The notice arrived on a Tuesday, the way bad news always did — slipped between a grocery delivery confirmation and a reminder about her dental appointment, as if the Bureau of Reproductive Services had calibrated its communications to be as mundane as possible.

TIER 3 RECLASSIFICATION — OKAFOR, GRACE A. — REPORT DATE: 14 MARCH 2147

She read it twice. Then she set her coffee down very carefully on the kitchen counter and stood for a moment looking at the rain running down the window of her seventh-floor apartment in what remained of Vancouver.

She'd known it was coming. Everyone knew the tiers, the same way they knew the ratios. After the Contraction Wars — three regional conflicts over seventeen years that had, among other things, reduced the global male population by sixty-two percent — the math had become inescapable. The Rebirth Act of 2131 had codified what the math required. Every woman of reproductive age was assigned a fertility designation. Tier 1: actively pregnant or recently delivered. Tier 2: enrolled in the standard program, showing progress. Tier 3: referred to the Accelerated Program for enhanced intervention.

Grace was twenty-seven years old. She had been in Tier 2 for fourteen months, attending the standard clinic twice monthly, taking the supplements, logging her cycles in the Bureau's biometric app. She had done everything correctly. Her body had, apparently, not gotten the memo.

She was a data analyst. She understood percentages. She understood that the Accelerated Program had a documented conception rate of seventy-eight percent within six months, compared to thirty-one percent for Tier 2. The Bureau called this a success story. Grace called it what it was: a schedule, a protocol, and monitoring that would leave very little of her reproductive life to herself.

The notice included a document titled Your Enhanced Fertility Initiative: What to Expect. She didn't open it that evening. She poured herself something stronger than coffee and watched the rain, and thought about the word expect and how it could mean two entirely different things depending on who was using it.

She reported on a Tuesday, because of course she did.

The Fertility Center on Granville occupied what had once been a private hospital. It had that quality still — clean floors, soft institutional lighting, staff in pale grey uniforms moving with the particular efficiency of people who have stopped noticing that what they manage is intimate. A receptionist with very good cheekbones checked Grace's biometric ID and directed her to Suite 4.

"Your Intake Coordinator will be with you shortly," the receptionist said. "Can I offer you water, or—"

"Water," Grace said. "Please."

She sat in a room with chairs that were designed to be comfortable and chairs that were designed to be forgettable, and these were both.