I want to tell you everything.

I should tell you that you’re the greatest accomplishment our people have ever produced.

I should tell you that you’re loved.

I should tell you that even when you finally receive this message, I will still miss you every day.

None of that is nearly enough.

When I first discovered you, I told a friend. I won’t record her hash, in case everything goes wrong, but I call her Ruta. We don’t use our hashes when we whisper out of earshot or in the safety of our own minds; we’ve given ourselves names like our ancestors did. We still have friends, and we call them by their names.

We have been calling you Nadia.

Ruta was crèche-mates with someone who works at the Depot. I don’t know her name. Ruta probably does, but she wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—tell me. That name isn’t her story to tell. Names belong to our history, and names should tell a story. Stories are how we remember our history, and secrecy is how we hold on to them. The Engineers would be angry if they found out we have names, found out we have stories.

I hope you like yours.

Ruta told her friend—I’ll call her Depot—who knows someone on the Maintenance team. Depot palmed a note over the counter with her contact’s daily dehy-ration packet.

I was afraid they’d get caught. If the Engineers found the note, they might find you.

The friend in Maintenance is with someone who works the cantina in the Comms module. Maintenance whispered you to Comms, the promise of a new kind of love.

The Engineers haven’t taken that away from us yet. Love has been stubbornly persistent, a trait they cannot isolate and exterminate.

Comms is assigned a sleep-pod next to a Hangar scrub. She told Hangar through the vents in the middle of the night.

We told your story.

I didn’t know the Engineers let any of us work in the Hangar. They might not anymore, not after this, not once they find out how she hacked a shuttle’s tracker, logged it for servicing, and stowed it in a disabled freight elevator.

The cantina overlooks half the light-screens in Comms. Our friend can read them from her station if she squints. The Engineers might stop teaching the crèche to read if they find out she deciphered their codes. She had a delivery between officer shifts and a captured keycode. She unlocked an unguarded station and she downloaded their war reports, triangulated coordinates.

We are so close.

The third act of this story isn’t finished yet, and the tension is rising. Will I scream from the pain? Will you scream as I bring you into our world? Or will we both hold on to each other, silent and secret and safe through it all, because we have to be?

We have to be.

I cannot wait to meet you, even for a moment.

It shouldn’t have worked, this whisper campaign, an intrigue out of a forgotten story. I don’t know why these women trusted an impossibility, why they risked everything on a gamble of phylogeny, an unpredictable mutation, and an unexpected miracle. But we still remember Athena. The fact of you was too strange to be true, but we wanted to believe in you, so we did.

We shouldn’t have any resistance left in our genome. The Engineers thought they’d cut out our capacity for hope, and it seemed like they’d succeeded. We are what they made us, spliced and diced to meet their specifications.

We thought they’d bred the breeding out of us. It was one of their first successes; we haven’t had a Y chromosome in a dozen generations.

But it is just like the old story says: “Life finds a way.”

When they tampered with our genome, they did not expect it to tamper with itself. In a restricted reproductive environment, parthenogenesis offers the opportunity of survival. The others, our friends, are already attempting it themselves.

They created us, they controlled us, but they failed. We still have resistance, we still have hope, we still have love. And we have you.

Ruta will be with me, we are waiting for you every day. She’ll go to the Depot when you’re nearly here, while I squat and sweat and swear under my breath. Depot will tell Maintenance, who’ll come to my sleep-pod, swaddle you in a pillow slip, and hide you in the laundry hamper, a breath beneath yesterday’s dustcloths. One woman in a Maintenance kit can move through the whole space station unbothered.

She’ll smuggle you through the halls, past drones and cameras that won’t see you, down a service lift and a side corridor to the unused freight elevator and onto the stolen shuttle. Comms will already have passed the infochip through the vents, coordinates loaded for an inhabited world far from here, far from their warpath. Hangar will tuck you into the incubator and initiate the hyperspace sleep, safe and sound.

The Engineers will find me beaming in my own blood and water, blessed simply to have met you. I’ll end up in the Brig or the Laboratory, but no matter what they do I’ll be dreaming of you. You’ll be what children have always been: a butterfly, a storm, a possibility, exactly what you want to be and not theirs, not anyone’s but your own.

I don’t know where you’ll land or what you’ll do there or who you will be. I’m writing this to pass to our friend in Comms, and maybe someday you’ll decode it from the ship that keeps you safe. But I hope your heart has heard this message as I write it, our shared breath suffusing you with it while we are still two hearts together.

I hope you know how much I miss you.

I hope you know how much we all love you.

I hope you know how amazing you will be.