The brown-robed man, who the others called “Brother”, ordered Apollo and Giger’s wrists bound. Their weapons were bundled up in Apollo’s discarded coat and carried alongside them by a hulking muscular mass that walked on all fours and had no apparent head. A thick, corded rope was run between the two of them, with one of the hooded folk at its far end. Whenever they lagged behind, or one of them fell in the churning mud of the road, the one with the rope yanked painfully at them until they caught up.
Apollo’s eyes, full of blood and filth and tears rolling from the corners, strained to see, to make out any detail about their captors. But other than the robed Brother, all four of them wore heavy hoods and face-covering sackcloth masks with only the tiniest black holes for eyes.
“Just what is it you want with us?” she asked. The Brother laughed a sickly, rasping laugh and smiled at her with black, rotted teeth.
“You’ll see,” he said. His face was fairly untouched by mutation, but for a slight looseness to his skin that made his face seem to shift and creep as the muscles of his face stretched and contracted. “Julius will be so pleased to meet you.”
The name set alarm bells buzzing in Apollo’s head. If they were being taken to meet the leader of this band of marauders, their chances of leaving alive were vanishing fast. Their options were either to attempt escape now, or to hope that their captors’ camp was close enough that it would be past nightfall when they arrived. This Julius, if he was anything like other marauder captains Apollo had known, would be too busy with his beer and girls to see them until tomorrow.
Then there was the matter of Giger. Would his desire to hurt her outweigh his desire to escape these mutants? There was no way of knowing without incriminating herself. They would have to work together, she knew that.

Apollo edged closer to the pack beast. It had a fine coat of silky brown fur, and it smelled horrible, like rotting flesh. The rattling, clattering bundle of weaponry hung from its pack, swinging back and forth as it took one lumbering step after another. A sharp tug on the rope attached to her wrist pulled her away from the beast suddenly, and the one with the rope shouted something that was incomprehensibly muffled and slurred. Apollo got the gist, though.
She slowed down a little, gradually closing the gap between her and the slower Giger, and spoke out of the corner of her mouth:
“We need our weapons. You distract the hoods, and I’ll retrieve my blade,” she said.
Giger didn’t reply for some time, only kept trudging forward. Then he spoke.
“Silence yourself. Mutant-loving bitch.”
Apollo turned, grabbing the rope that linked them and pulling Giger towards her. She stuck out a foot, tripping him easily and sending him face-down in the mud. Without his hands, he couldn’t right himself. He was a pathetic sight, trying to extricate his face from the sucking mud. Eventually Apollo flipped him over with a kick.
“You want silence? I’ll give you silence,” she said, showing teeth. The silence of the grave.
Then a wooden club struck the back of her head and everything went dark.

This time Apollo’s consciousness returned like a bucket of cold water in the face. One of the mutant monks lowered the bucket and bowed to her.
She and Giger were tied to posts, arms above their heads. Apollo shivered. Outside the tent’s flaps it was dark, but for the scattering light of a torch that played over the grass. A single candle lit the tent, a point of light that was all Apollo could see clearly.
“Giger,” she hissed. No answer came. “You must recognise this is more important than your petty prejudices!”
“They can’t kill me. It would be a major incident. I plan to walk out of this forsaken trap tomorrow morning, right as rain.”
“Nice plan. Care to enlighten me?” Apollo said.
“Oh, you they’ll kill. Probably eat you alive or something. How ironic!” Giger said, and chuckled.
“You really are psychotic, aren’t you?”
“Please,” Giger said. “I’ve never felt more sane.”
The words chilled Apollo to the bone. She could only rely on her own wits now. His experiences in the Static had given Giger the kind of insane sanity normally reserved for the religious fanatics of the old Hydrogen Crusades.
“Destruction is your lot,” Giger continued, laughing. “Destruction and ruin! As befitting a mutantfucking freak like you!”
“Giger! Giger Caust! Think of your daughter!” Apollo said, hoping against hope. “Your little Polonia, think of her. Would you want her to see you like this? Ranting like a madman?”
Giger fell silent. After a long time, he began to sob.
“Polly…” he keened. “I’m sorry. I only wanted to help you…”
“And I want to help you,” Apollo said. “That’s all I’ve wanted since we came here.”
“Help me?” Giger said. “After everything, you’d still…?”
“Not for you. For her.”
Giger began to weep noisily, sniffing and snorting as his sinuses flooded with tears.
“I’ll pay you twice as much. Three times! I only want to see my little girl again,” he said between heaving sobs. “Thank you.”
“Alright,” Apollo said, extracting her arms from the rope around her wrist. “There’s no time like the present, and no present like time.”
“What the… how?” Giger asked, incredulous.
“A neat trick,” Apollo said, stretching her sore fingers, flexing her thumbs. “And like any great trick, one I’m bound never to reveal.” She deftly untied Giger’s rope and picked up the candle from where it was stuck in the ground. It was on the end of a long metal spike.
“Now, I feel naked without my sword,” she said. She handed the candle to Giger and crept to the edge of the tent, peering out into the gloom. “Let’s see if we can do something about that.”
She stepped out into the darkness, her eyes quickly adapting to the shadows. They were in the middle of a vast camp. Horses grazed in a gap between tents nearby.
“My God,” she murmured. “It’s a damned army!”
She had seen Bad Companies with camps near this size before, but never so organised. Whoever this Julius was, he was styling himself after his Roman namesake. Delta would kill to be here, she thought. She’d be like a kid in a candy store.
They quickly shuffled through the camp, rarely having to shove themselves against the side of a tent as guard patrols, dressed in dented plate armour, passed by.
The tents were full of men and women, mostly sleeping, although more than once Apollo had to freeze mid-step as a round of laughter rang out from a doorway she was about to pass at some game of dice or dancing girl. The regular arrangement would put the most important items, the armory for instance, at the center where they would be easier to defend, closer at hand. That made sense.
Apollo pulled the belt tight around her waist. Now she felt ready to face anything. Giger shrugged his coat onto his shoulders and patted the pockets.

As they left the armory tent, the first strands of dawn could be seen wavering overhead. Apollo cursed silently. If they didn’t find Polonia before she went about her business they would have to leave and return the next night, and every night they waited was another night that Giger might lose his grip again and decide she had to die for his honor or something.
She ran from tent to tent, looking for anyone who fit Giger’s description that now seemed like a lifetime ago: Seventeen, five foot four, dark eyes, golden hair. No luck, no luck, no luck.
She rounded a corner, and a guard turned straight towards her. His eyes flashed recognition, but her sword was already in hand. His call for backup died in his throat as his lungs filled with blood.

Polonia was only half-awake when the woman burst into her tent, a bloody blade in hand. Otherwise, she would have screamed.
“Wh- who are you?” she asked fearfully.
Lina murmured in her sleep and turned over. The woman stood aside to let someone else enter.
“Daddy?” she said. Her father took one look at her and fell to his knees.
“Oh, Polly. My darling. How could you?” he said. “You’re…”
It was too terrible to say. Polonia screwed up all three of her eyes.
“I’m sorry… we knew we could never…”
She opened her eyes again and her heart broke at the expression on his face. Suddenly she knew that she would never see him again after this moment. She was totally lost to him, and he to her. She put her hand in Lina’s, and Lina unconsciously squeezed it.
“You’ve become something I don’t recognise,” Giger said. “Human no more.”
Apollo knew this cadence. Giger’s furious fervor was returning.
“So have you,” said Polonia. Giger stopped dead. His face seemed to run through every possible emotion at once. He finally came to a halt on a mixture of grief and horror, and turned to Apollo.
“Please don’t make me do it,” he said, tears welling in his eyes. “I don’t want to do it.”
Apollo was disconcerted. She had expected rage, ranting, sound and fury. Not this. “Do what?” she asked.
“Don’t make me kill her,” Giger said, raising his gun from his pocket and aiming it squarely at Polonia.
“Giger, no!” Apollo said, trying to grab his hand, but the man seemed to have suddenly grown muscles and tendons of iron and she could barely move him. “It won’t work! It’ll blow up if you pull that trigger!”
“So you say,” Giger said. “But you believe a lot of lies, Apollo Ridley. You even believe that this is my daughter!” He started laughing. “My daughter is human, Apollo Ridley! Sweet and innocent and human! Not some mutant slu-”
He pulled the trigger.

Inside the slim, shiny gun, the hammer struck the firing pin of a small brass cartridge – less than a centimeter across – sparking off a tiny flash of heat that ignited just four grains of high-quality gunpowder, which burst into an explosion of super-heated gases that rushed up against the back of a rifled lead slug, which began to move towards the only escape it had, the end of the spiralling barrel of the gun.
And then. It. Stopped. The rushing gases battered against the bullet and turned around. With nowhere to go, the pressure grew until-
Boom.

All this took less than a second. The moment Giger pulled the trigger, Apollo threw herself forward, shielding Polonia and Lina from the shrapnel with her body.
Giger looked at what remained of his hand. White bone gleamed in the morning light that was beginning to stream into the tent.
“Polly?” said Lina blearily. “What was that?”
“Nothing. It was nothing,” Polonia said. “Just go back to sleep.”
Apollo stood over Giger.
“You’ve destroyed yourself,” she said. “Your body lives, but you are dead.”
“I am dead,” Giger repeated quietly.
“Go back to the city. It is a city of the dead.”
“City of the dead.”
Apollo grabbed his collar and hoisted him to his feet. “He brought me here to rescue you. But I can see you don’t need rescuing.”
Polonia shook her head. “I don’t,” she said. “She rescued me.” She gestured to the sleeping Lina.
Apollo nodded. “I know.”
“What will you do now?” asked Polonia.
“I’ll take him home,” Apollo said. “He’s burned up inside and out, but the internal wounds at least will heal. And from those ashes, something new might grow. I heard of a tree once that grows in the aftermath of forest fires. I think people are the same. I’m sorry you had to see this.”
“He wouldn’t do this for you,” Polonia said.
Apollo nodded. “I know.”

She took Giger’s good arm, bowed to Polonia and Lina, and walked out. The guards didn’t bother them, somehow seeing that they were no longer a threat. And they walked, walked for days without stopping, until the great bustling necropolis of Stellenmarek was in sight again.