I

At first Darcy thought it was a bird, its quiet, high keening seeping through her daughter’s bedroom door and pooling in the hall. True, something was a little off about the cry, something not quite birdlike, but with climate change driving so many creatures from their original habitats, it was about time for even Darcy to find a displaced animal she’d never seen before. Whatever it was, it was clearly frightened. Perhaps it had hurt itself in its bid to escape Melanie’s room and was caught flapping a one-winged circle on the carpet. Maybe, with the record-high July temperatures, it didn’t want to leave.

Darcy didn’t take time to think about how a bird had gotten in. This was back when she still took time for granted: three hundred sixty-five days equaling one year, nine years equaling child, equaling much too young. But all that stopped when she opened Melanie’s door and found not one but two daughters.

Daughter No. 2 was flipping through a worn paperback, something with horses on the cover, looking exactly like Melanie always looked while reading: brow furrowed, lips pursed, radiating skepticism instead of concentration. Could this girl read, or was she merely imitating? Darcy had no idea. All she knew was that Melanie, her original daughter, was pressing herself into a knot against the wall, staring at No. 2. The bird call kept coming, leaking out of Melanie, and the image in Darcy’s head resolved itself: not a bird at all but a girl, terrified and trying to scream yet finding only a threadbare voice with which to summon their mother.

Their mother. Already Darcy thought of herself as theirs, thought of Melanie as the original, not the real. It meant the second was not an imposter. It meant the second would stay.

Melanie’s head snapped up. “I don’t know how it happened,” she said. “I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know how it happened.”

Darcy scooped Melanie into her arms. They didn’t have to know.

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II

The girl’s staying meant deception (small town, nosy neighbors, visions of tabloid vultures and predatory scientists descending), but No. 2 was easy to hide — no Social Security, no public school, no paper trail. Darcy knew immediately that No. 2 would have to remain inside, out of sight, but it took a couple days before Darcy considered that other important matter: the name. She let the thought fly out of her mouth the moment it came, but Melanie told her not to worry, she’d already named the girl Kaitlyn. In its commonness, Kaitlyn seemed a suitable name, and Darcy imagined laughing at any passersby who inquired: No, no, that’s Kaitlyn. Melanie’s cousin? From out of town? They do look a lot alike, don’t they?

If anyone were to insist they were identical, Darcy decided, she would direct them to the three-inch scar on Melanie’s inner right elbow, a light red swoop that showed whenever she wore short sleeves, which was all the time, with the heat. She’d gotten the scar as a toddler, when she tried to pick up a feral cat. She knew it didn’t have a home, and she just wanted to take care of it. She didn’t know there were limits to the help one could offer such a creature.

When school resumed, Darcy watched Kaitlyn during the day, blinds pulled as the girl read or drew or wandered about the house. She gave no sign of being anyone other than Melanie, out taking tests and playing soccer and going to friends’ houses. Whatever Melanie learned, Kaitlyn knew as well. Whatever Melanie could do, so could Kaitlyn. When Melanie came home with a story about a classmate who’d accidentally ricocheted the soccer ball off a post and into the coach’s head, Kaitlyn broke in and helped tell it. The air was charged with the tumble of their words, each girl rushing toward the story’s high point, a rare moment of competition, of conflict. Then, the girls stopped and stared one another down until Melanie blinked away her glare and said Kaitlyn could finish the story. She did, grinning first triumphantly and then with glee, a glee that spread to Melanie as she listened.

Darcy remembered the birdcall, short-lived, tapering off after only a few minutes of Darcy’s cradling. After one night together, Kaitlyn (had she already been named?) in a sleeping bag on the floor, Darcy was always finding the girls laughing and whispering and settling into comfortable silences. It was as though Kaitlyn had always been there, waiting invisibly for an invitation to step forward.

Darcy called her supervisor at the environmental nonprofit and arranged for time off, then for a work-from-home deal. She’d been meaning to ask anyway, she told herself, for the convenience, the savings in time and gas money, although she could never remember actually thinking about it. But it was still a good idea. She didn’t need to go out that often; she had few friends and no relatives in the area, and all her shopping could be done online.

They were eight weeks into their new life when No. 3 showed up.

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III

What was her responsibility? Darcy often wondered to the point of sleeplessness. One, two, three were chance rolls of the dice; she easily could have ended up with twins or triplets, and really, could she have asked for daughters who got along better than those three? The thought was encouraging, normalizing enough that she’d even taken Melanie and Kaitlyn and Sarah on the two hours’ drive to the beach, soaking in the cold October sun and trying to convince herself the stares from other families were admiring rather than suspicious or hostile. Still, she packed up the umbrellas and towels and children before the sun was anywhere near the horizon.

But then the fourth came, and a fifth, with the sixth and seventh right behind. Six daughters in her house, then almost immediately seven, the same number of girls as billions of people on the planet. What would this do to the Earth? The question unspooled across Darcy’s days and nights, filling her dreams with endless replicas of Melanie. They were ants crawling across the writhing body of a dying worm, so many they blotted out the thing they overtook, the thing Darcy couldn’t bear to look at in its suffering.

Melanie was creating them. But maybe they all created each other; maybe each girl was equally likely to spawn the next iteration, with no way of knowing who led to whom. Darcy was determined to accept it — the uncertainty, the newness, the hard lump in her throat whenever she considered how unsustainable this was. She prayed the Serenity Prayer. She ordered used copies of books on Buddhism for Western audiences, not the real thing but just enough to point her in the direction of care — for the girls, for the Earth, for herself so she could keep caring.

She considered scouring the Internet (were there others like her daughters?), but it was too risky. If there were others, the FBI or the NSA or another jumble of governmental letters must know already and be on the lookout for people foolish enough to leave online traces of these extra lives. So any others were as well hidden as the girls were, silent and unobtrusive, their carbon footprints invisible to their fellow travelers yet certainly felt by the ground beneath their feet. Those footprints were stomping a hole in the environment, Darcy knew; what she didn’t know was how long it would take before all of them kicked straight through, rending whatever invisible life-giving forces sustained them.

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IV

They took turns going to school, since the girls — eight, then suddenly eleven, then thirteen — all needed to socialize. They didn’t ask Darcy. She might never have known if an unreasonable silence hadn’t wrapped around the house, a silence Darcy was grateful for in its practicality before she thought to become suspicious. But when she took Melanie aside, there was no looking away, no scuffing of shoes against the increasingly worn carpet: she simply told Darcy they all had to get out of the house. It was like things had always been between Darcy and Melanie — honest, relaxed, without drama. Darcy let it go. Whatever schedule the girls had decided among themselves clearly worked. Although they were certainly not self-sufficient, with Darcy applying for assistance and scouring food banks and swiping the occasional neglected purse, the daughters were self-governing, a school of fish operating as one.

Melanie’s first period came. Fourteen other girls’ periods came too. Darcy couldn’t keep up with it — the clogged toilets, the loads of laundry, the emergency runs to the convenience store. She went alone, returning with whatever assortment of pads and tampons had been available. Some of the girls were too scared to use the tampons and had to use toilet paper because there were never enough pads.

And then, six days later, it was over. It would happen again in twenty-some days, but Darcy basked in the relief. From now on, she would plan for this to happen. It could never again be this bad.

Then, one morning in early November, Nos. 7, 10, 12, and 15 (not even the newest addition, that being 18) hopped the same bus into the city, riding bareheaded under the cloudless sky. Darcy had no idea they had even left, had no idea anything was wrong until, in the midst of an afternoon of reading and drawing and board games, all the girls screamed — one sudden, urgent note. Then, the sound broke up into crying and sniffling and more screaming. Darcy ran to each of them, staring into the same blank, terrified face over and over until a hand touched her arm. Then Melanie was explaining that Nicole was dead. It was a speeding car around a corner, none of them had been looking, but don’t worry, everyone else took off when it happened, nobody was caught, don’t worry, don’t worry.

Darcy couldn’t remember which one Nicole was. It felt harsh just to think it. But “which one she was” didn’t matter; she knew Nicole as well as she knew Kaitlyn or Sarah or —

Not Melanie. Darcy wrapped her daughter in a hug to stifle what she’d almost thought. That stranger was not Melanie.

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V

Darcy waited until the next day to buy a pistol. She never thought she’d need one, but with a dead girl lying on a cold slab and looking for all the world like Melanie, it was only a matter of time before people came banging down her door. Some of them would be the wrong kinds of people. The thought prolonged her errand, and she ended up making two purchases: the gun and a farm on the outskirts of town. Its owner looked way past seventy, and a few mentions of eminent domain and grasping adult children got her an affordable hiding place for her twenty-some girls. It wasn’t that she had stopped counting; she just didn’t know when she had to count again.

Darcy had always experienced the world as a wild, pulsing thing. She had little idea of how to tame it and would have sworn Melanie knew even less. But within a week, the half-neglected garden out front was weeded, the fallow back fields were seeded with winter crops, and the basement held an assortment of cleaned jars to be filled with pickles and preserves. Darcy’s browser history turned up new searches: pests in corn fields, when strawberries are in season, how long for blight to heal.

Then the girls’ periods returned. All the toilets clogged, then overflowed. There was always a line at the outhouse. Darcy made her customary run to the convenience store (a longer drive now) and returned with far less than they needed. Somehow she had forgotten the inevitable rise in their numbers — thirty-three now. And there was no reason to think there wouldn’t be fifty, seventy, a hundred girls next month, needing more and more and more.

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VI

Darcy waited for the end of the week; that wait cost her four more girls. Then, she assembled a nanny-cam-style teddy bear and set it in the living room, where the girls slept in a jumble of sleeping bags and blankets. She didn’t tell Melanie. This was something Darcy needed to solve on her own. Even the Buddha would understand that she couldn’t let this mistake continue.

She hated thinking of the thirty-seven girls scattered around the farmhouse as mistakes. They ran the place almost without Darcy’s input, entirely without quarrelling. It was a mistake only in the sense that their harmony put the rest of humanity to shame.

But Darcy couldn’t take it back. The girls were mistakes.

This could go on forever.

This couldn’t go on forever.

Daylight cracked the blinds. Darcy’s eyes were barely open slivers. She should go to bed — fake an illness, tell a half-truth about insomnia. She could watch again the next night.

But a new girl could appear at any moment. There was no pattern; Darcy couldn’t predict the next arrival. The girl could present herself at midnight in the center of the sleeping bags or just after breakfast in the cornfield.

A thud sounded overhead. It came from the empty upstairs bedroom — a wild animal, a burglar, someone who knew too much. Darcy grabbed the pistol, took the safety off, and headed up the stairs. Her heart thumped in her throat for one awful moment before she flung open the door.

Melanie rummaged in the closet, her back to Darcy. She took a thick blanket down from the top shelf, standing on tiptoe, her body a frozen moment in time. When she settled back on her heels and stepped away, another girl stood in the spot Melanie had just left. She held the same pose as the original, her arms extended, her body stretched toward the shelf where the blanket had been. Then she too stepped back from the closet.

“It’s like they unfold.”

Melanie’s voice, tight with guilt. Darcy wrenched her gaze from the newest girl and made herself look at Melanie.

“Or like a shadow peels off.” She was eyeing Darcy, eyeing the gun.

Darcy made herself ask the question she had avoided since summer: “Do they come only from you?”

Melanie nodded.

And there it was: the only way forward. Darcy raised the pistol. It had to be done. One way forward, straight forward, don’t think, hurry up and do it, don’t think about trauma or disaster or aftermath, don’t look at the cliffs on either side, just look at the planet, spinning toward disaster, but she can save it, one way forward, one way out…

Melanie shoved past Darcy. Darcy’s finger jerked against the trigger, and the gun fired, the bullet tunneling into the drywall. No. 38 screamed, her hands flying to her ears, her gaze riveted to Darcy, who tried to look but couldn’t. It was like looking into the sun.

+

VII

Winter came and went, sliding into a spring that heated the world into a steaming, soggy mess. Somehow summer was worse, the steam gone, the landscape feeling like the desert it would certainly become just one decade later, two decades at most.

Melanie never returned. She’d bolted out of the room, out of the house, and as far as Darcy knew, she’d kept on running.

Seventeen of the girls left. Twenty-one stayed. Their numbers never increased. The farm had enough room for all of them, more than enough, given their lower, fixed population and how industrious they were: constructing outbuildings, planting new crops, trapping and cooking the rabbits that wandered into the gardens. Sometimes Darcy overheard chatter and the occasional burst of laughter. Once every few weeks a sudden gasp would ripple through them or silence would cut them short mid-sentence, and Darcy remembered Nicole. What else could happen to such young girls alone in the world? But whenever Darcy approached, the girls looked past her. They had closed their circle.

The twenty-one wouldn’t have to venture into the forest to fend for themselves. They wouldn’t have to split into packs, to avoid the US Army or CIA, bounty hunters or vigilantes. They wouldn’t have to steal or kill or whore themselves out to live. But all of that awaited the seventeen — and all the other girls that Melanie couldn’t help but pour out into the world.

Sometimes Darcy regretted bringing the pistol to Melanie’s room. Sometimes she regretted her hesitation. She wasn’t strong enough to fire, wasn’t strong enough to pretend doing the hard thing was possible. One day, someone else might find that hard thing easier than she ever could.

She preferred to consider what calculus had gone into the girls’ split decision. Had they discussed it? Had they even needed to? Perhaps those who had left simply ran into the night, homing in on Melanie like moths to a flame. Perhaps they scattered, but Darcy doubted it. They were meant to be together, as linked by geography as by DNA, and now they were permanently cleaved — apart from the whole, yet none entirely alone. It made both decisions, to stay and to leave, however the girls had reached them, seem easy and right. The girls, at least, still might have the option of right decisions.

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