The mouse darted out from behind the stone and, in a haze of compulsion, raced toward the sweet vapor. She slapped a hand down to trap it, but missed. The mouse dashed straight into the sedge’s quivering branches.

One of the tiny, ghostly faces oozed outward with an elongating tongue. This leering appendage caught the mouse’s ear, wrapping around it. The mouse spasmed, its feet scrabbling against the ground as it tried to flee. It was too late. Its corrupted ear twisted into a bloody claw that groped downward to shove a fresh-grown white talon into its own eye. More threads flowed from the sedge, eager to stake a claim in the animal’s living vigor. Plants were rich food, but a Spore’s favored prey must always be a mobile animal, so as to quickly spread the corruption. The mouse’s head was already distorting, growing two more heads like fruiting pods eager to expand and burst. The mouse went rigid, its desperate struggle fading as the Spore devoured its brain.

She had to act fast. It was a good thing Kem wasn’t here to see.

She set her gloved right hand on the ground, palm flat, and woke the viper in her heart.

A sensation of burning cold started deep in her chest, like a coil unraveling around her heart. The feeling was not precisely pain and yet not pleasure, so intense it raised tears in her eyes. The sleeve of her shirt rippled as if a thick strand of icy wire was being drawn the length of her arm toward her wrist. The tip of the scar bubbled, swelling. A pale snake’s head solidified into view. The white viper slithered out of her arm, tail popping free as it undulated off her skin and onto the dirt. Its body shimmered with a cold so sharp it glittered. Its tongue flicked out, tasting the air. It, too, was a predator.

Eagerly, the viper glided to the thick base of the sedge cluster. As the mouse convulsed, being eaten from the inside out by the Spore, the viper sank its fangs into the mouse’s hindquarters. With a sound like suction, it inhaled the mouse. At the same time, its venom dissolved the skin, muscle, and bone of the writhing animal, turning it into a kind of melting sludge that shifted shape—claws, faces, snouts, snapping maws—as the threads of Spore tried and failed to escape. A few wisps reached the ground just as the mouse was fully consumed, and the wisps probed as if in pursuit of its lost prey. When they found no trace of it, they surged toward Elen’s life force.