The Stars Are Legion(56)

I roll over to face her. My heart quickens. But of course it won’t be Zan, will it? Rasida has seen Zan and recycled her, and would never bring her here.

But I sit up. If nothing else, Rasida has awoken my curiosity, which I thought long dead along with my heart.

“See, there,” Rasida says, and she wipes the tears from my cheeks. “I am not so monstrous. I’ve done all of this for you, love. Come.” She holds out her hand.

I take it. My purpose comes roaring back to me as we walk into the great foyer. I will give birth in one hundred and thirty cycles, if all goes as it’s supposed to. Her witches have visited me several times already to confirm that the pregnancy is progressing as promised. If I had tricked them and was doomed to carry something else, they would recycle me immediately, and Rasida’s lovely words would mean nothing. But I know what I’m carrying, because Zan once carried it, before she gave her womb to me.

*

I smooth my hair from my face. It’s agonizing for me to walk unaided now, so I take Rasida’s arm and lean heavily on her as she escorts me to my “gift.” Walking is torturous, but we don’t have far to go.

Rasida takes me into the courtyard outside my rooms. She gestures expansively to a cluster of three women standing in the foyer. Two of them are Bhavajas. The third stands between them, a slim, lovely young woman who I recognize immediately. I feel a mixture of anger and despair. I smile.

“Sabita,” I say, and my heart sinks. This is the worst possible person she could have brought me, short of bringing me Anat. I had one of our security women cut out her tongue because I feared what she would reveal to Zan. I may not have done that myself, but she will have guessed whose order it was. Anat would not have cared, because Anat never knew who Zan was. Sabita, though . . . She might have intuited something. She had to be silenced before she talked to Zan and ruined everything.

“She was quite enterprising,” Rasida says. “She hid in one of the great arteries running along the corridor outside the cortex. If we hadn’t noticed the fluid leak, we may never have found her. What do you think of my gift?”

“Lovely,” I say. I let tears fall. She need not know why I shed them. Of all the women Rasida could bring to me, it is Sabita, the woman who hated what I did to Zan more than anyone else on Katazyrna, because she had foolishly taken Zan into her arms and comforted her after she came back up from being recycled, before Zan lost her memory. What had they spoken of, in those few hours before Zan left again for the Mokshi, never again to regain her memory? I would never know, but I knew Sabita had come to care for her these many cycles, nursing her back to health after every assault.

I make a small sign to Sabita without raising my hands. The Bhavajas shouldn’t know our signing language, but it’s best to be discreet with a paranoid woman like Rasida in the room.

Sabita glances at my fingers but makes no response. I wonder if it will be worse with her here. Will she murder me in my bed? But she may be the last Katazyrna besides myself who still lives. There is something to be said for the power of blood. She may know something of life on Katazyrna, something that will help me.

“Thank you, Rasida,” I say. “You are . . . kind.”

Rasida kisses my forehead. She takes my face in her hands and searches my expression. For what, I am uncertain, but I press my mouth to hers, lightly. I try to imagine Zan doing that, after all that Rasida has done, and cannot. Zan would murder her, and forget the plan, and throw her down a recycling chute.

“Good, you see,” Rasida says. “You are just lonely.”

“I am,” I say. “I know you are very busy. I appreciate this gift.”

Rasida escorts Sabita into my rooms and putters about, pointing out where Sabita should sleep, here on the floor beside me, instructing the girls to treat her as my handmaiden. Sabita wanders through all of this with a dull-eyed stare. I wonder what it must have been like all this time, hiding in one of the arteries above the cortex, covered in the world’s blood, subsisting on blood and whatever she could peel off and choke down from the fleshy walls.

When Rasida leaves us and the girls go off to retrieve our refreshments, Sabita and I stand weary before one another. Do I look as defeated as she does?

Finally, Sabita signs at me, “I know where you got that womb. It’s not yours. You bought your freedom with it, though. You traitor. Zan told me that much.”

I sign, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Be pleased you’re alive and Anat didn’t recycle you. You always tell Zan too much, and she goes mad, doesn’t she?”

“Mad with grief,” Sabita signs. “She would never tell me, but I suspect her grief had to do with you. Something you did. It always does. You bring us all nothing but grief. When I spoke to her of the past, she remembered that grief, and it destroyed her every time. That’s not my fault. It’s yours.”

“You don’t know what Zan and I—”

“You’re monstrous,” Sabita signs, and turns her back to me.

I want to tell Sabita everything, but it occurs to me that that’s exactly what Rasida might have hoped. Perhaps she rescued Sabita so I’d open up to her. Betrayals within betrayals. I resisted Nashatra, and that may have saved me from a far worse fate. I have not seen Nashatra since the day Aditva was recycled. Sabita is the first face I have seen that is not Rasida’s or the girls’ in some time.