When Maria stepped into the circle of orange light beside the forge the world tightened around him. She stood six feet away and was fully illuminated. Dirt streaked her cheeks while her hair clung damply to the sides of her face. Her shoulders trembled faintly as if she questioned her right to breathe the same air as him. Ethan’s eyes went to her face first. She looked drawn and older from six-seven months of surviving this hellscape. And then there was the wound. Fresh. Barely scabbing over.

  The wound looked like a glowing laceration. It was jagged and wet. Resin pushed faint red light through the torn fabric where the plates or her armor hadn’t protected her. Every throb matched the rhythm he’d heard in the caves, the beating that guided the building and rebuilding of its maze. He felt something slip loose inside him. His gaze drifted lower. She had lowered the plating, revealing the silhouette of her stomach. The other secretshe had been hiding now revealed in the forge’s glow. It was rounded and moving.

  Seven months since their last night together. His breath fled his lungs like a blow to the ribs. He reached back blindly and steadied himself against the forge. The hot metal seared his palm before his mind even registered the pain. Maria stood still and steady. She looked like someone afraid that any shift might shatter whatever fragile thing existed between them.

  “Ethan,” she whispered.

  It was simply her voice, quiet and real. He tried to answer. The first attempt was a dry sound in his throat. The second came out worse, half breath and half disbelief. He pointed at the wound on her shoulder and then at her stomach. His hand shook.

  “How...” He stopped. “When...”

  The questions failed to form. Each one carried too much weight. Maria swallowed. Her eyes glistened in the forge’s light.

  “It happened yesterday. The wound.” She hesitated and braced herself against the heat behind her. “The rest... I’ve been carrying since before my team landed here.”

  The forge hummed softly beside them. Ethan stared. He tried to align the last six months of fear with the person standing in front of him. The math broke apart instantly. Every memory fractured and reassembled in new shapes. He remembered the night before the launch, the injections, the promises of Celestitech’s medical protocols that would supposedly keep them safe.

  “You’re...” He exhaled sharply, voice unsteady. “You’re pregnant. And infected. Fuck.”

  Maria lowered her gaze. She looked exhausted on a deep, marrow-level.

  “I didn’t know until after we lost the first base. After Brown...” Her voice thinned but didn't break. “I couldn’t let Thorne or Jettison see. I couldn't risk anyone taking him from me.”

  The room shifted again like gravity tilting underfoot. A soft chime broke the silence.

  CelestOS: Operator, your biometrics indicate elevated cardiac stress. Would you like to initiate a calming visualization exercise?

  Ethan closed his eyes and breathed through his teeth. “Not now.”

  CelestOS: Understood. Logging emotional distress for future survey opportunities.

  Maria gave a faint, tired huff that might have been a laugh. Ethan stepped forward slowly as if approaching something fragile. He lifted a hand toward her shoulder, stopped short of the wound, and let his palm drift lower. When he touched her stomach, she stiffened before melting into the contact. Her breath caught. His fingers spread slightly, unsure and reverent. A soft thump pressed back against his hand. A small kick proved the child was real and here. Maria’s eyes met his. They held fear but also hope.

  Ethan realized he’d stepped back when his shoulders hit the cool metal of the conveyor frame behind him. The forge’s glow washed over Maria. It caught the bruises beneath her eyes and the chapped skin at her lips. She sat on the nearest crate with a slow, controlled exhale. Her body seemed done pretending it was stronger than it was. His mind felt frozen, like machinery trying to turn with sand in the gears. Maria watched him quietly. Her hands rested against her thighs and the faint tremble in her fingers was the only sign she was still holding herself together by willpower alone.

  The forge crackled. A single drip echoed somewhere deeper in the tunnel. Ethan braced a hand against the conveyor and closed his eyes. He finally gave his brain permission to catch up. The memories came all at once. They slammed into him with the force of a dropped crate.

  They were still on Luna Base then, tucked in the cramped crew dorms where everything smelled faintly of recycled air and ammonia wipes. Outside the tiny window, the regolith fields stretched gray and endless under a black sky scattered with motionless stars. Maria’s duffel sat packed by the door, the Perseverance launch patch bright against the dull metal floor.

  Ethan lay beside her on the narrow bunk with the blanket half kicked off from the heat of their bodies. Maria’s arm was tucked under his and her leg anchored across his hip like she feared gravity might give up and drag him away. Her breath traced warm rhythms along his collarbone. He remembered thinking that nothing in space felt as alive as she did in that moment.

  They lay in silence at first. Silence was the language they used when emotions felt too large to name. After a long stretch, she spoke into his chest.

  “I wish you were coming with me.”

  He ran his fingers through her hair and let the strands fall between them like thin threads of copper. “I wish they’d let me.”

  “You’re overqualified,” she said with a tired smile. “They wanted someone who wouldn’t argue about protocol every five minutes.”

  “You say that like arguing was a flaw.”

  She pinched his side lightly. “It is when you argue with mission control.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I argued accurately.”

  She smiled at that, a real one that was slow and warm. It made something in his chest loosen. He felt her nerves thrumming like a taut wire underneath the calm. The Perseverance launch was tomorrow. He had to stay behind on Luna Base and watch her walk into a sealed world he could never enter.

  Maria shifted closer and nestled her head under his chin. Her hand traced the outline of his ribs in the familiar, grounding pattern she used whenever her thoughts got too loud.

  “Do you think we’ll miss this?” she asked softly.

  He tilted his head to look at her. “The bunk? If the ship bunks resemble this one, you’ll miss personal space more.”

  She nudged him with her knee. “I meant us. This.”

  His throat tightened. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I think we will.”

  She lifted her head to meet his eyes. “Promise me something?”

  “Anything.”

  “When I’m gone... don’t disappear or drift. Live your life. Don’t wait around for me like the world is on pause.”

  He refused to promise that. Instead, he pulled her in and kissed her.

  She pressed her forehead to his. “I don’t want to say goodbye.”

  “Then we won’t.”

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  “Ethan...”

  He cupped her cheek. “We’ll call it a pause. A long, annoying pause. When you get back, you can yell at me for all the things I inevitably screwed up while you were gone. But I’m not going to move on. I gave you that ring for a reason.”

  She let out a soft laugh that caught on something fragile. “You’re impossible.”

  They held each other until the lights dimmed further. The automated base lighting tried to mimic a sunset they hadn't seen in years. Maria’s breathing evened out against him. He stayed awake long after she fell asleep and memorized the shape of her shoulder and the curl of her fingers around his shirt. Morning meant she walked into a future he wasn't allowed to follow.

  A nagging thought crept him back to reality. His voice cracked when he finally spoke. “The preflight meds... Maria... they said it was impossible to be pregnant after taking them.”

  She accepted the accusation without trying to soften it. She simply looked tired, like someone who had carried this truth alone for far too long.

  “Celestitech said a lot of things,” she said. “Most of them weren’t true.”

  She laced her fingers together to ground herself. “I realized two months after we landed,” she said softly. “I was sick. I felt exhausted all the time. I thought I caught some alien bug. Brown kept telling me to rest. Thorne was already seeing things.” Her jaw tightened. “Nothing made sense. Everything was falling apart.”

  She paused for breath. Ethan suddenly understood the full cruelty of her situation. She had been surrounded by collapse, fear, and paranoia while carrying a child in the middle of it. Their child.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “If Thorne had found out, he would have lost it. Jettison... I don’t know what he would have done.” Her voice thinned. “I hid it because it was the only thing I had left that felt like hope.”

  Ethan’s chest knotted. He ran a hand across his face and tried to steady the shaking breath building behind his ribs. The guilt crawled up fast and tightened around him like vines. He could picture every moment he’d wasted. He had cursed the cave, the resin, and the silence while she was out there starving herself to feed someone who didn't yet have a name.

  “If I had just...”

  He stopped. The rest stayed trapped in his throat. Maria reached out and took his wrist gently. She stopped the spiral before it swallowed him. Her hand felt cold and unsteady, but the grip was firm.

  “You didn’t do this to me,” she said. “Veslaya did. Celestitech did. But not you.”

  She held his eyes for a full heartbeat. “I survived. That’s what matters.”

  The room felt smaller. It was intimate in a way that cut deeper than anything they’d said. A soft, tone-perfect chime broke the moment.

  CelestOS: Operator, emotional agitation detected. Would you like a full-system biometric scan?

  The timing was impossibly precise. It seemed the AI had been waiting for the tension to crest. Ethan let out a long, uneven breath. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Actually... yes.”

  Maria hesitated not because she feared knowing the truth, but because she feared what it might do to him. Still, she nodded once and shifted on the crate. She worked the buckles around her collarbone loose with slow fingers. When she peeled the fabric aside, Ethan’s breath caught again. The wound looked worse up close. Resin glow bled under the skin in slow pulses. The heat radiating from it felt wrong. It was steady and alive. The edges were bruised in a deep, mottled pattern that suggested a blunt strike. The infection bloomed outward in thin, violent lines that looked like cracks in glass. She sat very still as he examined it. She had gone beyond fear into endurance. He stepped back, swallowed hard, and said it with a voice steadier than he felt.

  “CelestOS. Scan her.”

  Ethan stayed beside Maria as she shifted on the crate. She adjusted the torn collar of her suit so CelestOS could get a full view of the wound. Her fingers moved slowly to avoid brushing the angry, glowing edges of the resin-laced laceration spiraling across her shoulder. Even that small movement made her wince. She tried to hide it, but Ethan saw anyway. Harold huddled near the forge where Ethan had left him earlier. The bot gave a soft, uncertain chirp when Maria exposed the injury fully. His optic flickered a pale, anxious blue. Maria managed a weak smile in his direction, but her eyes were dull with fatigue.

  “It’s okay, buddy,” Ethan said, as he idly laid a hand on Harold. He wasn't sure if he meant it. Maria infected, and carrying their child. What could they even do at this point?

  A faint hum rose from above as CelestOS activated the scanner. Translucent blue grids shimmered into existence and swept down like cold light across Maria’s skin. They traced her collarbone, curved over the bruising that spread down her arm, and caught the resin glow in a sharp, clinical halo.

  CelestOS: Initiating CelestiMed? Diagnostic Sweep. Please remain still and avoid panicked breathing.

  Maria let out a low exhale that might have been a laugh if she weren’t so exhausted. “I’ll try.”

  Ethan crouched beside her. He braced one hand lightly against the crate near her back to steady her but was careful not to touch her anywhere near the wound. His chest tightened as the grids swept lower. They passed over the subtle curve of her stomach. The forge’s warm glow and CelestOS’s pale AR light mixed strangely across her skin. They cast deep shadows under her ribs and bright highlights across the rising swell of her pregnancy. The hum deepened. Data scrolled in clean white lines across the air. Ethan couldn’t read any of it fast enough, so he watched Maria instead. Her head tilted slightly back as she closed her eyes. She braced herself against whatever truth the AI would deliver. The scan paused.

  CelestOS: Fetal biometric evaluation complete.

  Maria’s eyes opened slowly. Ethan didn’t dare breathe.

  CelestOS: Fetal heartbeat stable. Growth rate within normal variance. System clear of contamination and abnormal cellular patterns. Nutrient siphoning efficiency: high. Maternal metabolic reserves: critically depleted.

  Maria sagged forward an inch. Her shoulders shook as she released a breath she’d been holding since the night she realized she was pregnant. Relief softened her features, but exhaustion crept around the edges immediately afterward. Ethan reached out and steadied her knee with a gentle touch.

  “Healthy,” he whispered, more to himself than to her. “The child is... healthy.”

  Maria nodded. Her lips trembled once before she forced them still. CelestOS did not pause.

  CelestOS: Commencing infection analysis.

  The AR grids drifted back toward her shoulder and intensified around the raw, pulsing wound. The resin glow brightened against the blue. It reacted almost defensively to the scanning field. Ethan leaned closer with a tight jaw. Maria held still and her breath was shallow.

  CelestOS: Surface-Level Resinosis detected. Classification: Type B-7. Aggression level: high. Expansion rate: zero-point-four millimeters per hour.

  Ethan’s heart hammered against his ribs. Maria shut her eyes again slowly. She seemed to have expected the verdict.

  CelestOS: Infection has not yet entered the bloodstream or major lymphatic pathways. It remains bound to dermal and subdermal tissue. Infection origin: external trauma.

  “That’s good,” Ethan said too quickly. He gripped the crate to keep his voice steady. “It’s good. It hasn’t spread far. Maybe your immune system is working over time.”

  Maria didn’t answer, but CelestOS wasn’t finished.

  CelestOS: Projected time until systemic infiltration: four to six days, given current progression rate.

  The world seemed to shrink around that single number. She had four to six days. Ethan swallowed hard and tried to force his thoughts into order. Maria looked toward him with a dim, resigned composure. She had lived with the wound long enough to sense its danger. Ethan shook his head. He refused the implication. “We won't let that happen,” he said quietly. “We'll stop it before then.”

  Maria pressed her lips together. Her voice came out faint. “Ethan...”

  CelestOS cut in with clinical enthusiasm.

  CelestOS: Treatment requires a functioning UV-C sterilization module, sterile environmental chamber, temperature regulation within half a degree Celsius, and medical-grade airflow.

  Ethan looked at the bare metal walls, the half-finished conveyors, and the exposed wiring in the shadows. The room lacked those necessities. It was too dirty. He whispered, “Well, there's no way were doing that.”

  CelestOS: Correct.

  Maria bowed her head. Ethan felt something twist inside his chest. Anger, fear, and determination surged at once. She looked so drained and thin. Her strength had been burned away by months of surviving for two. She spoke softly.

  “I wasn’t hiding anything. I just… didn’t have time to fall apart until now.”

  Ethan breathed out slowly and reached forward, lifting her chin with gentle fingers so she couldn’t look away. “You’ve been holding the world together by yourself,” he said quietly. "Now its time to do things together.

  Her eyes glistened. She blinked hard to hold the tears back. CelestOS displayed a three-dimensional model of the infection in midair. It showed a pulsing outline of the wound and the red branching patterns beneath it. Ethan stood slowly. The forge’s glow caught half of his face while the AR light lit the other. He stared at the projection the way he studied a broken generator. He was already breaking down the parts, the requirements, and the risks. Maria whispered his name once. Fear and hope tangled together in her voice. Ethan didn’t look away from the projection.

  “We can treat this,” he said. “We will. We just need to find more Veslayan ore. It cured me. It can cure you.”