Everyone is born with one. A soulmark. An image that only your soulmate will have the double of. This is the way of the world.
They start of as a grey-black outline and turn full colour when two soulmates meet. And they stay that way until one mate dies. Then the mark turns grey and colourless.
You only get one soulmate. You only get one soulmark.
Until now.
Jeff traced the dove on his wrist. All shades of blues and violets and touches of green. And waited. Suddenly, his Mom was in front of him and he stood up. 'She's fine, Jeff. This way.' He followed her through the winding hospital corridors.
The screaming told him where he was heading before his Mom could tell him, and his pace quickened. Jeff burst through the doors and Lucy screamed at him.
'Where the hell have you been!'
He so wanted to grin at that, but he thought he better not. Instead, he grabbed her hand and kissed her hair. And then stifled a scream of his own as she crushed his hand and let loose another of her own.
An hour later there were two exhausted parents and a small sleeping bundled up baby boy.
Scott Carpenter Tracy was a perfect baby. Happy all the time, he had his father's eyes and his mother's hair. And he grew fast into a lithe little boy with a ready smile and deep dimples.
At two years old, as was the custom, the faintest lines of his soulmark began to appear. Etched onto his left wrist as it should be, his parents took great joy in speculating what bird would appear.
Over the next few weeks, the marks coalesced into the outline of a swooping eagle.
But that wasn't the only mark that began to appear.
Once the outline on the boy's wrist was complete his parents were shocked to find a second one appearing, this time on his right shoulder.
Jeff and Ruth spent days researching how this was possible. No one had ever heard of a person having more than one soulmark.
It took three weeks, but eventually the soulmark on his shoulder formed into the outline of the number one, with tendrils of what looked like ivy wrapped loosely around the figure. And the ivy snaked out and around eight evenly spaced circular holes.
Eventually they could only come to one conclusion.
Scott Tracy was an anomaly.
In a world where you were born to love only one person, would he be so full of love that he would love nine?