Blue was horrified. Only parents feed inchoate penguins. She gulped down the last of her fish and then scuttled away. Prestige was one thing but living with a mate who couldn’t mate was another.

****

Amal offered a new conjecture. She suggested that the women had involuntary become medical guinea pigs. Weeks before she and her coterie had noticed their state of flowering, Amal had accidentally collided with a pharmacist. That pharmacist was walking through the locked hospital ward, where Amal’s sister was a nurse. Maybe, that drug doc had not meant to dispense medications, but to surreptitiously test a rare gonadotropin.