She Walks in Shadows(77)
She lets me go: The Inspector doesn’t seriously believe me a suspect — the crèche logs would corroborate my assertions and I lack either motive or means — but she seems disappointed that her only lead has no better to offer than dry speculation. In any case, none of it has much to do with me. A freak death of a freak condition; it happens to other people and not even in the vicinity of where I work or live.
Back in the office, I meet with a colleague and we discuss the matter briefly, the way we would handle gossip. None of us spares any great feeling for rejected applicants, united in a remote disdain for those desperate to parent. To add to the load of the station, to test the survival coefficient.
Schedule clear for the rest of my shift, I seek solace in another cigarette. This time, I remember little of what I see, though I retain the impression of headless newborns crawling and struggling to assemble themselves.
When lucidity returns, I find myself among the chambers.
No panic: My senses are still drug-glazed and everything shimmers in high contrast, the blackened metal of womb-capsules, the eye of Prathayayi. We’ll never know why the station planners put this room here, directly facing that half-lidded eye. A scleral well without pupil, reflecting nothing. Not the wombs, the lights, not myself. Before this gaze, nothing exists.
A seam in the glass that I wouldn’t have noticed without the hyper-focus of the comedown. The outline of it suggests a panel cut out and welded back in place with intricate care, the work of hours. When I press my ear to it, I almost expect a submerged, gurgling voice. All I hear is my cardiac meter reverberating back, seismic.
I recall the last time security logged an alarm. The hour is about right. There’s a risk I am wrong, but I’ll take it. My request is answered in the affirmative.
Kittisak’s shadow precedes him, distorted, but coming into view, it is more than just his shadow. He totters as though carrying an unfamiliar weight. The bloat on him has nothing to do with muscle growth or bad diet run amok — distributed fetal development, the Inspector half-joked. He kneels by the spot I pressed my ear to ten minutes ago, breathing onto the glass. Mesmerized.
“Khun Kittisak.”
As before, his breath catches and he freezes, electrified by his own guilt. “Doctor,” he begins, “I can explain this.”
“Which part can you explain? That you’ve been sneaking in here, or that mysterious and — apparently — fatal condition?”
“Those who deserve her gift safely carry to term.”
I glance sideway at the immense, inert eye. “Yes,” I say mildly, “that sounds very sane.”
“This is how we were meant to be and our children will live forever.” He sweeps his arms outward. “There’s no sunlight here; do you see? We need only to make. We need only to break the glass. The perfect seedbed in which the next Y’ha-nthlei must inevitably flower, in which we will be reborn.”
“I have no idea what you just said.” Nor was I aware the human throat could pronounce those sounds. “Attempting to reproduce without a license is illegal, Khun Kittisak.”
“You don’t understand, Doctor. I’m in total control of my faculties. If you listen and pay attention, you can hear her too. You would see.”
A gun emerges from his hand, its passage smooth as an egg’s. His aim drifts low, meant to wound, slow to squeeze the trigger as though he has all the time in the world. And against me, he does. Maybe he plans to explain himself while I bleed, persuade me to his viewpoint over the aria of my pain.
Unlike me, the Inspector is armed; unlike him, she does not hesitate, is quick to fire, and interested in no rhetoric save that of the bullet.
He goes down, a rupturing of more than just flesh, more than his own. A fetal arm or hand, maybe even a head. When the Inspector’s subordinates take him away, he is weeping, clutching at the tiny limb dangling from his open wound. Numb to the pain but vulnerable to the grief. When they operate on him, I wonder how many they will find, those parasites attached to that willing host.
I stay behind, as does the Inspector. She commends me for my intuition and quickness of wit; I pay her only half my attention, the other half drawn to the wombs. But they remain as they are, ordinary and in order, much as the carcass is. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. We march inexorably toward a certain end.
A silhouette that evokes my cigarette haze, for a moment, one of the fetuses seems finned and scaled, a sleek tail curled in on itself.
“Doctor? Is there something wrong?”
In the tank, that shadow has vanished.
“No, Inspector,” I say quietly. “Everything is just fine.”
T’LA-YUB’S HEAD
Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas
Translated by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
THE FIRST THING that rematerialized was her head, vomiting with a death rattle. Then, as she regained her breath, her arched body began to appear. Slowly, the luminous vapor she seemed made of, turned into flesh until it collapsed on the floor. The long black hairs, drenched in vomit and sweat, adhered to her face painted red and black.
“What did I do wrong this time, Tonantzin? How did I make a mistake, Mother?!” T’la-yub asked in a scream when she was able to stand on her feet.
But there was no answer. Why should there be? So, she half-closed her eyes and held the amulet with such strength that its borders made her left hand bleed.