The Stars Are Legion(28)

Compared to the people of Katazyrna, many of whom seemed disfigured and cancerous, the people here appear in good health. I do not see a single person who is thin or hungry or bent under the weight of some disease or contagion.

“What will happen to these people?” I ask Anat.

She is very drunk, eyes glazed over. She smiles at me and smacks me on the back. “I’m so glad I didn’t recycle you this time!” she says. “You are so amusing.” She points at the ceiling. “You see how healthy this world is? The skin of the world keeps out all the radiation that ruins people. We’ll strip the skin of the world here and use it to repair Katazyrna. That’s how we’ll last long enough to board the Mokshi and take the whole of the Legion. Rasida is such a fool, giving me this fresh world.”

“But . . . what will happen to them?” I say. “How will we fix this world?”

“Fix it? Have you been listening? We are not here to fix anything. We’ll plunder this world for its goods, then let the rest rot here. We’ll take what we want and use it to board the Mokshi. You’ve seen the skin of the Mokshi. Aside from the crater, the skin is healthy and intact. The witches can fix that rupture easy enough. But we need organic material to do it. That’s what this exchange is for. We aren’t here to help anyone. Keep your eye on the end goal.”

I stare again at the line of happy, dancing women. There are women of every age here, even some young children, though no babies. It doesn’t look like anyone has borne a baby here in at least ten rotations. They are all so fat and happy and alive.

Of course Anat would want to destroy that.

“Let’s go,” Anat says, patting my head as if I’m a child. “Aiju! You others, let’s go.”

Aiju, too, pats me, this time on the shoulder, but it feels no less condescending.

“Jayd is theirs now,” Aiju says. “The sooner you come to terms, the better.”

As we gather to leave the world, a few faces turn to watch us go. They don’t treat Anat like she is lord of their world now. If anything, this whole display made it clear that Rasida and Jayd rule here now, not Anat. But Anat appears powerfully certain that she has won something here and that this place is hers to ravage.

Rasida’s security team peels away from the room to follow us. They escort us all the way back to our hangar. We stop to spray on new suits. Anat argues drunkenly with the security women for a time before the twins both pull her back. I’m the first to spray on my suit, because I don’t want to listen to Anat anymore.

We go back to our vehicles, and I stare at the ceiling one last time. Then we are seated on our vehicles, and the skin of the world puckers open and we speed off into the blackness that surrounds the Legion.

When I look back, the world appears no different from before, but my memory delivers a future to me, as if it has seen just such a future on many other worlds. Soon, what is left of the world will be a soupy ruin, and Anat will send me or one of her daughters out here with an army to salvage it and feed it into the great mouth of the recycling monsters on Katazyrna, until Katazyrna is healthy again. But only for a time. Only for a time. Because the worlds are hungry beasts, and the organic matter here to feed them is finite. Eventually it will eat us all whole.





“BE A VILLAIN.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





12


ZAN


Anat leads the way back to Katazyrna like the drunkard she is. She does great spiraling rolls in her vehicle, weaving between the twins, making obscene signs with her hands. She is in fine spirits. I certainly have no memory of her ever being so happy, but maybe that’s because I simply have so little of it. Inside my own chest, I feel as if I have swallowed a hard black stone. The Mokshi may be able to give me back the memory it took, but I am doubting that I want it. If my memory makes these mad people and this mad life make sense, I will cast it out altogether. I don’t want these people, these decisions, to be normal.

Anat speeds up over a great ring of detritus, then tumbles back through it. The ring rotates around a pitted wreck of a world at the edges of Katazyrna territory. It’s long dead and picked over. I see flashes of metal among the rotted tangles of skin, slabs too big to cut out and salvage, most likely. The eye of the sun at the heart of the Legion shines through the center of the ruined world.

I squint and raise my hand to my brow to shield the light, wondering if Anat will go zooming through this wreck too, half-hoping maybe she bashes so hard into something that it knocks her senseless.

Instead, as we come around what’s left of the world, following Anat’s spent fuel stream, Anat’s vehicle suddenly spins out.

A great thorny mass erupts from the side of Anat’s vehicle, knocking Anat free.

One of our security vehicles goes next. It’s hit once. Twice. Three times.

The security vehicle tumbles toward me. It happens too fast for me to react. The vehicle smashes into me. The force is so great, I’m hurled free of the vehicle and into open space. I do not scream, but I gasp, and the sound is loud and close in my suit. We aren’t wearing any communications devices. We are drifting soundless and alone.

Pushed free of the group, I see the raiders coming up from beneath the orb of the rotted world. There are not a dozen, or two dozen, but sixty or more vehicles mounted with cephalopod cannons. The great tentacle weapons bash into the Katazyrna vehicles, picking us off like insects.