Something like a laugh goes through the room. Brief. Needed.
Later, much later, when the contractions are close enough together that time becomes a rumor, the physician says, “Selene, listen to me. Next time, you push.”
I am so tired I feel transparent.
Rhyx crouches beside the bed—they moved me there eventually, to our bed, to our room, to the place where we sleep and argue and pretend futures into architecture—and his hand is locked around mine.
His scaled fingers are huge. Careful. Warm.
I squeeze hard enough to probably bruise him.
He does not react.
“Rhyx,” I gasp, because saying his name is the only thing that feels more solid than pain.
“I’m here.”
The words cut through everything.
I bear down.
The room goes white-hot and wet and animal and impossible. I hear the physician telling me yes, like that. The medic counting. The monitor still carrying the baby’s heartbeat, quick and relentless. My own voice doing things I will never forgive myself for later. Rhyx saying my name again and again, never louder than necessary, like he is laying it down as a path.
Then pressure changes.
Then the physician says, “One more.”
I think, with startling clarity, I will murder everyone in this room.
I do it anyway.
And suddenly the world breaks open.
A cry.
Sharp. New. Furious.
Everything stops.
No, not stops. Reorders.
The air in the room changes in one impossible instant. The medics move. The physician laughs once under her breath. My whole body goes hollow and electric all at once.
The sound comes again—indignant, outraged, alive.
Alive.
Tears hit before I know they’re happening.
“Baby’s out,” the physician says, like she is announcing weather and not rearranging the universe. “Strong vocal response. Good tone. Good color.”
I can’t see properly for a second. There are too many tears, too much light, too much blood pounding in my ears.
“Selene,” Rhyx says, voice cracked in a place I have never heard crack before. “Selene.”
I turn my head.
He is staring at the child in the physician’s hands like language has become suddenly insufficient and perhaps offensive. His face—this face that has held tribunals and war and restraint and every careful decision we’ve made since then—is open in a way so raw it almost undoes me entirely.
