CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THREE - MADNESS IS CONCRETE-COLOURED

Silence.

Tanner loathed the silence.

The sickly yellow light of the bunker seemed to claw at her skin as time went on, coating it, making it greasy and thick. Slowly growing over her like lichen, to the point that she was afraid that once she emerged, blinking, into the harsh red light of the day... she'd find her skin had permanently shifted its shade. If she emerged at all, of course. Her days became defined solely by the regular reports, by the ticking of her pocket-watch, but the barely-muffled moans of the detectors. The ambient contamination was going up. Sometimes it would remain static for an hour... then jump a few awful decimals. Confirmed by everyone else. The other bunkers sent in updates, dissecting the populace down to simple strands of behaviour, to codes that curtly rattled off their behaviours and mistakes. A fight breaking out in bunker seven, responded to by immediate imprisonment - in times of crisis, the law was more forgiving to those who snapped, who were crushed under the weight of panic. A sudden wail of alarm from another bunker when their detectors jumped up by unreasonable amounts... only to guiltily admit they were mistaken, they hadn't confirmed properly, the detector had just been behaving badly.

The air had a sterile tint to it. The filters made everything slightly woolly around the edges, and it wouldn't surprise Tanner if the yellow lights were living creatures, breathing on them, creating a kind of... stew of air, like the humid interiors of certain forests. Two days passed, and nothing happened. Soldiers patrolled. Mutants clambered around and enjoyed breathing air that humans had to hide away from. The bunkers continued their quiet functions. Something Tanner noticed more and more as the hours rolled on was the smell. The smell of humans crammed together, nervous, in a place where the air was sterile and mechanical, moving through layers of filters that seemed insistent on draining the air of character or quality. The smell of sweat, the smell of stale breath, the smell of tooth-powder that people used to counteract the breath, the smell of old food, the smell of old clothes, the smell of hair and the smell of shoes, the smell of damp where they'd trodden in snow on that first day, the smell of odd perfumes and odd spices... the smell of the material the food was cured in, that gave it a hard, flint-like consistency and appearance, like it should shatter when bitten rather than give way. The water was slightly brackish, and didn't quite slake thirst, not truly. Existence became an exercise of patience.

And all the while, the moaning increased in pitch. Increment by increment. Enough time for her to get used to each individual note, to mark it out as status quo, to panic a little when it shifted... only to look at the dial and realise how much it'd increased already. How she was panicking over the tiniest of tiny rises. People walked around in the bunker - bored, trying to stretch their legs, but all she felt was that they were walking over a living piece of skin. And each time they made a circle, they wore it down a little more, they dirtied it, they marred it, they bruised it, they wore the membrane thinner and thinner and thinner until... maybe one day they'd just fall through. The bunker was a living creature, it breathed for them, it nurtured them with its flesh, it sheltered them with its body, it moaned softly as the contamination rose, and like any living creature, it could be worn down by years of hard labour. The hooves could split. The skin could wear thin and tear. The bones could become creaking and weak, the fluid around them stagnating. All wild dignity faded, all power ceased. Size seemed to diminish. Horns were worn down to stubs, teeth ground to the size of burned-up cigars. Eyes grew cloudy and unfocused, surrounded by a haze of grey ichor that smelled sweeter than any syrup. Everything broke down over time. The membrane of the bunker would snap, the flesh would run out...

She kept thinking about growing old. Amongst other things. But time was a nightmare she found hard to get away from.

Her mind was a widening thing. Eventually it ran out of thoughts, every train crashed or stopped, and it had to start pondering other matters. She'd find herself staring ahead into the yellow gloom. The real... moment had come after... maybe a full week of nothing. Which felt like far too long to remain here without people contending, but... somehow. Somehow the colony was obeying, somehow her authority could manifest even through the telegrams. Maybe locking everyone up had only increased her power, by removing all hints of a broader world. Rekida had done that, in the old days. Cut off the world, severed every tie, hid every vulnerability, and ruled as gods. Only when the red tide had come did they find old instincts stirring to life, flickering weakly in the gathering storm. She kept thinking of the inner temple, of the closeness of it all, the labyrinth, the darkness... the sacred was best known in conditions of closeness, she thought. When the world was banished. Because... she stared at the walls, and thought about how easily perception could shift, how easily the hallucinations could come, how you could never known another person, and never know the world either. And when you cut off the broader world, you found herself alone with yourself. With the dark, the closeness, the pressing of echo in a solid wave... there was nothing but yourself. Nothing but the world you built - because objective reality was more banished than ever before.

The world shrank. And became more concentrated. More potent. All beliefs sharpened.

In conditions of closeness, all you had was what you built. The only sound was your own breathing, the echo of your voice. The darkness allowed for projection, the safety prevented this projection from wavering. A mirage of an oasis in the desert lasted until you ran into it and found nothing there... but in a secluded grotto, you were safe. There was nothing to crave, nothing to require, so the illusions might as well be real.

And in such conditions, the murmuring voice of a god, a commander, a king... it might as well be one's own voice, echoing back out of the gloom.

Maybe.

Or maybe closeness was just a reminder of the womb, and in that state, one was accustomed to being still-forming, to being utterly dependent on someone else. Maybe a combination of both.

Ageing. Ageing was... unnatural. Why did people age? What was the point of it? What was the reason for humans, and other animals, to decay over time, over the span of a handful of decades? Surely there'd be some pressure for people to live forever, some kind of... advantage to having joints which remained fluid and perfect, skin that never lost its elasticity, a mind that never slowed or wavered. Surely. But... then she thought about it a little longer. Maybe because... humans cared too much, kept their children in a womb rather than an egg, and effectively shredded themselves as a result. Willing parasitism. Maybe it was because a human which lived forever would have no need to change, and ageing was a way of... terrifying the young, showing them how it was all going to end, encouraging them to explode outwards and do things. In age there was vitality, just not for the person ageing. Maybe it was a lesson taught by flies. Flies infested, they burrowed, they left maggots... maybe once upon a time, humans had lived forever, and this was terrifically inconvenient for all the lovely things which squirmed and feasted and hungered. So, one day, a fly sat in a human's ear and murmured about how lovely it would be if the human lay down and rested, and never stopped resting, not as the grass grew over the skin and the maggots coiled around bones and moss infiltrated the brain, and all the while the fly murmured away that this was fine.

But this took a while. Very inconvenient. So, the flies which hatched from this first act would go on not only to whisper, but to take. They said that... once upon a time, there'd been a theory that dead flesh spontaneously turned into maggots. Easily disproven. But maybe that was what the maggots wanted people to think. Maybe the reason mutation was so awful for humans was because it woke up the maggots - humans weren't one animal, they were two, the second were the creatures that gnawed at them, drove them to age, stopped them from being immortal, killed those who dared to dream of immortality. Produce a child, fulfil your wretched womanhood, and then the maggots could get to work, having satisfied some hidden arrangement. Mutate, and the maggots panicked, reacted violently, devoured the brain to stop the human from doing anything with the immortality they were reawakening.

...another reason closeness and darkness were so very good at making things sacred and authoritative. Reminder of the womb, reminder of ageing, reminder of explosive terror and ancestral maggots, reminder of purpose.

She was going funny.

But what else did she have to do?

She hadn't removed her clothes. Just... splashed water on her face in what felt like the morning, when the lights were permitted to become brighter. The buffalo pelt felt like it'd grown into her skin. The axe refused to leave her hands for longer than a few minutes at a time. Her hair seemed to merge into a solid mass, greasy, clammy, hanging in thick locks... washing it felt wrong, any contact with water felt wrong, because it felt like she was destroying this closeness, this membrane, this stone womb. She admitted that she wanted to be cleansed, and if she did that, then the aura of the sacred vanished, her voice would surge out without any echo returning, the delicate aura of control would vanish. She'd be a sheared sheep in the middle of a blizzard, stumbling around and bleating sadly as the cold ate through whatever scraps of wool remained. She'd place a divider between Tanner-the-executioner and... whatever came next. And right now, she couldn't make that gamble.

Time rolled on. But for Tanner, time remained absolutely still.

Sometimes she noticed vague goings-on.

The investors mumbling to one another, old stories of old deals and old parties, building a little memory-room that each and every one of them could live inside. Their own static membrane, their own cloistered womb, their own echo. The past riding on their backs like a Fidelizhi god. The soldiers operating in placid nothingness, minds empty. Sometimes one of them would look at her, hunched on a chair, watching the time go by until she had to send another report. Stare unblinking for a few moments until she felt their gaze and looked up to meet it. Then she'd see... glazed, empty eyes, which turned dully away, the head moving while the eyes remained locked open. There was nothing inside. Once or twice, a soldier seemed to become lost in this stillness, lost in a perpetual state of alert. One man simply stopped shaving, and dark brown fur accumulated rapidly around his neck, while his eyes became emptier and emptier, until it seemed like his uniform - tight, spotless, immaculate - was the one calling the shots, the body inside wasting away... until a colleague dragged the man aside, snapped him back to reality, presented him curtly with a razor and soap and told him to get back into proper condition - muttered in strange embarrassment, as if he was letting some secret show. Uniforms talking to uniforms, guns muttering to guns, take care of the body inside, or people might start to notice! Shave the mould that accumulates around the throat, shave it off! And the pale face which emerged at the end... smooth, pale, almost infant-like. The disguise somehow less convincing.

...on second thought, no.

No, they were probably just being efficient. For a moment, she thought she knew the truth, and that she ought to follow in their example. See - everyone knew that there was such a thing as miscellaneous flesh. The odd pink stuff which seemed to serve no purpose, which accumulated at the edges of ingrown nails or inside rotten pits. Undifferentiated. And presumably, this was capable of reshaping itself, becoming anything else, because otherwise what else did it do? Had to be able to become skin, muscle, hair, bone, blood. And the soldiers had flamethrowers. Flamethrowers full of jellied fuel that sloshed around. She'd seen that fuel - pale and spongy and sticky. Maybe, just maybe... they lanced a little hole in the back of the neck, and drained out all this undifferentiated matter, removed the pinkness, and stuffed it into those tanks. The body, after all, was about to be compromised - evacuate the valuables, evacuate the thoughts, store it safely away. Flow into the uniform when movement was needed, flow into the gun when violence was needed, pulse into the tongue and inflate it up to imitate conversation. And when the fighting began, this jellied matter would burn, would explode from the flamethrower, igniting along the way. And human thoughts would spray out in smoke and fire, would mingle together.

For weeks and weeks, this black cloud of human intelligence would hang over Rekida, lumbering around like a shapeless amoeba, tasting everything, realising that maybe there was something to be said for staying out of the body for good. They could think, move, eat, drink, touch, could infiltrate the pores of a willing partner and simulate lovemaking, they could do everything, and they just needed to be smoke. A body had to dismantle all the processes. And so they'd float away to pursue their dreams, and leave behind empty, empty bodies, with brown-grey fur around their necks....

Maybe that was why shell-shock happened. Not damage - the mind literally floated away, migrating to a higher state. Hold on. The fuel tanks were aware of her suspicions. Could hear them murmuring to one another, gurgling away in jellied voices, oh no. Remain very still.

They might very well tear her to shreds if she moved too quickly and suggested her knowledge.

Don't look the soldiers in the eye. Or the jellied mass of their brains would leap out and fill her mouth and eyes and nose and ears and form a translucent stomach to digest her in, like starfish did, the freaks.

Reality came back when she heard Yan-Lam talking.

...not to Tanner, though.

"...what sort of gods did you believe in?"

Hm?

All-Name looked up from his work. And Tanner's eyes sharpened significantly.

Ah.

"Oh. Uh."

"I mean, you believe in gods, I keep hearing people say 'honour the gods' or 'before the gods', but... who were they?"

All-Name looked deeply uncomfortable.

"...not really meant to tell outsiders."

"I'm Rekidan. Like you."

"...you fled the city. Your father did, anyway. Really not... meant to talk about this."

Goodness, he was half a person without the General hanging around to direct him. Tanner had the sudden image of All-Name rescuing her from the cold after escaping the cartel simply because he had no idea what else he was meant to do now that no-one was ordering him to do anything. Maybe Tanner had mumbled 'help', and he'd immediately complied out of simple instinct. Maybe he'd rescued her out of social awkwardness.

Hah.

Yan-Lam looked up at Tanner, petulance visible in her face. Goodness, she'd really developed her sass-organs, hadn't she? Probably happened when she insulted all the investors, probably did a real number for her self-confidence. Good for her. Oh, gods, now she was thinking about that scene, and...

"Honoured judge, could you tell him to tell me about the gods he keeps talking about?"

Tanner sighed.

"All-Name, tell her about your religious mysteries."

The young man instinctually nodded, froze halfway through, seemed to try and glare at himself... and hesitantly complied.

"...the wall-gods are anonymous if you're behind them. We just call them 'wall-gods'. But if you're in front, outside of the walls, they're the Spites. If you're a foreigner, they spite for you not being Rekidan. If you're Rekidan, they either spite you for wandering outside of the city, or spite you for not treasuring their protection. Usually both. Used to have wall-wanderers who patrolled the top, and they were allowed to know the real names of each one. It's carved into their hair, you can only see it from the very top. Not sure how many are left, really not meant to learn. Wall-wanderers were a brotherhood and a sisterhood - brotherhood took the side of the wall facing the rising sun, sisterhood the setting sun - and their leaders are both dead. And the hermaphrodite idol which ruled both is shattered. So..."

He shrugged vaguely.

Huh.

Yan-Lam tried the word 'Spites' out for size, and All-Name shot her a genuinely nervous look.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Don't say their names inside the walls. Bad luck."

"You just did it."

"I'm a noble. We're immune to bad luck."

Yan-Lam stared at him. All-Name flushed, and with the scars lining his face, it made him look like a bowl of tomato soup covered in soft, pale croutons.

"Shut up."

"Well, if it's bad luck, wouldn't it be bad luck for me, and not you?"

"Bad luck infects people. Bottom of the chain is less important, but if it snaps, whole chain goes down."

"Spites."

"Stop it."

Tanner intervened, her voice a low, warning rumble.

"Yan-Lam, don't annoy the gods."

It was a conscious effort to not say 'spite the gods'. That was conduct unbefitting of a judge. Or a governor. Or a raving lunatic who was hallucinating constantly and kept thinking about maggots. Or a warlord. Or whatever she was, now.

"Yes, honoured judge. What about the others, though? I mean, are there just wall-gods..."

"Gate-gods, those are the Snake-Breakers, there's... Inn-Ula and Val-Ras. Inn-Ula is the woman. She grasps the head of the snake and breaks the neck. Val-Ras is the man who grasps the tail, and holds in place. The snake doesn't get a name."

"...why?"

All-Name's voice shifted, becoming almost... sermonising, like he was quoting someone else, something authoritative.

"The sacrifice of a serpent over the boundary of a structure is to diffuse all grudges and all wickedness - as they crawl upon the ground, serpents are reservoirs of corruption, much like their infant forms, the leeches. In days of old, milked snakes would be allowed to bite a human, and that human would then kill the snake before daring to intrude on another's territory."

A pause.

"We... found that snakes were in short supply. The statues rectified it. Permanent symbolic sacrifice, and boundary-marking."

"You ran out of snakes?"

"We were killing a great many of them. And snake farming is not an exact science."

Tanner interjected.

"...you said leeches were baby snakes. Did I hear that correctly?"

"Of course they are. If a snake is born inside a body of water, it becomes a leech. If it escapes the water, it develops a cocoon, and a baby snake hatches out of it. Everyone knows that."

"And you said you... farmed snakes?"

"We used to. Anyway, it only happens when the snake is born in a body of water. If it's born on dry land, it skips the leech stage and becomes a snake. But all the biggest, most powerful, most intelligent snakes started as leeches, and were then reborn. Same reason why leeches drain poison from the blood."

...hm.

Yan-Lam grimaced.

"I don't... think that's right."

All-Name sniffed.

"Have you ever even seen a leech, or a snake?"

"...no."

"So you can't disprove me."

Tanner grunted.

"I can. Leeches and snakes aren't related."

"Maybe in southern lands."

He really had a response for everything. Oddly, she had to respect that. Fine. In Rekida, leeches were just an optional stage in a snake's life cycle. Somehow... this was helping her stabilise, just a little. The yellow light felt less sickening, the smell felt less awful. It was deliriously frustrating, honestly. A little interaction with some mostly normal people, and she was feeling more stable. But, at the same time, interacting with (mostly) normal people was exhausting, stressful, and created at least a thousand opportunities for humiliation or embarrassment. If you were alone in a room, you could only embarrass yourself. But eventually, she started to hallucinate and refused to bathe or remove her cape.

Really no good option, was there.

Oh, well.

This was nice enough.

All-Name continued to talk about the gods. There was no such thing as a god which existed in and of itself - it had to either be a boundary, or exist within it, and only encounter humans sporadically. The chains weren't gods - they were closer to a natural force, something like gravity or the wind, something that underpinned everything else. They were to be respected, but not as personalities, not like the Spites or the Snake-Breakers. Oddly... Tanner liked watching Yan-Lam learning about Rekida. None of the rambling about slaves and nobility, none of the perpetual callousness and paranoia... he talked about the ways to honour each statue, the rites for different times of year. Even the festivals he'd been taught about, but which lacked the priesthood required to celebrate them. The festivals calculated based on when a full moon rose perfectly above the head of a wall-god, the taboos observed when the noonday sun was poised directly above a boundary (indicated by the shadows underneath). At all moments of harmonisation of boundaries, there was either danger or excitement. Most business transactions, according to the nobles, had once been carried out under the watchful gaze of the Spites, but only during hours when their faces were at their most happy, to suggest they weren't feeling especially Spiteful at that time. Apparently mapping out the right spot was quite an exercise. Even now, the nobles before the colony's arrival had done this when settling arguments, and All-Name remembered spending hours shuffling around in the freezing cold to find exactly the right spot, while mutant slaving nobles debated if the face was happy, ambivalent, bemused, or hungry.

If it was the last one, they ought to leave immediately.

...All-Name was going to die out here, she realised. Well, she'd always known, but it really.. hit home, seeing him talk about his culture. That culture would die with him. This... talk might be one of the last chances for scraps of it to be passed along, but there'd never be the belief. Yan-Lam would leave this place and find an open, sprawling world. The cloistered conditions of the sacred would be gone, and would never reform - just like she'd been thinking earlier. There was no godly echo to guide her thoughts. This was just knowledge, as sterile as the bunker's air. Was there... the nobles would consider it pointless to communicate it, knowledge without belief being downright offensive when it came to their gods. Tanner just thought that it was something. Not going to pretend she had the answers, but... even if the cloistered conditions of the city could never be reproduced, even if genuine, unreflective belief was no longer possible, even if the majority of these arts could never be practised again, at least it was something. Maybe one day someone would do something with the knowledge.

Suddenly, she wanted Rekida, the city, to endure. The bunker felt strangely obscene, formed out of ruins, built by people who understood none of the significance of those ruins. The colony melting down so much of Rekida... yes, it was a rotten city, but there'd been something here. There'd been people. Not all of them had been sadistic nobles. Statistically, most of them weren't.

Anyway.

The watch told her she had another report to give. She left the two Rekidans talking with one another, sitting cross-legged on the ground like children. If children told long stories about boundary-gods.

They might, for all she knew. Never really had normal conversations with other children when she was young, could be that all the cool kids talked about boundary-gods and chain-oiling and snake-breaking.

Right... readings...

Within acceptable ranges. But still increasing. After a week, they were hovering around 1.7 inside the walls. Slow increases, sometimes by a single increment of a decimal, but it said enough. If she went outdoors, she'd need to have a gas mask on. Wouldn't kill her if she didn't, but it'd probably snip some time off her life in her old age. No wonder she was thinking about ageing so much, she was surrounded by poison, and if it stayed at this level, she'd start losing year by year by year... wondered if she'd die young and flexible, or if she'd just get premature wrinkles and die at fifty looking like she was eighty. No... no, she could just overwork herself, refuse to sleep, drink too much coffee, stress herself, and she'd look that way anyway, should make it easier for others to adjust. Oh, look at that, she was already doing all the above - she was basically just doing the contamination's work for it! Why worry about ageing, her heart was already going to explode at forty-five, she wasn't shortening her lief-span, she was outrunning the contamination.

Oh, she needed to stop thinking.

It was either this or hallucinations. And... she was having enough of them. Had, ever since Lyur. No, since before Lyur, he'd just... made them spike. Widened the instability, but he'd needed an entry point.

Right, telegram... send in the reports... 1.72, that was it. Had to be precise. The telegrams rattled out, and another one rattled back quickly, compiling all the data from around the colony. 1.7s across the board, except near the Breach, where it was spiking into 2.1. Alright. Tolerable. If she was going to guess, the mutants were circling around, trying to get a read on the situation, preparing for a sudden, rapid strike. Hm...

She twitched.

A sound. Right at the corner of her... not a screech from the detector, there was no spiking, so...

Oh.

It was coming from the cells.

She strode quickly, ignoring Yan-Lam's sudden squeak of 'what's wrong, honoured judge'. Marana perked up from where she was sprawled, talking about Fidelizhi gossip with a few investors. Started to follow, but Tanner was already most of the way there. The bunker lacked a centre, a centre would make the whole thing easy to compromise, take the centre and the entire bunker might as well be lost.. So every movement required a chaotic swirl of corridors and passages, almost nauseating with the angles they took and the routes they formed, each one punctuated by heavy metal doors used to seal off contaminated sections. The sound... it was somewhat similar to the detector's moaning, but coming from something more organic, not... quite as mechanical, as unvarying. The cells...

Could hear Tom-Tom yelling out. Asking for guards.

Processed the intent. Ignored the words.

The little mutant's cell... the sound was coming from here. Hesitantly, Tanner placed a gas mask over her face, slipped on her gauntlets, and opened the viewing grille.

There she was.

...curled up.

Curled up on a cot she had no use for, like a human would. Her red hair falling madly around her head, tangling with her horns and the bristling antlers around her neck. The sound clarified without the metal intervening. It was... it was animal, wordless, unnatural. Like her imitations of the human voice, but infused with something more than just empty repetition. There'd never been any emotion in her voice - nothing of her own, anyway. Only the emotion of whoever had originally spoke.

That had changed.

Now there was a distraught tone of... panic in her tone.

A mutant was panicking.

Mutants didn't panic. Mutants were dispassionate and cold. If they could panic, they could feel nervous, if they could feel nervous, they could behave irrationally. If they could behave irrationally, they were basically human. Mutants were machines that happened to have some flesh stitched over the top, there was no emotion in them, no empathy, no understanding of others that wasn't rooted in self-interest.

This sound should not be emerging from that mouth.

But she was... she was curled up, on a bed, moaning in genuine panic, while her eyes bulged in her head.

And Tanner realised something.

She almost crushed Marana into the ground as she sprinted for the telegram, and rattled off a message so quickly she could feel the lever come close to snapping. Quick. A message to Vyuli, crude and unsophisticated. No explaining her working.

T - heredetonate STOP

Lantha had talked about losing her mind to the... whatever it was that commanded the mutants, got them to work together. They'd have long-since figured out how to stop the contamination building up too quickly in advance of their arrival. Honestly, if Tanner had been even slightly less cautious, they'd have arrived anyway. An idle thought - if Lyur hadn't died, if she hadn't executed him in front of everyone, then she might not've been able to keep everyone in the bunkers for the full week. There'd been reports of fights, but nothing else. The patrols had continued. The city remained sealed. The mutants had been trying to lure them out. Couldn't stop every increase of ambient contamination, btu they could confine it, they could restrain the increase enough to stop them panicking. Wanted to lure them out.

A week of waiting had proven that to be a poor strategy. And their response had been appropriate.

They just hadn't suspected that Tanner would have a canary in the coal mine to warn her of their approach.

Could mask everything but the... whatever it was that allowed them to harmonise together.

The wailing of the mutant merged with the increasing moans of the detector.

They might well know she was panicking.

They might see through her eyes.

Tanner bellowed.

"Close the grille!"

A crash of protesting metal. And the wailing dimmed away, only reverberating through the walls, the floor, merging seamlessly with the detectors into a single rumbling cry, like something that should be heard in a temple, or at a graveside. She was listening to the rising song of the mutant approach. They would move in silence, otherwise.

The only sound of their invasion was a low, low, wail.

...if Lantha hadn't come here, the colony would've seen these increases as nothing but... erratic alterations. Not a sign of an invasion.

If Lyur hadn't died, no-one would've obeyed her commands to remain here for a solid week.

She'd ordered them to the bunkers on the basis of a single uncomfortable mutant. No reasonable leader would be allowed to do that. The governor would've been questioned, everyone would've been questioned, if people were thinking logically they'd have questioned. And they'd be dead.

She hadn't even... thought about it. Hadn't felt like she was consciously projecting authority. But now the time was here, she could... so very clearly see people fighting, getting out of the bunkers, the investors kicking her into the streets, the soldiers growing unruly after associating with the mutants, gods, she hadn't even noticed...

She'd become a tyrant capable of ordering people into conditions like this.

And hadn't even noticed.

Now... now she could see no other way this could've played out. If she'd failed a single preceding step, truly failed, they would all be dead by now. One mutant. One murderer. One hunter. A death. An execution. A wail. The three pillars that meant they had a chance right now.

She prayed that Vyuli would...

A rumble.

Another note to the war-song of the mutants.

They were detonating the tunnels.

It was beginning.

Barely felt them from up here. But the others were starting to panic - it thrummed in the air, a high note of discordance, the investors were growing nervous, the soldiers were awakening from thier slumber, life returning to their over-stressed eyes, the world beyond was beginning to roil... negotiate with them, talk them down, get them to understand what was happening and why they should be quiet. Just explain, and... the temptation burst in her suddenly, and overwhelmed whatever feeble restraints she had left. Already ordered them into a bunker for a week, already executed someone in front of them, already ruled them. So she yelled at them, feeling her lungs moving in a way they almost never did - a proper furious bellow, the sort that made her throat ache and her lungs work, the sort that shook her skull. Like a bird of prey shrieking at its quarry to stun them before the talons could wrap around, around, around...

"Everyone, be quiet. I'm handling it."

Silence.

And now she loved this silence. This silence was victory.

And she hated it all at the same time. This silence was surrender.

Bayai. Telegram. Updates. They were coming. The theurgists needed to get the rest of the charges ready. The mutants would need to emerge from the tunnels outside of the walls, they'd need to start doing things, need to meaningfully claim territory and surround the city, and that meant they almost... it was a long shot. A very long shot. But... right, consider. Strategy. It rushed through her head in a clarifying wave, the simple needs of the war. The binary snapping into place, even as the rest of the world turned to chaos. Right. The Breach would be the primary point of entry. The walls were tremendously high, descent would be difficult. Flying mutants existed, but flight was hard, required innumerable dedicated structures. And birds, the ones most likely to have those structures pre-existing, tended to avoid contamination with more ease than any other creature. No, no, they'd be crawling through, or going over in very limited numbers. The Breach would be a killing field for the mutants, it would be a massacre, even if they won. Even a victory would be a defeat, reduce their numbers enough to make fighting in the city a viable option.

Remember - this wasn't a case of armies clashing. This was a case of a tide rushing in, and Tanner trying to place barriers in its way. One barrier might soak up the water, another might redirect it and reduce the pressure, another might stop it entirely, another might narrow it to make it more manageable, another might force it to go uphill and spend some of its furious energy, another might be a mass of humans emptying it bucket by bucket as the water slowly wrapped around their throats. And, by the end, if the tide still had the force required to kill her... she lost. And if the water lapped around her heels and did nothing else, she won. The Breach was going to be a killing field, so they'd be trying to avoid it. Best way of doing that would be to claim territory, build structures (organic or otherwise), try and scale the walls. If they could get their larger creations to the top, they could rain death onto the city. But that would take... a lot, it'd take creatures to build these structures, it'd take creatures to defend them, it'd take creatures to actually scale them and take the walls. The General had told her that the first invasion had culminated in the seizure of the walls, by that point the city had been doomed. Of course, his city had been... a city, not a scattered few bunkers amidst a great ruin. But the point remained. The walls would give them high ground - and while flight might be out of the question for the bigger mutants, gliding wasn't. No way up but through blunt-force clambering, the original stairs up were long, long gone, and the walls were pointless to defend with the numbers they had.

For all their height, the walls had always been mostly symbolic. Covered too much ground to be easily manned, soared too high for sharpshooters to use effectively, were in conditions too cold to be patrolled reliably in the winter. The winds alone could toss a human off the side with lazy ease.

Idly, she thought that the brotherhood and sisterhood that once patrolled the walls, according to All-Name, would've been wonderful allies at this point. All gone, alas. Their deaths may well have spelled the end of the city, in practical terms. The last truly decisive line, before it all became a massacre. But the nobles would be devastating fighters regardless, the trick was in the next few hours - if they could break the first rush of the tide, if they could stem it at the source, they could stop them performing more daring manoeuvres. If they weren't able to mass in enormous numbers, if they had to commit everything to a conventional invasion rather than scaling the walls like they'd done last time, then the colony had a chance.

Not a certainty.

Just a chance.

Battle wouldn't be won or lost at the Breach... but the Breach would definitely indicate how things were likely to go from now on.

It was time, wasn't it?

She'd... played all her pieces. All her cards were on the table, her deck was empty.

Just rolling dice, now.

Seeing if her number came up.

With a flat, flat face, she began to suit up. Took some effort to remove the buffalo pelt from her shoulders, and it seemed to peel away... hated having it off. Trousers. Boots. Heavy overcoat. Gas mask. And... she almost put the buffalo pelt back on over the coat, ignoring the fact that taking it outside would mean contaminating it. Desperately wanted the reassurance. The leather overcoat just didn't have the primal warmth of wearing another creature's near-raw skin. The primal joy of climbing into another animal and becoming it, achieving the same dull, simple understanding of the universe. Like this... there was just her. The last time she'd worn this coat, she'd snapped her restraints and changed. Begun this path.

Felt appropriate to wear the coat to end it, anyway. Or begin to end it.

The pelt stank a little. But she'd come to like it all the same. Like a holy relic of Lantha, the one who'd started this avalanche of preparation. And in her hands, the axe which had allowed her to make this preparation in the first place, actually gave her the authority and strength. Fidelizh had the empty throne. Mahar Jovan had the twin-faced king, or the jewelled gargoyles. And now Rekida had the cloak and the axe.

Didn't like thinking about that.

But any kind of costume made it easier to play the role.

She sat.

And waited.

And as if on clockwork... a knock came from the door. Heavy and certain. The telegram chattered simultaneously.

B - incoming STOP

Tanner rose. Looked through the viewing port. The shape of... Ms. Sulphur and Ms. Starfish, two of the Rekidan mutants, one with her body fusing with her weapons, the other with gelatinous, mostly-alive hair. Both of them smiling at her with naked happiness. All-Name was at Tanner's side, putting on his own equipment, and she murmured a request for a message. The Rekidans shouted back happily.

"They... say they couldn't really feel it until now. Until the detonations. This shadow in their minds. A twitch at the base of the spine."

"They're in control?"

"They were here last time. They know exactly what limits they can reach before the shadow takes them and forces them to its side."

The wailing behind her had stopped.

Could imagine the mutant staring at the door.

Placidly waiting for her chance to escape and join her brethren.

The canary had done her job. Just... had to leave her alone, hope she could recover afterwards.

Time.

And with a clunk, and a few bellowed alarms to the civilians...

She began to unlock the door.