“Just love. Love for those behind them. Love for those who come after them. Love.”
When I wake, the light outside has changed, and my dream feels less like memory. How would I have met Jayd on the Mokshi? Why would I have spared her? And how did that start all of this?
Arankadash is sitting across from me on another mattress, speaking softly to her offspring. She seems to be struggling with it.
“You all right?” I ask.
She does not respond. The hunk of living tissue she has carried with her all this way is squirming violently in her arms. She is openly weeping.
“Arankadash?” I say, but she only shakes her head.
She slowly unties the knots of the sling she has carried it in and sets the pulsing organ-thing down on the ground. It’s grown to nearly four times the size it was when she birthed it. What it’s eaten, I don’t know, as I haven’t seen her lactating. I wonder if it’s subsisting on the world itself, feeding at night on the floors, the walls, and the billions of tiny creatures that infect this place. It has taken on the shape of a large cog with a wide-open center and nubby teeth all around its circumference. It shudders once on the ground and then begins to roll away, leaving a slimy trail in its wake like a slug.
Arankadash sobs, great heaving sobs that make my chest hurt.
I crawl over to her and put my arm around her. She wraps her arms around me and cries into my shoulder so hard, I wonder that it does not break her in two.
“The light has come for it,” she says. “The light has taken it.”
I say nothing, because nothing I can say will bring any comfort. We are each of us alone, united only in our inability to be free of this sticky world.
After she has cried herself out, I leave Arankadash to sleep, and unpack the rope I have in my pack.
Casamir is telling Das Muni a very involved story about two women born joined at the head who were found to puzzle out logic problems four times faster than an average person. I wonder if she’s told Das Muni that the information, if true, is likely gleaned from a recycled pair that the engineers kept in cages.
“I need your rope,” I tell Casamir.
She gazes up at the tree. The leaves are starting to unfurl. “I guess it’s worth a try,” she says.
“Our other option is to go farther up into the city,” I say, “but I get the impression we’ll meet more of those monsters on the way, and the positions farther along are less defensible.”
“Up, then,” Casamir says.
I knot Casamir’s rope and mine together. I tie off the first knot when I get about twice my height up. Make the second knot a couple of paces above that. Crawl down and untie the first, make another a few paces above my second, and so on.
Casamir stares at me from below, hands on hips. “This is the first time I’ve seen you climb anything with a care for safety,” she says.
I don’t tell her that the dream makes me think we are closer to our goal now, and to die so close would be a tragedy. I keep on with my tying and untying, up and up and up as the lights flash in the tree branches beneath my palms.
I know, intellectually, that the sky is a long ways off. But I don’t realize just how long until I’ve been climbing for some time and I dare to look down. I can already blot out Casamir’s body if I hold up my palm. I gaze up, shifting the weight of my metal blade to the other shoulder, and wonder at the madness of what I have planned.
No madder than staying below, I guess.
I climb and climb. Leaves begin to break off in my hands. They are growing larger now, fully unfurled. I wonder how much time we have.
The branches become thinner, about half the size of those below, but do not become any thinner than that as I ascend, for which I’m thankful. This high up, I see little skittering creatures with enormous eyes that remind me of Das Muni’s. Their webbed feet cling to the branches. Some munch on the leaves and fling themselves off as I approach, hopping to another branch. I’m fascinated at the ecologies of all of these places, which each hold people and animals that exist nowhere else in the world. What happens when Katazyrna rots away? It will all be lost, leaves shed at the end of the season.
As I come to the top of the tree, I dare not look down. I knot the rope around me to the closest branch, in case I fall, and press my fingers to the ceiling. It’s warm and slick, and I feel the pulsing heartbeat of the world beneath it.
I have the urge to look down, but close my eyes instead. Take a deep breath. I pull the blade from my back, lean back a little until the rope holding me upright is taut, and then shove the blade with all my strength into the ceiling.
The blade encounters no resistance. It cuts clean through. I work it around in the wound a bit and draw it out.
A trickle of bloody gore oozes out as I release my weapon. My blade is covered in black ichor. I’m not sure if it’s really blood or just something like it. I hack again at the ceiling. Again and again, tearing out great hunks of flesh. I work until sweat streams down my face and the bloody ooze spatters my face and chest.
I hack and hack as the leaves shudder around me. The edges of them have turned orange.
I dare to look down now, and immediately regret it. The tree is in full foliage again; it’s a great jeweled yellow cushion, and down and down, so far down I can nearly erase their forms with my thumb, are the people I have traveled with from the belly of the world. They are all down there now—Das Muni and Arankadash, and Casamir, staring up as I stare down.
I’m running out of time. I can feel it. Perhaps they can too. Whatever assaulted this village will come for us soon.
I get back to hacking, though I am out of breath and my arms feel heavy as lead. My muscles are burning hot. The heat from the ceiling is also increasing, which doesn’t help. I’m nearing the core of the artery.
I hack out another slab of flesh and let it tumble down through the branches. It reminds me of the hunk of flesh I sacrificed to Casamir’s people. What are they doing with it right now? What will they do with it if I die here and don’t return?
I slice up into the ceiling again.
The membrane bursts.
Bloody fluid pours over me, hot and sticky. It pushes me off my feet. I fall and almost drop my blade. I swing from the branch as the warm, coppery flood gushes from the wound and pools below.
Arankadash is shouting. Casamir seems to be floating away in the flood.