The Stars Are Legion(34)

“You can’t . . . ,” I say, and I don’t want to ask her, I don’t want to know if she’s killed Zan too, because of course she has, and then I wonder if she knows about Zan, and who she really is. Does she suspect? Could I have given myself away? I stare at the arm. My mother’s gory flesh is still inside of it; the arm was always too small for her. It pained her to wear it.

I clasp my hands together and try to control my trembling. The tears come, unbidden, but Rasida will expect tears. If I did not cry, I would be less believable when I finally said I forgave her for murdering my world.

I fall to the floor, and Rasida settles in beside me. I let her take me into her arms, and I sob against her. “What have you done?” I say. “What have you done?”

She makes a shushing sound. She wipes my sisters’ blood through my hair as she strokes me.

“Hush,” she says. “It’s just us now.”

And then, finally, I scream.





PART II:


DOWN BELOW





“THE MONSTERS DON’T LIVE IN THE BELLY OF THE WORLD LIKE THEY ALL SAY. THE MONSTERS LIVE INSIDE OF US. WE MAKE THE MONSTERS.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





14


ZAN


Everything is monstrous in the dark.

The recycler monster moves heavily in the flickering light, squelching across the detritus of the world’s waste: spent suits and table scraps, bloody piss and shit and ruined bodies, corpulent or lean, old or young, mangled, deformed, mutant, or hacked to pieces, all the castoffs, the lame, the hobbled, the imperfect, the mistakes, the merely unlucky, the dead.

I wake thinking I have dreamed this horror, but it’s real. My head feels heavy, stuffed with gummy ooze. I see hazy blue light shot through with blackness, as if some great light above me is swinging back and forth on a long string. It makes me dizzy. The stench is overpowering, so caustic that I dry-heave.

I can’t move. As I piece together the light and shadows as they crawl across the landscape, I see that I’m lying in a heap of corpses. Someone’s hand lies heavily on my face. I taste bile. I spit and slaver instead. A deep, shuddering sob bubbles up inside of me, so powerful I think I might burst with it. Out in the darkness, among the oozing piles of waste and half-rotten body parts, I see the dim shape of something terrible moving among the piles. I have met this monster before, in some other life, some other time. I know this moment in my bones.

I try to pull myself free of the bodies around me. They have cushioned me after my long fall through the darkness. How long I fell, I don’t know. Of all the things I don’t want to remember, that long fall is among them, but it comes back in terrible waves: a slimy, guttering slide to death. My hands are covered in grime. My fingernails are bloody, slathered in mucus from trying to grip the walls of the garbage funnel and slow my fall.

Now I want nothing more than to be free of the bodies that saved my life. A few paces away, I see something else moving. The blue light overhead swings back, and I see Maibe on her hands and knees, spitting bile or blood onto the rotten, uncertain ground beneath her.

The great hulking thing that wanders beyond the next rise of corpses grunts, then sighs. Everything around us seems to shake and tremble as it trundles forward.

I wave to Maibe, but she must not be able to see me. And then I go still, for the monster is upon us.

Maibe raises her head as the great shape of the thing rumbles toward her. I can see only its general outline. It’s an enormous beast, fifty paces or more tall, and has four great front arms, powerful haunches, and the snub of some tail. It lumbers forward. Maibe babbles something that is half-scream, half burst of ragged breath.

The light swings away. The monster grabs Maibe’s body. It takes her head into its massive bony fingers and pops Maibe’s head from her torso as if she’s brittle as a dry stick. It tosses both pieces of her into its mouth. The crunching of the body in its powerful jaws is so loud, I feel it in my own bones.

The monster groans and shifts, causing the bodies around me to tremble again. One corpse rolls off the top of the pile.

The monster snorts and shambles closer to the pile of death that surrounds me. I hold my breath, shaking so hard, my whole body feels like one open wound.

I feel its hot breath on me. Snuffling. Reeking. The light swings back, and I see the face of the thing illuminated for the first time. I bite back a scream, gnawing on my tongue so hard, I taste blood.

It has a roughly human face, a bulbous nose, and a wide-lipped mouth full of jagged teeth, yet there is just one eye, one great yellowish eye that sits at the center of its forehead. A tangle of thick, matted hair is heaped across its massive shoulders. The first set of forearms are the largest, each wrist as big around as my whole body. The hands have just three fingers: a thumb, an index finger, something like a little finger, the smallest as long as my whole arm.

The monster snorts again in my direction, its eye rolling in its socket, searching for . . . what? Movement?

It paws at the pile of corpses with its three-pronged fingers, yanking bodies up. It pops off the heads and eats them. One of the bodies is still alive, like Maibe, and screams.

The monster snorts at it. It makes a deep, regular grunting sound, like laughter.

It plays with that one for a while, tossing her among its hands, slamming her into the piles of corpses until the screams go silent. I don’t want to know who it is. I hope I never met her.