Yet there came the nod in her mind that told her Botch would not fight them. That Botch feared the unknown watchful preternatural nature of Moss more than the known cruelty of the Company. Mistrusted her less.

Botch let Moss in and they were both by the sea, by Moss’s tidal pools. Under the ruined arches. Botch was small again, Botch was so very small smooth still in a tidal pool and Moss, giant, peered into that pool and shone down like the sun on Botch. Covering Botch. Beaming love down on Botch in rays of calm.

Botch’s one eye milky and closed. Opened. Moss knew now that Botch had been born that way. Knew that the eye saw more than the other one. Knew Botch would not remember their parlay because she would give him the mercy of forgetting something so human. Give herself that mercy.

<<I dream of fresh, open water. I dream of sunlight and cool mud. I dream of the food walking ecstatic, into my open mouth.>>

Was that Moss or Botch? For some part of Botch would forever be with Moss now. Part of Moss would, clandestine, contaminate all the tidal pools. If they were lucky.

Botch was very large, towering over her reflection in the glimmering water, and she was small and tired.

Goodbye, Moss said to her doppelgänger or her doppelgänger said to her. Goodbye and hello.

The body did not exist separate from the soul because the soul didn’t exist. But the future never left the past behind, either.

Her doppelgänger peered out from a burning shed and said nothing more. Shut the door, with her self inside. Taken by the conflagration. Burning at the heart of Botch.

The duck with the broken wing had not appeared during their parlay; the duck was nowhere nearby. Relief beneath the weariness of what she’d lost to Botch. What she’d conceded to the fox. But she never thought about why, until later.

That perhaps the duck had already been there.

xiii.

disposable and finite
and vulnerable

There wasn’t always mission for the three. You couldn’t mission forever, Moss would say, or there would be no mission. Building an image from before as prod and tease: When she had hopped between the tidal pools and had run onto the beach just to pretend she had legs, to pretend she was not a wall of onrushing onrushing wall onrushing.

Danced on the beach, all alone. Had made play into a game of tag that wanted to be caught, to be it. Nothing must be glum. Nothing must be serious, even if it was serious. Not all the time.