No

The trouble started with a requisition form, of all things — a request Rachel had submitted weeks ago for expanded access to the settlement's fuel reserves, needed to properly stress-test the catalyst model against real-world energy constraints rather than theoretical ones. It should have been routine. Ava had approved a dozen similar requests without hesitation over the past two months.

This one came back denied.

"There has to be a mistake," Rachel said, standing in the science wing doorway with the returned form still in hand, Ava seated at her console with an expression that had gone carefully, deliberately neutral in a way Rachel hadn't seen from her since their very first meeting.

"There's no mistake," Ava said, not looking up. "I reviewed the request myself. I denied it myself."

"Why?"

Ava set down her instrument, finally meeting Rachel's eyes, and something in her face carried a weight that told Rachel this conversation had been coming for longer than the requisition form suggested. "Because the council reconvened three days ago, following Xavier's death, and the calculus around your presence here has shifted in ways I don't think either of us fully anticipated."

"Shifted how?" Rachel asked, though some cold, sinking part of her already suspected the answer.

"The argument that carried the most weight, when Seli and I fought for your continued support here, was that your knowledge represented a long-term investment — four people, potentially permanent additions to a settlement that has needed new perspective for longer than anyone alive can properly account for. That argument held, more or less, even once we learned three of you intended to leave. William's decision to stay gave it enough substance to survive the first real test." Ava's voice had gone careful, measured, the tone Rachel recognized from council-facing conversations rather than the warmer, more honest register she'd come to associate with their private hours together. "Xavier's death changed the shape of the math. Not because anyone on the council is cruel enough to reduce his life to a resource calculation — I want to be clear about that, whatever else I have to tell you. But it proved, in a way theory alone couldn't, exactly how fragile and finite your presence here actually is. One quarter of your crew, gone within months of arrival. The council is asking, now, with real urgency, exactly how much more this settlement should invest in relationships that keep proving this temporary."

"That's not fair to Xavier," Rachel said, her voice sharper than she intended. "He didn't die to make a point about resource allocation."

"I know. I said as much, in the chamber, more forcefully than I think Seli entirely appreciated. It didn't change the vote."

"Who argued loudest for the reduction?" Rachel asked, though some tired part of her already suspected the answer wouldn't surprise her.

"Several voices carried it, in the end. It wasn't a single person's doing, whatever it might be easier to believe." Ava's expression tightened. "I want to be honest that I understand their reasoning, even as I've spent the last three days fighting my own instinct to simply override it out of feeling rather than logic. This settlement has limited resources and a population that keeps asking harder questions every year about what those resources are actually for. A temporary alliance, however meaningful, is a difficult thing to justify indefinitely to people who are watching their own children go without in smaller, quieter ways nobody likes to discuss openly."

"I understand that," Rachel said. "I don't like it, but I understand it. I just need you to understand that Xavier's death being used as evidence for it feels like a wound on top of a wound."

"I understand that too," Ava said, quiet. "I don't have a way to make that feel less true. I only have a way to try to fix what comes next."

"What vote?" Rachel asked, though the word landed heavy, final, in a way that told her she already understood the shape of what was coming.

"A formal reduction in resource allocation toward your continued research and support," Ava said, each word visibly costing her something. "Not an expulsion — nobody argued for that, and I would have fought it with everything I have if they had. But a scaling back. Reduced access to fuel reserves, reduced research allocation, reduced administrative priority on requests like the one you submitted. The council's position, as I understand it, is that with only one permanent addition to the settlement now confirmed, the resources previously justified by four potential long-term residents no longer apply to the same degree."

Rachel felt something cold and furious rising in her chest, and made herself hold it, made herself ask the next question calmly rather than let it come out as an accusation. "Did you vote for this?"

Ava's silence lasted a beat too long.

"I abstained," she said, finally. "Which I understand may not feel meaningfully different to you than opposition. I want to explain why, if you'll let me."

"Explain," Rachel said, though her voice had gone tight, guarded.

"I couldn't in good conscience vote against the reduction, Rachel. Not honestly. My entire position, my entire career, has been built on the argument that this settlement's resources are finite and must be allocated according to what genuinely serves our long-term survival. If I vote to protect resource access for research that will, in a matter of months, lose two of its three primary contributors to a return journey — Darrell, you, whoever else goes — I would be contradicting eleven years of everything I've argued for, purely because the person asking happens to be someone I've grown to care about. I don't think that's a defensible position for someone in my role. I think it's exactly the kind of decision-making I've spent my career fighting against in other people."

"So you let it happen instead."

"I abstained," Ava repeated, quieter now. "I couldn't vote for it either, Rachel. I sat in that chamber, and I looked at the model we've been building together, at how close we actually are to something that might work, and I could not bring myself to vote to make that harder to finish. So I did neither. I understand that might be its own kind of cowardice. I've been sitting with that possibility since the vote happened, and I don't have a comfortable answer for it yet."

Rachel stood there a long moment, the requisition form still crumpled in her hand, feeling the shape of the whole situation settle into something she hadn't expected to have to navigate — not Ava as adversary, not Ava as ally either, but Ava caught, genuinely and painfully, between two versions of integrity that had never before been forced to conflict this directly.

"I need the fuel access," she said, finally, quieter now, some of the anger draining into simple exhaustion. "Not for me. For the model, Ava. We're close. You said so yourself, weeks ago. If I can't stress-test against real energy constraints, I don't know how much further we can actually push this before the window comes and I have to leave whatever we've built unfinished."

"I know." Ava's composure cracked, finally, visibly, the careful administrative distance giving way to something rawer. "I've been trying to find another route since the vote. A private allocation, a research exception, anything that doesn't require reversing the council's decision outright, because I don't currently have the political capital to reverse it outright. I haven't found one yet. I want you to know I'm not giving up on finding one."

"What happens if you don't?"

Ava didn't answer right away, and Rachel watched something painful settle into her expression — the specific, unbearable weight of a person who understood, with total clarity, exactly what failure would cost, and had no guaranteed way to prevent it.

"Then the model stays unfinished when you leave," Ava said, finally, honestly. "And I spend however many more decades I have left in this position wondering whether the answer was sitting three months away from completion, on the desk of the one person who happened to care enough to abstain instead of fight."

"Fight, then," Rachel said, the words coming out sharper than she'd planned, though she didn't take them back. "You said you couldn't vote against the council in good conscience because you didn't want to contradict everything you've argued for. But Ava — what you've argued for, this whole time, is that this settlement needs to reach further, try harder, take the risks it's been too afraid to take for generations. Denying me the resources to finish this model isn't consistency. It's exactly the kind of caution you've spent your whole career fighting against. You're not protecting your principles by abstaining. You're betraying them."

Ava went very still, and Rachel watched the words land, watched them cut somewhere real and unguarded.

"That's not a fair thing to say to me right now," Ava said, quietly, though there was no real anger in it, only a kind of exhausted, wounded honesty.

"Maybe not. I'm not trying to be fair. I'm trying to be honest, the same way you've always been honest with me, even when it cost you something." Rachel softened, slightly, seeing how deeply the words had landed. "I don't think you're a coward, Ava. I think you're someone who's spent eleven years being the only person willing to fight for something nobody else believed in, and now, for the first time, the fight is personal instead of abstract, and you don't know how to hold both at once. I understand that. I've been there myself, more than once, since we landed here. But I need you to find a way to hold it anyway. Not for me. For the model. For every generation of this settlement that's going to inherit whatever we manage to solve, or fail to solve, in the time I have left here."

Ava didn't answer right away, and when she finally spoke, her voice had gone quiet, resolved, something hardening in her expression that Rachel recognized as the particular, dangerous clarity of a person who has just decided to risk something significant.

"I'll take it back to the council," she said. "Formally. I'll argue against the reduction directly, on the record, rather than quietly working around it. I want to be honest that I don't know if I'll win. The vote wasn't close, Rachel. Reversing it will cost me capital I may not be able to spend again for a long while, on whatever else this settlement needs from me after you're gone."

"I know. I wouldn't ask if I didn't understand the cost."

"I know you wouldn't." Ava met her eyes, steady now, resolved. "I'll do it anyway. I think, somewhere in the last hour, you've made an argument I don't actually have a defense against. If I'm not willing to spend my own capital on the thing I've spent eleven years insisting was worth fighting for, I don't think I get to call myself the person I've always believed myself to be."

Rachel felt something in her chest ease, gratitude and exhaustion tangled together in equal measure, and reached out to take Ava's hand, the same gesture from weeks ago in this same room, now carrying the weight of everything that had happened since.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don't thank me yet," Ava said, though something had settled in her voice, steadier now than it had been all conversation. "Thank me if I actually win."

She found Darrell and William waiting when she finally left the science wing, and told them the shape of it — the vote, the reduction, Ava's choice to fight it despite the cost, the fuel access still hanging uncertain in the balance.

"This complicates the window too, doesn't it," Darrell said, quiet, working through the implications. "If the council's scaling back resources generally, do we know that includes what we'd need for the return itself? The fuel for the Silex Sxar attempt?"

Rachel felt her stomach drop, the thought not having fully occurred to her until he said it plainly. "I don't know. Ava didn't say. I don't think she's had time to think that far ahead yet, honestly — she's still absorbing the vote itself."

"We should find out," William said, careful. "Soon. If the same reduction touches the return fuel, that's not just your research at risk anymore. That's whether Darrell and you can actually leave at all."

Nobody said anything for a long moment, the weight of it settling over all three of them — a single council vote, born out of grief and caution and the ordinary, understandable fear of a civilization that had learned, the hard way, exactly what reaching too far could cost, now threatening to close every door at once, the model's completion and the window home both hanging uncertain on the same overstretched thread of political will.

"I'll talk to Ava again tomorrow," Rachel said, finally. "Find out exactly what the reduction actually touches. We need to know the full shape of what we're fighting before we can fight it properly."

Darrell nodded, grim, and William's jaw had gone tight in the specific way it did when a problem revealed itself as larger than he'd first understood it to be — and Rachel understood, walking back toward their quarters in the gathering dark, that whatever came next, the fight in front of them was no longer just about a model, or a settlement's future, or even Ava's own conscience.

It was about all of it, tangled together now, inseparable, and none of them had any guarantee, yet, of how it was going to end.