She gestures me toward the table where the suits and the vehicle guts are. She sprays on a suit. I do too. Then she waves me over to one of the vehicles and tells me to be still. She programs the release sequence, using a tangle of lights near the door. I look up at the observation window and see Casamir up there, hefting her weapon and peering at us. Will she be brave enough to come after me, really, once she sees the blackness of open space? She didn’t believe a single word of this a rotation ago. I worry it will test her sanity.
Jayd slips onto the vehicle behind me. I feel the heat of her, and the pulsing thing inside of her. I flex my arm. The lights above us move as the skin of the world thins.
I start the vehicle, and we pop free of Katazyrna.
I have been underground so long that the sight of the Legion takes my breath away. The great orb of the artificial sun is shuttering open, and it spills across my vision like a promise of rebirth. Behind me, Jayd is tense. I am too. I wonder at both of our motives.
I pilot toward the Mokshi, and in my bones I know this route so well that it feels like the most natural thing in the world. There are dead vehicles circling Katazyrna, and abandoned bodies that no one has bothered to collect and recycle. When I gaze back at Katazyrna, I see that half the world’s tentacles are now dead and withered, tucked close to the rotten black skin of the world. How long have I been gone?
I want to say something to Jayd, but we have no way to communicate in our suits except by sign language, and what I have to say is far too long and complex for that while I’m piloting a vehicle.
As we near the Mokshi, I see its defenses light up, the same blue and green auroras I saw the last time I tried to take it. This time, Jayd taps my iron arm and points to the Mokshi.
I raise the arm and make a fist.
The aurora dissipates.
I stare into my upraised hand and marvel at it. Once again, I am ushering my enemy into the Mokshi. I am inviting her and her weapons and her motives, and I understand even less of them this time than I did the last.
I fly us straight toward the hole in the world, and though Jayd points the way as we sink below the skin of the ship, I pilot my way there of my own volition, like taking a long journey home.
We part layer upon layer. I expect to see bodies, but there are none this deep into the world. Of course not. They were all recycled by Jayd. How did I forgive her? How? I don’t trust who I used to be any more than I trust Jayd. There’s dripping ichor from the ruined levels, much of it frozen and blistered, peeling back.
I bring the vehicle to rest in a broken hangar that contains the remnants of another sort of vehicle. These have two eyes and great bulbous bodies, not the wedged heads of the ones from the Katazyrna. We land and Jayd gestures me toward the sealed door.
I reach out my iron arm, close my fist, and the door opens. We step inside. The door closes. I look for the controls to pressurize the space, but Jayd is already ahead of me, her fingers moving over another complicated light display.
A brilliant yellow light suffuses the room. I squint. The room pressurizes. The inner door opens.
Jayd motions me forward.
I step into a long hall. Lights blink intermittently. Much of the corridor looks rotted out. I follow Jayd’s lead and don’t take off my suit. It’s too unstable here.
We climb through a set of half-open doors, then down another corridor. The world here is much worse off than the Katazyrna. The flesh has peeled back from all the walls to reveal rusted-out metal, twisted wiring, shriveled tendons. What really makes up the core of every world? Metal skeletons? Fashioned by whom? The gods? Did a god truly come all the way out here and shit out the Legion itself and fly on across the universe, or have we been here all along?
Finally, we come to the bottom of a great stairwell. I know this stairwell. At the top of the steps is a great domed structure. It reminds me of the temple where Rasida and Jayd were joined. I don’t know why I have put so much faith in coming here. Maybe because it’s my only hope of finding out what’s happened. But I can’t think of anyone or anything I would trust to tell me the truth of the twisted story that got us to this place.
We climb. There’s a spongy growth at the center of the door. I press the warm center of my iron arm to it, and the door opens. Yellow lights slowly brighten, giving my eyes time to adjust.
We are in a massive room lined in hexagonal apertures that give us a clear view of the entire Legion. It doesn’t even look like the room has a floor, but Jayd walks across it, and it holds her. I stare at the worlds below us as I walk after her. There’s a great round console at the center of the room. Jayd leans hard against it. She sets her weapon down and slides to the floor. She presses the bit on her suit to release it, and it falls off her. Jayd is breathing hard. She hisses and clutches at her belly again.
“Jayd—” I begin, but she shakes her head and points to the console.
There’s a divot at its center, and bundles of light appear all around the circumference. On the panel in front of me are two small containers. They grow from the console, and the liquid in them seems to have bubbled up from inside. I pick one up and pour out what’s inside, set it back down. It fills again.
One is full of clear liquid. The other is full of purple liquid. I have a memory of these spongy containers, of drinking them again and again.
I pull the sphere from my pocket and set it into the divot at the center of the console. Natural as breathing.
There is a feeling of static in the air; the console trembles. Light escapes the sphere and dances at the center of the console. The light shifts and weaves itself into an image of my own face and body. The image looms above me, twice as large as life. I look much younger.
“If you’re here again,” the image says, “and you don’t have the world and the arm, you need to start again.” It gestures at the console below me. “I’m sorry you don’t remember much of anything, but that was necessary.”
“Necessary?” she mutters. “Did you do this to yourself?”
“You have likely met Jayd Katazyrna,” my image says. “She is your greatest love and your greatest enemy. The Mokshi, this ship, is your salvation, and the salvation of those you take with you. You’ve designed this ship to pilot itself out of the Legion. It was originally stationed at the very core of the Legion, where worlds are much more stable. You’ve programmed a destination into it that was buried in its redundant systems. Don’t try to make sense of that now; it will come to you. What you need to know is that your first attempt failed. The ship failed here on the Outer Rim, and the Bhavajas and Katazyrnas attacked you for scrap.”
“It was for more than that,” Jayd says. She lies with her head against the console behind her, eyes glassy. “Anat wanted everything.”
“You admired Jayd’s fighting. You thought you had convinced her of your purpose. But she stole your arm and blew out the core of the world, ejecting your people into the vacuum and recycling them on Katazyrna.”
I stare at Jayd. She looks away, says, “I thought you mad. I didn’t know. . . . I didn’t understand, until later, until I realized Katazyrna was dying too.”
“I should have killed you,” I say.