“You have to send the credits directly using the ship’s AT, and then they’ll send me in the shuttle. That’s what he says. Just do what he says. Please!”
Then the com-link cut out, and the screen went blank.
“What happened?” asked Margo.
“Backworld machinery,” said Rumer.
“Did he even hear the last thing I said?”
“Who knows?”
They were all silent, listening for sounds of being boarded, for the click-snap of metal weapons and the thunder of boots.
“I’m gonna throw up,” said Margo airlessly.
“Do me a favor,” said Rumer, “save it ‘til they come for me.”
And then there was a disused buzzer that sounded, somewhere, a quick “ping,” short and loud. Everyone turned.
“Credits,” said Diallo. He aimed his grin at Margo.
Margo laughed a sob.
There were no goodbyes, exactly. Just nervous half-slaps and grumbles. Kell rubbed his eye at her an absurd number of times.
It was the captain who strapped her in.
“Well, that’s just about it,” said Pilgrim Pilgrim. “Gone over all the controls?”
“I’ll figure it out,” she said.
“You got your story straight? What you’re gonna tell them?”
“I have a few stories to tell them.”
“They’re not gonna want to hear ‘em all.”
“That’s my problem, not yours. Go deliver what you have to deliver, let me get off this ugly ass ship, for the love of God.”
She knew she’d made Rumer laugh, though she didn’t stay to listen to it. Instead, Margo darted off into the black, and prepared for what she would do when she landed. She’d have to give up the true tale soon enough, tell people there had been no kidnapping, that she was perfectly well.
First, though, she would have a servitor run a bath, and actually get in it.
Follow Me Down
Originally published by Unlikely Story in their issue The Journal of Unlikely Academia
The night that Kora Gillespie, their Incubus Parvulus, was born, it was Bernadette who received the emergency house call to the walk-up in Washington Heights.
Ramona knew that she should never have come with her. They both knew it. But Ramona had been giddy with courage, full of imaginary clinical detachment, and Bernadette had been in too fierce a hurry to object when she tagged along behind.
There had been no discussion of what she would see when she got there.
At nineteen, a second-year student with hands that still shook, and eyes that still glistened when a mother began to crown, Ramona stood in the choking summer darkness and watched the Cambion emerge.
She would never forget how Ms. Gillespie screamed into the silence, screamed and screamed and screamed. Her screams were thin and high, without grunts, without pauses for breath, coming out wild and alien over Bernadette’s impossibly steady voice: “Calm, now. Breathe for me, now, child. You breathe…”
But there was no making her breathe. The woman’s back formed a perfect arch of terror and pain with every contraction, as she pulled away instead of pushed. And every time a contraction left her, she fell back to trying to wriggle out of the bed—as though she could leave behind the thing emerging from her body—making lakes of inky amniotic fluid on the floor as she collapsed, and was dragged back. “We fight the fear, dear, yes that’s what we do.”
As Ms. Gillespie crowned, Ramona clasped the woman’s hands to stop her tearing at her belly. With terror-clouded eyes, the woman begged them to take it from her, now, please, now. NOW. And then she went into an arch that folded her in half, screaming and beating her head against the headboard until she bled. She seemed unconscious when the baby finally spurted from her in a pool of black blood.
But when Bernadette brought it to her, wrapped in a clean pale cotton blanket, she came awake again. Like the middle of a nightmare, she shrieked a suffocated shriek toward the ceiling, arms flying up as though the baby’s father were there on top of her, suckers fast attached (and still, long years later, whenever Ramona had the nightmares, her brain seemed to insert the creature seamlessly, as though she could never quite believe it hadn’t been there, watching).
Ms. Gillespie sat upright, still screaming, and threw the blood-black sheet over the baby’s face. Before Bernadette could stop her, she leapt free of the bed and tore out of the window, her womb still raw and open. Whether she climbed or fell down the fire escape, Ramona never saw.
Bernadette moved quickly. She never seemed to encounter anything she did not expect. She took up the Cambion, tightened its swaddling, jiggled it a little to stop its soundless crying, and passed it to Ramona like a parcel. “Hold her steady,” she said, business-like, “the girls like steady hands.” Even back then, Bernadette only ever spoke to Ramona in essential facts. In requirements, as though that was all there was.
And then, with a sigh of annoyance, she gripped her Saint Raymond medal, crossed herself in a quick prayer, and hurried down the fire escape after her patient. And Ramona was left sick and shaking, holding what Ms. Gillespie had birthed.
Later, safely back within the towers of the Morningside Heights campus of the New York College of Theogony and Preternatural Obstetrics, the thing squirming hotly in her arms would feel no different from a baby.
It was a baby, as far as Ramona could tell, eyes shut tight against a new, bright, cold world. So cruelly ordinary a thing. It smelled like a baby. It made a baby’s faces and spit bubbles. It shivered like a baby; Ramona held it closer to her chest, and it rooted, just as if it had a right to find a nipple.
The girl was, she supposed, exactly as parasitic and insensible to others’ pain as most babies tended to be. Only, her screaming was easier to ignore, if you wanted to, for being soundless. Even after Ms. Gillespie was found a full day later, naked and babbling in a storm-drain, Ramona could not find anything particularly un-babylike about the one who drove her there.
But then, Ramona could never really bring herself to look at it straight on.
“Davie, you have to come fast if you want to see the selkie babies get born!” Kora called, and listened for the slap of the seal-boy’s hands and feet behind her.
Kora would have brought Davie along just to see him walk. Usually the little webbed feet carried him upright in delicate, almost sneaking steps. But whenever he tried to move quickly, he threw himself down on all fours and flop-crawled, beating the ground to death with his front flippers. His slaps and barks made the best kind of echoes off the College’s sharp, spire-y towers.
If he wouldn’t cry and tell everybody, Kora would have brought him down into the tunnels, just to see what kind of echoes he could make. But he was only four. It had taken her this long to convince him to cross the wall and the tiny grove of linden trees that separated the Seminary from all the good places. Now that they were through, he stopped his flopping every few feet to look doubtfully around.
He was going to make her miss Ramona’s whole class. And she couldn’t leave him because he couldn’t find his way back, and somebody would find out and be mad. Besides, she wanted Ramona to see that she’d brought him with her. “Come on, Davie, she’s going to be done soon. They’re all going to be born without you. We have to go faster than this!”
“I don’t want to go faster,” complained Davie, “I don’t want to run away from home.”