My morning consisted of manageable rituals of being a scientist rather than the woman currently being clipped and captioned. Still, as my head shifts from tasks to data, everything presses in at once. Publicity. Ambition. Risk. The trial. The thing I have already done. The thing I keep telling myself I have to do. My elbow shoves the centrifuge lid down, nearly sending a rack of pipette tips into the sink.

“Graceful,” Lena says from the doorway.

​

My head turns over my shoulder. “Kinetically gifted.”

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“Hmm. You say lots of things when you’re about to break university property.”

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She stands in the doorway with two coffees and a smirk. Lena dresses as if she considers vanity a wasteful use of fabric. Black cargo trousers. Navy polo top. Boots built for weather, judgement, and possibly kicking through a locked gate. Her plait barely contains her thick black hair.

​

My hand takes the coffee she thrusts towards me. “You love my chaos.”

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“I respect it as a hostile environmental factor.” She leans against the bench, sips, then smiles over the rim of the cup. “Also, the Weird Science clip from your pre-release promo has escaped containment.”

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My eyes close. “Stop it.”

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“You’ve gone viral.”

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“That phrase should be retired from scientific settings.”

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Lena unlocks her phone. “You remember that line from the podcast teaser?” The corner of her mouth hitches.

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I remember all of it. The overheated studio. The orange lamp in the corner. Wilder grinning at me. My hands moving too much. My mouth moving more. The sudden lurch of realising, halfway through an answer about fungal intelligence, that I had somehow made mushrooms sound erotic to a man with a producer and a ring light.

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Lena clears her throat and reads in the podcaster’s smoky little cadence. “‘Dr Avery Dunt makes mushrooms feel like something you’d want to hump instead of something mouldering in your fridge drawer. Total mushroom darling.’”

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My eyes widen.

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A snort of air escapes Lena’s nose. Her teeth catch the inside of her lip.

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“Oh, good.” I sigh. “That’s exactly how I hoped to advance public understanding of neuroscience.”

She laughs. “You have to admit it’s a line. It’s gone everywhere.”

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“Define everywhere.”

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“Group chats. TikTok. Twitter, yes, I still refuse to call it by its current name. At least three people in the comments are saying they’d let you explain mycelium to them in a darkened room.”

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Heat warms my cheeks. “That is deeply inappropriate. I am a scientist.”

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“You’re a little bit horny, scientist. It’s also excellent outreach.” She sips her coffee.

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Maybe a little. I have no intention of granting her admission. I snatch the phone from her and watch the soundless clip. There I am under soft studio light, quick-eyed, hands describing invisible networks in the air. I know how I come across. Bright. Open. Like I am about to tell you something illicit and make you feel clever for wanting to hear it. The university calls that public engagement. Neuro Order calls it sponsor visibility.  I suspect it is my brain moving too fast to stay modest about its own fascinations. “Please tell me I don’t look like that all the time.”

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“You look exactly like that all the time.”

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“Oh fuck.”

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“Worse, actually. In person, there’s more velocity.”

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I hand the phone back and try to ignore the thought of strangers watching me as both a scientist and sex. The trouble is, part of me adores it. I like a room that turns towards me. I like feeling people catch on to a sentence and follow me into it.

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Lena tucks her phone away. “Anyway, congratulations, Mushroom Darling.”

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“I’d rather be dead.”

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“No, you wouldn’t. You’d hate missing the analytics on how far this reaches.”

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A laugh breaks out of me. I turn back to the bench and reach for my notebook that lies open beside the sink, dense with arrows, cross-references, numbers and phrases written fast enough to tilt downhill. EEG synchrony. Verbal retrieval. Track confounders around sleep. Rework language for steering group.

Subject 04. Also, a possible interaction between seizure threshold and. The sentence stops.

My eyes fix on the gap, waiting for the thought to come back. Nothing.

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My brain works in sparks and swarms. A line of thought splits into six others before I have finished the first. Connections arrive so fast they almost hurt. Sometimes I catch them and turn them into papers and lectures. Sometimes they vanish, leaving only the burn mark.

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Lena watches me with the look she uses when I tip from entertaining into concerning.

“You’ve done the face,” she says.

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“What face?”

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“The one where you look like the universe is speaking and you only got half the sentence.”

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“I’m fine.”

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Her tut says she has weighed my evidence and found it insufficient. Lena knows about my epilepsy. She has to. We work too close for secrecy. She knows where the rescue medication is. She knows the small pre-seizure tells: my hand going still mid-task, my eyes tracking something no one else can see, the lag between hearing my name and returning to it. She knows when to wait, when to speak, and when to intervene. She is also the person named as my emergency contact, which makes her officially responsible for the collapse of my brain and unofficially insufferable about coffee.

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The public version is boring and controlled. Temporal lobe epilepsy. Managed. Mostly stable. Rescue meds in the top drawer of my office desk, labelled and tedious. The private version sits in the same drawer beside three unlabelled vials I absolutely should not have made and definitely should not have used on myself.

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Lena reaches for the sample log. “Mercer emailed twice.”

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“Twice since when?”

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“Nine-thirteen.”

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“Urgh, it’s not even ten.” I set my coffee down too hard and a pale brown wave breaches the drinking hole and splashes over my glove. I peel the glove off and bin it.

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Lena moves to the bench and wakes the monitor. A spreadsheet fills the screen, followed by two documents she has left open side by side. One is our internal synthesis of participant responses. The other bears Neuro Order’s grey-blue header and the title MIDPOINT OUTCOME OVERVIEW.

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Lena points at a highlighted section. “Participant 04.”

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My heart rises into my throat. I reach for my coffee. “What about them?”

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“The wording is different.”

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Sipping my coffee, I lean into Lena’s screen. On the left, the original observation reads:

Reported heightened perception. Described objects as connected beyond visible boundaries. Sense of prediction via the connections. Stated that the surrounding structure appeared to turn towards the participant. 

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On the right:

Reported spatial distortion and heightened environmental patterns. 

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I stare at the two versions. “Who edited it?”

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Lena clicks into the document history. “Mercer says the sponsor’s clinical liaison standardised the language.” She raises one of her perfect brows at me. “So, apparently someone in Neuro Order standardised our cutting-edge work.”

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My mouth opens around the theory already forming.

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Lena lifts a finger. “Before you decide what that means, this could just be editing. Stripping back what isn’t useful to them.” She raises one of her sharp brows. “But, we could explore to see if there is a pattern in what they have been editing out.”

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I close my mouth. Irritatingly, she is right. “Fine. We compare the versions first.”

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I frown at the screen. The human trial sits at the centre of everything now. Funding. Press. Steering groups. The podcast. The ridiculous promo clip. People who have never thought about fungi repeating my words back to me in clipped little videos with captions and edits. I know the trial has to be careful, controlled, respectable. Psilocybin-derived compounds. Adjunctive fungal therapies. Neural network modulation. Every phrase scrubbed until it can survive donors and ethics committees.

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But Neuro Order had approached us before the trial had a public face. Someone willing to fund the question itself. I had liked that about them. Will they like me knowing I have crossed this line?

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The results are too strange to leave alone. Participants describe clarity they cannot quite name. The scans show small but consistent changes in connectivity. The data carries a pattern I can almost hear. Something in me keeps answering it. I tell myself I need proximity. I tell myself the work demands it. I tell myself lots of things clever women tell themselves just before a scandal.

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Lena flicks onto another tab. “Anyway, I’ve updated the biomarkers. You need to add the adverse events section.”

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My mouth dries.

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She glances up. “Avery?”

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Before I can answer, the warning arrives. My left thumb twitches against the notebook cover. Then comes the internal shift I never find language for properly, the one that makes the room feel both too close and fractionally out of reach. The strip lights sharpen. The incubator hum separates into layers. My tongue floods with metal.

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Lena tenses. Her gold-flecked dark eyes pin me. “Aura?”

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“Maybe.”

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“You need to sit down.”

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People hear epilepsy and imagine flashing lights, instant collapse, jerking limbs, noise, and an emergency with an audience. Only a small percentage of people with epilepsy have photosensitive epilepsy. Mine usually begin more slowly. A wave through the head. A taste that is not there. Pins and needles. The terrible part is how often I stay aware. I feel each stage arrive. I feel myself becoming trapped inside a body that may still collapse and stiffen while everyone around me reacts.

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Lena sets the file down. “Want me to get your meds?”

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“No.”

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Her eyes narrow. “Avery.”

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“I don’t need them. It’s fleeting.”

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That is true often enough to sound calm. Most of my seizures burn through fast. Seconds. A minute, sometimes two. Strange smell, twitch, bright edge to the room, then gone, leaving me washed out and furious. I can often explain while they happen, which is both reassuring and obscene.

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But the drawer. The drawer is suddenly all I can think about. Besides the rescue medication, shoved behind a bundle of printed protocols, are the vials. Clear glass. Plain caps. My handwriting on the base is in tiny coded marks that no one will understand unless they look very closely. If Lena goes to fetch the medication and finds those first, my life splits open right here beside the autoclave.

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I set my hand flat on the bench and breathe through the rising fizz in my skull. “I’ll get them myself.”

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Lena tuts. “I am more than happy to get them for you, Avery.”

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“I don’t think I’ll need it. It will pass.”

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I push myself out of the chair. The smell from the substrate trays by the far partition hits me at once. Damp. Mineral. Sweet at the edges. Forest floor after rain. The growth-room glass turns bright, and for one dislocated beat, the room beneath it seems to pulse.

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Threads under trays.

Threads under tile.

Threads under walls.

The impression of something moving below the architecture of things, immense and busy with exchange.

The sensation passes so fast I almost doubt it.

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My fingers twitch again.

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Lena steps close. “Sit back down, Avery.” Her cocoa-butter hand cream washes over me.

“I just need my office.”

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The aura turns sly again. Silver creeps along the edge of my vision. The world does not black out. It overexposes. My hand catches the bench before I stumble. The laminate is cold under my palm. Agar tacks at the edge where someone has missed a wipe-down. Coffee, ethanol and damp earth fold together until the air feels thick enough to climb.

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Lena is beside me at once, her cocoa-soft hand at my elbow, her voice lower now. “Talk to me. You’ve gone pale.”

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“I’m already pale.”

 

“Do you want me to time it?”

 

“No. It’s easing.” My teeth press into my lower lip. But it’s true, it is easing. The metallic taste has begun to thin. The twitching in my hand is easing. The awful sharpened quality of the lights recedes, leaving the usual after-feeling, the one I can only describe as the world having passed too close to my face.

 

Lena keeps her hand on my arm another second before letting go. “Office, and I’m coming with you.”

 

My pulse jumps. “No.”

 

“Avery.” She raises her brows at me.

 

“I know where the medication is.”

 

“And if you need it, I’m the one who’s meant to know you’ve taken it.”

 

She is right. Of course, she is right. That is the problem with working beside competent people.

 

My hands reach for my phone and notebook, so I do not have to look at her. “I don’t need it. I want to sit down for five minutes before Mercer starts emailing me in capital letters.”

 

She studies me. Lena’s concern never looks soft. Her immaculate eyebrows turn it sharp, almost managerial. Annoyed on my behalf and everyone else’s. “This had better be one of your short ones.”

 

“It is.” The words come easily enough that she lets me go, though unhappily.

 

The corridor outside the lab hurts after the seizure shimmer. My office sits at the far end, past the glass meeting room and the poster display where my own face looks back at me beside the words REIMAGINING NEURAL FUTURES THROUGH FUNGI. Underneath it, someone has pinned a print-out of the Weird Science promo with a mushroom doodled in the corner and DARLING written in block capitals.

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I want to die. I also want to know how many people have seen it.

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My body still feels wrong, as though the aura has left a charge in the air around me. The hairs on my arms lift. My skin buzzes. Every person in the corridor looks fractionally more vivid than they should.

 

Halfway down, my gaze snags on him. A man stands by my office door as though he belongs there, although I know with certainty that he does not. Tall. Black trench coat. Shoulders pulled back. Hands taut at the ends of rigid arms. The corridor light catches in his slicked black hair. For one absurd second, I think the seizure has spilt into hallucination and, if so, my subconscious has become embarrassingly specific about my type. He turns his head. Looks straight at me.

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The air in my lungs vanishes. My mind pulls at his attraction, then falters. He reads as too composed. Too exact. His eyes hold mine with a concentration that should feel invasive and instead lands lower, hotter, somewhere behind my ribs. Attraction pulses through me so sharply it almost makes me angry.

 

I am still half inside the static of the aura. My skin feels over-aware. Perhaps he has been sharpened by the seizure. Perhaps the seizure has stripped out my usual defences and left me exposed to the full force of him. Perhaps he belongs to it. The aura. The silvering edge of perception. The strange after-image of things. Some people describe déjà vu, fear, odd visual disturbances and a wave through the head. Nobody ever mentions finding a man at the end of the corridor who looks like temptation, but medical leaflets are famously poor on reality.

 

His eyes continue to hold mine. They have the near-black depth of compost at the centre of a heap, rich, hot and fertile. A cold certainty plunges through me. Whether he is real or not, he means trouble.

 

Before I can test the reality of him, the strip light flickers, and he turns into shadow between one blink and the next.