“How are you feeling?” I ask Sash.
“A little sore,” she says.
I softly kiss her lips and then ask, “Do you want some sap?”
“I would, thank you. And bring a cloth.”
I get up from the bed and soon return with a cup of sap and a cloth. I hold the cup to Sash’s lips for her to sip from while our daughter continues to nurse. When the cup is empty, I set it by the side of our bed. Baby girl pulls her mouth away from Sash’s nipple, apparently full for the time being, and looks up at her mother. A few drops of blood roll down the underside of Sash’s breast.
“You’re bleeding,” I say. “Is something wrong?”
“It’s the blood stored in my breasts,” she answers. “That’s what she was drinking.”
“You don’t make milk . . . a special liquid for the child?”
She shakes her head. “Our breasts fill with blood. That’s how babies get their sap. I’ll wean her to pure sap several morrows before her Naming Ritual.”
I look away in thought for a moment. “That explains it,” I mumble.
“Explains what?” she asks.
I return my eyes to Sash. “I could never figure out why the Murkovin drink blood.”
“If it’s what I needed to stay alive,” Sash says, “I’d drink it, too.”
Sash uses the cloth to wipe blood off her skin and clean our daughter’s lips. After pulling her shirt back down, she leans back with baby girl in her arms. Our daughter’s eyes begin to droop a little, but they still bounce back and forth between Sash and me.
“She has your eyes,” Sash comments. “They look exactly like yours.”
Wanting to see our daughter as she truly exists in this world, I press my palm to the floor beside the bed. I close my eyes and whisper, “Please show me what she looks like.”
After a few moments, I reopen my eyes and stare at our daughter. In the space between her face and mine, vibrant blue blooms from her eyes. The texture of her skin fades away, replaced by a semi-opaque, translucent film. Swirling molecules of glowing white matter shape her skull and skeleton. In the center of her head, a stunning starburst of color slowly rotates, every hue as pure and rich as I could imagine.
“She has your spectrum,” I say. “She’s perfect.”
Chapter 8
Marking each Darkness on my calendar as it passes, I begin a new count of seventy. I also make notes of milestones in baby girl’s development process. Her hand-eye coordination, motor skills, and mental alertness increase much more rapidly than anything I’ve ever seen or heard of in an infant, not that I have a lot of experience in that area. But I’ve always been under the impression that babies don’t do much for the first few months.
From morrow one, baby girl’s eyes follow Sash or me whenever one of us walks across the cavern. If either one of us says something, she immediately turns her head to the sound. At two weeks, if we lay her on her stomach, she raises her head and uses her arms to push her chest up. At four weeks, she grasps things with her hands.
She soon becomes attached to the Krymzyn version of a baby rattle—a tiny steel shaft with padded material wrapped around hollow balls on either end that are filled with metal pellets. The toy provides our daughter with hours of entertainment. As though she’s a mariachi musician with a maraca in her hand, she shakes it in distinct, rhythmic patterns.
At six weeks, she begins babbling incessantly in her own private language. Like many new parents, I conclude that she’s magically gifted in a way far superior to any child ever born. Sash takes the wind out of my sails by explaining that her maturation process is the same as any other child in Krymzyn. Children simply develop much more quickly in this world, and our daughter’s behavior is within the norm—except for two things.
The first anomaly is something that neither of us can explain. Baby girl never cries. She softly moans when she’s hungry, but the sounds never escalate into anything more. If she wants something, she reaches a hand towards it and grunts, but a tear never once falls from her eyes.
The second difference from other infants in this world is easily explained by me being her father. When baby girl looks at Sash or me, she almost always smiles. I’ve never seen the other children in Krymzyn smile, even when they’re playing a game. Just like the adults here, the kids are always serious and focused.
In a strange way, our daughter’s smile doesn’t always look like one of happiness or contentment. It’s often subtle and accompanied by a knowing expression on her face. The corners of her lips curl up slightly while her sparkling blue eyes look at Sash or me in a captivating way. It’s as though her smile is saying, “I know something amazing, but I can’t tell you about it yet.”
Other than having my blue eyes, baby girl’s resemblance to Sash is striking. When I sketch my first portrait of our daughter, it doesn’t take much imagination to think that it might be a drawing of Sash at that age. And the more our daughter grows, the more uncanny her resemblance to her mother becomes.
Sash spends every morrow doing nothing but taking care of baby girl. As far as I can tell, she never once lets her out of her sight. When my duties for each morrow are finished, Sash and I take our daughter for walks around the Delta. Taking turns with her draped over our chests in a baby carrier, we stroll to the top of the Empty Hill, or sometimes to the top of the Tall Hill.
We sit in the grass, hold her in
