The moment of weightlessness and awe. Grayson, in the life pod, so long ago. The plunge toward the glowing orb of Earth become half-circle and then even more enveloping. The limitlessness contained. The universe reduced to part of a world. The broken, redrawn lines of continents, oceans dull glazed blue or salt white, and her instruments unable to divine the countries upon them or she even to remember what they had been. Or why. The sun revealing the vast catafalques of sprawled dead Cities against dry brown rockscapes.

Dead astronauts were no different than living astronauts. Neither could shed their skin. Neither could ever become part of what they journeyed through. Suits were premade coffins. Space was the grave. Better to think of yourself as dead already. There was freedom in that; liberated the mind to roam quadrants farther than the body.

Pod descending in flame and friction. The lurch and shudder of it. The way that figured in her bones, lived there even when she was still again. How she could sit quiet in a chair and her bones vibrated, never free of space or the journey. It accumulated, kept hold.

She was old, encased in an astronaut’s suit that made her seem new. She was traveling across a wasteland. She was naked by the tidal pools. Grayson lying on the beach in the cool sand, above and beyond her the ruined arches of another time, another world. The tide a chorus of tiny voices at her feet. Moss the shape of Grayson, all around Grayson, covering Grayson like a second skin. Showing, kiss by kiss, the beauty of Grayson to Grayson, who had never thought herself beautiful. That she was beautiful. All of Moss kissing all of her and Grayson seeing herself through Moss’s eyes. Reborn in that moment.

This green dust and Moss in reverie, giving up the body. Becoming what she’d been before Charlie X.

And the green glowing dust settled over the land and although the land was no less barren, it was more aware. The questing, the questing of that dust over the landscape, the way it had intentionality even as it faded into the wind at dusk.

As the life pod, burning, reentered the atmosphere. The friction and the shaking rattle.

Why should it hurt so much? After all she had seen. The slowness and yet the speed of space. Slow because it was so vast that speed could not get the better of it. The desolation and violence of that, and yet the grim elation, too. The way it beckoned, rejected. The stars, once charted with such human precision, backing away, reduced again to the twinkling lights in some psychotic god’s cosmology.

Ten count to reentry. To reenter another world. But she preferred just the lucky number, and the end.

I’m coming for you, Moss. I don’t know you yet. But maybe I’ve always known you.

Wait for me.

But now Moss was dead.

xix.