Grower's Omen (The Fixers, book #2: A KarmaCorp Novel) (13 page)

N
othing
in me wanted to do this—and everything knew I had to. I headed for the medical bay on the dead run, presuming I didn’t have much time. If growing up with the aunties had taught me anything, it was the enormous value of never letting them catch you.

Glenn looked up as I crashed through his door, eyes wide. “Tee—what’s the problem?” He was already grabbing for his medical bag.

I waved my hands around ineptly and tried to catch my breath. “Not that kind of emergency. I need to use your comm system.” He would have a fast channel, and one the Basturs couldn’t touch.

His eyes went back to wide and confused. “Of course. This way.”

I blessed his level head, even though he had no idea what was going on. “I need to send a stat message to KarmaCorp.” Sixteen hours wasn’t very much time, even for Yesenia Mayes.

“Okay.” He was already pairing his tablet to a screen on the wall. “Regular comm relays won’t pass messages for another three or four hours, but I can run you through the priority medical channel—that should reach Stardust Prime in a couple of hours.”

“That works.” I took a deep breath, trying to assemble my thoughts. Yesenia would grind me into soil additive if I sent her gibberish. “Can we do video?” It was a long shot—most biome-level habitats didn’t have the bandwidth, but I made a lot more sense in person than in written form, especially when I was in a hurry.

“Yes.” Glenn pulled up several screen menus, his actions crisp and efficient. “I’ll queue you up a spot in the priority channel. I’ll have to stay—it requires my thumbprint to record and send.”

Standard medium-high security.

He reached to draw a sound curtain around me.

I waved him off. “You’re welcome to listen.” I might as well get scuttlebutt flowing with some actual facts.

He looked surprised, but pulled over a stool, staying out of camera range.

I hovered my finger on the record function and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to send this message—once I did, I would be starting a chain of events in motion that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Not after hearing Kish’s stories. Those of us born knowing what Talent was still sometimes had a hard transition. My roommate had taken five years to trust again after KarmaCorp had ripped her away from everything she’d known. A grown man, and one with very little trust and something to protect?

Hell was coming for Jerome Salmera, even if it came with the very best of intentions.

But the protocols on this were as clear as Erythrian glass. I needed to report, and I needed to do it right now. Fixers weren’t lone rangers. We, too, worked as part of a team. A rogue Talent who could challenge my skills and intended to put up a fight was going to require a team, and a good one.

I’d also, belatedly, remembered Yesenia’s words.
Identify the problem. Fix it if you are able.
I wasn’t able. This just wasn’t something one Grower with her roots shriveling could fight.

I opened my eyes and tapped the video on. “Journeyman Tyra Lightbody, reporting to Director Yesenia Mayes. I have been on Xirtaxis Minor for three days now, and have uncovered the root cause of the issues here. The lead research scientist, Dr. Jerome—” I broke off at the thud beside me and turned just in time to see Glenn’s head, clutched in his hands, take a nasty hit on the floor.

I didn’t have to ask why. I could feel the energy flowing from the big potted plant in the corner. Or rather, from the Xirtaxis Minor dirt that it grew in. And this time, it wasn’t a tree behind the attack, or at least it wasn’t only a tree. This one had Grower Talent stamped all over it.

I dove for the floor, cradling Glenn’s head in my hands, reaching for the skill that would remind his cells how to knit together. I wasn’t much of a healer, but I would do what I could.

And then I remembered that I was a KarmaCorp Grower—I knew how to work with dirt too. Even foreign dirt that very actively disliked me.

I jammed my fingers into the soil of the potted plant. The pulse of Talent I sent wasn’t gentle or subtle or nuanced. It was a lance of short, sharp clarity.
Be who you are. Not who he is.

The dirt shuddered.

I pushed harder, reaching for the parts of the soil that had been here long before Jerome Salmera. Water. Minerals. Infinitesimal bits of rock. Things that knew time as a stretch so long that a few years in a garden were less than a blink. Life that easily remembered who it was, who it would always be.

I reminded—and then I pulsed that energy through the rest of the soil, the decomposed plants that provided the soil’s richness and remembered the man who had made them all too well. Dirt always remembers the gardener.

I needed this particular dirt to forget.

Glenn groaned, his arms beginning to shake. Seizure. The attack wasn’t aiming to kill—that much I could read clearly. But its aim wasn’t all that good, and the line between unconscious and dead is a highly individual one.

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.

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.