Welga traveled often and never visited them for long, but she kept her feeds so open that Nithya felt as if she knew her well.

“I’m the younger brother. She’s supposed to be the responsible one,” Luis grumbled. “This new thing could cost all her savings. Papa told me that she’s been sending him coin for the house repairs.”

“She has? For how long?”

“I don’t know, but if Welga can’t help him, then what? It’s not like we can afford it.”

Especially not if we keep this baby. In the dark quiet of midnight, Nithya couldn’t contain the pressure of her secret. “I’m pregnant.”

“What?” Luis propped himself on an elbow. His expression softened. “That’s wonderful! That’ll be something to cheer everyone up. But… how? I thought you were on birth control with your dailies.”

“There’s a point-two percent chance of failure with regular use of flow. We beat the odds.”

Luis lay back on his pillow. “At least we have some good news to balance out the bad.” He grinned. “A baby… now I really can’t sleep.”

Nithya closed her eyes and gathered her resolve around herself—armor for the upcoming battle. “I don’t want it.”

“Sleep?”

“The pregnancy.”

The silence that followed had a weight she couldn’t bear. Nithya kept her eyes closed.

“I thought we were done with this discussion when you got pregnant with Carma,” he said, his voice one step above a whisper.

She swallowed the tears, but a sniffle escaped.

Luis sighed. “When your mother died, you said you wanted another baby. That maybe her soul would be reborn in her grandchild. What if this is God’s way of making that happen?”

“Don’t throw my grief in my face! You don’t believe in reincarnation. And it’s not a good time. I need to be working, earning. I lost an entire year of expertise because of Carma.”

“So you’ve decided? Then why involve me at all? You know what I believe. Abortion is a sin. Bad enough that you’re using hormones. You can’t ask me to end a God-given life!”

“I haven’t. Let’s push it off for a week. I can stall on my projects that long, stay off flow. I’ll say that I’m not well to explain the slowdown.”

Her husband grunted and rolled away. She didn’t expect either of them to sleep well that night.

WELGA

5. In the aftermath of every major technological advance, we observe a consolidation of wealth and then a political correction, some more bloody than others, but all leading to a redistribution of power across society. At the end of the Digital Age, we broke down corporations as socioeconomic entities. The individual became paramount.

—The Machinehood Manifesto, March 20, 2095