The Stars Are Legion(38)

“Thank you for accepting, love,” Rasida says. My gut goes icy at the endearment. She is mad like Anat was mad. But I’m here sitting across from her of my own will, so I’m no better.

Her sister Samdi serves us, which makes me wonder if Samdi is her sister after all. Like me, Rasida has shown herself to be a master in the art of deception. In part, I think it’s because she absolutely believes that the things she’s telling me are true when she says them. She is nurturing reality into being as she speaks.

“I have thought long on what’s happened,” I say. I pick at my food. We are eating a mix of clotted protein gel and fresh greens. At least something still grows on this dying world, somewhere. I’ve been offered nothing this fresh in my own quarters. Maybe there will be something sweet afterward. This thought bubbles up and I almost laugh at myself, that my submission can be bought with something as simple as food.

“I came here to you because of my mother,” I say. “She was always overbearing. You knew her. My whole family wanted a life killing and dying for Katazyrna. I am . . . not like that. I never wanted that. The things I did . . . all those worlds. That was something she made me do, never something I wanted. But on Katazyrna, you did what Anat asked or she had you recycled.”

Rasida says, “What do you want, Jayd?”

“Just you,” I say. I meet her look. “I want to have a new life. Maybe it’s true that I am free now. Maybe you’ve freed me.”

She smiles at me, but it is the smile that does not touch her eyes, the black smile that goes with her black eyes. A fist of worry forms in my chest and does not go away. If she makes me a prisoner here, I will have a much more difficult time escaping.

Rasida rises and goes to her wardrobe. She pulls out my mother’s iron arm. She drops it on the table between us and sits back down.

“Is there some trick to it?” she says. “We all know Anat used the arm to power the world. She put on lovely little light shows, and I heard rumors of far more. They say she had control over Katazyrna the way the witches did, using this arm. We can’t find the Katazyrna witches, so we need the arm if we’re to remake the world.”

“I don’t know,” I lie. I stare at the arm. She has taken out my mother’s wasted, fleshy arm from inside of it, and it’s only a metal brace wrapped over the warm organic green skin now. I don’t tell Rasida that the arm is not something from Katazyrna at all. We don’t have the skill to build such a thing any more than she does. Only one world does.

“If you knew how to operate it—” Rasida says.

“Mother didn’t trust any of us,” I say. “I’m sorry, love. If I knew how it worked, I would tell you.”

“Would you?”

“I would,” I say.

She considers me, expression cool, calculating. She stands and picks up the arm and puts it back in her wardrobe. I note its placement, and also that it doesn’t seem to be locked up in any way. Perhaps she trusts that her people fear her enough not to touch it. It’s a good thing I am not hers.

“I suppose it was not important to know such things,” Rasida says. “With what you can carry in that womb, such things are not your concern. How many have you birthed?”

“None,” I say.

“None?” She narrows her eyes. “Then how do you know—”

“Anat had them removed before they came to fruition,” I say. “She decides . . . decided who got to give birth, and to what, on the world.”

“Quite a feat,” she says.

“Surely,” I say carefully, “you have control over the fecundity of your people, the same way you control your own.”

“I administer corrections when I deem it fit,” she says. She drinks from another beautiful metal goblet. This one has blue stones embedded along the rim. I cannot imagine she eats this way every rotation. But I know very little of this woman who is my enemy, far less than I thought I did before I came here.

“I have always thought it strange,” I say, “that you continue to live in a world such as this when you have the power to make a new one. What do you care about a metal arm to patch up the seams of some world, when you could remake the world?”

Rasida raises her brows. “Oh, yes,” she says. “I hear that often. But no one tells you what it does to you, to make a world.” She refills my goblet. “Do they?”

I fold my hands over my belly. “Anat always said leading a world was far more dangerous and terrifying than making one.”

“Anat was a fool,” Rasida says. “Drink your wine.”

I drink my wine.

I cannot help but glance at the wardrobe again and the iron arm within. My family dead, Zan dead, and here I sit with the arm just a few paces away, and the woman who can remake worlds pouring wine into my cup.

I have stepped into the belly of my enemy. I am within a whisper of everything I sought. But at what price?

Rasida leans toward me. “There is something you should know,” she says.

I wait. She seems to expect a response, but when I give none, she continues. “I love you very much,” she says, and grins.

“I love you also,” I say.

Smile and smile, Zan would say. Smile all the brighter for being the villain.

“It does worry me,” she says, “that you have yet to bear a pregnancy to term.”