The attack, when it came, was something of a surprise. There was some warning, of course, so it wasn’t a shock, wasn’t the crashing thunder that rung the ears and dizzied the mind. The surprise was in the nature of their attacker, a single man.

Any sense of relief that began to emerge, tentatively sniffing the air for danger from the safety of her heart, was quickly slammed back. Lilijoy was barely able to alert the others that the attacker was coming from behind before he was upon them. The flies, dependent more on chemistry than light, could not perceive him until he was well into her radius of awareness. They told her where he had been a moment or two before, which was entirely too late, for he traversed the distance in seconds, moving at a speed she would have considered implausible even on the Inside. Moving faster than she could at her best.

Anda had only gotten his rifle pointed in the general direction when the man slammed into him, a crushing blow that Lilijoy saw with unfortunate clarity, for while the attack was blindingly fast, her mind was faster still. It did her no good to see the details unfold as the man ran into Anda and crushed him into a wall of reinforced concrete, the serial cracking of ribs and the blood forced from Anda’s mouth in slowly rolling drops. The man, dressed in a loose blue top and flowing yellow pants, the colors of the Walden Clan, pushed off, entirely unfazed by the bone-crushing impact.

He took a step back, adjusting his shirt, and looked directly at Attaboy, ignoring Anda writhing, and gasping by his feet.

“Would you like to watch, while I kill the rest of them?” he asked.

Attaboy’s response was to level the shotgun he was holding.

The man smirked, and Lilijoy noticed he looked more than a little like Pineapple. She never had learned the boy’s first name, only his Inside moniker. Brother? she wondered. Father or uncle? She was certain it must be a relative of the young Master Smith, but she supposed the man in front of her could be a great-great-uncle and she wouldn’t be able to tell. Augmentation of the kind he clearly possessed typically took decades though. He had a sheathed sword at his side.

she messaged.

She did her best to repress her concerns about Anda, for the moment. His survival would be linked to theirs. Other than that, this was in most ways their best-case scenario; if the man had stayed in motion, had run them down in turn, they would all already be dead. Anda’s weapon was the only one that would have a chance of truly injuring him, or perhaps Nykka’s sword, if he was kind enough to hold still for her. Thankfully, he wanted to prolong the moment.

“Leave them out of it,” Attaboy said. His voice was just a bit more even, and a bit deeper than she was used to, and Lilijoy knew he was channeling Atticus.

The man smiled, waving his hand through the small cloud of midges that had found him.

“No.”

Then he was moving, and in the nature of that movement, Lilijoy understood something about what it truly meant to have every part of the musculoskeletal system augmented to the highest level. From the perspective of her fastest thoughts, his movements came in bursts, oddly punctuated, alternating between the speed of his thoughts and the speed of his execution. The first was fast, to be sure, faster than any system other than her own that she had seen, but the second… it was inhuman.

It was as if he was using macros, pulling preset movements from a menu that his body could implement faster than thought, stringing them together in combination with the skill of the best twitch gamers from a bygone era. It was not fluid grace, it was savage mechanism.

And then he had Attaboy’s shotgun in his hand, now a twisted mass. He tossed it to the side as Attaboy fell backwards.

“Can’t have you distracting me with that,” he said. “It’s bad enough I’ll need to wash the blood out of my robes after this without you going and adding holes.”

Her midges were in his sinuses, two of them, already delivering their payloads.

“Now,” said the man, “who’s first? Perhaps--”

His sentence was interrupted by a sneeze that sent her little minions tumbling away at great velocity. It was no matter; they had done their job.

“Gesundheit,” said Lilijoy.

The man looked at her with an arched brow. “I’m afraid I can’t wish the same to you, gob.” His face brightened. “Say!” he said. “I bet you two are related. Perhaps...” he made a small move to the side, avoiding Attaboy’s attempt to stab him behind the knee, “… I should save you for last? Well, second last,” he chuckled.

Just keep talking, asshole. Her flowers were in his tissue now. She could already sense the huge variety of nanomachines within him, outnumbering the original cells by a substantial margin. Blood bugs and what she thought were med bugs swarmed in countless billions as she searched for the blood vessels that would lead to his brain.

“I’m in contact with Sinaloa now,” Nykka called out. “Walden will face terrible retribution if you contin--”

She was interrupted by the man’s wedged fingers penetrating her abdomen. Lilijoy had no time to warn, only watch in horror.

“Go on,” he said, leaving his hand where it was. “What was that about retribution?”

Nykka’s mouth opened and closed and her body spasmed.

“You aren’t even a Rank Five, girl,” he continued. “Perhaps your clan doesn’t care so much about you as you think.”

Just hold on, was all Lilijoy could think. A few more seconds…

But there was something wrong. She had found blood vessels, but they weren’t made from cells. There were no gaps her flowers could slide into, only tubular lengths of carbon-diamond lattice and what appeared to be gates.

Nykka made a gurgling gasp, and Lilijoy realized with horror that the man was wiggling his fingers among her organs. He looked over his shoulder at Attaboy with an expression of delight. “See...” he began.

What happened next took place so quickly that it took Lilijoy a moment to interpret. The man jumped away from Nykka in a single reflexive jerk. Only then did she realize she had seen the tip of Nykka’s sword emerge from the man’s back just a millisecond before.

The man looked down at his front, at the thin slit in the fabric of his shirt. Lilijoy couldn’t see his front, but she could see a hint of clear fluid dampen the fabric at the similar slit on his back. Nykka collapsed to the ground, her sword falling with her.

“Now that is a surprise,” the man said. “Perhaps you are more valuable to your clan than I assumed, if they let you carry a weapon like that.”

In a flash of movement, he leaned down and cuffed the side of Nykka’s head. Lilijoy winced at the sound of bone cracking.

“Oops,” he said. “Well, I suppose fate will decide for me, won’t it.”

Lilijoy could only assume he had meant to leave Nykka unconscious, rather than crush her skull. She was now entirely focused on the navigation of her flowers, searching desperately for access. Some, she sent the long way, pushing through connective tissue and membranes, while others worked at the sphincter-like molecular gates to his blood vessels, trying to pry them open with mechanical force, while also seeking the method by which his own system permitted access.

The man took a step toward her, slowly, savoring the moment. Then another.

Attaboy messaged.

She wanted to tell him no, that it would do no good, but he had already turned, was already stepping away as fast as his legs could carry him.

The man tsked. Then he was upon her, handling her, moving faster than she could respond. Her feet left the ground, and just as she assumed he would carry her as he pursued Attaboy, she realized that was not his plan at all, and she was accelerating, hurtled through the air in a way she had, oddly enough, experienced before at the hands of Rosemallow.

Her previous experience helped enough to keep her orientation and awareness as she spun, enough to track the man as he ran beneath her. He had already caught Attaboy when she landed, just feet away, in a crushing crouch turned roll, nearly able to spring to her feet, if it weren’t for the piece of rubble that caught her knee and sent her sprawling.

“There is certainly more to you than meets the eye,” the man said, his voice airy. “I figured it was the Sinaloa bitch who was trying to get into my head, but it’s one of you, isn’t it?”

Oh shit.

If you are still alive.

She was still scheming, still racking her mind for anything, any possibility that would lead to their escape from the situation, no matter how battered, when the man grabbed her again and flung her straight up into the air.

“She certainly does fly well, don’t you think,” she heard him say to Attaboy as the wind roared past her ears. By the time he had finished speaking she hit the uneven ground, doing her utmost to absorb the impact, covering her head with her arms and absorbing her momentum with her legs as best she could. It wasn’t enough so spare her though, not falling into the sharp edged rubble studded with rebar. She felt and heard bones snapping, blood vessels rupturing and muscles tearing beneath her hardy skin.

“I know!” she heard the man say brightly through the fog of impact. “Why don’t I see how many pieces I can cut her into before she hits the ground?”

She felt his hands on her again, gathering her. And then she was flying.

***

“Hold up,” Mo said.

Maria looked back at him, halfway through the soiled curtain that passed as someone’s back door.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We have to keep going, no matter how much you are hurting.”

“It’s not that,” he replied.

Maria pulled herself up, somehow, and he saw an expression emerge on her face that frightened him, just a little. “Oh no you don’t, Anthony Corsetti!” she said. “No stupid gods are going to make you risk your life again!”

She’ll die, die, die if you don’t, Ixtab whispered.

“Going back would be suicide!” Maria continued.

Oh, yesssss, Ixtab hissed ecstatically.

“I’m sorry,” Mo said. “Truly, truly sorry. You have to keep running. Please!” His voice broke and her face fell.

“No,” she said, under her breath, like a sigh.

He turned his back on her and began, painfully, to run. He ran out of the hovel they were cutting through, onto a street covered with black plastic and old bones, nearly tripping over the same half-dead wretch who had watched them enter with clouded eyes. One of his wounds was open, dripping down his side, but it was the stab to his thigh that hurt the most. He pushed down the pain, pushed down his relief and sorrow that there were no footsteps behind him.

Now which fucking door… ah.

They had been cutting through buildings as much as possible, following signs of recent foot traffic, in the vague hope that it would, somehow, throw off pursuit. Mo hadn’t pointed out that if Lilijoy would be able to follow their scent trail to eventually reunify, so would many others. If Maria didn’t understand that, then she would feel a little better, and if she did, then at least they were pretending together.

Mo was actually surprised by how many people they had passed, some of whom he was now passing for a second time, huddled in apathetic stupor. The people he was lumbering past had already died, only their bodies hadn’t gotten the memo quite yet.

Another street, another building, and then he was back. He took no precautions, but burst onto the street. He saw Nykka first, lying motionless in a pool of blood, her own, he presumed. Then his heart sank as he saw Anda

It’s come to this then, old… shit. I guess he wasn’t a friend. Maybe he could have been? Should have been?

He didn’t stop, as much as his aching everything demanded, because he saw it then, almost glowing where it lay abandoned on the street, Anda’s ridiculous rifle-thing. He heard the voice then, someone talking a ways down the street, and he didn’t think further, but grabbed up the rifle, tearing open another wound in the process, and he felt the tunnel forming around him, so that when he rushed forward and heaved the many-barreled thing up and over a mound of tumbled blocks, he had the man in his sights, such as they were; his eyes hadn’t been great for a while.

His finger began to squeeze the trigger as the man hurled something high into the air, and while some distant part of his mind was wondering just what it could be, he exhaled. The man drew his sword as the bundle descended, a move too fast for him to process, and he took the shot. Then, two things happened.

The man flinched as whichever species of diabolical projectile that had resided in that particular barrel flew past his ear. And the sword arced through the air, with a crack that cut the ringing in his ears, and the bundle landed in two places. Only then did Mo realize what the bundle had been, and he slumped onto the sharp edges of the ragged blocks beneath him, as a cry of outrage rang out.

“I could have done at least four, damn it!”

***

And then he was alone.

It’s not real, Attaboy told himself. Why now, of all times, did he have so much trouble believing it?

The rage boiling within him was unlike any he had ever felt, in any life. It was undirected, universal. He felt that if someone put a reality deleting button in front of him at that moment, he would press it, with a sneer to match that of the man standing in front of him. The man he had been unable to stop. The man who had just killed Lilijoy.

But, he thought, but she always gets out of these things. She always gets out of these things.

He stopped himself before he thought it again. He had just stood there. He could have… when she was in the air he could have… something. Tried anything. Now…

Now her head and her body were in different places. He could see them both.

“Well,” said the man, “that was disappointing. Whoever fired that gun just signed their own death warrant.” He shrugged. “Eh, I was probably about to kill them anyway.”

Attaboy couldn’t speak. He trembled with the need to hurt the person in front of him, and was utterly powerless. Anything he said or did would be no more than a momentary amusement, one more tiny bit of satisfaction for the bastard. Even so, he found himself about to move, to hurl himself forward, to do something.

To get it over with.

The message that came just before he launched into action was a bit of a surprise.

it said.

Despite himself, he looked over at Lilijoy’s head and body once more, to confirm a reality he desperately wished to deny.

That was when her head winked at him.

***

Lilijoy took a deep breath and enjoyed the feeling of sun on her face, the scent of grass and clover, the beauty of the lush land that stretched before her. She knew she should be conserving every last bit of energy, for that was what it probably was, the last energy she would ever have, but she needed this, this peaceful place on the Inside, to anchor her.

There had been a lot of time to think as she flew through the air, first up, then down. Two seconds, roughly. She could remember the moment she hung, poised for just a moment at the top of her flight, oddly peaceful, entirely resolute. She had fought for survival her entire existence with desperate tenacity, and at her core that was who she was, a survivor.

It was a moment of reflection, hanging there, to contemplate her life. She didn’t even know how long her life had been, exactly, or where she should count it from. Was she even the same Lilijoy who had scavenged for food pellets in the wastes? Or should she begin the count from when she became who she was now? Either way, her life had been short and hard fought.

On the way down, her thoughts had been more pragmatic. She would leave the world as she had lived within it. In this world, there are miracles still, she had thought as she twisted in the air. What I wouldn’t give to be able to pull out a Nasty Hanging Tentacle Monster this time.

The sword had passed through her neck so quickly, it was only the change in her fall that let her know it had occurred, the enormously strange sensation of spinning around an impossible axis as she separated from her body. She had prepared for it, this decapitation, as much as anyone could prepare for such a thing, even maneuvered her body in the air as she fell to invite it, and still it was impossible to understand, to be in a place separate from arms and legs and heart.

She had stopped her heart when he threw her up that second time. Her blood was quiet, held within by her many nanoscale helpers, and full of oxygen, for now anyway. Legend had it that Marie Antoinette had lived for almost thirty seconds after her decapitation, and Lilijoy knew she could beat that record many times over.

She had a plan. If Attaboy didn’t ruin it by getting killed.

His gasp of surprise when she winked could have ruined the whole thing, but instead provided just the distraction she needed. It drew the renewed attention of the man just enough for her body to spring into motion. She gathered her broken legs… well, not exactly under her, but gathered them nonetheless, and sprung toward his back. She had never imagined, what seemed so long ago, that her work circumventing her spine and providing a direct connection between her muscles and her brain would be used in quite this way. She had rather thought she would still be attached should a situation calling for it arrive.

His reaction was just fast enough to begin to spin, to take in the headless body, impossibly still mobile. If her movements were a bit clumsy, due to the change in balance from a missing head, and the bizarre nature of controlling her muscles from a distance, it was more than offset by the man’s surprise and disgust. There was no fear in his eyes, no worry that this impossible thing lurching into frenzied action could hurt him in any way. His upraised arm was tentative, a warding gesture, and she grabbed it with one hand and pulled herself just high enough to slap his face, a blow too feeble to even rock his head, too light to bring a flush to armored skin.

But not too light to crush a small silicon capsule against his cheek. Crush it and hold in place for the fraction of a second necessary for its inhabitants to find a molecular buffet.

He hurtled her headless body away, the expression of disgust moving to a sneer at the feeble effort. She watched as that sneer began to slide, to melt along with the side of his face, and if he had last words to say, they were not spoken aloud as his jaw unhinged and quivering lips dissolved in liquid flow.

Steam rose from his head, now a bubbling cauldron as the heat from the released energy of broken bonds ended his life even before Kurtz’s bugs could. She followed the ghastly situation from her place in the rubble, though she did not forget to reach across her distant body and tear off her prosthetic with her good arm, throwing it to the side as her artificial hand burst into flames from its own share of the ravenous nanomachines.

Sorry Savitri, she thought.

A warm breeze danced through the verdant field of her Inside presence, causing a patch of buttercups to dance and wave to her, and she thought of dominoes. What was it the likely-Archon had said? Every action has the whole universe on both sides of it. Why assume the dominoes had stopped falling?

She didn’t think her current situation on the Outside had been engineered by the Archon, but she couldn’t help wondering if her encounter with the Etalaki and her subsequent talk with him had been tailored for a moment like this, had been a seed planted, this notion that persistence, in some form, was possible.

Could she heal her Outside body in time? She had her doubts. It was one thing to prolong her existence with her blood bugs and her system, but gross physical repairs took time. Reattaching major veins and arteries might be possible, if everything was in perfect alignment, but bodies were messy, squishy things, and her vines and flowers might take too long to move her tissues into place. She only had about fifteen minutes and she didn’t love her odds. Or even like them. Heck, she probably wouldn’t nod to her odds if she passed them on the street.

Persistence might be possible, she thought, but would I want that? How coincidental it was, that she had learned the truth of Henry Choi’s transformation just hours ago. His body still lived, was still connected, somehow, but his mind had become something entirely… other. It put the last words of that conversation into a new light. Beware the Sage.

A warning to be sure, but of him... or his path? Probably both, she decided. I need to stop thinking in binaries.

With that, she made her decision and turned her attention to Attaboy, who was still in the early stages of reacting to the ugly demise of the high rank Walden guy. He looked like he might have blown a gasket or something, standing frozen with face red and flushed, his mouth agape.

she messaged him. She didn’t like the notion of remote piloting her one-armed body over to where she was to pick up her head and slap it onto her neck like a particularly heavy hat. Attaboy could help her get things started, then run over and see if there was anything to be done for Anda and Nykka. They were both tough, and equipped with med bugs and blood bugs, so she felt optimistic about their chances, enough to ask Attaboy to help her first.

While she waited for him to finish his shocked paralysis, she turned her attention to the other half of her endeavors. She knew it was possible to, for lack of a better term, upload herself to the Inside. Unfortunately, the examples she was aware of couldn’t be called successes, not by her, anyway. The Etalaki were mere scraps of sentience, though she didn’t know whether they might have degraded over time. Henry… well, it seemed he had lost his humanity along the way. Or even worse, he kept the worst parts and lost the pieces of himself that kept them in check.

She remembered all too well the time just after she had passed Eskalia’s glyph of awakening to the Greatwood, when her organic mind had been damaged and disabled, thankfully not beyond recovery. There had been nothing particularly malicious about the experience, just a sense of drifting away, of losing something central, a solar system whose sun had left, leaving the planets to peacefully spin away into the void. She had been able to manage herself, split into two complimentary personalities, until the worst of the crisis was over.

This situation started much better, in some ways, but the end was certainly worse. If she couldn’t resume adequate blood flow and drainage to her brain, the organic parts would die. She imagined that Stage Two would be able to hang on longer, that she would enter that same state, ungrounded by biology, until the structure of her cells collapsed and left behind a fine lace of crystal. She doubted that it would be robust enough to survive, this hypothetical future material self. Probably vibrations and gravity would knock it apart as soon as her cellular structure started to truly degrade. Her system was designed to power itself off of her biology too. Once that was gone, she would fade and crumble.

So the problem remained. How could she, in a relatively short span of time, move enough of what made her...herself, across the constraints of bandwidth and into the mind of Guardian? It seemed an impossible problem, and yet it was almost as if… someone… had been preparing the way for her from the beginning.

What else would a ‘soul space’ ultimately be for but to contain her essential self? She had been struggling with that question ever since she learned how much more it was than a simple place to decorate, why Henry had designed such a thing into his system. Now, maybe, she was beginning to understand. Perhaps it was what the Etalaki had been missing.

It didn’t stop there though, for if she were to somehow transmigrate herself to the Inside, she would need a place prepared for her, no doubt, raw and fragile psyche. How fortunate, then, that Nandi had kindly provided just such a thing, her Trial Space. It was still part of him, but he had made it clear that someday, and she had assumed it was in some distant, hypothetical future, but someday, it would be hers, in fact be her.

It was only seconds, though naturally it felt much longer, before Attaboy responded, jolting into motion with a stoic look on his face, the look of someone about to do something so disturbing that they had no choice but to retreat within themselves. He picked her up gently, with awkward hands that didn’t know just how to hold her decapitated head, and carried her to her body, which she arranged in a lotus position as he approached.

he messaged.

He nodded, and carefully lowered her into position, turning his head sideways as he attempted to line everything up.

he asked.

Shrugging was emphatically not an option at the moment. was all she could pass on.

He grunted, then ran off, as soon as she had her hand in place. Her first order of business was connecting to the physical antenna structures running throughout her body. What she had in her head was fine for normal purposes, but her brush with death due to overheating had taught her well that size mattered, when it came to high intensity transmissions. As she did that, she also brought every other system element she could spare to the gargantuan task of reattaching her head.

While managing those tasks, she took one, possibly final, look around the landscape of her instanced travel, and then activated Nandi’s Boon. She wondered briefly if there would be some complication from leaving the instanced travel in such a way, and then decided it would be great to have a future in which to worry about such things.

The last time she had stood in front of the door to Nandi’s Realm, it had done its utmost to discourage her, but now she had an arrangement. It opened for her without complaint, and she moved beyond, into radiance and dimensions beyond her ken.

“Hi,” she said to the mighty intelligence hanging in space before her. “It seems I might need to move in early.”

.

.

.