The first thing I noticed as soon as I broke the surface, spluttering and heaving in heavy breaths, was fire.

Most of the shoreline was aflame. Smoke hung low overhead, rising slowly. There was a cloying smell in the air too, besides the smoke and the burning. My nose wrinkled. It was almost as though someone had sprayed most of the surrounding area with a flamethrower.

I coughed out more water once Mutton finished dragging me back onshore. My whole body was nothing but a giant, pulsing wound. Even with the pain receptors limited to their lowest possible setting, it was still hard to think, to sense anything beyond the agony of my missing lower half and the lost arm and a dozen other smaller wounds.

“You’ve destroyed me,” Aliya said.

“So it would seem,” I said.

She had been scared, angry, and who knew what else during that battle against the Cull. Now, it seemed she had exhausted all her emotional energy. Honestly, I was glad for it. I needed space to think. To gather enough energy to get going. We had so little time to waste.

“I can’t believe we’re still alive,” Aliya said. “That your stupid idea worked.”

I turned my head. No sign of anyone else. No second Cull, nor any of those two goons from the Commissioner. My best bet was that the two opposing groups had taken each other out. “I don’t know if you can call something stupid if it works.”

“Oh yeah?” Anger spiked in her voice, rising sharp and fast. “What’s next? There’s no way we can get to the Morgue. That was your plan, right? Getting to the Morgue and stopping the Commissioner there. How are you going to do that when you don’t have legs.”

Mutton woofed and lapped my face. I laughed softly.

“Oh, no,” Aliya said, slightly horrified. “Are you seriously expecting your damn dog to carry us all the way there?”

“Well, you don’t see any other rides, do you?” I asked. “Plus, don’t worry. We’ve lost a lot of weight. Mutton’s a strong boy. He’ll be able to get us wherever we need. Isn’t that right, boy?”

Mutton woofed eagerly.

Deciding not to waste any more time, I did my best to lever myself onto Mutton’s back. I had packed all the mechanical arms back into the body’s back, while also holding my arms close. That would make sure nothing was trailing on the ground.

As for the blood loss, I couldn’t do much about it other than using the failsafe Aliya’s Augmented torso provided to shut down the blood flow below her missing waist. There were mechanisms that allowed rewriting the lower arteries and veins to make sure the circulation continued unabated through the heart.

The next difficult thing was making sure we weren’t spotted by anyone. A half-destroyed body being carried by a beat-up dog was going to pull eyebrows right off of foreheads.

Thankfully, Mutton was smart. He rushed through the fire, always sniffing, occasionally pausing to make sure he wasn’t being observed and there was no one up ahead. Now, we just had to maintain that all the way to the Morgue.

“I can see why you decided to back up your life drive inside this dog,” Aliya said. “He’s intelligent. Probably smarter than you.”

“I only take the bodies of smart people,” I said.

“Really? What’s that supposed to be? Flattery? Flirting? No, don’t answer that. I know just what it is. It’s pathetic.”

Clearly, she was still pissed off, and I couldn’t really blame her. Her body was broken beyond repair, thanks to me. And it was unlikely to come out in any better shape once we were done with everything at the Morgue.

Though, it was thanks to me we were still alive.

“Just because you work with the dead, Operator,” I said. “Doesn’t mean you have to be dead too, you know?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Aliya asked.

“Isn’t that what you said last time? That everybody in Underlevel was no better than dead?”

“So? I’m right. I’m not open to counter opinions at the moment.”

“No. I can see where you’re coming from. If you look at things from a certain perspective, everything looks dead and desiccated. I agree. What’s the point?”

Mutton was carrying us through the streets at a rapid pace. He paused every now and then to judge the direction. Good boy already knew he was supposed to take us to the Morgue. The streets of Underlevel were basically empty, which helped with stealthing through.

But I still winced, unable to help imagining just how many security systems we were getting caught on. Thankfully, we were moving fast enough that anyone looking to respond would have a tough time doing so.

“Then why even bring it up?” Aliya asked. “What was your point anyway?”

“My point was that we need to stop judging others,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what things look like from the outside. You don’t get to decide who lives and who dies. You don’t get to decide who’s already dead. You don’t get to decide who’s the sacrifice, and who’s the beneficiary.”

“Shouldn’t you be telling that to the Commissioner?”

“Don’t try to deflect blame, Operator. Would you be a part of his crazy plan if you didn’t believe it too?”

She had no answer to that. I waited a bit for her to come up with some sort of reply, something I could then reply to, but after a while, it became clear she had checked out of the conversation. That was better than being in vehement denial or cussing me out, I supposed.

“What’s he really planning?” I asked, deciding to get things back on track. “I know the gist. What I want to know is the mechanics. How’s he going to cause the Arclight surge?”

With the conversation redirected away from herself, Aliya was once again open to chatting. “Essentially, you want to know if you can stop it? Forget it. By now, it should already be underway. There’s no way you can stop the Morgue from functioning quickly enough to stop what’s coming.”

“And yet, you never mentioned it before this point. There’s something you’re not telling me, Operator. Something you’re trying to hide.”

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“Did you really come this far just for me to tell you how to stop the Commissioner?”

I sighed again. My hand trailed along the road Mutton was carrying us along. I had let it drop, tired of constantly holding it close. “I have some idea of what I need to do. It would help if you decided to cooperate. I might even be able to save some remainder of your body if we worked together.”

“Remainder, huh?” Her laugher was loud inside my head. “Sure, Xylen. You can leave me the remainder of a chewed-up corpse, if that makes you feel better.” Before I could reply to that, she went on. “The bodies. The key is the bodies you’ve been brining along for a year.”

I decided not to reply to the earlier jab. “I got that part. What are they doing, though? How’s he using the Arclight inside them, inside the bullets I fired into them, to create a surge?”

“Do you have an advanced degree in Arclight Studies?”

“What? No?”

“Then stop asking questions with answers you won’t even be able to understand.”

This was getting frustrating. Here, I just wanted to understand what I was dealing with. But I also realized she had a point. I needed to specify my questions, and if I still didn’t receive satisfactory answers, I could get mad then.

“At what point in the Morgue is the initial Arclight surge going to gather? The turbine? The generator?”

“The generator.” Aliya’s voice shifted. Maybe she was sensing my growing frustration. “You know where it is?”

“It’s closer to the outside, away from the burning chamber where all the bodies are.”

“Right.”

“Next question—how much energy can the generator contain before the surge really activates and starts burning through the wires connecting the Morgue to everything else?”

I had a rudimentary understanding of how the Morgue functioned. In the case of any power surge, the generator often acted as a damn, holding back the excess energy and Arclight to prevent it from flooding all the locations it was connected to. Those other places weren’t capable of handling severe excess energy.

But with the generator damming it up, it would allow Operators like Aliya to release the built-up pressure and channel away the excess energy safely via other means.

“About enough energy to blow up the Morgue itself,” Aliya said. “I know. It’s ironically funny. The Morgue holding back enough energy to self-explode.”

I agreed. It was kind of morbidly funny. “Last question—when you’re redirecting the excess, do you have the option to do it manually? Like, jury-rig a mechanism that can draw it all away if the built-in failsafe isn’t working?”

“I can…” There was suspicion in Aliya’s voice now. She probably had an idea of what I was going to do. “But it’s extremely dangerous, fatally so if you don’t have the right equipment.”

“Good thing I’ve got someone inside my head who knows all about the right equipment.”

She grumbled.

We arrived at the Morgue without mishap. A couple of times, we had to reroute because the path ahead was too perilous with either people or security or whatever else. It got a little tense at times. I couldn’t tell if we would make it in time, and though I knew we couldn’t take our foot off the gas, I restrained myself from urging Mutton to go faster. He was fast already.

The real problem was the Morgue itself. Calling the security there tight was gross misinformation.

Little eye-cams floated everywhere. Literally. Dozens were hovering along all around the parking lot and the other surroundings of the Morgue building. Their grasshopper-sized bodies glinted in the low light of the dying day, the cameras set in their centres flashed red, covering nearly every possible approach to the structure they were overseeing.

“What now?” Aliya asked. We were hiding behind a dumpster a street away, out of sight for now.

I was about to reply, when the ground shook a little. A loud hum reverberated from the Morgue as my heart started thudding faster.

“Are we out of time already?” I asked.

“Looks like it,” she said. “I knew it would happen fast, but not this fast. I was supposed to act—ah, shit.”

“It’s the Commissioner. Got to be.”

“Alright, I’m slightly reassessing our situation. We’ve got zero time to waste now.”

I cursed again. Good thing I didn’t need long to consider how we were going to get inside. Mutton woofed. That was all the suggestion I needed. “We’re going to use Mutton as a decoy, then—”

“You think it’s going to work twice?” Aliya asked. “After that other Cull has already sent over the entire stream of his death to whoever’s waiting at the Morgue?”

That was a good point. But I had already accounted for it. “We won’t be trying to convince anyone of anything or trick them. That ship has sailed. Instead, Mutton will serve as the main distraction, while we sneak to the generator.”

Aliya was clearly not enthused by that basic plan. I didn’t like it either. Putting Mutton through the paces was going to bite us in the ass at some point. But we didn’t have many other options. We had to get to work.

I patted Mutton’s head, and he lolled out his tongue. “We got this, don’t we, boy?”

Mutton woofed.

----------------------------------------

The entry went without a hitch. Mutton rushed across the yard, dragging away the attention of all the eye-cams. At least, the ones that were guarding the same back entrance I intended to use.

I wasn’t stupid. To any somewhat competent observer, it would be obvious that Mutton was specifically directing the security away from a vulnerable spot at the Morgue.

But the obviousness was what I was counting on.

Just to sell my apparent path of infiltration, I started hacking into the actual security too. I opened the panel on the outside, pulled out some of the tools Aliya’s mechanical arms were lacking, and dug into the security Interface. I plugged in a quickly computed virus that made it look like the hacking was ongoing. It would register as a breach that had to be addressed fast.

Which was what gave me the opportunity to go for a different entry. The back door might be obvious, but the window a floor above it much was less so.

“I had no idea your arms allowed you to climb like a spider,” I said, marvelling at the traction and grip Aliya’s mechanical arms provided on the side of the walls. The ascent did make me vibrate though, my whole body thrumming along with the Morgue.

“I… had no idea either,” Aliya said.

I laughed. “Guess you just had never used Arclight this way, huh?”

“No. No, I don’t make the habit of climbing walls.”

If only she had ever been in the military.

Getting through the window wasn’t hard. They were secure, but not as secure as the door itself. A precision cutter tool allowed me to remove a pane of glass and then reach inside, extending the limb itself until I was able to undo the latch. Of course, I had to first send pulses of Arclight into the more basic security system on one side to deactivate it.

“The security cams,” Aliya reminded me.

“Mm.”

I quickly slunk just inside the window, then spider-crawled my way to the first security camera on the corner of the hall. Losing half the body was no small a blessing. It helped a lot when trying to be stealthy.

Hacking into the security camera was a piece of cake. With all the tools I possessed and the rudimentary security standing against me, I had no issues.

“Let’s go,” I said. “No time to waste.”

With Aliya’s guidance, I went through the hallways and rooms of the Morgue’s upper level. I hadn’t been here myself, so her directions were invaluable. I was placing a great deal of trust in her, and she could just as easily have betrayed me, but the die was already cast. It was time to see what numbers popped up.

“Better not go through the normal route,” Aliya said.

I agreed. So instead of crawling through the hallway like a monster out of a horror creature feature, we decided to take the slightly less frightening path of trawling through the ducts.

It helped that the closer we got, the louder and stronger the vibrations grew. I had to be a little careful not to make too much noise or trigger any other alarms. It took about ten minutes of tense shimmying along the duct until we finally reached our goal.

“There,” Aliya said as I spotted the generator through the grate. “It’s unguarded by the looks of it. Do you sense any traps?”

I sent out a few pulses of Arclight and found nothing incriminating. “Nope. You seem to be into it now, Operator.”

“I just want this over with.”

“Sure.” I tutted. “You can’t fool me. I know you’re imagining the Commissioner’s face when we succeed here.”

Aliya grunted.

I pushed open the grate and approached the generator after dropping as gently as I could. Having already taken out the security cam, we would be safe. The huge machine was already running, the vibrations now so strong that if I tried to talk, my teeth would be chattering in my skull. I could barely hear myself think.

Once again, I needed the Operator’s guidance to access the generator’s Interface and hack through it, before opening up its actual sides to get at the real mechanisms.

“It’s… a lot,” I said, slightly overwhelmed by the sheer complexity inside the generator.

“Yes,” Aliya said. “One small mistake, and you’ll just end up accelerating the Commissioner’s plan.”

“Then I’ll be counting on you, Operator, to not make any mistakes.”

“Sure. Lay it all at my feet, why don’t you.” It sounded like that was it, but then she spoke up again. “Get started. I’ll help, and I can tell you what’s really going on.”

“What’s really going on?”

“You asked me how the Arclight is going to work, didn’t you. Well, now you get your answer.”