Despite the pain, Sadea cheered inwardly as she successfully pulled Raksha into her lightning aspect. Their corporeal bodies de-atomized into wisps of psychic energy, the physical manifestation of which would be a cloud of crackling cobalt-blue electric light.

She directed this cloud through the steel doors of the mortuary plant, riding their electron stream and emerging on the other side, right in the midst of a horde of frenzied, clawing corpses. The unsanctioned dead fell apart into ashen piles beneath the touch of her lightning aspect.

Sadea dropped back into corporeality, materializing several inches above the permacrete floor of the plant’s entrance lobby and stumbling the rest of the way down. Raksha landed deftly behind her, much to her annoyance, because she’d been hoping that he’d eat a mouthful of floor-dust.

“What the hell was that?” he demanded. “What did you do to me?”

“Turned you into lightning, then pulled you through the door,” Sadea said, chuckling as she wiped a trickle of blood from her nose. “You know, you’re the first person I’ve been able to do that to and still keep alive. Wasn’t entirely sure it’d work, but here we are.”

“I thought my aegis…” Raksha muttered.

Sadea savored the tinge of uncertainty in his voice, but she couldn’t resist explaining. “I already touched on this. Your aegis and my lightning both strengthen the veil between the material and immaterial realms, the latter being the Ethereal Tides. This means that they are metaphysical parallels, benign and impervious to each other. That’s how you’re still alive. Your aegis kept your soul from being torn to shreds by my lightning.”

Something occurred to Sadea, then, as she pulled her scarf free from Raksha’s neck. “This also means that if you had resisted at all, I wouldn’t have been able to turn your flesh into electricity.”

A grin spread across her face. “I know you find me irresistibly beautiful, but you really shouldn’t just trust me, or anyone else, so quickly. That’s cute, though, very cute.”

“How would I resist something that I didn’t know was happening in the first place?” Raksha growled, casting his gaze around and getting his bearings.

Sadea took the opportunity to do the same. The entrance lobby of the mortuary plant was a vast chamber with unpainted permacrete walls and floors. Their dull-gray surfaces sported dozens of wooden signs denoting, in neatly stenciled letters, different locations.

We’re in, she pulsed telepathically to Viktoria.

Head for the lower levels and find the source of these unsanctioned energies. The processing chambers would be your best bet, the necromancer replied.

No, really? I’d have thought it’d be somewhere all these corpses aren’t boiling from, like the archives numbered “one” through “forty-four” or the privies. Maybe even your in-house eatery. Wow, you necromancers are living large, aren’t you? And just how much garbage paperwork do you lot have to need forty-four archives?

I wouldn’t know, Sadea. I’m a field operative. Viktoria’s mental voice was laden with her characteristic snippiness. Like you, but with a steady income and pension plan.

Blah, blah, blah. Hold on. I’m going to patch Mister Big-and-Dumb in, so I don’t have to repeat everything you send. Pulling a ribbon of lightning from her right temple, Sadea walked over to Raksha, who glared at her suspiciously.

“Relax. I’m just establishing psi-comms with Vicky.” She sighed at the confusion on his face. “We’ll only be able to access each other’s deliberate, transmitted thoughts, so all of your deep, dark secrets are safe.”

Raksha muttered a few ignorant, stereotypical superstitions about sorcery under his breath, but he nodded and lowered his head, so that Sadea could reach his left temple. She connected their heads with a crackling arc of lightning and established the psi-relay between them.

There. You should be able to hear my thoughts, now, Sadea pulsed to him. Vicky, send something. See if he picks it up.

The necromancer complied. Warrior. Can you hear me?

Raksha nodded, but his attempt to reply came out as little more than a blurt of mental noise, which was typical of someone untrained in psi-craft. Sadea cocked her head and scanned him with her mage-sight once more. The martial scientist’s psychic capacity was no more, or less, than baseline, effectively a Class Zero. He was no sorcerer, and he’d never be one.

How, then, did his aegis have such an affinity with her lightning?

Just speak normally. If Sadea hears you, I will be able to perceive your words through her, Viktoria pulsed to Raksha.

“Understood,” he said.

One final test, and then we can get going, Sadea sent.

What? Wait, no, Sadea, not again. You always do this. Don’t—

Sadea crafted an extremely detailed mental image of a memory in which she’d dumped a bucket of water over Viktoria while the necromancer was squatting over the privy. Then she blasted it into the psy-comms network.

Raksha’s eyes went wide.

Sadea! Viktoria shrieked, her mental voice bright with outrage and embarrassment. I’m going to kill you!

“Let’s go.” Raksha sighed, his shoulders slumping. “The sooner we get this over with, the better.”

“Eh, this place stinks, anyway, so yeah, let’s go kill something.” Raising her war-staff and wreathing its tip in lightning, Sadea strode into the mortuary plant, Raksha in tow.

The source of the unsanctioned energies has to be within the lower processing chambers, Viktoria sent. Almost certainly the intake chambers, where corpses are first brought for initial screening and sorting.

You already said that, Sadea replied, as she disintegrated an entire hallway of charging corpses. Most of them had been wearing sackcloth, but several had been clad in the robes of staff necromancers or worker coveralls. Looks like there are no survivors, by the way. Everyone working here is dead.

Raksha trailed her, his sword held loosely. The martial scientist had been more than content to let her do most of the work.

“I think this might be connected to the Tree of Hearts and the monster with three heads,” he said.

“What’re you talking about? Unsanctioned dead and a chimera are very different things.” Sadea hurled a sphere of crackling lightning into a cluster of corpses as they turned the corner of yet another seemingly endless corridor. The corpses flew apart, leaving little more than ashen, greasy smears on the permacrete walls.

He’s probably talking about a level 9 psychic phenomenon picked up by the Necromantic Bureau Primus several days ago. Raksha was the first, and only, one to provide an eyewitness account of it to me, while I was making my rounds in Asculum-Septimus. Where, incidentally, your bar-tab is astronomical, Sadea.

“Eh. I’ll pay it… someday.” Sadea raised her staff and pointed it at a small group of corpses running toward them, but Raksha dashed past her.

His blade flashed, turning carrion into mincemeat. Within moments, there was only a single unsanctioned dead left, its limbs hacked off and its torso skewered on Raksha’s sword. Still animate, it snapped its jaws at the martial scientist and flailed about with its stumps.

“Look. It is… smiling,” he pointed out.

Sadea took a closer look. The martial scientist was correct. The corpse’s lips were drawn back in a ghastly grin, even as it gnawed at the empty air, and its ruined, rotting brow was lifted, as if in morbid mirth.

“That’s unusual.”

“I saw many serfs make faces like this before they turned into mutants and cut their own hearts out.” Raksha flicked the corpse off his sword and crushed its skull beneath his boot-heel. “There is probably another fruit from the Tree of Hearts here, just like there was in the manufactory attacked by the three-headed monster.”

“Still not entirely sure what you’re talking about, but that does sound interesting, and potentially profitable,” Sadea said.

Yes, this merits further investigation.

“One thing at a time, Vicky.” Sadea scanned a stenciled sign at a pair of branching corridors. The elevators to the processing chambers were to the left. Heading right lead to an all-purpose stairwell.

She hated stairs, so she turned left.