The Stars Are Legion(25)

I want it nonetheless.

Rasida sets aside her own glass and gets onto her knees in front of me. She bends her head and gently parts my knees.

I freeze, uncertain of how to react. I wear only a long tunic, with nothing beneath. I feel Rasida’s hot breath against my skin. Then her tongue.

I gasp. My precious metal goblet falls to the floor. The thirsty flooring laps up the wine as Rasida presses her lips to me, as if her tongue seeks to find the heart of me. She is a flickering, insistent whisper.

I dig my hands into Rasida’s long hair and cry out. Rasida pushes up my tunic, stripping me bare. Rasida pulls me against her, hungry and passionate, the way Zan had taken me in the early days, before she was rewritten and erased into some pale shadow; a woman without a past, only purpose.

Is that me? Can I be a woman without a past, in this moment? I want that, desperately. I want to start over the way that Zan has.

Rasida’s desire is contagious. I wrap myself around Rasida’s thigh and cry out.

“I love you,” Rasida says into my hair. “You make the very Lord of War tremble. I am yours. I am your lord.”

“My lord,” I gasp. I hold Rasida’s head against my chest, feeling the warmth and power of her. How exhilarating, to hold this woman in my arms. I am drunk on her desire of me.

“You are the love of my life, the mother of worlds,” Rasida murmurs, stroking my belly.

I move Rasida’s hands away. “I am more than that, love,” I say, and it tastes strange on my lips, to call some other woman love. My enemy. My love.

“Of course,” Rasida says, and she strokes my cheek and moves her hands lower.

“When will we be joined?” I say, and I don’t say, “Because I want to see Zan again,” because I am not a fool, but with Rasida’s hands on me, I see Zan again, the way she was before all of this started, and I want Zan. I want our old life. I want to see her one more time before I do what must be done.

“Soon,” Rasida says. “Let us slake our thirst first.”

“My family will be there?” I ask.

“They are invited to the world of the joining,” Rasida says, and her fingers find me again, and I close my eyes and think of Zan. “But first,” Rasida says, “I must do one last thing.”





“ONCE YOU HAVE THE HEART, TAKE THE HEAD.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





11


ZAN


It’s Sabita who wakes me while the glowing blue lights of the wall in my room tangle before me. I spray on a simple suit, something a bottom-worlder left for me before I went to sleep. It is red and black, and clings to my skin the same way my suit did, only it does not cover my hands or face.

“Maibe says you were reassigned,” I say to Sabita.

Sabita gives a small smile but says nothing. She leads me to the hangar and the stir of my sisters, where we gather to attend Jayd’s binding.

“Sabita?” I say as she moves away.

She opens her mouth. Her tongue is gone. I open my own mouth to cry after her, but she closes the hangar door behind her, leaving me with Anat and the others. I’m struck dumb with both shock and horror.

Anat is pulling at the collar of a suit. The others are dressed in far too many clothes, it seems to me, vests and long jackets over their regular clothing.

“Sabita—” I begin, but Anka, one of the twins, shushes me.

“Let it lie,” Anka says.

“Who did that to Sabita?” I say.

“Why aren’t you wearing your exterior suit?” Anat spits.

“Who did that?” I say, louder this time.

“Who do you think?” Anat says. “Jayd, of course. Sabita talks too much. She gets you overly agitated.”

I gape.

Anat snorts. “Dumb idiot,” she says. “Put on your exterior suit over those clothes.”

Aiju, the other twin, rolls her eyes and says to me, “It’s a show of strength to wear both clothes and suits. You think every world can afford clothes like these? Most wear nothing, like some kind of bottom-feeder. We’re one of the wealthiest worlds on the Outer Rim.”

I stare at the peeling blank walls of the hangar. It huffs gently with the thrum of the world’s heartbeat. I gaze at the grungy gunk lining the corridors, the haggard faces of these women, and wonder what the poorest places must be like. And I think all this rot hides an even more rotten center, just like Jayd’s smile.

“Maibe and Prisha will look after Katazyrna,” Anat says. “That leaves Suld and the twins to go with us. Neith and Gavatra are already with Jayd.”

She then gives careful instructions to the security team tasked with following us, and I recognize some of them as the women I sparred with while in recovery.

I know I’m not the only one to note how the security team salutes Anat and keeps their eyes on me. Why do they treat me as more of a threat than the Bhavajas?

When we are all suited up and situated on our vehicles, Anat waves her great arm, and the hangar opens, and we speed off into the black between the worlds, shooting from the comforting embrace of Katazyrna and into the cold, airless space that threatens to devour it.

I keep to the back of the party, just ahead of the rear security team. If it is a true peace, if Anat believes in it, she wouldn’t have brought so many security people.