The Mother

Marina had always known she would be a Mother. She had no discernible talent, wasn’t particularly pretty or intelligent. But she had a womb, and the moon needed those.

She signed up the day she became legal, scrawling her name across a thick black line in her still childish-looking cursive. Marina didn’t tell her parents. She took her advance and a week before she was supposed to leave, she broke the news. Her mother cried for days. Her dad put up a listing to rent her room. She never told her boyfriend—she just broke up with him two days before she left.

When the time came, they sent her a life suit, an aerospace ticket, and a packet full of information on the parents who would take whatever grew in her belly: Jane and Benjamin Monroe.

That was about all she needed.

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