The Stars Are Legion(49)
“I need to say good-bye to my family,” Casamir says. “Just a moment! I’ll only be a moment!” Casamir bounds for the stairs.
I sigh and wait with Das Muni, trying to stay out of the way of the women passing by us. Their stares are more open now. A few try to ask me something, but it’s in their language, and I just shake my head and frown.
Das Muni leans into me. “We should just go,” she says. “Let’s not wait for Casamir.”
“Stop that,” I say. “That conversation is over. Casamir knows this area better than we do.”
“You have given them flesh,” she says. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“The alternative is killing all of them. Would that have been better?”
“Yes,” Das Muni says. She leans her head against me.
Casamir returns, more somber now.
I nearly ask her how things went with her family but decide I don’t care to know. We aren’t going to travel long together, just to the next level. I’ll need to find more help after that. Best not to get attached.
But Casamir volunteers the information, as Casamir seems to volunteer everything I don’t want to know. “They think me foolish,” she says, “but that’s no surprise. They think I’m reaching too high, but I’m here to be an engineer, not some recycler. Engineers must go on missions.”
“Then let’s do that,” I say, and I take her arm and hustle her to the door because both my legs are throbbing now, and I’m not sure how much longer I can take being in this crowded place that now owns a piece of my flesh.
We exit the compound and step back into the relative dim of the outer corridor. I blink as my eyes adjust. Moths descend, covering my arms and hair. I brush them away.
“Lead the way, engineer,” I say, and that brings a smile from Casamir.
“I will indeed,” she says, and forges ahead.
I’ll need to eat soon, but not yet, not until we put a lot of distance behind us.
“What’s between us and the next level?” I ask as we trudge along. Das Muni trails far behind.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Casamir says. She unrolls something from her bag. It’s a map written on human skin.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I say.
“Well, I know what the map says.”
I grab her shoulder. We halt. “Are you telling me you’ve never been to another level?”
She holds up the map. “It’s all fine! I have the traders’ maps.” She squints at it. “According to this, there are some pits, a mountain range, some monster herds, and a couple tribes of mutants. It will be fine! A fine adventure!”
“You’re joking,” I say.
She shows her teeth. “Fine!” she says, and continues on her way.
I stare after her, shocked, long enough for Das Muni to catch up with me. As Das Muni passes me, she sighs and says, “I told you so.”
“I LEARNED DECEPTION FROM MY MOTHER, BUT IT WAS THE WORLD THAT TAUGHT ME THE NECESSITY OF DECEPTION FOR SURVIVAL. WHEN THE OTHER WORLDS CAME FOR THE MOKSHI, I WAS PREPARED FOR THE FIGHT.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
20
JAYD
I always suspect a trap, because I have been plotting traps for my own family my entire life. Nashatra seems sincere, but I put her off. I plead ignorance of such terrible schemes and say that I love Rasida. She clearly doesn’t believe me, but if this is some trick she’s playing on me, I’m not going to walk right into it.
Instead, I go back to my rooms and consider what I know. The people here seem to love Rasida, even if her family doesn’t. If they are her real family. And of course, I haven’t considered what family means here, and how it differs from Katazyrna. Anat raised us, but she did not birth us. She chose us from the children of the women who could bear them. I was raised with Nhim and Neith and Maibe and a dozen others, now dead. Suld and Prisha were much older than me, raised with another group, then Anka and Aiju, who were half a dozen rotations younger than me. The numbers of daughters in each age group were fewer each time. Anat liked to think that raising armies was easy, but the more she did it, the deeper into the world and across the Legion she had to go to get them, and the stranger and less malleable to her whims they were. We had child-bearers on Katazyrna several rotations before Zan joined us, but most have died out. I often suspect that was Anat’s whim more than the world’s, because as long as she had child-bearers who were native to Katazyrna, she always had a rival for power.
When I am taken to dinners with Rasida, I spend a great deal of time analyzing the corridors, the steps, the great peeling hunks of the walls that reveal shiny metal beneath. As the world rotted around them, the Bhavajas had no choice but to mix with all the levels. Anyone could be a Bhavaja here. Rasida was not as hierarchical as Anat. Blood was blood. Perhaps that’s why it was so easy for her to proclaim that I was Bhavaja now and to have some of her people, at least, accept that.
As my pregnancy proceeds, Rasida seems to grow more distant. I try affection, though it pains me to attempt it, and she turns me away. This is something Zan could never pretend at, this affection. But I am a great pretender, sometimes so good at it that I convince myself that what I pretend is what is truly real.