Blank-Legended Lilith

"Dr. Yurna. Please help me. I have to have an abortion."

It was as absurd—and as illegal—as if the girl had asked to devour her whole, bones and all, here in the consultation room. The population was staggering back from the abyss even now, wilted as a clutch of violets after church.

Still. You couldn't kill someone for asking. Report them to CON-DWAM? Absolutely. Not yet, though: Yurna was stayed by time, temperament, and a particular empathy for the ages-fled memory of youth and bodily autonomy. Chicago had about eight thousand people as of January, and Dr. Yurna knew that, despite whatever Miss (here a surreptitious glance at her lab results and the name above) Edie Freeman wanted, it would have one more from her womb.

"Miss Freeman. Edie. Why do you feel this way?"

Yurna was practical. The bloodwork confirmed pregnancy. Even without it, visual cues were enough. Miss Freeman would deliver within the month.

How and why did she evade the CON for so long, only to stagger in here long past a time when such a thing would be considered even before the Losses—ready to pop, in fact—and beg for a termination NOW?

This girl did not strike her as unintelligent, only badly frightened. Miss Freeman had not lived this long without somehow missing out on the ongoing crisis, the dilapidated world, the hastily-constructed maternity laws. Judging by her age, it was, in fact, the only world she had known.

Edie said nothing, and Yurna recognized that she had used a great deal of her resolve just to ask for this ultimately taboo thing.

"Sit here for a moment." She guided Edie to the least-objectionable chair.

Dr. Yurna went to the reservoir station and poured a glass of cool water, glanced at her patient, and surreptitiously added two tablets of insta-dissolve QuikInduction. It was a necessary risk. Miss Freeman could not be allowed to exit the hospital after what she had asked for, and Yurna preferred not to involve the CON when the issue could be resolved in the here and now. She turned back to the girl after a moment.

"Tell me why. Is it an unwanted pregnancy? Were you assaulted?"

"Assaulted? No! No," Edie said. Sitting down brought some expression back into her shock-swabbed eyes, and she accepted the cup Yurna handed her.

"He was a good lover, he would never have forced me. I liked him, and I want to keep her. But I can't. The world is doing so badly, and I think we wouldn't...ever recover from it. If I allowed her to be born."

Edie set the glass down on the floor, undrunk, and massaged as much of her own lower back as she could reach.

Dr. Yurna reassessed the girl. Mental illness. PTSD, trauma, delusion possibly. Something. Perhaps she had escaped from one of those rumored monsters, men who took advantage of the new world's limited oversight. Who hid from CON-DWAM, who kept pens of women in an attempt to bring new life into the world.

"What was his name? The father," Yurna prompted, as gently as she could.

"I don't know his name," Edie said, looking not the slightest bit bothered by it. Her fear seemed to have abated a bit. "I have a picture, though, if you'd like to see him. He's terribly handsome and he could make me come—can I say that to a doctor? He could make me come with just his fingers. I think I could fall in love with him, even."

Edie produced, from under the collar of her perspiration-dampened dress, a locket made of what appeared to be ivory. She lifted the silver chain from around her neck and handed the entire necklace to Yurna, who took it, utterly bemused.

"I do want to keep her," Edie said. "I know it's illegal to even ask for an abortion. But I felt that I just had to try to do the...the right thing. Just once, before."

She picked up the glass of water and drank it down.

Dr. Yurna held the locket in her hands. Bone-colored, tiny engraved loops of scrollwork on the face of it, wrought in the shape of a heart—an obvious antique, whether ivory or not—and backed with luminous silver.

"Open it," Edie said. "I keep a photograph of him inside. It was a gift."

Yurna found the spring and pressed it open. Inside was a picture of a black goat. She looked between the photograph and Edie Freeman.

"Still, I suppose I did try," Edie said. "My back is really aching badly, doctor."

A tremor shook the earth. The empty water glass toppled and rolled, ringing like a bell as it went.