“You should have,” she says. “But you didn’t know, not until—”
“Until Anat had me recycled,” I say, “and told me who it really was who did it.”
She nods.
“You made an error,” my former self says, “the error you always make. Every woman has her weaknesses. For some, it is drink. Others, abject gluttony. I once knew a woman who could not resist a bet. My weakness was always my heart. I could not sacrifice someone I loved. Things, certainly. But to lose something I loved cut me too closely. It was agony to recover. Love would destroy me as completely as any army. And I fell in love with Jayd Katazyrna.”
Jayd closes her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says, and I’m not sure if she’s saying it to me or the past version of me. Maybe both.
“She stole our arm, it’s true,” the ghost continues. “She didn’t believe us. She destroyed the Mokshi, blew it all apart, and let me think it was Lord Katazyrna who did it all and captured Jayd and brought her back. It was a story only a fool in love would believe, or a fool who had never met Anat Katazyrna. Lord Katazyrna would never, ever come to retrieve any of her children. I know it now, but I didn’t then. And when Jayd came back here, saying she was convinced now that the Legion was dying, I believed her. I know I’m a softhearted fool, but it got us this far. I let her in again, and we came up with a plan that would make all the betrayal worth it. I promise you.”
“But we had to get the arm back,” I say to Jayd, “and the world from the Bhavajas. Why was I stupid enough to take you back?”
Jayd winces and clutches at her belly again. The contractions are coming closer together. I stare up at my image, willing it to hurry, knowing I have no control over the past as it unfurls.
“Jayd took me back to Anat and said I was just another of her prisoners,” my image says. “Anat didn’t like me. But that wasn’t the worst of it, no. No, it was learning that it was Jayd, not Anat, who stole my arm and recycled my people, that destroyed me. It made it impossible to work with her once I knew that. I was recycled, and then . . . How do you survive after that? Maybe you could. But I could not.”
“I’m sorry,” Jayd says, and her voice is thin. “I had to give you up to go on. No one survives being recycled.”
“The plan had to proceed,” my image says, “but I could not live with Jayd’s betrayal.” And at this, the woman with my face laughs. “You’ll sit here brooding for cycles and cycles with a broken heart. A broken heart that will slay you as surely as any army. You don’t want that. We have done that. It won’t save the Legion. So . . . make your choice.”
The image fades. I’m left in the dim with all the answers it appears I’m going to get, and a terrible choice, and Jayd wheezing beside me.
“I never knew what happened when you went here,” Jayd says, and her face crumples in pain and sorrow. “I didn’t know you forgot me on purpose.”
“You let me be recycled,” I say. “You let me come here again and again.”
“We had to save the Legion.”
“At the expense of my sanity?” I say. “Was the love false too, like she said? Was this really your game all along, to save the world, no matter who you would destroy? No matter how many worlds? You said I was some great general, a warmonger, but you’re the cold one, Jayd. Colder than I ever was.”
“It’s why it had to be me,” she says. “Don’t you see that? I could have traded you to the Bhavajas, you and your childbearing womb. But I didn’t. Because I knew you couldn’t do what needed to be done. You can fight, yes, but you are too softhearted to endure the long game. You have no idea what I had to do with Rasida to get here. You wouldn’t have been able to manipulate her like I did. You would have murdered her again and again, or she would have found you out and recycled you.”
“I sacrificed my child,” I say. My first memory. The child. The womb.
“What is a child,” Jayd says, “but potential? And that’s what you traded it for. The potential to free the Mokshi.”
I stare hard at the fluid in the containers. Do I want to remember? Do I want to heap more heartbreak over Jayd onto my existing heartbreak? When I close my eyes and think of love, it’s not Jayd in my mind now but Das Muni and Casamir and Arankadash. Jayd is fear. They are love. Do I want to exchange all of that for full knowledge of the past instead of what some old version of myself thought I should know?
As I consider my options, a second image springs up from the console.
The woman in this one is me, but not the calm, considerate one I saw before. In this one, I recognize her eyes. The haunted look. The fear.
She bows over me. She is already fairly looming, so the effect is dramatic. It’s as if she’s trying to see through time. She wears a tattered garment ripped through by the claws of some animal, perhaps. Her skin is red and raw in the seams of it. Half her head is scorched clean of hair.
“You don’t want your memory back,” she says. “I don’t know how many times we’ve done this already, but don’t get your memory back. You don’t want to know what you were.” She looks at something outside the frame. Shakes her head. “We are the fist of the War God. We are the inheritors of the worlds. We will show ourselves worthy.”
The image bursts apart.
Jayd moans quietly in the corner.
“Jayd,” I say, “what are we here to do?”
“Save the world,” she says softly.
Another misty image bubbles up from the console. Myself again. My hair is shorn short. There’s blood running down my head from a long gash. There seem to be great yawning distances of time between these. I didn’t make a record every time I came back. Why? Did I always just choose to lose my memory? Have I always acted on blind faith? How many times had I done this before I made the second record?