‘I was a university student, you know,’ Layla had told Casey, as they tapped on their laptops side by side. ‘Before all this, before the crisis, we’d all work together on a class project just like this.’

The NGOs, paying Western rates, hoover in anyone who speaks English from across whole countries, causing ripples of difficulties in schools, in hospitals, in universities.

‘Thank you for coming up here, Layla,’ Casey said.

Layla shrugged. ‘I have been talking about surrogacy with a friend of mine in India. She works as a journalist there. I suppose one day the technology will advance, and the babies will be grown in labs, all tidy. But for now . . .’

‘It is so hard to know what’s right,’ said Casey. ‘If the women choose to do it, then—’

‘Do you really think the surrogates in India, or wherever, always get paid when they agree to carry these babies?’ Layla’s face grew fierce. ‘Do you think that they get to keep the money to do whatever they want?’

‘I know,’ Casey said quietly.

‘My friend said that the doctors in India needed donor eggs too.’ Layla picked up a biscuit, bit into it. ‘She said they harvest them like a rice crop. You get more money for a Caucasian egg, apparently.’

Casey met her eye. ‘Yes.’

For a second, Casey thought of witches, saving locks of hair and clips of nail and tiny drops of blood. And what would they make of an egg, just like that? Too good to be true.

‘She said the doctors put in several embryos at a time, to hurry things up,’ Layla went on. ‘And abort a few if too many take.’

‘They’ve thought of everything now,’ said Casey flatly.

‘Mind you.’ Layla rested her chin on her palms. ‘In some places, the clients go through the whole thing, and quite a long time later realise that their baby is not actually genetically theirs. Because their own embryos just weren’t working, so someone somewhere in the system just swapped them out.’

‘I heard about that,’ said Miranda.

‘In the women’s contracts,’ Layla said, ‘there is a clause saying that the girls agree be kept alive on life support if things go wrong, but there is still a chance the baby could survive.’

Emily, a thousand miles away, who wouldn’t even know when her daughter was born.

‘It’s barbaric.’