Surgery, viewed from the inside out, is an act of desecration. Heresy against the natural order, but what was the natural order? Inertia cried out that it was the way of things, but what came before merely insisted like an echo. The natural order was a thing of apathy. It raged against change.

Zoe raged as she changed.

Her body, her flesh, hung inside out. The gnarled tree served as a loom for her innards, her Skein, to be threaded like strings on a harp as Not-Cassy dug around, fished, and extracted the various links of the Black Star system. The fusion between Zoe and chain went deeper than wrist or ankle, deeper than cells, in that ephemeral space between tactile and thought… barbs clung.

ding!

This hurts me as much as it hurts you.

Zoe wanted to express her doubts, but her teeth floated in the air as they orbited her skull, blood oozed from her gums, her eyes — lidless — stared at the crimson whirlpool above as Not-Cassy conducted the fluids of her body with one hand and sliced with the other.

Zoe should never have agreed to this, but she was tired. Sometimes, a lot of times, it was easier to submit. There was only so much one can do against the rising tide. Eventually, everyone drowns.

The Black Star circled above, clanging vultures, chains swimming like sharks around a shaft of chum. Zoe’s tongue sat inside her throat. She did not breathe. She only felt and thought.

Not-Cassy teased apart Zoe’s spine, worked it into slivers, fragments suspended in the air on Zoe’s unspooling Skein. It was too late to fight melting like this. Strangely — horrifically — she was alright with what was happening. It was awful, but it was fine.

Necessary.

Not-Cassy hooked a miasmic claw deep inside a vertebra. It tugged something deep inside her brain — Zoe smelt the dry air of the dunes before the glass rain fell — a snap at the base of her mind like an uprooted tree and she screamed without a mouth.

“Pain is merely a direction in time,” Not-Cassy said as she withdrew her tool from Zoe’s bone.

A black chain squirmed like a baby eel on the end of the hook. Not-Cassy withdrew it and with a fluid flick, she cast the chain up to join the others in the sky. Nineteen chains circled. Above them, the sky whirled the deepest red, as though heaven above this surgery of the apocalypse.

Zoe’s arms floated in the network of organs and bones. Everything exploded out from around her chest. Her implants — shockingly intact after all of this as though her Vitality wove through them as well — floated beneath expanded ribs. Her lungs expanded with each breath, unfurling like slow-motion parachutes. In the shadow of the spreading canopy, her heart thudded slow and steady. If there was one thing Zoe knew to do it was to control her heart rate.

Strange, how even with her body disconnected in such a surreal manner, the heart remained the seat of fear. The tell, the spreader, the push. She forced herself to calm. Disconnect. Float through the pain. One last chain remained, trailing up toward the sky like an anchor in deep water, hooked to her heart.

Not-Cassy leaned closer.

“Your technique is wrapped tightly throughout this muscle. Do you see?”

Zoe examined her heart — how was she seeing? — the muscular tissue was covered in what looked like a disk of fungus. The foreign tissue curved and pulsed with her heartbeat. Iron grey, almost rotted in appearance, but metallic up close. It resembled a bell with her heart as the clapper.

[Our Hearts Toll as One]

Whenever Not-Cassy probed with her hook and saw, the bell closed off and protected the heart. It felt unnatural to Zoe, having her organs pulse in the air felt cold, hollow, and raw.

“I don’t know if I can get past this,” Not-Cassy said as she gazed between the technique-warped organ and the circling chains. “You must choose between a living heart and a free chain.”

Zoe wondered how she was supposed to speak with her body parts scattered, but the question wasn’t for her.

ding!

I’m sorry, Zoe, I need all my chains for this to work.

What? Zoe thought. You don’t want any part of me? After you saved my life? We’re friends, Black Star. I sacrificed for you.

If you’re my friend, you’ll let me do this.

You didn’t have to trick me.

I’m sorry I did that.

You didn’t have to kill me.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

I…

ding!

There’s no other way.

Not-Cassy flicked her hook, and it engorged into a crude club that pulsed and throbbed with a dark purple lightning. Whatever sense Zoe used to survey her floating parts, it corroded at the touch of the dark, arcing energy.

If that touched her heart…

Not-Cassy stepped closer. Her skinny body creaked as she hefted the oversized hook above her head. Blackened slime dripped from her mouth as she jerked into position.

“This won’t hurt,” she said.

Where was Moth? Zoe reached out for her Mirrored clone but felt nothing. Was she gone? Locked away? Zoe reached for any of her Skein, her techniques, and found them absent. The loss sent a blood-chilling crinkle through her mind.

She was a floating mess of body parts.

Disabled Skein, systems beyond reach, immobile, waiting to die as some forsaken parasite was about to smash her heart to pieces.

Whatever haze of pain or toxin had kept her in place suddenly vanished. Her mind raced through her options. Not-Cassy stepped forward.

She tried to move, but there was nothing she could do. Her body parts remained suspended. She thought of the Chroma Viscera. Why were its parts suspended? Could she use that to her advantage? The core still glowed somewhere in the floating pile of guts like her empty clothes beside them. The thought of being naked as well as vivisected added a startling layer of shame to the situation.

No, rose a voice inside her, she was proud of her flesh.

She reached for her New Flesh. Neither Skein nor Black Star; it was her native system, and Not-Cassy had left it alone as she inspected her body. The old flesh disguised the New.

[Manifestation of the Hound]

Zoe never saw it from inside before.

Her floating organs and muscle and bone brimmed with light. Melting from within like broken candles. Liquid strands spun together. The heart melted out from under the chain. The slurry connected and hounds struck the snowy ground. Six hounds shook their fur and circled Not-Cassy, while the seventh, with snow-white fur, gripped a struggling black chain between its jaw.

The chain shook free of the growling hound and floated into the sky. It joined the swimming of the others through the air and slowly the chains expanded out, lengthening, ass they encircled the sky above the hilltop.

ding!

I will not forget you, Zoe Chamber.

The hounds snarled at the sky. Zoe floated between them, as scattered as before but grounded in living tissues. She couldn’t say which hound she was, or if she rode above them, for they didn’t move as one.

But all seven slunk away through gravestones as the circle between the chains darkened. The swirling crimson clouds vanished as a black pit formed overhead. An end of the shadow, solid in its totality, and Zoe recognized it for what it was.

A pillar of darkness fell like a shadow from the circling chains, and with stately gloom, it pushed off and drifted toward the horizon. One pillar of darkness spread the sorrowful desert of the Black Star system. An incursion. Another force on the battlefield of Earth.

But as seven dogs, she found it hard to care about the betrayal and loss of earth, she just wanted to find her friends, and so she turned her noses to the air and raced through the graveyard toward the mausoleum.

The half-shattered building stood amidst a court of marble angels. They beckoned Zoe and her bodies ran sleekly against the ground. She couldn’t believe the power that came from her Skein-enhanced body separated into this form. She felt sleek and powerful in a way the human body couldn’t. Her hounds moved like muscled lightning. She felt like she could outrace the devil.

Not-Cassy appeared at the mausoleum door.

One second she was there, and then the empty air spat her out. A wave of dark miasma poured out from around her and crashed toward the hounds. Zoe separated. The hounds broke like water upon a stone and went in separate directions. Tendrils of miasma reached for them as Not-Cassy pointed her staff like a shepherdess. The hounds dodged away through the gravestones. Tendrils followed. Twisting like snakes until they struck earth or marble and exploded.

Not-Cassy’s thralls stumbled away. The hounds darted around the parasite-stricken humans, but miasma swallowed them like floodwater.

Free of Not-Cassy’s constraints, Zoe felt her techniques at her mental fingertips. Everything was closer now, sharper.

The white hound leaped onto a boxy marble tomb and faced the pursuing miasma. A speared tendril lashed forward like a viper.

[Empress In Time]

The dark tendril stuttered. The hound leaped and bit into the frozen shadowy tentacle.

[Mind’s Eye Incision]

She pushed on the technique against the point where the frozen tendril started and the active tentacle ended: the bisection of time. Not-Cassy could separate her flesh and her systems. Her technique felt similar to Zoe’s, adjacent somehow, and Zoe clamped down upon the miasma as she focused on slicing apart the matter of systems.

Spectral teeth tore through the mists of nothing. Not-Cassy hissed and the miasma recoiled. Dark sparks of jeweled purple floated within the black clouds. The tendrils darted forward but retreated as the hounds turned and savaged the shadowy weapons. The miasma retreated until the tendrils lashed close around Zoe. Hounds darted between the tombstones. Tendrils and hounds harried each other, but a stalemate occurred.

In the distance, the black pillar of the Black Star system passed beyond the edge of the floating island. It fell a perfect cylinder into the abyss as the black circle rose into the crimson sky. The incursion extended away, and as it faded from view Zoe spied the glint of a chain flying free into the distance, no doubt off to form another circle and continue spreading upon the world.

So in the end, the Black Star was just another system. Zoe felt… lessened by betrayal and by the new knowledge slotted into old wounds, but such a feeling spread across seven minds no longer hurt.

The black miasma retreated and formed a dome around Not-Cassy and the entrance to the mausoleum. A perfect sphere of thick shadows and glittering purple sparks. It seemed at once liquid, solid, and ethereal. Intrusive thoughts curled whispering fingers…

Dive inside…

Taste the shadows…

Know the abyss…

Seven hounds slunk closer, teeth bared, muscles ready. They neared the massive dark pearl, stepping around the bodies of the fallen thralls, and the only sound came from the distance — screams of humans rounded up by clicking, laughing mantis. A snarl broke the frigid calm. The wind returned, blowing scraps of snow into eddies between the graves.

The dome rippled and burst. Not-Cassy’s children leaped howling from within. Their claws flashed in the crimson light as they charged Zoe’s hounds.