He sat back on his stool, rocked on two legs and tried to focus on balancing, but the lurch in his stomach told him he couldn’t return to his research. The pouch felt like his personal success in some ways, one he was deeply proud of, one he loved, and now he felt like he was personally on trial. Looking around, he saw that everyone else in the lab was waiting too. They were all invested. He readjusted his hood, loosened the strap under his chin. They were hot, the cleanroom suits, the material designed to stop any molecules passing through. He could already feel the sweat on his back, on his forehead.

The ring of the intercom made him jump in the kind of unexpected-but-expected way that caused his pulse to pound rather than his body startle.

‘This is Quentin,’ he answered, his voice reluctant, his heart sinking.

‘Yes. It’s bad news.’

He closed his eyes. Not again, he thought. Not again.

‘We’re ready,’ he said.

Now there could be no more denying it. The intercom had gone silent in his hands, but he didn’t hang it up. He turned to the lab and nodded.

‘The pouch is going to be sent up,’ he said.

He couldn’t be sick, though he wanted to be. They mustn’t allow any contamination to affect their data.

That’s right, he thought to himself. Think about samples. Think about data. Do your job. Block out everything else.

Holly stepped away from the birthing table as the doctors began rushing in. Her whole body was shaking. There was something like sea mist filling the room, engulfing her feet, rising and blurring her vision, seeping into her lungs. She closed her eyes against it, but that was no use. There was only one thing she could see when her eyes were closed, and she didn’t want to see it. She wished she had never had to see it.

For a split second, he had looked so perfect. His chubby knees were bent, his feet slightly wrinkled the way babies’ feet often are. He had deep brown hair lying slick over the top of his head. But his eyes were closed, she noticed, waiting then for the nurse to pat his cheek to get him to wake up, to take a deep breath, to have his first cry. The nurse didn’t move. No one was moving.

His colour. Holly saw suddenly that his colour was wrong, he was too … he looked wrong, the pallor of his skin, the slightly greasy sheen that she could see, as she stared, unable to move, to speak, as the nurse pressed the alarm and people started screaming and there was the most terrible wail from Rosie. She would never stop hearing it, that cry her granddaughter let out. That awful sound would be with her for the rest of her life.