Iriko was getting frustrated.
She had spent the last three hours wriggling deeper into the hidden heart of the tomb — mostly following Serin’s lead, but sometimes leapfrogging ahead, whenever the whim took her or the balm of the hunt began to fade. The labyrinthine route took her down lightless tunnels and over pits of silently churning machinery, through echoing galleries lost under oceans of dark and beneath walls of hypnotic clockwork metal, past monoliths of flickering black glass and up the twisting viscera of exposed stone. She passed by knots of terrified zombies who huddled together for shelter from the hurricane outside, and ghosted around heavily armed lone wanderers in the inky depths, always leaving them none the wiser as to what had drawn so close in the shadows.
She was good at that part. Sneaky, sneaky Iriko! She’d never tested herself so sorely before. Until now, stealth had been for catching prey, or for hiding from predators, never for the sheer challenge of the act.
Serin was very insistent on that final point of behaviour; if she and Iriko were to hunt together, then Iriko must not stop and stray to slake her hunger on scraps of meat. They could afford no distraction. Their true prey would take advantage.
「Focus,」 Serin had broadcast over the semi-permanent short-range radio uplink. 「On the hunt. All I ask. We both know you can.」
「focus not to feed,
but give what little we must.
fools rush to eat more」
Serin had laughed out loud behind her metal mask, echoing off the distant walls of an empty chamber. Serin laughed all scratchy and rough, like she’d hurt her throat a long time ago and decided not to heal the wound. Iriko had bristled at the laughter and sprouted some fleshy trumpets to hoot and honk in Serin’s stupid face. Iriko had put her real feelings into that poem. Mockery hurt her on the inside.
But then Serin had replied, 「Self denial? Mm, interesting. Enough for our purposes, for now.」
「for now for now for now. don’t laugh laugh poems beautiful pretty good. good?」
「Mm? Mm. Yes. You have a skill for quick composition.」
Iriko decided not to hoot at Serin.
Serin couldn’t have stopped Iriko from eating her fill of other zombies, but Iriko decided that was okay, for now. Howl and Victoria had asked her to do the same thing, after all, and Howl and Victoria were both very nice to Iriko. They needed her to restrict her appetite to zombies who it was okay to eat, and maybe to donated meat. Iriko’s hunger would cause problems for Pheiri and Elpida otherwise.
Iriko’s hunger caused problems for Iriko, so Iriko understood. She had to be better. She had to be what Pheiri believed she could be.
Iriko wasn’t sure she’d be able to do that normally, out there in the wild ashes of the city. Out there nobody could see what she ate, not even Pheiri. But in here, in the darkness of the tomb, for as long as the storm lashed and wailed beyond the walls, she would hold her hunger.
Doing so was easier than ever before. As long as she had something to think about, or something to do, she didn’t have to feel the pangs in her core.
So the hunt was perfect. The hunt was a balm. The hunt was a great time, great fun, great everything, despite the growing frustration.
The hunt kept Iriko’s mind off more than hunger.
If she and Serin had done nothing but wander around the corridors and passageways of the tomb, Iriko wouldn’t be feeling any frustration at all. Yes, she would rather be beside Pheiri, solving the clever little puzzles he fed her or swapping nonsense tight-beam pings with him, and no, she still couldn’t re-establish the tight-beam uplink. That made her a bit sad and a bit worried, no matter how many times Serin repeated that Pheiri was fine when she’d left. Iriko would rather be snuggled up next to Pheiri and listening to him talk about all the silly things he kept in his brain — like how many bullets he had left in each of his guns, or where his zombies were currently positioned inside him. Iriko never cared much about any of that, but she cared that Pheiri cared, and that was more than enough to help her forget her hunger.
But Serin was okay. Not great, not bad, just okay. She wasn’t big and clever and strong like Pheiri, and she wasn’t as nice to talk to as some of Pheiri’s other zombies, and sometimes Iriko got the sense that Serin knew more than she was saying. But Serin’s presence helped keep all the bad things at bay — like hunger, or the illusion of being buried underground, despite the muffled fury of the storm and the pitch darkness of the tomb and the profusion of tangled passageways leading ever deeper.
And Serin knew how to play.
Serin made a game of hiding from the various zombies they passed. Iriko had all the natural advantages, of course, since she could flatten herself or stick to the ceiling or cease all of her bodily functions, so the game wasn’t fair at all. But Serin turned out to be a better opponent than Iriko expected, and that made the game so fun that Iriko managed to forget what she’d been trying not to think about. Iriko watched in amazement several times as zombies wandered within a few feet of Serin, standing right there in the dark, her entire body hidden inside her black cloak, her glowing eyes doused to nothing, motionless as rock. Twice Serin became almost indistinguishable from the background material of the tomb itself; Iriko could only catch her again by flowering open specialised organs to sift particulate matter in the air, to pick up Serin’s distinct mushroomy taste. One time Serin vanished entirely as three power-armoured zombies had tromped beneath Iriko’s hiding place. When the zombies were gone and the echoes of their heavy footsteps had faded, Iriko couldn’t locate Serin for almost thirty seconds. Iriko only found her again by breaking her silence and nattering a bit of poetry into the darkness; then Serin stepped from a corner of shadow, shaking out her black cloak. Iriko was certain that she’d already checked that corner a dozen times.
「where go where go serin hide hide?」
Iriko had expected Serin to be cold as a corpse after that stunt; perhaps she had turned parts of herself off, like Iriko did when she was being hunted by larger things from beyond the graveworm line. Iriko knew how difficult it was to keep her inner parts warm and fluid when she had to do that for a long time, and Serin was much smaller than Iriko. Did she need to be warmed up now? Iriko could do that. Iriko could be very good at that.
But Serin was running hot. Little curls of steam rose from her scalp and skin, reeking of rotten wood. The memory of that smell made Iriko stop and do nothing for a moment.
Serin had actually opened her robe to vent some of that heat, though Iriko had been unable to peer inside, too distracted by a fragment of green and brown and the smell of leaves playing beneath light in her memories.
「Didn’t go anywhere,」 Serin was replying. 「Even you couldn’t see me? Good.」
「serin okay okay? too hot hot hot?」
「Mm, I’ll be fine. Not a safe trick, but those apex predators could have tied us up for hours. Rather not get bogged down.」
「how go where go clever clever hide?」
Serin became a pillar of black robes again, spindly white limbs tucked away inside. Her dark red eyes glowed in the shadows. 「You want to know how I did it? Mm. In life I came from a very cold place. There were cold things, very cold things, from the dark. Sometimes ships needed to hide from them, by covering themselves, keeping their heat on the inside, so it would not be seen. I have copied the technique. Not so healthy for small things like you and I.」
Iriko thought about that, then wrote a poem.
「wrapped warm in winter,
embrace not the flame itself,
or die as kindling.」
Serin laughed at that one too, a happy-scratch sound behind her metal mask. Serin’s laughter was big and true and came without warning, not like Victoria’s laughter, which sometimes seemed forced, or like Kagami’s laughter, which was kind of nasty. Serin laughed like Howl, but without any anger.
The stealth game and the poetry and Serin at her side kept the bad feelings at bay — but as time wore on, Iriko realised that she was not doing what she was meant to do. This was meant to be a hunt. Iriko was meant to be making herself useful to Pheiri. And after almost three hours, Iriko had yet to catch even a single Death’s Head, let alone eat one of them. She knew it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t Serin’s fault either, but it was very annoying.
The Death’s Heads were cheating.
As Serin and Iriko descended into the core of the tomb, they ran across fewer and fewer random zombies, and the simple fun of their hiding competition fell away. Serin knew the Death’s Heads were down here, but Iriko didn’t understand how; Serin hunted in ways Iriko didn’t get. For Iriko, hunting was about grabbing any zombie she could ambush or overpower. Ones who ran too fast or fought too hard weren’t worth the bother. But Serin had ways of hunting specific zombies, when Iriko would have long ago lost their particular scent.
「Explosives leave chemical signatures,」 Serin explained. 「They used a bomb. It’s getting easier as we get closer to them, closer to the ones who handled the material.」
「how how???」
「Smell. They reek.」
The deepest places of the tomb were so much stranger than the ones toward the outer walls. Iriko passed through chambers full of blinking machinery whose lights were black, beneath forest canopies of hanging cable vibrating with secrets, down passageways lined with faces trapped behind glass — which spoke an endless babble in strange language. Serin paused to stare at a series of transparent globes suspended in the air, then steered their path away from corridors that contained automatic guns, still awake and ready for a fight
When they found black skulls painted on the walls or scratched into metal surfaces, Serin paused to destroy them — then paused again, because the skull symbols were often a sign that a trap had been left nearby. Serin said the Death’s Heads were stupid in a very specific way. She was rarely wrong.
But the traps were not very dangerous. Iriko ate their little mines and swallowed the explosions. She pushed through tripwires and dissolved their constricting nooses. She hardened her outer layers to absorb the puny impacts of dead-fall made from loose metal and bits of machine housing. Serin let her lead, pushing through the trail the Death’s Heads had left behind them.
But then the tomb itself moved to conceal their prey, and that wasn’t fair.
Iriko and Serin almost caught the Death’s Heads, three times in a row — or at least a straggler, trailing at the rear of the main group. They must have been falling back into the tomb as fast as they could throw up traps to slow down the pursuit. The first time, Serin was certain the scent was right around the next corner; Iriko went in first, wrapped in lightless black scales, sliding across the ceiling, half a dozen pseudopods extended and ready to grasp and crush and melt. She raced into the room just in time to see the walls ahead folding closed, like rotten honey swallowing a drowned fly. The second time, Serin spotted figures at the end of a long corridor; she had whipped out her big rifle, one eye to the scope, and Iriko had raced ahead at full speed, flinging herself along a wall with anchors of bone. But when Serin fired, the bullet had hit a wall of blank black metal, and Iriko had slammed into a dead end, all splayed out with the impact. She had to suck lost portions of biomass back together before they could move on. It was all very humiliating. She made Serin promise not to tell anybody.
On the third time they got so close that the Death’s Heads had returned fire. The prey had been up on a raised gallery, spraying bullets down to make Serin stay behind cover. They had spotted her somehow, despite her almost invisible approach.
Iriko had slid up the wall, sneaking into position, as the zombies had shouted at each other.
“Is that you, Yolanda?” Serin boomed and crackled behind her metal mask, over the sound of gunfire. “Maybe I am speaking with the other, Cantrelle? I know your names now. I will notch your faces into my arms when I take your heads. Pride of place for you both.”
The gunfire stuttered. Iriko was almost at the corner of the wall and the ceiling, but the Death’s Heads were hidden by a lip of black metal around the edge of the gallery. She would see them in a moment; she closed the sensor-gaps in her refractive mail and readied herself to pounce, extending spikes of hardened bone to crack zombie shells and hollow-tipped tendrils to pump them full of digestive acid.
“Waste yourself on us, degenerate!” one of them shouted. “I can smell you a mile away, and you reek like a kingdom of worms! Your outsides match your insides!”
Iriko recognised that voice! It was one of the zombies she and Serin had nearly killed the previous time, when a Necromancer had interrupted them, and then Thirteen Arcadia had spoiled everyone’s aim.
She raced across the ceiling and dropped hard, splaying herself wide, opening her senses, salivating with a layer of acid—
Onto nothing.
Iriko landed with a heavy splat, cracking the floor and losing cohesion for a split-second.
This story originates from NovelBin. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
A few feet away a section of the wall was closing like tar over a handful of rocks. The Death’s Heads had been swallowed by the tomb again, and this time Iriko had seen it happen.
Serin was silent for a long time after that third failure, staring at the wall where the prey had vanished. Iriko stared too, bouncing echolocation pings off the metal and stone, looking for hairline cracks with predictive topology mapping. She found nothing, not even when she pressed herself against the wall and tried to squeeze through invisible gaps, nor when she formed little drill-tips of synthetic diamond and tried to chip away at the imperishable surface.
「They have hidden allies,」 Serin sent over close-range radio. 「The tomb itself, or something that can coax it. Enough to flee. Not enough to kill us.」
「saw us saw us coming!」
「That also, little Iriko. We were almost invisible, but they saw us. They were warned. We must take them by complete surprise. In silence. Again.」
Iriko redoubled her efforts at stealth. She packed her outer layers with inches of viscous fluid to absorb sound, then softened the underside layer of her refractive mail as much as she dared, reducing her motion to the faintest possible whisper. She folded her sensory organs back inside her body, limiting herself to the basics of low-light vision and infra-red and heat-mapping. She shielded her core biomass in concentric spheres of flexible bone, laced with dense metal in a tightly woven web, to cloak the energy signature of her body. She drew on every hiding trick she knew, the ones she usually reserved for concealing herself from bigger predators. She even occupied the greater part of her mind with one of Pheiri’s clever geometric puzzles, just in case the Death’s Heads could read her thoughts. She didn’t think they could, but you never knew for sure.
Serin became a ghost — a flicker of fabric in the dark, her red eyes gone black as spent coals, her body a whisper of rot in the corner of Iriko’s vision.
「Radio silence,」 Serin broadcast. 「Keep the line open.」
「soundless void of life,
we tread beside each other.
unheard, not alone」
Serin purred behind her metal mask. Iriko saved that one for later, maybe for Pheiri, if she still liked it when this was all over.
The Death’s Head trail led through lightless vaults of stone and metal, grey and black and full of strange echoes. There was nobody all the way down here but Serin and Iriko, unless the knots and tangles of machines counted as people, and talked to themselves in some silent language Iriko could not imagine. She followed Serin through a tight and twisty route bordered by grey stone thick as a mountainside, then across a series of huge and echoing spaces filled with tall machines like smooth circular poles.
In one of those chambers, walled by vast and silent mechanisms, Iriko almost stumbled right into a lone zombie.
She hadn’t expected to run into anything down here except the Death’s Heads, so when she slipped around the corner of a doorway and into the chamber, she almost raced straight across the floor, right at Serin’s heels. But then Serin veered off into the deeper shadows, and Iriko saw the lonely figure standing just ahead.
The zombie was small and neat and very pretty, with lots of messy dark red hair, her skin so thin that it showed the lines of her blood all blue and clean beneath. She was wearing a dress made from offcuts of armour — Iriko had never seen anything like that before, and she quickly captured the dimensions and angles of the fabric, storing the details away for later. The zombie had a lot of arms sticking out from her shoulders and the sides of her torso, which Iriko thought was a little bit impressive, but also kind of a clumsy way to achieve whatever the zombie had been trying to achieve.
She was standing there with two of her hands on her hips, peering into a glowing screen in the machines that made up one wall. Another hand held a little pistol, while two more cradled a shiny steel axe. Three other hands poked and prodded at buttons and switches near the screen, but they didn’t seem to be doing anything. Her face was dyed green by the sickly glow.
Serin ignored her, slipping through the shadows to one side; she didn’t break radio silence, but she gestured at Iriko to let the zombie be.
Iriko tried to be good — she really did! — but then she paused almost directly behind the lone zombie.
She couldn’t help herself. It wasn’t that this zombie was the only one down here besides the Death’s Heads, or that she looked particularly special, or that she was doing anything suspicious. It was something else, something Iriko couldn’t quite put her finger on. She needed to look closer, much closer, as close as she could get.
Iriko broke her almost-perfect stealth to extend shrouded blossoms of sensory organs from her back, flowering open in sticky wet branches and feathery petalled bulbs, crimson and slick in the stagnant air of the tomb. She leaned over the lone zombie from behind, pressing as close as she dared without alerting the girl.
The lone zombie’s hair was rich as blood and her skin was so delicate and fine it looked as if it would tear beneath a mere breath. Her face was shaped like a heart, and she was smiling even though she was peering into that funny screen filled with numbers and letters and symbols. That smile was so sweetly curved, her lips juicy and soft and plush; she looked as if she giggled a lot. Iriko wondered what that giggle would sound like. Her hands were small and dainty and clever, all of them tucked away inside cute little gloves. She wore big boots, good for stomping. Iriko wanted to stomp! And that dress, that armoured dress made from scraps, it was incredible. Iriko mapped it again to make sure she had it committed to memory, every seam and stitch recorded, from the tip of the high collar to the hidden underside of the skirt.
Committing the lone zombie to her memory tugged at loose bits and pieces inside Iriko. For a strange moment she felt vertigo, as if this girl was somebody she’d known before — but then Iriko realised the girl wasn’t from her memories, but Pheiri’s.
This lone zombie was in some of the pictures and videos Pheiri had sent over to her in his most recent data-swap, when he’d told her what his zombies had been getting up to. Elpida had briefly spoken with this zombie.
Her name was Puk, and she’d had a lot of friends with her when she’d met Elpida. But she was alone now? What had happened to her friends?
Iriko decided she really liked Puk. The dress was just beautiful. Iriko wanted to learn how …
How to make her own dress?
The balm of the hunt burned away. Anger and humiliation and tears came rushing back like vomit. Iriko wished she had a throat, so she could gag and choke and purge her innards.
She had made a dress already, only a few hours earlier — a beautiful kimono, wrapped around a puppet on the end of a modified pseudopod. And it had been so ugly that it had gotten her screamed at and rejected and shot, by nasty, rude, horrid little zombies, just before she’d bumped into Serin. They had screamed and shot her and fled. Iriko had let them live because they’d been wearing the symbol of Telokopolis, Elpida’s symbol. Which meant they were right, and Iriko was wrong.
Stupid, stupid, stupid Iriko! Make a new dress? Hadn’t she learned already? When she had poured her heart and soul into a little fake self at the tip of a tentacle, it had looked like a twisted doll made of rotten rubber. That was her! That was Iriko! So what if she learned how to make a dress like the one Puk wore? It wouldn’t go any better. She would still be ugly, no matter what she wore.
She would never be as pretty as Puk.
And Puk didn’t even know Iriko was there. She was poking and prodding at the little screen, muttering things to herself in a high, sweet, musical voice — “Can’t disable that subroutine without better access, can we? But we can send you elsewhere, you little thing, yes we can—” But if Puk turned and looked at the thing behind her, she would scream and scream and scream. She would not be Iriko’s friend. She would not teach Iriko how to make a dress like that. She would shoot and scream and run.
Iriko folded her sensory blossoms back within her body. She extended pseudopods sticky with mucus, muscled for constriction, and lined with spikes and barbs and hooks for tearing.
Nobody would know. She couldn’t see Serin — perhaps Serin had already pulled ahead. Iriko would eat this pretty girl, and nobody would know. She wasn’t even hungry, but she needed to do this anyway. She needed to eat Puk before Puk could turn around and scream. And nobody would know, nobody would know ugly Iriko—
But Iriko would know.
She wanted to sob and scream and thrash about. She wanted to gobble up the zombie, dress and all, so she might absorb some of whatever it was Puk had. She wanted to slink off into the dark and forget all of this. She wanted a dress like that, and to touch those lips without melting them off Puk’s skull.
Puk was none the wiser, huffing and clucking her tongue at something on the screen.
Eating Puk wouldn’t make Iriko any prettier. Maybe if she just asked, without being seen, hiding where the room was darkest, maybe then—
A web of shadow peeled from the wall and fell toward Iriko.
A mass of ropey black tentacles slammed into the surface of Iriko’s refractive mail, sticking fast and shoving her away from Puk with a spring-loaded muscular jerk. A dark face on a stalk-like neck drooled charcoal mucus from a mouth full of fangs.
“Away away! Off off! Away!” it screamed at her.
Puk twisted in surprise, pistol in one hand, axe in another; Serin sprinted back into the chamber, limbs unfolding in a flower of white from within her robes, half a dozen guns flashing into her hands.
And then the ball of tentacles — which Iriko realised was a zombie like any other — flowed into the gaps in Iriko’s armour, and Iriko went deaf and blind.
The blackly slopping zombie was called Tati. Iriko knew this from Pheiri’s data — here was Puk’s missing friend. Tati fought a little bit like Iriko did, with extruded acid compounds and hidden layers of rapidly stiffening keratin. She melted through Iriko’s armour in wide patches to get at the biomass beneath, then jammed mucus-slick tendrils into the vulnerable flesh and turned their tips to scalpel-clusters that tore and ripped and burned. She pumped toxic mucus and paralytics and custom bio-agents into Iriko’s exposed meat.
But Tati couldn’t plate herself in metal, nor produce countermeasures to neutralise Iriko’s own formulae, nor re-sprout her sensory organs a dozen times on the far side of her body — which was exactly what Iriko did mere moments after being blinded.
The fight lasted just under ten seconds. Tati got the upper hand with that initial assault, but it was little more than surprise and shock — and besides, Iriko had been about to cry, hamstrung by her own mercy. When Iriko recovered six seconds later, she brought the full force of her biological and chemical control to bear on this stupid little slap fight. She melted the intruder’s tentacles and digested the remains in a flash of heat and acid. She cracked her opponent’s plates of rapid-growth keratin with spikes of diamond-tipped bone. She pulsed out magnetic fields and specially-armoured feelers to grab the zombie around the neck and the middle of her writhing body.
Iriko pinned Tati to the floor — a mass of black mucus and flowing flesh, like living tar. She was mewling and lashing, spitting acid and drooling corrosive saliva, trying to squeeze out from between a dozen pincers. Iriko blanketed her with handshake pings and tight-beam uplink requests, trying to squeeze a virus past Tati’s defences.
Tati squealed back in a burst of radio: 「Get away get away get away!!! Fuck you off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck offffff!」
Iriko extended a narrow pseudopod and formed a virus-tipped probe, aimed at the centre of Tati’s sticky dark forehead — a physical delivery method to kill this rival dead—
“Iriko,” Serin purred from behind her mask.
Serin had Puk at gunpoint, her big rifle pointed at the girl’s head. The zombie had all sixteen hands up and a sweet smile on her face, but she was sweating.
“Tati!” said Puk. “Tati, stop it! Let the nice lady let you go.” Then she batted her eyelashes at Iriko. “Please, Miss. Tati is my most beloved thing in the world. She must have thought you were going to hurt me, but you weren’t going to do that, were you? If you eat her, I won’t ever forgive you. And I can be pretty scary when I don’t forgive, ‘kay?”
「Best let her go,」 Serin sent. 「This one isn’t our prey.」
「tried to eat me eat me! burned holes and stuck fingers in. bad girl bad girl bad.」
「Only defending her friend here. Your choice, Iriko. Eat, and I will pull the trigger on this one. Let her go, and they both go.」
Tati stopped struggling and bleating nonsense all over the radio frequencies. Black ropes of tentacle reached toward Puk, but Iriko kept her pinned. “Pukkkkk,” she gurgled. “Puk!”
“I’m here, Tati,” said Puk. Her eyes slid sideways, to Serin. “Call your girl off too, please? Unless you intend to end this here. But you haven’t shot me yet, so I don’t think you’re going to shoot me. But don’t keep us waiting, if you are. Never keep a girl waiting and all that, am I right?”
“I don’t tell her what to do,” said Serin.
Puk smiled at Iriko instead. “A pretty thing like you wouldn’t hurt us, would you?”
Iriko slackened her grip.
Tati wriggled free like a greased worm, slopping across the floor and into the deeper shadows beside Puk. A set of dark tentacles whipped out to shield the smaller zombie from the muzzle of Serin’s rifle. Serin stepped back and lowered her gun.
Puk played her hands across Tati’s tentacles, like stroking a plant. “There there, sweetmeat. There there. You only meant well.”
“Sheeee was gonna eat youuuu,” Tati glugged and gurgled, like mossy rocks bobbing in a swamp.
“But she didn’t,” Puk crooned. “See?”
Serin pulled the hood of her robes back over her head. 「Iriko, wounded?」
「nothing nothing just a scratch already gone we go now? go on? carry on?」
Iriko hoped Serin would say no.
Serin nodded to Puk and Tati, taking a step back into the shadows. “We’re leaving. You and yours should do the same. The core of the tomb is infested with flies, we are here to kill them, but you might get caught too.”
“Ah, do wait a moment,” said Puk. Iriko couldn’t figure out why she was smiling like that — or why she pinched the corners of her skirt and dipped one knee in a curtsey, or why Iriko wanted her to do it again. “Surely you owe a moment of your time, after that? Besides, I’ve seen you before. Not your big friend here though.” She shot a look and a gesture at Iriko, all eyelashes and lips. “See, Tati? She’s so pretty. You’ll be like that one day, sweetmeat.”
“Alreadyyyy prettyyy,” Tati gurgled.
“Of course you are. Come here. Mwah.” Puk kissed the tip of one of Tati’s tentacles; her lips came away sticky with strands of black mucus.
Iriko barely heard the rest of the conversation. Puk had called her pretty?
“Huh,” Serin grunted. “Seen me before?”
“Mmhmm.” Puk nodded. She dipped her head as if Serin had made an unfunny joke, but she was laughing politely anyway. “With Elpida and the big boy. You were up on his back, looking at me through a sniper scope, and perhaps liking what you saw? That same one you have there, I think. What a big, strong, rigid weapon, ooooh.”
Serin grinned behind her metal mask; Iriko could see it in the crinkles around her eyes. “Won’t work on me.”
Puk hid a cheeky smile behind the fingers of one hand. “Worth a try. Can’t blame a girl.” She fluttered her eyelashes at Iriko. “Maybe I should try it on you, instead? No? Oh, don’t flinch, no no, it’s fine, I don’t bite. You’re too sweet for that, you’d rot my teeth.” She giggled and looked back to Serin. “Though I see more than just your gun. The way you speak … Outer? Silk? Not Verthandi, but you might be—”
“I don’t look like I did in life, not speak like I did,” Serin rasped. “Give it up.”
“You’re not from Earth, though. Tell me I’m correct about that? Oh, please, don’t hold so much back.”
“Mm,” Serin grunted. “Good vision. What of it?”
“Neither was I, that’s all.” Puk twisted a strand of red hair around one finger and bit her bottom lip, then ran two other hands over her scalp. “For realsies, though, I know the flies you’re hunting. Tati and I spoke to them a few hours ago—”
“They let you live?” Serin rasped.
“They’re weaker than they look right now,” Puk said. “And Tati is very big and very scary when she wants to be. But you’re having trouble catching them, aren’t you? And oh, I’m not disparaging your skills, just making an observation. I’m sure you’d have them cornered by now, under any other conditions. Right?”
Serin straightened up. “You guess. They have some hidden ally. The tomb. Unknown.”
Puk shrugged with six different arms. “Necromancer bullshit.”
Serin laughed soft and scratchy. “Necromancer bullshit. Are you proposing to help?”
Puk wet her lips, then tossed her steel axe and caught it in another hand. “Let’s say I’m good with tombs. Let’s say I knew this kind of thing a bit more than most. Let’s say that I’ve figured out whatever was helping them just left, a little while ago. Let’s say I can try to pin them down for you. Put them in a corner, mayhaps?”
Serin grunted. “On our side?”
Puk smiled like she was about to say something very naughty; Iriko’s heart would have raced, if she’d spared the biomass to create one.
“I’m on my side,” Puk said. “And my side … ” She reached out to stroke one of Tati’s mucus-slick tentacles. Tati’s big dark eyes fluttered shut. “It’s not their side. Good enough for you two?”
「Iriko?」
Iriko almost didn’t respond to Serin’s question. 「what what how what?」
「Your opinion. Are we being tricked?」
Iriko wasn’t sure. She didn’t want this to be a trick. She wanted somebody to touch her like Puk touched Tati.
「no no,」 Iriko broadcast.
Serin nodded to Puk. “All right. Show us what you can do.”
Puk smiled and winked. “Not on the first date. But I’ll do you one better.” She nodded sideways, at the little screen still glowing green in the darkness. “Come take a look at this, if either of you can read what I can.”