by Y. S. Lee
Rukmini inhales again, all the way from her diaphragm, and hesitantly releases the first few notes of the jazz ditty. But the glamour holds, and those notes ring out with power, in a voice low and smoky, even sensuous. Rukmini’s true voice has never sounded like this, not even close. With a wink at her listeners, she belts out the rest of the tune, giving a little shimmy of her hips and shaking her arms for good measure.
The audience titters with delight, and for a second, Rukmini forgets why she’s actually there.
Then she sees Peter glaring up at her, the only person not smiling or laughing or tipping back a glass of some pretty liquor or another. It’s as if someone threw those cold drinks at her. Can he somehow see through the illusion? Or is he thinking about something else?
She won’t panic. He can’t, he doesn’t know. Instead, she grimly sings while the guests mingle, until Peter, ever the suave, put-together shipping mogul, comes up to play emcee. They haven’t been this close in years.
He thanks her disinterestedly, takes the mic, and launches into a speech thanking everyone for coming.
Her heart beating hard, Rukmini sashays down into the crowd. She isn’t supposed to start singing again until after the speech. A few people smile at her, a couple with the kind of leering attention that just begs for a good right hook to the cheek. But she only nods back and hurries on. It isn’t worth breaking cover for, as satisfying as that would feel.
“After a brief break, we’ll enjoy the delicious banquet Angelica organized for all of you. She personally selected and sampled every item on the menu,” Peter booms, gesturing to his starlet-delicate, sequin-clad wife, who has joined him onstage. “And of course, we have our exhibit to reveal still! The best treat of all.”
We’ll see about that, Rukmini thinks, her eyes narrowing.
“I need to powder my nose,” she tells the harried event coordinator and her perfectly coiffed personal assistant, who are running around with a clipboard, making sure everything is still on track.
The PA nods distractedly. “Make it snappy. You’re back on in five.”
Rukmini heads toward the rear set of restrooms, which, not coincidentally, isn’t far from the green room. She pauses outside and murmurs into her mushroom pin. “Everything still a go?”
But whatever reply the others made is lost in the burst of Peter’s laughter into the microphone. It sounds real in a way his speech didn’t, and it rips the calluses off her heart.
There, in the middle of the underwater ballroom, she remembers another day when his laugh rang out like that.
Rukmini, age twelve, and Pravan, age fifteen, retreated into the forest near their house yet again that summer. It was the only safe place with their parents’ constant fighting. Father loved Mother, a light-skinned Indian woman, but his associates and friends had made it clear the marriage was a misstep.
Father himself seemed to have reached a point where he no longer disagreed. “At least Peter looks like me. He has a shot in life.”
“Pravan,” Mother repeated, her accent lilting. “His name is Pravan!”
“Only if you want to keep him down, like the poor girl.” Father ran his hand through his thatch of yellow hair. “There’s no hiding her looks.”
Her gut churning, Rukmini sprinted out of the house, and Pravan followed. “Don’t listen to him.” He overtook Rukmini and hugged her. “He’s just scared.”
But Rukmini knew that wasn’t true.
They’d gathered dandelion clocks and were blowing the fluff into the wind when Rukmini noticed a circle of toadstools just outside a clearing they’d never ventured into. “Look, a faerie ring!”
“There’s no such thing as faeries,” Pravan scoffed, laughing. “Don’t you know anything?” Still, he led the charge into the clearing, where a white-skinned woman with gills on her temples and long, white-spotted scarlet hair welcomed them with a smile.
The harried personal assistant has appeared before Rukmini and is tugging at her arm, cutting off the memory. Well, good. Rukmini doesn’t want to think about the past. Peter made his choice.
She channels the tears burning a hole in her throat into her second set, crooning sultry lyrics and winking at the audience now seated at the tables as the waitstaff serves the first course. But the set can’t finish fast enough.
At last, it’s over, and she can let herself think again. She acknowledges the smattering of applause with another wink, then strolls backstage.
The other Mycologians meet her there. The Indigo Milkcap, a black woman named Olivia with a quick smile and a quicker wit, grins broadly. “A fine job singing,” she notes in her French accent. “I could scarcely believe it was the same girl I know can’t carry a tune in a bucket to save her life!”
The Bleeding Tooth, a redhead by the name of Matthew, is less amused. “I saw your brother, but made sure he didn’t see me,” he mutters, shaking his head. “Still hard to believe.”
“Well, we’d best be on our way before he sends others after us,” Olivia announces, glancing at her slender gold wristwatch. “We’ve now got fourteen minutes and thirty seconds to get her out.”
Rukmini fingers her pin again. Olivia also has one, hers featuring a dark blue mushroom, while Matthew’s is a more gruesome pink-and-cream mushroom dotted with scarlet drops like blood.
She asks herself, as she has so many times since his defection, if Peter ever misses his pin, a delicate enamel reproduction of the orange Chicken of the Woods fungus. He’d flung it at Supriya when he quit.
“You’re on the losing side, don’t you get it? You can’t stop progress!”
Nah. He’s likely tossed that memory into the rubbish bin, along with his morality.
“Matthew, stats?” she asks, focusing on the present moment.
“I scoped out the perimeters,” Matthew rumbles, “and there’s security posted everywhere. But we’d expected that.” He flashes a grin to rival Olivia’s. As Bleeding Tooth, he can induce gigantic blood blisters in others that explode at his bidding. That ability is hardly Rukmini’s favorite, but it’ll come in handy here if anyone tries to stop them.
Olivia tries the door with a gloved hand. “Locked.” She removes the glove, and her fingers ooze a blue milklike sap that sinks into the doorknob. After a few seconds, she turns it. “Unlocked. Come on.”
The room is empty.
Rukmini exchanges mystified stares with the others. They’ve done their homework, their due diligence. They have their informants on the inside. They know exactly where Supriya will be held until the reveal—in this room. There’s even a marble tub of dirt for her to dip her feet into. And yet she isn’t here.
“Damn it!” Rukmini and Olivia swear. Matthew groans.
“Time for plan B.” Rukmini speeds back toward the ballroom, stiletto heels clacking on the floor as she runs. These have to be the most uncomfortable shoes ever made, but she can’t kick them off, not yet.
There is no plan B. They shouldn’t have needed one, not when their plan A always works.
She slows just before entering the ballroom, composing her face and smoothing her hair. The other two fall back into the role of waitstaff while she heads to the stage.
Someone grabs her arm. “There you are,” says a familiar voice. “I’d like a word with you about your next set.”
Rukmini’s head snaps up. She’s so startled, she drops her glamour for a second. “Peter?!”
Her brother leans close as if to kiss her cheek, then whispers, “Did you really think I wouldn’t recognize you? Or that I wouldn’t expect you to do this? Of course I did.”
She jerks backward. “How could you sell her? What, you’re not already filthy rich enough?”
He huffs impatiently. “You don’t know what’s at stake here.”
The chandeliers and candles go out, leaving only the oceanic glow from the water all around the ballroom. Three-dimensional images of colorful fish and sea creatures appear in the air, transforming the space into a true lagoon, an underwater realm
of dreams. A dolphin swims past, followed by a pair of sirens with saucy eyes. White chocolate pearls eddy through the “water,” real enough that the partygoers try to snatch them up and eat them.
Rukmini’s heart doesn’t stop, but she almost wishes it had. That style, that projected hallucination—that can only be the work of the Amanita herself. Peter did this. Peter kidnapped the person who had given them a place to go when their world was falling apart and is making her perform like a trained monkey for the very people she loathes.
Almost on instinct, Rukmini follows her brother’s gaze to the center of the room. There, with a spotlight shining down on her, is Supriya.
Her long red locks swirl around her in waves almost the length of her body. She’s wearing a slinky silver gown, though Rukmini can’t imagine it was her idea. Starfish gleam from her earlobes and hang from her neck, and bracelets of coral ring her wrists—shackling her to a seashell-shaped porcelain tub filled with what appears to be turquoise water but must really be soil.
She’s as stunning as ever, but the strain of holding the vision in place shows in the wrinkles around her mouth. Amanita muscaria poisons as much as it provokes hallucinations, and if Supriya can’t release the toxins fueling this display, they’ll turn in on her.
Rukmini can’t read her distant expression. Why is Supriya refusing to act? Does she even know what’s happening?
Supriya’s eyes meet hers, and another memory unspools.
“Humans are masters at destroying themselves in the name of progress,” Supriya proclaimed. She leaned back on her lichen-covered throne of branches. “They lie, both to themselves and to the world, about what they need and how their plans will benefit everyone else. Such selfish behavior is their prerogative, but the realms do not belong solely to them. Flora, fauna, fungi, and Otherkind all rely on nature, too.”
The ten recruits to the Mycologian Society, drawn in from all around the world, nodded. One girl even took notes in a tiny journal, as though they would be tested on this later.
“That’s where you come in, my little agents of disruption,” Supriya continued. “Like the toadstools that led you here, like the fungus you already share much in common with, you will charm and be charming. You will endure as you help others endure. As members of the human race, you will help preserve nature in the face of the onward, unfeeling march of Technology and Industry.”
No student listened more eagerly than Pravan. He was determined to help take Industry down, even if it meant taking their father’s business with it, and restore balance. “But why mushrooms?”
“Because nothing better encapsulates how we are all dependent on one another. And because even what starts from an individual spore later has many roots.” Supriya began handing out tiny enamel pins and bestowing their recipients with titles and corresponding abilities.
Pravan beamed with a pride and a sense of purpose Rukmini had never seen in him. With a bow, he swore always to uphold the principles of the Society.
Rukmini reels. Supriya won’t act because she won’t risk hurting Peter. Even after all this time, she still thinks he’ll come back to the fold. Rukmini is sure of it. It makes her angrier than ever, so angry that her hands shake, but all she can do is stare.
“I know what you’re thinking,” announces Peter into the microphone someone’s given him. He’s standing beside Supriya’s tub. “And yes, she’s real.”
The crowd exclaims in amazement. “You did it! How did you find it?” one man asks.
A woman who’s risen from her seat appraises Supriya. “It’s, what, a sentient fungus? I’ve been reading about the alchemical properties of poisons. Just consider the homeopathic possibilities.”
Almost everyone is on their feet by this point. “I want to touch it!” someone calls.
It. “Like hell,” mutters Rukmini, and just like that, she pulls free of her paralysis.
Peter puts up a hand for patience. “Imagine: Magic still exists. We thought we’d lost it forever. But here it is, and just think what we might accomplish. If a single mushroom creature can create this atmosphere—and while it seems like clever lighting to you, it’s real water she’s letting you breathe—what could a bunch of mermaids do? A herd of satyrs? A flock of harpies? You get the picture.”
Olivia and Matthew circulate with trays of wineglasses no one takes. Rukmini knows they’re ready to run at a moment’s notice.
“We could put an end to disease once and for all!” someone calls. “With their magic, we can eradicate cancer. Heal deformities. Relieve pain. All the things I spent my life researching—with an actual specimen, I can finally test my theories.”
Rukmini shakes her head in disgust, and to her surprise, Peter looks exasperated, too.
“I’m not done,” he says. The crowd hushes. “I brought Supriya—her name is Supriya—to show you magic still exists. But we’ve been going about this all wrong, all of us.”
Rukmini can almost feel the fizzy excitement of the gathering shifting from giddy champagne bubbles to a rolling boil of suspicious mutters. Peter must feel it, too, because he doesn’t wait before barreling on. “We’ve been looking at these beings like they’re objects for us to take and exploit. They’re not. If we want their power, we have to listen to their concerns and work with them.”
Now the bubbles are at a roar, the shrill scream of a steaming teakettle. The mutters have given away to outraged disbelief, and people storm the tub.
Even now, Supriya doesn’t move.
Poison them already! Rukmini thinks to the woman who’s become like her own mother. The only family she had left after Mother died and Peter and Father abandoned her to boarding schools.
But Supriya doesn’t. She can’t, not with her Mycologians in the room. She’s willing to sacrifice a lot to restore balance to the world, but not the children she raised as her own.
“Wait!” Peter cries. No one, not even his wife, heeds him. Rukmini recognizes what’s happening before he does. He thought if he could show these people what he knew, they would listen, but all he’s done is lose their respect.
There’s no time to worry about Peter’s hurt feelings, though. As one, Rukmini, Olivia, and Matthew come together. Rukmini thinks frantically back to all her lessons with Supriya. The key to a heist is to give onlookers something else to look at, diverting them from the real target. She knows that well, has enacted it countless times.
But this isn’t a heist anymore. There’s no mark, nothing to hide. They just need to grab Supriya and run.
Her power won’t help. Neither will Olivia’s. But Matthew’s…
Then Peter is by them. “We have to get her out of here!”
“What ‘we’?” demands Olivia. Matthew just grunts.
“This is your fault,” Rukmini hisses.
Peter bows his head. “Would you please just listen for a minute?”
The guests are crowded around the seashell tub. Rukmini puts her cigarette holder to her lips again, trying to still her trembling hands. “Get talking, then.”
You’re the Amethyst Deceiver, she reminds herself, Supriya’s right hand, so what are you going to do?
Peter glares at her. “Why do you think I’m here?” he whisper-shouts. “For my health?”
Rukmini’s eyebrows leap up to her hairline in surprise. “Excuse me?”
“You wouldn’t answer any of my letters, and when I tried to call you at Olivia’s, she said you didn’t want to talk to me. But I’ve been trying to tell you I left the company.” Peter turns his collar just enough for the orange enamel pin to show. “Once the stock market crashed back in ’29, I knew I couldn’t keep pretending I was okay with everything. I thought I could get Father and the others to look at what they’re doing, maybe consider researching other kinds of resources.”
“Wait, let me guess. It didn’t go so well?” Rukmini can’t believe how naïve he’s been. “What, you thought you could coast by on your blue eyes and pretty smile, and they’d just start seeing us all as people?�
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Supriya lets out a moan, and suddenly nothing else matters.
Rukmini claps, and Olivia and Matthew immediately begin flinging the wineglasses into the crowd, eliciting screams and forcing it to break up, until the path to Supriya is clear.
“Pardon me, but what do you think you’re doing?” the event coordinator demands.
“I’m sorry for ruining your event, I really am,” Rukmini tells her. Then she races to the center of the room and starts singing at the top of her lungs to distract the already distraught crowd further, while Olivia gets to work dissolving the coral shackles on Supriya’s wrists.
The whole thing is so confusing, only a few security guards come forward, and a few of Matthew’s blood blisters erupting on their skin is more than enough to keep everyone else back.
Peter joins them, and Rukmini reminds him that if he helps, he’ll never be able to work in this circle again. “Good,” he says. “That’s all I want.”
Only then does it occur to Rukmini that Peter couldn’t have his enamel pin unless Supriya gave it back to him. “Wait, Supriya, you were in on this? Then why’d you let him shackle you?”
Supriya wiggles her illusory tail, causing her scales to flash and iridesce, then drops the hallucination. The ballroom is just a ballroom again. “Outside,” she says to Rukmini. “Pravan?”
Rukmini waits for her brother to correct the name.
But he just smiles and squeezes Supriya’s hand. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”
And Rukmini knows exactly how they’ll achieve that.
“Listen,” Pravan whispers, “that isn’t the only reason I left. I also couldn’t stand how they cut you out. How they talk about people like Mother. I should have said something before. I’m sorry.”
“Later!” But the corner of her mouth turns upward. “Do your part first.”
Peter—no, Pravan—cracks his knuckles and then starts strutting. It’s ridiculous—Rukmini has long suspected Supriya has fun with the powers she doles out—but effective. Chicken of the Woods grows in clusters, so with each movement, a copy of Pravan appears, dancing through the room. In under two minutes, the entire room is full to bursting, making it impossible to see, and it’s a good thing the Mycologians don’t need to talk, because between the screams and the shouts of the irate security guards, they wouldn’t be able to hear one another.