Page 78 of Chaos

Late that night, when Auden is finally asleep and we’ve crawled into bed, he says, “I need to talk to Sheila.”

“Okay.”

“She’ll need supplies. We can move monitors and machines here. Whatever she needs.”

A little puff of laughter escapes, imagining him asking the army to carry home a maternity ward.

“You’re going to need baby stuff,” he keeps probing at new obstacles, new stars, new threads to be plucked from the tapestry of our future. “Diapers and a crib.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll need formula, bottles, little shoes.”

This is Yorke, managing stress, taking control of an uncontrollable situation, and I get it. But it’s stressing me out, so I slide under the covers, down his body, and use my mouth to chase away his worries as well as my own.

I don’t add one more problem to his ever-growing list.

Ben.

He ismyproblem, a controllable problem in a world full of uncontrollable ones.

I saw something in his cell, in the blip of time I spent inside it.

He eats Plumberger’s crappy poisonous-tasting food, just like the rest of us. I don’t need Tani to get me in a vent with a knife and breakers flipped in the night like an assassin. I don’t need a book on poison in my own backyard.

I have everything I need in the greenhouse.

I just need to get into the kitchens.

18 |Blueberry of a girl

YORKE

EVEN AT THE HEIGHT OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY,childbirth was the most dangerous thing most women ever did, more dangerous than skydiving or firefighting or working on the police force.

This baby is more likely to kill Frankie than anything we’ve faced since the plague hit.

She’ll rip her way, through blood and pain, from Frankie’s body, the size of a watermelon, capable of screaming the resort down, stripping us of sleep and sanity at a time when both are at a premium.

According to the book I’m flipping through, she’s currently roughly the size of a blueberry.

And the only defense against the threat she represents—is Sheila.

Which means Frankie is staying right here.

She can’t leave.

I turn another page in the book Sheila gave me this morning and read about how she will suck vital nutrients from Frankie’s already-taxed body in her bid toward life.

I slap it shut, closing away the pale, unsettling pink drawings of fruit-sized fetuses that look more like aliens and seahorses than humans.

I stow the book carefully in my bedside table drawer, beside a book on German siegecraft in the middle ages and another on construction of European strongholds, each jam packed with more shit to do.

Too much.

And no time to do it.

Because the second most dangerous thing to Frankie’s safety—is me.

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