After the world ended, Marie boarded the last functional vessel at the port and set out from Vancouver, heading across the strait toward the cloud-shrouded spine of Vancouver Island and the open ocean beyond. A sheer blue sky covered the stars as her ship left the city, and the sun shone on the barren mountains and the ruined streets. Nothing moved except the wind, stirring the dust; and the last crows and rats, scurrying to feed on the dead.

As far as she could see, there were no other vessels on the water. No solar-powered skimmers carrying people up the coast, no spaceships swooping down from the orbital stations, no self-piloted cargo-carriers either, but as she sailed past the rocks at Point Grey, a seal bobbed up and looked at her, its face so human she might have thought it spoke her name as she passed. But even if it had spoken, what could a seal tell her that she didn’t know already?

Marie did not have to navigate or handle the sails or rudder. The vessel’s destination was pre-set, and it already knew where it was going and how to get there.

She peered back at the city through her tinted UV-visor, saw the clouds gathering over the inlet, and smelled both ruin and rain on the breeze. As the crumbling city receded into the past behind her, the clouds and the mist, the fog and the pain folded over the jagged skyline like wet paper until there was nothing left to see.

Marie looked down at the seal frolicking in the ship’s wake. Its movements were agile and swift in the waves while her own limbs and thoughts were weighty and cumbersome, too heavy to lift or move.

• • • •

The first week after Marie set out, her hair fell out. She didn’t mind. Mostly she was relieved as the strands of grey and blonde slipped through her fingers like yarn, like silk, like unbundled neuro-fibers, like meadow grass and straw. She let it all fall into the water and watched it sink below the waves, swaying like seaweed as it took on the hue of the ocean waters.

The wind raked its briny fingers across her bare scalp and its touch made her heart beat faster.

• • • •

During the second week aboard, Marie’s skin sloughed off. The top layer first as if she’d suffered a sunburn except it didn’t itch or hurt. She rubbed her arms and legs, her chest and neck and face, watching as the papery shreds of her epidermis drifted down into the darkening sea below. After that she peeled off the deeper layers, pulling the wet, glistening dermis and hypodermis off in strips and swaths, revealing flesh and veins and nerves beneath.

As she let the last of it fall into the depths, she saw the seal far below, its sleek body still keeping pace with the ship.

• • • •

Marie changed, and the world changed too. Creatures teemed around the hull and prow—whales and dolphins, fish and octopus, otters and cormorants. Yet the longer she watched them, the less they resembled the creatures she knew. Maybe the animals had evolved since the world ended. Maybe they had taken to this new, ravaged world in a way humans had not been able to do. Or maybe, without anyone else there to tell her what she was supposed to see, she saw them true for the first time.

Even the ship itself was changing. Some days, the wooden deck rang hollow like metal and alloys under her feet, while the rough, braided tack turned to slippery tubes and wires in her hands. Other days, the shape of the vessel itself morphed into something other than a boat. Something sharper, faster. A knife, cleaving both darkness and light.

Marie no longer knew with any certainty where she was headed. Neither could she remember passing any of the expected landmarks on the route. There had been no islands in the strait, no jagged shore of Vancouver Island to skirt around, nothing at all except an ever-deepening sea and a sky that seemed to come ever closer, the blue membrane above and the blue surface beneath thinning into lustrous indigo and black.

The only constant was the seal watching her from the water. Leaning over the railing, Marie looked back and wondered what it saw.

• • • •

Once Marie’s hair and skin were gone, her flesh was next. It fell away in a shudder when she woke up in her bunk one night. Fat and sinew, muscle and veins; she shrugged it all off and left it behind.

She was naught but bones now, and standing on deck, the air passed freely through her ribs, whistling through her pelvis and skull. Marie knew what she ought to feel, but the only thing she truly felt was unburdened.

• • • •

One morning, the sky above the ship shed the last of its indigo, revealing the depths beyond where stars and planets, moons and comets, souls and spirits, serpents and dragons moved restlessly through the vacuum. That same morning, the sea lost its colour, and in the translucent waters every creature was visible as clearly as if it were encased in crystal and glass.

Marie gazed into the sky and into the sea and found she could no longer tell them apart. Up and down had lost all meaning. Sea, sky; above, below . . . it all flowed together into one immeasurable depth where the lights in the darkness were both ruinous and beautiful.

In the ocean-sky, below-above, the seal looked at her with its large, bright eyes and this time it spoke her name.

I am not what you think I am, Marie, the seal said, and as it spoke, it became something else, something she could not see clearly because she could not understand it yet. Only the eyes, round and large, deep and bright, remained the same. You are not what you think you are either, the seal continued, and Marie knew it spoke the truth.

She looked back at the beginning of her journey, pulling in her memories like pulling on a fishing line, and the shape of the past twisted in her grip, taking on a different shape and hue.

Once upon a time, there had been a mission, a cargo, a future she was supposed to save. A destination, beyond the confines of this star. Marie could remember that the mission, the cargo, the future, the destination had once seemed important to her, but she no longer remembered why.

Looking into the dark mirrored surface of the void that surrounded her, Marie did not see the soft sheen of her bones. Instead, she saw a body reclining in a seat. She saw no face, just an opaque, frost-rimed helmet visor, and below that, a full-cover suit, padded and zipped tight, connected to tubes and wires, neural fibers and sensor arrays.

Marie knew that everything she had been, everything she had discarded—hair and skin and flesh; her bones picked clean in whispers—was still inside that suit, and she also knew none of it was hers anymore.

Come, the seal said, looking at Marie from the water’s surface even though there was no water.

Marie’s bones whispered softly in the wind, and she felt herself change again. Her bones and joints loosened and fell away. The weight of the ruined world, the burden of the mission she had been sent out to achieve, the heaviness of the maps and the coordinates, the cargo, the future, none of it meant anything anymore.

Without it, and without her bones, she was light—both ruinous and beautiful—and in the depths surrounding her, she saw that the seal had been joined by others like it. They were many, and their bright eyes gazed at her, the true shape of their bodies hidden in void and shadow.

Marie did not remember letting go, but behind her, the ship was already tumbling away through the dark, taking her old body with it. No matter. She didn’t need it here.

The seals looked at her as she rose and fell towards them, and in a flash of sheer and utter joy, she wondered what they would tell her that she didn’t already know.