who don’t even wait for the draw,” Lizwi is saying. “Because of the forced sterilisation of the losers immediately afterwards. They disappear into the Wildlands, and sometimes their boyfriends go with them. I suppose some of them are already pregnant and avoiding a forced termination, but I think most of them are just scared of the draw in the first place. I’m due in soon.”
“Me too,” Halo says.
“I keep thinking – what if I’m not drawn? If I have to go for sterilisation? I know it’s wrong to say this, but I hate that the lucky ones get to have two kids each. But the Minders say only children will become a social problem.”
“Except that they’re forever contradicting themselves, creating one-child families with all their Parkings, and taking kids away to be Pets, and all the other stuff,” Silver mutters to me.
“I know,” Halo is answering Lizwi. “One child each, and more of us could be mothers.”
“Never mind that it’s only women put into the draw, and our boys and men can end up fathering a whole pack of kids with different women, or none at all, depending.”
“At least the draw is democratic.” Halo is so tolerant.
“I know, girls in the Margins, Stains, the lot, they all go in. My father, he’s a Minder, he says they let the Stains have the same chance to breed as everyone else so there’ll always be reminders of the Disobedience, only he doesn’t know what that was.” Lizwi lifts up her shoulders, then lets them fall.
I make a sound through my nose. Even I don’t know what my forebears’ Disobedience was, but it must have been something extreme for the Minders of those days to infect them with our hereditary Stain.
“I’ll never be a father,” I mutter to Silver.
“Me neither,” he says in an absent way.
“Even if I’m drawn, I’ll still be so scared,” Halo tells Lizwi. “Yes, all right, we’re living in the Prosperity, but Repairs are getting seriously expensive if my children turn out to need them.”
“My father keeps dropping hints about the ingredients for some special muti running out.” Lizwi blows out a big breath. “It’s making them stricter about Parking damaged kids.”
“Parking or putting down?” Halo’s voice is very low.
“Whatever. Removing. I’ll tell you something.” Lizwi moves closer to Halo. “If I’m lucky enough to get drawn, I’m hiding my children until they’re too old to be disappeared. Then, if they turn out to be damaged or flawed, they’ll just have to let them go for Repairs. Like Meyi and Silver.”
People stare at us passing, stare at me especially, it feels like.
I envy Meyi his cap.
“What are you looking at, freaks?” I glower at a pair of Bleeders.
“It’s because we’re a mixed group,” Silver says. “A Skin and Feathers and all the rest. Hey, maybe we’ll set a new trend.”
“So fashion is everything in here, is it?”
“Because of the Prosperity.” Silver’s eyes drift all over the place, and he sounds vague, but he’s kind of making sense. “It’s made everything too easy. People haven’t got enough to do. Like my parents. Every new thing, they have to be it or have it. I think it stops them thinking too much about their disappointment.”
“Disappointment?”
“Me being flawed.” He doesn’t come across embarrassed, saying it. “And my baby brother being Parked or whatever, because after I was diagnosed when I was already too old for Parking, there was always some Minder checking on us and they caught him early enough to take away.”
“Parked or whatever?” I’m curious. “Don’t you know?”
“We’ve never seen him again.”
“So maybe us Stains aren’t so cursed.” I’m surprised to hear myself saying it. “I mean, we’re the most flawed of all, but we get left alone to get on with our lives as well as we can in the Margins.”
“What’s it like there?” Silver asks, and I hear a harsh yap of laughter from behind us, letting me know Orpa is listening to us. “I was surprised someone from there could text and read.”
“Only some of us, from people who’ve kept reading alive and passed it on. You’ll see for yourself what it’s like,” I say. “I mean, the only way out to the Wildlands is through the Margins. We can spend some time there, getting supplies, deciding things.”
“Unless Ricochet and Leoli have a better idea.”
“How come we’ve never heard they’re still around?”
“Like she said, not all the draws are screened.” Silver lifts his eyes to Halo’s bright head.
“Another thing I’d like to know is why this Meyi boy is so desperate to go to the Wildlands,” I continue, and I’m thinking how weird it would be if Meyi has somehow seen or heard the same things I have.
“I don’t know.” He stops, and I get the impression he’s really struggling to order his thoughts, or maybe just to make sense of things. “I’ve heard that in the old times, long before the Drowning, people like him were sometimes believed to have special senses or abilities.”
“To make up for being flawed,” I suggest.
“Or maybe our flaws are really talents,” he says.
“What’s yours?”
“Attention deficit disorder.”
“If you and Meyi both regularly have to go for Repairs, and I’m Stained … Hey, wouldn’t it be crazy if it turns out we’re all flawed?” I say.
Halo looks back at us, twisting her lovely long neck to see over her shoulder. She looks disturbed, or uneasy.
“You and Ril –” I start to say to her.
“Flaws are personal.”
I get a glimpse of her mouth, such a sad curve to it suddenly, before she turns her face forward again. Her braids swing gently.
“That’s all right, Halo, I bet lots of people feel like that,” I say to her back.
“I don’t know why,” Silver says. “We are all what we are.”
“Hey!” Ril pipes up behind us. “Which Breeding Control Centre are we heading for, Halo? Shouldn’t we jump on a tram?”
“It’s just through here.”
I can understand how people with nothing to gain or lose might enjoy attending a live draw. I even get that some men, yearning to be regular family men, might have an interest in identifying possible mothers for their offspring.
What I don’t get is how the women and girls in each draw can bear to learn their fate in front of a live audience,
