“Nyet.” The word cut, but Lebedeva had switched to Russian. “This is happening, Naomi. It is horrible, terrible. I am not going to pretend it is not. They had their chances to fix things, and they did not. They knew what was at stake, but they still bought plastic, ate beef, took flights. I did, too. If I had been left behind, I would have died with them. But that is not my fate. It does not have to be yours. Think, Naomi. Valerie is making the hard decision, the impossible choice, so we do not have to.”

“I do not believe that,” Naomi said.

“It does not matter what you believe,” Lebedeva said. “This is what is happening.” She tied the neck of the bag of nutriblocks and made for the door.

“If your—” a pause for the word—“conscience wakes up, Oksana, you know where to find me. It is not too late,” Naomi said.

Lebedeva halted for the barest breath, and then she was gone.

Naomi dropped her hands, her palms tingling. She worked feeling back into them, grimacing. She sat at her lab table, poked at her evening meal of four nutriblocks. Finally, she stuffed them in her mouth, forcing the stuff down as quickly as possible, before she went over every inch of her lab again, determined to find something she could use as a weapon when Lebedeva came back the next day. Naomi needed to distract or disable Lebedeva as soon as the door opened.

Naomi’s hand strayed to her stomach. Horribly, this bump was what might save Naomi’s life. Valerie wouldn’t risk harming her granddaughter. She’d want her blood to survive on Cavendish. Though Naomi would put good money on the odds that some of the embryos in cryo were Valerie’s own, frozen when she was younger, perhaps. If growing artificial wombs proved difficult, would Valerie be able to carry a child easily? Or would she make the others carry them instead?

Naomi paced. Twenty-three steps. Twenty. Twenty-three. Twenty. It would be easy to let the grief settle in the crevices of her mind. For Evan. For everyone she knew back on Earth. Her friends, like Lynn, and her family. Her NASA and ESA and Lockwood co-workers. Her Hawthorne colleagues had given everything to Project Atalanta, not realising they were engineering their own destruction.