I cling a long time, longer than I probably should have, until the girl’s body goes limp and a third shot clips the girl’s leg and sends her vehicle spinning. I drop the girl and roll my vehicle toward a billowing yellow cloud.
I punch the dash, deploying the burst shield, and cut through the cloud neatly, breaching the other side. I kick my vehicle around and face what must be the Bhavaja family. They are finishing off the last three surviving members of my army.
I snarl at them and make an obscene gesture, knowing I am too far away for them to catch it. I burn hard toward them, firing off my weapon into their lines.
The lines peel away, outmaneuvering me.
Whoever controls the Mokshi controls the Legion, another bit of wisdom bubbling up from my broken memory. Whoever said it, the Bhavajas seem to know it too, and they will never let me take it, and I’ll never get my memory back, and all these girls are dead for nothing. I will never get any closer than this gaping wound, this portal to the center of the world.
I zip past a long line of Bhavajas, then tilt back toward the billowing yellow fog, gunning hard for it like some madwoman. A few of them pursue, foolishly, and why wouldn’t they? They think I have burned and conquered their worlds, and they will follow me to the very limits of the Legion for revenge, wouldn’t they? I would.
A handsbreadth from the fog, I cut the fuel to my vehicle and drop like a stone, so hard and so fast, they don’t know what’s happening until they plunge into the yellow fog, bubbling and sizzling, colliding with one another like broken stars.
I come out of the drop and up, fast, so fast I nearly smash into another Bhavaja vehicle, one of the ones that hung back. I circle the crater once and see not one of my soldiers still riding the Mokshi’s thin atmosphere. I’m alone. The yellow mist covers the whole mouth of the crater now, blocking entry. There is no way in; I’ve lost the brief window between the world’s first and second defensive deployments.
Another of the Bhavajas comes at me, taking lead of the group, and she signs at me: “You won’t make Katazyrna space. You won’t make it home.”
“What’s happening?” Jayd’s voice.
I answer by hitting the dash and propelling myself abruptly upward, bursting through the atmosphere so fast, I feel the heat of the friction on my suit.
I pop free and let the burst of momentum push me from the weak gravity well of the world. I see the crimson wave of the defense grid coming up behind me. I try to twist my vehicle around and counter the red wave with the burst shield. The wave glances off the edge of my shield and I spin out of control, tumbling end over end through the desolate inky spaces between the worlds.
The impact of the defense wave burns the left side of my suit, blackening my vision on that side. I squint through my one good eye, blinded by the auburn glare of the misty sun of the Core.
Ahead of me, a dozen worlds burn with the auroras of their outer defenses, casting off waves of vermillion, turquoise and misty emerald light.
I see the kid’s gasping face again, the thick fingers of dark hair, while light flares again and again across my field of vision.
A vehicle zips past me—not mine but Bhavaja: one on the left, then one on the right.
I fight with my vehicle’s propulsion system, thighs gripping either side of it hard, trying to keep my seat.
A cephalopod thuds into my vehicle’s undercarriage.
It gives me the push I need to right myself. I reorient myself and shoot past the two vehicles that flank me. I can see Katazyrna rising ahead of me. Wispy, snarling white tentacles grow out of the Katazyrna’s surface. I see bits of debris caught in those sticky tentacles. If I can reach the pull of the world’s gravity, I can lunge for them and climb back down planetside.
I push hard for the world. It grows into a great amber disk as I near. Another thud judders my vehicle. I correct it before I spin out.
One of the Bhavajas comes up beside me. Her expression is hard: brows meeting over deep, hooded eyes, a twist of a mouth from which peeks a pink tongue, held tightly in clenched teeth.
The Bhavaja raises her weapon and fires.
I release my vehicle, stretch out my arms, and launch myself off it like a space swimmer, catapulting toward the shimmering white tentacles of Katazyrna.
A cephalopod clips my leg. I feel the frigid rush of vacuum and the creeping horror of the suit dissolving around my leg, sickening from the outside in, peeling away like a gory fruit rind.
My grasping fingers take hold of one of the waving tentacles streaming from the surface of Katazyrna. It curls around my arm, yanking me down and down to the surface of the world and the cold, thin atmosphere of home.
I hit the spongy surface just as my suit dissolves around my face and my oxygen runs out.
I have time to suck in a painful breath of frigid, too-thin air and make an obscene gesture at the Bhavajas as they shoot out and away in the face of the world’s blue defenses. Katazyrna pitches wave after wave of radiant energy after our snarling enemy.
“Home,” I say through cold, parched lips into thin, crackling air, “home,” and black out.
“WE ARE ALL SERVANTS OF THE LEGION, SOME MORE SO THAN OTHERS. OUR POWER COMES IN REALIZING THAT SERVITUDE IS NOT A NATURAL STATE BUT A LEARNED ONE. OUR POWER COMES IN KNOWING WE CAN REMAKE IT ALL.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
4
JAYD
The first time Zan came back from the Mokshi with no memory, I thought it was a blessing from the War God. We had done too many awful things to one another by then, and I feared we would never achieve what we’d set out to do. She was always more emotional than me, which made it a miracle she had achieved so much before we began to work together.
In truth, I never expected to play this game so long. But my mother, Anat, Lord Katazyrna, is stubborn, and so are the Bhavajas. They have been fighting us so long, I don’t think they know how to stop, and Anat certainly can’t stop them alone. Zan and I believed we had a way to end the fighting and save Katazyrna, and perhaps the Legion, too. But some people don’t want to be saved.
I am thinking of this as I head down to see Anat. I’ve had visual confirmation from the surface-walkers that Zan has reached the well of Katazyrna’s gravity, and they are going to pull her in. It makes me nervous not to be the one to welcome Zan back, but Anat is already suspicious of me, and I don’t want to inflame her any more than she already is. We have come close to swaying her so many times. I touch my stomach. Everything we planned so very long ago depends on Zan being there, flinging herself at the Mokshi, and me being here, rescuing her from it, until we can convince Anat that I can better serve her in the hands of our enemies.
After this latest failed approach on the Mokshi, I prepare to debrief our mother as if I am a soldier preparing for war. It’s how our mother raised us all. We are Katazyrna soldiers, born and raised for just this purpose. But I find soldiering false, a broken way to manage people who should be bound to you in love, not fear.
Love worked far better on Zan than fear, I found. At least until she found out what I did to what she loved most. I have made many mistakes. I am the first to admit that. But forgiveness is a luxury I cannot afford to court. I’m not convinced I would deserve it, even if I got down on my knees and cut open my palms and begged Zan for it.
I press the wrinkles from my slick outer coat and ask for admittance into our mother’s corridor. The big women on either side of the door press the flesh of the door, and it blooms open, but it is not my mother on the other side; it is the gaggle of witches, shuffling their way down the corridor, quickly ducking from my view, fleeing my approach. Unlike Zan, witches have long memories. They remember what Zan and I had to do to them to keep them quiet. But they didn’t dare give away our secrets after that. Every time the witches are recycled, they lose a little bit of their sanity on rebirth. A secret like ours is worth keeping if it means they won’t have to be reborn again for another few turns, at least. Until it’s Anat who tir
es of them.
I have not seen the witches since the day Zan came back without her memory. Some days, I wish I understood their loyalties. Do they belong to the ship or to Mother? Like everything else that belongs to the world, they are reborn in the womb of a woman, usually the same one, but if we kill that woman, the ship simply gives another one the task of birthing the witches, and we start again. We can never get rid of the witches, no matter how many times they are killed or recycled. They always come back.
Like Zan. Like me.
I find my mother in the long translucent stretch of the world called the reflective pool, though there is no water, only a sheen of filmy skin so thin that it reveals the faces and forms of the dead and half-undone floating in the guts of ship’s walls. All those bits of bodies we have recycled eventually pass through here on their way to being devoured and repurposed. Sometimes, if I stand here long enough, I can see the faces of my dead sisters. Everyone is a sister here because we are all of the world, all but those we have scavenged from other worlds. The corridor stretches on and on until it comes to a crumpled ruin, something purposely destroyed to ensure no one went any farther down that way, I expect. There have been countless insurrections and blight over the rotations. I once asked Mother why she didn’t fix it, and she snarled something at me—I don’t even remember what—and I let it drop. I suspect Mother has far less power than she pretends. It’s why I am willing to take the risks that I do.
Anat is talking loudly to three of her secretaries, all bottom-world people she has raised up to serve her. Raising them from below instead of capturing them from other worlds makes them more loyal, she always says, but I think my mother conflates fear and loyalty far too often. I fear her, yes, but I’ve never been loyal. She is gesturing to them with her great metal arm. The metal covers a heated green organic core, which can be seen through the grill on the underside of her arm. She likes to wave it around like the war trophy it is, but seeing it always makes my stomach turn. It reminds me of my mistakes.
“Zan came back alive from the latest assault,” I say.
Anat keeps talking to the secretaries in their patois. I can speak half a dozen bottom-world languages, and I can hear them talking about trading contracts. A group in the level below has broken out in civil strife over the matter of tariffs. Anat uses those goods in her bid to win the hearts of the people she intends to conquer. The witches on every world plead with us, often, to stop sharing materials among worlds. They say it has contributed to the rotting of the Legion. Worldships are meant to be self-sustaining, they say, and the more we swap resources among worlds, the more we upset the delicate balance of the ships. But I have seen ships that never shared resources. I have conquered them. They died out faster than those who traded on the Outer Rim. When I cracked those supposedly self-sustaining worlds open, the only people alive were barely sentient, scrabbling out a living at the very center of the world, where it was still warm. I think the witches give us advice from some dead time, a time when the longevity of the worlds was never in question. But we have moved long past that. The witches haven’t.
My mother’s response to the witches’ proclamations is less rational but just as dismissive. She says she is the only thing keeping the Legion together, and she answers only to the Lord of War. Anat believes she can do whatever she wants as long as she holds the surface of the world. That has been true here for a long time. It’s why Zan and I needed to be smarter than Anat, because no one rules with a bloodier fist than Anat.
Finally, Anat dismisses her secretaries, who scuttle off on their clacking little feet, and she rounds on me. “Did Zan gain control of the Mokshi or not?” she says.
“No, but—”
“Then don’t waste my time,” Anat says. She nods at the reports under my arm; little slips of light escape the hemp folders. “It’s gotten worse, hasn’t it? The cancer on the surface of the world?” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “The technicians were out running another scan at the poles when Zan came back from the assault. It’s the only reason we got her back inside in time. We almost lost her, Anat.”
“This scheme of yours has yet to pay off. I’m getting tired of her, and you.”
“She has gotten closer to the Mokshi than any of us,” I say carefully, and move on to the more pressing subject, because the less we speak of my schemes, the better. “It’s clear that the rot on the skin of the world is cancerous. It’s eating right through the world’s skin. We are only a rotation away from a breach. They hardly had to break the skin to let Zan back in.”
“I know, girl,” Anat says. “You leave that to me.”
“How do we save the world?” I say. “We aren’t going to be able to move people to the Mokshi. Zan isn’t going to succeed in time. We need another option.”
I have been pressing this since Zan and I began this dance, but Anat is stubborn. No one knows that better than me. She cannot be pushed into a political option if she believes a military one will achieve the same ends.
Anat peers at me and curls her lip. “The same way we’ve always saved the world. We must sacrifice something to it.”
“I agree that there are other options,” I say. “We should discuss them.”
“You speak as if I’m not the Lord of the Legion,” Anat says.
“I would never presume—”
“Oh, you would. You would.” Anat starts pacing, and that makes me fearful, because it signals one of her violent moods. She becomes impossible to reason with during these episodes. “How are your treatments? You’re not coming to term, are you?”
“The treatments are fine.” Anat has never said it, but I suspect she doesn’t want me to bear what I’m capable of carrying, because in the eyes of our sisters, it would make me more powerful than her. When she found out what I’d done to myself, she was not elated, but cold. She wanted to find out why I would do such a thing, why I would want to carry something like that in my womb, if not to inspire the people she ruled to overthrow her.
“I need you to stay off the skin of the world for a time,” Anat says. “I have great plans for you, and they require you to stay intact. It’s time to make use of what you bear.”
“And what of Zan?” I say.
“Zan is failing. I should just recycle her again. Maybe she’ll stay dead this time.”
“Please don’t do that. You know what happened last time.”
“What’s the use of her coming back if she can’t get my army into the Mokshi with her? We still don’t know what happens to her in there once she gets under the skin. Does it eat her? Remake her? If her memory loss isn’t feigned—”
“It’s very real,” I say. It wasn’t, the first time, but it has been ever since. I don’t tell her that, but it’s a truth I know and Zan doesn’t, and it still makes my skin itch. Why does she lose her memory now, when she gets back to the Mokshi? That was never part of our plan. She had all her memories intact after she crawled her way up and went back to the Mokshi the second time. Had something happened to her down below? I would never know now.
I gaze at the ceiling, imagining the cancerous skin of the world eating into every level, striking down and down and down into the center of Katazyrna and destroying us all, level by level, cell by cell, while my mother dances with some impenetrably broken world that has already claimed hundreds of her daughters and thousands of aliens and bottom-world misfits. It is a mad vision Anat has. There is another way.
“Is that all you had?” Anat says. “Just more bad news?”
“That’s all,” I say. “You shouldn’t—”
She raises her iron arm. “Are you trying to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do again, girl?”
I cringe. I hate that I cringe, but she has struck me too often. “No,” I whisper.
“Good,” she says, and sweeps past me, back toward the first level of the world. I scramble to keep up with her, because I know what happens when she and Zan are alone.
“WORLDS CAN BE REBORN, BUT THE R
EST OF US ARE DOOMED TO THE SKIN WE’VE MADE FOR OURSELVES. DOOMED TO LIVE WITH THE CHOICES WE’VE MADE.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
5
ZAN
Blackness, then milky green.
I am sucked from the surface of the world and deep into the verdant emerald interior of Katazyrna, reborn for perhaps the millionth time, or perhaps just the tenth. Certainly only the second I remember.
As I fall, I see the Bhavajas’ needled vehicles blot out the blackness. I see their dark faces, and the glinting whites of their eyes in the blue-green halo of the world’s defenses. They cannot approach through those defenses, but they fire off another round from the cephalopod guns.
As the world’s skin closes over me, one of the Bhavajas signs at me, “You’re already dead.”
I hit the floor of the ship’s interior and let out a rush of air. My suit begins to dissolve into the spongy floor. I panic, struggling to my hands and knees, and begin hacking uncontrollably. The suit melts, leaving me shivering even in the humid air.
Around me, the floor blinks with a soft blue glow, turning the milky green world aqua.
Ahead, a slick squad of retaliatory troops is heading topside. I squeeze my eyes shut. My lungs and face and throat hurt. I sucked in air out there, and it hurts. I retch and gag.
“Zan!”
I raise my head, hoping it’s Jayd. But it’s Sabita, the woman who found me in the vehicle hangar. She is wearing a red shift, and my memory offers up a bit of wisdom. The red shift marks Sabita as an emergency tissue technician. Sabita extends her long brown arms to me and catches me up in her arms as if I am a child.
I try to speak, but my lips and tongue are blistered. Sabita takes a shimmering purple slug from the bag at her hip and fills my mouth with unguent.
“Hush now,” Sabita says. She wipes more unguent around my lips, her fingers strong and sure against my battered skin.
The Stars Are Legion Page 4