The Stars Are Legion(13)

“I know, girl,” Anat says. “You leave that to me.”

“How do we save the world?” I say. “We aren’t going to be able to move people to the Mokshi. Zan isn’t going to succeed in time. We need another option.”

I have been pressing this since Zan and I began this dance, but Anat is stubborn. No one knows that better than me. She cannot be pushed into a political option if she believes a military one will achieve the same ends.

Anat peers at me and curls her lip. “The same way we’ve always saved the world. We must sacrifice something to it.”

“I agree that there are other options,” I say. “We should discuss them.”

“You speak as if I’m not the Lord of the Legion,” Anat says.

“I would never presume—”

“Oh, you would. You would.” Anat starts pacing, and that makes me fearful, because it signals one of her violent moods. She becomes impossible to reason with during these episodes. “How are your treatments? You’re not coming to term, are you?”

“The treatments are fine.” Anat has never said it, but I suspect she doesn’t want me to bear what I’m capable of carrying, because in the eyes of our sisters, it would make me more powerful than her. When she found out what I’d done to myself, she was not elated, but cold. She wanted to find out why I would do such a thing, why I would want to carry something like that in my womb, if not to inspire the people she ruled to overthrow her.

“I need you to stay off the skin of the world for a time,” Anat says. “I have great plans for you, and they require you to stay intact. It’s time to make use of what you bear.”

“And what of Zan?” I say.

“Zan is failing. I should just recycle her again. Maybe she’ll stay dead this time.”

“Please don’t do that. You know what happened last time.”

“What’s the use of her coming back if she can’t get my army into the Mokshi with her? We still don’t know what happens to her in there once she gets under the skin. Does it eat her? Remake her? If her memory loss isn’t feigned—”

“It’s very real,” I say. It wasn’t, the first time, but it has been ever since. I don’t tell her that, but it’s a truth I know and Zan doesn’t, and it still makes my skin itch. Why does she lose her memory now, when she gets back to the Mokshi? That was never part of our plan. She had all her memories intact after she crawled her way up and went back to the Mokshi the second time. Had something happened to her down below? I would never know now.

I gaze at the ceiling, imagining the cancerous skin of the world eating into every level, striking down and down and down into the center of Katazyrna and destroying us all, level by level, cell by cell, while my mother dances with some impenetrably broken world that has already claimed hundreds of her daughters and thousands of aliens and bottom-world misfits. It is a mad vision Anat has. There is another way.

“Is that all you had?” Anat says. “Just more bad news?”

“That’s all,” I say. “You shouldn’t—”

She raises her iron arm. “Are you trying to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do again, girl?”

I cringe. I hate that I cringe, but she has struck me too often. “No,” I whisper.

“Good,” she says, and sweeps past me, back toward the first level of the world. I scramble to keep up with her, because I know what happens when she and Zan are alone.





“WORLDS CAN BE REBORN, BUT THE REST OF US ARE DOOMED TO THE SKIN WE’VE MADE FOR OURSELVES. DOOMED TO LIVE WITH THE CHOICES WE’VE MADE.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





5


ZAN


Blackness, then milky green.

I am sucked from the surface of the world and deep into the verdant emerald interior of Katazyrna, reborn for perhaps the millionth time, or perhaps just the tenth. Certainly only the second I remember.

As I fall, I see the Bhavajas’ needled vehicles blot out the blackness. I see their dark faces, and the glinting whites of their eyes in the blue-green halo of the world’s defenses. They cannot approach through those defenses, but they fire off another round from the cephalopod guns.

As the world’s skin closes over me, one of the Bhavajas signs at me, “You’re already dead.”

I hit the floor of the ship’s interior and let out a rush of air. My suit begins to dissolve into the spongy floor. I panic, struggling to my hands and knees, and begin hacking uncontrollably. The suit melts, leaving me shivering even in the humid air.

Around me, the floor blinks with a soft blue glow, turning the milky green world aqua.

Ahead, a slick squad of retaliatory troops is heading topside. I squeeze my eyes shut. My lungs and face and throat hurt. I sucked in air out there, and it hurts. I retch and gag.

“Zan!”

I raise my head, hoping it’s Jayd. But it’s Sabita, the woman who found me in the vehicle hangar. She is wearing a red shift, and my memory offers up a bit of wisdom. The red shift marks Sabita as an emergency tissue technician. Sabita extends her long brown arms to me and catches me up in her arms as if I am a child.

I try to speak, but my lips and tongue are blistered. Sabita takes a shimmering purple slug from the bag at her hip and fills my mouth with unguent.