I fucking hate telepathy.

Thegn cranes his pale, gaunt frame over a massive table, staring at his maps. His open fingers, old and deceptively frail-looking, stretch one of the maps so it lays flat. He spits at the ground. Yeah, yeah. I know you can all hear me. So what? For fuck’s sake, when’s the last time I heard actual words from a voice that wasn’t my own?

Looking up, he scowls at the Karui technician entering the room. Being blind and mute, the Karui can only effectively communicate by way of telepathy, but Thegn is too annoyed—and too drunk—to care. He’s barely heard even his own voice in the last few weeks; communicating with one in the Karui hive is a poor substitute.

Part of the problem is you don’t use words. You push the whole idea, fully baked, into my head. You know how annoying it is to have your questions answered before—

See? That’s exactly what I mean! Fuck efficiency! It’d be nice to get a complete thought assembled before you yank it out of my skull.

Aiming his face in Thegn’s direction, the technician adjusts his grip on a cylindrical metal container about the height and diameter of an adult chicken. The technician tilts his cleanly shaven head inquisitively. His eyes and mouth are covered in their ceremonial bandages, so any cues from facial expressions are impossible for Thegn to see. Of course, it’s not like there’s much to see under the bandages. All conscripts to the Karui are first enlisted among the legions of the hive. And all members of the hive undergo purification—a removal of hair, eyes, tongue, and memories. The Umbrati have a similar induction process for their new recruits, but they don’t use sugary terms like “purification.”

Over a hundred and fifty years, and still no clear winner in the war. Not that I expected anything else.

Thegn takes a step away from his maps and straightens his back. His old bones creak in about half a dozen different places, but there’s thankfully no stiffness as he reaches his full towering height. Walking past the newly arrived subordinate, he reaches for his jug. He takes a deep swig and wipes his mouth with the back of his opposite hand. It’s an ineffective gesture; a good portion of the overflow already found its way along his short, scraggly beard and is now dripping on his shirt. He lowers himself into his chair and stares out across the length of his dank subterranean room.

The only surviving member of the original Four, Thegn, the Reaper, was there when the war between the Karui and Umbrati started. Technically speaking, he helped start it.

What a fucking wreck that turned out to be.

He takes another pull from the jug and glares at the technician. No, not yet. I’m in the middle of a memory here. Every time you interrupt, I’m going to take another dr—.

Gulp.

You made me do that.

Thegn attempts to punctuate the point by taking yet another deep draft but finds only a couple drops left in his jug.

“Fine. But I’m talking out loud. What have you got?” He faintly smiles at the sound as his scratchy voice echoes across the chamber. The smile doesn’t last long.

“Wait. What? All of them? We contracted three teams of hunters for this! Should’ve been more than enough.” Thegn stands, perhaps a bit too abruptly, and lurches his way to the glass wall on the opposite side of the room. “Let me see the playback.”

The Karui technician dutifully sets the canister on Thegn’s table and proceeds to unscrew its lid. A plume of fog pours from the container as its lid is removed, revealing a head preserved in a cryogenic bath.

“You said he checked in at a desert post? Which one? Not the number! That doesn’t mean anything to me. Use its name or the name of something near—thank you. So he reported at the desert post just north of canyon country.” Stupid bastard. He should’ve known better than to report in with nothing more than information and an injury.

Thegn looks back at the head resting in the canister. Your head is much easier to transport than that large body you had … especially a skull as small as yours. Hey—

“Hey!” He reaches out and stops the technician from putting the canister on his table. “Not there! I’ve still got stains on my maps from the last time. Use the stand.” Thegn points to the metal stand at his right. “I put it there for a reason.”

Complying, the technician sets the canister on its proper location. With his hands free, he holds them a bit above the face of the small-headed bounty hunter. The technician’s hands pulse light blue, and the muscles in the disembodied head begin to twitch and seize rapidly. Slowly, the twitching synchronizes with the pulsing glow of the Karui tech’s hands. Eventually, the seizing stops and the head comes to rest.

The technician splays his fingers. The eyelids of the small preserved head snap open as consciousness is forced back behind them. The headless bounty hunter’s eyes dart about, frantically trying to figure out what’s going on.

Poor dope. Seeing your mouth move, I can practically hear the screams you’d make if you still had lungs. I hear that being decapitated feels like being suffocated on air. What an odd feeling that must be.

The cold, logical brutality of the Karui—the Force of Light—ceased to bother Thegn ages ago. It no longer strikes him as hypocrisy, just merely ironic.

Take this situation as an example. The Karui at that post could have easily healed this bounty hunter when he checked in. But failure, coupled with his wounds, made knowledge his only valuable commodity. Since playback kneaks use the brain for storage, the obvious solution was to remove the hunter’s head, preserve it, and transport it to base for analysis. Sure, they could have just downloaded the images from his playback to a data sphere, but kneak downloads aren’t as reliable as what the Karui term “primary origination” data. Makes perfect sense.

Keeping one glowing hand above the bodiless head, the Karui technician reaches behind the hunter’s left ear and activates the playback kneak. Returning his hand above the silently screaming face, the technician leans back. On the glass wall before Thegn, moving images materialize from an amorphous cloud, like ink dripped into a glass of water.

The bounty hunter’s life flashes before Thegn’s eyes. I have to hand it to humans. They continue to innovate in even the most dire of circumstances. This was so much harder to do before they invented these “kneak” devices. And nearly impossible to do with a corpse.

The images from the hunter’s kneak play in reverse. Though there are gaps missing, it tells a definite story. Decapitation, a fruitless argument with the mute Karui field soldiers, a slow trek through the desert, huddling by a fire next to the corpse of a bounty hunter with an enlarged arm, being dragged out of a canyon by that same hunter, a bar fight—

“Wait! This block. Run it forward in real time from here.”

Thegn watches the carnage unfold on the glass wall. It seems that this particular bounty hunter got hurt early and spent a good portion of this fight hiding. And then Thegn sees it—sees her.

“Stop! Track backward slowly until—there! They did find her.”

Thegn walks up to the wall and reaches toward the blurry image of a dreadlocked girl with empty green eyes, blood floating in the air around her, a slight smile on her face. This is her. The only known survivor of the Fareburne massacre. The Karui believe that with that much soulmantic energy being poured into a single town, any survivor would be a valuable addition to the hive. But this face. This face doesn’t quite belong to the girl they’ve been looking for. It isn’t hers. It belongs to a memory.

Durga?

Thegn catches himself and halts his mind before any further thoughts escape. He lingers a moment with his hand on the wall and glances back at the purified technician. No expression. No reaction. If the hive noticed any of that last thought, this technician isn’t indicating one way or the other.

“Wait a moment. There’s no way she should be this powerful.” What happened?

“Push back to the start of the fight and see—What do you mean you can’t? Head trauma?” Shit.

Thegn glares at the head before pulling his long, bony middle finger back and delivering a solid flick right between the bodiless bounty hunter’s eyes. “Stupid tough guy merc. Wear a fucking helmet!”

The bounty hunter’s face scowls in pain and confusion. Thegn turns back to the glass wall and addresses the Karui technician. “Alright, just take it to as early in the fight as you can.”

The glass wall shows images of bodies—and body parts—flying through the air in reverse. Blurred flashes of the violent girl show in spurts. Then, the images get less distinct. They become a blurred haze. It’s like trying to read while someone blows in your eyes.

“Crap. We’re not getting anywhere with this. Push before the fight. What town are they in? Yeah, I know it’s a canyon town. Need to be more specific than that. Those things are warts on a giant axe wound in the ground. They’re everywhere. I just need—”

An idea comes to mind. His own idea. Not one jammed into his skull by the hive. He looks in the canister, past the horrified eyes of the disembodied head. “Wait a minute.”

He knocks the technician’s hand away and wraps his fingers around the head in the canister. Yanking the head out, he turns it to look at the jack matrix behind its left ear; the array of pore-sized receptacles that kneaks can plug into.

The hunters we hired for this are supposed to wear beacon kneaks. Where’s—

“Damaged, you assume? Well in all you’re assuming, did you think that maybe the broadcast coords for that kneak might also be saved in his gray matter? Head trauma, right. You didn’t look. Well, go look. With what’s left of that data and the vid from this playback, you can piece together where she is. Let me know when you have something. I’ve got preparations to make.”

Thegn dumps the head back in its canister and walks toward the chamber’s entrance. He stops and faces the room. “Caffiel! Where the fuck are you? Get out here. We’ve got work to do.”

A squeak sounds, and a large albino rat crawls up from behind the chair Thegn was sitting in earlier. It perches itself atop the chair’s back and casts an incredulous glare at Thegn with eyes that are distinctly non-rat-like. They still show the expected albino red, but unlike typical rat eyes, these are slitted and lizard-like.

Thegn returns the glare with a hiss through his teeth. “Get your furry ass over here.”

Caffiel squeaks in affirmation and scurries across the floor, up Thegn’s leg, and around to his shoulder. Turning to the door, he pulls up the hood from his cloak. A pair of enormous black wings grow from his back.

“It’s time to ready my scythe.”