So she followed the ravine, the trace of water down the center. In a trance. In a kind of ebb and flow as she abandoned human form. A carpet of moss roiling across the dirt, sand, and rocks. A screed that rewrote whatever it encountered, so the dirt had new properties and the sand burgeoned with new life and the rocks began processes that might not germinate for centuries.

An onslaught, a hidden invasion. Runneling like an unseen, weightless, slow-motion avalanche, her advance guard become her rearguard. Spreading out to the sides and then in again. Folding over and over.

Lingering in the roots of shattered trees and the neural networks of fungi. All of it battered, not at capacity but alive still. A shadow of a vastness. And she existed there, splayed out across those axes in a special kind of ecstasy. Remembered the other ways. Thought, perhaps, to close down human-type thoughts, to stay. To exist just in that moment and the next. To not go back or go forward.

Exhausting. It exhausted to be so close to Grayson, to Chen. Ecstatic. Amazing, that intimacy. To lie down upon a bed with two others enfolded there, not cheek to cheek but the same cheek as one. Yes, ecstatic, but exhausting, exhausting, exhausting. Never alone, and Moss herself so many Mosses and thus never alone in herself either.

Moss kept the human form for certain advantages, to live with Grayson and Chen. Because it helped Chen hold his body together. She did it for other people.

Become nothing or everything. Nothing that could be other than nothing. Nothing that could feel what Moss had felt at the hands of Charlie X.

To be something again in the end—something that would mean everything to Grayson. That was the price, the price, the price. And at the very end, to come back into the consciousness that human recognized as human, that she might parlay with the fish on their behalf.

At the bottom of the ravine, the blue fox waited, as she had known he would. And by that sign Moss knew she hadn’t slipped into another place, another time. For this would never happen again and had never happened before.

“Are you ready?” the blue fox asked.

“Yes,” she said.

No, she wasn’t ready, she’d never be ready. Ready would be too late.

Or so the fox had convinced her.

xi.

such savage mockery
of the tidal pools

In some Cities, the leviathan of the holding ponds had suffered at the Company’s hands. Open sores. Burns. In those places, Moss would sing to the leviathan to soothe it and dull its pain receptors and show it images of a limitless and fecund sea. Once, all she could do was ease the creature toward a merciful death.

Do you see me? Here I am.

Casting out a line before ever she saw the beast.