Zoe placed the eye of the Earth System into the socket of the brave little girl. Her name was Rosa, and she clenched her mother’s hand with a white-knuckled grip as Zoe worked. Lacking anesthesia, Zoe used [Our Heart’s Toll as One] to place the girl in a near trance. [Mind’s Eye Incision] flashed on the edge of vision as Zoe delicately sewed the eye into place with lengths of Blood essence.

Blood smeared her chain fingers and smudged the little girl’s face. She was six and three-quarters years old, and while Bella held her head still, her mother — Tilly — held her hand and whispered encouragements in Zulu.

“You’re doing great,” Zoe said. “Soon, you should be able to see.”

“Are you sure she doesn’t need to eat it?” Anton said as he cradled an eye of god in the palm of his hand. “It feels like we should eat it.”

“Eat it if you want to.”

“That’s not encouraging. You’re a doctor.”

“This is new science.”

“Still, there should be some theory that applies. I mean, what if —”

“Anton,” Bella interrupted. “Shut your hole and go do something else.”

“You’re just jealous I get an eye and you don’t.”

“I get a spear, so no, I’m not jealous at all.”

“Oh, I thought Miss High and Mighty refused the Mubilashi-Maelstrom quest? Didn’t you want to stick it to Daddy Gambler in every way but one?”

Bella’s cheeks flushed with rage.

“Well, the old prick is dead now, so what does it matter if I use his damned quest to get more powerful? Huh? So shut up and eat your eye while we take care of this brave little —”

“Anton,” Zoe said.

“Boss?”

“I need you to scout the perimeter. See if there’s anything besides cages.”

“My eyes are already on it.”

“I can’t look away from this brave child’s eye, so pretend I’m giving you a look and go scout the perimeter.”

His poker face settled into place.

“Sure.”

Oriz and Jack left with him, as well as the lightning-wielding punk who called herself Skidmark Steffanie, leaving Bella and Zoe with the South African family,

The girl’s mother looked at Zoe.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t thank me yet.”

It took almost another hour before Zoe felt it was complete. She had incorporated the girl’s Skein as effectively as possible, any more healing would be up to Rosa.

“It’s done,” Zoe said.

Bella released her hands, and Zoe leaned back.

“Thank you,” said the mother as she hugged her child.

The eye sat like an orb of bloodshot gold inside the young girl's face. The metallic contrast against her almost black skin was alien and beautiful, but the eye remained a dead thing. Zoe’s heart sank. She had pushed her technique to the limit, threading Skein through the flesh to bind the two together. But the Earth System body was not wholly Skein. Nor was it wholly flesh. It felt — to her uneducated spiritual senses — like something caught in the transition.

The Gambler had been planning a power-up with the Earth System and the rigged game. She couldn’t imagine how awful things would have become if he had completed his plan. Having the Gambler as a major part of the Crimson Armada System was bad enough, but having him as the ruler?

Though she wondered what would happen now that he was dead… and she was sure he was dead.

For that prompt still lingered at the back of her mind.

[Which System do you side with? The Crimson Armada that has given you the strength you currently enjoy, or the Heart Torn System and the chaos —]

She forced herself to focus on the present.

“How does it feel?” she asked the little girl. “Can you see?”

The girl looked up to her mother and made a gesture. The mother’s expression softened as she made several hand signs back.

“My daughter is mute,” said the mother in a thick accent. “But she can see. She says thank you and to tell you that… before she died she wanted to be a doctor.”

Zoe frowned.

“Died?”

The mother leaned close to whisper below even Insight-boosted hearing.

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“We told our children they were dead and in hell. It seemed kinder than explaining the truth.”

Zoe’s eyes widened. She felt the urge to argue rise, but… how wrong was the woman, to say that? Surely the apocalypse felt like hell, and now, they were literally in one.

She nodded and buried the subject. It wasn’t important enough for her to focus on.

One of Anton’s eyes drifted over to her from between the stacked cages. He and Jack were investigating the nearby cages with the lightning-wielding punk, Zoe hadn’t caught her name, but they had dragged away the corpses from the area they dubbed their camp.

Though the action felt futile, Zoe didn’t discourage it. Anything they could do to achieve normalcy was good in her books.

Brassus and his other daughter sat nearby, taking turns wriggling their toes. It might take Brassus a while to learn to walk properly with the Earth System’s foot, but the stitched-on flesh had resized itself to fit his ankle like… well… magic.

The eye had taken longer than the foot, or her tongue, or even her kidney. Vitality and [Mind’s Eye Incision] connected muscles and arteries quickly, but the fine nerves required for an eye were trickier. There was a point where Zoe felt like she was creating, as much as guiding, the threads of Skein. She still wasn’t sure about the rules of Skein surgery, but she was feeling it come to her instinctually. The little girl blinked and walked over to her father and Zoe let out the breath she was holding.

Anton’s eye floated over to her.

Zoe turned to face the chrome sphere.

“Let me guess,” she said. “Bad news?”

“Yes, and no. It looks like most of the cages around here are empty or they contain demons. But we found one cage that holds a door.”

“Oh?”

“We were thinking of going through.”

Bella leaned against Zoe’s shoulder.

“Doors are strange in this place. We shouldn’t split up.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Anton said, slightly annoyed. “Waiting for you here.”

Bella rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, yeah, just don’t forget who’s been here before.”

“Whatever.”

Anton’s eye winked out as Bella mimed choking the air.

“Something about that guy…”

“He gets under your skin?” Zoe asked.

“He gets all the way up my arse with how annoying he is.”

“Yeah,” Zoe let a lopsided smile play across her scarred lips. “But I wouldn’t be here without him.”

“You mean in hell?”

Zoe laughed.

“Sure, but you know what I mean. I wouldn’t be here without you, either.”

“And don’t you forget it,” Bella said as she pulled Zoe into a quick hug. “You want to come look at my new spear?”

###

The spear wielded by the dark-haired punk was around seven feet long and bore the name [Gut Spitter]. A single length of bronze formed the shaft and leaf-shaped spear tip. The engraving on the blade swirled in a complicated Celtic knot that caught the smoldering light like an ecstatic, stylized face. Both eyes and mouth were closed, but Zoe and Bella recalled the howling of the spear as it activated.

A leather thong wrapped down the shaft. Hardened by time and magic into something that could endure strikes from Bella’s runeblade. Still, the straps were soft enough to form a comfortable grip no matter where she placed her hands.

Bella gave the spear an experimental spin, and it hummed through the air.

“It’s inactive since I haven’t bonded with it,” she said, her eyes paling as her runeblade slid into her consciousness. “But it craves a wielder. If I didn’t already have my sword, the spear would plunge itself into my veins and take control.”

She stooped spinning and ran a finger along the leaf-shaped blade.

“It’s beautiful.’

Her sword hummed, and Bella patted it with a laugh.

“I can appreciate a weapon without wanting to abandon you.”

Zoe pursed her lips. This wasn’t the first time she noticed Bella’s differences since her time in hell.

“You’re more in synch. I thought, well, I thought you despised that sword.”

“I did, but to survive we needed to work together. The runeblade is alive, and it craves violence the same way we crave oxygen. I don’t like that the Gambler thrust it upon me. I don’t like how he took my fate out of my hands, but… that doesn’t mean I don’t like the sword itself.”

The sword hummed like a purring cat. Zoe wondered what it was like inside Bella’s head… did the runeblade speak to her like the Black Star?

ding!

Of course not, silly! The only person as special as me is you!

Zoe smiled.

I thought you didn’t need to say ‘ding’ anymore, she thought.

ding!

I like it… makes me feel comfortable… do you hate it?

Of course, I don’t. Ding away.

ding!

ding!

Thank you, Zoe! I promise to do my best to get us out of hell!

Thanks.

“What are your plans for the spear?” she asked Bella.

“I never planned on following up on the Mubilashi-Maelstrom quest. The Gambler bribed me with it or tried to anyway, I don’t know… I still don’t believe he’s dead. I want to, but I don’t trust reality anymore.”

“I understand.”

The screams of the caged damned in the prison-packed ceiling eroded any moment of silence between them.

“But now that this opportunity has come, now that the Gambler is dead, I think I’m going to follow up on the quest. If it were different circumstances, I would let one of you take the spear without argument,” Bella’s eyes hardened as she said this, the blue orbs grew pale, shaded by a ghost, and she looked at Zoe, testing, waiting. “I will feed the spear to my blade and fight anyone who tries to stop me.”

“I won’t fight you, Bella.”

Bella sagged with relief.

“Great, I —”

“But I have one question.”

“Yeah?”

“What do you think the end goal for the Maelstrom-Mubilashi quest is?”

“Umm. Power?” Bella frowned. “I don’t know…”

“Because after watching Rue and the Gambler battle, I have a stronger hypothesis for what a Mubilashi is.”

“I thought they were monsters.”

“But why would the Gambler link them to a quest for your weapons?”

Bella ran a finger along the runes of the sword.

“World-ending weapons and world-ending monsters. One to slay the other?”

“Perhaps…” Zoe had considered that. “But I believe there is another reason. The Gambler planned to use the Earth System to gain more power. Possibly he was planning on overthrowing the Smith and the Witch.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because they left him to fight Rue alone.

Bella nodded.

“So he was trying to cheat the system he created.”

“Exactly. The Gambler said Rue was ‘just another Mubilashi’. I think a Mubilashi comes when someone fails their ascension. They’re a powerful, reality-warping monster somewhere between a mortal and a god. As though they tried to fly above the mountain, but fell back, and the peak impaled them. They are stuck in pain, and so they lash out.”

Bella’s eyes widened at Zoe’s intensity.

“Seems like you had your adventures, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the point you’re making?”

“I think these weapons come from pre-Crimson Armada worlds. They contain essences of other systems, and assembling the complete set is another of the Gambler’s experiments. Combining them creates a weapon, and feeding them the Mubilashi will charge that weapon. I think that the Mubilashi-Maelstrom quest is a shortcut to apotheosis.”

They stared in silence for a moment at the weapon, as Anton’s silver eye bobbed overhead like a lazy drone.

“So…” Bella began. “This fits into your plan how?”

“I’m working on it, but before then…”

“Yeah…”

The question throbbed away.

“I guess we better answer that prompt.”

“So, boss?” said Anton through an eye wandering overhead. “What system should we choose?”

The question weighed upon her soul. Did she stick with the [Crimson Armada System] and the pathway to power she was learning? Or did she take a step into the unknown and allow the [Heart Torn System] to shape her fate?