I found her on the beach, like everybody said that I would. The morning was cold and grey.

I had walked all through the night, which was also cold and grey. Dark billowed across the sky from behind the mountains and my eyelids became nearly as heavy as my pack, but I was too excited to rest. To my left the ocean rushed. It heaved heavy breaths. The wind razored off the crests of the choppy waves, and they bled white, foamy blood. Clear grey stars shone clearly and greyly and I could see that the black sea water, all the way to the horizon, was choked by jellyfish: pale masses of arterial fat, loosed into the brine. I could smell that I was close. I could smell the salt, and I could smell my quarry. How could I have slept?

She was old, of course. I could tell this from a distance. Funny—of course she was old. I had pieced her together from letters, papers, scraps of photos, and outlandish campfire talk; she was young then, in those. Of course she was old now. Impossibly old. But no one had mentioned it, and I had forgotten to consider it.

What I was considering: the woman´s alleged gravity, and her alleged brilliance. The hermit of the near mountains was the one to call her—what was it? Monumental. I had sat outside of the mouth of her cave, in the wet, empty air of dusk, and she said that they met once. She said that she could not remember much of what they’d talked about. She said that mostly she remembered the woman’s monumental back, the way it seemed to broaden even as the woman descended. She said that she remembered how the woman’s massive shadow lingered on its own for days, darkening her home and her hearth. People called the hermit mad. She said that she had remained in her cave until the shadow had gone away, not wanting to cross its threshold. She had been afraid it would never go away.

It was the son of an extinct line of scientists who had alleged the woman´s brilliance. He grew up with stories of her, and with her relics. He said that he’d had an old leather jacket of hers, and that it smelled of pine right up until it disintegrated beyond repair. He said that his own great-grandmother had been the woman’s partner. They had made and bravely taken the compound together. And he said that this hermit of the near mountains, just five days southwest, was rumored to have seen the woman, but warned me that if I accepted her hospitality, the hermit would strike me down and turn me into meat. It took me eight days to reach her cave, and I did not share her fire, though she offered, though I liked her.

I did not sense that the woman had any command of gravity, as I closed our distance over the packed sand. On the contrary; the woman’s figure was nearly doubled over as her head and shoulders succumbed to the pull of the earth. Her back rounded unforgivingly at the middle to look forward, her neck craned directly up, giving the impression of a permanent shallow bow. Her white hair moved with the wind. Like the sea foam. I approached. I saw her see me. I thought about lifting my hand but didn’t. Neither did she. Everything was so grey. I had the abrupt thought that it was coming out of her, all this greyness, leaking from this bent woman by the ocean. Ridiculous. But no more ridiculous than anything else.

When I was twenty paces from her, I realized my speed, and I slowed. The wind I had been generating with my forward push fell off of me. In its absence I understood that I had been very cold. Now I wasn’t. This so far was the longest part of my long, long walk. A pace away from the woman I stopped, and she regarded me. This pallored old woman studied me from her semi-prostration. A mole on her neck grew thick black hairs; all else was more grey. She exhaled, and it was grey mist that left her grey mouth, grey lips that parted, that were wetted by even a grey tongue. She cast no shadow in this strange, even light. I found no trace of gigantism in her hunched form. Perhaps it had been this seeping greyness that had frightened the hermit so.

I waited while she looked at me. What would she see? It shouldn’t matter. If I found her, she would give it to me. These were the rules for the seekers of eternal life. I had come such a long way. I wiped sweat from my palms onto my pants. She would find my nerves typical. My nerves were typical. I didn’t trust my voice.

She turned away from me and my stomach dropped. But it wasn’t rejection. It wasn’t, it wasn’t. She was only studying now the ocean. I looked as well. It was vast, yes. The waves came in irregular intervals, at irregular heights. Far out a grey clump of birds wheeled and dove. Their shrieking rose and fell separate from what I could see of their movements. Quickly, I grew bored. I had seen much vastness on my journey. And this was only dead, warm water.

I had resolved to ask—something, anything—when I heard the woman’s voice. “You know, then, what it will mean?”

She spoke with great measure. The sound was startling. Her tone was weary, but her voice was young. She sounded younger than I.

I nodded.

“Speak.”

“Yes,” I said, or tried to say—from disuse and thirst, my throat produced only a single cracking noise. I coughed, swallowed thickly. “Yes,” I said, and it came out low and hoarse. I wondered who she talked to, out here at the end of the world, to keep her voice in such ready order.

The woman sighed. She still was looking at the ocean. “You don’t.”

I didn’t smile. So she had no idea of me. So she had seen nothing, in her regard. This was good. I wiped my hands again against my pants. “Will you tell me?”

Another long moment, waiting.

She turned from the ocean, and from me. “Come.”

We went together inland, barely, to a strange spreading of objects in the sand beneath a woven overhang. I wouldn’t have believed that someone lived here if there was anywhere else around for the woman to live. In the center was a low-kept fire and a grey rock, worn flat on one side; around this, in a rough circle, was a collection of plastic bins and metal chests. Behind all of it was a long, narrow tent, hip-high, staked over some sort of inorganic platform.

From a nearby bin, the woman pulled out a clear jug of water and two metal cups. She took them around one side of the flattish rock, and gestured for me to go to the other. She also removed a small vial of rust-red substance; my breath caught, but she did not notice.

I kneeled in the cold sand, following the lead of the woman. The tube was set seemingly without care on the rock, and it rolled a little on some invisible slope. The woman was going very slowly with the cap on the jug. It couldn’t have been easy. Her hands were nearly clawed with age. I considered offering help but was worried that she would find impatience in my asking. It would be there. I was terribly, terribly thirsty.

To distract myself, I cast my senses elsewhere, and was shocked again by the intensity of the noise. As soon as I remembered to notice it, it invaded every aspect of my mind. I wondered how the woman stood it. When looking toward the ocean, all I could hear was wind. And when looking into the wind, along the shore, it was only crashing ocean. Yesterday, hours after I had reached the water and turned north, I’d tried walking with my hands over my ears for a bit of respite. This only changed the noise—instead of wind and water, I heard my heart beating, air rushing from my mouth, the impact of my feet in the sand traveling through my body—and my arms grew tired fast, so I let them fall. I thought of the jellyfish during this time, drifting in quiet parallel.

For the woman to live here, and only here, to stay always at this grey and howling place—I couldn’t fathom it.

She was pouring into a metal cup. Now, this was a delicious sound. It drowned out all else. I swallowed, and the sides of my throat rubbed against one another.

But she did not pour a second cup. She set the pitcher down instead, and picked up the full cup. When she drank from it, she looked at me. I felt foolish. I felt fooled. I did my best to keep this off of my face. Why had she set out a second cup?

No matter.

“It will take days,” she said, after she had drunk. Her throat worked slowly. I counted three small swallows. I could smell the fresh water even through the salt and the wind. “It might take weeks. The compound works at variable speeds across individuals. It’s possible that it will hurt. It would make sense for it to hurt, badly. Your organs will melt. Your skin will slough. And at some point in the changing, you will die.”

“And be reborn,” I said, softly.

The woman shook her head. I saw her change tactics. “You are thirsty, yes? Everyone who comes to me is thirsty. Starving for water.”

She took another drink from her cup, and a hot spike of hatred flashed up through me: at her cruelty, at her condescension, her lecturing, her assumption that our disagreement was because I did not understand. I understood.

“This thirst you are feeling,” she said. “It is true that you would feel it no longer.”

She had left the cap off the jug; she lifted it again, with obvious difficulty, and poured into the second cup. Some water trickled over the lip of the jug, clung to it, travelled backward at a slant until it dripped into the sand. The waste of it wounded me. It must have struck her, too, it simply must have. I imagined that at least half of her waking hours were devoted to collecting water, desalinating it; and there is just never enough.

“You would never again feel the relief of it quenched.” She pushed the cup toward me. It was half full. My hands were sweating, salivating.

“Drink,” she said. “Drink, and enjoy it—feel your gladness for it. You will lose that, too. The gladness. The capacity for gladness. You will become a low creature. The path between desire and satisfaction, the relationship of extremes, the mind’s hand in the body’s hand—do this, and you will lose that. You will be human no longer. Drink.”

Over the past six years, I had traveled from shrinking reservoir to shrinking reservoir, sniffing along a stale path laid long ago. I went from one dying settlement to the next. It was all houses of mud and hay and ancient plastics. Rusted corrugated metal, broken pipes. Pale, tough crops. In the hazy sun, they grow smaller and tougher every year. A rare goat, well-guarded. Gaunt-eyed adults; sometimes, gaunt-eyed children. Lean, strong, and obviously sick. Sick in the lungs and sick in the flesh: by rash, by cancers. Contaminants everywhere. Wary, too: it wasn’t the season for travelers. All the dogs were gone from the world.

I had seen too much to be compelled by this clumsy, childish rhetoric.

“The rain burns,” I said. “The reservoirs are toxic. I was born with thirst. It has never been satisfied. It is not possible.”

“Try.”

Instead, I picked up the vial. The woman stiffened—I barely noticed. It was made of glass. Unbelievable. It was cold to my touch. My nails clinked on the outside. Made of glass! When inverted, the compound slid slowly toward the other end. It was ridiculously red, in this grey place. I made no move to unscrew the cap, and the woman offered no protest beyond that initial startle of alarm.

I was holding the compound. Unbelievable.

It was the hermit who had given me my final directions. To the ocean, and south. Before I left, she asked me if I thought that the jellyfish dreamt. I told her, yes. I said I thought that they dreamt incessantly. That it was indistinguishable from waking. That in whatever language jellyfish composed their sensory information, there was no separate concept of the two.

The hermit stood quiet for some time. I had been warned not to turn around first, after we were engaged in conversation; so I waited. The fire spat behind her, and smoke oozed to the ceiling, trickled out and upward from the lip of the cave. It smelled of cooked meat. In spite of what I knew, my mouth did water, and the hermit must have seen my longing look. To the ocean, and north, she amended, and gave me a heavy wink. Come back before you take it.

“I want to ask you a question,” I said, to the grey woman before me. “Does this water quench your thirst?”

She looked down at the cup in her grip. She twisted her wrist, and watched the water move. She sighed. “I am old. Too old for thirst.”

I studied the vial some more. There seemed to be infinitely fine flecks of crystal mixed into, or maybe making up, the substance. Or perhaps it was some sort of organic exoskeleton. I refused to look again at the second cup of water. The rhetoric would not compel me—but my thirst, my thirst—my mouth was so dry, my body so dry, and drying more with every breath…

The woman sighed again. “None of you seem to understand. You see now only what we saw then. When temperatures rose, algae choked the ocean. Jellyfish bloomed. Many things died, were crowded out. We had hopes of correction at first by the appetites of sharks, turtles, even salmon—and they did thrive, in that initial explosion, easy meals all the time. But not three generations later everything was sick and weak. It’s only jellyfish, now, and the gulls. I watch the gulls, and they are failing too. They wash up dead, young. In ten years— ten years from now, until the end of time—there will be only jellyfish in the ocean, only algae, about as living as this rock. About as alive as this cup.”

I knew this. I knew all of this and understood it. When she gestured, the fresh water smell wafted again toward me.

“Yes, we thought that this was the way out. If we could become different—become less complex—perhaps we could survive. Could thrive, again. From whence we came we could return. The compound is the product of this dream. But it was a failure. Understand? It was a failure. The change is too dramatic. It is not a transforming, but a replacing. The person dies entirely to become the creature. A simple jellyfish. A facsimile of consciousness. To do this is suicide.”

We. She kept saying we. I wondered if she noticed. If she wanted me to ask. I wet my lips. Or—my dry tongue ran briefly over my dry lips. I had the vial. It was still cool in my hand, despite my warm grip. I wondered if this was a feature of the compound or of glass. I had never held glass like this before.

“The mind is the host of the suffering,” I said. “We can force the mind to endure suffering until death; or we can change it, and set it free.”

The woman had begun to raise her cup to her mouth as I started to speak; as my words registered, she froze. She looked sharply at me.

The son, this descendant of scientists—I wondered if she knew that he existed. I didn’t think so. It had taken me a long time to find him, and I think she would have destroyed him if she had known what he had kept stored. I’d asked for records, for research, and he gave me everything; naive little thing, and completely illiterate. He was so excited that somebody had found him, had come looking. He called the woman brilliant. He gave me a library of archived notes and discovery and, most damningly, correspondence. When he asked me to read some of it to him, I obliged, though I was not entirely faithful to the pages. Certainly, his great-grandmother was in there. She had taken the compound. But she must have done it alone.

“No longer is this a world for human thought or feeling,” I continued. I was quoting from the great-grandmother’s copies of her own sent letters. “No longer can a mammalian lifestyle sustain our complex ambitions, desires, impulses, emotions. I have to believe that personhood transcends humanity. I do believe this.” And then—because this grey woman was looking at me with such trembling incredulity—because she had brought out two cups, and at first filled only one; filled the other only conditionally—“Wait for me, Jane, and we’ll do it together.”

The woman spasmed; her metal cup hit the rock with a clang, and precious water crested over one side. She kept her grip on it, her clawed grey grip.

“It was she who spread the stories,” I said. “She who lit the way. She didn’t expect for either of you to stay behind, to explain. Were you to build a monument here, for the seekers to find? What would your instructions have said? Your warnings? Surely you must have written them together. Are they around here, still? Or did you back out before those plans needed to come to fruition?”

“Who are you?” Still, her voice! So young and measured!

“Does it matter?”

She released the cup. Took a slow breath. “No. No, I suppose it doesn’t.”

“I want to ask you another question.” My voice was shaking a little. It cracked in strange dry places. “Were you ever going to go through with it?”

She stared into me. Her grey gaze bore into me. I thought she might not answer—which was fine, I had what I needed—though I had been wondering for such a long time how it happened, when it fell apart—until she turned away from me, and looked to the horizon.

“I had it on my tongue,” the woman said, slowly, and I was convinced now more than ever that it was coming from her, the greyness of this part of the world. She went somewhere else as she spoke and took every color with her. “I tasted it in my mouth, and fear struck me deep. It was wrong. Wrong! What we were doing was wrong. I wanted to stop her, too, but I was too late.”

I imagined them on the shore. Partners, looking out at the vast dead water. Or maybe they are looking at each other. They bring the product of their combined life to their mouths—and in this crucible, one spits it out. It is red in the sand. It sinks, harmless in the sediment. I wondered if the other saw this change of heart before she had swallowed. If she saw the woman forsake her. I wondered if she chose instantly to go on alone. I had read her letters, her journals, her research. I thought that she would have gone on, even alone.

“How long did it take?” I asked, quietly.

“Four days. We had expected one, maybe two, from our previous experiments; but of course a person is much larger than a gull. She stopped eating immediately after. And then she was only drinking water from the sea—she wouldn’t leave the shallows after the second day. We walked inland, to test this impulse; at a certain distance, something overtook her, glazed her eyes, and she would follow some secret sense to the most direct path back to the ocean. Then her hair fell out, and her skin fell off, and her flesh congealed translucent.” The woman’s voice was dreamy, mechanical. She was reciting something to me. Her notes, I realized. Of course she would have kept notes.

“Her new flesh absorbed ocean water, swelled with it, and let out blood, expelled chunks of fat and muscle and connective tissue. Her eyes melted across her face. She was still talking then. She said that it didn’t hurt. But how could I believe that? I could barely hear her. I knelt in the wet sand to listen better, and I realized that her voice was not coming from her mouth anymore, but instead was dispersed across the new form. Air left her this way as well. There was a window of time when her flesh was thickening but still clear, and her blood was so thinned with ocean water that I could see through it, too, and I saw her heart beating. I saw it slow and deform. I saw her brain twitching. Her lungs folded, and air stopped coming out, and then I was unable to distinguish from the outside anything else internal. I knew that all that had been her was dissolved, in the way of caterpillars in the cocoon.

“Her bones pushed their way out last, in splinters, from the massive pink cloud of her. I gathered them. I would bury them. By volume she was as big as or bigger than she had ever been, but her semi-translucence and horizontal spread made this feel unbelievable, too. I watched her to the end. I kept the gulls away until the tide came back in. It dragged her out, and I let it. She was still changing as she went.”

And then she was quiet. She was not looking at me.

I had crossed the world to find this woman.

I had seen red rock in the morning light, pale blue sky, pink early crust of the horizon. Beautiful. Barren. No birds decorated any ledges; no snakes coiled in any cavities. Nothing crawled or bit. Often I would leave my rations in the open, just to see—just to be sure—and nothing found them. Nothing looked.

Away from the mountains, there was dry dust and bramble. There were monstrous storms of dry dust and bramble. I watched dust ride the wind, I watched it rise in the distance—watched it form as a sprinting, rolling giant beast—watched it bully out the sun for miles, for stinging, choking miles. There was vastness. There was blighting terror. It advanced and you could see. And I walked above trenches that had been creeks, and through long valleys that had been rivers, which were all empty now, and to think about how they became so empty so recently was also blighting terror. Between reservoirs, if I needed water, I had to dig. On my way into the ground were always the bleached remains of grasses, trees, pelt, bone. hair, where there should have been clean rot and fertile mud. Static death everywhere. The water was never good. Nowhere was the water good.

The woman would not draw my same conclusions. She, who saw the ocean killed, who couldn’t fathom that the land was failing in this same, slow, terrible way, who had taken the cure on her tongue and spat it out—she could not arrive at this truth as I had.

I would tell her anyway. I have been wrong before. For some reason she had kept the compound.

“I will be your last supplicant,” I said, “but I will not be your last visitor. In the coming years, you will have much company at this shoreline.”

The woman blinked. I watched her shake herself from the past; I watched her pick up my words, hold them to the light. I watched her figure them out. Her grey eyes widened.

“I know all of the reservoirs. I will take this medicine to each of them.”

“No,” she said. “No, no.”

I swallowed, and it hurt. I had not spoken much in days. “You have been away,” I said. “These are sick and starving times for the creatures of the earth.”

“But you cannot do this,” she said. Her mouth was turned down in a ghastly, trembling crescent, and she was so human, so grieving; my mouth turned down, too. It was her life’s work that I was taking from her. Not just the compound but her place in the world. “I am sorry,” I told her.

I wanted to tell her of my reverence for her work, her extraordinary history, right up until her sudden reversal into cowardice, but I knew that this, too, would be impossible to convey, in light of what I was doing—so instead I unscrewed the lid on the vial. I poured some of the compound into the second metal cup, the one that she had tried to tempt me with. It left the glass thickly, with a sludging reluctance. It smelled sweet, like rot. I didn’t have to ration. I knew from reading that the compound could not dilute in fresh water. It was the contaminant to end all contaminants. The woman’s face searched my face again. On hers I found only that awful expression of anguish. “You cannot,” she said, again. “You cannot do this to anyone who has not asked for it.”

I shook my head. “No one asked for any of this,” I said, and I saw it strike her, that I meant it, that I would do it, every reservoir would be augmented by my hand and by her work, new life for every miserable terrestrial beast. She fell completely sideways into the sand, that old grey woman. So much for giant. If she made any more sounds, I could not hear them over the wind and the sea.

I pocketed the vial. I reached across the stone table for her own cup, still a quarter full and clear, and I drank it in six slow sips. I picked up the jug and tilted back my head, put the spout to my mouth, and I drank that, too. My eyes were closed. All I could hear: throat working, inhalation through nose, swallowing, pressure changing, eardrum swelling, releasing, exhalation through nose. I felt the cold path of the water from my throat to my stomach, through my chest, and it was rapture. After two minutes, I stopped. A drop had leaked from the corner of my cracked mouth and slugged a slow descent toward my ear. I collected it with my tongue. The rest of the jug went into my waterskin.

I put my back to the ocean and started inland, again toward the mountains. It would be some time before I could return.