I’ve slept on a couch in this house before, but I still find it strange to wake up in Ava’s room but not on her bed. I also find it strange that I wake up to a hand shaking my shoulder; it’s Penny, and when I groan and roll over and almost fall off the couch he takes the pillow my head was on and whacks me with it. “Where’d she go?”

“What?” I say, my brain still sleepy, and then I remember what happened last night, and sit up. Nua’s looking at me from the other side of the couch, and Bayan and Sloan are gone, and so is Ava. Penny hits me with the pillow again. “Where’d she go.”

“Stop it,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?” says Penny, his voice sounding strained, and I look up at him, finally awake. “She, I, she said she was going to work, she told us that.”

“She wouldn’t leave without waking me up,” says Penny. “Unless she was going somewhere bad.”

I stare at him for a moment, and Nua stares at us, and then he says, “She fell asleep against you last night.”

“She woke up in the middle of the night,” I say softly, and then I stand. “She said she would come back.”

Nua looks at me. “What?”

“Aber,” says Penny forcefully, and I swallow. He grabs my shoulders. “Did you talk to her before she left?”

“She said goodbye to all of us,” I whisper, tears suddenly starting to fill my eyes. “But she told me to follow her.”

“Where did you go?” asks Penny, loosening his grip slightly, and I shrug. “She talked to her mother. Got Owen’s ring, I think. And then she told me to go back to bed, and she said she’d be back.”

“Well, she’s not,” says Nua quietly, and Penny lets go of me to bury his face in his hands.

“She’ll come back,” I say, still slightly in shock, and Penny goes back and sits up on her bed with a groan. “When? What can we do without her?”

There’s a knock at the door, Bayan’s knock, and then he comes back in with Sloan and breakfast. They both lay their trays down on the coffee table, and then Sloan says, “Taymer said she left with Lilly early this morning. They took the car, and it hasn’t come back yet.”

“How’d they take the car without you?” asks Nua to Bayan, and Penny laughs bitterly. “Oh, she can drive, she just likes making him chauffeur her around.”

“Well, at least your mother’s gone, too,” mutters Nua, reaching over for a bowl of blueberries, and I sit back down on the couch, replaying last night’s events in my head. It’s been a while since I’ve kissed her; last night she showed me Owen’s ring and kissed me and then left. And I just let her. She knew I couldn’t stop her, I wouldn’t want to, I wouldn’t think to, because I trust her now. I do trust her now, and I know she’s going to come back. I do trust her. But I don’t trust Miss Lilly.

“Where is Taymer?” Penny asks after a moment, coming down for some breakfast, and Sloan shrugs. “He was in the kitchen cleaning something up. He used to have your guys’s old room, until we kicked Abigala out of here and she moved there, so now he’s been sleeping in a guest bedroom. He said he was going back to bed.”

“He deserves that, at least,” I say softly, and Bayan smiles a bit, taking a bowl for himself. I wonder how he feels, having a replacement. Sloan flops down on the couch with a sigh, petting Chloe when she comes up to her, and says, “Let’s talk about me.”

Penny looks at her, and then swallows his bite. “Actually, yeah, let’s talk about you.”

“Are you going back to Shan?” asks Nua, and she exhales, taking a piece of toast off of Bayan’s dish. “I should go, soon, but I don’t know what I should tell them.”

“Ava’s going to look into places where people can go,” says Penny. “Or so she says. I suppose after she comes back from wherever she is. We need to find a place where anyone who’s under eighteen can go, and the people who have needed medical help for years now.”

Stolen novel; please report.

“And the baby,” says Bayan softly. Sloan looks at him, and I see something pass between them, through their eyes, that I can’t make out. They’ve been communicating in secret for so long that they can talk without talking, and I don’t know what they’re saying.

“The most important thing is that we need places where they can be safe,” says Penny softly. “And not just be safe but feel safe. They might not even trust Ava, or me, or you, Sloan, now that we’re here.”

“But they’ll trust Shan,” says Sloan. “And it’ll be slow at first. They have a list of the most important people they think should go back up to the surface, like you said, Penny, the young and the old and the sick. Alicia and the other girls will be able to check up on them and go in between like I can.”

“The other issue, then,” says Nua, “is Miss Lilly.”

“Yes,” says Penny slowly. “We need to get you in and out of the house without her knowing.”

“Well, she’s not home now,” I point out, and Sloan smiles slightly, popping a blueberry in her mouth. “True,” she says as she chews, “but how will I get back? How will I know when to come back?”

“I don’t suppose you have cell phones down there,” Nua says under his breath, and she laughs and shakes her head. Penny smiles slightly too, but still looks worried. “I suppose we’ll think about it a little more,” he says after a moment. “We have time.”

“How much time?” asks Nua. Penny shrugs.

“You should go back,” says Bayan softly. “As soon as you can.”

Sloan looks at him, but she does not disagree. Bayan takes a breath, and then says, “It’s…they need to know what’s going on. And then once we have more information we can start taking people up, but you should at least let them know where we are.”

“We don’t know where Ava is,” mutters Penny. Sloan ignores him. “I can go today.”

“What about the fence?” asks Nua.

“It’s off,” answers Bayan. “I don’t think Lilly has been checking, but if she does turn it on before you come back up you can just go back to Shan and then try again on Thursday night like before.”

Sloan nods. “Works for me.”

“Alright,” says Penny, leaning his head back. “Have you guys talked about places to go to?”

Sloan nods. “Alicia does some scouting for us, her and her sister.”

“The one with the trains?” I ask, and Sloan smiles slightly. “Yes. She has a husband or two, and they work on the tracks. They help Alicia and us find out about places like your parents’ house, Aber, that will take in runaways. But we’re trying to get farther out of the city, too, send them farther away, and that’s what we’ve been looking for lately.”

Nua exhales, leaning back. “I never knew all of this stuff existed.”

Sloan smiles again. “People have been trying to find a way out of this since the day it started.”

“When did it start?” I ask suddenly, and Penny looks at me. “A couple generations ago.”

“Lilly’s mother’s generation,” says Bayan softly. “And those a little older than her. They were the first ones to start taking multiple husbands.”

“Did she?”

“My grandmother didn’t,” answers Penny. “It wasn’t so common yet.”

“There weren’t so few girls then,” says Bayan. “Their birth rate was only starting to fall and the need for multiple husbands wasn’t so great.”

“And they were still figuring out how to keep the babies in the hospitals as they grew,” says Penny. “But by the time my mother was old enough they were pretty good at it.”

“But she only had your father,” says Nua, and he nods. “She got what she needed from him, so.”

“Twins are getting more common, you know,” says Sloan, gesturing to me with her chin. “Especially fraternal twins like you. A lot of women take medicine to…be more fertile. Leads to twins and triplets and more.”

“Did Ava take medicine?” Nua asks me, and I shrug. “I only know about her lungs.”

“Some medicines you can’t take together,” says Bayan softly. “For her it was either the lungs or the eggs.”

And it was the lungs, I know. Briefly I consider that once I would have supposed that Miss Lilly would rather have had grandchildren than a living daughter, but then I shake my head. Lilly does love Ava, in her own way, in her own way, one that destroys everything in its path.

There is a lot for us to think about, and a lot for Bayan and Sloan to figure out if she is going to go back to Shan. We do not tell Miss Lilly about it, obviously. She is not even here. We all go down to the kitchen later that evening, and find Taymer, and bustle around to make a late lunch early dinner, and that evening, Bayan goes to check the button for the fence. It is still off, so Sloan leaves us. We do not know when we will see her again.