When they hold up the bowl together, there is a roar from the room. Not of fear or horror, but of approval.
Aiju claps her hands and shouts with the others. Then she says to me, “They are part of this world now.”
“Both of them?” I say. “I thought this would be Anat’s world.”
“It’s a complicated treaty,” Aiju says.
I see Jayd holding Rasida’s hand. They raise their bloody arms aloft. Jayd’s mouth is bloody. The former—what, First? Head? Leader?—woman’s body lies there between them. Jayd struck her down like so much chattel. And Jayd did not flinch or hesitate in any way. No gasp, no shaking. When Jayd finally catches my eye, she grins, and her teeth are crimson.
I look away.
When Jayd and Rasida are ushered from the dais, I sit heavily in my seat. “Will they go back to Bhavaja now?” I ask Aiju.
“Most likely,” she says. She peers at me. “You really shouldn’t be sad. Jayd has never had your interests at heart. She has what she wants now.”
“You think she always wanted to marry Rasida?”
“Of course,” Aiju says. She lowers her voice, looking meaningfully at Anat, who thankfully is engaged in conversation with someone at a neighboring table. “Jayd was never going to be Lord of Katazyrna. Anat would never permit that. She will have far more power bound to Rasida.”
“You think she meant to do this all along?” I ask.
Aiju pats my shoulder. “You wouldn’t be the first person she used to get ahead. She’s the best of us at getting Anat to do something she wants while getting Anat to think it was her idea all along. Have some drinks. You’ll feel better.”
I stare into my cup and see a bleary shadow stare back at me from it. It’s too dark for me to see my reflection properly, but I feel old, in this moment, and foolish. Sabita warned me about Jayd, and suffered for it. Now whatever Jayd wanted from me . . . is this it? Is it over? Was this Jayd’s intent all along, to get far from me and Anat so she could be co-consul of some other world?
There is more singing, more wine, and a great group of women begins to dance in three lines at the center of the room. I don’t remember this place or these people. None of these things is triggering any sort of memory at all, and I am deeply angered at that. Jayd has left me alone and broken with her mad mother and sisters. I have nothing.
Anat comes up behind me and puts her arm on my shoulder. I flinch, and she leers at me.
“We’re not here for Bhavaja,” Anat says. “Keep your eye on the Mokshi. None of this shit matters.”
But it does matter. My vision isn’t clouded like Anat’s with some single-minded purpose. I’m trying to see this not from Anat’s perspective, or even Jayd’s, but from Rasida’s. What is all this? Why have a ceremony here, set between the contested Katazyrna and Bhavaja spaces? I watch the women sway together at the center of the room, their hair all done up in elaborate hanks that have been twisted and plaited into large cross sections. I see the rime of whatever it is they’ve put into their hair, and it looks like rusty dried blood to me. If I was Rasida, all of this would be a show, a distraction, from my real purpose. I see Anat swigging from the cup in her other hand. I see her daughters all doing the same, and even if Jayd got herself into this mess through her own devices, I fear for her anew.
If it was me suing for a true peace, I would have invited both families to my own world and offered not just some planet but an exchange of organic matter. An exchange of sisters. But Rasida offered no such thing. She did not give Anat any of her own organic matter. Nothing of her own world. Only the cast-off leavings of this one. What did that mean? It meant Rasida gave nothing of herself in this joining, only the blood of some other people.
Rasida risked nothing.
Anat gave them a daughter. And in this place, among worlds where organic matter was the literal lifeblood of the world, and the Legion, a daughter was everything.
Compared to the people of Katazyrna, many of whom seemed disfigured and cancerous, the people here appear in good health. I do not see a single person who is thin or hungry or bent under the weight of some disease or contagion.
“What will happen to these people?” I ask Anat.
She is very drunk, eyes glazed over. She smiles at me and smacks me on the back. “I’m so glad I didn’t recycle you this time!” she says. “You are so amusing.” She points at the ceiling. “You see how healthy this world is? The skin of the world keeps out all the radiation that ruins people. We’ll strip the skin of the world here and use it to repair Katazyrna. That’s how we’ll last long enough to board the Mokshi and take the whole of the Legion. Rasida is such a fool, giving me this fresh world.”
“But . . . what will happen to them?” I say. “How will we fix this world?”
“Fix it? Have you been listening? We are not here to fix anything. We’ll plunder this world for its goods, then let the rest rot here. We’ll take what we want and use it to board the Mokshi. You’ve seen the skin of the Mokshi. Aside from the crater, the skin is healthy and intact. The witches can fix that rupture easy enough. But we need organic material to do it. That’s what this exchange is for. We aren’t here to help anyone. Keep your eye on the end goal.”
I stare again at the line of happy, dancing women. There are women of every age here, even some young children, though no babies. It doesn’t look like anyone has borne a baby here in at least ten rotations. They are all so fat and happy and alive.
Of course Anat would want to destroy that.
“Let’s go,” Anat says, patting my head as if I’m a child. “Aiju! You others, let’s go.”
Aiju, too, pats me, this time on the shoulder, but it feels no less condescending.
“Jayd is theirs now,” Aiju says. “The sooner you come to terms, the better.”
As we gather to leave the world, a few faces turn to watch us go. They don’t treat Anat like she is lord of their world now. If anything, this whole display made it clear that Rasida and Jayd rule here now, not Anat. But Anat appears powerfully certain that she has won something here and that this place is hers to ravage.
Rasida’s security team peels away from the room to follow us. They escort us all the way back to our hangar. We stop to spray on new suits. Anat argues drunkenly with the security women for a time before the twins both pull her back. I’m the first to spray on my suit, because I don’t want to listen to Anat anymore.
We go back to our vehicles, and I stare at the ceiling one last time. Then we are seated on our vehicles, and the skin of the world puckers open and we speed off into the blackness that surrounds the Legion.
When I look back, the world appears no different from before, but my memory delivers a future to me, as if it has seen just such a future on many other worlds. Soon, what is left of the world will be a soupy ruin, and Anat will send me or one of her daughters out here with an army to salvage it and feed it into the great mouth of the recycling monsters on Katazyrna, until Katazyrna is healthy again. But only for a time. Only for a time. Because the worlds are hungry beasts, and the organic matter here to feed them is finite. Eventually it will eat us all whole.
“BE A VILLAIN.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
12
ZAN
Anat leads the way back to Katazyrna like the drunkard she is. She does great spiraling rolls in her vehicle, weaving between the twins, making obscene signs with her hands. She is in fine spirits. I certainly have no memory of her ever being so happy, but maybe that’s because I simply have so little of it. Inside my own chest, I feel as if I have swallowed a hard black stone. The Mokshi may be able to give me back the memory it took, but I am doubting that I want it. If my memory makes these mad people and this mad life make sense, I will cast it out altogether. I don’t want these people, these decisions, to be normal.
Anat speeds up over a great ring of detritus, then tumbles back through it. The ring rotates around a pitted wreck of a world at the edges of Katazyrna territory. It�
��s long dead and picked over. I see flashes of metal among the rotted tangles of skin, slabs too big to cut out and salvage, most likely. The eye of the sun at the heart of the Legion shines through the center of the ruined world.
I squint and raise my hand to my brow to shield the light, wondering if Anat will go zooming through this wreck too, half-hoping maybe she bashes so hard into something that it knocks her senseless.
Instead, as we come around what’s left of the world, following Anat’s spent fuel stream, Anat’s vehicle suddenly spins out.
A great thorny mass erupts from the side of Anat’s vehicle, knocking Anat free.
One of our security vehicles goes next. It’s hit once. Twice. Three times.
The security vehicle tumbles toward me. It happens too fast for me to react. The vehicle smashes into me. The force is so great, I’m hurled free of the vehicle and into open space. I do not scream, but I gasp, and the sound is loud and close in my suit. We aren’t wearing any communications devices. We are drifting soundless and alone.
Pushed free of the group, I see the raiders coming up from beneath the orb of the rotted world. There are not a dozen, or two dozen, but sixty or more vehicles mounted with cephalopod cannons. The great tentacle weapons bash into the Katazyrna vehicles, picking us off like insects.
The twins crash into each other, smashing one another’s limbs. Aiju grabs hold of Anka, and as I spin out of reach, I see Anka’s suit rotting away, her leg throbbing with the bite of a three-pronged cephalopod.
Another projectile hits Aiju in the back so hard, it spins them both farther from the group, knocking them into their forgotten vehicles. They drift off into the black.
Suld holds out with a small group of security personnel. She’s leapt onto one of their forgotten vehicles and now turns it toward the advancing force. She fires off a hail of energy bursts so bright they hurt my eyes.
I smack into another body rolling behind me; one of the security women, her face twisted in death, the suit mostly rotten, clinging to her body in scraps. Hitting her body slows my momentum. I try to push off her to get back to the fray, but she is at least two hundred paces away now; the only reason she isn’t moving faster is because the world’s gravity will only let her get so far.
The assault force swarms Suld and the security holdouts, firing round after round of their cannons. They riddle the eight of them like fine paper, hurling their bodies in every direction.
I tangle with another body behind me, one still attached to a vehicle. I hook her arm into the organic tubing of the vehicle to keep me attached to it but remain motionless as the dead. Asphyxiated, half-suited Anka is tangled beside me. Her mouth is gaping open in death, eyes and lips and tongue slowly freezing.
I do not have to get close to know who the raiders are. I know those weapons. And the vehicles. The Bhavajas betrayed us, and Anat walked right into it. As I watch, three of them find Anat’s body. One takes her great iron fist. Another holds her still. A third brings up an energy weapon and fires it into Anat’s elbow, severing the iron arm from her flesh.
They shoot Anat in the head for good measure and push her body into orbit with the others. The lot of them raise their weapons and shake their arms, holding the trophy of Anat’s arm aloft.
When they buzz back around the wreckage they’ve wrought, I fix my stare straight ahead, knowing they will fire into anything that looks even remotely alive. Weapons are precious things, and the cephalopod bursts cost them. That’s what I’m counting on.
They fire at me anyway. One projectile clips my leg. I let my legs and torso jerk with the push of it but keep my arm hooked in the vehicle’s tubing.
I expect them to gather us all up into a net or tie us up into a caravan and recycle us. It crosses my mind that no one will leave this much good organic material to orbit some planet unless it is impossible to retrieve it, like the armies around the Mokshi.
I wait, breathing shallowly, as the sixty-odd-strong Bhavaja squad pokes and prods at the scattered wreckage of our party. After a long while, I allow myself a blink, and I see them engaged in a heated conversation in sign language. Did they get new orders?
Finally, the leaders break away, speeding back toward the rotten world. Their squad follows after them, leaving me and the dead to orbit the ruin.
I wonder if this is some trick and they’ve left someone behind to watch over us. But all I see is the dead that I’ve been told are my family, and for one terrible moment, I believe they are indeed my blood relations, and that everything I know is dead. I shake myself out of this thrall and pull myself onto Aiju’s vehicle. I try to start it.
But it’s dead. Just like everything else.
I swear and lean over to poke at the guts of it while Aiju’s dead face looks on. I can’t help but believe that if I can just remember everything, if I was just the whole person I should be, I could have not only seen this coming but convinced Anat of it too.
I find half of one of the tentacles twisted in the undercarriage of the vehicle. I carefully pull it out. Droplets of fuel snake from a torn hose. I press it closed with one finger but can’t see any deeper into the guts to find other problems. I long for one of the speculums back in the hangar. It would make this much easier.
What I’m missing is something to fix the leak in the tubing. I can’t just hold my hand in it. I search around and come up with nothing. Aiju’s body is still tangled with the vehicle on the other side. The rest of the bodies are strewn two hundred paces distant, slowly circling back around the world. Eventually, the inhabitants of some other world will find them and have a grand recycling event. I don’t intend to wait up here that long. My air will give out first. Won’t it? I don’t even know how long I can breathe out here in these suits.
I stare hard at Aiju’s accusing face and bared torso. There is, of course, an analog to the organic tubing of the vehicle in the human body.
I work off a piece of the outer shell of the vehicle and bash it with one hand until a sharp piece comes off. I take hold of Aiju’s body and plunge the piece into her frigid torso. I use both hands to tear open her body, which is not yet frozen through, only cold. I pull out the intestines and cut off a short section, squeezing out the waste.
Then I turn off the fuel line, unhook the organic tube, and slip the intestine over it before it freezes. A perfect fit, as if the vehicle is, indeed, patterned after human organs. I hook the fuel line back up and try starting it.
The vehicle comes to life, the green glowing control console blazing. I kick the vehicle forward, circling the detritus of my family once, wondering again why the squad has not netted them all up and brought them back to a Bhavaja world.
What can be more important than salvaging flesh and vehicle components? What are they off to do?
I come up alongside Anat’s body. Her suit has rotted off. A giant cephalopod rises from her side. The iron arm she has menaced us all with is no more. All that remains is a stump of an arm, cut off at the elbow.
I stare long and hard at that arm and remember Anat’s fake displays with it. Why haul that arm around at all, if it is worthless? And what will Rasida do to Jayd now? Has she flushed Jayd out into space too, left her to asphyxiate?
No, the key is the arm.
Why would they take the arm? Why would I have taken it? Probably because, after a display like Anat put on, I thought I could control Katazyrna with it.
Understanding dawns. I turn my vehicle abruptly away from the dead and speed back to Katazyrna, and the invasion I know is already underway.
* * *
The Bhavaja forces make two broad arcs around Katazyrna. I hide just behind the nearest world, hoping they will think I’m some salvager or scout from another world. But they pay me no mind. They are wholly concentrated on Katazyrna, sending wave after wave of cephalopods and bursts and scramblers into its defenses. Katazyrna is awash in blankets of red and blue and green defenses. The energy rolls off it in thick bands. The world glows so fiercely now that this close, I
could almost say it rivals the sun.
Then I see them breach the skin of the world. It tears up under their weapons, curling back like burnt bark. I let out a breath. They are going to get in.
Half the Bhavajas wheel around and dive directly into the broken skin of Katazyrna, seeking to destroy all that I know of the universe, all that I know to be true.
I kick my vehicle forward, powering hard and fast for Katazyrna. I think a whole host of things in those blazing seconds as I power toward the world. The Bhavajas are very likely to fire on me. My own world might not recognize me. It is a desperate, risky move, but so is being alive.
I hurl myself toward the breach, opening up the fuel line as wide as it will go. I look back once and see the misty yellow belch of my spent fuel spiraling out behind me.
The fuel gives out four hundred paces from the surface of the world. I hunker low, though I suppose it won’t matter—there is no atmospheric resistance—and ride the wave of my momentum down and down, toward the breach in the world’s skin.
I zoom between two Bhavaja lines, so fast that when I glance back, I see them still signing to one another, trying to determine if I’m friend or foe.
I have no way to slow my momentum—I’m out of fuel to shoot out the front of my vehicle—so I hit the spongy floor of the first level of Katazyrna hard. The momentum throws me from the vehicle.
I crawl across the floor, trying to get clear of the breach. The massive hole in the skin of the world is mitigated by its thin atmosphere; I might be able to breathe for a while if I take off my suit, but I’m not going to risk it until I get down a few levels. I wonder if the ship has defenses against a breach in its skin.
I run down the empty corridors, past bodies hunched in the thresholds of doorways, all dressed in the black-and-red cut of security personnel. I come to a broad, fleshy wall at the end of the corridor. It’s been carved open with some weapon, and now it stares balefully at me like a weary eye.
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