The Stars Are Legion(86)

Casamir returns a long time later. Everyone else is asleep. I peer at her from beneath my arm and watch her take off her pack and unroll her sleeping pad. She settles in. Sees me watching. Gives a little two-fingered wave.

“What is freedom, Zan?” she says.

It sounds like a saying, like something I should know. And the response comes bubbling up, the way the sign language did out in the black vacuum of space. “Freedom is the absence of outside control,” I say.

“What is freedom?” Arankadash says. “It is control of the body, and its issue, and one’s place in this world.”

“See?” Casamir says. “We aren’t all completely dead in the head.”

*

When we wake, it’s cold for the first time in my memory. A cold wind blows from above us, too high up for me to see the source. It’s as if there are cracks or holes in the ceiling, and cold air is being blasted in. Fifteen thousand steps later, as we crawl out of the wetlands and onto a rocky plain, I see a bright blue light in the distance. It flickers like a flame, and as we near I see it is a flame of a sort—it’s a rent in the sky oozing sulfurous blue lava.

The smell rolls over us. I cover my mouth with a hemp cloth from my pack, but it doesn’t do much to filter the air.

“This is dangerous,” Casamir says. “Can we go around?”

“It will take us farther from the river,” I say.

Arankadash shakes her head. “I don’t want to risk losing access to water again.” She moves past us, taking point.

“Water’s all well and good,” Casamir says, “but not if you can’t breathe.”

But we carry on. The toxic air grows denser. I suggest going back, but Arankadash is still in the lead, and she doesn’t seem to hear me over the bubbling of the burning sulfur. I wet my hemp cloth and tie it over my mouth. Das Muni has dampened her cowl and done the same.

A blast of cool air buffets us from behind, clearing the air briefly. We make our way between two dripping seas of blue blazing sulfur, up what appears to be a path.

Casamir says, “It’s about time we see some people.”

“Not all people are nice,” Das Muni says, and passes Casamir and me as we pause to look back over the burning blue sulfur seas.

“Long way back,” I say.

“Not really,” Casamir says. She shoulders her pack and starts walking again. “You take me to this surface of yours, and I’ll just jump right back down that recycling chute. Then I’m only a level away from home!” She laughs.

I hang back. The world is large, I know—I’ve seen it from the outside, but I never anticipated all of this. Maybe I thought the world was hollow, or that it was all corridors and spiraling doors like the surface. This is much more, and far more complicated. The Katazyrnas and Bhavajas were fighting for control over the Legion, but they didn’t even control their own worlds. What were they actually fighting for, then? A title? An idea?

“Zan!”

Arankadash has reached the head of the path, high up on the ridge. She’s waving me forward.

I start climbing again. The air is thicker with sulfur up here, but just as I think I can’t stand it, there’s a thread of cool air running just above me that clears the toxic cloud away.

“What is it?” I ask as I come up beside her.

Arankadash points into the valley below. “Bodies,” she says.





“I DON’T HOPE FOR THE BEST ENDING. I PLAN FOR IT.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





32


JAYD


It was Zan’s idea.

I would like history to believe that, but what led us to this place is not something I want recorded in any way.

“What do the Bhavajas want more than anything?” she asked me there on the Mokshi, after all my terrible betrayals, when she still took me back because she still loved me. She believed me when I said I had changed my mind, and yes, I had changed it, but I never expected her to believe that.

“They need children,” I said. “It’s known that they haven’t had a child-bearer in at least five rotations. Like us, they’ve been stealing from other worlds. More than us, really. I heard they don’t have as much of a hierarchy because of it.”

Zan folded her hands in her lap, just below the curve of her belly. “I can give them children,” she said. “Present me to them as a gift.”

“What about the arm?” I said. Because I had already stolen that from her too, and given it to Anat, because I was a young fool. It was the first betrayal, but not the worst. “You said you can’t restart the Mokshi without it. The Mokshi will never leave the Legion without a new world birthed on board. It’s too wrecked.” And I wince as I say it, but Zan doesn’t notice or doesn’t mind. How can she be so forgiving? Or does she not care? Does she love me at all, really, or is it all feigned, the way my love for her was feigned in the beginning?

“Can you steal the arm from Anat while I’m with the Bhavajas,” she said, “the way you stole it from me?”

“And do what with it?” I said. “It only works for you, here on the Mokshi.”

“What if you could bear children?” Zan says. “You convince Anat to trade you to the Bhavajas for peace. When the peace is set, I board the Mokshi, turn off the defenses, and get Anat inside. She’ll walk right in. I can take the arm easily once I have her on the Mokshi. That world obeys me.”