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Food! Food! Food!
The babies were seeing through my eyes. They saw the food, and they were reminding me how hungry I was.
“I need to eat.”
“You need to give birth,” Midwife said.
“I need to eat, woman!” I shrieked.
That settled it. Tschenkar and Thuliak raided the shelves for rations. They both had to crouch down awkwardly, otherwise their heads would hit the low ceiling.
There was another room, but it contained a big tokamak generator, and a bunch of other equipment to keep the bunker powered and climate-controlled. There was barely room for a woman to stand there.
I devoured the food. Canned fish—which I usually hated—was the most divine taste I’d ever felt.
“Omega acids,” Midwife said, nodding, “those should be good. I think.”
“They taste good,” I said with my mouth full.
From the way she crinkled her face up, it surely didn’t smell good.
“I think,” I said, “the babies want to make sure I can make good on my promise to give them lots of milk. I hadn’t eaten for a while, and—”
A contraction hit. A big one.
The babies weren’t going to wait. They’d waited as long as they could, but I was on a bed now. I was safe. I was surrounded by loved ones.
It was time.
The next contraction hit just a few seconds later.
Tschenkar and Thuliak were fighting again. They were arguing about something, but I was doing everything I could to tune them out.
“Now,” Midwife said, “um, I think you just want to, uh, let it happen, basically?”
It was too late to take back that she was the perfect midwife.
“You’re standing in my spot,brother,” Tschenkar said.
Thuliak shoved him, and his massive body slammed against one of the shelves. Cans of vegetables fell off the shelf. Two cans rolled across the room. One rolled under the shelf on the other side of the wall, while one seemed to roll right underneath my bed.
Midwife looked up at the two massive Khetar. “Get out!”
“She’s our—”
“Out!” she said, pointing toward the stairway. “You’ll see the babies at the same time. I won’t have you two knocking the bed over, or otherwise fucking this up. So get out!”
They tiptoed out of the room and toward the stairway.
“Engineer,” Tschenkar said. “We’ll…we’ll see you soon. With the babies.”
When the two Khetar men were finally out of the bunker, it felt much more quiet, and a hell of a lot less cramped.
“Thank you,” I said to Midwife, and I realized that shewasthe perfect Midwife, because there was probably no other woman on the planet who could have gotten two scions out of that room so quickly and without spilling another single can of food.
