Picked herself up, in time, as the sun faded, into that new world. Hoping it was the same world. Hoping it wasn’t. Trudged under a hellish red moon, the Balcony Cliffs well at her back. Alert for the return of the blue fox.

Her first impulse had been thwarted. She had wanted to rage, to kill. She would storm the gates of the Company. She would murder them all. She would be a cleansing fire. All would part before her anger. To assail the Company. To breach. To be in breach. Find the portals. Destroy them. Or be destroyed. What did it matter now? No thinking in that, no equations, just to stop the awful emptiness in her head where Moss and Chen had been.

That she could live with herself. That there would not be so much failure. That her thoughts a chaos, her gait, injured, might mean something.

But there, in the mouth of the ravine, had stood the blue fox. Barring her way.

She raised the weapon of her arm.

The fox was no longer there but somewhere else. Turned to follow but the fox was in two places at once, then none, then three.

“Let me pass,” Grayson said.

“That is not to be.”

“Let me pass.”

“I’m not in your way.”

A lie.

“I never saw anything like you out there.” Waving at the sky. “But you don’t belong here, do you? Never saw anything like you even as a hallucination. Are you a hallucination? Did Moss make you up?”

“We were always here,” the fox said. “You never noticed. So we made you notice. We made it so you had to notice.”

The fox’s pink tongue lolled from its mouth and it appeared to be laughing at her, or at a joke she didn’t understand. Which made her angrier.

“Sometimes it was just the Company,” Grayson spat out. “And sometimes the Company and the duck. And sometimes the Company and you. But never all three. Until now.”

“Probability. You were only ever three.”

“Conspiracy,” Grayson managed. “You betrayed us. You tricked Moss. You did.”

“Probability was against you,” the fox replied. “And Moss knew this.”

“That’s a lie!”

“It’s a beautiful truth.”

“They can’t get away with this.” Anguish broke her voice wide, made her throat sore. The sting of words still bleeding. The way she felt full of broken glass yet walked on broken glass, too.

“They already have.”

“I’ll kill you.”

But the blue fox had grown yet bigger and Grayson felt herself grow weaker. Loss of blood. Hallucinations. Loss of loss.

The blue fox drew near. She could feel the coarse softness of his blue fur. Could feel the liquid heat spurling from him. Could not meet the directness of that stare.

“Do you want to die?” the blue fox asked her.

Sensed the regret living within the pulse of the body made manifest before her. Sensed, too, the determination. The patience.