Visceral flesh fluttered and pulsed on monumental scale, trembling and throbbing in slow, steady, stately rhythms, almost too subtle for human eyes to follow. Disrobed meat smouldered with the crimson glow of molten blood, glistening slick and wet with layers of silken mucus. Hawsers of thickly thrumming tendon and bunched cables of braided sinew sutured and stitched hidden layers of marrow and muscle to the arching spans of soaring bone. Osseous columniation curved toward the vault of the ceiling, joining there like steepled fingers, each rib-like support yellowed as ancient paper, encrusted with long streaks of darker deposit, pitted and worn in swirling patterns by the passing of processes no mortal mind could trace. The lowest and narrowest of the veins melted from flesh to dull silver metal, spreading out to become the floor. Tiny side passages puckered and winked, some of them closed by metal bulkheads marked with the symbol of the bone-speakers guild, others with warnings that the interior was unsafe for unprotected human beings, but a few stood open — membranous voids between the bones, lit by the dappled backwash of dark red light, spiralling upward and downward, deeper into the body of a living god.

  Elpida crept onward through the remembered flesh and bone of Telokopolis, though she knew not where this vessel led.

  Before she had left the memory of the cadre’s private quarters, Elpida had paused to equip herself from the armoury. She wore a fresh pair of black leggings and a clean back t-shirt, along with elbow and knee pads which the cadre had sometimes used for training. She had also dug out a pair of flexible, soft-soled sparring shoes, muffling her footsteps to near-silence.

  A jury-rigged harness was looped around her left shoulder and forearm, made from two rifle slings and some combat webbing, cradling a GXI-115 lightweight submachine gun — little more than a pistol with a stock and some punch. Elpida had added a silencer, bulky and awkward but essential for her strategy. The weapon was designed for non-Legion civilians operating out on the plateau. It drew ammo from a pre-loaded block of reaction mass, produced minimal recoil, and had as few moving parts as possible. No way to jam, no need to reload, nothing that would force Elpida to fumble with the absence of her right hand.

  She also wore a simple ballistic protection vest. Her long white hair was stuffed down the back. The front of the vest concealed an additional sidearm — a 117-MCS hand cannon, the same heavy pistol she had used against Lykke, along with two additional magazines, and a long-bladed combat knife.

  Elpida had located some white paint deep in the armoury and done what was necessary, even though it had brought bile to the back of her throat.

  The ballistic protection vest now sported the Covenanter’s triple-triangle symbol on the chest, daubed in white, by Elpida’s own hand.

  Better than stripping the dead woman. Elpida had taken the greensuit hood, despite the blood on the inside; it was stuffed down the front of the ballistic vest, in case she needed to complete the disguise in a hurry. Her hair, skin colour, and height would give her away quickly, but she didn’t plan to pass for a Covenanter for long, just enough to fool a quick glance and slip on by — or to get close enough to open up with her firearm.

  She still longed to employ the opposite strategy. Her hardshell suit still stood in the armoury, intact and undamaged, as if she had never tried to use it against Lykke. A missing right forearm wouldn’t matter once inside the suit. She could lock the servos in place, arm up the suit with a heavy machine gun, plasma-casters, and anti-personnel close-proximity fragmentation rounds, and then cut through a hundred Covenanters like a scalpel excising rotten flesh. But she had no idea how many of these memory-ghosts stood between her and Howl. She could not count on a total lack of anti-armour. Worse, the Covenanters could bog her down with sheer numbers in a protracted firefight, while they moved Howl elsewhere, or simply held her hostage, or threatened to kill her.

  Elpida had to rely on stealth. Get to Howl, as quickly and quietly as possible.

  Lykke walked beside her.

  The Necromancer had shed her trembles and her shuffling limp, padding along quite comfortably on bare feet, though she still bore the bruises and welts that Elpida had left all over her skin. One of her eyes was puffy and purple. Blood and vaginal mucus still stained her little white dress, though the stains were muted by the omnipresent crimson light, turning all white to scarlet and maroon, wrapping her shins and ankles in rose-bright ribbons. Her golden blonde hair lay loose, turned dark red. Pain occasionally crossed her face in a suffocated wince.

  Elpida didn’t complain about the flexible boundaries of Lykke’s promise of permanency; the Necromancer could lie all she wanted, as long as she helped recover Howl.

  Lykke was still pouting, though.

  “Truly, I have no idea what happened back there,” she was muttering as she followed Elpida. “That … that scrap of animated meat, that bag of unmodified flesh, that weak little mote of nothing, nothing, nothing! She wasn’t even holding me back, not really. Nothing like that has ever held me back. It’s nonsense, it’s contrary to every principle of good sense. It’s offensive. Yes, offensive, that’s what it is! Those flecks of lead, those bullets, holding me back? Tch! Perish the thought, perish the very notion. I just … I simply couldn’t … couldn’t touch her!” Lykke fell silent for a moment, then sniffed. “You do … you do believe me, don’t you, Elpida?”

  Elpida kept her eyes on the main trunk of the passageway ahead, floor and walls and bone-supports all bathed in blood-red light. Each rib of arching bone was a potential ambush, each unfolding metre of curve a possible encounter. Her left hand was dry and cool on the grip of her weapon. Her bruises complained and her groin ached, but she ignored the sensations; the demands of her body faded to nothing.

  Lykke whined, “Elpida? Elpida? Zombie? I asked, do you believe—”

  “Already told you. Wasn’t your fight.” Elpida replied in a whisper. “She was a Covenanter. My responsibility, my failure.”

  “Aren’t your responsibilities mine now, too? Now we’re … as we are?”

  Elpida glanced at Lykke. The Necromancer’s pale skin was dyed darkly glistening red. “You said this software space exists inside me. I considered her my responsibility. The symbolism was obvious. I did not want you to kill her. I had to do it. Why are you so surprised?”

  Lykke shrugged. “It shouldn’t have happened. It’s never happened to me before. You are … no offence, not after we shared so much, but you are only a zombie, after all … ”

  Elpida returned her attention to the passageway. “You do the distracting, I’ll do the shooting. Or we slip by unseen, in disguise. All we need to do is recover Howl. Nothing else matters.”

  Lykke sighed, sounding lost.

  Elpida pushed onward, down the main trunk of this inner passageway of Telokopolis.

  The passageway was very high and very wide, enough for two dozen Legionaries to march abreast, a clear memory of one of the largest and oldest veins in the living core of the city. It curved away to the right in a slow, lazy loop, ribbed with bone, upholstered with cliffs of flesh. The light dyed everything a mottled, dappled blood-red; a deep throbbing hum lay just below human hearing, resonating with the meat-and-fluid engines of the city; the air carried a sweet iron and tangy copper scent, the smell of machine-meat and organic lubricant, occasionally joined by the rich mineral spice of the exposed bones.

  Elpida did not recognise the specific location. She had visited the deep innards of the city plenty of times, as much as the bone-speakers guild had allowed, but one meat-and-bone vessel was much the same as any other.

  She ignored the open side-passages for now. They were tight and twisty, leading anywhere. If this kidnapping had happened in reality, in the real Telokopolis, in life, then Elpida would have been in a terrible situation; whatever force of Covenanters had overpowered and kidnapped Howl could have taken her down any passageway, into any adjacent vein of the city, into any one of a million hidden abscesses and pockets, or just hurried her to an elevator or transport tube, to whisk her off to another floor.

  But this was a simulation, a software recreation made from Elpida’s own memories, running on the local nanomachine network of her own undead body.

  So she followed the obvious passageway, toward obvious confrontation.

  Lykke huffed again. “Sneaking about in the shadows? Really, zombie? We’ve been having so much fun, you and I. Haven’t we? Not counting my little … issue, back there.” She cleared her throat. “If we’re going to run into more of your dour and disgusting little friends, the least we can do is have some fun with them, can’t we? This is your internal network space, it’s not like getting shot or cut up would make any difference to you. Have some fun, cut loose! Ride that revenge!”

  “Stop making suggestions.”

  Lykke sighed — then cut off with a little cough. “Oh. Oh, you’re not … you’re not avoiding a dance just to … to spare me further … embarrassment?” Lykke lowered her voice. “Are you?”

  “This might not be my doing,” Elpida said. “Keep that in mind.”

  “ … eh? I’m sorry, zombie, what?”

  Elpida glanced at Lykke again. The Necromancer looked clueless, eyes like pools of mulled red wine, hair the colour of dying roses. “I’ll explain. You listen. Then you tell me anything relevant, about how the network functions, how it interacts with my own internal software space. Understand?”

  Lykke blinked three times, then shrugged. “I suppose so?”

  Elpida kept her eyes on the curve of the corridor and her left hand on the grip of her machine pistol. She whispered quickly, ears pricked, listening for any sounds from up ahead.

  “Option one, I am doing this to myself. The Covenanters are pure software. They’ve kidnapped Howl. My subconscious is doing this, perhaps to punish me, because I feel guilty. Something like that. The positive conclusion I came to earlier wasn’t enough.”

  “You mean, after we fucked?”

  “Mm.” Elpida shook her head. “But option one is unlikely. I do consider myself responsible for my sisters’ deaths. I may harbour some self-loathing. But I would never harm Howl. I would punish myself, not her. I don’t think I’m doing this to myself.”

  “Punished me quite effectively,” Lykke purred. “Maybe Howl isn’t enough of a naughty girl?”

  Elpida shot Lykke a sharp look. Lykke smothered a giggle.

  “Option two,” Elpida carried on. “I am not doing this to myself. This is the work of an intruder, inside me, inside my local network, however it works. We’ll call this hypothetical intruder ‘hostile one’. Hostile one is using the Covenanters against me, a symbol from my memories, from my life. I am inclined to believe this, since I’ve already confirmed a prior intruder.”

  Lykke gasped. “You have?!”

  Elpida glanced at the Necromancer. “You.”

  Lykke pouted. “You weren’t complaining about my intrusions earlier, zombie. In fact, I seem to recall you making some quite wonderful—”

  Elpida halted and held up a hand.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “—noises when my—”

  “Quiet,” Elpida snapped. “Now.”

  Lykke shut her mouth, then sighed through her nose.

  Elpida dropped to one knee and tucked herself half-behind a protruding ridge of bone. She turned her head, cocking one ear toward the passageway.

  She wasn’t sure what she had heard.

  The sound had been too subtle to identify, drowned out by Lykke’s words, captured and muffled by the meandering organic innards of Telokopolis. A voice, perhaps — a shout? A meaty, liquid — something? As Elpida strained to listen, she heard a brief moment of higher-pitched thumping — or perhaps only imagined she did.

  She waited another minute, then two, but the sounds did not reoccur.

  “Just Telokopolis?” she murmured.

  Lykke sighed, flamboyantly irritated.

  Elpida stood up, stepped out of cover, and continued her advance. “Lykke, still listening?”

  “Tch! Not as if you’re good for anything else right now, zombie. Yes, yes, do continue … ”

  “Good enough. My initial assumption was that ‘hostile one’ was you, but now I think it’s something else. Can you confirm that for me, Lykke? Is there another intruder?”

  “How should I know?” Lykke snorted. “I don’t make a habit of slipping into zombies’ private networks. I told you, Elpida. You’re my very first. My first and only. The only one I want, the only one I’ll ever take, I think.”

  Elpida ignored that. “Right. Brings me to my point. If hostile one is real, it might intend real harm, toward either myself or Howl. It might be able to do real damage. So, no, I’m not going to indulge anything, let alone a desire for revenge. We do everything we can to reach Howl, stealth or otherwise. Everything and anything. Understand?”

  “I would be so much better at the ‘otherwise’.”

  Elpida pushed on, each footstep silent, with Lykke trotting along behind her. The curve of the passageway sharpened — first gradually, then more intensely, as if coiling toward some vital organ of the city. Elpida stayed on the outside of the curve, for maximum visibility. She kept her ears pricked for any recurrence of the unexplained noises from earlier. She focused on each fresh arch of rising bone, every new expanse of red-glowing meat. She was waiting for any sign of Covenanters, but secretly for something else.

  Elpida was keenly aware that her hopes were impossible. Despite her resolve to stay true to her new comrades, to put to them the question of Telokopolis as their future, she still ached for another glimpse of that white dress — that flutter around a corner, that hint of red flesh, that confirmation.

  She wished that Telokopolis herself would show the way.

  At Elpida’s shoulder, Lykke suddenly whispered: “What’s it like to have a sister?”

  Elpida almost looked back. “What?”

  “A sister. Like your … ‘Howl’.” Lykke tutted softly. “Or the others, the names I could read all over, back there in your sisterly love-nest. Orchid, Yeva, Asp? They were all your sisters, yes? But you weren’t spawned from the same womb. You were grown in machines, then decanted. Isn’t that right?

  “She was our womb.”

  “Eh? Pardon, zombie?”

  Elpida nudged the wall with the stump of her right elbow. “Telokopolis. Our womb, our mother. She was the one who bore us, even if human hands helped her do it.”

  Lykke fell silent for a long moment. Elpida kept her eyes on the curve ahead as she advanced. Was that another sound, at the edge of her hearing — a long metallic scrape? Or just another echo from the depths of this memory?

  Lykke whispered again. “But what’s it like?”

  “Lykke.”

  “I know, I know!” Lykke hissed. “You’re trying to concentrate! You have to be ready to duck and roll and blast with your stupid little bang—bang splurt gun. But I’m trying to understand you! Your little goblin is horrible, just utterly rancid, I despise her. I would happily see her carried off by whatever bugbears your memory has summoned for you. But here I am, helping with a rescue, and for the love of myself I cannot figure out—”

  Lykke rambled on. Elpida filtered it out, because the passageway had led somewhere.

  The curve of corridor terminated in a tangled junction — a vast knot of meat and bone soaring far overhead, tied together with twists of naked tendon and strings of exposed sinew. A tracery of crimson spider-webbed toward the apex in a confluence of veins, like the canopy of the green, carrying more than blood in a dozen shades of scarlet flame and sluggish flows of raw red marrow. Wedges of bone rose from the floor, melded with the living metal extruded by the city, great gnarled horns of osseous matter marked with silvery capillaries; they seemed to have grown directly into the garnet flesh of the walls, fringed with hardened ruby nodules. Machine-meat was thickened and roughened in long furrows and wide patches, many of them dozens of meters in size — some of them were browned or blackened, then paled again with incredible age. Huge flaps of loose pink hung from the ceiling, ragged and empty. The floor was uneven, canted and bowed; Elpida had never encountered that before, anywhere in Telokopolis.

  The metal of the city had been augmented and assisted by human hands — plates of common steel had been bolted to the bone in dozens of places, support struts riveted into the floor and braced against the arches, pins and disks and cables all clamping and splinting and fortifying this jagged crater. The steel surfaces were stained and discoloured like water on oil, protected against rust but warped by aeons of exposure to the city’s innards.

  The abscess echoed with a deep, meaty palpitation, irregular and rough, just below the range of human hearing. It made Elpida’s eyes water.

  “—and all I want is to understand,” Lykke was still talking. “I want to understand this thing you have with her, with any of them. This ‘bond’?” She spat the word. “Ugh, that makes me sound so twee, I could just vomit. What does it feel like, to have somebody so … so … ”

  Elpida dropped to one knee at the edge of the junction, tucking herself into cover behind metal and bone. She could barely follow standard operating procedure, and had to force herself to concentrate. She scanned the mouths of the tunnels and passageways and arches, each one leading in a different direction. Some were fringed with Telokopolan bone, but others were ragged sections of unprotected machine-meat; a few had been reinforced with the living metal extruded from the veins of the city, as if it had flowed out and coagulated upon the flesh.

  “All I am asking,” Lykke was saying, “is what it’s like. What is it like to have a sister, Elpida? Is the question so difficult?”

  Elpida saw no motion in any of the exits from the junction. She stood up and stepped forward, out of cover. She let go of her machine pistol; it hung against her side, suspended on the straps and webbing.

  She couldn’t help herself.

  She reached out with bare fingers and touched the exposed flesh of Telokopolis, as she had a million times in true life. She ran her left hand over one of the thickened, roughened, darkened patches of machine-meat.

  “Elpida? Zombie? You’re not paying attention, you’re not even listen—”

  “Scar tissue,” Elpida whispered.

  “What?” Lykke tutted. “What now?”

  Elpida struggled not to lose herself. She focused on the concrete implications. “This is scar tissue. This whole junction. Scars and … and physical repairs, done by hand? By … by people? Look at this steel, it’s ancient. I’ve seen steel objects dated from the time of the city’s founding, and they don’t look like that, these must be … thousands of years older?” She forced herself to take a deep breath. “This was a wound. A very old one.”

  Lykke just stared, expression limp. Then she put her hands on her hips. “I knew it. You’re not paying the slightest bit of attention, you—”

  Elpida rounded on Lykke; she quickly replayed the Necromancer’s words in her head. “Having sisters is like having parts of my heart outside of my own body at all times. Lykke, pay attention. This is a wound. A wound in Telokopolis.”

  Lykke blinked, frowned, and then shrugged. “Your city gets boo-boos, boo-hoo. What does that matter? This is all software, Elpida, it’s not happening right now.”

  “I was never here.”

  Lykke shrugged again, with more ostentation and fewer words.

  Elpida explained. “In reality, in life, I was never here. I know the city can be wounded, in theory. But— but I’d never seen it with my own eyes. And nothing like this. The wound … this steel … it pre-dates—”

  Lykke spread her hands. “Then you have a wonderful imagination, well done.”

  “No!” Elpida snapped. “I could never have imagined this. I can barely—” Her eyes flickered along the gigantic streaks of scar tissue and missing chunks of bone replaced by metal, up to the ceiling, where the ragged sheets of once-torn flesh hung in pale pink memorial. Elpida tried to visualise what kind of weapon, wielded by what manner of foe, in what form of combat, could possibly have produced this wound. She felt a quiver in her chest. “I can barely process that this is even possible. Telokopolis, the city, her body, it’s not … totally invincible, I-I know, but—”

  Lykke waved a hand. “If you want to rescue a sister, you have to accept some wounds.”

  “No, Lykke.” Elpida clamped down on her awe, forced herself to focus. “That’s not the point. The point is, these aren’t my memories.”

  Lykke’s mouth made a silent o-shape.

  Elpida went on. “The cadre’s quarters, those were my memories. The deep places of Telokopolis, the living places, I went to those many times, yes. But I never saw a wound. Never an old scar, not like this. This is somebody else’s memory.”

  “ … Howl?”

  Elpida frowned, then shook her head. “She would have told us all if she’d seen an ancient wound. This would have changed our world.”

  Lykke shrugged.

  Elpida pressed: “Lykke. Are we still inside my internal network? Is this somebody else?”

  Lykke rolled her eyes. “Yes, of course we are! Zombie, you fucked me upside down and inside out, but I’m not blind and deaf. Yes, we’re still inside you. Tch. It’s probably just your little goblin,” Lykke sighed. “Anyway. Which way do we go now? I thought you were the one in a hurry, and now we’re wasting so much time on this boring old hole.”

  Elpida slipped her hand back onto the grip of her machine pistol. She clenched all her muscles to halt any residual quiver. The wound was unthinkable — but it also wasn’t real. This was a simulation. She still had to locate and recover Howl.

  Telokopolis could be wounded, perhaps by mortal means; Elpida bottled that up and shoved it deep. This was not the time.

  She scanned the junction exits once more, turning slowly on the spot. If Howl had been conscious when she’d been brought this way, she would have done anything she could to leave some kind of sign. But Elpida couldn’t see anything — no droplets of blood, no fresh scratch on a wall, no detritus dropped on the floor, not even a boot print or scuff mark on the metal.

  “I don’t know,” Elpida admitted. “We may have to pick at random. Lykke, this is still software, and you’re a Necromancer, I need you to—”

  A flicker of motion snagged Elpida’s peripheral vision and spun her round.

  Down a passageway — a smaller cylinder-vault of bone-ridged flesh — a fluttering step strode around a distant corner.

  White fabric, red flesh, bare ankle, a slip of dress?

  Elpida couldn’t tell for sure, not at that distance, not with the crimson innards of Telokopolis painting every surface in glowing scarlet. But her heart leapt.

  “There,” she snapped. “There.”

  Elpida moved quickly and quietly, her soft-soled shoes silent on the living metal, slipping out of the wound-junction and into the slightly smaller passageway. Her mouth went dry and her fingers tightened on the grip of her weapon. Something familiar buzzed in the back of her brain, a recognition she could not quite put her finger on, not as adrenaline flooded her veins and Telokopolan genetic engineering prepared her for contact.

  Contact? With the ghost-memory of Telokopolis herself? But why—

  A familiar scent slammed into Elpida’s nostrils.

  She reached the corner and flattened herself against the wall. Lykke trotted along to join her, hanging back. Perhaps she smelled the reek as well. Elpida peeked around the corner, weapon first.

  Six Covenanters lay dead — strewn across the floor, smeared up the walls, taken apart and emptied out.

  Elpida held her position. She counted twenty seconds, then went to sixty. Lykke whispered a complaint, but Elpida wasn’t listening. When the Necromancer tried to step past, Elpida made a hissing noise that stopped Lykke without argument.

  Elpida held her position. She watched the shadows, the corners of bone, and the places where something might stand unseen in plain sight. She watched for the tell-tale shimmer, the refraction of light which should have been still. She listened for clicking or humming, for the drip of fluids. She inhaled deeply, trying to pick out sharper scents beneath the iron reek of fresh blood.

  Nothing.

  Elpida held her position.

  After two hundred seconds, Elpida eased out of cover and stepped around the corner.

  She didn’t bother to keep the machine pistol levelled. If she was right, then there was no point. The weapon was too small-calibre, lacking the necessary penetration.

  She drew the hand cannon instead. One shot might break her elbow, but it would be worth the risk.

  A group of Covenanters had been dismantled. The corridor was awash with fresh gore, stinking of blood and bile and voided bowels. No single corpse was in less than four pieces. Intestines had been torn out and smeared up the walls in slopping masses of mashed-up meat. Heads lay smashed apart, brains dashed out, grey and greasy. Limbs had been severed, torn from their sockets, or just pulped into ruined flesh and bone fragments. Clothes were shredded, soaked in blood, hard to recognise. Weapons had been shattered. Elpida spotted one rifle that had been bisected clean in two; the Covenanter had probably been trying to fend off a killing blow. A short combat knife lay on the floor amid a pool of blood; the blade had been snapped.

  Elpida struggled to guess the ages or genders of the dead Covenanters. One surviving face on a severed head looked like an older man, perhaps. One arm looped in spilled intestines had the look of a young woman’s hand. A shattered pelvis wore the torn remains of a kilt, but that could have meant anything.

  A handful of spent brass was scattered amid the blood and bodies. A few squashed bullets had fallen on the floor. Less than a dozen rounds.

  Elpida wished she’d worn the hardshell after all.

  Lykke tottered forward, showing her little white teeth in a big grin. She cooed with satisfaction. “This is more like it! Straight through them!”

  “They were waiting for us,” Elpida said. “An ambush.”

  “Did your little goblin do this? Did she get free and get wild?” Lykke let out a cackle, spinning on the spot, her bare feet pattering in the blood. “Oh my, my, my! Perhaps I misjudged her!” Lykke frowned. “Well … well, I wouldn’t go that far, she’s still horrid, but if this is her idea of a proper response, well, I do approve, I—”

  “This wasn’t Howl.”

  Lykke stopped turning. Her smile collapsed into confusion. “No?”

  “I saw it, right there in the corridor. It must have been watching us, cloaked. I thought it was … ‘her’ again, for a second. Telokopolis. But it wasn’t, that was just in my mind, just what I wanted to see. Why didn’t it attack us? We were wide open. It could have taken us.” Elpida looked down at the heavy pistol in her hand, then at the end of the corridor, where the red light of Telokopolis glinted on angular footprints, blood-prints on the metal floor.

  Minutes old. Fresh.

  “Zombie, what are you going on about now?”

  “These people were killed by a Silico construct,” Elpida said “A murder-machine, from my memories, from my life, my time. From out in the green.”

  that got into this simulation? Unless it really is nothing more than a bad memory. But who's bad memory?

  a mock-up front cover version of last week's 'Resurrection', by samsungsmartfrog (I love how this looks, and I'd love to use it as a volume cover or something!), and then also , with shotgun and shield and lots of meaty cybernetics, by spring. I know I say this every time I repost art here, but thank you so much!!! I'm so flattered and amazed by all the fanart. You're all incredible!

  a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I'm plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!

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