Chapter 33: The Scientist’s Proposal

Jenna covered the briefing-room wall with the pages Harrow had failed to steal.

Hospital blood assays hung beside Ava’s medical scans. Notes climbed around them in Jenna’s compact handwriting, linked by lines of blue cord because the briefing display had died halfway through the work. The arrangement looked less like an answer than the anatomy of an obsession.

Dr. Elias Karrow stood beneath it with a capped marker in one hand.

He had arrived aboard Haven’s Vanguard with the survivors from the eastern outpost: forty-two years old, thin from rationing, and too interested in Ava to hide it well. He introduced himself as Dr. Elias Karrow and immediately asked to see the recovered assay tables.

“The hospital team was searching for a stabilizing agent,” he said. “They tested blood from patients whose mutations progressed unusually slowly. None of it worked.”

Ava sat nearest the door. Gabriel occupied the chair beside her, his injured leg extended beneath the table. Jenna remained standing.

Karrow uncapped the marker and circled an assay result. “They did not have a subject whose body neutralizes mutated tissue.”

“A subject,” Ava repeated.

No. Not again. Not from him too.

The marker stopped.

“Ava,” he corrected. “They did not have you.”

Her old laboratory returned in fragments: white light, restraints, a gloved hand describing her survival as useful. She pressed both feet into the floor until the briefing room held.

“Say exactly what you want.”

Karrow placed the marker on the table. “A small blood sample. Jenna and I would compare it with the recovered assay methods. If the reaction is stable, we test it against inactive spore material, then cultured mutant tissue. Nothing enters your body.”

“How small?”

“Ten millilitres to begin.”

Jenna spoke before Ava could. “Five.”

“Five limits replication.”

“Then your first result will be limited.”

Karrow’s mouth tightened. “Every delay costs lives.”

Gabriel leaned forward. “Don’t put them on her.”

“I’m stating the scale of the problem.”

“You’re making strangers’ deaths part of whether she can say no.”

Karrow looked at Ava. “That was not my intention.”

“It was still what you did,” she said.

He lowered himself into the chair opposite her. Some of the certainty left his posture. “You’re right.”

No justification followed. That mattered more than the apology.

Ava examined the wall again. One page bore a brown thumbprint at its corner. Ava wondered whether its writer had been bleeding. Beneath the mark, someone had written alternative stabilizing agent and expected enough tomorrow to test one.

“What happens to my blood after the first test?” she asked.

“Whatever you authorize,” Jenna said. “We can destroy the remainder in front of you. No secondary use. No shared data without your approval.”

“And if I say no now?”

“The samples are never taken,” Karrow said.

“If I say yes and change my mind while the needle is in?”

“It comes out,” Jenna said.

Ava turned to Gabriel. “What do you think?”

His answer took time. “I think Karrow sees a discovery when he looks at you. I don’t like it.”

Karrow accepted that without looking away.

“I also think the notes are real,” Gabriel continued. “If you want to try, I’ll help you make them follow every condition you set. If you don’t, I’ll help Jenna burn the forms.”

It was not permission. It was the answer she had asked for.

“I need tonight,” Ava said.

Jenna began taking pages down from the wall. The meeting was over because Ava had said it was.

In the corridor, Ava waited for Gabriel to catch up on his crutches. She wanted to ask him whether her refusal would change the way the crew looked at her. Karrow had said no sample would be taken. He had not said the disappointment would be easy to live beside.

She pictured the greenhouse door, people collecting leaves without looking at her, a conversation ending as she entered. Then she recognized the scene. She was taking the old fear of losing her place and using it to answer a question nobody had yet asked.

“I want to get out of this corridor,” she said.

Gabriel nodded toward their quarters. She matched his pace instead of rushing ahead.

In their quarters, she opened the journal to the entry about the first bean seedling. Gabriel sat on the floor with his back against the bed, giving his injured leg the space Malik had ordered.

“The people who took me said I could save lives,” Ava said.

“I remember.”

“Part of me hates that they might have been right.”

Gabriel looked up. “They weren’t.”

“My blood—”

“What your blood can do doesn’t make what they did right.” He adjusted the brace on his leg. “If a thief steals a seed and somebody else grows food from it, the theft doesn’t become farming.”

Ava glanced at him. “That metaphor was terrible.”

“I live with a botanist. It creates pressure.”

She smiled, then returned to the blank page. “I want to do it.”

Before the meeting she had thought there would be one honest reason and a collection of reasons she ought to be ashamed of. She wanted the injured man from the subway to have a chance. She wanted Malik to have something better to offer the next patient. She also wanted to sleep without examining her hands when she woke, and to believe she might grow older beside Gabriel in a body she could still recognize.

Nobody had promised that last thing. Karrow had spoken about assays, not a treatment for her. She made herself keep the distinction even while she wanted more than he had offered.

She looked at the early greenhouse pages. The woman who wrote them had been frightened too. Ava could care about strangers and still want something for that woman. She could be curious about a result without forgiving the people who had made her afraid of a laboratory.

Gabriel said nothing.

“Not because Karrow asked. Not because people will die if I don’t.” She pressed the pencil hard enough to dent the paper. “I want one thing they made inside me to belong to my decision.”

“Then write the conditions.”

She did.

Mine. Every condition is mine.

Five millilitres. One draw. Gabriel would handle the needle under Jenna’s direction. Ava could stop the procedure at any point. No restraints. No one behind observation glass. The remaining sample would be destroyed or retained only by a new decision. Jenna would keep the results with the carrier’s medical records, and Ava would decide when they were shared.

The next morning, Karrow read the list and signed without negotiation. Jenna signed beneath him. Gabriel signed as witness.

In the medical bay, Malik had removed the nearest instrument trolley to give Ava a clear path to the door. No straps crossed the examination chair.

Gabriel opened a sealed needle packet. “Left arm?”

Ava offered it, then withdrew it before he touched her.

Everyone stopped.

She breathed through the first surge of memory. “Ask me again.”

“May I take the sample from your left arm?”

“Yes.”

He tied the band above her elbow. Jenna confirmed the vein and talked him through the angle, though rescue work had made his hands familiar with blood. The needle hurt. Ava watched it enter because looking away felt too much like surrender.

Dark red climbed the short tube and entered the vial.

I said yes. I am still here.

“Five,” Jenna said.

Gabriel released the band and removed the needle. “Done.”

Ava pressed gauze to the puncture. Her body had already begun closing it.

Her arm felt almost ordinary. She had imagined a great difference between the old needle and this one, something she would know at once in her skin. The prick had hurt in the same place. The difference was in the room: Gabriel waiting for her to move, Jenna putting the unused materials away, the door still open where Malik had cleared the path.

She let herself sit a little longer. Nobody announced another phase. When she was ready, she lowered her arm.

Karrow did not reach for the vial. He waited until Jenna placed it in a coded carrier and Ava nodded.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t thank me yet.” Ava stood. Her knees held. “Do careful work.”

Karrow inclined his head. “We will.”

She watched Jenna enter Ava beside the sample number in the log. Then she left the medical bay with Gabriel, her signed conditions tucked into the journal.