“Poison? Why would they have poison?” Casamir says.
That may answer the question, or it may not. Casamir’s knowledge is based on maps and stories.
“Let’s keep going,” I say. “Das Muni, I need you to lead.”
“You take the light,” Das Muni says, thrusting the torch at me.
“I need to help Casamir,” I say. “I’m right behind you.”
“But—”
The hooting starts again. It raises the hairs on the back of my neck.
Das Muni’s big eyes widen, impossibly large, and I wonder just how well she can see with eyes so big. “All right,” she says, and takes a few hesitant steps forward. The insects stir, retreating from the light. Many swarm back toward their caves, where they continue watching us.
We walk and walk, fearful to stop as long as we can see the mounded caves. Then the floor begins to slope downward, and we move into a great forest of fungus-lined pillars that stretch so high I cannot see where they end.
The forest goes on and on, and after walking for some time without encountering hostile life, I suggest we bed down for some rest.
We spend time cleaning our wounds and untangling the webbing from our hair. I go in search of water and find brackish pools of damp among the trees. When I tell Casamir about it, she says it’s fine to drink.
“Isn’t there a way to clean it?” I say. “It’s salty.”
“You don’t need to clean water,” Casamir says, like I’m the stupidest person she’s ever met. “It’s all wet. It doesn’t hurt you. Nothing in the world is meant to hurt you.”
“What about those insects?”
“Well,” she says, rubbing the bites on her wrist, “I think we just startled them.”
I’m not convinced, but Casamir and Das Muni both drink the water, and eventually my thirst overcomes caution. We sleep, and when I wake from my doze, I find that the whole forest is filled with wispy green lights. Casamir is awake, plucking mushrooms from the trees.
I sit up and marvel at the light. “What is that?” I say. It’s a misty green luminescence, as if the air itself is glowing.
“I suspect it’s pollen,” Casamir says. “The trees are mating.”
Das Muni wakes at the sound of our voices. For a time, we sit and stare at the misty green waves moving through the trees. There are little creatures in the upper reaches of the trees. I see them hopping back and forth between them, chittering.
I lie back on the soft ground; it’s covered in dead fungi and probably the leavings of the animals up there, but it’s comfortable enough. The musty smell of it is still an improvement from the recycling pits.
“This is a journey every engineer must take,” Casamir says, popping another mushroom into her bag. “You learn more about the world, they say, and our place in it. I always feel we are very large, but out here, well, it’s clear we are a small piece of something much larger.”
“The world is massive,” I say. “I’ve seen it from the outside. I didn’t think about what was inside, though.”
Casamir eats a mushroom. “That’s a very persistent delusion you have.”
“Isn’t that the best kind?” I say. “The kind you’re most interested in.”
“It does keep you interesting,” she says. “I never liked a bore. Did I tell you a story about—”
“I’m going back to sleep,” I say.
“It’s a great story!”
“Later,” I say, and close my eyes.
She tells me the story anyway. It’s about an engineer who wanted to become a warrior but didn’t understand that you have to kill people to do it. I suppose it is meant to be funny, as she tries to kill insects and then animals, working her way up to a human, but for one reason or another, she fails at each attempted kill.
“What she realized is that we’re all connected,” Casamir says. I’m drifting off to sleep now. For better or worse, I’ve gotten used to the drone of her voice. “If you kill one thing, you kill everything.”
* * *
At the end of the forest is a door.
I counted the steps through the forest, and it’s upward of fifty thousand. Now I’m struck not by how far the forest stretches but how strange a door looks here at the end of it.
The door is a broad, round metal thing, like a great eye sewn into the flesh of the world. We have traveled ever upward the last thirty thousand steps. This is, almost certainly, a door to the next level.
But that doesn’t please me as much as it should. I’m mostly just shocked and confused, because I know this door. I have seen it before. Not a door like it, but this door. I’ve gone through this door. But most importantly, I remember that I’ve left something important here. Something for myself.
“Zan?” Casamir says.
I’ve been looking at the door a long time. Casamir and Das Muni are both staring at me.
I approach the door cautiously, willing myself to remember. What is so important that I left here?
I crouch in front of the door. “You’re sure you’ve never met me before?” I ask.
“I’ve never seen you before,” Casamir says. “What are you going on about? We’re here! Aren’t you excited?”
“None of your people have seen me?”
“No, why would they? You’re the one who keeps saying you aren’t even from here!”
I run my hands over the seams of the door, the same way I had in my cell when Jayd first put me in it. And there, stuffed into one of the upper seams, I find a rolled-up piece of human skin.
I pull it out and unroll it. Casamir and Das Muni crowd around me.
There are markings on the parchment. I don’t understand them, but there’s something familiar about them. “Casamir, do you have something I can mark this with?”
“Sure,” she says. She pulls a charred stick from her tool belt. I marvel at the stick a moment. Where are all these plants? And then I make the same marks on the page, seeing if it prompts a memory.
I don’t remember anything new, but I’m startled to find that the marks I’m making exactly match those on parchment. I have the same handwriting.
“Can you read this, Casamir?” I say.
Casamir shakes her head. “I’ve never seen that language before. But it looks like you have.”
“I can read it,” Das Muni says. She takes it from me into her long fingers. Casamir holds the light closer.
“It says, ‘If you don’t have the arm and the world, you must start again.’ ”
“That’s all?” I say.
“Yes.” She hands it back to me.
“How can you read this, Das Muni?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I know the language.”
“That’s an odd language for a mutant to know,” Casamir says. She snatches the parchment back from me and scrutinizes it. “I think she’s making this up.”
“I’m not,” Das Muni says.
“Das Muni,” I say, and wonder how I’ve failed to ask her this until now, until it is almost too late. “What world are you from? What is its exact name?”
“I’m from the Mokshi,” Das Muni says.
“BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRETEND TO BE. IT’S FAR TOO EASY TO BECOME WHAT YOU PRETEND.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
22
JAYD
You have been so melancholy,” Rasida says.
I lie in bed, resting my hands on my growing belly. I still get up sometimes, to eat and scroll through the story tablets, but my hair is unwashed. I could wash my clothes or have the girls wash them. I know these things but cannot make myself act on them.
Rasida crosses the room to me. She visits at least once every cycle. She sits beside me and takes my hand in hers. Her palms are rough and callused. I remember how lovely her fingers felt on me when I thought I had the power here, when I thought it was all going according to plan.
“I know it’s difficult,” she says. “It was so, for me, when I took my first world. Sometimes, the darkness comes. It
obliterates our sense of the future. But you carry Bhavaja’s future, Jayd. You have worth.”
Worth, I think, and turn away from her. Worth only for what I carry, as if I’m just a vessel. But of course, this is what I wanted. I just didn’t want all of Katazyrna destroyed to get me here. I tell myself we will all die anyway if Zan and I aren’t able to make this plan work, but it’s little comfort. The Katazyrna dead in a generation is far different than the Katazyrna dead in my lifetime.
“I care very much for you, Jayd,” Rasida says. “I hope we can be true lovers.”
My eyes fill, and I keep my face turned away. Let her see me suffer. Let her feel sorry for me. I deserve it. I want her to suffer in turn.
“I have brought you a gift,” Rasida murmurs. “We have been eagerly getting Katazyrna ready for you, you understand. Now that I have the arm, our people here can move there. Some are not so happy about that, those who followed Aditva and the other sisters I had to slay, but they will fall in line. They will understand, as you do.”
I say nothing.
“Did you hear me?” she says softly. “This is my way of apologizing, love. I sometimes act very rashly. I feared for you. I feared my family would corrupt you. I see now that you would never have need to run from me. Let me make it up to you with a gift. I found one of your sisters, alive. I thought she could make a fine companion for you. Loneliness can be difficult, my mother tells me.”
I roll over to face her. My heart quickens. But of course it won’t be Zan, will it? Rasida has seen Zan and recycled her, and would never bring her here.
But I sit up. If nothing else, Rasida has awoken my curiosity, which I thought long dead along with my heart.
“See, there,” Rasida says, and she wipes the tears from my cheeks. “I am not so monstrous. I’ve done all of this for you, love. Come.” She holds out her hand.
I take it. My purpose comes roaring back to me as we walk into the great foyer. I will give birth in one hundred and thirty cycles, if all goes as it’s supposed to. Her witches have visited me several times already to confirm that the pregnancy is progressing as promised. If I had tricked them and was doomed to carry something else, they would recycle me immediately, and Rasida’s lovely words would mean nothing. But I know what I’m carrying, because Zan once carried it, before she gave her womb to me.
* * *
I smooth my hair from my face. It’s agonizing for me to walk unaided now, so I take Rasida’s arm and lean heavily on her as she escorts me to my “gift.” Walking is torturous, but we don’t have far to go.
Rasida takes me into the courtyard outside my rooms. She gestures expansively to a cluster of three women standing in the foyer. Two of them are Bhavajas. The third stands between them, a slim, lovely young woman who I recognize immediately. I feel a mixture of anger and despair. I smile.
“Sabita,” I say, and my heart sinks. This is the worst possible person she could have brought me, short of bringing me Anat. I had one of our security women cut out her tongue because I feared what she would reveal to Zan. I may not have done that myself, but she will have guessed whose order it was. Anat would not have cared, because Anat never knew who Zan was. Sabita, though . . . She might have intuited something. She had to be silenced before she talked to Zan and ruined everything.
“She was quite enterprising,” Rasida says. “She hid in one of the great arteries running along the corridor outside the cortex. If we hadn’t noticed the fluid leak, we may never have found her. What do you think of my gift?”
“Lovely,” I say. I let tears fall. She need not know why I shed them. Of all the women Rasida could bring to me, it is Sabita, the woman who hated what I did to Zan more than anyone else on Katazyrna, because she had foolishly taken Zan into her arms and comforted her after she came back up from being recycled, before Zan lost her memory. What had they spoken of, in those few hours before Zan left again for the Mokshi, never again to regain her memory? I would never know, but I knew Sabita had come to care for her these many cycles, nursing her back to health after every assault.
I make a small sign to Sabita without raising my hands. The Bhavajas shouldn’t know our signing language, but it’s best to be discreet with a paranoid woman like Rasida in the room.
Sabita glances at my fingers but makes no response. I wonder if it will be worse with her here. Will she murder me in my bed? But she may be the last Katazyrna besides myself who still lives. There is something to be said for the power of blood. She may know something of life on Katazyrna, something that will help me.
“Thank you, Rasida,” I say. “You are . . . kind.”
Rasida kisses my forehead. She takes my face in her hands and searches my expression. For what, I am uncertain, but I press my mouth to hers, lightly. I try to imagine Zan doing that, after all that Rasida has done, and cannot. Zan would murder her, and forget the plan, and throw her down a recycling chute.
“Good, you see,” Rasida says. “You are just lonely.”
“I am,” I say. “I know you are very busy. I appreciate this gift.”
Rasida escorts Sabita into my rooms and putters about, pointing out where Sabita should sleep, here on the floor beside me, instructing the girls to treat her as my handmaiden. Sabita wanders through all of this with a dull-eyed stare. I wonder what it must have been like all this time, hiding in one of the arteries above the cortex, covered in the world’s blood, subsisting on blood and whatever she could peel off and choke down from the fleshy walls.
When Rasida leaves us and the girls go off to retrieve our refreshments, Sabita and I stand weary before one another. Do I look as defeated as she does?
Finally, Sabita signs at me, “I know where you got that womb. It’s not yours. You bought your freedom with it, though. You traitor. Zan told me that much.”
I sign, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Be pleased you’re alive and Anat didn’t recycle you. You always tell Zan too much, and she goes mad, doesn’t she?”
“Mad with grief,” Sabita signs. “She would never tell me, but I suspect her grief had to do with you. Something you did. It always does. You bring us all nothing but grief. When I spoke to her of the past, she remembered that grief, and it destroyed her every time. That’s not my fault. It’s yours.”
“You don’t know what Zan and I—”
“You’re monstrous,” Sabita signs, and turns her back to me.
I want to tell Sabita everything, but it occurs to me that that’s exactly what Rasida might have hoped. Perhaps she rescued Sabita so I’d open up to her. Betrayals within betrayals. I resisted Nashatra, and that may have saved me from a far worse fate. I have not seen Nashatra since the day Aditva was recycled. Sabita is the first face I have seen that is not Rasida’s or the girls’ in some time.
Yet seeing her makes me angry. It makes me angry because no matter how hard I try, I cannot forget what I’ve done to get here. Zan is able to forget. I’m not. How can I pity her when she gets to start over? It’s me who has to feel what happened. It’s me who carries the burden. It’s me who carries on while she flails about like an empty-headed child driven to one purpose. I have to feel because I can shutter it away, box it up like something that happened to someone else. She can’t. She never could.
When you understand what the world is, you have two choices: Become a part of that world and perpetuate that system forever and ever, unto the next generation. Or fight it, and break it, and build something new.
The former is safer, and easier. The latter is scarier, because who is to say what you build will be any better?
But living in servitude is not living. Slavery ensures one’s existence, but there is no future in it.
Zan and I believed in the future.
“Help me,” I say aloud, and Sabita turns and grimaces.
“I see she’s hobbled you,” Sabita signs, “or did you do that to yourself, to garner pity? I wouldn’t put it past you.”
“Don’t pretend to know me,” I say out loud, and I r
emember the girls could walk in at any moment, so I switch back to signing. “Do you know how far the hangar is from here?”
“Planning escape? If you’d wanted to escape, I’d think you’d have done it by now.”
“And go where?” I sign. “Tell me of Katazyrna.”
“It’s at war,” Sabita signs. “If she tells you she’s routed it, she’s lying. Half of the people she brought there sided with us when they saw how rich the world was. They’re trying to push out her people. She has a civil war over there. I couldn’t believe I didn’t see any signs of it here. There is a whole faction over there trying to separate itself from Bhavaja.”
“Her family has turned on her here,” I sign. “I didn’t know it was out of control over there, though.”
“I was holding out with three of her own people,” Sabita signs. “She killed them and took me. I thought I was dead for sure. Where are Neith and Gavatra?”
“Dead with the rest,” I sign. “I think so, anyway. We were separated before the joining.”
“What a fucking disaster,” Sabita signs. “You sure got what you wanted, though, didn’t you?”
“What do you know about what I want?”
“Zan told me once, early on, that you two wanted to get you into Bhavaja hands. I don’t know why. But I hope it’s working out for you.”
“Rasida is smart,” I sign.
“Rasida’s a fucking madwoman.”
I have nothing to add to that. I just nod, and the girls come back in with refreshments. I wave them off into another room, and sit down to eat with Sabita at a small table at the end of my bed.
If Rasida turned Sabita before bringing her here, she’s done a very good job. Still, I hedge my bets. It’s my distrust that has kept me alive so far. I can’t let it go, not yet.
We say nothing as we eat. Sabita gorges on the protein gel and greens. There are sour, soft-skin fruits as well, and she eats them greedily.
When she is done, she signs, “How are we getting out of here, then?”
The Stars Are Legion Page 17
