The Stars Are Legion

by Kameron Hurley

  “I’m . . . I’m sure that’s not . . .” But I can’t continue. “We need to go,” I say.

  “I want to find my child,” Arankadash says. She gazes into the light-seared faces of the captured giants. Is this what becomes of these children? Trapped in amber? For what purpose?

  I drop my voice low. “Whatever did this to the children will do it to us too if we don’t get out of here,” I say.

  “Is this the place?” Arankadash says. “The place you threw away your child?”

  “No,” I say. “The place where I threw away my child was dark. Very, very dark. And I don’t know if it is was my child, really, or someone else’s.”

  “Can we stop talking about babies and move?” Casamir says. She’s already three rows of bodies down. “I’m not staying here to find out what this is.”

  I head after her, and Das Muni grabs my hand and squeezes it hard. We meet up with Casamir. I turn and see Arankadash still frozen in front of the giant.

  “Leave her,” Casamir says. “She is locked in the past.”

  I let go of Das Muni’s hand. “You two go ahead. Find a way out.”

  “Zan!” Casamir says. “Fire take you, Zan, you promised we’d see the surface.”

  “You will!” I say, and lower, to myself, “All of us will.”

  I gently take Arankadash’s arm. “It’s not yours,” I say.

  “How do we know?” she says. “What are they doing to them?”

  “Do you want to go back?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Then we must go forward.”

  She sags against me. I hang onto her and gaze up at the giant’s blazing eyes. “Come on,” I say.

  I step away, but she grabs my arm hard.

  “I . . . can’t,” she says, and gazes down at her feet.

  I look, too, and yank my own feet up from the sucking floor. The floor is running up over her boots, oozing a thick, amber sap.

  “Get out of your boots,” I say.

  “I can’t—”

  “You can. You will,” I say. I untie her boots, hopping from foot to foot as the ground tries to tug at me, too.

  I yank her free and together we run, arm in arm, across the brilliant yellow room.

  “Casamir!” I call. “Casamir! Das Muni!”

  Nothing.

  I pull Arankadash in the direction I last saw them in, and we sprint down another long aisle of bodies, each more grotesquely postured than the last.

  I hear a terrible squealing and tug Arankadash the other way. “That sounds like Das Muni!” I say.

  I’m out of breath now, but we keep on because the sticky fluid on the floor is building up on my shoes and her bare feet, and it’s only a matter of time before our feet become too heavy to move.

  I turn a corner and see Das Muni halfway up a broken mound. It’s a shattered giant, upended. It’s torn a hole through the wall, opening a portal into inky darkness.

  Casamir is wallowing in amber up to her ankles at the other end of the statue, trying to paw her way after Das Muni.

  I yank out my walking stick as we near and bring it down hard on Casamir’s ankle.

  She yelps. The amber cracks. I hit the casing around her twice, three times.

  Das Muni shrieks again and slides back down the lower half of the statue. She lifts her feet up, avoiding the ground.

  “Stop hitting me!” Casamir says.

  “Then get up!” I say.

  Casamir turns and tries to get up the statue, but like Das Muni, she slides right back down.

  “Stay there!” I say.

  “What—”

  I don’t give her time to think. I take a running jump and leap onto her back and propel myself up the side of the statue to the rift in the wall. My hands slip. Gain purchase. I struggle over the other side, feet kicking against the giant. All I can see is darkness; that doesn’t mean it’s dark, only that it’s darker than the brilliant room.

  I reach for Casamir. “Up!”

  Casamir grabs my hand, and I pull her up. Arankadash heaves Das Muni over her shoulder. Das Muni squeals again, and I think of a dying animal. I grab her hand and pull her over.

  Arankadash gazes up at me. I hold open my hand.

  She takes it.

  I pull her over, and into the darkness.

  * * *

  All around us is a crystal forest.

  It takes us some time to realize that, because we’re still half blind from the transition from light to dim. The crystals give off a faint gray-white light.

  We stumble on, aimless, for at least five or six thousand steps before Casamir says, “Where are we going?”

  “Away,” I say.

  “We should rest,” Arankadash says.

  I say nothing but collapse where I stand. The edges of the crystals have been smoothed by time, but they don’t make comfortable seats, even so.

  We drink water and eat. I try to catch my breath. The light keeps coming back to me. I’m going to dream of that light, those giants.

  “I thought we had entered the den of the skull-eater,” Arankadash says.

  I start at the name. “What did you say?”

  “The skull-eater,” she says, “the Lord of War.”

  “Someone called me that once,” I say. “Why would they call me that?”

  She shrugs. “They thought you were a god?” She says it like it’s amusing to her.

  “Does skull-eater mean something else among other people?” I ask.

  “Your people are different than mine,” she says. “If they were your people who said it.”

  “I don’t know whose people they were,” I say, and that’s true. I feel I know far more about the world below the Katazyrnas than I know about the Katazyrnas.

  “We should keep moving while we have the strength,” Casamir says. “I don’t like this place.”

  “It’s better than the last one,” I say.

  But we move on.

  As we walk and our eyes adjust, the size of the crystals grows too. Soon they tower above us, so high they touch the ceiling, which is also covered in crystalline structures.

  Das Muni picks her way ahead of us, the first time I can remember her taking the lead. I take up the rear, walking stick out. If we’re going to be swarmed by creatures or giants, I want to be ready.

  We walk for a long time. Arankadash is barefoot, and every time we stop, she tends to her feet. I offer a bit of my suit, which I’m able to cut off with Casamir’s knife and wrap around her feet. But in the dim light I see her feet are blistered and bloody already, though she has not complained at all.

  I wake sometime during a rest period to the sound of someone grunting. The light here is low but constant, so it’s impossible to see how much time has passed.

  Arankadash is squatting about forty paces away, leaning hard against a large crystal. She’s sweating. For a moment, I think she’s defecating, but the grunt turns into a long moan.

  “Are you all right?” I ask. “Arankadash.”

  She waves me away, but I scramble over to her.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  She shakes her head. Huffs out rhythmic breaths. “Birthing,” she says.

  I try to get closer, but the look she gives me is murderous. “Let me be,” she says.

  She grits her teeth and bears down. I can see nothing beneath her—her robes are too long—but I worry for whatever she’s giving birth to. Will it smash itself on the crystals?

  I bring her water. She drinks and pushes me away again. By now, Casamir and Das Muni are awake. Neither approaches. They simply sit and eat. Casamir is making marks on a parchment book.

  Arankadash heaves one more time. I hear something fleshy slide to the ground.

  She lets out a long breath that turns into another moan and leans hard on the crystal behind her. She reaches for me, and I hold out my hand. She levers herself up and reaches beneath her.

  I tense, remembering the squirming, toothy creatures Das Muni gave birth to. I�
��m already horrified about what she might have created. What has the ship given her to carry?

  Arankadash pulls up a wriggling mass of slimy flesh. For a moment, I think it’s her placenta, but no—this is a round, mechanical-looking cog, like a toothy organ, something that would be affixed to a vehicle. It has a grooved, hollowed-out center. It has no eyes or face.

  I expect her to toss it into her pack or throw it among the crystals like the waste it seems to be, to me. But she does not. She slumps to the ground and pulls it close to her. She coos at it like it’s a child, this great mucus-slick thing.

  I have to look away, but I can still hear her. She begins to hum softly to it.

  I sit beside her, swallowing back my bile. This is something about the world that I can’t stomach. Something I can’t understand. There is a wrongness to it, women giving birth to what the world says it needs instead of what they yearn for.

  Arankadash folds her offspring into her arm. It settles in, pulsing softly. It’s red brown and laced in thick, ropy veins.

  “What is it?” I ask, voice low.

  “It’s a gift from the light,” she says.

  “How do you get it . . . to the light?” I say.

  She turns her sweaty face to me, and her expression contorts, as if I am mad. That gives me pause, because I don’t feel like the mad one. She and her pulsing gob of flesh look mad to me. So mad that I wonder if I should leave her and it here while we carry on. But no. I’m the outsider. I need to understand this.

  “When it’s time, the light will come for it,” Arankadash says. She gazes lovingly at the mass in her arms. “I need to rest.” She holds out her arm to me.

  I take her hand, averting my gaze from the thing in her arms again. I help her back to the circle. When I glance back at where she gave birth, I see a placenta and great gobs of afterbirth. We bleed, we birth, we bleed again.

  Arankadash lies down with her new offspring and falls immediately to sleep.

  I can’t help but think of the squirming basket of creatures Das Muni showed me.

  Das Muni is watching me from a few paces away, chewing thoughtfully on a bit of rancid tuber left in our pack.

  “What do you do with yours?” I ask Das Muni. “Why don’t you keep it like she does?”

  “I’m not from this world,” Das Muni says. “They will only recycle what I make. It doesn’t need it. I give birth to things useful on some other world. But whatever she’s made, well. The world will need it eventually. Probably. Unless that part of it is dead now.”

  And now I understand why they’ve taken Jayd. The Bhavajas needed something she had inside of her. I touch the scar on my belly. It is something I did not contain, so I cannot go in her place. But what does she give birth to? What do I have waiting in my own belly, and why have I yet to get pregnant like everyone else? Worse, then, is the idea that I will get pregnant at some point on this journey, and I am terrified of what it is I might nurture there. I resolve to cut it out long before it comes to fruition. Whatever it is, I don’t want it.

  We rest for a few long periods there, until Arankadash is recovered. But the resting costs us. Our water runs low after five sleeping periods in the crystal forest, and tempers begin to run high. I suggest rationing, with extra for Arankadash. She does not listen to me when I suggest this, as she is cooing at her cog or wheel or organ or whatever it is.

  I’m not surprised when Casamir and Das Muni begin bickering on the walk after that.

  “If you washed half as much as the rest of us, you wouldn’t be crawling with vermin,” Casamir says.

  Das Muni is still in the lead, picking her way across the crystals. She is agile. Though she, too, has no boots, her feet are splayed, callused things. She crouches atop a large crystal, scouting ahead. “Dead end this way,” she says.

  “Of course!” Casamir yells, and takes off her pack. She throws it at her feet. “I’ve had enough!” she says. “You can’t really see anything up there! She’s leading us in circles! She’s going to eat us all in our sleep!”

  Das Muni cocks her head at Casamir and bares her teeth. “You will ruin your food.”

  “What do you care!” Casamir says. “You’re going to eat us! That was probably the plan all along. Are you going to call your little mutant friends and—”

  “Stop yelling,” I say. Casamir’s voice is echoing. It’s made much louder as it reverberates among the crystals.

  “And you!” Casamir says. “You delusional little psychotic! What was I thinking, coming all the way up here after you? The surface? Surface! Like the way a bubble has a surface? Let me tell you something. When you get through the skin of a bubble, it pops. Even if you can get us up there, then—”

  “So, why don’t you turn around?” I say, knowing I should just let her yell it out but tired of her whining. “We’re all tired, Casamir.”

  “I had everything back home!” Casamir says. “I had a great job! It isn’t so bad. And then I came here—”

  “Stop shouting,” I say.

  Arankadash has strapped her offspring to her chest. She raises her hands now to cover her ears.

  “—and you!” Casamir says to Arankadash. “You fell for it too! All her important talk! Don’t pretend it’s not because she’s handsome. I see how you look at her. But she’s mad, I tell you. A perfect study in madness, because she’s drawn us all into her delusion, and now we’ll rot here, starving—”

  Das Muni leaps.

  I think she is leaping onto Casamir, but she overshoots Casamir and hurls herself into me, so fast I don’t have time to react. I fall hard onto the crystals behind me. Pain radiates up my ass. I twist my leg.

  I hear the crack then. Not from my body, but from the crystals above us.

  A huge hunk of crystal falls. It slides neatly and suddenly into Das Muni’s back. The crystal pierces her flesh. I feel the hard thump of it through her body pressed tight against mine.

  I garble out something unintelligible.

  Das Muni sighs. She grips me tight. A dribble of blood colors her mouth. She grins at me with crimson-stained teeth.

  “No, no,” I say. I hold her in my arms. We are both of us pinned against the floor now. She by the crystal, me by her body. I don’t know what to do.

  Arankadash lunges at us, but I yell at her to stay back.

  “Don’t move her!” I say.

  The crystal has not gone all the way through Das Muni. I’m unharmed but trembling. I work my way out from under Das Muni. She squirms as I break free.

  “Don’t move,” I say softly, to Das Muni this time. I crouch beside her. She lets out little hissing breaths. “Why did you do that?” I say, but I don’t expect an answer, and she does not give me one.

  Casamir and Arankadash crowd next to me and lean over her. Casamir is wringing her hands. I reach for the crystal.

  “Don’t!” Casamir says. “If you pull out the crystal, she’ll just bleed out.”

  “I can’t leave it in there,” I say. “Das Muni?”

  She squeals again.

  Arankadash slides out of her pack and kneels next to Das Muni. The shard of crystal is as long as my arm and half as wide. It’s taken her low down on her right side, just below her ribs. I can’t tell how deep it is, only that it hasn’t gone all the way through her.

  I press my ear to her back and listen to her breathe. I can hear a rattling sound.

  “Why are you such a little fool?” I say, and I press my forehead to her shoulder. I don’t know how we will move her. I don’t know how we’ll survive even if we can. She is the one thing I have had beside me from the beginning of this horror, and now she lies bleeding and rattling to death.

  “BE WARY OF WOMEN WHO PRETEND AT FRIENDSHIP.”

  —LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION

  30

  JAYD

  I step through the girls’ blood and back through the door that Sabita made. On any other world, the blood would have been absorbed immediately, but not here on Bhavaja. Sabita did not c
onsider this. I know because I can follow the dripping spatters of blood through the door and into the dark, narrow sub-corridors that bisect the main ones.

  I am slow, terribly slow. I have no idea how far ahead of me she is, or what she means to do once she gets to where she is going. I find a dead Bhavaja security woman in the hall, her throat cut neatly. Sabita never fought in my mother’s armies, but when you put people back together again, you also learn how to take them apart. She has ended this woman neatly. Much more neatly than the girls.

  She stepped through the blood here and has left smeared half-footprints along the floor. I see blood along a bend in the corridor where she had paused. For breath? To catch her bearings?

  I try to speed up, but with my injured leg, it’s impossible. I wish I had a walking stick. I wish I’d learned to stand on my hands, the way that Zan could.

  I hear raised voices, yelling.

  “Sabita!” I say. “Sabita, stop!”

  I hope that it gains me the time I need to reach the open doorway at the end of the hall. There is a dead end here right before the door. A great face made of rotten skin stretched over molded bone blocks the end of the hall; the corridor has partially grown around it.

  I step into the lighted doorway and find Sabita dripping blood from her chin and Nashatra holding a great obsidian machete. Sabita’s cunning bone knife is tiny in comparison, but the women’s gazes tell me they are well matched.

  “How did you find her?” I ask Sabita.

  She signs, “The girls.”

  The girls. How had she gotten them to talk? No, of course, they could sign. I hadn’t thought to sign at them, because I didn’t want them to know I knew how. Sabita did not care.

  “Don’t kill Nashatra,” I say.

  Nashatra barks a laugh. “You should be telling me not to kill her.”

  “No more killing at all, then,” I say. “The Bhavajas need Nashatra,” I say.

  “For what?” Sabita signs.

  “Who will rule when Rasida is gone?”

  “Rasida will just kill her anyway,” Sabita signs.