As we come over a bone-white expanse on the Mokshi’s surface, my army breaks up into two teams and fans out around the equator, as if seeing this terrain has triggered a directive that I don’t know about. The soldiers are equipped with shimmering weapons and spray-on suits that catch the light of the great slumbering sun there in the misty core, which is winking awake now, unshuttering after half a turn to bathe them and the rogue world in orange radiance. I squint. The mist hiding the core swirls with light as if on fire.
The Mokshi is still moving, though, eclipsing the great orange sun, and we must move faster to keep pace with it. I look out behind us, back toward Katazyrna, and am overwhelmed at the idea that we are a Legion of worlds hurtling through an immense darkness, a space so vast I can see nothing but twinkling lights beyond Katazyrna. Are those other suns like ours? Other Legions? If they are, the distances involved make my head hurt. I turn back to the Legion. It is breathtaking, impossible, like something conjured out of my black, sticky dreams.
But this is my reality.
This is home.
Isn’t it?
“Yours is the first team to enter the Mokshi’s orbit in a full rotation,” Jayd says, her voice so close that I jerk in my seat. I had forgotten her.
“What’s a rotation?” I say.
“A turn is one sleeping and waking period,” she says. “A rotation is four hundred turns.”
“Then who retrieved me,” I say, “when I broke free of the Mokshi?”
“The Mokshi spits you free,” she says. “You come out in a pod, ejected beyond its gravity well. And no, we don’t know why, and you always say you can’t remember.”
“What happens on that ship?” I say.
“That’s what you’re here to find out,” she says, but of course, I’m here for far more than that. I’m here for Jayd, and her lord mother, and whatever it is they want to do with the only ship that can leave the Legion. I gaze out at those twinkling lights beyond the Outer Rim.
The wrongness in my gut roils.
“What’s that debris circling the Mokshi?” I ask, trying to get a better understanding of taboo subjects.
“Our sister Nhim’s dead army,” Jayd says.
The scattered remnants of Nhim’s army still orbit the great disk of the Mokshi: desiccated bodies in blistered suits, escort vehicles mashed into spongy, unrecognizable shapes, and warped, melted weapons that appear to have imploded, eating themselves from the inside out.
“We sent teams to recover them back when it first happened,” Jayd says. “The War God wants nothing to go to waste. But they fared no better than Nhim. The Mokshi obliterated two teams outright. Six simply . . . disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Eaten by the world . . . or perhaps cast out of range of the Legion’s gravity. When you are lost to the Legion, you are lost.”
“Why does Anat want this world if it just eats her daughters?” I say.
“She must make it hers,” Jayd says. “There are too many others trying to gain control of the Legion, including the Bhavaja family. The Bhavajas are winning, though Lord Katazyrna will not admit that.”
I cannot imagine conquering worlds like this, not this scattered necklace of ships spinning and spinning around the core. My memory sparks and kicks and quails like a captured beast of pure, terrified energy.
I sweat hard in my suit. From my position just above the swarm of my army, I sign at them to attack. My body knows the signal just as it knows how to breathe.
The wailing starts then.
It rises from the Mokshi itself. Hearing it should be impossible, as we are still far outside its thin atmosphere. I can’t even speak with my team once they are in suits.
Yet I feel the wailing in my bones, like some mournful monster roused from sleep.
I steel myself and navigate the vehicle forward, weapon raised. I am the first to pass across the Mokshi’s outer security zone, and the first to see the great crimson wave of its defense grid light up. The wailing goes on and on. It shudders through my army like a physical force.
The keening brings with it a terrible memory of Jayd going in for treatments—why, or for what, I don’t know. She is hidden behind a black door that pulses in time with the heartbeat of Katazyrna. Jayd had wailed like this, on and on, while I pounded my fists against the door until my hands bled and a large, squat woman—Lord Katazyrna?—slapped me and told me soldiers must endure sacrifices, and every one of her daughters is a soldier, and what Jayd had to bear would never be allowed on her ship. These were the prices the Katazyrnas must pay to rule the Outer Rim and, eventually, the Legion, she said.
If this is real memory and not dream, it confounds me further still. What would Jayd bear that is so dangerous?
The first red wave of the Mokshi’s defenses peels away from the atmosphere: a massive red flare. I turn my vehicle neatly toward the Mokshi’s southern pole, deploying the thorny defense scrambler at the head of my vehicle and twisting my trajectory so the vehicle collides with the wave at its weakest point. The energy wave bursts around my vehicle like a soap bubble, flashing past me toward the squad coming behind. Another wave coalesces below. I mash my hand into the indicators on my dash, recharging the scrambler or whatever it is.
Two of the squad light out ahead of me, burning so much fuel I see the yellow spores of their spent charges rippling behind them; two young, stupid kids without a burst of sense between them.
I start to sign at them, “Stay in formation,” instinctively, wondering where I’ve gotten that sign, but they are clearly intent on being the first to cross into the atmosphere. They aren’t looking behind, only forward.
“What’s happening?” Jayd asks, but I am moving now, my body acting on instinct, as Jayd had promised it would. It’s like being piloted by some stranger, a bag of meat pushed along at the end of a stick.
I go into another wild roll, falling past the next wave issuing from the outer defenses, pushing for the speed I need to break below the grid. I know I need to get below the grid, have done it a hundred times before, but the defense grid is only the first hurdle. Assaulting the world is like feeling my way over a familiar path.
I catch up to the kids just as they plunge through the atmosphere, skimming above the surface of the tumbled cities of calcified bone, weathered stone, and twisted amber deposits.
I see the older one sign to the younger. I swerve my vehicle close enough to that one to catch her attention before I sign, “Fall back with the formation.”
The two girls fall back behind me, where six more of the squad have broken past the grid, skipping above the surface now like world-walking mechanics out on a repair run. They are below the world’s defensive security zone now, but the greatest danger is yet to come. I can feel it. My whole body is taut with expectation.
I take the lead again, speeding ahead, and then I see it: a great yawning chasm at the center of the world. This is where we were going, a colossal crater that doesn’t give one the impression of something having crashed into the world so much as something impossibly large having burst out of it.