Chapter 1: A Botanist’s World

The jungle hummed with cicadas and distant bird calls. From the high canopy to the moss-covered floor, every layer competed for light. Ava knelt in the dirt and eased back a tangle of vines. Beneath them, a cluster of bioluminescent caps glowed at the base of an ancient tree.

“You’re a beauty,” she whispered, tilting her headlamp away. The fungus kept its pale blue glow when the beam moved off it. Ava watched until her own shadow stopped confusing the observation. If it could grow in this soil, she wanted to know how.

Sweat ran into her eye. She wiped it with her sleeve, leaving a smear of soil at her temple, and balanced the field notebook on her knee.

She liked herself best at this hour, before she had to make the work sound impressive to anyone. Here she could be wrong, turn a leaf over, and look again. At twenty-two she still sometimes rehearsed explanations before giving them, worried that a pause would be mistaken for ignorance. The jungle allowed longer pauses.

The department had not. In the last seminar before this trip, Dr. Pell had waited until she finished a sentence and then repeated it in a smaller voice, as if translating her for the room. Two of the postdocs had laughed. One of them, Ellis, had started calling her Field Notes whenever she asked a question he did not want to answer. She had smiled the first time because correcting him in front of the others would have made the joke last longer. Afterward she had stood in the stairwell with her face hot and her notes crushed in one fist, furious that a nickname could make her feel twelve.

Nobody out here knew that name. The relief was so sharp it felt like sadness.

The morning after the seminar she had asked the question again, on paper, and signed her own name beneath it. Pell could shrink her voice in a room. He could not make the work untrue. Out here, with soil on her temple and the caps still glowing, the pleasure was simple and entirely hers. She trusted it more than she trusted a seminar.

Even so, she imagined her name beneath a photograph of the caps. She caught herself arranging the sentence that would announce the discovery and smiled at her own vanity. First identify the damn thing. Publication could wait until she knew whether she was kneeling beside something remarkable or something another botanist had described a hundred years ago.

Please be new.

The wish was embarrassingly childish. It was also hers.

• Bioluminescent fungus; identification pending. Decaying wood nearby. Check roots for possible mycorrhizal association.

• Potential biochemical adaptation for survival in high-toxicity soil.

• Initial sample taken, approximately 10 grams.

She turned one cap with the flat of her pencil. The gills underneath were already dry, though the wood beneath them was wet enough to darken her knee. A fungus that fruited into dryness while its host stayed soaked was doing something she had no name for. The pleasure of the find thinned. Her wrist itched where a spore-bright fleck had settled on the sweat, and rubbing it only drove the itch deeper.

Her pencil stopped halfway through the date. She had forgotten the month. A moment later it returned, absurdly ordinary, and she blamed the long day. She sealed the sample in its sterile container and checked the lid twice.

When she stood, the pressure behind her breastbone made her bend over the notebook. She waited for it to pass before putting the pencil away. Cicadas buzzed overhead; the birds she had heard earlier had stopped.

Not here. Not when nobody knows where I am.

Since the meteor struck far to the north, she had been crossing out measurements in her old field records. Shoots grew beyond their marked lengths between visits. Leaves appeared where she expected bare stems. Each change had seemed worth investigating on its own. Together, they were filling a second notebook.

On the return path, she checked each strip of survey tape before trusting the turn. The jungle looked different in the lowering light. Twice she stopped at a rustle behind her; twice she found only leaves settling against leaves.

By the last turn she was thinking about washing her hair. She wanted clean clothes, something hot to eat, a conversation in which she would not have to write down the interesting parts. She wanted, with a bluntness that embarrassed her, a body on the other side of a narrow bed: a knee against hers, a hand careless at her waist, the ordinary heat of someone who had chosen to stay. There was no one she could name for the wanting. That made it worse. It did not cancel the day. The sample was sealed, the notes were hers, and she was glad of both. Solitude had been her choice that morning. Now she felt the small resentment of having to make every sound herself. She could hold the resentment and the gladness in the same walk.

She rehearsed how she would describe the blue caps to someone who had never cared about fungi. Little lamps, perhaps. No, that made them sound ordinary. She wanted someone to understand why she had stayed so late. She wanted, with equal force, someone to tell her she could leave the work until tomorrow.

“You could have gone home at four,” she told the sample as she unlocked the lab. “One sensible afternoon. Imagine that.”

Her own voice made the room feel emptier. Still, she smiled as she set the container down.

Back in the lab, she put the sample on a clear corner of the desk and peeled off her gloves. The cuff snapped against her wrist. She meant to record the collection time before sitting down. Instead, she woke in the chair with the notebook open on her lap.

Pain gripped her chest. Ava pressed a hand beneath her ribs and tried a careful breath. Carrying too much equipment, she told herself. Tomorrow she would leave half of it behind.

I can still go home.

The specimen still glowed. She switched on the bench lamp and reached for a fresh pair of gloves. Outside, something scraped against the window frame.

Ava turned off the lamp. Her reflection vanished from the glass, but the foliage beyond remained too dense to see through. She waited until her fingers cramped around the gloves.

The scrape did not come again. She set the gloves down beside the sample, careful to make no sound.

“Hello?” she called.

The jungle gave her nothing back.