The core of the bunker was much farther down than a mere mile down. After the first minute or two of burning green, the emotions elicited by the memory of her burning sister started to peter out, and her capacity approached thirty percent. Valyrie returns to her default state, a dull numbness where she can’t really bring herself to care about much of anything. She tries to put on a podcast, but her connection to the outside world has been completely cut off. No music, no films, and no books are available without a direct connection to the server holding her lease to that content. Her HUD is empty of everything not related to the information. That’s an issue because a number in the bottom right pulsates with a dull yellow.

  Viral factor exceeds 3 MOI, infestations are likely, and living contaminants are near. Valyrie mostly ignores the droning AI voice. Valyrie is immune to the airborne contagion. Most people in this era are. Even so, she holds her breath as breathing in the zombie virus is still freaking gross. There was an outbreak of the virus on a black market outpost midway between Earth and Mars. International territory, none of the big players were obligated to deal with that sector of space, and the Freestar Collective figured they could prove they were a force to be reckoned with if they managed to put down an outbreak and resecure the outpost. Reopening the Gloom Bazaar under actual legal protections might have even gotten them a few privateers in their pockets.

  Gloom was the first time the Freestar Collective ever dealt with a major outbreak, so they sent Valyrie on a single light cruiser with a crew just shy of one hundred people. Only thirty crew members were combatants; the majority of them were mages fresh out of the academy and barely capable of a third-circle spell. Valyrie and her squad leader were the only blue warriors present. There weren’t any soldiers capable of green or yellow.

  Valyrie’s job was supposed to be simple. Shut up and follow orders. The cruiser would raze the planet from afar with incendiary bombs, survivors were already considered lost by the time Freestar secured the permits. Once that was done, soldiers would tear apart any surviving bunkers, vaults, and warehouses for valuables and zombies. Valyrie, given her power and sunny disposition, was usually sent in first to make a lot of noise and draw out whatever undead horde was still alive. Then she would burn them.

  Valyrie got really good at not breathing over those five weeks. All she knew about zombies before Gloom came from flicks. They were supposed to be shambling half-dead things with skin sloughing off and moans. They weren’t supposed to talk. They weren’t supposed to scream. They weren’t supposed to be alive. Valyrie’s first encounter with a Zombie was in the cellar of the former’s government mansion. Celestial munitions had turned the place into a heaping pile of rubble, but were calibrated not to scorch the surface or anything beneath. The cellar was an entire facility capable of sheltering dozens of people. Valyrie tore through pristine bedrooms and organized libraries. Nothing was out of place, and there was no indication that the place was lived in. Valyrie had just assumed nobody was lucky enough to make it in.

  She called for backup after the first few floors. There were valuables to collect, paintings, jewels, fuel, working electronics, and gizmos that the mages had tagged for collection on her HUD. Too much for her to carry on her own, even if she spoke and formed a gravity well to shove everything not nailed down back to the surface. Her squad leader was a hardass, though, made harder after her handler repeated a few choice insults Valyrie had made behind the woman’s back (turns out the handler wasn’t your friend, who could have guessed?). Her squad leader required that she fully explore the place before risking the two or three non-nil civilian resources available for salvage collection. It was all bullshit though. Barely anyone on that mission was a non-nil, just the squad leader and a couple of the mages. It's how Freestar operates.

  Whether it was spite or instinct, her squad leader was right to prevent anyone but Valyrie from entering that shelter. When she got to the fifth floor, Valyrie started hearing music. Singing specifically. Not AI voices modified to hell and back to be absolutely perfect, but actual human voices shouting and laughing, and singing. She heard clapping and feet tapping the ground. Echoes of conversations from below. Without a shadow of a doubt, there were survivors, but she was still forced to go down alone.

  Valyrie had rushed to tell the survivors the good news, crossing the last two floors in a streak of yellow and bursting into a grand dance hall with a smile. It took her seconds to parse what she was seeing. There were about two dozen people, well dressed in tuxes and suits, waltzing with each other. A few were children in their Sunday best, chasing each other and laughing while they played. There was so much blood. Valyrie remembers stumbling into the room after cutting off her announcement, her eyes unable to focus on what she was seeing. Her eyes subconsciously looking away from a cracked open ribcage in the corner, or flies gathering around excrement smeared on the walls. Her gaze instead lingered on the gilded chandelier or the honest to god wooden table in the center of the room. There in the center of the room was an immaculately carved wooden dining table. Bound to it was a shaved person devoid of any gender marks holding a stretched smile that reached its glowing yellow eyes. The body was singing, its mouth bloody, its voice louder than all the others. Valyrie had no idea what language it was singing in. It sounded almost English, though she couldn’t make out a single word. Still, somehow she knew the voice was beckoning her to come closer, to move past the dancers and truly see what the hell was going on.

  They were butchering it. Men, women, and children using their knives and fingernails were sawing and digging at the skin, taking large cuts of flesh as the body sang without a single care in the world. The body looked at Valyrie and said the first recognizable word of her song. “Eat.”

  Valyrie shakes her head as the viral factor indicator flashes orange. The Gloom Bazaar was not a good memory at all. She killed a lot of zombies that day. She didn’t expect it to be a fight, but even while using grenades and flaring green, they didn’t die easily. The singing corpse didn’t have a single limb left; its stumps weren’t even leaking blood, any and all fluids drunken in the revelry, but even after Valyrie had slayed every other zombie and burned the ballroom to a crisp, it kept singing. And that was just a single zombie. The Wandering Echo of Gloom was so, so, so much worse.

  Valyrie doesn’t know if Petra is a zombie. She hopes not. The mission would be considered a failure even if she took the zombie back, kicking and screaming. Some non-nil nobody would argue that in the hour Valyrie was off her lease, she had managed to infect Petra with the woman’s own research. The non-nils were always looking for reasons to cite her and tarnish her record.

  She doubts Petra is a zombie, though. The woman sounded fearful over the loudspeakers, and that’s the one emotion she knows zombies don’t feel. Still, such a high viral factor meant that a living zombie was down there. Or these new viral detectors were shit. Valyrie would bet on her old squad leader retrofitting the army with the cheapest of the sensors she could find. Either way, Valyrie would find out in a moment.

  Valyrie hums as she breaks down the elevator doors and steps into the final chamber of the bunker. She’s immediately taken aback by how large this place is. Maybe the size of a heavy cruiser end-to-end. She sees the girl, who must be the good doctor’s daughter, waiting at the far end of the room. The chamber is domed with artificial sun lamps about four stories up. She feels her aura charging the barest degree at the luminescence, but she won’t be going up in capacity more than a percent or two even if she spent an entire day down here under these artificial lights. Still, it’s interesting that this bunker has any electricity. Rare earth metals were probably present in every wall of this facility, come to think of it. It would be worth flagging this place for copper extraction at the very least. Though maybe it would be better if nobody disturbed this chamber’s serenity. In between the sun lamps, somebody has painted the stars.

  Somebody’s done a lot of painting, to be honest. The chamber is shaped like a town square. There’s a quad laced with artificial grass and trees, leading towards the center of the chamber where the girl waits in front of the steps to a large installation. Around the edges of the chamber are entrances to what must be apartment buildings based on the balconies present above the second floor. Soviet brutalist architecture is present everywhere, but it’s been undermined by flowers and trees painted on the hard concrete.

  It’s really quite beautiful. Someone has painted this old soviet bunker to grant the sense of standing in the middle of a terraform bubble and looking through bulletproof glass at the night sky. Valyrie wanders down the sidewalks in awe of the place. The sky has been painted on the upper half of the apartment buildings. To her east is a rendition of Earth, half lit like you would expect to see when standing on what remains of the moon. Next to it, taking up too much of the canvas in a mockery of astronomy, lies the sun rendered in brilliant gold. Valyrie wanders there first. This has been the closest she’s ever been to something so majestic, but it’s not real. She feels no warmth from it, and the memory of today crashes her out of her awe. She turns away, still finding beauty in this place but less joy.

  Nothing much is painted on the west wall. There’s little to see in space. A few small spheres dot the landscape here and there, which must be indications of planets, but nothing the size of Earth or its mother. Valyrie does catch something taking up around four apartment buildings. She feels like she’s at the wrong angle to make it out clearly; it’s like looking at a painting through a kaleidoscope, but it’s impossible not to know what the artist tried to render. Some idiot has painted the Eventide.

  The fifth apocalypse was aliens, because of course humans couldn’t inflict enough suffering on themselves. The Sacred came from the Eventide, and in three years, they took over most of the solar system. Humanity was just a few space rats floating on moon shards and cobbled-together stations. We won that war eventually, the humans remaining were incredibly tough and almost all of them were speakers. Most of the Sacred fled back through the Eventide, but a few remained in cities spread around the solar system that remain no-fly zones to this day. Several Sacred communities trade with the major players, and various Sacred inquisitors monitor the solar system for heresy. Painting the Eventide is one of the worst crimes a sentient could commit. Entire stations have been exterminated over a few digital photos. Cave paintings on a wall would drive the inquisitors crazy. The Sacred consider it anathema to witness the God of gods in anything less than its own majesty.

  It’s still nice to look at though, even jumbled up from a distance. The sentient black hole sits at the center of four balconies. Around it, the artist has rendered ship after ship trying to fly to its center. Valyrie recognises a few of the more prominent ones, the USS Autumn in brilliant white, a mockery of sacred ships, the Red Requiem dripping blood as it emerges from the aether. Hundreds of ships and arcs attempted to fly into the Eventide during the century of madness. We know all of the failures as they’re stuck forever in the event horizon of a sentient black hole.

  “If you’re not going to fight us, leave!”

  Valyrie takes a cursory look at the irate girl bravely standing as far away from her as possible. She sees the shimmer in the aether of a second-circle ward but no aura. The girl’s not a threat, she could beat a third-circle ward with red. The girl’s magical specialty is a bit interesting, though. The girl’s covered with thorny vines that dig into her skin. She looks like a cross between a green mummy and an iron maiden. If Valyrie were a betting girl, which she is, she bet on some plant-related shenanigans happening soon.

  “What?!” Valyrie shouts with a smirk.

  “I said leave,” the girl shouts back.

  “I’m sorry I can’t do that.” Valyrie shakes her head and shrugs. She’s got an hour to bring Petra back, and she’s spent about five minutes admiring the artwork. If she’s not quick, she’ll only have fifty minutes to climb back up that greuling elevator. Still, the daughter poses a serious question. Should Valyrie kill her?

  Facts are the Collective only outfitted Valyrie with one space suit for this mission, and they’ve made it very clear that that suit is only for Petra. Taking a girl without aura into the cold vacuum of space is like taking, well, anyone into the cold vacuum of space. She’ll implode or explode or do whatever flesh does in a zero-pressure environment and sub-zero temperatures.

  “Hey, do you have a space suit?” Valyrie asks. If the duo has scavenged any spare suits, then Valyrie could potentially get them both to the Collective. She does only have a single collar though so if thorn girl gets rambunctious on the journey there it could be a big problem. Maybe Valyrie just leaves the child here? This place should be torn apart for copper and whatever is in those apartment buildings anyway, so the next crew come exploring could take the girl to safety. Valyrie will need to destroy any turrets she missed on the way in on her way back to make it worth their while. It’s doubtful the salvage crew would risk going through turrets for some rambunctious space rat.

  “Even if we had suits, I wouldn’t tell you. Slaver!” The girl spits.

  Valyrie chuckles. “Ah. Teenagers.” Valyrie remembers when she was young. Got beaten by overseers a lot for caue of her mouth. She’s been hollowed out since. The old memories make her frown. This girl can’t be more than thirteen, but she’s standing firm against a blue Speaker and making demands. The girl has gumption. It would be a shame to hurt or kill her. Or it would be if this was the first time the Collective made her kill children.

  “I’m an adult.” The girl argues in favor of her death.

  “I bet you are,” Valyrie says. “Say. Is there any chance we could resolve this peacefully? I’m just here for your mom and her research. I can come back for you later.”

  “You’ll have to go through me first.”

  “Okay.” Valyrie burns green, and in a moment, she’s right in front of the girl. “That can be arranged.” By the time the first syllable is out of Valyrie’s mouth, her kick lands with the strength of a freight train on the girl's side. As expected, the vines around her arm thicken to the size of tires to lessen the blow. Valyrie’s impressed at the aether control. Most mages need to activate complex circles to do the most basic task, but the girl is at a point where she can just will her vines to obey. That takes talent and dedication. Most adult mages only have one or the other. Having both is impressive for a child. Even more impressive is the fact that the girl’s eyes tracked Valyrie’s from her first step. She wasn’t caught unaware at all. Petra has trained her daughter well, but at the end of the day, this girl is still just another mage.

  The kick sends the girl careening into an apartment. Valyrie doesn’t wait to see if the girl gets up. She starts walking up the steps of the building that the girl was guarding. It’s shaped like a church, with large battlements on each of its four corners. “College of Science and Engineering” adorns the sign above its doors. The girl unfortunately recovers when Valyrie reaches for the door handle.

  A vine snakes across the green much too slowly, but Valyrie humors the mage and lets it wrap itself around her ankle. She feels nothing, so she drops her aura to yellow, then orange, then red before finally feeling a bit of pressure against her skin. In a decade or two, the girl might warrant orange.

  “Can you just stay down? I’ll only pull my punches for so long.”

  The girl roars and attempts to drag Valyrie off her feet, but Valyrie digs in, forcing herself down into the ground until the concrete steps crack. She grips the doorknob tightly for good measure. The girl tugs three times in frustration before screaming and thickening her vines once again. This time, Valyrie is finally whisked off her feet and the door she grips comes off at the hinges. Valyrie laughs at the G-forces as she’s thrown through the air at an apartment building.

  Concrete and glass shatter under the weight of an aura-capable warrior. Valyrie tumbles head over heels through an ancient fridge and into a living room where she finally comes to a stop on top of a couch. The apartment is nice, well taken care of with pictures of a long-dead family lining the walls. There’s an aging television in the corner that is remarkably still drawing electricity, though every pixel has burned out by now. She sees blood on the walls. Whoever lived here did not abandon such a cozy place easily.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Vines rise and lift the girl to the hole in the wall that Valyrie just made. Valyrie crosses her legs and sinks into the leather couch with a calm exhale. The girl hops through the devastation into the building. “Why won’t you leave?” She growls through heavy breaths.

  Valyrie shrugs, “‘Cause you haven’t made me.”

  Against the girl screams, and Valyrie makes a mental note to talk to Petra about her daughter’s anger issues. Vines shoot out and wrap themselves around both of Valyrie’s arms. The girl once again tries to pull Valyrie away, but Valyrie’s done being tossed about by this point.

  “I’m going to give you one more chance,” Valyrie says with her arms not even bulging from their spot on the couch. Her voice is devoid of any previous warmth. “Stand down. Freestar is only here from your mom. If you continue. I will kill you.” A normal child would run crying at Valyrie’s words. She can be scary. Valyrie’s like a demi-god when she flare’s red. Her power is tangible, it feels humid and the air hums with power. A child should scream and run, but Valyrie sees nothing but rage in the girl’s bloodshot eyes. Her yellow irises don’t show a tint of fear. Valyrie sighs, then burns the vines to cinder.

  Aura is a gift from the sun. It can be used to keep you warm in the vacuum of space. It can heal wounds, nourish the body, enhance your natural prowess, speed up your perception until you can wave at individual particles of light (if myths and legends are to be believed). All of this is secondary to what aura truly is. It’s a loving caress of a goddess that wants you to be nothing less than the child of a star. Valyrie lets her hands become stars for a microsecond. The air ignites. Flames erupt throughout the apartment, burning pictures, fridges, and old televisions to ash. Fire shoots up the vines and immolates the girl. The vines covering the girl disintegrate as she screams and tumbles out of the hole she so haughtily climbed through earlier. Valyrie’s capacity diminishes by one percent.

  Valyrie holds her breath. She knows the smell of burnt flesh is all around her, but she doesn’t need to ingest it. She floats down lazily and examines the body. The girl has quite literally been burned to a crisp. Spots of red flesh eek out from cracks in blackened skin. Bones are bent in all the wrong directions. Her eyes have evaporated, leaving only sockets. Valyrie will have nightmares about this, but those can wait until she’s off the clock.

  Valyrie floats forward towards the building, resolute in her task. She doubts Petra will come peacefully now. Valyrie will have to use the collar, and she doubts even persistent near electrocutions will hold back a mother’s grief. This isn’t good work. These missions aren’t what she thought she’d be doing all those years ago when she discovered she could go red. Valyrie thought she would be a citizen by the time she hit sixteen. Here Valyrie is ten years later still a nil. Still doing Freestar’s dirty work. Still 0-19.

  Viral Factor exceeds 10 MOI. Please evacuate. Laughter rings out from behind her. Her aura shivers.

  “I’m so happy you didn’t leave,” hums a too high voice. “She never lets me out. She never lets me play with anyone.”

  Valyrie does a 180 burning green. Destroy the head, burn the body. Destroy the head, burn the body. Her mind is racing with a singular thought. Flashes of the Gloom Bazaar blaze through memory. She knows how to kill these things, and that’s to kill them quickly before they heal and multiply. Valyrie stretches out her hand to grab the head. Her fingers interlace with others. She burns green and is met with red.

  “Green is my favorite color.” The monster giggles. “Let me show you.”

  Vines burst from the paintings against the wall. Her first thought is that she’s high on soma right now, but this is painfully real. A vine as large as a building crashes into her. She blocks with an arm, but the arm snaps as she’s sent sailing back to the elevator. She’s burning green and her arm snaps.

  Valyrie remembers the scent of her sister’s ashes and goes blue. She screams rage and regret, promises death though she’s never been more afraid of anything in her life. What this monster just did wasn’t magic. Pictures can’t come to life. This girl was bending reality. That meant exactly one thing. A Wandering Echo in the skin of a girl. Even if she burned blue, even if she spoke, this was still a fucking Wandering Echo. The last time she killed one of these things, she had an orbital laser at her back and the wherewithal to flee.

  She does that now. Valyrie shoots up the elevator shaft, but a vine shoots out, wrapping around her leg before she can leave the chamber. She burns the shaft down, going solar for a full second, but the vine doesn’t so much as wilt. The vine pulls her down. Valyrie burns with the force of a star and crashes to the ground like a meteor. Before she can stand up, a vine burrows itself into her chest. Valyrie vomits blood, her vision flashes white, alarms in her head start blaring, but she’s been through certain death before. She dodges the next vine by instinct while one is still tickling her spine. She pulls it out, green aura flaring against red. Mages aren’t supposed to have an aura. Magic plants aren’t supposed to have an aura. Magic means you’ve been forsaken by the sun, but Wandering Echos break reality, scorn the Eventide. The vine only comes out of her chest with a red glow that Valyrie can’t compete with. The only reason she’s alive right now is because the monster is playing with her.

  The monster is laughing. A full-on belly laugh, hacking her guts out on the floor. Vines thrash around her, destroying the art on the walls and tearing apart the concrete ground. The monster’s sanity is long gone. All Wandering Echoes have is a lifetime of regret and pain to inflict on others.

  “No leaving now little bird. We warned you. We cried and shouted and yelled and whispered and begged for you to leave, so no more leaving. You have to play.”

  Valyrie nods at the monster’s words. Fornacis.

  Speaking so soon will have consequences. Speaking is beckoning a god to drop whatever they are doing and take up residance in your body. Fornacis is very annoyed. Her insides burn, the smell of burned flesh waifs up her throat. She vomits smoldering black blood and collapses into her own sick, but her blue is stronger than ever and now she has magic too.

  Valyrie can’t fly, but she tosses a hand towards the monster and then clenches it with all the force she can muster. Pressure around the monster increases to thousands of tons in an instant. Her vines are squashed into paste, water explodes, and then evaporates into mists. The monster’s bones break and shatter three ways, but it remains standing. Its laugh doesn’t even hitch. A vine crashes against Valyrie, but her ambient heat burns a Valyrie-shaped hole into it. She doesn’t have to doge, which is good because she can barely walk right now.

  Valyrie stumbles to her feet, and blood leaks from dozens of spots on her body. Fornacis is angry. Her skin bubbles and pops with every muscle. She’ll need a week to fully recover from this, making it out of here in an hour is a pipe dream. If she somehow survives the monster, the bomb in her neck will kill her after she passes out.

  Anger like she’s never felt in her life pulses through her. Flickers of indigo float at the edges of her vision, but she knows those are only hallucinations. Valyrie’s not special; she’ll die blue. Good thing fatalism is as efficient as anger. Valyrie spreads her arms out wide as if she’s going to embrace the monster, then smashes them together in a clap like a nuke. The ground implodes around them, feet of thick steel and concrete and astroturf shape themselves into a sphere, securing the two demigods in place.

  She knows this won’t hold a Wandering Echo for long. It’s not a prison anyway. It’s a kiln. Valyrie goes supernova for a full minute. At some point, laughter turns into screams.

  —

  Daylight breaks through the darkness as the shell surrounding the two crumbles into ash and dust. A grey snow lingers in the air, burning Valyrie’s nostrils. To her great disappointment, both of them are still alive. For now. Valyrie is still on her feet while the Echo sleeps peacefully. It's unnerving how human zombies are. The girl’s skin is nonexistent, the flesh beneath is blackened to char, and yet her breathing is easy while a gentle smile rests on her face. The viral factor is 15 MOI.

  Pale and pasty skin starts to grow over burned flesh. The monster is healing. Valyrie is definitely not. When Valyrie speaks, she usually can’t be harmed by her own power. A thin layer of aether is meant to cover her and her belongings. Fornacis did not provide her with one this time. She looks like the impression of a human facing a bomb. Her skinsuit evaporated, leaving her in little more than her underwear. The collar still digs into her skin, the starmetal designed to absorb as much aura as it takes to persist. A hole in her chest belches batches of blood, and her arm is bent in all the wrong places, but none of this is something an aura capable warrior can’t fix with time. The real issue is that her god did not extend any protection to the pack on her back, so the space suit and collar, and bits of expensive jerky are gone. Valyrie eventually shrugs at that. This mission was fucked from the beginning. She’s not going to get out of this alive. In all likelihood, Freestar knew Petra was held up in here with a Wandering Echo. It would explain why this bunker was somehow untouchable despite that distress signal being on for months. Nobody wanted anything to do with this place, so Freestar sent an expendable.

  It’s her fault for choosing to be an expendable anyway. Tons of nils made a living as tuggers. There was nothing wrong dragging a station out of the shade. That life just wasn’t for her, though. Maybe life in general wasn’t meant for her.

  Well, at least she’s not going out alone. Valyrie walks towards the sleeping girl. The black is already disappearing, and skin reappears on her face. She’s pale and peaceful. Bits of brown hair start to bloom on her head. The profane aura writhing around her body has been thoroughly extinguished. Valyrie wonders how to kill her.

  She dropped out of red for the first time in a decade. If she had even an iota of real power, she would have started burning red, but everything she had went into knocking this monster unconscious. Her capacity is pretty much exhausted, except for the few surviving sunlamps giving her a few watts of power. It’s funny that she’s so low on aura that her HUD has to measure what she has in watts of all things.

  Huh. She does have the last resort.

  Valyrie takes out her gun. She genuinely has never fired this thing outside of a training range. She drags it around because it’s part of the uniform code, but hell, why not try it on the Wandering Echo? The worst thing that happens is that the monster wakes up and bites. Being a zombie can’t be that bad, right?

  She aims at the monster’s head, dumps what little aura she can muster into the magazine, and pulls the trigger. The barrel lites up, a beep goes off, and of course, life can never be this easy. Some asshole jumps infront of her shot.

  Wait. What the hell. “Petra?” First circle wards shatter against the laser. Petra falls back, clutching a wound on her gut. There’s no blood. If Valyrie were at normal capacity and burning her typical red, there would be a smothering hole through Petra’s gut three inches wide, but as she is now, the woman is just badly burned. “What the hell are you doing here? Get away from that thing?”

  “Don’t,” Petra coughs. “She’s my daughter.”

  The words are so stupid that Valyrie almost hesitates before shooting again. This time Petra tackles Valyrie as the gun’s loud windup starts. Her concentration breaks before she can feed enough power into the gun, so Valyrie unfortunately doesn’t blast the woman’s head off. The two tumble backwards in a tired heap. Petra’s glasses go flying, and Valyrie spits Petra’s golden locks out of her mouth.

  Valyrie moans getting up. The internal burns are agony with every movement. Petra takes that time to scramble backwards and stretches out her hands as if she’ll catch the next laser Valyrie shoots. Only then does Valyrie notice how the lab coat hangs loosely at the shoulder and one pant leg collapses into nothing but fabric. Petra’s a one-armed, one-legged squatter trying her best to stop a blue Speaker from enforcing her will. So that’s where the girl gets her attitude from.

  Valyrie can’t help but laugh at that. Petra is every bit the clueless academic. She wears a white lab coat now dirtied with ash and blood that isn’t hers. Her face is scrunched into a pout, but with her wriggling button nose and puffed out cheeks, she looks too cute to chastize anyone with that face. Petra glows red when she realizes that Valyrie is laughing at her. Her freckles dance as she wriggles her attempted scowl in every which direction. Petra looks too young and naive to be a mom. How on earth does a woman like her have a daughter?

  That’s a thought that makes Valyrie frown. A lot of space rats get pregnant whether they want to or not. Valyrie stands. She feeds power into her gun so it goes off whether Petra interferes or not. “Okay, move aside. I’m putting that thing down.”

  “You can’t! Amelia has done nothing wrong.”

  Valyrie frowns. “You stupid or something? That’s a Wandering Echo. Is that lab coat for show? Are you Petra Xu or combatant number three?”

  “Combatant number three? It’s just me and Amelia down here. And put the gun down! There’s no need for violence.”

  “Look around you!” Valyrie points at the formerly beautiful compound that’s been turned into a burned-out husk. “That monster did this, and it’s waking up.”

  “Amelia isn’t a mon-” Petra cries out as the girl wakes with a snarl and lunges at her. Valyrie shoots, and she’s relieved her shot finds purchase. The aura is gone, and without wards, the laser blasts the girl’s arm off. The monster cries in pain but then bites into Petra’s forearm.

  “Amelia, don’t bite down! Don’t be a monster. Don’t break the skin.” Valyrie readies another shot, but Petra turns her head and does the scowl that makes Valyrie want to laugh. Valyrie hesitates long enough to notice that there isn’t blood running down Petra’s arm, and the monster is shaking but not clamping down on its meal.

  Vines burst up from the ground. Valyrie spends her shot on one of them, but there’s dozens sprouting. None of them go for her. Instead, the vines wrap themselves around the monster’s head, her remaining arm, her torso and legs. Slowly, the vines pry the girl off of Petra. The girl wraps herself in a cocoon of vines, eyes full of rage and tears.

  What the hell is Valyrie seeing? Zombies don’t have self-control. Wandering Echoes especially don’t. “What the hell is that?” Valyrie asks.

  “The cure. Or what I’ve managed to figure out so far. Now, are you going to put that gun down so we can talk this out?” Petra huffs and stands, trying to brush the ash off her now grey lab coat, but just smearing it all around. Valyrie stares at the monster, which stares hatefully back with piercing yellow eyes. It’s bundled up tight, vines continue to crawl up and wrap it into some sort of egg. There’s a shred of humanity in there doing its best to prevent a monster from breaking free.

  This is way above her pay grade. Valyrie sheathes the gun and grabs Petra.

  “Hey! What are you doing?”

  “I don’t get paid to negotiate. I get paid to bring you to Freestar. I only have” Valyrie glances at her HUD, “forty or so minutes left to do that, so we’re leaving before the cocoon over there hatches.”

  The monster in question doesn’t follow as Valyrie drags Petra kicking and screaming to the elevator. She doesn’t have enough capacity to go red, but that’s fine; she’s got enough arm strength to climb up the cable. She just needs to get far enough up to contact the handler and get new orders.

  “Stop this right now, Valyrie.” And to Valyrie’s surprise, she does.

  “You know my name.”

  “Of course I do you dolt. You told me it not even an hour ago when I asked you about the Freestar Collective. Do you remember what you said to me?”

  “That I got to take you back.”

  “No! You said that you hated the Collective in no uncertain terms. You practically spat every time you said that name. You hate what they’ve done to you. You hate that you're a slave. Why on Earth would you take me to them?”

  Valyrie points at her collar, “cause this goes boom in forty if I don’t.”

  “I can fix that. I can fix anything. It’s my Resolve, my power. However that collar works, I can crack it and you’ll be free.”

  Valyrie laughs at that. “You think you can jailbreak Freestar tech? Thousands of the best witches have been hired by Freestar themselves to crack these things, and none of them have come close. You think you can do it down here with old-world tech. Lady, you’re dreaming.”

  “No, it’s true. I can do what others can’t. Luna blessed me that way. Like I said, it's my Resolve. Look at Amelia.” Valyrie does. The monster hasn’t taken an eye off the pair this entire time. It’s still unmoving, binding more and more vines to its cage. “She should be a soulless husk, but she’s healing. My daughter is healing with nothing more than old war tech. I’m so close. I just need resources, maybe a few echoes, some Sacred blood. All I’m saying is that no one said it was possible. We’ve been living with zombies for centuries, but now we have Amelia. That’s so much harder than a collar.”

  Valyrie thinks for a bit. She hates thinking. Her mind starts to wander to painful and irrelevant things. “In forty minutes? You genuinely believe you can crack my collar in a bit over half an hour?”

  “Yes! Of course. Though I really only needed to stall for a minute or two so my wards would come back online.”

  “What?” Valyrie looks at the monster, but the vine comes from her blind spot. The two women are hit with a vine the size of a car. One of them is covered in wards that shatter on impact. The other one is knocked unconscious.