The way he’d looked at her that day, pulling himself up from under the main console, checking her out from head to toe, smiling at her from under that ridiculous moustache … She’d told the Captain, told him there was something about this man that she didn’t like, but he didn’t listen. Sometimes she still wished he had, that she’d never met the man who was to become her husband. Then she wouldn’t still be grieving two years on, still waking in the night reaching out to an empty pillow, throwing those damn dinosaurs at the wall in frustration and rage. In the morning she’d pick them carefully up, ashamed at how angry she was, angry at him for dying, for leaving her to carry on without him.

She didn’t show it. When she looked into the mirror each morning, catching her long dark hair back from her face, pulling the curls into the clip, she looked the same as always. A little older, maybe, more experienced, but it was still the same face that had smiled back at her the day of the wedding. Inside, though … it was as if she was hollow. Everything that she had been, that she had become, had been wrenched out of her in a single moment, and now she had to live with that. She understood, more than ever, how the Captain had never really left the Valley, naming his ship after it so he didn’t have to. Well, she’d never left her marriage bed, and now it was time to finish it.

“Simon?” Zoe asked, stepping into the infirmary.

“Hi,” the young doctor said. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” He was staring at a screen, some mishmash of colours that intertwined with each other.

Zoe stepped closer to him. “It’s … interesting. What is it?”

“Recombinant DNA. Normal recombinant DNA.” He turned a happy, smiling face on her. “Kaylee’s.”

“Then she’s –“

“All right. The accident didn’t affect her.” He sighed and leaned back against the counter. “The drugs washed the radiation out of her system, and there was no damage.”

“That’s good, doctor.” Zoe pulled a smile out. They’d all been worried