“No,” Casamir says, folding her arms. “None of this is all right.”
“We can’t be much farther from her people,” I say. “We’ll carry her and follow the path.”
“Why don’t we just leave them all?” Das Muni says quietly. “The world will eat them. That’s as it should be.”
“I made a promise,” I say. “Carry what bodies you can. We will send Arankadash’s people back for the rest.”
I heft Arankadash over my shoulder. I can’t carry her and the bodies of her kin, too, but Casamir and Das Muni are able to lift one set of them. The three of us follow the path up a long, winding stair. It’s in heavy disrepair, and I stumble. Das Muni and Casamir struggle to carry the bodies up.
We walk a long time in silence until we see a woman standing on an outcrop far ahead of us.
I wave at her. She ducks. I say, “I have Arankadash!”
She disappears.
“Scout?” Casamir says.
I nod. “Let’s wait. I don’t want to bumble into anyone the way we did with those other women.”
“How do you know she’s not with those other women?”
“Her hair is different,” I say. “You should know how to pay attention to that more than me.”
“I can’t see that far,” Casamir says, squinting. “My eyes aren’t as good.” But she and Das Muni let the bodies they carry rest on the steps.
After a few minutes, a long procession of women comes out to meet us. Two are armed, but the rest wear long flowing robes of hemp and waxy leaves.
Casamir greets them in their language. Arankadash is heavy. I feel her stir but don’t set her down. She may have trouble walking with a head injury.
The woman at the front is middle-aged. She wears a mass of bone and a hemp necklace that cover the front of her robe, hanging nearly to her waist.
“I have not spoken Handavi in some time,” she says to me.
“I’m good practice, then,” I say. “There are more of her sisters back there. We couldn’t carry them and her, too. She asked us to bring them home.”
She gestures to the people behind her. One of the women with a weapon runs back up the steps.
“They will retrieve our sisters,” she says. “Come, we offer rest and water. We will have a funerary feast. You are invited. You will be our special guests.”
“No offense meant,” I say, “but nothing good has come of me being a special guest.”
“You have suffered,” she says, not unkindly. “That is unfortunate. We are a peaceful people. You are in no danger here.”
“Peaceful unless I’m a mutant,” I say. Das Muni has put on her cowl again, but I’m aware of her breathing hotly next to me.
“All are welcome,” she says, and she peers at Casamir and Das Muni. “You have done us a great service. To lose the bodies of ours is to lose a piece of our people. We lose our future.”
I follow after her and her retinue. Two women come down the hill with a stretcher and take Arankadash from me. My hands are covered in her blood. I wipe my hands on my suit.
Das Muni takes my arm, Casamir rolls her eyes, and we go up and up, into some other world.
“CONTROL OF FECUNDITY IS SOMETHING EVERY WOMAN WANTS, AND EACH BELIEVES IS HER BIRTHRIGHT. THE WORLDS HAVE OTHER IDEAS, AND IT EVENTUALLY LED TO THEIR DESTRUCTION.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
25
JAYD
When I aborted the thing in my first womb, I expected to see some sad, tentacled monster in a jar, a half-baked gob of potential life, now just mutilated flesh; a collection of nubby tentacles and burst tissue. Or maybe I’d see the thing itself, whole and writhing in a pool of bloody afterbirth before the witches recycled it at Anat’s order.
I fought the gauzy dream of the light anesthetic huffing through the air, and struggled to sit up when they tugged away the hungry tuber that was emptying my womb. But when the witches raised the jar overhead, I saw only a knuckle’s depth of dark, frothy blood. I could see nothing within its murky depths. No mangled monsters. No tattered substance. Just blood.
“Is that all?” I asked, and my words came out slurred, muddy, like the stuff in the jar.
“That’s all,” the witches said. They looked amused, as if they had just told some recycler girl that the cog she bore to replace the dying one inside the core atmospheric lung of the world was just what they wanted, everything they had hoped for.
It was the first time I realized that we had some power over what the ship did to us. It was the first time I dared to hope that we could escape the Legion. I realized I could build a future instead of just a fate.
When I took the new womb, the one I knew Rasida would need, and my mother learned it wasn’t going to be just another bit of organic shielding or some new recycler monster, Anat put me on a regular schedule of what she called “treatments,” though the witches begged and pleaded for reason every time, because it’s been so long since we had a womb like this on the first level of the world that they considered it a great portent.
“We don’t need it yet,” Anat said, as if what I bore could happen only so many times, and maybe she was right. I didn’t know. I’d never had any contact with people who gave birth to what I could now. I started to wonder what she was saving it for.
I learned to recognize my mother’s look of distaste every time the witches made their case—suspicion, fear, and something else, something more—a realization that I was not the daughter she had hoped for. She had wanted me to lead an army. But I had fallen in love and given myself a valuable womb and failed to give her the Mokshi. It was not the future she wanted.
“Get rid of it,” Anat said, every time.
The witches would bow and scrape before her, nodding all three of their heads. “She is necessary. It’s necessary. Please, we must have this one. This one is for us. Please. We must have it.”
“End it. You know what happens.”
“It’s the will of the world. A world without issue—”
“She hasn’t birthed it yet, has she? Get rid of it or I’ll have you recycled after all, the way I promised when I sent Zan out. It’s not as if she’s giving birth to a world, just another sorry piece of it.”
This is how I know that Rasida is not taking the same treatments that I am. I know the signs and symptoms. If she is going to give birth, if she is pregnant or has recently aborted, she shows no signs of it. When Rasida invites me to dinner, I accept. When she brushes my fingers, I do not flinch. When she speaks to me of the troubles of the world, I listen with my most sympathetic expression, the one I used on Anat throughout my whole childhood.
And this is how I come to realize that Rasida doesn’t have the world, the same way that Zan no longer has her own womb. Rasida has given it to someone else, and I need to find out who.