But I know it’s deeper than that. I’ve always thought of Lena as alone, like me. I always saw myself in her a little bit. But she isn’t alone. She has a mother, a free mother, a fighter. Someone to be proud of. She has family.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, think of a stone cottage all wrapped in a haze of snow. I open my eyes again.
“We had to take care of something,” Tack is saying.
“But we’re all set now,” I say quickly. I glance over at Tack, trying to communicate with my eyes—let it go, drop it, let’s get out of here.
“We almost left without you,” Pike says, still not ready to forgive us.
“Give us twenty minutes,” I say, and at last Pike shifts aside and lets us pass.
The room where we’ve been sleeping has been stripped down: cots dismantled, gear packed up. Everyone’s getting ready to move on. Once the regulators fig . Igulatorure out it was Invalids who sprang Julian—maybe they’ve already figured it out—they’ll do a sweep. They’ll come looking up here eventually.
There’s no sign of the boy who arrived late last night, the escapee from the Crypts. Young. Quiet type. Barely said a word before falling into bed. He looked like he’d been worked over pretty bad.
He’s from Lena’s part of the world. I can’t help but wonder.
“One of my knives is missing,” Tack says. He peels the mattress of the cot away from the frame. That’s where we stash the stuff that matters, the stuff we don’t want other people poking at and looking through. It’s not exactly a hiding place, since everyone does it—more like a boundary. Tack starts going crazy, pulling off the thin blankets, thumping out the pillows. “One of my best knives.”
For a second, the need to tell is overwhelming. It builds like a bubble in my chest. Let’s go, I almost say. Just you and me. Let’s leave the fight behind.
Instead I say, “How about you check the van.”
When Tack leaves the room, I’m left alone. Suddenly I need to see it again, need to know that it’s true. I squat down and stick my hand in the space between my mattress and the cheap metal frame. After a minute of fumbling, I find it: a small meter, barely bigger than a spoon, carefully wrapped in a plastic bag. It cost me one of Tack’s knives and a silver-and-turquoise necklace Lena gave to me when she first crossed over; the trader who agreed to get it for me kept emphasizing the risks. Everyone knows it’s impossible to get a pregnancy test nowadays, she was saying. You have to have documentation. Letters of approval from the regulatory board. Blah, blah, blah.
I paid. I had to. I needed to know.
I sit back on my heels and smooth down the thin plastic, so I can read the results: two faint parallel lines, like a ladder leading somewhere.
Pregnant.
Footsteps sound in the hallway. I quickly stuff the test back under the mattress. My heart is beating heavy, quick. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I think I feel another heartbeat, a faint pulse somewhere beneath my rib cage, answering.
The first one, we’ll name Blue.