“Whatever the witches said about the Mokshi, Anat would have told me already.”
“Would she?” Maibe says. She picks at her ragged nails. Leans over me again. “Jayd isn’t here. Sabita has been reassigned. And you’re practically a half-wit now, aren’t you? I could do whatever I wanted to you.”
I sit up. Memory stirs again, hot and uncomfortable, but nothing comes up clearly from the blackness. I hold out both of my hands. One palm open, one squeezed into a fist. “I am a half-wit who throws a spectacular punch,” I say. “You should see it. Or we can skip that and share information.”
Maibe shrugs. “You do what you like. It’s not me she keeps throwing out there.” She ignores both hands and turns to go.
“How many times?” I ask. “How many times has she sent me out to the Mokshi?”
“Hundreds,” Maibe says.
Hundreds. A gaping hole in my memory comprising hundreds of missions. Failed missions.
“Not the rest of you?”
“Some of us, too,” Maibe says. “But you always got the closest. Nhim’s army died out there, and Ravi’s. Moira’s. Maybe a dozen others. But you were always the best. Jayd found you on some salvage run. Brought you in with thousands of other prisoners from some dead place, she said. Guess that worked out.”
“Jayd was a general?”
“Jayd’s a lot of things,” Maibe says. “Don’t think she’s some victim in all this. I don’t know what her plan is, but I can tell you it’s not meant to benefit any of us.”
“Why does Jayd want me to think I’m her sister?”
“Why do any of us pretend to be sisters?” Maibe says. “We all work better if we’re family.” She gives a little smirk. “Anat has her own reasons for doing what she does. If you’re mounting another assault, you go to the witches yourself and get their advice. Don’t go through Anat.”
“After the joining, on Bhavaja?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” Maibe says. “I’ve only told you this a hundred times. But you never listen. You never fucking listen, Zan.” She leaves me.
I sit on the floor covered in the guts of the vehicles and consider my position. If I go to the witches now, it may tip off Anat that I have doubts about Anat’s command. That way leads to the recycler monster. The fact that I have some memory of it makes me think I’ve been down that path before. But if I wait, if I go after the joining, right before the assault, Anat will have no time to stop me, not if she wants the assault to happen in time.
I get up and stick my hands into the spongy blue surface of the far wall; it absorbs the fluid from my hands, leaving my skin clean and unblemished. Some parts of how the world works still seem very strange to me, like I expect it to work a different way, like how I’d been confused about this being a ship or a world or both. Or neither.
It’s the third option, the neither that gives me pause. I know about things outside of this world. But what they are, I have no complete idea. If Maibe’s telling the truth, and I was a prisoner brought here from some dying world, why did Jayd tell me I could lead armies? Did it make me a better leader, just as telling me I was her sister was supposed to make me more loyal? If I was her sister and not her prisoner, it would certainly make me trust Jayd more.
Don’t trust Jayd, they all said, and I didn’t. But I couldn’t help feeling that she and I were bound together, nonetheless. Some secret united us.
“I will bring you the world,” Jayd had said, and it was the first thing she said that I truly believed with all my heart.
“THE HEART IS A VITAL ORGAN. CONTROL THE HEART AND YOU CONTROL THE FLESH IT FEEDS. WE ALL HAVE WEAKNESSES. THE HEART IS MINE.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
10
JAYD
I want to hate Rasida with all my heart. I want to hate her as I hate my mother, hate her as I hate the Bhavajas, hate her as I hate the slow apocalypse of the Legion that has brought me to this place. I have wanted to hate her all my life, but as I’ve learned since my early days pining after Rasida, I am drawn to and desire my enemies, and it may be my worst flaw.
Rasida, for her part, is perfectly charming.
From the moment I catch sight of the Bhavajas’ primary world, I can see that it, too, is dying. It’s much further gone than ours. The cancerous rot that eats the outer skin of Katazyrna at the poles, leaving it soft and vulnerable, covers half the world here. Much of the outer defenses look dead. I’m surprised Anat’s forces have never breached this world, but Anat has focused most of her attention on the Mokshi for some time, and I have not led an army anywhere but the Mokshi since the Mokshi entered the Outer Rim. Even the great tentacles that pull in debris from the outer edges of the Bhavaja’s home atmosphere are shriveled now. I see long lines of space walkers hauling in debris by hand from a half-dissected world that hangs desolately behind Bhavaja, its resources consumed by its neighbors.
Inside, Bhavaja is not much better, though its people seem in high spirits.
They reach for me but don’t touch me. Some fall to their knees before Rasida as if she is a god. And perhaps she is; in the same way Anat has styled herself Lord of the Legion, Rasida is their lord. Maybe a lord of salvation. I can’t help but fold my hands over my stomach. My last treatment was not long ago, and unless Rasida means to decide the time and place at which I’ll give birth to what’s growing inside of me, I will give her what she married me for in less than a rotation of the Legion.
We continue down the corridors. I expect to travel through the umbilicus between levels, the way we do on Katazyrna, but we descend on staircases instead, each carved into the fleshy guts of the world. Above us, in the narrow passages, I see the shriveled brown skin of the former umbilicus. I wonder when it stopped working for them.
On the second level, Rasida asks a member of her security team to take Neith and Gavatra to their quarters.
“They aren’t staying with me?” I say.
“You’ll see them again at the joining tomorrow,” Rasida says.
When Gavatra protests, Rasida says, “Jayd is Bhavaja now. Only Bhavajas may enter these parts of the world. I’m sorry, but you must stay in the guest quarters.”
“They are my family,” I say. “Doesn’t that make them your family?”
“This is not my rule,” Rasida says. “It is my mother’s.” I look around for her mother, Nashatra, but she has been swallowed by the crowd.
“We’ll be at the joining,” Neith says. “All I ask is that we get real food. Do you have real food?”
“Of course,” Rasida says. “Samdi, take our esteemed guests to the eating hall.”
Samdi makes a gesture of obeisance and peels away from us. Gavatra is still clearly not happy, and she signs something at me, fingers held low against her thigh. “Be careful,” her fingers say, and I sign back, “I am always careful.”