The city had quieted again, as it sometimes did in the midday lull, when the air shimmered like a lens and the clouds hung like gauze above the ruined cranes by the Sea Gates out past Broadway where the shoreline now rose. Kailani lay curled on the cracked green velvet couch that still smelled faintly of eucalyptus and mildew from when Jay had hauled it in off a collapsing veranda last fall. It had become her gravity anchor, her command post, her womb within a womb.
Pregnancy, in the post-Flux world, was not the sacred and sparkling phenomenon the midwives of old had whispered about—or maybe it was, but in a different dialect. Less glowing goddess, more dark feminine; less Venus on a clamshell, more Persephone dragging a sledge of blood through liminal tunnels beneath a burning city.
Kailani had never planned to carry a child in a city like this. The rules of biology were slipperier now, ever since the Flux warped gene lines, timelines, sometimes even memories. Some women never showed but birthed full-term; others swelled like moons and gave birth to water or ash. Hers was the more traditional path, if such a word could still be used in a world stitched together by biotech cults, ration codes, and fractured quantum fields.
The baby—if it was a baby—was making her crave things that had gone extinct before she was even born. Starburst candy, street tacos from a taco truck on Folsom she swore she had never visited. Chalk. Vinegar. Eel meat. Miso ice cream. Sometimes she’d dream of foods she’d never eaten and wake up starving, her tongue coated in copper and the taste of lime Skittles.
Lately, she could feel something more than just the baby kicking.
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