A few weeks ago:"How badly do you want to live?"
Leah could feel his hot breath on her neck, rancid with the stench of onions and sour milk. His voice was an oozing thing, bubbling up from the putrescent depths of his innards. Every now and then he let out a shrill giggle, and she felt his body twitching behind her as blasts of air chuffed against her crawling skin.
"I don't know," she had replied, knowing it was not the answer he had anticipated. She was only twenty-three. She hadn't been anywhere, seen anything, done anything.
He had said nothing for a moment, and she had known he was weighing his words.
"We could make a lot of money," Siekan whispered. "A lot of rich people can't have kids."
-
"Leah! Don't!"-
The baby stopped waving his arms...and stopped breathing.
"What have you done?" the mother screamed. She was clean. Her clothes were clean, new and light. She washed her hair every day and watched what she ate. She had a job. She was only twenty-three.
Leah screamed.
-
"He doesn't love you! Lord Jesus, help me save my baby girl."-
She was only twelve. Clive had been living with them for a couple of years, and now he was leaving. She had come out into the TV room, wiping a knuckle across one sleepy eye and carrying her book of stories. She wanted Clive to read to her.
"Marry you?" He punched one arm into the sleeve of the thick, flannel coat he wore to work. "White trash? Ha. Marry you I'd never live it down. Find me a real wife someday. But not you, Caroline. No white trash wife for me."
Even at twelve, Leah knew he was right. This is what they were, and this is what they would always be. Nothing important, nothing anyone wanted. Just trash.
But she wanted to live.
And a lot of rich people can't have kids.
-
"Not like this, baby. Not like this. This isn't the way..."-
Fifteen when she first said yes. Used to be drugs made you high, the man had said. Nowdays they special. Nowdays they make you feel
alive.How bad, he had asked, you wanna live?
Leah skirted around the girl, wanting to pity her but finding that any hope she'd been given was too fragile to allow for compassion. Dead eyes glared up at her. She frowned and looked away, but not quickly enough to avoid seeing the nasty, deliberate, rictus grin that twisted itself over the junkie's lips.
:How much life can you give me?:Her rhythms broke, shuddering into discordance.
"Leave me alone!" she snarled.
Something moved in her belly. It kicked against her. Afraid, she clutched at her suddenly bulging gut. The Junkie's Stone, the unliving
thing inside her, was no longer unliving.
She was just fifteen. She was twenty-three.
She slipped to the ground and cried.
-
"Oh baby ... no, Leah, it's gonna be all right. You'll see. Jesus forgives."-
She had been twenty-two when she finally, accidentally, fell pregnant to a man whose name she couldn't remember. Hadn't realised until after she'd been with Siekan for a week, and hadn't told him at all for two months.
It had taken Siekan five months to convince her to see the Doctor: long-faced, long-fingered. What convinced her in the end was what Siekan had said to her at the beginning:
"How badly do you want to live?"
Have a baby, your life's over.
The Doctor had told her how much money someone pays for a healthy white child. Told her to think about it, about what that money could buy for herself, for her mother.
Even at twelve, Leah knew he was right. This is what they were, and this is what they would always be.The money could change that.
The room came into focus. It was dark, cold and dusty. A thin army blanket tangled across her, one bare foot dangling just above the concrete floor. A camp lantern burned on the banana crate by the cot on which she lay. Her books were there. Her favourites: Gaiman and Donaldson,
Neverwhere and
Thomas Covenant."All will be explained, if you take the next step with me.""To where?"
"To the Dream Dens."
"Who are you?! What are you?!"
In a casual voice he replied. "We are the Sorien. Dream wranglers in the employ of The Night Brethren."She screwed her eyes shut, said "God." She was drug-cold, like a thick layer of gelid water lay sandwiched between the inner and outermost layers of her skin. Her gut burned. Whimpering, tears pooling in her eyes, coursing down her cheeks, her hands travelled the length of her chest, her stomach, the unfamiliar flat of it, and found the livid, crescent line of fresh stitches there.
She remembered the Doctor's voice, half-heard, half-remembered, from sleep:
"I told you that you'd do something for me before the end. And so you have. You've birthed me in again. Thank you, mother."It was done. They had taken her baby.
And now they were gone.
(Cameron Rogers)
Andy Hallett, who starred as Lorne (otherwise known as Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan or simply "the Host") on the Buffy spin-off TV series Angel, died of heart failure last night at age 33. Hallett passed away at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles after a five-year battle with heart disease. 
