Kano stepped out of the citadel and stared up at the sky. A towering column of dark-gray light rose from the west, projecting far above the walls and buildings. She marveled at it for a few moments before racing toward it. Whatever was happening had to do with An’s disappearance. Kano didn’t need to be a detective to figure that out.

As she was approaching the light, Kano realized she was close to the abandoned warehouse that housed Eomonsa’s machine. And lo and behold, as she came upon the source of the light, she saw that the locations were one and the same.

But it had changed drastically since she was last here. The warehouse’s walls had fallen, exposing the machinery to the world. Even the machine itself had changed—now it was covered in a thick coat of slime that moved before her very eyes. Seeing its alien yet purposeful movements reminded Kano of the blob version of herself. Could the two somehow be related? It was far from implausible.

On the other side of the sprawling construct stood two necromancers. Rendered anonymous by their concealing robes, they stared at the spectacle before them. They didn’t seem to have noticed Kano yet, and after ducking behind the machine’s bulk, she crept toward them. As she got closer, she heard them talking.

“Is it working? I can’t really tell.” Kano recognized An’s voice, breathless with excitement.

“Everything is within expected parameters. The process should proceed smoothly from here,” said a man’s voice, one that Kano had never heard before. It definitely wasn’t Eomonsa’s. He sounded calm and collected. Was he the mastermind behind all this?

Not far from where the necromancers stood, slime poured forth from the machine and collected on the ground. Once there was a sizeable pool of the gray substance, the flow ceased, and the slime began to take form. Rising up, it shaped itself into a ghoul, the texture of its body hardening and changing until it looked much like any other ghoul.

“I believe these should be suitable materials for you to work with,” the other necromancer said.

An walked toward the newly formed ghoul. Taking a small metal container from her robes, she went to work covering the ghoul in a thin coat of her nearly transparent gel.

It was absorbed into the skin, and the ghoul’s features shifted, growing less uniform and more pronounced. But other than their skin taking on more color, it just looked like an uglier ghoul. Kano was wondering if this was all An was trying to achieve when the ghoul’s body swelled. Blood pouring from its orifices, it collapsed at An’s feet.

She sighed and turned away. “I thought I had it for a moment, but no, this won’t work.”

“The machine must require further calibration,” the other necromancer said, unperturbed. “If you’ll give me your input, we’ll have it sorted out in just a few moments.”

Focused on their work, the necromancers were oblivious to Kano. She considered springing out and ending them right then and there. But she had no idea what they were doing, and though it was strange, it didn’t strike her as necessarily harmful or dangerous. And even if she did kill them, there was no guarantee that whatever they’d set in motion would stop.

She might even make things worse if it went out of control without their supervision. Then again, the man had to be the one behind that slime, which had either caused or was connected to the deaths of a large number of ghouls. Kano wasn’t sure how much that counted against them, though. After all, ghouls were close to mindless tools. Did their destruction really count for much?

Kano found that reasoning rather attractive, but there was also the fact that Thirty-Six and the other children were ghouls. Though they could be subservient when it suited them, there was nothing mindless about them. What if they ended up dead as a result of all this?. She could simply ask them about it, but that seemed a foolish risk to take in light of the treacherous nature of necromancers. Better to establish a dominant position and work from there.

With that in mind, Kano rounded the corner she’d been hiding behind and aimed herself at the necromancer who wasn’t An. Though she hardly saw eye to eye with An, she still held her in higher regard than the person responsible for that slime. Particularly when he was connected to a lot of the trouble she’d run into. Had Eomonsa been working with him?

It was hard to say what the exact nature of their relationship was, but they were clearly connected. Neither of them noticed Kano until she was almost upon them, and they had no time to do anything more than flinch before she threw the unknown necromancer to the ground and set her boot against his head. She applied enough pressure to grind his face into the dirt, but not enough to crack his skull open. Not yet.

“Hi, An,” Kano said. “I see you’ve made a new friend.”

An glanced down at her fellow’s peril and raised her hands in a placating gesture. “I don’t know what you think is happening here or what you’re trying to achieve, but please don’t interfere. Our work is still a volatile stage.”

“Our? How long have you been working with this guy?” Could An have been in contact with the other side all along? The idea that she’d been involved in the latest attack on the citadel didn’t sound so farfetched now, though Kano didn’t see why An would do such a thing.

“Not long, barely a few hours, in fact. But we’re already on the cusp of achieving great things.”

“Yeah?” Kano asked, unmoved. “Great things? Like what, exactly? Putting on a light show? Or do you mean the part where all your ghouls got killed?”

“That was an accident. None of them were supposed to die,” the man beneath her boot said. He sounded rather self-righteous given his current predicament.

“And who’re you?”

“Werisah. You’re Kano, I take it?”

“Yep.”

“Could you get off me?”

“I’ll think about it, right after you explain what this thing you made is doing.”

“I doubt you’ll be able to understand, but I’ll try to explain things as simply as possible. I assume you’re at least aware of Angakkuq’s work to create a new organism?”

Kano was impressed that he could sound so condescending while being ground into the dirt. It was a testament to either his willpower or his overwhelming arrogance, probably the latter. “Yes, I know of it. Does this have something to do with it?”

“No, this has everything to do with it,” Werisah said, speaking quickly with great fervor. Were it not for the clear logic behind what he was saying, Kano would have assumed he was a raving lunatic. “You see, I had some idea of what Angakkuq was working on, and I hoped that we might be able to combine our efforts. But to my surprise, I found out that she’d progressed far beyond what I’d expected, just one step short of creating a new life-form. A true one, not like those tawdry ghouls and their ilk. The only problem was the organism’s instability, which coincided perfectly with my own work. My work, which I’ll be happy to explain, if you’ll just let me go.”

With a dissatisfied grunt, Kano let Werisah up.

“Thank you,” he said without the slightest bit of gratitude as he brushed the dirt from his robe. Taking a step closer to his design, he pointed to where a series of tubes converged. “Do you see that?”

“See what?” It didn’t look like anything in particular to Kano, nor did she have any idea as to its purpose.

“Look closer. Do you see how they all connect?”

Resentfully doing as she was told, Kano’s eyes traced the path of each tube as she tried to make sense of it all. She was starting to understand how it fit together when she heard a loud hiss, and a toxic cloud enveloped her. The heavy vapor seeped into her eyes, and Kano fell back, reeling. Vision blurring, she spun to face Werisah.

Shreds of synthetic black cloth clung to his new armored form. Gone was any semblance of a necromancer. Now he looked just like those who’d attacked her at Sherp’s office. The cloud was issuing from his hand, so she knocked it aside and swept his leg at the knee. She wasn’t going to lose to these creatures, not again.

However resilient the armor covering him might be, the joints were still vulnerable to leverage. As he fell backward, Kano moved with him and grabbed his head. He flailed with his free hand while the other continued to douse her in the foul concoction, but she ignored it all and twisted his head.

His struggles grew more frantic until, with a loud snap, Kano wrenched his head sharply to the right, and he went limp. Kano fell beside him and rolled around in the dirt, trying to get the stuff off. Despite her efforts, her body trembled as parts of it died.

Feeling uncharacteristically exhausted, Kano stopped to rub her eyes. She could see a few hazy shapes around her but other than that everything was dark. Was this it? Was she dying at last? It seemed rather likely from what little she could see.

“What have you done?” An said, horrified. By the sounds of it, she was standing over Kano, though it was hard to say for sure.

“He attacked me,” Kano managed. Talking and thinking had suddenly become difficult.

“That doesn’t mean you had to kill him. You should never have interfered in the first place.”

“What do you care, anyway? You’ve already got his machine.”

“I have access to it, yes. But I don’t understand the technology or how to operate it. What if something goes wrong?”

“Well,” Kano said, her vision fading as she lay still, “that’s your problem.”

An sighed. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry that you ended up this way. Even if you would have been better off not meddling with things beyond your understanding.”

Kano wanted to tell her that the same went for her, but it was just too much effort for her right now. Instead she went with the easier option and let the darkness claim her. Her last thought was that at least she’d killed another necromancer before their plans came to fruition. That brought her a measure of satisfaction, but that soon faded in the face of her increasingly unfeeling stupor, until she knew no more.