Page 49 of The Sin

The first married couple in Capra to conceive naturally.

I’d always silently mocked the notion as a myth, the elusive holy grail—at least, in my lifetime—but it was less myth now, less holy grail, although I still couldn’t imagine it happening in my lifetime.

“The girls in The Smoke have the option of harvesting their eggs.” The Protectorate rewarded them with credits, Jenna had told me, a similar system as they did for every child born. But the weekly credits weren’t the main prize.

“The first three cycles of harvesting is for the Protectorate.”For Capra and the trading post.“After that, all their eggs are frozen, and stored, for them to use one day, when they’re ready…to be—” my voice cracked “—a mother.”

“I’m sorry,” Roman said.

“All that bullshit about a precious, limited supply of frozen eggs—” I broke off on a bitter, slightly psychotic laugh.

“Not all bullshit. That was the promise that the Eastern Coalition was founded on, but the original supply dried up long ago, Georga. The supply from the girls in The Smoke is still limited, and will always be precious.”

Was he trying to make me feel better?

I wriggled out of his arms, turning about to face him on my knees. The flashlight had gone skittering when he’d tackled me, and lay somewhere beyond us, lifting the peripherals of blackness into shadowy echoes of vision.

It was enough to see the grim set of his jaw.

It was enough to see him pull a hand through his hair, and to feel his gaze on me.

“Why would they do this to us?” I demanded. “Why did they keep this from us? Why couldn’twehave had our eggs frozen?”

Why couldn’t I be a mother one day? A biological mother with babies that truly came from my own flesh and blood?

I couldn’t.

Capra made that decision for me years ago.

And yes, I know that theoretical baby hadn’t yet been born—and now, never would be—but still, it felt like he or she had been torn from me, ripped straight out of my womb.

Capra may not have literally murdered my unborn babe, but they had murdered the one choice that really, truly mattered.

It was dead.

Gone.

There was nothing I could ever do, no fight I could ever win, no rebellion or uprising or anything, that could ever restorethatchoice to me.

“Why?” I demanded again into his silence. The answer wasn’t his to give, and I didn’t expect one. But I needed an answer. For once in my tiny, irrelevant life, I needed the universe to give me one damn answer.

Roman answered, his voice grave. “I don’t know why Capra does half the things they do, but I can guess. The harvesting process is invasive—”

“I don’t care.”

“It requires weeks of hormone treatments.”

“I. Don’t. Care.”

“It probably places unnecessary, unnatural stress on the body,” he said.

Of course! They couldn’t do anything unnecessary, unnatural, to their lab rats. Not physically, anyway. They were quite happy to go wild with mental and emotional experiments and torture.

I glared at Roman. “You knew all this time, and you never told me.”

He looked me in the eye. “I knew.”

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

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