CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE - PALE FIRE

Tanner walked through the ruins, and Ms. Blue followed behind her. The other soldiers looked at them idly, but didn't retort, didn't question. When you beat someone down enough, when you projected an aura of competence... well, it was like replacing brains with straw, or clicking clockwork. Squeezed them dry of the vital organs that questioned and doubted, that attempted to carve their own paths. Agency, Tanner was starting to realise, was something most people were happy to give up. Not just her - everyone. When exposed to the inhumanity of the mutants, the relentless tide of extinction, the boundless sawing motion of the gales... when you fought humans, there was a kind of detachment, she'd read, she'd heard. Same reason people took trophies of the dead, even if they were perfectly ordinary people in regular life. They removed the part of themselves which recognised the enemy as a human, and adjusted their perceptions and behaviours accordingly. Make the enemy an animal, and you made the enemy easier to kill. Then, when you return home, you had this organ transplanted back in from wherever you'd been keeping it. But against mutants... there was nothing to substitute. No will that could be placed in those ruptured eyes. The mutants lived and died with passive contentment and ravenous hunger, they had no love, no fear... should make it easier. Should make it easy to alienate them and kill them with impunity.

But it also removed the satisfaction. She'd taken 'revenge' on the porous man, smashing his head into a bloody crater after he'd almost killed her on the first day of the siege, but... she knew the porous man hadn't felt anything when she killed him. And the swarm had carried parts of the body away, returning them to the greater mass. One might as well try and punch the sea, even animals fought wildly to survive, screamed as they died, clearly disliked being injured or killed. This wasn't even like fighting machinery, there was something about mutants which was reminiscent enough of animals to trick the senses, to inspire the sense that these were animals, behaving... incorrectly. The uncanny and the inhuman built up. The silence weighed. Eventually, it crushed something, the pressure far too much for any human to bear. Dehumanising the enemy meant nothing against things that weren't human. Treating them as animals failed when they were clearly something other. Treating them as machines was pointless when the mind and body still wanted to see them as living creatures, to project something onto them. In the middle-ground between these three approaches, there lay no response but...

Total shutdown. A mental breaking point past which there was nothing but obedience to the powers-which-commanded, to anything which seemed to understand what was going on. Maybe it was mental regression - turning back into children, desperate for something that could guide them out of the dark. Maybe it was just... surrender to the tide of a greater will, let the waves take them and deposit them where they like. And Tanner thought... the governor had been to that breaking point. So had Vyuli, come to think of it. And the General, without a doubt, had gone beyond that breaking point. No wonder they were all... the way they were. The governor, turned into someone obsessed with controlling every detail of his colony, because maybe he'd been the guiding force of his old unit, the thing which had to occupy the position of father, captain, confessor, friend... everything for everyone. And when he got a colony, his methods immediately erred towards the controlling, just out of instinct. Vyuli, turned into a sad-eyed man who would do anything to survive, anything, and had clearly had some sort of breakdown when he realised his time was running out, and became desperate to find another purpose. He'd reached the breaking point, regressed, surrendered, became more animal than man. And the General... the General refused to move on from the war. He was still in it - he smiled when the mutants came, because this was how he wanted to die. He wanted to ride the breaking point's shattering wave until it battered him to pieces in a spray of ecstatic pain.

And her...

She'd become whatever she was. Ms. Blue followed at her heels, as loyal as any hunting dog. Tanner strode on, her buffalo cloak twitching in the wind. And straw-headed soldiers stared blankly after her, wondering where she was going, too crushed to ask, too shattered by exhaustion, by stress, by the strain of fighting the uncanny. The power of questioning her had vanished. There were no alternatives. The Sersas weren't commanding them. Vyuli was dead. Canima was dead. The governor was dead. All that remained was Tanner. And onto her was foisted the role of... mother, ruler, temple-priestess, commander. By abdicating responsibility to her, they made it possible to imagine recovering and becoming human again at the end of this. The governor had been in her place, and never healed. The General had, and was trying to die gloriously as she spoke. Vyuli had, and became Vyuli. Maybe Bayai had tasted it, and flinched away so strongly he'd committed to backing out by any means necessary. If she looked at the hollow soldiers all around her, swaying slightly like victims of hypnosis, she could almost imagine a shadowy version of herself resting on their backs like a Fidelizhi god, murmuring assurances, dictating behaviours. Submit, obey, be silent, fight on, burn the bodies, turn the snow black with ash, turn the sky red with fire, and never, ever, ever stop. Collapse is not permitted. If you do this, you will one day let me fall away and you can go back home.

Ms. Blue's bright, zealous eyes certainly confirmed that impression. Though Tanner wasn't sure if that woman wanted to go back home. Or if she was enjoying this... abdication.

In Tuz-Drakkat they think of eels as vessels of curses, they say the eels come from distant places and bear inside them a churning substance which inflicts ruin on anyone it touches. If you spear an eel, you invite the curse into yourself. They say there are cities across the city where eels are used to take away all bad luck and bring it to other continents, that there are people there so fat in curses that a clipped fingernail can become a curse-ripe eel, a snipped lock of hair can become a whole tangled mass of the things.

This is why you never kill an eel in Tuz-Drakkat with a spear, there's a whole ritualised process, requires quite a bit of effort. It's also why coats of eelskin are so prized - hard to make, and they're meant to contain curses like a waterskin contains water, so they make for the best sort of barrier against it.

I miss the river.

Shut up.

Coward.

The streets were becoming more alien by the day. Ms. Blue took the lead, but continually glanced over her shoulder, making sure Tanner was following. Gore slicked many surfaces, ash stained the slow black, the movement of bodies churned it all into a slurry, so that the streets were marked by rivers of black-red sludge, and expanses of grey-white ice where the bodies hadn't been sufficient. The sky was split open by black pillars - all that remained of the pyres. Great carbonised cables that led from earth to sky, linking them together like umbilical cords, fuelling something. Not sure if the world was being cannibalised to feed the glow above, or the sky was being dragged down, the redness of the evening and morning transmitted to the blood-stained snow. The dawning sun was small, red, and weak, thought it was surrounded as always by a hungry corona of orange light that streaked the sky around it. It was a sun that shrivelled, that denied scale and replaced with a cold meagreness. It was a sun that pickled people who lingered under it for too long, and it made the city seem strangely... sterile. Bodies were everywhere. The bodies of soldiers in melted equipment, immolated where they'd fallen, snow filling in the crevices in their armour and outlining them starkly. And the mutants...

The mutants were skeletons. The swarm devoured everything that could be devoured, and that the flames hadn't reached. They aged prematurely, so that despite the siege beginning not a few days ago, they were surrounded by an antique ossuary, a charnel house that filled the entire city from wall to wall, or so it seemed. The chains which bound the walls to earth clanked mournfully in the stiff winter gale. There were so many bodies... the diseased, with their almost-human frames. A tattered skin from a buffalo-balloon, mossy tendrils sprawling across whole buildings, the deflated head of the creature looking comically sad, almost clownish. Ribs protruding like sickles from uncounted corpses, the remains of carbonised organs lingering inside like opals and coals, some of them rattling as flesh inside tried to escape, tried to mutate until it could leave this basalt prison. The skeletons looked as though violence had been done to them from the inside out as much as the outside in, as flesh desperately tried to get out of the body before it was consumed. Ribs pulverised where animate lungs had tried to crawl away. Skulls furrowed with long grooves where eyes had tried to flee. Limbs snapped like old driftwood as the muscles contracted fiercely, snapping the bone so they could flee... but the ash spoke volumes to their success. They were surrounded by the high-pitched ticking notes of almost-living organs, of little nubs of flesh inside opal prisons. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick... and the mourning ringing of chains... and the crunch of fresh snow, the squelch of damp ash... the stink of smoke and flesh and coppery blood.

The city was turning to a graveyard. She was... honestly surprised at how the mutants were holding their numbers together... and then she started mapping out the attacks, a little more. An odd thought began to occur. See, with the breakdown in the telegram wires, and the general isolation of the bunkers from one another, save for through messengers and flares... it was hard to tell where the mutants were moving at any given time. When they attacked, they did so simultaneously at all locations, allowing for no movement of troops to support overstressed positions, allowing for no warning, allowing for nothing but immediate, brutal combat. Demanding a state of constant tension from the soldiers, breaking them until they were hollow things which now stood silently and gore-slicked around the humming coffins of the bunkers, with their wheezing filters and ever-growing wail of detectors. That, surprisingly, didn't seem to be a problem now - the ambient contamination was rising slower. The mutants had reached a basic plateau, confined by wind and constant snowfall and rising pillars of fire that helped keep the air clear. Anything more intense, and they'd need to devote themselves completely. Small blessings. Still, it was another source of pressure on the soldiers, who needed to rotate constantly to make sure they didn't get too exposed - even so, they were losing years by the day. Eighty years of healthy life, to seventy eight, to seventy four, to seventy... lower, lower, lower. A gradual nibbling erosion. Crawling gravestone.

Anyway.

She was finally getting a picture of... how they were spreading. The image was both bleak and confusing.

Bleak, because they were surrounded. The Breach might be their most solid piece of consolidated territory, but before an attack... they were filling the streets all around a bunker, they were surrounding them. The mutants controlled the city - they just wanted to evict the humans inside it. Made sense, the bunkers had never been meant to hold territory, just to provide shelters in the event of a regular, if large, mutant incursion. Still. The alabaster walls felt more like the sides of a box canyon, the sort that Lyur described, full of buffalo bones so tightly packed you could walk across them without stumbling once, absolutely level from edge to edge. The confusion came because... well...

Why?

What was the point in surrounding them like this, then retreating, then attacking agian? Why were these streets so clear, and... yes, the bones faded in number as they left the bunker behind, left the kill-zone, but this was still a lot of bodies. They'd fought tooth and nail against the soldiers from all sides, and if they wanted to, they could probably consolidate further, contaminate these places so much that there'd be no chance of winning. Ambient contamination would skyrocket if, say, they started conducting their operations inside the city rather than outside, making it more a case of... tiny pockets of stubborn existence inside a membrane of mutant control, rather than a conventional war.

The bunkers could be digested, rather than besieged.

Yet... the streets were empty. The heart had sent blood into the blood vessels of the roads, and had then withdrawn them as the sun rose.

She itched idly at her gas mask, trying to reach something on her face. Didn't want to think about how badly she must look underneath this all. Didn't think there was anything underneath all this equipment, really. Just pale, filthy flesh and staring eyes. Something profoundly inhuman. Not like she'd removed her gear since the bath, where she'd felt the terror of unwinding come over her. Not experiencing that terror again, not when it might overwhelm her. The ringing opaline organs continued their solitary symphonies... Ms. Blue glanced over her shoulder, eyes shimmering like great vague pools behind the stained lenses... the insects in the air whirred faintly, seeming strangely distant, though her head still throbbed even at the slightest reminder - like a tortured body cringing from the slightest show of force, no matter how small.

"Insects are quieter, ma'am."

"Hm. They are."

"Good sign, isn't it, ma'am? Favourable?"

Her voice had a slightly plaintive, if embarrassed, edge to it. Eager for an answer. Tanner forced herself to play along, not to impress her, not to make her think more positively of Tanner, just... because she might as well. The old coward Tanner would shirk conversation as a rule. The new Tanner, the Tanner who was in charge, would be... well.

Wouldn't care. Would just talk.

Not sure if her spine was resisting shivering out of exhaustion or confidence. Chose to believe the latter.

"I imagine their numbers have been cut a bit. Fire, contamination-gathering, gas, that sort of thing. And they already lost a huge amount of the swarm during the explosion."

"Might not have to deal with the buzzing for much longer!"

A weak laugh that died in the bone-fields. Tanner hummed pessimistically.

"Maybe. They'll be focusing on recycling contamination, that still needs to happen. If that means getting the swarm to be more focused rather than being active participants in battles..."

She didn't say what she really thought. That the insects were likely being regrown as they spoke, sculpted for the future, and that... ultimately, once the swarm started to recover, their fuel would be too deficient to burn them all. Each burned insect was a few thimbleful of lost contamination - they could afford the loss. But a gout of flame was a solid piece of fuel, and they needed to use abundant flame to make sure that the insects couldn't recycle contamination from dead bodies. They were in a brief golden lull, she felt, where the swarm was diminished enough and their reserves were full enough that the swarm would leave them be.

But once that balance shifted...

Her grimness radiated around her in a solid aura, and Ms. Blue shivered slightly, bowing her head in ashamed obedience.

"You're... quite right, ma'am."

Tanner shifted her axe on her shoulder, not replying in any way beyond a vague hum. The detector on her waist clicked a little faster - they were approaching the hole in the centre of the city, the navel of Rekida. Nobles said this was where one of their temples had once been, a major site that could never be rebuilt. If it had endured, maybe the Fidelizhi would've understood Rekidan culture a little bit more, enough to stop the cartel from gaining so much of a foothold. Speaking of the nobles, some of them were moving over the rooftops, muttering to one another, swaying a little as if drunk, singing old hunting songs in their hoarse, mutated voices... overhead whirled the same damn bird, the one which, to her knowledge, had killed quite a number of soldiers through precise, immaculate strikes and subsequent retreats. Every day it remained up there was an insult, really. Tanner's filter rattled, keeping almost perfect time with the ticking detector...

And when the mutant came, it did so as they always did.

In silence.

It was just one, for now. A dog-creature, extended and thin like a greyhound, ribs clearly visible and oleaginous in their flexibility. Black as coal, a wisp that might be confused with any of the pillars of greasy smoke that oozed into the red sky. Four legs, no additional limbs, no other heads... it had the slimness of a mutant, the slimness of a creature which had removed anything it no longer required. Why have a normal stomach when you could have something that bloated like a tick once contamination was found? Why have normal teeth when draining contamination was important? Why have all the little organs that filtered waste when it could all be simplified - mutants fought, ate, and excreted through their mouths, hacking up the red masses that had once been the flesh of other mutants.

But the head was what drew her attention.

It was... tube-like, and hollow. Expanded almost like a trumpet from the neck, showing a dark red interior, ringed with supportive bones. No fangs. No proboscies. Not even a tongue. Reminded her a little of the porous man, though... not quite. Not quite as advanced. It stared with no visible eyes.

...idly, Tanner thought that the mutants here could afford to be blind. They had a swarm to guide them, a grand intelligence which unified all perceptions. It might actually be totally blind, deaf, dumb... and it could hear them through the ashy cockroaches and shivering grasshoppers that only appeared normal at a distance. It could see them through the bird wheeling overhead, wings spread wide and flat. It could taste them with the senses of a whole army.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

It was one. And it was many.

Ms. Blue raised her rifle calmly - at her waist was a large brown metal canister, a miniature flamethrower for dealing with the limited forces they expected to handle out here. For now, though... at this range, the rifle was required. It thundered, the heat of the barrel steaming immediately in the cold...

And the dog rushed for them, bullet spraying up rubble nearby, a bizarre...

Was that light?

A pulse of phosphorescence, of biological light, running around and around the black cone in fat sparks... Tanner raised her axe, moved to Ms. Blue's side, ready to go in front if needed... though a part of her murmured, insidiously, that Ms. Blue would gladly stand in front of the dog until it was close enough that she could feel the warmth of its flesh. Ignored the voice. Tanner's edge didn't gleam, now. Soaking it in gore, then plunging it into fire to burn the contamination away, had gradually given it a gleaming patina of... almost lacquer, black and shimmering. Like a beetle's shell. But the edge... the edge remained sharp enough to destroy the dog-thing. It rushed closer, limbs eerily fluid across the ground, seeming to fly towards them, the light rising...

Another shot. A hit, this time. Tearing a chunk of meat from its front shoulder, enough to make the leg paralysed immediately... at least, until it could heal.

Tanner braced to swing as Ms. Blue struggled to reload...

And the light flashed.

Bright. So very, very bright.

Tanner stumbled back, and Ms. Blue cried out in pain, almost dropping her weapons - but her hands were too stiff with tension, just like everyone else at the moment. The light lingered in her vision, after-images swimming like insects, the street vanished in a haze of distortions... and in this moment of abject blindness, she thought... she stumbled a little more, and her head throbbed, incapable of even feeling the bones as she crushed them. In the blindness... she hadn't slept for longer than half an hour at a time, usually less, snatched between blinks. And that was a dubious sleep, more of a low doze... this was darker, darker by far, and... she just... the buzzing in her head seemed to intensify, her face felt uncomfortably warm, her skin itched furiously under her coat... in the clarifying dark, there was something...

She had no idea what was happening.

Her head throbbed.

The swarm was all around her. Had to be. Backing up the dog, swarming in as the light flashed, bombard every sense at once. Had to be. Had to be. Her axe swung on instinct, she felt it colliding... but the dog was moving with the momentum, rolling over and over... one leg useless, the side split open and weeping dark ichor...

Dark. How did she know it was dark?

Blindness receding. There was nothing around her but bones and stone, not more than a handful of insects...

The dog was sprawled against the rubble, struggling back up, the light blooming again...

Tanner lifted her axe to finish the job, her face flat...

Ms. Blue screamed, and unloaded her rifle into the dog's face. The sound made Tanner freeze. The soldiers didn't scream when they fought. It felt wrong in the face of this particular enemy, which never made any sound if it didn't need to. The scream continued as the woman unloaded another rifle round into the creature's head, splitting the rings of bone, dousing the rubble with eerily glowing fluid... another scream, another shot...

And now she was driving a steel-toed boot into the creature, smashing the ribs, which struggled to flow out of her way. The meat was reaching the rebel stage, where it decided to abandon the idea of a body and do anything to save itself - the creature's skin was bunching and flexing, blood vessels were leaching out like snakes, bones were shaking as the marrow made a break for it...

"Do! Not! Touch! Her!"

Another kick - nothing met it, the body was unmaking itself.

Tanner was very nervous.

She quietly removed the flamethrower from the woman's waist, Ms. Blue so utterly enraged that she didn't notice until Tanner started placidly spraying fuel over the dog, which began to squirm apart faster and faster, terrified of what was coming, and...

A spark from the same canister, from a little device at the front.

And with that, the creature began to burn. It wriggled silently, flames making it curl up like old paper, each chunk of flesh ripping itself apart to escape... and the increased surface area only made it worse, of course. The insects didn't even bother reclaiming it, save for a few nibbles at a stray scrap of flesh that escaped the inferno. It'd been a quiet, effective removal of an exotic mutant that probably took quite a while to design. If it had a pack of others like it, the blindness might've been permanent, or at least more enduring. It could've backed up other mutants and torn apart a soldier before the others realise the threat and moved their flamethrowers to intercept. Instead...

Killed by a few rifle shots and as little fuel as possible in a random street. Strange.

...Tanner was focusing on this because it stopped her thinking about Ms. Blue.

"Ah. Sorry, ma'am. Didn't... I got a bit carried away, ma'am. Sincerest apologies, ma'am."

Tanner blinked. Kept burning the mutant, kicking the ashes around for good measure. In silence, she returned the canister. In silence, she walked away. And Ms. Blue trotted loyally at her side, rifle at the ready, eyes flickering from the road to Tanner and back again, checking to see if she was offended, or... should Tanner say something? Her face was utterly flat with discomfort, and knowing Ms. Blue even slightly probably meant she was reading a whole suite of feelings out of that. Anyway.

The streets were... gods, this was strange. First expedition beyond the bunker in days, first penetration into the inner city period. The slowly rising click-click-click of her detector told her, in abundant detail, precisely why this was. Ms. Blue started talking, slowly and carefully, policing her words into a state of abject professionalism... tinged by a hoarse edge where her scream had scraped her throat on the way out.

"Should be alright, I think, commander. The contamination is higher than usual, but if we're not here for too long, we take our pills... I mean, this place was already being scrubbed when things ended up like this."

"Still higher than usual."

"Oh, definitely, commander. Definitely. When the city was taken back, they... well, they burned the outskirts down to ash, cleared out everything they could. Then dropped enough theurgic bombs down the middle of that hole in the middle to collapse the entire pit. They were careful, and it was years before anyone was thinking of a colony, they just drove by in a fleet of airships and got it over with, same with a dozen other cities."

Tanner shivered imperceptibly. Theurgic bombs... she'd improvised a couple of those out of food-storage devices, and it'd been enough to decimate (inaccurate word, but in the confines of her own head no-one was judging her on it) the approaching horde, turn earth to glass, turn hills to smouldering calderas. Even now, she could sometimes smell a hint of metal on the wind, under all the contamination and rot and meat and bone and ash. Same out here. A theurgic bomb... theurgists actively trying to build something from scratch that would devastate a wide area was enough to make her feel very uneasy indeed. The last time she'd seen them be that dedicated, there'd been the smouldering corpse of an inconceivably large mutant to prove the efficacy of their work. That titan was still trying to heal itself, and yet the theurgists had put it down completely - so completely that not even other mutants would come to eat of its corpse.

And she'd forced a raft of them to work for her. Hm.

Could always just... well, kill them. Shut them up. Stop them from doing... this to her, whatever this had been.

If she felt like jumping off the edge of a moral cliff into the awaiting rocks of monstrousness, upon which the last traces of conscience would shatter like so much stained glass, of course.

Still had enough decency left in her to recognise that. That there was a difference between 'lying and smashing open the skull of a psychopath who would've needed to die anyway' and 'murdering people who were inconvenient to her'. She wasn't a monster.

She was just odd.

But in the act of the former was contained the act of the latter. It was another thing entirely to just not kill anyone at all.

Anyway.

"But they've cleared most of the streets?"

"Cleared almost all, ma'am. Might need to do some clambering, but... shouldn't be a problem."

There were leaving behind the boneyards, coming into streets that were only lightly be-speckled by ash, and only every minute or so did she see a mutated insect crawling lazily over a wall, basking in the ambient contamination that allowed it to grow, to improve, to develop. The ticking rose. They were coming close to the plug, or... seal, or whatever the correct term was. Plug or seal implied there was something behind it, something it had to contain, but it was really just a restoration job, right? Pouring foundation stone back into the pit, filling it up, and over time a semi-solid layer would return, bringing the city back to a state of genuine safety, back to the state it'd been in for a long, long time. Really, when you thought about how long foundation stone lasted in some places, the entire Great War was a strange little blip in which a tiny portion of stone was removed, then swiftly returned, and that was the end of it. An interruption so tiny it was barely worth noticing. They rested on one of the pillars of the earth, the immaculate columns that kept civilisation going. Honestly, if they weren't inside a city, the ambient contamination would be significantly more of a threat - in the wilds, it would have an abundance of material to draw on. Wooden houses started to revive, to become beings with rooms for stomachs and doors for teeth. Countless vermin, all the little chittering hordes that filled any occupied face after long enough, became more meat for the organic furnace. Trees, grass, everything becoming in some sense dangerous, a vector for infection.

Cities were sterile, though. The pillars of the earth were pillars of stability.

...maybe that was the choice humanity had made. To live and thrive on pillars of sterility, isolated from the churning biological chaos of the world beyond... and then to end up besieged by those who'd mastered that same biological chaos. The bird overhead cast a dim shadow over them, seeming to swallow them whole. Mocking them for their smallness, for their stubby limbs and their woeful dependence. Animals didn't like the scent of contamination... but it couldn't be argued, they adjusted to it much better than humans ever could. When your existence was defined by simple instincts, the substitution of one set of instincts for another was... devoid of conflict, really. As opposed to humans, with their ideals, their memories, their personalities, their keen emphasis on social life. Their sense of what they were losing. And yet, looking at the horde around them... could it really be said that humanity was the only route to 'higher thought' or 'higher action'? You could say a great deal about whether the intelligence in the swarm was enlightened, but... when you could change the world, when you could carve innumerable organisms into your image, when you could almost extinguish humanity... Tanner was a person of concrete realities, even now, even with her mind going in odd directions, she was effectively just becoming more herself, stripping away the intangible relativism that had kept her cowardly for so long, dragged her kicking and screaming to whatever this breakdown was. When you could break the world, what did it matter if you were unenlightened? She kept thinking of how Lantha had moved, so smooth, so articulated, so... precise. Enormous, yes, and monstrous in so many ways, but...

She moved with more grace, as a shambling mutant abomination, than Tanner had in her whole life. Even now, with the bright calm surging through her whole body, with her thought and action becoming melded, she felt as though it was only held together by tension, like an overweight man sucking in his stomach to fit into a good suit. The image only lasted until his breath ran out, until his discipline gave way...

Soaking in the bath had almost brought her to that.

Couldn't let that happen again. Too risky.

And an hour or two later, without any announcement...

They were at the seal.

Staring out.

Tanner blinked.

She'd expected a few heaps of rubble, the equivalent of a scrapyard for old stone...

She hadn't...

It was beautiful and terrible.

The pit had been a pit. It extended as far as the eye could see - at the time, it would've been a barren, gaping maw in the ground, leading to a near-limitless wellspring of contamination to fuel the war effort. The city felt small suddenly, small and diminished, when she considered what kind of structure must have sat in this great empty space. The ends of chains lay nearby, some of them truly enormous - this had been the anchor, the central point holding all the spokes of the city together. And with it gone, the city had spun away, losing structure, losing purpose, losing everything. And then the theurgists had filled it all in with a few bombs. The wind howled lonesomely over the rocky white surface, and it was smooth, uncannily smooth, as if a great source of heat had completely melted the rock together, softened it and let it congeal. In the red light of the sun it shone like a great coin, and here and there gaps in the stone showed oddly flickering white fires, painful to look at, such was the brightness. What... how could there be fire? What was the fire feeding on? How could it burn in the midwinter gale, in the midwinter cold, in the barren fused stone? Yet she felt... confident saying that the white fires had burned since the bombs were dropped. Maybe they'd never stop burning. The sun was rising overhead now, and it hung perfectly above the middle of the seal, such that shadows emerged outwards in all directions, each stone casting a dim outline that lunged towards the two travellers, like darkness was fleeing the circle at all times, fleeing the white lights, fleeing the smoothness, fleeing that stone which was still too warm to permit a single flake of snow.

The air stank of metal. Her detector was screaming at her - ambient contamination at significant levels, spend no longer than half an hour. Didn't intend to spend that long, not even close. Even looking at this place made her teeth itch, some old animal instinct telling her that a space this open, this smooth, this pale was a land where nothing could grow, and nothing would take root. Years since the bombing, and still nothing dared grow, not even the meanest grass... and no lichen, neither. And the sound... the sound... it was like... like a perpetual hum, emanating from the earth. The great coin becoming a resonator for something. Maybe there was something trapped underneath, maybe... no, no, the sound was emanating through every stone, through the great bulk. The smoothness, the way it fused together, the depth to which it surely stretched... they were listening to the earth's throat humming to them, licking the air with tongues of white fire. Her delusions made her see a red sky and a red sun, but the light died with those bodies, leaving the disk an immaculate, immaculate pale.

The most dead shade she'd ever seen. The dead white shade of a polished bone

They were defending this?

This was the place the mutants wanted, most likely? The thing that they were sacrificing so much to reach?

She glanced...

Mutants scattered around the rim of the disk. Staring into the centre, enraptured by something Tanner couldn't see. None of them were reacting to the two - hadn't seen them, hadn't scented them. Couldn't, not with the stench of iron in their noses, not with their hearing overwhelmed by the hum. Her eyes darted over, while Ms. Blue readied a rifle just in case, slipping a bullet into the breech. A low growl built in the soldier's throat, a protective instinct rising up. Evidently some people became hollow vessels when crushed enough. And others became hollow... then filled themselves back up with something else.

Not sure how much she liked seeing people dragged to this sort of extreme. Their dearest emotions teased out... then replaced with something brighter and harsher.

Tanner drew a pair of binoculars from her waist, placed them to her lenses, shutting out the rest of the world.

The glass hummed with the great silver coin.

Gritted her itching teeth. Ignored it. Kept looking.

The mutants were standing like sentries around the edge, but... no, no, not quite. What could they be guarding, if they were all staring inwards? They weren't even paying attention to the world beyond, and the silver... it wasn't good for them. Foundation stone was never good for mutants, and these ones were just... lingering her, soaking up the heat, the cold, the abuse, the strange effects of prolonged contact... they looked shrivelled, dried out, blackened, hard as iron. Eyes shrivelled until they fell back into their skulls and left them sightlessly staring. None were moving. And not all of them were standing at the edge.

Bizarrely, some were actually lingering on the disk, dark shimmering shapes that became vague and illusory if she stared for too long - the disk was surrounded by an odd haze which obscured outlines. These were so blackened by the strange effects of the disk's white flames that they seemed to almost be statues, made entirely of pencil graphite, the black matter left behind when trees were struck by lightning. If she smashed one with her axe, she felt confident that it would simply shatter to dust, everything beneath long-since solidified. Again, immobile. Waiting for something. No insects were here to recollect their contamination, they were just... sitting there. One of the mutants was far too close to one of the pits of white fire, and half of its body had melted away, sloughing downwards and solidifying into eerily shaped waterfalls, glittering like baubles of glass cast from onyx. They were bisected, but as mutants they ought to still be alive, yet...

Yet none of them moved, even as the great pale took away their eyes, the flexibility of their skin, the function of their organs, the contamination their comrades relied on to survive.

They stood like stylites on the pillar of the earth. Meditating for reasons Tanner couldn't fathom. She'd talked about how mutants weren't enlightened - maybe she was looking at a religious sect, suicidal and ascetic...

No. Nonsense.

She scanned the edge again, trying to pick something out...

Saw a mutant moved to the disk. Maybe she'd been stopping one from doing this when she killed that dog... this one was similar, with a great black cone for a head, ringed with phosphorescent bands of bone, and it was already dark enough to be one of the others. It paused at the rim... then sprinted right towards the centre, fast as it could possibly go, the light in its cone blooming brighter, brighter, flashing warnings at some invisible enemy. Even from here she could hear its claws skittering over the rock, could see fat pale sparks tear up where it made contact, could see a haze of dust forming behind it like a comet trail... it sprinted, sprinted...

Seemed to have no legs at all, it was moving so quickly. A shadow flickering over the pale...

And then it stopped.

Through the binoculars, saw skin tearing where it struggled to come to a halt, limbs eerily still.

It stared sightlessly ahead. Hadn't made it especially far, only sprinted for less than a minute. It didn't sit on its haunches. It just... stayed still, frozen in place.

Looked around, the light in its face flashing erratically. Looked lost.

And a second later, it stopped moving for good.

She watched as the glow slowly faded. Killed by the stone, killed by the pale fire, killed by whatever had killed the others.

Ms. Blue let out a strangled snort of a laugh.

"They're... killing themselves?"

The snort was genuine, the surprise was genuine - she'd forgotten to say 'ma'am' after all.

"I..."

She had nothing.

"...maybe they're looking for something in the middle, or..."

She trailed off.

Could see there was nothing in the middle but more stone, more fire. If anything, the centre was even nastier, the stone not as well-fused... but the pale fire was all the brighter. They could plug this entire thing with bodies, and they wouldn't get an inch deeper into the earth. Maybe if they had... another handful of theurgic bombs, they could tear up the land enough to dig deeper, but... why. Why even bother. The destruction visited by the airships was such that nothing could survive. At the bottom of this seal was nothing but a drained underground river so polluted with discarded flesh that it couldn't even be used, unless they wanted to destroy all the advancements they'd made to their bodies. And if they wanted the river, they could access the river via other means, the theurgists had built a lift down there. Just widen that, if they felt like getting down into the dark.

They were running out and dying in the pale.

One by one.

No purpose.

And somehow, the dog had looked... confused. Bizarrely confused.

Never known a mutant to look that way. Even when defeated, they had a polite resignation to everything - they acted as their inner instincts dictated, never showed emotion, never really doubted. Doubt was born of indecision, and a mutant always knew what their decision ought to be, even if that was just 'wait and observe further developments' or 'die and evacuate flesh'.

Then her eyes caught movement. The nearest one of the carbonised stylites was slowly, slowly turning her way...

The skin around the neck of the creature, which had once been a bull of some kind, cracked as it went. Exposed flesh that was barely showing any signs of life.

Stared sightlessly.

It tried to move in her direction... but the hooves were dry as twigs, the legs had long-since given up any pretence of function, and it hissed as it collapsed to the pale, whatever flesh remained struggling feebly and dying a second later.

There'd... been nothing in it. Nothing.

Tanner stared out at the coin. It'd be one thing if the mutants were shunning this place, then she could say 'they have other priorities'. It'd be another thing if the mutants were clearly preparing for something, then she could say 'they're trying to do this, that, or what have you'. It'd be another thing if the coin had an obvious point of interest in the middle, then she could say 'ah, there's the target, and all they need is a few mutants to reach it'.

She saw nothing but a flat, pale, burning expanse where mutants were committing suicide.

And as she watched... another one was running out to do it.

Didn't even make it half of the dog's distance. Had never stood a chance of reaching the centre. Died standing up, burned into place by pale light.

She lowered the binoculars.

And stared.