Charlie X had thought Moss could be a kind of incubator to supplement the wall of globes, even if in this reality the wall’s mechanism had failed and most of the globes were dark and dead, and in some other realities even the Company building itself had fallen away so that it was just Charlie X laboring in the open air, shoving into a dead wall creatures that, deprived of sustenance, expired almost immediately.

While Charlie X didn’t even notice but continued on to the next thing, until he ran out of supplies and equipment and the next thing was just a tangle of twigs attached to clay and the eyes he jabbed into the clay with his thumbs and with a rasping cry of triumph he smashed yet one more creation into the dusty jagged hole where a globe had been many years ago.

“Nothing lasts! Nothing ever lasts!” he would rant to the tortured souls still alive in that place, captive and unhearing. “Nothing is made of what it needs to be!” Sounding like a child.

Then he would retreat to his secret room, where even Moss couldn’t see him.

Moss did not lead to repetition. Moss, over time, learned skills Charlie X had not intended, hardly noticed. Sometimes Charlie X even placed parts of Moss in the wall. She could be broken down just as she could be built up, but each time a part of her returned, was not consigned to the holding ponds, she learned something, too.

Grayson’s Moss escaped the Company when her Charlie X was thirty-nine, at a time when the holding ponds rose in rebellion and slaughtered everyone inside, even Charlie X. She had fled across the sands, occurred somewhere else, without Charlie X’s control over her.

Grayson found Moss on the coast of a different reality three years later. Charlie X would have been forty-two, if he had lived. But he lived across most other timelines, and the first time the three encountered him, Charlie X was already beyond repair.

Charlie X did not really remember Moss. But she would never forget him.

xvii.

across the divide
that could not really be crossed

The storm blustered, subsided. Fell away. The world returned to normal, dark presence subsumed. The door was still closed to the three. Grayson, arm slack at her side. Chen still slumped there. The blood had stopped, but he was delirious. Equations skewed.

Chen mumbling, “It’s all right. You already told me what to do. I know what to do.”

Could look upon Moss, Grayson peppered with shrapnel, the arm the worst of it, and see how Chen-not’s touch had damaged her. A disease had spread. How parts of all of Moss had gone dark, while patches of light shone through like fireflies against a black night with no moon.