“I’ll decide who you’re here to see,” the woman says. I’ve had time to search the corridor, and I note that she’s alone. I’m surprised to see a single patrol. She hasn’t yet called for others.
I start to get up.
“Stop!” she says.
“You told me to get up!”
She frowns hard. She’s young, not much past menarche, and I feel sorry for her. I was that young once, following orders.
“I’m going to come up slow,” I say. “All right?”
She jerks her head, and I decide that’s close enough to a nod. I slowly rise to my feet. I’m taller than her by a head.
“I need to see—”
“I don’t give a fuck who you’re here to see,” she says. “Where did you come from?”
“Level below,” I say. “The umbilicus isn’t working.”
What I’m saying is ridiculous, because we’ve come down from the ceiling, but it doesn’t matter. She’s committed a rookie error, and she hasn’t spotted it yet. She’s let me get too close.
I grab the stock of her weapon with my left hand and push it away from my body while punching her hard in the face with my right.
She stumbles back. I wrench the gun free and point it at her, jamming it hard in her face so the tentacles split flesh. She shrieks and goes down.
“Rasida Bhavaja!” I say.
“Outside the hangar,” she says.
“The vehicle hangar?”
She nods.
I try to get my bearings, but the truth is I hardly remember my way around this place. I’ve spent more time underground than I have up here. At least as far as I can remember.
“Take me there,” I say.
Casamir lands behind me. “What the shit?” she says.
“We’ll need more of these weapons,” I say. “Rasida will have people around her.”
My captive looks from me to Casamir. “You don’t know?” she says.
“Know what?” I ask.
“The consort has pinned herself in the heart room with the witches,” the Bhavaja woman says. “There’s a full civil war happening on this ship, and she’s become the focus of it.”
Ah, I think, resourceful Jayd and all of her plans. I remember what she told me when Rasida took her away, about this being what we wanted, what we planned for, and I wonder if this was all part of it: the blowing up of my people; this civil war; even me, here, running after her. What kind of monster was I that I kept her in my confidence, knowing what she had planned? Is that why I have no memory? Did she take it from me so I would go along with this?
“And why are you telling me this?” I say.
“Because we might be on the same side,” she says.
Das Muni slips down from the ceiling too.
“How many of you are there?” the Bhavaja woman says.
“Weapons,” I say. “Take us to a weapons cache first. Then the hangar.”
The woman nods. Blood trickles from the wounds in her face. “Fine, all right.”
I glance back and see Arankadash has made it as well. “We’re getting weapons,” I tell her, “then we’re finding the woman who stole this world.”
* * *
The Bhavaja woman tries to walk us right into a trap, but Casamir lobs a vial of something at the women springing the ambush and blinds them.
Arankadash and I smash the oncoming women in the face. They go down, and we take their cephalopod guns, but not before one of the women sprints away. Arankadash fires at her, but she isn’t very good with a gun yet.
Casamir pulls at my sleeve as we start again, her face pained. We are a stinking, filthy bunch. The bloody arterial spray has caked our hair and skin and has been slowly flaking off. We have all lost weight, Casamir most of all, and she looks hungry and exhausted.
“We can’t just walk in there,” Casamir says.
“Why not?” I say.
“Because I didn’t come all this way to get shot here at the end,” Casamir says.
“Jayd is right up ahead!” I say.
“And what else is ahead of us?” Arankadash says. “We don’t know.”
“So what, we split up?” I say.
“We take the time to think it through,” Casamir says.
I point my weapon at the opposite wall and fire. The cephalopod rams itself into the flesh of the wall. The wall begins to blacken and crack, making a large circle of rot around its tentacles three paces in circumference.
I point at the rotting wall. “That’s what’s happening to this world,” I say. “All that time we traveled, what did we see? A dying world. We’ve got nothing to go back to, none of us. There’s only up. There’s only forward.”
“We are not arguing with you,” Arankadash says.
“We’re your friends,” Casamir says, “but you shouldn’t have let that woman run away.”
“You want me to leave behind a trail of bodies?” I say.
Casamir raises her voice. “If we’re all going to die anyway, what does it matter?”
Arankadash sighs. “Stop yelling,” she says. “Use your heads up here. You are heading in the opposite direction of the woman who’s clearly running for reinforcements,” she says. “If I was that woman, I would go straight to my commander to report you; wouldn’t you?”
I stare at our captive, who looks back at me with big eyes. I hit her in the face with the butt of my gun and she goes down.
“When did you become the dumbest person here?” Casamir asks me.
I nearly butt her in the face too but check my anger. We have made it too far to screw this up.
We hear the armed party before we see them. I raise my gun and power forward. Yes, I’m the dumbest of the bunch, and I don’t care.
Eight women stand outside a large round door. They’re firing cephalopod guns into it, which have rotted away all the organic tissue from the outside to reveal a big metal door. The tattered, ruined bits of the surrounding wall also reveal a metal core.
The woman at the center of them is yelling up at a blinking eye above the door. I know the woman immediately for Rasida Bhavaja.
“The things I’ll do to you when I get this open,” she says, “are extraordinary. It’s mine, Jayd. Get your—”
She sees me before her women do. I’m already firing.
Rasida drops below the first line of women and takes off. She snatches at a hand weapon at her belt as she goes but does not turn.
I press myself against the wall and fire again. The cephalopod gun is slow to reload.
Casamir and Arankadash catch up to me and exchange more fire.
We have the element of surprise. Four women are already down. One is wounded. Two more take off after Rasida.
I run up to the door and stare at the blinking eye. “Jayd?” I say. “It’s me! Jayd!” No response.
I point at the door. “Can you get this open, Casamir?”
Casamir bites her lip. Nods. She hands her gun to Das Muni. “Cover us, all right?”
Das Muni stares at the gun in her hands. I pat her cheek. “We’re almost home,” I say.
I expect to see delight, but she only stares hollowly at me. I don’t have time to understand that. I tell Arankadash to help Casamir hold the position, and pick up a second gun from the fallen women on the floor. I take off after Rasida and the other two Bhavajas.
I hear them ahead of me and pick up my pace. There’s something familiar about the corridor, and when I turn and see the huge open hangar door, I recognize it immediately.
The two Bhavajas have taken up positions at it and fire on me. I hurl myself to the ground so hard, I lose my breath. I roll to one side, firing both guns. One cephalopod goes wide, hitting the top of the door. The other clips one of the women. She swears, goes down.
I fire twice more, heaving for breath, and the second woman skitters inside.
I run.
The lights in the corridor change colors. They blink blue and yellow now. I see the hangar doors closing. I shoot again. The cep
halopod smacks the door, burning away the organic shell, revealing metal beneath.
I lunge through the doors just as they close, and roll to a halt inside. I bring up my other gun and fire, hitting the fleeing Bhavaja in the back. She sprawls forward.
Rasida is spraying on a suit.
I fire at her.
She ducks. Picks up a big weapon from the case of them along the far wall, and rolls behind a vehicle.
The hangar lights are on, brighter than I’m used to after so long in the dark. I squint and stay low, moving vehicle to vehicle and using them for cover.
“You don’t have to go through with this, Zan!” Rasida says. “Whatever Jayd has told you is a lie!”
“How do you know I don’t remember everything?” I say. I check my weapons. One of them seems to have failed to reload. I bang it on the ground next to me. It rattles. I leave it there and eye the big weapon rack that Rasida pilfered from.
“If you remembered everything, you wouldn’t be trying to kill me!” Rasida says. “You’d be as keen to murder Jayd as I am.”
“I thought you were in love with her,” I spit. I look underneath one of the vehicles, trying to get an idea of her position. The room is so big that it distorts our voices.
“There’s no such thing as love in the Legion,” Rasida says. “There is birth and there is death. That’s all.”
I peek above one of the vehicles and fire off a test shot.
Sure enough, she fires back. I sight her position and shuffle forward. I jump over one of the vehicles and half-crouch as I hurry down the next row.
“Zan?” she says.
I stop moving. Press my back against a vehicle. I hear her footfalls and low breathing. She’s close. I breathe long and slow, keeping as quiet as possible.
“You know who you are yet?” Rasida says. “I worked it out, though Jayd fought it. Refused it. She never would have told me, which is fascinating in and of itself. You aren’t some grunt from the Mokshi, are you? No . . . no. You’re the lord herself.”
I swing around the vehicle. See her peeking over another one two rows down. I fire. The blast goes wide and buries itself in the far wall. A ring of rot appears.
“I didn’t believe that for a minute,” I say.
“She thought you were quite convinced,” Rasida says. “You really thought you were her sister?”
I gaze over the vehicles again, but she’s taken cover. I do the same. Waiting.
Rasida is silent for some time. I listen to my own heartbeat, straining to hear the sound of her movement, but there’s nothing but the pulse of my blood and the purr of the vehicle behind me.
I wait for her. Rasida does not disappoint. She says, “You and I are a lot alike, Lord Mokshi.”
“Don’t call me that,” I say. My stomach twists. The lord of the world? Wasn’t I just another castoff, like Das Muni? A conscript? But a regular conscript wouldn’t have been able to open up the Mokshi’s defenses and let Jayd in after her army died around her.
“Lord Bhavaja and Lord Mokshi,” Rasida says. “I could have offered you a great deal more than Anat. And I wouldn’t have betrayed you like she did.”
I close my eyes, cursing my rotten memory. How can I deny what she’s saying now, after all that has bubbled up from the depths of my memory? I want to fight it. I want to fight the truth, the way I have fought everything put in front of me on the long, mad journey.
I stay quiet, and she does the same.
I breathe. Wait.
I hear the squelch of her boots.
I jump up and roll over the vehicle. I come down right on top of her.
Rasida punches me with her weapon. I reel backward, pulling the trigger on mine. The cephalopod thunks into the floor behind her. It rots beneath her. She rolls away, taking me with her.
I knock her fist against the face of a vehicle and head-butt her. It’s enough to stun her. She lets go of the weapon. I overreach, trying to get it myself, but she wraps her legs around me and throws me over again. I lose my grip on the cephalopod gun.
I punch her in the face. She spits blood at me, unfazed.
She comes around and punches my kidney. Pain shoots through my body. I reel back. She smashes her fist into my nose. Blood sprays. I fall back on my seat and she’s on top of me, relentless, fists flying.
I reach to my left and smack the dashboard console of the vehicle next to me. It starts up and ejects a plume of spent yellow smoke that envelopes Rasida.
She coughs and hacks. I punch her in the guts. Bowl her over. I take her by the hair and drag her away from the plume. Take a breath in the clear air. I snatch up her forgotten gun and point it at her.
“They have used you,” Rasida snarls. “They took your womb and your memory and now they will take your ship, and you’ll gladly give it to them, won’t you?”
How does she know all this? Or is she guessing? For a moment, I think Jayd really did betray me again, and she told Rasida everything. She had looked at Rasida with such desire. Far more than she ever had for me.
“Jayd and I are on the same side,” I say.
Rasida spits blood from her broken mouth. “They boarded your world, you fool. Jayd recycled all of your people to keep the heart beating on this hulking wreck of a world. Jayd betrayed you then, and she will betray you now.”
“That’s a lie,” I say. But it’s not. My memory says it’s not. Das Muni was recycled, and many more like her. Who else but the Katazyrnas would recycle those on the Mokshi? Who else but Jayd? I want to weep. I admired how she fought, and opened my world to her, and told her the Legion was dying. She did not believe me. She had likely drugged me and stolen my arm and blown up my people and recycled them, and when she came back—who knows how long after?—saying she believed me now, she had changed her mind, she let me think it was her mother who had sneaked a force onto the Mokshi and killed it. How could I have been so foolish as to allow her to come back after that? Why was I so desperate? So emotional? What a fool. I hate that woman. I hate who I was. I hate the woman who endured that betrayal and welcomed Jayd back after it. I was desperate enough to save the Mokshi that I joined forces with my greatest enemy.
“I came for the arm, Rasida. You can give it to me or I can chop it off.”
“You’ll have to take it,” she says, and spits more blood. “I never did figure out how to use it. Funny, isn’t it? All this for the arm, for the world. You think you’re saving the Legion, but the Legion is already dead. All you’re saving is the Mokshi and yourself. You’re as selfish as Jayd.”
I raise my weapon. She raises her arm.
I shoot her in the chest.
She’s still alive when I use the obsidian blade at my hip to cut off her arm. She shouts at me.
“You’ll be sorry for this in the end.” Blood flows. She goes into shock as she bleeds out.
I thought the arm was something she had to affix to the stump of her old arm, but no—it’s clear that she’s slipped it over her own arm, so the metal arm acted as a skin. Her arm was too large for it, though; as I wriggle the dead arm free of the casing, I see that the skin and flesh have been stripped away, not to the bone but very near it, so that her arm would fit into the metal one. The flesh of her real arm is covered in green lubricant, which must have numbed her pain and discomfort.
I pick up the metal arm with my right hand and swing around to go back to where Jayd has holed herself up. Then I stop and stare at my outstretched hands and the metal arm.
My left arm is smaller than my right. It is among the first things I noticed when I woke, after the body on the floor. I pass the arm from my right hand to my left and feel the heft of it in my palm.
I have a memory then, of waking up in a sea of pain and blood. My left arm was a red, gory wound. In the memory, I’m naked, and the first thing I do is look beside me to where I should find the woman who shares my bed. Where I should find Jayd. But she is gone. And that’s when the world trembles.
Jayd stole everything from me.
The Mokshi is my world, Rasida had said. But not my world in the same way it is Das Muni’s world. I built that world. I freed it from the core of the Legion, and I designed it to leave the Legion. But something went wrong. Something inside of it failed, and then the Katazyrnas attacked me. Jayd attacked me. I thought I could convince her of my purpose. But her first loyalty had been to Anat. She feared Anat far more than me.
I tremble as I slip my left arm into the metal one. The interior is slimy with the green lubricant.
But the arm fits like a glove tailored just for me.
The arm warms around me. My fingers slide into the metal sheaths at the end. I squeeze my fist, and I can feel a terrible power there at the center of it.
Why did Jayd want the arm? A trophy for her mother, no doubt, but as I stare at my fist, I see this is the key to something. It’s why we needed the arm, too, and not just the world. Jayd had no idea what it contains, what it can do. To be honest, in this moment, I don’t either. But it’s more than a trophy.
I raise my hand; a ripple of heated air flows around me as I do. I imagine the ruined door ahead of me becoming whole. I imagine it sealing itself back up. Soldering itself together.
Green mist emanates from the center of my palm, and then the skin of the world is rippling and growing over the ruined doorway. It forms a perfect spiraling circle, then blooms open, a fresh seal without even a scab. All that’s left to signal anything happened to the door at all are the blistered pieces of it lying at my feet; as I watch, they are being absorbed into the floor.
I was not a general, a leader of armies, as Jayd told me when I first woke. No, it seems my skill was in something else. My skill was never in death but in making life.
I have the arm now.
Does Jayd have the world?
Together, we’ll get to the Mokshi. And I will have my real answers.
“WE ALL SAY WE WANT THE TRUTH. WE’RE LYING.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
37
ZAN
I race back to the heart room and turn the corner just in time to see Arankadash and Casamir step inside.
Das Muni waits in the threshold. She gazes in, once, then back at me. She removes her cowl and stares at me with her big eyes. I see something there that makes time seem to slow down. I listen to my heartbeat and the pulse of the world beneath my feet. I see her look at me just this way in another life, another time, only that time, she is kneeling at my feet, because I am her lord.
The Stars Are Legion Page 29