Ortus Nigenad is a creative man. This has often proved his downfall, but it has rarely ever taken a manifested form.

His venture out to run his modest errands began in good spirits. He paused at Koz Orphanage, as is sometimes his wont, to do what small tasks he might, and to regale those few children interested with stories from the Ninth. He rarely has more than three or four in attendance, which suits him well. He does not seek attention for every story he might tell.

When he leaves, he does so with an unusually light step, and a gladness in his heart. This may be why, at first, he does not attend to the distant echoing clang of metal that begins to follow him. The first glances he casts over his shoulder are brief and curious as he wends his way through the streets of Trench, no more troubled by them than he is by the many other strange ambient sounds of the world.

By the time he comes across another Sleeper, this is no longer the case. Ortus has his heavy black cloak clutched tight to his throat in one hand as he looks behind him with furtive fright, his other hand on the hilt of the slim rapier he wears at his waist. He might nearly bump into the personage he comes across, or careen past them unseeing in his apprehension, but either way, it is clear: this is a man who thinks himself hunted by something.

“It’s my turn,” a teenager in grey and black skull face paint says, peevishly, to another teenager painted the same, both of them wearing long black robes that swallow their thin frames.

“I’ve barely had her a minute,” his sister snaps back to him, jealously cradling the black swaddled bundle she has possession of for the moment, “Don’t be greedy.”

“You’re greedy -”

“You’re going to make her cry -”

“Both of you, shut up,” says another teenaged girl, rolling her eyes in her own death mask, “The other babies are sleeping? You morons?”

The Ninth House infant wing of their crèche is small. The five teenagers clustered in it almost fill up the room, brushing against the walls with their hanging prints of the human skeletons, all of them here in attendance upon the newest addition to the nursery. Two dark haired infants with cool brown skin sleep soundly in cribs side by side, one of them a few months older than the other, both used to periodic disturbances intruding on their sleep. They look like smaller versions of all of the youth assembled around them, alike in their dark, close-cropped hair and dark, nearly lightless eyes.

The baby currently being contested burbles and stretches, knocking askew the swaddling over her bright red hair as she does, and the first girl (Adah) coos to her fondly, chucking her under her chubby chin. Her brother (Zakaria) scowls, folding his arms over his chest and leaning back against the side of a loudly humming refrigerator.

“That’s better,” says Prisca, tutting, as she pulls open the refrigerator and produces an ancient, stained plastic bottle full of pale formula that she sets in a partitioned bottle warmer she flicks on with another low hum of inefficiently conducted power, “You’d think none of you ever saw a baby before.”

“We’ve never seen this baby before,” says a lean, spare young man whose face paint is the least elaborate of all of them, barely a sketch of a jawbone and dark markings around the eyes, “And Ortus hasn’t got to hold her at all, which is actually not fair, if we’re keeping count - which I am, by the way!”

“As if you know how to count -”

“As if you know anything about babies -”

“It’s all right, Mikael,” says the boy who must be Ortus, quietly and shyly. He is the tallest and broadest teenager in the room, but somehow conspires to occupy the least space, tucked in at the elbows and the shoulders as he hovers by the door. He looks unfinished at his age, not yet grown fully into the promise of his bones, but he still towers over Mikael as the smaller boy steps lightly over to him to prod his ribs.

“Nah,” Mikael says, briskly cheerful, “Hand lil’ Gideon over, Adah, or I’ll toss you and your lousy brother’s favourite old granny down a mineshaft.”

“You wouldn’t -”

“Wouldn’t dare -”

Ortus turns to the person standing next to him, crestfallen and embarrassed, and shrugs as if to say, what can you do - ?

And then he blinks, very quickly, twice, and understanding falls across him like a long shadow.

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