CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN - THE PELICAN AND THE EEL

She'd just been planning.

That'd been her day. The battle was over. The nightmare was, for the time being, abating.

Nowhere was safe. Nowhere. Just... walking down a street, a spider attacked, she barely managed to kill it... if she hadn't noticed something was wrong, she'd be dead. If she hadn't blocked the pincers with her axe, she'd be dead. If she hadn't hit the brain, disrupting something crucial, she'd be dead. Three close chances. Three. So many times she could've just... just died. Her heart was pounding out of her chest, and nothing felt... real. Everything was just... she stared ahead, not really seeing anything. Each breath felt strangely wrong, like she shouldn't... like... oh, gods. Did she feel sick? Was she feeling sick? No, no, no, just... her heart was beating, and she felt confident that it shouldn't be. That was too close. She paused. Slumped against a wall, breathing heavily through tightly clenched teeth, one lock of hair trailing down in front of her face inside her mask, impossible to get it out of the way except by... by shaking her head like a dog with a bone, really toss her skull from side to side, and...

And the exertion helped. Too much nervous energy.

Couldn't drop the axe. Fingers were too stiff. If she unwound them, she thought they might snap.

Her coat was stained thick with gore.

Had to... get cleaned up. The mutants were gnawing it off her, the insects were bathing in the blood of their fallen comrade. She hadn't killed anything. Just... broke a vessel, let the liquid flow free. Now they were collecting the liquid back, and would use it to fill another vessel. The swarm, the swarm... the weight of insects pressed upon her, and she stopped for a second, just getting her bearings. The sky was still blood-red, as was the sun, but a hotter, crueller shade. Still the swarm. Still the whirring humming chittering grinding gnawing weeping swarm. When they tore apart each other, the contamination was consumed, but the venom wasn't always. So it sat in stagnant, sulphurous yellow pools, some no larger than a thimble, some the size of her closed fist. Inside the venom swam young mutant, half-life tadpoles, belching out little clouds of something more refined than the venom. Living venom sacs, all of them, ingesting, refining, excreting, creating poison that steamed up in little geysers, that reacted strangely, that moved like quicksilver, that gleamed iridescent, that sometimes burst into flame spontaneously. She genuinely wasn't sure where the hallucinations ended and reality began at this point. Sky might be red. Venom might ignite. The snow was streaked black and white, white from snow, black from ash and smoke. The spider was dead. The spider had been torn limb from limb.

Her mind couldn't quite leave the garden of limbs.

Spiders weren't meant to be that large. Their circulatory systems couldn't handle it, they were too passive, too... heartless. No creature that size lived without a heart. So this spider had grown them. Blood vessels that were square, formed like some kind of mineral structure. Mottled valves which propelled lymph around from place to place, powering the limbs through mechanical thrusts of pressurised fluid. A heart without reference to any previous prototype - nothing human, nothing recognisably animal. She remembered the harsh protein stink that erupted when she smashed the spongy white-pink mass apart, revealing countless chambers and valves, harshly shaped like they were in a beehive, layered like a wasp nest, a heart which had grown to fit the host and did so layer by layer by layer. Split it open, and it fanned out like an artichoke, bubbling free from the chitin. When the heart fell, it'd tried to grow legs out of blood vessels, dragging itself away... to be a mutant was to be in a state of stalemate with one's own flesh. If prompted, it would rebel. No wonder they were so silent - their entire life was negotiation, deliberation, plotting, scheming, backstabbing, if they spoke they might lose focus, and their hearts might jump out through their throats, while their intestines coiled around the stomach to choke it to death, and their spines clambered up to usurp the brain (which was declaring war on the skull which dared imprison it).

Oh, gods...

Not sure if she felt sick, or was just... adjusting to having a body which expected to live longer than a minute. Never really... felt her stomach moving before, the constant churn of muscle, whirling around whatever it could find, gyration upon gyration upon gyration upon gyration... part of her had resigned itself, when she was being crushed, to just... never feeling anything ever again, the only thing which mattered was each panicked beat of her enormous heart. Now she was feeling everything else. Reverse phantom pain - the return of something she thought lost, and the resulting nausea.

Hoo.

Hoo.

...shouldn't be affecting her this much. Just... the suddenness.

It'd been too fast.

Been walking. Then, been attacked. Then, fought back. Now, alive again, and still walking. The Rekidans were surely used to this, they'd already be picking matter from their hair and combing it back until it shone, exposed the smooth beauty of their precisely measured skulls. For Tanner, though... for Tanner, it'd just... she'd barely been aware she was dying, she had operated purely on instinct. The city around her was a fog of bodies. She staggered back to the bunkers, no, no, the barricade, the Breach, she still had work... shadows in the fog, and she gripped her axe tighter, lifting it up as a cascade of twitching brown blood ran down the edges, giving the axe a kind of chittering life. Hoped the wood wouldn't be infested. Overhead... more was happening. She glanced up to see things drifting, passive, buoyed by the intense midwinter gales. What was... oh. Oh. The blundering blimp-like creatures, brainless and senseless. They drifted overhead, so far she could barely see them... no, no, she was wrong. The last ones had been jellyfish, clearly. Adapted for life on the surface. These were different. These were deconstructed animals, spread thin enough to become see-through. Buffalo, seemed. Could see their fur, could see their horns, bunched up to act like... rudders, catching and redirecting the wind. Their tentacles were just long, shaggy strands of green-black fur...

She remembered these buffalo. Last she'd seen, they'd been shedding these same spores across the barren plains beyond the city.

In a matter of a day, they'd deconstructed them. Spread them thin. Thin enough to float, propelled by their own natural gas.

And now they rained down spores.

A putrid green rain. Each spore planted a tiny droplet of lichen, immobile for now, but...

They were ramping up the ambient contamination by any means necessary. She dreaded checking the detectors. Dreaded to imagine how loudly they must be screaming. Weighing on people's minds, overstressing them... shadows in the fog, what was...

Soldiers.

Two of them. Tanner froze. What had the General said - right, ask them about their past. If this wasn't possible, check the back of the neck. Body language was always imitative. She straightened her back, rocked on her heels, placed her hands on her hips. The soldiers paused, glanced at one another. One called out:

"Ma'am?"

Oh, probably human. Probably. And...

Right, not a voice she recognised. That was good. Meeting Ms. Blue would be... she was stressed enough.

"Are you alright, ma'am? Detectors were going a bit..."

"It's nothing."

"...ma'am, you look..."

Yes, crusted in gore.

"Mutant got inside. Giant spider. Don't worry, it's dead. I assume it was just here to spread terror, make us spread out forces a bit thin."

The soldier froze.

"Go and burn it, please. Might as well stop the swarm consuming more."

"Yes, ma'am. Right away, ma'am."

A sharp salute from both of them, and they jogged off, flamethrowers clanking on their backs. As they passed, Tanner thought she heard the other muttering to the speaker, his voice heavy with... something.

"She killed one? On her own? With an axe?"

"Shush. Might not be a big one."

Big enough to pick her up with ease and almost crush her to death. But, well, she had won, so... presumably it hadn't been excessively tough. She staggered onwards, slowly getting the strength back into her limbs. A lock of hair fell over her face again, and she contented herself by chewing idly on it until the Breach was back in sight. Bayai was... not there. Frustrating. Ms. Blue was, though - oh, fantastic, she told herself that she was lucky to not be stressed by the intense woman, and bang. Found her. Almost made her forget about the spider, really. About the mirror-like eyes. The brown hairy legs. The lung-wasp-nest-heart. The crushing...

"Ma'am!"

The loyal bark was like hearing the welcoming yelp of an excitable puppy.

"Oh. Ah."

A pause.

"Hello."

"Hello, ma'am! Are... oh my goodness, are you alright?"

"Fine. What's the situation here."

"...refuelling, ma'am. Getting everything ready for another assault."

"What's the reading on the detector?"

"One moment, ma'am - I'll just check. It's... well, reading out here is much higher than in the city. Last average was a few minutes ago, generally... hovering around nineteen throughout the city."

Tanner blinked.

"Nineteen? It'd barely reached ten last I heard."

"They're moving quickly, ma'am."

"What about down there? Has anyone... investigated the swamp?"

"Oh. That's at roundabout forty-five. But that's acute, there's not much ambience around it, ma'am. No need to worry! And we're rotating regularly, keeping equipment clean, avoiding exposure, all the protocols, ma'am!"

Forty-five. That was... forty-five meant they couldn't go down there. At all. Shifts couldn't be longer than... maybe twenty minutes, if forty meant no longer than thirty. Equipment would be useless after contact with it, would be too contaminated, the leather would literally be a few sparks away from coming to life. No filters would last, not even military-grade. And... they were pouring fuel over it. Gallon after gallon of the stuff, shimmering iridescently. Had to pour it using a hose worked by a pair of sweating soldiers, struggling under the weight of the armour they needed to survive. She clicked in another filter on instinct, imagining the swamp below slowly unifying into a single being. Right. Right. Borrowed a pair of binoculars, and started surveying the mutants ahead. Come on, what would their plans be, what would their plans be...

They could wait around and placidly increase the ambient contamination. Issue was, the colony had already purified Rekida of contamination before, there were tricks for it. Burning was ideal, but they could shovel snow, the theurgists could construct heaters that would melt the snow and wash away the contamination which clung to it, and ultimately, they'd need to be reaching ambient readings of sixty before the bunkers really started to feel the strain, breaking down in about a week. The mire where mutants had been butchered, absolute heaps of them, was registering forty-five at the most acute points. Meaning, even if they shovelled this mire around the city, they'd still not be able to get inside the bunkers for months. Spores, lichen and insects could only do so much.

In the end, she doubted the lichen was even meant to be decisive. It was just... seeding the way for a final attack. Giving them a larder they could gnaw happily at on the way to wipe everything out. They needed to break inside - if they didn't, this would be a campaign demanding the mutants spread contamination into the air (losing it in the process, spending their most valuable resource on an effort that a strong gale could seriously derail). Had to break in. The ambient stuff was just... well, to strain everything. To supply them when they broke inside. To make protective gear mandatory to engage in the smallest battle, which would effectively tie them to a resource as non-renewable as contamination. Attrition - which lasted longer, the contamination, or the equipment the humans needed to survive?

"Where's Sersa Bayai?"

Ms. Blue blinked.

"Oh, he... left. I believe he was attending to something."

"I see. I need to send some telegrams - keep an eye on things."

"Yes, ma'am. Not expecting an attack until tonight, they're still... modifying themselves, we think."

"Right. Understood."

A soldier ran up and nudged Ms. Blue curtly, murmuring something in her ear, before glancing respectfully at Tanner and dipping his head, a strange half-bow that Tanner squirmed internally at the sight of. Ms. Blue froze. Stared at Tanner. Tanner resisted the urge to run away - come on, she'd barely avoided dying, she could handle a little bit of uncomfortable eye contact.

...no, no she couldn't.

"Did you kill a spider, ma'am?"

"I... did."

"They said the spider was... uh... big, ma'am."

"Sizeable."

"They say you... took it apart, ma'am."

"I... had to kill it somehow, it's a mutant, it pays to be thorough."

"With an axe, ma'am?"

"...well, I had to ask them to burn it."

"Ma'am..."

Ms. Blue was staring at her with an expression under her mask that Tanner ideally never wanted to see again. Oddly, this was refreshing - she was terrified, she was stressed, she'd almost died, but she was still deeply uncomfortable around this freakishly intense lady. And all the spider-squeezing in the world couldn't get that out of her. As ingrained into her as... a destination was for an eel, so ingrained that they'd literally keep going for it whether or not there was water, whether or not it had a head still attached to the body. Yes, being an eel meant being dedicated to her goals without fail, moving forward no matter what, while remaining true to her inner nature - unnerved of (mostly) ordinary people. Goodness, she felt like she hadn't almost died!

Oh, gods, this was yet another inventive stage of her continuing mental breakdown, wasn't it?

...then again, she'd liked eels for a very, very long time... did this mean she'd been having a mental breakdown since the distant days of her youth?

Yes.

Yes, it probably did.

Mental breakdowns were built upon solid foundations of dysfunction, so, yes, she'd been having a mental breakdown since she started to build those foundations. At least, that... mostly made sense to her. Mental breakdowns were like property law, there was always precedent involved. And a surprising amount of scribbling on large quantities of paper.

Anyway.

Gouts of fire began to be unleashed - the mire needed burning, the contamination needed clearing. Tanner actually wound up asking for help with operating a flamethrower herself, if only because... standing around with her arms crossed, surveying the carnage with cool glass-covered eyes, felt like... well, it made her feel like a general. And if she was a general, then she was... associated with a whole suite of things she didn't want to be associated with. No, had to be a grunt, put her on the ground, put weapons in her hands, let her work beside the others, and... well, she started getting the same looks she'd been getting for some time. If not more intensely. Remain aloof and detached, and she inspired the looks. Muck in with everyone, and... she inspired the same looks. At this point, she was genuinely wondering if there was any path she could take that wouldn't inspire the damn looks, the deferent gazes, the loyal salutes, the hurried straightening of uniforms. Maybe if she broke down and cried in front of everyone... no, they'd probably see that as humanising her, engaging with their struggle, weeping over the dead they themselves wept over. Maybe if she ran away into the horde and let herself be torn apart...

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Oh, gods, shameful suicide was her only way out, wasn't it?

Oh gods...

By nightfall, the story was everywhere. An enormous monstrous spider had attacked Tanner Magg while she was alone, an assassin who validated their target by deeming them worthy of assassination. They didn't know that the mutant had been treating her as just another target, another human that needed removal, wrong place at the wrong time. They hadn't seen how the creature had eaten a mound of human hands, desperate beyond belief to simply incorporate, ignoring the human in favour of the feast. Venom dripping like ravenous spit, entire body in a state of frantic peristalsis as it consumed, dissolving the entire purpose of the invasion of favour of the primary mutant instinct - to devour, to thirst. So dedicated to the feast that it seemed, for a moment, as though the chitin would give way and a great pale lump of flesh would extend out to engulf the meal, every organ a starving mouth, every cell a ravenous beggar, every single nerve aching to leave the system and lance out like red, stringy maggots, aching to consume, to prevent loss...

They didn't know.

Nobody knew.

By nightfall, they all thought they knew. And Tanner waited underneath an invisible moon, and watched the lingering fires of the blood swamp, the glistening bodies of the mutants as they waited, as they mutated.

She lingered in silence.

Bayai was still gone. Ms. Blue was at a distance, too respectful to approach without provocation. And the atmosphere was poison to anyone who didn't have the right equipment. Telegrams were swapped back and forth with Marana and Yan-Lam. Clinical deliveries of information, nothing more. The mutant was still utterly silent - had become silent the moment the great horde arrived. Waiting for her kin to arrive, to mutate her further, to lead her into battle. But Tanner remembered the screams. The moans. She'd been terrified - a mutant had been terrified. Losing control to something which treated them as just a vessel for contamination, sacrificed and purposed at a whim. Maybe it was feeling of being eaten alive - being integrated into something grander, entirely forcefully. Maybe.

But night slid in with elegant inevitability. Invisible moon. Gouts of occasional figure from the unignited patches of fuel. And silent, silent soldiers.

Bayai didn't return for the whole night.

And Tanner looked out at the horde with a pair of binoculars pressed against her mask. She almost thought she'd stopped existing at this point - that the spider had squeezed her enough that she'd popped like a tick, oozed into her own clothes, become just... an inflated balloon of meat, held together with a coat, a mask, a pair of solid boots. Hollow. Maybe the other soldiers were like that, too. She didn't talk to them - they just stared out into the fiery darkness. Tanner really ought to talk more with them. She ought to sing songs and play games, swap stories about old loves and old sights, about dreams and hopes and longings. But when she looked... her mouth froze up. And she found herself incapable of asking a single thing. And each second added another lock to her lips - she'd spent an hour not talking, why should she start now? They were used to her being silent, being chummy would seem forced... and she had a nightmare of slipping back to silence, having run out of things to say. And at that point she could never start again. Bottle it up, bottle it all up, and maybe, one day, she'd have enough to say to fill up a full, unprompted conversation. Thus far, she was still... dismally short. Stared out into the dark. The black, dead eyes of her mask like the eyes of an insect.

They were changing. Out there.

She could see it.

Sometimes. Illuminated by strange bursts of blue light that she wasn't sure were real or not. Her eyes had long since started playing tricks on her. Damn untrustworthy piles of jelly - no backbone in them, moral or physical.

Among the fields of carbonised glass, so hot the snow couldn't melt... she saw them.

Buffalo.

They'd... changed them.

A herd of buffalo. A whole damn herd. Fused together. Mutated until they merged, until it all came... came crashing together, like waves in the ocean. Fur linking to fur, flesh knotting to flesh. Heads vanishing into the great pulpy mass. A herd expanding an unknown difference in every direction, all she could see were the countless hooves, and the mass of heads around the borders, staring blindly into the dark. Most of them didn't have eyes at this point, those had been replaced with... other things. The fused herd lingered out there, silent and impassive... and sometimes, she saw why they existed. They were a living storage cupboard. Sometimes a mutant, wounded or unstable, would come along and take a great, heaving bite out of the buffalo mass... and she'd see masses upon masses upon masses of organs, purple and grey and silver and red and black, compacted into a solid wall of tissue. A cultured farm from which the mutants could take what they needed, long dark tongues slithering out to lap contamination from arteries the size of her fist, from great vascular teats, and they'd integrate. Grow stronger, grow better, purge some unwanted mutation. Even with such... control, they still couldn't decide what contamination would produce, not precisely.

That being said.

They were... exacting.

And then she saw the trees. They were made of bone and flesh and fur and hoof, growing from the living landscape of steaming bodies. And from them hung fruit - organ fruit, not human, not animal, something other. Specialised components, maybe. Eaten in small numbers, and only by a few. They were upgrading for the assault. Hadn't known what might face them, not exactly. She had a sudden flash of terror - mutants shedding flame-retardant slime down their sides, growing armour tough enough to resist the flamethrowers, becoming somehow superior. But the mutants gave no answer - just devoured organs whole, unhinging their jaws to do so, before shuffling off to sit perfectly still and wait for the biology to integrate. Brutality wasn't quite the correct word, it was too casual for that, too... disaffected. The smell of meat filled the air - meat, blood, bone, muscle, fat. She saw a gibbering, unstable mutant force its way messily into the flank of the great buffalo, gnawing inside like a starving rat, burrowing deeper, deeper, deeper, eating and eating... before a purple sphincter puckered, the herd shivered, and something better was reborn, something glistening with fluid and wet with preservative caul.

This must've been what the Great War was like. Not an army of mutants - a single mutant with countless cells, linked by a single mode of control, a single purpose, a single drive. Consume the humans. Purge their lands. Devour the contamination they guarded.

Maybe.

Maybe.

The night passed.

Ms. Blue waited.

And Tanner sent telegram upon telegram.

YL - mutant is silent. Bunker is nervous. STOP.

Tanner gritted her teeth nervously.

T - it's fine, we're holding the line. I recommend getting some sleep. STOP.

YL - detector sounds like a woman crying. Can't sleep. STOP.

T- you're safe in there. Safer than I am. You're a growing girl, you should sleep, you need it. STOP.

Strange how... it was easier to talk like this. The distance divorcing her from the consequences of her actions or communications. Yan-Lam didn't exist - just click-click-click of the telegram.

YL - the detector is so terribly loud. The others are so quiet. Even the mutant. I don't know what's going to happen. STOP.

T - you're going to be safe.

Tanner paused.

She was lying.

Might as well tell the girl the ugly truth.

T - if we live, we live. If we die, we die. If we die, we won't be worrying for very long. I've almost died a few times now, after a while you settle down a little. You stop thinking. You almost end up surprised when you live. Trust me. If you survive, good. If you die, we're all dead, and we can keep each other company. STOP.

There was a long pause. Oh. Crumbs. She'd... been a little morbid, hadn't she? Her gloves itched. Her mask chafed. And if she focused, she could pretend that none of this was the case, and Tanner Magg was just a suit, just a purpose, just a slithery, slithery eel.

T - would you like me to tell you about eels

Forgot to send 'STOP'. Felt unnecessary.

YL - yes please.

Tanner's face split into a rare smile.

T - did you know that eels are considered magical in some regions nearer the coast? They say in Tuz-Drakkat that wearing a coat of eel skin will protect some people from bullets, and that if you drown an eel in a barrel of beer, you'll never get a hangover? I think that it's because of morphological ambiguities. Eels are a weird middle-ground, and liminality has always had power. Liminality means uncertainty, and uncertainty means that normal rules stop applying so much. I mean, if you're a city-dweller, and you go out into the countryside, or the wilderness, your rules stop applying. Pickpockets and train times are just so much nonsense, so you really start caring about the most subtle details. People become more superstitious when in times of crisis, and crisis is a kind of liminality. Anyway. I think that's why eels are considered magical. They live in water, but can crawl on land. No-one, for a very long time, knew how they bred. Even now, we don't know where they breed, only that they do, at some distant location in the ocean. Eels cross boundaries. So, they get magical power, the same way that city walls do in Rekida, or the wild forest does in old folk stories. In fact-

YL - what does liminality mean, miss STOP.

T - a kind of between state. Land is one thing, sea is another, but the beach is awkwardly between the two of them STOP.

YL - Ms. Marana says that you're a goose STOP.

Tanner flushed.

T - tell her to go to bed, too. Now, eels are a weird liminal space. Also, did you know that eel-sellers used to wear big hats full of eels? And they'd go around saying 'pluck an eel from my cap, oh good sir' in Mahar Jovan until the industry industrialised more? And that in Herxiel, eels used to be the last opponent for the guard of their steam-shamans? You had to stand in a river and hit them with a scythe, it was terrifically difficult, and very frightening for the poor animals, but it tested their skill, and their luck. And their ability to stay upright in deep water. STOP.

YL - I didn't know any of this.

A second passed, and she sent a hesitant 'STOP' which made Tanner smile faintly.

T - they also used to say that eels never bred, they just appeared. Some, in a few colonies of Fidelizh, say that a horsehair (black) dropped into water becomes an eel spontaneously! And around Mahar Jovan, they say that eels just sort of appear in the right conditions, when the water is right. So, there's no male and no female eels, because they don't need to breed! They used to say that 'they are produced from mud or a particular sort of dew, falling in certain months of the year in spring and summer, and this dew is actually eel eggs, and when the turf is cut, and blades of grass lie together, on the warmest side of a promising pool or pond, the sun's heat must naturally hatch them'. Isn't that silly? They used to think dew was eel eggs, and it just took the right heat to wake them up! There's diagrams in old books of eels, the size of clouds, swimming in the sky and having a grand old time, shedding dew-eggs. It's a silly idea, but I've always liked it.

A pause.

'STOP'

YL - oh, I didn't know that, miss.

A pause.

YL - I'll go to bed. STOP.

And Tanner had succeeded once again in her duty. She-

19 - stop hogging the channel, bunker 2, we're all trying to send reports STOP.

And Tanner's good mood had vanished, and if not for her mask and coat and dress and brassiere, one could easily see a flush spreading over her collarbone, like a scarlet woman. Well, in her defence, Tanner was a real anguillophile - an appreciator of eels. A term she... had forgotten she knew. Oh. Ah. This was... rather like finding the umbrella. She remembered seeing bright yellow eels, stuffed and preserved, in the Fidelizh exhibition of the unusual. She remembered seeing books develop, understanding more and more over time. She remembered talking to Eygi for hours upon hours in the evening about how, actually, the largest eel ever caught was eleven pounds and two ounces, by a society dedicated to the capture of very, very large eels. If they didn't eat the eels afterwards, she'd have loved to join them... and oh, if Yan-Lam hadn't gone to sleep, she'd have talked about how the consumption of eels in Mahar Jovan started after a terrible famine, when the old vermin (eels) were suddenly eaten as a necessity. Rats were abandoned once the famine passed, as were badgers and crows, but eels remained, they were scooped up out of the river by enormous eel barges sent from distant cities, saving a whole suite of lives, and the twin kings had awarded a whole decree to allow free berthing for all those ships involved in the eel trade, sold millions each year! Or how a whole range of Mahar Jovan's minor colonies were named after eels. Translated - there was Rock-of-Eels, there was Eel Meadow, there was Eel Marsh down the road, and Lake-o-Eel, and Eel-Stream-Peak, and Weir-of-White-Waters. So very many places built on their consumption. Poor things...

She felt human. Sleep was off the table. Conversation was basically impossible. Relaxation was... never going to happen. And the fury she'd felt while killing the spider still slept in her bones like a long-simmering infection.

The fires beyond burned unceasingly.

Yet... she felt a little more human. Content that she'd entertained Yan-Lam enough, soothed her with silly stories of eels and whatnot. Even if she'd been hogging the channels. In some sense, Tanner had done her duty. She'd... been a good person. And she huddled around the fire, waiting for the end of it all.

And snow began to fall from the black-red sky.

Tanner rose.

Quietly.

And... she found her clothes to be cloying and repulsive. She spat out a lock of hair she'd been chewing since she'd torn apart the spider. She left. She left. Went to the nearest bunker - not one with Yan-Lam or Marana, not quite ready for that. She entered, and was scoured clean by nervous masked men who used assorted jets to remove everything, including the omnipresent insects. Felt like they'd become an oasis in a desert of chitin, really. A desert whipped into a sandstorm, at least. Walked as if in a dream, divorced from the world around her by the fact that... she'd almost been squeezed to death today. By an enormous spider. She'd witnessed an immolation, she'd seen the blood swamps grow, she saw an orchard of organs within fused buffalo, she'd seen things, and she wanted a second of civility. A part of her railed against this. Stop, this part said. Stop, you dolt. If you hesitate, you'll never start again. Never relax. Never uncoil. Never recline. Remain tense until the end of days! Remain tense or you're going to come apart, I promise this, I promise this for I know you better than you know yourself, you young oik, and -

Tanner ignored it.

She moved in a state of exhaustion-drunk calm. All emotions purged by constant exploration of their extremes. Memory flickered. And she was inside the bunker, swallowing a bitter pill to purge contamination, nibbling a crust of bread at a table. She was sweat-stained and gruesome, her eyes were sunken into deep pits, her mouth was pinched into a frown, her skin felt... wrong. The denizens of the bunker, cartel and colonist alike, watched her with obsessive reverence, memorising every detail of her muscles, her size, her matted hair that wove itself into barbarian locks, sealed by sweat and grime, held in place by a hairnet of leather and metal that most people would call a gas mask. She breathed slightly-less-filtered air, and ignored all the people around her.

And when the time came, she bathed.

She sat in lukewarm water. Barely aware of what she was doing, just knowing that... that this was what Tanner Magg would've done, if she were here. Tanner, who liked eels and Eygi and expectations. And the grisly Tanner who came afterwards was no more. She pooled water in cupped hands and let it fall over her upper body, like some sort of ritual oblation. She rubbed sandpaper-coarse soap in, and watched a long, ragged strings of dried sweat, grime, and assorted miseries washed away into the water around her. Wide, wide haloes of filth drifted away, and she stared blindly. Saw innumerable bites from insects that had powerful enough pincers, saw how bruised her front was from the kick of the porous man, how swollen her sides were from the grip of the pelican spider, how little any of this has healed, how fresh it all still was. She watched as the water turned darker, turned the colour of used dishwater. Worked the soap in deeper, deeper, leaving long, ragged red tattoos of inflamed flesh across her body, striped like the snow outside. She soaped her hair and let it fall around her shoulders, a helmet that was... returning.

When you washed hair, it lost its memory. The compressions it endured under a hat or a mask. The abuse it endured as it was soaked in oceans of sweat. The simple... foulness of not washing for a week, and then fighting two battles. She felt pale and raw, she felt like a snail emerging from her shell, she wondered at the strange paleness of flesh she hadn't seen in a week, she felt... diminished, somehow. Like she was washing away too much, and she felt...

Felt the terror.

Felt the unwinding coming. The shivering, weeping core that screamed for her mother, for Eygi, for anyone or anything. The coward.

And she rose from the water, statuesque and glistening. Eyes dark and blank. Hair falling around her in dark cords.

Moved for her clothes. Found cleaner versions, when she could... but she was large. There was only so much she possessed. So she contented herself with wearing cooler clothes, cooled by exposure to cold air rather than her warm meat. They felt rough, felt stiff with sweat, felt... gnarled, like the bark of old trees. She found herself exhausted at her own filth, her own caked-on repugnance. And when she emerged... she was already heading for the door. No rest for the wicked.

The civilians parted before her like a wave.

Silent. Eerily reverent.

Her axe settled easily into her hand. The governor's scarf had already become stiff with gore, there was no telling what it'd originally been. Evidence wiped away. Felt lean, felt raw, felt dangerous in a wolfish sort of way...

"I'll be off."

One of the civilians spoke, quietly and respectfully.

"Pleasure having you, governor."

Tanner froze.

Said nothing for a few long seconds.

And when she did, her voice was low, and solemn, and her face was utterly flat.

"Looks to be a cold night. Stay warm."

And then she was gone, goosebumps prickling over her skin as she cringed in embarrassment. Felt like lashing herself. Guilt for being called governor... overwhelm it by being an awkward cow. Well. If it worked. The coat slid back over her shoulders, still fairly smooth from continuous wear, and her boots were practically organic at this point. As for the mask... she welcomed the dark, the warmth, the seclusion. The way the world beyond became marred with tiny flecks of deformed glass. The way the air rasped and rattled on the way inside. Her throat stung where the pill had gone down, her body slowly, carefully tightened back to a familiar state of tension. The spider had crushed the reserve out of her and made her go berserk. Now she crushed the terror out of herself through muscular contractions. The terror, the hesitation, the doubt, all of it.

And returned to the unalterable flow of glorious momentum.

Momentum that drove her out of the door of the bunker. Momentum that sent her back to the ash-striped snow. Momentum that led her back to the barricades, where she faced out into the fused-glass wasteland, punctuated by still-glowing calderas where cold-houses had once sat.

To the heaving mass of meat which lingered still.

Bayai was here.

And she welcomed his presence.

"Anything?"

"Nothing. Silence."

His voice was stiff. His entire bearing was stiff, to the point of it looking uncomfortable for him to... do anything, stand, sit, breathe, exist. What an odd fellow. She stared at him from the corner of her eye for a second, the motion invisible behind her mask. Watched him with impunity. His stiffness, his discipline, his sturdy form... he was wrong, of course. There was never silence. Always the burning of distant fires, the cracking of pseudo-volcanic glass, the slithering, slurping, chewing of meat as the mutants rearmed themselves. Even far away from it all, the sound was still faintly audible, awakening the same instincts that... hearing termites chewing in walls, moths colliding with windows, rats scurrying in hollow spaces evoked. Like mosquitoes whining past one's ear. Come to think of it... ah, there they were. The insects. Almost tuned them out. That was the worst part of the swarm - their omnipresence. Just been a day, and she was finding them nearly unbearable, just because they never stopped. Always whirring, always buzzing... the only way to find some peace was to retreat, and to retreat was to fail, and to fail to was unwind. To feel the crippling terror that had stalked her in the bathtub. And quietly, the two of them spoke.

"Canima's still gone, isn't he?"

Bayai was silent for a moment, before replying.

"Seems to be that way. Imagine he was stranded out there... they'll have torn him apart, if he wasn't already dead."

"Wonder why. I... saw him, he was close, he wasn't going to fall behind."

"Maybe Vyuli had him shot."

"No point. Vyuli's not the type for unnecessary cruelty."

A pause.

"...terribly sorry, didn't he try to torture you to death?"

"Because he wanted information from me. Moment he didn't, and couldn't, he was... almost civilised."

"Almost."

"...doesn't feel like many of us are civilised at this point. Executions. Immolations. Week of living in big stone coffins."

Her voice was low and soft. She felt more... unrestrained than usual. Maybe the spider had squeezed that out too. Bayai hummed.

"Sarcophagi, surely?"

"Hm?"

"Stone coffins. Sarcophagi. Never been entirely sure where the term came from..."

Tanner's voice rattled out with all the regularity of a typewriter in a well-honed pool. She was a typewriter managed by someone wearing pearls, she was optimal. And she did lots of crosswords at one point.

"Flesh-eating. Comes from old Khosharite, I think."

Bayai snorted.

"How unfathomably grim."

"Hm."

"Not inaccurate, I suppose. Kho'shar, that was a grim bunch. No wonder they're all gone. Anyway. Sorry for vacating my post. Be here for some time, of course. No interest in deserting my duty."

"Right."

He turned slightly, his voice rendered oddly distorted by the mask, somewhat nasal, somewhat rattling. Felt like the voice a congested rat might have, and Tanner was keenly aware of her own being no better.

"...it's been a funny few weeks, hasn't it?"

Tanner blinked.

"Few... weeks?"

"Few weeks. Barely been over a month, in my reckoning..."

"Gods."

"Time flies?"

"...time is deceptive, I'll say that much. If time flies, it does that despite... I don't know, time is a cat, and time flies, which means there's something wrong with time, and I don't really want to trust it."

She was rambling. Stop it.

It'd taken a few weeks for her to become like this. And if it only took a few weeks... had she really changed at all?

"Wise. Anyway... odd, isn't it? Fighting intelligent mutants. Like the Great War all over agian."

A small sigh.

"When I was younger, I almost wanted to be in the Great War. To have this... unifying event to work around, some kind of monolith. A religion you didn't need to believe in, because it was real, no faith involved. The Great War happened. You operate around it, you're affected by it... when you're young and have no idea what to do in life, that seems frightfully appealing. Structure, but not demanding structure, nothing formal."

His voice had become a murmur by the end, more intended for himself.

"Meet someone who was alive during the Great War, and you have an anchor, some universally salient point... and that's it, you have this point where they showed their true colours, this point where they made their best friends. Almost, almost wish you could be with them back then. Childish. Damn insensitive and ignorant. But still. Still."

Tanner hummed.

"Still. It's... you see people who behave a certain way, and you think - I can learn this, I can do this. But you can't. Because what they experienced is so different. You can't be... them."

A pause.

"...felt that way about my father, sometimes. He was from Jovan, not Mahar, and he was... free-wheeling. Free-spirited. Left his lodge behind, fished happily, met a woman he loved, had me... I can't imagine doing that. Can't imagine doing what he did."

"Well, you don't really have the equipment."

Tanner stared.

"Sorry."

"...uh."

"Oh, gods, that was rude. Sorry about that. Unbefitting of a soldier, and disgraceful for my reputation. I hope you can accept my apology. If you cannot, I hope you can accept my resignation."

A desperate humour in his voice. And enough genuine shame for her to feel that he was... mostly remorseful. Slipping into crude gallows banter, whether he liked it or not. She... didn't know him, did she? A childish attraction to strength, a certain greatcoat-clad muscle, a certain military nature that supposed confidence and competence. Now, though... everything else had been snapped away. And she knew that she didn't know him. Nothing about his hobbies, his childhood, his personality, what he thought of himself... and if he was the sort of person to tell her about any of this, he wasn't Bayai, the person she'd... talked to, worked with. Not sure if she could respect someone who was that open. Be self-controlled and unknown, or be wild, untamed, unpredictable, unreliable... and known. Oh, wlel.

"Quite alright. Just... you know what I mean. My father did things I couldn't, but he was from a different time. Hard to imagine following in his footsteps."

A pause.

"For one thing, fishing industry is much worse paying, rents are higher... just not feasible."

"Know what you mean. Be a soldier now, it's a game of fighting shrinking budgets, low numbers of recruits, too many duties for too few people... time when everyone was conscripted for a basic war of survival, that's all gone. Back to the normal routine, and all I can see around me are veterans who remember it the old way. Childish as it is, you almost want to be them, just to get that kind of certainty."

"Binary of survive or don't survive. Everything else becomes irrelevant."

Bayai let out a long sigh that sounded... relieved. Genuinely relieved.

"...exactly. Exactly. You understand."

The two lingered together.

And quietly, they watched the sun slink closer to rising.

Neither slept.

Neither were capable.