Reattaching Ilyusha’s bionic limbs was not as easy as Ooni had hoped.

  Ooni’s role in the process was simple. All she had to do was lift the ragged ball-joint — a partial sphere of black bio-polymer, encrusted with dark red circuitry, smeared with sticky clear fluids and pinkish froth — and jam it into the socket of Ilyusha’s right shoulder, where the interior circuitry waited to re-establish the connection, wet membranes fluttering with delicate urgency deep inside. But Ooni was not strong enough to shove the joint into place; her own right shoulder was growing stiff and sore, still blossoming with the bruise she had taken by firing Ilyusha’s shotgun to drive away Kuro.

  She fumbled with Ilyusha’s joint for a moment, pushing and twisting at the socket, the bionic muscles slipping in her sweaty hands. “I-I don’t think I can get it in, it’s not—”

  “Knees!” Ilyusha snapped. “Knee it in! Grab me and knee it in!”

  “Are you sure? I-it feels like it’s going to snap and—”

  “Do it! Shove! Do it!”

  Ooni did as Ilyusha instructed. She had to lean over Ilyusha’s prone, helpless torso, bracing both hands against Ilyusha’s opposite flank, fingers sinking into the padding of Ilyusha’s bulletproof vest. Ooni wedged her knees against the shoulder of the detached bionic arm, then tensed her legs and core muscles all at once, squeezing harder and harder, until—

  Clunk!

  Ilyusha’s right shoulder joint slammed home. Ooni almost sprawled onto Ilyusha’s face, catching herself at the last moment, then scrambling upright.

  Ilyusha screamed.

  She gritted her teeth and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed — eyes bulging, blood-flecked drool running from one corner of her mouth, tendons standing taut on her neck. Her one remaining leg thrashed and stamped, crimson talons scraping and squealing against the black metal floor. Thin fluid leaked from around the reattached shoulder joint. The arm twitched, claws flicking in and out, bionic muscles trembling.

  Ooni had witnessed so many kinds of terrible pain across her long afterlife in the nanomachine ecosystem, most of them blurred by the haze of endless memory, some the result of ruined bionics or botched attempts at nanomachine-driven self-modification. But this was new. Ilyusha’s bionic limbs had not been designed for removal and reattachment. Whatever Ilyusha was doing, she did it without anaesthetic, wide awake and screaming, reconnecting bionic nerve pathways and cybernetic synapses.

  If Ilyusha passed out from the pain, Ooni would be alone.

  “Ilyusha?! Illy!?” Ooni’s hands hovered over Ilyusha. “What— what can I—”

  Ilyusha’s screams subsided, replaced by heaving breaths hissing through her clenched teeth. Bloodshot eyes whirled in Ilyusha’s bloodstained face, open but blind with pain — then suddenly blazing up at Ooni.

  “Get—” Ilyusha croaked. “—next— get—”

  “The next limb? The other arm? B-but you’ll—”

  “Get!” Ilyusha screamed, jaws snapping wide, the talons of her good leg screeching across the floor.

  Ooni shot to her feet and lurched back over to the black metal table which projected from the wall. She grabbed Ilyusha’s other arm, heavy and awkward, crimson claws catching on Ooni’s t-shirt. She fell to her knees on Ilyusha’s opposite side. Ilyusha jerked her head back and forth, eyes wild with pain and terrible need.

  “In!” she screeched. “In!”

  Ooni repeated the process, leaning over Ilyusha’s prone torso, knees wedged against the shoulder of the detached limb. She squeezed with her core muscles and her thighs, harder and harder, pressing the joint into place. The shoulder socket creaked with the sound of tortured metal and warping bio-plastic, then—

  Clunk!

  Ilyusha didn’t scream this time; somehow that was worse.

  Her mouth opened in a wide, silent cry, eyes clenched shut, back arching off the floor like a terminal tetanus victim. The dried blood all over her face and hair began to run with rivulets of cold sweat. She clenched her jaw so hard that Ooni heard teeth creak and crack; if Ilyusha had been a mortal human being, she would have burst a blood vessel or given herself a hernia or simply died of a heart attack.

  Ooni didn’t know what to do. She didn’t dare touch Ilyusha. She couldn’t do anything but watch.

  Ilyusha slowly descended back down from the apex of her pain, torso collapsing to the floor, lungs heaving for breath. Her eyes were unfocused, staring up at the featureless ceiling, clouded with a sheen of tears.

  Neither of Ilyusha’s reattached limbs were moving properly; fingers twitched, claws jerked in and out, muscles shivered. But nothing more.

  “Illy?” Ooni hissed. “Illy, are you—”

  “Next … ” Ilyusha wheezed. “Leg. Leg! Leg … ”

  “Maybe … uh … maybe we should wait, just a moment, so you can recover and—”

  Ilyusha’s eyes rolled in their sockets, suddenly thrown wide again with rekindled rage, tears brimming over and rolling down her blood-caked cheeks. “Shit-eating bitch fuck—” Ooni assumed Ilyusha was insulting her, but then Ilyusha squeezed out: “—coming back— back—”

  “Kuro?” Ooni shook her head. “No, no. She won’t come back, not until we step into the next part of her game.”

  Ilyusha managed to squint her eyes in silent question.

  Ooni struggled to swallow, to slow her racing pulse long enough to speak coherently. She wiped her long black hair out of her face; that helped. “When she rushed back into the room earlier, she was letting me shoot her. She let us do that! She could have wrapped herself in the black metal and made herself invulnerable to our guns. But she didn’t! She let that happen. She does this, it’s how she thinks. She likes to play with her food. She got bored with this phase, or she got what she wanted out of me, so she’s moved on to another one, the next part. She wants us to feel like we’ve maybe got a chance.” Ooni shook her head, trying not to tremble. “She— she wants us to leave, to try to escape, so she can play with us. This is what she does with other zombies, it’s what she enjoys, I’ve seen her do it before, to dozens of others. She won’t come back here, not yet, not unless … unless we give up and … and refuse to provide her any … ‘sport’.”

  Ilyusha’s lips twisted with disgust. “Put … leg. Leg. In!”

  “But—”

  “Pleassse!” Ilyusha gurgled, gritting her teeth.

  Ooni nodded and stood up, trying not to shake too hard. She grabbed Ilyusha’s leg from the table; it was much heavier than either of the arms, with stronger muscles, more built-in bio-polymer superstructure layered on top, and the huge bird-like foot with long crimson talons dangling from the shrouded ankle joint. Ooni staggered back to Ilyusha and lowered the limb to the floor. Positioning this joint was more awkward than with the shoulders. Ooni had to grope around inside what was left of Ilyusha’s shorts, to expose the massive bionic socket of her hips — a gaping hole of black-red bio-plastic and fluttering membranes, framed by the pale, clammy, sweat-soaked flesh of Ilyusha’s abdomen and groin. Ooni pushed the shorts aside, angled Ilyusha’s hips upward, then got the joint into place, pressed against the socket. She leaned on the knee of the detached leg, putting more and more of her own body weight against the bionic joint. The whole hip-socket creaked with the sound of tortured metal and deforming polymers; Ilyusha flinched, then gritted her teeth and screwed her eyes shut. Ooni pushed harder, until—

  Clunk!

  Ilyusha thrashed like she was having a seizure. Ooni scrambled clear, narrowly avoiding the razor-sharp blades of Ilyusha’s good leg; reflex action made her kick at the air. She drooled and spat bloody mucus, heaving and keening and whining like a spear-stuck boar.

  “Illy, Illy!” Ooni said. “Y-you can do it, you can ride it out! I’ve got you, I’m … I … I … ”

  Ooni couldn’t do anything. She didn’t ‘have’ Ilyusha. She had nothing. All she could do was wait and see, and pray to Telokopolis that this was going to work.

  Eventually Ilyusha’s seizure trailed off. She lay still, wheezing for breath, face sticky and slimy with a sheen of sweat and blood.

  The reattached leg quivered and twitched, just like the arms. Ilyusha did not seem able to lift the limb.

  Ooni’s hopes curdled; she felt sick, a fist gripping her intestines. If Ilyusha couldn’t stand or walk, there was no way Ooni could carry her out of here, let alone through whatever sick game Kuro had planned. With all four limbs attached, Ilyusha weighed a ton, and Ooni was not strong enough to lift her. The only option would be to wait for rescue, to hope that Kagami was able to pinpoint their location from the brief moment of comms contact. But if Kuro thought they were stalling, perhaps she would come back again, armoured in the black metal, game abandoned.

  Tears gathered in Ooni’s eyes. She bit her lip, jaw trembling, retreating inside herself. She couldn’t do this alone, could not stand up to Kuro without help. If Ilyusha couldn’t walk, Ooni’s only option was to flee in shame and hide in some dark hole and wait to—

  Telokopolis is forever.

  Ooni sniffed back her tears and shook her head, hard enough to hurt.

  It was as if somebody had slapped her across the cheek and poured a cup of hot wine down her throat, a taste she had not known since true life. The memory lingered upon her tongue, filling her with something adjacent to courage.

  She could not and would not leave Ilyusha behind. Telokopolis leaves nobody behind. Nobody gets left out in the cold, alone and helpless, to be taken by the elements and the wild animals. If Ilyusha couldn’t move, then Ooni’s role was clear — protect her, or die trying, and fall atop Ilyusha with her wounds to the fore, not upon her back. Telokopolis made that clear. There was no other option.

  The relief was incredible, a burden lifting from Ooni’s shoulders. She did not have to think, did not have to make a decision. She only had to obey the principles she had already thrown in Kuro’s face, the principles she had already adopted as her own, and had washed her clean of her past mistakes.

  Ilyusha hissed, “Tail. Tail!”

  “Y-your tail, right!” Ooni started to rise, then hesitated. “Can you … can you turn over?”

  Ilyusha flexed her torso. Her one good leg moved properly, trying to get into position, but her three reattached limbs only shivered and convulsed, like an elderly person with the shaking palsy. She gritted her teeth and peeled back her lips, furious in humiliation.

  “ … roll me.”

  Ooni did as Ilyusha asked, trying to roll her onto her front as gently as possible. Ooni’s own wounded right shoulder screamed with the effort of supporting Ilyusha’s body weight, but she got Illy onto her front without any additional bruises. Ilyusha’s cheek was pressed uncomfortably against the black metal floor.

  “Tail!”

  “On it, right, yes!”

  Ooni leapt over to the table and picked up Ilyusha’s tail as best she could. The specialised bionic was impossible to lift cleanly — six feet long, thicker than the other limbs, and heavily armoured, made for combat. Most of the tail dragged across the floor as Ooni pulled the joint over to Ilyusha, the crimson spear-tip end scraping against the black metal. Ooni fumbled with the waistband of Ilyusha’s shorts to expose the base of her spine. The tail socket was just as thick as Ilyusha’s leg-joints, a massive junction with her spinal column. Ooni braced the joint, then put her whole body weight into a shove, bearing down—

  Clunk!

  She slipped and fell forward onto Ilyusha, briefly squashing Illy against the black metal floor. Ooni scrambled upright. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry, I … Illy? Il—Ilyusha?”

  Ilyusha was unconscious.

  She wasn’t faking it this time. Ilyusha had gone limp, eyelids fluttering, eyes rolled into the back of her head. A thin stream of bloody drool hung from her slack lips, pooling on the metal floor. She was breathing, a reedy whisper hissing from laboured lungs.

  “Illy? Illy?!” Ooni shook her, but Ilyusha did not respond. “No, no, no, no no no! No! No! No, please, no! Illy! Illy, I can’t— I can’t do this alone, I can’t, I can’t do this.” Tears ran down Ooni’s cheeks; her earlier burst of courage turned to ice and ash in her heart. She glanced back over her shoulder at the hole Kuro had left in the wall, half-expecting a figure in powered armour to loom out of the shadows. But there was only darkness. “I c-can’t— I can’t— I— Illy, I-Illy please, please wake up, please, p-please—”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Telokopolis is forever.

  The reminder was like another pull from a jug of hot wine. Ooni’s insides flushed with heat, the fear ebbing back just enough to avert collapse. She remembered — firelight? Firelight deep in a smoke-filled hall, the soft murmur of speech, the scent of roasted meat and vegetables, the sensation of wool and fur against her skin. A full belly. A hand on her shoulder. A voice so much like her own, whispering in her ear — up, up, up!

  Ooni forced herself to scrub her eyes on her sleeve. Ilyusha was helpless. Ilyusha needed Telokopolis. Ooni had to get to her feet and arm up.

  Right now, Ooni had to be Telokopolis.

  She staggered upright and lurched over to the table, eyeing Ilyusha’s powerful shotgun. She’d blind herself with pain if she tried to fire it again. Instead she crouched down and grabbed the plates of carapace armour, assessing the damage.

  The helmet was useless — forehead caved in, visor-display broken, built-in comms busted. The main chestplate was intact, along with the plates for Ooni’s belly, hips, back, and shoulders. The buckles and straps and lock-points were a little bent and cracked where Kuro had ripped the armour off her, but they were designed with multiple redundancies; the armour would be looser and less reliable, but still usable. Ooni strapped herself back into the main components; the process was awkward and slow without anybody to help her, and she couldn’t get the under-layer braces to sit right across her stomach — those were the layers of gel padding and hex-foam meant to distribute kinetic force. If somebody shot her in the gut the plate would still turn the bullet away, but the impact was much more likely to leave deep bruising or internal bleeding. She had no choice, it would have to do. She found her greaves and overboots were also intact, then sat down to strap her legs into the protective plates. Her gauntlets were scuffed and dented — had Kuro struggled with her hands? — but she slipped them on and found they moved alright, though the inner layers for her right hand were mangled and torn, as if she’d fought against Kuro disrobing her, even when unconscious. She removed the gauntlet, stripped out the inner layers, then put it back on and locked it to the rest of the suit. Her right hand would chafe raw within an hour of use, but it was better than nothing.

  Her right arm was increasingly useless anyway. The bruise in her shoulder was swelling up inside her clothes, throbbing in time with her heartbeat and the echo of pain in her skull, turning stiff and increasingly difficult to move. Ooni was worried she’d dislocated something or damaged a tendon. Within an hour or two her range of motion would be seriously limited.

  She grabbed the ruined helmet and clipped it to her hip, then scrambled for options.

  Ooni grabbed all the weapons from the table. She jammed the sidearm and the three grenades into the pouches on her armour, slung Ilyusha’s shotgun over her back, then used the strap on her own submachine gun to brace the weapon against her left hip, holding it one-handed.

  She turned and pointed the gun toward the gap in the wall, then placed her right hand flat against her chestplate, clutching the crescent-and-double-line symbol of Telokopolis.

  “Telokopolis is forever,” she whispered. “Telokopolis is forever. Telokopolis is forever.” Her voice rose into a shout. “Telokopolis is forever! I am part of Telokopolis, Kuro! I am part of her!”

  The tomb swallowed her voice — then returned it as a ghostly echo from the labyrinthine dark, drowned out by the distant fury of the storm beyond the walls.

  Ooni shivered inside her ill-fitting armour.

  She fiddled with the comms headset and tested Ilyusha’s set as well, but the uplink with Pheiri’s network was gone, every band was filled with nothing but static. Kuro’s on-board jamming had caught the transmissions and blocked them, or somehow fried the sets themselves. Ooni lacked the necessary technical knowledge to repair the sets or counter the jamming.

  She whispered into the headset regardless, talking to the static, on an open broadcast: “Pheiri, if you can read this, this is Ooni, and we still need help.” She swallowed, considered her next words carefully, then spoke on. “If any revenants are reading this message, this is a child of Telokopolis speaking. We have been cut off from our allies and … and we need help. Any of you who heard and believed Elpida’s words, please … please tell Pheiri. Please contact the others. Please … do … ”

  Ooni trailed off.

  A blue glimmer had appeared in the darkness, far beyond the hole punched through the wall of the little black chamber.

  A wisp of transparent blue, coiling in the air, like steam or smoke or semi-visible flame. It cast a cold glow over the black walls to either side. Ooni struggled to estimate the distance, squinting her eyes, wishing she had her armour’s visor to help; she guessed the glimmer was perhaps a hundred feet away, at the end of a long corridor. The colour reminded Ooni of — clear sky?

  Blue skies on an empty morning.

  Ooni shivered again, struck by a phantom memory of winter cold.

  The blue wisp floated forward, moving toward the chamber.

  “Unnnnhhhhh,” Ilyusha groaned.

  Ooni whipped around in surprise. Down on the floor, Ilyusha was blinking her eyes and working her jaw. Her reattached bionic arms finally moved, drawing up beneath her. Ilyusha pushed off the floor, onto all fours, limbs trembling.

  Ooni glanced back into the corridor. The blue wisp was gone.

  “Unn!” Ilyusha grunted again.

  Ooni turned back to her, hurrying over and dropping to her knees, hands out to help Ilyusha stand. She’d thought the sound was just a grunt, but Ilyusha had been trying to call her name.

  “Ilyusha! Ilyusha, you’re awake, thank— thank Telokopolis. Y-yes, yes!”

  Ilyusha just hissed, drooling and shivering. She grabbed Ooni’s armoured gauntlets and used the support to climb to her feet. She looked dazed and unsteady, eyes squinted with lingering pain, face slimy where the dried blood had mixed with her sweat. Her arms and legs shook with effort, the bionic muscles still not back to normal. Her tail hung limp.

  “Fuckin— b-biiiiiitch,” Ilyusha wheezed. “Can’t keep me— from your— cunt throat … cunt … ”

  Ooni smiled, panting with relief. Ilyusha’s rage toward Kuro was undimmed. Ooni started to believe that perhaps they could make it out of here.

  “Illy,” she said. “Illy, we have to get out, we have to get moving. I checked the comms and I can’t make contact, it’s just us. Can you … walk?”

  Ilyusha staggered a few steps, pulling Ooni along with her, clinging to Ooni’s right arm. Her tail lifted, weak and limp, then wrapped around Ooni’s armoured waist, locking itself tight. Ilyusha scrubbed her face and wiped away her drool on one forearm, then grinned through the exhaustion and the pain. “Walk. Sure. Like this.”

  “I— I’ve got you, okay,” Ooni said, trying to figure out how to make this work. “We— we can move like this. We— we can. We can do it. We can!”

  Ilyusha held out her right hand, fingers jerking. “Gun.”

  “Are … are you sure you can … with your arms, I mean, can you—”

  “Gun! Now!”

  “Okay, okay!”

  Ooni dragged Ilyusha’s shotgun off her back and pressed the grip into Ilyusha’s clawed hand. Illy blinked hard, then retracted her claws so she could get her fingers around the trigger guard. She tucked the shotgun against her side, into the crook of her elbow. An unaugmented human discharging that weapon from that stance would dislocate their own elbow, but Ilyusha’s bionics could probably absorb the recoil. Probably.

  Ooni knew she had to hold on tight, or one shot would send Ilyusha sprawling, likely dragging Ooni down with her.

  “Lessgo,” Ilyusha slurred. She staggered forward, making for the hole in the wall; Ooni kept pace, arms linked tight, holding Ilyusha upright.

  Beyond the little black chamber lay a junction — a knot where several corridors converged, dozens of dark passageways leading off toward blind corners. This part of the tomb did not look similar to the intestinal tangle where Kuro had ambushed the fireteam; the corridors were all ruler-straight and very narrow, barely wide enough for three people to walk abreast — but also very tall, their ceilings lost in vaulted shadows. The little black room sat in the centre of the junction like a blister extruded from the floor.

  Ooni strained her ears, listening for the whisper of Kuro’s suit reactor, or the subtle creak of her boots against the floor.

  Silence and the storm, and nothing besides.

  There was no sign of the strange blue wisp, either.

  “Fuck are we?” Ilyusha rasped, heavy-lidded eyes peering about, claws clicking against the body of her shotgun.

  “I … I think this is a different part of the tomb,” Ooni whispered. Her voice echoed down the tall corridors, soaking into the distant static of the storm beyond. “I spotted something moving out here while you were unconscious, a-a light or something, a blue light. But it’s gone now. I don’t know which way to go.”

  Ilyusha sagged against Ooni, then jerked her shotgun at a random corridor. “That way.”

  “Why that way?”

  “‘Cos I says so.” Ilyusha managed a grin and a snort. “C’mon.”

  Ilyusha lurched forward. Ooni held on tight as they crept into the narrow, tall, silent corridor.

  She did not have the heart to ask — was Ilyusha merely hoping to draw out Kuro?

  The corridors were empty, nothing here but the faraway fury of the hurricane, the rhythmic click-tap of Ilyusha’s clawed feet, and the thump-thump-thump of Ooni’s own heart racing against her ribs. Her left hand quickly grew clammy inside her gauntlet, wrapped around the grip of her submachine gun. Her right shoulder ached and throbbed as she did her best to support Ilyusha’s weight. She tensed at every corner they approached, expecting this to be the moment, ready to face whatever cruel twist Kuro had planned.

  But the corners turned and Ilyusha staggered onward and Kuro did not appear.

  After half a dozen corners and several minutes of cautious exploration, they turned up nothing but more of these vaulted passageways, straight and angular like runes cut into rock — and they were partially made from stone, or at least simulated stone. The black metal floors and lower parts of each wall gave way to great slabs of raw masonry, vanishing up toward the unseen ceiling.

  Eventually Ilyusha hissed: “She’s playing with us, huh? That right?”

  Ooni kept her eyes peeled as they eased around another corridor. “Yes. Yes, she does this with other zombies, I’ve seen it before.”

  Ilyusha grunted. “Like how? How’s she gonna fuck with us?”

  “I … uh … I’m not certain.” Ooni swallowed, trying not to think about how cruel Kuro could get. “She wants us to think we’ve gotten away, to give us hope, so she can take it away again. B-but she knows me, and she knows that I know. So … she knows I won’t believe it, not for real. She has to get us to believe it, for real, to let us think there’s a real chance of escape. So she can … crush it.”

  Ilyusha grinned, wide and nasty. “Escape? Fuck that. Fuck her!” She raised her voice in a raspy shout, echoing off the stone walls. “Hear that, cunt-face?! I’m not going anywhere until I fucking eat you! Gonna peel you open, rancid fucking shit! Fight me!”

  Ilyusha fell silent, voice trailing off into the darkness, whispering echoes crawling back. She snorted with disgust.

  “Coward. Puss-fuck chicken bitch. Eat my shit.”

  Ooni tried to take heart in Ilyusha’s fire, but she knew if Kuro wasn’t responding, she must have something worse planned. Ilyusha did not pose much of a threat to Kuro, not in her current state.

  “She … she might try to separate us,” Ooni said. “Or spook us, or … or something else. I’m not sure. But we should expect anything. Anything at all. If she gets bored, she might just … just kill us.”

  Ilyusha growled, eyeing the shadows ahead. “Biiiitch. Bitch. Reptile … fuckin’ … cunt … ”

  They crept past two more corners, passing through junctions each identical to the last, with no change in the structure of the corridors. Ooni began to worry that Kuro had picked this part of the tomb on purpose, knowing it was laid out in a maze almost impossible to navigate, every hallway exactly like each other. There were no rooms or open chambers, as if the spaces between these corridors contained nothing but solid stone.

  “Ilyusha,” she whispered. “I-I still don’t know where we’re going. There’s no landmarks, there’s nothing. I can’t even hear any sounds out there. We— we may be playing into Kuro’s hands, we might be—”

  The darkness burst asunder.

  Ooni and Ilyusha’s conjoined shadows suddenly exploded onto the floor and walls in front of them, outlined by a swirling blue glow; the light source had bloomed to their rear, far too close.

  Ilyusha roared with fury, dragging Ooni sideways as she tried to twist the pair around; Ooni yelped and lurched, Ilyusha’s tail around her waist threatening to unbalance her. She staggered three paces to one side under Ilyusha’s weight, accidentally slamming Ilyusha’s hip in the stone wall. Ilyusha howled with pain — but she’d gotten the pair turned around, facing toward the light source. She yanked the trigger on her shotgun; a round split the air with a deafening boom. Ooni felt the recoil ripple upward through her arm, but she planted her feet to stop Ilyusha losing control.

  The shot plinked off stone and metal.

  Ilyusha didn’t fire a second shot, jaw hanging open, bloodshot eyes gone wide. Ooni froze as well, finger on the trigger of her submachine gun.

  A ghost stood twenty feet away.

  Blue — the pale blue of electric skies after a storm; semi-translucent flesh and clothes and hair were all that same impossible colour. The shotgun round had done nothing, passing harmlessly through the figure. The ghost was a woman, with long hair down to her waist, dressed in a rough woollen skirt and long shirt, furs draped over her shoulders. She carried a short sword in one hand, and a circular shield in the other. She wore no expression.

  She had Ooni’s face.

  Ilyusha snarled: “Izzat … you? The fuck?!”

  Ooni stared back at herself, dressed for a war that time had swallowed.

  “It … it can’t be,” Ooni said. “It’s not— Kuro said ghosts, but— it can’t— it’s a hologram or a t-trick or—”

  Ooni’s ghost took a step forward. Ooni scrambled to aim her submachine gun, but she already knew the bullets would do nothing. Ilyusha bared her teeth, but the ghost continued to advance, then stopped safely beyond sword-reach.

  “Fuckin trick, right,” Ilyusha growled, turning her head to check the rear. “It’s Kuro! Kuro fuckin’ with us. It’s not real. It’s the tomb, it’s—”

  “Hello, sister,” said the ghost.

  Ooni couldn’t breathe. The ghost had her voice — almost. Her face — almost. Her build — almost, but not quite.

  But she couldn’t recall a sister. She couldn’t even recall the feeling of sunlight, or the smell of vegetation, or the taste of fruit. The memory of hot wine faded to nothing, leaving her cold inside. Courage fled. Confusion and dislocation made her head spin.

  “ … I … I don’t … a sister? I don’t—”

  “You threw me from the cliffs,” said the ghost. “One winter’s morning. Into the sea. My body was broken on the rocks.”

  “W-what?” Ooni stammered. The blood drained from her face. Her muscles slackened. Her stomach felt like it needed to empty upward, through her throat. Ilyusha was pulling on her, but Ooni couldn’t move. “No. No, I would remember, I would remember if I— if I had a sister, I would—”

  “You forgot.”

  “I … n-no … ”

  “I have come to remind you of your crime.”

  Ooni felt the ground give way beneath her heart. She felt walls collapsing about her head. She let go of her gun, trying to pull away from Ilyusha.

  “You think you only did bad things because of the people you fell in with, after you died,” said the ghost. “But that’s just a lie, one you’ve been telling yourself for too long. I have not come to forgive you, Ooni. I have come to—”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Ilyusha jerked her shotgun at the face of the ghost and pulled the trigger again — but the round passed harmlessly through the shimmering blue light and hit the wall instead. Ilyusha almost dragged Ooni off-balance, scrambling to stay on her feet. “Shut up! Shut up! Ooni, fucking— don’t listen! Fuck her! Fuck you! Fuck! Fuck!”

  All Ilyusha’s shouting couldn’t drown out the ghost, like she was speaking inside Ooni’s head.

  “—remind you that you were always like this. And you always will be. You will never make it up to me. I hate you.”

  Ooni sagged. She would have fallen to her knees if it wasn’t for Ilyusha’s tail wrapped around her waist. No memory came back to her, no clarity of sudden revelation. She could not recall if she had ever had a sister, let alone if she had committed a murder — before the nanomachine afterlife, before the starvation and the madness, before the Death’s Heads, before all of this.

  But the guilt and the hatred rang true, twisting an invisible knife in a hidden wound.

  Ilyusha was shouting, waving the tip of her shotgun barrel through the ghost’s blue flesh, but the ghost ignored her, undisturbed. Ooni’s eyes filled with tears, clouded with a phantom of old grief; she was evil, wasn’t she? Even within the walls of Telokopolis, she was still evil, she had done terrible things. How could she atone, if even her own sister — sister? — could not forgive her? She was not worthy of Telokopolis, nor of Elpida’s second chance. She was filth on Kuro’s boots.

  Ooni gazed up at the ghost, lips parting to beg for a forgiveness she didn’t deserve, bearing her throat in a gesture of submission. Why did the ghost suddenly seem a hundred times larger?

  Was this what Kuro had felt, when the ghost of the hiver had forgiven her? No wonder Kuro had seemed so different. Nobody could survive this unchanged.

  “Beg for nothing,” said the ghost.

  She raised her sword in one steady fist, point arcing down, aimed at Ooni’s throat.

  after this next one will likely be the final one of the arc. If that's right, we'll be ending on chapter 13.13, which is just ... you know, perfect! I love it! Spooky numbers for a spooky story.

  a single chapter ahead, about 6k words. Behind the scenes I'm plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!

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