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Five–year–old Barbara sat at the head of the party table, wrapped up tight in a yellow taffetta dress and frowning across the room at her mother and Miss Sibyl and the other lady, who kept talking talking talking instead of bringing over the presents. "I'm going to have a temper," she thought. Her friend Clara never had tempers because she was special.

Right at this moment Clara sat peacefully with her hands folded in front of her, smiling. Clara had turned six two weeks ago, but she and Barbara were celebrating their birthdays together at Barbara's house on account of their mothers being so close (also because Clara's mom was tired from just having a big saving–babies meeting at her house). Clara wore thick little glasses that wrapped around her head. She had a hearing aid, too, and she still couldn't talk as much as other six– year–olds, even though she'd been practicing a lot. She'd had an accident when she was born, and it was a bad doctor's fault, not hers (it wasn't that she was dumber than Barbara, or that she disobeyed or anything like that). Clara said she was scared sometimes about going to the doctor, but her mother told her that bad doctors didn't treat big children and that he lived a long way from Maryland, anyway.

Barbara and Clara were excited because Barbara's new baby sister Annika had already had the very same kind of accident! The bad doctor had done it to her, too. She had a little pink cast on one of her feet, and every now and then it poked up in the air over her fluffy stroller and waved around like a balloon. That made Clara and Barbara giggle. Clara had wanted a sister so much, only her mother didn't have her a daddy to get her one, so how would she get one unless a bad doctor did an accident on another? But Barbara didn't like the baby thatmuch anyway and was pretty happy to share.

Down the two sides of the birthday table sat fourteen other children; if Rose had been here, she'd have recognized a few of them from the weekend meeting. They were children of staff members and volunteers. She might not have noticed that one little boy was the very child she'd seen in the picture at Joseph Corbin's office (the child who'd carried that ugly sign at the pro–life rally). His mother now stood in the corner with Barbara's mother and Sibyl, chattering rapidly with her front teeth propped on her bottom lip.

She was passionate about something: anybody could have seen that. She wore a lace cap and a black skirt with a plain white blouse. Corbin had been wrong in guessing that she was a Mennonite. She and her husband belonged to no particular religious group. They had formed their own church and adopted ten children, who accounted for most of their congregation. She'd just come back from a protest in Iowa and had photographs to show—pictures of flowers and cows but also photographs of herself being arrested for crossing a clinic buffer zone in order to talk to a young pregnant woman going in.

Sibyl knew that her brother Jim and Jenny and a lot of other mainstreamers thought of people like this as "extremists" or "on the fringe." She had lately decided, though, that there was no such thing as "a fringe" when it came to fighting abortion. Talking about a "fringe" implied that the anti–abortion movement was like a banner, hemmed up with clear borders except where the occasional fray broke out. But Sibyl had begun to see that the movement was a living thing, and that it would grow where and how it needed to in order one day to protect all the little ones like Clara and Annika, as well as to make sense of the loss of the seventeen million—seventeen million!—other children already dead at the hands of the enemy (otherwise known as doctors, tissue harvesters, liberal lawmakers, atheist intellectuals, media stars … ) No law could stop the movement from growing, no human outcry could silence it, because God was at the root.

In the last six months Sibyl had experienced no less than five supernatural visions. Stretched out on her bed at night, alone, listening to the beat of her own heart, she had repeated this prayer: "Lord, protect your precious ones through me, Lord protect your precious ones through me, protect your precious ones through me." She had always been a rational woman for the most part, in spite of believing in tongues and healing and the other more exotic gifts of the Spirit. So the first vision had surprised and shocked her—an angel coming down and touching her forehead with a white hot finger.

The angel said, "Their cries have reached my ears. You must go."