Chapter Eighteen

Krodaw was not one city. It was two. Two towns, really, that had grown together slowly and painfully over the years, tendrils stretching from one to the other, roads pumping support to sustain both partners... the colonial town on one side, and the old town on the other. A freeport that had become so profitable, so powerful, that it inevitably eclipsed its original partner. Carza had only really seen the colonial town, with its hodgepodge buildings, omnipresent guards, perpetual artillery fire, and the glimmering windows of the governor's palace perpetually in sight. Cobbled streets and curfews. Now, as they trotted quietly down a long, long road, she clung a little closer to Lirana, making sure that nothing could make her fall off. Because if she did... well, she had to admit being a little alarmed at the possibilities. This part of town was a mix of small buildings of varying styles... and tents. So many tents. She'd seen scraps of this, but never anything... intense. Refugees had been coming here for days now, months. Supposedly the Sleepless had a single-minded focus on winning, and anyone who opposed their victory by resisting or simply not joining up was treated as the enemy. As a moral enemy, the kind that could be killed, tortured, brutalised... anything was acceptable.

And that meant that people either joined up, handed over all their goods to support the war effort, or simply... ran. And where could they go? Another principality of this strange land? The nearest ones were miles away, through dangerous territory swarming with vengeful Sleepless. Another region entirely? The problem was only magnified. And thus... Krodaw. All came to Krodaw. Arguably a victim of its own success, grown too large, grown too much of a target, grown to be the one remaining place which could actually hold the tide of refugees. A village of nearly a million people, maybe more, they said. No way of counting them. No way of caring for them. Sometimes the Sleepless attacked, and when they did, they never went for the colonial centre - too well-guarded. They went for the refugees, because that inspired panic, resentment, fear. All the things which were hard to control in a tightly-packed and half-starved population. The soldiers clustered tightly, and kept their hands on their weapons. They knew where this could go. The tents approached, all of them threadbare and overcrowded, locals sitting sullenly outside, some cooking things. Though Founder knew what they were cooking - the soldiers said the rats had been eaten a while back.

If they were eating mutants... Founder preserve them.

The surest vector for catastrophic mutation was consuming contaminated meat.

In short: don't eat the mutants. No matter how fat and healthy they look, no matter how many there are, you never ate them. There were stories about that, rhymes they were told as children. Do not drink the sweet waters, do not eat the mutant meat, do not breathe their fetid air, do not kiss their rotten cheeks. A restaurant serving mouldy food could expect scandal. A restaurant serving rat-gnawed or maggot-infested food could expect closure and jail time. A restaurant serving mutant meat could expect to be burned to the ground, the owners hung by the necks until dead before being burned themselves, and the waiting staff would be subject to numerous examinations. Failure would mean being mercifully shot in the head... unless they were complicit in the mutant meat being served, in which case, hanging, burning, all in public. No-one did it. Because no-one was that much of a moron. Even the urchins knew to steer clear.

Carza, sheltered in the Court as she was, wasn't enough of an idiot to eat a damn mutant, but... no, no, try not to judge. Try to relate. To be empathetic. If, hypothetically speaking, she was starving, if the choice was madness a decade from now, or starvation a week from now... she didn't know what she'd choose. But she shivered nonetheless, and reached for the gas mask at her waist, sturdy, heavy, and probably stifling in this heat. For once, the war became more than ominous rumours and the low thump-thump-thump of heavy artillery in the distance. It became... well, close. She saw a group of crouched children passing around a cigarillo, staring bored into the mud and occasionally muttering something to one another. A man stood nearby, staring at the riders as he leant against a wall... and she saw that he was suffering from the first stages. His iris had begun to split. She heard that was one of the first signs.

Itching of the stomach due to painful crystalline growths as the body struggled and failed to purge contaminants.

Changing in the voice as the vocal chords were altered due to inhalation of contaminated particles. Often a slight whistle, or a dim whine, something to indicate that the voice was now operating on wavelengths not intended for humans.

Insomnia without the negative symptoms, perpetual wakefulness and alertness broken every few days by periods of lower activity, but never true rest.. No dreams.

Hybridisation with surrounding fauna/flora and internal infections.

Splitting of the irises as the eyes began to adjust for newer and more refined methods of seeing. Some people spoke of seeing shadows at the corner of their vision - readings from senses they were still adjusting to. Maybe he could see the blood in their veins. Maybe he could see heat radiating from them. Maybe he could see the sounds they made, from every spoken word to every pulsing contraction of the heart.

But then he walked away, and the ideas were gone.

No idea if he'd go insane and spread more panic as time went on. That was how it started - mutants got into an area, they fought, hunted, were killed... sometimes they hunted normal people, but mostly one another. They wanted to harvest the contamination, harvest the putrid material from the bones and flesh of their kin to enhance themselves. When all other neural functions degraded, that was what remained. Acquisition and growth. The two concerns. Even breeding was taken off the table, mutants were invariably infertile. So that meant... purely selfish growth, with no real goal in mind beyond being bigger, and eventually, too big for anyone else to kill. That was it. That was all. But no mutant ate everything. So the contamination could spread from corpses. Soak into the earth with their blood, and in bad cases, could infest the air more... cohesively. This place had foundation stone and root-dust, but that was it - it prevented springs from coming up from underground, but overground? Nothing. The only thing that could stop that was a loaded gun, a high wall, and enough fire to choke the skies with smoke.

And no-one was giving a bunch of half-starved desperate people guns.

And the soldiers who did get guns were dropping like flies.

And the children were playing in the streets from the jellied fuel they'd stolen from the trains. She watched them with alarm, and nudged Lirana until she sent the horse cantering far around them. Bottles of the stuff, traded from child to child and child to adult. Their hands were streaked, their faces were stained, their clothes were sodden with huge splashes of the stuff. It was monstrous - she could see children with fuel-stained hands lighting up cigarillos and passing them around. A second away from immolating themselves. And based on the lack of reaction from the soldiers, either they didn't notice, or this was too common. Maybe it was just desperation. People wanted anything they could use to defend themselves... or the Sleepless could want any amount of highly volatile flammable material. Imagine the terror they could sow with something like that... tooth removal, amputations, infections, those were all good for terror. But burns? Burns were visible. Burns never truly went away. Burns were incapacitating and ludicrously painful. Maybe some of these hollow-eyed local children would be giving over their full bottles of fuel to the people trying to kill the city. Anything for a crust of bread.

Maybe the governor was right. There'd be no Krodaw to return to when they were heading back home. In that case... Shan was going to make a lot of money out of this expedition. Not like they had many other choices. Carza huddled close, and watched cautiously as the town slid by, buildings overwhelmed by temporary dwellings and crowds of people sitting listlessly, soaking up the heat and trying to conserve their energy. She was surprised at... well, she expected there to be more anger amongst them. More irritation at the soldiers coming through, maybe a few barked accusations or insults, but... just staring. Just quiet, solemn stares. The captain of the platoon was nearby, and he took a quick swig from his canteen, before turning to Carza.

"Scholars, huh?"

Majar Jovan's civisprach passed his lips, and Carza could understand him. Good. Her practice was paying off.

"Yes. Scholars."

"You look nervous, what, seeing something you don't like? My duty to protect you, so you tell me if anything's wrong, hm?"

Lirana looked over, frowning slightly.

"They're quiet today, aren't they? Thought they'd be louder, angry about food, but... they're so quiet."

The captain barked a quick laugh.

"A little! A little, yes. It's the exhaustion, you see. There were food riots back a few months ago... not any more. People are hungry, hot, tired... artillery fire and paranoia keeps them up at night. For a while, that makes you angry. Very angry. Then you just get tired. Very tired. And once that happens... out like a light, poof. Attrition, you know? And... well, the Sleepless are keeping the peace."

Carza blinked.

"Really?"

"Of course! We're surrounded by their agents now, I'm sure of it. But they won't attack. They like using these people as cover, and these people won't attack each other because you never know if you're going to piss off the entire damn organisation that forced you here in the first place. Sleepless attack them, we attack back and protect the people, we get more popular, maybe more people join us, bad for Sleepless, hm? People attack Sleepless, even by accident, Sleepless retaliate, and no-one wants to get scalped. Little violence, little terror, always a few probes, a few gunshots from the forest that clip a few of our guys, a few of the civilians. But otherwise... peace."

Carza shivered.

"I... see. So... it's a balancing act."

"Balance! Yes! Very good command of my language, very good. You learn quick. And yes, balance. All of us are in... harmony. Ain't that what the new church teaches? Harmony between the disparate, unity among the disunited. Well, we got our own unity here, and it's not the kind built on brotherly love. More... uh... sisterly hate, huh? Opposite? For now, we have sisterly hate and lovely peace. Soon, we will fight and kill. Soon, there will be no rats to eat. Soon, no more mutants too! Soon, tiredness becomes killer, worse than Sleepless. At least Sleepless just kill and torture, you know? But once you're tired... mind goes, everything goes, decay, anger, outbursts, no-one thinks straight, boom, chaos. And then the Sleepless come in force, when there's no more shells to fire or no-one left to fire them or no mechanism to do the damn job."

He shrugged lightly.

"Then we all run or die. But until then... balance! Ha!"

The shivers recommenced. Even Lirana seemed wary. There was... she realised as she walked that there was no damn wall surrounding Krodaw. There were barricades, the occasional established barrier or... well, fencing, but that was it. There was nothing truly resembling a genuine castle wall, which she had thought was mandatory for this sort of place. ALD IOM had walls. Loads of them. Courts had huge compounds with high walls, every structure was reinforced, everyone knew at one point that violence was inevitable and made ready for it. Slate's houses always looked like they were ready to resist a siege. And to see nothing... it unnerved her. It unnerved her a lot, and made her feel even more exposed.

Technology declined as they rode onwards. The governor's palace had a cooling system, the morgue had theurgic lighting strips... and the road had started out with attractive cobbled stones, before giving way to clumsily placed slabs supporting a layer of dirt, to simply dirt, to churned mud, to undergrowth. The buildings went from stone to wood to cloth. The windows went from existent to broken to non-existent in the first place. And the forest was coming closer, sometimes intruding into the settlement. There were no defences against the Sleepless, not really. The captain was gone, but Lirana spoke quietly. Become much more polite towards Carza ever since she'd drunkenly bawled into her shoulder. And... Hull had become more friendly after getting drunk with her once or twice...

She hoped this wasn't some kind of proof that alcohol made her a competent social creature, or at least made her perceived as such.

Maybe it was nerves, too. They were heading into the wilds, and the last thing any of them wanted was to be at one another's throats. Egg kept clenching his jaw, though. Still dwelling on his friend's death... but willing to stick this out.

"No walls, huh."

Carza nodded.

"No walls. Odd. I thought…"

She trailed off. Lirana nodded her head firmly, coming to a conclusion and settling on it despite a lack of evidence. She'd made for a good academic - she came to conclusions and would find stuff to support it later. Made it much easier to write essays, in Carza's experience. Which was probably why she was out here instead of producing works of effortless genius.

"Bombs, I think. This place doesn't have many theurgists, but... they know how to make bombs. Walls just become liabilities at that point. More things for the Sleepless to destroy, more rubble to scatter, more chaos to spark. Easier to just keep guards around to defend key points. When the chaos starts, this place will go first, guards won't even try to keep it. Retreat to the colonial centre, where they actually have some level of control... and can manage the evacuation."

Silence.

There was silence.

The artillery strikes had stopped. The forest was quiet. The settlement was... nothing. Like a hurricane had passed through and swept all the people away, but left the buildings miraculously untouched. This wasn't hell - it was too quiet for hell. Hell was noisy, hell was surreal, hell was a chorus of screams and burning and nonsense. This was just... the world. It was a world giving up, allowing the Sleepless to take it when the time came. it was a settlement curled up into a ball, waiting for the end. Sweat trickled down her skin, her tiny gold bracelets jangled slightly, and she kept going. The forest merged with the settlement at the furthest extremes, trees growing into buildings and buildings scattering into the trees like soldiers fleeing a lost battle. The forest was marching on Krodaw, and it was winning - because the Sleepless had no reason to give up, and the colonials had ever reason to. She wondered how many rounds of ammunition these soldiers had. How many thousands? And how many Sleepless? How many Sleepless sympathisers, agents, pepole who could claim innocence and a second later could turn around and start fighting the good fight once again?

How many could they kill?

And how many could the Sleepless afford to lose?

They were already butchering their own countrymen, recruiting them forcibly or driving them out violently. They were torturing, practising every dirty tactic in the book, planting stakes and pulling out teeth, doing everything in their power to hurt the occupiers...

The forest welcomed them. The realm of the Sleepless.

* * *

Silence. And green.

And heat.

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The leaves trapped the heat, the earth could only soak up so much, and between the two, an oven was created. The horses immediately started to bow their heads lower, and stumbled down the long dirt tracks Shan directed them along. Any sight of the mountains was lost, now all that remained was the road and the horses and the green gloom. One step in front of the other - the only destination in sight. Well, at least it wasn't her feet marching, right? Horse was taking care of that. Frothy. Frothy, who might decide to eat a human if it thought that grass was no longer nutritious enough. And what was she going to do, run? it was a horse, they were good at running and scaring her and she imagined very little else. Well, hauling stuff too. But she was mostly focused on the part which could immediately threaten her life and limbs. She was thin, her arms could be chomped off with depressing ease by this thing.

It wasn't convenient to learn that she disliked horses while in the middle of a horse-based expedition.

Gah.

She turned to Hull, slung over another horse and gripping to a grizzled-looking Anthan. A quick switch to Tralkic, and they were ready to go.

"So..."

"Yep."

"...holding up?"

"Mostly. You?"

"Surviving."

"Good to know."

Silence. Their words were swallowed by the forest. They wandered deep, and the silence was all-consuming. The paths were narrow, forcing them to go in single-file, one horse behind the other. Canteens were sipped from carefully by the soldiers, but Carza had to resist gulping each time she reached for her own. No food, not yet. They rode for hours into the dark, and the sound of insects was tremendous - mostly because nothing else was breaking it. Vicious snarls of flies clustered around the heads of their horses, and she could see ears twitching up and down the line as the horses fought their own war. They were normal flies, but still unpleasant. Big black bodies and wings that whirred, like some of the airships she'd heard rumours about, seen pictures of. They attacked senselessly and relentlessly. What could they stand to gain from this? What possible... she slapped at one, and her hand came away red with blood, and black with smeared chitin.

Bloodsuckers.

She remembered the governor's story about Fidelizh trying to settle this region, and giving up because their bows rotted out of their hands and disease wiped out the few stubborn folk that lingered. And now the current colony had succeeded in overpowering the distance, the disease, the local fauna... and now the people were driving them out. They'd graduated, and the certificate of their success was a less embarrassing reason for their failure. And here she was - surrounded by bloodsuckers, and no matter how many were warded off or killed, more would come, and eventually... Egg called over from his horse, voice strained - his neck was a solid red collar where he'd been slapping away at the damn things.

"They say these things can smother deer! Hey-"

He spat, a fly buzzing away angrily.

"These things, they grow from the mud, they live in the pools between the trees. Most? Small, most don't even have stomachs, my girl, nothing digestive. All just a cavity for blood. But they bite. Oh, do they bite. Only live for a few days - price of travelling at this time of year, eh?"

How was he so damn cheerful? His smile was strained, sure, but... he was still talking loudly and confidently, he still had the same boisterous good humour as usual. She wasn't sure whether to be impressed or alarmed, but she certainly couldn't quite see him as the same anthropologically interesting fellow on the train, who'd seemed the most outgoing and reasonable of her hires. The soldiers barely seemed to notice. They'd wait for the insects to settle on any exposed flesh, piling up... before sweeping a hand over smoothly and dispassionately, coming away with red-stained gloves and a mass of welters along the skin, smears of black chitin that seemed like the stripes of some exotic animal. Supposedly they'd be gone by tomorrow morning. Quick to come, quick to fade. And that felt like a parable. They rode for hours until stopping in a clearing some distance away from the spawning pools of those damned flies, and dined sparsely on chunks of concentrated food - pressed pieces of fruit, vegetables, meat, and blood sausage that the locals apparently loved. Hard to contaminate, they said. Not sure if that was true, but they tasted decent enough, she had to say. The soldiers seemed surprised at how much she enjoyed it, actually.

Blood sausage was a strange dish in Mahar Jovan. In ALD IOM, it was damn near omnipresent. Couldn't get away from blood sausage. Court of Horn had brought over the practice, Hull noted, from their home country where things were leaner and any source of food had to be viciously exploited for anyone to survive longer than a few months, let alone hundreds of continuous generations. As they sat, a few guards munching quietly as they pointed guns into the undergrowth at the slightest movement... one of the local girls came over. She looked out-of-place in her colonial uniform, and her face had a sardonic look to it mostly gained from a huge scar marking part of her face. A bullet, grazing her jawline. Or so it seemed. She crouched, resting easily without straining her knees - an art that Carza wished she could learn. Crouching made her feel three times her actual age, the way her knees burned...

"Oy-oy. New girl, ha?"

A fusion of Mahar Jovan civisprach and the local tongue. Interesting. Carza nodded, and Hull leant back into the soil and gave a broad smile, acting the debonair once again. The girl grinned.

"You... come here for study, ha?"

...ha? Maybe an indicator of a formal question? Not all languages worked on inflection to suggest a query. Hm.

"Yes. Study."

Keep it simple.

Not just because she didn't feel like talking.

The girl laughed quickly, and cut off just as soon.

"Good time to come! Good time to go, too. You want stories? Some scholars like stories."

The girl bobbed a little as she rested on her... well, unsure where the centre of gravity lay in her perpetual crouch, but wherever it was, she was swaying on it. Barely Carza's age, maybe a year or so younger. Her grin was fixed, glued. Like she'd forgotten how to do anything besides it.

Hull coughed.

"I'm... sure those would be interesting. But we're interested in stories over the mountains."

Oh, she loved him and one day she would marry him in contravention of tradition in order to raise a generation of effortlessly social, gloriously self-sacrificing children. And from her they would inherit actual intelligence and dashing good lucks. Alright. Joke was over. She was glad Hull had diverted things. She was interested in this, obviously, but... she was done doing anthropology when she didn't need to. No matter how much the pulse of interest in her stomach tried to convince her otherwise, already formulating questions and queries. The girl processed the response, hummed... then leant on her rifle like it was a walking stick, rocked back and forth idly, and began to talk.

"You get out at a good time. Very good time. Bad time for us, no?"

She leant in, whispering.

"You want to know about officers who sell guns to Sleepless? They like the money, more than that, they like the safety. Hey, I hear that Sleepless? Whole bunch are just spooks from other states, come over to fuck with us, ha! Is good? Is good. Governor bring good times, though. Good guy. Old guy? Not so good. Sit in palace, call himself god, love himself and all the women we can bring, ha. You know, one officer, little girl, he had a whole unit. Big unit! Names and all. Fake. Total fake. Charged their salaries, then bought himself a bunch of whores and cocaine and died ass-up in a river, me, I saw it, put a bullet on his naked cheeks. Pop, little eye on one. Pop, little eye on the other. Looked like tits, huh? Like pair of tits, big old red-"

"I understand."

"You like?"

"No."

"You like, you just not say. You, big boy? You like?"

"It's... definitely got a quality of morbid humour to it."

"He like. You like. I like. I'm very funny. You from that place up north, ha? Maybe I'll go there after this is over. Got me some enemies round these parts, some bad bad boys and bad bad girls... me, I'm the sort of bad girl who puts a bullet in your ass-cheek, those guys? Those bad bad guys? Little girl, they do things to you, things they'd hang me for doing if I did it in this uniform. And, you know, if I had a cock."

She grinned loosely, and pulled a pistol out of her jacket - tiny, didn't look standard-issue.

"This? One bullet. One for me. Sleepless do not like us 'defectors'. They like the lady defectors worse. Real angry at us, and when they get angry, they get in moods. Easier to just pop, take yourself out. You should pack some heat too, new scholar-girl. You won't like what they do to women."

Carza shivered, and the girl seemed to take some kind of enjoyment in her discomfort. Marana, now her. Founder, was this whole damn place obsessed with making her feel uncomfortable? Must be something in the air. Maybe in the insects. Or the food. And now she'd been exposed to all three... when she got back home, she'd probably qualify as a legitimate sadist, perhaps even a diagnosable psychopath. This girl would certainly be considered very, very, very unstable. Her voice when she replied was quiet. Cautious.

"How long until Krodaw falls?"

"A year."

She shrugged.

"Two weeks."

She leaned closer.

"Today and now, ha?"

She strolled away with a hoarse laugh. The other local-women-turned-soldiers were currently lounging underneath a statue, half-buried in the trees. A man wearing the dress of a colonial soldier... one of his arms was snapped off, exposing the metal frame underneath the concrete, and the weather had worn away the inscription underneath. Sobering to think that Krodaw had once had territory out here, maybe enough power to turn this patch of forest into a place where statues were necessary. And now? Nothing. She couldn't even make out his face - the metal had rusted over, and turned a sickly green from which no features could escape. Only a crater for a nose, two hollow pits bursting with lichen instead of eyes, and a mouth curled into a haughty scowl... a scowl which protruded a little from the face, and now dripped with loose spiderwebs. A type of spider that made dangling, tassel-like webs... reminded her of the strips of repellent paper that were hung around the Court of Ivory to stop the moths from eating their way through their libraries. Hull gave her a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder.

"Just trying to piss us off, I think. Or scare us. Both."

Carza checked her pistol nonetheless. Loaded. And she could hardly miss herself. She spoke quietly.

"Shoot me if they catch me, please."

"If you'll do the same for me, eh?"

"Agreed."

Lunch ended. And they continued their ride. Dark thoughts on her mind, clouding her eyes. Her gun was never far from her hand... but at least the insects had stopped. The local girl ahead was laughing with her colleagues. At least, for the first few minutes. Then the laughter died. They knew the stakes, they knew it keenly. They were in a position where they could be seriously brutalised by the Sleepless... it was a miracle that they'd been sent out at all. A cruel miracle. A very cruel miracle indeed. But here they were, and she saw that all three had means of killing themselves before the enemy could extract any satisfaction from them.

All of a sudden, one of the soldiers held up his hand, and brandished a small metal tool. It was a theurgic thing, and while in ALD IOM it was ludicrously expensive, out here it was... marginally more common. Metal and specially treated wood, with a humble dial in the middle. And a tiny whistle. A whistle that was slowly rising in pitch as they advanced. She knew this thing - it was designed to detect contamination. Inside the device was a... she thought it was called a 'circuit', something the theurgists adored, apparently. She understood none of it. But the circuit was connected up to some container with a little water inside, and contamination somehow made the circuit... warmer?

No idea.

But it made a whistle go off, rather like a kettle. Needed to be topped up frequently with more water, but in this case, it worked just fine. Cheap, and required minimal maintenance... here, at least. In ALD IOM, the art was still being perfected. And the whistle was rising. A slow scream that told them they were entering a danger zone. The gas mask was on her face before she could think, the stifling interior surrounding her, vision reduced down to what the goggles allowed. All she could hear was her own breathing, and the rasp of air through the filters. Her smell was almost entirely overwhelmed by strange, strange herbs. Filters were made of them, dried and compacted into flat, latticed disks. Twyre, Heleme root, lesser spithwhip... but they couldn't dampen her nervousness, not with all the intensity they could muster in their herby selves. A spring would be near here. The captain rode closer, his gas mask making him look like some sort of humanoid elephant - a long tube connected his mask to his belt. Military model - no need to change the filters, just load all of them in and process them one at a time, each one disengaging as it was worn theough. Good system. She felt a little envious. His voice was a muffled roar, like the crashing of distant waves.

"Contaminants. Spring must've opened up. Want to see?"

She hesitated... and shook her head firmly.

Not seeing the outcrops of the great underground rivers which pumped contamination into the world beyond. Being close was one thing, getting in diving distance felt suicidal. They were outside the protection of the foundation stone, and had entered the realms of the rotten. She remembered what Marle had rambled about. The underground rivers... and she wondered what swam in them. What lurked in the depths, with nothing but glorious mutagenic contamination all around. The captain barked out a quick laugh, yelled something to his men, and the train was back on its way.

The intimacy of the forest only grew.

She was trapped in her mask.

She could hear only her own breathing and the thump-thump-thump-thump of hooves in soft earth.

An invisible barrier had been crossed, she could feel it. The stink of contamination was in the air - sweet and sour, like a confectioner's shop rotting in summer heat, but with a crackle that reminded her of alcohol. Like champagne was bubbling into her nose, accompanied by cloying syrup. Never smelled it this strongly before... the spring must be close, and new. They moved fast. Mutants would be here, and while they would initially be afraid of humans... or at least, they'd recognise the power of the rifle, eventually hunger would overpower everything else, and they'd be torn to shreds. The only defence was that the spring would be much, much more attractive than any little human, or even their fattest horse. Speaking of whom - the soldiers were digging out special masks for the horses, who accepted them with grumbling resignation. They looked like things out of a nightmare - clattering things in the low mist of the forest, eyes hidden by black disks, faces turned into monstrous masks by the addition of leather and paper, by the dangling filter which stretched them out further than was strictly natural.

They walked, wheezing and half-blind, through the corroding mists. The spring would be gone soon. Soon. Mutants would flock, and consume every drop. The earth would shift, the spring would cease. The mutants would leave. Airborne contaminants would be drunk up by mutant flora, or simply dispersed, settling to the ground and being eaten by mutant fauna. A spring was dangerous to people near it... and who were unlucky enough to be in the way of a mutant on its way to drink.

And they were too, too close... and she sure as hell didn't feel lucky.

Carza kept checking her exposed flesh for mutations. Skin tags. Warts. Hard growths as flesh developed into tougher material, like leather, scales, unknown substances. Dermal teratomas - little bulging mounds of teeth or random cells that emerged out of her. The glitter of crystallised contaminants settling...

...no, the mutations would be slower than this, nothing for a while after exposure, unless it was truly intense. And she still had her clippers. She was fine. Just... had to get through this without panicking too much. She was surrounded by strangers wearing the clothes of her companions. Changelings that had masks for faces, and black glass instead of eyes, that had killed her allies and replaced them and surrounded her on all sides, and...

Calm. Down.

She was fine. Focus on her breathing. Her loud, loud breathing.

They rode...

And halted.

She wanted to scream at them. Keep going, morons. Keep going, until their devices stopped whistling and they were free of this damn haze and the threat of mutation and... and...

She stared.

A barrier had been crossed. A border had been invaded. And now they were no longer in their own world.

Bodies.

The Sleepless had left them some welcome gifts.

Carza couldn't look away.

A dozen, maybe. Men and women. A hut stood in a clearing, which had once perhaps served some small purpose, maybe operated for a farm, or served as a place for soldiers to rest in the shade and water themselves. There was even a small well nearby, but the water had risen up and was choked with algae. She kept staring at the thatched roof of the hut. Rotting, of course, and scorched... but it had been laid with care. Designed by someone who truly cared about what they were building. And underneath, on a low wooden platform... someone had made the arrangements. Twelve heads in a row. Tongues stuck out, and nailed down to the wood. Eyes pecked away by the birds, or torn out by their killers. Impossible to say. Ears removed... and most of their teeth taken. The shattering pattern of the few remaining teeth made it seem like someone had cracked them out one by one for some unknown purpose.

Their scalps had been taken.

One by one by one.

Red patches where hair and forehead had been. Nothing underneath. Just... red, with hints of white where the bone began. Bone carved with a geometric symbol that she found hard to describe.

Carza felt sick.

The bodies had been disassembled, piece by piece by piece.

Fingers arrayed in front of the heads, a parody of a picket fence, secured in place with more nails. Arms and legs hung from the trees, dripping slowly where life still lingered enough for there to be liquid blood. The flesh, what was left of it after carrion eaters, was mottled purple with bruises, and stained with some kind of poison that turned the veins a corpse-green, and spread outwards in awful brown patches which made her think of horse hide. Poison. Necrosis induced by poison.

...and she wondered, in a dim part of her mind which was still rational...

How long had this taken them?

It would've been recent. Had to be. The bodies were still stinking. The bones were barely visible, flesh still lingered despite the best efforts of the scavengers. And... and that meant the Sleepless would've been here recently. When the spring was up. The whistling of the contamination detectors was rising to a scream, like a woman was howling in grief at the sight of the things on that wooden platform in front of the small hut, with its carefully made thatched roof charred with soot and flecked with rotten matter. The air had been contaminated when they were here... even with a gas mask, that was dangerous. Sleepless. Incapable of sleep. She'd thought it was figurative, but... were they mutants? Had they mutated themselves?

She wanted to blame this atrocity on that fact. That they'd lost their minds.

But... the calculation. The placement.

The fact that this was clearly a warning. A marker of territory.

It suggested intelligence. Real, human intelligence.

Maybe they had mutated... but they were still human underneath it all. Only a human could do something like this.

One of the troopers grunted - it was the girl from earlier, the local.

"They got the teeth."

They... they had. Why? She didn't realise she'd said that out loud, not until the girl replied.

"You never want to get caught by them. They like teeth. Painful. Inhibiting. Embarrassing. You want to live on soup for the next five years, girl, ha?"

Carza couldn't tear her eyes away. Shattered teeth. They hadn't just broken them. They'd stolen them. Picked them out with long, brutish knives, poking them from the gums. She could see the marks where they'd missed. Based on the raggedness... it had happened while the victims were alive. Only now did she see the letters scrawled with charcoal to the side of the wooden platform, and the girl helpfully translated.

"It says: THUS ALWAYS TO TRAITORS. These twelve must've refused recruitment. Wanted to make a show of them, I guess. Dragged them out here, killed them... look at legs. Marks from marching. Death march, they say. Better to die along the way, I say. Better to die quick."

Lirana jumped from her horse, tearing the gas mask from her face... the sound of vomiting could be vaguely heard. Carza immediately leapt after her, keeping her gas mask firmly attached. The woman was hurling up her lunch into a bush, and Carza gently patted her on the back, holding her hair out of harm's way. A murmur of thanks was all she received, before the vomiting resumed.

And always the buzzing of insects.

And along a tree... something crawled. A spider.

Wrong.

Abdomen too fleshy.

Eyes too large.

Legs too long.

Too many.

Size of a plate.

With legs that tapered into sharp, wolf-like claws, the spider stared at her, eyes twitching. Nothing left on its head but eyes, black masses packed tight, each one the size of a fingernail. It did nothing. But glistening wet tongues lashed underneath its pincers, lapping at the contaminated air. It stared.

Lirana was quietly led away.

The spider departed.

And the heads stared sightless into the gathering gloom of the forest night.

This was not her world. This was a violent world where sense had abandoned everything, and all that remained was meaningless brutality. It was a world that stank of iron and syrup, of champagne tinged with blood that fizzed at the bones of her nose.

She grabbed Hull's arm, insisting that he wrap it around her shoulders.

And together, they waited.

Waited until the march began again.

And in the distance... smoke still rose.

From those who were unafraid of the land and any enemy.

Unafraid of contamination. And unafraid of becoming monstrousness.

As weariness wrapped around her mind... sleepless eyes stared out. And sleepless minds schemed.