Shard-3: Greatling is going to make his move next week.
Mirror-Convex: Received. Does he have any information regarding the incident in the gutters?
Shard-3: Negatory. He’s clueless as the rest. I’ve tapped them… Well, maybe not all of them. Chambers is still missing. Two techs with him. Dead or captured. Scalpers have them.
Mirror-Convex: Dead, then.
Shard-3: Most likely outco. They took the ghoul with them. mory leaks ca back with it sared though. Looked like the damn thing put up a hell of a fight. Rotlick had so pretty weird wards on it. Looked almost professional. Only got a glimpse while it was making a victim out of Rantula though.
Mirror-Convex: Yes, the… Moonblood?
Shard-3: Another one of Greatling’s hair-brained ideas. I swear to Jaus, it’s like babysitting a bomb waiting to go off. The half-strand won’t stop giving conflicting orders. I think he’s having a ntal breakdown.
Mirror-Convex: Received. Continue monitoring the situation. We move to intercept if nothing else changes.
-Conversation between Incubi and Handler, Ori-Thaum
8-11
Limbo
Ti passed. Draus blinked. “What?”
He didn’t answer her imdiately, choosing instead to revel in the sensation of the falling spray washing the wounds from his body. “Real. Do you feel like you exist?”
“The fuck kind of question is that?”
“Honest one.”
“Avo… what the hells are you talkin’ about? Are we still fighting?" She sighed. "Are– are you havin’ another mont? Is that what this is? Because if this is, I wanna talk about that…”
Her words drifted past him while he cupped raindrops with his winds, shifting them aimlessly from one to another. “Before the Soul. Before all… this. It was like a dream to . Limbo. An unlife. Wasn’t miserable. Wasn’t happy. Just was. Tried being what my father wanted.” He twitched his claws and curled them, feeling his joints move anew. “I think that’s what happened. When the node forced to kill him. Ended the dream. Ended my limbo. Set free.”
Draus stared, blankly. “That’s… uh… real poetic and stuff.”
Avo frowned. “Real poetic and stuff.”
“C’mon,” Draus said, shrugging, “What do you want from ? A hug? I shoot shit and kill half-strands, Avo, I’m not a fuckin’ philosopher.”
The honesty was appreciated, but the alienation remained.
“So–uh–you havin’ a mont there or we still fightin’?”
“In a mont,” Avo said.
She shook her head in disbelief. “You’re unbelievable, you know that.”
“No,” Avo said. “It’s just… this isn’t supposed to happen.”
“What?”
“. You. The fight. You’re supposed to kill sothing like . What I used to be. Kill easy and move on.” He looked up at the highest ring again, where his brothers lay dead and pasted. Where he butchered them with contempt and ease. “Not what I was before. Was this what he wanted?”
Rolling her shoulder, Draus wiped the blood streaming out from her reforming eyes. “Your pa?”
“He used . Hm. Not him. Another offshoot. Still don’t fully know what he is. But he used to kill him. Made feel it for a reason. Broke . Broke from my… paraters.” Draus was walking over to him, tension bleeding off her posture as she shook off the post-fight adrenaline. “Now, I…”
“Not you anymore?” Draus offered. Her rig was gone. A few pieces that remained of the wings drifted upon the shaking waters. Now, she was clad in but the thermalskin undersuit, its hexagonally laminated scales plastered to her musculature. Reaching down, he noticed her clicking sothing, a hidden pocket patched along the side of her hip. She pulled out a thin stick–a line of hiflass.
“Didn’t take you for a smoker,” he said.
“It’s hiflass. It steadies the nerves after gettin’ bloody,” she held one out to him. He considered rejecting her as he had with Chambers; he never much liked smoke. Not with how they reminded him of the aftermath wrought by fusion burners. “How’s your booster?”
He flexed his Celerostylus. Pain stung his senses. He held back a wince. “Healing.” He reached out and accepted her offering. “Lasts longer in this body. Don’t feel the strain as much. Don’t know how long I can keep it active.”
Draus snorted a laugh. “Long enough. Congrats, consang–you’re a real boy now.” The wrist on her right arm twisted, a projectile launcher jutting out as her hand folded over her forearm. Avo lurched back, Echoheads rearing. She fired twice to the side without looking and swiped the glowing barrel over her stick first before offering it to him. He brushed his smoke across the shimring heat and watched as the tip of his hiflass ca afire.
Awkwardly, he tried to fit between his fangs.
“Don’t suck it all in at once. You’ll choke. Take it slow. Sip.” She took a light drag, and the burn danced down the pale column of her nootropic. A fraction of it peeled away, trailing off into the wind as specks of ash.
Reaching out with his Heaven, he felt them dissolve further and further until they were so small they might as well have never been.
Mimicking the Regular, he took his own sup from the smoke, expecting a certain kind of filth to knot his throat; irritate his lungs. Instead, the llow flavor of grass and soil expanded inside him, layering over his mind like a blanket.
He exhaled again, and this ti, a certain weight felt loosened. In a strange sense, he felt more kindred to the winds than ever before.
“Ah, yes. How easily the flesh is persuaded. Such is the unfortunate design of chemistry, master: your emotions are fickle, and will fail you. Only a devotion to a Domain fixes you on higher path. I offer only good intentions when I state this: consider parting your mind from such persuasions. Seek only the highest path.”
Where his words slipped past Draus earlier, he felt the sa about his Woundshaper. He was a Godclad. It was a Heaven. He would choose to feel and live however he so pleased. It would accept. It had to accept.
For a few monts, he stood there with Draus, watching the blood-stained waves crest and fall, lapping at the rising ivory pillars.
“Why stay here?” Avo asked. He noticed her blink, but she said nothing. “You could go anywhere. Offer services to Fallwalker. Run street squire crew. Steal things. Sell out to another Guild. Return to Tiers. Be soone again. Why suffer here? Why get yourself killed fighting golems and Syndicates for FATELESS? For a ghoul?”
She drew in a deep breath, dangling her hiflass half-finished between her fingers. Digits caked in blood and grit, he noticed crenulations running along her skin. Cybernetics probably. Part of her projectile launcher. “I didn’t do none of that for the FATELESS.” She smirked. “And sure as shit I wasn’t plannin’ on startin’ no fistfight with a Sangeist over you.”
“But you did.”
“But I did.” Draus nodded. “Life makes you do stupid shit sotis. Never told you why I ca down here." She took another drag. "What happened after my discharge.”
She did not. “No.”
Pulling the smoke from her lips, she opened her mouth to speak, but seed lost in a forest of mories instead. “They called the Regs of my generation the Orphans. Nicoma’s Orphans. Nicoma was my…” She frowned, uncertain how to respond. “Well, he sure as shit wasn’t my pa. I rember that poor half-strand dyin’ along with my ma. Enclave got breached. Fallwalker got dead. Weird shit ca in to kill us. Real typical ending for a bunch of rusts livin’ next to a open Rupture.”
“Saved you?” Avo asked. “Nicoma?”
She shot him an insulted look. “No. Half-strand ca a day too late. By the ti he got there, it was only . Sohow managed to keep myself alive and kill… whatever those things were.” She shrugged. “I guess I lived because I wasn’t so scared. It could… follow your fear. Materialized inside people. But after it did it to my ma I just… didn’t feel so much of nothin’ no more.
“Anyway. I went through all that. Decided to jump in with the Regs. Took everythin’ they had. The training. The conditioning. The wars. I might not’ve been born in the Tiers, but I was Highfla to the bone.” She smiled then, the expression a genuine spark of forgotten joy, recalled with the shimring haze of her smoke. Then, with the ashes, the mont was lost and her face hardened back into a cold slab of steel. “I was worthy.”
She turned her eyes on him again, her gaze burrowing deep into his. “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout this dream shit you keep talkin’. Shit, I don’t think anyone does. You might be the single most weirdest half-strand in this here city, and that’s a hell of a thing to say. But limbo… yeah. I know a thing or two about purgatory.”
“The Warrens,” Avo asked. “That’s your purgatory?”
Draus shook her head. “Naw. You’re right. I could leave. Highfla–after they discharged , one of the Seraphs… she uh… she offered a deal. A sponsor for a Soul. A chance to go ‘Clad under them instead. Sothing of a… side-promotion, with a new identity.”
“You didn’t take it?”
Her face broke into a vicious sneer. “Of fuckin’ course I didn’t take it. The deal was to keep the Greatling na clean. After what they did to and mine? After how they wasted our lives durin’ the war.” She spat. “We’re soldiers. Regulars. Dyin’ just a part of the gig, but… it had to an sothin’. We didn’t die for the hell of it. We died for objectives, to save people, to protect the Reg next to us.”
She paused. “You know, fightin’ you and yours was the happiest ti of my life. Because for once… just once… there was no question we were doing the right thing. You ghouls were a bunch of godsdamned monsters carved out of a child’s nightmares. And we were finally there to stop you. Save the people. Highfla’s finest hour. Should’ve known it wouldn’t last.”
“You stay because fighting here made your deaths feel aningful?” Avo asked.
“The Guilds have been at war with each other for a long, long ti, Avo.” Draus sighed. “I saw the end of the third war. All the fourth. Thousands of skirmishes in between. Nukes and thaumic weapons exchanged. Billions dead in an afternoon. But when the sun cycles back around, it’s like it was all just a hallucination. Like all the killin’ never happened. It’s why I’m jealous.”
“Jealous?” Avo said. “You said you were envious before. Of my Fra? The Heavens?”
“Nah,” Drausr replied. “I’ve seen plenty of ‘Clads and Heavens. It’s what you did with it that I wanted.”
“Hurting the Syndicate.”
“Yeah,” Draus said. “Nullin’ all those folk.” She whistled. “Now, there was a ti I would’ve hated you for that. Voiding the minds of all those tax-payin’ citizens. But now… Now I just think you managed to do in a little bit over a month what I never could in all my years down here. That’s what pissed off most of all: you were changing things. Breakin’ things. Shit I could never touch.”
“So,” Avo said. “The refugees–”
“--Oh, no don’t get twisted: that was still stupid as shit. Gave the Exorcists and Paladins a full five hundred minds to scry through. Makes our run on Mirrorhead all that much more miserable.”
He couldn’t help but smile. “Draus, they felt so… free when they did it.”
“Who?”
“The refugees. When I gave them the chance to kill the jocks. They were… unchained. It was wonderful.” With a ntal command, he caressed Req’s deep mories using his tamind. Through countless walls and hundreds of miles, a single gleam flashed down through walls and layers, all the way up in the Tiers.
m-locking soone was a beautiful thing.
“That’s why you did it?” She snorted. “You’re… lookin’ for a new hit.”
“It wasn’t a hit,” he hissed. “I wanted… I wanted to know… To feel what it was… choice. Choice in totality.” He paused, his black eyes intent on hers. “Draus. If I can. If the Fra fixes the other Soul. Do you want it?”
For the first ti, he watched her gaze quiver, breaking away from him. She spat her near-finished hiflass into the water. “Drop it.”
He cocked his head and chittered softly. “What’s stopping you?” Avo asked. He leaned down, closer, speaking directly to her. “You can choose to. Take back your mantle. Show Highfla–”
Her elbow smacked him across the chest. He stumbled back. “I said fuckin’ drop it.”
“She fears what it ans,” the Woundshaper laughed. “Poor, poor girl. She fears the power that it will grant her… to exceed her station so much. Pure thing, she was made to be a soldier–a lion of a sacrifice, but a sacrifice still. Should she ascend to master, what mockery would that make of all her kindred that fell? How you shake her reality.”
“It needs to just be ?” Avo said. “My Fra… It can change things. Free us. Free everyone.”
“And what the hells would that do?” Draus asked, more frustrated than enraged. “What… what kinda world you think you make if everyone's free? To be as they want? Probably just this one." She stepped up to him and jabbed a finger into his fungus-plated chest. "Because I’ll tell you what freedom is Avo, freedom is maximizing your own choices, and a hell of a lot of ti, that ans takin’ soone else’s options so they don’t do you first. We’ll just end up like the Guilds again. You ain’t thought this through.”
“And you are running from it,” he replied claws clenching. He turned his head. “You were happy when we fought. When you kill. Happy to battle. Why won’t you let yourself be happy now?”
“Because it ain’t gonna change nothin’” Draus snarled. “The people I wanted to save? That life I wanted to live. That’s all done and gone now. I just missed my chance to die then.”
“With a Heaven you can die all you want–”
“Avo! Rotlick, that’s not the point–”
A ringing spectral wail washed through the circuit chamber, the rising pitch a warning klaxon broadcast through chains of ghosts. Avo shifted his attention from Draus to the descending ssengers, the noise delivered on wavelengths of thought instead of vibration.
A request flashed across Avo’s cog-feed. Green River wanted to link him.
GHOST-LINK ACCEPTED
River, what–
Yosanna Kivranpuvak. She ssaged earlier. Told that her husband’s Auto-Seance ca online, that he used it to call her.
A knot ford at the base of Avo’s guts. Might’ve been the sudden clench of worry brought by the news. Might just be so lingering damage yet to heal.
“What?” Draus asked. He ignored her.
When?
Now, Green River replied. Just now. Avo, the Strix said–
I rember what the node said. He hissed, mind racing. The node all but stated that Yosanna’s husband was dead. Now he was using a session to contact her?
A packet of m-data danced along their interlaced ghosts. A new marker manifested in his DeepNav: the location of the turncoat. She was two traffic stops away from the docks, on the thirtieth floor of a hab-block. The details marked it as one in a series: building Ox-Three. Seal her. Cut off all loci. No ghosts. Place your best wards around her.
A spike of annoyance greeted him. I don’t need you to tell rote procedure, ghoul. I have accomplished my end, but the Nether must be left to you. A lull followed. Please. I do not possess the skill nor ans to contend with… whatever this is.
LINK LOST
Avo growled. “Draus. Turncoat. Her husband called her. Auto-Seance. She’s at the docks.”
Imdiately, all hint of animosity was lost. “Got it. Do you–”
He didn’t hear the rest as he parted into a rush of wind, diving up vents and gaps, washing through halls at speeds that sent drones careening against walls.
Soone was entering the turncoat’s mind. Soone that probably wasn’t her husband.
A churn of apprehension spiked inside Avo. He had a strong suspicion as to who he soon might have to face.
And despite all his newly amassed power, he didn’t know if he was ready.
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