Anat turns her face slowly to me. “Are you telling me what to do, filth?”
“I’m telling you how to get what you want,” I say. Jayd told me I was some great woman, some great general, but it’s only now, when I remember this terrible moment, that I see it was not me who was the general; it was Jayd. I was a tactician. A very confident and high-strung tactician, full of fire. I feel like a badly copied version of her now, or maybe someone else entirely, just some woman bereft of memory who others are trying to imprint with the memories of some dead woman.
“Gavatra,” Anat says, still looking at me. “Recycle this presumptuous piece of trash.”
“No,” Jayd says.
“What?” I say.
Gavatra and four security women advance on me.
Jayd comes forward to shield me, but Anat snatches her with her iron fingers, holding her firmly.
“What do you care,” Anat says to Jayd, “when it was you who blew open the Mokshi and recycled their people? What’s one more of the Mokshi’s ilk sacrificed to feed Katazyrna?”
Anat does not touch me, but her words are like striking me in the chest. I stare at Jayd, incredulous. “You?” I say.
Jayd recoils from me. “Zan, don’t—”
“You said it was Anat!” I yell. “You said she stole the arm and recycled my people! Did you sabotage the Mokshi, Jayd? Blow it up? You? You?” She had murdered everything I loved and then had the audacity to come back to me and lie about it, and beg forgiveness for not trusting my plan for the Mokshi. We started anew.
I fight, because that’s what I do. I bash two women in the face. I take Gavatra by the hair and smash her skull into the wall; my fingers leave great gory scratch marks on her skull. She staggers. Grips me by the collar. Someone comes up from behind. I see a burst of light, then blackness.
So, Anat recycled me, and somehow, with the help of the people below, I crawled back up here, leaving messages for myself along the way. But why? How did I know then that I would lose my memory when I next assaulted the Mokshi? Clearly, it hadn’t happened during the assaults I’d been on before learning Jayd’s betrayal ran so deep. How had I trusted Jayd for so long and believed her lies? She must have known I would never have trusted her if I knew it was her who blew a hole in the Mokshi, her who recycled my people, instead of Anat. We could never have worked together if I had known.
But there are still holes in this memory. It doesn’t give me everything I need. It doesn’t tell me why I have no memory, or what I hoped to achieve out there on the Mokshi with the arm and the world. What happened when I returned from the bowels of Katazyrna? The version of me in this memory seems confident that she knows what the plan is, even if Jayd misled her in how they all got there.
I remember tangling my fingers in Jayd’s hair when she told me she was being sold off to the Bhavajas. I remember her telling me it was all going to be all right, that she knew what she was doing and this was all part of some greater plan. But had she foreseen Rasida’s betrayal and our mother’s death? Now she is alone out there, captive to the Bhavajas, at the mercy of Rasida’s whim, and I am here, stuck under countless megatons of rotting shit inside a dying world.
The cephalopod gun moves closer to my face.
I jerk back to the present, still reeling.
“Get up!” the woman holding the weapon barks.
I raise my hands.
My walking stick is slung across my back, and I have a bone blade at my hip, but I don’t go for either of them. Arankadash is just behind me, but Casamir is at least another twenty paces down, and Das Muni is ten more after that.
“I’m here to see Rasida Bhavaja,” I say.
“I’ll decide who you’re here to see,” the woman says. I’ve had time to search the corridor, and I note that she’s alone. I’m surprised to see a single patrol. She hasn’t yet called for others.
I start to get up.
“Stop!” she says.
“You told me to get up!”
She frowns hard. She’s young, not much past menarche, and I feel sorry for her. I was that young once, following orders.
“I’m going to come up slow,” I say. “All right?”
She jerks her head, and I decide that’s close enough to a nod. I slowly rise to my feet. I’m taller than her by a head.
“I need to see—”
“I don’t give a fuck who you’re here to see,” she says. “Where did you come from?”
“Level below,” I say. “The umbilicus isn’t working.”
What I’m saying is ridiculous, because we’ve come down from the ceiling, but it doesn’t matter. She’s committed a rookie error, and she hasn’t spotted it yet. She’s let me get too close.
I grab the stock of her weapon with my left hand and push it away from my body while punching her hard in the face with my right.
She stumbles back. I wrench the gun free and point it at her, jamming it hard in her face so the tentacles split flesh. She shrieks and goes down.
“Rasida Bhavaja!” I say.
“Outside the hangar,” she says.
“The vehicle hangar?”
She nods.
I try to get my bearings, but the truth is I hardly remember my way around this place. I’ve spent more time underground than I have up here. At least as far as I can remember.
“Take me there,” I say.
Casamir lands behind me. “What the shit?” she says.
“We’ll need more of these weapons,” I say. “Rasida will have people around her.”
My captive looks from me to Casamir. “You don’t know?” she says.
“Know what?” I ask.
“The consort has pinned herself in the heart room with the witches,” the Bhavaja woman says. “There’s a full civil war happening on this ship, and she’s become the focus of it.”
Ah, I think, resourceful Jayd and all of her plans. I remember what she told me when Rasida took her away, about this being what we wanted, what we planned for, and I wonder if this was all part of it: the blowing up of my people; this civil war; even me, here, running after her. What kind of monster was I that I kept her in my confidence, knowing what she had planned? Is that why I have no memory? Did she take it from me so I would go along with this?
“And why are you telling me this?” I say.
“Because we might be on the same side,” she says.
Das Muni slips down from the ceiling too.
“How many of you are there?” the Bhavaja woman says.
“Weapons,” I say. “Take us to a weapons cache first. Then the hangar.”
The woman nods. Blood trickles from the wounds in her face. “Fine, all right.”
I glance back and see Arankadash has made it as well. “We’re getting weapons,” I tell her, “then we’re finding the woman who stole this world.”
*
The Bhavaja woman tries to walk us right into a trap, but Casamir lobs a vial of something at the women springing the ambush and blinds them.