There were still two others to attempt. Bee rose, legs wobbling. Her vision sparked at the edges with fatigue. Vashante immediately braced her, concern etched on her face. “Bee, you’re exhausted. Please—”

  “I have to finish,” Bee said, more sharply than intended. Vashante pressed her lips tight but nodded.

  Cartaxa was next. His situation was slightly better; as an older veteran, he had significant cranial augmentation. SepGNT had a detailed record of his neural map up to the moment of death. Encouraged by that, Bee worked feverishly on his body. She repaired sites of internal bleeding, mended a punctured secondary heart—Cartaxa’s original phenotype had two, prior to being shaped according to the strictures of the Pale, and still they remained—and replaced a shattered arm with a spare cyber-limb Slashex had hauled in for expediency.

  Unlike Toshtta, Cartaxa had lost most of his head to being torn apart and consumed. Bee had to construct a cranial frame much like Vashante’s. She did so with practised motions, though her fingers were numbing and clumsy now.

  Twice, she nearly lost consciousness, once coughing up a clot of blood as the worms in her chest cavity coiled through her violently. Yomnar reappeared then, wiping her mouth and giving her a drink of purified water. She mumbled thanks and pressed on.

  Slashex hovered all the while, silent or issuing occasional instructions in a terse hiss when needed. Bee could feel his impatience mounting, though he tried to hide it. He had not protested when Bee took the time to properly revive Vashante. But now, with two failures looming and with Bee’s affliction progressing, his posture grew tense.

  The upload on Cartaxa was engaged. Bee and Slashex both monitored the vitals as life-support machines whirred. Cartaxa’s new cybernetic eyes blinked online, glowing a soft green. Bee’s heart leapt. Cartaxa’s mandibles twitched, and a groan rattled from his throat. Bee leaned in.

  “Cartaxa? Can you hear me?”

  Cartaxa’s compound eyes swivelled with mechanical precision, focusing on Bee. For one tantalising moment, Bee thought she saw recognition. His four-fingered hand jerked upward, as if to grab her arm. Bee grasped his hand hopefully. His mandibles opened… but then a harsh, grinding burst of static came from his throat in lieu of speech. Cartaxa’s face contorted, not with emotion but with blank confusion.

  His eyes flickered, and his hand slipped from Bee’s, falling limp.

  “No… no, stay with me,” Bee pleaded.

  SepGNT flooded her vision with the data. A critical error in cognitive coherence had occurred; the pattern was too degraded. The daemon had tried its best, but what woke up in Cartaxa’s body was only a broken fragment of who he had been. It subsided quickly into nothingness, leaving another animate shell with autonomic function but no self-awareness.

  Bee slumped against Cartaxa’s armoured bulk, closing her eyes. Another failure. Two of her knights were still dead in all the ways that mattered, despite their breathing bodies tricking her senses with warmth and life.

  She felt Vashante’s hand take hers, squeezing gently. Bee squeezed back, drawing what little comfort she could.

  Behind them, Slashex exhaled a long, metallic sigh.

  “We’ve run out of time for subtlety,” he rasped. There was an edge to his voice now. Bee recognised it. “The enemy won’t wait. Our time is nearly spent.”

  Bee rounded on him, sudden anger flaring through her grief.

  “I’m doing everything I can—” she snapped.

  “And it hasn’t been enough,” Slashex interrupted, blunt but not cruel. “Not for them.”

  He gestured to Toshtta and Cartaxa’s silent forms. The implication that it was enough for Vashante hung in the air. Bee bristled.

  Was he accusing her of favouritism? Her mind raced, insecure and uncertain.

  Of course she’d lavished extra care on Vashante—she loved Vashante.

  No, the worms loved Vashante.

  She was doing this because…

  No…

  It was hard to think. But she had tried just as hard with the others, it just… hadn’t worked.

  “I won’t let them just die!” Bee screamed back.

  It echoed, hollow in the dome. Behind her, Yomnar flinched at the sudden outburst; Vashante placed a calming hand on Bee’s shoulder.

  Slashex’s blind gaze angled toward Bee, unflinching.

  “They are already dead, Bee. What remains are bodies we can repurpose.” He said it flatly.

  Bee’s eyes widened at the coldness.

  “How dare you,” she whispered, fury and pain mixing hotly in her chest. “They were your friends too—”

  “Friends,” Slashex allowed, but there was an undercurrent of amusement in his voice. “And if their minds can’t be restored, then let their bodies yet serve the cause they gave their lives towards. Our cause.”

  Bee felt a sick chill. She had known in some corner of her mind this possibility loomed—that she might not truly resurrect them but could still use their reanimated corpses for battle. The very thought was repugnant. Had Slashex wanted this all along?

  It was a line legendary for its profanity. Lord Centric Hash had done as much a millennium past, and history remembered him as a monster. Unaware of the evils of the past, Bee stared down at Toshtta’s peaceful face and Cartaxa’s roaming eyes and felt ill.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I won’t turn them into… into puppets.”

  Slashex’s jaw tightened. His voice, when it came, was quieter, dangerously soft.

  “Do you think I enjoy the notion? You think this was my plan?”

  His head jerked subtly as if he almost glanced over his shoulder at someone—or some phantom—then back to Bee.

  “I guided you to use SepGNT so we could bring back the Knights Consort in full. That has failed. But an opportunity remains. If you allow SepGNT to run autonomously, these soldiers can still walk again. They can fight. The Vat-Mother’s interference will be for nothing, and more than that, we shall be stronger for it.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Bee heaved with hot, angry breaths. She realised her hands had curled into fists.

  Across the dome, near one of the humming server stacks, Lady Isbet Hash had stepped just inside the dome. Perhaps drawn by the raised voices, she watched, her retinue hovering anxiously outside. Bee’s eyes fluttered as a coil of worm flesh rolled through her brain matter. Had she let the Lady Hash inside?

  Isbet’s eyes flickered from Bee to Slashex to the bodies, and Bee caught a haunted, knowing look on the Lady’s face.

  Isbet Hash—a descendant of Lord Centric—knew exactly what was at stake here. She said nothing, but that silence was weighted with unspoken permission or perhaps resignation.

  Yomnar cleared his throat, breaking the tension.

  “Your Ladyship, Bee,” he ventured gently, “Perhaps… perhaps it is time you rested.” The old bone monk’s voice wavered; clearly, he was deeply uncomfortable with this direction

  Bee felt cornered. Her head throbbed, and a ripple of static scratched at the inside of her skull—as if SepGNT itself was chiming in with dispassionate agreement. They can still serve.

  Bee’s vision blurred. She swayed on her feet; Vashante steadied her. Exhaustion, unlike any she’d felt before, was crashing over her. Her infestation was raging, sending spikes of fever through her blood. Her limbs locked rigid, then spasmed and she grunted with a seizing of her chest. Her attempt at miracles had left her with barely the strength to stand, and in the end, she only got one miracle out of four.

  Was it hubris to think she could save them?

  Should she have hurried to the cure, instead?

  Slashex stepped closer, lowering his voice to a coaxing tone.

  “Little Bee… I know you did all you could. No one will fault you. This path, grotesque as it seems, will ensure their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. The Pilgrim is far stronger than the worm you have disposed of. You need every weapon at your disposal. They would want to protect you, even now.”

  Bee closed her eyes. In the darkness behind her lids, she saw them. Sar-ek’s last heroic stand, Toshtta rallying frightened soldiery with firm resolve, Cartaxa solemnly handing a fellow soldier a blade with a paternal nod.

  Would they consent to this final desecration if it meant victory? She didn’t know, and they weren’t here to ask.

  Her lip trembled. “I don’t want to let them go,” she admitted brokenly, at last. “If… if there’s even a fragment of them left that can know what I’m doing, and hates me for it—”

  “We’ll never know,” Slashex said. He placed one of his mechanised hands, surprisingly gentle, on Bee’s forearm. “We must act, now. You are dying, and the time wasted here means that the fight to the Ossein Basilica will take too long without them.”

  “I-...” Bee collapsed to her knees. She didn’t mean to. The world was turning with a lurch.

  No. She was falling.

  Vashante caught her.

  Disoriented, Bee looked around, up at the figures that surrounded her now. They were all looking at her, expecting an answer. Expecting her to make a choice before it was too late. Everyone was waiting for her word: Slashex, Yomnar, Lady Isbet, even Vashante, though her face was drawn in sorrow. The world outside was waiting, too—for the Lady Bhaeryn to emerge either with nothing… or with an army of the risen dead.

  Slashex spoke lowly.

  “The daemon can animate them in moments, if you authorise it. Please.”

  Her mind felt splintered.

  They deserve to rest… but Bee still needed them. A sob bubbled up, and she choked it down. Slowly, she nodded.

  “Do it,” she said, barely audible. Then louder, with grim resolve. “Do it. Let SepGNT… let it raise them.”

  The words tasted like bile in her mouth.

  Slashex’s face betrayed a fleeting flicker of relief—or was it triumph? Bee was too far gone to tell. He moved swiftly to the control console linked with Bee’s neural lace. She felt her senses pinged with access requests and permission warnings. She let them through.

  Then, Bee felt a sudden buzz as the daemon took fuller hold, a sense of background processes ramping up.

  SepGNT’s presence swelled in her consciousness.

  “Autonomous revivification protocol initiated. Three subjects. Proceeding.”

  It announced its intentions blandly through her mind’s ear. Bee’s stomach turned; she almost wanted to call it off hearing the cold phrasing, but it was too late.

  Looking up, she could see, overlaid on her sight, a map of that thing’s dataome. It crept like a mind spider, predatory. Its legs touched their minds—Vashante, Yonmar, the Lady Hash. They were defenceless. They were unaware as it touched them, tasted them, and used their laces as hosting stacks.

  Slashex seemed to be the only one untouched. She watched as the daemon tried and failed to creep a limb into his mind, only to retract as if burned. It found balance in the digital interfaces in the chamber around them, taking over computing processors with equal ease.

  Bee couldn’t stop it, now, even if she wanted. It drifted, networked beyond physical sight and sound, independent and animal in its own regard.

  Then it reached out to touch the bodies.

  “Stand back,” Slashex warned.

  He ushered Vashante help away from the bodies, out of the ring of cables and machinery. Bee leaned on Vashante, each of them bracing the other as they retreated a few paces. Yomnar murmured a prayer under his breath and likewise stepped back, his old eyes wide behind his mask. Lady Isbet remained by the dome’s edge, peering in with horrified fascination.

  Inside Bee’s head, lines of code scrolled faster and faster. She could discern what it was doing at a glance, even if she no longer controlled it.

  The dome was filled with a rising electric whine as SepGNT commandeered the network of wires sprawled across the ground. Those motorised, limbed arrays picked up and moved the wires, cables trailing like serpents in the dark. Bee watched, numb, as they were latched onto Toshtta, Cartaxa, and even the dismembered pieces of Sar-ek with inhuman precision.

  Needles bit into flesh, pumping in biomass, gels, and nanites in far greater volume than Bee had dared use.

  The bodies reacted violently. Toshtta’s back arched off the ground, a guttural hiss escaping her throat as muscles spasmed. Cartaxa’s mandibles gnashed open and shut rapidly with a clacking sound. And Sar-ek’s remains—-scattered as they were—-began to twitch and slide across the slick floor, moving with what augmented musculature they still had whole. SepGNT’s cables coiled around those pieces, and the limbs of its surgery interface dragged them into rough alignment.

  Bee clapped a hand over her mouth. A part of her wanted to scream for SepGNT to stop, but shock and weakness held her silent.

  Robotic arms descended and began affixing mechanical components to the bodies. Slashex had prepared these earlier, anticipating this possible outcome: exoskeletal frames, actuator motors, metal braces that would puppet limbs. SepGNT attached them with efficient, brutal speed. Bee could hear bones cracking as joints were forced into new housings, hear the wet squelch as stakes drove into flesh to anchor the devices.

  Toshtta’s corpse shuddered and sat upright abruptly, like a marionette jerked by its strings. Her head lolled to one side; the eyes remained closed and likely would never open again. The daemon didn’t care. It pumped a jolt of current through her spinal cord. Toshtta’s body convulsed, then rose to its knees. One arm hung useless. Bee hadn’t finished repairing its nerves, so SepGNT improvised, building a rod to bind that arm to her torso so it would stay out of the way.

  Cartaxa’s heavier frame was slower to rise. His cybernetic eyes flashed erratically, outputting streams of meaningless data. The daemon fed directly into his augments, overriding them. Cartaxa let out a distorted moan that gradually pitched into a droning monotone. The feedback of internal systems coming online. He rolled over and pushed himself to his hands and knees with stiff, halting movements.

  Bee’s heart pounded in terror and anguish. These things moving before her only resembled her friends in outline. All identity was gone. They moved as mindless entities, unsure and jerky.

  Finally, Sar-ek. SepGNT faced a challenge here: too little of the body intact. The daemon solved it in the simplest way. Bee watched in revulsion as the machinery dragged the largest piece of Sar-ek’s upper body toward Toshtta’s still-kneeling form. With a whir, clamps and filaments stitched Sar-ek’s torso stump against Toshtta’s back. The lattice of nanomaterial began fusing them, sharing circulatory and control systems.

  Toshtta became the unwilling carrier of Sar-ek’s remnants. A second head—Sar-ek’s half-crushed helmet, still containing scraps of brain—lolled over Toshtta’s shoulder, attached by sinew and newly extruded cables.

  Bee had to look away, gagging. Sar-ek’s eyes flickered once with a residual reflex, and Bee imagined an expression of eternal agony frozen behind that faceplate.