-means- she means we’re not engaging in cannibalism. We’re not eating the flesh- t-the nanomachine-flesh, from the zombies. Other zombies! Fuck! That is what you mean, isn’t it? Serin? It’s necessary for survival here, isn’t it? Eating flesh? That’s what you mean. Say it! Just say it!”

Elpida said, “Kagami, take a deep breath.”

“We don’t need oxygen, but we need meat!”

“Kagami, breathe. Now.”

Kagami drew in a shuddering breath.

Serin made a metallic rasp. “Wise.”

Elpida addressed Serin: “I don’t feel any hunger. I haven’t felt hunger since we arrived here — sorry, since we were resurrected.”

Serin tilted her head from side to side; vertebrae cracked and popped in sequence. She looked out of the bank of windows, across the rotten teeth of the corpse-city. She said: “Not an injector? Confused? No?”

“Excuse me?”

Serin settled her blood-red bionic eyes on Elpida once again. “Some zombies never ate in life. Don’t know how to chew and swallow. Only inject into nutrient ports. Others wake without their microbe-stack gut replacements. A few feed like plants.” A spindly finger pointed out of the windows, at the black sky. “Not enough light for photosynthesis. Hunger is strange to them. But that type is rare enough. Rarer still to live long. You’re not one?”

Elpida shook her head. “In life I ate with my mouth. I am genetically modified for increased starvation endurance, but I know how hunger feels. I don’t think we have any strange eaters in our group, either. Serin, I’m serious, I’ve not felt hunger, and neither has anybody else. Kagami, have you?”

Kagami swallowed. “Not … exactly.”

Serin chuckled. “Not hungry for meat. For what lives within the meat.”

Elpida sighed. “Yes, I follow the logic. We need fresh nanomachines. But nobody has spoken of feeling—”

“Nothing?” Serin rasped. She dipped her head close again, leaning down eye-to-eye with Elpida, her neck and spine moving like the body of a snake. Red orbs burned in the dark. “No need at all? A thirst? An urge? Desire to mount? Fuck? Take? It comes in different ways. We are ridden by machine ghosts. Sometimes they pull the wrong strings. Tell me true — you have felt no needs?”

Elpida paused, then told the truth: “I have. Twice. I felt thirsty when looking at the cannisters of raw nanomachines. I can’t deny that. Is that what—”

“Meat.”

It was a cheap trick — the kind of conversational feint that Old Lady Nunnus would have loved: Serin had coaxed Elpida into recalling her own thirst, then forced her to imagine the object of attention. Drawing a tiny neurological pathway.

But Elpida shook her head. “I don’t feel any hunger … for … ”

Elpida’s salivary glands tingled. Her stomach spasmed and clenched. Her imagination filled her mouth with the taste of hot, red, dripping meat, sliding off bone and slipping down her throat. For a split second she was speechless; in life, in Telokopolis, she had eaten plenty of vat-grown clone-meat, both cooked and raw, plain and fancy, red and white and everything in between. But real meat was extraordinarily rare in Telokopolis; the genetic stocks of the buried fields were too valuable to be served up as food. And besides, why bother with butchery and slaughter when the city itself could grow as much as the population needed?

Except once, for Elpida. The very first time she had tasted meat. That had been human.

This urge, this hunger, did not recall the regular routines of cloned protein. It dredged a deeper memory.

Elpida swallowed down a mouthful of saliva.

Kagami had it far, far worse; she gasped, panting for breath, throat thick with need. “Oh … n-no … ”

Serin straightened up, grinning behind her mask. “There. The shell is broken. Have fun.”

Kagami forced out a strangled laugh. “Oh, yes, as if eating human meat would be the obvious fucking conclusion to all this, in the absence of hunger. Of course. Stupid us! Fucking cannibals.” She spat drool on the floor. “Should have glassed the surface when we could. Fuck Earth. Fuck all of you!”

Serin turned blood-deep eyes on Kagami. Elpida felt Kagami’s hand tighten on her sleeve and heard Kagami swallow. But the petite, doll-like woman held her ground. Elpida was impressed.

“Fuck you, cannibal. Don’t look at me like that.”

Serin laughed. “Once bitten, twice shy. For you, six times. No?”

Kagami spat again. “Fuck you, zombie. Why is everyone down here obsessed with eating each other!?”

Serin said, “Eat or die. Eat and grow. Noble fools become food.”

Elpida took a deep breath and took control of herself. The strange hunger was already passing. “Pira said we didn’t need food, didn’t need to eat. She was very clear that proximity to the graveworm would sustain us on ambient nanomachines alone. Are you saying that isn’t true?”

Serin made that hissing metal rasp again, sniffing loudly. “I can smell your wounds. Both of you. Falling apart. Ready to drop. Easy prey. You can sit and heal for a year — if the worm does. Or you can eat.”

Elpida said, “I have no ethical problem with human meat, but cannibalism is going to be difficult for the others to accept.”

Serin turned her head to look at the wall. Tiny lenses flexed and focused inside her blood-red bionic eyes. “Others, mm. ‘Pira’? Must have a word with ‘Pira’.”

Elpida allowed one hand to drift back to her submachine gun. Was that recognition in Serin’s rasping metal voice? Elpida asked: “You don’t know Pira, do you?”

“No.”

“If you do, and this is a trick to kill her, then I will fight you, Serin. She’s one of us.”

“Huuuunh,” Serin made a sound that might have been a laugh. “No. A word. And a gift. Your others can decide for themselves.” She turned back to Elpida and Kagami. “Lead on, false Necromancer. Show me your comrades.”

Elpida said: “No violence.”

Behind her mask, Serin grinned. They both knew she could cut them to pieces if she wished.

Serin extended another spindly pale arm from inside her black robes; Elpida recognised the exposed tattoos — a row of nine black skulls, with little crosses for eyes, limp tongues hanging from dead jaws, and comical bullet-holes in their foreheads. Each skull was crossed out: kill markings for the death cult who Serin hunted. At the head of the tally was the same symbol as on Ilyusha’s t-shirt: a crescent intersected by a line.

Serin tapped her own arm. “Showing my side. In case of twitchy trigger fingers.”

Elpida led Serin back into the depths of the structure. The towering revenant followed with barely a whisper of cloth against the cracked tiles — though Elpida could detect a faint infrasound hum, far too low for unmodified human hearing, so quiet that she couldn’t pinpoint the source within Serin’s body. Kagami smothered her pride for the return journey; she clung to Elpida’s arm for support, swallowing the pain of her bionic legs in little grunts and gulps.

When they reached the refuge, Elpida knocked on the door. She called out, low and calm. “It’s us. We have a guest — a friendly. Leave your guns down. Fingers off triggers. Acknowledge, please.”

A chorus of confused murmurs. Vicky raised her voice: “Elpi, what’s wrong?” Ilyusha made a snarling noise. Elpida heard the click-crunch of a charging handle — Pira’s submachine gun.

Atyle called out: “The warrior brings a mystery at her back. But she is not coerced.”

“Atyle is right,” Elpida replied through the door. “We’re not being threatened. Guns down — that means you, Pira. No violence. We’re entering now.”

Elpida opened the door and led the way, with Kagami hanging off her arm. Serin followed. She had to duck to get through the door frame, then straightened up once inside. Black robes hung from nine feet of hunchbacked frame; blood-red bionic orbs scanned the room; a hissing sigh rattled behind her painted metal mask. Serin kept her tattooed arm on display, kill-tally turned outward.

Vicky scrambled to her feet, open mouthed and staring. She glanced to Elpida for guidance; Elpida shook her head. Kagami slipped out of Elpida’s grasp and slumped against the wall, sliding away from Serin on stumbling feet. Ilyusha was up already, with Amina clinging to her side. The younger girl was silent and wide-eyed. Ilyusha’s tail lashed the air in angry swipes — but when she saw the ‘friendly’ was Serin her tail dipped in a little bobbing motion, like a laugh. She snorted and said: “Shit for brains is back again.”

Serin acknowledged her: “Little comrade.”

Atyle wasn’t surprised; she stayed sitting cross-legged in front of the makeshift game board drawn on the floor in grease paint, examining Serin with her peat-green bionic eye, like an aristocrat judging an expensive animal. She must have seen their approach through the walls; perhaps Atyle had witnessed the entire conversation. Straight-backed and high-headed, she managed to radiate ritual dignity in her refusal to stand.

Pira was up, submachine gun in her hands, eyes fixed on Serin’s centre of mass.

Elpida spoke quickly, hands out: “Guns down. I mean it, guns down. Everyone relax. This is Serin. She’s the sniper, the—”

Vicky spluttered, “The crazy one who shot at us?”

“She helped us last night,” Elpida said. “She wants to help us now.”

Kagami laughed, low and bitter and unstable. Vicky glanced at her in alarm.

Elpida said: “Kagami’s in shock because of information. Nothing more.”

Kagami spat, “Information! Oh, spare me your creative euphemisms, mud-eater.”

Ilyusha was saying to Amina: “She’s fine! Ami, she’s fine. Big and stupid. But like me, kind of.”

Serin was still smiling behind her mask. Her head swivelled on that snake-like neck, framed by her humped back, examining the others one by one — and finishing on Pira.

Red eyes waited. Pira stared back, ready to leap.

Elpida said: “Pira, do not open fire. She doesn’t want to fight. If she attacks you, I’m on your side. But she doesn’t want to fight. Pira, lower your gun. Pira!”

Pira didn’t even twitch.

“Pira?” Serin said. She cocked her head at the flame-haired girl.

Pira’s eyes flickered to the dead-skull tattoos on Serin’s exposed arm, then back to Serin’s red-burning eyes. She shook her head sharply, and said: “I’m not with—”

“How many times reborn?” Serin asked.

Pira frowned. “What?”

“How many times have you been around, zombie? How many times resurrected? You’re no fresh meat. I can see. Truth?”

“Plenty. What do you want?”

“How many?”

Pira spat: “I’ve lost count. What do you want?”

“So many cycles,” said Serin. “And nothing to show but one bionic arm. Why keep coming back if you won’t grow? Why tell a clutch of chicks to starve themselves?”

Pira’s fear froze on her face — then vanished, shuttered behind sky-blue eyes. “Nobody has to be a predator.”

“Ha!” Serin barked. “Predation? Survival!” Serin’s head twisted; her blazing red eyes found a new target — Ilyusha. “And you, little comrade. You aren’t fresh meat. You should know better.”

Ilyusha bared her teeth and hissed — but she averted her eyes, sulky and cowed. Her tail lay limp on the floor. “Tried.”

“Truly?”

“I fucking tried!” Ilyusha spat.

“You balked. First sign of disgust. Easier to avoid conflict. New friends, new start. Hope not to be cast out. No?”

Ilyusha hissed again, eyes down. Elpida realised that Ilyusha was deeply humiliated. She didn’t like that; she was losing control of this situation.

Elpida said, “Serin, stop. Ilyusha is one of us, too. Don’t—”

“Little comrade. Should have shown more spine.”

Ilyusha muttered. “Fuck you … ”

Vicky cleared her throat. “Excuse me, but what the hell are you talking about?”

“Starvation, zombie,” Serin said. “By ignorance. Or worse, by foolish choice.”

Elpida stepped forward and raised both hands; she’d been willing to entertain this strange argument for the purposes of extracting more information from Serin — and possibly from Pira. But she’d heard enough. And Ilyusha’s hangdog humiliation was an insult too far. Elpida would not allow that blow to their morale.

“Stop,” she said, command in her voice. “Serin, stop, right now. Everyone else — Serin has informed me we’re all starving to death. We need to eat.”

Vicky said, “Eat what? What are you talking about? Pira said—”

Kagami laughed, hard and loud and shrill: “Use your brain! What else is there to eat in this place? Each other!”

Pira said, cold and unyielding, “Cannibalism. She means cannibalism.”

Elpida quickly explained her summation of Serin’s lesson; there was little to say. They needed fresh nanomachines, preserved in the bodies of other revenants. Their new physiology demanded constant input, no different to the requirements of a mortal metabolism, the demand for protein, carbohydrate, and fat.

She finished by saying: “We’re all wounded and we’re healing very slowly, except when we drink the raw nanomachines we took from the tomb. The thirst I felt is proof of that. And the … desire for meat, that was real. If anybody else has experienced similar cravings or hungers, don’t be ashamed or afraid; I believe it’s strong evidence that our nanomachine bodies are craving more input. It’s a biological imperative, now. We can’t control that.”

Only Vicky and Amina seemed truly shocked; Vicky was shaking her head, mouth hanging open, while Amina was just staring. Atyle’s expression had not changed at all; perhaps she’d already figured it out. Pira was cold and closed. Kagami had a strange, manic smile on her face, laughing softly behind her teeth. And Ilyusha was looking away, sulky and embarrassed.

After a moment of silence, Vicky said: “What happens if we don’t? Serin, right? What if I don’t want to eat human meat?”

Pira answered: “Nothing. Ambient is enough for survival.”

Serin laughed, a harsh metallic rasp. “You weaken with every wound. You get slow, and clumsy. Easy to hunt. Damage piles up. A predator catches you. Crunch crunch. Yum.”

Pira said: “You don’t have to participate. Vicky, don’t listen to her. You don’t have to participate. You have a choice. We all have the choice to refuse.”

Kagami laughed so hard she shrieked: “Choice?! You were keeping this from us, you bitch! You lied to us! So what, you could starve us out and then feed our corpses to your real friends, you—”

Elpida snapped, putting the whip-crack of command into her voice: “Kagami, stop. Right now.” Kagami flinched hard, staring at Elpida with wounded anger. “Pira had her reasons. Pira?”

Pira said, “Nobody has to participate in this.”

Serin laughed. “Eat or die.”

Kagami spluttered: “She lied. She lied to all of us. She’s been lying to us this whole time!”

Vicky was saying: “No. No, no, no. It was right there in front of us. Back in the tomb. Illy — Ilyusha! Back in the tomb, when we woke, you were … ” Vicky put her hand to her mouth, miming a memory. She was shaking. “The corpse-water, the blue goo, the goo in the failed coffins. You were drinking it. You were going to eat them, weren’t you? You were going to eat them, like … like aborted foetuses? The revenants who didn’t make it to resurrection. And I was disgusted, I was horrified.” She was panting, cold sweat running down her face. “I’m … I’m sorry?”

Ilyusha wouldn’t look up. “Corpses eating. Gotta do it.”

Serin made a hissing noise. “Your limbs came from somewhere, little comrade. How many corpses to grow those?”

Ilyusha’s head snapped upward, teeth bared, grey eyes blazing like burning lead. Her augmetic tail whipped out, stinger pointing at Serin. “I’m no fucking reptile! You gotta eat, so you gotta eat!”

“Yes. No nobility in starvation. Don’t be ashamed of survival, little comrade.”

Ilyusha hissed disgust between clenched teeth.

Vicky said: “Are there truly no other options? No other way?” She laughed. The sound worried Elpida. “I always wanted to go vegetarian, but … ”

Kagami answered, “Of course there’s no other way! There’s nothing else alive on this rock but us! Not even plants.”

Vicky shook her head. “What about all the bio-film stuff? The black rot we’ve seen? Some of that stuff fills whole rooms. Isn’t everything made from nanomachines? Can’t we eat that?”

Serin said, “You are what you eat.”

Kagami snorted, “What, you’ll turn into a building? May as well! Can’t get more absurd down here.”

Serin shrugged. “Low energy. A zombie would have to eat more of structural nanites than a body could hold. We need them in high-energy states. The blue — or the flesh. Eat concrete? Worse than sucking air like a filter feeder.” Her red-glowing eyes turned to Pira again; Pira stared back with open contempt.

Vicky said, “The blue, right! The raw nanos. We can drink that, we can live off that!”

Atyle spoke from the floor: “Only from the graves. Each one a risk. Each one a trial.”

Serin pointed at Atyle. “Yes. Raw blue is good. High demand. But only on tomb refills.”

Pira said, “No. There is another way. You’ve been around long enough to know.”

Serin grinned wide behind her mask: “Utopian madness.”

“It is possible to get inside a graveworm.”

“Fool.”

“It is possible. It can be done. It will be done.”

Vicky said, “Serin?”

“Mm?”

“Do you eat other people? Do you eat human flesh?”

Serin answered by spreading her limbs: a dozen spindly-white mushroom-pale arms emerged from beneath her black robes; she stretched upward until the hunch-back hump straightened out and her head almost brushed the ceiling; that infrasound hum Elpida had noticed earlier intensified in volume, throbbing through the air. The dull red-tinted light from the single frosted window caught in her eyes, red-on-red.

Kagami spat: “Of course she fucking does, you moron! Look at her!”

Vicky shook her head. “I-I-I can’t, I can’t eat other people, I can’t—”

Pira snapped: “You do not have to participate. Don’t listen to her.”

Serin said, “Yes. Your choice. Lie down and die.”

Elpida raised her hands out wide, to include everybody. She raised her voice, level and calm. “We’re all wounded and it keeps getting worse with every encounter, every fight. One way or another, we have to eat.”

Vicky shook her head. “You can’t be serious. Elpi, we can’t. I won’t.”

Kagami said, “We’re all starving! You all heard her!”

Ilyusha hissed: “Gotta eat, gotta eat … ”

Elpida said, “Vicky, I’m not suggesting we act like predators. Nobody is suggesting we start preying on the vulnerable or attacking other groups for food. I understand, I agree, and I won’t ask you to do that. Serin — when you spoke to me earlier, you specifically said ‘eat our kills’. Did you mean that?”

Serin tilted her head at Elpida. “Mm, you understand. I do not kill to eat — I only eat my kills. There is a difference. Last night you left fresh corpses untouched. You killed them — and then nothing. Left them for carrion. Wasted.”

Vicky lit up with sick relief. “The corpses from last night! Yes! We could eat— I mean, we could, but … ”

Serin shook her head. “Too long. Gone by now. In the bellies of early birds.”

Vicky sighed. “Right. Because everyone’s competing for meat.”

Elpida said, firmly but gently: “For nanomachines. Not the meat itself.”

Vicky nodded along. “Right. Right.”

Atyle said: “Even the gods eat other gods. Truly we are worms.”

Kagami laughed. “Dog eat dog! Zombie eat zombie! Fuck it, why not?”

Serin relaxed her posture. She withdrew most of her arms back inside her robes, resumed her hunchbacked stoop, and stopped humming. But a grin creased the corners of her eyes.

“A gift.”

Serin produced a bundle from inside her robes and tossed it into the middle of the floor. It landed with a wet squelch.

Severed heads.

Five human heads, inside a loose net of ropes. Each head was missing the lower jaw, the tongue, and both eyeballs; but muscles twitched around the empty sockets and in the remains of the cheeks.

Amina cried out in a soft whimper and clung to Ilyusha; the heavily augmented girl just rolled her eyes and snorted. Vicky held a hand to her mouth and made a retching sound. Kagami went pale and green. Pira stared with open disgust. Atyle just looked, unmoved. Elpida felt her stomach turn over with nausea — but also with a terrible hunger.

“Oh my God,” Vicky said. “They’re still … they’re alive? They’re m-moving, twitching, oh … oh fu—”

Vicky turned away and vomited, but there was almost nothing in her stomach. She spat bile onto the floor.

Kagami made a choking sound too, but she didn’t vomit. She spat drool. “W-why … why heads? Why heads?”

“Brains,” said Serin.

“What?”

“Brains. Best place. High-energy, high-activity nanomachines. If you won’t eat flesh, eat brains.”

Ilyusha spat on the floor. “True. Works.”

Kagami started laughing, slowly at first, then building toward a panting hysteria. “Brain! Hahaha, fuck. Brains. Brains!”

Serin withdrew all her hands inside her robes again. “Decide for yourselves. Eat or die.”

Elpida said: “Who were these people?”

Vicky was doubled over, hanging onto the wall: “They’re still alive, Elpi.”

“Are,” Elpida corrected herself. “Serin, who are these people? You told me you hunt the death cult. Are these people from them?”

Serin shook her head. “Following you. Not death cult. But working for them, for promise of pay.” Serin wasn’t grinning. “Work for monsters, you are monsters. No quarter.”

Pira echoed, “Monsters.” She sounded unconvinced.

Elpida said: “What’s ‘pay’, in this context?”

Kagami said, “Meat! What else?”

Serin shook her head. “Raw blue. Portable. Easier than flesh.”

Elpida said, “Why are the ‘death cult’ after us? Last night, they were trying to take us alive — take me alive. Why?”

Serin shrugged. “You are interesting. Eat, and keep being interesting. I will watch.”

Without another word, Serin folded herself up and stepped backward out of the door. Her robes blended with the shadows in the corridor. She whispered away without a goodbye.

Elpida leapt after her. She turned as she moved, pointing toward the twitching heads on the floor and flicking a finger across the others. “Ilyusha, cover those with a coat. Atyle, help Vicky. Kagami, sit down, breathe. Pira — we’ll talk. I’ll be right back.”

Elpida hurried out into the corridor. A hissing argument broke out behind her — Pira snapping, Ilyusha snapping back, Vicky stammering in horror. But Elpida couldn’t allow this source of information to slip away.

Serin was only a few paces down the corridor, wreathed in shadows. Elpida caught up with her. “Serin, I have questions, please listen to me.”

The hulking revenant stopped and turned around. Her blood-red eyes were creased with fresh amusement.

Elpida said: “What do you know about the combat frame?”

Serin raised her eyebrows. “Nothing?”

“The object which fell from orbit. You must know that’s what we’re trying to reach. If this ‘death cult’ wants me alive, they may know about it. They may be trying to capture me so they can use it.”

“Orbital impact. Right at the edge of the worm’s cradle. Dangerous place. Worm-guard, maybe. Perhaps worse.”

“We met one of those,” Elpida said.

“I know. I shot at it.”

Elpida blinked. “That was you? Thank you. Serin, you saved us twice. It doesn’t quite make up for shooting me before, but thank you.”

“Mm. No thanks. Sport.”

“Serin, why not come with us? We stand a better chance of reaching the combat frame with a more competent group. We—”

“Your little comrade, ashamed of what she eats. Pira, fool, too noble to live long. And Kagami, huh.” Serin grinned wide beneath her mask. “She’s been at your raw blue. Smell it on her. Growing new parts beneath your nose. Good luck, Elpida. Don’t eat each other.”

Serin turned and whispered away down the corridor again, leaving Elpida behind.

“Serin, please. If—”

“If you want to touch the stars, false Necromancer, first bury your snout in meat.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Braaaaaaaaaaains. Well, they are zombies, right?

Mired in meat and muscle, there’s only one way to ascend, and it’s not quick or clean. Might turn a few stomachs, as well. Pira really doesn’t seem on board with this – but Kagami has a point, has she misled the group about more than just this? What else might they not yet fully understand? And Serin, oh, Serin, that was a harsh lesson. I must admit though, this chapter is a lot of … reaction? Set up? Not too much happens, not quite yet!. I think I was correct to say this arc is going to be a long one, possibly the longest so far. Especially if Elpida wants to reach that star.

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

Patreon! Lookie, it’s a link.

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m currently trying to make time to write a few more chapters ahead, but I can’t promise anything on a specific schedule yet, as you can probably tell from my repeated efforts. I’ll get there eventually though!

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

And lastly, but most importantly, thanks for reading! Thanks for reading my little story. I’m having so much fun with it, and I hope you are too. I can only promise it will get so much weirder and darker as we go.

Content Warnings

Discussion of cannibalism
Discussion of mental illness
Slurs

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

When dawn found her comrades still wounded and weary, Elpida’s first priority was to explore and secure the rest of their temporary bolt-hole.

Only Vicky and Atyle were fully awake; she left them with instructions to listen for unexpected noises. Atyle said she saw nothing and nobody nearby, but Elpida insisted on manual confirmation. Vicky protested but she was too exhausted to make demands. Elpida carried only her submachine gun and the contents of her armoured coat. She pulled up the hood to conceal the white shine of her hair, then she slipped out of the tiny concrete chamber and into the corridor.

Sunrise was nothing worthy of the name: ghostly ember-glow along the rim of a black-choked sky.

Elpida crept into the gloom, treading floors paved with cracked tiles, easing past yawning doorways to rot-infested rooms. She stayed away from the windows. She paused to listen for motion, footsteps, or breathing. She held her own breath for minutes at a time. She held her submachine gun in an awkward grip to compensate for her broken right wrist.

She knew the group would not move today.

Telokopolan genetic engineering gave Elpida an advantage at recovery from combat stress reaction and combat fatigue; she felt clear-headed and alert, despite only a few hours of uneasy sleep. All her clade-sisters had been blessed with the same rapid return to sympathetic nervous equilibrium, facilitated by enhanced hormone and neurotransmitter rebalancing.

Mentally she was fresh — but physically she felt awful. Two days of pushing through the corpse-city, the shock of the ambush, and then a rapid retreat to an unsecured hiding place had left her exhausted. She could have picked up and moved on, could have marched through the streets for days without true rest. But pushing her comrades presented an unacceptable risk: they were normal human beings — even if they were nanomachine revenants studded with bionic augmentation. They were not of the cadre, they did not have her advantages. They needed rest and recovery. At least for one day.

Besides, none of them were healing fast enough.

As the others had stirred and returned to sleep, Elpida recognised their exhaustion and mental fog, the post-combat lethargy. That alone would have been enough for her to call a halt; but the physical wounds were worse.

Vicky was bruised and slow, still suffering post-concussive symptoms. Pira had taken more knocks than she let on, though she did a good job of hiding how slowly her bullet wound was healing. Kagami whimpered in her sleep, cradling those bite marks; the nanomachine goo had stopped the bleeding and formed thick scabs, but she was a long way from healed. Ilyusha was quietly nursing several fractures and nasty bruises. Amina was still in some kind of post-euphoric shock.

Atyle was the only one completely untouched; Elpida wasn’t sure if she should be surprised by that. The woman didn’t flinch even in the face of direct gunfire.

Elpida herself was still carrying the echoes of earlier wounds: thin patches of raw-red flesh on her chest and back, remnants of her ‘death’ at the hands of the Silico murder-machine; a massive discoloured bruise across her abdomen from Serin’s bullet, with the accompanying internal damage making her stiff and awkward; an aching right trigger finger; and a persistent cough whenever her heart lurched.

And now her right wrist was broken. She’d done her best to set the bones so her nanomachine physiology could repair the damage, but the flesh was still puffy and tender. Pain throbbed up her arm.

Raw blue nanomachines would heal her wounds in mere hours. But that wouldn’t soothe the group’s fatigue. If they were going to rest, she may as well rest too, and save their resources.

The voice of Old Lady Nunnus echoed in her memories: “Soldiers are not machines. Legionaries are not machines. And you girls are not machines either, never mind what those fools tell you or how much metal and plastic they jam into the back of your skulls. You’re meat and muscle piloted by a wet blob of squishy grey cells. If you do not rest, you will break — yes, even you, ‘Commander’. I know what you think of yourself. And people cannot be fixed like machines. Throw a steak into a meat grinder and see how easy it is to fix.”

Elpida hadn’t quite believed that at the time, but Nunnus was right.

She needed to get the others out of that cramped utility room. They’d slept practically on top of each other. Being crammed together in such a tiny space was not good for morale, psychological recovery, or fraying tempers. Forced proximity presented a risk of internal conflict — especially regarding Amina.

Elpida spent almost an hour exploring the building into which they had retreated. She was uncertain of the structure’s purpose: she had assumed it was residential, but the upper two floors were full of large, airy rooms, some of which contained rows of desks, whiteboards, and bookcases full of sagging pulp.

Most of the rooms had too many big windows, flooded by that dull red light from the black and empty sky. Others were full of gooey wet rot, or skeletal corpses infested with sticky gunk. The bottom floor was not defensible — too many points of access, too many ways in and out, too many ground-floor windows. Up on the third floor she found a few rooms which might serve, mostly empty and large enough for everyone to spread out. She selected what had probably once been some kind of small gym space. The floor was cheap plastic and the walls were whitewashed, clean of rot or holes. A couple of tables stood at one end, surrounded by a cluster of lonely chairs. There was only one window, with frosted glass.

Elpida stood alone in the deep gloom of a dead dawn, armoured hood pulled low over her brow, staring through the frosted glass at the distant mountain-line of the graveworm.

She might not have another chance for privacy that day.

“Graveworm?”

No answer.

“Howl?”

Nothing but regret.

Elpida returned to the group and found everyone awake, groggy, and grumpy. She ordered the move. Nobody complained.

Pira said: “Keep away from the windows as we move. Heads down. And stay quiet.”

But Pira followed with the rest. Away from the windows.

Once they were safely upstairs, dumping backpacks and weapons on the floor, easing themselves down in exhausted heaps, Elpida explained the plan. She stood tall and spoke strong. She pushed her hood down so the others could see her eyes.

“We all need to rest, at least for one day. We can’t push on like this. We’re all wounded and exhausted — combat does that to anybody, even to trained soldiers. There’s no shame in admitting we need rest and recovery. So, that’s what we’re going to do. Rest for today, sleep tonight. Tomorrow morning we can push on for the combat frame again, pending reassessment of our condition.”

Vicky said: “Right on, Elpi. That’s a girl with a plan.”

Elpida took a deep breath. “I think we’re safe here. I haven’t heard anything moving except us. Atyle, would you confirm again with your bionic eye? Are we alone in the structure?”

Atyle answered, “Just us, warrior.”

Nobody asked about Serin; nobody asked if Elpida had seen the sniper again since last night. Was nobody else aware of the assistance Serin had rendered?

Pira was already choosing a corner in which to sit. She said, “We shouldn’t be moving at all. Not until the worm does.”

Atyle smiled, thin and amused. “The warrior is wise enough for the gods. Wise enough for me.”

Kagami didn’t say anything. She looked more exhausted than anybody else. Her auspex visor hung from a limp hand. Ilyusha shrugged and wagged her augmetic tail, then stepped forward to bump her head against Elpida’s side, demanding a head-pat. Elpida gave her that. Amina watched Elpida with bright eyes, openly fascinated and adoring. Elpida gave her a smile and a nod, and asked how she was.

Amina said: “Radiant. Am I radiant?”

Kagami hissed, “Fucking hell.”

“You are radiant, Amina,” Elpida told her. That made Amina smile. She was still smiling when Ilyusha took her hand and diverted her attention.

There was little to do in an empty room in the middle of a nameless corpse-city; Elpida was briefly concerned that boredom might be more dangerous than enforced proximity. But the others surprised her. At first everyone simply split up and dozed. Elpida sat down in a chair, examining her own exhaustion. Ilyusha and Amina spent a while tucked inside their now-habitual nest of spare coats, whispering to each other. They even giggled a couple of times. But then Ilyusha emerged, dragging Amina after her. She fetched some sticks of camo paint from her backpack and started drawing a grid on the floor.

She and Amina played noughts and crosses — Ilyusha had to teach the game to Amina. Quiet whispers passed back and forth. Corners of coat were used to scrub out previous games. They covered a corner of floor in black and red and green. Vicky drifted over, and Atyle watched with interest, her solitary meditation interrupted by curiosity. Once Amina understood the simple game Ilyusha transitioned to something more complex; she drew a whole game board on the floor, used shotgun shells as pieces, and included Atyle and Vicky as players.

Vicky asked, “Illy, is this from your home? Like, something you learned as a kid?”

Ilyusha shook her head. “Naaaah. From here.”

Kagami did not join in, not even at Vicky’s invitation — she refused with a limp shake of her head. The petite, doll-like woman sat slumped against a wall, buried by her over-large coat, augmetic legs sticking out at awkward angles. She barely moved except to lift her left hand now and again, flexing the fingers and staring at her palm. The bite marks on her face, neck, and head stood out with dark red scabbing. Her eyelids were heavy, her lips were slack, her breathing was too hard. She had a sheen of cold sweat on her face. Pira had assured them that nanomachine revenants were immune to illness and infection, but Kagami looked sick. Combat shock? The bite wounds? Something unknown? Elpida decided to watch her closely.

“Elpi,” Vicky said, nodding at the grease-paint game-board on the floor. “You want in?”

“No, but thank you, Vicky.”

“Come on, it’s easy. Aren’t you bored?” Vicky even smiled, a crease in a dark, tired face. “Look at you, sitting there in a chair like the only adult in the room. Super-soldier shit going to your head.”

Atyle explained without looking up: “The warrior watches over us.”

Elpida nodded. “Somebody needs to stay focused and alert. I’m the least affected by fatigue, and my senses are naturally sharper. I need to concentrate on external sounds. And I’m going to patrol the corridor shortly, as well.”

Vicky shrugged. “If you say so. Place for you any time you want, though. Right, Illy?”

“Yaaaaah,” said Ilyusha.

Pira didn’t join in either. She sat in the corner by herself. But as one hour turned into two and two dragged into three, as Vicky drifted off into an uneasy nap, and Ilyusha started teaching Amina and Atyle a new game — one that involved two opposing sides of pieces — Pira eventually stood up and took off all her clothes.

The others were surprised by that, but it made sense to Elpida. Pira checked her own body for additional wounds. Her strangely pale and freckled skin formed a milk-shadow in the red-tinted gloom. Pira rotated each of her joints and stretched all her muscles, then checked her armour for holes and tears and frayed straps. Then she got dressed again. Elpida approved.

Pira sat back down, spread out her personal weapons, and set about field-stripping and cleaning the guns. Elpida approved of that, too.

Elpida took stock of their equipment, spare ammunition, and weapons. She checked the coilgun and power-tank as best she could; she had no idea how to strip or clean the Silico sliver-gun, and doubted it needed such attention anyway. She examined the pair of ballistic shields for cracks, but found none. They hadn’t lost anything since the tomb, nor expended too much ammunition from the bullets and shells crammed in packs and pouches and pockets. They’d even picked up a couple of heavy pistols from the ambush last night. But they couldn’t operate without resupply forever.

There was no such thing as resupply, in this place. Only scavenging, raiding, and looting the tombs.

Elpida counted the cannisters of nanomachine slime. She took them out of the backpack and lined them up.

Thirteen full bottles.

Three short, compared with last night.

She hadn’t counted previously, but her memory had stored the details regardless. The blue glow touched her face and hands as she stared at the bottles lined up on the floor. She counted them three times. A thirst gripped the back of her throat. She resisted that and packed the bottles away again, in full view of everybody else.

Then she picked up her submachine gun, flipped up her hood, and went to walk the corridors.

There was little to see inside the building except dirty plastic floors, plain white walls, and empty rooms tainted with rot. The view from the windows allowed an occasional deeper glimpse through the thicket of concrete and brick. Faraway gunshots echoed between the buildings; strange noises howled in the distance. Elpida was careful to stay out of sight, sticking to the shadows, pausing to listen for hidden movement. She would not allow herself to be taken by another ambush. She would not make that mistake again.

She worked her way to the opposite end of the corridor, along the front of the building, where the windows were wider and the view was better and there was more room to hang back in the shadows.

The plume of smoke from the fallen combat frame had dwindled to almost nothing. A terrible fire must have burned for days, but now there was only a thin trickle of brown, barely visible in the dying firelight of the revenant sun.

Serin was nowhere to be seen.

Who had taken three cannisters of nanites without telling anybody? Kagami, for her wounds? Ilyusha, without guile? Was Elpida over-thinking this? But the empty bottles had been hidden or removed, not added to the other spares full of water. Perhaps she had miscounted.

When she returned to the refuge, Elpida found Kagami sitting in her chair. She was staring down at her hands, at a shiny metal cylinder.

The doll-like woman stirred and looked up when Elpida approached. “Oh,” she grunted, eyes only half-open. “Stolen your seat, have I?”

“Don’t worry, please don’t get up,” Elpida said. “You’re very welcome to it.” She fetched another chair and joined Kagami. Perhaps Kagami wanted company but couldn’t ask for it out loud. The others were all occupied — Ilyusha, Amina, and Atyle were playing yet another game scrawled on the ground; Vicky had gone to sleep; Pira was cleaning Vicky’s sniper rifle.

Elpida waited to see if Kagami would talk without being prompted, but Kagami was more interested in the object cradled in her lap: a shiny metal oblong about the size of a cigar. It was one of the six smart drones Kagami had taken from the tomb armoury, still inactive, just a lump of metal.

Kagami was stroking the drone with the fingers and thumb of her left hand. Her eyes drifted shut, then eased open again. She transferred the drone to her right hand, flexed the fingers of her left, then resumed the idle sensory stimming.

Elpida said, gently, “Any luck getting those powered on?”

Kagami huffed — Elpida guessed it was meant to be a snort, but she didn’t have enough energy. Kagami croaked: “What do you think? If we had drones, we wouldn’t have been ambushed. And where would I get the power? There’s only one source of power around here.”

“What’s that?”

“Nanomachines, you idiot. Us.”

Elpida let the insult pass. Kagami deserved to vent. She said: “Kaga, how are you holding up?”

Kagami turned dead-tired eyes toward Elpida, and said, “How the fuck do you think I’m holding up?”

“Worse than anybody else. You look sick or ill. I’m not sure why that is, and that worries me. How do you feel? Please, tell me the truth. I won’t leave you behind for being weak, because I don’t do that. Kagami, is something wrong with your body?”

Kagami’s stare dredged her mind out of torpor. She blinked. For a moment Elpida thought she might say something honest.

But then Kagami said, “How do I feel? I’m covered in fucking bite marks because you fucked up. That’s how I fucking feel.” She swallowed, leaned closer to Elpida, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “And we’re dragging around a serial killer. Or have you already forgotten?”

Elpida replied in an equal whisper: “Amina is one of us. She fought for us. She took on a highly augmented revenant with nothing but a knife—”

“And she wanted to stick that knife in you, Commander, if I understood her psycho ramblings correctly.”

Elpida straightened up, out of whispering range, and glanced at the others. Atyle was giving them a curious side-eye. Pira was staring. Amina and Ilyusha hadn’t noticed.

Elpida leaned back in and whispered: “Kagami, if you want to discuss Amina, we should continue in private. Do you feel well enough to stand and walk out into the corridor with me?”

“Fuck her and fuck you,” Kagami hissed. “We can talk right here—”

“Kagami,” Elpida put a touch of command into her whisper. Kagami flinched. “Are you able to stand and walk into the corridor?”

“Y-yes, fine, sure. But—”

Elpida put a firm hand on Kagami’s shoulder — the one without the bite wound. “Then come for a walk with me. We’ll talk.”

Kagami lost most of her bluster by the time she got her feet. She shoved the unpowered drone into her pocket and crossed her arms, then followed Elpida to the door.

Elpida told the others: “I want Kagami to look at a building in the distance with the auspex visor. We might be a few minutes, so don’t worry if we’re not back soon.”

Everyone knew it was a lie to protect Amina — everyone except Amina. Pira looked back down at the field-stripped rifle without a word. Atyle all but grinned. Ilyusha snorted. Vicky was asleep.

Out in the red-lit, window-lined corridor, Elpida led Kagami far beyond earshot of the refuge. Kagami could walk under her own power now, but only with a halting, jerking precision, made more difficult by the need to stay in the shadows. Elpida offered her arm, but Kagami hissed a refusal. Elpida let Kagami set the pace. They walked all the way to the front of the building, to the slightly wider corridor where Elpida had paused earlier to look up at the plume of smoke. Kagami leaned against the wall, bracing her back to take the weight off her augmetic legs.

Elpida said, “We can speak here, but don’t raise your voice. We don’t want to risk attention.”

Kagami tutted. “This is fucking stupid.”

Elpida said: “I want to make this very clear to you. Amina is one of us. She fought for us. I’m not casting her out because she committed murders in life. If—”

“She’s a serial killer!” Kagami said. “She wanted to stab you and then — what, seek forgiveness? What does that even mean?” Kagami tapped her own head. “She’s insane! A crazy person. She’ll stab one of us in the guts while we’re sleeping. Or did they not have serial killers in your perfect future?”

“None of us are a threat to her. She won’t hurt us.”

“How can you know that? Does she need an excuse? We all heard her fucking nonsense up there in that tower. She’ll stab us the moment she gets a chance.”

“Forgiveness and acceptance makes her one of us. You saw what she did for us last night. You saw the choice she made.”

“She’s a murderer, a psycho killer!”

“We’re all killers.”

Kagami squinted. “What?”

“It’s the only thing we have in common. I suspect it might be intentional, perhaps a condition of resurrection. Or maybe only for our group, from that specific tomb, or batch. Soldiers, commanders, revolutionaries. We’ve all killed. Sometimes for a good cause, but maybe not always. You’re no exception to that, as far as I understand. Amina is no different.”

“Oh, don’t spout such fucking nonsense. There’s a difference between being a mad slasher and shooting soldiers in battle. Bet you’ve never done something like what she talked about, huh? You’ve commanded others and shot at the enemy in—”

“Me and my clade-sisters killed one of our handlers at six years old. We used bare hands, stolen plastic cutlery, and a piece of bedsheet.”

Kagami stared, mouth open.

Elpida added: “We ate part of his corpse afterward.”

Kagami blinked three times.

Elpida took a deep, cleansing breath. She thanked Howl. It felt good to speak the truth.

For a moment, Elpida thought Kagami might break down, or sob, or turn away in fear; she would have to intervene if that happened. Kagami was also one of her comrades, whatever difficulties she was having. Elpida wasn’t sure how to deal with that — if this had been one of her cadre, she would have enveloped Kagami in a hug. She suspected that wouldn’t work. She prepared herself for gentle words.

But Kagami pushed herself upright against the wall, eyes bulging, jaw muscles tightening.

“We’re never going to reach that walker mech you’re so obsessed with, because we’re all going to be dead!” she spat — too loudly, voice echoing down the corridors. “Look at us. Look at you!” She jerked her head up and down at Elpida. “You stand straight enough but you’d get knocked on your arse by a stiff breeze.” She hissed a weird laugh between her teeth — and there was the edge of a sob, finally. “What does it matter that we’re carting around a serial killer and a traitor, huh? We’re not going to make it. We could barely make it through one fight. We’re falling apart!”

“Kagami, I’m not going to let us—”

“I shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t be down here.” Kagami flexed the fingers of her left hand, staring at them as if in pain. “I shouldn’t be on the surface with you dirt-sucking primitives. This place is fucking obscene. All of you are—”

Elpida clapped a hand over Kagami’s mouth. Kagami’s eyes went wide. She flailed against the wall, trying to get away.

But Elpida said: “Be still. Quiet. Listen.”

Footsteps.

Heavy, solid, climbing the stairs.

The owner of the boots made no effort to conceal her approach; echoes filled the corridor. Elpida dropped her hand from Kagami’s mouth. Kagami stared at the end of the corridor, shaking and panting. Elpida slipped one hand around Kagami’s waist, preparing to physically pick her up and haul her back to the others.

But then a metallic voice called out in a soft croon: “Only me, fresh meat.”

Elpida relaxed. Kagami was frantic with confusion for a second, then said, “Oh, it’s the sniper-bitch, it’s— fucking hell!”

Serin came around the corner.

Nine feet of black robes hung below a pale half-face, mouth and chin concealed inside that metal mask painted with black teeth. Lank blonde hair was raked back over her skull. Red bionic eyes glowed in the shadows. Shapeless and swaying, Serin walked up to Elpida and Kagami — no longer making any footstep noises. Her robes concealed everything but her head and her hunched back.

“Serin,” Elpida said.

“False Necromancer,” Serin said by way of greeting. Her voice was an amused metal rasp from inside her mask. Kagami was staring, open mouthed; she was also gripping the sleeve of Elpida’s coat. Red eyes swivelled to look at her. Serin made a strange hiss from inside her mask — inhaling? Kagami shrank back.

Elpida said: “This is Kagami. She’s with me. Serin, thank you for the help last night. I’m not sure, but I think you saved my life.”

“Mm. Mmmmm. Huuuuh.” Serin’s red eyes flickered and focused, lenses tightening behind bio-plastic, bouncing back and forth between Kagami and Elpida.

Something was wrong. Elpida allowed her hands to creep toward her submachine gun. Serin wasn’t standing too close, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

“Serin,” Elpida said. “What do you want?”

Serin leaned down and forward; she moved slowly, making it clear she didn’t intend any aggression. Elpida put both hands on her submachine gun. Serin leaned close, until her pale skin and all-red eyes were only two feet from Elpida’s face. Then she made that hissing noise again — sniffing, inside her mask. She moved her face to Kagami and sniffed again, several times. She repeated the motion, going back and forth, then straightened up.

Kagami murmured: “What the fuck?”

Elpida kept her hands on her weapon. “Serin, please answer me. What do you want?”

“Better question,” Serin rasped, still amused. “What do I not want? I do not want useful bait to wither away. I do not want to watch fresh meat refuse food.” Lenses irised and adjusted inside her red eyeballs — and focused on Kagami. “Some of you. Know what’s good. Mm. Poor choice of diet.”

Elpida said, “What are you talking about?”

Serin tilted her head and focused on Elpida again. “Fresh meat. Comrade-to-be. Or otherwise.” A spindly pale hand emerged from the black robes and pointed a finger at Kagami. “Kagami is correct. She knows what she needs. You’re weak and failing. You’re falling apart.”

“We’re resting. We—”

“You’re not eating your kills, false Necromancer. You’re starving to death.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

No hunger felt and little thirst to speak of, but those nanomachine bodies still demand fuel. And there’s only so many places to get it. The undeniable reality of flesh was always going to catch up with these zombies sooner or later. But shouldn’t Pira already know about this? She’s been around so many times, why is she not feasting on the dead? And Ilyusha … well, I guess that explains the licking. On a lighter note, this entire chapter was written and edited while listening to the original Resident Evil 2 save room music on repeat! If you want the extended experience, use that as a soundtrack for it.

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

Patreon! Lookie, it’s a link.

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m currently trying to make time to write a few more chapters ahead, but I can’t promise anything on a specific schedule yet, as you can probably tell from my repeated efforts. I’ll get there eventually though!

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

And – thank you for reading! Thank you for reading Necroepilogos. I’m enjoying this story a lot, and I hope you are too. We’re finally settling in for the long haul, and I’m really looking forward to more.

Content Warnings

General bigotry/offensive terminology (mostly fictional)
Wounds
Ableism
Chronic pain
Suicidal ideation

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Kagami didn’t trust anybody — but she trusted Pira least of all.

None of the others had recognised what had really happened during the skyscraper ambush, though it had taken place right in front of their eyes. None of the others were capable, none of them had intelligence processing or operational directions experience. None of them saw further than the next wall, the next meal, the next set of orders, like every dirt-sucking ground-walker who’d never bothered to look up for once in their filthy, stupid lives. Soldiers and psychos, fools and primitives, every one of them.

None of them had noticed Pira’s tricks, the little manipulations hidden inside decisive zeal.

Kagami was the only one with her head on straight — even through the constant grinding pain of those absurd, offensive bionic legs. May as well have stapled lumps of steel directly to her bones for all the good they did. The connection trauma inside her hips made her want to claw at her own abdomen. She could barely think under the never-ending assault of uninterrupted exposure to the desert of the real.

And now she was covered in bite wounds.

Izumi Kagami — Seventeenth Daughter of the Moon; Logician Supreme of the Lunar Defence Intelligence Network since she was eleven years old; ‘Princess’ of Tycho City; Heroine of the L5 Machine-Plague (at a comfortable distance of half a million kilometres, via a drone fleet and a squad of armoured tankers, but who was counting, really?); destroyer of at least one Anglo-Rim invasion attempt before it had even left Lisbon space-port; mistress of no less than three thousand fully wire-slaved surface agents; mother of fourteen top-class artificial intelligences; lifetime network hub of Luna’s atomic arsenal and the robotic defence drone fleet — sat on a bare concrete floor, wrapped in bloody clothes, with human bite wounds on her face, neck, shoulders, and forearms.

She would have strangled a baby for a thermonuclear targeting matrix. Glass this obscene city and turn the cannibals and zombies to ash.

She would have sacrificed every one of her stupid, blind, moronic ‘comrades’, killed everyone in this city, cut off her own legs and one arm and scoop out an eye and give up the ability to eat solid food and pass solid waste, in return for a proper uplink to the LDIN and re-immersion in sim-space.

She would give up an awful lot more for a shuttle back home and a quiet return to her sensory suspension tank.

And she’d have sold her soul to make the pain go away.

Vicky dabbed more glowing blue nanomachine gunk on Kagami’s neck. Kagami flinched and hissed and wanted to punch Vicky.

Vicky sighed and said: “This would go a lot quicker if you hold still, Kaga.”

“You try holding still when you’ve been fucking eaten. Ow. Ow! Fuck!”

Nobody else paid Kagami any attention — certainly not Pira. The traitor sat on the far side of the filthy, windowless, pitch-black room, eyes closed, arms folded. Her weapon lay on the floor well within arm’s reach. Elpida was saying something to her, but Pira wasn’t replying.

After the ambush in the skyscraper, Elpida had led the ragged and wounded group out of the suite of office rooms and down the absurdly long staircase — yet more torture on Kagami’s legs and hips, even with Vicky hauling her like a sack of potatoes. They had emerged into the black winds of the dead-city night. Their fearless commander, praise be to her naivety and foolishness, had force-marched them down three or four streets; Kagami couldn’t tell exactly — she couldn’t keep track of the winding city-labyrinth even when she wasn’t bleeding from half a dozen missing chunks of flesh. She hadn’t been coherent enough to pull the frankly primitive auspex gear back on over her face. The night was terrifying, a whirl of shadows and deep dark holes and leering buildings. Nothing like a sim. Couldn’t switch it off.

Their gene-edited commander had found a tumbledown low-rise apartment block — not that half the group knew what an ‘apartment block’ even was. The building was mostly filled with mats of nano-based rot and toxic slime. But Elpida found a utility room in the rear, the sort of place that should have been full of industrial washing machines. Concrete floor, cramped and narrow. No windows. One door in and out. And no cannibal zombies.

She’d piled them in and slammed the door. Vicky had dumped Kagami on the ground. The others had all but collapsed.

They were not in good shape. If this had been a squad of Kagami’s surface agents, she would be sending them an evac gunship. With heavy armament. And a suitcase nuke.

Kagami wasn’t the only one wounded: Elpida’s right wrist was a huge purple bruise, the bones shattered and trying to re-knit; Vicky was still wobbly with concussion; Atyle was sitting cross-legged, meditating or pretending to meditate, but Kagami suspected that the paleo-primitive priestess had taken several bullets in that fight, but wasn’t telling anybody. Maybe she was waiting for everybody else to go to sleep so she could secretly dig the rounds out of her chest and stomach.

The borged-up berserker — ‘Ilyusha’, what a ridiculous name, pure Twen-Cen bullshit — was intact. She’d spent half the fight getting knocked about like a rag-doll, but she seemed to thrive on that. No care for her own safety. No concern for her physical integrity. Cyborgs went that way, in Kagami’s experience. Bodily alienation. Too much chrome and plastic. Vile little flesh-nugget.

But Ilyusha had pulled the ravenous cannibal off Kagami. Not fast enough — oh no, absolutely not fast enough. But she’d done it where others had failed or not even tried. Maybe she wasn’t a total lost cause.

Ilyusha was already curled up in a corner, nesting with the real psychopath.

Kagami hadn’t been able to watch the disgusting display once Elpida had sealed them all into the shitty little laundry room. The serial killer had been covered in blood and pink slime — and Ilyusha had licked her clean.

She’d stripped her friend naked and lapped at the caked-on gore, eating blood off the skin. The others had looked away in politeness, but Kagami had wanted to vomit. She’d looked back just in time to see the borged-up lunatic running her tongue between Amina’s fingers and peeling the knife out of her grip. At least Ilyusha understood that much; they couldn’t leave an actual psycho slasher loose with a weapon.

But then Ilyusha had cleaned the knife, glanced at Elpida for approval, and handed the damn thing back.

The serial killer herself — Amina — seemed untouched and elated, speechless with drugged-up happiness. Which wasn’t good news for anybody who didn’t want to get stabbed in the stomach while asleep.

Morons.

Vicky finished applying the blue gunk, sucked the scraps off her fingertip, and offered Kagami the rest of the half-empty cannister. She said: “Here, drink up the rest, Kaga. Doctor’s orders.”

Kagami scowled. “You’re still concussed. And you have a shit bedside manner. And you’re not a doctor.”

Vicky smiled. Probably couldn’t make sense of the words with her brain all jarred around. “Kaga, shut the fuck up and drink the magic goo.”

Kagami kept her arms folded. She knew the raw nanomachine slime would help heal her wounds, but she felt bitter — against Vicky, personally.

In the middle of the ambush, Vicky had prioritised Elpida. Kagami had been screaming and flailing and getting chunks of her face bitten off. And Vicky hadn’t helped. Vicky had gone to rescue Elpida. Vicky had leapt up like a fire was under her backside for her precious gene-mod bull-dyke soldier girl.

Vicky must have seen the simmering anger in Kagami’s eyes, because Vicky tilted her head and frowned.

“Kaga?”

Kagami hissed: “I don’t want your help.”

Pira spoke from the far side of the cramped little space, without opening her eyes: “The bite wounds aren’t that deep. If she doesn’t want to drink, give it to Elpida. Saves us opening any more bottles.”

Vicky looked up at Elpida. Miss Clever-Clogs Commander was still on her feet, hovering around everyone else, that submachine gun strapped over her shoulder. Like they were all children in need of a protector.

Vicky sounded unsure, “Well, if Kaga doesn’t want it, Elpi, do you—”

Kagami hissed, “Give me that!” She snatched the blue-glowing cannister and poured it down her throat. The nano-glop tasted of nothing, but it went down thick and warm. The slop settled in her stomach.

Vicky snorted. Elpida nodded in approval and said something stupid, some hollow ‘well done’. Pira said nothing.

Pira was a traitor. Kagami knew it.

Yes, the ambush had surprised Pira; she hadn’t been forewarned. The zombie cannibals had not pulled their punches for Pira; the combat had been real, she’d fought for her life. But then Pira had planted her boot on bullet-pocked chests and emptied her magazine into zombie brains, turning them into irrecoverable pulp — after they’d already been incapacitated. Pira had used Ilyusha’s blood-thirst and Elpida’s trusting naivety against them during the aftermath, with that clever fiction about the ‘transceiver’.

That pink zombie had looked obscene, like a sex-robot from the Anglo-Rim, or a dolled-up pop-singer from the Republic. Did it matter if she’d had a transceiver inside her severed head? If she had any friends out there watching the fight, they would already know the ambush had failed.

But Pira had needed that brain pulped, dead and gone. Pira had wanted them unable to question the ambushers.

The bitch wasn’t even trying to hide it. Pira was relying on the fact that everyone else was gullible and half-blind.

Once, Kagami would have been able to pinpoint exactly who Pira was: she could have loaded biometric data into LDIN, sourced from a surface agent’s sensor suite; she could have queried stolen birth certificates and school record databases from the Republic, military service logs from the East Africans and the South Americans, a thousand poorly-defended Anglo-Rim corporate information trawls, police fingerprint and facial recognition uploads from the blubbering idiots in Europe, and even the carefully guarded citizen IDs of the NorAm — the only other power apart from Luna who operated human logicians.

If Pira had been a NorAm agent, Kagami would have respected her. Anglo-Rim, Republic, Euros — Kagami could run rings around them. NorAm, less so. But Pira didn’t even try to cover her tracks. It was offensive.

But why bother? Pira was none of those things. None of those places existed anymore. Kagami was an obsolete part of a machine that no longer operated.

Maybe Luna still lived. Maybe this was just another surface thing, in the end.

After two hundred million years? Fat chance, bitch.

Kagami drank the tasteless blue slime. She kept an eye on Pira. And for the millionth time since waking up, she strangled the desire to weep.

She’d been bitten six separate times — right cheek, left side of neck, top-front of scalp, twice on left shoulder, and once on right forearm. That last one was the reward she got for trying to defend herself with her own body. The bites were deep and wide, twin semi-circles of human teeth marks. They ached and throbbed and burned and she couldn’t switch off the pain. In her sensory suspension tank deep in the underground layers of Tycho City on Luna, she could have edited any sense-input she wanted. Bodily pain was for the healer-nanites in her pressure-gel to deal with, not something inescapable and constant and pulling her thoughts to shreds every second of every minute. Pain was something she dipped into via the feedback uplinks from her surface agents.

Once, when she was twelve years old, one of Kagami’s agents had been blown in half by a roadside IED, somewhere deep in the cursed landscape of the Texan Interior, amid mile after mile of sun-cooked abandoned houses the NorAm hadn’t bothered to reclaim. The rest of the squad had been locked in a firefight with some natives who’d gotten too big for their boots; for fourteen minutes the bisected agent had lain in a puddle of blood and guts and auto-deployed wound-sealant — but his pain-shock dampeners had failed. He’d felt every second, screaming and writhing, kept alive for recovery and treatment, but fully conscious.

Kagami had tapped into his feed, both curious and horrified. It was so overwhelming that she’d cut the entire connection in panic and disgust, and curled into a ball inside her pressure-gel. Kurumi had to take over and finish the remote firefight in her place.

But there was no crash-landing out of this pain. No escape, no nerve-blunting, no sim. This pain was hers, in her own physical body.

Or was it? She wasn’t even herself, not really. She was a nanomachine simulacra loaded with a memory engram. Izumi Kagami, Princess and Logician and Daughter of the Moon, had died two hundred million years ago, spaced by NorAm spies whom she would have happily worked alongside if only they had asked. Want to make my father eat Moon rock? I’ll open all the airlocks for you, you cute little things! I’ll peel down Tycho’s defences like an exotic designer sex-organ with a wet sheath. Come on in! But they’d fucking spaced her.

She wasn’t real. She was a fake.

But that didn’t make the pain go away.

The other zombies did their best to settle down and get some rest; Kagami wondered why they bothered. Why not just stay awake and let your brain rot? What was the point? They weren’t going to make it to that mech which had dropped from orbit; if they did they wouldn’t be the first there; and if they secured it, where would they go? To the graveworm? Great plan, let’s try to communicate with an AI which perceives us as equivalent to dust particles.

No, they were going to get eaten. Alive and screaming. They were all going to die, horribly. And then come back and get eaten again, and again, and again.

Kagami wanted to blow out her own brains. But that wouldn’t help.

Pira remained where she was, sleeping with her back to a wall. Atyle meditated, then lay down flat like a corpse. Which she was. Vicky kept asking if Kagami was alright, if she needed help, if there was anything Vicky could do. Kagami grunted and snorted and eventually Vicky gave up — but at least she stayed close. She slept right next to Kagami’s side.

Ilyusha and Amina — the little psychopath horror bitch — nested like animals. Elpida ‘patrolled’ — which meant stepping out of the dismal little laundry room and creeping to the front of the building and back again. But eventually she returned and sat down. Elpida was just as exhausted as the rest of them. Gene-jacked and modded far beyond anything legal, but the fight had worn her down just the same. That’s what you get for pushing meat too far.

There was no way Kagami could go to sleep. She couldn’t switch off the pain. She just sat there, propped against a wall, trying to think about anything except the burning in her wounds and the aching in her hips and the terror of her own end in some dirt-eater’s belly.

In the shared darkness, trapped in a tiny room with a bunch of psychopaths, she whispered: “I can’t believe we’re dragging around an actual serial killer.”

A voice replied. She hadn’t expected that. Pira. “She’s a liability.”

Atyle whispered: “She is the long-clawed rabbit. She saved the warrior. None will cast her out.”

Kagami needed to keep talking. “What the hell do we do now?” she whispered. “What the hell do we do, after that … that!”

Elpida murmured, “We recover.”

“Then what?”

“We head for the combat frame. Our objective has not changed.”

“You fucked up,” Kagami hissed. “You fucked up, commander.” She poured her pain into that word. “You were too busy coddling a literal serial killer to notice a fucking ambush, fifteen floors up! Your idiot quest is going to get us all killed — and eaten! You gene-slop mud-fucker bi—”

Vicky’s hand grabbed Kagami’s knee. Kagami flinched, hard. She’d thought Vicky was asleep.

“Hey, Kaga,” Vicky said. “Cool down, yeah? Elpi doesn’t deserve that.”

Kagami’s face burned with humiliation.

But then Elpida whispered: “I made serious errors. The ambush was my responsibility. You all have my apologies, my thanks for repelling the assault, and my promise to do better.” Those purple eyes bored through the dark, right at Kagami. “Kagami, I’m sorry you got wounded. You deserve better. You deserved me in that room, with you. The wounds should be mine. Take more of the blue if you want it. You’ve earned that.”

Kagami looked down. She gritted her teeth. She said in a strangled voice: “I’m fine.”

Elpida carried on. “They were sent to take me alive. Did anybody else hear that order?”

Vicky mumbled, “What? Elpi?”

Pira grunted. “Mmhmm. I did.”

“Shit,” Vicky murmured. “Why? How’d they even know? Who would send them? What were they after? We’re not important or anything. Are we?”

In the darkness, Pira shrugged. Her shoulders scuffed against the wall. “Predators get all sorts of strange notions. Especially when they group up. They encourage paranoia in each other. They convince each other of things. Especially the ones who don’t understand what’s going on or where they are.”

Vicky said: “Elpi’s white hair, maybe? Or … or because she’s leading us, so she’s … ”

Elpida said, “They’re after the combat frame.”

Vicky asked, “Who is ‘they’, Elpi? In this context, who is ‘they’?”

“Somebody who knows what it is, and knows that I’m a pilot.”

Bullshit, Kagami thought, Pira knows more than she’s saying: she knows why we were ambushed, she knows who those zombies were, and if we’d been able to interrogate any of them, the connection with Pira would be all too obvious. Kagami was certain of that. There was no other explanation.

The others eventually drifted into sleep, or at least sleepless recovery. They didn’t post a watch rotation — everyone was too exhausted. And there was only one way in or out of the tiny, dirty, cramped room. If they got attacked now, that was it, afterlife over. They were relying on stealth and obscurity, like wounded animals who’d dragged themselves into a burrow.

Kagami’s pain just wouldn’t go away. The ache went on and on and on, dragging her thoughts to mush, blurring her senses into a veil of ragged red between her and the rest of the world. She kept probing around the bite wounds with her fingers, wincing and hissing at the ache; why couldn’t she leave them alone, let them heal? The pain was unbearable, a cage she could not escape. She hissed and whined and gritted her teeth. She tapped her head on the wall and dug her nails into her stomach. But it wouldn’t go away.

She tried to imagine being back in her sensory suspension tank, plugged into the LDIN, swimming through whatever medium she chose. In the sim-space she could have bathed in painkillers, filled in the missing chunks of flesh, dipped herself in a warm bubble-bath, surrounded herself with singing beauties and sculpted young men and gotten some sleep.

She should be debriefing herself on the ambush, unfolding the tactical layout in overlapping fire-lines and charts of reaction time, with Kurumi and Kuro at her sides to offer their own less meat-bound insights on failures and successes, on points of improvement, on agents to congratulate or retire, on lessons to learn and tactics to adjust. When she was younger Kagami had favoured Japanese-style feudal war-room projections, simulations of open-sided castle-top rooms with views over soaring mountain peaks. When she’d gotten a little older she’d realised that taste was a pale imitation of her father’s fascinations; she had rebelled by employing the stripped-down utilitarian brutalism of a Twen-Cen-War concrete bunker, complete with distant booms of artillery and the chatter of telegraphs and typewriters. That taste had darkened and intensified over the years, until she’d been running every debriefing under the world-ending noise of thermonuclear war.

Kurumi and Kuro had gotten tired of that. Kagami had softened her tastes — she told herself it was for her daughters’ sake that she’d adopted a more classical style of surroundings as she’d entered adulthood. Something Roman, with lots of marble. And columns. And men in togas. Lot of wine.

Kurumi and Kuro were the only two of Kagami’s AI children who had chosen to stay with her after fledging. The others had all left, for other parts of Luna’s sphere or the Lagrange Point Stations. One — Kana — had even slipped Luna’s bounds completely and joined the NorAm. Clever little darling, Kagami loved her so, but she never wrote.

But Kurumi and Kuro would have snuggled up and helped her feel better, flashing in black fur or midnight satin, softening her self-critique into something actionable.

She tried to imagine what they might have to say about this mess. Kuro would encourage cutting Pira out as quickly as possible. Use the closest asset, as swiftly as need be, without time for hesitation. Kurumi would have advised watching. She did always like to play with her prey, like a cat.

Kagami could barely hear their voices, barely imagine their shapes against her skin. She’d never had to imagine before. The sim-space had done it for her.

So now she shivered and shook, in the dark, in pain, down on the surface, after the end of the world.

The raw nanomachine slime performed its unfathomable work inside her cells, she couldn’t deny that; within two or three hours — what was time, without internal chronometer tracking? — the bite wounds were scabbed over, hard and solid as if they’d been healing for days. The pain ebbed, back below the surface, but it didn’t go away.

Worse than pain was memory.

The revenant who had gone straight for Kagami during the ambush hadn’t been that far removed from baseliner human being. Kagami had seen that, after Ilyusha had pulled the cannibal off her and put two shotgun rounds through the thing’s chest. But in her own short-term memory the figure was a snapping, whirling maw of slavering fangs, a dark weight pressing down on her body, from which she could not escape. The monster had tried to eat her! If they’d lost, she would have been eaten! Her flesh was wet and red and vulnerable — it crawled beneath her hands. She felt sick. She wanted to vomit.

She was not meant to be here, down on the surface, covered in dirt and blood and stinking of sweat and fear. Her skin was so thin, her eyeballs exposed to the air, her lungs breathing in muck and dust and rot. She had legs! She’d been forced to get up and walk, to put her flesh at risk. But it wasn’t even her flesh, it was a stolen imitation, a fake. She wasn’t even Kagami, she was a memory of a woman who had died of decompression hypoxia.

Beneath her coat, tucked against a wall in a laundry room full of other zombies, Kagami shook uncontrollably.

She was meant to be on Luna, in the core of Tycho, in her tank, with her daughters.

She needed a ship.

A ship? Where? How? Luna was dead! Everything was dead. Mars, Titan, the Oort morons — if any of them still existed they would have recolonised Earth by now, so they were dead too. That orbital ring was a miracle, but it was rotting as well, probably full of zombies. There was no way out, nowhere to go, nowhere to run, no suspension tank to return to, no Tycho, no nothing. Just flesh and darkness and pain.

Kagami screwed up her face; she would not cry. She refused to cry.

She needed the pain to go away.

Still shaking with what she hated to admit was post-traumatic stress reaction, Kagami got to her feet and crept over to the backpacks lined up against the wall.

She had to be careful and quiet — the others might not understand. She knelt down as gently as she could, without clanking her bionic knees on the concrete floor; kneeling was a stupid pose, everything involving legs was stupid. You didn’t need legs in a suspension tank, you needed high throughput data cables hooked to your spine. She unzipped the bag full of shotgun shells and cannisters of nanomachine slime. Her mouth felt so dry. Her stomach clenched. She used her own torso to hide the faint blue glow as she extracted a cannister.

The lid came off with a touch. Her hands were shaking, her lips quivering. The goo had no scent, no taste, and a slimy texture which clung to her mouth — but her body demanded she drink. The urge was overwhelming.

She poured the liquid down her throat, gulping and glugging and swallowing and taking care not to pant and gasp. Couldn’t wake the others.

She tucked the empty cannister inside her coat and returned to her spot. Had Vicky realised she’d left? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe the others wouldn’t notice one cannister less. She doubted anybody was counting; it was Ilyusha’s bag and numbers were probably too much for the cyborg-brained midget. Besides, any of them could have risen in the night and stolen a cannister. If Kagami was confronted she would tell the truth — the pain was unbearable and she didn’t have any other way to switch it off. Elpida had offered, too! She was allowed to do this!

One cannister. That was all. Nobody would begrudge her that. Besides, it might make her useful.

In the afterglow of the feasting, Kagami stared at her left hand. She had no data-uplink and no slots for the cables, not with legs in the way. But what had Pira said? If you drank enough nano-slop, or ate enough nanomachine-derived flesh, you could change yourself? Yes, that was correct. But how did it work? Willpower? Self-image adjustment? Bloody-minded determination?

Kagami stared at her hand. Data uplink. Access points. Connection processor.

She returned to the bag twice more. Her body demanded she drink again, and again. Her belly seemed to absorb the stuff directly into her stomach walls. She guzzled the blue gunk like she was dying of thirst. And she stared and stared and stared at her left hand.

After the third cannister, she saw faint lines beneath her flesh. Geometric, sharp, clean. Circuitry? It must be. She concentrated, willing her flesh to become more than flesh.

When she turned back for the third time, with the intention that this cannister would be her last, she met a pair of mismatched eyes staring back at her from the floor — one dark, the other peat-green.

Atyle was awake, watching her drink.

For a long moment Kagami stared at the paleo-primitive. The priestess stared back with a faint smile on her lips.

Kagami swallowed, then whispered: “Are you going to tell the others?”

Atyle smiled wider. She closed her eyes. “Tell them what, scribe? I am asleep. As are we all.”

Kagami returned to her spot, next to Vicky. She watched Atyle for a long time, but the woman didn’t move again. Then Kagami stared at her own left hand, but the lines had vanished.

Had she only imagined the change? Or did the work require more raw materials?

That must be it. She needed more nanomachines. Much more. So much more.

Then she would have a weapon to defend herself from the traitor. And not a gun — a real weapon, a weapon worthy of Izumi Kagami, Seventeenth Daughter of the Moon.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

A glimpse into another mind, with a very different way of thinking, from a world just as long-dead as Elpida’s. But is Kagami just paranoid – or is Pira more than she appears? Gosh, Kagami is so absolutely awful, just terrible; amazingly fun to write a look into her POV here. This won’t be exactly like the POV structure of the previous arc, where we followed Amina for several consecutive chapters. Be prepared for some variation here, and some surprises. This arc is likely gonna be a long one, too. A star has tumbled from ash-choked heavens; the carrion eaters gather to feast on stellar entrails – but our zombie girls are wounded and tired. For now.

No patreon link this week! There’s still just one chapter ahead, but it’s nearly the end of the month and I don’t like baiting people into getting double-charged. Feel free to wait until next week!

But there’s still the TopWebFiction entry, for voting on. Voting makes the story go up the rankings, which helps more people see it! It really helps spread the story.

Thank you so much for reading Necroepilogos! I have big plans for this arc. Things are gonna get … messy. Looking forward to lots more!