The Stars Are Legion

by Kameron Hurley

  Her lord. She must have known this whole time.

  I hear a hiss. Something thuds into Das Muni’s chest, and she sprawls back hard. Her little body hits the opposite wall.

  I yell. What I yell, I don’t know, but I run to her, still yelling whatever formless thing that’s burst up from my chest.

  She is lying in a pool of blood rapidly expanding from the hole in her chest. Inside her chest cavity is a pulsing black bit of charged bone or other organic material. It’s neatly burst her open.

  “Das Muni,” I say, and I pull her into my arms. Her blood runs hot and wet into my lap. She is so light.

  Her mouth moves. Blood colors her teeth and tongue. I see that she’s bitten her tongue hard.

  I turn, unbelieving, back toward the heart room. Jayd is there, slumped on a long console that dances with lights. Threads of red and yellow and blue tangle in the air above her. She is heavily pregnant and holding a massive weapon. I recognize it as the kind I took out on my attack on the Mokshi. Her face is drawn and haggard, and though her belly is distended, her face is hollowed: her eyes are sunken, and there are dark circles beneath her eyes. A tangled mass of arms and legs and heads is huddled up in the corner, and as they unfold themselves, I see that they are a single body. I shudder, wondering what new horror the world has for us.

  Arankadash fires at Jayd and misses.

  “Don’t kill her!” I say. “That’s Jayd.”

  Casamir’s eyes bulge. She has her own weapon now, and she does not take her finger from the trigger. “Are you mad?” she says.

  “Jayd, why did—” I begin.

  “For fuck’s sake!” Jayd says. “She was . . . Listen to me. She knew who you were. She was serving on this level. I can’t have . . . We can’t . . .” Her eyes fill. She fights it. “I can’t start over. Yes, I recycled her. So what? She recognized you. We can’t start over. This is the endgame, Zan. She can’t . . . She can’t ruin this. I just . . . I shot her without thinking. We can’t start over. This is the end. This has to be the end. I can’t do this again, Zan. I can’t.”

  “Das Muni, what’s she—”

  Das Muni brings up her long fingers to my face and shows her teeth. “I am yours, Lord,” she says.

  I cradle her head in my iron arm. “I’m not just another woman from the Mokshi, am I?” I whisper, because though I know it now, have known it for too long now, I want to hear it from her.

  She shakes her head.

  “Why didn’t you kill me down there?” I ask. “I failed the Mokshi, didn’t I? Failed you and everyone who lived there. This traitor recycled you. And I took her back after. I took her back because we could not go on without her.”

  “You are not the same, Lord Mokshi,” Das Muni says. “You are a different woman. I am too.” She huffs up blood.

  “You want answers?” Jayd says. She points her weapon at me now. “Get us both to the Mokshi.”

  I squeeze Das Muni to my chest. Her blood slicks my suit. “No,” I say. “You kill her, you kill me.”

  “You don’t care about her,” Jayd says.

  “Maybe some other version of me didn’t,” I say, “but I do. I won’t leave her here to die like this.”

  “She is already dead,” Jayd says.

  Blood is bubbling on Das Muni’s lips. “Save her,” I say, “or kill me here with her.”

  Something in Jayd’s face twists. Is it wonder? Surprise? She gazes back into the room and at the many-headed woman there. “Can you repair her?” Jayd asks it.

  The left head says, “What will we get in return?”

  “I won’t shoot you,” Jayd says.

  “A hard bargain,” the right head says. They bumble forward.

  “Will you make sure she’s all right?” I ask Casamir and Arankadash.

  They exchange looks. Arankadash says, “Hole up here, hoping you return alive? Not a chance, after this.”

  “If I’m not back in an hour, come for me,” I say.

  Casamir knits her brows. “Come for you how?”

  “I’ll show you,” I say.

  * * *

  Jayd leads us to the hangar. Or marches us there; I don’t know which. Maybe both. Part of me wants to take her in my arms. The other part wants to disarm her and scream. I show Casamir the hangar and explain it. She gives a low whistle.

  “You can watch from the observation window,” Jayd says, motioning Casamir out.

  “You sure about this?” Casamir asks me.

  “No,” I say, “but the Mokshi has always been where I get my answers.”

  “One hour,” Casamir says. She shuts the hangar door behind her and goes up to the observation room.

  Jayd limps toward one of the vehicles. I noticed on the way here that something had happened to her leg.

  “What have you done?” I ask.

  She’s breathing hard and clutching at her belly. “I’ve done everything we promised,” she says. “You clearly don’t remember yet, but you will. You must. On the Mokshi. I’m sure. I’m so sure you’ll remember.”

  “It won’t let us in,” I say.

  “It will let you in,” she says. “It always does, eventually, because you remember how to disarm it. But now you even have . . .” She trails off into a deep breath, winces. “You have the arm.”

  “The arm and the world,” I say. “You have the world, don’t you?”

  She nods. “Trust me one last time, Zan. Just one last time. You remember this was our plan?”

  “I remember we agreed to bring the arm and the world to the Mokshi,” I say.

  “Good,” she says. Her tone is lighter, relieved. “Good, yes, that’s something.”

  She gestures me toward the table where the suits and the vehicle guts are. She sprays on a suit. I do too. Then she waves me over to one of the vehicles and tells me to be still. She programs the release sequence, using a tangle of lights near the door. I look up at the observation window and see Casamir up there, hefting her weapon and peering at us. Will she be brave enough to come after me, really, once she sees the blackness of open space? She didn’t believe a single word of this a rotation ago. I worry it will test her sanity.

  Jayd slips onto the vehicle behind me. I feel the heat of her, and the pulsing thing inside of her. I flex my arm. The lights above us move as the skin of the world thins.

  I start the vehicle, and we pop free of Katazyrna.

  I have been underground so long that the sight of the Legion takes my breath away. The great orb of the artificial sun is shuttering open, and it spills across my vision like a promise of rebirth. Behind me, Jayd is tense. I am too. I wonder at both of our motives.

  I pilot toward the Mokshi, and in my bones I know this route so well that it feels like the most natural thing in the world. There are dead vehicles circling Katazyrna, and abandoned bodies that no one has bothered to collect and recycle. When I gaze back at Katazyrna, I see that half the world’s tentacles are now dead and withered, tucked close to the rotten black skin of the world. How long have I been gone?

  I want to say something to Jayd, but we have no way to communicate in our suits except by sign language, and what I have to say is far too long and complex for that while I’m piloting a vehicle.

  As we near the Mokshi, I see its defenses light up, the same blue and green auroras I saw the last time I tried to take it. This time, Jayd taps my iron arm and points to the Mokshi.

  I raise the arm and make a fist.

  The aurora dissipates.

  I stare into my upraised hand and marvel at it. Once again, I am ushering my enemy into the Mokshi. I am inviting her and her weapons and her motives, and I understand even less of them this time than I did the last.

  I fly us straight toward the hole in the world, and though Jayd points the way as we sink below the skin of the ship, I pilot my way there of my own volition, like taking a long journey home.

  We part layer upon layer. I expect to see bodies, but there are none this deep into the world. Of course not. They we
re all recycled by Jayd. How did I forgive her? How? I don’t trust who I used to be any more than I trust Jayd. There’s dripping ichor from the ruined levels, much of it frozen and blistered, peeling back.

  I bring the vehicle to rest in a broken hangar that contains the remnants of another sort of vehicle. These have two eyes and great bulbous bodies, not the wedged heads of the ones from the Katazyrna. We land and Jayd gestures me toward the sealed door.

  I reach out my iron arm, close my fist, and the door opens. We step inside. The door closes. I look for the controls to pressurize the space, but Jayd is already ahead of me, her fingers moving over another complicated light display.

  A brilliant yellow light suffuses the room. I squint. The room pressurizes. The inner door opens.

  Jayd motions me forward.

  I step into a long hall. Lights blink intermittently. Much of the corridor looks rotted out. I follow Jayd’s lead and don’t take off my suit. It’s too unstable here.

  We climb through a set of half-open doors, then down another corridor. The world here is much worse off than the Katazyrna. The flesh has peeled back from all the walls to reveal rusted-out metal, twisted wiring, shriveled tendons. What really makes up the core of every world? Metal skeletons? Fashioned by whom? The gods? Did a god truly come all the way out here and shit out the Legion itself and fly on across the universe, or have we been here all along?

  Finally, we come to the bottom of a great stairwell. I know this stairwell. At the top of the steps is a great domed structure. It reminds me of the temple where Rasida and Jayd were joined. I don’t know why I have put so much faith in coming here. Maybe because it’s my only hope of finding out what’s happened. But I can’t think of anyone or anything I would trust to tell me the truth of the twisted story that got us to this place.

  We climb. There’s a spongy growth at the center of the door. I press the warm center of my iron arm to it, and the door opens. Yellow lights slowly brighten, giving my eyes time to adjust.

  We are in a massive room lined in hexagonal apertures that give us a clear view of the entire Legion. It doesn’t even look like the room has a floor, but Jayd walks across it, and it holds her. I stare at the worlds below us as I walk after her. There’s a great round console at the center of the room. Jayd leans hard against it. She sets her weapon down and slides to the floor. She presses the bit on her suit to release it, and it falls off her. Jayd is breathing hard. She hisses and clutches at her belly again.

  “Jayd—” I begin, but she shakes her head and points to the console.

  There’s a divot at its center, and bundles of light appear all around the circumference. On the panel in front of me are two small containers. They grow from the console, and the liquid in them seems to have bubbled up from inside. I pick one up and pour out what’s inside, set it back down. It fills again.

  One is full of clear liquid. The other is full of purple liquid. I have a memory of these spongy containers, of drinking them again and again.

  I pull the sphere from my pocket and set it into the divot at the center of the console. Natural as breathing.

  There is a feeling of static in the air; the console trembles. Light escapes the sphere and dances at the center of the console. The light shifts and weaves itself into an image of my own face and body. The image looms above me, twice as large as life. I look much younger.

  “If you’re here again,” the image says, “and you don’t have the world and the arm, you need to start again.” It gestures at the console below me. “I’m sorry you don’t remember much of anything, but that was necessary.”

  “Necessary?” she mutters. “Did you do this to yourself?”

  “You have likely met Jayd Katazyrna,” my image says. “She is your greatest love and your greatest enemy. The Mokshi, this ship, is your salvation, and the salvation of those you take with you. You’ve designed this ship to pilot itself out of the Legion. It was originally stationed at the very core of the Legion, where worlds are much more stable. You’ve programmed a destination into it that was buried in its redundant systems. Don’t try to make sense of that now; it will come to you. What you need to know is that your first attempt failed. The ship failed here on the Outer Rim, and the Bhavajas and Katazyrnas attacked you for scrap.”

  “It was for more than that,” Jayd says. She lies with her head against the console behind her, eyes glassy. “Anat wanted everything.”

  “You admired Jayd’s fighting. You thought you had convinced her of your purpose. But she stole your arm and blew out the core of the world, ejecting your people into the vacuum and recycling them on Katazyrna.”

  I stare at Jayd. She looks away, says, “I thought you mad. I didn’t know. . . . I didn’t understand, until later, until I realized Katazyrna was dying too.”

  “I should have killed you,” I say.

  “You should have,” she says. “But you didn’t know, not until—”

  “Until Anat had me recycled,” I say, “and told me who it really was who did it.”

  She nods.

  “You made an error,” my former self says, “the error you always make. Every woman has her weaknesses. For some, it is drink. Others, abject gluttony. I once knew a woman who could not resist a bet. My weakness was always my heart. I could not sacrifice someone I loved. Things, certainly. But to lose something I loved cut me too closely. It was agony to recover. Love would destroy me as completely as any army. And I fell in love with Jayd Katazyrna.”

  Jayd closes her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says, and I’m not sure if she’s saying it to me or the past version of me. Maybe both.

  “She stole our arm, it’s true,” the ghost continues. “She didn’t believe us. She destroyed the Mokshi, blew it all apart, and let me think it was Lord Katazyrna who did it all and captured Jayd and brought her back. It was a story only a fool in love would believe, or a fool who had never met Anat Katazyrna. Lord Katazyrna would never, ever come to retrieve any of her children. I know it now, but I didn’t then. And when Jayd came back here, saying she was convinced now that the Legion was dying, I believed her. I know I’m a softhearted fool, but it got us this far. I let her in again, and we came up with a plan that would make all the betrayal worth it. I promise you.”

  “But we had to get the arm back,” I say to Jayd, “and the world from the Bhavajas. Why was I stupid enough to take you back?”

  Jayd winces and clutches at her belly again. The contractions are coming closer together. I stare up at my image, willing it to hurry, knowing I have no control over the past as it unfurls.

  “Jayd took me back to Anat and said I was just another of her prisoners,” my image says. “Anat didn’t like me. But that wasn’t the worst of it, no. No, it was learning that it was Jayd, not Anat, who stole my arm and recycled my people, that destroyed me. It made it impossible to work with her once I knew that. I was recycled, and then . . . How do you survive after that? Maybe you could. But I could not.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jayd says, and her voice is thin. “I had to give you up to go on. No one survives being recycled.”

  “The plan had to proceed,” my image says, “but I could not live with Jayd’s betrayal.” And at this, the woman with my face laughs. “You’ll sit here brooding for cycles and cycles with a broken heart. A broken heart that will slay you as surely as any army. You don’t want that. We have done that. It won’t save the Legion. So . . . make your choice.”

  The image fades. I’m left in the dim with all the answers it appears I’m going to get, and a terrible choice, and Jayd wheezing beside me.

  “I never knew what happened when you went here,” Jayd says, and her face crumples in pain and sorrow. “I didn’t know you forgot me on purpose.”

  “You let me be recycled,” I say. “You let me come here again and again.”

  “We had to save the Legion.”

  “At the expense of my sanity?” I say. “Was the love false too, like she said? Was this really your game all along, to save the
world, no matter who you would destroy? No matter how many worlds? You said I was some great general, a warmonger, but you’re the cold one, Jayd. Colder than I ever was.”

  “It’s why it had to be me,” she says. “Don’t you see that? I could have traded you to the Bhavajas, you and your childbearing womb. But I didn’t. Because I knew you couldn’t do what needed to be done. You can fight, yes, but you are too softhearted to endure the long game. You have no idea what I had to do with Rasida to get here. You wouldn’t have been able to manipulate her like I did. You would have murdered her again and again, or she would have found you out and recycled you.”

  “I sacrificed my child,” I say. My first memory. The child. The womb.

  “What is a child,” Jayd says, “but potential? And that’s what you traded it for. The potential to free the Mokshi.”

  I stare hard at the fluid in the containers. Do I want to remember? Do I want to heap more heartbreak over Jayd onto my existing heartbreak? When I close my eyes and think of love, it’s not Jayd in my mind now but Das Muni and Casamir and Arankadash. Jayd is fear. They are love. Do I want to exchange all of that for full knowledge of the past instead of what some old version of myself thought I should know?

  As I consider my options, a second image springs up from the console.

  The woman in this one is me, but not the calm, considerate one I saw before. In this one, I recognize her eyes. The haunted look. The fear.

  She bows over me. She is already fairly looming, so the effect is dramatic. It’s as if she’s trying to see through time. She wears a tattered garment ripped through by the claws of some animal, perhaps. Her skin is red and raw in the seams of it. Half her head is scorched clean of hair.

  “You don’t want your memory back,” she says. “I don’t know how many times we’ve done this already, but don’t get your memory back. You don’t want to know what you were.” She looks at something outside the frame. Shakes her head. “We are the fist of the War God. We are the inheritors of the worlds. We will show ourselves worthy.”