The Stars Are Legion(77)

“I have my ways,” she says. She comes around the bed to me. Grabs the edge of the wardrobe door with her iron fingers. “You know what I loved about you when you were a child?” she says.

I shake my head.

“Boundless curiosity,” she says. “Fearlessness. When we first came to talk peace with your mother all those rotations ago, do you remember it? You weren’t even at menarche yet. My aunt still led us then, but I would supplant her soon. And when we met Anat, you stood beside her with your sisters and stared us all down. My mother, my aunt, and me. You didn’t care. And when your mother and sisters left, you came right up to me, though I am ten rotations your senior, and you lit into me with a barrage of questions. Fearless.” She shuts the wardrobe with her iron arm.

I flinch.

“What’s your game here, Jayd?” she says. “You have given birth to my child. You say you are my family. But still you creep about, sniffing after something. What do you need this arm for, if it only works on Katazyrna? Do you think you’re going back?”

“That’s not what I came for,” I say. “I just . . . I didn’t know where you were. You haven’t been to see me in some time. I thought I’d look for you.”

“When I am able to see you, I come to see you. That’s why I brought you Sabita, to give you comfort when I cannot. The wars I must wage to unite the Legion are many. They keep me very busy.”

“I feel like a prisoner,” I say, and sit on the bed.

“That is not my intention. You know that.”

“If you’re wearing the arm,” I say, “we must be very close to going home. Did you find the Katazyrna witches?”

She flexes her fist. “You say it works on Katazyrna, but I have tried it there, with no luck. Perhaps only a Katazyrna can wield it. Your daughter will wield it.”

I say nothing. She hasn’t found the Katazyrna witches yet, then.

Rasida watches me. Drums her metal fingers on the wardrobe door. Finally, she sits beside me. “I am a woman who is meant to conquer worlds,” she says, “not birth them.”

“I would like to birth your worlds,” I say.

She kisses me.

Fear and desire are tangled things in this place. She has not kissed me since that first night, and I am angry at my body’s response to her touch. But Rasida simply lies beside me and holds me close. I exhale, relieved and grateful and hating myself for feeling either.

It’s only as she settles her iron arm around me that I understand the importance of the gesture. She holds me close with my mother’s arm.

I take the arm in mine and hold her.

“You are the mother to Bhavaja’s children,” she says. “Let’s keep you as such.”

“But who is better suited to birth worlds than you?”

“My mother,” she says.

I hold the arm in my hands, but it’s attached to a woman who will crush me with it as surely as Anat would. While it was unattached, I had a chance. Now . . . I don’t know. Without the arm, I will never be able to get inside the Mokshi.

“Don’t fret for Bhavaja,” she says. “The world grows inside of my mother now. When we move enough to Katazyrna, she will stay here and birth a world. That world will begin to remake Bhavaja. When you and I return here, we will be Lords of not only Bhavaja but of the whole Outer Rim, and then the Legion.”

Her mother. I have never been so disappointed to be right. With the arm, I could have carved my way to Nashatra. We could have had a chance to fight our way out of Bhavaja. Now that Rasida has put it on, I’ll have to kill her in order to leave. I don’t have the option of doing what I did on the Mokshi.

“It is a grand vision,” I say.

“I want you by my side for it,” she says.

“I will be,” I say. “But, Rasida, please, I must feel less like a prisoner. I want to be happy here, but I can’t feel that way as a kept thing.”

Rasida kisses my neck. She rolls over on top of me, straddles me, and takes my face into her hands. Peers into my eyes. I let my expression soften. I push away the fear. I remember what it was when I first feared Zan.

“All right,” Rasida say. “So long as the girls are with you.”

“Thank you,” I say, and I kiss her, and the gratefulness I feel in that moment is not feigned. I hold her iron arm tight and wonder how I am going to cut it off of her and leave this dismal place.

*

Rasida offers to lead me back to my rooms, but I challenge her. “So soon after saying I’m not a prisoner, you wish to give me escort?”

She sighs and says, “You will learn that it is more for your safety than mine. But go.”

I consider that as I make my way back to the heavy foyer. The women posted there do a double take as I enter, but I ignore them.

I cross the foyer and find that the door to my rooms is open. I move over the threshold and note that the room is very still.

There’s a low-hanging arch leading to my bedroom. I see a dark spill of something there and walk around it.

My bed is empty.

The girls are lying dead on the floor.

I limp into the next room, and the next, searching for Sabita, calling for her, but she is gone.

I lean against the outer door, trying to catch my breath. I’ve told Sabita about Nashatra. I told Sabita about the world.