A roar of static, deafening and mind-shattering, rippled through Bee’s consciousness. In an instant, the world dissolved into scrambling shadows and grainy flashes of colour. Her ears no longer heard, her eyes no longer saw—there was only an endless, disorienting shriek.

  She could not say how much time had passed in that oblivion. An immeasurable cluster of seconds, minutes, or hours, all lost in a haze. Then, slowly, through blurred edges and a hot burning in her chest, she returned to reality.

  She found herself kneeling atop a collapsed mass of gore. Mounds of broken limbs, fallen machine plating, and shredded lumps of living flesh spread out in every direction. Smoke and dust blanketed the horizon, lit by the hateful red glow of the moon above. Her breath caught in her throat as she realised her hands—original and new—were sticky and wet with someone else’s blood.

  Between her shaking fists, a creature cowered. It was small—its swollen, pale belly studded with lumps of half-formed armatures, each black with residue. Blachaeus. Maggot-like, he couldn’t have been as large as Bee herself, writhing and squealing in a pitiful plea for mercy.

  Her arms lashed out again. She struck its squishy skin with dull, uncoordinated smacks, weeping and sobbing.

  “Why?! Why…?”

  She tried to form words. Tried to ask why. Tried to demand answers. But they choked out as her grief stole all sense from her, and her mind still reeled from the kill command.

  She only found angry, impotent blows. They boiled out of her. Hit after hit after hit…

  And Bee saw how the little maggot wailed, mewling, pinned beneath her. It deserved this. It deserved worse. She could hardly think—only feel scorching tears run down her cheeks, dripping to mingle with the stolen guts littering the ground.

  Her strikes were feeble, each one more an exhausted smack rather than a lethal blow, yet she refused to stop. A throbbing ache tore across her muscles. Worms squirmed beneath her skin and she loosed a broken scream.

  Then Jhedothar stepped behind her. A firm but gentle grip eased across Bee’s shoulders, guiding her away from the pitiful, squealing remains of Blachaeus. Bee shrieked in protest, kicking at the ground, trying to scramble forward for another swing.

  “It’s over,” Jhedothar muttered, his voice somewhere between caution and relief. He had to keep a careful hold on Bee’s trembling frame in shock. “It’s done. He’s beaten.”

  Bee thrashed against Jhedothar, sobs of anguish contorting her features before, at last, she collapsed into his arms.

  The City surface around the carcass was now still and sagging beneath the ash and the carnage. A portion of the entire world now lay dead by her doing. The horrifying realisation of what she’d done—what she’d become—washed across Bee’s face.

  But it was worth it.

  And in the dirt, the broken little maggot whimpered, too overwhelmed to move, utterly bereft of all the power it had once wielded.

  Bee was struck with a realisation. Vashante. She looked around the vast, fallen carcass. Vashante had to be somewhere amongst all this.

  She twisted free of Jhedothar’s arms, ignoring his startled shout. He called after her, voice strained, but she was already dashing across the lumps of glistening, dead tissue that sloughed away from Blachaeus’s monstrous corpse. The stench of chemical rot and acrid bio-coolants made her mouth sting with bile, yet she pressed on.

  A plateau of broken grafts marked what had once been the serpent’s skull. Bee took wrenching steps to climb the shifting rubble of bioceramic plating, bone, and the ruined shells of devoured freaks and pale. She stumbled more than once, body still trembling, but anxiousness and determination kept her upright.

  Bee lurched to the far end, where she recognised the twisted shapes of cybernetic limbs. Her stomach turned. Even before seeing it up close, she knew it was Vashante. It looked parted out and anatomised—a trove of mechanical muscle, actuators, pumps, and exoskeletal interfaces stripped of flesh, the vital life beneath it cruelly exhumed.

  Gone.

  The real her, the meat and the brain and the heart and the more, it was all gone, except for the battered plates of Vashante’s face, dark metal slashed by star-metal edges and riddled with the congealed gore of Blachaeus’s rampage.

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  Bee sank to her knees, plucking those plates carefully from the surrounding muck. She almost thought she’d find something left.

  Some part of Vashante alive.

  Some part of her still breathing.

  Even just a heartbeat.

  But she found only emptiness when her trembling fingers turned the face plates over. Where once Bee had helped shape a visage so Vashante might feel human, now she held a mask with no trace of the woman that once dwelled behind it.

  For a moment, Bee stared, unseeing, tears drying to salt on her cheeks. Then grief tore through her throat, an unsteady cry that spluttered through half-closed lips. She pulled the plates closer as though trying to cradle them against her body, half-expecting them to respond.

  They did not.

  “Bee!” Nearby, Jhedothar stood at the lip of the grisly wreck, calling Bee’s name again. His voice caught in the swirling dust.

  But Bee could not bring herself to answer.

  She could only kneel there, heartbreak raw, gazing at Vashante’s face in her quivering hands, left with nothing but the hollow remains of lost humanity.

  They gathered near the wreckage, step by weary step until they formed a ring about Bee in her grief. Jhedothar came first, dragging the maggot-like remains of Blachaeus behind him. The Grafter’s true body, pathetic and writhing, squirmed through shallow pockets of gore.

  In his free hand, Jhedothar clutched his blood-wreathed spear, but his gaze slipped to Bee, remorse catching in his throat. He hesitated, then, with grim resolve, tossed Blachaeus onto the ground. The soft-bodied monstrosity let out a feeble mewl. Its tiny, malformed legs scratched at the blood-soaked dirt, trying to gain a hold.

  Yomnar Free—old robes caked in filth—laboured over the corpses, and once he saw Bee, he staggered toward her. She turned blindly into his chest, tears still fresh on her cheeks. Yomnar’s arms came up to hold her.

  “Shh… it’s all right,” he murmured, a voice frayed. “You saved us, Bee… you saved all of us.”

  A choked sob escaped Bee, then a broken whisper: “Not everyone. Vashante—”

  “I know,” Yomnar said gently, voice trembling with a mixture of relief and grief. He tightened his hold as though trying to shield Bee from the ruin around them.

  Nearby, Lady Isbet Hash advanced, retinue in tow, her azure garments now smeared with someone else’s blood. Hollow-eyed, she spared no soft words. Instead, her voice carried a glacial chill.

  “So. This is how you planned to end the Pilgrim,” Isbet Hash said, throwing Jhedothar a pointed look. At his nod, she turned her attention to Bee, regarding her with an unreadable expression. “I see it clearly now, Lady Bhaeryn. You can undo the Immortal’s and her lineage’s blessings. You… share their witchcraft, where as we have for generations been deprived of such power.”

  But Bee, trembling in the old monk’s embrace, didn’t react. The words barely reached her at all. She was numb, raw, her mind still fixed on her loss.

  That was when Slashex—lurking at the edges with mechanised limbs and whirring sensors—crept forward. His voice was quiet, razor-edged.

  “Listen to me, now, Little Bee,” Slashex said, “Vashante can yet be saved, but our time is short. We must act now. You’ll have to do precisely as I say.”

  Bee lifted her head from Yomnar’s shoulder, numb eyes locking on Slashex.

  She remembered what he had done to her already. The corrupt coding inflicted upon her, the old language, executables and ‘witchcraft.’ He could well be telling the truth, given that his gifts had already achieved the impossible. She wasn’t sure what to think.

  Slowly, she pulled away from the old monk, tears still wet on her cheeks, compelled by Slashex’s words.

  Jhedothar’s posture went rigid, spear gripped in hand, as though he sensed fresh danger. The battered maggot that was Blachaeus gave a pitiful squeal, wriggling in the slurry of ruined flesh at his feet.

  And, high above, the moon glared down with that eternal, hateful red.

  Now all eyes turned to Bee, who had undone the Vat-Mother’s blessing and shattered the monster.

  Slashex waited, promise hanging in the air, if only Bee would once again follow his instructions.

  Bee’s voice trembled as she stared at the battered face plate resting in her palms—the final remnant of Vashante. Every inch of her being felt raw, anchored to the swirl of destruction that smothered the field. Yet the seed of desperate hope in her refused to die.

  “What… what about the others?” she asked, voice cracked. “What about… everyone else?”

  Slashex lifted an unnatural, mechanical limb toward Bee as though in reassurance. A crooked grin tugged at his exposed mouth, the synthetic patchwork that passed for lips.

  “Anything is possible for you, but we must hurry if you want to save Vashante.”

  Bee closed her eyes. Flashes of the monstrous cognito-viral power she had unleashed drifted through her mind in vile echoes—she felt them under her skin, a suffocating hum of static and lethal potential. How she had accidentally killed so many in Cruiros with just a slip of her mind. The memory of it made her want to retch, yet she had no choice. No real choice at all.

  At last, her eyes opened, shining with an edge of resolve beyond the trembling and the tears.

  “All right,” she whispered, gaze dropping to the metal shell in her hands. “Tell me what I have to do.”

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