I slide into the back row. The students around me part like I carry a radioactive isotope. Maybe I do. In this place of pristine ambition, a baby reads like a scarlet letter stitched to my chest.
“So brave,” I heard one of the girls say last week, half-whispered into a cappuccino.
“She was military, you know,” her friend answered. “Worked with some mech program. Then boom—baby. No father on record.”
The words had stung, but I didn’t flinch. Let them talk. They didn’t know.
They didn’t feel the sharp edge of air that day on Rhavadaz, when the Meld broke and the sky lit up with fire.
They didn’t watch a titan swallow the man who changed her from bones and blueprints into someone who couldfeelagain.
They didn’t hear Garma cry his first breath like a war chant.
They just saw the carrier and the dark circles under my eyes and decided I was tragic.
I wasn’t. I’m surviving.
Barely.
Later, in the lab, the fluorescent lights cast long shadows over the old engine prototype I’m meant to be calibrating. The others have gone to lunch. It’s just me and Garma, who’s propped in a cushioned bassinet beside the console, gurgling at the light strips overhead.
He lets out a coo—then a hiccup—and I glance over.
“You think plasma intake ratios are funny?” I ask dryly.
He kicks his legs, delighted.
I set the spanner down and lean over him, fingers brushing the faint fuzz of hair on his head.
“You’re not supposed to be this happy. Not here.”
He blinks up at me with Naull’s eyes. That same storm-gray ringed with bronze. Eyes that held war, wonder, and a gentleness he tried to hide until it poured from him in the quiet hours before dawn.
My throat tightens. I turn back to the panel.
At night, the silence in the dorm flat is too loud.
Garma sleeps, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in fits of grunts and murmurs like he’s trying to communicate with someone I can’t see. On those nights—these nights—I sit beside his crib with my hand pressed to his chest, grounding him. Grounding me.
His skin is warmer than it should be. Not fevered, just…charged. Like he hums at a different frequency than the rest of the world.
Maybe that’s my fault. Or Naull’s. Or the Meld that fused our minds too many times to be undone.
Tonight, when he whimpers, I whisper back.
“He would’ve loved you,” I say into the dark. “He didn’t get the chance.”
The ceiling fan hums above me. A draft slips in through the window seam, raising goosebumps along my arms.
“People keep telling me I’m strong,” I murmur, “but I think I just forgot how to break.”
Garma stirs. I lower my voice to a thread.
“You have his breath, you know. He used to sleep like that, chest rising slow, like he didn’t want to disturb the air.”
A laugh snags in my throat and turns into something wetter. I wipe at my face but the tears come anyway, quiet and hot. I press my forehead against the crib’s edge and cry until the weight of it knots my spine.
When I finally crawl into bed, dawn’s only an hour away.
