Zildiz thumped into something hard and uneven, felt a rib crack. Groaning, she rolled onto her stomach, coughed up something wet and hot, her breath coming in painfully shallow.

Her hands were burning. She looked down and saw the wire digging into her blood-soaked palms. She’d been hanging on so tight to the Leaper’s knife hand that she’d sawed her own hands open.

The hidden speaker system crackled to life, the flayed god idly commentating:

“Flushed him out at last, have you? And with only three minutes to spare. Well done!”

The harsh voice brought Zildiz’s senses swimming back to the present. She saw a body lying right next to her on the trash heap that had broken their otherwise fatal fall. The Leaper! She was still hanging onto it by the cords wound around its wrist. Its helm had slipped off its head in the crash, the soft face of its innards blinking up at her as it gradually recovered its bearings.

It was a very young male. Scrawny and malnourished, with the long, wispy hair of a dried-up corpse. It couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen years old; it hadn’t even undergone the Leapers’ ritual mutilation whereby they removed their own lower jaws to make room for the powerful chelicerae of their exomorphs. What was Kryptus thinking, sending a mere hatchling like this after her?

Suddenly it gave a violent jerk and reached up to stab her. Zildiz flinched out of its reach then twisted its arm behind its head with the wire, wrapping the leftover cord around the Leaper’s neck, hitching it tight. His neck was so skinny that it took a lot of additional loops to get a nice fit, yet once the noose was set it was only a matter of time.

The boy’s eyes bulged out of their sockets, tongue lolling out like a pink slug. Funny, the colors of his irises did not match; one was blue and the other a soft green.

Not he, she reprimanded herself. It. Always it.

She ought to have just plunged her blade into its innards’ heart and killed it in one stroke. But she didn’t dare loosen her grips now, not even for a moment—one graze from those fangs and her innards would be paralyzed within seconds and dead not long after that. She needed both hands to immobilize the weapon and keep the stranglehold.

And keep it she did. The boy’s legs began to kick and spasm, he scratched at her face with his spare hand and tried to claw out her eyes with his fingernails. Zildiz shut her eyelids and turned away as it scraped off the skin of her cheek.

Mustn’t let go. Mustn’t let go. Go to sleep, little Leaper. It’ll all be over soon.

Zildiz hung on like grim death even as the wire sliced ever deeper into her palms, the Leaper flailing and tossing about in a futile effort to buck her off.

“Zildiz,” she heard Rene groan about thirty meters up the trash pile, “You alright?”

“I’ve got it by the throat!” she yelled back, “Come quick!”

The pathfinder started picking his way to her down the pile of refuse, stopping briefly to pick up his halved shield. Meanwhile the Leaper’s toes found purchase on a tall stack of container crates and it began walking itself up the vertical surface.

“Hold down his legs,” Zildiz growled through bared teeth, “His legs!”

The Leaper pushed off the crates, somersaulting over Zildiz’s head so that it landed behind her, reversing their position. The tension in the garrotte had transferred to the back of its neck and the Leaper could breathe freely again. More worryingly, it had created room with which to use its push knife.

Zildiz let go of the useless noose and twisted around to face it. She heard its incisors snapping centimetres away from her jugular but dismissed them as a lesser threat, instead seizing the push knife with both her hands. She had to disarm it, now or never! Though she was bigger and heavier than it by far, it was attacking with a manic fury that more than made up for the difference in strength between them. It went low and slammed into her hips, driving her against the crates, the transparent venom glistening like dewdrops on the tips of its fangs. Over the Leaper’s shoulder she saw the pathfinder still struggling to descend, the unwieldy shield slowing his progress.

“Lose that useless thing and get over here!” Zildiz wheezed, her lungs burning from the exertion. Rene heard the desperation in her tone and finally dropped the piece of scrap. Not that it mattered now; he was too far up to make any difference now.

Or so she thought. Knowing he couldn’t climb down in time to save her, Rene opted instead to stand on the back of his halved shield and leaned forward. The concave piece of scrap skittered rapidly down the slope, Rene sticking his arms out to either side for balance as he rode helter-skelter on top of it.

“Oy!’ he called out to the Leaper as he closed the distance. It turned at the sound of his voice and caught Rene’s fist flush in the face, the pathfinder putting all of his weight and crashing momentum into the punch—Zildiz heard the small bones in his hand crackling at the impact. Then the Leaper slumped against Zildiz, folding gently at the waist, before toppling over without a sound.

Rene raised his shield over the unconscious Leaper as if he meant to drive in its skull with the rim. Then he stopped and said in wonder:

“By my stars and nebulae,” Rene lowered the shield and brushed away the dark hairs which covered the Leaper’s wan and pallid face, “He’s just a boy. No older than my nephew…”

Zildiz smacked her lips, tasting blood. Had the fractured rib punctured her lung? She felt as if she’d inhaled a handful of wooden splinters. Zildiz finally wrested the push knife out of its limp grasp and slid it over her own hand.

“What a shame,” she said. She drew back her arm for the coup de grace, but out of nowhere Rene knocked her thrust aside with the shield, shoving her away.

“I can’t let you do that,” he said, placing himself between her and their helpless enemy.

“Oh, not this shit again!” Zildiz cried, his interference sending her into transports of rage, “We’ve been over this before! When will you learn? The only mercy a Leaper deserves is a quick and painless death.”

“He’s just a boy,” Rene repeated softly, as if that alone could justify this monumental piece of idiocy.

“Where’ve you been these last few minutes? That ‘boy’ just took a chunk out of your arm with his teeth!”

“It’s not that bad,” he replied, glancing at the suppurating hole in his forearm, “Alright, never mind, it’s pretty bad,” he added with a pained expression, “But he’s just like you, see? He doesn’t know any better!”

“And he never will,” Zildiz said, trying to step around him. Rene paralleled her movement and headed her off, unwilling to let her do what had to be done.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“I told you before,” she said in a low and level tone that radiated menace, “I can go through you like a door. Move, or be moved.”

“No,” Rene said simply, and brought his fists up in a fighting stance. Zildiz uttered a wordless snarl of frustration and unsheathed both her blades, circling to his left.

“I hate to say it chief,” Exar spoke up with reluctance, “But I think Zildiz might have a point here. From what I’ve seen so far, the Leapers are too far gone as culture. Take it from me: not every oompa loompa deserves to work in the chocolate factory.”

“Shut up, Exar,” Rene snapped, “Nobody understands what you’re saying anyway.”

“The plot thickens,” the flayed god said with undisguised merriment, “This is better than primetime holovision. Forty-five seconds remaining, by the way.”

She didn’t have time for this pointless moralizing. He’d lost his monomachete sometime during the tumble they’d taken, which meant that she held all the advantages here. Zildiz made a quick sidestep to his right, forcing Rene to react. In so doing, he crossed his feet—a rookie mistake. Zildiz pounced at him, causing him to trip over his own feet. She feinted high, saw him cower behind his upraised shield, spotted a glaring opening right through to his exposed abdomen. On any other day, she would have plunged a sword through that gap and put an end to the matter without fuss. But at the very last instant something inside her weakened and she pulled her thrust, allowing Rene to recover his footing.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. Refusing to barter any more words with him, Zildiz swatted at him with her lefthand sword, deliberately telegraphing her attack to draw a reaction.

As expected, Rene cringed and brought his shield to bear, creating an opening just wide enough for her righthand sword to come flashing down, aiming to chop off his hand at the wrist. Again the inexplicable weakness within her made her soften the blow so that she only nicked his flesh. It was still enough to make him drop the piece of scrap with a yelp. Now defenceless, Rene backed away and threw his body over the unconscious Leaper.

Insufferable fool, Zildiz fumed. Why must he always make things so difficult? She could run them both through right now and save herself the trouble of talking. Try as she might, she could not bring herself to harm Rene. Instead, she begged him to see reason at sword point:

“Last chance, Fleet-man. It’s us or him. The lives of the plurality weighed against the survival of the singular. Even you should understand that there’s only one right choice to make.”

“T-minus forty seconds,” the flayed god chimed in, “The girl’s right. If the ethics fit, why not commit?”

“Listen to your god. For the rest of us to live, he has to die,” Zildiz pleaded one last time, her anger faltering against the force of his conviction, “Why can’t you see that?”

“T-minus thirty…”

“Because I’ve already made that choice once before,” Rene had a faraway look in his eyes now. He placed his throat against the tip of her blade, said: “And it might have cost me the better part of my soul. Never again, Zildiz. Never again. D’you hear me?” he roared suddenly, his cries rebounding off the hanger walls, “I ain’t doing it! He’s just a boy, a child! And any god that calls for the blood of innocents is no god of mine!”

Rene climbed the stack of crates and shook his fist at the ceiling.

“Look at him! Look at what we’ve become in your absence, because of your indifference! You’ve left us nothing but a scrapyard of dead moons and blasted worlds from here to the edge of eternity. We can’t go on killing each other like this, swirling down the old spirals of hate, rolling dice at a game where nobody wins. There has got to be another way! And if there isn’t, then by God, I refuse to play!”

His defiant shouts died away into the stillness.

“…five, four, three, two, one,” Zildiz whispered, counting down the last precious moments of her life. There was a hiss of gaseous effluents. She looked up to the rent in the ceiling they had fallen out of, saw a thick white mist curling out of the ventilation system, coating the entirety of the hangar in a matter of seconds. She thought of holding her breath and running back to the safety of the shuttlecraft with its internal atmospheric recyclers, but what would be the use? The flayed god would just blast the ship to smithereens.

Better to go out on her own terms. There would be dignity in acceptance. Zildiz closed her eyes and sucked in a good lungful of air (well, half a lungful anyway) and waited for the neurotoxins to take effect.

It took its sweet time about it, though. Zildiz snuck a peek under her eyelids and saw Rene trying with all his might to hold his breath, cheeks all puffed out and reddening.

“You sanctimonious sonofabitch,” she said in outrage, “All that big talk about your morality, and you don’t have the guts to follow through with it?”

She slapped him sharply on the back of the head and made him release all his pent-up air in a splutter of embarrassment. He took in a snort of the nerve gas mist and clutched at his throat in horror. When nothing happened, he slowly relaxed, saying:

“I don’t think it’s working as advertised. Do you?”

Had the gas gone inert? Their questions were soon answered when the egress port in the cavern wall slid open again. Through the rising plumes of ineffective aerosols, the flayed god emerged once more, trundling his way towards them on his treads.

“I’ve changed my mind. You’re even more defective than she is,” he told Rene, sounding impressed despite himself, “Are you sure your engrammatic manifolds haven’t lost coherency?”

“I did what any man of the Fleet would have done,” Rene replied.

“Weren’t you supposed to gas us by now?” Zildiz asked him.

“What, this?” the corpse waved a skeletal arm at the mist coalescing around them, pouring out of vents in the roof in columns of white smoke, “That’s just fungicide. I don’t want any of that Arachnean filth getting in here. Present company excluded, of course. How’s the rat?”

Rene felt for a pulse on the Leaper boy’s throat then heaved the boy over his shoulder, saying:

“He’s still with us, though he’ll wake up with a hell of a migraine. Had to knock him silly for his own good.”

“Good, good,” the flayed god said absently, “He’ll make for an interesting interrogation subject. Relax,” he added as Rene opened his mouth to object, “I’ve never tortured anyone, and I’m not about to start now. Pain only distorts the data. And I must assimilate all the good info I can get.”

“Would you really have let us kill a boy to save our own skins?” Rene demanded.

“I wasn’t aware that the cosmophage was in its juvenile phase. But yes, I would’ve allowed it. I can’t let this facility be compromised by hostile vectors.”

“He’s not a ‘vector’ and he’s not a rat,” Rene said, his voice tired and disappointed, “He’s a human being that needs our assistance.”

“Hasn’t your culture dissected these creatures yet?” the flayed god sounded shocked.

“Uhm, no,” Rene said slowly, “Or at least, I hope not. Up until three days ago I thought the Amits were the only other race inhabiting Arachnea.”

“You mean to say that your iteration of humanity hasn’t even broken out of its reservation yet? Oh, wonderful,” the flayed god starting massaging its temples as if suffering from a sudden headache, “Just wonderful!”

Reservation? Zildiz found the usage of the word strange. It was a term her own people used to describe a habitat where endangered species were kept for their own protection, a space where they could multiply and reach self-sustaining population growth.

“…the kindreds aren’t people, crewman,” she heard Rene’s god saying, and felt another flush of anger at its words.

“You could’ve fooled me,” Rene muttered. The progenitor heaved a rattling sigh and lamented:

“This is going to be tedious. You don’t happen to have a neural crosslink-interface, do you? No? Figures. Come on inside and I’ll give you the full audiomemetic briefing, crewman.”

“Briefing on what?” Rene asked cautiously.

“Everything. The events of the last ten thousand years, so far as I can understand them. The Vitalus, the Amits, the kindreds, and your place in the grand scheme of things.”

He trundled back to the exit, shouldering his battle rifle. When he noticed that they hadn’t moved he circled around on one tread until he faced them again, then asked:

“Aren’t you coming?”

“I’m not sure I want to,” Zildiz said, crossing her arms, “Given that you don’t consider me a person, I can’t expect that you’ll treat me with anything amounting to decency.”

“Touchy, touchy,” he teased, wagging a finger at her, “But you’re right—it’s not polite to point out the genetic deficiencies of one’s guests. I’m forgetting my manners. A few centuries of intermittent cryofugue can do that to a person. I hope you can find it in you to overlook my occasional indiscretions.”

He spoke with light jauntiness that Zildiz thought was completely at odds with its monstrous appearance.

“It appears you have us at a disadvantage,” Rene said, addressing him with well-oiled formality, “You claim that we’re your guests, but we have yet to learn the name of our gracious host.”

“Fair enough. You can call me…Commodore. Yes,” the Commodore cracked a dry smile, “That’s got a nice ring to it. We’ll go with that.”

“Sir,” Rene made a point of giving him another deferential salute, “Begging your pardon, Commodore, but you just threatened to exterminate us half an hour ago. Why on earth should we trust you?”

The Commodore shrugged.

“Well, for one thing, I made us some hot cocoa. Do you take it with milk or sugar?”