“What’s the use of her coming back if she can’t get my army into the Mokshi with her? We still don’t know what happens to her in there once she gets under the skin. Does it eat her? Remake her? If her memory loss isn’t feigned—”
“It’s very real,” I say. It wasn’t, the first time, but it has been ever since. I don’t tell her that, but it’s a truth I know and Zan doesn’t, and it still makes my skin itch. Why does she lose her memory now, when she gets back to the Mokshi? That was never part of our plan. She had all her memories intact after she crawled her way up and went back to the Mokshi the second time. Had something happened to her down below? I would never know now.
I gaze at the ceiling, imagining the cancerous skin of the world eating into every level, striking down and down and down into the center of Katazyrna and destroying us all, level by level, cell by cell, while my mother dances with some impenetrably broken world that has already claimed hundreds of her daughters and thousands of aliens and bottom-world misfits. It is a mad vision Anat has. There is another way.
“Is that all you had?” Anat says. “Just more bad news?”
“That’s all,” I say. “You shouldn’t—”
She raises her iron arm. “Are you trying to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do again, girl?”
I cringe. I hate that I cringe, but she has struck me too often. “No,” I whisper.
“Good,” she says, and sweeps past me, back toward the first level of the world. I scramble to keep up with her, because I know what happens when she and Zan are alone.
“WORLDS CAN BE REBORN, BUT THE REST OF US ARE DOOMED TO THE SKIN WE’VE MADE FOR OURSELVES. DOOMED TO LIVE WITH THE CHOICES WE’VE MADE.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
5
ZAN
Blackness, then milky green.
I am sucked from the surface of the world and deep into the verdant emerald interior of Katazyrna, reborn for perhaps the millionth time, or perhaps just the tenth. Certainly only the second I remember.
As I fall, I see the Bhavajas’ needled vehicles blot out the blackness. I see their dark faces, and the glinting whites of their eyes in the blue-green halo of the world’s defenses. They cannot approach through those defenses, but they fire off another round from the cephalopod guns.
As the world’s skin closes over me, one of the Bhavajas signs at me, “You’re already dead.”
I hit the floor of the ship’s interior and let out a rush of air. My suit begins to dissolve into the spongy floor. I panic, struggling to my hands and knees, and begin hacking uncontrollably. The suit melts, leaving me shivering even in the humid air.
Around me, the floor blinks with a soft blue glow, turning the milky green world aqua.
Ahead, a slick squad of retaliatory troops is heading topside. I squeeze my eyes shut. My lungs and face and throat hurt. I sucked in air out there, and it hurts. I retch and gag.
“Zan!”
I raise my head, hoping it’s Jayd. But it’s Sabita, the woman who found me in the vehicle hangar. She is wearing a red shift, and my memory offers up a bit of wisdom. The red shift marks Sabita as an emergency tissue technician. Sabita extends her long brown arms to me and catches me up in her arms as if I am a child.
I try to speak, but my lips and tongue are blistered. Sabita takes a shimmering purple slug from the bag at her hip and fills my mouth with unguent.
“Hush now,” Sabita says. She wipes more unguent around my lips, her fingers strong and sure against my battered skin.
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.