Today, Jack would be surveying two hectares of woods and meadow. He looped a camera around his neck and shrugged on a backpack that rattled with specimen jars. The meteors continued to flash constantly in the sky, but he kept his eyes on the ground, and the canopy of evergreens shielded most of the light show anyway. A milky mist seeped through the woods, streams of it curling around trees. He took slow steps and swept his UV flashlight—what he called his torch—like a pendulum before him. The mushrooms popped in the light, standing out against the heavy, sodden greens and browns that defined the rain forest, blindingly white and wrinkled. Like the ears and snouts and genitalia of the underworld.

An owl hooted. A fir cone fell. A twig snapped. A spotted green banana slug oozed along a log, leaving behind a glistening trail of mucus. A deer startled from its bed of flattened ferns, and Mia cried out and hugged Jack’s leg hard, and Jack said, “It’s okay. It’s just a doe. We woke her up.” The mist swirled in the deer’s wake and they listened to her crash off into the darkness for a minute or more.

Jack tried to talk to Mia, keep her distracted, telling her a few terrible fungus jokes, like “What kind of room has no windows or doors?” He pointed out the different varieties of mushrooms, which ones were safe to eat—like the honey mushroom—and which ones were poisonous even to touch, like the fly agaric with its sinister red cap.

“What’s so interesting about dumb old mushrooms anyway?” Mia said.

“What’s so interesting about mushrooms? What’s so interesting about mushrooms!” Jack gave her a joking nudge and a tickle. “Seriously? How about the fly agaric I just pointed out to you? You know how it got its name? People used to mix it with milk and leave it out in a bowl to kill flies. Isn’t that interesting?”

“I guess.”

“How about that they’ve been evolutionarily static for ninety-nine million years?”

“I don’t know what that means. You’re always saying things that don’t make sense to kids.”

“Okay,” Jack said, scanning the underside of a half-buried log. “How about this—if it weren’t for mushrooms, there would be no life on this planet. You know why? Because they eat and recycle debris.”

“Debris!” Mia said, remembering the word. “Wait. Mushrooms eat space junk?”

“No, I mean the debris of our world. Plants. Carcasses. Fungi eat them and turn them into nutrient-rich soil. And if they didn’t do that, the surface of the Earth would be buried beneath several feet of horrible dead stuff.”

“Oh. Gross.”