“Fungus actually has more in common with humans than plants.” He gestures to the girl, who begins to hack up something gray and bilious. “Case in point.”

The girl takes one ragged breath, allows it to sit in her lungs for what seems like a minute, and then exhales. Her eyes are barely open, slivers of exhausted irises peering out from beneath her lids. Her skin is ashen and moist, like the inside of a mealy apple.

Director Ricketts sets down her can of Diet Coke so suddenly that it tips over and sizzles a puddle across the desk. She leans toward the intercom and says, with some urgency, “Vacate the lab.”

The scientists don’t waste any time hurrying through the exit and sealing the air lock behind them. They’ll be blasted with UV light in the first room, sprayed with decontamination foam in the second, stripped in the third, showered in the fourth.

The girl is trying to sit up, but every movement is clumsy and labored. She doesn’t look starved, but she looks soft. Without definition. Her body atrophied. She presses her arms against the table, rises a few inches, and flops back down. She shouldn’t be able to move at all, given how long she’s probably been trapped inside this thing—Isaac has a feeling it’s been a long, long time—so that seems to imply stimulation of some sort, like a baby kicking in the womb, readying for the day it will be released.

Eventually she gives up. She lies there panting for several minutes. Damp curls of hair helmet her head. Peaches can see her try to open her eyes more fully and then squeeze them shut in the painful light of the room.

“Dim the lights,” Isaac says. “Now.”

Director Ricketts says, “Excuse me?”

“Will you please dim the lights, Director Ricketts?”

She hoists her painted-on eyebrows like crowbars and gives him an assessing gaze. Then she walks over to a wall panel and adjusts a series of knobs, and a twilight haze softens within the lab.

Another minute passes, and Isaac can see the girl’s eyes blinking with the same steady rhythm as her lungs cause her chest to rise and fall. They are a good fifteen feet apart, but he can tell her vision is unfocused, as degenerate as her muscles.

For the rest of the day and through the night, little changes, but when they return to the lab in the morning, they find the window dirtied with spores. At first Ricketts orders the glass wiped clean, but Isaac stops the staff from following the directive, stepping closer, eyeing it from different angles. “Just wait,” he says.

“Wait for what?”

“I think she’s trying to tell us something.”

“With spores?”

“They’re not spores. Can’t you see? They’re letters.”

17