I know what’s going to happen, but I can’t figure out how to avoid it. The door is going to come inward when they push it open. It is going to crush the first twenty people on the other side of it. But we are packed so tight, they have nowhere to go.
“When it falls, come over to the breach!” I yell, but there is so much fear and confusion, I’m not certain anyone is paying attention to me. Prisha is yelling at them too, and Maibe.
There is a second powerful burst, and the door comes free.
The door crushes the first ring of women inside the door, messy and horrifying. I duck, fearing a volley. And it comes—a blast of multiple weapons. Four or five dozen cephalopods explode into the room, taking down the next ring of women. And then the Bhavajas come in after them, storming the only entrance, cutting us down like so many beasts, their faces broad and grinning and purposeful, like this is the inevitable end to the game, like they knew this was coming all along.
I fire back, yelling for order, for tactics. Prisha is hit first; a cephalopod clips her face and she goes down. Maibe fills the void where she had stood, firing her weapon into the melee of the advancing Bhavajas, as if it makes any difference.
It is a slaughter.
I meet the first line of the Bhavajas, stepping up as the lines of my family fall. I discharge my weapon three more times. Then it malfunctions. I butt the next Bhavaja in the face with it instead. I shoot two more with the fallen woman’s weapon and then wrestle with a third.
They swarm me. A punch to the kidneys. The butt of a weapon in my face. A burst of darkness, a bright light. I go down. A stray blast from a Katazyrna weapon takes out my leg, and I crumple like a folding flower. I collapse onto a pile of corpses.
I claw across the bodies, making for the escape route. I grab hold of someone’s face and realize it is Maibe’s. Maibe is spitting up blood, clawing at a wound in her gut. The eye of the cephalopod nestled there gazes stupidly up at me, and I almost retch.
A blazing pain erupts in my shoulder, like someone has set a hammer on fire and hit me with it. I collapse on top of Maibe.
I lose some time.
The world swims. I’m aware of Maibe’s watery breaths. The cries of my kin. Shots. Merry voices, joking between the sounds of the weapons. Bodies sliding across the floor. Click, click of piled weapons. The Bhavajas are cleaning up.
Someone rolls me over, and I gaze up into Rasida’s face. Rasida is chewing on something, grinning down at me like I am some prized animal.
“Jayd,” I mutter.
Rasida kicks me and yells back at someone behind her. “Recycle them,” Rasida says. “Don’t let a single body go to waste.”
A woman grabs me by the arms and drags me painfully across the floor. Blood makes a long trail behind me, and it takes me a moment to realize a lot of it is mine. My leg is a twisted mess, and the pain in my shoulder burns white-hot. Black spots float across my vision, like burns.
They leave me next to a pile of corpses in a low room, close to a great black maw. Two Bhavajas work wordlessly, each taking one end of a corpse and throwing it into the darkness.
The recycler. The monster. The memory roars through my fuzzy head. I’m not a corpse, I try to say, but I am choking on something; my own spit, blood.
They pitch Prisha’s body into the darkness.
I try to scream. No sound comes out.
One of the women takes my arms. The other grabs my twisted legs.
Pain. Fearful pain. They swing me toward the black mouth that I know leads to the monster.
Darkness, at least, can bring me some peace. I know darkness. Know it very well.
They let me go.
I make a sound then, something like a dying animal might make: a grunt, no more. Then I am falling and falling, into the sticky darkness, falling and falling to the center of the world.
“TRUE POWER IS THE ABILITY TO MAKE THOSE WHO FEAR YOU DESPERATE TO LOVE YOU.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
13
JAYD
I wake in Rasida’s rooms on Bhavaja, snug in her bed, head muzzy with a terrible hangover. I sit up and find that my hands are still covered in rusty blood. It’s all over me—my suit, my hair, my arms. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and my stomach heaves. I try to put back together the events of the evening, but it’s all a haze. The joining, yes, I remember some of that. I remember Rasida leading me down the dais and giving me something to drink, and passing me off to her security team and her sister Aditva, whose breath was terrible and whose eyelid kept twitching.
I had meant to turn around, to see Zan and Anat, but Aditva said that for my safety, they needed to have me sit and wait for Rasida in an apartment just outside the temple. I sat. I waited. I drank.
And now, somehow, I am back in my room on Bhavaja. Where was the rest?
Beside me, the bed is not mussed. Rasida did not sleep here. So, where is she? Though she is not here, I am comforted by the fact that she did not send me back to my rooms, as she would a prisoner. We will get close, the way I got close to Zan. That thought gives me pause, though, because what happened with Zan was something neither of us could have anticipated, and it is not a path I want to tread again.
I stare into my bloody hands and am overcome with a desire to scrub myself clean.
I go to the shower and pour oil over my body and scrape myself clean, removing the blood and smell of sex from my skin from the day before, though as I shake the dirty oil onto the sticky floor to be absorbed, I admit I could have burrowed happily into the sheets and inhaled the smell the rest of the waking period.
Maybe I am a terrible traitor. But Zan is far from here, and it is not the real Zan anyway, is it? Some pale imitation of Zan, wiped and recovered, wiped and recovered, over and over and over again. Maybe the Zan I thought I loved, the one I have spent all my time arguing with Anat about, no longer exists. What is love anyway but a hunger than no meal can satisfy?
I stare down at my belly. I’ve gone in for my treatments every fourteen rotations. Now the thing I carry must already be splitting and multiplying, using my body, my strength, to bring itself to fruition. Thanks to Zan, I am capable of giving birth to the most important resource in the Legion now. Rasida’s world cannot live without me. Whether Rasida truly loves me or not, I am valuable to her. I’m annoyed that she did not let me see Anat and Zan one last time. It seems strange to attend a joining and not present the two families together at the end. Maybe it was done, and it’s something I don’t remember?
I pull on one of Rasida’s tunics, which is a little tight and too long, and venture out into the hall. A beefy woman stands outside and gives me a dark look when I leave. As I walk, the woman follows, eight or ten paces distant.
I round on her. “I’m sorry,” I say, “but are you meant to be guarding me?”
“If you leave, I’m to ensure you get back to your quarters,” the woman says.
“What is your name?” I say, but she does not fall for that. She presses her lips firmly together.
“Where is Rasida?”
“She is attending matters of foreign policy,” the woman says.