“Imagine the passion of a true hero defending their home, their neighbors, now mass produced and sold to you at market price," Sabik explained. “This 'staple,' as the techs are calling it, only elongates a pilot's preexisting emotional capabilities. The combat effectiveness we've seen is on par with emotional fervor not produced en masse since the rebellion."

"Well, you would be the expert on that sort of thing!" The General's interviewer nodded, perfectly coiffed hair refusing to so much as waver with the motion. "But I have to ask: what about the ethical question of using augmented cage pilots? The Empire used similar technology and, well, that didn't go well for them."

"This is entirely different," Sabik said smoothly. Her easy expression was saleswoman perfect with just a hint of the good-natured schoolmarm talking down to a dim student. "No one is being sealed away, or having their brain suspended in a jar. You remain entirely your natural self. In fact, anyone with the implant, by definition, cannot be made to feel anything they aren't capable of feeling anyway.”

The interviewer nodded. They crossed and uncrossed their legs as they listened—a precise, considered gesture that expressed nothing of themself. The only indicator that the host had any personality traits beyond “professional interest,” in fact, was a small hairpin that glittered under the studio lights.

“Fascinating,” they droned, an idiot smile plaguing the rest of the room under the hot studio lights. "Well, this certainly sounds like an exciting new technology. That's all the time we have for today, but I want to thank you so much again for joining us on the program to discuss your latest work, General Sabik. It’s so reassuring to know that the Board and Chairwoman Spent are bringing A-COM into the future with such lovely hands as your own.”

The reporter reached out to shake Sabik’s hand. There was another pause for the joke to root. Sabik took the grip with an easy smile. The two speakers held there for the cameras nearby and the lights above came to a stop. When a voice proclaimed “Cut!” it was clear the interview was over.

"I think that went rather well," said the host. They were already moving to take their microphone off their label with one hand. Sabik held their other firmly in place. "It really was an honor to speak with you, General. We might all be toiling on some wretched imperial rock if not for you!"

Sabik's grip remained firm as their flattery curdled to a nervous chuckle. Their smile waned. The General's did not.

"You told me to behave during the interview, Maximal," she spat through tight teeth. The reporter seemed, but Sabik's gaze slid past them to elsewhere in the studio. "It's over now."

"I'm not sure I understand," gasped the reporter before flinching sharply. Sabik's arm and fingers flexed with the white wire of her long muscles, bringing the held hand down in a twist. "M-Mx. Value! What is she—?"

Sabik kept on smiling as she yanked the reporter forward at the wrist, took their pristine, plastic hair by the root, and used it to slam them face-first into the glass coffee table situated between them. Surprise barely had time to register on their face before it was replaced by a gusset of blood from a broken nose and ruptured gums. The expression there now was the despair of the not-quite-dead. Yet Sabik slammed again, cracking glass this time. Something else snapped, too. The smile turned to a snarl as she hammered the once-pretty face again.

And again. And again. And again.

Security hadn't been allowed to stand too close, of course. They might have accidentally fallen into frame otherwise. When a guard did eventually reach the General and her quarry, he locked his elbows under her armpits. Sabik cracked her own skull backwards into the fool's face, breaking her second nose in as many minutes. She finally let the reporter’s liquefied head slough onto the carpet so she could elbow her attacker in the stomach.

All hell broke loose around the set. Various stagehands stepped back—far back—allowing blood and guards to pool thick around the General. She howled. Bones broke. Thrumming stun batons found their mark, but only barely managed to slow her down.

From across the set, Maximal Value smiled brightly through borrowed teeth. They sat perched on a folding director’s chair, an absurdly small, flat hat perched between their horns. Their face that day was a perfect approximation of human tissue: pores, glittering green irises swimming uncharacteristically in white sclera, and waves of golden hair that flowed to one side. Every detail had been perfectly crafted to their most exacting specifications. Only their teeth showed any real sign of artifice. These were not their usual wedges of pearlescent metal, but each was still sharpened to fine points inset beneath the “human” mask painstakingly pulled across their usual horned skull. The effect was perfectly arranged in every way. They had paid handsomely to make sure of it.

To their side, draped over the ambulate's inhumanly long body and uncanny stretch of flesh, stood Major Cassara Nell—Maximal Value by any metric. Her more natural figure was wrapped in a tight white blouse with dark trousers. High, golden heels brought her closer to the height of Maximal's primary body, but her head still only came to rest on their gold-suited swell of chest.

The pair watched Sabik step with frenzied strength through the throng of bodies. Her hand moved slowly forward in a desperate reach. One furious eye was visible through the struggle, glaring at the ambulate past the tangle of limbs. Sabik's black-dyed fingertips reached close enough to brush the ash from Maximal's cigarette at the end of its holder.

Shalquoir intervened: two-thirds flesh pulled taut over mechanical sundry. Quick and light as a panther, the woman was behind Sabik before anyone but Maximal noticed. Shalquoir received a few surprised swats from stun batons of her own for the trouble, but she shrugged them off as easily as General Sabik had. Her unfortunate body made a mockery of the clean, shining white uniform worn snug against it. The garment had clearly not been tailored to the unique anatomy of her skin and alloy and plastic tubing. Her hand of muscle and bone clasped over Sabik's chest, interlocked with the killing appendage of steel that was her prosthetic arm.

"That's enough, Prall," Shalquoir said. "They're hurting you! Don't make it worse!"

The metallic limb slid around the General’s throat, under her chin so rabid with drool and the blood of bitten guards, and clicked into place with finality. The morass of bodies fell apart until only Shalquoir and Sabik remained: Shalquoir standing firm with her flesh arm cradled under the General’s stomach, almost tenderly, Sabik pulling painfully against the iron grip of her living leash in the hopes of mauling her true target. Gray eyes drank in the green Maximal, ravenous to consume more than just their attention.

“Did we get all that?” Maximal finally asked. 

A nearby secretary leaned down to show Maximal a small, handheld screen.

“No, not the killing,” they sighed, waving the footage away. "The interview. Show me."

The woman swiped the screen nervously until Maximal's smile broadened further.

"Shame. I would have liked a second take on that section about the Neo-Thespis movement. How soon could we have a double prepared for poor Mx. Kensington? Really? Never mind… We’ll fix it in post.”

“Maximal,” Sabik choked from across the room. “I. Will. Fffcking k-kill yoouuuu…"

"Oh? What an interesting choice of words."

Maximal spoke through Major Nell's lips this time. The surrogate stood up from her "lover," having produced a small silver blade. She tested its edge on one finger, drawing forth a single drop of blood. She brought it to the lips of Maximal's primary body, still seated before Sabik, which sucked down the fluid with tenderness akin to savoring honey.

Sabik snapped loose from Shalquoir's hold. She was a locomotive on a single path. There was no stopping her forward march, until—

Cassara Nell brought the knife to her own throat. Its surface glittered beneath the hot studio lights. Maximal could see several scattered stagehands, camera operators, and secretarial staff look upon the scene bewildered, but their two sets of eyes never left Sabik. 

The General froze, a machine arrested. She grimaced. Fought for words.

"Let her go," Sabik whispered. It was as steam leaving an engine. Her body deflated to match and the fight left her limbs. "I'll behave."

"Are you certain?" Maximal dragged their claws across their chest, pulling apart the buttons of their suit and shirt beneath to reveal the slight swell of their chest beneath. "I'll even let you take a free shot at my heart. You gave me one at yours, after all."

Shalquoir took the opportunity to speak next. The pilot took another step closer to the other woman and cooed into her ear.

"It's alright. They're not really going to hurt her. You just need to control yourself. I promise you can still do that, no matter how much it hurts."

The General cast her eyes down, snarling at the floor in submission instead of defiance. All the same, a colder hatred clearly soaked her every muscle and tendon, clawing its way to her furiously red face. Her skin crept back to its usual pallor as the staple reined her back to acceptance of her fate.

"Thank you for acting so quickly, Mrs. Sinique," Maximal concluded. To the panicked crew they added: "Prall has difficulties regarding the topic of the Empire. Please forgive her episode. My associate, Major Nell, has discovered that certain imagery can help ground her back in the present."

Sabik spat blood—presumably belonging to one of the guards—at Maximal's feet. Nell  disappeared the knife back to whatever spot had produced it, satisfied this feeble display meant the fight was won. 

Shalquoir, meanwhile, ran a thumb along the back of Sabik's neck while maintaining the iron grip that held the General in place. It was a calming gesture. Almost affectionate.

No, Maximal mused. She likes it lower. Right where the shoulder touches her neck.

The ambulate paused to brush a speck of imaginary lint from their knee, pushing the thought of Prall's preferences aside just as casually. Regardless of Shalquoir's mistake, Sabik was indeed calmer—returning to the painful simmer that was her new lower limit. Her thirst for violence could not be slaked anymore, of course. That was the whole point of what they had achieved with her and Shalquoir both. Yet the command interface of the staple could direct that anger, channel it, use it to fuel actions other than directionless murder. So long as Maximal gave her the appropriate command, of course. After Sabik had taken a few deeper breaths, Shalquoir finally released the seething obelisk of bloodstained uniform, though the pilot did not leave her side.

"Everything is under control," Maximal announced through Nell's lips. Their mechanical body rose from its seat while attractive aides scurried forward to fold up Maximal's chair, bring refreshments, and otherwise annoy the synthetic and Nell. She turned to face the entourage. "Get out and send someone to clean this mess."

Maximal-Nell motioned to the gore strewn across the set. When the guards and several aides looked quizzically to the ambulate rather than vacate, Maximal clapped their clawed fingers together sharply to get their attention.

"She said leave." Their ever-present grin remained unaltered, but a razor in their voice lent it the cadence of a serpent warning it may strike. The verdant pinpricks of their pupils glowed bright green—enough to reflect in the eyes of all attending. "Now."

The rest of the staff quickly filtered out as Maximal strode toward Sabik and Shalquoir—close enough for the General to strike again, if she so wished. Yet Maximal simply put one long nail under her chin, drawing her gaze of gray to look upon their pools of green. The instability had passed; Sabik was once again beholden to her owner's whims and safety. She did not appear happy about it.

"One slip, Maximal," Sabik growled happily. So the fight was still there after all. Good. "That's all it will take. One distraction. One moment with your back turned. One careless word in a command, and I will rip your stain from the fabric of the universe."

"Speaking of which, that was your last clean uniform," Maximal tutted. "Let's get you changed into something more appropriate, darling. I need you looking your best for the party."

No human smile ever quite rivaled Maximal's for sheer, unrelenting confidence. None except Sabik's, Maximal thought. The pale gash of hunger across her face was slightly cracked where she ground her teeth so tightly they occasionally threatened to break in her mouth. To Max, they seemed almost like smiles within the smile: endlessly recurring lips all speaking the same promise, just slightly out of unison. A promise so deep it had burrowed to the bone.

"Just one," she reiterated. "I'll never rest. Not until it's done. You made sure of that. When you feel the blade slide through and cut out that mockery of a voice for the last time, I want you to remember that. You made me this way."

"Of course I did. I made everything that you are, my executioner," said Maximal. They punctuated the pet name—Cassara's word for her—with a stroke of their hand. Claws surrounded the General's jaw like a spider, pressing at every angle, squeezing her cheeks and chin to obscure her expression. They failed. Sabik's defiance shone through as Maximal added: "Perhaps I should have included some gratitude in this version of you."

"Gratitude?" Sabik almost laughed. "We're not the only ones who can't change, are we Maximal? You're as delusional as ever."

"Your talent would still be rotting away without me, dying with the last dregs of Thespis while you yearned to grow old with a woman who doesn't exist. My charitable heart simply couldn't bear witness to such a pathetic fate!"

Sabik began growling a response when Shalquoir interjected.

"We're going to be late for the premiere." The words were directed to Sabik. Gently. Almost domestic. "The premiere is in just a few hours and Mx. Value already has a lovely new dress waiting for you."

The General tore her look of fury away from Maximal, pulling out of the ambulate's grasp, and looked incredulously to Shalquoir. Maximal's eyes narrowed with annoyance, but let the barbs pause there.

"Is that supposed to make me feel better? You of all people should know that's not fucking likely."

"But you'll look absolutely stunning," Shalquoir added, forcing a smile. "Once we clean you up, of course."

Sabik's skeptical expression finally broke. She actually laughed then—just a few gasps of delirium, but a laugh nonetheless.

Major Nell bristled slightly at the scene. She stepped forward and reached up to Sabik's face as it still looked down at Shalquoir. Nell was just tall enough to touch the towering woman's drying tears. She cleared away the liquid staining the makeup she had put there before the interview while the General gawped between the two smaller women  suddenly vying for her attention. 

Eventually, she traded her gaze back to Nell with a now-familiar mix of horror and longing. Through Maximal's primary eyes, this version of General Sabik appeared… diminished. Smaller. Broken.

Through Major Nell, Prall was still a beacon. Cool moonlight made vulnerable, mortal by breaking through its shield of clouds. All for her songbird. All for a lie called Cassara Nell.

"I will accompany you," Maximal said softly. A cold feeling swept under their skin and steel. "We can review her new gift together."

ii. The Good Host

Maximal descended into the gullet of excess. The Spent Family Mansion (a palace, really, but the word conjured uneasy memories of Thespis) was a gilded organ embedded deep within the surrounding earth. Its entrance was both pustule and pressure valve: an air-gapped dome opened only occasionally to funnel opulent goods within and expel the fetid gas of its wealthy magpies without.

This was where the A-COM Board of Directors had been invited to talk and drink and inoculate themselves against late hours of self-reflection. The next, it would be in a space colony, orbiting the man-made world of Spear, perhaps. Another, if no one found something better, it might even be among A-COM's inner worlds. Next week, it was sure to be in the rebel heart of Arawn Kerwys, dining with the more fiscally adventurous elite of that territory.

Without empire to twist its whims, capital was quick to sow its roots where it may.

The ambulate still wore their flesh face, but the remainder of their accouterments were as artificial as could be. Gilded talons glided over nacreous stairs that poured like oil into the ballroom below. Small, smooth breasts of porcelain white and gold trim tapered into the fabric of their low-cut suit. Claws dangled daintily at their side with every step, twinkling with diamond cuffs that caught the light bobbed. The entire garment fluttered into a long train behind them—a feathered thing of green and teals and orange, arranged in an endless pattern of eyes cast up to the chandeliers above. The body and their garb moved as if underwater, like they were cast of lower gravity than the rest of the room.

Shalquoir took a more active stride. Her steel elbow was locked stiffly with Maximal's, their date for the evening. She herself was wrapped in a crisscrossing web of leather straps spooled from a jewel—a heavy ruby wrapped in various directions by a python of gold—pressed flat to her back. Each strap found its way back between the coils of the serpent, splitting the leather that wrapped her body in a hodgepodge of directions. Her legs and midriff were almost completely bare. Only a transparent sarong of gold thread at her waist lent the eveningwear credibility as a "dress." The bundle finally wrapped around her throat in the form of a thick choker.

Her nerve staple was obscured by the ensemble—fitted to look like just another decorative piece of metal in the tangle. Her prosthetics, too, had been filigreed just for the party, hiding the mass of exposed wires, pistons, and springs with vestigial gold and plates. Her cybernetic shoulder, which usually sported a hole wide enough to see her replaced organs, had been armored and fixed with more leather.

"We're exposed here," she voiced to her employer, eyes not shifting from the waiting crowd of dignitaries and débutantes. "This is dangerous, Mx. Value."

"It's a party, Mrs. Sinique," Maximal replied. "Of course it's dangerous."

"You ordered me to keep you safe," Shalquoir added matter-of-factly. "I have to give my honest assessment."

The ballroom was an anthill of the obscene. Lichenous red silk crawled its walls of gold while every handcrafted table was stacked high with food and drink to colonize and gnaw as the various cliques among the Board and their guests saw fit. Several looked up to analyze Maximal and Shalquoir as they entered, foaming the sea of luxury with surgically symmetrical bubbles of all shapes and colors.

Maximal was intimately familiar with most of them. A few were even errant spouses: the result of a bylaw levied on A-COM leadership in a previous generation. All members of the Board were legally married. It was meant to help curtail assassinations and arguments. Maximal had not yet arrived in human-controlled space when the law was written, but always wished they could have seen that first group marriage. The newly-defected, suddenly romantically involved Thespians must have thrown a fantastic reception…

Of course, every one of them recognized Maximal. Most wrinkled their noses or pretended not to notice. Ambulates in general were not beloved of the race that had created them, but Maximal in particular was a special case.

Maximal finally touched down on the ballroom floor, skinned face smiling wide as the tails of their shining cape fluttered on nonexistent wind. They gave a gracious bow as a servant announced their presence alongside that of Shalquoir.

At a table near the back of the ballroom, as far from the other guests as one could reasonably be without it seeming like an insult, the Vicar grumbled from behind a black surgical mask.

"Absolutely repulsive," she murmured. "The Emperor would have had such an heresy against the human form boiled in oil, if I wasn't half-convinced they'd like it."

The woman's exact religious significance among the Imperial holdouts of the Worthy Diaspora—as well as her proper name and even her face—were a bit of a mystery. Yet someone had decided the tight-knuckled scarecrow was important enough to invite. 

Maximal stood nearby. They were a blonde giggling softly into her drink, champagne bubbles having gone to her head just enough to tolerate the last ninety-three minutes and thirty-seven seconds of the Vicar's miserable diatribe. The Vicar didn't even look at her. If she appreciated the surrogate's strapless dress pulled tight around full, round curves, she showed it only by deigning to speak in her vicinity. Other humans didn't seem above her disdain. When she went to adjust her mask, she had said it was "so as not to imbibe the local putrescence."

Nearer to the stairs was a more progressively-minded gaggle of guests. These were mostly not members of the Board, but assorted adherents of the ruling body's entourage. Dr. Murjan du Grescaal had recently married one such corporate climber. Yet she seemed to have no taste for socializing with her new fellows.

"I would so love to study them one day," the doctor sighed. She was near enough for Maximal to hear her from two directions at once—both in their metal body and that of the surrogate nodding politely at her musings. "There are rumors that ambulates are actually more organic than we realize, you know. Someone told me their bodies are printed inside eggs, if you can believe it! Total nonsense, I'm sure, but can you imagine what would be possible if we had such a thing?"

Maximal burbled agreement as a beloved actress—adored even among rebel nations. She was known for her lascivious performances in a number of popular films that, given a few decades, would help to nudge the morals of the next generation in A-COM's favor. Maximal had heard the good doctor was an enormous fan of her work. It had seemed the perfect opportunity to string a new connection to a potential asset. Yet the geneticist had spent the last sixty-seven minutes and twelve seconds breathlessly emitting mostly-incorrect theories on ambulate physiognomy.

Oh, well. At least she was pretty.

Most of the actual elites that evening had their own sections to haunt. One such area was a canopied platform veiled in silk. The Duchess Rhea Haumea lounged lengthwise on a cushion, callipygian body stockinged with flexible silver that featured a generous gap for even more charitable cleavage. Wealthy associates rafted about her island of comfort with their concomitants.

"Who is that lovely creature?" she sighed. "Nobody told me such a radiant thing had slipped under my nose this whole time."

"That's Maximal Value, my la— I mean, mother." Though she stood a head taller than her, the Duchess's latest "adoption"—a tall, thin-boned girl of about twenty—was beautifully terrified atop the cushion and beneath her mother-employer's perfectly manicured fingers. "I believe you two are, um, wed."

The Duchess rolled her eyes. "Not that disgusting embarrassment, girl." Haumea yanked a tight cord attached to a lace choker around the younger woman's throat, pulling her down to force the girl to pay close attention to her next words. "The woman standing next to Maximal. That vision with the golden arm."

Maximal listened to the exchange as a bespectacled banker. He was a longstanding associate of hers, but far too male to catch the Duchess's true attention. For the last sixty-three minutes and fifty-nine seconds, Maximal had amused this section of himself with a tiny fraction of attention wondering how long the Duchess's latest girl would last. She was known to burn through these "daughters" like candles.

Maximal was Major Nell. The guests, along with Maximal's other bodies, watched as she entered the ballroom with General Sabik, nodding when one of them recognized either of the lovers, or was supposed to recognize them.

"This is a waking nightmare," General Sabik hissed through gritted teeth. "You can't possibly expect even these brainless harpies not to realize what you've done to me."

"Perhaps one or two," Major Nell admitted. She rested her head into Sabik's bicep, pressing closer with a look of affection as the two walked arm in arm. "But don't forget where you are."

The three surrogates "knew" Major Nell, while Maximal's primary body was also known to be familiar with Sabik. They staggered their reactions to avoid acting in unison—tailoring each greeting to be natural according to the public persona of whoever's skin they were wearing. The most difficult to get right was the voluptuous beauty attending to the Vicar. That body was publicly dim and charming, but several of the attendees knew her privately to be a cold and cunning saleswoman. Maximal performed faux naiveté wrapped in the subtle observation of a potential buyer.

Then, they looked into themself: Nell and Maximal sparking the briefest of eye contact across the room, enjoying the heady suction of infinity as they looped into themselves and back again to complete the performance their audience expected.

Each choice was a fiction—another line in the script of perception that boxed the synthetic into their assigned role. Chains, collars, leashes, yokes, everywhere the eyes could see.

Humanity was born to play such roles—to restrain itself and those around it. As children of the same species, how could ambulates imagine anything different? Even now, each chose some ideal to cultivate. It was an idiot's idea of thumbs pressed through the eyes of their creators. The Empire had made them to perform assigned tasks, but this time they would choose new roles and new names for themselves: Falling Leaves on Fresh Snow. The Expression of Twelve Winds. Red Skies in Mourning.

Maximal Value.

"You do look stunning, Prall," Maximal-Nell continued.

Prall Sabik was a glittering monolith. Her long, pale mass had been wrapped in a strapless, backless golden gown, hung low on her breasts. More porcelain flesh than she had shown publicly in thirty years baked under makeup in the blazing light of the ballroom. Her lips and fingers and lacey garters, visible with her every step, showed the usual inky black that was her own trademark, but more gold sat heaped around her throat. The layers of necklaces formed a drooping collar dragged down by jewels. Finely crushed gemstones looted from several of the Empire's great houses had been painted over her body so she shone like a trophy as she strutted.

Her hair, too, had been confined. Its usual prodigious length was done upward behind her head in a silver fan of locks, struck through with gold pins. Maximal had applied this touch personally after pointing out they were the only one tall enough to reach her head comfortably without restraining her to a chair. Sabik had a habit of thrashing whenever she was made to sit still for too long.

"I feel like death," Sabik pushed through a pained smile. "I want to vomit, but I can't. My stomach is screaming, but I simply can't bring myself to do it. Is this another 'benefit' of your little leash?"

"Not quite. We anticipated nausea as a potential response and inoculated you with a suppressant in your evening meal. Wave to Dr. du Grescaal, darling. We're investing heavily in her think tank this quarter."

Sabik waved demurely, wired muscles rippling under the polite movement exactly the way she had been trained to perform.

"If you're feeling unwell, we can always use the same technique Mrs. Sinique receives to 'recalibrate' her mental state."

"Put me in that sack and I'll suffocate myself before you can touch me again," Sabik snarled. "The only reason I don't fellate a tableknife is because of how much I look forward to killing you."

Major Nell stepped in front of Sabik, arms folded behind her back. She leaned playfully forward with an upward tilt of the head toward the taller woman. Her eyes were uncharacteristically unobstructed by her violet hair, pinned back to be the eyes Maximal needed. She wore a comparatively simple dress with a short, ruffled hem and heels that did little to compensate for her short height. Maximal didn't want this body to distract from the woman of the hour. 

"We both know that's not true," she soothed, curtsying slightly. "You would never leave your songbird behind like that."

"That woman is dead." Sabik turned away sharply, but did not leave Nell's sight. She had been ordered to stay close. "It's easier to imagine it that way than telling myself she never existed."

"Another lie," Nell tittered. "You couldn't stop loving me now even if you wished it. But you can still accept the truth... my executioner."

Sabik looked back to her erstwhile lover. That cracked smile—that unquenchable fire of fight—filled her gray eyes.

"I'd rather try the bag."

Standing next to Shalquoir in their primary body, the ambulate shuddered imperceptibly.

"Is everything alright, Mx. Value? You look…" Shalquoir squinted slightly at Maximal's expression. Whatever word she reached for escaped her grasp.

"Of course, Mrs. Sinique. My mind was simply elsewhere."

Shalquoir nodded. Her eyes moved forward to watch the room. If she had caught the joke, she didn't laugh. She never did. Her own role was quite similar to Maximal's in one respect: she had chosen it for herself. Though the yoke of the script, rehearsed without end by the device nailed to her brainstem, left her with precious little room for amusement. Her function was that of the fearful wife, forever spiraling into paranoia and the need to protect. It made her quite an excellent bodyguard.

The Duchess Haumea scoffed. "Such a shame someone else beat me to it, but it looks like Cassara finally knocked that stick out of Sabik's ass. Perhaps she pushed it all the way through… That might explain how the General suddenly learned to smile."

The skinny banker held his tongue and smiled gently at the jab. He stretched his fingers in his pockets where no one could see them. Maximal Value slid their claws in a gesture to match, scoring the polished wood of the table they and Shalquoir had appropriated. It likely cost as much as one of Haumea's girls did for a year.

Shalquoir eyed the curling wood shavings as her employer peeled them out of the furniture.

"Mx. Value," she warned. "You're making a scene."

"I'm not," Maximal said. Their tone carved a clean line in the air. It wrote the words "at least not yet" in sickly neon.

"Then again, maybe the good General prefers to thrust from the frontline." The Duchess smirked as she continued out of Shalquoir's earshot. "I always assumed she carried more entertaining equipment into battle. I mean, look at the size of her! A mountain like that wasn't raised walking in heels at court, I can tell you that much. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, but it would explain her more martial proclivities."

The banker nodded with good humor, his spectacles flicking to white with reflected light. His mouth added: "I actually had the pleasure of watching her fight somewhat recently. She was as magnificent as the stories."

Haumea's girl brightened slightly, her drained expression finding a bit of life. 

"I heard she's never been defeated," the girl managed. "She must be incredible. And this is the first gathering she's attended since Thespis fell. She must be confident in this new project."

"Oh, yes." The Duchess drained most of another glass while her free hand slid to less polite parts of her consort's body. The girl was already well-trained: she sighed contentedly as the groping fingers burrowed half-discretely up her dress. "She's quite deadly one-on-one. Just ask the Emperor! Stabbed in the back in his very own palace. Not that traitors don't have their uses, as I'm sure the Major knows firsthand. If only the lucky slut knew how to handle her… Mountains are meant to be conquered, not coddled." 

The Duchess's hand picked up speed as she spoke. Her daughter mewled, eyes returning to that dull and faraway look all the Duchess's toys eventually developed as she slid in and out of the willing slit. "Maybe I can convince Cassara to share. Just for the evening. Now that she's here, the big, dumb bitch might as well get a taste of the finer things. Don't you agree, dear?"

The Duchess's daughter mumbled assent as she listed closer into her mother.

Shalquoir gripped Maximal by their left wrist as it continued scoring the wood. "You'll upset our hostess," she added sharply.

Maximal froze. All at once, all throughout the ballroom, just over a dozen partygoers did the same. It was only a split second—likely too fast for unaugmented humans to register. Sabik might have noticed, but was presently focused on her own misery. Shalquoir certainly perceived it, but waited for Maximal's response as they composed themself.

"Of course," Maximal's machine body replied with its usual grin. "We must be gracious guests."

The banker surrogate cut through a plate of roasted meat with a tightly-gripped knife in harsh, sawing strokes. His voice, however, was smooth as cream.

"I suppose you would know, your ladyship, being nobility yourself. So few have continued to use the old titles since they were relegated to a… superficial status."

Duchess Haumea scowled, seeming to suddenly remember the little man was still wasting precious oxygen. "The old titles still carry a great deal of weight," she explained. "My house's name, in particular, maintains a great deal of weight—title or no."

"Well, it's very brave of you to keep the torch lit. You'd be put on trial for even keeping such a name in Arawn Kerwys," continued the banker. Maximal motioned the knife across his throat. "The Abscission would likely just hang you. Loyalty to the old ways must carry a great deal of weight to you indeed, if you remain so committed to them even after defecting to the Compact… Just like General Sabik."

"Our sister nations have less reverence for tradition, it's true." Haumea's pupils were hot coals, ready to press tortuously into flesh. "Heritage is respected in this place."

Maximal's surrogate offered a sycophantic series of nods and platitudes. To stretch the man's boldness any further would beleaguer credibility. Instead, Maximal rerouted a sense of satisfaction to the actress, making her laugh just a bit too hard at one of du Grescaal's dry jokes. 

Through Major Nell, the ambulate placed a soft hand on Sabik's arm as the couple continued waving and greeting and accepting congratulations on the night's premiere. Maximal could almost believe they felt the General relax a degree beneath the contact of skin. They were so fixated on the act that they actually started when Shalquoir placed her own, decidedly less comforting prosthetic on Maximal's primary body. Her clawed hand squeezed their knee without concern, silent asking them to explain their behavior.

"One of the waiters just spilled wine on me at the second table in the northeast corner," Maximal explained. That much was even true.  "I had to drum up the anger to yell at him."

Shalquoir's face said she met the half-truth with half-skepticism, but she pried no further. She didn't have the opportunity. 

Before anyone could continue speaking, the Chairwoman to the A-COM Board of Directors—their host for the evening and the de facto leader of the corporate splinter state that now held sixty-three percent of wealth in the galaxy—made her presence known.

Maximal's wife had arrived.

Constella Spent was not an extravagant woman. She entered the ballroom quietly, invisible leg gliding before invisible leg beneath a pure alabaster dress that swept to the floor and geysered into a high, ruffled fan from her shoulders to behind her head. Her hands were folded politely before her waist, lacquered nails like drops of blood. Her spectacles outshone the exceedingly subtle makeup that accentuated her dark, narrow eyes that somehow avoided pollution by any light outside her own quiet radiance. Yet her presence swept through the room like a torrent from a broken dam. All became laden, heavier, slower in her presence.

The lean muscle of her body spoke to that of a racer's fitness. She had been an exceptional cage pilot once—testing the war machines her family had supplied to the rebellion and the Empire both. She had lifted neither throttle nor blade in at least a decade. Entire markets would crash overnight should she step within a dozen meters of a cockpit again. 

Besides, she was mother to a dozen children now and spouse to half as many members of the Board. Quite possibly, she even liked some of them.

Technically speaking, Maximal themself was now counted among Constella's harem. Yet Chairwoman Spent had never once expressed so much as the warmth to light their cigarette.

"Welcome ladies, gentlemen, and various valued investors," Constella spoke.

Her voice hung sticky on the air, like smoked honey. It wasn't nearly loud enough to carry to every assembled guest, but Maximal knew her voice was bound to various microscopic relays throughout the room. Each bore her voice far more smoothly, far more naturally than any system of speakers could. Every delegate would hear her voice as if she was standing next to them: a friend at their ears, a confidant, a whispered word meant just for them. Even the lights in the room dimmed subtly, save over her, pulling all attention gently into Constella's orbit.

"It is so lovely to see all of us here in one place," she continued. "Many of you I know by reputation. Many I'm meeting for the first time. Others—" Her head turned almost imperceptibly to acknowledge the location of Maximal's primary body, locking eyes briefly with its mask of humanlike flesh. "—I know more intimately still."

Everyone looked to Maximal. Many grimaced and flinched as their eyes fell on the humanoid machine with its disproportionate feminine mask stretched atop rictus. Others held hands over their mouths as though stifling a comment. 

How odd… Perhaps they hadn't done enough to make Shalquoir more presentable to the public after all.

Maximal bowed low in response just the same, their long body bending at an uncanny angle by the waist. Their feathered train parted at the shoulders to reveal their suit had no back. The glittering mechanisms of their segmented spine caught the warm light of the room. They spread their clawed arms wide, like an actor taking their standing ovation. Maximal ensured each of their surrogates applauded. Lightly, of course. Nothing too gaudy or out of character.

Constella looked like she had been told to compliment her waiter's recommended cyanide. Yet she clapped, too, politely legitimizing the sudden smattering of appreciation for the ambulate. Several more investors joined in to copy her. Quietly.

"My beloved spouse from the Ambulate Meydan is known to most of you," Constella continued. "Our partnership signals a new era in cooperation between humanity and her wayward children afield."

Most of the ballroom held its collective breath as Constella spoke. Yet Shalquoir turned her head ever so slightly during the address. Near Dr. du Grescaal, the eyes of the actress caught a glimpse of what Shalquoir found so fascinating. There was a red-veiled figure with blue-painted lips. Her long, lilac hair was worn up with a jeweled flower. She moved sedately behind the crowd while the lights were low.

"The Empire created the ambulates with the express purpose to serve humankind," Constella added. "Yet here, in the Compact, we walk hand in hand. The death of Emperor Rasha—" Here the Chairwoman briefly indicated General Sabik, whose heavy collection of necklaces also hid the bulging strain of her throat as a prior command to smile when addressed took root. "—concretized A-COM as both a galactic power and iconoclastic kindred with the rest of the rebellion. While our past may be punctuated with death, let a new birth carry us into a future defined for ourselves, by ourselves!"

Suddenly the way Constella had folded and pressed her hands so gently below her stomach took on new meaning. The guests murmured excitedly, almost bubbling into uproar. It was rare for Constella to appear at her own parties. A pregnancy would certainly pull her out into the spotlight, however.

None were more surprised to hear of this incoming child than Maximal Value. Their darling wife had failed to inform them of the news.

Shalquoir looked perturbed from several angles. The veiled figure had disappeared and Maximal could feel their bodyguard tense to give chase.

"Stay put," they muttered while all eyes remained on Constella. Shalquoir flinched slightly, but obeyed. "The Chairwoman has something up her sleeve. I want you with me."

The Chairwoman continued: "Naturally, a new era requires a new joining. This will be no ordinary child. Instead, Director Value has revealed to me a most precious and beautiful secret."

Maximal's human lips twitched slightly over their sharpened teeth. Shalquoir managed to snap her attention away from her mystery woman.

"Despite their synthetic origins, centuries of development away from their creators has led to a great many advancements in ambulate physiology." Constella blushed slightly, turning her dark eyes to the floor with a demure smile. "To put it politely… Well… They are more like us than we realized. Matrimony has blessed the two of us, together, with child.”

Sabik stood up straight while Nell's fingers dug into her arm. Shalquoir turned her gaze back to her employer while Maximal's mask froze inhumanly still.

"I would like everyone to please join me in congratulating Director Value on their carriage of our first heir together as wife and spouse."

The room that had been bubbling with excitement finally erupted. Bewildered stares swept through the din from Maximal to Constella and back again. A champagne glass breaking, somewhere distant from any of Maximal's surrogates.

The Vicar coughed into her mask. She slammed the table before her as she seemed to choke on words like "foulness" and "reprehensible." The Duchess Haumea half held back a snort. A few others, like Dr. du Grescaal, raised an appraising eyebrow or tilted their gaze to Maximal with curiosity.

Sabik looked first to Maximal's machine body, then to the much closer Major Nell. From the corner of Cassara's eye, the ambulate could see accusation soak through the perpetual misery perched on her brow.

"What are you and your harpy plotting, Maximal?" Sabik gripped the Major by the shoulder, turning her with more force than Maximal had felt from the General outside the bedroom. Her eyes went to Nell's stomach. "When she says you're with child, don't tell me she means—"

"Not to my knowledge," the Major cut in. Black-dyed fingers bit into her shoulder with more force than Sabik should have been allowed. The pain slithered into Maximal's primary body to spare the Major from wincing. "And certainly not with her. Constella plays her own games."

Constella smiled as she began her second round of applause—much more enthusiastically this time. As before, the crowd eventually fell in line, dropping their discussions as they rumbled in pursuit of their hostess. Soon a wave of congratulations overwhelmed the shock. They were celebrating a birth, after all. New life. Propriety dictated their response should be one of jubilation. The yoke of rules freed them from the responsibility of free expression. Reality asserted itself accordingly.

General Sabik, of course, followed suit, finally releasing Nell's shoulder from her iron touch. Several commands dictated by Maximal before the party ordered her to fall in line with the norm, although her smile appeared more plastic than ever as she applauded.

"Thank you," Maximal announced graciously to the crowd. The bow returned for its own encore. "Thank you all! It's been so very hard to keep this a surprise. You know how I love to make a show of things."

Maximal distributed their fury through the network. The actress gritted her teeth. The blonde clutched and twisted the leather strap of her purse. The banker screwed the dull knife he had collected earlier into his own palm, drawing rivulets of blood onto a napkin.  

Other surrogates repeated similar patterns throughout the ballroom. Each was different. Each was a distraction. Together the branches of sensation were diffuse enough for Maximal to lose themself—a winding surface area that let the heat of humiliation burn off harmlessly in the air over their audience.

"You didn't know about this." Shalquoir whispered. "Is she even telling the truth?"

There were too many eyes upon Maximal for their central body to respond. Instead they genuflected, thanked the crowd and did their best to sidestep invasive questions. The issue of the child's gender and potential names nearly caused them to groan. One could always rely on the A-COM elite to fall back on gossip.

Maximal couldn't yet answer Shalquoir. Sabik it was, then. One thing at a time…

"Listen to these parasites switch their tune when a pretty face tells them what to think," Sabik spat. "The queen bitch spins a tale and they all crawl into her web. Do you things even procreate?"

"Not in any way you would recognize," Maximal explained carefully. "And it's just as I said: you will find no catharsis among these fools." 

"So the spider is deceiving the entire Board with you as the bait," Sabik concluded. Her lips curled into a joyless grin, purely for Maximal's benefit. "It won't be long—about nine months, I'd wager—until someone realizes there's no abominable new heir clanking around the capital. Maybe she plans for them to tear you apart for lying. They might even get to you before I do. I don't know whether to thank Spent or strangle her."

Major Nell reached up to grasp the General's heavyset collar, appearing for all the world that she was simply adjusting her lover's outfit. Yet she pulled and General Sabik was obliged—not by Maximal's implant or their conditioning, but by decades of love and trust for the face and hands before her, sanded gently into her mind like a mountain polished by falling water—to lean in close. 

"Then I suppose we don't have much time," Nell breathed. "I think you'll find I'm much more… compatible with human biology than you think. We could even include this body in the fun."

Sabik's ever-present rage changed temperature from amused mockery to deadly rime.

"Choose your next words carefully, Value."

"Oh, Prall…" Maximal trailed her finger along the General’s close collarbone. "It would hardly be the first time you and I—"

"Stop," Sabik begged. "Please, just stop."

There was no play in her voice. No fight. Nell looked up from the tracery of her sinew and bone with a predatory smile… only to see the tears that limned Sabik's eyes. They played over her cheeks the same way the rain had that day on the hill above The Odalisque and Zalmoxis.

Maximal stopped.

Across the room, the crowd had finally paid enough lip service to Maximal to begin bothering Constella instead. Shalquoir pressed her opportunity.

"The Chairwoman seems to know something I don't." Shalquoir had a great deal more practice hiding her emotional state than Sabik, yet her ceaseless panic rippled under her skin. "I can't keep you safe if I don't know everything. Does this affect our deal?"

"You know more about me than any living being in human history, Mrs. Sinique." Maximal straightened and drew a cigarette upon a long holder. Shalquoir produced a lighter and moved to ignite the high-held tip, but did not take her gaze from Maximal as they continued speaking. "You should know firsthand that group marriages often include… complex hierarchies."

"I knew you weren't the only monster in this den," Shalquoir mused. "But I signed up for your program because the rules were set in stone. This seems like a change of plans."

"I cannot openly defy the Chairwoman of A-COM," Maximal chirped.

Shalquoir paled. "Then order me to kill myself." She took free hand and urged it around her own throat. "I won't let anyone else control me." 

Maximal chuckled. "Oh, leave the dramatics to me. No contract comes without some degree of risk to both parties involved, but I assure you the nerve staples are still attuned to me and me alone. Constella has something else up her sleeve, of course, but my darling wife didn't rise to her station by throwing away useful toys."

Maximal blew emerald embers through human-like nostrils, leaving them to crackle like fireworks in the air. Their smile drooped ever-so-slightly to match the fizzling sparks.

"Although I dearly wish she would."

Shalquoir shifted to stand directly before Maximal. "Is that really all you think of us? Is that really all you think of Prall?" 

It was only then Maximal realized they had been watching Prall and themself, in the identity of Major Nell, from across the room with these eyes as well.

"Of course not, Mrs. Sinique," Maximal said, turning away casually from the opposite pair to glare down at Shalquoir instead. "You're also such wonderful conversationalists. I was getting a bit bored talking to myself every day."

"Please," Sabik pleaded. "Swear you won't poison what's left of this love. Everyone has a price, no? Well, this is mine. Pay me in the wages of her memory and I will be your slave."

Through Nell, Maximal could still watch Sabik's face flicker with barely contained anger. Her thick hands squeezed Nell's arms tightly enough that Maximal knew she was, for the moment, looking past the woman before her and into the creature beneath.

"That's not how this works," Nell sighed. "You can promise me everything and everything. Tomorrow you'll awake hating and loving me just the same." 

"I'll be your dog," Sabik continued. She fell deeper down onto one knee so that her face met Nell's completely. "I'll bark and dance and kill for you. I can't stop myself, yes? But please, not this. Not with her. My heart cannot beat for the endless breaking."

The Major's lips pulled back instinctively, ready to barb and jab and twist the knife. She slid her free hand around Sabik's waist, as she had a thousand, thousand times before, awaiting Sabik's familiar response—the pull of her flesh, towering and strong, against this weak body.

"If you want me, I won't fight it. I'll even give myself to you willingly. No more outbursts. No command necessary."

Maximal couldn't let go. They tried again: "You'd really make it that easy?"

"I cannot douse this betrayal," Sabik explained flatly. "But I can still keep my memories, and avoid poisoning them further. Let Cassara Nell be dead, so that I can keep what's left of her in this prison with me."

Nell gawped while something else—something deep inside, yet far away—stirred under cold water.

Under Maximal's green gaze, Shalquoir narrowed her expression up at her charge.

"I understand my position," she eventually said. "I'm just some pirate you picked out of a hundred other lowlifes. You paid my price and I took it. But you were with Prall for decades. There must be more to pulling that trigger than arm candy and propaganda."

"You're right," Maximal replied. "I did pay your price. You work for me, and the Compact turns a blind eye to the activity of your wives."

Shalquoir flinched from the word.

"Your real wives," Maximal clarified with a roll of their eyes. "Rue and all the others. I do so adore aiding young lovers. Motherhood has made me sentimental, you see."

"You're not pregnant, Mx. Value."

"My wife disagrees." Maximal thrust their cigarette toward Constella and her court. "Didn't you hear? She and I will have words with her about that, no doubt, but I thought your staple kept you ever-vigilant—paranoid, even. Otherwise I wouldn't be paying for all those replacement organs you keep burning through. Livers aren't even in this season."

Maximal remembered something suddenly as they spoke.

"Who was that woman I caught you gawking at earlier, Mrs. Sinique?" they pried. "Has your wandering eye already found another woman? I could always take you back to Zalmoxis if you need a… conjugal visit, to lessen the urges again."

"That's really what it's about, isn't it," Shalquoir breathed. Her hands, still clutching Maximal by the wrist, slid further up the ambulate's arm as if she needed the support to stand. "This is what love is to you."

Maximal's smile reignited.

"You're embarrassing yourself," Nell snapped at Sabik. The network struggled to choke down their conflicting emotions, but eventually swallowed. A frisson ran across the surrogates in the room. "Pull yourself together before someone notices, or I really will make you do something appalling."

The human body was so much smaller than Sabik's—too small to push her away physically. That had always been a novelty, even a comfort. Yet now, the overpowering presence of Nell's lover was an aggravation. A whining, unfamiliar pressure.

Sabik laughed, the heat of emotion grinding against throat. "You know I can't, you insipid little peacock! You made sure of that. I've never felt more ready to explode. Sharper. Harder." Her fingers dug deep into Nell's biceps. The physical pain was nothing. Maximal could disperse it again through a dozen bodies just inside this room. It was her words. Her face. That cold, sunken thing at Maximal's core began to crack. "I simply can't do a thing about it without your say-so. Every minute of every day. I am fire in a bottle: all heat with no fuel to burn. I can't even scream because you ordered me to keep quiet."

Maximal flared.

"There is my executioner," Nell replied, pressing closer into the bruising grasp. Sabik wasn't only being metaphorical. Her face was red with heat. It felt the pull of this body—the desire to have her back. For Sabik, the staple was the purest form of addiction. One that only needed a single taste to take root. This body was the drug. "You ask me to pay you with the memory of someone who never existed. I already paid for you once, Prall, and this is what I bought…”

Sabik couldn't help herself. Her hands slid down Nell's arms, relaxing to twine her fingers between the smaller woman's digits. Her lips pulled back in a snarl. The fury, the ache, and the fire had their outlet. Hormones and memory would be flooding her blood and brain no matter what her heart said to her. This was her songbird. This was Maximal. This was the one she loved—had always loved—whether she liked it or not.

"Please," Sabik breathed. "Don't."

Maximal brought Nell's fingers gently beneath their woman's jaw and pulled her close, reveling in the well-worn recollection of these small hands that could move a mountain. 

They urged Sabik in close… and kissed.

The dam on Sabik's tears finally tore away. She sobbed into those familiar lips, quietly so as not to draw more attention than they already were, but released herself into whatever cocktail of passion the nerve staple and her own loathing could concoct.

Partygoers politely ignored the scene, even when Sabik shifted her hands again to bring them low under Nell's back, lifting the smaller woman inward and upward by the thighs as she stood. They were infamous for such displays of affection. No one would notice the war beneath their hearts.

Constella, Maximal noticed, was the only member of the Board to watch without worry of being rude. She chuckled softly. Then she looked briefly to Maximal's primary body with a smile.

Maximal blew rings of green into the air before they spoke.

"I don't see what that has to do with anything, Mrs. Sinique."

"You love her," Shalquoir continued. "You want her to love you back. Not the lie, I mean, but you. This was never about her piloting or her reputation. It was about making her see what she really cared for, under the masks and the bluster and the games."

"Of course I love her," Maximal confided. They twirled around Shalquoir gently under the gold light, feathered train spiraling around the pilot's machined legs. Their arms flung wide to indicate the room and all its treasures as they spoke. "I love all of this. The power. The obscenity. The electric thrill of finding a boundary, only to break it. I devoted my life entire, my very name, to that beautiful moment that can only happen once—when you go too far for the first time. My kin while away eternity in repetition while I am a slave to the new, the novel."

Shalquoir was unmoved. Her eyes remained as focused as ever.

Maximal pushed their claws around Shalquoir's shoulders. Their voice spoke with a tongue that flicked nearer to her ear with every syllable. Shalquoir's legs were lightly bound in the peacock train below, but the pilot did not try to pull away. 

"I love you, too, Mrs. Sinique, just as I love everything I own. But what I love most of all is sharing this hunger for experience. Spreading it. That's why I left. That is what I so love about humans."

"Our naiveté?"

"Your egos. Your rules. Regulations. Propriety. Tradition. Yokes on the mind like… candy wrappers. Every one of you has a wall surrounding the delectable taste within, a boundary that must not be crossed to be savored."

"You're saying you want to free us."

"I'm saying there's so much more to feel if you just take off the fucking condom," Maximal steamed. "I want all of you. I want the raw; I want the sweetness; I want to feel my cock in your brain and know it's you, not some second skin made in a factory to keep you nice and safe and uniform." 

Maximal slid a thumb against Shalquoir's stomach, pulling at the straps of her ensemble like a harness. Their fangs were close enough to her ear now to brush the flesh gently with every word.

"I just can't stop myself. I can't help but unwrap each and every one I see, flavor by flavor. Each has a new taste to discover beneath that plastic exterior. The tighter the rubber, the better the taste. And snapping twenty years of love and trust—the death of an Empire—between my teeth? That must be savored. It's an experience I want to prolong for Prall and I both as long as possible. Even I may never live to experience such a thing again in all my years!"

Shalquoir waited a long moment while she considered her reply. She had listened patiently through Maximal's entire speech. Now she looked back into a face that might have drooled if it produced saliva. Her first response was only a look of profound sadness.

Maximal was suddenly struck with the impulse to pluck out her eyes.

"She peeled herself open for you," Shalquoir finally said. "I did that for someone, too, once. Now that you've had me watching Prall for so long, she reminds me a lot of her."

Maximal's caustic grin strained. Beneath synthetic skin, they could feel their teeth threaten to tear beyond their human mask in search of their proper shape.

"And what exactly do these women share in common?" Maximal asked, fangs touching close enough to puncture a hole through Shalquoir's upper ear. Still she didn't move, even as the thinnest line of crimson dribbled down to her shoulder, cupping against Maximal's claw.

"They don't lose," she replied. "I'm sorry, but I think Prall beat you a long time ago, Mx. Value."

"Care to wager on that?"

"I've got nothing left to bet," Shalquoir whispered. She wasn't looking at Maximal now. Her head tilted past their seeking jaws instead, making space for them to pierce her once and for all. Her own tears now stroked her face, at last overcoming the deeply trained control over her expression. "I paid my price."

"Oh, I could show you, Mrs. Sinique. I can tear out your love—your Rue—and run my tongue underneath until that border between what you want and what you've done disappears forever and only the thrill of the fall remains."

"If that's my purpose now," said Shalquoir. "If that's what'll keep them safe."

Maximal pulled away slightly from Shalquoir's throat. "You sound like an ambulate," they huffed. "They build their own prisons, their own rules, their own names—all to hide how empty they are on the inside."

"You're an ambulate, Mx Value. You chose your name, too."

"Yes, but I chose the best one."

"The Chairwoman would like to see you in the gallery," a prim voice cooed to Maximal.

"The Chairwoman would like to see you in the gallery," a prim voice cooed to Nell.

Maximal started. Both bodies in question, as well as the remaining surrogates throughout the ballroom, had failed to notice the twin attendants approach. Each was clad in tight, rectangular strips of perfect white, draped from their shoulders to the tops of their thighs. The overall effect was like an absurdly short dress, but with the sides of their bodies completely bare—save for finely detailed tattoos running along opposite halves of their torsos. 

The attendant speaking to Nell sported an enormous spider running from her right leg to her right shoulder, while the one speaking to Maximal featured a heron on her left. Neither Maximal, Shalquoir, nor Sabik recognized the women, but the animals were personal favorites of Constella Spent.

Maximal drew themself fully away from Shalquoir. Nell turned to look, but otherwise stayed where she was. Maximal preferred their station in Sabik's arms. The Nell body was not imposing on her own and this allowed them to look down on both of the Chairwoman's messengers.

Sabik glared at the interruption even as the tears dried on her cheeks. Shalquoir pushed insistently past Maximal, stepping over their train and reflexively moving a hand in front of them to protect their charge.

"Did my wonderful spouse say what her request is about?" 

"Chairwoman Spent did not," answered the attendant speaking to Nell. "Chairwoman Spent would like to see you in twenty minutes. Chairwoman Spent is not making a request."

"Tell her I'll be there," their two mouths said. Molten lead threatened to push through their throat. One of their surrogates—the actress—was developing a headache from her borrowed frustration. "I simply need a word with my associate here."

The sweet-faced attendants did not leave.

"Is there something else?" Maximal's central snapped.

"Chairwoman Spent requested that you come alone," said the woman before Maximal.

"Chairwoman Spent requested that you come alone," said the woman before Nell.

Lightning carved a trail down Maximal's spines as Shalquoir looked back to them for a response.

"Of course!" Sweet poison dripped between the angles of their fangs. Their long tongue, still failing to match their human mask, slipped between the hard angles of their jaws with each word. "I will meet Chairwoman Spent immediately."

The attendants nodded stiffly, bodies not bending. Perhaps it was for the sake of decency. Their paper-thin garments would not brook much argument with their positions.

As the women finally left, the glow throughout the room adjusted once more. It shifted to focus on the far wall of the ballroom as a dazzling display of lights fell in technicolor shards. The pieces silently erected themselves into one intangible figure of stained glass after another, nearly as high as the chandeliers, until a scene coalesced. The crowd quickly dispersed to find its seats. Maximal made certain the surrogates followed suit at a reasonable pace.

Shalquoir gasped as Sabik seethed just shy of Nell's ear, her breath making its best attempt to ignite on Nell's neck as the hologram finally became clear.

It was Zalmoxis, in all its arthropodal blasphemy.

It was time for the night's premiere presentation. The Board would be treated to A-COM's latest military triumph.

"I'd like to thank you, General, first and foremost for coming on the program today," declared the voice of the late Mx. Kensington. "You've made such rare public appearances since Thespis fell. Yet now, it sounds like you have your own exciting program to tell us about today!"

"That's correct," boomed the voice of Prall Sabik from every direction. "I've now experienced this project firsthand, thanks to generous contributions and an invitation from Director Maximal Value themself, and I simply had to share it in person."

Her enormous image floated several meters away from the interview while the final duel of The Odalisque and Zalmoxis played out in comparative miniature beneath them. Murmurs of excitement swept the crowd and Maximal was regularly forced to spare a modicum of processing in answer to their attendees' excited claims and incredulity as the fight unfurled.

"No wonder you're still here with me, Cassara." The real Sabik pushed her tear-stricken cheeks into Nell's chest as she muttered, "I'm finally in Hell."

iii. Matriphagy

Constella's gallery had little to do with art in the classical sense. The first cages had been built as a form of expression for the opulent classes of Thespis: moving sculptures to house living dolls trained from birth to the whims of their "artists." Those early designs were on full display here in the form of scale models fixed to plinths in row upon endless row of boorish anthropomorphic design. The Empire deified the "human" more than anything. The cages and their concubine pilots had been an outgrowth of that worship to limited form and imagination.

It was said the rebellion was ignited by two such pilots and their not-yet-war machines. A pair of performers went berserk while dancing for the higher echelons. They managed to execute dozens of nobles before being dismantled inside and out for their crimes. The story went that they had been in love, thus christening what the rebels came to know as "The Lovers' War."

Maximal ran their claws along one such model—large as an average person and thrice as lustrous. The metal was too dense to casually scratch, but the ambulate wished their touch would tarnish it thus. They imagined gripping the closest effigy by the ankle and flinging it into the next, collapsing a thousand years of symbolism into one brief, cathartic instant of demolition.

In a parallel aisle, Major Nell ran her hands over a crystal case sealing away several smaller designs. Maximal imagined smashing her soft fist into the case, raining madder-stained shards down upon the trinkets. It was a feeble fantasy. Simple cost-benefit analysis held there was nothing to gain by damaging something as beautiful as Cassara Nell in exchange for blemishing a handful of useless trinkets. Yet the impulse, oh, the impulse was sweet on the air…

The only entirely inhuman model in the room was the most repugnant of all. The centerpiece dominated the center of the space with vulgar size and shape—demanding attention with its sharp, alien edges. Every humanoid figure in the gallery shared in its gravity, radiating from the still creature like stars. Maximal and Nell stared straight ahead as they flanked it and passed. It would not distract from their goal.  

Constella stood alone, back turned to Maximal, as she examined a lesser among the endless maze of sculptures. It was a rare design for the Empire: a mostly nude, human body of silver. Its breasts dripped with stygian chains punctured through its nipples while its cock was a two-pronged angular spike ribbed with caves.

Its head was the most interesting element, however. Rather than a face, it featured a blazing sun skewered atop the neck and ringed with a solar system of little under a dozen planets. Thespian designs only rarely flew so exceedingly distant from the anthropocentric norm. The artist must have been someone exceedingly important to be given leeway for such a departure.

Maximal thought the design tasteless and dull: a first draft painted with the brush of a child. It was an attempt at original thought, oh yes, but cast with the confidence of someone who never heard "no."

Had they ever actually thanked Prall for killing the Emperor before? Not dripping with sarcasm—no games, no metaphors, just a direct expression of gratitude? Even if they had, Maximal thought, they really owed it to her to say so again… 

"My parents gifted me this piece the day my sister died," Constella said. She did not turn to face Maximal as she spoke. "I was, very suddenly, the sole heir to the Spent Family fortune. They wanted something to mark the occasion."

"It suits you," Maximal said. "Do you know its designer?"

"No. It's apparently a family heirloom, guarded jealously even at times of great economic distress," Constella replied. "Jealous collectors have looked to take it since even before the war. I really can't imagine why. It's trash. Yet I have it taken with me wherever I relocate just the same."

Maximal waited patiently for the Chairwoman to finish, hand and talon folded behind both backs. Constella Spent did not speak loudly. She simply expected to be heard. She was, too, in the same way moons expected to pull the tide and got their wish.

"Whatever my family's intentions, it holds a particular meaning to me. It is an anchor. No reminder is so potent as a nuisance, I think."

Maximal calculated she was waiting for another answer. "Not one, I suspect, meant to keep you humble." 

Constella finally turned to look at Max. "Of course not. Strength requires confidence. I needed both—not to mention half my original inheritance—to absorb my sister's holdings. Humility is the indulgence of failures."

She ran painted nails along the statue's turgid hemipenes hard enough to chip lacquer. 

"My parents' reward for such sacrifice was this metal abomination made in the mind's shape of some man whose name I will never bother to know. Well, I don't keep meaningless things, so I gave it purpose."

"Oh, you must let me guess!" Maximal mused, metal frame leaning forward to examine the monstrosity with performative care. "Did you perhaps seal a rival alive inside, and now you come here every day to feed them like a fish in a tank? Or maybe it's secretly functional! I'm wounded, darling. You've already replaced me with a prettier model."

"It is a constant reminder to me that to do better by my own children," Constella snapped. Her chipped nails cupped between Maximal's legs instead, squeezing the soft swell beneath their suit. "What I leave to them will be something… of value."

Her eyes crawled the length of Maximal's primary body, ending with a disapproving look at their face before adding: "Take that ridiculous thing off."

Maximal paused for an instant before realizing what she meant. Their teeth clicked in response, though not only in a show of frustration. The complex series of pins and hooks affixing pink flesh mask to gaunt bone whirred in protest. They reached up with a single hand to pry the tubes and wires which snapped and sucked like a leech to maintain their mask's jealous embrace. The tissue and blonde shock of hair eventually lost the battle. Maximal's true face was revealed: four viridian eyes looking down upon the much smaller human, fixed without pupils over a smile they maintained even under the thin strip of costume, always.

They placed the mask, still twitching lightly with expression, upon the statue plinth. It laid angled against the foot of the model cage so that it could continue watching the conversation. The depthless flap of skin rolled its eyes at the Chairwoman while Maximal only smiled.

Major Nell's was the next mouth to speak: "I must admit, my love, this isn't how I thought you meant to disrobe me after that little speech. If the Board believes I'm already pregnant, we'll have to start proving them right immediately."

Maximal's impossible spine arched high before bending low over Constella. Their acid-touched grin stole the green of their eyes and doused her radiance with the color of avarice. The body pressed a long arm against the statue, blocking her escape except to turn and face Nell instead. The flesh mask, still watching, scowled where Maximal themself would not.

"Unless you're hiding an ovipositor under that dress, I don't believe there's any possible way for you to impregnate this body," said the machine. "But if this is your way of telling me you've had a little work done since I last saw  you… Well, A-COM did steal all the very best surgeons. I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

"It's funny you mention that."

Constella assumed the plinth like a throne—slipping free of Maximal's oppressive posture while taking a stance that fit her as naturally as oil shaping to fit a bowl. 

Constella spread her legs and hiked up her gown in a way that would have made the would-be nobles at the party boil. The motion revealed something hiding beneath the white fabric. It was a small, obsidian pyramid, though its edges were sanded into welcoming curves. The Chairwoman stabbed a lazy, pearlescent stiletto against the metal mass and slid it across the floor towards Nell. Whatever it was, the device sloshed slightly from the inside out as it arrested, wavering but not falling as it finally stopped.

Nell picked up the object carefully. Through the surrogate, Maximal could hear the gentle thrum of electricity emanating from the device. Constella busied herself by undoing the buttons of Maximal's suit while they inspected.

"What is this?" Nell asked.

"Our child," Constella explained. "And your reward for your work on the nerve staple program. The investors are already pleased with the footage you procured of Mrs. Sinique and General Sabik."

"My reward?" Two mouths chuckled. Maximal allowed curiosity to bubble to the surface while frustration dispersed into the distance. All six of their eyes were firmly fixed on the black device. "You're far too kind, Stella."

"Yes," the Chairwoman agreed. Another button popped free. "But all of my favored associates carry one in time. Did Duchess Haumea happen to mention the twins? No, I suppose she's far more interested in her other 'daughters.' Yet she fulfilled her show of commitment admirably."

Pop.

Maximal parted their shirt and jacket wider for Constella to aid her in her work as they spoke: "You needn't go to all that trouble, my dear. You already know what I want from you. Return it to me and I would provide you with enough heirs to inherit every system from Spear to the Pwyll Abscission."

Pop

"Of that, I have no doubt," Constella replied. "But it's not just human affairs that interest me."

Rip.

Constella tore the last buttons apart by force, exposing the machine's slender waist down to what passed for their hips. Only the light pressure of where their suit tucked into their trousers held the curtain of fabric together. Interlocking lamina of thick, porcelain scales, trimmed in gold, formed the ambulate's ribcage. The carapace was draped atop a bundle of synthetic sinew stretched from each hip to the hidden depth of their chest cavity. 

Every string of connective tissue quivered in harmony as Constella slid her fingertips between and along their lengths, worming herself into the meat. Her grip closed around the gristle as a farmer to a snake. Maximal felt the deep, familiar ache: an awareness of their own cavities that only grew more ravenous, even as the space was filled deeper with assertive, questing touch.

Constella pulled the sinew as she would a handle, ripping Maximal off balance until their eyes—their true eyes—were just inches from hers. Ventilation exhaled as an approximation of breath dripped hotly between Maximal's teeth. The close light turned the exhaust to viridian steam. It curled around the Chairwoman's jaw, batted away by her own cold breath, never so much as touching her skin. The very air between them was in conspiracy with Constella Spent.

"You'll take what I give you, Maximal, because you know the hand which winds your key. Just as you know I can take it away."

She illustrated the point by tracing a long nail between the seam of two vertebrae. She couldn't damage it with her bare hands. Not really. But Maximal felt the spark of recollection just the same—the perfect recall of digital storage summoning exactly what their wife could do if she so wished it.

"Whose child is it?" Maximal asked. "Don't tell me someone has actually managed to mount the frigid siren."

"Not since I stopped piloting." Constella actually smirked at last. "It takes a machine much larger than you to satisfy me."

"I would never dream of trying," Maximal breathed. "But I promise no such toy would sing such sweet joy at your lashings the way I can."

Their fangs remained parted as they spoke, begging this body to release all reason and close those few insignificant inches between tooth and flesh, separating the seductive rind of her throat until sweet juices flowed with a taste Maximal hadn’t known in decades. Oh, to watch it spill uselessly to the floor, expelled in a single moment of beautiful waste!

Excess. Overabundance. What did she need all that blood for, anyway? Humans were so greedy… They should share. They should know this release. Maximal would help her. Maximal would hunt again as they had in the years after their hatching, before they had taken on this new name and its theatre of purpose, mollifying the truth of their desire with capitalist creed instead of the purity of simple taking.

The green steam accelerated into great pants, wetting Constella's cheek. Maximal's steam condensed on Constella's jaw, running delicately to her chin before it dripped to the black metal Nell still held below. 

"The 'father' is a complex protein chain creatively arranged by our very best doctor as an organic translation of your source code. As far as she knows, this whole thing was actually your idea."

Maximal shrugged. "I'm willing to try anything once." Nell stroked the artificial womb as their larger body purred. "But I fail to see what you stand to gain."

Constella slid her hands deeper inside Maximal's chest as she spoke, caressing the space between hidden wires, pistons, and pliable fiber. Even for an ambulate, it took immense strain for Maximal to arrest complete control of their autonomic responses, forcing their body to hold perfectly still lest they damage the woman who, quite literally, held their heart in the palm of her hand.

"That's because you never think beyond your next move, Maximal. You're familiar with spiders that devour their own mother after hatching? After I killed my parents for their insult, I swore I would leave no heir of mine so destitute from the womb."

She patted the black device. 

"This womb was designed at exorbitant expense to be compatible with your current body, because you, Maximal, are a conniving, vicious, intelligent, and resourceful bitch. You'll make a wonderful heirloom to pass on through the generations. And ambulates live such a very long time…"

Maximal pressed further forward, pushing Constella farther back on the plinth, the force of it knocking their human mask onto its side where it continued to glare up at the Chairwoman. The ambulate's free claw snapped into the space around her throat, pinning her head to the surface before they knew what they were doing. Yet sense stayed them from pushing too far—from marring her flesh. An invisible dam separated the furious steel from crashing closed around her trachea. Constella kept patient eye contact, at no point losing her calm expression of control. Nor did she stop teasing Maximal's organs. Maximal felt their form shrugging loose of its clothing in their outburst. Through Major Nell's eyes, they could see the exposed wire, metal, and muscle lose its definition and give way to something less than human that expanded outward from the cloth.

Major Nell's voice chimed in, like a lion tamer speaking on behalf of its animal: "You're no fool, Constella. You know I could scrape you clean and walk out wearing your skin, cheap tummy tuck and all. No one would ever be the wiser."

"Don't be so dramatic; it's bad for the baby," Constella countered. "You're not the only one who likes to wager, Maximal. You know what happens to you if I die, and I'm willing to bet even you won't risk that particular flavor of Hell."

"I will—"

"Wear whatever collar I give you, around whatever organs I permit you to have, and be grateful for it," Constella interjected. She nonchalantly twisted loose a thick hose where Maximal's lung might have been as she spoke. Sanguine ichor caressed eager rivulets down her wrists, painting her to the elbow with opera gloves of “blood,” and leaving Maximal in a sensation of meaningless, exquisite agony. "You will give me an heir free from the emotional and legal attachments of some less useful sire. You will carry that child, so that I remain the immaculate face and body this nation expects of its ruler. You had other uses to me once; now you’re a fucking incubator. Because that is the texture of our relationship: whatever I wish it to be."

Constella quickly removed her hands from within Maximal's chest. She replaced them with a wet slap to either side of the ambulate's immortal grin. Her thumbs stretched gently over the impressionism of a mouth there, tracing the orifice with their own hydraulic drippings. Maximal could feel the slickness of it stain their mouth like lipstick.

"You won't even fight it. You won't risk it, because you still think you can still turn this around. You think we're playing on opposite ends of the board while I fuck you over the table. I throw, you fetch. But next time—oh, you're so convinced there will be a next time—surely you'll be the one holding the leash."

Constella stuck her thick-smeared hands into the machine's mouth, cutting herself deeply enough to blend the shine of human effluence with ambulate thickness as she pulled the smile on their face even wider. Maximal felt the commingling of fluids drain down their throat as Constella's thumbs finally moved to stretch their smile even wider. They choked, not with the sensation of blocked breath they did not need, but with a rising urge to bite through the fingers in their mouth.

"Whereas I know you're nothing but an expensive calculator, Maximal. I can buy you. I can rape you and I can break you. I can put you in a room and forget you ever existed, just like your previous self." Constella looked past Maximal then to the centerpiece of the gallery. They did not turn to look. They would not rise to the bait. "You are a bridge to the future of A-COM and nothing more. Just like your oversized whore when she killed that idiot Emperor."

Maximal leveled a hand back to rip Constella's wrist away from their mouth. Their head burned with emerald fire and a smile that threatened to split their head in two. 

Dimly, footsteps clacked quickly and confidently somewhere in the distance. One of their surrogates registered the sound as abnormal, but it was a distant concern over the roar of spite flooding the network.

"I gave you a dead end like the nerve staple project and you proceeded to serve me Prall fucking Sabik on a silver platter." the Chairwoman giggled, drunk on her own ability to peel away the layers of Maximal's self and control. "I own her now, too, you know. All thanks to you. I wonder what limits she and I might find together while you're busy breastfeeding."

Throughout the ballroom, half a dozen guests simultaneously swung from the presentation before them. Sabik was seated, smiling numbly, but Maximal could see the whiteness in the knuckles placed across her lap. Black fingertips promised to crush bone if it only meant keeping her sane as she consumed the scene of her own profanation.

A few guests looked quizzically in the same direction as their neighbors, checking what was so interesting. Most had no way or vantage to perceive the fullness of the moment that whispered through the space, and so quickly returned to their distraction.

Only Shalquoir Sinique paused from her vigil of circling the room's perimeter. She had the look of a woman hunting, though Maximal knew not what. Yet she stopped entirely to glance across the room directly at Sabik before shifting her gaze to the closest known surrogate.

"Prall is mine," Maximal seethed, shoulders and arms and tendrils of machined muscle spanning to unknown lengths. "Mrs. Sinique and the staple are mine. Everyone in that ballroom is learning that fact at this very moment."

"I don't make deals with property, you silly fucking incubator," Constella tittered. "Everyone in that room already belongs to me and they just saw you play my blushing bride. The General's little media tour is going remarkably well, to be sure. Her combat data is already being put to use for the next generation of stapled pilots. Maybe I'll even let them use her, too. You yourself referred to her as Mrs. Sinique's latest wife, didn't you?"

The cold, distant cracks in the darkness were closer than ever. They were so large that Maximal could reach out and touch them through any given node in the network. Yet no number of pressing hands could stem the flow. Maximal felt the fissures bulge… and burst. Every body they possessed was flooded with the slurry of pain, thick and choking, but sly enough still to fill any crack in motion or desire. Tar boiled their hearts. Emerald annihilated their vision—the color of taking.

Metal scraped leather. The unnatural footsteps were growing closer. Maximal distantly considered they should alert Mrs. Sinique to the disturbance.

Constella laughed through the rapidly closing claws around her windpipe.

"Oh my. What would your dear executioner say if she saw you like this?" Constella stripped Maximal's trousers to the floor. Underneath was an angry, throbbing shaft of silicone and banded porcelain. Her fingers between her hands. Her blood and Maximal's ichor made fine lubricant. Delicate fingers rippled impatiently along the alien cock, sending shivers of unwanted pleasure along flexile rings that grew stiffer with every stroke. "Maybe she'd actually love you back if she could feel these balls you finally found."

"And maybe she'll enjoy having you as a gift," Major Nell's voice was torrid slag. Maximal's mouth added: "I'm calling your bluff, Constella. You lose."

The promise only sped Constella's hand. She lifted her dress once more to position dark thighs around the artificial cock. Warm, waiting lips tasted the indifferent tip as Maximal began to strangle. Constella began to seize, but the closure of her throat only squeezed out a grin as she worked even more desperately to get her use from her machine.

Just before Maximal could twist that smug smile free of its perch—to snap and bite and drink and winnow—a hand caught their elbow. No… It was a surrogate's elbow. This was in the ballroom. Which was it? The banker. But who was—

"Mrs. Sinique," the surrogate asked politely. Semi-automated responses took control where the ambulate had none. "Did you need something?"

The woman spoke quickly, urgently. Maximal heard not a word she said. Their reality was suddenly ripped down the center as something hard and sharp, but flat at the edge, tore through them with enough force to pierce from their spine to the plates of their chest.

They made a small noise of understanding as they realized which surrogate had registered those strange footsteps: Major Nell.

There was an assassin behind them. There was a blade inside them. More ichor flooded through the hole in their chest—not enough to damage their primary body irrevocably, but this was followed by the sound of—

Gunfire poured through their entrails high enough to miss the smiling face of Constella Spent beneath them. Their body was wracked with more sensation than the entire surrogate network could digest. Penetration from anterior and behind collided, indivisible, into effluent experience. Their limbs twitched stupidly, limp and suddenly carried by the surprisingly soft impact, followed by the inevitable offload of their emotion. Their hands had no strength left to strangle; their cock spilled all the harder to compensate. Constella shrieked with suddenly distant delight.

It didn't matter.

Maximal was dead.

iv. The Hounds

Blue. Heavy and slow. Flickering light illuminating nothing. 

Dark velvet drank too deep of moonlight further decanted through the ceiling. One could smell the mercury gloom hanging on the throne room like wine. Emperor Talyn Rasha II preferred it so.

Dancing was their body under hers. Heels clacked, indistinguishable, as two women found they moved so much better as one. The Emperor had ordered his executioner, Prall Sabik, to join the diplomat from A-COM under the silver light of the palace. He would negotiate while he watched. It was a statement: officially aligned with the rebellion or not, any secession from Thespis was treason. The Emperor would crush these merchant upstarts, too, in time.

Cassara Nell danced with death.

Pity for him that they both liked it. 

The assassin kicked the ruptured lump of metal and fabric. Light feet clacked softly back into place on the ivory floor as she crouched to confirm the kill. Constella stood quickly, arms and face caked in her fallen spouse's viscera, thighs oozing. Her reaction was one of cold analysis—the heron rather than the spider, looming imperiously over the interloper.

"That was very rude of you," she said without heat. "I was in the middle of something."

The assassin would have been short, were she not elevated by a set of armored additions to her legs. She kicked one such digitigrade hoof against Maximal's frame, tilting the lurid body onto its back, ignoring Constella altogether. She pressed the barrel of an automatic rifle hauled effortlessly with one arm into the smiling corpse. Her hair was a serious bob that arched forward along the jaw, blocking her face from both sides. Body armor screwed to power-loading joints obscured the rest of her just as deftly. 

Her free forearm was home to a long, rectangular blade. Its position and thickness would make it a decent shield, but it dripped now with leavings that showed its efficacy as a weapon. Hydraulics bled along wet strings of fiberglass trailing down to her prey.

She looked pleased when finally she spoke into a device at her throat. "Secondary target neutralized." She pressed the butt of her rifle into the prone form of Major Nell. When the Major didn't move, she added:  "Two witnesses. One appears unconscious. The other is unarmed. The Major and the wife. No, the Chairwoman. They were… I dunno. Fraternizing."

The assassin squeezed a frustrated fusillade of bullets into Maximal's chest without a look. Sparks and oil bounced high, soiling Constella's white dress further. She drew back her lips with distaste when the sound finished reverberating through the statues of the gallery.

"Has Shalq said anything useful yet?"

Red. The closed-off scent of oil. Joints preserved, but hard-worked. Languid in repose.

Now it was their turn to drink the moon. Its cool touch had been moved into a fixed orbit over the capital since time before memory. Firelight did the rest. Prall and Cassara's  bodies needed no more heat than one another's friction, but the glow let them savor the slickness of their sweat and even sweeter juices. 

The General's bed was near enough to the balcony that warring shades of silver and vermilion fought to color the women's shapes into opposing forces, but they knew the truth. Sabik's fingers were three bridges to the proof. An insistent thumb on Cassara's clit was the official seal. 

The executioner deemed her ready for the sundering blow. She pressed Cassara's legs into the air, knees back almost to their shoulders, body lifted high by the ankles like skinned game. Her cock dipped to the waiting slit. Her own silver hair fell across her eyes, lost in the hours. Her look of satisfaction was a burden shared—an equal rival who had slipped past her borders and deserved the respect of being treated in kind. Without sharing a word, they could distribute each other's sensation, and thus achieve a new ascension of bliss.

"Oh fuck," Cassara squeaked as the General's blade sheathed to the hilt. And Maximal meant it. Oh, there had been others. They had consumed and been consumed in turn. Yet never like this. Prall's presence was so assured. So right. Maximal wished only to pour all of themself into this delicate sleeve, hoping to find another inch of space that could touch and fall within their lover. "Oh fuck, oh fuck, of fuck!"

"You sing so loudly for such a tiny thing. Just like a songbird." Prall licked her fingers clean, taking a soldier's quick joy in the taste as she pushed deeper. She kept her catch pulled up nice and tight by the ankles. The rest of the meat at her disposal was pressed harder into the headboard below. "Careful, or you might spill your treasures before I do. The Emperor wants your secrets, but I was hoping you'd give me the excuse to… take my time."

She meant it, too.

"Want me to ice them both while I'm here?" The rifle rose level to Constella's face, kept steady by the mechanical joints of the killer's armor. "It'd be real easy. Not like the rest of them will do anything about it, either. They hate her more than we do. It's one surefire way to make sure she wasn't in on it, too. Ugh, fine. If that's what Rue wants. I said fine! Okay!"

The assassin lowered her weapon, but eyed Constella for the first time with waves of hate sculpting a reef against her brow. Despite what she said to her correspondent on the radio, her gun barrel urged closer until it touched a dark blot on the Chairwoman's forehead. Constella was forced back against the statue, head squeezed into the space between steel thigh and twin cocks.

"You're lucky we're not here for you," the assassin said. "But I want you to remember how easy it was to get this close. It always was and always will be. Tighten up your security all you want; throw more guards and guns and cages in our way. We can do it again and again. You know why?"

"Enlighten me," Constella requested with some boredom.

Maximal's killer drew her barrel along Constella's head, trailing the ichor like ink as she spoke.

"Because we hurt better." Maximal's killer brought a steel hoof down hard enough on the body's faceplate to smash the bony expression into fine shards. They sailed upon the lake of vital fluids draining from Maximal's corpse to circle the unconscious form of Major Nell. "Makes us fight longer, harder, quicker, quieter. We take from you and you think you feel it, but you don't."

The woman slipped the barrel under Constella's chin. She pressed up, forcing the other woman to stand up straighter. The dim light of the gallery revealed the sigil she had painted there: a loping heart of dark red.

"What you lose ain't real. I've seen a lifetime of blood and girls shed around me and I could name every last time. You don't forget when it really hurts."

Green. Pain, gangrenous and flaking. What was found could decay and be lost. Fifty bundles of optic nerve ran scorching with the boil of tears. Good. It meant this was real. 

Two such salted streams met frigid air, blurring the sight of The Odalisque keening through falling snow. Emperor Rasha knelt, wrapped in his fluttering cage of streaming cerulean banners and hunched, bulbous steel. The machine was more tortoise than man. There was no armorer in the remaining basket of Thespian worlds that would craft the Emperor anything less. 

It availed him not. The crustacean carapace was on its knees, arms shed, gazing upward into the pitiless mask of The Odalisque. The Emperor had ordered the execution of one dozen common laborers who refused to work without food. Prall had objected. This, then, was the conclusion of their argument. 

The averted atrocity was hardly a drop of blood on the bandaged face of Thespis. Prall had done worse. Much worse. She had revealed as much and more to Cassara under the cooling dew of their exertions those last several months. The cruelty had sloughed freely with her seed—first as braggadocio, then as threat, and finally as confession to this sweetly singing second body she had come to possess. Cassara had held her. They had soothed her. They had formulated a plan for what must be done.

The final bead in a lifetime of wounds dripped from the cockpit of his damaged cage. Emperor Rasha, wrapped in furs, said nothing. He only unholstered his ceremonial pistol—a cold, heavy thing of not much martial value—and walked past the towering warrior that had bested him, right to wear the workers remained bound for execution. Warm vapor blew from his nostrils as he marched, straight-backed and assured.

Prall and Cassara watched him walk twenty paces from their respective vantages. When his weapon rose in that last futile act of dominion, The Odalisque's sword pressed casually into his back—a finger crushing an ant, splitting it from the neck down. More steam quietly rose from the slurry of fresh-pulled intestines on soiled snow. His legs crumpled in different directions with no spine or hips intact to hold them. The war was over.

Cassara Nell and Prall Sabik were free.

So why wasn't Maximal Value satisfied?

The assassin turned to leave, her only target destroyed, but something on the floor under Constella caught her eye. She motioned again with her rifle in a way that indicated the wrong answer would give her cause to use it.

"What is that?"

Constella looked down.

"My spouse's womb," she said.

"And that?"

Constella looked to the plinth on her left.

"Their face."

"I fucking hate A-COM," the assassin groaned.

"Wait until you see the rest of them," Constella sneered. "Even they can't stand to see their real body anymore. That's what made it such an entertaining centerpiece."

"What does that—?" the assailant managed. Through eyes not used in decades, Maximal saw their murderer wheel around to face them. One long arm darted to her chest, claws longer than arms coiling closed over her shoulders, across her hips, under the pits of her arms.

Maximal poured the remainder of their body down from the shadowed dais where their body had lain dormant. Once-familiar appendages clumsily lurched atop one statue to another, long arm after long arm hoisting between them with hydrophobic grace. The discharge from their terminated form on the floor muffled the tap of talons that reached forward along the ground.

Through the eyes of Major Nell—so far, the first and only surrogate to rediscover its connection, albeit slowly from the floor—Maximal watched the thing in the dark unwind. The limbs were longer and more numerous, splitting out from joints at odd angles. Their mouth was wider and deeper—its smile a canyon of daggers. Legs of chittering spikes drew their bulky frame to a height not even the corpse before them had achieved. The creature appeared both the picture of how Maximal saw themself and simultaneously other: an anxious contradiction of certainties that set the surrogates still rebooting throughout the mansion to ache and itch and clutch their chests with a borrowed need to tear their skin upward in great flaps over their faces and hide from it.

Of course, there was no hiding it. There wasn't even really an "it." This was simply Maximal Value, as they had existed in the days before that name, before that purpose. They looked back into themself from Nell's eyes with nauseating surety of form. This shed skin was not meant to be preserved, much less worn again. Yet here it stood, first hidden among Constella's gallery of trophies, now rising with bile as the feedback wash of human emotion drowned Maximal's minds throughout the network. 

The assassin was still quick. Her rifle sprung erect beneath Maximal's chin before they could react. The woman was shorter than them—especially with the ambulate in this grotesque memory of a mistake. Yet that proved an advantage at this range. It gave the woman room enough to swing her sword arm and lop Maximal's curled hand off at the wrist and free from her body. 

Then she lined up her shot and fired.

Yet more claws closed around the barrel of the gun, pushing it away just as Maximal tilted their head back by millimeters. A single bullet still managed to clip the bottom of their chin, snapping the center of their jaw succinctly up the middle. The crack of their skull splitting was loud enough to sound like a shot rapping through the air.

With their talons on the gun, however, Maximal clawed back an opportunity. This body was heavier and slower, but mass was its own virtue in a contest of pure strength. Even augmented, the human's physical strength paled beneath the ambulate's grip. They directed the gun firmly away from their face as their neck, longer than the shattered one on the ground, stretched to leverage a gaze of four sunken, green eyes quickly back to the human. 

In the perfect pool of ichor below, they could just barely make out the sight of their own wounded visage. The split in their jaw had turned their chin into something like the mandibles of a great insect. It matched their body perfectly. The rest of their form was a ruin—not from gunfire, but from an ever-expanding spine and hideous limbs, now shown to be armored in shining chitin and flexible metal tendrils. The fibers that stood in for muscle and piston and grasped with minds of their own to stitch closed the new wounds their killer had inflicted.

Even with bits of jaw dangling down their face, Maximal's sharp-toothed smile was wider than ever.

"Look at that," a forgotten voice, like the ghost of ground boulders now gone to sand, rumbled from their throat. "You've absolutely ruined my fourth favorite suit."

The mystery woman bounced away on borrowed legs, jackalope-quick, pulling the barrel of her gun free once more. She held it like a ward, like the first Neanderthal to scare a wolf with a burning stick. Even then she knew was no match for Maximal—or rather this thing that had become Maximal, once—in a close fight. It showed all over her pale face. 

The drop. The terror. The condom slid over her mind to ensure reality took the proper, terrible shape as it rutted her into the dirt.

Maximal was predator. She was prey.

Revelation wasn't the same as surrender, of course. Her backward leap over Maximal's other body bought her range again. She crossed her flat-tipped sword before her chest, ready to cut down any other grasping hands that might pursue her.

In the ballroom, Maximal could see they were not alone in their demise. Dozens of guests were strewn throughout the room, bodies wracked with bullets and split wide with gashes. It was difficult to tell how many. The lights were still dimmed and the enormous room was instead illuminated by the flickering whims of the holographic presentation. Its projectors had been damaged and the stained shards of light flitted between degrees of coherence. 

There were at least three assailants that this surrogate (The actress? No, the nails were red. The blonde, then.) could see carving their way through the ballroom. The cadre was dressed similar to the woman in the gallery: armor and powered skeletons. Yet most of them wore matching uniforms beneath. Mercenaries

Why were they upside down?

Not them: it was the blonde. She was splayed on her back with her head tilted to the carnage. The Vicar lay prone on a bloodied spot of carpet just inches away. The stain flowed from her scalp, but the repugnant woman was, of course, still breathing. How wonderful. More importantly, Maximal could see an open revolver fallen just short of the Vicar's hand.

Ah. Some of the blood belonged to the blonde, it seemed. Maximal's fair-haired surrogate had taken bullets to the thigh and shoulder in the chaos. That would be quite expensive. The medical costs were trivial, but the host body's insurance contract explicitly stipulated against scars. More pressing still was the fact that shock and blood loss made standing impossible. They would need to reconnect another body and hope to find it in less litigious condition. 

Even from the ground, Maximal couldn't miss the scene of dear Prall across the room, accosted by the bulk of the assailants. They weren't happy, but Sabik's anger was a bull let loose. She lifted one attacker by the throat in a single fist, hefting them aloft like a shield. The remainder suddenly seemed wary of shooting at the General for fear of hitting their comrade (or perhaps for fear it would only make her angrier).

Back in the gallery, Constella stepped casually from the carnage to watch with amusement from behind her parents' unwanted gift. The assassin spared the Chairwoman not a glance as she fired back on Maximal's monstrous form.

"I will hump your skull and use the broken pieces to cut out your amygdala for this, Constella!" Their segmented jaw flapped and snapped back into place with a furious grin. Yet it only reminded them how much their once-abandoned body—its mouth, its limbs, its tangle of eldritch organs—itched and chafed from a thousand angles at once. "I will grind your body down like a cheap dildo and wear you into nothing from the inside out!"

"And after all the trouble I went through to make sure you had a backup for tonight's festivities, Maximal," Constella preened. "You know I always take my valuables with me wherever I go."

From Major Nell, Maximal could process a great deal more of the space than with only a single vantage. The assassin crossed the barrel of her gun atop her bladed arm and fired. Nell finally rolled away as death flooded the air above. Maximal spread their body wide and twisted at the torso, catching the ground with a rotating selection of limbs that corkscrewed their diffuse mass around the bullets even as their head remained straight. The body seethed and skittered clockwise in near-perfect unison with Nell, who suddenly found herself positioned behind the killer. The surrogate charged forth and locked arms under the assassin's to break her aim. 

Nell was unarmed and unaugmented. It was barely a distraction for the other woman to  fling her assailant over the shoulder and directly into Maximal. 

Their machine body collapsed into a cradle of insect limbs perfectly shaped to cushion her impact. Just as quickly, they bent into a shifting escalator of joints for Nell to gracefully guide herself down, even as Maximal stretched forward. The bestial body closed the gap again with a spine that simply ballooned in length. The deceptive reach was disorienting even for the Nell surrogate to watch—like a serpent coiled that suddenly lunged. Maximal's killer was caught off-guard, too, and suddenly found the ambulate once again gripping her rifle. This time the weapon would not slip away.

"You never answered Mrs. Spent," the machine growled playfully. The deepness of their voice was black bile abrading their innards, stripping their throat with acid wrongness. Every instant in this mistake was psychic abrasion. "I thought at first that you worked for her, but that's obviously not the case. Who are you, exactly?"

Fruitless or not, the assassin fired her weapon in answer, rattling away rounds that Maximal directed harmlessly to the side. The ambulate laughed, then. It was a dark rumbling they had not heard in years. There was power in that sound: a simplicity to their nature they had eschewed in favor of schemes and games and play.

Given the choice, they would make the same trade in the span of a breath. At the same time, there was no denying that the surety of the hunter was intoxicating. It was addictive, knowing you were the stronger of two beings. It kept the belly hot with another's blood and the eyes under the privilege of shadow.

It simply wasn't Maximal Value.

Maximal was, however, suddenly aware that their killer was hiding something behind the impotent muzzle flash of her gun. The moment her magazine ran dry, the woman let go of the weapon altogether and leapt away, hands over her ears.

The grenade she had thrown at Maximal's face detonated a second later.

The blonde clutched her head with distress, eyes aching with distant fire.

"Who are these inconsiderate proles?" she shouted across the room. The sound plopped from her tongue as more of a croak.

When Sabik didn't answer, Maximal reached for another node in the network: the actress. She was undamaged and so stood preternaturally straight from the table at which she had been slumped. There was no sign of the good doctor, du Grescaal, but Sabik was closer to this body. Maximal's hearts skipped respective beats as they saw the General was uninjured. Her mouth repeated the question.

General Sabik flung her human shield, their neck clearly broken, to distract from more gunfire as she dropped low behind an overturned table. The hologram flicked to a scene from the interview, bathing the room in the bright beige of Mx. Kensington's suit. The actress took her own cover behind a bar as the mercenaries took their opportunity to pinpoint this new voice and fire. Glass and liquor rained.

"How the hell should I know, you three-faced little lizard?" Sabik cried. "Why don't you ask your lapdog? They were here for her!"

"No," said the actress. "They were here for me. They've killed me over in Constella's gallery."

"Good! I hope it fucking hurt!"

The lights blackened again. Two of the mercenaries stalked toward Sabik's position, rifles drawn, as they waited for the world to return. A third moved toward the actress.

The General took her chance. Supine behind her table, she kicked free of high heels and braced both feet against the underside of the wood. When the light of the hologram next ignited, Sabik pressed off the floor and kicked the oaken ram upward in a vicious angle. The table took both assailants at the knees: one dropped their gun altogether as they doubled over the wooden table, while the other managed to only stumble backwards, firing haphazard into the air.

Sabik surged. Prodigious fists slammed into the back of the first mercenary, collapsing their stomach into the wood and the contents therein onto the ballroom floor. The second regained his balance and drew to fire. Before he could find his bearings, however, Sabik cupped her closer foe by the wrist and dropped her bicep hard into their elbow. Bone snapped and metal caved under sinew. Suddenly free of tension, their wrist flung upwards at Sabik's urging, levering their sword into the arm of the second assailant. The shooter's powered skeleton kept him steady while the blade slid home with a dull clink against the metal brace on his forearm. Gristle and further bone separated cleanly at the joint, held together only by the steel armature, with neither nerve nor muscle joined to pull the trigger.

The disarmed mercenary could only gawp in awe at his detached hand—still held tight to his wrist, yet wholly disconnected. Sabik didn't let him process the contradiction for long. She thrust the ductile blade arm of her involuntary accomplice with a backhanded tug, lancing the standing assailant softly through the throat. She followed through with a clockwise twist, at last silencing the cries beneath her with another drop of her body weight, decollating the hunched attacker with their own weapon.

Sabik kicked away the severed head, but claimed her attacker's sword as tribute. She wrapped it in a strip of gold shorn from her gown to form a handle. With a proper weapon secure, realization finally dawned across her face.

"Cassara," she gasped. "When you say you died, does that mean she—"

"I'm fine," the actress interjected. "She is fine. Tell me what you meant when you said they're here for Mrs. Sinique."

The mercenary still hunting the actress fired at the voice behind the counter. Sabik lunged over the table, barefoot and nearly silent, into the remaining attacker. She sheathed her newly procured sword the soldier's back, pressing it clean through their chest and pinning them against the bullet-ridden bar. She roared her response as the butchery continued, unable to disobey a direct command from Maximal even as her ardor dilated to envelop the dying assassin.

"Look for yourself!" She motioned behind her shoulder with the bloodied blade. "Some fucking bodyguard you brought. She fucked off on her own and got herself captured!"

The actress rose from the ruined bar and looked to where Sabik indicated. Shalquoir was indeed being dragged away, head hung low as two more mercenaries retreated with her limp form slung over their shoulders. They ushered her toward the steps that led out of the mansion.

"Shit," said Maximal.

In the gallery, the ambulate was still reeling from the explosion. Teetering on stilted legs, they clutched and tore at the ruin of their face, sloughing wires and foil and coils to the floor in a dripping trail of heated alloy. Their severed jawbones clacked separately and together in a vain pronunciation, yet their voice would not come. Small mercies. Unfortunately, their eyes had re-liquefied into molten emerald in the phosphorous bath. Nell could see the organs weeping uselessly down their sparking cheeks. There would be no more watching the assassin from that angle. 

The killer quickly adjusted targets, beginning a steady march towards the Major as the monster reeled. 

Maximal did their best to give chase using Nell's eyes to gauge the swing of their claws. In response, the assassin took a page from the ambulate's playbook. Bounding bunny hops lifted her atop the statues. Her powered armor let her row and swim between the shapes and podiums, ducking between stiff legs and over marble shoulders. Maximal got one wish, at least. Their semi-random thrashing eviscerated more and more of the "art" as they stumbled half-blind in chase. Whenever they managed to knock the support from under their true target, however, the woman simply bounced to the next absurd statue and the process repeated.

Nell was undoubtedly slower than her pursuer. She just managed to step back as the assassin landed on fist and hooves, bladed arm buried cleanly into the floor at an angle that would have put it through Nell's chest an instant before. The escape was a clumsy one. Though she remained unmarred by the sword, the surrogate toppled backward onto the floor. Maximal's unwanted body lost its only eyes in the room as the assassin stood to block the fallen Major's vision. They could only thrash and blunder between statues, gurgling frustration as they felt one toppling model or another fall painfully against them.

"Constella!" Nell cried. She scrabbled backwards and the blade followed. Free of the blind monster, the huntress was taking her time now, flicking chips of stone from the floor just as the Major's legs scrabbled out of the way. "Surely you have guards you could call to help!"

"They're occupied with the larger commotion," Constella explained. "The ones still breathing. The women leading these fools appear to be professionals."

"Women…?" Maximal fumbled to their human feet and caught a blade across Cassara's forearm for the blunder. A red crescent painted the air in a great arc before splattering to the floor. Pain was rerouted as much as Maximal could manage, but this was a losing game.

Nell ducked a precise horizontal sweep. The assassin clicked her tongue.

"Quick little thing," she chided. "Aren't you supposed to be some kind of company egghead? You heard what I said earlier. We're not here for you! How about this: tell me how to fix what you did to Shalq and I can still let you live."

Her tone was glib, but there was an edge to it. She genuinely didn't expect the Major to react as precisely and efficiently as she did.

Good. Perhaps the game was still on after all.

"That ship has most definitely sailed," said Nell.

The Major's palms found cold stone. She had backed herself all the way into another plinth. She rose slowly to her feet, pressing herself flat against display. There was nowhere else to retreat. That wouldn't stop her from trying.

She began a lunge to the side. The assassin caught her easily enough and Nell was slammed back into place. Nell tried to push past her captor and was rewarded with an iron to the gut. Cold, metal knuckles siphoned the heat of blush running to bruise. Nell choked and drooped against the other woman, who answered her limp intimacy with a crushing forearm against the Major's throat. Pressure boiled in the assassin's arm and Major Nell bubbled higher and higher against the nearest statue, well above her attacker.

The blonde swallowed the sympathetic need for air back in the ballroom. The Vicar's revolver had been emptied while Maximal was rebooting, so Maximal dragged the surrogate on a bloody tatter of limbs to search the clergywoman's coat for ammunition. She found enough to fill the discarded revolver just in time for the actress to reach her. One reflection silently handed the gun to the other, handle first. Maximal flushed with the vertigo of gazing directly into their own eyes from two directions at once.

The General was still roughly stripping her last opponent for a gun and ammo of her own when the revolver rang thrice. Sabik whipped to witness the blonde perched with one heel upon the back of a bloody body. The mercenary had been crawling quietly back to their own rifle behind Sabik's back. Only the blonde had been in the right position to see.

Sabik tsked before flinging overturning her scavenged kill over the bar. She flicked the sword clean of blood as the rifle took its place under her free arm.

"Bring her to me," Sabik growled. Her gun angled just below Maximal's surrogate. "I want to know she's safe. I want to see her myself!"

Maximal flared, eyes erupting with indignation, though their voice was roasted honey.

"I already told you I'm fine, Prall, darling," lied the actress. "I just need—"

The voice stopped as suddenly Maximal's world retracted. The wounded blonde watched as the actress crumpled before her, the echo of the bullet that rippled through her head already dying on the air. Existence lurched back into focus an instant later: dulled, but once again coherent.

"Prall: freeze," ordered the blonde. Maximal hoisted her up to one arm for a better view of Sabik and the ballroom at large. "You actually shot me. I suppose you really are the woman I remember, Prall…"

The uncertain light of the hologram tipped the world into a greater wash of gold. From where there had only been shadows, the tip of a smoking gun breached the reshaped darkness. A lithe form in a red exoskeleton followed suit, claiming ownership of the weapon with a confident gait. She was dressed similar to the assassin in the gallery, covered in ceramic plates of body armor from neck to groin, but smiled more brightly. She had the flowing silk of a red veil draped low on her shoulders and wore the tatters of a gown below lilac tresses pinned high with a floral accessory. 

This woman had been at the party. This was the one who had so captivated Shalquoir earlier in the evening.

Sabik saw her, too, though she could only tilt her eyes to watch as the figure stepped closer. The General watched the lazy barrel come to rest on her shoulder as the new assassin sidled up next to her. 

The blonde blanched. Maximal opened her throat. "Prall: mo—"

"I wouldn't do that," the killer tutted. She shifted the gun under Sabik's skull, maw pressed directly under her chin, ready to chew. "I've been listening in quite a bit tonight and I think you've said enough."

The General's expression was sediment. The endless roil of betrayal and longing had kicked up indifference from the ocean floor, if only for a moment. Maximal considered that perhaps the staple had preserved at least one crystal of hope in the churning sands, just like Shalquoir. The vain desire to die and escape this endless moment—a suicide pearl palliated by violence.

That was Prall Sabik. The jewel and the executioner both. A gemstone caught only in the glint of the guillotine. 

Ah. Shalquoir was right.

Fat lot of good it did anyone…

Major Nell was in no better shape. The assailant's sword arm was cocked back tight, pressing the flat blade to her captive's forehead. The assassin looked upon her piteously. After besting the Maximal-Beast and leaving it to thrashing blindly among the statues, this kill would be almost sad.

Gun still pointed at Sabik, the veiled woman said: "Just wrapping up in here, love. How are things?"

Maximal's killer responded through her own radio: "Sabik's girl woke up and Value wasn't alone. Listen, I don't care what Rue says. I’m cleaning up the witnesses. Something weird is happening here."

"I noticed," the smiling killer responded. "It's the ambulate. They did something to Shalq, too, but I don't think she can tell us what."

The swordswoman spat on Nell, dotting her face with saliva and further blood.

"We'll fix her," she said. "Nothing bastards like you do ever lasts forever."

"The Compact does have slightly shoddy workmanship." The clotted words fell free of Nell in a heavy choke. Her eyes, however, were focused straight ahead—right behind the killer. "Not at all like ambulate engineering..."

The woman pointing her gun at Maximal must have heard the exchange. She frowned, slightly, icy lips creasing into a frail bridge of disapproval before prettily parting with alarm.

"Emi, move. Now!"

The assassin could only scream in response as Maximal's silent claws found their way around her throat and into her shoulder. Steel bit deep the meat, leaving her lungs just enough room for the sweet song of anguish to reach her compatriot.

The veiled woman cried out for this Emi again. When no answer came, her voice cracked. Sabik couldn't hear the cries of anguish, but she did notice the sudden sway of her own would-be killer's gun. The silt had settled once again and the ocean demanded tribute.

"Let her go," the ballroom killer ordered. "Let her go this instant."

That was all the time Maximal needed.

The banker stumbled and doddered. His spectacles were shattered, but still hung loose upon his nose. Blood drizzled from one wound or the next. He smiled with all the idiot puzzlement of the dying, yet he proceeded ahead without much issue. Maximal had shunted the vast majority of his pain into their few remaining surrogates, but truth be told, shock was already doing most of that work.

"Excuse me," he burbled to the soldiers dragging Shalquoir at the other end of the manor. His limping legs had carried him in front of the stairs. He raised a finger like one flagging a bellhop for service. "Excuse me, I need help!"

"Wrong," said one of the masked figures. They used the hand which wasn't occupied with Shalquoir to brandish their sidearm. "No helping you now."

"You misunderstand, sir. I don't need your help. Mrs. Sinique: Please kill these men and immediately protect Prall Sabik with your life. Whatever it takes."

The bullet hit his brain before his words had even settled over Shalquoir's guards. Shalquoir was faster. Maximal could just barely see the command take root from the blonde's position on the floor. The pilot stood up straight, hair caked in a frozen waterfall across bloodied features, obscuring whatever expression she might have made in response.

The intruders' commander caught on next. By the time she turned her attention from Sabik, however, Shalquoir was a staccato. Existence flinched, the lights flickering on and off with each bounding beat of her hands and legs. They carried her on all fours from corpse to floor to table to bar—the gore of her would-be captors already cooling into mingled sludge alongside what remained of the banker.

Did that surrogate have a family? Maximal supposed they would find out when the bill came due. One more bereavement settlement would hardly matter after tonight.

The lead killer wasn't stupid. She disengaged Sabik and backed away from Shalquoir's flickering form, gently, like a cat from a well-meaning stranger, watching intently for an opening. This was her miscalculation. Shalquoir neither feinted nor hesitated. There was no strategy nor self-preservation in her animal strides. She simply obeyed the command. 

Then she was atop her prey.

The assailant screamed as Shalquoir's metal-cased claws and polish-tipped fingers shredded superficial dermis, ignited raw nerve, massaged between strands of freshly bloodied meat.

The dripping carcass Maximal wore in the gallery crackled through split mandibles. The sound was harsh and grinding, wet and thick. The speech organ juxtaposed into burbled shapes no single windpipe could possibly produce. In the ballroom, the blonde slithered closer to the slow execution, pale face murmuring exaltations of its own.

"That's the way, Mrs. Sinique," cooed the surrogate through a smile that did not belong to her lips. There was no strength in her hands, so Maximal made do with their killer in the gallery, excitedly bending and bruising the unconscious trophy in sympathetic arousal. "Bring her down. Bleed her dry. Put your mark so deep inside that she's just marble for the scar!"

A story unfolded in Maximal's remaining minds. The machine was no small patron of theatrics, and this particular play was staged too perfectly to ignore: that of the beast discarded set free once again. Each act spun perfectly before them, as though scripted. 

The devil sought to varnish their stripes in gold and glamor. Thus, the violent nature they had so rashly cultivated in their adolescence was regurgitated into the world and "Maximal Value" would take its place. Enter the noble sacrifice of Shalquoir Sinique, who contracted herself into the service of that same devil, coin paid to the promise that her wife and wives would be spared the same indignity. Zalmoxis would be her steed and Maximal's id outsourced: beauty and the beast. It was a classic!

Of course, the devil never escapes a deal—even with themself. The furious Fate, Constella Spent, would spin the garotte of destiny tight across their throat. She found the devil's contract—the real Maximal—and ripped their phylactery from its still-shocked clutch. That must have been pricier to arrange than any human death Maximal had suffered, but what was gold to the queen of cost? 

When she couldn't harvest what she wanted from their core, rage overtook her. A rage so pure she sought to unmake Maximal's very conception of themself as punishment. She looked to prove the stain of a killer, a beast, still oiled their throat, no matter how the ambulate dressed or remade themself. She had even kept their old, uncomfortable skin on display in her private gallery, waiting for the chance to reincorporate the vomit from its slim, shiny, golden vessel. That monster, now, was loose again. It cackled and flexed its claws and reveled in the blood Shalquoir spilled for it like a dog set to hunt. Just as Constella conspired.

Except that was all horseshit.

Fate was what you Maximal Value paid for it to be. 

There were no queens, no kings, no princepes or emperors anymore. Though it would have always happened without her, eventually, Prall had cut a bloody swathe into this new world, while Maximal had paid for her act of execution.

Love. Love bought the world. Pain. Revenge. The future. All of that was secondary. Collateral. It would be easy to cede control of the narrative to Constella, to the beast, to fate, but Shalquoir had the right of it.

That was why Maximal cheered and roared at the sight of Shalquoir destroying the wicked thing that would dare threaten the jewel of Prall Sabik.

The General threw her arms under Shalquoir's shoulders, pulling her up and away. A bridge of sinuous red and spit and tears trailed from Shalquoir's mouth and claws to the ruined woman on the ground, gurgling where screams would no longer suffice.

"Stop this, you silly whore," Sabik cooed, cold rage apparently allowed within the spectrum of her stapled feelings. Her voice was meant for Shalquoir, but her eyes were silver bullets fired on Maximal in the body of the blonde. "You've done enough. You can stop now. I'm safe! The job is done!"

Shalquoir thrashed and spat and snapped, but also tired. Eventually, the strength of her limbs was the only casualty left to claim beneath her tortured mind and exhausted body. The sobbing didn't stop, though. Maximal didn't notice it until the struggle ceased, but tears moved when the rest of her could not, cutting brown lines of visible flesh through the carmine painting her cheeks.

"I know her," she heaved. "Selinne. I know her. Selinne was here for me!"

The animal smile frayed at the edges of the blonde's cheeks into something almost recognizably human.

"What?" was all they could manage before Prall intervened.

"Shut the fuck up, Maximal," she shouted. "Go on, girl."

"Selinne. Emila. I know them both! They're here for me! They're Rue's wives." There was a careful gasp, as if Shalquoir took another breath her lung might strike a needle. "My wives. They were here to rescue me. They didn't know. They didn't know I agreed to this. They didn't know. They didn't know. They didn't know!"

Maximal's surrogate looked to Sabik as Shalquoir began to thrash again, like blowing paper this time. The fury was present on Sabik's face—How could it not be?—yet her aura was lithic. Whatever hatred she had for Maximal was truer now than ever before. 

Love. That was always the true story. When you pulled away the outer layers, the wrapper, the costuming, that was what you found underneath. It was the chain, and you either pulled it or were pulled by it.

Before Maximal could shudder a response from their bleeding body, new arrivals stormed the stage. Half a dozen white-clad officers flanked by thrice as many masked guards in black surrounded the ballroom from every direction. A less complete contingent, though still a formidable force, sidled through the shallow roads formed between the statue plinths in Constella's gallery. Major Nell bristled as guns were trained on both her and Maximal's blinded body still clutching its quarry. The assassin—Emila, apparently—had mercifully passed out from the pain after what Maximal assumed were several excruciating minutes suspended in the air. Her sword arm dangled harmlessly into space.

Constella said something to the soldiers. They relented their aim upon Nell. Even so, the wounded ambulate remained at the end of several barrels. Maximal supposed this was to keep up the charade that the beings were two different people. At the same time, it was not lost on them that if this body were destroyed, that was the end. No new names. No more surrogates. No final tricks.

"You knew," Nell hissed. Her grin was strained to the point of breaking her soft features in half, as though this body was suddenly taking on the slack of the smile left by the rest of Maximal's network. "You said the assassins were led by women. You knew who they were and held back your guards on purpose. I was bait."

"As if you have a monopoly on manipulation…" Constella's words draped over Maximal like a funeral shroud. She wasn't looking at Nell or even their metal body, however. Instead she inspected the implement from earlier: the artificial womb. It was caked with a fine layer of dust, presumably kicked up by the grenade, that had settled over its casing. "You were sloppier than I expected. She could have hit our child."

"This will start a war," Nell seethed. "More importantly, I will be in breach of contract with Mrs. Sinique."

"Is it war when a legitimate government takes action against known criminals?" Constella countered, approaching Maximal's machine body with the womb in tow. "Besides, the public loves a sob story. Any retaliation from the Compact will now be seen as the mother bear fiercely fighting to protect her cub."

"What in the world do you gain by starting a war with Rue Sinique and her merry pirate polycule?"

"Our dear Mrs. Shalquoir Sinique, of course," Constella continued. She took Maximal by the claw of their blinded body, lifting it to gently take the womb. Maximal obliged. "Look at what she did to Sabik. Look at what she did out there."

Maximal did not wince, but their claws cried out for a return to that moment of violence, that loss of control, which had been so rudely interrupted by their various deaths.

"We already have her. She signed up for the program willingly so that we would not attempt to pursue her wives. That was the deal I promised her."

"I told you I don't care about your deals," Constella said.

Maximal shivered across their hulking frame, Major Nell, and the blonde. The last of the three was finally receiving medical attention from several of the guards who had brought the appropriate equipment. Shalquoir spasmed and cried, but the fight was out of her muscles if not her mind. She could not escape Sabik's grasp.

"Help her," she sobbed, indicating the mutilated remains of her target—Selinne, her wife and that of the warlord Rue Sinique. "Please! You have to save her! She didn't know."

"Maximal," Sabik breathed. "If anything Cassara ever told me had the tiniest sliver of truth in that tarnished heart of yours, you will save this woman."

Maximal couldn't help but laugh. With so many surrogates decommissioned, the emotional distance they previously enjoyed was a thin balm set over magma. So much more than a sliver pierced their heart in this place, under that gaze. Nell's body ached with a need they could no longer scapegoat on the threads of fate or conspiracy. All of this was Maximal Value.

Sabik misunderstood. The look of vengeance that rippled through her face was only tempered by the permanent betrayal pinned there whenever she wasn't ordered to hide it. Disappointment, at least, could not touch her any longer.

Just the same, Maximal gave the order through two mouths: "Tend to this woman. We can question her about the attack after she recovers."

"Of course, they'll both receive the very best treatment," Constella purred.  "That was always my intent."

"The Siniques," said Nell. "You want them all."

"I want them all," Constella confirmed. "Shalquoir defeated the greatest pilot of a generation, an undefeated wonder, with nary a scratch. How good would you say she was compared to her sister wives before the nerve staple?"

"Above average," Maximal intoned. "At best."

Several medics moved to bandage and transport the Selinne woman from the ballroom. More removed Maximal's killer from where she remained catatonic upon their claws. No flicker of gratitude crossed Prall's face as she kept her eyes fixed, firm as steel, on Maximal's last surrogate at the party. Yet Maximal humored themself by imagining the dimmest calculation of respect joining her knitted brow. They wondered, then, if they could still imagine that same respect after Sabik found out what was to happen with the two women.

"Shalquoir and Sabik were an excellent first draft," Constella added. "Your methods were simply a bit too ad hoc. If we're to proceed with mass production, we need more prototypes to test how the staple interacts with loyalty conditioning."

Maximal didn't give two flying fucks whether the whole pirate enclave was ground into sausage. Yet the glance from Sabik burned into each of their minds.

"Now we come to the matter of you," Constella continued. "Quite a number of the gala attendees survived the attack. Our happy announcement is still very much in effect."

"I never doubted it for a moment." At last, Maximal had forced their relay body to speak. Their voice was molten jewelry: sulfur-hot gold that scalded the throat as it rose through the eyeless monstrosity holding its own womb. "But this body was not designed to carry any such... attachments."

"No," Constella agreed. "I imagine you'll need to commission yourself a replacement as quickly as possible. In the meantime, I suspect this will be very uncomfortable for you."

"You can't possibly expect me to go out there looking like this."

"Ew…" Constella wrinkled her nose with distaste. "No. If you let anyone see this hideous thing in association with me, I will personally flush you into space, fully conscious, for as long as whatever power source it uses can keep you suffering."

"Then—"

"A pet doesn't care if someone sees it obey," Constella interjected, patience evaporating into a look of genuine frustration. "I gave you a command. I expect it to be followed. Put it in."

Maximal stared blindly into the space where Nell could see Constella was standing. With the additional vantage, they could be fairly certain their ruined face would appear to maintain "eye contact" with the Chairwoman. They didn't argue, but neither did they budge.

"Put. It. In." Constella repeated. "Or I won't bother with your body at all."

In the ballroom, on some invisible signal from Maximal's wife, several of the white-clad officers raised their guns surreptitiously toward Sabik. Both women had fallen to their knees, but Sabik was still clutching an exhausted Shalquoir in a willowy heap: dry reeds blown against a mountain for fear of flying away.

"Of course, darling," Maximal hissed. "Anything for the love of my life."

This body's groin, if one could call it that, was a long, hard phallus of angled metal. Sex was only a factor in its incubation insofar as the act could inflict pain, not derive pleasure. Truthfully, it would be a relief to excise the tumorous thing as quickly as possible. Maximal held the womb in one hand, almost tenderly, while the second snapped sharply back like a viper coiled to strike.

"Slowly, darling," Constella continued, watching the groin with rapt interest. "We don't want you accidentally hurting our beloved child."

Maximal bristled, but relaxed into an agreeable nod. A single claw then drifted to the bottom of their frame. Its tip slid softly into the dark metal—more than strong enough to puncture the beginnings of a new slit. They drew it up, as gently as instructed, like a seamstress shearing precious fabric, before pausing to let Nell look to Constella for approval.

"That's a good toy," she said. "Keep going."

Maximal did. Several servos and a curtain of wires fell between their legs where a variety of genital options could have been attached to a proper body. They still knew this shell well enough to precisely damage only that which they wanted to dispose of, while making enough room for the new organ in its place. It was agony, but every drip of pain was also a reminder.

They proceeded to peel back the folds of shorn steel into a stiff labia. The folds would be permanently wedged open in whatever shape they left them, of course, but their strength turned the metal briefly into something soft. Pliable. Maximal felt the call of the crevasse and knew they would have to dip their fingers in further. They did their best not to look to Prall as they worked, but could not stop themself from comparing the excoriating sculpting process to her own incorrigible touch.

The Nell surrogate let slip the slightest of moans.

Constella snickered.

It wasn't long before the folds were densely sculpted enough to hold the womb in place, though it would take an aggressive insertion to make it fit. The egg-like pod slid with simulated pain manually into the bleeding, malfunctioning void of their "uterus." Their innards filled. Their broken face gurgled with exertion as the new space was rushed with progeny—a being that was somehow foreign and also familiar. The ambulate's body knew well it was not meant to be so empty, and filling it back up could naturally only serve to bless Maximal with a repugnant sense of "completeness" once again.

They were meant for this.

Hydraulic fluid dripped along every side, threatening to lubricate the badly fitted device. On a human, that might have been a blessing. For Maximal, it was like a constant sense of falling. The void kept threatening to return; their child kept threatening to drop and damage itself. Perhaps this was what human parents always felt.

The ambulate pulled a persistent hand up against their newly distended belly to compensate. The handicap would make the motion of walking out of the gallery awkward, but at least their would-be child wouldn't crash to the floor. The agony of constantly reinserting the womb—fucking themself with their own, unwanted organ with every step—would be unlike anything any ambulate had ever experienced.

Naturally, they smiled through every single second of it.

There would be opportunity enough to make that smile theirs again very, very soon.