Haru stood up, still scowling. “I’m going outside; I need some air.” He walked away, and Kira heard the back door click open and closed.

Madison smiled sadly. “Sorry about him,” she said. “He’s under a lot of stress.”

“Rough week at work?” asked Kira. Haru worked in construction. Not building things, because everything they could ever need had already been built by the old world. In East Meadow the construction department maintained the buildings currently in use and analyzed new ones the Senate thought the community might need. They spent a lot of time on salvage runs, studying old buildings’ stability before the crews went through and stripped out anything useful. Haru had shown a knack for excavation, so they’d transferred him over from the Defense Grid, but he apparently hadn’t been happy about it. Kira knew that every time something went wrong on his job, it left him surly for days. She’d wondered on more than one occasion if Haru’s transfer had been a veiled dismissal for some conflict or infraction.

To Kira’s surprise, Madison shook her head. “His job’s been fine,” she said softly, “it’s…” She stopped, staring at the floor, then looked up at Kira intently. “Come here.” Her voice was soft but excited, here eyes suddenly alive with energy. Kira narrowed her eyes, wondering what could make Madison so happy and Haru so edgy. She slid across the couch while Madison looked over her shoulder, and suddenly it hit her; she felt the emotional weight like a punch in the gut. She looked at Madison with wide eyes, her breath caught in her throat.

“No…”

Madison turned back, her smile stretching from ear to ear. “I’m pregnant.”

Kira shook her head, still trying to take a deep breath. “No, Mads, no—”

“Yes,” said Madison, “I’m positive. I’ve been sick for weeks, too sick to even eat sometimes, and then ravenous thirty minutes later for something totally weird. I’ve been craving dirt, Kira, like dirt from our garden. Is that the craziest thing?”

“We don’t get certain minerals in our diets here,” Kira whispered. “Pregnant cravings are your body’s way of telling you what nutrients it needs. Dirt’s not that uncommon with our diet.”

“I’m going to go into the hospital in a few days to get tested for real,” said Madison, “but I wanted to tell you first.”

“No,” said Kira again, shaking her head. This couldn’t be happening—she knew that it could, that it was in fact very likely, but at the same time she knew that no, this was Madison, this was the closest thing to a sister, to a family, that Kira had left. “Do you have any idea what it’s like?” she asked. “The pain? The danger? Women die in childbirth; even with all our equipment and experience at the hospital it still happens, and then even if you live, your baby won’t. We haven’t cured RM yet—you’re going to live with this for a few more months, and go through all that pain and terror and blood and everything else, and then it’s going to die.” Kira felt herself tearing up, felt a hot wetness welling up in her eyes and spilling coldly down her face. She imagined Madison where Ariel had been, wide-eyed and screaming, banging on the glass as her daughter squirmed and wailed and died. “Haru is right to be upset,” she said, wiping her face with her fingers. “This is too much for you, you don’t need this.”