I reach for Casamir. “Up!”
Casamir grabs my hand, and I pull her up. Arankadash heaves Das Muni over her shoulder. Das Muni squeals again, and I think of a dying animal. I grab her hand and pull her over.
Arankadash gazes up at me. I hold open my hand.
She takes it.
I pull her over, and into the darkness.
*
All around us is a crystal forest.
It takes us some time to realize that, because we’re still half blind from the transition from light to dim. The crystals give off a faint gray-white light.
We stumble on, aimless, for at least five or six thousand steps before Casamir says, “Where are we going?”
“Away,” I say.
“We should rest,” Arankadash says.
I say nothing but collapse where I stand. The edges of the crystals have been smoothed by time, but they don’t make comfortable seats, even so.
We drink water and eat. I try to catch my breath. The light keeps coming back to me. I’m going to dream of that light, those giants.
“I thought we had entered the den of the skull-eater,” Arankadash says.
I start at the name. “What did you say?”
“The skull-eater,” she says, “the Lord of War.”
“Someone called me that once,” I say. “Why would they call me that?”
She shrugs. “They thought you were a god?” She says it like it’s amusing to her.
“Does skull-eater mean something else among other people?” I ask.
“Your people are different than mine,” she says. “If they were your people who said it.”
“I don’t know whose people they were,” I say, and that’s true. I feel I know far more about the world below the Katazyrnas than I know about the Katazyrnas.
“We should keep moving while we have the strength,” Casamir says. “I don’t like this place.”
“It’s better than the last one,” I say.
But we move on.
As we walk and our eyes adjust, the size of the crystals grows too. Soon they tower above us, so high they touch the ceiling, which is also covered in crystalline structures.
Das Muni picks her way ahead of us, the first time I can remember her taking the lead. I take up the rear, walking stick out. If we’re going to be swarmed by creatures or giants, I want to be ready.
We walk for a long time. Arankadash is barefoot, and every time we stop, she tends to her feet. I offer a bit of my suit, which I’m able to cut off with Casamir’s knife and wrap around her feet. But in the dim light I see her feet are blistered and bloody already, though she has not complained at all.
I wake sometime during a rest period to the sound of someone grunting. The light here is low but constant, so it’s impossible to see how much time has passed.
Arankadash is squatting about forty paces away, leaning hard against a large crystal. She’s sweating. For a moment, I think she’s defecating, but the grunt turns into a long moan.
“Are you all right?” I ask. “Arankadash.”
She waves me away, but I scramble over to her.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
She shakes her head. Huffs out rhythmic breaths. “Birthing,” she says.
I try to get closer, but the look she gives me is murderous. “Let me be,” she says.
She grits her teeth and bears down. I can see nothing beneath her—her robes are too long—but I worry for whatever she’s giving birth to. Will it smash itself on the crystals?
I bring her water. She drinks and pushes me away again. By now, Casamir and Das Muni are awake. Neither approaches. They simply sit and eat. Casamir is making marks on a parchment book.
Arankadash heaves one more time. I hear something fleshy slide to the ground.
She lets out a long breath that turns into another moan and leans hard on the crystal behind her. She reaches for me, and I hold out my hand. She levers herself up and reaches beneath her.
I tense, remembering the squirming, toothy creatures Das Muni gave birth to. I’m already horrified about what she might have created. What has the ship given her to carry?
Arankadash pulls up a wriggling mass of slimy flesh. For a moment, I think it’s her placenta, but no—this is a round, mechanical-looking cog, like a toothy organ, something that would be affixed to a vehicle. It has a grooved, hollowed-out center. It has no eyes or face.
I expect her to toss it into her pack or throw it among the crystals like the waste it seems to be, to me. But she does not. She slumps to the ground and pulls it close to her. She coos at it like it’s a child, this great mucus-slick thing.
I have to look away, but I can still hear her. She begins to hum softly to it.
I sit beside her, swallowing back my bile. This is something about the world that I can’t stomach. Something I can’t understand. There is a wrongness to it, women giving birth to what the world says it needs instead of what they yearn for.
Arankadash folds her offspring into her arm. It settles in, pulsing softly. It’s red brown and laced in thick, ropy veins.
“What is it?” I ask, voice low.
“It’s a gift from the light,” she says.
“How do you get it . . . to the light?” I say.
She turns her sweaty face to me, and her expression contorts, as if I am mad. That gives me pause, because I don’t feel like the mad one. She and her pulsing gob of flesh look mad to me. So mad that I wonder if I should leave her and it here while we carry on. But no. I’m the outsider. I need to understand this.
“When it’s time, the light will come for it,” Arankadash says. She gazes lovingly at the mass in her arms. “I need to rest.” She holds out her arm to me.
I take her hand, averting my gaze from the thing in her arms again. I help her back to the circle. When I glance back at where she gave birth, I see a placenta and great gobs of afterbirth. We bleed, we birth, we bleed again.
Arankadash lies down with her new offspring and falls immediately to sleep.
I can’t help but think of the squirming basket of creatures Das Muni showed me.
Das Muni is watching me from a few paces away, chewing thoughtfully on a bit of rancid tuber left in our pack.
“What do you do with yours?” I ask Das Muni. “Why don’t you keep it like she does?”
“I’m not from this world,” Das Muni says. “They will only recycle what I make. It doesn’t need it. I give birth to things useful on some other world. But whatever she’s made, well. The world will need it eventually. Probably. Unless that part of it is dead now.”