The silence in Dr. Vance's office was different from the silence in the archives. In the archives, silence was a preservation of life. Here, it was the sound of an ending.
"The HCG levels are dropping," Vance said, her voice clinical but not unkind. "The immune response we saw yesterday was the beginning of the rejection. Your body identified the edited cells as foreign and... dismantled them. The pregnancy has terminated."
Julian felt the floor beneath him lose its solidity. He had planned for a thousand structural failures in his life, but he had no contingency for this. He looked at Clara, expecting tears, expecting a breakdown. But she was eerily still, her hands folded in her lap like marble.
"So, the bridge collapsed," Clara said. It wasn't a question.
"It wasn't the engineering," Vance countered quickly, leaning over the desk. "It was the environment. The suppression drugs weren't aggressive enough to mask the edit. We know more now. We can adjust the chemistry for the second attempt."
"The second attempt," Julian repeated. The words felt heavy. They only had two embryos left. Two more chances before the "Third Way" became a dead end.
The drive home was a descent into a private hell. The city was neon-bright and indifferent, the traffic pulsing around them like a fever. When they entered the loft, the air felt stale, trapped in the vacuum of their shared failure.
Julian went straight to the kitchen to prepare her medication—the habit of the "Caregiver" was the only thing keeping him from shattering. But Clara walked past him, heading straight for the bedroom.
"Don't," she said, her voice a flat line. "Don't touch the pills, Julian. I'm done with the chemicals for a while."
"Clara, Vance said we have to maintain the baseline if we want to try again in—"
"Try again?" She turned, her eyes flashing with a sudden, raw fury. "I just lost a life, Julian. A life we spent a year and a fortune to create. And all you can talk about is the 'baseline' and the 'next attempt'?"
"I'm trying to keep us moving!" Julian shouted, his frustration finally breaking the surface. "If we stop, we sink. If we give up now, everything we've lost—my job, our families—it was all for nothing. We have two left. We have to be stronger than the rejection."
"I am the one being rejected!" Clara cried, gesturing to her own body. "It's my blood that fought it. It's my womb that's empty. You're looking at a blueprint, but I'm living in the ruins."
She slammed the bedroom door, leaving him alone in the center of the room they had built together. The "Structural Collapse" was no longer a metaphor; it was happening to their relationship in real-time.
Julian spent the night on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. He thought about his father's words—about the "selfishness" of their pursuit. Was he being selfish? Was he forcing Clara to be a laboratory for his own need to defeat the math?
He got up and walked to his drafting table. He looked at the sketches of the house they wanted to build—the one with the nursery that didn't have a name yet. He picked up a charcoal pencil and, in a fit of sudden, violent clarity, he crossed it out. He didn't want a legacy if it meant losing the woman who made the legacy worth having.
At 3:00 AM, the bedroom door opened. Clara walked out, wrapped in a blanket, her face pale in the moonlight. She sat on the floor beside the sofa, leaning her head against his knee.
"I went to the archives in my head tonight," she whispered. "I looked for the stories of the people who failed. There are so many of them, Julian. People who tried to build things that the world just wouldn't let them have."
Julian reached down, stroking her hair. "We don't have to be one of them. We can stop. We can walk away from Nexus. We can go back to being just us."
Clara was silent for a long time. Then, she looked up at him, her eyes clear. "No. We can't go back. We've already crossed the midpoint of the bridge. If we turn back now, we'll spend the rest of our lives wondering if the next span would have held."
She took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. "One more, Julian. We try one more time. But this time, we don't do it for the science. And we don't do it for your father. We do it because we aren't finished with the story yet."
The "Scarcity" had moved from a fear to a resolve. They had two chances left, but for the first time since the "Red Flag," they were moving as one.