“Yes,” I say, relieved to find some excuse that doesn’t entail telling her more of my strange story. “Since I got dumped down here, I don’t remember many things.”
“You birth what the world wants,” Das Muni says. She picks something out of the pot over the fire, something that looks like a stick, and chews on the softened end of it. “When it decides something is needed, you make it. The witches on every ship, they know all about it. Some are madder than others, but they can tell you.”
“We . . . make it?” But then, who else would make what the ship needs? The ship, maybe? Are we the ship, living on its flesh like parasites? “What do you make, then?”
Das Muni eyes me over a long moment, chewing thoughtfully. Then she stands, hunching over in the low space, and picks up a tightly woven basket. It sits on the other side of the room behind stacks of corded fuel and what appears to be semi-rotten foodstuffs.
She shuffles toward me and shoves the basket at me.
Inside is a slithering mass of oily, fishlike organisms with human-shaped heads filled with spiny teeth.
I recoil.
Das Muni looks into the basket herself, frowns. “They are not so bad this time.”
I feel nauseous.
“It’s all right,” Das Muni says. “They are also very tasty.”
“I can’t stay here,” I say. “Thank you for looking out for me, but I have to get back up to the surface.”
“There’s no way back up,” Das Muni says.
“But you’ve been inside other worlds, you said. Been recycled before. How did you get out?”
“When the scavengers come,” Das Muni says, “they break open every level of the world, right to the core here, and they take out all the organic things. Without this, the world dies. It has nothing to use to regenerate itself.”
“What did you do before?”
“I served people, that’s all.”
“How do you know so much, then?”
“I listen,” Das Muni says. “I listen when people think I don’t. That’s the secret to staying alive. You must know more than you pretend.”
“I don’t know anything,” I say.
“Then we are a good pair,” Das Muni says, and begins clubbing her offspring to death for dinner.
“VILLAINS SMILE BRIGHTEST. MY GRIN IS WIDEST BEFORE I DINE. ALL MY ENEMIES KNOW THIS.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
16
JAYD
I will not lose sight of what I’m here for. Now, more than ever, every word and gesture matters. But I didn’t anticipate Rasida’s betrayal. Not so soon. It was . . . it was something I would have done, broker peace and destroy the world. I close my eyes. I’ve done it before.
Rasida has the arm. I tell myself she has done me a favor. I am halfway to getting both of the things I want, but I’m on my own now. I can’t rely on Zan to hold up her part of this plan. In truth, her role was most important in getting me here. The rest, I can do alone. It will be more difficult, but it’s possible. I must assume Zan and my sisters are dead; it’s just me now. So I have to go through with this plan Zan and I concocted so many rotations ago, and believe that what we came up with then can still work.
But it’s several sleeping periods before I can make myself accept Rasida’s dinner invitation. Even getting out of bed is painful. Keeping food down in the morning is difficult, though, and by the evening, I’m starving. The food the girls offer me is terrible. I suspect Rasida knows that what will finally get me to dinner is the hope of better food.
I am careful with my appearance. I ensure I am clean and well groomed. I practice smiling. The practicing helps when I step into Rasida’s rooms and see her for the first time since she murdered my family.
My expression is sad but sincere, I hope.
I don’t ask her about Neith and Gavatra, though I have considered a hundred ways I could ask her during the long, sleepless periods I’ve endured. They are dead. I have probably been eating them.
“Thank you for accepting, love,” Rasida says. My gut goes icy at the endearment. She is mad like Anat was mad. But I’m here sitting across from her of my own will, so I’m no better.
Her sister Samdi serves us, which makes me wonder if Samdi is her sister after all. Like me, Rasida has shown herself to be a master in the art of deception. In part, I think it’s because she absolutely believes that the things she’s telling me are true when she says them. She is nurturing reality into being as she speaks.
“I have thought long on what’s happened,” I say. I pick at my food. We are eating a mix of clotted protein gel and fresh greens. At least something still grows on this dying world, somewhere. I’ve been offered nothing this fresh in my own quarters. Maybe there will be something sweet afterward. This thought bubbles up and I almost laugh at myself, that my submission can be bought with something as simple as food.
“I came here to you because of my mother,” I say. “She was always overbearing. You knew her. My whole family wanted a life killing and dying for Katazyrna. I am . . . not like that. I never wanted that. The things I did . . . all those worlds. That was something she made me do, never something I wanted. But on Katazyrna, you did what Anat asked or she had you recycled.”
Rasida says, “What do you want, Jayd?”
“Just you,” I say. I meet her look. “I want to have a new life. Maybe it’s true that I am free now. Maybe you’ve freed me.”
She smiles at me, but it is the smile that does not touch her eyes, the black smile that goes with her black eyes. A fist of worry forms in my chest and does not go away. If she makes me a prisoner here, I will have a much more difficult time escaping.
Rasida rises and goes to her wardrobe. She pulls out my mother’s iron arm. She drops it on the table between us and sits back down.
“Is there some trick to it?” she says. “We all know Anat used the arm to power the world. She put on lovely little light shows, and I heard rumors of far more. They say she had control over Katazyrna the way the witches did, using this arm. We can’t find the Katazyrna witches, so we need the arm if we’re to remake the world.”
“I don’t know,” I lie. I stare at the arm. She has taken out my mother’s wasted, fleshy arm from inside of it, and it’s only a metal brace wrapped over the warm organic green skin now. I don’t tell Rasida that the arm is not something from Katazyrna at all. We don’t have the skill to build such a thing any more than she does. Only one world does.
“If you knew how to operate it—” Rasida says.
“Mother didn’t trust any of us,” I say. “I’m sorry, love. If I knew how it worked, I would tell you.”
“Would you?”
“I would,” I say.
She considers me, expression cool, calculating. She stands and picks up the arm and puts it back in her wardrobe. I note its placement, and also that it doesn’t seem to be locked up in any way. Perhaps she trusts that her people fear her enough not to touch it. It’s a good thing I am not hers.
“I suppose it was not important to know such things,” Rasida says. “With what you can carry in that womb, such things are not your concern. How many have you birthed?”
“None,” I say.
“None?” She narrows her eyes. “Then how do you know—”
“Anat had them removed before they came to fruition,” I say. “She decides . . . decided who got to give birth, and to what, on the world.”
“Quite a feat,” she says.
“Surely,” I say carefully, “you have control over the fecundity of your people, the same way you control your own.”
“I administer corrections when I deem it fit,” she says. She drinks from another beautiful metal goblet. This one has blue stones embedded along the rim. I cannot imagine she eats this way every rotation. But I know very little of this woman who is my enemy, far less than I thought I did before I came here.
“I have always thought it strange,” I say, “that you continue to live in a world such as th
is when you have the power to make a new one. What do you care about a metal arm to patch up the seams of some world, when you could remake the world?”
Rasida raises her brows. “Oh, yes,” she says. “I hear that often. But no one tells you what it does to you, to make a world.” She refills my goblet. “Do they?”
I fold my hands over my belly. “Anat always said leading a world was far more dangerous and terrifying than making one.”
“Anat was a fool,” Rasida says. “Drink your wine.”
I drink my wine.
I cannot help but glance at the wardrobe again and the iron arm within. My family dead, Zan dead, and here I sit with the arm just a few paces away, and the woman who can remake worlds pouring wine into my cup.
I have stepped into the belly of my enemy. I am within a whisper of everything I sought. But at what price?
Rasida leans toward me. “There is something you should know,” she says.
I wait. She seems to expect a response, but when I give none, she continues. “I love you very much,” she says, and grins.
“I love you also,” I say.
Smile and smile, Zan would say. Smile all the brighter for being the villain.
“It does worry me,” she says, “that you have yet to bear a pregnancy to term.”
“Now that I have the opportunity—”
“Yes, of course,” Rasida says. “We’ll make sure you are cared for. You know that’s all I want. To care for you.”
“I know,” I say.
As we finish our meal, Rasida talks of the salvage work on the neighboring world, petty insurgencies in the level below, and relates a story about how one of her sisters burned out an infestation of vermin on the upper level. The conversation seems trivial, but I note that she is careful about how much she tells me. I never hear more of her sisters’ names, nor the name of the world they are salvaging from, nor what is being salvaged.
We are interrupted by Rasida’s mother, Nashatra.
I make to stand as she enters, a show of respect, but Rasida waves me back down.
“What do you want, you old fool?” Rasida says.
Nashatra ducks her head. “Apologies, Lord, you’re needed on the fourth level.”
“The fourth? Fuck and fire,” Rasida mutters. “You can’t take care of it yourself?”
“You asked to be alerted any time the—”
“Shut your fool mouth,” Rasida says.
I close my own mouth, even though she is not talking to me. I can’t help being shocked at Rasida’s tone. If I had spoken to Anat that way, I’d have been recycled.
Rasida gets up. Nashatra backs away, trying to give her room to go past, but as she does, she knocks the table, and Rasida’s goblet falls to the floor.
Rasida raises her arm, but Nashatra is already getting to her knees—painfully, from the look on her face—and babbling apologies.
“I’m sorry, daughter,” Nashatra says. She pulls the goblet off the floor and begins to wipe it clean on her tunic.
I try to get down beside her to help, but Rasida snaps her fingers at me. “You go back to your rooms,” she says. “Samdi, escort my consort to her rooms.”
“I’m sorry,” I say to Nashatra stupidly, because what do I have to be sorry for? We’re all just things here, owned by the most powerful person in the Legion.
When I finally go back to my rooms, the light on the walls feels very bright, and I’m exhausted from my long performance. The girls are still there, though, turning down my bed and pouring fresh, warm water into a bowl so I can wash my face before I go to sleep. I say nothing to them as I disrobe and bathe and slip into bed. The semidarkness is welcome, because it is the only time I can be certain no one can see my face.
Yet I still pull the blankets over my head before I let my face relax. The temperature inside Katazyrna was always more or less constant, but here on Bhavaja, it fluctuates. It’s warm now, but in a few breaths, it could cool to something less comfortable. Cowering under the covers this way, I can pretend I’m back on Katazyrna, though I find that memory brings me little solace. Life on Katazyrna, before Zan, was little better than my situation here. It was Zan who gave me hope that we could be something else, after I nearly destroyed her.
When I wake, the girls are rubbing the walls alight, and I find I have another long cycle of nothing before me. I make myself get up and dress. When the girls run off to get my food, I walk out into the courtyard outside my rooms and begin walking the circumference of it. I’m too nauseous to eat but hope that exercise eases both my stomach and my anxiousness. I have never been a prisoner before. I understand now how Zan felt.
When the girls arrive with the food, there is someone with them. It’s Nashatra.
“Hello, Mother,” I say. I expect to see Rasida there behind her, but she is alone. She is lanky in the arms and legs but soft in the middle, with a round, fleshy face and firm mouth that put me in mind of Rasida. Her eyes are hooded; she doesn’t fully open the lids, making her expression difficult to read. I expect that is a blessing here.
“Walk with me, child,” she says.
I follow her into the foyer. We walk in silence past the guards in the outer corridor and down a series of twisting passages. Finally, we come to a large, bowed room. Half the ceiling has collapsed, revealing brittle layers of the world above it, all fused and twisted together like scar tissue.
“We are alone,” she says.
“I can see that.”
“Your family is dead, and you owe us your womb,” she says.
“That’s correct.”
“I told Rasida we should trade only for your womb and have one of her sisters carry it. She refused. She wanted you. All of you, against my better judgment. I don’t trust Katazyrnas.”
“Yet you are here alone with me,” I say.
“You are not so foolish that you’d do harm to me here. You don’t yet know the full extent of Rasida’s wrath, but you will, child. Rasida always gets what she wants.”
“I have seen what she does to her own mother,” I say.
“I never wanted war,” Nashatra says. “Rasida’s aunt was Lord before Rasida was. I never held the title. You can see why.”
“You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Don’t I?” she says.
“Why have you taken me here?”
“The girls are Rasida’s,” she says, “like most people here. But not all of us. Not all of us, child. You understand? Just because I raised that girl doesn’t mean I will stand by while our world rots around her.”
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“When you first came here, I thought you were a spider,” she says. “Then I thought, perhaps, you loved her. Then I saw that we were the same.”
“We’re not the same.”
“Oh, we are,” she says. “We are both smart women who thought being smart could save us here. It cannot, with Rasida. Logic does not win against her. Nor does love. You have tried both, I know. I know how you got here. But neither will work. You must try something different.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
“Because you are closest to her now,” she says, “and if we are going to overthrow her, we need someone who can get close enough to kill her.”
My expression does not change. Killing Rasida was never part of the plan, but I am desperate for allies here.
“You had best speak quickly,” I say softly, because I fear the walls are listening. I fear they can divine my true intent. “Because I would never betray Rasida in that way.” And when I say it out loud, I almost believe it. I almost believe I am the woman I pretend to be.
“COMING BACK INTO THE WORLD IS ALWAYS TORTUROUS.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
17
ZAN
Recovery nearly kills me.
I vomit and tremble. Das Muni feeds me something like water—a viscous substance—from her crooked hands. I wake once to hear Das Muni grunting while she
squats over the basket. Splashing and gurgling. The soft cries of some mutant living thing, left to drown in its own afterbirth, send me to sleep.
The horror of the real world extends into my dreams. I dream that I give birth to a squalling, one-eyed recycler monster. It grows so rapidly, it eats off my arm just minutes after birth. It snuffles after me while I try to crawl away, eating me piece by piece until it devours my chest and swallows my head.
I wake screaming, often. The screaming reminds me of the screaming I heard while asleep in my room, back before the invasion. Did my sisters dream of the same things? Of people recycled? Is that what Jayd dreams about?
Das Muni squeezes water into my parched mouth and wipes my fevered brow. I piss myself often, and Das Muni replaces the spongy blanket beneath me. It absorbs most of my sweat and piss. I watch in fascination as Das Muni goes outside the hovel and wrings it dry, like a sponge.
I don’t know how long it is before Das Muni finally makes me move.
“Your leg is healing well enough,” Das Muni says. “You need to get up now and move it, or you’ll lose your strength.”
I grunt at her. I’ve lost something here, in all this squalor and horror, and I don’t know how to get it back. As I look at Das Muni, all I can think is that dying is preferable to living down here the rest of my life. What hope is there to ever leave, if what Das Muni says is true? What if Jayd is already dead, like the rest of our so-called sisters? Anat is dead. The Katazyrna armies are dead. I want to have hope for some reality other than this, but I can’t see it. My body rebels. I whimper.
Das Muni is much smaller than me but surprisingly strong. She hooks her arms under mine and yanks me past the fire, pulling me outside the hovel for the first time. The light here is not the swinging blue light I saw when I first descended into this mire, but soft green. The glow comes from the piles of refuse all around us: a slithering green light, like something alive. And it is something alive, I see now as a thread of green slides up my arm. They are bioluminescent worms.
I wipe it off. It twists and tumbles to the ground, squiggling in the muck.
The Stars Are Legion Page 12