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Move deeper into the wilderness to put more distance between us and the wreckage. We also grow while moving. Our height doubles to 38'6". Our weights triple to 15,000 pounds. Our bone and muscle density is 96x average. Our senses improve even further.

The forest thins as the elevation climbs. Pine gives way to spruce, the trunks narrowing, the canopy opening up to a sky the color of old sheet metal. Lena walks north and the ground changes under her feet — from soft needle duff to exposed granite ridges slicked with moss. The 5,000-pound body does not slip. The 24-times density feet grip stone the way fingers grip rope, every toe finding purchase, every step deliberate. Diane moves beside her in silence, their bodies casting shadows long enough to cover entire stands of birch saplings. The smoke column from the helicopter is behind them now, invisible below the ridge line. The wind carries only spruce resin and cold granite and the copper still clinging to their skin from three staging areas.

The growing starts between the shoulder blades. A deep ache that is not pain — the wish has never caused pain — but pressure. The vertebrae multiplying like a spine being unrolled from a compressed spring. Lena feels her perspective shift, the treetops dropping lower relative to her eyes, the trail she has been following narrowing into something a body her size cannot use. She watches her own hands change. The fingers thicken, the knuckles widening, the tendons in her forearms standing out like cables under the brown skin. The fat layer she carries — the softness over the muscle, the thing she chose to keep — redistributes, settling lower on her frame as the bones lengthen beneath it. She is still dense. She is still soft. The combination is the thing the wish gives.

Diane stumbles. Not from the terrain but from the growing. Her frame is stretching too, the 19'3" height climbing, the proportions shifting, the 5,000 pounds adding mass in the legs and hips and shoulders the way a river adds volume from tributaries. Lena catches her arm — the grip is effortless, 24-times density holding 24-times density — and they stand on the granite ridge watching each other change. Diane's face is the same face but larger, the jaw wider, the cheekbones broader, the black eyes set deeper. The blood from the staging areas cracks and flakes as their skin stretches, falling away in scales, and underneath the new skin is brown and smooth and warm. The growing does not stop. It does not slow. The wish has no interest in stopping.

The spruce canopy that was at shoulder height is now at waist height. Then at thigh height. Then at knee height. Lena watches the forest shrink around her the way a diver watches the surface shrink above — a gradual recession, a change in scale that the mind accepts because the body accepts it first. The 38'6" frame moves through old-growth spruce the way a woman moves through tall grass. The 15,000 pounds do not sink into the granite. The 96-times density distributes the weight across feet wide enough to park a car on, and each step is a controlled placement, the toes reading the stone for fractures the way fingers read braille. The senses sharpen. Lena can hear a creek two miles northwest — not the sound of water but the sound of individual stones clicking against each other as the current moves them. She can smell the elk herd four miles east — not the elk but the grass they cropped an hour ago, the chlorophyll breaking down in their stomachs, the methane leaking from their digestive tracts. She can see the thermal bloom of a porcupine in a hollow spruce 800 yards ahead, the small body a warm orange point against the cold grey of the bark.

The ridge crests and the land drops into a valley Lena has never seen. Old growth. No roads. No clearings. No diesel smell. No rotor blades. The valley floor is three miles wide and twelve miles long, walled by granite ridges on three sides, open to the north where a river cuts through. The spruce are 200 years old, the trunks four feet across, the canopy a closed roof that Lena's 38'6" frame still rises above. She stands on the ridge and looks down into it and the warmth in her stomach spreads outward through the 15,000 pounds of her body. The wish says *this*. The animal says *here*. The remaining human — the part that used to worry about waistbands and quarterly forecasts — looks at the valley and sees no one. No one for miles. No roads. No drones. No helicopters. No men with rifles. The valley is the thing the 38'6" frame wants. The wanting is the thing the wish gives. Diane stands beside her on the ridge, 38'6" and 15,000 pounds, and their shadows cover the granite like clouds.

They descend. The 15,000 pounds move down the ridge in controlled steps, the 96-times density feet finding the stone, the 38'6" frames lowering through the spruce canopy. The trees are larger here — the trunks do not break against their shoulders. The valley floor is soft with decades of needle duff and moss, and the 15,000 pounds sink only slightly, the feet wide enough to distribute the weight. The river at the north end is loud enough to cover the sound of their movement, and Lena stops at the water's edge and drinks. The water is glacial — cold enough to make her teeth ache — and the 96-times density body does not shiver. Diane drinks beside her. Their reflections in the still water are two enormous brown shapes, blood-streaked and hairy and fat-layered and dense, and Lena looks at hers and the warmth in her stomach is the wish saying *right*. The right is the thing the 38'6" frame knows. The knowing is the thing that is still going. The going is the thing the valley holds. The holding is the thing the wish gives. The giving is the thing that is still building. The building is the thing that does not stop.