The man lay on his back. Connected to the “tree,” which was a huge mushroom. Connected by tendrils. The smell, vile. The man’s eyes open and flickering.

Wyte should have left. Wyte should have known better. But maybe Wyte was bored. Or wanted a change. Or just didn’t care. He hadn’t seen his kids since they’d been sent out of the city. He’d been fighting with his wife a lot.

He leaned over the body. Maybe he thought he saw something floating in those eyes. Something moving. Maybe movement meant life to him.

“Who knows? Just know that it’s a dumb move.”

A dumb move. That’s how the detectives would say it during the retell. At their little refuge, not far from the station. Blakely had discovered the place. In front of what used to be the old Bureaucratic Quarter. Looks like a guard post. Nondescript. Gray stone. Surrounded by a thicket of half walls, rubble hills, and stunted trees. With a moat that’s really just a pond that collects rainwater. From the inside, it’s clear the structure is the top of a bell tower pulled down and submerged when the gray caps Rose.

Always half out of their minds with whiskey or homemade wine, or whatever. When they told the story. A dumb move. Like they were experts.

“Point is,” Albin would say, because Albin usually told the story, “he leaned over, and the man’s head exploded into spores. And those spores got into Wyte’s head.”

White spores for Wyte. Through the nose. Through any exposed cuts. Through the ears. Through the eyes.

Although he fought it. Twisted furiously. Jumped up and down. Cursed like the end of the world. So at least he didn’t just stand there and let it happen.

“But by that time, it was too late. A few minutes later and he’s just somebody’s puppet.”

Wyte became someone else. The “dead” man. Someone who didn’t understand what had happened to him. Wyte ran down the street. Taken over. Screaming.

“Screaming a name over and over. ‘Otto! I’m Otto!’ because that was the dead man’s name. Wyte thought he was Otto.”

Or most of him did. Wyte, deep inside, still knew who he was, and that was worse.

Sometimes, out of a casual cruelty, a kind of boredom, one of the other detectives, usually Blakely, will call Wyte “Otto.” Until Finch makes him stop.

“Well, they found him a day later. Once they figured out who the dead body was. Cowering in a closet. Saying ‘Otto’ over and over again.”

In the dead man’s apartment.

“A caution to us all.”

Then they would clink glasses and bottles, congratulating themselves on being alive.

Truth was, they told the story less to humiliate Wyte than to keep reminding themselves not to take any chances. Ambergris Rules. No dumb moves.