by Keri Lake
“Heseya wants to induce labor.”
“Is everything okay?”
“I don’t know. All you can do is wait and see at this point.” Part of me is answering his question, but another part of me is preparing him for the realities of childbirth and his limited role when it comes to my own labor. Aside from comfort, there isn’t much he can do when complications strike out of nowhere.
He nods, frowning as always, and allows me to keep on.
A number of cases stand stacked, holding serums and herbs that she uses for healing. The Alpha who was shot earlier lies on a pile of blankets beside them, breathing heavy with sleep, and across from him sit jars of various plants and berries, encased in an opened crate. I lift each jar, reading the name of them, and come across two. One of them is an oil named savin—Juniperus sabina—and the other is berries, simply titled Juniper.
What the hell is the difference?
Uncertain of which to bring, I swipe up both and race back to Mara’s tent.
“There are two!” With trembling hands, I pass off the Juniper to Haseya, who accepts the berries.
“The oil will abort the fetus,” she says, setting it aside.
“And the berries? They don’t cause the baby to bleed out?”
“If taken early in pregnancy, and consumed in large doses, I suppose they might.” She tips the jar into her palm, gathering a small handful of the berries.
“I … I lost a baby to them once.” It’s not something I’d normally confess. In fact, the only one I’ve told is Six, but there’s a sense of urgency beating through me. I can’t let her feed these berries to Mara. “I bled everywhere.”
“You’d have to eat quite a lot of them to bleed significantly.” She gathers towels as she explains, placing them around Mara’s bottom and between her legs. “Were you exposed to anything else prior to that?”
My mind rewinds to that day and the night before. The only thing unusual that comes to mind are the injections Papa gave me to aid in my escape. Alpha pheromones.
“Now hold her down.” Heseya snaps me out of my thoughts. Banding my arm across Mara, I hold her still, as Haseya lifts her head. “Eat these, Mara. If you wish to save yourself and your child.”
Breaking into a sob, Mara shivers in my arms, and her jaw quivers as she opens it for the berries that Haseya deposits into her mouth. Mara’s face screws up, and as if I had bitten into the bitter fruit, I can feel the sour flavor burst on my tongue, and yet also recall the utter relief of having found food in the desert that day.
In the quiet that follows, my pulse rate slows, and I dip a nearby cloth into an awaiting bowl of cool water. Daubing Mara’s forehead, I watch as her eyes blink up at me, heavy with exhaustion.
“Wren? Will my baby be okay?” Her lips tremble with the question, and I steal the opportunity to look away, the tears in my eyes far too telling of the worry I feel for her.
Eyeing Hesaya at her feet, I note the sweat glistening on her skin and the concentrated, determined look that creases the many wrinkles of the older woman’s face.
Swinging my attention back to Mara, I force a smile and gently wipe her forehead. “You’re in good hands, Mara.”
No sooner do the words fall from my lips than her eyes pop wide with terror, and she arches again.
“Oh, no!” Hesaya mumbles words in her native tongue and places one hand at Mara’s belly, the other between the agonized woman’s thighs, where blood pours out of her. I’ve witnessed births before, but never once have I seen so much blood.
“Mara!” I feel her body convulse beneath me, and watch as her eyes roll back into her head, while blood trickles out of the corner of her mouth.
A whimper escapes Hesaya as she holds her arms outstretched, supporting a too-small infant, coated in blood, still attached to the umbilical cord. A boy. The midwife’s hands tremble, her eyes wide with shock as she stares down between Mara’s thighs.
“Is he dead?” Surely, she’s done this enough times to have seen complications and hemorrhage. I’ve never delivered a baby, but even I can see she may have suffered a ruptured placenta.
“Take him,” she whispers, and with a quick glance at Mara, whose unfocused eyes and paling skin tell me she’s in no condition to hold her newborn son, I do.
Hands trembling, I curl him against my chest, where he lies tiny and vulnerable.
Hesaya lifts what I presume is the placenta, torn to shreds. On the outside of it sit two small bulbous sacs that appear to contain two more fetuses, as if attached to the first. Both deformed, with abnormally bent limbs and elongated heads. “I’ve … never seen such a thing in my life!”
Watching the two fetuses squirm, I notice the absence of movement in my arms and focus on the newborn’s too-still chest. “Hesaya, the baby isn’t breathing. I don’t think he’s breathing!”
She takes him back, massaging his chest, and seems to perform mouth to mouth on him. Hands covered in blood, I turn my attention back to Mara, noticing she’s gone still, her face paler than before, eyes closed as though she’s sleeping.
“Mara?” Running my hand over her forehead leaves a streak of blood there, and when I shake her, she doesn’t move. “Mara?”
Swallowing back the hysterics itching to break free, I feel for a pulse.
Nothing.
“Mara!” Resting my head against her chest, I listen for a heartbeat.
Silence.
Like Hesaya with the infant, I perform the same chest compressions Papa taught me back when I lived with him, giving her air in between each.
Nothing.
For minutes, I scramble to bring my friend back to life, but my efforts prove futile, her fate written in the cold blue of her lips and vacant stare.
“She’s lost too much blood,” Hesaya says, setting a hand to my arm. “She’s gone.”
“Why? Why did you give her the berries? Why did you do that!”
“It wasn’t the berries that killed her, child. She bled before they were given.” She lifts the placenta, further exposing the two attached, underdeveloped fetuses, pulsing with life. “Whatever this is, it isn’t natural.”
I run my hand over my own belly, the panic swelling inside of me at the sight of it.
“Go, Wren.” Heseya wipes her tears across the sleeve of her shirt. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Gaze trailing over the macabre, I catch sight of the lifeless child she’s placed at Mara’s side, and a sob chokes inside my chest.
“Go.”
On shaky legs, I push to my feet, and when I exit the tent, there’s a crowd gathered. The cool air stirs a dizzying rush to the distressing heat smoldering inside of me, ready to combust.
“Wren!” Six strides toward me, and the moment his arms are around me, I collapse.
Chapter 11
Cali
Standing off from the crowd gathered at one of the tents, I watch the woman I’d spoken with earlier, the one named Wren, emerge coated in blood. Her eyes carry what I surmise as horror, wide and unfocused, as she pulls her arms in close to her chest, her whole body visibly trembling.
“I’ve … never seen anything like it. She … bled. So much blood. And the baby. Three of them.” A string of incoherence tumbles from her mouth while she stares off at nothing. “Unformed fetuses … in … sacs attached to the outside.”
Her words strike a familiar chord, and I glance back to where Cadmus waits for me by the fire, smoking a cigarette. I heard of countless female subjects losing babies on the obstetrics ward back at Calico, which is what prompted my inclusion in the Alpha project, at all. They modified me to accommodate the pregnancies that my peers couldn’t carry.
“She was … impregnated by an Alpha?”
The woman’s eyes lift to mine, brows winged up in concern. “Yes.”
“Not a subject of the Alpha project, though.”
“I wouldn’t know. How would I know?”
“Was her head shaved before?”
“Yes.”
; “Then, she was common group.”
“What does that mean? What are you saying?” The desperation in her voice is odd, given the woman apparently didn’t survive the birth.
“Only females assigned to the Alpha project are capable of carrying an Alpha’s child.”
The woman glances to the Alpha beside her, and if I’m not mistaken, she’s trembling even more.
“You’re full of shit,” the Alpha says, urging her away from me.
Wren wrenches herself free and steps closer, prompting me to step back. In my periphery, I catch sight of Cadmus, rising to his feet. “What happened to the ones from common group?”
Unbidden memories slip through my mind, of the almost angelic expression on Bryani’s face while she lay unconscious on the gurney, until I feel Wren’s hand on my shoulder, drawing me out of those visuals. “As far as I know, all of them perished.”
A blast of breath expels past her lips, and her chest rises and falls, as though distress is setting in. “Oh, God.”
“Wren, don’t listen to this. Please.”
“I’m telling you the truth. My sister was among common group. In a coma, while they used her body for impregnation. She wasn’t equipped to carry, either, even under constant monitoring.”
Hands lodged in her hair, Wren snaps her attention back to me. “And you? Were you Alpha project?”
“Yes. I was taken to the lab multiple times a week. Endured painful procedures. All with the hope that I would eventually conceive.”
Tears glisten in the woman’s eyes, and when she places her hands at her belly, it’s then I realize why she’s asking me so many questions.
“You’re with child.” My eyes flit from her to the Alpha, who lowers his gaze from mine. “I’m sorry.”
Mortified, I turn away from her, but look back at a tight grip of my arm.
“Did anyone survive? The babies?” she asks, as tears slip down her cheeks.
“I’m not sure. I know the babies were kept in water suspensions, but I’m not sure if they lived, or died.”
“When you say you were modified. Was it surgery?” She wipes tears from her eyes, which rake over me like she’s searching for physical evidence of my alterations.
“Partly, yes. Along with injections.”
“Injections? What kind of injections?”
“Alpha. I don’t know what they were exactly, but apparently it runs through me. It allows them to recognize my scent.”
Gaze lowered from mine, she’s clearly trying to hide her panic, but the rapid rise and fall of her chest betrays her.
“I didn’t mean … I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were …” Remorse hammers through me, which I tamp down for fear of breaking into emotions. I don’t know these people enough to offer insight into my weaknesses. Something I learned upon my arrival to Calico all those years back.
Wrapping his arms around her, the Alpha glares back at me in a way that tells me I’m nothing to him. That he would crush me to bits for this woman, and I shift my gaze to Cadmus, who holds the same look in his eyes, as he watches the Alpha walk off.
Exhaling a shaky breath, I make my way back to his side and we take our seats by the fire. “We have to figure something out. Grab Kenny and get the hell out of here,” I whisper. “I don’t like how that other Alpha looks at us. Like we’re an enemy.”
“We are. I’ve no qualms about killing him.” He jerks his head toward the crowd still huddled outside of the tent. “What were the screams about?”
“One of their women had been impregnated by an Alpha. Common group. Not Alpha.”
“That’s unfortunate.” His eye squints as he sucks in a drag of his smoke.
“Cadmus …. She apparently had more than one baby. Two were attached to the placenta. She described them as underdeveloped fetuses.”
He stares off, looking both thoughtful and troubled, the tight knit of his brow telling me my words have taken him back to a dark place inside his head.
“That’s what you saw in the tunnels, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know if it was real, or a hallucination. If I just saw those things in my head.” He rubs his heel against his temple, and I’m reminded to tread carefully with Cadmus. There have been a few times he’s snapped into one of his fits, talking nonsense and lashing out at Titus.
Problem is, Titus isn’t sitting nearby to stop him.
“It’s okay. Let’s just drop it for now.”
“The woman I saw … the one who looked like you … she told me of the cure.” His brows furrow, eyes staring off beyond me, as if he’s seeing something, concentrating on it. “The samples. She kept begging me to save her.”
“The samples from the tunnels?” I’m beginning to think more and more that these hallucinations were designed to play on his attraction to me, and coerce him to seek out the cure with some level of enthusiasm. The manipulative mind techniques the docs at Calico used to get what they wanted out of subjects. “Is that what she meant?”
“I don’t know. You … I mean, she was crying. Reaching out for me. Begging me to save her. To find the cure.”
“You never spoke of the cure before, Cadmus. Are you certain that’s what she said?”
“Yes. I’d forgotten that part of it. Until you mentioned those things attached. That’s when those faceless things came after me. They knew I planned to take something.”
I remember the story he told back at the waterfall, of these things surrounding him, growing suspicious of him. “This cure … it might be useful to the rebels. The Alpha’s female is pregnant. She’s not an Alpha subject, either.”
When his eyes find me again, they’re lucid, absent of the crazed look I’ve seen a few times before when broaching this subject with him. “How unfortunate for her.” His gaze dips to my stomach, holding the same longing as when he first spoke of the woman from the tunnels, when he expressed a desire to impregnate me, and I pull my knees up to break his stare.
“Unless the woman from your memories is correct, and the cure exists somewhere below the hospital.”
Rolling his shoulders back, he abandons his staring and flicks his cigarette into the bonfire. “Might be worth cracking open the seal on that hospital.”
“Might be worth the risk to save her and the unborn child.” I don’t dare let a smile escape, for fear my hopes may well be too high.
Might be worth saving Valdys.
Chapter 12
Wren
“She could very well be lying. We don’t know anything about these people!” Six paces inside the small cave, his hands smoothing over short cropped hair. “Don’t let her words get to you.”
“It’s not her words that are getting to me, Six. I saw the woman bleeding out her son. I saw those things clinging to a shredded placenta. As if they destroyed it from the inside out. I’ve felt the stabbing pain in my belly that makes me wonder if something is doing that very thing to me.”
“I did this to you.” Hands at his skull, he falls to his knees, his chest expanding and contracting too fast with his shallow breaths. “I can’t let you carry this baby, Wren. I can’t lose you that way.”
I cross the small cave to where he remains on his knees, and run my hand over his hair. “We don’t have a choice. I’m not giving up on this baby, Six. Not this time.”
His eyes are brimming with tears, jaw set to a hard line. “If I lose you … I’ll be a fraction of a man.”
“A fraction that will need to remain strong, in the event something happens to me while giving birth. This child is ours. I won’t see it destroyed.”
“Tell me what to do. I’m begging you. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
A knock at the barrier of the cave interrupts my thoughts, and I swing my attention toward the makeshift door. “Who is it?”
“Cali. Um. The one who--”
“Yes, I know. Come in.”
The barrier slides to the side, and the girl stands in the doorway, wringing the fabric of her tattered shirt. Nervous, I would
guess, particularly as Six slowly rises to his feet beside me.
“I want to apologize for … what I said earlier. That was … had I known you were ... “
The growl in Six’s chest is the irrational anger of a desperate man, misdirected at a girl who has nothing to do with my ultimate fate.
I reach behind and grip his hand in warning. “You spoke freely, and unless you’re here to tell me it was all a lie, I needed to hear it. To know what I’m up against.”
“The fate of women these days always seems to rest in the hands of men, whether we wish it that way, or not.”
I glance back at Six, who remains disenchanted by her presence, as he stands with his shoulders bunched, hands balled into tight fists. “I chose this particular fate. And I don’t regret it. Regardless of the outcome.”
“It doesn’t have to be death.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean … there is a cure. One Doctor Ericsson spoke of.”
I scoff at that and shake my head. “Doctor Ericsson was an obsessed maniac. The only cure they produced in that hospital was the cyanide I fed to his son, before both were torn apart by mutations.”
“He’s dead.”
“Yes. In pieces.”
“Cadmus … the one I travel with, he was sent down to those tunnels. That’s what we think, anyway. Hard to tell what was real, or hallucination, in that place.”
“Precisely, which is why I question where you’re going with this.”
“Because he spoke of those underdeveloped fetuses two months ago, after he lost his mind. They were attached to a woman who pleaded for the cure.”
The slightest flicker of intrigue dances across her face before it quickly disappears. “You just said he suffered hallucinations. How do you know he wasn’t manipulated into believing that.”
“I don’t. In fact, he doesn’t know if anything he saw was real. But what other choice do you have?”
“I find it convenient that you show up talking about women dying in childbirth. Babies kept in water.” Six steps from behind me, and I have to give the girl some credit for holding his stare. Particularly without the company of her Alpha companion, who, I’m guessing, is pacing somewhere outside this cave. “And now you’re talking about going back inside Calico to look for some fucking cure that a halfwit told you about two months ago.”