For a few weeks everything's like she planned. She gets the baby out, makes her escape, and comes in for a landing at Desert Rose. Demonstrates to the madam a few skills and nods earnestly about extending them to male patrons. Plenty of the other whores have babies and trade them around. She feeds Khatijah and her co-workers' babies and her co-workers do too. She feeds herself, working, though she's off the full-service list while she heals. Sucking customers off is - easy, actually? She was expecting it to be worse somehow but actually it's easy. She was already ruined anyway.

Khatijah gets sick. Can't keep milk down. Spitups turn into fountains of bile, it's impossible to keep her rear clean, and eventually she's too listless to even nurse. Rabiah skips work evenings to lean over her till her spine is screaming, squirting milk into Khatijah's uncooperative little mouth, and it won't stay down, and Khatijah just withers away, Rabiah's hands leaving imprints on her graying skin, and one day she won't wake up and not long after that she won't breathe.

Rabiah's co-workers with babies have mostly already lost one or two but Rabiah hasn't, and she's out of her mind with it, screaming at anyone who tries to talk to her, sobbing uncontrollably when someone suggests she could at least take more babysitting hours if she's not going to keep it together for customers, finally shuffled into laundry duty. She mindlessly shuffles hampers full of sheets and dancing costumes and lingerie to and from the nearest laundry wizard. One day she's out of tears. The laundry wizard says she can keep the coin the madam gave her to pay for doing the laundry if he can have a freebie and, sure, why not. It's easy. It's always been easy and that's the problem, isn't it. She tucks the coin in her shoe. Goes back to Desert Rose. Goes back to work. She could throw herself on her parents' mercy, now that it's just her, but would they even take her at this point? If they did would it even be better?

She doesn't like drunk customers but she can't be picky. One of these days it might get her killed but so would starving.

One of these days it gets her killed.