The unguent begins to do its work. I feel my mouth and tongue again. The dead cellular tissue inside my mouth is rapidly sloughing away, choking me with pasty mucus. I gag.
“Don’t vomit,” Sabita says. “Give it another moment.”
But I spit it all out anyway—the unguent and the dead cells from my mouth and tongue. I wipe at my face, and the skin around my lips flakes away.
“Jayd,” I say.
“Jayd is with the Lord of Katazyrna,” Sabita says.
“Have to tell her about the Bhavajas.”
“She knows, Zan.”
The flickering blue lights fade, replaced with the soft green glow. Is the blue an emergency indicator of some kind? I stare at the walls, bewildered. “I don’t understand,” I say. “If she knows Bhavajas are attacking us, why isn’t she doing anything?”
Sabita touches my hand, briefly, as if some of the bitter cold from between the worlds still lingers on my skin.
“Your mother won’t permit any retaliation against the Bhavajas,” Sabita says. “The ones attacking us now probably don’t know yet.”
“Know what? That squad I just saw heading out, though—”
“Your mother sent those ones out to the Mokshi, to confirm your . . . failure. They weren’t sent out for the raiders.”
I hear the soft, irregular squelching of an approaching party.
“But—”
“So, you live. You die. You live again,” Gavatra says. She holds a shimmering purple sheath of material that ripples as if alive.
I stand and step into the sheath. It conforms easily to my body. I wipe my hands against the material. It seems to be made of mites. They tickle my skin. I realize they are eating the remnants of the melted spray-on suit.
Gavatra spares a look at Sabita. “Back to the infirmary with you,” she says.
“I’ve brought her back every time,” Sabita says, “from far worse, and that is the thanks you give me?”
“We have other tissue technicians,” Gavatra says.
“Where’s Jayd?” I ask.
“Oh, she is coming up after me,” Gavatra says. “She and your mother.” I see half a dozen women dressed as Gavatra slide in from the umbilicus farther down the corridor.
“What’s all this?” I ask.
“A precaution, only,” Gavatra says.
Sabita steps nimbly past me, gaze lowered, and I feel a confrontation coming. I hold my ground. Sabita slips away just as the group of women parts and I see a stout, grim-faced woman striding toward me at the center of them. She is older and squatter than the others, but what really sets her apart is her great metal arm. The underside glows slightly green, and I wonder if it’s hot to the touch. What does a woman do with an arm like that? Just behind her is Jayd; Jayd’s expression is hard to make out from this distance in the low light, but she’s moving fast after the woman with the iron arm.
This woman must be Anat, because only a woman styling herself a Lord would walk as confidently as she does while barely reaching my shoulder. I suspect the metal arm helps her ego enormously. The arm is the most metal I’ve seen here, and it’s clearly well taken care of—it fairly gleams in the bluish light.
It’s not until she’s nearly on top of me, though, that I realize she is tougher than her height would have me believe.
She grabs me by the ear, which is far more painful that I would have thought, and drags me across the floor. I’m so shocked, I yelp. When I grab her hands, she releases me. She has pulled me from the open corridor into a vestibule. The six beefy women of her security team stand between us and the corridor, effectively blocking me from Jayd and anyone else passing in the hall. The security team crosses their arms and puts their backs to me and Anat. They are a wall of flesh, and I lie in their shadow.
“How close did you get?” Anat says.
“To the lip of the crater,” I say, annoyed at the whole exchange, but somehow even more put off by the fact that she doesn’t introduce herself. But of course she already knows me. She’s likely met me many times. “The Bhavajas took out my army. They took out more than the defenses did.”
“Blood-smeared Bhavajas,” she says. “You were close, though. Why do you keep failing? Why are you defective?”
“We’re fighting the wrong enemy,” I say. “If the Bhavajas want that world, too, you need to defeat them first.”
“Only a fool fights a war on two fronts,” Anat says.
“That’s effectively what they have you doing,” I say, “whether you want to or not. It’s why you’re losing.”
“I never lose. You lost.”
Everyone here is insane, I think, but that’s probably best kept to myself right now. “Take the army out there yourself, then,” I say instead, and that’s probably not going to go over well either.
Anat swings her iron arm at me.
I catch it and hold it, surprised at my own strength. The metal is warm and comforting. The green bits of skin that glow through the metal mesh give off a surprising amount of heat. I meet Anat’s gaze, and in that moment we are mortal enemies, two women locked in orbit around one another. She knows her ultimate goal, but I don’t know mine yet. Right now all I want is to let her know I am not some animal that will sit here and take her fist. When she gazes back, it is with the blazing maniacal eyes of a prophet or a seer, a woman who believes with absolute certainty that she is the chosen of a god.
She wrests her iron arm from my grip. “We are done dancing,” she says. She pushes past her security people.
I open my arms for Jayd, but Jayd does not come to me. She runs after Anat. So I scramble up and follow Jayd, and this time, the security women don’t bother to hold me back.
“I have made a bargain,” Anat says to Jayd.
But just as I catch up to them, the security women decide to pull me back after all. I yell.
Jayd looks back once. Anat says something to her, and amid the stir of women, I cannot hear it, but I see something in Jayd’s face change. At first I think it’s fear, but as she turns away from Anat, I realize it is triumph.
“Come away!” Sabita’s voice. She has come back. She snatches at me from behind.
“Get her out of here,” a security woman says. “She’s disturbing the Lord of the Legion.”
“Quickly,” Sabita says, and though I yearn for Jayd, Jayd has already disappeared after Anat, and their path is swallowed by the security women.
Sabita and I are left behind in the dim corridor. She is trembling.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Don’t trust Jayd,” Sabita says. “I’m sworn to help you achieve what you need to. I will keep her safe for you as you asked, but—”
“What are you talking about?” I say.
“You didn’t tell me this time,” she says, “another time. The first time. Before you lost your memory.”
“If you know who I am—”
“Only Jayd knows that,” Sabita says. “You never even told me that. Whatever is between you and her has survived all of her betrayals. I don’t pretend to understand it, but you need to listen, because she will fill your head with lies. Stay true to your purpose. I was supposed to tell you that, every time. Your purpose. Not Jayd’s.”
“But I didn’t tell you my purpose?”
She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. It frustrated me as much then as it does you now. I think you suspected that would be enough to . . . trigger a memory of some kind?”
“When did I get here, Sabita?”
“Several rotations ago,” she says.
“And I’m not a Katazyrna.”
“Hush,” she says. “It’s not safe to speak here. Let’s go back to your rooms.”
She takes my hand in hers, and leads me farther from Jayd and her mad mother.
“AT THE HEART OF EVERY SHIP IS A WITCH. SHE IS THE ONLY ONE OF US WHO REMEMBERS EVERYTHING. AND IT’S THE KNOWING THAT HAS DRIVEN THEM ALL MAD.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
6
> JAYD
A bargain?” I say. Zan is yelling from the corridor, many paces behind my mother and me, but this is far more important. I stick close to Anat as she marches back to the umbilicus to head down to the second level. “With who?” My heart flutters.
“The Bhavajas.”
I skip a step, and nearly stumble. “The Bhavajas? After all this time?”
“They offered peace before that last run. I told them I’d think about it. Seems they wanted to push me again and remind me of what meddlesome insects they are.”
“What are their terms?” I ask.
Anat rounds on me. “You know what they want, Jayd. The same thing every world wants. They already have the ability to make new worlds. But I’ve always had many daughters who could do things theirs couldn’t. They’ve raided six worlds to get what you carry. They think adding a new sort of woman and her offspring to Bhavaja can save them.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“Wouldn’t I?” She puts her hands on my shoulders. Grips me hard with her iron hand. “You will be the mother of worlds,” she says. “The Bhavajas have asked for you to marry their general, Jayd. You know Rasida Bhavaja. And I have given my consent. It is the best decision for the Legion.”
I have to turn away then. I choke on a cry, but it is not the cry she expects. It is not the cry she has been trying to wheedle out of me all along, the cry she is hoping for.
I turn away so she cannot see that it is a cry of relief. I turn away so she cannot see me smile.
* * *
I watch Anat take the umbilicus down to the second level along with her security team. It’s the security team that’s made it so difficult for Zan and me to overwhelm Anat, after all these cycles. To be fair, the arm makes her deadlier too, and the arm was my fault. For all her swagger, she is indeed a clever, brutish woman, and she has confounded our plans many times But not this time.
I steady my breath and my resolve. I have been pushing Anat toward this final solution with the Bhavajas for so long that I don’t know what to do with myself now that it is decided. The Bhavajas need a marriage to a woman like me. They need the potential I carry. And I need to get off the ship so I can steal what they have and we don’t. Everything depends on me getting off this ship. Zan can handle Anat from here.
It has taken longer than Zan and I anticipated, to twist Anat into gifting me to Rasida, and we have sacrificed more than either of us expected, but we have convinced Anat in the only way she can be convinced—through trickery and obfuscation. Yet it’s a lonely victory. Zan is the only person I can tell about this change in our fortunes, but she will remember none of its significance.
I pick my way back where I came from, but Zan is no longer in the corridor. I suspect she went back to her room. I’ll have to tell her this news later, even if it means nothing to her. The only living things, then, that will understand and appreciate my victory are the witches. Even if they are mad now, they’ll know I beat them. Zan and I are doing the impossible. We are going to save the Legion.
I go down two levels and stop by the alcohol distillery and speak with two bottom-world brew masters. I ask where the witches are—they often drink too much—and the brew masters tell me to try the port observatory near the hangar.
I walk back up to the first level, traveling the great umbilicus that connects the levels of the world, and—wiping the mucus from my skin—I stride into the observatory overlooking the hangar.
A tangled figure crouches beneath one of the massive, misty workstations. Blue and red lights crackle from the workstation’s surface in patterns whose meanings have long since been lost to us. Only the witches seem to make some sense of them; Anat once told me, in one of her drunken reveries, that even her own grandmother thought the lights just a pretty decoration.
On first look, the mash-up of arms and legs and heads beneath the console appears to be several people, but I know better. The witches rise from beneath the console as a single torso on two thick, meaty legs. Two vestigial legs hang off the back of them. This iteration has six arms, only four of them working. The smallest set hangs off the front of the torso, boneless as a vestigial tail.
They see me and begin babbling and juddering.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” I say. “I wanted to tell you it worked. Despite you. It worked.”
Their body and heads shake. Then they still. The three mouths gabble at me for a moment in a language I don’t understand, until the far right head hits upon the right words.
“There is an anomaly in here,” it says. “You’ve brought an anomaly from outside the world, and it is contaminating this space. You will destroy the balance of the ship’s systems. You will destroy the Legion.”
“We can’t continue as we are,” I say. “We’re dying. You know that better than we do, yet you stick to that same sorry line. The worlds that stopped importing new flesh died out long ago. We are all that’s left, but we’ve only postponed the inevitable.”
“You are the embodiment of all evil,” the center head says, and the three of them chatter together, clicking and hissing in some bottom-world language that I don’t know.
“New world,” the right says. “The world is too old and must be regenerated, but you cannot see it, can you? Cannot understand your place.”
“We all have a purpose,” left says. The witches lurch toward me, and I flinch. The hands flap at me, reaching for my stomach.
“Not yours!” they shriek.
I step back. “It’s not up to you anymore,” I say. “You’ve failed to preserve the Legion. We must do what you could not. Whoever put you in charge here is long dead, and you’re too mad to be of any help.”
The heads cackle. “Falling apart,” they say, not quite in unison, and they laugh again, the mad little things.
“We have given you all such purpose,” right says. “You are breaking the balance. Treachery and spite. We are here to protect and preserve—”
“You’re preserving death. We won’t be slaves anymore.”
“You’re a villain,” right says, and the witches crouch beneath the console again, their four working arms poking at the guts of it. This may be the sanest thing they have ever said.
Sometimes, they try to repair things, but it doesn’t usually work. Like the Legion, the witches have outlived their usefulness. We are stuck inside a closed system that’s slowly coming undone. Even they know it; they just can’t bear to admit it.
“We’ll be free of you,” I say.
The left head turns while the others remain fixed on their work. “The passengers must pay their way.”
“Pay their way!” the other two heads say, and then the right head, too, turns back under the console, and they ignore me again.
I was wrong to come to them. They hardly remember more than Zan does now. We are all just so much meat to Anat, even the witches.
I won’t be meat anymore.
I walk up to the observation window, the one overlooking the hangar, and gaze at the rows and rows of vehicles hooked into the spongy floor of the ship, gurgling contentedly. There are just four rows of vehicles, though the hangar stretches back and back for over a thousand paces. Heaps of spare parts take up a few areas, but the rest of the hangar is an emptiness, a boneyard for a once-great army, or perhaps . . . something else.
I dream of a world where this hangar is used for some other purpose, when we would ride vehicles out into the blackness between the worlds to help one another, to form alliances, to repair worlds together, instead of what we’ve become: this broken remnant of a once-great Legion.
I look out at the blackness sometimes, when I am allowed to go topside to inspect the cancer or collect detritus pulled in by the world’s tentacles, and I try to imagine the Legion as it might have been in the beginning. One can see the empty spaces where other worlds used to be, the broken lines in their ranks. Anat tells me and my sisters stories of dead and dying worlds she remembers from her own youth, or stories of worlds she has k
nown, and the sheer scope of that, of the loss, is sometimes staggering.
The Legion is dying. We will die with it if we don’t act.
Anat thinks the solution lies in the Mokshi. She believes she can control it and use it to wage war on the rest of the worlds of the Legion. It’s the only world that has ever clearly been able to leave its orbit, and though Anat waged a war on the Mokshi, too, when it first arrived, she was never able to board it. Not like Zan could.
Not like I could.
Maybe Anat thinks she will put it to better use than the Bhavajas, who will no doubt use it for salvage as they do every other world. But even Anat’s vision is myopic. She cannot see past the Legion. Even so, she has been willing to sacrifice her daughters to achieve her ambition.
Zan and I are willing to sacrifice much more.
“IT’S A SIMPLE EXCHANGE OF GENETIC MATERIAL: MY DAUGHTER FOR YOURS. BUT THOSE EARLY EXCHANGES SIGNALED THE BEGINNING OF THE END. WHEN THE WORLDS WERE NO LONGER ABLE TO BE SELF-SUSTAINING, IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME UNTIL OUR EXTINCTION.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
7
ZAN
Sabita takes me back to my quarters to rest. “You should know that I will do what I can to help you,” she whispers, as if fearing the walls themselves can hear her.
“Unless you can give me back my memory,” I say, “or tell me how to board the Mokshi, there’s no useful help you can offer me. Why is it Jayd tries to keep me away from everyone else?”
“You’re kept cloistered while you’re in recovery,” Sabita says. “Some of that is for your protection, and the protection of others. Sometimes, when you come back, you have very violent fits. Perhaps that’s to do with the means through which you lose your memory. I don’t know. But I have cared for you in recovery. Many times.”
“This is a fool’s game,” I mutter.
“It’s coming back, isn’t it? You should have had some memories resurface by now.”
“How do you know that?”
“We have done this many times,” she says again. A cry comes from the corridor. “I must go,” she says.
The Stars Are Legion Page 5
