Page 130 of The Alien Jungle Warlord's Bride

"Be still," Rythar says gently. "Don’t you want to see her?"

A band of soft light slides down the length of me. It reaches my belly and stops.

And she's there?—

Above us, turning slowly in the air, a hologram lit from nowhere, is our daughter. Small. Curled in on herself. The curve of a spine. The bud of a nose. Ten fingers. Her heart is a fast bright stutter of light, and the pod gives me the rate. She’s perfect.

Rythar doesn't say anything. He's looking up at her with his mouth open. I've never seen that look on him before. His hand finds mine on the berth and grips too hard.

After a long moment he speaks, his voice barely a whisper. "She's small," he says.

"Yeah," I say. My voice isn't steady. "For now. On New Terra I'd have grown this baby and given her away. For duty. Here you tell me we keep her. For love. The two of us. Mother and father." I say the words like they're foreign, because they nearly are.

"Yes," he says. He watches the image of our baby as though he’s figuring out how to kill anything that threatens her.

I squeeze his hand. "I don’t know how to do this on Xytheos. And our child will want other children around. As friends."

He squeezes my hand back. "Then that's a thing we work toward.”

Maybe we will. Maybe someday I'll sit in a room with all of my friends and our children. It's a good thought to fall asleep on. The warmth climbs through me, slow and total, until I can't hold my eyes open.

Rythar's voice drifts through the sleep that’s overtaking me. "You still have a temporary translator. I can make it permanent while you rest here. Only if you wish it."

I know what he's really asking. The translator patch was always the temporary thing. The one I could peel off and hand back when I left.

"You want to put something permanent in my head," I murmur, eyes already closed. "While I'm growing your baby. Bit late to be asking me for commitment."

"I am thorough," he says.

"Mm. Do it. I'm already making a person who's half yours. A translator implant isn't the thing that scares me off."

"You are certain."

"Rythar. Yes." The warmth and the sleepiness of pregnancy have me. I feel the cool press of the tech behind my ear and a brief sting. Then it fades, and the last thing in my head is the heart of the green, and what he does when he takes me back to it. I sleep, dreaming of what's to come.

Maya is alive. I feel her sometimes, far off and dim, a light behind glass. Most nights I reach for Dana before I sleep. All I can sense is her presence, but I like knowing she’s there. But Sophia has gotten through to her. They’re trying to find out who brought us to Xytheos. I spent my whole life thinking I had to carry every one of them myself. I don't. I just have to carry my part, and trust the next pair of hands to carry hers.

Rythar comes to me in the heart. The new border—the stretch that used to be Reach's End—always needs him, but he comes to me anyway, still smelling of the deep green, still in his armor, hands reaching for me before he's all the way through the door.

He kneels and sets one of his hands carefully against my belly, a smile tugging at his mouth. I cover his hand with mine.

"She's bigger today," he says.

"You can't know that," I laugh.

"I can." He says it the way he says the sun will rise. I gave up arguing with that voice a long time ago.

I move behind him and wrap my arms around his shoulders and rest my chin in his hair. He lets me hold him longer than he used to.

This is the rhythm I dream for us, the months before our daughter comes. The fortress when the world needs a warlord. The heart when it's time to disappear. I can't travel the jungle alone, not the way he does—not yet. But he takes me to the nexus in the grey before sunrise, when Jarrett's eyes are turned elsewhere, and pours the green into me a little at a time, and a little at a time my body learns to hold it. Not too much. He has opinions about how a pregnant woman should rest. But the flowers bloom for me now. He says that's only the start. Soon I won't be only flesh and bone.

Over the place our daughter will sleep, he grows a canopy of vines, and at night they bloom—small, white, slow, opening and closing on no schedule I can find, like the jungle is breathing over her cradle. He says the flowers will know her when she comes.

A daughter. Rare, they call it here. Precious. On this planet, precious means being owned. Assigned to a lord the way I was assigned, her future sealed before she's old enough to argue. That's the part I won't allow. I was handed over and had to fight my way back to choosing. She'll start where I had to fight to get to. I'll teach her to flip off the void with both hands, the way my grandmother would have. By the time anyone comes to decide her life, she'll already have decided it. Let them come.

I wake up. Rythar is still in the chair, pulled close enough to reach me, my hand in both of his. He presses his lips to the inside of my wrist, then leans forward and sets his mouth againstmy belly, whispering lightly, like he's telling her something he doesn't want me to hear.

"What did you dream?" he asks, cheek against my skin.

"We were in the heart. You and me. Her." I put my hand in his hair. "We were ready."

He lifts his head. His eyes are curious. "Were we?"

"No," I smile. “But we’re going to try.”

His mouth curves. He pulls me up from the berth and holds me against his chest. Outside the pod, the jungle is waiting. I feel it through his skin—the green, the heat, the low hum of everything he is. It's always louder when we touch.

"The threat of war didn't end," I say. "It just paused."

Rythar’s arms tighten around me. "That's just another day on Xytheos."