Sanzhima was in agony. She wanted it to end.
By the time she dragged herself into the tomb chamber full of revenants, she could barely walk. The pain was a flood, drowning everything but itself, scouring her insides raw and hollow. Every lurching step and wheezing breath chafed her naked skin against the cage-vest of bare metal, welded shut around her shoulders and groin. Every wince and flinch harrowed her with the metal rods which skewered her body — creaking against her broken ribs, scraping the ruptured tissues of her belly, grinding against her intestines with a squeaking, rubbery, slick sensation. She wanted to pull herself open, just to make it stop.
The right side of her face was covered with bruises, still blossoming into the fullness of their throbbing torment. Her right eye was half-blind, her vision mashed and blurry. Her scalp stung from where she’d tried to escape, leaving behind clumps of hair in armoured fists. Her lips and nose and left eye were sticky with dried blood, rat-tails of hair stuck to her face. Her right hand hurt so much it had gone numb, a dead limb stitched to a lump of metal. The coat in which she had been wrapped was glued to her back. She’d left a trail of crimson in her wake.
The Death’s Heads had used her body as a canvas of torture. Sanzhima wished they’d simply killed her — or eaten her alive. Simple cannibalism would have been less cruel and insane than this.
Sanzhima had tried to shoot herself, with the pistol her tormentors had pressed into her hand. But the gun had gone click click click. No bullets, no way out. The Death’s Heads had roared with laughter.
The giant in grey power armour had repeated her instructions, then gently turned Sanzhima around and nudged her toward the tomb chamber.
Sanzhima was no fool. She’d never seen a bomb before — neither in her twenty-seven years of biological life, as game warden and wildlife expert, nor across the dozen screaming resurrections in this cannibal madness at the end of time. But she knew what the Death’s Heads were using her for, she knew what they had strapped to her body and concealed beneath a high-quality tomb-coat. They had turned her into a murder weapon, to assault other hell-bound undead, the few who had found the courage to venture into that dark, echoing, blood-lit chamber, where the monsters from inside the big bone-white tank were handing out ‘free meat’.
The more things change the more they stay the same; that was what Sanzhima told herself, as she lurched through the darkness. The biosphere is dead, everyone’s a fucking zombie, but people still find reasons to blow each other up. Typical human beings. Animals don’t do this kind of shit to each other. Animals are less inhuman than the humans.
Sanzhima had heard others shouting about the free meat, but she had decided it was nonsense, some kind of trick, another undead obscenity in a world of undead obscenities; besides, she had found it difficult to care. She had lost Tsering and Kirke in the chaotic running battle outside the tomb, the desperate rush to outrun the hurricane. Her companions of the past few months were lost to her, probably torn apart by the storm and the hail, or drowned by the floods. The only companions she had ever found in this roiling grey-goo afterlife, the only other people she’d touched in what felt like years, and they were gone, just like that. She hadn’t seen much point in carrying on, so she had crammed herself into a dark corner to cry bitter tears, until either the storm passed or the tomb was crushed or somebody killed her and ate her. She didn’t care which. Any end was an end.
But then the Death’s Heads had found her, lured her out with a bit of meat, and imposed a new purpose upon her body.
She had considered lying down to die; she would bleed out sooner or later. But the Death’s Heads had forced handfuls of meat down her throat, jabbing at her wounds until she swallowed. Her belly was full enough to give her quite a nanomachine buffer, to keep her alive and in agony for many hours yet. Death would take a day or more.
Pain drove her to impossible hope — what if the Death’s Heads weren’t lying? What if the revenants in the tank really could help her?
Or perhaps the horde of zombies would tear her apart, or somebody would shoot her dead, or set off the bomb. At least then the pain would end.
Sanzhima had limped and stumbled down the lightless corridors of the tomb, careening from one wall to another, panting between clenched teeth, leaving a trail of blood in her wake. She followed the scent of raw meat and the murmur of talking and eating, just about audible over the omnipresent static haze of the storm outdoors. Eventually she burst into the echoing vault of the tomb chamber and plunged into a sea of blood-red illumination, flanked by dozens of twinkling eyes and wide mouths streaked with gore.
She reeled away from the corridor, weaving between the huddled groups of zombies. Faces looked up at her, hungry and bloody and full of teeth. Sanzhima was in too much pain to feel any fear. She stared back into the most inhuman and modified of the whirling visages, daring them to rip her open and end this torment. Dark crimson light poured down from the great bone-white armoured vehicle which occupied the rear of the chamber. Sanzhima staggered to a halt, staring up at the machine. She’d glimpsed it a couple of times over the last few weeks — a distant hump of gnarled and pitted bone, covered with high-tech weapon systems and rocket batteries and directed-energy shielding, pushing its way through the corpse-city like an osseous tumour embedded in desiccated flesh. She’d thought of the machine as a ‘tank’ — just a larger and more boxy variation on the sleek carbon-mail fighting vehicles of her own time, simply lacking hover plates and any concession to proper aesthetics. A big ugly beast, covered in guns.
But up close, maddened by pain, with one eye clouded by blood and blur, Sanzhima felt as if she stood at the skirts of some star-spun god-thing.
She had not felt such a sensation since true life, since looking up at the Primorsky mountain range as a child, or the heady wonder of climbing Belukha Peak. Her pain momentarily ebbed away, routed by awe.
This was no tank — it was a temple, encrusted with living bone, like the skull of some fantastic creature from the depths of the oceans, or the herald of alien life from far beyond the solar system. Perhaps it was. Perhaps this armoured god-thing stood outside the madness and the cannibalism and the cycle of death.
Sanzhima stared up into that scarlet light. She tried to say, “Help” — but she could produce only a cracked whisper.
She gathered all her remaining strength and staggered forward a few more paces, toward a thin band of half-naked zombies sitting and sprawling and squatting on the ground, before a line of combat drones — boxy dark shapes bristling with weapons, winking with little crimson running lights. Some of the revenants began to stand up, or shuffle back, or draw weapons. One or two called soft words to her, drowned out by the storm of blood pounding in her ears.
“H-help,” Sanzhima croaked. Metal scraped against her ribs. “ … help … They told me come here f-for help, for … help—”
A clean glimmer flashed high up on the tank’s forward armour — the glint of a rifle scope.
Sanzhima closed her eyes and shuddered with relief. The pain would be over in a moment. She whispered a final farewell to Tsering and Kirke; perhaps she would meet them again, a thousand years from now in—
A voice boomed from the tank, crackling with the squeaky backwash of external speakers.
“You!” it roared. “The zombie who just walked in! Stop, stop right where you are! Stop right there or we will open fire on you! Do not fucking test us!”
Sanzhima opened her eyes again, blinded by tears. All around her other zombies were jumping to their feet and scrambling away. A ring of bright red light had blossomed around Sanzhima’s feet, projected from somewhere high up on the tank, marking her out from the crowd.
“N-no,” she wheezed, staggering forward another few steps. “P-please, shoot—”
A second voice rang out across the chamber — not from speakers, but out on top of the tank.
“Come on, don’t do it!” the voice screamed. “Don’t make us shoot you! Just stop, please, please stop! And we— we can help you! We can! She can! The Commander can save anybody! It doesn’t matter what they did to you! She can make you clean again!”
That second voice was so desperate and earnest. Sanzhima lurched to a halt.
“Please … ” she whined. “Please.”
Other zombies were scrambling back, drawing weapons, swapping hisses of alarm, and dragging half-eaten corpses after themselves. Mutters passed through the retreating crowd — low voices questioning who or what she was, snapping warnings about “cyborg mimics” and “Necromancer bullshit”, and what hidden secrets may have been exhumed from the depths of the tomb. The only group not fleeing was about twenty feet to Sanzhima’s right; they were levelling heavy weaponry at her. She stared at the contact-point explosive-tip of an anti-armour rocket, pointed right at her face.
“J-just,” she whined. “Just do it—”
The booming voice rang out from the speakers again: “And the rest of you down there, if any of you open fire, Pheiri will respond in kind! Understand?! Anybody starts shooting, you will be a smoking hole in the fucking ground! Persephone, that means you and your girls! Weapons down, or by Luna’s blessed soil we will put you down! I don’t care if you’re from the core of fucking Jupiter, I will turn you into paste!”
The leader of the group with the heavy weapons — ‘Persephone’ — looked upward, toward the tank. She was a true cyborg terror, eight feet of shining chrome and smooth bio-polymers, with a face cast in blue and black like a ghost from between the stars, wearing a halo of golden hair.
She shouted in a buzzing machine-voice: “What is happening? Elpida! Answer me! Your response will address me as—”
“Weapons down!” the booming voice shouted over her. “Now!”
Sanzhima swayed where she stood, ten feet from one of the darkly twinkling drones. Blood pooled at her feet, dripping from beneath the coat. The crimson light from the tank — Pheiri? — dyed her blood almost black. Persephone must have lowered her weapons, because the chamber did not explode into violence and gunfire.
Moments later, five revenants came trotting past the front of the tank, behind the picket-line of drones.
One of them was extremely tall, dressed in shimmering armour which blended in with the crimson shadows and half-light of the chamber; she held a small arsenal of guns in six long arms. Three others were unremarkable — two of them unarmed, one a mid-grade cyborg carrying a ballistic shield, her bionic tail lashing at the air.
Their leader strode at the front of the group, long white hair swaying with an easy, rolling gait, one hand on a submachine gun at her waist, eyes fixed on Sanzhima.
Persephone shouted again as the group passed. “Elpida! We demand to know—”
“You’ll know in a moment,” said ‘Elpida’, without breaking her stride. “Get your people back.”
Elpida and her companions halted opposite Sanzhima, on the far side of the drone-line, framed by the bone-white bulk of the tank. The tall one in lots of armour didn’t seem to be looking anywhere in particular, but the other three and Elpida herself all stared at Sanzhima. The petite cyborg was trying to cover Elpida with the ballistic shield. The other two, both unarmed, both in tomb-grown coats, seemed oddly unconcerned.
Through Sanzhima’s blurry, bloody, pain-wracked vision, she realised they were all wearing a symbol — a pair of lines haloed by a crescent, daubed in green.
Mountains against dawnrise. Battered hope flickered in Sanzhima’s chest.
Elpida muttered something into a headset microphone.
The booming voice spoke from the tank’s speakers again: “The zombie who just walked into the chamber is wearing a bomb vest. We strongly — very fucking strongly! — suggest you all wind your necks in as far as you can get! Fifty meters, ladies, fifty meters! Get moving!”
Up on the tank, the blood-red lights flashed and shifted. Sanzhima saw a red line flicker to life in her peripheral vision — minimum safe distance, presumably fifty meters to her rear. The crowd of revenants scrambled back, hissing, shouting, jeering. Sanzhima saw some of them start to peel away to leave the chamber entirely.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The group to her right, led by the big cyborg, Persephone, stayed right where they were. One of that group shouted, “Fifty meters? Not much of a bomb, is it?”
Sanzhima closed her eyes again, shaking with relief, prepared for the bullet. Once they had the others cleared out, they would put a round in her and—
A voice cut through her pain, calling cool and clear as cold water.
“Open your eyes and look at me, please.”
Sanzhima opened her eyes.
Elpida — still on the far side of the picket line — had one hand raised to catch Sanzhima’s attention.
“Can you hear me?” Elpida called. “If you can’t speak, nod for yes.”
Sanzhima wheezed, trying to comprehend through the pain. She nodded. “Y-yes … ”
“Good. My name is Elpida, these are my comrades. What’s your name?”
Sanzhima blinked. Thinking was almost impossible. When she’d been limping and lurching toward the chamber, the pain had dribbled out behind her; but now, standing in one spot, the pain was pooling inside her, overflowing through the wounds in her belly and chest, bubbling up her throat to drown her brain. What did her name matter now? She was dead, she would be chunks of steaming meat in a moment, why did this zombie want—
“What’s your name?” Elpida repeated. “Give me your name, please.”
“ … S-Sanzhima … Tyumed … ”
“Alright, Sanzhima,” Elpida called. “The first thing I need you to do is drop that pistol. Throw it ahead of you, slide it along the floor.”
“ … can’t … ”
Sanzhima raised her right hand, to show why she could not let go of the gun.
The drone directly ahead of her squawked with the same reedy voice that had boomed out from the tank: “Throw the gun away, you moronic—”
The voice cut off.
Blood slid down Sanzhima’s hand and wrist. The meat of her palm was bound to the pistol’s grip with a length of wire, metal knots rammed between her metacarpals and wrapped around the weapon.
A moment of silence was filled with the furious static of the storm.
Elpida called out again: “Alright, forget the gun. I’m gonna need you to take off that coat, get on your knees, and put your hands in the air. Do you understand?”
Sanzhima shook her head. She’d been following along so far because Elpida’s voice was so reassuring, the kind of voice you just wanted to obey, the kind of voice which would make everything right again. Elpida’s voice was like listening to the rustle of trees in the forests, or the gentle winds coming down a mountain, or the distant murmur of deer; Sanzhima knew this was delusion, brought on by pain. But now she realised that Elpida wasn’t going to shoot her.
“No,” she wheezed. “N-no, just … ”
“We can help you,” Elpida called. “But you have to help us. If you can’t get the coat off, at least open it up, show us the bomb. If you can’t drop to your knees, just put your hands—”
“Shoot me,” Sanzhima croaked. “Shoot me!” Louder: “Shoot me!”
She stumbled toward the picket line of drones, toward the revenants, toward Elpida, trying to wave the gun. Several of the nearest drones twitched around, taking aim at her with their on-board weaponry. The little cyborg at Elpida’s side hissed a warning and produced a shotgun from behind her ballistic shield. The big revenant in armour suddenly swung her guns down to cover Sanzhima. High up on the tank, somebody shifted their position. A weapon went ca-clunk.
“Please!” Sanzhima wailed. “Just shoot—”
Elpida’s voice whipped the air. “Look at me! Sanzhima, look at me!”
Sanzhima halted. Purple eyes burned in the crimson shadows.
Elpida said: “I will clear this whole chamber and withdraw, rather than shoot you. Do you understand?”
Sanzhima closed her eyes and began to weep. The pain was too much. She shook all over, barely able to stay on her feet. She felt metal grinding inside her chest and belly with every sob. She would never get it out, never be rid of that sensation.
“Sanzhima, stay right there. I need you to listen to my voice and follow my instructions. You can keep your eyes shut if you want. It’s just you and me in here, Sanzhima. Nothing else matters. Just you and me. Just listen to my voice. I need you to take the coat off. Can you do that for me? Nod for yes— okay, good girl. That’s it, just move your arm away from your belly. Good, now lift the arm from the sleeve. Well done, you’re doing great. We’re going to get you out of this. Roll that shoulder back, let the coat fall from your shoulder. Good girl, you’re halfway there. Now raise your left arm, reach back, and tug the coat to your right. Sanzhima? Can you still hear me?”
Sobbing, shivering, shaking apart, Sanzhima did as Elpida ordered. Elpida’s voice was so easy to follow. Obeying her instructions made everything so simple, even through the pain.
But the last instruction was impossible. The tomb-coat was stuck to Sanzhima’s back, adhered to her naked skin with a thick layer of half-dried blood. She stood there for a long moment, quivering and crying, until eventually the weight of the armoured fabric dragged the coat downward, peeling it away with wet rasp. The coat snagged on the gun stitched to her right hand, then finally slithered to the floor.
Sanzhima stood naked, except for the bomb. Barefoot, covered in blood, shaking like a leaf. Dark, dank, dripping air caressed the fresh blood on her torn flesh, and slipped fingers of ice into the wounds on her belly and chest, chilling her deeper than any living biology could feel.
Behind her, a murmur passed through the crowd of zombies. A few shouts and snarls echoed off the ceiling. Somebody else started crying. A wail went up.
Elpida kept talking: “There you go, good girl. Well done, you’re doing great. Keep breathing, keep listening to my voice. I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere.”
Sanzhima nodded, eyes screwed shut against the pain and the indignity.
“I need you to open your eyes for me, Sanzhima. Can you do that?”
Sanzhima opened her eyes. She could barely see, vision blurred by tears, dyed red in the bloody backwash from the tank. Her body was a ruin wrapped in jagged metal, a darker smear of crimson amid the bloody shadows.
Elpida was a beacon of white hair on the far side of the drones. She said, “Sanzhima, I need you to raise your hands. Up, up, that’s it. Outward, away from the vest. That’s it. Hold them there. Stay as still as you can, don’t move. We’re going to approach you now.”
Keeping her hands raised was another pain, another tally on the list of tortures. The weight of the pistol tugged at the flesh of her palm, but Sanzhima tightened her grip. For that angelic voice, she would try her best.
Two of the drones in the picket line moved aside and floated forward, as if adjusting to engulf Sanzhima. Elpida strode through the breach. The little cyborg scurried along at her side, ballistic shield raised, chunky tail standing straight up. The two unarmed revenants came behind. The giant with lots of guns followed last, then stood astride the break in the picket line, as if holding the rear.
Elpida stopped about two meters from Sanzhima. She was so tall, muscled lithe and tight like a gene-modded soldier. The little cyborg glared and grimaced, eyes running up and down Sanzhima’s body, bionic tail quivering. One of the unarmed revenants — the shorter one — stopped by Elpida’s side; up close, something about that revenant’s dead-eyed look gave Sanzhima a feeling of creeping dread, even over the pain. She did not wish to be naked and vulnerable before those eyes.
Elpida said: “Sanzhima, we’re going to get you out of this. The bomb has a timer, but it’s not been activated. We’re going to figure out how to cut you free.”
Sanzhima just shook her head, wheezing and speechless with pain.
The other unarmed revenant was tall and confident, topless beneath her tomb coat. She strode around Sanzhima’s side to peer at her back.
“Atyle?” said Elpida. “Talk to me.”
‘Atyle’ said: “The Moon Princess is correct. Words are written on her skin. I quote the foulness, it is not my own — ‘The fate of all degenerates.’”
Elpida did not look away from Sanzhima. “The Death’s Heads did this to you, didn’t they?”
The little cyborg snapped, “Fuck. Fuck! Snatched her? Fuuuuuck!”
“Probably,” Elpida said. “I would almost respect them if they sent one of their own. But they don’t have that in them. Illy, check the coat.”
The scorpion-like cyborg — ‘Illy’ — darted forward, shotgun trained on Sanzhima’s face, ballistic shield angled to catch the blast if the bomb detonated. She grabbed the armoured coat with one clawed foot, dragged it away, then scurried back to cover Elpida again. She rummaged through the pockets, produced a scrap of crumpled paper, sneered with disgust, then held it out to Elpida.
“Radio frequency,” Elpida said, speaking into her headset mic. “Kaga, you listening?” Elpida rattled off a sequence of numbers. “Get to work on breaking that, but don’t contact them, don’t let them know we have it. Contact might be their signal to detonate.”
Atyle stepped back and peered at Sanzhima with a high-grade bionic eye, peat-green in the darkness. “An offering,” she said. “Incinerated on the altar of violence. Ready for the maw of the gods.”
The other unarmed one, with the dead eyes and the too-clean skin, said: “Terror tactics. She’s been turned into a weapon.”
Atyle said, “Incredible that she has not been bled white getting here.”
The other one replied, “Her nanomachine load has a transitory boost. She’s digesting a lot of meat. They force-fed her, to keep her on her feet.”
Illy sneered and spat, tail-spike jerking in and out.
Elpida said, “Shilu, Atyle, hold your observations for now.” Then she spoke into her headset: “Kaga, are you certain there’s no— okay, yes, understood.” She looked at the others. “We’re in the clear, Kaga’s jamming any incoming signals, and the detonator isn’t—”
“P-please … ” Sanzhima murmured. “Please, just shoot me, please … i-it hurts so—”
Elpida stepped forward, grabbed Sanzhima by the chin, and forced her to look directly into those glowing purple eyes.
“I’m not going to let you die this kind of death. Understand? I am going to cut you out of that vest. Now—”
Elpida flinched. So did Illy and Atyle. ‘Shilu’ just blinked. The six-armed revenant in the rear twitched once, as if she’d spotted a target and then reconsidered.
“Fuck! Fucking shit!” Illy shouted.
“Ahhhh,” purred Atyle. “The stinger beneath the lid.”
“They must be observing from a distance,” said Shilu. “It’s what I would do.”
“Kaga—” Elpida said, raising a hand to her headset. “Okay. Okay. Yes! Well done, thank you. Understood. How long do we have? Alright, that’s plenty.” Elpida met Sanzhima’s eyes again; suddenly she seemed a little less in control. “The people who put that vest on you just sent a remote detonation signal. We jammed it, but they set up a fail-safe timer. We have seven minutes to get you out of that vest. Do exactly as I say. Do you understand?”
Sanzhima closed her eyes and started to cry. “Shoot me, please. Please. Please!”
Shilu said, “We cannot afford it, Telokopolan. Not with so many eyes on you.”
Illy spat, “Yeah, no shit!”
Elpida said: “Kagami, talk to me, what am I looking at here? I see a detonator on the front and a lot of wires. There’s four distinct packs of explosive attached to this metal vest. Five bars of metal going through her body, two in the chest, three in the abdomen. Atyle, do those connect to the back?”
“They do, Commander. The cage is seamless.”
Shilu spoke. “The wiring is very high quality. All the lines would need to be severed at once to avert a detonation. This is expert work.”
Illy growled, “Fucking reptile shit. Fuck, fuck!”
“Illy, focus,” said Elpida. “Kagami, you too, stop muttering in my ear. We need ideas and we need them quickly. We need to cut through the metal supports on the vest itself and pull the whole thing off her. Those bars are almost an inch thick. What do we have in the way of cutting tools?”
Sanzhima didn’t care anymore. She just wanted the pain to end. She wanted Elpida to put the muzzle of her submachine gun to Sanzhima’s forehead and end this. Perhaps if she jumped for one of them, or lowered her hands to the box of wires on the front of the vest, they would all just shoot her and let her die already.
But in the back of her mind, Sanzhima was already elsewhere. The pain had washed everything else away and turned her into a lightning rod for her own thin and watery memories, sending her back to places she had not been able to fully picture in years. She was hiking up a mountainside, fresh snow crunching beneath her boots, a hiking pole in each hand, snow goggles pressing into her face. When she turned and looked over her shoulder, she would see the dark green forest stretched out for mile after mile, and the glimmer of the Baikal Rift on the horizon, diamond-clear waters flowing for thousands of miles in a dark blue ribbon all the way to the Arctic. Her hike was almost over, she had almost reached the peak. The overhead monorail lines would fly her back to the Irkutsk Arcology-Sprawl in a matter of minutes, after the long, gruelling hours of hauling herself upward through freezing temperatures, all alone, with only the radio for company. A familiar challenge, a familiar victory, a routine she had kept since she’d been a teenager old enough to take this route all by herself. She travelled light, without even a tent or a sleeping bag, for this would be over in a single day.
But she did not turn and look back; she kept her eyes focused on the dark peak, denuded of snow, which made no sense. When she reached the summit, she was not going to call a rail car. She was going to keep going, over the top and down the other side, into darkness and shadow, to lose herself beyond.
She was going to give up, by carrying on to the place she should have gone all along.
Out in the wavering veil of reality, the revenant called Shilu spoke very softly: “Telokopolan. Elpida. I can cut the metal with my hands. I can be covert.”
“Alright, Shilu,” said Elpida. “Get behind—”
A shout cut in from Sanzhima’s right — a buzzing machine-voice, the tall cyborg called Persephone.
“Elpida! This one is wounded beyond help! One slip and your people will be paste. This is foolish, ‘Commander’. I am not impressed. Charity is one thing, insanity is another. Stand back if you cannot do it yourself. Let me. She will go quick, if it bothers you so much.”
Sanzhima opened her eyes, shuddering behind a torrent of tears, and looked toward the metal-clad cyborg. “P-please, yes, please just—”
Elpida whirled toward Persephone, face twisting with a wild-eyed grin, as if another person was looking out from inside her skull.
“You accepted our meat, you giant metal cunt!” Elpida shouted, pointing right at Persephone with her submachine gun. “Right now, you’re in Telokopolis. You’re on my ground, bitch, my home, my turf. And so is she!” Elpida reached out and grabbed Sanzhima’s face. “Nobody gets left outside, understand?! No matter how hopeless! If you can’t get that into your head, you can fuck off and eat rocks!”
Persephone’s girls shifted, hefting their heavy weapons, eyeing Elpida’s group with frozen eyes. The big zombie with the shimmering armour openly turned her guns toward Persephone. The line of drones adjusted, acquiring targets, pulling into a combat formation. Illy thumped her shield with her shotgun and hooted at the top of her lungs. Up on the tank, a tiny figure stood up and levelled some kind of launcher.
The tank itself flickered those blood-red lights, throwing a ring of crimson down upon Persephone and her zombies.
“Well!?” Elpida yelled. “Yes or no, bitch? Wanna fucking step up, or step down? Try me!”
Sanzhima prayed for gunfire.
Persephone tilted her golden-haloed head to one side, smiled the thinnest of bionic smiles, and made a lowering gesture with one hand. Her girls stood down, though they didn’t look happy about it.
“Be my guest,” she buzzed.
Elpida blinked three times; the rage-filled grin left her face as if it had never been there. She turned back to Sanzhima and let go of her chin.
“Shilu, get behind her,” Elpida said. “I’ll hold the front. Snip them as fast as you can, count them off. When they’re clear, I’ll grab the vest, you grab her shoulders.” Shilu stepped away from Elpida’s side; despite the pain, Sanzhima’s skin crawled at the proximity of that dead-eyed revenant. But Elpida kept talking: “Sanzhima. Sanzhima, look at me. This is going to hurt you, it’s probably going to hurt a lot, but once we’ve cut—”
Elpida halted, eyes going to the side, listening to a sudden tinny voice from her headset. The others halted too, even Shilu, the only one not wearing a headset.
“Fuck!” Illy snapped.
“Ooni,” Elpida said. “Ooni, slow down. Repeat that.” A pause. “Are you certain? Okay, then get down here, show me. Vicky, escort her. Both of you get down here as fast as you can. Go, now.”
Elpida made a chopping gesture at Shilu and shook her head. Plan aborted.
“Telokopolan?” Shilu said.
“Ooni says she knows who designed this bomb. She says the crossbars through the victim’s body are a trap. It’ll detonate if we cut them. The whole thing is meant to present us with a no-win situation.” Elpida turned her burning purple eyes and met Sanzhima’s gaze again. “But I refuse to accept that. There’s no such thing as a no-win situation.”