Archive of Our Own

The test blinked positively at Aventurine.

He sat despondently on the edge of the bathtub. Frankly, the entire thing was, from start to finish, his own damn fault. As an experienced accountant of guilt, he could trace the fault line from his own poor decisions right through the bastard who had actually knocked him up and right on back to his own arrogant surety that this would never happen to him. A bike ride on a cliff’s edge was great fun until it sent him hurtling into the rocks below—no, it was the aftermath that was excruciating. The part where all his limbs were in casts and he was pregnant.

This particular problem had never really factored in any of his plans, except the indulgent ones where he faked it to trap Ratio into staying with him. Except, if Ratio thought he was having a baby, he’d bar Aventurine from having fun. 

The test was so inordinately cheerful. He wanted to throw it away, but he held it even more tightly, fixating on the blinking You’re Pregnant! as though the words would blind him. 

They stayed clear.

He lifted his head and looked around himself. The bright little piles of pills on the white marble counter, the colorful remains of powder, the playing cards creased and folded where he’d used them to cut decreasingly fine lines with increasingly unsteady hands. Last night this place was full of the universe’s up-and-coming. Aventurine was good entertainment, but a maudlin drunk—no good to anyone when the loneliness gripped him so hard he’d fold down sobbing at a stray touch—so he retreated at intervals to refresh his high.

He could sell his misery if he wanted to, but he could only convince people to buy it so often before they realized how disgusting it was, how needy, because he loved how they looked at him when they hated him and wanted to stamp him out. How close he held their rotten love.

It was only fun to humiliate him when they didn’t know he was getting off on it too.

Better to be happy, a good happy boy, with the boyish smile that made him look young and vulnerable. And he did like that smile on himself, because his face in the mirror reminded him of Jade slapping him until he could have held it like a shield even as a bullet dove into his head. Oh, the good old days.

He slid to his knees on the pink bathroom tiles and slid his fingers into his mouth with practiced ease. He had worked so hard to rid himself of his gag reflex, it no longer came back even when he wanted it to. But it was all in the mind, wasn’t it? He threw up everything he’d eaten and drank last night and then took a shower, waxed, took another. Dressed. Spotted the pregnancy test, lying innocently next to the bathtub, and swallowed.

Right.

He could have taken another test, but what was the point? He knew the truth; all the symptoms fit. 

The cleaners wouldn’t come until three. Aventurine locked his personal items in the closet when he had guests. He punched in the code and rifled through until he found his handgun, lifted it to his head, and hesitated.

Makeup first. When they found his body he needed it to look good.

Finally, comfortable in his favorite sofa, he tilted his head back and picked up the gun.

His phone rang.

Aventurine squeezed his eyes shut and pistol-whipped himself as hard as he could. Then he flung the gun aside and went hunting for his phone. Blood dripped into his eyes and onto his fresh clothes.

It was a video call from Jade. He accepted it and turned the camera around. “What’s the damage?” she asked. She was at home, sipping coffee; he knew the routine of her morning better than his own. Jade moved in her own time. She’d check the alert for his name first, then the gossip, then respond to the fresh customers at the Bonajade Exchange, before finally—and reluctantly, though she expertly feigned the same devotion they all did—moving on to official Stoneheart business. “Your little house party's all over the news.”

“What can I say, I make them good.”

“I’m sure you do. Show me your face.”

“Unfit for your esteemed gaze, Madam. I only just woke up.”

She hummed. “Did you have fun, my dear dishonest pet?”

“I always have fun,” Aventurine said sincerely. “Life is a precious, fleeting gift. Every day is a delight.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Not yet,” Aventurine said. He wasn’t planning to.

She ended the call. He put a hand to his face; it came away red. The phone rang again. He accepted it.

“Delivery, sir.”

“Leave it at the door.”

A brown paper packet of bagels and coffee and a blueberry muffin arrived a minute later. His head throbbed at the sight. He ate a plain bagel without cheese and washed it down with black coffee, and found a lipstick at the bottom of the bag.

He smiled, feeling weird. Uncapped it to draw a word on the hand holding the bagel and snapped a picture for her. He could tell her, he knew. She would have ideas about what to do. She’d create options from thin air. But he’d pay for every one of those, and he already had the morning-after ache of finding his bank account overdrawn, and he didn’t want to pay. He wanted to live cheaply and then die in a gutter.

It would be so much easier that way. He imagined a thumbnail-sized obituary in an unread local paper. The last Avgin from Sigonia died today. The body will be incinerated. His property will be repossessed by the IPC.

He could ask Topaz for help. She would not ask for anything in return, but she would be disappointed. Why didn’t you use birth control? she’d say, exasperated.

Aventurine made a call. It went straight to voicemail. If you are hearing this message I am teaching, working, or otherwise occupied. My absence is an excellent opportunity to sort out your own problems.

Sage advice. Aventurine cut the call and made it again just to hear it again. And again.

The fourth time, Ratio picked up. “I am teaching,” he said. “It is Monday morning. What do you want?”

“Just the sound of your voice.”

“Are you drunk already or drunk still?”

“I,” Aventurine said. The tips of his fingers were red. “I’m pregnant.”

“Is this a joke? I do suppose it’s very funny, if you have the IQ of a stump.”

Aventurine put the phone down and went looking for the gun again. This time, he found it jammed.

When he’d been a slave, he’d gotten pregnant more than once. Back then it was easy—he just had to wait for the next time his Master had a bad day and rile him up until he beat Aventurine to filth. Problem solved.

Now he was rich. He looked around his penthouse apartment. When the zeroes in his account started to overwhelm him he browsed through the most ludicrous furniture catalogues he could find. It was how he’d ended up with a twisted steel barstool, impossible to sit on without grievous injury—the wooden table that curved so alarmingly that nothing could be placed on it, the sharply-angled and incoherent chairs and coffee tables that all amounted to the noisy vision of a man who didn’t know how to spend his money. 

He loved to tell Topaz that postmodern artwork was an investment that paid for itself down the line, but the truth was he hated every bit of it and only ever invited his least favorite people to parties so that he could force them to drink themselves silly and then watch them go mad as they failed to find a decent place to flop over.

Could he raise a child here? And would he, of all people, tell a child—a daughter, he imagined, never a son—that home was a distant desert that was never the same after they left. That home was a language Aventurine didn’t speak and wouldn’t recognize if he heard it. That home was a faith he held like a fistful of sand, always flowing out between his fingers.

✧✧✧

Ratio called him at lunchtime. “Are you actually pregnant?”

“Relax, I was joking,” Aventurine said. 

“What are you doing?”

“Drinking bleach.” He swirled the clear liquid in the champagne glass.

Ratio cursed.

Aventurine miscalculated the amount, and was still vomiting when the cleaners arrived. He let them in and waved them to their work and retreated loyally to the toilet. Ratio let himself in not long after that. Aventurine heard his voice telling the cleaning crew that he was Aventurine’s boyfriend.

Liar.

“You,” Ratio said, poking him with the tip of a shoe.

“Can we skip the niceties,” Aventurine croaked. “I’ll envision the threats and insults on my own time.”

Ratio unerringly spotted the pregnancy test and picked it up like he was lifting an animal for dissection. It was almost tender. Aventurine wanted to tell him he’d pissed on that thing just to see him react.

“What are you planning to do?”

“I was hoping you’d punch me in the stomach until I shit blood,” Aventurine said honestly.

“Have you heard of this medical procedure,” Ratio said, “It’s called an abortion.”

“No.” Aventurine rolled his eyes. “Never.”

“I’m calling a doctor.”

“Wait,” Aventurine lurched and grabbed the hem of Ratio’s pant. “Aren’t you a doctor?”

“I’m not qualified to carry out this procedure.”

“You’re a genius, you can figure it out.”

“No.”

“Ratio, please.”

“Don’t beg,” Ratio said coldly. “It’s unseemly.”

The frigid shock was an anesthetic. Aventurine noticed, distantly and for the first time, how hard he was shaking. 

When he came back he was holding a glass of water and a couple of round white pills. Aventurine wanted to be a brat and kick up a fuss, but his stomach hurt so badly. He took the medicine and stayed quiet as Ratio scrolled through his contact list.

When his stomach didn’t feel like it was being scrubbed out by wire wool anymore, Aventurine found the voice to say, “I can’t get an abortion like this.”

“Like this?”

“As me.”

“How long have you been pregnant?”

Aventurine counted the days. “I haven't had a period since before I went to Penacony. I often skip them; I didn’t think much of it. But I’ve been vomiting every morning for the past few weeks.” His cheeks burned. “And my breasts hurt.”

“That,” Ratio said. “Is at least two months. Or more.”

Anything Aventurine said would come off begging. Almost. “Do you think I should keep it?” he asked lightly.

“Why are you asking me? You’re the one who has to live with it.”

Live with it. The words tasted like bile.

“I think it would kill you,” Ratio said, after a moment. “But I’ve thought that about a great many things, and here you remain.”

“I’d kill the child,” Aventurine said.

“Possibly. Or possibly not.”

“You have faith?”

Ratio said, “Book an appointment under a different name. Make a fake ID and masquerade as your own employee.”

While Aventurine made a fake ID on his tablet, Ratio shouted at the cleaners about how to do their job. They probably knew what they were doing but he was in a better mood when he came back so Aventurine added a hefty tip to their fees and considered it money well spent.

They sat together to make the call. Aventurine fiddled with a chip. “Aren’t you going to ask what happened to my head?”

“No,” Ratio said. “It’s obvious.”

“Some concern would be nice, you know.”

“Make the call.”

“You can say, ‘you poor darling, what did you do to yourself?’ and I can act dumb until you get so mad you f—”

Ratio pulled the phone away from him. It was one of the dozen-or-thereabouts phones people had forgotten in Aventurine’s apartment after parties. He kept them for things like this. Ratio dialed the number. 

“Hello, you’ve reached the clinic of Dr. Cindy. How may I help you?”

“I want to book an appointment,” Aventurine said, pitching his voice differently. Ratio gave him a sharp look, then ostentatiously examined his nails. “For an abortion.”

“What’s your name?”

“Katrina Parker.”

“Are you an employee at the IPC?”

“Ye-yes. Rank P-13. I work in the Strategic Investment Department?”

“Mhmm, and who’s your boss?”

“Mr. Aventurine. Of Stratagems?”

“One second—okay, got it. I’m afraid you don’t have health insurance coverage for non-essential medical procedures until P-30 with your current employer.”

“How is this a non-essential procedure?”

“It is,” the secretary said unapologetically. “Would you still like to book a consult, ma’am.”

Ratio muted them. “Appointment for an abortion, not a consult.”

“Okay,” Aventurine said, and unmuted them. “I want to book an appointment for an abortion, not a consult.”

“The consult is mandatory.” 

Ratio picked up the tablet and began looking up other clinics.

“Is there a way to avoid it?” 

“No, it’s mandatory in all clinics in Pier Point.” 

Ratio put the tablet down.

“Then I’ll take the booking.”

“The closest I can get you is a week from now—next Tuesday.”

“Alright, that’s fine,” Aventurine said.

“How far along is the pregnancy?”

“Seven weeks, I think? Or over two months?”

“You think? Ma’am, I’m going to need something more specific.”

“Um, eight weeks is fine.”

The secretary sighed loudly. “I’ve put that down. We’ll register your file when you arrive for your appointment at ten o’clock on Tuesday. You will be sent a reminder one day prior and one hour prior. Have a nice day.”

“Thank you, you too,” Aventurine said meekly. Then, in his normal voice, “I need a cigarette.”

“You’re pregnant,” Ratio reproached.

“We’re killing that thing, I don’t think the nicotine is going to make any difference. Fuck, why don’t I have health insurance?”

“You wouldn’t even need a consult if you booked an appointment as yourself.”

“So all my lovely colleagues can know that I’ve gone and gotten myself knocked up?” He lit up. “And since when are secretaries so damn condescending? Don’t answer that, I don’t care. I think I’m going to throw up.”

Ratio waved him away on his business. Aventurine evacuated his breakfast, tried to rinse out the taste, found he’d picked up the glass of bleach, and threw up again.

Then he answered emails.

✧✧✧

It was dark by the time he looked up from his work. He stretched and got some water. Ratio’s strident you’re pregnant bounced around Aventurine’s skull like a screensaver. In the normal scheme of things Aventurine practiced self-destruction like a daily ritual, hurting himself like he could keep the bad luck at bay by being his own worst bet. Was anything different now? All this fuss for a temporary affliction…

He found himself pressing a hand absently to his stomach as he looked past his orderly apartment into the skyline of Pier Point. The milky red glow of Qlipoth’s Wall softened to a dark pink broken by the sharp neon of a thousand holographic billboards. 

There was something inside Aventurine. Given time, it might become someone. Given time, it might become anyone, just like him.

Where could he buy that time, when his own was begged for, stolen, borrowed, broken?

Given time.

✧✧✧

Aventurine had a lunch meeting at Sugilite’s restaurant the next day—Obsidian would be there too, in attendance alongside Aventurine himself, Jade and Topaz. “What’s the order of business?” he asked, strolling in ten minutes into the first course.

“You’ve gotten fat,” Sugilite said. “Is the food that good on Penacony?”

Aventurine almost tripped. “You might be mistaking me for a mirror.”

“You’re fat,” Sugilite insisted. “Obsidian, back me up.”

“Oh, whatever. Maybe they’re finally planning to slaughter him.” She dipped a piece of meat into gravy. “Good riddance.”

“You’re all so crass,” Topaz huffed.

Jade looked at Aventurine, searching, just like them—except her eyes always saw more than he wanted them to. When he smiled for her he knew it lacked his usual luster. He was accustomed to swallowing their indiscreet hostility. But the food on the table (rare meat and raw fish, sour fruit and gooseberry wine) turned his stomach into a cluster of aches. Everything was nauseating, redolent with the smell of metal and brine.

He forced himself to withstand it and make conversation, but afterwards barely remembered what they spoke about. 

Later, ensconced firmly in the relative safety of his office, he called Ratio. “Am I fat?”

“No,” Ratio said. “What is this about?”

“Sugilite said—”

“And you listened?”

Aventurine cut the call and hid his face in his hands. He felt fat. He felt heavy with what he carried, his tits prominent in his awareness, two meaty delicate bags of nerves. He’d felt them like that for so many weeks and just hadn’t wanted to think about it.

He smoked until he calmed down and worked until he could go home. He couldn’t sleep for hours. All night he wished he owned enough shares in his body to get rid of his breasts. 

✧✧✧

The week dragged on interminably. Keeping up with the grand tradition of the empire of backstabbers that was known to the universe as the IPC, Aventurine made his gossip-gathering rounds and fed the most interesting tidbits back to Jade, but his heart wasn’t in it. He felt their eyes on him, raking down his back, silently asking questions he did not have answers to. What would he say if his secret slipped out? What tale would he spin?

Weeknights at the betting tables, sauntering through the paper-thin glamor that kept the creamy opulence of the zero-point-one percent separated from the teeming, chittering desperation of the ninety-nine—the hungry old world always seemed to be waiting for him with bated breath. There was no great difference between Pier Point’s criminal underclass and those who sat at the table. He came and left masked, disguised, but he saw through the disguises of others with ease.

In this world, Sugilite sourced the rarest cuts of meat for his restaurants—in this world, Pearl obtained the forbidden technologies she involved in her research—in this world, Obsidian found the pleasures too bloody and gauche for the world above.

Some people thought of the IPC as a great whale, swallowing everything in its path, but it was so much more than that—the IPC, Aventurine knew, was a way of life. A religion that anyone could convert to, a god that didn’t require one to forswear any other. Money, money, money. He gambled away his wealth and laughed as it flowed out from his fingers, because in the perfume-choked dark of the gambling halls, he felt the wheels of fortune turning around him, grinding him into fine gold. All of what he frittered away always came back to him eventually.

So he drank and drank, all night long, and when it was over and it was just him under the jeweled sky, he felt all the hands that had touched him as a coin might feel them. Just like a coin, he had no meaning if he wasn’t exchanged for something else. 

Valuable only by comparison.

But his head was misty with alcohol and his stomach ached and his thoughts wandered. He didn’t know who’d fathered the child. It had been months since he’d slept with Ratio. He whored himself out because it was easy, because his mind blanked out and his body slipped into mechanical adoration, and he liked that. His body was a means to an end. 

He loved to lie, but pretending was exhausting. And he did not enjoy being fussed over. 

(He’d dated someone once who texted him good morning every single morning and Aventurine staged a fight and pissed him so hard within two weeks that he’d punched Aventurine in the face and blocked his number.

Later, he’d messaged Aventurine to apologize profusely about punching him, but Aventurine could hardly hold that part against him. He prided himself on pulling the worst out of people.)

It reflected in his section of the Strategic Investment Department. He cultivated a work environment of suspicion, betrayal, and mistrust, and was rewarded for it in a steady stream of information that fed into his elaborate, strangling schemes. That he often had to weed out plants by other Stonehearts and from other departments did not concern him. Sussing them out was a good diversion from his own problems. 

Ratio came over on Saturday. He timed his arrival carefully to give Aventurine a fair window to throw up; as such Aventurine was draped over his very uncomfortable living room sofa and seriously considering taking to his skin with a fruit peeler for some respite from the hellish constraints of the flesh

“Jade thinks you’re slacking off,” Ratio informed him.

“I don’t think it’s fair that you’re on first-name terms with her and I’m not.”

“Then go ahead and call her that.”

“Do I seem crazy to you? It would be like calling my mother by her name.”

“What was your mother’s name?”

Aventurine didn’t answer. He’d been having nightmares in which his body bloated and distended in improbable ways. In his dreams the baby looked just like his mother in a red river. The current topic of conversation tasted like the lingering sourness after he’d thrown up everything he’d eaten.

“Is this her way of telling me she’s worried about me?” Aventurine said. “If Madam Jade thinks I’m sick, she can come ask me about it herself. Preferably sometime next week after Tuesday. In any case, I’m fine. Don’t you know how pregnant people glow? I’m glowing.”

“You talk like you want to bludgeon yourself to death,” Ratio said bluntly. “I’m more than aware of your tendencies. I’m here because I might not be that kind of doctor, but that doesn’t mean I can’t give you a basic physical.”

Aventurine exhaled. “If you wanted to see me naked, you could’ve just said.”

“You’ll notice that I said precisely nothing of that sort.”

They went to the bedroom, the only comfortably furnished place in Aventurine’s home. He stripped out of his clothes slowly, not because he was trying to be seductive, but because there was a lethargy clinging to his skin in a sticky film and it made moving hard. 

Ratio walked around him. “I’m going to touch you.”

“As long as you don’t leave me high and dry,” Aventurine said, tight-lipped.

Smooth, clinical touches. The cold pad of the stethoscope against his skin. Some raw newborn birdlike thing fluttering in Aventurine’s throat as Ratio drew his blood. He wanted to sink into the sharp facts of the procedure as paper sank into the shredder, all guaranteed outcomes. His ears were ringing.

“This isn’t my procedure to do, but I’m going to show you what will happen so you aren’t surprised. You’ve never been to an obstetrician before, have you?”

Aventurine shook his head.

“You don’t have a file on record, so they’ll run through everything in order to make certain. That means they’ll test you for drugs and alcohol, genetic diseases, mental disorders, and allergies. They’ll also have you go through a breast exam and a vaginal ultrasound.”

“Okay,” Aventurine said. He felt myriad, unknown to himself, mesmerized by the vial of blood in Ratio’s hand. Paralyzed by the thought that someone could know him entirely differently than he knew himself. “Do I have any allergies?”

“No, you don’t. They’ll also ask you about your sexual history.”

“Oh.”

“How are you going to answer?”

“Lie, of course.”

“Of course,” Ratio’s amusement flickered warmly in Aventurine’s splintering awareness. “Pay attention, now. Stay still.”

Aventurine could stay so still. He could shrink inside his body, keenly aware of the mechanics of it—the heavy tenderness in his breasts, the powdery flush on his cheeks, the tension in every joint, the breath he held whenever he was touched so his stomach looked perfectly flat—he could observe himself within the untouchable machine of his mind, like a rat sharing space with a ticking bomb, incognizant of its future. 

That someone was touching him felt entirely besides the point when Aventurine couldn’t feel it.

“Does anything hurt?”

“Yes,” Aventurine breathed. “There…”

“I’m not touching you.”

He was guided into sitting down. He allowed himself to be manipulated, unwilling to return just yet. Too difficult to arrange his limbs back together. It hurt… “Everywhere.”

“I’m not surprised.” Ratio was in the doorway, like a stranger. An intruder.

“You said you wouldn’t leave me,” Aventurine faltered. 

Ratio hadn’t said that.

“I’m going to test your blood. Stay still a little longer.”

It was harder to stay still when he wasn’t being watched. He found his own reflection in the window and stared firmly until it behaved, every breath contained until it didn’t ripple the fragile surface.

In the end, Ratio didn’t fuck him. Aventurine’s strange mood crumbled into an irritable exhaustion, and he bitched Ratio out until he left, but afterwards he felt like nothing so much as a carcass, rotting and unsightly. He tried to jerk off but he was too dry, uncomfortable with his body, so angry he forced himself to orgasm anyway and faked it to himself over and over until he was convinced by the pretense and slept.

✧✧✧

On Sunday, he had breakfast with Jade. He woke at six and got to cooking, pulling out a spread to rival any of Pier Point’s best cafes and extensive enough to feed four—three species of eggs in four different ways, fresh fruit jam, cut cheeses and cold meats, a pasta salad, sourdough bread from the local bakery, two different morning cocktails, red and green, and chocolate tart for dessert.

Occasionally he cooked for Ratio and Topaz too, but they liked it too much.

Jade arrived at ten-forty. She ate precisely one breakfast sandwich and a berry parfait. Humiliation was a luscious thrill and tasted better than anything he could make. 

Then, they talked business. The reincorporation of Penacony left no small amount of loose strings to be tied up. 

She reached for the parfait with the tiny spoon in it, and that was how he knew they were done with work. He watched her eat slowly, then made another cup just like the first. It was likely she’d eaten before she came, and this was all she could stomach, but she smiled warmly as he handed her the cup. “Did you enjoy your little break?” 

“A much-needed respite,” Aventurine said, sitting down again. He wanted to go to the bathroom. “But I’m glad it’s over. I was starting to feel restless—it’s good to have my head back in the game.”

“Isn’t it? How has work been treating you? Remember, if you have any problems…”

“You’d be the first to know,” Aventurine reassured her.

She stared at him. He stared back blandly.

“Remember to rest,” she said finally. “Take a day off this week—there’s no need to jump all the way back in before you have to. Not Wednesday—we have a meeting with the hacks from Talent.”

She stood as she spoke. He hurried to get her handbag and offer her his arm, walking her out of the door. When she was gone, he leaned against it and pressed a hand to the sharp pain in his chest. 

Then he threw out all the food he’d made and ordered lunch.

The next order of business was shopping. He was simply too recognisable a figure on Pier Point. His beautiful damned eyes, the slave brand on his neck that he flaunted like a diamond choker because it was more of a statement than a piece of jewelry that could change hands at will. He kept an array of contact lenses on hand just in case.

He bought hair dye and plain, practical underwear for Katrina. Clothes like she would wear, no-nonsense and a little frumpy, reflective of her nervous tendency to hide herself.

If, along the way, he blew a few million credits on retail therapy—that was between him and his bank account. Turning an hour’s shopping into a six hour hate crime against his wallet was a good way of ensuring he’d sleep well that night, and he dearly needed the rest. He marked everything down for delivery, went home, and crashed without changing.

When the parcels arrived the next morning, the buyer’s remorse had settled in like a hangover. He had no time to savor it. The morning sickness took priority.

He went to work late, getting through his early-meetings with the help of an anti-nausea pill. He checked the time every hour and invariably found it had only been ten minutes since he’d last looked. Unable to focus on work, he started rumors by running up bets about whether Sugilite was pregnant. He was putting the finishing touches on an elaborate presentation—complete with doctored photos of Sugilite’s ass—when Topaz wandered in. “Do you have time for a coffee?”

“Now? Sure,” Aventurine logged out and deleted his trail. He fetched his black cape and offered Topaz his arm, but she slapped it away. “Any particular service you’d like from me, or is the scintillating pleasure of my company enough?”

“You should pay me to put up with you,” Topaz huffed. 

Aventurine pulled out his credit card. “Name your price,” he said sincerely.

“Put it down, I was joking! Jeez. Does everything have to be a transaction with you?”

Yes, because he’d rather pay upfront than run up a tab he couldn’t deliver on. Although he always found a way to deliver; he loved to be the cavalier, devil-may-care gambler, but he was a threadbare man. “Of course not. I was joking too.”

“I wanted to run some stuff by you,” Topaz said. “But now that I think about it, it might be too much for one coffee. How does lunch tomorrow sound to you?”

Aventurine looked at her sharp, forthright expression, and felt something in him twist. He bit his lip and pulled out a coin, flipping it gracefully. 

Topaz caught it before he could. “What’s this for? Just to see if you can do dinner tomorrow?” She held out her palm, heads-side up. “I win.”

“You weren’t even playing,” Aventurine protested half-heartedly. “I can’t do it tomorrow. I have a doctor’s appointment. How about Thursday?”

“Doctor’s appointment? Why is this the first I’m hearing about this?”

“Well, I wasn’t aware my health was on the list of things you have to be updated about.”

“Aren’t we friends? Even though you scam me every chance you get. What’s it about, anyway? I thought the Doctor of Chaos we paid a few billion for cleared you of everything.”

He hadn’t cleared this. Maybe he thought Aventurine wanted it, secretly. “Nothing in particular,” he said at last. “What did you want to talk about, anyway? Maybe we can wrap it up right now.”

“Don’t change the subject! I need to know about this appointment. Does Madam Jade know about it?”

“No, Topaz— Listen to me.”

“No, you can listen to me, Aventurine. I can tell that this is important. You wouldn’t be so weird about it otherwise. I’m going to tell Jade, and she’s going to find out what it’s about, if you don’t tell me right now.”

Aventurine pinched the bridge of his nose. He should have said he had a golf date. “I’m going to an obstetrician.”

Topaz’s eyes widened. “Hang on, are you and Ratio—” she made an indeterminate gesture that he decided to interpret as trying to have a baby.

“No. It’s not his.”

“Not his? Then whose is it?”

Aventurine shrugged.

“You’re having a baby,” Topaz said. “And you don’t even know who the father is?”

“I’m not having a baby.” He could see the next part coming a mile off. “And you’re not to tell Madam Jade.”

Topaz stared at him. “This is so weird. Why wouldn’t you tell her? She’ll be delighted—you know how much she loves kids. She’s always wanted one of her own.”

Aventurine laughed. He couldn’t help it; Topaz could be so naive sometimes. “I’m not keeping it.”

“Why not? It would make her happy,” reason enough in both their worlds “and you know, if you don’t want the responsibility, she’d be delighted to raise the child as her own. She’d take perfect care of them, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure,” Aventurine echoed. He knew the price Jade would extract for that; it was the same price he’d set. He would never, ever be able to tell the child that they were Avgin. Jade would make sure of it any way she had to. Aventurine wouldn’t be the last of his people anymore, but he’d wish he was—mute on the sidelines looking into pretty eyes just like his own and a child’s voice like fresh honey.

Besides, he knew too why Jade didn’t have a child of her own—why she spread her costly care into orphanages and on pet projects like himself and her darling Jelena—her countless expensive deals had left too long a trail of bitter, bitter debtors, furious at the price of their desires and desperate for vengeance. 

Any child of hers would be a beating heart outside the cage, vulnerable to her enemies. She would strike at the chance to have his child instead, smugly secure in the knowledge that it wasn’t her own flesh she was setting out like lure on the line.

Topaz was staring at him as though she’d never seen him before.

“I’ll owe you,” Aventurine said quietly. “Don’t tell her.”

✧✧✧

The clinic’s waiting room was awash with the colors and branding of the IPC, as with everything else on Pier Point. To amuse himself, he guessed at the stories of the other patients. But he kept getting distracted because he hadn’t eaten last night or today, partly due to the nausea and partly because he was vaguely sure that some medical procedures could only be done on an empty stomach. 

He’d thought about looking it up, but lost a bet against himself and decided that heading in blind was less anxiety-inducing.

“Ms. Parker,” the receptionist called. “Please be ready, you’re next.”

Aventurine clutched his handbag and stayed alert. Ratio had offered to skip class and accompany him, but he was also far too recognizable a figure on Pier Point for that. And Aventurine would never convince him to wear a wig or dye his hair blond, so he was here alone. He caught sight of his own reflection in someone’s glasses and bile rose in his throat; with the long hair softening his angles, he looked just like his sister.

Or rather, like his memories of his sister.

When his number came up, he found the frosted glass clinic doors and went in. Dr. Cindy was a dark-haired woman with angular glasses. “How long have you been pregnant?” she asked.

Wasn’t all of this in the intake procedure? “At least two months,” Aventurine said, pitching his voice into Katrina’s higher, more nervous tone.

“Let’s do an ultrasound to be sure,” Dr. Cindy said. “Do you use any substances? Drugs? Alcohol? Cigarettes or vapes?”

“Yes,” Aventurine said. “All of those.”

“What about sexual partners?”

“Multiple,” Aventurine said. “On and off.”

“When was the last time?”

“A week ago.”

“No wonder you’re trying to get rid of it,” Dr. Cindy said.

Aventurine didn’t respond. He told himself he was a bruise, accidentally incurred, a puzzling infringement in his own body. What he thought or felt did not matter. He was not ailing; he was the ailment. 

She asked him some more routine questions. Then she did an ultrasound, tested him for all the drugs he’d already said he took, and examined him for STDs and cancer. Aventurine was up-to-date on his vaccines and had little to worry about in the latter department, but the ultrasound results surprised him.

“You’re three months pregnant,” Dr. Cindy said.

Aventurine swallowed. “Are you sure? Because…”

He couldn’t quite hold the timeline together, in his head. Some lingering side-effect of Sunday’s strings hooking into his mind; he wasn’t sure of the past few months. The events were clear, their order obscured. He tried to chase dates and pin down specifics, but failed at anything greater than the most rudimentary sequencing. Three months ago, it could have been Ratio’s. It could have been anyone’s. 

Aventurine didn’t want to tell him. How did you come back from: hey, I killed your baby. 

“I’m sure,” Dr. Cindy said. “Look, it even has a heartbeat.”

A heartbeat. He squinted at the screen, but in the blurry mass of tissues and pulsating flesh he couldn’t discern where he ended and where the other thing began. “Okay,” he said doubtfully. “So, about the abortion…”

“You’re sure that this is what you want?”

Aventurine nodded. This one certainty had propelled him through every moment lately; he didn’t want a baby. He couldn’t stand the thought of some pulpy, squelching thing in his life, needing him, a leech upon a leech. One of them would have to starve. He was too selfish to take that on himself.

There was no language he could share with a child. He was too bitter to love something more innocent than himself, and he would never find another as jaded. He had walked out from the old world and into the new world, but he was still the same old gambler, just richer. Thieving, reckless, bored of life. 

He didn’t want to live differently, live better, even if it was what was good for him. 

“I’m going to insert this device into your vagina,” Dr. Cindy said, lifting something that looked halfway between a sex toy and a torture device. “It might hurt, especially if you’ve recently had sex and experienced any bruising or tearing. Do you want a painkiller or a local anesthetic?”

“No,” Aventurine said. “Is this how you…take it out of me?”

“Yes.”

He lay down and spread his legs as directed. Dr. Cindy didn’t say anything about the needle marks on his thighs, or the scars underneath from all the times he’d been wounded for entertainment. Since he didn’t have to perform the role of the whimpering, contrite creature desperate to avoid pain, he allowed himself some dignity, but contributed a token simulacrum of distress at having something inserted none-too-gently into his vagina.

It took fifteen minutes. Aventurine stared blankly at the ceiling and pretended he was being raped. It wasn’t that different—something going in, something coming out. And he was far more familiar with rape.

At least that way he could understand it. The knowledge that this was helping him was fine for his mind, but hardly good for tricking his body into compliance. Only fear could calm his racing heart, the cold knowledge that there was no fleeing this pain—only years of experience withstanding sadistic idiosyncrasy could protect him against the logical sensibility of the clinic, which unmade him and remade him in files and symptoms and vials of blood.

Then it was over, and it hurt far less. She gave him a cup of ice and directed him to a private room where he could gather himself. “I’ll be with you in a moment to walk you through the aftercare,” she said. “Wait.”

Aventurine nodded obediently, and sat for a moment on the padded chair, then stood, a thick dull pulse of pain digging into the base of his stomach.

He needed to get out of here.

The clinic’s cold fog dampened his thoughts. He felt, more than once, like he was forgetting something, but couldn’t figure out what it was.

✧✧✧

He didn’t remember how he reached home. He shed Katrina like she was the one hurting him. It was only after he’d ripped all his clothes off and was standing awkwardly, nakedly in the middle of his bedroom that he realized the skirt was stained with blood. It had seeped to the outer layer. Telling.

Loud.

He bit his lip.

His hands were shaking as he moved the clothes and wig to the incinerator. He plucked the contacts from his eyes too, threw them in. 

His fingers came away wet and soggy with tinted plastic. He was choking on a sentiment that couldn’t be named. He lunged back towards the incinerator and, hardly knowing what he was looking for, pulled the skirt out. He turned it on and collapsed, shaking, against the hot vibrating machine. 

Was he really crying over something like this? He started to laugh, but the shrill sound quickly devolved into listless gasping. 

He wanted this. He wanted this. Why did he have to feel like he’d lost something? He’d never had that—he never would. There was no gamble in the world that would secure a future for any child of his, so why did he have to feel like he’d failed?

You did fail, a voice whispered in his head. It sounded like his mother. She had told him, once, that she’d prayed for two daughters and received them; she had. Two daughters and him, a fault-ridden artifice made of money that was all that remained of both those beautiful girls. There was no place inside his hollow shell for a child. There was no place outside himself for his child. And he didn’t want it, so who exactly was he letting down, anyway?

All his people? They’d died long before he was born. Even the little piece of nothing he’d carried unknowingly for a while hadn’t been all Avgin—just half, and what a half.

It took him a while to calm down.

When he could breathe properly again, he put away the bottles of pills he’d pulled down in his search for something that would kill him right. He put the blood-soaked skirt, unwashed, in an empty drawer in his closet, near that old sentimental rag. He cleaned up the mess he’d made, took a quick shower, and pulled on an old t-shirt, not his own, and the softest underwear he owned. His body felt tender all over, as though someone had taken a meat mallet to it when he wasn’t looking. 

He was tired.

Aventurine wound his way to his dining table and sat, gingerly. He texted the little group chat all of them shared. All clear.

congrats, Ratio texted back immediately. where r u?

All clear of what? Jade wrote.

That was quick, Topaz sent.

Aventurine smiled vaguely to himself. Safe now that the ordeal was over, he could savor the anguish. He’d catch immaculate hell for leaving Jade out of the loop. He was already looking forward to it. 

At home, Aventurine responded.

bringing grading, stay put.

Aventurine turned his phone over and got dinner started. He needed to eat.

He had work tomorrow.