5 Kaia #2
I knew what she was asking. I’d known the answer since I was twelve years old, reading placement records in the Steward’s archive.
“The Order identifies bloodline suitability at Steward rank and above. There’s a panel—blood work, genetic mapping, compatibility assessment.
When the Order determines the timing is correct, they designate a donor from the Order’s approved registry.
The records don’t use names. Just codes.
The procedure is administered in the medical wing monthly until confirmation.
” The words came out flat and orderly. “My mother went through three cycles. The result was me.”
“There’s no—” Sloane paused. “There’s no man in that equation.”
“No.”
“No one who—” She was choosing carefully now. “No one whose face you’d know. No one who knew yours.”
“The anonymity is for my own protection. For the bloodline and for the donor.”
“The anonymity,” Sloane repeated, the way she repeated things when she wanted me to hear them outside of my own voice. She said nothing else for a moment. Then: “And afterward. Once you’ve fulfilled the requirement. You raise the child alone.”
“My mother did.” The words came easier now, which was worse.
“Her mother before her. It’s always been just the two.
One generation to the next, mother and daughter, the bloodline maintained and the work continued.
It’s efficient. It’s safe. No secondary attachments to complicate the mission.
The Order provides housing, education, full integration into the compound structure.
The child is trained from birth to restrain the infection.
” A pause. “The way I was trained from birth.”
Sloane walked quietly for a moment.
“Do you want children, Kaia?”
The question landed so simply that my first instinct was to answer it simply. “Of course. When the Order determines the timing is right, the process will be initiated and—”
“That’s not what I asked.” Sloane cut across the catechism before I could finish it. “I’m not asking what the procedure is. I’m not asking what the Order does. I’m asking what you want. Do you want children?”
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came.
The gravel crunched. The gate was thirty meters, and I walked toward it and I turned the question over in my hands for the first time in my life, really turned it, not as doctrine, not as protocol, not as when the Order determines the timing—but as a plain, living thing that had an answer underneath all of that, if I was willing to look.
What did I want?
The market square came back to me. The two boys shoving each other toward the cart of sticky buns, laughing loud enough to startle pigeons.
The woman with flour to her elbows, leaning out over her stall to call something to a man three stalls down and him calling back and both of them laughing at whatever it was, that quick, intimate, unguarded language of people who belonged to each other.
A child balanced on a fence post while a man I took for her father—the same nose, the same stubborn set of the jaw—held her by the ankle and pretended he wasn’t.
The baby on the hip of a woman buying apples, fat-fisted, solemn, regarding the market with the gravity of a tiny emperor.
My throat tightened.
The wanting hit me so fast and so clear that I lost a step—actually stumbled—and recovered and kept walking and did not look at Sloane because my face would have told her everything.
More than one. More than a girl. Boys with their father’s jaw and their mother’s stubbornness and some third thing that was only theirs, a laugh nobody had planned for, a habit of collecting rocks or asking why until the adults around them ran out of answers.
A table loud enough to need a second one pulled up beside it.
The particular exhausted joy I’d watched on the face of the woman with the baby—the kind of tired that doesn’t make a person less, because she’d made the thing that was making her tired, and it was hers, and she knew it.
I want that, I thought, and the thought was so clean and so enormous that I had to press my lips together and focus on my breath.
“Yes,” I said, because Sloane was still waiting and she deserved an honest answer. My voice came out low and a little unsteady. “I want children. More than one.”
“More than the Order will give you?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t push further. That was Sloane’s particular mercy—she knew when a truth needed room to breathe, and she gave it.
The gate opened ahead of us.
I walked through it, and the ward-stones swallowed the market noise behind me, and the line under my breastbone went taut and eager and pulled me up the hill toward the very thing I’d come down here to get away from, and I carried the word more with me the whole way up, quiet and alive and refusing to be filed.
I looked at my friend. “Sloane, what are you really doing here?”
Sloane half-smiled and shook her head. “All I’m saying is there might be other ways, Kaia.
Other kinds of lives. Than the one the Verdant Order decided for you before you were old enough to have an opinion.
” She paused. “I’m saying I’ve been watching you for six months, and I have never once watched you want anything. Until four days ago.”
I opened my mouth. The catechism rose to fill it: The servant’s need is the Order’s need. My fulfillment is the work. A Steward who wants for herself has already failed—
The verse came. The verse came and it was hollow, a bell with no clapper, and I let it go unsaid.
“Sloane, can I—”
Sloane half-smiled and shook her head. “No, Kaia. Not yet. But I’ll be here when you’re ready to ask it properly.”
I should have gone to my office.
There was a clean, sanctioned, holy path from the receiving door to my desk, and I knew it, and my feet did not take it.
I turned down the corridor toward the common room instead. Toward Tommy. Twice-flagged for excessive verbalization, vitals erratic during ward-song. It was my responsibility to look in on him. It was vigilant. A Steward who ignored an unstable guest was a Steward who failed the floor.
My skin had gone tight as a drumhead and the heat had pooled low and heavy in my belly and started to ache, a slow molten throb that had nothing whatsoever to do with vigilance.
I walked toward the common room because every cell I owned was leaning that direction and I had run out of the strength it took to lean the other way.
I heard him before I reached the door.
Not the words—the voice. Out of the whole murmuring drowse of the common room my ear reached in and found his pitch and lifted it clear of everything else, the way it had been doing for two days now with no permission from me.
A warm rolling cadence, building toward something, and then the thing it was building toward landed and the room laughed—three, four potential dormants at once, the rusty disbelieving sound of people who’d forgotten the shape their own mouths made—and the laugh went into me low and bright and I stopped in the doorway with my hand on the frame.
“—and I’m not saying the goose was possessed,” Tommy was saying.
He had the floor entirely. He sat backwards on a plastic chair with his forearms folded across the top of it, leaning into the story, and a half-circle of patients leaned in with him as if he were a fire on a cold night.
“I’m saying that if you’d looked into that goose’s eyes the way I looked into that goose’s eyes, you would also have updated your will. ”
“What’d you do?” A young woman, hugging her knees, grinning.
“I did what any rational man does when confronted with the divine. I climbed a tree. A man, in a tree, being judged by waterfowl. Beto took a picture. Beto is banned from showing you that picture.”
The room laughed again, and I leaned against the doorframe and let it wash over me, and I was—
God help me, I was charmed.
I stood there in my pressed tunic with my hands that knew prayer and my spine that knew the crescent print of my mother’s nails, and I watched a rare potential male dormant make a roomful of frightened women forget for thirty seconds that they were caged, and the thing it did to my chest was indecent.
He talked with his whole body. His hands carved the goose, the tree, his own ridiculous flailing dignity out of the air.
When he hit the end of a beat his head went back and his throat worked and he laughed at his own story without an ounce of shame.
I watched the long line of that throat move and felt the heat between my thighs go suddenly, humiliatingly liquid.
I drew my spine off the doorframe. Straight. Chin level. Hands folded, right over left, even pressure, the way I’d been able to hold them since I was six years old.
The old soreness lit up between my shoulder blades right on cue.
I leaned into it. It was mine and it was familiar and it had nothing to do with him, and I held the posture and projected nine years of authority into the room and waited for the calm of it to come down over me the way it always, always did.
It didn’t come.
My pulse climbed instead. I could feel it in my throat, in my wrists, in the soft skin behind my knees.
He hadn’t even looked at me yet. He was three days into his stay and a containment priority and the enemy of everything I had been built to defend, and I stood in the doorway wanting him to look at me, and the wanting was so total and so foreign that for a moment I genuinely did not recognize the body it was happening in.
I pressed two fingers beneath my jaw.
I knew better. I took it anyway because the habit was older than my fear.
It galloped. It threw itself against my fingers, sloppy and urgent, the count of a woman fleeing something, or running toward it, and I stood motionless in a temperature-controlled common room and could not get it under control.