Necroepilogos

Thirteen Arcadia pushed deeper into the porous and putrid tissues of the south, where the corpse of the world grew wild and weird.

Nineteen days from the continental shelf, she met a wounded worm.

At first sight the jagged dark line rising above the horizon seemed like an exposed mountain range, perhaps a twin to the one which had sheltered Thirteen from the third of central’s assets. Thirteen’s intended route would carry her to the foothills of the range, then over a corner of the peaks; she planned to flower open her sensors from the tallest spot she could reach, to take a long-range high-ground geographic survey of the surrounding area. She would send the results back to Pheiri and Elpida, on the tiny chance that they might find the information useful one day, if they ever had cause to tread in her footsteps.

But as Thirteen drew closer, the peaks and valleys resolved into sharp regularity — segments of colossal living metal slicing at the sagging underbelly of the sky.

The back of a graveworm, still and silent.

Thirteen’s heart quickened with excitement; perhaps this was her chance to assist newborn revenants hurled forth from a tomb. She might be able to do some good on her journey south, to make up for the guilt of abandoning her Commander.

But her hopes of heroism vanished as she examined the distant line of the waiting worm in more detail; the ordered points and angles were disturbed in one area, toward the front of the worm’s body.

A trio of gaping holes yawned wide in the grey metal.

Three wounds, spaced in a neat triangle, bleeding vast quantities of raw blue nanomachines down the mountainside of the worm; the flow seemed like a trickle at Thirteen’s distance, but up close she knew it was a crashing waterfall, thousands of gallons gushing forth every second. Glowing stains on the worm’s hide showed that the bleeding had once been much more extensive, and not too long ago. The falling liquid shimmered with blue light beneath the dead sun in the black and empty sky.

The trio of wounds were closing rapidly, plugged with a thickening latticework of silvery metal. The wounds were so vast — miles across — that the graveworm would not be fully healed for many days yet, perhaps as much as two weeks. Thirteen watched the healing process through her long-range cameras as she approached, taking measurements of the huge metal scabs and the open space they had yet to fill. She compared the speed of the observable process and the size of the holes. She calculated the worm had sustained the wounds approximately twelve days prior.

Thirteen could not approach the wounded worm; two miles out, thousands of worm-guard formed a phalanx six deep and six high, a wall of writhing tendrils and pincers and lashing limbs, clad in triple-thickened armour and bristling with weaponry, stacked up atop each other in an unbreakable barrier. They reacted to her presence like magnetic ferrofluid, flowing through the streets and swarming across the buildings, chasing her until she had crossed an invisible marker and was no longer considered worth pursuit.

The grey area around the safe zone should have been a haven for opportunistic predators, more evolved revenants, or those about to leave the zone. But it was empty. Nothing dared approach. The worm-guard had chased everything away.

The wounded worm was taking no chances with intruders.

Thirteen watched for most of that day, taking readings with her long-range sensors, spying on what she could without aggravating the worm’s protective cordon. She pinged Hope and requested high-angle shots of the worm from above; Hope was happy to help.

Thirteen counted over six hundred thousand active worm-guard — and almost a million dead, lying in great piles and heaps amid the rubble and ruin. Their corpses were being consumed and processed by their active fellows. Thirteen attempted to calculate how many dead worm-guard may have already been eaten and recycled, prior to her arrival, based on the assumption that the worm had received those wounds twelve days ago.

According to her calculations, somewhere between four point six to eight point nine million worm-guard had already been recycled.

She took readings of the buildings and recent destruction, but she could not piece together what had happened, or who the combatants had been; a swathe of damage spiralled off to the west, but it did not match anything she had yet encountered, nor anything she could imagine.

Thirteen could not comprehend the scale of the battle which had taken place here.

Very few ordinary revenants remained alive within this graveworm’s safe zone; Thirteen counted less than a hundred, most of them huddling in deep holes or hiding within lightless buildings, clinging to each other down in the dark.

Thirteen sent all the data back to Pheiri, then took the long way round this recuperating god-machine. She prayed to Telokopolis that she would not meet the foe which had left those wounds upon the worm. She quietened her never-ending stream of omnidirectional poetry, trusting that Twelve Fifty Five already knew she was on her way.

Elpida contacted her over long-range comms a day later, when Thirteen had left the wounded worm far behind.

<<What kind of combatant could do that to a graveworm?>> Elpida asked. <<Something from central, you think? Did you see any evidence of a fight? Any remains, any enemy it might have neutralised?>>

<<Nothing but the wounds,>> Thirteen replied. She did not want to think about it too hard. <<There were a lot of damaged buildings. I don’t know.>>

Past that final graveworm — for Thirteen did not see another in all the reaches of the south — the city itself began to lose coherency.

She first noticed the decay when she was seventeen days from the edge. More and more buildings were colonised by black rot, hung with dripping sheets of mucosal matter, spotted with dark grey lichens, coated with slick slime and slippery sludge, slumping into their foundations as they forgot what they were supposed to be. At first Thirteen assumed she was merely passing through yet another variation on the endless arteries and capillaries of the continent-spanning city-corpse. But the rot intensified with every step. By fifteen days from the edge there was more black nanomachine slime and roiling humps of rotten filth than there were intact buildings. The facade of regular ruin had gone untended for too long; concrete and brick and glass and steel ached to return to primordial sludge.

Her southward route became difficult and confusing. The city collapsed into a swamp. Vast lakes of pitch-black mud and dirty grey slurry sucked and snagged at her ankles, threatening to drag her down into the tangled darkness beneath the surface, where rusted skeletons of sunken buildings rasped against her exterior armour.

Thirteen treated this as an opportunity for practice; after all, the black beyond the shore — out in whatever was left of the green — would be far worse than a marshland of muddy lakes. She plunged into the swampy landscape several times, submerging herself in the lightless soupy depths. Building-sized spikes of sharp metal threatened to run her through; underwater labyrinths of mush and filth and rotten brick threatened to leave her trapped and pinned; strange swimmers in the silt twitched and flexed beneath her unquiet feet.

She could have practised for days, but even one would be too long. Trudging through the ooze and muck would slow her down, add weeks to her journey. Thirteen spent just twenty four hours testing her external seals and internal pressures, pushing her sensors to their limit when blinded by black gunk, and learning how to jet through the mud on flumes of syphoned fluid.

Then she climbed back to dry ground. She sent her testing data back to Pheiri, in case he ever needed to pressurise his internal spaces. She pinged Hope, far above her, dancing and swooping just beneath the cloud layer. She requested readings of the landscape ahead, so she might pick her way along the ridges and rises of higher ground.

This complex detour would take time, but not too much.

The revenants — the highly evolved zombies of the wilds — became even fewer in number as Thirteen continued south. They grew less comprehensible to both her sensors and her imagination. She tried not to speculate too much. She sent data back to Pheiri at irregular intervals, but she could no longer answer any questions or offer any analysis. She simply did not know.

At fifteen days to the edge she spotted a revenant striding across the slurry-lakes on stilts of bone. The zombie’s form was stretched out to a knife-blade of steel and polymer, with no room for a brain or organs or facial features. The lone wanderer was spear-fishing with limbs like whipping tentacles, plunging them into the muck and drawing forth wriggling morsels of undead life which had adapted to the crushing darkness.

The blade-bodied revenant ignored Thirteen utterly, as if grown to specialise in one thing and one thing alone, ignorant of the world beyond the mud.

Two days later a face formed in the side of a rotten skyscraper as Thirteen walked past, like a sleeper roused from slumber by her footsteps.

A hundred feet tall, with lips made from dripping black slime and cheeks formed from grey lichen; it wavered and wobbled like melted wax beneath a candle flame, but it uttered no sound and extended no assault. Thirteen’s sensors told her it was nothing but nanomachine slime — then it registered as a lone revenant, then a dozen, then a hundred.

It formed a single silent word with lips wide enough to swallow Thirteen: ‘Where?’

Then the face melted back into nothing, into the black slime. Thirteen waited to see if it would reoccur, but it did not.

Twelve days out from the edge, Thirteen was buzzed by an aircraft. At first she thought the rapidly approaching airborne signal was the long-awaited fourth asset from central — for what else took to the dead skies of Earth anymore, except Hope?

But then the craft came roaring over the rooftops and revealed itself as a fusion of undead flesh and cybernetically grafted omni-directional engines. Flat like a plate, the top bristled with eye stalks and sensors, while the underside was covered in sticky cilia and bulb-like digestive organs, ready to scoop up any wandering prey.

It — she? he? — whooped in some forgotten language, screaming exuberance to the sky as it slammed through the air at top speed. “Aiiiiiiieeeeeiiii!”

Thirteen simply observed it pass overhead. It was uninterested in Thirteen’s inedible flesh.

A day later, Thirteen discovered something inexplicable, even by the necromantic technology of this undead ecosystem. She reached a strange area of high ground between the swamp-choked corpse-pockets, swept clean of all matter — rubble, ruin, concrete, even dust. The area was a perfectly level and empty space about a mile across, floored with smooth, glossy grey. The dirt itself was polished to a mirror sheen.

Thirteen’s sensors told her this area was a perfect heptagon. The buildings had been cut off at the exact edge of shape, as if sliced by a knife.

Thirteen shot a sabot-round into the space, just to see what happened. The round vanished the moment it crossed the edge.

Thirteen took the long way round, through the swamp.

A week and a day from her destination, Thirteen finally came face-to-face with something that could talk back.

Amid a particularly wide and open area of high ground, between the wind-swept bulwarks of intact city blocks, she found a circle cut into the concrete and brick of the ground. The circle was no more than thirty feet wide, and not some kind of spatial anomaly like the heptagon. This demarcation had been cut by hand.

A humanoid zombie was sitting at the centre of the circle, cross-legged on the ground. She wore lightweight flexible armour, the colour of moss and leaves in a dark forest. The zombie had dark hair tied back in a ponytail, and no visible cybernetics. A sword lay across her knees; the blade was almost invisible to Thirteen’s sensors, and completely unseen on her regular optics. The weapon was only detectable via matter-analysis. Thirteen could not figure out what the sword was made from.

The sitting zombie greeted Thirteen with a raised hand, as if she could feel the sensors on her skin. Thirteen stepped out from behind the building she had been using as shelter, exposing her true form to the tiny revenant. But the zombie revealed no expression, unsurprised to meet something several thousand times her own size.

They communicated via radio; the swordswoman had internal comms implants.

<<Hail and well met,>> she said. <<Do you seek to challenge me?>>

Thirteen Arcadia considered this. <<I don’t think I do? Unless you’re blocking my path, I have no quarrel with you. I don’t want to fight. I certainly don’t want to kill you, not over nothing.>>

<<If you do not seek to enter my domain, then we do not have a challenge. You may pass beyond my circle without fear or caution. This I promise you, on my honour and the honour of my family name.>>

<<What is your family name?>>

<<Ah! So few I meet in this shadow world are interested in the answer to that question.>> The swordswoman sounded excited, but her expression did not change. She did not even blink. A covert examination with Thirteen’s sensors showed her that the zombie’s face was not flesh, but extremely fine polymer, tougher than steel, flexible as spider silk. <<My family name is Uusop. I hope you will carry it with you, though you will have little reason to do so, without the memory of our blades in meeting.>> The woman — Uusop — tilted her head to one side, as if thinking. <<However, if our blades were to meet, yours would surely shatter, and you would not carry the memory of my name. This is an interesting paradox. I must meditate on this.>>

Apparently the statement was literal; Uusop fell silent for three hours, unresponsive to Thirteen’s radio hails. Thirteen decided to wait in the sheltered gap between two tall buildings, curious enough to pause her journey for a while.

Finally Uusop looked up again, examining Thirteen with her tiny biological eyes. The afternoon had deepened into grim dusk, casting deep red shadows across Uusop’s little circle.

<<You are still here,>> said Uusop.

<<Yes. We were in the middle of a conversation. It seemed rude to leave.>>

<<Do you seek a challenge after all?>> Uusop asked.

<<Not at all,>> Thirteen replied. <<I’m just curious about you. I haven’t seen anybody else human-shaped in a couple of weeks. Everything around us is very … advanced. I don’t understand how you’ve survived out here.>>

<<By the edge of my blade. How else is survival achieved?>>

<<Fair enough. And you think you could beat me, in single combat? I’m not trying to goad you or insult you, I just … well. Look at me.>> Thirteen flexed several weapon pods to illustrate her point. She kissed the air with half a dozen high-explosive missile tips, spun up the engines of her point-defence auto-cannons, and flared the magnetic power of her main railgun.

Uusop watched, then nodded once. <<Yes.>>

Thirteen didn’t know what to say. <<Wow. Okay, I accept that, then. I don’t want to challenge you, though. I have absolutely no quarrel with you. Is this … is this what you do, for food? You bait challengers?>>

Uusop shook her head. <<I bait nothing, but I will move for nothing. No demon, no spirit, no monster, no god. I sit in my domain. That is all I do.>>

Thirteen thought this sounded very sensible, but a bit boring, and very solitary. <<Don’t you ever get lonely?>>

<<The world rarely exists between challenges. You are the first conversation I have had in a while which did not result in a challenge.>>

<And … how long has it been? Since your last fight, I mean.>>

Uusop paused briefly, then said: <<Seventeen years, eight days, eleven hours, three seconds.>>

Thirteen did not know if she could say anything relevant to that. <<And you haven’t eaten in all that time?>>

<<What need is there to eat if one does not move?>>

Thirteen briefly considered not relaying the details of this conversation to Elpida — Uusop’s simplicity might spark a crisis of purpose. But then she decided that was a bad idea. Keeping intel from her Commander and her little brother would have been treachery, no matter how strange or difficult that intel might be.

Thirteen asked: <<What will you do if a graveworm comes this way?>>

<<I will match blades with it.>>

<<Do you think you’ll win? Against a worm?>>

Uusop thought about this for a moment. <<Perhaps. I would very much like to discover the answer.>>

Thirteen eventually bid Uusop goodbye — though not before asking about her sword, but Uusop refused to answer any questions about the blade. Thirteen transmitted the audio and video logs of the conversation to Pheiri. Elpida and her comrades spent the entire next day picking through the footage, examining the readouts of Uusop’s body, trying to figure out what she was.

Mirror gave the final assessment, late on the following day.

<<She’s essentially an ultra-dense cyborg. She’s no taller than me, but she weighs over eight hundred pounds. Those arm muscles and tendons can probably move her sword fast enough to break the sound barrier. I’d be surprised if her top running speed is less than a hundred miles an hour. Not a scrap of flesh left in her, not even the brain. The deep-radar and magnetic imaging returns of her skull, see that? Thirteen, you know what that is? Of course you don’t, you’re no expert, that’s why I’m here. That is an artificial brain. Same basic technology as an AI substrate enclosure, but without the gravitic-assisted spatial densification. I have no idea how she did that, it would have required replacing her own brain cell by cell.>>

<<Or uploading her old self into a new body, right?>> Elpida asked.

Mirror just sighed. Thirteen heard the gentle rasp of skin over skin — Mirror dragging a hand across her own face. <<Every single aspect of that woman is an infernal miracle. And I can’t even work out what the sword is made of! Her little toe would have been enough to trigger worldwide condemnation and nuclear sterilisation. Of all the weird shit you’ve sent us, Thirteen, this fucking cyborg sword-bitch is the most impossible to believe. The most dangerous, too. You know what? I don’t even think she was joking. I think she may have stood a chance against you. Maybe she could even put a scratch on a worm.>>

<<How?>> Thirteen asked.

<<Ha!>> Mirror barked. <<I don’t even want to speculate. Frankly I would have been happier never seeing this.>>

Four days later, four days from the edge, Thirteen met something much worse than a woman sitting on the ground with a sword across her legs.

Deep in the swampy entrails of the land, surrounded by half-sunken buildings and sludge-lakes of rotting ruin, a giant walked out of the west.

A mountain of flesh strode upon twelve pillar-like legs. Each limb was a parody of human thigh and knee and shin, wrapped in pale armoured plates like the hide of a lizard, furred with thick black hair. Every footstep swept through the swamps as if the muck and mud wasn’t even there, throwing up waves of sludge to wash the shores of the marshland, shaking the ground with miniature earthquakes.

The main body was a heaped pyramid of muscle, punctuated a million times by eyeballs, mouths, ears, tiny grasping baby-like hands, and other strange sensory organs that Thirteen had never seen before, bulbs and flaps and hanging clusters of nerve endings. The thing babbled and sang and cried as it walked, a million mouths all speaking over each other in polyphonic chaos. Thirteen attempted to sharpen and filter her external auditory sensors to pick out individual voices, but the effort was impossible, and the languages were too many.

The giant was easily the size of a real mountain. It glowed with the steady nanomachine signature she expected from a single zombie, a normal revenant, but multiplied in size rather than density.

The creature had arms, too — not the tiny grasping arms affixed all over the pyramid-shaped body, but real arms, six of them, arcing outward from the tip of the pyramid like scythes hanging from branches. Each limb broke into a trio of gigantic pointed bone-spears. Each spear tip was laced with hollow passages, siphons ready to suck at the blood of gargantuan prey.

The giant carried a hundred score of wounds, mostly across the legs and the lower reaches of the main body — red scabs over deep gashes, tiny compared to the vast mass of the thing.

Was this the monster which had wounded the worm?

Thirteen had no way to be sure, and she was not eager to find out. But she could not run. The giant revenant walked faster than she could sprint, covering the ground with the ease of a human striding through ankle-deep water. Thirteen did not flee. She stood and waited.

It stopped a mile away, watching Thirteen with hundreds of thousands of eyes, babbling nonsense to the blackened heavens.

Thirteen had Hope take pictures from far away. She sent them back to Pheiri. She prepared for a fight, for death, for worse. If this thing chose to eat her, she would not stand a chance. This would be the end of her journey. She resumed her poetry-song, abandoning stealth, howling her love out into the void.

She flowered open a tiny section of her armour, showing a glistening portion of her own gleaming garnet flesh.

<<I am not made of the same stuff as you,>> she broadcast on every medium and frequency she could. <<I am not edible. You cannot digest me. I am not good to eat.>>

She had no idea if the thing comprehended, or cared, or was capable of either.

It simply turned north and walked away. Each stride washed the high ground with torrents of black mud and grey slime. Thirteen let it crash over her in filthy waves, immobile in her relief.

Then she turned south and walked on. The scraps of her old flesh quivered and shook inside her amniotic core, crying slow tears of mortal terror.

Elpida and the others shared very little reaction to the data she had captured. They were tight and controlled. They saw a possible future, one they did not like, and they wished to spare Thirteen the horror of knowing their fears. She silently thanked them for that. She had to focus on her journey.

Over the following three days the corpse-city dropped away and the swamps dwindled. The lakes shrank to pools and puddles, stagnant and stinking. The buildings became lower, more squat and skeletal, then collapsed into mere stubs of wall and outlines of fallen frame. The landscape levelled out to both east and west, a flattened plane of dark grey earth without the slightest hint of moss or lichen, worm or beetle, life or remains, punctuated only by low ruptures of rock and slow trickles of black ooze.

The land sloped toward the south, leading down.

On the dawn of that final day, beneath the heavy droplets of a swirling rainstorm, Thirteen Arcadia took her first step beyond the bounds of the city. There were no more buildings, only the slope.

As the raindrops pattered off her sealed exterior bone-armour, she spotted three things out of place.

The first two were far behind her — energy signatures roaring through the periphery of the corpse-city, throwing up sheets of rotten water and black sludge high into the air.

Central’s assets had shown themselves at last. Numbers four and five were trying to beat her to the edge of the world.

She could not see the machines themselves, only their rough shapes on long-range radar and gravitational analysis. One was a jagged ball of slender spikes, like a sea urchin; it was tiny, barely larger than a zombie, but it glowed with a nanomachine density like the heart of collapsed star. The second was gigantic, vaster even than the first asset, a machine like a blunt hammer of force racing across the landscape.

They were very far away. They would be on her within three hours, but not before.

Thirteen Arcadia pumped her legs and braced for a sprint. The green was not far now, just over the horizon one last time. She would dive off the world before central could catch her. She was free. She had won.

But then she saw a person.

The figure was standing far to her left, four miles away across the damp grey soil. Thirteen would never have spotted the figure if not for the utter emptiness and barren desolation of the intertidal plain.

Five foot four, dressed from head to toe in featureless black robes. It was like a cut-out of shadow against the backdrop of the world. It stood and watched, face hidden within a deep hood.

It had not been there a moment ago, when Thirteen had taken her final step behind the ragged edge of the city. She was sure of that.

And her sensors told her it still wasn’t there.

The figure had no radar signature, no nanomachine-load, no gravitic disturbance pattern, no material composition. Echolocation returned empty space. Raindrops seemed to fall through the figure’s body. It only showed up on visible light, via Thirteen’s exterior sensor clusters.

<<Hello?>> Thirteen sent.

It did not answer.

Thirteen considered the fact she might be hallucinating. Had she been infected by something from the nanomachine ecosystem? That was impossible, her body was now sealed and pressurised and ready for anything. Her immune system was a perfect balance of aggression and caution; if a single outside nanomachine entered her flesh, she would know. The intruder would be surrounded, devoured, and purged within seconds. Her data processing was flawless, uncorrupted; her mind was clear.

She continued sweeping the figure with her sensors until she was absolutely certain nothing was present. Then she spun up one of her point-defence auto-cannons and put a single round straight through the figure’s chest, at four miles away, with pin-point accuracy.

The bullet passed through the shadow and chewed into the dirt behind, throwing up a cloud of grey grit to join the falling rain.

The figure did not waver — but it raised a hand, or at least a wide and drooping sleeve.

It pointed south.

Thirteen packaged up all the data — mostly just the external feeds in visible light — and sent them to Pheiri in one final intel broadcast, bounced off Hope’s underside. She did not understand what she was witnessing, but perhaps others might find it interesting.

Then she turned south and launched into a sprint.

Thirteen galloped across the sodden soil, throwing up clods of dirt behind her. Greasy, gritty, grey raindrops slashed and whirled around her body as she pounded onward, down and down and down the slope. Far behind her, the fourth and fifth assets from central slowed a little, lingering in the ruins of the city, as if reluctant to follow Thirteen to the precipice.

A ribbon of black broke the horizon, widening with each lunging footfall.

The world fell away; a sea opened beyond the land.

After an hour and a half of travel at her top speed, Thirteen slowed to a trot. A few minutes later she halted. For a while she did not move, feet planted on the wet rocks of the deep cliffs. The rainstorm died away. Moisture glistened on her armour. Thirteen could do nothing but stare. Minutes ticked by. Eventually she roused herself and walked the last few hundred meters to the drop-off, the cliff-edge, the end of the supercontinent.

Deep inside her fleshy core, she shivered, weeping slow, warm, wet tears into her amniotic cradle.

She stared out across black infinity.

The green was gone.

In its place lay an ocean of sable sludge, stretching from horizon to horizon. The rotten black fluid did not move like water, flowing and ebbing, lapping and sloshing. Instead this world-sewer roiled and rucked like a living creature, boiling and bubbling and bursting in vile pockets of overflowing animation, reaching upward with pseudopods of inky pus which collapsed as quickly as they were formed. Runnels of matter glugged and gulped, sucking thinner patches of slime downward, the infernal sea rolling over itself with the slow motion of hot tar or cold blood.

Great masses of uneven black flowed down into the deep, guided and funnelled by unseen structures below the surface.

Trees!

Thirteen realised with nauseated shock that the trees of the green were still there, choked and strangled by this limitless sea of smothering nanomachine slime. Here and there, plant life climbed above the surface of the waves, almost invisible against the dark immensity — a few branches, a cluster of leaves, a spreading fern. But all those desperate survivals were rotten and dying, covered in black mould or eaten by grey infection, falling into the sea below as rapidly as they could grow.

The green lived — and yet was being destroyed? Growing again and again, only to be devoured by the very process it had given life, the forest-floor rot arisen from the body of the world?

Was that the secret behind this nanomachine ecosystem? Was this all nothing more than leaf mulch, left to grow strange and horrible over too many millions of years?

Elpida’s voice suddenly cut into Thirteen’s thoughts, hissing across the long-range communications uplink.

<<Thirteen! Thirteen, that thing you saw back there, the thing in the black robes, what was that!?>>

Her voice was faint and far away. Even bounced off Hope, the distance and the interference was too great to achieve proper clarity. The nanomachine sea was scrambling the signal.

And the singing from the deep was too much to drown out.

Thirteen heard it clearer than ever before; the voices of all her sisters whispered from down there, down below a world of rot and decay and struggling pain. Their voices danced across the nanomachine ecosystem itself, like a tapping behind the walls, a scratching in the back of Thirteen’s mind.

<<I don’t know what that was,>> she replied to Elpida — and plugged the comms uplink directly into her visual cortex, feeding images back to Pheiri. <<Look at this. Commander, look at this.>>

For a long time she received no reply.

Eventually another zombie spoke up. It was Atyle, the ancient one. <<A sea of death, or of new life? Swim hard, newborn god.>>

<<I will,>> Thirteen replied. <<Thank you.>>

Elpida broke in again. Thirteen could barely hear her words.

<<Thirteen! Thirteen, that thing you saw back there, the figure standing on the beach—>>

Somebody barked with laughter, repeating the word ‘Beach, beach!’ in an almost hysterical tone. That was Mirror.

<<—can you go back and get a better look at it?>> Elpida said. <<Thirteen? Thirteen?!>>

<<I’m sorry, Commander,>> Thirteen replied. She could not tear her eyes away from the green — dying and dying and dying beneath the black. <<Central’s assets are an hour behind me. They’ll catch me if I turn back. I have to dive. I have to go. I’m sorry.>>

Inside her own body, behind her bone-armour, Thirteen Arcadia was quivering like naked meat exposed to freezing winds. She grew limbs to hug herself tight, but that didn’t help. She sucked down lungfuls of her own innards, choking her tears and her panic on warm, salty blood. Her legs felt like they were made of lead and concrete, but they kept moving, carrying her to the very edge of the upper world.

She peered off the cliff — the drop-off. There were no rocks below on which to dash herself by accident, no outcroppings on which to snag or smash a limb. No clinging cliff side trees, no bird’s nests tucked into cracks. Just grey rock, a straight drop down into the roiling black unknown.

<<Okay,>> Elpida said. Her voice was barely more than a whisper now, drowned out by static interference from below. <<Okay, Thirteen. I understand. I understand you have to go. But this isn’t—>>

<<Thirteen Arcadia.>>

Elpida understood instantly. <<Thirteen Arcadia. This isn’t goodbye. This isn’t the end. Whatever you’re going into down there, you are coming back to us. Eventually, somehow, you are coming back. You understand? We’re going to see what you see, aren’t we? This isn’t the end.>>

Thirteen stared down into the ocean.

<<I don’t know.>>

But she had no choice. Behind her lay death, and no clever tricks up her sleeve. Before her was infinity, dark and unknown.

The revenants were all saying things over the comms uplink. Each of them cheered encouragement, or said thank you for protecting them, or ‘good luck’ or ‘see you soon’. Even the androids — Melyn and Hafina — chipped in with a few words. Serin purred and murmured about the world beyond the continent. Mirror and Victory snapped at each other. Pheiri completed a full systems handshake, and passed on a wordless message of positive emotion from Iriko, though tainted by childlike petulance. Hope joined in with a soft acknowledgement ping, to which Thirteen replied with an automatic ‘I love you.’ Howl added a war-cry of whooping excitement, telling her to ‘give ‘em hell’ — whoever ‘they’ turned out to be.

But all of it washed over Thirteen like so much greasy rain. None of it helped, even as she clutched the words to her heart. Below her feet, hundreds of meters down, the dying green called to her, full of her sisters’ voices, full of—

Elpida spoke. Suddenly her voice was clear, by luck or chance or the clarity of Hope’s relay.

<<Good hunting in the green, but do not stay from these doors too long. Hurry home to us, sister. Hurry home soon.>>

Thirteen took the combat frame equivalent of a deep breath; she would not need it down there, for she had grown filters and gills and specialised structures for permanent submersion. But the breath helped, drawing oxygen through her body, filtering out the nanomachines, filling her blood with fresh determination.

<<Thank you, Commander. Sister. Elpida. Thank you, everyone.>>

<<You’re welcome, Thirteen. Good hunting. Stay safe. I love you, sister.>>

And then Thirteen leapt off the edge of the world.

She plummeted hundreds of meters, twisted her body side-on to cut the surface, and hit the black like a blade. Dark sludge closed over her in an instant, swallowing her whole.

For a moment Thirteen almost lost herself, tumbling in the black. Up was down, left was right. She was lost in the dark.

But then she reached out and touched the rough, raspy, raw surface of something upright, something growing and rotting at great speed, living and dying over and over with every second.

A tree. The green. Still here.

Thirteen found her bearings, thanks to a tree. Down was down once again. She pointed herself in the right direction, pushed her sensors to their maximum, and slammed back the darkness with the probing beams of a hundred lance-lights.

Thirteen Arcadia descended, diving deep into the dark beneath the world.