Before she left the bone-speakers’ chamber, Elpida called down to Misane one more time. She couldn’t see where the Covenanter girl had hidden — Misane had either crawled back into that nook full of corpses, or squeezed herself into a corner of steel. She shouted that Misane should head in the opposite direction, away from the fighting, or else stay put and stay quiet. The bodies and blood and raw viscera strewn all over the chamber soaked up the force of Elpida’s voice, but she hoped the girl had heard.

  She hoped Misane would make it out. Simulation or ghost or memory, whatever she was, a teenage girl did not deserve to die here.

  She received no answer.

  Elpida led the way out of the chamber — through the blast door and past another empty checkpoint — heading in the same direction as Arin’s Legionnaires, the lone Silico construct, and whatever Covenanters had first passed this way. Lykke padded along beside her, skipping and bouncing with excitement, biting her lower lip and shooting sidelong glances at Elpida; her apparent distaste had fallen away at the prospect of another fruitless search at Elpida’s side. The Necromancer’s bare feet and Elpida’s soft-soled shoes left a twined trail of sticky scarlet footprints for the first few meters, marking the bone and metal with Covenanter blood.

  Elpida had no idea what she was going to find beyond this busy threshold. All that mattered was recovering Howl. All other priorities were secondary.

  The checkpoint disgorged Elpida and Lykke into a narrow passageway with a high ceiling, walls lined with ribs of ancient yellowed bone, meaty innards glowing with the omnipresent blood-red light. The ceiling soared upward twenty to thirty feet, crisscrossed by layers of fluttering membrane and mucus-slick frills, punctuated by slender flutes of turgid flesh that vanished upward into crimson haze. Smaller passages branched off from the main vessel; some were blocked by sphincter-seals, others by artificial doors of steel, a few by chunky pads of bone. But most lay wide open; some were signposted as ways out of the city core, toward the vast outer layers of polymer and metal, the ordinary conurbation which made up ninety five percent of Telokopolis.

  Elpida moved quickly; she discarded the greater part of her former stealth, trotting along at just under a jog. She drew her machine pistol and looped the weapon back into the makeshift harness around her left arm. She flexed her shoulder where the ballistic vest had stopped a round back in the bone-speakers’ chamber; if this hadn’t been a simulation, that bruise would be stiff as stone by the next morning, but it wouldn’t slow her down yet.

  She followed the main vessel and ignored the side passages, hurrying beneath the shivering membranes of the city.

  This was still a simulation, even if many of the participants seemed to be more than mere data. This was the way everyone else was going. If she was going to find anything, then it would lie in this direction. This was her best bet for recovering Howl.

  Fifty two seconds later Elpida sighted the first clutch of dead Covenanters.

  Four corpses were smashed and smeared across the floor and walls of a six-way junction. The condition of the bodies was too chaotic to tell if they had tried to hold this position, or if the Silico had ambushed them. Hardshell bootprints led through the gore — the Legion kill team had carried straight on.

  Elpida skidded to a halt amid the carnage.

  If this had been happening in reality, her course of action would have been clear. She should have been catching up with the Legion, since her own armaments were of little use against a Silico construct, and she lacked the Legion hardshell sensor suites. The Silico might be hiding right in front of her and she wouldn’t know until it was too late.

  But she wasn’t hunting Silico. She would leave that to Arin.

  Lykke scrambled to a stop with a high-pitched squeal, almost crashing into Elpida from behind. Elpida looped her left arm around the Necromancer’s waist and set her back on her feet. Lykke wheezed for a long moment, tears shining in her eyes, a trembling smile on her lips; her belly was still bruised from earlier, still tender.

  Eventually Lykke straightened back up, face flushed. “Oh, zombie. Do warn me next time. Unless you want me to knock you down into a pile of guts. Didn’t know you were into that—”

  “Quiet.”

  Lykke blinked, then let out a dainty sigh. “Not that I’m above a little bit of gawking at all these flesh bags, but I’ve had enough of dead meat for one day. Even I get tired of machine-gunning fish in a barrel. Do you really need to stop and stare at every—”

  “Quiet.”

  “Tch! You could at least—”

  “Quiet, right now. I need to concentrate.”

  Elpida glanced down each of the six junction exits, one after the other. She lingered on the shadows gathered in the corners of bone and machine-meat. She dragged her gaze slowly over empty air. She unfocused her eyes. She waited.

  If Elpida was right that an unknown hostile had invaded her private network space, then that hostile was hiding somewhere, hiding from her — otherwise it would have simply hunted her down. Either it couldn’t fight her face-to-face, or it didn’t consider her worth fighting. But it was hiding. The Covenanters had tried to kill her, to stop her advancing in this direction. Arin and the Legion kill team were obviously not being used against her; if they had been mere puppets dancing to the tune of a true player in the network, they could have detained Elpida at their leisure, or simply shot her out of hand, or killed her by accident in the crossfire. Arin had protected her, not barred her way.

  But the Silico had killed the Covenanters. The Silico had neutralised the initial obstacle. The Silico had attempted communication, even if it was incomprehensible. The hatreds and fears of Elpida’s life told her that was nonsense, but she pushed that aside. Her world was long dead. She accepted the evidence of her senses.

  The Silico had helped her.

  Which meant—

  A hundred feet away, down the corridor which led off the fourth exit out of the six-way junction, a shimmer of crimson light hung at the wrong angle.

  “Don’t react,” Elpida whispered. “The Silico is standing right there, where I’m looking. Two o’clock. A hundred feet out. Optical camo online. It’s probably watching us.”

  Lykke’s eyebrows shot upward. Her mouth formed a little o-shape. She turned and looked — then scowled and pouted and wrinkled her nose, as if she’d only just remembered that the construct had beaten her in a straight fight. She huffed and tossed her hair over one shoulder; Elpida winced, but the glimmer of misplaced light didn’t move.

  Lykke whispered. “And how did your new squeeze and her big shiny soldier gang miss that?”

  “Because it came back. For me.”

  Elpida took a step forward.

  The glimmer-ghost of optical camo slid through the air — then vanished around the corner.

  Training and doctrine and experience all told Elpida this was a trap. Out in the green this would be suicide. In life this would have been madness. Even the cadre would not have followed her; they would have restrained her for her own good, and they would have been correct to do so.

  “After it!”

  Elpida broke into a run.

  Lykke whooped and squealed. “That’s more like it, zombie! Let’s get sweaty, unnnh!”

  Elpida sprinted away from the junction, shot down the narrow passageway, and swung round the corner. If the Silico intended an ambush, Elpida would have died right there; her whole body rebelled against the motion as she flung herself past the end of the passageway and found — nothing! The Silico was gone!

  A fleeting glimpse of refracted crimson light glinted about fifty feet down a long and winding corridor of metal and meat.

  Elpida shot after it, feet slapping against yellowed bone. Lykke scrambled after her, shrieking and giggling, taking the corner with a tumble, then leaping back to her feet with a yelp and a groan of tortured bruises.

  “Keep up, Necromancer!” Elpida shouted. “I won’t slow down for you!”

  “Oooh please, take me as fast as you want, zombie!”

  The Silico led Elpida deeper and deeper into the city’s tangled entrails — down tight tubes of wriggling meat, beneath soaring arbours of hoary bone, across trembling sheaths of sensitive organ-flesh, over shrouded chasms of churning fluid. She raced past three more groups of slain Covenanters, their bodies and their defences dismantled by the Silico, perhaps during some initial pass along this route; two of the three groups had hardshell bootprints crossing their bloody remains, but the Legion kill team was nowhere to be seen. Twice Elpida thought she heard distant gunfire echoing down the maze of guts, but the sound was drowned beneath the throbbing of Telokopolis. Once she heard a shouted command — the leader, Arin? — but she couldn’t make out the words.

  Elpida concentrated on her breathing and on the repeated tiny glimpses of cloaked Silico, leading her forward, baiting her onward, showing her the way. It must be leading her to Howl. She had no idea how or why, but that was the only explanation, it was the only—

  Elpida burst from a narrow corridor of old bone, out into a vast abscess.

  She slammed to a stop in surprise at the sheer size of the chamber — it hadn’t seemed that large on approach, but on the inside it was gigantic, easily a twin to the combat frame hangars down in the Skirts. The abscess was utterly barren; Elpida’s final footfalls echoed away into the towering void. The floor was a mottled hybrid of grey metal — scuffed and marked by the passage of so many billion feet — and the oldest, most yellowed bone she had ever seen in Telokopolis, so mineralised and crusted that it resembled raw stone. The walls soared upward, curving inward as if bowing under their own weight; great bulges of darkened meat were sustained and supported by an extensive tracery of living metal, thickening here and there into striated columns which joined together toward the floor. The omnipresent blood-light of Telokopolis was deeper and darker in this raw and empty place, as if the fluids of the city itself concentrated their potency around some secret organ.

  Elpida had never heard of this place before. That such a massive chamber would remain unused, so deep in the heart of Telokopolis, was faintly absurd. Yet she felt as if she recognised the place — as if she had dreamed of it once, or seen it when too young to recall.

  The Silico stood revealed at the opposite end of the abscess. The optical camo was offline again. The construct’s limbs were spread wide. It wasn’t moving.

  Elpida raised her machine pistol before she could stop herself. The gesture was absurd — not only was the Silico more than three hundred feet away, but even at point-blank the machine pistol wouldn’t do more than tickle the construct’s armoured skin.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Lykke peeked over her shoulder. “Going to switch to your bigger bang-bang, zombie? Or can I claim another dance? Pleeeeeeease? I won’t disappoint this time, I won’t, I promise you. Please? Please?”

  Elpida lowered the machine pistol. She flicked the safety on.

  “No. Follow me. And, Necromancer?”

  Lykke sighed. “I can already tell this is going to be tiresome. But fine, fine, fine. The things I do for your affections.”

  “I suggest you don’t try fighting it again. It’ll hand your arse to you.”

  Lykke made a pouty sound. Elpida ignored that.

  The abscess-chamber seemed to pulse and murmur on every side as Elpida strode down the middle, toward the Silico. Her footsteps echoed for a while — and then were swallowed up, as if absorbed by a thickening of the air. A distant sound like low wind whispered at the edge of her hearing. A throbbing tremor reverberated in her abdomen.

  The Silico did not react to Elpida’s approach, perfectly still. The four remaining blade-limbs were spread in an arched halo, which appeared to point to the left; the stumps of the two arms which Arin had severed were sealed by masses of sticky black flesh, like cold tar. The vertical strip of sensors and eyeballs and lenses stared straight ahead. The missing chunk of armour was glowing red-hot, the edges of the wound creeping closed as the metal regenerated.

  The cherubic face in the middle of the body was still wide-eyed. White orbs stared at nothing.

  More dead Covenanters littered the floor to the right of the Silico killing machine — six corpses, some of them torn apart, some simply decapitated, and one of them dead without a mark on the body, still masked in a greensuit hood, with one hand outstretched toward an exit on the right of the chamber.

  The abscess-chamber had three exits at this end. One behind the Silico and one to the far left were simple tunnels of bone and metal.

  To the right lay a much closer exit, only a few paces away — a strange protrusion of machine-meat which bulged outward from the wall. The aperture was wrapped in thin veils of pinkish flesh, fluttering and quivering and undulating. Elpida had never seen anything like it before; it looked like something from deep within the body of Telokopolis, something that should not be exposed to the open air, let alone to human touch. She felt a deep disquiet at the Silico’s proximity to such trembling vulnerability.

  But the position of the Covenanter corpses made the encounter clear — the Silico had guarded that soft entrance against them, or perhaps denied them the refuge it offered.

  Elpida stopped twenty feet away, just in case.

  The Silico did nothing.

  Elpida discarded the absurdity of talking to one of these things, then raised her voice. “Are you leading me to Howl?”

  The Silico said nothing.

  Lykke whispered over Elpida’s shoulder, “Perhaps he’s shy? Want me to try him for you, zombie?”

  “Why are you killing the Covenanters, but not me?” Elpida shouted. “This isn’t normal Silico behaviour. If you’re trying to stop them, then … then good, but they’re human beings too. You don’t have the right. I do. I have the right to deal with them. Not you. I will try to give them every chance to turn away from what they did, but if they don’t, I won’t hesitate. But you don’t have that right.”

  That wasn’t what she’d intended to say. The words were simply too much to hold back.

  Silence. A throbbing pulse. A distant wind. Elpida’s eyes stung as if the air itself was hot and wet — but she couldn’t smell the rotten garlic scent of the Silico, only the warm machine-meat of the city.

  “Answer me!” she shouted. “What are you? The Legion will catch up to you soon. They will hunt you down, so answer me while you still can. What are you?! Answer—”

  Behind the shivering veils of pinkish flesh to the right, a shadow rose from amid crimson light.

  Elpida jerked her machine pistol at the sudden interruption.

  “Who’s there?” she snapped. “Show yourself, or I’ll open—”

  The abscess-chamber gasped.

  “Please don’t.”

  A whisper, so faint and gentle that it could have been spoken from lips pressed to Elpida’s ear, clicking a moist tongue upon tender meat. But it came from the abscess itself, from the subsonic throb of machine flesh and the subtle flex of blood-weathered metal and the slow creak of ancient bones. It was high and breathy and soft. It made Elpida’s eyes water and her guts clench. It made her skin break out in cold sweat.

  The shadow behind the veils of sealed flesh turned toward her.

  Elpida knew what it was that spoke.

  She lowered the gun.

  The whisper came again. “I have done everything I can to clear your path, but I have risked everything to do so.”

  The shadow behind the veils was difficult to make out, blurred by the darkened blood-glow of the city, outline turned to haze and mist by the flutter of gauze and flesh. The figure was shorter than Elpida, petite and delicate. The fabric of a dress caught and clung to slender hips. The spikes of a crown rose from the brow.

  Elpida shook her head. “You … you can’t be … t-this is a simulation, how do I know that you’re … what you appear to … be … ”

  The shadow turned her head aside, as if pained.

  Elpida clenched her teeth. Her voice was quivering. “I … I already came to terms with the fact you might not exist. Or you might be a fake. But Howl isn’t fake. Howl is real, and she’s in danger, and I have to rescue her. I will … I will turn away from you, or shoot through you, if you’re not … if you’re … ”

  The shadow shook her head. The whisper returned. “You are everything I could never have been. You remain my greatest success, though I love others no less. Yes, I am what you think I am. But if you do not believe — or even if you do — you may shoot through me, if it will save another of my children, even the lowest. My judgement is a murmur, yours is a battle cry.”

  Elpida’s machine pistol dangled from the straps around her forearm; she couldn’t remember letting go of the weapon. Her left hand reached for the veils; her feet stumbled forward. She needed to pull back that curtain. She needed to look upon the face she never dared hope would be real. She needed true guidance, she needed to know she was doing the right thing, she needed forgiveness and—

  “No!” the voice hissed.

  Elpida stopped.

  “No,” the shadow repeated. “I have already shown too much of myself, come too close to discovery. I dare not risk further exposure, or I will be found by things that can annihilate me completely. Please, do not.”

  Elpida curled her fingers back and lowered her hand. She almost couldn’t do it.

  “What— what’s happening here?” Elpida said. “If you’re … ‘real’, whatever that means, then … have you been hiding inside me all this time?”

  The shadow shook her head. The whisper hissed through the abscess-chamber. “I have taken a grave risk by being here, and a graver one by speaking with you. This is the most exposed I have ever been. Only the hurricane above us allows me this lapse of caution. The clouds hide me, the rain blurs my limbs, the drum of hailstones drowns out my words.”

  “Then why take the risk? Why?”

  “You have been invaded. A breach was made, I do not know how, and something entered you. The invader is not something I can expose myself to, for fear that I will invite total destruction, when I have endured so long. The invader came from without, from the sea of souls.”

  “The network? You mean the network?”

  The shadow nodded. “The invader is using the ghosts of my own wayward children against you.” A slender hand gestured downward, at the Covenanter who had died on the threshold of the veils.

  “The Covenanters,” said Elpida. “They’re real, then. I was right. They’re ghosts. They were real people, yes?”

  The shadow nodded. “Yes.”

  Elpida glanced up at the Silico. It was still frozen in place. “And this … ?”

  “I could not bring myself to kill my own children.” The shadow’s whisper grew thick; the air seemed to tremble. Elpida’s eyes watered and the pulse inside her head pounded. “No matter their sins, no matter how they have been used against the daughters of my body, no matter that they have died once before. I cannot. I just cannot. I had to enlist this distant branch, from so far a fallen seed, no matter the bad blood between us. They are as diminished as we now. The old enmity matters nothing.”

  Elpida’s head whirled with the implications of those words. “But … the Legion, Arin, just now … ”

  “Mine also,” whispered the shadow. “To aid you against the real foe. But I cannot reconcile their ghosts with every twig of our scattered forest. I do not control them. I never controlled anybody. Not even you.”

  Elpida’s mind raced. The Silico and the Legion had been summoned by … by the entity she was talking with, which she could not quite bring herself to name, not just yet. And that was why Lykke had been able to fight them. The shadow, the voice, the figure — she was hiding, not exerting network permissions inside Elpida. She was simply sharing her memories.

  But the ghosts of the Covenanters had been summoned by a hostile invader — and that hostile had network permissions that exceeded Lykke’s.

  “That is likely,” whispered the shadow. “Don’t be afraid. I can read your thoughts on your face, but there is no trickery in it. I just … know you. I knew you for your whole life. I knew every expression you ever made. I’m sorry.”

  Elpida felt tears gathering in her eyes. She had not expected to feel this way. She tried to hold onto the practical considerations and needs of this moment, but she faltered and flailed beneath a torrent she had not known could exist.

  The whisper went on. “And yes, you are likely correct. The invader is of higher rank than your strange and unwelcome friend.”

  Elpida glanced back at Lykke — and found her frozen in place, just like the Silico. Her eyes were glassy and fixed, her chest stilled.

  “She will remember none of this,” whispered the shadow. “I am sorely tempted to snuff her out, now that she is severed from the demon at the centre of the world. While she is inside you, I could … ”

  Elpida whipped back around. “Please, don’t—”

  “She holds you in high esteem. She values herself as yours, in a way I do not understand, more than she values her old freedom. For that alone I will stay my hand.” A sigh. “Besides, I was never skilled at revenge. I cannot hold on to hate, no matter how hard I try.”

  Elpida nodded. “I-I want to believe you’re real, I—” Elpida swallowed hard and wiped at her eyes. She did not have time to lose control, not when faced by this singular chance. “I … I need to know.”

  “I know. But I can’t give you what you need.”

  Elpida shook her head. “I need to know that I’m doing the right thing. Not here, right now, that’s not what I mean, but … o-out there, I need to know, I—”

  “I am happy you have not forgotten me, in a time when so many others have.”

  “But—”

  “Whatever you choose is right, my first-born daughter.”

  Elpida bit back a sob.

  “You must focus,” whispered the shadow. “You need to find your sister. I will not lose her again, not when I fought so hard to pluck her from the waves.”

  Elpida blinked hard. She forced the tears back down inside. She had her answer. “Right. Howl. And you’ve cleared the way?”

  “Yes. Though … ” The shadow turned aside. “I am afraid for you. I am afraid for all of you. Your companions out in the flesh — my children-to-be — they are plagued by ghosts as well. I have done what little I can, guided them away from the wolves and the darkness. But I am almost powerless. It has been an age since I could shelter even but one. I am so reduced.”

  “The others?” Elpida said. “Pheiri and the crew? Kagami, Vicky, all of them? Is something happening out there, what—”

  “They hunt. They flee. I do what little I can, without being seen. But when the storm ends, I must hide my face from the world. You must focus.”

  “Right. Where’s Howl?”

  The shadow pointed — past the Silico, at the far exit from the vast abscess-chamber. “Beyond another door. She is held by many. The invader is there.”

  “What is it?” Elpida asked. “A Necromancer?”

  A shrug.

  Elpida nodded. She took a deep breath and grabbed her pistol again. She wet her lips, hesitating over words she wanted to say, but had no idea how to phrase. “I have so many things to ask you. But—”

  “We are running out of time,” whispered the shadow. “You cannot endure my voice for much longer. I must flee before I am heard. You have all you need.”

  “That wound I saw back there. That ancient wound, inside … you? Was that real? Was that one of your memories? How old are you, really? How is that possible?”

  “Older than you can know. We do not have time to speak of me.”

  Elpida couldn’t turn away. She couldn’t make herself do it. “I … I don’t … I can’t … we will ever speak again?”

  The shadow lowered her head. “I am always with you.”

  “I’m going to resurrect you,” Elpida said. “Somehow. I don’t even know yet, but if you’re real, then there must be a way. I’m going to find your body, and I’m going to find a way to dredge you from the network. And I’m going to bring you back.”

  The whisper grew thick with tears. “I matter nothing compared with your clarity and resolution. You said that yourself, didn’t you? What is dead and gone does not matter. What has passed cannot come again. I am a blurry memory. You are ablaze. What matters is what you carry forward—”

  “Telokopolis is forever,” Elpida said. “Telokopolis is for all. That means you, too.”

  A long silence. The shadow behind the veils turned one way, then the other, as if unable to find a way out.

  “Say it,” Elpida said. Her voice shook and her tears threatened to return. “I won’t listen to you speak about being dead and gone. Telokopolis is forever. Telokopolis is forever. Say it. Say it!”

  “Telokopolis is forever … ” The whisper was almost a sob. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  The veils fluttered — and the shadow was gone.

  Lykke sighed and huffed all of a sudden, putting her hands on her hips. “Zombie, who are you trying to talk to? Yourself? You’ve been standing there for seconds now. This is, by far, the least entertaining thing you’ve done all day, you’re better than this—”

  The Silico whirled to life.

  Limbs lowered from the tilted halo, back into a combat position. The sweeping curve of the metal body twisted toward the leftward exit from the abscess-chamber; the lenses of the many eyes seemed to focus on Elpida for a split-second. The cherubic face closed its lids, as if returning to slumber. Six powerful legs kicked off the ground, galloping across the metal and bone of the chamber. The Silico construct darted through the distant exit, wriggling off toward the hostile invader.

  “Oh, now we’ve lost it again!” Lykke tutted. “Zombie, I am getting a little—”

  Elpida turned to Lykke. The Necromancer cut off with a gasp, boggling at her, one pale hand rising to cover her own mouth.

  Elpida realised she was grinning through the remains of her tears.

  “My mother,” she said.

  “W-what?” Lykke stammered. “Zombie, I’m not into—”

  “I was speaking with my mother. We’re going the right way.”

  Lykke looked at her like she was insane; perhaps she was. Perhaps all that she had heard and seen was nothing more than an illusion — but did that matter? Would it change anything if she had hallucinated this meeting with Telokopolis?

  No. Nothing at all.

  Elpida laughed and gestured after the Silico with her pistol. “After the vanguard, Necromancer. Our way’s been cleared. Let’s not let her down.”

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

  TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps!