I squeeze through the busted door, realizing I not only have no weapon but also no plan. Find a weapon, get to my sisters, and help them hold off the Bhavajas is about as far as I can get in my reasoning.
I round a bend and come face to face with two Bhavaja women arguing. I punch the first in the face, easy as breathing. The second raises her weapon but has no time to fully draw it, let alone fire it. I have a vague recollection about how I can best a better-armed target who has not pulled a weapon so long as I’m within ten paces, but my body knew it before I consciously considered it.
I disarm the women neatly and shoot them both with the cephalopod weapon. Their suits dissolve around them. They gasp in the thin atmosphere. I heft the weight of the weapon in my hand and continue on down the corridor, navigating by sight as opposed to sound. I miss Jayd in my ear, miss the soothing sounds of the single person in the whole world who seems to give a shit.
What has Rasida done with her? Murdered her? Tossed her out into space? Or is she really as important to Rasida as she pretends?
I step through another broken corridor. A woman stands over two bodies. I heft my weapon, but as she turns, I see that inside the spray-on suit, it’s my sister Maibe.
Maibe signs at me. “The others?”
I sign back. “Dead. Anat too.”
“Jayd?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come with me,” Maibe signs. “We’re holding out in the cortex. This isn’t the main force.”
Maibe opens a gummy hatch in the corridor; it comes away from the sticky surface like pulling off a scab. I crawl after her in the darkness, dragging the weapon awkwardly in one hand while holding my weight with the other.
The darkness goes on and on. I wonder, again, how long the air in my suit will hold out. Does the suit recycle air? Do I have a limited amount? I have no idea.
Green-and-violet light spills out ahead of us. Maibe steps out and reaches a hand back for me. I have a long moment to wonder if I’m being lured into a trap.
But I take her hand anyway, and we squeeze into another long corridor. It’s like a series of umbilical cords that connects the levels of the ship. We walk for some time until we come to what Maibe signs to me is the second level and the cortex. Cortex sounds important, and I figure it’s some kind of control room.
Maibe turns off her suit, and it dissolves around her. She signs at me to do the same. “We’ve got good pressure on every level but the first,” she signs.
I mimic her movements, sliding two fingers up my left wrist until I find a series of raised bumps. I plug in the combination, and the suit falls off, peeling quickly away like shedding my own skin. I pick the little pieces off as I follow Maibe to a big green banded security door. Maibe knocks four times.
I hear raised voices on the other side and a heavy thunking sound.
The door opens. Prisha stands there, holding a big weapon like the one I used out on the assault on the Mokshi.
“Mother?” Prisha asks.
“All dead,” I say.
She narrows her eyes, as if convinced that I had something to do with Anat’s death. If only.
Finally, she nods and motions us in.
I’m not sure what I expected of the cortex, but this isn’t it. It’s a tight, round room with high ceilings and interfaces embedded in the walls. Organic tubing sticks out from each station, like they were meant to hook up to something that has long since been removed. The room is packed with people, all my remaining sisters and many others I don’t know—more family, maybe? They seem familiar. All are armed. It occurs to me that there are no children here. The youngest person is just past menarche. The oldest isn’t much more senior than Anat.
If this is the center of the world, it is unassuming and in terrible disrepair. I can’t tell what anything in the room is meant to do.
The whole lot of them is fixed on the origin of the thunking sound: the great round portal on the far side of the room. I can just make out the seam of it on the wall. I don’t have to be told the Bhavajas are on the other side.
“How did they know where this is?” I ask Maibe.
“How do they know anything?” Maibe says. “Spies, probably. Or their witches. Some witches remember how the worlds work better than others.”
“Why hold here?” I ask. “If we keep going down, we can find places to hold out and regroup on other levels. We can—”
Maibe frowns. “Zan, if they take the cortex, they take control of the world. There’s no point in going on once they have this room.”
“But . . . what does it do here?
“She can hook into the mind of the world here,” Prisha says, looking back at us. “She can twist it to her purposes. Maybe better than we can. It’s a mad ship, but the Bhavajas . . . you’ve seen what they do to other worlds.”
Have I? I don’t remember, but the point seems moot now.
The air in the room is tense. It stinks terribly: too many unwashed bodies pushed together in sweaty fear. I survey the room, trying to assess our tactical options. When the door goes—and it will, I am sure of that—we can retreat through the secret way Maibe and I had come in, but there doesn’t appear to be any other exit. And retreating through there is going to be tight, far too tight to get very many out. This is a last stand. My sisters intend to win or to die here . . . and those are in fact the only options if what Maibe says about the cortex is true.
I check the remaining cephalopods on my weapon. I don’t like the idea of losing. I especially don’t like the idea of losing to people who’ve bought Jayd as if she were a brood animal. What happens to Jayd if I’m dead? Who will go after her when I’m gone? No one. She’ll be on her own.
The thunking continues. I stay posted at the entrance to the escape route, more to ensure no one comes in than in the hopes I can be the first one out. Maibe is right—running now won’t mean anything if it we’re just giving the world to the Bhavajas. Idiot Anat, for trusting them. Foolish Jayd, for going along with it. And here I am, useless and pinned down.
The breach comes sooner than I expect. As the first weapon punches through the door, three women try to get past me through the exit. One loses her will completely and starts screaming and tearing at her hair. I hit her in the face with the butt of my weapon. She goes down hard on her ass. For me, the breach is a relief. I don’t know how to wait. But I know how to act.
Two women at the front of the room shoot back at the breached door, foolishly, because their weapons only serve to help open up the first hole.
“Hold!” I yell. “Hold until you have a clear shot!”
Something whumps against the door so hard, the whole room trembles. The ring of the portal moves perceptibly inward.
Those at the front arm their weapons.
I know what’s going to happen, but I can’t figure out how to avoid it. The door is going to come inward when they push it open. It is going to crush the first twenty people on the other side of it. But we are packed so tight, they have nowhere to go.
“When it falls, come over to the breach!” I yell, but there is so much fear and confusion, I’m not certain anyone is paying attention to me. Prisha is yelling at them too, and Maibe.
There is a second powerful burst, and the door comes free.
The door crushes the first ring of women inside the door, messy and horrifying. I duck, fearing a volley. And it comes—a blast of multiple weapons. Four or five dozen cephalopods explode into the room, taking down the next ring of women. And then the Bhavajas come in after them, storming the only entrance, cutting us down like so many beasts, their faces broad and grinning and purposeful, like this is the inevitable end to the game, like they knew this was coming all along.
I fire back, yelling for order, for tactics. Prisha is hit first; a cephalopod clips her face and she goes down. Maibe fills the void where she had stood, firing her weapon into the melee of the advancing Bhavajas, as if it makes any difference.
It is a slaughter.
I meet the first line
of the Bhavajas, stepping up as the lines of my family fall. I discharge my weapon three more times. Then it malfunctions. I butt the next Bhavaja in the face with it instead. I shoot two more with the fallen woman’s weapon and then wrestle with a third.
They swarm me. A punch to the kidneys. The butt of a weapon in my face. A burst of darkness, a bright light. I go down. A stray blast from a Katazyrna weapon takes out my leg, and I crumple like a folding flower. I collapse onto a pile of corpses.
I claw across the bodies, making for the escape route. I grab hold of someone’s face and realize it is Maibe’s. Maibe is spitting up blood, clawing at a wound in her gut. The eye of the cephalopod nestled there gazes stupidly up at me, and I almost retch.
A blazing pain erupts in my shoulder, like someone has set a hammer on fire and hit me with it. I collapse on top of Maibe.
I lose some time.
The world swims. I’m aware of Maibe’s watery breaths. The cries of my kin. Shots. Merry voices, joking between the sounds of the weapons. Bodies sliding across the floor. Click, click of piled weapons. The Bhavajas are cleaning up.
Someone rolls me over, and I gaze up into Rasida’s face. Rasida is chewing on something, grinning down at me like I am some prized animal.
“Jayd,” I mutter.
Rasida kicks me and yells back at someone behind her. “Recycle them,” Rasida says. “Don’t let a single body go to waste.”
A woman grabs me by the arms and drags me painfully across the floor. Blood makes a long trail behind me, and it takes me a moment to realize a lot of it is mine. My leg is a twisted mess, and the pain in my shoulder burns white-hot. Black spots float across my vision, like burns.
They leave me next to a pile of corpses in a low room, close to a great black maw. Two Bhavajas work wordlessly, each taking one end of a corpse and throwing it into the darkness.
The recycler. The monster. The memory roars through my fuzzy head. I’m not a corpse, I try to say, but I am choking on something; my own spit, blood.
They pitch Prisha’s body into the darkness.
I try to scream. No sound comes out.
One of the women takes my arms. The other grabs my twisted legs.
Pain. Fearful pain. They swing me toward the black mouth that I know leads to the monster.
Darkness, at least, can bring me some peace. I know darkness. Know it very well.
They let me go.
I make a sound then, something like a dying animal might make: a grunt, no more. Then I am falling and falling, into the sticky darkness, falling and falling to the center of the world.
“TRUE POWER IS THE ABILITY TO MAKE THOSE WHO FEAR YOU DESPERATE TO LOVE YOU.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
13
JAYD
I wake in Rasida’s rooms on Bhavaja, snug in her bed, head muzzy with a terrible hangover. I sit up and find that my hands are still covered in rusty blood. It’s all over me—my suit, my hair, my arms. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and my stomach heaves. I try to put back together the events of the evening, but it’s all a haze. The joining, yes, I remember some of that. I remember Rasida leading me down the dais and giving me something to drink, and passing me off to her security team and her sister Aditva, whose breath was terrible and whose eyelid kept twitching.
I had meant to turn around, to see Zan and Anat, but Aditva said that for my safety, they needed to have me sit and wait for Rasida in an apartment just outside the temple. I sat. I waited. I drank.
And now, somehow, I am back in my room on Bhavaja. Where was the rest?
Beside me, the bed is not mussed. Rasida did not sleep here. So, where is she? Though she is not here, I am comforted by the fact that she did not send me back to my rooms, as she would a prisoner. We will get close, the way I got close to Zan. That thought gives me pause, though, because what happened with Zan was something neither of us could have anticipated, and it is not a path I want to tread again.
I stare into my bloody hands and am overcome with a desire to scrub myself clean.
I go to the shower and pour oil over my body and scrape myself clean, removing the blood and smell of sex from my skin from the day before, though as I shake the dirty oil onto the sticky floor to be absorbed, I admit I could have burrowed happily into the sheets and inhaled the smell the rest of the waking period.
Maybe I am a terrible traitor. But Zan is far from here, and it is not the real Zan anyway, is it? Some pale imitation of Zan, wiped and recovered, wiped and recovered, over and over and over again. Maybe the Zan I thought I loved, the one I have spent all my time arguing with Anat about, no longer exists. What is love anyway but a hunger than no meal can satisfy?
I stare down at my belly. I’ve gone in for my treatments every fourteen rotations. Now the thing I carry must already be splitting and multiplying, using my body, my strength, to bring itself to fruition. Thanks to Zan, I am capable of giving birth to the most important resource in the Legion now. Rasida’s world cannot live without me. Whether Rasida truly loves me or not, I am valuable to her. I’m annoyed that she did not let me see Anat and Zan one last time. It seems strange to attend a joining and not present the two families together at the end. Maybe it was done, and it’s something I don’t remember?
I pull on one of Rasida’s tunics, which is a little tight and too long, and venture out into the hall. A beefy woman stands outside and gives me a dark look when I leave. As I walk, the woman follows, eight or ten paces distant.
I round on her. “I’m sorry,” I say, “but are you meant to be guarding me?”
“If you leave, I’m to ensure you get back to your quarters,” the woman says.
“What is your name?” I say, but she does not fall for that. She presses her lips firmly together.
“Where is Rasida?”
“She is attending matters of foreign policy,” the woman says.
“Take me to her,” I say.
“I am to fulfill your every request,” the woman says, “except when it countermands an order from Lord Rasida. Lord Rasida requests that you be escorted to your rooms. Your girls are waiting for you.”
“Can I go to the banquet area?” I ask. “Perhaps eat with the rest of the family?”
“You are not family,” the woman says.
That rankles, but I recognize the line. It’s something Gavatra would say. Where is Gavatra? I try to tamp down my feeling of unease. Rasida professes love. I might almost call what I hold for Rasida a kind of love. I tremble at the memory of her touch. A woman who touches me like that would not make me a prisoner.
But I cannot help but think, again, of Zan. If Rasida needs me, I will use that need to manufacture her downfall. I will retain control over this situation. I got myself here, against all odds and at great cost. I can do what must be done to see the rest of it through.
I let the woman bring me back to my rooms. The girls are already there with food waiting on the table, and a stack of glowing tablets.
“What are these?” I ask, but of course they can’t answer. I turn over one of the tablets and I see it is a moving storybook. I have not seen anything like this since I was small. When I concentrate hard on the image that moves across its surface, I can immerse myself in the story. This one, however, is barely comprehensible. The language is not one I know, and the setting of the world is alien. Even the people are strange—spindly and long-limbed, with squinting little eyes and flattened faces. I set the tablet down, wondering which world Rasida dug these up from.
I expect to see Rasida before the walls go dim, but she does not come for me. I think perhaps she will summon me for dinner, but that time, too, passes, and she does not come.
I’m nauseous, and vomit in the shower.
I spend time looking at the story tablets, but most are like the first—so old that they are nearly incomprehensible. And they give me strange dreams.
It’s during one of these dreams that I wake with a start in the darkness. My door is open, and I
see Rasida there.
I blink and rub at the walls until they brighten. I pull off my blankets and prepare to yell at her for keeping me here alone, but when the light comes up and I see her, I am mute with shock.
She is covered head to toe in blood. Not old rusty blood like I was from the day before but new, clotting blood. Her hair is a matted tangle. Clearly, some of the blood is hers. There’s sticky yellow salve on her left arm. She is holding something in her hand, a weighty object that glows green.
“What’s happened?” I say, and my heart catches, because I fear that Zan has done something stupid. Did she attack the Bhavajas? She is going to ruin everything.
Rasida does not meet my gaze. Instead, she gets down on her knees in front of me. She drops what she is carrying.
It is my mother’s arm.
“I have brought you a war trophy,” she says, and it is all I can do not to scream, because this is exactly how I presented this arm to my mother after I stole it the first time.
“My mother—” I begin, but I know what’s coming now, and I want to run, but I am rooted to the spot.
Where would I go? I have nowhere to go.
Rasida takes my hands into hers, smearing dried blood and grime onto my skin, and presses my hands to her cheek.
“You are free now,” she says.
“Free?” My voice is a whisper.
“I have freed you from Katazyrna,” she says. “Your mother is dead. Your world is ours.”
My gut twists. I must say the right thing. I can’t waver in this moment, or she will murder me too. “I don’t understand,” I say. “We have brokered peace.”
“I have done this for you,” Rasida says, and she gazes up at me now with her black eyes, and in them I see absolute certainty, complete calm. “You are Bhavaja now. Katazyrna is no more.”
“What have you done to my sisters?”
“They will renew the world,” she says. “They have been recycled. We will eat their bones.”
“No,” I say, and I back away from her. I can’t help it. My mind and body are split in this. I want to claw at her face. No, I want to claw at my own face, because this is my fault. I did this. “Rasida, we brokered peace. You’ve broken the peace. You broke your word!”
The Stars Are Legion Page 10