The Stars Are Legion(104)

Zan gets up now and wipe her hands on her suit. I lie back as the contractions still wrack my body. I begin to tremble. I lean back and wait for the world to devour me. This is how it should be. I was the stronger one. I could get us this far. I’ve done my part.

But Zan is holding out her arms to me. She’s helping me up. I’m confused. My legs are weak. I can barely stand, but she is holding me up and helping me across the floor. I’m trailing afterbirth. My placenta slides free of my body, and the umbilicus tangles my legs.

Zan leans over and cuts me free of it. I glance back one more time at the last Zan I knew, the one before this one, the one who chose to come back to me despite all we had done.

“I don’t want to go back,” the other Zan says. “Who would want to go back to a dead world? But I can’t leave her, can I? I can never leave her, no matter how many times I do this.”

I burst into tears again because I feel like a monster, though Zan and I, the old Zan, are just the same. We were made for each other. We could have only done this being as we are. We couldn’t be anything else and save the Mokshi.

“I have done terrible things,” I say.

“I know,” Zan says.

“Sabita,” I say, because I ignored her too. I used her, and while we are here confessing all we have done wrong, she is one more thing I must atone for. “You should know she protected me. She helped me, just as you asked her. Even if you don’t remember. She helped me get here. Turned around and took on the Bhavajas following us, and I . . . I just let her. I didn’t look back. I didn’t go back. I didn’t . . .”

Zan is shushing me. I have no more breath for my guilty admissions. Zan pulls me toward the wall of doors that house the organic tubes that will jettison us from this place. She showed them to me when she first captured me, and invited me to leave any time I wished. But I wanted to stay, that first time, and sabotage this place. I was a fool then. I hadn’t believed her yet that she had found a way to stop us all from dying.

“This isn’t how I want it to go,” I say. “I want to die. That is my story.”

“Fuck that story,” Zan says.

She pulls me to one of the doors and palms it open with her iron arm. It’s going to be tight, and it won’t have air very long for two of us. I’m afraid, more afraid to die with her than without her, because at least without her, I could pretend she had some future that outlasted us. Who will pilot the Mokshi if she dies?

She brings me into the damp tube. “You can stay if that’s what you really want,” she says, “But if you stay, I’ll stay too. I don’t leave people behind.”

I am shaking hard. I gaze back at the control room. The images, all of the old Zans, have gone quiet.

“There is nothing for me here,” I say.

“Good,” she says. “Then let’s start over.”





“I HAVE SPENT MY LIFE BATTLING MONSTERS. IT WAS ONLY IN REALIZING THAT I WAS THE MONSTER, AND CHOOSING TO DESTROY HER, THAT I COULD SAVE THE WORLD.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





39


ZAN


The massive organic tube pops free of the Mokshi and enters the long, quiet dark of the Legion. It is the silence that comforts me. I got tired of listening to my own voice. I hold Jayd against me until her trembling subsides. She drifts in and out of wakefulness.

We begin to circle the Mokshi, just another bit of detritus caught in its gravity well. This is the part I haven’t thought through. When I escaped before, no doubt Jayd or Anat came for me, but now we are alone.

We are alone.

I hope that Jayd sleeps through it. I hope she does not wake to find that we’re doomed out here together like two young stupid lovers. I gaze out at the Mokshi and raise my hand to it. The auroras light back up. They are beautiful to look at. A fitting final view. Maybe we can watch the Mokshi be reborn. I wonder if what I did to it means it can leave the Legion without a pilot. Maybe this reborn world will be a sentinel for the whole Legion, an ambassador to Legions that circle all those other stars. Maybe it will be ripped apart and used for scrap out there the same way it was here.

The air becomes stale. I drift in and out of consciousness as we float free. I think of all that I’m told I was, and all that I have become. All that I could be. That we could be, together, if we had the courage to start again.

Just like the Mokshi.

It’s then that I see the vehicle speeding toward us from the Katazyrna. I can’t make out the figure, but I can see the big cephalopod gun.

I pull Jayd closer. She murmurs something. “Sabita,” she says. “Sabita held off the Bhavajas. I let her go. I let her do it.”

It’s only as I raise my arm that I see the rider’s face.

It’s Casamir.

Casamir gives me a little two-fingered salute. She clumsily attaches her vehicle to the tube’s outer face. Her first walk in the blackness, her first view of the Legion. I should not be surprised that she has taken it all in stride. She has always been an intrepid explorer. I just never thought she’d take the leap and believe me.

She burns the vehicle’s yellow fuel and tows us back to the open hangar of Katazyrna.

From this vantage, the world looks as if it has an open wound. I see the great blackened patches of skin surrounding the hangar and wonder how long it will hold out. How many can we move to the Mokshi? The whole world? Can we really start again? And from there, then what? The whole of Katazyrna is still swarming with Bhavajas, all of them running around without someone to lead them. It will be a mess to clean up, and doing it will require a great deal of help from the levels below.