We are legion. We are legion.

Kukata-vessel brings back the moon. Let us crawl into your face.

Let us die once more cat-headed demon. We will live inside you.

Etalaki, etalaki.

We are missing. We are missing.

The voices crowded among his thoughts, sometimes crowded out his thoughts. He kept pulling himself back up, fighting for existence under the crushing feet of the crowd, a desperate process that left no room to breathe. There were windows of near sanity, a time when he remembered peeling off just enough of himself to formulate messages that sounded like something he might say. Another time when he had thoughts that felt like something he might think.

Etalaki.

How his people referred to those who die young. Missing. Missing from life, missing life. An emptiness, a hollow. Not dead but missing.

He could end it at any time. The connection to this stew of mind-stuff that had spilled into the Inside was his to command. With every cycle of this great circular stampede thundering across his mind he reached out but then withdrew his will from the command. He yelled into the tumultuous abyss, and if he used the right words, the abyss listened.

The Etalaki were not individuals, not anymore. Perhaps all of this was one mind that had sprawled, released from its earthly container and splashed and tumbled across a land that was just hospitable enough, to persevere in parts. Now he had collected it back up, lured it in with the hint of familiar essence, a pheromone trail of identity and home, and offered it a taste of the promised land.

It was very, very hungry.

Or was it they?

I should contact Lilijoy, he thought in a moment of lucidity. Or did I already?

It was difficult to call upon his memories, his personal memories, while feeding the Etalaki’s voracious appetite for language, for lore, for shared experience condensed and nutritious, for context and meaning that might help it, help them, to understand who they were, where they came from. The system utility masquerading as an ability, as Two Minds One Self, was acting as a conduit between his mind and something almost like a vacuum, like a hole in the hull of spaceship Anda through which the atmosphere of his thoughts evacuated.

Why don’t I plug the hole? he wondered momentarily. At least nothing’s coming in.

He had the feeling he was forgetting something. Missing something.

I should contact Lilijoy. No, I already did that. I should...he lost the train of his thoughts, the track too, and a singsong chant passed through him and out

It is now soft but not yet burst,

My children of the knee.

Go, my little one, let me in,

Open the door to me.

It was an odd feeling, like the deep buried roots of his childhood were being pulled to surface, a process he couldn’t control, or if he was controlling it, then perhaps the portion of his thoughts observing it wasn’t him? He could barely remember that story, though it came with the scent of fire and the feel of soft blankets upon his skin and the face of his favorite aunt flickering with shadows and light. He remembered the chant because that was his part in the telling; it came back several times, the words passing across his innocent lips like the purest fact.

Of course children could spring forth from an old man’s knee, and it was entirely natural that the man would sing this song to let them know it was him, and not the wicked strangers who would seek to take them for their own. He did remember, though, wondering just how the children had gotten into the old man’s knee in the first place. It was one of a hundred half-forgotten tales buried within him.

Kukata-vessel, let us crawl into your face, he thought, or perhaps heard.

No, he heard, or perhaps replied, that’s just a metaphor. The leaf cannot be reattached to the plant. What is said cannot be unsaid.

He wondered for a moment if his own words were speaking to him. Was he simply a vessel to them? Then he remembered what was missing. I am Anda Kukata.

Yes, you contain that identity, vessel, something replied. And more. You contain more, and you leak and spill. Is the gourd the water it contains?

His head began to hurt, and a wave of dizzy confusion passed through him. He could no longer tell which thoughts were his own, and when he reached for the command that would end this spinning torment, he wondered if he was ending himself.

He hesitated, and a stray thought ambled across his mind, almost lost in the stampede of wild thoughts on all sides.

Why is my nose on fire?

***

It was a convenient fact that Nykka had garnered something of a reputation for being bloodthirsty among the Sinaloa clan. Convenient, because, as was the way with such a reputation, it spared her a fair amount of trouble from those who preferred their blood on the inside of their bodies. The fact that she was Quimeas’s protege, or, as most would have it when she wasn’t listening, pet, only went so far in light of her size, appearance, and the ruthless culture of strength that the Doctor had cultivated around him.

She had done her best over the years to avoid killing those who didn’t truly need it, and whether that was due to compassion or disdain was an open question.

The first time she killed, on purpose anyway, was at the age of eleven. She didn’t like to think about it, about the feeling of helplessness, and then the rage that swept away her reluctance. In the end, it had been horrible, and messy, and had left her numb and withdrawn for the weeks that followed. On the whole, she much preferred her violence on the Inside, where the consequences, and the mess, were less indelible.

Even so, the stains from the blood she had shed were a price she was happy to pay for the peace of respect, even if that peace did not follow her easily into the dark places of her imagination.

The words felt like relief. They felt like permission.

She just hoped some of them made it to her.

***

Attaboy found Mo and Maria by the sound of their retching coughs. They looked pitiful, huddled together in misery, completely overcome by their bodies’ reaction to the gas that had made its way into the building. He almost felt guilty, somehow, that they were suffering so terribly and he wasn’t. His system had just about solved the primary problem of his body’s reaction to the capsaicin, and was rapidly taking care of the lingering symptoms.

He still had just over seven minutes of oxygen left, according to his blood bug interface, but that could go down in a hurry if he needed to truly exert himself.

his alter-ego replied.

He stood there for a moment, somewhat paralyzed by his inability to do anything useful, before he made his decision. Ultimately it was the plight of his companions that overcame his reluctance, though the messages he had been receiving from Nykka played a role as well. She seemed to think everything was likely to go to hell, and he didn’t want to wait, in case it took him time to recover.

***

Wolfie felt the usual thrill of adrenaline when the order came. That, and relief that he was that much closer to being done with the operation du jour. The night air had been cool, but that didn’t do much when you had to maneuver in gear. Perhaps the one blessing of the gas mask he wore was that he didn’t need to smell himself or his neighbor.

Tonight’s task wasn’t that unusual, extracting a couple non-compliant high-values from whatever den of inequity they had burrowed into. It was the kind of job that payed the bills for the mercenary clan he had joined a few years back, but it didn’t mean he had to like it. He much preferred the sabotage missions, or even the occasional false flag raid. The problem was the friggin’ gas that was used on a flush and grab like this. It was hell getting that stuff off your gear, and it wasn’t like the company cleaned it for them.

his unit leader sent.

Nice vocab, dude, he thought. Just a few more syllables and captain may finally let you kiss his ass.

He checked the charge on his weapon, then moved forward on the prescribed route at a fast lope. There was no further need to communicate; the movements and timing of the operation were coordinated from above, sent through encrypted augsight. Just follow the line, green means go. So easy a child could do it, at least until the shooting started. The captain firmly believed that too much information created chaos, and Wolfie couldn’t disagree. He and his fellow soldiers moved like parts of one great beast; everyone could focus on the task in front of them and let victory emerge. It was exhilarating, when seen from the relative comfort and safety of the transport that would move them back to base.

He heard commotion a quadrant over. Guess someone’s getting to party early, he thought. His display told him to stop just short of the gas zone, and he used the opportunity to review the targets. The one way to seriously screw up here would be to kill one of the high-values. He was a stunner, so the chances of him personally committing such a mistake were slim, but if he didn’t do his job it could put the gunners in an awkward position. He needed to put down the Rank Four girl fast, if she crossed his path. He was less worried about the gob boy, other than the possibility of accidentally stopping the kid’s heart.

The others he could ignore; the gunners would take care of them.

came the captain’s voice, as a new target appeared on his display. He didn’t have line of sight just yet, not from behind the pile of former building where he had stopped, but he could follow the blob as it approached, juking and darting unnecessarily. He always enjoyed this part, watching them come, oblivious and vulnerable.

Another couple seconds, and the blob resolved into a human figure with a green target laid upon it. This was it, his target, the albino girl he could only assume from the nature of her movements. His fellow squad members would see her with a red target, warning them away from lethal actions. He cast a quick glance around to confirm their locations. If necessary, they could contain her until he came to bring the hurt.

That’s odd. Park is usually up with Mendos. And why isn’t Looky flanking?

He didn’t have time to consider the mysterious configuration of his squad, because his target was almost even with his position. She couldn’t have picked a better route, for him anyway. He exchanged a glance and a nod with Nils, his partner for this operation and so many before, who was crouched on the other side of the narrow path through the rubble that had once been a street. It was Nils’ job to distract the target, to keep them occupied until Wolfie could seal the deal. One had to be careful with a Rank Four; sometimes the gas didn’t phase them much.

There were some big-ass flies circling the guy’s head, which gave him a moment of amusement. He’d rag him about it on the way back.

The target stopped just before passing between them, and Wolfie heard a tapping noise.

Is that her foot? he wondered.

“Who wants to go first?” she asked, her voice somehow lower than he would have expected.

Wolfie and Nils exchanged glances. Even with his system, it was hard to see much beyond his partner’s eyes through the gas mask, but he thought he caught a raised eyebrow, the sure indication of a smirk below. The rest of the unit would be circling in and…

barked the captain.

Wolfie thought Nils looked as confused as he felt at that. They were in their assigned positions.

“I’m waiting...” said the girl.

Wolfie checked his display once more. He wasn’t sure where the others were assigned to be. That fell under the whole ‘too much information’ issue. But he was pretty sure they weren’t supposed to be where they were, and, seeing as how several appeared to be lying down, they weren’t supposed to be doing what they were doing. The unit leader, in particular, was certainly not supposed to be wandering out of the combat zone on an odd zigzag trajectory as if he’d knocked back, or been knocked by, a few too many.

Now that’s an anomaly, he thought.

Another glance was exchanged, and this time Nils shrugged. he sent.

came the command from above.

Wolfie motioned with his hand.

Nils knew his job well. He had long since stowed his principal firearm, and now he had what he liked to refer to as his ‘pacifier’ in hand, a rather substantial metal rod with a rubberized coating.

“You can make this easy on yourself,” he said, stepping out onto the former street’s graveled surface. “We’re professionals. Put down the sword and-”

There was the dull thud of metal on… Pacifier, and Wolfie began to slip out from his cover. Nils job was simply to put the girl’s back to him, but it wouldn’t be the first time the large Afrikaner drew things out for his own amusement. Wolfie had once watched him handle a Rank Five who was armed with a pair of handguns. It’s very hard, Wolfie learned on that occasion, to aim a pistol without making it quite obvious where the bullet is going. That was the first time he witnessed someone actually parry a bullet.

It also really doesn’t matter, it turned out, how hard your skin is when your brain impacts the inside of your own skull from blunt force to the forehead.

He peered around a slumped brick corner and readied his own weapon as a sniper’s shot sounded in the distance. It was important that he put the girl down before Nils got carried away. Professionalism only went so far after all. Not that this was going to be much of a problem. It was a little sad, Wolfie thought, how so many people thought they could somehow bring their Inside weapon of choice into the real world. This little girl with her oversized blade was probably a holy terror in the Garden.

Sorry, honey, there’s no magic out here. Welcome to physics 101. Come on, Nils, get your ass out of the way so we can end this and go home. Play time is over.

Indeed, he could see the girl had a displeased, almost disappointed expression on her face as Nils rebuffed her attacks, almost casually spinning Pacifier to intercept blows that, to her credit, were lightning fast, belying the apparent mass of her weapon. She was good, Wolfie would give her that. In a tournament, she would be a force to reckon with, even with her size disadvantage.

Then the magic happened. The moment that changed Wolfie’s sense of the possible, that would shape his sense of how reality could work for the rest of his life.

Which was less than thirty seconds.

With a sigh of resignation, she stepped into range and swung the blade in an upward arc. It was too fast for Wolfie to see exactly how it happened, how her sword somehow moved through an inch of solid metal. For a split second he thought the sword had broken, that the top foot of it had flown off around Pacifier and somehow struck Nils. For another split second, he waited for Nils to put the girl down in annoyance for having taken the hit.

Then, somehow, she was standing over his partner, and he felt the spray, like hot rain, heard the red spatter across his mask. The sword was intact. Nils, not so much.

He took the shot. Hundreds of microfilaments fired out from the bulbous head of his weapon, an invisible net distributed across a wide enough area to make dodging impossible for even the best Rank Three augments. For most below Rank Five, the filaments alone were enough to incapacitate. They were thin enough and tough enough to slice through anything short of armor, should the target struggle. Of course, that wasn’t where it ended, because the weapon was smart enough to know where it hit and could drive a chaotic storm of high-voltage pulses through any two filaments, enough to overwhelm nervous system and bugs alike.

Wolfie had never heard of anyone lower than Rank Eight resisting it, though there were rumors of new Rank Fives with built in countermeasures. There were always rumors though, and personally, he doubted it. The man-o-war was far too uncommon a weapon for a clan to invest time and treasure in defense against it. It was a specialist’s weapon, and only someone who was exceptionally paranoid and with way too much time on their hands would bother to create countermeasures on the tiny chance it would ever be wielded against them or their forces.

The girl dropped to one knee, her sword arm outstretched and quivering. If Wolfie squinted, he thought he could see the faintest hint of a black web of filaments from the man-o-war crossing her white skin. It was easy to see the muscles of her face twitching, the corner of her mouth pulling back in an electric rictus.

He failed to see the moment her sword thrust toward his head, elongating impossibly fast, and so he missed his last chance to see something like magic on the Outside, because in the time it would have taken for him to understand what was happening, the sword, now thin as a barbecue skewer and much, much longer, had entered into his skull and formed a shape reminiscent of a Christmas tree where much of his brain used to be.

***

Lilijoy sent. There was no time for her to try anything too fancy. She sent her remaining horseflies in for the kill and piled as many midges as she could spare in the paths of the three groups she had eyes on. Everything her insects sensed from the southern group was also being relayed to Nykka, which left the east and west to her.

She could only hope that the north group gave her enough time to get back before anyone was hurt or killed. On any other day, she could have counted on Anda to solve that problem, but he wasn’t responding. That left…

He replied quickly.

For some reason, it hadn’t crossed her mind that Attaboy would want that information, probably because, as far as she knew, he had never used a gun. She slapped herself on the wrist mentally for letting an assumption blind her, and quickly passed the information to him. There were several caches of weapons tucked throughout the building. Anda always liked to have options close by.

Time shifted and lurched as she stretched her multitasking abilities, simultaneously guiding her insects and managing the signals to and from the men whose systems had been infiltrated. She was quickly forced to discard good in favor of ‘good enough’, and then ‘good enough’ in favor of ‘could be worse’, when it came to her manipulations. The snipers she wanted as a backup, and she simply furnished them with the same view they had had for a few minutes now. Unfortunately, that view included swirling gas and random ambient sounds, so it took up more of her processing power than she would have preferred.

The men on the ground she tried to take out as quickly as possible. Some she was able to put to sleep soon after her bugs reached their brains. Others, those who might have gotten a midge in the ear or the like, she had to handle with more creativity, as she couldn’t simply overwhelm their systems. She impaired their motor functions and invaded their auditory cortices when possible, sending them stumbling around with fake commands to withdraw.

All the while, she passed counterfeit reports up to the captain who seemed to be running things, doing her best not to conflict completely with what was visible to his eyes in the sky. What worked in her favor was that the captain seemed to prefer to maneuver his men in ways that reminded her of early twenty-first century video games, using his top-down view point to draw paths and assign targets. He didn’t seem to like giving orders by voice, or perhaps he was simply overwhelmed, because his attempts to salvage the situation were sporadic at best.

It could also be, she mused, that he hasn’t quite realized how out of control things are down here quite yet.

While doing all this, she darted toward the two soldiers she hadn’t been able to sabotage from the eastern group. It was better to take them out while she could, no matter how much she wanted to return to the others. She could see them, one half crouched in the standing door frame of a collapsed building, the other, about forty feet away, tending to one of her unconscious victims. They both carried some kind of small machine gun or assault rifle. She could see the moment they got word she was on her way, through their sudden change to an alert posture. Barrels came up and trained toward her, as if the men could see her through the mounds of rubble and half-tumbled buildings. Which they probably could, she realized, as they were being fed the data from above.

I really need to figure out some way to modify the skin bugs to get them to hold onto heat temporarily, she thought. Fair fights are no fun.

There was no way she could take on even one of these men with a frontal assault. Luckily, she didn’t need to. All she needed to do was get them to stand in the east sniper’s line of fire and then convince the sniper that they were her. Unfortunately, that was far easier said then done. The snipers had great angles on the building her group had been camping in, but not so much on the rubble-strewn warren where the streets had once been.

New plan, she decided. Time to wake up sleeping beauty.

She stopped her advance for a few seconds while her flowers went into overdrive in the brain of the man at the foot of one of her untouched enemies. She didn’t have anything approaching control of the sleeper or his senses, for she had sent most of the flowers that made it into his bloodstream straight for the areas that initiate slow wave sleep. But it wasn’t like she needed to rewire anything. She simply needed to gain control of his existing system and give his perceptions a few tweaks.

She watched it unfold through her insects, the moment that the sleeper awoke, limbs flailing in panic. She saw the other man try to hush him, saw him kneel down. That was when she made the kneeling man’s gas mask look like a writhing, demonic beast clamping on to his face and then gave the former sleeper’s amygdala a jolt of extra alarm for good measure. The panicked tussle that ensued wasn’t pretty, what little she could see of it through the eyes of her waiting swarm, but it certainly got the job done. At some point a few seconds in, the mask was dislodged sufficiently for some of her midges to make it into the guy’s airways.

One down.

Meanwhile the soon-to-be last effective member of the squad had heard the struggle, and was looking nervously around, as if unsure what he was supposed to do. Now that he was the only one, it wasn’t hard for Lilijoy to pull him out of position by the simple expedient of running toward the area where Nykka was about to engage two members of the south squad. Soon, he was following, and it was simplicity itself for Lilijoy to substitute her own heat signature and image for his in the sniper’s internal display. The sniper had a simple shot, since his unsuspecting compatriot made no effort to minimize his profile against a threat from behind.

Two down.

There was only one member of the west group remaining, and he had remained in place so far, while the captain tried to figure out just what could be happening to his operation, or so she assumed. She sent every remaining midge in that area to land on him. It was only a matter of time before one of them would find a way to his skin, hopefully unnoticed. She didn’t want to pull the sniper trick unless it was the only option, since there would be no way to play that off as some weird friendly fire accident from a technical malfunction, not when the captain could see that she and Nykka were nowhere near the area.

And then there was Nykka’s battle. Lilijoy was already on her way back to help the others as it happened. Nykka had made her own decision, and Lilijoy wasn’t inclined to talk her out of it, or to delay helping those closer to her heart.

That certainly turned out to be the correct decision, though she was sure that Nykka would be some time recovering from whatever that strange weapon had done to her. The flowers that Lilijoy had in Nykka’s body reported that her vital signs weren’t horrible, so she could wait.

Boy, she thought, we’re really going to need to have a talk about that sword.

.

.

.