The Glass Empire (The Mire Diaspora #1)

1. The Valley, Twelve Years Ago

The Valley, Twelve Years Ago

Monika

The barn smelled of hay and blood before I ever saw either.

That's what I remember most—the smell. Thick and sweet and wrong, the way a living thing smells when it's trying not to die. Hay was supposed to smell like summer, like the dried gold of August afternoons. But blood had its own season, and tonight it was drowning everything else out.

I was ten years old, barefoot in the straw, my nightgown already ruined.

"Hold her steady, Moni."

My mother's voice came from somewhere behind the cow's flank, calm as still water.

She didn't sound afraid. She never sounded afraid, not even when the blood was this bright, this fresh, this wrong.

I pressed my palms against the cow's heaving side and felt the animal shudder—a long, deep tremor that started in her bones and traveled through my fingers like a message I couldn't quite read.

Bella was her name. She'd been my father's favorite since she was a calf, born the same year I was, and we'd grown up together in the way that farm children grow up with animals—not as pets, not as friends, but as something older and stranger.

Fellow travelers. Witnesses. She'd licked my face when I was a toddler, stood beside me while I learned to walk, watched me through the fence while I played in the mud.

And now she was trying to push a calf into the world backward, and the world wasn't having it.

"Breech," my mother said, and I heard the word like I'd heard it a hundred times before. "Legs are folded. She can't do it alone."

I knew what came next. I'd watched my mother do this before—twice, three times, enough that the shape of it had carved itself into my bones. But watching and helping were two different things, and the weight of my palms against Bella's side felt like the most important thing I'd ever touched.

"Arms are smaller than mine," my mother said. She was kneeling now, her sleeves rolled past her elbows, her hands already slick with something I didn't want to name. "I can reach, but I can't see. You're going to be my eyes. Can you do that?"

I nodded. My throat was too tight for words.

"Need you to say it, Moni."

"Yes, Mama."

She smiled. It was a tired smile, the kind she wore at the end of every day, but there was something else underneath it. Something that looked like recognition. Like she was seeing me for the first time and finding something she'd been looking for.

"Good girl. Now come here and tell me what you see."

I moved around Bella's flank and knelt beside my mother in the straw. The smell was stronger here—copper and earth and something else, something I would learn to call the smell of effort. The smell of a body doing something it wasn't sure it could finish.

My mother's arm was buried inside Bella to the shoulder. The cow was lowing now, a deep, rhythmic sound that vibrated through the floorboards and up through my knees. She wasn't screaming. Not yet. But she was close.

"Look," my mother said. "Tell me what you see."

I looked.

The calf's hind legs were visible—just barely, two small hooves wrapped in something slick and shining. But they were wrong. They were facing the wrong direction, and above them I could see the curve of a tail and something else, something I didn't have a name for yet.

"The legs are up," I said. "They're bent at the knee."

"Good. What else?"

"The—the back is facing down. Toward the ground."

"Toward the ground," she repeated. "So if she keeps pushing—"

"The legs will go up and she'll tear."

My mother's eyes found mine in the lantern light. They were the same color as mine—brown as river stones, brown as the dirt we planted in every spring. But hers had something mine didn't. They had years. They had the weight of all the things she'd seen and done and survived.

"You've got the hands for this, Moni." Her voice was quiet, almost a whisper, like she was telling me a secret the barn wasn't allowed to hear. "Steady. Some people run from the blood. You lean in. That's a gift and a curse."

She pulled her arm out, slow and careful, and wiped her hands on a rag tucked into her apron. Then she reached for my hands—my small, ten-year-old hands with their chewed fingernails and the callus on my palm from the rope swing—and held them in hers.

"You're going to do this now."

I felt the word no rise up in my throat. I felt the word can't push against the back of my teeth. But I looked at Bella's face—the dark curve of her eye, the wet flare of her nostril, the way she was watching me like she'd been watching me my whole life—and I swallowed both words down.

"Tell me what to do."

My mother guided my hands into the warmth.

I won't pretend I wasn't afraid. I was. The heat inside Bella was like nothing I'd ever felt—a living heat, pulsing and shifting and full of sounds I could hear through my palms. The calf's legs were slick and small, and when I found them, they twitched against my fingers like they were trying to kick me away.

"Push the legs forward," my mother said. "Toward the head. Then hook your fingers around the hooves and pull them toward you. You're going to feel something pop. That's the hip. Don't stop when it happens."

I did what she said. My fingers found the bend of the knee, pushed forward, felt the joint slide into a new position. The calf kicked again, harder this time, and something deep in Bella's belly shifted. I hooked my fingers around the hooves and pulled.

The hip popped. It felt like a knuckle cracking underwater—muffled and wrong and absolutely correct all at once.

I kept pulling, and the legs straightened, and suddenly I could see what I was doing.

The calf was turning. Not all the way, not yet, but enough.

The hooves were pointed toward the light.

"Now the other one," my mother said. "Same thing. You have time."

I didn't feel like I had time. I felt like the world was contracting around me, shrinking to the size of Bella's body and the small space inside her. But I found the other leg—bent at the same angle, tucked the same way—and I did it again. Push. Hook. Pull. Pop.

The second hip released with a sound that made me grit my teeth.

"Good," my mother said. "Now pull. Gentle. Steady. You're not pulling the calf out. You're helping Bella push it. You're dancing with her. Feel the rhythm."

I felt it. Bella's body clenched around my arm, a wave of pressure that started somewhere I couldn't see and ended at my shoulder. I pulled. The calf moved. Bella pushed again, and I pulled again, and somewhere in the middle of that strange, ancient dance, the calf's head appeared.

It was small and wet and perfectly formed, and for one terrible moment I thought it was dead. Then it blinked. Then it sneezed.

My mother laughed—a real laugh, bright and sudden and so out of place in the bloody straw that I almost looked around to see who'd made the sound.

But it was her. It was my mother, laughing like she was watching something beautiful, and the sound of it made my chest ache in a way I didn't have words for.

"Pull the rest," she said. "Slow now. The shoulders are the widest part."

I pulled. The shoulders came. The rest of the calf slid out in a rush of fluid and blood and something that looked like smoke in the lantern light, and suddenly my arms were full of a wet, trembling animal that was trying very hard to breathe.

"Put it in front of her face," my mother said. "She needs to lick it. That's how they bond."

I dragged the calf—she, I saw now, a she—through the straw and placed her in front of Bella's nose.

Bella's tongue came out, rough and dark, and she began to clean her daughter with long, patient strokes.

The calf shivered. Then she shivered again.

Then she opened her mouth and made a sound—a small, indignant cry that was almost a moo but not quite, like she was practicing for something she didn't understand yet.

I sat back in the straw and watched them, mother and daughter, breathing together in the lantern light.

My mother put her hand on my shoulder. Her fingers were still wet, still warm, and I could feel the shape of them through the thin cotton of my nightgown.

"You did good, Moni."

"The calf," I said. "Is she going to be okay?"

"She's going to be fine." My mother knelt beside me and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. The hair was damp with sweat and something else, something that might have been blood or might have been water, and I didn't care. "You want to name her?"

I looked at the calf. She was still shivering, still making those small, indignant sounds, but she was pushing herself up now—front legs first, then back, wobbling like a newborn deer.

Bella was still licking her, still murmuring in that low, rumbling way that cows have, and the sound of it made something in my chest loosen.

"Mercy," I said.

My mother tilted her head. "Mercy?"

"Because she could have died. But she didn't. Somebody gave her mercy."

My mother was quiet for a long moment. The barn was quiet too—the kind of quiet that comes after something important, when the world is catching its breath. Even Bella had stopped her lowing. The only sound was Mercy's small, wet breaths and the distant hum of the propane heater in the corner.

"That's a good name," my mother said finally. "That's a very good name."

She stood up and offered me her hand. I took it, and she pulled me to my feet, and we stood together in the straw and watched the calf find her feet for the first time.

Mercy's legs were too long for her body, and her ears were too big for her head, and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Then my mother coughed.

It wasn't a big cough. It wasn't the kind of cough that makes you stop and pay attention. It was small and quick, barely more than a clearing of the throat, and she turned her head away from me and covered her mouth with her arm the way she always did when she was being polite.