It’s a girl, though I can hardly call her that. Her lank hair has fallen out in clumps and lies in piles beside her head. Her pasty sore-pocked skin is nearly see-through on her skeletal face. Cords and wires jut out of her arms, chest and head like she’s some kind of machine. Long, thin fingernails curl from her lifeless hands. An odor like rotten meat wafts from the bed, gagging me.

She’s the living dead. And she’s eight months pregnant.

Icy waves of fear wash over me, weakening my knees. I scan the dark beds. There must be dozens of girls in similar states. They’re human incubators. A fate worse than death. On a bed next to me a legless creature lies nine months pregnant, her face covered by paper-thin skin. The stumps of her legs still oozing. Oozing.

I gag and stumble back. Have to get out.

“Dear God,” I whisper with trembling lips, “What is this?”

“Plan B,” the husky male voice behind me says.

I whirl around, but it’s too late. He slams me to the ground. My knees bang into the tile, then my wrists, and finally the ground hits my cheek like a punch. I shove up and scamper forward, but he’s got my ankle. He pulls. My fingers find a bed sheet. I claw up the bed. The sheet slips back and the unconscious woman’s head lolls towards me. It’s then I see the burns.

My mother’s burned face lies before me. She’s unconscious, a tube taped over her mouth like a transparent snake burrowing into her throat. Tubes coil out of blue veins in her arms. One hand lies cupped on the bed as if she were reaching out to me. But she’s not. She’s unconscious. One of their plan B experiments.

“No!” I scream. The guard yanks on my arms, pulls me across the tile floor. I lock my eyes on my mother until it’s too dark to see, until she’s a ghostly blur in my tear-filled eyes. “Mama!”

God, no. Please no. Not her. Not like this.

I used to think the Breeders were monsters. Now I know they are.

The guard drags me back upstairs to my room. I’m glad he grips my arms because my legs are jelly. When he pushes me on my bed and straps me down, I barely have the strength to fight back. All I can see in the darkness is my mother’s lifeless face. The tube in her throat. Her hand clutching, finding nothing in the dark.

Dr. Rayburn stands at the side of my bed. He waves the guard away.

“You’re a monster,” I manage to croak.

“You … uh, you are not authorized to roam the hallways.” His eyes flick to my face and then away again. “Full restriction is back in place.”