“Well, the problem with giving cooked chicken bones to your pet is that they can splinter, and thus a single bone becomes many tiny knives and… hold on, Splinter…”

  —The Creator, speaking to the owner of a cat that had stolen a carcass from the trash, before pulling off his notepad and scribbling a hasty note on it.

  Proprioception is a bitch when the body is alien. Anything not obliterated he could reattach, and the hole marking the absence of three or four Danes provided an inappropriate trench to hide from the assault of the Lensed Bracco. The stolen body folded in unnatural ways, and Dirofil just had to buy some time so Caenor could sneak on their attacker. A burning hole in his tight still gave out smoke, impoverishing his already-deficient vision. The pain receptors teased him; he imagined them begging to be brought back to life. He wouldn’t acquiesce: clarity of mind remained paramount. Only hiding behind the impersonal veil of a body that wasn’t his he could ignore most of the damage. His current self was a bit of mucus and a bit of crystal, not the flesh or bones that guarded them. The liquid, not the vessel.

  The legs wiggled against him—ulnae and humeri, calcanei, fibulae and tibiae and femora, he could feel every singular bone pressing from one side or another and onto thieved fur. A constant reminder of his reluctant stay in the belly of the beast.

  Caenor, would you be a dear and kill the damn thing before it turns me into a pile of coal?

  These lensed mutants are no bastions of bravery. Approach? methodical, precise. Slow.

  Bloodlessness is wasted on you.

  Energy invaded the tattered muscles and the cracked bones. Whatever gaps undead cellularity left, metal and slimy matrix filled up. Rooted deep into the wells of stagnant blood that the vessels had become, psychosarc pulled and curled to aid in movement as Dirofil cut forth through the darkness. His claws found a multitude of jutting extremities he used as vantage points, leaping from one to another, not minding the gashes that multiplied over the taut skin of the Early bird. In the enveloping darkness he couldn’t see his quarry, except for the shining bags under its eyes.

  Something changed in the light above: it became more defined, and a transparent barrier seemed to be placed in front. The intensity increased and then darkness, heat, and silence. The climb didn’t come to an abrupt halt: even as the next wave of psycholocation found no head over Dirofil’s shoulders, he charged towards his prey. The arm that held glued to his body merely by the grace of mucus, thick and stick, got slung sideways, launching in an arc, a thin thread of translucent mucilage the only connection between the tow halves of the upper arm the moment it slapped the bitch. Another shot, misfired at the last moment, whizzed through the air, and briefly illuminated the canine ravine. The last irradiation of that singular Lensed Bracco, that, with a broken snout and still processing the loss of several teeth, beheld in horror how the headless zombie rose in front of her, the severed arm clawing on her side to try and drag her closer as tendrils she could barely see sprouted from the charred neck.

  She tried to retreat, to turn back and flee from the incoming mass that promised doom. But the tendrils hooked on her nostrils and elicited a yelp from her thoath, a flare from the bags under her eyes, that without the aid of the focusing ears barely warmed the air around her, and would have flashed Dirofil had he still enjoyed working eyes. Unfortunately for the dog, she had burnt those off.

  Caenor rushed to the scene, long strides covering several Grand Daneses each. The idiot would destroy the ears, damage the lenses.

  H froze in confusion when he realized Dirofil seemed to have no intention to hastily finish his prey off: He had pinned the hips of the struggling Bracco with a heavy foot, and restricted the movement of her head by making an impromptu pincer with the good arm and its corresponding mace. Slime flowed from the neck and into the kicking, flaring dog’s nostrils and mouth, sick gurgles coming out of her, the mace of the severed arm nowhere to be found.

  Once Dirofil placed the severed ball of knuckles in its adequate position inside the bitch’s stomach and properly anchored it with psychosarc, he twisted and twisted and twisted, forcing a volvulus such that the esophagus got almost closed off. Almost, only a little tendril of slime managed to remain connected to the contents of the organ, and said tendril was hollow, lined with thin walls that acted as one way valves. By the Bracco’s throat, more mucus forced the epiglottis open, and a sucker made of the same material hindered the passage of air with each exhalation: The breath could get into her lungs, but whenever she forced it out, Dirofil’s contraption forced it into her stomach. He didn’t mind the heavy expenditure of energy this represented: fine-tuning of his flesh was a talent he was proud of, and practicing it as he found alternative means to kill his enemies was a tradeoff, to him, seemed reasonable enough.

  Noticing the taut stomach growing, hearing the unproductive retching and deglutitions of the bitch. Caenor figured out Dirofil’s plan. Creators cruel, bloat is not a merciful death for a dog.

  She should have thought about that before making me lose my head.

  Why?

  I have no guarantee that everything that wants to eat me will have a traditional heart. Other organs seem like good targets to practice alternative executions.

  Bloat requires a traditional circulatory system to be lethal, moron.

  The headless hulk shifted slightly towards Caenor, still connected to his victim, still unable to look at anything. I’ll ignore that for the time being, if only for the sake of experimentation.

  The restrained Bracco shivered in pain and fear as her swollen stomach kept growing, collapsing her veins and cutting circulation off from her legs, and organs. Her once rosy gums shifted to a bony white, her consciousness slipping away from her and returning in bouts as her racing heart pumped chaotically, trying to rescue whatever blood it could to keep homeostasis. After both and eternity and a little while, depending on perspective, shock took over her body in a final seizure, Caenor already kneeling by her side and inspecting her ears.

  “Tsk, there’s some damage but it’s workable.” He complained for nobody sentient to hear. Nice job, you somehow avoided screwing it up. I am impressed.

  You only want the ears. The rest is mine to keep.

  Yes. And we have enough, I think, at least for this tide. He masterfully excised the ears from the base, and stashed them inside his slime for safekeeping. Figure out how to carry everything—yourself included— back to my abode.

  Give me a little while and it’ll be solved. Then I’ll do some proper meatcrafting back in your sorry dwelling.

  I have a dwelling. That’s more than you could say.

  I could say I have a dwelling. Granted, it’d be a lie. But I am not forbidden from lying.

  Caenor started back, swatting a few collies out his way, careful to not trip and fall again into the ravines that plagued the Dane ground. I got what I wanted. You know the way back. I’ll expect your return or your demise. And I am fine with either.

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  The corship mentally screeched in pain the moments every light inside the ship went red. Splinters rushed up and down the halls, securing themselves to a piece of the floor or a pole of the sphere-stairs as the ship slowly tilted on its right side, the legs succumbing to the pain, slackened, seizing out of control.

  Morbilliv lay against the wall of his chamber, too busy cursing to bother lifting himself up to go and see what was going on.

  Babesi moved swiftly, as she knew. This had happened before, and it was an “any moment now” occurrence whenever Lyssav was blue: when the fury returned, it did so not in a gentle wave, but as a raging tsunami.

  Roots of bloody slime imitated those of a pulled fang around the doorframe of Lyssav’s room. One of her eyes watched from under the lattice, unnoticed by most but not by the curious sister. “Hi Lyssy!” Babesi chirped up, poking the eye with her hand tail. “Open the door for me, will you?”

  Slowly, the two halves of the sliding door were pried open by disorganized fingers, seven of them, from five different hands. Hovering on the seat of her throne, Lyssav’s bloody core smashed its loose pieces together, dripping liquid redness as it tried to glue itself back into one. The teeth waited evenly spread across the room, on the walls and the roof and the floor. Pain like a spray permeated the air and imbibed Babesi’s scales, but she pushed through by means of focusing on whatever else such that she avoided noticing the fact she was aching all ove.r Eventually, her core would become aware of the fact if had suffered in the recent past, but by then the pain would be gone, the torture concluded.

  Babesi was the weakest of the siblings, if one excluded the Corship from the equation. Yet this meant little: Since her first thought, she had never found herself in a situation where she couldn’t get by, or even prosper, by using the tools at her disposal. When her spire had fallen she had said goodbye and accepted the fall, calling out a farewell to her siblings as she climbed into the descending mass of dogs. She had run and hid from the Dachshunds until she ahd understood them, and how to achieve an understanding with them. Power existed to check on power, and there was no part of the nature of their wolrd that she considered in need of a check. The ocean did what the ocean did; the aberrant dogs were, deep down, scared and confused puppies. Hungry ones, too. She had once lounged on a seat others called a throne, but for her was merely a funny chair.

  There in the Corship, surrounded by her siblings, both Original and Splintered, she thrived, and the sight of Lyssav splattered all over the room, returning to her red form, fulfilled a little need for familiarity. The tide could come where she lost everything she loved. And in her grief she would find a way to have fun, and to pay her torturer due respect.

  She cuddled against a corner, coiling over her own body with the utmost silence she was capable of—which wasn’t much. She tuned out the screeches and screams of pain in the mental links, the unintelligible din of most of the crew being enveloped by Lyssav’s encroaching gaseous presence. “Lyssy, can you talk.”

  “Yes.” Lyssavs voiceboxx, hanging fromn the corner of a wall and the ceiling, slurred.

  “You make a nice room.”

  “That comment couldn’t… come from anyone else but you. Are you ready, Babesi?”

  Babesi blinked, her only pupil zapping from left to right as she scanned the room in seach of context clues. “Ready for you coming back together?”

  “No. The sea has a thoughtcrystal. One that not even Leptos can rival. I plan to consume it.”

  A silence only tarnished by babesi’s humming settled between them.

  “… and how do you reckon it’ll taste?”

  Lyssav’s core shifted upside down. Her voicebox dropped from its elevated position before psychosarc dragged it back into a mound of tumorous slime. “I expected a different question. I wish I were you.”

  “Well…” she lowered her head, a gesture Lyssav knew denoted an inner conflict. “I guess I can try to eat you if you lend me your mouth.”

  “You are far too precious. But the time for precious things is long gone.” Lyssav gathered a few teeth together and slowly dragged them down the walls, across the floor in a line. “And I am not lending my mouth to anything precious. I do not yearn for you to assimilate me: I meant that there’s no weight upon your shoulders, when the world rests on the ring of mine.”

  There was a little annoyance in Lyssav’s tone, but it wasn’t directed at Babesi, not even when she checked both sides of her body for good measure. “I suffer from a characteristic shortage of shoulders.”

  “I may fail at devouring the sea, Babs,” the older sister said, in the calmest tone she was capable of, given her current state. “A path to thoughtlessness so grotesque and shameful. And there may be things you should be afraid of out there.”

  “I am used to the doggies. With enough time and study I bet I can befriend a Reaper too.” She dismissed Lyssav’s words.

  “The mutants are the least of my worries. I should have killed him. I should have,” she said, the words bitter enough to force her conical tongue to squirm away from her voicebox. “Now, even if the sea did him in, we will live in fear something is slipping past my watch. Dirofil, if alive, is desperate, and thus dangerous. And if dead, he took my peace of mind with him.”

  Babesi mulled over her sister’s words a moment, bobbing her head from side to side as she thought. “I am positive I could make Dirodiro and Shadiran come to terms with this current world.”

  “Parvov is dead, Babesi. Shadiran has never been half of the fighter Parvov was. This sea introduced grief to us: we don’t know how it may affect each of us. We have lived together for a seemingly endless amount of time, and yet… we only truly know our siblings and the originals of the Edge in times of bliss.” Lyssav gathered a few more teeth before her throne. She arranged them in a carpet of red as Babesi twitched in place. “You noticed the pain?”

  “Now that you mention it… yes, this room is quite lyss-achy.” Babesi barely raised her tail, and after that brief gesture she used the hand on it to drum on the lattice of the floor, on a spot not covered in Lyssav’s flesh. “The others tend to mind it more.”

  “You are a pain sink, sister. You do not embrace it the way I do, you don’t find it positive. You fill with it to the brim, and stay as impervious as a vial, unbothered by the foul, limpid liquid inside. Because I know, Babesi, that my pain is your water.”

  “I daresay wrongness evades you tide in and tide out, sister. Alas, I am too thin to be a sink.” Babesi said with an air of sophistication unusual for her.

  Lyssav , at a loss for words, made a hand creep until it cupped Babesi’s eye, massaging the thin layer of slime that kept it embedded in her body.

  “You are worried. You hope he lives, right?”

  “My heart hopes he lives. My reason tells me we are better off if Dirofil thinks no more. If Shadiran, too, lives, and we find her in time, we may recover our sibling.”

  “And if Shadiran is dead?” Babesi made the question Lyssav dared not speak aloud.

  “Then we better pray either Vedala or Leptos care enough to lift a single finger in my aid. I can defeat Dirofil once, twice, a hundred times. But even a strong wall can be eroded, and faster so when the storm learns with each failed attempt to take it down. I fear what I cannot kill. I fear what I love for even if the world corrupts it I foster a need to preserve it. And in the face of this reality, I wonder: how do you manage to remain so cheery?” The arm retreated, climbing up the throne to drum with twisted fingers upon Lyssav’s core.

  “It’s not that I don’t think, first and foremost. It’s just that finding a particular thought inside my mind is like tracking down any one puppy in this sea. Not like Morbilliv’s barren mental landscape.”

  “You quaint little thing. My last thought , no matter when it happens, I hope it is of you, Babs.”

  Babesi coiled like a spring and bounced wice in place. “And I hope mine is of you, Lyssy!”

  Babesi then slithered through the rarefied atmosphere, climbed on the slanted throne of her sister, and cuddled around the heart of Lyssav. Side by side they fell into a deep meditation as the older sister reorganized her body and pained everyone on board. Closer to her sister’s raging heart, Babesi didn’t notice when the slime coalesced around her. She saw not, heard not, and felt not as she got buried into the flesh of her beloved. Inside Lyssav she slept as the older sister emerged form ther chamber, crawling towards the laboratory while still immersed into a drowsy spell.

  And when Babesi woke up, she dug out her sister’s back with the bubbliness and energy she was known for, sending a thrilling stab through the Empress-to-be.

  “Good tide Lyssy!”

  “Welcome back, Babi.”

  Doratev stood in front of them, there, clawing the lattice of the hall that eld to the lab entrance. Wondering if it was worth to synthesize plastic-like cups just to hold one in such situations. “You tortured us all. I wonder which sort of solatia can we expect as a crew.”

  “Survival is compensation enough, Doratev.” Lyssav barked, annoyance clear on her monstrous, restored visage.

  “You didn’t call me Splinter this time. How quaint.” He put all his weight in his foretoes briefly standing on them as his hands fiddled behind his back.

  “And you dare mock me, pest.” she jabbed back. “Is the crew ready for my departure? Are there any materials you need me to produce?”

  Doratev walked past her with firm step. “Come Babesi, inventory duty awaits. Wait, Lyssav, and you shall have your answer.” And thus they disappeared, him walking, her hopping, down the latticed halls of the sleeping, dark ship.