The Stars Are Legion

by Kameron Hurley

  I begin to run.

  * * *

  My bare feet slap against the moist floor. I come to the end of one corridor and turn into another. I run and I run, and as the air rushes through my lungs, I feel truly alive for the first time since waking. I take a soft left turn, and the corridor widens into a gaping mouth. An open door. I come up short and stare. Through the opening is a cavernous space with a ceiling so high, it’s lost to darkness. Green, bioluminescent flora or fauna of some kind line the walls and the floor, but it’s not enough to give me a sense of the depth of the room.

  I step through the mouth and the ceiling lights up in green and blue. I squint and now I am the one who gapes, as I have entered a giant vehicle hangar. Row upon row of snub-nosed vehicles go on and on. They are strange, slumbering animals, these vehicles. They are slug-like things twisted with coiled tubing, their glistening exteriors splashed in yellow, red, blue, green. I don’t know what I expect vehicles to look like, but it seems odd they have no wings or wheels or feet.

  As I pass, I brush them with my fingers, and they shiver and blink at my touch. They are warm, and their surfaces feel like toughened skin. Strange creatures, these. I wonder what they eat.

  I crouch beside one, and it opens a massive eye, which bears an orange iris. For a long moment we stare at one another. I see that it’s leaking a viscous yellow fluid from one of the tubes crisscrossing its back end. There’s a workshop bench along the far wall where other vehicles are strung up in various states of disrepair. Some of them hang on bony hooks in the wall like slabs of meat.

  The vehicle looks at me with its one orange eye. I feel pity for it, huffing here alone in the hangar, leaking vital fluid. I walk over to the workbench, and just like in the training room, my hands move of their own accord with some latent memory. I know how to fix this sad vehicle, and that knowledge gives me far greater pleasure than knowing how to hit someone.

  I cut and stitch and smear salve across a long length of the vehicle’s tubing. It has a texture and consistency somewhere between intestine and an umbilical cord; the knowledge that I know the texture of both is sobering. There’s a heap of tubing in a warm bin on the workbench. I know where everything is, and I know the names of the tools: scalpel, haystitch, speculum, forebear.

  I crouch next to the vehicle, a bone scalpel between my teeth, and repair the leaking tube. The vehicle hums softly beneath me. When I’m done, I’m smeared in sticky lubricant and yellow fluid. The vehicle rolls its eye at me and purrs. I pat its big snub of a front end, like thumbing a warm slug. We are probably both too happy in this moment.

  “I’d heard you were alive.”

  I raise my head. An unfamiliar person stands at the door. She is slender and wiry where Jayd is soft and luminous. Her black hair is cut short on one side and braided into one long plait on the other, twisted atop her head like a crown. She moves toward me. I grip the scalpel, uncertain.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “Sabita,” she says. “I suppose it’s still too early for you to remember that.” She strokes the snub nose of the vehicle. It purrs under her fingers. “I wanted to make sure you were safe this time.”

  “I’ve only met Jayd so far,” I say, “and those people without tongues.”

  Sabita curls her lip. “Bottom-worlders.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “People who live in the levels below here,” she says. “The world is very wild in the layers beneath us. When Lord Katazyrna takes a world, she consigns those she does not recycle to the bottom levels. Most are conscripted into the army, eventually.”

  “Why am I here?” I ask.

  Sabita presses a finger to her lips. Hesitates. “She hasn’t told you yet?”

  “She says I’m supposed to take the Mokshi. She says it stole my memory.”

  Sabita smiles, but it’s a sad smile. “Then I suppose that’s the truth she wants you to believe,” she says.

  “I have a feeling I’m getting very little of that,” I say.

  “I’ve never lied to you,” Sabita says. “Though you lied to me a great deal before confiding in me. I suppose it was the same with Jayd.”

  I shake my head. “I’ve got no reason to believe you any more than I believe Jayd.”

  “You don’t believe Jayd?”

  My skin crawls. “I care very much for Jayd,” I say. “I’m still working things out.”

  “Are you ready to return to the Mokshi? You only ever come here when you’re ready to go back there.”

  “I’m ready,” I say. “How many times have I done this?”

  “You told me not to tell you.”

  “When?”

  “Before you lost your memory. Before . . . all these hopeless missions.”

  “What can you answer, then?”

  She shrugs. “Nothing about your past. Jayd tried to tell you about your past when you first came back, I heard, but it didn’t go well. You became a raging, violent fool. Lord Katazyrna nearly had you recycled again. Ask about something else. The ship, the vehicles. Though you are doing very well with the vehicles already. They always did love you.”

  “Why would someone throw away a child?” I ask.

  Sabita sees the scalpel in my hand for the first time. She takes a half-step back, though I can see she is trying to mask her fear. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Something I heard,” I say, which is an easy lie for her to catch because who would I have heard that from?

  But she does not seem bothered by it. “Throw them away where?” she says. “You mean recycle them?”

  I search the sliver of that first memory I woke with, the one I know is mine. Shake my head. “Blackness. A black pit.”

  “Children get recycled when they come out wrong,” she says. “Just like anything else that comes out wrong.” She looks me up and down. “Or anything that goes wrong.”

  “What are you doing here?” Jayd’s voice.

  It startles me. I tuck the scalpel under the vehicle, because I don’t want to think what Jayd will do if she sees me with a weapon. When I glance over at Jayd, I see her gaze is not on me but Sabita.

  “Neither of you should be here,” Jayd says.

  I pat the vehicle one more time. “We’ll be together soon, friend,” I murmur, and Jayd frowns. Let her think I remember more than I do.

  Sabita smiles at Jayd; a flinty smile. Her gaze is black. “I’ll leave you to her,” Sabita says. She walks past Jayd.

  “Don’t come back here until she goes out again,” Jayd says.

  “Of course,” Sabita says, and she is already crossing the mouth of the door, out and away.

  “What did you talk about?” Jayd asks.

  “Nothing,” I say. I stand. “I got tired of being locked up in that room. Went for a run. Saw some work here that needed doing.”

  “I’ll talk to the mechanics,” Jayd says. “They should do a better job maintaining these for the next assault. And keep the doors closed.”

  “When’s the next assault?”

  “When you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “No,” she says.

  I lean against the vehicle and fold my arms. “I’m done being treated like an invalid child,” I say. “I came here for my memory. You’ll give it back or I’ll make of you what I made of those people in the training room.”

  “No, you won’t,” Jayd says, and her certainty surprises me. “I’ll tell you when you’re ready.”

  I move toward her. I am taller than Jayd by half a hand and outweigh her by a good measure. But she stands firm. Only raises her head to meet my look.

  “I could kill you,” I say.

  “You could do any number of things,” she says. “But you won’t.”

  “How about this?” I say, and I reach for her. I mean to pull her into my arms and kiss her, but it startles her, and she dances away.

  “Enough of that,” she says, but her voice trembles, and she will not look at me now, and I know in that m
oment that I’m right. She’s not my sister. These people are not my kin, and she is drawn to me as much as I am to her.

  “Why the game?” I say. “You must know I don’t believe a word you’ve told me.”

  “The game isn’t for you.”

  “Then who?”

  She smooths her hands against the fabric of her shift. She still will not look at me. “Please come back to your room, Zan.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then I call Gavatra and she drugs you, and we haul you there ourselves,” she says. “Would you prefer that?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Then come with me,” Jayd says. “You must trust me, Zan. I know that’s difficult, but the only reason we’ve gotten this far is because you’ve trusted me.”

  “Gotten this far to what?” I say.

  “To the Mokshi,” she says. “Do you trust me?”

  “No,” I say.

  * * *

  After another round of calisthenics on my own—Jayd won’t say what happened to those women I beat up last time—I tuck the spongy blanket around me back in my cell of a room, but cannot sleep. Instead, I watch the play of lights moving under the membrane of the ceiling. It’s eerie, like observing the inner workings of a beast.

  At some point, I must sleep, because I dream.

  I dream of a woman with a great craven face walking along the surface of a massive world. She is a titan. She snatches flying vehicles from the air and crunches them in her diamond teeth. Green lubricant and yellow puffs of exhaust escape her gaping mouth. Little blue insects flitter through the ether, and when they encounter the yellow mist, they fall down dead, like leaves.

  The surface of the world is covered in wavering tentacles, and the titan grabs on to them for purchase as she strides across the world, snarling and spitting out the corpses of her enemies and poisoning everything she breathes on. She snatches at one of the flying vehicles and stabs herself in the stomach with it. She cuts long and low, and though I expect her to cry out in pain, she only roars and shows her teeth as gouts of blood pour from her body and float lazily to the surface of the world, sluggish and distorted by the low gravity.

  When I wake, the pulsing lights in the ceiling have dimmed. Jayd stands over me with a blade in her hand. I snap awake and snatch her wrist.

  “I need to cut your hair,” she says.

  My heart pounds so loudly I think she can hear it, and perhaps she can, standing so close to me with that black edged weapon.

  “I don’t need to cut my hair to go back to the Mokshi,” I say.

  “The witches recommend it.”

  “The . . . witches?”

  “We’ll consider that in time,” she says.

  She hacks at my hair with less care than I expect, her mouth a thin line. I am surprised to see that amid the hanks of black hair she removes, some are gray. When she is satisfied, she takes me by the chin and gazes into my face, as if trying to peer up under my skull. I cannot get used to the way she looks at me, as if I am lover, sister, and enemy all at once.

  “I’m ready,” I say. “We go to the Mokshi now?”

  She brushes my hair back from my face. “I miss you when you go.”

  “Now, Jayd.”

  Her hand trembles. “I wanted a little longer with you.”

  She takes me back to the hangar.

  It’s been cleaned up since I was last here. The workbench is tidied. I go right to the big orange-eyed vehicle I repaired before, and it opens its great eye and purrs beneath my fingers.

  “How do they get around?” I ask.

  “They fly,” Jayd says, “through the airless spaces between us and the Mokshi.”

  “And how far is our . . . ship from the rogue world?”

  “We are not a ship, not really,” Jayd says. “You’ll understand when you get outside, and inside the Mokshi, well . . .” She trails off. “You need to get a squad in there with you. Whatever happens to you in there, however you lose your memory, maybe they can prevent it and help you get it back.”

  “So, you don’t really know if I’ll get my memory back if I go.”

  “If the Mokshi took it, the Mokshi can give it back.”

  “And if I don’t get out?” I say. “Isn’t that the problem? That I didn’t get out last time? That I’ve been gone for . . . how long?”

  “You’ll remember,” she says firmly.

  I hoped to remember more by now, to uncover some truth, but my memory is still as much a cipher as Jayd. All I know is that I can hurt things, I can repair things, and I once recycled a child. So far, the person I had been didn’t seem to be someone I wanted to remember; seeking these memories may be like picking at a soft scab, one that barely conceals the pus and rot beneath.

  Jayd points out how the assault vehicle functions while she leads me around the hangar. We pause at a long line of depressions in the wall, and she pulls out various items from the pockets of the wall’s seared flesh. One item is a spray-on suit, which she tells me to coat myself in before I go out. The bulb that contains it is soft in my hand. The other is a massive weapon that I hope gets easier to carry outside, because just holding it hurts my good arm.

  “You deploy the vehicle’s burst scrambler when the world’s defenses go up,” Jayd says, pointing to a gnarled whorl in what I take to be the vehicle’s control panel. “The world is dead, and nothing lives inside of it anymore, but the defenses are still active.”

  “If you’ve never been inside the Mokshi,” I say, “how do you know everyone is dead inside?”

  Jayd takes my good arm and repositions my fingers on the weapon. “Don’t hold it like that or you will shoot your foot,” she says.

  A sticky memory stirs: I remember a great round ship as big as a world, bathed in wave after wave of blue-green light. The image whispers away a moment later, but the memory of it raises the fine hairs on the back of my neck. My heart pumps a little faster; I worry I might have another panic attack, like I did with Gavatra. But my body stays in check. I breathe deeply through my nose. I’m learning to control my body the way I’m learning Jayd, and the ship, and the vehicles. If I can’t remember, I’ll start over. We’ll begin again.

  “The first assault the world makes will be an energy wave,” Jayd says, and though the tour of the vehicle is over, she paces now, brow knit. I want to rub the furrow there between her eyes and tell her everything is going to be all right. But what would I know?

  “The second will hit after you get into the atmosphere,” Jayd continues. “The burst scrambler will work to repel both, but you have to recharge it between hits. Don’t press it too much, too fast. That’s important.” She points to the place on the soft green control panel, another gnarled, almost root-like protrusion.

  I don’t understand much of this, but as with the fighting and the repair of the vehicle, I’m starting to believe that some broken shards of my memory will indeed come back, hopefully when they’re most needed. I wonder why Jayd and Gavatra and whoever this mother of theirs is were mad enough to keep sending me off to this fate, and why I had been mad enough to agree to it time and time again. Did this same argument work every time, this promise that I will get back a memory? Maybe there is no memory. Maybe the memory itself is a lie, and I am just like these vehicles, bred for this purpose like a sack of sorry meat.

  “Won’t I fall off?” I ask, pointing at the sleek tube of the open vehicle. Neither the vehicle nor the bulb containing my supposed suit looks particularly safe. I have an idea of what an airless vacuum of space is, which is odd. I can understand things like food and furniture and heat, but not who I am, or where we are, or why I dream of cannibal women cutting themselves open.

  “You straddle it,” Jayd says, patting the seat. “Your suit sticks to it. To unstick yourself from it, press here.” She shows me the release control. It looks like a massive white pustule.

  As Jayd smiles at me, a memory bubbles up: Jayd with her big eyes and full, round face reminds me of Maibe. But I have n
o idea who Maibe is. I want to ask how many “sisters” there are, and where all the other people are who live on the ship, like Sabita, and who all these bottom-worlders are, but there is no guarantee I’ll even survive this assault. Why bother to ask about a place I have a good chance of never seeing again, with a zero chance of Jayd giving me a straight answer, anyway?

  I heft the weapon. “How do I use this?” I ask.

  Jayd taps the butt of the weapon, just above a soft, hooked trigger mechanism made of the same spongy stuff as the walls. “Just point and shoot,” she says.

  I lower the weapon, and Jayd bats it away. “Not at me.” She pulls something from her pocket, a wormy little thing that she tells me to put in my ear.

  “No,” I say.

  “It’s the only way we can speak after you spray on the suit,” Jayd says.

  I wince. She raises her hand to do it for me, and I snatch her wrist. “I’ll do it,” I say, and I do as the thing slithers into the whorl of my ear canal.

  I want to turn back, then. But a part of me knows that if I refuse to go on this assault, something far more terrible will happen, and this mother of ours—hers?—will recycle the lot of us, and death in service to the War God sounded a fair bit more glorious than death in the mouth of some recycler monster.

  That name, that entity, the recycler monster, blooms into my thoughts the same way as the words speculum and haystitch had. My memory provides an image: a great lumbering one-eyed beast snarling at me from the guts of a rotten refuse heap of decaying bodies.

  And then I stop thinking, stop coming up with questions, because I am terrified of what other horrors still lay locked in my broken mind.

  “Time to drop,” Jayd says, and a broad door unfurls from the other side of the room, and in walks my glorious army.

  “THE KATAZYRNAS THINK THEMSELVES THE MOST POWERFUL FORCE IN THE LEGION. I AM NOT THE FIRST TO HAVE PROVEN THEM WRONG.”

  —LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION

  3

  ZAN

  The army the Lord of Katazyrna has rallied for me is more a squad. They are nearly two hundred strong, and when I gape and ask Jayd where they have all come from, she shrugs and says, “They had no choice,” and tells me to spray on my suit.