Too many things were tumbling into me at once, and I felt overstimulated and raw, as though my nerves had been sliced open with a razor. I’d never wanted to hurt anyone. And I never again wanted to be the person who lost control and did just that.
Just the thought of doing Magic again put me into a cold sweat. Max had been asking since the first day I’d come back. But I just couldn’t do it. It left me so vulnerable, so wide open. Stripped me of every ounce of my hard-earned independence of Max.
Because no matter what I wanted, when we did Magic together, we were connected. We were, just like the stories said, one half of each other’s Magical soul. And that terrified me. I was terrified to give him more power over me than he already had, power I’d been fighting tooth and nail to get back over these past few years.
I stumbled across the grounds while the sun sank below the Sangre de Cristos and the sky bled scarlet.
Back at Ludlow House, the double doors of Josephine Ludlow’s old powder room opened onto a balcony off the back side of the house. From there, I had a view of the other buildings on campus, including House Torlaine. I watched as a group of girls walked in, the hinges of the door groaning as it closed behind them. My eye caught on something above their heads. There was some sort of marking on the cattle skull over the door. Graffiti? I’d have to get a better look the next time I went to my room.
I’ve added here the notes of Dr. Luce Montgomery, assistant professor at S&B and mycologist, who,with some hesitation and quite a bit of prodding, generously granted me her field notes for admission to the investigation’s record. She noticed things of interest during the time she’d spent here searching for an elusive fungal species in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and looking for fungal properties that could help the scarring on Dani’s skin.
Field Journal of Dr. Luce Montgomery
April 7th
My dreams were becoming strange. Massive cityscapes, hundreds of stories tall, all glassy and shiny, with mushrooms spilling out of their windows. Fuzzy green moss and lichen growing up the sides like on the back of a tree trunk, black mold weaving through the cracks in the walls.
In my waking life, the fungus had already found its way down to my palm. It sprouted from my fingernails, a fuzzy green moss that crept down my fingers. Quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. Sure, Luce, let’s go with the cheap gloves when experimenting with aggressive fungi.
Even so, I couldn’t let it distract me from my real mission—what could be the biggest breakthrough of my career. Because I’d found it. After countless hours of experimentation and years of research, I found the thing that would save Lela, my four-hundred-year-old juniper dying in Carson National Forest. Something that could save old-growth forests across the Southwest, across the world even.
Agaricus cataphractus.Fungal armor. A fungus that existed nowhere else on earth except for the dry deserts of New Mexico, that showed resilience to fire and heavy metal toxicity, erosion, and disease, and that could help insulate trees against the rising temperatures. Dr. Rochester doubts such a thing could exist. No surprise there; it feels like all I ever get is doubt. I’m used to people sneering, thinking I’m the pretty Native American girl who couldn’t possibly be a real scientist.
Well. I’m also used to the shocked look on their faces when I prove them wrong.
And this time, I will prove them wrong. This fungus exists, and I’m going to find it. I have a map, thanks to the help of the local mycological community (what little one exists here), and all I have left to scour is the last quadrant.
It’s here. It has to be. It’s the only place I haven’t searched.
April 8th
My search today yielded much of the same. Signs of fox activity around the crumbling structures of the campus perimeter, rodent skulls littering the canyon—might be a source of organic material? The only thing of real interest was the person I ran into behind the Phi Kat house, Dr. de Vries’s TA and Marble County’s own mini-celebrity, Basile Samir. His father’s the Egyptian real estate mogul Amir Samir, who owns one of the largest development companies in the state. As a forester myself, that makes him my mortal enemy, but his son … perhaps there’s still time left for him. Doesn’t hurt that he looks the way he does, either.
Basile has this easy way about him, utterly relaxed in trousers and a breezy linen shirt, like he should be lounging on a sailboat in the Mediterranean. With his father’s strong, regal Egyptian nose and his Italian mother’s dark, glittering eyes, he looks like he belongs in a smoky jazz club, sipping a bourbon, with Louis Armstrong or Billie Holiday playing in the background rather than on a college campus.Or better yet, in my bed.
I know him more from his Instagram and TikToks. Some of his eighty-thousand followers are there for the thirst traps, hoping to catch a shot of him with his shirt off, but a lot are there for the math shit, too. Supposedly, he came up with a mathematical proof of the existence of parallel realities, worlds that live alongside this one. Naturally, it was a magnet for controversy. Some people insisted it proved that Heaven and Hell existed. Other people thought it could be taken further, to examine multiverses. If there was another reality out there like this one, how many were there? Could you get to them? A whole host of mathematicians and physicists had come forward to weigh in on it; about half of them dismissed his work as pseudo-science metaphysical bullshit conducted by an amateur grad student. The other half were cautiously optimistic.
He had a right to be suspicious of me snooping around behind the Phi Kat house, especially with everything going on. Campus was on edge while they underwent an investigation. I recently learned it was being led by Cella Gibbons, the bitch thatset me on fire. But that’s a whole other can of worms, and I won’t waste what little time I have on it here.
Tomorrow, I’ll continue my preliminary search of the western half of campus. So far, it’s mostly just a lot of charred wood. Not firewood, but it looks like it’s been burned deliberately, in some strange, swooping pattern I’m not familiar with. Could be indicative of some sort of cult activity. I’ll report it to Dr. Robetresse. Magicians historically do have a proclivity to cults, if for no other reason than safety, but the practice is strictly forbidden at S&B.*
CHAPTER TWELVE
The library was the same as the day I’d left. Same burgundy carpet and dark wooden furniture, same enchantment that stretched the room’s inside wider than its outside.*
I pulled a text at random, flipping through the yellowed pages, savoring that old-book smell, when someone cleared their throat behind me.
“I hope you’ve got your library card.”
I spun around to see the man standing there, mouth crooked in a sly grin. His hair was whiter than the last time I’d seen him, and he wore his pants high up around his waist, the way men of a certain age tend to do.
My mouth stretched into a smile. “Vern!”
Vern had never enjoyed copious displays of warmth, so I stopped just before I threw my arms around his stooped neck. He offered a firm handshake.
“Good thing you made it back; these bones don’t have much juice left in ’em.” Vernwoulduse his age to guilt me for not coming back sooner. He was only sixty-four, but liked to pretend he was going to kick it any day now.
“Well, of course, I had to come back, if only to haunt you after you’re gone. I’ve still got a few books checked out.”
