Rasida says, “What do you want, Jayd?”
“Just you,” I say. I meet her look. “I want to have a new life. Maybe it’s true that I am free now. Maybe you’ve freed me.”
She smiles at me, but it is the smile that does not touch her eyes, the black smile that goes with her black eyes. A fist of worry forms in my chest and does not go away. If she makes me a prisoner here, I will have a much more difficult time escaping.
Rasida rises and goes to her wardrobe. She pulls out my mother’s iron arm. She drops it on the table between us and sits back down.
“Is there some trick to it?” she says. “We all know Anat used the arm to power the world. She put on lovely little light shows, and I heard rumors of far more. They say she had control over Katazyrna the way the witches did, using this arm. We can’t find the Katazyrna witches, so we need the arm if we’re to remake the world.”
“I don’t know,” I lie. I stare at the arm. She has taken out my mother’s wasted, fleshy arm from inside of it, and it’s only a metal brace wrapped over the warm organic green skin now. I don’t tell Rasida that the arm is not something from Katazyrna at all. We don’t have the skill to build such a thing any more than she does. Only one world does.
“If you knew how to operate it—” Rasida says.
“Mother didn’t trust any of us,” I say. “I’m sorry, love. If I knew how it worked, I would tell you.”
“Would you?”
“I would,” I say.
She considers me, expression cool, calculating. She stands and picks up the arm and puts it back in her wardrobe. I note its placement, and also that it doesn’t seem to be locked up in any way. Perhaps she trusts that her people fear her enough not to touch it. It’s a good thing I am not hers.
“I suppose it was not important to know such things,” Rasida says. “With what you can carry in that womb, such things are not your concern. How many have you birthed?”
“None,” I say.
“None?” She narrows her eyes. “Then how do you know—”
“Anat had them removed before they came to fruition,” I say. “She decides . . . decided who got to give birth, and to what, on the world.”
“Quite a feat,” she says.
“Surely,” I say carefully, “you have control over the fecundity of your people, the same way you control your own.”
“I administer corrections when I deem it fit,” she says. She drinks from another beautiful metal goblet. This one has blue stones embedded along the rim. I cannot imagine she eats this way every rotation. But I know very little of this woman who is my enemy, far less than I thought I did before I came here.
“I have always thought it strange,” I say, “that you continue to live in a world such as this when you have the power to make a new one. What do you care about a metal arm to patch up the seams of some world, when you could remake the world?”
Rasida raises her brows. “Oh, yes,” she says. “I hear that often. But no one tells you what it does to you, to make a world.” She refills my goblet. “Do they?”
I fold my hands over my belly. “Anat always said leading a world was far more dangerous and terrifying than making one.”
“Anat was a fool,” Rasida says. “Drink your wine.”
I drink my wine.
I cannot help but glance at the wardrobe again and the iron arm within. My family dead, Zan dead, and here I sit with the arm just a few paces away, and the woman who can remake worlds pouring wine into my cup.
I have stepped into the belly of my enemy. I am within a whisper of everything I sought. But at what price?
Rasida leans toward me. “There is something you should know,” she says.
I wait. She seems to expect a response, but when I give none, she continues. “I love you very much,” she says, and grins.
“I love you also,” I say.
Smile and smile, Zan would say. Smile all the brighter for being the villain.
“It does worry me,” she says, “that you have yet to bear a pregnancy to term.”
“Now that I have the opportunity—”
“Yes, of course,” Rasida says. “We’ll make sure you are cared for. You know that’s all I want. To care for you.”
“I know,” I say.
As we finish our meal, Rasida talks of the salvage work on the neighboring world, petty insurgencies in the level below, and relates a story about how one of her sisters burned out an infestation of vermin on the upper level. The conversation seems trivial, but I note that she is careful about how much she tells me. I never hear more of her sisters’ names, nor the name of the world they are salvaging from, nor what is being salvaged.
We are interrupted by Rasida’s mother, Nashatra.
I make to stand as she enters, a show of respect, but Rasida waves me back down.
“What do you want, you old fool?” Rasida says.
Nashatra ducks her head. “Apologies, Lord, you’re needed on the fourth level.”
“The fourth? Fuck and fire,” Rasida mutters. “You can’t take care of it yourself?”
“You asked to be alerted any time the—”
“Shut your fool mouth,” Rasida says.
I close my own mouth, even though she is not talking to me. I can’t help being shocked at Rasida’s tone. If I had spoken to Anat that way, I’d have been recycled.
Rasida gets up. Nashatra backs away, trying to give her room to go past, but as she does, she knocks the table, and Rasida’s goblet falls to the floor.
Rasida raises her arm, but Nashatra is already getting to her knees—painfully, from the look on her face—and babbling apologies.
“I’m sorry, daughter,” Nashatra says. She pulls the goblet off the floor and begins to wipe it clean on her tunic.
I try to get down beside her to help, but Rasida snaps her fingers at me. “You go back to your rooms,” she says. “Samdi, escort my consort to her rooms.”
“I’m sorry,” I say to Nashatra stupidly, because what do I have to be sorry for? We’re all just things here, owned by the most powerful person in the Legion.
When I finally go back to my rooms, the light on the walls feels very bright, and I’m exhausted from my long performance. The girls are still there, though, turning down my bed and pouring fresh, warm water into a bowl so I can wash my face before I go to sleep. I say nothing to them as I disrobe and bathe and slip into bed. The semidarkness is welcome, because it is the only time I can be certain no one can see my face.