You would think that after the third or fourth time, it would stop being so scary, these life or death infiltration missions. Maybe I should have taken that fear as a warning. The closest approximation was the Treaty Grounds, racing from rooftop to rooftop in order to negotiate with Ikamja before all of my friends were killed in battle against her tribe. Theoretically that should have been scarier, what with the massive scale and the ongoing sound of battle behind me; but I think it was a different kind of fear. That was the numb, hot fear of war. The ruins in the Great Desolation were uncomfortably warm, but I still felt like I was being strangled in ice.

Delilah had told us what she remembered of what had been described in the journal: the desiccated skeleton of a woman, sitting against the wall of the building where she’d settled down to die of thirst. There was shade over her from a roof that was at least partially intact, and it was definitely on the first floor, but if the journal had said anything about which part of the ruined town the corpse had been in, she couldn’t remember. Every intact canopy was a place I had to stop and search.

Maybe it was because I had Laura to think about now. Not that I didn’t care about Lady Halflance and Rook and all the rest, but there’s just something different when the person whose life is in danger is someone you love, someone who you would feel incomplete without. Maybe it was greater uncertainty, not knowing if or when we’d be found out, not knowing if or when I’d stumble across the thing I’d been searching for. There was also the growing sense of being entirely out of our depths.

I like to think that I did a good job of avoiding the wolves. There weren’t very many of them around, they didn’t seem to have any kind of regular patrols, but the few groups I saw passing me by sure as fuck didn’t catch so much as a whiff of my existence. My small size and incredible speed meant that I could always find cover, racing across rooftops and clambering over shark-tooth segments of half-collapsed wall.

I heard it before I saw it, an odd and earthy sound echoing through the maze of ruins from about a block away. At first I ducked into hiding, thinking that it was an approaching patrol, but the sound wasn’t moving. I approached it as swiftly as I could, not even bothering to check the buildings I raced over and through as I searched for what could have been the key to victory. That suspicion was only strengthened when I saw a pack of wolves circulating around the building, the reinforcing steel bracework and covering canvas, the piles of earth and worn tools. Delilah hadn’t said anything about there being a need for excavation, but I wasn’t going to leave this place without getting a very thorough look at the site.

I wish I could say that I took it calmly, that I stayed hunkered down on a nearby rooftop and observed patrol patterns for hours, but no. Of course not. That’s never been me, and that’s especially not been me when the threat of my girlfriend’s death is hanging over my head. The fact that I was able to observe for two whole entire minutes was a minor miracle.

I wet my saber on the inside of my elbow, then as soon as the blood had settled under its own magnetism I dropped down. There was no pattern of patrol; my only hope for getting close was to pick a direction that didn’t look to have many eyes on it, and move quickly. I’m very good at moving quickly. I waited behind canvas walls to find out if I’d been heard, trying to tune out the sound of my heart. I dashed behind chunks of masonry for cover, crawled on my stomach across the sand. My flight and freeze instincts were both in high gear, muscles both painfully tense and buzzing with energy, so I split the difference, approaching the dig site in quick jolts of motion.

Which was why, when I rounded a corner and found myself looking directly at the hunched back of one of the wolves, I wasn’t able to stop myself. My hands slapped against the stone, stinging painfully. At once, the wolf spun around, making a soft noise of confusion the instant before its bright eyes fell on me. Fortunately, I’d landed in a sort of crouch, meaning that I could leap up at it, almost throwing myself right into the wolf’s jaws.

Her head hit the side of the supply crate I’d been hiding behind, knocking it painfully to the side but not slowing her down. I dropped my sword in a panic, both hands flying to the muzzle and holding it shut before she could make a sound. Almost immediately a shock of pain went down my back as the wolf’s claws tore at my flesh, and with no blade, all I could do to hurt her back was kick and thrash and beat its head against the ground. I clenched my jaw shut so tightly that I might have cracked a tooth if it weren’t for my regeneration in order not to cry out in pain, blood dripping down my back, blood splattering across the stone as the back of the wolf’s head hit rock over and over.

I almost didn’t notice when the wolf stopped struggling. I was exhausted, I was in pain until the claw wounds healed, but somehow I had twisted its neck around entirely by accident to the point where something broke. I rolled off of it, grabbed my sword. Already the wolf was healing, jaw flexing as it tried to cry out, spine slowly healing back into one piece. And then I took the sword in a reverse grip and slammed the thing right through the back of its mouth.

For a few seconds, I couldn’t do anything but stare down at the dead, glassy stare of the corpse below me. The same flashes of memory rose up like bile in the back of my mouth, the smell of antiseptic and my sister’s ring, but I let them pass. I had no non-lethal way of preventing this one from calling for the others and completely blowing the element of surprise for all of us. When I stood up, I realized two things. The first was that I was running out of time before the body was discovered. The second was that I’d bent the tip of my sword.

With stealth no longer a serious possibility, I leapt out of cover and made a run for the source of the sound and movement. I had expected a series of dirt trenches, maybe the skeleton that Delilah had described. Nope. Half-buried in the dirt, slowly being dredged out, was something enormous. Up close, it became clear that what I had assumed was more collapsed rubble wasn’t stone at all, but metal coated in a layer of sand and dust.

All urgency was forgotten as I crept one step closer at a time. My eyes traced out a labyrinth of steel piping and ridged plates, gears long jammed with dirt and decay. How the machine hadn’t rusted into scrap long ago was a mystery, but then, it was a mystery I had encountered before. This was the same dark metal as the enormous towers of Amrinval, the same as the ancient Archopolids that the people of Bluerose still used for construction to this very day. Indeed, the longer I looked the more I began to trace out familiar shapes, long spindly legs and steam pipes in familiar arrangements.

This was an automaton. Too small to be an Archopolid, but lacking some of the clunky simplicity of an Archopolid’s construction. The pipes were more finely built, the plates shaped with infinitely greater craft. Tersine and her entourage weren’t just here to find the map. They were digging up relics of the past… for what?

My thought process was interrupted by the growl of a werewolf from behind me. I whipped around, sword drawn and at the ready, and found myself face to face with four of the creatures, claws extended as they approached. At first I was surprised they weren’t charging; then I realized they were wary of me. They knew who I was and they knew that I could actually hurt them. So I took the initiative, hard-earned combat instincts taking hold. The blade moved and I followed, its tip reaching out to slice a heavy cut across the breasts of the wolf in front of me. She fell back and I pursued, a thrusting wound to the gut, a hack at the neck. Then the other wolves caught up, falling in around me, and I moved to defend.

It was almost unnerving how easy it all was. When was the last time I’d fought without having to worry about someone else, without having to account for the ordinary human beings who couldn’t get their flesh shredded and walk it off? When I could run purely on instinct, on the hard equations of attack and defense, it was almost easy. More wolves moved in, attracted by the sounds of the fight, but they were losing numbers just as quickly, falling with mortal wounds that their EV fields couldn’t fix. Someone started laughing, and I think it might have been me.

And then someone started screaming in the distance. Not a scream of triumph, not a scream of alarm, not even a scream of terror. It had that raw-edged quality to it, the sound that let you know it was hurting the person’s throat just to make that noise. The sound that only comes when someone is hurt, physically or in the soul.

That sound felt like being torn out of the sky and crashing down to earth. All at once, this battle felt pointless, violence for violence’s sake when there were more important things going on. I didn’t even have to think. I broke off with the wolf in front of me, turned, sprinted, juking past the wolf behind me as easy as if she hadn’t been moving at all. That scream was loud enough to have alerted the entire ruin. I stayed on the ground and ran as fast as I possibly could. The wolves may have had some serious agility, but in a flat-out sprint, I don’t know that a steam carriage at full speed could have kept up with me.

The person—it sounded like it was Laura, but I had to believe that wasn’t the case—screamed again when I got closer, allowing me to pinpoint her location. She was in one of the largest surviving structures, something that looked almost like a sports stadium made out of concrete and rock, a large rectangle with high sides that sloped into a small central courtyard.

And like an idiot, I ran right in through the front door. Anything that was between me and my friends I could fight through, I thought. I drew my revolver as I slowed to a cautious jog, head on a swivel for any sign of danger. The main floor of the structure was conspicuously empty.

Except it wasn’t; I could hear movement in the shadowed hallways that ringed the outside of the building, and occasionally see flickers of movement. It looked fast, furry, and powerful. I considered firing a shot, even raising the pistol and placing my finger on the trigger, but reconsidered. I’d be more likely to shoot one of my friends than do anything useful.

“Laura? Delilah? Whoever it is, it’s Emma! What happened?”

No response. I kept moving further from the entrance, circling around near one edge of the marketplace in search of any sign of whoever it was that had screamed. It was there, I knew it was there. I started sweating, panic growing, limbs trembling: was I already too late? The anonymous shuffling continued, and I saw yet more wolves—or what I thought were wolves—moving in the shadow.

And then a burst of noise. “Emma, no! It’s a—”

It was Laura’s voice, coming from the far side of the ruin. I whirled around, gun and sword both raised into a guard, and charged toward the sound. There was no time to process what she had said; my girlfriend was in danger, and goddamnit was I going to be the knight in shining armor. I made it about two-thirds of the way across before I was stopped in my tracks. It wasn’t even the dozen or so wolves that chose that moment to emerge from their hiding places that stopped me. It was the laughter.

“You fell for that! I cannot believe that you fell for that!” Doctor Nika Tolva Tersine stumbled out from behind a pillar, almost doubled over with laughter. She was dressed differently from when I’d seen her last, her slight figure almost enveloped in scarves and robes and goggles to keep out the sand and sun. She nearly danced up to the line of wolves. “I suppose my assistant knows the human mind better than I had suspected.”

“Indeed,” said Falem. “A classical hero complex, your alraune has. Powerful motivating force, but easily manipulated.”

There was not a hint of pride in the automaton’s synthetic voice. To her, my falling for her trap hook, line, and sinker was just business as usual. She had to duck to avoid hitting her head on the archway as she stepped out into the sun, but her grip on Laura’s shoulder and face remained utterly resolute. As soon as I saw her, without even thinking, I took aim with the revolver and fired off a shot. With a resounding ping, the bullet blew a hole in her dress right above the collarbone, revealing a slightly scuffed plate of metal and doing no damage whatsoever.

Shooting at Falem had jarred me out of the moment of shock, and almost before the bullet hit home I was looking for a way out of this. The most obvious path was back where I’d come, but no sooner had I turned that way than the pack of wolves that had been following me started to catch up. I turned toward the other side of the building, thinking I could maybe climb over the walls there, but I was quickly cut off by more wolves. I was surrounded on all sides by easily twenty of them.

“Running won’t save you. And it especially won’t save Laura, whom Falem will kill if you try. The trap has been laid, so she is rather expendable.”

“What do you want, Tersine?”

She shrugged. “At this point? Everyone you brought out here dead and you sufficiently dismembered as to be easily transported. I am quite sick indeed of this… social club of yours trying to interfere.”

“Fuck you,” I said with a sneer. “Fucking murderer.”

“How many of my wolves have you killed at this point? How many ghouls?”

I crunched like she’d just punched me in the gut, but I didn’t give in. “They were armed. Those girls you killed were college students. Don’t try pulling that Uno reverse card bullshit on me.”

Tersine’s head silently tipped to the side in a way that suggested she really, really wanted to ask me what I was talking about. Then she shook it off and was back to business. “You were right, Falem. Hero complex. That would explain why she is so determined to kill her own creator. Though I will admit, you caught us off-guard by actually coming all the way out here.”

Up until that point, Laura had been standing fairly still in Falem’s grip, apparently defeated. Suddenly, she dropped, twisting out of the steel grip. She ran in my direction, making it two steps before Falem caught her again.

“Try that again and I will break your other arm.”

I moved the revolver from being aimed at Falem, to Tersine. “Let her go, Falem. Your master isn’t as bulletproof as you are.”

“Falem, if I die, kill the hostage.”

And there we were. Stuck in a stalemate. But Falem had forgotten to cover Laura’s mouth when she regained her grip, so it was Laura who started talking.

“The map is here,” she said. “I tried getting to it, tried sneaking past, but… I got caught.”

“Put up quite the fight, though,” Tersine said. “I’ll have to grow even more wolves to replace the ones you killed, and that isn’t cheap.”

“They got Unity, too,” Laura said. “I tried not to scream, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Falem said. “I was programmed to know the nature of pain.”

I started to understand what they were doing. Capture one of us, then make her scream to lure the others. We would be captured one at a time, and once they were sure that everyone was here... I needed a way out, and I needed it fast, before the jaws of the trap closed around Delilah and Tillie, the last two members of our group who were still running free.

“Shortcake?”

I looked up at Laura, the sadness in her voice startling me out of my train of thought. Her eyes were aimed at the floor and her face looked… ashamed.

“I just want you to remember that I love you,” she said. “Now shoot Tersine and let me die.”

“What? No!”

“Listen. If Tersine dies here, it’s all over. Falem kills me, sure, but then what? You’re faster than her, stronger, tougher. You can free the others and get out of here, and without Tersine, the plan falls apart.”

“Don’t bluff me!” Tersine screeched. “You would never do it and we both know that. You’d rather gnaw off both of your arms than have to make a really hard choice, you hero personalities are all like that.”

“Just let me die! End this right now! Maybe even go and destroy the map while you’re at it, it’s right—”

Falem slapped her hand over Laura’s mouth. Apparently the location of the map, wherever in this building it was, was a secret she was very intent on keeping.

I wasn’t thinking about the map. I was thinking about the gun in my hand, the evil woman at the other end of it, and the impending death of the greatest love I’d ever had. Laura was right. There was nothing that could get between me and Tersine in the time it would take for me to fire that single bullet, and all it would cost to obtain victory was Laura’s instantaneous and untimely demise.

But I had gotten used to death, hadn’t I? I’d confronted it, lived among it, stared it right in the eye until I was no longer afraid of its presence. I loved Laura, but wouldn’t it be worth it to save the others, to save myself, to stop Tersine? My whole body was shaking and it felt like an ice-cold blade was being driven with agonizing slowness into my heart. At long last I’d gone too far, taken too many risks, and I was going to have to pay the price. My left hand had been holding onto the grip of the revolver for so long that it had become stiff and sore, and the muscles and tendons were about to rebel against me if I had to hold it any longer.

“I don’t know if I can do this, Laura,” I said. “Tersine might be right. I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

Her mouth was still covered, but Laura finally worked up the courage to look into my eyes again. The look was like nothing I’d ever seen from her. It was a wide, heavy, iron-strong look, one that combined determination and love into a single expression. It was an expression that said that she would be proud of me.

I took aim down the iron sights, right at Tersine’s forehead. One twitch, one tension passing up my arm and through my hand and down into my index finger to set off the bullet that would kill Tersine, break the stalemate, and save both myself and the other three. Two lives taken, one friend and one foe, and I could save three lives now and who knew how many more down the line. One bullet. But was I the type of person who could?

I never got to find out. There was a sound of footsteps in sand from somewhere behind me, followed by a shout. Instinctually, I turned to look. It was Tillie, rushing through the opening of the ruined marketplace, calling out my name.

Tersine started moving towards her at once. “Enough melodrama. Wolves, take her. Falem, deal with the alraune.”

I tried turning, to aim the gun at Falem or to blow out my own eardrums or something, but my body was too damn slow. Falem spoke almost before Tersine was done giving the order.

“Storm-child. Sleep now, like death.” I fell to my knees, tendons cut, as unconsciousness began to flood in all around me.

SaffronDragon

Sorry about the delay folks! I've actually gotten really caught up in another writing project lately, an erotic Warhammer 40000 fanfic that y'all can go read on my AO3 page. Not that that's actually stopped me from writing more Wolves of Selene at all, I just literally forgot to post or schedule this chapter. Remember that I have a bonus chapter available on my Patreon if you want to see what happens next, and see you in two weeks for Chapter XXXIII: Sleep.