Her voice was cut off as the wall shimmered and locked back into place, locking Harper inside the room, alone without her baby, stripped from him and me.
Harper beat against the wall with her fists, shocking her with electricity and emitting an ugly rasp. Her voice was gone now. She must have felt the pain of the shocks but didn’t stop.
She didn’t even stop when I ascended the stairs toward Krial’s apartment. I blocked myself off from the pain and anger and sorrow in my soul as I trudged, one grim footstep after another up the steps, clutching the gibbering baby in my arms. So small, so fragile and vulnerable.
I knew with cold certainty Harper’s shrieking cries would haunt me for the rest of my days.
The blinds had been drawn and it would have been pitch black if it wasn’t for the candles arranged in the shape of a five-pointed star. In the middle sat a single pink pillow.
The other members of Krial’s personal guard took their positions at each point. At the head was Krial, bent and hobbled and old, leaning on his walking stick the same way he had when I saw him after a three-month hiatus.
His hair had fallen from this scalp once more, his bald dome clear of features. His eyes were a dull dry yellow and I caught the unmistakable sign of cataracts.
“Bring forth the child,” he said.
I hesitated a moment, hopefully undetectable in the darkness. I didn’t have to go through with this, I told myself. I didn’t have to let this happen to the child in my arms. I could have turned and ran and I could have escaped…
But Harper was still trapped in that padded cell. I couldn’t hope to rescue her as well.
It was no use. We would never hide away in the prison for long before they found us.
As emotional as I felt, with my heart pumping hard in my chest, thumping hard like it wanted to escape and run a thousand miles from this place, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Krial and the others were my family. You made sacrifices for your family. This was just another one.
Then the baby boy reached a hand and took my thumb in his tiny fingers and squeezed, surprisingly strong for a baby so young.
He peered up at me, though I wasn’t sure if he could really see me with his brand-new eyes.
My feet were already moving forward. I placed the child on the pink pillow delicately, his makeshift towel-blanket wrapped tightly around him.
He struggled on the floor and made a gurgling noise at the back of his throat, his arms and legs flailing weakly from beneath the towel.
Krial smacked the floor with the tip of his walking stick, making sharp crack noises. The noise reverberated around the space and he hummed a tune, wheezing, rasping groan from his aged and decrepit throat.
We guards hummed in return, a deep tune in the style of the ceremony we’d been taught, rehearsed, and practiced a thousand times before.
Krial spoke in a deep, guttural voice, the forgotten words of his ancient native tongue that even the translator implants buried in our arms couldn’t understand. He waved a single arm, making an arc meant to represent the entirety of the universe, but as weak as he was, he could only do it with a single arm and not both as it was meant to be performed.
As we came to the climax of the song, he reached up for the clasp at his shoulder and let his dressing fall to the ground, revealing the hideous and haggard shape of his aged form. His legs were skinny and weak, his skin hanging like soggy bread. His strength was all but gone. His bones were visible, poking at the thick skin of his body, straining at his flesh like tentpoles beneath too little fabric.
Then our humming came to a halt and a twisting wrenching sensation overtook my stomach and I could barely bring myself to watch.
The other guards looked on, not one, not even Tus, glancing at me as Krial dropped to his hands and knees and crawled toward the infant in a halting, disgusting manner, twisting his arms to use his palms to carry him forward. His shriveled penis swung to and fro, limp and useless.
The baby cried and screamed from the confines of his silk pillow. He kicked and flailed as if sensing what was about to happen. He shoved the towel free from about his body, his soft, pink flesh still a little red from passing through his mother.
Krial bent over the child and placed his hands on either side of it. He sucked, breathing in.
The infant really went for it now, screeching as Krial sucked the lifeforce from the child.
The matter of time and space shimmered as he pulled the youth from the child right before us, like dark magic.
Krial’s bones first snapped, cracking into place, and returned to its original strong and youthful position. His skin turned a healthy flesh color similar to that of the young child that he gorged on.
The baby flailed his flabby little arms, defenseless against the onslaught, unable even to smack the creature across the face.
As Krial became younger, his years passed to the child. Its skin turned pallid and grey, and what little hair he had on his head turned white, then fell limply to its skull and slipped to the ground.
Its harsh cry shifted from the youthful spear of anger to the wheezy groan the old man had sung with earlier. His face turned sallow and thin and even his movements altered, turning sharp and lacking their earlier dexterous smoothness.
Krial would sup until his body could take no more. He pulled his head up and sucked smaller amounts now, leaving the child with no more than a handful of hours remaining of its life. He wouldn’t have left even that if he didn’t have to, but not doing so was to suck too deeply, to
