Vashante’s grip faltered. Beneath the flickering ceiling lamps, the old Basilica around them felt alive with twitching shadows. The voice in the console hissed again, patient and cold.

  “Cut her free.”

  A painful silence lingered between Vashante and the computer screen. A heavy atmosphere, broken only by a deep rumble emanating from deep in the complex beyond, stirred Vashante back from her dread to the real.

  “This miserable old Lady’s interests are not aligned with ours,” Vashante finally spat.

  “They are,” came the reply through the speakers. Slashex’s tones narrowed like a blade. “More than you know.”

  Vashante hesitated. And then Bee convulsed in her arms. The child’s body went rigid; her eyes flew open, glassy and terrified. Vashante tightened her arms around Bee as seizures shook her limbs. None of her training prepared her for this.

  “What is that?” Slashex demanded urgently. “I cannot see inside. What is happening to her?”

  “Bee—she’s having a seizure,” Vashante gasped, laying Bee down on the dusty, ornate bedspread in the corner of the chamber. By the lamp’s jaundiced light, Bee’s face twisted in mindless agony. Thin arms and legs jerked wildly. Wings spasmed. Her back arched as she grunted uncontrollably. Vashante’s heart thudded in panic. She watched, helpless, as Bee heaved and shook.

  “Then you must hurry. Disconnect the Wire-Witch. Now is not the time for fear. Only she will be able to save—”

  On a sudden impulse, Vashante drew her blade. With one swift, trembling motion she slashed at the tangled wires coiling around the Witch’s head. As the final filaments parted, Slashex fell silent. The hum of the console remained, the monitors bright.

  “What must I do next?” Vashante called out, voice hollow. “Slashex— answer me!”

  Her shouting echoed throughout the depths. Only silence answered her.

  A soft groan stirred from the couch. Metal and flesh shifted as the Wire-Witch’s head jerked upward. Her empty eyes, hollow, were distant and cold. She surveyed them both—first Vashante, leaning back as if expecting an ambush, then Bee, shaking on the bedside.

  The Lady tutted softly.

  “Oh, do be careful with that,” she admonished, indicating Vashante’s blade as she straightened slowly. Joints clicked with a long-held malaise as she stood, fighting against stupor from her stasis. She drifted toward the young Lady, hands outstretched with curious gentleness.

  Kneeling, the Witch placed a warm hand on Bee’s forehead. Under her touch, Bee’s convulsions stilled. She murmured a series of low words, fingers probing for a pulse.

  “She’s alive. Fragile, but alive. We must hurry,” the Witch stated plainly. “Carry her,” she ordered without looking at Vashante.

  The command was flat and urgent.

  Vashante stared. Fear and hesitance warred in her chest, but Bee needed them.

  A tense silence fell. Vashante’s face—worried and soft with emotion—seemed the very mask Bee wore. Every tremor of panic was written plainly on that porcelain visage. The Witch opposite her was bare and unreadable beneath grimy bone, a skull carved unreadable and emotionless.

  Vashante spoke first. Her voice was small but clear. “You were controlling Slashex all along.”

  “So you have been paying attention. Good,” the Witch replied, her tone smooth. “That will make this easier.”

  Vashante lifted Bee gently into her arms, careful not to jostle her. The Wire-Witch stepped forward. Side by side they moved out of the chamber, the wounded child cradled between them, shadows flickering along the vein-like corridors toward the distant, sterile glow of the medical laboratory.

  The corridor pinched to a needle-eye, then blossomed into a vault of cracked ceramic and cold glass. Here lay the Sanctum Infirmary—or what remained of it. Overhead, luminaires flickered in arrhythmic dread, washing the room in a queasy chiaroscuro. Rows of examination pallets—steel, not bone—stood in disciplined ranks, each bearing a shrouded failure. Under translucent polymer sheets, the cadavers bubbled with chemical bloom: limbs blackened by necrotising agents, lungs petrified mid-scream, epidermis sloughed where trial aerosols had gnawed the living meat. Transparent tubing still threaded their arteries, looping into silver canisters whose labels were scrawled in a language too clean, too modern, for the City’s primaeval dialect.

  Vashante recoiled from the sterile stench. No scent of marrow oil, no blood or oils at all—only the antiseptic bite of forgotten laboratories.

  “Lay her there,” the Wire-Witch instructed, indicating a vacant pallet beside an array of humming cabinets. Vashante obeyed, easing Bee onto the cushioned slab. Sensors blossomed beneath the child’s weight; muted glyphs crawled across a nearby vitreous screen.

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  With Bee secure, the Witch turned, her empty sockets studying the Dame. “Tell me, Vashante Tens—what is it you imagine we are fighting for?”

  Vashante’s helm visor retracted, revealing a face tight with fatigue. “For Bee. For her life. For… hope.” The words felt thin even as she spoke them.

  A soft sigh resonated in the Witch’s throat.

  “Hope is a vessel; purpose is the water it must carry. Look about you.” She swept an arm to encompass refrigerated drawers, racks of neatly ordered implants, and banks of compact servers still pulsing with emerald code. “These are relics of the Highest Reach: our remit beneath the Lord of Bones—salvage, restore, perfect. Above and below, the Oldest Lines labour in mirror commandments. In the deep sump the Vat-Mother breeds workforce and fodder; here in the spires we reclaim the intellectual sinew of the World-That-Was.”

  Vashante’s gaze traced a glass cylinder where a human arm floated, veins shot through with metallic filaments. To her it looked like sorcery bottled for study.

  “You send all this somewhere?”

  “To the Heart,” the Witch confirmed. “To Her demesne. Industrial engines, refined alloys, reclaimed and domestically produced electronics, even the weapons your order once bore—all tribute to the Immortal’s design.” The Witch paused as though tasting a memory. “She alone shepherds the sum.”

  “Shepherds—for what?” Vashante asked, voice barely more than breath.

  Instead of answering, the Witch busied herself at a console. From a cooled cabinet, she extracted a slender phial of clear fluid edged in pink refracted light. A braided tube snaked from pump to needle; she bled the air, then suspended the ampoule on a gravity armature above Bee’s bed. The solution seeped down, bead by careful bead, into a catheter she slipped beneath the Lady’s clavicle. The clear liquid glinted like watered crystal, a ghost tide meant to coax equilibrium back into fever-ravaged cells.

  Only when the drip settled into steady motion did the Wire-Witch lift her head. Behind her ivory visage, something wordless weighed upon her.

  “What is the Immortal building?” Vashante repeated, steadier now.

  The Witch’s gaze met the Dame’s camera-like eyes—or seemed to, for the sockets were void—while the cadence of medical pumps counted the seconds between them.

  “That is why I needed her,” she said at last, turning to calibrate the monitors. “Bee. My attempts to interrogate the City were for naught. We must heal her, then have her connect with greater Acetyn once more. Then we shall both discover whether the answer was worth the centuries we have bled to forge it.”

  Vashante’s fingers tightened on the hilt at her hip. Bee’s chest rose in shallow, clock-tick breaths while the solution whispered down the tube.

  “Whatever scheme rattles around that skull of yours,” Vashante said, voice pitched low to keep from startling the childe, “She will not be your tool. I will not watch her mind burn so you can pry at the City’s knots.”

  The Wire-Witch’s skull tilted, braids of severed silverline wire swaying like pendulums. “You mis-name prudence as cruelty. Bee was bred for interface—blessed”—the word dragged across her tongue like glass; half sneer, fake reverence—“as the Vat-Mothers are. Their lace has permissions we do not. The City speaks, and they do not drown.”

  “Everyone drowns! I have seen them drown!” Vashante hissed, memory flashing hot—acolytes with empty eyes, mouths drooling agape. “And I saw you lashed to that very room, half-devoured before I severed the tethers.”

  A thin, humourless sound escaped the Witch’s chrome teeth. “An overreach. My curiosity exceeded my credentials. Yet even so, I returned—whole enough to save the girl.”

  “Whole?” Vashante swept a hand at the vacant sockets. “You would be dead had I not arrived. An arrival you were too arrogant to even ask for, I now realise.”

  The Witch only shrugged. “Doubtful. Jhedothar and the Catabolites—”

  Bee gave a soft moan; both women leaned in, the argument skidding to a fragile halt. When the child settled, the Witch continued, tone softened by a fraction. “She will not be forced. She will volunteer once she wakes and understands the stakes.”

  “And if she refuses?”

  The Witch tapped a bony knuckle against the vitals display. “Then our long war ends in this room. The Immortal’s dark design continues unabated. I do not accept that outcome—do you?”

  Vashante opened her mouth and closed it.

  “You forget,” the Witch murmured, “I have precedent on my side. Your own precedent.”

  Vashante frowned. “Speak plain.”

  “The Eidolon who touched the outside world for the first time in an age—who felt the wastes below her feet and lived.” The Witch’s head cocked. “You. In your first attempt to capture little Bee, you, yourself, witnessed her connect to the City via drone interface and disconnect hale and whole. It recognises her credentials.”

  Cold iron seemed to slide under Vashante’s cuirass. That mission seemed to lay an age behind her, half-buried under countless fights and flights. “How could you know—?”

  “Bee told me,” the Witch replied. “During her tutelage she recounted every legend of her knight. She sees you with such profound esteem. And she trusts me more than you imagine.”

  “Trust?” Vashante snorted. “She tolerates your lessons. You will never hold her faith.”

  At that, the Witch gave a rich, unexpected laugh—short, barked, almost human.

  “Faith is a currency I spend sparingly, Dame Tens. Allegiance, incentive, necessity—those I trade in abundance.” The skull angled, amusement still clinging to its edges. “But this false-Goddess thanks you for your help, regardless.”

  The brittle air warmed by a single degree. Vashante found one corner of her mouth hitching upward despite herself. For a heartbeat, they regarded each other—not as sovereign and deserter, nor puppeteer and pawn, but as women pared down by years of attrition, sharing a bleak joke at the Gods’ expense.

  “When she wakes,” Vashante said at last, “I will ask her. If Bee consents, I will not bar the path.”

  “Reason prevails.” The Witch adjusted a flow valve, satisfied with its sigh. “Rest, Dame Tens. Prepare your blade; the City will not give up its answers gently.”

  Vashante sheathed her weapon, the metal kiss echoing off chrome benches and quiet cadavers. She took position beside the gurney, one gloved hand brushing a stray curl from Bee’s brow. Across the aisle, the Wire-Witch busied herself with instruments, yet now and then, her skull tipped toward the knight—gauging, recalculating, perhaps even respecting.

  For the first time since the Basilica swallowed them, the silence felt almost companionable—an armed truce forged in the glow of life-support and the hush of watching dead.