Ah, I had not intended that it change the result of things that happened in the past... only that you could sort of find out what might have happened.  If you drop focus, go back to that time you and your sister drove across the burn flats, and kill your sister in the memory, your sister is still alive when you come out of the trip.  You just find out what might have happened if you had killed her.  It would let us set scenes in the past, and could be limited by the supply of Focus.

There are no high-Weird characters in our game, although I suppose someone could build their focus up.

I think the angel thing is just like the bodyguard thing.

Hey, Doc, you're a useful guy to have around, and this is a dangerous town.  If you'll be my personal doc for the week I'll have Plum here do things to you with her mouth that you'll never forget.

Hey, Doc, Balls has this meatcleaver thing in his back and he's making noises like he might die.  If you patch him up I'll get Plum here to do things to you with her mouth that you'll never forget.

The first situation is a gamble for the doc.  If you don't get your ass shot off that week then the roll in the hay is free.  If you do, damn, he's gotta pay up in sweet narcostabs and gauze.

The second situation has a certain cost, but at least it's quick.  He gets a go at Plum and he doesn't have to put up with your shit all week, but he's definitely out some narcostabs and gauze.

If you hire him as your personal doc and don't mention that you're going to go fight Rolfball's mutant biker gang tomorrow, then Doc might feel he's been deceived.

I think the one is assassin-work and the other is bodyguard-work.  Like this:

Hey, Balls, will you kill Rolfball for me?  I'll give you this box of canned hams.

Hey, Balls, will you hang around me, look tough, and make sure nobody offs me this week?  I'll give you this box of canned hams.

Balls' estimation of the likelihood of being wasted in the line of getting the canned hams is going to factor in, right?  Like if you just fucked the hardholder's mom and lit his car on fire and Balls knows it, he might want more than some ham to pull your ass out of the fire.  Like if Rolfball is the head of a huge gang of mutant bikers.

Similarly, if you hire him as a bodyguard and then announce you're going to attack Rolfball's mutant gang tonight and Balls has to come along, he may feel that he was deceived.

But the base assumption is a pretty normal situation where a bodyguard expects only a slim chance that he'll have to fight in any given week, versus the assassin who knows that the job involves killing someone who may not want to die.  If that assumption isn't true, and Balls knows it, then the price ought to change.

The burn flats move doesn't really tell me what I'm doing.  Am I trying to go somewhere?  If so, and I hit the roll, I ought to get there.  Also, you might be able to collapse some of the entries as basically the same thing.  You're lost, you're not making good time, and you're out of water are all striking at the same purpose.  On the burn flats time is water, water is time, and you're running out of both.

In my jungle apocalypse I made salt one of the important scarcities and I made the players add salt countdown clocks to their character sheets.  Then when time passes in the game I can tell them all to fill in another block on their countdown clocks.  When they're hugging the river and hanging around hardholds, especially near the coast, it just means they have to buy when the clock is getting near midnight.  In the jungle, though, salt is time and getting lost or injured is going to run down their salt clocks.  If the salt runs out I'll give them -1 ongoing and start dealing harm over time.

So maybe something like this?

When you navigate to a landmark in the burn flats, roll +Sharp.  On a 10+ you make good time and arrive at the landmark before the sun gets too high.  On a 7-9 you're lagging.  Act under fire to push it to the landmark before the hot time or spend the day camped out on the flats.  On a miss you're lost or you suffer some disaster.

That way you can ding their water countdown clock once if they're on track, twice if they have to camp on the flats, and if they miss the roll you can make a move (vehicle breaks down, attacked by slavers, stumble onto a golden age military facility, whatever).

It's certainly horrifying - a frothy wave of leaping vampiric jellyfish.  Probably beautiful, too.  I wonder how you foresee this threat building and hitting.  When would you say "vampiric jellyfish leap out of the sea?"  And what do you figure the characters can do about it besides scream?  Would they rush to raise nets, pilot their boat out of the swarm before they're overwhelmed, or blow jellyfish off each other's necks with guns?  What do you figure will be the drama?

You know those fish in the Amazon that swim into your dick while you're pissing?  Well, a quick little silver fish just swam into your brain when you opened it to the Maelstrom.

Now what?

I'm running a jungle-pocalypse and I really want to do this to my players when they fail an open-your-mind move, but the question is, what does a fish do once it's in your brain?

Okay, Creases, I like the "unfinished business" lens.  I'll try to keep that in mind.  The apocalypse in my game was an alien invasion that set up a xeno-terraforming process.  The humans fought in conventional ways at first and ultimately nuked the higher concentrations of alien activity all over the world, which made things much worse for humans.  Then vaguely defined weirdness happened before it rolled out into people with football pads and feathers killing each other for food and batteries.  So far we've assumed that the mission of the people in stasis is to survive and repopulate when radiation levels drop to something more reasonable, but I suppose there could be further missions.

Bignose, you're right... the archive could be useful to investigate the people in stasis.  We know that one of the people in stasis is one of the top generals who ordered the nuclear response, and have foreshadowed that he's... formidable.  Maybe finding out more about him is one way to use the archive.  Maybe the general won't be willing to let go of the past, either.  We could do that trope where the losing general never accepts that the war is over.  Assuming the quarantine wakes him up and doesn't just euthanize him in the cradle.  :)

The quarantine in my game has taken the class in a somewhat different direction, which is brilliant, but he's maybe not the typical quarantine (if that's a thing).  In some ways he's more concerned with hiding the past than revealing it.