26. Leah
LEAH
The scanner chirps one last time before I crush it beneath the heel of my boot.
It’s funny how certain sounds stick in your memory—little beeps and warnings that once meant identity and access and belonging, now reduced to nothing more than dead noise under steel.
I watch the light die.
And I don’t flinch.
They said I was a ghost once — a relic — a traitor. That the world would wash over my name like wind over blown sand.
They were right about one thing: it feels like I’ve been erased.
But I won’t go quietly.
Not even into forgetting.
I burn the access codes next — every last one tied to my name, my record, my history with the Alliance.
The flame sputters yellow-orange in the recycling chamber of the old access core, and the heat tastes like lies and beginnings both.
I watch the numbers curl and warp until they’re nothing but ash, and for a moment I think I hear a voice in the hiss of the fire.
Then I destroy the comm devices — the encrypted hails, the beacon tags, the old loggers that geek-tech thought would protect me. I shred them down to circuit fragments and melt the pieces into the waste flux. No back door. No trail. No way for anyone to find me.
I don’t tell a soul where I’m going.
N o t a n y o n e.
Glimnern isn’t exactly a speck on most maps. A marginal world far beyond League oversight, far enough from Coalition reach that people there don’t bother asking who you are. They ask what you want — and if you can pay for it.
That’s the kind of place I need.
I arrive at Glimner on a late-rust dusk, when the twin suns hang low enough to drag long shadows across the desert plains, and the wind presses warm against my cheek like a memory I forgot I had.
This world tastes of dust and salt and promise — a strange, sharp mix that claws at the back of my throat. The air here doesn’t feel like imprisonment. It feels like choice.
The transport drops me near a small settlement: nothing but worn metal structures and cracked concrete, jutting out of the sand like exhumed bones. I step off the ramp with nothing but the pack on my back and a pouch of credits. No comms. No codes. No past.
Only a name on my lips.
“Kalev,” I whisper into the rising wind.
The sound disappears almost instantly, swallowed by distance and emptiness.
But it feels good to say it.
Glimner doesn’t care about grief.
It doesn’t care about war.
It just is.
The bar at the edge of town is dim and buzzy with chatter — rusted stools, whiskey vapor tanging the air, the smell of roasted root and sweat thick enough to hold water.
I take a seat at the far end, orders a diluted drink, and study the room with eyes that have learned what to look for and what to avoid.
“Not from around here,” the barkeep says, wiping the bar with a stained rag.
“No,” I say. “Just passing through.”
He smiles — the polite kind that means I don’t want trouble. Good. I don’t want trouble either.
I don’t stay long.
I rent a small room — one dusty cot, one flickering lamp. The mattress sighs when I sit. I watch my reflection flicker on the cracked mirror above the sink. My eyes are too tired. My heart too full.
Too empty.
And yet I feel something shifting — something tender and fragile.
The nausea comes back a week later.
Not the war-echo nausea. Not the pain-memory nausea.
Different. Softer. Subtle at first.
I’m in the shower — warm water sluicing down my back, steam in the small room thick enough to taste — when it hits me like a lurch in the ribs.
The world tilts.
I blink.
And the water runs warm through my fingers.
Not because I’m imagining it.
But because I can’t wash away what’s growing inside me.
I know before the test confirms it.
Not because I’m clever — because I’m living it.
The food I once loved twists sour in my mouth. The wind out on the dunes feels too sharp. My sleep is full of dreams — warm hands, distant corridors, voices calling without words.
I take the test in the crammed bathroom stall, holding one breath in, one breath out, because the future is always measured in heartbeats.
And when the screen reads positive, I don’t gasp.
I don’t collapse.
I just feel it — like something ancient shifting into place.
A new gravity.
Glimner’s sun dies slow, and I sit outside on the chipped stone step of my room, one hand resting lightly on my stomach — once empty, now stirring with something so small it feels impossible.
“Hey,” I murmur, voice soft as nightfall. “You’re here, huh?”
No reply, not on this world. Just the distant rumble of wind and the slow, steady thrum of my own heartbeat.
That little spark — mine, his, ours — thrums under my palm.
And for the first time in a long while, I breathe.
Birth doesn’t wait.
It storms in.
Early. Unannounced. A riot of pain and sweat and fire that I never imagined would belong to me. I collapse onto the rough mattress in my little room, boots kicked off, shirt soaked with sweat and grit, and the labor comes hard and fast.
I don’t have a doctor.
I don’t have a team.
I have a makeshift medkit and a will that twists sharp in my spine.
“Breathe,” I tell myself, over and over, in between the waves that crash through me like tidal force.
And it works.
Step by step. Breath by breath.
I push.
I howl.
I cry.
I bleed.
And then?—
A tiny cry, sharper and sweeter than any alarm I’ve ever heard.
The baby is small. Fiery. Wrapped in the gauze I learned to fold with numb fingers — not gentle, not cautious — just survivor.
I hold him against my chest, skin-to-skin, feeling the faint press of life against my own ribs. Tiny fists curl. Tiny eyes blink at the light. Hair fine as stray silk.
And I name him.
Not for the world.
Not for the Alliance.
Not for war.
For the man who chose death so I could live.
I whisper it over and over, a vow stitched into bone and breath:
“Clancy…Kalevson.”
Not because he’s here.
Not because he came back.
But because his courage made this possible.
Because love and grief don’t cancel each other out.
They coexist in the same breath.
In the same first cry.
In the same name I whisper into the night as sand and breeze settle around this new life.
The joy I feel is inseparable from the ache that sits heavy in my chest — like two tides meeting at the same shore.
I pull the child close, feeling his warmth against the ghost of my own pain. My eyes travel across his tiny features, and I trace the curve of his brow with trembling fingers.
“You’re here,” I murmur. “And he mattered.”
Stars wheel overhead. The wind hums a low song.
I close my eyes.
And let both love and grief live inside me.