Yet I still pull the blankets over my head before I let my face relax. The temperature inside Katazyrna was always more or less constant, but here on Bhavaja, it fluctuates. It’s warm now, but in a few breaths, it could cool to something less comfortable. Cowering under the covers this way, I can pretend I’m back on Katazyrna, though I find that memory brings me little solace. Life on Katazyrna, before Zan, was little better than my situation here. It was Zan who gave me hope that we could be something else, after I nearly destroyed her.
When I wake, the girls are rubbing the walls alight, and I find I have another long cycle of nothing before me. I make myself get up and dress. When the girls run off to get my food, I walk out into the courtyard outside my rooms and begin walking the circumference of it. I’m too nauseous to eat but hope that exercise eases both my stomach and my anxiousness. I have never been a prisoner before. I understand now how Zan felt.
When the girls arrive with the food, there is someone with them. It’s Nashatra.
“Hello, Mother,” I say. I expect to see Rasida there behind her, but she is alone. She is lanky in the arms and legs but soft in the middle, with a round, fleshy face and firm mouth that put me in mind of Rasida. Her eyes are hooded; she doesn’t fully open the lids, making her expression difficult to read. I expect that is a blessing here.
“Walk with me, child,” she says.
I follow her into the foyer. We walk in silence past the guards in the outer corridor and down a series of twisting passages. Finally, we come to a large, bowed room. Half the ceiling has collapsed, revealing brittle layers of the world above it, all fused and twisted together like scar tissue.
“We are alone,” she says.
“I can see that.”
“Your family is dead, and you owe us your womb,” she says.
“That’s correct.”
“I told Rasida we should trade only for your womb and have one of her sisters carry it. She refused. She wanted you. All of you, against my better judgment. I don’t trust Katazyrnas.”
“Yet you are here alone with me,” I say.
“You are not so foolish that you’d do harm to me here. You don’t yet know the full extent of Rasida’s wrath, but you will, child. Rasida always gets what she wants.”
“I have seen what she does to her own mother,” I say.
“I never wanted war,” Nashatra says. “Rasida’s aunt was Lord before Rasida was. I never held the title. You can see why.”
“You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Don’t I?” she says.
“Why have you taken me here?”
“The girls are Rasida’s,” she says, “like most people here. But not all of us. Not all of us, child. You understand? Just because I raised that girl doesn’t mean I will stand by while our world rots around her.”
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“When you first came here, I thought you were a spider,” she says. “Then I thought, perhaps, you loved her. Then I saw that we were the same.”
“We’re not the same.”
“Oh, we are,” she says. “We are both smart women who thought being smart could save us here. It cannot, with Rasida. Logic does not win against her. Nor does love. You have tried both, I know. I know how you got here. But neither will work. You must try something different.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
“Because you are closest to her now,” she says, “and if we are going to overthrow her, we need someone who can get close enough to kill her.”
My expression does not change. Killing Rasida was never part of the plan, but I am desperate for allies here.
“You had best speak quickly,” I say softly, because I fear the walls are listening. I fear they can divine my true intent. “Because I would never betray Rasida in that way.” And when I say it out loud, I almost believe it. I almost believe I am the woman I pretend to be.
“COMING BACK INTO THE WORLD IS ALWAYS TORTUROUS.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
17
ZAN
Recovery nearly kills me.
I vomit and tremble. Das Muni feeds me something like water—a viscous substance—from her crooked hands. I wake once to hear Das Muni grunting while she squats over the basket. Splashing and gurgling. The soft cries of some mutant living thing, left to drown in its own afterbirth, send me to sleep.
The horror of the real world extends into my dreams. I dream that I give birth to a squalling, one-eyed recycler monster. It grows so rapidly, it eats off my arm just minutes after birth. It snuffles after me while I try to crawl away, eating me piece by piece until it devours my chest and swallows my head.
I wake screaming, often. The screaming reminds me of the screaming I heard while asleep in my room, back before the invasion. Did my sisters dream of the same things? Of people recycled? Is that what Jayd dreams about?
Das Muni squeezes water into my parched mouth and wipes my fevered brow. I piss myself often, and Das Muni replaces the spongy blanket beneath me. It absorbs most of my sweat and piss. I watch in fascination as Das Muni goes outside the hovel and wrings it dry, like a sponge.
I don’t know how long it is before Das Muni finally makes me move.
“Your leg is healing well enough,” Das Muni says. “You need to get up now and move it, or you’ll lose your strength.”
I grunt at her. I’ve lost something here, in all this squalor and horror, and I don’t know how to get it back. As I look at Das Muni, all I can think is that dying is preferable to living down here the rest of my life. What hope is there to ever leave, if what Das Muni says is true? What if Jayd is already dead, like the rest of our so-called sisters? Anat is dead. The Katazyrna armies are dead. I want to have hope for some reality other than this, but I can’t see it. My body rebels. I whimper.
Das Muni is much smaller than me but surprisingly strong. She hooks her arms under mine and yanks me past the fire, pulling me outside the hovel for the first time. The light here is not the swinging blue light I saw when I first descended into this mire, but soft green. The glow comes from the piles of refuse all around us: a slithering green light, like something alive. And it is something alive, I see now as a thread of green slides up my arm. They are bioluminescent worms.
I wipe it off. It twists and tumbles to the ground, squiggling in the muck.
“Up,” Das Muni says. She tugs at me again.
“I can’t,” I say.
“If you don’t get up, I’ll leave you out here for Meatmoth,” she says.
I don’t quite believe her, but I move my legs anyway, leaning hard on Das Muni.
Pain radiates up my bad leg. I hiss at the pain. Just the act of standing, even pushing hard against Das Muni, has me sweating and trembling. When I am finally standing straight, I find that I’m head and shoulders taller than Das Muni. And even in this state, having lost much of my flesh here during recovery, I easily outweigh her by fifty or sixty pounds.