“I will give you this much: There is no Moss in this City. No Moss at all. You should consider that before all else.” Moss by then was a conduit as well as a person, and even as a person she was an accumulation of Mosses, all of whom lived inside her. Every time Moss encountered another Moss, across timelines, they merged, and she had become more powerful because of it.

Then the fox trotted off the bridge, out of sight, and his followers melted away as if they had never been there.

“That has never happened before,” Chen said. He had noticed how the fox looked covetous at Moss, as if she were a tasty morsel. That had not happened before, either.

“Give it time,” Moss said, even though Time was a joke. Even though they had less of it with no Moss in the City. No new partner, no new joining.

“How much time do we have?” Grayson asked.

(What came back to Chen was how 7 became both lucky and finite, not a door but a wall. Without an anchor at 6.999999999999. But the fox was the master of it and thus in a way Chen could not see in the numbers … their master, too.)

As they met the fox ever earlier, so too would the Company be drawn to them that much faster. This they knew. And Moss knew one thing more the other two did not: that she would see the fox again, soon.

I think you are beautiful, Moss thought hard, at the space the fox had disappeared into. I think you have always known the future. I think this time I might trust you.

But she always had done that in the past, too. Because she meant it.

Where had the blue fox come from? The vexing question, the one they had stopped trying to answer. Moss said that the blue fox had not been born in the Company or borne by the Company, or they had so forgotten it that there was no residue. A rogue lab, Chen guessed. Or some spontaneous mutation. Neither probable.

Moss believed: The blue fox was aware of its brethren across all the paths. Moss believed: The blue fox often knew them before first encounter.

Once, Grayson, after analyzing the blue fox and finding only … fox … pressed the creature.

The fox replied, “I came from where you come from, Grayson. I come from up there.”

The sky. The stars. The leap of startled recognition in Grayson before she realized the fox was joking. That the fox was telling her she had been read, down to her core.

“How do you know?” Grayson had asked. Could not help that reveal.

“You stink of space,” the fox said. “You stink of stale air and the burn and countdowns to false zeros, and places not of Earth.”

But Grayson thought the fox lied and there was some other reason.