“Just something that came to me,” I say. I don’t want her to know how much of the sign language I can understand. Not yet. “I don’t know,” Jayd says, and it’s a relief to know with certainty that she is lying. I still don’t know how much of what she has told me is a lie or an exaggeration. I yearn to trust her, but my body urges caution. Once again, my body intuits what my mind has forgotten.
“Why can’t you just tell me what’s happened,” I ask her, “the way you’ve told me the other things?”
“Because you will go mad,” Jayd says. She opens the door to my room. My bruises are fading.
“How do you know?”
Jayd hesitates on the threshold. She speaks softly, as if to herself, without turning. “Because if we tell you too soon, you go mad,” she says, “and then you could be recycled, or thrown out there at the Mokshi without the reconditioning you’re doing now. You don’t want to start over like that. You will have no chance, and then you will be stuck out there for turns and turns again. Or maybe the Mokshi will kill you this time. And I . . . I don’t want that.”
“I want my memory back, Jayd. I want what was stolen.”
“You will get it,” she says, “when Mother has the Mokshi.”
I have no sense of time here, and though Jayd calls it a ship, or perhaps a world, for all I know, we could be deep underground at the center of some star. I spend endless nights trying to figure out how to open the door that seals behind Jayd whenever she leaves. I run my hands over the seams of the great wedged panels that purl open when Jayd enters. But though running my hands over it brings back memories of me doing this same thing again and again, it tells me nothing else.
As my bruises disappear, I resolve that this is not how I’m going to end my life, trapped in whatever cyclical horror these mad people have engineered for me.
This is what I’m thinking about when I pop one of the women in the training ring in the face with my fist. I don’t pull the punch this time as I have with all the others, and she reels back, pinwheeling her arms.
I leap at her. Her companions swarm me. I duck and dodge. My fists come up. I make four solid hits. Blood spatters my face. I’m not training now, I’m fighting, and Jayd’s fearful voice is just a dull buzzing at the edges of my awareness.
When Jayd takes my shoulder, I turn, fists up. She does not recoil. But the heat bleeds out of me. I let out a breath.
Around me, the three women I’ve been training with are all on the floor. There’s blood. Not a lot, but enough to startle me.
“Go back to your room,” Jayd says.
I stare down at the women. One has a burst nose. Another is spitting blood. Another crawls away from me, hand pressed to her ribs.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what—”
“Go,” Jayd says. “I’ll take care of them.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again, and turn on my heel and scuttle out of the room. I step into the corridor and take deep breaths. Stare at my fists. What am I, really? What have they made me into?
I hurry down the hall. As my haze lifts, I resolve that the last thing I want to do is go back to my cell. I change directions, picking a corridor off the main one at random. I try a few doors, but none will unfurl for me. Trapped in a maze. No way out.
I begin to run.
*
My bare feet slap against the moist floor. I come to the end of one corridor and turn into another. I run and I run, and as the air rushes through my lungs, I feel truly alive for the first time since waking. I take a soft left turn, and the corridor widens into a gaping mouth. An open door. I come up short and stare. Through the opening is a cavernous space with a ceiling so high, it’s lost to darkness. Green, bioluminescent flora or fauna of some kind line the walls and the floor, but it’s not enough to give me a sense of the depth of the room.
I step through the mouth and the ceiling lights up in green and blue. I squint and now I am the one who gapes, as I have entered a giant vehicle hangar. Row upon row of snub-nosed vehicles go on and on. They are strange, slumbering animals, these vehicles. They are slug-like things twisted with coiled tubing, their glistening exteriors splashed in yellow, red, blue, green. I don’t know what I expect vehicles to look like, but it seems odd they have no wings or wheels or feet.
As I pass, I brush them with my fingers, and they shiver and blink at my touch. They are warm, and their surfaces feel like toughened skin. Strange creatures, these. I wonder what they eat.
I crouch beside one, and it opens a massive eye, which bears an orange iris. For a long moment we stare at one another. I see that it’s leaking a viscous yellow fluid from one of the tubes crisscrossing its back end. There’s a workshop bench along the far wall where other vehicles are strung up in various states of disrepair. Some of them hang on bony hooks in the wall like slabs of meat.
The vehicle looks at me with its one orange eye. I feel pity for it, huffing here alone in the hangar, leaking vital fluid. I walk over to the workbench, and just like in the training room, my hands move of their own accord with some latent memory. I know how to fix this sad vehicle, and that knowledge gives me far greater pleasure than knowing how to hit someone.
I cut and stitch and smear salve across a long length of the vehicle’s tubing. It has a texture and consistency somewhere between intestine and an umbilical cord; the knowledge that I know the texture of both is sobering. There’s a heap of tubing in a warm bin on the workbench. I know where everything is, and I know the names of the tools: scalpel, haystitch, speculum, forebear.
I crouch next to the vehicle, a bone scalpel between my teeth, and repair the leaking tube. The vehicle hums softly beneath me. When I’m done, I’m smeared in sticky lubricant and yellow fluid. The vehicle rolls its eye at me and purrs. I pat its big snub of a front end, like thumbing a warm slug. We are probably both too happy in this moment.
“I’d heard you were alive.”
I raise my head. An unfamiliar person stands at the door. She is slender and wiry where Jayd is soft and luminous. Her black hair is cut short on one side and braided into one long plait on the other, twisted atop her head like a crown. She moves toward me. I grip the scalpel, uncertain.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“Sabita,” she says. “I suppose it’s still too early for you to remember that.” She strokes the snub nose of the vehicle. It purrs under her fingers. “I wanted to make sure you were safe this time.”
“I’ve only met Jayd so far,” I say, “and those people without tongues.”
Sabita curls her lip. “Bottom-worlders.”
“What does that mean?”
“People who live in the levels below here,” she says. “The world is very wild in the layers beneath us. When Lord Katazyrna takes a world, she consigns those she does not recycle to the bottom levels. Most are conscripted into the army, eventually.”
“Why am I here?” I ask.
Sabita presses a finger to her lips. Hesitates. “She hasn’t told you yet?”
“She says I’m supposed to take the Mokshi. She says it stole my memory.”
Sabita smiles, but it’s a sad smile. “Then I suppose that’s the truth she wants you to believe,” she says.