Chapter 28
Chapter 28 — The Weight of Arrival
Kayline and Mireth lie bound together with leather straps, Kayline's head resting on Mireth's chest, her lips against Mireth's breast. They slip into a shared coma-like sleep as the unborn child accelerates growth. Aldren sits bound beside them, watching Kayline's breasts begin lactating and the baby visibly growing in Mireth's body over twenty-two hours. When the black moon reaches full, Aldren hears the child's command to act now. He frees his hands with a blade, cuts the baby free, and the child spills into his lap. All three adults wake instantly. Kayline takes the newborn to her breast. Mireth begins healing. Aldren discovers he has regressed five years in age, an occurrence he cannot yet explain.
The straps had been waiting. The house had been waiting. The moon — still fat and pale and not yet black — had been waiting with the particular patience of celestial bodies that have watched this kind of drama unfold before and will watch it unfold again long after the players have changed. Everything waited, in fact, except the three people standing in the bedroom holding leather like it was a lifeline, which it was, which it literally was, and if you think metaphors are more powerful than tensile strength then you've never tried to pull someone back from a telepathic coma using nothing but symbolism.
Kayline took the first strap. Soft, worn leather, the color of old honey, the kind of material that remembered every hand that had ever gripped it. She bound her left wrist to Mireth's right. The knot she tied was not the kind taught in books. It was the kind the house knew, the kind that existed in the grain of the leather itself, a binding that said 'I am here and I am not leaving' in a language older than rope.
Mireth lay on the bed, six months pregnant yesterday, seven months pregnant this morning, and counting. Her breathing was shallow but steady. The heartbeat in her belly — the fifth heartbeat, the one that belonged to no one and everyone — continued its patient, impatient rhythm. Steady. Strong. Waiting in a way that contradicted everything it had said through Mireth's sleeping mouth about not knowing how to wait.
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