The Stars Are Legion(60)

“We make a good pair, then,” I say. “Well?”

Arankadash grimaces. “I will not harm her while she is yours,” she says.

I get up.

“Great,” Casamir says. “Can we get to work now? I don’t want to stay here any longer than we have to.”

“You’re coming with us?” I say.

Casamir is already busily knotting rope from her pack onto the ends of the bones. “You would be lost without me,” she says. “Besides, I’ve never seen the sea.”

“And it’s a long way home in the dark,” I say.

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not afraid of the dark. I’m a scavenger. I crawl into the very bowels of the world to—”

“I’ve got it,” I say. “We’ll agree to disagree.”

While Casamir and Arankadash work, I go over to Das Muni. Her cowl is thrown back. Her face is dirty again. I lick my finger and wipe a bit of blood from her face. Hers?

“You all right?” I ask.

She tilts her enormous eyes up to me. This close, I see how strange her irises are, little crescents of color. It’s unnerving. Her ears are so large, I wonder how she didn’t hear the mutants beyond the door well before it opened.

“I told you that traveling with others is not good,” she says softly.

“If I’d thought that, I wouldn’t have taken you with me either,” I say. “It cuts both ways.”

“I want to go home,” she says. She presses her hands to her eyes.

“No one knows how to get back to the Mokshi,” I say. “A lot of people have tried. Including me.”

“Not the Mokshi,” she says. “I was nothing there. I want to go home to Sledgemaw and Meatmoth.”

“That is no place for you,” I say, but I look back at Casamir and Arankadash and realize this isn’t any place for her either. At least to the monsters she is just another piece of meat, no different from any other. I don’t understand the hatred I see for people like her. People on every level look different. Why do they hate mutants and people off-world? It all gets recycled the same. We’re all made of meat.

I help Casamir and Arankadash finish tying off the bodies to the makeshift litters. Casamir hangs her torch from the one she and Arankadash carry, and Das Muni and I come from behind. The litter is too heavy for her, I know, but I want to see how far we can get before thinking of another option.

But when Das Muni shoulders her end, I’m surprised to find that she doesn’t complain at all. She keeps trekking after me, slower than I’d like, but not so slow that I lose sight of Casamir and Arankadash. There’s not much to see outside our pool of light. There are long lines of bioluminescent flora or fauna lining the rolling ground and the far walls. I see the occasional protuberance or fallen fold of the ceiling. After a break for water at a bubbling pool oozing up from the spongy ground, we keep on. My mouth tastes of copper after I drink, as if the water is tinged with blood.

Eventually, we come to a broad path, a well-worn depression in the ground that signals human habitation. Casamir and I are exhausted, but Arankadash and Das Muni barely seem winded. We rest again, and Arankadash suggests sleep.

“I will keep watch,” Arankadash says.

Casamir shares food from her pack. “I bet this is farther than anyone I know has gone,” she says.

“You are of the Bharataiv?” Arankadash says. “The tinkers?”

“Engineers,” Casamir says.

“Yes, the peddlers,” Arankadash says. “Sometimes our traders meet with you, near the golden veil.”

“What’s the golden veil?” I ask.

“Oh, nothing,” Casamir says. “You want some mushrooms?”

“No,” I say. Then, to Arankadash: “What’s the golden veil?”

“Thirty thousand steps back,” she says, “near the mountains. It’s a far easier route up here than the one you came. Going through the door is only something foolish tinkers do, because you have to cross the valley of beasts, and the mutant camps.”

I stare at Casamir. “You could have taken us here through there? We’d have saved all those steps! And the bugs, those crawlers, and door—”

“I had to complete my initiation,” Casamir says. “You can’t take the shortcut or it doesn’t count.”

I rub my face. “I am so tired of your shit, Casamir.”

“You would have wanted to take the shortcut!” Casamir says. “Let me tell you a story about someone who took the shortcut. It starts with—”

“Don’t,” I say.

“—this woman who wore her womb as a hat, because—”

“Who did what?” I say.

“On her head,” Casamir says, patting her crown of braided hair, “but that’s not important. It just identifies her, you see. Anyway, it made her look taller and more imposing, so she took the shortcut, thinking that—”

“Is this a real story?” I ask.

Casamir sniffs. “I only share real stories.”

“People can’t just take out their wombs,” I say.

“Of course they can,” Casamir says. “People swap wombs all the time.”

“What?”