The Gone World

ONE

An echo, insubstantial.

A woman in orange, a woman from the river, a woman on the cross. NSC engineers lifted Moss from the cockpit when she landed at Apollo Soucek, a figment of a dream intruding on the real. Intravenous fluids, medication.

They’re keeping me alive.

O’Connor arrived at her bedside, startled by her disfigurement. “They told me you suffered injuries commensurate with car-crash victims,” he said, eyeing her marred nose and gapped teeth, an eyelid droop that might not ever heal. He touched her face the way a father might touch a broken daughter’s. “Shannon, I’m so sorry,” he said. “For everything that’s happened, I’m sorry.”

“We’ve done this before,” she said, remembering O’Connor at a different bedside of hers, apologizing for her blackened toes and fetid gangrenous shin—I’m an echo—but she couldn’t bring herself to admit this to him, not yet. She feared O’Connor’s reaction. She didn’t want his pity, his regrets, and she feared that his care and friendship would drain away if he knew she was a phantom of an IFT, a revenant from an existence that had blinked away when she was taken from the cross. I’m not real, she wanted to say, but she feared he would sigh at the revelation, disappointed in her, like a man giving up on an aimless child. She feared he would leave her here in this hospital, alone.

“I found them,” she said. “I found Libra.”

“Tell me.”

The path of trees, the Terminus winter, she remembered the shipwreck sputtering blue flame, but in the half-forgotten way she might have recalled a reverie. You will see things your mind will not understand. Already her mind rejected what she had seen. They have my leg somewhere, she thought, remembering V-R17, dissected, sealed, stored.

“Let me start with what I’m certain of,” she said. “The Terminus isn’t fate, it’s not certainty—I think the chances of the Terminus reaching terra firma are so great that it feels like a certainty.” I came from a future without a Terminus. “But it’s not, it’s not fate.”

“Explain,” said O’Connor.

“Hyldekrugger believes that NSC will bring the Terminus to terra firma, that there are certain events that will lead this to happen. I’ve heard him refer to these events as a ‘chain,’ a chain of information that will allow Naval Space Command to rediscover the planet that Libra had encountered. NSC will bring the Terminus home.”

“That can’t be right, Shannon.”

“All the murder, the attacks they’re planning, the chemical weapons?” she said. “They’re trying to break the chain, to keep NSC from bringing the Terminus to terra firma. They’re trying to weaken our resolve to sail Deep Waters. NSC causes the cataclysm, NSC brings the Terminus.”

“You can’t listen to that man’s poison,” said O’Connor.

“I think Patrick Mursult was preparing to sell the location of Esperance to the Navy, to sell where the QTNs came from, or sell the location of Libra,” said Moss. “He wanted protection because he knew Hyldekrugger would kill him, he wanted a new identity. There’s a lawyer named Carla Durr, Mursult’s lawyer.”

Doubt shuddered through her. Carla Durr had to die, Dr. Peter Driscoll had to die. According to Hyldekrugger everyone had to die, all the physicists at the Naval Research Lab who would one day form Phasal Systems and all the sailors of Deep Waters, brave boys with bodies polluted by QTNs, everyone…

I protect the innocent.

“What about the lawyer?” asked O’Connor.

“She’s innocent,” said Moss, and seemed to feel the weight of the future avalanche into the present. Whether she held her peace and let the lawyer die or spoke now to save the lawyer’s life, every choice seemed like the wrong choice, the last meaningless moves of an endgame. A great weariness swept over her, and she wanted to hide herself, retreat beneath her covers as a child might hide from imagined fears. A disquiet worked through her thoughts; she wondered what would happen if she saved the lawyer’s life. Would she hasten NSC’s discovering Esperance? The lawyer would remain alive, would sell Mursult’s information. No, no, she thought, that’s Hyldekrugger’s way of thinking, but she felt bound. Protect the innocent. “Carla Durr, the lawyer,” she said. “Patrick Mursult had been meeting with her, and she wants to parlay his secrets into protection, money. But she doesn’t understand the consequences of what she’s involved in. Hyldekrugger, or one of his followers, will kill her on March twenty-fourth in the Tysons Corner mall food court because she’s met with Mursult. They think of her as part of the chain. The gunman will use an echoed firearm, a Beretta M9 probably pulled from a dead echo of a Libra sailor, identical to the guns we recovered from the Blackwater Lodge and from the remains of Torgersen’s house.”

“The twenty-fourth is three days from now.”

“I want to request a pre-crime warrant,” said Moss. “We can save this woman’s life.”

“We can justify pre-crime,” said O’Connor, “to save her life. I’ll write up the paperwork. We’ll be able to hold her for possession of classified intelligence on the suspicion that Mursult talked to her about Deep Waters or Libra. We can question her, find out what Mursult was preparing to sell. That should protect her past the twenty-fourth. I’ll call the Fairfax County Police, ask them to apprehend her for us. If they can’t find her, we’ll set up a direct intervention at Tysons Corner. Carla Durr, we’ll find her. Now, tell me about Libra. Do you know where she is?”

The eye of God is on fire, and the pupil is black. “Libra is caught inside the Vardogger,” she said. There is a whirlpool of fire, and it burns through every existence. “I don’t know how else to explain it. Inside the Vardogger there are paths that open from the trees. You saw it. Libra is caught inside there, and so is the Terminus somehow, or a part of the Terminus. Like a pocket universe, almost like it’s in a different time, or not in time at all. Njoku said thin spaces exist outside time…”

“SEAL Team 13 has been searching near the Red Run,” said O’Connor, “but Commander Brunner hasn’t found anything like you’re describing.”

“You can slip inside it,” said Moss, remembering when she’d been lost in the thin space, as easily as losing her way in the woods. “But there’s a trick to it. I don’t know the path that leads to Libra. And there’s something you should see, in the Grey Dove’s computer, a message you recorded for yourself. The Vardogger is dangerous, if you stray from the path, but Hyldekrugger uses it like a gate.”

Reverberations, copies, universes opening in the pines. She was spread thin, thinning, and as she lay in her hospital bed long after O’Connor had left, she closed her eyes and saw the vortex of fire spreading from Libra like the incandescent rays of a black sun, or like a burning eye searching for her. I am an echo; the woman in the orange space suit had been reality. The woman in the orange space suit had been Shannon Moss. That woman is dead. You’re here now. Everything was thin—her body, her bed, the medication dripping through her, the clinic, the base, the world—everything seemed like wrapping paper, something she could tear away to reveal only emptiness. She peered into herself and saw nothing. She felt that if she plunged her nails into her skin and ripped open her chest, only darkness would spill from her.

Agitated, that night, insomnia as she watched the minutes of her bedside clock tick between 2:00 a.m. and 3:00, her thoughts an anxious jumble. Tossing, her pillows warm and too lumpy, but even more bothersome were the twitching phantom cramps that irritated her missing leg. The sensations came and went regularly, but affected Moss most acutely when she was stressed. Lying on the stiff hospital mattress, staring at the ceiling, she could feel that first cut the surgeons had made, felt it plain as day, across her shinbone when they had tried to amputate low to save her knee. She knew that her foot and ankle were gone—she no longer felt her foot—but it seemed the rest of her leg might still be there. It was almost as if she could reach down to touch her left knee, but there was nothing there. Blankets, sheets. Cramps in her calf, racing up her thigh, agonizing; even looking down and staring where her leg wasn’t wouldn’t help. Mirror therapy brought relief, and in the morning she asked her nurses if they could find her a long mirror, at least as long as her leg. Her nurses found a mirror hanging on the back of a closet door and brought it to her. Moss reclined backward in her bed, fixed one edge of the mirror snug against her groin. She looked down the length of the reflection. Two legs instead of one. A simple trick, one that shouldn’t work but did: her mind responded as if she had two legs again. She curled her toes, rolled her ankle, flexed her knee, scratched itches, and rubbed out cramps, touching her right leg but bringing relief to the reflection.

The nurses liked her, but they coddled her, asking if she needed help with her walker or her wheelchair, or if she could dress herself, or use the toilet. Moss seethed at the idea of helplessness, that the absence of her leg was the most present thing about her. An echo or not, I can use the bathroom by myself, she thought, and remembered all those bitter women she’d met in her support groups, the women who cursed everything and everyone, who seemed hate-filled and spiteful and loathed anyone who noticed their disabilities. Moss opened herself to some of that similar vitriol, letting it pour into her like gasoline, and she became prickly, snapping unfairly at her nurses when they offered her help in getting to the cafeteria for dinner—she knew she was being unfair, but that anger cut against her despair. An echo, I don’t exist, I’m an echo. Mobility was essential, her independence.

“I need my prosthetist from Pittsburgh,” Moss eventually told her nurse. “Laura. She’s in my files. I need her.”

Moss had developed a professional intimacy with Laura over the years, Laura the only civilian medical professional Moss visited on a regular basis. Laura understood aspects of Moss’s body better even than Moss did. She was familiar with Moss’s residual limb, knew the type of liner Moss preferred, the sensitivity of her skin, already knew the location of Moss’s bony protuberances, her body type, and where her weight would fall. Regular appointments at Union Prosthetics in Pittsburgh for adjustments and resizing, salmon walls and gray carpeting, Union like a dentist’s office except for the attached fabrication shop, a commotion of plaster and plastic limbs and equipment for cutting and sanding, sheets of carbon-fiber and anatomical models of arms and legs. Laura was aware of Moss’s peculiar circumstances and was accommodating; she had passed the government background checks, signed the nondisclosure agreement, and was often able to make the trip to Apollo Soucek at a moment’s notice for emergency refitting and repairs.

“Are you all right?” Laura asked early the following morning when Moss arrived at the examination room in her wheelchair. “That’s all I want to know. Tell me you’re all right,” she said, her riot of brown curls wrestled into a ponytail, her eyes taking in Moss’s transformation: her once-pert nose now off axis, her weight loss, the startling gaps in her teeth.

“I’m fine,” said Moss.

Chatting about The X-Files as they set to work, Laura prepared Moss’s limb, chose a liner to roll over Moss’s stump and thigh. Significant shrinkage in the limb, Moss had been compensating for the changing circumference by adding padding to her socket and wearing extra layers of socks. As Laura massaged out tension to help cast a relaxed shape, however, Moss realized just how lean her residual limb was compared to her right thigh, how bony it seemed, how shriveled.

“My leg… looks so small,” said Moss. “Is that normal?”

“How does it feel?”

“I think it feels all right.”

“Then it’s all right,” said Laura, swathing Moss’s limb with plastic wrap, tight without pressure over the liner, smoothing out creases and wrinkles in the wrap as she rolled. She measured Moss’s thigh with yellow measuring tape and a heavy metal caliper and wrapped Moss’s limb in bandages sopping with plaster of paris. Laura’s hands were confident, molding the cast, handling Moss’s leg without delicacy.

“I made arrangements with Booden Prosthetics. They’ll let me use their fabrication shop again,” said Laura, sliding the plaster cast from Moss’s thigh once it had set up, her mold for the carbon-fiber fabricated socket—a hollow space matching the shape of the limb.

“I’ll need another C-Leg,” said Moss.

“It took you six months to get your hands on a C-Leg,” said Laura. “I’ll be able to get you a 3R60.”

The 3R60 from Otto Bock was a stance-flexion joint, secure but mechanical. “Damn,” said Moss. Without the computerized C-Leg joint, walking would feel like relearning a stick shift after years of automatic transmission.

“I get it,” said Laura, “but if you want the C-Leg, then don’t lose yours.”

“I know, I know—”

“Besides, the 3R60 is good,” said Laura. “You’ll lose some of the mobility you had with the C-Leg, but you’ll be stable. I’ll bring the first socket to you this afternoon, have you try it out. We’ll make our adjustments, and you should be good to go by tomorrow.”

“And then you’re hitting the beach?” asked Moss.

“You think I came all this way just to see you?”

The new prosthetic socket gloved Moss’s thigh, but the movement of the 3R60 was different from what she was accustomed to, the knee joint a spring-loaded swing, the entire prosthesis a weight of metal. Her gait was altered, a conspicuous limp as she made her way from her food-court table to the top of the escalator, peering over the railing at the vast lower floor of Tysons Corner. She knew what Durr had been wearing when she died in the future and so assumed that the lawyer would be wearing the same blaring royal-blue suit this afternoon as well, for her lunch meeting with Dr. Peter Driscoll. Moss scanned the shoppers below, seeing the tops of their heads and their shoulders, the bags they carried, and although Carla Durr with her carroty orange curls and her blue suit should be easy to spot, Moss found no sign of her. She made her way back to her table, one she’d chosen for the clean sightlines to the Five Guys burger stand, every step tentative, having to trust her mechanical knee to lock when she needed to put her weight on the joint, to unlatch and swing when she needed to step.

“Still no sign of her,” said Moss into the microphone clipped to her lapel.

“It’s early yet,” said O’Connor through her earpiece.

But it wasn’t early, it was after three o’clock, nearing three-thirty, and Moss knew that Carla Durr’s time of death was at three-forty, approximately.

“Any sign of the shooter?” she asked. A Caucasian male in black military fatigues was all she could describe of Durr’s killer, but just like Durr’s royal-blue skirt suit, a man in black fatigues should be easy to find. O’Connor had arranged for patrol cars from Fairfax County to scan the parking lot, and there were additional county police officers in the mall as well, plainclothes officers stationed near every entrance.

“Not yet,” said Njoku’s voice through her earpiece. Njoku was stationed with another NCIS special agent in the food court, O’Connor below near the foot of the escalators.

Imagining how all this might play out: Someone would spot Durr, Moss thought, and arrest her. Or if no one spotted her in time, Moss would see the lawyer as she ascended on the escalator to the food court. Or one of the patrolmen might spot the shooter, maybe Hyldekrugger himself—the police were under orders to stop and arrest anyone fitting the description of the shooter, any male in black fatigues. By now a short line had developed at the Five Guys burger stand. Moss tried to remember, hadn’t Carla Durr already received her food when she was killed? The image of that potential crime scene flashed in her mind: Durr’s body sprawled in front of the hamburger counter, blood slicking the floor, several shots in her back and head. Carla Durr would need to get in line now to have time to order, to receive her order, and be gunned down in the next few minutes. Moss looked frantically across the food court, to spot the man in fatigues, anyone suspicious, but she saw only groups of teenage girls and mothers with strollers, middle-aged men holding their wives’ bags.

Three-forty came and went, and a few minutes after four O’Connor’s voice spoke through their earpieces: “We have to close up shop.” NCIS warrants for pre-crime intervention were written only for specific windows of time, only for specific circumstances, constrained by the constitutional rights of individuals who had not yet committed the crimes they would be arrested for. The lawyer Carla Durr had never shown. What had happened? Maybe the extra police presence had scared off the gunman, but that wouldn’t explain why Durr hadn’t made it for her hamburger meeting with Dr. Driscoll. Durr wasn’t here, Driscoll wasn’t here, there was no gunman. Something had changed from the future that Moss knew, but it could have been anything—flat tire, indigestion, Durr grown too scared to meet with Driscoll, or she was already dead. Moss was annoyed at having wasted everyone’s time, but failed operations like this were a matter of course when serving pre-crime warrants. She’d been on plenty of operations where the circumstances had changed from the expected future, and nothing was accomplished. Moss had supplied the information that led to this abortive operation, which meant paperwork, but, more important, she owed the others involved the customary rounds of drinks special agents bought when their predictions failed.

Moss woke early the following morning, anxious for her debriefing with Admiral Annesley. She dressed in a charcoal-gray skirt-suit and silky blouse, and made it to NCIS headquarters with plenty of time to go over the notes she’d prepared about her IFT and to fine-tune her statement about her request for the pre-crime warrant. A few minutes before the debriefing was set to start, however, O’Connor brought her a fresh cup of coffee and let her know that the debriefing had been postponed. “Annesley called just a few minutes ago,” he said. A relief, in some ways, being spared the scrutiny of a roomful of men, some of whom would whisper about how she looked, how she used to look.

“You’ll need to write up your reports,” said O’Connor, “and I’m sure you’ll be called in to talk eventually, but the Navy is taking over, Shannon. Not every facet of the investigation, but the thin space, Libra. Carla Durr. They’re all military matters now. We’re through.”

“I understand,” said Moss. She knew that eventually, when Hyldekrugger was captured, or Cobb, or the others, they would be held in military prisons and tried in courts-martial. She would be called on to testify, to work with the prosecution, but her role in this investigation would be finished. Even so, having the military take over the investigation before any arrests had been made was disappointing, leaving behind work only half finished.

“What about Carla Durr?” Moss asked. “If the Navy’s taking over, is she dead? Did we miss her?”

“She’s very much alive,” said O’Connor. “I talked with Admiral Annesley that first night you returned, told him your theory about the Terminus, what you’d learned in your IFT. He was keen on finding Durr. And just this morning when he called, he told me the Navy had already arrested Carla Durr. She was already in the Navy’s custody when we were out at Tysons Corner waiting for her to show. So you saved her life, Shannon. But she’s out of our hands now.”

“Where was she?”

“Staying at a hotel in Chevy Chase,” said O’Connor. “The Navy filled the parking lot with military trucks, battered down her door—D.C. SWAT handled the operation. It was all over in fifteen minutes. Someone working with the admiral questioned her for several hours and then let her go. NCIS was never involved, strictly military.”

“All the death we’ve seen,” said Moss, like she’d been punctured and deflated. “All the killing, Mursult’s children—it all led to her. And we never had a chance to speak with her. The Navy questioned her for a few hours and just let her go, and we never had a chance. What about the FBI?”

“I’m meeting with the director this evening,” said O’Connor. “They’re moving forward on their investigation into the chemical-weapons lab we discovered at Buckhannon, and so are we. Domestic terrorism, the homicides. Jurisdiction’s a nightmare on this one. We’ll be untangling strands of this investigation for years.”

She worked with O’Connor over the course of the afternoon, translating her notes into a summary to send over to the admiral’s office in Dahlgren. O’Connor remarked on how tired Moss seemed. “Take some time,” he said.

“I think I’ll head home,” she said.

“William Brock’s funeral service is scheduled for tomorrow morning,” said O’Connor. “In Pittsburgh. You can represent our office if you’re up for it.”

She was weary. Brock’s death seemed from another lifetime. “Of course,” she said.

Over a thousand police officers in dress uniform from cities across the nation had gathered at St. Paul Cathedral in Pittsburgh, a cavalcade of men and women standing at attention along Fifth Avenue as the family arrived in limousines. The cathedral was crowded with friends and colleagues, but Moss made her way to an open seat in a rear pew rather than shake hands with people she only vaguely knew from crime scenes. Brock’s casket was near the altar, draped in an American flag.

She spotted Nestor during the homily; he sat toward the front, his arm in a sling. Nestor might look for her, she thought, might wonder if she were here, where she was sitting, might want to sit with her, Moss a victim of the same blast that had taken Brock’s life. But when she thought of Nestor, she remembered him shooting Vivian in the woods and preferred to avoid him even if it was unfair to judge a man for things he hadn’t done. The director of the FBI and the attorney general of the United States each offered words, the director presenting Brock’s wife with the FBI Memorial Star and announcing that Special Agent in Charge William Brock would be designated a service martyr, his name added to the other engraved names in the FBI Hall of Honor. Rashonda Brock and her two daughters were led from the memorial, grieving but proud. Moss waited while the front rows cleared, mourners walking down the center aisle. Nestor looked her way, but his eyes passed over her. She thought of what she must look like now and realized he hadn’t recognized her.

She slipped out a side door to a quiet courtyard, avoiding the chance of encountering Nestor or anyone else she knew on the cathedral stairs. A motorcade had formed along Fifth. Pittsburgh’s Bureau of Police motorcycles with lights flashing guided the hearses and the escort cars away from the church, a long train of police cars following. They were headed to the airport, where the casket would be flown to Texas for the family funeral and burial.

Moss visited her mother that night. An enduring image of her mother, alone in the kitchen, only the single kitchen light on, going through her envelopes of Reader’s Digest cutouts, the rest of the house dark. Moss used to wonder if this was how she would remember her mother long after her mother had died, but now she knew that the Terminus would rob her of even this. Moss had called after Brock’s memorial and told her mother she was coming over, trying to prepare her for her injuries. She’d told her mother over the phone that she’d been in a car crash, that she would be fine, but the moment her mother saw her, she stood from the kitchen table.

“Let me look at you,” she said, angling her daughter’s chin toward the light. “Whoever he is, leave him.”

Moss sighed. “I told you how this happened. I was in an agency car, and a truck ran a red light—”

“They don’t stop,” said her mother. “You listen to me,” she said, staring hard into her daughter’s eyes. “If it’s in them, it’s always been in them and always will. He’ll destroy everything about you, he’ll take everything that was good. You’re worth more than that.”

“It’s nothing like that, I’m telling you—”

“Protect what you have, even if it means losing everything you think you want.”

Moss had aged as she traveled IFTs, even as the rest of time stood still, catching up with her mother incrementally over the years. Since her mother had been pregnant with Moss when she was young, only seventeen, Moss sometimes thought she might actually catch her mother in age, or pass her by. As her mother examined Moss’s face, however, the hot light of the kitchen lamp warming her skin, Moss had never felt more like a child. They ordered pizza and settled in for a night of television. Her mother kept the living-room lights low, and in just the harsh blue flicker of the television Moss found herself staring at the photograph of her father in his Navy whites, grinning until the end of time. They watched ABC News, her mother smoking cigarettes. The news of Brock’s funeral had been buried beneath the news of a cult in California, thirty-nine members discovered dead, a mass suicide.

“Of all the… you hear about this?” asked her mother.

“No,” said Moss.

“Thought the damn comet was a spaceship, so they killed themselves. They thought if they killed themselves, the spaceship would beam them up, like in Star Trek,” she said. “All wearing the same sneakers. Look at that, they’re showing one of the bodies. Look at the sneakers.”

A body draped in a purple tarp, only the slacks and black-and-white sneakers visible, brand-new sneakers, bought for the occasion of death. They watched Beverly Hills, 90210 and Party of Five, shows her mother followed, but Moss let her mind wander to the Vardogger trees, the infinite paths—to Remarque ordering her crew to self-destruct Libra and commit mass suicide like the Heaven’s Gate cult, believing that if her crew died, then the world they had wrought would die with them. Her mother had fallen asleep in her chair by the time the local news came on, her glass of whiskey still in one hand, her cigarette in the other, burning down. A house fire, Moss imagined—she wondered in how many IFTs the cigarette dropped ash to the floor, caught the carpet on fire. Moss brought an ashtray over, a clay monstrosity she’d made for her mother in first or second grade, stubbed out the cigarette.

She expected more of the Heaven’s Gate suicides on the news, wanted to hear more about the spaceship these people thought was flying the Hale-Bopp, but the news was filled instead with a different cosmic event. Images of people gathered in fields, crowding hilltops and the roofs of buildings, staring at the night sky. The Star of Bethlehem had returned, some said—the Star of Bethlehem hanging in the sky, eastward. Some said the star was pointing the way to Bethlehem, some thought it represented the second coming of Christ, though the talking-head astronomers offered differing explanations. Another comet, some said, coming into our viewing region in a cyclical manner, an unprecedented doubling of comets, the Star of Bethlehem and Hale-Bopp like twin silver lights. Others claimed that the shining celestial event was more likely a distant supernova, the light just now reaching the Earth from a star that had died magnificently several billion years ago. Moss’s eyes, however, filled with tears that spilled down her cheeks. She unlocked the side door and walked into the street and faced the east. There were already others out on the street, looking up, shielding their eyes. The event was like a shining star, a star extraordinarily bright—bright enough to seem like a nighttime sun casting the Earth in a cold glare that washed out color and heightened shadow. The moon was dim, as were other stars—as was Hale-Bopp, that silvery smudge that had hung grandly in the sky for the past several weeks. The new light felt like the brightest light Moss had ever seen, and it grew ever brighter as she stared. It meant the death of everything she’d ever known. The White Hole had appeared. The Terminus had come.

Her cell phone rang, and she checked the number: O’CONNOR.

“We’re still alive,” she said.

“We have work to do.”

TWO

She drove to Virginia by the pale luster of the White Hole, a blinding disk bounded by a halo of night. Four a.m., but people gathered on their lawns and lined the roads, staring eastward, the unnatural light reflecting against their faces reminding Moss of faces in a movie theater. At dawn the sun rose pallid, but the sky remained preternaturally gray, the temperature dropped, and soon Moss turned on her windshield wipers against fat snowflakes that spun in the air. The radio was full of prophecy at the Star of Bethlehem, announcing the second coming of Christ—a child had been born in Puerto Rico in the instant the White Hole appeared, he’d been named Jesus, and already the infant was hailed as the sublime sign announcing the end of time. Winter was general over the Earth; even the sandblasted deserts of Africa experienced snowfall. NPR news reported that suicides lined the streets of Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, copycat deaths of Heaven’s Gate, bodies draped in sheets. There had been minor looting of shoe stores, people stealing the black-and-white Nikes favored by the cult. This is how the world ends, Moss thought. No panicking, no riots. No reports of the hanged men appearing, or of people running in herds, not yet anyway, though when she arrived in Virginia Beach, its few snowplows deployed laying salt and scraping the roads clear of slush, she learned that scores of people had congregated on the beach, that they had bent and flailed in concert, a sort of calisthenics, before wading into the ocean to drown.

Naval Air Station Oceana was in the midst of Operation Saigon when Moss arrived at the gates. The president’s and vice president’s families would be flown here on Marine One, would be boarded onto Eagle, a Cormorant shuttle kept ready for this moment. Their families and the members of their essential staff would rendezvous with TERNs Group 6, the USS James Garfield, at the Black Vale Station. NSC soldiers were notifying civilians who’d been chosen for evacuation, a life-or-death lottery plagued by nepotism, a supposed mix of genetics, genders, and aptitudes that a think tank of politicians and scientists had devised in consultation with the military to represent the last best hope to revive mankind. Moss drove the streets of the base and saw one of the Cormorants taking off, its flight path over the churning Atlantic. She met O’Connor at the NCIS offices.

“We have a new crime scene,” he said.

There would be a final Cormorant, a last ship held to transport NCIS and NSC staff who assisted with Operation Saigon in these final hours. Moss was prepared to miss that flight. Now that the White Hole shone, now that QTNs flooded every man, woman, and child, soon to wipe away consciousness like a whiff of ether, she knew she would work against the Terminus until she, too, was wiped away. She hadn’t remained with NCIS all these years to save herself, to book passage on a lifeboat leaving Earth—she had joined to help people, to protect the innocent, and she felt that everyone was innocent in the face of dissolution. She took out her yellow legal pad, uncapped her pen.

“Tell me what we have,” she said.

“The appearance of the White Hole coincides with the launch schedule of a Cormorant shuttle called Onyx,” O’Connor said. “The B-L fired last night, at 10:53 Eastern—the exact moment the White Hole appeared.”

“A Navy ship will bring the White Hole,” said Moss, shaking her head. “Who?”

“The ship was registered as public/private,” said O’Connor. “Black Vale reports that the Onyx was requisitioned two days ago, by Senator Curtis Craig Charley.”

“C. C. Charley’s the chairman of the Armed Services Committee,” said Moss.

“He’s close with Admiral Annesley.”

“So Onyx sailed Deep Waters, returned with the White Hole in its wake. It would have followed the Onyx’s Casimir line,” said Moss. “But why is the Onyx a crime scene?”

“Because everyone on board is dead,” said O’Connor. “Could be something as simple as a mechanical failure, but we have to find out. The B-L launch was successful, but Black Vale received the Onyx’s emergency beacon. We get first crack at the ship, but we have to move. NSC will take Onyx from us as soon as they need it for the evacuation, but they want us to determine what happened in case it represents a threat to the evacuees.”

The Grey Dove was cleared for departure within the hour, one of the few departing Cormorants not ferrying evacuees to dock with the massive TERNs. Moss taxied with the other Cormorants, wondering how quickly the effects of the Terminus might manifest. She launched, cutting through dense, snow-spitting clouds that spired into violent plumes stretching magnificently upward. She imagined everyone on Earth already in a state of living death. She imagined crucifixions, imagined running to the sea. The Grey Dove broke from Earth, and Moss floated into the main cabin, her view of Earth no longer one of tender blue fragility but of a white-palled planet, an eye milky white and blind.

The Onyx was a Cormorant, identical to the Grey Dove. It looked like a mirror-smooth piece of black glass, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding night except for the silvery planes of the wings and some hull sections that caught the glare of the White Hole and reflected cast-off light from the moon. The Grey Dove’s AI maneuvered close to the Onyx while Moss prepped for the crime scene, wearing the olive-green space suit marked NCIS and checking her camera, the film. The Grey Dove chirped a three-point alert once it had closed the gap between ships, matched rotation with the Onyx. Moss fastened her helmet, floated into the tubular airlock. The airlock of the Onyx was only twenty-five feet away, but the distance between ships was a span of open space. The Onyx and the Grey Dove spun in relation to each other, like the two parts of a binary star. The Onyx’s airlock was directly in front of her, unmoving. She gripped its steel handlebars while she worked to quell the sense of vertigo that curled through her stomach at the thought of floating from one ship to the other. My God, she thought, still just a girl from Canonsburg when faced with a space walk. Moss had seen marines do this maneuver, jumping ship to ship, countless times, soldiers leaping from the lip of one ship and floating—sometimes untethered—across the gap as easily as jumping over a sidewalk puddle. Moss attached one end of her tether to the Grey Dove, tugged on it experimentally.

She stepped into space, an infant on an umbilical cord, full of adrenaline as she drifted between ships. And soon the Onyx’s hull loomed large enough that she could reach out and grab hold of the airlock, pulling herself the rest of the way.

“Onyx, this is Shannon Moss. Please unlock the port airlock.”

The lock snapped open. Moss hooked her tether to the Onyx, stitching the ships together, then pushed open the airlock and crawled inside. She waited for the Onyx’s green light of pressurization before she swam into the body of the ship, through the lightless airlock tube, her path lit only with the penlight attached to the side of her helmet. She gasped when she saw the bodies in the main cabin—there were twelve, naked, floating in the airless, lightless room like icebergs under dark water. Her penlight spotlighted wherever she looked. Globules floated among the bodies, some as large as her fist—blood, she knew, fractionated, large water spheres filled with sprays of red platelets and yellow plasma like the swirls of color in hand-blown glass ornaments.

“Onyx,” said Moss. “Lights, please.”

The interior of the ship illuminated the ghastly dead and their floating blood. It struck her that the bodies looked like they might have been dead for only a few minutes, but she knew that was because there was no oxygen to trigger decomposition. Years could pass and they would look virtually the same.

They killed one another, she thought, that much was clear. The bodies were marred with slash marks and other cutting wounds and blunt-force trauma. Some of their bones had been broken; in one case a snapped shinbone had poked through the victim’s skin. A long gash flared across one man’s spine; another had entrance wounds over his heart, several stab marks. She counted: someone had stabbed this man at least thirty times, mincing his heart and lungs. Like documenting a crime scene that’s been put in a box and shaken, she thought. She recognized the senator, C. C. Charley, his body on the ceiling, his foot caught in wiring. His stomach had been opened, and his guts had leaked out across the ceiling like the long tentacles of a crimson squid. Moss took photographs. Smaller blood droplets hung like a rainstorm frozen in place, the fine mist painting Moss’s space suit as she moved through the ship, snapping pictures. After every few shots, she wiped blood from her lens.

She measured the distances between bodies, taking notes with pencil in the notebook fastened to her suit. She used yellow cords to tie the bodies to the ceiling and walls so they wouldn’t drift. A ghastly concern, but despite their weightlessness these bodies’ masses were the same as they would have been on Earth and could crush or injure her like falling debris if she were to bump one, set it moving.

Where were the murder weapons? She began to find them, handmade things: a shard of a mirror duct-taped to a length of pipe, pieces of a shattered faceplate fastened to the fingers of an EVA glove. She bagged the shivs in plastic evidence sacks. They had used the rather dull knives from the mess room, scissors, and some of the decedents had bruising that indicated they were choked and beaten to death when weapons weren’t available. The sailors would have had firearms, but Moss saw no indication that they’d been discharged. She couldn’t find bullet wounds in any of the bodies. The image of what had occurred here turned in her mind, and she closed her eyes to regain herself. She had excused herself to vomit at crime scenes before, cleansing herself to refocus on the work, but vomiting at this crime scene, into her helmet, would be disastrous. She waited for her nerves to calm, for the flopping sensation in her stomach to level. Deep breath. Being up here alone with so many bodies was claustrophobic; the Onyx enclosed her. She opened her eyes.

The onboard computer recorded that the life-support system had been cut manually. Moss weighed the extent of the damage these people had inflicted on one another, the sheer butchery. She imagined some sane sailor cutting life support just to make the killing stop. Or maybe he’d cut life support in order to kill everyone with a single stroke. The crew of the Taurus, that first NSC ship to encounter the Terminus, had met a similar fate, a sudden flash of insane violence—and Nicole had spoke of Esperance, sailors killing one another on those icy shores until the Navy SEALs, Cobb and Mursult, had helped the survivors regain their sanity.

Three and a half hours documenting the main cabin before moving through the ship. She found the commanding officer’s body in the galley, a knife stuck in his back. There was still food in his mouth—either he’d paused in the killing to have supper or was the first to have died, someone ambushing him as he ate. She found another body shoved into the toilet compartment, his lips cut away from his face to reveal his teeth. Distracted by the grotesquerie of the mouth, she didn’t recognize the corpse until after she’d taken pictures of him.

Driscoll. Dr. Peter Driscoll, the scientist who appeared to me as a simulation. She recognized his hair, that white whoosh. Without his lips, Driscoll’s teeth could almost be mistaken for a cheek-spanning grin, his dark eyes wide open, his eyebrows lifted, as if he, too, were surprised at what had happened here. Senator C. C. Charley, Dr. Peter Driscoll—Moss formed a guess about the party aboard the Onyx. She expected to find other future founders of Phasal Systems on this ship, engineers and physicists from NRL, if anyone ever took the trouble to identify the bodies. She found Admiral Annesley’s corpse floating chest-down near the floor like a bottom-feeding fish. Moss flipped the corpse over and saw that the man’s face had been cut away.

Another corpse she recognized, drifting near the sleeping compartments—a woman’s body, obese, her flesh floating outward. Carla Durr had been gutted, slashed from neck to belly. In the moment of her death, she must have plunged her hands into her breast cavity and tried to pull herself apart. It looked like she was revealing her rib cage and organs, some of which had floated away.

We saved your life, and what did you do with it?

The Navy had arrested Carla Durr in her hotel room in Chevy Chase and questioned her. She had sold Patrick Mursult’s secrets to Admiral Annesley, Moss figured. How much money had Durr received, what other favors than this voyage to Deep Waters? Whatever information she’d sold had led to this.

The thought came to Moss.

A chain of information: Patrick Mursult to his lawyer, Carla Durr, Durr to Admiral Annesley, to Dr. Peter Driscoll, to Senator C. C. Charley—Hyldekrugger had been breaking the chain. But I saved this woman’s life. I should have let her die. The thought was repugnant, but as Moss looked at the lawyer’s ruined body, the enormity of what had hinged on her decision to save this woman’s life rushed over her, when in the hospital she had told O’Connor that they weren’t too late to stop the killing. But I should have let them kill her—it was clear to her now. What was one life set against all life? Hyldekrugger had been right: killing this woman would have broken the chain, would have staved off NSC from discovering Esperance for another few years at least.

It’s my fault.

Moss screamed, thinking, No, letting the lawyer die wasn’t right, that wasn’t the right answer. And she turned inward, surrounded by butchered corpses, thinking about inevitability. Throughout her professional life, Moss had lived with the idea of the Terminus sweeping closer, but now her mind opened to the idea that it had all been because of her, that her career in NCIS had set her on the path to the Mursult investigation, and every bit of evidence she uncovered, culminating in her decision to intercede in the killing of the lawyer Carla Durr, had ensured that NSC would rediscover Esperance sooner and sooner and sooner. I ended the world, she thought, looking at the dead that surrounded her, but their eyes offered no solace. She felt trapped here, spun in webs, the White Hole a spider’s eye bearing down on her.

Someone else would quit. Her little mantra was so absurd in this hideous context that just thinking it made her feel a rush of giddiness, as if she were losing her mind. But when that sensation passed, she felt centered, resolute.

This is a crime scene. There are questions to answer.

What had Mursult told his lawyer?

Mursult’s information might be here, but where? The Cormorant-class ships were fitted with personal compartments, little more than cubbies cut into the floors and ceilings, coffin-shaped cubicles meant to serve as private places to sleep. But most people preferred to tether their sleep sacks somewhere in the main cabin rather than squeeze into these casketlike compartments, so civilian passengers generally used these compartments as footlockers to stow personal items. There had been twenty people on board the Onyx. Moss picked through each compartment, looking for Durr’s.

“Here we go,” she said, uncovering a set of burgundy overnight bags monogrammed “C.D.” Undergarments, a folded tracksuit, hosiery, a jar of Oil of Olay, bifocals. She found a Stephen King paperback and a manila envelope closed with a metal clasp. Moss opened the envelope, slid out the sheaf of papers: lined sheets, torn from a spiral notebook, the edges fringed from the perforation. Crude pencil drawings. What are these? In one of them, Moss recognized the Vardogger tree. There was a photocopy of a map, red ink pointing to a location at the Red Run, the thin space, highlighting the approximate location of the access route to get to that spot. Then she found a handwritten note:

It’s a trick, it might take you a few times before you see the trees if you can ever see the trees at all. Bietak thinks you need QTNs in you to see it, as some people never can figure out the trick, but I don’t think that’s the case—the damn thing opens whenever our engine misfires. Follow the trees once you see them, but once you cross the river, don’t step off the path. You’ll think you’ll want to—it feels like that—but if you step off the path, you will be exposed and you can’t be saved.

The next sheet was a drawing of Libra, in black ink, the bow circled with rings of blue ink—meant to be the spurting blue flame from the B-L drive, Moss guessed.

The trees lead you here to Libra. When you’re here, you will see other lines of Vardoggers. If you walk these other paths, you go to other worlds like your world but slightly off. H marks paths we took, so we remember. He sets cairns in the paths. There are many paths.

Moss flipped through the pages. A map of Buckhannon, the chemical lab marked in red.

Building a heavy-duty facility at Zion, multi-million dollars, H got the idea from cult in Japan. There’s an orchard there—Jared’s mom will move to the orchard, hold it for him. H and Jared want to re-create Japanese gas attacks, use the same stuff they used. Test batches at Buckhannon.

There were other drawings, some of geometric shapes, seven-pointed stars, one of the Black Sun design, its spokes like the Vardogger paths, and there were hand-drawn maps labeled ESPERANCE, a series of drawings showing locations of campsites, remembered fragments of geography. Moss recognized the fjords and oceans Nicole had described. There were star charts marking the location of the dim binary stars, the location of the planet that Libra had discovered. She found a longer letter:

Patrick Mursult thought he would escape through the Vardogger, walking the paths, start a new life in some other IFT. But he was killed at the Blackwater Lodge before he could escape.

Marian will be a young child… But how was that possible? None of us can go back, can we?

The Terminus had followed Libra, but Libra was caught in a space-time knot, somewhere beyond time. The Onyx, however, had returned to terra firma. The crew of the Onyx had shed their clothes because they were infected with QTNs, Moss thought, remembering how her own skin had burned. That had been the sensation in the minutes before her crucifixion: burning skin. She had stripped off her clothes despite biting winter wind, and was crucified.

“Onyx, please call Apollo Soucek Field.”

She heard the tone for “failed command.” Moss found one of the ship’s computers, saw:

…ACCESS NOT AUTHORIZED.

“Override,” said Moss. “Please place a call to Apollo Soucek Field.”

…ALL CHANNELS REQUIRED FOR OPERATION SAIGON.

“Damn it,” she said. “Onyx, override. Send out emergency signal. Please place a call to Apollo Soucek Field or to the Black Vale.”

…ALL CHANNELS REQUIRED FOR OPERATION SAIGON.

“Fuck.”

The bodies in the cabin moved when she brushed against them. They looked like they danced, like someone’s dreamy joke of a morgue ballet. She escaped belowdecks, exploring the galley, the recreation room. She found an American flag, stiff without gravity, a fabric rectangle thumbtacked to the floor. On the ceiling were a camcorder and tripod. She checked the camera, found a tape, wondering if these people had filmed themselves murdering one another. She loaded the VHS tape into the entertainment system, figured out how to turn everything on. The screen was filled with an image of Senator Charley, wearing a blue polo shirt and khaki shorts, tube socks pulled near to his knees. The American flag was over his shoulder, a backdrop. Moss had seen the man countless times on television, but he looked much younger here, sparked by a childlike wonder, the circus ride of weightlessness.

“Fellow Americans, I have been on the journey of a lifetime, of a thousand lifetimes,” he said, and then a woman’s voice, off camera, asked him to try again. The senator cleared his throat, plastered on a practiced smile, and said, “I have been on the journey of a lifetime. Fell Americans. I mean, fellow Americans—”

“Go ahead,” said the woman’s voice. “We can edit.”

“Fellow Americans, on March twenty-sixth, 1997, aboard a Navy vessel, the USS Onyx, a group of men and women embarked on the journey of a lifetime, a journey of a thousand lifetimes. We traveled a distance once only dreamed of. No longer the ‘final frontier,’ the vast distances of space have been opened to us… Wait, wait, let me try that again.”

“You used the word ‘distance’ several times,” said the woman off screen. “We can use cue cards.”

“No,” said Senator Charley. “I want this to feel natural.”

“Let’s practice the section about Majesty,” said the woman.

“Okay,” said the senator. He smiled to the camera and said, “We have discovered a planet rich in wondrous, strange materials, beautiful fauna and undreamed-of life. Yes, life. I have had my eyes opened anew to the miracle of God’s creation and have had my mind opened to the possibilities of his grandeur. As Christians, and as Americans, we have called this planet ‘Majesty.’”

“A touch too preachy. Oh, hold on,” said the woman’s voice, off camera.

The image of the senator turned to fuzz, but a new image appeared. Someone had filmed through one of the ship’s windows—an image similar to pictures of Earth seen from a distance, the curved sphere of a planet, but the planet filmed here was a sphere white with ice and black with oily seas, crater-pocked and scarred with jagged mountains. A sizable moon rose over the crescent horizon, a golden giant. The monitor turned to static.

“—Shannon?” from over the comm.

The sudden voice startled her.

“Shannon, was that you? Are you okay?” said O’Connor. “I received the emergency signal.”

“I’m… I found something important up here,” she said, her voice shaking.

“I have rendezvous instructions for you, enact immediately,” he said. “You have been assigned to TERNs Group 5, the Cancer. Don’t come home, Shannon—”

“Listen to me,” she said. “The Onyx went to Esperance, they went to the—”

“I understand,” he said. “But it’s too late now. Once you reach Cancer, set the autocourse on the Onyx for Apollo Soucek. We need more ships for the evacuation, we need every ship. The Navy has seized control of the Grey Dove. They’ve recalled the ship, but we need more.”

“The answer might be here, on the Onyx,” said Moss. “We need more time.”

“It’s too late,” said O’Connor. “The hanged men are here, the running men are here. People everywhere are looking at the sky, their mouths are filled with silver. The forests are burning, the snow is heavy. It’s too late, Shannon. It’s too late.”

Moss pulled herself along the lower-deck passageway, flying upward through the portal leading to the helm, thinking, Remarque. They murdered the Libra’s commanding officer. The cockpit of the Onyx was identical to the Grey Dove’s: a reinforced-glass canopy, two flight chairs nestled into a sea of controls, panels of switches and knobs. She thought of her mother. She thought of Cancer. Receding in the distance was her ship, the Grey Dove, the tether snapped.

“Onyx, were you given new instructions?”

…RENDEZVOUS WITH USS CANCER, SET AUTOCOURSE FOR NAVAL AIR STATION OCEANA.

“Onyx, can you belay that order?”

…NO. ALL RESOURCES REQUISITIONED FOR OPERATION SAIGON.

“Onyx, can you belay the order to dock with the USS Cancer if you fly to Oceana?”

…YES.

The TERNs would be loaded to capacity, she thought. Two hundred souls. She thought of Cancer, an older ship, a ship that once had faulty O-rings before its overhaul. We would live like rats, thought Moss, and there would be nowhere to run, no haven, nowhere, there would only be one blind jump to the next, to far-future IFTs in unknown galaxies searching barren stars and infertile planets for safe landing, for any safe landing, until the food ran out or the recycling for the water malfunctioned. Everyone on board would kill one another, they would eat one another, drink one another, and eventually they would all starve, they would all die of thirst, or they would run out of oxygen. One way or another, they would all die.

Only a few hours of oxygen remained in her tank. “Onyx, please reestablish life support,” she said. “And belay request to rendezvous with the Cancer. Continue to Oceana.”

An impulsive request, but she felt the burden of culpability, the belief that her actions had brought the Terminus here. She felt she deserved to die or never escape. Pushing through the hanging legs and arms of the corpses felt like swimming through a skein of seaweed. Driscoll was in the toilet, his lipless, toothy grin—she didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to see Durr’s revealed heart. She used the American flag as a cover to the upper-deck portal, to keep the blood out as the air began to circulate. When the Onyx had reached healthy oxygen saturation, Moss removed her helmet. She’d been expecting a smell of putrefaction, but there was none.

She left the lights on. She tried to sleep during her return to Earth, but her body tensed and her mind flitted with fear. Images darted through her thoughts. The hanged men, the running men, Nestor asking if she believed in the resurrection of the body. No, there is no God, this is the natural order. She imagined a snake flailing in the weightlessness of space until it curled toward itself to swallow its own tail. She thought of silver, swatches of silver swimming together, a school of fish. Njoku in the Pacific, reaching deep into a watery thin space and feeling a fish appear in the middle of his hand, the sensation of the fish slipping free…

Moss skimmed the surface of sleep and woke when she fell to the floor, the clatter of everything that hadn’t been tethered crashing down around her, the camcorder cracked to pieces, the tremendous thud, thud, thud of the bodies whapping the walls and floor. Earth’s gravity. She hurried to the pilot’s chair, strapped herself in, thinking of the wreck of the Libra, just before the misfire. Libra had burned and fallen in that long, dreamless night. The Onyx’s cockpit was tinted, shading the incandescent smear of fire as it burned against the atmosphere like a struck match. They murdered Remarque, she thought. At one of the Brandt-Lomonaco space-time knots, Pacific jack mackerels were caught in a Gödel curve—a loop. She thought of Libra, her disorienting night in the brig, her experience of mutiny and the shipwreck that followed. Mursult’s letter to Durr had spelled out what Remarque had been attempting, a cascade failure to obliterate us all. A black hole.

“I can do what Remarque couldn’t do,” said Moss, piecing her thoughts together even as she said them aloud. Nicole had told her that Remarque had ordered mass suicide. That if the entire crew of Libra blinked, then the planet Esperance would go unfound. “My God,” Moss said aloud, to no one. “Libra’s a jack mackerel. I can do what Remarque couldn’t do.”

But what would come of it? she wondered. What would happen if she managed to breach Libra, if she somehow managed to cause a cascade failure?

She had been brought here, pulled across the river when she was pulled from the cross. Everyone’s mistake, she’d been told, is that we believe in our own existence. The falling star as it blooms. Patrick Mursult believed he could walk the Vardoggers, travel backward in time: Marian will be young. If he could walk backward in time…

When was terra firma? she wondered. It wasn’t here, it wasn’t 1997. 1997 was Libra’s IFT. If she could cause a cascade failure, if Libra can blink, when was true terra firma? She imagined the thin space overwhelmed by the Terminus, imagined the Terminus reaching Libra, imagined the White Hole traveling Libra’s Casimir line back to the point of its original launch, to terra firma. Marian will be young, five years old. Nicole, when she rescued Moss from the brig, had said that eleven years had passed. Ebullience rose through her like bubbles in a flute of champagne. If Libra blinked, then this IFT will blink, everything will blink. NSC ships would still comb the universe and distant time, would still sail Deep Waters, but Libra will have blinked in its future. Esperance will go undiscovered. There would still be a chance of that planet’s discovery, Moss realized, some chance of another ship happening on that planet, there would still be a chance of the Terminus, but only a chance. A possibility. But there can be other possibilities. Terra firma would be the date of Libra’s initial launch, the moment just before Libra first used its B-L drive.

November 7, 1985.

“Courtney,” said Moss.

The Onyx cut through the whiteout squall, the ocean an undulating gray beneath the gusts, and skidded on the ice-slicked runway at Apollo Soucek. People broke through the barriers and swarmed the runway, chased the Cormorants as they taxied, insensible of their own safety in their desperation to flee. Moss saw bodies in the snow. She was still far from the terminal when a yellow truck the size of a bus cut across the runway ahead of her, sped toward her, to collide with her. What are you doing? she thought as the truck fishtailed on the slick surface. It was an anti-icing truck, the cherry-picker arm and hoses flailing wildly. The truck swerved and cut back and rammed the Onyx’s front wheel.

“What the fuck?” shouted Moss, the Onyx now stuck in the wreckage of the truck. Maybe an accident caused by the ice, maybe the truck had slid into her, but she saw the first few people rush toward the Cormorant shouting. Others appeared, families, soldiers, surrounding the Onyx, trying to climb aboard. They want to get into this ship. They want to save themselves, take over this ship.

Moss popped the canopy just as one of the men reached her. He’d clambered up the wreckage of the yellow truck, his eyes wild. “Take me on this one, take me!”

“Get in,” said Moss, climbing from the canopy to let him pass, needing to escape these people. She found her footing on the Cormorant’s boarding ladder, but once she made it down a few rungs, clutching hands yanked her off, tossed her aside to the tarmac. At least a dozen people had made it to the Onyx, and more were coming. They crawled over the ship, trying to find openings. She saw another Cormorant, the Lily of the Valley, streak past and swerve into the sky, bodies strewn along its runway. They’ve gone mad, thought Moss. She turned back to the Onyx and saw people ejecting the bodies of the dead, throwing corpses away like unwanted ballast.

“Shannon!”

She heard him: O’Connor. He was with Njoku, the snow blowing in slashing gusts between them. He waved to her, but she lost sight of them in the storm, in the rush of people heading toward the farther runways in anticipation of another Cormorant. Moss fought her way through the masses, into the terminal. The hallways were quiet compared to the clamor outside. She took off her heavy space suit, wearing only her long underwear. Luggage was strewn about the airport, abandoned in the mad rush to catch ships to escape. She found a U.S. Navy tracksuit in a duffel and a flight jacket with VFA-213 patches: the Blacklion, a double-tailed lion drawn in stars. She put it on.

The Navy had abandoned most of the base. The streets were empty, the snow mounting in sifting drifts. Moss brushed off a half foot of snow from her truck, listening to the engine crank before it turned over. More people streamed in through the abandoned station gates as she sped away, the streets of Virginia Beach swept with snow but passable. She had always imagined immense traffic jams in the event of cataclysm, but there were no cars on the road, only a few that had been pulled to the berms, abandoned. Everyone’s dead in their homes, she thought, or stuck in ice. There were a few other cars on the highways, their brights only dim spots in the blizzard.

Four people clustered on the roadside gazing at the White Hole, immobile, utterly paralyzed, their mouths hanging wide, extended open as if their jaws had been stretched apart. The silver filled their mouths; it looked as if each gurgled a mouthful of mercury. The silver ran down their cheeks, over their necks. She didn’t see her first pack of running men until well outside the city, a group of thirty or so runners, nude and barefoot despite the freezing winds. She had almost imagined the running men as something funny, absurd, but seeing them terrified her, running desperately without thought of bodily injury or endurance, their faces twisted into expressions of blank rage, some of them screaming. They ran like they were being chased by a swarm of stinging insects, passing into the forest that edged the interstate, disappearing into the woods. They would run until their bodies disintegrated, Moss knew. If they made it to the shore, they would run into the water to drown. She drove recklessly, spinning out on the icy roads, swerving lanes, panic settling over her that she was wrong to be here, so wrong, that she should have docked at the Cancer, should be among colleagues, far from here, leaving the dying Earth to seek a new refuge somewhere out in endless space.

Night descended as she entered the forest, and the glare from the White Hole reflected off the blizzard snowfall and bathed the evergreens in silver. The fires that would devour the Monongahela National Forest, and all forests, had burned since the White Hole appeared, and Moss saw firelight flickering deep in the woods on either side of her like will-o’-the-wisps or ghostly torchlight processions. The access route leading up toward the Vardogger was impassable. Moss abandoned her truck and climbed, sliding hopelessly down the snowdrifts until she grappled tree trunk to tree trunk, dragging herself upward by gripping saplings and using them like climbing cords. Any moment your skin might burn, the QTNs might fill you, you might shed these clothes and run, you might join a pack, you might be lifted into the air…

She staggered into the clearing where Nestor had once shot Vivian, where Marian’s bones were once found, where Marian’s echo had been recovered. The woods were on fire. She struggled for breath, the freezing air and smoke and ash burning in her lungs. Her body ached.

“Oh, God,” she said, heart pounding from the climb, but she continued through thicker pines and soon dropped several inches into deeper snow. She had found the runnel that Nestor once followed, the shallow ditch of the creek that had run dry. The cairns were near here, she remembered, but they would be buried under snow. She heard rushing water and followed the sound on a downward slope. A Navy truck was left here, iced over. They hadn’t yet fenced this area off, though they’d planned to before the evacuation. She saw heavier equipment, abandoned. Some trees had been cleared from the zone, were piled like lumber. The white Vardogger tree was untouched by snow.

Moss ran her hand over the bark; it felt like cold steel. She fell to her knees, hoping the tree would open, would multiply, to show her a path of trees, but nothing happened. The wind pushed through the hemlocks, the sound like a broom sweeping concrete. This was where Nestor had left her to die. In one of her futures, he had betrayed her here. What had happened to Nestor? She imagined him crucified, upside down in a forest of other crucifixions, but the thought seemed too cruel, despite his future cruelty. She chose to remember how his body had looked silvery in the moonlight of that first night they’d spent together, how his freckles had formed a constellation over his heart. She was filled with sorrow.

She stood, walked away from the tree, turned back.

There was only one tree.

No.

Mursult had written that the path might be a trick of the eyes. That it might always exist but remain unseen, or that it might be a function of QTNs in the blood, or that it might open whenever the B-L drive misfired. In any case there was no telling when or even if the tree would form an infinite path that led to Libra. The hour is late, Nestor had said. What do I do? Moss screamed, raging, nervous. What do I do? Time passed, the snow and violent wind numbed her, she bundled in her coat, concerned about QTNs that must be in the air. They must be filling me, she thought. They must be saturating my blood.

Will I die here? She wondered if her death would come while she waited for a path to appear. Nothing as violently bizarre as what QTNs might do with her, but naturally, a natural death in this unnatural cold. The flight jacket she had taken from Apollo Soucek was leather, lined with wool, but the cold seeped through and hoarfrost froze over her hair when she tucked her face deep into the lining. She pulled her arms in from the sleeves, breathed onto her fingers, but her skin stung and tingled, and she knew she would soon lose feeling.

Walk. Move. Keep your blood flowing.

Twilight. She went to the clearing, to the river, and returned to the white tree. When she passed the tree, the landscape changed around her. She lost sight of the Navy vehicles and the felled evergreens. The pines had grown in, were thick, and she pushed through branches, hoping to find that infinite path, but instead came back to the same white tree. Or… this must be a different tree.

She was in the thin space, she realized, but the path of trees that Hyldekrugger had followed wasn’t here; there was only a dark forest, boughs and branches, needles that scratched her. She came again to the white tree, and although she knew she was caught up in this place, just as she’d been caught here before her crucifixion, she began to panic, lost. She forced her way through dense pine boughs and came into the clearing, to the rushing black river, but she was on the wrong side of the river, she felt, the same sense that Njoku and O’Connor had described when they were here. She saw the white tree across the river, but she had come from the white tree. It should be behind her.

Marian crossed this river, she remembered, and I crossed the river with Hyldekrugger. But the pathway of trees hadn’t appeared for her, and there was no tree fording the river. Shannon Moss climbed from this river, the echo, she thought, just before Cobb beat her to death.

She approached the river, toed the bank. The swift water broke against boulders into white water, misting her with river spray. She could make it across, though, maybe. There were enough stones in the water, sharper rocks jutting above the rapids; they could be stepping-stones, she thought.

You’ll die, Shannon. You’ll get hypothermia in that water, with no place to dry off, with the air so cold. You’ll die.

But she scrabbled down the snow-covered bank, gauging her distance to the nearest rock, a few feet ahead. She stepped wide across the river onto the rock and found her footing, trusting her weight to her prosthetic leg. The wind ripped at her, and she shivered. The next rock was closer, with a wide flat section she could land on. She gathered herself, took another step, but her prosthetic knee joint gave when she needed it to lock, and she slipped and fell, gashing her head against the jagged stone before the current carried her under. Her entire body felt lacerated by the cold water, and her lungs constricted in the frigid rush; she couldn’t breathe. She was submerged, and she flailed in desperation; her hands groped, scraping against rocks, but she couldn’t find purchase. The river carried her. She reached above the water, and her fingers touched smooth wood. She grabbed for it, caught herself, held fast to the branch, and pulled her head above water, gasping. She heaved herself from the river, scrambling onto the felled tree, the bridge. She had found the Vardogger, and she hugged it, lying on her chest. Her clothes were soaked with river water, fast becoming a shell of ice. She had to warm up somehow, or she would die.

THREE

The wind battered her. Her fingers were numb, her toes. I don’t know what to do. Take off the wet clothes? I’d freeze. But I’ll freeze with them on. The Vardogger trees ahead of her were like an illusion of forced perspective, each tree along the path slightly smaller than the preceding, until the farthest tree was only a point of white almost lost against the snow. If I die, I’d rather slide back into the river to drown than just freeze to death here on this tree.

The river was inviting—she could still slip in. I shouldn’t have climbed out, she thought, and imagined being swept away as peaceful, like falling asleep somewhere familiar after being gone so long. She looked around her, taking in the world a final time, everything reduced to monochromatic shades, white trees, white snow, black water, evergreens turned the color of charcoal in the dim light. Only the blot of orange retained vital color. A body, in orange. In the distance by the tree line. She had seen the orange with Hyldekrugger, was seeing the orange again now—a thin space. Over the years as she adjusted to the confusion of the accident that had cost her leg, Moss had considered the woman in orange as something like a crack in her psyche that needed to be repressed, and so she rarely thought about the woman but dreamed of her often. Strange dreams where they interacted, traded places, back to the way things were supposed to have been. And now she knew that this woman in orange was Shannon Moss, that when she was pulled from her midair crucifixion, when she was boarded onto the Quad-lander, the pilots were different men from those she remembered. There had been so many small differences from one life to another, but she’d experienced such trauma that she’d rationalized these changes. Now she knew: she realized now that when she was saved, she’d been pulled into this woman’s life, this woman in orange.

She struggled against the wind, back toward the clearing. She followed the Vardogger path to the line of evergreens, to the body in orange. The orange space suit was a modified Extravehicular Mobility Unit, the orange the color for trainees. She brushed away snow that had accumulated on the body, flipped the body over, and saw her own face through the visor. A younger face, twenty years younger. Moss cried huge tearless sobs seeing this young woman. A child, still just a child. Remembering herself, her own face so changed, imagining her own life cut short at this early age.

“I’m sorry,” said Moss. “I’m sorry but I have to do this.”

She unlocked the connection between the orange suit’s torso assembly and pants, pulled off the woman’s boots.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said, sliding the woman from the pants, from the torso assembly and sleeves. The woman’s long johns were dry. Moss stripped her, allowing herself only a single glance at the young woman’s legs. She pulled off her ice-encrusted clothes and traded them for the dry clothes, thick pants and boots. Putting on these suits was always an ordeal, much easier with another person’s help, but Moss managed alone. NSC’s designs had been modified from the suits NASA used, had been slimmed down. The torso assembly would be difficult. Usually she would have used a harness that held the suit in place while she stepped into it, but here she had to crawl inside, extending her arms through the sleeves. She locked the helmet into place, latched the buckles around her torso. Warmth returned immediately, thawing her. She sat beneath the pine boughs, shivering while she warmed. Numb and sluggish, but the feeling returned to her extremities, warmth spreading outward. The naked body of Shannon Moss lay supine, pillowed on a drift of snow. The suit’s dosimeter was black. This woman had died of radiation exposure, the QTNs. She was beautiful, thought Moss, in the way people realize about themselves twenty years too late. Her golden hair outspread, snowflakes settling on the surface of her blue eyes, snow accumulating over her skin. Moss watched the snow, and by the time she was warm enough to stand and move, the snow had buried this other body.

She followed the path of trees, but the trees themselves were repellent. She struggled against the wrongness of this place. She had no plan; even assuming she could relocate Libra by following the Vardogger path, she didn’t know what she would do. Remarque had been trying to spark a cascade failure, a catastrophic collapse in Libra’s B-L drive that would have destroyed the ship and everyone on it—but B-L drives were designed with a series of fail-safes, nothing Moss knew how to overcome. And she didn’t have her sidearm or a weapon of any kind to defend herself during the mutiny, if indeed she found mutiny. The hanged men wailed as she crossed the felled tree. Mursult’s letter to Durr had warned against straying from the Vardogger path, and as she glanced to either side of her, seeing snowy fields and distant trees, the temptation was to veer from the path to escape this Terminal chaos and the abhorrent repeating trees. Moss didn’t believe in God, but she increasingly believed in hell—and farther away in the distance she saw that the air had crystallized and that what she’d taken for mountains were clashing floes of ice, and she thought that despite their abstract beauty this might indeed be perdition.

There was a man in the path, ahead of her, shambling. She glimpsed him, his gray silhouette veiled by snow, but recognized him as Hyldekrugger only as she neared. His coat and the blankets he’d draped himself with were scattered across the ice, blown about by the wind; he had taken off his shirt, and his skin was burned red-violet and black with dead flesh. He scratched at his chest, drawing thin lines of silvery blood. His lips were silver, and some silver had dribbled down his chin, wetting his ruddy beard.

“I’m boiling,” he said when his eyes focused on Moss, plaintive, and he fell to his knees in front of her. “There’s too much fire,” he said. “Help me, please.”

Moss kept her distance, but she wasn’t afraid. She knew his mind was gone. Hyldekrugger watched her, vaguely. He coughed up blood, but his blood was mixed with silver, and more silver rose in his mouth and overflowed his lips. “You ain’t real,” he said. “You ain’t even real, it’s just me here.” But as she left him, he called out, “Help me, you’ve got to help me!” until the wind overwhelmed his words and the blizzard enveloped him.

Moss felt the QTNs now, too—that first heat of interior chemical burn she remembered from before her crucifixion. She hurried. The Vardogger trees were on fire around her. She walked the flaming path until sparks of blue caught her attention and she saw Libra like a black gash on the horizon. At the dome where Hyldekrugger’s sentinels had kept their watch, naked men stared toward the sky, their mouths filled with silver. Crewmen of Libra, the survivors of the mutiny, Cobb among them, their lives suspended in the Terminus, dribbling silver from their mouths to coat their bodies in gleaming streams. Above them hung bones and specks of meat and veins traced delicately in the air, lungs and a heart and other organs displayed, and skin fluttering in the wind like a silk banner waving at the death of mankind. Hyldekrugger was already a ghost to her, and this was what remained of his followers; all the death they waged was a levee against the tide, but the levee had broken and left them wasted in the flood. As Moss neared the ship, she noticed that Libra’s hull was enclosed in ice; long spikes encased the bow like a jagged carapace and would have encased the stern, too, were it not for the flashes of blue radiating from the B-L, melting it back. Moss left the Vardogger path only when she could touch the hull. She followed along the hull until she found the gangway stairs that led to the airlock and found the red-thick blood that had been painted there, and the fingernails.

The black river would be painless.

She shook these thoughts. The airlock was iced over, so she struck at the ice with the metal cuff that locked her suit’s glove to her sleeve. She thought of the first time she had stepped through this airlock: the swift loss of gravity, Hyldekrugger holding her.

In the brig for eleven years, she reminded herself, fearing the immortality of being stuck in Libra’s Gödel curve. No room for error. She would have to attack the B-L drive, somehow spark the cascade failure. If she failed, she might not ever know she’d failed; she would be in the loop with no one to ever retrieve her.

QTNs accumulated in her, she felt them like pinpricks. She struck at the seal of ice, frantic, I have to get inside this thing, she thought, away from the Terminus. And then what? That first time inside Libra, after she had lost gravity, after Hyldekrugger caught her, she remembered that Hyldekrugger had waited for the sound of gunfire before moving from the airlock. Someone murdering the bull nuke, Moss remembered, the officer responsible for the nuclear reactor. He must have been trying to spark the cascade failure.

If I move quickly, she thought.

I might be able to move into the engine room before the gunfire.

I might be able to intervene, at that crucial moment, to save the bull nuke’s life.

She could protect him while he caused the failure.

Moss chipped away the ice. She took hold of the hatch, using her body weight to push until she felt the lock slip and she was able to open the iron door. She took a deep breath, readying to move quickly. Libra’s entry was a circular black void, and when she climbed through, she was engulfed in flame.

Fiery air, liquid waves roiling through the airlock. She was bucked by a lurch in the ship, alarms clanging. We’re falling. Her suit was fire-resistant, but the flames had wrapped her in a cocoon of light, and she felt her skin warming. She could burn alive. Another jolt, tossing her. Libra crashed in a roar of tearing steel. Her head hit a wall, cracking her visor. The smoke of the electrical fire filled her faceplate, and she choked, coughing, her eyes burning.

She covered the faceplate crack with her gloves as best she could, but smoke still streamed in, blistering her. Her gloves were scorched. Her suit had melted in spots; the multilayer insulation was rated to a high degree of Celsius, but the engine-room fire would incinerate her. She crawled along the floor, as low as she could get to avoid the smoke, but the air was black where it wasn’t fire. Her suit was on fire now, the flames burning through her layers of protection. She felt the heat and screamed, I’ll burn, I’m going to burn alive—I’ll be in this loop, I’ll burn forever.

She saw blue light within the fire. She felt mounting tension, the immense crack of electric shock: the B-L misfire. As Moss floated upward, the fire and smoke disappeared, the conflagration gone in an instant except for the flames still crawling along the legs of her suit. She hit the ceiling, bounced. The fire-suppression system belched a stream of foam that doused her suit fire. No gravity. She was in the loop now, certainly. She must have entered at a different point from before, this time during the ship’s crash. Am I stuck in the loop? It was like wondering if she was stuck in a dream.

Then everything happened too quickly. The two-tone clangor of the Power Plant Casualty alarm rang through the ship, but Moss was out of position, her suit stiff with the foamy fire suppressant. She scrambled, but the clatter of gunfire cut down her hopes. She was too late, everything was playing out as before. That gunfire meant the bull nuke had been shot. She wasn’t in time to save him, to help him start the cascade failure of the B-L drive.

She tried to remember.

After the sound of gunfire, Hyldekrugger had brought her into the engine room. That’s where Moss went now, hoping she might be able to pick up where the bull nuke left off, thinking she might be able to figure out the control panel. The engine room was just as she’d seen it that first time, the silver containment vessel of the nuclear reactor, the B-L drive in its own compartment. The body of the bull nuke floated above the control panel, gluey blood in a long bubble from the bullet wounds in his gut.

She pushed the body aside, took off her scorched gloves, her helmet, let them float away. The control panel was a gray metal morass of switches and knobs, meters and blinking lights. It had been built in the 1970s: no AI interface, no digital screens. Again Moss was seized by a dreamlike frustration. She had to accomplish a task but didn’t know how, had to spark a cascade failure but didn’t know which switches to flip. Try anything—but, No, that won’t work. There were fail-safes. The whole thing would just shut down, requiring an override code from an engineering officer.

Hyldekrugger hadn’t wanted to stay in this room, she remembered, because Patrick Mursult would be here soon, a Navy SEAL in the frenzy of mutiny. We don’t want to fight him, not here. The nuclear reactor rattled, a grinding whine, and the lights of the ship went out, casting her in pure darkness.

There had been a flashlight, she remembered. She floated to the near wall, feeling Velcro, feeling metal tools attached there, things she couldn’t recognize in the dark. She recognized the shape of a flashlight when her fingers found the lens. She pulled it from the Velcro, turned on the light.

I need help, she thought. I need to find Remarque before they kill her. How?

She drifted into the passageway lined with portal windows, where she had first looked out and seen stars. The stars were brilliant now, burning cold in their multitude. The Power Plant Casualty alarm fell silent, and the running lights snapped back on. A flighty panic, adrenaline coursing through her. Moss realized she wouldn’t know where Hyldekrugger would be, knew she would die if any of his followers saw her.

But she did know that Nicole Onyongo would hide in the brig eventually. Nicole had escaped into the brig, fearful that Hyldekrugger might kill her in his bloodbath. But where was Nicole hiding now? Moss thought back. Nicole had mentioned this to her, she was sure, when they were in the orchard together, Miss Ashleigh’s orchard, and Nicole had smoked her cigarette…

Moss floated near the ship’s electrolysis cabinet, and the memory clicked: Nicole had said she was hiding in the life-support room when the fighting broke out. The electrolysis cabinet was a narrow compartment housing the water reclamation system and the oxygen generation system.

She shimmied through the portal into the electrolysis cabinet and swung the door closed after her. A small workspace was nestled behind the chrome tanks, a chair with a writing desk bolted to the wall.

A volley of gunfire erupted in the passageway. She wanted out of the space suit in case she had to fight. Beneath the suit she wore only the long johns she’d taken from the body, that other version of her. Little protection, but at least she would be able to move. She unbuckled her waist harness, kicked off the charred, foam-coated pants. Moss tried to slide from the torso piece of her suit, pull her arms from the sleeves—

“Please don’t hurt me.”

Moss turned at the voice. The woman was hiding beneath the writing desk, tucked back into the shadows. So young, just out of her teens, her hair frizzy black, burnished with hickory accents. Beautiful brown eyes. Her T-shirt and shorts were spattered with blood. Her own? Her hand was wrapped in a bandage. She was barefoot, a gun floating near her feet.

“Nicole,” said Moss.

“How do you know me?”

“I’ve known you before, in other times,” said Moss.

“How is this possible?” asked Nicole, terrified, her skin lathered in sweat. “There are strange things happening. I don’t understand. What do you mean, in other times?”

“Help me with my suit,” said Moss.

The request brought Nicole out from hiding. She helped Moss unfasten the torso assembly, tugged it over her head. Nicole had left her gun floating near the writing desk, a Beretta M9, and she didn’t react when Moss plucked it from the air. Either Nicole wasn’t afraid of Moss or she was beyond fear.

“Did you use this?” asked Moss.

“I’ve never…”

Moss checked that a round was chambered. “Would you know how to destroy the B-L drive?”

“No, only the engineer officer or the bull nuke would know.”

“Where are they?” asked Moss.

“Dead,” said Nicole.

“Remarque’s not dead,” said Moss. “Can you get me to her?”

“You can’t… You don’t understand! She wants us to die,” said Nicole. “She said we have to kill ourselves. She’s gone insane. Why do we have to die? We can hide in the prison. We’ll be safe there.”

“I need to find Remarque,” said Moss.

“They won’t look in the prison—”

“Listen to me, Nicole. Listen,” said Moss. “You’ve left this all behind. You were a nurse at a place called the Donnell House when I knew you. You helped people, elderly people. You took care of them.”

“A nurse,” said Nicole. “My mother was a nurse. I went to medical school because of my mother. And my father convinced Remarque to take me on this ship, because of my training. I miss him so much, I miss my father.”

“Help me.”

“How do you know me?” asked Nicole. “What’s your name?”

“Shannon.”

“Shannon, I don’t want to die.”

“Don’t fear dying,” said Moss, holding up her wrist, showing Nicole the ouroboros bracelet, the snake swallowing its own tail. Nicole put her hand to her own wrist, her own bracelet.

“Yes,” said Nicole. “Yes, yes.”

“I need to find Remarque before they kill her,” said Moss. “She’s not the one you should fear, Nicole. She can help. I need her.”

“She’s in the wardroom,” said Nicole. “Remarque and Krauss locked themselves in. Cobb and some of the others are waiting to ambush them.”

“Where is the wardroom?”

“I can get you there,” said Nicole.

Nicole opened the portal door, disappeared into the passageway. A moment later she waved for Moss to follow. The ship smelled like death: loosed bowels and exsanguination. Nicole swam smoothly through the passageways, practiced, pulling herself along the handholds while Moss followed several feet behind. She led Moss through the Quad-lander stowage compartment, where three Landers were folded into their launch bays; they gleamed with a coating of dust that shone like diamonds. Moss realized that these Landers had come from Esperance.

“Up through here, through the bunks. The galley leads to the wardroom,” said Nicole.

Libra’s galley was a stainless-steel box designed for zero-g food prep. Counter space limited, rectangular pots on hot plates, a cavernous utility sink filled with canned goods, the room like an Escher drawing. Culinary specialists would crowd in here, walking up the walls and across the ceiling to reach the bread ovens, dropping to the floor to keep the coffee brewers filled, standing on one wall to boil meat before jumping across the room to fold dough for pies.

“Most of them are above us, in the crew’s mess,” said Nicole. “We can go this way.”

The galley opened up to a second prep area meant to serve the wardroom, the formal mess cabin for the commander and her highest-ranking officers. A narrow passageway lined with stainless-steel cabinets, every nook and cranny stuffed with canned foods. Nicole stopped, turned back, but Moss pushed ahead of her.

Two men waited at the wardroom door. They wore camouflage, the larger of the men shirtless, though it looked like he was clothed in blood. Cobb, she thought, nothing like the older brawler she knew, but a sharply chiseled warrior, his hair trimmed to a prickly crew cut. Their backs were to her, but she could see they each held a weapon, Cobb’s an M16 rifle, the other man with his sidearm. She imagined coming up behind them—silently, floating over—and casually executing each man, a shot in the back of the head. Cowardly, but she needed to kill them to save everything. Moss sighted Cobb’s center mass and shot.

Cobb spun toward her. She’d hit him, his narrow eyes confused. He raised his weapon, firing off a series of aimless rounds that tore through galley freezers before he’d marked where Moss was. Moss returned fire, reclined backward in the air, drifting with the recoil of her gun but keeping her aim, firing as she’d been taught to fire in zero-g, the smoke from her barrel puffing in spheroids pierced by bullets. She’d landed a grouping of shots, several rounds in Cobb’s chest that spurted out bubbly spatter, and watched him go limp before feeling a sting in her left shoulder, again through her left breast. She screamed—more in surprise at the sudden pain than at the pain itself, but the awareness that she’d been shot grew as the pain increased like a spreading burn. She had lost sight of the second gunman, ducked back into the galley. Nicole was already cowering there. Blood had spread through Moss’s shirt, over her chest and her left sleeve. It was increasingly difficult to breathe.

“Give up,” she called out. “Drop your weapon. I’m NCIS—you don’t have to do this.”

She’d seen videos of firefights between patrol officers and armed men, people who’d been pulled over on routine traffic stops for minor infractions, who’d gotten it into their heads that someone had to die. Moss had always marveled at the simple brutality of the exchange of fire, two men separated by a short distance—how straightforward it all was, no acrobatics or sharpshooting, just two men walking toward each other, firing rounds until one person lost the strength to stand. She heard movement and raised her gun. She recognized the second gunman, so much younger than when she’d seen his suicide in the mirrored room. Fleece was a young man here, nothing like the obese corpse hanged from the tree of bones, though behind the thick lenses of his glasses she saw his eyes and remembered that this man had recently lost his mind on the surface of Esperance. He ran toward her along the ceiling, firing rounds, his face a mask of confusion and rage. Moss felt another sting, this in her left thigh, above her prosthesis, but she gained her balance, expecting more stings across her body, expecting a sensation like being stung to death by a swarm of bees, and fired into the approaching gunman, calmly unloading her weapon into his center mass just as if she were at a range firing at a paper target. Fleece died, but his body kept coming, spinning as blood spun from him. She lowered her shoulder to absorb the blow, but he flew over her, crashing against a bread oven.

“Ow, fuck,” said Moss. Three rounds, she thought—I took at least three rounds. She had heard stories of people taking thirty rounds or more, so pumped up with adrenaline that they continued to resist arrest long after they should have died. But one bullet can kill you, she knew. One bullet is enough.

“Okay,” she said, struggling. “Nicole, okay. We need Remarque,” but the pain intensified. The bullet wound to her thigh bled heavily, blood spilling out over her prosthesis and rising around her. “We need to find her.”

“I have to stanch your bleeding,” said Nicole, applying pressure to Moss’s thigh, but blood still pulsed from the wound. Nicole found a thin dish towel in the galley, looped it around Moss’s thigh as a tourniquet. Blinding pain. Moss screamed as Nicole tightened the knot.

“We have to go,” said Nicole. “Shannon, they’ll have heard—”

“No, we need Remarque,” Moss growled.

She pounded on the locked wardroom door, a larger door than the iron portals throughout the rest of the ship, meant for ease of access for the dinner service. She slapped at the closed door, leaving handprints of blood.

“Shannon Moss, NCIS! Come out, we’ve got to hurry! Remarque? I need you for the B-L— Ah, fuck. I’m NCIS. Come out—”

Nicole pounded at the door with her. “It’s Nicole Onyongo! Come out! Hurry! It’s Onyongo—”

The wardroom door opened. Moss had seen a photograph of Remarque, in the Libra crew list, but even so she was much younger than Moss had imagined. Remarque was only a few years older than Moss, her hair a whitish silver color, cut in a boy’s style with swept bangs. In her cotton slacks and U.S. Naval Academy sweatshirt, Remarque looked more like a woman’s soccer captain than a professional soldier. Lean, athletic, her jaw squared. She came from the wardroom with her hands raised, projecting calm rather than surrender. Chloe Krauss followed, the ship’s weapons officer, her hands also raised, a taller woman than Remarque, her crimson hair cut high and tight. Without weapons they had retreated to the wardroom, where they locked themselves in. Eventually, Moss knew, Chloe Krauss would have been shot in the ensuing firefight and Remarque would have been subdued, taken to the crew’s mess, where Hyldekrugger would have slit her throat in front of his men, then passed around her ruined body.

“You’re hurt,” said Remarque. “We can help you. Krauss has training.”

“We don’t have time,” said Moss. “These men, they all fought against you because you wanted to destroy Libra…”

“How did you get here?” asked Remarque. “You aren’t my crew.”

“You have to finish what you started,” said Moss, her breath rattling, the taste of blood in her mouth. “Cascade failure, the B-L—”

“Who are you?” asked Remarque. “How do you know all this?”

“Do you know what a thin space is?” asked Moss. “A space-time knot?”

Remarque’s left eye narrowed, a rakish expression of calculation. Her jaw tensed. “All right. Let’s get to the engine room,” she said. “The B-L was damaged in the initial fighting, but I need to spark a cascade failure for it to develop into a singularity.”

“Hyldekrugger’s in the crew’s mess,” said Nicole. “He’ll be coming.”

Krauss snatched Cobb’s rifle, the M16, loaded a new magazine.

“We can make it to the engine room through the Quad-lander stowage compartment,” said Nicole. “That’s the way we came.”

“There’s a quicker way,” said Krauss. “We can drop through into the gunnery, a straight shot to the engine room.”

“I can’t,” said Moss. She was losing blood, felt cold. A forest in winter, an eternal forest. The tourniquet had already come loose, and blood stained the air around her. “I can’t move anymore.”

Nicole held her. “Let’s go, let’s follow them.”

Krauss led them belowdecks, into one of the thruster houses. She unlocked a portal door and dropped even farther down to one of the cavernous gunneries, the munitions storage. They passed the starboard laser generator, a gray box with a lens. Moss smelled fire as they neared the stern. There’d been fire when she was locked in the brig, she remembered. How long before the inferno would bring down the ship? We could run out of time, she thought. We’d run out of time, and I’d never know it. If the B-L drive misfired, the crew of Libra would reset like chess pieces for a new match.

“Up,” said Krauss.

An iron ladder led to the engineering department, the passageway to the engine room. Moss floated ahead of Nicole, Remarque bringing up the rear, closing the iron door behind them. As they entered the engineering department, however, a voice called out to them.

“Drop your guns! Remarque, give this up! Drop your fucking gun, Krauss!”

Patrick Mursult barred the portal to the engine room, M16 in firing position. He braced himself to counter the recoil of his rifle fire, three magazines floating within arm’s reach for reload. Devastation crashed through Moss: she had saved Remarque only to lead her into this different death. He could kill them all in a rapid spray just by easing back his finger.

“Patrick,” said Nicole. “Please.”

“I can’t let you in here,” said Mursult. His eyes were cold when he spoke to Nicole, and Moss realized that the burgeoning emotions that would one day lead to their affair were dead to him in this moment of decision. He’d kill her, thought Moss, as easily as he’d kill any of them.

“Drop the gun, Krauss,” said Remarque, and Krauss let her rifle float aside. “We’ll talk about this,” she said. “You think you’re doing the right thing—”

“Karl’s coming,” said Mursult, “and he’ll kill you. He wants to be the one. He wants to cut your fucking head off with his ax.”

“Mursult,” said Moss. “Damaris, she—” But her words failed. She was light-headed, so much of her blood lost.

“Who is that?” asked Mursult, his cold eye finding Moss. “She shouldn’t be here.”

Moss tried to speak, choked on blood. She took a deep, wet breath. “I come from another time,” she said. “I’ve seen how this all plays out. You have a wife, named Damaris. You have a daughter, she’s five years old. You’ll have another, a son not yet born, and another daughter. This doesn’t end well, what you’re doing. They all die… because of this. They always die…”

Mursult pointed the gun at Moss’s heart. No hint of emotion, no hint of reckoning.

“You can give her a future, Patrick. Your daughter. Marian.”

She saw the moment emotion broke through, at the sound of his daughter’s name. Mursult lowered his weapon. “Go. I’ll hold them off as long as I can, but they’re coming.”

Nicole carried Moss through into the engine room, Remarque and Krauss following. The B-L drive was the center of a blue corona that shimmered like the reflection of light on water, the room stinking of electrical fire. Krauss shut the main portal door, barring it closed. Moss heard gunfire, outside in the passageway, short bursts before the sound died away. They’re here.

Remarque opened the control locker for the B-L drive. Moss saw blood in the air and thought of treasure chests at the bottom of fish tanks, how their lids flipped open and bubbles raced upward. My blood, she thought. Blood soaked through her long johns and spilled from the gaping wound in her thigh, bubbles propelling from her thigh and spreading around her and Nicole. Bubbles in a fish tank. Moss looked at the B-L drive, its eerie blue light flickering outward in concentric rings.

A sizzling sound, an explosion, and the portal door blew from its hinges in a rush of fire. No, thought Moss as Hyldekrugger glided through into the engine room. Krauss shot with her rifle, but Hyldekrugger’s followers fanned out through the room, returning fire. Nicole was hit, a spray of mist and ropes of blood gushed from her chest and formed into wobbling spheres. Another sting zipped through Moss’s leg, her stomach. The pain settled deep within her. No—

“We have it,” shouted Remarque, blue light appearing like a halo around the B-L, an intense plasma light, an arc.

Krauss was sprayed with bullets, and her body spun like a knot of shredded rags. Remarque screamed, but Moss heard her voice as if underwater. We are all underwater, she thought. Bodies floating, blood escaping her intestines in quivering globs and rushing squiggles that formed into circles as they rose.

Hyldekrugger was a young man. There was nothing of the devil in him, not yet. He was just scared and selfish. He placed the barrel of his gun against Remarque’s temple and fired. Blood sprayed from the exit wound, and Moss watched as it misted and as it fell. Her own blood mingled with Remarque’s, a rising stream pulled toward the gravity of the B-L drive. The failing engine flooded the room with blue, and Moss saw a speck of perfect black within that light. The black expanded, a perfect circle, and soon the perfect circle bent everything around it, smearing the world toward it. Moss saw all of time written out in that black circle, everything that was and everything that will be, the first oblivion and the last. As the circle expanded, all of existence diminished. Libra and the winter woods, the evergreens and the Terminus, the world covered with snow. Moss felt herself held in this gravity before she, too, was enveloped by the black hole. All thinking ceased, all suffering. She slipped into that darkness, no longer a body but a wave of light.