It’s funny. Humans were almost wiped out, but too many survived. Too many to keep that kind of population alive in Eden for a millennium. So EcoPan figured out our ideal sustainable population, the exact number of people that will keep us going until we can leave Eden. Until we reach that, our numbers have to be gradually diminished.

EcoPan, in its wisdom, decreed that there can only be one child born for every two living people of fertile age, until we reach the ideal population. Any more than that, and our resources will give out, and the small remnant that is left of the human race will die out once and for all.

A more practical artificial intelligence might have culled us at the very beginning, creating the perfect population and then regulating it. But EcoPan loves us like a mother. It decided to save us with as much compassion as possible.

And so I, and other second children like me (if there are any) really are monsters who would doom the human species if we could, simply by our very existence. I feel guilty when I let myself think about it. The food I eat, the air I breathe, the waste I produce, might be the thin edge of the wedge that makes Eden fail. I am one too many.

But I’m glad to be alive, and I’ll hold on to my own life strongly, selfishly, if EcoPan or anyone else tries to take it from me.

Now I start to realize the full implication of my position in this society. Mom takes my hand and pulls me gently to the sofa. Her touch is soothing. I remember when I was much younger, if I ever got sick, it was my father who healed me, but my mother who made me feel better. The touch of her hands, the look of love and kindness in her eyes, is better than any medicine.

Now it just screams at me what I will lose by gaining my freedom. It’s not worth the price.

“Every child grows up,” she says softly. I can see her lower lip tremble slightly. “Everyone leaves home someday.”

“But not like this,” I say between clenched teeth. “Not forever.”

She sighs. “It’s too dangerous for you to stay here.”

“Why?” I demand. “If you’ve gotten the false lenses and a new identity for me, why can’t I just be that other person and live here?”

“You’ve lived a very sheltered life, Rowan,” she begins, and I snort. Understatement of the year. “You don’t realize how it is out there.” She gestures to the vast city, unseen beyond our high walls. “There is always someone watching. Greenshirts, Center officials, even the most innocuous little cleanbot scouring the streets for refuse. They’re all on the lookout for something just a tiny bit off. With your father in such a high position, and apparently about to rise even higher . . . ,” she makes a face I can’t quite interpret, “. . . we’ll be under tight scrutiny. You’ll be taking on the identity of a stranger. It would be almost impossible to concoct a scenario in which a stranger could move in with us. You’d be investigated, and all our hard work over your lifetime would be for nothing.”

“But Mom,” I begin.

“This is life-and-death, my love,” she says, pulling me close. “Death if we fail, if anything goes even a little bit wrong or anyone has even the slightest suspicion. And life for you—a real life, with friends and a job and a family of your own someday—if this works.” She’s whispering, her cheek pressed against mine. I feel like this is good-bye already.

“I don’t want to leave you and Ash,” I say miserably. My anger is still dominant, with sadness creeping along slyly at the edges of my fury.

“You deserve to be in the world, your own person,” Mom says. And part of me thinks she’s right. But I feel like a starving girl offered a bite of poisoned food. I want to snatch what is offered and swallow it down, because I need it with every fiber of my being. And yet . . .

“I don’t deserve anything special,” I protest.

“But you do,” Mom says, pulling away from me. “More than you know.”

There’s something in her tone that makes me stop. “What do you mean?” I ask cautiously.

She bites her lip. “Never mind.”

“Mom.” I look at her evenly. “Tell me.”

And she does. I wish she hadn’t.

My world flips upside-down as she tells the story of my birth.

When my mom found out she was pregnant, she had just been named chief archivist and was in the middle of so many projects that she and my father just decided he would be her attending physician. So for the first few months of gestation, Mom didn’t miss any meetings at work, and Dad took care of all her nutritional monitoring and fetal health scans at home. As long as it was an uncomplicated pregnancy, there wouldn’t be any problem. They’d transfer care to a specialist when it came closer to her delivery date.

Everything went fine until the third month, when my father heard two heartbeats.

What Mom should have done—what the laws of Eden compelled her to do—was immediately report her condition and leave it to a Center panel to decide the babies’ fate. Most of the time, one would be terminated right away. The panel might make the decision about which would live—if one was obviously healthier than the other, or if a girl or boy was necessary to balance that generation’s gender ratio. But other times it would be random. One fetus would live, the other would die before it was born.

“We couldn’t. We just couldn’t,” she said, tears in her eyes at the memory. “You were only three inches long, we’d never met you, but we loved you both with all our hearts and we decided then and there to do whatever it took to keep you both.”

She says “we” but I know, from the way my dad treats me, from the coldness in his eyes when he looks into mine, that there was no “we.” Mom made the decision, and Dad followed for her sake. Because his eyes are never cold when he looks at her.

“We hid it, and then when I went into labor we hid that, too. We told everyone it came on quickly, that there was no time to go to the hospital, but actually it lasted more than a day. I gave birth in this house, in secret. When you were born first, Rowan, and I looked into your perfect eyes, I knew it was all worth it. All the secrecy and difficulty that had already happened, and was yet to come . . . all worth it. We would show you to the world, and keep our second born a secret. But we’d treasure you both.”

I was a first child! I stare beyond my mother, looking at the past, at a different history in which I am the real child, I am the one out in the world, with school and friends and a room of my own with my own things in it. I am the one who laughs and chats with Lark and the others, while Ash . . .