The protagonist drops to one knee before the guard can react and pushes an arm into the gap. The moss-light swells around their wrist — warm, not cold as expected, the warmth of a fever pressing in from outside rather than welling from within. Their fingers close on something: a knot of dense, faintly ribbed tissue, about the size of a closed fist, seamed with the same green-gold light. When they pull it free the hum drops an octave — almost contrite — and the spore in their throat blooms open, copper gone metallic, clover gone sweet and wrong, a taste like the inside of a wound that has been quiet too long. The guard does not move. The crowd does not breathe. The thing in the protagonist's palm pulses twice, slow and patient as a sleeping heart, and the gap in the stem closes behind it, smooth as skin healing over a scrape.