The Stars Are Legion(103)

“I don’t understand any of this,” I say.

Jayd makes a guttural laugh. “Neither do I. That’s the awful part. We’ve done such awful things to each other, Zan. So many awful things. But it’s going to end now. Just . . . leave me here. Please. I just want to end it. You have had this gift. You don’t have to remember any of this. But I do. I must. And I’m tired of it.”

“No,” I say.

“It all worked out in the end,” Jayd says. “You got back your ship, and you’ll escape the Legion once it’s reborn. I got revenge on the Bhavajas. We did this together, Zan.”

“I don’t want my bloody ship,” I say. “I want an end to all this death.”

Jayd chokes out a laugh and, with it, a spattering of blood. “Someone had to birth the new world, Zan. I wanted it. You didn’t.”

“You were my greatest enemy,” I say.

“No,” Jayd says. “You were always your own greatest enemy. Even here. Even now.”

I place my hands on the console beside each of the growths full of liquid. Above the vials is a spongy cap. It feels familiar to me, and I open it. Inside is a bubbling mess of green gel, very much like the green skin of my arm. I dip my arm into it and watch the green liquid from my arm bleed back into the wound on the console.

When the liquid from my arm joins the rest, the whole pot of green goo turns yellow and is absorbed into the console. As I watch, spidery yellow tendrils snake out from the console and run all along the floor and up the walls of the temple room. A soft amber light fills the room, and it reminds me of the light in the hall of giants where Arankadash nearly stayed behind to find her child.

Jayd screams behind me. The world is coming. The Mokshi will be rewritten, will be reborn, will escape the Legion.

Yet here I finally sit with my memory in reach, and the means to erase everything again too. Which to choose? I have come here and chosen one or the other dozens of times. We were so single-minded in this, Jayd and this woman I once was. But do I want to become her? Lord Mokshi, the single-minded woman who was willing to sacrifice everything—her ship, her children, her womb, her memory—to power her way out of the Legion? Must I become her again, or is she, too, simply a suit, a temporary but necessary fix to get me to where I am now? I consider the pieces of my memory I have, and the pieces I’ve been told, and I wonder if it is all meant to bring me here, to this moment. This choice. To be someone I was, or to start over again, to fall in love again with Jayd. Am I doomed to love her and to be destroyed by that love?

One or the other.

I think of Das Muni’s choices—to poison and maim, but also to heal and rebirth. I think of Arankadash and the cog she nursed until the world came for it. I think of Casamir and the love she lost to the recycler pits, and her endless stories. And I wonder if I’ve given myself a false choice.

There are never just two choices.

I step away from the console. Behind me, Jayd is panting. She does not need a warmonger or a general or a tactician in this moment. The tactician got us here, but someone much different needs to get us out. I need to get us out.

And so, I make another choice.

I choose neither. I choose the woman I’ve become, not the woman I was, not the woman I can be. The woman I am. Like the versions of myself before me, I stare at the long row of doors leading to my escape, but unlike those before me, I do not step into one. Not yet.

I take Jayd’s hand. Together, we will remake the Mokshi, as we planned all those rotations ago.

But it must be our last act together.





“LET IT NOT BE FORGOTTEN, NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES WE GO BACK, OR HOW MANY TIMES THINGS ARE UNDONE, THAT I LOVED JAYD KATAZYRNA, HOWEVER MUCH IT HURTS MY HEART TO GIVE HER UP.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





38


JAYD


I give birth to a world.

It does not seem so portentous. It’s mostly pain and agony, as if my whole lower half is being split apart. It’s worse than when I gave birth to Rasida’s child . . . Zan’s child. I just want it out. I want it over.

Zan takes her hand from mine and pulls the world from my body and holds it up wonderingly, as if it is a great light, though really it is only a fleshy, nubby organ of a thing. Its tentacles wriggle out from its nubs and cling to her fingers, and in the amber bloom of the room, it does not look like something that was worth all this pain and darkness.

Zan sets it on top of the console.

Above her, all of the past Zans are still playing. This last one has the long wound on her head, the one she still bore when she came to me this last time, when I thought her dead. I had seen her crash into the Mokshi that last time. She bears the same terrible wounds and scars that I would see on her when we finally retrieved her from the organic tube she used to escape the Mokshi. I thought she’d come back to us because she could not tend her own wounds. I thought she’d come back to me to be remade.

“I waited so many turns,” the recording says. Zan, my Zan, the last Zan, who is not this Zan. I gaze up at her and remember how awfully things went that time, and I weep again, and I’m glad I’ve told Zan to leave me here, because we have been so awful to each other that there’s nothing to pick up anymore.

Sometimes you can’t go forward. You can’t put things back together. I will die here. This will be my penance for all we’ve done.