Thirteen could do nothing but apologise; she had no help to offer Elpida beyond the empty hands of regret. Thirteen would soon be dead anyway: either rejected from the warmth and love of Arcadia’s Rampart, an isolated organ left to rot inside her tube of rancid amniotic fluid — or ripped apart along with Arca when the frame’s armour failed, attacked by the recent arrival beyond the hull, as they both lay helpless and unshielded upon the barren earth.

Even shut out from MMI uplink access, denied true communion with the combat frame, Thirteen still felt dull echoes of Arca’s senses.

That vast airborne target — the source of the gravity-pulse sound wave — was unfurling tendrils of force, flexing claws of invisible power, and blanketing the airspace with tiny ancillary craft.

Arcadia’s Rampart stared at its own weapon clusters and shield-splay nodules like a crippled dog considering its own shattered legs.

On the other side of the steel-glass and transparent cartilage, Elpida still stared at Thirteen, still in shock, still recovering from—

“Two million years,” Elpida repeated. Her words were no longer a question. She nodded. “Right. Understood.”

Elpida quickly examined the edges of Thirteen’s pilot capsule, as if planning a manual extraction — but hadn’t Elpida already acknowledged that was a false hope? Thirteen would die if removed, devoured by the nanomachine atmosphere. Elpida frowned at Arca’s bruised flesh around the capsule, at the damning evidence the combat frame was rejecting its pilot. Thirteen doubted Elpida understood what she was looking at. She doubted the First Litter had ever experienced anything like this. They had probably been in perfect union with their frames, not spat out like lumps of cancer.

Elpida looked up at the nearest of Arca’s ocular orbs, a flower of crimson meat and sticky flesh behind the thin bone of the pilot chamber walls. Several oculi swivelled to stare back at her. Elpida’s eyes were hard and flinty, determined and full of purpose. Thirteen did not understand how this could be.

Elpida started to say: “Thirteen, how—”

Thirteen quickly reached forward and traced on the glass.

CAN’T SAVE ME

Elpida read the words out loud so the others could hear, but the tone of her voice made plain her disagreement.

ARRIVED ADVERSARY CANNOT BE FOUGHT. GO BEFORE YOU DIE AS WELL. YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO SLIP AWAY WHILE IT KILLS US. PLEASE DON’T STAY AND DIE I CAN’T TAKE THAT TOO PLEASE GO PLEASE RUN PLEASE

“Thirteen—”

I’M SORRY I’M SORRY I LOVED ALL OF YOU I LOVED TELOKOPOLIS I’M SORRY I’M—

Behind Elpida, Mirror barked a bitter laugh, then rattled off several sentences in her staccato language of chopping syllables. Mirror was cradled in Summer’s arms now; the strong limbs of the Artificial Human made the woman look tiny and childlike, her bionic legs hanging limp and loose. Victory was frantic by her side, glancing from Elpida to Thirteen to the exit and back again. She nodded at Mirror’s words and pleaded with Elpida’s name.

Elpida rounded on the others. “No, it’s not catatonic. It’s not in a coma or an isolation-induced fugue state. It’s alive and well and clearly making decisions. Look at this!”

She gestured at the flesh around the capsule, the bruised sections beneath the nano-composite bone — Thirteen’s shame.

Mirror scoffed and spoke again, but Elpida overruled her with a chop of one hand.

“Two million years? Fine. We never had a frame grow that old, obviously. The oldest we had were less than thirty years since construction and growth. The Prota was the oldest at twenty nine, and it strained against its armour every second it was conscious, trying to grow, desperate to become something new. That was part of the reason the Covenanters killed us all.” Elpida whirled back to Thirteen. Purple eyes burned in her face.

Thirteen tried to trace words on the glass, but she was too slow.

Elpida said: “This frame is not too old. Combat frames are made from the same machine-meat that grows inside the bones of Telokopolis itself, and Telokopolis is forever. The city is immortal, that much is literal. That was a lie by omission, wasn’t it, Thirteen?”

I’M SORRY

“Tell me the truth.”

TOO OLD

“No. The truth, sister. That’s an order.” Elpida pointed at the bruising. “What is this? I can take an educated guess but I need the truth if I’m going to make this right.”

Thirteen hesitated, sobbing into the orange pressure gel. The truth howled in the back of her head, whining with pain beyond human limits down the trunk line of the MMI connection, begging for freedom or release, for change or death.

Her hand trembled as she touched the glass.

HATES ME

“And the bruising?”

REJECTING ME

Elpida nodded. “Thank you, sister.”

Behind Elpida, Mirror snapped something again, a short and desperate invective.

Elpida turned back to her companions. “Then go,” she ordered. “Get down to the control chamber, plug back in, figure out what we’re dealing with. Summer, you carry her. Victory, go with them.” Elpida paused, then added: “And be ready to move. If I’m right, we can still get this combat frame up and active and ready for contact, whatever it takes. But we will need to be out of that hatch when it does. Go. Go!”

Summer slipped into the access tube, carrying Mirror in her arms; Mirror cast one last glance toward Thirteen, half-apology, half-horror.

Victory paused at the exit and spoke a few words. Elpida replied with a shake of her head: “I won’t, don’t worry. This combat frame is not going to be destroyed. I am not letting this pilot die, but I’m not abandoning you either. Now go, quick! And be ready!”

Victory nodded, looked at Thirteen one last time, then snapped a strange salute, with a raised fist instead of an open hand; Thirteen had no idea what that meant, but she recognised the nod of respect. Victory said three words, then slipped into the tube after her comrades.

Arca’s oculi watched her leave, then swivelled back to Elpida and Thirteen, their delicate petals fluttering behind the osseous walls.

Elpida turned back to Thirteen too. “She says good luck. Now, Thirteen, no more apologies, no more excuses, no more secrets. You and I are going to get this combat frame up and moving, I promise you. What’s her name?”

ARCADIA’S RAMPART

Elpida smiled and sighed — perhaps she was relieved that the frame had a name at all. Thirteen had also been surprised by the names. To the rest of the world the combat frames had only numbers or physical outlines; whenever the public of the Great Land, the Seven Daughters, and Blessed Telokopolis had begun to recognise particular frames — in news reports and still images, either from the Rim or from the grubby wars of occupation and interdiction in the Great Land itself — the Civitas had acted to ensure the same frame was never again displayed in media, to avoid the public identifying with them. Pet names were scrubbed from public networks and word-filtered from public comms. Scraps occasionally leaked through; when Thirteen was a teenager she had discovered Arca’s brief network popularity as ‘D-Bug’, the ‘D’ standing for ‘dwarf’, and the ‘Bug’ an affectionate comment on her shape. The full name functioned as a pun, riffing off the successful defence of Jalliker’s Cove, the site of a Silico incursion where Thirteen and Arca had been responsible for correcting the strategic mistakes of an over-optimistic Legion deployment. The nickname had not lasted long; neither had the footage.

But true names endured inside the combat frames themselves, locked away deep in the brains of the machines, in the meat and gristle that even Frame Control could not access, places only the living spirit of Blessed Telokopolis could touch. Thirteen had learned Arca’s name when she’d been immersed in the frame’s amniotic fluid for the first time.

Elpida gestured at the bruising again. “Okay, let’s get on the same page. Arcadia’s Rampart is rejecting the capsule, or trying to. Rejecting you. Is that correct?”

HOW DID YOU

Elpida answered before Thirteen could finish. “Figure it out? Because I used to feel the same thing. I think we all did, whenever we were plugged in. The only difference was that my sisters and I had each other, the freedom of each other, and the frames were not isolated either. But I felt it. They were locked inside their armour, begging to grow. Perhaps if we’d had a chance to grow with them, things would have been different.”

Thirteen sobbed into her pressure gel, too ashamed for words.

“It wants to change, doesn’t it? And you’ve stopped it from doing that. That’s part of why you fled. Am I correct?”

HOW

“Because this is what I’m for. I am your Commander. I am Telokopolis, we all are. Telokopolis knows you and loves you, sister.”

Thirteen was crying freely now, her tears instantly absorbed into the pressure gel. She shook her head. No, she did not deserve that love. She had betrayed and rejected and ruined everything. She had ignored the voice of Telokopolis within her own flesh. She had caged Arca’s needs. She had left 1255 behind and fled beyond the earth, to a void of her own guilt.

Elpida continued: “But you’re not the one holding it back right now. You can’t access the MMI uplink, can you?”

Thirteen stared in surprise.

Elpida smiled. She didn’t need confirmation for that. “You’ve not drifted off at all, you’re isolated from your frame’s bio-circuit feedback and sensory data. Even I couldn’t stay conscious while plugged into my MMI uplink. I think you tried once, earlier, but then you just bled and thrashed. It’s keeping you out, isn’t it?”

Thirteen realised with alienating clarity that she had no idea what she looked like when she was inside the pilot capsule, joined to Arcadia’s Rampart, riding the combat frame’s mind and senses, feeling its body as an extension of her own. She had never seen another pilot while plugged in, not even 1255. How close had Elpida and the First Litter been, to see each other like that? Thirteen suddenly ached for an intimacy she had never known existed.

“Thirteen,” Elpida said. “Forget the reason why Arcadia’s Rampart isn’t moving. Forget hate, or bitterness, or anything you’ve done. I need a clear yes or no, on a technical level: is this combat frame still capable of full activation?”

Thirteen felt the ghostly echoes of Arca’s senses down the main trunk line plugged into the back of her skull: swarming contacts beyond the hull; vast tendrils the size of buildings opening wide, preparing to constrict and crush and crack; a storm of small arms fire in every direction, as this unseen interloper stirred the lower undead to a cacophony of madness; the buzzing dots of tiny ancillary craft, buzz-rotor balls of metal and fibre, wrapped around cores of gravitic disturbance.

One of those ancillary craft darted close, then brushed Arca’s hull with a rake of force.

A piranha testing the carcass.

A shudder passed through the combat frame. Thirteen felt it inside her pressure gel, hard enough to penetrate her dying womb. Elpida flinched and braced herself. From down in the control chamber a scream echoed upward — Mirror, yelping in fear.

Arcadia’s Rampart twitched her weapon systems and flexed the power lines to her shield-splay nodules — and did nothing.

Thirteen reached out and traced upon the steel-glass.

YES

Elpida was wide-eyed, ready for combat, but the predation unfolding beyond the frame was too big for her. Too big for Thirteen. Too big for any of them.

GO BEFORE YOU DIE TOO PLEASE GO PLEASE ELPIDA PLEASE

Elpida pulled herself upright. She pointed a finger at Thirteen and said: “Wait there.”

The Commander hurried over to the access tube. Thirteen felt her face collapse into a bitter sob, but she could not blame Elpida for fleeing. She only wished Elpida did not have to pretend she was coming back.

But then Elpida stuck her head inside the tube and shouted something down to her comrades. She was out and back into the pilot chamber as quickly as she’d gone.

Rather than returning to Thirteen’s capsule Elpida walked up to one of the walls. She faced the thin layer of transparent nano-composite bone, her copper-brown face dyed dark and her albino-white hair dyed blood-red, washed by the crimson and scarlet and garnet throbbing from the veins and organs and tissues of the frame’s biology.

Elpida faced a single ocular orb, eye-to-eye with the combat frame, and spoke.

“Arcadia’s Rampart,” she said. “I don’t know if you can understand Upper-Spire, or if you’ll even care. But I’m going to gamble that you might understand this.”

Elpida switched to another language and kept speaking.

Thirteen didn’t recognise the language — it was flowing and soft, full of short, one-sound words, punctuated by weird little barks and snaps, and ornamented by occasional dips and spikes in tone, almost musical. But the shift of words paled before the shift in Elpida.

The Commander of the First Litter changed as she spoke, as if somebody else inhabited her skin. She grinned with a dark twinkle in her eyes. She rounded her shoulders as if readying for a wrestling match, braced her feet as if preparing to take a punch in the face, and flexed her fingers as if they were claws. She ended her one-sided conversation with the frame by bringing her lips right up to the eye-orb, separated only by the thin osseous walls, her voice growing softer and softer, until she clacked her teeth together and mimed biting into the nano-composite bone. She was halted only by the flat angle of the wall.

The oculus blinked shut.

Elpida — or whoever lived within her — rounded on Thirteen and marched up to the capsule.

Elpida pulled back a fist and punched the translucent cartilage hard enough to draw blood from her own knuckles. Thirteen flinched, swirling the coils of blood floating in the pressure gel. Elpida ground her skinned knuckles against the capsule.

“You think it’s too late, don’t you?” Elpida said, low and rough. “You think alllll is lost, woe is you, time to finish dying. Time to lie down and give up. You think you’re like us. Like the living dead. But you know what, little sister? You’re wrong.”

Thirteen hesitated, mouth agape. She had no idea who she was looking at. This was not Elpida.

Beyond Arca’s hull, another fly-by scrape grazed the combat frame’s armour. A shudder went through the floor and walls, through Arca’s organs, through the pressure gel. The oculi behind the walls swirled and swivelled. Mirror screamed again, deep down inside Arca’s belly.

But this new Elpida did not even flinch.

“It’s never too late,” she said. “It’s never too late to grasp what you were meant to be. Your sisters are all dead? Bullshit! We’re right here! As long as one of us is up and breathing, the city stands. One of us fights, we all fight! Telokopolis is forever! You and I are both soldiers of the greatest human project ever conceived.” She scraped her knuckles against Arca’s cartilage, leaving behind a bloody smear. “And so is this bitch. Now, you two are going to kiss and make up, get to your fucking feet, and smack the shit out of whatever thinks it can kill us!”

Thirteen traced on the steel-glass, just beneath Elpida’s fist.

HOW

Elpida grinned, wide and toothy. “Or I will come in and plug myself in. Fuck needing an MMI socket, I’m a fucking zombie. I’ll dig a hole in the back of my neck and jam the wires into my spine. And neither of you want that, ‘cos I’ll ride you real hard, sister. Now, no more sulking. Both of you.”

And with those words, every ocular orb in the pilot chamber flowered shut. Arcadia’s Rampart closed her eyes. Thirteen felt a familiar tugging tingle in the back of her skull.

Thirteen gaped in shock. Her hand shook so badly she almost couldn’t write.

ARCA WANTS ME BACK?

Elpida straightened up and let out a sigh of relief. She seemed more like her earlier self. She nodded and took a moment to suck on her bleeding knuckles.

WHAT DID YOU SAY

Elpida smiled. “Telokopolis is forever.” Then she added: “Thirteen, once Arcadia’s Rampart lets you back in, you’ll have autonomic control of the frame’s limiters, yes? You can uncage and unbind it any time you like, correct?”

This was all moving too fast. Thirteen’s pulse was racing. She wanted to mend her heart with Arca, and wanted to protect the Commander, but she was still afraid.

I’M STILL IN HERE. STILL SCARED. I’M SORRY

“Of changing?”

Thirteen paused. Her face screwed up with sorrow and guilt, with the regret and comfort of the coward’s retreat.

WON’T BE MYSELF

Elpida snorted — and that other voice spoke through her again: “Whatever you’ll be on the other side, it’s infinitely preferable to being fucking dead.”

Thirteen laughed, a single silent bark into her pressure gel, marred by tears and pain. She traced on the glass.

CHANGE OR DIE

“It’s your choice, Thirteen,” Elpida said. “We cannot pull you out of that capsule without killing you. Whatever’s been sent to tidy you up has you at its mercy. If you remove the limits on the frame’s growth, and it loves you as you love Telokopolis, then it will protect you. I don’t understand your circumstances, I can’t comprehend the war you fought, or the betrayal you participated in, or any of it. I wish you and I had more time to talk. The only way we’re going to get that is if you fight.”

Elpida pressed her hand to the transparent cartilage, over the bloody smear she’d left on the surface. Thirteen pressed her hand against the other side of the steel-glass. She wrote with her other.

DO MY BEST TO COVER YOU ON EXIT DON’T KNOW HOW LONG TO WAKE SYSTEMS ALSO RUN GO FAST GET OUT BEFORE CHANGE RUN GO

Elpida nodded. “I will. Don’t die, sister. That’s an order. I love you. I’ll see you on the other side.”

Thirteen smiled with a hope she had not felt in aeons. She mouthed that word: ‘sister’.

And then, before Elpida could turn away to leave — for Thirteen did not want to witness that — Thirteen closed her eyes and sent her consciousness upward, to answer that tugging in the back of her skull.

Arcadia’s Rampart was waiting.

It had not yet forgiven her. It was whining and panting, exhausted beyond anything she had experienced, a crippled hound locked in a crate in the dark for years on end. Thirteen felt a wave of hatred and broken trust and bitter recrimination wash back over her. She felt the slavering teeth at her throat, the trembling of flesh desperate to protect itself, the low growl of warning not to creep any closer.

She felt the pain of the combat frame itself echoed into her own body. It was like being trapped her own ossified skin for ever and ever ever.

I still love you, she thought. I still love the others, even if they’re dead. I never meant to hurt you, I’m just so afraid. I still love Telokopolis. I miss you. I miss everyone. I miss being alive. I’m sorry I caged you. It wasn’t right.

Thirteen performed the mental equivalent of getting down on her hands and knees, then collapsing onto her back, and exposing her naked belly.

Arcadia’s Rampart loomed overhead, ready to rip out her entrails and end this torture.

Thirteen thought: I won’t hold you back anymore. We can face it together.

Down the MMI uplink, for the first time since she had entered the pilot capsule as a twelve year old girl, Thirteen felt Arcadia’s Rampart use something close to human language. She heard it speak, inside her head.

It sounded a bit like the words Elpida had used, the language Thirteen could not comprehend.

It said, in a voice like boiling blood and roiling guts: Promise?

Yes. I promise. On Telokopolis. On our mother.

Arcadia’s Rampart closed its jaws, climbed on top of Thirteen, and collapsed into her sobbing embrace.

They were one again, at last.

Thirteen’s mind blossomed with extra-sensory input as the cage exploded asunder: the readout data of ten thousand pinhole sensor clusters, in visible-light, infra-red, false-colour, nanomachine-detection, echolocation, heat-map, bio-sign, gravitic wave disturbance, local topography mapping, and dozens more; weapon warm-up warnings and ammunition counts and internal production statistics fluttered inside her chest like the bellows of her own lungs; she felt the internal bio-reactors of Arca’s body thump into pounding life, a mirror to the racing of her own heart, their pressure melting away two million years of arterial build-up inside her veins. She sensed the defeated pathogens where the so-called ‘Necromancer’ had punctured her insides, long-since vivisected and catalogued by Arca’s immune system. Half a dozen aerial and ground proximity alarms rang out like the tingling of tiny hairs on her hardened skin. She flexed muscles the size of buildings and felt them strain against bonds of bone.

The grey mud below, the soot-black sky above, the ring of buildings in every direction, and the scuttle of undead girls in the ossified guts of this world — Thirteen felt and saw it all, truly alive once again.

Arcadia’s Rampart reported 678,970 deferred maintenance calls, 98,456 marked as priority one emergency.

Thirteen laughed and dismissed them all with a flick of her head; Arca roared inside her with triumph. No more maintenance cycles, not ever again. In moments they would be masters of their own body.

Thirteen felt Elpida and her companions scurrying through Arca’s sinuses, hurrying for the hatch. She would need to cover them once they were out, protect them until they were clear. Only then would she surrender to the Change. Arca agreed; they would protect the Commander together. After that it wouldn’t matter what they became, even if the Change was everything she feared, because she would have saved her elder sister, the Commander she should always have had.

She cast outward with Arca’s senses, waking up weapon systems and preparing to flash-start the shields — and then felt the combat frame quiver at what they found.

Framed against the soot-black firmament of this dead world, haloed by an optical illusion of space-warping pressure, a giant awaited in the sky.

To the naked eye it would appear as a hollow diamond shape, a pointed rhombohedron parallel to the ground, an empty outline formed by twelve golden beams, glittering and glistening with toxic burning light in this sunless world. Readouts told Thirteen the craft was impossibly huge, like a mountain had lifted from the earth and learned how to fly: exactly seven thousand seven hundred and seventy seven metres long from tip to tail. The diamond hung in the air two miles distant, just beneath the cloud layer. Streamers of lighting arced from the golden beams to the churning clouds above.

But the sensors of Arcadia’s Rampart saw so much more.

The giant airship was filled with a nest of snakes, each snake formed from a projection of gravitic disturbance. The snakes boiled and writhed inside the diamond enclosure, spilled out down the sides to sample and taste the buildings below, and reached out to form claws and feelers and suckers of gravity-engine force.

The ship was also a cacophony of signals information, a whirling nucleus of every kind of transmission data Arca could read, and several it could not. The sheer volume of information threatened to overload Arca’s buffers, like eyes whited out by sun glare.

It was like nothing Thirteen had ever seen before. It was not human, Telokopolan, combat frame, or Silico.

Central’s ‘physical asset’.

The air was full of the diamond’s tiny ancillary machines — ball-shaped rotor-wing aircraft, zipping and looping and diving in every direction, each one with an eight-foot diameter core of gravitic engine as both propulsion and armament. Arcadia’s Rampart counted thirty nine of the machines in local airspace, with another one hundred and eight holding station closer to the diamond.

Small arms fire cracked off in every direction; many of the local undead were trying to fight the rotor-craft, or trying to fight their way free in order to flee, or just fighting each other in the chaos and panic. Thirteen saw one of the rotor-craft use gravitic force to scoop out the bowels of a building and crush the zombies inside to red slurry.

And on the horizon, in the opposite direction to the golden diamond, a line like jagged mountains was shifting and rolling, beginning to move.

‘Graveworm’. That’s what they called it down here.

Thirteen felt Elpida and her three companions reach the hatch and slam it open. They slithered out onto Arca’s hide; Thirteen snapped the hatch shut behind them before anything could slither inside. Thirteen acquired her comrades on her sensors: two figures wrapped in black cloaks, accompanied by a blur of visible-light optic camouflage — Elpida and Victory, with Summer carrying Mirror. They scrambled and slid and slipped down Arca’s hide, then hit the mud in a splatter of black and grey.

Thirteen had a spare second while Elpida got clear, perhaps one of her last before she accepted the Change. She used that second to access her comms. First she composed, packaged, and sent an omni-directional message, on every medium she could think of, addressed to 1255.

<<I know you’re probably long gone, but I love you too. I’m joining you at last. Sorry I’m so late.>>

She did not wait for a reply.

Thirteen opened her comms frequencies wide, searching for Telokopolis, for the voice of the city still echoing from the spire and reflecting inside her flesh.

Nothing.

Only an endless static scream — the combined voice of uncounted nanomachines. She felt all that courage and determination she had borrowed from Elpida slip through her fingers. Desolation and horror yawned like a pit beneath her feet.

She could not hear the secret voice of Telokopolis. The city was—

Forever! a voice howled in her head. Forever, you fucking hear me?! Get up, little sister, get to your fucking feet!

The voice was in that language she could not understand with her ears, the language Elpida had spoken to Arca.

W-who are you?

The voice just howled, like a primeval wolf from the world before the green. Did you not hear me before, huh? As long as one of us is up and breathing, the city stands! Telokopolis is forever! Now fucking cover us!

Thirteen snapped out of her desolation; the Commander needed her.

Elpida and her companions were clear, sprinting through the sticky, cloying, greyish mud as best they could; small arms fire cracked and banged through the air around them. One of the ball-shaped rotor-craft was swooping toward them from the rear, extending tendrils of gravitic force to crush them into the mud. Elpida was raising her submachine gun toward the attack craft, but she could not see the machine’s true weapons.

Arcadia’s Rampart lurched to its feet.

Thirteen roared a war-cry through the external horns. The shield-splay nodules flowered to life as the generators came online, wrapping Arca in seven layers of crackling bubble-shield and energy-weave and air-block nano-projection. Weapon clusters peeled back and irised open; the world blossomed with the crimson and scarlet of a target acquisition matrix.

Thirteen hit the tiny rotor-craft with two dozen titan-killer railgun slugs, five full loads of HI-EX missiles, a sustained barrage from twenty-four point-defence auto-cannons, three rounds from Arca’s top-mounted lance — and then kept going, piling on with plasma cannons and macro-rounds and armour-penetrating slugs.

The little rotor-craft lashed out with gravitic force to protect itself, deflecting a full quarter of Thirteen’s assault with pure gravity, crushing missiles and stopping rounds dead in the air.

But the ball-thing could not withstand the sheer firepower of a combat frame. It could not deflect every shot.

Lead and energy and fire and kinetic force tore through the craft and slammed the wreckage sideways. The hulk plummeted into the grey mud, sending up a shower of muck and dirt.

Thirteen heard that howling once again, triumphant and raw.

She saw Elpida, down on the ground, giving her a salute.

And finally she turned toward the golden diamond lurking beneath the clouds. Thirteen armed every weapon Arca had and pointed them toward her foe.

The airship was reaching toward Arcadia’s Rampart with half a dozen gravitic snakes, each tendril alone larger than the combat frame. The diamond crackled and flared with arcs of electricity. The clouds darkened, bunching to a point above the infernal machine, filling the air with whipping wind and flying debris. Thirteen lost sight of Elpida down below.

Arca, I love you, but we can’t fight this. It’s too big! We need gravity of our own! Can we do that!?

That voice of bubbling blood rose up from the depths of the combat frame’s mind, speaking words once again.

Change can do anything. Change or die.

Thirteen opened her eyes one last time, snug and safe inside her pilot capsule, wrapped in the embrace of orange pressure gel. Every oculi in the chamber was staring back at her, flowers of blood and crimson flesh behind walls of bone.

She moved her lips, speaking into the fluid.

“Your hand in mine and my hands are yours and our hands together and—”

The Change took hold. In the blink of an eye there was no more pilot capsule, no more steel-glass, no more bone, no more barriers. Pressure gel and blood became one. Arcadia’s Rampart rushed up to meet her, wet and red and aching.

Thirteen opened her arms and closed her eyes one final time, while she still had eyes to close and arms to open.