Her hand trembles. “I wanted a little longer with you.”
She takes me back to the hangar.
It’s been cleaned up since I was last here. The workbench is tidied. I go right to the big orange-eyed vehicle I repaired before, and it opens its great eye and purrs beneath my fingers.
“How do they get around?” I ask.
“They fly,” Jayd says, “through the airless spaces between us and the Mokshi.”
“And how far is our . . . ship from the rogue world?”
“We are not a ship, not really,” Jayd says. “You’ll understand when you get outside, and inside the Mokshi, well . . .” She trails off. “You need to get a squad in there with you. Whatever happens to you in there, however you lose your memory, maybe they can prevent it and help you get it back.”
“So, you don’t really know if I’ll get my memory back if I go.”
“If the Mokshi took it, the Mokshi can give it back.”
“And if I don’t get out?” I say. “Isn’t that the problem? That I didn’t get out last time? That I’ve been gone for . . . how long?”
“You’ll remember,” she says firmly.
I hoped to remember more by now, to uncover some truth, but my memory is still as much a cipher as Jayd. All I know is that I can hurt things, I can repair things, and I once recycled a child. So far, the person I had been didn’t seem to be someone I wanted to remember; seeking these memories may be like picking at a soft scab, one that barely conceals the pus and rot beneath.
Jayd points out how the assault vehicle functions while she leads me around the hangar. We pause at a long line of depressions in the wall, and she pulls out various items from the pockets of the wall’s seared flesh. One item is a spray-on suit, which she tells me to coat myself in before I go out. The bulb that contains it is soft in my hand. The other is a massive weapon that I hope gets easier to carry outside, because just holding it hurts my good arm.
“You deploy the vehicle’s burst scrambler when the world’s defenses go up,” Jayd says, pointing to a gnarled whorl in what I take to be the vehicle’s control panel. “The world is dead, and nothing lives inside of it anymore, but the defenses are still active.”
“If you’ve never been inside the Mokshi,” I say, “how do you know everyone is dead inside?”
Jayd takes my good arm and repositions my fingers on the weapon. “Don’t hold it like that or you will shoot your foot,” she says.
A sticky memory stirs: I remember a great round ship as big as a world, bathed in wave after wave of blue-green light. The image whispers away a moment later, but the memory of it raises the fine hairs on the back of my neck. My heart pumps a little faster; I worry I might have another panic attack, like I did with Gavatra. But my body stays in check. I breathe deeply through my nose. I’m learning to control my body the way I’m learning Jayd, and the ship, and the vehicles. If I can’t remember, I’ll start over. We’ll begin again.
“The first assault the world makes will be an energy wave,” Jayd says, and though the tour of the vehicle is over, she paces now, brow knit. I want to rub the furrow there between her eyes and tell her everything is going to be all right. But what would I know?
“The second will hit after you get into the atmosphere,” Jayd continues. “The burst scrambler will work to repel both, but you have to recharge it between hits. Don’t press it too much, too fast. That’s important.” She points to the place on the soft green control panel, another gnarled, almost root-like protrusion.
I don’t understand much of this, but as with the fighting and the repair of the vehicle, I’m starting to believe that some broken shards of my memory will indeed come back, hopefully when they’re most needed. I wonder why Jayd and Gavatra and whoever this mother of theirs is were mad enough to keep sending me off to this fate, and why I had been mad enough to agree to it time and time again. Did this same argument work every time, this promise that I will get back a memory? Maybe there is no memory. Maybe the memory itself is a lie, and I am just like these vehicles, bred for this purpose like a sack of sorry meat.
“Won’t I fall off?” I ask, pointing at the sleek tube of the open vehicle. Neither the vehicle nor the bulb containing my supposed suit looks particularly safe. I have an idea of what an airless vacuum of space is, which is odd. I can understand things like food and furniture and heat, but not who I am, or where we are, or why I dream of cannibal women cutting themselves open.
“You straddle it,” Jayd says, patting the seat. “Your suit sticks to it. To unstick yourself from it, press here.” She shows me the release control. It looks like a massive white pustule.
As Jayd smiles at me, a memory bubbles up: Jayd with her big eyes and full, round face reminds me of Maibe. But I have no idea who Maibe is. I want to ask how many “sisters” there are, and where all the other people are who live on the ship, like Sabita, and who all these bottom-worlders are, but there is no guarantee I’ll even survive this assault. Why bother to ask about a place I have a good chance of never seeing again, with a zero chance of Jayd giving me a straight answer, anyway?
I heft the weapon. “How do I use this?” I ask.
Jayd taps the butt of the weapon, just above a soft, hooked trigger mechanism made of the same spongy stuff as the walls. “Just point and shoot,” she says.
I lower the weapon, and Jayd bats it away. “Not at me.” She pulls something from her pocket, a wormy little thing that she tells me to put in my ear.
“No,” I say.
“It’s the only way we can speak after you spray on the suit,” Jayd says.
I wince. She raises her hand to do it for me, and I snatch her wrist. “I’ll do it,” I say, and I do as the thing slithers into the whorl of my ear canal.
I want to turn back, then. But a part of me knows that if I refuse to go on this assault, something far more terrible will happen, and this mother of ours—hers?—will recycle the lot of us, and death in service to the War God sounded a fair bit more glorious than death in the mouth of some recycler monster.
That name, that entity, the recycler monster, blooms into my thoughts the same way as the words speculum and haystitch had. My memory provides an image: a great lumbering one-eyed beast snarling at me from the guts of a rotten refuse heap of decaying bodies.
And then I stop thinking, stop coming up with questions, because I am terrified of what other horrors still lay locked in my broken mind.
“Time to drop,” Jayd says, and a broad door unfurls from the other side of the room, and in walks my glorious army.
“THE KATAZYRNAS THINK THEMSELVES THE MOST POWERFUL FORCE IN THE LEGION. I AM NOT THE FIRST TO HAVE PROVEN THEM WRONG.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
3
ZAN