Cantrelle found Yola in the bomb-damaged casino, with her chin in her hands, her head in the clouds, and nobody at the wheel.
Thirty two hours had passed since the so-called ‘superhuman’ — Elpida of Telokopolis — had broken out of her cell and escaped the Sisterhood’s temporary fortress. She had taken the apostate with her, and made an unexpected traitor out of Ooni. She’d also been assisted by her gang of reprobates and a figure that half the Sisters swore was an ART, an artificial human, a nano-blank void who had somehow walked right past every sentry and guard and pair of eyes the Sisterhood possessed. Cantrelle had not witnessed the ART herself; she had only woken from her undead coma about ten hours ago, when her own latent nano-load had resuscitated the grey meat inside her skull. She’d spent all of those last ten hours scrambling to reassert control — tending to her own wounds, then pinging the comms network for a basic roll-call, gluing and stitching and jamming the Sisters back together as best she could without the use of her hands, counting the dead and locating their corpses, distributing meat to the wounded, and figuring out what in frozen fucking hell Yola was playing at.
Daydreaming. Building castles in the sky.
Yola was sitting on an overturned slot machine, amid the wreckage of her command post, gazing out through a massive hole in the exterior wall of the skyscraper, a ragged wound torn by a red-lined plasma rifle used as an IED.
Ooni’s handiwork, apparently; Cantrelle never would have guessed that the little worm had it in her.
Cantrelle regretted missing the fireworks. She would have enjoyed seeing Yola forced to leap out of the way. But she had not enjoyed applying nano-mould to explosion burns all down one side of Neoci’s body, or gluing pieces of Sofika’s skull back together, or amputating the remains of Luuia-chuut’s left arm and feeding the pieces of charred meat back to her. Ooni was lucky that she’d fled Cantrelle’s justice.
Yola was not alone in the casino room, though the Sisterhood was no longer using it as a command post — something about the gilt and gold covered in soot and burns offended Yola’s delicate sensibilities. DeeGee and Yazhu were lounging against one of the rear walls, both of them sealed up inside their suits of powered war-plate.
Cantrelle stopped just inside the casino, at the edge of the blast damage. She gave DeeGee and Yazhu an unimpressed look, then spoke to them over the comms network, via her own internal bionics.
Click-buzz.
<
DeeGee levered herself up from the wall, joint-servos whining with minor damage; Cantrelle added that to her mental list of necessary repairs. The list was getting very long, and the Sisterhood was running low on parts. They could not stay here much longer without hunting.
Yazhu kept lounging; she nodded sideways toward Yola’s back, then answered over comms.
<
Cantrelle stared. She let her expression do the talking. Her blank bionic eyes were often useful for this.
Yazhu finally straightened up. She sent over the comms network: <
<
<
Cantrelle sent: <
Yazhu and DeeGee shared a look, war-plate helmets turning to glance at each other. DeeGee shrugged and broadcast something on a private channel; Cantrelle felt it flicker across the network.
Yazhu sent: <
<
Cantrelle resisted the urge to flex her mechanical tentacles, or spit on the floor, or snap orders. She had to maintain her temper and her nerve, especially if she was about to deal with Yola. Somebody around here had to keep her head on straight, or the Sisterhood was going to fracture and break.
DeeGee saluted. Cantrelle didn’t like it when she did that; the gesture was a rotten holdover from DeeGee’s life before resurrection, a pantomime of submission to military rank. But at least it meant she was doing as she was told. Yazhu just shrugged and wobbled her head, abandoning responsibility. The pair of them trudged out of the room, past Cantrelle and into the long dark corridor. Cantrelle made a show of ignoring them, not even turning to cover her own back — not because she trusted them, but because her authority and credibility should extend without question.
God knew that Yola’s credibility wasn’t extending past her own fingertips right then.
Cantrelle crossed the blackened, soot-stained carpet, weaved her way between fallen slot machines and spears of shattered card table, climbed the twisted, half-melted steps up toward the raised platform, and approached the suit of ridiculous purple plate armour which contained a woman who had once been her closest friend and most unshakeable ally.
Yola did not look up, too absorbed in the view.
The ragged hole in the skyscraper wall reminded Cantrelle of an exit wound; the edges were fringed with clumps of concrete clinging to spikes of bent rebar and scorched water pipes, dirty with burnt wiring and sooty residue. An unstable lip threatened to collapse toward the ground below.
Beyond the hole the hateful sky glowered down upon the world, ruddy red in one corner with the ghost of the unborn sun. The rainstorm had blown itself out overnight; the air was filled with dull damp drizzle, reducing visibility. Ordinary eyes could not have seen across the impact crater outdoors, across to the other skyscrapers on the far side, but Cantrelle’s bionic eyes saw further and with more clarity than most. Above the rotten fingertips of the skyscrapers she could just make out the dark line of the graveworm’s mountainous body.
Rain had turned the grey earth of the crater into a sea of mud, filled with stagnant pools and little runnels of silt and slop. No revenant would be crossing that today, not unless they wanted to volunteer for target practice.
The strange bone-armoured mech — Elpida’s ‘combat frame’ — lay crumpled at one end of the impact crater, a helpless pale phantom in the grey drizzle.
Cantrelle stood next to Yola for a moment, but she couldn’t tell what Yola was staring at; the ‘boss’ was buttoned up tight inside her purple and gold war-plate. Yola’s helmet turned her face into a segmented beak beneath glowing emerald lenses.
Click-buzz.
<
Yola did not move.
<
Yola sighed through the external speakers in her helmet. The shoulders of her plate armour went up and down.
<
Yola finally looked up. The helmet of her armour turned away from the view, though she did not raise her chin from her hands. Emerald lenses blazed above that sharpened beak.
<
Yola’s purple helmet slid back segment by segment, sinking into the rear of her armour.
She’d been caught by the outer edge of the explosion from Ooni’s red-lined plasma rifle: Yola’s right cheek and the right side of her jaw were crispy black with burns and dried blood; her right eye was milky with damage, the lid crisped away, lashes and brow burned up, the brilliant green colour turned swampy; the trailing edges of her ruby-red hair were singed and blackened. She’d already begun to heal — her own nano-load was higher than the Sisterhood’s average. But she would carry the scars for weeks yet.
Yola didn’t show any pain; she never did, and Cantrelle had yet to figure out how. Back in the good days — back when they’d shared a bedroll every night — Yola had been a crybaby, worrying at every minor wound and aching muscle, weeping into Cantrelle’s shoulder in fear of half the others. Now she was like a statue.
She spoke in a voice like molten honey dripping on hot steel.
“Sent my guard away, have you?” Yola said. “Cantrelle, if I didn’t know you better, I would say you’re planning an assassination.”
Cantrelle cleared her throat — which hurt, a lot. She tasted fresh blood again. But then she spoke out loud, for pure spite: “Yola, if I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t send anybody away. I’d do it in front of as many Sisters as possible. With you on your feet. And armed.”
Cantrelle’s voice sounded worse than a corpse. Her usual mechanical buzz was warped and broken; she needed time and meat to fix the damage.
Yola chuckled softly, in the exact manner which she knew full well made Cantrelle grind her teeth. She glanced past Cantrelle, ensuring they did not have any eavesdroppers, then said: “You always did have a more esoteric understanding of leadership than I. Sometimes I wish I had your gift, instead of the ones that nature and breeding have bestowed upon me.” Yola looked Cantrelle up and down with her healthy left eye, lingering on Cantrelle’s hands, her face, and the ends of her four metal tentacles. “Ella, Ella, Ella,” she purred. “You look terrible, my dear. You look like you have been dredged from the hangman’s pile and warmed up in a manure pit. How are you feeling? I hope you are not too sore, in either sense of the word.”
Cantrelle had so many wounds that the pain was an overlapping cacophony; she had administered her own analgesics, but they were ineffective at such low doses. She didn’t want to drug herself insensible, not yet, not while Yola was acting like this.
Her throat was a mangled mess, one big throbbing purple strangulation bruise, puffy and swollen, flesh and metal both marked with the outline of the chain which Elpida had used to choke her to death. Her bald scalp was scraped and grazed from where she’d hit the ground several times. Her hands were much worse, nails and knuckles skinned and bloodied from the struggle, with several nasty bite wounds on her fingers and palms and wrists; the little one — Amina, Elpida had called her — had taken serious chunks out of Cantrelle’s hands, but also bitten her in the face several times. Cantrelle had not lost any fingers to the little biter, but her hands were out of action for the foreseeable future, wounds slathered in nano-mould, wrapped in gauze and bandages, swaddled up like mittens. She was forced to use her two tentacle-claws for everything, including bandaging the bite wounds on her own face.
One of the facial bites had gone right through the skull-tattoo on Cantrelle’s cheek; Amina had ripped away a chunk of flesh, bisecting the Sisterhood’s symbol, leaving it ragged and fractured.
In life Cantrelle had believed in signs and symbols, in messages from God found in the flying of birds and the entrails of road-kill.
She was glad she had left such infancy behind. But she tried not to think about the meaning of the broken and bisected skull.
Worse than throat and hands and face, worse even than the insult to her allegiance, the superhuman and her little rabid bitch had broken the ends of Cantrelle’s other two tentacles: her bone-saw and her needle-delivery system were both snapped and shattered. Regrowing those bionics would take months of work, constant mental reinforcement, and several whole corpses worth of fresh nanomachines.
They’d stolen her favourite shotgun too, the nice little super-compact she could fire one-handed. They’d even taken her sidearm. She had a jerky little PDW tucked under her coat for now, and a pair of large calibre revolvers shoved into her waistband.
But Elpida had not killed her.
Elpida had her unconscious, helpless, and wounded — but she’d not finished the job. Yola’s ‘superhuman’ was naive and weak at best, sentimental and foolish at worst. If their positions had been reversed, Cantrelle would have shot her without hesitation and eaten her corpse with relish.
Elpida had not, however, looted Cantrelle’s other personal possessions. When Cantrelle had awoken from her coma and fixed her own wounds, she had been surprised to find everything else still in her pockets, including the box with the tiny locket of Yola’s hair — blonde hair, not Yola’s current ruby-red, from before Yola had changed herself.
Another death avoided. Another lucky break. Cantrelle was beginning to get tired. She’d whispered something to the locket of hair, something like ‘let me fucking go’. A shameful lapse, now carefully locked away again.
She echoed Yola’s question, deadpan: “How am I feeling?”
Yola’s one unblinded eye twinkled with cruel mischief, emerald in the grey light. “Yes. Can’t I show concern for my dearest friend?”
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Cantrelle rasped, “I feel about as bad as you look, Yola.”
Yola chuckled, her laugh trailing off into an amused sigh. “Don’t feel too humiliated. You may have been overpowered, stripped of your weapons, and ignored as not worth killing, but it was the superhuman who did so. Such a result was only to be expected. In truth, the fault is mine, not yours. I should have sent Kuro with you to bind her ankles. I should have given you backup. After all, I am in charge, am I not? The buck — as the peasants used to say in the north — stops with me. Do you think that saying was a reference to hunting deer? I rather like that notion. Regardless, Ella, she did leave you alive. I am glad you are still with us, old friend. Where would I be without you?”
“Dead.”
Yola’s lips twitched. “Probably.”
Cantrelle jerked one mechanical tentacle-claw at the ragged hole in the wall. “That sniper is going to get you, sitting here like this.”
Yola shook her head. “The sniper is gone. Of that I am quite certain. A clever little creature, but unwilling to confront us directly. She didn’t even score any real kills, did she?”
“She did.”
Yola raised her eyebrows. “Did she now?”
Cantrelle said: “Yola. What the fuck are you doing?”
Yola smiled, making that infuriatingly perfect bow-shape with her lips, soft and red and inviting. The expression pulled at her cracked, burned, bleeding cheek, opening a dozen tiny wounds in the blackened flesh; watery blood and bloody plasma ran down her jaw. “Thinking. Considering further options. Observing our prize.” She gestured with one purple gauntlet, indicating the massive form of the bone-armoured mech, embedded in the grey mud outdoors. “Staring upon the world and lamenting our wayward superhuman, who could not pause to listen for long. Such a pity, is it not? She was so strong, so—”
“You are spending us,” Cantrelle grunted. She tasted blood again.
Yola showed no surprise. “I am spending well, dear—”
“We need to move. We need to consolidate, pull together, regroup, and hunt. We are wounded and reeling.” She jabbed one mechanical tentacle toward the hole in the wall again, past the form of the fallen mech, across the impact crater, toward the other skyscrapers. “Any one of those groups of reprobates and degenerates out there could fall on us right now, and we might not be able to fight them off. I’ve spent all night stuffing organs back into the Sisters’ bodies, stitching wounds and gluing bellies shut and cramming nano-mould and meat into girls’ mouths. And then I find out you’ve sent Sisters beyond the graveworm line, to chase your fucking missed conquest.”
Cantrelle stopped, breathing hard. She wanted to slap Yola right across that bleeding cheek.
Yola tried to flutter her lashes, but with only one eyelid the effect was grotesque, one naked eyeball twitching in the burned socket. She purred, “Ella, my love, my side is always open to you, even now, even—”
Cantrelle spat: “I don’t care what you want to do with your ‘superhuman’, if you want to eat her, or put a collar on her, or feed her to Kuro, or if you want to tie her up and force her to grow a phallus and use it to fuck yourself up the arse every night. I do not care, Yola. I care that you are spending us.”
Yola tilted her head sideways. “Are we quarrelling, Ella?”
Cantrelle snapped both of her tentacle-pincers shut with a click. “You’ve done this before, but never this badly. Remember the time with Warusei—”
“A traitor and a false prophet, yes, of course I—”
“—or the group with the red flags and the clever plastic decoys? Or the time that scavenger with the stinger broke in when we were staying at the old university buildings? Or the—”
“Ella, I understand your frustration with—”
“No, you don’t understand,” Cantrelle hissed. “All those times you kept control. You spent lives wisely, to re-establish our dominance and position against anybody who thought we could be pushed around. That’s part of why I let you lead, Yola. You get results. Your obsession and sadism and lust for revenge gets results. But this isn’t revenge, it’s something else. You’re slipping. It’s disgusting. You’re acting like them, the degenerates. No better than a zombie.”
Yola wasn’t smiling anymore. “How is this any different, Ella? We have been undermined. We must show our strongest hand. We must recover the superhuman—”
Cantrelle snorted; she tasted blood again. “Recover. Exactly. Not kill, not string her corpse up on a pole and show what happens to fucking zombie filth that tries to fuck with us, not carry her skull around for a while as proof — but ‘recover’. And she’s fucking gone, Yola. She’s gone beyond the graveworm line. Who cares? We need to move, and eat. Soon.”
Yola straightened up. Her eyes were like green fire. “She is a natural born leader. She is everything the movement has ever needed. She will see our way, Ella. I will prove that, to you and everyone else.”
“And for that you’re sending girls out to die, beyond the graveworm zone, for nothing.”
Yola shrugged to indicate that she was done justifying herself.
Cantrelle felt her blood go cold.
Was this the moment she’d dreaded and yearned for these last six years? Was this the moment that Yola’s charisma and cunning had finally run dry, exposing the pathology and obsession beneath the waters? It had happened before Yola, when Furina had led the Sisterhood, and Furina had deposed Quietusul before that. Cantrelle did not want to lead, did not want the responsibility of corralling the Sisters in the right direction, but she would not see them spent like this.
And Yola was her fault, her responsibility. She’d put Yola on the throne in the first place. She could remove Yola just as easily — poison her armour intakes, overload the chem-levels inside her war-plate, or just walk up behind her and put a bullet in her skull. Yola did not even pretend to be afraid of betrayal from Cantrelle.
But Cantrelle wanted to see Yola weep.
At least one more time, like she had done in the old days, like when she’d buried her face in Cantrelle’s shoulder and clung to her for everything. Cantrelle wanted to see Yola’s face scrunch up with fear and longing and desperate need.
Was the old Yola even in there anymore? Maybe. Maybe she would show herself in the last seconds, overpowered and staring down the muzzle of a gun.
Cantrelle could not grasp the pistol-grip of the PDW beneath her coat, not reliably enough to win in a struggle; her hands were too mangled and too swaddled. But if she could get a good hold on Yola’s armour with her tentacle-pincers, she could stop Yola redeploying her helmet, then she might be able to handle one of the revolvers and get it in Yola’s face. One shot would end an era. She’d need to deal with Kuro afterward, and possibly Nahia and Joye, but most of the Sisters would side with her. Nobody else would mount a serious challenge to Cantrelle’s justification for a change of leadership.
Her throat felt thick. Something was thudding and shuddering inside her chest. She was sweating.
Cantrelle took a final shot: “Yolanda, you need to lead us. Or I will.”
Yola stood up. She held her chin high, burned cheek gleaming in the grey light. She did not look at Cantrelle, but gazed out across the fallen mech, the sea of mud, and the drizzling rain.
She spoke in a voice of caramel and iron: “We need that mech. Not I, not you, but we, all of us, the Sisterhood as it stands. The tank as well, if we can lure it back and disable it briefly, but mostly the mech. Either or both of them represent a kind of power we have been seeking for many years now. With the mech at our command, we could approach the graveworm as an equal. Could we not? The pilot — Elpida — is the key to entering and controlling our prize.”
Cantrelle suppressed a sigh and unclenched her jaw, shuddering as she backed off from violence. Yola was finally speaking sense again, or at least pretending.
“True, boss,” she croaked. “But what about—”
Yola gestured sharply at the far side of the mech, lost beneath the ruddy light and the grey raindrops. “Those three worm-guard did not withdraw far. I do not believe we can approach without the cover of the pilot. If recovering her becomes impossible, then I am willing to entertain alternative courses of action. But mistake me not, my dear friend, I am not willing to abandon this prize, this great promise, this gift. And I do not believe the worm itself will move, not while this machine lies here. Does this meet with your approval, dearest Ella?”
Cantrelle grunted. “Barely. Boss, you can’t keep sending Sisters out beyond the graveworm line, it’s folly and madness. We don’t have the numbers to—”
Yola snapped: “Casualties?”
That was more like it. “Four dead, unrecoverable. Hatty, Zdenka, Esmae, and Cui. Three dead, recoverable and regenerating: Soo-Hyun, Urd, and Mojdeh. They’ll need about six to seven more hours before they can move. Sixteen additional wounded, including you and I, all able to walk, except Onyeka, she’s got two mangled legs from the road collapse. Everyone in plate armour is fine, including Kuro, incredibly, considering that apostate bitch dropped the entire fucking road on her with a coilgun.”
Yola nodded. She did not look away from the mech, out there in the rain. “Kuro is fine, indeed. A little dented. We spent the night together.”
Cantrelle clenched her teeth. Of course Yola had spent the night with her favourite pet while ordering all this ongoing madness. Cantrelle said: “There’s also the six you sent beyond the graveworm line. We’ve lost comms with all of them.”
Yola ignored that. She asked: “The dead have been distributed?”
“Stripped and rendered. Armour and weapons divvied up by the usual permissions. Meat went to the strongest of the wounded on down. I do know what I’m doing, Yola, when you’re too busy sucking your thumbs, or fucking Kuro. And here.” Cantrelle dug around inside her coat with one tentacle-claw, opened a pouch, and pulled out a package of cloth-wrapped gore. She held it out to Yola. “Your share.”
Yola smiled with girlish delight. She accepted the package and unwrapped the cloth, revealing the chunk of greasy grey-pink meat. “Oh, brains,” she cooed. “Ella, you shouldn’t have.”
“It’s Hatty’s brains. Good luck getting any nutrition from it.”
Yola giggled, then tucked into her share of the dead. She chewed and swallowed delicately, staring out across the downed mech.
Cantrelle allowed the silence. She had one more question, one further probe for Yola’s leadership; but this one was hard to ask, especially after bringing Yola around, after backing down from a change of leadership. If Yola gave the wrong answer, Cantrelle knew she would have to act.
Yola spoke first, licking brain grease off her perfect lips.
“We must claim that mech,” Yola said. “The tank, the pilot, my superhuman, all of it is secondary. You are correct about that. The only thing which matters is securing the graveworm, and glutting our future on the innards. Thank you for reminding me, Ella. I do love you, I hope you still know that.”
Cantrelle grunted. She had no good way to ask the question. She stared out of the hole in the wall, and said: “Have we received any more outside help?”
Yola smiled, thin and bright, her emerald eye glittering. “The Necromancer has not contacted me, not since the previous time. I assure you, Ella, we are not guided by the secret hand of another. We are in control.”
“Right,” Cantrelle said.
But she could tell when Yola was lying.
Cantrelle went cold inside; all this coaxing and cajoling had been a total waste. Yola was still being used by the Necro-fuck corpse-rapist thing — willingly.
Cantrelle glanced over at her old friend, slipped one tentacle-pincer inside her coat to grasp the handle of a revolver, and braced the other pincer to grab the lip of Yola’s armour, where her helmet would deploy. She should have done this earlier, not waited until Yola was standing up. One shot, one bullet in her perfect, too-pretty mouth, to shut her up forever, to stop her lies and her little betrayals, to put the Sisterhood back in Cantrelle’s hands. One bullet. Maybe Yola would cry for mercy first. Cantrelle would like that. Cantrelle’s tentacles were quivering. One bullet, one moment, and it would all be over. She pictured Yola’s smile, together in the dark, coiled up together in a bedroll, when it had been a real smile, when they’d made their pact, their deal. That smile was gone, and the tears which came before. This Yola was a ghost — no, a zombie. Cantrelle would put her down with a bullet and forget her tears and her smile alike.
“First order of business,” Yola was saying between bites of brain, “is, as you mentioned, rapid re-consolidation. Give me a moment to finish my meal and—”
Click-buzz.
Cantrelle’s internal comm-link pinged her on a private channel.
She almost jumped. She let go of the revolver, lowered the other pincer, and accepted the connection; DeeGee and Yazhu were probably getting impatient out in the corridor. She needed to stall them for a few moments. There was nothing wrong with a couple of witnesses for a change of leadership, but Cantrelle did not want anybody else to ever witness Yola’s tears. Those belonged to Cantrelle alone.
She started to send, but somebody else spoke first.
<
Cantrelle froze.
That voice did not belong to any Sister she knew. But she recognised it all too well.
It was the pilot, the Telokopolan, Yola’s superhuman toy — Elpida.
She was inside the comms network.
“—then we’ll check on the wounded,” Yola was saying. “Together, of course. I can judge who is fit to carry on, though I surmise that all will be, except possibly Onyeka? But then, she is very strong. I think she will make it with the six to seven hour window. Ella?”
“ … yes, boss,” Cantrelle answered out loud. “Got everyone laid out in the big conference room, we’re already regrouping there. I’ll head back first. Make it look like normal, like you came without my prompting. Sounds good?”
Yola smiled; the gesture made her cheek bleed and weep again. “Delightful, Ella.”
Cantrelle gestured at Yola’s cheek with a tentacle-pincer. “And we’ll get some nano-mould on that. See you in five, boss.”
She left Yola behind to stare out of the ragged hole at her unattainable prize, eating her piece of Hatty’s brain. Cantrelle descended the steps, crossed the ruins of the casino, and walked back into the dim and shadowy corridor. DeeGee and Yazhu were waiting for orders, but Cantrelle gestured them into the room and ignored any further questions, stalking back down the corridor. She turned two corners, paused in a dark place amid the dusty marble, and listened to the soft hum of the open line.
<
<
<
Elpida replied: <
Cantrelle wet her lips. She tasted blood.
Had Elpida been listening to her conversation with Yola just now? That wasn’t impossible, not if Elpida had broken into the comms network somehow. Cantrelle glanced up and down the corridor, switching her sight to infra-red and low-light. She could not risk anybody tapping into this connection at close range.
Cantrelle sent: <
<
<
<
Cantrelle asked: <
<
Cantrelle didn’t believe a word of that. <
<>
Cantrelle clenched her teeth and stopped breathing.
Opportunity, yes — but was it the one she wanted? She’d rather see Yola dead than deliver any Sister into the hands of some degenerate, let alone Yola. Her oldest friend needed to be removed, but Cantrelle would do it by her own hand, and see Yola’s tears before the end. But this way—
Elpida continued: <
Cantrelle bristled. Yola belonged to her. <
<
<
<
Click-buzz.
The channel went dead.
Cantrelle stood in the dark, breathing hard, feeling every one of her bite wounds and every chain-link bruise across her throat. She looked toward the light at the end of the corridor. The rest of the Sisterhood was gathering in the conference room up ahead, ready to regroup and make a new plan, ready to keep manifesting their vision into reality.
Then she looked over her shoulder, back toward the bomb-damaged casino; she pictured Yola’s infuriating smirk, then imagined it collapsing into tears.
And she remembered that private smile back in the old days, so sweet and so real, alone in the dark with a needful friend.