“Above naming your foe, you should know defeat.“ - quote attributed to Serena Smiler.

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His feet dangled above a dark expanse. Were he to fall now——how many of them, how many of Camp Sala’s people would see him? Would they care?

Viktor Solzhenitsyn glanced up at sky-the real sky, not the fake one of an arcology- and released a pent up sigh. The wind whispered over the metallic cylinders that acted as the homes here in the provincial camp and he marvelled. Did Raja Sviratham know?

Stupid question. Of course he knew. The punishment for his insolence-not that he thought of it as such- had been a placement at a program in the boons, what in the 21st century was a provincial camp.

Oh, how he had raged at the placement in the beginning. Fresh from dealing with Somaronov and Chevalier; arrogant brats, avenging themselves on Soleri for the crime of being born in an arcology.

He had hurt them more than necessary, his anger at Sviratham and the wider High Command projected on a series of scapegoats. He could recognise that now. He still didn’t think he was wrong. Well, apparently Sviratham had come down on Chevalier in the end. He’d split the difference and count this one as a victory.

The stars came wheeling out on the canvas of the dark firmament. Real stars. It was funny how days, weeks and months could change one’s perspective. The last message, sent by Lisa Guo had changed everything.

Somaronov had gone down with ship, the rest of class 2095-13 duking it out with a drone as close to as Sovereign as could be imagined. Chevaliers was gone-perhaps not for long seeing as High Command never wasted Proxies. They had fought, the Guos, Soleri, Sonnentag, Calix and the rest…and he hadn’t been with them.

Viktor Solzhenitsyn kicked his legs over the uppermost cylinder, one of the many stacked in a pile and he wondered at the difference he could have made.

______

Berenice Sonnentag sat at table filled with data. There were tablets, screen, actual physical books, audible recordings from great generals - Thinnakorn Saolirin to name just one, all placed in a wide arc around her.

Her planning and her paranoia had taken her far. All those hours logged in a battle cell and her painstaking attempts to weave wards even further.

The Sovereign moved beneath five consecutive wards. Two were her limits and her Field was emptying at a rate faster than she had ever imagined. The bleed, the resulting feedback from maintaining that many wards was splintering her head from the inside. What would go first, the her head or her Field? Soleri had once told her that he viewed his Field as strings, but to Berenice it was always a cascade of numbers. That column was descending, reaching zero. Tick, tock.

But it hadn’t been enough. She thought back to the way she had arrayed the class. Skirmishers, long distance artillery and screeners to distract that drone. To her eyes, the fault didn’t lie with the strategy. They just, an errant thought whispered, hadn’t been enough.

Their Fields had given up before that of the Sovereign. In other words——she needed to increase the size and potency of her Field. The solution was painfully clear to her: now, all she had to figure out was the how.

______

Hong Guo, or Guo Hong, depending who spoke to him-there were less of a difference between the two no matter what Grandmother said- crouched down.

Feet beneath the pole. Arms straight. Shins touching the horizontal bar. Chest out. Face down. He heaved, his form perfect as seen through the wide mirrors on the gym at Level 8.

The gym was hidden in a crook, and invitation-only, but as he had showed his dance-skills, and perhaps more important, his muscles some weeks ago, he had been invited. Erich, the guy who picked a fight with him, had told him that the place was owned by some technician in the BoA, but Hong didn’t care.

There was chalk, a wide array of machines and the speakers were blasting neo-metal straight out of Australia. Just the way he liked it. On the twelfth repetition, he slammed the weight down. The bang echoed through the empty gym—— a directed effort to pick a time when nobody was there, but even so…

He had failed against that mock-up of a Sovereign. His elder sister, carrying the swords of their parents had failed. The burning bile in his throat, suddenly rising, it wasn’t due even to his own failure.

Even the class, gathered, could do nothing but to hold out. Cameron Westerfield, who easily could have gained the rank of junior Proxy-what he was doing suffering a Tutelage confused Hong-had put a fight that even his honoured Grandmother would deem sufficient. Indeed, the Scottish Proxy might be strong enough to brave one or two of the first Rings in Beijing Crater.

That strength hadn’t helped Westerfield. The less said of his own effort, the better. The light wavered around his body, the Chassis forming slower that it should have. He had the bloodline. His brain was attuned to the Chassis, as always. So why was he slower than usual?

Guo Hong thought back to what Raja Sviratham had told them about endoaurics. His own speciality was kinetics, momentum. To wield endoaurics, you needed to be in tune with your emotions. You needed a great quantity of whatever sentiment powering that auric. Perhaps it was time to try something…a little different.

______

Somchai Saolirin stared at the screen. It had been close to a year since he had spoken to his father face to face. Even longer since they had met in person.

His centered his sight on a spot above the screen. He had promised himself. To not speak to his father unless lives were at stake. But weren’t lives at stake?

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During their recent trial they had lost. But all Somchai could think of was: what if it had been real? What if that had been a real Sovereign or a High Regial? If they had fought at a Front, or one of the lesser zones of perpetual warfare in Europe or Asia- places where reinforcement might not be coming- what would have happened? High Command wasn’t their mother. If that had been a real fight their callous commanders might just write them off.

The cast of Westerfield’s claymore hanging in the air, falling because there was nobody to operate its auric was making the rounds among the class. Each of them took a different view of it.

Westerfield had fought no Proxies during their beginning bouts but he had decisively showed his strength. The important part wasn’t the internal rankings in their class or the Crown Championship. The most important thing was being able to fight and kill Host. It had been an epiphany, in more ways than one. Then, Saolirin had never been as confused as some of his other classmates. He knew which side the bread was buttered.

He steeled himself, and sent the message. His father was currently in Southeast Asia. The distances involved meant that he couldn’t reach out to hurt Saolirin. Not physically.

______

Renaldo Hevreron was lost and he didn’t care. When had that begun? Back when the fires seared him, that time in Rio?

No, he had come to accept the smell of burnt flesh——rendered perfect by the Administrator of his old home arcology. Then, that healing had only healed his surface.

He drank from the glas bottle and stared up at an overcast ceiling. The marble-colors of the real sky frightened him almost as much as fire. To people reared in the arcology, nothing was as seductive, as the true sky. He imagined that gravity would cease to function and he would tumble, tumble——he shut down that thought. No need to go there. Don’t remember the auditorium and his Examination of Worth. His failed examination.

There was an explosion nearby, but what did he care? This was just some provincial camp in Southern France.

There were days when he could almost care. When, if he squinted his eyes and tried, he could almost remember. There were days when his smell became too much.

He had washed himself with soap he found in a trash can in Helsinki Arcology a month ago. Later took a shower in Schwarzwald Arcology on a trip he had payed with earnings from doing dishes on its lowermost Level. That had been weeks ago. He had taken trams and gasoline-powered vehicles to the current abode: a gutter alley.

Another explosion rocketed the alley. What were they doing?!

He—a scream echoed over the synth-straw floor of the alley. Without thinking he stood up, back brushing synth-wood. His feet moved on autopilot, taking him out of the alley and onto the wooden walkway above the dusty ground. He might not care about himself, not anymore, but there was yet a small part of him that wanted to do the right thing.

This part of Camp Cassis was made to fit the image of some old Western and the scene that his stumbling steps took him to was very much such a one.

A horse-surely a drone, who kept an actual flesh horse these days-was tied to a post. A man lay on the walkway, clutching his nose. He had a pad in his hand and the look of abject of fear on his face.

The woman before him wore a motley jacket sewn from a great variety of fabrics and the sort of boots that availed a person to some major ass-kicking.

She turned and Renaldo Hevreron began to pity the would be-thief. Her eyes were as dark as his, the only feature that could be made out of her face. A sliver of light shone through the grey clouds, refracting off the mask of mattermetal on her face.

He swallowed. There were Chassis adorned with the same material, but those had been worked and warped by Administrators and Field-tech. This, this had the make of a piece torn from the body of a Host. The edges of the mask were jagged, almost biting into the woman’s face.

He didn’t know who she was, but he knew where she belonged. The Cannibal Cadre. The followers of Serena Smiler.

“Bag him,” she said, utterly uncaring if anyone heard.

Renaldo felt a sting of something in his neck but even then, he didn’t care. Not if a innocent wasn’t hurt. He felt a small figment of curiosity but other than that…

Everything else had been burned out of him.

______

The decorator of the office had foregone the traditional sofa, opting rather for a series of low-standing…he’d call them pouches, the soft ones commonly used in preschools, but that couldn’t be right.

What kind of therapist was this? Martin Soleri tried to get a deeper impression of the owner of the office, but all he could tell was that someone had painted the room in softer shades of blue, chosen chairs more fitting for a primary school and what was that creature over the door. What animal had horns like that?

The door glided open, revealing a forerunner with glasses and a receding hairline. The man walked past Martin, leapt with his arms out and hugged one of the pouches. He flipped around, hands behind his head, and looked up at Martin.

Martin, very carefully, didn’t look at the spots on the man’s face. Maybe…but no, this was the therapist Coastline had recommended to him. The Administrator wouldn’t have said so without a proper reason. Of course, Martin was beginning to understand that what was logic to a human being might not be the same for an Administrator.

Soleri sat down, directly oppose the therapist.

“Do you know who I am?”

“A therapist. A recommended therapist.”

“By a common friend of ours,” Farid Sternman said.

Martin had been given a reason as to why this particular forerunner made a good therapist: and now he saw it. The man’s eyes twinkled, his body language relaxed, all the better to work on the lingering suspicions Martin couldn’t help but feel.

Farid Sternman, after all, was a forerunner whose Implant skewered towards emotions.

______

Isla Calix reclined on a couch, oddly mellow. On the table before her, a set of brown paper had been wrapped, then quite not so neatly unwrapped. Remnants of a dark paste could be made out; and if the police that acted as the Administrator’s long hand were here they would be frowning. The scent was quite suggestive of her misdemeanour.

Fidel had come through for her. He always did. She put one hand against her throat, feeling for the ubiquitous itch. Gone, but never for long.

She had once asked him how he could do the things he did. Everyone knew that the Administrator of each arcology maintained eyes everywhere. Privacy was for those born in a provincial camp - along with the mud and occasional attack by the Host, she thought in a dark way.

The truth of it was that there was a panopticon, a surveillance of all within an arcology, yet the mind of an Administrator couldn’t know all. See all, but not know it. Even their minds had limits. Some of the information was processed by sub-routines, then ordinary artificial consciousnesses before eventually reaching Segments, greater pieces of the whole, before eventually landing at the highest office, the Prime Segment. Fidel had described the long years it had taken for criminals to reach these conclusions, but human ingenuity knew no bounds, he had said. The commented philosophy had been ruined by an aside about human vice too being limitless.

This, of course, only applied to things that didn’t catch an Administrator’s direct attention or one of its Segments. Do that, and you’d better run out of the arcology. Or throw yourself on the ground and hope for mercy.

She sat on the couch til the buzz was gone, leaving only when the hour grew late and the guilt became too much. She ascended upwards, taking elevators and a tram, reaching Level 6 and the rooms the variety of 2095-13 had.

Her room - if you call it that, being bigger than the whole apartment back at Bilbao - consisted of three parts, and it was the middle part she stopped at, pouring herself a glass of water.

Afterwards, after she had used, she thirsted. A case of cottonmouth like no other. She drank deeply.

This was who she was. A fighter. A girl, young woman who wanted a better future for her family. A Proxy, a warrior at the forefront.

She sat the glass down on the counter synth-steel counter. And an addict. She mustn’t forget that. Best to remember who one was.

“HELLO, ISLA CALIX.”

She jumped, the Chassis summoned onto her body as quick as thought.

“I AM THE MULE. I ADMINISTER THE YSTAD ARCOLOGY. TELL ME: WERE YOU SATISFIED WITH YOUR PERFORMANCE AGAINST THAT SOVEREIGN?”

______

Cameron Westerfield became light, as thin as venetian blinds, as dark as blood freshly spilled: wave, then particle, exploding outwards in a surge that brushed the ground of the battle cell.

Then——

Nothing.

The battle cell was empty. A sub-routine created specifically to ensure that no fatalities were incurred scanned the environ at a molecule-level. It was without emotion, noting only the tangible, and so it became curious. On a sub-atomic level…something was happening.

The floor of the battle-cell shattered. At turns burning, otherwise cracking, splintering, rapidly heated from the inside.

Cameron Westerfield re-manifested in a burst of light, chest heaving, falling on the ground. There he lay, considering their fight against the Sovereign-drone. It wasn’t a true Sovereign. He had seen one, and you could never mistake power like that. But, he conceded, his breath firming, the toll of the endoauric stabilising, not bad for an incomplete copy.

The fight, that is. The people of the cadre - Sonnentag, Calix, Soleri, Dijkstra - had all congratulated him on holding out. The last one standing, so to speak.

It seemed that the spectre of disapproval, him not wanting to fight other Proxies, had gone away. Even so, the palpable disappointment of his classmates echoed whenever they met.

They had all gone all out, and failed. Westerfield threw himself on his back. Eyes up at the ceiling of the battle cell. He too had failed, but it was expected. The insight he had derived from fighting a being so close to a Sovereign, yet not, was worth the weight in gold. What he had learned in the ruins of Paris, the tactic he had developed…it bore fruit. He glanced down on his hand, transmuting the limb into red light.

The rest of the class thought that he had been the last man standing due to his skills as a Proxy. He stared through his stained-glass hand, returning the limb to its physical state. They were right, but only in the most general, peripheral way. All of his aurics were designed for one thing, and one thing only.

To kill a Sovereign: to transmute his loss and fury into a blow that would kill even machine god.