Cartography kept me directly on track to an unexplored part of the city. Parts of it opened up to display whole second and third floors, their floating entrances inaccessible halfway up the high ceilings.

If a Promise had no choice but to resolve one way or another, and if I couldn’t find a way up, my destination was unlikely to be up there. It didn’t change anything practically-speaking, but it made me feel a little better. I focused on the ground floor, ducking into empty rooms one after the other.

Thirty minutes later, I found the network station completely without fanfare. The room it sat in was perhaps a little bigger than some of the others around it, but all other identifying marks had long since been scrubbed clean. An entire cultural centre scoured out of existence, even its architecture gone, until almost no clues remained.

The locus gleamed at me in its iridescent curves. For some reason, they seemed to be the only thing the razorlings couldn’t consume. They’d been through somewhat recently, judging by the lack of rubble and rock dust.

It was barely functional, but better than the one near the eaten Grand Stair. When activated, it flowed hesitantly to life, as though struggling to recognise the command.

Many nodes awaited me, all but one dark and unresponsive. I guessed the one final node was our key to the surface. It remained as illegible as ever. Taking my strongest fingernail, I painstakingly scratched a copy of the label into the skin of my forearm, putting up with the pain.

My sense of the locus had slightly changed. There was something else there now; a fringed edge of loose charge like a string of cables waiting to plug into sockets. I realised I knew how to forge a connection, adapt a charge to a place it shouldn’t fit, but found no available destination within reach. An issue of proximity.

“Moving the body is too dangerous,” Ipoh protested on my return fifteen minutes later. He no longer knelt close to the Sanctioner, but watched from a minor distance.

Ptokt had degenerated further, and gruesomely. The infected hand had disappeared and was nowhere to be seen, along with an obvious decay of her forearm, notable in the floppy sleeve. There was less blood than before, which at first seemed like an improvement until I realised it, too, had been eaten.

“But the promise –” I said.

“Will happen regardless,” Ipoh interrupted. “You need do nothing.”

“In your own words, it specified we’d be unharmed when we arrive on the surface,” I said. “We’re safe.”

“Unharmed does not equal uninfected,” Ipoh returned in a serious tone. “What good does it do us if we return as razorling incubators on a delayed timer? Worse, carriers to let this plague spread to new territory? A promise doesn’t care about collateral damage. Stop, Black. Think. And don’t let your arrogance be the end of you.”

I gave him a frustrated look. One moment he wanted me to help, and when I tried, that was wrong, too. Without a word, I began unstrapping my leathers until I stood in my underwear. It was also black. The garments I laid overlapping on the floor, relying on friction to keep them together. Then I pulled Ptokt up by the armpits and dragged her onto it. She was heavier than I could really manage, especially on a lack of food, but I dug into the fear of what else my promise might bring.

I stepped away out of Magnetism range and blasted myself clear of potential razorlings, then returned, picked up the collar of my shirt, and began dragging. At the least the tunnel floor was perfectly smooth.

Ipoh stared after me wordlessly, then picked himself up and followed from a safer distance.

The journey back took closer to the original thirty minutes, partly due to my lack of strength and endurance, and to pausing every few minutes to ensure I was razorling-clear.

Exhaustion hit early on, with no forthcoming upgrade to make it easier. Nevertheless I persevered, losing precious fluid through sweat with the effort. The clothes parted a couple of times, needing me to fix the makeshift stretcher. Ptokt’s arm grew increasingly shorter, absent up past the elbow, but she was still breathing.

Eventually I laid her halfway across the network station, purged myself of razorling influence one more time, and tried the locus again through heavy breaths and a burning chest. I’d thought Ipoh might say something, but he simply continued to watch from a distance.

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There was something new to latch onto in the interface, a point to connect the local charge. Hundreds of them, in fact, but I picked just the first, plucking a strand from the air and feeding it into the Sanctioner’s body just above her arm. I felt the sensations in my mind as much as my arm.

The strand thickened and attempted to meld with the selected razorling, which resisted in lack of compatibility. I seized at it without using my hands, not entirely sure how I knew how to do it, broke the barrier of its surface and teased out a ragged fringe the charge could latch onto, then poked the latter back in.

The strand took hold immediately, joining the two loci.

And then they were all connected; the travel network to the entire swarm, and the interface in my awareness expanded.

But it was as unintelligible as the first, without even the benefit of written labels this time.

My heart sank. So close, and I’d hit a dead end.

“What do you see?” Ipoh called over.

“Controls I don’t know how to use,” I replied grimly.

“Be extremely careful, Black,” the Servant called back. “The last thing you want is to send them through the network to fresh lands.”

I was steering well clear of the travel network’s nodes while the razorling swarm was attached, there was no doubt about that. But among the swarm’s own controls, there had to be something I could use that would help fulfil the terms of the promise.

I just didn’t understand any of it.

Guide?

--This knowledge is unknown to me. Upgrade required.--

The one it wouldn’t give me.

Almost all of Ptokt’s arm had been eaten, the rate of consumption speeding up. Once the main mass reached her shoulder and entered her torso, I imagined it would be the end.

My promise had specified her returned to the surface unharmed. I didn’t see how else it would be possible.

I reached for the controls and took a wild guess. Selecting a razorling interface node at random, I lowered it down to the Sanctioner and pressed it into the stump of her arm.

It sank in, disappearing into her body; otherwise, nothing happened.

The spread of decay reached her shoulder, fast enough I could see it with my own eyes.

“What are you doing?” Ipoh asked me again.

I didn’t answer and squinted at the next node, trying to get a sense for what it did. Unlike the travel network, there were no obvious lines of charge. I received a faint sense of activation versus deactivation and toggled it towards the former.

The node inside Ptokt flashed. Nothing else happened.

I moved on to the next one, another activation switch. This time, a line of charge appeared, connecting the Sanctioner directly to the interface.

“Stop,” said Ipoh.

I toggled the next switch, changing it from inert to ‘on’.

“I said stop!” The Servant stared at me, openly afraid. “You’re meddling with artifacts you don’t understand. Country-killers. Do you want your first act on rebirth to be the death of another territory? You must be the most stupid of all the Ancients’ cycles I’ve ever seen.”

Pausing, I snapped out of it a bit. “But we can use this,” I said. “We know the outcome of this promise. We know Ptokt will be fine. All I’m doing is trying to find it.”

“It could be anything, you little twit!” Ipoh exclaimed. To my surprise, he strode over to me and slapped me hard on the cheek. “Your kind have done enough damage to the world. Stop trying to accelerate it.”

A cough from below silenced us both.

Ptokt’s eyes were open and bleary, her expression pained. Thin silver lines ran up the sides of her neck in the colour of the razorlings.

Ipoh spoke a word in the local language and knelt beside her, holding back from touching her skin directly. He spoke in soft, even tones while the Sanctioner looked on and listened.

A hole opened up in my stomach, and I clutched at it lightly like a physical thing. My eyes couldn’t meet her face, so I looked at her eaten shoulder.

It had grown longer.

My imagination; the fabric folding differently as she moved. But no, the sleeve was filling out before my eyes from the top down. Ipoh hadn’t noticed.

Was the process undoable? No – the silver streaks had climbed further up the Sanctioner’s face. She looked pained, and growing more so.

I could protect myself from the razorlings. Kneeling on her other side, I made to peel back the sleeve on her arm. The limb was extending visibly, far faster than it had been eaten. The razorlings were still replicating exponentially – but differently to how they had before.

Ipoh broke off as he noticed the arm. He glanced from me to it, and back at Ptokt as the swarm devoured her face in a terrible cry.

But it didn’t turn to dust, and the razorlings didn’t fly away. Ptokt shook as the last of her was consumed by the swarm, still in one human-shaped piece, and sat up. Her body and clothes were entirely silver. She lifted the stump of her wrist in front of her, watching as it rebuilt itself, and spoke to the stunned Servant beside her in a voice that sounded metallic.

The pair spoke for some time while I unhooked the temporary connection between the two interfaces, until eventually Ipoh waved towards me.

“She says she’s unharmed,” the Servant said in a tone somewhere between relief, disbelief and dubiousness. His hands gave away he’d been shaking. “And that she now controls the swarm.”