Bee watched from a distance the crowds of freaks and carriages that filled the ramparts. There was a scream, the start of monsters tearing into each other, turning on each other in the blind fury of their subjugation. A beast’s head popped from a hatch, sniffing the air and the thick smell of gore carried on the wind, mingled with sweat and desperation. It bared its teeth at Bee. She hissed back, shaking the lance, and it quickly disappeared.
A band of pale-clad warriors barrelled through the freaks ahead. They brutalised those who would not get out of their way and tore the clothes and veils from the heads of those who did not submit. It was a search. That was why they were not allowing anyone into the city, Bee realised. They were looking for her.
Pulling rags to ensure they covered her mouth, Bee looked back to the crawler she had left behind. Their search would find Ay in there soon. Would they even know who he was? Would they know that she was here? Bee realised she had no idea how Ay was connected to this pale army, but he seemed to know they wanted to eat her. That was enough for her to hurry.
Crouching low, Bee moved behind the wreckage towed by the massive beasts of the caravan. She crept aside, trying to keep out of sight. The elevator was closed to her. Even she could see that. So she stayed low, dragging the lance in hand, using her stump to hold the rags to her face, ensuring she captured no one’s attention. Keeping her distance, she avoided the sight of the inhuman crowds, who remained focused solely on their oppressors.
Carefully, Bee wove her way through. When one patrol of the guards passed, she snuck between the stomping crowds and to the next wreck, then the next crawler. A stack of hardened crates provided shelter for a while, and then a leathery tarp that whipped in the desert wind, holding down stacked star metal rods, tore up from the sands.
Once she was sure none were looking her way, Bee scurried around the leg to where a hole left in the elevator’s structural wall gave way to its mechanical frame. She awkwardly squeezed between iron beams, once scavenged and now wrought to the titan’s leg, trying not to slip and fall. Making her way up and onto a ferrous gangway, intersected with narrow platforms and ladders, Bee looked for a way to reach higher. She found a ladder bridging the platforms.
After struggling with the ladder, Bee had to drop the lance. Climbing was hard enough with one hand, even with her damaged arm hooked around the right rail. All the while, her wings restlessly twitched under her makeshift cloak. Nevertheless, she made her way higher and higher until she could take hold of the next platform and prop herself against it with both arms.
One final heave and Bee was up. She sat on the edge of the platform to catch her breath and looked out into the night. The moon was coming, filling the sky with its hot, sanguine light, fighting the cool breeze. Fire streaked down from the heavens as sky wreckage silently tumbled into the distance. Closer, the second sky — the city of Acetyn — was illuminated by countless electrical lights and the soft outline of bioluminescent growths.
Bee narrowed her eyes as she regarded the city above. From a distance, it almost seemed still. Yet, just perceptible, its underbelly was a hive of activity. Countless platforms had been secured there. It crawled with life. She couldn’t quite make out what, though. They were microscopic before the city’s immensity, viewed from this distance. Her eyes trailed down to Acetyn’s next great leg. It subtly flexed and bulged.
Then, the leg raised in an instant, kicking up and forward, casting countless specks of nothing from its unstoppable mass. It cracked down into the earth with cacophonous might, sending out a surge of dust and glassy sand.
The distant screams reached Bee at last, seconds after the sight of its motion, of so many thrown to their deaths, having been trapped on the leg, or swallowed up in shifting desert as the leg lifted, or crushed by the shockwave blasting out from the subsequent impact. Acetyn was careless as it advanced. The wind carried the destruction from the city’s adjacent leg, catching her high and exposed on the platform. Rolling clouds of dirt and the metallic, cloying scent of blood filled the air.
Bee’s heart leapt. How long did she have? Minutes? Hours? Tentatively, Bee looked up the climb ahead of her. Hundreds of metres remained. Unconsciously, her weak wings flexed and the bioengines between her shoulders churned before failing. She sighed before looking down over the surge of monsters below. She could still see fights breaking out here and there, the freaks turning on each other and those that kept them at bay. In the distance, she could make out fires and the cries of those wounded or dying.
As she stood, Bee’s eyes turned to the base of the elevator itself. There, by the bay, that cloaked figure remained, surrounded by sycophants. She was waiting.
Bee felt herself grow breathless. She wasn’t sure why she was so afraid. Then, the figure moved. Her hood slowly turned back and up directly towards Bee.
For an instant, Bee locked her gaze with those twelve shining eyes, piercing the dark beneath the Eidolon’s hood. The Eidolon tipped her head curiously.
Collapsing back on the platform, Bee gasped in fright. She caught her breath again and quickly looked around. Unsure whether she had been seen, Bee hurried up a wrought iron stairway to the next level.
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Bee climbed higher. At first, it was fine. Soon, it made her dizzy to look down, involuntarily clinging to the rails and leaning against the walls for support. She made her way up and into the elevator’s substructure, a space for repairs just below the first joint in the city’s leg, where bony spurs growing from the limb were used to reinforce the machinery used to drag material up into the city. It was far removed from the ramparts, and the stilled carriageways were supported further into the open air by blocks of cement and steel.
Feeling her desperation grow, a fire lit in her heart by the screams echoing up from below, Bee came to an iron gate. She tried to rattle it open, but it was sealed shut with metal lumps crudely welded into its frame and lock. Bee considered trying to move around it — over the ledge — but it was bladed and barbed, preventing her from getting too close.
“Why?!” Bee cried out, shaking the gate one last time and then stepping back with a huff.
Fear gripping her, considering just climbing back down and fleeing the great leg before it was too late, Bee looked up and saw one of the city’s eyes. The lidless orb, set into the meat of the leg, was fixed upon her.
Taken aback, Bee scrambled away from the eye with a gasp, pulling the rags back over her head to hide her face. In her hurry to climb, they had fallen down.
That eye shifted. It looked past her. Slowly, with a creeping sense of dread, Bee turned with it.
The Eidolon stepped around the corner, approaching Bee on the platform. With almost casual regard, the ordained champion of the Axiamati looked down on the clamour below them before that hood turned towards Bee.
A shriek issued from the false sky above them. The city groaned its resentment. Its refusal. Its hate. Bee looked up, mouth hanging open, as the world itself seemed to judge them with contempt. Steeling herself with a breath, Bee looked up and around, determined to find some way to run or fight.
The buzzing of a patcher filled the air. It landed on the leg, just over their heads, clutching onto the vertical structure with its sharp tarsus. It turned weightily — much larger than the child — wings flicking, then began to clean its forelegs by spitting gel over them and sucking it back up. All the while, its faceted eyes reflected the scene below.
Bee paused, eyes narrowing at the creature, finding it familiar despite its shape being subtly different from the ones her home city of Sestchek created. Its red compound eyes followed the freaks below, the bio gel sacks hanging empty from its thorax, transparent wings tucked back. Arterial hoses pumped and bulged in its abdomen, visible beneath the inky surface of its chitinous exoskeleton. Bee turned to look back at the city’s eye with realisation, remembering the Wire-Witch’s words. The patchers were a part of the city.
Then they dropped down.
Startled, Bee suddenly faced a war drone. This one was much more powerful in its frame than a patcher, with eight legs and brutal weapons. Its thick carapace and wedge-like head reminded Bee of the other drone types that the Wire-Witch had captured in her bunker and experimented upon. Another stood between Bee and the Eidolon. Bee was confused, though. Why would they protect her? She didn’t know what to do.
The war drone charged its wide-bore biocannons and fired. In that instant, the Eidolon stepped aside, a flash of augmented musculature whipping her cloak behind her. She sidestepped the blast, and Bee looked on with awe as the artificial musculature of the Eidolon reset. Pneumatic hoses and thick cabling sunk into her flesh and flexed as they pumped full of their potential and prepared for what would come next.
The Eidolon raised a finger and wagged it, silently chastising the weaponised drone — perhaps even the city itself.
Then, in one fluid motion, the Eidolon drew a shining star metal sword from her cloak, cleaving it up in an arc through the drone. The impossible speed and force of the strike tore through the armoured beast, cavitating its meat, bursting it wide open. The superstructure they stood on rattled and shook, steel groaning with the power of the Eidolon’s sudden blow. The massive war drone, its front ripped open, kicked its eight legs, unable to stop itself as it was propelled aside and thrown over the railing.
Just one swing.
Bee looked at the sword as she backed away towards the war drone behind her. Its edge dripped with gore.
The Eidolon reached out towards Bee. Despite everything, it was a gentle gesture, palm up, inviting the child to take her hand. If Bee didn’t know better, it looked like she was trying to save her.
“I’m sorry,” Bee blurted out, afraid for her life. “Please don’t hurt me!”
As the child backed away and glanced up, she saw that Acetyn’s colossal leg was now crawling with motion. The patcher above shrieked a clarion call, which drew out into a dull boom as it crossed the expanse and issued back from the city’s underbelly high overhead.
Turning back towards the armoured host, Bee screamed as a swarm closed around her. Countless patchers filled the air with buzzing wings and shook the steel platform with their weight. The night went from cool to hot as their body heat, wings, legs, and augmented organs surged, saturating the air. Hundreds of their weak bodies flashed forward, buffeting the Eidolon, vanishing her from sight.
Bee was suddenly dizzy, a feather tickling the back of her mind. There was a familiar pheromone taste in the air. She remembered her exposure to Sestchek’s drones in the Wire-Witch’s lab and clamped her hand over her mouth. She was salivating again, disgorging her long, sharp tongue by some autonomic reflex.
The large drone, using the distraction of the patchers to its advantage, stepped closer on its heavy legs. Unfolding two mandibles from its underside, it used the crude manipulators to take hold of Bee, pull her hand from her mouth, and seize the bladed tip of her tongue.
Fear, embarrassment, and confusion touched Bee’s mind but dissipated before she could focus. Suddenly, thinking really wasn’t that important. She should just let it happen. The war drone opened its armoured face, mandibles parting as it plugged the hardened tip of her tongue into a metallic socket.
The world turned dark, and oblivion took her.