by Audrey Faye
I didn’t have time to search for a medical bot. With as much precision as I could muster, I split the work of my Talent into two. One set of resonances to call the cells of a man’s brain to safety. The other, to convince a pot of soil that it wasn’t a killer.
I pushed that message, hard. At the compost and at the plant memory and at the man who was trying to use both.
And felt the attack suddenly cease, along with a flash of something that almost felt like remorse.
One scientist who wasn’t a killer either.
But the man in my hands was still very unconscious—and from what my ragged Talent could read, pretty damn likely to stay that way for a while.
Which was a clear message to me.
This was not my turf, and I would be putting anyone who helped me at serious risk. I had no idea what Jerome’s Talent could do, especially with the dirt and green, growing things of the biome on his side. The next person they went after might not have Glenn’s hard head.
I was very much alone.
I looked around to assess what equipment I could reach within a step or two. And saw the flashing screen. “Biometrics security fail. Message unsent.”
KarmaCorp wasn’t going to be riding to my rescue either.
20
I moved as silently as I could toward the entry portal to experimental dome Alpha, afraid of what I would find and what I would need to do. The memory of Glenn’s friendly face, twisted in anguish, pushed me onward.
Nikki was with him now, and what appeared to be a very competent medical bot.
But this had to stop.
Confrontation wasn’t my strength—I wasn’t that kind of Fixer. Kish was, not me. I gathered resources, watered, connected, mixed good additives into the soil. But I had a rogue Talent and his willow on the loose, no way to fetch help, and people I cared about in deep danger, probably including myself.
I wished I could tell Jerome how much damage he would do if he stayed on this path—how much damage he had already done. But the proud man who grew beautiful gardens and disdained his fellow human beings wasn’t remotely capable of hearing any of that. Maybe one day.
Today, he just needed to be stopped.
There was a time to hide and a time to stand, and I’d just run smack into one of them. I’d lived with a digger-rock chick for long enough to know how it was done.
I hit the first set of portal doors and stepped inside, waiting for the decon vacuums as the Talent-gathered storm inside me rose, raw and alien.
I wasn’t used to pulling the energies of a warrior, much less one who needed to execute a quick and very definitive strike. This couldn’t be a war—there were too many innocents in the way, and too much willingness on the part of a man and a willow to use them. I needed to stop a rogue Talent in his tracks. Or his tree. I still wasn’t sure which one was the bigger threat, so I was going to borrow a trick from their tactics manual and try to knock both of them out cold. Long enough to send for help, anyhow.
Which sounded like a great plan, except my Talent didn’t run to knocking out two entities at once. Not with anything on the spectrum of energy I was willing to use, anyhow.
I’d have to take them one at a time—which meant this was the scariest, dumbest thing I’d ever done. Or it would be, right after I conked the first one of them on the head.
I winced at the noise as the second set of doors slid open. If the occupants inside were paying any attention at all, my arrival wasn’t going to go unnoticed.
I stepped onto Jerome’s turf, my Talent on screaming-high alert—and froze, reading something entirely different than what I’d expected. Every molecule, every cell in the garden was focused on its center.
I could see the willow’s canopy, but not the presence of the man I knew must be with her. I didn’t probe with my Talent. Passive mode only—no point in goading him into attack before I absolutely had to.
Somewhere, a small voice still hoped he could be reasoned with.
An image of Glenn’s twisted face floated up again. Jerome had forced a potted plant to seriously hurt an innocent human being.
The small voice swallowed hard. Maybe the scientist didn’t know his own strength. As trainees, most of us had some memory of responding to a slight of childhood and doing far more damage than we had ever intended.
A second small voice floated up, this one much harsher than the first. Jerome Salmera had intended to stop me from sending an alert to KarmaCorp. That went far beyond schoolyard pranks—I could only be grateful that he had the control to knock Glenn out without killing him.
My Talent reacted with scorn. Rendering someone unconscious with that much pain was either unforgivably sloppy, or intentional. The man’s ethics were nonexistent.
I stopped the stealthy forward slide of my feet, horrified both by the proliferation of voices in my head and by what they were saying. I was deeply, badly out of balance. Cells don’t have voices—they only have belief. Strength. Knowing.
Breath shaking, I reached for mine. And felt the voices quiet. Not entirely, because I didn’t have time to fully ground, to fully combat the slow nails-on-chalkboard that this biome had been to my sense of connection and community and love and home. But I’d lived steeped in all those things for twenty-six years, and I reached for what my cells knew cold.
Two big handfuls of it would hold me for long enough.
My fingers physically cupping the resonances of memory, I called one more time on the striking energy I would need to get this done—and stepped around the bend in the path that would let me see to the center. To the man, and the tree, and the battle I needed to fight.
Vibrations rocked my cells. Naming intention. Seeking release.
But I couldn’t let them go.
Because it wasn’t warriors I faced. What I found at the garden’s center wasn’t a complicated genius and his creation on a rampage.
Instead, Jerome Salmera curled up on the ground at the base of his willow. He sat sideways to her trunk, bare feet dug into the dirt and moss that covered her roots, heart and cheek pressed toward her core.
I moved so I could see his face, the storming energies I held still ready to fly at the slightest provocation. I needed to be absolutely sure what I was looking at. Growers worked through skin contact, and whatever this looked like, maybe it was just Jerome’s version of battle stations. His best way to control the weapon that was his tree.
My Talent snorted—it clearly thought I was an idiot.
I moved with fierce stealth anyhow, a warrior not yet ready to stand down. And stopped as I finally saw Jerome’s expression. Eyes closed, face the kind of calm that only comes after the wild tornadoes are done.
This was not a man controlling his willow, or even comforting her. It was a man doing what every Grower and every Lightbody eventually did, at least if they knew what kept them whole. We were not stewards of the green, growing things, not their guardians. We were partners—living beings gifted with the chance to journey together.
The man leaning against his willow knew that as deeply as any member of my family.
I had completely underestimated their bond. In every line of his body, I could see a love far deeper than anything I had understood. A man who had opened his heart in a way that had almost certainly caused the problems on Xirtaxis Minor, and likely enlarged his own Talent as well. A man who loved—and who still thought that love would eventually be enough to teach his willow what she needed to learn.
I felt my insides shaking. He had the Talent to do it, even raw and untrained. But he didn’t care enough for his fellow human beings to teach her that. And he didn’t have the lessons of the heart.
Boundaries. Compassion. Responsibility. Devotion. Limits. Sacrifice.
The man in front of me loved enough—but he didn’t have the rest of it. Neither of them did, and the only way I knew how to change that was to plant them in rich, nurturing soil and give them time. Let them understand what they were missing, and how much richer life was with
those things in place. I’d seen it work with countless Lightbody adoptees, of both the human and the plant variety.
But my family wasn’t here. I didn’t know how to buy these two time or good soil. The tree wouldn’t live if I left—the Basturs would take care of that. Or Jerome would blow up himself, or someone else, trying to protect her.
The energies inside me kicked, railing against the impossible. There was no way to buy time for a ticking bomb.
My fists clenched, holding the storm back. There had to be a way to save them both. I needed to diffuse the bomb. Somehow. Without setting it off.
Or I needed to make the two of them care about the consequences.
I stared at Jerome and his willow in horror, cursing the very existence of the idea that had just popped into my mind. As a scientist, I could see the rationale, and it was a potent one. As a Grower, as a Lightbody, and as a human being, everything about me hated what the neurons in my skull had just dared to conceive of.
The glow of conviction pulsed stronger. Storm energies reshaped by gut-deep rightness. No words—just cells that knew.
I could feel the rush as every voice I owned hurled protest into my skull. Some things simply weren’t meant to exist, even as ideas. They shaped intention, energy, truth, even winging around the confines of my own brain.
I would not think like this.
The sense of conviction in my center blithely ignored the driving sleet of words and didn’t dim at all.
I gulped in air—I knew better than to fight cell knowledge with words. I knew better than to fight cell knowledge at all. It wasn’t always right, and it wasn’t always immoveable, but it was the bedrock of who I was.
I yearned to put my hands down into the dirt, or around the neck of my father, or Mundi, or the squirming wiggles of one of my baby cousins. I felt like an astronaut on a spacewalk without a tether—a dirt-born gardener’s very worst nightmare.
This dirt would not welcome me, however. And I didn’t need the man currently communing with his tree to know I was here.
Unlike what I’d thought two minutes ago, the time for this fight had not yet come.
I backed toward the portal doors, keeping my eyes on the pair in the center of the garden—and tried not to puke at what the pulsing conviction in my gut thought I needed to do to them.
21
I stumbled into the utilitarian, nondescript room that served as my temporary quarters, a box full of purloined lab supplies under my arms and my stomach and heart in absolute rebellion.
I’d sent a message to Yesenia on the fastest channel I could use on my own authority. I didn’t plan to wait for her forces to arrive.
My hands shook so hard the box of lab supplies rattled. What I was contemplating was unthinkable. Undoable. Immoral by any standards I’d ever applied to myself.
My family would never forgive me.
I dropped the box on the floor and my tortured self down on the bunk bed, giving in to the need to curl in on myself like a terrified seed. Trying not to whimper. Trying not to wail in horror.
The node of conviction sitting just under my ribs had yet to waver. It was the way. A dangerous and fraught one to be sure, but there were no easy paths for rogue Talents, or for the uniquely beautiful and unstable species they had created. If I didn’t act, their future was bleak—and I had no idea how much damage they might leave in their wake.
Glenn’s tormented face swam into view behind my scrunched eyelids. I could feel my breath rasping over my throat. My insides, demanding air and wishing desperately for the friendly oxygen of home.
I curled in a little tighter, sobbing into my knees. Home would never understand this choice. Yesenia would condemn the mess I was about to create, and my family would recoil from how I intended to get there.
Because I could feel the truth, still lying quiescent under my ribs. I intended to do this. I could feel the terrible beauty of alignment—the inexplicable sense of rightness that every Fixer searched for. I had found it, in a dark and awful place.
I scrubbed my eyes with my fists. I wasn’t a tadpole. I knew that the right answers didn’t always come with shiny silver bows and celestial singing. But I’d never had one come wearing the cloak of evil, either.
I pushed myself up to sitting, suddenly annoyed. I didn’t think of life in terms of good and evil, and I didn’t curl up on my bed and whimper, either. I was a KarmaCorp Fixer and a Lightbody and a freaking grown-up.
One with an idea, a way of pushing two beings and the whole community around them toward the good, which was exactly what I had chosen for my life’s work. Either it was a good idea or a bad one, but I needed to commit and then I needed to get my butt in gear. Gardens didn’t get weeded by people who weren’t willing to get their hands dirty and do the work.
I reached for the box on the floor, well aware this new and far more useful attitude needed buttressing. Thinking had always been a dangerous occupation for me when I was scared—I did far better when I grounded my feet in the dirt and kept my hands moving.
My feet would just have to make do with polymer floor, but there was plenty in the box to keep my hands occupied. I pulled out a burner, a set of beakers, a precision digital thermometer, and a titanium spoon. The basic equipment of a brewer, or in this case, the closest to it I’d been able to find in the state-of-the-art gear of a lab that clearly had more funding than it knew what to do with. Everything in the box was way too shiny. I resisted the urge to dent a few things just on principle. They were good tools and they would serve, and that was all I needed them to do.
I could feel the shaking inside me ramping up again, and I quietly, firmly steadied it. I was brewer enough to make a potion over a candle flame in a tea mug. I sure as heck wasn’t going to fall apart because my equipment was too shiny.
A couple of breaths shuddered in and out, letting go of the worst of the wobbles.
I reached for the stuff in the box that was going to be a far bigger problem. I’d ruthlessly raided Toli’s carefully annotated stash of dried plant material and organics. I’d taken nothing that was part of ongoing research, or at least I hoped I’d interpreted things that well on the fly. Most of what I needed was standard issue in any bio-genetics lab or well-equipped experimental garden.
Base materials, cells and molecules that held knowing that I needed them to share. A good potion was a community, each member speaking the piece they could offer to the power of the collective. One Grower’s rant-to-be against the dissension and separateness of a biome that could do so much better.
My breath moved evenly in and out now—I was finding my steadiness. No potion was ever evil, no matter what it looked and felt and smelled like. This one would speak messages that mattered. It would be up to the hands that held it to decide if it worked on behalf of the highest good—or against it.
I shook my head, even as I pushed a trickle of resonance into a beaker half full of water. Purifying. Warming. Brewing was tricky business, and one that didn’t need the distraction of deep philosophical meanderings. Those could wait until I was back home and thinning pea shoots.
I reached toward the small jars I had liberated from Toli’s ingredients room. The organics first—those would be standard extracts, created off-planet. I rarely used them at home, preferring the vitality and individuality of ones I had prepared myself, but today, predictable and boring was just fine.
I managed a smile at that. I had never created a boring brew and I had no intention of starting now.
Adding the first three organics went well enough. A basic energetic lattice, a framework that would hold the potion together and act as a receptor for the infusion of Talent. I added little bits of vibration as I went—I’d never been all that good at following a recipe, and the clear liquid in the beaker needed to feel like me before I moved on to the hard stuff.
I smiled as the concoction under my spoon color-shifted to light purple. Better. Not anywhere near good yet, but even a brew base could have a little life and personalit
y—and having one to chat with was steadying my Talent faster than anything else I could have done. It always had. The magic of color and light and the feel of substances stepping up to do the work that was their essence.
Helping things find their potential had always jazzed me, even if it was just a little methyl-hydrox.
I cycled the potion yellow, just because I could.
And then I anchored in the steadiness and the light and reached for a small bag of chamomile flowers. Not generally the first choice for what I was about to ask this potion to do, but these particular flowers and me, we had a history, and I wanted that history to infuse into the brew under my spoon. Because no flower got to slide down my throat and yell at me and try to wreak havoc in my soul. Not without a good, stiff talking to after, anyhow.
I poured out a few of the dried blooms into my hand, feeling their jumpiness. Not a surprise—it wasn’t in their nature to do what they’d done. Bits of dried plant, as off-center as bits of dried plant can get.
I soothed. Eased. Reminded the almost-weightless scraggles in my hand of their cell-deep knowing. It wasn’t hard. Chamomile lived and died to comfort, to connect, to heal. One of harmony’s best workhorses.
The vibrations in my hand slowed, gelled, even as I crushed the dried blooms into gentle dust. It was essence now—form no longer mattered, only that it had one. I made a funnel of my hand, sending the chamomile dust into my happy yellow liquid. And held my breath as the color dimmed, and then brightened again.
More orange now. A touch of passion. History not forgotten.
Good.
I reached for the next jar, feeling my muscles tense, asking them to release. I never worked with ingredients I needed to fight—but somehow, tonight, it made perfect sense that was what the task required me to do.
This was the kind of thing you never wanted to be comfortable.
Three more plants born in the soil of Xirtaxis Minor, and three more stern, gritty arguments with cells that were not at all convinced that I deserved what I asked of them.