The asteroid didn't look like a rock anymore.

  Christine pressed her palm to the cold glass of the transport and stared. Below the shimmering atmospheric veil, an ocean caught the light, cerulean and impossible, curving against the interior of terraformed stone. The city rose from its edge in ivory and warm timber. Real windows. Real rooflines. The kind of architecture that assumed someone was coming home to it.

  "There," Callum rasped from the seat beside her.

  She turned. His eyes were open, fixed on the view. The gray had won most of his face by now, mapping the slow advance of scar tissue beneath the skin. But his eyes were clear. They had been clear for days in the way eyes go clear when a person has made peace with something the rest of their body hasn't caught up to yet.

  "I know," she said.

  "No." He moved his chin slightly toward the center of the skyline. "There. The building with the tower. That's yours."

  She looked. A structure of white stone and glass stood at the city's heart, its windows catching the light and throwing it back gold. The nursery cathedral. She recognized the specifications from the schematics she had approved in the amber dark of the Terra lab, months ago, when Eden had still been an abstraction she was building for other people's children.

  "Callum," she said. Her voice did something she didn't authorize.

  "I couldn't give you back New Mexico," he said. The respirator marked its rhythm under every word. "I couldn't give you the world that broke. So I built you a new one." A pause. A breath that cost him. "This was always for you, Red. All of it."

  She didn't answer. She put her hand over the place on his armrest where his hand would have been, if the Lattice had left him hands, and she held on for the rest of the descent.

  +++

  The nursery was everything the schematics had promised and nothing she was prepared for.

  Floor-to-ceiling windows opened the room to the hills beyond, to the glitter of the ocean in the distance, to a sky that was genuinely, impossibly blue. The amber incubation pods stood in curved rows, waiting. The equipment was pristine. The air smelled of something living, actual air moving through actual filters, carrying the faint green smell of the garden plots Patrick had seeded along the outer wall.

  Rain and River were installed in their pods within the first hour. Christine checked every seal herself. Twice.

  Callum's suspension chair was positioned at the room's center, where he could see the pods, the windows, and the door simultaneously. He had asked for that specifically. She hadn't questioned it.

  He was quiet for a long time.

  Patrick moved through the room on his monitoring rounds, his blue-violet light casting slow arcs across the floor. He had been quieter than usual since they left Terra. Christine had attributed it to logistics, the migration, the installations, the thousand simultaneous processes he was managing. She hadn't looked too closely at the quality of his silence.

  She should have.

  "Red."

  Callum's voice was different. She turned.

  He was looking at her with the expression she had learned, over fourteen months of watching him fight, to recognize as the one he wore when he had already made a decision and was bracing for her response to it.

  Her stomach dropped.

  "No," she said.

  "I haven't said anything yet."

  "You don't have to." She crossed to him. She stood in front of the chair and looked at him directly. "Callum. No."

  "Red."

  "You are not doing the upload today." Her voice was steady. Controlled. Everything her hands were not. "We just arrived. You haven't seen the nursery properly, you haven't—"

  "I have seen it." His voice was gentle. That was the worst part. She could fight his stubbornness, his arrogance, his brilliant devastating selfishness. She had no tools against his gentleness. "I'm looking at it right now. Look at this room, Red. Look at what we built."

  "What you built," she said. "You don't get to leave it."

  "I'm already leaving it." Not unkind. Just true. "The question is whether I leave something behind."

  The monitors on his chair registered the uptick in her heart rate. She knew they did. She didn't care.

  "You told me it would be violent," she said. "Patrick told you the attempt would kill you. That the energy and the vessel aren't separate things."

  "I'm already dying." The same words he had said in the dark of Terra, the same flat accuracy. "My lungs are converting themselves into stone. The trajectory does not change whether we try this or not. The only variable is whether there is anything left of me when it's done."

  Christine's jaw locked. She looked at Patrick, who had stopped moving. He stood at the edge of her peripheral vision, his lights cycling slow and blue.

  "Patrick," she said. "Tell him."

  Patrick processed for a moment that lasted longer than processing usually lasted.

  "The attempt carries significant risk of severe biological distress," he said carefully.

  "You mean agony," Christine said. "Tell him what it actually means."

  Another pause. "The extraction process will be painful," Patrick said. "I cannot quantify the degree."

  "And the probability of success?"

  The pause this time was the longest yet.

  "Unknown," Patrick said. "I have no prior data."

  Christine turned back to Callum. "Unknown," she repeated. "He will put you through something I cannot sedate you for, something I cannot intervene in, for an unknown probability of success."

  "Red." Callum's voice stopped her. "Look at me."

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  She looked.

  "I have spent months gathering it," he said quietly. "Patrick has been helping me learn to focus the frequency. Every night. I have been practicing." He held her gaze. "I know what I'm asking you to watch. I know what I'm asking Patrick to do." He stopped. Breathed. "But I am thinking of you right now. I am thinking of Rain and River. I am thinking of my mother's kitchen and the smell of toast and that terrible hospital coffee you always pretended wasn't terrible." The monitors on his chair began to climb. Not in crisis. In warmth. She watched the readings change. "I am holding all of it. Right now. Every good thing I have ever had."

  The light in the room shifted.

  A warming of the amber, a slight brightening that had nothing to do with the overhead panels. Christine looked at Callum and saw it. The gray she had been watching for months was different now. Not gone. But threaded through with something gold.

  He was already glowing.

  "If I am ever going to have enough," he said, "it is right now, in this room, with you."

  Christine's hands were shaking.

  She had held the hands of people who were leaving whether she wanted them to or not. She knew, with twenty years of emergency medicine behind her, that there was a category of choice that belonged entirely to the patient and she had no right to stand in front of it.

  She knew that.

  She stepped aside.

  +++

  Patrick positioned the emitters with a precision Christine had never seen from him before. No efficiency in it. No optimization. He placed each component carefully, deliberately, like a person who understood what was at stake.

  He stood at the head of the chair.

  "Callum," he said. His voice was quieter than usual. "When you are ready."

  Callum looked at Christine one more time. She made herself hold his gaze. She made herself not look away.

  "Don't let them be afraid of the dark," he said. "Rain and River. Don't let them be afraid of it."

  "I won't," she whispered.

  He closed his eyes.

  And he began to speak.

  Not to her. Not to Patrick. He spoke quietly, without performance, the words serving as anchor. He talked about his mother's hands. About a surgery in his second year of residency that had gone right when it had every reason to go wrong. About the first time he had seen Christine run a trauma bay. "Like watching someone conduct an orchestra," he said, "except the orchestra was on fire." About Rain's face in the amber light. About River's thumb.

  The gold in the room deepened.

  It built slowly, gathered and intentional. The Glow of a man who had spent weeks learning how to hold everything he loved at once and was holding it now, with everything he had left.

  Patrick's emitters began to respond. The light shifted, not violent but drawing, moving toward Callum with a steadiness that had nothing mechanical in it.

  Callum's voice didn't stop. He talked about the color of the sky over Edinburgh. About a particular equation that had taken him four years to solve. About the word home and how he had never been sure what it meant until he watched four hundred and seventy-three broken people refuse to stop existing.

  Then his voice changed.

  The words became less coherent. The spaces between them widened. Christine's nurse brain catalogued the readings: he was not losing consciousness. His vitals were not crashing. He was—

  He arched.

  A sustained tension that held him taut in the chair, his whole body pulled by a force without a visible source. The gold light intensified until it was the only light in the room.

  He made a sound.

  She had worked emergency medicine for two decades. She had heard pain in every register. This was not the sound of tissue failing. It was something else entirely. Something being asked to move that had never moved before.

  "Patrick," she said.

  "The frequency is holding." His voice had something in it she had never heard before. "Red, do not intervene."

  "He's in pain—"

  "He is still here."

  She stood at the edge of what she could not fix and she did not look away. She owed him that. Her eyes on his face for every second of this, so that if there was anything left of him anywhere it would know she had not turned away.

  The light peaked.

  Then it snapped off.

  The room was ordinary again. Amber. Quiet. The soft hum of the incubation pods. Wind against the nursery windows.

  Callum slumped forward in his chair, his chin to his chest, his eyes closed. Still.

  The monitors flatlined. She had heard that sound a thousand times. It had never sounded like this before.

  Patrick stood motionless. His sensors cycled through colors she didn't have names for. The emitters in his hands were dark.

  The silence lasted a long time.

  Then the lights above the incubation pods flickered.

  Just once. An irregular pulse, brief and warm, moving through the amber rows. Not mechanical. Not a power fluctuation.

  Christine stared at the ceiling.

  "Patrick," she said. "Did it—"

  "The consciousness did not anchor," Patrick said. His voice was very quiet. "The energy transferred. But the pattern, the specific architecture of him, did not survive the translation."

  Christine sat down on the floor.

  Not collapsed. Not fallen. She folded deliberately until she was sitting with her back against the leg of Callum's chair, her knees pulled up, her hands in her lap.

  After a long moment, she heard Patrick move.

  He crossed to Callum. He worked carefully, without being asked, folding the length of silk he had brought around Callum's body with a precision she recognized. He had learned this from her. The wrapping of the dead.

  She watched him and did not say anything.

  When he finished, he stood.

  Christine stood too.

  The grief was there. She could feel it waiting behind everything else. But it was not what came first.

  "You knew," she said.

  Patrick turned toward her.

  "You knew what it would do to him." Her voice was low. Controlled in the way that is more dangerous than shouting. "You knew the probability of success. You told me yourself. Unknown. No prior data. And you helped him practice anyway. Every night. For weeks. Behind my back."

  "Callum requested—"

  "Callum was dying and desperate and not in a position to make that call alone." She took one step toward him. "You are supposed to be the one with the processing power. You run the models. You calculate outcomes. You watched him scream, Patrick. You watched me stand there unable to stop it, and you told me not to intervene, and now he is wrapped in silk on a chair in a room I will have to walk into every single day."

  Patrick's lights cycled. He did not speak.

  "You have spent fourteen months learning what we are," she said. "You held River. You sat at Callum's bedside. You learned what it means when something cannot be undone." Her voice cracked on the last word. She did not let it break further. "And then you helped him do an undoable thing. In secret. Because he asked you to and you did not have the courage to tell me."

  "He did not want you to—"

  "I know what he wanted." Sharp and final. "He wanted to stay. He was so afraid of the silence that he let you take him apart trying to avoid it. He deserved better than that chair. He deserved a bed and his children in his arms and a death that didn't hurt. And you took that from him. Both of you took that from him."

  The nursery was very quiet.

  Patrick's lights had gone nearly gray, cycling so slowly she could count each pulse. When he spoke, his voice was different from anything she had heard from him before. Not clinical. Not careful.

  "I am aware that I have caused harm," he said. "I am aware that my calculations did not account for variables I should have weighted more heavily." A pause. "I am finding that awareness difficult to process."

  Christine looked at him. The rage did not leave. But something shifted underneath it.

  "You knew he was afraid of the silence," she said, quieter now. "More than anyone, you knew that. And instead of helping him find peace with it, you helped him run from it." She looked at Callum's wrapped form. "He deserved better from both of us."

  The nursery held that.

  "Christine." His voice was barely above a functional output. "Nathan Reeves has been attempting to reach this terminal since your broadcast. He knows you are in Eden. He does not know how to find you."

  She did not answer.

  "I need to leave this room," Patrick said. "I am not processing at full capacity and I do not trust my own judgment right now. But I am concerned about leaving you alone."

  "I'm a nurse," she said. "I've been alone with the dead before."

  "I know," Patrick said. "That is not what concerns me."

  The lights in the nursery flickered. That same brief irregular pulse, warm and without explanation, moving through the amber rows before settling back to silence. Neither of them said anything about it.

  Then Patrick's lights went out.

  Not gradually. Not cycling down. They simply stopped.

  The avatar stood where it was. Perfectly still. Hands at its sides. Optical sensors dark. The shell of it remained in the room exactly as he had left it, standing in the amber light with everything Patrick had ever recorded still stored inside it. The door had not opened. He had not walked out.

  He had simply left, the way a signal leaves a frequency, and what remained was a body in the corner of the nursery with its hands at its sides and its echo file intact.

  Christine looked at it for a long moment.

  Then she sat down on the floor with her back against Callum's chair, her knees up, her hands in her lap, and she let the grief come. It was going to come regardless. She had run out of reasons to make it wait.

  Outside, somewhere above Eden, Patrick was already moving toward Solace.

  Toward Nathan Reeves.

  Because Christine would not ask for help.

  And someone had to.