AN: Here we go, another chapter. I'll have more out soon for anyone interested. Real life has taken over for a bit, but I'm working on getting more writing done when I can.

I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!

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"We'll wait for that to come back," Alice said. "Won't take long. And then we'll decide from there."

"Decide?" Carol asked.

"What comes next," Alice said. "According to the plan I'm following with you, I'll keep you on the hormones until week ten. Just changing them a little. I'll dose you before you go and—probably again in a week."

Carol swallowed and nodded her understanding.

"And if I'm not?" She asked. Doubt, worry, and every other negative emotion that she could imagine was starting to take over her mind for the day.

Alice shrugged her shoulders.

"I'm nowhere near out of ideas," Alice said. "Don't worry about that. But...how do you feel about it? Are you feeling optimistic at least? Because I'm choosing to feel positive about things."

It was Carol's turn to shrug. She didn't want to admit that positive wasn't a word that she'd use to describe herself in any way at the moment. She'd hoped the mood would pass, but it hadn't yet. It only seemed to be intensifying as time ticked on.

"I can't even begin to put together how I feel right now," she admitted. She knew the answer wasn't a clear one, but nothing about her feelings felt clear right now.

"But you want this?" Alice asked, ignoring what she'd started to do on her computer for the moment.

"The baby?" Carol asked. Alice nodded. "I want to have a baby with Daryl. And he wants to have a baby with me. It's everything else I'm not sure about."

"Don't worry about everything else right now," Alice said. "You two want this baby and that means that, one way or another? We're going to make it happen."

"And then what happens?" Carol asked. Alice cocked an eyebrow at her. "When the baby happens? Then what happens? I have a daughter that could be out there, lost somewhere without—without even an identity. And everyone is so inept that the government we're supposed to trust, the government that we have to trust, can't even find her? So what happens to me? What happens to the baby?"

Alice closed her eyes and held them shut long enough that Carol wasn't sure what she should do—if she should do anything at all. Finally, the woman opened her eyes and shook her head gently at Carol.

"The government might know where your daughter is," Alice said. "I can't promise you that they don't."

"Then why won't they just tell me the truth?" Carol asked. "I just want to know if she's alive or she's dead. Really know. Once and for all."

Alice nodded her head and rolled her chair back to sit in front of her computer. She waved at Carol.

"Come here," she said, stressing the words when Carol didn't move or respond to the waving motion. "I want to show you something." Carol slid off the exam table and walked over to where Alice was sitting, looking at her computer. On the screen there was some sort of form, but Carol was unfamiliar with the program—she hadn't really examined anything on a computer since the world had crashed and taken technology, as she knew it, with it. Alice pointed to the screen. "This is your profile," she said. "I brought it up when I scanned your chip. See? It's open. That's so I can enter in what happened here today. I keep a record of everything. This is an active form. But when I click here? You can see that it goes to this profile. This is what any of us see when we bring up your information. Everything's here. Everything we have. You were tagged 8294F by White Hills Captivity Force. That doesn't even exist anymore. You were brought in with all these prisoners. See? That's the list of everyone captured that day. Some of them are italicized. That means they've been recorded as deceased and their profiles are inactive."

"They're dead?" Carol asked. Alice hummed.

"You came in with WB639," Alice said. "Your daughter. Wild Born, capture 639 of living Wild Born Children. Her profile, you see, is open. She's not marked as deceased."

"So she's not dead?" Carol asked.

Alice shrugged and clicked on the profile that she claimed belonged to Sophia. Unlike Carol's profile, which populated with what appeared to be pages and pages of information, Sophia's profile was blank.

"I don't know," Alice said, gesturing at the screen. "Your profile is up to date and complete. Everything that's happened to you—good or bad—has been recorded there. I can pull up all your reports. Your daughter? Her profile is clean. I don't know if nothing was ever recorded, if it was wiped clean, or if there's something that blocks me out of her profile for whatever reason. If you look here..." Alice pulled up another profile. "This is Andrea. LC456F."

"You keep her profile open all the time?" Carol asked. Alice hummed again.

"I have to be ready to deal with anything that comes through about her. Milton can call me any time, night or day, and I have to be ready to give him the information that he needs. The point is that her son? His profile is exactly the same as Sophia's. All the children's profiles are exactly the same as Sophia's."

"So you think it's a record keeping mistake?" Carol asked.

"I think that I don't have access to their profiles. That's what I think," Alice said. "I think that the government thinks it's none of my business. I'm not employed to deal with the children. I'm employed to deal with prisoners. Samirah doesn't have access either. Or, at least, she has the same view as I do."

"Why?" Carol asked. "Why wouldn't she have access?"

"Her concern is rehabilitation of prisoners," Alice said. "Not Wild Born children or Wild Capture children. We're not hiding information from you. We don't have it. I mean—don't get me wrong. Enough people around here lie about everything that I wouldn't believe it's raining if you don't look out the window, but that's outside of this project. We're—actually trying to do things differently. We're trying to treat you all like people. Like humans. Because we believe that—if you're treated like people? Then this strange thing will happen where you'll act like people. You'll be people."

"Because Kreegan said we were animals," Carol pointed out. Alice's expression told her that she was surprised to know that Carol knew about Kreegan, but she didn't say anything. She neither confirmed nor denied Carol's assertion. "What happens to the children that we have here?"

"You keep them," Alice said. She sighed. "Short of drawing pictures in the dirt? I don't know how the hell else to explain this to you. Act like a human? The project is a success? Keep the kid. Don't? And it all goes belly up. The project shuts down, the Wilds are exterminated in prisons and hunted in the wild just like the remaining Dead. The kids go to government funded orphanages." She minimized the profiles she'd been playing in and pulled Carol's back up to the front. It was waiting for further information to be input. Then Alice stood up and ran her fingers through her hair. "Look, Carol, we'll keep looking for information for you. For all of you. But for the time being? You've got to focus on the now. The what the hell is right in front of us all because none of the rest is going to matter if this project falls through."

"The baby," Carol said. "I've got to focus on—the baby."

Alice nodded.

"And your life," Alice said. "What do you want out of it? Out of this? Start working toward that now. You and Daryl want a baby together. That's a great start. So how do you want to have a baby together? What do you want that experience to be like for you? You have some choice in the matter, all you have to do is let me know what you want out of the whole experience."

Carol returned to the table and hopped up to use it as a seat. She laughed to herself to consider that any of them had anything that even remotely resembled free will. She shook her head at Alice.

"It doesn't feel like I can have anything I want," Carol said. "It feels like a foreign concept. I keep expecting someone to show up at the door and say that Daryl and I can't be together. That—if I'm not pregnant? He has to be with someone else. I've got to go somewhere."

"Not gonna happen," Alice said. "Everyone here is partnered up anyway. You can stop worrying about it. Think about the good things. Like—is he going to be really excited about the baby?"

Carol shrugged.

"As excited as I think any of us even know how to feel these days," Carol confirmed. "It's hard to feel excited when everything feels so out of your control."

"Bit by bit, you're getting the control back," Alice said. "So focus on that."

"You know I was married before all of this," Carol said. Alice nodded. "He wasn't really thrilled about Sophia. If this was that world? I'd be excited just to think what it might be like to have a baby with someone who—who wanted it."

"Why can't you have that in this world?" Alice asked. "What's stopping you from having that experience? Because that's what's going to happen. You decide, though, how you live it. No one will stop you from—celebrating it. From being happy or excited or whatever you want to be. You're the only one that'll take that away from you. And years from now? When this is just a memory? I bet you'll look back and wish you hadn't taken that happiness away from yourself because you were worried about things that you were making up and—really? Things that you couldn't change anyway."

Carol laughed to herself.

"It doesn't feel like there's any surprise here. I told him I was coming here for the test. He asks me every day if I'm pregnant. It's just a yes or a no and that's that."

"And you think that was ever any different?" Alice asked. "No matter what, there's usually a little loss to the surprise factor once you're trying to have a baby. The excitement isn't in the element of surprise, it's in—finally getting the yes."

"I would be having a baby with the man that I don't even have a word for beyond saying he's my mate because that's all that anyone calls him," Carol said. "Like I'm a—dog or something and I've chosen someone to have a litter of puppies with."

Alice laughed at that.

"Yeah, well—and the woman I've lived with since I was eighteen is the love of my life. But I've called her my partner most of my life like we play tennis together or like—we're opening up a business. You can call it what you want in the privacy of your own home and, if you're lucky, eventually everyone else will come around to accepting the title you've given each other too. For the moment? You're mates." There was a knock at the door and Alice shuffled her feet across the floor to go and open it as though her feet suddenly weighed a great deal more than they usually did. "It's the hormones, Carol," Alice said. "They bring you swinging from one direction to another like a pendulum. Right now? You've swung toward the negative. Try to swing it back, though, it's better for everyone." She opened the door and reached out, collecting the paper offered to her. She thanked whoever was outside and came in without looking at the documents in her hand. She walked over and leaned against the edge of her desk, the paper wadded in her hand.

"Aren't you going to look at it?" Carol asked.

"What do you want it to say?" Alice asked.

"I just want to know what it does say," Carol said.

"And we'll know that soon enough, but what do you want it to say?" Alice asked.

"You know what I want it to say," Carol responded.

"And if it says that?" Alice asked. "How are you going to tell Daryl?"

"You know I don't know that," Carol said. "I guess—I'll just tell him."

"Don't sound so damn glum about it," Alice said. "Make it special. Or—if you can't make it special? At least make it a happy moment. With that look on your face? I'd believe you think there's a firing squad waiting just outside the door."

"My stomach makes me feel like there is," Carol admitted. "My nerves make me feel like there is." She sucked in a breath. She knew that Alice was right. She swung back and forth—one direction or another—these days and she was in a slump. It had started when they'd walked her to work and she'd started thinking about the test. If she was honest with herself? It had started because she'd begun to convince herself that it would be negative—and that every test she ever took would be negative. She was mentally digging herself a hole and she honestly had no one to blame for it except herself. Daryl hadn't done anything. Alice hadn't done anything. The government hadn't even done anything. Carol was the only one that was actively digging her negative little hole down to the center of herself. And she was likely the only person that was going to be capable of getting herself out of it. "If it's positive? I'll put on a happy face. I'll come up with some way to at least be positive about it when I tell Daryl."

"But it's what you want," Alice said. "You should want to be positive about it."

"And I will be, eventually," Carol confirmed. "But right now—I'm just not sure if I can feel good about anything."

Alice nodded and glanced around the room like she didn't know the office like the back of her hand. Then she looked back at Carol.

"And if it's negative," Alice said, "then you change your whole fucking outlook, you hear me? Because—we've got other options and your positivity is going to go a long way with things."

"You really believe that?" Carol asked. "As a doctor—you believe that the outlook is that important?"

"I believe that attitude gets us just about everywhere we're going," Alice said. She straightened out the paper in her hand and sighed deeply enough that Carol accepted the answer without having to hear it. Alice looked at her and shook her head and Carol's stomach turned a little in response. "I guess—I'm just not going to get the chance to try my other ideas right now. Not with you, at least."

Carol furrowed her brow at Alice and the woman's frown slowly crept into a half smile. She lowered her eyebrows at Carol.

"That feeling? The relief? Hold onto that. It'll remind you that things could be worse while you're contemplating the tragedy of not having your picture perfect announcement," Alice said.

"You mean I'm pregnant?" Carol asked. Alice nodded her head. "Really pregnant?"

"I mean your HCG levels are every bit as high as I've seen them," Alice said. "And then some. You're as pregnant as you can be. And—you're taking the rest of the day off. I'm not going to have you moping around here and disturbing my other patients and you've got some planning to do."