I pull the sphere Vashapaldi gave me from my pocket. The sequence comes easily now, like remembering the way to the home of a friend: the child, the fish, the bird, the water, the water.
The sphere warms in my hands. I drop it. It splits like an egg, revealing a gooey green core that sprays a red-green mist into the air above it. The mist coalesces into a head-and-shoulder view of a familiar face, the face I saw reflected back at me from the mirror of a crystal. This reflection of me has no scar on her face, though, and there is something different about her eyes. She is more confident, full of purpose. I see no fear in her, no indecision, only absolute faith.
“If you’re seeing this,” the woman who shares my face says, “it means we’ve been recycled again and Jayd is not with you. You have remembered enough to unlock this recording, but I expect there’s still a lot that’s unclear to you. That’s all right. That’s how it’s supposed to be right now. You’ll remember when you’re ready. That’s how it has to be. You and I both know you’re too emotional to do what needs to be done when you remember . . . Well, you don’t want to remember what happened. It will ruin you as it ruined me, and we must stay focused on the end goal.” The woman looks away at something outside the range of the recording, then back. “If Jayd hasn’t yet found her way to the Bhavajas, through marriage or prisoner exchange, then you’ll need to return to the Mokshi and start again. There are more answers there. If she is with the Bhavajas this time, though, it means we are closer to success than we’ve ever been. Get back to the surface and find her. If she has done her part, then she will meet you at the Mokshi. Be sure the two of you have the arm and the world before you go, though, or we will have to do this again. Don’t think about why this is. Trust me as one can only trust oneself. You don’t want to start over. The world and the arm.” She looks away again, starts to say something else, and frowns. The recording ends. The mist swirls back into the core of the sphere, and it closes.
“Who is that?” Arankadash asks. She has come up behind me. I didn’t hear her over the sound of my own voice. Her offspring is pulsing softly against her chest.
“It’s me,” I say.
*
I replay the recording for the others once everyone is up the waterfall.
“This is a trick,” Casamir says. “You recorded it just now.”
“She doesn’t have a scar in that image,” Arankadash says.
Das Muni says nothing. She has pulled up her cowl again, so I cannot see her expression.
“Do you believe me now?” I ask Casamir.
“I believe this delusion is very complicated,” Casamir says. “I’m going to find something to eat.”
We spend some time foraging along the waterfall to restock our supplies. There are mushrooms and fish-like animals and flying things, which Casamir catches by rigging up a throwing ball she had in her pack with a rope on the end that knocks them senseless. They are about as wide as both of my hands put together, and they are mostly wings, which makes for poor eating. But Casamir enjoys catching them, and after a time, we have a whole stack of them to skin and eat.
As we sit and skin and chew, I say, “How many levels are there to the world, that you know?”
“Hundreds,” Arankadash says. “That’s what we’ve always learned.” She gazes up at what will be our route very soon, following the river upward, ever upward.
Casamir says, “We have scouted and recorded eighteen. These Katazyrna people you talk about aren’t recorded on any of them.”
“I didn’t fall far enough for there to be hundreds,” I say. “Besides, I’m not the only one to fall. Das Muni has, too. She’s seen another world like I have.”
Casamir rolls her eyes but says nothing.
“She saved the lot of us,” I say. “You can be respectful.”
“Sorry,” Casamir says. She glances over at Das Muni. Reluctantly hands her a skinned bat-bird. “I do appreciate it, even if you tried to fucking drown me.”
Das Muni takes the offering in her long fingers and sets the bloody thing in her lap.
“We thought you dead,” Arankadash says to Das Muni.
“A spirit saved me,” Das Muni says.
Arankadash nods. “I understand.”
Casamir grimaces but, after a quick look at me, says nothing. We all create the stories we need to survive. Let Das Muni and Arankadash have theirs.
When we are rested, we start the long walk up the waterway. When the space opens up into a broad, watery plain that runs off in many directions, I suggest we follow the main flow of the river.
“It’s always going to flow downward, right?” I say. “To the center of the world. So it makes sense to follow it back up to wherever it’s coming from.”
The watery plain is teeming with biting bugs. We itch and scratch at them. My skin blisters, and when the blisters burst, little larvae squirm out. I should not be bothered by this after everything I’ve seen, but this feels like a grave imposition.
It’s Casamir who stops the second cycle in and screams and screams, though. It’s not a scream of fear but one of frustration.
I plant my feet in the spongy plain and I scream too. Das Muni echoes me, then Arankadash, and for several long minutes, we are a group of four women screaming at the top of our lungs in the middle of a buzzing bog. We scream until our mouths fill with bugs, and then we stop.
And we carry on.
After a time, the waves of biting insects subside, and we camp on a bit of higher ground near a long plain of water. While Arankadash and Das Muni make camp, I walk down to where Casamir is by the water.
She stands at the edge of the milky lake, throwing stones. “What’s wrong?” I ask, expecting a long and convoluted story, a rant about Das Muni’s table manners, or some snide remarks about Arankadash.
“I’m pregnant,” she says. “I was hoping it would wait a little longer. But I guess not.”
“Oh.” I put my hands in my pockets. “What do you . . . Is it all right to ask what you have?”
“It’s only been a couple times,” she says. “Usually you get pregnant when the world has a need, I guess. It’s some great organ thing, like what Arankadash has, only it grows much bigger. We kept the last one for some time, did experiments on it. They aren’t living, not really. They’re part of the world, I think. I think they replace parts that wear down.”
“Shouldn’t you always have them, then?”
“What?” Casamir says. She stops throwing stones. “Are you mad? I’m not giving myself over to some god, some creature bigger than me. I own what I am. Nobody else.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“Maybe what Das Muni has is useful,” she says grudgingly, “and maybe Arankadash is so desperate for a child that she’ll try to nurse that thing, but that’s not how things are for me. I’ll just get rid of it.”
“You can do that?”
“You can do anything you want,” Casamir says. “It’s your flesh, you know. If there is cancer eating out my arm, you wouldn’t tell me I can’t cut it off.”