I balanced on all fours trying to navigate my large body to a standing position. Just as I pushed myself from the rock floor, my stomach clenched, and I stumbled. Jared caught me, but I couldn’t stand straight up.

“Contraction?” he said, frowning.

“I don’t...I don’t know,” I said, breathing through the pain.

Bex and Claire were immediately at our side, with Kim and Ryan trailing behind.

“The baby?” Bex said. “Should I set up?”

“No,” Jared said. Let’s let her rest. See if it eases up.”

Claire nodded, and assisted Jared in helping me to our makeshift bed. My feet up and relaxed, I tried to think about something else other than whether that pain would return. Labor was going to be a nightmare if I had to look forward to hours of that. I had hoped that my new abilities would anesthetize the pain a bit, but if the previous encounter with contractions had been any indication, I was screwed.

The pain crept up again, like a wave swallowing me whole.

“Breathe, sweetheart.”

I sucked in through my nose and blew out from my mouth, but it didn’t help the pain. A large fist had gripped my uterus and was digging in its fingers while I suffered the worst case of food poisoning ever recorded—that was what I felt.

“Should we set up?” Bex said again.

“No,” Jared said firmly. “We’re just timing them now.”

We waited several minutes, and then I felt another contraction, but it wasn’t nearly as painful. They became less frequent painful before stopping all together. Everyone in the room breathed a collective sigh of relief when Jared deemed the event a false alarm. He wouldn’t allow me to sit up, though, or even leave the bed after that. He or Claire would walk me to the hole in the floor if I needed to relieve myself. It was half-humiliating, half-frightening. My body hadn’t felt like my own for quite a while, but now there was no control over the situation.

We had no idea what went on in the world aboveground. I wondered what Beth and Chad were doing, if they worried about us, and about Cynthia and Lillian. If they leaned on each other for support, waiting to hear their grandchild had been born and that all of their children were alive. Even though I knew I needed to stay positive in those last difficult days, lying bed with nothing to do but read the same magazines, or think, my mind effortlessly traveled to less trivial things.