Folds

Chapter Seven

SADIE

Two months later

The blue streak in my hair faded back to dull, ordinary black.

A cheap caff pod burned in my hand; I nursed it, tongue still raw from my last overtime.

The station’s clocks all ran slow, dragging the monotony out like some cosmic joke.

Most days I patched pipes, recalibrated life support, spliced cable.

Sometimes I got to play medic, the minor stuff, when Mara was on leave or hungover.

If I closed my eyes and let the off-gassing hum of the ventilation pipes fill my skull, I could almost forget that two months ago, I spent a whole night reprogramming an alien’s nerve endings and letting him rewrite mine.

Izu Karel had been very explicit: he’d return, and soon. He’d left a note, even—I stared at the strobed projection sometimes, a blue-green glyph with a translation beneath. “You have altered my axis. I will return.”

I wasn’t sure if he meant it metaphorically or in the orbital mechanics sense.

Either way, I hadn’t heard from him since.

I knew time worked funny wherever he’d been reassigned.

I knew the Bozad had comms embargoes that made even a simple “hey, what’s up” into a breach of procedure.

Still, I missed him. I didn’t tell Mara.

I didn’t tell anybody. I told myself it was just a hookup, a once-in-a-lifetime fluke—no, a two-time fluke, because we’d done it again the next night, and that second round of exploratory surgery made the first seem like a handshake.

But then Izu was gone, and the only thing left was the echo.

Just as I was starting to feel like myself again, I woke up one morning in my pod to the most insane lower back pain I had ever experienced.

It felt like period cramps, but they radiated out from the base of my spine.

What the actual fuck? It was bad enough that I decided to take myself to the med bay to see Mara about painkillers and maybe a muscle relaxant.

The med bay was quiet, humming with the low-level anxiety of shift change, too early for drama, too late for the graveyard calm.

Mara was off—I’d checked the schedule twice—but the interim medtech was new.

Not fresh-from-school new, but new-to-our-wreck-of-a-station, a transfer from some lunar outpost where they probably didn’t get patients who reeked of melting insulation and back-alley caff bars.

She had a scar below one eye and a voice that said don’t fuck with me, even as she handed me a seat and started up the diagnostic panel.

She eyed me sidelong. “Chronic pain, or acute?”

“Acute,” I said, and tried not to look like I might throw up on her shoes.

She scanned me with the basic wand, shining a pale bar of blue through my abdomen and lower spine. She spent extra time at L3 to L5, made noises at the screen, then shut everything off except the nightlight. “No herniation. No shrapnel. You do manual labor?”

I shrugged. “Mostly. Sometimes I sleep bent in a question mark. Is that important?”

She cracked her knuckles and gestured for me to stand.

“Let’s try full range. Touch your toes, then rotate left.

” I did as told, noting the way my hips creaked and the sharp line of heat that shot from my lumbar straight through to my ovaries.

I’d been dealing with cramps since I was thirteen, but this was on a new level.

“How’s your cycle?” the tech asked, voice disengaged as she typed notes into the pad. “Predictable?”

I opened my mouth to say clockwork, but my brain started to tick through the calendar.

When had my last period been? The one before?

Had I really been so busy, so wrapped up in overtime and side jobs, that I’d missed a whole month?

Two? I waited for the horror to catch up—the menstrual apocalypse that stalked every woman on a fixed rotation—and realized, with a cold, sick drop that it hadn’t shown up.

I stared at the medtech. She was already prepping a routine hormone panel, but the words jammed up behind my tongue.

“I—uh—” I started, but it came out as more of a burp.

“Actually, now that you ask, I don’t think I’ve had one since—” I did the math.

Since Izu. Since the day I, uh, got laid like a starship hull.

But that couldn’t be it. Right? That wasn’t how this worked.

The medtech must’ve caught the hard reboot behind my eyes, because she pivoted in her chair and leveled a look at me.

“There’s always anomalies in artificial environments,” she said, “but if you’re two months late, we should screen for pregnancy anyway.

” Her tone was clinical, no-nonsense, but under it I could hear the faintest quiver of her enjoying the show.

The station population had maybe three unplanned pregnancies a decade, and I wasn’t aware of a single one that started with a one-night stand and ended with a blue-skinned baby.

I wasn’t even sure how it would work. I’d always assumed—hell, everyone assumed—that different species meant different DNA, different gametes, different everything.

Impossible to create life together. It was basic xenobiology.

I hadn’t even given protection a thought.

She slid a sterile swab under my tongue. “We’ll run a full panel, but in the meantime, I’d like to do a standard urine dip. Just protocol.” Her voice was dry as chalk, no edge of judgment, which somehow made it worse.

I tried to laugh it off. “Yeah, let’s hope it’s just a parasite. Or a—” The next words dissolved. Because if it wasn’t a parasite, it was a—

Pregnancy test. The thought landed like a brick in a zero-G locker. The medtech handed me a tiny specimen cup and pointed to the curtained alcove.

“You know the drill,” she said. “Fill to the line.”

When I came back, she was tidying away the blood draw, her hands sure and a little smug.

I handed over the cup, climbed back onto the table, and pretended to scroll my public feed.

Every muscle in my body tightened, a full-body clench I couldn’t shake no matter how I tried to relax my jaw or unclench my toes.

The medtech set the cup down. She slid a spatula of dipsticks through, then double-checked the result.

“Huh.” Not the most reassuring sound. She reran the strip, squinting.

Then she looked at me, and for the first time in ten minutes, showed emotion, a small lift of the eyebrows, the ghost of a smirk.

“You’re pregnant,” she said. Just that. Not a question, not a congratulations.

A weird, high ringing started in my ears.

For a second, I thought there had to be a punchline coming.

Maybe the Bozad had played a prank on me, or maybe this was how the station’s new medtech unwound after a sixty-three hour shift, by making a tired pipe rat believe she was ground zero for the first documented case of interspecies conception.

But the tech just stared at the results, then at me, then back to the results, like the translation layer in her brain was buffering too.

I tried to laugh it off, but the sound that came out was more like a hiccup.

“No way,” I said, voice brittle as the fracture lines in station gravity plating. “That’s not possible. The genes don’t… cross.” According to fourth-grade xenoschool and every boredom-wiki I ever mainlined as a kid, anyway. “Maybe the test is off?”

She shook her head. “These panels aren’t even coded for Bozad biology.

The hormone spike is purely human.” She pointed, not unkindly, to the readout.

“You’re not just pregnant, you’re… robustly so.

If you want, we can run a molecular assay—” Her voice trailed off, no version of the next sentence that didn’t short-circuit both our brains at once.

I let it hang, the silence louder than any klaxon.

So I nodded, with the professional calm I’d learned in ten years’ worth of disaster drills and lockout-tagouts. “Yeah, please. Run the panel.”

She did. She tapped her pad. I read the angle of her neck, the way her eyes flicked over the results. Her lips made a pout, then a flat line.

She looked at me. “Have you had… Are you aware of any interspecies conception attempts succeeding?”

I just laughed, for real this time, and shrugged so hard my whole body wobbled. “No. The odds are supposed to be zero. Not low, not one in a million. Just zero.”

She swept the pad toward me and, for a moment, I half-expected to see a pop-up: “Achievement Unlocked: Impossible Pregnancy.” But the numbers were real.

All my numbers, but one of the columns in the hormone readout was off the scale.

There was even a Bozad marker, flagged in a color she probably hadn’t known the system could display.

“Spontaneous genetic recombination,” she whispered, almost reverent.

I made a sound that, if I’d let it, could have twisted into a panic laugh.

I told the tech thanks as I slipped out of the med bay and into the corridor, completely forgetting about the painkillers.

The lights in the service tunnel were brighter than I remembered, humming so hard it felt like my teeth were vibrating.

By the time I palmed the lock open and slid inside, my hands were shaking with a fine, delicious tremor.

Pregnant. Pregnant. It wasn’t a joke. I locked the hatch behind me and spun a slow circle in my closet-sized quarters, letting the weight of it all settle somewhere between my collarbones and pelvis.

The impulse was to freak out, a what-the-fuck primal scream into the foam insulation.

But it was like a different panel of my brain had taken over.

I’d spent my entire life hunting every anomaly, every weird bug in the system, every demo day meltdown and field repair.

I was built for crisis and anomaly, to ride out the storm and see what secret signal pulsed out of the static.

I pressed my palm to my belly, not expecting a damn thing, but there was—something. Not a flutter, not even a heat, but the ghost of a tickle under my skin, a new vibration in the silent zero of my body.

I should have felt panic. Instead, I felt a surge of excitement, that made my heart beat so loud I worried it might trip the local security sensors.

I—a human—was pregnant. And not just with anyone’s kid, but with a hybrid, a cross, a first in history.

My brain atomized the logistics: would it be blue?

Would it have his eyes? Would it need to molt?

But under the avalanche of questions was a vein of pride so bright I almost laughed.

There would be consequences. Social, bodily, maybe existential. I didn’t care. I wanted to be the first, to chart new territory, to watch the world blink in shock and then clamber after me to figure out what I’d done. It was so thoroughly, catastrophically me to end up here.

I sat down on the edge of my tiny bunk, pressed both hands to my cheeks, and let myself grin for the first time in months.

And then I laughed, and then I cried exactly three times, but the last one was from the kind of joy that comes when you realize what you are about to do is going to fuck with the entire system and maybe, god help you, even improve it.

The next step was obvious. I had to tell Izu.

I couldn’t send a message—too easily intercepted, and Izu was one of those security types that didn’t check messages unless it was life or death or maybe a grand romantic gesture involving a wormhole.

He was due to return in a week, maybe less, but the days felt like syrup, stretching out into infinity.

Every moment was some new twinge or worry.

Would the kid be viable? Would it burn out my body from the inside, grow too fast, be so alien it set off alarms?

There wasn’t a single line in any manual on this scenario, even the unlicensed ones.

I didn’t know what I’d say. Congratulations, you’re a statistical aberration? Hey, Karel, hope you crossbred for emotional bandwidth, because you’re about to be a dad?

It’s not that I thought he’d freak. More like I worried it would fry whatever fragile connection we’d built.

Maybe he’d see a hybrid as a flaw in his perfect engineering.

Maybe he’d be too rational, try to brute-force a solution with logic and tradition and completely miss the point that this—us, the genetic bug in the system—was better than anything we could’ve planned.

I needed to tell him in a way that would bypass all his defenses, that would ignite the same wild curiosity in him as it had in me. I needed to make it impossible to ignore. But how did you tell an alien who spoke in triple redundancy and encryption that you were both about to be parents?

Easy. You turn it into a puzzle.

I pulled my dataglove from the charger, flexed my thumb to access the synthpad, and started to draft. A text would be intercepted, a voice memo could be spoofed. But a puzzle—nobody on this station solved puzzles except me and, on his best day, Izu.

I set the message header to “Emergent System Fault,” flagged it as low priority, and then in the body, set the syntax to mimic a diagnostic report.

He loved diagnostic reports. He once told me he read them to relax.

Then I laced the content with every clue I could wedge into the three-paragraph limit: sporadic power surges originating from a previously inactive maintenance relay.

Rogue energy readings, intermittent at first, but increasing.

A “secondary anomaly” detected—something in the genetic screening array, a subroutine that flagged parentage markers as both unknown and highly probable cross-species origin.

Embedded in the final line of the report, where the summary always appeared, I wrote, “Recommend you see for yourself. Condition persistent. Await further instructions.” Then, as the cherry on top, I signed it with a string of numbers, the timestamp for when I expected him to dock.

I paused with my thumb hovering, then hit SEND.

Now it was just me and the long, slow spiral of the station’s artificial night. I couldn’t sleep, not the real sleep but that fuzzy, half-conscious drift you do when the air recycler is a stutter and your body’s rebooting on the cellular level.

I didn’t tell Mara, not yet. There was no point in breaking the news until Izu was here, until there were more variables in play than just my own biology and the panopticon of station rumor.

I didn’t check my inbox because if you stared at a kettle on this station, it only got colder.

I just did my job, same as always—patched lines, rebooted subroutines, and hung upside down in access.