Then I hear the small bot roll across the room, pausing right near the vent. I hold my breath. Has it spotted something suspicious, some sign of my existence? I don’t know what kind of bot it is, but if it is a variety with good visual acuity it might be able to actually see me if it scans directly into the tiny openings in the vent. It inches closer, and beeps. If a bot can sound uncertain, this one does.

Then the chancellor says, “I won’t take up any more of your time now. Let me know what you decide by tomorrow morning.” The Greenshirt guards wheel in formation. The chancellor snaps his fingers, the bot glides away after him, and the room is quiet. Though my legs are stiffening and the air is growing stale with my breath, I don’t dare leave until I receive the all-clear signal. It takes so long I think they’ve forgotten about me.

When I scramble out, covered in a light dusting of plaster, Mom is waiting for me in the living room. She’s alone.

I have so many questions, about the first Center visitor, about the chancellor, that I don’t know where to start. But first, most important, is Ash. “He was having an attack. Is he okay?” My jaw is clenched tightly as I wait for the answer. It takes a long time coming. At first that makes me think it is going to be terrible news.

“I just checked on him, and he’s resting comfortably,” she says. I sigh with relief. Somehow, the rest doesn’t seem to matter as much now. That feeling lasts for all of thirty seconds.

Mom looks at me in silence for a long moment.

“What’s going to happen?” I finally blurt out. It is an all-encompassing question.

Mom’s answer shakes me to my core. It’s like all of my dreams and nightmares are coming true at once.

“They’ve made lenses with a new identity, Rowan.” I wait for her to smile. She doesn’t, and I tense. Mom pauses again, then says gently, “And they’ve found a new family for you. You leave in one week.”

My legs give out and I sink to the floor, my back pressed against the very wall that hid me just moments before.

“NO,” I SAY weakly. I’ve waited for the freedom to move all my life, and now . . . “No!” I cry again, smashing the back of my fist against the wall. Sorrow and anger are building inside me, fighting for control. I decide to let anger win for once.

“I won’t do it!” I shout. “You can’t make me leave this family. My family!” I jump to my feet and don’t know whether to hug my mom or punch the wall or run for Ash or collapse again.

It was always a possibility. I’ve known that for years. But I always believed there would be another way.

I always believed my parents wouldn’t let me leave them. Ever.

But there are only two fates for a second child. A life hidden away . . . or a life in a new identity.

Well, there is one more, the usual one. Termination after conception—or after birth. However long after birth the child is discovered.

When the Earth died just a little more than two hundred years ago, humanity was doomed along with every other higher animal on the planet. Everything bigger than a paramecium became extinct—and life probably wasn’t all that good for the paramecia, either. Of course, we humans were the only ones who had it coming. It was our fault.

We were the only animals with brains clever enough and fingers agile enough to create nuclear power, to frack the Earth and poison the sea and spew out chemicals that would destroy the atmosphere. We, intelligent humans that we are, fiddled with the DNA of our crops to make a better soybean that could survive anything and feed the world—until that soybean proved so hardy and aggressive it took over the rain forests. We raised living things for food, forcing them to live as prisoners, walking in their own feces. So we dosed them with antibiotics—dosed our children, too—and then we were surprised when bacteria mutated into superbugs.

We killed the world and ourselves at the same time. The planet began to die. The Earth’s temperature jumped ten degrees in a decade when greenhouse gases trapped the sun’s heat, turning our planet into an oven. A team of scientists had a bright idea to inject a revolutionary new product into the atmosphere to fix it.

Can you guess how that went?

The Earth cooled, all right. But when the sun’s radiation reacted with the new man-made atmosphere, it created a cascade reaction that killed nearly every plant and animal on the planet.

Except a few of us. Remember our big clever brains and agile hands? The best thing humans ever did with those assets was to create something smarter—and kinder—than us. When it became obvious that the Earth was going belly-up, a visionary created the EcoPanopticon, the all-seeing guardian of nature.

The EcoPanopticon is god and mother and physician and king to us now. We gave it power over us, because we could no longer be trusted with power ourselves. But we don’t mind being ruled, because like a mother, the EcoPan’s only goal is to keep us alive.

With our flesh and blood and weak fallible bodies, we didn’t stand a chance in this harsh and terrible broken world. But all the things we created went along just fine without us. The man who came up with the idea of the EcoPan, Aaron Al-Baz, created an artificial intelligence that would link into every last bit of electronics and internet and communications that we left behind. It completely co-opted the systems we created—the power plants and reactors and factories that had destroyed the Earth in the first place—and turned them toward saving the planet. The EcoPan directed factories to make robots, every one of which was linked to its all-seeing global eye. The robots in turn created this sanctuary, Eden, for the few human survivors. At the same time, it went to work on repairing the devastation we’d wrought on the planet. Fixing the world to the point where it was safe for us to live in would take hundreds of years, though. In the meantime, we lived in this paradise that the EcoPan had made for us.

Except, as in every paradise, there are a few rules. Break them, and you get tossed out.

Because we are a completely closed system, our resources are severely limited. With no plants or animals left to eat, we subsist on the things that were tough enough to live through the Ecofail, like algae, fungi, and lichens, as well as synthesized proteins. Everything (and I mean everything—think about that) is recycled, reused, re-consumed. We’ve been in Eden for just shy of two hundred years, and we’ll have to be here for at least a thousand more before Earth normalizes. So we have to be careful.