Ooni’s hope and clarity guttered out, revealing a wasteland of ashes and agony.
Her body was a boiling crucible overflowing with burnt flesh and ruptured nerves. Kuro’s iron forearm pinned her chest and one of Kuro’s suit-mounted weapons was jammed beneath her chin, but Ooni couldn’t feel that anymore. The tides of pain washed it all away, dragging her down into the currents of a black and endless sea. Her vision was a dark red smear, reducing the mysterious tomb-chamber to a cursed dusk of black on black. Her comrades, her friends, the other daughters of Telokopolis, they were not even outlines in the dark. Elpida was a blur of off-white in her carapace. Ilyusha was a suggestion of deeper red. Shilu was invisible. Ooni’s only hope of salvation was an iridescent stain wavering in the middle of her sight; Iriko was her only hope of a meaningful end.
“We’re not leaving without our comrade!” Elpida was shouting. Her voice was amplified by the carapace helmet, but to Ooni’s ears it seemed to come from beyond a crushing weight of dark water. “If that means we have to let you go, then so be it. But you are not leaving with her. This is non-negotiable.”
Somebody shouted back, down in the black at Ooni’s side. One of the Death’s Heads. “You’ll fucking kill us the moment Kuro puts her down! Why should we trust a word out of you, degenerate!?”
Ooni tried to figure out who that was. Surely she recognised the voice? But she was sinking deeper into the pain, into an endless empty void where she should have found herself staring back.
“You can choose to trust me,” Elpida shouted. “Or we can kill you all. Put her down, now.”
A quavering, broken, blood-choked voice coughed a few words; for a second, Ooni thought it was her own. “Per-perhaps we should … should do as they … ”
Yolanda, weeping through her shattered jaw. Finally she and Ooni had one thing in common — a broken mandible.
“Shut up,” somebody else hissed, tight and hard with rancid anger. Cantrelle.
Kuro’s external speakers clicked and hissed. “Order your monster away.”
Ooni tried to speak. She needed to plead with Elpida not to fall for this trick. But all that came from her throat was a dull whine, drowning in pain, more animal than revenant.
“Put her down first,” Elpida repeated. “Then we can negotiate.”
“You all fucking die, you rotten reptile fuck-rags!” Ilyusha, screaming mad. She made her shotgun go click-clunk; the sound was so sharp and clear that it cut through the murk of Ooni’s torment. She groped for that sound, held onto it as hard as she could, and promised herself she would remember. No matter the circumstances of her next resurrection, she swore to herself that she would always remember Ilyusha and Noyabrina. “That’s ours fucking terms!” Ilyusha screeched. “I’ll eat your faces and wear your guts over my shoulders! I’ll shit out your fucking eyeballs! Fucking put her down! Put her down! Down!”
Long aching seconds followed. Ooni couldn’t hear the hurricane over the rasp of her laboured breathing, the scrape of her shattered jaw, and the silent screaming of her flesh as it burnt away inside.
“Your … k-kind,” said Yolanda. Her voice was a wet weep, thick with swollen tissues, tongue clumsy, teeth broken. She slurred her words as if she could not fully open her mouth. “Your kind never know … never know when the hard choices must be made. This … this is the moment. You should have … k-killed us already, if you were going to. But you w-won’t—”
“Yolanda,” Cantrelle hissed. “Quiet—”
“No — no!” Yolanda snapped. “I speak … I speak truth. Let me speak now. I have always spoken nothing but truth. Even when I was not … m-myself. Even to … t-to you, my Ella. And now I speak … t-truth to these … these fallen things, these degenerate fools. You, y-yes, you. Elpida the Telokopolan. I know what you … what you are. I was told, instructed, educated. You … you are a memory of the most foolish of times. And thus … thus … thus—”
A clatter of armour broke into Yolanda’s heaving stutter, followed by a hiss of frustration and a high-pitched whine of pain. Had Yolanda fallen, overcome by her wounds? Somebody had dragged her back upright, and none too kindly.
A moment of wet sobbing passed, then an indrawn breath like the flutter of exposed lungs. Yolanda continued.
“Thus … thus I know, you will not make the necessary sacrifice here. You will … you will risk everything, for the sake of one filthy apostate.”
Elpida didn’t rise to the bait. “We will let you go, in exchange for Ooni. That’s the only possible deal here. If you take her with you, we’ll kill you all.”
Ooni gurgled, throat wet with blood, choked by the pain of her fractured jaw. She needed to make Elpida understand that wasn’t an option. The Sisterhood would find a way to take Ooni away. They would take her and torture her. A quick, clean, easy death here would be victory, a real victory, over the Death’s Heads! Anything else, any deal that allowed them to live to fight another day, Ooni could not bear the thought.
“You would … kill us regardless,” Yolanda replied. “She is our insurance.”
“You’ll kill her as soon as she’s out of our sight,” said Elpida. “That’s no deal.”
Ooni tried to sob. Elpida did not understand. How could she? The unblemished legitimate daughter of a real goddess. She did not understand what the Sisterhood would do to Ooni. They would not kill her quickly.
Kuro’s speakers crackled. “The deal is already struck. She will be returned to you outdoors, once the storm has passed.”
“No deal—”
“Call off your monster. Do it now.”
Kuro’s weapon forced Ooni’s head up and back; Ooni gurgled with a spike of additional pain.
A moment of silence unfolded — too long, stretching out so that Ooni started to lose herself on the sucking waves of agony. But then that iridescent smear in the middle of her vision started to shrink and recede. Iriko was backing away, leaving the chamber.
“N-no!” Ooni whined, forcing her lungs to work against the mass of shattered ribs. “No, kill … me … ‘pida … please … ”
Her voice was so pitiful that she doubted even Kuro could hear.
Furtive whispers rustled somewhere behind Ooni, behind Kuro. Ooni realised the Death’s Heads were trying to get the wounded Yolanda to open the wall again, with whatever trick the ghosts had imparted to her, while Kuro was tied up holding Ooni hostage. A wet ripping sound rippled at the edge of Ooni’s hearing — the sound of the black metal wall peeling back like warm tar.
The tomb chamber started to blacken at the edges, as if being swallowed by the darkness, closed in a fist of night. Ooni felt little jolts of torture jostle her shattered ribs, her broken wrist, the throbbing mass of her bruised shoulder. Kuro was walking backward, step by step, taking Ooni with her.
Ooni cried out, a mangled retch clawing up her glass-scoured throat. She put everything she had into a final scream, spraying flecks of blood, clawing at Kuro’s arm. She reached out one hand — her burned hand, still encased in Ilyusha’s resin — toward the shrinking figures of Elpida and Ilyusha, one a white smear, the other a red-tinted shadow. She couldn’t even see Shilu. Iriko was gone.
“—Elpida—” she whined, “—please—”
And then the darkness closed in, tightening on a tiny circle of the world. Ooni realised it was the wall between chambers, easing shut like tar flowing closed over her head, cutting her off from her comrades, from Telokopolis.
In the final split-second before the wall slid shut, Ooni was granted a single blink of unclouded vision, dizzying and blinding with sudden clarity.
She saw the eyes of the gravekeeper interface, propped in its upright coffin.
Rotten eyes, dead and glassy, met her own. Then they flickered downward, as if looking at her wounds, her broken ribs, her charred armour plates. And then they were gone, sinking into the black, replaced once again by the blurred crimson smears of Ooni’s failing sight.
A vision? A message? Ooni’s mind groped and kicked, trying to gain the surface of the ocean. But the message had seemed like nothing. A final mockery from the nightmares in the network? A lingering goodbye from the goddess who had so briefly touched her mind? Or just the spasm of an old corpse?
Ooni could not swim. She floated down through the darkness and the pain. Time stretched out, meaningless so deep in death’s iron grip. Nothing had meaning anymore, not after this final and most terrible betrayal.
Telokopolis had abandoned her. Elpida had abandoned her. Hope and clarity and purpose, all had fled her. If only Iriko had not paused at the sight of Ooni clasped in Kuro’s arms, with the threat of Ooni’s death as a shield for the Sisterhood of the Skull. At least then Ooni’s death would have meant something — she would have been a single sacrifice to secure the final end of the Sisterhood. All of them would have died beneath Iriko’s bulk, or trapped by the acid of her grinding innards. Kuro, Yolanda, Cantrelle, and whoever else who had survived the grenades and Ilyusha’s ambush. The Sisterhood of the Skull would have been no more, scattered in time, forced back to the cycle of resurrection, all for the paltry price of Ooni’s pitiful skin.
Ooni sobbed. She wasn’t sure if real tears were running down her cheeks, but she felt the weeping inside. She cried not for herself or the drawn-out, messy, awful death that she was about to endure — because her former Sisters would not make it quick or clean, oh no; they were going to pull her apart while she was still alive, they would eat pieces of her in front of her eyes, and Kuro would do worse, far worse before the end. Kuro would dismantle her, physically and otherwise. But Ooni didn’t weep for herself. Ooni wept because Yolanda was right. The prophet and leader of the Sisterhood had proven herself correct.
If only Elpida had been willing to sacrifice Ooni, then Telokopolis would have won. But Telokopolis could not protect her own.
The Death’s Heads had been right all along.
Ooni retracted to a nub of awareness deep inside her flesh, coming to settle on the floor of her empty ocean. The floating stopped — Kuro must have drawn to a halt — but Ooni could see nothing apart from dark smears and lightless smudges. She heard the rasping of several sets of lungs, panting with adrenaline comedown.
“Is this it?” somebody asked, hissing through their own dram of pain. “Is this all that’s left? Fuck me … ”
Elodie. How had she survived such close proximity to Ilyusha’s shotgun?
A click-buzz echoed off distant walls, as if the last of the Sisterhood stood huddled in a vaulted chamber. “You’re shot.”
DeeGee, with the last suit of powered armour. She sounded intact.
“No shit,” Elodie snapped back. “What gave it away, all the blood? Fuck me, that little cunt thing with the tail was fast. Fucking bitch, ffffuck!”
“This is it, then,” said somebody else — Teuta? “And then there were six.” She heaved and grunted, which was followed by a clatter of gear against the ground. “There, that’s Durock, but she’s dead. We’ll need the meat. You’re welcome, by the way.”
A gurgle of pain was cut by a sharp hiss. Yolanda coughed herself clear, then said: “A nucleus, from which to r-rebuild. We are … d-delivered, once again. The hand of providence returned our Kuro to us, in our hour of greatest need.”
DeeGee said, “Kuro, you’re damaged. You’re venting rads, girl. And your power sigs are—”
Click-buzz. “Ignore it.”
“I can hardly believe this one little apostate did so much … d-damage,” Yolanda hissed, then trailed off with a croak of pain. She made a series of wet sucking sounds, like she was struggling to get her broken jaw back into position using only her tongue. “I … I w-want … unnnghhh … ” Her voice broke again, silenced by agony. “I want her … f-flayed. Kuro? Kuro, do you understand? I want her to feel every inch of … t-this. Do you hear me, apostate?” Yolanda hissed. “Ooni?”
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Ooni heard, but she didn’t care. She felt a hand on her face, saw a pale blur before her eyes.
Yolanda had already won in every way that mattered. Everything which happened from this moment onward held no further meaning. Yolanda was correct — about Elpida, about Telokopolis, about Ooni. Yolanda had been right all along. That was how she had gotten away with it. She was correct, and so she had won. Ooni could see nothing else through the infinity of dark water but that one truth, the truth that negated all others.
Yola’s face coiled and drifted before her, a pale soot-stained smear, bruised and bloody, with a ring of contusions blossoming around her right eye socket, the imprint of Ooni’s knuckles.
A battered spark of Ooni’s former clarity struggled back to life inside her chest, not quite dead. It was not enough to boil away the sea of pain, but it gifted her something akin to a clear thought.
Yolanda hadn’t escaped yet, had she? Ooni was still here. If only Ooni had a weapon, if only there was a way to—
The spark brightened. Memory peeled back like rotten flesh from clean bone. The gravekeeper interface — it had looked down, not at Ooni’s body or her wounds or in pity for her wretched state and the way she would meet her end at the hands of her former sisters. No, it had looked at the armour carapace, at the hip and thigh plates.
Her sidearm!
In all the chaos and the pain, Ooni had forgotten about the pistol. She’d picked it up back in that tiny circular room where Kuro had imprisoned her and Ilyusha, along with her submachine gun and the trio of grenades. The grenades were used up, the submachine gun was gone, but the sidearm was tucked safely away in her left-side thigh-compartment.
All she had to do was draw the gun and take one shot.
If she could achieve that, though Ooni’s own inevitable death would be a terrible one, Yolanda’s proof would mean nothing. Yolanda would be reduced to so much meat, just like everyone else, resurrected again without her followers, her reputation, her armour, her anything. Yolanda would be wrong.
Ooni twitched the fingers of her left hand. Her broken wrist was like hot metal inside her skin, but she felt her fingers move.
Kuro’s high-pitched voice was rasping from her external suit speakers. “Ooni has to remain intact. They will be watching us, mostly through their drones. We must keep her as insurance, as we promised.”
The pale smear in front of Ooni wavered and sank as Yola moved. Ooni forced her eyes wider, forced herself to focus. She would need to see to shoot straight. She’d get one shot, that was all, one moment of surprise.
Yolanda’s face — bloody, beaten, bruised, jaw at a strange angle, green eyes dimmed by pain, hair all covered in soot — floated back out of the haze. She was looking up, over the top of Ooni’s head, at Kuro’s faceplate.
“K-Kuro?” she croaked. Her jaw barely moved as she spoke, words muffled by the fracture. “My darling, my perfect hound, you cannot be … serious. We will not keep promises with such things. The apostate is ours now, is she not? She is ours to dispose of—”
Kuro interrupted. “Your foolishness will get you killed.”
Yola’s eyes widened, even through the pain of her bruises and broken jaw. She stared up at Kuro with a shock that Ooni understood all too well. None should have dared speak to Yolanda that way, especially not Kuro, especially not in front of the rank-and-file. Not that there was much of that left anymore.
Elodie laughed, low and bitter. She was beyond Ooni’s blurred sight. “And you won’t?” she said. “You won’t, Kuro? You left us, you bitch. You left us and that thing started following us, that fucking blob-monster. You abandoned us, you traitor.”
Teuta muttered, though a mouthful of something meaty and wet, “We’re all traitors now. I’m with Kuro. Fuck risking that again.”
Kuro’s speakers crackled. “We must retreat to the edge of the tomb. The storm is ending.”
Yolanda was trying and failing to shake her head.
“How do you know that?” hissed a broken voice.
Cantrelle’s face floated into Ooni’s smeared vision. Her big dark glassy eyes and bald head, her ruined throat, still marked purple by the memory of strangulation. Metal tentacles floated above her. She was bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts across her forehead and cheeks, wearing a mask of drying blood and sticky black soot.
Kuro said nothing. Yolanda turned to hiss something into Cantrelle’s ear, but Cantrelle glared at her with real hatred. Yolanda’s mouth wavered shut.
Ooni moved her left hand as slowly as she dared, inching down her hip. Numb fingers found the edge of her thigh plate. The compartment was still there.
“I said,” Cantrelle rasped up at Kuro. “How do you know that? How do you know the storm is ending?”
Kuro’s voice hissed through a wave of static. “I’ve been told.”
Cantrelle’s face twisted. “More Necromancer bullshit! You betrayed us, Kuro! You’re no better than the apostate—”
DeeGee’s voice floated from somewhere beyond Ooni’s vision. “Hey, hey. Cantrelle. Cool it, hey? She came back to us, she came back—”
Cantrelle whirled away. “She is a fucking traitor! Her and Yolanda, listening to Necromancer voices! Both of them! Yolanda with Necromancer hands up her cunt, and Kuro vanishing into the tomb at the sight of some fucking hologram trick! Traitors, traitors!”
“All traitors now, you stupid shit,” Teuta grunted. An arm waved at the limit of Ooni’s vision. “Have a snack, come on, it’ll cool you down.”
“Fuck you too, you waste of skin!” Cantrelle hissed.
Ooni’s left fingers quivered as she eased open the compartment on her left thigh; the smallest scrape would distract from the argument.
Yolanda mewled with pain. “Ella. Ella, please, let’s just be gone from this—”
Cantrelle rounded on Yolanda. “Never call me that again!” she spat. “You cheating fucking whore. You filthy slut. All the time, all your promises, all of it just rot! Twice, twice you’ve done this! This is who you are! I was a fool to believe in you.”
Cantrelle shoved Yolanda in the chest; Yolanda staggered back two paces, crying out with more than pain.
Ooni slipped her hand inside the compartment. She wrapped her fingers around the sidearm. She could barely feel it, her hand was throbbing with such pain. Her thumb poked at the safety — slowly, slowly — and eased it off. Did she have a round in the chamber? She wasn’t sure, couldn’t remember if she’d fired the gun or primed it. She had no way to rack the slide without being noticed. She had to trust in her own preparation.
Teuta grunted. “Cantrelle, for fuck’s sake. We need to get out of here. Kuro’s right. We run or we die.” A wet slap, meat against meat.
Cantrelle’s face twisted with rage. “Then we die!” she roared, her voice echoing off the distant walls of some vast tomb-chamber. “We all die! None of you were ever worthy of this! Not a single one of you was worthy of the Kingdom of Death! Degenerates and failures and incompetents, all of you! You all die, you all— oof!”
Cantrelle’s words ended in a low groan as somebody smacked her in the gut. A hazy shape in powered armour got one forearm around Cantrelle’s neck and another hand clamped on her tentacles. There was a short scuffle, no punches thrown, but Cantrelle was not in any shape to be wrestling with DeeGee. In a moment, DeeGee had Cantrelle restrained.
“Boss?” DeeGee said from inside her armour. “Yolanda, boss. What do we do with her?”
Yola’s face floated back into Ooni’s dimming field of vision. “Hold her,” Yola slurred. “Don’t … don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt my … my Ella … but we have to leave. Kuro is … c-correct. Kuro?” She turned to Ooni — to Kuro, filling Ooni’s vision with that broken jaw and tear-filled eyes. “But you can’t be serious … about the apostate. She has to … ”
Kuro’s external speakers crackled back to life. “We keep her intact to keep them at bay. When the storm is gone, we leave. We can flay and eat her then.”
Yolanda smiled — painful but genuine, her lips curling with pleasure. “My hound,” she breathed through a broken mouth. “I knew you would understand.”
Yolanda’s eyes lowered to meet Ooni’s. Her smile sharpened with cruelty — but then she winced, as the muscles of her face pulled too hard on her broken jaw.
Ooni gathered every scrap of strength she had left, clarity flaring bright in her chest, and ripped the sidearm from her thigh pouch.
Yolanda’s eyes flew wide. She tried to throw herself aside.
Ooni got the muzzle lined up with Yola’s jaw.
Squeezed the trigger.
And—
Kuro’s other hand whipped out from beneath Ooni’s chin and wrapped around her broken wrist.
Bang!
The shot went wide, thumping into a distant ceiling. Ooni screamed, wailing her wordless frustration, her wrist pinned, bones crushed to powder in Kuro’s iron grip. She held onto the pistol in hopeless vanity. She would never get another chance now, there would never be another shot. Yolanda was stumbling sideways, Cantrelle was straightening up, Kuro had Ooni finally and utterly disarmed. It was over. Her final attempt was over, foiled, futile.
Ooni’s spark of clarity finally went out, surrendering to the cold and the dark. She went limp in Kuro’s grip, pistol about to tumble from her hand.
Yola had won. Yola had been right all along. The Death’s Heads were correct. Telokopolis was a lie. Ooni was—
Boom-crack!
A deafening gunshot tore through what little was left of Ooni’s hearing. The impact crunched into Kuro, throwing up a burst of ruptured metal and ceramic plating. Kuro’s arm was torn from around Ooni’s wrist, spinning Ooni from her grip, Kuro tumbling away into the darkness beyond Ooni’s narrow tunnel of vision.
Suddenly Ooni was free. By some miracle she kept her feet. Her world was black and red and fading into the sound of her own heartbeat. She raised her pistol again.
Yola was right in front of her, raising her purple gauntlets as if she could surrender, eyes going wide with shock. A second shot split the air, loud as thunder. Cantrelle was suddenly free of DeeGee’s grasp, lurching forward, going for Ooni. DeeGee was falling back, floored by the kinetic impact of an anti-materiel round.
Ooni pressed the muzzle of her gun to Yola’s forehead. She pulled the trigger and—
A battering ram of force swept Ooni off her feet and into the air. Her second shot went wide and she screamed with righteous rage denied. Yet again, again, how?! Kuro’s arms went around her, hauling her upright, one hand struggling to bring a weapon back to Ooni’s throat. Kuro whipped Ooni around to face an onrushing wall of iridescent beauty.
Iriko!
Ooni suddenly understood what her new comrades had achieved. Those deafening shots like lances from the heavens, that was Serin’s anti-materiel rifle, knocking Kuro’s hand aside from Ooni’s throat, clearing the way for Iriko to attempt a rescue — or a mercy-kill, should the plan fail.
Iriko’s charge was so fast, like lightning across dark skies, a wave of prismatic meat about to break on a shore of metal.
Kuro’s weapon systems flowered wide either side of Ooni’s thrashing, screaming, flailing body. For one blinding second Kuro opened fire with everything she could spare; miniature autocannon rounds chewed into Iriko’s mass, bright bursts of plasma cooked patches of her armoured scales to blackened meat, and gouts of flame made her leading edges shrivel up in tiny retreats.
But it wasn’t enough. Iriko roared onward like the tide.
Kuro heaved Ooni upward and threw her at the onrushing wall of death. Ooni felt herself weightless for a split-second, twisting in the air. She caught a glimpse of Kuro’s back turned, of that grey-armoured giant sprinting away, saving herself first. And then Ooni landed without impact, as if caught in a warm, wet, sucking net.
Iriko crashed down on the remains of the Death’s Heads with an earth-splitting splatter of meat, carrying Ooni along as part of the wave. The Sisters struggled and fought, firing their guns into Iriko’s body even as they were sucked inside, as protoplasmic flesh enveloped their limbs and choked their faces, forcing itself down their throats and nostrils and past their eyeballs. Elodie screamed and thrashed, skin melting off her bones, clawing at the floor, trying to drag herself free. Teuta just closed her eyes and spread her arms, letting it happen, accepting the end — until she felt the acids and enzymes dissolving her flesh and eating into her bones, and then she gaped for relief, shuddering like a beached fish. DeeGee fought the longest, protected inside her powered armour; she drew a blade and tried to hack her way out. Iriko cracked DeeGee’s plates and spat out the hard bits, dismantled her back-mounted power-plant and dropped the refuse on the floor. Iriko sent questing tentacles of biomass into the first gaps in DeeGee’s war-plate, and ate most of her flesh before she’d even finished shucking the revenant.
Yolanda and Cantrelle clung to each other as they were engulfed and devoured. Ooni found herself alongside them for a moment, in the centre of Iriko’s jelly-like body.
Cantrelle had her hands tight around Yolanda’s throat, even as her fingers melted and her bones dissolved. Yolanda’s armour protected her for a few moments, long enough to know that her beloved Ella was strangling her as they both died.
Ooni’s limbs still worked. Her armour and her clothes were melting off her skin, joining the meaty, gel-like soup of Iriko’s body. But she still held her pistol. She pushed it through the throbbing, pulsating mass of Iriko’s innards, and pressed the muzzle to Yolanda’s forehead.
Cantrelle’s mouth widened in a silent scream. Her lungs were already full of Iriko.
Ooni pulled the trigger. The round punched through Yolanda’s forehead and scattered her brains across the inside of Iriko’s biomass. The light in her eyes went out, a split-second before the eyeballs themselves dissolved in Iriko’s acid. Yolanda got a quicker death, but Cantrelle was denied the pleasure of killing her.
Cantrelle turned her flat, screen-like eyes toward Ooni. They were dissolving as well, eaten away at the edges, almost gone. Cantrelle reached for Ooni, but her hands were burned away, already digested. She tried to claw at Ooni with the bony stumps, but then she spasmed and jerked as Iriko’s fluids breached her skull and reached into her brains. Ooni smiled as Cantrelle’s body collapsed into meat-fluid sludge.
Then — a spark. From the last few scraps of Cantrelle’s body, a spark seemed to flicker, as if struck from flint. Then it fled Iriko’s innards, vanishing in a direction Ooni had not known existed until she saw that spark turn and leave.
An illusion. The moment of death, embellished by Ooni’s own dying mind.
Ooni’s pistol finished dissolving in her hand. She was naked now, her armour carapace and her clothes and equipment all melted off her body by Iriko’s acid insides. Her pain was incredible, throbbing through every part of her flesh, diminishing as her nerve endings were eaten away. But this death had meaning. This death was the end of the Sisterhood. Ooni had to go with them, for her sins, for her past, for everything she had been a part of. She closed her eyes and finally felt at peace. For Telokopolis, she was happy to die.
And then with a wet and painful thump, Ooni landed on hard ground. The impact jarred her broken ribs so hard she almost blacked out.
Cold air raked her naked skin. Her own gasping throat ripped at her ears. She choked and flailed, twisting on her side to vomit up a great sticky mass of Iriko’s bio-matter, laced with her own blackened blood. She blinked and heaved and clutched at her belly, clawing at the pain in her ribs, sobbing the wet and broken sobs of pain without relief.
She was intact. She was alive. She was wet and cold and shivering.
A mass of black rags entered her narrow, throbbing, field of vision, accompanied by red claws and off-white carapace boots. Two pairs of hands lifted her to her feet, under her armpits; they were gentle as they could manage. The pain was drowning her, but she was lifted up, above the surface.
She stared into three faces — Serin, behind her metal mask, Elpida, with her helmet off, and Ilyusha, grinning with a mouth full of red-stained teeth.
“Ooni?” Elpida was saying. “Ooni? Can you hear me? Ooni? She’s in too much pain, we need to carry her. Illy, keep her on her feet, keep her upright. Serin, can Iriko assist?”
“Iriko has learned to be gentle,” Serin rasped. “But she still does not know her own strength.”
Ilyusha grabbed Ooni by the chin. Ooni’s broken jaw sang with fresh pain, but Ooni didn’t care. Ilyusha was grinning, so Ooni was grinning too.
“You’re fucking alive, you stupid bitch! Haha!” Ilyusha whooped — then pulled Ooni into a sharp-edged, awful, painful hug. Ooni felt Ilyusha’s claws open fresh wounds on her back, but she didn’t mind. Ooni could not return the gesture. Her arms wouldn’t obey her brain. Maybe there was too much pain in the way.
A voice whispered in Ooni’s ear — Ilyusha’s voice, but not Ilyusha’s words.
“That’ll do,” murmured Noyabrina. “That’ll do.”