The smell of unburned gasoline in the exhaust fumes drowned out the fermenting sourness of the coniferous forest.
Two Ford station wagons, caked in dried mud, spun wildly on the rutted road. The twelve-cylinder engines howled in a death thud, spewing thick blue smoke from their exhaust pipes. Finally, the tires crushed a dead, fallen birch branch lying across the road, gaining enough traction to lurch and stumble toward the interstate ahead.
Ten-year-old Rowan stood on the edge of a puddle.
As the rear wheel of the Ford on the left spun wildly, it flung out a large chunk of wet, pebbly-covered clay, which landed with a "thud" on the instep of her left foot. The mud was cold. It trickled down between her bare toes like the tongue of some cold-blooded animal.
Rowan didn't move. Her hands hung limply, an oversized chunky knit sweater draped loosely over her thin shoulders, the cuffs calloused and worn from years of dragging through the mud.
She watched as the red taillights of two cars gradually blurred and diffused in the thick, grayish-green mist, finally disappearing completely into the rainforest like drops of blood falling into a pond. The roar of the engines quickly subsided, and just a few seconds later, a vast silence returned to the space.
The wind swept through the 150-foot-high canopy. The patter of raindrops on broad leaves, the soft thud of a drop falling from a pine needle into a puddle, reclaimed auditory dominance.
This was the "Son of the Sun" Utopia Commune. Or rather, the "Son of the Sun" Utopia Commune of an hour ago.
Rowan turned to face this camp where humanity had sworn to coexist with nature, only to be so easily defeated by it.
Three months ago, a torrential downpour collapsed the canvas roof of the supply and marketing cooperative. Now, the stagnant water has grown a thick layer of brown, filamentous algae on the sunken, dark green canvas. Piles of "Counterculture Manifesto" and handwritten agricultural guides lie carelessly discarded in the mud, the paper soaked into a grayish-white pulp, emitting a sour, moldy bread smell. A wooden guitar with a broken neck lies half-buried in a pile of fallen leaves, a black ground beetle crawling out of its soundhole.
The adults had had enough of the parasites, enough of the six-month-long rain, enough of the acidic red soil that wouldn't grow potatoes. They took all the machinery, ironware, and dry rations that could be exchanged for money, leaving behind only a pile of non-biodegradable plastic packaging and a ten-year-old girl who refused to get on the bus.
Rowan didn't go to the tents that had once belonged to her parents. She knew there wasn't a single grain of salt left there. In this forest where the temperature hovered around ten degrees Celsius year-round, human emotions were less valuable than a piece of dry bark that could be used to start a fire. Humans always try to alter the soil's pH to suit crops, while the forest simply rains silently until all the foreign structures rot in the mud.
She trudged through the mud-caked ground towards the deepest part of the camp.
There stood a massive, hemispherical glass greenhouse. It was an architectural marvel built in the commune's first year by young people with fervent ideals, using aluminum alloy tubing and tempered glass. They had dreamed of simulating tropical temperatures in this perpetually sunless temperate rainforest, growing tomatoes and sunflowers.
Last winter, a rare hailstorm shattered a third of the dome's glass. Now, it stood like a giant, punctured eyeball, staring fixedly at the gray sky.
Rowan approached the greenhouse. The wooden doorframes, swollen and warped from the extreme moisture, were stuck tightly in the aluminum alloy tracks. She pressed her small, thin hands against the moss-covered glass door, her knuckles turning bluish-white from the pressure. With a grating screech of wood fibers, she used her weight to force the door open a crack wide enough for her to squeeze through sideways.
A pungent, almost tangible odor assaulted her nostrils.
The temperature inside the greenhouse was at least five degrees Celsius higher than outside. The air was still, the humidity near saturation. It was filled with peat moss, high concentrations of ammonia (from piles of decaying leaves), and a subtly pervasive, sweet-smelling odor, like fermenting dough.
Outside, vines had long since dangled from the broken dome, and wild climbing plants had strangled the cash crops that had once been planted in flowerpots. The sunlight, filtered through a thick layer of diatomaceous earth and grime on the glass, was a weak, sickly greenish-blue.
Rowan stood on the central tile floor. Rain dripped from her tangled reddish-brown hair, pattering into puddles at her feet.
She didn't seek any hope of survival left by her parents in this abandoned, enclosed space. Her gaze swept across the overgrown cultivation beds, fixing squarely on the southwest corner of the greenhouse—where lay a massive North American white oak trunk, snapped in a strong wind three months earlier.
The oak's once-hard bark was now completely soft, a sickly dark brown. On the shaded side of the trunk, clusters of tiny, yellowish-brown fungi were densely sprouting from the cracks in the wood.
Rowan walked over. Her movements were extremely subtle, her feet landing first on the outside, then slowly transitioning to her heels, without making a sound, as if afraid to disturb some slumbering beast.
She knelt before the decaying wood. The rough floor tiles hurt her kneecaps, but her eyes were completely fixed on the fungi.
These weren't ordinary wild mushrooms. They were called *Galerina marginata*.
Rowan had memorized its illustrations and characteristics from a rain-soaked botany book. Its appearance was extremely plain and transparent, resembling an edible honey fungus. But beneath that fragile, yellowish-brown cap lay an extremely high concentration of amatoxins. This toxin could silently dissolve the RNA polymerase in human liver cells. Ingestion, even in adults, would result in death within days from complete organ failure, vomiting blood.
It was the forest's most efficient scavenger, and also its deadliest line of defense.
Rowan reached into the deepest pocket of her waterproof overalls and pulled out a small, blackened folding knife. The latch was rusted; she used her thumbnail to pry open the groove, and with a dull click, managed to push the blade aside.
Then, she pulled a lidded glass jam jar from under a nearby discarded flowerpot. The jar was spotless, lined with several slightly yellowed blank pieces of paper torn from a commune's accounting book.
Rowan approached the helmet-shaped cluster of poisonous fungus. The two were less than ten centimeters apart. The stench of decaying wood mingled with the dusty smell of fungi assaulted her nostrils. She held her breath, her taut jawline etching a harshness incongruous with her age.
She extended her left hand. It was extremely small, her fingernails crammed with black grime. She gently pinched the slender stem of one of the fungi with her index finger and thumb. The fungus was cool and supple, its surface covered with a very thin layer of slime.
Her right hand gripped the knife, the blade slicing at a 45-degree angle into the junction of the fungus's root and the fibrous decaying wood.
Without hesitation, a barely audible "swoosh" rang out as the blade severed the stem. The cut was smooth, without tearing away the vast network of white mycelium at the base. She knew perfectly well that the mycelium was the main component; as long as the underground network wasn't damaged, the fungus would regrow its fruiting bodies after the next rain, like hair being cut.
Her index and middle fingers firmly held the severed amanita. Rowan carefully turned it over, revealing the dense, cinnamon-brown gills on the underside of the cap.
She laid the slightly yellowed piece of paper flat on the dry floor tiles, then gently placed the poisonous mushroom cap-down in the very center of the paper. Next, she inverted the glass jam jar over it, creating an absolutely sealed, windless space.
Having done all this, she didn't leave, but instead sat cross-legged on the cold, damp, muddy ground.
Even though her stomach was aching from contractions caused by more than fourteen hours without food, Rowan remained absolutely still.
About half an hour later, the glass greenhouse, which had been swaying slightly from human movement, fell silent again.
Rowan stared intently at the poisonous fungus through the slightly distorted glass walls of the jam jar.
In the microscopic world, imperceptible to the naked eye, the fungus was carrying out the most important stage of its life cycle: reproduction. Millions of tiny brown spores were being ejected from the gaps in the gills. They drifted silently through the sealed space of the glass jar, drawn by gravity, slowly settling onto the yellowed piece of paper.
Rowan watched as a perfect, radial outline, composed of countless deadly dust particles, gradually emerged on the paper—the absolute fingerprint this deadly substance had left on the world: a spore imprint.
The adults called this a disaster, a reason for not surviving. But Rowan saw its structure. It was far more orderly than the humans in the commune who argued loudly over a share of cornmeal.
"Plop."
A drop of icy rain leaked from a hole in the broken glass of the greenhouse, landing precisely on the back of Rowan's neck. An extreme chill spread rapidly down her spine.
She didn't shiver, nor did she look up at the gray sky.
She gently ran her mud-covered fingertips along the rim of the jam jar. In this ruin filled with toxins, rotting wood, and endless rain, for the first time, she felt her heartbeat slow and steady.
The tire tracks will eventually be smoothed over by tomorrow's downpour. In this world beneath the canopy, she is no longer an abandoned orphan.
She is a fiercely resilient spore, newly fallen into damp soil.
As long as there is decaying flesh and moisture, she can take root.