“This is what we would look like as fish.” (Chen’s idea, laughing as he said it, but Moss had nodded serious, still recovering from her mission. “I would bob near the surface, Grayson would be some kind of barracuda, and Moss would be a school of minnows hiding in seaweed.”)

People were serious, but the world wasn’t serious. Not the drunk, lurching beetle that had feasted on the remains of an alcohol minnow. Not the seaweed that brilliant and wet-slapped displayed its color and its texture there, against the silly sea anemones blazing forth their tentacles. And if there were fewer creatures on this Earth man had made, then still they took time to be still. To be thoughtful. To frolic. Before returning to the eat, drink, forage world.

The three played cards sometimes to take the edge off. They had an old battered deck. Or played catch with a worn tennis ball.

Or, as here, as now, standing outside the south entrance of the Balcony Cliffs, each aware of the slant of ravine and half-dead trees through which they could still see the Company, for purest white did blaze.

Grayson’s eagle eye trained on the holding ponds, that she might determine from some break in routine or intervention if the Company had sussed Moss’s secret meeting the night before.

Moss: “Never liked team sports, though.”

Grayson, affectionate: “You are a team sport.”

Chen found this so funny he could not stop laughing. It cut through his disapproval of Moss sneaking off, which evaporated as he would too, one day.

They had been in this spot before. Sometimes this was where they found the dollhouse, half-crushed, the one they used to strategize, and brought it back inside, repaired it. Best they could.

This time they had found what Grayson called a Frisbee.

“What’s a phriz bee?” Moss asked.

“This.”

“This plastic disk.”

“And you throw it.”

“Why?”

“For fun.”

“Team sport.”

Grayson zipped the Frisbee to Moss, who threw it straight up in the air like it was made of heat.

Yet somehow it came down and leveled out and sped right into Chen’s hand. He liked the grooved feel of it, yet the smoothness. His hand was always cataloging new textures. He kept squares of linen paper to write on, for the lines across it that felt like connection, like it had already been written on.

They backed up into a proper triangle.

Chen threw the Frisbee to Grayson, who caught it, held it a moment, tried not to laugh at the quizzical, worried look on Moss’s face.

“They really did have teams,” Grayson said.

“When?”

“Ages ago. Long ago. I don’t remember when.” It was too painful to think of her childhood, because she could remember when none of this could be thought of as real.

Chen thought he could remember when, too, but how could he be sure?

“What else like this did they have?” Moss asked.