The Ghouls were not a race in the way humans understood the word.

A race, by every standard the older catalogues of the Crusade used, required a body. Bodies had bones. Bones had a shape. Shape had a history, and the history could be read by the system and filed against the entry for the species.

The Ghouls had none of these things. The Ghouls were not bodies.

The Ghouls were appetites, and the appetites had decided, somewhere in the deep early years of their existence, that the only way to remain in the Crusade was to wear bodies that did not belong to them.

A Ghoul fed on death energy.

Death energy was the residue a living thing released at the moment of its death. Every species shed it. The energy was small in most cases, the slow exhalation of a thing that had been alive and was no longer.

Ghouls had learned that the residue could be harvested if the Ghoul was close enough to the dying thing at the moment of its passing.

The Ghoul could swallow the residue. The residue could feed the Ghoul. A Ghoul who fed often was a Ghoul who survived. A Ghoul who fed rarely was a Ghoul who, slowly, ceased to be.

The arrival of humans inside the Crusade had been the most welcome event in the recorded memory of the Ghoul race. Humans died at a rate that no other intelligent species in the Crusade had ever matched.

They died in their first tunnels. They died on their first frontiers. They died in their second, third, and fourth campaigns. They died in numbers that the older races, who had been managing their own birth and death cycles for thousands of years with careful protocols, found vulgar.

To the Ghouls, the vulgarity was the gift. Humans were a buffet.

The two races had been at war for almost the entire period of human presence in the Crusade. By the count of the system, the war had cost humanity nine million registered Crusaders. The war had cost the Ghouls a number that could not be counted, because the Ghouls did not count themselves the way bodies counted themselves.

Each side held one Conqueror. Each side held a comparable number of Diamonds. The war had not, after two centuries, resolved.

The Ghouls were patient.

The Ghouls had also, in the last decade, begun to develop an interest in the higher cores of the human service. A Ghoul who fed only on the death energy of foot soldiers grew at the rate of the worth of a foot soldier’s residue.

A Ghoul who fed on the death energy of a higher rank grew faster. A Ghoul who harvested the core of a higher rank, intact, at the moment of the death of the rank, advanced in a way the higher catalogues of the system had only recently begun to track.

Core harvesting was illegal under the standing accords of the Crusade between the older races. The Ghouls did not consider themselves party to the accords.

In a small private room in the residential ring of the human sector of Solgrace, a man named Velkyn was walking back and forth across the rug. The rug was a deep red. The wood of the floor beneath it was the dark, polished wood of a higher-end residence.

The walls were the cream of the standard civilian color scheme. The window across the room looked out onto a quiet street where two children, in school uniforms, were arguing about the rules of a game with chalk drawn on the pavement.

Velkyn was not watching the children. Velkyn was thinking.

He had walked the length of the rug forty-seven times since returning to the residence. He had stopped at the wall, turned, and walked the length back. His hands were clasped behind his back. His head was inclined slightly forward.

To any human observer who had glanced into the room through the curtain, he would have appeared exactly the man he had been pretending to be for the last sixteen months: a junior transport officer of clean reputation, returned from his morning appointment with the kind of preoccupation that suggested a difficult meeting.

The body Velkyn was wearing had been a junior transport officer. The name of the officer had been Halen Voss, no relation to the captain of the same family name who served the second Diamond of the Eastern Front.

Their original target was that Halen.

Halen Voss had been twenty-six. He had been engaged to a girl in the Western district. He had been three weeks from his wedding when his transport convoy had been ambushed on the return run from a supply drop to the southern frontier, four months ago, by a small Ghoul scouting unit that had been operating below the radar of the senior staff.

The convoy had carried twelve soldiers. Eleven of them had been killed cleanly. Their death energy had been harvested in the field by the scouting unit and distributed by rank.

The twelfth, Halen Voss, had not been killed. He had been kept alive long enough for Velkyn, who had been the senior officer of the unit, to study his memories, his speech patterns, his daily routines, and the small particularities of his face.

Then Halen had been killed too, but not cleanly. The death had been engineered. The body had been preserved.

Velkyn had walked into the body of Halen Voss the way a man walked into a coat that fit. The infiltration had cleared the border checks at the outer perimeter of Solgrace without difficulty. The papers of Halen were in order.

The biometrics of Halen had been calibrated. The Lightlings at the gate had registered Halen as a returning citizen and waved him through with the brief polite attention the Nexus system gave to low-ranking residents.

He wondered if those abominations even cared if they knew this. For them, nothing mattered until that nothing was inside Solgrace.

For sixteen months, Velkyn had lived in the residence of Halen, filed the reports of Halen, and attended the social functions of Halen. He had cultivated the friendship of three civilian families and had moved, quietly, through the lower rungs of the human elite.

The intelligence he had gathered was already, in its raw form, the most valuable single deposit any Ghoul agent had ever assembled inside Solgrace.

He had not yet transmitted any of it.

The transmission protocols required the agent to surface, briefly, to a designated handler outside the city walls. Velkyn had not surfaced. He had told himself, in the first six months, that the intelligence was not yet complete.

He had told himself, in the next six months, that the timing was not yet right. He had told himself, in the most recent four months, that he was building toward a larger asset.

The truth was simpler.

Velkyn had decided that the intelligence was his.

A Ghoul of his rank, returning to the homeland with a deposit of this size, would have been rewarded with a single advancement on his ledger.

A Ghoul of his rank, harvesting a single high-grade human core in addition to the deposit, would have been rewarded with a permanent seat on the council that distributed harvests across the race. The difference, in the math of the Ghoul ledger, was the difference between a thousand small advancements and one large one.

Velkyn wanted the large one. In simple words, he was an ambitious Ghoul.