And I hate how part of me still believes.
Still waits.
Still looks up every time a ship jumps in from deep space hoping maybe, he’ll walk through the door again.
I don’t need a test to tell me.
I already know.
It’s in the way my body moves differently now, like it’s no longer mine alone. The way I can’t smell burnt synthoil without gagging. The way I get winded climbing the narrow stairs in the safehouse, even though I used to sprint across rooftops with a camera rig on my back and a death warrant on my head.
It’s in the stillness. The aching, heavy stillness that’s settled in my bones like gravity doubled overnight.
It’s in the dreams.
Not the violent ones—I still get those, of course. Valtron’s blood on cold alloy floors. Quinn’s empty eyes. The Combine exec’s smile as he offered me freedom in exchange for silence.
No, these are different.
Softer.
It’s been a month since Valtron left.
Some nights I dream of a tiny hand curling around my finger. Of a warm weight against my chest, rising and falling with each impossible breath. Of laughter—mylaugh—but higher, smaller, like it’s been fractured and put back together with joy.
I wake up and know.
I’m pregnant.
Since I set the galaxy on fire and vanished before the flames could touch me.
I don’t tell anyone.
Not Dowron. Not Leena. Not the kind-eyed doctor who patches me up in a side wing of the floating medical barge where I make the mistake of asking for anti-nausea meds.
No one.
Because this… this is mine.
And if I say it out loud, if I speak it into the world, it becomes real.
And once it’s real, the Combine cantakeit.
I won’t let them.
So I disappear.
Completely.
Dowron sends me a secure comm ping a few days after the protests on Threx Prime end in riots and the Combine’s stock collapses twelve percent overnight.
He offers protection. A secure outpost. A place on his advisory council once things “settle.”
I send one sentence back.
“I will never stop fighting, but I cannot raise a child in a war.”
He never replies.
