“Alright,” I said, rubbing my hands together as I looked the man up and down. My eyes saw much more than any regur eyes would have, I dissected him, down to the cellur level in just a few seds and pared everything I saw to my standard humaes. I looked into his eyes- erm, eye(?) and smiled. “Do you want to keep your metal bits?”

  “What?” He asked dumbly, visibly putoff by my iy. Or maybe he was just slow. He looked aska the Inquisitor, likely not even knowing that it’d beehey had been told to shoot if the order came. To him, I was just a very weird woman who’d just asked whether he wao keep his prosthetics.

  “Answer her question,” Amberley ordered in a tohat brokered nument.

  “Do I want to keep my ‘metallic bits’?” He repeated, not even looking back at me. “Sorry ma’am, but I think I do. It’d be hard to shoot with my hand missing.”

  “How did you lose the hand anyway?” I asked musingly, not really hoping for an answer. Not a verbal one anyway. The muscuture and the state his joints and anic ans were in, I dubbed the man as a sniper and a few lingering burn scars and a few microscopic metal shrapnels still lodged deep he end of his anid told me enough. “Did you check what happens if you hold a live grenade in your hand or something? I ’t see how else a marksman got his hands blown off … though I guess shit happens in real bat. Hmmm. The visual sensor is better than yanic eye, though not by much, you really should stop staring at porno-stes in the dark, it’s not good for your eyesight.”

  The fbbergasted expression he had as I finished my monologue was everything I wanted and more. Really, messing with people was just way too fun, especially when I khere would be no sequeo me either way.

  “What?” The man asked, soundiirely founded by my words. Then, he once again looked at his boss for help, which was starting to mildly annoy me. I eaking to him, and he had the gall to ignore me.

  “Did I use some big words your little brain couldn’t grasp?” I asked in a mock g tone. “I asked you a very simple question your Inquisitor mistress ordered you to answer: do you want your metallic bets repced with inal anies? Yes or no.”

  “You-“ he started, expression morphing into one of a my obvious mockery, but his jaws snapped shut a moment ter and he sent a fearful g the Inquisitor and the issar sittio her. They didn’t interrupt, or chide me, though Amberley looked to be disseg every word I spoke and every twituscle I made. Seeing that they weren’t ag, the man got the message and swallowed his indignation with some visible effort. “Yes, yes, I would like to have my ‘anic bits’ back.”

  I ignored his brusque answer and smiled. That was good enough for me, I wouldn’t just start re-shaping the body of an unwilling subject, but he had agreed. Kind of, anyway, but that was good enough.

  “Perfect,” I hummed, turning my gaze ba the Inquisitor. “I’ll fix this one up to tip-top dition, but only as a demonstration. To do the same to the rest will cost you.”

  She just nodded, which I took as my cue to get to work. Not that it was much of one. First, I he man’s nervous system with a flick of biomancy, which also had the added be of making him dazed as hell.

  He staggered left and right, barely managing to keep himself standing as his eyes gzed over and his mouth opened into a slurring question of something I didn’t bother deciphering.

  I stepped up to him, a white glove of eldritch flesh grew over my hands and covered them, which I then pced on his ned the other on his shoulder to steady him.

  Not being that tall of a woman, I probably made a strange sight as I effortlessly held the bulky trooper’s body up with one hand.

  Wasting no time, I extended hair-thin tendrils from my gloves that passed through his skin and flesh beh without messing with everything. It phased through much of it, leaving the man’s body in its path unged. For now.

  I grew a wide work of tendrils through his body in all of five seds, with every single cell getting at least a brush-up if not a whole f tendril for themselves. I ate his genes up, deciphered them using my vast library of human genes and then ran a quick re-build and optimisation of it through my mind-cores.

  From there, remaking the tempte of his body at its prime was the work of a sed. I’d have struggled with any other species anism, but with how many human samples I had, I uood their gerains.

  My optimisation run even eliminated a few strains that were responsible for the man’s ied susceptibility to bone marrow cer. The beginnings of which were already growing in his body, along with a few dozen other diseases currently barely kept at bay by his immune system and the medical drugs c through his veins.

  Before I hahose problems though, I pushed all of his metallic prosthetid add-ons out of his body. It was a wonder he survived the operation that gave them, I found. Most of them ected to his nerve endings, but many of them — primarily the bun his head — ected directly into his brainstem, with others burrowing into his spine.

  The operation assable, though still pretty atrocious by my standards. They were actively corroding every nerve ending they ected to, and some weren’t even eg properly. My instincts told me those would hurt like a motherfucker. That robably why the man had an inbuilt paior he base of his skull.

  I gently disected them all, takireme care with everything that actually burrowed into his brain. His spine, I cut entirely, along with the rest of his nervous system. It was easier than to keep some pain feedback from brutalising his currently dazed mind — numbing his nervous system might have stopped the disfort of my tendrils slowly moulding his body, but I didn’t think it would be enough to stop him from feeling the agony that apanied what I did afterwards — and I would be rebuilding everything but his mier than ever anyway.

  Oer the other, his metallic bits got pushed out of his body and my telekinesis carried them away and dumped them behind me. I didn’t bother fixing the gaping open wounds left behind beyond stopping any blood from flowing and any iioing the other way.

  Preparations done, I held his prime tempte in my mind and with a surge of bio-energy, forced his body to ge.

  There was a sharp intake of breath behind me, and a muffled curse from as the man’s skin rippled like the disturbed surface of a pond. Flesh flowed underh his skin as his ans, bones and muscles healed. Forty years washed away in a moment as his wrinkly skin tightened up around his now youthful muscles, scars and bured away like freshly fallen snow and where his prosthetics had once been, new flesh grew.

  First the open wounds where the several smaller cyberics were slotted into his body healed over, flesh and skin knitting itself back together and then came the missing arm, before finally, the ruined left side of his face regrew. It ulsive sight, flesh wiggling like threads knitting themselves into some macabre fabrid then got worse as the eyeball finished f before the eyelids and the skin.

  Then, as a finishing touch, I reected his nervous system to his brainstem after making doubly sure there were no more frayed ends or mangled bits.

  That still left the man with a lingering daze that I washed away with an infusion of bio-energy. The man jumped, a visible shudder running down his spine as my electrifying jump-start of his body brought him back to the here and now.

  “Done,” I said, taking a few steps back as the man stared at his hands in wonder. He pulled at his unwriight skin on the back of his hand as his expression grew increasingly more weirded out.

  “These … “ he started, mouth hanging open for a moment. “Are my hands? How? Wha- “

  His words died off, and I felt a strange mixture of emotions run through him as he heard the sound of his own voice. He k was his, but he also knew he hadn’t sounded like that in decades. Which, rather uandably, threw him for a loop.

  I heard some muttered curses, ‘Emperor protect us’ and other simir nonsense spoken under someone’s breath. They came from the two yet to be named goons behind Amberley and from ’s surface thoughts.

  Despite not being what one would sider a pious or even religious man in the Imperium, the ex-issar raying to his Emperor. I suppose he’d never ran across a Sorcerer adept at biomancy before, or he has, and my little dispy had freshened up some unfortable memories.

  “Go check him over,” I said, crossing my arms under my chest as I gestured for Amberley to get on with it. “firm what I said, then we get on with this.”

  *****

  Amberley watched Estaban, the Chiurgeon of her retiep away from the ‘healed’ trooper with a look of cealed horror. For a man who specialised in stitg barely living people back together just ‘good enough’ for them to survive, something to inspire horror had to be … unique. Especially since his qualifications also made him the perfeterrogator as he knew precisely how much punishment the human body could take before it gave out.

  “This … This is unnatural,” whispered Estaban, a deep frown on his bald face as he watched the trooper, who showed his disuch more openly. “It shouldn’t be.”

  “Esteban,” Amberley said with forced ess. “Speak to me. What’s your diagnosis?”

  “Diagnosis?” Esteban asked, whirling on her as a slightly deranged chuckle escaped his lips. “My diagnosis is that I have never in my life seen anyone as healthy as that thing. Not a single scar, not a single iion, not even the dormant diseases I know Sebastian had before that creature worked her abominable sorcery on him. If- … If … I didn’t know better,” he swallowed, then made the sign of the Aquil over his chest. “May the Emperor five me for saying this … but if I didn’t know aer, I’d have suspected him to be a Living Saint. His body is, to all my sensors and even to my instincts, as perfect as a human body be.”

  Amberley took a moment to digest that, so the woman — if she was even that, and the skin she wore wasn’t just some bio-manti ed around its true form to imitate the human form — wasn’t lying. irely anyway. Dozens of pns got thrown out the window as she structed new ones and residered her options and priorities.

  Sure, the primary objective of her mission to this fringe-dwelling dirt-ball was to capture the artifact with the alternative of destroying it if the primary objective proved unfeasible. But its destru was also airely acceptable result. What she couldn’t accept, would be the artifact falling into enemy hands, she- No, the Imperium, couldn’t risk even the possibility of any forpleting the puzzle.

  In a way, destroying the artifact, which was supposedly the only one of its kind still ience, would ensure no one would ever plete the whole thing. If she was ho with herself, Amberley actually preferred it that way. The Inquisition’s vaults were secure, but every now and again, some things just up and disappeared from them. The ones responsible were usually radical Inquisitors who thought they knew better than everyone else and thought they would be able to resist the temptation of using the artifacts in their hands responsible.

  Usually, they thought wrong.

  Not once had it been her own mission to track due Inquisitors on megalomaniacal power-trips who got their hands on dangerous artifacts and elimihem. Putting this artifato one of those vaults would just be giving her future self more work.

  What she still wasn’t sure of was whether destroying the artifaow, before that biomancer could exami, and risking her wrath was worth it. Quite possibly, she and everyohing her camp would die a horrible death if she just pulled out her sidearm and bathed the gilded gem in psma fire. But it could be worth it if it meant an enemy of Mankind was robbed of dangerous knowledge.

  She took a quice at Ciaphas, the man she’d dragged out of retirement again to e with her all the way over to this backwater. She would destroy the artifact even if it killed every single one of them … but she wao know for absolutely sure that it would be the correct choiake. Ciaphas and many of her other men and women did not deserve whatever horrid ends a biomancer could e up with and she was determio spare them off that end if she could.

  “So he is healed,” Amberley reiterated questioningly, reasserting her focus over her slipping thoughts. “And his apparent youth is not just skihe regrown parts aren’t just some facsimile?”

  “No,” Esteban said, the few seds of silence she’d given him apparently having been enough to calm himself. “He is in perfect physical dition and I’d have no reason to doubt the fact that his body appears to be around 25 to 28 Terran years old. It cks even the lingering signs that even the best rejuvenatioments known to Man all have. This is … a twisted miracle. A Bsphemy of the highest order. That creature ’t be allowed to live.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” Amberley said coldly, gesturing for the man to sod off, which he thankfully did in short order. Though not before throwing a malicious look towards Sebastian. “Rakel, your turn. Tell me what you think.”

  Her Saned Psyker shivered at the order, meekly standing from the small wooden box she’d been sitting at in the er of the tent. Amberley frowned, eyeing the woman for a moment. Rakel had always been … not quite there in the head, but whenever something terrified her, it was usually with very good reason. Except is, which terrified the woman no matter how small or harmless they were.

  Thinking of it, Rakel had been ag strarahan usual anyway, ever sihat ‘Emilia’ woman had been in the camp. After a sed of going over her memories, Amberley realised the Psyker had never once shared space with their enigmatic visitor and the only reason she was ient right now was because she’d been ordered to be there by Amberley herself.

  She should have noticed sooner. She should have, but in her defence, she had been rather preoccupied by the powerful biomancer in her camp, and her entire months-long mission starting to u the seams before her eyes.

  “Rakel,” Amberley said in a tone she’d perfected over the years, it was half authoritative and half gentle, just the right mixture to startle Rakel into a state of mind fit for receiving and pleting her orders. “I want you to tell me what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling.”

  “The breeze has ears,” the woman muttered, looking around the tent like a scared rabbit hearing a pack of howling wolves closing in on her. “She knows. She knows everything, hears everything. She is in the wind and the earth. I ’t hide, not even in my head. There is o hide.”

  “Who is ‘she’?” Amberley asked, though she k was a rather worthless question with an obvious answer.

  “The Silver Lady,” Rakel said, visibly shivering as the words left her mouth. “Her light is sht. It’s everywhere, hiding. It’s murky, but I see some of it, the bits she lets me see. She knows I see her. It’s terrifying.”

  P3t1