What do you run in? Do you run in? Do you ever run in circles chasing your own tail? Is your tail ever on fire yet you chase it still? Circles. Reentry. Burning up like a space capsule. Fever run hot. Why lunge for a jugular when you could rip out tendons, watch the timber fall, and then, at your leisure, circle back in the dark.

Sometimes it wasn’t about the hunt or the kill. Sometimes it was about meting out in equal measure a never-ending bile. A never-endingness. A never-ending moment of never having rest. Let them never rest as they have not allowed us to rest, to just be. May they always be on the run, looking over their shoulder, that we may have peace.

It wasn’t a cabin. It was a burrow. We knew they’d come for us. But we could see what they couldn’t. We knew, and by the time they arrived, we weren’t there. Or we were underfoot, underneath—under the pine needles, the bramble, the dirt, even the limestone. We could hear them above, clumsy, loud. But we had dissipated. We had dissolved like rainwater into the substrate.

To hide, I came back to my own. Through all the hidden doorways. I spread myself thin to do so. I made many versions of myself. We multiplied through the burrows. We came out the other end … different. In different places.

I watched—

I watched a Grayson on an empty moon base. Frozen there. Unable to decide. For that Grayson, I became the noise around the corner that made her blanch, made her decision for her. In another it was the hatching sound of a thousand Company invertebrates, which had swept the base clean. Maybe in a third, Grayson left for simple loneliness and the Company never reached that moon.

I watched—

I watched—

I came back to my own. I bled through mud. I fell in sand and dirt. I ate lichen off old stone and dead tree trunk. I snapped up mice again. Rolled in yellow grass and offal. Still they did not know me as kin. I smelled wretched, like you, not like fox. I could not shed it. I was an alien, come down from the stars to them. I wished it wasn’t so. I wished I could run with them. Remember nothing. Be erased under the moon. Disappear into Nocturnalia.

But still I came back to them. I came back to their minds through their scent. They sniffed me and danced around me and I was still not like me. Not like them.

Yet they stayed and followed me.

You say why save an empty Earth? I can smell it on you, hear it in your voice. The way you can’t remember because how could you live. But it’s only empty to your eyes. It’s only empty because you helped make it so, and thought nothing of it.