Humankind has found the stars - and forgotten the coordinates of their home planet. Then Hana does the impossible and gets pregnant. Her mother's predictions ringing in her ears, she sets out to find humanity's lost cradle. She only has a myth to gu...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The night was a cascade of deep dark blues. In the sky, the Pelagi lights wove around the stars in a fairy tale dance. Teal, cobalt, and azure were tentacle fingers teasing the horizon. But Hana was oblivious to their beauty.
The blood on her fingertip reminded her of a ruby. Like the one on the chain her mother had gifted her on her twenty-first birthday.
In her mind, she heard her mother's sweet-natured lilt. "One day you will meet that special person. He may not be perfect nor have those Frank Sinatra baby blues, but he'll be the one to twine his life with yours and in due time you two shall become three. And then maybe one day you can give this necklace to a daughter of yours, my flower."
Wiping the blood on a tissue, Hana recalled how her mother's words were so full of hope and simultaneously so full of pity. Madrigal was sure her only child would never become a mother herself...but she hoped. And hope was a powerful thing.
In the last two thousand years, way before Hana turned twenty-one and was officially considered an adult in at least seven solar systems, healthy pregnancies and births began to decline at an alarming rate. Nowadays, it was rare that a human could be created outside of a test tube – not on Earth nor on any other planet – and no one knew why. Even after artificial conception, the birth of a healthy baby was rare. Despite how far medical research had come, even the best scientists tossed up their hands in defeat at the low number of live births.
Now, another twenty-one years after that birthday, Hana was sitting on the edge of her bathtub, surrounded by pieces of jagged glass, and looking at the mirror she had destroyed when she tossed her hCG reader at it and broke it into a trillion little pieces. From across the room, Hana's reader blinked its fluorescent eye. The numbers were clear: 44,186: week 10.
"I'm pregnant," cried Hana.
An overwhelming feeling of uncertainty cloaked her. Uncertainty brought insecurity and insecurity brought an ugly sense of fear.
