Shilu had to break up the fight in the infirmary. The other revenants were all asleep, and the Commander wasn’t there to help.
She realised a physical altercation was imminent long before either of the participants did. In the past, back in the dimly remembered primordial soup of her true life, she would have attributed this to gut instinct, to some kind of animal sense for when violence was about to go down; she had been very skilled at reading such situations during her time in the Interior Service, though the specific memories were a jumbled mash of half-digested leftovers. She had saved a partner once, warned a superior, pulled her sidearm on a suspect before he’d had a chance to draw a gun. The context of all those memories had long since washed away in the sea of blood that was her afterlife, but the impressions remained.
As an instantiated Necromancer — or whatever she counted as now, with her crippled network permissions and semi-permanent body — Shilu knew the details in the data which formed that gut instinct.
Tension in the cramped infirmary had been steadily rising for almost an hour. After Melyn had finished tending to Ooni, Victoria had gently encouraged Melyn to leave Ooni to rest. They were all putting too much pressure on the android as their sole medic; Shilu approved of the Commander’s attempts to ease that pressure. Elpida had set an example by heading up front to the control cockpit. The others had dispersed shortly after — back to the bunk room or the crew compartment, or to one of the half-dozen tight little chambers hidden off Pheiri’s spinal corridor.
Except for Pira and Atyle.
Pira sat by the narrow slab bed, planted on one of the fold-out metal seats, gazing at Ooni’s fitful sleeping face. Pira wore an expression that Shilu did not care to analyse too closely. Atyle lounged at the opposite end of the infirmary, near the hatch, though the room was so small it made little difference where she stood. She was open-faced with fascination, locked into her own penetrating look, her high-spec bionic eye blurring inside the socket as the internal components adjusted hundreds of times per second. Neither of them bothered to look at Sanzhima, the unfortunate revenant still laid out on the other slab bed, shrouded in bandages after her encounter with the Death’s Heads’ improvised explosive device. Neither of them paid any attention to Shilu beyond an initial glance. They were both too busy staring at Ooni.
Perhaps the fight would not have happened if they had maintained their positions, but Atyle had insisted on a closer inspection.
The first time Atyle came forward, she angled her bionic eye to peer at Ooni’s closed lids, then stared intently at where her heart lay beneath her ribs. Pira did not approve of this.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Low, angry, confused.
Atyle hadn’t even looked up. “Searching for marks on more than her flesh. For signs she was touched by a god. She already tells us she was. Why not look for the fingerprints? Pressed into her bones, her fluids, her soul. Do you think we will find them?”
“I think you should back up.”
Atyle smiled at Pira’s slow anger, then raised her hands, and took the advice.
The second time she came forward, Atyle moved slowly, watching Pira’s face, like a cat which knew it was doing something naughty, but was going to do it anyway. Pira watched her approach, arms folded, a glower growing behind her shuttered face. Atyle came close, then leaned down to examine Ooni’s burned hand and forearm, now encased in bandages and ointment.
Pira endured this with the patience of a statue, until Atyle reached out to lift the arm by Ooni’s wrist. Then Pira was on her feet. Atyle put her hands up and backed away again, smiling all the while.
“Calm yourself, officer of the watch,” Atyle said. “I am no grave robber, and this is no grave. We are all on the same side, are we not?”
“Stop trying to fuck with her,” Pira said. “You can talk to her later, when she’s awake. Go somewhere else.”
“I will go right here, I think.” Atyle resumed her position by the hatch. Pira glared for a while, then gave up and looked back down at Ooni’s sleeping face.
Shilu did not care about this interpersonal conflict. She was sitting at the other end of the infirmary, because the Commander had asked her to. Elpida did not want Sanzhima to wake up alone, or with only Pira and the unconscious Ooni for company. Elpida needed somebody level-headed, somebody who didn’t need to rest. Besides, Shilu’s mind was busy; she was considering a number of gentle questions put to her by Amina, concerning Shilu’s current state and the nature of her body. Amina’s unfailing politeness and obvious fascination had inclined Shilu to answer seriously, but she had to think about the questions. They were not problems she had considered in a very long time — “Do you look like that because you enjoy it?”, “Which is the real you, the metal body, or the human one?”, “Did you always want to be this way?” Dredging the answers to these questions was uncomfortable and difficult, so Shilu had asked Amina to wait until later.
The third time Atyle drifted forward to examine Ooni, Shilu saw this would be the last. Her optics picked up all the signs of sudden violence, magnified and highlighted: the tightening of Pira’s muscles; the way she braced herself in the little seat: the deep, slow, steady breathing; the widening of her pupils; the sweat breaking out on her face. Atyle would not stop either. Shilu did not need to analyse and record the little smile on Atyle’s lips to know what it meant. She would goad until she got a response.
Pira rose to her feet and stepped around the slab, blocking Atyle’s path. “Stop.”
Atyle peered down at Pira; she had the height advantage. “Stop what, ex-traitor?”
“Call me whatever you like, but stop. Ooni needs to rest. You can talk to her later, when she’s conscious. Don’t try to touch her again.”
“What happened to this little lost lamb was the will of the gods,” Atyle said. “And I am going to interpret the message written on her flesh. Do you not wish to know it too? She is your lover, isn’t she? Or is she a mystery to you?”
Pira tucked her chin. “I know you’re doing this to piss me off.”
Atyle’s grinned. “Is it working?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. Atyle stepped past Pira, arms brushing in the close confines of the infirmary.
Pira’s temper broke.
It wasn’t much of a fistfight. Despite her pretensions to airy detachment, Atyle knew exactly what she’d been doing; she was ready for Pira’s first punch, clumsy with anger and exhaustion and a cousin to grief. She was less ready for the second, third, and fourth blows, because they came faster than she expected; Pira fought for pure practical advantage, no flair and no show. Atyle still managed to block the impacts with her arms, grinning through the gap, losing her footing. She was entirely unprepared for Pira’s knee in her gut, though she took the strike with admirable game, and cuffed Pira on the side of the head. But Pira was not slap-fighting, she was going for the real thing. Pira didn’t falter, she came on with both fists, hammering for Atyle’s face. She broke through Atyle’s guard and socked her hard in the jaw, but the punch didn’t shake Atyle’s grin.
Shilu had seen this sort of fight before. Messy, ugly, ill-considered. Pira would get Atyle on the floor and do her a serious injury, then regret her rage. If Atyle was anybody else, she would be crying out for help. But she just took it, as if the whole of her intent had been to bruise Pira’s knuckles on her own face.
Shilu considered letting events unfold. These revenants had known each other much longer than she had known them. She was only inside Pheiri’s hull under a kind of sufferance. The trust placed in her was highly conditional. She had no formal rank or authority among the crew. Her allegiance to Elpida’s offer of Telokopolis had been cemented by the network ghost of the lady herself, but the revenants were a different matter. If she got in the way, they might turn on her instead — though they could do little physical damage. More importantly, Shilu had no patience for drama.
But the Commander had asked her to watch over Sanzhima, and this was technically happening ‘over Sanzhima’.
Shilu told herself that was the reason she intervened; it had nothing to do with the look on Pira’s face as she had gazed down at Ooni.
Shilu was out of her seat and across the infirmary in a blink, vaulting over Sanzhima’s slab bed, discarding her human disguise in mid-air. She dropped next to the scuffle, all black metal again, strong enough to be unstoppable. She grabbed Pira by the scruff of her neck, fingers bunched in fabric, and dragged her off Atyle. Her other arm shot out, an black iron bar, and shoved Atyle back.
Atyle ignored Shilu, as if she had expected this all along. She put her hands in the air and backed away, still smiling at Pira. The shine of a nasty bruise was dawning on her jaw. Pira flinched hard at Shilu’s sudden proximity, at her black metal body glinting beneath the harsh infirmary light — and then showed her teeth, tried to pull away, and turned her cold scowl back to Atyle.
“Get out,” Pira said, calm as a stone. “If you come near Ooni again while she’s unconscious, I’ll break your jaw.”
Atyle purred. “A challenge, then?”
Shilu didn’t think Pira was bluffing; she didn’t need her on-board processing power to analyse the tone of Pira’s voice and the sweat on Pira’s face and the heaving of Pira’s lungs. Pira would do it, no doubt. Pira would do worse. Pira was angry, and Atyle was making herself a target, on purpose.
Fucking zombies. Never simple.
Shilu looked at Atyle. “I suggest you leave the room.”
Atyle’s gaze drifted to Shilu, like she was looking at a piece of furniture, or a talking machine, then back to Pira. She straightened up — taller than both — then turned with a tight, precise motion. She left the infirmary with a languid wave over one shoulder.
Pira’s eyes found Shilu. Pinched, tight, tired. “Let go, Necromancer.”
“Are you going to go after Atyle?”
A pause. A deep breath. “No.”
Shilu let go. Pira stepped back, smoothing out the collar of her greyish tomb-grown t-shirt. She considered Shilu with sullen eyes; it was like staring at a wild cat kept in a cage.
Ooni murmured in her sleep, a mushy snore of drowsy pain. She shifted beneath the scratchy blue blanket draped over her torso, turning her left foot to one side. Her lips tried to form a word, then gave up. Pira’s eyes left Shilu, returned to Ooni.
“My apologies,” said Shilu. She didn’t really mean it. Pira and Atyle should both have known better. But a touch of humility cost her nothing. “I assume the Commander would not want any fighting in—”
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Pira darted forward from a standing start, using her leg muscles to launch, ducking low to avoid Shilu’s out-flung arm, firelight hair flowing in a wave against the grey walls of the infirmary. Pira was fast, and skilled, and she might have gotten clean past Shilu back in life, when Shilu was limited by human reaction times and the fragile angles of a human skeleton. But Shilu the Necromancer could move in ways no human or baseline revenant could — taking a diagonal step that would have sent any zombie tumbling on their arse and snapping both knees. She blocked Pira’s path, caught a fistful of fabric at Pira’s throat, and hauled her upright. Before Pira could recover, Shilu took three paces and slammed Pira into the back wall of the infirmary.
Pira didn’t fight. She hung there, sullen and sulky, eyes like the sky after a snowstorm.
“What was that?” Shilu asked.
“You’re too fast,” Pira muttered.
“No, not that,” Shilu said. Inwardly she sighed. She had no patience for these games. She’d done this kind of thing a thousand times before, a thousand times over, in a thousand different configurations — sometimes with revenants, sometimes with other Necromancers, sometimes before her false apotheosis within the system, sometimes after it. Her memories were a silt-bed of revenant lifetimes, so many of them filled with brushes against the drama of others, with cries of jilted jealousy or lost lovers, or just the endless hungry feasting on the flesh of one’s companions. She didn’t wish to re-run any of them. “If you had made an excuse and stayed calm, you probably could have walked past me. Either you wanted me to stop you, or you’re too angry for self-control. I don’t care which. Don’t make me do this again.”
Shilu let go, stepped back, gave space. Pira stared for a moment, then slumped down into her seat. She returned her gaze to Ooni, forgot Shilu was even there. Moments passed. Pira’s face slowly resumed her former expression.
Shilu turned away before she caught too much of that, but it was already too late.
Pira’s face echoed in her mind. The hollow space behind her eyes, the way her gaze seemed sunk inside itself, the fragility of her mouth, the desperate yearning that could not be put into words. Or maybe Shilu was imagining it; maybe all she had seen was a very old mirror. For such a long time her emotions had been dry as dust, so ancient that she recognised them only by their outlines and their relation to each other. The unexpected visitation from Telokopolis — which had won her to Elpida’s cause — had also awakened the buried streets of her heart, stirred her memories like fresh wounds, memories of Lulliet as more than just a corpse in the universal grave.
She knew she shouldn’t, not only for her sake, but also because Pira might try to start a fight again, but Shilu couldn’t help herself. She slid back into her human disguise, dropped the metal, the sensors, the internal processing, all off it. She turned back around, to examine Pira through human eyes.
The infirmary was silent, apart from the tiny sounds inside Pheiri’s body, and the distant wash of the hurricane against the exterior walls of the tomb. The storm was easing off, but the difference was still too subtle to hear with human ears. The static only made the silence more clear. The light was too stark, revealing every secret of every surface, washing it of colour — except where it touched Pira’s fire-bright hair. Pira had bags under her eyes, a warp to her mouth, a heaviness in her cheeks, all so familiar to the jumbled matrix of Shilu’s memories.
Pira looked up, met her eyes, frowned. “Not you as well. No. Talk to her later.”
“I’m not looking at Ooni,” said Shilu. “I’m looking at you.”
Pira frowned harder. “Why?”
“ … because you remind me of myself. The way you look at her. I’ve sat where you sit now.” Shilu almost sighed out loud. What was she doing? Being sentimental. She should have left that behind long before the grave. Sentiment does nothing to protect Lulliet’s peaceful death.
Pira leaned back and crossed her arms over her belly. “What would you know about that, Necromancer?”
Shilu considered not answering the question. What were either of them getting out of this foolish conversation? This was hardly a balm for pain, either ancient or fresh. But Shilu found her mouth was moving anyway.
“I was human. Then I was a revenant. Her name—”
Shilu paused. She had not spoken Lulliet’s name to Elpida, only to the network presence of Telokopolis, to the promised protector of her beloved’s grave. And even then, she had not used her lips to speak. Speaking Lulliet’s name out loud would give her a kind of life once again, in Shilu’s own breath. Wasn’t that the very thing Shilu was trying to avoid? Would speaking about Lulliet force her into a new kind of resurrection, just as painful as the physical ones?
Pira’s face twitched; any other face would have twisted with a sneer. “Forgotten her, eh?”
“Never,” Shilu said. “Her name was Lulliet. She is dead. Truly dead, in central’s archives, not to be resurrected. I put her beyond suffering.”
Pira’s face went cold. “You killed her?”
Shilu turned colder. Pira blinked. “No,” Shilu said. “I ascended to Necromancer. She came with me. She grew tired. We both wanted … an end.”
And now I’ve made her live again, thought Shilu, by speaking her name. The pain was so old it was scar tissue turned to bone, but it tugged at something that was no longer a heart. The static of the distant rain and hail drummed onward beyond their shadows, but it was fading now, hour by hour. Shilu told herself she did not understand why she was telling all this to a revenant, a zombie, even a daughter of Telokopolis, when she had not shared this detail with Elpida. This was selfish and imprecise. It was exactly why she had not wished to be resurrected. A piece of Lulliet lived with her, and would live as long as she was out of the grave.
Shilu turned away. “You need the Commander. I’ll go fetch her.”
Pira was on her feet. “No.”
“No?”
“No. Please, not … not Elpida, not right now. I can’t … I can’t deal with that. With her. Please don’t.”
Shilu nodded. “All right. No Elpida.”
Pira eased back into her seat. She placed both hands on the edge of Ooni’s slab bed, and stared at the contours of Ooni’s sleeping face, pinched with pain and exhaustion, but still there, still warm inside. Her fingers twitched. Shilu did not need on-board processing and analysis to guess that Pira wanted very badly to reach for Ooni’s hand, or face, or heart.
But Ooni went untouched. Pira eased back and closed her own eyes very tight.
“Maybe you do understand,” Pira whispered. “Maybe you’re the only one who would get it.”
Shilu wasn’t sure she wanted this — connection with another revenant, something more personal than following a commander or pledging herself to a lost goddess. Those were abstract relations, directly concerned with the sanctity of Lulliet’s grave, and her own potential future rest. But this conversation in a bloody infirmary, over the sleeping form of another revenant, this was a concrete moment, about her. She did not want this. She wanted to leave. She wanted to sit in stillness and not think about Lulliet too much, because the old scar tissue was growing sore.
“I doubt I would,” she said. “You need another, not me.”
But Pira spoke anyway, as if she hadn’t heard. Her eyes were still screwed shut. “A few hours ago I was advocating that we leave Ooni behind. Now she’s back with us. Despite me. I feel … ”
“Relief?”
Please be relief. Please be simple.
Pira opened her eyes and slowly shook her head, staring down at Ooni’s face. “When she and I … when we were first together … before The Fortress, before all of that, she was so strong. She didn’t understand it, but she was. Ooni was an optimist. An optimist, here. Even as a bottom feeder, half-naked and grubbing for a single mouthful of meat, Ooni was an optimist. She wouldn’t have appeared so, not to anybody else. But she was. I never told her how much I admired her strength, because I didn’t understand it at the time.” Pira paused, took a deep breath, voice firming up. “When I joined the Death’s Heads, I understood it was an act of weakness. When I left them, I acknowledged that weakness. Everything I have done since then is with the aim of never letting that weakness in again. Never. Never. And then when we found Ooni, she had joined them as well, a different group, but the same underlying beliefs. I never imagined she could be so weak.”
Shilu reconsidered. Perhaps she could not understand this. “The same thing happens to all revenants. It’s the nature of the ecosystem.”
Pira looked up, eyes blazing with sudden anger. “No. No it doesn’t. It’s a fucking choice. And she made it. I made it. We both did.”
Shilu shrugged. “The ecosystem produces Death’s Heads. It’s an inevitable emergent property of—”
“It is not inevitable. It is always a choice.”
Shilu said nothing. She wouldn’t win this argument, and she didn’t really care. Pira slowly looked back down at Ooni, eyes creasing at the corners with distant pain.
“Ooni was weak,” Pira said. “She was weak in ways I never expected her to be. I’d never realised until then, I always thought she was … better than me. But then I met her again, and I was wrong. She was worse. Maybe it was the optimism, it made her weak and vulnerable, made her a good target. And then, after we got her back here, nothing changed. She kept being weak. Elpida saved her, and the weakness did not go away. She healed, she was forgiven, she left the Death’s Heads behind, and … and she kept being weak.” Pira’s voice crackled with the broken edges of hatred. “I didn’t love her anymore. It was like loving a ghost. I was disgusted by this thing with her face and her voice, but it wasn’t the girl I’d loved. It was a … remnant. Not her.”
Silence drifted down, lost in the distant static of the hurricane outside.
Pira drew a shuddering breath. “But now … I didn’t see it for myself, but I’ve been told what she did out there. Ilyusha told me. Elpida told me. I want to talk to Serin as well, I want to hear … I want to know … how she drew on people who had her captured. I … I was … ”
“You were wrong?”
Pira shrugged. “I don’t know. Was I wrong all along? Have I been ignoring Ooni, mistaken all this time, when she was already strong? When she was already herself again? Or did she just return, today, out there, in some kind of crucible? I don’t know.” Pira almost laughed, a twitch of her lips and a puff of breath. “It’s like she’s back from the dead, for real this time.”
Shilu said nothing, because she had nothing good to say.
Eventually Pira raised her eyes, shining with a layer of tears. “I don’t know what to do. You said you’ve been here before. You—”
“You disgust me,” said Shilu.
Pira blinked. Wiped tears from her eyes. She looked confused more than angry.
“I didn’t mean to say that,” said Shilu. “But you insisted on explaining. And you were wrong, about me. I can’t understand this. I can’t understand whatever hesitation or conflict you’re dealing with now. It’s nonsense.”
“Did it not make sense? Don’t you—”
“The girl you love is right in front of you.” Shilu pointed at Ooni’s body, laid out on the slab. “She wants to live. She might not be alive tomorrow. Love her now, or regret it forever.”
Pira stared for a long time. Her eyes refilled with tears, then returned to Ooni, softer than before. She reached out, for hand or face or heart.
Shilu turned away. She felt the prickling of tears in her own eyes, so she cycled her body away from the human baseline, adjusting the nanomachine matrix to augment her vision, her hearing, her data processing. But that didn’t help. Tears gathered unbidden, slid down her cheeks. Lulliet’s face floated to the surface of her memories — smiling, close, smelling of cold skin, old sweat, greasy hair. Shilu blinked hard to banish the phantom, then almost gasped as Lulliet left. The space she vacated hurt like an old fracture.
Shilu listened to the rain beyond the walls, but Lulliet’s voice whispered in the static. She listened to the tiny sounds of Pheiri’s body, but they couldn’t drown out her insides. She focused, listening to somebody muttering in the crew compartment. Cyneswith, repeating some kind of mantra to herself.
Hadn’t she been asleep? Shilu sharpened her hearing.
“—and the masters of time and space and space and time, I still hew to you, please hear my call, I still hew to you, I beg you appear before me again, appear before—”
Pira said, “Necromancer?”
“Yes?” Shilu tightened her hearing up again, but made a mental note. Eseld and Sky were both in the clear, according to the Commander. But Cyneswith? She warranted further investigation. A good distraction, if nothing else.
“What are our chances?”
Pira wasn’t crying anymore. She was a little red around the eyes, but she seemed to have moved past it already, or perhaps bottled it back up. Shilu wasn’t sure which she preferred. Ooni was still unconscious, lying on the slab bed. Her dark hair had been brushed away from her eyes. Shilu’s augmented sight picked up the impression of lips in the sweat on Ooni’s forehead.
Shilu shrugged with one shoulder. “Impossible to know.”
“Does ‘Central’ do this? Send multiple Necromancers to mop up a problem?”
“No,” Shilu said. “Central sends individuals. Agents or assets. The scalpel or the sledgehammer.” She decided to answer the obvious follow-up question before Pira asked it. “If ‘Perpetua’ was telling the truth, then a group of Necromancers will be arriving. That’s not normal behaviour. So, yeah. It’s probably something other than Central. Another side of the war in heaven, the war in the network.”
Pira glanced at Ooni, but her face did not crease with difficulty this time. Her eyes hardened.
“You want to protect her,” said Shilu. “Then take the Commander’s advice, get some rest.”
“Not as if I’ll be able to do anything against a Necromancer,” Pira muttered.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Shilu.
Pira looked up at her again, eyes full of something too close to envy, a resentment deeper than bone. “Easy for you to say.”
“If you can’t do anything else, you can always keep living.” Shilu pointed at Ooni. “If not for yourself, then for her. For the Commander. For Pheiri. For the ones who are going to fight. Otherwise, what’s the point? How do you think I became a Necromancer? I kept living, for Lulliet.”
Shilu hadn’t meant to say any of that. The words just poured out of her. She lowered her arm and turned away. She didn’t want to have this conversation any more.
Pira shifted in the tiny fold-out seat. “I’ll take a nap right here. Get myself rested for … for the waiting.”
Shilu nodded. “Right.”
A long moment of static and silence passed overhead. Pira’s mouth opened again with a soft click.
“Thank you. Shilu.”
But Shilu was already leaving. She headed for the hatch, out into the crew compartment. If she heard Sanzhima wake, she would come right back. She told herself she was going to speak with Cyneswith, not to accuse, but just to listen, to gather intel. It was time she started scraping the rust off all those skills she had honed back in the Interior Service.
She was telling herself a lot of things since she’d been dredged from the archives.
But she’d rather be telling them to Lulliet.