Elites of Eden (Children of Eden #2)(9)
What Mom should have done—what the laws of Eden compelled her to do—was immediately report her condition and leave it to a Center panel to decide the babies’ fate. Most of the time, one would be terminated right away. The panel might make the decision about which would live—if one was obviously healthier than the other, or if a girl or boy was necessary to balance that generation’s gender ratio. But other times it would be random. One fetus would live, the other would die before it was born.
“We couldn’t. We just couldn’t,” she said, tears in her eyes at the memory. “You were only three inches long, we’d never met you, but we loved you both with all our hearts and we decided then and there to do whatever it took to keep you both.”
She says “we” but I know, from the way my dad treats me, from the coldness in his eyes when he looks into mine, that there was no “we.” Mom made the decision, and Dad followed for her sake. Because his eyes are never cold when he looks at her.
“We hid it, and then when I went into labor we hid that, too. We told everyone it came on quickly, that there was no time to go to the hospital, but actually it lasted more than a day. I gave birth in this house, in secret. When you were born first, Rowan, and I looked into your perfect eyes, I knew it was all worth it. All the secrecy and difficulty that had already happened, and was yet to come . . . all worth it. We would show you to the world, and keep our second born a secret. But we’d treasure you both.”
I was a first child! I stare beyond my mother, looking at the past, at a different history in which I am the real child, I am the one out in the world, with school and friends and a room of my own with my own things in it. I am the one who laughs and chats with Lark and the others, while Ash . . .
No. I might wish it had been me, but I can’t wish it were me instead of him.
“Then Ash was born, small and almost blue. He didn’t breathe for the first minute of his life, and when he did, it was obvious that he was in trouble. Your father diagnosed it immediately as a serious chronic lung condition.”
Mom nods as she sees I understand.
“We had to make him the firstborn, Rowan. We didn’t have a choice. Without being in intensive care for the first few months of his life, he wouldn’t have survived. There was no way he could have lived if we’d hidden him away.”
Unspoken in that moment of silence is the other bitter truth: no matter what our birth order, if it had been up to the Center officials to decide our fate, they would have chosen me to live and terminated Ash even after birth. I was strong and healthy, an asset to Eden. He was not. It’s probably only because both of his parents are high officials that he was allowed to live at all. For a poor person on the fringe of Eden, a far-flung outer circle, a sickly first child would be eliminated, the parents encouraged to try again.
My brain is in a tumult. Angry, terrible thoughts seem to attack my head, bitter thoughts that are unworthy of me. Unworthy of the love and protection I’ve known all of my life. But I can’t keep them at bay. It should have been me.
I hardly listen while Mom tells me what will be happening next. Soon, I’ll go to a secret surgical center and have my lenses implanted permanently. Then I’ll be smuggled to my new family. I don’t understand exactly how this is possible. If my own family can’t fabricate a story to keep me, how can a stranger?
Ash comes downstairs, his hand raised to the wall but not quite touching it as he walks, as if he doesn’t trust his legs to hold him up. He gives me a weak smile.
I glance at Mom, and she shakes her head. Ash doesn’t know.
I want to shout the truth to him. Go hide in the hole, second child! Let me be free, like I should have been all along.
I hate myself for thinking this.
I can’t be in this house anymore.
MOM MUST JUST think I need a minute alone to process everything she’s told me, so she doesn’t follow me when I run out to the courtyard. Neither does Ash. I think she must be holding him back. Alone? How can they think I want to be alone when my whole life has been essentially alone? My world is three people, and they are gone all day having lives of their own. I exist in a state of loneliness. Alone? Solitude is the very last thing I need.
What I need, I decide suddenly, is everything that has been denied to me. I feel angry, resentful, reckless. For nearly seventeen years I’ve left my fate up to my parents and whatever machinations and bribes they’ve been arranging to get rid of me. Now it’s time I take matters into my own hands. I may not be a real, official person according to the only humans left alive on Earth, but maybe I can be in charge of my own destiny. For one night at least.
Dimly, miserably, I’m aware that I’ll have to conform to whatever my parents arranged for me. I’ll have new lens implants that will mark me as a different person, and somehow a new family to fit that identity. But right now I want to take a taste of everything I’ve been missing all these years. Everything I was entitled to and didn’t realize it until a few minutes ago.
I climb once again to the top of the high courtyard wall. Eden glitters around me, a mix of the greenish-blue fairy lights of bioluminescence from the modified microorganisms that permeates the city at night, providing a base light, and the electric glow that lights up wherever a human moves. I can see a living diorama in flashes of light all around me, the people showing up as deeply contrasting shadows. There, just down the block, a neighbor I’ve never met, and never will, opens his front door and steps into the night. For a fraction of a second the city seems to examine him. Then, as if the very street itself must have decided to accept him, it lights up beneath his feet. He walks on in the direction of the entertainment district, and the light leads him on, following his footsteps just long enough to let him know he’s not forsaken. I watch his personal light grow smaller in the distance, a will-o’-the-wisp from Mom’s old stories that seems to call me.