Sanctuary
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 8: Kerath
The transport that carried us to Kerath Colony was smaller than the Meridian’s Hope and considerably less dramatic. A cargo hauler that made the Rim run every six weeks, carrying supplies and occasionally people who needed to be somewhere the major powers weren’t paying attention to. The crew asked no questions. We offered no answers. For eight days we watched the stars change outside the viewport and I administered my injection every seventy-two hours and Derek read everything he could find about Outer Rim ecology and Kira Thane and Mason Simms practiced being themselves.
It was easier than I’d expected. Or he made it easier. He had a talent for that.
We talked about the child constantly and never ran out of things to say, which surprised me. I had not previously understood how much there was to think about when a life was coming that had not existed before. What she would need. What we could give her. What Kerath Colony would look like to someone encountering it for the first time with new eyes that had never seen anything at all.
“She’ll need a name,” Derek said, on the fifth night.
“I know.”
“Do Kathari name children before birth or after?”
“After. We name what we can see.” I thought about it. “My mother waited three days. She said she needed to know who I was before she could call me anything.”
He was quiet for a moment. “That’s a good way to do it.”
We didn’t decide anything that night. But we kept talking, the way we’d kept talking through everything — not toward a conclusion, just toward each other, because that was what we did now.
Kerath Colony announced itself first as light.
We came in through the atmosphere on a clear morning, local time, and the settlement spread below us in the pale dawn — low buildings, practical and unbeautiful, arranged around a central hub with the pragmatic logic of people who had been more concerned with surviving than with aesthetics. Beyond the settlement, a wide valley opened into something that caught my breath before I could manage it: forest, dense and green-gold, nothing like Sanctuary 7’s engineered malevolence. Just trees. Just a world going about its business of being alive.
“Look at that,” Derek said softly.
I looked. I kept looking until we touched down.
Kerath’s administrator was a heavyset human woman named Calloway who had the handshake of someone who meant it and the eyes of someone who had heard most stories and was prepared to hear ours without judgment. She looked at our documents, looked at us, looked at the slight change in my silhouette that seven months had made undeniable.
“Medical bay is on the north side of the hub,” she said. “Dr. Osei runs it. Good physician. Discreet.” She handed our documents back. “We have a unit available on the east residential block. Two rooms. You’ll want the space.” She said it without inflection. “Welcome to Kerath.”
That was all. No ceremony, no interrogation, no performance of welcome that required anything from us in return. She turned and went back to the business of running a colony, and we stood in the thin morning air of our new world with our bags at our feet and the valley spread out beyond the settlement’s edge.
Derek picked up both bags.
“East residential block,” he said.
“East residential block,” I agreed.
We walked.
Dr. Osei was a Ghanaian physician who had come to Kerath twelve years ago for reasons he didn’t share and had apparently decided to stay. He reviewed my file from Veris Station without expression, asked several thorough questions, examined me with the unhurried attention of someone who had learned that patience was the most useful medical instrument available, and then sat back and looked at us both.
“Healthy pregnancy,” he said. “The interspecies physiology is unusual but not unmanageable. The child is developing well.” He paused. “I’ve delivered three interspecies births in my time here. This will be the first Human-Kathari.” Another pause. “I’ve been reading.”
“And?” Derek asked.
“And I’d like to continue reading for the next two months, and then I’d like to have a very detailed conversation with you both.” He almost smiled. “The compound synthesis is straightforward with our fabrication equipment. We’ll have your supply maintained without interruption.” He looked at me. “Every seventy-two hours. Don’t miss a dose.”
“I won’t.”
“Good.” He stood. “Come back in two weeks. Both of you.”
We came back in two weeks. And two weeks after that. And the weeks accumulated into months the way weeks do when you are building something — not quickly, not dramatically, but steadily, each one adding to the last until you look up and find that you are somewhere real.
Derek set up a small research practice in a room off the residential unit, cataloguing Kerath’s local biology with the systematic joy of a man who had found a new jungle that was trying to be interesting rather than lethal. He became known, over those months, as the man who would answer questions about anything that grew or lived in the valley. People came to him. He never turned anyone away.