Das Muni slumps in a corner.
I search the room, trying to get a better handle on it. There are no openings. One of the spidery water bulbs is affixed to a pillar at the far corner of the room, giving out heat and light. I contemplate breaking it open just to drink the water. If it’s really water.
Testing the various growths and protrusions from the wall turns up a water sluice, which spills water into a shallow, crescent-shaped bowl against the far wall. I drink my fill, disrobe, and wash. The water is cold, but the room is warm, and the floor eats the damp as I pour it over my neck and shoulders.
“You thirsty?” I ask Das Muni. As I turn, I see she has been watching me wash. She lowers her gaze. Nods.
I towel myself off with one of the blankets. It’s made of plant fibers. I still haven’t seen any plants. I rinse off my suit, which dries quickly and doesn’t soak up muck. When I dress now, the only things that still stink are my hair and Das Muni, but I can deal with that.
I pull at the blanket and rip off a long length of it. I twist it in my hands and test its strength. I remember what I did to those tongueless women. I am capable of great violence if pushed. Casamir and her people will soon see it.
Das Muni drinks from the basin and washes her face. Then we both sit and wait. I lie back on the bench, contemplating the play of the light on the fleshy ceiling. I play with the length of blanket, imagining wringing Casamir’s throat with it. I think this idea should make me happy, but it doesn’t. I want to believe the world is better than it is.
The door opens some time later. It’s not Casamir but the same two guards we saw at the door to the engineering room. “The conclave will see you now,” the tallest one says.
“Where’s Casamir?” I ask, stuffing my improvised garrote into my pocket.
“She’s there already,” her shorter, thinner companion says. She picks at her teeth.
I keep my hands out of my pockets as we’re led back out into the engineering room, which is now eerily empty. They take us up a set of tall, broad steps that lead into a massive theater. All of the engineers are here, sitting in the broad half-circle of the amphitheater. Six women reside at a broad table on the stage below. Casamir stands in front of them, gazing back at us as we enter. Her face is more serious than I’ve yet seen it. She looks even more frightened than when I threatened her in the recycling pits, but when I catch her eye, she gives a broad grin.
Our guards hustle us down the steps of the amphitheater and tell us to halt beside Casamir. Now I put my hand in my pocket, the one with the garrote, and I wait.
“Casamir tells us you speak Handavi,” a plump, wizened woman says from the center of the table. Her hair is arranged in a spiky crown. She wears a red woven tunic and blue apron. Her hands are stained in grease.
“If that’s what you call what we’re speaking, then yes,” I say.
Das Muni grumbles something.
“And you say you come from the top of the world,” the woman says.
“I do,” I say. “There is a war above, on the surface of the world, between us and another world like ours. It’s between the Bhavajas and the Katazyrnas. My sisters and I were recycled.”
There’s a murmur in the crowd behind me.
A skinny woman, closer to my age, points a bony finger at me and snorts. “This is clearly a case of delusion,” she says.
“There are other levels,” Casamir says. “We have seen many of them and met many different kinds of people. It may not be . . . so incredible. Perhaps this is just how her broken mind put together what happened to her.”
“None like she states,” the older woman says.
I finger the garrote and consider taking Casamir hostage and fighting my way out. It will get messy. I try a different tack. “You’re traders,” I say. “If you help me get back to my own level, I can open up a new trade route for you. We have all sorts of wonders,” I say. “Clothing that you can spray on, durable, like mine.” I smooth a hand over my sleeve. “We have sentient vehicles”—well, they won’t be going out into the vacuum, will they—“that can help you haul things. We have different kinds of foods and materials.” From the looks on their faces, they still aren’t convinced. I reach. “We have many different kinds of metals,” I lie, because the most metal I’ve ever seen on the first level was on Anat’s arm. “In browns and golds and grays. You can build a great many things with what we have to offer.”
That rouses the crowd. The women at the table confer with one another in their own language. The plump older woman leans forward. “And if you are mad?”
“If I’m just some mad person, then what have you lost in helping me?” I say. “Casamir is precocious. She is a thrill-seeker, trouble. What do you lose by letting her guide us if that is what you want? You’ll keep her busy and out of your hair. You lose nothing.”
Casamir raises her brows at me, but says nothing.
“How will we bind her to her word?” the skinny woman says. “If you are telling the truth, and you arrive back to this . . . level of yours, then what’s to keep you bound to your word?”
I shrug. “You’ll have to trust me.”
She snorts. “Trust? No. I say we bind her blood.”
More murmurs from the crowd. I look at Casamir.
“I’m not sure that’s necessary,” Casamir says.
“What is that?” I say.
“They cut out a piece of your flesh,” Casamir says, “and . . . make stuff out of it.”
“Like what?” I ask.
Casamir shakes her head. “You don’t want to know.”
“Well, I won’t have to,” I say. “I’ll keep my promise. If you can get me to the surface, I’m happy to trade with your people. But we need to get there.” I pause and meet the gaze of every woman on the stage. “Safely.”
They confer again. The crowd, too, shifts to low conversation, and I try to gauge the mood. Casamir doesn’t look at me. I tighten my grip on the garrote.
Das Muni takes my arm. “Not yet,” she says. “Not yet.”
We wait. I take a long look at the ceiling and glance back at our escape route up the amphitheater. Casamir may not be the best hostage to take. I’ll need one of the elders, the council. The skinny one, preferably. That will feel most satisfying. I play it out. Six steps to the table. The garrote, the threat, the hustling up the stairs . . . The metal door will be a problem, but if they care enough about this little council . . .
“We agree to your terms,” the skinny woman says.
I startle out of my plan, a little shocked.
Casamir grins. Raises a fist. “Oh, you will not regret this,” she says. “My first mission!”
“Let’s hope it’s not your last,” says the plump woman. “Take her to the butchers to harvest her flesh. You are permitted the standard supplies. Go.”
Leaving the amphitheater is a bit of a haze. I’m still half-stuck in the other reality, the one where I have to fight my way out. Casamir takes me to an efficient, clinical little room with a woman and a large bone scalpel.
“Where do you want me to take it from?” she asks, and I honestly have no idea. I stare at the heft of my body and wonder just how much flesh I have to spare. Who wants to sacrifice the bulk that gives them strength and presence?
“My thigh?” I say, and before I have time to reconsider, she’s sliced fast and deep, two cuts.
I yell, and two more women come in and restrain me while she carves out a fist-sized lump of flesh from my thigh and plops it into a clear container.
She stuffs the wound full of a sweet-smelling compress that’s clearly crawling with worms or parasites, and tells me to hold still as she wraps my wounded thigh. I curse because she’s cut my good leg. Why didn’t she go for the other one?
The compress stifles the pain, though, enough for me to stand and yell at Casamir, “What is that for? What’s the point of that?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Casamir says. “You’re keeping your promise, right? So, it’s not impor
tant.”
I want to get out of here as quickly as possible now, fearful that the council will change their mind. Casamir wants to linger and chatter with friends about the trial, because really, that’s what it is, but I hound her onward. We collect supplies from a woman in the engineering room. I’m starving, weak with hunger, but I don’t even want to stop to eat.
I limp beside Casamir as we push back out across the big traders’ hall, heading back for the main entrance while people glide above us in their balloon baskets.
“I need to say good-bye to my family,” Casamir says. “Just a moment! I’ll only be a moment!” Casamir bounds for the stairs.
I sigh and wait with Das Muni, trying to stay out of the way of the women passing by us. Their stares are more open now. A few try to ask me something, but it’s in their language, and I just shake my head and frown.
Das Muni leans into me. “We should just go,” she says. “Let’s not wait for Casamir.”
“Stop that,” I say. “That conversation is over. Casamir knows this area better than we do.”
“You have given them flesh,” she says. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“The alternative is killing all of them. Would that have been better?”
“Yes,” Das Muni says. She leans her head against me.
Casamir returns, more somber now.
I nearly ask her how things went with her family but decide I don’t care to know. We aren’t going to travel long together, just to the next level. I’ll need to find more help after that. Best not to get attached.
But Casamir volunteers the information, as Casamir seems to volunteer everything I don’t want to know. “They think me foolish,” she says, “but that’s no surprise. They think I’m reaching too high, but I’m here to be an engineer, not some recycler. Engineers must go on missions.”
“Then let’s do that,” I say, and I take her arm and hustle her to the door because both my legs are throbbing now, and I’m not sure how much longer I can take being in this crowded place that now owns a piece of my flesh.
We exit the compound and step back into the relative dim of the outer corridor. I blink as my eyes adjust. Moths descend, covering my arms and hair. I brush them away.
“Lead the way, engineer,” I say, and that brings a smile from Casamir.
“I will indeed,” she says, and forges ahead.
I’ll need to eat soon, but not yet, not until we put a lot of distance behind us.
“What’s between us and the next level?” I ask as we trudge along. Das Muni trails far behind.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Casamir says. She unrolls something from her bag. It’s a map written on human skin.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I say.
“Well, I know what the map says.”
I grab her shoulder. We halt. “Are you telling me you’ve never been to another level?”
She holds up the map. “It’s all fine! I have the traders’ maps.” She squints at it. “According to this, there are some pits, a mountain range, some monster herds, and a couple tribes of mutants. It will be fine! A fine adventure!”
“You’re joking,” I say.
She shows her teeth. “Fine!” she says, and continues on her way.
I stare after her, shocked, long enough for Das Muni to catch up with me. As Das Muni passes me, she sighs and says, “I told you so.”
“I LEARNED DECEPTION FROM MY MOTHER, BUT IT WAS THE WORLD THAT TAUGHT ME THE NECESSITY OF DECEPTION FOR SURVIVAL. WHEN THE OTHER WORLDS CAME FOR THE MOKSHI, I WAS PREPARED FOR THE FIGHT.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
20
JAYD
I always suspect a trap, because I have been plotting traps for my own family my entire life. Nashatra seems sincere, but I put her off. I plead ignorance of such terrible schemes and say that I love Rasida. She clearly doesn’t believe me, but if this is some trick she’s playing on me, I’m not going to walk right into it.
Instead, I go back to my rooms and consider what I know. The people here seem to love Rasida, even if her family doesn’t. If they are her real family. And of course, I haven’t considered what family means here, and how it differs from Katazyrna. Anat raised us, but she did not birth us. She chose us from the children of the women who could bear them. I was raised with Nhim and Neith and Maibe and a dozen others, now dead. Suld and Prisha were much older than me, raised with another group, then Anka and Aiju, who were half a dozen rotations younger than me. The numbers of daughters in each age group were fewer each time. Anat liked to think that raising armies was easy, but the more she did it, the deeper into the world and across the Legion she had to go to get them, and the stranger and less malleable to her whims they were. We had child-bearers on Katazyrna several rotations before Zan joined us, but most have died out. I often suspect that was Anat’s whim more than the world’s, because as long as she had child-bearers who were native to Katazyrna, she always had a rival for power.
When I am taken to dinners with Rasida, I spend a great deal of time analyzing the corridors, the steps, the great peeling hunks of the walls that reveal shiny metal beneath. As the world rotted around them, the Bhavajas had no choice but to mix with all the levels. Anyone could be a Bhavaja here. Rasida was not as hierarchical as Anat. Blood was blood. Perhaps that’s why it was so easy for her to proclaim that I was Bhavaja now and to have some of her people, at least, accept that.
As my pregnancy proceeds, Rasida seems to grow more distant. I try affection, though it pains me to attempt it, and she turns me away. This is something Zan could never pretend at, this affection. But I am a great pretender, sometimes so good at it that I convince myself that what I pretend is what is truly real.
“You must want me,” she says. “I don’t desire a thing which has no love for me. It’s easy to force affection. Far more difficult to entice it.”
“I do love you,” I say, but even to my own ears, I am unconvincing.
“You don’t,” she says. She pulls my hands from her throat, and I think about how easy it would be to turn my caress into a strangle. Perhaps that’s what she’s thinking, too.
We are having dinner in her rooms again. The wardrobe is open; the green glow of the iron arm beckons to me from the darkness. I go back to my seat. Rasida has poured wine, but I haven’t had any since the night of my joining, when I became too sick or drugged to remember anything.
“You don’t want me anymore?” I say. “You only want the thing in my belly?”
“I can have anyone I want,” Rasida says. “I can have the whole Legion, can’t I? They bow and prostrate themselves; they tear off their clothes and beg for my favors. But that is not wanting.”
“We fucked here in this room,” I say, “under false pretenses.” I do not make my hands into fists. I eat instead, but it’s painful to pretend at decorum. I try to imagine Zan doing this without severing Rasida’s head, and fail. Zan has a temper. I do too, but I have become far better at moderating it than Zan. I have the patience she does not. Which is why I’m here and she isn’t.
“Whose false pretenses, though?” Rasida says. “I’ve told you, I never lied to you. The truce was never with you. It was with Anat. I never told you I wouldn’t take the Legion.”
“You can’t say you love someone and then murder their family,” I say. I sip my drink, my expression perfectly blank. I admire my own calm. I’m not even drunk.
“Why not?” she says, and her tone is not mocking. It sounds like a genuine question. “You didn’t love your family. You loved belonging, perhaps, to something greater than yourself. But you hated Anat. You’ve hated her since you were a child.”
“Every daughter despises her mother,” I say.
“I love my mother very much,” Rasida says. “She knows her place here. She performs her function well.”
“I don’t know why,” I say. “You treat your family the way Anat treated me.”
Rasida jerks out of her seat.
I start and scramble back. I’m moving more slowly than I’d like; my body is changing with the pregnancy, ungainly and sluggish.
But Rasida does not hit me. She goes to the wardrobe and pulls out the iron arm again. She throws it at my feet.
“Put it on,” she says.
“I . . . can’t,” I say.
“Why? You are Katazyrna. It will fit you, surely.”
I hold out my left arm. “It won’t fit,” I say. “It’s not mine.”
“It wasn’t Anat’s either,” Rasida says, and I wonder at this turn in the conversation. “She had cut her arm up so it would fit in there. Whose arm was this, Jayd? What world did it come from?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “Anat has always had it.” I snap my mouth shut, but it’s too late. Rasida has seen Anat many times. She knows when Anat acquired the arm, not long before Zan joined us.
Rasida meets my gaze, and we acknowledge the lie with that one look.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“The time for lying is over,” she says.
“The witches,” I say, and maybe I hope that saying this so quickly, so immediately after she says the lying is over, means that she won’t know that this, too, is a lie. “The witches know how it works. They gifted it to Anat. It’s something very old. That’s all I know. If you can find the Katazyrna witches, they could tell you.”
“You could have said this before,” she says.
“Maybe I feared what you would do with the arm,” I say. In truth, I know what she could do with the arm, and it’s not what she thinks. It’s far worse than that. It would undo everything I’m trying to achieve here. The longer I can keep her from putting it on, the longer I have to find out how to steal the world, too.
“There are people here on my own world who would betray me,” Rasida says, “the way you betrayed Anat.”
“I didn’t betray—”
“I know who Zan was, Jayd. I’m not the fool you think I am.”
“No one knows who Zan is,” I sputter. “Not even Zan.”
“I know what you did to the Mokshi. You think I don’t have spies inside Katazyrna?”
The Stars Are Legion Page 15
