One day he asked me to go to his home with him – his brother having finally found work. Once a month we left our shifts early, claiming illness or emergency, took off in different directions and met at his door. His bed was unmade and narrow. It forced us to lie close. Our breaths mingled, and our skins were slick together. I loved the feel of him inside me.

Neither of us thought I was fertile – my periods were rare, and Drew, who had been tested for violence training, probably did not have enough hormones. We figured we were safe. I did not ever want to bring a child into this chaos. I was just shy of twenty-eight when I woke in the middle of the day and vomited. My mother brought me a double ration of water and I could see the worry in her eyes. “Who is he?” she said.

“I met him at the tech centre. His name is Drew.”

“Bring him here.”

“To live?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“He has a brother.”

“Bring the brother too.”

We found a bigger place; half of a house on the way out of Bana. We called it the Halfway House. Drew’s brother didn’t come to live with us, but he sometimes visited Drew at the tech centre and they would talk during break.

My belly grew. I was both starving and repulsed by the thought of food. I was also terrified. If the Domins learned I was a fertile female, if I birthed a boy with the right hormone levels, they would take the child and I would be given to a Domin man.

I was lucky; I had a small belly and no one at the tech centre noticed what I carried under my white coat.

Drew had a friend with a doctor uncle, and we went a few times to speak with him. He told me what to expect and said he would help when it was time for the baby to be born.

My daughter was born on the kitchen table of the Halfway House just as the sun came up. I always figured that’s why she couldn’t go to sleep at sunrise. A daylight come baby, my mother said, as she handed her to me.

CHAPTER 8 – FERALS

Sorrel woke, washed in sweat and disoriented, surprised to have slept at all. She was cramped and stiff but didn’t want to wake Bibi by moving. It was lighter in the tree cavern and she looked at the intricacies of the root system that sheltered them. What kind of tree had it been? A big one, perhaps centuries old? Were the roots living or dead? If dead, why had they not decayed? Maybe the soil was too sterile. A ray of sunshine touched the ground at her feet, and she assessed its angle. Had to be past midday. The hottest time. The silence of the day lay over the charred land.