Archive of Our Own

All around the dead, listing towers, snow dances down.

It flutters and dives, then twists and returns, circling round the scraper’s base, uplifted again by a breeze’s blow, before darting to rest on the waving white banks that engulf the streets. One drone walks them. His crunching footsteps beset the storm’s lull: Khan Doorman, the WDF’s own, treads the silent city.

He isn’t lost. He goes westward, reckless against the ill wind. What he wants: a burial. What more? That’s all. There is nothing in the world he could want more than a burial.

There’s a song in his head, ethereal, repeating, not so far to the forefront for its vocals to parse, just close enough to numb him to the dreadful noise his steps make, doubly burdened by a clattering backpack full of climbing equipment. Drones his age know to cringe from the sound, so loud to shred the cover of breeze, and even now it would stress him overmuch to keep his audial feed clear. No, he needs the music to tie up all his loose process threads around the Mecca of his march: Nori. Nori!

The name fades, raises, repeats like an echo. Borne in the crunch of every step, bouncing among the scorched towers that encroach and loom overhead. From the broken glass of the cars that pile around, and the frayed bones that glimmer in their seats. From the distance that he walks to; in the pale lamplight that rebounds off the ground and bleaches the eerie towers ahead, all their shattered windows. There she is: nowhere.

At the farthest point of the horizon, where ice and snow refract the glows, and they converge and seem to blaze – ignis fatuus.

And above, ghostlight pollutes the midnight sky. All the stars are choking out.

The hunting grounds welcome him. But he hardly pays any mind. He goes to meet Nori. She’s still a ways off.

“Eh, boltbrains. Get down from there, dear.” She’d said, flicked a purple lock off her stress-lined eyes, and sipped on a can of midgrade oil off a straw, as she always did.

She wore one of those gaudy kanji-laden shirts and that numbered choker of hers, lined with flower-shaped rhinestone glitters. The idle hand just hung dead on her side, a well repressed one-arm akimbo. He smiles at the thought now, though throat and voicebox are quick to frost in the icy wind. He shot her a glare through the steel scaffolds, and oh, she stopped repressing it right there. Stayed there even as the storm picked up through the open mouth of the unbuilt blast-door.

She wouldn’t urge him any more, but made right sure he heard the periodic loud sipping, spaced but constant like the ticking of the minute-hand. Once he’d made a sufficient dent on her patience, she added a second-hand to the clock; insistent tapping. Tap-tap-tap-tap–siiiiiip–tap-tap-tap-tap, at a constant beat, not one hitch or slump in the rhythm until he decided he was done with the troublesome coupling and made his way down.

She managed to be so imposing like that. Can you believe that? With that Japanese cartoon themed shirt and that determined pout? It’s hard not to find the image a little funny looking back. But so persistent was she all the time and there was so much force behind her that right now Khan hears a single loud tap and it almost startles him to the ground: his own boot on a spot of dry asphalt, peeking through its white drape. The road just ahead’s wrinkled up by foregone tectonic thrashing, warped into a matte black hill. Servo-joints and segment tensors tauten for the climb.

Then her arm went around him, and she walked him away from the maws of Door One. A dissociated impulse returns the half-hug to the empty air. An onlooker might believe he balances on the climb, fighting the backpack’s load. But really, it doesn’t pull a mote of attention away from reminiscence. “Where to?”, Khan thinks he asked. “Home, we’ve both gotta recharge”, was for sure the reply. Funny thing to say while clutching an empty cup of midgrade. She even tilted it around so the straw (because she drank cold midgrade oil off a straw!) spun around the cup’s edge. What he said next slips his recall, ‘cause he trips on a tangle of bent pipework atop the asphalt hill, something about the importance of the work no doubt, just an excuse to keep from home, but he well remembers how she winked, head tilted aside with a strange tang of wry glee, and said: “hey, I told you, you’re safe with me.”

An eyebrow raised and a shiver went up his back, because her smile got broad. Real broad, from side to side of her cheek, then even farther, so teeth split her face in two from aural to aural. Not unnatural, not wrong, just strange like she always was, but still strange, because what she said didn’t parse and she kept walking with that sharp, frozen rictus all the way home.

There’s a shade that’s settling on the way down the hill, pulling at him. She’d been getting kookier and kookier. Neurotic, impulsive – she told him off, drifted away and muttered about them, her, it, the same things always, the Sky Demons for sure, but there was more, about which she couldn’t tell, only mumble. But he still let her take him to rest when she remembered he was there. Too weary to put up a no she’d hear, and it’d be no more than two hours before the lights came on again and that day’s shift got started. Best enjoy the little things, the soft things, he thought then, ‘cause there’s less and less of them to come by lately.

There was never much of that. Not with a woman like that, brash, forceful, boisterous and loud, so flippantly strange even when the world was lighter to bear – things he couldn’t help but like, meek as he was. But appearance and taste aside, it was truly only distance. Like a moat. A gap around her. What gave it meaning were those times, those surreal times, like then and there at the bedroom door, when her face smoothed, went blank, hid from him, and bridged the gap in that soft voice she seldom used; her way to say what comes from the core.

“You’ll make it.” – that’s all she said. Not much, but he took and pinned that to his chest. It’s trust, he thought then. A bridge descended on the moat and warmth reached out. Acknowledging the strain permeating everything, and in that act dispelling it like smoke waved away.

He should’ve pondered the wording more: it was a bleak admission that she wouldn’t. Hardly hidden, right there in the negative space of the statement, but it avoided him anyway. He choked Nori in a tight hug and didn’t say what he thought would spoil the moment: “with you”. She returned half a hug. Then it passed and she puttered about the living room, muttering and preoccupied anew with inward matters. Swung one hand around to conduct her soliloquy, and the other hung still. He wouldn’t stay to listen. Those things were all hers, and what she wouldn’t tell, he shouldn’t hear. But he tried, still, to call out: “Nori, baby”, and was left there wondering, aching, whether she’d care to answer if he’d gone and said it.

Bad thought. These ‘what’s and ‘why’s and ‘how’s are meant to stay out of his reach. They’re like the little buggers in human cartoons, those shrill buzzers that swayed back and forth around the head and refused to go when fleshy hands waved full of petty ire at the tiny things. They’ll vex him as long as his core cycles, and maybe he isn’t alright with that, but ah, they were always there. New one drifts by as soon as one drops dead, what’s changed is he couldn’t hear them much before, when the world wasn’t quite so quiet. Even when–

Whistling up above rips him out of the fog. He stands straight, tense.

What flutters? What whirrs? What stirs and plagues the ghostlit wreck? It trembles! It quakes! Air shakes, glass shivers, all rumbles and quivers at the nearing roar. What comes? What brings the blighted wind? The masters of the grounds, the harrows of its crop, the dragons of the waste. They come, they come. There they fly! In the distance, in the sky. A pair: each a third of the flock.

Yellow streaks split the night, one hither, next yonder. And they whistle, they whistle, the blazes barrel to the towers, straight at them. But then, nigh the crash, they break and swing, one to each side, they draw a tight helix round the ruined pillars. That uncanny, matchless flight knows nothing of obstacle or hurdle. Abrupt and sharp, it veers to cleanly avoid, strains the air to a shrill scream and that flight-wail outrides them.

And at that havoc, Khan stays. Well-learned dread beckons for the sides, for the burrows, the cover of the cars. But he won’t move – surprising even him. Fear pounds at the chest, oh it does! The chassis thumps and legs bend, weary capacitors gasp for charge, everything readies for the run, but the shot hasn’t rung. It still doesn’t when a dust cloud kicks up just ahead, near the tower’s top. Loose from its bedrock, the structure tilts and threatens to tumble. Glass drizzle comes down on him, and concrete hail follows. But he won’t move.

Because he finds a challenge, written on the gold bonds that draw the nerves of his circuit heart – take me, sky-scourge, if so you can. Else, fate forbids, and I am meant to make it through. His hands reach back, swiftly zipping open the backpack and already grasping the rope of a grappling hook. It’ll lunge for him, and he’ll drive the barbs through its skull. Soon. Soon.

There it is. Its yellow glows emerge from the dustcloud. Around the killer’s cross branded on its visor, pallid hair softly waves. Pallid claws clutch the battered steel cladding, and pallid wings with pallid talons gleam as bones do under the white light. The Murder Drone is as unearthly as the grounds it hunts. Its upward crawl is fast, insectile, ill-fitting of its shape: those limbs stretch backwards to lift it in ways its mockery of a drone’s form should forbid. The wave of its glowing sting is morbidly enthralling, up by the head one moment then down at the feet, waving and slithering, breaking to a swing then idly rattling as the winged thing stops to a gargoyle’s perch. A fanged smile’s rock-still on its face, as it always is – excited, expectant as it seems? How much of that grin is felt, and how much was simply sculpted that way to terrify?

Khan spins the hooked rope to a blurred disc, arm tense and trembling. The other hand grasps for something else in the backpack, feeling everywhere for– there, it’s there. His fingers wrap round a cold, bottle-sized cylinder. It’s set. The hook’ll hurt and stun it, just long enough. Not even they are strangers to pain.

It reaches aside, by the angled corner of the tower, head tilted upward… Smelling, he thinks. Means he has not been seen. But it’ll see him, oh it’ll see him, he’s too close. It’ll catch a whiff of the skydrol leak mixed with oil still staining his jacket. The nanite burns on its sleeves, maybe. Here. Turn here. See me. I’m not hiding. Yes. There. It’s slowly scanning rightward. He must be only a few degrees off its periphery.

Only it turns back – snaps aside, spreads its wings, and blasts away. The pebble-hail renews briefly. It darts for the other yellow trail, already as far as the horizon.

And now… he just feels a little silly. Takes about a minute to unclasp his hands off the cylinder, then another for his sore arms to miserably slowly pull and curl the rope to shove it into the backpack. He really, really was ready to do it, and it left him a bit lost now, holding for this much voltage to settle. The trembling, though – he’s tired. Underslept. Overburdened.

No – still afraid. Even now, his hands are unsteady, lagging behind where he means them to move. How much worse would it have gotten if the Murder Drone leaped at him? How much worse can it still get? Will he crumble to a pile of steel jelly and let them rip him apart?

No. No he won’t. Let out some exhaust, Khan Doorman, and suck in the cold air. Let it cool you, and steel your joints. Listen close and inward; the chorus is coming.

I keep on playing our favorite song
I turn it up while you're gone
It's all I got, when you're in my head
And you're in my head, so I need it

He was afraid, but he was ready. That much he’s proven, and that much is enough. If he keeps on track, he’ll make it. Those two are flying far, and chances are the other one’s even farther. The road ahead’s clear. Now the backpack’s zipped up, and the distance waits. Can’t be more than half the trip left. But before I set off, let me hear the next chorus, just one more time.

I keep on playing our favorite song
I turn it up while you're gone
It's all I got, when you're in my head
And you're in my head, so I need it

It goes on to the solo as he drags to his feet again, not walking anymore, speeding up to an unsteady stride. The towers get taller, the banks broader; with less space to spread, the snow piles and most street-level debris goes under it. Closer, closer, but he’s managing to calm down. There’s something about this song – the vague echo of the vocals, the relentless guitar sequences, those indescribable flute-chimes in between… the artistry behind them’s wasted on his crude audials, but it’s always served to unsnarl all his ragged nerves. So so strange, because it was to neither of their tastes, Nori’s least of both, she preferred music that to him was halfway between a constant scream and a passing train. But they’d managed to like this song together.

The catalog of music they shared was painfully small – one in size, precisely. And it’s been such a long time since he’s given it a listen. Messed it up back when. A few months ago, with Door One’s completion still midway and the whole of Outpost-3 anxious and busy like ants, they’d simply stopped talking. He’d drag back home and leave his spirits back at the construction site, and Nori kept locked up, snagged on her inmost worries. Some weeks passed where they’d share hardly a word, but it ground, it ground heavy, until even a numbcore like him could take notice.

Because something kept eroding, something great and adorned milling away to a soft nub with the passing cycles. Some boldness, some trust, some-thing that wasn’t what bound them, but that made them look each other’s way for worldly purchase. That very thing that Khan felt last when some night sleeping sore in the just-settled storage halls of what would one day be christened Outpost-3, she shook him, held his head, and raved; “They’re coming. They’re coming. Her reapers sail for us and there’s nowhere in this cold dead rock deep enough that she won’t pluck us out of unless we get up, right now, and haul ass to seal this place shut.”

That thing that made him look into her eyes, see fire, and do what little he knew how to. A thing that, steeped in the dread and haste that came with the killers’ landfall, he learned too late to miss.

But he felt it again, one last time, when their song woke him up. Somewhere in the deep of night, he heard it echoing through their home. Loud like an airplane crash, brazen like most still dreaded try with the ringed moons up high. Ought to wake someone else soo. No, it must’ve already, but no one dares knock on his door to make the common-sense request to turn the damned thing down. So it fell to him, and he hurried to it for the sake of his neighbors’ – and engineers’ – sleep.

He saw her there, in the living room, one hand hung dead at the side, hunched over a spread of pencil-drawn notes and sketches. She was sobbing. Gasping, choking as she drew. Her lines were thick and ugly, rough in that way possible only when excess pressure snaps the graphite tip and harsh strokes grind what’s left to a nub.

Didn’t even see him, or didn’t care, till he was right by her, sat aside on the other half of the couch. Said nothing, just looked him in the eyes, rested her head flat on the pencil hand, and put up a token smile. Made no effort to hide the sobbing.

Please talk to me. His core ached. It swelled to the membranes and prickled them cold. The deafening music did little to help it. Tell me what you cry and rave for, please put my mind at ease. Are we doing enough? Are we going to live?

“Wanna talk?” he asked instead. The voicebox just wasn’t as sophisticated as the CPU. Brick-simple was all he could manage through the haze and noise. Wouldn’t do any good to just let slip the blues.

“No. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine in a bit.” – She answered, and laughed. Put on the mock voice of a soap wife and a hand on her chest as she leaned closer to his face. – “Fuckin’ look at me. Ohh Khan my love, I just don’t know if this life is for me… It’s becoming a novella around here lately, I’m sorry.”

“No, no, don’t say sorry. It’s alright.” Khan brought her closer, kissed her forehead.

“You can’t sleep either.” She said, and all sorrow slipped from her voice. Nori was smiling. The song looped, for what must’ve been far from the first time.

And what could he do at that, but draw a jagged breath and rub his eyes?

“The music’s a tad too loud. You’re gonna wake ou–” His voice goes, dry and dull. If he’d thought of it, he’d tried a more caring tone. But she took that chance from him.

“Ah! Ah. I’ll try to. In a bit.” She leaned her head and looked away. Her distortion of a nod, because his wife would never let any such gesture come from her. Still smiling. Too reasonable a request to rebuff. – “Ah, y’know what. I’m gonna walk for a bit. Friggin’ parched, that’s what’s up with me. I’ll turn it off now.”

“You don’t have to right away–” But she was already on it, unplugging the speaker before the thought was all the way out of his mouth, and without a jacket, without her shoes, just a nightshirt and helmet, she escaped their home in the time it took to get up and start thinking how to ask her to stay.

So he crashed down on their coach and breathed in deep. Were she angry, there would be ample proof. Were she just sad, she’d sit there in silence. He couldn’t even begin to guess why she thought a thirst for midgrade was a good enough excuse to leave him there.

And there was nothing he could do but turn down the dial, return the plug to its socket, and sink into the cushions as their song rang out from the speaker. It's the cruelest joke to play…

Ah, getting close now – back on Copper-9, Khan spies a U-bent arm hung on a lamplight’s top, so buried in the snow that it’s at head height. A tiny black stalactite hangs from the shoulder wound; long-frozen leftovers.

And something else’s there… the bits of an upper half protrude from the snow, bereft of head and arm. The same arm? No way to know; the shoulder linkage is gone. Not torn, not broken. It’s gone. Ripped clean out. It makes his head spin. How? The linkage is screw-bound with the upper-spinal assembly as closely as roots to the dirt. Something should be left, some bent scrap of it. But there isn’t. It would only make sense, maybe, if they shook it, but very specifically, at the shoulder’s edge, with fierce abandon, and didn’t let go until all the nuts and bolts and welded edges gave out. It must’ve been like mammalian carnivores ensuring the kill; biting down and shaking. This drone resisted. That’s how. They tried to get loose and the killers tore them. What’s left remains where it fell.

Khan’s core weighs heavy. It thumps. Pulls at the vents, makes it hard to exhaust. Hands clench the backpack’s straps until the knuckle steppers hurt. He shouldn’t have run through that train of thought. Come on, come on. It ain’t that far. He’s taking his first steps into the broad graves, so Nori’s real close. Here, somewhere. Keep looking. He’s seen them tear each other over less oil than that. This arm must’ve been left here since the day of the kill… and none have flown by here in what might be months.

He advances, shakily, slowly, stumbling for a hint of purple. A bent strut pops out underfoot, a shred of membrane hitches to the boot’s vamp, then frayed wires, drives, and phosphor screens hook to the lining. The immixed ruin clings along the march. He’s realizing now how many were there just hidden by a thin snowy cloak. Hardly any tell-tale FATAL ERROR red to give them away – screens flayed from the face and heads gutted to a plastic shell.

One there looks to have lost its cathode-ray tube: pulled off its mount through the visor’s glass. Claws tore past an eye and left the other aperture hanging, divorced from its optic unit. Another’s hollow, caked in paste that leaked out and congealed around it: nanite acid ate the drives and eyes and face and the hardware goo that fluxed from them’s now blent to bubbly paste.

Brown hair. Blue hair. Black. No purple. Blonde, ginger, pink. Whose? Should any bells be ringing? Any names? Why, with so many parts all over, only robo-God knows which is whose. Cloth got torn and eaten through. Hair ripped or fell. Everything’s made the same as fibers in one big cloth. All that’s left of the people that were is the assembly-line yield, cut to scrap and thrown aside. Melted, voided of all material worth; iron drained of vigor, wires drained of voltage. Beyond even the farce of recycling.

This is not a sight unfamiliar to him. Khan Doorman has seen corpses. He’s seen corpses torn very badly. Broken polymer shells spilling wet black mince. But he’s never seen this many. He’s never seen enough to blanket the streets, from end to end, walk to walk, piled aplenty in the concave path between the towers, dark gray inner casings rendering the snow dalmatian spotted, but with faded cloth and strings of wigs drawing the eye everywhere away from the overflowing gore.

And above them, above the towers, slithering up, slick black against the total dark, he sees it.

Its twisted heights. Its rugged skin. Its red glimmers. The Spire.

The alloyed dead bestride the scattered dead, and the pale ruin that cradles them.

He’s close.

Nori, Nori, Nori Nori Nori Nori. Where is she? Would he stomach seeing her? Is there enough of her to bring home? Anything left to be told apart from the graveyard? What if he’s already walked past her, anonymous in the milliards?

He can’t bear to think that. Gotta go somewhere else, make it easier on himself. Before his legs take over and run him away. Nori – Nori – Nori. Think of the lights, the fairy lights. It’ll set you right, light you up again. He takes in cold air, and lets the music flood in. Flickers come, dazzlingly quick. They take him far.

Few will ever know just how close Outpost-3 was to becoming another gravestone in the frozen desert. How many restless days all its hands spent finalizing the magnetic locks that would stop the killings for good. Only a few dozen at first, then hundreds after the Landfall, rushing up and down the tunnels in a terrified fervor that made the mine-turned-bunker resemble an anthill. Fresh memories of excruciating shifts down at the iron-mining shafts were inevitably unearthed. It helped some that they remembered Khan as their overman. To others, he’d just slipped on the hat of a human manager. Brought the air to a cutting pitch in no time, and if things went on any longer, many heads were at risk of rolling – his, first of the list.

But the need for hands diminished quick, the fevered droves vanished, and by the final month all but a dozen engineers had to return home to twiddle their thumbs and face the fact that no more could be done. Sometimes – quite often – the wait was too much, and they’d come by to check, ask around, and quickly rediscover the exasperation such ill-conceived pleasantries aroused. Because as the areas of work narrowed, their complexity skyrocketed.

It was one thing to design the doors, another to build them. Magnetic locks were mastered a millennium ago. Putting together a sufficiently powerful blast door was more a matter of material and fabrication; with Copper-9’s industry lost to the collapse, there were no assembly line assurances. All had to be procured, built and tried by hand. What worse environment to test their limits, then, than at that freezing, howling maw? Against mechanical failure, the only available countermeasure was the possibility of a miracle. No matter how good the minds, how true their aim, nerve-stricken hands would slip in ways sensors miss, and sky-high fears would rush along the parts to trial by fire. Failure was bound to find them. Khan just hoped it wouldn’t.

It happened right before sunset. Khan’s team were sitting down and holding back cheers, not daring to tempt ill fortune. They were proud. They were beaming. They’d finished taking the impermeable gates from hopeful mirage to ironclad dependence. So it was fine to stretch their last shift past the golden hour as the special coupling – the deadbolts of a lock, so to speak – was being tested by the last three busy engineers, Khan among them.

It wouldn’t shut right, but they stayed there. The Sun left them, and they kept waiting. Moonlight filled its place, and the damned door still wouldn’t close.

The strike plates; it was the piece of shit strike assemblies they’d made. Hastily crafted, anxiously wired, they’d intermittently click and reset and cut the power. They kept tripping the breaker. Sure, the rollers were fail-secure (not fail-safe), the outmost door could close right then and there, but what good would it be against their claws without the extra locking kick of the linear solenoids on those strike plates?

None of the other doors are ready. If worse came to worst, months of work would buy them seconds; no actual machine could directly challenge the demons’ strength and come out on top. That was the realm of dreams and fucking magic. They would simply force the doors open. The thousand lives of Outpost-3 might last another hour behind the crude barricades farther into the mines.

So they kept at it. Pulling apart, putting together, carefully looking, running through every point of failure imagination could conjure. Khan stayed up in the scaffold, tore a coupling, tested voltage, drew a wrench from his belt, took out a plate, tested again, tightened it back, told them to test the panel below, put the coupling back. The breaker wouldn’t budge. Testing, trying, juggling pieces, over and over and over – till a frenzied call came. Panic cut up by radio static. A scout’s voice, out in the hunting grounds, described three yellow trails piercing the clouds southward. The words, the name, they’re lost to memory, their message too brief for any of that to stick. Khan just remembers the bellowing dread. All those held-back cheers turned to ash in their throats.

The sights of those that weren’t working froze on the radio. The others shot it quick looks, tried but couldn’t focus on their now-urgent job. All expecting the voice to finish. It just came and went too fast; would it say anything else? Forgot something? Held back by dread? Minding wording? For a grueling stretch of seconds, they all held for a takeback, a clarification, some good news…

Inevitably, urgency dawned. Someone flipped off the hall’s lights. Whichever other senses the sky-demons had, visible light was their sharpest. By avoiding visual contact, maybe over half a minute could be bought. That shook them all out of the daze. One by one, they turned back to him. A dozen cathode-ray glimmers stared Khan down, hands ready, and asked in silence; what can I do?

Another grueling eternity went by. Time got heavy, so heavy. It hammered down on the joints, the head, the arms. Pulled down when he realized that the only answer he could give is nothing. There’s not even enough space in the critical area to let them all get a look. But they’d sure want to stick around. They wouldn’t want to go. They’d get turned to mush before his eyes. Their lives weighed on him like a car weighs on quicksand.

But he cycled air deep. Reined in the dread, straightened up his back. No time remained to keep at the slow probing, and the problem must be a proverbial excess of cooks. Their – his – only chance came down to one pair of hands, and no more. Everyone else should at least get to spend if only a minute longer with whoever was waiting back home.

“Whew, lookit that. Shift just flew past me and I kept you here. Mouth’s just achin’ for a cuppa midgrade, right? Don’t tell me it ain’t!” – He strutted around, wore his loudest cheer. The sight’s so fuzzy, the memory’s quality ravaged. All his resources were frenetically evaluating the chances of the only solution he could think up, hardly any to spare on recording. No one moved. – “You guys go. Thaaaaat’s an order! We’ve all done enuff today, hah! Go home, I’ll catch up when all our ducks are in a row.”

“If you’re gonna work up there, you’re gonna need someone to- to pass you stuff. Your tools. That way you can- Do… it faster, right?” – One of the shyer boys spoke up. That’s Braxton. The blue-eyed kid. He’d been getting less stuttery, but that day wasn’t kind to him. Poor kid was about to blow a fuse.

Khan walked up to Braxton and patted his back. A bit too hard. Almost pushed him over. – “Hey. I said we’ve all done enough. Come on. Scram.” – He could’ve been nicer, said that a bit better, but eloquence left him fast. Time ran thin, quick. He didn’t stay to hear the response; ran right up to the failing main panel, put up both hands on the wall, and gave the bundled wires a helpless look. A 16.000-ampere rated hunk of tungsten and ceramic stared him back. The departing echo of hasty steps let him breathe out a sigh in a process tick’s tranquility.

How much time did he just lose? A minute and a half. For what? For what? They’re coming, they’re coming, they’re coming, the demons, the raptors, the rippers. What would an extra minute or two home matter? He should’ve said nothing. Let them go back on their own. He should’ve gone right up to the panel and got to work. Told them off however many times were needed.

Is there anything else he could try? Any last-second spark of genius?

No.

He laughed. The sound bellowed with force and rattled his weary, tired limbs, complicating the finicky process of pulling the screwdriver from his belt.

“Well, it’s about time the bot upstairs chucked us a hand.” – Khan mumbled to no one. The driver’s tip trembled down the little crevice where a lone terminal screw bound the hot wire to the main breaker’s in-feed. – “He’s been rather busy though, hasn’t he?”

He turned it as fast as it’d go. It snapped out of the screwhead. It had to be slotted back into the grooves. Five spins and he was only halfway through the screw’s length. Another five pulled it out. In total, six seconds. Point six per spin. Maybe he could shave point two off that. In the rush to move the screwdriver down to the breaker’s out-feed, it snagged on something out of his narrow cone of focus. That was a one-fourth second sized grain of time that idly slipped.

Something howls afar. The wind strains.

Was it flight? Was it breeze threading metal? It’s nearing, it’s coming! The storm hails! The very air braces!

The impulse to rip the breaker right out its slot briefly overtook his hands – point nine went by. He needed the wire ends exposed. Stripping them again was time lost. The driver bit the screw’s grooves, and let go. Then it did that again. These screws went on and off maybe fifty times today: their heads are abraded. Another whistle. Close or far? Nearing. A careful third attempt finally got the pointy tooth to stick. One, two, three, four spins. Point five each, could go faster. Five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen – the screw was dancing on its seating, already loose. At least two spins could’ve been done without.

Whistle, again. Something dashed his coat. Snow drifting in. The entrance faces north. Winter winds are never southward.

Dread stabbed. It forced his neck aside and to the sky. He caught a glimpse of yellow before composing himself. The movement was unmistakable – turning.

A quivering, cold weakness gripped his core. It tided outward. Khan’s knees failed and he slumped to the wall, grasping the panel sides for purchase. The screwdriver clattered to the ground. Wasn’t turning that he saw. Circling. Circling above Outpost-3.

Then he gripped the breaker’s frame and pulled, rocked it with all the might his choking motors afforded him. It hung to its slot an agonizing second before it broke off and he could throw it aside. His core pumped with undammed panic. The membrane undershell frayed from the incessant brisk stirring of the servos. It was them that jolted and twitched while he fought to reach the roll of armored cable under the doorside scaffolds. The roll’s end wasn’t exposed. Would take some extra seconds to correct. The wire stripper on his belt became tiny and slick with soap. Another few to cut an appropriate segment. Yet more to strip the other end. About a minute to twine them with the in- and out- feeds and complete the circuit.

The wire’s rubber cover groaned against the stripper’s teeth.

And the dull bang of heavy impacts on snow followed, thrice. It shook him whole. The flailing of his hands fuzzed away to sensory noise and the whole world went dark and still. He couldn’t help but look, and through the icy mist, three yellow crosses looked back. There were only the yellow lights, and the blurry nothing between him and them that was rapidly ceasing to exist. Time ran out. Death came for him.

But the stripper’s bite did its job and ripped the rubber cover. He pulled it out. Eyed a decent length and cut a decent stretch of wire. Shifted his grip and readied the stripper again.

A strange, deep whirring sound, and a high crackle, not unlike a lightning strike – takeoff. It registered close to his aurals. Bassy droning. The wire stripper bites again. He can feel it now. Some pressure. Some presence. Splitting the distance. The rubber whines, doesn’t budge. A pale glare lights the wall before him and the approaching heat already touches him.

Khan turns one final time to the blinding yellow. Couldn’t resist the glow. Death’s warmth bathing him. White hair ripples in front of the killing cross. No more than a meter off him. Shrouded outlines of needlepoint teeth grow and grow as lips recede. Glistening wings to each side devour what’s left of the world whole. A sharp claw reaches deep into the very last place that still exists, headed for the core. It advances. Its contours become clearer as it nears.

And the rubber whine ends, and the wire cuts – click.

But a little blemish emerges from Death’s portrait. A tiny dark clot upon the cross.

More follow. And the killer’s eye goes dark.

Then a milliard bright purple lights flared round the killer’s frame – and they danced. They whirled like snow caught in the storm, faster than the optics catch and faster than the processor's tick. The demon froze, still grinning, and the fairy-lights drew oil from every inch of its pallid skin; tears, streams. Then rivers.

Another bright flare struck its chest and sent it reeling, spinning aground, and the movement tore every discernible shape to a thick cloud of oily vapor. An invisible grinder sliced it into a thousand clean-cut chunks that scattered violently, hammering the construction scaffolds and action-painting black all over the snowy banks beyond the entrance. Bits of its sliced internals whirled out with such force that they became flying shrapnel, pelting right through Khan’s polyester jacket and into his shell. One shard struck his right backhand LED light and snuffed it right away.

The mangled wings, gleaming as they wheeled, caught on the snow and stopped the rolling carcass, divorced from its limbs, dead at the feet of its remaining flock. No, not dead, not quite – it was still squirming. The feathers were twisted every which way, and the tumbling punched white webbing across its once-face now agape, but it lived still. Its companions spared it only a moment’s glance.

Around Khan the purple lights began to play, spiraling up his arms and head before retreating inward, into the Outpost. They guided his baffled eyes. A dreamlike haze had at some point set in, and he’d been raptured from Copper-9. Thinking fortune must’ve smiled, thinking justice might’ve come, he let out a narrow wheeze, and a shy, shaky sound welled out of him. He was laughing.

Then the lights pulled quicker – they reeled back and spun, spread out from the cloud into a curved line and arranged before a head with purple hair, as diamonds of a tiara. The cable slipped from his hands. He hardly noticed. It didn’t even make a sound.

Nori brandished a toothy, broad smirk. She stepped forth, as sure as fate, and lit bright the throat of Outpost-3. Another drone followed far behind – the other kid, Braxton. They couldn’t be there. It occurred to him that they weren’t. These are artifacts of memory. Noise drawn by the spasming voltage of a circuit brain that was swiftly ceasing to be.

“Nori. Nori… I didn’t know...” Khan started anyway. You’re safe with me. The lifetime-old audio file replayed, distant. A hundred little mysteries that’d clung to upper cache like a tick were falling in place. The bytecode language of the mind became as foreign to his voicebox as aramaic to aymara.

“Yes dear, I’m a witch. On with it.” – She reached out and reminded him, with a hand on his cheek and another on his shoulder, that the world was still there.

Up close, details were appearing that weren’t there just then. Hair that ought to hang smooth stood up and bent the wrong way. Some fibers were caught below her choker. It was shaggy, poorly cared for. She wore a baggy, black nightshirt that slung uneven at the neck. Stress lines hid at the corners of eyes that scanned everywhere, as if adjusting to a brightness he couldn’t see.

A few more ticks passed, and it finally registered to his choking processors that his head was jittering. It’s Nori. What she aims to do is becoming evident and profoundly terrifying. Her mind’s long made up. She’s been facing this exact moment in her imagination for impossibly long. Not an inkling of her long preparation was shared with him.

“No, no. Do you– did you have to do it alone?” Khan asked. Not what he meant to. He’s not that stupid. There’s no point in trawling for an alternative. It just dribbled out of his mouth.

It struck that they must’ve been seeing the very same thing: a disoriented, disheveled creature, shaken out of their mind. But she wielded that cheeky smirk that defused his vocal drivers. Radiated with cocksure certainty in which the haze just dissipated. A thousand other thoughts passed him by. Questions, cheers, thanks, all untouched by language. So the stupid question stood alone.

Nori didn’t bother to answer it. – “The kid’s here to help you, big man. Don’t be done too quick, alright? I wanna tango for a bit.” – If he’d asked what he meant to, whatever it was, nothing would’ve changed. But at least he could say he’d tried.

Instead, she walked right ahead. Passed through him like air, like he’d become a ghost. She shot him an even broader smirk, as if suddenly finding his face the most humorous thing on the planet. In an instant, the distance grew until she seemed so very far. Uncanny light enveloped her, so that in the Outpost’s shade she became a mirage. A fantasy, a special effect, misplaced out there in the cold. Fizzy thrill went through her fingers, they twitched, spidered around, and the fairies guarding her swayed in tune. There were ten of them. Ten exactly.

Over there, the Murder Drones waited. They were waiting, keeping still and rigid over their mutilated kin that fought with a stump for an arm to get back on its feet. They’d been halted; bladed wings shrank before the lone, dowdy drone that simply strolled to them as if to have a quick chat. Given pause for the first time in History by magic most eerie that only Nori could work. And as their yellow glare crossed one of her fairies, its trick became obvious to him.

Ice. Its edges glinted with muted mauve shades; yellow and purple refracting through knife-sharp spikes of ice. Tiny glyphs clamp their centres and make them whirl. Nori’s fingers curled inward and the needles spun wider and wider, reconfiguring to plates – leeching the moisture in the air? Or willed, maybe, by the glyphs themselves to grow from nothing?

A hand dropped on Khan’s shoulder. – “Boss? Wh– what do you need?” – And Braxton’s cyan eyes snatched him from Nori’s smile. All the while, she hadn’t even deigned to look the killers’ way.

“... tape. Get me tape–” – Khan managed to blurt out. His optics caught a white glimmer, his audials logged a soft metal clack – the short tidings of gunfire.

–TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK–

Survival overrides bent his legs and joined his hands above the head. Plinks and clanks told of narrow misses denting the wall just over. Braxton wailed something. Khan lunged, pushed him off, not quite looking where. For naught: the burst silenced before all thirty rounds were spent. He glanced up, and captured a single frame before diving to recover the stripped wire.

It processed as he caught the cable in his hands and clutched tight. Nori, arm at the tail-end of a wide swing, the Murder Drone’s arm kicked off-target. Its gun was subtly bisected at the receiver: purple pierced through a hair-gap angled through the clip and ejection port. Havoc followed. Deafening thuds and killers’ wings winding up with a bassy hum. A rocket’s blast, and a steely rasp.

Khan got back up, and there was Nori again – dancing. Oh, she danced! She lunged below a claw’s thrust, and for a tick the fairies dimmed, then up she rose, pulling them aside, already in a flash-fast counterattack. She curled two fingers, and hell came loose. The glyphs swirled and swung, and down came rampage on the demon’s wings. They shred, they slash, they slice, and aground the demon crashed, to a dull thud. She tried to have them slice through its back, no doubt to rend the core, but another flapped nearer, undeterred, undaunted! It sheathed off its rocket gun, but the host of wisps cast again their icy bite – five knives stabbed five eyes, and tumbling back went the blinded beast.

In the brisk tempo of her dance, their thunderous guns and molecular blades became hopelessly slow and torpid. Even coordination did them little good. They seemed to concert, by some worldless means, to maneuver as a clamp and approach from contrary ends of her periphery, but simply weren’t swift enough; one was cut down at the very start of its charge, and only halfway there the other had course derailed by a gouging of its rightmost optics. It slowed, veered too far, and bought Nori the split-second gap she needed to side-step the lunge.

But oh, the swing was too wide, the miss too narrow. Her baggy shirt is shredded, but the arm beneath only lightly cut. So wild was the charge, so full of ire, so near the face. The fairies were commanded to swarm its chest, but it remained near enough for another go at her head, scraping three white marks onto her visor. The fairies flickered and disarrayed, while it rushed ahead still, its visage so close that white and purple hairs brushed. How would she do it? How would she drive it back?

But Copper-9 called. The door must close. Braxton, Braxton. Where was he? He was getting the tape… there, under the scaffold, rummaging through a toolbox. He was well covered, and Khan wasn’t. So he fought the pull of the bladed tango, and got back to the gutted panel. A quick look shows he overestimated the required length of the new replacement tract: about two inches. His core sank. It’d bend and fit, sure, but the thick polyethylene cover made it a nightmare to hold in place while twining the ends of the wire with the feeds.

But betting on having the time to cut again would’ve wasted their shot. It’d have to do. And the kid came in handy.

There he was. Stumbling over. Eyelights hollow. Black tape on hand; was that the right type? It better be. It’s gotta be. Khan gestured to rush over, pointed at the panel and held the cable tract where it’d go. Took him a second and some between getting over and nodding. He was too slow. He was way too dazed. But he couldn’t be done without.

“I’ll roll them. You tape it when I’m done, right? Wanna switch?”

“Yes– No I, I’ll just–”

Sounded enough like an affirmation, so he got going. It was easier to start with the lower end. Simple as can be; the replacement tract rested between the pinky and ring fingers, and index and thumb helped the other hand roll both copper cords together. Once, twice, thrice – was that enough? No. Five rolls at least, just in case.

When that was done, he shifted a bit to leave Braxton some room. Kid took his damn sweet time. Carefully cut a bit of tape, spun it around the twined wires. Cut another, went again. He trembled so much Khan feared he’d just come apart. The bulk of tape he made was uneven, scrunched up, but to hell with the pull test. The stitched wire would simply have to hold. Khan left that to Robo-God.

Time for the upper side. Same process, just more finicky. The wire fought to pull away from his grip, like trying to bend a large eraser. Five rolls sure weren't going to cut it – six, then there was a chilling noise outside, metal screeching as it warped, the wire slipped from his hands and in the panic he nearly tripped overvoltage shutdown, seven rolls, the mesh held somehow, eight, that’s as many times as the cord would bend. Welding would’ve been better. They should’ve just welded it. They really should’ve welded it. They didn’t have time to weld it.

Then it came – the roar, the flash. He veered away, simply removed his hands from the panel, didn’t even check that Braxton was finishing the job. For an ethereal, immeasurable span of time, his thought threads gave out. Crashed; out-of-memory. Nerves expended. Flushed the registers and reset his senses.

Because a blinding, thin stream of dragon’s breath blazed before him.

Laser fire ionized the air and lit the night yellow. All the snowy banks, the steel walls and the clouds that wrapped heaven above were painted pale gold. It drowned the soundscape in static rage. Khan’s still-rebooting processes vaguely understood it as the noise that plasma-hot air left behind when it expanded faster than sound. It rebounded down the Outpost’s throat and became a tinny, indiscernible roar. Braxton covered his ears. He couldn’t.

All rightward, a wounded Murder Drone stood. Long shades like twisted trees stretched off mangled wings. The mouth sprawled to let show teeth upon teeth upon teeth and its limbs were rigid, arched, whole body warped by malice waxing with the dense vapors that billowed at the killing end of the laser. Personal, profound. Infinite glee that beamed from every piece of its gaunt shape.

But then, the laser doubled. Another stream, angled sharp, grazed the shooter’s rictus close enough to scorch the hairs. It leaped back and veered off-target then ceased fire; its malice ebbed and gave way to tottering. Molten glass dripped over its mouth. The demon hurt, reeled. It blazed, it burnt, harrowed and afraid. It reached for its face, and what was left lazily sloughed and burnt through the plastic bellows at the gaps between its joints, and surely deeper, scorching the pencil-thin servos that moved its hand.

And on the other side; Nori. Nori. Nori! She emerged from vapor’s cover, hurling aside a block of boiling ice. But she hurt, she hurt too – assessed her hands, bit her lips and grimaced. Steam swelled off the wounds and plastic dribbled, tore wire and frame out to the cold air. A great many oily tears showed beneath the flapping tatters of her shirt. Heat’s lesions stuttered her arms’ motors.

But still they moved! One reached back, the molten hand grasped the air! She bit harder at her lip, and paired glyphs flickered by the palm and empty air above, then a finger’s twitch spun them fast. And she threw; the fairy-light threaded the wind, congealed to a rugged shape that struck below the killer’s shedding face and drew a choking scream. Right at the neck. A spurt and stream dashed black the snow, and it cut and cut and cut!

Its hands grasped at but failed to grip the oilslick spike that slid just below the chin, though it fought and clawed and howled a muffled rage cut short by wet retching from the pilfered lifeblood leaking down its throat, inside and out. Then, then and there, only then, never afore and never after, slaughter’s wages seemed paid, not handsomely, but quite justly still. Clean but slow, slow but sure, sure but shaking, Nori drew a circlet cleft all round the nape then pop! Off went the head, and the corpse slumped, graceless, and became a yellow-lined heap on the ground.

Nori vented exhaust, stood askew. She looked his way, leered for a moment – failed to distinguish him from the dark, maybe. Hobbled once, and her blackened hair dangled heavy, and only when she dragged a hand to pull it off her right eye did she see him. Broke out a smile and a bluish plume leaked through her teeth: what hindsight notes was the color of oil burning. Khan’s eyes evaded hers, scouted all over. What for wasn’t yet registering. The banks, the distance, the dark. He saw one other corpse. Panic erupted from somewhere in him as a raspy creak, too rash and sharp to make a shout. It got out with only enough time to shape it into a single word.

“Two!”

She eyed him, confused. Bore through his eyes, no doubt asked herself what the hell he was trying to say, and though he was already fighting to articulate it wouldn’t come to matter. It clicked, too late, before he could – her eyelights hollowed the same frame Khan glimpsed the killer’s leap.

It reached with a dreadful claw extended so far it seemed dislodged from the joint, and something cracked like glass. The noise shook him. He lost a frame. He opened his eyes, not sure when he’d closed them; the talons pierced through a slab of ice where Nori was just before, but now beside, and its weight dragged the whole body down, too far forward to fight for balance. Its only limb was manacled. There wasn’t another to strike back with. Two eyes shone red, one yellow, two not at all. It was on its last legs.

She brought forth a shaky hand and spun it, but dithered, throttled by a split-second hitch, and the glyph flickered twice then flew for the last killer’s nape. No time at all to sculpt it into sharp shape, but the strength of the throw would suffice. It dashed and drilled the back of the head, tore chipset chunks from within the skull and the killer convulsed – and the light died there. The shard of ice spun on its seat and stopped.

Nori’s fingers quivered. They turned rightward insistently, over and over, as if fighting a knob, and nothing happened. The hand fell down.

Khan moved his eyes just an inch to the left, and saw the yellow nanite sting skewering Nori just below the neck. The wound widened fast, the tail loosened and slipped down. The demon collapsed. She only had time to hurl gray bile before she dropped.

Time hastened. Executioner and killer were both still. Thinking fortune mattered, thinking justice served, he cried out her name – a sad little whine under the wind. Nori must’ve lived still. She, of all drones, earned the palm. The way of things would have let her have a pyrrhic victory at least.

Only her body didn’t move an inch. It stayed aground, right by the killer’s corpse. Khan didn’t call again, though he felt he should. Didn’t move, though he felt he could. Frozen there, at the Outpost’s threshold, as though a spectator before closing curtains, because what he ought to do just wouldn’t come to him.

But the snow began to move. It shifted and shook. Something jolted and twitched; a limb pulling. It dragged up a bank of snow, then pushed with one hand to lift the mangled form.

The Murder Drone arched its back. Moonlight refracted through the sharpened ice wedged through its torso. Some form of artifacting rendered the spikes scarlet. It made the oil seem as blood. The monster eyed Nori – then away. It seemed to watch the horizon. Its dead comrades. Like it was lost, like it was wondering. Head hung; weeping? Its mouth was open, its jaw quivered. Drool glimmered at the lower lip. It hungered. Even now it hungered.

Khan fought to step. Once, then twice. First unmeant. Then with force. The killer slowly turned. Building inertia made sure he wouldn’t stop when they locked eyes. It stepped once and shivered, still not fully turned his way. Twitching plagued its stance. Exhaustion. War drums beat on his core and their song rang through him loud and clear and full of fury. He passed the scaffolds by Door One and ripped one of their supports right out as he broke to a run and howled the fire pooling in his little frayed voicebox, spinning up all the steppers and servos from heels to hands to lean aside, pull back one arm and hold the other ahead, and prepare for a swing with sinew and might he’d never know again. He would impale its skull with the metal pipe as if it were a spear.

The beast finished turning, shut its jaw and straightened with a sudden vigor he couldn’t have expected. The yellow cross bore through him. The throw hitched, the joints weighed, and Khan became small, so very small his arm faltered under the pipe. It showed no teeth. Slow and deliberate, its sole claw flexed to tear him asunder with a slow conviction that, he realized, could only come from an utter lack of concern.

He felt the pipe slip from his hand, close to the farthest point of the backward swing. It slid for something like an inch before he could grip it again, and in that thin accumulation of a hundred or so CPU loops, the war song died completely. Out went the fire. But he never quite stopped moving.

Though the throw’s force slipped below the killing threshold, he pushed his sorry motors to keep going. The motion renewed, with only half the runway left to pick up steam. The Murder Drone’s hand was already raised, palm outstretched, reaching forth to intercept or preempt him. No more could be done. The rest would be left to the meager mercies of fortune. The spear left Khan’s hand and hurled ahead, with all the strength it could gather. Though he hadn’t earned it, though things couldn’t work that way, though justice didn’t matter, he hoped he’d at least hurt the abominable thing.

The spear left behind a fluttering breeze, then all his servos loosened. The killer’s hand stood perfectly still in the spear’s way. He looked away, readied for whatever would come to him. But he heard the creak and whine of metal mangling metal. An instant later, glass; cracking, shattering, showering the snow.

The Murder Drone teetered. Staggered. Its hand was still held up. It stopped the throw. Its screen was dark. No. It didn’t. It hunched and shook. The spear nailed palm to visor and put out the hunter’s cross. But a lone gold eye still gazed Khan’s way; it failed to kill. The hand, though pierced, absorbed enough of the impact that the speartip didn’t reach its cranial drives. Squirming claws curled inward to the palm to grasp the spear’s shaft with their tips, and slowly pushed it ahead, out of the wound. With booming footsteps, the monster promised to end him all but swiftly.

And at that, Khan just stumbled. Fell. Must’ve blown a fuse. Deadlocked. He fell on his back, numbed. Not even afraid, not even surprised. It was remarkable, really, how little he had to do or think in the face of death other than stare. Maybe if anything occurred to him at that moment, he’d stood and tried it. He just didn’t have time to. Maybe that was the last he had to give. Maybe he just didn’t believe he’d die.

But a purple glyph clamped around the spear’s shaft. It struck, like a hammer to a nail, and drove it the rest of the way. Silicon scraps and ground glass burst through the other end of the perforated cranium. Its posture crumbled, and its last eye dimmed – finally, mercifully, the last of the killers collapsed, dead.

Khan watched its corpse. Not a twitch.

Then to Nori.

You don’t have to remember what came next. You can stop here. This is enough.

The wind shuffled her hair. One hand reached to him, three fingers spread.

But what’s out there awaiting, his knees steeped in dry gore, marching somewhere he won’t find, he doesn’t want to see either.

And her lights were already out.

“Nori. Nori. Nori. Nori.”

Khan held her head on his lap and hugged tight. She mustn't have had the time to recognize the fatal error before it punched a hole through her too large to stay awake. Didn’t realize it.

This is the better way to go. This is the better way to go. There wouldn’t be any agony, any hurling, trembling, ugly noises. At the very least, she was spared the slow going.

Couldn’t close his eyes. Couldn’t veer away. Choking on that cold comfort. No peace to find him in that snowstorm. He had to keep looking into the growing hole on her chest, crowned by the glitters of her choker. How the acid ate inward. The thoracic assembly of belts and flexile struts had already been eaten through, and the split-up halves rested against the inside of her shell. But there was so much left to go.

Most peripheral components had already fused to liquid. Sensory relays. Hydraulic balancers. Sensitive membrane and its bulky nodes. Soft feed for the nanites, the first and fastest they got through. From the noxious, milky mush it’d all become, fast-melting chipsets and corroded piping stared back at him.

“Nori. Nori…”

And it kept working his way down. Because he still couldn’t shut his optics. No manner occurred to him to remove the acid other than letting it travel along and diffuse on the snow. He hugged tighter and held to tufts of purple hair. The air tasted like burning.

The central beam was next in line, though its outward cover took a while to give. Thicker. Stopped the mass of acid and sundry detritus and made it start spreading horizontally. Like puree. Broadened the wound more. The softer structures it supported, proprioceptive arrays, membrane, and cooling grates, were all quick to disappear.

“Nori.”

The acid grew thinner at the center. Made it easier to see the metal grow uneven as it sloughed. The cavities gave inward and these spots grew into jagged holes dripping with ooze. What was being washed away was Nori’s marrow. The fiber optics and messy cablework plugging drives to core, as the nerves that mediate heart and brain. It bubbled with a scarlet hue. He couldn’t imagine why.

Couldn’t imagine why he was seeing white, rugged shapes along the edges of the steaming wound. Why they shifted, as if cringing into themselves, then expanded. What kind of scraggy supports furrowed them. Whether the spreading acid would leave him enough to bring home. He kissed her face’s glass. Put her chin between his optics and the wound, and embraced for the last time.

But he felt a grip on his wrist that quickly tightened.

Horror rattled him. Like the world had woken up and began to quake.

Nori looked at him. Yellow flickers tore at her purple eyes.

“Nori.”

“Hey, Khan…? Wouldja do me a favor?”

Her voice rang loud and clear. Like she wasn’t hurt at all. He couldn’t answer.

“I’m about to become a real problem for everyone. I need you to do something.”

“Wait. Wait.” – The words hung there for a moment, just long enough for the dread to start digging in. His voice growing shaky. – “A mechanic. Please hold on. Please, please, please, I’ll go get a–”

“No, don’t go. You’re sat just right, actually. Don’t move me. What I need is in the maintenance latch.”

“It’s just a moment but you’ll live, I’ll just take a moment–” – She gripped his arms like a clamp and refused to let him move.

“No time, stud. It’s urgent.” – The words gave him pause. Reason was ceasing to be, and with it everything else but Nori and him. They were left in a senseless nothing. He slid his hands into her hair and held on tight.

“What… what’s going to happen? Nori. I need– can you tell me what’s happening? Please. Please tell me what’s going on.”

She sighed and complied. Cleared her throat. Her voice was getting strained.

“Witches become a problem when we die. Vengeful spirits… or something. It’d make it all go to waste. Wouldn’t be pretty. You’re going to have to reach in deep into the maintenance latch around my nape. We’re looking for a circuit board. Take it out. I’ll guide you.”

“No, no no no. I– Doc Martin can stop it. He knows how to stop nanites. Just hold on a bit and we won’t need…”

The grip on his arms became more of a caress.

“Khan. Please. I need your help. I really do. Just this once.”

And what was left in him, what he didn’t know still remained, gave out all at once.

Air’s venting out at uneven intervals. Muffled noises like the beginning of words that he can’t finish kept coming out as he slid his hand under the hair and flicked the hatch open. Then, he pushed inward with his fingers.

Wire and silicon as well as plastic and beamwork resisted him while Nori goaded him on with words that memory left behind, wriggling fiber optic until it snaps at her guidance and dragging it out the hatch, then RAM chipsets, then hard drives, while she describes the path of least resistance through the workings of her brain to reach for whatever’s she’s looking for.

But the even softness of polymer rubber and metal all became lost to his fingers when the inmost corners of the skull welcomed him with slush and fudge and things that softly bent but didn’t return to shape when he pressed them too much, soft like tissue but creased by raspy textures like roots, and he lost himself to the mire inside her head because the acid was still eating her guts away and it didn’t smell anything at all like burning anymore and for every piece of white substance removed more appeared beneath, and all the while, her voice never shifted pitch, refused to answer the questions he couldn’t ask, only spurred and spurred to the task of slowly digging into her brains out, eventually pushing into and even ripping off shreds of unmistakably fleshy stuff snagged in the silicon, because she said he’d need enough room to push a wrench through and undo a fastened lock, and it was all made nauseating and repugnant because the meaning of the task was so unashamedly blatant and yet it registered so, so late, nearly all the way through, when his hand already had a shaky grip round the wrench on his belt. An infinite cold made the gearworks of his servos as a single block of stone. But they moved, they moved somehow…

Then the wrench finally went into her head, and it slotted on the six angles of a nut deep within. His hand found itself grasping a trigger, and Nori softly asked that he pull it.

“Wait. Wait a moment. Nori.”

“Hm?”

“I need a moment. Is this the last bit? Can we talk?”

She sighed again.

“This is the last time-sensitive part. There’s a little more left, but we’ll have a bit longer. Loosen it first, then we’ll talk, okay?”

“Alright. Alright. That’s enough. I’ll do it.”

He caught his breath. Fastened his grip. After a moment, she spoke again – a little softer, a little lower.

“I’m not going yet. Frickin’ boltbrains.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry. I’ll do it in just a bit, just a bit…”

It takes some twenty tries of impossibly uncomfortable wiggling to loosen the nut, then it falls out on its own.

“I’m done. Can we talk now?”

No answer comes.

“Hey. Nori? Something up?”

Please answer me.

Please, please, please, at least say goodbye.

He opened his eyes. He didn’t know when he closed them. Nori’s screen is red. FATAL ERROR. The acid reached the snow at the other end of the corpse and was starting to dig down. The stuff was going up in smoke.

In an instant, without grace or ceremony, the world returned to him, and he was alone.

He thought he would remain there, forever, weathered by the wind.

But he remembers being dragged. Slowly pulled away from her and back below ground.

He remembers the undying monsters coming to their feet through the closing edges of Door One.

He remembers the gap thinning and vanishing, and with it Nori’s corpse..

Khan stumbles and falls face first. The hunting grounds welcome him again. He’s exhausting fast and his whole frame’s trembling.

He grips tight on a handful of plastic shreds, wire and glass shards. They poke through the shell and bite at the membrane beneath. Then rests the fist on the ground, and forces his arm to arch. It pushes up, weakly. The other follows.

I keep on playing our favorite song
I turn it up while you're gone
It's all I got, when you're in my head
And you're in my head, so I need it

Before he knows it, he’s staggering around. Scanning the grave around him again. Eyes not truly looking, not even where he walks. By now, he can’t ignore it. This is everything he’ll get. Bits and scraps, scattered with all the rest.

Time passes at an even pace, mercilessly empty. Without a reason to end the wandering, the streets push him to a rightward turn. Then left, and dead ahead. More and more blackened plastic and darkened glass: the sombrest approach drawing him in along the riven graves. It is the mammoth presence right before him that breaks the trance and stops the walk. The last place to look unfolds before his sight, by red light met.

FATAL ERROR.

The dead flare and wail out, knitted into its black sludge walls. Above and above it rises, digging its tooth into the shallow sky. Even in man’s towers it finds no peer.

Left to grow, it will eclipse the world.

Khan Doorman, the WDF’s own, made it to the Corpse Spire. He looks toward its mighty archway, the open maw of the lions’ den. Near its very top, but just to the side, among the many contorted dead shining bright, he spies a faded, familiar hue.

Frayed purple tufts over a blackened screen. The chest below it has been split apart, the wound widened to gorge what refuse remained of her innards. The core, the abraded ruin of Nori’s core is gone. Of the legs there is nothing left, and of the arms only the right stump. The numbered choker is still there, still glittering. His Nori gazes down, mouth agape, into the boundless graveyard. Made into a saint of this utterly abominable cenotaph.

But there is enough. There is enough to bring back home.

He undoes the backpack’s zipper and reaches in with quivering hands, barely managing a grasp into the climbing hook and rope that’s neatly rounded in it. He’s right there. He’s right there! Khan fists both hands and spins the hook as well as he can, fighting to build enough momentum. Again. Again. Again. Can’t be much longer left now. They’re coming back. They’re coming back. And he’s yet without his prize.

Wracked out of his mind, he howls out a muffled cry and throws the hook with all the might his arms afford him. It goes half that vast distance, and that’s as far as it gets. It plunges aground, to a dull thud.

So he reels it back, and tries again.

And when he fails to reach the mountainous height again, he reels it back and tries again; then once more; then again, and a dozen times over. And then, when he’s wringing the very last sparks of strength his motors have, it strikes the very bottom of the archway and hooks in.

Though everything from grip to chest and neck to knees is hurting bad, he grasps the rope and gets to dragging up, not letting go one moment, though the membrane at the palms warns of excess pressure, though the shoulders ache and turn to stone with every pull. Left, right, left, right, he vents exhaust inbetween, sometimes something that sounds like a whimper makes it out, on, and on, and on, till he’s twenty times his height away from the ground.

Not even a quarter of the way through, his left slips. His right’s too slow to stop the fall. Enough momentum builds that he’s sliding down the rope and grinding away at his shell on his palms and knees until the ground receives him with a heavy blow that hits his heels the wrong way and makes him stumble away from the rope.

It occurs to him then, half sitting and half lying, that he has no means of ripping Nori’s corpse from the sludge congealed around it.

With drones old and new there is an infantile presumption toward death. It won’t happen to me, they think, aware or not. It cannot: I am resourceful. I am kind. I am careful. I am strong. I am lucky. It mustn’t. There is too much yet left for me to do. Death takes others because they weren’t so, because their duties were done. The great killings are as if a sieve, and its invisible design sifts grain from chaff. There needn’t be a Robo-God to hold and shake the sieve, or secret law to evenly measure its fine lattice. It needn’t even be fair; things simply are so, and among chaff I am grain.

He’s above that, Khan likes to think. He sees through the presumption. It can and no doubt will happen to him, because no quality separates him from the dead but life itself. The corpses all over were more or less virtuous than him and it didn’t matter – death was awarded at random. The impersonal truth of mortality was indifferent to him, and as a drone of a certain age he knew these things well enough that he took it upon himself to teach them and made sure insofar as he could that monstrous death took no one unprepared.

But between knowing and understanding lays a wide gap. It can’t be seen. It can only be imagined. It can’t be felt and recognized until it is crossed and the distance of the leap makes itself apparent in the cold shudders that appear when the yawning depth is left behind.

They are coming now. The shudders. The dread. The urge to puke that cripples the heightsick when they look down the chasm just leapt. Face to face with the alloyed dead, he gets it; death is erasure. It’s the melding of metal. The ripping of cloth and the fading of color and the peeling of hair that’ll make him a red flare among the milliards. Because not even the otherworldly power that endowed Nori alone could make a difference. All of that only served to exchange for time, and time means nothing to a world that’s already dead.

She was thrown in with the other bodies and all the justice and might and good deeds and rightful vengeance of her last moments earned only worthless time so that bodies may join the pile at a later date, like the hand strains to prolong the ripping of the bandaid. This is where we'll all go. The dead shall swell, the Spire shall climb and pierce the clouds. It’s how things are. What were once people shall all become the amorphous, pungent bricks of this mausoleum most grotesque. But what is yet darker, what's even uglier, what haunts him worst – is that he won’t know what for.

Even magic could not change this world's course. Like fire burns, like wind blows, drones die. We’ll pile, like snow does, and it will serve nothing at all. Fire heats the shivering and wind brings snow that man’s children cheer but this great pile of pig iron and mixed plastics won't make anything new. Its material qualities are nil. It can’t turn the air any more noxious. It won't even pollute, because there's nothing here left to poison.

Metal, memory and meaning will boil away in nanite rage until every color in the planet is the same concrete gray and it will all sit there in great heaps slowly weathered by the wind until the terrible making instruments have themselves become part and long eroded, when man's machines return to seed life anew and whatever's left is pummeled by asteroid rain and the flattened scraps withered by the brisk terraformation to follow until it becomes impossible for all but the most specialized of the coming settlers to tell that there used to be anything there at all.

The eradication will be so absolute that the colonial produce of the new Copper-9 will bear no trace of today’s corpses, whichever slivers that found their way to raw material refined out and again discarded.

A generation’s worth of struggle will be rendered as a pig iron blotch in a thin plastic-steel layer of geological history, and what was lost won’t have mattered. History budges not an inch for the bloody toil of Copper-9’s survivors.

There, right before the gaping maw of this monument for history to come, Khan finally starts to cry.

What am I doing here?

What were you planning to do? What were you thinking, Khan Doorman? Did you forget you have a daughter to raise?

What’s she doing now, while you bawl your eyes out at the grave? She shudders awake, she waits at the door, she wonders where you are. It’s just not something you can leave behind. It’s just too heavy, without a shoulder to share the burden with. He can’t do it. Someone else has to take care. The road left ahead is long and exhausting and what will it matter if Uzi won’t have a mother, if all she’ll have is him, burnt to a crisp and unable to even look at the promise of a life they’ll never live.

But she doesn’t deserve to lose another parent. No words, no mementos, no nothing. That’s cruel. That’s just so cruel. Outpost-3’s promise everted. The embers of his courage wasted.

But what does that all matter anyway?

So Khan’s hands spread on the harsh ground, debris digging into his sore palms, and he struggles up.

He throws down the backpack, and reaches in for the only thing that still matters.

A green, glowing cylinder meets his gaze. A switch is flipped, and it buzzes with power – ready to blow. It goes between his teeth.

And his hands grip the rope again.

Everywhere, the heavens wail. For an anxious moment, approaching stridence muffles the storm. Then, with thundering aplomb, the hunter makes landfall.

It perches with such might that the corpse-spire rattles under it, the carcass bricks clattering a far-reaching din as it creeps downward on all fours. Though only four would seem a gross underestimation to any onlooker; the swift, snappy movement of its limbs has the indistinct, freakish quality of a spider’s run.

The Murder Drone is in pursuit. It has been since the very moment it landed. For brief instants, it stops and angles its head. Stealth’s far from a concern here, at the heart of its lair. Out there, it might glide up high and circle seeking. It needs to do no such things when prey comes marching right up to its maws.

No more than twenty seconds from folding its wings, it’s already crawled down to the archway. It taps its claws in a dazzling sequence, and its tail twitches behind. Arms stretched, legs flexed tight. All teeth showing in a half-moon sneer. Now slowly, it creeps ahead, and the inbound bootprints come into view. Some would swear the eager hisses that escape its mouth are tittering.

Now it sees the lower end of the rope, idly swinging. And it stops; waits. Closely heeds its multifold senses. There is a certain noise below it. The antsy pit-a-pat of a prey’s thoracic transformers. The rhythm’s absurdly fast. Gone hysteric.

It leaps to the very verge of the archway and spreads its wings wide, targeting arrays sharp and searching. Near. Near. Within fifty meters. But there’s another waveform, louder, of less interest to its tautly tuned pattern-finders. Location grants it undue importance; directly in front of the abdomen.

Its neck curls inward and stares down a little hole in the spire’s wall. Green light emanates from within an open torso, below purple hair. It grows refulgent. The noise becomes a high-pitched wail.

The killer gets hardly a moment to howl before the rigged battery erupts, and it is engulfed in the powerful thunderclap of an ionizing blast that dyes the world a blinding green.

Somewhere out there, behind sparse rubble cover, Khan overvents and shudders. His eyelights are hollow, and both hands are balled up to his chest. Whether courage or resignation made him turn and run from the burial blaze, its last embers have given out.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing there. He doesn’t know how he’s alive. He vents out hot air and his entrails whirr with panicked overcharge. The residual vigor of a poorly-fed battery array is burning out fast.

But in his hands– in his hands is the only thing that matters. He opens them, fearfully, as if what’s in them might disappear if looked away from. The numbered choker with a little skull and rhinestone adornments.

Yes. This is what he came looking for. This is enough to bring back home.

Far away from Hell, rightly secured, his daughter’s waiting. He cycles in deep, and vents out. He might not make it there. But he ought to try.