Necroepilogos

Iriko was on a very special mission.

Technically she was on two special missions at the same time, but the first mission was neither particularly difficult nor any different from what she would have done anyway. She did not need to be asked or encouraged or have her efforts acknowledged, but those things all felt very nice regardless of necessity. Outwardly Iriko had replied to the transmission with a sharp complaint and much residual grumbling, via several follow-up tight-beam radio squirts. But inwardly she had delighted at the message.

Iriko admitted to herself that this undermined the task’s designation as a ‘special mission’. But special missions were cool, and therefore she was on a special mission. Pheiri was rubbing off on her, silly boy that he was.

Iriko’s first special mission was very simple.

Stay alive!

The mission had come from Pheiri himself, via the private tight-beam uplink through which they passed all regular chatter. The actual wording was much more complicated than simply ‘stay alive’; even at the best of times, Pheiri was a gentleman of most ostentatious loquaciousness. He loved his data so very much, and loved to gesticulate it around to make points which could be easily condensed into much more concise forms. His tight-beam squirt had included predicted weather patterns and incoming rainfall amounts, wind speed adjustments and debris saturation calculations, and even suggested routes of exfiltration beyond the range of the incoming storm, backed up with locations of several dozen nearby potential hardened buildings or subterranean tunnel complexes, which might survive the fury of the approaching hurricane. Pheiri did not so much ‘order’ Iriko to flee — he never ‘ordered’ her to do anything. He simply and strongly suggested via a torrent of information that she needed to make herself scarce.

Iriko felt all warm and fuzzy at the request. Pheiri cared, despite his usual prickly exterior.

But Iriko wasn’t going anywhere. Oh no, not now. She would have to flee for miles and miles to outrun the storm. She wasn’t about to leave Pheiri behind inside that horrible tomb.

She’d been feeling a little lonely and abandoned after Pheiri had gone charging through the tomb’s outworks and fortifications, guns blazing in all directions, shield flashing, punching his way through any groups of zombies unwise or stupid enough to engage him. Iriko had watched from her rooftop vantage point with actual eyeballs, suitably modified with magnification and telescoping so she wouldn’t miss any of the details of Pheiri being all heroic. He had been very dashing, but then within thirty seconds he was inside the tomb’s gates and Iriko was left outdoors, all by herself, with only the rising wind and the pouring rain for company, amid thousands of zombies starting to panic and run off through the city streets.

So she sent a big raspberry-blow of refusal — 「nooooooooo! no! no! no!」

Pheiri’s personal tight-beam connection narrowed into raw audio, unspooling directly inside Iriko’s body.

「Hey there Iriko, how’s it hanging out there?」 said one of Pheiri’s zombies. It was Vicky!

Of all Pheiri’s zombies, Iriko liked Vicky the best, because Vicky talked with her more than any other. She’d even held one or two conversations with Iriko while standing up on Pheiri’s back, rather than across the tight-beam connection. Iriko had enjoyed those a lot, even though Vicky had struggled to understand Iriko’s replies. It wasn’t that the other zombies never talked to Iriko at all, but the others were often all business, or treated Iriko like she didn’t understand, or like they were speaking with an animal. But Vicky? Miss Victoria was always up for a good natter.

Iriko replied — not with a detailed breakdown of her current biochemical composition and mass-levels. Pheiri always demanded that whenever he was concerned about Iriko’s condition. Instead, Iriko replied with a poem, composed that very moment, as raindrops began to kiss the tiny scales of her refractive mail.

「victoria yes!
full stomach and lightened heart
sky fury scary?」

Vicky laughed down the radio, but Iriko could tell something was wrong. Vicky’s laugh was all stressed.

「Yeah, Iriko, uh, beautiful phrase. Sky fury scary. You see all those low clouds on the horizon to the north? That’s a bunch of very high winds and really heavy rain. Pheiri says it’s an actual hurricane, but uh, he’s already sent you that data, right. You’re probably feeling the leading edge right now, but within fifteen minutes those winds are gonna be hitting sustained speeds of eighty to a hundred miles an hour. Behind that, uh … shit. Fuck me.」 Vicky stopped and swallowed. 「Well, it’s a very powerful storm. We’re worried about you, Iriko. You can’t stay out there in this storm, not even if you stick yourself to the ground and armour up. You gotta leave the area or come indoors, you—」

「no tomb not tomb dark tomb dead things badness dark smelly bad bleh bleh. bleeeeeh!」

「We all know how you feel about the tomb. I’m sorry. But it’s the only structure sturdy enough to withstand the storm. Iriko, please, you’re going to get hurt. You need to come inside, or flee, or take some kind of shelter.」 Vicky did a big sigh; Vicky liked doing big sighs. 「Iriko, we’re on a serious time limit here. That storm is going to rip a canyon straight through the city. Come on, girl, don’t be stubborn now. You gotta understand this. Do I need to put Elpi on? Or Serin, you’ll listen to Serin, right?」

Iriko understood perfectly well. She knew all about typhoons and hurricanes and great big storms. She couldn’t remember any specific storms from before being like this — her memory was still a shattered window of broken fragments, which she knew she would never restore. But she got the gist of it. Big wind, lots of rain.

She also knew this storm was special. She didn’t need Pheiri’s big clever eyes and the panicked voices of the zombies to tell her that. The leading edge of the storm had chased the worm-guard away from the limit of the graveworm’s safe-zone a couple of hours earlier. When the ceiling of black cloud had started to dip and bulge toward the earth, the worm-guard had scuttled off through the ruins. Pheiri’s long-range sensors showed that they’d retreated into the shelter of the graveworm’s body itself, huddling beneath the vast curve of dark grey metal.

The storm had cleared a path for Pheiri and Iriko to strike inward for the tomb.

But Iriko wasn’t going to take shelter inside that tomb. She hated tombs! She couldn’t remember why, but tombs were very dangerous. Tombs were the most likely place to die, over and over again. She would get eaten if she entered a tomb. Tombs were dark and scary places full of dead things.

But the word itself was a paradox; Iriko found that fascinating, in a way she would not have been able to do so as little as two months earlier.

A ‘tomb’ was a place where you put the bodies of dead people. But the tombs here made people anew, bringing them back from the dead. The massive black metal pyramid which reared toward the sagging black belly of the sky was not a ‘tomb’ at all. It was the opposite of a tomb.

Iriko composed a poem about that paradox. The rain was falling heavier now, splashing across the top of her body, coating her refractive armour, and running down her sides, to pool in the cement surroundings of the city below.

「not dead but only
resting in eternity.
returned, for eating.」

Iriko decided she didn’t like that poem. It was another failure. She didn’t broadcast it, not to Pheiri or any of his zombies. She filed it away in the new parts of her mind where she kept notes and scraps and other such failed poems.

「Iriko? Iriko, hey, come on, say something!」 Vicky was still broadcasting down the tight-beam. 「You can’t just sit up there on a rooftop and ride this one out. At least get down to ground level and into a tunnel or something! Come on, girl!」

Iriko heard other zombies in the background — Kagami and Pira and Elpida, arguing about something, clattering about with their guns and armour plates. Somebody started shouting about risky behaviour.

Suddenly a new voice crackled down the tight-beam.

Elpida said: 「Iriko, I’m leaving Pheiri and pushing into the tomb, with a team of five. If you’re staying on-station instead of running from the storm, I need you ready for network interdiction.」

Vicky spluttered behind Elpida: 「Elpi, she can’t fucking stay out there! The winds will rip her apart—」

「Not if she gets into the tomb or gets underground. Do you read, Iriko? Do you understand?」 Elpida paused. Iriko didn’t feel like answering. 「You need to enter the tomb or get underground. I know you can do it, for me and for Pheiri. Iriko? Iriko, I want you to acknowledge me, please. Get into the tomb or get underground. Iriko, acknowledge please. Iriko. Iriko. Acknowledge—」

「pppppffffffffftttttt!!!」

Iriko blew a big raspberry down the tight-beam, then cut the connection.

Elpida was only trying to be nice, but Elpida’s ‘nice’ was so pushy! Besides, Iriko did not feel like running and hiding anymore. She had spent so much time running and hiding. Now things were different.

Iriko decided to enjoy the storm.

The wind began to shriek and wail between the taller concrete buildings, just as Pheiri and Vicky had said would happen. Tentacles of wind tugged and pulled at loose boards and hanging beams, whipping up whirls of grit and dust, sending great swirling torrents of sideways rain splattering against broken windows, running down the brickwork and the exposed steel in great flows of crashing water.

Iriko lay flat on the roof for a while and watched all this, anchored to the concrete with hard spikes of extruded metal and special bone from the underside of her body; this storm wasn’t anything like the other storm a couple of months ago, the storm caused by that great shining golden diamond in the sky. This storm could not be eaten, which Iriko found very disappointing — it was just wind and rain. On the other hand, this storm wasn’t dangerous in the same way. No beast lurked at the centre of the maelstrom, nor did the wind burn Iriko’s flesh with anything more than friction.

Iriko extended special armoured eyes into the wind, followed by thin tentacles covered in millions of microscopic hairs. She added infra-red, echolocation, and a big messy clutch of predictive algorithms.

She almost giggled. Was she really going to do this? How naughty!

This was the precise opposite of what Pheiri had suggested she do. She wondered if his zombies would start to panic when they realised her plan. She had to do it now, before she lost her nerve.

Iriko retracted all her bone-and-metal anchor spikes, launched herself off the rooftop with a single muscular heave, and went surfing through the sky.

First she flattened her body to catch the wind, riding the powerful surge of air between rows of buildings, adjusting the surface of her skin to keep it hydrophobic and glossy, cutting through the rain with the edge of her sail. She extended her senses and identified a likely group of zombies down in the ruins below, busy eating each other and pulling bionics off a kill. Iriko narrowed herself into an aerodynamic, bone-tipped dart, and dive-bombed directly into the group of advanced zombies two hundred feet below, cushioning her impact on the wind itself with outstretched flaps of flesh. Her landing scattered half her prey, though she fluttered to earth as delicately as a leaf; she ate the other half, let the runners go, then spread her body wide to catch the wind beneath her fleshy sails once again. She whirled upward between the buildings, carried off in a spiral around the vast black bulk of the tomb.

Iriko liked this very much.

Ever since she had rescued Pheiri by diving off a skyscraper, Iriko had dreamed of trying to fly, but her body was simply too heavy. She had done some secret experiments with wings and pressure-based propulsion, but those had ended in failure. She was too big, too ungainly, too messy. The failed experiments had made her want to hide away again, slink off into the dark, and stop showing the ruin of her body to Pheiri and all his zombies.

But they hadn’t cared. Pheiri never cared. So Iriko had not given up entirely.

And now, in these incredible winds, she achieved lift-off with such ease.

The hurricane was beautiful. Great swirls of coal-black cloud were piled up on the horizon like a tilted stack of gigantic plates, each one racing forward and melting into sheets of pouring rain, replaced from below by layers of gathering storm. The nearer skies churned like the innards of an iron cauldron filled with boiling pitch, whipping itself into a vortex of rotten black.

Iriko composed three poems in mid-flight. Two of them were failures, but the third was passable. She tidied it up a bit and then broadcast it in the open, so any nearby zombies with suitable communications equipment would hear her work. She used to be so terrified of doing that sort of thing, but fear itself trembled beneath the need for others to hear her speak.

「wind and rain the gods
have called down upon me
but I laugh and fly!」

Iriko picked up a few scattered responses on local radio frequencies: 「—the fuck was that?! Alice, Alice, was that you? Did you fucking hear that, somebody is shouting poems into this storm—」; 「—shut up shut up shut up! Get out of my heeeeead you bastard—」; 「—cut that open frequency, something’s using it to mess with—」; 「Mediocre, at best.」

Iriko tried to reply to that last one; she wanted to hear the critic’s thoughts in more detail. But whoever it was flooded their own connection with jamming data and squirted a series of low-grade recursive viruses back up Iriko’s tentative tight-beam. Iriko squashed the viruses. How rude!

She satisfied herself with more food instead. Iriko slammed down amid groups of easily detected zombies, falling upon them from the sky, using the wind to speed up or slow down whenever she needed. She crashed through walls and straight into ongoing cannibal feasts, declaring herself the most essential uninvited guest; she landed behind ongoing firefights with a slam of concrete and brick, then ate the largest and most easily disoriented zombies; she rode the wind through hand-span gaps between buildings and fell upon clever revenants who were themselves about to ambush others — others who were more sensibly fleeing the hurricane.

In a concession to Elpida, Iriko did her best not to eat those who were running away from the storm or just hiding and keeping to themselves. But she couldn’t be sure. Certainty was impossible. What Elpida didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

The flying — or rather, gliding, as Iriko admitted to herself — required a great deal of very complicated calculations, all done inside Iriko’s mind. She could not have done any of this two months earlier, before Pheiri and the edible storm and all the talking she always did with Pheiri’s zombies.

This would have been impossible when distracted by hunger.

Iriko was still hungry, of course. She was always hungry. She would always be hungry, no matter how many zombies she ate. Even after she had absorbed so much biomass and uncountable nanomachines from the edible storm — then spent quite a bit of that biomass saving Pheiri, of course — she had felt the hunger ebb back over the next few days, leeching the clarity of mind she had so briefly felt.

But the hunger was easier to endure these days, because Iriko was not alone.

Prior to meeting Pheiri, most of Iriko’s conversations had been with those zombies she was about to eat. Such conversations had been necessarily quite short, and often ended inconclusively. But now Iriko spoke with Pheiri every single day and every single night. Pheiri was not the best conversational partner; he rarely communicated in actual words, preferring to share sensor readout data, pieces of his own internal functions, or short sets of curt instructions.

But still, he talked.

At first Iriko had misinterpreted the regular twice-daily broadcasts Pheiri always sent, no matter how much or how little they had spoken on any given day: 「location and status update report CRITICAL PRIORITY」, always followed by 「proximity acknowledgement POSITIVE. retain supporting coherency」

After the dozenth time, Iriko realised these broadcasts always came at first light and total dusk. Pheiri was saying good night and good morning! And asking her to stay close, in case they should need each other.

This had made Iriko so happy that she’d sent Pheiri half a dozen poems. Pheiri had not supplied an opinion on those poems. He must have been embarrassed!

Over the last two months, Pheiri had warmed to her, or so Iriko surmised from the implication of his guarded attitude. Pheiri was a very silly boy, after all. He liked to send her logic puzzles and chemical equations, things for her to chew on with her newly sharpened mind. He had sent her chemical compounds to improve the scales of her refractive armour and another set to heighten the potency of her various acid extrusion methods. He had spent two weeks broadcasting increasingly difficult logic puzzles after his morning greeting each day — strange many-angled shapes which unfolded inside Iriko’s mind into much more complex arrangements. Each shape plugged into the results of the previous puzzles, building a vast trapezohedron in fourteen steps. When the trapezohedron was complete, the new shape formed a fresh puzzle which required all the tricks and principles Iriko had learned by solving each previous step; the moment she had completed the puzzle she had felt as if her mind expanded. She had paused to check her body for any signs of rogue organs or cancerous grey matter growth, but there was nothing physical to the effect. A few days later, Pheiri had sent her the chemical and molecular formula of his beautiful bone-armour; Iriko had tried to replicate the material, but she’d found that her own cells did not turn in the right direction.

Pheiri’s zombies — his ‘crew’ — spoke to Iriko as well, even if not quite as often as Pheiri himself. Iriko had gotten to know them as best she could. Elpida made sure to check in with her every day and ask if she had spotted anything important, but Elpida was all business all the time, and Howl was a little bit scary. Serin spoke now and then, but Serin liked to talk in riddles and Iriko could tell Serin did not actually enjoy Iriko’s responses. Atyle liked Iriko a lot, but Atyle was impossible and spoke nothing but nonsense. Pira was weird and difficult; she liked to monologue at Iriko, and Iriko didn’t like the subjects. Amina came by now and again too, but she seemed to find it challenging to speak for prolonged periods. Kagami had stopped in to talk quite often, but she was an angry little zombie and didn’t like Iriko’s poetry; Iriko knew that Kagami was using her as a kind of sounding board, first to rant about the difficulties of her meat-plant project, then to rant about how Victoria was a primitive fool with no sense of romance or timing. Iriko didn’t like that, because Vicky was nice to her.

But no matter how weird or troublesome the zombies could be, they just kept talking.

Iriko was not alone. Not being alone made thinking easier. Iriko discovered that she could hold onto thoughts for longer, even beneath the weight of ever-present hunger.

Words became easier, too. Poetry had come oozing back into Iriko’s mind.

She knew on some level that her poems were terrible. She was using language clumsily and shamefully, in ways that some vaguely defined prior self would have been horrified and disgusted by. She knew she had been good at poetry once. Beautiful people and clever people had liked her poetry. They would not like her now.

But to Iriko, these words were still beautiful, even if she could not do much. So she kept going, and hoped the other Iriko — the older one, before she’d been ‘Iriko’ — would understand the need to continue.

After about half an hour of zipping through the air and eating zombies, the storm stopped being fun.

The winds blew stronger and stronger and stronger still, tearing crumbly concrete from the edges of the buildings and casting it into the air; the grit and loose chunks started to foul Iriko’s trajectories, rendering her calculations less reliable. The howling wind ripped at less sturdy structures, stripping away roofs and walls, throwing boulders of brick and metal into the hurricane-whipped air. Pieces of building smashed into other buildings, exploding with brick dust and sending debris flying everywhere. The rain hammered harder and harder and harder again — hard enough to pelt unprotected flesh with bleeding bruises; walls turned into waterfalls, streets to rushing rivers, broad roads to sheets of flowing froth. The lowest areas of the surrounding city were rapidly choked up with debris-filled waters, turned into deadly swirling stews of loose metal and wood and concrete. The only remaining zombies were held up inside the few sturdy structures — a handful of scattered bunkers or high-ground constructions — so there was nothing left for Iriko to eat or hunt. The beautiful sky darkened as the embers of the shrouded sun vanished, strangled to death behind a low ceiling like a fist dragging itself through the city.

Iriko stopped flying and landed on a high hilltop; the buildings up there had all been wrecked and stripped by the wind, but the rising waters would not reach this high. She could barely control her flight anymore, the wind was too powerful and unpredictable. She anchored herself hard, sending spikes twelve feet down into the concrete and rock. Wind threatened to rip her muscular foot off her perch, so she glued herself to the ground with sticky mucus, then hardened the mucus to rival the best concrete. She made herself rounded and flat and low.

Hail came next — small at first, gathering on the concrete and plinking off Iriko’s refractive mail. The sound was quite pleasing.

But the hailstones grew steadily larger, large enough to shatter glass and dent metal; the sound of them pounding into the waterlogged ruins drowned out all else, deafening Iriko even through the toughened aural organs she kept folded deep within. She added layers of spongy ablative flesh beneath her armour to absorb the repeated impacts.

But then the hailstones kept growing. Concrete began to crack under repeated blows. The wind strengthened beyond anything Iriko had thought possible; even the tiniest tongue of air threatened to rip her from safety and throw her into the spume and scum of water and debris below; Iriko made the outer edge of her body sharp and dug it into the ground as additional anchoring, but then the wind started to tear at the earth itself, pulling up crumb-clouds of concrete and clods of grey mud. Pieces of building larger than Iriko’s body sailed through the air, concrete floating like tissue paper; a few stray fragments slammed into Iriko’s hardened shell, bruising the flesh beneath, cracking the plates of her refractive armour.

A large enough piece of building would sweep her aside like nothing. Iriko pressed herself low.

Iriko could not even see what was happening with any clarity; she dared not extend sense organs beyond her armoured shell. The debris in the wind would strip flesh from bone within seconds, and even the wind itself would tear her apart.

This was too scary. Iriko had left it too late to run.

Vicky’s voice crackled over Pheiri’s tight-beam, almost drowned out by the static of the storm: 「Iriko! Iriko, is that you on that hill? Fuck me, it is you! Why are you still outdoors?!」

Iriko tried to compose a poem in reply, but panic made words hard.

「stupid blob not smart
mistakes made bad time
help can’t come fast now」

「Then get underground! You can swim, right?! All the subterranean stuff around here is flooded, but I know you can grow gills for oxygen if you gotta! Fuck, what am I saying?! We don’t need to breathe, we’re all zombies, you too! Come on girl, just go down! Dig!」

「dark in earth dark dark don’t want to go down trapped in rock trapped trapped」

Iriko wasn’t sure why she was so afraid, but the notion of being stuck underground was worse than being trapped in the storm. She knew she was panicking and being irrational, but she did not wish to go down into the dark.

「Iriko, in about thirty seconds those winds are going to hit eight hundred miles an hour! You have to go underground! Girl, please, come on! We can’t help you right now, Pheiri’s driving deeper into the tomb. Fuck, we couldn’t even come out there if we wanted to! The tomb is gonna be the only thing left standing! Just come and join us. Come on, girl! You can do it, being underground isn’t scary at all!」 Vicky’s voice moved away from the microphone. 「Mel! Mel, we need Pheiri to talk to her or something, she’s not fucking going, she’s going to die out there! She—」

Pheiri interrupted the raw audio with a packet string of three chemical equations and a topographical structure map of a three dimensional shape.

Iriko squealed with delight. Pheiri had been holding out on her. Cheeky boy!

She synthesized the compounds Pheiri specified. She almost couldn’t make them; these were similar to the composition of Pheiri’s bone-armour, and her cells wouldn’t turn the right way. Iriko had to find workarounds, but she worked fast, and she found her way around.

The first was a fast-acting superacid; she squirted it from the underside of her body in a nice thick fat layer, directly onto the blackened rocky ground. The second chemical was a kind of foaming agent, rapidly clearing the layers of melted rock. Iriko dropped into the hole she had just burned; rain and hail sloshed after her, filling the shallow burrow with deep water and concrete debris. Iriko squirted the final compound upward — an expanding artificial concrete sealant, plugging the hole and plunging her into darkness.

Iriko dived into the filthy water, churning the mixture into a soup of mud and gritty mess. Her sides blossomed with bioluminescent lamp-organs. She extended her front downward and formed a dozen versions of the topographical design Pheiri had sent.

Drills! Big drills, with side-scoops and special angles for added efficiency!

Iriko cut through the earth, burrowing deep, away from the surface and the sky and the hurricane which ruled both.

Iriko had never been underground before. She had explored basement levels and subterranean tunnels and the like, but that wasn’t the same as digging through the rock and soil itself. The concept terrified her for some reason she could not place, some piece of herself lost deep in her broken memory. The earth would surely trap her and crush her to death! But now she melted and burned her way through her very own tunnels, coating them with slick purple sealant as she went, to stop them from collapsing behind her as she wormed through the snug embrace of rock and stone. All her earlier fears melted away, just like the earth before her scoop-drills and her squirts of acid. With Pheiri’s help she could do anything, even swim in the soil like it was the sea.

She dug through layers of solid rock and burst out into flooded underground bunkers and sub-level tunnels of the buildings above, plunging back into the earth on the opposite side after drinking her fill to fuel fresh acid synthesis. She wormed deep into the open veins of natural cave systems, popping out and dropping through the black abyss before catching herself and squirming back into the tight arms of the living rock. She ploughed through layers of tight-packed soil, bursting ancient pipes and crashing through brick walls and splitting tree-trunk-width bundles of cable and wire.

After ten minutes of wild headlong flight from the storm above, Iriko slowed down and learned to navigate. She used bursts of echolocation and sweeps of deep-penetration radar to map the rock and underground concrete and the empty spaces of open caverns.

And when she looked closely, Iriko discovered something new.

The tomb — the towering black metal edifice which ripped zombies back to life — was more than just a pyramid.

Iriko’s radar returns showed that the tomb structure was mirrored beneath the ground; black metal pyramid-steps descended in reverse, toward an apex-tip pointed down, into the bowels of the earth. The black metal was pressed flush against layers of rock and soil. The whole structure was more like a sharp-ridged octahedron, embedded exactly halfway into the ground. Iriko found this very curious, but she couldn’t tell if it was important. She broadcast this information back to Pheiri, just in case, as she swam through the earth and circled the underside of the tomb, making sure of her observations. She drew close enough for a better look, but there wasn’t much to see; the underside of the tomb did not have windows or doors or any way in and out.

Pheiri replied with a plain acknowledgement ping. Iriko prepared a teasing retort at Pheiri’s taciturn treatment — but then another voice spoke first, into Iriko’s mind.

「Hey, blob girl!」 Howl yelled. 「Nice job getting down there! Be ready to rumble!」

Iriko didn’t like Howl’s voice; Howl gave Iriko the creeps.

Howl was fine when she spoke through Elpida’s mouth, but Iriko didn’t like it when Howl spoke directly into Iriko’s mind. Iriko never understood where Howl’s voice came from — it felt like a tight-beam connection, but it wasn’t. When Pheiri spoke via tight-beam, Iriko could trace the broadcast back to his current physical location. But Howl’s voice seemed to come from nowhere, with no broadcast origin. Iriko understood why this was; Howl had taught her about the network. But the sensation still made Iriko want to curl up and go quiet, in hopes that Howl would stop being so damned spooky.

Iriko sent back: 「what what ready for what ready ready?」

「I’m about to flush a Necromancer back into the network! Remember everything we talked about? You got a meal coming your way! You’re up, Iriiiiii!」

Iriko forgot all about Howl being creepy.

This was the moment she’d prepared for! This was Iriko’s second special mission.

「need help help iriko help?!」

「Nah!」 Howl cackled. 「Pretty sure we got this bitch! But be ready. She’ll be fast, just like I told you. Give it your best shot, blob-queen. Scare the shit out of her for me, hey? I’m about to give this cunt-face a set of bruises to remember!」

Howl cut the tight-beam.

Iriko went still and silent inside her underground burrow, conserving resources, preparing her heart for the task ahead; she did not have a real heart right then, of course, that would be wildly inefficient, but she considered growing one anyway so she could count the beats.

It was very quiet underground. Quiet and dark and empty. The hurricane was a distant static hum, far away, up on the surface, powerful but muted.

Iriko felt very nervous. She’d never done this before.

Howl had taught Iriko about the network; Howl had kept it simple, avoided technical terms, and stuck to metaphors. Iriko had felt offended by that at first — she was not stupid, she understood more than she could express with words. But then Iriko had realised that Howl did not understand the network either. All the other zombies got the same metaphors from Howl, same as Iriko, same as Pheiri, same as Elpida. Iriko had felt much better after that.

Iriko did not have what Howl called ‘network access’. Apparently that was impossible.

But Howl had taught Iriko how to make special senses, to observe large enough things moving through the network; Elpida had climbed down from Pheiri’s back one day and plunged her naked arm into Iriko’s body, so Howl could show Iriko how the senses should be made.

Iriko reformed and extended those special sense organs now: delicate tendril-clusters linked to gyroscopes of bone and metal held inside her core; miniature vibration-sensitive organs which contained isolated nanomachines in tiny vacuum sacks; wide plates of reactive chemical suspended between sheets of super-cooled flesh.

When the Necromancer fled — because Howl was going to give her a set of bruises? Iriko decided that was another metaphor — Iriko would be able to see the Necromancer moving across the nanomachines themselves. Iriko could not see into the network, just as she could not see the wind of the hurricane above ground. But she could measure the direction and strength of the wind through observation of what the wind acted upon. She would know the Necromancer’s escape route by the same method.

Iriko waited in stillness and silence. Minutes ticked by.

A little of the old fear crept back. Buried underground. Crushed beneath rock. Pinned, breathless, starving, eating pieces of—

There!

At the tip of the inverted pyramid, a ripple passed through the nanomachines embedded in the rock and soil, spreading outward in a dozen different directions, so tiny that no senses would have noticed the passing, except those designed by another Necromancer.

Iriko cried out in frustration — the Necromancer was going in twelve different directions at once! How could Iriko hope to—

「Get after her, blob-girl!」 Howl shrieked into Iriko’s head. 「You don’t have to get them all! Just one is brilliant!」

Iriko surged forward through the rock and soil, melting and burning and squirming and worming.

The Necromancer’s passage was faster than Iriko could move — faster even than the winds of the hurricane above ground. Iriko selected the nearest of the twelve offshoots and arced sideways to head it off, taking her one chance at successful interception.

Iriko slammed through the roof of an open cavern and dropped straight down into darkness, falling faster than she could have dug, tumbling past walls of dead rock. For a split-second she drew level with the Necromancer’s invisible ripple, a tiny signal on the network, racing downward six inches below the rock face.

Iriko reached out with a specialised, thickened, armoured pseudopod, and formed a massive acid-dripping maw laced with a special metal cage structure — a ‘Faraday Cage’, Kagami had called it. She opened those jaws wide and lashed out toward the wall of rock, to bite deep into the stone and entrap this tiny mote of fleeing Necromancer.

The rock wall exploded outward with golden-white light.

A burning face of pale marble and melting wax thrust itself from the wall of the cavern, keeping pace with Iriko as she fell through the darkness. The face cried tears of white fire, expression warped with spurned fury, bow-shaped girlish lips twisted with spite and rejection. The light was so bright it melted Iriko’s metal cage-mouth and burned away the specialised pseudopod. Her skin began to boil and bubble and cook; parts of her refractive mail began to blacken and burn. All the bioluminescent lamp-organs on one side of her body burst and sprayed the wall with fluids, droplets sizzling into smoke as the light consumed them.

The face — the Necromancer — screamed into the cavern, drowning out the hurricane above, voice like all the storms of the world combined into one.

“Treated like so much meat! Pounded and beaten, and not even a word of care! I hate her I hate her I hate her I hate her!”

Iriko ran away.

She shot out drag-lines of thick ropey tentacle and grabbed the opposite wall, fleeing from the Necromancer’s burning mask. Iriko slammed herself into the side of the cavern, then burrowed into the rock with Pheiri’s special superacid, sealing the way behind her as quickly as she could. The burning face fell into the darkness of the cave behind her, then went out like a fire snuffed beneath the waters.

Iriko did not stay to watch. She got out of there.

She dug upward, heading back toward the surface, toward the tomb. She did not want to remain underground with that thing, that tiny piece of a Necromancer, lurking down there among the horrible deep rocks. She had thought Necromancers were small and easy to eat, just like zombies except for that trick where they could freeze parts of her body. But now she knew better.

She surfaced right next to the tomb itself, on the side facing away from the hurricane and the terrible winds and the worst of the hail. The tomb was on high ground, safe from most of the flooding. Iriko burst out of the earth and slumped against the base of the tomb, cold black metal kissing her skin.

The air itself tore at Iriko’s body, high-speed winds ripping around the walls of black metal on either side. Hailstones pounded at her armour, cracking the bone and metal and pockmarking her flesh beneath with hundreds of bruises, exploiting the damage already done by the Necromancer’s white-hot fury.

Tight-beam broadcast crackled inside her mind. Vicky again: 「Iriko! Iriko, holy shit, girl, you need to get back below ground! The winds are going to hit nine hundred miles an hour, you won’t—」

「in we sadly slink
sad and wet is not enough
iriko is scared」

「 … you’re coming into the tomb?」 Vicky’s voice softened. Vicky was kind. Iriko wanted to talk more, but she was getting very hungry and that made it harder to think. She wasn’t sure how she had composed the poem. Perhaps it was shame. 「Okay, okay, come on, come on in, quickly, get inside. There’s zombies other than us in here now, but nothing which could threaten you. Get in, Iriko. Quick as you can now, come on!」

Iriko did not need telling twice. She climbed the massive metal steps of the tomb pyramid, sliding upward while clinging to the surface against the pull of the wind, thickening her armour to soak up the blows of the hailstorm as best she could. The wind howled around the sides of the tomb, making the structure creak and groan. Beyond the tomb, the city was a wall of grey rain and dense hail and the wild slashing and whirling of wind. The hurricane had swallowed everything.

A broken window stood exposed about a third of the way up the tomb pyramid. The glass was very thick — three feet, at least, but it had not survived the hail. Iriko pulled herself through the gap and out of the rain. The wind still tugged at her, so she squeezed herself down several narrow corridors and up a stairwell, until she was finally beyond the hurricane’s reach.

Iriko sat quite still for almost an hour, mending her armour, healing her bruises, tending to her burned skin. The damage was not too bad; the shock had been worse than the actual pain or lost biomass. The embarrassment was worse. She and Pheiri exchanged acknowledgement pings; he was fine, but very busy, thank you. Some of the zombies asked her if she was okay. Iriko said yes, she was alright, but she didn’t feel like composing a poem about it. She listened to the sounds of the storm and the odd sounds inside the tomb. She tried not to think about tombs.

After another half hour, Elpida spoke over the radio. 「You get the Necromancer, Iriko?」

「no nope no failed」

「That’s alright. Thank you for trying. You did your best, and I’m proud of you. Pheiri tells me you took some damage from the storm, and from Lykke. That’s the Necromancer’s name, Lykke. Did she hurt you very badly? Do you need biomass? We’ve got a lot of corpses down here, more than we can process. None of our own though. Everyone’s okay. We’ve picked up a few new faces, so be careful please, don’t eat them by mistake. Iriko? Iriko, are you there?」

「don’t want go down down is bad」

Elpida paused. 「We can bring a couple of corpses up to you, if you want. Did you enter the tomb through a broken window, or a skylight?」

「yes yes window shatter smash」

「I’ll come up and see you, then. I want to get a look at this storm with my own eyes. The way you entered might be the best spot to take a look. Don’t move far, okay? We’ll be up to see you shortly. Shout to Pheiri if anything happens or if you see any unfamiliar revenants. Stay safe.」

Elpida signed off.

Iriko extended some long meaty pseudopods back down the route she’d taken from the broken window, to peer out at the storm beyond. She stayed like that for several minutes, watching the churning vortex of clouds, listening to the screaming wind and the pounding rain, and the drumming of massive hailstones bouncing off the black metal of the tomb pyramid.

The storm did not seem to be moving; the hurricane had stopped directly overhead, as if trying to demolish the tomb.

Iriko was pretty sure storms were not meant to do that. No wonder Elpida wanted to have a good look.