Together, they began the reconstruction. Slashex wheeled over a mechanised apparatus—some mechanical skin-welder, which Slashex referred to as an auto-surgery array. Its jointed arms were tipped with syringes, laser scalpels, and bone knitters.

  Bee, however, started by assessing the situation, guided by SepGNT’s knowledge. She flexed her fingers. Data scrolled behind her eyes: schematics of Vashante’s previous augmentation layouts. Error readouts of damaged subsystems. Organ replacements were required.

  “SepGNT suggests beginning with structural assembly and vital organ synthesis,” Bee said, surprised at the calm, almost clinical tone that came from her own mouth. She realised she was partially echoing the daemon’s feed in real-time.

  It felt natural

  It frightened her a little.

  “Then begin,” Slashex said.

  He positioned a set of nutrient gel vats at arm’s reach. Within one, lumps of tumour tissue bobbed—raw biomass. In another, a cloud of what Bee now understood to be cultured stem cells floated, a haze in the warm liquid.

  Bee gently lifted Vashante’s shattered torso pieces and placed them on a more stable surface – a flat slab of bioceramic plating set across two emptied ammo crates. She fitted the two halves of the torso together as best as she could, like puzzle pieces. They didn’t fully align; chunks were missing, edges frayed. That was fine. She just needed a baseline. Last she put down a small vessel of the constructive nanomaterial, the juddering liquid silver gathered into an old urn.

  She closed her eyes, took a steadying breath, and placed her hands over the largest gap in Vashante’s broken chest.

  Concentrate, she told herself.

  A faint pink glow suffused Bee’s chest, and flashes of radio signal emanated from her crown. But this time, it was controlled, focused. The silvery nanomaterial responded to her mental command, flowing in threadlike streams onto the torso. At the same time, Bee tapped into the SepGNT instructions: how to weave replacement flesh and bone from available biomass.

  Strands of reactive nanites laced through Vashante’s remaining form. The auto-surgery array responded by plucking biomass from the vessels. The liquid metal met them. Reformed them. They became severed muscles, and it continued to bind them.

  Bee guided them to form a scaffold where organs had been ripped out.

  “Heart,” she whispered, voice taut.

  Immediately, SepGNT projected a recipe of sorts into her mind—the necessary components to synthesise a functional heart for Vashante.

  Bee instructed. The array grabbed another glob of vat-grown tissue from the nutrient gel and pressed it into the chest cavity. Then, focusing intensely, she drove the nanites to shape it, cell by cell, guided by the daemon’s precise parameters.

  The gelled lump quivered and began to metamorphose. Within moments, a crude but viable heart was forming inside Vashante’s chest—stitched together by swarms of the nanomachines that acted as guiding cells and scaffolds. Bee’s breath caught as she witnessed it: chambers coalescing, valves sculpting themselves from bio-mass. It was grotesque and wondrous all at once.

  A new heart, where moments ago, there was nothing but empty space.

  It wouldn’t be as perfect as the one Vashante was born with—if she’d even possessed a natural heart after all her augmentations—but it was a heart nonetheless, slick and pink and oozing fluid.

  Bee next addressed the lungs. One had been completely obliterated, the other punctured. She regrew them from scratch, layering delicate tissues into balloon-like sacs. For other organs, she decided to rely on mechanical substitutes: Vashante’s last body had used cybernetic filtration units instead of kidneys, and those remained mostly intact though offline. Bee reactivated them with a jolt of current from a power pack. She spliced severed tubes and arteries with flexible fleshy grafts.

  All the while, the auto-surgeon arms hovered around, occasionally moving in to cauterise a vessel or inject a stabilising cocktail under the combined guidance of Bee and Slashex’s technical supervision, ensuring they did not malfunction. But Bee did the bulk of it with her own two hands and her mind’s newfound skill. Her lineage’s gift. Her command. Her face was set in deep concentration, sweat dripping from her brow despite the chill air pumped by the refrigeration unit.

  Piece by piece, Vashante’s form grew whole. Bee fused the segments of her spine back together using blocks of metal interlinked nerve tissue grown into filaments and threaded into place. She patched the torn muscles of the neck and regrew the flesh of the shoulders. She even took special care to line the interior of Vashante’s armour plating with a thin layer of regenerating interstitial connective tissue so that when the armoured torso closed, it wouldn’t chafe raw muscle underneath.

  Comfort over pure functionality—a subtle touch entirely Bee’s own. Something she could see was lacking in the previous design.

  It was meticulous work, and time slipped by unnoticed.

  Bee was vaguely aware of daylight fading to a sullen dusk outside, the red light over the dome dimming as it was captured by cameras linked to her greater network.

  The worms writhed in periodic protest as she taxed herself, but she bit down on the pain. Another one crawled up into her skull. The pressure behind her left eye made her vision warp and then flood with red. Failing to blink it away, Bee hurried, desperate to finish her work before it was too late.

  At one point, she realised Yomnar had quietly entered. She must have let him in. The ghostly white glare of an electric arc lamp now illuminated the dome’s interior, throwing stark shadows of their figures on the curved walls?. The bone monk didn’t speak; he simply set a canteen of water and a rag within Bee’s reach. Bee gave him the briefest grateful glance and continued her labour. Yomnar murmured a soft prayer and backed away, disappearing outside once more.

  Lady Isbet did not intrude at all but Bee had the eerie sensation that, somehow, she knew everything regardless.

  Finally came the most delicate part: the head. Or rather, the lack thereof. Bee’s hands hovered over the messy stump of Vashante’s neck, which ended raggedly just below the skull’s base. Here lay the greatest challenge. Vashante’s brain was gone—consumed or destroyed by Blachaeus—and without it, no amount of flesh-weaving would restore her.

  They would need some sort of record of Vashante’s last neural state. One step at a time, though, Bee thought. First, they needed a vessel for it.

  She gingerly picked up the polished faceplates from the crate and fitted them together, imagining Vashante’s face as it should be.

  Bee recalled the dance in Ymmngorad’s hall—the gentle sepia light on Vashante’s features, her camera-like eyes alight with joy?. Bee had crafted those features for her from spare parts and vat-grown flesh. Now she would do so again, from nothing if she must.

  Instantly, a flurry of schematics burned themselves into her mind’s eye: an optimal design for a cyber-cranial vault integrated with synaptic grafts. It was all very technical and very cold. Bee pushed aside some of the recommendations. She didn’t want to give Vashante a war machine’s interface or a drone’s sensory array. Such indecencies had been inflicted on her before and she deserved better.

  Bee wanted Vashante back, the woman who had shown her kindness and fierce loyalty.

  The woman who had asked her to dance.

  She modified the design as she went. Using a bowl-like piece of an armour plate as a mould, Bee began to layer biomaterial and circuits to form a new skull. Nanites hardened a shell of bioceramics and metallic bone. With SepGNT’s guidance, Bee laid down a matrix of lab-grown neurons interwoven with a new neural lace—something that she now intuitively understood operated as a networked host of photonic processors that connected to the different centres of her biological brain on the most fundamental level. It was not exactly an organic brain and not exactly a computer—more a hybrid of both.

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  It would need to be, to accept what they were about to upload into it.

  According to the information flashing before her mind’s eye, provided by SepGNT, this was a baseline human state. A human mind, with a design standard refined over 3.1x1013 seconds ago. There was so much information here that she did not have time to internalise it, but one fact struck a chord in her, its meaning clear.

  She was giving Vashante a human mind…

  Slashex stood by in silence, visibly impressed by the speed of Bee’s work. The procedural aspect was largely handled by SepGNT’s algorithm, but Bee’s little interventions and alterations to what would have been the recommended design seemed to draw his interest.

  “You’re incorporating a thermal regulator and pain dampeners?” he asked at one point, noticing Bee installing a tiny implant near where the hypothalamus would be.

  “Yes,” Bee said curtly as she delicately connected a cluster of nerves.

  She didn’t elaborate. The regulator would ensure Vashante’s new body ran warm like a living human, not cold like a machine, and the pain inhibitors could be toggled by her neural lace to spare her undue suffering.

  Lethal efficiency was not the priority here—Vashante’s comfort was.

  At last, Bee had fashioned a crude skull and embedded the necessary neural substrate within. It lacked eyes, ears, and a beautifully sculpted face, but those cosmetic details could come later. For now, it was a smooth grey head shape with sockets for the faceplates and ports for sensory augmentation. Bee affixed the old faceplates onto it gently, like fitting pieces of a helmet – they clicked into place over the front, giving the head a familiar silhouette. The twin cameras slotted into the eye openings, dark and unlit.

  Bee lifted this newly made head in both hands. A few trailing tubes hung from its base – synthetic arteries waiting to be connected. She positioned it above Vashante’s neck stump and, with intense concentration, lowered it onto the waiting spinal column. Slashex swiftly brought the auto-surgeon arms in; they whirred and fused metal to metal, sinew to sinew.

  Bee held her breath as she heard locks twist and clamp.

  A red glyph on one of Slashex’s monitors turned green.

  Connection established.

  “She has a head…” Bee murmured, almost in disbelief.

  Vashante’s body lay before her, whole.

  But was she alive?

  That remained to be seen.

  Bee touched Vashante’s shoulder softly. It was warm, thanks to the new blood and beating heart within. A thin steam of perspiration was even rising from the flesh and metal seams. All signs were positive, at least biologically.

  SepGNT’s voice suddenly manifested in Bee’s mind, clear and monotone: “Neural chassis in place. Ready to initialise cognitive upload.”

  The impersonal words flashed as text across Bee’s inner vision, and simultaneously, she thought she heard a faint static-laced whisper from one of Slashex’s implants. It was as if the daemon spoke both in her head and through the machinery around them.

  Bee swallowed. This was it.

  “Do it,” she whispered.

  At once, Slashex stepped forward, delicately producing a charred coil of slender filaments he had secreted away. She recognised it immediately as Vashante’s previous neural lace—a faintly iridescent mesh once threaded through the Eidolon’s spine and skull. Clots of dried blood and a few scorched connectors confirmed it must have been forcibly ripped free during her assimilation.

  “Her neural data,” Slashex muttered, holding the lace in both hands like some relic.

  Bee’s breath caught. Gently, she took the too-light, impossibly soft but incomprehensibly durable material, her own neural lace buzzing with SepGNT’s presence.

  At her mental command, another radio wave flashed from her crown. The brief hiss of connection followed, then a spark—SepGNT whirred to life inside Bee’s skull, processing Vashante’s engrams in a flood of flickering code.

  Instantly, Bee felt the rush of another’s memories ghosting across her mind: flashes of Vashante’s earliest days.

  Vashante was born the last child of the old Tens lineage. Her mother/father, decrepit and tumour-infested, gave her away to serve the Lord of Bones in an effort to appease some old debt. Vashante was a lowly freak in form, squat and eight-legged. She was made into the shape of the Pale by force that first time so she could better serve the Lord of Bones and his Witch-Wife. Her form was a warped amalgamation of everything except humanity, pressed and shaped into some crude emulation of an imagined Pilgrim, nothing at all like the true monster that came to be revealed. Such were forty-three generations of Eidolon and Pale, devoted to something that never truly was.

  Old Lord Tens died in his estate not long after, Bee realised, surrounded by his servants. Vashante was not there. Her biomodifications meant that her bloodline would end with her. One last petty and cruel act committed by the Lord of Bones domineering over an old rival.

  Bee saw the old architecture of her quarters in the Ossein Basilica and that resolute sense of devotion she carried through every mission. Vashante had been reborn and given a place in the world. She wanted to prove her worth.

  Bee shuddered, almost overwhelmed.

  There, ahead of her, awash in indistinct memory, Bee saw a dozen missions and more, Vashante Tens at the eager service of Sir Ohmax. But as she worked, there became more to her life than base service. She had dreams. She had a life. Vashante wanted to become a true human woman. She wanted to become as the Wire-Witch and more. She didn’t want to languish in inequity as an Ossein Guardian until the end of her days.

  And what should have been the proudest day of her life, her enfeoffment as Dame Tens turned into abject humiliation.

  The Wire-Witch standing over her, judging her with contempt. Even as she earned the title through deed and service, Dame Vashante Tens would never have been good enough. She would never possess even a mote of the Wire-Witch’s divine femininity. She would never approach the grace of her, the divine half-human, a true inheritor of the progenitors.

  Bee was shaking, eyes wide as these thoughts and experiences cascaded through her unbidden.

  Slashex guided her trembling hands toward the half-completed skull unit.

  “Keep going,” he urged her.

  A final approving hum emanated from the server stack as SepGNT accessed and compiled these engrams, threading them through Bee and into the newly grafted cranial substrate.

  “Vashante’s memory imprint integrated,” Bee found herself murmuring, half in the daemon’s words, half in her own.

  Slashex stood back, silent, and waited.

  A series of spidery cables were snaked out from the server stack by the array and attached to ports at the base of Vashante’s skull unit. The body—no, Vashante—jolted once as power flowed in.

  Vashante’s body stiffened and then relaxed, as if some tension had been released. Bee felt a tingling in her own skull as SepGNT accessed the memory imprint. There was a rapid-fire sequence of data exchanges too fast for conscious recognition. Bee caught fragments: images of battle, a sensation of duty, the outline of a prayer Vashante used to repeat—My shape, my kin—all of it flickered through her mind and into the head on the table.

  Vashante’s chest suddenly heaved. A gasp, ragged and mechanised, tore from her throat.

  Bee jumped, nearly stumbling back into Slashex. Then she leaned forward over Vashante, heart pounding.

  The Eidolon’s newly crafted lungs sucked in air and expelled it in a shuddering cough. Then another. Fluid gurgled; Bee quickly turned Vashante’s head to the side as a mixture of bile and saliva spilt from her lips. Her body convulsed weakly, and Bee realised Vashante was choking.

  “Easy… turn her—” Bee stammered.

  Slashex was already there; he helped roll Vashante’s heavy form onto her side. More fluid drained from her mouth as her body’s systems equilibrated.

  A moment later, Vashante’s breathing steadied. She was lying on her back again, her chest rising and falling in a slow rhythm.

  Bee hovered over her, tears of hope welling up.

  “Vashante? Vashante, can you hear me?”

  There was no response. Vashante’s eyes—the glass lenses—remained dark.

  Bee anxiously smoothed a hand over Vashante’s forehead.

  “Please… come back to me,” Bee whispered.

  Had something failed? Her instruments showed life signs, but if the mind upload hadn’t taken—

  Without warning, the lenses flickered. A faint red luminescence lit up within them, then calibrated to a gentle amber. Vashante’s optical sensors came online. They focused slowly, dilating. Bee felt a sob catch in her throat. Those were Vashante’s eyes looking at her.

  Vashante’s head jerked slightly, a confused twitch. Her mechanical lips, faceplates whispering against each other as the servos beneath them moved, parted with a shaky inhale.

  “Where…” The voice was raw and distorted.

  Vashante’s hand spasmed at her side.

  Bee could not restrain the tears now coursing down her face. She clasped Vashante’s hand and squeezed.

  “Vashante, it’s me. You’re safe. You’re… alive. Just breathe.”

  Vashante’s fingers curled around Bee’s in reflex. The array’s monitoring software beeped erratically as it started to monitor her heart rate, then settled.

  The Eidolon slowly turned her head towards Bee’s voice. Bee saw confusion and recognition war in those inhuman eyes. The processes were still booting up, memories aligning with fresh neurons. Vashante’s chest heaved as she struggled to form words.

  “My L-Lady…?”

  It was her. Vashante’s voice was uncertain and soft, addressing Bee by the honorific only she had used since they first met.

  A radiant smile broke across Bee’s tear-streaked face. She sank to her knees, still clutching Vashante’s hand in both of hers now.

  “Yes. Yes, it’s me, Bee,” Her voice quivered. “I’m here.”

  She wanted to laugh, to sob, to throw her arms around Vashante—but she held herself still, afraid any sudden move might hurt her freshly rebuilt knight. All the while, Slashex watched with blind regard, a crooked smile on his mutant lip.