I gasped—the little boy was without eyes, stretches of pale, smooth skin bulging over the empty sockets in his skull. Oddly, I felt that he could see and understand my horror. The tiny rosebud mouth, perfectly formed under two flattened nostrils, opened into a thin, shrill scream.
“Darling,” the mother said, pulling up the hood and pulling the child into her arms. “Shhh, quiet.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, horrified at myself. “I didn’t expect to see—”
“No one does,” she snapped, caressing the child’s blond curls.
“We’ll be on our way now,” the man said. “If there is no help for us here, we must move on. There’s a surgeon in Ironcove we can see next.”
Still shuddering from the child’s tragic deformity, I focused on the parents instead, placing them as ordinary folk. A bright-green symbol sha
