We push into the radioactive zone called the Big Burn. Ahead, in its heart, grows a jungle of mutant life, radiation-resistant. We have medication that protects the two of us, at least for now. She and I are agents, seeking a professor lost here years ago--soon after the Catastrophe, in fact. We're to verify his death--the government fears he may have faked it, defected to the enemy. They also want us to check out the ruins of the lab that developed the bomb technology used in the war, and make sure no one's been digging for weapons secrets. No one wants another Burn.

But... it's beautiful in the Big Burn! The jungle glows at night. Life profoundly strange, but... it's adapted.

And when we find the labs, the professor is alive and well. He's been hiding all these years from BOTH governments in the weird wilderness he inadvertently created.

He refuses to go back. "I won't be a war tool again." He'd rather study the jungle.

My fellow agent tells me she's not going back either. She loves the jungle and planned this all along. Suspected she'd find him here.

And other dropouts may be moving into the mutant forest, too, one by one, or two by two.

I'm a bit in love with her, and don't know what to do... It is beautiful. But lonely. And hot! Can our radiation drugs really shield us long-term? An expedition's one thing. But... live here?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• The Big Burn: in the Andre Norton novels I read voraciously as a kid, the American heartland was a vast radioactive scar--the Big Burn. In Plague Ship (by "Andrew North", Norton's pen name in the 50s, as she needed to pass as male in the sexist world of science fiction publishing), the Solar Queen makes an emergency landing there... to find it's not all sterile rock as everyone thinks--its heart hides a still-hot but rich, mutant jungle. Life adapted. Just not human life.
• Full of human refugees: I was on Haight Street today... beautiful girls all over--and all smoking and popping drugs I can't touch, not with my fragile immune system. A scene as forbidden to me as if it's radioactive.
• What is the Burn? The scar inside me left by childhood abuse. I hide in it. I SAY I'm lonely, but... it's strange and beautiful inside my withdrawal, in the jungle of my dreams.
• The professor who worked for defense: My intellect. It developed social defenses that isolated me as a kid. Now, my brain's on strike--hiding out in a hippie jungle, refusing to become a professional and get a career... because that'd mean being around normal people.
• My anima defects to it too: Should I live in solitude, dwelling on what was done to me for a while? Fully owning my strangeness?

22 YEARS LATER

The dream warned a beautiful tempting world was forbidden me, due to mutation hazards. I took this symbolically at the time. It was literal! I am, it turns out, a mutant; Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome makes me vulnerable--immunologically, physically (fragile joints), and socially (autism). I can't eat your food or breathe your air. I live in the Big Burn.

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