CHAPTER SIX

June 14, 2039 — Voyos Island

Nicole looked down at the stick. Technology had transformed the landscape, but pregnancy tests were still the same basic kits they’d always been. 

“Shit,” she said. 

This wasn’t good. Something had been amiss for a while now, but Nicole figured she was just getting sick. It made sense; she’d been sliding into a shallow depression throughout all of April and May and hadn’t been treating herself well. She ate right and exercised because her profession demanded it (nobody wanted a fat girl smearing the glass above them), but she hadn’t been sleeping, had been consuming her requisite calories via synthetic snack foods, and didn’t exactly have Clive’s EndLax available to flush it all through her. 

Few people here thought much of modern medicine. On Voyos, it was all ointments and acupuncture, massage and meditation. There were even shamans who took off-island clients. Nicole had felt sick, and drank tea. Seeing a physician wasn’t even a thought. 

Nicole put a hand on her belly. She had to call Clive. She wasn’t sure how she’d reach him at the summit, but she had to. It was June. He’d left in early February. Looking down, she saw almost no bulge. There was only a slight bump, but until now she figured her discipline had been slipping. It hardly seemed enough to account for a 4-month fetus, but she’d heard that sometimes girls didn’t show much in their first pregnancy. 

Not that she had much experience or knowledge. Her mom had died before they’d had a need for the details, and Nicole was an escort before the world’s smoke had fully cleared. Her mother had probably learned all about babies and how they grew when she’d been younger, but their childhoods had been worlds apart. For Nicole, who’d had major surgery and started a career that treated pregnancy like cancer, taking the time to learn the details of child-bearing — during the apocalypse, on her own, without a mother — would have been like learning to weld for the hell of it. 

Regardless, she was pregnant. No question. The results were unambiguous and, according to the package, 100 percent accurate. The same was supposedly true for the other six tests she’d taken in the last 12 hours. 

How had she not noticed for four months?

And … you know … didn’t a girl need a uterus to get pregnant? 

Of course she did. Otherwise, what had been the point of crying all those times about never being able to have kids? 

But answers changed nothing. Nicole knew she was pregnant, and that the baby was Clive’s. She’d worked with Sam on the tables since he left, but Sam was born on Voyos and would be more sterile than a laboratory test tube. He’d also made it abundantly clear when they met that he’d had a vasectomy, probably trying to pretend that was unusual in an attempt to woo Nicole into an exclusive contract. 

Proof of the contrary was right in front of her. 

Nicole picked up her tablet and ran a Forage search. 

She didn’t like to think about the fall. The black times. Her mom died in the aftermath, in what passed for a hospital. Nicole nearly passed in the same almost-hospital a year later. Back then, she’d believed in the medical system even as it crumbled, largely due to her father’s insistence that those in charge knew what they were doing. 

A doctor was still a doctor, he said, and doctors, especially now, were needed. But what did he know? 

She remembered the experience. For Nicole, the thought of hospitals and clinics made her wince with remembered pain, conjuring images of dirty floors and dirtier knives, of men and women who were just as lost as the rest of them during the bad times but who’d been skilled enough to save patients. 

When the almost-doctor in the stained smock had taken her mother for what he swore was a routine but urgent procedure — removal of her inflamed appendix — he’d actually winked and said that everything would be okay. 

It hadn’t been. 

Nicole had always wondered what had happened behind those closed doors after she’d given the stranger her trust. She only knew that her mother never came out. That she’d believed in medicine once, and her mother had died in its hands.

That and her own experience.

They’d told Nicole she had a benign tumor. She hadn’t known what that meant, so they had to explain. They’d gone in and removed things, and miraculously, despite her growing sense of medical distrust, she’d survived. 

But had the men and women in that crumbling building in a burning city done what they’d said? Had they done it right? They swore that she’d never have children. She couldn’t. It was physically impossible. You simply don’t have the kangaroo’s pouch, one of them had told her as she sobbed in a failed attempt at cozy familiarity. 

She patted her stomach, proof of their error. 

Part of Nicole knew she was raising yet another mental wall. 

She should go to the Voyos clinic. But she knew that she wouldn’t. 

Not unless something went very wrong, and her situation grew dire. 

The Islanders had babies without any assistance, save possibly for a midwife. Humanity had survived for hundreds of thousands of years without the butchers in blue. 

And besides, Nicole had other problems. 

She hadn’t heard from Clive for weeks after his departure. That being expected was hideously depressing. She kept trying to bolster her mood, but it had continued to disintegrate like a sandcastle waiting for the waves. 

Part of her kept wanting to believe that their relationship was different and that Clive would miss her. He’d call, just to hear her voice and see her face, even if there were no sexual favors exchanged. But he hadn’t called, and his silence had cracked their relationship open like a blighted fruit. 

Nicole had finally admitted the truth she’d always known: 

She was an escort, hired for sex. 

When there was no sex, there was no need for the escort.

Nicole’s hand returned to her stomach. She did the math. 

Based on when she and Clive had last had sex, nine months after that final bout would be late October. 

She breathed deeply, trying to accept it all. It was a lot to take all of a sudden … and all on her own.

But she forced herself to focus. 

Halloween. The baby would arrive somewhere around Halloween. Clive would return before then, and he’d certainly be around for the Voyos Halloween celebration when Nicole was about to pop. 

Maybe he’d want to be part of the child’s life. He’d said he’d likely want kids some day when she’d whined about her supposedly kaput baby maker, and it was true that Clive had been with Nicole more than any other woman over the last half-decade. 

If he was ever going to have kids with someone, why not her? 

If Clive returned to Voyos, could she take him back? Tell him that he was going to be a father? Maybe it would bring them closer together. Maybe it would make their relationship deeper. 

She sighed in pathetic desire. 

Hers was a stupid, stupid desire. 

Nicole looked at her tablet. She didn’t want to call Clive and tell him the news. Nobody wants to learn if they’ll be bringing a baby into this fucked-up world, her mother once said. Before the doctors killed her. Before the same species of lowlifes had told her she’d never be a mom, then butchered her. 

For all Nicole knew, the tumor was still inside her. 

For all she knew, what she and the pregnancy test thought was a baby might be the tumor. 

A trip to the clinic would answer so many questions.

As would a call to her unborn baby’s father.

But, Nicole rationalized, both could wait for an indefinite later.