Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [50]

Even I admit that. My brother Keith used to pretend to be hurt just to trick me into sharing his supposed pain. Once he used red ink as fake blood to make me bleed. I was eleven then, and I still bled through the skin when I saw someone else bleeding. I couldn’t help doing it, and I always worried that it would give me away to people outside the family. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 50

Note

The red ink detail does the double duty of characterizing the brother’s cruelty and the syndrome’s rules in one image; “I still bled through the skin” is the chapter’s cleanest demonstration-versus-explanation moment, showing that the condition is a somatic bleed with no volition. The final clause ties the medical fact to the family’s secrecy economy — vulnerability itself is contraband.