There were no windows in Womb Sector Nine.There hadn't been windows in any of the sectors since the sun became property of the vampires.
Even the walls here were mute, smooth metal lined with surveillance nodes and nutrient tubes. Air pumped through the vents in rhythmic sighs. Artificial warmth glowed from the floor. Everything smelled of bleach and old blood. Even the girls.
Charlotte — once called Lottie, when names still mattered — had long forgotten how many days she'd been alive.
There were no clocks in Sector Nine.No calendars.Only cycles. Dosage cycles. Breeding cycles. Elimination cycles.
She sat on the edge of her cot in silence, hands curled in her lap, legs tucked under her thin cotton gown. Her cell, like the others, was twelve feet by twelve, with one retractable cot, one drain in the floor, and one sliding door that never made noise when it opened. It simply blinked red when someone entered. Blinked green when they left.
Lottie had never seen the lights, of course. But she knew the difference by the way the air moved.
She didn't remember what color looked like, but she imagined the red light felt heavy.
She was marked for termination.
Not because she rebelled. Not because she bit a handler or screamed during the evaluations. Those girls were removed early. Loud girls didn't last.
No — Lottie's crime was quieter.
She had failed to carry.Failed to produce.Failed to be useful.
She'd been too weak for implantation. Her blood hormone levels never rose. Her biometric scans stayed flat and uninterested. They'd tried three times to restart her cycle. She had hemorrhaged the second attempt. Bled silently for hours. The nurse assigned to monitor her pulse had simply logged the data and moved on.
By the third failure, her chart was stamped with a gray mark. Unviable.
Lottie didn't cry. Not then. Not after.
She hadn't cried since she was twelve — since the blindness took the last bit of color from her world and left her with nothing but breath and texture and sound.
Now she had a date. Not a name.
She would be recycled by the end of the week. Her body drained. Her tissues processed. Her remains composted back into the nutrient tanks.
And still, she said nothing.
Outside her cell, the world roared and whimpered and starved. Whole cities had become farms. Humans were bred for blood, for labor, for wombs — and if they didn't fit into those three categories, they were marked for culling.
Lottie was one of thousands. And no one would notice when she was gone.
But that was the strange thing.
The girls in the sector cried. The ones with hope always did.Lottie never did. And no one ever noticed that she hummed.
It wasn't a real song. Just a quiet vibration in her throat — a habit left from childhood. When the dark felt too big, too loud, too sharp, she used to sing. Not for comfort. Just to prove she still had a voice.
She hummed now, too softly for the sensors to register.Just a breath, a murmur. A presence.
Something about it made the air in her cell feel less empty.Like she was still there.Like her soul hadn't been drained by the system.
When the guards passed her door that morning, they didn't even glance in.She was too broken to bother with. Her name didn't exist on the new breeding rosters. Her blood type was incompatible. Her womb was a failed experiment.
Lottie was no one.