The Gardener (13 page)

“What?” I asked. “What did you feel?”

Laila looked at me, her eyes wide, and she screamed as she extended an arm toward me. But just as I reached out, her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped over. I caught her before she fell.

Her head lolled as her eyes fluttered.

Just then, a man hurried in, wearing blue overalls and pushing a yellow plastic mop bucket on wheels. “I heard a scream.”

Scooping Laila up, I brushed past him and the startled expression on his face. In the empty hallway, I hesitated.

Dr. Emerson was right behind me. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“We’ve got to get her out of here.” I stopped and turned around. “She needs help.”

“You have no idea what’s wrong with her.”

She was right. I had no idea. But I knew what I had seen so far. “She’s been getting weaker ever since we left Haven of Peace. I mean, that was when she seemed the strongest. It’s like she’s gone downhill since then.”

Dr. Emerson said, “Tell me about her there.”

The vision of those four sitting on the couch, looking eerie and sedated, was pretty easy to call up. “Well, they just sat—”

She frowned and held up a hand. “Back up.
They?
”

I nodded. “Yeah, there were four kids, all sitting together on the couch.…” Although I didn’t want to tell her everything I knew, the story of what had happened at the nursing home flowed out before I could stop.

After I was done, Dr. Emerson’s brow wrinkled as she held a hand to her lips and cocked her head.

“What?”

She stared at Laila a few seconds more, and then shook her head slightly as she dropped her hand. “I have a car downstairs.”

My options seemed pretty limited. I could try to get Laila some medical help, but they would ask so many questions, questions I had no idea how to answer. Dr. Emerson had distanced herself from TroDyn for a reason. Maybe, for Laila’s sake, I could take a chance and trust her.

When Laila came to in the elevator, she was still weak. With an arm around her waist, I held her up as we rode down to the parking garage and followed Dr. Emerson to a blue Prius with rental stickers.

After we’d buckled in, I said, “Tell me what you know.”

She shook her head. “I’m not the best city driver, so just wait until we get there.”

I tried asking her questions, but she held me off, saying she needed to concentrate. After what had happened that morning on the ATV, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Dr. Emerson constantly fidgeted while she drove, reaching up to scratch her cheek or run her fingers through her hair. I was nervous, too, but tried not to show it. At the Hilton, we took the elevator up to her suite and I helped Laila over to a white couch, where she curled up and closed her eyes. I dropped to the floor and leaned back against the couch.

My stomach rumbled.

“You’re hungry.” Dr. Emerson stepped over to the desk and tossed me a thick, white book. “Call room service. We may be here for a while.”

I was starved, but I set the book aside. “Just tell me what is going on.”

Dr. Emerson walked over to the mini bar, broke the seal, and pulled out a bottle of Pellegrino. “Want anything?”

I shook my head.

After pouring herself a glass, she came back and sat on a chair across from me. “I’m telling you, again, to just walk away. If you know what’s best for you.”

Laila might have been asleep already, but I lowered my voice in case she wasn’t. “I don’t care about what’s best for me right now. I care about her.”

Dr. Emerson raised her glass to me. “Noble. Very noble, Mason.” She took a drink. “But you don’t even know this girl.” She leaned forward, obviously intending for Laila not to hear what she was saying. “Believe me, she has issues you couldn’t even imagine. Are you really willing to put your entire world on the line for her? Because that’s what you’re doing if you stay here.”

I crossed my arms. “Spill. Everything. I want to know.”

Laila coughed a little, then propped herself up on an arm and looked at us. “You’re talking about me.”

When neither of us said anything, she said, “I want to know. If this is about me, it’s only right.”

Dr. Emerson set her glass down and ran both hands through her hair. “Laila, you had an accident resulting in head injuries. Your parents chose to put you in an experimental recovery program run by TroDyn. Nothing more.”

That made no sense. “Then why do you want to keep her from them? The people at TroDyn?”

She hesitated slightly. “I didn’t agree with some of the … procedures. And I found myself at odds with the director of the program. I’d rather see Laila get help somewhere else.”

“But don’t you need her parents’ permission to take her out of the program?”

Again, a small pause. “They’d given up, all the parents. Unless their children came back completely whole, they felt it best to leave them with TroDyn.”

Laila’s eyes welled up, but I didn’t believe Dr. Emerson for a second. Parents wouldn’t just give up on their children, no matter how injured they were. She was lying about some, if not all, of it. There had to be more. “Why would they come looking for her in Glenwood?”

Dr. Emerson shrugged. “I’m sure it wouldn’t look good for them to lose her. Think about it. A girl with amnesia turns up, the only thing she knows for sure is she is afraid of TroDyn? The media would catch on, putting TroDyn in a very difficult situation. The parents might pull the kids out of the program.…” She trailed off.

Her words sounded hollow. I just didn’t believe the past twenty-four hours could all be attributed to a lost test subject.

I had to get Dr. Emerson to tell me the truth.

Getting to my feet, I turned toward Laila as I said, “So I might as well take her back.”

Dr. Emerson’s response was immediate. “You can’t!”

“Why not?” asked Laila.

I whirled around. “Yeah, why not? She’s just a test subject, right?”

Dr. Emerson was on the edge of the chair, her eyes wide. “Right. But—”

I waited.

A big sigh came out as she leaned back. “Wrong. That’s not it at all.”

“Then tell us. Tell us how you know her. Tell us what TroDyn is doing.”

She didn’t say anything, and I moved to pick up Laila.

“No, wait. Just … just leave her, okay? I’ll tell you.” Dr. Emerson stood up and began to pace. “I was just through with my PhD in research biology when TroDyn hired me to work on species and sustainability. In my interview, management presented cutting-edge ideas on how to manage food crises around the globe, food shortages, droughts, even the impending problems global warming will cause. As I said in my lecture, the end of food is not far off. I wanted to do something about it, and TroDyn seemed a perfect fit forme.”

Questions flew through my mind, but I forced myself to stick with basics, leave the tough ones for later. “What kind of project did you work on?”

Laila asked, “How did you know me?”

She sighed. “That’s where it gets complicated. I’d been working with these nudibranchs, marine snails that had developed the ability—”

“To make their own food,” I interrupted.

Dr. Emerson appeared startled that I knew.

I shrugged. “I like biology.” I sat down on the floor in front of Laila, my back against the couch.

Dr. Emerson looked down a moment, gathering her thoughts. “I’d been working with the nudibranchs for a while when one of the scientists approached me about a new experiment related to the snails, but on a much more practical level that could be directly applied to the food crisis.”

She paused in her pacing and sat down on the ottoman. “This is not going to sound good. And it may be hard for you both to hear. But you must understand I truly was passionate about finding an answer to starvation. I mean, to actually be able to count yourself as one of the scientists who solved a crisis like that? Especially when the future will see all of us struggling for food during climate change.”

She was already making excuses, coming off as defensive. Why? Rubbing my eyes with both hands, I asked, “What did you do?”

She shook her head. “No. Don’t take that attitude with me. This started long before I ever showed up at TroDyn. Long before.”

I nodded. “Go on.”

“They took me to see the scientist who’d been working on the autotroph project.”

My eyes widened. “Autotrophs?”

Laila asked, “What’s that?”

Dr. Emerson met my gaze. “Self-feeders, organisms that can produce their own food.”

“You’re talking about snails, right?”

Dr. Emerson took a long drink. Over the top of the glass, her eyes drifted to Laila.

I lowered my voice. “Tell me it was snails.” I shut my eyes, and my final plea was only a whisper. “Please tell me it was snails.”

Laila’s hand grasped mine and squeezed.

Dr. Emerson said nothing.

I opened my eyes. “Tell me.” My voice was nearly a shout, and she winced.

She said, “It wasn’t snails. Mason, it wasn’t snails we were turning into autotrophs.” Her head fell into her hands. “God help me, it wasn’t snails.”

I
SHOUTED
, “W
HAT DOES THAT MEAN
?”

Scrunching her eyes shut, her words all came in a rush. “Laila was part of the second phase of the autotrophs experiment, raised from the time she was a baby to develop the ability to self-feed. The scientists kept them in a room with artificial sunlight that they used to create nutrients. I didn’t know about it until she was nearly ten. They’d already been doing it for a decade.”

Laila gasped, and I dropped her hand. In a flash, I launched myself away from the couch, scrambling to get away from the girl, from Laila, whatever she was. Smacking my head on the corner of the nightstand, I ended up on the floor, smashed up against the bed. My heart pounded and I couldn’t say anything.

Laila had covered her face with her hands and was rocking back and forth, saying something I couldn’t hear. Then she curled up, facing away from me. Her breathing evened out until she seemed to be sleeping.

Dr. Emerson sat next to her, rubbing her back. “You don’t have to be afraid of her. She hasn’t changed, Mason. She is who she is.”

But she wasn’t … what I thought. Not just a girl. She was something else.

Words eked out. “How did that happen?”

Dr. Emerson swallowed. “As I said, it was the second phase. The first phase had … worked out a few kinks, and I came on board with the second phase.” She started to sound more excited. “But with the second phase, we did it. These children actually were able to feed themselves—”

“Hold on,” I interrupted. “Children?”

Dr. Emerson’s mouth was a thin line.

My confusion and bewilderment were overruled as I glared at her. “Where did you get the children?”

She held both her hands up. “It’s not what you think. They were all children of TroDyn employees, and their parents knew what they were doing. Those who didn’t want to participate were given the chance to leave.”

I thought back to what Jack had found on the Internet, the similarities between the ex–TroDyn employees, that they’d all had babies within months after leaving. Was that why? They didn’t want their children to be part of the experiment?

Dr. Emerson spoke slowly now. Maybe she’d figured out Iwasn’t going to completely freak. “The ones who left weren’t as committed, obviously. But the ones who stayed, they were deeply … passionate about finding a solution to world hunger. To them … to me, it was …
is
as real a challenge as curing cancer. Those scientists truly thought they could do it and it was worth enrolling their children in the project.” She looked over at Laila. “And keeping them in it.”

I leaned back on my haunches. “Why did you leave?”

“A disagreement in philosophies.” She raised her chin, seeming to gain strength as she talked about her defection from TroDyn. “I agreed with the concept, giving humans the ability to make their own food, not having to rely on weather or other humans for nourishment. And I believed it could be done fairly simply, giving the subject a normal life in the process. This is what the project looked like to me when I came on board.”

“The project?”

“It began when the children were babies. The head scientists weaned them from food nutrients and developed a process of garnering nutrients from the sun.” Her voice was firm. “As long as the amount of sunshine was perfectly regulated, the child maintained a perfect balance of nutrients, requiring neither food nor water.”

I didn’t believe it. “That’s it? Just sit the kid in the sun and they’re an autotroph?”

“It would seem that way.” A line appeared between her eyes. “I didn’t know all the intricacies of the process. Each of us knew only parts of the full recipe, just enough for us each to do our jobs. Mine was to monitor the children.” She rested a hand on Laila. “She was one of them. What I didn’t know was that as the children got older, they couldn’t maintain that perfect balance through adolescence. So TroDyn wanted to change the experiment. They wanted to add an artificial element to boost the anomaly. Artificial horizontal gene transfer.”

My stomach turned. I got it. Unfortunately. “They’re playing God.”

Dr. Emerson came over and sat down on the chair, smoothing her skirt under her. “The evolution was not going to happen on its own.” She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice took on that lecture tone. “There is a genus of lizard called Anolis that lives on a Caribbean island having varying geographic features. Scientists studying these lizards realized that even though the genus on the island was the same, the different habitats had caused them to develop different abilities.

“The species that lives near tree trunks in the rain forest developed longer legs for running and jumping quickly, while another, which lives on twigs in the rain forest, has short legs for maneuvering on the smaller surface. Over generations, more than 300 species developed, and they adapted to their specific environments. Evolution on a small scale.”

I made a face. “But that doesn’t just happen.”