Seven days after the two Fords left, a perfect layer of purplish-brown, radially patterned spores had accumulated in the jam jar on the greenhouse floor tiles.
But less than five feet from the jar, Rowan's bodily functions were rapidly declining.
A rusty iron spoon scraped the bottom of a tin can. The sound was extremely sharp, causing the air to vibrate slightly. Only a little solidified lard and a few blackened oat flakes remained at the bottom. Rowan scraped off the less than one-millimeter-thick layer of grease with the edge of the spoon and put it in her mouth.
There was no chewing. Her salivary glands were exhausted, and her mouth was as dry as rough sandpaper. The rusty-tasting grease slid down her esophagus into her stomach, where it was instantly and violently refluxed by the excessive stomach acid. Her stomach muscles contracted violently, producing an extremely loud bubbling sound, like an empty sac being squeezed.
She casually tossed the gleaming tin can at her feet.
This was the last of her calories in the commune ruins. The prolonged, severe carbohydrate deficiency had caused her blood sugar to plummet to a dangerously low level. The blood vessels in her extremities began to constrict to ensure blood supply to her internal organs, making her fingers and toes stiff and white like ice cubes.
But hunger provided her with another form of compensation—an extreme heightened sense of smell.
Due to the rapid depletion of her fat layer, her sense of smell had become as acute as that of a carnivore. She could even smell the faint acidic odor emitted by a millipede gnawing on withered leaves three meters away in the greenhouse; she could clearly hear the murmuring of underground water veins flowing through the quartzite crevices deep within the coniferous forest.
This ten-year-old body was sending its most primal, most intense red alert to its brain: seek energy, or the cells would begin to devour themselves.
Rowan stood up. A dense ring of black glare instantly appeared at the edge of his vision—a momentary cerebral ischemia caused by orthostatic hypotension. She pressed the back of her hand against the moss-covered glass wall, waiting for the dizziness to subside, then pushed open the greenhouse door and stepped into the cold rainforest.
It was a late autumn morning in the Pacific Northwest, the fog as thick as a bowl of cooled bone broth.
Rowan hunched over, her gaze sweeping across the thick layer of humus beneath her feet like radar. She walked slowly, trying to minimize heat loss. She needed starch. Chewing a few tender fern stems wouldn't stop the excruciating pain of stomach acid corroding her stomach lining.
On a sunny slope not far from a pile of rusty tractor parts abandoned at the commune camp, she stopped.
Beneath a layer of decaying redwood needles, the withered stems of several plants caught her attention. At the base of the stems, a few narrow, onion-like remnants of leaves were faintly visible.
Rowan crouched down, plunging her hands directly into the cold, damp black soil. Soil clung to her fingernails, its chilling coolness traveling from her fingertips straight to her central nervous system. She dug away the topsoil and unearthed a bulb resembling an onion.
The bulb's outer skin was pale yellow; peeling back the thin membrane revealed white, juicy flesh inside.
Back when the commune was still in operation, the adults had dug up wild bulbs called "Blue Camas" in the woodlands during the spring. They were a traditional source of starch for the Native Americans, and when roasted, they had a sweet, sweet potato-like flavor.
Intense hunger bypassed any rational checks. Even though this bulb lacked the signature pungent sulfurous smell of wild onions, and even though its color was slightly paler than the Blue Camas she remembered, Rowan's mouth instantly watered.
She roughly rubbed the soil off the bulb with her thumb, opened her mouth, and bit down hard.
Crisp and juicy, it had a slightly raw, potato-like texture when chewed, but the subtle sweetness of starch quickly melted on her tongue. Rowan didn't chew for long, practically wolfing the entire bulb down her throat. Then came the second, the third.
Until she ate the fourth, an extremely subtle, strange sensation gripped her.
The sweet aftertaste vanished. In its place rose a sharp, metallic bitterness from the back of her tongue.
Rowan's jaw stopped moving. She still held the half-eaten white bulb in her hand. A few seconds later, her lips began to feel slightly numb, as if being pierced simultaneously by countless tiny ice needles.
Nature made no sound, but it had already delivered its verdict.
This was not a blue lily.
This was a "Death Camas" (a highly poisonous light-emitting daisy). Every cell of it was saturated with high concentrations of steroidal alkaloids (zygacine). This toxin specifically damages the vagus nerve and ion channels in the heart of animals.
The toxicity took effect much faster than expected.
Just three minutes later, Rowan's previously pale cheeks suddenly flushed a sickly red. Beads of cold sweat the size of soybeans streamed down her forehead, dripping from her eyelashes into her eyes, causing a stinging sensation.
She dropped the half-potassium bulb she was holding and tried to stand up and walk back to the greenhouse. But the muscles in her legs had completely lost control. Her quadriceps were experiencing extremely violent, visibly spasmodic contractions.
With a thud, she collapsed heavily onto the rotting, muddy ground.
The toxin entered her bloodstream and began to take over her parasympathetic nervous system. Her salivary glands completely malfunctioned, and copious amounts of thick, white foam gushed from the corners of her mouth, smearing her chin and the mud-caked collar of her sweater.
A dramatic change in his heart followed. His heart, previously beating weakly from hunger, suddenly felt like a pump being squeezed shut. Within seconds, his heart rate plummeted from eighty beats per minute to less than forty. Rowan could clearly hear each heavy, muffled thud in his ears:
Thump…
A long, deathly silence.
Thump…
The photoreceptor cells around his retina went on strike en masse. The towering fir trees, the gray fog, and the black earth before him rapidly distorted into a shrinking, tubular field of vision. The world was being rapidly extinguished.
His stomach began a catastrophic churning. Not the spasms of hunger, but a violent, reversed peristalsis of smooth muscle, stimulated by alkaloids, attempting to expel the deadly foreign substance.
This was a pure, emotionless near-death experience. There was no resentment towards his parents, no cries of fear. Beneath this indifferent canopy, tears and cries for help could not dissolve any alkaloids.
Survive, or become nourishment for fungi in the next downpour.
Rowen lay prone in the mud. A wild, instinctive will to survive suddenly erupted in her previously unfocused eyes.
Her fingers dug deep into the soil, using the meager strength of her nails gripping tree roots, she dragged her completely numb lower body toward the abandoned hearth at the edge of the commune camp.
The straight-line distance was less than ten meters, but in her bradycardia and muscle paralysis, it felt like a dried-up riverbed.
Her nails tore open, blood seeping out. Rough stones cut her palms and knees, leaving two dark red drag marks.
Finally, her fingers touched the damp, black ash at the edge of the hearth.
Last night's rain had turned the remaining charcoal in the hearth into a pool of black mud. Rowen didn't hesitate. She propped herself up, using the last of her strength to grab a handful of black mud mixed with rainwater, gravel, and charcoal residue, and shoved it into her mouth.
Charcoal has an extremely strong physical adsorption capacity. This was a rule she had learned from observing the sick hunting dog in the commune—animals that have ingested poisonous plants will gnaw on the ash from the campfire.
The black mud mixed with charcoal residue rubbed extremely roughly against her mucous membranes in her mouth. She forced herself to swallow. A piece of hard charcoal, about the size of a thumb, became lodged in her throat.
This extremely violent physical stimulation instantly triggered the gag reflex deep within her throat.
"Ugh—"
A stream of mucus mixed with undigested white bulb fragments, black charcoal ash, and a large amount of yellowish-green bile sprayed from Rowan's mouth.
The sour, putrid smell mixed with the bitter taste of poison instantly filled the cold air.
She coughed and gagged violently, like a dying animal disemboweled, tears forced out by the spasms in her stomach. After the first vomit, she grabbed more charcoal ash from the ground and shoved it into her mouth, inducing vomiting again.
Until nothing solid remained, only bloody acid from ruptured capillaries in her mucous membranes.
She stopped gagging. Completely exhausted, she collapsed like a tattered rag into the muddy puddle blackened by her own vomit and charcoal.
The rain had started again, sometime earlier.
The cold rain mercilessly washed over the black and white stains on her face. Trace amounts of residual toxins still lingered in her veins, causing her muscles to twitch weakly from time to time.
But amidst the dull, stagnant sound of her heartbeat, Rowan felt its rhythm slowly, gradually returning.
Forty beats per minute. Forty-five. Fifty.
The darkness at the edge of her tubular vision began to fade. The outlines of those massive North American cedars were once again clearly imprinted on her retina.
She wasn't dead.
Rowan rolled over, lying on her back in the mud. Raindrops pelted her eyelids, sliding down her cheeks.
After an extremely long, almost suffocating silence, the ten-year-old girl's face showed no relief at surviving, not even a trace of the exhaustion often seen in rescued humans.
She turned her head, looking at the "death lily" a few meters away, its hole dug out.
It still grew there quietly, its leaves swaying slightly in the rain, beautiful, pale, silent yet possessing an absolute violence capable of destroying an adult at any moment.
Rowan grabbed a handful of damp soil from the ground, clutching it tightly in her hand. The stickiness and real warmth of the soil confirmed that she was still part of this harsh ecosystem.
She understood.
This world offers no morality or charity to rely on. To survive here, she must be more precise than poison, more ruthless than the bitter cold.
She closed her eyes, letting the early winter rain soak her completely.
The soil was hungry, but it hadn't just devoured her.