Chapter Text
Joshua Tree at dawn is the kind of quiet that makes you want to apologize to it. No wind. No birds. Just rocks doing their thousand-year impression of being inanimate, and the pale sky getting paler, and Marshall Cuso sitting cross-legged on a flat stone with his back against the upside-down elephant rock, watching a tortoise eat a piece of kale.
The tortoise was named Socrates. The rock was named, technically, the elephant rock, and it was only upside-down because Marshall had been looking at it for six hours that first night, alone, hallucinating gently, trying to decide if the message would reach her. It had. That was the part he still couldn't quite square.
"Okay," he said to Socrates. "So now what?"
Socrates chewed. Socrates had opinions about kale and very few about fugitive logistics.
Behind them, inside the sagging tent, Frances was still asleep. She slept like someone who'd been awake for three days, which she had. Marshall had counted the breaths because counting breaths was something to do, and because every time he looked away from her he was half-convinced she'd evaporate, the way people in his life had started doing.
Three days since the raid. Three days since Hildy's farm burned and the FBI came down on it like weather, and Copano went down in the crossfire, and Marshall - dead again, briefly, the way you'd stub a toe - had surfaced on the far side of the portal with Copano's spore dissolving on his tongue and the whole world rearranged. Three days since Frances drove into this parking lot of the afterlife in Rick's company Prius with the gas light on and said, "I got your elephant."
She hadn't said much else. Neither had he. They'd been circling each other ever since, the way two people do when they've got a thing in common too big to mention. The thing being: they had committed the same crime - believing it - and the world had decided that was punishable by everything.
Marshall had been in the process of being dead enough times that he'd stopped fearing it, which he understood was not the same as being brave. It was more like being familiar. The dying, the actual dying, there had been three of those. The first, in Peru, he'd been some guy who'd eaten a weird mushroom out of scientific curiosity and then woken up with the taste of lightning in his mouth and a scar gone. The second, the crash on the way to Frances's, he'd felt it go dark and then felt it come back, the way a bulb flickers. The third, Hildy's hands on his back at the cliff edge, the sky tipping, the ground coming up - that one had teeth. That one had been a person deciding, calmly, that he was better off dead. That one had left a mark under the one Copano's spore had already erased. And the room, the white room with the figures, he'd been in that four times, because there was one visit that hadn't been a death: the afternoon in New York, the demonstration, when he'd eaten a piece in front of Frances to prove it wasn't poison, and then spent four hours trying to explain the little white figures to a woman who'd thought he was having a stroke.
He didn't want to do it again. He wanted to be done being the guy who dies for the cause, mostly because the cause hadn't actually asked him to.
Frances came out of the tent at 6:47, which Marshall knew because he'd been timing her, not in a weird way, more in a "is she breathing" way, and she stood in the pink light with her hair doing whatever it did and looked at him the way you look at a math problem you've been avoiding.
"You're up," she said.
"Tortoise was up."
"Tortoise is always up. Tortoise is the most up person I've ever met." She sat down next to him, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, far enough that they didn't. "You been out here all night?"
"Mostly."
"Thinking about her?"
Marshall considered lying. He considered it for about a second. "Thinking about what she said. Before she pushed me. That the mushroom wants things. That it's not a medicine, it's a - a signal. I keep turning it over."
Frances was quiet. She watched Socrates work on the kale like it was the most important thing in the desert. "And?"
"And I don't think she's wrong that it wants things. I think she's wrong that it wants her. Or wants what she wants. The mushroom doesn't talk to people. It just shows them the room. Everybody's in the same room, that's all." He picked up a pebble, turned it. "Hildy decided the room was a church. It's not a church. It's a room."
"Okay," Frances said slowly. "So if it's a room, what do we do with it?"
"We put people in it who need healing. One at a time, because that's how many mushrooms we've got." He gestured at the cooler, where the last of the real thing was - a stub of fruit body and the spores wrapped in a damp paper towel inside a Ziploc inside another Ziploc, like a fugitive onion. "That's the whole plan, Frances. That's all I've ever had. I find people who are dying, I feed them a mushroom, they don't die. Then I find the next person."
"That's not a plan," Frances said. "That's a hobby with a body count."
"It's a plan with a body count of zero so far. I'll take it."
She didn't answer that. The sun came up the rest of the way, all at once, the way it does in the desert, and the rocks went from gray to gold, and somewhere out on the highway a semi downshifted, and for a minute it was almost possible to believe they were just two people on a camping trip with no warrants, no dead mentor, no pharmaceutical empire that wanted their heads in boxes.
Then Frances said, "We can't stay here."
"I know."
"We've got maybe a week before someone remembers the Prius. Rick will have reported it stolen by now, or not, depending on how much he wants to pretend I don't exist."
"You think he reported it?"
"I think he's in a boardroom telling everyone I was always a flight risk and that this is why you don't hire out of the county college." She said it without heat, the way you talk about an ex-boss who isn't worth the calories. "Either way, the plate's hot. And the cash is -" she did the math in her head, visibly, the way she'd always done math, like a bank statement unrolling behind her eyes "- a problem."
"Gas station breakfast is on me," Marshall said. "We've got like forty dollars."
"Thirty-seven. I counted."
They walked to the gas station. It was a gas station. It had the flat feeling of a place that had been built with no expectation of being loved, and the woman behind the counter looked at them the way she looked at the security camera, which was with a kind of tired professional suspicion. Marshall bought two breakfast burritos and a bottle of water and a bag of ice for the cooler, because the cooler mattered more than the burritos, and Frances bought coffee and a map of Arizona, which she unfolded over the hood of the Prius like a general planning a siege.
"We go north," she said, "we hit the interstate, we get picked up in about four hours. We go south, we're in Mexico by nightfall with no papers, no plan, and no way to grow the mushroom, which needs -"
"The tortoise," Marshall said. "I know."
"Right. So we can't leave the country with the one thing that can actually regrow the thing that matters, and we can't stay here, and we can't go back to the farm because the farm is a crime scene, and we can't go to your brother's because he's on a list now." She tapped the map. "So what we can do is figure out where the mushroom grows and find it. Zane's got tortoises. He's got, like, a greenhouse full of them. That's where we go."
"Zane's the first person they'll watch," Marshall said. "He's my brother. He's on the list. They probably have a chair set up across from his driveway."
"Then we don't go to his house. We go to the tortoise farm. The one he told us about, the importer, out by the border. The tortoises are the point. Zane can meet us there or not. But the mushroom doesn't care about the address, it just needs the -"
"The substrate," they both said at the same time, and then neither of them knew what to do with the little flash of it, that old high-school-lab-partner thing, so they let it die in the parking lot.
That was when the radio in the gas station started talking about Diablo Flats.
Marshall heard it through the open door. The woman behind the counter had turned the volume up, the way people do when a small town gets a big story, and the voice of a reporter was doing that thing reporters do where they sound urgent and also like they're reading off a card. Something about a hospital. Something about a water tower. Something about a dozen patients, all of them from the same small town, all of them showing up at the regional ER in the same forty-eight hours, all of them hallucinating.
"Public health officials say they are investigating a possible contamination event. Residents are being advised to boil water. The patients - some of whom have been hospitalized - have described seeing small figures, which one nurse told our station 'looked like something out of a fever dream.' At least one patient has been restrained."
Marshall's hand, the one holding the map, went still.
Frances looked at him. She saw it. She'd worked at Reutical long enough to read a symptom list the way other people read a menu, and she saw it the second the reporter said "small figures."
"No," she said.
"Yeah," he said.
"It could be anything. Water-borne, mold, some old pipe -"
"It's the tincture," Marshall said. "It's her. That's what the concentrate does when it's not the real thing. The real mushroom heals you. The processed stuff - the pill, the derivative, whatever Hildy was cooking - it puts you in the room and doesn't let you out. It's a key with no door. You just stand there with the figures." He'd seen the real mushroom heal a man in New York - a man who'd been dying, and then wasn't. But he'd also seen what the processed version did to people in Reutical's tests, the ones Kiki had written favorable reports about, the ones with the glassy eyes and the twitching. "It's her. She's dosing a town."
Frances looked at the map. The town was maybe a hundred and fifty miles from here. Not far. In the desert, a hundred and fifty miles is breakfast.
"We don't go," she said. "We can't go. That's the first place they'll look, Marshall. She poisons a town, the whole world is looking at that town, and we show up with the one mushroom in existence that can fix it? That's a trap. That's the oldest trap."
"She's not trapping us," Marshall said. "She's not even thinking about us. She's -" He stopped. How did you explain Hildy to someone who'd never sat in her kitchen, never watched her talk about spores like they were prayers? "She thinks the mushroom wants everyone in the room at once. She thinks the tincture is an invitation. She's not baiting a trap, she's throwing a party and she thinks we should come."
"And you want to go because you think you can - what, reason with her? Give the town the real mushroom?"
"I want to go because there are people drinking poisoned water," Marshall said. "That's the whole argument. That's the only argument I've ever had, and I'm not going to stop having it because the water's in a town that's on a map."
Frances stared at him. The desert light made her look older than she was, or younger, Marshall could never tell. She had that face, the one that had been doing math since she was a kid, the face of someone who had learned early that the universe charges interest.
"You're going to get us caught," she said.
"Probably."
"And you're going to get us killed."
"Also probably."
"And then what?" She threw her hands up, a gesture so fast and furious it startled a bird out of a bush. "What's the plan, Marshall? We get to Diablo Flats, we dose the water with the last spores we have, we save forty people, and then we have nothing. No mushroom. No way to grow more. No tortoise, because Socrates eats the wrong thing and dies, and then we're not even the good kind of fugitives, we're fugitives with a dead turtle and a memory of a cure. That's the plan?"
Marshall thought about it. The sun was fully up now, and the heat was starting to come on, and the map on the hood was curling at the corners.
"People are thirsty," he said. "The plan is that people are thirsty and we have water."
It was not a plan. Frances would have told you that. She did tell him that, in fact, in several different ways as they packed up the Prius, and she kept telling him as they loaded the cooler and the tent and Socrates's travel bin into the back, and she was still telling him, in a low furious monotone, when she got in the driver's seat and started the engine.
"Get in," she said.
"Are we going?"
"We're going to the town," she said, "to see the water tower, to see if it's actually her, and then we are leaving before anyone knows we were there. And you are not going to give away the whole supply to the first sick person you see, because I am not losing this - I am not losing you again to a - to a gesture."
Marshall got in. Socrates, in the back, made a sound that might have been agreement and might have been gas.
They drove out of the parking lot of rocks, past the upside-down elephant, and Marshall didn't look back at it. He was done with signs. He was done with messages in the dark. He was, he told himself, done with being the guy who dies.
Frances drove. The desert slid past. The radio was still on, and the reporter had moved on from Diablo Flats to a story about a new seasoning product that was selling out at a grocery chain on the coast, and Marshall listened with half an ear and a cold stomach, because the seasoning was Reutical's, he could hear it in the way the reporter said "breakthrough," and that meant Rick and Kiki were in the food business now, which meant the processed derivative was out in the world in a form you could sprinkle on a chicken.
He didn't say anything. There wasn't room in the car for another thing to be wrong.
Out the side window, on the far edge of the horizon, a plume of dust was moving. A car, or a truck, or something on two wheels, cutting across the desert parallel to the road, too fast and too purposeful to be a tourist. Marshall watched it until the road curved and the dust was gone, and he didn't tell Frances about that either.
He thought about the elephant. He thought about the room, the white figures, the way the portal had felt when he'd drawn the sign in the air and known, the way you know a thing in a dream, that somewhere else Frances was seeing it too.
Come find me, he'd drawn. And she had.
Marshall watched the dust settle on the horizon and told himself the rider was nobody. A rancher. A ranger. A desert person doing desert things.
The radio said something about the new seasoning being "available in three flavors."
Socrates ate another piece of kale.