Nicolai was alerted after moving halfway up the stairs, his Soul Sense moving ahead of him as always. He’d seen the door to the safe-place was hanging open. That was wrong: against protocol. The door should never be left open. He had made sure the others understood this.

  ‘Ready up, we may have trouble,’ he said to Jo and Beth, who moved with him. Maxine and the others were a distance behind them, as Maxine with Daksh had wanted to perform some scans of the area. As he slipped up the stairs, assault rifle raised, he sent the Grasping and Repulsive finger Symbiotes out to his hands, charging his shield and the Blue Hornet.

  He found a room thrown into chaos, bodies in the floor. Old Ben, Sara, Katie and Elena. All very dead. But, there was one more body, male, headless, and somewhat decomposed. Not one of the group, he would have said, except it was wearing gear like he and the others commonly equipped, though torn and ragged.

  There was a creature in the hallway. It looked up as soon as he emerged and Nicolai saw it had Karl’s head, which he matched to the body, a minor mystery solved. Karl’s corpse had risen and come to seek him out. This caused him a pulse of irritation. The annoying man had refused to stay dead.

  He fired immediately and the bullets knocked the creature tumbling through the air. It moved in a snap, unbelievably fast, so much so his arm couldn’t keep up as it darted into the room and sideways, getting to cover.

  As he moved toward it he heard Jo and Beth entering behind him.

  ‘Don’t do anything,’ he told them. ‘This one is mine.’ A smile curved across his face as the thrill clicked up into first gear, an eager hum through his body. His Soul Sense lunged ahead of him, catching at the creature, and he found it had a Soul Sense of its own but weak, very weak.

  Normally he would have overwhelmed it in an instant, but here he felt another tingle of irritation. His Soul Sense was beginning to degrade. It didn’t work as well as it once had. The Soul Rot grinding away at his Soul was weakening it. He struck at the creature’s Soul Sense once, and it was almost broken but not quite.

  The monster exploded out of its cover, but he struck again, broke it’s Soul Sense and then it was caught by the Repulsive Finger, flung away to slap into the wall. Nicolai held it there, arm outstretched, and he moved at an angle until the line of straight force between him and it sent it sliding along the wall. He tilted his arm and it ended up stuck in the corner between wall and ceiling, squirming madly.

  Nicolai looked it over carefully with his Soul Sense, interested in whatever this thing was. His lip wanted to curl into a sneer at the faint fuzziness and lack of clarity that now afflicted his Soul Sense. He suspected that he was now below the threshold for creating a Major Node. The other Modules pressed close upon him, expressing their interest in the strange being.

  Their attention calmed him, allowed him to relax. He focused, using his Soul Sense to examine the creature as well as he could. It was some kind of large insect. A little like a centipede in form. But with a vicious, segmented tail for striking. Its vital points seemed to be the wider, torso-like area hanging out of Karl’s neck, and it had a kind of head that it had inserted through the bottom of Karl’s neck and into his head, and from there spread little tendril parts which it used to manipulate the dead man’s features.

  Stuck as it was in the corner, there was nothing it could do to him. He approached closer, raising his shield, and then covered the last bit of space in an instant, slotting his shield in front of it to hold it there against the ceiling. Like you’d catch a bug with a cup.

  ‘You killed me, you killed me, I hate you,’ gibbered the creature in Karl’s voice. He could see it manipulating the man’s features, but it was doing the actual speaking.

  Nicolai drew his sawn-off and took aim, pressing the creature harder back into the corner, shrinking his shield as he did so until it was pressed tight in there, raging and squirming but unable to strike with its body folded up. Its Soul Sense was trying to re-emerge but he used the same technique the bird had once used on him, applying constantly spiritual pressure to keep it bottled up. That done, he investigated its actual form more closely, interested in the alien creature. This confirmed the area hanging out of Karl’s neck was its torso, which was less armoured on the front. It should die if he shot it there.

  ‘You bastard!’ gnashed Karl’s dead face. ‘You’re scum! Scum!’

  ‘You know me?’ he asked it.

  ‘Nicolai! I hate you!’

  Interesting. This thing had found Karl’s corpse, cored him out and dug through his memories. A clever trick he’d like to learn for himself.

  This world truly is full of wonders.

  He leaned closer to the dead thing. His teeth clenched in a vicious grin as the rage bubbling in him at the damage to his Soul Sense found a handy target in Karl’s corpse. ‘I did kill you,’ he whispered, ‘and I enjoyed it, and I’m going to enjoy killing you again.’

  He dismissed the shield in the same instant as he pulled both triggers. One 12 gauge round smashed through Karl’s face and into the head of the creature within, the other caught it in its “torso” part.

  Its insides sprayed over the wall and it fell to the floor, dead.

  He considered the corpse on the ground, prodding it carefully with Soul Sense to make sure it was dead. It felt dead, and he found his rage somewhat vented.

  He calmly took his assault rifle into his hands and spread shots over its snake-like body regardless, splitting it apart into grizzly sections, then stomped on the bits that looked at all dangerous until they were crushed into gore. He wouldn’t put it past a thing like this to have a few more tricks. He knelt down and reached out, Examining it.

  Nascent Skinwalker

  The infantile form of natural Skinwalkers. It does not possess the full capabilities of the adult version and makes do by riding corpses, rather than copying forms. Like the adult version, nascent Skinwalkers are capable of stealing memories from those who have recently died. They are known to use bodies of dead loved ones to gain access into homes and other areas where they will not be expected. Blindingly fast, they are difficult to deal with if allowed to get close, though in this form they are incapable of using Symbiotes and, except for their speed and the tough outer plating on their backs, are quite weak.

  As he’d been looking over the creature, Jo and Beth had rushed to the bodies on the ground, letting out cries of shock and horror as they checked and realised all were dead. Nicolai hadn’t felt any need to rush in this manner. He had known they were dead the moment he entered the room.

  A door opened and he began he raise his assault rifle, but he saw it was merely Perro and Azure. The pair crept out of the room, faces white, eyes wide and wild.

  ‘Are any of them…?’ began Azure, her eyes darting to the bodies then flinching away to Jo and Beth.

  Jo shook her head at the girl, mute.

  Nicolai observed from the side as the four gathered, standing over the dead. They stumbled around like zombies and stared down as though shell shocked. He supposed such a reaction was normal from Perro and Azure, but he was surprised to it from Jo and Beth. They’d seen plenty of corpses, after all.

  Because these ones belong to our friends! cried the Mask.

  Friends. Nicolai tilted his head. Not the word he would have used. He looked to Perro and Azure, from whom he felt horror, dismay, and something else. Guilt.

  ‘What happened here?’

  ‘T-that thing, it arrived at the main door and knocked,’ spoke Perro after a moment, staring at the ground. ‘I thought, I thought that we shouldn’t open the door.’

  Azure nodded at his words. ‘But old Ben said that we were too untrusting. He and Elena wanted to let Karl… to let it in. To treat his wounds.’

  Nicolai could imagine it all too well. Old Ben had always been eager to help anyone who appeared to be in pain, and none too concerned with checking the pain was real. Elena’s connection with the dead man had likely sealed the deal.

  ‘There was a moment, where I almost stopped Elena… but then I just… didn’t,’ said Perro. His head hung low.

  ‘If we’d done something, everyone would be alive,’ muttered Azure.

  From what he felt of them, the pair seemed to expect that he was going to strike them, or cry out that they were at fault.

  He didn’t see the point in any of that. He didn’t really consider it to be anyone’s fault. The Nascent Skinwalker had simply been entirely unexpected and inexperience plus bad decision making had led to a singular, crucial mistake: opening the door.

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  ‘I can’t believe this,’ mumbled Beth. She was hunched up over Katie’s sprawled form, tears running down her face. ‘Just this morning we were playing. You know that game she liked to play, over Local?’

  The others nodded.

  ‘No, no, no,’ mumbled Beth, her face shaking, rocking back and forth as she gazed down at Katie’s body. Jo came and put a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Dead, all dead,’ cried Perro. ‘Why didn’t I do something!’ he screamed, tearing at his hair.

  Then they were all sobbing and shaking and wailing, as though some blockage had been removed.

  Nicolai’s eyes widened, stumbling a step backwards at the sudden outpouring of raw emotion.

  He found all this entirely incomprehensible and thus deeply disturbing. His eyes fell on Azure who was thrashing her head side to side and wailing. Is this some kind of performance? It had to be, hadn’t it? It was too over the top. But he couldn’t see any possible reason to do so—who was the act for? It could only be real, but he couldn’t understand how anyone could allow themselves to be so lost to emotion, to act in such a ridiculous manner.

  While the others flailed and wailed, he moved to look down, gazing at old Ben. Glassy eyes and the big hole in the man’s chest gazed back. It was a shame the old man had been killed. In spite of his naivety, he’d been useful, and had made many things for Nicolai. As to Elena and Sara, he was less concerned. They hadn’t been of much use, but he supposed it was a shame. The world was a little less interesting with them gone.

  Strangely enough, he found that he felt saddest—if his response could be described as “sad”—about old Ben. The old man had had some actual principles. He’d wanted the new world to be a better place than the old. Now, old Ben would never see if that might come to light. Nicolai had always found himself in a vague kind of agreement with the old man.

  There was no denying capitalism, old Ben’s eternal enemy, had turned Earth into a shithole. But at the same time Nicolai really wasn’t sure what could work as an alternative. His general view was that people simply couldn’t manage themselves in any way that might bring about an actual utopia, because as a collective humanity was just as insane as he was. He wondered if the Better Man he vaguely wished to be might try and do something about that in the future. When he was much stronger. That was what old Ben had never really grasped. If you wanted to change things, you had to be strong.

  Nicolai pondered that. If he were to win, to become the strongest at the end of it all, what would he do with that? He liked the idea of fighting, and striving, and pushing to rise to the very top. He wasn’t too keen on thinking about what’d happen if he got there; there didn’t seem much point. But if he did… he’d rather not rule over piles of corpses. That’d just be boring, wouldn’t it?

  His eyes found the form of Katie, her hair bloodied, body limp, half rolled over. The nexus of the insanity called “grief” that had possessed the others.

  Something erupted within him where he’d been subconsciously holding it down. It squirmed over his face, digging into him. His Mask. Nicolai winced, and quickly cut his connection to it. He reached to his face, pulled it off, and after a thoughtful moment reattached it to his chest, a place where it was far less able to sink its hooks into his mind, unable to generate flurries of powerful emotion.

  His eyes flicked over the distraught visages of the others before returning to Katie, and as he gazed down at the tiny corpse he thought... Certainly the most useless of them all.

  And yet he knew her death was considered a particularly Bad Thing. His Mask definitely believed so; he was having to work quite hard to keep it down there on his chest, to keep its juddering feelings from latching onto him. Nicolai struggled to understand why, exactly, a child dying was so much more tragic than an adult dying.

  All the adults had once been children. It was simply a matter of how many years had passed. But people seemed to find something especially upsetting about the deaths of children. Perhaps it had an evolutionary basis? Children needed to be protected by adults, because they couldn’t survive on their own. Thus the maternal urge. Was that the root of this reaction?

  Nicolai had quite liked Katie when she’d been alive. She had been amusing. But now she was dead he didn’t see any point in making a big fuss. That wouldn’t change anything. If she’d been injured, he’d have seen about putting her back together. If she’d been captured, he might have gone to rescue her. But she was simply dead so there was nothing to be done. This, he believed, was the primary reason he found the reaction of the others so incomprehensible.

  What was the purpose of it?

  People died. This was, in Nicolai’s experience, a Thing That Happened, and though he intended to avoid dying himself through every means available, he recognised that the more time passed, the more the odds of it happening rose. Katie would have died eventually, though perhaps she might have made it to an old age. In this case, she had died now rather than later. The Thing Had Happened.

  His Mask, and the reactions of the others, told him that her death was a big deal, at least according to the standard human view. But understanding why remained beyond him. He touched on his Mask and attempted to communicate, to inquire as to why it was so major, but it was beyond the abilities of his Mask to articulate. It simply knew that this was, and tried to summon up snapshots of her when she’d been alive, using them like claws to dig into the empty centre of him.

  Nicolai was not receptive to this and it found little success. He took a wider view of these events. If you calculated how many humans had died over the past thousands of years, the number was staggering. Huge numbers of children had died at birth. Was it tragic? He supposed so. But that was life. It was brutal and unrelenting. If it had been different, if it had all been softness and happiness and there was no pain or struggle… then what would be the point?

  Where would be the satisfaction in surviving if anyone could survive?

  He was sure that the only reason the Mask cared so much about Katie’s death was because it had known her. What if they had never met? What if, in a hypothetical alternate timeline, another him walked into a room and found this group and they were all dead, but that was the first time he was ever seeing them? The Mask would have been sad to see a dead little girl, but nothing on this level.

  Reactions like this were a common human foible, and the fact the Mask possessed it told him that, indeed, it was doing a good job of being human. We all have our roles. The Mask’s job was to be human so he could understand humans better, and, at times, when it made sense, allow himself to be more human. His job was to choose if the time was right, and if being human was reasonable or foolish.

  Nicolai did the same thing he always did. He moved around and closed the eyes of the dead. That was the right sort of thing to do, he was sure about that. His Mask, having progressed further through the gamut of emotion and spiralling thought it was experiencing, off in the corner of his mind and Soul where he’d quarantined it, pushed something new at him.

  This is all because you killed Karl…

  Nicolai snorted. How could he have known there would exist some creature in the jungle that could take Karl’s corpse, ransack the man’s memories, and then come here to kill people? He recognised that it wasn’t impossible; perhaps if he’d asked Kleos, or perhaps if he’d completed reading the Memory Tome on creatures sooner, something he still hadn’t quite managed because he’d prioritised the other Tomes first.

  He hadn’t done those things, because he hadn’t known exactly which parts of the information were the most important. In this world, there was simply too much he didn’t know, and all he could do was learn what he could when he could. Asking Kleos “is there a danger in leaving Karl’s corpse out there” never occurred to him because why would it? As to killing Karl, he’d done what he’d had to do. There was also a small possibility this wasn’t just random chance—perhaps Paxolnaz had played a role in what had happened here. If so, he didn’t know how he could have predicted and avoided this event.

  Sometimes Shit Happened and That Was Life.

  His Mask was less than pleased with this viewpoint of shrugging acceptance. In fact, it squirmed with discontent and raw misery, crawling up his chest. Still… I suppose it is human to feel guilty. He nodded to himself, and decided to open himself to his Mask. It was important to do so, because he was pretty sure that was how he fed it, how he made it stronger and more real. Something which had become of pressing importance since the realisation of the important role it played in resisting the dark and the Demon. If it hadn’t been for that he would have left it on his chest to tire itself out, as in practical terms he didn’t see much point in experiencing these emotions when he knew he wouldn’t agree with the reasoning behind them.

  The moment he opened himself to the Mask, it took the opportunity and lunged upwards over his chest and neck and latched onto his face, and now the sensations it gave him were not a simple sharing of experience, they were a punishment.

  They’re dead because of you! She had her whole life ahead of her!

  Suddenly he was awash with memories of the others and “regret.” It poured through him in a terrible wave, snatching at him and dragging him into a whirl of memory. He saw old Ben and Katie and Elena and Sara, smiling together, doing the things they’d done. Being human and alive and happy. He experienced the raw misery his Mask felt at their loss.

  It took a moment for him to regain some clarity, and he found his face a little wet with tears. Had he been snivelling? All of this was quite unpleasant. He realised he needed to try and deal with it. He attempted to do another thing humans did, one of what he believed was the typical methods of dealing with such feelings. He worked to frame what had happened in a way that would allow him to “process it.” To move on, and ideally gain something. After a moment’s thought, he found a way.

  It was a Bad Thing that this happened, and now I have a duty to make sure it Doesn’t Happen Again; at least, not in the exact same way. Therefore, this was a Learning Experience. In the future, if I have to Kill Someone—like Karl—then if Circumstances Allow I will seek to Burn Their Body before something can Make Use Of It.

  Nicolai nodded, and congratulated himself on being human because Encouragement Is Important.

  Job Done.

  The Mask wanted something quite a bit more substantial but it knew it wasn’t going to get it. It could only accept his Heartfelt Moment of Internal Growth because that was the only thing on the plate, while continuing loop itself into knots of suffering and grief. Nicolai allowed it to remain fully affixed to his face, and experienced all of this himself, because he knew that doing so was important to the Mask. It would help keep it strong, and he needed it strong. However, as he’d worked out the correct framing with which to filter these emotions through, the guilt found little purchase on him, and the grief was simply useful to enhance his act.

  ###

  After dealing with his Mask he did his best to join in and do what a leader ought to do; saying the proper words and consoling people, with a reminder that all they could do was keep going. It wasn’t easy and he felt sure his words rang false, but no one pressed him.

  After deciding the moment was right, he enacted a short speech to help the others move on. To finish, he dug up one of the old winners that was worth using in situations like this: ‘Old Ben, Elena, Sara, and Katie wouldn’t want us to let their deaths distract us. They would want us to go on, and live. We have a responsibility to them to make sure we stay alive.’

  He’d timed this well, after several other words and quiet moments and regret-slash-sadness he modelled by drawing on the actual dismay his Mask felt plus his observations of their reactions.

  They all nodded in response, and he felt a warm glow inside at the realisation that he’d gotten it right: those had been the right kind of words. His Mask was pleased he’d spoken them, even if it would have rather he spoke them honestly. He told the Mask the words were honest, because they’d come not just from him, but from the Mask too (in a way). This didn’t exactly soothe it, but it did cause it a momentary confusion that distracted it from its misery.

  is definitely one of us,’ snapped Ben. ‘It’s Karl!’

  not to be wary.