“Telokopolis was a—”

  Ooni winced, biting her bottom lip until she tasted the blossom of blood on her offending tongue. She refused to blame her mistake on the concussion, or the fear, or the static haze of the storm, or the unblinking focus of Kuro’s stare.

  The mistake was her own. Her faith felt so fragile.

  She tried again.

  “Telokopolis is a city. A living city, with meat and bone and brains on the inside. Alive, with a mind, and a— a soul, I guess. It’s built in the shape of a spire, like … like this.” Ooni raised both hands and put her fingertips together to form a sharp wedge, pointing toward the occluded heavens beyond the tomb. The gesture helped to steady her shaking hands. “It’s a very— very special city. Unique, in all— all the ages before this, before us. It’s where Elpida came from. She was, uh … it’s hard to explain, and I don’t understand all the details, but she’s a daughter of the city. Literally, physically, biologically. The city made her, and gave birth to her, and all her sisters. And— and Telokopolis still exists, that’s the important part. Even in this afterlife, it’s still out there. It’s on a plateau, very far away, but we know where it is. We have proof of that—”

  “We?” Kuro echoed.

  Ooni choked on the rest of her sentence.

  Kuro’s expression was unreadable, eyes wide inside the open faceplate of her helmet, pink skin framed by the feather-soft folds which cradled her skull, her powered armour a grey smear against the featureless black wall of the small circular chamber. If Ooni turned her gaze aside, Kuro was reduced to a face floating in the black, emerging from a bloom of pale-flesh petals.

  “ … w-we, yes,” Ooni confirmed. “Elpida … and … and the others. Elpida’s comrades. Her … girls. Her … ”

  Ooni trailed off. Her words felt so inadequate. She longed to express herself with the same clarity and charisma as Elpida; if only Elpida was here, then even Kuro would be forced to understand.

  “You belong to her now,” said Kuro.

  It wasn’t a question, but Ooni shook her head. “No, no, that’s not—”

  “Don’t try to mislead me with something so simple, Ooni.” Kuro’s high-pitched voice filled the small chamber with airy irritation. “You’re not smart enough for that. You’re no double-agent, playing both sides. That way out is closed. You are no longer one of us, no longer a Sister of the Skull. That’s a statement of fact.”

  Kuro reached for Ooni’s face again, armoured gauntlet rising through the shadows, fingers curling to cup Ooni’s chin, to deliver punishment and correction for the wrong answer. Ooni’s hands fluttered with surrender and submission. She squeezed against the wall at her back, trapped by the metal band around her belly. Her lips tried to form an apology—

  “It doesn’t work like that, Kuro!” she spat. “You don’t understand!”

  Ooni was stunned by the fire in her own voice. She didn’t sound like herself, as if a hidden passenger had crawled up her throat and spoken the truth in her defence.

  Kuro’s hand paused, then returned to her armoured lap. She tilted her head, helmet unmoving, skull brushing through the layers of feathery white flesh-folds.

  “You’re right!” Ooni said, clinging hard to this sudden hot spark in her mouth, though her words quivered and her chest was shaking. She lowered her own hands and wrapped them around the metal band which held her pinned to the wall. “I’m not a Sister of the Skull anymore. Not a ‘Death’s Head’. I … I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be! I wouldn’t come back if you begged me! But that’s not what I meant. Not what I meant at all. It’s not about Elpida, not about the others. Not even— not even Leuca! I-I haven’t been seduced or coerced or corrupted. That’s not how it works. It’s about Telokopolis.”

  “A city.”

  “No,” Ooni hissed. “More than a city, more than her physical body. I am inside Telokopolis, right now. Even here, alone in the dark, as your captive, I am armoured by her walls. I am inside Telokopolis. I am one of her daughters, no matter what I was born as, no matter what I’ve done in the past. No matter what. I am inside Telokopolis! Right now!”

  Kuro just stared.

  Ooni shook all over, panting hard, throat closing up. She knew her words were not enough, her passion meant nothing. Her eyes flickered past Kuro, to where the discarded plates of carapace armour lay against the opposite wall. The crescent-and-double-line of Telokopolis, daubed in green on the chestplate, still glistened despite the near total darkness.

  Kuro turned her head to look. “That’s what the symbol means? That’s Telokopolis?”

  “Y-yes. Yes. The spire, and … and the world. I-I think.”

  Kuro started to turn back to Ooni, but then paused halfway, to stare down at Ilyusha lying on the floor, a dismembered torso with only one bionic leg left attached; Ilyusha had already closed her eyes again, pretending to be unconscious or dead.

  Kuro spoke without looking up. “You think?”

  Ooni swallowed, then nodded. “Some of the others say it’s … t-the moon, or a symbol for unity, or infinity, or a zero, or … or other things. But I think it’s the world.”

  “You think.”

  Ooni’s words ran out; the brief fire she had felt upon her tongue was fading back to an ember, slick with blood and chilled by fear. The black metal wall was so cold against her back and legs. The band around her waist seemed tighter than ever.

  Kuro gestured toward Ilyusha. “Is she a daughter of Telokopolis as well?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. We all are, we—”

  Kuro reached down to Ilyusha’s helpless body and stuck the fingers of one armoured gauntlet into the exposed bionic socket of Ilyusha’s left shoulder. She yanked hard, dragging Ilyusha sideways by several inches, pulling her by the softly fluttering innards of the violated cybernetic implant. Ilyusha let out a strangled gasp of pain, eyes rolling behind closed lids, cold sweat breaking out on her face. But her eyes stayed shut. After a moment her breathing settled, then ceased once again.

  Kuro raised her head, finally looking back up at Ooni.

  “Not very good armour, this Telokopolis,” she said.

  Then Kuro smiled.

  Ooni fought down the urge to scream; that would only inflame Kuro’s desires. Ooni knew that smile — wide and sweet, accompanied by a crinkling in the corners of the eyes, like Kuro really was nothing more than a young girl playing in a meadow, showing all her shiny, sharp, metal teeth. This was just another one of Kuro’s cruel games, like every other time she had cornered Ooni in a dark, cramped, lonely place. How could Ooni have been so naively optimistic, to believe that Kuro really wanted to know about Telokopolis? Whatever Ooni said, her chances of survival were still slim to none.

  Her words did not matter. She was already dead.

  For the first time ever, it didn’t matter what she said to Kuro; there was no Sisterhood here, no slender excuse of greater purpose to keep her alive. No matter how much she wanted to make it out, she was not going to. Avoiding pain was impossible; Kuro would do worse to her before the end than sticking fingers into her sockets. Fear would have left her crippled and muzzled, but for a single handhold.

  Ooni had spoken the truth — even now, she was still within the embrace of Telokopolis.

  Ooni swallowed and took a deep breath. She was shaking all over, covered in cold sweat, and completely powerless. She did not want to be a martyr, but the choice was not her own. The only thing she could do was ruin Kuro’s fun, and that was cold comfort.

  All Ooni had was the truth, and the truth felt like victory.

  “Telokopolis is greater than the sum of its parts!” she hissed. “Me, her, Elpida. It doesn’t matter! Telokopolis rejects nobody, leaves nobody outside. It’s for everybody, everybody! Even me! That’s what Elpida has been doing. She did it with the others, then with Pheiri, the tank. Then with me! That’s what it means, Kuro! Nobody gets left behind!” Ooni’s voice rose to a reedy shout, echoing off the walls of the little black chamber; her head throbbed with every word, but her veins rushed with fire and thunder, in a way she had not felt since true life. “Nobody gets left behind, or eaten because they’re weak, or cast out because they can’t measure up! It’s nothing like the Sisterhood, nothing like you!”

  Kuro opened her mouth — but Ooni already knew what she was going to say, and shouted over her.

  “And it’s strong!” Ooni almost screamed, straining forward across the band of metal around her belly, pushing at it with both hands so hard her fingers ached. “It’s a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times stronger than the Sisterhood, than any Death’s Heads! It’s stronger than Yolanda could ever be. It’s stronger than you, Kuro! Telokopolis is stronger than you!”

  Ooni paused, heaving for breath, tears running down her cheeks.

  Kuro waited a moment, almost as if for Ooni to continue. Then she said: “And yet I am free, and you are bound.”

  A strange laugh clawed up and out of Ooni’s throat. “You think that matters? You know why Telokopolis is strong? Because it’s united! We! We! We! Me and Leuca and Elpida and Ilyusha here and all the others! Even the ones who think I’m a traitor and a coward and a weakling, they’re all one with me and I’m one with them! Because we’re not in competition with each other! We’re together! Together!”

  “Like a hiver,” Kuro muttered.

  “And we’re strong!” Ooni shouted again. “We’re strong!”

  “We were strong,” Kuro said. “We could do whatever we wished, to whomever we wanted. The Sisterhood was—”

  “We were never strong!” Ooni spat, rage taking her, face burning, kicking out at Kuro in a way she never would have dared before, though her boots could not reach Kuro’s armour. “We picked on weak targets and ate those who couldn’t defend themselves. You call that strong?! Scavengers, carrion-eaters, and weak! We ate each other! I remember you, Kuro, eating bits of me, because I couldn’t stop you! Does that make you strong, or a coward?! You don’t have the courage to face Telokopolis, because you’re weak and you’re alone!” Ooni’s voice dropped to a cold point, squeezed out between panting breaths. “Don’t think I can’t see that.”

  Kuro’s face flickered with a delicate, girlish frown. “I’m not—”

  “Where’s Yolanda, hmm!?” Ooni said. “Where’s your beloved mistress with her orders and her punishment and her hands all over you?! Where are the others? They’ve abandoned you, haven’t they? Or you’ve abandoned them. And I’m not abandoned. I’m not alone.”

  Kuro’s frown darkened with something Ooni had never before seen on her face — real anger. “Your friends won’t find you, Ooni. They’re not going to—”

  “But they’re trying!”

  “And they won’t succeed. So much for Telokopolis.”

  Ooni barked with laughter. “You still don’t understand, Kuro. Telokopolis is forever! You can’t kill her, you can’t even wound her. Killing one of us does nothing. Nothing!”

  “What if I kill Elpida?”

  A brief tremor of disgust gripped Ooni’s bowels. She knew better than almost any of the others that Elpida was not invincible. She had watched Leuca empty a magazine of bullets into Elpida’s gut, and had witnessed Elpida chained and tortured by the Sisterhood. Elpida could bleed and die, just like any other zombie.

  “Elpida is not Telokopolis,” Ooni said. Her courage rallied to the words. “If she falls, the rest of us carry it on. Me and Leuca and—”

  “What if I blow up your tank? Kill all your companions? Eat the flesh, eat all of you, turn you into more of me. What if I wipe out the whole group? What then, Ooni? What’s ‘forever’ then? Your meat in my gut?”

  Ooni forced herself to laugh through the fear; it helped more than she had expected, and the laugh became real. “It doesn’t matter! Others would take up the mantle! We’ve converted so many now, Kuro. All those zombies we gave meat, all the zombies Elpida spoke with, even if they don’t get it like we do, not yet. But they will. Are you going to kill all of them, too?! Hunt down any whisper of Telokopolis? What about when Elpida is resurrected again, are you going to go from worm to worm, looking for her, specifically? You can’t!”

  “No zombie can sustain such—”

  “She can!” Ooni shouted. “I can too! We all can! You cannot fight Telokopolis, Kuro. She is larger than you. You can’t kill this with guns and strangling and- and- eating flesh, and- and all of it! She is more than this.” Ooni raised one booted foot and thumped her heel on the black metal floor. “More than this! More than this!”

  Kuro said: “And what if I just kill you?”

  Fear stopped up Ooni’s throat.

  She thought she had accepted the inevitable — that her death did matter. But still she faltered, trying and failing to swallow.

  Kuro snorted softly; her frown turned back into a little smile. “Abstract principle is all well and good. But practical reality is meat and bone, and you are both—”

  Telokopolis is forever.

  Kuro stopped.

  “Telokopolis is forever,” Ooni repeated; she was so numb she wasn’t sure if she’d said the words the first time. “If you kill me, it doesn’t matter. She will find me again.”

  “Elpida?”

  Ooni laughed — a hacking, wheezing, desperate sound, as if a fraction of the tempest outside had entered the quiet dark of the tomb via her lungs. “No! You still don’t get it! Telokopolis will find me again. Maybe it won’t be Elpida, or Leuca, or Pheiri. Maybe … maybe I’ll never see any of them, ever again. Maybe it’ll be a thousand years, or a million years. Or … or longer. But Telokopolis is forever. She will find me again. Or … or I will be how others find her.” Ooni’s voice dropped to a whisper, as if speaking it too loudly might force Kuro’s hand. “You can kill me. I can’t stop you. But it simply doesn’t matter. It changes nothing but the details. Telokopolis is forever.”

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  Kuro stared into Ooni’s eyes; Ooni stared back.

  The hurricane howled beyond the walls of the tomb, a chorus of the dead turned to static by the drumming of rain and hail upon the black metal hide. Ooni tried to keep her expression hard and defiant, but she couldn’t stop herself from bracing for the moment that was surely approaching. Kuro was going to reach forward and hurt her, perhaps for a very long time, and then finally kill her. She had thrown the truth in Kuro’s face, spited her with the impossibility of her victory; the future would turn to ash in Kuro’s mouth, but for Ooni there was no escape but death.

  Kuro moved like a striking snake — a flash of motion against the dark. Ooni winced, teeth clenched, eyes scrunching up, not ready, not ready, not—

  But Kuro simply stood up.

  Powered armour towered over Ooni, grey-on-grey in the black chamber, Kuro’s face a bright blossom of pink and white.

  Ooni drew a shuddering gasp of relief; she couldn’t help herself.

  Kuro muttered, “All this for a city you’ve never even seen.”

  Kuro turned away and walked over to the opposite side of the room, where Ilyusha’s detached limbs and the confiscated weapons waited atop the table extruded from the wall. She picked up the chestplate of Ooni’s armour, then returned, sitting back down again. She held up the carapace plate, examined the symbol of Telokopolis for a moment, then propped it next to her, so that the symbol faced toward Ooni. She traced the crescent-and-double-line with an armoured fingertip.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” said Kuro.

  Ooni blinked, confused. “I … I have? I have. You asked about Telokopolis, and I answered. I answered, I told you. If you can’t understand it, then that’s your fault.”

  Kuro looked up from the armour plate, eyebrows raised, almost as if surprised. “I saw a ghost. She forgave me. Why? You said ‘because Telokopolis is forever’. What does that have to do with the ghost of a hiver I killed, back in another life?”

  Ooni slumped against the metal band around her belly. She didn’t care; Kuro’s question was nonsense, and Kuro knew it. Kuro was going to kill her anyway, and Kuro refused to understand.

  “I’m not playing your games anymore,” Ooni muttered. “Just kill me or let me go. Torture me. Rape me. Eat me. I am inside Telokopolis, and I don’t have to do this anymore, I don’t—”

  Kuro slapped the black floor with an open palm, armoured gauntlet ringing against the tomb-metal. “No!” she shouted.

  Ooni shot upright, cramming herself against the wall. Kuro’s eyes were ablaze with frustrated anger, her lips peeled back from her metal teeth.

  “W-what? I won’t, I won’t play anymore—”

  “When you said ‘because Telokopolis is forever’, you meant it.” Kuro’s voice was rushed and urgent. “You weren’t just blabbering to save your skin. You meant what you said. I could hear you meant it. Tell me what you meant. Tell me why that ghost forgave me.”

  Ooni didn’t know what to say. She’d never seen Kuro lose her temper like this. Even through the pounding of her head and the resignation of death, Ooni realised she had been wrong.

  This was more than one of Kuro’s cruel games.

  “ … K-Kuro, are you—”

  “Answer the question. Why would the ghost forgive me? Why would she do that? What does that have to do with Telokopolis? Explain the connection.”

  Ooni opened her mouth to answer — then hesitated.

  Kuro wasn’t quite correct; when Ooni had blurted out the words, she had been grasping for any handhold, any statement which would stop Kuro from eating her face. But now that she had been given time to explain what Telokopolis was, to turn her inner turmoil into concrete statements, she knew exactly what she had meant. She also knew that she had already said it to Kuro, but that Kuro had not understood. She would have to spell it out, but she didn’t want to. The bright spark in her mouth was turning toxic and dark. Her heart curdled. Her tongue tasted of blood.

  She did not want to give this truth to Kuro.

  Did this make her unworthy of Telokopolis? No, nothing could do that now, nothing but betrayal. Would Elpida have agreed with this desire? Probably not, but she would have understood, she would have talked it through, and found a way.

  What would Elpida do?

  “Tell me,” Kuro said. “Tell me!”

  Ooni swallowed. “When … when Elpida took me, she … she cut the Skull symbol off my flesh. She ate it, right in front of me. Destroyed it by eating it! She … she brought me into Telokopolis. Made it so what I’d done in the past was … washed away, made clean. It took the others time to accept me, and some of them … maybe they’re right, maybe I don’t deserve it, but … but they did let me stay. I’m not pretending they accepted me instantly. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be so … so … important, because we’d all be doing it already, and there would be no Death’s Heads, no Sisterhood.”

  Kuro frowned delicately, girlish face scrunched up. “I don’t understand.”

  “I already told you. Telokopolis rejects nobody. Nobody is abandoned, or left behind, or cannibalised. Not Elpida, and not even me.”

  Kuro’s frown relaxed. “Ah.”

  Ooni grimaced. Kuro had worked it out. But she said the words anyway. “I was forgiven, when I didn’t deserve to be forgiven. Telokopolis rejects nobody.” She swallowed the taste of blood and bile. “You included.”

  Kuro shook her head slowly, face and hair brushing against the cradle of fleshy white folds inside her helmet. “And you think that’s why the ghost of the hiver forgave me?”

  Ooni shrugged. Earlier, with the fire on her tongue, she had felt almost like Elpida, like the voice of the city was speaking through her; now she was spent and cold, and had little more to say. She had no power over Kuro anymore, nothing more to offer. She was going numb, retreating to the walls inside herself.

  “Answer the question,” said Kuro.

  “Whether she knew it or not,” Ooni said, weak and quiet. “She was embodying it. You’re … you’re forgiven too, Kuro.”

  Kuro broke into another smile, sweet and girlish and full of sharp metal teeth. A shiver shot straight up Ooni’s spine. She tried not to whimper or squirm.

  Kuro said, “And what about you? Do you forgive me, Ooni? For all those moments we shared?”

  Ooni shook her head. She whispered the truth, “No.”

  Kuro nodded. “Good. I don’t want to be forgiven.”

  “A-ah?”

  Kuro straightened up in her armour. She let the carapace chestplate fall, so the crescent-and-double-line of Telokopolis lay face down on the black metal floor. “What does Telokopolis do with things like me?”

  “I … I don’t understand?”

  Kuro filled her lungs with a deep breath; the bulk of the suit hid the rise and fall of her chest, like a body entombed behind metal and stone.

  “I like being what I am,” Kuro said, still smiling. “Being what I was before this reincarnation. I know what I am, and I don’t pretend to be otherwise. I am a serial killer, Ooni. I am a monster, and I love it, because it was meant to be. I found it very hard to accept at first, for most of my twenties, after that first hiver woman, when I had to hide what I’d realised about myself. I felt … alone, and confused. Like maybe I shouldn’t exist, like I didn’t have a place in the finely tuned systems of Factory Head, no matter how many holes I hacked and vulnerabilities I exploited. But over time I came to realise that it was the systems which were wrong. I belonged to the natural order of things, and I found a place for myself as the systems broke down. I know what I am, and I am not ashamed. What does Telokopolis do with things like me?”

  “ … I-I don’t—”

  “You do know. Your Elpida did plenty of it already. What does Telokopolis do with things it cannot contain?”

  “ … Telokopolis should kill you,” Ooni whispered. “Elpida should kill you. I would— I would kill you. If I— if I could.”

  Kuro smiled wider, cheeks dimpling, delight sparkling in her black-on-red eyes. “I don’t need forgiveness, it makes me feel … stifled. Yes, stifled! Like my early life in Factory Head. Thank you, Ooni. Talking to you has helped me figure that out.” Kuro shook her head; faint tears shone in her eyes. “I don’t want any ghosts to forgive me, no matter what they teach me in return. I would have preferred if she had fought. I would gladly fight a ghost, even if she won. That would be interesting.”

  Ooni didn’t know what to say. She would never understand Kuro.

  But then Kuro tilted her head, inside her helmet. “Would you fight, Ooni?”

  “I … I already said, I would … kill you if I could.”

  “Would you?” Kuro sighed. “If I let you go, right now, would you forgive me, and feed me secrets, trying to get me to do your bidding? You got halfway there, before I made you tell the actual truth. You gave me the secrets of Telokopolis. But you couldn’t forgive. And that’s much better, I think it’s much more honest. No, I think you would fight. Even if the odds were nothing. Especially if the odds were nothing.” Kuro’s smile died down, still burning behind a curious little frown. “You were never like this before. You were always the first to run and hide, trying to stay unnoticed, laughing at jokes you didn’t understand. Even when I caught you, you never fought back properly, because you knew I wouldn’t finish you off. Even just now, you tried to hide behind the skirts of Telokopolis. But I drew you out. And here you are. Declaring that you will kill me. You’ve changed, Ooni.”

  Ooni found her voice. “Telokopolis changed me.”

  “A city you’ve never seen, and never will.”

  “I will. We all will.”

  “No. You changed you, Ooni. This dream of an immortal city, that’s just a catalyst. I’m almost impressed. I think I’d have you—”

  Kuro suddenly sprang to her feet, moving so fast her grey armour became a blur.

  Ooni thought this was it, this was the moment Kuro was going to kill her. She yelped and jerked back against the wall, hands pushing at the metal band around her waist.

  But Kuro twisted on one ankle, toward the right-hand wall. The faceplate of her armour descended from inside her helmet and snapped back into place with a soft hiss, giving Ooni a momentary glance of the holographic readouts, flickering back to life before Kuro’s eyes. Guns extended from the forearms of her suit, as one of the plasma weapons on her shoulder twitched and jerked to life, barrel glowing with a gathering charge. Kuro’s suit reactor ramped up with an audible rush of air through the armoured intakes.

  Kuro broke into a sprint from a standing start, powered armour joints slamming through the dark like pistons, boots ringing against the floor. She hit the black metal wall and vanished as if plunging through the placid surface of a dark pool.

  But this time the gap did not close behind her.

  Kuro’s passing left a ragged hole in the curved wall of the little black room, streamers of ferrofluid freezing into long spikes in her wake. A way out — into the lightless dark beyond.

  Kuro’s racing footsteps vanished a few moments later, sprinting off into the corridors of the tomb. Ooni gaped at the hole in the wall.

  Ilyusha’s eyes snapped open, little bloodshot circles in her crimson-caked face. Her lips peeled back from her teeth, clenched with rage and pain. Kuro’s momentary torture had dragged Ilyusha a few inches closer to Ooni; when she raised the clawed foot at the end of her one remaining leg, she was now almost within range of the metal band around Ooni’s belly. She reached for the metal, hissing with effort.

  “Pull me! Ooni, pull me in! Pull me!”

  Ooni reached out and grabbed Ilyusha’s bird-like bionic foot, gripping the thick joints of her toes, trying not to touch the dark red talons.

  But she didn’t pull Ilyusha in; she held her back.

  “Illy, Illy, we can’t! We can’t!”

  Ilyusha’s eyes blazed with fresh fury. She shoved hard, kicking at Ooni with razor-edged claws, forcing Ooni back against the wall. Ooni’s fingers slipped on the complex joints of Ilyusha’s foot, opening a shallow cut down the back of her right hand. She winced with the pain and scrambled for a better grip on Ilyusha’s ankle, trying to hold her steady as she jerked and bucked.

  “Illy! Illy! Listen, listen—”

  “Fuck you, reptile! Fucking— let me cut— cut you out! Put my limbs back—”

  “Ilyusha, please! It’s a trap!” Ooni hissed, trying not to raise her voice, because surely Kuro was still listening. “She left the hole there on purpose, she’s testing us, or testing me! This is what Kuro does! She didn’t get what she wanted, so now she’s drawing me into another game! She’s playing with us, playing with her food, she—”

  “I know!” Ilyusha spat, pulling her head up off the floor. “I know!”

  “ … t-then you know we can’t, we can’t—”

  “We have to get her! Fuck her up!”

  “I-I-I c-can’t,” Ooni stammered. Standing firm with Telokopolis at her back was one thing, but fighting Kuro? “It’s impossible, I can’t, I can’t fight her, I—”

  Ilyusha’s lips ripped into a manic grin. “Yeah, but we can! You and me! Come on!”

  Ooni froze. Surely Ilyusha was wrong. Kuro had beaten her once already. Kuro could beat them all. Kuro could not touch Telokopolis itself, because Telokopolis was beyond harm, but Ooni and Ilyusha were doomed. Any zombies would be doomed in their position. Leuca, Elpida, even all the others, with Pheiri to protect them, would be nothing more than meat, for sport and—

  Telokopolis is forever.

  Ooni felt a spark catch in her gut.

  Ilyusha was talking: “Got me once with her magnet bullshit tricks but I’m dialled in for that bitch now! Won’t get me twice! Won’t get me again! Come on, Ooni! Come—”

  “We,” Ooni echoed, nodding. “You and … and me! Right, right, okay. Okay! Okay, Illy!”

  Ilyusha flexed the toes of her taloned foot. “Let go?”

  Ooni released Ilyusha’s talons. Ilyusha lowered her foot toward the band of metal around Ooni’s stomach, gritting her teeth with the difficulty of aiming; Ooni grabbed Illy’s toes again, guiding the sharp cutting edges around the band of black metal. She sucked in her gut as much as possible, pressing herself against the back wall of the little chamber, to make room for Ilyusha’s claws. Even with her best efforts Ooni still ended up with Illy’s thick bionic toes digging into her belly. One wrong jerk and Ilyusha’s talons would spill Ooni’s intestines.

  Ilyusha grunted and strained, clenching her foot, bearing down on the metal bar with her claws. Crimson edges bit into the black steel; Ilyusha wiggled her foot from side to side, working the notch deeper and wider. Ilyusha relaxed, strained again, relaxed a second time — then flexed so hard that her whole limbless torso rose up from the ground, arching with her skull as support, as she exerted every muscle in her bionic leg.

  Snikt!

  The metal band snapped with a loud twang. Ilyusha collapsed, her foot slamming into Ooni’s abdomen, knocking the wind from Ooni’s lungs; luckily her claws were already curled inward. Half the metal band flew across the room, somehow broken from the wall with the tension of the cut — it bounced away with a deafening chorus of metal-on-metal, clang-clang-clang. The second half of the band jabbed Ooni in the gut as she scrambled forward.

  She was free, and she wasn’t wasting a single second.

  Ooni didn’t even pause to thank Ilyusha. Winded from the kick, head spinning with fresh nausea, adrenaline and terror pumping in her veins, Ooni shot forward on her hands and knees, crawling across the room to the little table with all the equipment and Ilyusha’s severed limbs.

  “Arm first!” Ilyusha was shouting. “Arm first, right arm! Right arm!”

  Ooni grabbed the edge of the table and hauled herself upright. She didn’t reach for Ilyusha’s limbs. That could wait.

  Ilyusha didn’t know Kuro like Ooni did.

  Ooni grabbed Ilyusha’s automatic shotgun. Her hands shook so hard she almost dropped it; the weapon weighed a lot more than she expected, bulky and awkward and hard to get her grip around. She slapped at the breech to check the shells — still loaded! — then made sure the safety was off. She jammed the weapon against her shoulder, then twisted to face the opening which Kuro had ripped in the wall of the little black room.

  Ilyusha was screaming: “What are you doing, you reptile fuck!? Get my limbs, get my fucking arm! Put my arm back—”

  The makeshift doorway was empty, a wide black void fringed with frozen streamers of metal, like molten rock in black seawater.

  Ooni kept the shotgun trained on the opening. She braced the weapon against the crook of her arm as best she could, and took her left hand off the forward grip. Eyes on the gap, ears tuning out Ilyusha’s screaming anger, she groped for one of the two comms headsets next to the guns. She found one, fumbled it over her head, pressed the mic to her mouth, and toggled the activation switch.

  “Kaga? Kaga!? Elpida? Victoria? Leuca!” she stammered. “Anybody there, Pheiri! Pheiri, record—”

  Ping-ping!

  Pheiri’s wordless reply dinged in her ear — emergency acknowledged. The comms network was still online. This headset was still connected.

  Ooni felt herself almost sag with relief, but she couldn’t afford that, not yet. She blinked hard, eyes on the dark opening in the wall before her, both hands back on the gun, stock against her shoulder.

  A voice crackled in her ear a split-second later — Kagami: “Ooni! Where the fuck— no, don’t waste your breath, I’m tracing the signal. Is Ilyusha—”

  “Listen!” Ooni hissed. “Kuro is using magnetic fields to move the material of the walls around. The black metal is a ferrofluid. She’s coming back any moment, you need to get that, you need to understand! Ferrofluids, magnetics in her suit. Illy’s here but she’s hurt and Kuro will be—”

  The comms cut out with a burst of static.

  Ooni pulled the trigger.

  The recoil almost dislocated her shoulder; Ilyusha made it look easy with her bionic arms, but the weapon was not designed for unaugmented human beings. The impact slammed the breath from Ooni’s lungs and threatened to jerk her aim off-target.

  Kuro appeared in the opening a split-second later — a grey-on-grey blur moving at high speed, returning at the same dead sprint with which she had left the room. The burst of static had given Ooni the warning she needed, the near-field interference from Kuro’s suit arriving a moment earlier than Kuro herself.

  This time, Kuro wasn’t wearing the tomb metal.

  The early shotgun blast hit Kuro like a brick to the gut, slamming her to an instant halt, jerking the suit back through the opening. Ooni clamped her muscles and pumped the trigger — boom! boom! boom! — chasing Kuro out of the room with round after round, knocking the suit away until it was nothing more than a shadow in the outer darkness. The recoil felt like being punched in the shoulder over and over by an iron fist. Ooni screamed and kept firing and—

  And then Kuro was gone.

  The final shotgun blast caught the black walls beyond. No Kuro, no armour, no trace.

  A moment of silence fell, filled with Ooni’s ragged breathing and the distant static of the hurricane. Her right shoulder was on fire and her head rang like a cracked bell.

  Ilyusha broke into a war cry, down on the floor. “Yeeeeeah! Fuck her! Get fucked! Fuck! Fuuuuuck!”

  Ooni lowered the shotgun in numb fingers, wincing at the pulped bruise on her shoulder. She tapped the comms headset, but the line was dead, blocked by jamming from Kuro’s suit. Kuro hadn’t expected Ooni to do that, or she would have simply trashed the headsets. Or maybe this was what she wanted, drawing more victims into her web.

  “You did it, Ooni! Hahahahaaaa!” Ilyusha was cackling, grinning, kicking out with her one leg. “You fucked up that shit-eating bitch cunt—”

  “No, I didn’t.” Ooni shook her head. “I didn’t. Those rounds didn’t even penetrate her suit, all I did was knock her around. And she wanted it. She wanted that. She wanted me to do that, I knew she was going to come back, I had to do it! She could have armoured herself in the black metal, she could have killed me with a hail of bullets, but she didn’t. She’s playing with her food. This is just another game. We’re not— we’re not free.”

  Ilyusha’s face fell, then twisted with rage, lips pulling back from her teeth. “Fuck!”

  Ooni put down the shotgun and lifted Ilyusha’s detached right arm from the table. The limb was incredibly heavy and awkward to carry, especially with the fresh bruise blossoming deep in Ooni’s shoulder; the claws would easily slice through her t-shirt and skin if she brushed against them at the wrong angle. She hefted the arm and staggered over to Ilyusha.

  “Yeah! Yeah!” Ilyusha said. “Arm, do it! Do it!”

  Ooni fell to her knees at Ilyusha’s side, cradling the arm, turning the exposed joint toward the open socket.

  “R-right. Right. We need to get you back together, Illy. We need to get you back together. I can’t do this alone.”

  Also! Just a quicker reminder, for those who may have missed this: Necroepilogos is taking an extended break, for 2 weeks, and the next chapter will be up on the 27th of February. This has been planned for a while, I've mentioned it before, and it's why I've kept writing for a while without the usual breaks. I didn't want to have to do this, but I don't have any choice, unfortunately. So! Things will be back to normal soon, and I will see you then!

  Necroepilogos will return as normal on the 6th of March!

  a single chapter ahead, about 6k words. Behind the scenes I'm plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!

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