I wipe the gore from my eyes as the initial tide abates. I grab for the branch and haul myself back up. I peer into the hole I’ve torn into the sky. The bloody stuff is still pumping from it, but only from the bottom now. It trickles over the lip of the hole with every pulse. I reach into the hole and lever myself up to get a good look inside. It’s absolutely dark and stinks of copper and afterbirth.
I try to peer up, but there’s nothing to see but more darkness. The artery is as wide as I am tall but has hard ridges around it. As I sit in the lip of it, I can feel it pulsing, trying to push the trickle of life that’s now burst all over the world below farther up into the far reaches of the world.
“Come up!” I yell. I gaze over the edge and see that the leaves have begun to fall. It’s only then, as I see them all struggling below, that I realize Das Muni is not going to be able to climb the tree by herself.
I hurriedly untie the rope from around my waist and the nearby branches and hurl it down as far as it will go.
“Casamir!” I say. “Help Das Muni up!”
There is movement below. They are all covered in red-black fluid. Casamir is coming up first, and she throws the rope down.
“Casamir!” I yell, but she does not look at me, only continues climbing.
I heft my weapon. The leaves are falling in earnest now, bursting apart as they hit Casamir’s head.
Arankadash is still below, standing with Das Muni. By the time I get to the ground, it will be too late for me to get back up. I know this, but I want to go down anyway. Instead, I stare at Arankadash and Das Muni.
Will Arankadash kill her for being a mutant? Will she shrug and tell me it is for the best, after losing her own sisters and that . . . thing she birthed? Is nothing precious?
Casamir is halfway up the tree. And then I see what had caused the other women to flee. There is a gory army of women with wan skin and fungi bursting from their heads, slowly shambling toward us from out in the surrounding forest. I see that they have no fingers. I know now where the baskets of finger bones have come from. But why cut off their fingers, if . . . I gaze upward. They are coming for the tree.
“Arankadash!” I say, pointing. “They’re coming.”
Arankadash leans over Das Muni. I turn my head away because I can’t look.
I stare up into the dark and wonder how we are going to ascend this slimy, trembling thing. Casamir says her people know of eighteen levels. We have not even traveled up half that many, and there could be twice or three times or even four times that. But there is nowhere else to go. Maybe there never was. It’s just up. Always up.
I gaze back down, expecting to see Das Muni’s little body there on the ground below, floating in the bloody sea.
Instead, I see Casamir’s head just a few paces below, and Arankadash making her way up slowly, hand over hand, with Das Muni strapped to her back.
I help Casamir into the hole. She sits across from me. We don’t say anything. She’s breathing hard, and I expect some story, but no, she knows what she did.
We wait as Arankadash ascends. Below her, the diseased women swarm the tree. They batter at it with the stumps of their hands. And I see now why they cut off their hands and not their heads. The women are trying to climb the tree. They, too, want to get to the center of the world, or at least eat whatever it is up here that powers it.
Arankadash finally reaches us. I grab hold of her left hand, and Casamir takes her right. We haul her and Das Muni up into the broken artery.
For a long moment, the four of us sit up here together, exhausted, covered in grime. I gaze at each of their faces, and though Arankadash does not look at me, I see Das Muni staring at her with eyes big as globes, and Das Muni starts to cry.
Love, I think. Just love. Fear has driven too much of this world.
“We should get going,” I say. “It’s not a steep climb. We should be able to walk for a while. You have your torch, Casamir?”
She digs into her pack and pulls it out. Holds it high above her head. It lights up the membrane that encompasses us, like peering into the throat of some monster.
I walk around the edge of the hole and take the torch from her. “I’ll lead,” I say. “You take up the rear, Casamir.”
She frowns but doesn’t protest.
And so, we climb.
We climb so long and so far in the dark that I lose track of time completely. We all fall silent, even Casamir. We stop for water and rest, and we climb again.
When I sleep, I dream of climbing, and when I wake, I am climbing.
I squeeze the sphere in my pocket. When the climbing and sleeping all blurs together, I take out the sphere again and play the recording.
Das Muni sits next to me as I watch it, munching on a mushroom. Her eyes are big and glassy. We have all taken on a numbed, distant look. When she gazes at me, it’s as if she sees through me to some other place. “I once believed that all we were is the sum of our memories,” Das Muni says, “but in this place, I found that it isn’t the memories that made us; it is what we decided to do with them. I tried to build a life down there, in the dark, based on the pain I’ve endured. But you can’t do that, can you? You have to . . . remake it. Transform. We are more than the sum of what’s happened to us, aren’t we?”
She is pleading for an answer. “I’m afraid my memory will never come back,” I say.
Das Muni rocks back on her heels. “Maybe you should be more afraid of what you’ll discover if it does,” she says.
We climb.
The way grows steeper. We can no longer simply walk. We must dig our fingers and toes into the ridges of the great artery and climb. We rope ourselves together, though I don’t know how much good that will do. It’s Casamir’s idea, and I don’t want to argue about it. If one of us falls, all of us will fall. But we use our weapons to steady ourselves, shoving them into the flesh to provide us with leverage and some reliable fallback holds.
It’s only as the neck of the artery begins to narrow and curve off to the left that I worry we have already reached as far as this artery goes up and are coming back down again.
I climb onto the flat, curved surface of the artery and help the others up.
We sleep, exhausted from what must have been a climb over several lost sleeping periods.
When we wake, I pat the artery floor at our feet. “Here,” I say.
They all look at me. “It’s going down again,” I say. “That means eventually it will turn back to go deep below the world again. This is as high as it goes.”
Our faces look garish in the light. I think they would gnaw their way out of this thing immediately if I told them to.
But Casamir unhooks her pouch of potions and comes over to me, presses her ear to the ground. “I can get it open,” she says. She pulls a vial from her bag and makes a circle of it on the fleshy floor.
There’s a hissing sound and then the smell of burnt flesh.
We all come up around the edge of the hole, and we wait.