When I was freed, I didn’t recognise the world. Not just in sight. Every sensation had altered in my sightlessness, and I had to somehow come to grasp with the newness of everything all over again. As if I’d been reborn, but into something aged and hostile. My body was mine, but it wasn’t. I was removed from it, and it from me, the way my baby was still a part of, but not fully, me. The last time I’d looked down at myself, I’d been slim but not scrawny as I was now. The last time I’d seen myself, I had a small roundness in my abdomen, not this mound which hid my toes as I hung my head under the shower stream. 

I stared at my hands for a time, letting the warm water run through them. I remembered the crushing sensation of thinking the mittens would never be removed, and recalled joking with myself about not being able to hold a fork and at the time thinking I’d never actually be free again. I’d been right. I couldn’t hold my fingers straight. I hadn’t had the strength or dexterity to turn the shower head. Raeia had done it for me. Despite the warm water, my hands cramped and shook any time I tried to force my fingers beyond their curve. Again and again, I tried to straighten them. The blisters and chaffing stung, but they were a welcome distraction from the frustrations growing inside.

‘Can I help with anything?’ Raeia asked from the side. 

I ignored her, tried using my stomach as a lever to hold my fingers in place while I twisted my wrist in yet another attempt at flattening the hand. My tendons seared with pain along my palms, right up my arms, as if molten knives were being dragged through my veins.

‘You should do that gradually. It could cause more damage.’

I was about to snap a retort she didn’t deserve when I saw movement near my thumb. My heart stuttered and filled and quivered with an overwhelming emotion. Was it dread or excitement? Love or fear? I had no idea. But I stopped forcing my hands into shapes, and let them rest on my stomach in their new natural curve. The baby kicked again and I slid a hand to meet the bumpy pressure. It felt like I was meeting them for the first time without any barriers. Just me and them. 

Tears ran from my eyes and mixed with the shower water. I trembled as my heart seemed to tighten and squirm with the effort of containing whatever these emotions were. All of them, maybe. Every emotion a human could possibly experience, all muddled and seeping from my exhausted brain. I’d been so numb for so long I hadn’t realised I might feel again, and now that I was feeling, I didn’t know what they all meant. I supposed it didn’t matter, really. We were finally together, and I was absolutely terrified and thrilled at the prospect of holding them in my arms so very soon.

I looked across the shower room to Raeia, who stood with a towel looped over her arm and a grey robe wrapped over her body. It was strange to look towards her and actually see her. I still expected to turn now and again, and be faced with a blue-black darkness instead of true sight. My vision quality hadn’t decreased, at least not noticeably. The opposite, maybe. Or else I had taken up a strange habit of squinting while being masked and I wasn’t quite able to kick it. I couldn’t remember. I blocked out as much of my masked-existence as I possibly could.

‘Can I come help you?’ Her brown eyes were soft and wide like a doe’s, and she moved with the quiet grace of one, too. The dark waves of her hair were tied back, but the flyaways fell loose and framed her full face. Everything about her was warmth and balance.

I nodded.  

Raeia came to me without pause. She left the towel on a dry bench and continued to my side. ‘Let me wash your hair.’ 

I felt my face heat. She had washed me before, but I’d never seen it and I’d never been switched on enough to think about it. I started to wonder at the state of my hair after its months under metal, but I shut down the thoughts. It was probably as much a mess as my hands. I was terrified to look in the mirrors for fear of what had become of me. The corners of my jaw and temples throbbed under their new exposure and I could only imagine the state of my face, but I didn’t want to imagine. Better to forget I had a face people could see, and hair people could wash, and–

‘Here,’ Raeia pointed to a wide-pronged comb on the bannister before me. It sat beside a sponge and tubs of shampoo, conditioner and soap. Before I could panic over my lack of vigilance, she said, ‘Pass it to me, please, if you can.’ 

I watched Raeia work around me. She started behind, taking small clumps of hair at a time, and used generous scoops of conditioner through the mess of knots. When she came to stand in front of me, I was surprised by the height of her. She wasn’t taller by much, but the couple of inches was enough to make me feel feeble. The condensation had made strands of her hair stick to her brown skin, but she didn’t complain about it frizzing or her robe becoming soaked from her proximity to me. 

‘You can turn the water off.’

‘No, no, it’s better with the flow.’ She scooped her hand through the conditioner again and proceeded to kneed it through a section she’d pulled forwards to hang over my chest. The smell from the substance was mercifully faint. Anything more would have overwhelmed me. In fact, having her this close was setting me on edge. 

‘It’s amazing. I thought it would have been unsalvageable.’ 

‘Magic hair, I guess,’ I mused, though my voice came out noticeably frigid.

‘It’ll take time, Blue, but you’ll come back to yourself. I promise.’

I nodded. I didn’t believe her.

‘You have lovely eyes,’ she said. 

‘Magic eyes, too,’ I said flatly. 

She laughed. She thought I was joking. I didn’t have the heart to tell her my dad had used a moon to make me this way. Maybe my hair was okay because the moons thrived in darkness, or maybe Raeia was lying to make me feel better. 

When she was finished, Raeia set aside the brush and clumps of dead hair, and took up a sponge. She lathered it in soap and began to clean my body the way she had done countless times before. Seeing her do it made my cheeks heat. 

‘I can…’

‘I can stop if you prefer.’ Raeia stopped and met my gaze. 

‘I can try.’

‘You can try if you like, and you know best,’ she said, ‘But you’re in enough pain. Let your hands rest.’

I nodded and Raeia continued. 

When sleep tried to take me that night, I couldn’t allow it. I was terrified of closing my eyes and possibly waking to a blue-black metal constriction. And it was so quiet. With the incessant humming gone I nearly forgot what it meant to be sane. But I was so tired, and all I wanted to do, all I could do, was wish for sleep to take me from the reality I faced. My family was gone. Instinct told me that my new family (the Contis) was under threat. I would have a child soon. On this abysmal rock. I had no idea where Day was or whether he was safe. The Scillas were obviously interested in him. Every one of the soulmaster’s evoked memories had centred around interactions with Day. It couldn’t have been coincidence. I’d unleashed plenty of blacked-out chaos without him. The Kagosae still awaited me.

‘Are you awake?’ I croaked. 

Theo shifted slightly. The Scillas had left him in my cell as Raeia helped me wash. He had remained sitting on the floor in my cell the entire time, had only moved to rest his back against one of the free walls near the foot of my bed. When I’d returned, I had forced him to join me in the cot as we had done for weeks before. Seeing the cell was so new to me, having the now familiar comfort of his weight beside me softened the blow ever so slightly. 

I rolled over so I could look at him. Such a novelty, still. I kept staring without blinking for as long as I could, and he didn’t try to stop me. ‘Have you thought about escaping here?’ I asked. It was an abysmal hush of a thing, my voice. 

‘Of course.’ Theo’s tone was hushed too, but it didn’t sound like he was draped in the same distress as me. How could he be? Beasts we were, but different kinds of beasts. The life brewing in my womb meant I had a tangible leash.

‘I can’t stay.’

‘What about Corina Bain?’ I had told him about Bain’s conditions and the promises Veil had made to her, but those plans relied on me still being under their grasp at all. 

‘If I get away before they can take my baby I’ll never have to think about her again.’

‘You really think you can hide well enough? Tassuri’s arms are long.’

‘I know you can.’

‘You want me to come with you.’ Theo shifted onto his back. He fumbled with his hands, picking at the skin round his nails. ‘If not you, they will likely send someone else for Dion’s life.’

It wasn’t the turn I expected, but I rummaged for a thread of logic in my tired brain. ‘You want me to do it?’

‘I’ve seen how you fight. I think you could.’ He glanced at my body, not unkindly, but it made my chest tighten in grief for the mobility I’d lost. 

‘If I was my old self,’ I said, before he could.

‘You can be fit again.’

‘Why do you want it to be me?’

‘Because he’s hard to kill, but you know him now, and I know you could live through it.’  

I was about to tell him how grateful I was to have someone rooting for my life when even I wasn’t, but a shrieking pain overcame my abdomen and it was all I could do to keep breathing.