Peaches knows he doesn’t have much time. He can sense Director Ricketts’s finger tightening around the trigger as if it were his own.

He closes the distance between them with seven long-legged steps, and that’s all the time it takes for him to finally let go, to reveal himself for what he truly is. He can feel the fungus splashing up around his feet and the grass bristling up as if electrocuted. He can feel the clothes tearing off him as his skin spikes into roots and unspools into vines. The pistol discharges wildly when the green twines around her neck and waist and legs, whipping around and around her, sewing her arms against her sides, tearing through her hazmat suit and cutting into her cheeks to cinch shut her mouth until she is mummied, and he is unrecognizable.

Gone is the meek and slender man. In his place stands something mossy, branched, and seething with blooms.

The fungus withers and blackens around him in a steadily spreading circle. A moth lands on him and tastes one of his flowers. A centipede falls off him and scurries away. A beetle scuttles across his foot and up his leg. Worms and salamanders rise from the soil all around him and test the air to see if it’s safe again. He has given himself over to the symbiont. He is the green man.

Jack, Nora, and Mia stare at him uncertainly.

He never learned the story of how Julian became a saint after killing his parents but he now understands it must have had something to do with atonement. “Go,” he tells them.

They start off a few steps and then hesitate. “Where?” Jack says. “Where are we supposed to go?”

If they run, they can only go so far, because the girl likely can’t survive outside of a damp environment. If they hide, they devote their lives to campsites and cash-only motels, to peering out between window blinds and hoping a red laser sight never tracks its way across their foreheads. Nothing awaits them but a future as long and rotten as a hollow log.

“Maybe there’s another way,” Nora says.

“I’m listening,” Isaac says.

“When I met you before, you said something that stuck with me,” Jack says. “You said you work for the government, but you don’t work for the government.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“You’re one of them,” Jack says, and Nora says, “But you’re not one of them. You’re just pretending to be one of them.” They begin and end each other’s sentences as if reading from the same script. Isaac hardly knows whom to look at, his attention bouncing between them. “You’re one of us.”

“As of a few minutes ago,” Isaac says, “I suppose that’s true.”