We want a family and a place of our own.
Isn’t that what everyone wants?
Once I’m done with the major ideas, I fill the remaining skin with stars. Simple crisscross stars. And then, finally, Little Baby’s body is nothing but lashes. Blood seeps out, mostly obscuring my drawings. But it doesn’t matter. The Darkness doesn’t see. Not the way we do. It senses the blood and the way it seeps through her skin. And anyway, it can read my intentions.
I look up at the oil slick, still hovering in the air where it was when I started the ritual.
Then all that’s left to do is invite it in.
There are many ways to do this. With my mind, with a beckoning finger, with words.
This might be the last time I ever see the Darkness—one can’t ever predict the future, after all—so I make it a formal request using careful words in the ancient language of the Obscurati. It roughly translates to:
Here is a body, here is a soul.
Take it, do as you will.
The Darkness begins to move forward towards us and I stay right where I am, ready to receive my gift. The room glows purple now—a color so lavender and soft, not even a princess in a fairy tale could imagine such beauty. And this beauty is reflected off the slick surface of the entity that hovers over top of me.
It knows what we’re doing and it approves.
It wants Syrsee’s baby even more than we do.
This is true, but it doesn’t think like that. There is no biological brain inside the oil slick. But at the same time, it is nothingbutbrain. Finally, the outside world has caught up withwhat is happening deep under the earth. Paul told me once, a couple years back, that he knew what the Darkness is.
Nanotech.
Billions, maybe even trillions, of nanoparticles. Where it came from, I have no idea. What it wants, I do not know.
But it likes me. I know this because when it descends down onto Little Baby’s body—seeping into the blood weeping out of her—it covers me too. Caresses me too. Touches me too.
It has always favored me. Why?
Because I’m beautiful?
Paul is beautiful too, but he makes hideous things with the power of the Darkness.
So it’s something more than beauty. It’s the gentleness of a spirit, maybe? Or, more likely—since I am not particularly gentle—the spirit’s artistic vision?
Creativity is what it longs for, after all.
Suddenly, Little Baby screams and every muscle in her body locks tight. Her back comes up in an arch and I watch as the last of the Darkness disappears inside her.
I was holding my breath, so I let it out. Smiling.
Now the glow starts. The purple. It begins very light—even lighter than the pretty lavender mist all around us. So light, it’s nearly white.
But as the moments tick off, and as Little Baby’s blood mixes with the lavender, it turns dark. This is how to make Black blood, after all. Which was never black in the first place. It was always just purple.
And now, the magic begins.
Little Baby goes limp again. But as I watch, the Darkness is crawling under her skin. Like she is filled with wriggling worms. The first time I saw this—thousands of years ago—I was terrified. I really thought it was worms. Or something worse. Botflies, fruit flies, eye worms, mites.
I shudder just thinking about the horror.
Finally, the Darkness settles inside her. Of course, there are no textbooks to explain the process to me. That’s why I had to write my own. So what I think is happening now is just a guess. An educated one. The Darkness doesn’t just get inside the blood, it gets inside the cells. And once in the cells, it gets inside the nucleus. And once inside the nucleus, it gets inside the DNA.
Deoxyribonucleic acid. Base pairs, and hydrogen bonds, and helixes. A very specific structure with very specific instructions on what this body looks like, and sounds like, and how it behaves.
