The child sat there, in the dark, for some time. Each time weapons discharged from above, the crack of metal flechettes and shrapnel striking silicon flesh and metal bone, it threatened to wrestle her attention back to the present. She was overwhelmed with dread and confusion over how she got here and what she just did. A pale white vapour issued from the fallen freak, where he was being digested or worse by Bee’s disgorged fluids. She couldn’t take her eyes off it, holding herself and trembling.

“Sorry,” she said as if that could change anything. “Sorry...”

When a pale and waxy pallor began to spread from the corpse to the surrounding flesh of the City, Bee crawled away from it, over the uneven ribbed floor to a junction. The passage forked sharply upwards or to the left. The leftmost tunnel appeared to wind around in the haze before joining another. Turning her head back, the child tried to peer upwards into the higher reaches. Above her, the passage breached into a cavernous expanse after ten metres. Veins that ran through the flesh amidst the bared ribs bulged hideously as the water was pumped through them.

Shouting and rushing shapes could be seen above. Instinctively, Bee tried to scale the vertical passage to get back to the open space and out of this claustrophobic pit. Her nails scratched at the bones exposed from the wall. But, as she pulled herself forward, she slipped and fell. It was useless. Her arms and legs felt clumsy again. She had just gotten used to them, and now they felt too long again, hips too wide and back too straight. The limbs on her back kept twitching and flicking, biomechanical engines all too eager, but they were throwing her off balance. Above all, her missing right hand meant she couldn’t get any leverage. She needed time to adapt to their new shape. A knot of frustration seized Bee’s belly, remembering her first days alive. She didn’t want to feel that helpless again.

Then movement caught her eyes. The fearful, slithering serpents that scavenged the tunnel sniffed at the vapours and the spreading pale before fleeing through the leftmost passage, scattering around Bee’s feet as they went.

“Where are you going?” She called after them before her attention was again drawn to the freak’s fallen body.

The body’s torso twitched and convulsed. Its belly distended, some ropey mass coiling beneath the softer flesh of its abdomen. Bee turned to regard it with wonder and disgust, mouth agape. Then, before her eyes, a ribbon-like worm erupted from the freak’s belly. It began to spiral and take on a wide helix dance, coiling against the floor as it extricated metres of its length from its dead host.

“No, no...” Bee said, shaking her head rapidly. Then, gawping, Bee felt her stomach turn, given the sickening display. Then the worm came towards Bee, its spiralling ambulation advancing. Finally, panic seized her, and she ran.

“No!” Bee shouted back as she fled, squealing with fear, her footfalls unsteady on the uneven floor. “Sorry!”

Bee slipped and crashed into one of the oily walls, the floor slick beneath her feet, tumbling to her knees before scrambling to keep going. But, daring to look back, she saw the worm kept coming. So Bee continued to run, throwing herself over fleshy knots that filled the tunnel, and slipping as the undulations in the floor gave way to a sharp decline. Finally, she hit a landing and rolled head over heels into the bioluminescent light of a narrow overlook. Still, she could hear nothing but blood pounding through her ears. Her breath rasped harshly, and her heart thumped hard against her ribs as her hand found an edge. Bee looked to see a vast chasm only inches away from where she had fallen.

Frozen with fear, Bee clung to the edge with her hand until she thought pulling herself up again onto the sloping floor was safe. But, as soon as she stood again, she felt the shrieking whistle of air throw her hair back and encircle her legs and body. Bee looked up to see the bone sky. It crawled with machines, working ceaselessly amongst churning vessels and vast pipeworks that fed into great, open vats. Where the furrowed and jagged arteries breached into the open air, Bee could see the frothing fluid pumped through the system. Within it, she could see the shapes of freaks, some dead, others diseased or confused, flushed down. Confused and fearful yells crossed the gulf, and the drowning figures were thrown unstoppably into machines that constricted and rotated violently. The stench of recycled meat made her stomach turn.

“What’s it doing to them?” Bee whispered to herself, eyes wide.

Bee stumbled away from the open drop. She looked back the way she had fallen to see no sign of the worm, so she dared to cry out for help. Yet no one came running to investigate her alarm. Instead, oblivious to the child, sirens wailed from the bioscape. Another gross mass surged through the recycling system. Bee looked around and saw an alcove and what might have been another passage further down the platform. Taking a deep breath through the siphons on her back, Bee began climbing along the ledge with a shaking hand, using the ridged floor and protruding shell upon the wall for purchase. Moving slowly, she tested every step to ensure it was stable enough to hold her weight.

Metres into the crossing, Bee felt a chill run down her spine. She looked over her shoulder, then down and around herself. Seeing the violence of the great filter below, Bee swallowed a lump in her throat and fought against her shaking knees to keep going. When she finally reached the other side, Bee pulled herself up against a cascade of long bones that approximated a railing. The child leaned against a wall of silicon flesh to catch her breath. Below, she met a massive lidless eye, whose unblinking gaze she returned as her gulping inhalations slowly dampened the panic burning inside her. That enormous eye flicked up, though, and gave Bee pause. Slowly, she turned to peer up with it into the dark haze above. There, crawling upon the wall only metres away, moved an inky-skinned hound. Gaunt arms and biomechanical claws took purchase in the wall as its long eyeless head turned towards her. A snarl escaped its needle-like teeth, and rivulets of oily saliva poured down from its maw and onto the child.

Gasping and leaning back against the bone rail, Bee stood wide-eyed and petrified as the dark monster dropped onto the landing and towered over her. Easily thrice her height, tall but hunched, thin, like a starving freak made of oiled skin stretched taut over muscle cords and bio engines. The hound’s eyeless visage fixed on the child as it snarled again, baring those wicked teeth, leaning down towards Bee whilst exhaling bitter, dominating pheromones. A scream died in her throat. As she cowered back against the ribs of bone, that spasming force took over her chest and belly again. The long siphons on her back sucked in the air, and she sneezed and vomited a wave of frothing fluid.

The hound moved with preternatural speed, stepping out of the path of Bee’s spray. Its hunched posture belied a moment of curiosity as its head turned and looked over the trail of sizzling discharge the child had emitted. A moment of wicked calculation followed before it returned its attention to Bee.

With her hand clasped over her mouth, Bee whined, looking up at the tall monster. It seemed to be waiting for something.

“I’m sorry!” Bee cried out, unable to back any further away from the creature. She wanted to run now more than ever. But her legs were unsteady beneath her, quaking violently. “Please let me go! Please...”

The slightest tip of its head signalled its permission, so Bee broke into a sprint. Then, without warning, it swung its gaunt arm. Razor claws raked the exposed skin of her lower back, beneath the plates where her wing engines were rooted, but above the shell that clad her hips. Bee screamed in fright, feeling the hot wash of blood running freely. However, adrenaline and dampeners hid the immediate shock of pain, and she fled down the adjacent passage.

The child ran into the labyrinthian warrens, quickly becoming disorientated in its winding passages. She grasped at her injury and discovered that her hand was sticky with blood, but she didn’t dare to stop or look back. Instead, Bee moved through each new tunnel with panicked haste, from dim bioluminescent light to the infra-red and back. She tried to head upward whenever she was faced with a choice. Her limbs burned when she had to crawl over obstacles or overcome the small climbs that she could still manage. Fearing every shadowed corner and jutting ribbed wall, Bee peered at them from a distance and occasionally saw heads and torsos growing from the city, meeting her terror with mirrored eyes.

Losing track of time in the maze, knowing only the exhausted burn that overcame her entire body, Bee stumbled into a large open chamber whose roof vaulted high overhead. Her lungs heaving as she tried to catch her breath, she collapsed to her knees. But there was no time for a reprieve, as a bright light dazzled the child, casting across the chamber focused upon her. She flinched away and crouched lower until she felt the shelled floor of bones under her palm.

Narrowing her eyes enough to make out the silhouettes of the two ahead of her, Bee recognised the bipedal shape and swath of pale raiments from the enforcers who had sealed entrance to Acetyn and had nearly kept her from entering the city. They raised lances in her direction, and the harsh glare came from a metal limb extending from the shoulder of the first warrior.

“That it?” the second one asked.

“Could be. Head looks like the casts, at least,” The first grunted. “The Eidolon will know.”

“Freak! On your feet, now.”

As she raised herself, still trembling, Bee looked around and back the way she came. She found a giant eye gazing down at her from over the entranceway she had arrived through.

“Don’t even think about it.”

They had advanced. The lance was so close to Bee now that her skin prickled, and she ducked her head low because she dared not make eye contact. Up close, they weren’t as big as she expected. Perhaps she was taller now. But, on the other hand, the predator’s size had certainly made her feel small enough.

“I think-” Bee struggled to speak. “I think there’s a hound following me.”

“It’s bleeding,” one of them - the one with the light - remarked, stepping around her. “It’ll live.”

“A hound?” The other asked.

“Yes,” she blurted out. “It caught me, but it let me go.”

“Some freaks have all the luck,” the one behind her muttered, shining his light down the passage instead.

The enforcer in front of Bee took a wired device from its belt. Gripping it in one hand, the tip of its lance wobbled as it remained trained on the child. She almost felt every slight jerk of its length as he spoke into the communicator.

“Oh-Eye-Ee Seven-Two,” he intoned into the hissing device. There was no reply, but he didn’t seem to expect one. “One apprehended. Phenotype match, but... Need oversight.”

“Move,” the one behind Bee barked and shunted her ahead with the shaft of his lance. She stumbled through the chamber, holding herself with both arms. The unblinking eye followed their passage from above ancient murals. The images of a vast tree formed from rising concentric rings until it touched the stars, and creatures fighting for survival in its shade, surrounded them as they crossed between the statue-likeness of great orb-studded arrowheads and departed the chamber.