The Stars Are Legion(14)

“Hush now,” Sabita says. She wipes more unguent around my lips, her fingers strong and sure against my battered skin.

The unguent begins to do its work. I feel my mouth and tongue again. The dead cellular tissue inside my mouth is rapidly sloughing away, choking me with pasty mucus. I gag.

“Don’t vomit,” Sabita says. “Give it another moment.”

But I spit it all out anyway—the unguent and the dead cells from my mouth and tongue. I wipe at my face, and the skin around my lips flakes away.

“Jayd,” I say.

“Jayd is with the Lord of Katazyrna,” Sabita says.

“Have to tell her about the Bhavajas.”

“She knows, Zan.”

The flickering blue lights fade, replaced with the soft green glow. Is the blue an emergency indicator of some kind? I stare at the walls, bewildered. “I don’t understand,” I say. “If she knows Bhavajas are attacking us, why isn’t she doing anything?”

Sabita touches my hand, briefly, as if some of the bitter cold from between the worlds still lingers on my skin.

“Your mother won’t permit any retaliation against the Bhavajas,” Sabita says. “The ones attacking us now probably don’t know yet.”

“Know what? That squad I just saw heading out, though—”

“Your mother sent those ones out to the Mokshi, to confirm your . . . failure. They weren’t sent out for the raiders.”

I hear the soft, irregular squelching of an approaching party.

“But—”

“So, you live. You die. You live again,” Gavatra says. She holds a shimmering purple sheath of material that ripples as if alive.

I stand and step into the sheath. It conforms easily to my body. I wipe my hands against the material. It seems to be made of mites. They tickle my skin. I realize they are eating the remnants of the melted spray-on suit.

Gavatra spares a look at Sabita. “Back to the infirmary with you,” she says.

“I’ve brought her back every time,” Sabita says, “from far worse, and that is the thanks you give me?”

“We have other tissue technicians,” Gavatra says.

“Where’s Jayd?” I ask.

“Oh, she is coming up after me,” Gavatra says. “She and your mother.” I see half a dozen women dressed as Gavatra slide in from the umbilicus farther down the corridor.

“What’s all this?” I ask.

“A precaution, only,” Gavatra says.

Sabita steps nimbly past me, gaze lowered, and I feel a confrontation coming. I hold my ground. Sabita slips away just as the group of women parts and I see a stout, grim-faced woman striding toward me at the center of them. She is older and squatter than the others, but what really sets her apart is her great metal arm. The underside glows slightly green, and I wonder if it’s hot to the touch. What does a woman do with an arm like that? Just behind her is Jayd; Jayd’s expression is hard to make out from this distance in the low light, but she’s moving fast after the woman with the iron arm.

This woman must be Anat, because only a woman styling herself a Lord would walk as confidently as she does while barely reaching my shoulder. I suspect the metal arm helps her ego enormously. The arm is the most metal I’ve seen here, and it’s clearly well taken care of—it fairly gleams in the bluish light.

It’s not until she’s nearly on top of me, though, that I realize she is tougher than her height would have me believe.

She grabs me by the ear, which is far more painful that I would have thought, and drags me across the floor. I’m so shocked, I yelp. When I grab her hands, she releases me. She has pulled me from the open corridor into a vestibule. The six beefy women of her security team stand between us and the corridor, effectively blocking me from Jayd and anyone else passing in the hall. The security team crosses their arms and puts their backs to me and Anat. They are a wall of flesh, and I lie in their shadow.

“How close did you get?” Anat says.

“To the lip of the crater,” I say, annoyed at the whole exchange, but somehow even more put off by the fact that she doesn’t introduce herself. But of course she already knows me. She’s likely met me many times. “The Bhavajas took out my army. They took out more than the defenses did.”

“Blood-smeared Bhavajas,” she says. “You were close, though. Why do you keep failing? Why are you defective?”

“We’re fighting the wrong enemy,” I say. “If the Bhavajas want that world, too, you need to defeat them first.”

“Only a fool fights a war on two fronts,” Anat says.

“That’s effectively what they have you doing,” I say, “whether you want to or not. It’s why you’re losing.”

“I never lose. You lost.”

Everyone here is insane, I think, but that’s probably best kept to myself right now. “Take the army out there yourself, then,” I say instead, and that’s probably not going to go over well either.

Anat swings her iron arm at me.

I catch it and hold it, surprised at my own strength. The metal is warm and comforting. The green bits of skin that glow through the metal mesh give off a surprising amount of heat. I meet Anat’s gaze, and in that moment we are mortal enemies, two women locked in orbit around one another. She knows her ultimate goal, but I don’t know mine yet. Right now all I want is to let her know I am not some animal that will sit here and take her fist. When she gazes back, it is with the blazing maniacal eyes of a prophet or a seer, a woman who believes with absolute certainty that she is the chosen of a god.