Edison took his own advice first, sweeping her down the corridor at a speed she could barely match. The thing that had woken up moved slowly, shaking itself out before pursuing at a crooked lurch. But it wasn’t alone. More bodies in every state of transformation and decomposition began rising around them, finding their mark and following. Rosalyn stopped glancing over her shoulder, screaming as a human-shaped mass of stems and twinkling, sucker-shaped fungus pulled itself up out of the sludge in front of them. Edison didn’t slow down, and Rosalyn braced with her elbow out in front of her face as they plowed through it, showered in a flurry of heavy blue sparks.

“Not again. Help me push!” They reached the door, sliding up to it and throwing their weight against the panels, the glass creaking from its compromised core, the pulsing tentacles speared through its center adding unbelievable density.

Rosalyn kept her eyes closed. She didn’t want to see how close doom crept. Edison roared as he gave another full-bodied shove, and at last the door began to move, inch by inch, allowing a space just big enough for them to tumble through and then back up against.

She spun, watching as a blond, short woman with half a face covered in growth walked right up to the glass, her nose bumping against it. Then she went still, as if the light in her head had dimmed. Nothing pursued them inside this apparent sanctuary, they simply froze in place, silent, pulsing watchers.

“Let’s go,” Edison said, taking her wrist gently. She glanced toward him, her feet so heavy with pitiless terror they felt fused to the floor. “We’re close now. For better or worse, we’re close.”

41

Like an aquarium, teeming and blue, the office pulsed with growth all around them. Rosalyn picked her way across reception, finding there was almost nothing to explain where they were or what was meant to happen there. All of the employees, it seemed, had fled, then succumbed to Foxfire out on the landing or elsewhere in the station.

“Are you all right?” she asked Edison, watching him closely as they moved deeper through the junglelike tendrils, the living blue sinews as thick around as a tree.

“No, are you?”

“No,” Rosalyn said. “If you’re going to give in—”

“I won’t,” Edison promised her, helping her over an overturned desk. “We’ve come too far for that.”

“I don’t think that will matter. If this is where it all began, it will only get harder and harder. But I’m here. Just don’t listen, okay? Whatever it tells you, whatever it promises you . . .”