19

The last few days of house arrest were the most divinely lazy, blissfully sated days of my entire life. Our evenings were spent around the fireplace, teasing and laughing, getting to know each other, or simply staring into each other's eyes.

And the way Roman made me feel…well, it redefined everything I thought I knew about love.

The first night, he arrived home with a picnic hamper from the home-baked store. He built a fire and we spread a blanket on the floor, and feasted on a selection of miniature savory pies. Spinach and goat cheese. Roasted chicken and parsley. Pumpkin and ginger. There was a bottle of dry, white wine and an assortment of tiny dessert pastries, each one not much more than a mouthful.

I took a bite of whipped coffee cream rolled in flaky pastry and groaned. "This tastes like heaven." I held the other half out to Roman. "Try this."

He leaned in, but he wasn't going for my offering. He kissed me on the mouth, his lips dragging on mine as he slowly pulled away. "You're right, it does take like heaven."

I slapped at him playfully. "You're ridiculous."

His gaze washed over me, a grin tugging at his strong, sexy mouth. "You're beautiful."

A sigh swept through me, taking my breath, and finally, finally erasing that stubborn stain of doubt that had kept me quiet last night when he'd blown my heart wide open. I love you so damn much.

I'd gotten it all wrong.

The space where Roman and I overlapped was an explosion of brilliant, electric colors. It was all the rest, the spaces where we couldn't meet, that were a dull, dreary gray.

I went up onto my knees in front of him and cupped his face in my palms.

If we were all a little broken, he was the glue that kept putting me back together, again and again.

He was the heat rushing through my veins, the thrill tingling down my spine. He was the ache gathering in the hollow of my stomach.

He was a wildness raging through me and the promise that anchored me. You have me. You will always have me.

I sat there on my knees, looking into the depths of his stone-baked eyes, and the love that welled up inside me was so powerful, so consuming, it stripped me to my core.

"I love you," I said softly.

Surprise dipped his brow, as if that was the last thing he expected to hear…ever. As if his shoulders were so damn broad, he could be both strong and vulnerable enough so I would never have to be.

Something fierce and protective caught my breath, and this time I said it like a vow, "I love you."

"Georga." His eyes turned stormy, and then he took me into his arms and kissed me until I burned hotter and brighter than the flames in the fireplace.

I fell asleep in Roman's arms each night, and I woke up in his arms. When he left for work in the mornings, I drifted through the day as if still in a dream. It was our own little time bubble, and I held onto it selfishly, possessively, refusing to share one precious moment with the world outside our cabin. Because it would intrude quickly enough. I knew it would.

And it did.

Wednesday came around, and I was free from house arrest, free to leave Parklands, and I would not be complacent.

I would not be silent.

Rose lived in a row house on the outskirts of the Bohemian Quarter. I parked my bicycle against the weathered, eggshell wall of Number 12, Rue Street, and rapped firmly on the front door.

Across the road, a woman practically hung out of a window on the second story, watching the goings on in her street. A pair of young mothers walked by, one pushing a stroller, the other holding onto the hand of a toddler.

I knocked again, feeling conspicuous, exposed, even though I wasn't doing anything illegal. Not yet.

The door finally opened.

Rose took one look at me and her welcome smile soured. She was in her mid-twenties, dressed in the silky harem pants she seemed to favor. Her blond hair was scraped into a severe bun and while I would have liked to say that was just her hairstyle, it was pretty much her entire personality.

I gave her a cheerful wave. I have no idea why. "Hi."

She glanced passed me, probably noticed the busybody pouring out the window across the road, and freshened up her smile. "Georga, this is a surprise. I don't recall arranging a visit."

"I needed to see you," I said.

"That's not how this works." She was still smiling for the benefit of her neighbors, but her voice was prickly.

The frosty reception wasn't exactly unexpected. Rose wasn't a big fan of my tendency to rock up on her doorstep out of the blue. But dealing with her wasn't all fun and games for me, either. I was her little protégée, however, and she was my only contact with the Sisterhood, so we both just had to suck it up.

Or she could slam the door on my face, and it looked like she was about to do so. Although after another painfully drawn out hesitation, she stood back. "I suppose you'd better come in."

I stepped over the threshold gratefully.

She closed the door and rounded on me. "The protocols are in place for a good reason."

"This is important."

"I can't help you with your husband."

My mind went blank. "What do you mean?"

"You tell me," she said irritably. "There's been whispers of rehab."

So, that's what she was talking about. "How on earth did you hear about that?"

She ignored me. "The Sisterhood can't be linked to troublesome behavior, Georga. I thought I'd made that clear."

I glared at her.

Her eyes narrowed into me.

A child's squeal broke into our stalemate. Her gaze softened a fraction as she glanced in that direction.

I adjusted my attitude. The strict protocols and prohibitive secrecy didn't just protect the Sisters of Capra, they protected Rose's children, too.

"I'll wait here, if you need to tend to him," I said.

She shook her head, and sighed. "You know your way to the kitchen. Wait there."

I didn't feel great about imposing myself—and the risks I brought with me—on her family, her children, but Rose also had a baby girl. And maybe, just maybe, what I had to say might make a difference to her daughter's future. And maybe that was worth the risk. Rose certainly believed so. That's why she'd chosen to hold a prominent position in the Sisterhood.

I had to pass through the cluttered living room to the kitchen. As I stepped over a stuffed giraffe, my gaze landed on the cot. Through the white-painted wooden bars, I could see Rose's baby sleeping on her side, blond curls plastered to a pink cheek.

Snowy, their black-haired German Shephard, twitched an ear and I moved on, afraid he'd yap at a stranger in his living room and wake the baby.

It was about ten minutes before Rose joined me at the kitchen table. She didn't offer me tea, just asked point blank, "So, what's this about?"

"It does have something to do with that trouble you heard about," I admitted, and launched into a brief summary of how I'd stowed myself on Roman's truck and what I'd discovered at the trading post, Sector Five.

She looked intrigued, almost despite herself, settling back in her chair and folding her arms.

"You don't have to worry," I said. "I was placed under reprimand, but it's not like there's a cloud of suspicion hanging over me. So far as Roman and the council and the Guard are concerned, I never left that parking garage. I was never even aware that I'd been outside Capra's wall."

"I wasn't worried."

Of course she wasn't. That's one of the reasons I was determined to keep Roman squeaky clean. Rose had made it clear that even on a sanctioned mission, I was on my own…well, me and a ready-made candidate to blame for inciting my nefarious activities. My mother was an acceptable option, although my husband was her personal preference.

"Okay." She stood and went to put the kettle on the stove. "Tell me everything."

I jumped to my visit in The Smoke first, using it to justify details I couldn't otherwise have known just from what I'd observed of the Outerlands and the barons at Sector Five. She wanted to know, of course, how I managed to not only get to The Smoke, but back again.

I took a leaf from the Sisterhood handbook. "I'm not at liberty to say."

She arched a brow on me. "Let me guess. Your warden husband?"

I snorted. "You seriously think Roman West would tolerate that kind of insubordination in his wife, let alone aid and abet? You obviously don't know him very well."

That's exactly what I was betting on.

"He turned me over to the Guard after Sector Five, and that's while he firmly believes I don't have a clue that I'd ever left Capra," I elaborated. "If he even so much as suspected I'd found a way to sneak out to The Smoke, he'd have me committed to rehab for life."

For a moment, I worried I'd laid it on too thick.

But Rose digested that, then demanded, "So how did you get from Capra to The Smoke and back?"

"I had help, obviously."

"Georga," she issued in a threatening tone.

I shrugged her off. "I can't give up any names. I won't. I'm sure you understand."

She wasn't happy, but I wasn't giving her a choice. After another minute of useless posturing and prodding, we moved on.

I told her about how the women lived in The Smoke—about how many women there were—which led into my half-assed explanation about the sperm sorting process to balance the gender numbers.

"Children are being born in the Outerlands and The Smoke," I said after that. "That's the greatest threat they've always hung over us. The world is dead outside the walls. There's nothing to escape to. It's a lie." Anger hitched my breath. "It's all lies. How do you even do that? How do you keep an entire town so utterly in the dark?"

I was asking morally, but Rose answered with the mechanics of how easily it had been done.

"People leave Capra occasionally, but they never come back." She thought on that and added, "Except for the wardens, I suppose, but they keep to themselves."

Because they lived in the real world, while we supposedly lived in some cotton-candy fantasy paradise. That's how Roman had once seen me—how he'd seen all Capra citizens—but that wasn't the whole truth.

And yes, we have a symbiotic relationship with The Smoke, and in turn, with the Outerlands. We relied heavily on them, but they needed our educated professionals, our medical expertise and research, which was also used for trade with the barons.

But that wasn't Capra's main purpose. It wasn't our reason for being, because we weren't just protected by our walls. We were a science experiment in motion. Isolated and studied, pitied and revered, left in a holding pattern of carefully manufactured stasis on the wing of a prayer that we'd one day produce a miracle.

I left the worst for last.

Rose didn't believe me.

"Impossible," she declared in a flat, no-nonsense voice.

"That's not all," I said. "Apparently the original supply of frozen eggs dried up ages ago and what we've been using is harvested from girls in The Smoke. And if their eggs don't rot until they're fourteen, that means ours would be viable, too, for a short time. Maybe even longer, what with all the pure-living and wellness that's forced on us."

Rose sat there, drumming her fingers on the table, staring straight through me.

The tea she'd put in front of me earlier had grown cold, but I sipped on it now, giving her time to absorb and process. I was done talking. I'd said everything there was to say.

After a while, she pushed out of her chair and crossed to the threshold of the kitchen. She leaned against the doorjamb, her arms folded, staring into the living room…at her baby asleep in the cot, I realized, when she spoke again.

"That's my baby girl," she said fiercely. "My boys are mine. I grew them in my womb. I love them with every fiber of my being, and then some."

I got it.

I really did.

I'd once been totally blasé about the concept of biological families. I'd accepted that my children would never be of my flesh and blood. I would love them, of course I would, just as so many mothers who'd come before me…just as so many women had done throughout history, women who hadn't been able to conceive even before the plague.

As fiercely as she'd spoken, when Rose turned to me, her eyes were haunted by the loss of that other child, the one she would never have.

That was the same loss I carried in my bones.

Because this was different.

This wasn't God or Mother Nature at play.

This was the manmade hand of five men sitting around the council table.

"I'm sorry," I said, and it was a heartfelt apology swelling up in my throat.

I wasn't apologizing for what Capra had taken from us. But I'd made this decision to not be silent. I'd made the conscious choice to give her all this hurt over something that could not be changed.

I didn't regret my decision, but I was prepared to own the fallout.

Her gaze swept from me to the living room, and then, when she turned and joined me at the table again, her eyes were still sad, but she was smiling. "It's happening. It's finally happening."

"What's happening?" I asked, confused.

"The future I promise my daughter every night as I rock her to sleep."

A thrill shivered my spine. "You mean the rebellion?"

"That, and everything," she said. "We will rise up and fight for this. My daughter will have the choice to harvest her eggs before they rot, if they rot. Those girls in The Smoke have a year or two. As you pointed out, it's entirely possible we've progressed way beyond that here in Capra. All the hard work put in by the generations of women before us is paying off. We're making progress, our bodies are healing. My daughter may well be in the catchment year of the First Couple."

That was a little too much optimism for me. The rebellion was about as much as I hoped for. It was enough.

"What will we do?" I asked her. "How do we rise up and fight?"

I wasn't being blood thirsty. Burning Capra to the ground wasn't the Sisterhood's style. Our rebellion was always going to be a gentle rebellion, a war of words and reason—in a town where women had no voice and weren't exactly encouraged to stretch their brains. That, of course, was the challenge.

"We aren't going to do anything," Rose said firmly, her face hardening as she reverted to her usual dismissive manner. "I will pass this up the chain, and meanwhile, you will not share this information with anyone. Is that understood?"

I didn't nod my agreement, and I certainly didn't understand. "There's been too much of that, secrets and silent nothings. That's how we've landed up here. Truth is a powerful weapon. And this truth, this truth needs to be whispered along the arteries of this town, from mother to daughter, until there is no place for the lies to hide."

"That's how they stamp you out." Her palm slammed the table. "That's how the rebellion dies before it even starts. You are young and impatient. But we've been waiting for a spark for a long time, and this is it, I can feel it. Don't ruin it by thinking you know who to trust, by foolishly believing that you can light that fire on your own, and it will dance only to your tune."

My mouth pulled down at the corners. How arrogant and na?ve did she think I was? It wasn't like I wanted to climb onto the bandstand in the square and kick start a revolution. Whisper. I'd said whisper.

Besides, I'd already told Jessie some of it. And I planned a heart-to-heart with my mom later, and had no intention of cancelling.

"Think of this as a deck of playing cards," Rose went on. "Right now, we're holding all the cards. We control the game. But every card you dish out is one less for us, one more that could find its way to our opponents and give them the winning hand."

She paused a beat, drilling a look into me, as if she could drill her will into mine. "You are a Sister of Capra. We stand together. That's how we rise, else we all fall."

I couldn't decide if she was being dramatic or passionate.

Dramatically passionate?

Either way, it had the desired effect.

When she sent me off a short while later, I cycled through the streets of the Bohemian Quarter with the induction pledge I'd given years ago pounding like a drum in my chest.

To the Sisterhood of Capra

I pledge my honor and my loyalty and my daughters

From shadow to light

From ash to flight

United we shall rise

Sisters one and all

I was also thinking about that other thing Rose had said. The First Couple. Was it really a possibility? Were we on the cusp of restoring the future of mankind? I'd been raised to respect what we were aiming to achieve here in Capra, if not all the methods.

I wasn't just a Sister of Capra, I was a daughter of Capra. The duty and purpose ingrained on my soul chipped away at me now, chipped away at the mutiny that had been building inside me with each new day and each new lie.

If we were a science experiment, should I still resent it so much…if it's starting to yield results? What did that make me? Selfish? Weak?

I didn't know.

But I didn't entirely trust myself right now.

The Sisterhood was cautious, pragmatic and committed. They would work together to raise us all without blowing up the world and the progress Rose seemed to believe we'd made.

I was all over the place at the moment, volatile and reckless, overly emotional. What if I wrecked everything with one wrong move or a slip of the tongue to the wrong person?