The trick to catching moondogs is sitting very still and very small. If you wait long enough, they’ll come pawing out of the burrows, come sniff your hand. Let you pet ‘em, even, let your hands tangle in her ears, and she’ll show her great white lolling tongue. At that point you reach forward and snap her neck. Then you breathe deep. That’s a holy moment, there: the deep, deep breath after you kill a moondog.

I tried not killing them. Whole first few years I said no way, I wouldn’t kill an Earth dog so I won’t kill one up here. I was eating OK, even from the start—we figured out the glassroot pretty quick, it only takes a few weeks to mature. I could’ve lived without killing a moondog, but at a certain point you just get tired. Back when I thought we’d go home, the wildlife mattered. Now I’d mulch this whole place for a handful of garlic salt.

So you break the moondog’s neck. Next step is cry like crazy: they’re so soft though, so untouched. The blood is silver, and it floats away the second you cut her open, dissolves impossibly small. One time I cut her throat and leaned down and put my pink tongue right in the slit: it just tasted cold. The pocketknife moves through her, and the pelt falls right off. The “meat” is more like nylon pillow stuffing, spongy and loose. You take it with both hands and gnaw, wet and fast, until you about choke—if you don’t go quick the whole dog will go cloud-soft and unravel. There’s another tip: don’t waste it.

So you eat, and the paws taste like clay. And Weiss says, “Jesus Christ. Jesus. Please, Jesus, stop it, please leave them alone.”

Weiss has never killed a moondog. This is one of many irritating things about Weiss. I just think that if she killed one too, we’d be able to stand each other. We’d have something in common, y’know, aside from the vast, all-encompassing thing that we have in common. Bet I could hang with anybody fucked enough to kill a moondog. I’m not gonna know.

The pelts, the pelts! I can’t tell you how sweet they are, fine like ermine, pure white and, funny enough, reflective. Weiss’s thermoceratic glasses are useless when I’ve got a pelt on, so I’m always wearing one. Drives her crazy. I say worth, because after all these moondogs I’ve killed I’m looking like a barbarian queen. Other day, I caught my own reflection in the base’s window: the suit all duct tape and fucked-up, cracked and pitted like my skin, and the pelt cape catching the floodlight. Barbarian queen. I swooned.

“There’s good material left under the dorm,” says Weiss. She’s chopping up glassroot, barely even looking while her hands go rotary-fast. “Cabling, filament, ceramicite. I don’t know. We could scrap the whole wing if we got the bulldozer back.” Weiss thunks the knife into the cutting board and does not look at me. She leans back on her heels: the gray curtain of her hair falls closed.

You’re wondering about the bones. I’d love to do something with the bones, but it turns out moondog bones have the tensile strength of spun sugar. It’s wild they can even walk, but then moondogs mostly don’t walk, do they. They float. It’s so stupid. Everything on the moon is stupid. I’ve tried damn hard to put a skull on my pauldrons, but even the slightest tap and the whole thing’s boom wasted.

“Let me try something tonight,” Weiss says around a mouthful of boiled glassroot. She glances low and fast at a fixed point over my shoulder. We haven’t made eye contact in a couple months—long as she’s wearing her glasses and I’m wearing the pelts, I’m just a column of light. I look down at my untouched plate, and Weiss leans forward.

“If you have time. In the interest of—uh, holistic—wellness—”

I head outside. It’s easy, never taking off the suit. Easy enough to click down ceramic tile hallways with my boots weighing about thirty pounds each, and easier still when I cross the airlock threshold and the weight just falls off. One good push from the ramp, my back bent like a bow, and I straighten hard and let myself fly over the face of the moon.

The navigable zone has a variety of notable features, all of which I’m sick of: the Spinetree, the Butt-Shaped Lake, the Big Fucking Rock. Spent the first few years charting this place—my whole bunk’s taped over with maps I drew on glassroot husks, and for what? I don’t need maps anymore, and Weiss hasn’t left the base in a dog’s age. Our aquaponics setup shits out endless material for her research, and everything always needs repairs. She’s busy enough, she says. There’s just no need to tempt fate outside.

I head to the Big Fucking Rock in punishing sunlight. “Daytime” here takes an Earth month, and it never gets easier—the moon’s surface is silver and cream, just blinding in all directions. If I’d borrowed Weiss’s stupid glasses I could see in technicolor, in heat, in motion or in perfect black. Instead I just squint. Each jump carries me through ridges of mooncrust, past gnarled silver brush and the spinetree that marks the Captain’s grave.

Everyone else we buried east of base. The view’s better, the soil’s softer. Initially I’d planned to hand-dig everybody’s graves, y’know, physically work through the grief, but that lasted about one-and-a-half crewmates. The bulldozer is just SO efficient. But the Captain always did his prayers under one particular spinetree - why not, right? Why shouldn’t he have it in death. So I took the dozer and fought through fucking spinetree roots, burrowed deep until my whole suit was stained with silver pitch, and that’s where the Captain lies.

What happens now, I can’t say. Can this earth even take his body? Is he just embalming in the ground, floating inches from the bottom of his coffin? I’d beg for the chance to cremate my crew, spare them all the endless drift—but then the Captain’s Muslim, we couldn’t have burned him anyway. Maybe he wasn’t Muslim enough. Maybe a more faithful man would’ve just stayed home and thanked his god for everything.

I follow my own dozer tracks up the Big Fucking Rock. The treads cut a vicious eight-foot stripe across the pitted face of the mountain, and they sorta hurt to look at. Dozer’s what, a couple tons? And the mountain is sugarcube delicate. It was always a dumb idea, but mountains need to be climbed, right, all that mission-statement shit. Push harder, go farther. So I drilled and dropped micropiles and stabilized with ceramicite every two yards, all the way up, all the way up, until that dozer sat on the fucking summit. It took months. I spent months on this.

Base to summit is a forty-minute hike. At the apex of each jump is a little moment of hang time, a little bump of gravity gone kitten-soft. My hair bounces up with each step, fills the glass bowl of my helmet with pinpricks of static. By the time I reach the top I’m panting and chilly with my own sweat. The summit hoves into view, and I perch my ass on a chunk of crystal and try not to look at the lake. It’s hella bright, anyhow, the “water” is liquid diamonds, you can’t see nothing. I’ll meditate and I won’t look down.

I make it a good few seconds before leaning off the cliff edge. The dozer lies exactly where it landed, toy-small from up here, crumpled on its side, halfway underwater. Sand curls up around its edges, pale silver on the dozer’s yellow steel. I head back to the kitchen.

My gloves hit the kitchen counter with a thud, fifteen pounds each, cracked and stained. The helmet is next, a forty-pound fishbowl that pops when I twist and break the airseal. Like ripping my own head off. Without the helmet and gloves I’m too light, too fast—when I reach for the pantry door, my knuckles crack against the paneling. The impact echoes through the kitchen, and I roar and bash my forehead into the pantry door, and the whole kitchen tilts hazy.

“Hey,” says Weiss. Sort of breathless. “You got a minute?”

She’s standing in the doorway with her hands clasped, her pink skin shockingly bright against the tile. A white towel folds around her midsection—one of our last good ones, crinkly and overbleached. Her hair is wet-black, her mouth an uncertain line.

Weiss takes a step towards me. “What’d you do to your forehead?”

I touch my face and the fingertips come back wet. “Problem with the suit.”

Weiss gives me a lawnmower look. She sits at the kitchen table and crosses her legs. The towel folds like a Möbius strip; I watch her thighs spread on the chair.

“Speaking of problems,” she says. “Been thinking about the salt thing.”

“Salt thing.”

“You said you’d kill for a handful of garlic salt.”

How long have I been repeating the same sad lines? “Jesus.”

Weiss sorta squints in my direction—no glasses, I realize. No bent-light halo from the pelts. I look back and I see—her last semester of postdoc, scowling at a tablet with her bare ass on a rickety kitchen chair. My body lined in cream-white ceramic composite, so untouched it might as well be draped velvet. Rosner’s launch confirmation in his clipped-clean voice and Dufournand ducking her head to smile. Weiss’s laugh lines gone Gumby in the G-force, aging a decade with the twist of a dial. Sheet-ghost hips and shoulders, too still in their bunks: when I crack the Captain’s ribs with the useless rounds of CPR, his mouth gapes, and the black in the pit of his throat swallows the shuttle whole. One good push from the ramp with my back bent. I’m still flying now.

“Hey,” says Weiss. “You still with me?” At some point she stood to move before me, just a breath of space between us. She peers at me, eyes wide and searching, and like a dream coming back, I remember. She’s blind without her glasses.

Weiss takes a faltering little step. “Hey, c’mon,” she says in her fighter voice, and then, softer—“will you touch me?”

I move into her. One thigh presses between her legs and she grinds down, makes a strangled sound. My mouth finds her neck, her jaw. She’s gasping when she leans into me fully, saying vowels, half-blinking. I hold her upright. Her weight anchors me to the tile and we find the arcs between us, we move together.

At some point she starts gasping out demands, so I lift her up with a single back-popping heave. Weiss thuds onto the countertop, still clutching her shock-white towel, and I fit my hand inside her and she jerks at my touch. My eyes feel hot: she’s all pink-quartz coils, stretched and spotted, so soft against my hard planes. If she has a problem with the suit still clamped around my thighs and torso, she doesn’t say. It’s better, right, it’s better to be locked in my armor when I touch her, it’s better to feel her writhe and know she couldn’t reach me if she wanted to. The suit will chafe, just a little, just enough. The heat between my thighs is for me. Not for her, not for nobody.

By the time I get her off, the motion-sensor lights have timed out and cast us into darkness. Tiny LEDs glint in the dark, little sensors and gadgets strewn throughout the kitchen, and the oxy pipes groan. I withdraw, wiping my hand on a corner of Weiss’s towel, and listen as her breathing slows. The body lights with pain—my bad knee, my lower back, the tendons in my wrist. Once upon a time, we did this constantly, and I had no complaints. I lean back, blinking hard when the lights snap on. Do you remember not hurting, I almost say, and swallow the words just in time.

Weiss scoots from the countertop, thudding onto the tile with a groan. She’s even pinker now, covered with a sheen of sweat. Scraping the towel over her skin with surprising vigor, she glances up, sees my unasked question.

“This’ll work,” she says. “Yeah. It was actually simple once I thought about it.”

She carves the water out of her, leaves the towel misty. Weiss is heavy and loose as we walk to the lab, and I’m out of my head, listening like a dog listens, just hearing the warmth and sometimes my own name. Something about the ancient spice trade, some book she read in grad school. There’s the patter, the high cut of her laugh. She still sounds like this.

In the lab her posture changes: she’s putting her hair up, she’s slapping down supplies. Sample containers, test swabs, Bunsen burner. She swings the towel into a headlock and wrings the shit out of it, thick arms heaving, the fabric almost squeaking with force, and a sample tin swells with weird gray liquid. Then it’s the centrifuge, then it’s a quick test swab—“obviously there’ll be some contaminants, the towel was clean but not sterile”—and then she lights the tin over a low heat. The water burns off, leaving a gray schmutz that Weiss tips into a salt shaker.

“For you,” says Weiss.

Glassroot cooks down the same way yuca did back home: it striates when peeled, it boils starchy and dense. Tonight Weiss carves out whisper-thin slices, so delicate they nearly disappear in the light. She dresses our plates with oil; she blanches the slices for forty seconds each. The whole time I’m just watching her hands, her careful movements and her pursed lips, and when she turns and gestures at the salt, I nearly flinch. I’m not part of this.

“No, c’mon,” Weiss says. Her eyes are calm. “It’s all for you.”

I tap the salt over my plate and Weiss makes a sound low in her throat. There’s a new tang to that familiar glassroot scent. I bite down and taste—bitter against the pale, flat glassroot, just the faintest hint of burnt offerings. Jicama sticks on my mom’s porch, chalky cheap cologne. Our brutal, mortal bodies. She watches me swallow.

It takes Weiss nearly forty minutes to suit up, even with my help, and she’s bitching the whole time. Her suit is barely worn, still powder-white and hard-edged. It’ll wear down, I tell her when she’s groaning at the chestpiece, the weight of the boots—you’ll smooth it out, it’ll fit you like a second skin. Tugging the jumpsuit over her ass takes a lifetime, and by the time it cinches tight, I’m foggy with exertion.

“God, we could just stop now and make another shaker,” Weiss wheezes, and when I laugh she laughs with me.

The helmet puts up a fight. I perch on a chair and apply pressure from above while Weiss scrabbles at the latch in her fifteen-pound gloves. When she snaps her head into place, this wet wave washes over me, right, this tongue-curling sense of deja vu, and I nearly lean off the chair. The suit is my body. Now her shape is my shape. She looks at me from my own reflection, just a weight behind a visor, totally untouched. I take her hand.

We move with our body. The airlock clicks shut and then we’re weightless, stepping in tandem, and the mooncrust is brand new. This is the navigable zone, I tell her. This was the lake Rosner used to sketch, this is the Captain’s tree. The biology postdoc rears her lovely head: she nearly wedges her whole chest under spinetree roots, she gasps and prods at the pale crescent grubs that float a few inches off the dirt. I forgot, she says, God, I haven’t been out here in so long, I forgot how alive it is. It’s healthy, see? It’s good soil, it’s growing.

Weiss wanders, of course, bounces off to see a vein of quartz or a weird bush, so I keep pulling her back, keep us stumping towards the furnace-glow from the lake. We crest the last ridge, and I hold my breath. There’s the valley laid before us, all pearly dust and blinding diamond water, and the dozer right at the shore.

Poor thing looks worse the closer we get. Its edges are no longer square, the yellow steel somehow rumpled in one great wave, and the bent headlights give it a guilty look. Liquid-diamond water cuts into its flank, grinding off the paint in a long smooth scar. A thin sandbar has built up on one side, pushing the dozer to an absurd tilt, and it’s stupid to feel sorry for a machine, it’s a waste of perfectly good self-pity, but then the dozer didn’t ask for this. It didn’t ask to be driven up the mountain.

But you’ve gotta finish projects, right. I pushed harder, I went farther. So I drove off the cliff, and of course the gravity is soft here, of course the dozer fell for a fucking lifetime and I was screaming the whole way, and I didn’t even hit terminal velocity. My math was off. Should’ve been higher up. If Weiss did the math, she’d have done it right. But I did the math wrong, I hit the lake hard but not hard enough, and anyway I’d forgotten to disable my suit’s distress signal, so Weiss just hauled ass from the base. Pulled me out the dozer by my ankles, threw me on the ground, told me some true things (selfish piece of shit). Fucking stupid end to a fucking stupid project. But hey. Let it never be said that I don’t follow through.

As we walk onto the sandbar, a couple of plush moondog heads pop into view. They bounce up close, snuffling at our heels, clicking and bouncing. I step closer to the dozer and sure enough, there’s a moondog burrow right where the sand touches machine. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise. They burrow, we knew that. They’ll chew through spinetree roots, they’ll rip right through shielded plasticine cabling. I learned that all those years ago in the dorm wing.

When it happened, I couldn’t understand how. Industrial fabrication often goes stupid, right, you see over-budget and under-planned, you see stupid ideas and worse execution. This was not that. My blueprints hung off the page in silver. My team refined those plans right down to the bone and they were elegant and pragmatic and safe, right, failsafe upon failsafe, our resources well-managed, our time well-spent. Do you know what it takes to create an environment that self-sustains, that adapts, that protects but does not imprison? My expertise, my machinery, my incredible luck. What good fortune to be chosen for the mission. What luck to be on the other side of the airseal. What a wonder that moondog bones are powder but their jaws are so strong. After my first few nights of howling, I finally dragged my ass outside and saw—a moondog burrow, just under the eave of the dorm, the wires sparking in the fresh-dug earth and the torn black tube pushing fresh-converted oxy out into space. They burrow, sure. I love to learn. Our foremost goal is the gathering of knowledge for the good of all humanity.

A silver moondog comes bounding up from the burrow below the dozer. It’s snuffling and sniffing and bouncing up waist-level to check me out, its fur all crazy in the moon gravity, and it looks like a happy little cloud.

“Hey, bud,” I say. For the first time in a long time, I imagine taking the gloves off. I could just reach down and touch. With my gloves creaking at the flex, I scratch him behind the ears. “Hey, hey. You like that?”

The moondog kinda barks, I guess. Can’t hear nothing. Vacuum of space and all, plus they’re all blind and deaf. But the dogs do have sense: they communicate over distance, they move in pairs, they mate for life. Gotta be something fringe, right. Psychic powers, some shit like that. I wonder if the pelts on my back give off some spiritual resonance, if my new buddy thinks I’m his friends. He could know I’m a local, but then I’m also a stranger, aren’t I? Maybe I’m a gnarled-up mass of moondogs, rotted and strange.

My hand stills on the moondog’s neck. He’s happy, tongue out, clouded eyes just little slits—this is the moment, right, this is the necksnap. And I let it pass, and I sorta kick him away. He bounces, of course, boings in a big circle around me. I reach out for one last pet, and then he’s bounding off, back to the nest with the rest of the stupid, perfect, beautiful moondogs. It’s OK. Weiss looks at me, a silhouette in a fishbowl, and I know her like this, I know her, I know her like I know myself. Many years ago we met in the G-force, ageless and grinning, and we hurled ourselves forward.

Editor: Kat Weaver

First Reader: Morgan Braid

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors