The phantom itch was the worst part.

  It settled in a right foot that had been left behind in a smear of molecular static somewhere between worlds. Callum's brain kept sending the signal. Shift. Adjust. Reach. The signal kept dying in a hollow, screaming nothing. He was a torso and a head. A human island wrapped in sterile sheets. The teleportation sickness hadn't just taken his health. It had dismantled his geometry.

  The mask over his face was a humid cage. Hiss. Click. Whir.

  He watched Red through the glass partition. She was a blur of controlled motion, managing the Choosing he had tried to prevent, her capable scarred hands moving between screens and samples like she'd been born to this alien lab instead of an emergency room in Albuquerque. He watched her hands for a long time.

  Then he looked at the empty space where his own should have been.

  The door slid open. Patrick didn't make a sound, but the air changed. Ionized. Sharp. The way it always did when the avatar entered a room.

  "The medical unit in Terra is established," Patrick said, positioning himself at the foot of the bed. "The first wave of residents is undergoing stabilization. Five births recorded in Solace. All successful."

  Callum's eyes tracked him. "And Red?"

  "She has begun specifications for the Eden nursery." A brief pause. "She is thorough."

  "She's a force of nature." The words came out muffled and wet against the plastic seal. He looked back toward the glass, toward the blur of her. "The twins. How close?"

  "Rain and River are viable. Dr. Brown estimates days, not weeks."

  Something shifted in Callum's chest that had nothing to do with the fibrosis. He let out a slow, careful breath. "I want to meet them," he said quietly. "I need to be awake for that. Whatever you have to do to keep me upright long enough to look them in the eye, do it."

  Patrick's lights pulsed once. "Noted."

  Callum watched Red a moment longer. Then the thing he'd been holding behind his teeth came loose.

  "I wasn't kind to her. Before all this. I wasn't kind to most people."

  Patrick said nothing. He was good at that. The particular silence that was not absence but attention.

  "I had this idea of myself," Callum continued. The words came slowly, not because he'd rehearsed them, but because they kept snagging on things he didn't want to look at directly. "The brilliant one. The indispensable one. I thought being that was the same as being good. I let people orbit me and told myself they were lucky to be close to the light." He paused. "I hadn't earned anything. I'd just been loud enough that no one argued."

  His monitor ticked upward. The shame was physical, he'd learned that. It sat in his chest alongside the fibrosis. Equally heavy. Equally suffocating.

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  "With her specifically," he said, and these words came harder, "I told myself I was protecting her. That keeping her in the dark about Nathan was a kindness. That if I could just get Eden ready, I could hand her the whole thing at once." He stopped. Started again. "But I've had a lot of time lying here with nothing to busy my hands with, and I know what it actually was."

  He didn't finish the sentence right away. He let it sit there between them, ugly and accurate.

  "I needed her. I was afraid she'd leave if I gave her the choice. So I just didn't give her the choice."

  Patrick's sensors pulsed, slow and blue. He didn't offer reassurance. Callum found, strangely, that he was grateful for it.

  "I don't know what I'd even be asking forgiveness for at this point," Callum admitted. "There are too many things stacked on top of each other."

  A cough came without warning. Wet, racking, the kind that used to bend him double when he still had a double to bend. Without limbs to brace himself, the spasm threw his torso sideways. The drones descended immediately. Cold metallic arms stabilized him, adjusted the mask seal, cleared fluid with a sound he had stopped letting himself think about too carefully.

  When they retracted, his breath came in thin, desperate pulls.

  "How much life you have left, Dr. Callum?" Patrick asked.

  "The fibrotic progression suggests weeks under optimal conditions. A secondary infection would compress that significantly," Callum answered softly.

  "I don't want to die, Patrick," he said. The mask fogged thick with the words. "I'm not ready for the silence.” His voice caught on that. Just barely. "I want to hear my children cry."

  Patrick was quiet for a moment. "We will do what we can to ensure you are present for the birth."

  Callum’s gaze drifted to the monitors, the rhythmic pulse of his own failing vitals mocking the silence he so feared. He swallowed hard, his throat tight with a question that felt like a betrayal of his own humanity. He hesitated, the scientific mind at war with the dying man, before he finally forced the words past the plastic seal of his mask.

  "And what about after?" Callum's eyes sharpened, searching Patrick’s face for a glimmer of something more than pity. "The upload. You've talked about the hive. About consciousness held in the frequency." He paused, his chest heaving with the effort to speak the unthinkable. "If there's any way to stay, to be uploaded, I want to know about it."

  "You are made of water and salt," Patrick said. "The hive is a frequency. There is no natural bridge."

  "But our Glow, you mentioned." Callum's voice climbed, not into strength but into the thin, sharp register of a man gripping the edge of something. "The energy you said we produce when we feel things. If I'm terrified right now, if I'm sitting here wanting to live long enough to hold two babies I helped create, then that energy is real, and it is somewhere in this room, yes?" He stopped to breathe. Started again. "Can you catch it? My glow? Before it dissipates into nothing?"

  Patrick went very still. His processors dropped to something almost subaudible.

  "The extraction of the Glow from a living host is undocumented," he said finally. "The energy and the vessel are not separate things, Callum. To capture one, we would have to dissolve the other."

  "I know what you're telling me."

  "The attempt would kill you."

  "I'm already dying." The words weren't angry. They were just true. "I'm a head on a pillow waiting for my lungs to quit. If the glow of one terrified, regretful man could do something useful before it goes out, then I want to try." He stopped. Swallowed. The effort of it was visible. "When the time comes. I want you to try."

  Patrick's lights cycled through something that didn't have a name yet.

  "Red will consider this a desecration," he said.

  The silence that followed was different from the others. Callum sat in it. He didn't look away from the space where his hands should be. He thought about Christine's face through the glass. The controlled grief of a woman who had already forgiven him more than he deserved.

  "Yes," he said. "She will."

  He kept watching her through the glass.

  "Don't tell her," he said. "Not until there's nothing left to tell."