Children. Children born from the stars torn from the night. And, together, they surrounded Brun.
They were almost as many as the number of fingers he had on his hands.
Until Brun realized something. He looked at one, then at another, looked at the one next to that one, the one behind that one, and those who gathered between the darkness and the starry clouds. They all had big, bright green eyes, and soft brown hair just like his, though not as messy perhaps. They were barefoot and wore loose white gowns, similar to the ones he used to wear when they took him to do his studies, the kind that left his butt exposed. Yes, there were many children, though it seemed to be only one duplicated several times.
You are the Duplicated Children, he called them.
Duplicate was a word he’d learned from hearing the ladies-nurses repeat it so often. ‘How am I supposed to know which is which? These duplicates all look the same!’ Duplicate meant it was the same, and these kids all looked the same.
Hold it! Now he remembered. He’d also had someone whom he had shared the same face with. A brother who had been born with him. But where was that brother now?
The grumpy man-nurse had talked about a kid who had run away. His brother, was that the kid?
Do you know where my brother is? he asked those children.
“No, but we know of something that might help you find him,” one of them said, though he spoke without moving his mouth.
What’s that? he asked.
“Our potions,” answered another child, also without opening his mouth. “Have you heard of them?”
He didn’t know what they were talking about.
“If you drink them, they’ll make you stronger than you already are,” the boy said.
Really?
“So strong that you won’t need anyone anymore. You’ll be able to go outside by yourself and leave these people who don’t like you.”
Wow, that seems interesting! He liked the idea. He felt fed up with everyone talking behind his back in that gray and cold place, but since he was forbidden to leave Bernardo’s laboratory...
“And then you can go looking for your brother,” said another of the children, and that idea enthused him even more.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“The problem is that unworthy people have been wasting our potions, Brun, and now only a few remain.”
Unworthy people? What is it to be unworthy?
“That they do things they shouldn’t with something that doesn’t belong to them, like our potions.”
“The potions belong to us, Brun! Those people shouldn’t even touch it!
Oh, I see... And where are those potions?
“We’ll show you,” said the children.
“Come,” said one of them, and taking him by the hand, led him toward those colored clouds full of stars from which they had emerged. “Our Night Nebulae will take you where you need to go.”
Brun followed them.
A few minutes later, the alarm went off in the lab. Brun had disappeared from his room.
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Silence. Silence and darkness.
And every so often, the Night Nebulae unfolded before his eyes, and he was somewhere else.
Sometimes he would appear in a room that looked like the room where his studies were done, in the cold lab, other times, in a very large and fancy room with many statues, and another, in the sea, floating among huge fish. Once, the Nebulae opened up into a tiny dark cave, deep below the ground, where a man made of bones in a dusty robe waited for him, leaning on the rocks, which had scared him a little.
Of course, no matter where he went, wherever he appeared, there was a gift waiting for him. A very small bottle, filled with the potion, a liquid that moved, something that reminded him of what those mountains he had seen on TV spit out, those volcanoes... lava, did they call it? Yes, but a white lava. And shiny. And alive.
Sometimes the little bottle wasn’t so little and was oddly shaped, like those old cups he’d seen in fancy places, and it was covered in dust and cobwebs, like the one he found in that cave next to the bone man. Although most of the time it was about those little elongated bottles that looked like a finger, very similar to the ones that old Bernardo had in his lab.
It was enough to break the little bottle for the potion to enter his skin. Then the light—the toxic light—jumped from his body and he would hear the screams and see the lightning bolts.
And he felt himself getting stronger, even smarter. And hungrier.
He also ran into some strange men who tried to stop him. It happened in a science room, where a gray-skinned, bald man with reddish eyes tried to hold him back so that he wouldn’t take the potion. Then it happened in that beautiful building that had a very high ceiling and long windows with drawings of people on the panes, all lit up with fire sticks on the walls, where another bald man with violet eyes, this one dressed in a long black robe, tried to convince him that he didn’t take the potion using some words, words that he didn’t understand. Both of them, in their own way, caused a strange sensation in his belly, like when he ate something bad and got sick, and then his nose bled a little; the same thing that had happened a long time ago, in the cold lab, when the bald, blue-skinned woman who visited him from time to time in the company of old Bernardo took him by the arm.
None of those strange men had been able to do much to prevent him from absorbing the potions. To tell the truth, though, those who had taken care of those strange men had been the Duplicate Children themselves, who moved the Night Nebulae so that they would eat them, making them disappear in starlight.
The Duplicate Children didn’t like people like Bernardo or the nurses, the unworthy people, but they hated those people with gray skin and no hair. Maybe because they were even more unworthy than the others? The Children didn’t need to tell him; the look on their faces when they saw what those people did with the potions had been enough for him to realize what they felt.