Chen had been beyond help before the foxes devoured Moss. Even donning his hazard suit for containment, Chen had begun to come apart in ribbons and rips of salamanders. Slipping through ever-larger rips in the fabric. Joyous in the agony of his dissolution, so weightless in the extremity of his need to become himself.

Grayson watching over his transition, wary of another attack, could still see Charlie X out on the plain to the west of the ravine. But only with her human eye. The other still flickered in and out, shut it against distraction.

Chen, who might at the dawn of some new decades-distant golden age know a form of Moss. The form of Moss still trapped within Botch, for Grayson knew that the past that rose up could be a hopeful future as well. She hoped for it, for the tatters and remnants of Moss within Botch. She hoped for it hard, although she knew she might never see it. Hoped for it despite betrayal.

Chen’s pain was now extraordinary, but his alone, for without Moss, Grayson could not feel it direct. But wished she could.

Only Chen could feel the pulling apart. Every splayed and grinding detail of it. How the stars within him became the joined feet of the salamanders. How they disengaged and thus rent him and hurt him, and him still trapped in the carcass of a man.

Chen let out a cry of anguish, but not from the physical pain. Could not bear, in the beginning or the end, that he had traded one life for another in trying to hurt Charlie X. No way to make it right that he could see, even with his equations.

“Hush. Hush now.” Grayson to Chen, meaning to get through this last thing. To go out to the farthest point again, to see the rock that might be a face staring back in the dim reaches of the universe. To return yet again from that, but this time bracing for how to do that in minutes, not a century.

Chen tried to say to Grayson, could not, in the end, say it at all, trapped inside without Moss to set it free: “At the wall of globes. It said to me. It said to me, it said, ‘No comfort. No forgiveness. No rest.’ And it was right. He was right.”

Grayson had meant to give some final comfort. Chen knew this. He knew her intent. But now there were only writhing green bodies within the suit.