"No! No!" Leagh screamed, and grabbed at her belly.
It was completely flat. Barren.
As barren as the landscape about her. She ran, more than half-doubled over her empty belly,through a plain of hot red pebbles. A dry wind blew in her face, whipping her hair about her eyes.
The sky was dull and grey, full of leaden dreams.
"No, no," she whispered. She was trapped in a land that had stolen her child to feed its ownhopelessness. Both sky and ground were sterile, and both had trapped her.
"No." Leagh sank to the ground, gasping in pain at the heat of the pebbles, and thenignoring the burns to curl up in a ball.
Nothing was left. Best to just give up. Best to die.
Nothing worth living for.
She cried, her breath jerking up through her chest and throat in great gouts of misery. Shewanted to die. Why couldn't she die? Wasn't there anyone about who could help her todie? Why couldn't someone fust put a knife to her (hopelessly barren) belly and slide it in? Thepain would be nothing compared to this ... this horror that surrounded her.
This desert. This barrenness.
Leagh cried harder, and grabbed at a handful of pebbles, loathing them with an intensity shehad never felt for anything or anyone before. She threw them viciously away from her, thengrabbed at another handful, throwing them away as well.
When she grabbed at her third handful she stopped, aghast at her actions.
Why blame the land for her misfortunes? If she had lost the child she carried, then how couldshe blame this desert?
A cool breeze blew across and lifted the hair from her face.
A tiny rock squirrel inched across her hand, its tiny velvety nose investigating her palm forfood.
Leagh smiled, and then laughed as she felt a welcome heaviness in her belly. Sherested her hand over her stomach and felt the thudding of her child's heart, then ...
... then she gasped in wonder and scrabbled her other hand deep in among the pebbles abouther.
A heartbeat thudded out from the belly of the earth as well, and it matched —
beat for beat
— that of her child's.
"What are you telling me?" she whispered, and then cried with utter rapture as the pebblesexplained it to her.
Leagh raised her head and stared at the others. A hand rested on her belly, and a strange, powerful light shone from her eyes. "Faraday," she said.
Faraday knew what it was she would confront, but her prior knowledge did not comfort her at all within the reality of her vision.
She was trapped, as she had always been trapped (time after time after time). She had trusted
— the trees this time — and they had turned their backs on her and left her to this.
A thicket of thorns.
Bands of thornbush enveloped her, pressing into the white flesh of arm and breast and bellyand creeping between her legs and binding her to their own cruel purpose.
Thorns studded her throat and cheek so that whenever she breathed, blood spurted and thethorns dug deeper.
Must I always bleed, she thought, and must I always suffer the despair of entrapment?
"It's a bitch of a job," muttered a thorn close to her ear, "but someone's got to do it."
Yes, yes, Faraday thought, someone has got to do it. She had been so sure that she'd notsuccumb to the temptation of sacrifice any more, but here she was, embracing it again.
Someone would surely have to die if Tencendor was to be saved, and Faraday supposed she'dhave to do it all over again.
Painfully.
Trapped, trapped by the land. Trapped by its need to live at her expense.
The thorns twisted and roped, and Faraday screamed.
It seemed the right thing to do, somehow.
"You have a choice," said the thorns. "You can succumb and the pain will end ... reasonablyfast. Or you can fight and tear yourself apart in the effort to free yourself. Which will it be?"
"I. . . I . . . "
"Quick! The decision cannot take forever, you know!"
"I. . . . "
