Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 90
“Rot like this ate Shonmai, didn’t it?” the mechanic signed. “Right before they lost orbit around the Legion? They screamed for days.”
“I remember,” Zahrah signed. She crouched at the edge of the abscess and pressed her fingers to the black surface. The lesion was soft and porous. Her fingers met no resistance, simply pierced the world’s skin. She yanked her hand away. Slimy organic gunk coated her fingers. She wiped it on her thigh.
“My sister was on the Shonmai,” the mechanic signed. “She’s why I became a Bolicheva mechanic instead of a bottom-world recycler.”
“A lot of people’s sisters were on the Shonmai,” Zahrah signed. The Bolichevas had relinquished many worlds to the Oseyvas over the last ten turns. But her mother had sacrificed half her worlds to the Oseyvas for a shot at the Anoshin – retreat after retreat, until they only owned half the Inner Rim instead of the entirety of it. With every failed assault on the Anoshin, Zahrah could feel the cold hand of the Oseyvas tighten. And now it would be Zahrah who had to push them back.
“How fast are the other lesions spreading?” Zahrah signed.
“Few centimeters a turn. And there are six more abscesses out here the size of this one. Your mother wasn’t concerned, though.”
Zahrah firmed her mouth. Why would her mother be concerned? This was the same woman who let cancer gnaw off her own breast because she was too busy growing armies and invading worlds to seek out proper treatment. It was all just worldly flesh, to her mother; some lesser thing. Souls, her mother said, did not suffer from cancers, and she would lose her virtuous path to the Lord of the Worlds if she wasted a single moment tending to her rotting body instead of claiming the Anoshin for the Bolichevas.
"The Anoshin is a symbol," her mother said, "the last world of a people we completely conquered. Extinguished from the Legion! It's ours by right. Soon the legion will be ours."
A legion of rot, Zahrah thought.
The mechanic moved past her, grabbing at the tentacles as she went, signing something about needing more recordings for the First of Bolicheva. She hefted the small globe ahead of her, carefully placing her feet along the edges of the abscess.
“That’s enough,” Zahrah signed, “We have enough evidence.” But the mechanic wasn’t looking at her.
The mechanic had frozen just ten paces distant, her attention riveted on something just over Zahrah’s left shoulder.
Zahrah knew there were many things to fear, out here – debris from other worlds, crushed satellites, forgotten bodies, misplaced excursion vehicles, and the ever-sensitive defenses of the Anoshin. But the grim calm on the mechanic’s face told her it was far worse than some errant bit of debris, or another wave of radiant heat from the Anoshin. It was something more dangerous. More personal.
“Incoming!” the mechanic signed.
Zahrah turned and saw the tell-tale glimmer of a swarm of raiders, just visible in the glimmer of the world beneath her. Their needle-like vehicles shot straight for the growing abscess. In the darkness, raiders like these could easily avoid detection from human eyes until they began firing on them - but it was less easy to fool the worlds themselves.
Beneath Zahrah, the surface of the world rippled. Even this blighted landscape still responded to threats. As Zahrah grappled through a waving sea of diseased tentacles, the world’s skin enveloped her in a blue-green aurora.
Zahrah’s grip on one of the tentacles slipped. The ones at her feet went flaccid. She lost her footing. Felt her body come untethered. Cold panic bloomed in her gut. Her twinset would rapidly lose heat in the blackness above the world’s thin atmosphere - just an arms’ length above her head.
The mechanic bounded forward, took her by her outstretched arm, and yanked her back onto the surface of the world. Zahrah saw that the mechanic was shouting, and though she could not hear her, she knew the words; some bottom-world prayer to the Lord - as if it meant anything to the raiders. Zahrah had seen the thorny cut of their assault craft. They were Oseyvas. The Oseyvas cared nothing for the Lord of the Worlds. The Oseyvas wanted the Inner Rim. They wanted to destroy the Bolichevas. The Lord had nothing to do with it.
Zahrah broke away from the mechanic and huffed past her, wading through the tentacles. They were nearly a hundred paces from the puckered scar that would take them back beneath the world’s skin to relative safety.
The mechanic caught up to her and slogged beside her. Zahrah glanced back, once, and saw the narrow heads of several assault craft break away from the formation centered on the abscess. They angled toward Zahrah and the mechanic now, skimming across the surface of the blue-green aurora of the world’s defenses.
Zahrah felt the atmosphere around her ripple. She flinched as finger-length thorns zipped past her and sunk deep into the skin at her feet, splattering poisonous milky fluid. Something caught her on the arm. She lashed out. Shook free a thorn. Cursed. Bitter cold stabbed at her arm. The twinset sealed itself a moment later, but the cold was enough to burn her.
She looked back.
A mistake.
The lead raider raised her arm. She wore chitinous armor like the mechanic, and had a cephalopod cannon mounted at her wrist; a uniquely Oseyva weapon. The poisonous thorns they spit were purely organic constructs - harmless to their own kind, but deadly to everything else. Including Bolichevas.
Zahrah saw the raider release the spray of thorns as if from a dream. Zahrah feared open spaces as her mother feared the light. It was a vague, terrifying horror that made her lungs seize and her palms sweat, and at the end of every open walk she’d close herself up in the storage bin above her sleeping pallet and take comfort in the close, soothing darkness until her breath slowed and her mind came back from the open edge. In her mind, she saw her body breaking free, unmoored, lost in the reckless space between the worlds.
This was how she died in every dream – sliding along the surface of the world, knocked free, her twinset cut to tatters, left to asphyxiate and freeze solid, never to come home, never to be recycled by her own people, all her breath and flesh and experience wasted. The Oseyvas would claim her body. Feed it to their world. Eat it for the next one thousand rotations. Use its energy to murder her people.
“Anyone can give birth to a world,” her mother once told her. “But it takes a gifted woman to raise it right. I have sacrificed many daughters to this world. Exorcised a lot of petulant, self-serving souls from its skin. I won’t have your fear and cowardice destroy all I’ve done.”
It was a fitting thing, then, that it was not Zahrah who birthed worlds. No, she just destroyed them with her fear and foolishness. It was her twin sister Jacosta who could save them. Her sister who should be out here, brave and steadfast against a sea of Oseyva raiders who were about to tear the world apart.
But Ghin was dead, and Jacosta was still in the medical lounge, and that left only Zahrah now, to fight and die on the surface of a rotting world.
"Please," she signed, without knowing why, or who she even spoke to.
The cephalopod thorns burst free.
The collision threw Zahrah into the tangle of tentacles behind her. But it was not the impact of the Oseyvas’ deadly thorns that sent her reeling – it was the impact of the mechanic’s body as she pounded into Zahrah to shield her from the weapon.
The mechanic took the full force of all six thorns.
Zahrah let out a breath. Fear gripped her. She took great gasping breaths, knowing even as she did that her twinset could not filter that much air that quickly. She needed Jacosta’s dead calm. It should be Jacosta out here, not me, she thought.
She tried to get her bearings in the sea of waving tentacles. The mechanic’s body jerked away from her. Zahrah started, and realized the Oseyvas had deployed a grapple. They meant to haul the mechanic’s body home and feed it to their world.
Zahrah grabbed the mechanic by the wrist and yanked her back. The raider was strapped into her assault vehicle. She used it as leverage as she tugged at the thin, poisonous cord with both hands.
The mechanic was dead weight now, just so much flesh. But Zahrah knew what would happen if she left her. With so few resources left for the world to use to repair itself, the loss of just one body could tip the balance. Even now, her mother’s soldiers would be out picking up the bodies left to circle the Anoshin. No doubt the Oseyvas were doing the same, trying to scalp Bolicheva flesh before Zahrah’s mother could take it home. The Oseyvas were always waiting to pick off what was left; always seeking to strike when they thought her mother’s defenses were softest.
And I am the softest of all, she thought, but tried to squeeze that thought away along with her fear. She had seen what her mother did to her soft sisters.
The raider gave another hard pull on the cord.
Zahrah fumbled at the mechanic’s tool belt with her free hand. She found a serrated blade, the sort mechanics used to chop back dead and diseased tentacles when tending the world’s skin. She pulled it free and lashed at the sticky band binding the body to the raider.
Six more thorns snapped past her. One lodged in her hand. She cried out and dropped the blade, turning her head just in time for two more to slice open the face of her twinset.
Blinding cold burned her unprotected face.
She saw that a second raider had joined the first, breaking away from the main party in search of easy meat.
Without thinking, Zahrah wrapped her arms around the mechanic’s body and snapped at the cord with her bared teeth.
The grappling cord was the consistency of an umbilical cord. She choked on bitter atmosphere, and clamped down hard on the grappling cord. She grit her teeth while twisting her head back. The cord snapped.
Poison spilled into her mouth. She spit it out just as her twinset resealed itself. Her face burned. The liquid around her mouth crystallized. Her tongue became thick, unresponsive.
Zahrah dragged the mechanic’s body across the world, leaping through the tentacles as they curled and released, curled and released, in time with her stride.
There was no sound, here. She heard nothing but her own heartbeat, her own jagged breath, and then, when she saw the scar that would carry her back down into the world, to safety, to her sisters, she heard her own ragged sob – and hated herself for it.
She did not look back. Another thorn spiraled past her, and she braced and rolled for the scar, dragging the mechanic’s body behind her; a makeshift shield.
The scar parted for her.
She descended into the milky green interior of Bolicheva.
As she fell, she saw the raiders’ needled vehicles blot out the blackness. Saw their dark faces, and the glinting whites of their eyes in the blue-green halo of the world’s defenses. They could not approach through those defenses, but they fired off another round from the cephalopod guns. She felt the impact in the mechanic’s body, snug against her.
As the scar sealed behind her, one of the raiders signed at her, “You’re already dead.”
Zahrah hit the floor of the first circle. The mechanic’s body bounced into hers. Zahrah let out a rush of air. Shoved the body aside. The scar above her closed. Her twinset began to dissolve into the spongy floor.
She struggled onto her hands and knees, and began hacking uncontrollably. The twinset melted from her body, leaving her naked and shivering even in the humid air.
Around her, the floor of the first circle corridor that spanned the entirety of the circumference of the world blinked with a soft blue glow, signaling that the world’s defenses had been triggered.
Ahead, she saw a slick squad of retaliatory troops heading topside. In the lead: her mother; a head and shoulders taller than Zahrah, broad and quick, her eyes black at the spaces between the worlds of the Legion. Her mother saw her, she knew, saw her gasping and dying on the damp floor, and flicked her gaze away, and continued up and up, onto the surface to save an already dying world.
Zahrah squeezed her eyes shut. Her lungs and face and throat hurt. She’d been burned in the outer atmosphere before, but the bitter stickiness of the cord’s poison was a new horror. She retched and gagged.
“Zahrah!”
She raised her head. Her heart clenched.
Jacosta took her into her arms and shushed her. They were twins, born of the same womb, but looked little alike. Jacosta held out her long brown arms to Zahrah and caught her up next to her like a child.
Zahrah tried to speak, but her lips and tongue were blistered. Jacosta took a shimmering purple slug from the bag at her hip and filled Zahrah’s mouth with unguent.
“Hush now,” Jacosta said. She wiped more unguent around Zahrah’s lips, her fingers strong and sure against her battered skin.
The unguent began to do its work. Zahrah could feel her mouth and tongue again. The dead cellular tissue inside her mouth was rapidly sloughing away, though, choking her with pasty mucus. She gagged.
“Don’t vomit!” Jacosta said. “Give it another moment.”
But Zahrah spat it all out anyway – the unguent and the dead cells from her mouth and tongue. She wiped at her face, and the skin around her lips flaked away.
"It's dying," Zahrah said. "We're dying."
"I know," Jacosta said. "It's why I need you to get me up there. To the skin of the world. To heal it."
"You can't."
"We can. Mother… can."
"Mother –"
"We are of the world, Zahrah. It is us. Mother's skin can heal the world."
"No wonder she put you in the medical lounge."
"Have you seen her?"
Zahrah pointed to the scar where their mother and her assault team had headed. "What do you expect to do?"
"Make a sacrifice," Jacosta said. "Isn't that what mother always wants us to do? Sacrifice." She showed her teeth.
They sprayed on new twinsets and harnessed themselves to the same lead on the interior of the world's healthy flesh. Then they squeezed up and through, to the tentacled surface.
Jacosta's eyes were bright. Zahrah recalled what the mechanic said, about Jacosta bleeding all over the world. Surely that wasn't something a sane woman would do?
Their mother stood not far distant, climbing up one of the tentacles with her team.
Jacosta ordered a woman on the ground to hand her a cephalopod gun. The woman appeared startled, but complied.
Jacosta shot her with it.
Then shot their mother.
Zahrah gasped. She leapt toward their mother's slowly falling form as it tangled with the tentacles. She arrived just as their mother raised her own gun, sending a thorny burst at Zahrah that clipped her suit. The suit sealed; Zahrah swore.
Her mother signed something; two of her team were close behind. Zahrah had to choose, she knew, sister or mother, always her sisters or her mother.
Zahrah pulled the bone blade from her hip and stabbed her mother in the throat with it.
Jacosta grabbed for her mother's arm. Droplets of blood moved lazily through the thin atmosphere and low gravity, like wafts of cut hair drifting from one level of the world to another.
Zahrah took her mother's cephalopod gun and raised it at the remaining tactical team. She signed, "Hold. I command the armies. I am First Zahrah Bolicheva."
The First.
Jacosta ripped open their mother's suit and skinned her there on the surface of the world, peeling great lengths of tissue from her body and slapping them onto the rotten bits of the world's face.
Zahrah looked away, nauseous. Was there a punishment for aiding a mad sister? For killing a First? She was First now, wasn't she? Zahrah had to decide her own punishment.
She slowly backed up, keeping her gun trained on the team, occasionally glancing up in case the Oseyvas returned. She signed, "Will you stand down? Accept?"
They signed back, "Yes," and bowed their heads.
Jacosta tugged at Zahrah's arm. Zahrah turned; their mother's flayed body lay before her, bloody tissue crystallizing in the frigid temperature. Beneath and to the left of her body, the long skeins of her flesh rippled along the surface of the rotting world, bubbling and fizzing.
"You see?" Jacosta signed. "We are of the world."
Zahrah shivered, gaze fixed on the meat of their mother's body.
"The same," Jacosta signed. "The same."
They left their mother's body on the surface, to be absorbed by the skin of the world.
Zahrah went down to the medical lab and had a mechanic look at her injuries. Then she sat on the sticky slab of the medical table and stared into her own hands, turning the bone knife she had used to kill her mother over and over.
A cackling at the door. A soft titter.
The gaggle of witches slithered past, all limbs and heads and cackling.
"You never told us," Zahrah said, "that the worlds are our children."
"All connected," the witches said, one head, then another, and another, parroting the phrase in different tones.
"All of us?" Zahrah said. "The Anoshin, the Osevyas, the Stoyevas?"
"Of course, of course!"
Jacosta came in behind them, face smeared in filth, one hand still shaking, bits of her twinset sticking to her skin.
"You knew?" Zahrah said.
"We are all related, in some way," Jacosta said. "All of the worlds. We forget that. Think we are all different." She sat next to Zahrah on the slab. Her warmth was comforting.
"It will still rot," Zahrah said. "If we keep killing each other."
"Eventually we will run out of worlds to conquer. The worlds will run out of women to birth them. People like mother… don't see that cycle. Don't see that we're dying."
"Yet we killed her. That helps?"
"The war is our plague, Zahrah. It can only be stopped with our sacrifice."
"And then?"
"And then," Jacosta said, sliding off the slab and taking Zahrah's face into her hands. "And then we rebuild the Legion."
THE WOMAN OF BOMANI
