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“You’ve got standard craft drills today, haven’t you?” Signy asked as she ran her short thumbnail into the skin of the small fruit.

Cora shook her head. “That’s tomorrow,” she said around her current mouthful. “Today I’ve just got counseling.” She considered. “I could skip out easy, though, if you’d like help at the shop.”

Signy smiled at her, moving nothing but her eyes and her lips before focusing back on sculpting her peel. “I always like having you at the shop,” she said, “but I have to go to the clinic this morning.”

“You okay?” Cora asked. Signy didn’t seem sick.

Her concern was waved aside. “Just my six-month jab,” Signy said.

“Ah.” Cora nodded with understanding as she popped another mandarin slice free. She really loved fruit. Vegetables she could take or leave, but fresh fruit was better than candy, in her opinion. She could easily eat a dozen mandarins in one go, if not for the fact that she’d immediately regret it. “Why do you go to the clinic for that?” she asked, in regard to the jab. “Couldn’t you make it yourself?”

“Easily,” Signy said. “But if someone my age with my anatomy doesn’t show up for her jab and she isn’t menstruating and she isn’t pregnant, that’s going to catch someone’s attention. I go to the neighborhood clinic and I get my jab from a doctor, just like everyone.”

“Mmm,” Cora said as she chewed. God, Signy thought of everything. That kind of precaution never would’ve occurred to Cora. She swallowed, her thoughts meandering. “Have you ever had a period? After your first one, I mean?”

Signy shook her head. “You?”

“Yeah, for a little bit. A few months in my teens.”

The mandarin was no longer enough to hold Signy’s attention. “Really?” she said with surprise. “Why?”

“You remember when the canvas plant farms got that weird mold and—”

“Oh, god, yes,” Signy said with a grimace. “My mom’s clinic was out of everything. She couldn’t even do antibiotics.”

“Yeah, so—” Cora paused. “Wait, hang on, how’d you get your jab, then?”

Signy tilted her head to the side, making a light smack between cheek and tongue. “I was the senior physician’s daughter. You figure it out.”

“Lucky duck,” Cora said. She hadn’t thought about getting her period in forever, and the memory was distant now, but the details were too weird to forget. Brownish blood that wasn’t anything like a cut, pain in everything from her back to her legs, constant anxiety about the seat of her pants, and the pervasive feeling of wanting to stab someone, then sulk about it. “It is not a fun time.”

Signy looked at her with interest, the same way she might look at a new sprout or a twist of DNA. “Can you see the egg when it comes out of you?”

Five months prior, Cora might have found this to be a weird question, but she’d come to learn it was just the sort of thing Signy asked. “Not that I remember,” Cora said. “It’s just . . . blood. Blood and other stuff I didn’t want to look too hard at.”

Signy was a little disappointed in that answer, but she continued to mull it over. “It’s funny to think about, isn’t it? That we’re both full of eggs right now?”

The slice of mandarin heading to Cora’s mouth only made it halfway. “Huh,” she said.

Signy smiled, amused. “Does that bother you?”

“Kind of,” Cora said.

“Why?”

“I dunno, I don’t like the thought of, like . . . little bundles of eggs in me.” Cora had no tangible impression of what an egg even was. She’d seen pictures. She remembered exhibits about bees and fish when she went to the farms. But as far as she was concerned, that’s all an egg was—a drawing on a display poster. It wasn’t something in her this very second. “Yeah, I don’t like it.”

“Well, too bad,” Signy said. “That’s how it is. They’re right about here.” She reached forward and poked Cora’s abdomen, down and to the side.

“Ugh,” Cora said, recoiling. “Stop!”

“Why ‘ugh’? It’s not any different than this would be”—Signy gestured with the fruit in hand—“if it hadn’t been engineered to be seedless.”

Cora stopped eating. “I don’t follow.”

“It’s an ovary,” Signy said clinically.

Cora blinked. “What?”