“Stay down, ma’am,” Paulson says. “Easy. Your condition is stable.”

Anthem watches the medic tend to the woman, calm, a flip of his agitated self. Since Unwin and Anthem had dragged the thing in and informed Paulson of it, the medic’s ire towards Anthem quickly yielded to responsibility and masculine duty.

The woman’s head pokes out of the pod, the neutralizer agents having singed away the top fifth of the oblong fleshy prison. It must have been entirely submerged in the mixture, which had already eaten through all other maligned organisms in the nest. The woman is beyond fortunate.

“I can feel it,” she says. “In every part of me. It’s like hair that I can’t pull out.”

Anthem thinks back to his texts at Galt Alese but can’t draw any explanations for this organism. It is doubtless maligned, not a product of the raw ground alone. He refrains from openly explaining that the pod’s blood vessels seem to have entrenched themselves in her arteries and are likely filling them with sustenance. “It certainly is far-reaching,” Anthem says instead, “but we’ll have to remove it.”

“Is it going to hurt?” Her voice is crystal clear, well-fed, and slick from continued sustenance.

“It shouldn’t,” though Anthem is unsure—he hasn’t seen anything like this.

“I’m the first, aren’t I?” The woman looks down to herself. “Oh, Hells. Get it off.”

The woman’s eyes dart around Lieutenant Nedland’s command tent and settle on a musket leaning against a pole. She would undoubtedly spring up and run out if not anchored to the pod.

“You’re a Thurmgeist?” Anthem asks, noticing the objects of her attention.

“For what other reason would a woman be on this fucking island?” She blinks and looks down at her predicament. Anthem can tell she is trying to move her arms, but they may as well be bolted in place. “This shouldn’t be happening. The Decree, it’s… what’s happened to the Decree?”

Paulson breathes out, the woman’s questions confirming Anthem’s and Watse’s earlier suspicions about what transpired in the cave before they lost Fletcher. The medic is too proud to apologize, but Anthem settles for that shrug of his shoulders, his stature chiseled down.

“The Decree is fine,” Anthem says carefully, “so far as I know. There have, however, been developments that I can’t quite discern. None of us can.” He contemplates holding back the events of the cave but does away with that indecision and, in detail, accounts for her the story that the others in the battalion should now see as fact.

“Fucking maligned,” says the Thurmgeist. She spits on the ground, missing the men. If Kanis were in that pod, she’d have aimed straight at Anthem’s face.

Paulson uses the quiet to present a scalpel taken from his table of instruments. “I will be as graceful but as thorough as the Surgeon Elder,” he says. “This thing is decaying, so the longer you stay in it, the more damage it will do.”

The woman turns to Anthem. “You’re a medical zoologist, are you not?”

Anthem does not quell the pride of being the expert over the medic. “I am,” he says, “and our surgeon here is correct; if you remain inside too long, the rot might extend to your body.” The neutralizers should have disintegrated the thing anyway. Unless no neutralizers work against the strand that built this pod—whatever it is.

“Get to work then,” she says, “and don’t mind cutting me either. Take my arms and legs if you need to. They’ll grow me new ones.”

Anthem doesn’t clarify that the process, at best, is gruesome and experimental.

“It won’t come to that,” Paulson says, looking at Anthem. “You’ll wait here?”

Anthem nods and doesn’t say much, for it seemed only days ago the medic would have cast Anthem into the fire as well. He steps back and primes a syringe with a general neutralizer, the action seeming academic, as the pod was submerged in the crater lake for at least a few minutes. “Ready when you are.”

Paulson gets to work, reaching into the pod with a gloved hand. The woman winces as the medic cuts the thin membrane that has grown over her skin, protecting it from friction against the pod. “Don’t look down,” Paulson tells her when he finds the first blood vessel. He cuts the vein from the pod and yanks it. She flinches, but it comes loose, and he quickly throws it into a crate that may be full by the end of the procedure.

While this happens, Anthem uses a scalpel to saw away at the dead cartilage lining most of the outside. With his other hand, he holds the syringe at the ready, searching for any maligned that would have survived the lake by hiding in the pocks and folds of this pod. He cuts off a portion and finds the woman’s splaying fingers. He grabs them, and she squeezes back.

“Can rightfully feel that,” she says. “Thank Hells. Can I punch through yet?”

“Not yet,” Anthem urges. Maybe it would matter, but this malignment is unknown, and he won’t risk it.

The process continues for hours. When Unwin enters the tent, the Ox-infused takes the scalpel from Anthem, leaving the medical zoologist to focus on inspecting samples from the pod and searching for any maligned hiding. None appear.

“Who is your commanding Thurmgeist?” Unwin asks, looking confused about how to broach the subject with a woman outside his command structure. She is a thousand times more agreeable than Grace Kanis, at least.

As if predicting Anthem’s thoughts and deciding to play with them, the woman, now with one arm hanging limp from the pod, perks up. “Grace Kanis.”

Great.

“I went into the nest yesterday,” she says. Anthem thinks he detects a blush. “Guess I got a little too carried away.”

“What happened in there, anyway?”

The woman’s eyes flutter as her mind recalls. “Well, I was supposed to clear it out for a burner crew but wanted to go early. The things crawled out of the walls and ambushed me. I tried to run.” Her lips press tight, remembering. “Hess.”

“Hess?” Anthem asks.

“Sorry, that’s my name. Yeah, that’s my name.”

The exchange bears the signs of a cover-up as if the woman formulates the story out of thin air, though it’s unclear why she would. “Is that your name?” Anthem asks.

“I think so. I… really think so. Yes.”

Why is this Thurmgeist being so overt in her attempt to subterfuge? Maybe she is just like Grace, though less subtle. Anthem doesn’t want to imagine what that would be like.

He thinks back to his zoology textbooks, finds nothing but interprets her words further, and arrives at a line of questioning and a possibility. “How long do you think you were in there?”

“Since yesterday, I said.” Her mouth hangs open as if additional words are peeking out from her teeth, not daring to leave. “Wait, you were not there yesterday. Alright… hold on. I know this.”

The men share a look, then settle on Anthem as if he can explain what’s going on. Coupled with what he witnessed in the cave, the arriving conclusion begins to loom high.

“Wait,” says the Thurmgeist, “wait…” She clenches her fist. “It’s been a day, right? Damn! I came up on the nest and thought it was worth checking. I didn’t even make it fifty feet inside.” The woman pauses. “That was yesterday, wasn’t it?”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Anthem studies her expressions, her frantic gesturing, her grasping for the information she should have readily available.

“I can’t remember much of anything after that,” Hess continues, looking around the tent again, peering outside. “This is the Hyrnlak Archipelago, right?”

“It is,” says Paulson. “We’re about a day’s march from Jubilee.”

The woman shakes her head. “Yeah, I know. I was just there. With the scouting teams.” She clenches her teeth. “What?”

She finds Anthem studying her, gauging her. Anthem also doesn’t know what to think, but that possibility from before continues prodding him. “Being in there,” he begins, “might be a lot like being unconscious. You don’t remember anything in between because there’s nothing to remember. I suspect the pod has been sustaining you, breathing for you, providing you with moisture and food. A sort of hibernation. A long sleep.”

The implication is lost on the woman. “Then the rest of my girls can’t be too far? Grace? She’s with you? I need to get back to them. They’ll be looking for me. Jubilee is an awful, awful place. There’s…” she trails off. “She is with you, isn’t she?”

“She’s near, but we’ve only recently marched here from the RLZ.” He approaches the next point slowly. “You must have been in that nest for months.”

Paulson hadn’t drawn the conclusion earlier either, for his hands still. Unwin’s pause is also momentary. The Ox-infused saws off another piece of the pod’s cartilage, revealing the smallness of the woman’s back. Only two large fragments remain now.

“Months?” Hess looks down at her body. “No, that’s all impossible.” She looks down again at the pod. “The Decree should forbid this.”

It should have forbade those bats from launching at Kanis, too. What is going on?

These thoughts linger as Unwin removes the largest piece of cartilage yet. He places this on a table, and Anthem quickly injects it with inhibitor agents so the strands don’t jump.

“Vesicles, everyone,” Anthem says, staring at the piece he’d just injected. The men follow, Paulson sharing a breath of his with Hess. The woman seems hesitant to take it, but the circumstances are different now.

“You can pull that off yourself, ma’am,” Paulson says, the only remaining piece covering her breasts and stomach.

“Fuck your decency medic. Get it off.”

Paulson does while Anthem keeps his syringe handy, though his mind is on the slabs of pod they’ve strewn around the tent. They are primarily dead flesh, but even they will contain answers.

“The rest you can do yourself.” Paulson removes his gloves. “Ma’am, I do suggest we monitor you for-”

Hess bolts upright, finds a Corps tunic nearby, and starts fitting it on. “Sorry, men, but I got maligned to kill.”

She is inches from the tent door when Anthem says, “I can stop it.”

The Thurmgeist pauses. “What’s that?”

“I can stop it.” Anthem gestures to the scattered samples of flesh. “These are all dead, but you’re living. If what did this to you is still alive in you, then we need to know about it. We at least need to get a contained sample and try to create a neutralizer.” It’s a lofty goal if he’s ever heard one, for it wouldn’t be as simple as creating a neutralizer but inventing one, too. “If it can happen to you, it can also happen to Grace. Maybe it already has.”

Paulson and Unwin turn to Anthem.

“I thought she was near you?” asks Hess.

“We haven’t seen her in days. She insisted on going off on her own.”

She rounds on Anthem. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“What can you do?”

She fumes, gazing upon the tent flap in a new light as if the pales will burn her if she steps out. She exhales and releases her clenched fists. “One night, then I’m gone.”

It takes years to invent a neutralizer, sometimes decades, with teams of twenty or more medical zoologists working round the clock. Yet much of that time is spent gathering samples, testing in labs, medical trials, overcoming government regulations, and distribution. Anthem has pure samples before him, and there’s not enough time to question if it will work.

He has to try.

----------------------------------------

The order comes through messenger, Nedland poking his head into his command tent, happy to give way to the sleeping Thurmgeist. “Tomorrow night, we’ll be on Jubilee’s doorstep,” the lieutenant says, leaving the thought as an approaching fire on the horizon.

Anthem lets that realization fuel him deep into the blazing night, dwelling on how close Jubilee is and how little time he has to do the impossible. By tomorrow, the Minds will no doubt send the maligned to the temple gates and overwhelm them. Anthem’s progress and ideas will die along with everything else on this archipelago.

His lab equipment is piled high: beakers, condensers, and empty bottles strewn among the samples of dead flesh. Since flooding the nest, the entire 1st battalion has been more than happy to throw him whatever devices or reagents he needs, but it may all be too late.

Anthem starts by removing small chunks from the larger samples and burning them, seeing the resulting substances, isolating those, and testing their reactions in other experiments. Mortaring the flesh, burning it, mixing it with acids and rubbing alcohol and other reagents, the resulting standardizes, always a glowing violet, brighter than any component of any neutralizer Anthem’s ever seen. Even sitting in the beaker, the mixture brightens the room, shining upon Hess’s sleeping face.

Paulson checks on her occasionally, and when she awakens, the medic draws blood for Anthem to store and test with his samples. Anthem injects her with inhibitor agents to keep the thing from jumping, whatever it is. Hess goes through argumentative bits, making up reasons to leave, and Anthem catches her looking his way more than once, but she never pulls out of the sleeping bag in the squad’s only cot, surrounded by the maligned samples like they’re teddy bears presiding.

Anthem burns them all and fills an entire carafe with the concentrate of that strange violet liquid. Whatever this strand is, it is the key to unlocking the neutralizer, though he’ll need more tests, experiments, willing subjects, and more time he does not have.

When the Lone Soldier settles over the treetops, the night bears its heavy press on Anthem. With the carafe sealed, he inspects the sloshing liquid inside through eyes that can barely stay open. He hasn’t slept in two days, and thinking this seems to do the trick. Slowly, his head slumps on the table as he surrenders to that approaching sleep.

He wakes to the rustling of tent flaps—of footsteps on dirt. He shoots up and sees Paulson standing over him. “How’s she doing?” Anthem manages groggily. “Sorry. Must have dozed off.”

The medic continues to stand there. “You shouldn’t keep women against their will,” Paulson says.

“She agreed,” Anthem manages, groggily. He frowns, understanding what has happened when he finds the empty cot.

He bolts out the door, running through the camp, most of it packed up for tomorrow’s march to Jubilee. The 1st battalion gathers in clumps around cook-fires, eating together while playing cards and telling stories. Anthem weaves through the throngs, jumping over roaring fires, knocking over pots and game tables, and suffering shouts and exclamations at the men whose lives he saved but doomed to thirst anyway.

A group of heavy shelled figures congregates on the outskirts of the camp. Some have long hair emerging from slits behind their helmets, while others have their visors closed, obscuring their faces. Anthem counts nine, but there could be more. Not a single man dares to stand near them.

Hess sits on a log, her armored hands covering her face. She seems tiny and frail in the heavy shell, like a doll in an adult’s clothing. She’s murmuring something, and as Anthem steps closer, he hears her singing something between sobs, a chant or prayer he doesn’t recognize. She stops, locking eyes with Anthem.

Grace Kanis stands over Hess. “What the Hells did you do to my Thurmgeist?” She approaches him.

Anthem frowns. “I saved her. We all did.”

“You should have delivered her to me right away.”

“I didn’t know where the fuck you were! No one did.”

Paulson catches up, standing on the edge of the Thurmgeist ring as if his gallantry means anything. He roots himself like some statue decorating an incubator’s chambers.

Kanis folds her arms and places a hand on her machete. “Do not step near her ever again. She doesn’t need to be a part of your experiments.”

Hess must have told her everything. “You think that’s wise?” Anthem asks. “This woman holds the key to neutralizing a new strand!” He knows nothing like it exists—what else could imprison a woman?

Kanis clenches her teeth. “Decree shield us,” she says.

“Fuck the Decree! You know yourself, it’s not working! How do you think she got into the pod?”

Grace raises an eyebrow. “What pod?”

Anthem blinks and finds Paulson quiet as a predatory bird as he withholds the truth. Hess glances his way. “What did you tell her?” Anthem asks her.

Hess shakes her head and says nothing.

“Whatever you told her,” says Grace, “forget it. I swear to the Hells, zoo man, you’re not a savant—you’re a doomed man. Accept it.”

“You owe your lives to us!” Anthem steps forward, compelled by the truth that only he sees. “If you let this thing spread, you’ll come crawling at my feet, asking for a neutralizer. Where will I be then? Probably-”

Kanis spins and slams the flat end of her machete into Anthem’s shin. He bends, falls, and tries to rise, but Grace stops him.

“I told you before, zoo man,” Kanis says, “I owe you nothing. I owe this battalion nothing. We will leave with the Flung; you’ll stay here as part of the raw. Whatever happens, it’s not our concern. Leave us alone.”

Anthem shimmies back and looks around, finding that useless medic staring straight at him.

He could make a big deal about this, arouse the camp, and tell Tatlock how they found a woman in a pod, but what would such a gesture accomplish? In such little time, there’s nothing Anthem can do.

Yet this isn’t about Tatlock, the Thurmgeists, or any naysayers like Paulson. This is about Anthem and his men: Unwin, Nedland, Watse, Hamill, Devitt, and everyone in the 3rd squad. The men of his squad in the firing lines arrayed before the water tower to fend off the intruders. The ones who had kept his neutralizers secret from the rest of the battalion. He would be dead without them.

They are not doomed, not anymore, despite what Grace says.

“I hope you turn,” Anthem says. “Slowly, too, and painfully. I hope you feel every system in your body surrendering to malignment, and I hope you perceive, quite vividly, the moment you lose your humanity.”

He leaves the Thurmgeists at the fire and gets to work.