“Where is my child?” she asked Damira, who in her fifties was the eldest of the women. Damira stared at her with unblinking eyes. Perhaps it was at how Aizhana looked. Her face was skeletal, with yellow-gray skin stretched taut in places and sagging in others. Her hair was missing in patches, and what she did possess hung limp and dirty like decaying fishing nets. Or perhaps it was how Aizhana smelled, as she had been dead for nearly two decades, and simply infusing a decaying body with new energy would not undo that unfortunate fact. “Wh-what are you?” Damira asked. “What do you want?” “I
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