#but time

He had to half carry her through, but she needed to come. The second crew, out of stasis. At least three of them. They were all supposed to be dead, just like the rest of the first crew. She hadn’t trusted the computer since they’d trusted. 

Rahim opened the door. It slid open a crack, and stuck. He wedged himself into it, and shoved, feet and back. It groaned open, and dim light from the hallway spilled in. 

“Hello?” Someone called, obviously confused, but it wasn’t any members of the second crew. It was Mallory, the coast guard doctor. 

“Mallory?” Gen took Rahim’s hand, and let him help her through the last obstacle, into the doorway. “Is Hai here? How did you get in?” 

“Gen? Is that you?” A third voice. Ae sounded exactly the same, shaky and on the verge of tears. Gen inhaled, let her breath catch, and stepped inside. It was wet in here, a cold humid. She could feel it on her skin, and she could feel the mold when she breathed. She’d already started to feel it shifting the rubble, an itch crawling under her skin, but now the back of her throat burned too. The air in here was bad. Stagnant water and old ruins and… well, she knew what old rot smelled like too, but she could push it aside. She could push it aside for the living. 

“Hudson?” 

One of Saeed’s grad students was standing, wrapped in a blanket, shivering, trailing lines and electrodes, in a little pool of light in the corner. Mallory was standing over another member of the second crew, very still on a stretcher, and the third was leaning on the head of it. Hai was there too, he was always there if Mallory was, he was next to aer with a tablet. Gen only had eyes for Hudson. Still twenty-eight. Still alive. Saeed had been so worried about those kids, and Hudson had been so excited to go on the mission.

“Gen!” 

It was Hudson, and ae were running up to her and wrapping aer arms around her. Breathing and alive and shaking, cold, covered in drying stasis fluid. Gen tried to balance the combination of the unstable crewmate in her arms and her forearm crutches and her own emotions, and only really managed the first two. 

“You’re alive!” Gen said, and Hudson let out one sob. Just one, but it said so, so much. 

“Gen, how long has it been? You look—your hair—”

“It’s…” Gen trailed off, and before she could even try to explain thirty years, fourteen dead friends, the other member of the second crew who was on her feet finally, weakly spoke up. Mallory’s headlamp was between Gen and her, casting a glare over her face, but she recognized her voice. Dr. Tawfeek. Mari’s counterpart. The other cloning specialist. 

“Saeed?”

Hudson whipped around, out of Gen’s arms. Rahim had stepped up to the counter to talk to Hai, and was standing, frozen, like a deer in headlights. Hai turned around, trying to find why the conversation had stopped. His hair was up, and he wasn’t wearing his hearing aids. 

“Uh,” Rahim stammered out. Dr. Tawfeek was squinting at him, very hard. 

“No,” Gen said, suddenly, and the lie came out, easily, smoothly; more easily than it often was to speak the truth. “This is Rahim. Saeed’s son.” 

She didn’t know what she was protecting. Mari’s secret was going to come out. She hadn’t been involved in it until it had been too late, because that had been a horrible year where they’d hardly talked to each other except to fight and had spent most of it trying not to kill each other and not quite managing to do it to themselves. She could have cloned half of the crew and Gen wouldn’t have been any the wiser until she’d been finished. 

They weren’t leaving the outpost. Dr. Tawfeek was a cloning expert and all of the information about Rahim’s birth, or lack thereof, was carefully logged into the computer. Gen knew perfectly well that it was a pointless lie to buy time, and it would only make everything hurt more later. Hell, Mari might take it back as soon as someone asked her. She was like that. 

It wasn’t going to be Gen’s fight, though. She’d never admit it, not aloud, because she loved Rahim like a son, and didn’t think Mari had ever quite managed to give him that, but she’d always hated her for cloning Saeed, just a bit. Maybe she deserved that. 

“Oh!” Hudson gasped. Rahim had gone very still. 

“Are you okay?” Hai signed. Rahim nodded, not fully turning his head towards him. Not fully looking at anyone else. “What did she say?” 

He made a vague gesture, and translated. 

“You’re very tall, how old are you?” Dr. Tawfeek asked. “I don’t have my glasses, I’m sorry.”

“Um,” Rahim said again. “We do… we do all day counts… so I don’t really…” 

“Nineteen,” Gen said, which wasn’t at all a lie.  

Mallory, fidgeting with the edge of his stretcher, interrupted. 

“Dr. Mackford? We’ve got to get these folks some medical care, if you don’t mind waiting for a later reunion.”

He always called her Dr. Mackford. He thought she didn’t like him, which was true. He thought she hated him, like Mari, though. She didn’t. She thought he was obnoxious, and a doctor, both of which would have placed him on her bad side before he’d gone and done it all on his own. 

“Just Gen is fine. We, um, can get to our medical wing.”

“All of my things are—” Mallory started, and she raised her head, tucking her chin on top of Hudson’s braids. It wasn’t hard. Ae were very small. 

“We can go to our medical wing. I, um, I think you’ll find everything you need. You’ll need, um, sterile supplies for the central lines, we have all that. Draping and gloves. I don’t know if, um, you have that on your boat?” 

Mallory glanced at Hai, who raised his eyebrows back. 

“I’d like to go back to the crew medical wing,” Dr. Tawfeek said. 

Gen glanced at Rahim. However this turned out, it wasn’t going to be pretty, in more ways than one. 

Seven Weeks Later: Standard Lab Two, Now Gen’s Bedroom

Gen sat on her bed on the former lab, watching Rahim as he fixed Hudson’s headphones, cross-legged on the floor. 

“Is your arm alright?” Gen asked. Rahim nodded. 

“It doesn’t really hurt.”

“That’s the painkillers. You don’t want to overuse it anyway.”

“I know. This isn’t going to take long.” He tapped Hudson’s headphones with his good hand. The one that wasn’t in a brace and sling. He’d come in from the storm, cradling his arm to his chest, hastily braced and bandaged and speckled in quick-clot spray. Bone jutting through his skin. She’d been terrified, but infection hadn’t set in and it seemed to be healing well. 

Gen smiled, just a bit. “You’re very good at that kind of thing. It’s, um, always surprising to me, you were basically, um, raised by two biochemists.” 

“You aren’t a biochemist.” Rahim snapped a piece of plastic back into place, and picked up a roll of electrical tape to secure it. Green, like the tape Khalil had used to fix his glasses when they’d broken in the wreck. “You’re a marine biologist.”

“You… you get my point.”

“I guess someone had to do it.” He rested the tape under his bad wrist, pulled out the piece he needed, and cut it. “Be a tech.” 

It shouldn’t have needed to be him. He’d been fixing things since he was fourteen. Sure, Gen’s father had tried to teach her and her brother to fix things. The sink. The boat. The radio. The water filters. The solar battery bank, because theirs was junk. It hadn’t worked great on either of them, Gen had turned out a marine microbiologist and her brother a high school art teacher. It hadn’t been dependent on their survival, though. If the water reclaimer broke, they had the saline filters. If both broke, they called Kaiota, who lived fifteen minutes away, to help fix it. The power didn’t go out, and if it did, it didn’t mean the world would end. Sure, there had always been a typhoon or algae bloom or heat snap on Earth too, but there had been people to help. There had always been people to help. It was just them out here. Them, and the storm, and this piece of junk outpost that got more and more broken every year. 

Rahim was only nineteen, though, that was too young to be so worried about this kind of thing, especially all by himself. When Gen had been nineteen, she’d been a lot like him. The same sort of awkward, shy young man, but she’d been in college. She’d been focused on something between school and a year of limbo, trying to figure out why she hadn’t killed herself yet and what to do next. At least she and Mari hadn’t passed on their hopeless despair to him. He didn’t have a concept of an outside world to miss, even with them, even with media, even with the ghosts of the first and second crew. At least Mari had never tried properly to kill herself again after he’d been born. 

He liked living here. He liked living here. He liked living here. 

He changed air filters and fixed trinkets and all sorts of those little things, and even though he had most of Saeed’s allergies, he didn’t have his asthma, because that had come from growing up on one of the few pockets of Earth where the hard work of people like he and Gen still had a long way to go before they scrubbed marks of pollution away from the land. 

“Do you know what Hudson’s favorite color is?” Rahim asked, snapping Gen out of her thoughts. 

“Not particularly. Orange, maybe? Ae wear a lot of orange.”

“Alright.” Another roll of electrical tape, an orange one, pinned under his broken arm. Gen could picture Saeed, doing nearly the same thing, thirty years ago, with a splinted hand, newly missing two fingers. Trying to be a good sport about learning how to be right-handed. He was a good sport about everything, and Rahim was so serious, but he still adapted, just like Saeed had. Gen stared down at her hands on her lap, fingers shining with ring splints, scarred and gnarled with age, and closed her eyes. He would have been a much better parent than her and Mari. 

Another Week Later: The Medical Wing 

Gen pushed open the door to the med wing with her shoulder, stepping in backwards and spinning around, letting the door slam behind her. She crossed to the cabinet, intending to find and cut open the tube of hydrocortisone cream she’d been using to finish it off, and froze. 

Rahim had come in here earlier to get his arm checked on by Mallory. He wasn’t particularly comfortable with Mallory, but he always chose him over Judith, like she could sense the fact that he was a clone by touch. She certainly couldn’t, but it was all clearly written in his medical file, and as soon as that was opened, it would all come out. 

Judith already knew. She must already know. She hadn’t said anything to Gen yet, at least, but she’d been through Rahim’s file when he’d broken his arm. Mallory, however, hadn’t. 

Gen could hear them through the door to Tovah’s old office. Mallory, mostly. He hadn’t raised his voice yet, but it was close. 

Whatever Mallory was being loud about, it was going to be making Rahim nervous. Gen winced, because she was still itchy, and went to get involved, knocking on the door into Tovah’s old office. 

Mallory answered. He looked, of all things, frazzled. “Hello, Doctor—oh. Dr. Mackford.”

“Gen.”

“Gen, yeah. Need something?”

“Everything alright? Rahim, um, want me to join you?” He was always better at telling her what he really wanted than Mari. He wanted to make Mari happy. Not because she wanted anything from him, but because he worried about her in a different way than he worried about Gen. 

A pause. “Maybe?” 

Mallory let Gen take the door. Rahim was sitting on the chair opposite Tovah’s desk. Gen had been in here many times, and it hadn’t changed much since Tovah had actually inhabited it. Mari, of course, had left it exactly as it had been, to become a dusty memorial; nobody else had used it much after Tovah had died. An occasional private appointment, but Amèlie preferred her own office. Parveen had used it, for whatever ce had done in cer spare time. It was cer yellow stethoscope on the hook. Gen had always wondered where that had gone. 

“How’s, um, everything looking?” Gen asked, flipping up the cuffs of her crutches and leaning on them, folding her hands. Mallory and Rahim both sort of stared at her, with a lost, confused, almost pained expression. Oh, no. 

“I just found out some important information about Rahim’s parents,” Mallory finally said, voice much more steady than Gen would have expected. 

“Do you mean Mari and I, or Saeed?” Gen asked, swaying back and forth, just a bit. Just enough to try to release some of the tension, to keep pain and blood alike from pooling in her ankles. 

The corner of Mallory’s mouth twitched. His voice grew icy. “I suppose both, but I would say Saeed. Do you know what you did?”

He’d gotten a good look at Rahim’s medical records, but he wanted Gen to say it. He really, really wanted Gen to be the one to say the words, Rahim is a clone. That was a stupid hill to die on, especially out here. 

“Not to shove off the blame entirely, but, um, I didn’t know what Mari was doing until, um, he was born.”

Mallory barked out a laugh, harsh, too loud for the small room. “And I’m supposed to believe that?”

“Sure. We, um, we were fighting a lot at the time. Mostly, um, interacted regularly enough to make sure that, um, the other hadn’t died. I didn’t go in the labs, I, um, I was working on… I don’t even remember. Um, I think still trying to fix the atmospheric systems.” Gen fixed Mallory’s eyes with hers. “Her trying to clone someone was the last thing that crossed my mind. But, um, he was born, so he was alive, and I wasn’t going to let her raise him alone.” 

“But does she know what she did?” Mallory repeated. 

“All three of us know!” Rahim said, very suddenly, and clapped his own hand over his mouth. Gen nodded to him. It was okay to talk. It was his body being discussed here. He slowly lowered it. “Don’t blame Mari. I know too. I understand it all.” 

“But you just—she just—” Mallory put a hand over his mouth, and paced back and forth, just a few steps. “You were a child. She brought a child into this fucking place. You raised a child, here.” 

“Don’t think we don’t know?” Gen said, tipping her head to one side. “I didn’t decide to create him, but he’s, um, my son, even if Mari wants to technically sidestep the word. What, um, what else do you call a kid you teach to walk and read? We also had to, um, teach him about the storm and, um, repair robots and…” 

She trailed off and shook her head, trying not to think about Khalil’s funeral, about being pinned in a maintenance shaft with those legs reaching for her, holding Amèlie in her arms as she gasped for breath. Rahim glanced down at his arm, still wrapped in its brace. 

“We fucking tried, Mallory,” Gen said. “I love him. I’d tell you to, um, take it up with Mari, but, um, she doesn’t deserve it either.”

“Why not? Why would she fucking do that?” Mallory snapped. “He’s got half the lifespan that any other person should and all of you know it, especially her. She’s an expert, she knows why human cloning is banned. What, did she just finally do it just because she cou—”

“Stop it,” Gen snapped back. She didn’t snap often, but this was worth it. “Stop. How—h-how alone have you ever been? The loneliest? When you, um, shipwrecked? What if Hai had died? What would you do for, um, just… anyone? Anything?” 

Mallory opened his mouth, and shut it again. 

“Rahim, come here,” Gen said. Rahim stood up. “Let’s—let’s go.” 

Rahim lay on his back, head resting on a pillow against Gen’s legs. She ran a hand through his hair, and stared at nothing. 

Mallory knew. Hai would probably know, now. He probably would go and take it up with Mari, and the delicate balance they’d built up over the past eight weeks was going to implode. 

“I already told Kit,” Rahim said, eventually. 

“What did she think?”

“She told me not to tell anyone else.”

“Good advice, unfortunately.” 

“I just want to exist, Gen. I don’t want to be Saeed’s… shadow, and I don’t want to make everyone start fighting again.” He fidgeted with the edge of his shirt, staring up at the ceiling panels.

“You are your own person. You aren’t Saeed.” They’d both made it very clear to him, over and over. 

“I know, but he’s… he’s present, and he’s just so bright and…” Rahim trailed off. “Is Mallory angry at me?”

“No. He’s angry that we put you in danger as a child.” Gen sighed. “And that your existence breaks a law, because the law exists for a just reason.”

“I got that, pretty much. And I know he’s angry that I was born guaranteed to die before I’m his age, but so did almost everyone else who ever lived on the outpost.” Rahim sighed too. “I mean, I guess that part is Mari’s fault, but it’d probably happen however I was born out here.” 

Gen closed her eyes for a long, long time. She and Mari would certainly die before him. She wouldn’t be there for him, when cancer inevitably took him, as it took all cloned bodies. She wanted to hate that he’d accepted it, but she’d accepted a young death on the outpost years and years and years ago, each birthday a surprise, over and over, until suddenly she was almost seventy and she was here, with Rahim on her lap. 

Nineteen, and talking about death like an old friend.