Lost Child LLC  

Prologue:

 

The child’s story began when his mother’s ended.

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The woman labored for no more than an hour before the newborn parted from her. His eyes peeled open to stare at the Pazish Nun who delivered him, then collapsed again as he wailed a healthy cry from a healthy child.

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The mother peered down at her son. She had changed since arriving at the birthing home three months earlier, and looked anything but healthy. Her eyes, once green and lively, now appeared a stormy grey. Muscle had melted from her body, and the roots of her colorful hair glowed ghostly white in the dim lighting. No doctors in the city had been able to diagnose her unusual deterioration, and now the young, beautiful woman named Tanshanine looked an unnatural thing. Her mismatched eyes lost their focus as her head fell onto the pillow below.

 

Dead, before she could even hold him, thought the Pazish Nun. The child’s crying ceased as suddenly and the tiny creature seemed content in her arms. He, like all the children born to Uncut street urchins, would be raised in relative comfort at the orphanage for the next seven years. The Pazish Order would feed and educate him, while the city’s Inquisitors tested his aptitude. If he excelled at his studies, he could be sold to an apprenticeship. If he did not, he’d serve out his remaining decade of life in the city’s slums.

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A death sentence, the Pazish Nun knew. The destitute conditions in lower levels of the city saw to the demise of many orphans, yet it was not exposure, violence, nor starvation that killed most of them. The biggest threat to the children in this city, and around the planet, was a disease called the first rot.

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The Pazish Nun turned the child’s right arm over in her hands. His teslac organ glowed faintly underneath his skin. A network of veins extended from his forearm, reaching down to the tips of his fingers, and upwards to his shoulder, where the tangle of lines dove into his torso and disappeared. The organ would speed his growth and mental development, help him fight illness, and make him proliferant, but in 16 years’ time, it would also wilt and poison him. Only surgically, and methodically, cutting out the organ would keep this boy from a dark fate.

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The Pazish Nun looked at the mother’s unscarred forearm; she was Uncut. While the rot spared women until they reached their twenties, Tanshanine would only have been able to spend a few years with her son before the disease took her. If she even wanted to, the Pazish Nun thought, aware that only half the mothers giving birth that day would choose to stay at Deep Home. The fleeting lives for the Uncut meant fast lifestyles. Their gravitation towards carnal pleasure resulted in hundreds of Uncut women giving birth to litters newborns every day. More often the parents would return to the slums, while their children would remain to fuel the city’s economy. The cycle of abuse sickened the Pazish Nun, she regretted her part in it.

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She looked again at the boy cradled in her arms. He shared his mother’s ghostly appearance, and the sight of him turned her stomach. Fear rose in her as she wondered what the Inquisitors would do with such an anomalous child. Yet, as she stared at him, his white hair and grey eyes slowly filled with colors suiting a child born in the city of Ehtlentin. He had an abnormal birth, and the Pazish Nun suspected, seemed destined for an abnormal life. A feeling of hope stirred in her.

 

“You will be different,” she whispered.