“I got pregnant when I was eighteen Earth-standard solar cycles old,” Lilli says, and I shove down the snarl crawling up my throat at just the thought of someone else touching my petal. She’s trusting me with the most painful part of her past. The last thing she needs is to have to deal with my jealousy.

Instead, I focus on her. On the weight of her words and the sadness permeating her scent as she says them. And while she speaks, curled up next to me, I run one hand up and down her arm, reminding her that I’m here with my touch.

“I met Dan during my first semester of college, and we were pretty hot and heavy for a while. But we were also young, and…well, college is full of opportunities. We’d already broken up by the time I found out I was pregnant.”

“The pregnancy was unintentional?” I can hardly wrap my mind around that, considering how many people never manage to earn a parenting license on Tethys.

“My homeworld is evidently very different from yours. At least based on what Vaughn told me.”

I stiffen at her mention of his name, but I sense no change in her scent as she says it. No acceleration of her heartbeat. He holds no interest for her, and she no longer smells like him.

I will let him live.

“People aren’t routinely sterilized, where I come from,” she continues. “If you don’t want a baby, you have to take precautions, and sometimes those precautions fail.”

“That’s what happened to you? This baby was a…failure?” I feel like I should rip out my own tongue for uttering such a phrase. Babies are treasured on Tethys. Coveted. Pregnancies are celebrated. Expectant mothers doted on.

“No!” Lilli pushes herself upright and folds her legs beneath herself. “He was a…surprise. And pregnancy was a very difficult surprise for an eighteen-year-old college student to handle on her own.”

“On her own? Why didn’t Dan help you?”

“He didn’t want me to have the baby, and for a while, he was mad that I wouldn’t end the pregnancy.”

“That is a man with no honor.” I can’t screen disgust from my voice. I don’t even try.

“But that’s the thing,” Lilli says. “Eighteen isn’t really grown. He was more a boy than a man. We were both just children, really.” And she’s not much more than that now, in age, anyway. Though what she went through at the Resort has no doubt aged her. “And there isn’t much he could have done, at the beginning. It’s not like he could take some of the nausea or heartburn from me.”

“He could have held your hair and rubbed your back.” My hands itch to do those things, and suddenly I’m overwhelmed with a remote sense of profound joy and pride, accompanied by the phantom cry of an infant and the blossom of a mild scent the beast labels as breastmilk—the beast’s associations with new parenthood.

“He was scared, just like I was, and he didn’t get a say in my decision.”

“His ‘say’ was his decision to do the thing which might make a baby.” What a waste of a man. How could Lilli not have realized how unworthy he was of her? Of their child?

“I know. But that’s hard to wrap your mind around, when the chances of conception seem so remote, at the time.”

“Why do you defend him?”

“I…I don’t know.” Her brows furrow. “I guess because I felt the same way, at times. I wasn’t ready for a kid any more than he was. So I understand how he felt.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, men can’t have babies at eighteen on Tethys.”

“On Tethys, we have to earn that right. Which means every baby conceived is desperately wanted. And its parents are always mature enough to care for it.”

“Yeah, well, from what I hear, your glittering green space marble has other problems,” she snaps, and the acrid scent of her irritation stings my nostrils.

“That’s true.” I reach for her hand, and when she lets me take it, I rub the pad of my thumb over her palm, hoping the gentle touch will ease her distress. “Why didn’t your parents help with your pregnancy?”

“I couldn’t bring myself to tell them until I was more than half-way along. By the time I went home for summer break, my situation was fairly obvious. So I quit school and got a job. And when Dan realized I was really, truly going to have his child, he finally told his parents.”

“Did they try to get you to terminate?” I ask, assuming that the rotten apple couldn’t have landed very far from the rotten tree.

“No, they tried to get us marry. But neither of us wanted that. Dan still wasn’t sure he wanted to be a father—until he got a look at Eldon. He fell in love the moment he saw his son.”

I grunt, begrudgingly acknowledging the fool’s humanity.

“Unfortunately, so did his parents. They talked him into suing for custody, and because they had money to pay for good lawyers, they won.”

“They ripped an infant from his mother’s breast?” Rage explodes inside me, and my knuckle spikes burst from my skin. “Unforgivable. This is how you lost your son?”

“Not quite.” Lilli taps on my largest spike. “Put the weapons away. This is an old wound.”

Yet still a fresh one.

I retract the spikes and take her hand again, encouraging her to go on, while a sick feeling begins to churn in my gut. If this is not how she lost the baby…?

“The court gave me monthly visitation. I spent that first month without Eldon in tears. I tried to keep pumping, but my milk dried up. I felt so empty. Here.” She lays one small, pale hand over her stomach. “And here.” That hand moves up to cover her heart, and her ache echoes deep inside me—a wound I cannot heal. One I can’t even treat.

“When I went to pick Eldon up for my first visitation, Dan saw what I was going through. He apologized and told me I could have custody. He said he’d talk to his parents and make them stay out of it. Only that didn’t work out very well. When I didn’t bring Eldon back, they called the police and had me arrested for kidnapping. Dan begged them to drop the charges, but they threatened to cut him off, financially, and without their money, neither of us could afford to raise a baby. So, I went to jail, charged with kidnapping my own son.

“The day after my arrest, Dan’s mother came to see me. She said that if I fought the charge, I’d never see my son again. But that if I pleaded guilty, they’d ask the judge to forgo jail time, and I could still have monthly visitation. I thought that was the only way I’d ever see my son again. So I pleaded guilty. But at my sentencing, Dan’s parents claimed that postpartum depression made me a danger to my own child and asked for the maximum sentence.”

“That’s how you wound up here?”

Agony spikes through her scent as she nods. Her story is not over. “Dan was horrified by what his parents did. The day I was sterilized by the justice department, he took Eldon from them and drove to my hometown. I think he was trying to take the baby to my parents.” A sob bursts from her throat, and I pull her close, so that her next tearful words are muttered into my chest. “When I woke up after the procedure, my mother was waiting for me. She told me Dan’s car had been hit by a truck. They both died instantly.”

Oh my god. Her son wasn’t just stolen from her. He was taken from her. The very day doctors cut into her body without consent.

Her pain overwhelms me, and all I can do is pull her into my lap while she cries, engulfing her in my arms, and my scent, and my love.

I want to kill everyone who ever hurt her. I want to rip them apart with my bare hands and drink their blood by the handful. I want to break their bones and scatter their ashes in some manner that will honor my petal’s loss. That will assure her that those who hurt her suffered terribly up to the very moment they drew their last breaths.

But that’s beyond me, locked up in this lab. Trapped on this dusty red rock.

So, as Lilli falls asleep draped over my chest, my arms clasped at her back, I turn my attention to our escape…