June-Leckie breathes in a waft of horse stink as she adjusts the heavy shell. The suit is rusted, pocked with holes from where insistent feelers had burst through. She hopes it will only be needed for glancing blows.

She loses herself in the tiers of buildings pressing up against Kaskit’s enclosure, where an airlock rests above a rooftop. She could leave through it, could follow the intercontinental ropeway cord towards Hyrnlak and… what? Find their ashes, if not reclaimed by the raw ground already? No. Her girls are dead, but she can open the door leading to the Minds’ demise and even the odds forever. Humanity can push back once the First Signature is dead and the Decree is rewritten.

Under the enclosure are gaps where the inhibitor atmosphere does not reach, where people take great strides to escape the city’s gas. The derelict building across the street is one of them. A brick and wood construction with bolted front doors, planks covering its windows, rags, and torn clothing stuffed into the holes to keep the outside air from seeping in. She could have walked by this place on the street and known it was a Chant temple. She only hopes someone inside knows where Ruinalk is.

She presses up against the back of a wagon and listens. On the other side comes a knock. A door opens. “I don’t believe I ordered this,” says a soft-spoken voice. “Can you return it?”

“Afraid not,” says a KCP officer undercover as a Kaskit Postal Service employee. “Can’t find the sender, and so can’t return it.”

Can’t return it. That’s the signal. The front door creaks, and the officer grunts as he carries the crate inside. The door is halfway open but closing fast.

“Just set it down-”

The officer drops the crate on the floor just as June-Leckie barrels through the door, her machete in hand, and points it at the old man. She feels a pang of guilt as he hunches over, putting most of his weight on a cane. His work shorts hang loose, his kneecaps grounded as if he’d been churned through a mill. June considers they have mistook the place for a legitimate business.

The old man raises his hands, dropping the cane and standing without it. “What is this?”

“KCP.” The officer flashes his wrist tattoo. It rotates as the strand that lives there explores the confines of its domain, then settles into the symbol of the city’s police.

The old man, confused, turns his head. His neck cracks. “You must be mist-t-t-taken.” He croaks, stutters, and doesn’t quite finish the sentence. His neck stiffens. His eyes bulge. Something thumps under his shirt like a mouse trying to escape. “If you’ll just-”

June lunges forward and hacks into the old man’s neck. The blade chews right through the flesh and hits something hard, which could be bone or an inner carapace. Something shoots from his chest and shirt. June leaps back. The tendril is thicker than the machete, a small, misshapen baby’s hand at its end. It latches onto June’s arm, trying to squeeze but can’t, entirely at the mercy of the Decree. June thanks the Hells the man isn’t Incited.

He thrashes, anchored in place and trying to free his arm. June slashes the tentacle, and the childlike hand limps away, spasming and sprawling on the floor. June lets the man fall and hacks at his neck until the machete chips away at the floorboards.

A door on the other side of the main room creaks open. Three figures stare wide-eyed, regarding the decapitated man with a mix of rage and impassiveness. Their necks crane further than normal. Their skin bubbles, the appendages underneath ready to burst out. June steps forward and makes her presence known. Just from how they recoil and cower, she can tell these are not Incited either.

The officer looks June over, mouth open, as if his moment of gallantry has arrived. Instead, he suppresses those masculine instincts, closes the door, and clicks the lock, leaving her alone with the acolytes.

She pictures what they see: a KCP heavy shelled officer who is not a man. She counts their stunned faces, their confused heads. Like termites, there are always more Chant hiding in their makeshift temples, slithering in the shadows, skittering like the rats they are, their exterminator coming to meet them.

There are rows of desks and bundles of documents sorted into trays. A printing machine occupies an entire wall, with a tarp and cobwebs covering most of it. A door leads upstairs. June walks over, relishing in every footstep that translates into a flinch and wince on the acolytes’ faces. She ensures the door leading upstairs is locked and the acolytes cannot run. They’ll have to pry the planks free to escape through the windows and into the KCP. Nothing will breathe when she’s done here.

Chant emerge from side rooms, scan her, gauge her weakness, trying to find something they can exploit. Maybe they already know they can’t touch her. She is invincible.

“The First Signature,” June says, showing her machete. She trains it on each of them, smiling as they crouch behind desks. “Where is he? Where is the First Signature?”

None of the once-human adherents respond, hands raised above their heads as if she’s a god that can be appeased.

“I won’t ask again. Where is-”

An appendage shoots out from an old acolyte, covered in tufts of hair. Perhaps he’s senile, deaf, or simply skeptical that she is indeed a woman. It hangs before her, splaying like a bird’s talon. The man’s head is at its center, his eyes raking across her in disbelief.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

She touches that head and feels the disgusting contours, the skin that is now membrane and too wet. She wants to throw up. “Do you know?” she asks. “Or are you just wasting my time?” She leans in closer. “Tell me, and I’ll spare you.”

Bargaining with these things has been a sport with June. She’s not sure if the once-man can even hear her.

It croaks, perhaps an exact location in its guttural language, but June can’t understand it. She hacks at the tentacle, and the man drops, pushing the others into full panic mode as they lock themselves inside their rooms, trapping others out.

“Well?” June screams. “Who is going to be the first to live?”

“We are all alike under the embrace!” It’s a younger man, speech clear, his skin a soft brown and blemish-free. He is the furthest from malignment.

June approaches. The man hops over a desk and runs, ramming the front door. He rattles the knob and makes for the door leading upstairs, but June grabs him by the shoulder, throws him down, and hacks into him until he can see his inky black heart.

One by one, June-Leckie cuts the maligned sympathizers down. They wrap tentacles around her, malformed hands, and other strange appendages that try to clamp, bite, cut, or burn, but nothing works. No matter how hard they will it, she is unbreakable in the face of them. It’s exhilarating. Her heart pounds faster with every slash through putrid flesh. She revels in the black gore and gurgling screams of these unworldly creatures. Each of their wails is stronger than an orgasm.

The locked doors are left, but they are weak constructions, bending and breaking at the force of her armored boots and shoulders. The men inside the rooms are against the walls, wielding lamps and chairs as weapons. June cuts them all down.

She finishes the count at seventeen acolytes when the rooms are cleared. She pants, regarding the black and puke-green bodily fluids strewn across the tables, staining the curtains, the papers, and the printing presses. Her hands look like she’s been swimming in a sea of tar. They’ll have to burn the place and maybe the whole block to nullify all this contagion. Yet she will walk out unscathed.

Something pounds on the floor above her. It gasps and cuts off as if forced to stop. June wipes the blood off her machete using the dress of the seventeenth acolyte, makes her way to the door leading upstairs, and kicks it down.

There are five rooms on the second floor, their doors wide open, each of the beds made, chests resting at their ends with clothing thrown inside. Shelves hold personal belongings—trinkets and jewelry in small bowls, half-open books, and a few squat oil lamps. June searches the rooms, opens every drawer, and looks under every bed. She pauses at the precipice of the last room.

Two boys huddle on a corner bed. A man stands before them, his arms out to defend them as if June hadn’t just hacked through a sea of limbs downstairs. The children peek through covered eyes, risking a glance at June, and then gasp when their gazes lock onto hers. One of them sobs.

“Monster,” says the man.

June chuckles at the absurdity of such a remark. She studies him, his black robes with a patch emblazoned on the front, the one of a tree with its branches extending too far. His beard is full, and he is old.

“You’re a vizier?” she asks.

He says nothing, but that is confirmation enough.

June shuts the door, the thud like a corpse flopping to the ground. “As for me,” she says, “I am just a woman seeking information.” She breathes in the dusty air, not an ounce of inhibitor agent she can detect. “What are your names?”

One of the boys pokes his head up. His murky, dark pupils hold tiny black swirls where the inky corruption of malignment is alive. Like thin leeches, the tiny maligned swim around his corneas. June’s heart falls, though only the small fraction wishing the men in pieces below had not dragged children into this. Worse, she wants to ask what kind of sickly illegal mother would birth such creatures.

“Stay away from them,” the man says. “Let us go. We didn’t harm anyone. We have our beliefs, and they are sacred to us.”

“Your beliefs are poison.” June folds her arms. “But we are both human, aren’t we?”

“Of course.” The man stutters, his breath catching. “Please. We have to go.”

The second boy removes his hands from his face, and the resulting sight tests June’s resolve. The wrinkles around his eyes belong to a man ten times older, gray and deep-set and in places they shouldn’t be. It seems invisible hands scrunch his face together, puffing his cheeks and leaving the rest of his body frail and bony.

Amidst the room’s silence, June hears her breaths fume and quicken. Two maligned children, victims of a world they didn’t choose to be in. She wants to bite down until her teeth break. Sympathizer pigs.

“You’re a vizier?” June bellows. “I won’t ask again.”

The man seems to have accepted his predicament. “Yes.” He gulps, his eyes darting to the window, to a balcony on the other side, where one could jump onto a nearby roof. He thinks the KCP perimeter won’t see.

“Then you know of the First Signature, yes?” June asks. “You spoke to him?”

The man clenches his teeth. His eyes bulge, and he shakes his head. “I’ve never had the honor. If I did, I would tell you, Thurmgeist, but I don’t. I really don’t. I don’t. I-”

June grips her machete’s hilt. “You are sure?” She steps aside, showing the three the window. “Tell me, and you can all run.”

“You’ll tell them to come after us.”

“Even if I do, you’ll have a head start. It’s a better position than you’re in now.” She sheathes the blade. “Where can I find him?”

“I don’t know!” The vizier shakes his head. “I really don’t know, I’m sorry! I.. I don’t know!” His lips quiver, and his face bulges. He looks ready to explode. Regret plasters across his face, the failure that he cannot save the boys in a time of great need. It’s then that June knows he is telling the truth.

The man falls to his knees. “Please let us go.” He stands up and starts for the window.

For the briefest moment, June isn’t sure what to feel. Failure? She had come all this way, cut down all those maligned, and had been certain a vizier would know. She had been wrong. She hates being wrong almost as much as the Chant of Harmony.

Anger boils. She lets this fester while the man pulls his children by their hands to the window. The machete scrapes when she pulls it out of its sheath.

It is done in five heartbeats, maybe ten. She leaves through the building’s front door, making way for the burners that rush inside and douse everything in sap. Above, the Twin Pales begin their slumber, perhaps appeased after the gruesome spectacle, yielding to the Lone Soldier, eager to see the ensuing fire show.

The officer from before helps June out of her armor while the building starts to blaze, spreading to the surrounding four blocks. June boards a covered wagon when the heat becomes unbearable and orders it away, watching the raging inferno indifferently. She is not a step closer to learning where the First Signature is hiding.

The carriage veers a corner, turns down a side alley, and stops. The door opens, and a man steps inside. He is big enough that he rocks the vehicle as he sits down. He’s robed, but June’s not sure what she sees when he removes his hood. “Cackles?”

“Thurmgeist.” Lieutenant General Herbert Gauss nods. He looks around before peeking through the slits of the wagon’s door. Then, he studies her. “I know where the First Signature is.”