What she found, when the hill finally resolved out of the gray, did not look like a person.
It looked, if anything, like a mistake someone had started making and abandoned halfway through. A shape, roughly the size and rough proportion of a body, curled tight on the ground, edges still uncertain — not featureless like an ordinary silhouette, not solid like a soul who'd finished building themselves. Somewhere in between. Like watching wet clay try, badly, to remember what a person was supposed to be.
Maren stood at a careful distance and did not run.
That fact alone should probably have scared her more than it did. Every instinct available to a dead woman standing in front of an unstable, half-formed something said leave. She didn't leave. She crouched instead, close enough to see that the shape — whatever it was — was trembling, in a slow, continuous way that had nothing to do with cold, because nothing in the Between was cold, that had everything to do with something under its not-quite-skin that was clearly, obviously, too big for the space it was trying to live in.
"Hey," she said. Not because she expected an answer. Because she'd have said it to anything that looked like it was in that much pain, human-shaped or not.
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The shape went still.
Not calm-still. Caught-still. The way something that has never once been spoken to holds itself when a sound finally arrives that isn't its own storm-hum turned inward.
Maren had enough sense, even then, even completely new to whatever this was, to understand that she'd just done something enormous by pure accident. She didn't know what. She only knew that the trembling had stopped, and that something — she still had no better word for it than something — had turned, slow and uncertain, toward the sound of her voice, the way a plant turns toward the one window in a room that isn't otherwise built for growing anything.
"Okay," she said, softer, crouching all the way down now, close enough that if this went badly, it would go badly at point-blank range. She found she didn't especially care. "Okay. I'm not going anywhere. You don't have to do anything."
It didn't move. It didn't speak — couldn't, she'd learn, not for a long while yet. But something in the uncertain, half-finished shape of it shifted, fractionally, in her direction, and Maren — three Missions old, still counting nothing, still walking toward nothing in particular — felt something settle into place in her chest that she wouldn't have language for until much later.
She stayed until whatever passed for night in a place with no sun.
She came back the next day.