I swear, when that conference finally spat me out back into the courtyard, it left me in worse shape than I had been after the battle royale. For days, I’d been (hyper)fantasizing about what would happen once I told my colleagues my secret. But, not in my wildest dreams would I have guessed they’d respond by telling me to “keep keepin’ it under wraps”. I really didn’t know what to make of it.

Honestly, I felt lost.

Andalon tried to cheer me up. She pointed out I no longer had to worry about keeping my secret.

And, I mean, yeah, but… that didn’t really help.

I was terribly hungry. That battle had taken a lot out of me, and puppet time with Dr. B’zool had only further strained my limits.

As usual, I dealt with the stress by trying to make myself useful. At the moment, that meant helping with clean-up.

Angel, the clean-up…

“Tense” didn’t even begin to describe it. Several times, I had to step out into the middle of the ruined courtyard and insert myself between Vernon’s soldiers and the trio of Ibrahim, Yuth, and Larry. The lengthy discussions that ensued consisted of me trying to dissuade the soldiers from firing point-blank.

I was worried someone might get hurt.

Ibrahim, bless his heart, volunteered to go down to the garage.

“If having fewer of us around would make you more at ease,” he’d said, “I’ll be happy to go to the garage.”

Karl had gotten taken down to the garage. It wasn’t that people didn’t appreciate what he’d done, it was just… people were scared.

He’d almost gone silver-eyed, too, after all.

The soldiers accepted Ibrahim’s offer, and off he went.

I imagined Karl would appreciate the company.

The remaining transformees were incredibly helpful, making use of their powers to the fullest. They wandered the courtyard, sweeping up bodies with their psychokinesis. Yuth was able to levitate whole clusters of corpses through the air, and suggested he could slither off to go dump the bodies somewhere, away from the hospital. This suggestion was shot down, though. The military insisted on doing it themselves.

It didn’t help that the soldiers caught transformees nibbling on the corpses on multiple different occasions.

Angel, I had to fight back my drool as I struggled to keep myself from joining them. I distracted myself by giving Yuth and Larry the latest updates, explaining what had happened with the knights. I didn’t need to worry about any eavesdroppers. The soldiers were plenty keen on keeping their distance from us.

I didn’t tell them about the other Angels. Things were hard enough for the others as-is. I didn’t want to burden them with more, especially if that burden would take away what little consolation the faith could still give them.

By and by, a couple of the white medical tents got rebuilt, using replacement tarp fresh from WeElMed’s matter printers. However, by and large, the courtyard was a shadow of what it had been merely hours before. Nearly all the fencing was ruined past the point of use. One of Vernon’s commanders made the surprisingly helpful suggestion that, if the transformees were hungry, they could eat all the wrecked metal, and it fell to me to tell him why that was a bad idea.

“Yes, they can eat the metal, but then they’ll burp up ionizing radiation,” I said. “That’s a danger to both people and equipment.”

“Shit…” the commander replied.

The only other option was to recycle the metal by feeding it to the matter printers to have it converted into raw materials. It was a slow-going process, both because it took significantly longer for the printers to break down metal than it did for them to break down plastic, but also because most of our printers were already busy printing up medical supplies—bedding, gowns, sheets, syringes, and, above all, mycophage.

Once Larry and the others had helped to clear the streets of any wrecked vehicles, Vernon’s men were able to drive the dump trucks waiting on Merchant Street into the courtyard. Their duties done, the transformees slunk off to the garage, until all that remained were bodies and undertakers.

I was in the latter category.

The concerted effort to clean up the carnage had given the hospital some much needed breathing room, with which it could bring out its dead.

It had been about three days since Mayor Joleston and the governor had deployed the military and declared martial law. Two days ago, things had been running relatively smoothly. The military had been working in concert with anyone willing to drive a truck, sending convoys of trucks to the hospital to ferry away the constant stream of fresh bodies. But, since Vernon’s arrival yesterday, that had pretty much crawled to a standstill. Now, in the calm that had followed the battle, the dump trucks were starting up again. And it wasn’t just dump trucks. The troops were getting as many big vehicles from the nearby streets as they could salvage. They brought trucks of every species. There were two dump trucks, a troop truck, a VIP tour truck, a sanitation truck, and even a fire truck.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

And all of them were being loaded up with the bodies of the dead.

It went without saying that this wasn’t going to last, and everyone knew it—even if they didn’t say it.

And, for the record, no one did—and I couldn’t blame them.

I stood on the older, smaller street opposite Merchant Boulevard, on the other side of the Administration Building. The grime and mustiness of the sett-stone pavement seemed almost warm and welcoming compared to the courtyard’s horrors. Like Garden Court Drive and all the other streets from the Second Empire, the individual stones in the pavement flared, like fans or sea shells—the waves of a silent sea.

The pile on the curb was half and again as tall as me. It wasn’t the most stable of piles. A good third of it had onto the street—a wave of flesh atop the waves of stone. Some of the bodies were from the battle, or those who had died soon after or before or after it, but many were the corpses of patients freshly pulled from WeElMed’s halls.

I stood behind one of the dump trucks. The truck’s green-painted metal body was kind of acting like a retaining wall, keeping the rest of the corpse-pile from spilling onto the street.

It was the closest I’d ever gotten to a dump truck, and it had me admiring how much care had been put into their design. In the glorious world of tomorrow, even our dump trucks looked sexy

The truck was smooth and rounded where you’d have expected there’d be sharp edges. The jaws on the truck’s prodigious rear-end were the only exception to that rule. The two unfeeling pieces of hefty metal formed a jagged, W-shaped mouth. At the moment, the truck’s jaws were wide open, showing off the jutting, triangle-tipped teeth on top and bottom. Inside, bodies piled like a rotten tongue.

My legs might as well have been made of stone. I felt nothing from them. It made me wonder how much longer they’d stay functional.

I figured it wasn’t long.

Bending over, I reached down, ready to pick up the next corpse. This one was light enough that I didn’t need to use my powers or ask for the soldier’s help with lifting the body into the dump truck.

As with all the other bodies, the urge to consume jostled about in my mind the moment my hazmat suit’s gloves grabbed hold of the corpse. Ordinarily, I would have had to fight to keep that urge at bay, but this time Fate had given me a helping hand.

The right side of the corpse’s face was deformed by necrotic, ulcerated tissue. Fungal filaments threaded through the skin like a torturer’s stitches. The left half of the girl’s face was ashen, but relatively intact, spiderwebbed by dark lightning. The fungus had opened fissures in the girl’s head, out from which its tumorous masses burgeoned and bulged. The parts of her scalp where the girl’s Night-black hair hadn’t fallen out in clumps still had their familiar silky sheen.

Unlike the others, I didn’t chuck the girl’s body into the dump truck. Instead, I held her, ginger and heartbroken, clutching her to my chest.

Yuta Uramaru’s soul stood beside me, gloom-faced and weeping.

Hoshi. Poor Hoshi.

I turned to look at Yuta, but he was gone. Even then, I could sense his pain. It was like a salted ember, burning on the soft tissue inside my skull. I sent a doppelgenneth to counsel him, but Yuta refused to acknowledge him.

He wanted to be left to his grief.

Sighing, I gently brushed the remnants of Hoshi’s hair off her face and slid her one remaining eyelid closed.

The other eye had been overtaken by the fungus.

Clutching Hoshi’s corpse tightly, I wept. I whispered my regrets into her unhearing ears.

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” A shudder rippled down my back. “I wish I could have done better.”

Gently, I laid Hoshi to rest atop the mound of fungus-eaten corpses in the dump truck. Arms and legs had interleaved one another like a pile of sticks—a macabre leaf litter of many different skins.

While we’d been in the conference, Ani had been bawling her eyes out, having returned to the hospital—a survivor of the battle—only to find that Hoshi had expired. As Jonan had explained to me via text, Ani blamed herself. The way she saw it, if she hadn’t screwed up the plan and hadn’t had to get pulled out by Heggy, she would have been able to go back and give Hoshi another dose of the mycophage.

He’d texted:

If you wanna know what I think, it’s not her fault. The mycophage doesn’t work. It’s just that simple. And why would it work? Nothing else did.

Andalon appeared at my side, quietly weeping. Resting one of her hands on the truck, she stared into its mouth.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Genneth.” She turned her head and looked up at me.

“Sorry for what?” I muttered.

“I…” She lowered her head. “Andalon couldn’t stop it.”

“What do you mean?” I whispered. Suddenly, I realized what she’d meant.

It was from yesterday, when she’d excitedly told me that she’d found a way to “make the Green Def less bad.”

Those very words played for the both of us to hear.

She nodded.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Hoshi died because the mycophage didn’t work.”

But Andalon shook her head. “Andalon dunno what a mikey-face is, but…” she looked over at Hoshi’s body in the truck. “Those peoples are gone ‘cause I wasn’t strong enuff.”

“I…” I stared at her. “What?”

But then it hit me. It hit me like a gelid lighting bolt. I had no blood in my veins, and yet it ran cold, all the same.

Break the Tablets, I thought.

“It was you?” I asked.

“What was me?” she asked, confused.

Andalon had said she’d found a way to halt the progression of the Green Death. Given all the nonsense with the knights and my necromancy, I’d lost sight of that little detail, but now, it was staring me in the face, clear as day.

I had to make sure.

I glanced at Hoshi’s corpse. “Patients like Hoshi were given the mycophage—a kind of medicine. It made them get better. They were sick with the Green Death, but they got better.”

I spoke to her in a whisper, not wanting to disturb the soldier over to my left, at the other corner of the dump truck’s mouth. We were both helping to load up this dump truck.

Though that really didn’t matter right now.

Andalon’s eyes widened in recognition. “Oh.” She shook her head. “Nuh-uh. That was Andalon.”

“But, the mycophage—”

“—Andalon tried to make the fungus stop, but it foughted back and, I…” She lowered her head in shame. “I’m sorry, Mr. Genneth. It’s too strong. I… I can’t…”

She looked up at me.

“I can’t do it.” She wept. “Are… are you mad at me?” She clasped her hands together. “Please, don’t be—”

I swallowed hard. “—No, Andalon.” My voice nearly broke. I fought back tears. “I’m not mad.” I shuddered. “You…” My lips quivered as I struggled to smile.

I patted her on the head. “You did a good job.” I nodded. “Sometimes, we do everything right, but things still end badly. It’s the way of the world. Still, keep trying. Do whatever you can. Even the littlest bit makes a world of a difference.”

She nodded in heartfelt understanding.

Beside me, the soldier coughed.

Andalon vanished as I turned to face him.

“Is everything alright, Doctor?” he said. “Ah, fuck, what am I saying? Of course it isn’t.”

Lt. Colonel Kaplan coughed again, and then groaned.