Me. This is your fault.
First light came red through smoke. The three ships of the relief detachment lifted from Farseek in sequence, small enough to disappear quickly against the scale of the wounded planet below. Maelis stood beside Kaiven in the civilian transport's observation compartment.
A medical alert sounded before they reached high orbit.
Maelis looked toward the corridor. Kaiven was already moving when the intercom clarified the emergency: labor, not attack.
The woman from the seed-vault route had apparently decided that surviving a Sargan assault, a tunnel collapse, and an underground evacuation was sufficient preparation for giving birth aboard a transport not designed for obstetrics.
Maelis found her in the converted treatment bay surrounded by two medics and the same farmer who had carried supplies for her through the tunnels.
"You," the woman said when she saw Maelis.
"Me."
"This is your fault."
Maelis blinked. "I am willing to accept responsibility for several things today. I need clarification on this one."
"You told me to keep moving."
"I did not instruct the baby."
The woman laughed and immediately regretted it as another contraction took hold. Maelis stayed because the woman grabbed her hand and did not release it. Kaiven hovered near the door until a medic put him to work carrying heated water packs, which pleased Maelis enormously.
The child arrived twenty-three minutes later, furious, healthy, and loud enough to make people in the corridor applaud when the first cry carried through the open bay. For a moment the ship changed.
People who had spent the day asking who was dead, who was missing, who had been taken, and where they would sleep tomorrow turned toward the sound of a new life insisting on itself. Crew members smiled. One exhausted security officer wiped his face and pretended he had dust in his eye.
The mother held the infant against her chest and looked at Maelis. "Put her on your list."
Maelis's throat tightened.
"Name?"
The woman looked down at the child. "Not yet. Give me an hour."
"Then I'll mark her as unnamed female infant, born aboard relief transport, identity pending."
"That sounds terrible."
"It is administratively perfect."
Kaiven laughed from the doorway.
Maelis entered the temporary record anyway. It was the first birth she had added since the registry became an emergency system. Until then every new line had represented someone being located, transferred, wounded, lost, or found. This one represented someone who had not existed that morning.
She saved the entry.
The universe, apparently, was not finished making people just because other people were trying to steal them.
Around them, evacuees settled into temporary berths while technicians argued over cargo balance and medical staff converted a supply bay into another treatment area.
No one aboard knew how long the assignment would last.
That uncertainty no longer surprised her. Below, Wasaytu was visible through breaks in the smoke: fields cut by black scars, irrigation mirrors flashing in the morning light, the market district reduced to shapes she barely recognized. Kaiven took her hand.
"Do you regret going?"
"We haven't gone anywhere yet."
"We are currently leaving the planet."
"Technically persuasive."
He waited.
Maelis looked at him. The bond made his presence easier to feel, but it did not make his question unnecessary. She was glad of that.
"No," she said. "I don't regret it."
"Neither do I."
A message arrived from the surface registry before they cleared orbital traffic.
CENTRAL RECORD REQUEST: CONFIRM DETACHMENT MANIFEST ON NEXT CHECK-IN. MULTIPLE FAMILY LINKAGES PENDING.
Maelis acknowledged it and added the request to her task queue.
Kaiven glanced over. "Already working?"
"There are eight hundred people aboard three ships whose records are a disaster."
"Of course there are."
"Try to contain your admiration."
"Impossible."
The transport shuddered as it changed vector. Far below them, Farseek turned slowly beneath clouds of smoke and sunlight.
Maelis thought of the old man with his granddaughter's blue coat. Of the twenty-eight people who had walked out of the irrigation channel. Of the names still listed as missing. Of the people already carried beyond Farseek against their will.
A registry could not rescue them. But it could refuse to let them become numbers. Beside her, Kaiven touched his forehead to hers.
"Next check-in," he said.
"Next check-in," Maelis agreed.
The relief detachment accelerated toward its assigned corridor.
Behind them, on Farseek, the first organized survivor registry continued to grow. Local command preserved the names, transport traces, and raw communication records for the officers and dreadnought crews still trying to return to a wounded world.
There would be searches. There would be rescues. There would be names carried across systems until someone answered them.
For now, however, Maelis watched her planet recede with Kaiven's hand in hers and chose not to imagine farther than the next message.
The newborn cried somewhere deeper in the transport, a thin, indignant sound that made two exhausted evacuees near the observation port smile.
Maelis listened until the cry faded beneath the engines.
Farseek had lost people that day, perhaps more than any of them yet understood, but loss had not become the only truth available to them.
People were still finding one another. They were still choosing one another.
They were still making records for children who had arrived after the lists of the missing had already begun.
The detachment made its scheduled departure transmission. Then the stars opened ahead.