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“Ew, cilantro. Soap leaves.” Mesmer straightened his suit jacket. “I like this world. Let us dive. I can get my first favor, and Jess can walk you through it.”

And so, Jess held the book up, and we leaned in together, the light contact between us humming as the book dissolved into a world of text.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Lex

We arrived in what appeared to be a dark hallway of a pristine and clean hospital, the scent around us decidedly sterile with no other complexities. Only that.

Distant murmuring, a single cough, and the hum of air-conditioning surrounded us as Jess gathered her bearings and checked a few notes she’d written in her phone.

“Should be down the hall and to the left. According to the chapter we’re in, the lovebirds are making out in a broom closet nearby… Not too many side characters, and we just have to look the part.” Jess meandered down the hall and paused at an abandoned nurse’s station, snatched a jacket off a hook, and pocketed a stethoscope while Mesmer did the same.

“Focus on making Mesmer align to this world’s anatomy. It should come intuitively.” Jess hummed as she went through the pockets of the jacket and examined some novelty pen that she tilted back and forth reading the garbled text.

I kept my head down and thought about what I knew of the world, the facts of the heats, the anatomy… Couldn’t imagine wanting to birth that way, but to each their own, I guessed.

As we circled a narrow hallway lined with private offices, Jess tapped an acrylic placard that declared one of the rooms Ultrasound Unit 4. She forged in and turned dim lights on, the soft glow they kept in rooms like that—based off what I recalled from a kidney ultrasound I’d had as a kid.

With parents that were constantly afraid of something happening, a little dehydration was enough to earn me the experience. So, I hopped up on the table and sat on crunchy paper while Jess flipped on switches that hummed to life.

“Are you focusing on it?” Mesmer patted over his chest as I glanced over.

“As much as I can be, I suppose.” I swung my legs gently as Jess rummaged around to procure a towel and the gel.

“Dang, this author is so literal. This bottle literally feels like it’s frozen.” She squeezed the sides of the squishy bottle and handed it to me. “No need to warn you; do it yourself. Just smear it all over your belly.”

I lifted my shirt and squirted it on my stomach, flinching at the sting of it. “Ack…”

“You do realize that—” Jess sighed heavily and wiped the gel off my stomach and squirted it below my navel as she jerked my pants down almost-criminally low. “Babies don’t start growing up under your ribs, weirdo. Your uterus is down here.”

“Womb,” Mesmer corrected her before clearing his throat. “Only females have a uterus. Omegas have wombs and do not shed lining monthly.”

Jess glared at him as he found a seat and crossed his legs primly. “Fine. Womb.”

I gasped as she whipped around and flailed a handheld apparatus at me, one wired to a dark monitor at her side.

She lunged in and rested one hand on the keyboard and the other, she used to press the device into the flesh beneath my navel.

I gasped and flinched, glancing over at the monitor as bits of innards flashed around in black and white relief on the screen. As she pressed in, I winced. “Hey, easy! I have to pee.”

“Good. Makes things easier to see.” She pressed in firmly right above my pubic bone, right over the dark line bisecting beneath my navel.

Back and forth, she wriggled the thing until she dialed in something with a few button presses on the strange keyboard and pursed her lips.

After a moment, it came into view, the folded static in a field of darkness, a little bean situated tightly in what must have been my womb.

She clicked on the mouse, tapped a few keys, and focused in on a rapidly beating little heart, racking up a pattern of sound and tally of numbers on the side of the screen. “Things look good, numbers wise. Heart is beating, little organs forming… I’d say congrats and lucky you, there’s only one.”

The thought of multiples made me want to be ill for a moment, but Mesmer, over in his own little world, only cooed with joy. “It really is real.”

The longer I stared at the little fetus, the more it became real in my mind.

I was pregnant.

I was going to have a baby.

I rested a hand over my navel the moment Jess moved the probe away and went about printing off a string of photos printed on plastic film. Lots of little numbers and things I didn’t understand spanned them. All I knew was, the baby measured at 6w 4d, but it was likely in another world’s metric. Warwitha Calvin likely didn’t even know what the correct measurement was, as her world hadn’t been fleshed out, a side effect of the world not being made by a deus.