Daughters of October

From: Issue 3

The instant she heard the door swing open, Vira grabbed the table’s edge and pulled herself up. The table shook, slopping cold coffee onto her best embroidered tablecloth, but she only had eyes for her daughter. Not that she could read anything other than fear etched into Kateryna’s middle-aged face as she emerged from the bathroom.

“What does it say?” Vira said, clutching the edge so hard her fingers went numb.

Kateryna glanced at the window, but Vira had already drawn the thin curtains across her view of Rurikst’s tiny town square. Biting her lip, the younger woman passed the small, familiar white stick to her mother. Vira forced herself to take it calmly and turned the plastic stick over, her thumb settling on the familiar words: Bayer-Hisamitsu™ Ultra-Fast SUPERHuman® Pregnancy Urine Test.

A blue vertical line. The test worked. A red horizontal line. Kateryna was pregnant. And next to the words Superpower Antigen Detection, a smeary gray-green blotch.

“Mama,” Kateryna said, her voice strangely girlish for a no-nonsense math teacher, “what does that mean?”

Vira’s fist closed over it until the plastic creaked, as if she could crack the stick open. As if she could pry out the answer that would tell her if she was going to welcome an ordinary grandchild into her beloved apartment. Or if she was going to sell that apartment and use the money to bribe her daughter’s way into Switzerland, to plead for asylum from a government that claimed its superheroes while still in the womb.

“It is ambiguous,” Vira said. She set the stick down; she would burn it later. Such tests were illegal, outside of the clinic and away from the ministry’s oversight. “These Ultra-Fast BHs, I never used. Fast, but so often you just found out quickly that you didn’t know. Better to get an ultrasound scan, or do the old rabbit-ovary test, or just…”

Her gaze slid to the worn leather bag and the small bottles of antiseptics and analgesics she had kept after retiring.

“No, Mama,” Kateryna said before Vira could take her cane and start towards the bag. “I don’t want to terminate. I’m 41. This is my only chance to have a healthy child, especially now that Georgy…” She trailed off, pressing her fingers against her face until the nails turned white. The gold ring still encircled her finger; it had only been three weeks since the accident. Three weeks since a stray ultraviolet blast had escaped a superhero’s shielding and irradiated a meter-wide strip through Rurikst. And Georgy.

“Healthy isn’t guaranteed,” Vira said, as gently as she could. “Down’s syndrome, superpowers—the chances increase with age. And the infusions that would protect you by dampening superpowers, those increase miscarriage risk.”

Kateryna shook her head. “You had me when you were 38.”

“I—” Vira bit her lip to close off the sort of words that might alert the neighbors. She took a deep breath of air that smelled of stale coffee.

“Yes, yes I did,” Vira said, glancing at the cross above her favorite picture of Kateryna and Georgy. “And every day I thank God. But now, we must find out, before your students notice you’re pregnant and their parents ask questions.” Before the ministry notices and tests you, before they condemn you to Siberia’s gulags for test-evasion or to Leningrad’s hospitals where the women are tied down as the infusions drip, drip, drip into their veins, Vira thought but did not say.

“Don’t you have something”—Kateryna’s hands described fantastical shapes in the air, a civilian’s idea of gynecological equipment—“that could tell us?”

Vira tapped her nails against the table, the cloth dulling the sound to thumps as soft as a twelve-week fetal heartbeat. She shook her head.

“Could you sneak me back into the clinic?” Kateryna said.

“Too busy all day.”

“Night?”

“Pyotr took my key,” Vira said, gritting her teeth. “He even tried to take back my bag that last day. I had to pay Lyubо́v to get it back when Pyotr wasn’t looking.”

To pay Lyubо́v. When Pyotr wasn’t looking.

Vira’s eyes met Kateryna’s across the table.

“Mama…I have some, but not much.”

“Save it,” Vira said, thinking of Switzerland, bribes, and what superpowers did to diapers.

She looked down at her embroidered tablecloth. A gift from her mother, the only family to support Vira when she’d married a destitute scientist fleeing the Reich. Once she’d scrubbed out the coffee, the beautiful lacework could fetch something on Rurikst’s small black market. As would everything else she treasured in her home: the sturdy wood chairs, the bookshelf heavy with novels and textbooks, the kitchen table cut and shaped by her long-dead Helmut in that first year of their marriage.

Her mind shied from the idea of prostituting such treasures. She’d go without meat and electricity at night, instead. And with this month’s pension, she might have the money to bribe Lyubо́v. She might get her daughter into the clinic. She might find out if her old age was to be spent peacefully in the company of a normal grandchild, a living Kateryna, and her beloved old things.

Or across the border, in a strange land with strange people and an even stranger grandchild.

Or in Siberia, awaiting execution.

— # —

Road dust and approaching night darkened the utilitarian green paint flaking off Rurikst’s only clinic. The door opened, spilling fluorescent light and the day’s last patients, who shuffled past where Vira stood in the shadows. As their footsteps faded, she gripped her cane in one hand and her cash-heavy purse in the other and stepped into the yellow light slitting through the clinic’s narrow windows.

Her cane had just thumped onto the crumbling cement ramp—a legacy from when so many had been paralyzed by American nerve gases—when the door opened again. A man in a doctor’s coat stepped through.

Pyotr. Vira jerked and the cane slipped from her hand, clattering noisily as it rolled down the cement ramp.

“We’re closed for the weekend, ma’am,” Pyotr said, his formal voice tinted with exhaustion and a Chechen accent. In the faint light, the head doctor’s silhouette tugged out a pack of cigarettes. “Please come back on Monday.”

Vira shifted her weight, unwilling to let her former colleague watch her fumble for her cane on the dark ground. “I know, Pyotr,” she said, glancing through the clinic window. Most of the lights were off. “I came t-to speak with Lyubо́v.”

“Vira.” His stance shifted. A match flared in a burst of sulfur. The acrid smoke of a dirt-cheap, unfiltered Belomorkanal puffed past Vira. “After you retired, Lyubо́v…left.”

Left. Vira clutched her purse, the carefully-folded bills a hard bulk through its worn leather. So many possibilities jumbled together in one word.

She should turn and leave herself. But she had walked this far, and they could not afford to wait much longer. Vira drew herself up as straight as she could. Pyotr was young and idealistic and patriotic, as Vira had once been. But his wife had just had their seventh child, and even Belomorkanals cost something. Ideals had a way of bending around the realities of money.

“My daughter,” Vira said, “she entered her menopause last year. But there was bleeding this week, heavy bleeding. May I,” Vira paused, wobbling on her splayed feet, “may I bring her here, and do a transabdominal ultrasound on her?” A transvaginal would be best—she could better visualize the uterus, to see if there was the excessive vascularization of a superpowered pregnancy—but the clinic was too poor for that.

The cigarette flared red, the light briefly outlining the stubble on Pyotr’s chin and upper lip. “It may just be a cyst—”

“It may be a tumor,” Vira interrupted.

He sighed. “We should have an opening in four weeks.”

“Four weeks!” Everyone would notice by then; God knew Vira had gained ten kilos by her fourth month.

“Take her to Smolensk, if you can’t wait that long.”

“She cannot take off a week, her students need her morning to night.”

“A substitute could cover her.”

“A substitute comes from her pay, and with her husband dead…” Vira squinted into the dark, but his head was only inclined with dispassionate politeness.

She took a breath of smoke and sweat and cheap antiseptic and swung her purse around. Hopefully, that seventh baby had bent his ideals enough.

“Please, Pyotr,” she said, pulling out the cash with a papery rustle that every Soviet knew, in these days when only the air inside clinics was free. “I understand that this is an imposition.”

They stood there, locked in a moment that stretched as long and tense as a first-time childbirth.

Seven children, Vira thought. Seven children, and a nicotine habit. Please, God.

Pyotr dropped the cigarette and ground his heel into it, cutting off even that faint light.

Vira jumped and nearly fell when the money was tugged from her grasp. Her other hand scrabbled against the clinic’s siding, gripping the painted cement.

Another familiar sound, of cash being fanned and counted. The light was far too dim now for Vira to make out denominations, but Pyotr’s eyes were forty years younger.

The rustling stopped. “Just enough.”

Vira sagged against the cement wall. Thank God. “I’ll go fetch her now.”

“Just enough,” he repeated, “to pay for a transabdominal ultrasound at the earliest opportunity, which is in four weeks.”

Vira’s body froze but her mouth kept moving. “That is too long.”

Pyotr said nothing. A chill breeze flowed over her sweaty skin.

“Pyotr, please,” Vira said, hating the pleading in her voice, hating how her tone must confirm everything he suspected. “The ultrasound can diagnose—”

“—cysts and tumors,” he interrupted, his face cloaked in darkness. “But also unregistered pregnancies, unreported miscarriages, and incomplete abortions in still-fertile, middle-aged women. As clinic head, it is my medical and patriotic duty to report such things.”

My medical and patriotic duty. Vira swallowed. She had once believed such things herself. She might believe them still, in another life where she had never smelled the blood and guts and shit after a superpowered fetus punched through the uterus of a woman who’d evaded the government—and its infusions. In another world where she had never seen the ministry’s men pull a woman from her home at midnight, grabbing her legs and arms and throat but never her full, pregnant belly.

Her mind painted Kateryna’s features over that woman’s shadowed, gagged face.

“I did not…was not…I—I meant…” Vira said, her voice sounding weak and tremulous.

Pyotr’s reply cut like a scalpel through abdominal fat. “Go home, you old liar.” He turned back into the clinic. The door clicked as it locked between Vira and him—and Vira’s money.

She stared after him. Through the crack between door and jamb came the familiar sound of the clinic’s main phone being taken off the hook, and someone dialing. Pyotr’s voice, indistinct but serious-sounding, reached her ears.

The painted cement scraped against her palm as she half-slid, half-fell to the ground, barking her knees against the ramp.

He knows.

— # —

The acidic tingle of vinegar in her nose jarred Vira awake. Mid-morning light slanted through a gap in her kitchen curtains. Her shoulders and back protested as she straightened from where she had slumped onto her table, keeping a vain watch as if she could intercept any intruders summoned by Pyotr’s phone call.

Her apartment stank of vinegar—and vomit.

Ignoring the stiffness in her joints, Vira grabbed her cane. She followed the sounds of retching to the bathroom, to her daughter.

Kateryna staggered up from the toilet and tried to shut the door, but Vira blocked it with her cane. Without saying a word, Kateryna collapsed before the toilet and retched again.

The stench grew stronger, layered with the chlorophyll scents of a pungent herb that Vira had occasionally smelled on her patients. The brew was supposed to turn a woman’s urine bright red if she was pregnant with a superhero. In Vira’s experience, the bright red was caused only by bleeding kidneys.

Vira stepped into the bathroom on shaky legs. A small brown bottle crunched beneath her shoes, the label blurred except for the handwritten words Tranquility Restoration. Her hands caught Kateryna’s shoulders as the younger woman moved to rise again.

“No,” Vira said, her voice raw. “Bring it all up.”

When Kateryna’s stomach was empty, Vira bundled her daughter in shawls and sat her at the table with a large glass of watered-down soda. She’d planned to delay her lecture, but her daughter took one sip and looked up with reddened, defiant eyes.

“That,” Vira said, “was foolish.”

Kateryna’s lips thinned. “As foolish as trying to bribe Pyotr?”

Vira flinched, but leaned forward. “Foolish was sneaking out this morning while I slept to buy that”—her hands waved towards the bathroom—“black market nonsense. You got it from the same bastard selling Ultra-Fast BHs, yes?”

“Yes,” Kateryna said, her swollen eyes narrowing. “She told me her great-grandmother used it to diagnose her own superhero pregnancy.”

“Her great-grandmother!” Vira lifted her hands towards the ceiling, as if beseeching some god of rationality. “You’re a teacher, Kateryna. Do the maths: the first superheroes only emerged fifty years ago, after nuclear fallout increased the basal mutation rate. Her great-grandmother used that nonsense to induce abortions!”

“At least I am doing something.” Kateryna slammed down her glass, slopping red soda onto Vira’s tablecloth. “I don’t see you accomplishing anything, Mama, other than giving away our money and tipping us off to the authorities! God grant us that he thought you were senile!”

“God grant me that I become senile.” Vira moved the glass and yanked the tablecloth off the table, limping as she carried it to the sink. The water was ice-cold as she ran it over the red spot. “Then I wouldn’t be worried to death about you dying from pregnancy or from poison!”

Kateryna opened her mouth, but instead of replying gulped more watered soda and looked away.

The silence filled with the sounds of Vira scrubbing the tablecloth. She turned off the faucet and, with a grunt, began wringing out the sodden cloth.

Kateryna got up. Elbowing her mother aside, she took the heavy cloth. Water dripped into the sink as she squeezed it.

“Does it really cause abortions?” Kateryna said, her eyes on the red water running down the drain. Her knuckles turned bone white as she squeezed.

“On occasion.” Vira moved to the table and found her purse. “More often, it causes kidney damage. Cytotoxicity. This turns the urine red with blood.”

Kateryna draped the cloth across the table. “I knew she was lying about her great-grandmother…” Her fingers smoothed the damp creases. “I’d just hoped it was a sales pitch.”

Vira nodded, not quite meeting Kateryna’s eyes as she pulled a half-empty tube of Finalgon from her purse. The ointment’s strong, medicinal scent filled the kitchen as she worked it into her sleep-stiff shoulders and aching fingers. “And I hope…he does believe I am just an old, senile woman.”

Kateryna nodded and continued smoothing the cloth. The silence between them relaxed some, but not all the way; Vira could still feel the tension beneath the surface, as tender as a freshly-strained muscle, aching as it was forced to keep going, to keep trying, when all it needed was rest.

Vira returned the tube to her purse and took her cane. Its worn bone handle settled into her left palm. Her thumb worried the small chip left by the clinic’s cement ramp, returning again and again to the spot as her mind kept repeating the words senile and old.

Go home, you old liar.

She needed a test for Kateryna’s pregnancy that she could do herself. Quickly. With the equipment she had. And that would not alert Pyotr or the ministry.

Old liar.

The cane’s handle was warm in her hand. Her thumb stilled, poised at the edge of the chip.

Old….

In her quiet apartment that smelled of watered soda and vomit, Vira nodded once and glanced at her worn leather bag. There was an old test. One that she was certain forty-years-younger Pyotr had never been taught. One that had always felt more pagan than scientific, as she’d gently untangled answers from the entrails and ovaries of a euthanized rabbit injected with the urine of a desperate pregnant woman.

One that, she prayed to a distracted and uninterested god of rationality, would work.

— # —

Vira had just turned onto the street leading to her apartment, the weight of the rabbit’s cage pulling at her arm when she looked up from the cracked pavement and froze. Fifty meters away, Pyotr and a large man in a ministry-style suit were getting out of an unmarked car. The car was parked outside the entrance that led to Vira’s apartment—and Kateryna.

He knows, Vira thought, the memory of Pyotr reaching for the clinic’s phone flashing across her mind. When she’d left for the market, Kateryna had been sleeping off a night spent bringing up the vestiges of that quack’s poison. Would she wake to answer the door? Would they force their way in? And would the smell—a signature written in vinegar and herbs and vomit, familiar to all doctors since superheroes first emerged—seep beneath the apartment’s door and into Pyotr’s nose?

Vira’s legs decided before her mind. Heedless of the pain in her worn joints, of the rabbit’s frightened scrabbling in its cage, she limped quickly towards them. Gravel skidded beneath her cane; a shadowed pothole turned her ankle; an old commemorative plaque in the sidewalk cracked suddenly beneath her feet. Verdigris flaked off an embossed mushroom cloud and the words dedicate this Victory Day, 19 April 1957, when the Americans surrendered.

She caught her balance, the cage swinging and the poor rabbit squealing. Pyotr and the man looked up.

Fall. Before her rational mind could weigh the probability of distracting them against the risk of breaking her pelvis, her knees and one hand barked against the pavement. The rabbit screamed like a panicked child.

Footsteps approached. Through a haze of pain that pulsed from her knees and the hand that had caught her weight, Vira looked up.

“Vira,” Pyotr said, his expression warring between professional concern and stern duty. “Are you all right?”

“Right enough,” she managed to say. And because she couldn’t help herself, because she hoped against hope, “Are you here for a house call, Pyotr?”

Duty chased concern from his face, leaving it a blank, stern mirror like that of the silent ministry man standing beside him. “We need to speak with you, Vira. And your daughter.”

“Kateryna’s not home,” Vira said, her voice thin with pain. “And we’re speaking right here.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t…” Vira’s eyes flickered between the sternness in Pyotr’s face and the bare condescension of the ministry man’s, seeing herself as they saw her: an old, frightened woman at their feet. A babushka tottering home with a rabbit she would kill for dinner, in the old way.

Old, she thought, her mind’s eye tracing over the lines etched deep into her face. Frightened. Confused.

Senile.

God grant me that I become senile. The bitter words coalesced into a plan as desperate and foolhardy as Kateryna’s buying poison from that quack.

“I don’t remember,” Vira said, her voice quavering without even trying. She tried to get up and groaned, collapsing back to the pavement as if her arthritic joints couldn’t take her weight.

Pyotr blinked, uncertainty cracking his expression. But the ministry man stepped forward. He pulled the rabbit’s cage from Vira and yanked her to her feet. His fingers circled her arm, pinching sinew to bone. Vira moaned.

“We will speak in your apartment,” he said. His voice was flat, void of any accent save cold professionalism. A man without a home or a past or a name, come to steal Kateryna from Vira’s home and crush her future as calmly and efficiently as he crushed Vira’s arm.

Vira protested loudly as he hauled her up the stairs to her apartment, hoping that the noise would alert Kateryna to leave the apartment, to go to a neighbor’s, to hide. But she heard nothing: no soft sound of the door opening and closing, no harried knocks at a friend’s door. Only the echoing steps of Pyotr following them.

The man deposited her in front of the door and turned its knob, the flimsy lock the only thing that stood between them and Kateryna. Vira’s aching knees wanted to collapse as she smelled the slight, tingling scent of vinegar. Behind her, Pyotr sniffed.

“Unlock the door,” said the ministry man.

Swinging her purse around, Vira fumbled among its scant contents. Her fingers pushed aside her keys and found the small tube of Finalgon ointment. She unscrewed the cap.

One hard squeeze filled her purse and the hallway with the ointment’s medicinal scent. Pyotr snorted and huffed behind her. The rabbit scrabbled, rocking its cage back and forth in the ministry man’s grasp.

“Oh, dear,” Vira said. The ointment was slick across her fingers, coating the inside of her purse and keys. “The Finalgon tube, I must’ve forgotten to put the cap on.”

Without a word, the ministry man set down the cage and reached for Vira’s purse. Vira squealed like the cowering rabbit and batted at his hand, smearing the ointment on him as much as possible as he wrested the purse from her.

The keys slipped and nearly escaped from his hand as he unlocked the door. His distraction gave her the time to seize the cage with her ointment-free hand.

The moment the door swung open Vira lurched forward. “Thank you, young man,” she said, blocking the doorway with the cage. She entered the apartment slowly, the cane sliding in her ointment-slick hand. Her gaze darted from the chair drawn from the table to the short, shadowed hallway. The door to the bedroom was open; the door to the bathroom was shut. Vira’s heart skipped a beat.

The man and Pyotr crowded behind her. The apartment’s door fell shut, sealing Vira—and Kateryna—in with them.

Vira took a breath. “I don’t know where Kateryna’s gone off to,” she said loudly in her best caricature of elderly, half-deaf indignation, “but she isn’t here. You’ll need to come back another time. But not Monday, she teaches Monday. And Tuesday. Wednesday, too. Thursday and Friday, those are also not possible…”

Vira prattled on, trying to give Kateryna whatever cover her voice could provide as she set the rabbit’s cage on the table and banged her cane hard against the floor. Pyotr’s irritated look only encouraged her to raise her voice, but the ministry man moved around her, his face turned towards the hallway.

Instinct hurled Vira in his way. “Oh no, young man!” she said, her voice as shaky as her grip on the cane. “The toilet, it is clogged, you must not—”

He shoved her.

Vira tumbled against the table, the cane falling from her hands, her slick fingers scrabbling for purchase on the tablecloth. The cloth slid beneath her grasp as she fell to the floor, her arm beneath her.

Something important cracked inside her wrist.

The rabbit’s cage fell off the table with a crash.

“Vira!” Pyotr exclaimed, his voice cracking with something that might have been horror.

The bathroom door squealed open.

“No,” Vira whispered, because some pain more terrible than that in her wrist was squeezing her lungs. She tried to push herself upright with her good wrist, to stand up, to throw herself after the ministry man in the futile hope that her body colliding with his torso would tear open some rare congenital anomaly in his descending aorta and he would bleed to death before he could reach her Kateryna.

Her good wrist collapsed, toppling Vira back to the floor. Vira rolled blindly, instinctively, her head coming to rest under the table and behind the tablecloth as she cradled her cracked wrist to her torso.

There was a sound—a short, soft intake of breath.

Her vision blurring, Vira looked up into Kateryna’s wide eyes. The younger woman was crouched beneath the table, still in her nightclothes, shrouded from sight only by the tablecloth that Vira had almost pulled off in her fall.

Their gazes had just touched when Pyotr pulled the toppled chair aside. “Vira,” he said, his voice shaking, “good God, I hadn’t intended—you know that we’re required to screen all women getting transabdominal scans, it would not be fair if we let your daughter…”

He stopped speaking. Crashes resounded through the apartment: a closet door banging into the wall, a lamp toppling to the ground, the bedframe groaning as it was shoved aside to reveal anyone hiding beneath.

Looking into her daughter’s terrified eyes, Vira took a breath and, through a pain so great it made her vision fill with red and then black and then a hideously soft gray, sat up. Up, so that her body was between Kateryna and Pyotr.

His face was pale, his eyes wide. In any other time—in any other place—Vira might have felt sympathy for him, might have put her good hand on his shoulder and told him that once she had believed it was her medical and patriotic duty, too. That his intentions meant something, anything, when Vira felt the cold winds of Siberia in her face and the Kateryna-shaped void in her heart.

But there was not time, and this was not the place.

“Pyotr,” Vira said, imbuing the single word with all the quavering weakness she could, crumpling her features with all the pain she felt in her wrist, aiming for the resonant frequency in the heartstrings of a guilt-stricken man.

The ministry man emerged from the hallway, straightening his suit jacket.

“I n-need to splint her wrist,” Pyotr said in a thick voice, looking up at the man.

The man looked from Pyotr to Vira. With a dismissive shake of his head, he stepped forward and seized Pyotr by the arm in the same grip he’d used on Vira earlier.

“You have wasted enough of my time already on an old woman’s demented prattling,” said the ministry man, tonelessly.

He hauled Pyotr to his feet. The doctor yelped. His rolling eyes briefly met Vira’s as he was dragged from the apartment, and then the ministry man slammed the door after them.

Pyotr’s protests abruptly cut off. A moment later, muffled by the door, came the sounds of footsteps—one set a steady march, the other a stumbling shuffle—fading down the stairwell.

Vira exhaled, a long thin papery sound.

The tablecloth rustled behind her.

“Kateryna,” Vira whispered, clutching her swelling wrist. “Lock the door. Check the rabbit. And bring my bag.”

— # —

Vira stripped off the disposable gloves, her right hand moving awkwardly with the thick cast about her wrist. She turned the gloves inside out so the bright blood and strong antiseptic did not drip on her rug. Sweat glistened on the latex; the procedure had taken longer than she’d remembered, between her broken wrist and the faded skills that had needed to be dredged up and dusted off. Between her overwhelming need to know—and her fear, of the answer that glistened bloodily nearby. Unable to yet look at the carefully-excised entrails, Vira leaned over the sedated rabbit.

Its whiskers fluttered with each breath. The steady movement of its heart was visible against its shaved abdomen. White stitches drew together the scabbing edges of the long cut she had made. When Vira had first learned to draw the morning urine of a pregnant woman and inject it subcutaneously into a rabbit, they had eaten the rabbits after the necessary week passed. Those were the days of rationing, when the caloric needs of soldiers and superheroes fighting the Americans had outweighed the needs of civilians.

Now, she had neither the stomach nor the heart to eat the poor creature. Kateryna could find the rabbit a home in a fellow teacher’s classroom, could tell the teacher that Vira had thoughtfully neutered it. They owed the animal that much, for the answer it had given them in its own entrails.

The answer she had both wanted—and dreaded. The answer that she must now read.

Vira turned to the nearby aluminum pie plate. The rabbit’s engorged ovaries and uterus slid wetly; such organ distension was a normal to response to the hormones in any pregnant woman’s urine. Only the interior of the rabbit’s uterus held the answer.

Vira put on fresh gloves and picked up the scalpel.

The uterus was thick with fresh patches of hyperproliferating myocytes. Pro-growth signaling, Vira thought. Numerous red lines snaked throughout the interior. Excessive angiogenesis. When the scalpel slid through them, impossibly red blood dribbled onto the pie plate’s mirrored surface. Increased hematocrit.

A miniature, rabbit version of what was going on in Kateryna.

Vira set down the pie plate and gripped the edge of the desk so hard her fingers ached and the slowly-knitting bone in her wrist throbbed. For one moment the weight of decades settled on her shoulders and bowed her spine. Muffled by the drawn curtains, the familiar sounds of Rurikst seemed as distant as if she was already in Switzerland.

She drew in a deep breath of air that smelled of blood and guts and antiseptic. She took off the gloves and turned them inside out. She straightened her back, and rubbed her eyes until the hot feeling behind her lids had disappeared.

Taking her cane with her good hand, she opened the bedroom door.

Kateryna stood up so quickly from the table that tea sloshed out of her cup and onto the saucer. “What did the rabbit show, Mama?”

Vira opened her mouth, but the words took too long to emerge. Her expression alone answered Kateryna; Vira watched as her daughter’s head bowed and her shoulders drooped.

Vira set the cane against the table and took her daughter’s clenched hand, wrapping both of hers around it. The younger woman’s pulse was fast and thready, and her fingers trembled in Vira’s grip. But when Kateryna looked up, Vira saw a mirror of her own forced calm.

“The term break is at the end of this month,” Kateryna said. “No one will notice for a week that I am gone.”

Vira had to look away. Her gaze traced every familiar line of her apartment, from her elegant kitchen table to the old chairs to the bookshelf crammed with Tolstoy and medical atlases. Her old, familiar, beautiful things would fetch the money they needed to bribe their way to Switzerland, to pay for the infusions to protect Kateryna. The money they needed to plead for asylum in a strange land that would welcome her even stranger grandchild.

Her superpowered grandchild—and her healthy, living daughter.

Vira’s eyes met Kateryna’s. “That will be enough time,” she said, and she squeezed her daughter’s hand.

© 2020 Megan Chaudhuri

From: Issue 3

About the Author

A toxicologist by training and a writer by inclination, Megan lives near Seattle with one husband and two cats. Her science fiction has appeared in Analog, Escape Pod, and multiple print anthologies. Her science non-fiction has appeared in Slate.