Page 44 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

She gently cupped the dish in her gloved hands to show the newly bereft pair before her. Melody, the thirty-three year old almost-mother, sat up on the table to take one last look at her daughter before Lana took her away to be put in cold storage with the others. Melody’s eyes were dry but swollen; likely she’d spent the prior night crying. Many of Isla’s patients did. Melody’s wife, a short-haired woman with a strong jawline and trembling hands, watched Lana’s progress across the bay until she disappeared from sight around the curtain. Then her gaze dropped to the floor and she covered her eyes.

Isla took Melody’s trembling hand, held out to her.

“You’ll be with her up there, won’t you?”

Isla met her eyes and nodded, forcing her cheeks up beneath the mask so Melody would see it as a smile. “I won’t leave her side.”

Melody sat back and nodded, tears gathering now that it was over. “Good. I wish…” She looked away, choking. When she was able to speak again, her voice was thick and hoarse. “I wish I could be with her. Wish more than anything that I could see her open her eyes, hold her when she meets the world.” Her wife let out a choked sob and took Melody’s other hand, but Melody didn’t look away from Isla.

“But knowing she’ll have a future now, one I couldn’t give her...that makes all the rest of this...okay. You know? I feel a lot of peace with things, now.” She gripped Isla’s fingers. “You’re the one who did that. This job...it can’t be easy. But you’ve given us hope. All of us. Thank you.”

Isla nodded again, returned the grip of the woman’s hand until she was ready to let go. When she was finally able to extricate herself and stand, she folded her hands in front of her and gave a slight bow. “Thank you for trusting me,” she said softly. It was a signoff she’d worked hard on, crafting just the right tone and demeanor to end her brief interactions with the patients who’d chosen to give her everything, and was almost universally successful.

This time, Melody called her back before she reached the curtain.

“Can I name her, please? Is that something I can do?”

Isla stared at her for long seconds, unable to speak. She needed to keep moving, to stay on schedule and maximize the harvest. Any day could be the last, depending on the whims of a space program that had long been taken over by billionaire cronies of a soulless administration. When word came down to halt, it would destroy the last, desperate hopes of every parent on the wrong side of the waitlist. Isla operated under the crushing sense of urgency every day, locking in to give her gift of peace to as many people as possible.

But Melody’s request plucked at something within her, threatened to throw her off her razor-thin balance.

Finally she gave a slow nod, cleared her throat. “Yes. Of course. What would you like to call her?”

Melody smiled through tears, looked up into her wife’s face. “Isla. I want her to be the future, too, just like the doctor who saved her.”

Melody’s wife broke down, and the couple clung to one another in a storm of heavy sobs.

The doctor nodded one last time, unseen. “Isla it is,” she said softly, and made her escape.

***

Word came down three days later.

Isla’s earpiece buzzed, the one she was required to wear and answer at all times as Future Biologist Mission Specialist.

She’d snorted when she first saw the title. Future Biologist sounded like some bullshit merch handed out to kids at a career day. Back when those sorts of things had still been common, before society gave up on any appearance of normalcy, stopped pretending to believe the lines they’d all been choking on for years. The kids are the future. The kids will save us. A burden that proved impossible to meet—even if it hadn’t been too late by then, Isla wondered how the hell anyone expected to be saved by children who were constantly talked down to, accused of being snowflakes, and half the time didn’t have enough to eat because of funding cuts to SNAP and school lunch programs. Future Biologist. Sure. Good luck with that, kid. I hear there’s an opening for tooth fairy, too.

“Dr. Marsh?” The man on the other end didn’t identify himself or wait for a confirmation. “The time table’s moving up. Cut it off, the harvest is over. Whatever we have is what we have.”

Isla allowed herself a beat of disappointment, the image of the endless waitlist, the cases scheduled for the next day that Lana had already prepared. Those parents would have already been called, confirmed for the following day’s procedure. Like all the ones who came before, they’d be spending their last night with their hope for the future, mentally preparing to hand that cargo off to Isla in exchange for the empty promise of peace in the face of annihilation. It was such a poor sop they’d offered these last few months, but it was all they’d had. And now it was gone.

Isla took a slow breath in and banished the names from her mind, set her face in the direction of the next phase. “Very well. When do you need me there?”

“Immediately. Accompany the last set of product to base in the morning. Prepare for imminent launch.”

“Tomorrow? Why so soon?”

There was a brief pause on the other end. They weren’t used to questions from Dr. Marsh, only exemplary compliance. When the man answered, it was in a tone of deep disapproval.

“Category 5 hurricane scheduled to make landfall in the next thirty-six hours. They’re projecting a storm surge over thirty feet—a near guarantee the shuttle will be destroyed. We have to move now if we’re going to at all.”

“Jesus,” said Isla, her knees weak. She did her best to ignore the daily disaster tolls, told herself that those who perished were lucky, avoiding a worse and slower death. But a storm that size…

“Will wipe out the Eastern seaboard. Very likely more. So you see the urgency, Doctor.”

Isla let out a shuddering sigh. “Yes. I’ll be there. Can I…” She hesitated, felt the weight of the man’s annoyance at not one, but two questions in one conversation.

“Yes?”