Tours of the Black Clock

119

DANIA DOESN’T KNOW WHAT grows in her, as she crosses Davenhall’s mainstreet to her hotel room. She only knows it isn’t of her, that something’s being made inside her that’s not of her tissue and soul. Several times, over at the tavern where she’s still trying to work, the nausea and pain inside her is so startling it nearly stops her heart. At first she assumes it’s because she’s almost fifty years old, after all. She’s never had a baby before and therefore has no real reason to suppose her experience is uncommon. But now some months have passed and she understands, instinctively, that something in her means to be formed and born of a will that isn’t her own. In the middle of mainstreet, not far from where she once guarded the body of Consuelo Garcia, she says, No. No, she says; the lover of all these years, who came to me unseen when he chose, will not have this victory. What’s in me is mine, and though I might have chosen never to have it in me at all, I won’t relinquish anything else anymore. All the men, she tells herself, and all their history, may have believed I was theirs to manifest whatever nightmare they needed to hurl free of themselves; perhaps they all believed that this presumption extended even to this thing in my belly. No; again no; no again and again and again. No. She gets to her room and lies down, and feels her belly and the movement in it. Conscious only of the sunlight through the trees beyond her window, she prepares to fight.