By the time we catch our breath and emerge from the wrecked office -- the water-of-life under my arm, wrapped in a pillow-case, while she carries the little golden cage -- it's all over but the shouting.

  The guards on the wall -- which amounts to all the surviving guards not trapped underground -- have quickly realized their predicament. The exits from the warren of corridors and gun emplacements in the fortifications are chokepoints, and Margie's team has a firm hold on them. Up on the wall-walk, the guards are exposed to fire from the courtyard and the windows of the tower; a few try to shoot it out with their sidearms, but it doesn't last long. And the heavy weapons they're meant to be crewing aren't designed to be turned inward.

  In short, they're stuck. Agni reconnects the phones and gives them a call from the commandant's tower to work out a deal. Margie and a few prisoners who can be trusted go in and round them up, disarm them, and march them to the barracks that we're repurposing as a POW camp. The guards holed up below are still being stubborn, but they don't have food or water beyond emergency supplies. Arborough and his people keep watch on them while they make up their minds.

  It's a good thing Agni can handle this, because my mind is elsewhere. A dark shape has just become visible, making its way down the face of the last dune and onto the clear ground in front of the fortress. The cutter approaches cautiously, and no wonder; the jutting barrels of those guns would make anyone except Fifth-crazed cannibals move carefully. I send a prisoner up to the battlements with a nomad-style truce flag, and that gives Quarter the confidence to move in closer.

  The gates swing open with a metallic squealing, dwarfing the little cutter. The ship is barely recognizable as the same one we stole from the raiders -- the spikes have been chopped off, blood scrubbed away, and a fresh coat of paint applied in Navy black and red. The side that was ripped open by cannibal harpoons has been patched, too, the seams still showing but obviously holding together. All in all, if I were the commandant, I would happily believe that this was a real Navy cutter, battered but still going, come to deliver crucial cargo.

  Which was the point of the whole enterprise, justifying the no doubt enormous amount of work Quarter, Theo, and the others must have put into the retrofit. All pointless now that Agni has blown the man's brains out, but it certainly makes for an impressive entrance. The prisoners watch with growing unease; I've warned everybody that these are our allies, but it sure like we're letting the Navy right into our midst.

  When the side door opens and a half-dozen clanspeople climb out, it generates a new kind of tension. Almost all the prisoners are Dextrals, either from the City or the broader Dextral Plain. Their sole experience of the Sinister Waste was crossing it in a prison ship, and the lurid stories we tell back east about cannibal psychopaths are not

  unjustified. It makes them somewhat wary of the locals, especially since everybody is heavily armed.

  Right now I don't care. I hurry over to ship and discover that one of the disembarked nomads is Theo, who hugs me tight in spite of my general filthiness.

  "What the fuck ?" she says. "Agni's message said the plan had changed, but --"

  "Later. Did you bring her?"

  "She's in the storeroom." Theo looks uncharacteristically diffident. "Kal, she's … she's kind of …"

  My heart stutters. "Show me."

  ***

  They've put Mercy on a cot in the room where we discovered Theo and Owain. Someone has covered her with a sheet, and while I want to protest that she's dead, when I pull it away I understand why.

  She's … melting. , Gray would say. Her body looks like a candle someone left too near the fire, or a half-deflated balloon, not actually liquid but definitely losing its rigidity. It's worst at her extremities -- her fingers look like empty sausage casings -- while her face is largely intact. Her eyes are still cold and empty, and the unhealed wound yawns in her chest.

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  My bag of things is beside her, and I fumble inside it for the skull. "Gray!"

  i told you, there's no need to shout.

  "Mercy! Is she dead?"

  she was never alive. but her core functions have begun to degrade.

  "?" I yank the water-of-life out of its pillowcase, the blue glow lighting up the storeroom. The sight of it seems to give even Gray a moment's pause.

  It can't be too late. It . Not after everything. time, I can protect her.

  i do not know, Gray says at last. if her uptake function has been affected, she may not be able to process the essence.

  "What do I do? Just pour it in her mouth?"

  that will suffice.

  I pull the stopper from the decanter.

  Water-of-life doesn't have a , exactly, but you can it, especially when there's a lot of it together. It smells like the memory of everything good about your life, the best meal you've ever eaten and the best sex you've ever had rolled into one. My hands are shaking as I lower the decanter, partly from exhaustion but partly from suppressing the urge to just guzzle the precious liquid myself.

  Instead I dribble it, very gently, between Mercy's lips. She doesn't move, doesn't swallow, and the water disappears down her throat as though I were pouring into a hollow statue. When nothing happens, I tip the decanter further. A small fortune trickles away with every heartbeat.

  "Gray!"

  continue. i think --

  Mercy blinks, once, twice. A hint of red burns at the very center of her eyes, like the first spark of a campfire.

  "It's working!"

  give her more. she needs all the essence she can get.

  I let the contents of the decanter run into her mouth until she shifts and coughs, glowing blue water splashing on her cheek. Her eyes glow brighter and start to focus.

  "Hey," I tell her. "It's okay. You're going to be okay."

  Her lips move. I lean closer.

  "K … Kal?"

  "I'm here." I take her hand, her soft fingers squishy against mine. I can feel them squirming back into shape.

  "Protect?" she says.

  "You did." I swallow hard. "Thank you."

  Mercy smiles gently and pats me with her other hand.

  "Murder," she says, with immense satisfaction.

  ***

  Eventually, when I've convinced myself she won't vanish if I turn my back, I get up. Mercy wants to come along, but her legs are still too gelatinous, and she reluctantly agrees to rest a bit longer. When I emerge from the storeroom, Theo is waiting outside the door, and I immediately return the hug she gave me earlier. She gives a little squeak of surprise.

  "She's okay?" she says, when I relent.

  "She's okay. Or she will be." I hope she doesn't ask how I know, because it's hard to explain that a talking skull reassured me. At some point I'm going to have to tell someone about Gray, aren't I? "Thank you."

  "Yeah, well." Theo rubs her spiky hair and blushes. "It'd be poor fucking manners to let her die after everything she did for us, right?"

  "Aye." Quarter comes in from the engine room. "Glad t' hear it."

  "Thank you as well," I tell him. "The ship looks perfect."

  "Far from it, but she's at least in spittin' distance o' neat," Quarter says modestly. "An' Raz and the others did much o' the work." He looks rueful. "Not that it meant much at the end, like."

  "We did … hit some snags. I had to improvise."

  "Yeah," Theo says. "About that."

  Now that my mind has room for concerns outside my urgent mission, I'm starting to notice a few things. Noises, mostly, coming from outside. There seems to be a lot of shouting. Cheering, mostly, but also voices raised in anger. The hull of the ship muffles things, but some words come through: "Princeps", and "Navy", and "kill the fuckers." Lots of cheering at that last one.

  "Everyone outside does seem t' be in a fairly excited state, like," Quarter says. "You have aught t' do with that?"

  "A bit," I admit. "I, uh, have started a revolution against the Princeps."

  I left the skull with Mercy, but I can Gray smirking.