She shouldn’t have wasted her time on the one-liner. Tersine was frozen in fear, her eyes locked on the barrel of the gun. But while her reflexes, honed for the laboratory and the lecture hall, failed her, the wolves all around Tersine were not as slow. The moment Delilah made her appearance they were moving, dropping me as though I didn’t exist as they raced to intercept the assassination attempt on their leader.

I don’t know which came first, between Delilah pulling the trigger and the closest wolf slamming into her, but it was close. A single crack reverberated across the ruin, accompanied by a flash of light and two screams of pain that blended together into one. Two people went down: Delilah was thrown to the side by the weight of the werewolf leaping into her, while Tersine collapsed under her own weight, a spray of blood emerging from somewhere in her side. The bullet had gone wide of its intended mark and struck her, not in the center of mass, but the thigh. Tersine didn’t even hit the floor before another wolf rushed in to catch her; Delilah went down with a wolf on top of her, the mass of brownish fur obscuring her body.

The wolf that was on top of me had rushed off to defend her master, leaving me with just one opponent. It seemed to understand the mandate, lunging forward jaws open in order to bite and hold on. But I was still faster. I shoved the hilt of my saber into its mouth, then let go of the blade with my off-hand in order to slam my fist into its eyes.

The wolf reeled back, so I carried on with the momentum, rolling over onto my side in order to knock her breath out with a vicious heel-kick. Always moving forward, one step at a time. I worked my way up onto my feet, taking a claw to the upper leg, then stomped down on the wolf’s skull. There was a crack, a fractured jaw or broken eye socket, far from the kind of injury it would take to properly disable a regenerator. But I just needed to buy a second.

Delilah needed my help: it was impossible to see her under the body of the werewolf, but what could be gathered was that she wasn’t doing much fighting back. I rushed through the swirl of wolves, a scream of anger and aggression on my lips. Delilah had probably just saved me and the entire rest of the group from a slow death, and nothing was going to stop me from repaying that. I took my saber in both hands and swung, less like a sword and more like an axe, chopping deep into the hunched back of the werewolf that had taken Delilah down. When it rose, turning to face me, its half-jaw half-muzzle was already stained with blood.

The wolf lunged, going for a grab, and I used her own momentum against her, stepping back even as I pushed the point of the sword through her chest. It swiped a claw at me and I ducked inward, yanking the sword out in a shower of blood, then following with a quick decapitation. The wolf’s head hadn’t even hit the ground when I realized that Delilah was gone.

I wanted to grab Tersine by the throat and rip her apart. My heart pounded, my lungs burned, my head ached, tears spilled down cheeks so sensitive it felt like they were being burned by the salt. She was being carried away by her own wolves, her bullet wound too severe for her to stand, but retreat wasn’t enough for me. There were enough wolves still standing that I wasn’t sure about my chances with the sword, but I didn’t need the sword anyway. I took the revolver out of Delilah’s still-warm hands.

I had five shots, and I used them all. I fired the pistol so rapidly my fingers stung from strain and recoil, and every single shot went wide. The wolves leapt into my line of fire to protect Tersine, and my aim had never been that good at the best of times. When the hammer finally fell upon an empty chamber, I shoved the gun into the empty holster at my belt and once more drew my sword.

In the depths of my laser-focus on Tersine, I had only vaguely noted that Tillie was on the move. The moment Delilah had fired her shot she’d broken from cover and, fending off the nearest wolves with her pistols, started running in my direction. Just as I was preparing to rush headlong into the pack in order to kill Tersine or get dismembered in the attempt, she reached me. Barely slowing down, she grabbed me around the midsection and hefted me onto her shoulder, lifting me off of the ground entirely as she dashed away from Tersine and towards where I’d left Laura. I thrashed and kicked and screamed myself raw as I watched Tersine fade into the distance with her life still in her hands, when I should have been thanking this near-stranger for saving me. My small size and light weight was almost certainly what let me keep my life.

A few seconds later, Tillie ran out of steam and hurled me off of her shoulder and onto the ground. I landed hard. Tillie stood over me, panting for breath, watching Tersine run. I jerked upright, and was about to start yelling at her—nothing coherent, just rage—when she silenced me with a word.

“Delilah gave her life so we could get out of here safe,” she said. “You rushing off to your death isn’t going to help anybody. We need to find the others and get the hell out of here.”

Laura and Unity were still around, somewhere. I was caught, split on the blade of two conflicting impulses, one to get revenge and one to protect the people I loved. Fortunately, I had Falem around to remind me which course of action was going to prove productive.

She had finally defeated the wolves that I’d somehow caused to turn against her, as evidenced by the splashes of blood all across her dress. She loped right past Tillie and I, determined to link up with Tersine but not so determined as to use her full speed, seemingly unconcerned by everything that had happened. But as she passed us, she stopped. Turned. The blank glass lenses of her reikverratr mask met my eyes, and even without any possible way of telling her emotions, I could still feel… something. Begrudging respect, or a resolution to deal with me later, maybe. But I wasn’t going to be able to fight another round, not without allies and not against her.

Tillie and I rushed off into the warren of abandoned, dust-buried hallways and chambers that made up the body of the ruined complex where all of this had taken place. It wasn’t difficult to track down where Laura had gone, her footprints were still fresh in the sand, and the evidence of her blade’s work even more so. Within a minute we’d found her, standing on top of a decapitated werewolf, gazing at the far wall of the room.

There was a skeleton slumped against the wall, still clad in the mummified remnants of a canvas explorer’s uniform. Above it, painted on the wall in what I hoped was ink, was a map.

I couldn’t read it, of course. I think even if I was familiar with the outline of the Great Desolation and the conventions of Selenian map-making, which I was not, it would have been tricky to decipher something painted onto a crumbling sandstone wall by the shaky hand of a woman rapidly dying of thirst and heatstroke. There was an array of curved lines, straight lines that intersected at precise points, fragments of script that I understood only as random collections of letters but were probably meant as abbreviations or acronyms. There was exactly one thing on the whole map that made sense to me, and it was at the far right-hand side.

Painted with a precision that bordered on awe was a five-pointed star. Above it was a single phrase, the only complete word in the entire map, a word so important that the map’s dying creator thought it necessary to write it out. The closest translation I can give would be… “Primary Control.”

Something about that sent a shiver down my spine, I won’t lie. But we needed to get moving, get back to the Ogre, and get the hell out of here. Which made it rather annoying that Laura had decided that now was the perfect time to get out her sketchbook.

“Laura, come on, we need to get out of here,” I said.

She didn’t respond. I didn’t even know that she had a sketchbook on her, or the stub of a pencil she was using to write in it. If it were a different circumstance, if I wasn’t running on pure adrenaline and still reeling from Delilah’s death, I might have even found the incongruity funny. Instead I felt like dragging her back to the Ogre by her wrist.

“Laura, what are you doing? Where the hell did you get that?”

“She-she’s copying down the-the map,” Unity said. I’d barely noticed her presence, but she was there, guarding another passage into the same chamber. “So Tersine’s not the only-only one who has it.”

It was an admirable goal, but I was skeptical. I stood close to Laura, trying to read from her sketchbook over her shoulder. “Do you really think you’re going to be able to copy that thing down accurately enough? I get it, Laura, I promise that I get it, but we’re done.”

Laura stopped sketching, looking down at me with one eyebrow raised. “Do you know what archaeologists actually do?”

“You, like… dig stuff?”

“We do a little bit of that, yes. But before we can move any of it, we have to preserve the original context. Which means a frankly astonishing amount of drawing from life.”

She held the notebook with one hand and showed it to me. It was unnervingly accurate. She’d even captured some of the contours of the wall, the way the shadows from Tersine’s electric lamp fell across the uneven stone. And the outlines of the map itself were more real and more precise than the actual thing.

I looked around the room, at Tillie so covered in sweat I was worried she’d pass out, and at Unity constantly jittering and looking around for threats. “Draw fast,” I said. “We can’t stay here for long.”

Unity took a moment to scan the room, pausing at each person there as though she were counting. “Where’s Delilah?”

I swallowed, though my mouth was parched. “She didn’t—”

“She’s dead,” Tillie said, pitching forward to rest her hands on her knees. “She tried pulling a gun on Doctor Tersine, and they ripped her apart. Didn’t stand a chance.”

“But in doing that, she saved all of our asses. If it weren’t for her, Tersine would still be coming after us, and I don’t know if we’d be able to make it back to the Ogre, let alone make a copy of the map,” I said.

Tillie stood up, wiping her forehead as she collected herself. “It’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit. She shouldn’t have had to die.”

“I know. Let’s just get out of here quickly, so at least she didn’t die for nothing.”

The next couple of minutes were harrowing on the nerves. The incessant scratching of Laura’s pencil against her notebook felt like an itch in the inside of the brain, one that was ready at any moment to burst out into violence. You could occasionally hear distant noises echoing down the hallways of the ruin, mechanical noises like something off of a construction site. Tersine wasn’t idle, and though we weren’t either, the feeling of idleness was infuriating.

“Alright, done,” Laura said, shoving the notebook back into her coat.

“Which way is our way out of here?” Tillie said. “I’ve lost track.”

Unity gestured to the hallway that she had been watching. “I’ve-I’ve been watching this way. I say we go out here.”

There was a general agreement that that was the right path. Once we were out of this ruin, we could make our way across the city, back to the Ogre. That, at least, we knew where to find, having left it in a valley in the opposite direction to the setting sun. As the others filed out, though, I found myself hesitant to leave.

My vision naturally fell upon the map. Everything that had happened over the last few weeks had been because of that. Six women had been horribly murdered over this map, and if I hadn’t been around to intervene it might well have been even more. In that moment, standing in a ruined stone building, staring at a few splotches of ink up on a wall, everything, this whole battle, had never felt so utterly pointless.

I drew Delilah’s revolver, loaded five chambers, and pulled back the hammer. Without a word, one after the other, I unloaded every round into the sandstone. The rock began to crumble almost immediately, old stone collapsing into gravel and dust that flew off in bursts. The craters torn into the wall began to affect its structural integrity, entire slabs of stone separating and falling to the floor, where they shattered into shards and dust. I paced calmly out of the room, reloading one bullet at a time.

There was only a sliver of sun left when we limped out of that huge building. None of us were particularly injured, thankfully, but the awareness that five of us had entered the ruined city and only four were leaving was more present and more painful than any wound. Even with the copy of the map that Laura had taken down, it made the whole thing feel like an abject failure.

I only hoped that Tersine was feeling the same way. After all, though I was certain that she had her own copy of the map, she had also lost a massive number of her werewolves and at the same time completely failed to actually kill me. Also she had been shot in the leg, which didn’t make me feel less bad about Delilah’s death, but did give me some sick sense of schadenfreude. I hoped that she was cursing my continued survival, that she felt as bad about all of this as we did. But it was probably a false hope.

Twilight had fallen by the time we escaped to the Ogre. Tersine had never found it: her attention was entirely on the ruined city and on her own caravan. We were still running on fear and dread when we reached the lumbering old vehicle. Laura and Tillie slumped into the front seats while Unity and I crawled into the back and prepared ourselves to withstand the freezing nights of the Great Desolation.

SaffronDragon

Fun fact, archaeology and paleontology still requires being able to sketch from life even to this very day. Something about photographs not being able to capture the proper three-dimensional details of an artifact in its context the way a sketch mediated by a human eye can. My high school physics teacher wanted to be a paleontologist until he found out how much drawing you needed to do. Anyway, now that I've justified that plot point, check out my Patreon, where I have the final chapters of Wolves of Selene already posted. Within the next few weeks I'll also begin posting the first chapters of my next new book there as well, building up a backlog before I post to Scribblehub. See you in two weeks for Chapter XXXV: Get Out Of Here.