The southern wind was creeping around him, the queen and bronze vultures were trilling as they bounced away, and Isou was idly envying the dead when he came upon it: a flower made of flesh, unfurling among the bodies.

She was free.
The world was dead.
And everything was hot as fuck.

They hadn’t let her remember where she’d been born, or the faces of any of her family members, not even her original name, but those wonderful scientists had let her keep the heart-warming memory of failing every geology exam she’d gotten at the academy.

As they got closer to the sea, the buildings grew squatter, the pale stone fading to gray ironwood, the ironwood crumbling into damp, mold-ridden shacks made of salt-stained bleached planks scavenged from ships.

Shi Veisya stopped, but didn’t turn around, thank the gods, his long dark hair shifting and swallowing the firelight as his head cocked to the right. “Find someone. Kill those in my way. Perhaps die.” He shrugged, slender palms up and out. “It is out of my hands.”

There were rough attempts at anatomical drawings of people bleeding from the mouth and nose. *Infected*. And then, on a page all its own, a much finer drawing of the fruiting body, with the parts labeled in that illegible script.