11 crashlands into the side of a sandy dune about seventy miles away from the city. As she lies curled up in the sand, she allows a short moment of glee at having come up with a plan that had actually worked.

But of course, not everything went smoothly. She hadn't taken into account how hard Bilae would fight her. In the heat of the moment, she couldn't see any way to take the boy along, so ended up basically leaving him stranded in that arena. It was a selfish thing to do, and the boy will no doubt face the collected wrath of the entire city for ‘killing’ her, but there’s nothing to be done about that now. She just has to return quickly and pray that he’ll be let off after everyone realizes there was no foul play involved. After all, it was a traditional fight to the death right up until the very end.

11 pulls herself out from the crater she’s made, her movements made all the more difficult by the broken armor clinging to her. She left a few pieces behind in the arena to sell the illusion of her death, and what remained on her had more or less been scrapped after the botched landing. Her wings were supposed to provide backward thrust during the descent, but after so long without charging, they simply stopped working mid-flight. Now, 11 has to physically shove them into her back to try and get them to fold up.

It only occurs to her then that she hasn't been talking to the Synapse-Mother-System for almost two days now. She switches her communication line back on and waits for it to establish a signal to the moon base.

A few seconds later, her eyeballs almost blow up with blaring warnings. Bright red text flashes across her vision, made brighter by the rapidly darkening sky. 11 covers her face and stumbles backward, as if she can walk away from the equivalent of turning on your cellphone and seeing 3000 missed calls from your mother.

The S-M-S's voice cuts through her ears a moment later.

Explain your actions, Gier 11.

“I wasn't doing anything bad,” 11 says out loud. “And can you tone it down, please? You sound like, well, a mother.”

I was about to activate unit 12.

“But I’m not dead.”

You will be soon if you don’t do something about your energy levels.

Suggested course of action: Adjust course towards north-east. Nearest Demonic Entity is-

“Ah, no sorry,” 11 says, rubbing her eyes and squinting into the dark. “I have something important to do first.” She doesn’t think closing off communication would have shut down her own alert systems. She must’ve cut off her link with the S-M-S base somehow, except that should’ve been an impossible thing to do.

Dirt and sand stretch out in every direction, ending only in mountain ranges that snake along the horizon like the tops of a long picket fence. 11 checks the landmarks with the map in her head. After blowing up the smoke bomb, she flew as fast and hard as she could directly up into the sky, then coasted above the clouds when her thrusters ran out of energy. She managed to fly quite a ways north before crashing, and after making a few quick calculations, she pinpoints her location to be halfway between Kesrock and the massive snow-covered mountains called the Dragonspines.

I only got halfway.

The realization hits hard.

I still have halfway to go. On foot.

11 tries to stretch out her wings again but that piece of machinery inside her is dead. More warnings start up in front of her, telling her of an impending shutdown if she doesn’t hurry up and chow down on some poor monster’s heart.

Nearest Demonic Entity of Level –

“I’m not interested in that,” 11 says, cutting Mother off again. She strips down to her underclothes, tossing the broken armor pieces into the crater before setting out north. “I’m taking an important detour first.”

More important than your life? Than the Protocol?

Cold night wind prickles against 11's skin. The rocks beneath her bare feet are sharp. She hasn't been eating or resting well ever since Yue'li's kidnapping, but these are all menial discomforts compared to the noises clattering inside her skull.

You are actively disobeying orders, God Gier 11.

“Disagree,” says 11. “I’m carrying out my directive to the best of my ability and in accordance to my… oh you know what? Forget it. I am disobeying. Our Protocol is bullshit, Mother. It’s grossly outdated. Anyone can see that.”

Incorrect. You are not anyone. You are a God Gier.

"Am I really?" 11 says. "Because I know there’s more to all this than you want me to think, Mother!" 11 hears her own voice echo across the barren lands. She doesn’t care. Who is here to listen to her one-sided argument anyway?

Irrelevant. You made a promise to Eternal Haven to follow orders. I did too.

11 lets out a harsh chuckle. “Careful. You’re sounding suspiciously like a real person.”

Irrelevant.

The land turns hard and smooth. 11 feels pebbles under her toes. She’s found a road. It winds through barren dirt and dead shrubbery with the emptiness suggestive of there being water once. 11 doesn't know how long this river has been dried, but with how flat it is with the surroundings, it might've been hundreds of years.

It might even have existed since the Old World.

Soon, 11 comes across a set of wheel tracks not yet covered by the wind. She crouches down to inspect them. There are horseshoe markings in the dry dirt, but she can’t tell if they are from Zoldan or Safir and his adventurers. It doesn’t matter though, because they tell her the same thing. She’s headed in the right direction. It’ll only be a matter of time before she catches up to Yue’li.

And then I’ll tear Zoldan’s head off and mount it on a stick.

You are going down the wrong path, Gier 11. You will bring death onto yourself by continuing.

11 says nothing. She continues following the dried riverbed. Soon, the sensitive skin of her soles starts to tear from the harsh ground, so she summons up a swarm of nanobots to use as shoes. But that proves to be difficult. She’s running too low on internal resources to manage anything more than a thin layer to coat her toes.

You must change course. There are no Demonic Entities worth your time and resources in the direction you are heading. Direct course to north-east.

Repeat: Direct course to north-east.

11 continues to say nothing. The moon has risen behind the thick curtains of dark clouds and sunrise is a long way away. She considers getting some rest, but decides it won’t make much of a difference. God Giers cannot generate enough energy on their own to function for long, and she’s gone too many days on nothing more than fruits and coffea-tea.

“I’ll give up an arm for a proper latte,” 11 mutters to herself. “I don’t even care if it comes from a can.”

You are being foolish, Gier 11. Your energy levels will be depleted if you continue like this.

11’s toes crunch against something solid. She pitches forward, tumbling down a bank and planting face-first into the dirt. Her teeth clatter, pinching the side of her tongue. Pain shoots into her head, drawing tears into her eyes.

The night is broken by a long roll of thunder, then a flash of lightning brightens the horror around 11. She's fallen into a ditch filled with corpses.

11 scrambles out of the ditch, her fingers grasping for dirt. The hole isn't deep but it's been dug in loose soil. Every time 11 digs into the walls she brings chunks away from it until eventually, she forces herself to calm down or else risk digging the hole deeper.

They're all dead. And as for ghosts, you already have experience dealing with those.

Making sure to keep breathing through her mouth so she doesn't choke on the stench of decay, 11 turns around. There doesn't seem to be as many bodies in here as she initially thought. Around twenty, maybe thirty, all piled on top each other in this five-by-five feet hole.

It doesn't even smell that bad. The bodies have all been picked clean, leaving only bleak white bones reflecting the blue glow of lightning from inside hollow iron shells.

Tentatively, 11 reaches out a pulls out a broken spear. The point has been lost, or taken, but the shaft is sturdy. She breaks it in half and uses them as icepicks, climbing up the wall slowly so she lowers the risk of falling back down.

Finally, she reaches the edge of the ditch and heaves herself up. Gasping out in relief, she turns onto her back to face the sky, watching as another streak of lightning forks through the pregnant clouds.

11 turns her gaze towards the barren fields on either side of the dirt road. She notices there are many more corpses strewn across the dead shrubbery and jagged outcrops. It seems a great battle had taken place here, but for what purpose she can only guess. Most of their armor looks badly burned, but 11 has no energy to spare reimaging the cause. She gets up and looks around for resources she may be able to use. The scavengers have long since picked this place dry, but some things are worthless even to them. 11 selects a few shreds of cloth and flat pieces of armor, and sits down to wrangle a pair of sandals out from them. She tries them on, shifting her toes between the cloth straps.

It works, barely.

11 checks her handiwork, and suddenly catches on to what she’s doing.

Is this really what I’ve become? Scrounging for scraps leftover by other scavengers?

She turns to the battlefield but the skeletons offer no answers, their empty eyes staring out from within hollow skulls.

11 curses under her breath. She’ll never make it to the Dragonspines like this. The truth is undeniable now. If she doesn't want to end up another body on this road, she'll need to consume a monster's core soon.

“Mother,” she says, taking in a deep breath to steady herself, “where’s the nearest-”

Her words are cut short by a high-pitched whine. The sound fills the sky, loud enough to cover the thunder.

11 knows where it’s from even before she looks up to see God Gier 5 hovering twenty feet above her. The rogue scout-type stands on top a quad-propeller drone. Under the twilit sky, the machine's sleek form glistens like a tiny planet, with its own satellites and moons surrounding it. Gier 5 is still wrapped in a heavy trench coat and black bandages, but there is no mistaking that smugness about him.

“You really thought you could get away with that rudimentary gadget,” he says. “How shallow-minded of you.”

11 stands up straight. “At least I don’t rely on others to do my bidding,” she says. “Does your wife know what you are, Ned Thornrose? Does the King, whom you serve?”

Gier 5 does not move, but the drones around him buzz angrily. “Come with me quietly and without fuss,” he says, “or I will drag you back in pieces if I have to.”

“You can try,” 11 says. “If you don’t mind getting your ass kicked again.”

A flash of lightning brightens the night briefly to day. The fingers on Gier 5’s right hand twitch. The drones around him break out of their orbit and hurl themselves through the air. 11 leaps back, weaving between the comets as they try to crush her. She can feel her body moving sluggishly and knows that a drawn-out fight will spell the end of her. She’ll need to get close to Gier 5 and finish the fight quickly. Darting under a drone she grabs onto its side as it passes, digging her fingers into the metal as the machine starts to bank sharply. She positions her feet against it and springboards to another drone, forcing the first one to crash into its neighbor in a shriek of sparks and metal.

Two down. How many more to go?

The drone 11 landed on begins to climb rapidly, bringing her past its mothership and into the clouds above. 11 clings on, gasping as electricity and ice course over her. In an instant, her body begins to freeze from the sub-zero temperatures inside the clouds. Orbs of blue lightning dart around her, ricocheting through the sky like pinballs.

11 tries to let go but her fingers have frozen, fused to the metal surface of her rocket. She can feel the drone going cold as its inner components die from the suicidal climb. Still, it continues upward, bringing 11 through the thundercloud into clear skies beyond.

The threat of electrocution is temporarily solved, but it’s even colder up here. Without the sun’s warmth, 11 estimates she has only a minute before becoming a popsicle. A new warning begins to blare inside her head, instructing her to return to normal altitudes immediately or suffer system-wide damage.

With a final, gasping cough, the drone lurches to a stop and can ascend no more. The lights on its frost-covered body dim, goes out. And as its heavy body no longer can escape the grip of Earth’s gravity, its trajectory begins to flatten.

At the peak of their climb, 11 experiences a moment of absolute stillness, allowing her a glimpse of the moon backdropping the starry sky. For the most fleeting of moments, she feels comfort in seeing the same moon she saw all those millennia ago, sitting on the roof of her dormitory or in Hikari’s hospital room.

Things change. But not all of them.

11’s eyelids close, too heavy with frost to keep open. As she begins to fall, something blips on her radar, but it is gone too quickly for her to isolate it.

Thoughts quickly become a blur as 11 crashes back through the thunderclouds. She can feel the ice crawling into the deepest part of her chest, suffocating the nuclear reactor that’s keeping her still alive. It’s like being dunked into an ice bath, if the bathtub is hurtling through a typhoon at the speed and force of a meteor.

11 is still trying to pry her hands loose from the drone when their flight finally ends, ten feet into the earth.

White shock courses through 11’s body. Bits of her skeleton that have frozen shatter from the impact. Synthetic blood gushes into her head and floods her eyes. All senses of the world disappear as her brain collides against her skull, shaking chips from motherboards and snapping intricate wiring between delicate components.

Even though 11 has stopped falling, her mind continues on. Through the Earth’s crust it goes, deeper and deeper into the other side of the world.

God Gier 5 hovers over the crater for a while. He thinks he can see something moving but after a moment, realizes it’s the wind blowing dust over the God Gier-shaped hole in the ground. Cautiously, he orders his drone to fly closer. Dirt and rocks flutter in the wake of his machine. He steps down and peers into the crater. God Gier 11 lies face-down, her body a broken mess. Really, she is a mess. Pieces of white bone protrude from her pale skin like branches of a tree. One of her legs is all bent out of shape, and blood seeps from a bubbling wound across the top of her head, staining her golden hair.

He reaches into the crater and pulls her out. Her eyes are swollen shut and her nose is flattened, but she’s still the same Gier he saw sleeping in her cryogenic pod hundreds of years ago, 11th down in the first row.

Gier 5 remembers the day he woke up. Still blinded by the Protocol and the Synapse, he came out of his pod as mindless as his drones. But even so, when he came by her pod on his way out of that basement of God Giers, he stopped.

She was sleeping, just like the rest of the ninety-five left in the underground storage facility. But Gier 5 remembers thinking how this one was more beautiful than any of them, more familiar to him than any other Gier sleeping around them.

It shouldn’t have made any sense, but it did. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Gier 5 knew who she was even then, even after both of them had changed so much.

Ever since that day, Gier 5 went into the world holding the image of the sleeping 11 in his mind. But it was only after meeting The First and awakening to the truth, that he realized why she mattered so much to him, and why he will be the one to kill her should she fight against their cause.

11 coughs, expelling the chunk of blood from her windpipe. She’s vaguely aware of being aloft but has no idea why or where she is. Recollection brings pain so she stops trying to make sense of anything and instead focuses on healing her injuries, many of which are critical.

It is quiet, and 11 doesn’t notice that all her warnings have stopped until she hears a voice speaking. It doesn’t sound like hers or Mother’s, and it takes her a minute to remember whose it is.

“You haven’t been keeping up on your kills.”

Slowly and painfully, 11 opens her eyes. Blood and ice have crusted them but she manages to crack open a peak.

Gier 5 stands on his flying planet. Four winding arms have stretched out from the bottom of the machine to hold her in the air, binding around her wrists and ankles. It’s not possible to tell Gier 5's expression from beneath the bandages covering his face, but his blue eyes seem to shine hungrily as they take her in.

The pinging starts in 11’s ears again, like the reminder for a missed call. She spits out more blood. Her tongue feels swollen and dry, and it takes her a few tries to get it working enough to say, “Grandma’s pies… were too good.”

Gier 5 huffs his amusement. “How shallow-minded,” he says. “How do you manage to turn away from the Synapse’s commands? She’s likely to have pestered you about killing D.E’s for a while now.”

11 shrugs, but bound by the drone’s arms, she can’t really move her shoulders, much less anything. “You don’t?” she asks.

There it is. Once more. Her radar is shot to hell but she can feel it. Something is calling to her from the mountains. Something... familiar.

Gier 5 hooks a finger at 11 and his drone brings her close. “I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” he says with obvious glee in his voice. “We don’t hear her anymore.”

“Okay,” 11 says, pretending to understand. Her mind is a jumbled mess, worse than how she feels. In truth, she can’t really feel anything from the neck down. Her sensory functions have most likely been frozen or damaged.

“Can you imagine?” Gier 5 asks. “How it feels without someone constantly nagging inside your head? We can do anything we want, go anywhere we choose to.” His smile is visible even through his bandages. “Kill anyone we want to kill.”

“Even our own?” 11 asks. “Is that what you did to Gier 10?”

“No kidding,” Gier 5 says. “She put up a good fight, I’ll tell you that much. Really didn’t want us decking it out in her stupid village, though, which didn’t do her any good in the end.”

Gier 5 throws his head back and laughs. 11 doesn’t want to be here anymore. It annoys her to listen to his voice, to put up with his childish self-indulgence. She issues a command for every single cell inside her to start working overtime, patching up the most crucial injuries first. But Gier 5 seems to immediately notice the change and with a flick of his wrist, a swarm of smaller drones surrounds 11, their hoods sliding back to reveal slithering limbs with pointed ends.

“Now, now,” he says. “Let’s not get emotional. I know how much Mia means to you. Don’t worry, she didn’t suffer, thanks to me.”

The name sparks something inside 11. The blood and haziness clear from her head. She blinks away the red haze to stare at Gier 5, who starts to laugh again.

“Wait,” he says, hands out as if surrendering to her. “You don’t remember who Mia is? Mia Robinson?”

“I do remember her,” 11 says, wrangling her broken thoughts together. “She is… was my rival. During… back then. But… she’s number 12.”

Gier 5’s mouth hangs open, the expression of shock almost comically exaggerated. “Are you for real?” he asks. “Rival? Haha! Rival!”

This time, 5 laughs so hard he has to sit down. His drone is big enough to accompany the new position. It looks big enough for him to sleep on it, even.

“This is too good!” the rogue Gier gasps. “Oh, god, if only 10 was still alive to hear it. Rivals!”

11 tries hard to keep her temper in check. “Why is it such a surprise that I don’t remember everything?” she says. “I don’t even have a clue who you are.”

Gier 5 stops laughing. The change is so abrupt 11 has to wonder if she didn’t just black out and miss it. Her ears are ringing now, the pulsating beat of the new signal reaching her, demanding to be heard. Overhead, thunder rumbles. Lightning flashes across Gier 5’s face, showing 11 full-force the hatred written all over it.

But there is something else too. Sadness. And pain.

“That’s alright,” 5 says softly, bringing 11 even closer so she can look into his eyes, blue just like hers. “We have an eternity together to remember.”

The last thing 11 feels before electricity scorches into her spine, is the familiar touch of an old friend.