Elpida’s voice whispered across the long distance communications uplink, filling Thirteen Arcadia’s amniotic heart with an unexpected chill.

<<‘Hunt,’>> Elpida said. She paused and laughed, cold and hollow. <>

Thirteen was still picking her way through the halo of ruined buildings on the outskirts of the landslide. The damage stretched for miles. Dawn had passed, noon had come and gone — or what passed for noon beneath the charred and choking grave dirt of the sky. Deep inside her body of wet warm crimson flesh and womb-soft frills and fluids, Thirteen hugged her old core tight, squeezing herself with a dozen arms. Elpida’s words made her shiver.

Pinned between black skies and dead soil, she listened to a zombie tell a tale of death and cannibalism.

She listened willingly; she could do little else to assist her Commander.

<>

Elpida cut off.

Thirteen paused beneath the shadow of a railway station. The building was made of toughened glass and dirty chrome, suspended a hundred feet in the air on a ribbon of corroded metal, arcing away toward the south-east. The massive support struts of the elevated rail-line had survived the landslide mostly intact.

<> she sent.

Elpida replied. <>

Thirteen stepped out from beneath the suspended station. A hundred feet to her left, a true zombie was perched on the shell of a collapsed building. It was an evolved revenant, like all the others Thirteen had witnessed in the wilds beyond the worms. It clutched a broken steel girder with half a dozen sets of avian talons. The rest of its body was a ragged mass of back-swept sheets of flesh and feather. It painted her with a suite of targeting sensors and deep-penetration scanners.

Thirteen replied with a targeting sweep of her own, backed up by a flare of her weapon pods — a glance and a shrug.

The zombie killed its sensor package, folded itself up into a tight ball, and turned its flesh to a mirror-finish. It scurried away into the rubble, invisible to the naked eye.

Thirteen strode onward.

She said, <>

Elpida sighed, long and low. Thirteen heard other sounds over the comms uplink — the rustle of clothing, the scuff of boots against metal, the gentle creak of a chair. Elpida’s body, moving inside Pheiri’s control cockpit, twenty days walk back north. Thirteen closed her inner eyes and pictured Elpida sitting there, tall and strong, white hair fanning out down her back, purple eyes ringed with dark circles. She imagined Elpida bent forward in her seat, hands clasped together, haunted gaze fixed upon the metal floor.

Part of Thirteen Arcadia — the part that had once been wholly Thirteen, and had once wrapped human arms around Twelve Fifty Five — longed to touch her Commander, to give her a hug, to tell her it was going to be alright.

Eventually, Elpida answered. <>

Elpida trailed off. Thirteen forced a laugh, with human-like lips inside her core. <>

Elpida laughed too, but it was fake and limp. <> she said. <>

Thirteen climbed the side of a fallen skyscraper as Elpida spoke. The tower was tilted at an angle, propped up on the tangle of rubble and ruin. She reached the apex and gazed out across the endless corpse of the world, red-lit by the tortured furnace behind a distant corner of the sky.

The southern horizon was nothing but more city, for mile after mile after mile.

<> she finished Elpida’s sentence.

<> Elpida echoed. <>

Thirteen jumped off the tip of the tilted skyscraper and fell one hundred feet to the ground. She landed with a compression of all four legs, using air and fluid to absorb the impact, rocking with the flow of gravity. A perfect touchdown.

Elpida wasn’t speaking.

<>

Thirteen heard a wet noise — a swallow. Elpida continued.

<>

<>

Elpida snorted a humourless laugh. <>

Thirteen did not know what to say. That was true, wasn’t it?

Elpida carried on. <>

<>

Elpida chuckled with residual warmth. <>

Thirteen set off into the streets of the dead city once again, striding down rivers of ancient asphalt. The buildings in this part of the city were windowless humps of concrete and steel, set low into the ground, nestled amid fields of ditches and trenches, rusted barbed wire and metal barriers. A land of bunkers and kill zones stretched off toward a black horizon. This part of the city was built for a war of ants amid the body of a machine, but it was empty and echoing, uninhabited by even the undead.

<> Elpida said. Her voice grew hollow. <>

<>

<>

Thirteen faltered, her steps halting. <>

Elpida snorted. <>

Thirteen carried on, striding across the field of bunkers. Elpida fell into silence. Thirteen wanted to help. She asked the only thing which made any sense.

<>

<> Elpida said. <>

<>

Elpida snorted a laugh which was not a laugh. <> Elpida trailed off for a moment, then rallied with a deep breath. <>

Thirteen strode across the endless field of bunkers. She swept her sensors back and forth, looking for signs of life — or unlife — just in case any zombies bold or unwise decided she was worth an experimental bite.

<> Elpida repeated. <>

Thirteen spotted an occupied bunker.

Three hundred meters to the east, one of the concrete enclosures contained a pair of revenants, their bodies burning bright to Thirteen’s long-range heat and motion sensors, their biology glowing like firelight to her nanomachine-load pick-ups. Thirteen could not achieve high resolution through half a dozen layers of reinforced concrete and steel rebar, but she could guess at what the zombies were doing. They were coiled around each other, one’s back to the other’s belly, arms clinging tight, deep in the guts of the ossified fortification. They were tucked beneath blankets, breathing softly.

Thirteen replied to Elpida. <>

<>

Thirteen’s footsteps must have disturbed the pair of sleeping zombies; her sensors showed one of them scrambling out of bed, deep inside the bunker, then pressing her face to some kind of periscope system. Her partner flew after her, gathering up objects, darting about the inside of their concrete nest.

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Thirteen killed her directional sensors. She angled her route away from the bunker. She quickened her pace.

<> she told Elpida. <>

<>

<>

Elpida’s voice was losing volume and clarity; long range transmission fidelity was suffering due to the geography between Thirteen and Pheiri, or perhaps due to the density of the city, or random atmospheric conditions; Thirteen cycled uplink mediums and re-handshook with Pheiri until the Commander’s voice regained clarity.

<> Elpida said. <>

Thirteen glanced back with a cluster of unobtrusive sensors, so the zombies in the bunker would not see her peeking at them.

The pair were huddled against a wall, their bodily processes slowed to a minimum, waiting in absolute stillness, hoping the giant monster beyond their sanctuary would pass by without stopping to eat them.

Everyone out here — every highly-evolved revenant beyond the graveworms — had engaged in the same process Elpida was describing.

<> Elpida said. <>

Thirteen did not know what to say. <>

<> Elpida said, with a smile in her voice. <>

<>

<>

<>

Elpida’s voice crackled across the connection, speaking with a new yet familiar tone: <>

<> Thirteen agreed. <>

<> Elpida said, in charge of her own voice once again. <>

<>

<>

Elpida paused. Thirteen marched on. The end of the bunker-field loomed on the horizon ahead; the city reached for the skies beyond, splitting into a dozen towers of rusted metal, little spires like imitations of Telokopolis, stunted and rotten.

<> Elpida’s voice shook. She gulped. <>

<>

<>

<> Thirteen cried into the amniotic fluid of her comfortable and cushioned core. She was weeping from eyes open in the warm dark of her own body. <>

Elpida paused. When she spoke again, she sounded strong. <>

<>

<>

<>

<> Elpida swallowed. <>

Thirteen had held the Commander in such awe, ever since she had stepped into the pilot chamber of Arcadia’s Rampart and freed Thirteen from what she’d done.

Thirteen could not find the right words to do the same in return.

Elpida did not speak for a long time. Thirteen listened to the tiny sounds of the Commander’s breathing.

<>

Nothing.

<>

The Commander finally answered. <>

<>

<> She took a deep breath. <>

Thirteen still did not know what to say. <>

Elpida echoed, <>

Thirteen walked on, heading south, toward the edge of the continent.

She spent the next five days watching the skies and watching her back, waiting for the inevitable arrival of central’s next monster. She checked in with Pheiri at irregular intervals, so her transmission would not create a predictable pattern. She swapped more words with the Commander, with Mirror, with Pheiri himself, and even with one of the little robots, Melyn. She settled into a routine of varying her long-range scans, keeping them fresh by injecting random numbers into her schedule, in case central should try to sneak up on her again.

After five days had passed, she started work on a satellite.

Constructing the satellite was not easy; it was a great challenge, the most complex object she had ever made, before or after the Change. The device had to be grown entirely within her own flesh, so in a way it was part of her, built from glistening garnet machine-meat and nano-composite bone. She wove the core of the satellite from thick layers of data storage and processing substrate, fatty and greasy with neurons. She armoured each layer, then plated the exterior with inches of bone. She gifted her creation with sensor suites and communication relays. She armed it with short-range self-defence weaponry, anti-missile cannons, miniaturised shield generators, and enough drive systems to keep itself aloft for a few dozen years, harvesting fresh fuel from the atmosphere.

She added internal gravitic engines, based on the tiny versions she had discovered inside central’s third asset. She was not beyond appropriating The Enemy’s clever ideas.

As she crafted and cut, she kept thinking of it as a ‘satellite’, but really the machine was a large drone; the object would never pierce the cloud layer, let alone achieve low orbit. The clouds which smothered the planet were opaque to all but the most powerful sensors, certainly too much for the eyes and ears of her little drone. Even if she could develop a method of seeing through Earth’s rotting coverlet, what would be the point? Such a tiny thing could not achieve escape velocity. She would have to carry it up there herself, and central would undoubtedly find a way to stop her from doing that. Central would notice the excursion. The point was to remain unseen.

Thirteen Arcadia copied the techniques she had observed during her fight with the Disco Ball. That was her final and most important gift to this bud-child of her own flesh — visible-light reflection, gravitic cloaking, nanomachine-load shrouding.

Her unseen eye in the sky.

Finishing the satellite took her fifteen days. Central had still not sent another asset.

Those two weeks were not all quiet journey. Thirteen sighted two more graveworms, one far away to west, and one much closer. She gave both of them a wide berth; she felt protective of the satellite she was growing inside her body, and did not want to risk a confrontation. She saw many strange zombies among the ruins, deep inside the cold, hardened guts of the city, in places where no worm had turned in decades. She catalogued and recorded and broadcast every scrap of data back to Pheiri. She improved her own scanners, looking for microbes, but found only nanomachines. She worked on her poetry, whispering her endless broadcast to Twelve Fifty Five, hoping and praying that she was heard.

She grew her satellite, healthy and strong.

Thirteen Arcadia launched her creation on the forty second day of her journey to the edge of the world, at dawn.

She tested the satellite first, sheltered by a deep canyon of concrete and steel, inside the heart of a vast fortress, a city in its own right. Portions of the fortification contained warring entities almost as physically large as Thirteen Arcadia herself. They were protoplasmic blobs of highly pressurised fluid and viscera, without sensory organs or limbs; they flowed and pulsed through the vast hallways and corridors, contesting for space with each other like overgrown single-celled organisms. Thirteen assumed they were revenants who had left behind their human body plans, though they did not seem much like Iriko. They were vast by comparison, and much less vulnerable.

She spent six hours watching and investigating the creatures, to make sure they would not attack her. They didn’t care. They ignored her, for she was not edible.

She kept to the castle courtyards, beneath the blackened sky, and began by extracting the satellite from within her own flesh.

It was an easy birth, assisted by gravitics. She had given the machine an oblong shape — not for ease of removal, but for operational purposes of stealth and manoeuvrability. The whole process took less than one hundred seconds. When it was done, Thirteen briefly savoured the sensation of cold air against the inner surfaces of her body, wet and trembling with the echo-ghost of pain. Then she closed herself back up and examined the result.

The satellite bobbed about twenty feet off the ground, holding itself aloft with tiny gravitic engines. White bone-armour was slick with machine-meat slime, dripping with the crimson sheen of afterbirth. The satellite quivered and shook as it took in the world beyond Thirteen’s body.

Thirteen reached out and stroked it with hands and tentacles and a brush of gravitics. The satellite responded with caution, then with recognition, and finally affection.

After a few moments of petting, the satellite spread its own outer layers of flesh and bone into great ragged sheets of whirling white and red.

<> Thirteen told it. <>

The satellite replied with a burst of machine-meat language, which Thirteen knew she could not have understood before the Change.

It was excited to be alive. It was ready to soar.

Thirteen spent a whole day and night bobbing the drone around the concrete innards of the castle, putting the machine through its paces by observing the blob-creatures fighting over territory. It learned to dance through the air, slip by unseen, and climb the metal spires of this ancient edifice. It learned how to peel open the concrete and steel with fingers of subtle gravitic power. It learned how to make itself invisible, how to hold itself so still that even the cleverest of eyes could not see. It learned how to speak Thirteen’s language, how to show her what she asked for, and how to see in a dozen different ways, some of which Thirteen did not fully understand, though she had designed them.

After a day and a night, when dawn arrived, Thirteen called the drone back to the castle courtyard. With an ache in her heart, she prepared to say goodbye. As a last gesture of devotion, Thirteen extended her obsolete flesh from a sphincter on her underside and planted a kiss on the drone’s external carapace. She made her lips acid, to leave behind an imprint of her affection, a little red bow-shape forever imprinted on the white bone.

Then she stepped back and gave the drone control of its main booster engines. Like a hound loosed from the leash, it leapt — upward on an invisible plume of power, punching for the skies. The machine — the flesh-bud of her own body — receded toward the clouds, invisible to the naked eye, then to sensors, then even to Thirteen Arcadia’s own biological echoes. It howled with exuberance the whole way, with a voice Thirteen did not understand how she had birthed.

She handed the machine’s functions over to itself, one by one. She wiped tears away from her old eyes, inside her amniotic core.

On the last step she gave the drone a name — a whim, a passing fancy, she told herself. She knew this was a lie.

She named the drone ‘Hope’.

Thirteen did not want failure to bring disappointment, so she waited several days before she informed Pheiri about Hope. She tested the improved communications clarity by bouncing transmissions off the satellite; she could not access Hope without asking first, for now the child was its own entity, independent and free. Hope went unseen by any unwanted sensors. Thirteen had to handshake into a void, then identify who and what she was, before Hope would even reveal itself to be more than a sensor ghost.

She requested the on-board cameras to take pictures of herself down on the surface — and one of Pheiri, which was a bit more challenging. She ran tests against Hope’s anti-intrusion measures, and pushed her little baby to fight back for real. It did, with admirable skill.

When Thirteen was satisfied that everything worked, she told Pheiri about her plan. He indicated it was a good one. Then she told him about Hope.

Elpida was amazed. <>

Mirror — the angry little zombie — was less impressed. <>

Thirteen did not argue. She sent Mirror her own data, all the records of her own counter-intrusion exercises against Hope. She gave Mirror Hope’s internal specifications, and challenged Mirror to do better. She allowed Hope to stand alone.

Mirror spent two whole days trying to break into Hope’s mind, to peel away one fragment of location data, or targeting data, or even just an acknowledgement that the satellite existed at all. Hope ran rings around her, for Hope was a little piece of Telokopolis.

Mirror failed. In the end, even Mirror was forced to admit that the plan was a good one.

Hope would speak true — the relay would work.

Whatever Thirteen found, down beneath the black and dead surface of what had once been the green, she would not be voiceless — not while her child hugged the rotten sky, waiting for her words.

Whatever she found down in the dark, the Commander would know.

Thirteen walked south, through the endless streets of a world that had become a corpse. At her current rate, allowing additional time for any further interruptions, she predicted the journey would take another twenty two days.

She began to thicken her armour and work on her internal pressures, filling her body with chambered fail-safes and ablative fluids, strengthening her immune system with new kinds of macrophage and lymphocyte, building up her reserves of raw grey nanomachines, gathering her courage.

Thirteen Arcadia began to prepare herself for the dive off the edge of the world, down into the black.