Chapter 13: The Birth and the Return
The pressure had been building all day, a deep, aching fullness that made every position awkward. Emily was waddling back from the pond, her hand pressed into the small of her back, when it happened. A soft, internal pop, like a rubber band snapping deep underwater. Then a sudden, warm rush down her thighs, splattering onto the iridescent algae at her feet.
“Oh,” she said, her voice small and surprised.
Sarah, who was testing the tension of the newly-lashed crib, looked up. She saw the fluid, saw Emily’s wide, startled eyes, and was moving before her own mind processed it. But she only made it two strides.
From the geometric ceiling of their world, living filaments unspooled. Dozens of them, sleek and silver, moving with silent, terrible purpose. They descended around Emily like a weeping willow made of mercury, coiling not with violence, but with an inescapable gentleness. They slid under her arms, around her back, beneath her knees.
“No! Let her go!” Sarah’s roar was pure animal, shredding her throat. She lunged, her hands clawing at the tendrils. They were cool and impossibly strong. They didn’t fight her; they simply ignored her, lifting Emily as if she weighed nothing.
Emily cried out, a gasp of shock and fear, her hands instinctively cradling her belly. Her green eyes found Sarah’s, wide with panic. “Sarah!”
“I’m here! I’m right here!” Sarah jumped, trying to grab Emily’s dangling foot, her fingers brushing air as the tendrils retracted upward. A section of the barrier shivered and dissolved. Emily, cocooned in living metal, was drawn through the opening and into the gloom beyond.
The barrier sealed. It was silent.
Sarah stood frozen, one hand still raised. The only evidence was the puddle on the ground, steaming faintly in the cool air. A vast, hollow silence opened up inside her chest, so profound it felt like a physical cavity. Then the panic slammed in, hot and nauseating.
She spun, searching the empty paddock as if Emily might be hiding. The cave was dark. The pond was still. The crib, their stupid, careful crib, sat empty by the moss bed. The golden orb glowed its relentless, peaceful glow.
“Bring her back!” she screamed at the walls. Her voice echoed flatly, absorbed by the humming metal. She ran to the barrier where Emily had been taken, pounding on it with her fists. Thud. Thud. Thud. It didn’t vibrate, didn’t yield. It was the unfeeling surface of a cliff.
Shadows moved in the gloom beyond. Patrons of the zoo. Faceless shapes pressed close to the barrier, their clicking, chattering language filtering through as a taunt. Sarah snarled at them, baring her teeth, spitting on the shimmering wall. They recoiled with sounds that might have been delight or disgust.
Hours bled together. She wore a path in the glowing mud of the bank, her bare feet slapping the same frantic circuit: cave mouth, to the barrier, to the pond, to the crib, back to the barrier. Every muscle was wire-tight. The aphrodisiac’s hum, usually a background thread tying her to Emily, was now a screaming violin string, plucked and vibrating with a note of pure absence. It was agony. It was a severed limb.
She tried to think like Emily would, analytically. Were they helping? The bath, the crib, the orb—they indicated preparation, not harm. But the thought evaporated in the face of primal terror. Alone. She’s alone. Something’s wrong.
Her knuckles were raw and bleeding from punching the wall. The pain was a dull, grounding throb. She finally slumped by the cave mouth, her back against the pulsating tendrils, her breath sawing in and out of her lungs. She stared at the spot where Emily had vanished. The silence was a living thing, eating her from the inside out.
Then, a shift in the light. A shimmer.
Sarah was on her feet before she knew she’d moved.
The barrier dissolved. The same silver tendrils extended, cradling a figure. They lowered their burden with infinite care onto the bed of moss beside the golden orb.
Emily.
She was on her side, curled slightly. She looked utterly spent, her auburn hair damp with sweat, her skin pale except for two high spots of color on her cheeks. Her eyes were closed. And her belly… her belly was soft, the terrifying, beautiful curve gone, collapsed into a tender swell.
But in her arms, tucked against her bare chest, was a bundle. A small, swaddled shape wrapped in a fabric that seemed woven from moonlight itself.
Sarah fell to her knees beside them. Her hands hovered, trembling. She touched Emily’s cheek first, her throat too tight for words. Emily’s eyes fluttered open. The green was hazy with exhaustion, but it focused on Sarah, and a smile, weak but radiant, touched her lips.
“Hey,” Emily whispered, her voice cracked from use.
Sarah’s hands skittered then—a frantic, silent inventory. Emily’s forehead (cool), her shoulders (whole), her arms (clutching the bundle). She finally let her palm rest on Emily’s empty stomach, feeling the startling softness through the fur loincloth. A shuddering breath escaped her, half-sob, half-relief.
Only then did she look at the baby.
The silvery fabric had slipped a little. There was a face. A perfect, tiny, red-faced mask of newborn indignation, with a scrunched brow and a minuscule, working mouth. A shock of damp, auburn hair, dark as blood, plastered to a perfectly shaped skull.
As Sarah watched, the baby’s eyes squinted open. They were a murky, newborn blue, but in the strange light, Sarah could see the promise of deep, forest green swimming underneath.
“Tali,” Emily breathed, her finger stroking a cheek so small it seemed impossible. “We decided. Tali.”
Sarah couldn’t speak. The word was a lodged stone. She simply reached out, her calloused, bleeding hands impossibly large and clumsy. Emily shifted, guiding the bundle into Sarah’s waiting arms.
The weight was nothing. The weight was everything. Sarah drew Tali against her own chest, the silvery fabric soft, the baby’s heat seeping into her skin. Tali made a small, snuffling sound, turned her head, and rooted instinctively against Sarah’s sternum.
A sound punched out of Sarah then, a raw, broken thing that was almost a laugh. Her fierce expression dissolved, crumbling into a smile of such unguarded, devastating joy that tears finally spilled over, cutting tracks through the dirt on her cheeks.
“Tali,” she repeated. The name was a vow, a prayer, a solid object in a world of shimmering walls. She said it to the baby, to Emily, to the humming air itself.
Beyond the barrier, the audience erupted. A chorus of approving hums, trills, and metallic clicks swelled, a wave of alien approbation. Sarah’s head snapped up, her body instinctively curling around the baby, her joy sharpening back into a protective glare.
But Emily just watched them, her eyes heavy-lidded and peaceful. She reached out and laid a hand on Sarah’s knee, a point of contact. “Let them look,” she murmured, her voice fading toward sleep. “They gave us the stage. But they don’t get the show.”
Sarah held her gaze, then looked down at Tali’s face. The alien noise faded into a distant, irrelevant buzz. The paddock, with its cave and its pond and its glowing mud, enclosed them. The crib waited. The orb cast its gentle light over the three of them.
It was a cage. It was a kingdom. It was, irrevocably, home.
The End