Tomorrow morning at ten AM we meet with Lilly in the kitchen. She is dressed in a suit jacket and a skirt and high heels and her hair is up in a bun and she carries a leather briefcase and she looks over at me and Ava and Abigala and Penny when we file in, and she does not say anything. Bayan is behind Penny, and when she sees him she gestures to the door that leads to the garage. We go outside and we get in the car and Bayan drives us away.

“What is this?” asks Ava after a moment, finally, it’s the first thing anyone’s said all morning, and Lilly crosses her legs, putting her briefcase on the seat next to her. “The boys have never been to my office.”

I look at Penny. He is looking at his mother. “Why would I want to go to your office?”

“It’s not whether you’d want to,” she says calmly. “It’s whether or not you can understand.”

“I think I understood fine when you sent me away with that woman when I was seventeen.”

Lilly smiles slightly. “Clearly you didn’t.”

Penny grits his teeth. Abigala is sitting next to me, and she takes my hand and squeezes it quickly and lets go. I feel her nails dig into my palm when she does it; she is nervous, her hands are always fidgety when she’s nervous, and I wonder why she is nervous. She has been working with Lilly for months now at this point. She is only nervous because now I will see, finally, what she has been doing.

No one talks for the rest of the ride. I cannot see out the window, Ava’s near it again, but she is just staring at her mother. When Bayan parks and we get out he comes with us, and we go inside a huge shiny building in the center of the city. I can hardly concentrate with all the bustle around us, people are pushing in and out and past and through and Ava takes my hand and then Lilly swipes her badge against something and someone at the front desk says, “Morning, Ms. LeGatte.”

“Morning,” says Lilly with a smile, and the man glances up at her, and then sees Ava and me and the rest, and does a double take. “Miss Ava.”

“Hey, Jerry,” she murmurs as we pass, and the man Jerry watches Penny and Abigala and Bayan file in through behind us.

Lilly brings us to an elevator. We go up up up. I don’t think I have ever been this high up before. We step out and we go down a hallway to a door, that she opens again with her badge. She goes inside; we follow. She takes off her jacket and puts down her badge, and Bayan closes the door softly when he comes in. And then Lilly hits a button, and the lights in the room turn off and the projector turns on. We all turn to the other wall, and Ava gasps. Penny winces, and I murmur, “Oh, my god.”

“Do you know what that is?” asks Lilly after a moment. Her voice is soft. I don’t want to look at what is on the screen; it is a mess of blood and tissue and what looks like tiny little babies, fetuses, Ava called them, a long time ago, on the night that we slept together. Infants, before they’re born. When they’re supposed to be in the hospital. Or, I suppose, when they’re supposed to be inside their mothers.

“It’s called a miscarriage,” says Lilly, when no one answers. “It’s what happens, when…” She trails off, and sighs. “It could be anything. The baby isn’t developing right, it wouldn’t survive when it’s born, it’s growing without a heart, or a brain, or it would have a genetic condition that makes it unable to breathe on its own or pump its own blood. Or the mother’s body isn’t fit to carry it; it implanted wrong in her uterus, or didn’t at all, or she has a medical condition and can’t give it enough nutrients, or she just isn’t…strong enough to do it.”

“Mother,” says Ava softly.

“So the body forces it out,” says Lilly. “Either it can’t hold it in anymore, or it forces it to expel. The infant cannot survive inside the womb or outside of it, and the mother, it can kill the mother, too.”

“Mother.”

“My father was twenty-four years old when I was born,” says Lilly, ignoring Ava. “By the time I was fifteen, my mother had been pregnant five or six times, but I don’t have any siblings, Ava, you know that. None of my mother’s babies made it. She miscarried all of them. And the last one, the day before my sixteenth birthday, the last one killed her.”

“Turn it off, mother,” says Penny. Lilly listens to her son. She switches the image on the screen; now it’s numbers, in rows and columns like what I saw in Ava’s office, Abigala’s work, a few days ago. But this is not the same; the rows start seventy years ago. And the numbers next to them get bigger. By the time the row says only ten years ago, the number in the first column is 74%, and the number in the second column is 93%.

“This is the number of miscarriages,” says Lilly, “or stillbirths. That’s when the baby is dead when it’s born. That first column, that’s all live births. What happens when a mother lets the baby grow inside of her. Even ten years ago, some women still chose to do that, and almost three-quarters of them lost their child.”

She is quiet for a moment, and then continues.

“The second column is specifically for babies whose fathers were over twenty-five years old. Ninety-three percent of them weren’t born, or if they were, they weren’t born alive. If they were, those seven percent, around eighty percent of them had some sort of genetic condition that either severely limited their quality of life, or killed them within five years.”

“That can’t be right,” murmurs Ava. Her mother does not respond to that, but switches the picture again. Another chart, more data, but now just two columns. One is labeled again by year, and the other says maternal mortality.

“Live birth,” says Lilly, “and miscarriages, and stillbirths. Maternal mortality. Women who have carried children in their bodies. How many of them died? About forty years ago, my mother died. She was one of those 46%.”

Thirty years ago, it was 52%. Twenty years ago it was 57%. Ten years ago it was 61%.

“Over half,” she says softly, “by the time you were born, Ava, Penny. If I had carried you in my body both of you and I would all probably be dead.”

Penny looks at Bayan, who is looking at the floor. Abigala is just staring at the numbers; I wonder if she’s seen this before.

“But,” says Lilly with a sigh, hitting the button again, and the lights come on and the projector starts whirring. “For a long, long time, for decades and centuries, scientists have been fascinated with how reproduction works. Humans are a kind of animal that gives birth to live children. There are other kinds of animals who lay eggs, and they’re much, much older than mammals. Some scientists think that the reason our evolutionary ancestors started carrying our children inside our bodies instead of laying eggs was not because it was beneficial to do so, but rather, simply, almost an accident.”

Ava turns to her mother. I don’t know what expression is on her face, but she does not say anything, just looks at Lilly, and she continues. “It might have been better for the fetus, you know, to be protected inside the very body of its mother, to use the nutrients and resources that she would give it. But it severely, severely endangers that body. Pregnancy is the single most dangerous thing a human being can put their body through, and for millenia almost every single woman did it.

“You can argue why,” she continues after a moment. “A long time ago a woman’s role was to stay home and be pregnant ten months out of every year. A lot of women were forced into it. A lot of women chose to do it, for the love of children and family and their husbands. But all that time, or at least within the past great era of scientific progress, one of the biggest overarching questions for researchers was how to make it safer.”

“It can’t be,” murmurs Ava. “I watched Marissa do it, it can’t be safe.”

“Exactly,” says Lilly. “So what do we do? We evolve. It might have been some sort of virus that changed our genetic code, to make us reproduce like this, instead of laying eggs like a reptile or a bird. Whatever it was, why can’t we overcome that genetic glitch? Why have we never overcame it, and how can we, now, when it’s so imperative?”

“But what caused all those…” I trail off, partly because I forget the word, and partly because I don’t want to say it even if I knew it. Lilly smiles slightly, and says, “The miscarriages. The stillbirths. The substantial risk if the fathers were too old. For most of human history men could father children until the day they died, and now, if they’re older than twenty-five, their children are deformed. What caused that? What is it, where did it come from, and why does it affect every male throughout the population?”

Yes, that.

“We don’t know,” says Lilly. “We’ve been researching that, too, but the first thing to figure out was how to stop the deaths. So we figured out how to keep children alive outside the womb, as if it were millions of years ago and we still laid eggs.”

“But the boys,” says Penny softly. “The men.”

“They realized, looking at the statistics,” says his mother, “that it was an age thing. Particularly on account of the fathers. Children born even to an older mother but a young father were healthier. And those miscarriages, that was how it started. Children were conceived, but if the father was too old, not even old but just over the age of twenty-five, the child wouldn’t survive. The mother’s body would expel it, or if it managed to be carried to term it would simply die. We started collecting this data, to figure it out, and we did. And we kept monitoring it. And soon we began to realize that, again, evolution, our genetics, were ramping up into gear to protect us. It takes a lot of energy and resource to be pregnant, and it’s not worth it if it will just end in tragedy anyway. We only started monitoring these miscarriage and maternal mortality statistics about seventy-five years ago; it had been happening for a while before that, but then, once we were in the full swing of it, we started to realize that the overall rate of pregnancy, of even conception, was dropping. If you did conceive the pregnancy was going to be dangerous, but less and less women were conceiving in the first place. And the only ones were getting pregnant from men who were under twenty-five years old.”

“Why?” I ask again, after a moment. Everyone and everything is silent and still, the numbers on the wall are gone but I can imagine them, I can imagine Marissa down in Shan with her baby, Nerev is twenty-three, I remember Ava telling me once, so Marissa was not at risk of the horrible blood and danger but she was still at risk of every other dangerous thing a pregnancy and birth could bring, much less a pregnancy under the ground. Lilly sighs, twisting her neck so it cracks, and shakes her head. “I don’t know, Aberworth. We still don’t know, why this started happening. A virus. A genetic switch that got flipped.”

Ava said the same thing to me, a long time ago, on the first night that we slept together.

“Maybe just self-preservation that went too far,” Lilly continues. “Some statisticians were worried that humans were over-populating the planet before this started happening. Of course, now, we’re dying out.”

Stolen story; please report.

Hardly, I know that. The human race is still billions strong, we are not dying out, but it has been shrinking. My parents always kept an eye on that. Every year the population is a few million less than before.

“So this is the solution?” says Ava, turning to her mother, finally. “What you’ve been doing? Sticking boys in homes, in agencies, where their only purpose is to be given to a wife? The boys on the streets taken in and sold to women? That’s how we fix it?”

“This system,” says Lilly, “was broken long before I came into this role. The system of agencies across the country was set up so that boys, that’s another thing, there are five boys born to every girl and just like the rest of it we don’t know why, all of those boys would have a place to go. A place to stay, if they were given up by their mothers, which a lot of them were. You’re right, Ava.”

She blinks. I wonder if Lilly has ever said that before.

“You’re right. It was supposed to be a system to protect them. To keep them safe, instead of dying on the streets, and to give them a chance to join and start a family. It was radical, at the time, when the first ones were set up.”

“So what happened?” Ava says softly. “If it was supposed to help them, how did it come to be that Aber’s parents were arrested for helping them while your agencies sold Bayan to you?”

And Lilly laughs, and she sighs, and she shakes her head. “I don’t know, Ava.”

“I know all of this,” says Ava quietly. “You’ve told me all of this before. It still doesn’t explain how Nua got here, or where you found Keol. It doesn’t explain why you gave Penny away.”

And Lilly smiles as she looks at her son, and she sighs, and says, “Let’s go get lunch.”

I raise my eyebrows. Lilly leaves the office. Ava rolls her eyes and sighs too, and then follows. I follow her and Penny follows me and Abigala follows him and Bayan follows her. We say hello to Jerry the desk man again as we go out of the building; right next to it is a little cafe, and Ava grabs my hand again and squeezes. I look at her, and she smiles a little. “I do love this place.”

Lilly sits at a table in the shade, under an umbrella, and pulls her wallet out of her pocket. “Bayan, get everyone the regular.”

I raise my eyebrows at him, and he smiles a little and takes her credit cards and goes inside.

The regular for Miss Lilly, apparently, is a roast beef sandwich, because Bayan comes back with four of them. He gives one to Miss Lilly and one to me and one to Penny and one to Abigala, and then leaves again, and comes back with a tuna melt. Ava smiles a little when she sees him, and takes it from him. “Thank you.”

He does not answer, just sits back down. He has not gotten anything for himself. Lilly wipes her hands off and picks up a fork to start her salad, and says, “Abigala has given me some very valuable insight as to what can happen when something goes wrong. Isn’t that what you’ve been worried about, Aberworth?”

I look up at her. I’m not hungry, not now, not after those pictures and not while I’m here with her. “Yeah. Things you didn’t know before, or realize.”

Lilly smiles slightly. “I suppose. That’s why a…plurality of viewpoints is always essential for examining any problem.”

“Sure, Mother,” says Ava, swallowing a bite of her tuna melt. “But that means you know it’s a problem.”

“Of course,” says Lilly, as if it’s the simplest thing in the world. “But I’m afraid that, while you think I have a limited perspective on the situation, all of you have had your perspectives limited as well.”

“I don’t know what you want to prove,” I say softly. Lilly looks at me, but does not say anything. “But my whole life, I’ve known people who have been abused by the system that you’re in charge of. I’ve taken care of them, and they trusted us, until you came and blew a hole in our front door.”

“But that’s just it,” says Lilly. “You have your one perspective, and you extend that to the entire system. Do you know what percentage of marriages across the country are forced?”

“Including ours?” asks Ava under her breath, and Penny rolls his eyes.

“Thirteen,” says Lilly, ignoring her children. “It’s not a big number, but it is still significant, and I understand your and your parents’ concern with it.”

Suddenly Bayan stands. He is looking away, looking across the plaza, squinting into the light, and I follow his eyes. Ava does too, and then she stands too. “Marissa.”

This gets her attention. She is standing in front of the government building, looking up to the very top, where Miss Lilly’s office is, she is squinting a little too, but she looks over to Ava when she hears her name. Ava leaves the table and goes to her and says, “What are you doing here, you shouldn’t be up here yet, where’s Nerev?”

But she hugs her anyway. I see Marissa hug her back, slightly apprehensively, and I feel something in my stomach. I do not know what it is. Marissa answers. “Nerev isn’t here. He didn’t want me to come and he wouldn’t tell me where his sister lives.”

The plaza seems quiet, suddenly, what happened to all the hustle and bustle of the people pushing past one another like this morning, and Ava sighs. “Marissa-”

“I looked for her, but I couldn’t find her, so I came here. I don’t really know why, but I guess I found someone else I was looking for.”

“Were you looking for me?” asks Ava, and Marissa shakes her head. “No. I was looking for him.”

She looks over Ava’s shoulder, to Bayan, and I feel cold.

He does not say anything. Ava looks too, and then looks back at her. “Marissa-”

“Where did you take my baby, Bayan?” says Marissa, ignoring Ava, taking a step past her. “Where is he?”

Bayan does not answer. He has not said a word all day today and normally I wouldn’t even notice but now, he has to answer now, he took Marissa’s baby away and now she wants him back and Bayan has to tell her where he is, but he doesn’t or can’t or won’t. He does not answer. Marissa takes another step past Ava, and she puts her hand on her arm. “Marissa.”

Lilly stands up now, too. “You must be the mother.”

“You’ve seen my baby,” says Marissa. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” answers Lilly. “He was taken to my home for one night and then brought somewhere else.”

“Somewhere safe,” says Ava softly, but Marissa is not listening to her at all anymore. “Where did you take my baby, Bayan?”

“Marissa,” says Ava, stepping in front of her so she’s in her line of vision again. “Listen, I was worried too, but Nerev said it was okay and that he wanted Julian to go to his brother-in-law, so that he could be up here. He could be safe. Julian is with Nerev’s sister, he’s okay.”

“He would’ve been okay with me,” says Marissa. Her hand goes into her pocket and she takes another step forward, towards Bayan and us, and Ava says, “I know, but you can go to him. You can go to him now.”

“No,” says Marissa softly. “Nerev doesn’t know I came up. No one knows I came up. They don’t think I’m ready, they won’t let me leave the tent.”

“It’s only been a couple weeks,” says Ava gently, and Marissa nods, her eyes still trained on Bayan. “I know. That’s why Julian should be with me.”

Bayan takes a step back from the table, and then goes around so he is not behind it. Lilly takes a step forward too, towards Marissa, she is in between her and Bayan now, and she says, “Marissa, I assume.”

“You’re Lilly LeGatte,” says Marissa softly. “You’re Penny’s mother.”

Bayan glances at Penny; Lilly does not. “I am.”

“You gave your son away, too. Just like Nerev did.”

“And look,” says Lilly, with a slight smile. “He came back. You’ll see your baby again.”

“Don’t,” says Marissa, “patronize me.” And she pulls out a gun.

“Jesus,” whispers Abigala, as she and I and Penny all startle, leaning away from her. He rises to his feet, and says softly, “Marissa.”

“Woah, okay,” says Ava, reaching out for Marissa, but then she thinks better of it. “Where did you get that?”

“Is that Keshi’s?” says Penny, and Ava makes a noise, glancing at her brother but then back to Marissa, Marissa’s hands, the gun in Marissa’s hands. “Why does Keshi have a gun down there?”

“I don’t know,” says Penny, his voice panicked, “they need them sometimes, I don’t know, Marissa, did you take Keshi’s gun?”

“Where’s my baby, Bayan?” says Marissa. She does not see anyone else in the world right now, except for Bayan, it’s her and Bayan and a gun, and her baby, who was taken from her. This is what Ava was worried about, that Nerev gave Sloan the baby but that he had taken the baby from his wife, from Marissa, she didn’t know or she didn’t agree and they took her baby from her.

Lilly takes another small step forward. “Marissa. This is a public place, there’s no need for weapons. Put it away.”

“I don’t need anything,” says Marissa, “except my baby.”

“He’s safe,” says Ava again, I don’t know what else she can say and it seems she doesn’t either. “He’s safe, I promise, Marissa, he’s okay, you can see him soon, you need to go back to Nerev.”

“No,” says Marissa, and I see her eyes filling up with tears now, one slips down her cheek, her hands shake but she keeps the weapon pointed directly at Bayan, who is slightly behind Lilly now, but he has not said anything yet, not to any of us and not to Marissa. “I need my baby, and he took my baby.”

“It wasn’t him,” says Ava softly. “He didn’t take him, he just brought him to Paige, it was all planned out, it’s okay, Marissa, Julian’s okay-”

“You took him away from me!” says Marissa, her voice rising, and almost in slow motion, I see her finger, perched on the trigger, start to move.

At least four people yell out, I don’t know if I’m one of them, but Penny runs, he runs to his sister and pulls her back, wrapping his arms around her to get her away. She struggles against him, reaching out, reaching for something just out of grasp, like Keol, like Owen, and then I see who she wants.

Miss Lilly steps in front of the bullet, and crumples.

Bayan catches her.

Everything stills.

Ava’s cry pierces the ringing, but Penny must be stronger than Nua because he doesn’t let go. Abigala has scrambled backwards in her chair, she bumps into me and I catch her and then I get out of my chair too, because I’m falling and because I’m trying to get away and I’m trying to get towards. I’m suddenly on the ground, I don’t know how, and Abigala crawls away from me, towards Bayan, towards Lilly. She looks up at him and says something softly, and then her hand falls limp. Ava falls to her knees on the ground, pulling her brother with her, and she stares at them, close but so far away from her in that instant. Penny’s mouth is agape and he just stares at his mother, whose eyes stare lifeless at the sky.

Bayan stands suddenly, letting Miss Lilly fall to the ground, and Penny looks up, and then untangles himself from his sister. Bayan takes a step back, and I can see his chest start to rise and fall with heavy breaths. Blood pools underneath Lilly’s body, and Penny goes to him, taking him in his arms, wrapping him up and turning him away. I see Bayan shake. Ava puts her hand on the ground, Abigala has her hands over the wound in Lilly’s chest but there is nothing she can do now, and I feel my breaths start to come quickly. I don’t want to look at it anymore, but there’s nothing else to do, what, how, when, where, who. Marissa is gone, I don’t know where she went, but the gun is on the ground, she must have run, it’s on the ground by Ava and she runs her fingers through her hair. I go to her, I’m practically crawling on the ground, she reaches out for me as I get to her and she buries her face in my shoulder; I lose my balance and fall over to sit. She wraps her arms around me, Penny has his arms wrapped around Bayan, Abigala has her hands on Miss Lilly, and the world suddenly slams into me again. There are sirens, there are people, there is yelling and crowds and I wince. “Oh, god.”

“Aber,” whispers Ava, and I put my hand on her head, her breaths are coming heavy and she presses her face into my shoulder. Tears are streaming down Penny’s cheeks as he holds Bayan close to him, they have sunk to sit on a bench nearby, by a table that we were not sitting at, and Abigala has moved away from Lilly’s body as it lies there on the ground, she is just staring at it, and Lilly is staring at nothing, and I run my hand over Ava’s hair. She makes a noise, squeezing her eyes shut, and I say again, “Oh, god.”

“Aber,” she whispers again, and I put my chin on her head. “Oh, my god, Aber.”

“It’s okay,” I say softly, even though it is so very much not okay, I put my other hand on her back to try and calm her down but how can I calm her down when I am not at all calm myself. I see flashing lights and I see someone in a uniform, I don’t know what kind of uniform it is until I see the ambulance, there are EMTs and security guards and where were they thirty seconds ago, oh, my god, what happened, what happened, who, what, how.

“Aber.”