4 out of 5

There’s some honest-to-goodness humor in this collection, when a particular safeguard – Dhomochevsky – requests for anyone to pick up his severed hand if they see it.

Severed hands; massive bodily punctures; heads blown off and reconstructed; Cibo and Killy are traipsing through the Megastructure, Seu’s genes in tow and searching for a way to use them to access that damned ‘Net, when they make frenemies with the local protectors (Dhomo and robo pal Ito).  ‘Traditional’ tech beasts have been supplanted by fleshy, insect nightmares, drawn with sickly masses of appendages by a constantly-improving Nihei.

When Cibo succumbs to bodily takeover again it’s sort of an eyeroll – it’s a trope by this point that she’ll become a bad guy every few logs – but it’s an exciting buildup all the same, Nihei diving deeper into his varying realities narrative for tension instead of just relying on endless battles.  This allows for the book’s majority to be interestingly silent – little dialogue, lots of wandering – and to then juxtapose that with apocalyptic wreckage toward the end.  …At which point things get a bit crowded and hard to follow, but such passages have generally led to a ‘reset’ of Killy’s path and progress, so we’ll assume that’s to come in Book 9.