Flashback ( PDFDrive )

“Hey,” Fitz said, stepping closer and offering his shoulder, not
seeming to care at all that she’d just pushed him away.
Sophie sank against him, tears soaking his cape as she clung as
tightly to him as he clung to her.
“There’s seriously nothing you can do?” Fitz asked, his voice shaky
with tears of his own. “What if we bring Elwin here, or Livvy, or—”
“You can bring as many physicians as you want,” Vika interrupted.
“They’ll all tell you the same thing. We’re going to lose these babies—
heartbreaking and devastating as that is. And we can’t let that break
our focus. We still have a victory to claim today. We’ve arrived with
enough time to save Silveny—and that is incredibly fortunate. I don’t
think you realize how often we lose the mother in these kinds of
situations. And the babies are also well positioned, so we should even
be able to preserve her ability to conceive—which is far better than I
imagined when I realized we’d be facing this challenge. So let’s try to
focus on that—on pulling Silveny through this and giving her a second
chance at being a mother someday. It means we’ll also have another
chance to reset the Timeline to Extinction.”
“Extinction?” Tarina repeated, crouching to study Silveny. “So
these are the creatures I’ve heard reports of.”
“The last of their kind,” Timkin agreed.
Tarina scratched her chin. “Then these aren’t normal babies. . . .”
“No,” Vika murmured. “A lot of hopes have been resting on them.
But . . . as long as nothing goes terribly wrong today, the alicorns will
have another chance.”
“They may not want it,” Sophie warned, glancing at Grady and
Edaline, who seemed to be very interested in the way she was all
wrapped up in Fitz. And she couldn’t bring herself to care. “You guys