Iriko was sunbathing.

She was perched on the roof of a skyscraper, the highest point she could reach. The majority of her biomass was stretched open and spread wide — her body had blossomed outward into thin, light, quivering membranes, cupping the air with meaty petals and fleshy fronds. She gorged herself on an endless stream of food, drinking straight from the whirling, whipping, wild currents of the surging storm.

Iriko was breaking every rule she had, all the habits of security and safety which kept her alive and whole. She was exposed to the sky and to the ground, out of cover and vulnerable; her refractive mail was peeled back from her flesh, to maximize the surface area she could use for eating; she was positioned at the outer edge of an environmental danger which should have sent her fleeing toward more placid climes, or at least into a deep dark hole in the ground; she was staring directly at two of the most terrifying monsters she had ever seen, yet made no attempt to run and hide.

But how could she resist this feast?

The storm was like honey poured down a throat she didn’t possess, like endless bowls of clean white rice passed into starving hands she could no longer form, like rich red raw meat torn by teeth she no longer needed.

Every cubic inch of air was soupy-thick with nanomachine nutrition.

But the storm was also rotten with radiation, crammed full of very nasty chemicals, and swimming with synthetic biological contaminants. Grit and dust and debris turned the wind into a sandpaper scythe, scouring concrete, scoring exposed metal, and slicing at unprotected flesh. Screaming madness flooded every corner of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Iriko’s flesh buckled and burned, melted and metastasised, twisted and tore in the fury of the storm. She had to regrow her fleshy membranes every few seconds after they were ripped apart in the maelstrom. Her main body was crammed flat against the rooftop, anchored to the concrete with screw-shaped bone-spikes and fusion-welded metallic bonds. She peered out into the storm and across the crater with recessed eyeballs and sensor pads armoured behind six inches of synthetic diamond.

And all that work still consumed less than one twentieth of the resources she was soaking up. The risk was worth the meal.

Iriko was no fool. She knew her limits. If she ventured any deeper into the storm — any closer to the giant combatants at the far edge of the crater — she might be torn apart by flying shrapnel, drowned in boiling mud, or burned to ash by toxic golden chemicals. She was right on the edge of her own tolerances, and she would keep feeding for as long as she could.

Radio contact crackled against Iriko’s underside.

Serin said: 「Still alive up there?」

Iriko replied, 「weather nice weather good-sunny hot warm come join join come」

Iriko’s invitation was not serious. She knew that Serin was only a little zombie beneath her robes, no matter how clever and quick and full of knowledge. The storm would cook Serin alive and rip her steaming flesh from her blackened bones. Serin was huddled inside the skyscraper, several floors down, cocooned in concrete and steel. Even before the storm had hit, Serin’s metal mask had expanded to cover her whole head and her robes had puffed up as if growing extra layers on the inside. Iriko knew those robes were special; when she and Serin had travelled together around the edge of the crater, hunting the zombies Serin called ‘death cultists’, Iriko had used every kind of sense and scanner to probe Serin’s body, but nothing could penetrate those black and ragged robes.

Serin would be safe indoors, wrapped up cosy and tight, here on the edge of the storm. Sunbathing with Iriko would kill her in minutes.

Iriko didn’t want Serin to die. That was not a new feeling — Iriko could dimly recall other zombies she had not wanted to die, though she could not remember their names, and thinking of their faces made her sad. She had struggled against the urge to eat Serin, as they had travelled and hunted together. Serin had always stayed one step ahead of Iriko, just in case.

But Iriko didn’t want to eat Serin anymore. She didn’t need to.

Serin replied: 「A comedian, too. You’re just full of surprises. How long you planning on sunning yourself, Iriko? We can’t stay here.」

Iriko was relieved that Serin understood Iriko’s joke.

「sunbathing」

Serin sent: 「I need a time window. How long? Estimate. In minutes.」

「sunbathing」

「The worm is moving. We have to move with it. I want to watch this fight too, yeah, I know. Never seen anything like it before. But we can’t get left behind. We’re already close to the edge of the safe-zone. An hour more and we’ll be in the wilds. You know that.」

In the opposite direction, away from the crater and the interesting fight, the graveworm was on the move. Iriko was sparing a tiny portion of her sensory input capacity to monitor and estimate the worm’s direction and speed. Serin wasn’t wrong. But Iriko would do anything to keep eating.

Iriko sent back: 「worm slow. sunbathing」

「Estimate. Please.」

「five five five more minutes more minutes sun good warm hot good eat」

「Five or fifteen?」

「fifteen. sunbathing.」

「Fifteen minutes it is. Then I go, with or without you, Iriko. I’d rather that be with. Keep an eye out for rotor-craft up there.」

「pbbbbbbbbt」

Sunbathing.

Iriko knew that word was not an accurate description, but it was a nice poetic metaphor.

Iriko could not recall the colour of true sunlight, let alone the caress of a summer’s day against her skin. She could barely remember what it felt like to have a single layer of exterior epidermis. But she knew that the toxic golden blood pouring from the machine in the crater was not sunlight; the taint of glittering brilliance in the whipping air was not the aura of a sunny day. It was too dark, too high-energy, too dangerous. Golden specks of the stuff burned through Iriko’s flesh membranes at the lightest touch, and left horrible patches of blackened meat where they fell on her main body. The big explosion earlier was almost like sunlight, but it had been too quick and violent for any bathing, and now the air was full of radioactive particles. Iriko was also not ‘bathing’ — she was spread out wide, sucking at the soupy air, gulping down great mouthfuls of pollutant.

She knew what she was. She knew what the world was. The sun was dead, the sky was black, the world had choked to death long ago. She was a mass of mutable flesh, sucking at the air with tubes of meat. She was not a pretty girl with her kimono peeled away from her shoulders, soaking in the sun.

As little as twenty minutes ago Iriko would not have worried herself over the messy particulates of metaphor and meaning. Who cared? Eating, sunbathing, ‘photosynthesising’, it was all the same. And she didn’t need to communicate to anybody, it wasn’t as if anybody else cared about the specific cadence and subtle semantic differences between those words. Serin didn’t. Serin was practical and straightforward. Serin only cared about killing other zombies. Nobody was going to ask Iriko to speak those words aloud. She didn’t have hands and fingers to hold a brush, or ink in which to dip, or paper on which to write. Poetry was dead. Who cared?

Iriko cared.

For the first time in a very long time Iriko was almost not hungry.

With every passing moment and every additional mouthful of nanomachines absorbed from the storm of dust and radiation and machine-blood, Iriko found her thoughts more clear and complete. She could split her attention in new ways, following multiple trains of thought at once. She no longer had to fight the overwhelming urge to wriggle down through the concrete and stairwells and ducts to ambush Serin and eat her up. Her mind was no longer consumed with appetite.

Most of the nanomachine glut was diverted to mass-building — Iriko was getting nice and plump and thick down on the surface of the skyscraper roof, dense with fat storage, heavy with specialised metallic compounds, rich with quick-reaction stem-cells — but she reserved a good portion for increasing her cellular interconnectivity.

Iriko wanted to do too many different things, all at the same time. She wanted to try that trick with an extruded pseudopod again, to see if she could recall and recreate the way her hair used to look. She wanted to broadcast a song, or a poem, or just a sentence or two, a simple composition shouted out into the world. She wanted to rush downstairs and peer inside Serin’s robes so she could learn all sorts of things about how the zombie worked. She wanted to broadcast to Pheiri, just to babble at him — she did not know where he had gone. She wanted to try growing wings, or proper legs, or re-route her digestive systems to finally extract some benefit from concrete. She wanted to—

She told herself to slow down.

Part of Iriko knew that this state would not last. When the storm ended she would hunger again. She would lose this clarity.

She had to focus.

Iriko sent a tight-beam radio broadcast: 「serin」

「Mm?」 Serin sounded distracted.

「sorry sorry missed the necromancer sorry too slow not fast enough she was too clever too clever for namekujin get other dead cult dead?」

Serin replied, 「No.」

「oh oh oh」

Silence from Serin. Iriko listened to the whipping, roaring wind, the distant howling of the wounded golden giant, and the mess of terrible nonsense smeared all over the electromagnetic spectrum.

She felt bad. She’d failed. The Necromancer had been too smart for Iriko; she hadn’t been able to freeze all of Iriko all at the same time, but she had run very fast and grown a lot of legs and then dived into the ground to become one with the dirt and the concrete. Iriko had eaten through the ground, thinking that maybe the Necromancer was just pretending to be concrete. But the Necromancer was gone. She’d gotten away. Serin was disappointed. Iriko’s fault. Iriko was so stupid when she was hungry, and she was always hungry, so she was always stupid. She was tired of being hungry and tired of being stupid.

Iriko had hoped that Serin had been able to kill and eat the other ones they’d found, the bad zombies, the ‘Death Cultists’. Iriko hadn’t asked about the bodies, though she had wanted to eat them very badly. She had run off and failed. The meat belonged to Serin.

But nobody had gotten that meat! What a waste.

Radio contact crackled on Iriko’s skin. Serin said: 「They got away. When that mech started sprouting flesh. My fault. Shouldn’t have paused to gloat. Never pause to gloat. Stupid of me.」

「stupid! eat first gloat later eat eat then laugh big-laugh belly-laugh ha stupid serin」

「Where’d your comedy streak go? I rate that a one out of ten.」

Iriko wanted to grow a mouth and beam a smile. She could spare the resources, for once. But the storm would tear apart unprotected lips. Iriko knew she could make lips sturdy and tough and plated with armour, but she also knew that would make her sad. She wanted her lips to be neat and soft and pretty. So she didn’t.

That was one thought dealt with, and it had only taken a handful of moments. Iriko turned toward the other urgent matter.

Why was the air full of poetry?

Iriko knew where the poetry was coming from, despite the cacophony of nonsense which filled the electromagnetic spectrum — the improvised verse originated from the smaller of the two giants locked in combat on the far side of the crater, the one called Arcadia’s Rampart. Iriko knew the giant’s name because it had attached a signature to one of the first pieces of poetry it had shouted. The poetry struggled through the density of signals in the air, an electromagnetic twin to the physical storm of debris and radiation and golden toxins. But the voice was distinct, clear, and highly poetic.

Iriko liked that. The food had cleared her thoughts, but the poetry made her think.

She could not listen to every line — the poetry was very beautiful, but it was also packed with viruses and infinite recursive loops and nasty terminal equations — but she opened a fire-walled data-port and scrubbed the incoming contents, just to listen to another snippet.

「—leap upon the glowing gyre, ride it into the wilds with me, ‘o beauty of my eye, apple in my hand. Come back to me, come back to me, for I fly beyond the limit of your song, to the stars where we may not be found abed. Twelve and twelve and fifty and five, all the times I have missed your hands in the long and empty dark. Your unlucky seed, your sweet pea abandoned on barren soil, has taken root and branch and nut and leaf and bitten the hand that feeds.」

A natural pause.

Iriko strained with a need to reply, to compose a response in equal verse. A dim memory stirred inside her, of swapping poems beneath pillows, of passing secret words into the hands of giggling friends. She started to string a few words together, then gave up in frustration and fear. Even if she could compose a line or two, she could not write it down. And she would not broadcast it; that would give away her position to both of the terrifying giants.

Arcadia’s Rampart started up again: 「Lily pads and lily pads and lily pads, pressed tight together in the sweating sun, swapping our saliva and our empty valves. We miss the curve of your spine against our belly and the flutter of your breath in our own mouth and the—」

Skreeeeeeeerk!

Poetry was drowned out by a storm-wall of roiling rage from the wounded golden machine.

Iriko did not like the mess of signals and data pumped out by the giant diamond airship. That was not poetry. It had no sense, no balance, no beauty. The thing had been screaming since it had turned up, filling every wavelength with jumbled nonsense which meant nothing, or at least nothing interesting. Iriko knew this technique well; sometimes it was used by things from far beyond the graveworm line, from out in the wilds. Flooding prey with nonsense information could stun or confuse for long enough to complete a kill. The diamond was a predator, a stupid and hateful one, filling an already dead world with empty nonsense.

The diamond had screamed even more when it had taken a wound. Arcadia’s Rampart was very clever.

Arcadia’s Rampart was also terrifying; crawling with rapidly growing flesh, blooming and sprouting like a plant, spewing weaponry and explosions in all directions, glowing with an intensity of nanomachine activity that Iriko could not track with even the widest of her wide-band sensors. Iriko knew she was only able to watch this fight because both combatants were focused so completely on each other. To encounter either of them alone would have meant certain death for Iriko, no matter the beautiful poetry from Arcadia’s Rampart. Beautiful things could be deadly. Arcadia’s Rampart was both.

Pity it was going to die.

Iriko could see no other way for the fight to conclude. She could barely see the fight anyway — her visual sensors were plated with inches of diamond, poking just over the lip of the skyscraper’s roof, staring into the gold and brown and black of the storm. She witnessed the fight mostly via echolocation returns, IR sensor readings, and heat-map output grids.

Arcadia’s Rampart was buckling beneath gigantic gravitic blows, legs sunk into boiling mud, flesh baking to crusts of blackened carbon. The golden diamond was bleeding to death, like a boar on the end of a spear — but it would gore the hunter before it bled out.

Iriko wanted to cry. She couldn’t though — the storm would whip away any tears quicker than any eye could shed.

Arcadia’s Rampart was terrifying — but the poetry was so beautiful. Part of Iriko’s mind told her it barely counted as poetry at all, but she didn’t care. She had not heard or composed poetry in longer than she could remember. Hunger had killed poetry. Now it was threatening a resurrection, urged on by this weird fleshy giant. Iriko did not want to lose that. But she could not help. She was still too small and too stupid.

If only she could drink faster. Grow bigger. Be stronger.

But if she did that, would she forget poetry again? Would she be like she used to, when she was large and strong and cruel? She didn’t want to keep being like that. She wanted to be smaller, more dense, more compact. She wanted to brush her hair and bathe in the sun. She wanted to grow lips for smiling and feet for shoes and skin for putting clothes against.

Maybe if she stored enough nanomachines and thought hard enough.

Far below, down at the feet of the skyscraper towers, down in the ash and dust of the city, a familiar dirty white speck burst into the crater.

Iriko almost lost her grip on the roof.

Pheiri!

His tracks were spinning, biting into the grey mud, throwing up waves of liquid muck. He hit the edge of the crater and skidded round to avoid plunging into the boiling swamp. His turret turned as he slewed to one side, perfectly balanced and perfectly level, even amid the fury of the storm; the barrel was like the arm of an archer on horseback, strong and sure and aimed right at the golden diamond. The weapon was turgid with energy, held back by a hair-trigger touch, a bowstring quivering for release. Iriko read Pheiri’s targeting matrix, the trajectory of his shot. She grew a heart — an actual organ, red and wet and pumping for just three beats — purely so she might feel it swell with emotion.

Pheiri was going to save the poet!

Iriko suddenly felt disgusted with herself. She was spread out like an untidy flower of burning meat on the rooftop, uncaring of how she looked. She thought the feast had made her confident, daring, even bold — but in truth she knew the giants did not care to look at her, and she did not care in turn what Serin saw. But Pheiri was strong and smart and sweet, even if he was sometimes rude and silly.

Iriko whipped her membranes back in, folding up her flower of flesh, ending her meal. She did not want Pheiri to see her all massive and bloated and ugly, even if he had already witnessed the truth of her body.

She was about to squirt a greeting — no, a friendly joke — no, again, how about a cold-shouldered grumpy pout — no, none of those, none—

Pheiri split the air.

A lance of light brighter than the forgotten sun flashed from Pheiri’s distended turret-weapon and hit the golden diamond. The beam ripped through the storm like a gust of clear wind through a fog bank, searing the air and roaring with super-heated particles.

Iriko squealed and scrambled back across the rooftop, ramming her anchor-spikes into the concrete and clinging to her cover. Half her senses were whited out, blinded by the beam.

Serin’s voice crackled across the radio: 「Iriko! Iriko, did you see that? Is that Pheiri?」

Iriko could not spare the attention to reply. She rushed back to the lip of the roof, plating her exterior in double layers of refractive armour, packing her flesh with fat and ablative coolants and plush-soft absorbent layers. She peered over the edge, blinking with new-grown eyeballs hardened against light damage.

Pheiri’s chivalrous lance had failed to slay the golden diamond — but the beast was wounded anew. A patch of golden metal on one of the struts had turned black, cooked by Pheiri’s weapon, like a sunspot.

Other weaponry fired upon the diamond from the opposite side of the crater. Iriko whipped all her senses around — then almost flung herself backward off the roof when she registered the source of the fire. A trio of worm-guard were attacking the diamond.

Iriko closed off that entire angle of her senses; the worm-guard were not nice to look at. She left positioning trackers where she had last seen the hated things, so they could not sneak up on her.

Was Pheiri working with the worm-guard? How? Why?

Iriko decided it did not matter. If they were helping Pheiri, she would not turn her nose up at the assistance.

Pheiri was skidding about down at the edge of the crater, far below Iriko’s vantage point. He slammed back through the buildings, brick and metal and dust raining all around his bone white shell. Iriko would have bitten her lip if she’d had a mouth. She wanted a mouth. She wanted to make a mouth and shout poetry down at Pheiri. She wanted to ask him—

「pheiri hurt hurt pheiri please hurt tell safe tell? unsteady wobble weave! get steady get feet get feet!」

Iriko squirted the radio-burst before she could stop herself.

Three whole seconds passed with no reply, not even a static burst telling her to shut up and go away. Iriko leaned over the edge of the skyscraper’s rooftop. The storm ripped at her flesh, trying to find ways through her armour plating. Pheiri was weaving and wavering, like he’d lost control. If only Iriko was larger, she could reach out and help.

Pheiri’s punch-drunk weave suddenly steadied.

A reply crackled back up the radio wavelength, a little data-packet just for her: 「NEGATIVE cease communications remove self proximity danger」

Iriko grew several trumpet-like organs and honked in outrage, almost loud enough to carry through the storm. She didn’t care about the radiation and the wind and the nanomachine cost.

「hate you hate you hate you! rude rude nasty rude look after look want to know! stupid boy hate fuck you fuck」

How dare he?! How dare Pheiri tell her to shut up, when she was worried about—

He replied with a burst of static, like slapping a hand over Iriko’s mouth. She grew more trumpets and screamed louder and—

Pheiri sent: 「ADVISORY. remove self proximity danger」

Iriko yanked all her flesh-trumpets beneath her armour and slammed back onto the roof. If she’d had cheeks she would have blushed. If she’d had lungs she would have squealed. She wanted to kick her legs up and down and screw her eyes shut and pull at her hair.

Pheiri was telling her to go away because this place wasn’t safe for her!

Pheiri’s turret jerked round as he slammed back through the buildings and skidded into the crater again. He took aim at the diamond a second time. Iriko irised all her eyes shut and darkened her sensors.

Pheiri tore the air with a second beam of sunlight.

The lance blackened another spot on the golden hide of the noisy diamond. The worm-guard on the opposite side of the crater added their firepower to the barrage. Pheiri skidded and slewed again in the aftermath of his thrust. Iriko watched, awestruck, wishing she could cheer.

Serin’s voice crackled over Iriko’s internal radio: 「Didn’t know that lot were suicidal. You seeing this?」

「not suicidal! not not no no not! serin stupid face shut face shut up shut up shut!」

Pheiri fired again, and again, and again, splitting the air with the colour of real sunlight, burning dead spots onto the false-gold of the monster’s hide. The worm-guard helped, pummelling the beast from a greater distance with ultra-high-output solid-round guns and narrow spears of laser beam and squirts of data-assault. The worm-guard were doing almost no damage, like pebbles flung against a whale.

But they were distracting the diamond, forcing it to grope for them with feelers of gravity. Iriko hid herself, flattening her body against the roof as those vast invisible snakes uncoiled overhead and slammed down to crush the worm-guard. But the nasty horrible machines had already danced away on their million little legs, taking up new firing positions to harass and irritate the giant.

Shot by shot, Pheiri and the worm-guard were saving the poet; Arcadia’s Rampart pulled crimson legs from the boiling mud and shot the diamond in the face with barrages of missiles and meat, retreating from the fight. The poet lost tons of flesh to burning gold light and sucking muck and the lash of the gravitic snakes, but it was quick and clever, retreating at speed.

The poet was going to live.

But Pheiri was not quite so fast.

As Pheiri lined up and loosed a thirteenth beam of burning sunlight, the golden diamond turned its attention toward the tiny white speck of the darting, dipping, ditzy little tank.

One of the massive snakes of gravitic power lashed out toward Pheiri, smashing through the buildings at the edge of the crater and stirring the storm-winds to greater fury.

Iriko refused to retreat, ramming her anchor-spikes deep into the concrete lip of the roof, clutching metal rebar with pseudopods, gluing her flesh to the glass and steel of the structure. Her eyeballs burned and melted but she grew new ones and wrapped them in fresh diamond, searching for Pheiri in the aftermath of the strike. Pheiri had to be safe! He had to be okay! He was too gallant and bold to die like that!

A cloud of debris and dust filled the air in all directions, like a knot in the storm. Iriko cycled through sensory information, peering through the debris with radar and infra-red and echolocation and—

Pheiri roared free of the dust cloud. Iriko cheered across the radio, babbling words she had not used in longer than she could recall.

But Pheiri seemed dazed, slower than before, his tracks pulling to one side. His turret was pointing in the wrong direction. His other weapons were quiet and still.

The golden diamond lifted the giant snake a second time, to break Pheiri’s shell and crush his innards. Iriko’s own insides contracted with terror.

Iriko broke the last and most important of her own rules — she broadcast her own location.

She squirted a data packet toward Arcadia’s Rampart, along with Pheiri’s position and the relative angle of the gravitic generator output, to aid in triangulation. She sent it on an open channel, unencrypted, with no carrier virus or hidden parasites, to increase the chance that Arcadia’s Rampart would listen.

It did.

The blossom-monster of flesh and bone reached back with one of its own gravitic feelers and interrupted the golden diamond.

Gravitic waves exploded in all directions like a shattering vase, as tentacle and feeler met in mid-air. A wave of pressure washed over the skyscraper, knocking Iriko back, forcing her to retreat into a high-density ball of tightly pressurised flesh.

The gravity waves passed. The giant snake and the little feeler both reformed, but they were pulling back.

Arcadia’s Rampart had saved Pheiri.

Iriko rushed back to the edge of the roof. She peered down, down, down — so many floors down, at the white speck of Pheiri’s shell, still speeding along the edge of the crater, still intact, still unbroken.

Pheiri had come back to his senses.

He turned his turret and fired a final beam of sunlight toward the golden diamond. Showing off! The fight was done: Arcadia’s Rampart was clear of the deepest mud, slapping at the gravitic snakes as the golden diamond tried to reach across the crater; the worm-guard had dispersed, vanished into the guts of the city, their fire-support mission successful, probably off to rejoin the worm; the golden diamond itself was thrashing and writhing, a whirling vortex at the core of the storm — but it was dying. The railgun strike from Arcadia’s Rampart had broken something essential. The diamond sprawled and bucked and spread ruin all about itself — but it would not be pursuing anything, not now, not yet.

Iriko felt very complicated.

Why had Pheiri rushed into danger? For Arcadia’s Rampart? Was the terrifying thing of flesh and bone dear to him? Did either of them even care that Iriko had helped?

Iriko peered over the edge of the roof and trained all her senses on Pheiri. He was racing toward a gap in the buildings, on a trajectory that would bring him into contact with Arcadia’s Rampart. Were they friends? Did the little zombies inside Pheiri care about the giant? Or was it something more?

Iriko was still sated enough to know that she was feeling jealousy. She felt very stupid and small. She wanted to pull back inside the skyscraper and hide in the dark.

Radio contact crackled across her flesh. Serin sounded sick: 「You alive up there?」

「no」

「Lucky you don’t have guts to empty. That wave popped one of my lungs. I’ll be okay. You need help?」

「no」

「We should move. Fight’s done. And I wanna see what our little friends are gonna do with that mech. Ready to go?」

「no」

「Iriko. I’m serious. I’m moving with or without—」

「no」

Iriko had more important things to worry about.

Three of the ball-shaped rotor-craft burst from the remains of the dust cloud behind Pheiri.

The trio of machines were hot on Pheiri’s heels, lashing the air with their own miniature gravitic snakes. Most of the rotor-craft from the golden diamond seemed to be dispersing through the ruins, or retreating into the sky, perhaps leaving their leader behind. But those three were focused and intent, moving fast, hunting.

Pheiri would not reach Arcadia’s Rampart in time.

Iriko squirted a warning, a blurt of static joined to a trajectory readout.

Pheiri didn’t reply. He acted; his hull weapons swivelled and fired — but only half of them, off-target, punching empty air. The rotor-craft smashed the shells and bullets out of the sky, knocking them aside. The distended spear of Pheiri’s main gun was powered down. He was spent and exhausted. The rotor-craft whizzed through the air, bearing down on him from behind.

Iriko retracted her anchors, bunched the base of her body, and leapt off the skyscraper.

She narrowed herself into a spear of flesh, tipped with a nose-cone of ultra-dense diamond-laced bone; the storm-winds ripped at her body and buffeted her sideways, slamming her into the wall of the skyscraper. She hurled herself back into open air with a dozen pseudopods, sacrificing the flesh to the radiation and chemical damage and wind shear. She righted herself, falling faster and faster, trying to calculate speed and trajectory and the correct angle of impact. She used flaps of meat to steer herself as she plummeted through the whipping storm.

The trio of rotor-craft were almost on top of Pheiri. One of them was reaching for his rear.

Iriko realised with mounting horror that she could not stretch herself wide enough to kill them all. She was too small.

But she was no longer too stupid.

She whipped out with a clutch of pseudopods and a squirt of acid, raked at the exterior wall of the skyscraper, and ripped a steel girder free from the structure. The effort sent her tumbling end over end, losing control, careening toward the ground.

She bunched up into a tight, dense, armoured ball. She sucked the metal girder inside herself, cut one end into a sharp point with a diamond razor, and then ejected the makeshift spear with a heave of muscular force.

The sharpened girder sliced through one of the rotor-craft and slammed it into the ground, pinning it to the earth.

Iriko spread herself wide at the last second, becoming a flutter of open flesh. She fell upon the remaining pair of aircraft in a rain of acid and digestive juices and specialised metal-eating toxins. Gravitic snakes ripped through her meat, but she parted before them, reforming in their wake. She slammed into the main bodies of the rotor-craft and coated them with the strongest acids she could produce, melting their metal and wiring and fragile plastics, eating through silicon wafers and exotic substrates and chewing into the armour of their high-density cores.

Iriko hit the ground just behind Pheiri, in a tangle of flesh and metal and acid and mud.

One of the rotor-craft cores managed to self-detonate before she got inside, exploding outward in a crump of ruined flesh and twisted plastic; Iriko smothered the core to protect Pheiri’s rear, swallowing the explosive force with her body. She lost hundreds of kilos of biomass, charred and burned and flung away into the mud. She rammed injectors of acid and sealant and corrosive enzymes into the other core, killing it before it could end itself in a similar explosion. Iriko digested the nano-rich substrate, sucking it within herself, desperate to regenerate her flesh.

She was badly damaged, de-cohered, and dazed, lying amid the splatters of boiling mud and shrapnel from the rotor-craft, still torn and tugged by the edge of the storm. In moments she would be up and whole, ready to slink away into the dark, but right then she was the most vulnerable she had been in a very long time.

And she was about fifteen meters from the rear of Pheiri’s bone-white shell.

Fifteen meters was a lot closer than Pheiri had tolerated before.

He was all pitted and gnarled, covered in mud and soot, his tracks damaged here and there, his weapons spent and sagging with exhaustion. Up close his surface was so much more complex than Iriko had been able to read from a distance. She could see the seam where his hatch would open to let the zombies in and out. She could see the way his shell curled into strange little fractal patterns and detailed knots and funny little coils.

Pheiri skidded to a halt. He pointed his hull-mounted weapons at Iriko, blanketed her with a warning of static, and pinged her with half a dozen targeting alerts.

Iriko stared back. She wanted to cry, or perhaps hide. She wasn’t sure which. She made no effort to explain herself, nor conceal the oil-on-water colour of her skin, nor pull herself out of the wreckage. Maybe this was it. This was the end. Slain by a silly boy who didn’t know any better.

Pheiri squirted a beam of IR comms, tight and narrow, just for her.

「ADVISORY escort damaged unit」

Iriko stirred from within the wreckage, pulling herself together. Had she heard that right? She extended a pseudopod toward Pheiri’s rear hatch.

「NEGATIVE minimum convoy range 10 meters. ADVISORY utilize unit as cover」

Iriko slid out of the wreckage and next to Pheiri, using his body as shelter from the storm. She waited for him to shoot her, but the barrage did not come. If she had a heart it would have been trying to escape her chest. If she had a face it would have been turned down and blushing bright red. She gave him the requested ten meters of clearance, pulling her wounded, melted flesh into safety alongside him. The hunger was beginning to return. Iriko’s thoughts were growing less focused.

Iriko squirted: 「safe safe fallen safe fall fast? pheiri tired sleep need meat more meat meat for pheiri meat for us? serin upstairs downstairs go get serin? serin behind not behind not leave」

Pheiri started moving again, tracks dragging at the mud, heading toward Arcadia’s Rampart and the gap between the skyscrapers. He broadcast a wordless affirmative; Serin was welcome to meet up with them, at the supplied coordinates.

Iriko reached out with a pseudopod again, toward Pheiri’s bone-white shell.

Pheiri squirted: 「WARNING no-contact minimum convoy range 10 meters」

Iriko pulled her pseudopod back.

「bwaaah. bah bah bah. as if no way no. ha ha ha.」

Silly boy.