For six seconds the Silico did nothing.

  Twelve feet of biomechanical killing machine stopped at the head of the walkway. Bladed arms hung frozen in the air. Subtle hues stuttered and stilled on translucent metal skin, like wind dying on oil-slick water. Thick black bands of leech-like muscle ceased their incessant pumping and throbbing, tarry fluids settling as rib-ridged flesh lay quiet. A hundred hard lenses and glassy wet eyes in the strip of sensory organs simply stared forward, as if hypnotised.

  Elpida had never been this close to a living Silico.

  Nobody got this close and survived, not unarmoured and practically unarmed. Elpida had seen enough helmet camera footage and after action reports to know her chances. If this Silico had been a smaller model, or a mere corpse-puppet, then she may have had other options — perhaps she could even have outwitted it. But this was no bumbling drone, no mote in a swarm. This Silico was an independent forward element, armoured to fight against Legion heavy weapons up-close. If Elpida turned and ran, she would be dead in three paces. Even if she’d had proper arms and armour, she was alone; her only backup now lay in a pool of deliquescent flesh on the platform behind the Silico. Lykke’s remains weren’t even twitching.

  At least Misane was silent. As far as Elpida knew, the Covenanter girl was right where she’d left her, crammed behind a bank of computer consoles down on the floor of the chamber. If Misane screamed, the Silico might go for her. If Elpida glanced that way, the Silico might follow her gaze.

  A way out?

  No. Elpida knew she couldn’t live with that. She wasn’t certain that Misane was just a simulation — the girl might be real. A data-ghost, just another zombie.

  She kept her eyes firmly on the Silico. She held her heavy pistol steady on the Silico’s centre of mass.

  She watched for a twitch of muscle or a shiver of limb. Any moment now, those black, leech-like bundles of tissue beneath the semi-transparent metallic skin would bunch and flex. That would be the first sign of the Silico preparing to pounce or charge — and that would be Elpida’s moment. She had almost no chance of landing a shot on the creature if her nerves broke first. She had to wait until the Silico committed.

  Even then, Elpida needed exceptional luck. She needed her first shot to find something vital. She would only get one chance to interrupt the Silico. The hand cannon in her fist was not designed for sustained or accurate fire, certainly not with only one hand.

  She wasn’t even sure the rounds would penetrate this Silico’s armour.

  Seven seconds — eight seconds — nine seconds — ten—

  The Silico opened its arms.

  A flower of blades peeled back with leisurely affectation — six combat-limbs spreading wide like the spokes of a wheel, their nano-molecular edges catching and cutting the crimson light of Telokopolis, glinting like diamond washed in wine. The other limbs followed, uncoupling from the metallic curve of the Silico’s body, coiling outward to join the unrimmed ring of blades. Each limb began to undulate, mirrored by its neighbours, as if the Silico were a rock wreathed in seaweed. Metal skin flowed once again with the muted rainbow hues of oil on water, bands of shimmering pigment rushing across the surface of the Silico as if stirred by fingers of gust and gale. Black muscles beneath the skin started to pulse and throb, flushing armoured innards with thick and tarry fluids; the Silico’s insides pumped and writhed, as if trying to tear flesh from underlying bone. The three semi-visible rings of rotating metal around the Silico’s body twisted into new configurations, warping into slow waves of flickering chrome.

  Beneath the blood-red glow of Telokopolis, framed by a backdrop of butchered corpses and steaming blood and stinking entrails, the Silico killing machine did something no Telokopolan had ever seen.

  Elpida watched, eyes wide, gun steady. Beads of sweat gathered at her hairline and ran down her face. The muscles of her left arm complained beneath the weight of the heavy pistol. Her eyes threatened to water.

  She caught a scent like rotten garlic and wet salt. Her ears picked out an erratic humming, beneath the distant bodily throb of the city.

  “What is this?” Elpida hissed through clenched teeth. “What are you doing? You should be rushing me. I’m barely armed.”

  Soft rainbow hues played over the Silico’s metal skin. Arms waved in slow rhythm.

  Elpida resisted the urge to shake her head. She reminded herself that this was a simulation, inside the network. This was not necessarily a real Silico. It could be a simulacrum, built from her memories and the memories of others; it could have been sent by somebody else, by whatever force or power had infiltrated her own personal network space. It could be anything. Necromancer bullshit.

  Elpida told herself all those things. She did not believe them.

  She glanced at the upside down human face in the middle of the Silico’s front. Pale, childlike, innocent. The eyes were still closed, as if in peaceful sleep.

  The Silico’s real eyes still watched her — the hundred lenses which dotted the vertical strip down the Silico’s front. Elpida picked one — a glassy black orb of living tissue, dead gaze tinted red beneath the blood-light glow. She stared into the empty depths of the Silico.

  Elpida opened her mouth, then hesitated.

  She felt like she was going insane.

  Thousands of years of accumulated Legion experience and Telokopolan science told her that speaking to Silico was pointless. Some kinds of Silico construct could readily imitate human speech, that was true; several such specimens were held deep inside the Legion archives, all but unknown to the public, barely known to the Civitas, only accessed by researchers who had the full trust and confidence of the entire Legion high command. Old Lady Nunnus had shown them to the pilot cadre as soon as Elpida and her sisters had been old enough to comprehend what they were looking at and speaking with. The things locked inside stasis chambers and lead enclosures and atmospheric bubbles had been all too eager to talk; they would ramble on for hours if somebody sat there and listened to their endless monologues. They would discourse on a million different subjects — abstract philosophy, experimental physics, epic poetry. But after a sentence or two all sense would fade into chaos; one thought would not connect to the next. They appeared to respond to questions, but the answers were nonsense. They would stare through the steel-glass and lead-laced walls, right at the human being they were talking to, and rattle on with endless nothings. They did not communicate, only regurgitate.

  Elpida wet her lips. She had no choice.

  “This is a simulation,” she said out loud. She told herself she was speaking not to the Silico, but to the mind behind the appearance. “If you’re something else, wearing a memory as a skin, drop it. Drop it now.”

  The Silico danced on.

  Elpida wanted to pull the trigger. Her fist creaked around the pistol’s grip. “Or … or maybe you’re real. Maybe you’re a ghost. A survival in the network. Maybe that’s what this is. And now you’ve run into me, your old enemy, and … and I’m … I’m something you recognise, so you’re not killing me? The Covenanters were my memory, but … I think they might have been real too. Ghosts, maybe. Did you kill the Covenanters for me? Is that why … ”

  The Silico danced.

  “If you’re what I think you are — if you’re real, if you know this is a simulation — then I need … a … a sign. I need you to communicate.” Elpida swallowed. Her voice was almost shaking. “Or maybe you are communicating. Is that what this is? Are you trying to communicate with me? You never did before. None of you. Not one time, in thousands of years. This can’t be real. You can’t be Silico. You must be something else. Take off the mask. You’re not Silico. You’re not—”

  The human eyes in that little childlike face snapped open. They were white as superheated metal.

  The Silico took a step forward.

  Elpida’s heart thudded with an irrational fear that she had never felt before. This was not a mask, not a simulation, not a Necromancer puppeting a memory — this was the network ghost of a real Silico. Those white lips on that childlike face were about to open and speak to her. It had heard her words. It was going to reply.

  Elpida knew she must not listen, because then the Covenanters would have been right all along. To listen would be to treat with the eternal enemy of humanity, with the voice of the green, with the invaders and despoilers of the city, with the siege that Telokopolis had stood against since it had been built. To talk to Silico and get an answer went against even the most extreme of the expeditionist theories. She would be a traitor. She would be worse than a traitor.

  Elpida broke first.

  She squeezed the trigger; even as she did, she knew she was wrong.

  The Silico’s rear legs bunched with sudden tension — to pounce, to rush, to dodge the bullet before Elpida could fire. And she couldn’t even blame it. She had shot first. She had broken their strange and uneasy truce. She was a nanomachine zombie in the ashes of earth, yet she could not escape the echo of her own life. The Silico would be justified when it tore her head off and—

  Shuk-shuk-shuk-shuk—

  A familiar sound blossomed on Elpida’s left, from the far wall of the bone-speaker’s chamber.

  A salvo of micro-missiles arced through the air and fell toward the Silico like molten hailstones. The Silico’s silent display terminated in a whipping whirlwind of blade-limbs, lashing out to deflect the barrage. Half the missiles were caught mid-flight, careening off into the air, bursting harmlessly without a target — but there were too many projectiles for the Silico to deflect them all. The rest punched on through. A bright line of tiny explosions blossomed on the Silico’s flank, detonations rippling across the metal skin.

  The Silico lurched to one side, forward motion aborted.

  Elpida scrambled back. Shrapnel went flying in all directions, some from the Silico’s metal skin, but mostly from the missiles themselves. The edge of the walkway offered almost no cover. Elpida hurled herself back the way she’d come, landing behind a solid plate of metal between the walkway uprights.

  She looked up and across the chamber, toward the third blast door, the one the Covenanters had not tried to defend, the one she hadn’t been trying to reach.

  Eight figures in hardshell suits slammed into the chamber. Bone white, moving like ghosts, faceless behind inches of armour.

  A Legion kill team.

  They’d come armed for Silico and they came in textbook. A second volley of micro-missiles arced through the air, fired from a back-mounted rack; the projectiles slammed into the Silico again, keeping it off-balance for crucial seconds as the team swept forward. The Legionnaires didn’t wait for return fire; three of them dropped portable generator-bulbs at their feet. A trio of heavy-duty energy shields snapped to life with a crack of displaced air, spitting and hissing with blue light, turning the platform in front of the blast door into a miniature fortified position.

  A split-second later, two Legionnaires stuck the muzzles of their weapons through firing slits in the shields — ultra-high-output macro cannons, hardshell servos whining with the weight of the guns. They opened fire with a deafening roar, turning the air between them and the Silico into a hurricane of reaction-mass rounds. The Silico whirled under the storm of impacts, but the firepower was not enough to penetrate its skin. The semi-visible metal rings around the Silico’s body pulsed and flickered, erecting shields of its own — flat white layers of shimmering translucence and odd-angled hexagons that shivered and jerked in and out of sight.

  Elpida crammed herself behind her scant cover. Shrapnel pattered and pinged off the walkway.

  The Legionnaire with the micro-missile rack fired another volley, missiles streaming through the air like falling stars. The Silico’s arms lashed out again, catching more of this third barrage than the first and second. Some of the missiles burst against the shields. More turned away under their own power, sent off-course by the Silico’s local jamming.

  It didn’t stumble a third time.

  Elpida was confused — the kill team had missed their opening, wasted the element of surprise. Then she realised they couldn’t use their true heavy weapons in here — shaped charges, plasma cannons, coilguns. One hardshell was hanging back, arms laden down with the bulk of a portable microwave beam emitter. Two of the others had kinetic acceleration autocannons strapped to their backs, but hadn’t even unslung the weapons.

  They couldn’t risk that kind of damage in a bone-speaker’s chamber. They wouldn’t risk harming Telokopolis herself.

  The Silico crouched and coiled, readying a leap even through the hail of firepower. One bound would put it right on top of the Legionnaires.

  Stolen story; please report.

  They had no way to stop it.

  Then three Legionnaires leapt off the platform, suits falling like bricks of chalk. A moment later each one jerked upward on twin pillars of heat-haze distortion, carried aloft by suspensor packs attached to the rear of their suits. Suspensor beams were not meant to be used inside the city — they presented too much risk of massive damage, uncontrolled detonation, internal fires. Not to mention the number of properly trained Legionnaires was very small.

  Elpida appreciated this was not exactly the time for normal doctrine.

  The three Legionnaires with suspensor packs darted as wide as they could, multi-ton hardshell suits floating like seeds in the breeze. Each was armed with a suit-powered plasma rifle; each of them rained purple fire down on the Silico, overwhelming sections of the translucent white shield, searing great blackened patches into the thick metal of the killing machine’s hide.

  The Silico twisted left and right, drowning in firepower, a metal worm half-swallowed by a storm.

  The Legion kill-team couldn’t finish it off, not inside the bone-speaker’s chamber, not without proper heavy weaponry. But if it wavered with indecision for long enough, sheer weight of firepower would wound it eventually.

  Or drive it off.

  Elpida realised the plan — the kill team had left the other two exits of the chamber wide open. They were trying to drive the Silico elsewhere, where they could fight it unshackled by concern for the soft places of the city.

  The Silico flailed and faltered. Legs bunched as if it was about to spring and take down one of the flyers — but then it seemed to shudder and turn aside. The translucent white angles of shield swung to block the macro-cannon rounds, then whirled back to the plasma bolts, then began to shudder and fade and wink out.

  The plan was working. The Silico turned to flee—

  Toward Elpida.

  She saw the open eyes in the childlike face once again. Blank, empty, white-hot.

  It was going to slam down the walkway and right through her. The space was too narrow to leap aside. Elpida scrambled to her feet and turned to run.

  Click-buzz — external helmet comms, turned up loud over the storm of firepower.

  A Legionnaire shouted, voice blurred by static: “Ma’am, get down!”

  The eighth hardshell of the Legion kill team vaulted over the edge of the upper platform, suspensor pack billowing to life with heat haze, carrying it through the air like a cannonball — not up, but straight forward, right to the stretch of walkway between Elpida and the Silico.

  The Legionnaire landed like a flying brick, hardshell boots slamming down, face toward the charging foe.

  Elpida thought she was witnessing a suicide. This was no little corpse-puppet. It would trample the hardshell or smash it aside.

  The Legionnaire drew a monoedge sword off the suit’s back, yellow as old bone and veined with grey, five full feet from tip to hilt — the kind of sword grown inside the bones of the city itself. The suit’s left gauntlet blossomed with a crack of blue light, flaming into the bubble of a personal combat shield, wrapping chalk-white armour in crackling power.

  The Silico slammed into the Legionnaire, but the suit was not swept aside. Blade-arms whipped and whirled too fast for the eye to follow, cracking and sparking off the energy shield a hundred times a second. The shield would hold only moments.

  The Legionnaire swung the monoedge sword in precise, unhurried, two-handed arcs.

  Two Silico blade-limbs dropped to the walkway, writhing and coiling like serpents speared through the belly; black muscle-leeches sucked back into the wounds, sealing the breaches. A chunk of Silico skin fell away from the hide like butter under a hot knife, the metal steaming and blackening as it tumbled to the floor of the chamber far below.

  The Silico recoiled as if stung, stumbling back on all six legs. The Legionnaire’s shield gave out a split-second later, collapsing in a burst of blue sparks and crackling white light.

  A final blow from the Silico’s flailing blade limbs tore a deep wound in the suit’s right thigh, grazed the right shoulder — and cleaved off the front of the hardshell helmet.

  Like a bisected skull, the front of the helmet fell to the walkway, trailing wires and torn padding, covered in blood.

  The Legionnaire collapsed to one knee with a clang of metal on metal.

  And then the Silico turned and charged in the opposite direction, feet ringing on the walkways and platforms. It leapt the pile of corpses — the dead Covenanters who it had butchered mere moments earlier — and vanished through the blast doors, worming off into the guts of Telokopolis.

  The deafening firepower ceased as quickly as it had begun, instantly replaced with a crackle of audible comms-chatter.

  “Lost visual on exogen. Repeat, lost visual on exogen. Target is zero-six outbound.”

  “Sweep, contain, confirm.”

  “Swept. Sensors negative. Confirmed.”

  Elpida realised the radio chatter was coming from the open faceplate of the Legionnaire in front of her. The helmet internals were exposed by the damage.

  “Drop, fold, repeat. Resume pursuit formation. Weapons free.”

  The three hovering Legionnaires killed their suspensor packs and slammed to the walkways. They sprinted into position at the blast door where the Silico had fled, plasma weapons levelled. They ignored the corpses of Covenanters on every side, their own boots slick with blood.

  “Confirmed no visual. Nine-nine-five angle ahead. Exit clear. Advise.”

  “Outbound in five. Go.”

  The other Legionnaires were already disengaging their portable shields, hefting the macro-cannons, hurling themselves down the metal stairs, hurrying to join their comrades at the blast door.

  Elpida had spent plenty of time up close and personal with Legionnaires in hardshell suits — as had all of the cadre, at her instruction and insistence; these were the soldiers who had fought at the cadre’s feet, at eye-level with the verdant madness of the green, while Elpida had strode above it in a combat frame. These were the soldiers who manned the edge of the plateau day after day, month after month, century after century. The pilot project and the combat frames were a scalpel, to cut deep into the green where nothing else could. But these people were the outer shield of Telokopolis. This was what it was like, down on the ground, though perhaps less dramatic most of the time. Elpida knew the reality all too well; she had spent countless hours reviewing helmet-cam footage from ordinary Legionnaires, to understand them better. That was part of her duty as Commander, even if these soldiers were not her own.

  Elpida knew enough to know this team was not composed of ordinary Legionnaires, no matter how well trained. They had not hesitated at contact in the middle of a bone-speaker’s chamber. They had not paused in horror at the slaughterhouse of corpses and blood and viscera; even experienced Legionnaires had to open their suit visors to vomit at the human wreckage of real combat. They hadn’t paused to collect themselves. They didn’t even break strict comms protocol after fighting a Silico in the heart of Telokopolis. These were hardened veterans of the endless war, lifers who’d been Legion for decades.

  The Legionnaire who had fought toe-to-toe with the Silico was still down on one knee, the chalky back of the hardshell toward Elpida, right gauntlet wrapped around the handle of the monoedge sword. The only one who hadn’t moved.

  A corpse, held upright by the armour. The Legionnaire’s face must be mangled meat inside the suit.

  The radio crackled again.

  “KT-106 engaged exofiltate, stoma chamber eight. Command, respond.” A pause as the others got into position by the door. “Command, respond. Command, respond. Command, respond. Channel open. Request command respond. Repeat.”

  One of the Legionnaires glanced back. The radio crackled. “Arin?”

  The Legionnaire kneeling in front of Elpida spoke out loud — clean and clear, not a tortured bubble of blood in a ruined throat. Alive.

  “Painblockers online. Shell reports right femur shattered. Stable in one-twenty.”

  “Confirmed.” A pause. “We—”

  “I’ll catch up. Outbound. Go.”

  The Legion kill team slammed out of the chamber, swarming after the Silico.

  Elpida snapped the safety on her pistol. She sneaked a quick glance over at Lykke — or whatever was left of her, a puddle of liquid meat — and saw the bloody mass shiver, as if coming around. Elpida’s pulse was still racing. Adrenaline was coming down, but she knew she’d been wired for a while yet.

  The kneeling Legionnaire let out a grunt of pain.

  “Thank you,” Elpida said.

  The Legionnaire heaved upright, using the sword for support, hardshell suit staggering two paces as the servo-muscles compensated for a broken leg and mangled thigh.

  The suit swung to face Elpida, boots ringing on the metal walkway, bone-white armour catching a crimson blush from the inner light of Telokopolis. The helmet had been half cut away by the Silico’s final strike, robbing the suit of sensors, compromising atmospheric containment, and ruining the helmet’s protection. But the Legionnaire was lucky; she’d escaped with nothing more than scrapes and bruises and a shallow cut across her forehead.

  The Legionnaire was a woman, older than Elpida, with high cheekbones and red hair, face cushioned within the padded enclosure of the hardshell helmet. She had a long scar running from the left corner of her lips, blossoming into a massive spider web of mangled tissue across her left cheek. Her left eye was an expensive bionic, as was the left side of her jaw. Most of her neck and throat had been patched several times with synthetic skin; the bulwark-tattoo of a lifelong Legionnaire was interrupted and blurred by the damage and repairs. The bionics and the scar gave her lips a distinctive sneering tilt.

  “Suggest you retreat the opposite way, Ma’am,” said the Legionnaire; her voice was rough and scratchy. “Or stay here to wait for reinforcements. My team can’t afford to slow down for casualties. That thing is already ahead of us. Command isn’t responding.”

  Elpida was speechless.

  She knew this woman’s face — from history lessons and textbooks, from vid-records and archives, and from more than a few movies, though no actress could match the real thing.

  Westinlass Aglaea Arin. A hero of the Fourth Incursion, a time that had produced a surplus of heroes, few of whom had lasted long.

  This woman had died seven hundred years before Elpida’s life, in the room-to-room warren-fighting of the western side of the Skirts. Her handwritten accounts of Silico behaviour were standard reading for any Legion officer. Elpida had once seen the original manuscripts, kept under glass in a public museum — the loose leaves of a large-format notebook, spotted with blood and stained with sweat, military matters jumbled together with personal notes and scraps of verse.

  The monoedge sword and the personal shield suddenly made sense; that had been part of the doctrine back then. Arin was one of the finest examples of a close-quarters specialist — a role that the Legion of Elpida’s time considered suicidal madness.

  “Ma’am,” Arin repeated. “I suggest you retreat in the opposite direction. My team cannot slow for casualties. Are you wounded?”

  “No,” Elpida said. She gestured at the floor of the chamber, far below; Misane had vanished, probably back into the concealed nook where she’d been hiding when Elpida had entered the room. “One survivor besides me.”

  “Eval?”

  “Null. Unwounded.”

  “Take her with you. We can’t spare anybody. As soon as my painblockers max, I’m outbound.” Her eyes darted around the chamber. Her lips curled in disgust. “Nasty fucking business.” She turned her head and spat on one of the Silico arms that she had severed, then hefted the two-handed monoedge sword and clamped it to the rear of her hardshell. When she shifted her weight the right thigh of the suit cracked and groaned with the deep cut the Silico had left there; the rent was oozing a thin trickle of blood. The suit had already coagulated and sealed the wound, but Arin would most likely lose the leg.

  Lykke’s liquefied mass shivered again. Elpida willed her not to get back up, not yet. She would not watch Lykke tear apart a Legion hero.

  “I’m sorry about your leg,” Elpida said. “And again, thank you. I would be dead otherwise.”

  Arin grinned; a gruesome sight, with her mangled lips and heavy bionics and the blood down her face. “Another replacement’ll do me good. That one was getting rusty anyway.” Her eyes flickered to the stump of Elpida’s right elbow. “Looks like you need one yourself.”

  Elpida couldn’t help herself — she laughed. An ancient hero was complimenting her war wounds.

  “And sorry about the danger close micro-shots, Ma’am,” Arin went on. “No choice. Had to fire before alerting you. Gotta keep those motherfuckers on their toes.”

  “You … you shouldn’t be calling me Ma’am,” Elpida said. “I’m not dressed as Legion, I’m not in uniform. You don’t even know the pilot project. You shouldn’t know me.”

  “Anybody who stares down Silico with a shitty pistol and dry breeches is one of us.” Arin grinned again. “You’re Legion. I can see it in your eyes.”

  Elpida shook her head. “You’re not a memory, you’re real. You’re actually here. Simulated, but real. I never imagined you like this. I barely imagined you at all.”

  Arin narrowed her eyes, but kept grinning. “Yeah. I’ve been feeling that too.”

  “What?” Elpida tried to reach for the hardshell suit, then remembered she had no right hand. “You mean you know this is a simulation? You were resurrected? Are you—”

  Arin grunted and drew a deep breath, then took a step back from Elpida; her painblockers had finally done their job. “All I know is that I feel like I’ve been dreaming for years, running through tar, underwater, weights on my ankles. Can’t remember where I was twenty minutes ago. Can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning. Command isn’t answering. Quantum comms are dead. Either this is the final incursion and the city is over, or this ain’t fuckin’ real. Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe we’re all dreaming.”

  She took another step back, started to turn.

  “This is a simulation!” Elpida said. “You’re right. We’re all dead. If you’re real, somehow — I don’t know, a-a ghost or something, then—”

  “Dead, alive, whatever.” Arin winked. “I’ve still got Silico to hunt. Take care, Ma’am.”

  “Wait!” Elpida shoved her pistol into her ballistic vest and reached out for Arin. “Wait. One of my sisters — my squad mates — has been taken. Not by Silico, by … ” Elpida glanced around at the Covenanter corpses. How could she explain ‘civil war’ to a hero from a time when such a thing would have been unthinkable? “By … ”

  Arin followed her gaze. “Huh. Right. But we can’t spare—”

  “Just keep an eye out for her,” Elpida said. “If you run across her before I do. She looks like me, but smaller. Same skin, white hair, purple eyes. Her name is Howl. Please.”

  Arin saluted with fist against the side of her ruined helmet. “Silico first, then I’ll look for your girl. Hell, Command is silent and you probably outrank me anyway. Good luck, Ma’am.”

  “You too. Good hunting.” Then: “Telokopolis is forever.”

  Arin’s brow furrowed. Then she grinned. “Sure. Dead or dreaming, I don’t care. Telokopolis is forever.”

  And then she was gone — turning, picking up her feet, running after her Legion comrades, her gait lopsided as the suit compensated for a broken femur. Her radio crackled to life as she pounded out of the room.

  Silence settled on the chamber, broken by the distant throb of the city and the slow drip-drip-drip of blood.

  Elpida left the walkway, heading for the blast door. She took a final glance down at the floor of the chamber, but Misane had not reappeared. She called the girl’s name a couple of times, but received no reply. She shouted that she had to keep going, and that Misane should either shelter where she was, or head away from the direction the Silico had taken.

  Then Elpida stopped next to the pile of crimson meat and bone fragments that was Lykke. She poked the mass with the toe of one shoe.

  Lykke surged back to coherence — from a puddle to a pillar of bleeding flesh, then to a woman in a little white dress. She was still bruised and bloody, golden hair still loose and wild, green eyes blazing with wounded pride. She put her hands on her hips.

  “Huh!” she spat. “Huh.”

  “ … yes?” Elpida said. “Are you alright?”

  Lykke pouted. “Enjoy your flirting, zombie? I assumed the big bad butches weren’t really your type. I mean, really! You’ve got a foot of height on her, even in that monkey suit! Really. Tch.”

  Lykke folded her arms and turned away.

  “Thank you for trying to fight the Silico,” Elpida said, and struggled to mean it. “But if you sulk, I’ll leave you here. I have to keep moving.”

  Lykke went, “Huh!” again, then cocked an eyebrow at Elpida. “So you can catch up with your latest squeeze?”

  “Because Howl is still missing, and that’s the direction everyone is going. Because the Silico was trying to communicate with me, and I don’t know what that means. Because there are a lot of playing pieces loose on this board right now, and not all of them are simulations.”

  Lykke unfolded her arms. She frowned. “You think all these memories are real? Zombie, this is all inside you.”

  “That was a real Silico, and those were real Legion. The Covenanters too, perhaps. Maybe even the memory of Nunnus was real. Network zombies. Ghosts. I don’t know, I don’t have the correct terminology. Something has invaded me — ‘hostile one’, as I explained to you earlier. Something is drawing these forces from the wider network, summoning them up, setting them in motion, setting them against each other. Maybe to slow me down, maybe to kill me. Maybe something else. I don’t know yet.”

  Lykke started to grin. “And you want to find it? Why? For another little dance?” Lykke grabbed the hem of her dress and straightened the fabric as best she could. “I won’t give in a second time. I won’t! I promise!”

  Elpida shook head. “No. Howl comes first. Howl is the only thing that matters.” Elpida paused. “But if a hostile invader has used the Covenanters to take Howl, I have to get to that hostile itself, not just the ablative meat it’s throwing in my way. Now come on, Necromancer. I may need your help.”

  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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