The Stars Are Legion(6)

“I need to cut your hair,” she says.

My heart pounds so loudly I think she can hear it, and perhaps she can, standing so close to me with that black edged weapon.

“I don’t need to cut my hair to go back to the Mokshi,” I say.

“The witches recommend it.”

“The . . . witches?”

“We’ll consider that in time,” she says.

She hacks at my hair with less care than I expect, her mouth a thin line. I am surprised to see that amid the hanks of black hair she removes, some are gray. When she is satisfied, she takes me by the chin and gazes into my face, as if trying to peer up under my skull. I cannot get used to the way she looks at me, as if I am lover, sister, and enemy all at once.

“I’m ready,” I say. “We go to the Mokshi now?”

She brushes my hair back from my face. “I miss you when you go.”

“Now, Jayd.”

Her hand trembles. “I wanted a little longer with you.”

She takes me back to the hangar.

It’s been cleaned up since I was last here. The workbench is tidied. I go right to the big orange-eyed vehicle I repaired before, and it opens its great eye and purrs beneath my fingers.

“How do they get around?” I ask.

“They fly,” Jayd says, “through the airless spaces between us and the Mokshi.”

“And how far is our . . . ship from the rogue world?”

“We are not a ship, not really,” Jayd says. “You’ll understand when you get outside, and inside the Mokshi, well . . .” She trails off. “You need to get a squad in there with you. Whatever happens to you in there, however you lose your memory, maybe they can prevent it and help you get it back.”

“So, you don’t really know if I’ll get my memory back if I go.”

“If the Mokshi took it, the Mokshi can give it back.”

“And if I don’t get out?” I say. “Isn’t that the problem? That I didn’t get out last time? That I’ve been gone for . . . how long?”

“You’ll remember,” she says firmly.

I hoped to remember more by now, to uncover some truth, but my memory is still as much a cipher as Jayd. All I know is that I can hurt things, I can repair things, and I once recycled a child. So far, the person I had been didn’t seem to be someone I wanted to remember; seeking these memories may be like picking at a soft scab, one that barely conceals the pus and rot beneath.

Jayd points out how the assault vehicle functions while she leads me around the hangar. We pause at a long line of depressions in the wall, and she pulls out various items from the pockets of the wall’s seared flesh. One item is a spray-on suit, which she tells me to coat myself in before I go out. The bulb that contains it is soft in my hand. The other is a massive weapon that I hope gets easier to carry outside, because just holding it hurts my good arm.

“You deploy the vehicle’s burst scrambler when the world’s defenses go up,” Jayd says, pointing to a gnarled whorl in what I take to be the vehicle’s control panel. “The world is dead, and nothing lives inside of it anymore, but the defenses are still active.”

“If you’ve never been inside the Mokshi,” I say, “how do you know everyone is dead inside?”

Jayd takes my good arm and repositions my fingers on the weapon. “Don’t hold it like that or you will shoot your foot,” she says.

A sticky memory stirs: I remember a great round ship as big as a world, bathed in wave after wave of blue-green light. The image whispers away a moment later, but the memory of it raises the fine hairs on the back of my neck. My heart pumps a little faster; I worry I might have another panic attack, like I did with Gavatra. But my body stays in check. I breathe deeply through my nose. I’m learning to control my body the way I’m learning Jayd, and the ship, and the vehicles. If I can’t remember, I’ll start over. We’ll begin again.

“The first assault the world makes will be an energy wave,” Jayd says, and though the tour of the vehicle is over, she paces now, brow knit. I want to rub the furrow there between her eyes and tell her everything is going to be all right. But what would I know?

“The second will hit after you get into the atmosphere,” Jayd continues. “The burst scrambler will work to repel both, but you have to recharge it between hits. Don’t press it too much, too fast. That’s important.” She points to the place on the soft green control panel, another gnarled, almost root-like protrusion.

I don’t understand much of this, but as with the fighting and the repair of the vehicle, I’m starting to believe that some broken shards of my memory will indeed come back, hopefully when they’re most needed. I wonder why Jayd and Gavatra and whoever this mother of theirs is were mad enough to keep sending me off to this fate, and why I had been mad enough to agree to it time and time again. Did this same argument work every time, this promise that I will get back a memory? Maybe there is no memory. Maybe the memory itself is a lie, and I am just like these vehicles, bred for this purpose like a sack of sorry meat.

“Won’t I fall off?” I ask, pointing at the sleek tube of the open vehicle. Neither the vehicle nor the bulb containing my supposed suit looks particularly safe. I have an idea of what an airless vacuum of space is, which is odd. I can understand things like food and furniture and heat, but not who I am, or where we are, or why I dream of cannibal women cutting themselves open.