Christine stood in the amber glow of the lab and let herself have one unguarded moment.

  Just one.

  River had discovered his thumb. He stared at it with the kind of focused bewilderment that was pure Callum, that specific furrow between the brows, the lower lip slightly forward, as though the universe had presented him with a problem worth solving. Across the pod, Rain slept with her whole body, her tiny chest rising in sharp, rhythmic huffs that made Christine's own lungs ache in sympathy. They were ready for a world that wasn't made of metal and glass.

  You two have no idea what's waiting for you, she thought.

  She let the moment close and turned to Callum.

  He lay in his suspension chair with his eyes shut, and she had learned, in the months since the Lattice had started winning its silent war, to read the difference between his sleeping and his pain. This was sleeping. Real sleeping. The gray had deepened along his jaw where the scar tissue mapped its slow advance, but his face was still. The respirator marked its rhythm, hiss, release, hiss, release, and Christine stood at his bedside longer than she needed to, adjusting the oxygen flow with a touch so light it didn't register on the monitors.

  Rest, Callum. She didn't say it out loud. She thought it in his direction the way she'd been doing for months, as though thinking hard enough could pass through to his failing tissue and find whatever part of him could hold on a bit longer. You've earned the silence.

  The door hissed open. Maria entered with a small cluster of residents from the long-term ward, David and Earl and a few others whose names Christine had learned to pair with their particular dignities. The Lattice had taken different things from each of them. From David it had taken the sharp edges, leaving something rounder and more open behind, a permanent child-like wonder that Christine had learned not to pity. He was, in many ways, more present than anyone else on this ship.

  "Director Red." Maria's voice was warm, the voice of someone who had long ago made peace with logistics. "Terra is ready. Transport is packed. Medical teams are standing by. We move to the Solace perimeter in four hours, then the final jump to Eden next week."

  David stepped forward, his face open and earnest. "Is it big, Red? The new home?"

  Christine stepped away from Callum's bedside and let herself answer the way the question deserved, not efficiently, but fully. "It's huge, David. And beautiful. There's a park right in the center, with real grass. Real flowers." She paused. "Maria's already planning which ones to plant first."

  David turned to Maria with an expression of pure delight. "I'm going to help," he informed her.

  "I'm counting on it," Maria said, and meant it.

  Christine squeezed his hand before Maria guided the group toward the transport bay. She watched them go. The door hissed shut. The lab settled back into its quiet, the respirator, the monitors, the soft movement of fluid in the pods.

  She stood in it for a moment longer than was necessary.

  The communications console waited.

  Christine had been not-looking at it for months. Every time she passed it she was aware of it the way you're aware of a door you've decided not to open, not forgetting it, just choosing, again, not to reach for the handle.

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  She pulled up the medical telemetry from Solace first. Elara was due any day. The scans showed a healthy baby boy, positioned well, with a strong heartbeat. And attached to the file, flagged and neatly organized the way Elara organized everything, was a proposal: a Discovery School for Eden, designed around tactile learning for the Lattice-damaged children. Sensory gardens. Hands-on everything. Patient and compassionate in every line.

  Christine read it twice.

  The jealousy came the way it always did, sharp, brief, and deeply unfair to everyone including herself. Not jealousy of Elara exactly. Not even jealousy of the baby. It was something more specific and harder to name: the grief of a woman who had survived things that left marks, looking at evidence that the world had kept moving in her absence, that life had organized itself around the space where she used to be.

  Nathan would be there when that baby arrived. Nathan, who thought she was ash.

  She forced it down. Not away, she had learned the difference. Down, where it could sit without running the room.

  It wasn't Elara's fault. It wasn't Nathan's. It was the math of the end of the world, and she had made her own choices inside that math, and most of them she would make again.

  She looked at Callum's sleeping face. She shook the bitterness from her shoulders the way you shake rain from a coat, deliberately, completely.

  Then she hit the broadcast trigger.

  The silence before she spoke lasted only a second, but she felt the weight of every terminal on Terra and Solace on the other side of it. Every common room. Every bunk. Every person who had made it this far.

  Nathan would see her face. He would see the woman he thought was ash, still here, still breathing, altered by the Lattice in ways that would take him time to understand, but alive.

  She let herself feel that for one breath.

  Then she opened her mouth and gave them what they had earned.

  "Citizens of Terra and Solace." Her voice came out steady. Not performing steadiness, actually steady, the way bone is steady, the way scar tissue is steady. "I am Director Christine Red Lando Reeves. Many of you know me as Red. Before the colonies, before any of this, I was a nurse, the nurse who worked alongside Dr. Callum Hartley to find a way to keep us alive long enough to reach this moment."

  She paused. Let it land.

  "You are the humans who survived the trip through space. You are the ones who didn't let the dark win. Today, I am proud to announce that our work is finished. In one week, we all call Eden home."

  She stood taller. Her unblinking eye held the camera lens without apology.

  "I am proud of every one of you who came together to become the foundation of tomorrow's future. We are one people." The next words she had rehearsed, and in the rehearsal they had felt clinical. Now they didn't. "I must also tell you that, Dr. Callum Hartley, health is failing. It is my deepest hope that he lives to make this final journey, that he can see with his own eyes the home his mind built for us before he leaves us." Her voice stayed level. Her chest did not. "Without him, the aliens' understanding of us would have been a catastrophe. He saved our voices. He deserves to hear us use them. I leave with him tonight to journey to Eden, and will wait for you all there."

  She cut the feed.

  Her hands went cold as she imagined Nathan’s face on the other side of the dome, hearing her voice and realizing she was not dead. The silence that followed was different from the one before. Fuller, somehow. She stood in it without moving.

  Patrick emerged from the shadows the way he always did, not dramatically, just suddenly present, as though he had been there all along and she had stopped noticing him.

  "The broadcast was received by 100% of functional terminals," he said. His blue-violet lights moved in a pattern she had come to recognize as something adjacent to satisfaction.

  She exhaled. "Has your projection of the Hives' reaction to your… infection changed at all?”

  "The projection remains at 78% for full disconnect." A pause, not a processing delay, a considered pause. "The risk has not decreased."

  She had known that. She had asked anyway.

  "Are we ready to move to Eden?"

  Patrick's sensors whirred. That particular sound, she had never been able to decide if it was deliberate or involuntary, whether Patrick had learned that humans found it reassuring or whether something in him simply needed to do it.

  "The planet is built, Red. The gardens are waiting." Another pause, his lights shifting through violet toward something she didn't have a name for. "I find the prospect of your arrival... significant."

  The lights steadied. Gold, pure, unwavering gold, and held there.

  Christine looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at Callum, at the twins, at the amber glow of the lab that had been her whole world for longer than she could cleanly remember.

  "Let's go home," she said.