Ooni woke slowly, in fitful halts and choking lapses, to the muffled static of the storm, an iron grip around her belly, and a painful throbbing in her head.
For the span of several dozen laboured breaths, Ooni stared at the black metal floor between her own outstretched legs. Each and every beat of her heart pounded on the drum of her skull with a dull thump of oblivion. Her vision blurred and swirled. She grew dizzy for a time, tossed about on the tides of her own bloody pulse, until the dizziness receded; but then it would return in a slow creep, before pulling back again. Ooni’s body was a rocky beach beneath the cold waves of a winter ocean. When that metaphor entered her mind, Ooni could almost see that winter-bound shore in her memory — the heavy grey skies, the dead grass on a headland, a line of withered seaweed on the rocks below, a warm arm around her shoulders. A memory of true life, shaken loose by a head wound. She struggled to hold onto the memory, but it slipped away as the waves scoured her empty.
The static of the storm went on and on and on. The throbbing and the spinning and the static seemed eternal.
Ooni was sitting on the floor, with her back rounded against a wall, sagging forward from her hips. An uncomfortable support around her stomach kept her from slumping face-first onto the black metal.
She couldn’t remember where she was, or how she’d gotten there.
Ooni knew she was concussed. She had been concussed before, more than once. Nanomachine biology would recover from this condition quicker than a live human being, though there was nothing Ooni could do but wait and breathe.
Time trickled over Ooni’s body. She must have passed into unconsciousness again, because she roused to find that she had drooled a little, her cold saliva pooling on the floor. After a while, perhaps minutes, maybe an hour, she grew used to the dizziness and the pain, though she could not tell if they had receded. Ooni realised there was another sound, beside her own instinctive breathing and the far-off roar of the hurricane — a gentle metallic ticking and scratching and clicking, like somebody nearby was working on a delicate machine.
Ooni blinked several times to clear her vision, but the darkness was near total. When she tried to sit upright she discovered the source of the grip around her belly. A smooth band of seamless black metal encircled her waist at the narrowest point, exactly the same colourless void as the floor, pressing against the fabric of her tomb-grey t-shirt.
She was pinned to the wall with a metal bracket.
“Unnhh … uhhn?”
Ooni pawed at the bracket, but her hands were weak and the metal was strong. She pushed herself into a sitting position with the support of her booted feet. The effort sent a wave of dizziness and nausea washing upward from her guts and downward from her throbbing skull. She closed her eyes for a long moment to weather the storm, gasping and whining, leaning against the wall at her back. A deep chill seeped out of the metal and through her clothes, invading her shivering flesh.
When the pain and dizziness had passed, Ooni opened her eyes and raised her head.
A grey-white carapace helmet lay just beyond her boots. The visor was shattered. The forehead had been crushed inward.
Her helmet? But how—
Kuro!
Ooni jerked forward, trying to lurch to her feet, forgetting the metal band around her waist; the bracket dug into her guts and forced the wind from her lungs. She sagged forward with pain, head pounding with pressure, sobbing dry and breathless. She quickly swallowed her sobs and tore at the bracket; she keened through her teeth and pulled until her fingers felt like they might fracture. But the metal would not give, it was part of the wall, or else buried too deep for her to dislodge. She pulled herself upright again, panting rapidly, sweat beading all over her skin, eyes thrown wide.
She was in a small, circular, black room; the floor, the walls, the curved dome of the ceiling — all were made from the same featureless, seamless, smooth, black tomb-metal. There were no doors or hatches or holes, no way in or out. The only interruption to the perfect inner surface of the room was a long table at the opposite end, also made of black tomb-metal. The table looked like it had been extruded from the wall and floor, with curved, half-melted edges, and simple flat sides instead of distinct legs.
Kuro was standing at the table, with her back toward Ooni.
Eight feet of silver-grey powered armour, blocky, angular, and functional. The suit bristled with weaponry set into every surface — short-range guns sunk-mounted on her arms, digital weapons inside her gauntlets, mechanical braces on her shoulders carrying plasma rifles, and the heavy weapon she kept mounted on her back, currently folded down and away. The massive reactor pack on Kuro’s back whispered and hummed as it drank the air through armoured ventilation grilles.
Kuro no longer wore the outer layer of black tomb-metal, which had been wrapped around her armour like a second skin. This was the Kuro Ooni knew.
She was holding up a long mechanical object of some kind, poking at it with her other hand. Ooni didn’t comprehend what she was looking at for a moment. The object was a slender mass of black and red, meaningless curves and angles, blurred by the pain in Ooni’s head and the lack of illumination in the room. The only light came from the tiny overspill from within Kuro’s suit reactor. A living human being would have been blind in this darkness.
Three similar long objects lay on the table in front of Kuro; beside the table was a pile of carelessly discarded carapace armour plates, including the chest-plate from Ooni’s armour, which still bore the crescent-and-double-line symbol of Telokopolis, green paint catching what minimal light it could. At the end of the table a set of weapons sat in a line, next to a pair of comms headsets — a sidearm, a trio of grenades, a submachine gun, and a big automatic shotgun. The first three belonged to Ooni, but the shotgun—
Ooni lowered her eyes.
Ilyusha was lying about ten feet to Ooni’s left, on her back, eyes closed. Sticky wet blood was smeared all over her face and matted into her hair. She still wore her bullet-proof vest. She wasn’t breathing, but that didn’t mean anything with zombies.
Ilyusha had been dismembered.
One of her bionic legs, both of her bionic arms, and the full length of her bionic tail had all been pulled from their sockets. Ooni stared into the exposed socket of Ilyusha’s left shoulder — a spheroid cradle of black bio-plastic and hardened circuity in bloody crimson. Soft membranes fluttered deep inside, wet and red, leaking clear plasma from the violated joint.
Ooni realised what Kuro was holding — Ilyusha’s left arm.
Ooni felt herself begin to withdraw, seeking the safety of Telokopolis within the confines of her own mind, all other thoughts receding behind a thick grey fog. She fought the impulse for a while; she told herself that such surrender would disappoint Elpida, would disappoint Leuca, and bring shame upon the very ideals of Telokopolis to which she now clung. But those ideals turned to dust, as grey and hazy as everything else. What point was there in struggling against the inevitable? Fighting would only make the pain worse, force Ooni closer to the surface of herself, to feel the torment all the sharper. At least if she pretended she was not here, she would not feel the bite of Kuro’s teeth and the invasive probing of Kuro’s fingers quite as much. Fighting would avail her nothing. She was stapled to a wall and stripped out of her armour; her companions were elsewhere or defeated or dead; she was an apostate and traitor, at the mercy of the one most of the terrifying members of the Sisterhood of the Skull.
Telokopolis had been a brief and brilliant illusion, but nothing more.
Ooni felt herself dwindle to a single cold point. A moment longer, and she would be extinguished.
On the other side of the small black room, Kuro lowered the severed bionic arm back to the table with a faint scrape of Ilyusha’s red claws.
Click-buzz. Kuro’s external broadcast speakers.
“Holding your breath won’t help,” Kuro said. Her high-pitched, airy, girlish voice filled the small black chamber. “I can hear that you’re awake—”
“Telokopolis is forever.”
Ooni had not meant to speak; it was as if some alien force had squeezed her lungs and gripped her tongue, to make her say the words. The dying ember in her chest flared with sudden life again. She sobbed once, swallowed a second, then bit her own lips until she tasted blood. Her eyes found the gentle green glint of the crescent-and-double-line on the discarded chestplate of her armour, shadows threatening to swallow it up.
Kuro turned around.
The faceplate of Kuro’s helmet was a blank grey slab. The grinning skull painted in the middle of her chestplate had been added to, with fangs and horns and additional eyes.
Seconds stretched on, filled with the distant static and whipping winds of the hurricane. At first Ooni whimpered, fighting against her sobs, feeling the tears running down her cheeks, kicking with her boots as if she could somehow push herself through the wall, scrabbling at the metal band around her belly with both hands, until her fingers were sore and her nails broken and bloodied with fruitless effort. Moments became minutes; Ooni sobbed out those words again, holding them up like a shield — “Telokopolis is forever, Telokopolis is— forever— Telo-telo-t-t-Telokopolis is f-forever—”
But as minutes lengthened and Kuro’s silence continued unbroken, Ooni realised something was not right. Her sobs dried up, her words fell quiet, and her terror coiled back, held briefly in check by bewilderment.
Kuro liked to play with her food, but Kuro wasn’t playing.
And Kuro was alone.
Ooni had to swallow several times before she could talk. She spluttered, stammered some meaningless sounds, then said: “Uh … where … where are … Yolanda, and Cantrelle? I thought I would be … t-taken to them.”
Click-buzz.
A long pause. Kuro left her exterior broadcast line open, without speaking.
“I … I mean,” Ooni added. “If Yola ordered you to just kill me, then—”
“Yolanda and Cantrelle went on ahead,” said Kuro.
More silence. Was this bait? Ooni had no choice but to bite.
“W-without … you?”
Kuro didn’t answer. Seconds ticked by. Ooni expected Kuro to close the external broadcast line with a soft click, but none came.
Through the dregs of a concussion and the terror of impending torture, Ooni realised this situation was upside down. Ooni should have found herself bound and gagged and tossed at Yolanda’s feet, or already being skinned and eaten alive by Kuro, or simply dead, waking up in another resurrection coffin, decades or centuries apart from Leuca once again, never to find Telokopolis a second time.
Kuro had never acted like this before, not towards her, not towards any other members of the Sisterhood, not that Ooni knew. Silences, stalking, savouring the fear of her prey, whether for food or simple pleasure — certainly, often, always.
But Kuro was talking to her.
Ooni was baffled, but she knew she had to keep Kuro talking.
“Did they … ” She swallowed, rough and hard. “Yola and Cantrelle, I mean. Did they leave you behind?”
Kuro’s helmet turned to the featureless wall, as if looking at something far away. “I’m playing at being rearguard.”
“P-playing … at? You mean, not … not rearguard for real?”
Kuro did not respond.
A strange thought crept into Ooni’s mind, a possibility she never would have considered during her days in the Sisterhood, let alone risked voicing out loud. But Kuro was acting in a way she never had before, as if she had been replaced, or changed, or had never been Kuro at all.
“H-how did you— uh!” Ooni flinched when Kuro looked back at her, faced by the blank plate of Kuro’s helmet. Ooni took a moment to find her words again. “How did you do that, back there, with the walls and the black metal? Have you … made a deal with a … a Necromancer?”
“No,” Kuro answered instantly. “Don’t insult me, Ooni.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” Ooni hurried to say, making a placating gesture with both hands. Kuro’s voice had not sounded angry, but Ooni did not wish to risk her wrath. “I-I just thought, that kind of control. When you came out of the wall, I thought you were a Necromancer or something, or— or— not really you, or … ”
Kuro reached toward the nearest wall with her gauntlet and touched the black metal with a soft click of her armoured fingers.
When she withdrew her hand, the metal followed.
Black filaments adhered to Kuro’s fingertips, stretching out from the wall like loops of hot tar, first sagging toward the floor, then pulling taut as Kuro dragged them further. With a flick of her wrist, Kuro detached the lines of flowing black goo from the wall; the separate strands waved in the air like seaweed in the shallows. Kuro twitched her fingers and the strands suddenly leapt together, combining into a single shard of black, long and straight, with a sharp point at the end.
Kuro held the slender metal pick in her massive grey gauntlet. Ooni stared at the point and tried not to shake. Kuro tilted her helmet. Ooni knew Kuro was thinking dark thoughts.
Kuro was going to ram that spike through Ooni’s eyeball and into—
Kuro dropped the metal spike. It hit the floor without a sound, absorbed back into the black metal, like shadow joining shadow.
“Ferrofluid.”
“ … w-what?” Ooni looked back up at Kuro’s blank faceplate. Kuro did not repeat herself. “Ferrofluid, right, yes. Uh— I-I know what that means, magnetic fluid, right, yes—”
“The tomb metal,” Kuro said. “The black stuff. It’s a kind of ferrofluid. It’s held in place by internal fields, projected from the nanomachines themselves. The tomb is a magnetic sandcastle.”
“ … okay.”
Kuro raised the fingers of her right gauntlet again. “Magnetic actuators in my suit. Code injection to take control of the fields. Just have to know how.”
Ooni shook her head. “The Sisterhood has been inside tombs before. You never … you never did this before. Were you … hiding this?”
“I didn’t know how. Not until last night. Night? Is it night?”
Ooni blinked several times before realising that Kuro had asked her a direct question, and was waiting for a reply. “I don’t know. Sorry.”
“Mm.”
Ooni was terrified that the show was over; Kuro would lose interest now she had revealed her bizarre little trick. Ooni had to keep her talking, no matter what. Perhaps rescue was already on the way. Perhaps Kuro would present an opening that Ilyusha could use — but Ilyusha was in pieces, and Ooni was alone. Nobody was coming. Telokopolis was just—
Telokopolis is forever.
Ooni swallowed, and said: “But how— how did you learn to—”
“A ghost.”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Ooni paused. “I’m sorry?”
“A ghost taught me how,” Kuro said. Her voice crackled, as if she was breathing hard inside her helmet. She raised a hand and gestured at the ceiling. “This storm, it’s full of ghosts.”
Ooni didn’t know what to say. She opened her mouth anyway, hurrying to say something, anything, anything at all to keep Kuro talking.
But then Kuro suddenly turned toward the wall on the right side of the chamber, striding away from Ooni and Ilyusha.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Kuro said. Then she stepped through the wall, as if the black metal was nothing but a layer of falling water.
Kuro was gone. The room was plunged into near-complete darkness, buried beneath metal and storm.
Ooni let out a quivering breath, swallowed a dry sob, and struggled to hold back a tidal wave of fear, whimpering softly. Why had she not retreated into herself when she had the chance? Her mouth could have spewed any lies she needed to beg Kuro for her life — that she had left the Sisterhood under duress, that she intended to act as a spy, that she was sorry, that she wished for the symbol of the skull to be carved back into her flesh once more. But instead she had shown defiance, she had refused surrender. She had pledged herself to Telokopolis anew.
But she did not want to be a martyr. She wanted to be safe.
She had to get out of here, had to find a way to free herself, but the metal band around her belly was so hard and strong she couldn’t shift it even with all the strength in her hands and—
Ilyusha’s eyes snapped open, staring right at Ooni, blood-pale circles in the dark.
“Illy!” Ooni almost wailed, catching herself at the last moment, in case Kuro might hear. She tried to reach out toward Ilyusha, but the gap between them was too wide. “Illy, you’re alive! Okay, okay, we can, we can … ”
Amid a mask of drying crimson, Ilyusha’s lips peeled back from clenched teeth. Bloodshot eyes blazed with fury. She twitched her single remaining bionic leg against the floor, claws scraping on the metal; but she couldn’t move herself, not at that angle, not with only one leg.
“Put my limbs back in!” she spat. “Ooni! Put my limbs back in!”
Ooni pulled at the metal band around her gut. “I— I can’t, I’m trapped here, I can’t get out of this!”
“Try harder!”
Ooni tried harder. She pushed and pulled at the metal band, then felt for where it joined with the wall, but she could not find even an inch of give. She tried to pull her hips upward through the bracket, but the opening was far too narrow. She tried to wriggle her ribcage downward through the metal, but that was impossible too.
“I-I can’t!” she said. “Illy, I’m sorry. I can’t pull myself out of here, I’d have to break my pelvis just to—”
“Then break it!” Ilyusha hissed, spitting between her teeth, face a mask of rage.
“How?!” Ooni wailed. “I don’t have the strength to do that! I can’t—”
“I’ll fucking break your pelvis for you, you reptile fuck!” Ilyusha spat. “Get my arms back on! Get them from the table! Put them back in the sockets!” Ilyusha kicked at the metal floor with her one foot, claws extended and clutching air, but she couldn’t move, just wriggling on the spot.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
“Shut up! Shut! Up!”
“I-I’m sorry, I—”
“Get me closer!” Ilyusha raised her leg and waggled it in Ooni’s direction. “Might be able to cut you free! Grab! Grab!”
Ilyusha strained as far as she could. Ooni did the same, both arms outstretched, compressing her belly against the metal until her insides were screaming. Her fingertips brushed one razor-sharp metal claw. Ilyusha grunted and stretched and—
Ilyusha yanked her leg away, went limp on the floor, and closed her eyes.
“Bitch is coming back!” she hissed.
Ooni collapsed against the wall again, panting for breath.
A moment later Kuro strode back into the room. She entered from a different direction to the one she had taken, appearing through the wall as if walking through a sheen of water. The metal closed behind her without a hint of whatever lay beyond, leaving the seamless circular room unblemished once again.
Kuro stood still for a moment, staring down at Ooni and Ilyusha. Ooni held her breath, expecting retribution to be swift and final.
But then Kuro stepped over to Ooni, moved the ruined carapace helmet aside, and sat down in front of her.
Sitting cross-legged in a carapace suit was difficult enough; in powered armour the process seemed almost impossible, but Kuro made it look easy and natural. Ooni did not understand the details, but she knew from her time in the Sisterhood that Kuro lived inside the armour; she was physically bonded with it in some way, reliant on it for her biological processes. She sat down cross-legged as if wearing nothing more awkward than simple cloth.
Ooni was so shocked; she didn’t even flinch when Kuro reached for her face.
Cold grey gauntlet fingertips touched Ooni’s brow, then ran around the orbit of her right eye, pressing cold metal to fragile bone.
Ooni began to shake as she realised what was happening. Kuro had grown bored of her, or was more interested in moving on to the next phase of her usual games, and was about to hurt Ooni very badly, with her fingers in Ooni’s face. Ooni resisted the urge to screw her eyes shut as tears brimmed against her lids; that would only make it worse, inviting Kuro to yank her eyes open and stick her fingers into the sockets. Kuro’s blunt armoured fingertips brushed across Ooni’s nose and down to her lips. One questing digit pressed against her cheek. Ooni braced for her teeth to be broken, or perhaps her jaw. She whimpered, and knew that was a mistake. Don’t show fear, never show fear, it makes Kuro so much worse.
Kuro removed her hand.
Click-buzz.
Ooni stared at Kuro’s empty grey faceplate. The heavy static of the storm was joined by the gentle static of Kuro’s open line. The moment ended in a soft click as the line lapsed shut.
Then, Kuro opened her helmet.
The blank faceplate slid upward into the armour, revealing a glowing recess inside, flooding Ooni with gentle yellow-red light. Kuro’s head was cradled by feather-soft layers of white bio-plastic membrane, as if held amid the diaphanous folds of an oceanic mollusc. Her face was briefly obscured behind layers of holographic readout, but those swiftly vanished, their lights fluttering off, leaving nothing between Ooni and Kuro but the shadows and the air.
In all her time in the Sisterhood of the Skull, Ooni had rarely seen Kuro open her helmet. Kuro made no special secret of her face, but she preferred to stay sealed within her armour as much as possible.
Kuro had always looked weird to Ooni, a human monster from the far future. Her skin was neon pink, dyed like plastic, patterned with deep orange spirals, and oddly poreless. Her facial features were small and delicate, with a neat little nose and bow-shaped lips. Her hair was a strange bronze-orange colour, like frozen rust, swept back in a smooth wave, vanishing into the feathery folds inside the helmet. Her eyes were both bionic, but of a kind that Ooni had never encountered elsewhere in the nanomachine ecosystem — red sclerae with no irises, just huge black pupils in the middle of each eye, flickering with tiny lenses.
Ooni dared not speak first.
Kuro said: “Do you believe in ghosts?”
Without her helmet and the comms, Kuro’s voice was sweet and melodic, but clipped and short; she let words trail off into murmurs, as if growing unsure of them the moment they left her mouth. Her teeth were pointed and made of metal, shiny chrome behind soft lips.
“Um … ” Ooni answered eventually. “Ghosts? I don’t know. Maybe.”
Kuro nodded slowly, her helmet unmoving, her head brushing against the delicate membranes inside.
“I was twenty one,” she said — then paused, eyes wandering up and to the left. “Or … maybe I was twenty two. It’s so long ago, I struggle to remember. But it was the year after the floods at the coast, when the trailing edge of the factory got washed away. I remember that sight, all those millions of tons of metal, washed downstream and out to sea … so much … waste … ”
Kuro trailed off. Ooni swallowed; Kuro’s eyes jerked back to Ooni.
“Twenty one or twenty two,” Kuro said. “It doesn’t matter. Does it?”
Ooni shook her head. “No. No, it doesn’t matter … ”
Kuro nodded. “Twenty one, then. That was the age I killed my first human being.” Kuro lowered her eyes to a spot on the floor, lost in places Ooni could not follow. “I’d killed plenty of factory jacks by then. Maybe one or two dozen. I’d lost count. Started when I was seventeen, ish. Each of those kills just blurred into the next, because the factory jacks were so … ” Kuro sighed. “They felt pain. I knew they felt pain, because if I wanted to kill one, I had to rip it off the factory systems first. I had to dump its log into my local terminal so I could lead it off somewhere quiet, else the factory would detect a malfunctioning part and send the recycling bots, and then I would be interrupted. Not that they cared, but it was a bother. So I always had all the readouts, I knew the jacks felt pain, but they never reacted to anything I did to them. A factory jack doesn’t complain, doesn’t scream, doesn’t do anything. Just stands there and takes it. Once or twice I even got bored and let them go, rather than finishing them off. And you know what they did? They just shuffled back to their places in the factory, dragging their guts along behind them. Recycled for parts an hour or two later. It was … boring. Boring, boring, boring. Just nothing.”
Kuro fell quiet for a moment. Ooni wasn’t sure if she should respond. Eventually Kuro raised her eyes and frowned.
“I couldn’t kill an actual human being, you understand?” Kuro said. “You understand?”
Ooni swallowed and nodded. This seemed to satisfy.
“There were eighty million jacks in the factory,” Kuro went on, “and more being spat out every hour of every day. But in Factory Head there were only three thousand actual human beings. Every single one of us was chipped, tracked, catalogued, all that, traced and monitored and looked after all the time. I could hack the system to hide myself from Factory Head, move around unrecorded, hide other people, do whatever I wanted. And I did, several times. Did things, stole stuff, went places people weren’t meant to go, though everybody had forgotten why.” Her lips curled upward at the corners, in fond nostalgia — then collapsed back into a frown. “But a missing person? A body?” Kuro shook her head. “Impossible. Every human being at Factory Head was of incalculable value. There were no ‘undesirables’, no ‘subhumans’. I could not have gotten away with it. Had to go elsewhere.” She began to nod, taking a deep breath. “Had to go kill a hiver.”
Ooni nodded along. She had no idea what Kuro was talking about, but nodding seemed the right thing to do.
Kuro carried on, eyes drifting aside as she continued.
“I started by stealing a lifter, for transport, from the factory systems. Could have taken a bike or a real hopper pod, but those would have drawn more attention from actual people. So, pulled a lifter, erased all the logging. Didn’t tell anybody where I was going, or that I was going at all. I had to pull a complex hack, make the systems think I was in my quarters for two whole days. Had a circle of fuckbuddies and special friends, kept them out with a lie about being deep in meditation. Once I was ready, I had to pilot the lifter past the perimeter on manual.” Kuro’s lips curled upward again. “Nobody had touched the perimeter systems for decades. All those guns and walls and anti-air bubbles, all pointing outward, not fired a shot in half a century. Minefields, hidden bunker complexes, whole legions of combat bots on standby. But I made it through alright. Didn’t wake up any killer robots. Got pinged by a concerned Def-Syst Agent, all worried about a human heading out alone. But I hacked it and made it not see me. That was fine. Then I went north.”
Kuro fell silent, staring at the black metal wall, her strange red eyes very far away. Ooni swallowed. Kuro still didn’t respond.
“North?” Ooni risked.
“North, yeah,” Kuro said softly. “North. Into the empty. Did three hours on manual just for the hell of it, then set the lifter to auto and drifted off in the driver’s seat. There wasn’t much to see, just scrub and bush, red soil for mile after mile, low hills. After a few hours I got a good view of the coral mountains to the west, but you could see those well enough from Factory Head.” Kuro shrugged, the shoulders of her powered armour rising and falling with a gentle whine. “That wasn’t what I was there for. I was there to find a hiver.” Kuro took a deep breath and sat up straighter, towering over Ooni inside her armour. “Rode the lifter for about twelve hours when I realised I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. Nobody from Factory Head had come that far north in generations. I started to feel … odd. Like I was a space traveller or something, out there in the stars. What was I expecting? Hivers just wandering around, ripe for the picking?” She shook her head. “I didn’t go far enough to see the hives themselves. I wasn’t that stupid, or that desperate. It would be another … thirty years? Mm. Another thirty years before I’d see the hives themselves. I just wanted to catch a stray.”
Kuro took a deep breath and let it out slowly; Ooni realised with numb shock that Kuro’s lips were trembling.
“It was dawn when I spotted them.” Kuro’s voice trembled too, just like her lips. “I assumed they were out foraging, or hunting wild game, something like that. A fool’s assumption. The hives didn’t need to hunt and gather. But I thought … hunting, right, because they all had these spears made of extruded chitin. I thought they were just bone or something. They were standing on a low ridge, silhouetted against the sky.” Kuro raised a gauntlet and gestured at nothing. “They didn’t have to fear predators. They didn’t fear anything. This was their domain, and they’d seen nothing like me for decades.”
Kuro’s eyes were wide. When she stopped speaking, her lips hung open.
Ooni said: “And?”
Kuro swallowed. “When I looked at them through the lifter’s cameras, I was … confused.” Kuro squinted and shook her head inside her helmet, as if reliving the moment. “They didn’t look like the pictures and videos of hivers I’d seen. I don’t mean that I’d found something else, they were hivers, I wasn’t mistaken. But they just weren’t … weren’t what I’d expected to see, and I wasn’t sure what I’d expected. They were standing upright, backs straight, expressions composed, watching me approach in the lifter. They had this mottled skin, red and white, with fur down their backs and all over the rear of their legs and arms. It took me a long time to realise why they looked so odd to me.” Kuro suddenly turned her head and stared directly into Ooni’s eyes. “Do you know why?”
Ooni shook her head. “No. No, I-I don’t.”
“I’d never seen an unaugmented human before.”
“Oh … ”
“Everyone at Factory Head was augmented. I had two extra arms, skin art, some bionics. Everybody was covered with them. The most recent birth was seventeen years ago, so I’d never seen a fresh baby, either. The factory jacks, they were encrusted with machinery too. But the hivers?” Kuro’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Nothing. Untouched. Natural.”
Ooni stayed silent. Kuro trailed off, then sat up straight again, nodding to herself.
“I drove the lifter right at the hivers on the ridge. Straight on, charging them. They scattered. I picked one to run down. Not the slowest or the weakest, that wasn’t what I wanted. I picked one who ran fast. A female, young, fit. If hivers were humans, she would have been in her twenties. I turned the lifter and ran her down. I’d planned to bump her with the front of the machine, just enough to knock the wind out of her and keep her down for long enough so I could get to her. But she turned at the last second and levelled that spear. Bone against metal, I thought. Or I didn’t think. Ha … ”
Kuro smiled to herself, flashing metal teeth, eyes distant.
“The spear wasn’t bone, it was hiver chitin. She rammed the end into the ground and let the momentum of the lifter carry it onto the point. Tore through the front bumper like a blowtorch through butter. Punched the chassis, went right into the engine block, then out into the driver’s compartment. Missed me by a foot or two. I panicked, slewed the lifter, hit her with the side, harder than I’d intended to. Broke one of her legs. She went down, but the lifter was broken too.”
Kuro let out a huge sigh. The smile was gone.
“I’d had a plan, you see. Tranq the hiver, pull her onto the lifter, then speed back south. Find somewhere quiet, wait for her to wake up, then do to her the kinds of things I’d done to the factory jacks. But this time with screaming and … and … and all of it.” Kuro’s eyes were wide and staring, her breath ragged, almost panting. “But she’d wrecked the lifter, and she was screaming, and … and when I jumped down out of the lifter … ” She shook her head. “We’d always been taught the hivers were small, stunted, muties. That’s how they made them look in all the old footage. And they were short and small, that’s true. She … ” Kuro faltered. “She was no more than four feet tall. But she was muscled like a crocodile. Must have weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. Dense bones, lots of muscle. Long hair, real long. Purple, like oil on water. She was beautiful. And she’d wrecked my ride. She’d already won.”
Kuro went silent. The silence stretched on, filled with the static of the storm beyond the tomb.
“Did you … ?”
Kuro looked right at Ooni again. “I couldn’t do it. Not in the way I wanted. She was a human, you understand? Hivers, they were just human beings. Different. Drifted far from factory stock. Eusocial, whatever. But they were humans. She, the hiver, she fought like a human. I didn’t expect that, and I wasn’t ready for it. All I’d done were factory jacks. She fought like a cornered animal, ‘cos that’s what we all are. Cornered animals. And I couldn’t do it. She spat and hissed and bit. Got my hands around her throat, but then she … she spoke. Spat words at me. Insults, probably. But words.” Kuro shook her head again, cushioned inside her armour. “Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do it.”
“But … you did kill her.”
Kuro pulled her lips back, hesitant and jerking, as if in memory of a snarl. The expression subsided. “Mm. Left her on the ground. Got my gun from the lifter. Shot her in the head. Felt like nothing. By that point the other hivers were sprinting back, waving their spears. I shot at them to drive them away. They followed me for a week, back south. That was … a different story. Too long. I made it back, but … ”
“But?”
Kuro eased back, growing calm again, eyes still far away. “The hive remembered me. That’s how it worked. Not those ones, those specific hivers, but the hive itself. The hive had a long memory. That’s how I died in the end. Hive got me. Revenge for a murder.”
Kuro lapsed into a heavy silence, then suddenly jerked upright and stared at Ooni, eyes wide and manic.
“Last night, I saw her ghost,” Kuro said. “The hiver woman I killed, an eternity ago.”
“T-that’s— okay, Kuro, okay—”
“She came to me. The others couldn’t see her, not even Yolanda. I thought she was a hallucination, but she was real. She spoke to me in that hiver language, and this time I understood every word. She gave me the code structure for this.” Kuro tapped the black metal floor with a fingertip of her gauntlet. “Told me the secrets of moving the ferrofluid. And then she forgave me. Imagine that, Ooni. Forgiving a serial killer. Forgiving your own murderer.”
Ooni expected Kuro to laugh; the old Kuro would have laughed, cruel and sadistic, hissing with static inside her helmet.
This Kuro just stared, and somehow that was worse.
Ooni struggled for words. “I … I don’t—”
Kuro leaned forward. Ooni cringed away, pressing herself against the wall, trying to turn her head aside. Kuro reached out and took Ooni by the chin, gently but firmly, the strength of her suit impossible to resist. She turned Ooni until their eyes met again. Her lips were parted, showing those metal teeth.
“This storm is full of ghosts,” Kuro said. “They’re all around us, all the time, watching us, inside us. Ghosts, Ooni. Ghosts.”
“Okay, okay, okay, I believe you, I believe—”
“They want things from us. I don’t understand what, or why. Why would my first victim forgive me? Why would she think that was something I wanted? Why would she do that? Why?”
Ooni whimpered, trying to turn her head away, but Kuro would not let her.
Kuro had not truly changed; she had simply been using Ooni, unburdening herself of the irreconcilable contradiction caused by the appearance of this ‘ghost’. Now the process was reaching a climax — the responsibility for resolving this paradox was passed to Ooni, and Kuro demanded an answer.
“Why did she do that, Ooni? Why did she do that?”
“I don’t, I don’t know, Kuro,” Ooni panted. “I don’t—”
Kuro yanked Ooni’s head forward, then slammed it backward, against the black metal of the wall.
Pain blossomed in Ooni’s skull like a wave of fire, chased by a heave of nausea, leaving behind a scoured landscape as her vision blurred with tears. She gasped for breath, straining against the metal band around her belly, but there was no escape.
Kuro’s face filled Ooni’s vision, metal teeth parted, red eyes burning.
“Why would a ghost forgive me, Ooni? Why would she give me the secrets of the tomb? Why do that, why give me anything?” Her hand tightened on Ooni’s jaw; if Ooni could not answer, Kuro would start to break her. “Why? Ooni? Why? Why would she—”
“Because—” Ooni spluttered.
Kuro’s grip loosened. “ … yes?”
“Because … because … ”
Kuro’s grip tightened again; she could tell Ooni was just stalling. “Ooni. Why?”
“Because, I— I don’t— Kuro, st— I don’t—”
Kuro’s face loomed closer, blotting out the little black chamber, filling Ooni’s vision with her pinkish skin. Her metal teeth parted, jaw opening wide; she was going to clamp down on Ooni’s offending lips and bite them off Ooni’s face. A scream started to claw its way upward from Ooni’s guts. Ooni pushed at the band of metal around her belly and slapped at the front of Kuro’s armour, but she was so weak. She tried to get her fingers inside Kuro’s helmet, but Kuro’s other hand shot out and clamped around her wrist. In her peripheral vision Ooni saw Ilyusha’s eyes snap open with alarm, but Ilyusha could not do anything to help.
Ooni screamed, right into Kuro’s open maw.
“Because Telokopolis is forever!”
Kuro paused.
Ooni panted for breath. She did not know where the words had come from.
Kuro closed her mouth, withdrew her hand, and sat back.
“Telokopolis,” Kuro echoed. “You said that earlier. Yolanda’s superhuman said it as well. ‘Elpida’. Telokopolis. What does that mean, Ooni? Tell me what that means.”