Chapter 32: Safe Harbor

By the time they reached Haven’s Vanguard, Gabriel’s temple dressing had dried stiff at the edges. Malik took him straight from decontamination to the medical bay. Ava stood at the window while the medic checked his leg. Below the carrier, engine wash chased snow across a dark ridge.

Malik checked the cut beneath Gabriel’s sleeve patch as well as the blast injuries. He logged the factory exposure for follow-up. Ava waited while he worked, remembering how little room she had given Gabriel after calling him closer.

Gabriel sat on a cot with his leg freshly bandaged and supported. When Malik finished checking his eyes, he turned toward Ava.

“You should rest,” he said gently, his voice cutting through the quiet.

Ava turned to him, a faint smile tugging at her lips. “I could say the same to you.”

Gabriel chuckled, though the sound was laced with exhaustion. “Touché.”

Malik began putting the unused dressings away. Ava watched him close one drawer, then another. If she waited for the last one, she could leave without making this visit about her too.

Say it. Before you become good at hiding it.

“My hand isn’t sitting right on the knife,” she said.

He left the next drawer open. “Since when?”

“The factory. The one near the subway.” She held her hand out, feeling foolish now that nothing was in it to show what she meant. “I have to think where my fingers go.”

Malik brought a chair and asked her to show him with a rolled cloth. He watched her close and open her grip. Then she told him about the pillar. Gabriel stayed quiet while she explained the part that had felt easy, the part she had been saving until last.

Malik wrote it down without looking at Gabriel to see whether it was true.

“Can you do anything?” she asked.

“The blast cuts are closing. The temple bruise will fade. These two fingers are not doing either of those things.” Malik turned her left hand under the lamp. The last two digits stayed short of a full extension, and she could not feel the cloth when he drew it across their pads. “I can document this. I can watch whether it worsens. I cannot promise it will reverse. Healing, for this, may mean it stays.”

She agreed to the examination. His uncertainty was difficult to sit through. She had imagined relief once she told someone; instead the facts were now on a page, and neither of them could put them back inside her where she had been able to avoid them.

That’s me on the page now.

When he finished, she asked to read the notes. He turned them toward her. She corrected the order of two things: the hand had kept striking before she caught it in the pillar. He changed the entry while she watched.

Before either could say more, the door hissed open, and Jenna entered, her commanding presence filling the room. She held a data pad in one hand, her sharp gaze sweeping over them.

“I’ve reviewed the remaining notes,” Jenna began, her tone brisk but not unkind. “We’ve lost some critical pieces thanks to Harrow, but what we have could still be invaluable. For now, they’re secure.”

Ava nodded, relief washing over her. “And the survivors?”

“They’re settled in,” Jenna replied. “Shaken, but alive. Thanks to both of you.”

Gabriel shifted, wincing slightly as he adjusted his leg. “We didn’t do it alone. The transport team, the survivors—they all played a part.”

Jenna’s gaze softened as she looked at him. “Modesty doesn’t suit you, Gabriel. You both went above and beyond. That’s not something I’ll forget.”

On the way out, two crewmen at the med-bay hatch stopped talking. One of them looked at Ava’s hand as if it might open by itself.

“Back already,” he said. “Guess the monsters missed their pet.”

Gabriel shifted his weight onto the good leg. Ava touched his wrist before he could spend the injury on her behalf.

“Say it to me,” she told the crewman. Her voice shook, which made her angrier. “I’m standing here.”

He looked at the floor. Jenna stepped into the doorway. “Enough. Back to your posts.” The other man pulled him down the corridor. She did not ask Ava to explain herself. Gabriel was still beside her, his wrist beneath her hand. He had not spoken over her. The pain in her fingers remained; so did the insult. Ava released his wrist when she was ready to walk.

Later, Ava found herself wandering the quiet corridors of the ship. The events of the past days played through her mind, each memory sharp and vivid. She stopped by the greenhouse, the familiar scent of soil and growing plants grounding her.

Someone had watered in her absence. Too generously at the shallow trays, but the beans were standing and a new tie held one heavy stem upright. Ava touched the knot. The work had continued without her, which ought to have pleased her. It did, after the first small sting.

Cole stopped at the doorway with a grow-lamp bracket under one arm.

“Cora said this one needed replacing.”

Ava looked up at the loose fitting. “It does.”

He waited for her to move back before entering. She did, and hated how quickly she knew the distance he wanted.

“I still don’t like what happened at the fortress,” he said while setting down his tools.

“Neither do I.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

He worked for a while. When the old bracket came loose, he asked her to hold the lamp steady. His fingers touched hers once at the base and he did not snatch them away.

“I heard you got people out,” he said.

“Other people helped.”

“Doesn’t mean you didn’t.”

He checked the fitting twice and left without staying for a drink. Ava switched the lamp on. She did not have to turn the visit into friendship to be glad he had come.

You waited for me anyway.

She fetched the journal from their quarters and opened it at the planting table. For a while she recorded only the state of the beds, enjoying the familiar argument between what the plants needed and what the carrier could spare. Then she turned the page.

I left my washing for tomorrow.

She wrote the soil on the sleeve, the open notebook, the light of the specimen on the desk. These were memories rather than evidence of a failure she had to explain to Malik. She did not know how to make them useful. She kept writing until she reached the moment before the pain woke her, and stopped there.

Below it she added the one thing she had nearly left out: I liked my work.

She found Gabriel sitting on their bed afterward, his crutches against the wall and his temple dressing half undone. She finished the unwrap for him. Then she kissed the unhurt skin beside the bruise, and the corner of his mouth. He made a low sound and drew her in by the hip. The corridor’s word was still in her ears. His hands were also on her, careful, wanted, sure of welcome. She laughed against his shoulder when her cramped fingers refused a button, and he held them until they eased, smiling as if the ordinary trouble delighted him.

A reply from the eastern outpost had been waiting in Jenna’s queue. Karrow’s note was short enough to read standing up. The copied assays failed where a stabilizing agent should have been; he could not name the missing compound from an index. He could say the blood-assay method was the part worth repeating, and that he would not propose taking anything from a living person until he had seen the tables himself. Ava read it twice. Expertise, at a distance, was not the same as a needle. It was still a man she had not met deciding which of her captors’ methods deserved to survive.

“I told Malik the truth,” she said.

“I know. I watched you correct him.”

“And I liked the beans. Someone kept them alive.”

“Marcus. He was very proud. Try not to let it go to his head.”

She kissed him again, slower, happiness and love arriving in the same room as the insult and not asking it to leave first. The pain in her hand did not vanish. She trusted him with it anyway. That was the part she meant to keep. Her hand still hurt when she rested it against his chest. She left him sitting on the bed, took the watering cans from outside their door, and returned to the greenhouse.

Gabriel arrived later on crutches, pausing at the doorway to rest his weight on the pads. “Thought I’d find you here.”

Ava glanced at him, a small laugh escaping her. “Not much of a surprise, is it?”

“Your watering cans were gone from outside our quarters.” He shifted a crutch. “Strong evidence.”

She turned to face him fully, her expression thoughtful. “Sometimes it feels like I’m caught between two worlds. The one I had, and the one I’m fighting for now.”

Gabriel reached for her hand, then caught his crutch before it fell. Ava brought a chair over. He sat with a grateful grunt.

She took the crutches from him and leaned them against the planting table. “You could have called me.”

“I wanted to be here too.”

As the carrier moved steadily over the night-dark terrain, the crew gathered in the central lounge. Jenna stood at the center, addressing them with her usual authority. “This mission was hard, and we’ve lost more than we should have. But we brought back survivors and part of the research. We learn from what failed, and we keep working.”

A crew member asked about replacing the filters used at the subway. Another wanted the outpost’s damaged alarm added to the repair list. Jenna wrote both down.

Ava sat beside Gabriel with his crutches against her knee. When the briefing ended, she stayed while people carried the recovered cases through to the laboratory. One latch still bore a smear of her blood.

Jenna checked each seal before signing the cases in.