She couldn’t stop thinking about what Skousen had said—about what it had been like to live through the Break. She couldn’t blame him for feeling so strongly about it, because everyone felt that way, but it hadn’t been until that moment when Kira realized just how differently it had affected people. Skousen would have been in a hospital when the virus was released; he would have watched it fill up in hours, spilling into the halls and out into the parking lot, consuming the world in a plague-borne storm. His own family members died in his arms. Kira, on the other hand, had been alone: Her nanny had died quietly in the bathroom, and her father had simply … never come home. She’d waited for a few days, until all the food she knew how to make was gone from the house, and then she’d wandered out to ask for more. The neighborhood was empty; the world itself seemed empty. If not for a passing army caravan, retreating desperately from the war front, she might not have survived at all.

Skousen remembered a world falling apart. Kira remembered a world pulling together to save itself. That was the difference. That was why Skousen and the Senate were too afraid to do what it took to solve this. If it was going to get done, it would have to be the plague babies who did it.

Haru was already talking—passionately, of course, since that seemed to be his only way of doing anything. He was always the center of any conversation he joined, not through charisma so much as sheer determination. “What you’re not realizing,” he said, “is that the Senate doesn’t care. You can talk about being robbed of your childhood, you can talk about inefficient science, but that’s all beside the point for them.” The rumor mill was working overtime, insisting that the Senate was going to lower the pregnancy age again, and Haru had taken Isolde’s refusal to comment as a tacit confession that the rumor was true. “They’ve decided that the best way to beat RM is to drown it in statistics, and that means they’ll lower the pregnancy age as far as they think they can get away with. Lowering the pregnancy age from eighteen to sixteen gives them what, five thousand new mothers? Five thousand new babies every ten to twelve months? It doesn’t matter if it’s effective or not, it’s the best and quickest advancement of their chosen strategy. It’s inevitable.”

“You don’t know that,” said Isolde, but Haru shook his head.

“We all know it,” he said. “It’s the only way this government knows how to make decisions.”

“Then maybe we need a new government,” said Xochi.

“Don’t start this again,” said Jayden, but Xochi was almost impossible to stop when she got going.