The women who carried children out got the flower tattooed on the inside of their wrist.
The children they saved, once they reached safety, got a small matching one — so that if the world ever settled, and they ever went looking, they could find each other. A carrier. A fellow survivor. A piece of where they came from.
“I carried forty-one children out,” my mother said. “Over two years. Before the network was discovered and we had to scatter.”
Forty-one.
I looked at my mother — seventy years old, retired, a woman I’d have described as having lived a small and quiet life — and I understood I had never known her at all.
“Why did you never tell me?” I asked.
She was quiet for a long time.
“Because the network was hunted, Grace. When it was discovered, the people who ran the war wanted the carriers found. Some were caught. What happened to them—” she stopped. “I got out. I came here. I built a new life, a small one, a safe one. And I was afraid, for fifty years, that if I ever spoke about the flower, someone from that old world would come looking.
