Sybel had stopped holding my hand. He was a little behind me at this point. We were almost at the end of Bannerville, not more than twenty feet from safety. Overhead, a streetlamp flickered free of the green glow that pervaded the rest of the city.

We were both about to turn the corner. I could hear Sybel’s heavy breathing as he ran. Then I heard an unfamiliar sound—a sound trapped between a gasp and a moan—and when I turned to look back at Sybel, all I could see was a mist of blood, floating out in streamers. I stopped running and stared. I couldn’t breathe for a second. Nothing of him was left—not even his shoes. Nothing at all. His dissolution was complete. Utter. There was such a final and terrible beauty to it that I thought it must be an absurd magic trick, a horrible joke. But it wasn’t, and the laughter caught in my throat, became a sob. Sybel had died, almost in front of my eyes, less than a block from the Cathedral. A moment later, I realized it must have been one of F&L’s fungal mines, but for an instant it seemed more deadly, more immediate—something personal.

When I tried to move—away from the blood mist? toward it?—I put pressure down on my right foot, felt a shock of pain, and fell to the ground. That’s when I realized that the mine had also erased my right foot, shoe and all. There was now just a stump. Nothing else. I lay on the ground, panting, and watched the blood dribble out of the part of the wound that hadn’t been cauterized. The silence had been transformed into a pounding of blood in my ears, a slow, aching pulse. It reminded me of the blood I’d let spurt from my wrists, and for a moment I was content to watch it leak out of me—all of this liquid that constituted me at a level more basic than brain or mind, soul or spirit. I almost let it happen. I almost decided to lie back and let it happen.

But then I thought of poor Sybel and something changed inside of me. We had come so far. We had almost made it. I started to shout or scream then, but not words, nothing as coherent as words.

I took the strip of cloth from around my mouth and made a crude tourniquet to stop the bleeding. Around me, the blood mist that had been Sybel writhed in strands of gorgeous crimson, already dissipating.