‘Still.’ I sway. ‘Better than drowning in a cesspit.’
She lets out a loud laugh and holds the bottle towards me, only to overbalance and land heavily on her side.
Fingers emerge from the sand like worms and crawl towards her. I grab the bottle first and her arm second, hauling her away from the reaching dead.
‘No,’ she groans.
‘Got to keep moving.’
‘… take orders from a Lifer,’ she babbles, her eyes rolling.
A corpse comes yawning out of the sand, and I stumble away from it. If we can just escape the dead, if only they would only stay dead, then maybe we can make progress.
‘Just a little longer,’ I mumble.
‘And then what?’ Moloney is ahead of us now, bending to examine an arm that crawls from the sand. He slaps it as it grips weakly at his leg. ‘I told you, there’s no way out. You have to wait for them.’
‘They’re here?’
‘Of course.’ The bandit slides a glance at the sky. ‘They made this place.’
I stop. Something has appeared on the horizon ahead of us; a black, crooked shape, like a ruined building or…
‘General.’ I shake her and her head lolls. ‘There’s a craft up ahead.’
When I look again, it seems to move further away.
‘No,’ I mutter. My body is disintegrating; with every step another cell blinks out of existence, and I can no longer carry the General. I let her crumple to the sand. But the craft is coming into view, just a bit further…
I stumble to a halt, letting out a cry. The craft is a wreck. Worse, it’s our wreck. It sprawls across the sand just as we left it, Moloney’s corpse slumped at the front. As I watch, the whole thing shifts, sliding across the sand with horrible slowness.
‘Told you,’ Moloney says, watching his own corpse inch away.
Half sobbing, I stagger back to the General and drop down beside her.
All around, the light is changing, turning the colour of old teeth.
‘Low,’ the General slurs, and I hear the frightened child she might have been, in another world. ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘I don’t think we have a choice.’
‘Always… a choice.’
The light is fading fast. Or is it my vision? I close my eyes, because from all around I can see limbs rising, corpses dragging themselves painfully across the sand from every direction. I know who they are; all eight thousand, four hundred and forty-seven of them. An entire cohort of new trainees from the Accord camps, wiped out.
‘Tamane,’ I whisper.
Moloney looks down at me, with his glassy eyes. ‘That was you?’
‘FL told me it would save lives,’ I murmur, ‘told me the Accord would use the virus on the border moons if we didn’t steal it. Didn’t say they would use it instead, and I didn’t ask, just followed orders…’ I open my eyes to look at the corpses, the victims of the bio-warfare attack who had died, drowning in their own lungs. ‘She was right. There is always a choice.’
The bandit says nothing, only watches the distant and lamentable parade of his ruined self disappear into the desert, as the dead come to claim me.
* * *
Death is not the release I thought it would be. For one thing, the dead are not satisfied by my act of dying. It is not enough for them; they want to open me up and number my bones, unspool my nerves and stretch them out to measure against their own lives, inch to inch. I let them. Didn’t I carve each of their lives into my cell walls, before I realised what I must do? Didn’t I keep the tally for this?
A needle enters my flesh, siphoning blood to add to the measure of me, a blade presses into the skin between my breasts, to take my organs and pile them on the scales.
Only, there is pain and that’s wrong because the dead should not feel pain. I open my eyes and see darkness, full of red pointed stars and moving shapes so vast they blot the light. Them?
Yes, they are here. And through the chaos, a face is looking back at me. The skin is marked, thousands of lines scored into the flesh in the same pattern: four lines and a slash.
Are you Hel?
The figure leans closer. Their hands are gloved in blood and when I see their eyes I try to scream, because they are my own.
The dead hold me down so the thing with my face can work. They speak, words I should understand but can’t and the stars pulse vermillion, and the thing with my face keeps cutting and they – they – sway the universe and beat worlds together until realities come loose.
I find myself looking into those eyes, dark mirrors of my own, the pupils huge and black and fathomless as a raptor’s. Then, with a decisive nod, Hel the Converter lowers the scalpel and cuts the last thread.
* * *
‘—could be alive, for all we know. And we won’t know until she talks. And she can’t talk if you’ve put a bullet in her head, Amir.’
‘It ain’t right. She ain’t right. No one walks outta there. Look at her.’
‘And you’d look a peach after days in the Edge?’
‘I’d look like I was missing a vital organ or two, that’s the point.’
Something brushes my arm. ‘She could have just been lucky.’
‘Luck’s a bad word, on Factus.’
Silence follows. I open my eyes. Everything is blurry and for a moment I see only a greasy film of light. No vermillion-toothed stars, no darkness. A shadow looms over me and I shrink in fear, remembering the thing that wore my skin and cut my heart from my chest.
‘Ten?’
The faces come into focus. Gentle eyes, one of them reddened and swollen, an untidy black beard…
‘Silas?’ When I try to speak, nothing comes out and I panic. Hands
