knew Sally felt abandoned. There was nothing any of them could do but carry on. Carry on with the campaign to convince the people of Changchi only enforcement of the law could provide them and their heirs with a viable future.
The ranks of the Daughters thinned again as the rains continued, bringing more greenery, bountiful crops, damp heat, fresh smells. Even the insects taunted them with their mating dances over newly formed ponds.
The ones who stayed, including Zhu, had been using the black patch since that terrible spring. Zhu’s bruises had healed overnight after Sally got her hands on an all-purpose Australian nanofix. The dysentery had cleared up with better food and water at the compound. But in her mind, Zhu attributed her return to health with the relief given by the black patch.
She began slapping a patch onto the back of her knee every two days, grinding its little teeth into her skin, relishing the moment when she felt the first surge. She carefully saved spent patches, which could be dosed again with the active ingredients if they couldn’t get fresh patches. She had since learned that the active ingredients were a combination of a bootleg Russian opiate and an illegal Vietnamese stimulant released by time-coded microbials in a beautiful combination of rush and bliss.
She didn’t notice when the patch became a habit. She didn’t notice she couldn’t get by on the third day without it. She didn’t notice how the combination of rush and bliss came to feel like normal everyday functioning. She just knew she felt good, starting in that ugly spring when she was sick and wounded and dispirited. She began to sleep even less than she ate and prayed to Kuan Yin, prostrating herself every midnight before the shrine.
She especially didn’t notice—no one noticed—when the Daughters of Compassion transformed themselves from Generation-Skipping activists into negative-growth fanatics.
Women of Changchi were defying the law, aided and abetted by the Society for the Rights of Parents. Skipmothers assigned to raise skipchildren were getting pregnant. Women who had one child were proudly fat with number two. Teenagers who had no bearing rights at all were leaving school to start families. The expectant mothers stole off to illegal birth clinics provided by the Parents.
“Dropping their spawn,” Sally sneered, “like there’s no tomorrow.”
The Daughters fell into a new routine. By day, teachers went around town with knuckletops, holoids, and contraceptive patches. And by night? The elite among them, the warrior women, the most dedicated cadre of which Zhu was a member, spent the short hot nights searching for illegal birth clinics.
And like a domino striking another and that one striking the next, one night Sally Chou announced that the Daughters of Compassion were going to stage a raid. “We’re gonna break into that freakin’ clinic in the basement of the rice-processing plant and seize the contraband.”
A shout rose up, “Seize the contraband! Seize the contraband! Seize the contraband!”
Zhu gazed around the room, caught her breath. She loved her fellow women warriors, clad in blue or black denim. Some wiry, lean, and muscular, others scrawny, sick, and pale. But all with fire in their eyes, their chests crisscrossed with bandoliers of bullets, their belts bearing butterfly knives and little automatics called spitfires that could gut a man in five seconds. As she gazed, a stray thought struggled up out of her consciousness like a drowning swimmer—What in hell are we doing?—then sank down again into the depths of a mindlessness that numbed her will. Her fellow women warriors—all of them wearing a black patch--shivered with irrationality, with incipient violence, with a bloodlust Zhu never thought any of them capable of, let alone herself.
“What is the contraband?” asked a fierce teenage girl whose name Zhu didn’t know. But the shouts, the exultation, the impetus for action silenced all questions.
“Let’s go!” Sally shouted.
And they swept out into the night.
They had no trouble breaking into the rice-processing plant, a low concrete building squatting beneath a decrepit old dome stitched by a network of cracks in the PermaPlast. No trouble finding the basement, which turned out to be a utility room sunk below the loading dock, a construction of layered concrete slabs that, in the night lights, possessed the solemnity of an ancient temple. No trouble finding the clinic because pregnant women brazenly climbed up and down the dock, unafraid in the shelter of half-lit darkness, laughing and jostling, fondling their own swollen breasts and bellies.
Zhu remembered her moment of surprise, remembered trading looks with Sally,