Kiini Salaam - Ancient, Ancient

The memory of that first moment with the veil washed over her. She shut her eyes tightly and screamed in terror.

“Relax,” the mothers had sung, “it won’t suffocate you.”

But Laki had felt suffocated. She had felt like it was plastered against her, crawling over every inch of her body. She had clawed at her neck, trying to pull it away from her throat.

“It can’t be grabbed,” the mothers had sung. “It can’t be touched with your hands. You can only move it with emotion.”

Laki had yelled louder.

“Laki, my love, the cloak is not your enemy. It can’t kill you.”

“Breathe, Laki.”

Laki had taken deep gulping breaths. But every time she had opened her mouth to speak, the cloak flowed into it and garbled her voice.

Now Laki raised her hands high in the air and shook her head back and forth. The women of Mahini mimicked her actions. She began whirling and dipping, trying to move faster than memory, but she could not outpace her fears. They stayed with her, panting inside her ear.

She felt it again: the cloak probing her eyes, nose, and armpits. She heard her mothers trying to ease her panic.

“It won’t always feel this way,” one mother sang, stroking her back.

“Each cloak is unique, it becomes a part of you,” sang head-mother. “It will take from you and become you.”

“Then when you’re in your unit it will…”

“…meld with the cloaks of the other women.”

“It will be an extension of you.”

“You will grow to rely on it…”

“…and it will know you better.”

As she continued to dance, Laki became more aware of the sounds Mahini was making. Not the sounds of their voices, but the sounds of their breathing—and of their bells. Laki looked at their faces as she swayed with them. Each of them, she thought, had lived through their first day in the veil, and each of them had survived.

Se-se heard Mahini before she saw them. She had located Laki’s pod, counted pods until she reached hers, then entered her pod. She had disconnected her pod from the party and reconnected it to Laki’s. When she had done all that, she stepped into a completely different party. The abandon and frenetic energy were gone, instead everyone was swaying as if eerily entranced. For a second, Se-se thought she had made a mistake. She went over her actions in her mind, but this was no mistake; there was no other party this could be. She walked back to where she had left Laki and came to a shocked halt.

Laki was no longer lying half naked on the floor. She was clothed, and dancing with…a mother-unit. Se-se’s shoulders drooped, and her knees went soft as her body prepared to bow before the unit, but then she stopped. She didn’t feel the emotions she usually felt when she was in the presence of her mothers. She took a step closer and saw that these women had revealed their faces. Her mind was a jumble as she tried to understand what she was seeing.

Se-se was momentarily immobilized, transfixed by the veil. It writhed with a predatory autonomy, as if it were an independent creature—haunted and hungry for new mothers. Suddenly Se-se felt the urge to grab Laki and run. She shifted forward, but when she reached for Laki, Laki slipped to the floor. Mahini reacted immediately, smoothly transitioning from chanting into a soft humming. Laki rolled back and forth with soundless sobs, while everyone in the party stood frozen in stunned stillness.

Mahini crouched over Laki and began a whispered accompaniment of sighs and hisses. Se-se crawled over to her sister and pulled on her arms, calling her softly. Laki’s eyes were unfocused and vacant. Every few seconds Laki would yelp, clawing at her face and neck. Se-se grabbed Laki more firmly and shook her, yelling Laki’s name. Mahini closed a circle around Se-se and Laki. As garbled sounds started to spill out of Laki’s mouth, faint trails of blue smoke wafted from her body. Se-se could see the mark of tears on her sister’s face.

Although Laki seemed paralyzed, she was fighting for her sanity within. She battled hysteria by forcing herself to remember her victories. “I can thin the cloak,” she murmured to herself. “I can show my face like Mahini does. I can stretch the cloak for long distances. I can do all the proper maneuvers for privacy. I can sit for hours with the cloak on, it doesn’t hurt me.” But you can’t get out , a voice whispered in her head. But you can’t get out.

The mothers described it as a particular wave of emotion—sudden fear when a child is in danger, a sharp tenderness associated with duty, or heartbreak when a child is in pain—that could part the veil. Once parted, the veil would release a mother from the unit’s bond, and she could temporarily detach, with her own unique section of the veil draped over her.

Laki was full of emotions—primarily anger and rage—but those were useless in a mother-unit. At each training session, she thought of gruesome situations, awful things that would put the lives of innocent babies in peril, but it never worked. No matter what she tried, the cloak remained unmoved.

Maybe it was the pull of Mahini’s voices, maybe it was Se-se leaning over her, but suddenly Laki broke through the mania of grief. She felt the sensation of the cloak falling over her again. But this time, instead of clinging to her, it laid cool and soft on her skin. It felt like the comforting presence her mothers had promised it would become, the gentle companion it had been becoming in Laki’s last days of training.

The memory of the one time she had parted through the veil burst into her consciousness, and pulled her further out of her turmoil. She had been under the veil, drowning in failure, when the thought had blossomed: “I bet Se-se could do it.” Her fear of never learning how to exit the veil was buried under a forceful flood of tenderness for her sister. Then it had happened—a small hole of unmoving air had appeared in the middle of the cloak’s shimmer.

Laki, smiling at the memory, was surprised to feel her dread of the veil slip away. Yes, she could not escape the veil, yet the grip of failure relaxed. She allowed that simple success to part her panic and slice open an exit through her grief. She was suddenly buoyed by the certainty that, with Se-se guiding in her, she would always learn the way out.

Laki heard a whispering, felt someone cushion her head. Her eyes fluttered open. Seconds passed while she stared at the face before her, a few more seconds passed before she realized it was Se-se.

“I thought…” Laki said, swallowing back tears. “I thought I’d dreamed that you were here.”

“I’m here, Laki.”

Laki looked at her sister and felt both relief and a soft sadness descending. In the wake of those all-too-real memories with the veil, sadness was a sweet emotion—a reprieve from her mother-unit anxieties and a welcome respite from her rage. She gripped Se-se’s hands and smiled apologies and love at her. Time and space suspended as everything around them fell away. When their hearts had been silently emptied, Se-se and Laki snapped out of their trance.

Laki let go of Se-se’s hands and looked around. “What happened to the party?”

None of Laki’s guests had left the party, but there was no dancing, no laughing, and no fondling. Everyone was gathered around, watching the sisters. Everyone except Mahini—there was no sign of them.

“Can someone put the music back on?” Se-se asked.

Someone put music on, but the mood was permanently broken.

Se-se helped Laki sit up. “The pods are ready. Are you ready to go?” she whispered.

“Go? Where are we going?”

Before Se-se could answer, the party started to dissolve. A friend of Laki’s came over with outstretched arms. Laki rose from the floor, fully recovered from her outburst. She was, once again, animated and enigmatic. She was passionate with her goodbyes, effusive with her embraces. A few times, she jokingly pretended to faint as punctuation in conversations, and each time Se-se jumped, arms outstretched, ready to catch Laki before she fell.