Chapter Text
Frances had seen Hildy exactly once before, in a photograph on Marshall's phone, and the woman in the picture had looked like somebody's cool aunt — gray hair, wire glasses, a smile like she knew a secret. The woman standing at the base of the water tower in the dark was not that woman. She was smaller than the photograph. Sharper. Her glasses caught the light from somewhere and threw it back like two little moons, and she was wearing a canvas work apron over a sweater, and she was holding a Mason jar with something blue in it, and she was waving at them like they'd arrived for dinner.
Marshall walked toward her. He didn't run. Running was for people who still thought there was a way out of a conversation.
"Hi, Marshall," Hildy said. "You look good. You look like you've been getting enough sleep, which is more than I can say for most of the people I've been around lately." She smiled at Frances. "You must be Frances. I've heard so much about you. Marshall's told me about you since you were both children, and I have to say, the mushroom agrees with you. It's not every day you meet someone who walks out of the room and then comes back in on purpose."
"It's not every day you poison a town's water supply," Frances said.
Hildy looked at her, and the smile didn't go away, it just changed temperature. "That's the tincture. That's not poison. That's an invitation. People have been drinking it for a week and what's happened? They're thirsty. They're seeing the figures. They're coming to the door. That's not sickness, that's the first step. You can't get to the room without the door, and you can't get the door to open for people who've spent their whole lives in a body that hurts." She held up the jar, and the blue in it glowed faintly, like something remembering. "The mushroom doesn't want to be a pill you take when you're dying. It wants to be the water. It wants to be everywhere. It wants everyone in the room at once, and I'm the one who finally figured out how to open the door wide enough."
"The door," Marshall said carefully. "Hildy. I've been in the room. I've been in it four times. It's a room. There's a lot of light and some little figures and it's — it's nice, it's quiet, but it's a room. It's not a church. It's not a plan. You can't put a whole town in there and call it a miracle."
"Can't I?" Hildy's voice was warm. That was the worst part. She sounded like the woman who'd taught him to spore-print, to love the smell of a mycena cap, to treat every mushroom with the respect of a thing that had its own life. "The hospital's full of people who are halfway in. They're not suffering, Marshall. They're learning. And when the second dose goes in —"
"Second dose," Frances said. "The valve. The hose."
"Oh, you found the hose. Good. I was hoping someone would find it before it went off, so they'd understand." Hildy turned the jar in her hands, watched the blue shift. "At midnight, the valve opens. The concentrate goes into the main line, the town drinks it, and everyone in Diablo Flats goes through the door together. Not one at a time, like you do it, Marshall, doling out cures like a man rationing love. Together. And then they'll see. Then they'll understand what the mushroom is. And it'll spread from here — not through farms and cooler bags and people hiding in the desert, but through pipes, through the water, through everything. That's what it wants."
"That's what you want," Marshall said. "The mushroom doesn't want anything. It's a fungus. It wants to grow. That's the whole of it. It wants to grow and it doesn't care how, and you've decided that means it wants a congregation."
Hildy's smile flickered, just for a second. It was the first crack he'd seen in it. "You don't know that."
"I know you pushed me off a cliff."
"I know I did." She said it calmly, like a fact about the weather. "And you're standing here, which proves my point better than anything I could say. You died, Marshall. You died and you came back. You've been through the door four times now, and every time you come back you're less afraid, and you think that's because you're brave, but it's because the room is taking the fear out of you. It's preparing you. It's preparing all of us." She stepped closer. "Give me the spores. The real ones. The ones in the cooler. With those, I don't need the tincture. I can seed the whole water table. The whole valley. Everyone, together, forever."
"No," Marshall said.
"Yes," Hildy said, "you'll see," and she said it the way you say "good night," like the matter was settled, and she turned and walked away into the dark, and the blue jar went with her, and Marshall stood at the base of the water tower and watched her go and did not feel brave.
"We have to stop the valve," Frances said. "Before midnight. We have to get up there and close it or break it or —"
"We have to get up there," Marshall agreed. "And we have to do it before she finishes whatever she's doing with that jar, and before the rest of her people show up, because she didn't come alone." He looked at the dark around them. "She's got Rusty with her. Probably more. We've got a screwdriver and a cooler with a thumb-sized piece of mushroom left."
"That's not a plan."
"It's the only plan," Marshall said, and they started toward the tower, and that was when the headlights came over the rise.
The truck came in fast, no lights on until the last second, and then the cab light came on and the door opened and a man got out, and he was tall and he was wearing jeans and a jacket that had been through a lot, and he walked toward them with the walk of a man who'd recently been shot and was still deciding how he felt about it.
"Copano," Marshall said.
Agent Copano stopped. He looked at Marshall, and he looked at Frances, and he looked at the water tower, and he said, "You found the news story too."
"You're supposed to be in a hospital."
"I was in a hospital." Copano said it like it was a complaint about a hotel. "The lady in the next bed kept asking me what the little white people were. I figured it was time to go." He pulled something out of his jacket, a worn manila folder, and held it up. "I've got the case file. All of it. The farm, the raid, the order to burn it, every name that signed off. I've been reading it on the road. You want to know who's coming, it's in here. Cecily. Her people. A whole alphabet of agencies that are going to roll into this town the second they figure out the water's blue."
"They're not coming for the water," Frances said. "They're coming for the mushroom. They've been coming for it since Peru."
"I know." Copano put the folder back in his jacket. "That's why I'm here and not in Phoenix. I'm not sure what I'm doing, yet. I'm not sure who I'm working for. But I know the difference between the people who want to heal a town and the people who want to own a miracle, and I've spent the last three days figuring out which one I am." He looked at Marshall. "The spore you gave me. When I was dying. It — it wasn't nothing. It was the most real thing that's happened to me in twenty years of police work. So I'm here. That's all I've got."
Marshall nodded. It was enough. It was more than enough.
And then, over the sound of the wind, they heard the motorcycle.
It came down the highway from the west, a single headlight cutting the dark, and it slowed as it reached the motel and turned into the parking lot and killed the engine, and the rider took off her helmet and shook out her hair and sat there a moment, looking at the three of them, at the tower, at the town.
Harrington.
Copano made a sound like a man who'd been punched in a dream. "Harrington. What are you — are you here to arrest us? Are you here to —"
"I don't know," Harrington said. She got off the bike. She was wearing her jacket, her badge on a chain around her neck, and she looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. "I've been riding for two days. I've been trying to decide. I gave you the spore, Copano. Do you understand what that means? I've been with the DEA for eleven years and I've never — that was the first time I've ever done something I couldn't put in a report. And I don't regret it. That's what I've been trying to decide, whether that makes me a bad agent or a good person." She looked at the water tower, and the badge glinted. "I still don't know."
"You can decide after midnight," Frances said. "Right now we've got a valve to close and a woman with a jar of blue to stop, and I'd like to do it before the whole town drinks their way into a room they can't get out of."
Harrington looked at her. "You're Frances."
"Yes."
"You're the one who works for Reutical."
"Worked. Past tense. I'm the one who left."
Harrington nodded slowly. She reached up, unclasped her badge, and put it in her pocket. Then she pulled off the jacket, folded it over the seat of the bike, and stood there in her shirt in the desert wind.
"Okay," she said. "Show me the valve."
The water tower had never been designed for four people and a plan. They'd moved the cooler and Socrates into Copano's truck before they crossed the lot, and the Prius they'd left in the motel lot with the keys in it, which was either a gift to Rick or a gift to a thief, and none of them cared which. The ladder sang, and the wind pushed, and the tower was dark against the stars, and somewhere down in the town, Hildy was walking with her jar, and somewhere closer, in the shadow of the hardware store, Rusty was watching the tower with a flashlight and a length of pipe and the expression of a man who had decided the mushroom was a god and he was its doorkeeper.
Copano saw him first. He'd been a cop long enough that he saw the dark shapes in the dark before the rest of them did. "Two o'clock. By the hardware store. That's one of hers."
"How many more?" Harrington asked.
"At least two. Maybe three. She doesn't travel light."
"So we're outnumbered, we're in the dark, and we're about to climb a ladder in front of all of them." Frances said it like she was doing inventory. "Great. That's fine. That's just a normal Tuesday."
Marshall was already on the ladder. He'd stopped being scared about three deaths ago, which was a thing you couldn't explain to anyone who hadn't died, so he didn't try. "I'll go up. Close the valve. You three keep them off the ladder."
"Marshall." Frances's voice. He stopped. "Don't be a hero. Close the valve, come down, we go. That's it. We're not saving the town tonight. We're just not making it worse."
"We're not making it worse," Marshall agreed, and he climbed.
The ladder took him up out of the dark and into the wind, and the wind sang in the tower's legs, and below him the town spread out, and he could see the motel and the diner and the church and the base of the tower where Hildy had stood, and he could see the three of them at the base of the ladder, small and waiting, and he could see the shape that was Rusty moving through the shadows toward them, and he climbed faster.
The hatch was where they'd left it, unbolted, hanging on one hinge. Marshall pulled it open and shone his flashlight in, and the blue was brighter now. It filled the tank in slow currents, pulsing, and at the bottom the mass of growth had spread, reaching tendrils up the walls, and the new pipe with the valve was there, and the valve was set, and the mechanism was simple: a timer, a handle, a hose full of concentrate, and a trip that would open it at midnight.
He could see the timer. It was digital. It read 11:47.
Marshall reached in. The water was cold, and the blue water came up to his elbow, and the growth at the bottom stirred, like a thing being woken, and he found the valve and put his hand on the handle and started to turn it closed.
Below, someone shouted. It was a man's voice, and it was not one of theirs, and then there was a sound like metal hitting metal, and the ladder shook, and Marshall looked down and saw Rusty at the base of the tower, saw Copano step in front of him, saw the pipe come up, and then he didn't see any of it because the valve handle came off in his hand.
It came off. The whole assembly was plastic, and the plastic was old, and the handle had been rigged to open, not close, and when he pulled it, it snapped, and the timer kept counting, and 11:48 blinked up at him, and the valve was jammed open, and the hose was full, and the blue water was moving through the pipe, and somewhere below, the town's pipes were drinking.
"Marshall!" Frances's voice, from the base of the tower, thin and high. "Marshall, get down! He's got Copano!"
Marshall looked down. Copano was on the ground, and Rusty was standing over him with the pipe, and Harrington was coming in fast, and Frances was running, and the timer kept counting, and the blue kept moving, and Marshall stood in the dark above the town with the valve handle in his hand and understood, with the particular clarity of a man who had died before, that he was going to have to go in.
He'd never told anyone that the last piece of the real mushroom was in his pocket. He'd taken it out of the cooler when they'd moved the gear into Copano's truck, wrapped in its corner of the damp paper towel, the way you carry a coin for a toll. He'd meant it for emergencies. He'd meant it for the next dying person, the next Frances's-mother, the next town. But there wasn't going to be a next anything if the whole town went through the door at once, and there was exactly one way to get from one side of the room to the other.
He ate it.
The taste was rain on warm stone. The world went sideways and white, and the tower was gone, and the wind was gone, and Marshall was standing in the room.
It was bigger than he remembered. He'd always been alone in it before, or nearly — a figure here, a figure there, watching from the edges. Now the room was full. Not of people. Of light. Of the little white figures, hundreds of them, thousands, standing in ranks that went off in every direction, and they were all looking at him, and they were not hostile and they were not friendly, they were just looking, the way you look at a weather system.
And in the middle of it, sitting on a rock that hadn't been there a second ago, Hildy.
She'd gotten in. She'd been in the room so long she'd started to furnish it.
"There you are," she said. "I knew you'd come. That's the thing about the room, Marshall. It always brings you back. It brought you back when you were dead, and it brought Frances back when she was lost, and now it's brought everyone in this town to the door. Can you feel them? All the people drinking? All the doors swinging open?"
Marshall looked around. He could feel it. Not like hearing, like pressure — a hundred small doors, all over the room, all opening, and through each one, a person. A man at a kitchen sink. A woman in a truck. The boy, Caleb, in his bed. Delia, in the diner, pouring herself a glass of the blue water with shaking hands.
"They're not ready," Marshall said. "They're not sick. They're not dying. You're not healing them, Hildy, you're drafting them."
"I'm showing them." Hildy stood up. For the first time, she didn't sound like his mentor. She sounded like a woman who had been right about something for so long that she'd forgotten to check if she was still right. "This is the greatest thing that has ever existed. It healed you when you were dead. It healed that man in New York. It could heal the whole world, and you want to hand it out one piece at a time like — like a man at a buffet portioning out the good chicken. I am not going to let you do that. I am going to open every door in this town, and then the next town, and then —"
"The figures aren't doing that," Marshall said.
Hildy blinked. "What?"
"The figures." He gestured at the ranks of white, watching, patient. "Look at them. They're not helping you. They're watching you. They've always been watching. I've been in this room four times, and they've never once told me what to do, and they've never once told you, either. You've been talking to a wall, Hildy. A beautiful, endless, silent wall. You decided it was a god, and it's just —" He looked around. "It's just a room."
Hildy's face did something complicated. "You don't know that."
"I know you pushed me off a cliff to protect a mushroom that doesn't care about you. I know you're standing in a room that has never once asked you to do anything, dosing a town with poison you made because you were lonely and the mushroom was the only thing that listened." Marshall took a breath. "I loved you. You were the best teacher I ever had. You taught me that a mushroom is a whole world — that it has a life, a purpose, a place. And I think you forgot that the mushroom's place is growing. That's all. It's not a plan. It's not a church. It's a mushroom. And you are a person, and people are better than mushrooms, and I'm not going to let you forget that."
The room was very quiet. The figures watched. One of them, the closest one, tilted its head, and Marshall could have sworn it was listening, not to him, to the room.
And then one of the doors slammed shut.
Hildy turned. Another door. Another. The pressure in the room changed, the way it changes when a storm breaks, and the doors were closing one by one, and through them, Marshall could see the town coming back — the man at the sink blinking, the woman in the truck shaking her head, Delia putting down the glass, the boy in his bed turning over and sleeping like a boy.
The tower. Frances. The valve.
"They're closing," Hildy whispered. "Why are they closing? They can't close, I opened them, I opened them—"
"You didn't open anything." Marshall's voice came out gentler than he expected. "You poisoned the water. The real mushroom is in the water now, and it's undoing it. That's what it does, Hildy. That's all it's ever done. It heals."
And below, at the base of the tower, Frances had found the main line. She'd pried open the valve housing with the screwdriver, and she'd gone back to the truck for the cooler, and she'd taken the paper towel with the last of the spores — the whole future, everything — and she'd dropped it into the pipe, and she'd watched it go, watched the blue fight the blue, watched the town's water turn from a bruise to a memory.
"Sorry, Mom," she said, to nobody, to Sonia, to the room. "We'll grow more. We'll grow so much more."
Dawn came to Diablo Flats the way it came to everywhere else: slowly, then all at once.
The town woke up thirsty and confused and alive. The hospital's patients came out of their fevers with no idea what had happened, which was a mercy. The news trucks would arrive by noon, and the CDC would test the water and find nothing, because the mushroom doesn't leave a trace it doesn't want to leave, and Hildy's second dose had gone down the line and come out the other side as something that would, in a few days, not be there at all.
Hildy was gone. Nobody saw her go. One minute she was standing at the water tower with her jar, and the next she was just — not there, the way a rumor stops being true. Marshall found her jar on the ground by the road, empty, and he picked it up and put it in the truck, because you don't leave glass in the desert, and because he couldn't leave her, either, not all of her.
Rusty was in the county jail, which was a holding cell and a fan. He kept asking the deputy if the little people were okay, and the deputy kept saying they were fine, and nobody had the heart to tell him the little people had never been real in the way he meant.
Copano had a gash on his head and a new respect for lengths of pipe. Harrington had a bruise on her shoulder and a badge in her pocket that she hadn't decided what to do with yet. Frances had a torn shirt and the look of a woman who had just spent the entire future of medicine on a water tower in Arizona and was still doing the math on whether it had been worth it.
The four of them sat in a booth at a diner outside of town, ten miles west, the kind of diner that didn't ask questions because it had never once been asked one back. The waitress brought coffee and eggs and didn't look at them twice, which was the finest service any of them had received in a year.
"Okay," Copano said. "Let's get the obvious out of the way. We're all fugitives now. Harrington, you gave me a spore. That's on camera. Marshall and Frances, you're wanted for — for being right, basically. And I'm a DEA agent who walked out of a hospital with the case file and no intention of giving it back."
"You're a former DEA agent," Harrington said. "As of about four hours ago."
"Fine. We're all former something." Copano looked at the folder on the table between them. "The way I see it, we've got two choices. We scatter, and they pick us off one at a time, and the next Hildy or the next Rick finds the mushroom and does whatever they want with it. Or we stay together, and I use the file, and Harrington uses the badge, and you two use the mushroom, and we make it so that the next time this happens, there's somebody who knows what the blue water is before it's in the pipes."
"That's a plan," Frances said slowly. "That's almost a plan."
"It's a start."
Harrington looked at her coffee. "I'm not going to be a good agent anymore. I don't think I can go back to being one. But I'm not going to be a bad person, either. I've been trying to decide which one that makes me." She looked up. "I think it makes me the kind of person who helps people hide a mushroom."
"Helpful," Copano said. "That's a job description I can work with."
Marshall had been quiet, holding Socrates under the table, letting the tortoise nose at a corner of his toast. Now he looked out the window, at the desert, at the road, at the jar on the seat of the truck, empty and blue.
"There's a greenhouse," he said. "On the border. My brother's got the tortoises. If we can get there — if we can get Socrates there, and the substrate right — we can grow more. Not a lot, not fast, but more. And every time we grow more, there's another town. Another Frances's mother. Another —" He stopped. "Another person who doesn't have to die."
"One at a time," Frances said.
"One at a time."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she slid out of the booth and walked out to the truck, and she came back with the jar, and she put it on the table, and she said, "Okay. But we're going to need a bigger jar."
The waitress brought the check. Copano paid with cash that was older than the town. Harrington put her badge on the table and left it there, and when the waitress came to clear it, she looked at it, and she looked out the window at the four of them climbing into a truck and onto a motorcycle, and she put the badge in her apron pocket and didn't say anything, because some things you don't turn in.
They drove west. Socrates sat in the back seat with the empty jar between his feet, and the sun came up over the desert behind them, and the road unrolled ahead of them like a question that hadn't been answered yet.
"We'll grow more," Marshall said, to nobody, to the road, to the room. "We'll grow so much more."
And he meant it, the way you mean a thing in the morning, before the day has had a chance to argue with you.