The Stars Are Legion(97)

“She thought you were quite convinced,” Rasida says. “You really thought you were her sister?”

I gaze over the vehicles again, but she’s taken cover. I do the same. Waiting.

Rasida is silent for some time. I listen to my own heartbeat, straining to hear the sound of her movement, but there’s nothing but the pulse of my blood and the purr of the vehicle behind me.

I wait for her. Rasida does not disappoint. She says, “You and I are a lot alike, Lord Mokshi.”

“Don’t call me that,” I say. My stomach twists. The lord of the world? Wasn’t I just another castoff, like Das Muni? A conscript? But a regular conscript wouldn’t have been able to open up the Mokshi’s defenses and let Jayd in after her army died around her.

“Lord Bhavaja and Lord Mokshi,” Rasida says. “I could have offered you a great deal more than Anat. And I wouldn’t have betrayed you like she did.”

I close my eyes, cursing my rotten memory. How can I deny what she’s saying now, after all that has bubbled up from the depths of my memory? I want to fight it. I want to fight the truth, the way I have fought everything put in front of me on the long, mad journey.

I stay quiet, and she does the same.

I breathe. Wait.

I hear the squelch of her boots.

I jump up and roll over the vehicle. I come down right on top of her.

Rasida punches me with her weapon. I reel backward, pulling the trigger on mine. The cephalopod thunks into the floor behind her. It rots beneath her. She rolls away, taking me with her.

I knock her fist against the face of a vehicle and head-butt her. It’s enough to stun her. She lets go of the weapon. I overreach, trying to get it myself, but she wraps her legs around me and throws me over again. I lose my grip on the cephalopod gun.

I punch her in the face. She spits blood at me, unfazed.

She comes around and punches my kidney. Pain shoots through my body. I reel back. She smashes her fist into my nose. Blood sprays. I fall back on my seat and she’s on top of me, relentless, fists flying.

I reach to my left and smack the dashboard console of the vehicle next to me. It starts up and ejects a plume of spent yellow smoke that envelopes Rasida.

She coughs and hacks. I punch her in the guts. Bowl her over. I take her by the hair and drag her away from the plume. Take a breath in the clear air. I snatch up her forgotten gun and point it at her.

“They have used you,” Rasida snarls. “They took your womb and your memory and now they will take your ship, and you’ll gladly give it to them, won’t you?”

How does she know all this? Or is she guessing? For a moment, I think Jayd really did betray me again, and she told Rasida everything. She had looked at Rasida with such desire. Far more than she ever had for me.

“Jayd and I are on the same side,” I say.

Rasida spits blood from her broken mouth. “They boarded your world, you fool. Jayd recycled all of your people to keep the heart beating on this hulking wreck of a world. Jayd betrayed you then, and she will betray you now.”

“That’s a lie,” I say. But it’s not. My memory says it’s not. Das Muni was recycled, and many more like her. Who else but the Katazyrnas would recycle those on the Mokshi? Who else but Jayd? I want to weep. I admired how she fought, and opened my world to her, and told her the Legion was dying. She did not believe me. She had likely drugged me and stolen my arm and blown up my people and recycled them, and when she came back—who knows how long after?—saying she believed me now, she had changed her mind, she let me think it was her mother who had sneaked a force onto the Mokshi and killed it. How could I have been so foolish as to allow her to come back after that? Why was I so desperate? So emotional? What a fool. I hate that woman. I hate who I was. I hate the woman who endured that betrayal and welcomed Jayd back after it. I was desperate enough to save the Mokshi that I joined forces with my greatest enemy.

“I came for the arm, Rasida. You can give it to me or I can chop it off.”

“You’ll have to take it,” she says, and spits more blood. “I never did figure out how to use it. Funny, isn’t it? All this for the arm, for the world. You think you’re saving the Legion, but the Legion is already dead. All you’re saving is the Mokshi and yourself. You’re as selfish as Jayd.”

I raise my weapon. She raises her arm.

I shoot her in the chest.

She’s still alive when I use the obsidian blade at my hip to cut off her arm. She shouts at me.

“You’ll be sorry for this in the end.” Blood flows. She goes into shock as she bleeds out.

I thought the arm was something she had to affix to the stump of her old arm, but no—it’s clear that she’s slipped it over her own arm, so the metal arm acted as a skin. Her arm was too large for it, though; as I wriggle the dead arm free of the casing, I see that the skin and flesh have been stripped away, not to the bone but very near it, so that her arm would fit into the metal one. The flesh of her real arm is covered in green lubricant, which must have numbed her pain and discomfort.

I pick up the metal arm with my right hand and swing around to go back to where Jayd has holed herself up. Then I stop and stare at my outstretched hands and the metal arm.

My left arm is smaller than my right. It is among the first things I noticed when I woke, after the body on the floor. I pass the arm from my right hand to my left and feel the heft of it in my palm.