Rachel Vincent - The Stars Never Rise

But for one long moment, I could only blink at her, and even once I was capable of speech, the words seemed to get stuck on my tongue. “How …? Who …?” She looked at the floor, and my eyes narrowed. “Adam Yung?” I demanded in a harsh whisper, and she nodded miserably. “Melanie, how did you think you’d get away with this? You knew your physical was coming up, and even if you hadn’t gotten pregnant, they can tell when you’ve lost your virginity!”

I could get away with having sex. Because I’d been declared unfit to procreate, then rendered unable to procreate, the Church no longer cared whether I preserved my virtue, so long as I still presented a facade of innocence and purity to the world.

I had gotten away with it, several times in the months following my sterilization, when my anger at the Church couldn’t be controlled without an outlet. I’d met in the dark, in the middle of the night, with boys who would hardly meet my gaze in school. A private screw-you to the system that had defined my future without so much as a “Hey, Nina, what would you like out of life?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted kids, and I certainly hadn’t been sure at fifteen. But I was damn sure I didn’t want anyone else making that decision for me.

Had I done this? Had Melanie seen my months of rebellion—back when I’d had time for such things—and assumed that what had worked for me would work for her too?

“We weren’t really thinking about that,” my sister said in response to a question I’d almost forgotten I’d asked. “We weren’t really thinking about anything. We were just … I love him, and he loves me, and it just happened, Nina!”

“Once?” I sat on my heels to keep my slacks off the laundry room floor. “You got pregnant the first time?” Not that that mattered. Once was enough.

Studying in the basement, my ass.

Melanie shook her head, and more tears filled her eyes. “We tried to stop. We knew it was wrong, but it didn’t feel wrong.”

“How does it feel now ?” I demanded. Fornication was a sin. Melanie wouldn’t have been the first fifteen-year-old to present a torn hymen at her annual physical, and if the whispers in the bathroom were accurate, several of my own classmates had already lived to tell that tale. They were sterilized, of course, and they’d been punished privately because our school didn’t want smudges on its record any more than the offenders wanted to be outed as sinners.

But Melanie was giving them no choice. A pregnancy couldn’t be hidden by a school uniform. Not for long, anyway.

My head spun with the details, and the consequences, and the potential outcomes, but in that deluge of possibilities, I couldn’t see a single good way out of this. Not one.

“Does Adam know?” I rubbed my forehead, trying to fend off the pressure growing behind it. We were screwed.

She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell him. I just kept ignoring it, hoping I was wrong, until I saw the calendar and remembered about the physicals.”

“Unlicensed pregnancy is forbidden, Melanie. For—”

“Please don’t say ‘Fornication is a sin.’ “ More tears rolled down her swollen cheeks. “I know fornication is a sin. Please don’t be mad at me right now, Nina. I need your help.”

“I’m not mad.” I was furious. I was so angry I could hardly think, but I couldn’t deny my own hypocrisy, and being mad at Melanie wouldn’t help either of us, so I pushed my anger back. Way back. All the way to the back of my mind, where anger at my mother festered, rotting our thin familial bond. “I just …” I didn’t know what to do. For the first time in my life, I had no clue how to get Melanie out of trouble. “You can’t have this baby, Mellie.” I squeezed her hand when her tears started falling faster. “You know you can’t have this baby.”

There were places women could go to fix that particular problem. I didn’t know where any of those places were, but I could find out. Maybe we could put Mellie’s physical off if I told them she was sick, and then when she showed up for the makeup physical, we’d only have to deal with the fornication issue.

We could survive fornication, even if the Church took custody of us and split us up. But fornication, unlicensed pregnancy, disobeying a Church official, and any other sins they uncovered when they looked into our living situation …?

The more sins they charged her with, the greater the chance of a conviction.

But one look at my sister’s tear-streaked face told me she wouldn’t even consider what I saw as our only option.

“No! Nina, there’s a person in here.” She pressed one small fist against her flat belly, and something deep inside me cracked open and fell apart. “It’s a baby—or it will be. It’s my baby, and it’s real, and it’s defenseless, and I’m going to be a great mother.”

But it wasn’t that simple. She was too scared and confused to see the real problem. “We don’t have a soul for him, Melanie.”

“Or her. It could be a girl.” Her words came out in broken, halting syllables half choked by wrenching sobs.

“The gender doesn’t matter if the baby doesn’t live.”

“Maybe Mom will …” She couldn’t finish the sentence, and I couldn’t finish it for her. The thought was too horrible to voice.

“You know she won’t.” Our mother was only thirty-nine years old, and I couldn’t say for sure why she’d ever had kids in the first place. The chances of her giving up her life—miserable as it was lately—for an illegally conceived grandchild she would never see were slim to none.

“One of Adam’s parents, then. They love him. They won’t want his baby to die.”

She was right. But Adam’s parents weren’t much older than our mom, and … “Do you really want to take one of his parents away from him? Away from Penny ?” Adam’s little sister was only twelve—way too young to lose one of her parents and half of the family’s income. “Would you really make them decide who should die to pay for a mistake you and Adam made?”

She looked crushed by the realization that that was exactly what she’d be doing. “What about the public registry?”

“Melanie, that’s no guarantee!” And I wasn’t even sure they’d put her baby on the list if the Church declared her unfit to procreate. They would never make her end the pregnancy—in fact, they wouldn’t let her—but they wouldn’t hesitate to let the child die a natural, soulless death.

“Then I’ll pledge to the Church!” she cried, swiping tears from her cheeks with both hands, and I glanced nervously at the closed laundry room door. We couldn’t hide forever, but we couldn’t afford to be discovered before we had a plan. And my sister pledging to join the Church was not a good plan.

Sure, if she pledged, they’d put her baby on the very short, very elite Church registry—a list of elderly Church officials who were ready to give up their souls to support the next generation of life. But then they’d take the baby, not as a ward, like the orphans, but as an ecclesiastic dedication. A human tithe. In another town. She would never see him again, and at eighteen, he would be ordained without choice, his soul to be paid for with lifelong service to the Church by both mother and child.

“You don’t want to pledge, Mellie,” I said, though I couldn’t make myself voice the reasons.

She wiped her eyes again and looked at me with more determination than I’d ever seen from her. “What I don’t want is to let this baby die.”

I stared at her. I wasn’t sure I recognized my own sister in that moment. Melanie had changed in the hour since we’d walked to school. She was still young and impulsive, and still wasn’t quite thinking things through, but at some point she’d come to value her unborn child’s life more than her own, and that made her a better mother than ours had ever been.