The Enclave (16 page)

Jade looked up at her, eyes narrowed behind the dark-framed glasses. “Did you hear nothing that was said to you today? It’s okay to rest.”

“Yes, but having Dr. Yuen railing at me every hour because I still don’t have his petri dishes ready, or his dissection packets, and then Dr.Ahmed-White comes in as soon as he’s left and wants a hundred glass beakers
right now
. . . but I have to tell her to wait for Yuen’s order . . .

Well, that’s stressful, too.”

“Ignore them.”

“They’re shouting at me.”

“That’s what they do, Lace. Ignore ’em. They’re only trying to intimidate you into giving them a leg up before the other one. Ahmed-White and Yuen have been competing since the day they got here.”

“But the review board—”

“Won’t be here till next week. Chill. In fact . . .” She stuffed her socks into her clogs, then pulled her laptop across the desk toward her and flipped it open. “How about we do one of those meditation sessions Viascola was talking about?”

“I need to get to bed!” Lacey protested.

“We’ll do one of the ten-minute ones. You have your box?”

“She said not to do it if you’re too tired. I’ll probably fall asleep.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?”

“Then let’s get ready for bed first.”

Fifteen minutes later Lacey sat on her bed dressed in her sleep tee, covers pulled over her folded bare legs as she watched Jade hang up her clothes. “By the way,” she said, “thanks for sharing about your experience when you first got here. It really helped.”

“Yeah, well . . . as you saw tonight, everyone has tales to tell. Even Dr. Reinhardt. Despite his claims otherwise.” Jade shook her head as she buttoned the collar of her shirt and hung it on the rod. “Though I’ll admit I never would have pegged
him
as one having mental health disorders.”

“What makes you think he does?” Lacey asked.

“You mean aside from how weird he was in the unity meeting today, not wanting to talk and all. Aaron said it was PTSD.”

“Post-traumatic stress? What? From graduate school?”

“He was in the military before he went into genetics. Did a tour in Afghanistan.” Jade shut the closet door. “And did you hear Pecos telling about how when he went up to get him for the meeting this afternoon, Reinhardt was on the floor under his desk? Said he was looking for a file folder.”

“Well, given the piling system he’s got going in his office, that could well be true,” Lacey pointed out. Although the information that Reinhardt had been in the military in Afghanistan triggered the sudden recall of the practiced competence with which he’ d cleaned and dressed her imaginary wound. How would she have known to imagine him competent in such a thing when she’ d had no idea he had any experience at it?

“Pecos sure didn’t think so. And for Reinhardt to refuse to talk about it—”

“I don’t think I’d have told
my
story in there if everyone didn’t already know about it.”

“You’re a newbie. You don’t know anyone. It’s harder for you.”

“Maybe, but you’re already hypothesizing he was having a . . . what?

A flashback episode? Under his desk?”

“Hey, a car backfires or someone slams a door too hard and they dive for cover. Some of them never get normal. Some of them are
dangerous.”

“You really believe Dr. Reinhardt is dangerous?”

“Well. No.” Jade snorted a laugh. “The man’s lucky if he remembers to zip his fly before he comes down to breakfast.” She flung back the covers on her bed and plumped up the pillows—she had two—then plopped herself onto the exposed sheets and drew the covers over her folded legs like Lacey. Then she reached for the laptop on the desk, already booted up and ready to go.

She set it on the bed in front of her, moved her finger on the touch pad, then tapped it once and looked up. “Ready?”

Lacey held up the little black box Viascola had given them and sat forward from her own pillows propped against the headboard and dresser.

“Just put the box there on the bed in front of you,” Jade said.

Lacey did so and Jade tapped the touch pad again to start the program.

A flat-toned feminine voice invited them to join her in a Buddhist meditation session, then suggested they should sit comfortably, relax, and be alert. A tone sounded.

“As a way of arriving in the present moment,” the woman said, “allow your body to relax. Let your awareness roll across places of tension. . . .” She paused to let them do so. “Loosen the shoulders . . . the neck. . . .”

Her voice was quiet, deliberately unobtrusive. “The chest is open . . . the belly soft, enabling a full breath.

“Breathe . . .” Again, the voice paused, letting them focus on the action of breathing. “In . . . out . . .
Feel
a sense of embodied awareness.”

What in the world is embodied awareness?
Lacey wondered, thinking this was really quite ridiculous. She felt sillier now than she had in Dr. Viascola’s demonstration earlier.

The voice continued. “You’re aware of what your feet are touching, of where you’re sitting. Of pressure. Temperature. Aware of all the body’s sensations.”

Again the voice fell silent as Lacey strove to become aware, staring at the box as Viascola had suggested. The woman instructed her to choose a place in her breathing to rest her attention—“the inflow and outflow of air through the nose, the rise and fall of chest or abdomen. A resting place to which you can return . . .”

“Note in . . . out . . . in . . . out . . .” the voice droned. “Or rising . . . falling . . . rising . . . falling . . .

“If some strong experience calls your attention, some difficult sensation or emotion, let go of the breath as the center of attention and include what’s arising. Note it: ‘Ah . . . tension, tightness, squeezing, heat.’

“Or, ‘grief, sadness, fear . . . ’ ”

A faint light flickered in the box, seizing Lacey’s attention and triggering a sudden gripping dizziness, as if the room had subtly shifted in alignment. Instead of merely noting it with a friendly aspect, as the meditation guide had suggested, she stiffened and leaned forward to study it more closely. It flickered again, and she sensed something. A presence. A heaviness . . .

Suddenly darkness enwrapped her, and she smelled the strong, sweet fragrance of jasmine mingled with the damp evening air. She sensed water nearby, though she saw only darkness. From somewhere ahead, more lights flickered and she heard voices talking in some other language, telling her to come, though she did not know how she knew that. She started toward them. Then, inexplicably, the voices silenced, and the sense of heaviness lifted. She felt the bed again, the rumpled coverlet beneath her calves and ankles, the tingling of a pinched nerve in her leg. Overhead came the faint rush of the air flowing through the air-conditioning ducts. After the fragrance of sweet jasmine, the room smelled like sweaty socks.

The meditation woman no longer spoke. Had the session ended?

She opened her eyes—and started violently at the sight of the black box floating before her eyes not six inches from her face. She flinched back sharply, swatting it to the bed as if it were some oversized insect. It tumbled across the folds of coverlet and came to a stop. She sat there breathing hard, blinking rapidly, and deeply alarmed
. Not again!

After a moment reality reasserted itself, and she realized she hadn’t been hallucinating, but dreaming. The clock on the desk read 12:55. They’d begun their ten-minute session at 12:25, so obviously she had twenty minutes to account for.

Nor was she the only one to have fallen asleep. Jade had collapsed back on her pillows and lay unmoving except for the rise and fall of her chest, her eyes closed, her mouth open. Lacey smiled at her roommate, wondering which of them had fallen asleep first.

She stood and set the box on her desk beside her cell phone, was about to turn back to the bed when she remembered the messages she’ d left with her family physician and her mother. Though she hardly cared anymore, and assured herself those messages could wait until tomorrow, something prodded her to check. A latent hope that she really hadn’t had a breakdown and they would actually exonerate her?

Whatever her reason, she picked up the phone and checked her voice mail. To her surprise there were three messages. The first was from Ma, who didn’t remember any specific photos of the scar, nor even the scar itself, and wanted to know what difference it made, anyway.

The second was from her physician, who, not surprisingly, recalled no incidents involving lacerations, nor did he have any records of treatment elsewhere.

“But the urgent care centers don’t always get the information to primary care, especially if the patient neglects to request it,” he said. So. Nothing there, either. But then, she hadn’t expected anything, and was okay with that. A tumble into paranoid hysterics in the middle of the night didn’t seem so awful anymore.

The third call was from Gen Viascola, who’d tried to get Lacey on her pager but failed, so she was calling to let her know that the young man from ASU was not going to be coming down from Phoenix tonight, after all, due to lack of transportation.

“He should be here by Tuesday or Wednesday,” Viascola said. “So you’ll have to do the job for a few more days. Hopefully you’ll get this message tonight, but if not, or even if you would prefer to wait until daylight, I’m sure everything can wait until morning. Sorry to spring this on you. Just give me a ping to let me know you got the message.”

With a groan she dialed Viascola’s number and left a voice mail, then flipped the phone shut and turned it off. Most times waiting until morning would have been fine. But as she’ d told Jade earlier, tomorrow she needed to get right on the autoclaving. And she couldn’t put the animal care off until tomorrow afternoon because she had a litter of newly weaned rats. If they didn’t have enough food, they would start eating each other. She could, however, go down and make sure they had food and water to last the night.

With a groan, she stood, pulled her shorts and T-shirt from the clothes hamper and donned them, slipped on her flip-flops, and went up to the animal facility.

As she stepped out of the elevator into the dimly lit hall of the animal quarters, a chill of unease brought her to a halt. The elevator door rumbled shut behind her, and silence wrapped her like a shroud. A faint trickle of water drifted through the stillness. Only a couple of the fluorescent ceiling panels were lit, casting triangles of light and shadow across the walls. Ahead on the right, the ready room stood dark, door closed. What if the strange youth had returned and was waiting for her . . . ?

Her heartbeat accelerated and her mouth went dry as memory of last night’s events returned with full and vivid force. It was only with great effort of will that she did not turn and slap wildly at the button to call the elevator back.

He’s not here,
she told herself firmly, drawing a deep breath and forcing the panic down.
He was never here. You imagined it, remember?
Remember Poe’s lab? My lab coat? My shirt? Reinhardt’s denial? It didn’t
happen. There’s nothing to worry about.

She drew another breath and started forward, her rubber thongs flip-flopping loudly in the quiet.

She went to the ready room, snapped on the light, and frowned at the sight of one of the sink counter drawers open. It held pens, pencils, and broad-tipped black markers. One of the latter had been thrown back in uncapped. Its tip was mashed and drying out, so she cast it into the trash, wondering why whoever had used it hadn’t done that in the first place.

With a sigh she retrieved her lab coat from the back of the door and put it on. By now fully awake, she decided to do all her chores and save herself the trouble tomorrow.

She tickled Harvey under the chin, then put him on her shoulder and dumped the wood chips from the bottom tray, replaced food and water, and moved on to the mice. Finally she put Harvey back into his home and went across the hall to the rat rooms, emptying the waste trays, refilling bottles and food bins, spraying down the floor to wash any stray droppings into the drain. There were five rooms and it took her forty-five minutes to finish them, all without incident.

Finally it was time to do the frogs, a task she normally did first but this time had unconsciously saved for last. She got a bucket from the ready room into which she would put the dead frogs—there were always a few to be picked from the tank—and headed with growing reluctance toward the corridor nearest the elevator.

She rounded the corner and stopped as suddenly as if she’ d run into an invisible wall, her breath hissing against her teeth. The corridor was dark, but the frog room’s light was on and its door stood open— inward, toward the room, exactly as it had been last night.

Tonight there were no frogs in the hall, though. Apparently Dr.Reinhardt had just been in and out, probably while she was in the rat rooms, and the frogs had not had time to escape. She could see a few on the floor, however, visible through the crack between door and jamb. At least she’ d arrived in time to stop them from hopping all over the place. If only she could move.

Her pulse had once more careened into the hundred-twenty-plus range, her hands cold and shaking. She forced herself to move, but it was like walking neck-deep through a pool of water. Almost as if she knew what she would find there.

Except there was no way in the world she could have anticipated the sight that met her eyes.

Chapter Thirteen

The steel tank lay on its side, frogs spilled across the painted floor, dead or dying, most of them legless. Bodies and legs floated separately on the water that had collected above the clogged drain. Here was the origin of the trickling sound she’ d heard earlier.

She stared at the carnage in disbelief, more bewildered than afraid, and stepped into the room without thinking. Even standing in its midst, she couldn’t believe it. No one person could turn that tank over with just the strength of his own arms. Especially not when it was full of water.

Yet there it lay, hinged lids gaping slightly open from the pull of gravity.