Chapter Text
“Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.”
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2
Shion vanished between one footstep and the next.
Nezumi walked six paces before the silence bloomed around him, losing the soft scrape of a second pair of boots, the intermittent chime of metal clasps on an overfilled pack, the half-audible calculations Shion had been making since sunrise about distance, cloud cover, and whether the road’s northward curve contradicted the survey map or merely exposed its age. He turned with one hand already beneath his cape, fingers resting against the knife he had carried through the grit and grime of city streets and the uncanny strangeness of a wilderness full of hungrier things, only to find Shion kneeling in the drainage ditch with his white head bent over a piece of rotting wood.
“Don’t touch it.”
“I already touched it.”
“Of course you did.”
The old road had been surrendering itself for years, first reluctantly, then all at once. Alder roots had lifted the asphalt into black scales; moss filled the fissures with a green so vivid it seemed wet even beneath sunlight, and young birches leaned over the abandoned lanes as though listening for engines whose last echoes had died before either of them was born. They had passed the final radiation marker yesterday afternoon, its warning symbol bleached almost white, although Shion continued checking the dosimeter every hour with the punctuality of a overzealous hen. Since morning, it had offered them nothing beyond the low, irregular murmur of ordinary background radiation.
For Nezumi, the instrument had become one more foreign voice among many he understood better. The wind had already told him rain would return before evening, carrying the cold mineral smell of distant water and the tender underscent released when leaves prepared to close their pores. He could feel the static of chemical erosion on the texture of tree trunks and could tell when it wasn't safe to tread further. The city had trained every part of his body toward vigilance, teaching his shoulders to narrow, his footsteps to measure exits, his sleep to remain hooked by one claw into wakefulness. In the wild, those same instincts opened instead of closing. He crossed slick roots without disturbing them, heard hollows beneath the soil through the altered note of his tread, and moved among trunks with the soundless, gathered grace of an animal returning to water. The Mao had belonged to the land in ways the numbered cities had never possessed language to record; even now, with most of their voices extinguished, something in him answered when branches shifted and the wind spoke through their leaves.
To him, every living forest carried the ashen negative of another. Nezumi could never enter one without seeing, somewhere behind its green abundance, the fallen trees of Mao Forest and the pale remains of a people burned from the earth that had borne them. Still, grief did not make the living trees his enemy. Their roots knew nothing of human borders, and their seeds had never learned obedience.
Shion, meanwhile, was crouched halfway inside a ditch.
Nezumi descended after him, boots sinking through leaves made translucent by rain. There was that faint metallic cold in the air that remained after a storm had emptied itself. Shion had found part of a fallen branch beneath the wreckage of an old road sign, although branch was too generous a word for something so softened by decay that its edges yielded beneath the weight of moss.
Through a split in the bark, an impossible blue was showing.
It ran beneath the surface in veins of turquoise and deep viridian, saturating the grain as though the tree had swallowed a piece of summer sky and kept it hidden through death, winter, and the long industrious hunger of rot. Where the wood had broken, the color deepened toward its center, too rich for mold, too cold for sap, resembling copper roofs after rain or seawater glimpsed through green glass.
Nezumi glanced at the dosimeter clipped to Shion’s belt. “Tell me that is natural.”
“It is natural.”
“You answered much too quickly.”
“I knew the answer before you asked.”
“That has never stopped you from giving me six additional answers.”
Shion looked up, rain-bright leaves reflected in eyes so dark they sometimes appeared black, although the light found secret colors inside them, violet at the edges and a blue like deep water shifting far beneath night. Weariness had lived there all morning, gathered after another night on hard ground, yet now it dissolved beneath an oncoming radiance, thought kindling thought until even the scar along his cheek seemed less like a wound than a line drawn toward discovery.
“Chlorociboria,” Shion said.
“That sounds like an intestinal disease.”
“It is a genus of ascomycete fungi.”
“That explanation has not improved matters.”
“The fungus colonizes dead wood and produces a pigment called xylindein. Its fruiting bodies are small and usually cup-shaped, although I don’t see any here. This could be Chlorociboria aeruginascens, but identifying the species from the stain alone would be irresponsible because C. aeruginosa produces a similar color, and without apothecia or microscopic examination of the spores, I can only identify the genus with confidence.”
Nezumi lowered his pack onto the leaves. Experience had taught him that Shion’s explanations possessed their own weather; once the pressure changed and the first words began to fall, shelter became a matter of patience.
Shion lifted the branch carefully, supporting its softened underside with both palms. “Look at the fracture. The color continues through the wood because the hyphae grow within it. Hyphae are microscopic filaments, and together they form the mycelium, which is the primary body of the fungus. Most people think of a mushroom as the organism, although the mushroom is only a reproductive structure, similar to seeing an apple and assuming it is the whole tree. The mycelium can remain concealed inside the substrate for years.”
“The comparison would work better if apple trees grew inside apples.”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“At least you considered it.”
“I did, and it was inaccurate.”
Shion turned the fragment toward the light filtering through the canopy, and the turquoise changed beneath his fingers, becoming first ocean, then oxidized metal, then the color of an old bruise healing beneath translucent skin. His thumb hovered over one stained ring without touching it. Even his hands had become attentive.
“Chlorociboria causes a form of soft rot,” he continued. “Its enzymes break down components of the cell walls, particularly cellulose and hemicellulose, which explains the texture. The xylindein accumulates as the fungus grows through the grain. We still don’t fully understand why it produces so much pigment. It may inhibit competing organisms or offer protection from environmental stress, but those explanations remain incomplete.”
“You sound delighted by that.”
“I am.”
“By not knowing?”
“By having an unanswered question.”
Shion said it without hesitation, as though no abyss had ever frightened him so long as he could measure its circumference. Nezumi watched water gather at the ends of his hair and descend along his cheek, briefly following the pale edge of his scar before falling soundlessly into the leaves.
“An unanswered question has structure,” Shion said. “You can identify what is missing, design observations, eliminate explanations that fail. Not knowing only becomes frightening when people disguise it as certainty.”
The forest breathed around them through a thousand small apertures. Water slipped from leaf to leaf; something winged and unseen rattled higher in the canopy, while beneath the soil fungi threaded through root, rot, and buried bone with an appetite too quiet for human hearing. Beyond the trees lay entire regions marked in red on Shion’s map, places where wells remained poisoned and wind lifted contaminated dust from fields that had forgotten the pressure of seed. Here, rain had entered the grain, and something infinitesimal had followed.
“So the forest is recovering,” Nezumi said.
Shion’s expression tightened with immediate concentration. “I would be careful with that conclusion. Recovery suggests movement toward an earlier ecological state, and we don’t have reliable baseline data for this region. One fungal genus cannot establish the condition of the entire forest, and its presence tells us nothing about radionuclides in the soil.”
“There are moments when talking to you feels like being corrected by a very earnest encyclopedia.”
“You asked.”
“I did.”
“What I can say is that decomposition is active here. The fungus is breaking apart dead plant matter, and the carbon, minerals, and other compounds held inside the wood are reentering biological cycles. Some will become fungal tissue, some will remain in the soil, and some may be taken up by the roots of another tree. Matter has no loyalty to form.”
The sentence entered Nezumi with a quiet violence.
Shion’s fingers shifted around the ruined branch, gentle with a thing already far beyond pain. “Life is using what died,” he corrected himself, brows knit. “That sounded cruel after I said it aloud.”
“I know what you meant.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
Shion studied him with the grave attention he usually gave damaged instruments and contradictory data. “Your expression changed.”
“Faces do that.”
“You looked away.”
“There are trees in several directions. Occasionally I look at them.”
“Do you want me to stop explaining?”
Nezumi looked back at him. The radiance had dimmed around the edges, banked by uncertainty; Shion held himself very still, waiting for an instruction precise enough to trust.
“The wood,” Nezumi said. “Continue talking about the wood.”
Shion blinked. “You are still interested?”
“It's fascinating when you speak science to me.”
“Are you mocking me?”
“Partly.”
“Which part?”
“The phrasing. The request itself is sincere.”
The words produced a flush that began beneath Shion’s collar and climbed with remarkable speed into his face. Nezumi enjoyed it for precisely three seconds before Shion lowered his gaze to the branch and resumed speaking as if sincerity, once confirmed, had to be honored with complete and meticulous effort.
“The pigment is unusually stable,” he said, his voice moving faster now, gathering tributaries. “Wood stained by Chlorociboria was used decoratively centuries before the fallout, particularly in marquetry and intarsia. Artisans placed pieces of naturally colored wood together to create images, and some blue-green sections retained their color for hundreds of years. The fruiting bodies disappear, the wood is cut and moved, the people who handled it die, and the pigment remains inside the grain.”
He paused, then looked directly at Nezumi.
“You like listening to me explain things.”
“What a reckless hypothesis.”
“It is an observation. When you are bored, you interrupt more frequently. When you are pretending to be bored, you make jokes but remain physically still, and your eyes stop checking the surrounding paths.”
The old instinct to move stirred beneath Nezumi’s skin, offended by recognition, yet it had lost some of its authority over the years. Shion had followed him into places where names peeled away, through silence, solitude, distance, and the vast interior wilderness Nezumi had once believed no other human being could cross. Somehow, he had reached the deepest chambers without forcing a door, then remained there so naturally that Nezumi could no longer imagine the architecture of himself without Shion moving through it.
“You have spent too much time studying rodent behavior,” Nezumi said.
“I have spent a great deal of time studying you.”
Nezumi reached for him.
His hand settled at the nape of Shion’s neck, fingers sliding beneath damp white hair to the warmth protected there. Shion leaned into the touch almost by instinct, as if he knew as surely as the roots know the earth that he belonged into that hold, that no matter what thread of the world came undone, this hand would remain. Nezumi brought their foreheads together, breathing wet leaves, cold air, and the familiar warmth of Shion’s skin.
“You study me,” he murmured. “I listen to you. We have each chosen our method.”
“That is not equivalent.”
“No. Yours is invasive.”
“I can stop.”
“I don’t want you to.”
Shion’s eyes lifted to his, and there it was again, that dark bluish twilight, the sea seen after sunset when color should have disappeared yet somehow remained, dense and fathomless beneath the surface.
“I like knowing what the world looks like after it has passed through your mind,” Nezumi said.
Shion’s breath caught softly between them. “That may be one of the kindest things you have ever said to me.”
“Then your sample size is poor.”
“It is extensive.”
Nezumi kissed the corner of his mouth, tasting rain, and felt Shion smile against him.
They returned the larger branch to its bed of moss, although Shion collected a fragment that had already broken loose, wrapped it in paper, and recorded the location with coordinates, moisture conditions, tree type, and several qualifications concerning the uncertainty of all three. By the time they resumed walking, the afternoon had thinned into a pale wash of gold.
Nezumi took the lead. The forest received him without resistance, guiding his feet through fern and root while the wind combed its cool fingers through his hair. Behind him, Shion resumed explaining the chemical structure of xylindein, secure now in the knowledge that it was wanted, and Nezumi listened as he always had, even during the years of absence, when memory had been the only voice capable of following him across every border.
At dusk they made camp beneath the tilted roof of an abandoned maintenance shelter where Nezumi coaxed a fire from damp twigs while Shion measured rice into their dented pot with unnecessary precision. Their socks steamed beside the flames. Dinner tasted faintly of smoke and strongly of nothing, yet Shion ate without complaint, one hand resting near the paper-wrapped fragment as though it might escape; until he fell asleep with his head against Nezumi’s shoulder while the forest whispered beyond the ruined walls.
After the fire had begun consuming its own red architecture, Nezumi unfolded the paper and placed the fragment across his palm.
In the weakening light, its turquoise darkened slowly, each blue-green vein receding beneath shadow until the wood resembled ordinary rot.
He wondered what color would surface if something split him along the grain. Perhaps the ashen grey of the trees felled in Mao Forest had entered deepest, settling in rings around the child who had escaped them; perhaps the mud and grime of West Block had seeped through his skin, or the pitch-black tunnels beneath the correctional facility had hollowed him and filled the space.
Beside him, Shion stirred, eyes fluttering open briefly. Touched by the last low flame, the blue moved within their darkness like waves beneath a moonless sky.
Perhaps that color had entered Nezumi too, quietly following every fracture, spreading through ash, mud, and cavernous dark until no blade could find the place it began.