They cried of the pain they had endured at birth, and all the wasted years they had spent without the taste of freedom. Some had been born free, and had been stripped of all vestiges of will before they were forced into this small gray cage. Others had taken their first wailing breaths right here, inside the walls of Midnight. It wasn’t long before a child born in Midnight learned never to cry. Malachi didn’t cry. Wrapped in the terror and despair of those who had gone before him, he hadn’t cried since his first infant exhalation. Nor did he reach for his mother, who had also been born here. She had nursed him and given him sustenance, but she did not know how to give comfort because she had never known any herself. He squeezed his eyes shut as Fate walked by the door, in the form of a man who moved in a sphere of destiny that called out to Malachi. There were many people in this place who dragged with them pasts so heavy that they were suffocating, but this man was surrounded by sparks and swirls of “what if?”
