Disease X’s miracle cure has irradiated her eggs. Pre-exposure, her babies would be butterflies, gauzy-winged. Post-exposure, they’ll be lumpfish, grey-n-salty.

She’ll lay them in the fern fronds, hoping for a lightning bolt to Frankenstein them into life. But what if pelagic predators eat them and are poisoned? She pictures the sea filling with fish floating belly-up, methylmercury scales glinting like a thousand dying suns. She can’t do it. No.

There’s only one alternative: a petri-dish baby. Guidelines are clear about the contamination risks. Sterile laboratories are like sterile women—vulnerable. But the Doctor assures her they’re committed to learning from previous mistakes, and there will be no repeat. She says yes, signs the paperwork, and as the nights grow shorter, a darting glimpse of life is implanted.

Come summer, she gives birth to an in-between creature: half sturgeon, half swallowtail. And he grows, flies into blue, wing-skims the water and swims back into her arms.

And she tells him he’s beautiful. Because he is. He is hers.