I got up, grit in my teeth. I began to hop around the corner, toward safety. I don’t know how long it took, or even what was happening around me—all I could focus on was the sound of my remaining shoe against gravel as I hopped, pain in my left leg from balancing the weight of my entire body. At some point I fell and could not get back up. I remember crawling until I reached the great doors of the Truffidian Cathedral, rising long enough to shove those doors open, pushing my way inside, and then falling to the floor.

Everyone inside the Cathedral was dead. I lay where I had fallen, next to a corpse. We stared at each other, eye to eye, and it took me a while to realize that somewhere in the background, near the altar, something was moving.

Once we reached our destination, I set Mary down. We stood in a large, circular cavern. Green lichens coated the floor. The walls reflected red-and-green, spores floating through the gold-gray light. I had made a throne of mushrooms for her, lavender and silver. I had sent into the air perpetually twirling strands of emerald fungi, like shiny crepe paper. I had carved a table to appear from the ground, and upon it set a cup of pure cold water from an aquifer. And beside it, three mushrooms—orange, blue, and purple—that would not only feed her but leave her feeling strong and calm.

I had spent a long time preparing for that moment. And yet, I must admit, not everything in that cavern lay under my control. How could it? Something was laughing in a corner, at a pitch no ordinary human ear could hear. Something nonhuman. It almost sounded like human speech. Things crept and crawled through the murk. A smell like rotted mango permeated the cavern. But, still, this was as safe a place as you could find belowground. It was my laboratory, my refuge. I knew everything here, including the thing that laughed. I knew them all on the most basic of levels. I relaxed as Mary wrapped her arms around me. I thought she would appreciate all that I had given her. But she wouldn’t talk to me, and she refused to look around. I couldn’t talk to her, either. Instead, I turned away so she wouldn’t see the veins of emerald creeping up my face.

They stayed for hours in that secluded cavern, sitting or standing. They spoke, if at all, in whispers, and sometimes not even whispers because some new threat would approach every few minutes, requiring utter silence.