The Stars Are Legion(10)

I hold up a fist, calling my squad’s attention. My heart thuds loudly in my ears. I wonder if the Mokshi hears it. The wailing continues; it has become a part of me now, like my heartbeat, my rapid breath, the stink of myself in the cloying suit.

Below us, something flickers at the edges of the yawning black crater. A creeping yellow fog emerges, coiling into the atmosphere like the breath of some titanic god. A secondary defense mechanism.

“We are the fist of the War God,” I sign to my team. “We are the inheritors of the worlds. Show yourselves worthy.” The words feel ancient, a benediction, the signs something my body has done so often, it performs them by rote.

It’s not until I gaze at their confused faces that I realize I have signed to them in the wrong language. I stare at my hands. I try again, using a different sign language, and their expressions turn from bewilderment to wonder. They raise their fists.

We carry on.

The army drops toward the crater. With luck, they will burst into the heart of the world and face whatever it is that waits for them and conquer it as they will conquer its world, and I will return to Jayd a hero, and our mother will not recycle me again.

I fall after them, the rush of atmosphere against my suit. I swerve to evade the curling yellow breath of the crater.

The woman beside me moves too late, and a snarl of the breath ensnares her leg, pulling her deeper into its arms. Her suit sizzles from her body. Her flesh bubbles on her bones. My vehicle and I go into free fall, tumbling into the dark mouth of the world.

I push forward, burning fuel to gain control of the fall. The two kids catch up to me again, plucky and drunk with youth, their faces euphoric.

The crater seems to grow larger as we approach, black as the inky spaces between the worlds, black as the Legion when the core shutters up, black as death, as nothingness, as the universe before the gods shook the worlds loose from their hair and ignited the spinning heart of the Legion. I have a moment to wonder who all these gods are for half a breath before a tangled shot zips past my head. It doesn’t come from the blackness below us but from behind. The shot rips a great gaping hole in the girl’s vehicle beside me. The girl’s mouth opens, surprise more than fear, and then I am spinning down, down, down into darkness after her. Leave no one behind. Save them all.

Her young companion swerves closer to me, and we nearly collide. Another shot disturbs the mist. A thorny protuberance blooms from the falling girl’s chest. We are in the Mokshi’s gravity well now, and it pulls her hard.

I grab for her just as the she releases her grip on her vehicle. The vehicle falls out from under her, rushing past us both.

I clutch the girl’s arm hard. She is so close now, I can see her great dark eyes. Her face is fully visible inside the transparent suit that clings to her like a second skin. I study her young, doomed face. She is just a child, not much past menarche. I want to save her so badly. My teeth ache from gritting them.

The thing blooming from her chest is a three-tentacled cephalopod projectile whose inky poison darkens the girl’s transparent suit, eating holes right through the skin of it.

“What’s happening?” Jayd says. Calm. So very calm.

I start babbling, trying to explain what I see happening to the girl’s body.

“That’s not a Mokshi weapon,” Jayd says. “It’s a Bhavaja one. You need to get out of there. You can’t survive the Mokshi and the Bhavajas at once. We have tried that before.”

I twist my head and see a full squad of soldiers behind me, not mine, riding up on the remnants of my army in three tiered lines, great angular weapons mounted to the fronts of their vehicles.

I still cling to the arm of the girl whose suit is disintegrating around her. It peels back from her head, letting her dark hair stream free of the suit, coiling through the air like snarled fingers. She gasps on air too thin to sustain her. I think of my sister Nhim and the dead army circling the Mokshi. How many went just this way? How many more will they sacrifice to control a world that can’t be conquered?

I cling a long time, longer than I probably should have, until the girl’s body goes limp and a third shot clips the girl’s leg and sends her vehicle spinning. I drop the girl and roll my vehicle toward a billowing yellow cloud.

I punch the dash, deploying the burst shield, and cut through the cloud neatly, breaching the other side. I kick my vehicle around and face what must be the Bhavaja family. They are finishing off the last three surviving members of my army.

I snarl at them and make an obscene gesture, knowing I am too far away for them to catch it. I burn hard toward them, firing off my weapon into their lines.

The lines peel away, outmaneuvering me.

Whoever controls the Mokshi controls the Legion, another bit of wisdom bubbling up from my broken memory. Whoever said it, the Bhavajas seem to know it too, and they will never let me take it, and I’ll never get my memory back, and all these girls are dead for nothing. I will never get any closer than this gaping wound, this portal to the center of the world.

I zip past a long line of Bhavajas, then tilt back toward the billowing yellow fog, gunning hard for it like some madwoman. A few of them pursue, foolishly, and why wouldn’t they? They think I have burned and conquered their worlds, and they will follow me to the very limits of the Legion for revenge, wouldn’t they? I would.

A handsbreadth from the fog, I cut the fuel to my vehicle and drop like a stone, so hard and so fast, they don’t know what’s happening until they plunge into the yellow fog, bubbling and sizzling, colliding with one another like broken stars.