He had, it was true. He had told the nurses to end it. They had known for months she wasn’t coming back, but selfishly he let her hang on, sitting next to her each day, finding he didn’t have it in him to lose his mother and his wife at the same time. Candace had stopped coming to see him at the hospital. Too hard on Joey, her son. Edison held his mother’s hand while the machine quit living for her, and sang a quiet song, one she had showed him on his record player.

You killed me.

His mother’s voice, and an accusation he couldn’t deny, even if he knew deep inside it was a mercy. She was gone, and it was his responsibility, his need, to let her go.

Something beyond the blue woman caught his blurring vision. Soon, without oxygen, he would lose his sight altogether, but a figure stepped through the archway into the observation deck. Then she was running, closer, closer, until she slid through the shimmery blue outline of his mother and grabbed him by the shoulders.

“What’s happening? Edison. Edison. Are you choking?” Rosalyn pounded on his chest, a crude attempt at chest compressions. Then she shook him a little, waving a hand in front of his face, and the turquoise glow she stood within vanished, dispersing around her, a halo that faded away into the twinkling ceiling.

Edison bent double, gasping, slapping at his own cheeks to see if they had feeling.

“I don’t,” he wheezed, “understand.”

“Did Foxfire just try to kill you?” Her eyes were wide behind the visor, and she helped him kneel on the damp floor. “That doesn’t make any sense.” Rosalyn trailed off, glancing away from him, but then her mouth tumbled open, a squeak escaping. “Unless . . .”

“Unless?”

“Rayan’s notes . . . He was convinced Foxfire evolved. It keeps appearing as people you all know, right? Maybe you’re changing it as much as it’s changing you. You’re a connected system, and it could go two ways. That thing, Mother, is becoming more human, and humans are petty.”

Edison nodded slowly; it made a terrible sense. The cleaning drone bumped around them, then whirred away toward the edge of the room and the padded benches. “I wanted revenge on it, now it’s taking revenge on me.”

For my own mother. No, he thought, it didn’t know him. It didn’t know how long he had waited before saying goodbye. A captain for years by then, and it was the hardest order he had ever given.

“And here I was hoping to give you good news,” she muttered.

“I could use some right now.” He felt safer with her there, more himself. Just her arrival had chased away the vision, and he hoped her presence would anchor him there, far from any tainted memories.