The world was magnificent, and an insult.

  The grass was blue. Not a sickly blue, but a cobalt so deep and alive it looked as if the ground had been dyed. It sprang back under Christine’s boots with a soft, stubborn resilience that mocked the sterile floors of Terra. Everywhere she looked, the landscape was a riot of defiant growth. Orange alien flowers bloomed in the shade of towering bamboo stalks that clattered against one another like hollow bones in the light breeze.

  It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. It smelled of oxygen and damp soil, of life that did not need a life support system to keep breathing.

  But Callum’s voice sat behind her eyes, calm as a lecture, cruel as fact. She knew this beauty came with a cost.

  Seed Harvesting Protocol.

  He had told her how Eden’s gardens were grown. The aliens had harvested them from the bellies of the first human casualties, men and women who died with their last meals still inside them. They had sorted what the dead had swallowed, planted it, and harvested what grew.

  Christine had imagined orchards and bamboo raised somewhere on Eden. Instead, they were already growing here, already thriving, and already feeding people.

  Every blade of blue, every clattering stand of bamboo, every tree that bore fruit was an inheritance. A cemetery garden that did not know it was a grave.

  She forced herself to keep walking, but her heart raced ahead, already miles into the orchards. Her datapad felt heavy in her hand, a cold, clinical slab of tech that looked increasingly absurd in a world that had moved on to dirt and sweat.

  Behind her, the medical team filed off the transport, their boots thudding against the ramp. Five of them, carrying cases of collection kits and the portable genetic screening equipment Patrick had fabricated. They moved with the cautious, wide eyed hesitation of people seeing the sun for the first time in a year.

  Christine was already half turned, scanning the treeline.

  A wild, manic energy bubbled in her chest, a teetering excitement she had to swallow back so she would not start running. This was it. Not just a diplomatic mission, not just the Solace Integration.

  Him.

  Every breath of real air felt like a countdown.

  “Director Red?” One of the medical team touched her elbow, overwhelmed by the vastness of the blue horizon. “Where do we begin?”

  Christine blinked and forced her professional mask into place over the terrified joy threatening to split her open. She swallowed hard, pulse drumming against her throat.

  “The collection tents are in the orchard field,” she said, voice tight with the effort of staying grounded. “North side of the settlement. Screening stations first, then we open for volunteers. The building is for the ultrasound-guided egg harvest drones. Keep that room from being crowded.”

  She stepped forward, boots sinking into the cobalt grass.

  She was not walking toward a clinic.

  She was walking toward the end of the long dark.

  Every step was a second closer to Nathan.

  She checked the schedule one last time.

  Subject N-42 Appointment Specimen Collection 14:00.

  Christine left the intake tent and walked toward the collection booths. She told herself she was checking throughput. She told herself a director should observe workflow firsthand.

  She was lying; she wanted to be where Nathan was going to be. Alone, at the specimen booth.

  The corridor behind the booths was narrow, lined with humming refrigeration units. The back walls were thin canvas over a lightweight frame. Not designed for privacy. Designed for efficiency.

  She heard him before she saw him.

  A laugh. Low. Rough. Familiar enough to turn her bones to liquid.

  Nathan.

  Christine’s whole body locked. Her lungs stopped mid-breath. The sound of his laugh hit her nervous system like a shock, so violent her vision flashed white. She remembered that laugh with a kind of hunger. She had dreamed it. She had built entire days around the idea of hearing it again.

  And now it was here, real and full and close, exactly the same.

  Her hand found the wall. The canvas was thin enough that she could feel warmth on the other side.

  Then the laughter changed. It softened. Turned inward. Private. Intimate. And was joined by another.

  Fabric shifted. A woman’s voice slipped through the canvas, and the sounds that followed were unmistakable. Not a medical procedure. The rhythmic shift of weight on a chair not built for it. The wet urgency of mouths.

  She was too late.

  Christine forgot how to breathe.

  A woman murmured something low. The rhythm built. Then Nathan made a sound Christine knew as well as her own heartbeat, ragged and helpless, and on the other side of the canvas, two women dissolved into breathless laughter. Someone, still laughing, asked for the cup.

  He was alive.

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  And he was not missing her.

  Christine pulled her hand back as if the fabric had burned her. A sound scraped out of her throat, involuntary and animal. She clamped her hand over her mouth and bit down on her own palm until she bled.

  She ran.

  Blinded by tears, she knocked a supply cart sideways, boots skidding as she scrambled for the exit. She shoved through the flap and sunlight hit her like a slap. She crashed through bamboo, stalks clattering like bones, and did not stop until she was in shadow where the blue grass grew tall enough to hide her.

  She went down hard on her hands and knees in the mud. The fall cracked whatever seal she had left.

  The crying came out of her like vomiting. A convulsion. She crawled through blue-stained mud until she was behind the transport, hidden from everything except the sky and the smell of engine grease, but could still look over and see the collection tents. She pressed her face into the wet grass and forced her screams into the ground.

  When the crying slowed, the hollow it left behind was worse.

  She pushed up on her elbows, fingers clawing into the blue mud. Through a gap in the bamboo, she watched Booth Four.

  She had not lost him today. She had lost him thirteen months ago in fire and screaming. The difference was what she had done afterward. She had kept his ghost alive in the corridors of Terra. She had fed that ghost, whispered to it, promised it a reunion.

  She saw the tent flap move, and Nathan stepped out.

  Christine went still.

  The sun had changed him. Darkened his skin. Widened his shoulders. He walked with a limp, but he looked like a man who stood proud and slept well.

  He held the flap open for two women.

  One was tall and striking, but Christine barely registered her. Her gaze locked on the second woman the way a wound locks on salt.

  Her tunic clung to her stomach. The swell beneath it was unmistakable.

  Five months. Six, maybe.

  Pregnant.

  Christine’s training kicked in before her heart could catch up. She read the belly like a chart. Fundal height. Position. The math happened without her permission.

  Conception window.

  This was a future Nathan had chosen.

  Nathan’s hand went to the woman’s belly. Not a casual touch. A cradle. He smiled, soft and rare, the smile that used to come out only when he was too full of something to hold it all.

  It was aimed at her. At the woman touching his collar like she belonged there.

  It burned. It scorched every whispered conversation Christine had held with his ghost. Every night she had told Rain and River about their hero father.

  He was not dead.

  He was warm.

  He was right there.

  And he was someone else’s.

  If she stepped out to him now, she would be the grenade that blew that child’s world apart.

  Christine turned away and pressed her back against the transport’s landing strut as she slid into the mud. She sat there and shook, forehead against her knees. The injustice was so enormous she could not hold it. A flare of hatred rose in her, then shame followed it like a shadow.

  “Red Lando.”

  Patrick’s voice cut through the wreckage.

  Christine looked up, eyes wild, face streaked with blue mud and tears.

  “Don’t,” she snarled. “Do not talk to me right now.”

  “You are experiencing acute emotional dysregulation,” Patrick said, lights flickering with a clinical, persistent hum. “He is right there, Christine. The biological bond probability is ninety eight percent. You should go to him. It is the most efficient resolution for your current state.”

  She surged to her feet, sudden and violent. “Shut up.”

  The word cracked against the metal casing of the transport.

  “You lied to me,” she said. “You all lied. You let me mourn a man who was here living while I rotted in a Dome worrying about a genetic collapse that was never real.”

  Patrick hovered, light ring spinning faster. “There are operational benefits to the deception. However, the data has changed. He is within fifty meters. Go to him.”

  “I do not care about your benefits,” Christine screamed. “I worried myself sick while children were being born here. You let me believe humanity was dying when it was thriving right here.”

  She jabbed a shaking finger toward the tents where Nathan was still visible, his hand resting on the swell of a blue fabric tunic.

  “And now you want me to do what? Walk out there and rip his life apart? Be the catastrophe?”

  “The bond remains,” Patrick insisted, his lights spinning with clinical agitation. “He would want to know. The logic of his past behavior suggests…”

  “I am done with what anyone wants,” Christine interrupted, and her voice broke.

  She took a breath, and when she spoke again, the sound had changed. It was no longer the sound of a grieving wife; it was the sound of the woman who kept four hundred people alive in a dying dome. It was hard. It was final.

  “We no longer get to choose what we want anymore. Look at her, Patrick. Look at that belly.”

  Her chest heaved, rage pouring through her, hot and clean and clarifying.

  “He has a child now. A real, living child on the way. If I walk down there, I am not a miracle. I am a weapon. I would be forcing a man to choose between me and his own blood. I would be the grenade that destroys that baby’s peace before it is even born.”

  She stepped closer, her face inches from the hovering avatar, blue mud still drying on her skin like war paint.

  “That baby is the priority now. Not me. Not my heart. Not his heart. And certainly not your data.”

  Patrick’s light dimmed to a frustrated amber. “This decision is inefficient. You are suffering.”

  Christine cried-laughed, a sharp, broken sound.

  “The truth is…” She paused, composing herself. “The truth is, I’m too late,” her voice dropping to a hollow, jagged whisper. “He already has a new life, Patrick. He has a child on the way. The priority is that child. It has to be.”

  Patrick’s sensors whirled, a frantic clicking sound in the humid air. “The biological data is still valid. He will find out about you, Red. Once the integration is complete and the people of Tera move to Eden, the probability of him discovering your identity reaches one hundred percent. He will find you.”

  Christine looked at the transport ramp, her hands shaking as she gripped the cold metal. “I know he will.”

  “And when he does?” Patrick asked. “What projection will you use then?”

  “When he finds out,” she said, her eyes hardening with a lethal clarity, “I will tell him I moved on. I will make it so easy for him to stay with them that he won’t even feel guilty. I’ll celebrate his family.”

  Patrick paused. “This decision will complicate future projections.”

  “The lie is not for him,” Christine hissed, grabbing the transport ramp. Her hands slipped on the wet metal. “That child is born to parents who are not at war. You tell him nothing.”

  The words tasted like ash. She did not believe them. She would make herself believe them anyway. You believed what you had to believe to get through the next shift.

  She turned once more. Nathan, looking embarrassed, holding the specimen cup. The women laughed. He smiled.

  Good, she told herself.

  Let him be happy.

  “Take me back to Tera,” she said, walking into the dark maw of the ship. “Immediately.”

  Patrick protested one last time. “Not telling Nathan continues with the dishonesty.”

  “Non-negotiable,” she snapped. “Let his child be born how it should, with his family.”

  The ramp sealed behind her. The air inside was cold and stale, oil and recycled oxygen. After the sweetness outside, it felt like a coffin. She crawled into the furthest corner of the hold and pulled a heavy equipment tarp over herself.

  In the dark, she curled into a ball, and the crying came in waves she could not hold back, silent and shaking, the kind that hurts the throat and leaves the body hollow.

  Through a gap in the tarp, the viewport showed Solace tilting and falling away. Green. Living. Full of people she would never meet, children she would never hold, and a man she would always love and could never claim.

  “Goodbye, my Blue,” she whispered to herself.

  The transport climbed. The Dome shrank to a curve of light against the dark landscape. Then it was gone.

  She waited for the engines to carry her back to the only place she understood.

  The glass room.

  Her twins.

  The dying man.

  She would hold. She always held.

  But in the dark beneath the tarp, in the smell of oil and recycled air, Christine Reeves pressed her hand to her own chest where the hollow lived, and for the first time in months, she was not sure that holding would be enough.