Chapter Text
Raven POV: Two years after Praimfaya.
The thing about space was that it never shut up.
Raven Reyes had grown up on the Ark, so she knew the sounds: the low thrum of recycled air pushing through vents, the distant percussive heartbeat of the reactor core, the occasional groan of metal expanding and contracting as the station rotated through its thermal cycle. She’d spent her childhood falling asleep to those sounds, cataloging them, learning to read the station’s health the way other kids learned to read books. A whistle in the port-side corridor meant the pressure seal on Section 7 needed recalibrating. A rhythmic clicking near the water reclamation unit meant the filtration pump was three days from failure. The Ark had spoken to her in a language no one else could hear, and she’d loved it for that.
The Ring was not the Ark.
The Ring was a stripped-down, jury-rigged skeleton of what the Go-Sci station had been, held together with salvaged wiring, Becca Pramheda’s leftover tech, and what Raven privately called “aggressive optimism.” It creaked. It shuddered. It made sounds at 3 AM that Raven couldn’t categorize, and that terrified her more than she would ever admit, because if she couldn’t identify a sound on this station, it meant something was wrong in a way she hadn’t anticipated. And anticipation was the only thing keeping seven people alive in a metal tube orbiting an irradiated planet.
Tonight, the sound that woke her was organic.
Screaming.
Raven was out of her bunk before her brain caught up. Her leg protested with the white-hot clarity it reserved for sudden movements. She grabbed the brace she’d fashioned from hull plating and carbon fiber (lighter than the one she’d worn on the ground, though it still couldn’t fix what was fundamentally broken) and was moving down the corridor before the scream came again.
Echo.
The scream was coming from the quarters Echo shared with Bellamy, and it wasn’t a nightmare scream or a fight scream. Raven had heard enough of both to know the difference. This was guttural, involuntary, torn from somewhere deep. The sound of a body doing something it wasn’t ready to do.
She rounded the corner and nearly collided with Harper, who was pressed against the wall outside the door with her hands over her mouth, her face the color of old paper.
“She’s...” Harper started.
“I hear her,” Raven said. “How long?”
“I don’t know. Bellamy came to get Monty ten minutes ago, and I heard...” Another scream cut through the thin walls. Harper flinched. “Raven, she’s only seven months.”
“Seven and a half.”
“That’s still too early.”
“I know that, Harper.” Raven pushed past her and through the door.
The room was small. All the rooms on the Ring were small, privacy measured in centimeters rather than meters, and this one was already too full. Bellamy was kneeling beside the narrow cot where Echo lay on her side, his hand engulfed in both of hers, his face a mask of controlled panic that Raven recognized because she’d seen it on the ground, in the moments before battle, when Bellamy Blake was terrified but refused to let anyone see it. Monty stood at the foot of the cot, looking like he was trying to solve an equation that kept changing variables. Emori was crouched near Echo’s head, murmuring something low and rhythmic in Trigedasleng. Prayer, Raven realized.
Murphy was conspicuously absent. Probably hiding. Raven couldn’t blame him.
“What’s happening?” Raven asked, and she directed the question at Emori, because Emori was the only one in the room who seemed to be functioning.
“The baby is coming,” Emori said, without looking up from Echo’s face. “It is facing the wrong way.”
“Breech,” Raven translated, and the word hit, cold and specific.
“She started having pains this afternoon,” Bellamy said. His voice was steady in that way that meant it was about to not be. “We thought it was something else. Monty said it could be Braxton Hicks, that it was normal...”
“It is normal,” Monty said. “Except when it isn’t.”
Echo screamed again, and this time it ended in a sound Raven had never heard her make. A whimper. Echo kom Azgeda, who had fought in a conclave, who had survived banishment, who had stood on the edge of the world and watched it burn with the flat, assessing gaze of a woman who had already calculated her odds and accepted them. She whimpered.
Bellamy looked at Raven with eyes that said everything his voice wouldn’t.
Fix this. You fix everything. Fix this.
“Okay,” Raven said, mostly to herself. “Okay.” She turned and limped back into the corridor at speed, ignoring the fire in her leg, making for the communications hub three sections aft. Behind her, she heard Bellamy call her name, but she didn’t stop. She didn’t have time to stop.
The comm hub was Raven’s favorite place on the Ring, which was like saying she had a favorite type of headache, but still. She’d built the long-range radio herself from components scavenged from Becca’s lab, a feat of engineering that she was privately, fiercely proud of, even though the signal was inconsistent and the range was limited, and the whole thing ran on a power converter she’d held together with wire and profanity during the first three months in orbit. The radio worked. It reached the bunker. On good days, the signal was clear enough to have a conversation. On bad days, it was static and ghosts.
She’d tuned the thing, over two years of use, to the specific frequency the bunker ran on, calibrating it through months of check-ins and medical consultations, through every crisis the Ring had scraped through with help from eight hundred miles below. It was always Abby Griffin on the other end. Abb,y who talked Raven through the water filtration problem in month four, Abby, who talked Harper down from a respiratory infection in month nine, and Abby, who asked after everyone by name in a way that felt like being remembered. Abby was their thread to the ground. Every time Raven sat in this chair and broadcast into the static, it was Abby she expected to answer.
Tonight, she needed it to be a good day. She needed Abby.
She dropped into the chair, powered up the console, and started broadcasting on the emergency frequency.
“Wonkru, this is the Ring. Come in, Wonkru. This is Raven Reyes on the Ring, broadcasting on emergency frequency. We have a medical situation. I need to speak with Abby Griffin immediately. Repeat, medical emergency, requesting Dr. Abby Griffin. Please respond.”
Static.
Raven adjusted the signal gain, recalibrated the antenna alignment from memory, and tried again.
“Wonkru, come in. This is the Ring. Medical emergency. I need Abby Griffin. Someone, anyone, pick up.”
Static.
Then, through the hiss and crackle, a voice.
“Ring, this is Wonkru. We read you.”
Not Abby. The voice was female, and it landed on Raven like a hand pressed flat to her sternum. Her fingers tightened on the headset. She knew that voice. She’d heard it on the ground. She’d heard it raised in fury and dropped low in grief, and once, just once, she’d heard it crack through in the moments after Lincoln’s death, in a corridor where everyone was moving fast and not looking at each other, a sound that had nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with the specific way a person breaks when the thing they love is taken without warning. Two years of silence between then and now, and Raven still knew it in one beat. The voice coming through the static wasn’t the one she’d been reaching for. But it was one she hadn’t known she was still carrying.
“Octavia.”
“Raven.” A pause. One beat, two. Then, sharper: “You said medical emergency. What’s going on?”
“Echo’s in labor. She’s only seven and a half months, and the baby is breech. I need to talk to Abby...”
“Abby’s in the quarantine wing. A virus hit the Skaikru section two days ago, some kind of respiratory thing. She’s treating patients around the clock. I can send someone to pull her out, but it’ll take time. Twenty minutes, minimum, to get through decon protocols.”
Raven’s hand tightened on the console. “Octavia, I don’t think we have twenty minutes.”
Silence. Not static: actual silence. Raven could hear, faintly, the background noise of the bunker: footsteps, the hum of generators, someone speaking in clipped Trigedasleng at a distance. She heard Octavia breathing.
Then: “Tell me what’s happening. Exactly.”
“I’m not a doctor...”
“Neither am I. But our healer died in the first winter. Fever took her before the first snow. I learned what I had to. Nine babies in this bunker over two years, three of them complicated, and one of them breech. Tell me what’s happening with Echo. Start with how much she’s dilated.”
Raven blinked. She opened her mouth, closed it, and then said the only thing that made sense: “Hold on.”
She ran.
Well, she moved as fast as her leg allowed, which was a kind of aggressive, lopsided lunge that ate up the corridor faster than anyone expected and hurt more than she let on. She made it back to Bellamy and Echo’s quarters in under a minute and skidded to a stop in the doorway, bracing herself against the frame.
“Emori. How dilated is she?”
Emori looked up. “I checked a few minutes ago. Maybe... this much.” She held her fingers apart. Six centimeters, roughly. Maybe seven.
“Is she bleeding?”
“Not yet.”
“Can you feel where the baby is? Like, which part is down?”
Emori hesitated, then placed her hand carefully on Echo’s swollen belly, pressing gently. Echo hissed through her teeth but didn’t scream. Emori’s eyes went distant with concentration; she’d learned more about this than any of them, mostly from a battered first-aid manual and grim necessity.
“I think... the bottom. The baby’s bottom is here.” She indicated the lowest point of Echo’s abdomen. “The head is here.” Higher, near the ribs.
Frank breech. Manageable, if they were careful.
“Is the cord visible? Can you see anything...”
“No,” Emori said. “Nothing is coming out yet.”
“Okay.” Raven turned back to the corridor. “Bellamy, I’ve got Octavia on the radio. She’s done this before. She’s going to walk us through it.”
Bellamy’s head snapped up. “Octavia?”
“Abby’s unavailable. Your sister’s what we’ve got. Are you going to argue with me, or are you going to help your girlfriend?”
He didn’t argue. He squeezed Echo’s hand and nodded once, jaw set.
Raven made it back to the comm hub and dropped into the chair, slightly out of breath, her leg throbbing in time with her pulse. “Octavia, you there?”
“I haven’t moved.”
“Okay. She’s about six to seven centimeters dilated. No visible cord. Frank breech, butt first, head up near the ribs. No bleeding so far. Emori’s been doing the exams.”
“How far apart are the contractions?”
Raven paused. She hadn’t thought to ask. “I don’t...”
“Go find out. I’ll wait.”
“I can’t keep running back and forth, Octavia. My leg...” She stopped herself. She didn’t talk about her leg. Not like that. Not as a limitation. “Hold on. I have an idea.”
It took her ninety seconds to rig a portable comm unit from spare parts and a headset she’d been cannibalizing for wire. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked: she could carry Octavia’s voice with her, hands-free. She jogged back to the quarters one more time and set up in the corner, the headset crackling faintly against her ear.
“Octavia, can you hear me? I’m in the room now.”
“I hear you. How far apart are the contractions?”
Raven looked at Emori, who held up three fingers. “About three minutes.”
“Three minutes. Okay. That’s fast for a preemie, which means this baby wants out now. Here’s what I need you to do. Raven, are you listening?”
“No, I turned the radio off for fun. Yes, I’m listening.”
A sound from Octavia’s end that might have been a laugh, compressed and distorted through static. “Don’t get cute with me, Reyes. Not now. First, I need you to wash your hands. Properly. Whatever you have for sanitizer, use it. Emori too. Anyone who’s going to touch her or the baby.”
“We have an alcohol solution. Monty makes it.”
“Of course he does. Use it. Second, I need clean fabric. Towels, sheets, whatever you have that’s been washed recently. At least four pieces. The baby’s going to be small, and preemies lose heat fast. We need to keep it warm the second it comes out.”
Raven relayed the instructions. Monty scrambled for linens. Harper appeared in the doorway (she’d apparently been hovering in the corridor) and was sent for the alcohol solution. Even Murphy materialized from wherever he’d been hiding, took one look at the scene, and disappeared again, returning thirty seconds later with a stack of thermal blankets he’d pulled from the emergency kit without being asked. He didn’t say a word. Just set them down and retreated to the corner, arms crossed, face unreadable.
“Okay,” Octavia said, and her voice was calm. The calm of someone who had learned that fear was a luxury she couldn’t afford, and had been paying that debt long enough that it no longer required conscious effort. Raven had heard plenty of people perform calm. This wasn’t that. This was someone for whom the absence of panic was simply the cost of being in charge, paid so many times it no longer required conscious effort. She filed the distinction away without knowing why. “Now. The breech. This is the part that matters, so I’m going to need you to listen carefully and do exactly what I say.”
“You know, I take instruction really well,” Raven said, and immediately regretted the innuendo because this was absolutely not the time, but the joke was out of her mouth before her brain caught up.
“Noted,” Octavia said, and there was a warmth in it, brief and involuntary, before the commander slid back into place. “Emori is going to be your hands. She’s the one who’s been doing the exams, so she has the best sense of the baby’s position. You’re going to be my voice. I tell you, you tell her. Bellamy, if you’re listening...”
“I’m here, O.” Bellamy’s voice was rough.
“Hold her hand. Talk to her. Keep her focused on breathing. You are not allowed to pass out. Understood?”
“Understood.” He almost smiled. Almost.
“Good. Now, Emori, can you hear me through Raven’s headset?”
Raven angled herself so Emori could hear, and Emori nodded, then realized the absurdity of nodding at a radio and said, “Yes.”
“When the next contraction hits, I need you to check if the baby has descended any further. Don’t push anything. Just feel. Tell me what you find.”
They waited. The room was silent except for Echo’s shallow breathing and the ever-present hum of the Ring. Raven counted heartbeats. One, two, three. Forty-seven. Forty-eight.
Echo’s body seized. She curled forward, a guttural moan tearing from her throat, and Bellamy leaned in, pressing his forehead to hers, whispering things Raven couldn’t hear. Emori’s hands moved with careful precision.
“The bottom,” Emori reported, her voice tight. “It is lower now. I can feel... I think one leg.”
“One leg,” Octavia repeated. “Okay. That’s a single-footling breech. Different from what we thought. Listen to me. This changes things. The baby is going to try to come out foot-first, and we need to let it, but we need to be ready to help once the body is out and the head is still inside. That’s the dangerous part. That’s where we lose them if we’re not careful.”
Raven’s stomach turned. She pressed the headset tighter to her ear. “What do we do?”
“For now: nothing. I know that’s the hardest thing I could tell you, but the best thing for a breech delivery is to let the body deliver itself as much as possible. No pulling. Do you hear me, Raven? No pulling.”
“No pulling,” Raven repeated. Her hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs.
“When the body is delivered up to the navel, Emori needs to gently feel for the cord. If it’s wrapped around anything, she needs to ease it free, but gently. Don’t clamp it, don’t cut it, make sure it’s not compressed. Then we wait again. The shoulders will deliver on the next push, usually. If they don’t...”
“If they don’t?”
“I’ll talk you through it. One step at a time, Reyes.”
They waited.
Echo pushed.
What followed was the longest forty-five minutes of Raven’s life, and she’d once spacewalked to repair a thruster during an atmospheric reentry, so her baseline for “longest” was already pretty extreme.
Octavia’s voice was constant: steady, precise, unhurried. She talked Raven through each stage, and Raven relayed to Emori, and Emori’s hands did the work. The baby came slowly: one foot, then a leg, then the curve of a hip so small it fit in Emori’s palm. Raven described everything to Octavia in real time, and Octavia responded with instructions that had the cadence of ritual, as if she’d memorized them the way Grounders memorized lineage chants.
“When the belly is out, check the cord.”
“The cord’s clear.”
“Good. Now don’t touch. Let the next contraction do the work.”
“How will we know when...”
“You’ll know.”
Echo screamed. The sound was different now, less pain, more effort. Primal. Her face was sheened with sweat, and her teeth were bared, and she looked, Raven thought with sudden absurd clarity, like a warrior because she was.
The shoulders came. One, then the other, and Emori breathed out a soft “yes” that was almost a prayer.
“Now,” Octavia said, and her voice shifted: tighter, more urgent. “Here’s the hard part. The head is still inside, and the head is the biggest part of the baby, especially at seven months, when the body is small. Emori, I need you to support the baby’s body. Hold it along your forearm, face down, and keep it level with Echo. Don’t lift. Don’t pull. Let gravity and the next contraction do the work.”
“And if the contraction isn’t enough?” Raven asked.
“Then I’ll talk you through the Mauriceau maneuver.”
“The what?”
“Trust me.”
The contraction came. Echo bore down with everything she had, and Bellamy held her, and Emori held the baby, and Raven held her breath.
And the head didn’t come.
“It’s not...” Emori’s voice was steady but thin, a wire stretched to its limit. “The head is not coming.”
“Okay,” Octavia said. Just okay. Like this was a problem with a solution, not a disaster. “Emori, keep supporting the body. Raven, I need you to take over the support. Hold the baby along your forearm, face down, and keep the body level. Emori, your hands are smaller, and that matters now. I need you to reach up along the baby and find its face.”
Raven moved. She didn’t think about her leg, about her shaking hands, about the impossible smallness of the body she was cradling on her forearm, bluish and slick and so light it barely registered as weight. She just moved, and Emori’s hands moved to where Octavia directed, and Octavia kept talking.
“Find the mouth. You’re going to press down gently on the lower jaw, not hard, just enough to flex the head forward. Tuck the chin toward the chest. This makes the head smaller and gives it a better angle. Raven, at the same time, use your other hand to press just above Echo’s pubic bone. Steady, downward pressure. Light. Guiding.”
“I’ve only got two hands, Octavia.”
“Then someone else presses. Bellamy...”
“Tell me where,” Bellamy said instantly.
Raven guided his hand into position. Emori’s fingers found the baby’s face. Echo was panting, exhausted, nearly beyond language, but when Bellamy said her name, she opened her eyes.
“One more,” he told her. “One more, and it’s over.”
“Emori, on the next contraction, maintain the jaw pressure. Bellamy, maintain the abdominal pressure. Raven, keep the body supported and do not pull. Let Echo do...”
The static spiked.
Octavia’s voice cut out mid-sentence, swallowed by a wall of white noise, the signal swinging wildly somewhere in the eight hundred miles between them. Raven’s whole body went rigid.
“Octavia.” Nothing. “Octavia...”
The headset screamed static.
“Octavia.”
“...Still here.” The voice came back clipped, the edges shredded, but present. “Still here. I said maintain the jaw pressure and do not pull. Is everyone in position?”
Raven exhaled through her teeth. “Yes. We’re in position.”
“Good. On the next contraction.”
She didn’t ask what happened to the signal. Neither did Raven. There wasn’t time, and there was something else, something in the speed with which Octavia’s voice came back, in the flatness of still here, that said she’d kept talking into nothing. That she’d given the instructions into dead air without knowing if anyone was receiving them. As if staying in the procedure mattered more than knowing whether anyone could hear her. As if she’d decided she was going to walk this baby out of the dark, whether or not the signal held.
Raven pressed her free hand flat against her thigh. Held on.
“Echo,” she said. “Blodreina says you can do this. Word for word. That’s the message.”
Something moved across Echo’s face: recognition, sharp and certain, the face of someone who knew that title and what it cost to carry it. She understood what was being invoked. She set her jaw.
The contraction came like a wave.
Echo pushed.
The head delivered.
And then there was a baby in Raven’s arms: a tiny, motionless, bluish-gray baby who wasn’t crying, wasn’t moving, wasn’t...
“He’s not breathing.” Raven’s voice didn’t sound like her own. “Octavia, he’s not breathing.”
“Turn him over. Face up on your forearm. Support the head. His neck can’t hold it. Clear the mouth and nose. Use the corner of a cloth, and gently clear any fluid.”
Raven’s hands moved on autopilot. The cloth was there. Murphy, silent Murphy who’d been standing in the corner this whole time, pressed it into her hand without a word. She cleared the tiny mouth, the tiny nose, her fingers enormous and clumsy against a face the size of her palm.
Nothing.
“Now flick the bottom of his feet. Light. A stimulus. Like you’re trying to wake him up.”
Raven flicked. Once. Twice.
Nothing.
“Rub his back. Up and down along the spine. Firm but gentle. Keep the airway clear.”
She rubbed. The baby’s skin was impossibly soft under her calloused fingers, and he was so still, so still.
“Come on,” Raven whispered. “Come on, come on...”
She rubbed harder. She flicked his feet again. She tilted his head back just slightly, the way she’d read somewhere, sometime, in a manual she couldn’t remember now.
The baby gasped.
It was a tiny, strangled sound, more hiccup than breath, and then it became a cry. Thin, reedy, furious, the cry of something very small and very new that had been yanked from warmth into cold and had opinions about it.
Raven had never heard anything so loud in her life.
The room exhaled. Harper, who had been standing in the doorway with her hands pressed to her chest, sobbed. Monty put his arm around her, and his face crumpled. Murphy turned away and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, aggressively, like he was angry at his own tear ducts.
Bellamy was crying openly, his face buried in Echo’s hair, and Echo, exhausted, shaking, half-delirious, was reaching for the baby with trembling arms. Raven placed him on Echo’s chest, the thermal blankets ready, and someone, Emori, wrapped them both, mother and son, in a cocoon of warmth.
“He’s breathing,” Raven said into the headset. Her voice cracked on the second word. She didn’t care. “Octavia, he’s breathing.”
Silence on the other end. One beat. Two. Three.
Then, very quietly, in a voice stripped of command, stripped of everything except the raw, shaking relief of an aunt who had just listened to her nephew come into the world from eight hundred miles below: “Is he okay? My nephew, he’s really okay?”
Raven looked at the baby. He was crying still, angry, determined cries that were already getting stronger. His eyes were scrunched shut, his fists clenched, and he had a shock of dark hair plastered to his impossibly small skull. His skin was pinking up, moment by moment, the bluish tinge retreating as oxygen did its work.
“He’s perfect,” Raven said, and meant it. “He’s small, but he’s loud. Dark hair. Really loud. Like, impressively loud for someone that tiny.”
“That’s the Blake genetics. We don’t do anything quietly.”
Raven almost laughed. “He’s got Bellamy’s jaw. Even now, I can see it. This kid’s going to be a heartbreaker.”
“What about... is Echo...”
“She’s okay. She’s holding him. She looks like she’s been through a war, but she’s okay.”
“She has been through a war.”
“Yeah.” Raven looked at Echo, who was staring at her son with an expression Raven had never seen on her face before: open, devastated, fierce. “Yeah, she has.”
There was a sound on Octavia’s end that might have been a breath or might have been something that came before crying. When she spoke again, her voice was controlled, but the seams were showing.
“Tell Bellamy to call me. When he’s ready. I want... I want to hear about him. Everything.”
“I will.”
“And tell Echo...” Octavia paused. The history between them was complicated, layered with betrayal and political alliance, and the strange alchemy of surviving the apocalypse on opposite sides. “Tell her that she did well. Tell her that her son is Wonkru. He has a people, even if they’re underground.”
Raven relayed the message. Echo looked up at the sound of the title, Blodreina, the one she had recognized. Her eyes went sharp. She nodded once, slowly. Raven suspected that, between warriors, this meant more than any of the Skaikru in the room fully understood.
The room began to settle into the fragile, exhausted peace of aftermath. Harper brought water. Monty did something useful with the makeshift umbilical clamp they’d prepared weeks ago. Murphy, who had apparently been timing contractions in his head the entire time without telling anyone, announced that the placenta should be coming soon and then looked deeply uncomfortable about knowing that.
Emori washed her hands with the careful precision of someone who needed to do one more thing that was within her control. Raven had watched those hands all night, watching them assess and measure and reach into impossible places without flinching. Emori kom Floukru, who had spent a lifetime being told she was less than. Raven thought about saying something. Decided it would only embarrass them both. But she met Emori’s eyes across the room, and Emori gave a single nod, and that was enough.
Bellamy hadn’t let go of Echo’s hand. He was looking at his son with an expression Raven didn’t have a word for. As she watched, he reached out with one finger and touched the baby’s hand, barely making contact, and when the tiny fingers closed around his, Bellamy broke open completely. He was a father on a dead space station above a burned world, and his kid was alive, and the kid was already holding on.
Raven slipped out.
She made her way back to the comm hub, not running this time, letting her leg set the pace. The adrenaline was draining out of her system, and what was left behind was a bone-deep exhaustion and a tremor in her hands that she couldn’t quite stop. She pressed them flat against her thighs as she walked, waiting for the shaking to resolve into steadiness. It didn’t, quite. She told herself it was adrenaline. She didn’t look at the thought long enough to check whether she believed it.
She dropped into the chair and sat for a moment, just breathing.
The radio was still on. The channel was still open.
“Octavia?”
“I’m here.”
Two words. Simple. But the way Octavia said them carried weight beyond radio frequencies. A declaration. A fact of existence: I’m here, under eight hundred miles of irradiated earth, in a bunker full of twelve clans that would tear each other apart if I let them, and I’m here, and I answered when you called.
Nobody had asked her to. Raven had called for Abby, and Octavia had picked up the radio anyway, and then she had stayed, for forty-five minutes of crisis instruction, into a signal drop she couldn’t control, through the part where she didn’t know if the baby was breathing. She had stayed. Raven was still figuring out what to do with that.
Raven leaned back in the chair and pressed her hand over her eyes. “Thank you,” she said, and the words felt insufficient, like trying to patch a hull breach with tape. “I don’t... Octavia, I don’t know what we would have done. If you hadn’t answered. I don’t know what I would have...”
“You would have figured it out. You always do.”
“Not this. This wasn’t an engine problem. I can’t... I can’t take a baby apart and put it back together.”
“Please don’t try.”
Raven laughed. It surprised her: the sound was wet and ragged and too big for the small room. She pressed her hand harder against her eyes and breathed through it.
“So,” Octavia said, after the laugh had faded into something more like breathing. “A boy.”
“A boy.”
“Bellamy must be losing his mind.”
“He hasn’t stopped crying. I think he’s broken.”
“He cried for two hours when we found a stray cat on the Ark once. A baby might actually kill him.”
“Echo’s going to have two infants to take care of.”
Another sound from Octavia, almost a laugh. Almost. “I wish...” She stopped. The static swallowed the rest. I wish I could see him. I wish I could hold him. I wish I was there.
She didn’t say any of it. She didn’t have to.
“I’ll make sure Bellamy calls you tomorrow,” Raven said. “And I’ll... I can set up a visual feed, if you want. The camera quality will be garbage, but you’d be able to see him.”
“You can do that?”
“Octavia, I built a long-range radio out of a dead woman’s lab equipment and sheer willpower. I can rig a camera.”
“Right. I forgot who I was talking to.”
“Don’t let it happen again.”
Quiet settled between them. Companionable. The kind of silence that happened between two people who had done something hard together and come out the other side. Raven had done plenty of hard things with plenty of people. She wasn’t sure she’d ever sat quietly with a near-stranger on the other end of a radio and had it feel like this, like the silence was being held rather than just endured.
She wasn’t sure near-stranger was the right word anymore. She wasn’t sure it had been since the moment that voice came through the static. She didn’t examine that, either.
Raven should have signed off. It was late, or early, depending on which side of midnight they’d crossed during the delivery. She was exhausted. Her leg was a column of fire from hip to ankle. And she had approximately six hours before the baby would need his next feeding, and someone would need to figure out how to make formula from algae protein and hope, because they certainly didn’t have anything else.
But she didn’t sign off. She sat in the comm chair with the static humming in her ear and Octavia breathing on the other end of the frequency, and she stayed.
“Raven?”
“Yeah?”
“You did good.”
Three words. Raven pressed her hand flat against the console and said nothing for a moment.
“Yeah, well,” she said finally. “Don’t tell anyone I got emotional. I have a reputation.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.”