Rasida gets to her feet, slowly. I fear her then. Not as I did before, not as my enemy, but the fear one has for a mad animal, a mutant creature who has never known the light.
“I will never break my word to you,” Rasida says. “But the peace was brokered with Anat, not with you. It will be difficult to adjust. But this is your home now.”
“You can’t . . . ,” I say, and I don’t want to ask her, I don’t want to know if she’s killed Zan too, because of course she has, and then I wonder if she knows about Zan, and who she really is. Does she suspect? Could I have given myself away? I stare at the arm. My mother’s gory flesh is still inside of it; the arm was always too small for her. It pained her to wear it.
I clasp my hands together and try to control my trembling. The tears come, unbidden, but Rasida will expect tears. If I did not cry, I would be less believable when I finally said I forgave her for murdering my world.
I fall to the floor, and Rasida settles in beside me. I let her take me into her arms, and I sob against her. “What have you done?” I say. “What have you done?”
She makes a shushing sound. She wipes my sisters’ blood through my hair as she strokes me.
“Hush,” she says. “It’s just us now.”
And then, finally, I scream.
PART II:
DOWN BELOW
“THE MONSTERS DON’T LIVE IN THE BELLY OF THE WORLD LIKE THEY ALL SAY. THE MONSTERS LIVE INSIDE OF US. WE MAKE THE MONSTERS.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
14
ZAN
Everything is monstrous in the dark.
The recycler monster moves heavily in the flickering light, squelching across the detritus of the world’s waste: spent suits and table scraps, bloody piss and shit and ruined bodies, corpulent or lean, old or young, mangled, deformed, mutant, or hacked to pieces, all the castoffs, the lame, the hobbled, the imperfect, the mistakes, the merely unlucky, the dead.
I wake thinking I have dreamed this horror, but it’s real. My head feels heavy, stuffed with gummy ooze. I see hazy blue light shot through with blackness, as if some great light above me is swinging back and forth on a long string. It makes me dizzy. The stench is overpowering, so caustic that I dry-heave.
I can’t move. As I piece together the light and shadows as they crawl across the landscape, I see that I’m lying in a heap of corpses. Someone’s hand lies heavily on my face. I taste bile. I spit and slaver instead. A deep, shuddering sob bubbles up inside of me, so powerful I think I might burst with it. Out in the darkness, among the oozing piles of waste and half-rotten body parts, I see the dim shape of something terrible moving among the piles. I have met this monster before, in some other life, some other time. I know this moment in my bones.
I try to pull myself free of the bodies around me. They have cushioned me after my long fall through the darkness. How long I fell, I don’t know. Of all the things I don’t want to remember, that long fall is among them, but it comes back in terrible waves: a slimy, guttering slide to death. My hands are covered in grime. My fingernails are bloody, slathered in mucus from trying to grip the walls of the garbage funnel and slow my fall.
Now I want nothing more than to be free of the bodies that saved my life. A few paces away, I see something else moving. The blue light overhead swings back, and I see Maibe on her hands and knees, spitting bile or blood onto the rotten, uncertain ground beneath her.
The great hulking thing that wanders beyond the next rise of corpses grunts, then sighs. Everything around us seems to shake and tremble as it trundles forward.
I wave to Maibe, but she must not be able to see me. And then I go still, for the monster is upon us.
Maibe raises her head as the great shape of the thing rumbles toward her. I can see only its general outline. It’s an enormous beast, fifty paces or more tall, and has four great front arms, powerful haunches, and the snub of some tail. It lumbers forward. Maibe babbles something that is half-scream, half burst of ragged breath.
The light swings away. The monster grabs Maibe’s body. It takes her head into its massive bony fingers and pops Maibe’s head from her torso as if she’s brittle as a dry stick. It tosses both pieces of her into its mouth. The crunching of the body in its powerful jaws is so loud, I feel it in my own bones.
The monster groans and shifts, causing the bodies around me to tremble again. One corpse rolls off the top of the pile.
The monster snorts and shambles closer to the pile of death that surrounds me. I hold my breath, shaking so hard, my whole body feels like one open wound.
I feel its hot breath on me. Snuffling. Reeking. The light swings back, and I see the face of the thing illuminated for the first time. I bite back a scream, gnawing on my tongue so hard, I taste blood.
It has a roughly human face, a bulbous nose, and a wide-lipped mouth full of jagged teeth, yet there is just one eye, one great yellowish eye that sits at the center of its forehead. A tangle of thick, matted hair is heaped across its massive shoulders. The first set of forearms are the largest, each wrist as big around as my whole body. The hands have just three fingers: a thumb, an index finger, something like a little finger, the smallest as long as my whole arm.
The monster snorts again in my direction, its eye rolling in its socket, searching for . . . what? Movement?
It paws at the pile of corpses with its three-pronged fingers, yanking bodies up. It pops off the heads and eats them. One of the bodies is still alive, like Maibe, and screams.
The monster snorts at it. It makes a deep, regular grunting sound, like laughter.
It plays with that one for a while, tossing her among its hands, slamming her into the piles of corpses until the screams go silent. I don’t want to know who it is. I hope I never met her.
The munching goes on and on. Eventually, the monster snorts a final time at the disturbed pile of bodies around me and shambles off. I lie still and strain to hear it until I can hear nothing. Then I choke on a sob, because I don’t know what else to do but sit in my misery. It would have been a kindness to kill me above. A kindness for me to die in the fall. But the world is not kind.
“Zan?”
It’s Prisha’s voice. “Where are you?” I say.
I try to pull myself clear of the bodies again, my leg and shoulder throbbing. “Can you see me? Where are you?” I ask.
“I can’t move,” Prisha says. She sounds at least a dozen paces away. An impossible distance, in the shape I’m in.
“Is anyone else alive?”
“It ate Soraya,” Prisha says. “Lord of War, take mercy on the fallen. Lord of War, let us die here. Let me die, Lord.”
I hear someone else take up the prayer, somewhere deep in the pile of the dead and almost-dead. I didn’t know Soraya. I’m glad of it.
Maybe we’ll all get lucky. Maybe we’ll die of our wounds before the monster comes back. I want to believe in a Lord of War that gives all what they deserve, but I fear that—among these people—I am indeed getting my due.
I try to surrender myself to true darkness. Maybe I’ll bleed out. But if I bleed out, who will rescue Jayd?
It’s that thought that stirs me. I open my eyes. Darkness won’t come.
But the monster returns.
It shambles among the dead, picking through them like sampling some fine banquet. Its massive eye fixes on a body near me. I hear a rambling prayer and a squeal.
It’s Prisha.
I watch the monster waggling her body high above the ground. It gnaws off one of her legs while she shrieks. I expect it to eat her the way it did Maibe, but instead it lumbers up on its haunches and grabs something dangling from above them, some tentacle or tendril. It wraps Prisha up in the thing, knotting it around her torso, and leaves her there, bleeding and struggling, until she dies or passes out. I can’t tell which. I hope she is dead.
The monster trundles off, leaving Prisha to hang like bait on a line for something far worse, far larger, and I don’t like my imagination
then. Not at all.
I don’t know how long it’s been when I hear Prisha again. I’m sweating and burning with what feels like a terrible fever. I hope that maybe this is all this is; some fever dream.
Prisha wails. I don’t know how she has the strength for it. She should know better. She’s just going to draw the thing back. Maybe that’s what she wants. Like me, she just wants this all over.
Her wailing continues. Screams ripple out over the landscape, far off, which makes me wonder how many more have been pushed down here from other parts of the world, still alive.
I grit my teeth. I have two choices: to wait for death or to fight it. No one is coming for us. There is no one to save us but ourselves.
I heave at the bodies surrounding me, finally peeling myself free of the heap. It takes an age, and I am sweating and shaking, but I am free of the dead. Time is difficult to measure here. I have only the trembling light to go on, and the long shadows. Where is the light coming from? Are the tentacles trailing from the ceiling attached to something else, some greater horror?
If there is a way down here, there must be a way back up. How did these creatures get here?
I pass out on the other side of the corpses.
When I wake, I’m sweating and delirious. I know I’m delirious because I see little black animals crawling among the filth across from me, but when I squint hard they disappear and it is only me and sobbing Prisha dangling high above me.
Then the ground begins to tremble.
I hug the ground like it is a solid thing, though it is filled with bones and feces and darker things. I’m thirsty and shaking, but none of that is worse than the fear I feel as the monster approaches, wending its way through the corpses. I hear the crackling of bones as it moves closer.
It looms above me now like a terrible nightmare, a mother’s horror story. It grabs Prisha from the dangling tentacle and makes that huff-huffing sound, the one that is like laughter, and pops her head from her body and eats her.
I grip the ground hard, hanging on for my life.
The monster makes great walloping noises behind me, poking at the refuse. A heavy force thumps my shoulder.
Its massive fingers wrap around my torso. It clutches me so hard, the breath leaves my body. The monster lifts me high and pushes me right up in front of its great yellow eye.
I kick with my good leg, but miss the eye. The monster roars. Its hot, rank breath roils over me. I wish the fever and infection had had time to take me. Let the darkness come. Anything but this.
The monster barks. It yanks at another of the tendrils on the ceiling. Knots it around my torso.
“Fuck you,” I mutter, so softly I can barely hear it myself. “Just eat me. Just eat me.”
But it chortles instead. And leaves me.
The sticky tentacle clings to me like a living thing; I feel sharp little needles along its flesh, digging into my own.
I hang at least twenty paces above the ground. Even if I manage to get free, the fall will hurt, and I’m already pretty far gone. I don’t know how much more I can take.
I dangle there for a long time, drooling, nodding in and out of consciousness. I have enough strength on my third waking to try getting myself free of the tentacle. The blue light swings over me, and I see I am not far from a heap of very old corpses.
I shift my torso back and forth, gaining momentum on the great tentacle, making myself into a pendulum. With slow and painful steadiness, I shift back and forth, back and forth. I swing closer and closer to the pile of bloated bodies.
In the distance, I hear a tremulous bellow.
I swing faster, working my body in the terrible grip of the tentacle as I go, praying to the Lord of War, though I’m uncertain if I believe in it, or anything, here in this place.
The corpses tremble. I hear the monster lurching out there in the distance, coming closer. Ever closer.
I will not die here. I will not be eaten at the center of the world without knowing who I am. Without a mother. Without a memory. Without Jayd.
I slip free of the tentacle. I grab it before I fall, and let go just as I begin the yawning swing toward the pile of corpses.
I land heavily in the bloated, gassy bodies. They rupture, billowing great gouts of gas. I retch and cough. Pain hammers through my open wounds, judders up my bad leg. I’ve likely lost the leg by now. What do I care for it? Just cut it off.
I pass out. Lose time. Pain. Darkness. Something skitters around me. I wake, once, and find a humanlike creature, tall as my knee, huddled over my leg, its lips smeared with blood, smiling a bloody smile in a twisted face. I swing my arm at it, limply, and it hops away on hands and feet, looking back just once, giggling sharply.
I’m not going to die. But maybe I’m going to get eaten alive, one way or another.
I hear the monster roaring, and I try to move through the bloated mess of leaking flesh. Skin sloughs off bones. Faces are barely recognizable as human. Maybe they aren’t.
I crawl to the edge of the heap of corpses.
Then I slide off it. Down and down. I land hard. Pain and blackness, pain and blackness. Some part of me wants to die, even if Jayd is alive. Even if I could save her.
Maybe that part is getting its wish.
“CARE NOT FOR YOUR SISTERS. THEY WILL LEAD YOU TO RUIN. I HAD TO KILL MY SISTERS FIRST, BECAUSE THEY COULD NOT BEAR THE CHANGE THAT WAS NECESSARY TO SAVE US ALL.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
15
ZAN
The smell of smoke; the warmth of fire. The stench brings with it the memory of a burning world. Whose world? I don’t know, but the smell evokes a deep feeling of loss and betrayal, of a people wasted, a purpose foiled. My purpose? What would I have had invested in the future of a world? Was it Maibe or Sabita who said I was supposedly a conscript from another world? Maybe that was my world burning.
It’s the smell that wakes me. I open my eyes. I am in a dripping cave or hovel of some kind. An emaciated woman crouches near a fire. The flames lick the air between us, casting the woman’s face in long shadows. Her hair is thin and greasy, her hands skinny and slender, bent slightly, curved like claws. Half her face is a twisted mass of scars.
“Who are you?” I croak. I gaze at the fire and worry over the hungry look on the woman’s face.
“Das Muni,” the woman says softly.
“What are you?” I feel groggy again. “The Bhavajas,” I say. “They’ve taken the world. I have to cast them out. I need to get back to Jayd.”
“I know,” Das Muni says.
“What are you?”
“Just a woman,” she says. “My world is dead.”
“What happens to dead worlds?”
Das Muni hugs her knees to her chest. “They are eaten. Salvaged for parts until they no longer hold together. Have you never seen the death of a world?”
I shiver. It’s as if she has been crouching over me and reading my thoughts. “Why did—”
“Hush,” Das Muni says. She holds her filthy hands to her own mouth, rolling her eyes to the entrance of the little stinking hovel of refuse. Bone and calcified organic structures make up the foundation of the thing, and the seams are stuffed with detritus.
The whole structure trembles. I hear the familiar roar of the great recycler monster shambling through the refuse.
After a few minutes, the sound of its lumbering fades, and Das Muni uncovers her mouth. “That’s the worst one,” she says. “That is Meatmoth. It loves you, I think. It finds you very delicious.”
“There are more?” I say, and it comes out a strained squeak, like some kid who just got her first lecture about what a vacuum is. That thought leads to another, a memory of standing in front of a room full of people my age, reciting the five rules of worldwalking. We aren’t speaking in the language the Katazyrnas use. It’s something else. I grasp at the name of that language, but it’s elusive.
“Many monsters,” Das Muni says. “We’re at the center of the world, or
very near it. They recycle everything for the world. It’s a big job. On my world, there were more of them—”
“How did you get down here?” I say.
“Same as you,” Das Muni says, but she does not look at me as she says it. She is gazing out beyond the light of the fire again, to Meatmoth’s world. I wonder what it is she’s burning. “Someone recycled me.”
“Why?”
“Why did they recycle you?”
I don’t know how much to tell her. I’m still wondering if she’s going to eat me or not. “The world’s been breached,” I say. “The Bhavajas have taken over Katazyrna.”
“Oh,” Das Muni says, as if I’ve told her I sprayed on a blue suit that morning instead of a green one.
“That’s very bad,” I say, pressing. “They slaughtered everyone.”
“They won’t slaughter everyone,” Das Muni says, “only enough to make sure they can bring all their own people over here. I heard Bhavaja is dying. Once a world is dying, the only way to turn it around is to give birth to a new one. And that’s . . . rare.”
“How do you know so much?”
“How do you not?” Das Muni says. “I’ve lived on a few worlds. No one ever wants me. I am always recycled.”
“What do you do?”
She cocks her head. “I give birth to the wrong sorts of things.”
“You . . . give birth?”
“Everyone births things.”
“I don’t.”
“Of course you do. There’s no one who doesn’t.”
I search my memory for something about birth or pregnancy but come up empty. I reflexively put my hands against my soft stomach, pressing to see if I can find some other life in there. But I don’t notice anything. I remember the scar there.
“How does that . . . happen?” I ask.
Das Muni raises her brows. “Have you lost your head down here?”
The Stars Are Legion Page 11