Mistelann wasn’t the only one who wanted to get some fresh air.

If only walking through the basement’s hallways wasn’t such a harrowing experience. Every corner I turned left me feeling lightheaded. Whenever I passed near body bags filled with NFP-20 corpses, strange, indescribable noises buzzed through me, half sound, half sensation. It made me wonder if I was developing some kind of trauma-induced claustrophobia. It got to the point where the air had a thickness to it, a fog of unseen white noise that swarmed all over me, swirling in my wake. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I also had to deal with a creeping sense of paranoia.

It manipulates them like ants!

I couldn’t get Mistelann’s words out of my head. I never would have considered that Andalon might be a creation of the fungus, one meant to manipulate me, whether by lying outright or making me hallucinate a more preferable reality. Of course, in the latter case, the fungus clearly hadn’t gotten the memo: I had absolutely no interest in becoming a wyrm! Even then, however, it was still a disconcerting thought, and that was bad, because I was already more disconcerted than I ever wanted to be, and I wanted the pile of disconcertment to stop growing.

So, hooray! Another puzzle for me! Another mystery to ruminate over, driving myself to madness! Yay for me!

I groaned sardonically. The sound briefly caught Mistelann’s attention as we stepped into the elevator. We rode up to the nearest aerial garden; that happened to be on the fourth floor. With each ding of the floor indicator, my head cleared. It was like I was rising out of a swamp. After we stepped out onto the fourth floor, I passed a vending machine, and I simply couldn’t resist stopping for a protein bar to nosh on. For good measure, I also got an extra one for later.

As soon as the doors to the garden came in view, Mistelann pulled out an auto-lighting cigarette, and I held the door open for him so that he wouldn’t crash. Dr. Skorbinka darted out onto the patio, reveling in the midday sun. He lit his cigarette once he was far enough from the entrance. DAISHU took no-smoking laws very seriously, and the consequences of smoking within twenty feet of an entrance were dire indeed.

The scene outside hadn’t changed much since this morning. Though the fog had scattered, warmed away by the Sun, traffic still blared; sirens still wailed. And—save for Mistelann and I—this garden was just as empty as the one from this morning.

Actually, there was one big difference: the plants. The plants that should have been in the garden’s terra cotta pots had all gone missing. Someone must have uprooted them, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea where they might have gone. The only clues were bits and clumps of soil scattered on the patio’s concrete floor.

Mistelann stood by the wall, leaning into the thick, frosted glass panes that overlooked the streets below. Pulling a stool out from one of the tables—its legs scraping along the floor—I dragged the stool over to the back wall and set it beside the door on the other side of the wind, several yards away from the mycologist.

I’d never liked the smell of tobacco. Its stench had made me queasy for about as long as I could remember.

Mistelann puffed out a cloud into the afternoon. As usual, the light breeze more or less canceled out the Sun’s heat, leaving us with the best weather this side of Paradise.

“Why do you sit over there?” he asked.

“I don’t really care for the smell of tobacco.” It was true, yes, but it wasn’t the whole truth.

The smell of tobacco sat next to my memories of Father Windmere’s brown, ash-smeared cassock and his ever-filling ashtray. The wiry, pasty-faced priest taught the Testament exegesis class at Sunlight of Arthomer II, my elementary school. Every day, during the hour before lunch, I sat through “test-ex” class, as he called it. Father Windmere also taught my math class, the hour before. He was more relaxed there, wearing casual clothes, unlike the robes he was required to don for any religious classes, as per Academy policy—the exception being the Mallard robe’s iridescent green skullcap, which he wore both because he genuinely liked how it looked on him, and because he genuinely disliked the fact that his salary wasn’t enough to afford hair regeneration implants. Father Windmere’s loose-fitting, buttoned-up shirt had embedded itself in my memory. It was the color of a sun-bleached sky. The blackboard chalk that inevitably dusted it was like a premonition of the cigarette ash fate to fall on his Mallard robe following morning recess.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

After so much time in PPE, the cool Bay breeze made my skin tingle. At the moment, my F-99 face mask was the only unusual article on my body—other than my tail, of course. My white coat was getting a bit musty, so it was good to air it out.

Mistelann blew out pungent plumes like a breaching whale. I watched him silently, noting that the trembling in his hands was subsiding.

More of his earlier words flashed through my mind.

When fully changed, organism should be capable of spore dispersal, likely through exhalations.

Though I had no proof I was breathing out spores, I was better safe than sorry.

“What happened to you back there, Dr. Skorbinka?”

“I’d seen pictures of those with… changes,” he said, glancing back at me. “But nothing so extreme as—” He shook his head. “—You have taken leave of your senses, all of you,” he said, “I am a troubled man, Howle Genneth, but what we saw goes beyond mere trouble. It is living madness; crawling nightmare.”

Mistelann’s timorous words were a hair’s breadth away from tears as he turned around to face me. “It cannot be real. This cannot be real. This is not life; this is monster movie. For if it is real, then reality is a lie. What can we do if world decides two plus two make five?” He tapped the tip of his cigarette on the wall, knocking off ash. “Answer: nothing.” He shrugged. “We live, then we die. No power. No hope.” He snorted out smoke. “Such is life.”

“We can still try,” I said. “I mean… as doctors, doesn’t that come with the job description?” I shook my head. “No… it’s not just doctors; it’s everyone.”

“Oh? You believe in non-futility?” he asked.

“I think the whole point of civilization is a belief in non-futility. Otherwise, why would man have evolved to leave the trees, walk on two legs, and invent and dream up answers to impossible challenges? The darkpox vaccine; antibiotics; air travel; mag-lev vehicles; wireless communication—I mean, if you were a person from hundreds and hundreds of years ago standing here, knowing the modern world for what it was, wouldn’t you think all those things simply couldn’t be real? Would you try to ignore it, or would you try to make sense of it, and press onward?”

Instead of answering my question, Dr. Skorbinka puffed on his cigarette. “Heh,” he chuckled bitterly, “I keep forgetting how many Trenton people believe in evolutionary theory.”

That got a raise out of my eyebrow. “I hardly think it’s a matter of belief.”

The mycologist outright laughed at that, leaning his head back in grim mirth.

“In Odensk, rationality is considered belief. If one plus one is two, many people think it only because the Holy Triun proclaim it so. Is no room for reason; only mystic oneness with Light of Divine.”

Odensk and the rest of the continent’s northwest reaches had been the Old Believer’s strongholds ever since the schisms that sundered the faith in the aftermath of the Second Crusades. The northwest was a place of stunning contrasts: utter poverty in much of the rural hinterlands, with old-boned cities that brimmed with half-shoddy knock-offs of cutting-edge tech and fully unadulterated oligarchic and governmental corruption of the archest pedigree, and a distressing number of the Odensky public still held to Occasionalism, the belief that nothing, not even truth, existed except at the Godhead’s behest. It was a mindset which said triangles had three sides only because the Moonlight Queen willed it so, and that they could have any number of sides at any moment, should She deem it so.

It was ironic, and as usual, the irony was dark. Whenever we’d discussed scripture, Father Windmere liked to compare Arthomer II’s celebrated scholasticism to geometrical proofs from Soland’s ancient texts. Both were examples of divine truth, illuminated by the light of reason. I’d always thought it a queer comparison: the geometry didn’t rest on additional assumptions or special pleading. It was self-evident, even if it took a while to get to that point. Yet, compared to what Mistelann undoubtedly had to put up with as a kid, yeah, I could see how Angelical theology might seem like a zenith of logic.

Now, calculus? That was witchcraft, but that was a whole other story.

“There is saying,” Mistelann said. He cleared his throat. “Optimism is like snow in springtime: quick to melt. You have advantage, Howle Genneth: you grew up in time and place where good thoughts had okay chance of becoming your thoughts. You know, no matter what people say, man is made in image of man’s world, not in image of Holy Angel. We are mix of choices: ours, others’, and God’s.”

Dr. Skorbinka puffed out another cloud. His eyes glinted wetly. “You and I, Dr. Howle, we are children of our lives, trapped in ways and means which have become our own. Maybe Brand has told you, but shark cannot breathe if not swimming. Most fish swim because they breathe, but shark? It breathes because it swims. To stop is to drown. I am shark, Howle Genneth. If I am not useful—if I am not at cutting edge… I drown.”

“That, well,” I sighed, “I guess that makes two of us. Like I said before, I’ve had to let people go. My mother, my sister…” I clenched my fists, straining to hold back my misty eyes. “My son.” I cleared my throat. “I’ve dealt with it enough that I’ve soured on helplessness, permanently. So I go around with a smile and bow-tie, hoping to give the world the kind of help I wished I might have gotten. That’s the only way I can keep myself from just letting go and saying fudge it all.” I frowned, wistful and ill at ease. “Though, if I’m being honest, I’m worried I’m slipping away.”

Slowly, he shook his head. “If that is true, then, no, you and I are not so alike, Howle Genneth. I do not have luxury of self-loathing.”