The earliest versions included uglier things: ground up insect eggs and corroded bronze, but the ink you receive is pure, made only from blood of the Cursed.
They inject it into your eyes first because that’s the easiest way to tell you’re different. The black ink mixed with blue and red, a purplish nebula pooling into the whites of your eyes.
It takes three months for your body to fully heal, but you’ll be able to see the dark patterns within just a few days. The ink aches in their presence, sweating through the pores in your skin, but that ink is your shield, your bridge, your right to a Contract.
Hana’s the first one to ask what you see.
“Just black clouds,” you say, waving a hand as if gathering phantom threads of spider silk between your fingers. You ignore the way she winces at the motion. She sees through your lie because her brother got Inked just a few months before you. Before he stumbled into the forest, reaching for shadows, and never returned.
“He said to ignore the first few who try to make a Contract. They’re the starving ones, and they won’t hesitate to take more than they say,” she warns, changing the dripping iced towel on your eyes for a freshly frozen one. The cold stings the thin skin of your eyelids. You feel the ink squirm its way from the front to the backs of your eyes like an overly curious needle.
You know Hana is a liar too. Her brother never said that; how could he? The dead don’t speak about their own mistakes.
You dream of red rivers and purple skies. Of climbing impossibly tall mountains on long stilt legs, your tongue a paintbrush that never runs out of ink. You watch the mountains cast shadows below like black floods cutting through the endless poppy fields. Jagged wings burst through your luminescent spine. You become a bird and leap off the ledge, spilling into the shadows.
You wake, aching for planets you’ve never seen, your throat dry.
They put it in your fingers next. The needle breaks through the delicate skin on the tips, spooling ink into the dermis underneath. The ink traces its own black veins, ancient circuits across a new body, your body.
By then, the patterns have taken clearer shape. No longer splotches on a canvas of air or smoky trails under flickering streetlamps. They are now the familiar shape of objects, animals, people. A favorite book that disappeared one day while you were at school, a friend’s pet cat stretching under the sun, a torn-up hospital gown washed up from the riverbed, your mother curled up on the stained couch before the Council arrived to take her away. You reach up and touch them with your swollen inked fingers. They whisper forbidden things into your skin.
The Artist tells you the ink will tell you when it’s time. To be patient. That you’re doing well, reacting better than most. There’s only a 40% success rate, the unclaimed bodies in the forest and the caked blood beneath their fingernails all evidence of that.
You don’t tell him that the ink is restless, how it wriggles in your eyes and fingers when you sleep, frenzied by the moans of the Cursed at night. How it traces the face of strangers onto the steamed glass of your windows. You don’t tell him that sometimes you worry it’ll find a way out of your body and let them in. How sure are you there are no leaks? you think. A body has so many openings.
As he pulls fresh ink into the syringe, you fight the urge to drag him toward you, to sink the sharp tip into his eyes and give him a look. Maybe together you could parse out the meaning of the dark constellations you see.
No one’s ever told you this story, but you’ve pieced it together through rumor and old books: the Cursed arrived one winter night long ago during a heavy, luminous snowfall and never left. They lacked eyes, mouth, fingers. They spoke through spectres, tricks of light and shadows, words carved into the frozen ground outside our primeval forests. The townspeople believed they were a blessing when they took the shape of loved ones long gone, bodies given life again through the warm light of a fire or porch lamp.
But then there were the dead birds. The children staring at streetlamps at night like light-starved moths. The flickering apparitions, the unfamiliar faces in mirrors, the deep ripples over warm bath water, the phantom fingers trailing across sleeping bodies, thighs and throats. By the time the people realized what was happening, their hands were already quilted in black veins, already pulling open their windows to let in the night.
The Cursed desired connection. They loved the people. They wanted to be with them forever.
Hana doesn’t ask what you see anymore. She sneaks you bread and apple slices from the school, but you have no appetite. When she catches you standing near the entrance of the forest, she grabs your hand so tight it leaves red fingerprints on your skin.
She turns you away from the window at night and tells you a story about birds. How some can soar across the sea for days and weeks, for thousands of miles until they reach their next home.
“What do they want so badly that they need to do that?” you ask, turning your gaze back to the window, to the faces and shadows that clamor for your attention, the fire burning on the street that only you can see.
“They don’t want anything,” Hana says, still holding your hand even when your fingers lack the strength to squeeze back. “Their body moves before their mind has a say. A programmed reflex.”
You miss Hana when she stops coming. You wish you could have asked her more about the birds, if they ever find their way back.
They inject it in your lips last, the ink streaming through microscopic pillows of fat. You expect it to have a taste, but there are no gustatory receptors inside the flesh. Instead, a phantom bitterness inks your tongue, a viscous metallic taste, and you squeeze the armrests, holding back the urge to retch.
When it’s done, the Artist sits back and asks if you’re okay. He massages the tension from his wrists, the syringe on the metal tray with traces of your blood on the tip.
“You’re almost there,” he says as if behind a glass wall, the ink in your ears corking his voice.
In the corner of the room, you see someone that wasn’t there before. They wave to you, but you know not to wave back.
You try to recall the taste of summer fruit, the sweetness of cold watermelon slices, the two-toned color of the twilight sky behind your mother’s house, the fevered pinks and oranges, the red gates outside your old school, your slanting reflection in the blue pool, a firefly pinging neon near your ear as your best friend holds your hand—any stroke of color to feel like yourself again.
But your thoughts settle on the shuddering black shadows in front of you like brushstrokes in the air. You can see the black eyes of lost friends who were Inked too, the charred black skulls of lost friends who were not. You want to peel the last piths of color from your memories and share them like precious, fragrant treats the way your mother used to dice tomatoes from her garden and douse them in oil and pepper for guests.
But these are not your friends, and a body is nothing more than a burning house where everyone has left except you.
The ink speaks, tastes, smells, touches, and takes. You are the canvas, its oils, its nourishment. Just as the Artist said, it comes when it is ready, even if you are not.
The warm threads of ink envelope your throat, tracing the soft line of your shoulders and hips. The black globes of your eyes see them before you feel them. A hurricane of dark light. A taste like cinnamon and electricity fills your mouth.
No one tells you that the longest night is the night when you are finally offered your Contract.
It’s been three months, and your body has healed, but it no longer belongs to you. The Inked are here to serve, and you will, just like all those before you. This is the Contract of your ancestors, the way they chose to survive the hunger, the love of the Cursed. The cost of peace paid by the ink on the skin.
A creature calls out to you, hungry, your body like a beacon in the dark sea. You do not question when your fingers reach out.
© 2024 Angela Liu
