AN: Here we go, another chapter here.

Despite the heavy theme, I hope that you enjoy! Let me know what you think!

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"They were relocated. They were put in special institutions for the correction of formerly wild children with the hope that they'd be released to non-wilds to be raised up as law abiding citizens," the voice explained. It was almost robotic in quality and belonged to Adele Weaver, as she'd introduced herself to them.

"They were put in prison," one of the women in the room barked.

They were crowded into a room. It was tight and was beginning to smell simply because of the overloaded number of bodies and the sweat and hormones and everything else that the stress of the day had stirred up on all of them. There were twenty eight of them, thirty if Carol wasn't counting correctly. They were the women who were reported to have been captured with children. This didn't include, or at least Carol assumed it didn't, those who had birthed children within the prison walls—children born of different types of illegal affairs. And, if she was honest, Carol was absolutely certain not all mothers were here and represented. They were only talking to them because the possible demands that they procreate, as part of Wave Thirty Three, would naturally bring them all to question the children that had been ripped from their arms already.

"Not prison," Adele said. "They were—juvenile centers. Not prison like Region Thirty Three."

"He was a baby!" Andrea snarled at the woman. Carol reached a hand over and rested it on Andrea's shoulder. Her daughter hadn't been a baby. Not like Andrea's. And Carol had come to the uneasy conclusion many years ago that she wouldn't ever see her again. She held out, somewhere in some small and dark corner of her mind, some hope that she might, but she never even really believed herself.

Her daughter was gone. She'd been the only one left to protect her. And she'd protected her from a great number of things—her father, the dead that tried to eat them whenever they stopped to rest, other groups that they stumbled upon—but she'd failed to protect her from the government. She'd failed to protect her from the one force that she shouldn't have had to protect her from at all.

That would forever be on Carol's shoulders, but she'd come to accept it. And, from the looks of it, many of the other mothers in the room had come to accept it too. They were the calm ones. They sat, arms folded, and simply waited for something. Some, however, were having a little more trouble fully taking in the information.

"He was a baby," Andrea repeated, this time sounding more pathetic than truly dangerous. "How could you put a baby in prison? He couldn't even...he wasn't even a year old. He wasn't even...six months old."

Michonne had come with Andrea into the meeting, declaring that the child was just as much hers as it was Andrea's, even if she hadn't been the one to give birth to him. Carol knew enough about the situation surrounding the birth of the boy—and the capture of the women—that she was glad that Samirah made the decision to allow Michonne sit in on the meeting.

After all, if it hadn't been for the baby, they may have never captured either of the women. At least, they wouldn't have ever captured them alive.

"The infants were taken to special facilities," Adele responded. "They were cared for and everything was done for them that could possibly be done to ensure that they were well-taken care of."

"When are we going to find out about them?" Carol asked.

Adele looked at her with some confusion on her features. She opened her mouth and stumbled and stuttered words fell out.

"When are we going to find out something real about them?" Carol clarified. "What you're telling me is that my daughter went to—to—to a juvenile detention center? And hers went to baby prison? But when do find out what happened to them? When do we find out where they are?"

"When do we get them back?" Another woman asked, her own voice acting as a "hear, hear" to Carol's.

Samirah stood up from where she was leaning against a table in the room and walked to stand beside Adele. She dropped a hand on the woman's shoulder as though she were silently telling her that she would take over from there and then she cleared her throat and very obviously took a moment to collect her thoughts.

"As soon as I knew that we were going to do Wave Thirty Three, I knew that this was something that was going to have to be addressed," Samirah said. "The family building unit of the project is one that I knew was going to be—touchy—for at least a few of you. And I'm going to be honest with you. Because—people aren't very honest with you. And they haven't been. And I'm sorry for that. You deserve for people...you deserve for me to be honest with you."

Carol moved her hand from where she was now absentmindedly resting it on Andrea's lap. She sat back in her chair, her mind already spinning as it interpreted everything that Samirah wasn't saying and worked to prepare her for everything she was sure was about to be said. Beside her, Andrea shifted in her seat and Michonne put an arm around her shoulder—an arm that she wasn't asked to withdraw at the moment.

"All of you were selected for the project for a number of reasons. I'm not going to lie, though, and tell you that one of those reasons wasn't because you're still able to produce children. It was. Eventually? With the success of Wave Thirty Three? We'll be moving for freedom of all prisoners. We'll be moving for the rehabilitation and release of all wilds. Wave Thirty Three is groundbreaking, though. It's got to be successful. It's got to be—even better than successful. It's got to be perfect. Exactly what the government wants it to be. There's a lot riding on that success. So, yes, every woman in the project was chosen—among other criteria—because she could potentially produce children," Samirah continued.

"We already know that," Michonne said.

Samirah stopped talking and looked directly at her.

"We're not wild," Michonne said. "And we're not stupid. In fact? You'll find that most of us are actually very intelligent. I know you can count, among our numbers, not just a few lawyers. I've met doctors who were in here. A judge. Police officers—from before the turn. Professors, elementary school teachers, scientists, journalists, soldiers—we're all here and accounted for. We're all bringing everything we knew before with us and everything we learned out there with us. We're not stupid. And all of us, from the family planning speech today onward, have known that you're expecting us to pop out children for you. Your perfect little citizens. And—hopefully—not to contaminate them with our wild blood in the government's eyes. You don't have to explain that to us. We already knew."

Carol held her breath. One too many outbursts and she was expecting Michonne to be escorted out of the room. She was expecting to hear that she wouldn't be going with them. Instead, she'd be waiting it out in Region Thirty Three to find out if they were successful—and if they were successful quickly enough—or if she'd simply be executed.

Samirah didn't scold Michonne, though. She didn't even gesture for an officer to take her under control. She folded her hands, letting them fall in front of her body, and she nodded her head.

"Fine," she said. "Our hope is that you will all procreate. If possible. Your success in the project, however, doesn't rely upon it. Not if you're behaving as you should within the community. But...I knew that this was going to be an issue for those of you who already had children. I checked your files. They aren't very well kept. At least they weren't. There was limited information about your children. They were given tag numbers, just as you were. That meant, of course, that I had to cross reference things and find those tag numbers. I had to contact people. A lot of people. I had to track them down as best I could."

"And?" Someone asked, though their voice was representative of what every woman in the space was thinking.

"And I found out some information. I made some phone calls. I didn't find out just about your children, but about almost all of the wild children that were captured. They were sent to specialized facilities. They were given the best care that they could have been given. Some of them were relocated to non-wild families. Those children's files were removed from the databases and moved somewhere else—that information isn't available to me. If your children were moved, you can rest assured that they're being cared for and are in very loving homes. A large number of the children, however, simply didn't survive. There was an outbreak of—fever. Of a flu. It was particularly hard on children and the elderly. It swept through the children's centers. The reason that most of the files were hard to find? The reason that they weren't well-kept and weren't organized? Was because most of the children were lost."

Carol couldn't have explained with words the feeling that tore through her. Her stomach knotted and rolled. Her chest tightened. Everything inside of her suddenly felt like it was being shredded. It felt like there was something trying to eat its way out of her. It was the violent death of whatever shred of hope she'd been clinging too.

And she'd been prepared for it. She'd been preparing herself for it for years. She couldn't imagine the ripping through that the women who clung to their hope like a security blanket might have felt.

"At any rate," Samirah continued, dragging through her speech like she hadn't just lost half her audience, "the children that were captured wouldn't and couldn't be returned to you. They've gone on to different lives. Taking them out of their homes now, especially those that were infants at the time of capture, would be uprooting everything for them. They remember nothing of their lives before and probably haven't been told about them. They were infants at capture, but they aren't infants any longer."

At Carol's side, Andrea was silenced. At least, she was almost silenced. There was some quiet noise escaping her—the breath sucking sound of anguish—but she wasn't speaking.

"So you're saying that we won't see them again," Michonne said, her voice less challenging than before.

Samirah frowned and shook her head.

"I'm afraid not," Samirah said.

"There's no way that we could..." Michonne asked, though her question never got finished.

Samirah shook her head. She stepped closer to where Michonne was sitting. She shook her head again and she bent her knees, stooping somewhat in front of Andrea and Michonne.

"I didn't get a lot of detailed information," she said. "I just didn't. There wasn't a lot to give. But—I do know that your son was at one of the facilities that got shut down. The flu swept through there. The whole place was shut down because it—because there weren't any children left to keep it open for. I'm sorry..."

At least, Carol thought, nobody flagged them for wrapping around each other. At least nobody told them that they couldn't touch each other. Nobody told anyone in the room, at that moment, who needed to seek comfort and solace in the arms of someone else who was realizing that they were no longer mothers to their long-unseen children, that they couldn't enjoy the slightest bit of comfort that human contact could provide.

I'm sorry.

They were the emptiest words in human language. They were the emptiest words to wilds—semi-humans—whatever they were, as well.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that we hunted you down like dogs. I'm sorry that we were more dangerous to you than things that could have only come out of your nightmares. I'm sorry that we injured you, drugged you, beat you. I'm sorry that we locked you away and said it was for your own good. I'm sorry that we killed your children—children you would've given your life for and almost did so many times.

I'm sorry.

Carol hadn't seen her daughter's face in so long now. It was still there, though, in her mind. Not as clear, perhaps, as it once had been, but it was there. Carol brought it to mind, more than she should, when she was going through something that was particularly trying to her. Her daughter's face, just behind her eyes, made taming tolerable—even if her daughter was something they used against her in the dark torture rooms.

When they said the horrible things that they said, though, Carol was somewhat able to push it out of her mind. She was somewhat able to take their words as just what they were—torturous words spoken to hurt her, to break her—because there was that small shred of hope somewhere inside her.

She was OK. It was a lie. It was all a lie. It was a nightmare. And it was a lie. And she was OK. Because Carol could see her there. Just behind her eyes.

Except, now, Carol knew that it was true. Everything they said was true.

She stood up and asked Samirah, who was once again standing and had returned to linger awkwardly in the center of the room, if they could be dismissed. Samirah hesitated a moment and, as softly as she could, Carol told her it was really better for her to dismiss them and let them all move on to prepare for the move to their new location. She'd said all she had to say, really, and nobody was listening anymore.

They would go. With heavy hearts, perhaps, but they would go.

But first—animals or people or whatever they were that was caught in between—they needed a chance to go and to mourn. Because even the wildest of animals mourned the loss of their young.