Flashback ( PDFDrive )

Sophie nodded. “You made it sound like eggs weren’t really a part
of it.”
“They’re not,” Tarina agreed. “At least not the way you might be
picturing them. Our young do not develop inside any sort of shell, like
birds or reptiles. Instead the process is much closer to marsupials.
And what I mean by that is, our babies are born at an incredibly early
stage—but instead of moving to a pouch to develop, they’re implanted
into a hive, where they can finish developing and grow to a proper
size.”
“A hive,” Sophie repeated, her mind immediately conjuring up
images of giant beehives filled with thousands of unborn trolls
thrashing around inside honeycomb shells waiting to burst into the
world as violent newborns—and she really hoped her brain was wrong.
“So . . . you’re thinking we’d put Silveny’s babies into the hive and let
them finish growing in there?”
Tarina nodded. “The hive should be able to provide them with
everything they need to reach viability.”
“Okay, so . . . how do we do that?” Sophie wondered. “We can’t
move Silveny—”
“No, we’ll need to retrieve two of our transport pods.”
“Transport pods.” Sophie knew she needed to stop repeating
everything Tarina was saying like a parrot. But her brain seemed to
require that extra second to process.
“Think of them like portable wombs,” Tarina told her. “Something
our scientists invented in order to ensure that every baby reached the
hive with enough time to be safely implanted with the rest of the
colony. Before them, we used to lose a few babies every year. It’s
strange how nature sometimes isn’t enough, don’t you think? Strange