Chapter 2 - The Voice Lied

Mark opened his eyes. Everything swam in and out of focus. Someone was carrying him, each step rocking his body gently from side to side. Voices echoed somewhere above him, strange and incomprehensible. Beneath them came a thin, miserable cry that took him several seconds to recognize as his own.
Alive, then.
Why could he barely see? He tried to gather his thoughts, but they slipped away before he could hold onto them. Medication, probably. He had spent enough time in hospitals to recognize that particular kind of blankness.
He felt himself lowered onto something soft. Warmth pressed against one side of his face, and beneath it came a heartbeat, slow and steady.
His eyes closed again before he could make sense of anything else.

 
Wakefulness came in fragments: a blurred face, a woman’s voice, the feeling of being carried somewhere. Then darkness again. It might have been terrifying if he had been capable of holding onto the thought long enough to realize it.

 
Eventually, something changed. His mind was still dulled, but for the first time he could follow a thought without losing it halfway through. He found himself sitting on packed dirt, his little hands smeared with some unidentified substance.
Little hands.
Mark stared at his tiny fists in disbelief. Then he looked down at the rest of his body, at two chubby legs sticking out from beneath a tunic. Or maybe a burlap sack.
What the hell?
Before he could do anything else, someone stepped in front of him.
For a split second, the woman looked enormous. Her long blonde hair was gathered into a thick braid over one shoulder, though several strands had escaped around a face weathered by work and exhaustion. There were dark circles beneath her green eyes, but nothing uncertain in the way she bent down and lifted him against her chest.
She murmured something in a language he didn’t recognize. Mark caught individual sounds, but they meant nothing to him.
When he looked up, she smiled and poked his nose.
Mark stared.
She did it again.
Humiliating.
The woman seemed delighted by his reaction. A moment later, she carried him into a larger room crowded with children. Some sat near the hearth while others chased one another between rough wooden beds. One nearly ran into her before being caught by the back of his shirt and redirected by the woman without so much as a glance.
The room smelled of smoke, damp wood, and too many people sharing too little space. A breeze drifted through a narrow opening in the wall, drawing Mark’s attention.
It was barely a window, just a gap in the wall fitted with two wooden shutters. Primitive, but effective.
Three beds, one table, a hearth, and far too many children for the space. Whatever this place was, money was clearly scarce.
His vision blurred again, and before long he was asleep.
For a time, his life became little more than brief moments of awareness separated by long stretches of sleep. As his mind slowly cleared, one thought kept resurfacing.
The Voice had promised him another chance. Looking at his tiny hands, Mark wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. When he had asked for a fresh start, he had meant in his old life. Not as an infant.
He went back over the Voice’s words. His death had been a mistake. Then there had been the promise of a gift, and something about a System.
So where was it?
Mark waited.
Nothing.
System.
Status.
Show Status.
System activate.

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Open Status.
Anything?
Nothing happened.
Mark stared at his tiny hands.
The Voice is a fucking liar.
A small mistake, it had said. As though being struck by lightning and reborn as an infant qualified as a minor inconvenience.
Apparently, his second chance meant starting over in a body that couldn’t walk, speak, or feed itself. The Voice had neglected to mention that part. Years stretched ahead of him before he could claim even the smallest piece of independence. The thought was suffocating, but complaining about it wasn’t going to change anything.

 
Mark spent the next few weeks frustrated with almost everything. Thinking about how helpless he was only brought back memories he preferred to avoid, so he gave himself something else to do.
He started with his body. Every day, he pushed against its limits, relearning movements most people mastered before they were old enough to remember doing so. It was exhausting, but the process felt unpleasantly familiar. He had already spent years of one life rebuilding a body that refused to cooperate.
Language came next. He listened whenever people spoke, searching for patterns, familiar sounds, anything that might help him understand where he was.
Unfortunately, people rarely spoke to him. Being a baby explained some of it, but not the way the other children behaved around him.
Kids who normally barreled through the house without fear grew quiet near his crib. Some stared openly. Others refused to look at him at all. More than once, he caught one of them reaching toward him only to hesitate halfway and pull their hand back.
Nobody played with him or tried to make him laugh. He told himself it shouldn’t matter. He had spent years alone before, yet the isolation bothered him more now than he wanted to admit.
Even his mother’s behavior felt strange. In front of the others, she treated him with careful indifference. She fed him, washed him, and changed him when necessary, but little more.
When they were alone, she was different. She would sometimes stroke his hair, speak to him softly, or rest a hand on his head for a few moments longer than necessary, always pulling away quickly if someone came near.
Mark didn’t know what they saw when they looked at him. But whatever it was, it made people nervous.
His eldest sister was the exception. Mark was staring at the smoke-darkened ceiling when a face framed by bright blonde hair suddenly filled most of his vision.
The girl looked perhaps nine or ten and had clearly taken after their mother: the same light hair, similar eyes, though hers held far more curiosity than exhaustion.
For a long moment, she simply stared at him.
Mark stared back.
After a while, she nodded to herself as if she had made up her mind, then slipped both hands beneath him and lifted him from the crib.
She settled him against her shoulder and began to sing quietly. She had a rather lovely voice. The singing startled him at first, but soon he found himself laughing. She seemed pleased that he liked it, and for the next few minutes she kept singing, pacing slowly around the room with him in her arms.
When she finally stopped, her voice had grown a little hoarse, but that didn’t keep her from talking. And she talked a lot. He wasn’t even sure if the words were meant for him, but it didn’t bother him.
The creak of hinges cut the monologue short. His mother entered, took him from his sister, and said something sharp. The girl answered immediately, and the argument escalated.
The girl held her ground. At one point, she even reached for him. Small fingers closed around his arm and held on until his mother pulled him away.
He couldn’t follow a single word of it. Everything happened so fast that all he could make sense of was the anger in their voices. He struggled to breathe, and his heart started hammering in his chest.
Mark felt his face do something he hadn’t decided to do. Then he was crying, which surprised him almost as much as it seemed to surprise his mother.
The whole scene was interrupted when a big, burly man walked in. Mark assumed the man would intervene, but he only listened, took a drag from his pipe, shrugged, and walked back outside.
After one final sharp remark from his mother, the girl ran out of the house with tears in her eyes. Mark kept watching the empty doorway. She had held him for only a few minutes, yet he already wished she would come back.
His mother finally began to soothe him, her voice softening as she tried to calm him down.
Whatever frightened them, Mark still had no idea what it was.

Mark kept thinking about the argument long after the shouting stopped, especially the way his mother had reacted when his sister picked him up.
In the evenings, the whole family gathered in the largest room of the house. Considering the only competition came from the kitchen and a cramped storeroom, “largest” was a somewhat generous description.
Mark watched them with quiet curiosity, trying to pick out individual words from a language that seemed to have far too many consonants.
While the adults talked, his siblings turned the three large beds pushed against one wall into a playground. One belonged to the parents. The other two somehow accommodated everyone else.
Mark, meanwhile, had a crib. He felt almost aristocratic.
Not that the crib itself was much to boast about. The wood was rough, worn smooth in places by years of use, and one of the rails bore what looked suspiciously like bite marks.
One evening, Mark noticed a faint mist around his mother’s shoulders and assumed it was smoke from the hearth. It drifted upward in a lazy strand before disappearing near the ceiling, blackened by years of smoke.
He blinked. The mist remained.
Mark looked toward his eldest sister and saw the same thing rising from her. His father and the other children had it too.
He had spent weeks learning the limits of these eyes. Blurred shapes at a distance were normal, and dim light made everything worse, but neither explained what he was seeing now. The mist remained no matter how often he blinked.
He had no idea whether the mist was magic or simply something normal in this world that he had never encountered before.
A faint sensation brushed against his awareness, too weak for him to identify.
For the first time, he wondered whether looking at the mist meant something could look back.