Escape (Alliance Book 1) Read Free Page B

not the other way around. Making it so that parents never had to bury their young because there was simply not enough food and warmth to keep them safe past breastfeeding, and at times, not even then. She was saving the dead babies from ever been born accidentally, thinking that if pregnancy did not almost automatically follow sex, she'd see fewer corpses of newborns on the streets, or starved, obviously abandoned toddlers breaking into old apartment buildings just to keep warm for one more night, subsisting on snow water and god knows what else. This, what they may have just discovered, would cost almost nothing to make. It would fix this. They could make these pills available for nothing with the freely donated meds and still have enough research funds left over to use for distribution. They could put up automated dispensaries in all the cities where one could anonymously take one pill and have no chance of having babies from simply being intimate with someone, or maybe, they could work it into a routine vaccine protocol.
    They would have to come up with a reversal procedure of course, for when someone genuinely wanted to have a child, but now that they know what compounds work, it would be something as simple as putting together one shot or pill that negates the initial effect. This would take a little bit of the cash they have left, and maybe a few months to perfect the delivery method. It would be a small price to pay for giving people this kind of control, a very small price to pay for not having to bury so many babies.
    She closed her eyes and for the millionth time she remembered when she learned what she would end up doing with her years of med school and pathology training. She drifted much against her will to the one dream she wished she never had again and couldn't stop herself from dreaming, knowing the whole time it was a memory. It was all far too real, and after all these years, still far too close, too intimate, too detailed to not wake up screaming in the middle of. And far too personal to ever share with Jason or Charlie or her thankfully now-dead mother... She was drifting into it yet again.
    The snow had just began to melt, not enough to turn to slush, but enough to feel uncomfortably slidy underfoot. It was the tail end of the first week of April, and the trees and shrubs on her street seemed to eye the world with curiosity again. She could almost smell the promise of green steaming off the trunks and branches, and the rare plush buds appearing here and there drew her to them with their impossible new softness. She'd take her gloves off and timidly run her fingers over the sides of the buds, inhale their still stale, almost mildewy scent, and spend far too much time imagining what the next week or month or year would bring, and she'd have to run to not miss her train to school.
    This was an every Spring occurrence and as much as she wanted to tear herself away from this examining, from this prying into the secret world of newness, she couldn't pull away in time to not be late. So she ran, through the slippery snow, pulling her hat and scarf off in the process for suddenly feeling hotter than the weather report indicated she should, and still hoping to catch that very last car of the train, even if she had to hitch a ride on the outside ledge. Sometimes she made it. More often than not, she did not, and on those days, as there was no longer any point in trying to get to school, she'd wander the streets of Manchester, following whatever streets caught her attention phonetically.
    On that day the street that appealed to her was called Madeline. She always thought of that word as indicative of some mysterious female, certainly not something as commonplace as a type of pastry. It drew her, and she walked for what seemed an inordinately long time. The hat and the scarf went back on. She was chilled to the bone now, and nothing on this street promised a solace of a well heated hearth. The entire street seemed to