And now I understand why they’ve taken Jayd. The Bhavajas needed something she had inside of her. I touch the scar on my belly. It is something I did not contain, so I cannot go in her place. But what does she give birth to? What do I have waiting in my own belly, and why have I yet to get pregnant like everyone else? Worse, then, is the idea that I will get pregnant at some point on this journey, and I am terrified of what it is I might nurture there. I resolve to cut it out long before it comes to fruition. Whatever it is, I don’t want it.
We rest for a few long periods there, until Arankadash is recovered. But the resting costs us. Our water runs low after five sleeping periods in the crystal forest, and tempers begin to run high. I suggest rationing, with extra for Arankadash. She does not listen to me when I suggest this, as she is cooing at her cog or wheel or organ or whatever it is.
I’m not surprised when Casamir and Das Muni begin bickering on the walk after that.
“If you washed half as much as the rest of us, you wouldn’t be crawling with vermin,” Casamir says.
Das Muni is still in the lead, picking her way across the crystals. She is agile. Though she, too, has no boots, her feet are splayed, callused things. She crouches atop a large crystal, scouting ahead. “Dead end this way,” she says.
“Of course!” Casamir yells, and takes off her pack. She throws it at her feet. “I’ve had enough!” she says. “You can’t really see anything up there! She’s leading us in circles! She’s going to eat us all in our sleep!”
Das Muni cocks her head at Casamir and bares her teeth. “You will ruin your food.”
“What do you care!” Casamir says. “You’re going to eat us! That was probably the plan all along. Are you going to call your little mutant friends and—”
“Stop yelling,” I say. Casamir’s voice is echoing. It’s made much louder as it reverberates among the crystals.
“And you!” Casamir says. “You delusional little psychotic! What was I thinking, coming all the way up here after you? The surface? Surface! Like the way a bubble has a surface? Let me tell you something. When you get through the skin of a bubble, it pops. Even if you can get us up there, then—”
“So, why don’t you turn around?” I say, knowing I should just let her yell it out but tired of her whining. “We’re all tired, Casamir.”
“I had everything back home!” Casamir says. “I had a great job! It isn’t so bad. And then I came here—”
“Stop shouting,” I say.
Arankadash has strapped her offspring to her chest. She raises her hands now to cover her ears.
“—and you!” Casamir says to Arankadash. “You fell for it too! All her important talk! Don’t pretend it’s not because she’s handsome. I see how you look at her. But she’s mad, I tell you. A perfect study in madness, because she’s drawn us all into her delusion, and now we’ll rot here, starving—”
Das Muni leaps.
I think she is leaping onto Casamir, but she overshoots Casamir and hurls herself into me, so fast I don’t have time to react. I fall hard onto the crystals behind me. Pain radiates up my ass. I twist my leg.
I hear the crack then. Not from my body, but from the crystals above us.
A huge hunk of crystal falls. It slides neatly and suddenly into Das Muni’s back. The crystal pierces her flesh. I feel the hard thump of it through her body pressed tight against mine.
I garble out something unintelligible.
Das Muni sighs. She grips me tight. A dribble of blood colors her mouth. She grins at me with crimson-stained teeth.
“No, no,” I say. I hold her in my arms. We are both of us pinned against the floor now. She by the crystal, me by her body. I don’t know what to do.
Arankadash lunges at us, but I yell at her to stay back.
“Don’t move her!” I say.
The crystal has not gone all the way through Das Muni. I’m unharmed but trembling. I work my way out from under Das Muni. She squirms as I break free.
“Don’t move,” I say softly, to Das Muni this time. I crouch beside her. She lets out little hissing breaths. “Why did you do that?” I say, but I don’t expect an answer, and she does not give me one.
Casamir and Arankadash crowd next to me and lean over her. Casamir is wringing her hands. I reach for the crystal.
“Don’t!” Casamir says. “If you pull out the crystal, she’ll just bleed out.”
“I can’t leave it in there,” I say. “Das Muni?”
She squeals again.
Arankadash slides out of her pack and kneels next to Das Muni. The shard of crystal is as long as my arm and half as wide. It’s taken her low down on her right side, just below her ribs. I can’t tell how deep it is, only that it hasn’t gone all the way through her.
I press my ear to her back and listen to her breathe. I can hear a rattling sound.
“Why are you such a little fool?” I say, and I press my forehead to her shoulder. I don’t know how we will move her. I don’t know how we’ll survive even if we can. She is the one thing I have had beside me from the beginning of this horror, and now she lies bleeding and rattling to death.
“BE WARY OF WOMEN WHO PRETEND AT FRIENDSHIP.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
30
JAYD
I step through the girls’ blood and back through the door that Sabita made. On any other world, the blood would have been absorbed immediately, but not here on Bhavaja. Sabita did not consider this. I know because I can follow the dripping spatters of blood through the door and into the dark, narrow sub-corridors that bisect the main ones.
I am slow, terribly slow. I have no idea how far ahead of me she is, or what she means to do once she gets to where she is going. I find a dead Bhavaja security woman in the hall, her throat cut neatly. Sabita never fought in my mother’s armies, but when you put people back together again, you also learn how to take them apart. She has ended this woman neatly. Much more neatly than the girls.
She stepped through the blood here and has left smeared half-footprints along the floor. I see blood along a bend in the corridor where she had paused. For breath? To catch her bearings?
I try to speed up, but with my injured leg, it’s impossible. I wish I had a walking stick. I wish I’d learned to stand on my hands, the way that Zan could.
I hear raised voices, yelling.
“Sabita!” I say. “Sabita, stop!”
I hope that it gains me the time I need to reach the open doorway at the end of the hall. There is a dead end here right before the door. A great face made of rotten skin stretched over molded bone blocks the end of the hall; the corridor has partially grown around it.
I step into the lighted doorway and find Sabita dripping blood from her chin and Nashatra holding a great obsidian machete. Sabita’s cunning bone knife is tiny in comparison, but the women’s gazes tell me they are well matched.
“How did you find her?” I ask Sabita.
She signs, “The girls.”
The girls. How had she gotten them to talk? No, of course, they could sign. I hadn’t thought to sign at them, because I didn’t want them to know I knew how. Sabita did not care.
“Don’t kill Nashatra,” I say.
Nashatra barks a laugh. “You should be telling me not to kill her.”
“No more killing at all, then,” I say. “The Bhavajas need Nashatra,” I say.
“For what?” Sabita signs.
“Who will rule when Rasida is gone?”