Roamed that landscape in shock, unaware of just how much time had passed since she had gone into space. Roamed the City as an astronaut might, still in her suit, in constant contact with the life pod.

Grayson had had perhaps a decade of solitude and air left at the base to look down on Earth’s ravaged face and try to convince herself that all would one day be better. But instead she’d returned to Earth, burning enough of the pod’s remaining fuel on reentry that she could never go back. Her reasons were sound enough: She felt too alone, more alone than just being one person. Too much carnage in memoriam there.

Eye reporting data dispassionate, she had sorted through the City’s wreckage much as a parent might go through a child’s messy room. A child missing or passed away. What was valuable. What had been cast aside. What overused. But unable to put it back in order.

In space, discipline meant life or death. Here, there had been no penalty for freedom until the end.

In the twisted remains of the Company building, Grayson found evidence that some had survived and fled west. So she had taken her life pod west, headed for the coast, adrift and aimless. Or maybe not so aimless. What Grayson had planned to do there, she did not know. Perhaps she would have explored until the pod’s fuel ran out. Perhaps she planned to die. Perhaps she had some better idea that never came to pass.

But it was there she found a treasure, beneath the broken pink stucco archway that once greeted tourists to a marine amusement park. In its crumbling state, the broken-down cement walls and rising seas had conspired to create artificial tidal pools full of strange life.

Tending to them was Moss.

Grayson found Moss early in the morning, the air fresh enough that she had taken off her helmet. Moss crouched by a tidal pool, cataloging its contents, regulating temperature, encouraging some organisms, discouraging others.

Moss presented ethereal. She presented as naïve, with green eyes that blazed at Grayson as she turned from her crouch, startled at the appearance of this sudden visitor.

Moss had not spoken to another person for months. Grayson recognized a fellow explorer; she saw in those tidal pools an infinity. Stars reflected there.

“You don’t come back often,” Moss said. “Sometimes I search for you. But most times you die up there.”

“I don’t know what that means.” Soon enough, she would.

“And I’m sorry,” Moss said. Staring so nakedly at Grayson that she looked away.

“For what?”

“That you’ve seen so much you loved destroyed.”

“Hasn’t everyone.”

“You’re an astronaut,” Moss said, turning back to her work. “The scale is different.”

“We each handle what we can.”

“No one should have to feel responsible for the entire world.”