for the price for the wonders
displayed within was too high

If you pulled out a globe from Chen’s side of the wall and peered into that empty space, you’d find Charlie X and his laboratory on the other side. Perhaps even replacing the missing globe with a new one, occupied by a new experiment. A serious expression on Charlie X’s face as he pushed the globe into place. Maybe you would even catch a hint of the hidden door leading to a secret room.

Sometimes the lighting made the globes look, against the black wall, as if they floated in defiance of gravity. Almost like large bubbles floating to the surface of the sea. Or, when the transfers were made and creatures disappeared somewhere else, like roiled, curving waves.

A pattern of rough circles with creatures caught within those eyes. As if they were in a sense extraterrestrial or other than terrestrial, and Charlie X would wonder aloud to Moss, who sat or lay or stood there behind him, on a chair or a bed or the floor … what would happen if aliens did come down to Earth and found the City. Found the Company. Found Charlie X’s wall of globes. Would they recognize its purpose? Would it trouble them? Would they welcome it? Would they have done anything about it?

Charlie X didn’t know what he wanted them to do about it, he told Moss, but he said he liked talking to Moss, which he thought of as talking to himself, since Moss was his creation. But Moss would tell Grayson and Chen later that she always knew he was wrong, that she was nothing like him. That, deep down, Charlie X might have known that—have planned it that way. Deep down.

Until later, the Moss that Charlie X talked to, that recorded his ramblings, was the green clotted “skin” over the wall of globes. The conduit, part and parcel of Charlie X’s genius. It could be said that transactions occurred through Moss. That time and space changed within her, if the globes could be understood as the body beneath the green skin. But this was only the roughest approximation.

The unfairness of it. The heedlessness of it. The awful sensation of being stretched thin in an organism that existed flat, whose texture was only an inch deep.

Charlie X liked to claim he put part of himself in almost everything he made. A hedgehog creature. A salamander. A duck with a broken wing. A scrim of moss.

All Moss could say later was she had the least part of him possible. That what was left had been quarantined and cleansed.

If that were possible.

What Moss knew, or thought she knew—she had come in late. And not across all Cities, where it applied and didn’t. How it varied more than it should in the beginning, and yet still not enough.