Birthmarked (9 page)

Shocked, Gaia took another step toward the platform. The guard was putting a second noose over the pregnant woman’s head now.

“Stop!” Gaia said.

The people around her turned and withdrew from her. Their expressions were a mix of confusion and contempt. She took another step forward and held out her hand. “No!” she cried.

But a hand on her arm held her back. “Idiot!” came a voice in her ear. “You want to see us all killed?”

Gaia, frozen, turned to her right and found Rita’s scathing eyes millimeters from her own. She watched as Rita’s glare widened in surprise at her scar, and then Rita released her arm. On the platform, the two prisoners, hooded and noosed, stood side by side, their feet touching. The woman’s head bowed beneath her hood as if she were crying, and her belly, enormous under her gray dress, seemed to shake with her grief.

Gaia looked to the people at the Bastion, and her shock turned to horror. No one was stopping this execution. It seemed impossible, but someone there must have ordered this murder. Why?

Glancing toward the black-clad form of Sgt. Grey, she was startled to find his eyes upon her and Rita. In that instant, she perceived that he knew, somehow, who she was.
Stop this,
she thought, aiming all the power of her outrage in his direction. His hand clenched on his rifle strap, but otherwise he did nothing.

Her gaze shot back to the platform as the guard spoke in a loud and terrible voice:

“Patrick Carrillo and Loretta Shepard. You are found guilty of a most pernicious crime against the State. In flagrant disregard for the laws of the Enclave and the natural order, you have violated the Genetic Screening Act for Advanced Citizens, you have married your siblings, and you have incestuously conceived a genetic abomination. For this, the sentence is death. Let you be an example to others who would so defy the will of the Enclave.”

There was one last cry from the man, a protest that Gaia could not understand for it was cut off by a banging noise as the trapdoor beneath the prisoners was released and they both dropped to their deaths.

An awful, loaded silence weighed in the courtyard, and not a soul spoke. The only sound was a creak from one of the ropes as the bodies swayed slightly below. Around her neck, the chain of Gaia’s locket watch grew heavy. She could feel the second hand ticking off the instants before the entombed baby would notice the distress of its mother’s body. First it would feel the lack of movement, the thinning oxygen, the sluggish heart. Gaia only dimly grasped why the parents had been condemned, but she fully understood the death sentence happening to the child.

“No,” Gaia whispered. She clutched the hard, round weight of her watch through the fabric of her shirt.

“I don ‘t know who you are, or where you come from,” Rita said, gripping her arm again and speaking in a low voice. “But you d better leave. A hundred people heard your outburst, and any one of them could decide to turn you in right now.”

Gaia barely registered her warning or noticed that several people were still watching them. She couldn’t spare a look for her mother or Sgt. Grey. Her mind was entirely focused on the baby. “I must get to the prisoner,” Gaia said.

“It’s too late,” Rita said, twitching her red muslin hood forward to shade her cheeks from the sun. “They’re dead.”

A desperate urgency was beginning to boil in Gaia’s blood. She turned for the last time to Rita.

“You don’t understand,” Gaia said. “I have to go.”

Gaia hurried through the thinning crowd toward the plat’ form. The guard at the platform loosened the rope from above, and another man below collected the male prisoner’s body and laid it unceremoniously facedown on a cart. Gaia arrived just as the woman’s body was being lowered. Mercifully, the men left the burlap sacks over the heads while they slipped the nooses free to use again another time. Without looking, Gaia instinctively felt her locket watch circle into the second minute, and she began to panic.

“Where are you taking the bodies?” she asked the man with the cart.

He looked at her, frowning. “Are you from the family, then?” he asked.

“Yes,” she lied. “I’m supposed to stay with them until the others come.”

“I was told they couldn’t come until sundown,” he said doubtfully. “Too disgraced to come earlier, not that I blame them. I’m to store the cadavers out of the sun. Will you be paying me?”

“Tonight,” she said. “My uncle will pay you tonight.”

He looked at her curiously. “What’s wrong with yer face?”

She turned her cheek away.

“Come, girl. What’s wrong with yer face?” he repeated.

She turned to face him again and felt the barely restrained fury in her own expression. “Do you really think that matters at a time like this?” she said coldly.

He tipped his cap at her. “No offense intended, Masister,” he said.

“Quickly, now,” she said.

The man did not move quickly, but he took up the two long handles of his cart and wheeled it over the bumpy cobblestones toward a quiet back street. Gaia felt hope seeping out of her with every meter they traveled. She knew the longer the baby remained without oxygen, the greater the chances of brain damage and death.

They arrived finally at a narrow street. Off the end of it was a passage so narrow the cart could barely fit through, and then finally there was a small yard with a shed where the man lodged the cart.

“They’re likely to smell in a few hours,” the man said. “They’re safe enough here if it’s vandals your worried about. If you like, you can wait at the pub around the corner. You’ll see anyone arriving.”

“This is fine,” she said.

He looked skeptical. She busied herself with righting an empty barrel so she could appear to settle on it in the shade.

“Suit yerself, then,” he said, and ambled toward the road.

As soon as the man’s back was turned, she stepped inside the shed and closed the wide wooden door. Cracks of sunlight came through slits in the wooden walls, and a spiderweb-covered window let in another block of grimy light, but Gaia was in such a hurry she barely noticed.

She felt for the woman’s pulse, but there was none, and a quick look at the woman s neck persuaded her she had died instantly from a broken neck. Gaia ripped at the woman’s dress, exposing her pale, mottled belly. Pale streaks of blue crossed beneath the skin, and a heavy, unnatural clamminess clung to her, but Gaia pressed her fingers firmly against her still-warm stomach. There was no movement within, no flicker to indicate the infant might still live, but certainly the baby’s heart had continued to beat, circulating oxygen through the placental blood, even after her mother was dead.

Gaia closed her eyes and paused. She had never performed a blade delivery. She had seen her mother do it almost a dozen times, but only when the mothers life was at risk, and in most of those cases, the mother had died afterward. But here, the mother was dead already. There was nothing to lose, and there was a chance-- a remote one certainly, but a chance-- that she could save the baby inside. It took her less than an instant to realize she had made her decision already, the moment shed seen the mother drop through the hangman’s platform.

She reached into her satchel and swiftly chose the short, sharp scalpel in her toolkit. She cut low and firmly below the woman’s belly button and gasped as the sweet-scented blood oozed sluggishly around the blade. There were three layers of muscle to cut through, tough but flexible, and when she reached the layer of the womb she had to be careful not to hurt the baby. She steadied the womb surface with one hand ‘while she again drew the blade firmly. Next came a gush of amniotic fluid with its strong, earthy smell, and she could see the pale blue body curled inside. Gaia reached in and pulled gently, bringing out a baby no larger than a loaf of bread. The limp legs dangled. A cream-colored, waxy substance clung in patches to his skin. Gaia smeared the bloody, mucousy covering off the baby’s face and suctioned quickly with a rubber bulb. She secured her own mouth over the infant’s lips and nose, ignoring the taste of blood. Gently, with hardly more than a puff, she breathed into the child. She saw his chest rise slightly. She gave the infant’s chest three compressions, then tried another couple breaths of gentle air.

Nothing happened. She turned the infant facedown and gave his back a firm slap, then breathed into him again, willing him to respond. She tried another round of chest compressions, then another. His body remained limp and unresponsive, and Gaia fought against tears of frustration. She was too late. It had been too long. He was dead like his father and mother, killed by the Enclave before he ever had a chance to breathe its corrupt air.

She listened to the baby’s beatless chest, checked his air passages once more, and breathed into him again, doing instinctively what she hoped was right and wishing more than ever that her mother could be there to help her. After another series of chest compressions she paused, peering at the little lax face. “Please,” she whispered. She had given up her chance to see her mother. She had risked her own life to help him. He must somehow live.

“What are you doing?” a voice said quietly.

Gaia had not heard the door open behind her. She turned swiftly, clutching the baby in her arms, the evidence of the dead -woman’s mutilated cadaver obvious beside her.

The man was no one she knew. His dark hair fell in sloppy bangs over his forehead, and his face was pale. “You’re mad,” he said in awed tones. He backed slowly from the door, shock written in the expression of his face. She saw his boot heel catch on a stone in the bright green grass and he nearly fell. “Boris!” he yelled.

“Please,” she said, following after him. “I was trying to save the baby. You must-- “

He shook his head, backing quickly away as if he was afraid to turn his back on her. “You stay away from me,” he said. Then he yelled again. “Boris! You d better get out here!”

Gaia was terrified. Glancing back at her bag, she grabbed the scissors and cut the umbilical cord. Then she threw her tools back in her bag and snatched it up. She couldn’t leave the lifeless baby behind. Panicking, she blew a last puff of air into his lungs, scooped him into the front of her tunic, and flew out the door. As footsteps came running in her direction, she scrambled rapidly up onto the top of the stone wall that en’ closed the yard. She slid over, scraping her hand, and dropped into a pile of steaming compost. The rich, putrid smell swept over her, but she was back on her feet in a moment, scrambling through a garden to a gate. She pushed through, still carrying the baby and her satchel. A long alleyway opened before her and she ran.

Voices rose in alarm behind her, announcing their pursuit. She fled along the alley, turned down a wider lane, looking desperately for a bakery or any familiar street. She glanced be’ hind her to see soldiers chasing her on foot, their rifles pointed, and she shrieked in fear. Around the next corner, four more guards appeared on bicycles. She bounded sideways, crashing through another gate, into another garden. A group of ladies in white straightened to their feet around a table set with silver and lemonade, calling out. Gaia ran past them, seeing another gate leading out of the garden.

She pushed through it, catching her satchel on the latch. She stumbled, freed herself, and looked desperately for an escape.

“There she is. Catch her,” cried a man s voice.

She shrank back against the gate and looked frantically back at the women in the garden. It looked like she had disturbed a post-execution card party, and the genteel ladies were watching her with curiosity and alarm. Their white hat brims hovered at expectant angles.

“Help me,” she pleaded.

Soldiers closed around her. One pulled roughly at her satchel, and the other tugged at the baby.

“No!” she yelled, yielding the satchel but holding on to the baby with all her might. With wild eyes she struggled back from them, crouching against the wall, protecting the baby tightly in her arms.

The soldiers boxed her in. She could see their shiny boots, their black-clad legs, the petrifying apertures of their rifles. Her heart was beating erratically against her lungs, and she gasped for breath. Never had she been so terrified. Her hood had slipped back during her desperate run, and she kept her gaze down, knowing her disarrayed hair covered her scarred face.

“We’ve got her, Cap’n,” one of the men said.

“Hold your fire.”

Gaia tucked the little head of the baby against her throat, gently cradling his shape close to her warm skin. One of the soldiers stepped nearer, and she winced when he pulled her hair back to reveal her face.

“Would you look at that now,” the unfamiliar soldier said quietly.

Gaia blinked, her cheeks burning, and anger rising as she knew she was being examined: a freak and a criminal. She jerked against the guard’s grip, but since he did not release her hair, her scalp stung with pain.

A tall, blond soldier moved forward next. “I believe we’ve found your missing girl from the outside, Captain,” he said in a light, cultured tenor.

Gaia looked through the group of men. Capt. Grey stood there in the sunlit street, his black uniform unruffled, a new glint of braid over his left breast pocket. It was he who had called to hold fire. Under the black brim of his hat, his expression was unyielding and firm.

With her face still twisted upward, she patted the baby to indicate the real crime in their midst. “Look who’s been murdered,” she said scathingly. “Captain”

He betrayed no reaction. “Take her to the prison,” Capt. Grey said. “Leave the baby with her for now. I’ll notify the Nursery we have a new delivery.”

The guard holding her hair finally released it, but only to hustle her roughly to her feet.

“But, Captain,” the blond guard said. “It’s the abomination.”

Gaia saw Capt. Grey’s eyes flash swiftly, and then his voice was calm. “It’s a baby, Bartlett,” he corrected. “And a healthy one by the look of it. The girl’s skills are obviously too good to waste. The Protectorat will hear of it.”

Gaia gasped at his description of the baby. Before she even looked down, her throat felt the first tentative movements of the baby she held there so possessively, and then she eased the little weight against her shoulder, untangling his body from the sticking, damp fabric of her tunic. The infant boy’s head rolled with a familiar bobble, his skin showed a mottled red, and with a lurch of his uncoordinated arms, the baby gave out his first, mewing cry of outrage: outrage at being alive.