Grower's Omen (The Fixers, book #2: A KarmaCorp Novel)

by Audrey Faye

  “They won’t all learn.” He touched a small planting of grasses, one of the species with the new splices. “This is the fourth modification of these meadow grasses I’ve attempted.”

  I could hear the sadness in his voice for the first three generations that had failed. The love of a gardener for all green, growing things, even the ones that hadn’t developed the right manners for communal living.

  I could feel the conflict inside me. My Talent still didn’t know what to make of this man, and my brain said he might well be at the heart of the problems here. But Tyra Lightbody, human being—she liked Jerome. Not a romantic like, and not a sexual one either. More like when I’d looked at a grubby, fierce ten-year-old girl with miner boots and blonde braids and furious eyes and decided she was going to be my new best friend. Something inside of me felt a connection to the soul that lived inside the charismatic, complicated scientist.

  Apparently I was collecting orphans again.

  I looked at his grasses and said what I would have said to a friend. “It will take time. You’re growing a family.”

  Walls slammed into place. “I wouldn’t know. I never had one.”

  Damn. I closed my eyes for a moment, letting the jarring resonances settle. “You’ve built one, then. I was in dome Alpha last night. Your gardens are absolutely beautiful—a harmony created by a man who understands what it is to depend on and love one another very well.”

  I could see the confusion land in his eyes as the scientist tried to keep his walls up and the heart who had created the gardens tried to step into friendly light.

  It didn’t surprise me when the scientist eventually won—but Growers didn’t give up that easily, and neither did Lightbodies. I reached out to his grasses and opened my Talent, reading the DNA of what grew under my fingers one more time. He was right, they were learning. Learning to share, learning to accept the presence of another in their space, learning to trust. Except for one thing. I looked at Jerome, my hand still on the grasses. “They’re afraid of running out of water.” Desert memories still ran strong. Light could be shared. Water needed to be hoarded.

  He blinked. “They’re being developed for a tropical environment. They’ve never been short of water.”

  Memories could be ferocious things, even when experience taught exactly the opposite. “It’s what I read from them.”

  I could see the moment the scientist remembered he was staring at a Grower—and what that might mean. He looked down at his fourth-generation grasses, a gardener’s love tangling with a scientist’s skepticism. “You could help them shift. To be less afraid.”

  I could, but in this case, it would be much more powerful if he did. “You could tell them. Talk to them, reassure them.”

  Very gently, his fingers touched the grass—and then walls slammed down again, ones that made the previous version look like toothpicks. “I’ll examine their genetic code. Perhaps we can splice in a rainforest gene or two.”

  My head was still ringing. We’d been momentarily connected through the grasses when he’d gone into shutdown, and it had shaken me. I wasn’t sure why—he was hardly the first scientist I’d seen reject my particular brand of woo.

  My heart whispered that he was maybe the scientist who needed it the most.

  Those who didn’t have the extreme fortune to be born into deep community sought it out in myriad ways, some a lot healthier than others. Fantasy was common, and the desire to control—and a research garden gave a lot of room for both of those.

  Jerome Salmera had built what he’d never had—but real life was neither that tidy nor that easily modified. Maybe somewhere at the intersection of garden fantasy and Xirtaxis Minor’s limp communal reality lay whatever was causing problems here. It might come from the man himself, or a project he’d created, or from one of his underlings. My mind considered what I had seen that morning. Smoldering lab techs and chameleon ones.

  It wasn’t only plants that thirsted for water.

  “Good morning.”

  For the second time in an hour, I found my musings interrupted by a voice behind my head. It didn’t happen that often—Fixers were hard to sneak up on.

  Jerome’s eyes snapped to the new arrival.

  I turned, breathing my chakras back onto solid ground as I did so. Toli stood at the entrance to Jerome’s planter beds. She glanced at him, eyes careful, and then at me. “Nikki said you were looking for me.”

  I hadn’t told the tech any such thing, so either she was psychic or she’d thought I might need to be rescued. Both were interesting possibilities.

  I made a mental note to check Nikki for Talent. Anyone who enjoyed a prickly little plant that much might be a Grower, although mine wasn’t the Talent most likely to wreak psychic havoc. That would be the Shamans—Raven had sent her entire habitat on midnight cooler raids when her Talent had manifested.

  I made a second mental note to find out if there were any preteen girls living in the biome. If there was a young Talent or psychic sensitive on the loose, I needed to find her. It wasn’t the most likely cause, or Yesenia would have sent a Psych or a Seeker instead of a Fixer—but it paid to cover all the bases.

  “Grower?” Toli’s voice sounded mildly concerned.

  I snapped back to real time. “Sorry. Travel lag.” Not something I suffered from, at least not this long, but almost everyone else in the universe did, so it made a handy excuse to cover for inappropriate mental wanderings. I gave the head of the labs my best innocent smile. “I was hoping to borrow some basic equipment for testing pheromone levels.”

  It would knock another thing off my suspect list, and it would provide cover for testing as many of the younger inhabitants of the biome as I could lay my hands on.

  Her eyebrows twitched. “Certainly. Can I ask why?”

  I tried to stay focused on her face and still keep an eye on the man beside me—because if I was reading him right, he’d just gone on full alert without moving a muscle. “I was going to do some basic elimination.” And since I was, I might as well jump in with both feet. “The data on who has been affected would seem to suggest a link to the experimental domes. I thought I’d start there, take a quick read to see if there’s any unusual pheromonal activity.”

  Jerome’s eye’s darkened. “I can assure you there isn’t. We monitor that kind of thing on a regular basis.”

  Not with Talent, they didn’t. “I have some ways of scanning that will differ from your equipment.” I tried appealing to the scientist inside the glowering man. “You’re welcome to join me if you like.” A chance to shadow a Grower at work didn’t come along very often.

  His face made one of those abrupt shifts again, back to charming, diplomatic scientist. I was getting very wary of that particular persona. He shrugged in pleasant acquiescence. “Toli, please provide whatever she needs. Take what readings you like, Dr. Lightbody. I’ll be happy to provide reports from our latest monitoring scans as well.”

  Toli’s head was bouncing back and forth, tracking our conversation like a ping-pong ball.

  “I’d appreciate those.” I gave in to the tug inside me that wanted to try to move past this particular shield of his. “Your gardens are beautiful, Jerome. If something in them is doing this, I trust there will be a way to set it right without harming that beauty.”

  I saw it then. Just a flash. Hurt. Disbelief. A small boy who had heard such promises and grown into a man who didn’t believe them anymore.

  He bowed slightly, the consummate scientist firmly back in place. “Let me know if your data shows any anomalies.”

  I watched him walk off, trying to reconcile the wildly complex set of data that was Jerome Salmera. And felt Toli stirring beside me.

  She studied me like I’d studied Nikki’s prickly plant, and then grinned. “You look pretty innocent, but you’re not, are you?”

  I had no good answer for that. “I hear that looks can be deceiving.”

  She laughed. “You’ll have your equipment within the hour, Gro
wer. See that you keep it clean and bring it back to me in one piece.”

  I smiled and said nothing. I knew better than to make promises I might not keep.

  12

  I inspected the box of supplies Toli had just dropped at my feet. It had been years since I’d run ambient sensor equipment, but the air-sampling gear looked like a shinier, newer model of exactly what I was used to. “Thanks—that looks perfect.”

  The lab manager grinned. “I stole you the best of what we’ve got. I don’t suppose you need help running it?”

  I didn’t, but a friendly face was always welcome, especially one who knew how to run an air-intake valve. “If you’ve got time, I’d appreciate an extra pair of hands. Especially if you’re up for what will probably be a lot of boring staring at readouts.”

  “Beats running inventory, which is what I have to go do if you kick me out.” Toli was already digging into her box, hooking up connectors and valves and tablet interfaces. “I assume you want this set up for immediate read-out?”

  She obviously knew more than intake valves, and I was happy to save anyone from inventory duty. “That would be great—here, I’ll patch you in to my tablet.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That would break at least fifteen rules before we even get started. I’ll send the data to mine, and then I can get you a copy of whatever you need later.”

  That seemed like it should break fifteen rules too, but I didn’t comment. I knew how bureaucracies worked, and how pragmatic managers got around them. “I’ll run a basic pheromone sampling first, but I don’t expect it to show much. Just looking for a baseline.”

  “Sure. Continuous collection or point data?”

  I might as well use her to full advantage. “Can you tweak it to run both?”

  Toli’s eyes gleamed. “Oh, yeah.”

  I adjusted my plans for the morning. She could more than handle the straight-up science, which would leave me free to do the kinds of scans that involved Talent. I wandered the central pathways of dome Alpha, touching my hands to various bits of foliage as I went. Noticing details that looked different by day than they had by night.

  I could feel Toli’s eyes on my back. “What are you up to—Grower stuff?”

  Curiosity, but with the polite offer of a brush-off if I wanted it. Which struck me as off, somehow. Someone with Toli’s personality would have her nose in everything with even the slightest invitation.

  Clearly those were scarce in these parts.

  Poor tribal soil. I kept circling back to that, even though it wasn’t what I’d been sent here to fix. “Yeah. I’m getting a baseline read right now, just like I’ll have you do once you’ve got the gear set up. Then we’ll stir things up a little and see what happens on both your measurements and mine.”

  She chuckled. “Does Jerome know that you intend to wreak havoc with his babies?”

  Interesting choice of words. “It shouldn’t interfere with any of his work.” Not unless one of the plants here was the guilty party, anyhow, and that would rapidly make it my work.

  “That won’t make him any less displeased when he finds out what you’ve done.” Toli suddenly sounded serious.

  “Fixers don’t ask for permission.” I glanced her way and offered an exit door if she wanted one. “I’m happy to run the equipment if you need to go take care of your inventory.”

  She snorted. “You calling me a coward?”

  “No.” I could feel my lips twitching—it was going to be very tempting to take her home at the end of this. “Just making sure you know what you signed up for.”

  “I’m a lab manager,” she said dryly. “If something hasn’t exploded before noon, it’s been a really boring day.”

  She likely meant that literally—explosions were a fairly unavoidable consequence when you mixed beakers, fire, and scientists who didn’t think things all the way through before sticking the first two in the vicinity of each other. “I blew up my first test tube when I was five.”

  “I was eight.” She tapped the equipment on the stones in front of her, indicating it was ready to go. “But I blew up four at the same time. Distilled pure alcohol by accident—I was trying to make fuel for my brother’s rocket.”

  I nodded that she should take her baseline readings, and took my hands off the plants while she did so. I was pretty sure nothing in here was wildly Talent sensitive, but I was scientist enough to value clean data where I could get it—and team members who could make a good rocket fuel. “The schools on Stardust Prime issue the chemistry teachers with extra hazmat suits when they have a Lightbody in the class.”

  KarmaCorp had just issued mine straight to me. Fixers were expected to clean up their own messes.

  Toli looked down at her machines, grinning appreciatively. “Baseline data’s done. You guys have a good lab manager?”

  It was a casually asked question, but even a Grower could hear the layers underneath. I eyed her carefully. “A cousin of mine, but good lab bosses are always in demand.”

  She shrugged a shoulder in acknowledgment. “Most of us are picky about where we go.”

  Toli and Glenn, both looking to finish their rotations and ship out. When a community couldn’t keep gold like those two, it was in deep trouble.

  Poor soil.

  Which I could contemplate after I got on with the job I’d actually been sent here for. I crouched down and laid my hands in the dirt. “I’m going to send out some small test signals. Let me know if your equipment picks up anything.”

  She nodded, watching avidly.

  If I did my job right, there wouldn’t be anything interesting to see. Carefully, I reached for resonance with the water molecules in the soil—they were easy to read and should touch pretty much everything in the dome. I sent a small message of peace, harmony, good drinking.

  Toli shook her head. My Talent wasn’t receiving anything unusual either.

  I sent out a different pulse, this one a question. To roots. To things which reached down into the dirt. Where do you belong?

  What came back was a deeply satisfying litany on a single theme. Here. Nothing felt alien, nothing felt lost. Green, growing things that understood their part in the whole and engaged in it willingly and with trust that their efforts would be seen and rewarded.

  The human inhabitants of Xirtaxis Minor could take lessons from this garden.

  Minor, gentle reverberations under my hands, but nothing on Toli’s equipment.

  I lifted my hands long enough to set us both back at baseline, and then put them down on the dirt one more time and sent out a more focused probe—one intent on being substantially more disturbing. Who sent me dreams?

  Silence. Green, growing things trying to understand the mysterious human concept that was a dream, or at least my Talent’s best attempt at rendering it into something cells would understand. I tried again, this time sending more shading. Memories. Real and not real. Things that might have been, could be.

  The smaller plants near me disengaged, headed back to drinking their water, finding clear paths for their roots. They were mostly annuals, and this question only confused them. A few months wasn’t enough time to process that kind of question—not at the cellular level, anyhow. I waited. Some of the perennials and trees in here came from stock that counted life in decades and centuries instead of weeks.

  More silence.

  Toli squinted at her equipment and shook her head.

  I didn’t feel anything either, but something was coming—I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck rising up in recognition of something that had not yet happened.

  My fingers clawed into the dirt. I feel you. I see you.

  A momentous, shuddering pause, and then all hell broke loose, under my hands and everywhere else.

  Heaving, reaching, chewing force, aimed straight at the dirt where I’d asked my question. What my Talent could only translate as a green, growing thing mad as hell. And scared. And very certain I was the problem.

  Violence, amassing under m
y fingertips.

  I was under attack. I could feel the horrible squeezing as my cells tried to empty themselves of water, of calcium, of silica—the basic constituents of life. My Talent reeled, not remotely equipped for meeting savagery.

  Somewhere in the deep background, I could hear Toli yelling. I didn’t have time to listen.

  I threw everything I had into the dirt under my hands. Stop. Am. Friend.

  Brief confusion—and then the pull on my cells got stronger. The death call of an organism who spoke more strongly to water than I did.

  I felt the hands on me, felt them lifting me off the dirt, settling me on something padded. Flat. Felt the violence dim.

  Gritting my teeth against the searing pain in my head, I reached over the edge of the stretcher and brushed my fingers against the dirt one more time. Seeking. Letting some of my precious water go and tracking it to source. Who are you?

  I felt the black taking over, felt its blessed eating of the pain.

  But not before I heard my answer.

  13

  I’d gone under to the sound of Toli’s voice—and I came awake to it too. She sounded at least as worried as when I’d blacked out.

  “She’s coming back to us.” Glenn, with the professionally reassuring tones of medicals everywhere.

  My body issued screeching confirmation. I was indeed waking up—and I hurt everywhere. I started running the simple chakra resonance check that all Fixers were taught to use when we’d been idiots. By definition, any of us who ended up feeling this way had most certainly done something dumb.

  Or that would be Yesenia’s conclusion, anyhow. She had very little tolerance for Fixers who ended up on the wrong end of a collision with a pod bus.

  Except in this case, I couldn’t even claim a few tons of traveling plastic and steel. The last few drops of water I’d sacrificed had yielded the answer I needed. A searing signature from a young willow whose beautiful form I remembered gracing the center of the dome. I ran my aching head through the litany of problems from Glenn’s files, and watched the data click into place.