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I come to rest on a muddy outcropping and stare downward into dark. In visible light, little is discernible and it suits me to see nothing more than the torrent of mud and rain into the dark. The ship exists as a throat, swallowing everything the world vomits into it.
Fey IV
confirms the distance, point six until we reach the main debris field, the field of dead, the field where they once would have scattered poppies and—
Shut up, Fey IV,
but the drone relays and confirms and relays again. The ship appears empty but for us, it says; what I cannot see has also been removed from the drone’s reach.

I snap my wrist backward and far above me, the paracord’s claw detaches from its anchor point. The umbilical whickers toward me, wet and dripping, until I can draw the claw into my hands to set a new anchor point. The Nessik slithers past me, off the edge of the outcrop and into the black beneath. With my anchor set, I leap off the edge and follow it down. Black every meter of the way, until
Fey IV
chirrups in my head and I know we’re there.

It doesn’t matter the wavelength I observe here; we could pass in blackness with only the ceph’s echolocation to guide us, but I would know the bodies that litter this chamber. With a silent command, I bleed clean, bright light into the rooms we sink through, and observe the dead.

(Splice: It’s ritual, you said, and
Fey IV
has always confirmed, to remember the dead, especially those who have fallen in battle, be it to knife or detached drone. Once, the dead were collected, honored, buried, but this battle saw no such luxury in its wake. In this battle, the dead could only be left where they fell. Those early days were dire, but didn’t exactly improve as they wore on; the starved and terrified hivelings, the humans and chimera who came to rescue and recover, but found themselves in the center of an alien war they did not understand. Nessik prisoner slaves and Nessik captors; what else was there to know?)

Chimera and human alike litter this chamber. Empty Nessik shells are scattered like moss-colored stones. Humans have long since been reduced to skeletons, moss spreading a dense, lumpy carpet over most of them, but here and there, aged and broken bones pierce the green. The metal exoskeletons of chimera gleam in my bleeding light. There are no echoing lights, no sensors that pick up my presence and respond. Only rain and mud move in this chamber, sliding ever-down as I and the Nessik (fucking ceph) do.

(Splice:
Not now, not here.
)

I feel the fine vibration through the paracord and think the ship is moving. Sinking perhaps, swallowed by the earth at long last. But it is my hand that moves even as I hold it firm against the descent line. Beneath metal there remains muscle that (is finite, is mortal, will rot) shudders.

The ceph is not silent in this chamber. Its constant stream of chatter serves to tell it where it exists in relation to every fallen body, some of which may yet be trapped, but even as I understand the reason, the incessant sounds grate. My vision fragments, the chamber bursting into black before it streams back pixel by pixel, and my body stutters down the line. The light goes out.

A cold tentacle wraps my leg, holds me still so I will not fall. For a long while, we remain suspended, twisting in the dark until the Nessik clicks and whistles, drawing my slack outline fully into its awareness. Then, other tentacles enfold and haul me down. My wrist snaps back, the anchor slides loose, and the fucking ceph bears me into the scattered dead.

(Splice:
No
—

The dead smell worse than you imagined. Maybe it’s made worse because of—

Oh God, Lil, there’s so much blood . . .

My blood? Mine. Blood never bothered you, doctor you, but the stench of my guts and brains in your hands is too much and they want—

They want to remake me, take me, they can
save
me.

But I was never in this place, among these dead. No.
N—

Yes, I was here, strewn in your hands and the memory of this punches down through me, hard fist in soft throat, but this throat is only metal now, only—)

I jerk back to full consciousness, hands trembling, vision skewed. I reach for
Fey IV,
but the drone is not in the sky, not crashed to earth. Nowhere. Everything above me is unreachable, as impenetrable as my own body. Beside me, the Nessik makes a low whir and I relax into the rain-wet moss that covers the skeletons that cover the ancient battlefield that once was a prison ship. This whir lulls me into a state that is close to sleep, even though sleep is a thing half-remembered. I used to do this—I used to need it—but not now. Not—

Tentacles encase me, tightening around arm, flank, and belly as if the Nessik thinks I mean to flee. I stare blind into the dark, useless to the ceph, to this entire journey, and listen to the rain pour down. It sounds different against metal skin and breathing tentacle; it sounds different against exoskeleton and shell. I want to figure how long it will take the ship to fill and sink, but while I can determine the rate of rainfall (two inches per hour), I cannot determine the exact volume the ship will hold, the amount that the earth will drink until it has its fill and overflows (
tongues lower into slopped mud and splits it further apart . . . tongues lower . . . 
). My vision sparks magenta, green, and settles into black once more.

The ceph wants to know what happened, what the trouble is. “Systems malfunction” condenses a host of problems that I don’t fully understand myself.

“Fucking— Squid.” I speak the words in English, mostly to see if I can. My voice is not my voice; it is your voice, a stream of imbedded, erupting memory that sends my systems flatline. This was not the plan.

Splice.

Down-falling forever into dark.

We came together, armed, prepared, and yet not. They sent an entire division, but it will never be enough. We see that the moment we touch down, the moment our fellow soldiers stream through the broken jungle; we have run toward enough danger to understand this one is unique, this one will change everything: you, me, the world. It will change the Nessik, too, but

(fucking squid)

we don’t care about them right now, because hundreds of thousands of their young are eating our soldiers in their panic, in their haste to escape the starvation cells they have been molded into.

Everything stands in ruin: charred and smoking trees, satellites drawn down from orbit, the Nessik ship itself, a crumpled tin-can spire rising six fucking miles into the clouded sky. The rain is ash and not water, but water would come soon enough, as if the world attempted to wash itself clean. None of this would be washed—

(fuc—)

we don’t care about them right now because—they are eating our—

My display boots in a wash of gold. Sunlight through October leaves used to look like that—but that memory belongs to another world. There hasn’t been an October for countless years, nor cheeks warmed by sunlight, but I can feel fingers (tentacles) against them. Warm (cold) and wet (wet). You (baseline).

Splice.

I can almost separate this stream from that stream: fingers were then, tentacles are now. You were warm; the Nessik is cold. Either way, the weight of another body against me is a block of data dredged up from a much-unused memory core and I shudder. It is only the sensation of systems coming back online (it is the only sensation of a hand (a tentacle) down a bare length of back).

Pixel by pixel, my system assembles you on the display. It’s almost over, you say—we’re almost there, but there’s one more step. One more down-falling forever into dark. You want me to hold your hand. The blood there is sticky and growing cold. Mine? Yours? Yes.

“Can you see me?”

These words whispered. I could see you—as clear as anything in this awful moment, you segmented from the horrors that writhe just beyond this ramshackle field hospital. From the horrors inside it.

They can only save one of us now, but they sink your memory core so deeply into me, we are both still there, though neither of us know it. The surgeons you once worked with mute you, cloak you, drape you in chains the way Nessik were held by their captors. But even there, a finger peeps out from this metaphorical prison, allowing air into an otherwise sealed room. Later, they will wonder how I know what I do, but as these skills benefit them, they never worry overmuch. I am on their side; they made me and they made you, didn’t they? Didn’t they?

This finger (your finger) is a constant press upon my heart, a memory I cannot name but a thing that draws every piece of my new life into focus. I take one path and not the other because of that press; I cannot explain it—and who else could? Why do people go where they go? Something (someone) drew them there, inexorably. The box of you, inside of me, burrowing deeper than you ever went with fingers or tongue. You are the solid weight within whatever remains of my pelvic girdle (titanium overlaying a sliver of bone).

You always looked so human, everyone said.

I never did.

Fey IV
steamrolls as spheres of orange data across the bottom of my display. I cannot tell how long my displays were dark; there is nothing and then there is the drone. The data it provides proves inconclusive; it shows the ship, me, and the Nessik. Constant sheeting rain. It tells me of descending Hell, of the violent and of the suicides; of blasphemers and sodomites.

Fey,
I think,
there
is
something here in these rings of Hell. There was something here, and there is no possible way that something could have gotten out of this ship, past us, and we need to find it. Cloaked, muted, look for a finger.

(Splice: You, rolling your eyes—they were mostly hazel but for that crescent of blue near the left pupil—and yet . . . and yet . . . )

Fey IV
’s data stays true, constant, inconclusive. I don’t alter its instructions despite the lack of change in readouts, but shift instead toward the ceph who still has me cocooned in its thick arms. At my movement, it startles and shits a stream of panicked chirrups and whirs at me. The dialogue is so fast and dense, I cannot separate one word from another. I wait for it to calm, to grow silent, and try again.

I don’t expect it to say my name. The name is a long trilling sound with too many Ls, a vibration that rumbles through the old bones beneath us.
Lillllliana.
Did I speak while offline? Was I offline at all? The Nessik’s hold on me does not ease; it pulls me closer if that is possible, drawing the bony crest of its sightless head toward mine. It outlines me in rapid-fire chitters, then speaks again, wanting to ascertain that I can continue, that the journey is not lost. Without my sight, we will never find the hiveling.

But why did the hiveling come here?

The answer bursts up from inside me, from inside my gut where you yet rest. You want me to know—

The hiveling had not
come.
It was
brought.

As we were all brought, to this place on the edge of the island, on the edge of the ocean where we once reached outward into space, but no longer do because space came to us: domino effect, all fall down. Down-falling forever into dark. To be made into that which could best serve; to be broken until our new forms suited the plans to come. Prisoner slaves and captors. And you? Knew? (
Created.
) What else? (
Treachery.
) Tell me. (
Come.
)

The Nessik hauls me up from the mossy carpet that covers the dead and does not release me even as I try to stand. I quickly discover that I cannot stand, not on my own. Everything below my hips refuses to respond, a relay shorted out within the technology that lines my body. Such an injury to a soldier would be ridiculous, costly; the Nessik keeps me upright as I reroute power into the metal which encases my legs, but even when I can move again—

The ceph doesn’t let me set my line, but keeps me bound in arms and tentacles. We plummet downward into dark. The ceph moves the way we saw them move
en masse
that day, chittering low as it goes to discern every ledge, every body, every passage that will take us to the bottom. Trusting (
fucking hell
) this creature to map the route, I scan in all the ways it cannot. My display stutters, spits.

I break the ship into every spectrum I can see, damage from the crash rendered in gradients of light gray to pitch black; damage from weapon blasts hovers in green and blue before I shift them away and to study biologics. You would think all this rain would wash the blood clean, but it still darkens the walls in visible light. And then—

It begins as a small point that blossoms into a faint heartbeat that becomes a fully realized body. At the bottom of the ship, where the mud has flooded a torrent and blocks most of the passageways leading deeper, there is a body. I chitter to the Nessik and we drop even quicker, a stone thrown down an empty well. One tentacle keeps us from smacking full into the mud; we touch down beside that still body, the adult reaching out with another series of high-pitched sounds. The body—perhaps a hiveling, for it is small—makes no vocal reply. It struggles to move, one tentacle whipping toward the sound. The ceph grabs the tentacle with one of its own, but then withdraws with a shriek, letting even me go.

I shift my vision through every wavelength of light to see what has been done to this Nessik. Most of its body has been encased in metal, small hexagonal panels that call to mind flexible armor. This casing looks nearly like my own, so that the body might be made to move even if injured. When I touch the metal, it flickers with energy and for a moment, the Nessik winks out of my view. Vanished. Cloaked.

(Splice: Your hands in my hair, my broken body dripping through your fingers. This is where I came back and where I said—

“Yes.”

And this is where you smiled that rare smile and nothing else mattered as they cut each of us apart and sank you into me so I could be stronger, faster, better, everything they needed me to be. In memory, it is your fingers raking me raw, it is your mouth covering mine—and nothing else mattered because both of us would live beyond every limit we had known just as you predicted.)