Anthem gets to work as soon as he leaves the command tent. He gathers Nedland and all the other lieutenants he can find who did not attend the briefing, and the twenty or so arrayed in front of him are more than he’s ever seen in one place. Most are unfamiliar faces but eager ones, having heard the orders from their messengers, from rumors on whispered mouths that they’ll be left with barely three days of water by tomorrow, and there is a damned good reason for it.

Anthem describes stokk root, grinnem seeds, and coshtal powder, telling them where to find the stuff and how to extract and preserve them. The lieutenants repeat the instructions while Anthem corrects them. Messengers of the various squads, unarmed men in shorts and wide-brimmed hats, infuse their strands with extra calories to extend the reach of their short-term memory and fan out across the battalion. The instructions percolate down the command structure until every private in the battalion is fixed on their tasks.

The sergeants set patrols, and the ‘water mule’ Ox-infused—most now free of the water tanks that burdened them—drag cannons to the lip of the crater. The scouts climb trees and post lookouts, checking if the maligned migration will ever round back, but it doesn’t. The Minds likely know what is transpiring and decide to ignore it. Tatlock orders a palisade erected surrounding the crater, shallow but just enough for firing lines to see over the heads of the men in front of them, and a few hours later, a two-tiered weaving structure hugs the perimeter of the crater, with an exit facing the thickest part of the jungle, on the complete opposite side from the command tent.

During all this, Anthem slaves over the tanks.

It takes half a dozen Ox-infused each to lift the forty 500-liter containers onto pedestals about five feet high. Once fitted, Anthem enlists the battalion’s engineers and architects to replicate magnified versions of the burners and condensers he would find in Galt Alese while crafting tubes from tents and sleeping bags pilfered from the dead. Anthem runs a few rudimentary tests to double and triple-check that their mechanisms have been replicated precisely, giving the men a thumbs up when satisfied.

By the time the neutralizer drums are ready, Anthem’s party of impromptu foragers have already gathered crates full of the reagents and have begun to mortar the coshtal shells and bundle up the stokk root for easy depositing into the tanks. All the while, Anthem checks for impurities and corrects on their form.

He starts the burners and condensers and connects the tubes through smaller intermediary tanks. The neutralizer concentrate floods through the tubes like the blood of a beast’s innards, life for them and the complete opposite for their enemies. The burners scorch the smaller tanks more than they should, but still just enough to hold their mixture. Men watch, enraptured, before their sergeants order them into the forest to gather more ingredients before nightfall.

The Lone Soldier observes from high up, checking on Anthem’s progress, lighting the construction of tubes and tanks and flame, perhaps warning the nest that such an operation will be its inevitable undoing and if it wants to stay alive, it must attack, and now! The Minds may hear the call, but they do not heed it, perhaps accepting their end, as it seems the men here have—at least before tonight. Anthem’s neutralizer won’t just burn the nest but will reinvigorate their souls and drive them to leave this place.

Men shout and cry out below. A group forms, lit by torches held high, twelve in all but swelling to twice that number, standing behind the foragers sorting through reagents. Many are from Foston’s platoon, and some have fixed their bayonets.

At some unspoken agreement or loyalty to their zoologist, the 3rd squad forms a firing line with an equivalent number of men. Lieutenant Nedland is with them and orders his platoon’s 1st and 2nd squads to converge. Anthem sees it all from atop a platform erected around the tanks.

“I’m thirsty,” says the man leading the mismatched collection of dissatisfied men. “And I’ll be thirsty next week. Foston says we don’t got much of that stuff left.”

“Drink your fucking piss first,” says Watse, holding a musket. “Better yet, drink mine.” With one hand, he starts to unzip his pants.

“I’m fucking tempted to!” The leader levels his rifle, and so do his men, though not instantly.

“It’s all gone,” says Nedland, trying to be the voice of reason. “All that’s left inside is neutralizer. If you drink that, you’ll disintegrate just like Frine.”

Frine. At the dead meathead’s mention, some intruders stare up at Anthem, and some step backward. The import of his presence hits home.

“Nah,” says the leader, “it ain’t done yet. I see it winding through the pipes.”

The self-appointed representative of the dissenters to Tatlock’s orders is correct; the neutralizer is still working through the intermediary tanks and won’t be applied to the water for another hour to allow for further burning and percolation. The man’s probably been watching the whole process.

“I’ll test it,” says another man, leaning over with some hunchback’s gait. “Give it here.” He steps forward.

“Fuck off, private,” says Nedland. “All of you, just fuck off and go away. You’re better off sucking the rain out of the earth.” The spittle from above is barely noticeable.

The line of intruders doesn’t listen, and in a flash, they lower their rifles as the leader cries out. “Kill them! Fire!”

Anthem cries out, too, knowing the balls will break the tanks and undo everything. The volley drowns him out.

Nedland had been watching the entire time, one hand on his machete. The 3rd squad had been watching, too, and they had quicker hands than these new arrivals.

The volley’s clap is louder than any of the thunder that day. When the rifle smoke clears, Anthem sees a wave of recognition echoing throughout the nest, the heads of every man in the battalion turning toward the tanks. He thinks about warning Nedland there may be more, but the lieutenant is calm and collected as he orders the 3rd squad to drag the wounded and dead intruders away. No one else approaches at the sight of the bloodied men wailing in fury and regret.

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Beneath Anthem’s feet, the neutralizer leaves the tubes and pours into the water tanks.

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Six hours later the Pales take their high seats to witness the performance. The overarching stretch of clear blue eventually surrenders to a gray dull that interrupts the Twins’ view but does little to diminish the heat. The rain resumes in torrential rolls as soon as the soldiers take their places on the crater’s lip, pikemen in the front, two lines of riflemen on the palisades behind them. They stick out their tongues and drink what they can.

“What if it doesn’t work?” asks Watse.

Anthem paces on the makeshift wall. “Then they’ll come for me next.”

Watse huffs. “We’ll make it quick.” It is the least funniest thing Anthem has heard during the march.

With barrels on their backs, the burners station themselves around the crater, the lines of men behind them waiting with bayonets fixed, along with cannon emplacements and their crews at the ready. Tatlock stands on the precipice of a lip in the crater that looks like it was built just for him. Colored flags surround him, one for each of the 1st battalion’s remaining platoons. He deliberates with his officers, discusses, and minutes later orders his standard bearers to wave the colored pinions. Upon the signal, the burners and their crews step down from the lip and begin sprinkling the neutralizer.

As Anthem instructed, the burners release a faint trickle, prioritizing surface coverage over depth. Rivulets of deep brown splash onto the nest and work toward the center, eating through every centimeter of the maligned flesh. The neutralizer eats through the structure’s blood vessels, enters the bloodstream, and contaminates as the hearts pump the stuff throughout the nest, unaware that the contagion is increasing by the second. The nest is a cone shape, and the maligned only notice the peril of such a construction when the first heart stops pumping.

The ground shakes, and a blister on the far side of the nest from Anthem pops open. Maligned spring out, three-legged things with tentacles on their backs like cannons that can search for targets. The pikemen meet them at the lip, spearing the things and driving them back. A volley fires from another side of the crater, and a line of maligned falls on that side.

The neutralizer continues to work, the burners growing anxious, paying less and less attention to the techniques of their poring as they see the flesh bubbling and smoking up, ash fluttering in the air. One man takes a burner’s barrel, exclaims the man is going too slow, and demands to pour the container himself. He does and throws the barrel back to the palisade wall when it is empty to be refilled. No one stops this enthusiastic man from Foston's platoon, who Anthem recognizes now.

A layer of beige water seeps to the top of the nest. The maligned’s push weakens until there is only a slow trickle of the things crawling out of their home’s gaging orifices, and even that stops. A cannon fires into the nest towards a maligned fungus the height of a clock tower. When they arrived yesterday, it was thick and healthy, but now the appendage withers and crumples before smashing against the roof of the nest. The effect carries to the foundations of the bullwheel tower, the stone edifice swaying, tilting slightly as the maligned flesh beneath it gives way. The great wheel attached to its top teeters, and as the tower bends, the circular contraption slams down, falls through the nest as if it is made of paper, tearing a hole to the inside, where men on the palisade wall watch with rapt attention.

The nest is a hollow pit inside, the neutralizer mixing with the blood and causing it to congeal, thickening to a paste that bubbles up like some stew. Fanged and clawed creatures swim in that morass of poison while their skin and flesh melt, leaving only the bones before they sink to the bottom.

The process takes close to an hour, and not once do the men stir, their rifles ready but their eyes fixed. Some get curious and step up to the lip, and some fall in, their squadmates forming human chains to rescue them. Most men leave with minor burns, but those too curious and close to the forming pool sink.

By midday, the soldiers hold the vesicle’s respirators to their mouths while waiting for the wind to carry the maligned flesh away. The rising smoke is a shade of rotted wood and death. A mist settles on the neutralizer lake, and as Tatlock orders the men to regroup, Anthem sits on the lip, watching the pool slowly evaporate.

The first sign is a groaning and then a scraping. The crater’s lip erodes unequally in places, bits of dirt falling into the neutralizer pool. Tatlock orders all men to leave their posts and hide behind the fortifications, though this is little solace for the fearful. The curious, however, cannot help but press their eyes against the slits in the walls and watch.

A flat black shape sprouts from the pool, beginning as large as a room in Cliff House but expanding to a size that could enshroud a cathedral. The geodesic dome is black as ink, and on its bottom are arrayed a hundred or a thousand limbs scrambling for purchase on the crater’s lip. Its shell wails and screams through the mouths of creatures and men plastered to it: thousands of shrieking faces, eyes open, all heads stretched too far.

A Mind, Anthem now sees, is much more grotesque in person. He yields to his curiosity, watching as the giant maligned finds the exit leading to the jungle. It stops, all of the open eyes and mouths closing. He speculates what the thing is seeing and how it calculates the success of a potential counter-assault. Instead, it deems the men not worth the time, pushing through the trees and out of sight. Let this battalion starve more, grow thirsty and tired, and meet them at Jubilee instead.

Hells, he had done it, though. They had doubted him, but he’d proved them wrong. The product of his determination and will is tangible in front of his eyes, and anyone who challenges him can walk straight into it and try to argue.

He’s going to make it out. He’s going to make it home.

The men gather at the lip, reflecting on what just happened and, perhaps, still uncomprehending such a feat is possible. As they disperse, Unwin finds Anthem. “They still got some neutralizer left,” the Ox-infused says. “Seems you overestimated.”

“Simple accounting.” Anthem breathes in his vesicle gas and plucks ashen flesh from his hair.

On the lake, just about at its center, something emerges. It’s egg-shaped, moving straight towards them, neither propelled by feelers nor pulling along, but floating on a current as the nest begins to drain in places, down into its Gash. The shape washes up next to the men, an oblong maligned mass large enough to enter—large enough to hold someone.

It has to be a Mind, the smallest one they have ever seen. Anthem approaches it slowly, reaches out, and touches it. A perverted sensation runs up him. He can touch this Mind. He shouldn’t be able to.

“Grab it!” he calls to the others. “Come on!”

Unwin seems hesitant, too, but he pulls the Mind onto the shore, standing it upright.

No one besides the Ox-infused sees Anthem inspect the top side of the Mind and discover a curtain of some membrane. Where is the rest of the creature? Where are the heads, limbs, and organs of other things it turned?

He taps the membrane. Nothing happens. Still curious, still filled with unanswered questions, he pulls the thing’s curtain aside. Within, he sees contours of bone and skin: shoulders, a head, a bundle of long blonde hair, and a face peering up at him. A woman’s face. A woman contained in this Mind that’s not a Mind at all but a fleshy prison.

The woman stares straight up at Anthem, naked as the day she was born but fully grown.

“Where am I?” she asks. “Who… who are you?”