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“60684.”
Matilda recites the numbers out slowly, as though she was a stranger to the six, black strokes curving towards her carotid. Saying them aloud, she realizes, does nothing to lessen her incredulity.
“Is there a problem?”
The Sister behind her says sharply, and instinctually, Matilda’s hand presses against the left pocket of her grey trainee pants. Tracing the outline of her knife - Headquarters-issued like the rest of her ensemble - was a small comfort. A child playing soldier.
“None at all, Sister,” she says smoothly, turning around. Her lips curve into a small, porcelain of a smile. “I suppose I was confused — I didn’t realize I had qualified for the Gestation Stage.”
The Sister grunts in agreement.
“There’s been a change in plans,” she says, moving beside Matilda to inspect the sheet herself. “Consider this a promotion.”
Matilda’s eyes rove over the list one more time. She isn’t the only girl below eighteen chosen, she realizes. Briefly, she wonders if this was some sort of experiment.
“Are you ready to move on?” the Sister asks, and it is the same question a woman in a high-collared dress had asked Matilda when she was twelve, when her fingers still grasped onto the hands of her mother.
If Matilda had been kinder, she might have asked what happened to Scarlet, who was also a perfect-scorer, and two entire trainee classes older than Matilda but very much not on this list of promotees. She might have asked if saying yes was effectively the same as drawing the silver edge of her knife across the neck of each girl in her own trainee class, a neat, red slash across sixteen more numbers ending in 84.
If Matilda had been braver, she might have stamped her foot against the cold tiles, cried and kicked her feet and screamed that she wasn’t ready to be a mother, much less leave her friends behind.
But Matilda was seventeen, and the only weapon girls at Gracefield possessed that was entirely their own was a smile. A child playing doll.
The corners of her mouth are taut when she answers:
“Yes, Sister.”
***
The change in plans, she discovers, resting the back of her head against the grey wall — just why was everything in Gracefield grey — of her Headquarters-issued room, is a mass drop in production quality.
“The Plants have been largely unsuccessful this year,” Grandma had told Matilda somberly, and Matilda can’t help but think that the higher-ups must have been unhappier than usual, if Grandma herself was individually briefing Sister candidates. “I hand-picked the perfect scorers from the best trainee classes to move up in their ranks. A way to replenish good stock, see.”
Matilda did see. She suspects that the higher-ups think they’re stupid, as if Matilda hasn’t been getting perfect scores since was eight.
“Were any of the recent trainees infertile, Grandma?” she asks evenly.
Grandma Sarah, a tall, rather bony, woman with golden hair twisted into a knot behind her head, blanches visibly at this. Her lips stretch out to reveal two perfectly-white rows.
“You’re as sharp as they say, 60684,” Sarah says, showing both her canines, and Matilda reasons that once they reach a certain age, their smiles didn’t have to be so pretty.
“There is no bigger waste,” Sarah announces, waving a hand vaguely. “Than a perfect candidate who can’t contribute livestock. The farms have no need for those. You understand, don’t you?”
If Matilda looks closely, she can see a little, grey outline of herself reflected in Sarah’s dark-green irises. She imagines herself in black instead, in a high-collared dress, her own pale hair twisted neatly against her neck.
“Yes, Grandma.”
***
“Boy or girl?”
The woman before Matilda asks, almost accusatorily. Her stomach is a lot rounder than Matilda’s, straining against their Headquarters-assigned grey dress. Her hair is blonde too — almost platinum — and her eyes are the palest shade of blue Matilda has seen in her life. Unsmiling, the woman’s features are that of glass.
“Well,” the girl sighs deeply when Matilda doesn’t answer. “I suppose no one really knows, do they? But what are you hoping for?”
Matilda finds her voice at last, her fingers skimming over her own abdomen, barely protruding compared to the other trainee’s. She guesses their due dates are at least several months apart.
“A healthy child,” Matilda answers placidly. They are seated at the long benches right outside of the Doctors’ rooms. A bit of honesty wasn’t worth Matilda’s head.
“Oh, please,” the woman rolls her eyes, as though reading her mind. “They won’t dispose of us now. A pregnant woman is valuable.”
The woman smiles a little nastily, and Matilda twists her features into an expression she hopes is reproachful.
“A pregnant woman is still a Sister candidate,” Matilda says coolly. “And a Sister candidate isn’t valuable until she passes training.”
The woman’s glass-like eyes brighten at this, as though Matilda had just made an excellent point.
“Exactly,” she nods approvingly. “That’s why I’m hoping for a boy.”
“A boy?” frowns Matilda, for one moment forgetting that she was supposed to be stern. The idea of a boy was just so ludicrous — there wasn’t a single boy born at Gracefield who was allowed to live past twelve. The only thing more worthless than a sister candidate was a boy.
“There is no better revenge,” the woman declares. “Than a son.”
When Matilda gives a little laugh at this, the woman grins.
“You’re not getting it, are you?” she says commiseratingly. “They only give a damn about us because we’re full-scorers. Our genes are supposed to make the smartest livestock. But what use is any of it if we give birth to sons?”
The woman snorts derisively. “Really, what a waste of perfectly-good scores!”
Matilda is forcibly reminded of Grandma, of her shark of a smile. She opens her mouth to respond when the door to one of the Doctors’ rooms is thrown open.
“72684!”
A masked figure in a white coat calls out, and the woman beside Matilda rises mechanically.
“All the best to you,” she nods, pressing a hand against her swollen stomach. “60684.”
“I hope you get your son,” Matilda says by way of reply, and the woman winks.
***
The woman’s name, Matilda comes to learn later, was Cecile.
She had been a full-scorer, in both the physical and academic evaluations, Matilda hears from whispers of the other girls, the closest to becoming a Sister, as young as she was.
“Rumor has it,” Helene informs Matilda over a breakfast of what can only be described as grey sludge — some formula, they are told, to maximize the chance of a successful pregnancy. “She tried to come up with a plan to escape. It almost worked too, until one of the other trainees turned her in.”
Helene’s voice is even, but Matilda still hears the faintest note of superiority within it. They were both less than 5 months from being due. 5 months from graduating.
“Anyway, Grandma had written her off for elimination,” Helene continues. “But they wanted her to pass the Gestation Stage before killing her off. So, they promoted her, and delayed her shipment in secret.”
“The farms must be desperate,” Matilda surmises, balancing her cheek against her palm. “To make an eliminated candidate carry to term.”
Now, Diane asks abruptly from the seat opposite Matilda’s: “So, she gave birth then? Before she died?”
Helene shrugs. “I suppose so. Though, I heard she made it er — harder on them.”
Diane raises a single eyebrow, and now Helene’s voice drops to a whisper.
“Well, it’s all speculation, of course,” Helene says conspiratorially. “But apparently, she — well, she tried to —“
Helene draws a line with her finger over her throat.
Matilda chuckles, surprising even herself. When the other two women stare at her, Matilda flashes them an apologetic sort of grin.
“She must have been desperate,” Matilda says, echoing Helene’s words. “To screw them over one last time. She probably realized they wouldn’t have let her live, even if they sent her child over to the Plants.”
The other two nod slowly at this, and when their words eventually dissolve into meaningless chatter, Matilda tries her hardest to pay attention, to ignore the little flutter against her abdomen.
Her child had kicked for the first time.
***
The Doctor in charge of Matilda’s care insists on observing her when she takes her medication.
“It’s protocol,” she says stiffly, standing in a corner of Matilda’s room when Matilda folds her arms over her taut stomach.
“It wasn’t before,” Matilda says, keeping her voice light.
“Things have changed,” the Doctor says simply, and Matilda thinks, inexplicably, of Cecile. She wonders if this was how she had attempted to kill herself — by tampering with her own medication.
No wonder the farms were unprepared, Matilda realizes, as she accepts the glass of water the Doctor holds out to her. They had counted on the girls’ sheer will to survive; the thought hadn’t even occurred to them that they might need to force them to live.
When the Doctor eventually leaves — after reminding her all the ways how a pregnancy could go horrifically, irreversibly wrong, and would Matilda please report any and all irregularities as they arise — Matilda balances a hand on her stomach.
She is greeted with a sharp kick.
A lump rises steadily in her throat, and Matilda muffles her sob into the fabric of her sleeves.
She thinks of Cecile, wanting a son just so she wouldn’t give up more to the Farms. She thinks of a teenage girl, poisoning herself so no part of her would ever set foot in Gracefield again.
The Doctor had once told Matilda about a child ridden with sickness in the infants’ room upstairs. An anecdote, meant to warn her against breaking the strictly-controlled regiment the higher-ups had devised for them, lest the livestock be spoilt.
Now, Matilda imagines a baby with lungs straining to cry, its limbs too weak to flail about, let alone kick against its mother. She imagines a glass-like infant born to a woman just as fragile. She wonders if Cecile had already begun to poison herself when they had met that day.
A daughter would live longer, Matilda knows. She will get to grow, even as her very heart shrivels into itself. Four glossy red walls closing in around one little black tracking chip. A daughter might be like Matilda, smiling like her life depended on it, or like Cecile, destroying herself from the inside out just so she wouldn’t have to smile any longer, or even — like Sarah, adorned in high-collared dresses and shark-like teeth. A daughter would unquestionably survive.
When her child kicks again, Matilda has already made up her own mind.
She imagines a little boy, with her hair and her eyes. He will only be half her DNA, she knows, but still, she hopes she can give him this much. She hopes he will be smart and brave and happy, that he will get at least six, if not eleven years in a loving orphanage. For all the kicking, she hopes he will be healthy because a daughter would survive but a son would live.
Above all, she hopes his death will be painless.