Beneath

“I have to get it out!”

The thought screams in my mind as I run, egged on by the bracelet that grips my arm as though alive.  The bracelet was the only thing that was left when I returned home that night; a strange symbol-emblazoned artifact that I had not seen before.  My mother, my father, had never returned.

“I have to get it out!”  The thought screeches again, followed by a piercing, searing pain between my shoulder blades.  I had to find my mother, so that she could remove it.  She was the only one that could.  She, after all, had put it there.

“It” was my baby sibling–I don’t know whether a him or a her–barely incubated and not yet ready to be born.  It was the future of our kind.  My mother left it with me for safekeeping, slicing my back between my shoulders with the tip of her finger and nestling the embryo within muscle and flesh.  Carefully, she resealed and smoothed the brown flesh of this body, chosen for its beauty and because it is ignored.  She and my father had gone to the council to try and broker peace.  Maybe she saw this coming.

It will not last long inside of me, and if it dies in me then I will die too.  I run, feeling the bracelet tugging me forward.  It is leading me; to my mother, I hope.

Pain rips through my body.  I shriek and would have fallen to my knees, but Lueca grabs me.

“I’ve got you, AnCaela.”  He says my name softly, throwing my arm around his shoulder and gripping my waist as we run on.  He has been with me, through all the strange countrysides of this lonely planet.  If not for him, I would be utterly alone.

The bracelet throbs, cinching tighter on my wrist.

“We’re closer, I think,” I say through teeth that are gritted against the pain.  “Just ahead.  Around the corner.”

We run forward, past the nondescript one- and two-story buildings that make up the main street of this small, anonymous town.  Down to the end of the block we run and then turn.

There is nothing.  No homes.  No trees.  No nothing.  Barren, endless stretches of dry cracked ground as far as the eye could see.  A mirage of death springing from nowhere.

“This is it,” I say.  The bracelet glows.

“But there is nothing here.”

“This is the place,” I repeat with certainty.  Looking across the vacant stretch of land, I know what we must do.  We must go beneath.

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