Bee stood at the edge of Acetyn’s wound and felt the City itself keening in agony. The living metropolis shuddered beneath her feet, its low moans vibrating through the broken ground. Before her yawned a cavernous fissure rent into the City’s flesh??: flayed membranes of muscle and biomechanical sinew hung in limp tatters, slick with ichorous fluids. Vein-like conduits and half-severed cables drooped from the torn walls, dripping a luminous silvery ooze that pooled in quivering rivulets. Each pearlescent droplet slithered as if alive, attempting feebly to knit the damage shut. But the wound was too grievous—Bee’s cognitoviral strike had seen to that?. Now, the City’s innards lay exposed to the hot, dust-laden wind, shimmering wet and raw under the blood-red sky.

  Bee swallowed, tasting copper and ash on her tongue. Guilt gnawed at her. This is the cost of victory, she thought, gazing into the mutilated depths. In quelling Blachaeus Tem Etal’s abomination, and even just in marching upon the Ossein Basilica, she had violated Acetyn. A portion of the crawling City—a portion of the world itself—now lay dead or dying by her hand?. The realization sat heavy in her chest. Far in the distance, the heads of Acetyn, the great skull-keeps, exhaled wounded groans that rolled across the carnage-littered plain. The sound was almost human: a throaty, desolate cry of pain and loss.

  The flock of patchers flitted about the periphery of the fissure, trying in vain to mend the damage. Bee watched one land on a torn ligament of living architecture and spit out a stream of tarry biogel, sewing threads of fibrous concrete across the rent flesh?. For a moment, the patcher’s secretions held, drawing taut a web of collagen and circuitry—but then a tremor coursed through the ground, and the newly formed bonds peeled away like flimsy scabs. The patcher hissed and buzzed off, its instincts defeated by the sheer scale of the wound. Others followed. Their diligent efforts amounted to nothing as fresh convulsions rippled through the broken City, undoing each repair attempt in turn?. Bee tore her gaze from the futile ministrations and steeled herself.

  Before her, the pools of silvery nanomaterial glistened invitingly. This fluid was the City’s secret lifeline: self-assembling constructs, part-machine, part-organism, able to clot wounds and rebuild tissue, and so much more. Her learnings from Slashex suggested to her that this compound predated life on this world and that greater secrets lay hidden in data vaults still to be uncovered. Now, it lay spilt and exposed, coiling in shimmering threads over shattered bone plates and spurting conduits?. Bee stepped closer, and the ichor tugged toward her plated feet as if magnetized by her presence. Tiny filaments within the liquid danced with static charge, reacting to the subtle radio signal emanating from Bee’s neural lace.

  She reached out a trembling hand—her left, flesh and blood—and dipped her fingers into a viscous puddle of the nanite-rich fluid. It was warm, unnaturally so, and it clung to her skin like mercury, crawling up her palm in wriggling capillary-like trails. A dozen micro-sparks skittered over the fluid’s surface as her neural lace synchronized with it. Bee closed her eyes and inhaled sharply. She could feel the material, in a way: sense the trillion tiny mechanisms questing for instruction, waiting to be shaped. It responded to her thoughts, eager to obey.

  “We need a place to work,” Bee whispered, voice reverent and shaky. “Come together… grow.”

  At her will, the silvery liquid stirred. It crept upward in snaking streams, coalescing into thin tendrils that clung to the fissure’s edges. Slowly, those tendrils began to lattice themselves into a structure. Metallic fibres wove through the fleshy walls and broken bones alike, crawling and looping, knitting a new architecture out of ruin. Bee guided it in a trance of concentration. This was her gift, the blessing of the Immortal’s lineage, the work of her Vat-Mother, and now the ancient witchcraft in her bloodline that Slashex had awoken. With her gene-locked signal thrumming silently from the base of her skull, she glowed with the unspoken language of the progenitors, coaxing the nanites to heed her design?.

  Behind her, a presence loomed—tall, spidery, and silent. Slashex watched, arms folded over his segmented torso. His many-jointed silhouette cut a jagged figure against the seething City flesh beyond.

  Bee did not turn to him, but she felt his sightless visor fixed on her back and sensed the restless twitch of one of his bladed limbs. There was always the feeling that Slashex’s attention was divided, as though some phantom occupied the space behind his missing eyes?. On occasion, she’d catch him cocking his head, listening to an unheard voice, the way he was doing even now. Bee’s lips thinned.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The nanomaterial filament at her command quivered, awaiting her next command. Bee refocused, sweeping her arm in an arc. In response, the lattice of silvery fibres arched overhead, following the motion of her hand. It was like painting with living metal: each gesture conjured new spines and ribs of matter that hardened from liquid to solid in moments. The first curving strut of the dome took shape above, ribbed and translucent like the cartilaginous fin of some deep-sea leviathan. Bee guided another sluice of silver upward, weaving it through the first. A web of gleaming threads spiralled out from the wound’s edge, enclosing a pocket of ravaged land—and Bee—beneath a nascent shell.

  With every coaxed strand, the dome grew. Its surface gleamed wetly, reflecting Bee’s drawn face in mutant distortion—a woman’s face, feverish but her dark eyes set with determination. The structure’s interior was alive with motion as nanites scurried to reinforce their formation. However, from the outside, it would seem an unbroken, eerily smooth hemisphere sprouting from the ruined earth. An unnatural excrescence amid the battlefield.

  Bee pressed her right palm—her cybernetic prosthetic conjured with the selfsame gift—against a vein of half-congealed nanomaterial that drooled from a cracked plate of city shell. She sent a pulse of thought through her implant, and the material obeyed instantly, surging up under her hand. It solidified with a hiss of steam, sealing another gap. Segment by segment, the dome was knitting itself whole at her bidding?.

  Her muscles quivered with exertion. The radio broadcast that allowed this miracle was an invisible strain—a drain of mental and physical energy that left her light-headed. Bee’s vision swam for a moment. The red haze of the wounded sky beyond the half-formed dome blurred with the silvery threads before her. She swayed.

  At once, Slashex was at her elbow.

  “That’s the last for now,” he rumbled softly. One of his metal hands hovered near her arm as if to steady her, but he did not touch her.

  Bee stiffened and forced herself upright. She would not show weakness before him. She surveyed her work. The dome encircled the heart of the devastation—a roughly circular patch of churned, blood-soaked ground perhaps thirty paces across, including the spot where Blachaeus had fallen.

  Outside its incomplete edge, she could still see the charnel expanse of the battlefield: mountains of charred chitin and twisted metal, the carcasses of war-beasts and the remains of soldiers beyond count. And beyond that, in the gloom, shapes moved—survivors. My soldiers, Bee reminded herself. What ragged few remained of them. Those still loyal to her cause, or at least too stubborn to flee, lingered at a wary distance. They watched the rising dome with unease, their forms silhouetted by Acetyn’s dying biolights.

  None dared approach.

  “I see you have been paying attention, after all,” Slashex said. His voice was mild, almost conversational, but there was a barbed undertone?. Bee caught his eyeless visage from the corner of her eye: hard to read, that mismatched, cybernetically assembled visage and the clicking echolocator where his eyes should be. Was that a hint of a smile at the corner of his scarred mouth?

  Bee ignored the provocation. She turned away, forcing her will onto the nanotech one more time. A final coil of material snaked up, closing over their heads. With an unsettling resonance, the dome sealed shut, joining its edges seamlessly and plunging them into a dim half-light. They were entombed in a bubble of gleaming filigree.

  Bee gritted her chrome teeth. LED Lights built themselves overhead, forming out of the roiling material.

  “You can do it yourself, if you like,” Bee murmured at last.

  Her voice sounded small and strained in the enclosed space. Out there, beyond this silver veil, the world would keep moving—the Pilgrim’s zealots regrouping, the City bleeding out. But in here, she and Slashex would work undisturbed. No interruptions, no prying eyes. No one to see the atrocities she was prepared to commit.

  Slashex gave a dismissive grunt, laughing quietly, only eventually speaking.

  “Whatever you say, little Bee.”

  He uncrossed his mismatched arms and paced away, the tips of his pointed legs scratching against the plated ground. In the close quarters of the dome, his towering, many-limbed form was all imposing, looming over her wherever he chose to stand. He lingered at the periphery, half in shadow and half-lit by the overhead lights. Bee could not shake the feeling that he was monitoring her every move?.

  Bee exhaled and allowed herself a moment to breathe. Her temples throbbed from sustained concentration, and beneath the ache she felt them—the worms.

  They were agitated by her exertion. Tiny parasites coiled through her muscles, threading along her nerves, a living corruption hitchhiking in her flesh. They squirmed beneath her skin in protest, and Bee’s stomach lurched. She pressed a hand to her abdomen, feeling nauseous.

  Not now.

  She could not falter now.