Prologue
He remembered the light first.
The way it shone and wandered in waves – each brighter than the last. He could see the whiteness of it, feel its artifice, the unnaturalness seeping into his eyes; his pupils darker than the obsidian he would watch – in the years to come – melt over the Horizon. But above it all was the yellow-green, the violet-blue, the fuchsia-red – the in-between colours that mesmerised him in those scant few moments; held him in their thrall as they leaked through the walls, swirling almost maddeningly into the pores of those who held him – who had brought him into this world – piercing into the vomit green of their robes, or scrubs, as the old man would call them much, much later; colours all mixing until their skin glowed a sickening hue (gamma rays, they would tell him in the years after, the very words spoken the way one would speak of the dead.)
There was a clang – the sharp, almost biting, unmistakable tone of metal on metal – from beyond him, behind him, the sound distant (it might have been a door), but reverberating all the same, a thousand echoes thundering in his head, and a scream tore its way out of his throat, the sound high and scratchy and primal.
They paused for a moment, their gloves – still that swirling, sickly in-between – frozen in the air, their forms hunched over him, shadowed and large and hulking – he couldn’t make them out – they stood there, shapes still blurry and almost incorporeal.
It was then that he felt movement: the squeak of a wheel on tiled floor, the rolling – the shifting – as they moved him out of the maternity ward, through the halls. His body curled into itself, the warm blankets swaddling him almost like a second skin against the sudden burst of cold air; and in them he shuddered and shivered, assaulted as he was by all these newfound sensations.
Hushed whispers fell on his ears – pink, and wet and puffy – idle caresses, sliding softly and quietly like smooth velvet. They shrouded him as the gurney shook and rattled, lights blinking above him – over him, words of mutations and extra-sensory cortexes spoken as if of a harshly-enforced taboo, and Mors Organa; the word quietest of all, the whispers surrounding it like an absent wind. They spoke of it as if it were diseased, and the word washed over him, tingled a spine still young and bowed, prickled the recesses of a memory he was yet to remember.
Hands grasped him, the slickness of their gloves sliding over bare, newborn skin – still glowing that maddening in-between – and he squirmed, the feeling of being held strange and new and wholly unfamiliar. They turned him up and over, this way and that, and the world blurred, colours melding together, until they settled him into a comfortable position (for them perhaps); one hand holding his head as if it were fine china, the other flush below his torso, supporting his weight. They brought him up, and up, and up until he saw – very briefly – a glint of steel glasses frames, and a flash of eyes the deepest blue.
In later years he would have sworn he had seen how those eyes widened almost imperceptibly, the blue growing larger by a fraction, the brows lifting marginally, mouth falling open on a sharp intake of breath.
It was only long after that he would understand that ghost of a word, the dreaded half-gasp, half-whisper – hushed and silent and taboo – flitting past those lips, the hands holding him tightening fleetingly, the light of the room cold and dim and dark.
‘Nightchild.’
Shivering, the hands laid him down, falling limp, blankets swaddling him in wool once more. There was a click, quick and shuttered, and a soft pop and swish, and the lights overhead fell dark – their unnaturalness gone and faded for now – as moonlight filtered in through a high window opposite. It shone beautiful and ethereal – its in-between soft and heavenly, nothing like the ghastly unevenness of the scrubs – like a melody from another world.
His eyes, large and dark and without a hint of white, glowed as they basked in it, blinking owlishly, the night a balm to soothe his aches.
Some day they wouldn’t be, and the dreams – of men underneath hulking monstrosities of steel, and floating cities suspended in alien silk – would draw him like a moth to a fire; raw and tantalising and burning him from the inside out.
But tonight, the light – frantic and chaotic – settled, in and around him, the in-between coalescing into a serene, comforting hum, and the darkness of the room spread warmth into his bones. His eyes fluttered shut, and his body – still small and frail – stilled, his chest rising and falling calmer than the distant moonlight.
Tonight, he slept.
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