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"Does the father know?" the healer asked.

"Not yet."

"Tell him soon. The bond tends to amplify through a pregnancy. He may already be feeling the change without knowing what it is."

* * *

She did not go straight to find him. She walked the long way through the Colony first, the way she used to walk a perimeter, because her body wanted a task while the rest of her caught up to the size of the thing she was carrying.

The corridors were full of the ordinary evening. Warriors were coming off rotation with the loose gait of people done for the day. A pair of engineers argued about water reclamation in the good-natured way that meant they had been friends for decades. A cluster of young Weredragons practiced their few words of English on each other and got most of them wrong. Two thousand people lived their lives around her, none of them knowing that anything had shifted, and she moved among them carrying a person who was three weeks old and the size of nothing and who would belong to both worlds at once.

She had spent a year in these corridors feeling like a thing that had wandered into the wrong room. She did not feel that tonight. Tonight she felt like someone who lived here, which was a different thing, and which had happened so gradually she had never caught the moment it became true.

Then she turned toward the practice caverns, because she had walked enough, and because the person she needed to tell was the only place she wanted to be.

*** Varek ***

She found him in the practice caverns, because that was where he spent his mornings now, relearning how to fight beside other people after two years of fighting beside no one.

It did not come easily. Solitary habits, total commitment, no coordination and the willingness to take a risk that assumed no one was covering him, were exactly wrong in formation. Thessok was his usual partner, and Thessok's assessments were blunt and useful in roughly equal measure.

"Your instinct is to end everything yourself," Thessok told him. "In a line, that gets your flank killed. A disabling strike is enough when someone is behind you to finish it. You don't have to be the whole battle anymore."

"I've been the whole battle for two years."

"You're not alone now. Adjust."

The word landed harder than Thessok meant it to. You're not alone now. Varek was still learning what it meant, in combat and in corridors and in the ordinary shape of a day that had other people in it.

He felt her before he saw her, the bond carrying her up the passage ahead of her body. There was the familiar warmth of her, and under it something new, a thing she was holding carefully, the way a person holds something they have not yet decided how to carry. He turned. She stood in the cavern entrance with her hands at her sides and her composure in place, and the bond told him none of the composure was the real story.

He crossed to her. "What is it?"

She looked at him. Her eyes were steady and bright, and there was a softness in them turned inward, toward whatever she was holding.

"I'm pregnant," she said, simply, the way she delivered everything that changed the world.

The word landed, and it rearranged him.

He stood in the practice cavern and felt two hundred years of his life reorder themselves around a single sentence. He thought of the banishment, the cave and the ridge with the hollow worn into it. He thought of every version of the future he had been able to build for himself, all of them ending with a body the Drogs would eventually find and none of them with room in them for this. There was the new note in the bond, the faint one he had been feeling for days and declining to name, because naming it seemed like too much to hope for. It was not hers and not his. It was theirs.

He had believed he would die alone. He had built a whole life out of that belief, a cave, a rotation and a shelter network for one. He had been wrong about the shape of the ending in every scenario.

Whatever had been left of the wall went down. It did not crack or fracture. It was simply gone, and what came up in its place was joy, plain, total and unguarded, the joy of a man handed the one thing he had stopped letting himself want.

He wrapped her up, arms and then wings, the amber-gold membrane folding forward around them both. The bond surged, and it was three now, two people and the faint bright beginning of a third, woven together and humming.

"Thank you," he said into her hair. Every word was too small for it, and he said the small ones anyway, because they were what he had.

She pulled back far enough to see his face, and she saw the joy on it, undefended and blazing. Her own composure gave way. Two tears went down, and she laughed at herself for them.

"You're going to be an impossible father," she said.

"I'm going to be a magnificent one."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

"In my case they're going to be the same thing."