Grower's Omen (The Fixers, book #2: A KarmaCorp Novel) (12 page)

I
sat
in the gel-chair in my small room, glad for its comfort and the warm mug of tea in my hands. So far, I’d done nothing but smell.

This was, for me, how I did much of my best work as a Fixer. Kish watched and collected her data and then she moved with a fierceness that shoved all but the really stupid well out of her way. Iggy flitted and amused and let the world dismiss her as she gathered all the strings into her fingers, and then did exactly what she wanted before anyone caught up. Raven was the pragmatist of the four of us, the one who pulled levers and realigned forces and generally bossed the energies around because she saw so clearly and took no bullshit.

Me, I was the one who slid quietly down all the side pathways and made friends with the locals and hooked together the bits that maybe didn’t know they needed hooking up. Raven called it spiderwebbing, but that made it sound a lot more elegant and intentional than it usually was.

I tried to imagine how my best friends might handle a rogue Talent. Kish would probably just duct tape him to the willow and Sing until one or both of them stopped being dumb. Finesse wasn’t usually her deal, but she was a really impressive force of nature. Iggy would distract him with her elfin beauty and lead him back to Stardust Prime by the invisible ring in his nose. Raven would tangle with his brain, tell him he was a menace, and draw an utterly convincing picture of what his immediate future held if he didn’t make the right choice.

I somehow needed to get him there with a little spider silk and a cup of tea.

I sighed—it wasn’t like me to underestimate my skills. I might not work with the flashiness or sheer bald genius of other Fixers, but I got the job done.

Or in this case, two jobs. As a Fixer, my job had just become Jerome Salmera, full stop. As a Lightbody, I wouldn’t abandon his uniquely beautiful and temperamental willow—it just wasn’t in me to do so. Not when death lurked at her door.

I took a sip from the mug in my hand, the last of my tea stash from home. Not something I usually ran out of, but the crew of the
Indigo
had done a number on my supplies on the way over. The tea was one of Mundi’s, full of flavor and hard work and the energy of a woman who knew exactly who she was and had grown every last leaf in the tea herself.

It soothed places I hadn’t even known were aching.

The consequences of feeling pulled in too many directions. I was deeply scared for the willow tree—but also for the man. Whatever in his history had wounded him, it had left a man who didn’t trust, who didn’t reach out for community. Which would hurt any human heart, but it was deadly for a Grower. We fed ourselves through connection. It filled up who we were and who we needed to be.

I remembered the burst of dark, erotic energy when we’d first shaken hands. Most Growers didn’t feel that way, but most of us had learned long ago what to do with those energies. A rogue Talent who walked alone had never found those outlets.

I closed my eyes and sighed, remembering his jerking reaction when I’d made my offhand comment to Nikki about waking up in gardens with no idea why I was there. A classic emergence symptom for Grower Talents—but I’d been eight years old and surrounded by people who knew and loved me. Jerome would have faced all that much older, and far more alone.

Growers weren’t born to walk alone. This one had chosen to—for decades.

I could feel my chakras tensing and inhaled, breathing the calm of tea and home into my belly.

I had no idea how to help the complicated, distant man of many masks, and I was terribly afraid KarmaCorp wouldn’t know either. I didn’t want him broken. There had to be a better answer here than a dug-up tree and a man dragged off to what he would see as the dungeons of hell.

But I couldn’t let him run loose, either. Not when he and his tree could bring the quadrant’s best Grower to her knees.

The knock on my door panel took me by surprise—at home, pretty much everyone just walked in. I dug myself out of fear and melancholy as best as I could and shifted to face my visitor. “Come.”

I smiled as the shadow of Nikki Jeffert crossed the threshold. She was excellent medicine for what was trying to ail me.

“I won’t stay long.” She held up a small green container. “I heard some of what you told the admin team, and it reminded me heaps of this little guy. You’re feistier than you look.”

“If he knows anything about Federation legal clauses, I could totally use his help.” I waved her in the general direction of the other chair in the room—an invitation none of my friends would have needed.

She set the spiky plant down on the table by my teapot. “I have to get back—I have some cultures on a timer. Will the legal stuff work?”

There was a very good brain inside a certain lab tech’s head. Good enough to deserve the truth. I tried to sink my head back into the confrontation in the cafeteria—the rest needed to stay under wraps, at least until I decided what to do about it. “Not for long.”

She grimaced. “How can I help?”

“You already are.” I met her eyes. “The admins weren’t the only one putting on a show in the caf.” Which was something I very much wanted to encourage. Baby rebels were exactly what the soil of this particular community needed.

“That’s nothing.” She shrugged a little and tried to hide herself in the shadows of a room that didn’t have any. “Shaking things up a little, is all.”

I reached down to touch the head of a spiky plant. Someone was learning lessons from her green, growing things.

“I don’t know if you can take him with you. Probably not.” Nikki looked a little sad about that. “But you appreciate him, and nobody else does. They all think he’s a nasty, evil bully.”

Good and evil were firmly a matter of perspective, especially where plants were concerned. “He’s a survivor, and all communities need those—he just needs to learn some manners.”

She laughed. “The little bugger’s got a really thick skull.”

I grinned. “My roommate would say that’s just a matter of finding the right drill.”

“Ha—haven’t tried that.” Nikki eyed the little pot musingly.

“You’ll get there in your own way. You’ve got a real affinity for understanding plants.”

She smiled, cheeks a little pink. “Thank you. Can I ask you something?”

I rolled my eyes. “What, you think I’m going to say no?”

Her discomfort fled as she laughed. “I was wondering about my dream.”

The forest primeval, and the child comforted in her grove of wise elders. “It sounded really beautiful.”

“You think it came from the tree?” Nikki sounded uncertain.

I wasn’t. “Absolutely.”

She frowned. “It was so different from everyone else’s. I thought maybe I’d just made it up.”

Sometimes my job is really cool. I leaned forward and grasped one of those moments with both hands. “It was so different because of
you
. Most of the other people here felt this alien presence slink into their minds and it scared them silly. You have a gorgeously flexible, empathetic mind, and that let you feel the true emotions of what the willow was dreaming and enjoy them.”

And the willow had been having a nice dream, but I didn’t bother to say that. It wasn’t the part that mattered.

The lab tech looked at me with something akin to wonder.

I kept my head shake to myself. Talent didn’t always pick the right hearts. Although I wasn’t ready to give up on Jerome’s just yet.

Nikki just stood at the door, a dopey smile on her face.

I smiled back, enjoying every bit of who she was. “Do your lab cultures need you that fast, or can you stay for tea?”

She jumped and glanced at her tablet, grimacing. “Can’t, sorry.”

I waved her off. It might be for the best—she’d absorb my words better if I wasn’t around to be a distraction. “Next time.”

“I will.” She grinned and headed off, the automatic panel sliding shut behind her.

I stared at the boring green door, musing. She had a fine hand with nasty, evil bullies—and she’d gotten me to thinking.

Rogue Talents were often seen in much the same way as Nikki’s spiky little invader—judged by the damage they caused instead of the potential they offered. And the same could probably be said for the willow. The Basturs were all too ready to uproot her and stick her into a stasis bag.

I understood, far better than they did, that she was dangerous. But I also knew she was a tree that had figured out a unique way to communicate with human beings. Somewhere in her symbiotic gene splices and the workings of an untrained Talent, something breathtaking had emerged—even if right now, it just looked like a mad soup of rogue Talent and teenage-willow angst.

I took a sip of Mundi’s tea. It was time to pick up the strands of my nascent spider web and start sending a message. One Nikki had just very nicely written for me.

See beyond the spikes. See to the lovable, vulnerable, worthwhile souls underneath. See something worth knowing—and worth saving.

A plea for man and tree both.

I
’d been called
onto the carpet in the offices of far scarier people than Mary Louise Bastur—but this morning, that felt plenty ominous.

I stepped out of my quarters off-kilter and grumpy. I’d been awoken by the priority message on my tablet, which meant I was facing skydawn with the sleep barely scrubbed off my face and an empty, complaining belly. That was no way to enter into battle, priority message demanding my presence or not.

I rubbed my eyes one more time and then I did what all good Lightbodies do when they’re under siege—I headed for the cafeteria. My family believed deeply that food helped with pretty much everything, and my cells were shaking with the need for an infusion of calories. If I could collect a little comfort or tug on a few lines of my spider web while I was at it, so much the better.

I stumbled into line, groggy and disheveled, and grabbed a bowl. I could already smell oatmeal, and if there was a little honey to add to it, I would be a much cheerier Grower in just a few minutes.

The line was very quiet this morning, but I didn’t have any extra energy to sniff out what was going on. A few random spoonfuls of stuff into my bowl later, I turned to make my way to a table and some company to share my breakfast. The caf wasn’t very full yet, and no one was making eye contact—with me, or with anyone else.

I scowled, found an empty table, and threw myself into a chair. There was no time to deal with any of this right now—I had power-tripping bureaucrats to deal with, my head hurt again, and my belly was screaming for food.

First things first. I slid a packet of dehydrated chamomile flowers out of my bag—Toli had given me enough for a steady supply once she’d seen how well dried flower bits helped my head. I added some to the steaming water in my mug and loosed a trickle of Talent, just enough to steep the tea in seconds instead of the forty minutes any of my aunties would have insisted on.

I didn’t have forty minutes to wait.

When I picked up the mug, I could feel the tears under my eyelids. That smell had always meant comfort, love, and the absolute assurance that whatever ailed you would be all right.

I took a swallow, prepared to take in goodness in a bitter guise—and nearly choked as my body tried to reject what I had already swallowed. The tea was like swamp water—if swamp water was full of prickly, agitated toxins, ones that were rejecting me at least as much as the muscles of my throat had rejected it.

I set down the cup, shakier than I wanted to admit. My Grower self was belatedly realizing what had happened—my bag of dried chamomile had been in the garden with me when Jerome and his tree rejected my help yesterday. Clearly the flowers had absorbed something of what had happened there, and it had shifted their resonances badly.

My grumpy-woman self, who just wanted a little TLC, felt picked on by some dried flowers.

I stabbed my spoon into the mountain of oatmeal, honey, and strawberries in my bowl and cursed as it slopped over the edges. This was really not my morning. I reached for a strawberry that had escaped over the edge of the spoon and hit the table. They were my favorite, and their red, sweet goodness was exactly what I needed to fight the powers of darkness that had dragged me out of bed.

And then the strawberry hissed under my fingers. I stared at it, nonplussed, and then reached a finger back out. This time my Talent was awake enough to hear clearly. One red berry that wanted nothing to do with me.

I felt like I’d fallen into a bad vid. And then I remembered the feel of the dirt under my feet in Jerome’s garden. Alarm bells ringing, I touched a fingertip to a bare patch on my hill of oatmeal, and then to a streak of honey running down its side.

All bearing the same message. If I ate real food this morning, I’d be fighting every single bite.

I pushed back from table, knowing someone was acting out trainee-school fantasies, and just as twisted up by it as I would have been back then. My breakfast had just hissed at me and I felt well and truly kicked in the knees.

I didn’t know if this was Jerome acting, or his willow, or both, but it felt intentional, it felt targeted, and it was very well aimed. They were cutting me off from all my sources of nutrition, all my good soil. I pulled energy from the people and the green, growing things around me—without them, I felt utterly bereft. Abandoned, left to drift in a world where nothing cared.

I swallowed, hard. My family adopted orphans, and somehow I’d thought that meant I understood a little of what they went through. The awful, hollow vacancy inside my ribs was making very clear that I’d never had any idea. It wasn’t just the terrible feeling of being alone—it was knowing that in every moment, success or failure began and ended with what I had inside me and what it could do. If I ran out of energy, of skill, of will, there was no one else waiting to pick me up, dust me off, and help me try again.

Fixers worked alone—but until today, I hadn’t actually known what that meant.

I took a deep, shaky breath. I was beginning to get a very clear sense of just how much trouble I was in.

And I still had the Basturs to contend with.

I looked at the three people already assembled in Mary Louise’s office and managed not to throw a Grower temper tantrum. Barely. She’d taken the position of power behind her desk—annoyed, regal, and more than ready to slap me down. John Bastur looked his usual, amiable, untrustworthy self. The lab tech who’d been dumb enough to take some legal courses just looked sick.

Clearly, this wasn’t going to be a friendly meeting.

I looked at Mary Louise. “Have you heard from judiciary dispatch?” I might be on the peon side of the desk, but I didn’t need to act like it.

“That plan has been superseded.”

Judging from the look on her face, I wasn’t going to like what had replaced it. I raised a polite eyebrow.

“We are declaring a state of emergency on Xirtaxis Minor. Level Two.” Her lips allowed a small, gloating smile. “All visitors and non-essential personnel will be evacuated from the biome immediately.”

John leaned forward, ever the helpful bureaucrat. “A shuttle will be arriving in sixteen hours. It will take all evacuees to Dowager Station. The
Indigo
will rendezvous with you there—they’ve already been notified.”

How nice of them to take care of my travel plans.

Mary Louise’s smile iced over. “We will remain here, along with other key scientists, to help examine and contain the danger.”

I didn’t need a translation for that. In sixteen hours, one willow tree was going to find herself summarily dumped into stasis.

Or that was their plan. At some point they would discover they’d lit a bonfire under a rogue Talent with something to protect.

I spent a fraction of a second contemplating whether or not to tell the Basturs who the real problem was—and decided that if they couldn’t handle a homicidal tree, there was no way in the galaxy they were equipped to deal with an untrained, threatened Grower.

That was my job.

And I had sixteen hours to do it.