“She take the bait?” said Vicky.

Kagami didn’t answer — she just stared at the bank of screens inside the combat frame’s manual control chamber, reflections dancing in her bloodshot eyes. Deep red vein-light throbbed from behind the osseous walls; a patchwork of unhealthy blues, rotten yellows, and muddy greens glowed from the surface of the control panel. Kagami’s soft brown skin was dyed the colour of drying blood. Her long black hair hung down limp and tangled. Her breathing was shallow, rough, and laboured.

Vicky hoped that Kagami was merely ignoring her. The two of them were sitting less than arm’s length apart, in adjacent grooves on the control chamber bench-seat.

Vicky cleared her throat as best she could. Her saliva was thick and gummy; she was so thirsty, her mouth felt like sandpaper.

She tried again: “Kaga. Did she take the bait?”

“Go back to sleep, Victoria,” Kagami muttered.

Vicky tutted softly and looked at the bank of screens again, trying to ignore the heartbeat of pulsing pain in the back of her fractured skull.

She could still not understand most of the exterior views provided by the combat frame’s sensor suite, despite having little else to stare at for the last thirty-six hours — or was it forty-eight hours? Time had grown slow, fuzzy, and indistinct, hard to track when blurred by the awkward, broken sleep, the hyper-vigilance Kagami demanded regarding the corpse in the room behind them, and the growing hunger gnawing at Vicky’s guts. She’d spent much longer than two days in much worse places than the inside of the combat frame, doing much worse things than sitting quietly and waiting for pick-up — at least she wasn’t eating handfuls of cold rice and dodging counter-battery fire in muddy foxholes.

But back in life she’d never had to nurse a biologically impossible head wound. The rear of Vicky’s skull had healed very slightly — the pieces of bone no longer shifted when she moved, no longer wracked her body with waves of disorientation and nausea. But the pain was a sharp, hard, rapid throb whenever she dared do anything more than sit and breathe.

Several of the screens made more sense in the reddish dawn, showing real-time views in human-visible light: the fingers of broken skyscrapers reaching up to tear the belly of the gravid sky, their lines of concrete and steel obfuscated by the omnipresent drizzling rain; the occasional scurrying revenant spotted through a window or doorway or broken patch of rubble, always keeping beyond the sight of snipers and rivals and predators; and the sea of grey mud below the bulk of the combat frame, churned by the storm overnight.

Vicky hadn’t heard a whisper of that storm. She and Kagami were tucked away behind meters of armour inside the combat frame. She’d witnessed it on the screens as a heavy static against the dark background.

Most of the other screens made no sense at all — ghostly night-vision peering into shadowy gaps, thermal readouts and infra-red picking up undead body heat, purple swirls and white flickers of echolocation and nanomachine readout, and other things that even Kagami could not explain in simple language. The scrolling text on some of the lower screens was worse; Vicky’s eyes stung if she stared too long. She wasn’t sure if that was her nanomachine biology struggling to translate, or because of the head wound.

She squinted at the blobs of thermal readout inside the nearest intact skyscraper — the skyscraper with those grinning skulls daubed on the exterior walls — but she couldn’t make out what was happening.

Vicky said: “Answer the question, moon princess.”

Kagami hissed through her teeth, but she did not look round. “Stop calling me that. Wish I’d never told you.”

Vicky forced herself to laugh; that made her skull hurt, but she needed to keep their spirits up. “But you’re a princess. From the moon. That makes you a moon princess. Am I wrong?”

“For the hundredth time, I was not a fucking princess, you dirt-sucking surface barbarian,” Kagami grumbled — but her words lacked venom. Vicky worried about that. “How many times? Luna did not have a monarchy, my father was not a king, he was elected—”

“For life! By a council of electors, not popular vote. That’s a monarchy, an elective monarchy, sure, but still a monarchy.”

Kagami sighed. “That doesn’t make me a princess, you mud eater. There was no royal family, no royal titles, no palace—”

“Oh, come on!” Vicky laughed again. “‘Tycho City’, ‘Princess’ of Tycho city? You were a princess, and you lived in a techno-palace on the moon. You were so proud when you said it yourself, like I was gonna roll over and show my tummy to your big flash aristo title.”

Kagami snapped: “It was never a title. It was what the people called me—”

Vicky snorted. “‘The people’, there you go! Face it, Kaga. You’re a princess, from a monarchy. My old comrades would have loved you.”

Kagami muttered, “Yes, I’m sure they would have loved to string me up.”

“Not you. You’re my little moon princess.”

Kagami clenched her jaw. She said: “And you have a head wound, Victoria. Go back to sleep.”

Vicky flexed her shoulders and lower back against the oddly soft bone-white seat; that made her head throb with a spider web of spikes, but she didn’t want to fall back asleep. She paused and breathed slowly, trying not to show the pain. She kept her arms crossed beneath the makeshift blanket of her armoured coat. At least this was more comfortable than a wet hole in the mud.

She said: “Nah. Don’t feel like it. Come on, Kaga. Keep me in the loop. Did the death squad girl take Elpi’s bait, or not?”

Kagami sniffed hard and wiped her nose with her right hand — her left was still plugged into the control panel. Vicky pretended she didn’t see the streak of crimson nosebleed, or see Kagami sucking her own blood off her knuckles. The nosebleeds had been getting more frequent.

Kagami gestured at one of the screens, at a lone blob of what Vicky guessed was nanomachine-detection readout, moving horizontally down a corridor inside the Death’s Head skyscraper. She said: “Cantrelle’s not heading back toward Yola. She’s rejoining the troops. Score one for our Commander’s theory of leadership, I suppose. Huh.”

Vicky squinted hard. “Which one is which again?”

Kagami sighed. “Yola’s the leader. Cantrelle’s the second. This is why I told you to go back to sleep, Victoria. You have a fucking head wound, you should be concentrating on healing. Leave the strategy and coordination to me and the Commander.”

“So, is that good, or bad?”

Kagami sighed harder. “Not enough information to determine. The external DR microphones on this ridiculous machine are extremely high quality, but they can’t read thoughts. All we can do is let the bitch chew on betrayal for a few hours, see if she goes for the deal.” Kagami snorted with disapproval and tapped her finger at another screen, a visible-light view of the skyscraper. “Pity she didn’t icepick her ‘dear leader’ through the head when she had a chance. Fuck interrogating either of them. Waste of time. Let them murder each other, that’s how I would do it.”

Vicky looked at the screen Kagami had indicated: an exterior view of the Death’s Head skyscraper, several floors up, with a huge ragged hole blown in the wall. The hole framed a tiny figure, blurred by the thin, misty rain, outlined against the background of broken concrete. Purple and gold glinted in the ruddy light — a suit of powered armour, topped by a barely visible wisp of ruby-red hair.

The figure moved her hand to her mouth, eating something, too small to make out at that distance and resolution. She stared out across the impact crater, looking right at the combat frame.

Yola, the leader. Vicky stuck her tongue out for a second, as if the woman could see. Sadly, Yola did not react.

Vicky croaked: “Confident, isn’t she?”

Kagami grunted. “Hmm? What?”

Vicky uncrossed her arms, peeled back her coat, and pointed at the screen. “Yola. Skull queen. She’s not even taking cover. Unafraid of snipers or spotters or even just random heavy weaponry. Just out there in the open. Rookie mistake. Get her head taken off if she’s not more careful.”

“Oh,” Kagami said. “Right. Whatever.”

Vicky said: “I thought you were supposed to be some kind of small-squad mission control expert? You never yell at a private to keep his head down and put his helmet back on?”

“Wire-slaved surface agents did not need ‘reminding’ of anything,” Kagami muttered.

“Ha!” Vicky barked — ow, that made her head throb again, worse than before. “You know, if you don’t agree with Elpi’s plan, we could just … pow.” Vicky spread her fingers toward the distant figure of Yola, eating her cannibal snack in that great big hole in the wall. “Blow her away right there. One round would do it. She’s not even moving. Give me one decent howitzer and I could land a round right on top of her head. Do it on paper, even, screw the computers, and I’ll put one right through that hole. Hell, I’d do it with a mortar team and guesswork. Make her run around a bit first. Ha.”

Vicky was exaggerating, perhaps outright lying; she’d never been good with trajectory calculations. But it might keep Kagami engaged, stop her from slipping away again.

Kagami did not respond. She stared at the screens, eyes fixed on a single point. Her whole body was sagging forward. A bead of blood gathered below her right nostril.

Vicky reached out and nudged Kagami in the shoulder. “Kaga. Hey. Kagami. Moon princess.”

Kagami blinked several times, smacked her lips, and wiped her nose. She licked the blood off the back of her hand again.

“Hear what I said?” Vicky asked. “I said we could blow her away with one artillery round.”

Kagami raised her left hand and stared at the pair of black cables which sprouted from her wrist, joining her to the combat frame’s control panel. The visible circuitry beneath the skin of her fingers, palm, and forearm had glowed earlier, when Vicky had first seen it, but now it had faded to a dark grey, like a coral reef choked by ash.

“Kaga. Hey.”

“I don’t have weapons access,” Kagami muttered. “This fucking bitch of a robot still doesn’t want me in its head.” She winced. “Huh, shouldn’t call it a robot either, it doesn’t like that. Weird little alien bastard. Yeah, you heard me. You want me to call you something else, then give me a real name. Huh? Thought not.” Kagami trailed off briefly, then spoke again: “If this is how the Commander’s people thought, then I’m glad I never met them. The only reason it’s not fighting me anymore is the say-so of that pilot upstairs. And she can’t put it into words either. Huh. Mute ordering around the mute, ha ha."

Victoria tried to smile as if this was funny and new, as if she hadn’t heard Kagami repeat the same complaint a dozen times over the last two days of confinement. She had almost preferred when the combat frame was fighting Kagami’s network presence — not because she wanted Kagami to be in pain again, but because Kagami coated in sweat and shaking and shivering and swearing up a storm was far less worrying than Kagami hunched and fading and falling apart.

Vicky had not yet decided what was causing the rapid deterioration.

They’d had no water since before they’d entered the combat frame; Victoria felt thirsty and dehydrated, but not desperate, not as a living human would have. There was nothing to eat either — except the corpse of the Necromancer, and they weren’t that desperate, not yet; Vicky kept telling herself that, every time she looked at the corpse.

Elpida’s theory made a lot of sense — Vicky and Kagami were cut off from the ambient nanomachines in the atmosphere, so perhaps this was more like slow asphyxiation rather than starvation.

They had debated cracking the exterior hatch, like opening a window to let in fresh air, but they’d agreed it was too dangerous. The hatch was easily visible from the ring of skyscrapers, and they had no idea how fast or how stealthily a revenant might move to gain access. If Kagami didn’t spot a potential intruder in time and shut the hatch remotely, they could both get eaten. Something might be watching the hatch right now, waiting for them to do exactly that.

So, no fresh air.

But Vicky had a head wound, healing slowly, blurring her thoughts; perhaps the only thing keeping her going was the bionic heart pumping away inside her chest. Kagami had pushed herself hard to communicate with the combat frame, then to help fight the Necromancer, then to plug herself back in and coordinate Elpida’s rescue. They were both exhausted and worn out, their resources burned through, but all they could do was sleep, not eat.

And Vicky was growing afraid of sleep. She was growing afraid that one of them would go to sleep and not wake up.

Elpida would be here soon; Vicky knew she had to keep Kagami talking.

“Kaga,” Vicky rasped. “The pilot. How is she doing?”

“Same as before,” Kagami answered. “Vital signs stable. Sleeping. Stop asking me. If she starts dying, I’ll let you know.”

Kagami stared at her own arm for a long time, then wiped her nose again, licked up the blood, and finally turned to look at Vicky. Her eyes were so bloodshot and ringed with such dark circles, despite her taking the lion’s share of the sleep; her beautiful long black hair needed a comb and a wash. Vicky would have loved to take a brush to that hair; she would like to see it clean and well cared for. Vicky knew she probably looked horrible too, exhausted and dark eyed and ashen in the face, her expressions all de-synced and messed up by the head wound and brain injury.

“Victoria,” Kagami rasped.

“Mm?”

“Go the fuck to sleep.”

Vicky shrugged. “Nah.”

Kagami’s jaw tightened. She spoke through her teeth. “We are meant to be sleeping in shifts.”

Vicky sighed. Her head throbbed. “Kaga, it’s dead.”

Kagami said, “It’s a fucking Necromancer. I’m pretty sure there’s a good reason the zombies and freaks out here call them by that name. And you — you came back to life! Elpida came back to life! Things come back from the dead here, Victoria. It’s inherent in the word ‘zombie’, in case you missed the linguistic connection somewhere.”

Vicky indicated the bank of screens with a tilt of her chin. “I don’t see you keeping a close eye on the body while I’m sleeping.”

Kagami pursed her lips and made a noise halfway between a strangled cat and a broken locking pin. “I was helping our ‘Commander’.”

Vicky shrugged again. “Well, I’m not tired.”

“Well I am!” Kagami snapped. “And I would like to sleep with somebody’s eyes on the fucking monster right behind us!”

Vicky rolled her eyes, pushed her armoured coat down, and sat up straight in her seat-groove. She turned her whole body so she could look over her shoulder without putting pressure on her neck and the back of her skull. She’d almost passed out earlier when she’d made that mistake the first time; since then she’d taken her turns on watch sitting propped in the control chamber doorway, while Kagami lay across the bench-seat. Kagami snored ever so softly, which helped keep Vicky alert.

In the circular chamber behind them lay the corpse of the Necromancer.

It was crumpled on the far side of the chamber, past the debris of osseous white bulkheads and bolt-shaped fastenings, with its head turned away, to face the wall.

Kagami and Vicky had worked together to remove it from the pilot’s chamber right after the confrontation, shoving it down the awkward spiral tube back to the lower levels of the combat frame’s human-accessible areas. They had hoped to locate a stomach or some kind of interior disposal mechanism, but Kagami had come up with nothing after re-linking herself back to the combat frame; even if she had found a convenient hatch leading to a giant pool of hydrochloric acid, neither Kagami nor Vicky were in any state to go crawling through the pitch-black passageways of this bizarre living machine — which also ruled out any attempt to drag the body to the access hatch and dump it outside.

The face still looked a tiny bit like Elpida, which was why Vicky had turned it toward the wall, but the rest of the body didn’t seem remotely human. Vicky had handled her fair share of corpses back in life — she’d spent a whole month on grave duty in the Irregulars once, cleaning up after the first battle of Chicago — but this thing didn’t even feel like real flesh, dead or alive or frozen or waterlogged or anything else. The angles and curves were all wrong for a living thing, the hair was stiff and artificial, the eight feet of height was all jagged and jinking and jumbled, and even the clothes were rubbery and wrong beneath Vicky’s hands.

But whenever Vicky looked at the corpse, hunger pangs gripped her stomach. Her hands quivered. Her salivary glands tingled.

Nanomachine flesh, rich and ripe — but also Necromancer.

“Kaga,” she said slowly. “It’s not moved an inch. I think we can safely assume it’s not going to.”

“Victoria.”

“I like that you call me that, you know?” Vicky turned away from the corpse and settled back into her seat; the hunger throbbed in her stomach like a second heart, but she ignored it, swallowing the excess saliva. “But you can use ‘Vicky’. We’re friends now, right?”

Kagami peeled her lips back from her teeth and put her face in one hand. “By Luna’s silver sands, I pray that you are not still like this when you don’t have brain damage. Can we please, please, please take seriously the threat of an undead monster, which might get up at any moment and eat us? Please?”

Vicky forced herself to smirk. “What are we gonna do if it does?” She gestured at her handgun, lying on the control panel where she’d tossed it earlier — out of bullets. “This time I really will have to throw the gun at it, no bluff. Think that’ll spook it?”

Vicky’s LMG and sniper rifle were still in the shaft beneath the access hatch, where she’d left them after falling into the mech. If she’d retrieved them right after the confrontation with the Necromancer then she might have stood a good chance of making it back to the circular chamber, even with the throbbing pain of her fractured skull; but now she was too drained, exhausted by slow starvation. Vicky knew that if she attempted the journey now she would collapse halfway there or halfway back, unconscious, alone, in pitch darkness. And then Kagami would be by herself with the corpse of a monster.

And the guns wouldn’t help anyway.

Kagami said: “I will pin it with gravitics again. With the drones. And then we’ll run.”

Vicky tried to keep smiling. She failed. “Neither of us are running anywhere.”

Kagami clenched her jaw and snorted through her nose, as if she was about to argue. But then she glanced at the Necromancer instead. The fight went out of her. Kagami turned away and shrank back into her seat, small and bony beneath her armoured coat.

Vicky reached out and tried to take Kagami’s right hand — clammy and cold and shivering. “It’ll be alright, Kaga,” she said. “Elpi’s gonna come for us.”

“Tch!” Kagami batted Vicky’s hand away. “Don’t!”

Vicky said: “Seriously. How long ‘till Elpi gets here?”

Kagami scowled at the bank of screens again. “I have no idea. Six hours, eight hours, half an hour? She and that massive android have to keep radio silence once they start, and ‘Haf’, whatever the fuck she is, seems to be the only thing these sensors can’t pick up properly, only if I catch her with the right wavelength of spacial distortion matrix, and that does tend to also pick up things like wind and rain. Unreliable nonsense. And they’re going to spend all those hours dragging themselves through the mud out there. A million things could go wrong, Victoria. A million ways to die out there and leave us stranded in here.”

“She’s going to come for us,” Vicky repeated. “Elpida’s going to come get us. The Commander will do right by her girls.”

Kagami squinted at Vicky, bitter and pinched. “Why do you have so much faith in her? We barely know her. What did you do, sleep with her that night before she got captured? Loyal to the tongue in your cunt, huh?”

Vicky laughed at that, for real. Kagami could be as crass as any Irregular when she felt like it. “Nah. She’s just … good at this. Gotta have faith in something, you know?”

Kagami snorted and leaned back. At least she was relaxing at last. “Never took you for the religious type.”

“I’m not.”

“Good,” Kagami grunted. “You’d probably be some pre-collapse happy-clappy Anglo Christian. You’d be even more insufferable than you are now.”

“Mmmm,” Vicky tried to purr. “You know it.”

Silence descended on the control chamber, broken only by the distant throb of the combat frame’s biology, a heavy pulse deep within the machine’s body. The bank of screens cycled and panned in silence, registering audio as scrolling readout graphs. Kagami’s breathing was shallow and rough. Vicky tried to concentrate over the slow heartbeat of pain radiating out from the rear of her skull — and the terrible hunger gripping her belly.

She needed to keep Kagami talking. She needed to keep both of them awake, coherent, and present.

She did not want to start thinking of Kagami as food as well. Would that happen, eventually? Was that how starving nanomachine zombies went, if they lasted long enough without food? It would explain all the scavengers. Maybe the next time she glanced over at Kagami, Vicky would see a big chicken drumstick, like in the goofy cartoons from the Old Empire.

But Kagami spoke first: “You didn’t have much faith in our fearless leader earlier, when she recruited the little fascist.”

Vicky tried to laugh. “Yeah. Well. Nobody’s perfect.”

Kagami looked at her sidelong. “Are we still on for shooting her? And Pira, too?”

Vicky sighed. “No, Kaga. I told you, I changed my mind. And I’m not going to be very impressed if you just go and start shooting captives and hostages. Elpida has her reasons. I’m reserving further judgement, until she can explain why she’s taken Pira and her friend on board.”

Kagami said nothing for a few moments, then: “Nobody’s perfect. Said it yourself.”

“We will defer to Elpida’s judgement. Please, Kagami.”

Kagami snorted. “You’re brain damaged. And you should still get some sleep, Elpida will be hours and hours, even if she does make it. You’d have better luck sleeping if you tried lying down. Is that another thing you surface dirt-eaters have forgotten about, bed and pillows?”

Vicky laughed, naturally this time. “Kaga, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve got a bloody great spider web of fractures on the back of my skull. Lying down makes it hurt more, not less.” She pulled a big grin, enjoying the way it made Kagami scowl. “Unless you wanna offer me your feather-soft lap for a pillow, my moon princess.”

Kagami blushed and looked away. “ … I … Victoria … ”

“Oh shit.” Vicky laughed, then winced past the pain in her skull, and put a hand up in surrender. “I was joking. You were seriously considering that? No, Kaga, your thighs would not make any difference to a head wound, even if they weren’t bionic legs. Sorry, I guess that’s not the kind of thing you could even do in life. Sorry for being weird.”

Kagami kept her face turned away. “In … in simulation.”

Vicky blinked at her. “You’ve given lap pillows? What? No, come on—”

“In simulation,” Kagami hissed between her teeth. “For my AI daughters. And yes, of course I didn’t have a lap in the flesh.” She snapped with derision: “Fucking legs!”

“Ah.” Vicky cleared her throat. At least Kagami seemed animated now. “You know, it’s not the rough conditions that stops me sleeping, that doesn’t bother me nothing, it really is just the head wound. I’m surprised you’ve managed to sleep at all, Kaga. You spent most of your life sleeping every night in a vat, right? The world’s best water-bed.”

“Luna’s best water bed,” Kagami corrected.

“Yeah, exactly! Whereas me? I spent most of my life sleeping in conditions you can’t even imagine, princess. The early years in the refugee camps we had tents, actual tents, no permanent structures allowed unless you were a Chicago City-State Citizen, or if some PRC diplo was visiting and they wanted to put on a good show for the television cameras. So it was a tent for me, for a long time. Used to get cold as all fuck in winter.” Vicky sighed with a mixture of nostalgia and pain, sinking into her seat again. She and Kagami stared at the bank of screens, side by side, close but not touching. “I’ve slept in truck beds next to spare tubes. I’ve slept inside the SP mount of a half a dozen types of gun. Slept in an old prison once, we were using it as a hospital. That was creepy and weird, hated that building, but it did have good walls, and heating. Slept in foxholes aplenty, of course. Worst foxhole I ever slept in was outside Charleston, while we were dropping H&I on the city for months.” She trailed off for a moment, gripped by a sudden morbid curiosity. “Did Charleston exist again by your time? They ever rebuild it?”

Kagami shrugged. “Coastal NorAm. So, no. Probably underwater before I was born.”

“Ha.”

Silence crept back. Kagami’s eyelids fluttered downward.

“Can’t believe you lived on the fucking moon,” Vicky said, shaking her head. “On the moon!”

Kagami blinked herself fully awake again. “We lived on the moon because my people got there first.”

Vicky laughed, forcing it to keep them both talking. “No you didn’t! My ancestors got there first! The moon landing? Neil whatsit? I do know some history, we did have school in the camps. I remember that from the textbooks. The Old Empire got there first, beat out some other place that used to be allied with the PRC.”

Kagami turned her head to Vicky with the most withering expression yet.

“What?” Vicky demanded. “You know I’m right! Don’t tell me they teach you some revisionist shit up on the moon?”

Kagami said: “Those people weren’t your cultural ancestors any more than Tokugawa Ieyasu was mine.”

Vicky squinted. “Who’s that?”

Kagami blinked with surprise. “A-an ancient warlord from the old country. Look, it doesn’t—”

“I think you’d make a good warlord,” Vicky said. “War Lady of the Moon.”

Kagami looked like she wanted to slap Vicky across the face. “It doesn’t matter! My point is, those people were not your ancestors in any real way. I thought you were a good little pre-NorAm citizen, all materialist analysis and grand social forces and dialectics, not national myth-making like all the other dirt-eating womb-born primitives down there. Down here. Whatever.”

“Hey!” Vicky tutted. “I take offence at that. A little bit. I think.”

Kagami snorted. “You’re talking about pre-NorAm, pre-collapse, old old old expansion period, Old Anglo pre-CF power, all of it. The people who landed on the moon first wouldn’t recognise you or I as anything.”

“I dunno about that,” Vicky said slowly. “People are always people. Look at Elpi — she’s millions of years removed, not just a few hundred.”

“Yes,” Kagami snorted, “and she’s completely impossible to deal with.”

“And she’s kept us alive.”

Kagami huffed, then lapsed into silence. Her eyes drifted across the bank of screens, growing distant once again. She sagged downward in her seat.

Vicky fished around for something new, anything to keep them talking: “I miss peanut butter.”

Kagami winced. “Don’t talk about food.”

“No, I’m serious. I really miss peanut butter.” Vicky smacked her lips at the memory, hamming it up for Kagami. “I was thinking about it because I mentioned growing up in the camps south of Chicago. Peanut butter was a real treat, you see. We used to get it in these little packages in the HM rations, all orange packaging so they were easy to see. And they’d always have these slogans stamped on them — they did that with all the best foods, the high calorie stuff, chocolate, jerky, stuff like that. They’d say things like, ‘With the best wishes of the people of China’, or ‘Eat with love, our American brothers and sisters’. My dad used to save those — the peanut butter, not the slogans — to make sure I could always have them. Loved that stuff. Used to squeeze it right from the packet and—”

“Stop. Talking. About. Food,” Kagami said.

“Sorry, just thinking out loud.” Vicky wet her lips with a dry tongue. Maybe she should stop talking, conserve energy. But then the worst might happen. “You know, I wonder if Chicago is still around somehow, just another part of all this jumble.”

“What?” Kagami grunted.

“I mean, it’s not impossible, right? It’s been hundreds of millions of years but the continents themselves are still there, all part of this mega-continent now, and maybe we could find the spot that used to be the shore of Lake—”

“Victoria,” Kagami snapped.

“Y-yeah?”

Kagami turned away from the screens again and made eye contact. Her face was a blood-dyed ghost, framed by the vein-light and the glow of the screens, hollow-eyed and drawn, like a starving wraith.

She said: “I’m not an idiot. I can tell what you’re doing. And we would be better served by you going the fuck to sleep and healing that head wound.”

Vicky swallowed, rough and hard. “Promise me you’ll stay awake?”

Kagami rolled her eyes. “Yes, I will watch the Necromancer corpse, of—”

“No,” Vicky said. “The Necromancer’s dead, Kaga. Promise me you’ll stay awake.”

Kagami blinked. She sighed, leaned back in her seat, then reached over toward Vicky with her right hand. She hesitated for a moment, then placed her hand atop Vicky’s waiting palm.

“Go to sleep, Vicky.”

Victoria held onto Kagami’s hand, no matter how cold and clammy. She snuggled down beneath her armoured coat, closed her eyes, and drifted off.

Sleep came and went for several hours. Whenever Vicky stirred she cracked open her eyes to find Kagami staring at the screens, washed in that blood-red light, a streak of crimson running from her nose and into her mouth. Each time she squeezed Kagami’s hand, and Kagami squeezed back, and Vicky returned to sleep.

Vicky wasn’t sure what finally woke her — Kagami’s voice, or Kagami’s hand slipping out of her own.

“She’s here!” Kagami was saying. “They’re here, they’re at the hatch! Vicky, wake up, they’re here. Wake up!”

Vicky snapped awake, stomach growling with hunger, rubbing her bleary eyes, then blinking at the bank of screens.

One of the screens showed a view high up on the exterior of the combat frame’s surface. A pair of heavily cloaked figures were crouched between the knots and gnarls of the bone-white armour, caked in wet grey mud. A narrow smear indicated where they’d scaled the side of the machine, their stealth ruined by the sucking mud through which they had crawled, picked out against the combat frame’s hull.

They could have been anybody or anything.

“Kaga—” Vicky croaked.

But Kagami’s hands were already flying across the control panel. Blood was running freely from her nose. She looked ready to collapse, eyes bulging, breathing wet and hard. “Come on, pop the hatch, pop the cork, get us out of here, get us—”

“Kaga, that could be anybody, that could be—”

“They’re in radio contact—” Kagami broke off for a second. “Yes, Elpida, she’s right—”

A voice crackled from the control panel, from the membrane-like speaker through which Elpida’s voice had issued before, when she’d made contact from inside the tank.

“Vicky, Kagami. Yes, it’s me,” Elpida’s voice sliced into the control chamber, clear and clean. “I’ve already verified—”

Kagami laughed like a barking dog. “At this point I don’t care if you’re another Necromancer, Commander! Come on in, and get us the fuck out!”

Up on the exterior view a piece of the combat frame’s hull suddenly popped upward — the hatch, opening to admit Elpida and Hafina. The two cloaked figures lurched from cover and slipped inside. The hatch slid shut a second later.

Vicky stood up, draped her coat over her shoulders, and stepped out of the bench-seat.

The rear of her skull throbbed with pain as she staggered out of the manual control chamber and into the circular room. She had to keep one hand on the wall. Her stomach was clenching with hunger. She was almost drooling. Elpida was bringing raw blue, raw nanomachine juice, everything she needed, everything she craved. Any moment now. Any moment.

“Victoria?” Kagami called after. “Vicky, what are you doing? Just sit! There’s nothing more we can do now. Sit down!”

Vicky stepped around the fallen bulkheads and faced the access tunnel which led to the hatch. She tried to ignore the Necromancer’s corpse a few feet to her left. She could hear faint noises now — like two people shedding layers of camouflage and crawling through a dark tunnel? Or was that just her imagination? She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. She really was drooling.

“Just … ” she slurred. “Just want to say hi … welcome her … mm, m’fine, Kaga.”

“You’re delirious with hunger!” Kagami called. “Sit down, you dirt-mating surface-monkey, before you fall over and—”

Crunch-crunch-click-click.

The Necromancer’s head turned away from the wall.

Vertebrae crunched and cracked as the corpse came to life and broke the rules of a human neck. The face came round, a parody of Elpida, the textures of skin and hair all wrong, rubbery and stiff and fake.

Dead black eyes stared upward at Vicky. The lips peeled back in a grin, to show a mouth full of gleaming, razor-sharp, steel teeth.

The teeth opened. A swollen red tongue flickered in the void.

“Nice — work dead, t-thing,” it said in a voice like broken static. “But we, didn’t fin—”

Vicky raised one boot, gathered all her remaining strength, and stomped on the Necromancer’s face.