Adrian's hand presses on my back in a gesture that reminds me to keep walking, that we have no choice.

'Do you trust me?' Adrian whispers as we approach the counter.

The connotation bursts like a rain cloud. I'd trusted him enough to marry him, hadn't I?

'Name?'

Behind the glass screen, a middle-aged lady perches on a stool, her bouffant hair blocking the 'per' in 'Prosper' from the sign on the wall. I've fixated on those letters for half an hour. Until now they were the only things keeping me sane.

'Name?' she repeats, taking my queue slip from the tray.

'Jade Rose,' I say.

'Jade Lively-Rose,' Adrian adds, swiping his iD tag through the reader by the glass.

I throw an apologetic glance; it's been only a few days since our wedding. How could I be so stupid? Perhaps it's the guards' presence setting me on edge, though the word 'Prosper' is enough to infuse fear into my veins.

Three months ago, around the time I'd let Adrian take me to dinner at Chinos, I'd only just learnt about Prosper. I hadn't noticed The Clinic sitting on the edge of Camden Lock with seaweed-green moss rising from the giant stone arches. Plenty can change in three months. I am testament to that.

With her vision centred on the keyboard, bouffant-hair lady has not noticed the way my fingers tremble against the counter's metal skirt. Like most items in the room, her computer is aluminium grey, embossed with the City of London logo: three chrome lines tied together into a triangle. When I squint at it, it resembles an eye. Perhaps there's a camera sunk into the small ampersand in the seal's centre, measuring my shallow breaths.

'Age?' she says.

What? They aren't supposed to ask this.

'Twenty-one,' I say. A lie.

'We shouldn't need to do this,' Adrian says, his palms flat on the counter so his wedding band glints off the artificial strip lighting. 'The paperwork is done.'

'I'm sorry, Mr... Lively.' She peels off her glasses.

Despite wearing his best blazer, at five-foot-nine with only a hint of stubble, Adrian doesn't look a day older than his twenty years. His unconventional appeal is undeniable. He cocks his head, raises his eyebrow and wraps one arm behind my back in a motion that reinforces everything he's ever done. Protect and love. More than I could ever ask.

'I don't know what you were expecting, but as I explained to you when you walked in, you must queue. Now you're at the front of the line, you both need to give me your details so we can set you up a file and get your application started.'

'But that's what I've been trying to say, if you'd listened in the first place,' Adrian says, brushing his auburn hair off his face.

When she raises her eyebrows, I nudge his foot. He knows as well as the other applicants seated around the room the haste in which the security guards react. They crawl about this building like ants.

Everything, from the etched glass screen, the batons in the guards' hands, the camera domes in the corners of the room, the logoed carpet, reminds me of Mandy. Prosper's visit to our school had unhinged her to the point of standing in the middle of Marylebone Road shouting incoherently. Hell, the way Captain Maylord had spoken on the RV projector screen in the Banyard Building, before a hundred and eighty pupils, had unhinged us all. But not to the same degree. For when she stood in the rain facing oncoming traffic, her ebony hair whipped by the wind into erratic blades, I knew what she would do.

But The Clinic doesn't do testing. She was wrong. Here they help people. They'll help me.

Adrian's impatient glance finds me in the glass reflection. He has every right to scowl. I should speak up. We've practiced the script a thousand times.

'We're on the scheme,' he says to the lady behind the counter. 'We've done stage one and two, my wife's taken her Fertility and had the procedure.'

I pull at my coat, without thinking. There's no scar.

'Jade's pregnant, and we're here for our first scan.'

A scowl. She can see through the lies. She knows.

Once upon a time, pregnancy didn't happen just to the ones who excelled at Prosper's birthing tests and responded to the treatment. Before IVF became a necessity, childbirth was not the commodity it is today.

Two security guards stop at the doorway to watch us, making the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. They don't know, I tell myself, they won't check. But when the clerk catches my eye, I feel the truth leaking out in beads of sweat across my forehead.

'Say something, Jade,' Adrian murmurs as the lady says, 'You're not on the system.'

Before panic takes hold, she flicks a button. The smart-glass divide clouds until just the outline of her puffed up yellow-blonde hair and the City of London emblem filters across the screen. The colours blur. She's speaking to someone else now. Together they'll realise I'm lying and take me away.

Below the counter's metal rim, I twist my fingers together. Adrian's smile is now an uncertain frown, and his flushed skin has turned pale.

They say these clinics were once for medical intervention, back when pregnancy came naturally. There was no security before the attack on Dover Ferry Terminal. Instead, they sold pregnancy immunisation packages, and wealthy parents paid to choose the gender of their unborn children.

Not anymore.

Seventy-eight. That's the number of days since a naturally conceived baby was born. It shouldn't be such an issue, seeing as they developed a means to aid conception when the decline in natural fertility took hold. Yet it's clocked on the right corner of The Times' front page, rising day by day. Perhaps the loot lynched at Dover spearheaded this current obsession with making babies. Maybe it was always there.

The Clinic bears no reference to the Dover attack now. The only web of numbers shining out from the pamphlets by the doors are the success stories. Happy couples with chubby, dribbling infants swinging between their outstretched arms.

I glance behind at the couples waiting. Most are at the upper age of the spectrum, twenty-eight or twenty-nine—an age I expected to be when I applied. They are watching now with palpable desperation.

'It's not fair, Ade,' I whisper. 'Why aren't they running more tests on them?'

'You think they can do any more than they're doing?' Adrian squeezes my hand.

The tests started at school —lower sixth—scouring for the ones who can conceive. In hindsight, it's good I dropped out when I did. Mandy was selected, with her multi-sibling family. Exhibited. Made an example of. They say she'd spent time in Prosper being tested earlier this year. So Mandy said.

Is that why I'm here? Perhaps. Mandy was out of options. That's what she said.

I fumble with the iD tag around my neck as the frosting in the smart-glass drains away. I suck in a breath and straighten up, for my moment of truth has arrived. The judge and jury will decide.

'Okay,' bouffant-lady says. In her frown are layers of doubt. 'This is unusual. You're not on the system. Your iD tags aren't coming up. Nothing. It's strange, but not my problem.'

'Maybe because they're so new?' Adrian says. 'They only became mandatory in September.'

He means after Dover. Half the Draconian rules around here were only fast-tracked through Parliament after Dover.

'I can't book you in for an ultrasound,' she continues. 'I can't do anything. Wait for your correspondence in the post like everyone else.'

'But,' Adrian says. 'Jade—'

'In some countries, there's a queue until the next decade to get on this birthing programme,' she cuts in. Like we'd even consider going elsewhere even if the borders re-opened.

'Two years ago,' she continues, 'when only one in six women needed our services, we'd scan your pretty little wife same day and charged you double. But every single person in the country needs us now. And since your Prime Minister—the one you and all these people re-elected into power for some crazy reason—turned this Clinic into a National Health Service, we work at his behest. Everyone gets to apply for their one shot, and we cannot change the application rules, no matter who your daddy is, you understand?'

Now her attention shifts with her minuscule eyes narrowed. Although I spent hours applying makeup and straightening my long hair, I look too young. She can tell.

'Adrian,' I whisper. 'Lets go.'

We need to leave before the security guards question us both. Besides the two grey-clad men by the door, we passed another one in the corridor, two at the front entrance, and a security checkpoint in the car park. It's been this way since the bombings in Dover; everyone's on high alert. Our Fertility drugs are not valuable to just us Brits.

They say when the bullets rained on the white cliffs of Dover, it produced chalky smog so thick, it choked the border control guards as they tried to load their guns. By the time I'd got back from the Heath—alone and confused—Stuart's frown had taken permanent residence on the sofa. As did his clothes in my mother's wardrobe. The news station he was watching portrayed white plumes around the breached passport control centre and floating shards of glass which twinkled in the late afternoon sun. Darker cumulonimbus clouds rose out of grenade-sized pits, and ammunition ricocheted off steel and sunk into brick-like teeth in a sandwich.

After that they grounded aircraft, and the borders sealed. Just like that.

I scan the narrow windows—latched with break-glass hammers by fire exit call points. It's not an ideal escape route rain cloudin my condition.

Who am I kidding, walking into The Clinic with nothing but an arsenal of lies? The state controls babies now; they make the rules. Soon they'll realise my ovaries weren't treated like everyone else's. That I haven't taken Fertility to stimulate the release of an egg and it wasn't harvested for IVF. They'll know I'm different. And like Mandy's mother, when they realise, they'll pick my life apart one thread at a time until no measure of knitting can stitch me back together.

'Not even the green notes?' Adrian says. Last ditch attempt.

My eyes float over the green pile by the lady's side, standing tall and proud like a pruned hedge.

'Save you the hassle next time.'

'I'm sorry, until next time there's nothing I can do,' bouffant-hair lady says. Now she's put her bifocal glasses back on, and her fingers hover over the queue number machine.

As if to compound my disappointment, there's a gentle flutter within my swollen stomach. Beneath my oversized coat, even my unborn baby knows we've failed.

'If you'd please step aside, I have plenty of people to process.'

Like cattle.

We nod as we back away and then walk towards the door with our heads hung low.

I imagined higher ceilings, and split offices for private enrolment in a place like this, with long regal towers like Prosper's headquarters in Southampton. Though, as one of a hundred antenatal clinics across England, why would it be anything but a uniform silver square box?

'Why didn't you speak, Jade?' Adrian whispers. 'If we could have just gotten those green notes then we'd be able to register the whole thing. They wouldn't have known you were any different from the others. That would have been it. This whole fear you have about being taken away for testing would have gone away.'

'I know they take you away for testing if you can conceive naturally. Don't you remember what happened to Mandy's mother? Six months of trials. She was so freaked out over her mum's absence she became this... I don't know what you'd call it.'

'Weirdo.'

'Ade!' I stop and turn to face him. He doesn't recognise it was Mandy who drew us together. Indirectly. 'There were scars over her wrists, and I saw that bus hit her. I was there. Sometimes, when I'm lying in bed at night, in that limbo before sleep, that bus comes for me, too.'

I wipe my eyes. Pulling my woollen hat on, we resume the walk towards the exit where a fresh downfall of snowflakes is forming a crystal sheet over the car park. Twenty feet below, Regents Canal roars past Camden Lock. Adrian slides an arm around my shoulder in an embrace that should comfort me.

That's when the lady behind the counter shouts, 'Wait!'

This is it.

She's realised I'm too young, our iD tags are fake, I'm different, I'm a natural. A panic room springs to mind: a clean, metal box I will rot in for my sins, stamped on four sides with the Prosper emblem. My mother was right. When she visits me in their lab with irritating Stuart, she can tell me I have no one to blame but myself.

I turn to bouffant-hair lady, whose pen points at us from behind her glass divide. Adrian's hand touches my back, the epicentre of a dull pain that has been lingering for days; a pain growing inside me like weeds knotting together.

'Come back,' the lady says. 'Computer glitch. Your details have now come up on my computer. Let's book you in.'

Her words hover somewhere in the suspended tiled ceiling, and for a moment, I cannot move for fear my reaction will be overzealous.

'Jade, we're in,' Adrian mutters, nudging me forward.

We surge towards the lady holding a green pamphlet stamped with the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Logo, Prosper's logo, The Clinic's logo and a dozen other official bodies; promising to steal my darkest fears away.

Thanks for reading Chapter Two of Sever. Please hit like, vote or comment - I'd love to hear from you. You can follow Sever for updates when new chapters go live. Here's a recap of the cast list so far. Meantime, the next chapter is now live, so go ahead, take a read...

CAST LIST (new ones in bold)

Jade Lively - Lilly Collins (the protagonist)

Adrian Lively - Alex Pettyfer (Jade's husband)

Blue - Liam Hemsworth (the protagonist / anti-hero and Jade's ex-boyfriend)

Mikey Drosner - Jack Black (Blue's lawyer)

Detective Pike - Viola Davis (Blue's prosecutor)