Iris:
hope you have a good day ❤️ I'm off to visit dad in hospital, so probably won't see you until the evening

Amanita:
ok
hope it goes ok

The taxi was stuffy, smelling of stale air-freshener and grime. Iris sat in the back fretting with her phone, torn between two worlds; she wasn't exactly thrilled to be leaving her comrades alone for the day, but she'd put her visit off for long enough already. Dad was starting to get worried.

"You're not responsible for his feelings," Thanatos told her. She ignored it.

The taxi pulled up at the hospital, and Iris paid the driver with a tap of her phone. She climbed out without much grace or poise and the car left her almost immediately, lost within a sea of cars, all coming and staying and going away again. Iris tucked her phone into her pocket and turned to face the building itself.

The Royal Arms Hospital was a squat, grey building complex somewhere in the outskirts of New Gloucester, a chimeric amalgamation of concrete and prefab structures sat in the centre of a sprawling car park. People flowed in and out of the entrance like blood cells in an artery, the air heavy with diesel and disinfectant. In a lot of ways, it reminded Iris of the Thanatos project base, but without the familiarity that place had developed for her.

Iris stepped through the entrance doors. Her heart was pounding in her chest.

"Oh, calm down," Thanatos said. Iris saw it in the corner of her eye, standing in the reflection of the glass of the entrance door. "It's just a bloody hospital."

Iris rolled her eyes, but said nothing more. She wasn't stupid: she wasn't about to start talking to a voice in her head in a hospital lobby. She strode to the directory board, scanning it for directions to the Barrie Serious Injuries Ward.

"Top right," Thanatos told her.

Well, that just wasn't fair. How was she meant to ignore it when it was being helpful?

"Suit yourself, then," it replied.

Iris sighed. "Can you back off?" she muttered, as loudly as she dared. "I'm here for Dad."

Thanatos smirked. Iris couldn't see it, exactly, but somehow the smirk was obvious. Mercifully, it said nothing; it seemed content just to smile.

The phone in her pocket buzzed.

Amanita:
what's it like there

Iris:
busy. what's it like at the base?

Amanita:
busy. going to have some kind of exercise later, so everyone's getting ready for that

Iris:
wish I was there

The lift to the fourth floor was empty, a cavernous space clearly designed for ferrying beds as well as people. It was quiet. The overhead lights flickered. The floor rumbled. Thanatos lurked in the reflection in the mirror-polished metal at the back of the lift.

"Game plan?" it asked.

"What 'game plan'?" Iris hissed. "He's my Dad, not an Aberrant."

"Who you've been avoiding for weeks."

Iris shut her eyes.

"The image just helps," it told her. "I'm still with you."

"Feels like you're against—"

The lift doors slid open. Iris hushed herself and stepped out into the fourth-floor hub, scanning the various overhead signs hanging from the ceiling for the particular one she wanted. It was calmer up here than down below; the waiting area to the side was near-empty, its hard plastic seats occupied only by two people, an old man and a middle-aged woman. Perhaps they were father and daughter.

Thanatos pointed the way. Iris took the advice without acknowledging it.

The Barrie ward was large, but sparsely populated. It had about twenty beds in it that Iris could see — though the room snaked around to the side in a way that could have hidden many more — but less than a quarter of them were occupied. Iris found her dad in the third bed on the left, sitting up and watching the telly on a tablet computer on his lap. He waved weakly when he saw her.

"Hey there, stranger."

Iris suppressed a twinge of guilt; his words probably weren't meant to be passive-aggressive. Probably.

"Hey, Dad," she replied weakly. She wasn't really sure what to say: she had trouble talking to her dad at the best of times. But she had to make an effort, now more than ever.

Her phone buzzed, and she checked it reflexively. Another message from Amanita.

Dad smiled. "Special someone?"

Was she that easy to read?

"Just… a friend," Iris replied awkwardly. She wasn't sure why she didn't just admit it. It just felt… hard, somehow. "How've they been treating you here?" she asked, hoping to head off any further discussion.

"Oh, you know," Dad replied. "It's not the Ritz, but it'll do. Though you're a better cook by a country mile."

He ran a hand over his face. A faint sheen of sweat lay upon his brow, and his facial hair had grown into what looked like the start of a beard. Iris noticed a quiver in his hand. Maybe he was struggling to shave.

Iris sighed, sat on the bed and offered her dad a hug. He took it, his movements coming just about as awkward as Iris felt. Neither of them were used to this.

"Oh, Dad…" Iris sighed. "I'm sorry."

"Not your fault," he replied.

It didn't help. That wasn't what she was sorry for.

"What's… what's the treatment like?" Iris asked, mainly to fill the silence.

"Physio's hard," he admitted. "The bones are all healing fine, but they say my nerves are shot. And I've lost a lot of muscle tone."

Iris studied her dad's frame. He'd lost some weight and some muscle definition, sure, but that'd be easy enough to build back in time. He'd never been much of a sporty guy; there wasn't much to regain. But the nerves…

He smiled; it didn't quite reach his eyes. "Guess I'll have to get into fitness," he said. "Just like my daughter."

Iris hugged him again. She didn't want him to see her tears.

"So," Dad said. "Tell me about this government project thing."

Iris nodded, glad of the change in topic. She'd managed to calm down a little since she'd first got there, but there was still not much of the whole facing-her-father's-mortality thing that she could take.

"Sure," she said. "What do you want to know?"

"Well, that Harry bloke mentioned giant robots…"

"They're not really robots," Iris explained. "Thanatos units, we call them. We use them to fight the Aberrants."

He nodded hesitantly. "The monsters on the news?"

"Yeah."

"And you're inside these machines?"

Iris nodded. "Kind of. It's more like… we're part of them."

Dad frowned. "'Part of them'?"

Iris felt herself relax and found a smile. "Like… I get into my unit and it's like I don't know where I end and it begins. I see through its eyes, hear through its ears, touch through its skin… it's impossible to describe. And when we fight together, it's the most incredible feeling in the world." She sighed happily. "It's like poetry."

Dad looked unconvinced. "Right. And… you fight the monsters? Alone?"

"No," Iris replied. "I'm part of a team…"

"Of… other girls your age."

"Yes," she admitted. He didn't understand. Why didn't he understand?

"And you trust these girls?" he asked.

"Yes!" Iris stopped for a moment. "Well, one of them, at least."

Now that she was saying it, it did feel a bit weak.

Dad sighed. "That's all a lot to take in," he said. He looked down at his lap, deep in thought.

Iris did similarly.

"You're fucking this up," Thanatos told her.

She wasn't fucking it up. It was just hard, to talk to your dad about this kind of thing. Nobody ever wrote the manual on how to explain to your parents that you're humanity's last line of defence against destruction. Maybe she'd have to write it herself, some time.

"You caught up on Northwood Park?" she found herself asking.

Her dad blinked, and then smiled back at her. "Yeah, finished the latest season last night. What a twist, right?"

"Wild."

That wasn't her talking.

"Can't wait for the next one…"

Well, it was. But it wasn't.

"I hear there's talk of bringing back Jade?"

Oh, for fuck's sake. That was Thanatos.

"Oh, man," her dad said. "I remember Jade. Bit before your time though, right?"

Thanatos was talking to her dad.

"Sure, but there's best-of compilations online," it replied.

Thanatos was talking to her dad about a fucking soap opera.

"Plus, she's fucking iconic," it continued.

This was unreal.

"Hey," Dad replied. "No arguments here. Plus, she's aged gracefully. From MILF to Cougar."

Really, Dad?

He sighed. "I know what you're up to," he said. "You don't want to talk about this Thanatos thing."

He was right; she didn't. And neither did Thanatos itself, apparently. She wasn't really sure why. Perhaps they were both scared.

"It really doesn't sound safe," he continued. "I don't want anything to happen to you…"

Guilt tugged again at Iris' heart. Of course it wasn't safe. How could she put herself at risk when her dad needed her?

"Dad, I…"

The words trailed away. Iris wasn't sure which of her had said that, let alone how the sentence was meant to continue.

Dad sighed. "I know you're old enough to make your own decisions," he said. "But maybe… don't make this one." He put an arm around her and pulled her closer. "Just come home, okay?"

Both Irises were at a loss after that.

The bus to the farm shook violently at every turn. Iris, aged eight and a half, sat at the back, gazing out of the window at the passing fields, giant oblongs tessellating as far as she could see and decorated by only the occasional barn or farmhouse. Most of the fields were grain of some kind, stalks of wheat waving and shimmering in the late morning sun. Once in a while there was a green field without any grain growing in it dotted with strange creatures painted with black and white spots, chewing on the grass and lounging about. From that distance, Iris couldn't tell how big they were.

One of the other children had said they were called "cows".

The class teacher, Ms. Truman, walked along the aisle of the bus. She wasn't Iris' favourite teacher. In fact, Iris kind of hated her; she was shrill, humourless and overly strict, matching her formally-dressed, carefully-primped appearance. Iris much preferred Mr. Wright. He was funny and kind. He didn't make her feel stupid.

Today, they were being taken to a farm, "to see how people used to make food," Ms. Truman had said. But that didn't make any sense to Iris. Surely if the farm was still there, then people were making food there. Otherwise it wouldn't really be a farm, just… some strange sort of garden. It was more that most people couldn't afford that kind of food, wasn't it?

Ms. Truman hadn't liked her pointing that out.

The farm was an hour's drive outside of the city, and by the time they'd got there, the ride had taken its toll on Iris' body. She staggered off the bus awkwardly, trying to shake life back into the bits of her that had fallen asleep on the way. Pins and needles danced up and down her thighs like ants on a mound.

The farm itself was a collection of three buildings surrounded by fields on all sides. The road up to it was made of dirt, not like any road Iris had ever seen before, and the air stank so much that Iris could barely stand to breathe through her nose at all. It was filth upon filth upon filth.

Why were they here again?

"Right," Ms. Truman told the children, once they were all assembled in the space between the farmhouses. "I want you all on your best behaviour. No funny business. There are dangerous things here, and I don't want to have to explain to your parents how you got hurt."

With that, she handed over to one of the farm workers.

"Right," he said. "My name's Mark. I'm here to show you all around Meadowbrook Farm."

Mark had blonde hair and wore overalls and boots. He didn't look much like a grown-up to Iris; maybe he'd only just finished school.

"Here at Meadowbrook," he said, "we're both a dairy as well as keeping cereal crops. Now, can any of you tell me what that means?"

One of the girls — Susie Jameson, a blond girl with pigtails — raised her hand. "It means you make milk out of animals?"

He laughed. "Not quite. We don't turn animals into milk the same way you'd turn soy beans or oats into milk. What we actually do is—"

A horrendous moan interrupted him, coming from one of the farm buildings. It sounded horrible; was somebody hurt in there?

Wait, why was the farmer laughing?

"Oh, that's one of our animals now. Does anyone know what kind of animal makes that noise?"

That was an animal?

Once again, Susie gave the answer. "That's a cow!"

"Right you are!" he replied. "That noise is a cow's noise, just the same way as your cats or dogs at home might make noises when they want your attention."

Wow. Cows must be pretty weird, Iris decided, if they sounded like that.

Mark continued. "Now, as I was saying, we don't make milk the way most places do. In fact, we don't really make the milk at all. In a dairy, we get the cows to make the milk for us."

Iris giggled, struck by the image of a cow squeezing some beans to get milk out of them.

"It sounds funny, I know!" Mark agreed. "But what actually happens is we feed the cows grass, and then the cows turn the grass into milk. It happens inside their bodies, see?"

Inside their bodies? Iris could hardly imagine how that was possible. The whole idea sounded disgusting, pulling milk out of cows.

Iris looked at her classmates; half of them looked as revolted as she was. Susie looked fascinated, but Iris and Susie had never really got on. Grown-ups often said they were just from two different worlds; maybe this is what they meant.

"Now," Mark went on. "If you'll all follow me, we'll have a look inside the barn where all the magic happens…"

The "milking shed", he explained, was where the cows came in to be "milked": to have the milk sucked out of them, in other words. It was a wide, squat building towards the back of the farm, adjoining a field full of cows. The creatures were bigger than Iris had expected, reaching almost the height of a grown-up and even longer than they were tall. They were massive, hulking beasts with powerful legs. Iris stared at them in a frightened fascination.

What if one of them attacked?

The farmer explained how the cows were about to be herded into the building, and Iris watched as another farmer gently coaxed the group of creatures in via a couple of wide gates on the side. They were slow-moving animals, moving kind of like they'd just woken up and didn't really want to go anywhere, but they didn't put up any real resistance. Iris felt a little silly for her earlier fears; the cows were like zombies, shambling forward with no real intelligence. They wouldn't hurt anyone.

Once a couple dozen cows had gone into the building, Mark led the class up some outside stairs and through a door to a viewing platform in the milking shed. From above, the beasts looked a bit like lumbering beetles, but soon enough they found their way to a series of rectangular cow-sized cages across the side of the room. Each cage contained some strange-shaped machinery, all linked up together and wired to a control panel at the front of the viewing platform.

Once all the cows were in position, Mark pressed a switch on the control pane. All hell broke loose; the machines sprang into action, mechanical arms in each cage whirring and screeching as they sought their way in to their corresponding cow. The end of each arm had a strange assemblage of cylinders that connected itself to a pinkish part on the underside of a cow's belly. Soon, they were all connected, and the sounds changed into something more rhythmic and anxious as white liquid flowed along pipes from each cow, along the mechanical arms and into the belly of the machine that the cows were now an intimate part of.

Iris felt sick. It was like watching torture. How could they stand it?

The milking went on for some time. Eventually, mercifully, the noises stopped, and the creatures were released. Iris started to relax, the white tension in her knuckles fading to a healthier pink as she released her hands from the fists she'd balled them into. When they took her out of the shed, she was glad to go.

But she couldn't stop thinking about the cows.

"Does it hurt them?" she asked. Mark had asked the class if any of them had any questions, and it seemed to her like hers was a pretty important question to ask.

"Of course it doesn't," Susie sneered. "Why would it hurt them? It's what they're there for, after all."

"Susie Jameson," Ms. Truman snapped. "Please refrain from mocking your classmates. It's not polite."

"But it's a stupid question," she protested. "Cow are bred to be milked, just like people are bred to work in offices."

"People aren't 'bred', Susie," Ms. Truman corrected.

"It's what my dad says," Susie insisted. She was such a know-it-all.

"I don't want to hurt the cows," Iris said firmly. "If they're hurt by this, then—"

"Who cares, anyway?" Susie retorted. "They're just cows! They don't have—"

Iris leapt at her, screaming, flailing. She threw a punch at her head and followed up with a kick to the shin, shoving Susie Jameson to the floor. She fell on top of her target and kept going, delivering blow after blow after blow to the helpless girl underneath her, the girl who was too shocked to put up a fight.

Susie Jameson didn't know what had hit her until Ms. Truman broke them up.

"Iris Platt! That is no way to behave!"

It probably wasn't. But it felt good.

When she got home that night, her dad told her he was scared of who she was becoming. But Iris wouldn't understand what he meant by that for a very long time.

"Look," Dad continued. "You're still basically a child. Fighting… monsters? That's a job for adults."

Thanatos sneered. "Didn't he just say you're old enough to make your own decisions?"

Dad sighed. "I don't want to put my foot down here," he said, "but military stuff? I really don't know…"

"I know it's… weird," Iris said. Maybe if she could explain this in the right way, he'd understand. "But Thanatos… these machines, they only work for certain people."

Her dad looked at her curiously, but with an obvious weariness behind his eyes. "'Certain people'?"

"Girls my age," she explained. "Amanita and Willow are my age, too. Apparently, Thanatos won't work for anyone else."

Dad looked at her, clearly unconvinced. Having said it out loud, Iris wasn't super convinced either.

"Just fucking put your foot down," Thanatos said. "What's he going to do, anyway?"

Its comments weren't exactly helpful, and Iris wished it would shut up.

"Rude," it replied.

Dad sighed. "Do you even listen to yourself? Little girls fighting monsters in robots? That sounds shady as all hell."

Thanatos bristled. "I am not—"

The words came out of Iris' mouth; she caught them mid-flow and finished the thought. "…a 'little girl'. I'm basically an adult."

He was right about one thing, though. It was shady.

Iris sighed, relenting a little in her heart. "I… I really like it there."

She did: she liked feeling powerful; she liked being around Amanita; she liked doing something good with her life. But she knew her dad was right. It wasn't a job for children.

And right now, she felt like a stupid little girl.

"I'll… think about it," she relented.

Her dad nodded. "Thanks."

Neither of them spoke for a while. The silence in the ward wasn't a true silence; it was polluted lightly by the sounds of the various machines of life that kept the hospital going. But it felt like the conversation had been killed. Even Thanatos had nothing to say from its seat in the back of her head.

It wasn't nice. It was a painful kind of quiet.

Iris' phone buzzed again. Another message from Amanita? Maybe that would break the stillness of the moment.

But it wasn't Amanita.

Searl:
We need you back here. Something's happened. Amanita's been hurt.

Well, that didn't sound good.

"Dad, I…" Iris stammered. "I'm sorry, I have to…" She looked up at her dad, his expression totally unreadable in that moment.

He grabbed her arm. "You don't have to," he said firmly.

But she did; she started to gather her things to leave.

"I'll visit again soon," she promised.

Maybe it was even true.

Next time:

Testing a new weapon should be straightforward. But nothing's ever simple at the Thanatos project, not least when "star player" Iris is absent. But hey, that means it's Willow's chance to prove herself! How will she do?

Find out in the next exciting episode. Episode Eleven: Neurotic!