4 ideas
In Green City, where surviving women must take several husbands and bear children for the state, a small group led by Lin escapes into a hidden underground refuge called the Panah. To survive, they go out at night to lie beside powerful men who pay for companionship and rest without sex. The plot turns when Sabine, one of these women, is stranded outside the refuge after a client visit and the network's secrecy begins to collapse.
When a population becomes scarce and essential, the state does not raise its status. It raises the stakes of controlling it. Once most women are dead, survivors are treated as a strategic national resource, so their bodies, marriages and fertility become matters of state policy rather than personal choice. Their rarity justifies surveillance and forced distribution instead of bargaining power.
The men who uphold a system of compulsory sex and reproduction privately pay for the one thing that system cannot give them: intimacy with no sexual or reproductive obligation. Their hidden demand creates a black market, and the market funds and shields the resistance. This reveals that the official order fails even the people who enforce it.
An escape network that survives by serving powerful clients gains protection and resources, but only as long as those patrons stay discreet and willing. That dependence makes it structurally fragile. A single exposure, mistake or withdrawal of patronage can unravel the whole refuge, because its safety was borrowed from the powerful rather than built independently of them.