“What?” Jake asked.
“This letterbox isn’t in Idaho. It’s a couple of miles from here.”
THEY PARKED IN A LITTLE LOT OFF ELLIS HOLLOW CREEK Road, next to a sign that said FINGER LAKES LAND TRUST PRESERVE.
“Did Liam come here with Dylan a lot?” Jake asked.
“We both did,” Maggie said. “Liam’s on the board of advisers of the Finger Lakes Land Trust. And Dylan and I did a couple of Fungus-Among-Us art projects out here. It’s a beautiful area, mostly forests, gorges, and streams, all owned by the Finger Lakes Land Trust. Over a hundred acres total. It used to be a hunting ground for the Cayuga Indians.”
The sun was low, the trail cut by long, dark shadows, as they worked their way through the brush. Maggie read the second pair of lines: “ ‘After spotting a ship, veer left and keep going/to water and up is a tree pregnant and showing.’ There’s a rotten old rowboat near the trail juncture,” she said. “It’s about a quarter of a mile up. Dylan loved to play in it when he was younger.”
“He seems to be holding up pretty well.”
“He puts up a good front—it’s a Connor trait. But Liam’s death has been very hard on him, I can tell. He’s hurt, and he’s confused. Just like me.” Dylan had fought to come with them, but Maggie wasn’t having any of it. She didn’t know what they were going to find, but she didn’t want her son to see it until she knew what it was.
A slight breeze was in the trees, setting off the eerie squeaking of tree branches rubbing against one another. They half walked, half ran down the trail. On the way over, Jake had told her about his conversation with the Cornell police, that people were coming from Fort Detrick to investigate Liam’s death and search his labs. And about Vlad’s comment that a Crawler would make a great vector for a pathogen.
“You think he would’ve kept any dangerous fungi in his lab?” Jake asked.
“It’s possible. There are thousands of deadly strains. Fungi are mostly feeders on the dead, but more than a few are willing to speed up the process and create their own food. There it is,” she said, spying the broken-down rowboat in the shadows on the side of the trail. Maggie had a flashlight with her, played the beam up and down the rotting boards. The trail forked, one part continuing straight, the other dropping off to the left. Maggie veered left, Jake behind her. A few hundred yards later was a stream. From there, the path went up a small rise, a larger ridge to the left. She stopped and flashed the beam around, the woods swallowing it. She reread the note.
“Pregnant tree?”
“Up there. You see that?” Jake said. “Partway up the hill. There.” He took off, running up the rise toward a strange-looking tree, its trunk bent. In profile, the bend looked like a protruding belly.
Maggie was right behind him. “It has to be it. The ‘tree pregnant and showing.’ ” She read the next lines: “then seek among fallen one whose life’s long bereft.” Just downhill from the pregnant tree was a fallen trunk, well on its way to total decay. She made her way over, palms sweating now. She ran her fingers over the green and brown moss clinging to the exterior of the trunk, tapped on it with her knuckles. It responded with a soft thunk.
“It’s hollow,” she said. She knelt down and aimed the flashlight inside. The core of the trunk was completely gone. Diffuse light filtered partly down the hollow horizontal shaft, but the trunk bent and the deepest reaches were hidden in darkness. She felt her way along the soft, wet, decaying wood.
“Ahh!” she yelped, and whipped her hand out.
“What?”
“Something moved in there.”
“What?”
“I think it was a worm or a bug or something.” She put her arm back in, shoulder pressed hard against the opening. “Nothing.”
Jake read the next lines.
“Wait,” she said. “I think I get it now.”
“What?”
“How much do you know about the kingdoms of life?”
“There are six, right? Plants, animals, bacteria, fungi. And the other ones.”
“Archaea and protists. Now. Look what Liam said. A marriage of royals. Different kingdoms. I think he meant a lichen. A lichen is a symbiote, part fungus and part algae. The fungus gives the algae water and minerals, like a gardener. The algae, in turn, produce food for the fungus by photosynthesis. A symbiotic relationship between different kingdoms.”
Jake finally got it. “A marriage of royals.”
Maggie nodded.
Jake shook his head. “You’re telling me Liam wanted you to look for a lichen?”
“I think so.”
ONCE THEY HAD THE IDEA, IT TOOK LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES to find it. Maggie squatted before a collection of rocks arranged in a loose pile. She lifted one off the top and showed it to Jake: a mottled, crusty growth on the rocks, like old paint, some patches reddish and the others yellow. Separating them was a twisted pattern of cracks, like dried mud.
“It’s two species of crustose lichen,” Maggie said. “When they meet, they put out chemicals that repel each other, form a kind of barrier. The black sections are the no-man’s-land. They both agree to stay off each other’s turf. They’re intertwined but two distinct organisms.”
She picked up the lichen-covered stones until she found a square metal box below.
She stood, the object cradled in her hands. Jake held the flashlight on it. It was a rusted lunchbox, Scooby-Doo on the outside.
Tears came to her eyes. “I haven’t seen this in years.”
“It was yours?”
Maggie nodded. “Pop-pop bought it for me when I was maybe six.”
Maggie unfastened the latches, her fingers trembling.
Inside was a plastic Baggie containing something hard and disk-shaped. She stood, holding it in her palm gently. She could make out three luminescent smears on the disk, each a different color. “Turn off the flashlight,” she said.
“Wow,” he said. “It’s glowing.”
The glowing slowly pulsed, brightening and fading, almost like breathing.
She carefully opened the Baggie. Inside was a round piece of wood. On it were three patches of fuzzy fungal growth, like mold on bread, except that each was glowing a different color, one red, one green, one yellow. Three distinct patterns. A yellow mushroom. A green arrowhead. And a red spider-creature that looked, Maggie realized, like a MicroCrawler.
Maggie understood.
The symbols for her. Dylan.
And Jake.
She looked to Jake. Tears welled up in her eyes.
The three symbols pulsed with life.
“Jake?”
“I don’t understand. The colors.”
“Green fluorescent protein. It’s a gene extracted from a jellyfish. The red is…” She stopped, too choked up to speak. She turned to Jake, then looked back down at the three symbols. Her tears were flowing now, buds of rain sliding down her cheeks.
She looked again at the piece of wood. “Why?” she said, her voice cracking. She started to quiver, as if the pent-up grief was about to burst through her skin. “This is all you left us, Pop-pop? You shove a few genes in a fungus, make it glow? Why?”