My son was going to be, to her, simply the next application of a technique she’d perfected on Mira.

And the only reason he is alive, the only reason this is a story about rescue and not about a small grave, is that the test subject she’d spent years silencing turned out, in the one moment it counted, to have a voice after all.

Chapter 17 — What the Guardian Said

Three days later a family-court judge took up the emergency petition.

Sondra’s attorney argued hard that this was one exhausted mother’s terrible lapse, and that tearing a child from her mother would do its own deep harm.

And then the guardian ad litem — the lawyer the court had appointed to speak for Mira alone — stood up and said one quiet thing that stopped the room.