“That’s right,” Izabel said, and she kept laughing lightly, like a bird was caught in her throat.

The spring after the Turning was gentler, in that the air did not become increasingly more toxic. It held the levels. Kaito and Izabel settled into a dome together. They were madly in love, which Izabel remembered mostly by how often they were touching—holding hands as they walked, being under his arm on the couch, sleeping with limbs across each other in their new bed, and standing close enough that she would often turn and kiss his shoulder.

Kaito proposed after they’d been living together for two years. And Izabel said she couldn’t marry him because the world was too new.

Thousands of kits had become a town in those two years, a real, functioning town. But it was hard to believe. Could they really survive like this indefinitely? Could there be a meaningful future for them, for any of them?

But about a year later it felt real to Izabel, despite herself, the possibility of their future taking shape, and then she said yes.

Though some things about the town would never feel right. How almost everyone over sixty had died and Izabel rarely saw an old person. And almost every child under ten had died. So Izabel saw infants, yes, but then teenagers, and nothing in between.

When Izabel was pregnant with Cami, so were a large group of women in the town, and it made Izabel feel like she hadn’t chosen to get pregnant at all. Like she hadn’t had countless conversations with Kaito, weighing the pros and cons, considering what was hope and what was foolishness. It felt instead like it was an imperative of her species at work.

Dr. Inaway came in, happy to see that Cami had woken up, and he said that he wanted to discharge her. Gregory and Luis were with him, and Luis went about undoing every cord he’d attached. Lines went flat, numbers dropped to zero.

They had to go home, and Izabel hadn’t thought of that consequence of waking Cami. She hadn’t thought about having to leave the safety of the hospital when a murder had just happened, when the domes were vivid in all of their vulnerabilities. And they still didn’t know what had happened to Cami. It seemed to Izabel that Cami could lose consciousness again at any time. What was stopping her?

“You don’t need to observe her overnight?” Izabel said.

“No,” Dr. Inaway said, smiling. And Gregory smiled behind him. Like they were delivering nothing but good news.

After the doctors left, Izabel said to Kaito, “That’s it? We never know what happened?”

“You know that we don’t know enough about the environment and its effects.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Of course it bothers me,” Kaito said.

“Can’t you talk to them?”

“It wouldn’t change anything.”