Chapter 9: The Snare
The sun was a bastard.
It wasn’t the heat. The clearing was cool, shaded by the ancient oaks. It was the light itself. It needled down through the leaves in sharp, dusty beams, landing on her pale skin like tiny brands. Beos shifted on the moss, tucking her feet further into the shadow of a root. The world above was so… dry. The air pulled at the moisture in her skin, in the delicate gills of the smaller fungi speckling her shoulder. She could feel a faint, itchy tightness there, a sensation like fine parchment cracking.
She hummed a low, three-note myconid lament for damp stone and soft, dark earth. But the clearing was pretty. So pretty. Golden light, green moss, those funny little flowers that glowed a faint blue even now, like captured cave-light. The Sovereign would like one, she thought. A piece of the above for the below. She leaned forward, her ink-black hair falling like a curtain, and reached for the nearest cluster.
Her fingers were a breath away from a velvet-soft petal when the world erupted.
The leaf litter burst upward. A coarse, weighted net slammed down over her, so fast it was just a blur of brown and a smell of old rope and something metallic that bit at her nose. It pinned her arms, her mushroom cap catching on the weave with a soft crunch of fibrous material. She made a sound—a startled, musical chirp of inquiry, more surprised than hurt.
“Got her!” a voice grated.
Two men stepped from behind the trees. They moved all wrong. No softness. Just sharp angles and heavy thumps. The first was big, his face a map of old violence, a scar pulling his lip into a permanent sneer. The other was thin, wiry, with eyes that darted over her like he was counting coins.
“Easy now,” the thin one said, not kindly. It was a instruction to his partner.
The big one just grunted, wrapping the net tighter. Beos blinked up at them, her large, iridescent eyes wide. She hummed again, a questioning tone. Hello? This is a strange game.
The smell hit her next. Stale ale, sweat, woodsmoke. It flooded her senses, overwhelming the subtle scent of crushed petals and damp earth. The thin man shoved a rough, sour-tasting cloth into her mouth, gagging her hum into a muffled noise. She didn’t fight. The concept was foreign. The myconids didn’t fight. They communicated, they yielded, they joined.
“Hold her still, Carn.”
“I am,” the big one, Carn, snapped. His hands were like tree roots, binding her wrists with twine that scraped her luminescent skin. It didn’t hurt, not exactly, but the sensation was profoundly wrong. Like being asked to breathe water. She went limp, observing.
“Lookit this,” the thin man murmured, his gaze lingering on the cap that grew from her skull. He reached out and patted it. It wasn’t a gentle touch; it was testing, assessing. “Solid. Thought it was some foolish hat. It’s part of her.”
Carn hoisted her up. The world swung violently, the canopy of leaves and sky swapping places with the ground. Her stomach did a slow, unpleasant roll. Then she was dangling, bent over the bony spine of a horse. The animal’s smell was hot and animalistic, its hide rough against her cheek. She could see the forest floor, the crushed blue flowers, moving away.
The thin man swung up into the saddle in front of her. “A queer little thing. Never seen its like.”
“Don’t matter what it is,” Carn said, mounting another horse. His voice was a stone grinding on stone. “Marrow said to bring anything that weren’t ordinary. This qualifies. Pays extra for live specimens.”
Specimens. The word meant nothing to Beos. The horse jolted into a walk. Each step sent a jarring impact through her ribs. The sun, which had been merely harsh before, now glared directly into her exposed eye, making the world a bleached, painful white. She closed her eyes. Inside the dark of her own mind, she reached out. She pushed a feeling into the stillness, a soft, questioning pulse of Where are you? aimed at the deep, familiar silence of the under-mind, the communal hum of the colony.
There was no answer. Just the empty, sun-bleached silence of the world above, the creak of leather, the clop of hooves, and the low, greedy murmur of men discussing profit.
Just the empty, sun-bleached silence of the world above, the creak of leather, the clop of hooves, and the low, greedy murmur of men discussing profit.
The forest gave way to a rutted cart track, then to a hard-packed road that stank of dust and animal waste. Buildings appeared, stacked together like rotten teeth, their wooden frames leaning in whispers over muddy lanes. The noise was a physical assault—shouts, the shriek of a blade on stone, a barking dog that sounded like it was choking. Beos squeezed her eyes shut tighter, trying to hear the soft, polyphonic hum of the myconid choir deep in the earth. Nothing.
“Keep the net on,” the thin man, whose name was Pell, said over his shoulder. “Don’t want it spooking.”
“It’s not an it,” Carn rumbled, though he didn’t sound convinced. “Looks half a person. A sick one.”
“Marrow won’t care. He’ll boil it down for reagents or put it in a cage. Not our business once the coin’s in hand.”
Beos focused on the feeling of the twine on her wrists. It was just a sensation, like the pressure of a friendly root. She practiced the soft-click language of the colony in her mind, the greeting for a returning gatherer. I am here. I have returned. But no one answered, and the horse’s gait was a relentless, jolting contradiction to the peaceful thought.
They stopped in an alley that smelled of wet rot and old urine. The shadow was deep, cooling her sun-warmed skin. Pell slid off the horse and yanked her down by the net. Her feet, unaccustomed to flat, hard stone, buckled. She sat down hard on the damp cobbles, looking up at the strip of grimy sky between the rooftops.
A door opened with a squeal of protest. A man stood there, silhouetted by a sickly yellow lantern glow from within. He was neither big nor small, but he seemed to absorb the alley’s scant light. His eyes, pale and liquid, passed over Carn and Pell and settled on her.
“This is the curiosity?” His voice was soft, almost polite.
“Live and intact,” Pell said, his posture shifting into a merchant’s slouch. “Found her in the Gloomwood. Part mushroom, see? The cap’s growing right out of her. Skin glows in the dark, I’d wager.”
Marrow took two steps forward. He crouched, bringing his face level with Beos’s. His smell was of dried herbs and chemical sharpness, like the blue veins that sometimes cracked the colony’s ceiling-crystals. He did not touch her. He simply looked, his gaze clinical, parsing the mushrooms on her face, the iridescent sheen of her wide eyes. Beos hummed a gentle note behind her gag, a tentative greeting.
“Fascinating,” Marrow said, not to her, but to the air. “Symbiosis or parasitic takeover? The flesh appears stable. No signs of necrosis.” He stood. “Twenty silver.”
“Twenty?” Carn spat. “We risked the Gloomwood for a month for that? Fifty.”
“It is a child of unknown origin with a potentially fatal fungal infection. Thirty. Final offer.”
Pell glanced at Carn, then nodded. “Thirty-five and you take her off our hands right now. Nets and rope included.”
Marrow’s lips twitched. “Agreed.”
He produced a small, heavy pouch from within his coat. The clink of metal was a dry, final sound. Pell snatched it, hefted it, and grunted. Carn moved behind Beos. With a rough tug of his knife, he cut the twine at her wrists and the net from around her, but left the gag. The sudden freedom made her limbs feel loose and strange.
Marrow’s hand closed around her upper arm. His grip was firm, cool, and utterly inescapable. He pulled her to her feet and toward the open door.
“Pleasure,” Pell said, already turning away, the coins a new weight in his pocket.
Beos looked back once, over her shoulder. The two men were mounting their horses, not looking at her. The daylight at the mouth of the alley was blinding. Then the door shut, cutting off the world, and the lock clicked with a sound of profound and absolute finality.
The click of the lock was a period at the end of a sentence she hadn’t understood. Beos stood very still in the sudden gloom, the gag still tasting of sour cloth. The air here was thick, layered with smells that pressed against her: the astringent bite of preserving alcohol, the sweet-rot odor of dried herbs, the underlying note of something metallic and cold.
Marrow released her arm. He moved away, his boots whispering on stone flags. "You will not be harmed if you remain calm," he said, his back to her as he lit another lantern. The new light revealed shelves cluttered with jars, their glass walls containing shadows that swam in cloudy liquid. "The gag is unnecessary for a quiet thing, I think."
He approached again and, with a surprisingly deft motion, plucked the cloth from her mouth. Beos worked her jaw, swallowing the flat taste of the air. She hummed, a soft, ascending two-note query. Where is this?
Marrow did not answer. He circled her, his pale eyes missing nothing. He noted the way the bioluminescent patches on her skin—pale constellations on her neck and wrists—seemed to drink the lamplight and emit a softer, milkier glow of their own. He peered at where the mushroom cap fused seamlessly with the skin and bone of her temple.
"Remarkable integration," he murmured to himself. "No inflammation. No rejection. The chitinous structure appears to have redirected her hair growth." He reached a hand out.
Beos, remembering Pell’s assessing pat, leaned her head back. She offered a rapid series of clicks from the back of her throat, the myconid signal for I am not food.
His hand paused. "Vocalization independent of a mouth. Fascating." He withdrew, turning to a heavy ledger on a desk cluttered with corroded instruments. "You will be worth a great deal to the right collector. A living hybrid. A dialogue between kingdom Animalia and kingdom Fungi."
She didn’t understand the words, but the tone was like the humming of the sovereign when he contemplated a new tunnel path—calculating, detached. She took a small step, her bare foot cold on the stone. A jar at her eye level held a twisted, pale creature with too many eyes, suspended forever in its silent scream. Beos tilted her head. She hummed a low, sympathetic note to it. She wondered if it was lonely.
A heavy knock sounded at the door, three precise raps.
"Ah. Punctual," Marrow said. He smoothed his coat. "You will stand there. You will be still. If you please him, your new life will be one of study and preservation. A kindness you would not find in the world."
He unlocked and opened the door. A man entered, and the room's atmosphere changed. The new arrival carried the scent of cold air, expensive wool, and a faint, soapy cleanliness that felt aggressively foreign. He was tall, dressed in immaculate grey, his hair the colour of polished iron. His gaze swept the room and landed on Beos.
"Master Thorne," Marrow said, his voice now oiled with deference. "The specimen."
Thorne said nothing. He walked toward her, his movements efficient and silent. He did not crouch like Marrow had. He looked down, his eyes a flat, analytical grey. They traced the contours of her fungal growths, the silky fall of her black hair against the mottled cap, the uncomprehending sheen in her large eyes. Beos looked up into that face, which held no more warmth than the surface of a still pond.
She offered a hesitant, friendly hum. It was the greeting-song for a new spore-drift visitor to the colony.
Thorne’s eyebrow twitched, almost imperceptibly. He slowly removed a glove, revealing a hand clean and pale. He reached out, not for her cap, but to gently lift a strand of her hair between his thumb and forefinger, rubbing the silken texture. His touch was dry and cool.
"She understands speech?" Thorne’s voice was quiet, clipped.
"Unclear. She vocalizes, but not in any tongue I recognize. Her understanding seems... intuitive. Reactive."
Thorne released her hair. He then placed his bare fingers directly against the pale, glowing skin of her neck, just below her jaw. Beos held her breath, a human instinct she’d rarely used. He was checking for a pulse. His fingers lingered, his gaze locked on her irises, which shimmered with captured lantern light. His expression did not change, but something in his eyes deepened, a flicker of intense, hungry interest.
"Cardiac rhythm is present, but slow. Profoundly slow," he stated. "And the dermal bioluminescence is reactive. Observe." He shifted his hand to block the lantern light from her neck. The soft glow of her skin there gradually intensified, bathing his fingers in a faint, blue-white radiance.
A long, silent moment passed. Beos, confused by the silence, hummed again—the specific, warbling call for Are you lost? that the myconids used for disoriented juveniles in the deep tunnels.
A faint, thin smile touched Thorne’s lips. It did not reach his eyes. He pulled his hand back, the ghost of her light clinging to his skin for a second before fading. He looked at Marrow.
"I will take her."
Thorne’s gloved hand rested on the small of her back, not pushing, but guiding with an implicit and absolute pressure. It propelled her through the door, past Marrow’s bowed head, and out into the alley where a black lacquered carriage waited, a hulking shape that smelled of oiled leather and the peculiar, flat scent of enclosed space. The horses were massive, their breath pluming in the cool air, and they did not smell like the forest. They smelled of iron and controlled fear.
“In,” Thorne said, opening the door.
The command was simple, a sound. Beos looked from the dark cavity of the carriage to the strip of visible sky. She hummed a fragment of the colony’s travelling song, the one hummed when a spore-drift embarked for a new chamber. It was a habit, a comfort. Then she climbed inside, her movements uncoordinated on the narrow step.
The interior was lined in plum-colored velvet. It swallowed sound. Thorne sat across from her, his grey eyes catching the faint light from the window as he pulled the door shut. The world outside became a muted painting, framed in glass. A slight jerk, and the carriage began to move, its rhythm a smoother, more insistent version of the horse’s gait from before.
He watched her. She watched the world slide by—the closing-in walls of buildings, the blur of faces that looked nothing like the soft, round faces of the myconids. She pressed a glowing palm flat against the cool glass, leaving a faint, damp print.
“Do you require sustenance?” Thorne asked after twenty minutes of silence.
Beos turned from the window. She processed the sounds. He had made sounds at her before, with Marrow. These were new sounds. She tilted her head, her mushroom cap brushing the velvet wall. She responded with a soft, warbling click, the myconid acknowledgment of a question not understood.
Thorne’s gaze didn’t waver. He reached into a recessed compartment and drew out a small, silver flask. He unstoppered it and held it out. The scent that wafted across the space was clear and sharp, like water from the deepest cave spring, but with a crystalline chemical edge.
Beos leaned forward slowly, her iridescent eyes wide. She sniffed. The chemical note was strong, but underneath was the promise of minerals, of moisture. Her body, so wrong in this dry, loud world, yearned for it. She took the flask in both hands. She did not drink. Instead, she brought it to her face and gently exhaled across the surface, a myconid practice to taste the air of a potential new substrate.
A near-silent sound escaped Thorne—a faint, breathy exhalation that wasn’t quite a laugh. It was the sound of observation confirming a hypothesis.
She took a small sip. The liquid was cold, startlingly so, and it carried the mineral tang deep into her, quieting the itchy dryness in her fungal patches. She hummed in appreciation, a bright, two-note tone, and offered the flask back.
thorne doesn’t know beos has a name and takes beos to his manor. beos meets the other specimens thorns has acquired (they’re all a type of hybrid and all look feminine). thorne takes beos for initial tests but beos doesn’t understand his instructions and unintentionally, in a cute and ditzy sort of way, ends up making every test more frustrating for thorne
Thorne took it from her without a word, sealing it away as if the interaction had never happened. Through the window, a structure resolved itself from the evening mist—not a home, but a fortress of ordered grey rock, its windows tall, narrow, and dark. No warmth bled from them. The carriage rounded a drive and halted before a pair of doors the color of old bone.
Thorne exited first, his silhouette sharp against the monolithic entrance. He turned, waiting. Beos scrambled out, her bare feet meeting stone so cold it felt like a shock. She looked up, and up, her head tilting back until her mushroom cap rested against her shoulders. The scale was all wrong. It made her feel like a dropped pebble.
“This way,” Thorne said, and began walking. His pace expected compliance.
She followed, not out of obedience, but because the open doors led into shadow, and shadows were familiar. The inside was worse. Vast ceilings swallowed the click of Thorne’s boots and the soft patter of her own steps. The air was motionless, scrubbed clean of scent except for a pervasive, frosty dampness, like a cave that had never known life. Lanterns flickered in sconces, their light absorbed by dark wood and stone, failing to reach the corners.
They did not go far into the heart of the place. Thorne stopped at an unremarkable door, produced a key, and turned it in a lock that clicked with a complex, heavy finality. He pushed it open and gestured her inside.
“You will wait here.”
The room was not a cell. It was, in its way, more unsettling. It was a sunken sitting room, furnished with faded but once-expensive settees and low tables. A fire smoldered in a grate, doing nothing to lift the chill. And it was occupied.
Three figures turned from the fire or looked up from benches as she entered. Beos stopped just over the threshold, her iridescent eyes widening. A soft, fascinated hum breathed from her lips.
One had skin the texture of smoothed birch bark, her hair a cascade of dry, russet leaves that rustled faintly when she moved her head. Another’s arms were traced with fine, downy feathers that faded into the soft skin of her shoulders, her pupils vertical slits in amber irises. The third seemed almost human until she shifted, and the firelight caught the subtle, opalescent shimmer of scales along her jawline and the backs of her hands.
All of them shared a delicate, feminine shape. All of them wore simple, identical grey dresses. All of them watched her with a hollow, knowing silence that was nothing like the receptive quiet of the myconids.
The feather-armed one blinked her slitted eyes slowly. “Another one,” she said, her voice a bare whisper.
The bark-skinned girl just pulled her knees closer to her chest, the sound like parchment rubbing together.
Beos, misinterpreting the silence for shyness, offered a warm, warbling sequence of clicks—the standard colony greeting for a new circle, an introduction of self and peaceful intent.
The scaled girl’s mouth twitched. It wasn’t a smile. “She doesn’t even speak,” she murmured to the fire.
Thorne’s voice cut from the doorway. “You will acclimate here. Do not attempt to leave.” His gaze swept over the other hybrids, a silent command to enforce the order. Then his eyes fixed back on Beos. “You. Come with me now.”
He led her back into the labyrinth, down a narrow, descending staircase that made her ears pop. The air grew colder, sharper, carrying the tang of metal and astringent chemicals that burned her nose. This was his true domain: a laboratory. Stone tables held brass instruments whose purposes were unfathomable. Glass tubing coiled like transparent intestines. Charts filled with precise, jagged lines covered one wall.
“Stand there,” he instructed, pointing to a painted circle on the flagstone floor.
Beos walked to the circle. She looked down at its white lines, then up at him, and hummed inquisitively.
“Remain within the boundary. Do not move.”
He turned to a bench, selecting a device—a brass frame holding a delicate crystal lens. He brought it over, intending to examine the junction of mushroom cap and scalp. “Hold still. Focus on the wall.”
Beos saw the polished brass, saw her own distorted reflection swimming in it. She remembered the pretty silver flask in the carriage. With a cheerful, appreciative click, she reached out and gently tapped the brass frame with a fingertip, producing a soft ping. She liked the sound. She did it again.
Thorne’s hand tightened on the device. “Do. Not. Touch.” He spoke each word as a separate island of sound. “Be still.”
He repositioned the lens. Beos tried. But a drip began from a piece of tubing on the table behind him—plink… plink… plink—a steady, rhythmic summons. Her head turned, her attention effortlessly captured by the falling water. She offered a sympathetic warble to the lonely, leaking apparatus.
Thorne lowered the device. A muscle in his jaw feathered. “Very well. Physical responsiveness.” He put the lens aside and picked up a small, rubber-tipped mallet. “I am going to test your patellar reflex. It is a tap. It will cause a jerk. Do not resist it.”
He moved to kneel before her. Beos watched, fascinated. He tapped the mallet once against his own palm, demonstrating the motion. Tap. She understood demonstration. The myconids taught by showing.
He aimed for the spot just below her kneecap. As the mallet swung, Beos, wanting to be helpful and participatory, chose that exact moment to mimic his demonstration. She bent her leg sharply, lifting her foot in a little kick to meet the incoming mallet halfway.
The mallet connected with her sole, not her tendon. A completely normal, non-reflexive motion.
Thorne froze in a half-crouch. He closed his eyes for a single, long second. “You were to hold still.”
Beos, pleased with the successful interaction, hummed an upbeat, concordant note. She pointed at the mallet in his hand, then at her other foot, her expression open and encouraging. Again?
He stood up, slowly, placing the mallet on the table with a definitive click. “Cognitive evaluation.” He walked to a slate board, picking up a piece of chalk. He drew a simple shape—a circle. He pointed to it. “Circle.” He then drew a square beside it. “Square.” He looked at her, his grey eyes expectant. “Show me the square.”
Beos stared at the shapes. The white lines were crisp. She loved them. She stepped out of the circle on the floor without a thought and approached the slate, drawn by the pleasing contrast. She ignored the drawings entirely. Instead, she reached out and gently ran her glowing fingertip down the length of the chalk itself, leaving a faint, luminous streak on the board’s dark surface. She examined the powdery white residue on her skin, then looked at Thorne and showed him her fingertip, her head tilted in shared wonder at this strange, mark-making substance.
Thorne did not raise his voice. He placed the chalk on the ledge of the slate. He methodically wiped his hands on a cloth. The quiet in the room was now brittle, charged with a profound and simmering frustration.