Necroepilogos

Frigid flesh quickened with furious flame; frozen meat melted into metabolic motion. A stilled heart stirred with a single beat, then hammered hard against a cage of bone. Lungs inflated with a clotted breath, sucking air down a slime-clogged throat. Eyes flew open, blinded by viscous residue. Lips parted with a slick wet rasp.

Eseld woke screaming, clawing at the inside of her resurrection coffin.

She screamed until her throat bled and her ears rang. She clawed until her fingertips were bloody and bruised.

She screamed to purge her respiratory system, splattering the grey lid of the coffin with blue-stained mucus from inside her windpipe and lungs. She screamed for the friends and companions once again left behind in the yawning abyss of death. She screamed with the realisation that she had been ripped back into unlife once again, dumped into this grey metal box once again, pushed into the abandoned, overgrown, rotten garden of the world once again, to die, once again. Once again. And again. And again. And again.

The cycle had begun anew, and all Eseld could do was break her nails against the coffin lid.

Eseld’s memory was a jumble. Always a jumble! Death and time stole everything except hunger. But this latest death felt different.

She had been asleep — sleeping for real, with closed eyes and softened breath, not the sleep of death in a heaven plundered and emptied by the demonic machines of this accursed future. No, she had been curled up in a dark hole with Su and Mala and Andasina, huddled beneath some threadbare blankets they’d found in the waterlogged entrails of a collapsed building. They’d been cuddled up, warm and tight, when—

Or was that the death before this last one? Or one before that? Eseld’s memories felt like shifting through tar with a toothpick. She had known her latest trio of friends for only a few months, and could barely remember their faces. Just another short-lived pack, bonded by sensation and shared meat, barely holding back from eating each other. They were little different to all previous faces, all previous flesh, all previous incarnations.

Eseld had died so many times. She had lost count long ago. She had stopped trying at fifty seven deaths — half because her mind could not take any more, half because fifty seven was a special number. Fifty seven was the year the king had ascended to the throne, which was also the year Eseld’s little brother had died. The number fifty seven had endured where so much else had turned to decay and fallen away; Eseld could not recall her brother’s name, nor the name of the king who she had never seen. She could not remember her parents’ faces, or the feeling of sunlight, or the sound of birdsong.

There was very little left of ‘Eseld’. She knew this with greater clarity, in these brief respites after return to unlife.

Eseld stopped screaming and stopped clawing at the lid of her coffin. She panted for breath, though she knew she did not strictly need to breathe. It just felt better to fill her lungs. She snorted clots of nanomachine slime and glue-like mucus out of her nose.

She had long ago given up recalling the exact circumstances of each death; there was nothing to learn, no improvements to be made. Eseld had harboured those illusions for her first few dozen deaths, when she had first been ripped from heaven and cast into this pit. But like everyone else, she had eventually given up and surrendered to eternal torture. Why make it worse by remembering the pain of being shot, stabbed, run-through, dismembered, disembowelled, crushed, and eaten alive?

But this death felt different — why? Eseld struggled to remember, gritting her teeth and hissing with frustration. She closed her eyes and focused. She had been sleeping, when—

Andasina!

The realisation hurt. This death was different, because relief had briefly interrupted the torture.

Because Eseld had liked Andasina.

They had met over the corpse of a fallen revenant — a real monster, covered in bio-mechanical augmentations, her flesh ripe with nanomachines, slain in a personal duel over some lofty consideration far beyond the ken of scavengers like themselves. Eseld and Andasina had stumbled across the corpse by chance, at the same moment, in the brief window before stronger predators had moved in to claim the resources. Fighting each other over the corpse would have been a useless waste of time, for they were both emaciated and starving; a fight would only have delayed them until the bigger girls turned up, and then they would both have come away with nothing — or died. So they had leapt at the corpse side-by-side, unspeaking, sharing only glances, tearing into the fresh and steaming meat, stuffing it into their mouths, clutching the bloody gobbets to their chests, working as quickly as they could to secure whatever nutrition they could steal.

When the well-fed revenants had descended with their guns and their body armour and their bionic limbs, Eseld and Andasina had fled together, back into the dark alleyways of the city. They’d giggled as they fled, over a caper shared.

Chance had brought them together, with full bellies and a wordless truce; touch and sensation had closed the remaining gap. Andasina was cuddly and small, perfect for tucking up against Eseld’s front, like a hot stone wrapped in cloth, warm in the freezing nights of this empty and Godless world. At first they had snuggled for sheer physical comfort. Over time they had grown used to the behaviour, made it a routine, the foundation of something new amid the rot.

Eseld had grown sharp teeth, after about a month together. Andasina had said that was cool, even though it sometimes made her lips bleed when they kissed each other. Eseld couldn’t remember how they’d picked up Su and Mala; Andasina had done the work, coaxing the fellow scavengers to safety one night with a chunk of wet and bleeding meat. Then they were four. Friends, or something more.

For a little while, companionship had eased the pain of eternal life without grace.

But then — last night? No, in the morning!

Light had been filtering through the broken bricks of their night’s nest. Su had heard footsteps outside the hole in which they’d been sleeping, footsteps approaching down the alleyway, one pair booted and heavy, the other clawed and quick. Stronger revenants, hunting for prey. Nowhere to run — the building was too clogged with ruin and rubble. Mala had tried to wriggle through, but all she’d achieved was ragged cuts down her shoulders and back. Andasina had hissed for silence, in the forlorn hope that the predators would pass them by, but they all knew that wasn’t true. Strong revenants did not poke around in dark holes unless they were hunting for meat.

All four of them had wept quietly, hoping the predators would turn away or take another route. But they hadn’t.

In the end, Eseld and Andasina and Mala and Su had put their heads together in the dark, skull to skull, tears intermingled. Eseld had kissed Andasina so hard that they’d both bled. Su and Mala had torn at each other’s clothes in premature loss. They all knew what was coming. There was no way out. They had no chance of beating stronger revenants, those who had thrived and flourished on cannibalism, and freed themselves from the cycle of torment. Those zombies approaching down the alley carried guns and wore armour. They may as well have been another species.

Eseld knew she was prey, no different to the rabbits she had trapped and eaten in life.

But she knew from experience that a rabbit with some fire still in it could twist in the snare and bite the hunter’s hand. A dying rabbit could still draw blood.

She and her friends had boiled from their nest and into the alleyway, screaming and shouting wild defiance. Eseld had snapped her nice sharp teeth, showing off what she’d made. Andasina had a knife, hidden somewhere inside her clothes. Clever little Anda.

Eseld didn’t recall much after that, only pain. She’d stared down the barrel of a shotgun, then been slammed sideways, smashed to the ground, her chest opened to the cold air. She had lain face-down in a gritty puddle of her own blood, wheezing and twitching, choking on her bodily fluids. A zombie had hoisted her up by her hair, to cut her throat — a true monster, a shining giant with glowing purple eyes and a shock of pure white hair, skin so clean and glossy, body armoured in plate, armed with death-spitting machinery that Eseld could barely dream of holding.

Eseld had turned away from it, toward Andasina, already lying dead on the ground. She had not wanted her last memory of that resurrection to be the face of some unknown zombie. She died with Andasina’s name on her lips, spoken through bubbles of hot, steaming blood.

Then, oblivion, for but a moment.

Death never held. Now she was back, in a resurrection coffin, weeks or months or a million years later.

She would likely never meet Andasina again. They were parted like two leaves in a storm, never to touch once more.

Tears cut tracks into the slime on Eseld’s cheeks, sliding down to join the shallow film of blue gunk in which she lay; with the gnawing hunger briefly sated by the mechanics of resurrection, her thoughts were clear for the first time in months, and all she felt was grief.

Eseld tried to scream again, but her voice emerged as a wet and withered whimper.

She had to be quiet and quick. Survival demanded she repress sorrow.

This resurrection coffin was identical to all the others in which she had woken — a grey box barely large enough for her naked flesh, with little room to move her arms across her body. A cold blue glow came from left of her head, from a tiny screen with the usual rows of buttons beneath. She did not bother to glance at the screen, because it never said anything different. Her pale, freckled skin was coated with a thin layer of nanomachine slime, already being absorbed into her body. But her build was no longer as emaciated as when she’d died. She was lithely muscled, supple and athletic once more, as she had been in true life. Eseld was gifted with compact, elegant muscle, from twenty years of climbing trees and cliffs to pluck eggs from bird’s nests, from scurrying about the woods to hunt rabbit and pheasant, and from a solid diet of oats and game meat. She could not recall the taste of those foods now, only that of human flesh.

Russet hair was slicked to her skull, soaked with slime. She ran her tongue across her teeth and discovered they were still sharp — she had retained the nano-biological adjustment, for once. Not much use in a fight. Perhaps she could use them to intimidate?

Noises filtered through the metal of her coffin — screaming, crying, thumping. The usual. The rest of this batch of resurrections were waking up. Some of them sounded as if they were already out of their boxes, sprawling on the floor, pounding the metal in their frustration, screaming to the empty heavens.

That was bad; the slow risers and the last out made easy prey. Eseld needed to get on her feet.

At least it didn’t sound as if the killing had started yet. That still gave Eseld a decent chance of sprinting for the door. Most of the weeping and babbling was coming from her right, but that didn’t mean anything; it was impossible to tell where one was in relation to the door before one actually broke the seal and climbed out.

This could be one of the rare groups which did not descend into instant cannibalism, of course. Eseld had learned long ago that was a poor wager.

Eseld wriggled both arms up, so she could press on the underside of her coffin lid.

It didn’t move.

“Fuck! Fuck, no! Move! Let me out! Move!”

She pulled a fist back and thumped on the metal; she prayed to God’s empty throne that she was not one of the few who needed help, stuck inside her own unbroken egg. That practically guaranteed she would get eaten, pulled live and wriggling from her shell and gutted with her first breath of open air.

She thumped again. Nothing happened. She gritted her teeth and tried not to scream. These deaths were always the worst, the ones which came before the hunger set in, when she still held onto shreds of hope. Eseld’s face scrunched up with cold tears.

“Please,” she hissed through her teeth. “Please. Please. I want … I want to see her again. I know— I know I can’t. It’ll never happen. But please.”

God did not answer her prayers, because God was dead, like everyone else.

Eseld slumped, giving in, giving up, giving—

Shick.

A black knife cut into the side of the coffin, six inches from Eseld’s face, slicing through the invisible seam between the lid and the base.

The blade broke the seal. The coffin lid clicked, then began to open.

The knife retracted as fast as it had appeared.

Eseld’s resurrection coffin opened on smooth hydraulics, lid rising with a gentle hiss. Cold air rushed in and coated her slime-soaked skin. The lid tilted to one side, blinding her with the clean white illumination of the resurrection chamber. Eseld had missed the red-alert stage, slept too long in the embrace of death. She was late to rise.

She gathered herself and grabbed the sides of her casket, feet slipping and skidding in the slime as she tried to get her footing. She found her balance and scrambled out of the box, down over the edge, onto the cold grey metal floor of an echoing vastness.

This resurrection chamber was like all others Eseld had witnessed; they always varied in the smallest details, but not in the larger aspects. Besides, who cared? The ceiling was higher than the vault of any Church or Cathedral she had ever seen, encrusted with great looping lines of cable and wire and pipe, hung with vast dripping orifices, their ends ragged with the afterbirth of the revenants below. Infernal machinery stretched off to the left and right, rows of semi-transparent obsidian glittering with inner lights — ‘computers’, running equations to tear souls from heaven; Eseld had not learned the word ‘computer’ in true life, only here in this empty and abandoned shell of creation. The rear wall of the resurrection chamber was dominated by a gigantic screen of silvery, liquid metal, flowing and scrolling with nonsense words and strings of numbers, as the devils in charge of hell chattered to themselves. Before the screen stood a human-scale control panel covered in buttons and switches and dials, same as always.

Clean white light burned upon every surface. Two rows of grey metal coffins faced each other in the middle of the room, raised on plinths, like caskets in a tomb.

Eseld was unlucky — her coffin was at the head of the rows, right next to the control panel, above which towered the unintelligible text of the liquid metal screen. The door was in the opposite direction, past the screaming, weeping mass of slime-soaked zombies.

This was a big batch. Twenty coffins. Poor odds.

Eseld glanced at her tomb-mates and tried to estimate her chances of survival if she sprinted for the door. Previous experience told her that one runner would set off a general panic, and trigger any wolves hiding among the flock.

Seventeen coffins had opened successfully; three revenants were still in the process of climbing free to join the others, but everyone else was out. Most of this batch was fresh meat, first-timers — eleven of the seventeen births looked dazed and awed, sitting or sprawling on the floor, gaping at the resurrection chamber, or clutching at where their mortal wounds had slain them in life. Harsh white light highlighted shivering, naked, sticky flesh.

Some of them were beginning to voice questions in halting speech.

“Where are— I was— I was sleeping, I was sleeping—”

“What is this? What is this?! Who are you people?! What is this!?”

“Father? Father, you were right there, where are you? M-my eyes were closed only for a moment. Father?”

“And peace and tranquillity and safety will come to all, will come to a-all, oh God, oh God, where am I, where—”

Eseld knew this was misleading. Some of those ‘confused’ and ‘stunned’ girls were predators, play-acting, planning on biding their time among the sheep.

But one of the fresh revenants tugged at Eseld’s heartstrings, no matter how she tried to resist; a young girl was up on her feet, walking between the two rows of coffins. She was one of the youngest zombies Eseld had ever seen, a little girl no more than eleven or twelve years old. She had bright blonde hair stuck to her skull with nanomachine slime, and the widest blue eyes, staring at everything with blank surprise.

One coffin appeared to have malfunctioned and melted into a twisted lump of slag — that was new, Eseld had never seen that before, but it didn’t matter. Two coffins had opened to reveal abortions — girls whose bodies had not finished forming, just meaty slurry and half-cooked organs in a soupy mass of tainted blue. One revenant was busy sticking her head into the melted flesh of the aborted births, slime and gore trickling down her chin, hands shoving the filth into her maw. Some of the others were beginning to stare at her in shock; any moment, somebody would ask what she was doing, and a panic would ignite.

Two additional revenants were covertly picking themselves up and eyeing the door. They knew the score, just like Eseld. One of them — a short and stocky girl with a weird twist of greenish hair — locked eyes with Eseld for a moment. Eseld bared her sharp teeth. The girl looked away, back at the door.

They were all trying to guess the best moment to run, but they were blocked.

Bad news: at the far end of the rows, closest to the doors, a highly modified zombie was rising to her feet. Bionic legs, bionic arms, all four limbs glistening with chrome casing and bio-polymer muscle. Her torso was a mass of armour plates set into dark skin. Her head bristled with additional sensory equipment embedded into her skull. Her joints were lined with pistons and armoured motors, giving her massive leverage. Two bright green eyes like headlamps opened in a narrow face. She must have been very well-stocked to carry all those enhancements over from her death.

The cyborg grinned as she straightened up, casting hungry eyes across the assembled prey. Eseld tensed, ready to sprint, sharing a silent glance with the other two girls who knew what was about to happen. The moment that cyborg committed to a target, that would be their opening to escape.

The cyborg’s glowing green eyes fixed on the little blonde girl. She tilted her head to one side, as if curious.

Eseld’s heart soured with disgust. But she could do nothing. She was prey.

But — wait. A shiver went up Eseld’s spine. If there was only one cyborg here, on the other side of the room, where had that black knife come from?

Who had freed Eseld from her coffin?

Despite her better judgement, Eseld tore her eyes away from the precipice of violence. She glanced over her shoulder, toward the control panel and the liquid metal screen.

A final revenant was standing right there, not five feet from Eseld’s back.

Soft brown skin, slender build, very little muscle on her frame. Long black hair fell all the way to the tops of her thighs — already dry, free of nanomachine slime, hanging in a glossy dark sheet. She had no visible bionics, no modifications, no bio-mechanical additions.

She was gazing upward at the vast liquid metal screen, as if she could read the machine’s words.

Before Eseld could back away, the final revenant lowered her gaze from the screen and looked right at Eseld. Her eyes were wide and dark, like oil at night. She wore no expression. Not a scrap of nanomachine slime was left on her skin or in her hair, dried or otherwise. How long had this one been awake?

“Don’t thank me,” she said.

That voice and that face froze Eseld’s blood inside her veins and turned her stomach to a leaden fist. Her legs went weak. She broke out in cold sweat.

This zombie was calm, collected, and unconcerned.

Eseld had never seen anything like this, not in all her resurrections.

“Wh-what … ” Eseld croaked, then cleared her throat. She wanted to retreat, but her own coffin pressed against the small of her back. “What do you mean? Was that you, with the knife?”

The calm woman said: “Forget it. Forget you saw me. You—” Her eyes flickered past Eseld’s shoulder. “Oh. Tch.”

From behind Eseld, a tiny voice spoke up, soft and gentle amid the weeping and babbling.

“Hello,” it said, angelic and happy. “Do you not want to be here?”

Eseld turned away from the calm woman.

Three coffins down, the little blonde girl had paused in front of a crying, confused, fresh-meat revenant — an older girl with pale skin and dark hair, face streaked with snot and tears, clutching at her stomach as if expecting to find a wound there. The little blonde girl really did look like an cherubic angel, smiling with open kindness, blue eyes burning bright amid all the shivering flesh.

Eseld wasn’t the only one staring. The little girl’s voice had carried to all the other zombies in the chamber. Others were watching, stilled to silence.

The heavily modified cyborg was stalking down the row of coffins, heading straight for the little girl. That one didn’t want just food, she wanted sport. But why was she frowning like that?

“Ah,” said the calm woman, behind Eseld. She sounded bored. “I don’t have the patience for this.”

Eseld prepared to break for the door. As soon as the cyborg began the violence, that would be her opening. She eased around the side of her coffin, ready to move.

Three coffins down, the weeping fresh-meat blinked up at the little blonde girl. “W-what? What?”

The cyborg raised her voice into a shout, breaking into a run, bionic legs pounding against the metal plates: “Don’t answer her!”

The little blonde girl ignored the cyborg. Other zombies leapt out of the way, scrambling back, yelping, shouting. The little blonde girl just smiled wider and repeated her question.

“Do you want to go back?”

The weeping freshie nodded. “I … yes! This isn’t real! I’m having a nightmare, I’m having a nightmare! I want to go back, yes! My— my guts are inside me, they were never spilled, it was just another part of the nightmare. I do want to go back, I do, I—”

The little blonde girl’s body opened like a mouth.

The diminutive figure unfurled, fleshy membranes expanding outward like the petals of a carnivorous flower, coated with crimson slobber and caustic saliva. The maw-body was lined with dozens upon dozens of foot-long, razor-sharp, envenomed fangs. Lashing tentacles uncoiled from between the teeth, whipping at the metal floor with tiny spikes and claws of bone. Eye stalks and suckers and bloody orifices snaked forth in a cloud of quivering flesh. The girl’s shining blonde hair hung backward and upside down from the rear of the monster, her face twisting with a giggle and a grin of childish cruelty and gluttonous glee.

An ambush predator, in no mood to wait.

The fresh-meat revenant was paralysed by the sight of the transformation, but her shock was lived-short; the ambush predator reached for her with tooth and tendril, grabbed her tight in a dozen lacerating limbs, and tore her to pieces with a single spasm of muscle.

A detonation of blood and bone and viscera splattered across the cold metal and the faces of nearby revenants. The ambush predator’s tissues flushed deep red, sucking the gore in through her skin, extending delicate tentacles to absorb the blood, shoving gobbets of minced organ into her many mouths. Even as she ate, she reached for her next victim with half a dozen grasping limbs.

The resurrection chamber exploded into panic.

A few girls tried to flee for the door. Some of them even got away, but the general chaos revealed other predators hiding among the flock — not like the true horror which had shown itself, just regular zombies who were skilled enough to pretend they were true fresh meat. Eseld saw girls go down, snagged at the ankles, heads bashed open against the sides of resurrection coffins. The ambush predator tore apart a second girl as quickly as the first, threshing her to pieces in an instant of flying blood and shattered bone.

The huge cyborg crashed into the ambush predator. They tumbled together, smashing into the floor, rolling across the cold metal. The cyborg won the tussle briefly, coming out on top. She reared up, a grin ripping across her face; her bionic limbs emitted some kind of near-field electric pulse that the ambush predator could not grip. Tentacles and tendrils slapped at the air, unable to find purchase on her foe. The little blonde girl — the ambush predator — squealed and screamed.

“The fresh meat is mine, slug-bitch!” the cyborg roared. “Down!”

The ambush predator replied with an ear-splitting squeal and a squirt of steaming acid into the cyborg’s face. Flesh hissed and smoked. The cyborg howled with pain and smashed a fist into the tooth-lined meat.

Eseld did not need to see who won. If she stuck around, the victor would eat her alive.

She leapt into a sprint, and broke for the door.

The resurrection chamber was chaos, covered in blood, full of girls eating or being eaten, fleeing or pursuing, or standing in frozen shock, still not quite believing that this was real. A few were staring at the fight. Eseld ducked past two awestruck freshies, leapt a puddle of blood, darted past the end of the coffins and—

Somebody grabbed her right ankle. Eseld went flying, then hit the floor, face first. She spat blood and heaved for breath.

An opportunistic predator swarmed over her, all teeth and fingernails, going for her throat and eyes. Eseld fought like she always had, biting and kicking, spitting blood into her opponent’s face. They grappled together on the floor, rolling against the side of a coffin. Eseld saw nothing of her opponent but a pale blur, a pair of wild eyes, a set of bared teeth. She was larger than Eseld, stronger, quicker.

The bigger revenant somehow got Eseld’s head in both hands and slammed her skull against the coffin-plinth. Eseld’s head rang with the impact; the world went dim and dark, throbbing black at the edges of her vision. Her opponent grabbed her throat and pinned her to the floor.

Eseld leaned forward and bit down.

That earned her a scream. Her fancy sharp teeth came in useful after all; Andasina had been right all along — her new chompers were very cool.

Eseld bit down again, chomping and biting and gnawing, until her mouth was filled with the hot iron taste of blood and ragged scraps of fresh meat. She clung on and kept biting until her opponent stopped moving, until she was slumped atop a blood-soaked corpse with the throat ripped out.

Heaving for breath, half-blind with a concussion, Eseld rolled off the other revenant. She never even got a good look at the girl’s face. She lay on her back for several moments, wheezing and whining, knowing she had to get up, had to move, had to go! She staggered to her feet.

The resurrection chamber was saturated with gore, all over the coffins and the grey metal floor. Beyond the bloody mess, the dark obsidian computers and the liquid metal screen carried on glinting and scrolling, as if calmly cataloguing the carnage. A few girls seemed to have reached the door and won their freedom, but most were dead. Corpses and limbs and offal lay everywhere, blood and guts and shit in great smears on the floor and up the sides of the coffins. A long streak of blood led to the door — somebody had dragged a wounded friend, or more likely a corpse, to find a quiet spot to eat their kill.

The huge cyborg lay in a tangled heap in the narrow passage between the coffins, bionic limbs shattered and broken, face melted away and torn off, ribcage hanging open.

Aside from Eseld, only three revenants were still alive.

Two fresh-meat girls clung to each other, both young, both smeared with gore, both faces covered in snot and tears and screaming in horror. They had collapsed in retreat against the obsidian blocks to one side of the resurrection coffins.

The ambush predator was advancing toward them, having killed and eaten everything else in the room. Teeth and tentacles whipped the air, dripping with fresh blood, flexing rows of tiny teeth and claws. The bright blue eyes of a little girl still hung upside down from the monster’s back, set in a face giggling and grinning with childish glee.

Eseld had a clear path to the door. The ambush predator — the little girl — was distracted. With any luck, it would stay up here and eat its fill.

The fresh-meat pair were seconds from death; they closed their eyes and pressed their heads together, skull to skull, tears intermingled.

Eseld hesitated, chest torn inside with an empathy she would never have felt when hungry. She felt almost truly alive.

For the first time in so many deaths, she broke in a new direction.

Eseld sprinted toward the fresh-meat pair. “Get up!” she screamed. “Get up! Feet, now! Door! Run to the door! Door!”

They didn’t seem to understand. The pair lurched to their feet, clinging to each other, bewildered. Eseld skidded to a halt between them and the onrushing nightmare-zombie. Eseld turned and spread her arms out wide, placing herself in the path of the killer. The thing was giggling, playing with its food.

“Run to the door!” Eseld screamed, waving her arms up and down. “Run! Run! Here! I’m here! Eat me, eat me first you bitch, you—”

She realised the fresh meat were not fleeing. They were sobbing, babbling pleas for her to follow, tugging on her arms.

“No!” she screamed, throwing the pair of them off. “Just run! Run, go, go!”

Then the ambush predator was upon her.

A wall of whirling teeth and tentacles was inches from Eseld’s face. Tendrils reached out to grab her and pull her into the monster’s muscular embrace. She kept her eyes wide open and opened her mouth even wider; she would bite down on the first thing she could reach. She would die, but at least this death would be quick. She would take a chunk of this bitch for herself, she would make these two behind her see that not everything in this Godless emptiness was hate and predators, that there was still something worth protecting, even if it was just a moment of respite, a moment of—

A figure appeared, standing right next to the ambush predator.

It was the calm woman — the one with the very long black hair, with no expression on her face, with absolute lack of concern.

She extended her right arm. The hand narrowed and sharpened, lengthening into a black blade — slamming through the predator’s body.

The calm woman ran the predator through with a ten-foot lance of lightless metal. She did not even have to thrust with her shoulder, or brace her hips — her flesh simply hardened and extended, until her right arm was a sword of black steel. She hoisted the girl-predator with effortless strength, lifting it off the ground and into the air. The predator squealed and hissed, like a squid on the end of a spear, animal noises mixing with the terrified weeping of a small child.

The calm woman held the predator in the air until it stopped moving, then lowered her arm and let the zombie slip from her blade. It fell in a bloody heap, and did not move again. The blue eyes had gone blank in death.

Eseld stared, mouth hanging open. The pair of fresh-meat girls clung to her shoulders, peering at their bizarre saviour, speechless and panting.

The calm woman flicked her sword-arm; it became flesh again, wrapped in soft brown skin. She flexed her fist. She stared at the dead predator for a long moment. Then she seemed to dismiss it, casting her eyes across the carnage of the resurrection chamber. She still wore no expression.

Then she looked at Eseld.

“Why did you do that?” said the calm woman. “Why did you protect those two? Do you know each other?”

One of the two fresh-meat girls said: “N-no! No! I don’t know where … what … what any of this, is? Are we in a fairy mound? Are you one of them?”

The other one nodded. “Yes. I mean no. No. We don’t. What— what—”

“Stop talking,” said the calm woman.

Eseld groped for her own voice. “What … what are you?”

The calm woman looked at Eseld again. “Answer my question. Why did you do that?”

“Do … do what?”

“Why did you attempt to sacrifice yourself?” said the calm woman. “Tell me the truth. I’ll know if you lie.”

Eseld shrugged; she wasn’t quite sure. “I … they— these two.” She reached back and patted one of the hands clutching her shoulders. “They reminded me of … myself? I didn’t want them to be separated. Not again.” She shook her head. “What are you?”

The calm woman sighed; it was the first emotion she had displayed. She looked away, up at the liquid metal screen. The scrolling text was slowing down, the clean white light growing dimmer by the second. The tomb had done its job, now it was dying.

“I don’t have all the permissions I was promised,” the calm woman said. “This is wrong. Somebody fucked up. Or somebody’s fucking with me.”

Eseld glanced at the fresh-meat pair, still touching her shoulders. Both of them shrugged and shook their heads.

Eseld said: “Permissions? What does that—”

“Never mind,” said the calm woman. “Don’t ask that question.”

Without another word, she set off toward the door.

“Wait!” Eseld said, scrambling forward. The freshies followed her, with nowhere else to go. “Wait, please, what are you? Can we— can we follow you? You saved me. Twice! You were the one who opened my coffin, weren’t you? Why did you—”

The calm woman stopped and turned around. Her eyes were wide dark pools. Eseld halted instantly, holding herself as still as she could. The freshies blundered into her back, but she kept her feet; the idea of accidentally touching the calm woman — let alone offending her — terrified Eseld in a way she had never felt before. She eyed the calm woman’s right hand, the one which had turned into a blade.

The calm woman echoed the question: “What am I?”

Eseld shivered inside. One of the two freshies whispered, “Maybe we shouldn’t ask that? Maybe we shouldn’t!”

“Yes,” Eseld repeated. “What—”

“Shilu,” said Shilu. “My name.”

“O-oh! Eseld,” said Eseld.

The freshies piped up too: “Sky!” “Cyneswith!”

Shilu showed no reaction to the names. Wide dark eyes considered the trio one by one, with little interest. Those eyes were cold and distant.

Eseld swallowed. She had to try. “Can we follow? You— you helped. We could get out, together? At least to the—”

Shilu said: “Follow me if you wish. I won’t stop you. But I doubt that’s a good idea. I think I’m about to get fucked over. You may not want to be nearby when that happens. Good luck, little zombies.”