The driver smiled at my amusement, and walked back around to his side of the car. By the time I reached the porch, he was gone, leaving me to hug my new suitcase to my chest and look thoughtfully at the empty street.
The light on the answering machine was on. There were two messages. The first was from my father’s lawyers, asking when they could schedule my next visit to the office. They sounded so smugly sure that they had me between a rock and a hard place, that there was no possible way I could get out of this one, that it made me want to scream.
The second message was from Ms. Ng.
“Hello, Miss Walden. I am calling to follow up on today’s discussion.”
My heart sank. She had changed her mind. Limbus didn’t want me after all.
“I wanted to personally let you know that the wire transfer to your account was successful, and you are now the proud, if temporary, owner of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars American. You’ll be meeting with an accountant tomorrow, who will go over your projected tax debt and help you with an investment plan, but all that will be applied to your next paycheck. This one is all yours.” Something that sounded like a smile crept into her voice. “Pay the bastards, and let us teach you how to make them pay.”
The message ended. I stayed where I was for a little while, looking at the answering machine, trying to put words to the way I felt. There weren’t any. There was just a tangle of conflicting emotions, each of them warring for dominion. My hands itched under the plastic gloves. Soil. Soil would soothe me.
I left a trail of discarded clothing, starting with my gloves and shoes and ending with my underwear, as I made my way from the front hall all the way back to the garden, where my greenhouse waited, silent and eternally welcoming, to let me step through its doorway and finally come home. The air smelled rich and green, ripe with a thousand poisons, playful with a thousand pollens.
The greenhouse had been my mother’s pride and joy when she was alive, heir to more of her affection than I, needy little science project that I was, could ever have earned. She was the one who placed the orders for rare and endangered orchids and bromeliad flowers. Some of her specimens were extinct everywhere else in the world now, growing only here, under their sheltering glass sky, protected from the outside world by the high fence that surrounded the property. There were plant thieves in the world, people who made their fortunes seeking and stealing rare specimens from labs and botanical gardens. Mother had always been good at covering her tracks. No one knew what she’d planted, and so no one knew what I had.
The central flowerbed was empty except for a few strips of moss. I crawled into the soil, spreading it over myself, nestled my cheek down against the moss, and closed my eyes, feeling the toxins seeping from my skin and leaking into the ground. The earth would neutralize the poison, or at least take it away from me, leaving me cleansed. Purified. Peaceful.
At some point, I drifted off. When I woke, the sky was dark and my skin wasn’t itching anymore. I rose from the bed of soil, brushing the dirt away as best I could, and walked back to the house. There were no new messages. I gathered my clothes, threw the gloves into the trash, and walked calmly upstairs to my room.
It only took a few minutes at the computer to trigger the payment to my father’s company. It should have hurt to have that much money and then lose so much of it, but it didn’t. It felt like freedom. This was me, paying my way in the world; this was me telling them that they didn’t get to own me anymore, that they never really had. I’d been caged and now I was free.
Or maybe I was just moving into a bigger, brighter cage, one where they’d feed me better and treat me like a human being instead of a lab animal. It didn’t matter much. I was going to do it, either way. I was going to be free if it killed me.
Or if it killed every single stinking one of them.
*
The suitcase Ms. Ng had sent for me contained clothes that were nicer than anything I owned, made entirely out of synthetic fabrics that my bodily secretions couldn’t dissolve. There was even a pair of pseudo-suede gloves, buttery soft on my fingers, with a tag identifying them as one hundred percent recycled plastic products. Luxury for the wealthy vegan set, now being used to hide the hands of a living weapon. They felt so nice compared to my usual plastic that I found myself flexing my hands over and over again, enjoying the way the fabric moved against my skin.
I was still flexing my hands over and over when my driver pulled up in front of the house. He got out of the car, and smiled at the sight of me standing on the porch. “Eager to get started, huh?” he asked, as I approached.
“More like not really sure you were going to show up,” I said.
He walked around the car and opened my door for me. I felt like Cinderella on her way to the ball. “This is my job, Miss Walden. I have a very strong work ethic.”
“It’s still a little strange for me,” I said, and slid into the car.
He smiled again. “It’s a little strange for everyone in the beginning. You’ll adjust.” He closed the door, walking back around to the driver’s side.
My mind was racing as he restarted the car and pulled away from the curb. He was a Limbus employee. Of course he was: he was driving the car that took me to and from the company. But was that all he did for them? Did they recruit ordinary people too, and not just freaks like me? What had he done to get their attention—or had he come to them, hat in hands, offering to do whatever they needed him to do? Did they make him kill people, too?
There were so many questions, and I couldn’t figure out how to ask any of them before the trip was over and we were pulling up in front of the gleaming steel and glass shape of Limbus, Inc. It hadn’t changed since the day before, but it still managed to seem somehow more welcoming, like it was glad to see me back again. The driver raised a hand before I could get out of the car, and this time he was holding, not a suitcase, but a little white card with my name and face printed on the front of it, like a label, like a promise.
“You don’t need to check in,” he said. “Just head straight for the elevator. Ms. Ng said to tell you that she’ll be meeting you on the thirteenth floor.”
“Thank you,” I said, and took the pass gingerly from his hand, careful to avoid touching his skin, even with my gloves.
“It’s all part of the job,” he said, and smiled at me. He didn’t get out of the car this time, not even to open the door for me. He just stayed where he was, watching as I walked up the sidewalk to the building. I looked back, and he offered me an encouraging nod. Then he hit the gas, and drove away.
The guard behind the reception desk didn’t even look at me as I walked across the lobby to the elevator. The ride to the thirteenth floor was swift and silent, and ended with me stepping out into another lobby, this one featureless and gray, except for the white door and the black box on the far wall. I walked to it, waved my card across the box, and was rewarded by the door clicking and swinging open, revealing a wide, unfurnished room large enough to be a dance studio. One wall was made entirely of windows, looking out over the city. Ms. Ng was standing in front of it with her hands folded behind her back, watching the world go by.
Ten pillars had been set up in a line across the middle of the room. Each one held a flower. Some were familiar to me—the orchids, the lilies, the bromeliads. Others were not. They bloomed in a multitude of colors, and every one I knew by name was deadly.
The door swung shut behind me. Ms. Ng turned.
“Today, we’re going to test how quickly you can adjust your body’s poison production. The figures we were able to get from your father’s people are mostly focused on volume—how long they have to prepare you to get a marketable quantity of any given toxin, what they have to do to change your receptiveness. What’s interesting is that they seem, in their eagerness to profit, to have overlooked one major factor.”
“What’s that?” I asked warily.
“From the ages of three through seven, your productivity was triple that of your la
ter years. You needed half the time to replicate any given compound, you produced three times as much, and even the purity was higher. Do you have any idea why that might have been the case?” Ms. Ng’s smile told me she didn’t expect me to know—but she knew, and was going to take great pleasure in enlightening me.
I’ve had a long time to get used to being ignorant. I shrugged. “No.”
“Those are also the years where their observations on your behavior documented the greatest desire to please your parents. You wanted to make them happy, and so you did what they told you happily and enthusiastically, instead of out of obligation. Willingness makes a difference, something your father would have realized if he’d ever stopped to view you as a valued employee, rather than an asset that couldn’t possibly escape.” She waved a hand, indicating the waiting flowers. “Please me. Show me that you’re the asset I believe you can be. Show yourself that this doesn’t have to control your life.”
“I can’t—”
“No. You haven’t wanted to. There’s a vast difference, I promise you. Limbus is not in the business of forcing our valued specialists to do things they don’t want to do, and I won’t make you follow my instructions if you’d rather not. I’ll just remind you that all bonuses are contingent upon successful completion of field work, and that this is the first step toward the field.”
“What if I’m not sure I want to go into the field?”
There: the question was asked. There was no taking it back now. Ms. Ng pursed her lips and said, “We would continue to employ you, of course. Even if all you wanted to do was sit in that house of yours and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist, we would keep you, if only so no one else could have you. Don’t look so surprised, Miss Walden. You were created to disrupt the pharmaceutical industry. You’ve done an excellent job. What could have been a boon to scientists everywhere has become a money machine for one company. Really, it’s a marvel no one had you assassinated before we came along to recruit you.”
“They’ve done a pretty good job of keeping me out of the public eye,” I said.
“They had to,” said Ms. Ng. “If you won’t kill for us, you’ll live for us. Being a hermit doesn’t strike me as a particularly rewarding lifestyle, but it’s your choice, and I’m not going to stand in your way.”
I looked at her. I looked at the flowers. I removed my gloves. The insides smelled like talcum powder and hemlock. I tucked them into my pockets; I was going to need them later. Then, after taking a deep breath to brace myself, I approached the first plant.
It was a rare, highly toxic orchid that I had mimicked once before, in my father’s lab, while he was still alive. He had stood there watching impassively while his employees strapped me down and pointed heat lamps at my exposed skin, encouraging my body to sweat as much as possible, so that they could wipe the secretions from every inch of my skin and out of every supposedly secret cranny. He had used me. Ms. Ng wanted to use me too, but she was being honest about that; she was asking me to transform myself from a servant to a co-conspirator. That, at least, was something I could see the value in.
I brushed my fingers over the flower. They tingled where the pollen touched them. I closed my eyes, focusing on the sensation, trying to pull the toxins into my skin, where they could multiply and spread. The tingling migrated from my fingertips to my hand, and further upward to the rest of my arm. I sighed, feeling the itch in my muscles subside. It was always soothing to pull a poison into myself, allowing my specialized, alien cells to do what they were made for. The itching came from too much extraction, and this was the only way to settle it.
“Miss Walden.” Ms. Ng’s voice was patient, and surprisingly close. I opened my eyes.
She was standing just out of arm’s reach, expression concerned. “Miss Walden, you haven’t moved in twenty minutes. Is that normal?”
“Only when I’m trying really hard.” I held up my hand. The pink and yellow smears that normally lingered under my nails had turned a creamy shade of uniform orange. The poison was changing. “Is there a way to test how well I’ve copied it?”
Her smile was a greater reward than anything my father had ever given me. She produced a strip of paper from her pocket, putting it carefully down on the edge of the nearest pillar, where I could retrieve it without touching her.
I did just that, and we both smiled as the paper changed color under my skin, blackening like a bruise.
“The toxins you produce without a profile to mimic would have turned that assay strip red,” she said. “We had it made especially for you. It was prohibitively expensive, but I believe the investment was worth the price. You’re doing it, Miss Walden. You’re mimicking the compounds on your time, at your own pace. If you don’t mind my saying so, I am very impressed by what you’ve managed to achieve. Shall we try the next one?”
For the first time in my adult life, I was eager to agree.
*
My days fell into a comfortable rhythm. I would be picked up at eight, delivered to the office by eight-thirty, and spend the hours after that working. I learned to mimic novel toxins in a quarter of the time it had taken me in the lab, replicating the compounds I was asked to study with the brush of a fingertip. I no longer needed to spend hours with the plants, learning every aspect of their biology; whatever strange receptors my father had engineered into me, they were hungry, aching for the chance to show what they could do. For the first time, I was hungry for it too. I had spent too many years not really knowing what I was capable of. Now, finally, someone wanted me to really show them, and I wanted nothing more than to agree.
My father’s lawyers had raged at first, trying to find a way to prove that I was still in violation of my agreement with the company—they had only wanted money when it was something I couldn’t possibly provide. As soon as I had done what they wanted, my money was no longer good enough. It never had been. Their demands had always been intended to bring me back into their sterile halls, to get me strapped back into their chair while they scraped another million dollars off of my skin. If they’d been compensating me fairly all along, I would have been so wealthy that even Limbus, Inc. couldn’t have tempted me. Instead, they’d been treating me like a useful, dangerous animal, keeping me in a cage, providing me with exactly as much care as was necessary to keep me from breaking out.
My training at Limbus included learning how to read the kind of contracts that my father’s people were so fond of shoving in front of me, learning how to coax the meaning from their tangled cul-de-sacs of legalese and misdirection. I had never realized how much money they made from me, or how little claim I had to those same profits. Legally, when they wiped the poisons from my skin, they were performing a “voluntary harvest”: I was a donor, and so while they made millions, I got nothing.
Every day, I left Limbus exhausted but fulfilled. Every day, I got faster, stronger, more assured of my own abilities. I was blossoming like the orchids Ms. Ng still set before me, each one more exotic than the last, some of them packed with poisons even I had never encountered before. I thought I was ready for anything.
I was wrong.
The morning started like any other. I rose, showered, dressed, and headed for the door, eager to see what I’d be doing today. But when I opened it, my driver was standing there, an orchid in his hands. It was beautiful, all creamy purple and delicate pink. I couldn’t take my eyes off his gloves, which were the sort of thick latex most people only wore when they were handling contact poisons.
“Ms. Ng sends her regards, and this gift,” he said. “Your dress will be delivered in an hour or so, along with instructions on where you’re to go tonight. If you do not want this assignment, I will carry your refusal back to her. The orchid is yours regardless.”
My hands shook as I reached out and took the orchid from him, cradling the pot against my chest like it was some kind of teddy bear. Eyes wide, I looked at him, and asked, “Do you know what they want me to do?”
“You know what they wan
t you to do.” His smile was gentle, almost apologetic. “This is what you’ve been training for, right, Bea? You wanted to do something with your life. Well, this is that something. This is the thing that only you can do.”
“Yes, but…” I let myself trail off. This was what I’d been training for. Ms. Ng had always been very upfront about the fact that she wanted me to be a killer: that everything I’d learned, from the poisons to the paperwork, was aimed at making me better at that eventual role. Even if I were the clumsiest murderess the world had ever known, there would be nothing to tie the poison back to me.
“I suppose it’s time to pay the piper,” I said finally. “Did she tell you anything about this orchid?”
“Only that it’s very rare, and that the poison won’t show up on any standard tox screen. It mimics the appearance of a heart attack. This should be a clean kill. I’ll be back to deliver your dress.” He turned to go.
“Wait!” I said, before I could think better. He stopped and looked back at me. I swallowed hard. “Do you…I mean, am I…”
“I work for Limbus too,” he said, and that answered everything, and that answered nothing at all. He walked back down the path to his car. I watched him go, and when he pulled away, I closed the door, and was alone with my new orchid.
In the office, I usually mimicked a new toxin by touching the plant that made it with one or both hands, letting the chemicals seep in through my skin. It was a perfectly reasonable method to do what I did, but it wasn’t the most efficient way. I set the orchid down on the table, looking at it solemnly, before I began slowly unbuttoning my blouse.
Full-body contact was always going to be the best way for me to copy a toxin I hadn’t encountered before. Some of the classics—hemlock, oleander, amanita—were so familiar at this point that I could copy them with the brush of a finger and with something that was closely akin to muscle memory, only buried more deeply, in the receptors my father engineered for me. New things, though, they took longer for my body to recognize and replicate. I could cut down the time required by getting more of my skin involved.
Limbus, Inc., Book III Page 4