(circulated quietly among women; the ending is often torn away)

  They will tell you

  there is a right time.

  They will tell you

  there is a safe place.

  If you are carrying the future,

  there is neither.

  Hide anyway!

  Freddie learned that hiding was not a place.

  It was a discipline.

  She moved through the City like a ghost trained in logistics: never the same corridor twice, never the same face, never the same pattern long enough to be useful. She slept in rooms that forgot her as soon as she left them. She learned which buildings were too clean to be safe and which broken systems had been abandoned by ZEUS’s attention.

  Pregnancy made everything louder.

  Her body betrayed her in small ways—hunger that came without warning, exhaustion that pressed behind her eyes, a weight low in her abdomen that reminded her constantly that she was no longer just herself.

  The City noticed the absence before it noticed her.

  ZEUS did not announce that Freddie was missing.

  It adjusted.

  Clinic protocols shifted. Contribution schedules tightened. Language softened. Words like viable and variance vanished from public systems and reappeared inside sealed memos Freddie could no longer crack fast enough.

  Women began to disappear. Not in groups. Not dramatically.

  Individually.

  Quietly.

  Freddie watched the pattern emerge from borrowed terminals and dead feeds, from data packets rerouted through obsolete infrastructure. Names flagged for additional care. Appointments that did not reschedule. Bodies that did not come back. She understood the math immediately. The system was correcting for her.

  That was when the girls found her.

  They came through old resistance paths Jux had once mapped, through cracked channels and hand-coded signals that ZEUS no longer prioritized. They arrived without ceremony, carrying their skills like weapons already drawn.

  There were hackers.

  Runners.

  Med-techs.

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  Girls who had grown up watching their mothers comply and disappear anyway.

  No one asked Freddie what she wanted to call them. They assumed she would decide.

  “We can keep disrupting feeds,” one of them said during the first meeting, faces lit by scavenged screens. “But they rebuild. Faster every time.”

  Freddie rested a hand low on her abdomen.

  “I know,” she said.

  Another girl—older, scarred, calm—met her eyes. “Then what?”

  Freddie didn’t answer immediately.

  She thought of Jux, barefoot in the Rim, singing like the ground still listened. She thought of the City’s voice calling her Viable. She thought of the child inside her, already outlawed by existing.

  “We stop pretending this is about fixing,” Freddie said finally.

  The room went still.

  “What do we do instead?” someone asked.

  Freddie looked at them—all intelligence and fury and grief sharpened into focus.

  “We remove,” she said.

  That was the moment the girls disappeared. Not from the City. From its expectations.

  They didn’t strike loudly. They struck where ZEUS assumed compliance would continue: secondary intake centers, logistics corridors moving biological payment between clean districts and hidden machines, mid-level administrators whose names never appeared in public records.

  Freddie learned how to kill without spectacle.

  She hated that about herself, which was how she knew she was still human.

  Violence became precise. Targets were chosen for effect, not revenge. Systems failed politely. People stopped showing up. Clinics closed “temporarily” and never reopened.

  The City called it maintenance. Freddie called it survival.

  Her body changed faster as the pregnancy progressed. The child was stubborn, heavy, and insistent. There were nights she pressed her forehead to cold walls and breathed through pain without sound, biting fabric so microphones wouldn’t hear. There were mornings she woke furious at the world for continuing at all.

  The girls took turns watching her sleep.

  “You don’t have to do this,” one of them said once. “We can move you. Get you out.”

  Freddie shook her head.

  “If I run,” she said, “they’ll follow the signal. If I stay, they chase ghosts.”

  She was not afraid of dying. She was afraid of being taken.

  The birth happened in a place that had once been a server cooling room—thick walls, dead feeds, the hum of machines long since shut down. The girls worked by touch and memory and half-forgotten training. No ports. No alerts. No permissions.

  Freddie screamed once.

  Then she stopped.

  When the child arrived, slick and furious and loud, the sound felt illegal.

  One of the girls laughed—a broken, startled sound that turned into crying.

  “He’s real,” she said, as if she were surprised.

  Freddie held her son against her chest and felt something inside her finally unlock.

  There was an umbilical cord.

  Warm. Living. Still pulsing with what had carried him here. Freddie tied the cord herself.

  Slowly. Deliberately. As if she were closing a door the world had forgotten existed. The girls stared- they had never seen this before. No one had.

  Outside, the City adjusted its models.

  Inside the cooling room, Freddie named her child without recording it anywhere.

  She did not mark the time. She did not register the birth. She did not ask permission.

  For the first time since the Flood, something entered the world that ZEUS could not trace immediately.

  Freddie knew it would not last. Nothing did. But it would be enough for now.

  And the system, for all its certainty, had begun to miscalculate.