Christine adjusted the feed on the holo-scan, fingers darting across the console with practiced precision. The dim blue glow bathed her features in sterile light as lines of genomic code scrolled in silence.

  The numbers stayed the same.

  Only two.

  Two viable female genomes across 473 survivors.

  Hers and Maria's.

  She dragged a fingertip down the chromosomal viability chart again, watching the red indicators blink like silent alarms. As if staring longer might somehow rewrite the reality staring back.

  It didn't.

  Two women. Two egg sources. Two fragile threads tethering humanity's future to the edge of extinction. Even with the Genesis procedure, the population bottleneck was razor-thin. Four generations at best, maybe five if mutations didn't cripple the genome first.

  Disease. Deformity. Collapse.

  Christine exhaled sharply, blinking away the burn behind her eyes, and looked up at the growth chambers.

  They glowed softly in the center of the lab, ovoid vessels suspended in fluid, wombs without mothers. Still. Silent. Contained potential.

  Callum leaned beside her, his posture deceptively relaxed, the soft hum of his hover-chair the only noise in the sterile space. He watched the data roll by, eyes scanning, absorbing.

  "Two women," Christine murmured, this time aloud. Not as despair. Not as mourning. A clinical statement. A diagnosis.

  "For now," Callum said, the words steady, measured. "Now that we have functional scanners again, and after Patrick rewired half the lab with scrap and prayers, we can run deeper scans. Look for dormant fertility markers we couldn't detect before. There might be more candidates. Viable ova hiding in the margins."

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  Christine didn't answer immediately. She stared at the display, at the cold, unwavering facts. Then:

  "And the men?"

  Callum gave a lopsided smile. "Plenty of samples. That part was never the problem."

  Christine let out a dry, breathless laugh. "Nature's cruel math."

  Her hands hovered over the console again, trembling slightly. Not from fear. From the weight of what came next, not just survival, but becoming the unnamed foremothers of whatever humanity would be.

  Progenitor status.

  No one asked for it.

  She lowered her hands to the edge of the console, gripping it. "What happens if we don't make it?"

  Callum turned toward her, away from the data. "We will." His tone softened. "We're past the first threshold. We're not dead yet, Red."

  He hesitated.

  "Actually, there's… something I've been meaning to tell you…"

  But he didn't finish.

  Lub dub.

  A sound cut him off. A pulse through the silence.

  They froze.

  Lub dub.

  Christine turned sharply toward the chambers. Her eyes widened.

  The monitor blinked.

  Lub dub. Lub dub.

  She took a step forward, the whisper falling from her lips like a prayer:

  "Rain."

  Callum edged closer, chair gliding silently. His breath caught.

  "That's…"

  "A heartbeat," Christine said. Her voice cracked halfway through.

  On the screen, the embryo floated within its luminous cocoon. Tiny. Translucent. No bigger than a seed. But curled within that delicate shell was movement, soft, sure, and impossibly alive.

  Lub dub.

  Then another.

  Lub dub.

  She gasped.

  "River," she breathed. "Not far behind."

  Two pulses. Separate. Mirrored. Stronger with every beat.

  Christine felt her throat close. Her knees buckled, but she held the console like an anchor.

  "They're thriving, Callum," she said, voice barely above a whisper. "They're really… alive."

  Callum didn't answer. She glanced at him, and the shimmer in his eyes told her everything.

  Her shoulders shook. The sob that escaped wasn't grief; it was relief. The unbearable, glorious sound of something breaking open inside her. Something that had waited a lifetime.

  And Callum watched her cry over life.

  He'd been about to tell her. About Sollace. About the other dome. About the 4,000 survivors she didn't know existed.

  About the choice he'd made to keep it from her.

  But not now.

  Not when Rain and River were finally beating into being. Not when she was smiling through tears for the first time in years.

  The truth could wait.

  Just a little longer.

  He reached out, or would have, if he still had arms. Instead, his chair floated closer, hovering beside her. The nearness was enough.

  "You did it, Red," he whispered, eyes locked on the pulse of life. "We created life."

  Christine looked at him. Her face was wrecked, scarred, streaked with tears.

  She smiled.

  And the heartbeats continued.

  Lub dub. Lub dub.