City of Glass

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But that’s not really true, is it? Some might even say that a baby’s first gasp of air, and the following scream into the terrifying new world, actually echoes around the entire galaxy. The second time that Orla’s brother was born, she was pretty sure the announcement of his arrival reached every distant star in the sky.

The incubation chamber opened with a hiss. Gas poured out, temporarily obscuring what was inside. That’s when Ewan let out his ear-splitting cry, and Orla felt something deep in the planet of Apheron shift beneath her. The doctor gave Orla’s mother a plastic smile. The faint, hooded woman had tears in her eyes.

“Look, Orla. It’s your brother.” She squeezed Orla’s shoulder.

Except the thing in the glass tube didn’t look like Orla’s brother. It looked like a pink, wrinkled little animal, squirming and screeching in a puddle of amniotic goo. Orla had never seen a baby being born before.

She had only heard her mother’s stories about the first time Ewan was born. She said he nearly tore her to shreds from the inside. How barbaric, she said, that of all things, they haven’t found a way to make childbirth any less unbearable. Orla’s skin had prickled with goosebumps. Oh well, her mother sighed. Some things never change.

The doctor lifted Ewan from the incubation chamber, holding him with the tips of his fingers to soil as small an area of his gloves as possible. He searched the baby’s pink skin for any signs of imperfection. When he was satisfied, an orderly came quickly and swaddled Ewan in a thin sheet.

When she handed the baby to Orla’s father, her eyes only flitted up to his face briefly. Then, shoulders hunched, she hurried out of the room.

At seven years old, Orla was beginning to understand why people looked at her father that way. She had never thought of him as a king. He was her father, after all, as distant and stern as he was. But as her mother often reminded her, Orla’s father carried the divine orders of Hedarr. His subjects, though they professed their love for him in the light, shrank from him in fear in the privacy of their minds.

Her father did not smile. He looked down at his first-born child with a quiet disdain. For once, Orla felt the same way. Something about it unsettled her, seeing her older brother in her father’s arms.

The doctor cleared his throat. Orla thought she saw a sheen of sweat appear on his bald head. She had no way of knowing how old the man was, with his smooth pale features and small frame, wrapped in a white robe with an embroidered collar that crossed his chest at an angle. “As you are aware, your Grace,” he said, “the reintegration process will take some time. There may be some gaps, if you will. Some memories or quirks that don’t appear in this iteration. He may grow up to look just a little bit differently than he did before. But rest assured, the soul always stays the same.”

He swallowed, waiting silently for her father’s approval. The soul always stays the same, they say, after they’re fed their entire digital footprint. All but the bad parts. But Orla harbored a sliver of doubt that she could never speak out loud. Could it be true? Was this squirming newborn really her brother?

The last time she had seen Ewan, he had woken her early in the morning. He pressed a finger to her lips: Be silent, Orla. Don’t speak. He told her he was going away for some time. She could see in the dull gray of his eyes that he would not return. She had seen that sadness grow in Ewan for years, waiting for it to bubble over.

At long last, Orla’s father looked up and gave the doctor a stiff nod. “Well done.”

The doctor did not need to be relieved—he had done this hundreds of thousands of times, and would continue his work as long as death demanded—but nonetheless, he was. He gave the king a cautious smile. “Thank you, your Grace, but your praise belongs to Hedarr.”

“In Hedarr’s image,” Orla heard her mother whisper.

Orla could not contain her curiosity any longer. “Will he get sick again?”

Her father looked at her for the first time that day, his dark eyes icy pockets in his angular face. Her mother’s mouth hung open before she caught herself and snapped it shut.

“Orla, you know very well that sickness doesn’t—” her mother started.

“I understand you have concerns about Ewan’s mind sickness,” the doctor said. His words hovered in the still air, his eyes darting between Orla’s father and mother. Any mention of mind sickness was sure to silence a room. Like childbirth, the idea made Orla’s stomach turn. It was the only sickness that could not be cured. People didn’t die from anything as benign as cancer or pneumonia, not in the past twelve hundred years. But people died from mind sickness.

“I can assure you,” he continued, the wavering of his voice just barely noticeable, “that Ewan will have no memory of any darkness from his previous life. He will be healthy and perfect.”

Orla’s mother gave the doctor an apologetic smile. She came to her father’s side, saying nothing. When he noticed, he passed the swaddled baby to her as if he was passing an empty dinner plate to a waiter. She cooed over the baby and kissed his cheeks softly.

She turned to Orla. “Do you want to hold him?”

Orla didn’t. She wanted to leave the incubation room. She wanted to be on the other side of the city of Phora, far away from the newborn creature that was supposed to be her brother. The soul always stays the same, waiting for its new vessel, but Orla couldn’t picture this body-less soul. She feared that holding her brother in her arms would be much worse than never seeing him again. But when her mother placed Ewan in Orla’s arms, his small body warmed to her immediately. She felt her muscles relax. Oh, she thought, it is you, Ewan.

Fifty-seven meters away, Sorem watched from the top of Kledin tower. The air was getting to be painfully frigid at this altitude, despite his fur-lined jacket, the hood trapping warmth around his ears. When he exhaled, the cloud hovered in front of him before condensing on the glass.

If one of the narrow-faced Phorians below decided to lift their gaze to the sky, they would have seen a window cleaner up atop the tower. It was not an unusual sight, as someone had to risk their fragile body to scrub the glass until it glistened. Except that Sorem had no water bucket, no squeegee, and no rope.

The Glass City, as it was called outside of Phora, stretched away in all directions. Its glass towers were connected by glass-encased walkways, and wave-like sheets of white metal twisted into the sky high above. From up here, Sorem had a view second only to the king and his advisors. He could see congregations of Phorians below, adjusting their drab attire on the sky rail that whizzed past below. When they arrived at work, he could see them in the towers punching imaginary numbers into electronic tablets for hours on end. Each floor, its wide window opening over Phora, was identical to the floors above and below. The people, too, were identical, or as close as you could come. The perfect, beautiful people.

As it so happened now, Sorem could also watch the birth of a new king.

Only he wished they would hurry up already. His fingers and toes, which were suctioned firmly to the glass, were beginning to go numb.

You could easily go a lifetime, or several lifetimes, without witnessing the birth of a king. The city’s architecture ensured the privacy of some, residing in its highest towers, while illuminating the intimate lives of so many below. It was all a matter of perspective. The freshly-healed suckers on Sorem’s fingers and toes, which could flatten and seal onto almost any surface, allowed him to crawl up a little higher than your average Phorian.

He flipped a second lens in front of his eye and the scene above him came into focus. There was Ewan, in the human girl’s arms in that antiseptic room. He tried another layer of magnification, hoping to catch a glimpse of the baby’s face. Even if it looks like him, Sorem reminded himself, that thing is not Ewan.

“What are they doing now?” Calou’s voice popped into Sorem’s ear over the static. He couldn’t help but jump. He had almost forgotten about the scrawny youth that watched him from below. Sorem wished he could shoo the enthusiastic voice from his ear like a gnat.

“Still talking,” Sorem grumbled. “It looks like they’re almost finished. Better tell Hida it’s show time.”

“On it.” Calou’s line went silent. Sorem trained his eyes on the orderly, who was folding linens in the hall behind the incubation room. He watched her perk up, eyes flitting around the empty hall, and then to the door. Hida looked so strange in the crisp white orderly’s uniform.

It was more uncomfortable than Sorem could have imagined.

Rolling her shoulders back until the fabric stopped her, Hida wondered how on Apheron they expected her to move in this thing. She had a sudden and fleeting moment of remorse for the real orderly, who she had dumped in one of the sewage chambers down the hall, but it didn’t last. Hida saw all of them, with their white robes and plastic skin, as extensions of the poisonous fingers that had dug their way into the heart of Apheron. Let them all be swallowed up, for all she cared. But that would have to wait for later.

She opened the door and approached Orla with her head bent low. Hida was better at blending in than the rest of them, but she still had to be careful if things were to go as planned.

Orla seemed transfixed by the newborn child. When Hida reached out her arms, for a moment, she was afraid she would have to yank the boy from Orla’s grip. Though Orla gave her the child with no trouble, Hida only let herself relax when Ewan was in her arms and she was halfway down the hall to the nursery. When she got there, she walked right on past the opaque door and headed for the elevator.

Then she stopped, frozen. In front of her, the elevator rose up. It played an electronic note that was supposed to resemble music, and then the doors slid open. Hida held her breath. The orderly that stepped off was a young man with round cheeks. His dark hair was slicked back, not a strand out of place, and his uniform was perfectly unwrinkled.

Though she kept her gaze downward, Hida could feel his eyes brush over her, then to the parcel in her arms.

Sorem could no longer see Hida. She had entered the part of the hall beyond his view. “She’s headed down the elevator,” he conveyed to Calou. “I’m coming down.”

Carefully, Sorem unstuck his fingertips from the glass surface, each making a pop as the suction released. Even though he’d developed a sense of trust in his sticky fingers, as Calou called them, Sorem still felt that tingle in his toes this far up in the sky.

Hida popped the orderly in the throat. It was all she could think to do. As soon as the soft soles of his shoes padded to a stop on the tile floor, even before she looked him in the eyes, Hida knew she was in trouble.

His eyes and mouth shot open wide, but no sound came out. Blood spurted from the tiny puncture wound right where his chin met his neck. See you in the next life, buddy boy, she thought. The metallic talon retreated into her finger, her hand returning to its humanoid appearance.

She realized as she reached the storage room that a little bit of the orderly had splattered onto the corner of her uniform. No matter. She wouldn’t need it much longer. Closing the door behind her, she was hit with a rush of cool air that poured through the Hida-sized hole she had seared through the glass an hour earlier.

Ewan began to stir. She hushed him, but the sound came out as more of a hiss. Please, just keep it down one more minute!

She climbed on top of the cabinet, which rattled with vials (she was sure that a few shattered), careful to support the baby in the crook of her left arm. Then, looking over the sprawling glass city and the drop to the ground beneath her, she jumped. Ewan let out a shriek.

Her wings punched through the fabric of the orderly’s uniform. She sighed with relief. She was weightless, the wind billowing under the skin-covered mechanisms that extended from her shoulder blades. Below, she could see the Phorians as small specks. She felt a little bit sorry for them, after all. They’d been told a lie (well, several really) about the limits of the human body. They would go about their whole, endless existences confined to one idea of humanity: man in Hedarr’s image. Spread wide and propagate. Dig your nails in. Engulf.

Ewan squirmed in her arms. She could drop him from this height and end the whole thing now. Though the idea of watching the prince of Phora go splat on the pretty white tile excited her, she had a job to do.

And then she could see over the tops of the city towers, all the way to the border where Phora released its grip on Apheron. Excitement swelled inside her. The mossy, sweltering planet grew below, beckoning to her.

By the time that Orla’s father heard the scream, it was too late. Hida was a bat in the clear blue sky. They had Ewan. They were going to feed him to Apheron.