The Stars Are Legion(94)

Jayd has brought me back to Katazyrna as her prisoner. We both know this is a ruse, but it is Anat we must convince, and Anat is having none of it. I attempted my first assault on the Mokshi, pretending I was a regular conscript, and failed. Anat has one punishment for failure.

“Let Zan go again,” Jayd says. “She was close. It was the Bhavajas who ruined our chance. If we had peace with the Bhavajas—”

“There will never be peace with the Bhavajas,” Anat says.

I am standing along the far wall of the great banquet hall, watching the two of them talk at the table. They are standing. Jayd has reports with her, tangles of light inscribed on foamy tablets. I have been here just a few sleeping periods, and I can already see that reports will not sway Anat. Like me, she is driven with blind purpose, a fanaticism. It’s what has gotten her this far. It’s allowed her to survive when so many worlds out here at the edge of the Legion have fallen.

“Why didn’t the Mokshi kill her like it does your sisters?” Anat says, pointing at me. “Who have you brought me?”

She is wearing the iron arm, and I want to rip it off of her, but there are security women at the doors, including Gavatra, and Gavatra especially wants nothing more than to murder me.

Jayd makes her argument for peace with the Bhavajas, again, but I have already heard it twice since I’ve been here, and it’s not swaying Anat. I didn’t expect that. Trading Jayd for peace, allowing her to get the world from Rasida and freeing me to walk into the Mokshi and take back the arm from Anat when she walks into the Mokshi behind me thinking she’s a conqueror, was a fine plan back on the Mokshi. But here, in the face of Anat’s myopia, I’m not seeing a clear line to that future.

I come forward. “Anat,” I say, “we can take the Mokshi. You can have the only world that escaped the core of the Legion. You can use it to do whatever you like—blow up all the Bhavaja worlds, take over the core of the Legion. All of it. But sue for peace first. Let the Bhavajas think you’re cowed, then turn around and destroy them at the helm of the Mokshi.”

Anat turns her face slowly to me. “Are you telling me what to do, filth?”

“I’m telling you how to get what you want,” I say. Jayd told me I was some great woman, some great general, but it’s only now, when I remember this terrible moment, that I see it was not me who was the general; it was Jayd. I was a tactician. A very confident and high-strung tactician, full of fire. I feel like a badly copied version of her now, or maybe someone else entirely, just some woman bereft of memory who others are trying to imprint with the memories of some dead woman.

“Gavatra,” Anat says, still looking at me. “Recycle this presumptuous piece of trash.”

“No,” Jayd says.

“What?” I say.

Gavatra and four security women advance on me.

Jayd comes forward to shield me, but Anat snatches her with her iron fingers, holding her firmly.

“What do you care,” Anat says to Jayd, “when it was you who blew open the Mokshi and recycled their people? What’s one more of the Mokshi’s ilk sacrificed to feed Katazyrna?”

Anat does not touch me, but her words are like striking me in the chest. I stare at Jayd, incredulous. “You?” I say.

Jayd recoils from me. “Zan, don’t—”

“You said it was Anat!” I yell. “You said she stole the arm and recycled my people! Did you sabotage the Mokshi, Jayd? Blow it up? You? You?” She had murdered everything I loved and then had the audacity to come back to me and lie about it, and beg forgiveness for not trusting my plan for the Mokshi. We started anew.

I fight, because that’s what I do. I bash two women in the face. I take Gavatra by the hair and smash her skull into the wall; my fingers leave great gory scratch marks on her skull. She staggers. Grips me by the collar. Someone comes up from behind. I see a burst of light, then blackness.

So, Anat recycled me, and somehow, with the help of the people below, I crawled back up here, leaving messages for myself along the way. But why? How did I know then that I would lose my memory when I next assaulted the Mokshi? Clearly, it hadn’t happened during the assaults I’d been on before learning Jayd’s betrayal ran so deep. How had I trusted Jayd for so long and believed her lies? She must have known I would never have trusted her if I knew it was her who blew a hole in the Mokshi, her who recycled my people, instead of Anat. We could never have worked together if I had known.

But there are still holes in this memory. It doesn’t give me everything I need. It doesn’t tell me why I have no memory, or what I hoped to achieve out there on the Mokshi with the arm and the world. What happened when I returned from the bowels of Katazyrna? The version of me in this memory seems confident that she knows what the plan is, even if Jayd misled her in how they all got there.

I remember tangling my fingers in Jayd’s hair when she told me she was being sold off to the Bhavajas. I remember her telling me it was all going to be all right, that she knew what she was doing and this was all part of some greater plan. But had she foreseen Rasida’s betrayal and our mother’s death? Now she is alone out there, captive to the Bhavajas, at the mercy of Rasida’s whim, and I am here, stuck under countless megatons of rotting shit inside a dying world.

The cephalopod gun moves closer to my face.

I jerk back to the present, still reeling.