“These things don’t seem like cancer.”
“Don’t they? How do we know, really, what they are or what our purpose is? We take it all on faith. But every level is the same. They all rationalize it by saying it’s something they don’t understand, but it’s necessary. I reject that. No one’s in charge of my fate but me.” She jabs a finger at my belly. “You know that, or you knew it, clearly.”
Casamir wanders off as we all bed down, telling us she’s going to forage. I lie awake with Arankadash as she rocks her pulsing offspring in her arms. She sings it a song in her language, something soft and very soothing.
“Casamir’s pregnant,” I say.
“Yes,” Arankadash says. “It’s easy to tell.”
“I can’t.”
“You are blind to a good many things.” She raises her head from the thing in her arms. “It’s odd, isn’t it, that you are the only one not to become infused with a spark of life, here on this long journey?
“Is it?” I ask. “How often do people get pregnant?”
“It depends on the will of the Lord,” she says. “When it needs something, it gets it from us.”
“How?”
“How is there air to breathe?” Arankadash says. “It’s like that.”
“It sounds like we’re slaves to this ship,” I say.
“This world,” she says. “No. It gives us shelter and food. It shields us from the black horror of the abyss that lies in wait for us after death. It keeps us warm and protected. We are as much a part of the light as it is a part of us.”
I remember the great metal door that Casamir cracked open, and the Legion of worlds above, and the corridor of giant bodies whose purpose I hope I’ll never know.
No, this is all very wrong. If I were a god, this is not how I would create a world, by enslaving everything that lived in it. Or would I? I gaze up at the ceiling. The world is a living thing, yes, but is it more than just a collection of organs and flesh and fluid? Is it conscious? Sentient? Is the world a literal god, some creature that’s captured us the way Casamir’s captured those women in the cages? I imagine us circling the misty Core of the sun for generation after generation, locked in a battle not just with ourselves but with the terrible things growing around us and inside of us, tying us so closely to themselves that we cannot exist without them.
Casamir returns a long time later. Everyone else is asleep. I peer at her from beneath my arm and watch her take off her pack and unroll her sleeping pad. She settles in. Sees me watching. Gives a little two-fingered wave.
“What is freedom, Zan?” she says.
It sounds like a saying, like something I should know. And the response comes bubbling up, the way the sign language did out in the black vacuum of space. “Freedom is the absence of outside control,” I say.
“What is freedom?” Arankadash says. “It is control of the body, and its issue, and one’s place in this world.”
“See?” Casamir says. “We aren’t all completely dead in the head.”
*
When we wake, it’s cold for the first time in my memory. A cold wind blows from above us, too high up for me to see the source. It’s as if there are cracks or holes in the ceiling, and cold air is being blasted in. Fifteen thousand steps later, as we crawl out of the wetlands and onto a rocky plain, I see a bright blue light in the distance. It flickers like a flame, and as we near I see it is a flame of a sort—it’s a rent in the sky oozing sulfurous blue lava.
The smell rolls over us. I cover my mouth with a hemp cloth from my pack, but it doesn’t do much to filter the air.
“This is dangerous,” Casamir says. “Can we go around?”
“It will take us farther from the river,” I say.
Arankadash shakes her head. “I don’t want to risk losing access to water again.” She moves past us, taking point.
“Water’s all well and good,” Casamir says, “but not if you can’t breathe.”
But we carry on. The toxic air grows denser. I suggest going back, but Arankadash is still in the lead, and she doesn’t seem to hear me over the bubbling of the burning sulfur. I wet my hemp cloth and tie it over my mouth. Das Muni has dampened her cowl and done the same.
A blast of cool air buffets us from behind, clearing the air briefly. We make our way between two dripping seas of blue blazing sulfur, up what appears to be a path.
Casamir says, “It’s about time we see some people.”
“Not all people are nice,” Das Muni says, and passes Casamir and me as we pause to look back over the burning blue sulfur seas.
“Long way back,” I say.
“Not really,” Casamir says. She shoulders her pack and starts walking again. “You take me to this surface of yours, and I’ll just jump right back down that recycling chute. Then I’m only a level away from home!” She laughs.
I hang back. The world is large, I know—I’ve seen it from the outside, but I never anticipated all of this. Maybe I thought the world was hollow, or that it was all corridors and spiraling doors like the surface. This is much more, and far more complicated. The Katazyrnas and Bhavajas were fighting for control over the Legion, but they didn’t even control their own worlds. What were they actually fighting for, then? A title? An idea?
“Zan!”
Arankadash has reached the head of the path, high up on the ridge. She’s waving me forward.
I start climbing again. The air is thicker with sulfur up here, but just as I think I can’t stand it, there’s a thread of cool air running just above me that clears the toxic cloud away.
“What is it?” I ask as I come up beside her.
Arankadash points into the valley below. “Bodies,” she says.
“I DON’T HOPE FOR THE BEST ENDING. I PLAN FOR IT.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
32
JAYD
It was Zan’s idea.
I would like history to believe that, but what led us to this place is not something I want recorded in any way.
“What do the Bhavajas want more than anything?” she asked me there on the Mokshi, after all my terrible betrayals, when she still took me back because she still loved me. She believed me when I said I had changed my mind, and yes, I had changed it, but I never expected her to believe that.
“They need children,” I said. “It’s known that they haven’t had a child-bearer in at least five rotations. Like us, they’ve been stealing from other worlds. More than us, really. I heard they don’t have as much of a hierarchy because of it.”