“Where have you been hiding this delicious creature from me, Cassara? I simply must have her!”

 

General Prall Sabik’s voice coiled around the shriek of shearing metal. Sparks, stained red in evaporating gore, erupted before her—or rather, the armored cage wrapping her body in a skein of steel. The boxy shape of her blade sang eight meters long to catch a stray, black claw that darted for the seams of her cockpit.

 

Her opponent’s appendage met the excited gossamer edge of her sword head on, yet somehow did not sever down the center. The monster’s onyx palm instead gripped the sword and pushed, more of its almost-blood vaporizing into a gelid mist around the two war machines.

 

“It’s only a recent design, General,” a woman’s smooth, sedate voice radioed back. “But the moment we finished her, I knew you would want to appreciate her skills for yourself.”

 

General Sabik’s smile split wide, even as her deeply shadowed eyes narrowed. Those who didn’t know her might have said she looked drunk; those who did would see an ember focused to a cutting edge through those gray slits of iris. “I’ve not had prey this arousing since the rebellion.” Her voice revealed her interest with a long, slow groan of desire. “She’s been fighting since dawn, and I just know she could go all night... I simply must have her, Cassara! Please, say that I can have her!”

 

“I’m afraid that’s for the Board to decide,” Cassara’s voice carried on. “They’ve invested quite a lot into this particular prototype.”

 

“To hell with them!” Sabik chuckled. She almost meant it, too. Every blow she deflected, every wound she inflicted, taught her more about the machine’s movements. But to watch it knit back together again with interlocking pyramids of shining, black aminoplastic along the machine's limbs and torso and neck made her muscles sing against the cockpit's controls with inequity. This was not the lover she craved. She needed to feel the creature’s reins beneath her hands, its power tugging at her biceps. “How could they ever stop me with such a beast lashed beneath me?”

 

“You’d be amazed what lengths they’ll go to to catch someone,” Cassara replied. “Besides, I have a different surprise waiting for you, my love.”

 

“It must be something special to match this fine suitor you’ve lined up today.” The General gave a sporting laugh, shifting her own steel titan to catch a new angle of approach. Her fingers twitched at her controls, and a spiked gauntlet shot out faster than the eye could see. It grabbed one of her opponent’s tentacles to rip it off balance. “What did you say she was called again? I should know before I brand something better into her hide. She deserves a name as beautiful as her dancing!”

 

The woman on the radio crackled into a chuckle: “Zalmoxis.”

 

The enemy cage, its closest arms preoccupied with clawing at Sabik’s mechanized shell, revealed its ruse. While it mimed a swipe from the left, Zalmoxis undulated to the right, spinning its weight on ferrofluid tendrils that projected slabs around its shoulders. This outer layer of indecipherable mass seemed to roll, while keeping the bulk of the cage completely upright, kicking up dirt and brutally whipping Sabik from the flank.

 

General Sabik dodged the blows well. Endless webs of silver stretched and glinted like spiderwebs across the many places where her brightly painted Odalisque—a trophy she had taken from a rebel “hero” by right of conquest—hardly resembled the knightly thing it had been. The machine had been welded, scavenged, and refitted too many times over those many years since the rebellion.

 

Some of its many quaint fixtures and bolted-on bindings had been Sabik’s own additions as she had pressed the deliriously pink thing into her service. Others had been added to its long, quick body by imperial engineers or through simple necessity.  All of them added up to the same silhouette: an impossibly thin, long human body, bound together in mismatched plates and straps. Even fabric had been incorporated into its design, a pair of impossibly light half capes unfurled from its shoulders like insect wings.

 

The most recognizable of these additions, however, was a band of flexile metal pulled around its “eyes” and surrounded in spikes—a halo and a blindfold in one, forever the symbol of the angel of death that had held fast against the rebels in the final days of the Empire. Never defeated, even as her nation crumbled around her.

 

Sabik’s cage twisted at the wrist under the hilt of her sword, answering Zalmoxis’ latest assault. Long and languid, the coral-colored forearm of the Odalisque allowed itself to be wrapped in one tendril, but held fast, arresting the other cage’s onslaught. Sabik’s back arched with effort, matching her machine. Zalmoxis’ momentum tried to drag them both down to earth, pinning Sabik’s cage on its stomach in the process, yet still the emaciated form of the Odalisque held firm. The spinning terror of angles and tendrils was forced to yield instead—finally revealing its true shape in stillness.

 

Where the Odalisque was spindly but oddly elegant in its humanoid curves, General Sabik could see Zalmoxis was instead a bulky horror. A long head tapered into a thick neck that typically stayed low beneath its too-many shoulders, almost bent into its chest, with a jagged phalanx of fangs cut long and sharp down to the base of its throat. A black, round visor bolted where its eyes would be gave it the impression of a helmet’s visor of comical size. The cage carried a tangle of obsidian limbs, bundled twelve meters tall at its full height, welded beneath elegant, interlocking geometry limned in gold edges. These endless, cubic angles were all that indicated it was truly a machine—something built, rather than hatched. 

 

Its narrow torso seemed to shimmer and seethe under the world’s ever-present sun.  Perhaps it was the seams of gray fur sprouting symmetrically from its neck and shoulders, swaying in the impotent breeze. Perhaps it was merely a trick of the heat radiating off its dark surface. Either way, it did not move the way a cage should.

 

Zalmoxis didn’t need to breathe. It couldn’t exhale with a grim satisfaction as it pulled its back into a hunch of spidery limbs. Yet it did.

 

The Odalisque snapped its arm, still coiled in the bubbling liquid metal of a tentacle, backwards. Zalmoxis fell off balance again. It tripped drunkenly off the crater-marked field below the two cages and went down on its belly. With one smooth motion, Sabik stepped the Odalisque over and atop her opponent, bringing a sharp, hoof-like heel into Zalmoxis’ spine, pressing it further down into the dust. A meaningless gesture of dominance, but a clear one. Clearer still was the way Sabik’s sword dragged its electron edge slowly, teasingly, across the ground and closer to her enemy’s throat.

 

Even then, three of the cage’s black arms dug into the dirt for purchase, readying it for a sprinter’s leap out from under Sabik’s assault and back into the fray. Another claw laid on the ground, sizzling where it had been sliced by the Odalisque’s monofilament as it fell. The “wound,” of course, was already beginning to close almost as quickly as it had been seared.

 

“That’s enough, Prall,” said Cassara. “We have—.”

 

“—all the data that we need, yes,” a second voice cut in over the radio. This one mocked its way through every word it burbled, as if on the cusp of tittering to some unmade joke. “Surely we can all agree your legacy is impressive enough already without adding my latest investment to the tally, General.”

 

“Maximal Value!” Sabik huffed, relaxing into her cockpit seat warily at the familiar tone. “I should have smelled your fangs all over this. She’s the very portrait of A-COM design: bloated budgets and ecchymotic aesthetics. You’d see a better return if you trusted her with a woman who understands what true worth looks like.”

 

Maximal’s cocksure voice countered: “My dear General… I understand worth just fine. Why, I’ve already promised to multiply yours several times over! You need only finally sell me the adaptation rights to your memoirs. The rebels would pay handsomely for a film featuring the Kingkiller in action. General Prall Sabik is too irresistible for anyone to pass up.”

 

That name. Kingkiller…

 

The General’s smile of triumph soured imperceptibly as her breathing deflated. But even Maximal couldn’t stall the rise of heat in her belly completely, however. Sequestered as she had been into early retirement, with only the occasional tournament or mundane test to occupy her, this was the most alive Sabik had felt in years. For the first time in two decades, today was different. Exciting.

 

She hissed with delight as her opponent bucked beneath her cage’s boot. It was trying to stand back up; Sabik offered it a lesson in futility.

 

“That’s enough,” Cassara repeated sharply. “We have enough telemetry. Disembark and give us time to prepare the final test pilot.”

 

Sabik huffed. She jammed the flat point of her sword into the earth with one of her machine’s gauntleted arms, rather than stow it. She had not used her Odalisque’s left arm across nearly an entire day of testing. She was sure Zalmoxis had just been about to force her hand. Literally. Her momentum felt arrested by these stutterstop tests. Stunted. She could taste the salt of exertion just begging to daub the edge of her pale cheeks. 

 

Even so, she kicked herself nonchalantly off Zalmoxis with a flick of a control stick. Ranks aside, she did not wish to contravene the other woman. It had been agonizing months since their last rendezvous, and General Sabik fully intended to make the most of their time together—both within her cage and without.

 

Instead, she strode the construct gracefully toward an open air collection of tents and sturdy equipment drilled into the earth on a hill above the cratered testing grounds. There stood a speck in the shape of Major Cassara Nell: a diminutive woman, even when she wasn’t standing before a fifteen-meter metal cocoon. She was hard to pick out in the tight, double-breasted gray of her dark jacket and long, matching boots. She held her arms behind her back and kept her pale legs close together in a pencil skirt, drawing a small profile on the countryside. 

 

General Prall Sabik, however, would never mistake the sight of the one woman she had ever truly loved.

 

At Sabik’s command, the Odalisque went down to its knees before the Major—never minding the way the sudden change in air pressure sent the tarps of their camp and the clothing of nearby technicians aflutter. The cage bent its head low in supplication, arms folded on the earth before its downturned face, palms turned upwards to a broken sky. 

 

Major Nell held firm as Sabik exited her cockpit from the Odalisque’s back, pulling herself free from the enclosure like a diver breaching the surface of a pool. 

 

Not for the first time that day, her eyes were greeted with the leavings of a failed world: a jagged, man-made horizon that curled back in on itself like the inside of a cracked eggshell. The perfect port of call for her current employers, Sabik mused—as empty and artificial as they were. Not to mention an excellent sparring ground for projects A-COM did not wish for the galaxy to see. 

 

Yet.

 

Sabik wouldn’t let them hide a creature as magnificent as Zalmoxis for long. It wasn’t enough to help test it. She needed to pilot it. And she knew just the woman who could make it so.

 

“Congratulations, General,” came the voice of the Major. Her voice sang so much sweeter in person than it had over the radio. It always did. A blend of natural breeze and cooling exhaust billowed over the Odalisque and kicked up her violet, jaw-length hair. “Five straight victories. No other pilot has managed even one against Zalmoxis, regardless of its operator.”

 

In contrast to the young, diminutive Major, Sabik was both a slender mountain and an older woman of frictious angles. Her heavily decorated uniform appeared to fit ill on her body, expanded perhaps to meet the needs of her many medals. In reality, her long face and sunken cheeks helped obscure just how tall she truly was. This matched a torso, an obelisk nearly twice as broad as those of the technicians already swarming to fuss over the Odalisque and Zalmoxis. 

 

Her tangle of honors—the last, true piece of the Empire she still carried—jangled over her chest. Each was counterbalanced by the many tassels, long aiguillettes, and a heavy epaulette of silver on her right shoulder. Each gleamed so bright that their pearlescence nearly matched her own flesh. Her face, though, was accessorized to match the fabric, instead: pierced through at the ears with various black studs and painted slick as oil across her lips and around her eyes. Her long hair, though pale blonde, wafted behind and before her like a funeral shroud in the breeze.

 

In the days after Empire's fall, when the Kingkiller had been credited with finally ending the war’s final, bloody stalemate, no few rebels stretching across the newly “liberated” galaxy had felt emboldened enough to say the lady looked like death herself. Certainly, she could heft a scythe easily enough.

 

The General smiled as she stepped over the back of her supplicating cage—first its back, then its downturned head, and finally stepping into its waiting hands without breaking stride. Her heels clacked against the metal, bare where her stride had worn a stripe of silver out of the paint over the years. During the war, her mechanics had first attempted to repaint it. Sabik had reprimanded them for it; she liked the reminder of what she had taken and made her own.

 

Sabik stepped off her cage’s hands and swept Major Nell bodily off her feet. The Major gave the barest hint of a bright laugh through her smile: one of the only features on her face not obscured by straight, violet bangs that completely covered her eyes. The soft music of it soaked Sabik’s heart to its core. Her stomach tumbled in ways the day’s battles could never come close to replicating.

 

“She’s your finest work yet, darling,” the General said, eyes arcing down into attentive slits on her prize, fingers exploring and squeezing her paramour from below, without restraint. “Nearly as fine as you, if such a thing can be believed.”

 

“Someone is feeling bold today,” the Major mused. “The engineers will talk.”

 

“Let them. I haven’t felt your breath on my skin or your lips at my breast in months.”

 

“The Compact—”

 

“Works you far too hard, sending you traipsing across the galaxy. I mean, really! Look at this failed attempt at a backwater they’ve sent us to.”

 

“You didn’t have to follow me.”

 

“I can only entertain myself with pretty young things back home for so long.” Sabik held Major Nell’s gloved fingers in one hand, easily cradling the smaller woman aloft with the other while kissing each digit in turn between breaths. “Eventually, the heart yearns for the real thing.”

 

Cassara wrapped her own free hand around the small of the General’s back, squeezing it gently while she pulled herself up to her knight to place a kiss on her cheek. Sabik replied with a twirl in the grass, making them both just a bit dizzy. Technicians respectfully averted their eyes and pretended not to see anything as scurried to refit the two cages. The Odalisque in particular would need a new assault rifle. Zalmoxis had melted the last one.

 

Only one nearby figure did not look away: a spindly, gold-clad individual waving daintily to Sabik and Nell. The second voice from the radio. The ambulate that called itself Maximal Value. They were flanked, as usual, by a corps of flittering secretaries and—more distant—a cadre of watchful soldiers in featureless, black masks standing guard.

 

“You didn’t tell me they were the mysterious benefactor behind your new toy,” Sabik grumbled, whispering low enough that she hoped Maximal would be unable to hear. “I could do without seeing them again for much longer still.”

 

“Mx. Value is a member in good standing with A-COM’s Board of Directors,” Cassara said. “Nothing I do happens without their knowledge, and you yourself have seen what Zalmoxis can do. They were bound to get involved one way or another. At least like this, they’re contributing rather than interfering.”

 

General Sabik’s wide lips drew low. “Yes, dear.”

 

“Are you upset with me?” Major Nell teased.

 

“Never,” Sabik sighed, truthfully. “But you know better than most: nothing with Maximal is ever free. The Compact always makes a return on its investments.”

 

“Of course, my love, but that’s what brought you to me, after all.”

 

It was true. Sabik was a woman of the Compact, now, too. Not unlike her lover. Not unlike the “self-made businessperson” waiting for them on the hill. The memory of her defection, however, was not entirely the warm recollection it was for the Major.

 

Her previous employer, the Emperor she herself had been the very last traitor to, had built a grand and generational culture on what had turned out to be quite shaky foundations of ostentation, ceremony, and a compulsive love of humanity. The people had disagreed with his… expression of that love, but at least Thespis had stood for something.

 

The Amage-Moon Mineral and Expansion Compact, otherwise known as A-COM, was just a pit of digestive oils, like Maximal and their shiny, addictive ilk. The rebel factions had taken the galaxy’s heart in the end, but it was this conglomeration of avarice that would grow to devour its soul. Even the mighty General Prall Sabik could not escape all its grasping tar forever. Thanks to Cassara, she hadn’t tried…

 

Even now, though—half a decade after she told herself she had made peace with drowning—the corpse gas of her pride sent her gasping for that air of lost home.

 

She tasted no such thing in sight of Maximal Value.

 

Like most ambulates, Maximal was constructed from perfectly polished alloys of various bright colors. Mostly gold, in their case, but with two sets of luminous green eyes to either side of their inverted triangle of a face. They were taller than the average human—positively towering over the endless host of secretaries who had only just finished setting down a tea table as the General and her lover crested the hill. The top of their head further added to the sense of scale, with swept-back horns that lent it a shape like a blunted crescent moon.

 

Unlike most ambulates, Maximal’s clothing clung tight to the body, showing off a sickly-thin waist and a lethal pair of stiletto heels mechanically melded to their ankle joints. Their attire cut through this parody of a human body nicely with the hard-set angle of their shoulders, secure in the shining gold silk of a pinstripe suit.

 

To Sabik, however, their most overwhelming feature was their ever-present smile. The inhuman gash seemed to choke the light around them—save the green tint of ash on their cigarette at the end of an absurd cigarette holder. Their teeth glistened like pearls so perfectly, so brightly, that it cut a halo of monochrome around the ambulate’s head. Nothing could bloom so sickly bright, Sabik thought, without sucking the surrounding life out through its roots.

 

Sabik frowned. There was something else standing next to the synthetic—something that hadn’t been there at the start of the day’s duels. It was a strange, round, metal ring set horizontally atop a tripod. A white sack of compact latex, vacuum sealed around some unknown cargo inside, dangled from the circle of steel.

 

Most of Maximal’s aides were already recusing themselves, but they had managed to snag one lucky girl by the wrists in their gold and silver claws. When Sabik approached with the Major, the other two were waltzing to a simple beat pouring from a small box on the nearby table.

 

“Our hero of the hour returns. With the princess in tow, no less.” Maximal’s tone was as glib as it had been over the radio, though more cheerful without its compression. The secretary struggled to offer proper greetings to the approaching colossus that was General Sabik, as well as match pace with Maximal’s footwork. “It’s so wonderful to see you again, General. Care to cut in?”

 

“Absolutely not,” Sabik grunted. Sabik’s face twitched as Maximal led their ridiculous performance in a circle around her and the Major.

 

“It’s a good thing you’ve brought your own partner, then,” Maximal insisted. “Surely you’ll at least do me the courtesy of dancing alongside me?”

 

Sabik opened her mouth to protest, but Cassara, ever the more tactful of the couple, first giggled politely.

 

“You’re most kind to offer, Mx. Value,” said the Major. “We weren’t expecting such rare pleasantries today.” Turning her attention to the General, she added: “Come now, Prall… When was the last time we had cause to dance? The next pilot isn’t quite ready anyway.”

 

“Cassara…” she pleaded. “Really? In front of them?”

 

Sabik felt her pride well up in her throat, then swallowed, chasing it with a sudden spoonful of her lover’s playful grin. She looked angrily to Maximal, still twirling like an idiot. She muffled a groan of disapproval under Cassara’s laugh as she slid the smaller woman onto the grass and took her hands. 

 

“Fine,” she sighed, but there was no fight in it. The Major was right: it had been some time since they had last danced. Seeing her now, beneath her like this and in her arms, even through the absurdity of it all, felt right. Thankfully, half a lifetime at Imperial court did not fail her. Even with their enormous difference in size, Sabik and Nell moved as gracefully as they had on Thespis those twenty years ago.

 

“I only hope you can keep up with two things at once, Mx. Value,” Major Nell called out to the ambulate. “I think the General is eager to discuss business while we dance.”

 

“Of course, darling! I never let business get in the way of pleasure. What is work, after all, but desire yet unfulfilled? Human or synthetic, we work only so that we may eventually play! I’ve always believed there is no greater labor than to want something.”

 

Maximal spun their secretary around once, then twice—no mean feat in her oppressively tall heels piercing the uneven grass. While the girl protested, it was clear to Sabik she was enjoying herself, too.

 

“Then I want to get this over with,” Sabik pressed. 

 

“And I want to stretch my legs!” Maximal interjected. “I want to dance. I want to enjoy the light of a new sun on my skin. I want to sample every pleasure this quaint little world has to offer while I can.” Maximal directed their attention back to their aide. “And that absolutely includes you, my sweet.”

 

They caught the secretary’s chin with one long nail to pull her gaze and posture up, away from her feet, until the petite woman could only stand en pointe. Tendrils of green smoke further trailed through Maximal’s teeth and nose as they spoke. The luminous green vapors of their cigarette caressed the secretary’s nose and mouth, cinders breaking off into unnatural shapes. Sabik held Nell just close enough for its pollution to harry them both, although Nell seemed more used to it by now than Sabik, given that her nose didn’t immediately wrinkle.

 

“Are you a local, my dear?” Maximal asked their secretary. “I just know I would recall seeing such an uncommon beauty as yourself in my retinue before today.”

 

The aide nodded, looking slightly abashed as Maximal twirled her by one hand. Maximal responded by pulling her back close to their chest and wrapping a hand around the small of her back as if to comfort her after sharing some painful secret. “I was born right here on Spear, Mx. Value. Just one of the lesser shards.” 

 

“Can you point it out to me?”

 

Maximal pulled the aide’s waist close, wrapping a hand around the small of her back. The ambulate dipped her backwards, supporting her back while the cap of her uniform fell free. Major Nell managed to catch it in the midst of her own dip as the other woman erupted into almost manic giggles under Maximal’s attention. The secretary pointed to a distant, jagged dot on the horizon. Maximal ran a nail along the length of her arm, following it to her finger until they wrapped their hand around hers, matching the point and locating the continent for themself.

 

Spear was a patchwork of such shards—jagged continental plates held together on a network of cables the size of cities themselves, an incomplete sphere surrounding a small sun at the center. The largest of such plates, home to the pseudo-planet’s capital, could be seen glittering upwards in a slope far, far to Maximal’s right. The patch of dirt the aide had pointed out was dark against the expanse of space and stars it barely obscured by comparison—nearly obstructed altogether by a patch of dark rain clouds slowly sliding down the horizon towards the dancers.

 

“I see the one,” Maximal said. “Quite small, as you said. You must have dreamed of much greater things to find yourself rising so high within the Compact as to serve me.”

 

“Enough nonsense,” Sabik finally snapped. The secretary jerked back to Maximal’s breast as the angel of death nearly shouted in their direction, immediately putting a halt to the dance. “I didn’t come here to watch you put your claws all over one of your trollops, Maximal. Will this final pilot of yours be joining us or not?”

 

“Please forgive this ‘mysterious benefactor’ their eccentricities.” Maximal cleared their throat: an asinine gesture, Sabik thought, since their body didn’t produce liquids to remove. They released the aide to adjust their tie, leaving her free to scurry out of Sabik’s sight. She turned off the music before returning to her sister secretaries. “Your opponent is resting while the engineers refit your mechs. Please take a moment to refresh yourself as well.”

 

Maximal took a seat at the clean, white table of strongly patterned iron. Their pointed nails just barely managed to slip inside the handle of a teacup, already being filled by another attendant, before raising the too-small vessel to their sharp teeth. General Sabik gently lowered herself into the chair, pulling Cassara with her and balancing the Major on her thigh. Even sitting down, her height rivalled Maximal’s more than adequately.

 

“Your real body moves surprisingly well,” the General reluctantly admitted after a moment’s silence. She looked to Major Nell and added: “The last time I saw them, they were ‘inhabiting’ a charming young redhead. The one with that little scar on her lip.”

 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in that one, Mx. Value,” said the Major. “You must have quite the collection.”

 

“You can hardly expect me to wear the same suit every day,” Maximal explained. “And human bodies are so expressive! They make for such lovely accessories. Provided you properly compensate and insure them for their use, of course.”

 

“Of course,” answered the Major, apparently unfazed.

 

Maximal sighed and tapped green ash from their cigarette between two long nails in thought, but their smile did not waver. “Sadly, that particular surrogate declined to renew her contract when it ran out. A pity… She had the most delightfully sensitive tongue!”

 

“Don’t tell me your final pilot today is one of those puppets.”

 

“I’m afraid I’m a much better dancer than a duelist, General, but I promise your next competitor will cash any checks my misbehaviors may write.”

 

“Competitors imply competition,” General Sabik murmured without looking away from Cassara’s face. Black-dyed fingertips stroked the back of the Major’s scalp, while the smaller woman took up a waiting teacup of her own. “I’ll admit it’s quite the toy…” she underserved, glancing down the hill. Two technicians were working crowbars into Zalmoxis to wrench its cockpit open. “But without me riding her, you’ll never break the thing into a proper lady.”

 

To the side of the table, the strange rack and its shiny, misshapen cargo that Sabik had spotted on the way up the hill continued to loom beside those assembled.

 

“Some new perversion of yours, Maximal?” asked the General, indicating the vacuum sealed sack. “Or perhaps a distant relative?”

 

Maximal leaned lazily in their chair, lanky limbs stretched awkwardly across a seat designed for the average human. They loosed a rancid melody Sabik assumed was a chuckle and looked to where the General had indicated.

 

“Was that a hint of prejudice, General? Hardly my favorite among your distressingly few vices.”

 

Before Maximal could answer Sabik’s question further, the two technicians finally pried the cockpit of Zalmoxis apart, splitting its ribs wide with a great deal of unaided effort. The glorious scarlet of its internals and operating lights laid at such an incline that the test pilot inside practically fell from their seat, dropping to all fours into the grass. The cage sat waiting, its red chair a tongue arrayed with endless teeth in the form of various controls. The pilot below did not quite manage to remove his helmet before vomiting.

“Oh, I suspect you would tame Zalmoxis far better than our test pilots,” Maximal replied, sidestepping the question of the bag completely. “The Board may even prefer it that way. Yet I think noble creatures are best appreciated when they remain wild. Creatures like yourself, General. I could show you just what I mean after today’s adventure. I may not put up much of a fight, but I promise ambulate engineering is quite robust. You can check with any of my girls here! I certainly have. Usually four or five at a time.”

 

“I so adore these rare reunions, Maximal,” Sabik said, anger pulling her from Cassara long enough to snarl. “It’s a sobering reminder that all the money in the galaxy can’t purchase a sense of humor.”

 

Maximal smiled. “Who’s joking, my dear? My offer stands.”

 

“Despite your supposedly superior engineering, you certainly enjoy a variety of pleasures of the flesh,” mused Sabik.

 

“You were there at the Empire’s embarrassing fall from relevance, General. Trust someone who was alive to witness the start of that particular rebellion: you either adapt with the times, or the times choke you in your sleep. Your Emperor learned that the hard way.”

 

Sabik’s smile wilted imperceptibly at the remark. 

 

“What the General means to say is that she’s spoken for tonight, Mx. Value,” Major Nell intoned. She wrapped her arms possessively around the General’s corded neck as she returned to the topic of Maximal’s offer. “Unless, of course, you’d like to share her as well.”

 

Maximal grinned. They always grinned, to the General’s reckoning. She had never seen the being without a smile on their face. That parade of sharp and perfect triangles would have cut itself from one ear to the other, if the machine’s pale skull had visible ears at all.

 

“I would be honored,” Maximal replied. “Though I suspect even our legendary duelist may be at a disadvantage while outnumbered.”

 

“All that gold seems like it would be expensive to replace.” Sabik smiled back, gripping Cassara tightly and tilting her head back in one sudden motion. The Major sighed excitedly as Sabik walked her lips along the length of her exposed throat. “When I snap that tiny waist in half, could even you afford the repairs?”

 

“Why bother guessing?” Maximal hissed, claws scratching forward along the table. Their voice was as composed as ever, but there was suddenly poisoned sugar in their words. “We could simply wager on today’s final bout instead.”

 

Nell pressed herself proudly into Sabik, gloved hand running along the underside of her chin. Despite herself, the General leaned into the gesture like a tame panther. 

 

“You don’t exactly have the best track record of betting against the General, Mx. Value,” the Major interjected. “You always seem to make the same mistake of betting against her.”

 

The knowledge that she had wiped out a considerable sum of Maximal’s holdings was nothing new to Sabik. Normally, it fueled a small spark of satisfaction. Yet the reminder of their repeated insults—of the ambulate betting against her time and time again as she whiled away the days of early retirement in various A-COM arenas—only stoked her belly today.

 

Maximal drew from their cigarette. “Where’s the fun in betting on an undefeated duelist?”

 

“Where’s the fun in making yourself look an utter fool?” Sabik sniped.

 

“Only a fool so long as you remain undefeated, General.” Maximal countered. “And I’ve invested so very much into testing your limits today.”

 

Maximal idly stroked the strange sack still dangling from its sealed rack with the back of their fingers at this last comment. Sabik let her eyes dart to the container as well.

 

“So that’s what this is really about. You’re free to waste your money however you wish,” Sabik replied. “At least you’ll have a smaller audience to your latest defeat.”

 

“So long as it buys me another moment of your attention, darling, I would spend all that and more! Nothing brings out your ferocity quite like a challenge.”

 

“Must you make everything so transactional?”

 

“Says the woman who named her cage another word for whore.”

 

Sabik smiled stiffly back at Maximal with that, lips preserved in amber.

 

She felt a shameful heat rise in her chest. Maximal was right. The tests, the duels, Zalmoxis… The delectable danger of it all had driven her blood up in ways she had not felt since the war. Not since a beautiful young woman had come to court in the guise of a diplomat from the newly formed and obscure Amage-Moon Mineral and Expansion Compact. Not since she had explained to Sabik, in secret rendezvous, between stolen moments and warm sheets too quickly left empty again, the cold calculus of a prolonged stalemate. She had shown Sabik that each day wasted meant a thousand lives tossed away and, more importantly, another day kept away from her Cassara Nell.

 

Sabik broke the silence first: “I’m not interested in you or your money, Maximal, but I will make you a bet. If I win, I take Zalmoxis. If I lose, you can name your price.”

 

Maximal’s green eyes gleamed. “You’re letting me set the stakes for your failure?” 

 

“I assure you: that won’t come up.”

 

“Are you certain this is wise, dear?” Major Nell beamed a calming smile beneath unseen eyes. She leaned in close to whisper. “You said yourself that the Compact always makes a return on its investments. Perhaps you should be patient…”

 

Sabik tsked, drumming the nails of one hand on the table while the rest pressed frustratedly into Major Nell from behind. The younger woman did not flinch; of course she didn’t. That was what Sabik loved about her, she assured herself.

 

“I have been patient for seven months. Another three before that. Another five before that. You’ve put real blood on my lips again and ask for patience? How much time has this project already stolen from us? How much more must I allow it to take? Let me finish this foolish game and stay by your side. Let me be your knight again, my love.” 

 

She paused, noticing how tightly her hands had gripped Major Nell’s biceps—remembering how that old fire had eventually swirled into this woman before her. Mercurial, unflappable, never intimidated, but somehow always exactly what Sabik needed. An existence of absence that she couldn’t help but be drawn back to day after day, like the gravity of a dying star. No one else was so fearless in the face of Sabik. Not even that last fool of Thespis, before she had driven the Odalisque’s sword through the chest of his cage.

 

Sabik felt that gravity, that void, pull her in all over again as she remembered the words spoken on that day. The day she had decided to slay her Emperor.

 

“Let me be your executioner…”

 

Major Nell was breathing heavily as Sabik squeezed her close. She slipped her hand inside the General’s coat, feeling the fine contours of her ribs and breast with no concern for their audience. With her other hand, she pulled Sabik down by a ceremonial chain at her neck, leashing her into a kiss—the kiss that had, all those years ago, sealed the fate of Thespis and established A-COM as a legitimate power in the galaxy. 

 

After all, who would question the Compact’s loyalty to the rebellion with the Kingkiller herself now counted among their ranks…?

 

“Yes, darling. You’ve waited long enough,” Major Nell exhaled excitedly, pressing herself free from the General’s waist. “I think it’s time we showed the General where the rest of your investment has gone, Mx. Value.”

 

“Yes,” the ambulate agreed. “I’d very much like to see the outcome of the General’s wager.”

 

Sabik noticed Nell wasn’t looking at her or Maximal. Instead, the woman’s face was directed to the white bag, still dangling in the heat from its odd container.

 

“Cassara,” Sabik finally interjected. They had flitted around the topic long enough. “What is that thing?”

 

Major Nell ignored her lover, instead cocking her head at the vacuum sealed package, turning curiously to inspect it like one might check the contents of an anthill. Yet her gloved fingers ran delicately along its outer edges, almost affectionately, until, finally, she picked up something Sabik hadn’t noticed before: a thin, hollow tube trailing from the center of the latex envelope to the ground.

 

“Cassara! I asked you a question.”

 

The Major stopped with the parcel, leaning her ear close to the dangling, dragging end of the hollow tube. She clearly heard… something. The General strained, too, and could just about make it out for herself.

 

A rhythmic rattle of air.

 

“Major! Answer me. That’s an order!”

 

Major Nell took the white tube in her palm, considered it… then pressed her thumb to seal the hole at its end.

 

Nothing happened, at first. The pulse of air simply stopped dead as the woman held her hand tight, not even bothering to watch the sealed container. Then the bag attached to the tripod rack jerked. Convulsed. Swung side to side with desperate, almost furious need.

 

Maximal moved to loom over Cassara, watching with enraptured interest. The aide flinched in Sabik’s grip at the surprise writhing.

 

The sickly motion drew forth a memory in Sabik—from her youth in Thespis, when the rebellion had felt so distant. Her father, then a moderately wealthy duke, had just scruffed a wild cat on a walk with his daughter through their manor grounds. He had placed it in a sack for tidy disposal… Only the animal’s lack of understanding and reflexive, all-encompassing fear drove it to twist and bite and claw at thin air—even its own body, as there was nothing else in convenient reach to attack.

 

It needed to affect something. Anything. Perhaps even more than it felt the need to escape. The General had taken a lesson away from this: all that lives craves to die fighting. One needs to feel like there is a chance, however remote, that they will be given the opportunity to face their murderer. More so, even, than one cares about living at all.

 

The rounded rack finally grew heavy with momentum, tipping over sideways with enough weight to bend one of the tripod’s legs in half, sending the sack against the ground with a thud. Cassara took a more measured step back from the scene, slotting into Maximal neatly behind her, while still tightly clutching the breathing tube winding its way to the coiled shape in the bag. She only finally released it when five sharp shapes pressed against the latex, ripping it open from the inside and erupting in a trio of silver, metal claws. There was the sound of air straining to enter the freshly torn sack, as its vacuum seal broke, but it became clear that the strangled gasping from within had another source.

 

The claws pushed ever outward, heralding a prosthetic arm of aesthetic, clean angles. An organic hand was soon to follow, joining its twin in tearing the bag open wide enough for the rest of the woman inside to emerge—unfurling her body from a fetal position to crawl upon her belly instead. Her dark, curled hair was drenched in sweat and drool down to bare shoulders just barely contained by a tank top. The mess dragged along the ground with her, lubricating her trek towards Cassara. Her flesh fingers reached the other woman’s boot just in time for the Major to bend, cupping the other woman’s chin and gently lifting her bedraggled face to greet her own, eyeless smile.

 

A watching soldier leaned down to rip the woman up by force, yanking a tangle of hair as a handle. They pulled her up and away from Cassara, muttering an apology for letting her get so close to the Major. 

 

The soldier didn’t finish his second word as the claws of the newcomer’s prosthetic arm snapped up and over her shoulder, sinking insistently between the tendons of his throat. His body froze as blood attempted to erupt around her fingers, until she threw him forward toward the watching crowd.

 

Blood ran down the wiry forest of pistons and cables that made up most of her synthetic arm, before it splattered into and over the grass, pecking it with red. The soldier’s horrified face—just barely visible inside his mask, staring aghast, directly upwards, into the sun and his killer both—was pale with death his body had yet to acknowledge. The stranger interrupted the look with a crunching blow to the nose from her organic arm, extruding viscera in slow geysers around her claws, still stuck in the wounds beneath. She looked down on her quarry with fragile indifference, obviously eager to hurt the dying man further. Her breath was heavy, not with exertion, but satisfaction, yet her focus remained diffuse. She was ready and waiting for anyone else who might attempt to touch her.

 

Maximal Value smiled, absently holding Major Nell’s shoulders as their many eyes fixed on the gore-drenched display. General Sabik reached for the sidearm at her hip, snapping up the imperial weapon with purpose for the first time in a decade before pointing it at the bizarre captive. 

 

“Now this,” Maximal breathed, “is what I paid for!”

 

“Behave,” Cassara soothed Sabik, tone gravid with familiar affection. Her glove brushed aside the General’s pistol as gently as her words, urging the barrel down harmlessly towards the corpse and away from its destroyer. “That’s enough of your tantrum, Shalquoir. I mean, really! What would your wife think?”

 

This loose cat, this Shalquoir, went wide-eyed at the words. Her jaw dropped with ease while her flesh arm fell to one side. The prosthetic remained fast in the dead guard, but bent at the elbow as it failed to fall free. Shalquoir’s head rolled back on its neck, positioning her face just so to gawp directly into Cassara’s curled lips and invisible eyes.

 

“My… wife?” she asked. Her voice had turned to smoke on porcelain: rough and fragile at the same time. The focused fight in her words drained away in a long, slow breath that ended in a line of drool down the center of her chin. “She’s here?”

 

“That’s right,” Nell said. “And she’s just dying to see you, as I’m sure you are, too.”

 

Sabik grimaced at the obscenity before her. “What the hell is this thing?”

 

“Your next opponent,” Maximal explained. “Shalquoir Sinique.”

 

The name itched at Sabik’s mind. She kept her closed fist low, but did not holster her weapon before tearing her gaze away from the drooling, bloody heap of a woman.

 

“You know this woman, Cassara.” It was not a question, and her voice bubbled with heat of its own as she noticed Maximal’s hands still on the Major. Her free arm shot out smoothly to take Cassara by the elbow and drag her from the ambulate, cloaking her anger in determination for answers. “You knew Maximal had her in that fucking sack. What in all the hells is this?”

 

“She’s your surprise, my love,” Major Nell elucidated. “You could say she’s of a kind with Zalmoxis. They were salvaged at the same time and are now indelibly tied together. Hold still, Shalquoir.”

 

Shalquoir was still—as if she hadn’t been already. The reason for the command became clear, however, as Maximal took a long step towards the woman, sending her eyes wide with blended fury and dread. The ambulate slid both hands beneath Shalquoir’s jaw before tipping her head forcibly forward to reveal her back.

 

“Stars above,” Sabik murmured. Her stomach fought her throat for position as her cheeks drained of blood. “How is she even still alive?”

 

Sabik hadn’t gotten a good look at Shalquoir in the disgusting moments after her arrival, but she saw her clearly now. The woman’s arm was far from her only prosthetic: the entire left side of her back was void of flesh, instead filled with more of the misshapen tubing, pistons, and sharp geometry that made up her claw. 

 

The gap between metal and flesh was wide enough to make her chest almost appear hollow from behind, if it weren’t for the synthetic stuffing inside her. It was clear that her changes ran down her spine and into her brain, as well. All of which circled up to a small, metal hole bored into the back of her skull.

 

“Shalquoir caught the eye of the very best doctor in the Compact,” said Major Nell. “But the core of her surgery is actually much older. The Empire called it ‘nerve stapling,’ though the practice was never perfected or put into practical use before the end of the war.”

 

“I can’t remember her name,” Shalquoir moaned to her chest. Her voice was low and quiet, but… not entirely as timid as her expression had indicated, Sabik thought. The General could see muscles quaking beneath the shackles of her nervous system. Whoever this Shalquoir was, she wasn’t entirely cowed. “I can’t… remember. What did you do to me? Where are we?”

 

“You’re right where you belong, Shalquoir," the Major soothed, bending down before Sabik with her knees together to speak closer to the poor creature. “And I have you. We just need to make sure you weren’t damaged. You need to look your best for your wife.”

The words hit the damaged woman like a drug. Her previously shivering arms shuddered with something else now: directionless bliss. “I… do. Yes,” Shalquoir slurred. “Need to look my best… for my wife. Who… is that again…?”

 

Major Nell ran her fingers over the augmentations that Maximal had revealed, checking them tenderly for signs of wear. When she was apparently satisfied, she brushed Shalquoir’s hair back in place, covering some of the hole into her chest cavity, and encouraged her to sit up straight with an embrace. Shalquoir stared dimly forward over the Major’s shoulder, catching Sabik’s eye but showing less than a cinder of interest in the larger woman’s presence.

 

Sabik bared her bottom teeth. Cassara clearly had to put on a practiced face for Value, but this was getting ridiculous… The tenderness of her behavior towards this girl, the familiarity, was nothing like the coldness she knew. It was fond. Familial. Possessive. 

 

“So this is your grand finale,” Sabik said. “A mentally gelded urchin with a few bits of ferroplastic bolted to her body. Forgive my disappointment.”

 

“The finale, dear General?” Maximal pressed. “I dare say Shalquoir is the main event! The cage is just another weapon. She, on the other hand, is the future. At least as the Board sees it.”

 

“Total, unwavering obedience,” Major Nell added excitedly. “It’s an art, not a science. The Empire never truly understood that... Shalquoir’s staple is unique in that it doesn’t eliminate the mind’s independence, but arrests it. Hormones, electrical impulses, thought patterns: all locked in place to the exact moment of her branding.

 

“Which means she needed to be sculpted absolutely perfectly, by a true artist, before she could be shackled. Conditioned into obedience while prodded into rage—rage we can direct.”

 

Maximal took a turn: “ A perpetual cocktail of passions perfect for a pilot.”

 

“Though the level of sensation does require regular resets,” explained the Major, toeing a shred of the latex sack that had contained Shalquoir. “This will be Shalquoir’s seventy-ninth ‘rebirth’ since her inception. I’d prefer an even hundred before field testing, but the deprivation seems to have sufficiently dulled her memories of her life before.”

 

“The human spirit, sanded down to fit whatever shape you need,” Sabik summarized. She was dizzy. Her heart was like a hammer in her chest. “You’ve taken something proud—something human—and poured it into a bottle to be sold!”

 

“Precisely! The rest of her augmentations are tailored to interface with Zalmoxis directly,” Nell added proudly. “It’s what allows her to bring out the machine’s full potential, unlike the kindling you’ve faced today. I think you’ll be sufficiently impressed, my love.”

 

Sabik took Major Nell by the chin, dragging her attention away from Shalquoir and back to herself.

 

“You knew about this... No. You oversaw the entire thing!”

 

“Of course,” the Major crowed, slightly confused but showing no less pride for Sabik’s sudden outburst. She had the temerity to chortle slightly as she spoke, though she drew a loving hand along Sabik’s cheek when she added: “Only something this enticing could possibly keep me from you for so long, my knight. I could not return without something worthy of my executioner.”

 

“Enticing? This is abominable!”

 

Major Nell cocked her head curiously. Maximal just laughed.

 

“That’s exactly what I said when the Board first brought the concept forward,” Maximal mused. “Thespis certainly lacked subtlety, but never ingenuity.”

 

“I thought you would be thrilled, my love,” Nell continued, voice now subdued with uncertainty. “This is exactly the sort of challenge you’ve been waiting for—begging for! General Prall Sabik is a generational talent.” She clasped her hands over the General’s with a plea for understanding. “No one has been a match for you since the rebellion. No one may ever be so again in your lifetime. Instead of waiting, we simply… crafted your equal.”

 

“My equal?! Do you really think so little of me?” Sabik whirled on Cassara. Her downcast eyes indicated exactly the sort of judgment she was already formulating. “This… broken doll should be put out of its misery and forgotten. I can barely stomach looking at her, much less condone your actions—no matter our entanglements, my sweet songbird.”

 

“Then this is your chance, Prall,” the Major pleaded. She looked even more excited than before. “Disprove the Board’s entire thesis right here and now. Show them the woman is more powerful than the machine! Bring back my beloved executioner for just one more battle.”

 

The General gritted her teeth. It took all her strength to bite back her sense of betrayal. She wanted to slap Cassara back to her senses. She wanted to vomit as badly as her last opponent. 

 

And yet… she couldn’t. Not when her songbird looked at her like that.

 

“Fine.”

 

“So you’ll still fight,” Major Nell stood a bit straighter as she purred at Sabik. “You’ll take the field and test yourself against Shalquoir and Zalmoxis together?”

 

“Zalmoxis,” Shalquoir perked up, eyes wider, but still unfocused. “That… name. I can’t… I…”

 

“Yes, dear.” Major Nell slipped gently free from Sabik to pet Shalquoir’s damp locks into something presentable. “We’ll get you two reunited in just a moment.”

 

“Let’s just get this over with,” the General insisted, sweeping herself around sharply enough that her coat billowed behind her. Thunder rolled in answer as the clouds threatening their camp’s position drew closer. She turned her head to Maximal. “You should come for a closer look, Mx. Value. You’ll enjoy a better view if you’re nearer to the action. I won’t be able to guarantee your safety, of course, but you do so enjoy gambling, don’t you?”

 

Two of Maximal’s secretaries approached as they crossed their legs. One placed a parasol over the ambulate in preparation for the encroaching rain. They were clearly staying put.

 

“And miss this rare opportunity to see the great General Sabik beneath me? You really don’t know me at all, do you, my dear.”

 

Sabik couldn’t contain it any longer. Her arm was a coiled spring looking to break. Her fist smashed painfully into Maximal’s face—drawing more of her own blood from her knuckles than whatever flowed under the ambulate’s ‘skin.’ At least the impact was enough to send their cigarette tumbling to the earth. Sabik was also quite pleased to see Maximal’s fucking smile, if not broken, at least deformed with surprise. The blow had been enough to turn their face away, but the General could still see one set of their eyes blink as they processed the moment.

 

Without turning back to Sabik, Maximal began to sneer. “I’ve just decided on your stake in our bet, General. If you lose, you endorse the program. Zalmoxis. Shalquoir. The procedure. All of it.”

 

Sabik clenched blood from her wounded fist, but didn’t bother waiting for Maximal’s next quip. “With me, Cassara,” she commanded the Major. “Let’s return to your abomination and end this.”

 

“That won’t be necessary,” Cassara said. “She’s already here.”

 

At first, the General thought Shalquoir had gone berserk again. She saw red splash itself across the Major’s face and thought, like in a nightmare, that some horrible, impossible reality had just come to pass and the love of her life had been slain before her. But it wasn’t blood… No. Too uniform. Like she had been bathed in it from the tips of her boots to the top of her hair. It was on Sabik, too, she saw as she held up her hands to inspect the sudden deluge of crimson.

 

It was light. Red, angry, insistent light. Sabik spun around, arm instinctively returning to her sidearm far less confidently than before.

 

Zalmoxis was there—its gaping ribcage of a red cockpit so much more like a gaping, hungry mouth of some luminescent undersea creature up this close. It was coming for her, moving towards her, waiting to scoop and swallow her whole in that infernal cradle of red and mechanical ribs. It would have been crawling on all fours, if it had only four limbs. One such claw was pressed into the back of the Odalisque’s head for purchase, pushing it away like a forgotten toy into the growing mud as the first drops of rain and the hellish cage bore down.

 

Had it always been like this? Surely not. It had been an impressive machine, yes. Thoroughly modern. Strange. But not like this. Something was different. How had it moved? Was it moving? Not quite, Sabik realized. It was sitting perfectly still. But then why did it feel like it was getting closer? Why did it look so hungry? When had it appeared behind her? How had she not fucking heard it?

 

Sabik couldn’t help but stifle a manic laugh. She had wanted to climb into this thing willingly. Now she wanted nothing more than to take Cassara and run far, far away—not just from the creature, but from the tainted soil it irradiated with that horrible red light, as well. Let Maximal have it. Let the Board find out what horror they had unleashed.

 

“There she is,” Major Nell cooed. “Don’t you remember, Shalquoir? It’s your wife. Zalmoxis.”

 

Sabik didn’t want to take her eyes off the horrible red void. She was afraid the damn thing would move again if she did. Yet she couldn’t help herself but look to the face of her lover, now standing with her hand on Shalquoir’s shoulder of flesh. The pilot was crawling on hand and knee—not quite on all fours, either, as her mechanical right arm stretched painfully straight towards that red wound.

 

No… That wasn’t quite right. It was pulled toward the cage, like a complementary magnet—like it felt a gravity that affected only Shalquoir’s prosthetics.

 

“Yes,” Shalquoir moaned. “God, yes. Please. It’s so loud. Everything is so loud. She needs me! Let me go to her! I’m… supposed to be with her.”

 

“That’s right, my dear,” Maximal intoned, pointing to the grasping, twitching claw of Shalquoir’s right arm with the tip of their cigarette. They had been surprisingly quiet after Zalmoxis, or whatever it had become, arrived at their little camp. But they spoke now, the sickly emerald of their eyes cutting through the miasma of mist and red as brightly as ever, their pale face and horns soaked with the color of blood. “Just follow your wedding ring.”

 

Shalquoir made it, eventually, pulling away from Major Nell and dragging herself up into the gash of the cockpit. Sabik wondered if the pilot might protest, or try to escape without the Major to stand sentinel. Instead, Shalquoir greeted the thing with open arms, pulling herself up and into the nearly horizontal cockpit under her own power.

 

 

The woman strapped herself into her seat so as not to fall. That wasn’t enough, however. Sabik dimly realized, as she gawked up at her competition, that she understood the purpose of the bag that had stored the pilot. Shalquoir hugged her knees tightly in the pilot’s seat, making herself as small as possible while the bulkhead walls of the cockpit slowly closed to swallow her. She was safe again, at last, inside her spouse.

 

In return, Zalmoxis revealed something Sabik had not seen amongst any of the other test pilots. It unfurled a stinger: a huge, pointed proboscis on telescoping curves. It stretched and explored behind Shalquoir’s seat, rearing up like a venomous serpent just behind her neck… and struck. The expression of pure ecstasy on the pilot’s face was already slick with drool and sweat and rain. Now she went into spasms. Her hands went nowhere near the manual controls the rest of the natural pilots had used. They simply went limp, dangling loose as Shalquoir hung from the horizontal hole like a marionette. Zalmoxis reared on its hind legs in an ecstasy of its own.

 

The last thing Sabik saw before its cockpit closed was Shalquoir’s eyes, finally focused on the General herself with something other than disinterest or catatonia. Something unfamiliar to Sabik, but instantly recognizable here and now, in this place.

 

Pity.

 

And just as quickly as it had appeared, the machine was gone. Oh, Zalmoxis was still there, of course—waiting and ready for its final duel of the day. Whatever it had been in that terrible moment, however, ceased to be. It was just a machine. A combat cage. General Sabik had felled hundreds in her lifetime and defeated many times that in duels, both lethal and for sport.

 

The engineering crews hurried over to the Odalisque as if nothing had happened, still averting their eyes from the Kingkiller and the mist that was quickly turning to a proper deluge. Had they not seen what Sabik had seen? Had no one at all?

 

“Are you ready, darling?” Major Nell asked, slipping a familiar hand around Sabik’s waist. “I know it’s been a long day, but this will be your final test.”

 

The absurdity of the moment was already beginning to fade. The feeling of Cassara, with her same smile and her warm fingers, should have grounded her. It should have brought reality crashing back down, insisting to her that everything had been in her head, and that the universe was arranged in exactly the way she understood it.

 

Sabik felt cold sweat press into the fabric of her uniform. Perhaps it was the rain.

 

She crossed one arm over her chest, interlocking her fingers between the Major’s at her waist. She turned to look at the woman who had brought her to this point and smiled.

 

“You know I love a challenge.”

 

The Odalisque, too, accepted Sabik as it always did—embracing the General in well-worn cushions and familiar controls. If the old girl was intimidated by Zalmoxis, she wasn’t showing it.

 

“Of course not,” Sabik muttered. “Cages don’t think. They don’t breathe and they certainly don’t eat people!”

 

Then why did it look so hungry? asked a voice in her head. She ignored it.

 

Sabik settled into the contours of the cockpit, dripping now with rain, and the rise in her adrenaline that followed. The Major stood by her side as the General climbed aboard. As Sabik grew situated, the Major snapped her fingers to order a group of engineers to divert Zalmoxis slightly further down the hill. They kept their distance, of course. They had seen what happened to the guard.

 

The General took up her blade, igniting the monofilament gossamer with a pillar of steam as it shook loose the rain around it. Major Nell was standing nearby, watching with rapt attention. Maximal still lazed in their chair, having somehow acquired a pair of opera glasses that they held pinched between two claws. They raised the lenses to one set of eyes as they watched the two cages take their positions.

 

Zalmoxis seemed… calmer. Even more so than it had during the day’s early fights. That was almost more unsettling; it no longer gave off the random, gnashing movement of a barely-contained animal. It was as if it had been leashed already from the inside. Just not by Sabik.

 

Their battle began without warning. There was no signal—no flag waved by Cassara or Maximal to begin the duel. Neither cage even made the definitive first move. They were simply at each other, blade clashing on claw, sharp-heeled feet biting into stone.

 

“Shalquoir Sinique,” Sabik muttered, leaving her radio on for the opposing pilot to hear. “That name… It sounds familiar. Have we fought before, girl?”

 

There was no answer from Zalmoxis but the measured twitch of tendril behind its arched back that could have been construed as a tail. Otherwise, it only watched carefully from under its blank, half-circle of a visor.

 

It was Maximal who chimed in first: “Highly doubtful, General. Mrs. Sinique is neither a soldier nor a duelist of any particular provenance. This will only be her second duel. In point of fact, she lost her last bout quite handily.”

 

The duo continued to slash and deflect this way, to parry and riposte, as they tested each other’s range and speed. Sabik was certain the thing was… longer than before. Its speed had increased tenfold compared to when it was operated by the test pilots, giving the illusion of additional reach. At least she hoped it was an illusion.

 

“Yet that demon bows to her like a kitten,” Sabik replied. “Do you really expect me to believe she’s not special?”

“Shalquoir is quite special,” Major Nell added. “Maxie was simply the first to see her… true value.”

 

Sabik gritted her teeth. The Odalisque slid one foot in a wide arc over the ground, gaining purchase to duck quickly beneath Zalmoxis’ upper mass. Sabik used the low position to bring the hilt over her blade up at an angle, into the beast’s chest, to knock it off balance. Then snapped its sharp side upwards into its torso. No sense avoiding damage to the pilot: this would not be a fight won with blunted blows.

 

Unfortunately, Shalquoir was fast—certainly faster than her predecessors in the bulky cage—and Zalmoxis had appendages to spare. Rather than turn a shoulder to take the blow someplace well-armored, Zalmoxis simply caught the sword outright. Its palm sizzled on the monofilament, as it had before earlier that day, when it had been on the offensive, but this time it turned the momentum against Sabik. It pulled the Odalisque up perpendicular to its side, exposing the pink length of Sabik’s cage to its jaws.

 

Then it bit down.

 

Sabik brought her machine’s leg against the smiling monster’s neck and pushed off hard. The Odalisque was light; the motion launched her off her six-legged counterpart with ease. Unfortunately, Zalmoxis’ jaws held fast, tearing a drooping line of mechanical gore between the two cages like a string of saliva. It dripped with hydraulic fluid, loose tubing, and glistening servos across the distance.

 

“Fuck!” Sabik cursed as red warning lights flared across her cockpit. Warning klaxons chastised her mistake nearly as loudly as the pounding in her head. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” 

 

From her position, she could see Zalmoxis drop its own casualty: the hand it had used to halt her attack. It fell, cauterized at the edges in liquid alloy, to sizzle in the mud. This one did not grow back. Sabik had not braced for an enemy so willing to sacrifice an entire limb this early in their melee. She should have known better. The beast was a swirling mass of grasping ends.

 

Speaking of which, it hadn’t ceased savoring the intestines of the Odalisque. It gnawed, caustic cutting saliva blistering the wires and cabling around its mouth, but did not sever, keeping their connection frustratingly intact. Shalquoir was suddenly free to begin belting Sabik with an eruption of ferrofluid whips that sprouted from between the pyramidal plates on her cage’s back. Sabik, by contrast, was well out of range to use her sword, and attempting to close the distance would be like walking into several blenders at once.

 

“It’s a fascinating design,” Maximal said. “The neural binding allows Shalquoir to calculate an incredible number of angles of attack at once, with a fraction of the delay manual controls provide.”

 

Sabik was on the defensive now. Her blade was useless as a weapon, but could shield her as long as her reaction speed kept up with Shalquoir’s decidedly unfair advantage. Several gauges on the burning HUD of her control console warned her she was running out of time. Several very important substances were draining out of the Odalisque every second they fought. Auto-sealing repair foam could only do so much while the wound was continuously wedged open by her own internals spilled into the air.

 

“So I’m told, anyway,” Maximal continued. “You might find this ironic, General, but machines never were my strong suit. People, on the other hand… Unique people, interesting people, like our dear Mrs. Sinique, are so much fun!”

 

“I’m sorry,” came another voice. Shalquoir, speaking at last. “I’m so sorry. I fucked up. I fucked up. I fucked up and now I’ve got to protect her. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ve got to protect her!”

 

“Oh, shut up,” Sabik grunted as another bladed whip snuck past her defenses. This one carved a line out of her Odalisque’s head, slicing clean through its blindfold to let the halo of fabric fall and flutter loose. “Asking about your name must have given you the wrong impression. I’ve killed so very many people. Perhaps you just reminded me of one of them. I really don’t care whatever it is you’re bawling about.”

 

Sabik carefully dodged a tendril, finding an opportunity to chop it cleanly free. If she had infinite time, she could reduce the prehensile ferrofluid to nothing this way, slowly pruning the horrible thing to pieces. She did not have infinite time.

 

“But her story is so incredibly tragic,” Maximal pressed. “Not a soldier, no, but a fighter nonetheless. A gangster, once. A pirate. Now a wife! Until she bit off more than she could chew. That’s a bit of a running theme with our Mrs. Sinique.”

 

“Would you shut up? If I don't know her, then I don't give a shit about her."

 

“I’m sorry,” Shalquoir repeated. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

 

“Then save me the trouble,” Sabik replied. “Die.”

 

A swipe of Sabik’s controls sent the Odalisque into a twirl with both hands on the hilt of their sword. General Sabik let the blade fly free towards her opponent and saw exactly what she was hoping for: a parry. Zalmoxis swatted at the rectangular weapon into the mud with ease.

 

“That won’t work, my dear,” Maximal chided. “Zalmoxis is a living redundancy. Shalquoir is the only truly irreplaceable component.”

 

“They’re right, my love,” Cassara added. “You need to focus on her vital points.”

 

“I know,” Sabik hissed. It was a deep sound: hard and from the gut. As warm as her father’s estate had been in winter. As cold as the capital had been on that final day. She tensed and filled her screaming cockpit with that long, lost gasp of home. “Don’t tell me how to strike for the heart.”

 

Self-repair systems or not, the sword was still damn sharp. Its inner “blade”—an electrically excited violin string of molecules vibrated to an impossible edge—hit the monster’s paw dead through the center, splitting it down the middle like a wishbone and dropping it limply against its side.

 

That wouldn’t stop it for long, but of course Sabik knew that. Yet she was now free to make use of her newly fitted rifle—sweeping the creature with a horizontal shower of bullets, each a superheated tombstone in search of a plot. The Odalisque’s feet slid to a stop and the tubing went taut. Metal howled as it sheared under the hail of rounds, yet Zalmoxis whipped away even more with a flick of its tendrils, only shedding a few globules of gray for the trouble.

 

“We are not done,” Sabik growled. “You are prey. I. Am. Prall. Fucking. Sabik!”

 

The General kept up her fire as she circled Zalmoxis, dragging her own cage’s guts around it like a maypole. The strange machine was tripped and fell forward in the assault. Thus, it didn’t feel the leash closing around it—not until Sabik was already at its rear.

 

Zalmoxis’ sense organs were versatile enough to see even from behind, however. It kicked with its hind legs in shocking precision. Sabik dodged one, then another, but couldn’t avoid the sudden stab of tendrils, sharpened to pikes, that shot through the shoulder of her machine. One was low enough to pierce through the upper right of her cockpit. The General was grateful: the spike silenced some of the alarms and blazing warning lights that had been irritating her since that first bite. Shalquoir lifted the Odalisque forward, attempting to fling Sabik over its shoulders into view of its face and jaws. Not unlike she had done to the soldier on the hill, the General realized.

 

That was a mistake. The pilot should have simply hardened the rest of her tentacles and dropped Sabik on top of the spikes, letting gravity do the work for her. Suspended like this, the Odalisque’s foot was now close enough to her sword, still harmlessly leaned up against Zalmoxis’ side, to stomp down on its blunt tip. The sudden leverage sent the hilt of the sword in a seesaw arc up to Sabik’s hand.

 

She caught it. She swung. Tentacles fell into limp liquid where she carved through them, her Odalisque suddenly free and standing directly on top of the mass of ferrofluid, riding it like a wave.

 

“Oh, General!” Maximal crowed. “This is a performance worth betting on! Give me the woman I remember! Give me the real you!”

 

Sabik commanded the Odalisque to enter a dancer’s pose. The sharp toes and heels of its feet closed together unnaturally, sharpening them into bladed points, and together the two of them leapt. When they fell back down, the Odalisque’s legs were spread wide, straddling and stabbing into Zalmoxis to maintain balance. Her cage’s thin body arched forward along her opponent’s length, as a cat might stretch its back, but with both hands on the back of her sword. She pushed the monofilament down. Hard. It was as though a guillotine blade had just fallen against Zalmoxis’ shoulders. Sabik was rewarded with the sound of Shalquoir screaming over the radio. She allowed herself a smile.

 

Feet still stabbing through the ferrofluid sludge and into the meat beneath, Sabik was eventually rebuked with electric light arcing off the beast’s back. All that fluid had to come from somewhere—a delicate, hidden mechanism likely dependent on the tendrils themselves for protection. Sabik battled her own convulsions inside her cockpit. Whatever insulation she had before, it couldn’t protect her with a ten-centimeter hole directly into her cockpit, lubricated in gray, liquid metal. Yet Zalmoxis fared far worse: its tentacles seized once, then died in long splashes along the ground.

 

“Oh, darling!” Major Nell shouted from the radio. “Just like that! Give it all you have! Give me everything!”

 

Zalmoxis bent its long neck bent backward to snap, but Sabik spared one of the Odalisque’s feet to stomp forward and down on its scalp, crushing the creature’s chin back into the ground with an eruption of mud. It finally released her cage’s tubing and wires in its flailing, dropping them beneath its jaw—perfectly positioned for Sabik to release her sword and yank the intestines tight around her opponent’s throat. She clutched the binding tight, stuffing a bit of it back into the bleeding hydraulics of her Odalisque. Sabik would swear it actually choked, though it was more likely the grinding sound of its own artificial teeth being forced through its metal skull. It fought hard to bend its many other armored limbs at angles they weren’t designed to move. That was fine. Let Shalquoir squirm. Sabik took her time reloading her rifle instead.

 

Then she shoved it down the monster’s throat… and fired.

 

Not a single round missed this time. Each and every one ripped through its body. Some ricocheted back out again in horrible vomit. The friction alone was enough to start secondary fires inside Zalmoxis’ mouth and gullet and torso and who-fucking-cared what else. 

 

Zalmoxis actually did manage to snap several of its arms, then, bending them back and losing all fine motor control in the process. Even then, they had enough blind strength still to scrabble and punch. The mindless blows shattered the Odalisque’s legs, crumpling the cage to its knees on its opponent’s back. Sabik’s own arms felt ready to burst under her skin as she fought the controls to stay balanced without the use of lower limbs. Her body rattled and smashed against the wavering innards of her cockpit and she cried out in utter, total fixation on violence.

 

When the rifle ran dry, Sabik ripped it free with both hands. Zalmoxis breathed fire as the plug on its inferno was suddenly unstuck. Sabik diverted the embers by swinging the rifle like a club, cracking the animal across its shattered head once. Then twice. Three times… Her groan became a scream. A war cry. A rage deeper than physical expression. The red light of her cockpit, a pale imitation of the crimson that had clouded her world before, was complemented now with a deeper, more chemical shade. Her mind closed out understanding of all other color or form or shape or thought as the butt of the rifle broke teeth and cracked jaw, using the heated barrel to stab and spear and puncture.

 

The gun broke before Zalmoxis did, of course, but the beating was only a distraction. The deep damage was done. Zalmoxis, or Shalquoir, or just as likely both, only needed to be held still long enough to realize it. The monster collapsed onto its chest.

 

Sabik collapsed, too. As did the Odalisque, sending the General bouncing back up, hard, as quickly as she fell. The tumbling sent her head thumping backward into an unfamiliar mass behind her head. At some point, Zalmoxis had apparently dented her hull deep enough to nearly crush her head. She hadn’t even noticed, though she felt it now. Safety harness or not, she rattled around the inside of her own cage like a coin in a jar… When the Odalisque finally halted its descent, her heaving breaths shot blood and saliva against her field of switches and displays—several of which pushed shattered glass and sparked against her repose.

 

“We are… not done,” Sabik croaked, forcing herself up from the dim panels of her cockpit. Her body ached, but no battle had ever forced her heart to beat so quickly. Only Cassara—the way she had touched Sabik that first night in the capital, kissed her into silence, bent her low, made her feel like a precious treasure to be hoarded and wanted, rather than a statue to be revered—had ever ignited such romance in her belly and pulsing between her legs. “Get back up. Get back up and hurt me properly, mutt. We’re not done!”

 

“Bravo,” Maximal cried in a crackling spurt of applause and static. “Bravo! Bravo! This is absolutely perfect! Just what I was hoping for from the start!”

 

“Shut up,” Sabik sputtered. She willed her hands to pull at the Odalisque’s controls. There was no response. The console was dark. Still, she added: “We’re not done. Stop acting like this is over! I’m not satisfied.”

 

“But I am, General,” Cassara soothed. Sabik was certain she heard the dull clapping of her gloved hands as well. “You’ve provided some absolutely excellent footage. Any more, however, and we might risk permanent damage.”

 

“Footage?” Sabik coughed up another lungful of stringy substance. The racking of her chest left her lightheaded. She couldn’t help but laugh. “I hope you caught the Odalisque’s good side. I’m very much afraid it’s too late to worry about lasting damage, though. The old girl isn’t getting up again after this one.”

 

“I’m sorry.” Shalquoir’s voice flickered into the conversation. “I’m so sorry.”

 

“Enough of that,” Sabik groaned. She collapsed back against her seat, bending her neck to avoid the massive dent Zalmoxis had left her as a souvenir. “You did well. Fancy toys are no match for experience, girl, but you have talent. I don’t care what they’ve done to you or what they said; you fight like a proper pilot.”

 

“I’m sorry they caught me,” Shalquoir pushed on. “I’m sorry, Rue. Please don’t come for me.”

 

“Rue? Who is—” Something shot through Sabik then. A phrase—the “branding” Cassara had mentioned before. Shalquoir’s personality was crystallized, frozen in the exact moment she had been taken. “You’re not apologizing to me, are you? You’re thinking of this Rue. Just who the fuck is she?”

 

Sabik paused. A thought occurred.

 

“She’s your wife, isn’t she? Your real one.”

 

“Please don’t come for me,” Shalquoir repeated. “I don’t want to hurt you, too!”

 

Zalmoxis responded for her. The beast shuddered to its feet—a mix of fresh and severed claws—with the Odalisque still on its back. Its own, long head still hung limply to the ground, drooling its anti-materiel acid and other liquids into a shimmering pool beneath it. The Odalisque slid gently off the side of the cage and landed on its back with a soft thump into the mud. That didn’t matter to General Sabik, of course. The sheer size of the bodies involved meant that she thumped and crashed against the inside of her cockpit all over again—the wind exploding painfully from her scratchy lungs.

 

“Don’t listen to her, Mrs. Sinique,” came Maximal’s voice. “Your wife is with you right now. You mustn’t let anyone hurt her ever again! Not like she hurt her. Now’s your chance! Prove you’re strong enough to make certain no one ever hurts Zalmoxis again!”

 

“Zal… mox… is…” Shalquoir recited. This was bereft of the usual begging, broken emotion from before. It started out artificial. Rehearsed. Yet it curled into iron as the words took root in her throat. “I won’t let you… hurt my wife… I’ll kill you first.”

 

“Good,” Maximal moaned. “Good! This is exactly the climax we need! Take it slow. Make it dramatic, darling!”

 

Sabik cleared her head long enough to play for her controls again, but it was no use. The Odalisque was dead, save for a few miscellaneous systems. Sabik had broken her on a gamble to defeat Zalmoxis… and come up short.

 

“Fuck you, Value!” she roared into her radio, fury and vengeance pushing through her bloodstained mouth. Then a dagger hit her heart, chilling her to the bone. If Maximal was speaking so plainly of murdering her, then why was the Major silent?

 

“Cassara! Are you there, Cassara?! Maximal, you scabrous bitch, if you so much as lay a fingernail on her I’ll tear those teeth through your anus!”

 

When there was no response from Cassara or Maximal, General Sabik kicked hard on the emergency release of her cage’s cockpit door. No response. She stomped hard with both feet. Nothing. Whatever damage Zalmoxis had done, it had crumpled the mechanism just as badly as the rest of her poor Odalisque.

 

But Shalquoir wouldn’t keep her trapped there for long.

 

An obsidian claw pushed its way through the existing hole in Sabik’s cockpit like rice paper. Another finger followed it. Then another. Then the cage tore downward, inviting rain to pour onto Sabik in a torrent.

 

Except it wasn’t rain—not just. It was Zalmoxis, its limp-necked face dangling just a meter above. Sabik couldn’t help but think it was intentionally looking down at her, inspecting the insect inside a torn can, rather than simply too damaged to do anything else. Its saliva and hydraulic fluids were dripping onto her body as surely as the downpour. It hissed and bubbled at her controls, atomizing them into slurry. The drops that fell on the General herself ate at her uniform, melted her medals, and bit through the belts of her safety harness.

 

The General didn’t waste time worrying about the creature. She unbuckled her straps wherever Zalmoxis hadn’t already annihilated them and prepared to leap free.

 

The question of whether or not Shalquoir could still see Sabik through her cage’s inoperable head unit was quickly answered as Zalmoxis swatted one of its uninjured hands—or perhaps one of the damaged ones, already self-repaired—down around Sabik, pinning her back to her seat. A cage within a cage.

 

One of her opponent’s fingers stayed itself. This one curled slowly forward, inching its way not around Sabik’s body, but towards her face… Slowly. It would be a horrible way to die, she realized, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

 

“Cassara!” she shouted. If her radio was no longer functioning, then she would make her voice carry. “Cassara! I love you, my songbird! I regret many things in my life, but never that! Never you! I love you! I love you, Cassara!”

 

Hot, hateful tears joined the symphony of fluid playing down her cheeks and chin. The claw continued. It hadn’t looked so large, at first, but Sabik knew that was only an illusion. Its tip was a fine, sharp point. That’s what would kill her, pushing through her gristle as easily as her many, meaningless victories across arenas and battles all throughout space. The rest of its mass would only serve to make a mess. 

 

She did not turn away. It wouldn’t have done any good. No one would ever know her final moments but her, and perhaps Shalquoir, but she was Prall fucking Sabik. She would leave this galaxy the way she had entered it. She opened her mouth as that clawed tip approached close enough to pierce flesh, buying herself another second of life as it slid into the void inside. She bit down.

 

Let’s see how you like it, she thought. I told you we weren’t done!

 

Her last thoughts then were of Cassara. She hoped she was alive—that Maximal had only detained her, rather than killed her, in their moment of petty betrayal. Cassara would have protested—would have fought back. She would have tried to stop this. Sabik hoped that, if Cassara was alive, Maximal wouldn’t punish her by showing her the body.

 

“That’s enough, Shalquoir,” said the Major. “We have what we need.”

 

The Odalisque’s communications had been damaged by the acid. The voice came in warbly and artificial. Yet it was unmistakably Cassara. She was alive. As was Sabik.

 

The claw itched at the back of the General’s throat, and she felt more than tasted the iron flavor of blood drizzling down her gullet. It had stopped just shy of cutting through her neck from the inside out. Her jaw burned with the exertion of biting down hard on metal, and her teeth sang with uncomfortable friction. Then, in a fraction of the time it had taken the thing to reach its destination, the claw retracted.

 

Sabik coughed blood, thick and unmistakable this time. She clutched at her throat with both hands and checked that she could still breathe.

 

“C-Cassara,” she rasped. “You’re… safe.”

 

“Retrieve the pilot, Shalquoir,” Major Nell continued.

 

“Cassara…?” Sabik’s world was a tornado. Just as soon as she found a place to set her footing, she fell through it like wind. “I don’t understand.”

 

A flash of red, then Shalquoir was atop the shorn front of her cockpit, arms and legs supporting her at the melted edges of armor in a spread eagle. Wet hair dangled down towards Sabik, but it was easy enough to see her face. It wore neither the haunted desperation she had carried into her “wife,” nor the blank and doll-like look she had on after Cassara had attempted to asphyxiate her. She looked stoic. Confident. More focused than she had been before. It was as if her time inside Zalmoxis had “recalibrated” her to some North Star. This, Sabik realized, was the real Shalquoir.

 

And she still looked upon her with pity.

 

“I’m sorry, General,” Shalquoir said. It wasn’t like before. This wasn’t the directionless mewling of a mind trapped in some past trauma. This time, Shalquoir meant it. “You don’t deserve this, either.”

 

“Fuck off,” Sabik choked. She was more confused than ever, but her blood was still alive with battle. “You don’t get to pity me. Not you! I won’t want it!”

 

“Not yet,” Shalquoir responded. “But we’re in this together now.”

 

The pilot seized Sabik with her prosthetic arm by the silver chain at her throat—the same chain Cassara had gripped just hours ago, still intact among the tatters of Sabik’s uniform—and hauled the General out of the cockpit. They fell together into the mud: Shalquoir on her feet and Sabik roughly on her back.

 

Looking up from her back, white flashing across her vision, Sabik saw Zalmoxis was moving on its own again. This time, however, its motions were stiff and mechanical, even if its objective most certainly was not.

 

The monster dug more of its claws into the Odelisque’s corpse, scooping out great heaps of alloy and composite and plastic. It shoveled each haul, one by one, down its ruined gizzard. It couldn’t chew—not with its jaw ruined so—but it swallowed piece after piece of Sabik’s trusted friend. As it did, the wounds along its back and arms and neck and jaw began to close. The self-repair system, in need of fuel, had found its meat. And it feasted.

 

There came a dim realization that Sabik was exhausted. She wasn’t sure she could stand even if she so desired, and Shalquoir stopped dragging her by the throat. The chain gave into fatigue first, however, so Shalquoir was forced to reach out and try to pull Sabik up from under her shoulder. 

 

Sabik would have none of it. She swatted and scratched and bit at the hand, attempting to get her bearings while half naked in the rain and muck. She managed to pull Shalquoir down with her for a moment. It was just long enough to confirm her theory; she couldn’t stand. The best she could manage was crawling on all fours and heaving. Looking up, she could see lights had been erected around the camp where Maximal and Cassara presumably still sat. Indeed, she could see five points of green light burning through the dark.

 

Cassara! She was alive. She had ordered Shalquoir to stop. Of course she had! But something wasn’t right… She had sounded so in control—almost amused. Without the radio, there was nothing to do but call and crawl to her. She tried the former, but her wounded throat could barely manage a gurgle when she tried to shout. Crawling it was, then.

 

She tried not to give voice to her fear.

 

Shalquoir saved her the trouble, both of dragging herself through the mud and worrying that Cassara might have betrayed her. The pilot stomped through the marsh quickly building around them and took Sabik again—this time by the hair. She yanked hard. Sabik fell forward, first on her chest and then, in her struggle to break free, slightly more comfortably on her back. She cursed and spit, smothering her thoughts in impotence and rage, as they ascended.

 

When Shalquoir dumped her in front of Maximal Value, however, her heart simply… crumbled.

 

Straddled upon the ambulate’s knee was Major Cassara Nell. Even in the rain, they were wet only around the lips and hips beneath Maximal’s parasol. Several aides stood behind the pair in gold rain slickers. Each held an umbrella of their own, which appeared to be encrusted with jewels around the top, as well as small handheld devices. Recording equipment. Somehow, this display was less gaudy than the lipstick stains smeared across the synthetic’s neck, collar, and everpresented smile. Cassara was already in the process of spreading the violet even further as the two clung to each other in a passionate kiss.

 

“No…” Sabik whispered. “No, no, no.”

 

Shalquoir released the General’s hair as soon as it became clear she was too shaky to move again. Sabik went back up on her hands and knees, transfixed by this impossible display. She felt nothing, she realized. Not even when Maximal’s hand slipped down the Major’s back, lifted her skirt, and squeezed. Not even when the Major slipped her hand into Maximal’s vest, popping a few buttons free to run along their modest breasts, and explored the same way she so often did with Sabik.

 

It was impossible. Maximal and Cassara. The two had known each other for years, of course. Even before Sabik and the Major had met during the rebellion. But there had never been any signs. Nothing at all that might indicate this. Had love blinded her so badly? It couldn’t be real. Sabik couldn’t bring herself to rage or to scream. She couldn’t, because it wasn’t real.

 

“No,” she repeated. Louder this time. “This is a trick. Everything about you is artificial, Maximal. What the fuck have you done with her, Maximal?! Where is the real Cassara?”

 

Cassara detached from Maximal then, arms still strung around the golden being’s neck. She smiled at Sabik. Whatever pity Shalquoir had lost, Cassara held it in that expression instead.

 

“My dear Prall,” she cooed. “I’m so glad you’re safe! We needed to make it look good for the cameras, you understand. Otherwise, I would have ordered Mrs. Sinique to pull out sooner. I knew firsthand that you could handle it, though.”

 

Maximal chuckled. They still clutched their tiny opera glasses between two fingers. They held them up to a new set of eyes and turned their attention directly to Sabik on the ground.

 

“Apologies for not waiting on your triumphant return before getting started,” they said. “You put up such an arousing fight that we just couldn’t contain ourselves.”

 

The Major spoke next with hardly a beat between them: “We were rooting for you the whole time, my love. Maxie was absolutely certain that you could beat them!”

 

“Maxie,” Sabik exhaled. “You called them that before. During the fight. You’ve never called them that. I should have known.”

 

“We were all, admittedly, a bit distracted,” Maximal continued. “Keeping up the appropriate phrasing gets difficult when I get excited. The girls took notes on my mistakes, but I’ll still review the footage of myself later. I’m always looking for feedback, by the way, in case you have any stage direction you’d like to share.”

 

“Kill yourselves,” Sabik suggested.

 

Shalquoir, who was standing at attention next to General Sabik, twitched her head just enough to look down at her. The pity was gone, or at least masked. She just looked sad.

 

“You don’t really mean that, Prall,” Cassara mocked. “Not after all the work I did to make you a star.”

 

General Sabik clutched the wet earth beneath her, feeling glass pierce her heart at last. Not from the betrayal, but at the overwhelming guilt of wishing harm upon her Cassara. It was followed by a wave of nausea. It made her sick to think that she still couldn’t help but care so deeply about this woman.

 

Maximal chimed in: “The Kingkiller herself—the greatest pilot the empire ever produced, forged in the fires of humanity’s deadliest conflict, undefeated, unbowed, and unbroken in her era—versus the greatest single-pilot weapon the Compact has ever produced for a new era.”

 

“I told you. You must adapt with the times, General,” Major Nell chided. “You just weren’t adapting fast enough. I needed something to bring out that old fire I bottled back when you were still a proper executioner.”

 

Sabik’s lungs froze. Her blood stopped. Shalquoir noticed. She shifted uncomfortably on her feet, seemingly confused by the reaction, but at the ready to intervene if the General did something sudden.

Sabik slowly raised her head back to look at Major Cassara Nell. The Major seemed to notice something, too. The harder Sabik stared—the wider her eyes grew—the greater Cassara’s smile became.

 

She tilted her head, pressing a finger to her temple as if in thought. 

 

“Whatever is the matter, my knight?” she asked. “Don’t you like to share?”

 

Her words, their cadence, their pace and tone—even the way her head had tilted and her finger touched her head—were all perfectly, exactly mirrored by Maximal Value several inches to her right. 

 

General Sabik ceased to exist. There was only pain left in her wake. Rage and betrayal boiled and popped into something less definable. Her husk sank backward into a kneel, clutching herself and shuddering with horror. It looked up into the clouds and saw the shards of the artificial sphere—a hollow fake, dreamed up by wealthy monsters who thought themselves the makers of a new paradise, before it was abandoned and shattered, breaking the lives of all the people who lived and labored under its gravity in the process.

 

“Please, no…” she said. “It’s too much. It’s too much. Please… Please… This isn’t happening.”

 

“The Kingkiller’s reputation served the Compact well once upon a time,” said Maximal and Cassara in tandem. The two spoke and gestured in perfect synchronicity. “But times change, my dear Prall.”

 

Maximal and Nell—no, just Maximal in their real body and the surrogate they had simultaneously puppeted for twenty, long years, perhaps longer—stood under their parasol. The two continued to move as perfect reflections of one another. They clasped their hands together. They hummed a tune only Maximal could hear. They began to dance in perfect harmony, more unnervingly, perfectly in tune than they could possibly accomplish as two beings.

 

The dancing duo continued, speaking one after another now. Maximal went first, of course. “Unfortunately, my many years in this galaxy have taught me something else: things don’t always change for the better.”

 

Cassara followed. “That includes you.”

 

“You’ve grown soft. Apathetic. You felt it yourself.”

“You asked to settle down. Start a family. Perhaps even leave the Compact. Retire for real.”

 

“What a waste… Why would I ever want one of my investments to be so boring?”

 

“The galaxy has a million tired, guilty soldiers. There is only one Kingkiller.”

 

Maximal dipped themself, letting their flesh body bend over backwards an uncomfortable distance to look face to face and upside down at General Sabik.

 

“And I want you,” Maximal tittered. “Just the way you are.”

 

The husk laughed. It choked. It cried. The whole affair was so stupid. It made perfect sense. It would have broken the husk’s heart, if it still had one. As it was, the husk of General Prall Sabik just reached into her coat. Though half-dissolved, it had retained enough fabric to hide her service weapon. She brought the pistol up slowly, peacefully. It was unclear where she even meant to point it. Maximal? The surrogate? Herself? Not even the husk knew.

 

Shalquoir didn’t let her make a choice. The pilot clamped her mechanical hand around the husk’s wrist. Painfully. It was enough to drag her back into reality. The maelstrom of General Prall Sabik crashed against her insides, refilling the vessel of her body with fury and disgust and vengeance and guilt.

 

“How long?” Sabik managed to croak. “Was any of it… Was any of it real?”

 

Maximal and Maximal paused. It was the real body’s turn to speak this time as the two twirled close to the General again. A new cigarette burned under her nose, but garnered no reaction. They removed it from their mouth as they spoke in the most serious tone Sabik had ever heard them use.

 

“It was always real to me, Prall.”

 

“I’ll kill you,” she replied, cold as blue flame. Her wrist felt as though it might break, but her face was absolutely neutral as she spoke through unbridled hate. “I’ll kill you in every way that matters!”

 

The dance ended with Maximal and “Cassara” falling into deep bows before all those assembled. Maximal’s secretaries applauded as best they could around their umbrellas. Then Cassara, slightly out of breath, fell back into Maximal’s lap as the two sat back down.

 

“Perfect! Just like that,” the duo intoned. “Shalquoir? Please welcome your latest wife into the marriage.”

 

General Sabik finally screamed as a hard, metal clamp was pushed into the back of her neck. Shalquoir stood behind her and held it in place as the device whined and, Sabik realized with more resentment than fear, it began to drill into her. Her hoarse, blood-streaked howls drowned out the sound of Zalmoxis still feeding on its prey below. The metal disc, surrounded in six deep nails that burrowed their way into her brainstem, finished its invasion with a loud, wet click.

 

Sabik fell back on all fours again and started to cough uncontrollably. Her wails had reopened the wound in her throat. She knew she should stop, but simply… couldn’t. Instead, she gulped her breath down again and roared, and roared, and roared until her throat literally couldn’t take it anymore. 

 

Eyes wide with loathing at all those around her, her gaze finally settled on Shalquoir. The woman was dropping down to her knees, as well, to be closer to Sabik. That was when the General understood. She knew why she couldn’t stop her desire to scream, to gnash, to strangle and tear at whatever she could find. Even Shalquoir, who wrapped her hands around Sabik in a gentle embrace, seemed an enemy—prey. She wanted to bite. She wanted to kill. She wanted her revenge.

 

Worst of all, as Maximal Value smiled down at her with eyes like sickly emeralds, she wanted Cassara back. Shalquoir’s embrace was the worst insult in that regard. Sabik didn’t want this woman; she wanted her songbird. And, as a result, she wanted to gut herself on the spot for the ignominy of it all.

 

“I’m sorry,” Shalquoir whispered to her. “I’m so sorry.”