Emotional engagement is not required or expected.

Maren Santiago counts things instead of feeling them.

Drinks.

Tips.

Steps between her apartment and the subway.

Eleven minutes in an elevator going three miles straight down.

She won the Decennial Carrier Lottery...which she never entere. Under the Kovalev-Chen Fertility Accords, participation is automatic, refusal is a treaty violation, and the Bureau of Interspecies Reproductive Compliance would like to congratulate her on her civic duty.

The pamphlet is reassuring and includes a FAQ.

Four to six hours.

A clutch of four to eight eggs.

Direct genital contact with the assigned drone.

Emotional engagement is not required or expected.

The pamphlet has no question for the drone.

Seven feet of iridescent chitin. Six amber eyes.

A species that has spent sixty million years three miles beneath the surface and has no word for blue because its world has never contained one. He touches her face like he is reading it. He makes a sound she can feel in her teeth.

He looks at her like she is the first sky he has ever seen.

The procedure is scheduled for four to six hours. Ninety-six hours later the Bureau arrives to extract her, and Maren looks at the woman with the clipboard and says "There's a sixth egg".

There is no sixth egg.