Elpida grabbed Lykke by the throat, hoisted her off her feet, and slamd her against the dormitory wall.
Lykke stopped laughing.
“What have you done with Howl?”
“I didn’t—” Lykke wheezed for breath. Her eyes filled with fresh tears, erald green shimring through salt water. “I didn’t do—”
Elpida tightened her grip. Lykke’s eyes bulged in her bruised face; her heels drumd against the wall; her delicate fingers fluttered around Elpida’s wrist.
“What have you done with Howl?”
“N-nothing— noth—”
Elpida jerked Lykke forward and slamd her back against the wall again. Lykke’s skull bounced with a hard little crack. The last of her breath spewed forth in a dribble of blood-flecked spittle. She wled and whimpered, giving voice to her choir of bruises.
Elpida slackened her grip. “What have you done with Howl?”
Lykke croaked, “Nothing, nothing! I didn’t do any—”
Elpida dropped her.
The Necromancer crumpled at Elpida’s feet, a heap of pale limbs wrapped in a bloodstained white dress. She hacked and coughed, pawing at her own throat. Then she retched and heaved. Strings of sticky bile hung from her lips as she vomited softly on the floor.
“What have you done with Howl?”
“I didn’t— ugh— d-do any—”
Elpida put one foot on Lykke’s shoulder and shoved her upright, pinning her to the wall, careless of the bruises all down her belly and abdon. Lykke whined and writhed and batted at Elpida’s ankle with all the strength of a dying moth. Her face was caked with blood and snot and tears.
Elpida leaned down and grabbed Lykke’s right arm by the wrist, forcing it outward, away from the Necromancer’s body. This maneuver at this angle was difficult with only one arm of her own, but Lykke was still pretending to be human, small and weak and easily handled. Elpida slamd Lykke’s forearm against the edge of the dormitory door fra. She started to bend it back, increasing the pressure little by little.
“What have you done with Howl?”
“Stop— stop asking!” Lykke sobbed through ragged wet gasps. “It wasn’t ! I didn’t—”
“I said that if you betrayed , I would break every bone in your body with my bare hands. Did you think I was joking?”
Lykke had ti to splutter.
Elpida slackened her weight on Lykke’s forearm — then slamd it back into the door fra with all her strength.
The arm broke with a neat double-crack, radius and ulna both snapping instantly. Jagged ends of the paired forearm bones burst from Lykke’s pale skin, tearing their way through with a aty rip of ruined flesh. They glistened red and wet in the muted dormitory light.
Lykke gasped, low and empty; the gasp went on well past the limit of her lungs, her mouth a silent ring. Her eyes rolled upward, and stayed that way for a long ti.
Elpida let go and stepped back.
She was so furious that she hadn’t been aware of crossing the dormitory. One mont she had been next to her empty bunk; the next she had her left hand around Lykke’s throat. The fury was cold clarity. Elpida hadn’t even raised her voice. Howl was gone, likely wounded, and the only possible culprit was right in front of her. Lykke had to answer the question. Any ans were acceptable. Nothing else mattered.
Lykke pulled her broken arm into her lap, adding fresh blood atop the dry stains on her white party dress. She’d gone pale as bone, eyes bug-wide, lips rounded in a silent scream. She sucked down little gasping sips of air.
“What have you done with Howl?” Elpida repeated.
Lykke raised her eyes. She was crying freely, her face still bruised and puffy from the aftermath of the fight and the fucking. Her arm lay awkwardly in her lap, spikes of broken bone jutting from her pale flesh.
And then, she smiled.
Her lips curled upward at the corners, trembling with need.
Elpida knew that smile. She’d seen it on Lykke already.
Orgasmic joy.
“Again, zombie!” Lykke sobbed. “Again!”
Elpida’s cold fury faltered. She held up her left hand. “Wait—”
“My ribs!” Lykke gasped. “Try breaking a rib or two, over my heart. Or a finger! Or fracture my skull, or—”
“Stop!” Elpida shouted. “Stop.” She pointed back over her shoulder, at the empty, blood-streaked bunk. “Howl is missing. Was this your doing? Answer the question. With the truth. Or I—”
Elpida stopped.
Or what?
She had nothing with which to threaten Lykke. Break her bones? Ignore her? Leave her here? Pain didn’t work; neglect did not solve the problem. If this was all a trick, Lykke could simply heal herself at will and do whatever she wished.
Lykke hurried to answer: “No! No, that’s what I was trying to—” A tremor of pain passed through Lykke’s body. She gasped and shuddered, eyes fluttering shut for a mont. “Trying to tell you. I don’t know where your horrible goblin has gotten to. Don’t ask !”
“You were laughing.”
“Because it’s hilarious!” Lykke whined. “Because now I’ve got you here for longer, all to myself! All mine! Because I’m such a … ” Her eyes flew open and whirled down to the jutting ends of her broken forearm bones. “Lucky girl.”
“Why should I believe you?”
Lykke let out a wet, sobbing laugh. “We just fucked!”
“That doesn’t make us lovers, Necromancer. I used you, you used . And now I’m wondering if this was all a distraction, so so associate or minion of yours could kidnap Howl. Am I correct?”
The masochistic arousal and frantic amusent vanished from beneath Lykke’s tearful pain. She even stopped sobbing. Her face fell.
Elpida said, “Answer the question.”
“No,” Lykke snivelled in a tiny voice. She sniffed hard, as if trying to hold back the tears that already stained her bruised and puffy cheeks. “No! No, it was about you. A-and , and … and … and … no … ”
“You expect to believe that you don’t know where Howl is, or what happened in here?”
“No! I don’t!” Lykke gestured with her unbroken arm. “I have no idea! Maybe she wandered off sowhere! How do you even know she was kidnapped, hm?! And why accuse ? I’ve been with you this whole ti, with you, in there, beneath you, sharing bliss with you, feeling your fists, napping with you—”
“You could have slipped away while I was asleep.”
“Huh!” Lykke barked an offended laugh, then sniffed again, tearful eyes scrunching tight. Her lower lip quivered. “Huh. You think I would do that … ”
The dregs of Elpida’s cold fury finally curdled into sour frustration. Anger had clouded her mind; she had acted without thinking.
Howl was gone.
Elpida had to concentrate.
She had no way of knowing if Lykke was telling the truth. Lykke’s appeal to raw emotion and sexual intimacy was either genuine, or calculated to irritate Elpida as much as possible. If this was Lykke’s doing, hurting her made no difference. The Necromancer could do whatever she wanted, and Elpida could only play along. If this trap was directed at Howl, then Lykke would do everything she could to keep Elpida occupied and slow her down.
But if the Necromancer was telling the truth, Elpida needed her help.
Elpida leaned down until her face was inches from Lykke; her long white hair pooled in Lykke’s lap. The Necromancer went very still, her eyes shining with sudden hope. Her blood-and-tear-stained lips tilted upward, as if awaiting a kiss.
“If I find out this was your doing,” Elpida whispered, “I will find out how to kill you for real—”
Lykke let out a shuddering whimper of pleasure.
“—but I won’t be the one to do it,” Elpida went on. “I’ll let Howl do it to you. I’ll feed you to her, piece by piece. I won’t watch. I won’t even be there.”
Lykke stopped breathing. Her pale skin turned the colour of wet ash.
Elpida straightened up and walked back over to the empty bunk.
She hoped that had done the trick.
A chess piece lay abandoned on the floor — the white city, the one Elpida had carried from the rec room. She must have dropped it in her anger. She picked it up and placed it on the neighbouring bed. She took a deep breath to control the disordered remnants of her fury.
Then she examined her empty bunk. She pulled the blood-streaked sheets completely off and shook them out; when they yielded nothing, she dumped them on the floor and lifted up the mattress. The bed fra told her even less, with no clues left behind. She crouched and looked underneath, hoping Howl had tossed sothing down when she’d been taken, but the floor was clear. She checked the surrounding bunks as well, but there were no boot prints, no scuff marks from a struggle, nothing except the evidence sared on the sheets themselves.
And the bloody handprint, on the wall.
Elpida touched the handprint. Her fingers ca away sticky — and shaking.
That shouldn’t happen. The modifications made to the pilot-project geno should have rendered her immune to this kind of anxiety, or at least resistant, hardened, less vulnerable in ergencies. Her fingers should not shake as she raised them toward her mouth. Her stomach should not clench up, her skin should not break out with cold sweat, her pulse should not pound in her throat like a trapped bird.
Elpida wanted to believe that this reaction was rely the fault of the software simulation. An attempt to undermine her. A failure of self-perception. Lykke’s deceptive distortion.
But she knew it wasn’t. The anxiety was true. Elpida was afraid, for the sa reason she’d been blinded by rage.
This was too much like the circumstances of her mortal death. Sisters taken away one by one.
She touched her tongue to taste the blood.
Iron and salt.
Unfamiliar.
Elpida let out a huge breath. Her head swam. Her heart was suddenly racing. She scooped up the sheets and licked at the streak of blood there too. The sa unfamiliar taste. The sa result.
“Not Howl,” she said. “It’s not Howl!”
“Why are you licking the sheets, zombie?”
Lykke had dragged herself back to her feet. She was leaning against the wall, cradling her broken arm across her belly, eyes half-lidded, erald depths muted.
Elpida held up her bloody fingertips. “This isn’t Howl’s blood. It’s baseline human.” She broke into a laugh. “Howl didn’t go without a fight, and she was the one scoring hits.”
“Bully for her,” Lykke wheezed. She tried to lift her broken arm, then winced and shivered.
“And the blood is fresh. This amount, in this humidity, I’d guess it’s less than twenty minutes old, perhaps less than fifteen. We didn’t hear a struggle, why is that? We would have heard a struggle. Howl would have shouted and kicked, bitten her attackers, done whatever she could. They must have gotten sothing over her face, bound her limbs. Caught her sleeping.” Elpida stepped away from the bunk and headed for the open doorway back to the corridor. “She can’t be far, not yet. How far does this software space extend?”
Lykke squinted. “Wait, you know the taste of her blood?”
“Pilot geno blood is unmistakable, yes. It’s unique, different. Sothing to do with erythrocyte composition.” Elpida licked her fingers clean. “And this is baseline human.” She paused at the doorway. “Lykke. How far does this software space extend?”
Lykke let out a wounded laugh. “How should I know? It’s your insides, zombie.”
“How far could Howl have gone?”
“I don’t know! Ask her!”
Elpida turned away, to leave the dorm behind.
“Wait!” Lykke hissed.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Elpida made a show — rolled her eyes and sighed before she turned back to Lykke. Had her earlier strategy paid off? She had to keep pressing. “Every second I waste is less chance of recovering Howl. Speak quickly.”
The Necromancer straightened up, unsteady on her feet, struggling to uncurl her spine from around her collection of bruises. Her right forearm hung useless, cradled against her belly. She spoke in an awkward murmur.
“If I … if I … assist you in your search, will you believe ?”
“Believe what?” Elpida asked. “What are you talking about?”
“That I had nothing to do with this!” Lykke squawked. “That I didn’t want to trap you, that I wanted you! Just you! I had nothing to do with this, nothing at all! I don’t care what happens to your little goblin, she can sleep in here forever if she wants, and besides, I wouldn’t risk waking her! I haven’t co in here with minions, or a plan, or anything! I ca in here because you called! You! You called , Elpida, you wanted as much as I wanted you, and I still do, I want more, I want you to—”
Elpida very much wanted to kick Lykke in the gut. But her strategy had worked — that, or Lykke was scrambling to improvise a new plan. Either way, Elpida wanted the Necromancer where she could see her.
“Stop,” Elpida snapped. Lykke stopped. “Alright then. If you help find Howl, and she vouches that you had nothing to do with this, then I will believe you. I’ll even apologise.”
Lykke’s eyes lit up, shining wet and raw. “May I fix this?” She gestured at her broken arm. “Being down an arm was not part of our agreent. And if you want to help, it only makes sense, I should be at my best, for you!”
“You need my permission?”
Lykke showed her teeth. “I am asking nicely. Pretty please?”
“Can you turn yourself back into a monster and clamber through the ventilation system? Can you track Howl like that?”
Lykke rolled her eyes. She took the wrist of her broken arm in her other hand and jerked it straight; the jagged bones were sucked back inside the flesh, the snapped ends grinding against each other with an audible grating of osseous tissue. Lykke cried out and screwed her eyes shut — she didn’t seem to enjoy the self-inflicted pain, not in the sa way as pain shared with Elpida.
The wound itself did not close, but after a mont the arm seed to straighten. Lykke extended her elbow and rotated her wrist. Then she giggled, wiggling her fingers at Elpida.
“All better! Thank you for your kindness, Elpida. I knew you’d understand.”
“Right. Now help find Howl.”
Elpida stepped out of the dormitory and back into the main corridor of the cadre’s private quarters. She decided to hit the armoury first, for a weapon — anything she could use one-handed. The software dream was symbolic and unreal, but if Howl had been kidnapped by fignts of Elpida’s imagination, she might need to put them down with a bullet. Armoury first, then she would sweep the gym, the showers, the briefing room, the ss-
Elpida stopped in the middle of the corridor. Lykke almost blundered into her.
At the far end of the corridor, where the door to the showers should have stood, the additional hallway had reappeared: a high, wide, vaulted passage, one of the great core arteries of the body of Telokopolis. Deep crimson glow throbbed and smouldered behind warm mbranes of life-flushed flesh. Crusts of mineral deposit and swathes of aeon-long erosion picked out yellowed cavities in the vast ribs of exposed bone. Veins of living tal lded into the floor, spreading out to welco human feet to this inner space.
Frad by the arched ribs of the passageway, backlit by the crimson glow of city-blood, a figure barred the way.
A greensuit hood obscured the eyes behind dark lenses. The hood was worn without seals or rebreather apparatus, polyr layers crinkled and loose. The rest was civilian clothes — work trousers, baggy jumper, practical boots, fingerless gloves. Mismatched bits of equipnt were strapped over the top, cast-offs from so looted Legion armoury — an ammo belt, so empty webbing, a hand-held radio. A protective vest hung slack, without any plates inside the pouches.
A symbol was painted on the vest, in white. A triangle within a triangle within a triangle.
Three triangles nested inside each other, three layers of protection and enclosure.
Elpida knew that symbol; it turned her stomach. So had painted it on their clothes, others on the foreheads or faces of the greensuit hoods. Sotis the layered triangle was daubed on signs or walls. The leadership had formalised it, stamped it on their proclamations, worn it as neat and tidy shoulder patches or silken armbands. None of them had possessed the conviction to tattoo it on their skin or carve it into their flesh. Nothing permanent, nothing they couldn’t cast off after the task was done.
But this was how Elpida had seen it most often, as a finger-scrawl in white paint.
The symbol of the city inviolate.
Telokopolis, closed.
The Covenanter carried a rifle — a matte-black carbine, loaded with a reaction-mass ammo-block, taken from a Legion armoury.
Lykke said: “Another friend of yours?”
“No.”
The Covenanter was flexing hands around the rifle, coiling and uncoiling gloved fingers on the grip, shifting weight from foot to foot. Elpida couldn’t see the eyes behind the lenses in the greensuit hood; that was the point of wearing the hoods inside the city. But Elpida could tell this one was nervous.
Elpida strode forward. She was shaking again, but not with fear.
When Elpida drew almost level with the door to the gym, the Covenanter raised the rifle into a ready position, stock to shoulder, muzzle at the floor.
“Halt!” the Covenanter shouted. “Halt, right there.”
The voice was muffled by the greensuit hood, but not enough — female, middle-aged, Mid-Spire accent. Elpida estimated height and weight — five foot six, perhaps a hundred and thirty pounds, very little muscle mass, no trigger discipline. Eight paces away. If Elpida could close that distance without getting shot, she could have the Covenanter disard and on her back in less than three heartbeats, dead in another one.
Or she could have done, if she’d had both arms. Close quarters was much riskier with only one hand.
But if the woman was just a fignt of Elpida’s software dreams, did the rifle even matter?
Elpida took another step.
The Covenanter stumbled back. She jerked the rifle upward, aiming at Elpida’s centre of mass. “Hey, hey! I said fucking stop! That ans you!”
Elpida stopped.
“Put—” The Covenanter panted, then swallowed hard. “Put your hands up! Hands up! On the back of your head!”
Elpida did not put up her hands.
Why had Elpida’s mind summoned the mory of a Covenanter? Was this a response to her anger and fear — a reflection of the mories of losing her cadre, a refracted piece of her own history, surfaced like an invasive thought? Was this all because she had been thinking about the past? Or had this apparition been catalysed by so external actor? Was this ‘Covenanter’ rely a familiar mask over a ruse by so unknown network presence?
Elpida decided none of that mattered. Her course of action was the sa either way.
“Where’s the other pilot?” she said.
The Covenanter hesitated. Elpida looked past her, down the blood-red corridor of ancient bone and machine-at.
“Oi, hey!” The Covenanter gestured with her rifle. “You’re not getting back there, you empty freak. You’re not going anywhere. I’ve got a gun, and you haven’t.”
Lykke caught up with Elpida. She peered around Elpida’s side. “Ooooh, zombie, what is this? An old ex? A—”
“Shut up,” said Elpida.
Lykke shut up.
Elpida and the Covenanter stared at each other. Dark visor lenses betrayed nothing, but the woman’s grip was unsteady and soaked with sweat. Eight paces was too far for a lunge or a charge, not without getting shot.
White heat was growing in Elpida’s chest. She forced it down. She could not afford anger.
She avoided glancing at the door to the gym.
Elpida said: “Where have you taken my sister?”
The Covenanter took several deep breaths, chest heaving beneath her scraps of gear. She flexed her hands on the rifle’s grip. “Here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna turn around, and go back to your filthy nest. You’re gonna sit there, nice and quiet, and fucking wait, like you’re supposed to be doing. Or do whatever it is you soulless husks do in private, whatever you do to each other. Alright? Do you understand that?” She gestured with the gun again, threatening with the muzzle. “Are you smart enough to understand that I’ve got a gun, and you haven’t? You can’t win against a gun, unard, with one hand. Can you? You … you rampant machine bitch.” She tried to laugh. A rough swallow ca from beneath the hood. “Good. Right. Now go on, get—”
“I should have ended you when I had the chance.”
The Covenanter paused.
“I could have done it, too,” Elpida went on. The white heat was bubbling over into her words, spilling out of her, pumping out of her lungs, out of control. “I could have rallied half the Legion if I’d tried, if I’d had the guts, if I’d been willing to start a civil war. No, I wouldn’t even have needed that. One third of the Legion? A few thousand would have done. I could have rounded up your leaders with a single company. Had the rest of you confined, thrown in prison, dumped in the Skirts. Cut the head off the snake and the rest of you would have withered. It wouldn’t have been hard to root you out, not when you were still growing.”
“The people were on our side!” the Covenanter shouted. “They wouldn’t have listened to you freaks! You’re hollow, there’s nothing in you, just lust and hunger! You don’t care about anything but each other and your—”
“The people of Telokopolis spent twenty years watching us fight for them.” Elpida said. “In reality, in fiction, out in the green. For them, for the city, for Telokopolis—”
“To infect the city with the green!” The Covenanter scread, spitting inside her hood. “We all knew what you were really for! Bringing it back, bringing it into the city, corrupting everything! If we’d left you alone, you would have out-bred and outnumbered us and opened the city’s skin to all the shit out there and shoved it down our throats and choked us with your—”
“You murdered and my sisters, for a lie.”
“It was self-defence!”
“It was genocide.”
“You’re not even fucking human!”
The Covenanter jerked her rifle forward, as if she could expel a round from the barrel by sheer force of will. Her finger was coiled on the trigger, but she didn’t shoot.
“And there it is,” Elpida said.
A sigh went out of her. The white heat went with it. Clarity settled.
“And you admit it!” The Covenanter raged on. “You’re admitting it to my face, right now—”
“I can’t see your face, because you’re ashad.”
“—you’re admitting you would have done it, you would have brought a war into the city itself—”
“You brought war to the city. Masked and ard. That was you.”
“And now you’re fraternising with the enemy!” The Covenanter pointed her rifle at Lykke. “What more proof do I need? We all know what you must get up to, out there in the green, among the plants and the Silico and the shit in the air! We all know! Everyone knows! And here you are, having sexual relations with this aberration, this fucking Silico thing!” She waved the rifle, motioning both of them back. “You’re lucky I don’t open fire, you overgrown petri-dish stain. Fuck off back to your rotting beds, both of you! Back up, right now!”
Lykke stepped forward. She was no longer stumbling. A nasty smile split her bloodied lips.
Elpida blocked her with an arm. Lykke wled with dissatisfaction, but she did not push past.
Elpida spoke to the Covenanter: “If I had to choose between your movent and a Necromancer, I would choose a Necromancer every ti. I would choose Silico over you. At least they didn’t pretend to occupy an imaginary moral high ground. At least they fought fair.”
Lykke made a sweet little sound. Elpida ignored that.
“You admit it!” The Covenanter was screaming. “You admit it! You admit every word of it! You—”
“Put down the gun and take off the hood.”
Elpida spoke at a normal volu, but her words ended the shouting. The Covenanter hesitated. “W-what? You can’t seriously think you can give orders—”
“Don’t make repeat myself, Covenanter. Saying it once was hard enough.”
The Covenanter woman just stared.
“Telokopolis is forever,” Elpida said, more for herself than the mory of her murderers. Her voice shook with more than anger. This was among the most difficult things she had ever forced herself to say. “Telokopolis is for all. You betrayed that. Your movent. Your whole ideology. You stained the city with so much blood, and not only that of my sisters. For that, you deserve to be cast out, into the green. And you know it.”
The woman in the greensuit hood seed to shrink back, sinking into the blood-red light of Telokopolis past her shoulders. Her aim wavered.
Elpida continued. “But if you put down the gun and take off the hood, Telokopolis will accept you. Even you get a second chance, however much I personally believe you don’t deserve it, however much I would like to kill you. I don’t know who you are, I don’t know your na, or what you did, because you’re wearing that hood. I know you’re not even real, you’re an image summoned from my mories, or a forgotten thing put into motion against . But I’m speaking of the real you, the woman you were based on. I don’t know how they seduced her, what lies they used, or why she fell for it. Probably because she wanted to. But you — the mory — you can turn back. Accept forgiveness.”
The woman shook her head. Red light glinted off the dark visors of her greensuit hood, revealing a curve that might have been the orbit of an eye. The muzzle of her gun dipped low.
Elpida held out her left hand. “Put the gun down. Take off the hood. Telokopolis is forever. She survived your movent. You were nothing more than a single vague line in the historical record. But we are all her daughters, and we will be forever.”
“No … no … ” The woman was breathing heavily now. A hard gulp interrupted her panting.
“Put down the gun. Take off the hood. This is your chance—”
“No!” The Covenanter jerked her rifle upright and pressed the stock hard against her shoulder. She tried to aim at both Elpida and Lykke at the sa ti, muzzle jumping back and forth. “Back up! Back up, right now! Stop talking, don’t say another fucking word! I know what you’re doing, worming into my brain, trying to seduce—”
“Lykke,” Elpida said.
“Mm?!” A stiffening shiver went through Lykke’s body.
“Do it.”
Lykke’s face blossod with teeth, sprouting from her gums in a rictus grin, lips peeling away. Bruised flesh stepped forward, wrapped in a stained white dress — but then the bruises turned darker, sprouting with feelers and tendrils and spikes; the hem of the white dress flowed outward like a flayed mbrane, glowing with an acidic hiss as it burned the air.
The Covenanter scread and yanked the trigger on her rifle, spraying rounds down the corridor.
Lykke scurried forward, cackling at the top of her twisting lungs.
Elpida leapt for the door to the gym.
She hit the wall and pressed herself flat, slapping at the palm-pad. The door slid open and Elpida tumbled inside. A round from the Covenanter’s rifle nicked the rear of her left calf muscle. Pain exploded in her leg. She twisted as she fell through the door, catching a glimpse of Lykke hurling herself past, eyes like green flas, hands hooked like claws.
The corridor rang with automatic gunfire; the gym doors hissed shut.
Elpida scrambled up. Her calf burned like it had been dipped in fire, but she didn’t have ti to stop and check the wound, let alone staunch the bleeding. The leg held steady. She ignored the pain and sprinted for the connecting doorway to the armoury, then slapped the palm-pad and shot through. She went straight for a rack of sidearms, sothing she could use one handed.
She knew just the one she needed.
A compact pistol, lightweight, caseless ammo, sixteen rounds. She ripped it from the racking and didn’t pause to check the magazine; it had been loaded earlier, when she had grabbed the very sa weapon and tried to shoot Lykke.
She flicked the safety off and pressed herself next to the door back to the hallway.
The corridor was still filled with the bang-bang-bang of the automatic rifle. Lykke was cackling and screeching and gurgling, but the Covenanter was still firing, which ant Lykke couldn’t bring her down.
Elpida had suspected that might happen.
She hit the palm-pad. The doors slid open. She waited for a hail of gunfire, but none ca; the Covenanter was not Legion, not trained to be aware of her surroundings, not used to keeping an eye on her flanks and rear. Elpida waited for a grunt of effort, an insult, a shout—
“Get away from , you hollow freak—”
Elpida stepped out of cover, aid her pistol, and shot the Covenanter in the side of her chest.
The first round ripped right through the woman’s flimsy jumper and burst from the opposite side of her ribs; a welter of gore and blood splattered up the soft greens and muted silver of the hallway. The second round did much the sa, jerking the woman’s body sideways under the impact. The third crumpled her spine. The fourth broke her hips.
The rifle fell silent and clattered to the floor as she collapsed. Her skull bounced with a nasty crack. She let out a wet and bubbling wheeze beneath the greensuit hood.
Elpida stepped forward and kicked the rifle clear.
The Covenanter lay still.
Elpida put another two rounds into the Covenanter’s gut; the bullets thumped into the floor beneath the corpse, adding to the pool of slowly spreading blood. The corpse twitched and jerked, but it was only a corpse.
Elpida wanted to pull the trigger again. She didn’t.
A few feet to her right, Lykke’s form was flowing like molten flesh and liquid sunlight — but when she stepped forward and left Elpida’s peripheral vision the Necromancer was just Lykke again, a petite woman in a bloodstained party dress, covered in nasty bruises, scowling with petty outrage.
“I couldn’t touch her!” Lykke screeched. “I simply couldn’t! This has never happened to before, really!”
“Mmhmm.”
“No, I’m serious,” Lykke went on. “Zombie, Elpida, I don’t want you to think I’m an incompetent, unable to annihilate one little flesh-bag with a firecracker! It was just that she was beyond my reach all the ti, like I couldn’t close the gap. And it’s not as if she did any damage to , of course not, but it’s the principle of thing—”
“Lykke, stop. Please.”
“But it makes seem like such a failure! And I’m not, I’m—”
“This wasn’t your fight.”
Elpida lowered the pistol, flicked the safety on, and stuck it into the waistband of her shorts. She went to her knees, uncaring of the blood all over the floor.
She grabbed the greensuit hood and yanked it off the Covenanter’s head.
A middle-aged woman, a few lines around her eyes and mouth, muscles already going slack in death, lips and chin sared with her own blood. Dark purple hair, dusky complexion. Blue eyes held a hint of amber around the edges. An angular tattoo on her cheek proclaid her to be a junior mber of so Independent Artisan Guild. Another tattoo on her neck was purely decorative, a bird in flight — a dove.
An unremarkable Telokopolan.
“Who was it?” Lykke asked.
“Another victim.”
Elpida rose to her feet. Her left calf muscle burned with the shallow bullet wound, bleeding freely. Her knees and shins were covered in blood; she couldn’t tell where her own ended the dead woman’s began.
She scooped up the rifle from the floor, then checked the ammo-block and tried to figure out if she could fire this one-handed. Braced against her hip, perhaps? A high-capacity machine pistol would serve her better for this. Rate of fire mattered; armour penetration did not. Covenanters rarely wore more than civilian clothes and scraps of Legion stuff, certainly not hardsuits.
Lykke snorted. “Well, this was all rather stupid. What now, zombie?”
Elpida nodded into the blood-red depths of her mories of Telokopolis. “Now? We go find Howl. And this ti, I shoot back.”
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