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The leader of the Mycelium Resistance had taken Scar’s place when he stepped into his office, feet up on the desk and chair craned back just waiting to send him tumbling to the floor, and for a heartstopping second, it seemed like he was completely himself. Scar recognized that startle, where Grian saw he’d come in and thumped back down, miffed like he’d wanted a more dignified start to whatever monologue he'd planned. He knew that casual disregard, those chipped fingernails, the street-standard filtration mask Grian had slung down at his neck, because dome air was so clean he wouldn’t need it.
Grian had dressed this way when he’d been campaigning for Mumbo, meeting with Scar to form a coalition that had inevitably fallen through; he’d had the same insouciant bird-of-paradise brightness on the picket line, standing tall after an assassination attempt, proclaiming that his enemies needed better aim.
He was wanted by colonial enforcers, and it was kind of concerning that he’d been able to get into Scar’s office at all-- especially with a knife, it had to be ceramic to get past the security systems but a knife, jeez, Scar had been hoping for subtlety-- but Scar had plans for if the Resistance wanted to parlay. He could convince Grian of a lot if he chose the right words. He knew that much for a fact! He could cut off the Resistance at the root with the right words, drag them back into the fold like he had with Mumbo Jumbo, under corporate authority-- but the words withered on his tongue when Grian looked up.
Grian’s wonderfully dark eyes had dulled, sclera tinging gray like an overshadowed walkway. Fine bulbous strands twined out from under his collar, pale golden pearls and darker purple undertones. The veins Scar could see in his wrists were streaked and blackened.
Oh, man. That confirmed some of Cub's theories, didn't it.
Grian should have been detected by those systems anyway, with or without a weapon. They were primed to identify unfamiliar human life signs.
It was possibly a horrible idea to be in the room with Grian right now. Scar smiled at him anyway, closing the door behind him and promising himself he’d run crying to Cub for antifungals as soon as he lived through this conversation, and said, “Well, hello there. To what do I owe this pleasure of a surprise visit? I thought you were busy scurrying around outside the dome, getting into troubles and schemes. Did my last pamphlets convince you? The graphic design on those could convince anybody, you know, I wouldn’t blame you. Xisuma hired some amazing individuals for the job.”
“I can’t believe you thought those would work,” Grian said, wrinkling his nose. “I mean, Don’t Drink The Water, Scar, really? With the little graphics of infections and medical care? Don’t get me wrong, the promise of clemency if we’d just submit ourselves to our natural authorities was a nice touch, but you can’t have expected me to consider it. It’d be a fine day for justice when the rebels rolled over and showed their bellies at the first setback they encountered.”
It had been almost half a year since the election, Mumbo For Mayor graffiti scoured from the upper streets, enforcers out in style to show the lower streets what they thought of their attempt at representation. Scar had given the order that sent Grian’s crew into exile, because they hadn’t capitulated like they should have; it had made the terraformers’ union restless, HermitCorp sending representatives with smiles even less genuine than Scar’s. He was pretty sure that had been the first setback the Resistance had encountered, unless he was even worse of a mayoral nemesis than he’d thought. The second setback had been Mumbo’s arrest.
So yeah, Grian had to be on like his tenth setback by now. The fact that he kept showing up anyway, sneaking into Scar’s private residence and his equally surveilled office, putting him to the trouble of hiding it from HermitCorp every time– the fact that the Resistance kept sabotaging things, preaching freedom to indentured terraformers and breaking down equipment, planting bombs around the mantle drills that were only narrowly found before they collapsed the lower city, and gosh, that had been hard to cover up, Scar had called on so many favors– was admirable, from that angle.
Scar had had to fight to keep HermitCorp from releasing the drill plot to the media. He’d arranged his nicest, most honeyed promises, positioning himself as the perfect sycophant, locked onto his own self-interest. Profits were the priority, after all! Mayor Scar Goodtimes had revenue streams from the lower city, a series of levers labeled smuggling and moonshining that HermitCorp could tug on at will.
HermitCorp hadn’t expected that campaigning on beautifying everything, bringing parks where plain concrete had rested, expanding water access and funding educational initiatives, could be so effective. Little sops tossed down to the lower city were the farthest Scar went, of course, couldn’t let them get too hopeful about other prospects, but that hadn’t mattered much. The votes that counted lived on the surface, and Scar was just enough of an upstart to seem attractive, especially when the lower city was agitating for a candidate of their own. Scar had been the safe option.
HermitCorp was very invested in making him into an unsafe option, though. His aides had left him alone for the night, and he hadn’t been given actual in-person security. Scar’s death at the Resistance’s hands would provide better publicity than his boring old continued survival could any day.
“It got you to come talk to me again, didn’t it?” Scar asked the face of that Resistance, taking the opportunity to pull into a chair across from him. Grian frowned. “Negotiations, that’s what we can do now, you and I. I have so much power at my fingertips, I feel like I’m full of sparkles and magic. I could make life a whole lot easier for you.”
“You know our demands,” Grian said. “I’ve come here to warn you to back off, not to have a nice little chat. We aren’t friends, Mister Mayor. You’ve made that thoroughly clear.”
“Have I now,” Scar said, keeping the smile on his face. “Because I’ll tell you right now, if you’re starving outside the dome where I’ve chased you, the offer’s still open to come back in. Sure, there’ll be some decontamination, and yeah, maybe someone will get sentenced to something, hard labor, a longer indenture, but once the examples are made, we can work something out. I can make sure nothing too bad happens to anybody– I did it for Mumbo, you know.”
Grian should have put the knife to Scar’s throat for that, but all he did was tilt his head, dulled eyes glistening. Scar kind of wished he’d kept his filtration mask on after all. “Yeah, right. You know our demands, dude, we’re not giving up that easily.”
An immediate end to all indenture contracts in the lower city, for the terraforming union and the related splinter unions that’d cropped up around them once they’d picked up enough momentum: the engineers who ran the mantle drill, and the miners who ventured outside of the dome with outdated hazard gear, half of them disappearing after a few years to fates unknown. Payment for work, and back pay, in the same currency used in the upper city and not in HermitCorp dollars, and improved living conditions for the lower city, and a host of aid initiatives and legislative victories that rebels like Grian only daydreamed about.
Scar knew. He’d had them listed to him before.
“I’ve been really really busy lately, with governing, and media releases, and this gala I went to where I danced with three different people, and it kind of blurred together by the end– you can’t expect me to remember your little group’s demands on top of it all, can you?” he said. He could have pressed the security button on the underside of his desk, at least to get someone maybe rushing to his location, but he kept his hands visibly in his lap. “I mean, apparently you’ve been violating environmental protection orders? That’s a crime in itself, I hope you know."
“We’ve been violating unjust laws,” Grian seethed, and Scar tried not to look at the fruiting bodies around his collarbone, especially not at the crook of his shoulder where they must have emerged from his skin. He really did try. There were some coming out of Grian's wrist, too, vibrant and button-like; they might have snaked all the way up his arm. “And our demands are simple, in case that makes them easier to remember: we want you to stop mining. We want this city to stop drilling, and sanitizing, and removing perfectly good filaments from where they’ve burrowed into the earth– we want rights for our people, and that means stopping the terraforming entirely. It can’t lead anywhere good.”
“It gives the dome fresh air and a place to expand into,” Scar said, “and some very lucrative business opportunities–”
“Right, and that’s your governing philosophy, is it? Business opportunities? You’re replacing all the mycelium with grass!”
Nothing about the exploitation of workers. Nothing concrete about the Resistance’s plans at all. Scar had tracked the Resistance’s activities since they’d fled the dome's protection, and each incident had been more disconnected from their stated goals, more likely to cause chaos and target terraforming infrastructure than to actually fire the lower city into action. The revolution had turned into a shambling husk, carrying out orders that made no sense, and Grian hadn’t seemed to notice. It was enough to bring a tear to a corporate representative’s eye.
Tell you guys what, Grian had said from the picket line, in a recorded speech that HermitCorp hadn’t been able to stamp out, much more fearless than a man in his position had a right to be– like he could up and fly right out of whatever spray of bullets had to be coming his way. Like being part of the indentured class didn’t weigh around his neck at all. We’ll send our illustrious new mayor our list of demands, and he’ll carry them through if he wants this strike to end. We know how collective action works, we’ve got the history, the blueprints-- we’ll go right to Plan B, now that Mumbo’s lost the election. We’re not out of the running yet, fellas, believe me– we’re just getting started!
There’d been more to the speech than that, not to mention an attack by enforcers that’d forced the demonstrators to scatter, but Scar was having a hard time remembering the details. He was having a hard time thinking about anything but how he wasn’t wearing a filtration mask, and how stale the air tasted, and how the intruder in his office had skin that looked wrong, spongy and moist, and how his eyes weren’t as bright as they should have been. Scar hadn’t thought seeing Grian up close nowadays would leave him so unnerved.
Grian had tried to bomb the mantle drills. Thousands of innocent lives, the geothermal energy that powered the colony’s water and air filtration and let them have sanitation systems in the first place– the Mycelium Resistance had tried to bomb it.
Scar wanted to ask which we he was referring to. He wanted to ask if Grian even wanted to know if his second in command was okay. Most of all, he wanted to call security to see if they’d come and then go to his private apartments and cry, missing the sounds of his friends living around him, Bdubs’ snorting laughter and Etho slinging terrible jokes when he came to visit from the engineering district, but that was another life, wasn’t it. Mayor Goodtimes had his own priorities. One of those priorities involved staying in this room.
“My governing philosophy involves pizzazz,” Scar informed Grian instead of doing those things, “and plain old-fashioned rapscallionism. Mayorship’s a lucrative business, Grian! Governing, when you get down to it, is just as much about the image as it is about results. I’ve got a nice image, haven’t I?”
“You’ve got posters, I’ll give you that,” Grian said. “I guess I can concede that you have style. But you’re dancing around the point. This is the only warning I’m planning to give you– if you don’t keep out of the Resistance’s way, we will go through you. You can’t keep on the way you’ve been doing, blocking our efforts and letting the terraforming go on. You’re harming the landscape.”
Scar opened his mouth to respond, and Grian’s hand shot out when he raised a hand to gesture, caught his wrist tightly, fingers colder than iron. Scar choked on a breath, tried to hide how he wanted to shudder at the texture of Grian’s skin.
The knife tapped against the desk, close to Scar’s thumb, the tip of it denting the synthetic mahogany. Bad craftsmanship. Scar decided to send the manufacturers a stern letter, a really mayorly thing to do– stern letters, strong words, meetings in private rooms where his corporate overlords outlined exactly how they’d bribe him with power and easy living in return for a compliant puppet, all of those were mayoral tasks that Scar was getting quite good at– and schooled his expression as carefully as he could, keeping it intent and scornful.
“Grian,” he said, “I’ll have you know that’s my document-signing hand, which I need for all kinds of official politicianiacal activities. Pardons, for one. Negotiating with unions, sentencing Mumbo Jumbo to an engineering indenture, having grass planted instead of this ugly fungus that I just can’t seem to make people get rid of–”
The last one got a reaction where the mention of Mumbo hadn’t. Grian’s eyes snapped up, grip tightening to actively painful, and Scar yelped, swallowed back the rest of the noise when Grian didn’t let up. Okay, so that was gonna be a bruise, then. That was fine. The mayor was entitled to wearing long sleeves whenever and however he pleased.
“The mycelium’s off limits.”
The mycelium was supposed to be a symbol . It was metaphorical, a motif the Resistance used because they planned to be just as impossible to erase, coming back no matter how often HermitCorp scoured them from the planet, welling up like blood from a fresh wound. Scar had sat through briefings on this strategy of theirs and how it played out, how to combat it best. People painted mycelia on piping in the lower city, laceworks of fruiting bodies, dappled pilei and filaments whose brushstrokes went on for miles, a single connected line that someone redrew every time their supervisors made them wash it off. Luminescent paints that shone in the gloom around the terraforming engines.
It’s about the principle, that was the slogan Grian had used, warm and excited like leading a revolution was the best fun he’d ever had. HermitCorp’s representatives had listed him as an extremist before the week was out. Scar had sat through a lot of meetings about it, since the push to make Mumbo Jumbo the mayor of the upper city had fallen through. Listen to me here. We’ve got to make them as scared of us as they are of their mushroom stories. We’ve got to get inside their heads.
Most people thought the tales of miners getting possessed were a myth, propaganda. Mumbo Jumbo had thought that. He still thought it, insisting to authorities that he hadn’t seen any signs of serious infection by the time he’d been arrested, but that had been months ago, hadn’t it. Some events had happened in between. Mumbo had been taken into custody, and the Resistance had gotten desperate enough to drink untreated water.
“I’m the mayor, aren’t I? I have to look out for HermitCorp interests in the colony,” Scar said, trying to pull his wrist from Grian’s grip, maybe unreasonably terrified that he’d pull too hard and Grian’s flesh would just crumble like a rotten log, white fungal filaments strung under the surface around his bones. Wow, was that a thought Scar needed to never have again. He’d never think of this office the same way again if that happened in here. “An upset, even, one for the history books! It’s not every day you get someone from the lower city in the most prestigious office in the colony, and let me tell you, Grian, the view up here is amazing. Really goes to your head, I feel lightheaded every time I’m up here, looking down... it makes me dizzy sometimes. Does it do that to your head, too?”
“You’ve been burning out the fungal layers,” Grian said. “It comes into the light and you sear it, you pull it apart. You hurt it.”
Scar swallowed hard. “The terraformers have quotas to meet, my friend. You wouldn’t want them to starve, would you? For shame, Grian. I thought you and Mumbo ran on a platform of working for indentures, not depriving them of a chance to pay their debts.”
“HermitCorp doesn’t want them paying their debts,” Grian said, and for a moment he could’ve been the man debating Scar across the stage, the two of them slinging arguments back and forth while HermitCorp’s original favored candidate struggled in the limelight. Mumbo had stuttered– Mumbo had been out sick for that event, letting his campaign manager take the stage in his place– but Grian had been the power behind the throne, then and for always. Grian’s had been the household name, even if the coverage hadn’t all been positive. “They want indentures for as long as they can hold onto them, even if it means falsifying their records, or– worse than that.”
“Worse than that?”
Grian still hadn’t let go of Scar’s wrist. He traced the tip of the ceramic knife along the back of Scar’s hand, not hard enough to so much as scratch his skin— Scar’s heart leaped anyway— and put it down with an abrupt clatter. For a second his empty hand spasmed, his eyes darting up to Scar, and then he said, “The– we were talking about the mycelium. The drills.”
“You were threatening me with a knife,” Scar corrected him, putting on cheer.
“You’re not acting very threatened.”
“Well, I could call security if I’m worried, can’t I? I just thought I’d hear what you had to say first. Listening to the people is a good way to stay mayor, you know. And you still haven’t told me your demands.”
“I have,” Grian said. “Our demands are that you stop terraforming, that’s simple. Stop the mantle drill, stop burning out mycelium when it creeps under the surface, stop making this wound in the planet’s surface– did you know, all the native animals avoid it here like the plague? It’s just rats, all the way down, and rats aren’t good for anything. Their brains are wrong.”
“That’s good to know,” Scar said, absolutely not meaning it. “So why should I do that? What will you give me in return? If you kill me you’re not getting any progress, I’ll have you know, I’ll be replaced in a jiffy and whoever’s after me won’t bother listening to you before they call in the big guns. And HermitCorp has some very big guns.”
“If I kill you, you’ll still be dead,” Grian said, and Scar wanted to scream. “And that’s– we can–”
Scar really wished he was wearing a filtration mask. Scar felt like he must have been breathing spores, if they were airborne— Cub said they weren’t, but it wasn’t like they’d studied the spores that affected humans, was it? No one saw infected humans up close. Scar had made inquiries, and— well, Mumbo technically had, but Mumbo hadn’t seen Grian like this. He would’ve been a lot more freaked out if he had.
Whatever was wafting off Grian’s skin was getting into Scar’s lungs.
“You can organize another strike,” Scar suggested. “That would get HermitCorp in a tizzy, if it happened again and interrupted production. You could start stirring up unrest in the lower city, making people think about all the cool privileges the upper city gets that indentured workers can hardly even start to dream of.”
“Scar, that’s not–”
“You can ask about Mumbo, since he’s been asking about you,” Scar said, a little desperately. “Or you could communicate with your existing allies, how about that? You could go up to a guy you, oh, let’s use a hypothetical example– you could talk to someone whose election you rigged and tell him what in the world is going on, and maybe let him in on whatever secret plans the Resistance is cooking up in the middle of nowhere. Just for his peace of mind, you understand.”
“I don’t have any hypothetical allies with rigged elections,” Grian gritted out, “because those hypothetical allies are stopping everything we try to do. Or they’re hanging around camp asking why everyone’s acting weird suddenly, when– when Mumbo was the one acting weird, not drinking the water when it’s perfectly fine.”
“Grian, you tried to blow up the mantle drill,” Scar said. “You sabotaged the terraforming engines.”
“We’ve been taking decisive action.”
“You let enforcers arrest Mumbo. You let Mumbo come back to the dome by himself, when he’s, like, almost as recognizable as you are–”
“I didn’t let Mumbo do anything,” Grian said, and if there was strain in his tone, Scar couldn’t hear it. The view from his office was beautiful, the rosy colors of the dome’s projected sunset streaking down across the false horizon. Outside of it, Scar knew, the sky was gray and dull, marbled with clouds that never quite went away. Parts of this planet were plagued by perpetual storms, or bracketed by oceans that threw up monster waves and made travel almost impossible. Their part of the planet had a stable ecosystem, predicated on a mushroom forest whose fruiting bodies reached past a human’s shoulders with ease, but it had a cost, too. Grian and his friends had been paying it in exposure to cold, and exhaustion, and the animal terror of being cast out of the den– they’d been paying with their minds, apparently, even if they hadn’t realized it. “He left on his own.”
“He thought you’d come to break him out,” Scar said, “but you never did, did you? He’s still in custody. Very nice custody, because I’m a merciful man, but you have to know that can change.”
“Mumbo isn’t the priority,” Grian said. “The union’s not even the priority, they’re all well and good but they’re as complicit as anybody.”
“Grian, the only way to stop the terraforming is to end the colony,” Scar said. “And that’s– I can’t let that happen, my friend. I haven’t been letting you win because I can’t, and HermitCorp, oh, man, you have no idea what they’ve been up to, what I’ve had to deal with these past few months. I haven’t gotten through one day without having to talk them down from something they want to do to our colony, extra taxes or hunting the Resistance down with drones or– or marking out union organizers, they don’t even give me enough security to keep you from sneaking in here with a knife in all your mushroom-y glory! Which would be fine, the Goodtimes Guarantee covers challenges like that, but you have to give me something, Grian. A smidge of support. An idea of what you guys are doing out there. You’re not all fungus-brained now, are you? You liked when I mentioned unions.”
“I’m not fungus-brained at all,” Grian said. “I’m here with perfectly reasonable demands from someone who’s supposed to be my secret ally, my man on the inside–”
Scar said desperately, “Blowing up the mantle drill would have killed people.”
“You should have let it,” Grian said, and there wasn’t anything of the union organizer left in his dark eyes. “We had a deal, Scar. Me and Mumbo helped you seem like a good candidate, and you helped us when we needed it. You’re reneging on your half.”
“I’m sorry,” Scar said, putting a hand over Grian’s hand on his wrist. Moving it up a little to Grian’s elbow, where a fruiting body peeked out of the crook, and refusing to shudder when this meant his fingers came away a little bit powdery. “I never meant to hurt your fungus friends. I just couldn’t let you take out so much of your own base, that’s all. No reneging intended.”
You and me, buddy, Grian had said back then, grinning like Scar couldn’t take him with an army. Collective action’s all well and good, but a fella’s got to be able to apply some strategy.
They’d been exchanging letters even before the election, avoiding digital communication like they owed it money. Scar’s illegal plant business had been struggling, which would have been fine except for how the strikes had meant increased scrutiny from upper city authorities, making a whole bunch of his more subtle sales fall through in the process.
Medicine had been hard to move. Literature had been easier, minus the difficult situation of having to print the dang things himself, and his customers’ belts had been tightening. Drawn faces, weary eyes, smiles that twitched up when Scar put on his very best salesman act and fell away like sparks from dying machines, going dull and quiet. A man couldn’t haggle in those conditions. A man had to talk to his friends and to their friends, and find that every one of them was in the same freaking boat, a lifeboat finally sinking under the waves of a ginormous ocean, and then– well, then a man had to find some new friends.
Friends like Grian, the newest representative of the terraformers’ union, who– rumor had it– had led a bit of a rebellion against his own leadership. He’d come around to Scar’s shop to invite him to a party, and then he hadn’t let up at all, the scoundrel, herding Mumbo and Doc and Impulse into his shenanigans, pushing at the terraformers to talk about pay, handing out union membership cards like beads at a parade.
Grian had used to know all of the workers around the mantle drill, the engineers and the terraformers and the sanitation employees who lived too far underground for the mayor of the colony to bother with, anymore. He used to know their families.
“But, you know, in the meantime, I need you to get out of my office,” Scar said, just as conciliating, and the leader of the Mycelium Resistance stared at him. The urge to reach out and brush his bangs away from his eyes shuddered through Scar like the aftershock of a long-past earthquake, a ripple of earth that made him queasy. He pasted on a politician’s smile. “You’ve made your points, Grian. Now it’s my turn to consider my options, and I have a lot of meetings scheduled for this evening, you know, I’m a busy man! A busy man in high demand, with other meetings than this one on my calendar.”
“I’m not done talking,” Grian said. “You haven’t promised us anything, do you– I’m not joking about escalation, dude, you’re not getting with the program. Scar, we had a deal.”
“Sure,” Scar said. “I’ll keep that in mind. Right now, though, what I see is an intruder in my amazing, picture-perfect mayoral office, with a view that could be on a postcard– and you’re ruining that view, you rascal.”
Grian tightened his grip on the knife, shivering like those words had snagged some indignant piece of him left behind. “Excuse me?”
“Cub’s coming up to talk to me in about an hour,” Scar said, “and trust me, you don’t want to be here when he arrives with his HermitCorp security. He gets a whole detail, it’s really unfair.”
“Scar.”
“I’ll consider what you said and make a decision, okay? No more terraforming, no more ruining the mycelial layer– you have been incredibly clear. I know exactly what you want, and what you’re willing to do for it.”
“Right,” Grian said uncertainly. “That’s– right, that’s what I meant to do here. That’s what I had to say. I’ll— I can go ahead and leave, then, now that I’ve said that.”
His dark eyes were dull, aggression faltering with no clear place to dig in. He’d gotten into Scar’s office, probably through a security gap so wide a rocket could pass through it, and now he was gonna get out in a similar way. Maybe through the front door, for all the mayor’s security seemed to care.
Scar wasn’t going to bother sounding the alarm before Grian left. He was gonna have to talk to Cub about a lot of things later today, and a potential assassination attempt was the least of them.
“Bye, Grian. Farewell,” Scar said, wrist smarting, wishing he could scrape a layer off his whole body and that he’d never agreed to this scheme in the first place, wishing he was a mayor with real actual power, the kind who could change society with a snap of his fingers. The kind of authority HermitCorp liked to let him pretend he was. “Have a great time surviving in the cold harsh wilderness!”
Grian left. Scar didn’t watch him go. The knife stayed on the desk like Grian had forgotten it completely, moving on autopilot with half his brain left behind. Scar only waited a moment after he’d gone to dig through his desk and scrape some of the powder from his hand into a vial, sanitizing after and carefully not touching the knife at all, then sat back and took another moment to breathe, involuntary visions of mushrooms sprouting from his own body crawling across his brain.
Cub would have antifungals. HermitCorp had all kinds of things the lower city and the Resistance couldn’t hope to access: that was why they’d decided on the scheme in the first place, getting someone in position to use those resources for good. Before Grian’s exile, it really had seemed like a good plan.
Maybe it could still be, if Cub could look over what was possessing Grian– if Scar came up with an excuse for how he’d gotten the sample that was convincing enough that HermitCorp labs wouldn’t mind analyzing it.
Scar pressed the button for security, wondering if he should crouch to see if it was even still hooked up. He tried not to breathe too deeply.