Page 63 of The Sin

She looked intrigued, almost despite herself, settling back in her chair and folding her arms.

“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “I was placed under reprimand, but it’s not like there’s a cloud of suspicion hanging over me. So far as Roman and the council and the Guard are concerned, I never left that parking garage. I was never even aware that I’d been outside Capra’s wall.”

“I wasn’t worried.”

Of course she wasn’t. That’s one of the reasons I was determined to keep Roman squeaky clean. Rose had made it clear that even on a sanctioned mission, I was on my own…well, me and a ready-made candidate to blame for inciting my nefarious activities. My mother was an acceptable option, although my husband was her personal preference.

“Okay.” She stood and went to put the kettle on the stove. “Tell me everything.”

I jumped to my visit in The Smoke first, using it to justify details I couldn’t otherwise have known just from what I’d observed of the Outerlands and the barons at Sector Five. She wanted to know, of course, how I managed to not only get to The Smoke, but back again.

I took a leaf from the Sisterhood handbook. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

She arched a brow on me. “Let me guess. Your warden husband?”

I snorted. “You seriously think Roman West would tolerate that kind of insubordination in his wife, let alone aid and abet? You obviously don’t know him very well.”

That’s exactly what I was betting on.

“He turned me over to the Guard after Sector Five, and that’s while he firmly believes I don’t have a clue that I’d ever left Capra,” I elaborated. “If he even so much as suspected I’d found a way to sneak out to The Smoke, he’d have me committed to rehab for life.”

For a moment, I worried I’d laid it on too thick.

But Rose digested that, then demanded, “So how did you get from Capra to The Smoke and back?”

“I had help, obviously.”

“Georga,” she issued in a threatening tone.

I shrugged her off. “I can’t give up any names. I won’t. I’m sure you understand.”

She wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t giving her a choice. After another minute of useless posturing and prodding, we moved on.

I told her about how the women lived in The Smoke—about how many women there were—which led into my half-assed explanation about the sperm sorting process to balance the gender numbers.

“Children are being born in the Outerlands and The Smoke,” I said after that. “That’s the greatest threat they’ve always hung over us. The world is dead outside the walls. There’s nothing to escape to. It’s a lie.” Anger hitched my breath. “It’s all lies. How do you even do that? How do you keep an entire town so utterly in the dark?”

I was asking morally, but Rose answered with the mechanics of how easily it had been done.

“People leave Capra occasionally, but they never come back.” She thought on that and added, “Except for the wardens, I suppose, but they keep to themselves.”

Because they lived in the real world, while we supposedly lived in some cotton-candy fantasy paradise. That’s how Roman had once seen me—how he’d seen all Capra citizens—but that wasn’t the whole truth.

And yes, we have a symbiotic relationship with The Smoke, and in turn, with the Outerlands. We relied heavily on them, but they needed our educated professionals, our medical expertise and research, which was also used for trade with the barons.

But that wasn’t Capra’s main purpose. It wasn’t our reason for being, because we weren’t just protected by our walls. We were a science experiment in motion. Isolated and studied, pitied and revered, left in a holding pattern of carefully manufactured stasis on the wing of a prayer that we’d one day produce a miracle.

I left the worst for last.

Rose didn’t believe me.

“Impossible,” she declared in a flat, no-nonsense voice.

“That’s not all,” I said. “Apparently the original supply of frozen eggs dried up ages ago and what we’ve been using is harvested from girls in The Smoke. And if their eggs don’t rot until they’re fourteen, that means ours would be viable, too, for a short time. Maybe even longer, what with all the pure-living and wellness that’s forced on us.”

Rose sat there, drumming her fingers on the table, staring straight through me.

The tea she’d put in front of me earlier had grown cold, but I sipped on it now, giving her time to absorb and process. I was done talking. I’d said everything there was to say.

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