The reinforced metal door stood defiant against the flesh of the dying city. Bee sat in the middle of the roadway, tiny before its immense size, as she tried translating the many enigmatic designs and eldritch devices that littered the bunker’s surface.


    Travelling across this disparate section of the great slug’s city sheathe had taken the entire day. Despite this, she had been instructed not to rush this process. She was told what to expect. The child had come with water flasks, at least enough for a few more days, and carried them on a strap over her shoulder. During her journey, when Bee stood right on the apex of the curving city streets, where the hills summited the curves of Sestchek, she could see a sparkling desert that stretched beyond. It called to her, but now was not the time — no, not yet.


    Now, the sun was creeping low towards the horizon, and those dazzling shades of bronze overtook the sky once more. The beating sun had made the soft skin on her shoulders and face — where it wasn’t silvered — turn pink and raw. She raised an arm, shielding her eyes from the glare with her armoured hand. The shade helped her see.


    There it was, lost in the dizzying, straight lines of yellow and black. The box. It looked like what Bee had been told about. She pushed herself up onto her two legs again. As she walked, they were getting stronger, or at least less prone to hurting.


    The child had to reach up on the very tips of her toes to get a good hold of the box’s handle. Then, with a gasp and a pull, she snapped it aside, hinging it open like a jaw. Inside, metal was woven together in a synthetic mesh. A flashing red light distracted her wide eyes for longer than it should have. Then she found the button she had been told about and thumbed it down as hard as she could until it clicked.


    The box hissed at her.


    “I’m here to see the Wire-Witch!” She shouted back louder, determined not to let it think it could get away with biting her hand off. She needed all of her hands.


    The ground shook, thumping harder than any heartbeat Bee had ever felt underfoot. The steel of the gateway screamed in pain, startling her. Bee took a quick step back, making way as it tore open. Strings of meat that had grown between the metal surfaces were stripped apart, bleeding profusely from the trauma of the opening.


    She looked into the armoured cave. First, there was darkness. Then, it was filled with an unnatural orange glow that reminded her of the setting sun. However, this light ticked and flickered in a way that disoriented her. Cold air rolled out to meet her. It caught in her throat and stung her nose.


    Bee had no choice. She had to step inside. It was why she came so far.


    Feeling her stomach twist into nervous knots, Bee lowered herself back down and crawled inside, her wings tucked tightly together. She saw a host here to meet her — a dozen freaks standing at attention, staring at her. Yet they didn’t move, not even as the child dared to creep closer. Only then did she realise their impossibly symmetrical forms had no meat. Their silverline flesh was lifeless. Once she crossed the threshold, the gateway groaned and ponderously resealed itself behind her.


    The walls buzzed and hissed, then called to Bee in her mother’s voice.


    “Come in. I won’t bite.”


    “Okay,” Bee said lamely. “I mean— I know.”


    The walls didn’t answer back. Bee stepped further into the chamber, then the next and the next. Squared off, doorways snapped open, and she was presented with only one path forward. This place had sharp angled rooms and unnatural narrow corridors. Absent were the pulsing gullets that connected cavities in the city proper. No great organs were growing in the open spaces. The walls and the ceilings were ribless and stripped of skin. That cold air seemed to have infected the nature of the place. It was sterilised of life, nauseating Bee with how removed it was from the rest of the city.


    After dizzying sharp turns, just when Bee lost hope of being able to find her way back, she stepped into a quiet chamber. Opposite, the entire wall was made of panels, alight with ever-changing, scrolling, transforming alien symbols. The array snatched her eyes away with its bright lights and countless electric colours. It took too long for Bee to even notice her mother.


    Bee froze in the doorway. No. It wasn’t her mother, sitting in a chair at a grand table in the centre of the room. With her chromed teeth and distinct jaw, the eyeless skull looked the same. Yet, the flesh of her body was plump, lacking the skeletal silhouette that her real mother acquired from ridding herself of internal organs. A bone crown swept around the dome of this woman’s head, and thick wires spilt down from it and around her shoulders. What hooked this woman into this place of plastic and metal was not fleshy and grown but instead consisted of hardened, cabled mechanical apparatus. The table she sat at looked old. It was something else, not bone but dark, stained, and still soft at the edges — still organic.


    “What’s your name, dear?” That figure asked.


    “Bee,” she answered, swallowing a lump in her throat. Then, suddenly conscious of her hanging tongue, she retracted it back into her mouth.


    “That’s a nice name,” she said. “But what is your real name, Bee?”


    Bee’s eyelids fluttered, gaze fixated on those chromed teeth.


    “SIM_SHALA_SAMP 2-32-B.”


    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.


    The words rolled from her mouth unbidden, retrieved from some corner of her mind that she tried her best not to think about.


    “And what time is it, Bee?” The figure softly asked. That glimmering skull was always smiling. It was so much like Mother. “What time has the clock now reached?”


    “31,541,360,515,488 seconds PDT,” Bee answered at length, somehow catching that ephemeral moment, that exact second, knowing that it had passed the instant it left her lips.


    “So she did speak to Sestchek,” the figure said quietly to herself.


    Bee came back to her senses with a start. She clutched the back of one of the seats for balance, disoriented.


    “Are you the Wire-Witch?” Bee asked with a gasp. It was a stupid question.


    “I am,” the Wire-Witch confirmed. “Come sit down, Bee.”


    Bee tried. She had never used a chair before. It was so much taller for the child than for the witch. She had to get up off of the floor, standing again. Dragging it back, Bee scuffed the chair’s wood against the floor’s wood before hopping onto it, first with her feet before settling down. The Wire-Witch watched her with a vested interest, back straight, posture perfect, whilst Bee leaned forward with her hands and elbows on the table.


    Seeing that lipless, eyeless visage on someone other than her mother was so strange for Bee. She knew from Heych and from the countless bodies of the dead that filled the city that no-one looked quite like them.


    “Can you help me with something?” Bee asked after the bizarre sitting-down ritual was completed.


    “That depends on what it is, Bee,” the Wire-Witch said. Amusement played in her voice. Bee felt out of her depth. She was out of her depth.


    “I need to send a message to the bone monks in the Crawling City.”


    “That’s very specific. Did your mother tell you to do that?”


    The vat-born gave an unsure nod before throwing aside her doubt. She looked at the Wire-Witch in her empty eye sockets and explained.


    “I have something to tell them.”


    “How is Eye?” The Wire-Witch asked, quickly changing the subject. Then, when Bee didn’t seem to understand, the witch elaborated.


    “That’s your mother’s base name.”


    “She’ll be dead by the time I go back,” Bee said quietly but firmly.


    The frankness of the answer made the Wire-Witch pause, broken when she bowed her head.


    “Yes. Yes, I imagine she will be. She gave herself to this city.”


    “Why do you look like her?” Bee couldn’t help but ask after their gazes met again.


    “We are sisters, or she is a clone of my mother. It depends on how you look at it. My base name is Djay. Do you know what a sister is?”


    “Yes,” Bee said, nodding. “I have sisters.”


    “Do you?” The witch laughed. “Do they look like you?”


    Bee shook her head, quietly mesmerised by the sight of her mother’s skull, so at ease.


    “No? I didn’t think so.”


    The two of them, strangers yet family, sat across from each other and shared a moment of silence. The air was filled with the soft hum of fans from the bank of screens. Bee wanted to say so much, eke out some familial bond that she couldn’t articulate. After squirming in her seat, she eventually managed to speak.


    “I’ll give you whatever you want.”


    The witch’s skull turned down. She looked over the table’s smooth surface before dragging a hand over it and tapping her long titanium nails in a steady rhythm.


    “No, you won’t,” the witch said. “And you should never make that promise to anyone.”


    Bee felt her throat tighten. Her hands shook. Despite everything she knew, it felt like her own mother chastising her.


    “Do you understand, Bee?” It was just like her.


    “I—... Yes.”


    The child turned her eyes back up to meet the Wire-Witch’s empty sockets, even though it made her cheeks burn and her stomach flip.


    “You shouldn’t trust anyone who doesn’t earn it. Not even your family has your best intentions at heart.”


    “I know you’re dangerous.”


    The Wire-Witch laughed again. She shook her head, leaning back from the table. Her chair creaked.


    “I’m dangerous? She told you that did she?”


    Bee nodded. The Wire-Witch bore down on her.


    “Do you even know what she is, the Vat-Mother?”


    The Wire-Witch stood as far as she could, hands slamming down on the table, the cables anchoring her body to the wall stretching taut.


    “She ravaged our body and made it into a little breeding factory, whoring herself out to them, making them twisted new bodies!”


    The Wire-Witch was shouting now, incensed that a child had come into her domain and insulted her.


    “She made living weapons, too, enslaved children reborne for killing on demand! She did it for biomass and a bit of their attention! She was the worst of us. She did this!”


    Flinching with every word, Bee kept her head down. She knew what most of it meant, but it took a moment for her soul to fully digest it whilst fighting back the tears of panic. Still, Bee didn’t want to hear these things about her mother, so she frantically shook her head as if that could make it all go away.


    Neither could meet the other’s gaze. Bee’s chest hurt, and she struggled to breathe. Finally, managing to look up to the Wire-Witch, she was met with a fleeting glance before the older woman averted her gaze.


    “A sample of your blood,” the Wire-Witch finally said. There was resignation in her voice. “That is the price. It will be nothing you’ll miss, and you’ll never get so kind an offer again.”