Chapter Text
The painting of The Angel, painted over 400 years ago by an artist whose name she does not know. It hangs behind the council's main stage like a window into a better century. A woman descending from the stars, her pale skin reflecting the light of distant suns, her blonde hair like rays breaking through white clouds. The figure in the painting is radiant, her cheeks plump and full of life, a serene expression that is, for lack of a better word, angelic.
Victoria stands at doors beneath it. Same white dress. The dress has survived 500 years better than she has, but she supposes it is easier for an object to outlast a person. It no longer suggests divinity and the pure virtue of a young woman, instead it is closer to the look of a hospital patient who has wandered too far from her ward. Her cheeks are thinner. Her body has waited in the emptiness of space for far too long.
The room is packed full. A silence so contrary to the human noise she remembers, every person in that room has decided not to breathe, lest they risk missing the end of the world as they know it. Hundreds of faces watch her pale figure walk toward the stage, the ceremonial lights catching her form in a way the lighting designer has clearly rehearsed for a more luminous subject, accompanied by loud and boisterous triumphant music. She does remember that humans have a flair for the dramatics.
The man at the front speaks first. The lights reflecting on her face make it difficult to map out his features. Middle-aged, white, a bit chubby on the neck.
"Miss... Victoria." His voice caught between a question and a declaration. He is someone, right. Someone who was probably told he would speak directly to a being closer to myth than history. Must be strange.
"That is the name I was given," she says. "My true name is impossible to communicate using human languages."
The man swallows. She realizes how strange it must be to see the old angel once more, not descending from the stars in light and fury but standing at a podium looking at them, well, not really looking. She lifts her hand to cover her eyes. The motion gives whoever is controlling the light the consciousness to turn it down a little.
"We were told you died."
She tilts her head slightly. A movement that would once cause adoration among her knights, a gesture she had saved and deployed until it turned into instinct. It does not seem to do much now.
"I was asleep. I communicated this with my knights."
The room seems to question it. She stays firm. She is wrong, she knows what she said before her slumber. _Death._ She was supposed to die.
"I understand the knights were not in their best shape after that final fight," she says, her voice sweet and calm, "but my communication was clear. I was meant to slumber."
The council, uncertain how to handle an angel making administrative complaints, allows it. That will be the truth from now on.
"Why are you here now?"
A different man. Taller, younger-sounding. She cannot make out his face either.
"To defeat the empire."
The smell of people, a place that is always packed full, a slight hint of lemon cleaner used for the floors. It is overtaken. She can smell the panic, literally, the chemical shift of dozens of bodies flooding with adrenaline simultaneously. She can hear the gasps, the chairs shifting.
"The empire is not back, Miss Victoria."
That is impossible. She feels the amalgams, growing, taking over the energy in the universe, eating away like mold on the fabric of existence itself. She feels, too, that something is left unsaid. In a way she has forgotten how easy it is to read humans, with their emotions so out in the open, their fear and their concealment of fear running on two separate tracks that never quite synchronize.
A third speaker takes the podium. Younger than the other two, thirties maybe, a complexion that spends its days under fluorescent lighting reviewing documents and its evenings under slightly different fluorescent lighting reviewing more documents.
Poor man looks like he is about to pass out. He clears his throat. His voice comes out broken and high at first.
"Miss Victoria." He glances down at his notes. "The current status of the knight program is-" He stops. Starts again by licking his lips. Victoria wants to roll her eyes but she contains herself. Not everyone can handle talking to her.
"The empire has not returned." He says this quickly because it is the good news and he wants it out of the way. "But the amalgam crisis has been worsening steadily for the last century and a half. Growth is accelerating. Current models project-" He glances at his notes again.
"The knight program collapsed. Trained military personnel were placed inside the suits under controlled conditions. Psychologically screened, physically vetted, the best candidates we had." He licks his lips once more. "Had negative reactions to the suits."
"They turned into amalgams. The pilots. Upon removal from the suits." Victoria interrupts the man, saving him from his tremors. "That is what happens when someone who is not chosen tries to use them. Proceed."
The room is extremely quiet. He is aware that he is explaining to an angel how humans have tortured other humans with her technology for decades and that it is not even lunch yet.
"Of the original 100 suits, 7 remain functional. The other 93 were damaged or destroyed during the experimental period. Various methods were attempted to, emm, to force compatibility. To make the suits accept-"
"The suits chose the pilots," she says with barely concealed exasperation. "This I know I told my old knights, and I can assure the message was passed down. They were always meant to choose their pilots. They cannot be forced."
"We thought it was metaphorical," the first man says from somewhere behind the third speaker. It erupts into a small chaos, fingers pointing and stern talkings between men she cannot quite see, not shadows but still too dark for Victoria to distinguish features. Not that it would matter. It is clear to her now that this room does not contain a single known face.
She watches as he is escorted down from the podium. A different man takes his place. Not the one who spoke but one who commands a calm from the room.
"The instructions were unclear, Miss Victoria. We thought the suits were choosing the people we put in them."
Right. Humans are not dumb, she knows this, and yet humans continue to try and prove her wrong. She has been asleep for five centuries and they have spent the time destroying the tools she left them because they could not accept that the tools had opinions about who held them.
A noise from the left side. Steps running frantically, and even without the hearing of an angel, the huffing and puffing of his breathing could be heard from the other side of the building.
He is old. Closer to 60 than 50, though the math does not work the way math usually does with him. Light brown hair that was once blonde, thinning at the crown in a way that would have horrified him at any age. His beard emulates that of a cowboy, intentional, as Victoria remembers. He wears a jacket with corporate logos stitched across the shoulders and chest. She counts four before she stops counting, dizzy from the frankly terrible taste of colors.
"Good evening, Jack," she says. "Happy you could make it."
She supposes that is it for her knights.
Jack is the sole survivor. Turned immortal for reasons no doctor or scientist could identify. It had been the word on everyone's mouth once, the miracle, the impossibility, the boy who would not die. But as centuries passed, the mystery dried in the sun like a fresh grape turning into a raisin. Turned into the kind of thing children wrote school papers about.
It is strange to see an older man about to cry. The wrinkles around his eyes trap the tears before they can fall. He clenches his nose, as if holding the expression causes him physical pain. He murmurs something close to _Victoria_ that comes out more like a howl than a word.
Victoria thinks she should feel something. The truth is that although she remembers Jack, the boy, the eager one, there is not much she actually remembers of the man. Or well, the boy, at the time. So she salutes him the way you salute someone when you are not completely sure you remember their name.
He does not seem to notice. He is too busy weeping at the sight of someone he has spent five centuries mourning and who is now standing in front of him looking annoyed by the lighting.
"So I see at least one of my knights is still here." The public looks tense, waiting for her next word. For a moment Victoria remembers what working with humans is like when they see you as a particularly strange but powerful alien, equal parts reverence and fear of something that could end them and is choosing not to. "I will need to rebuild them."
---
Aslan introduces himself the following morning. He walks into the room, clears his throat, and delivers the line he has clearly been practicing.
"Miss Victoria, it is genuinely an honor. I am Aslan Druso, council sub-member, liaison to the knight program, and your designated point of contact for all logistical, political and administrative matters during the reconstitution process." He extends his hand. She shakes it, the way she learned to do a couple of lifetimes ago, his grip tells the tale of someone who has climbed the ladder by any means necessary.
He is a bureaucrat in his mid-thirties, polished, careful with his words. She can tell he has been given instructions to keep her cooperative. She knows this. This Andromeda does not have the trust in her that *her* Andromeda had. It will take time, if even that is on the table.
"The suits," Victoria says, because she is not interested in pleasantries. "How many are active?"
"Seven remain. All dormant. No viable pilots since the last round of, well." Aslan adjusts his collar. "Failures."
"The suits are not dormant. They are waiting."
Victoria opens the window. She breathes in. The air seems to carry something with it and bring it back.
"We will begin immediately," Victoria says, walking out of the room, Jack following in tow. "How much money do we have?"
---
The helicopter descends on the southern frontier of Andromeda. The blue sky makes a stark contrast with the brown and beige of the environment below, the green of vegetation appearing only as a mark of luxury.
"Our first knight," Victoria says. She breathes in the air, hot, alive, dense with too many people and too many machines in too little space.
"And he's from the Cob," Aslan comments. He scrunches his nose. Maybe if he scrunches it enough he can push out the dust that got in after his first breath.
"The Cob," Victoria repeats. "I do not remember a place called as such."
"Coprabana," Aslan says. "Southern part of Andromeda, before it turns into the tropical islands. Everyone calls it the Cob."
Jack shifts in the back. He has been following them with unease since they left the council building, a man that feels forced to be re introduced to a life he was supposed to not out-live. The corporate logos on his jacket catch the light.
"I remember Coprabana," Jack says quietly. "It was farmland."
"Not anymore." Aslan pulls up something on a screen he is holding. "Its relationship with its northern border, the Providence, is not great. There is an artificial mountain and dam separating them, a marvel of engineering built to protect the Providence from flooding. It also incidentally created an economic border more effective than any wall."
"What do you mean?" Victoria asks.
"The Cob sits in the most unstable part of the country. Earthquakes that can destroy streets. Tornadoes that can lift entire cities in a couple of minutes. The earth can give out at any minute."
"And people still live here?"
Aslan opens his mouth and then closes it. He does not have a good answer for that.
There is a plot of land. Many years ago it had been a shopping mall that anchored a neighborhood, that gives people a reason to come somewhere and spend money and call it community. Its parking lot would flood during the few weeks of rain. The shopping mall got demolished and the plot of land became infested with parked home vehicles, some owners even daring to build precarious houses using the discarded remnants of the mall. Rebar, drywall and corrugated metal arranged showing Victoria once more that human ingenuity for survival.
What comes out from one particular structure, not quite house and not quite car, a hybridized thing with the footprint of a mobile home and the ambition of a studio apartment, is a young man. Maybe twenty. Traces of a mustache growing over his lip. Aslan recognizes his features first, some kind of native, of which group he does not know nor does he really care. His long black hair is tied up at the back and his brown eyes have the look of a cornered animal.
Victoria looks sideways to Aslan, thankful he is not talking. The boy stands like someone who has been trained to hold a posture and then told he was not good enough to hold it.
"Reed," Victoria says, as if tasting the name. "Good morning."
"What do you want?" The kid does not even try for pleasantries.
Victoria explains that he has been chosen as a knight of Andromeda. Reed stares at her. He does not laugh. He does not move. His jaw tightens and his eyes go from Victoria to the helicopter to Jack's silhouette still inside it and back to Victoria, running on whether this is real or whether this is something that will be taken from him once he lets himself believe it.
"No," he says.
Victoria explains that it is not a joke. The suit chose him. She produces the wrist bands, two curved pieces of metal, dark and warm to the touch, humming with something that is not quite vibration. They open.
"The wrist bands will open for anyone," she explains, glancing at Aslan. "That is not choosing."
Reed puts them on. The bands clasp around his wrists and unlike every other time, when they would remain as normal bands, inert and indifferent. they extend. The metal flows like liquid across his skin, climbing his arms and shoulders and torso, forming a skin-tight suit of armor. The knight armor. Not quite the armor from the paintings and the propaganda, this looks slightly different. Newer. Personalized in some way that seems to come from Reed himself rather than from any template.
Jack steps out of the helicopter. Reed's face changes immediately, recognition, something close to reverence, making his expression shift in a way it has not shifted for Victoria. He knows Jack. Everyone knows Jack. The immortal knight, the last one standing, the face on the posters and the history textbooks and the brand deals.
"I'm honored," Reed says. And Victoria knows for the first time since they arrived, he means what he is saying.
---
Their next stop gives Aslan a breather.
"The Farklands," he says from the back seat, almost to himself. "Finally somewhere civilized."
"What are the Farklands?" Victoria asks.
"Richest part of the center city," Aslan says. "Old money, mostly."
The house they are after is simple and elegant, which in the Farklands means restrained rather than modest. Aslan notices the expensive car safely tucked in the garage, visible through a small window designed precisely so passersby can envy it. The lawn is green in a way that costs more in monthly maintenance than most people's rent.
An older woman opens the door. Her working dress identifies her before she speaks, the maid. Aslan is about to ask if she is the one they are looking for, but Victoria speaks first.
"There is a Meena in this house."
The maid calls up the stairs. What descends is not what either Jack or Aslan have been expecting. She is chubby, which is easier to see once the suit begins covering her than it had been when she first appears in her sleeping camisole, the fabric hiding most of her body in a way that now seems deliberate. A round and nonthreatening face. Her dark skin looks soft and cared for and her braids are close to her scalp, ending in puffs of curly black hair. Doe-round eyes look around as if asking for help from someone who is not there.
"I don't understand," Meena says.
"You are a knight," Victoria says.
Meena looks at the suit forming around her arms and then at her mother, who has appeared at the top of the stairs. Her mother is a woman who has spent twenty years building a particular future for her daughter. She is watching it get replaced by something she cannot control.
"I really don't understand," Meena says again, quieter.
Nobody explains it to her satisfaction. Victoria knows this one, she will trust them. Gives her a smile, it's not hard to share the warmth with a simple touch and the girl looks alive, curious. Childlike.
---
For the third knight, neither Jack nor Aslan know what to expect, and, as if Victoria is messing with them on purpose, they now have to go to the tropical islands.
"Qzacual," Victoria says.
"Oh, I know Qzacual," Aslan says. He leans back. "Beautiful beaches. I've been on vacation there, what, four times?"
"Five," Victoria says. Aslan looks at her. "You mentioned it earlier."
"Right. Well. The resorts are wonderful."
"What is it like outside the resorts?" Victoria asks.
Aslan pauses. He realizes he has no idea. He has never left the fenced perimeter of a vacation compound. He opens his mouth, closes it, and then says: "Different, I imagine."
It is different. The moment they step out of the government car, people walk away from them. Not running, walking, calmly. But clearly about to sprint if necessary.
The house is modest and loud. A woman comes to the door, Leto's mother, wide and sun-darkened. She looks at the government car and then at the three strangers standing outside her house and her expression settles into something that is not surprise. She has learned to treat government vehicles as a bad sign.
Victoria asks for Leto. The woman calls into the house.
What comes to the door is warmth before it is a person. Leto, brown-skinned, with wavy sun-dyed hair and striking green eyes that seem to belong to a different face, a different story. He is twenty and looks both older and younger simultaneously, the body of someone who has grown up working, the smile of someone who has not let the work consume him. He is warm immediately, in a way that seems involuntary.
He looks at the three strangers standing outside his mother's house, an angel, a bureaucrat, and an old man in a corporate jacket. And his first instinct is hospitality.
"Can I get you something? Water? It's hot." He is already gesturing them toward the shade before anyone answers. Aslan opens his mouth to decline and finds himself holding a glass of water he did not ask for. Jack takes his and drinks, and Leto smiles at him as if Jack drinking the water is a personal favor Leto will not forget.
Victoria explains. Leto listens. He does not interrupt but his face reacts to everything, eyebrows up at _knight_, a small nod at _chosen_, a flicker of something harder to read at _the suits._ He asks two questions. The first is about what happened to the previous knights, which Victoria answers vaguely. The second is about whether the position pays, which Aslan answers specifically. Leto nods at the number, and Aslan can see him doing arithmetic that has nothing to do with himself.
Jack notices three other boys watching from the corner of the street. Brothers. They have the same jawline and the same wariness their mother carries, minus the warmth. Leto glances at them once, communicates something with a look.
Then he turns to his mother.
She has been standing at the door the entire time, arms crossed, watching the conversation, a woman who has raised four sons and can tell when one of them is about to leave. She does not say anything. Leto walks over to her and they speak quietly, too quietly for Aslan to hear, though Victoria certainly can. Whatever he says makes her close her eyes for a moment. Whatever she says back makes him hold her arm.
He turns back to Victoria.
"My mother," he says. "The money. She gets it. Directly. Not to me first."
"That can be arranged," Aslan says.
The boy accepts the contract. He hugs his mother, says something to his brothers that makes one of them laugh despite the wariness.
---
In the helicopter on the way to the next knight, Aslan is visibly relieved.
"Puname," he says. "Center of innovation. Glass towers, startup incubators, the whole thing. You'll like it, Miss Victoria. Very forward-thinking."
"You seem happy," Jack observes.
"I am happy. Puname is a good city. Modern. Clean."
"What happened to Fali?" Victoria asks. She is looking out the window at the landscape below them. "There was a country here. South of the east."
Aslan's relief dims slightly. "Fali is... complicated. There was a conflict. Large-scale displacement. A lot of Falian refugees were relocated to other parts of Andromeda. Puname took a significant number under a reintegration program."
"A reintegration program," Victoria repeats.
"Founded by Andromeda. Scholarships, housing, employment assistance." He pauses. "It is a good program."
There is a tick of silence, Victoria is waiting and can't help but feel a small satisfaction once Aslan realizes the person they are looking for is once more, someone who will give him issues with the council.
Thay, the fourth knight, is not a Puname native. She is a Falian refugee, here under the reintegration program, one of those programs that exists to demonstrate institutional goodness and incidentally produces the optics necessary for the institution to continue doing the things that created refugees in the first place. Her scholarship is funded partly by the same government apparatus that destroyed her home, a fact that sits in every document Aslan has read about her without anyone seeming to find it remarkable.
They find her in a university lab. Tools and papers and half-assembled devices cover every surface, arranged in a way that makes sense to exactly one person.
"A knight?" The girl has brown olive skin and deeply brown hair. Light brown eyes and what Aslan has heard referred to as _resting bitch face_, an expression of permanent assessment, as if everything in her visual field is being evaluated and most of it is being found insufficient. She is nineteen and she looks at the wrist bands. Not hunger for power. Hunger for the answer to how it works.
She does not accept immediately. Victoria mentions the investigation, that the suits themselves are a mystery, that understanding how they function is a priority for both the knights and the council, that Thay's background in engineering would be an asset.
"I would have full access to examine the suit's systems?" Thay asks.
"Within reason," Aslan says.
"Define reason."
Victoria intervenes before Aslan's definition of reason can disappoint the girl. The investigation is part of the arrangement. Thay would have access to study the suits in a capacity that no one else currently has. This is genuine, Andromeda is desperate to understand the technology they have been breaking for decades.
The girl accepts. Aslan notes that he will need to inform his superiors about the research concession.
---
From the heat of the center east to the biting cold of Tazania.
"What do you know about Tazania?" Victoria asks, in what is becoming a pattern.
"Cold," Jack says immediately. "It was cold five hundred years ago and I assume it is still cold."
"Correct," Aslan says. He pulls his coat tighter. "Tazania is an industrial region. Heavy manufacturing, mining, that sort of thing. It was booming about forty years ago. Then the industries automated or moved. What's left is-" He gestures at the window.
Below them: concrete block apartments stacked like filing cabinets. The architecture of a place that has stopped pretending to be anything other than storage for people.
"Housing," Aslan finishes.
"For who?" Victoria asks.
"For the people who used to work in the factories that are no longer there."
Jack says nothing. He is looking at the buildings with an expression Aslan cannot read.
The hallways of the building smell of cooking and cigarette smoke and damp, a building that has never been adequately insulated. The door opens to a disheveled young man. The boy looks compact, tall but dense. Pale, with light blonde hair and dark eyes that move across them, cataloguing exits. Iared is his name, as Victoria tells them.
He leans against the doorframe. He wants to look relaxed. He also wants you to know he could move very quickly if he needed to.
"Whatever this is," he says, "I didn't do it."
Victoria explains. Iared listens. He finds the entire concept of being chosen by an ancient suit of armor to save the universe extremely funny, though the amusement does not reach the part of his eyes that is still cataloguing exits.
The complication is financial. Iared's current employer, whatever criminal enterprise has been employing him, the specifics of which Victoria navigates without caring about the details, has a claim on him through his sister's debt. Victoria pays it off. The amount is not insignificant. She does not negotiate. Aslan watches the transaction happen and is already dreading the formatting of the report he will have to write about it.
Iared accepts. Which says something about either his possessions or his readiness to leave.
---
They do not have to look for the sixth knight.
When they land on the Quun, a mountain region in the far east, cold, high and ancient in a way that makes Tazania's concrete blocks look like a temporary inconvenience — a convoy is already waiting for them on the landing platform. Organized.
"What is that?" Victoria asks. She is looking at the banners. They did not exist when she was last awake.
Aslan, for once, is in his element. He straightens. He has briefed dozens of foreign dignitaries on Andromeda's religious landscape. This is the part of the job he is actually good at.
"The Zhandou Xiunu," he says. "The War Sisters. They are, well, the simplest explanation is that they are a government-sanctioned techno-religious order. Though calling them a religion makes the engineers uncomfortable and calling them a government body makes the faithful uncomfortable, so everyone has settled on calling them _the Sisters_ and leaving the definition vague."
"A techno-religious order," Victoria says. "In five hundred years."
"Quite a lot happened in five hundred years," Jack says.
"At the center of the order is the Elder Sister," Aslan continues. "She is... immortal, or close enough that the distinction has stopped mattering. She has been alive for over a thousand years. She is connected, physically, neurologically and permanently. To a vast network of computational systems. Machines that have been running and growing and learning for as long as she has been alive. The connection allows her to process information on a scale that no unaugmented human mind can approach. The Sisters believe, and the data largely supports, that the Elder Sister can predict the future."
"Predict," Victoria repeats.
"With considerable accuracy, yes. Not perfectly. The predictions are probabilistic rather than absolute, and they degrade over longer time horizons. But her track record across centuries of political, economic and military forecasting is... well. It is why the Andromeda council tolerates an institution it cannot fully control. The Sisters' predictions have been right often enough and on matters important enough that no government has been willing to risk losing access to them."
"And the Sisters themselves?"
"Women, exclusively. They enter the order young and train in a tradition that combines contemplative discipline, martial skill and computational theology. They maintain significant control over trade routes and space travel infrastructure, which gives them economic leverage independent of any government. They are formally recognized by Andromeda but operate with a degree of autonomy that makes certain council members deeply uncomfortable."
"Does it make you uncomfortable?" Victoria asks.
Aslan pauses. "I am a council sub-member, Miss Victoria. Everything makes me uncomfortable."
"They knew we were coming?" Victoria asks.
"The Elder Sister foresaw it, apparently." Aslan adjusts his collar. "Which is either a genuine demonstration of predictive capability or an excellent intelligence operation. The council has never been entirely sure which."
The convoy's lead vehicle opens and two women step out.
The first is young, twenty-one, maybe, though she carries herself with a weight that does not belong to her age. She has been trained to occupy space deliberately since childhood, and it shows. Her hair is dyed a vibrant red, the mark of the Xiunu seers, bright against the mountain cold. Dark brown eyes in a round, smooth face. She looks at Victoria with an expression that is not awe. It is assessment.
"My name is Alma Zhang," the young woman says. Her voice is clear and precise and completely without deference. "I am a seer of the Zhandou Xiunu."
Close to her stands a woman, older, with a burn scar taking half of her face in a way that has long since stopped being a wound and become a feature, part of the landscape of who she is. Her black hair is tied in a low tail behind her and tracks of white run through it like roads on a map. She is still. She learned to be dangerous and then she learned to be still, and the stillness is the more frightening of the two.
"This is Elder Sister Martirio," Alma continues. "I am her charge, and she will come with me." This is not framed as a request.
Victoria looks at Alma. Alma looks back. The silence between them is not hostile, not warm, but evaluative on both sides simultaneously. Two people deciding what to make of each other.
"My loyalty remains with the Sisters," Alma says. She says it the way someone says a thing they need to have on the record before anything else begins.
Victoria nods. "I would never ask you otherwise."
Props to Alma for being the easiest to sign out of the six. The wrist bands open, the suit forms, and she looks down at it like a new variable in a calculation she has been running long before the angel arrived.
#### The Angel and Her Knights
---
The council gave them a main ship in honour of the old knights main ship, called, 'The Main Ship' It was an intergalactic war and people weren't busy with making creative names. This one is smaller, an old model Victoria can almost recognize.
Reed as the first at 8.00 am sharp, although Victoria saw him waiting for the clock to hit 8.00 am for around 15 minutes, he saluted both Aslan and Jack, both of whom awkwardly returned his salute, he was carrying a simple backpack and a sac, a flour sac he seemed to be using to transport who knows what exactly.
Thay came after holding a device in her hand along with a backpack and a duffel bag "I can't find the signal here, is there an issue with it?" She asked Aslan
"We are not approved for a signal" Thay's face fell "Yet"
Then Meena, running behind Thay as if trying her best to not enter alone, she reached them out of breath, with a simple but breathy "Hi, hello, good morning"
In too came Iared, quieter than the rest, just saying a simple "G'd morning" before entering the ship, unlike Alma and Sister Martirio, each carrying their luggage on suitcases.
"It is an honor to be part of the knights" Alma said, doing a short bow in front of the tree "Will we be departing shortly?"
"This is more for you guys to get used to it, we won't really be moving yet"
Alma tilts her head, her eyes closing slowly before she walks inside.
Leto was the last, he came in running, apologizing profusely for his lateness.
"The project starts once more" Victoria said to Jack and Aslan before going inside the ship.
"There are amalgams in a mining complex fourteen kilometers south of here," Victoria said. She did not raise her voice. "You will need to wear something comfortable. Activate your suits. Meet me outside in five minutes."
"We just got here," Meena said, as the other began to move.
---
The mechas were waiting outside.
They stood in a row on the cracked surface beside the main ship, six humanoid figures, roughly twice the height of an adult person, their silhouettes catching the dust-colored light of a planet that had not seen maintenance in decades. They looked like humans drawn from memory by something that understood the general idea but had its own opinions about proportion and function.
They were not identical.
Leto's had a dynamic shape, joints and limbs that folded and compressed in ways that suggested the thing could make itself smaller or larger depending on what was needed, a body built for adaptation, for fitting into spaces it was not designed for.
Reed's was leaner, engineered for speed, but the density of its frame suggested it could take a hit and stay standing. It looked like it had opinions about efficiency.
Meena's was smaller than the others, compact, and where the other mechas distributed their armor across the body hers concentrated it, layers of protection wrapped around the torso and head like something that expected to be hit and had decided the best strategy was to survive it.
Thay's was the inverse, the main body relatively light but the limbs heavy and bulky, arms and legs built for force rather than finesse. It looked like a person who had decided to become a set of tools.
Alma's and Iared's were the most human of the six, proportioned for combat, for movement that a human body would recognize as its own. But where Alma's was balanced and symmetrical, Iared's was elongated, the limbs slightly too long, the reach slightly too far, a body designed for someone who fights by being where you did not expect them to be.
"These are yours," Victoria said. She was standing on the ground beside the mechas, arms behind her back, looking at them with the same awe one looks at a painting. These were the armours of the knights.
"Step on, they will respond to you" She said, walking off into the main ship.
The stepping in was not graceful.
Reed entered his mecha like someone following a procedure he had studied but never performed, each movement correct, each transition clean, competent. The mecha responded to him immediately and he stood still for a moment, adjusting to the sensation of being inside something that was also inside him but not physically.
Leto climbed into his the way you climb a tree, instinctively, with too much trust in the branch holding your weight. He was moving before he was settled, testing the legs, the arms, the range, already trying to figure out what the thing could do before he knew what it was. The mecha folded slightly around him, accommodating.
Thay entered hers and immediately began moving. She lifted one heavy arm and rotated the wrist joint.
Alma entered hers. The mecha activated around her and she stood still, when she moved it was like a human walking.
Iared fell into his. Taking the process seriously enough to be careful not to die, but is naturally coordinated enough that it does not matter. He was upright and moving before anyone registered that his entry had been more of a fall than a step.
Meena entered hers last. She was careful. The mecha was the smallest and the most armored and it closed around her with something that felt, she would say later, like someone standing behind her and putting their hands on her shoulders. Steadying her.
---
The mine was visible from the main ship, a massive open pit carved into the planet's surface, concentric terraces descending into the earth like the rings of a dead tree. The kind of mine that eats a mountain from the inside and leaves the shell. The terraces were wide enough for the mechas to walk on and narrow enough that two could not walk side by side. Rusted machinery sat on the ledges like the skeletons of animals that had died mid-task.
The amalgams were at the bottom.
Victoria's voice came through the intercom. She did not have an intercom. The knights could hear her anyway, her voice arriving inside the mechas as if someone speaking directly into their ears.
"You will descend into the mine. You will clear the amalgams. The suits will help you."
"How many are there?" Reed asked, his voice was calm and direct, Victoria was reminded of the most soldier like knights of old.
"Enough to be a problem. Not enough to be a serious one. A handful"
"That's not a number," Thay said.
"No, it is not. Begin."
---
Reed went first because nobody told him to and he interpreted the absence of instruction as permission to lead. He moved down the first terrace with efficient steps, his mecha's speed evident even at a walk, each stride covered ground that the others would need two strides for. He reached the first switchback, turned, and continued down without looking back to see if anyone was following.
Leto followed because Reed went first and Leto's instinct with closed people was to stay near them. He was faster than he expected, the mecha's folding joints gave it a low, adaptive gait that handled the uneven terrain of the terrace like something that had been walking on broken ground its whole life. He caught up to Reed in seconds.
"You good?" Leto asked through the intercom.
Reed did not answer.
"Cool," Leto said. He dropped back slightly and matched pace with Meena, who was navigating the terrace. Her mecha's heavy armor made it stable but slow, and the coordination between what she wanted her legs to do and what the mecha's legs were doing had a half-second delay that produced a gait like a person walking on a boat.
"You're doing great," Leto said.
"I am visibly not doing great," Meena said.
"You're standing. That's great."
Behind them Alma descended at her own pace, unbothered by the distance growing between her and the others, she intended to arrive at the bottom with exactly the amount of energy she would need when she got there.
Iared passed all of them. He was not walking. The mecha's elongated limbs had found a rhythm that was closer to hoping long uneven strides that ate the switchbacks whole, and somewhere around the third terrace he stopped using the path entirely and began dropping from ledge to ledge, the mecha absorbing each impact with a flexibility that should not have been structurally possible.
"Iared," Reed said through the intercom. It was the first thing he had said since the descent began and it carried the weight of every opinion he had formed in the last two minutes.
"What?"
Reed did not elaborate. He did not need to.
Thay had stopped on the second terrace. She was crouching, or the mecha was crouching, her body inside it making the motion while the machine translated it into something larger, and she was examining the rock face where an amalgam had passed recently. The surface was discolored, a reddish-black residue that pulsed faintly, like something with a heartbeat that had been left behind.
"Victoria," Thay said through the intercom. "How are these powered?"
Victoria's voice arrived without static, without distance, without any of the markers of a signal traveling fourteen kilometers. "Angel magic."
Thay rolled her eyes inside the mecha. The mecha did not roll its eyes, but it somehow communicated the gesture through a slight tilt of its head that Thay had not consciously initiated.
"Noted,"
---
The first amalgam came around the corner of the fourth terrace like something between a dog and a nightmare.
It moved on four legs, or four limbs, or four extensions of itself that functioned as legs. It was a mass of reddish-black energy, dense and wet-looking, something that had been alive once and had gone wrong at the cellular level. It had eyes. Too many of them, scattered across its surface without the organizing principle of a face, each one tracking movement independently. It had teeth, or structures that functioned as teeth, visible when the mass shifted and a seam opened that might have been a mouth. And on its left flank, half-absorbed and recognizable only if you looked directly at it, was something that had once been a human hand.
It was fast. Not faster than the mechas, about the speed of a horse at full gallop, covering the terrace with a fluidity that came from having no skeleton and therefore no joints to limit its motion. It saw Reed first.
Reed's mecha responded before Reed fully processed what he was looking at. The suit, the layer between him and the machine, fed him something. Not a thought. More like a sudden fluency, as if a door had opened in his brain and behind it was a room where he had always known how to do this. His hands found the controls for the weapon system and a blade extended from the mecha's right arm and he cut the amalgam in half with a single efficient stroke before consciously deciding to.
The two halves collapsed into residue. The eyes went dark.
"What was that?" Meena's voice came through the intercom, high and unsteady.
"Amalgam," Victoria said from fourteen kilometers away, with the tone of a teacher who has shown her students a picture of a frog and is waiting for them to identify it.
"I know it's an amalgam, I meant—"
"There are more. Look down." Victoria said in a sing song like voice.
They looked down. The bottom of the mine was moving. Not the ground, the things on the ground. A good handful of amalgams, most on four legs, some pulling themselves along on two with the specific wrongness of something that remembered being bipedal but could not quite execute it anymore. Their eyes caught the light from above and reflected it back as dozens of red-black points scattered across the pit floor. A sound rose from them a wet shifting. The sound of a large amount of something rearranging itself.
"You call that a handful?" Leto said "More like a couple-of-hands-full"
"Maybe she meant it like a handful" Iared said, his robot mimicking the movements of someone grabbing a couple of breasts, they laughed for a second before they got interrupted by Reed going straight to the bottom
"I said enough to be a problem," Victoria explained.
Reed hit the bottom first and began clearing a perimeter. His mecha was fast, the fastest of the six, and the blade work was clean. He cut through three amalgams in the time it took the others to reach the pit floor, each strike efficient, each movement exactly what it needed to be and nothing more. He did not speak. He did not coordinate. He worked alone in the center of a group and the gap between his competence and his isolation was visible from every angle.
"We should spread out," Reed said through the intercom. "Cover more ground."
"We should stay together," Leto said. It was the first tactical opinion he had offered and it came out as a correction rather than a suggestion.
"I won't be slowed down" Reed spat back.
"Right, sure, but Meena's still on the third terrace and if we—"
"She needs to move faster."
"She needs to not fall off a cliff, Reed."
He did not respond. He killed another amalgam. Leto turned his mecha around and went back up to walk Meena down, matching her pace, keeping his body between her and the edge of the terrace in a way that was protective and also prevented him from engaging with anything happening at the bottom, which was getting more active by the second.
Alma reached the pit floor and began working. A blade materialized from her mecha's arm, she had found the weapon system faster than anyone except Reed, as if the suit had shown her where it was and she had simply accepted the information.
She moved through the amalgams closest to the eastern wall with an economy that made Reed's efficiency look busy. She did not waste motion. She did not waste attention. She cleared her area and held position and when an amalgam tried to flank her she adjusted without urgency and cut it down, returned to holding position. If the suit was feeding her knowledge the way it was feeding Reed, they seemed to have a closer connection.
Iared did not use a weapon.
He landed in the pit floor from the terrace above, a drop that should have buckled the mecha's legs and instead produced a shockwave that flattened two amalgams beneath him. He was laughing. The laughter came through the intercom and it had the unhinged quality of someone who has just discovered that the giant robot they are wearing can fly. The mecha's elongated limbs gave it a reach that turned every movement into a strike, he was swinging, stomping, grabbing an amalgam and using it as a projectile against another amalgam, treating the entire engagement as an opportunity to find out what happened when you applied force to things without a plan.
"Iared," Alma called his attention, a flicker of what used to be a full and alive amalgamation body on her mecha's shoulder
"I'm helping!"
"Could you be tranquil about it?"
"Sorry mom"
An amalgam lunged at Iared from behind. His mecha sidestepped with a looseness that should not have been possible for something twice the size of a person and Iared brought both fists down on it like a hammer. The amalgam flattened. Iared made a sound of satisfaction.
"The force output. If it's magic, there shouldn't be a proportional relationship between my physical input and the mecha's output. If I push harder, does it push harder, or is the force fixed?" Thay asked?
"This is not the time, Thay." Victoria spoke, not sure if she was the one being talked to
Thay's mecha stood up from its crouch, descended the remaining terraces with a speed that suggested she had been capable of this the entire time and simply had not been motivated, and walked directly toward a cluster of amalgams gathered near a collapsed support structure. She did not draw a weapon. She extended the mecha's heavy arms, the bulky limbs that were its defining feature, built for force, and pushed.
She pushed an amalgam against the rock wall. She pushed slowly at first, then harder, measuring something internal, tracking the relationship between what her body was doing inside the suit and what the mecha's arms were doing outside it. The amalgam compressed against the wall. Its eyes tracked her. Its mass deformed. She pushed harder. The amalgam burst.
"Not proportional," Thay said. There was a note of genuine delight in her voice. "The output scales beyond the input. That's not mechanical. The energy amplification is,"
An amalgam hit her from the side. The mecha stumbled. Thay caught herself, turned, and crushed the second amalgam against the ground with a force that was part test and part irritation. "They do react to instinct"
---
Meena reached the pit floor.
Leto had walked her down every remaining terrace, talking the entire time about nothing in particular. The weather on Qzacual. A fish his brother caught once that turned out to be a shoe.
He understood that Meena's problem was not her legs but her head, that the half-second delay between her intentions and the mecha's responses was being amplified by the panic of watching everyone else do this better, and that the panic would shrink if there was something else in the room with it.
By the time they reached the bottom Meena was walking correctly. Not well. Correctly. The mecha's armored frame moved with her now rather than after her, the delay shortened to something manageable, and the feeling of someone standing behind her with their hands on her shoulders had become less like support and more like partnership. The presence in the suit was still doing most of the work. But Meena was letting it, which was itself progress — the decision to stop fighting the help and accept it.
The pit floor was mostly clear. Reed and Alma had handled the eastern side. Iared had handled the western side and also two of the support structures, which were now rubble, which Reed had noticed and was managing his response to. Thay was on her fourth experiment and her second amalgam cluster. Leto released Meena into the engagement like someone releasing a bird that might not fly.
Meena walked toward the last cluster of amalgams near the mine's central shaft. There were three of them, mid-sized, four-legged, fast, their eyes tracking her movement and her heat. The suit offered her a blade. She felt it more than she understood it. A weight in the mecha's right hand, a weapon materializing the way Reed's had, the suit telling her _here, this is what you need, take it._
She took it.
The first amalgam lunged. Meena's mecha did not dodge, the armor took the hit, absorbed it, held. The amalgam clung to the mecha's torso and its mass began to spread across the surface, looking for a seam, a gap, a way in. Meena could feel it.
She swung the sword. It was not a good swing. The blade caught the amalgam across its midsection and the amalgam split and fell and its eyes went dark.
The second amalgam was already moving. The suit adjusted her stance, the feeling of being guided, the hands on her shoulders turning her slightly, widening her base. She swung again. Better. The amalgam collapsed.
The third one she hit with the flat of the blade because she had not figured out which side was the edge. The amalgam went flying across the pit floor and hit the far wall with a sound like wet cement. It did not get up.
---
The pit was clear.
The amalgam residue was already evaporating, the reddish-black material losing coherence without living amalgams to sustain it, dissolving into a gas that smelled faintly of copper and something older, something that did not have a name in any language the knights spoke. The mine was quiet. The rusted machinery on the terraces above stood unchanged, indifferent to what had just happened in the pit it overlooked.
"My legs feel like I ran a marathon," Leto said.
"Your legs didn't do anything," Thay spoke, making Leto jump "The mecha's legs did the running. What you're feeling is the cognitive load of having another presence in your mind"
Iared's laugh came through the intercom. "Brainfucked"
Reed was quiet. He had deactivated his blade and was standing still with the posture of someone conducting an internal review and finding the results mixed. He had performed well. He knew he had performed well. The others had not performed well, or had performed well in ways that did not match his definition of well, and the distance between what this had been and what it should have been was sitting in his chest like something he had swallowed wrong.
Victoria's voice arrived from fourteen kilometers away with the warmth of a moderately impressed instructor.
"Congratulations on your first demonstration."
The word _demonstration_ sat in the air. Like a fart.
"Go to your bedrooms," Victoria said. "Sleep. Training starts at six AM sharp."
The intercom went quiet.
Six mechas stood in an open pit mine on a planet that did not care about them, carrying six people who had known each other for less than a day, who had just fought something together without understanding what they were fighting or what they were fighting with or what they were to each other. The dust settled around them. The evening light caught the scratches on their armor.
They climbed out of the mine in the order they had descended: Reed first, alone, fast. Alma at her own pace. Iared dropping between ledges. Thay stopping once more to examine the residue. Leto and Meena last, together, Leto still talking about nothing, Meena too tired to tell him to stop and not sure she wanted him to.
The main ship's lights were on when they returned. Jack was waiting outside, a man who remembered what the first time felt like and was not sure whether to tell them it gets easier or to tell them the truth.
"You'll be sore tomorrow," Jack said. "It's the, it's from having something else in your mind. In your body. The suit. It leaves a kind of..." He gestured vaguely at his own head. "Residue. Not the bad kind. Just the kind that makes you feel like you ran a marathon with someone else's legs."
"That's what I said," Leto said "And I would rather not think about it," he added.
They went inside. The corridors of the main ship were too large for six people and the emptiness of them was audible, their footsteps echoing in a vessel built for more, now carrying a fraction of that a thing that knows it is underfilled. They split toward their bunks without ceremony, without debriefing, without the conversation that would need to happen eventually about what they had just done and what it meant and what comes next.
Reed went to his bunk and lay down in his clothes and stared at the ceiling and began composing a list of everything that had gone wrong, organized by severity.
Meena sat on the edge of her bed and looked at her hands and tried to remember how it had felt when the suit swung the sword for her and could not decide whether to be grateful or ashamed.
Leto fell asleep in under a minute, thinking is a tomorrow Leto problem.
Thay opened a notebook and began writing measurements she had memorized from the mine, force ratios, response times, the delay between intention and execution that was different in each limb. She wrote for twenty minutes and decided to stop when she realized her words had turned incoherent.
Alma did her night ritual, sighing at the fact she was not given enough time to organize the bathroom so she would have to do that now, it's fine. Nothing a good night mask can't fix.
Iared lay on his back with his arms behind his head and grinned at the ceiling this was fun, what else was fun? The message he got before reaching this place, and even funnier was the money it offered.