Zan folded her hands in her lap, just below the curve of her belly. “I can give them children,” she said. “Present me to them as a gift.”
“What about the arm?” I said. Because I had already stolen that from her too, and given it to Anat, because I was a young fool. It was the first betrayal, but not the worst. “You said you can’t restart the Mokshi without it. The Mokshi will never leave the Legion without a new world birthed on board. It’s too wrecked.” And I wince as I say it, but Zan doesn’t notice or doesn’t mind. How can she be so forgiving? Or does she not care? Does she love me at all, really, or is it all feigned, the way my love for her was feigned in the beginning?
“Can you steal the arm from Anat while I’m with the Bhavajas,” she said, “the way you stole it from me?”
“And do what with it?” I said. “It only works for you, here on the Mokshi.”
“What if you could bear children?” Zan says. “You convince Anat to trade you to the Bhavajas for peace. When the peace is set, I board the Mokshi, turn off the defenses, and get Anat inside. She’ll walk right in. I can take the arm easily once I have her on the Mokshi. That world obeys me.”
“And what,” I said, “I disarm Rasida and steal the world she’s got in her womb?”
Zan grinned. “You stole my arm out from under me,” she said, “and my heart. I suspect you can steal far more from Rasida.”
I climbed onto Zan’s lap then, and she put her strong arms around me, and for a moment I let myself be held. I felt her child kick in her belly, and I said, “We’ll need to do something with the child.”
That idea, I admit, was mine.
*
It was already a complicated plan. It relied on desperation more than anything else. What we had utterly failed to consider, though, was Rasida and what she had already put into motion. I think at some point, many cycles ago, I believed I did all of this out of love for Zan, but now, drifting in a cottony haze as Sabita lifts her bloody hands from my body, I think I am doing it for the love of something far greater than Zan. I’m doing it for the love of the Legion, the love of survival. I know just how precarious life is here, and I know that I must sacrifice a lot of it in order to save any of it.
That is my burden.
When I come awake finally, it is Sabita patting my face gently. “You’re still healing,” she signs, “but we must be quiet. Rasida has noticed that we’re gone.”
I glance over at Nashatra, who was beside me when the surgery started, but she is already gone, as are the witches.
“They’ve gone to distract her,” Sabita signs. “Can you get up? I know it’s difficult, but we must get you to the hangar.”
“I need the arm,” I say, “I have the world, but not—”
“We’ll tell Rasida you’ve escaped to the Katazyrna,” Sabita signs. “But you need a head start.”
“I don’t understand,” I mutter, but then I do. If I take the world to Katazyrna, Rasida will follow me. It’s impossible, in my current state, to defeat her in combat. But I know Katazyrna, and I know where the witches go when Katazyrna is boarded. I will take the world to Katazyrna, and Rasida will take the arm.
“If Zan is dead . . . ,” I say.
“If Zan is dead,” Sabita signs, “then at least the Katazyrna will be reborn. You’ll save our world. There is that. It must be enough.”
“I can’t fail,” I say.
Sabita helps me up. Pain rolls over me. She hands me a cup of something bitter, and I drink it without question. There’s a dagger of icy fire in my gut, and then the pain eases.
I don’t know the way to the hangar from here, but I am not the only one who has been counting steps. Sabita takes me left, another right, and down a crumbling umbilicus. We begin to climb a long set of stairs. I hear voices on the level just below us. Sabita presses us both up against the wall at the top of the stairs, and we wait until the women pass. Stairs. Lord of War have mercy. I lean hard on the stairwell, but Sabita puts her arm under mine and half-helps, half-drags me up.
When we reach the corridor outside the hangar, Sabita carves out a new door for us and seals it behind her. Row after row of vehicles stretch out before us, all of them in far worse repair than those on Katazyrna.
Sabita yanks me forward. “Stop,” I say. “Why are you helping me? You despise all I’ve done.”
She points to a vehicle. “This is a good one,” she signs, and starts it up for me. She finds several suit canisters in a bin at the back and throws me one.
“We’ll go out together,” she signs. “Stay close. If they spot us, I’ll draw their fire.”
“Sabita,” I say. “I have to know whose side of this you’re on.”
She grimaces. “You don’t know yet? I’m on Zan’s side, Jayd. She came to after Anat recycled her, and she climbed up out of the pits. She came to me after you turned your back on her and told her to go out there to the Mokshi again, to do as Anat asked. She loved you, Jayd, and you broke her heart. This stopped being about your love for Zan when you let her be recycled. You never went after her. You think she dismissed that? You think she didn’t care?”
“I couldn’t go after her!” I say. “It would have given us away. Why would I have gone after some rogue prisoner? Anat would have known who she was.”
“She told me to protect you,” Sabita signs, “in case anything happened to her and your plan went wrong. It did. And I keep my promises.”
There’s a sound outside the hangar door.
Sabita snatches the canister from my hand and sprays my suit on me. She runs to the lights of the depressurization console and sprays her suit on as she goes. Yellow lights flash.
The hangar door leading into the corridor blinks blue.
I grip the vehicle tight and release a burst of fuel, and we are sucked up and up and pop free of Bhavaja like two vermin flicked from its skin.
We make it four hundred leaps away from Bhavaja before the first pursuers appear. It has been a long time since I fought out in open space. But it comes back to me, easy as breathing. The cephalopod guns take a moment to understand, but then I am firing back at our pursuers.
Is Rasida one of them? I don’t know, but I can’t risk a direct hit. I sign back at Sabita to wound them only, and her grimace tells me what she thinks of that.
I power forward, speeding through the worlds of the Legion. I have missed them and all this open space. My heart was never in leading armies—I was better at planning battles than fighting them—but the Legion from outside the worlds is a breathtaking wonder. When Zan told me she believed there were other Legions rotating around those stars in the vast distance, I told her there couldn’t be anything else like the Legion in existence. Why not? she said, and it revealed my own sense of ego. I believed we were somehow special, blessed of the War God. I believed She made all of this for us, and we were doomed to make of it what we will. We were stuck here in the belly of creation. There was no escaping this universe.