Dead Astronauts. Jeff VanderMeer

There, before them, would stand what appeared to be another Moss, fuzzy at the edges, but the same warm smile. The same inquisitive look.

      A gaze that transmitted light from one semblance of an eye to another. All of Moss was eyes. None of Moss was eyes.

      Moss would talk to her doppelgänger and her doppelgänger would set off on the mission, accompanied by Chen, who could navigate the wasteland to the holding ponds and who turned on camouflage so, in his suit, he could not be seen except by arcane means. While Moss’s doppelgänger, this pointillist portrait of her, disassembled and reassembled by Chen’s side, in a shimmer of molecules that leapt out across the sky, circled back, formed a film creeping fast forward across the ground. Chen would wait at the holding ponds, while the wraith of Moss-like would spiral past and visible-invisible to the Company sensors, penetrate the Company building and complete Moss’s mission for her.

      Or that had been the plan. In the past.

      It wasn’t safe for Moss to get closer, for Moss was the way out. Without Moss, they’d never make it to another City if they failed.

      Moss did not just tend tidal pools. Often, before Grayson, Moss sent ripples across those still surfaces. About the creatures who lived there and what their lives were like. She looked up from the pools, become what lived there, staring as the giant looming down to peer in, to be both receiver and received. In an endless amplified loop. Slipped across realities. Very tactical, as Grayson had said, and yet infinite. Each time it changed them, just a little. But Moss couldn’t remember what they might have been before, at the start. None of them could.

      Moss couldn’t extend the field. But, at a price, she could become a door—they walked through her and she followed, and wasn’t that the definition of sacrifice?

      As much as clinging in a film of green to the back of Botch as he dove so far and so deep, and twisted and bucked to dislodge what could not be dislodged, for Moss’s grip extended beneath Botch’s scarred skin, hooks in deep. Even as bits of her tore away from the violence of Botch’s panicked tunneling into the depths. Into the darkness.

      But she could see what lay there. The skeletons in a familiar tableau. The memories she should not have. Made manifest by the nature of the mission, the nature of her body.

      Hush now, hush now.

       Soon you will be free. I will make you free.

      But could Moss make her free? Could she free them both?

      No, but I can …

      This was the part where things began to fall apart, because they were meant to fall apart, because they were meant to fall apart because they meant to fall apart. The ways they’d been cut off. How Moss had not yet shared that she could reach one more City, and maybe one more after that, if lucky. But the respite the three had always had before, retreat to the tidal pools of the coast for a time … that was closed to them now.