“I’ve never thought you a fool.” Even if it was true, if she did know who Zan was, when even Anat had never intuited it, what did it matter now? Let her think Zan was a construct, something I cobbled together from bits of other women, or the spirit of some general, plopped into the body of one of my own sisters. But she mentioned the Mokshi in the same breath as Zan, and that made me fearful.
“I want you to know what happens to people who betray me,” Rasida says.
“I didn’t betray—”
“Not you,” she says. “Not yet.”
Relief floods through me. “Your people love you, Rasida. I have seen their eyes when they look at you. Why do you fear?”
“Because you are new here,” Rasida says, “and everyone will try to turn you against me. We can’t have that. We must cut the cancer out now, before it’s too late.”
She leaves the arm on the ground and goes to the door. She summons Samdi and two more security personnel.
Together, the five of us walk in silence. Rasida and I are side by side, following Samdi as the security people come up behind.
I map out the route we take in my mind, counting steps and turns. In bed, with the covers pulled up over my head, I will often retrace my mental map of Bhavaja, storing it for the day when I will need to leave this place quickly. The day I have the arm and the world.
We come through a broad corridor and into a holding room. I am not surprised to see Nashatra there, standing next to one of Rasida’s sisters, Aditva.
“This is not necessary,” Nashatra says when Rasida comes in.
Nashatra does not look at me. I keep my gaze focused just above Aditva’s head, trying to pretend I know nothing of any of this.
Rasida takes Aditva by the shoulder. I tense.
“Tell me what you planned,” Rasida says to Aditva.
Aditva begins to cry.
“Please, Rasida,” Nashatra says. “I know you are displeased, but—”
“You know what we do to traitors, Mother,” Rasida says.
“I know,” Nashatra says again.
“The Legion is my sister,” Rasida says. “We are all sisters. That means nothing when survival is at stake.”
It’s only now that I notice the black, gaping wound on the far wall. Its edges are dry and puckered, but I recognize it for what it once must have looked like. It’s a recycling chute.
She’s going to recycle her own mother. “Is this necessary?” I ask, because though I have no love for Nashatra, I fear that if she is gone, there will be no one to counter Rasida. If Nashatra is planning a coup, she may help me get what I need from Rasida in exchange for my help. The long game. I have always been good at the long game. It’s another reason it had to be me here and not Zan. She understands vehicles and genetics and gooey organic sludge, but not people.
“Of course it is,” Rasida says.
“But—” I say.
“Let it lie,” Nashatra says, and meets my look.
I stare at her feet. Bite my tongue. If I reveal myself, then we are both done. If I—
“Stand, Aditva, and tell my consort what you did,” Rasida says.
Aditva?
Aditva stands. She is a short, skinny woman, all knees and elbows. Her face is long and pained, her hair stringy and unwashed. I wonder how long she has been here.
“Tell her,” Rasida says softly. She begins stroking Aditva’s lank hair.
“I betrayed you, Lord,” Aditva says. She begins to sob. “I am sorry, Lord. I was weak. The Lord of War—”
“Do not blame your foolishness on the Lord of War,” Rasida says. “You tried to foment rebellion, is that right? An uprising. But an uprising of who, and to what? There is nowhere to go, Aditva. If you had truly listened to the Lord of War, she would have told you all this and much more, the way she spoke to me. She has whispered to me of the only way to save our people, and it is to work together to unite the Legion. It’s the only way. You didn’t want to unite us. You wanted to overthrow me and divide us.”
“Yes, Lord,” Aditva says.
I am staring at Aditva’s bare, callused feet now. I don’t want to see Nashatra’s face. I fear that I will give her and myself away. Why should I feel guilt now, when this is not my family? When I declined Nashatra’s offer? It could very well be me here, barefoot and filthy. The next time, it very well might be. What will happen then? Will Nashatra speak for me, or let me be recycled as she is letting her own daughter be recycled?
Rasida makes little shushing sounds and draws Aditva into her arms. Aditva embraces her and continues sobbing, great heaving gasps that wrack her little body. As she grips Rasida, I see two fist-sized lumps on the back of her neck, most likely cancer, and I wonder how long she has been sick.
While Rasida comforts her sister with one hand, she moves the other to her waist and the long bone knife she keeps there. I could call out. I could, like Nashatra, beg Rasida to spare this woman, her own sister.
But I don’t. I put my hands over my belly instead, and I watch as Rasida plunges the knife into Aditva’s armpit. Once. Twice. A third time.
Aditva crumples.
Rasida lifts her up as blood pumps from Aditva’s armpit. Rasida’s expression is sad, almost kind, as if she is doing Aditva some great favor. Then she dumps Aditva into the black maw of the recycling chute.
Aditva cries out once. Then silence.
Rasida stares into the blackness.
It is only now, with Rasida’s back turned, that I dare to gaze into Nashatra’s face.
She signs something at me. It takes me a moment to understand it, because she’s using an alternate sign language, not the Katazyrna one, but the more general one we use among worlds on the Outer Rim. She signs, “Who is your master?”
I sign back, “I am my own master.”
And Rasida turns. “This is what I did to Zan,” she says, “your prisoner who is not a prisoner. If you cannot love me, if you lie to me, if you betray me, you will end up here, like Aditva. Like Zan.”
She means this to be a warning. It’s meant to break me or perhaps Nashatra. But like Nashatra, I am not bowed. Though I cannot smile for fear of giving myself away, hope blooms in my belly in a way I have not felt since hearing that Rasida had destroyed Katazyrna. Hope blooms because I know this means it’s possible that Zan is still alive. Zan has crawled up from the belly of the world before. Zan has survived it once. She can do it again. Zan will come back for me. She always comes back for me.
Nashatra sighs. “Is there anything else, Lord?” she says.
“Yes,” Rasida says. “Samdi, take Mother to the witches.”
“The witches?” Nashatra says. “What—”
“I heard you wanted to save the world,” Rasida says, “so I decided to help you do that.”
“What? No, I—”
Samdi takes Nashatra by the arm. The other security women help her, and they escort Nashatra out of the room.
“What will you do to her?” I ask.
“What do you care?” Rasida says.
“You’re my family now,” I say. “She’s my mother too.”
Rasida wipes her bloody bone knife on her tunic and sheathes it. “Walk with me, love,” she says, and holds out her bloody hand.
I take it.
We walk back to my quarters. I see a familiar corridor along this route. It’s the same corridor I first came down, the one leading back to the hangar. I make a note of that and count the steps back to my rooms. I’d been a fool not to do this when I first came in, but I hadn’t been expecting Rasida’s betrayal. I thought I had this whole situation well in hand. But I had spent so much time trying to understand Anat that I never considered what would happen with Rasida.
Rasida sits on the edge of my bed and pulls me gently down next to her. She smooths my hair from my face. “Was that enough?” she says.
“Enough for what?” I say.
“Enough to dissuade you from what you’re planning.”
“I don’t know wha
t you’re talking about. This is my home now.”
“Yes,” Rasida says. “We must make sure you stay here.”
“What do you mean?” My voice comes out a whisper.
“Shhhhh . . . ,” she says.
There is something in her hand. It’s the bone knife.
I leap up from the bed. I make it three steps. I grab the edge of the doorway.
I feel a hot, burning pain across the back of my right knee. I stumble and fall heavily onto my side, screaming.
Rasida leers over me. She wipes her bloody dagger on my shoulder. Kneels beside me. “You will be better now,” she says. “Clearer-headed. Pain does that. There will be no running, love, because you have nowhere to go. Do you understand?”
She’s cut the tendon in my leg. I don’t want to understand. I don’t want it to be true.
When I have the arm and the world, I will have to leave quickly. And now she has hobbled me.
“I hate you,” I say. “I’ve always hated you.”
“I know,” Rasida says, “I know. It’s why we are so perfect together.” She wipes the blade of her knife on her knee. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“TO ESCAPE THE LEGION, YOU MUST FIRST UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS. MY MISTAKE WAS IN ASSUMING I UNDERSTOOD HOW THE WORLDS WORKED.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
21
ZAN
We scale a range of mountains built of human bones. Mostly human, anyway. I can see as we struggle over the piles, all soldered together with some calcified substance, that some of the skulls are too big, the pelvises too wide, to be fully human. I don’t know whose graveyard this is, then. Everyone’s, I suppose. Everything’s.
Time is impossible to measure at the bottom of the world. After a few sleeping periods, the moths become less and less, and are replaced by skittering beetles with great glowing abdomens. Sometimes we exist in complete darkness, and Casamir brings out a small, portable version of the tentacle globes, which she simply calls a torch.
The way would be grim and quiet if it were just Das Muni and I, but Casamir chatters ceaselessly. When we camp, Casamir tells stories, most of which make little sense to me. As we bed down for what must be our thirteenth or fourteenth time, Casamir tells a long and involved story about a woman with a cog that defecates in her hat each morning. I only half pay attention to it as I eat the tepid stew she’s mixed up for us from her pack.
Casamir ends her story with “And that’s why they call her Lord Knots!” She slaps her knee and guffaws.
I shake my head. “I don’t understand,” I say.
“It’s a joke,” Casamir says. “Because of science.”
“I see,” I say.
“I’m very funny,” Casamir says. “Everyone loves that joke. Let me tell it again. Maybe you missed the middle. This woman—”
“That’s all right,” I say.
Das Muni mumbles something about defecating scientists and wanders off to, I presume, defecate.
I watch Casamir hum to herself as she eats.
“Do you believe me,” I say, “that I’m from the surface?”
“Oh, sure,” Casamir says.
“That means no.”
Casamir shrugs. “What is reality, anyway? Reality is something we make with our minds. Yours exists as certainly as mine.”
“You think I’m insane,” I say.
“Oh, no,” Casamir says. “Just mentally delusional. It’s all right. Very common. Especially among those who’ve been discarded by their people.”
“So, you agree there are upper levels?”
“I agree there are different levels,” Casamir says.
“How diplomatic,” I say.
Casamir covers her mouth with her hand, failing to hide a smirk.
“I’m an experiment, then?” I say. “Let me tell you something, Casamir. I’m tired of being somebody’s experiment.”
“Sorry,” Casamir says. “It isn’t like that, though. I can’t become an engineer without going on this journey. Every engineer has to go up a level, has to explore. I’m tired of the pits. They always get tired of me talking and send me to the pits. Can’t be an engineer unless you fight for it.”
“How do you prove you got to another level?”
“I have to bring something back,” she says. “There’s . . .” She unrolls the map from her pack and spreads it out in the light of the torch. “There’s a gateway, here,” she says, pointing.
“Where are we?”
“Almost there,” she says. “Another hundred thousand steps, maybe. Five sleeping periods, give or take.”
“You say there were mutant hordes.”
“Oh, that. Yes,” she says. She rolls the map up again. “We may encounter them in the next twenty or thirty thousand steps. We’ll need to keep a lookout.”
“Did you bring weapons?”
“I have my knife,” she says. I’ve seen her knife: a sharpened tibia.
“Are they dangerous, the mutants?”
“Sometimes,” she says. “Mostly, they keep back from the light. We just need to stick close when we’re walking the next few periods. It shouldn’t be too bad.”
But she isn’t looking at me when she says it.
I don’t sleep well. I toss and turn at every sound. The spaces here are so vast that we cannot huddle against the walls, so we sleep at the foot of the bone mountains, and the bones creak and clatter as small animals and insects scurry around inside of them. I wake twice with black, palm-sized insects sitting on my chest, and I bat them away and stab them with the tibia that I’m using as a walking stick.
When Casamir shakes me to get me up, I’m already awake, exhausted and irritable.
I follow Casamir’s bobbing light as we come to the end of the bone mountains. She raises it as high as she can, and I see mounds of fleshy protuberances, some two stories high, riddled with a patchwork of holes and burrows big as my head.
I don’t have to ask what lives in there, because I can see the shiny glint of their six eyes reflected back at us from the burrows. Whatever they are, they do not like the light.
Casamir smiles back at me nervously. “Onward, and all that,” she says.
We move cautiously across the pitted ground. It’s as if something has eaten away at the floor. I’m reminded of what Casamir had told us closer to the city, about how the walls and floors were permeable outside of the light.
There’s skittering along the edges of our pool of light, and Casamir freezes.
I come up behind Casamir. Das Muni bumps into me. She grabs at the back of my suit.
“Keep going,” I say.
“I just . . . maybe . . . ,” Casamir says.
I step ahead of her, to the edge of the circle of light. “There’s no option where I go back,” I say. I think of Jayd and all I haven’t yet told Casamir, or Das Muni. “There’s a whole world at stake up there.”
“Not my world,” Casamir says.
“Your world,” I say. “Come on.”
Casamir inches forward. She moves the torch to her other hand and drops it. She says something in her language, probably swearing, and runs after the torch as it rolls away toward a depression in the floor.
I scramble after it as well. I lunge, too late, as it rolls into the hole, plunging us into darkness.
A hooting sound comes from all around us. One voice and then others.
I reach into the hole. My fingers brush the end of the torch, but I’m too big to get any farther.
“Cas,” I say.
She’s next to me, burrowing her head inside. “My arms aren’t long enough!” she says.
“Let me,” Das Muni says softly.
The skittering sounds grow closer. I feel the hush of breath against my ankles and kick out but don’t make contact with anything.
Das Muni presses herself next to me. She crawls down after the torch. I keep hold of her legs, fearful about some creature pulling her down.
“Ouch!” Casamir says. “
Something bit me!”
The hooting is a storm now; it reverberates. I want to cover my ears.
“I have it!” Das Muni says. “I have it.” I pull her back up. She raises the globe, and I see that her eyes are broad and bright and there is something like triumph on her face. But as she turns and looks behind me, the expression turns to fear.
Casamir is tangled in crystalline webbing swarming with bulbous, multi-segmented beasts. They each have a dozen legs that look like long, clawed fingers lined in black hair. Their faces are fanged, lined in six eyes and hundreds of little feathery antennae.
I pull up my walking stick and swing at the webbing. “Bring the light!” I tell Das Muni, but she is frozen in shock, mouth agape.
I plunge ahead, striking at the creatures. They burst when my stick makes contact, splattering yellow guts across my face. I try to pull the webbing off Casamir. The insects turn their attention to me. I feel their feathered antennae brush my ankles.
“The light! Das Muni!” I say.
I stab and swing. Yellow gore covers my face, my hands, smears the front of my suit. They’re crawling up my arms now. Pinching. Biting. I tear again at the webbing binding Casamir. She is so stuck now that she has ceased to struggle. She is screaming at me, but I don’t know what she’s saying because my feet are tangled in the webbing and I’m starting to panic.
“Das Muni!” I try to rise and fall. The swarm descends. I bite and kick and flail. My mouth is full of insect guts.
There is a hissing shriek. The insects skitter away.
I spit, trying to clear my mouth. Das Muni leans over me. She holds the torch high.
I yank myself free of the webbing. Das Muni helps me up. I hear the insects hooting and skittering, waiting at the edges of the light.
I hack Casamir free of the webbing. It’s rooted her in place, intricate strands so tough that she’s locked in a standing position. Finally she falls free, and I wrap my arm around her. She sags into me. “Are you hurt?” I say.
Casamir’s head lolls. “I don’t know. I don’t . . . No more than usual, maybe.”
I search her body for bites or scratches and find four small puncture wounds on her wrist and two more on her thigh. “Are they poisonous?” I ask. “The creatures?” I’m bitten too, far more than her.
The Stars Are Legion Page 16
