Page 214 of May: Bloom & Bane

A wail comes out of me with no warning at all.

“Oh no,” Elena says, already crying herself. She yanks tissues out of a box and passes me a handful. “C’mon, mama. Let’s get you up on the table so we can see this little sweet pea.”

Sage lifts me onto the crinkling paper of the exam table, adjusting the blanket so it covers my legs while leaving my belly exposed.

Elena rolls a stool beside me and snaps on a pair of gloves. She squirts some blue gel onto my belly, and I yelp.

“What is that vile slush?” Ashán snaps. “Is she trying to freeze our nestling?”

“Sorry, Eden. I’m not used to giving the animals a warning.” She picks up the wand. “Okay. Let’s go find your girl.”

One of Sage’s hands cradles my skull, the other is breaking my hand, every ounce of his attention fixed on the dark screen angled toward the wall.

She presses the wand low against my belly and drags it slowly. Gray static swims across the monitor.

She frowns, adjusts a dial, and tilts the wand. “Huh.”

Sage’s hand goes rigid underneath my head. “Huh? What is huh? Why is there a huh?”

“No—nothing’s wrong, baby is fine, her heartbeat’s gorgeous. Listen—” She taps a button, and the room fills with a fast galloping whumpwhumpwhump that knocks the air out of me. My daughter’s heart. I’m listening to my daughter’s heart.

“—it’s just, uh.” Elena tilts her head at the screen. “Normally there’s a, you know. A sac. An amniotic sac. And this is reading more like a…” She trails off, tilting the wand the other way. “…a pod.” She gets closer to the screen, squinting her eyes. “Well what do you know… she really is a sweet pea.”

Another sob escapes me.

“Hold on, let me—” Elena nudges a dial, tilts the wand half an inch, and the static sharpens.

There, inside the curved walls of the pod, floating in her own little world like she hasn’t a single care in the universe—is my baby. The soft slope of a nose. A rounded cheek. One tiny fist tucked beneath her chin, and a thin curl of vine wound loose around her body, like she’s grown herself a blanket and pulled it close.

She’s no longer a flutter under my ribs or a hungry pull on the greenhouse magic. She’s real. A grainy, devastatingly small face that I would already die for.

Sage lets out a sharp, breathless gasp, and the petals across his chest all burst open at once, every bloom blossoming in a soundless explosion of pastels. The jars of salve on the counter rattle as the shelves sprout in a fine green fuzz

“Oop—yep, that’s—I’ve always wanted a chia pet,” she says, glancing away from the screen.

Ash is silent, studying the screen with unnerving intensity.

“Rahnové? Are you⁠—”

The wand drifts higher, and Elena hums. “Okay, sweet girl, let’s check that heart while you’re being so cooperative.”

The screen flickers where the wand passes over the small cage of her ribs, the gray image blossoms. Light pulses in her chest, in perfect time with the galloping beat filling the room, glowing through the grayscale like a lantern behind a curtain.

Elena leans back, then taps the monitor twice with one gloved knuckle.

“That’s… probably an artifact,” she says.

It’s not an artifact.

Through the bond, I feel something cracking down the center of Ashán.

“That’s mine,” he whispers. “Ash’kaela, the light in her chest—that’s mine.”

“She took the best part of you first,” I whisper. The frost at my spine shudders.

“Next time I do something like this, I have to make sure not to schedule it during my period,” Elena whispers under her breath. She punches a button, and something whirs inside the machine. “Every mama leaves my clinic with pictures. House rule. Usually they’re of foxes.”

A glossy strip of paper slowly prints out of the slot. Shadow pours down Sage’s left arm, his green skin swallowed by black, vines hardening into pale ridges of bone. His fingers stretch into elegant white tips, and Elena freezes with the printout half-extended. Her eyes track up his transformed arm.