“We made it out. We were supposed to. We should’ve. We know we are home. By these signs…” Chen rambling, hugging himself tight to hold himself together.

Inside his head the colors changed from green to red and back again. Inside his head, he could see himself as puzzle pieces beginning to pull apart. “We can still get away.” There was a pulse in his ears. A pulse that was calling to him from far, far away. From a polluted river, where a creature turned long enough to call his name and then slipped into the water, disappeared.

Grayson thankful that her eye was damaged, could not diagnose Chen’s damage, Moss’s distress. It was too much. Welcomed the beaded pain of the sharp bits of rock debris embedded in her arm.

Moss knew. From her own diagnosis. From how the double at the holding ponds had been diminished by the storm, reduced almost to nothing. Or even just from the anguished look on Grayson’s face. And, dying fall: Grayson experiencing for a moment Moss looking up at her. Then: No connection. Just the pulse of other creatures all around, watching. Moss shutting her out, shutting Chen out. For their own protection.

“There will be nothing left of me soon, Grayson. I’m sorry. Careless.”

But had it? Been carelessness? Grayson thought. The ravine opening up beneath their position like a swallowing mouth. Of Moss there, on her mission to Botch. Unable to think through to the right conclusions.

The question they’d never thought would need to be asked. Grayson, in a voice torn apart: “Can you give me nothing?”

Can some part of you become some part of me.

Not the part that knows you best, that you know the least.

“You’d die,” Moss said. “You’d die as I am dying.”

“I don’t care,” Grayson said.

“Yes, you do. If you love me, you care.”

Grayson reached out with her injured arm, that the pain might shield her from the other thing. Moss flinched away.

“Don’t touch me. Don’t. Please.”

Last hope: “Can you save any part of yourself?” For Grayson couldn’t bring herself to put the real question to Moss. “What have you done?”

“It’s everywhere at once. Anything I quarantined…”

The human form of Moss had blurred, become indistinct, and then sharp in other ways: the edges of lichen and leaf, spore and loam. Blackening into clarity and out again, dulled and blackened more, drying out.

Grayson knew that Chen knew—numbers leaking out of him now, seeking comfort in his equations, or maybe just counting the tiny lives he would become.

10 7 3 0. 0 3 7 10.

10 7 3 0. 0 3 7 10.

They had always known, but it had never been real before. Without Moss there was no path out. No escape. To another time. To another City. They would stand or fall here, in this place. Grayson would stand or fall. Chen already was his own escape plan.