Sara and followed Jenny to admissions, where the new woman lay on a gurney, her husband standing beside her, holding her hand. She was older than the patients Sara was used to seeing, maybe forty, with a drawn, hard face and crowded teeth. Shocks of gray ran through her long, damp hair. Sara quickly read her chart.

"Mrs. Jimenez, I'm Dr. Wilson. You're thirty-six weeks along, is that correct?"

"I'm not sure. About that."

"How long have you been bleeding?"

"A few days. Just spotting, but then this morning it got worse and I started to hurt."

"I told her she should have come sooner," her husband explained. He was a large man in dark blue coveralls; his hands were big as bear paws. "I was at work."

Sara checked the woman's heart rate and blood pressure, then drew up the gown and placed her hands on her belly, gently pressing. The woman winced in pain. Sara moved her hands lower, touching here and there, searching for the site of the abruption. That was when she noticed the two boys, young teenagers, sitting off to the side. She exchanged a look with the man but said nothing.

"We have a birthright certificate," the man said nervously.

"Let's not worry about that now." From the pocket of her coat, Sara withdrew the fetoscope and pressed the silver disc against the woman's abdomen, holding up a hand for silence. A strong, swishing click filled her ears. She recorded the baby's heart rate on the chart, 118 bpm-a little low, but nothing too concerning yet.

"Okay, Jenny, let's get her into the OR." She turned to the woman's husband. "Mr. Jimenez -"

"Carlos. That's my first name."

"Carlos, everything's going to be fine. But you'll want your children to wait here."

The placenta had separated from the uterine wall; that's where the blood was coming from. The tear might clot on its own, but the fact that the baby was in a breech position complicated matters for a vaginal delivery, and at thirty-six weeks, Sara saw no reason to wait. In the hall outside the OR, she explained what she intended to do.

"We could hold off," she told the woman's husband, "but I don't think that's wise. The baby might not be getting enough oxygen."

"Can I stay with her?"

"Not for this." She took the man by the arm and looked him in the eye. "I'll take care of her. Trust me, there'll be lots for you to do later."

Sara called for the anesthetic and a warmer while she and Jenny washed up and put on their gowns. Jenny cleaned the woman's belly and pubic area with iodine and bound her to the table. Sara rolled lights into place, snapped on her gloves, and poured the anesthetic into a small dish. Using forceps, she dipped a sponge into the brown liquid, then placed this into the compartment of the breathing mask.

"Okay, Mrs. Jimenez," she said, "I'm going put this on your face now. It will smell a little strange."

The woman looked at her with helpless terror. "Is this going to hurt?"

Sara smiled to reassure her. "Believe me, you won't care. And when you wake up, your baby will be here." She positioned the breather on the woman's face. "Just take slow, even breaths."

The woman was out like a light. Sara rolled the tray of instruments, still warm from the boiler, into place and drew up her mask. With a scalpel she cut a transverse incision at the top of the woman's pubic bone, then a second to open the uterus. The baby appeared, coiled head-down in the amniotic sac, its fluid tinged pink with blood. Sara carefully punctured the sac and reached inside with forceps.

"Okay, get ready."

Jenny moved beside her with a towel and a basin. Sara drew the baby through the incision, sliding her hand beneath its head as it emerged and hooking her thumb and pinkie beneath its shoulders. Her arms; the baby was a girl. One more slow pull and she came free. Holding her in the towel, Jenny suctioned her mouth and nose, rolled her onto her stomach, and rubbed her back; with a wet hiccup, the child began to breathe. Sara clamped the umbilicus, snipped it with a pair of shears, drew out the placenta, and dropped it into the basin. While Jenny put the baby in the warmer and checked her vitals, Sara sutured the woman's incisions. Minimal blood, no complications, a healthy baby: not bad for ten minutes' work.

Sara drew the mask off the woman's face. "She's here," she whispered into her ear. "Everything's fine. She's a healthy baby girl."

Her husband and sons were waiting outside. Sara gave everyone a moment together. Carlos kissed his wife, who had begun to come around, then lifted the baby from the warmer to hold her. Each of the sons took a turn.

"Do you have a name for her?" Sara asked.

The man nodded, his eyes shining with tears. Sara liked him for this; not all the fathers were so sentimental. Some seemed barely to care.

"Grace," he said.

Mother and daughter were wheeled down the hall. The man sent his boys away, then reached into the pocket of his jumpsuit and nervously handed Sara the piece of paper she was expecting. Couples who were going to have a third baby were allowed to purchase the right to do so from a couple who had had fewer than their legal allotment. Sara disliked the practice; it seemed wrong to her, buying and selling the rights to making a person, and half the certificates she saw were forgeries, purchased on the trade.

She examined Carlos's document. The paper was government-issue stock, but the ink wasn't even close to the correct color, and the seal had been embossed on the wrong side.

"Whoever sold you this, you should get your money back."

Carlos's face collapsed. "Please, I'm just a hydro. I don't have enough to pay the tax. It was totally my fault. She said it wasn't the right day."

"Good of you to admit, but I'm afraid that's not the issue."

"I'm begging you, Dr. Wilson. Don't make us give her to the sisters. My sons are good boys, you can see that."

Sara had no intention of sending baby Grace to the orphanage. On the other hand, the man's certificate was so palpably false that somebody in the census office was bound to flag it.

"Do us both a favor and get rid of this. I'll record the birth, and if the paperwork bounces back, I'll make something up-tell them I lost it or something. With any luck, it'll get misplaced in the shuffle."

Carl made no move to accept the certificate; he seemed not to comprehend what Sara was telling him. She had no doubt that he had mentally rehearsed this moment a thousand times. Not once, in all that time, had he imagined that somebody would simply make his problem go away.

"Go on, take it."

"You'd really do that? Won't you get in trouble?"

She pushed the paper toward him. "Tear it up, burn it, shove it in a trash can somewhere. Just forget we had this conversation."

The man returned the certificate to his pocket. For a second, he seemed about to hug her but stopped himself. "You'll be in our prayers, Dr. Wilson. We'll give her a good life, I swear."

"I'm counting on it. Just do me a favor."

"Anything."

"When your wife tells you it's not the right day, believe her, okay?"

At the checkpoint, Sara showed her pass and made her way home through darkened streets. Except for the hospital and other essential buildings, the electricity was shut off at 2200. Which was not to say that the city went to bed the minute the power was cut; in darkness, it acquired a different kind of life. Saloons, brothels, gaming halls-Hollis had told her plenty of stories, and after two years in the refugee camp, there wasn't much that Sara hadn't seen herself.

She let herself into the apartment. Kate had long since been put to bed, but Hollis was waiting up, reading a book by candlelight at the kitchen table.

"Anything good?" she asked.

With Sara working so many late hours at the hospital, Hollis had become quite a reader, checking out armfuls of books from the library and reading them from a stack he kept by his side of the bed.

"It's a little heavy on the mumbo jumbo. Michael recommended it a while ago. It's about a submarine."

She hung her coat on the hook by the door. "What's a submarine?"

Hollis closed the book and removed his reading glasses-another new development. With little half-moon lenses, cloudy and scratched, set in a black plastic frame, Sara thought they made him look distinguished, though Hollis said they made him feel old.

"Apparently, it's a boat that goes underwater. Sounds like bullshit to me, but the story's not bad. Are you hungry? I can fix you something if you want."

She was, but eating felt like too much effort. "All I want to do is go to bed."

She checked on Kate, who was sound asleep, and washed up at the sink. She paused to examine herself in the mirror. No doubt about it, the years were starting to show. Fans of wrinkles had formed around her eyes; her blond hair, which she now wore shorter and pulled back, had thinned somewhat; her skin was beginning to lose its tightness. She'd always thought of herself as pretty and, in a certain light, still was. But sometime in the midst of life she had passed the apex. In the past, when she'd looked at her reflection, she had still seen the little girl she'd once been; the woman in the mirror had still been an extension of her girlhood self. Now it was the future she saw. The wrinkles would deepen; her skin would sag; the lights of her eyes would dim. Her youth was fading, easing into the past.

And yet this thought did not disturb her, or not very much. With age came authority, and with authority came the power to be useful-to heal and comfort and bring new people into the world. You'll be in our prayers, Dr. Wilson. Sara heard words like these nearly every day, but she had never become inured to them. Just that name, Dr. Wilson. It still amazed her to hear someone say it and know they were speaking to her. When Sara had arrived in Kerrville, three years ago, she'd reported to the hospital to see if her nurse's training could be of any use. In a little windowless room, a doctor by the name of Elacqua quizzed her at length-bodily systems, diagnostics, treatments for illness and injury. His face showed no emotion as he responded to her answers with marks on a clipboard. The grilling lasted over two hours; by its conclusion, Sara felt like she was stumbling blind in a windstorm. What use could her meager training be to a medical establishment that was so far ahead of the homespun remedies of the Colony? How could she have been so nave? "Well, I guess that about covers it," Dr. Elacqua said. "Congratulations." Sara was knocked flat; was he being ironic? "Does this mean I can be a nurse?" she asked. "A nurse? No. We have plenty of nurses. Report back here tomorrow, Ms. Wilson. Your training starts at oh-seven-hundred sharp. My guess is twelve months should do it." "Training for what?" she asked, and Elacqua, whose lengthy inquisition was a mere shadow of things to come, said, with unconcealed impatience, "Perhaps I'm not being clear. I don't know where you learned it, but you know twice as much as you have any right to. You're going to be a doctor."

And then, of course, there was Kate. Their beautiful, amazing, miraculous Kate. Sara and Hollis would have liked to have had a second child, but the violence of Kate's birth had inflicted too much damage. A disappointment, and not without irony, as day by day new babies traveled into the world beneath her hands, but Sara was hardly entitled to complain. That she should have found her daughter at all, and that the two of them should have been reunited with Hollis and escaped the Homeland to travel back to Kerrville to be a family together-miracle was hardly the word. Sara was not religious in the churchgoing sense-the sisters all struck her as good people, if a bit extreme in their beliefs-but only an idiot would fail to feel the actions of providence. You couldn't wake up each day in a world like that and not spend a solid hour just thinking of ways to be grateful.

She thought rarely of the Homeland, or as rarely as she could. She still had dreams about it-though, strangely, these dreams did not focus on the worst things that had happened to her there. Mostly they were dreams of feeling hungry and cold and helpless, or the endlessly turning wheels of the grinder in the biodiesel plant. Sometimes she was simply looking at her hands with a feeling of perplexity, as if trying to remember something she was supposed to be holding; from time to time she dreamed about Jackie, the old woman who had befriended her, or else Lila, for whom Sara's complex feelings had distilled over time to a kind of sorrowful sympathy. Once in a while, her dreams were flat-out nightmares-she was carrying Kate in blinding snow, the two of them being chased by something terrible-but these had abated. So that was one more thing to be thankful for: eventually, perhaps not soon but someday, the Homeland would become just one more memory in a life of memories, an unpleasant recollection that made the others all the sweeter.

Hollis was already out cold. The man slept like a fallen giant; his head hit the pillow, and soon he was snoring away. Sara extinguished the candle and slid beneath the covers. She wondered if Marie had delivered her baby yet, and if she was still yelling at her husband; she thought of the Jimenez family and the look on Carlos's face as he lifted baby Grace into his arms. Maybe grace was the word she was looking for. It was possible they'd still get flagged by the census office, but Sara didn't think so. Not with so many babies being born. Which was the thing. That was the heart of the matter. A new world was coming; a new world was already here. Maybe that was what getting older taught you, when you looked in the mirror and saw the passage of time in your face, when you looked at your sleeping daughter and saw the girl you once were and would never be again. The world was real and you were in it, a brief part but still a part, and if you were lucky, and maybe even if you weren't, the things you'd done for love would be remembered.

6.

The sky over Houston released the night slowly, darkness easing to gray. Greer made his way into the city. Where the Katy Freeway met the 610 in a tangle of collapsed ramps and overpasses, he arced north, away from the bayous and swamps, with their sucking mud and impenetrable foliage, bypassing the liquefied inner neighborhoods for higher ground, then followed a wide avenue of junked cars south to the downtown lagoon.

The rowboat was where he'd left it two months ago. Greer tied up his horse, dumped out the mosquito-infested rainwater, and dragged the craft to the water's edge. Across the lagoon, the Chevron Mariner lay at its improbable angle, a great temple of rust and rot lodged among the listing towers of the city's central core. He laid his supplies in the bottom of the boat, set it afloat, and rowed away from shore.

In the lobby of One Allen Center, he tied off at the base of the escalators and ascended, the duffel bag with its sloshing contents slung over his shoulder. The ten-story climb through mold-befouled air left him dizzy and short of breath. In the empty office, he pulled up the rope he'd left in place and lowered the bag to the deck of the Mariner, then climbed down behind it.

He always fed Carter first.

On the port side, just about amidships, a hatch lay flush with the deck. Greer knelt beside it and removed the jugs of blood from the bag. He tied three together by their handles with one of the ropes. The sun was angled behind him, raking the deck with light. With a heavy wrench he unscrewed the safety bolts, turned the handle, and opened the hatch.

A shaft of sunshine spilled into the space below. Carter lay curled in a fetal position near the forward bulkhead, his body in shadow, away from the light. Old jugs and coils of rope were piled in a heap on the floor. Hand over hand, Greer lowered the jugs. Only when they reached bottom did Carter stir. As he scuttled on all fours toward the blood, Greer released the rope, closed the hatch, and replaced the safety bolts.

Now, Amy.

Greer moved to the second hatch. The trick was to move fast but not with panicked recklessness. The scent of blood: for Amy, it could not be contained by something as meager as the thin plastic membrane of the jugs; her hunger was too strong. Greer set his supplies within quick reach, unwrenched the bolts, and placed them to the side. A deep breath to calm his nerves; then he opened the hatch.

Blood.

She leapt. Lucius dropped the jugs, slammed the hatch, and shoved the first bolt into place as Amy's body made contact. The metal clanged as if hit by a giant hammer. He threw his body across it; another blow came, knocking the wind from his chest. The hinges were bending; unless he could get the remaining bolts in place, the hatch wouldn't hold. He'd managed to get two more into their holes when Amy struck again; Greer watched helplessly as one of the bolts jogged free and rolled across the deck. His hand stabbed outward and seized it at the very edge of his reach.

"Amy," he yelled, "it's me! It's Lucius!" He shoved the bolt into place and smacked it with the head of the wrench, driving it home. "The blood is there! Follow the scent of the blood!"

Three turns on the wrench and the bolt locked down, bringing the fourth hole back into alignment. He rammed its bolt into place. One last pound on the underside of the hatch, halfhearted; then it was over.

Lucius, I didn't mean it ...

"It's all right," he said.

I'm sorry ...

He picked up his tools and put them in the empty duffel. Below him, in the hold of the Chevron Mariner, Amy and Carter were drinking their fills. It always happened like this; Greer should have been used to it by now. Yet his heart was pounding, his mind and body flying with adrenaline.

"I'm yours, Amy," he said. "I always will be. Whatever comes, you know that."

And with these words, Lucius made his way across the deck of the Mariner and climbed back through the window.

7.

Amy returned to awareness to find herself on all fours in the dirt. Her hands were gloved; a plastic flat of impatiens rested on the ground close by and, beside it, a rusty trowel.

"You all right there, Miss Amy?"

Carter was sitting on the patio, legs akimbo beneath the wrought-iron table, fanning his face with his big straw hat. On the table were two glasses of iced tea.

"That man takes good care of us," he said, and sighed with satisfaction. "Haven't eaten my fill like that since I don't remember when."

Amy rose unsteadily to her feet. A deep lassitude enveloped her, as if she had just awoken from a long nap.

"Come and sit a minute," Carter said. "Give the body a chance to digest. Feeding day like a day off round here. Them flowers can wait."

Which was true; there were always more flowers. As soon as Amy finished planting a flat, a new one would appear by the gate. It was the same with the tea: one minute the table was bare; in the next, two sweating glasses awaited. By what unseen agency these things arrived, Amy did not know. It was all part of this place and its own particular logic. Every day a season, every season a year.

She removed her gloves and crossed the lawn to sit across from Carter. The greasy taste of blood lingered in her mouth. She sipped the tea to clear it away.

"It's good to keep your strength up, Miss Amy," Carter said. "Ain't no prize for starving yourself."

"I just don't ... like it." She looked at Carter, who was still fanning himself with his hat. "I tried to kill him again."

"Lucius knows the situation well enough. I doubt he takes it personal."

"That's not the point, Anthony. I need to learn to control it the way you do."

Carter frowned. He was a man of compact expression, small gestures, thoughtful pauses. "Don't be so hard on yourself. You ain't had but three years to get used to things. You still just a baby in the way of being what we are."

"I don't feel like a baby."