Issue #1: REBIRTH

You step into The Black Hand Side and never see coming the smack upside the back of your head.

“Girl, didn’t I tell yo’ narrow ass if you come up in here agin I was gone snatch a knot in yo’ head?”

Big Mama Black has a heavy hand. Tears come to your eyes. The cowl of your lurksuit is seamless. It is tight. It is thin. It is sensitive. It is bonded to you by SoulSkin. It does not offer much protection.

“I’m sorry, Big Mama Black,” you tell her, “but I’m looking for Roshan. Do you happen to know where he is?”

Big Mama Black puts her hands on her hips and twists her mouth as she looks down her nose at you. She does not like you. She has never liked you. She will never like you.

The motorcycles surrounded the two brothers in the abandoned, dusty parking lot. They were lions about to take down injured gazelles. Back to back, the hot Phoenix sun bore down on them as the laughs and jeers of the scavengers assaulted them. Kalup knew his machete and Adrian’s guns might take out a couple of the barbarians, but death pretty much stood as a guarantee if more drastic measures found themselves unimplemented. They’d traveled too far for things to end here. Not this close. “Adrian, you have to!”

His brother screamed in frustration which only made the motorcycle gang hoot and holler more. The Twisting made human interaction a brutal affair. The gang could just want their supplies or want to boil them in a pot. Starvation drove people to primal places.

It’s midnight and I can smell the new moon through the cracks in the concrete. This organism in my womb has heightened my senses in unnatural ways. I can hear the Council’s hushed arguments through the walls of my cell as they contemplate my death, their words carried by the night wind through the cracks in the concrete that constitutes the community prison.

Old habits die hard.

We’ve been on this planet for less than 10 years and a prison was the first building we constructed. We have spent the majority of our lives behind prison walls. And here I sit, face pressed against cold concrete, trying desperately to hear my fate, a future that I reclaimed when I escaped the child prisons on earth.

Prayers of thanks steal through my lips at Mother Night’s embrace. The sun is nearly set. The villagers of Engosfur Pools flank my path, a fence of crossed arms and stony faces singing in twilight’s gathering murk. My every step closer to the Elder’s Rise is spit in their faces. I have an urge to cast aside my tattered body shroud and taunt them, finally, as an equal, but it won’t do for a flash of pride to stir Mother Night’s displeasure and invoke my madness. Not this night.

“Stop where you stand, thief!” Deryat yells, bursting into my path. The villagers’ song dies mid-praise. They expected this, expected me to fail this task and remain as I am.

Baba and I bolted through the forest as fast as our short legs would take us, our small steps not nearly enough to distance us from the Ituri following close behind. We dodged through the knotted tangle of trees, veering around spiky cycad palms that scratched my face and chest. For centuries, our advantage had been stealth, not speed.

I leapt over a fallen branch and lifted my snout, tasting the air. The Ituri were not far behind; I could hear their grunts, smell the piquant sweat basting their arms and crotches, marinating their backs.

I did not know how old my baba was and only had a vague idea of my own age. But there had been twelve favored siblings before me. And I had watched his and mama’s coating turn brittle, straw-like over the last year. He was no longer young. His snout hung open, his tongue, age-darkened along the edge, lolling out. He was tiring; we didn’t have much time.

“It is almost time,” Chesirah smiled despite her screaming fingers. They were a blur, working feverishly to finish lacing together the last of her dark braids before Nazar the dollmaker made it home. She wove one braid into a dozen others and then a dozen more until she wore a high crown of them pinned in place by the dollmaker’s thick needles. She needed them to make her escape.

Fenox as a rule were kept creatures, usually by those of means, influence and the odd eccentric streak. They needed a safe place to burn and someone to keep their ashes. Their keepers needed a conversation piece; something subservient and entertaining.