“You intend to save Katazyrna with it?” Sabita signs.
I’m still worried about telling her too much. So I lie and sign, “Yes.”
Sabita is silent for a time. She folds her hands across her chest and gazes at the ceiling.
“Will you help me?” I sign. “She won’t keep you any longer than she will keep me. This may be over now that the child’s here. You understand?”
Sabita makes a quick sign. “Yes.”
I let out my breath and sign, “I will need you to cover for me in my absence. Soon.”
“What will you do?” Sabita signs.
“It’s best you don’t know,” I sign. “You can tell them I forced you to it, if we’re caught.”
She does not answer. If she is going to betray me, she will betray me in the morning.
When I wake, it is with the knowledge that this could be my last day breathing, one way or another.
But when I see Sabita wake on the floor next to me, she signs, “Let me tell you about the tunnel I’ve been making,” and hope blooms within me anew.
*
It’s another ten cycles before I feel well enough to leave our quarters. Even then, it takes three attempts. The girls are always awake, always eager to please Rasida, and there are women outside the large foyer who guard our way.
But Sabita is a tissue technician, and she has been burrowing out an old doorway in one of my rooms, slowly carving away the slab of meaty flesh so that it opens now like the peel of a fruit. Sabita takes her place in my bed, pulling the covers up over her head, and I sneak out twice before eventually finding my way back to Rasida’s quarters. Sneaking is painful; I cannot move very quickly. My walk is more a shuffle, but my advantage is that Rasida will not think me capable of walking even this far.
She has visited me several times during my recovery, always bringing small gifts, bits of other worlds, sheets of paper, colorful strands for the loom. I gave her a fine colorful cape I had woven for her, and she wears it now like a fine suit.
I, too, can smile like a villain.
The door to Rasida’s rooms opens at my touch. Like her wardrobe, she does not bother with locks. Or perhaps there are none here. Perhaps the world doesn’t know how to create them anymore. One more broken piece.
I go to her wardrobe and open it. Inside are a line of suits and some piles of embroidered bags and two obsidian machetes. Has she moved it already? I wonder where else she would have put it, and turn to look under the bed.
“What are you doing?”
Rasida is standing in the doorway.
She is wearing the iron arm.
My legs nearly give out from under me. I have to catch myself against the wardrobe. I want to scream. Seeing her wearing that arm reminds me of the last time I stole it, and what I had to sacrifice for it, but I clench my teeth and say nothing. Try to feel nothing.
Rasida smiles and holds up the arm. “Fits well, doesn’t it?”
“How did you get it on?” I ask. “Anat had to . . . It didn’t fit her very well.”
“I have my ways,” she says. She comes around the bed to me. Grabs the edge of the wardrobe door with her iron fingers. “You know what I loved about you when you were a child?” she says.
I shake my head.
“Boundless curiosity,” she says. “Fearlessness. When we first came to talk peace with your mother all those rotations ago, do you remember it? You weren’t even at menarche yet. My aunt still led us then, but I would supplant her soon. And when we met Anat, you stood beside her with your sisters and stared us all down. My mother, my aunt, and me. You didn’t care. And when your mother and sisters left, you came right up to me, though I am ten rotations your senior, and you lit into me with a barrage of questions. Fearless.” She shuts the wardrobe with her iron arm.
I flinch.
“What’s your game here, Jayd?” she says. “You have given birth to my child. You say you are my family. But still you creep about, sniffing after something. What do you need this arm for, if it only works on Katazyrna? Do you think you’re going back?”
“That’s not what I came for,” I say. “I just . . . I didn’t know where you were. You haven’t been to see me in some time. I thought I’d look for you.”
“When I am able to see you, I come to see you. That’s why I brought you Sabita, to give you comfort when I cannot. The wars I must wage to unite the Legion are many. They keep me very busy.”
“I feel like a prisoner,” I say, and sit on the bed.
“That is not my intention. You know that.”
“If you’re wearing the arm,” I say, “we must be very close to going home. Did you find the Katazyrna witches?”
She flexes her fist. “You say it works on Katazyrna, but I have tried it there, with no luck. Perhaps only a Katazyrna can wield it. Your daughter will wield it.”
I say nothing. She hasn’t found the Katazyrna witches yet, then.
Rasida watches me. Drums her metal fingers on the wardrobe door. Finally, she sits beside me. “I am a woman who is meant to conquer worlds,” she says, “not birth them.”
“I would like to birth your worlds,” I say.
She kisses me.
Fear and desire are tangled things in this place. She has not kissed me since that first night, and I am angry at my body’s response to her touch. But Rasida simply lies beside me and holds me close. I exhale, relieved and grateful and hating myself for feeling either.
It’s only as she settles her iron arm around me that I understand the importance of the gesture. She holds me close with my mother’s arm.
I take the arm in mine and hold her.
“You are the mother to Bhavaja’s children,” she says. “Let’s keep you as such.”
“But who is better suited to birth worlds than you?”
“My mother,” she says.
I hold the arm in my hands, but it’s attached to a woman who will crush me with it as surely as Anat would. While it was unattached, I had a chance. Now . . . I don’t know. Without the arm, I will never be able to get inside the Mokshi.
“Don’t fret for Bhavaja,” she says. “The world grows inside of my mother now. When we move enough to Katazyrna, she will stay here and birth a world. That world will begin to remake Bhavaja. When you and I return here, we will be Lords of not only Bhavaja but of the whole Outer Rim, and then the Legion.”
Her mother. I have never been so disappointed to be right. With the arm, I could have carved my way to Nashatra. We could have had a chance to fight our way out of Bhavaja. Now that Rasida has put it on, I’ll have to kill her in order to leave. I don’t have the option of doing what I did on the Mokshi.
“It is a grand vision,” I say.
“I want you by my side for it,” she says.
“I will be,” I say. “But, Rasida, please, I must feel less like a prisoner. I want to be happy here, but I can’t feel that way as a kept thing.”