One year later

“Beautiful child, God’s creation.

Rest in his perfect salvation.

Close your eyes, and rest your soul

In the silence of his hold.”

Staring down at her sleeping daughter, Ester wondered at the way the girl’s hair sprung in tiny ringlets, amber brown with hints of gold encircling the cherubic face. The golden glow of the fire enhanced the shine.

Neither she nor Garridan could remember what they had looked like as children, nor could they remember each other in the nursery to be able to describe one to the other. Not that she could ask him again, her thoughts reminded her, but she clamped those down.

He was gone. As good as dead, she had found out from the Outsiders. Once someone entered the hospital, they didn’t return. She would return to the dome someday, to search for him. Of course, she knew he wasn’t in there. She remembered at least seven years of her time inside, and she had never met an Outsider beyond the few who came inside to trade on market days.

It had been the market day that had set Ester and Garridan on the path to their insanity, watching the small children play around the feet of the women who entertained them while their men hawked the wares. According to Garridan, he had interviewed several of them before he approached Ester with his idea.

Before that moment, she had liked him at least more than anyone else inside. He was an Advocate, which made him both more fun to interact with and a little more intimidating to deal with. He mostly didn’t use his advantage, though he couldn’t help but seem impressive.

The idea of human connection. It was strange. It was terrifying. And the reality was both far beyond more than she could have imagined and yet not enough. When he had first kissed her, she had almost collapsed. He told her he had needed to let go of her far before he had wanted to because he wasn’t sure what he might have done to her.

Surely, their modern bodies weren’t made for human connection.

For weeks, they had teased the sensations, dancing around a society created to keep them apart. She had persisted in believing that their bodies weren’t made for something so overwhelming, that this was what had broken the Outsiders, this marriage to the physical. Finally, though, after several months, their connection had settled into one of comfortable dependency. Like what they had seen in the couples from the Outside.

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They called it marriage.

They would call her a wife.

They would call him a husband.

Then they would call them both parents: mother and father, father and mother.

Looking back, she had to question her decision on one level, on the simple level that ached with loneliness at his absence. On the level where she avoided pain at all cost. On another level, though, she felt a much deeper knowledge than the surface aversion for pain. It awoke for her the moment she recovered enough from the pain to realize they had laid a tiny baby in her arms.

The pain was nothing.

Sure, she couldn’t forget it. It wasn’t like the memory evaporated into nothingness, but it faded and was shrouded by the unmatchable beauty of the child.

Eva had said it when they had arrived in the village. Having children would revolutionize the domes, render people dissatisfied with the monotony, the grey dismal sameness of what they offered the people inside.

Not that they hadn’t tasted hints of the same sensation inside, with the views of nature, the minimal access to art, the hollow songs of the ANGELs and SENTORs. There was creation from the minds of men, and it spurred a longing for more. Inside, the longing rang empty since there never was anything more.

Outside, even without a child, men created more.

From artistic endeavors to community projects to family connections, every man found some outlet for his urge to create, and children just offered a kind of culmination of those longings. Somehow, despite the ephemeral nature of time, everyone who wanted to contributed to a seeming eternity, passing on something of themselves, of beauty, to the limitless future.

Now that she had experienced loss and had read about the natural order of death, she had sought wisdom from Eva, and the elderly woman and her “assembly” had offered their version of meaning. One Ester considered a distinct possibility. One that rendered the deaths in the dome so much more tragic.

Eva believed that the life of man on the earth served as a kind of testing ground, where men found out what they wanted to be and revealed those decisions through the actions they took. There was a maker who existed outside time who had set the rules and provided the route to honor, and if a man chose to accept the maker’s path, they would step beyond the temporal into a sort of eternal beauty.

In a way, it was the complete opposite of the domes, which promised that every man would be subsumed into a timeless collective with no greater meaning than the perpetuation of the domes.

If she had to pick one, she would choose Eva’s way, though she wasn’t sold on all of the mythology just yet.

Looking down at the golden curls, though, she couldn’t help but wonder. For herself, the loss of that magnificent eternity seemed at least fair. For her daughter, though, the loss of her existence, the swallowing of her soul into an eternity of meaninglessness, rang as basely unjust.

Perhaps that above all else explained why the Founders of the domes had forbidden families. Great men might accomplish great feats and decide that they deserved to last forever, but most people were not great. They were just people. Everyone, though, could make one of these little creatures, and Ester couldn’t imagine anyone who had done so allowing the idea of their dissipation into nothingness.

Peering at the long, damp lashes fresh with the tears of infant exhaustion, Ester leaned her head back in her own satisfied repose. Through her own actions and the kindness of the community around her, little Leia would know the eternity of love and that she – and all others – held value beyond the sad existence of the dome. Maybe someday, her child would stand as Eva had or serve in the Assembly, validating every life that passed by her counsel.