Chapter Text
The events of the first years after her creation were not Tierce’s favourite subject on which to dwell, but it kept her mind off the pain in her chest like nothing else would.
All right, she thought to herself as she looked down at the gash in her chest. This would be a lot easier to do with Sixte here to help, but he’s gone, so you’re going to have to do this yourself. She steeled herself, pinched the sides of the gash together with her left hand, and readied the needle with her right. Just keep sewing.
She winced at the first stab of the needle, feeling her back tense up, but managed to drag the thick blue thread through the first puncture.
That wasn’t so bad, was it? Now just tie that end off and keep going… That’s it… Stitch one… stitch two… stitch three…
As the task became more mechanical, her mind began to wander towards the past.
There had been eight of them once, each containing half the soul of a member of the University Fencing Club, from faculties right across the board. None of the humans had ever told Tierce their name. She just remembered them as the Makers. Most of them had been students. Hers had been in engineering; Sixte’s had been doing a joint degree in Textile Art and Mechanics, while Septime’s had studied veterinary medicine, Quinte’s had been in chemistry, and both Quarte’s and Octave’s had been studying architecture. Prime, on the other hand, had held the soul-fragment of a Doctor of English Literature, and Seconde’s maker was a Professor of Archaeology.
The humans had disappeared long ago. The makeshift barricades around the University hadn’t held the War Machines back for long. Octave’s maker had been the first to go. The fierce young woman had donned her helmet and body armour and gone out to find the machines before they found her. Tierce remembered the day the others had retrieved her body, found next to two dead machines – felled by a tripwire and a bolas – with a spray of bullets in her unprotected back.
Tierce had never been entirely sure how the other Makers had died. The machines had broken through the barricade one day and converged on the university. There had been a chaotic hour of gas clouds and hails of gunfire before the machines moved on, leaving nothing but silence and bodies behind them.
Octave had been the first ragdoll to disappear, a year after the University fell. Septime had found her – or what was left of her – in one of the city’s ruined squares, surrounded by the long-toed footprints of some huge beast. Septime herself had quickly followed. All they ever found of her was half of her right arm, one optic, and some scraps of white canvas. Two years later, Quarte and Prime had gone out to find some supplies. Sixte had rushed down from his vantage point on the roof and breathlessly told Seconde, Tierce and Quinte what he had seen.
It was not something Tierce wanted to remember. Ten minutes with a magnet had nearly scrubbed the memory away, but it still managed to resurface sometimes.
Tierce had been the next to meet the Beast. Unlike the others, she had been fortunate: she had managed to run for a storm drain and wait for the Beast to leave before she emerged and ran back to the University.
Quinte had not been so lucky. It had crept up on her one night when she had been hauling a sledge full of wire and spare batteries back to their hideout. Sixte had retrieved her body and the supplies, but even his unparalleled skill at needlework hadn’t been able to repair her before her soul escaped.
After that, none of the final three left the relative safety of University for a long time. They took it in turns to man the watchtower on the roof, tracking anything that moved and sounding the alarm if it turned out to be the Beast. The doors were easily big enough to let it inside the building, but a controlled explosion by Quinte, using an old bomb and the casing of a fallen War Machine, had taken out the human-sized stairs to the upper levels three days after the Makers had died. Whenever the alarm sounded, everyone would instantly drop what they were doing and run for the ladders upstairs.
One day, Sixte and Seconde hadn’t run fast enough.
Tierce remembered standing at the top of the ladder, safely out of the Beast’s reach, watching it prowl back and forth searching for a way up. Eventually, it had left, presumably out of boredom. Tierce had gone to find their old book of fencing techniques and turned it to the page that showed the different lines of defence.
Prime
Seconde
Tierce
Quarte
Quinte
Sixte
Septime
Octave
She had just stared at the page for a while, before she picked up an old pen and scored out all but one of the names.
After that, she had just loaded some screws, a spool of blue thread – the only colour left in Sixte’s surgery – and a bundle of slender needles onto Quinte’s sledge, and left without looking back.
She had found a new refuge in a bombed-out house almost a kilometre away from the University, where the floorboards were too thin and dry to hold anything heavier than herself, and sat down to think about what to do.
Another year passed, then another and another. Tierce almost forgot what her own voice sounded like; there was never any need to use it. She found bits of debris, whether useful or just interesting, and brought them back to her house. She went on long patrols and practised her bladework, wondering to herself if one sharpened darning needle would do anything against something the size of the Beast, but practising all the same. She found cans of oil for her joints, and pots of varnish to refresh the flaking cover on her wooden feet.
Twenty-six years to the day after the end of the human world – seventeen and a half after the end of Tierce’s – she had been sitting on the windowsill of her house when she spotted something moving down below, white against the grey background. It had quickly flashed out of sight behind a pile of rubble.
Tierce had got to her feet, trying to catch another glimpse of whatever it was, but it hadn’t reappeared.
“…Hello?”
Seventeen and a half years of disuse had not been good for her voicebox. She had shaken her head at the unhealthy crackling sound behind the words and gone to find some oil for the connections.
“Hello?” she had repeated at the emptiness. Her voice sounded much better that time: the friendly Glaswegian brogue she remembered. “Is someone out there?” No reply.
A minute later, down on the street, she had found the footprints in the dust. They weren’t Beast tracks. They were more like her own, if slightly bigger: pointed at the front and flat at the back, but where her feet were flat-soled, these seemed to have been made by a hollow shell. The shape was the same, but the actual imprints were thin lines.
She had only met one ragdoll with feet like that, but she had died twenty-five years ago.
Hadn’t she?
Tierce had looked back down at the footprints. They were spaced far apart from each other, showing that whatever had made them was running fast. For a moment, she had looked back towards the University, before she nodded decisively and began to follow the prints.
She had seen another flash of white up ahead and vaulted over a fallen brick to see another ragdoll, standing some ten metres away with its back to her.
She was made out of white canvas. Part of her back had been torn away and patched up with cloth of a different colour – some shade of red. The lower half of her right arm seemed to have been replaced by a shield of some sort. Tierce couldn’t see her face, but she would bet anything that she was missing an optic. The craft-knife spear and the crow skull helmet were new, but everything else added up.
Tierce had tucked her needle sabre into its loop at her waist and begun to run forwards.
“Septime! It’s me!”
The other ragdoll had turned like lightning at the sudden noise and hurled the spear like a javelin, dropping into a defensive crouch. The sharp blade cut through Tierce’s cloth like a hot knife through butter, lodging against her voicebox and knocking her onto her back from the force of the impact.
The strange ragdoll’s optics – of which she definitely had two – had widened under her helmet and she hurried forwards to yank the spear out of Tierce’s chest, bringing a handful of blue sparks with it.
“You surprised me,” she had said, her tone making it an apology in everything but the actual words. “I thought you were the Beast.” She had held out a hand to help Tierce to her feet, but Tierce had scrambled out of reach and run for her life. Nobody who threw a spear through her chest was someone she wanted to touch her.
Finishing the last stitch in her chest brought her back to the present. Tierce tied off the blue thread and cut it off with the rough edge of one finger before she unzipped her chest and opened it to inspect the internal damage. She almost gasped at the sight, but all that came out was a rough crackle of static.
The spear wound had cut her voicebox almost clean in two.
That’s fine, Tierce thought, trying to sound more calm than she actually was. I have spares – I can replace it. Gently, she prised the broken voice box out of its setting. It wasn’t until she had got up to hunt down a spare voice box in her collection that she noticed the mangled state of the connecting port.
She tried one voice box and another, but none of them made anything more than static when she tried to speak, and all of them hurt even more than the broken one did. Eventually, she just put the broken one back in her chest. At least then, she thought resignedly, she could make slightly more distinctive static noises.
When her repairs were finished, she found a pot of ink and went to her chart of things to avoid, pinned to the wall across from her bed. Most of its contents were immobile hazards: rotting planks, collapsing stonework, unexploded grenades and so forth. The Beast held pride of place in the centre, with a neat label under its cat-skull head. Tierce flattened out the paper, dipped the splinter of wood she used as a pen into the ink, and began to add a new figure next to the Beast. She wasn’t much of an artist, but the spear and the crow skull made what was otherwise little more than a stick person more recognisable.
She paused for a second, casting an optic over the other labels on the chart, before she added one for the new figure.
Definitely. Not. Septime.