(4) Purple “drug” mushrooms with ball caps and almost no stems—dispensed from the red “tree” mushrooms, these purple mushrooms are clearly meant to serve as “crowd control” by giving the people of the city sustenance and making them dependent. These mushrooms create a strong addiction by affecting the pleasure centers of the brain. They also create hallucinations intended to pacify, most drawn from happy memories.

Definitely her handwriting. She’s slipped more than one message under his door while he’s out. Tells himself: I’ll throw it away when I know more about her. But nine months have passed since he found the note. She hasn’t told him anything more than what he knew before.

Yet caution loses out when she walks through the door. Remembering how, on days when he’s expecting her and she’s late, the fear creeps aching into his muscles. Finds himself gulping air like water. Thick and heavy. Lost. Never lost.

2

After Sintra had left, Finch fed the cat, grabbed a quick bite, and cleaned off with a couple of pails of once-used bathwater. Fresh shirt, same pants, same jacket. Kicked Feral out to explore on his own while he went down the stairs to the courtyard, then the basement.

Rath’s pale, angular face peered out from behind the door. Evaluating him. Looking for something.

She let Finch in without a word. Through a hallway brightened by walls painted light green. Probably to conceal rot. Then into a larger area with a few chairs, her strange library to either side. Beyond, where Finch had never gone: the start of entropy. The bruises of gray and blue stains spread across the ceiling. Disappeared into the darkness of a tunnel.

“Nothing new, I see,” Finch said.

Rath laughed. “Not that you’d notice.”

Finch brushed by her to sit in an armchair on a blue throw rug. Rising above him, water-damaged paperbacks and hardcovers had been stacked unevenly on warped shelves. The shelves perched on stilts to fend off any sudden rise in the water level. The weighted smell of moisture seemed both fresh and claustrophobic.

“Coffee?” she asked. The usual.

Hesitated, said, “No. Tea, please.” Didn’t know why.

Rath disappeared into the tunnel. Did she have a kitchen back there? Maybe a bedroom. Maybe more books. A whole troupe of clowns. The thought made him smile.

Stray pages saved from long-drowned books caught his attention as he waited for her. Red eye peering from monstrous face. Lines of scrawl in an unknown language. Diagrams of buildings or plants or motored vehicles. A black-and-white photograph of a gaunt five-year-old girl in a ragged dress standing in the muddy track of a tank.

Truff knew who had lived here before, collected the books originally. Or how long it had taken Rath to organize it all. Or how much she had added to it, scavenging across the city. The collection was an ever-changing scene of preservation and dissolution. So many things saved only to be destroyed by time. Always with the water gurgling its way along the floor. Sometimes fish would get trapped, their fins brushing against pipes or grillwork and making a sound like quills over skulls.