His nightmares he would never burden Grayson and Moss with. But in Chen’s dreams the ceiling of the Company building fell away and the globes in the wall floated off into the night sky, leaving behind the Company and all categories of hurt, of injury.

Sometimes, Chen confessed to Moss, he followed them, floated off into the heavens and never came back. And when this happened in the dream, Chen wept, for he had a sense of contentment such as he had never experienced before.

But in truth, their Chen had walked back into the Company building, had worked there for months more before leaving. Waiting for the moment. Sabotaging what he could.

Saw the salamander, large and constrained, curled in the globe. The piercing way it looked at him, the autonomy there, and knew he could not fail that gaze a second time. Not and live.

If the hedgehog creature broke Chen, perhaps the salamander saved him. Or, at least, that was how Chen’s equations told the story. Part of the story.

And so Chen had sent the salamander through the wall of globes into another world. One where the Company had a foothold, but hadn’t conquered yet. Where the salamander might have a chance.

And, in a moment of opportunity, sent Charlie X’s precious journal after, tumbling down, there one moment.

Gone the next.

xv.

there was no path out
no escape

Then, it was too late. Now, it was too late.

The morning of the next day, as they stood outside the Balcony Cliffs, ready for the next phase. The duck risen up before them as a storm. Vast and dark and deranged: An apparition that dried up the air around it, burned the oxygen so that they were gasping for breath outside the door leading into the Balcony Cliffs. An apparition that blotted out the sky and singed their skin, scalded their senses so they did not want to see or hear or smell or taste or feel. Made the air thick with red dust and dried blood and tiny flaps of metal that cut their faces.

The darkness beneath the duck, sensed by Moss, had escaped, or been let loose or deployed for the first time. It welled up, oozed, and rose, to spread across the horizon and within their minds as a high, black wall. The scrabbling, terrible presence, demanding to be let in. Knew, three as one, that once it locked into place, they would be lost. You are broken; let me fix you.

Moss could feel it. An enclosure. A capture or containment, her doppelgänger locked in place. A sensation that made her gasp.

The past always waited. To wound, to rend, to tear.

“My double is compromised,” she said to Chen, to Grayson.

Grayson staring at her sharp with that all-revealing eye. “Your double?”