Chapter Eight
IZU
I parsed the body in a single sweep, attention faltering only at the diagnostic readout labeled secondary anomaly.
The numbers, the parentage marker, the suggestion of cross-species origin.
At first, I thought it was a riddle aimed at my boredom.
Then I saw the timestamp—she had embedded my own return ETA in the closing line, down to the minute.
I reviewed the message twice, then three times, searching for the error.
There was none. It was a factual report, her way of telling me what could not be told.
Pregnancy.
My hands shook, not from alarm but from a pulse in my core that spread outward, refracting every thought into seven. Pregnancy was not a thing that happened.
I dropped everything. Not metaphorically.
I physically abandoned my shift. The encrypted transmission from Sadie obliterated my capacity for protocol or sequence.
Every priority on my queue was routed to null.
I touched the soft-ink glyph she’d encoded in the diagnostic header, letting my fingers caress the screen’s glowing pulse.
I read the words again, slower, this time not as an analyst but as the animal I suddenly realized I was.
Every Bozad cell in my body thrummed at the revelation.
Pregnant.
Not just a theoretical anomaly, some footnote for a later time, but real—a human, my human, was carrying a hybrid.
Our hybrid. I flexed my hands, felt the low-level tremor that had haunted me since my last combat drop.
I wanted nothing more than to be at her side, to see for myself if the miracle was real, to wrap my arms around her and study the axis I told her she’d shifted.
There could have been a hurricane roaring outside the docking ring, and I would have walked naked and unshielded through it to get to Sadie.
I triggered the red-priority override on my personal comm. Not even senior command could veto a Level 1 Medical Emergency, and for the first time in my career in the Bozad military, I breached the chain and initiated my own recall.
The medical officer on shift, a beta-rank named Rwellan Jass, intercepted my override. His face appeared in the comm window, flushed with the offended dignity of one woken before his cycle. “Karel, this is highly irregular. You are not in physical distress—”
I cut him off. “You aren’t cleared for the details. There is an emergent cross-species event on Station 184. Human subject. I need a full transit priority. And you need to log this under containment protocol or higher.”
Rwellan’s brow furrowed, silver hair lit by the default red of the medical suite. “What classification?”
I considered how to answer. The Bozad had a language for everything but miracles.
“Category: Unprecedented.” The words tasted right.
“If you transmit the log upstream, you may set a flag for the Kinetics Division—evolutionary and reproductive systems. And you may cite my clearance. It is not a malfunction. It is a… genesis.” I wasn’t sure if the word meant what I wanted; the translation layer in my head flickered and shrugged, then let it stand.
“Are you in danger?” Rwellan asked in reflex, but the small muscle at his jaw ticced sideways—a tell of genuine concern.
“No,” I said, “not that kind of danger. But I need to be there. I need to be with her.” I realized, as the words came out, that this was not an excuse but a biological imperative.
There was nothing in the Bozad manuals for this, but I knew with absolute clarity that if I failed to reach Sadie now, I would lose something I could not ever recover.
He stared—measured me for liar or fool. “You leave in thirty,” he said with gruff empathy. “Don’t take a public corridor. Escort will meet you at 09.”
I wanted to say thank you, but Bozad courtesy would have made it untrue.
I closed the channel, packed my only bag—two shirts, one synth-leather data vest. I read her message a final time before I keyed the transit, memorized the pulse pattern of the numbers, the cryptic joke embedded there for me alone.
There was a woman. She was pregnant. With my baby.
And she was mine—not in the possessive way I once thought of the universe, but in the way an orbital moon belongs to a star.
I arrived at the dock with a Bozad escort on either side—ostensibly for my safety, but really for my containment, in case my biology had already gone feral from the crossbreeding.
They kept glancing at the pale bruise on my jaw where Sadie once bit me.
I held my head high, which hurt my neck but felt correct, and walked until the only path left was to her.
I thought I’d have the tactical advantage—I knew every corridor, every blind spot.
I’d even mapped the cycle times of the cleaning units so that I could approach the maintenance deck from three different vectors, but Sadie had her own tricks.
She was waiting for me before I was ready, standing in the archway between two shadowed bulkheads.
Her jumpsuit was spattered with something that looked like rust but probably wasn’t, and her face was lit not by fear or panic, but a wild, feral joy.
My heart—both hearts, both of them—accelerated into a pulse so hard it made my teeth hurt.
She saw me before I could speak. Our eyes locked at a distance of twenty meters, then ten, then there was only the gap of two outstretched hands.
I didn’t know whether I would bow, or embrace, or simply let her strike first. I had not expected the violence of impact—she slammed into me, hips and ribs meeting so hard, it forced the air from my lungs.
Her laughter was a shockwave, a solar flare.
I wrapped my arms around her, unsure if I meant to steady her or myself, and buried my face in her hair.
The scent was pure Sadie—sweat, the tang of caff, and something new, a deeper note beneath it all.
I catalogued the scent of change, of emergent genetic destiny.
She pressed her cheek to my chest, right over the crash of my two hearts.
“Knew you’d come,” she said, voice muffled and smug. “You read the logs?”
“Yes.” My throat was thick. I wanted to say so much, but the words clotted together and became only, “Yes.” She pulled away just far enough to frame my face with both hands.
Her palms were rough, heat-seared from mechanical labor but infused with impossible softness.
She looked into me, as if about to speak, but the words bubbled out only as a dry, nervous laugh.
For a heartbeat, we hovered in the dark.
“You’re not freaking out?” she asked, and I realized she was bracing for revulsion, or at least a tactical retreat. Some distant, vestigial part of me wanted to perform surprise or horror. It felt not only false but unworthy.
Instead, the awe surged up uncontrollably. “No. Not even slightly. I want this to be real.” The heat in my chest sharpened, bright and ragged. “Is it?” I tried to swallow, failed. “Please tell me this is real.”
Her smile didn’t flicker. She reached for my hand, pressed it flat to her abdomen, and held it so tight I felt bone through jumpsuit and skin.
“Two months,” she whispered, and I could hear the tremor in her voice, equal parts terror and pride. “I don’t know how far it’s going to go, but it’s real, Izu. I’m really, honest-to-god pregnant.” Sadie was shaking. Not from weakness. The movement was more like a vibration.
She looked up at me as if waiting for crashdown, either my reversal or a failure of courage in her own system.
But all I felt was a pulse of joy so new, my biology had no protocol for it.
I smoothed her hair, searching for words, and found none.
Language, in that moment, was an artifact of lesser needs.
So I kissed her.
Her mouth was open before mine made contact; her laughter short-circuited into a half-sob, full of relief and hunger and disbelief.
There was no Bozad precedent for this kind of greeting, but I anchored her with both hands at her lower back, pressing her body against mine, letting her find the apex of closeness.
The pressure of her belly against my abdomen was subtle—no visible change, not yet, but my hands could feel a barely perceptible shift at her midline, evidence of our anomaly already rewriting her shape from within.
She gripped the collar of my shirt with both fists, twisting the fabric, pulling me down for another kiss, more insistent than the first. I’d never kissed like this—never needed to.
She was slick with tears and my own desire, my own.
We held each other, my arms caging her in so fiercely, I feared I might bruise the child forming inside her.
I eased off by a fraction, but she wouldn’t let me—her hands balled my shirt and dragged me closer, as if proximity itself could fuse us into a new compound.
I wanted to say her name, but my mouth kept returning to hers, greedier each time, searching for some confirmation that she was as overwhelmed as I was.
After a span, she broke the kiss and pressed her forehead into my sternum, gasping for air and laughter in equal measure.
“You’re not scared?” she asked again, almost angry, as if daring me to withdraw.
I told her the only truth I could find in the debris field of my thoughts.
“No. I am…” I tried for a word. Ecstatic. Terrified. Awed. Nothing in Bozad or Standard contained what I felt. I settled for, “You are the event horizon. I want nothing more than to be pulled in.”