“I hate you,” I say. “I’ve always hated you.”
“I know,” Rasida says, “I know. It’s why we are so perfect together.” She wipes the blade of her knife on her knee. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“TO ESCAPE THE LEGION, YOU MUST FIRST UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS. MY MISTAKE WAS IN ASSUMING I UNDERSTOOD HOW THE WORLDS WORKED.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
21
ZAN
We scale a range of mountains built of human bones. Mostly human, anyway. I can see as we struggle over the piles, all soldered together with some calcified substance, that some of the skulls are too big, the pelvises too wide, to be fully human. I don’t know whose graveyard this is, then. Everyone’s, I suppose. Everything’s.
Time is impossible to measure at the bottom of the world. After a few sleeping periods, the moths become less and less, and are replaced by skittering beetles with great glowing abdomens. Sometimes we exist in complete darkness, and Casamir brings out a small, portable version of the tentacle globes, which she simply calls a torch.
The way would be grim and quiet if it were just Das Muni and I, but Casamir chatters ceaselessly. When we camp, Casamir tells stories, most of which make little sense to me. As we bed down for what must be our thirteenth or fourteenth time, Casamir tells a long and involved story about a woman with a cog that defecates in her hat each morning. I only half pay attention to it as I eat the tepid stew she’s mixed up for us from her pack.
Casamir ends her story with “And that’s why they call her Lord Knots!” She slaps her knee and guffaws.
I shake my head. “I don’t understand,” I say.
“It’s a joke,” Casamir says. “Because of science.”
“I see,” I say.
“I’m very funny,” Casamir says. “Everyone loves that joke. Let me tell it again. Maybe you missed the middle. This woman—”
“That’s all right,” I say.
Das Muni mumbles something about defecating scientists and wanders off to, I presume, defecate.
I watch Casamir hum to herself as she eats.
“Do you believe me,” I say, “that I’m from the surface?”
“Oh, sure,” Casamir says.
“That means no.”
Casamir shrugs. “What is reality, anyway? Reality is something we make with our minds. Yours exists as certainly as mine.”
“You think I’m insane,” I say.
“Oh, no,” Casamir says. “Just mentally delusional. It’s all right. Very common. Especially among those who’ve been discarded by their people.”
“So, you agree there are upper levels?”
“I agree there are different levels,” Casamir says.
“How diplomatic,” I say.
Casamir covers her mouth with her hand, failing to hide a smirk.
“I’m an experiment, then?” I say. “Let me tell you something, Casamir. I’m tired of being somebody’s experiment.”
“Sorry,” Casamir says. “It isn’t like that, though. I can’t become an engineer without going on this journey. Every engineer has to go up a level, has to explore. I’m tired of the pits. They always get tired of me talking and send me to the pits. Can’t be an engineer unless you fight for it.”
“How do you prove you got to another level?”
“I have to bring something back,” she says. “There’s . . .” She unrolls the map from her pack and spreads it out in the light of the torch. “There’s a gateway, here,” she says, pointing.
“Where are we?”
“Almost there,” she says. “Another hundred thousand steps, maybe. Five sleeping periods, give or take.”
“You say there were mutant hordes.”
“Oh, that. Yes,” she says. She rolls the map up again. “We may encounter them in the next twenty or thirty thousand steps. We’ll need to keep a lookout.”
“Did you bring weapons?”
“I have my knife,” she says. I’ve seen her knife: a sharpened tibia.
“Are they dangerous, the mutants?”
“Sometimes,” she says. “Mostly, they keep back from the light. We just need to stick close when we’re walking the next few periods. It shouldn’t be too bad.”
But she isn’t looking at me when she says it.
I don’t sleep well. I toss and turn at every sound. The spaces here are so vast that we cannot huddle against the walls, so we sleep at the foot of the bone mountains, and the bones creak and clatter as small animals and insects scurry around inside of them. I wake twice with black, palm-sized insects sitting on my chest, and I bat them away and stab them with the tibia that I’m using as a walking stick.
When Casamir shakes me to get me up, I’m already awake, exhausted and irritable.
I follow Casamir’s bobbing light as we come to the end of the bone mountains. She raises it as high as she can, and I see mounds of fleshy protuberances, some two stories high, riddled with a patchwork of holes and burrows big as my head.
I don’t have to ask what lives in there, because I can see the shiny glint of their six eyes reflected back at us from the burrows. Whatever they are, they do not like the light.
Casamir smiles back at me nervously. “Onward, and all that,” she says.
We move cautiously across the pitted ground. It’s as if something has eaten away at the floor. I’m reminded of what Casamir had told us closer to the city, about how the walls and floors were permeable outside of the light.
There’s skittering along the edges of our pool of light, and Casamir freezes.
I come up behind Casamir. Das Muni bumps into me. She grabs at the back of my suit.
“Keep going,” I say.
“I just . . . maybe . . . ,” Casamir says.
I step ahead of her, to the edge of the circle of light. “There’s no option where I go back,” I say. I think of Jayd and all I haven’t yet told Casamir, or Das Muni. “There’s a whole world at stake up there.”
“Not my world,” Casamir says.
“Your world,” I say. “Come on.”
Casamir inches forward. She moves the torch to her other hand and drops it. She says something in her language, probably swearing, and runs after the torch as it rolls away toward a depression in the floor.
I scramble after it as well. I lunge, too late, as it rolls into the hole, plunging us into darkness.
A hooting sound comes from all around us. One voice and then others.
I reach into the hole. My fingers brush the end of the torch, but I’m too big to get any farther.
“Cas,” I say.
She’s next to me, burrowing her head inside. “My arms aren’t long enough!” she says.
“Let me,” Das Muni says softly.
The skittering sounds grow closer. I feel the hush of breath against my ankles and kick out but don’t make contact with anything.
Das Muni presses herself next to me. She crawls down after the torch. I keep hold of her legs, fearful about some creature pulling her down.
“Ouch!” Casamir says. “Something bit me!”