“I will go again, then,” I say.
“Mother can’t afford to risk another squad,” Jayd says, “not with the Bhavajas lying in wait for us in orbit around the Mokshi. The Bhavajas have taken another ship since you’ve been gone, Zan.”
“What’s a Bhavaja?” I say.
Gavatra rolls her eyes. “These cycles get tiring,” she says.
“They are the greatest enemy of our family,” Jayd says. “A family we have been feuding with since Mother was a child. It’s only a matter of time before they take the Mokshi out from under us too. Maybe even all the Katazyrna ships.” This time, I am sure she says ship and not world, because taking an entire world seems impossible.
“The Mokshi has destroyed a good many people,” Gavatra says. “Your mother will just steal more from some other distressed world. If Zan is ready to assault the Mokshi again, I won’t deny her.”
Jayd slumps in her chair, defeated. Am I something to be fought over and won? “This is a foolish enterprise,” Jayd says. “It’s just as likely that Zan will die as it is she’ll retrieve her memory. Some of it comes back without you going to the Mokshi, Zan. If you stay—”
“No,” I say. I press my finger against the long ridge of the scar on my face again. “I would like to finish what’s been started.”
Gavatra waves her hand over the table, and the patterns of light fade, revealing the table surface for what it is: a smooth, stitched-together canvas of human skin.
I jerk up from the bench. The trembling in my arm becomes a spasm, and I lash out and smash the wall. The wall gives under my fist, as if I’ve mashed it into a lung. When I pull my hand away, it is moist. My body begins to shake; my breath comes hard and fast.
Jayd wraps her arms around me. “Hush, it will pass,” she says.
I feel as if I’m watching my body from a great height, unable to contain or control it. The panic is a monstrous thing. My body is trying to fight or flee, and I can’t allow it to do either until I understand what’s happening here. The attack is so sudden, so consuming, that it terrifies me.
Gavatra snorts and stands. “She’s going to pop again,” Gavatra says, and she scratches at the scars on her head.
My heart hammers loudly in my chest. A dark and twisted impulse seizes me; an uncoiling of everything I have held back while pushed and prodded in my sick room.
I leap across the table and take Gavatra by the throat. We collide with the wall and fall into a tangle on the floor. Gavatra writhes beneath me, gasping like a dying woman, and perhaps she is. As I straddle her and look at my hands, I fear my weaker left is not up to the task of strangling a woman to death.
I bare my teeth at Gavatra. “I do not believe a word of what you have told me,” I say.
Gavatra twists my weaker arm. Pain rushes through me, blinding my panic. She head-butts me in the face, so fast and unexpected that I reel back in shock as much as pain, clutching at my face as blackness judders across my vision.
Jayd rushes between me and Gavatra. She slides across the floor to wrap me again in her arms, as if I am a prize animal gone feral.
Gavatra uses the table to lever herself up. She rubs at her throat and gives a wry grin. “Perhaps there is something of the old Zan in this one,” she says.
“My memory!” I say.
“You fool,” Gavatra says. “You have no idea what a gift that loss is for you.” And then Gavatra smiles, her wrinkles deepening, her face cavernous in the dim light. “The truth is worse than you can possibly imagine.”
“Get me out of here,” I say. The panic is subsiding now, but the pulsing walls feel closer, as if the room itself is going to swallow me whole.
Jayd presses her cheek to mine. I take a fistful of her hair and squeeze gently. “Who are you, really?” I whisper.
I feel her mouth turn up at the corners. “I am your sister, Zan mine.”
And I smile in turn because my face is throbbing, and a trickle of blood runs from my nose, and I remember my other injuries. I have two choices here: to fight them and risk being recycled—whatever that is—or to go along with it, to give them what they want, and figure out where my memory has really gone and why these people are going to so much trouble to pretend I am their kin.
“I’m afraid,” I say, and that is partly the truth. I am afraid of what I am going to have to do to this person who claims she is my sister, but who I want to take into my arms and fuck until the world ends.
“MEMORY IS A MEATY AND DELIRIOUS THING, AND IT MAKES US PRONE TO FALSE RECOLLECTIONS. STORIES MAKE MEMORY; IT’S MERELY A MATTER OF REPEATING THE STORY MOST BENEFICIAL TO ONE’S PURPOSE.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
2
ZAN
I sleep in a room three paces across and eight paces long. I curl up in a filmy blanket that’s slightly spongy, like porous bread. Sleeping periods are marked by the change in light across the whole of the ship, from milky green to soft blue. I’m surprised that my body responds so quickly to the change in the light, lulling me to sleep almost instantly each period. Perhaps my body remembers many things my mind does not.
“The memory will come,” Jayd reassures me each sleeping period as she tucks me in after the long, sweaty exercise sessions in the tubular room at the end of the corridor outside my room. The corridor reminds me of the throat of some monster. When I ask about the rippling line of the ceiling, Jayd tells me that one of the big arteries of the ship runs overhead.
“An artery?” I say. “Does it move . . . blood?”
“Of a sort,” she says. “The lifeblood of the ship. It’s different from ours, but serves the same function. It brings up all the recycled proteins from the center of the world and feeds each level.”
The idea of living inside the belly of an organism unsettles me. “Is it safe?” I say. “Why doesn’t the ship eat us?”
She looks away. “It devours us all in the end.”
During the waking periods, I work with several others in hand-to-hand combat and grappling. When I try to speak to them, Jayd tells me they do not have tongues. I think perhaps it is a figure of speech, but when they open their mouths to bark or leer, I see they have no tongues. They communicate in a sign language that seems familiar to me. After a few of these sessions, I remember what some of the signs are: smarter, good effort, and skull-eater. I sign skull-eater back at one of them and she looks as if I’d said I was going to gut her.
“What’s skull-eater?” I ask Jayd as we walk back to my room.
Her back stiffens. “Where did you hear that?”