Bloodborn

The world didn’t end in fire or ice, but in consumption. Pregnancy had become a death warrant. Birth became sacrifice.

It wasn’t so centuries ago. Scientists tried to stop miscarriages, to fortify life before it could deteriorate. They tampered with DNA, redesigned embryos, and intervened surgically. Their meddling had created something a thousand times more malicious: a mutation that became hungry, an internal predator disguising itself as life.

Mothers didn’t merely bear children, they were being devoured alive, their bodies transformed into food. Death came quickly for some, little by little for others, yet was always certain. No living woman could safely have her child.

Artificial wombs failed. The mutation required a living host. The term mother was a myth, a memory of the past.

Surrogacy had become a business of coercion. The wealthy commandeered children through bribery, terror, and force, leaving the poor with nowhere to turn. Babies were currency, and nobody was spared—men drained of virility, veins running dry, marrow weakening, their ability to father life snuffed out.

Sineti moved about cautiously, body gaunt, steps measured. She saw what happened to her friends, they just vanished, to serve at the whim of the elite, their bodies sapped empty for someone else’s profit. Fear clung to her, and yet survival demanded vigilance. Every glance over her shoulder was a calculation, every narrow alley a potential trap. Warnings travelled faster than truth, and both arrived too late.

Jasko had known life before the mutation claimed its full horror. Once potent, he had sired a child, and the effort had drained him hollow, veins darkened, hands trembling with exhaustion. Now he proceeded with care, aware that his ability to sire was finite, that each moment of hedonism could mark the end of his life. He crossed streets to avoid touch. And yet, he lived, scanning for signs of the recruiters who would take him or the drug dealers who prowled the alleys.

Mr. Heller, one of the ruling classes, ruled his kingdom from glass and steel skyscrapers high up. He never set foot in the slums of the poor, but his rule was absolute. All conceptions, all deliveries, all deaths were tallied. Mineral imbalances triggered alerts long before a woman knew she was pregnant. He observed the rot and pain with clinical detachment. Children were commodities, survival more precious than mountains of gold. Women were vessels, men were vessels, and the world itself was a machine tuned to reap life.

The poor learnt to adapt as best they could. Networks were created underground, gossiping about where recruiters were, where the streets were safe, where the hungry gaze of the elite couldn’t penetrate. But evasion was only temporary. The survival mechanism made claims, and humankind had grown to expect its own destruction as the cost of continuation.

Sineti’s turn came when shadows of escape weren’t enough. Pale-furred recruiters swooped down like vultures in alleys. She turned the wrong way on purpose. Her own bony, unyielding frame was dragged into antiseptic-fragrant, fear-infested corridors. Data on the monitors flashed her vital signs, her mineral balance, the pace at which her body was breaking down. The foetus within her pulsed and survived on ravenous hunger, a parasite elegant in its cruelty.

Every expended man learnt the routes eventually. The clinics had an underside, and he had walked it once before. Jasko watched from the shadows. His own body had given everything it could. He couldn’t save her. Every muscle of his body trembled with helpless rage as Sineti was stripped into a room that measured out each cell of hers, calculating how much life there was to consume. Time was irrelevant. The foetus consumed in perpetuity.

Bone, muscle, and organ alike were stripped; her body reduced to a vessel emptied of substance, every nutrient siphoned away, leaving only the foetus thriving. The monitors charted every speck of iron, every crumb of calcium, every ounce of strength leaving her. She thrashed weakly against the restraints, but the process was inevitable.

The recruiter’s voice was flat, “Vitals stable. Remain calm. The process requires your stillness.”

Flesh peeled away, veins deflated, marrow becoming a river of nourishment. The child thrived, brilliant and unblemished, an apex hunter in a human host. Mr. Heller observed, unmoved by terror, but by seeing only effectiveness. The mechanism was flawless. The mother reduced to nutrient, the foetus perfection, the ledger of survival level. It was to him a deliberate world, a plan of inputs and outputs, a device that required no compassion.

By the final hour, Sineti had transformed beyond recognition. Her eyes sockets were hollowed out. Limbs hung loosely. Joints creaked and muscle wasted away. Her chest cavity was nearly emptied out, bones crushed, organs liquefied. The child, plump and rosy with life, stirred in the remains, a horrific evidence of survival. The immediate removal was sterile. From the remnant body of her mother, the child was extracted, wailing with vigour it didn’t know. Sineti’s body remained in the room, a gelatinous residue, the vital essence drained and measured.

Jasko lingered in the shadows, powerless, watching as the medical crew removed the rosy, wailing infant, leaving the mother’s husk behind. A mechanical arm rotated the operating table, and the gelatinous husk that was Sineti was pushed toward a narrow opening in the floor, descending into the processing layers below. This wasn’t a funeral; it was waste disposal.

His feet finally moved, guided by an intense purpose. He had no power, no future, no life left, but he wouldn’t let them wipe her from the world like a spill. He found the access point three blocks away, a rusted manhole cover that dropped him into the cold underbelly of the clinic. The waste systems were never sealed properly. No one expected the emptied to climb back up. He crawled through the pipes and the dark channels, using the knowledge of the city’s rot to climb toward its sterile heart.

He breached the processing floor. It smelled of industrial purification and ozone. He found the room where Sineti’s husk had been sent. It was a factory floor, not a morgue. Above the drainage basin, a monitor flashed a final tally. A final log flashed on the monitor. The body was tagged: Output: High-Grade Serum. The reading clarified the horror Jasko had only suspected: The purified essence of Sineti’s death was being pumped to the elite maternity wing, fortifying the child who had devoured her.

The realisation was a shock of cold clarity. The elite didn’t merely take children; they consumed some of the mother’s very essence to sustain their own life. The cycle was cannibalistic perfection. Jasko didn’t look for the body. He reached into the basin and pulled out a single, unnaturally light shard of pale, rigid material, a piece of processed rib. He wrapped it and pressed it against his chest. It was his talisman, a piece of the horrific truth. The system had won the battle for life, but Jasko had taken a weapon of pure, cold knowledge. His grief had ended. Vengeance had begun.

He walked the known alleys of the slum, moving past the husks of women waiting in their halls and the men sapped by want. He looked for the silent ones, the women who lived in the deepest shadows, known for the fierce, desperate intelligence in their eyes. He found her in the skeletal remains of an old laundry: Taranne. Once a midwife, she had stitched him long before men learnt how to count their own depletion. Midwives learnt how to slow the alarms—how to lie to the body just long enough. She had delivered life. She would decide how it ended. Jasko pulled out the bone shard. “They didn’t discard her,” he said, the shard burning a hole in his tunic. “They processed her. She is in the purified serum, fed to the next child.”

Taranne took the shard. She weighed it the way she once weighed infants—quickly and without sentiment. Her face tightened into a line of pure contempt.

“I may have one seed left,” Jasko said, his voice dropping to a harsh rasp. “One chance to put a child into this world outside of Mr. Heller’s tallies. Not for profit, not for sale, but for a purpose. A secret. A defiance. A child that belongs to the rot, not the spire.”

She stood silent for a long moment. She calculated the speed of her own depletion. It was acceptable.

“One seed,” she confirmed. “One life. It’ll be hidden. It won’t be Mr. Heller’s property. Tell me the safest way. Tell me what is left of your broken body.” Jasko closed his eyes, relief and absolute terror washing over him. He had traded his last power for a weapon, sentencing a woman he respected to death, but granting her the one thing the elite couldn’t buy: choice. The game had changed.

The laundry was a tomb of rusted machines and stale air, but in the dim, kerosene glow of Taranne’s corner, it was a sanctuary of grim purpose. They were quiet.

Taranne didn’t offer comfort or softness. She merely stripped the shroud from a cot, revealing a rough, stained mattress that smelled of dust and old sweat. There was only the transaction of life and rebellion, sealed in silence and the presence of Sineti’s relic.

Jasko approached, his body a map of depletion, his hands trembling not with desire, but with the cold weight of his final power. She stood there, her eyes meeting his with an unbroken, fierce volition.

The effort was agonizing, draining Jasko to the last cell. Something inside him failed. No pain, only an emptiness where pressure had once lived. It was the end of his potency. He felt his veins collapse further, his marrow protesting the ultimate expenditure. As he drew back, he was a hollow man, a true shell of his former self, his purpose fulfilled. He had nothing left to give the world, only a terrible, silent promise. Sweat cooled on his face. He whispered, “Is the seed true?”

Taranne nodded, covering the cradle. “The lie is planted. Now go. You’re useless here.”

She rose first. She moved with a cold efficiency, covering herself. There was no intimacy afterwards. Only the terrifying knowledge of what had just been started. She reached for a hidden satchel and pulled out a handful of dried herbs and a vial of murky, fermented liquid.

“The lie begins now,” she whispered. “Mr. Heller tallies the fertile and the expended. You’re now expended. You leave the city. You die in the waste, or you disappear into the north. I am still alive, for now. I will make sure the rumours of my own... transactions... continue.”

She crushed the herbs in her hand. The bitter scent masked the copper smell of their creation. The child within her, a microscopic tyrant, was already beginning its ravenous journey. She could feel the numbers shifting. Taranne knew the exact moment the parasite would signal its presence to the system. She would be ready. The secret life had begun, bought with a conscious debt and concealed by a necessary exile.

Jasko didn ’t look away. He understood with intolerable certainty: every new birth in this world was paid for, and the price was complete. The city endured, humanity a parasite upon itself; life tended, survival demanding death, the world devouring itself child by child, mother by mother, husk by husk.