Hafina took point — a transparent shimmer ten feet tall, moving with absolute silence, near-invisible in the unlit corridors. Atyle stuck close to the giant’s heels, but not too close; Atyle’s camouflage turned her into a smear of oil-dark shadow — good for hiding in corners, but not in plain sight. A Death’s Head revenant might miss Hafina right in the middle of the corridor, but Atyle was less well concealed.
Elpida stayed in the rear, her white hair tucked down the back of her coat, her hood pulled up over her head. The best she could do.
She held Cantrelle’s compact pistol-grip shotgun in one hand, and Amina’s sweaty little palm in her other.
The makeshift holding cell in which they had been confined was on the fifth floor of the skyscraper, perhaps to avert a window-based escape, or to discourage others from interfering without permission. The Death’s Heads were mostly using rooms on the second floor of the building; Atyle whispered this information to Elpida as they hurried down the fifth-floor’s main corridor. They had a straight shot to the first set of stairs. Going down.
The interior of the skyscraper was all gilt and gold, marble floor tiles and sculpted window frames, doors of darkest wood with handles of deep brass, and light fixtures shaped like torches ablaze; all quiet and cold now, blanketed in decades of dust, smeared with soot and filth, marked by black traces of nanomachine mould.
Hafina slipped down the first staircase like a torrent of falling water; Atyle followed with a crouching lope, her weapon cradled close to her chest, a blurred shadow among friends.
Elpida did her best to minimise her target profile and move quietly — but her gut wound burned inside her belly, raking her nerves with claws of barbed acid, jerking skewers of pain into her spine and lungs and groin.
Her skin streamed with sweat. She clamped her teeth tight and closed her lips against the temptation to whine. She pulled Amina along.
There was a window in the stairwell. No glass, just a hole, like a dry-socket wound. The black-choked sky was heavy with night, the ring of skyscrapers a skeletal hand below the gravid rotten belly, pockmarked here and there with tiny signs of undead activity, lights showing in empty windows. The combat frame was a dirty white ghost lying prone upon the grey and ashen earth.
Crack!
Another distant gunshot from a high-powered rifle. Serin, taking another swing.
From somewhere far below, muffled by concrete and brick and broken asphalt, Elpida heard the distinctive thump-thump of Ilyusha’s rotary shotgun.
And then a shout? A laugh? A cackle caught on the night air? Too far away to be sure. She hoped Ilyusha was winning.
And then they all plunged back into the skyscraper’s innards. Revenant night vision was essential here; a human being would be blind.
Atyle paused at the stairwell exit to the fourth floor; the stairs terminated here. She crouched, a blurry blob in the dark. Elpida joined her and swallowed a grunt of pain. She couldn’t see Hafina anywhere.
Atyle whispered: “Silence now, warrior and rabbit. We walk in the valley of death. Follow my lead, to the smallest detail.”
Elpida nodded. Amina whimpered. Elpida squeezed her hand and Amina held on tight.
Atyle turned her head to stare at Elpida. The dark smear of technological camouflage was difficult to read, but Elpida recognised the peat green colour of Atyle’s bionic eye, obscured and blended with the colour of her face.
Atyle whispered: “Warrior.”
Elpida wheezed. “What?”
A pause. “You are bleeding.”
Elpida looked down at her stomach; the fresh bandages applied by Cantrelle were saturated with dark red blood. One corner was dripping onto the marble floor, leaving a tiny puddle of sticky crimson between Elpida’s boots. Had she burst more stitches than she’d realised? The bleed was slow, for now.
She shoved her stolen shotgun into her coat and cradled her belly with one arm. “I won’t— leave a trail.”
Atyle stared. She tilted her head. Unreadable behind that camouflage blur. Then she whispered quickly. “Hafina can carry you, but contact will shed her invisible skin, and lift the blanket that protects all of us from curious eyes, from eyes like mine.” Her peat-green bionic winked shut, then opened again.
Elpida blinked sweat and tears out of her eyes. “I can— make it to the exit— I won’t pass— out.”
“If you falter, ask for aid before you fall.”
“I won’t—”
“We cannot slip back and forth between combat and stealth, warrior.” Atyle gestured with the cyclic coilgun, a long gunmetal blur in her hands. “We are not armed for a silent raid. Once we are seen, we fight, and that will be all.” Atyle tilted her head again — listening to Kagami through her headset? Then: “The scribe wishes me to say that you look like a ‘microwaved dog turd’ and that you are fooling nobody. I agree. When you are ready to fall, tell us first. Hafina will carry you. Then we fight.”
Elpida knew she was fading; between the gut wound, the thought-rending pain, and the effort of strangling Cantrelle, she was all but spent. Telokopolan genetic engineering could keep her on feet through almost anything, as long as she had a beating heart and an intact brain — but her head felt like it was full of cotton wool. Her thoughts were jumbled, her sense of time was inaccurate. She was caked in sweat and quivering with pain. And now she was losing blood, again.
But the longer she kept moving, the better the chances of escape.
“I won’t fall,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “Stop wasting time. Go. Lead.”
The fourth floor was occupied by only a handful of Death’s Head revenants — high-ground sentries, their attention turned outward. Dark armoured shapes crouched by windows, blanketed in a constant click-buzz-click of encrypted transmissions. Atyle only signalled a halt twice, fist raised, stopped in the middle of a corridor; both times they all crouched, frozen, unbreathing, waiting for Kagami’s all-clear, for mission control to tell them that nobody was looking.
The third floor was almost empty, nothing occupied except a room of corpses at one end. The bodies had been peeled out of their clothes and partially eaten, limbs removed, guts spilled across the floor, heads severed and skulls cracked open for the brains. Nanomachines for the wounded, meat for the revenants, strength to the victors.
The second floor was crawling with zombies.
Serin’s sniper fire and Ilyusha’s muffled assault had stirred up the Death’s Heads into a frenzy. Armoured figures clustered at the windows, encrusted with extra limbs, machine-tentacles, eye-stalks, weapon-implants, and more — and then they ducked away again, rushing to and fro, talking in a jumble of orders and suggestions and insults, punctuated by audio-transmission clicks.
“—can’t see her, still can’t see her, the rat, the rat, rat! Come on, take a shot again you—”
“—use your fucking eyes, Alheri, you’ve got enough of them.”
“—that’s a grav-sig, she’s got grav gens inside her—”
“Then pinpoint her!”
“She’s invisible! Fuck you!”
“—elevation thirteen meters, estimated trajectory departure point, third window from left—”
“It’s not invisible, I saw her! I saw her! She’s just good at hiding!”
“—hiding sense, hiding inside sense, no sense in shooting at us—”
“Is this the ART? The ART signal? Are we fighting a bot?”
“Yola said—”
“Down.”
“She’s not the ART. She’s just another fucking zombie.”
“Down.”
“Don’t rush. Keep clear of the windows.”
“Down.”
“You fucking cunt! Shoot again! Go on, I fucking dare you!”
“Down, down. Pholet, get your head do—”
Crack-crack!
“Told you, Pholet. Duck faster.”
“ … ooouurgh, ow. What the … ? She— she bounced my helmet! This isn’t even armour-piercing calibre! This degenerate is playing with us!”
“Duck faster.”
“Mocking, mocking, mocking!”
“She’ll be playing with her own fucking guts when we zero her! I’ve got the drone missiles online, let’s just blanket that building, fuck her up, fuck her—”
“What about the little bitch? What the hell is she shooting at?”
“Ignore her, she’s fighting a drone. Making noise. Let her play.”
Creeping through the second-floor corridors was a painstaking process of constant stop-start motion, of watching the blurred oil-smear of Atyle’s back, of waiting for Kagami’s instructions to come through Atyle’s headset. Atyle used hand-signals to communicate: halt, stop here, retreat, into that room, no!, that room instead, wait, wait, wait — go!
Whenever Atyle raised a fist her blurry camouflage effect momentarily peeled back from one arm, like a limb thrust out of a blanket. Elpida could barely see Hafina up ahead; she assumed the giant was following her own stealth procedures. Amina gripped Elpida’s hand so hard that her bones hurt.
Kagami’s inaudible instructions to Atyle were often opaque, always without explanation, and several times almost too late. She halted the group at strange moments, held them waiting in the middle of wide hallways, exposed and vulnerable — or sent them scuttling into side-rooms, behind desks and lockers, hiding beneath tables or crammed into corners while Death’s Head revenants stormed past outside. Elpida’s shoulder blades itched; sweat matted her long white hair shoved down the back of her coat, prickling on her skin and running down her face; her stomach wound burned like fragments of molten metal rammed into her gut, the pain ratcheting upward with every moment she stayed crouched or hunched or pressed flat. She clutched her coat to stop from dripping on the floor. She closed her throat to stop from screaming.
Once, Atyle’s hand signal flashed downward — Kagami ordering them all prone, in the middle of a corridor. Elpida hit the ground and pulled Amina after her, then bit her own tongue so as not to cry out, swallowing mouthfuls of her own blood. Another time, Kagami had them pause outside an open door for a full seven minutes, waiting, aching to move, her own crimson blood smearing all over the sleeve of her coat.
Elpida was not used to being outside of the command loop, let alone following orders she did not understand and could not hear — but in her current state she would not make much of a commander.
She could not have escaped alone.
Elpida’s mind was growing dull with exhaustion and pain, even as her senses stayed sharp and open. She felt like a true walking corpse, an undead puppet, moving without internal direction. Silico. Zombie.
She followed orders. She held onto Amina. She did not breathe.
If she and Amina had broken out of that cell without help, they would have lasted less than a minute, crawling through this without the benefit of Kagami’s overwatch and Atyle’s direction.
Atyle had become an enigma. Elpida’s mind ran the questions even as she fell into dull automatic action: where had Atyle learned the hand signals, or the basic techniques of physical infiltration? Since when did she follow orders from anybody, let alone Kagami? A few hours ago Atyle had been unwilling even to duck her head during a firefight, disdainful of bullets, contemptuous of death, walking proud and tall and showing off the cyclic sliver-gun. Now the same woman took and gave orders like she had been doing so all her life, freezing in place rather than be seen by her foes, relaying the control of another.
Was this even the same Atyle?
Didn’t matter. This Atyle was breaking Elpida and Amina out of imprisonment. If she was a Necromancer, so be it. She was on their side. She opposed the Death’s Heads. Elpida needed nothing more, not then, not yet.
Elpida put her trust in her cadre — no, she corrected herself, trust in her comrades. Her fellow zombies. Not her cadre. Her cadre was dead.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
While any of us still stands, the cadre lives too, Howl whispered in her memories. Don’t be such a bitch.
Keep moving, follow orders, stay silent, hold on to Amina.
The second-floor corridor circled almost the entire circumference of the skyscraper, drawing Elpida and her comrades away from the Death’s Head revenants; the zombies were grouped on the south side of the building, trying to locate Serin’s vantage point. The north side was quieter. The shadows pressed deeper, unbroken by windows; dust lay thick along the skirting boards; the walls were smeared with nano-mould.
They reached a t-junction; floor tiles marbled with gold led off both left and right — into the core of the building, and out, toward the edge.
Atyle stopped and crouched. Hafina paused just beyond, in the middle of the junction. The giant shimmered like a sheet of water, then turned invisible. Elpida crouched next to Atyle; her stomach wound throbbed and burned, her sleeve was coated with crimson overflow. She gritted her teeth and tried not to shake so hard. Sweat dripped from her eyebrows and blood dripped from beneath her coat. Amina huddled close.
Atyle gestured left, into the core of the skyscraper, and whispered: “Pira.” Then right: “Coilgun. Stairs. Exit.”
Elpida waved a hand — left.
She hissed: “Pira gets— one chance. But not— we’re not— leaving her. If she— wants.”
Atyle’s face twisted beneath the oil-smear blur. A grin? “And if the betrayer declines?”
Elpida didn’t have the energy to think about that question, let alone answer; she was not in charge here. She shook her head.
Atyle paused for a moment, listening to Kagami over the communications headset. “The scribe urges haste. Leave the betrayer behind. She calls you many things, which all mean ‘fool’. Warrior, loosing our terrible arrows will be the end of our stealth, and the beginning of a fight. The betrayer’s refusal could end us all.”
Elpida glanced back at Amina; Amina’s eyes were wide with fear, her face a mask of white, her lips clamped tight. The younger girl could not take much more of this.
“We’re going— to get out of here,” Elpida whispered. Then to Atyle: “We’ll check. If she— if we can’t ask— safely—” She panted with the pain. “I have to try.”
Atyle nodded. “We will see, warrior. We—”
“Maddeuwch iddi?”
The whisper came from invisible lips; Hafina’s voice was surprisingly delicate.
Atyle waited a moment. Kagami must have supplied a translation, because Atyle chuckled. “Perhaps. It is not up to me. But just in case the foolish betrayer refuses forgiveness.” Atyle lifted her cyclic sliver-gun.
Forgiveness?
Elpida hadn’t considered that. ‘Forgiving’ Pira hadn’t even entered into her thoughts. This was not about that — or was it? Would a member of the cadre require ‘forgiveness’?
Elpida’s mind was too full of haze, too fogged by pain. She pushed all that away.
No time to think now anyway; Atyle was hurrying away to the left. Elpida followed, staying low, holding tight to Amina’s hand. Hafina brought up the rear, a looming wall of shimmering water.
The left-hand fork of the corridor was quite short; it turned once and then led to a single large door, which was standing wide open. Atyle pressed herself against the wall next to the door and gestured for Elpida to follow. She gave Elpida the best spot to peek into the room, right next to the door frame. Amina huddled between them, one hand clamped over her own mouth. Elpida could not see where Hafina had gone, but she assumed the giant was standing right there, covering their escape.
Beyond the door was a conference room. Dozens of chairs surrounded a long table, with a wall of televisual screens at the far end. The table and chairs were caked in ancient dust. Some were rotting, black with nano-mould.
Lumps of red raw meat lay on the table in a puddle of gore.
Low voices came from inside.
“—may as well end this farce,” squeaked a voice Elpida had never heard before. High-pitched, raspy, and rough, like too much air forced through a thin and corroded pipe.
“Shut up!” snapped a second voice. “Just shut up, Hatty! Shut the fuck up!”
Elpida recognised that one: it was Pira’s friend, the woman who had delivered the raw blue and rammed it into Elpida’s stomach.
A third voice, a weird giggling gurgle, said: “Ooni, stupid Ooni, thinks she can order us around? She’s deluded and slow.”
“Uunnh,” squeaked the first voice again — ‘Hatty’? “Don’t get above yourself. Yola gave us real clear instructions.”
Silence fell for several seconds. Somebody was breathing hard, panting in anger or panic. Pira’s friend? Ooni?
Then: “Leuca?”
Ooni said the name with deep tenderness — but desperate, quivering with fear.
“Leuca. Leuca, please, you have to eat. You have to eat, or they’re going to k-kill you. Leuca? Leuca. Leuca, look at me, at least. Please. Please!”
Leuca — Pira.
Her ‘real’ name? To Elpida, she was still just Pira.
Elpida glanced at Atyle and mouthed: “Am I clear to look?”
Atyle stared through the wall with her peat-green bionic eye, then nodded once. “Be quick, warrior. Time is short.”
Elpida made sure her hood was up and her hair was hidden. She eased one eye around the door frame.
On one side of the conference room was a more intimate area, with several low tables and a cluster of comfortable chairs. Two Death’s Head revenants were standing with their backs turned to the doorway; both wore lightweight carapace armour — the left in muddy brown, the right in a clashing smear of vomit colours. Grinning skull symbols leered from a shoulder plate on the latter.
The zombie on the left possessed a bizarre metallic structure sprouting from her skull, like a web of antennae, or a cage wrapped about her cranium. Her dirty brown hair was tangled with the metal fronds. The zombie on the right — the one in the armour coloured like a splash of vomit — had flowing blond hair woven into braids, surprisingly clean and neat. Both of them were armed with high-power plasma rifles, bulky matte black weapons with wide muzzles. A long gladius-style sword hung from the belt of the cage-head. Miss vomit-armour had a brace of heavy pistols around her waist — and her left arm was unarmoured, bionic, with half a dozen elbows. The limb was folded up like the bellows of an accordion.
A third revenant was down on her knees in front of them. Long black hair, olive skin, green eyes ringed red from crying. She wore grey armour carapace, with a grinning skull painted on her chestplate. She carried no weapons.
Pira’s friend, ‘Ooni’.
And slumped in one of the chairs was Pira.
She was not imprisoned as Elpida and Amina had been, with stakes and chains and manacles; she’d been disarmed, but her wrists and ankles were free. She still wore her bulletproof vest, her tomb-grey underlayers, her boots, her body armour — but her clothes had been roughly peeled back to expose the chrome-and-matte of her bionic right arm.
She was staring at the floor. Her flame-red hair hung down, partially obscuring her face. Her sky-blue eyes were red and puffy from crying.
Elpida expected to feel anger. Pira had betrayed her, shot her in the gut, almost got everyone else killed. But instead she felt only numb resignation.
Pira had chosen this; Pira was not her comrade; Elpida could do nothing to help. She was almost spent, an unthinking zombie, running on automatic.
Not the Commander, not right then.
It’s not something you get to switch off, Howl whispered, deep down in Elpida’s brain. Lost girls need you, bitch. Get to it.
Shut up, Howl, Elpida thought. I can’t. Too slow. Can’t think.
But Elpida didn’t look away.
Ooni was offering Pira a handful of pinkish-grey meat — a chunk of human brain.
Cage-Head, the revenant on the left, spoke with that giggly gurgle: “She won’t fuckin’ eat, Ooni, you little shit. She won’t eat, so what good is she?”
Ooni turned and looked up; Elpida resisted the urge to pull back. A flicker of motion presented more risk than staying still. And Ooni was too full of rage and fear to notice Elpida.
Ooni spat: “She shot the pilot for us! She’s one of us!”
Vomit-Armour — ‘Hatty’ — spoke in her squeaky rasp: “She won’t eat. She’s some useless apostate. Yola said we check. We checked. We check! Check, check, check.”
Ooni shot to her feet, eyes bulging with rage. She raked her long black hair out of her face and gestured with the chunk of brains. “Leuca is a better fighter than both of you put together! She was more than one of us, she was the best of us! We took a fucking tomb together! We killed a worm-guard and ate the—”
Vomit-Armour and Cage-Head both laughed.
“Yeah, right,” gurgled Cage-Head. “She won’t even eat. Go on, carrot top. Eat your din-dins. Num num num num. Here comes the air-plane!”
Pira said nothing.
Vomit-Armour squeaked: “We could use the bloody meat, that’s for sure. What-say, what-say, Hats? Make some more meat?”
Crack!
Everyone looked up at the sound of Serin’s rifle, muffled and distant — all except Pira.
Cage-Head said: “Yeah, so, like, how do we know that shit isn’t her friend or something?”
Ooni’s eyes flickered across her comrades — and over the pair of plasma rifles in their hands. Elpida recognised that wild and desperate look. Ooni was trying to decide if she could fight them and win, if she could take both of them down in hand-to-hand combat, or ambush them, or trick them, or do anything except plead — anything to save Leuca, Pira, her friend.
Elpida knew that look, that mortal calculation; she’d seen it on her own face during those last days, just before the cadre had been imprisoned by the Covenanters. Ooni had made a deal with monsters. Now the monsters were going to devour something she loved.
Elpida’s numb resignation fell away.
Before Cage-Head and Vomit-Armour could resume their conversation, Ooni shoved the chunk of brain matter into her own mouth and took a bite. She turned back to Pira, chewing quickly, and fell to her knees again. Then she leaned forward, mouth open, trying to press her lips against Pira’s.
Pira lashed out with her exposed bionic arm. She caught Ooni by the throat and shoved her away.
Ooni fell to the floor with a crash of armour plates. Cage-Head and Vomit-Armour both burst out laughing, guffawing and snorting. Ooni pulled herself to her knees, weeping, sniffing, her black hair all stuck to her face; mashed brains dribbled down her chin, mixed with bloody saliva and twin tear-tracks. She sobbed hard and wet, swallowed and hiccuped. One grey-armoured hand reached toward Pira.
“Leuca, p-please. Please! I did— I did what you told me. I did everything! Please, you have to eat! They’re gonna kill you! And then— again— not again— not again not again not again not again—”
Pira didn’t even look at Ooni; she just stared at the floor.
Atyle tapped Elpida on the shoulder. Elpida withdrew and turned to find Atyle offering Elpida her headset, her link with Kagami.
Atyle mouthed: “The scribe wishes your ear. Quickly now, warrior.”
Elpida slipped the headset beneath her hood.
“Kagami?”
Kagami’s voice crackled into her ear: “Elpida! Elpida. ‘Commander’. What the — fuck! — are you doing?! There’s four of them in there! You cannot take four fucking zombies without making any noise, you’re not an infiltration agent linked to my— whatever! And the moment you break stealth, this is over — you’ll have to shoot your way out through a wall of bullshit. And you’re too far from the entrance for effective fire support. I can’t get this moronic tank to come close enough. He doesn’t have any infantry support, so — okay, fine, fair enough! And before you ask a stupid question: no, I have no idea what that berserker idiot Ilyusha is doing. I’m not in contact with her. Now move! Stop stalling!”
From inside the conference room, Vomit-Armour was saying: “How about we go get the little one?”
Elpida whispered: “Kagami, I’m not leaving Pira behind—”
Kagami spat down the comm-link: “She shot you! She’s one of them! She fucked us, she betrayed us, and I swear to Luna’s silver soil that if you bring her back, I will shoot her in the mouth myself. Move! Now!”
Cage-Head grunted: “The what?”
Vomit-Amour said, “The little one. The little one that Yola brought in with the superhuman. She’s small enough for some fun.”
Elpida whispered: “Kagami, Pira is not— one of them. She won’t even pretend to— follow their ideology, to save her own life. She won’t eat—”
Kagami snapped: “So she’s stupid and treacherous! Fucking hell. I should leave you lot where you are. What about Amina, huh? Your pet psychopath? What if you fuck this up and she ends up dead as well? Pira or Amina, Commander? Hell, Pira or me? Who matters more? Fucking hell!”
In the conference room, Cage-Head laughed: “Ha! Right. Let’s go get her little friend, crack her head open, see if Leuca here will eat those brains. Maybe she needs one she’s rutted with before, huh? Like Tak does? Or maybe we should break your head, little Ooni?”
Elpida glanced over her shoulder, at Amina.
Amina had her knife out. Her eyes were wide with terror and full of tears. But her blade was naked, shaking in her fist.
You’d never leave one of us behind, whispered Howl. Not even if we fucked up. Especially if we fucked up.
And you would have followed me anywhere, Elpida thought. And now Amina wants to do the same? But I’d get you all killed—
Howl screamed inside Elpida’s head: One of us fights, we all fight!
Elpida whispered to Kagami: “I can’t let this happen. We’ll do it quiet. If—”
A confused grunt came from inside the conference room. Elpida quickly peeked around the corner again.
Pira was on her feet.
Cage-Head and Vomit-Armour watched as Pira walked over to the table. They covered her with their plasma rifles. Ooni stood up as well, gaping at Pira, her tears trailing off. Pira stopped before the pile of dripping meat. She stared down at the gore for a long moment, then selected a chunk of pinkish-grey brain.
Pira lifted the meat to her lips and took a bite.
She chewed slowly and carefully. She turned back to face the other Death’s Heads. Ooni hiccuped with relief, wiping her eyes, sniffing hard, raking her long black hair back out of her face. Cage-Head snorted.
Vomit-Amour lowered her plasma rifle and squeak-rasped: “Hunger gets you all in the end. Yola always says that. Starve ‘em out, let ‘em feel it.”
Pira raised her eyes to the ceiling and took a deep breath through her nose. She was still chewing.
Kagami’s voice crackled in Elpida’s ear: “She’s one of them. Let her go, Commander. She’s a lost cause. Get moving!”
Cage-Head lowered her gun too. “Fuck. I was looking forward to—”
Pira spat a mouthful of masticated brains into Cage-Head’s eyes.
The Death’s Head revenant yelped and spluttered. She attempted to wipe her face and point her weapon at the same time. Pira was already in motion — she jerked to the side, dived for the floor, then rolled to her feet inside Cage-Head’s guard. Her augmetic right arm lashed out and drew the sword from Cage-Head’s belt. Pira crouched like a spring to put all her body weight and bionic strength behind the tip of the sword. She rammed the blade through Cage-Head’s throat and up into her skull. The edge crunched off the revenant’s metal cage structure. Cage-Head went down like her strings had been cut.
Ooni reacted almost as fast; she leapt for the Vomit-Armoured revenant. They grappled for the plasma gun, rolling on the floor. Vomit-Armour’s multi-jointed left arm ratcheted outward, as long as her body, and whipped toward Ooni’s head like a metal chain. The smaller zombie jerked and wriggled and hung on tight, deflecting the blow onto her armour instead of her skull. She spat and hissed and clacked her teeth, trying to bite Vomit-Armour in the face
“Fucking— cunt— fuck!” Vomit-Armour spat — and then head-butted Ooni right in the nose. Blood flowered in the darkness.
Vomit-Armour rolled on top and slammed Ooni to the floor, but the weapon was still pinned between them.
Vomit-Armour raised her head.
Click-buzz.
Comms open. She was about to call for help.
Elpida stood up and drew her shotgun from inside her coat.
But then her vision swirled and throbbed; her legs shook, about to give out; her stomach burned with consuming fire. Cadre-standard pain-blockers and adrenaline and re-balanced hormones flooded her circulatory system to keep her on her feet, but she would be a second too late, a second spent feeling the blood rush to her head and drip from her belly and—
Pira stepped forward, yanked one of Vomit-Armour’s pistols from her own belt, then jammed the muzzle against the back of her neck and pulled the trigger.
The round exploded the revenant’s throat in a spray of blood and bone — destroying whatever bionic communications equipment she had been about to use. Vomit-Armour collapsed in a clattering heap, choking and gurgling and flopping, in a pool of spreading blood.
Ooni wriggled free. She ripped the plasma rifle from her former comrade’s twitching grip. She was panting hard, covered in blood and brains.
She hissed: “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit—”
“Ooni,” said Pira. “Stop.”
Ooni looked up at Pira. She blinked, then broke into a quivering grin.
“Leuca!” she yelped. “Leuca, we can run, we have to run! You and me, like before, we can—”
“Ooni, stop.” Pira stared at the pistol in her hands and shook her head. “There’s no point.”
“W-what? L-Leuca? No! We can—”
Pira reached out and grabbed the barrel of Ooni’s plasma rifle. She stepped forward and pressed her own chest against the muzzle. She stared into Ooni’s eyes.
“Shoot me,” Pira said. “Then shoot yourself. If you can’t do it, I will.” She raised the pistol and pressed it gently to Ooni’s chestplate, right against the forehead of the painted skull. “Doesn’t matter which way we go. Just that we do.”
Ooni was crying again, wide eyed and open-mouthed. “Leuca … L-Leuca … I love you. Please. It’s been— for me it’s been … it’s been decades.”
Pira said: “I love you too. But this can’t go on.”
In Elpida’s ear, Kagami made a gagging sound, then said: “Fucking no. Absolutely not. Get moving, Commander, right now!”
Elpida whispered — to Atyle and Amina: “Get ready to move. Follow my— lead.”
Elpida stepped out of cover and into the doorway.
“No,” she said.
No, not forgiveness.
Pira and Ooni looked up. Ooni gaped, amazed, like she was seeing a ghost. Her eyes boggled at the crescent-and-line symbol daubed on Elpida’s chest. Kagami was screeching in Elpida’s ear.
Pira’s eyes were unguarded, open, all her defences abandoned. She stared as if Elpida was a summation of all her sins.
Elpida wheezed. “You don’t get to kill— yourself, Pira.” She had to clutch her bleeding stomach. The gore was seeping between her fingers. “You aren’t getting off— that easy. You’re coming— with us.”
Pira said: “I can’t be trusted.”
“Pira. I am your Commander. And that was an order.”