The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw

Author:Cassandra Khaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Erewhon

Interlude

Six dead. She cannot conjecture the number. Six of the Dirty Dozen are dead and buried, cremated, leavened into the bellies of vultures and other such scavengers, punted into orbit, composted, whatever. Who gives a shit about the method of disposal? Dead is dead is gone. Maya peruses the obituaries. Four—Meghna, Feng Hui, Annora, Nadia—are just that: terse paragraphs condensing entire lives into epilogues, without dimension, without any marginalia to indicate how fucking badass they’d been in life.

They made sure there was no fucking way they’d be roped back into this miserable existence, all gone down the path of multitudinous dissections, their organs taken and disseminated between hospitals. Their data banks were incinerated too; every copy of their souls committed to nothingness, a mercenary’s suicide.

Maya combs the newsfeeds obsessively, metronoming between them and privatized info sources, social media clips, company profiles, anything where she can salvage another scatter of data or better, the flash of a familiar face.

But she holds out a feeble prayer for that one last name:

“Rochelle might still be around,” Maya blurts out of the blue. The steerage is a long thin loop of a corridor, badly lit like the rest of the ship, its only redeeming feature its proximity to the engine room. Here alone is it warm-ish. “I can’t find anything on what happened to her.”

“No news is good news,” says Verdigris, perched on a rail twinned around a baluster, anchoring her. Maya averts her gaze, unable, unwilling to meet those leadlight eyes, especially here where she can be surveilled. “Rochelle always knew how to sneak off to the best places.”

“Yeah.” This version of Ayane continues to be a surprise to Maya. She possesses a nebulous recollection of Ayane in their heyday, back when they were feral: chambering pejoratives, singing out curses, maenad-wild and gorgeous as a bullet flying true. She’d been happy then. But not like this: unclenched, denuded of everything save for the most rudimentary make-up, hair in a messy ponytail, the loose strands curling over a face gone child-like wonder. Ayane’s looked twenty-three since the day Maya first met her, but she has never looked so young. “You remember when she ran off to that casino planet?”

“Fuck, I thought Rita was going to kill her.” Verdigris’ laughter detonates through the room. Her attire is austere: black turtleneck, black leather skirt with its hems a crisscrossed maze of thick lace, black boots. Biker-nun in exile, especially with the two revolvers strapped to each thigh left brazenly in view.

“Didn’t she?” says Constance, slouching into view, a shoulder propping against the wall, her hands curved around a chipped blue mug. Maya knows, even before the olfactory data grazes her sensors and long before her nose puts a name to the memory, the mug brims with watered-down hot chocolate and two plump marshmallows. She knows because she keeps a stash on the shelf that had belonged to Constance, exchanging boxes for fresh doppelgangers whenever the expiry dates were crossed. Waiting, though she’d eat a shotgun before confessing, for Constance to come home.

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