“Many monsters,” Das Muni says. “We’re at the center of the world, or very near it. They recycle everything for the world. It’s a big job. On my world, there were more of them—”
“How did you get down here?” I say.
“Same as you,” Das Muni says, but she does not look at me as she says it. She is gazing out beyond the light of the fire again, to Meatmoth’s world. I wonder what it is she’s burning. “Someone recycled me.”
“Why?”
“Why did they recycle you?”
I don’t know how much to tell her. I’m still wondering if she’s going to eat me or not. “The world’s been breached,” I say. “The Bhavajas have taken over Katazyrna.”
“Oh,” Das Muni says, as if I’ve told her I sprayed on a blue suit that morning instead of a green one.
“That’s very bad,” I say, pressing. “They slaughtered everyone.”
“They won’t slaughter everyone,” Das Muni says, “only enough to make sure they can bring all their own people over here. I heard Bhavaja is dying. Once a world is dying, the only way to turn it around is to give birth to a new one. And that’s . . . rare.”
“How do you know so much?”
“How do you not?” Das Muni says. “I’ve lived on a few worlds. No one ever wants me. I am always recycled.”
“What do you do?”
She cocks her head. “I give birth to the wrong sorts of things.”
“You . . . give birth?”
“Everyone births things.”
“I don’t.”
“Of course you do. There’s no one who doesn’t.”
I search my memory for something about birth or pregnancy but come up empty. I reflexively put my hands against my soft stomach, pressing to see if I can find some other life in there. But I don’t notice anything. I remember the scar there.
“How does that . . . happen?” I ask.
Das Muni raises her brows. “Have you lost your head down here?”
“Yes,” I say, relieved to find some excuse that doesn’t entail telling her more of my strange story. “Since I got dumped down here, I don’t remember many things.”
“You birth what the world wants,” Das Muni says. She picks something out of the pot over the fire, something that looks like a stick, and chews on the softened end of it. “When it decides something is needed, you make it. The witches on every ship, they know all about it. Some are madder than others, but they can tell you.”
“We . . . make it?” But then, who else would make what the ship needs? The ship, maybe? Are we the ship, living on its flesh like parasites? “What do you make, then?”
Das Muni eyes me over a long moment, chewing thoughtfully. Then she stands, hunching over in the low space, and picks up a tightly woven basket. It sits on the other side of the room behind stacks of corded fuel and what appears to be semi-rotten foodstuffs.
She shuffles toward me and shoves the basket at me.
Inside is a slithering mass of oily, fishlike organisms with human-shaped heads filled with spiny teeth.
I recoil.
Das Muni looks into the basket herself, frowns. “They are not so bad this time.”
I feel nauseous.
“It’s all right,” Das Muni says. “They are also very tasty.”
“I can’t stay here,” I say. “Thank you for looking out for me, but I have to get back up to the surface.”
“There’s no way back up,” Das Muni says.
“But you’ve been inside other worlds, you said. Been recycled before. How did you get out?”
“When the scavengers come,” Das Muni says, “they break open every level of the world, right to the core here, and they take out all the organic things. Without this, the world dies. It has nothing to use to regenerate itself.”
“What did you do before?”
“I served people, that’s all.”
“How do you know so much, then?”
“I listen,” Das Muni says. “I listen when people think I don’t. That’s the secret to staying alive. You must know more than you pretend.”
“I don’t know anything,” I say.
“Then we are a good pair,” Das Muni says, and begins clubbing her offspring to death for dinner.
“VILLAINS SMILE BRIGHTEST. MY GRIN IS WIDEST BEFORE I DINE. ALL MY ENEMIES KNOW THIS.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
16
JAYD
I will not lose sight of what I’m here for. Now, more than ever, every word and gesture matters. But I didn’t anticipate Rasida’s betrayal. Not so soon. It was . . . it was something I would have done, broker peace and destroy the world. I close my eyes. I’ve done it before.
Rasida has the arm. I tell myself she has done me a favor. I am halfway to getting both of the things I want, but I’m on my own now. I can’t rely on Zan to hold up her part of this plan. In truth, her role was most important in getting me here. The rest, I can do alone. It will be more difficult, but it’s possible. I must assume Zan and my sisters are dead; it’s just me now. So I have to go through with this plan Zan and I concocted so many rotations ago, and believe that what we came up with then can still work.
But it’s several sleeping periods before I can make myself accept Rasida’s dinner invitation. Even getting out of bed is painful. Keeping food down in the morning is difficult, though, and by the evening, I’m starving. The food the girls offer me is terrible. I suspect Rasida knows that what will finally get me to dinner is the hope of better food.
I am careful with my appearance. I ensure I am clean and well groomed. I practice smiling. The practicing helps when I step into Rasida’s rooms and see her for the first time since she murdered my family.
My expression is sad but sincere, I hope.
I don’t ask her about Neith and Gavatra, though I have considered a hundred ways I could ask her during the long, sleepless periods I’ve endured. They are dead. I have probably been eating them.
“Thank you for accepting, love,” Rasida says. My gut goes icy at the endearment. She is mad like Anat was mad. But I’m here sitting across from her of my own will, so I’m no better.
Her sister Samdi serves us, which makes me wonder if Samdi is her sister after all. Like me, Rasida has shown herself to be a master in the art of deception. In part, I think it’s because she absolutely believes that the things she’s telling me are true when she says them. She is nurturing reality into being as she speaks.
“I have thought long on what’s happened,” I say. I pick at my food. We are eating a mix of clotted protein gel and fresh greens. At least something still grows on this dying world, somewhere. I’ve been offered nothing this fresh in my own quarters. Maybe there will be something sweet afterward. This thought bubbles up and I almost laugh at myself, that my submission can be bought with something as simple as food.
“I came here to you because of my mother,” I say. “She was always overbearing. You knew her. My whole family wanted a life killing and dying for Katazyrna. I am . . . not like that. I never wanted that. The things I did . . . all those worlds. That was something she made me do, never something I wanted. But on Katazyrna, you did what Anat asked or she had you recycled.”