Chapter 35: Epilogue

Six days after the birth, Ava carried her daughter into the greenhouse.

Gabriel walked beside her with both hands raised beneath the bundle, never quite touching it. He had maintained this position from their quarters through two corridors and a lift.

“If I drop her,” Ava said, “your hands will not become faster because you’ve held them there for ten minutes.”

“This isn’t about speed. It’s preparedness.”

“You’re making Cora nervous.”

Behind them, Cora stepped out of the lift. “He’s making everybody nervous.”

Cora left a small parcel on the planting table. Gabriel opened it for Ava: infant socks knitted from orange wool unravelled from an old sweater. One was larger than the other.

The greenhouse had outgrown the cargo hold’s original boundaries. Bean vines climbed cable trellises. Trays of medicinal herbs occupied the warmer wall, each tagged for one of the settlements on Jenna’s distribution map. Near the water tank stood the descendant of the first crooked seedling, now dry-podded and waiting to be harvested.

Ava settled into a chair Gabriel had repaired twice before admitting it needed to be replaced. Their daughter slept against her chest, one fist tucked beneath a round cheek.

She had wanted an hour alone this morning. The thought had come while the baby cried and Gabriel searched for a clean cloth: an hour in which no one needed any part of her body. Then the crying stopped, and she felt guilty for having wanted it.

I don’t want anyone to touch me.

The thought had been true for perhaps three breaths. She loved her daughter during all three. Knowing both things could exist together hurt almost as much as the exhaustion.

Here, with the child asleep, she could admit she was tired. The greenhouse had survived missed waterings, ill-judged repairs, her absence. She looked at the labels other hands had written and asked Gabriel to move a cushion behind her back. It was easier than explaining why she had almost cried at the prospect of sitting down.

“She’s breathing,” Gabriel said.

“I know.”

“Just checking.”

Ava loosened the blanket enough to show him the small rise and fall. Wonder rearranged his face every time. It made him look younger than the man who had pulled her from the ruins and older than the man who believed he could protect everyone by standing in the doorway.

He sat beside her. “Karrow sent the morning results.”

The words tightened something in Ava before she could prevent it. Gabriel waited, giving her room to ask.

“And?”

“Healthy. Nothing unusual in the screens they know how to run.”

They both understood the limit of that answer. Ava’s biology had broken too many certainties for either of them to build another around their child.

She examined the tiny fist, then made herself look at the whole child. It frightened her how quickly love could become inspection. She knew too well what it was to have every movement studied for the next sign of change.

This morning their daughter had objected furiously to a cold cloth. Yesterday she had slept through a dropped tray. Ava wanted to learn those things too, the preferences that belonged to this particular, unreasonable person. She loosened the fold near the baby’s cheek. A small frown appeared, then smoothed away.

“Good,” she said.

“Good,” he agreed.

Outside, Haven’s Vanguard rested on a basalt shelf above the settlement. Its engines were silent for maintenance, and without them the greenhouse seemed too still. Through the reinforced window, Ava could see people moving between the carrier and the new clinic. They hauled vaccine coolers down the ramp and returned with empty water drums, damaged filters, and a child on a stretcher whose mother refused to release his hand.

The vaccine had not healed the world. It had made different work possible.

Jenna entered with a tablet under one arm. “Departure moved to eighteen hundred. Weather front from the west.”

Gabriel looked through the glass. “We can clear it.”

“Cora says the aft fan needs another hour.”

“Then we wait.”

Jenna’s attention shifted to the baby. Her command expression lasted almost three seconds.

“Would you like to hold her?” Ava asked.

Jenna tucked the tablet more firmly under her arm. “I have a briefing.”

“In twenty minutes.”

“Eighteen.”

Jenna put the tablet on the table and held out her arms. Ava transferred the baby carefully, supporting her neck until Jenna had her. The commander sat with rigid concentration.

With her hands empty, Ava felt the ache of missing her parents so suddenly that she could not speak. She wanted to show them. That was all, an ordinary wish with nowhere to go. There would be no message she could send, no belated introduction, nobody to tell her what she herself had looked like at six days old.

Mum, look. I made it. I made her.

Ava pressed her lips together. The word had come easily; the face would not come at all.

Her daughter would ask about them one day. Ava would have fragments and a few pages about plants. She hoped she could tell the child what she remembered without filling the gaps with kinder inventions.

Jenna adjusted the blanket, concentrating fiercely on the baby’s neck. Ava watched until she could enjoy how frightened the commander looked. The sorrow remained, but it no longer occupied the whole room.

“You’ve carried unstable reactor components with less fear,” Gabriel said.

“Reactors have manuals.”

Their daughter opened dark, unfocused eyes and caught one of Jenna’s coat fastenings in her fist.

Jenna stopped breathing.

Ava laughed. Six days ago, that sound had hurt. It still pulled at the healing muscles of her abdomen, but she did not stop.

An announcement sounded through the carrier: the west clinic needed two more hands at the loading ramp. Gabriel glanced toward the door by reflex.

“Go,” Ava said.

He looked at her and the baby.

“We are both breathing. Jenna has eighteen minutes. Go.”

Gabriel kissed Ava’s forehead and left at a run. Jenna eased her own coat fastening out of the baby’s fist.

Ava watched him go with the old impulse to call him back. She wanted him here, smiling at the child, wanted their first days together protected from every other need aboard. Beyond the window, a mother was still holding a stretcher.

She let him reach the lift. Later she would ask him to come straight back, to sit with her while she ate and tell her something about his day. She could ask for that much without wishing the world empty of everyone else.

Jenna watched him go. “He’ll never learn.”

“I hope not.”

Below them, the clinic doors opened. Gabriel crossed the ramp toward the waiting stretcher as the first hard grains of snow struck the glass.

Ava took her daughter back and carried her to the oldest bean plant. A dry pod split beneath Ava’s thumb. Three mottled seeds rolled into the creases of her palm.

She placed them in the journal Gabriel had given her and wrote the date.