There were no zombies in the cafeteria. No howls. No banging on the hastily reinforced barricades. No sneaky silent zombies that somehow slipped past our defenses. Not even a bit of floating debris or trash. The zombie nests were gone, cleared away long since.

I kept expecting there to be an attack. Or something very like, maybe a stasis pod failing or a panicked message from one of the other survivors.

Nothing.

The quiet and stillness was oddly disturbing. Violence had become, if not routine, at least an accepted part of my existence. At this point I quite literally could not live without it.

I was also actively suppressing the side of me that wanted to go down the rabbit hole. It would be so easy. The signs were obvious, in the clarity of hindsight. The hints I ignored to focus on my work. The seemingly capricious decisions of management. The constant observation. The questionable excuses.

But that line of thinking would not clear any rogue nodes, nor would it kill any zombies. It would not keep the living safe. So I put it in a mental box and closed the lid, to be examined at a later date.

It would not, could not be forgotten. But it equally could not be adequately dealt with now. The monsters of yesterday were I distraction I could ill afford while the monsters of today were a more present threat.

The other survivors were still asleep. I could not sleep. Not after what I had just learned. Fortunately for me, there was work to be done to occupy my hands and mind.

The first thing was to eliminate as many rogue nodes as possible in the areas that people would be living in. The labs were still secure, according to the node detector. The atrium and cafeteria were decidedly not. That would be my first task of the day.

There was another thing that needed to be worked on. It would take longer. If we were fortunate, it might not even be necessary.

But it would worry certain people, I was sure. Best to keep that project a secret for now.

I found the first node under the deck. It was near the exit to the labs, but hidden beneath the floor that covered the utility and network connections. My nanite threads couldn’t penetrate the thick plating, but they could follow power and networking cables just fine.

It was a weak node. Much weaker than I expected. Barely a handful of rogue nanites defended it. My own nanites sliced through them quickly and cleanly.

I felt a tiny bit of strain after recalling my threads. Working without the dubious benefit of nanite bloat meant relying more on my own body’s resources and stamina. That difference made me stop and think for a moment.

The exertion was quite low. Lower than it should have been, in fact. Probably. Without the tools to reliably measure how much energy I was using I still wasn’t completely sure. The scientist in me wanted to set up a series of tests to see precisely how efficient the process was.

The realist said that this wasn’t the time for it. As long as these rogue nanites existed everyone else was vulnerable.

And there were still more nodes to clear, after all.

The next node, in one of the vendor stalls, was almost as weak as the first. It was located right above what used to be the caffeine synthesizer. The one by the public restroom was even weaker. Barely a bite of one meal bar at a guess. Then I was ready for the next one. Or so I thought.

The instant that I touched the public terminal by the elevators I could feel the rogue nanites trying to swarm through the grimy console and into my skin. The burst upon me in a wave the likes of which I hadn’t experienced before, not even when tackling the worst node networks I had ever found.

I jerked my hand away, breaking the connection. The console seemed to glitter for a moment. In the next, it was the same dirty screen and input pad it had been before, only with new fingerprints where I’d just touched it. A few of the invading nanites had lingered on my skin. Briefly.

Well. That was interesting.

My heart rate slowly returned to normal as I mechanically took out a meal bar, stripped the foil packaging off, and consumed it in slow, measured bites.

The attack was rather unexpected after the weak nodes I had encountered recently. After pulling out the node detector and sweeping the cafeteria area again it looked like there were at least a dozen more in range.

But the nodes themselves were not differentiated in any way that I could tell so far. Any of them could hold a strong colony of rogues. Stretching my colony as I had done several times before with larger networks was not possible without the extra numbers that came with nanite bloat. The very thing that Dr. Delveccio thought might be killing me.

Which begged the obvious question. Could I not just use the node generated nanites to boost my range without draining a single zombie?

It turned out that I could. Somewhat.

The weak nodes could not extend my range very far. A small bit of experimentation showed that they died off the further they strayed from the node itself, their connection withering with distance. That range varied from node to node, as some could support more nanites and were thus ‘stronger,’ for lack of a better term.

The threads that were made from those nodes alone frayed to nothing rather quickly when they weren’t supported by my own colony. And the weak nodes were too far from each other to be mutually self supporting. Whether the weakness meant they could not connect and thus came first, or the lack of connection was what made them weak was unclear.

But the closer the nodes were, the stronger they’d be and the better they could respond to attacks, as evidenced by the node near the elevators. After systematically working my way around the console, I was attacked seventeen times but I was able to determine that there was a tightly packed cluster of nodes there. The one I chose to attack had been an outlier, but close enough to the main network and strong enough to turn my attack around immediately.

Brute force was not the answer. My own colony was too small to simply force my threads in. Relying on drain boosts would be suboptimal.

There was a puzzle to be solved here. And I had enjoyed solving puzzles once upon a time.

In the mean time, there were other isolated nodes to clear. The ones near the food vendors proved to be weaker, as expected. Six more nodes later they started to become harder to overcome, until by the tenth I was thrown out again.

It was close to the bulkhead separating the upper engineering deck from the cafeteria. The node itself was close to the holo projector in the ceiling that broadcast annoying advertisements and station announcements before the zombies arrived.

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That meant there were at least two clusters. Assuming they did not connect up somewhere out of the range of my detector.

My own colony was turning out to be quite adept at eliminating rogue nanite clusters. For their numbers, they could easily take out two to three times as many rogues. More than five times as many seemed to be the limit, at least so far.

The attrition was not perfectly scalable- some nodes fell with nearly no losses, others of similar strength meant my threads were consumed at a much greater rate. There were frustratingly no indications of which ones were tough and which ones were weak, though. Too many unclear variables muddied the problem for me to extricate the formula for reliable success.

Every time I sent my threads in to capture nodes, my colony took losses that were only replaced slowly within my body from the nutrients and trace elements I consumed. The nodes I captured were replicated based on my own colony’s pattern, but these seemed as tied to the nodes as my own colony was to me, preventing me from simply extracting them for a boost.

I tried other paths. The web of power and com lines spread through the inner workings of the station in predictable ways, from power sources to outputs. It seemed impractical at first, but there were differences in how far the nodes could extend depending on what paths they took.

Finally, I managed to connect two nodes to each other. Then a third. The pathways to get there had to be routed first through a secondary power circuit then transferred through a nearly melted terminal into the com lines. The route was longer than the range I’d estimated for both nodes by nearly half, but it worked.

The third node was rather simple to connect after that, tying in to the existing circuit without issue. After that progress stalled. No matter how I tried to thread the nanites through the network, the other nodes remained stubbornly isolated.

My eyes closed as I rested between attempts. No dreams came to plague me. This time.

* * *

“Found you.”

Doctor Delveccio landed on the bulkhead beside me, steadying herself and canceling her momentum automatically with enough skill to make it look easy. She had bags under her eyes and a blanket wrapped loosely around her. She was also carrying a pillow under one arm like a teddy bear.

“You’re not supposed to be going off on your own, you know. We talked about this, Z. Wait.”

She rubbed her face and shook her head, frowning.

“I just scolded you the other day. It’s not time to do it again. But still. Tell one of us before you go off to, I don’t know, challenge an entire horde or fight one of those giant zombies with your fists or something.”

The reproachful look was a bit much, I thought. I didn’t go seeking out to challenge the most dangerous situations I could find. Did I?

“Let me see,” she started poking and fussing over me. “No blood at least. New bruising? Little ones, looks like. You’re not bleeding internally. No new broken bones. No concussion. Okay. Mostly fine. Well, except for the other stuff we already talked about,” she muttered darkly.

“So what’s got you up and about so early? I saw the other lab was open. And that giant spider bot thing that nearly gave me a heart attack. You weren’t slaving away all night cleaning that forest up.”

I shook my head.

“What was it then? Hit me with it. You didn’t find anything in there that might help us right now, did you? Or was it something that makes everything worse?”

Doctor Delveccio was not the kind of woman to give up easily. I told her about the empty cages. And the not-empty ones.

Then I told her about the files.

The next thing I knew, a bottle smacked me in the head. I looked down. Raspberry was drooling in her sleep, all six limbs splayed out in every direction. Wasn’t the fuzzball then.

“You’re being foolish, Z.”

The silver haired catgirl squinted at me through the bed hair that had fallen loose. The formula bottle in her hand waved threateningly at me, keeping my attention.

“Are we real people to you?”

That question was so utterly unexpected it stopped my spiraling thoughts harder than a formula bottle to the head.

“I know you’re not comfortable with social situations. And you’re kind of bad at noticing social cues. You totally missed out on Ileane’s interest in you, and if I didn’t know any better I’d think you were actively ignoring how Vera and Sam have been dancing around each other. Not that we’re going to interfere in any way now that you know about it, Z.”

She shook her finger at me as she listed my faults. They weren’t unexpected.

Well, Sam and Vera was. And Ileane. Relationships hadn’t been a feature worth noting for me for a rather long while.

“Hey, pay attention when I’m scolding you!”

I raised an eyebrow. She stared back, utterly unrepentant.

“The thing is, you get caught up in your own head too easily. You get focused on something, some intractable problem, and everything- and everyone else goes right out the window. It’s actually kind of intimidating.”

Me? Intimidating? That was something new. Also, compared to zombies the size of a small hovercar, I did not believe a questionable amount of undivided attention rated.

“And don’t get me started on your inability to just stop for a minute. Everyone else is asleep right now, you know? Exhausted! We just came from an expedition and a fight that turned into a frantic rescue! Mentally, physically, emotionally- everyone is racked out and asleep. Everyone but you.”

The catgirl’s expression softened as she came down from her rant.

“And now you’re here, just after discovering some new fresh hell on this station and you’re worrying about it. Worrying about whether or not you’re a bad person.

“Bad people don’t worry about the ones they didn’t save, Z. Generally, they don’t worry about other people at all. You’ve been saving lives and working harder than anyone else to make sure they stay saved ever since before you saved me and Sam from being eaten alive.

“That’s a good thing, Z. I know Sam and I will always be grateful to you for it. But I worry about you. You don’t see the people around you. Not as real people. We’re not robots. We can’t keep going at full speed at all times.

“Neither can you, you know.” She poked me in the chest with a look.

“Even when the entire universe seems determined to shove the very worst parts of it in your face, sometimes you just need to slow down for a bit and process things.”

I didn’t want to slow down, though. There was too much that needed to be done right now. Too many things that I’d already let slip through my fingers. Too many people that had died while I hid away, watching the world below burn.

Too many more would die, cold and alone in failing stasis fields before we could even find them, no matter how quickly I got to work. How could I even slow down, knowing that? It made even the thought of rest a betrayal.

Doctor Delveccio must have noticed the direction of my thoughts. She gave me a disapproving look.

“Despair is a sin, Z. Worse, it lies. I don’t need to know exactly what’s going through your head to know it’s torturing you. Don’t listen to it.

“It is spitting on the graves of everyone that never gave up even when facing insurmountable odds. We don’t get the luxury of giving in to despair, Z, because we can’t afford it. We have to get it right, even when we get it wrong at first, because right now, at this very moment we have hope.

“For the first time since the initial infection, hope. That’s on you, Doctor Zolnikov. Your research and breakthrough insights are what will turn the tide, Z. What you just did here, while I was worrying about you and hoping you hadn’t gone off and gotten yourself killed? Never happened before.

“That’s important, Z. More important than I can even put into words. That means we have to take our time and make sure we’re prepared as best we can before charging out into danger once again. It means you’ve got to go to sleep. Real, honest, uninterrupted sleep. You need to take the time to make sure you’re ready for whatever comes next. Just like-”

A massive yawn interrupted her words.

“-Just like the rest of us, Z. Now go to sleep, you utterly amazing idiot.”

She mumbled the last bit as her eyelids drooped. I could feel myself drifting off as well.

It seemed like all the frantic escapes, running fights, and everything else was finally catching up. Aches and pains that had been just a background annoyance made their presence known.

Sleep rose up and snatched me down in the instant I was distracted.

The shadowy tunnels of City Four haunted my dreams. This time there were zombies. Of course there were zombies. But the zombies did not howl or attack as soon as they saw me. The just stood there, silent and still- until they didn’t.

Every single one turned to look at me, their blank stares following my footsteps as I started to move.

I began to run. The tunnels under the city were never this crowded. Not with people. Or zombies. Unmanned freight haulers rushed through them at regular intervals. Anything in their way got crushed into paste. The only way to avoid that was to make it to one of the maintenance sections. A faint rumble underfoot was a sign that time was running out.

The zombies began to follow. I could hear the rising whistle of oncoming doom and the raindrop like splatter of zombies being crushed by the dozen as it rapidly approached. But the dark opening ahead was my salvation. I sprinted inside. Scant moments later the roar of the passing hauler hit my ears like a physical force.

There were other people crowded into the room with me. I recognized them as the zombies that had followed me through the tunnel- but these were people. Not zombies. The lights in the room brightened until I had to squint to see, washing out all the details around me.

Then came utter darkness. I was alone once again.