There was no incense, but Misato found a quiet corner in the lab, compiling and sorting the notes Rayan had made while studying Foxfire. Research was its own kind of meditation, and she couldn’t think of a better way to honor his memory than to look at what he had found. His notes weren’t particularly organized, and they became less so as time went on, the Foxfire making a messy scrawl of his handwriting by the end. Rayan had experimented on himself relentlessly, but nothing physical seemed to make for much of a change. She, too, suspected that once the spores were ingested, it was too late. More interesting were the complex charts Rayan had made tracking the mental progression of the Foxfire, taking careful stock of how frequently he felt himself hallucinating or losing control.

The trend was clear, day by day the episodes increased, but he had found other connections.

Worse today: Memory of my mother, her perfume, her wrinkled hands, Foxfire stronger then, electric, live wire at the base of my neck. The hallucination calls itself my mother now, uses her voice. Troubling. Fascinating? It’s learning our weaknesses.

And then, the next day, a single circled note after his tally of hallucinations:

This phenomenon is obsessed with increase. Children. Us.

Misato waded further into his meticulous notes, tracking the time he attempted to lock them into separate parts of the ship, a clever effort to see if separation slowed the Foxfire’s power over them, removing the nearness that seemed to amplify its control, like a signal that grew stronger the longer they remained in proximity. And Rosalyn’s arrival was cataloged, too, an explosion of hasty, scrambled ideas . . .

Someone new is here. Mother is louder and louder, she wants the salvager. Why so desperate? Ship is infected, time on Foxfire’s side. Why the urgency? I smell lemons all the time now, hear a distant laugh. My brain is on fire. Something has changed.

Misato finished reading, allowing herself to feel the sharp sting of sadness when the notes trailed off for good, all but illegible. Standing, she gathered up the personal possessions Rayan had laid out on the drafting table, and placed them in a small, cozy storage bin. Tuva’s went into a separate bin next to his. She didn’t store the complicated biological notes Rayan had made, the ones that looked like another language to her. Those, she kept out prominently on the lab’s drafting table. If the Brigantine was ever found, she wanted that science, that potential understanding, easily found. Maybe whoever found their wreck could pick up the thread and unravel what Rayan could not.