The man held the child by the hair—a brown girl in the throes of puberty—pulling back her head so that the sanguine liquid of her life drained into a funnel. Her blood flowed down a narrow hose, a conduit from the child's neck, through the water to the obsidian stone at the bottom. Wispy, red clouds formed in the crystal-clear water at the end of the hose, billowing around the stone as the girl gave out, her gurgling cry dying in her throat.