The Stars Are Legion(40)

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“When you first came here, I thought you were a spider,” she says. “Then I thought, perhaps, you loved her. Then I saw that we were the same.”

“We’re not the same.”

“Oh, we are,” she says. “We are both smart women who thought being smart could save us here. It cannot, with Rasida. Logic does not win against her. Nor does love. You have tried both, I know. I know how you got here. But neither will work. You must try something different.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

“Because you are closest to her now,” she says, “and if we are going to overthrow her, we need someone who can get close enough to kill her.”

My expression does not change. Killing Rasida was never part of the plan, but I am desperate for allies here.

“You had best speak quickly,” I say softly, because I fear the walls are listening. I fear they can divine my true intent. “Because I would never betray Rasida in that way.” And when I say it out loud, I almost believe it. I almost believe I am the woman I pretend to be.





“COMING BACK INTO THE WORLD IS ALWAYS TORTUROUS.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





17


ZAN


Recovery nearly kills me.

I vomit and tremble. Das Muni feeds me something like water—a viscous substance—from her crooked hands. I wake once to hear Das Muni grunting while she squats over the basket. Splashing and gurgling. The soft cries of some mutant living thing, left to drown in its own afterbirth, send me to sleep.

The horror of the real world extends into my dreams. I dream that I give birth to a squalling, one-eyed recycler monster. It grows so rapidly, it eats off my arm just minutes after birth. It snuffles after me while I try to crawl away, eating me piece by piece until it devours my chest and swallows my head.

I wake screaming, often. The screaming reminds me of the screaming I heard while asleep in my room, back before the invasion. Did my sisters dream of the same things? Of people recycled? Is that what Jayd dreams about?

Das Muni squeezes water into my parched mouth and wipes my fevered brow. I piss myself often, and Das Muni replaces the spongy blanket beneath me. It absorbs most of my sweat and piss. I watch in fascination as Das Muni goes outside the hovel and wrings it dry, like a sponge.

I don’t know how long it is before Das Muni finally makes me move.

“Your leg is healing well enough,” Das Muni says. “You need to get up now and move it, or you’ll lose your strength.”

I grunt at her. I’ve lost something here, in all this squalor and horror, and I don’t know how to get it back. As I look at Das Muni, all I can think is that dying is preferable to living down here the rest of my life. What hope is there to ever leave, if what Das Muni says is true? What if Jayd is already dead, like the rest of our so-called sisters? Anat is dead. The Katazyrna armies are dead. I want to have hope for some reality other than this, but I can’t see it. My body rebels. I whimper.

Das Muni is much smaller than me but surprisingly strong. She hooks her arms under mine and yanks me past the fire, pulling me outside the hovel for the first time. The light here is not the swinging blue light I saw when I first descended into this mire, but soft green. The glow comes from the piles of refuse all around us: a slithering green light, like something alive. And it is something alive, I see now as a thread of green slides up my arm. They are bioluminescent worms.

I wipe it off. It twists and tumbles to the ground, squiggling in the muck.

“Up,” Das Muni says. She tugs at me again.

“I can’t,” I say.

“If you don’t get up, I’ll leave you out here for Meatmoth,” she says.

I don’t quite believe her, but I move my legs anyway, leaning hard on Das Muni.

Pain radiates up my bad leg. I hiss at the pain. Just the act of standing, even pushing hard against Das Muni, has me sweating and trembling. When I am finally standing straight, I find that I’m head and shoulders taller than Das Muni. And even in this state, having lost much of my flesh here during recovery, I easily outweigh her by fifty or sixty pounds.

Das Muni leads me on an agonizing walk around the hovel, squelching across the slimy ground. I wear no shoes or trousers, only a long tunic woven with the same plant stuffs as the basket. Hemp, maybe? Where do all of these things grow? Certainly not here.

I sleep after, exhausted and sweating. When Das Muni rouses me again, we again walk around the hovel, twice this time, though I whine about it. The more I must rely on Das Muni, the more I hate her, but the longer I stay, the more she seems to stare at me. I’m not sure if the hunger in her gaze is desire or actual hunger. Perhaps it is a little of both. I find that it is her gaze that inspires me to move now. I must get well before she decides which compulsion she wants to act on.

When we are not circling the hovel, we listen for the recycler monster, for Meatmoth, and the others: Bonemesh, Blightdon, Ravisher, and Smorg. It’s as if Das Muni has mushed all these names together like a child. I wonder how long she has been down here, really. How old was she when her world died? I ask her about the names, and she says they just came to her; they have no greater meaning.

When I ask about her past and her people, she has the same reaction.

“That time is dead,” Das Muni says.