Grower's Omen (The Fixers, book #2: A KarmaCorp Novel) (14 page)

I
stumbled into the utilitarian
, nondescript room that served as my temporary quarters, a box full of purloined lab supplies under my arms and my stomach and heart in absolute rebellion.

I’d sent a message to Yesenia on the fastest channel I could use on my own authority. I didn’t plan to wait for her forces to arrive.

My hands shook so hard the box of lab supplies rattled. What I was contemplating was unthinkable. Undoable. Immoral by any standards I’d ever applied to myself.

My family would never forgive me.

I dropped the box on the floor and my tortured self down on the bunk bed, giving in to the need to curl in on myself like a terrified seed. Trying not to whimper. Trying not to wail in horror.

The node of conviction sitting just under my ribs had yet to waver. It was the way. A dangerous and fraught one to be sure, but there were no easy paths for rogue Talents, or for the uniquely beautiful and unstable species they had created. If I didn’t act, their future was bleak—and I had no idea how much damage they might leave in their wake.

Glenn’s tormented face swam into view behind my scrunched eyelids. I could feel my breath rasping over my throat. My insides, demanding air and wishing desperately for the friendly oxygen of home.

I curled in a little tighter, sobbing into my knees. Home would never understand this choice. Yesenia would condemn the mess I was about to create, and my family would recoil from how I intended to get there.

Because I could feel the truth, still lying quiescent under my ribs. I intended to do this. I could feel the terrible beauty of alignment—the inexplicable sense of rightness that every Fixer searched for. I had found it, in a dark and awful place.

I scrubbed my eyes with my fists. I wasn’t a tadpole. I knew that the right answers didn’t always come with shiny silver bows and celestial singing. But I’d never had one come wearing the cloak of evil, either.

I pushed myself up to sitting, suddenly annoyed. I didn’t think of life in terms of good and evil, and I didn’t curl up on my bed and whimper, either. I was a KarmaCorp Fixer and a Lightbody and a freaking grown-up.

One with an idea, a way of pushing two beings and the whole community around them toward the good, which was exactly what I had chosen for my life’s work. Either it was a good idea or a bad one, but I needed to commit and then I needed to get my butt in gear. Gardens didn’t get weeded by people who weren’t willing to get their hands dirty and do the work.

I reached for the box on the floor, well aware this new and far more useful attitude needed buttressing. Thinking had always been a dangerous occupation for me when I was scared—I did far better when I grounded my feet in the dirt and kept my hands moving.

My feet would just have to make do with polymer floor, but there was plenty in the box to keep my hands occupied. I pulled out a burner, a set of beakers, a precision digital thermometer, and a titanium spoon. The basic equipment of a brewer, or in this case, the closest to it I’d been able to find in the state-of-the-art gear of a lab that clearly had more funding than it knew what to do with. Everything in the box was way too shiny. I resisted the urge to dent a few things just on principle. They were good tools and they would serve, and that was all I needed them to do.

I could feel the shaking inside me ramping up again, and I quietly, firmly steadied it. I was brewer enough to make a potion over a candle flame in a tea mug. I sure as heck wasn’t going to fall apart because my equipment was too shiny.

A couple of breaths shuddered in and out, letting go of the worst of the wobbles.

I reached for the stuff in the box that was going to be a far bigger problem. I’d ruthlessly raided Toli’s carefully annotated stash of dried plant material and organics. I’d taken nothing that was part of ongoing research, or at least I hoped I’d interpreted things that well on the fly. Most of what I needed was standard issue in any bio-genetics lab or well-equipped experimental garden.

Base materials, cells and molecules that held knowing that I needed them to share. A good potion was a community, each member speaking the piece they could offer to the power of the collective. One Grower’s rant-to-be against the dissension and separateness of a biome that could do so much better.

My breath moved evenly in and out now—I was finding my steadiness. No potion was ever evil, no matter what it looked and felt and smelled like. This one would speak messages that mattered. It would be up to the hands that held it to decide if it worked on behalf of the highest good—or against it.

I shook my head, even as I pushed a trickle of resonance into a beaker half full of water. Purifying. Warming. Brewing was tricky business, and one that didn’t need the distraction of deep philosophical meanderings. Those could wait until I was back home and thinning pea shoots.

I reached toward the small jars I had liberated from Toli’s ingredients room. The organics first—those would be standard extracts, created off-planet. I rarely used them at home, preferring the vitality and individuality of ones I had prepared myself, but today, predictable and boring was just fine.

I managed a smile at that. I had never created a boring brew and I had no intention of starting now.

Adding the first three organics went well enough. A basic energetic lattice, a framework that would hold the potion together and act as a receptor for the infusion of Talent. I added little bits of vibration as I went—I’d never been all that good at following a recipe, and the clear liquid in the beaker needed to feel like me before I moved on to the hard stuff.

I smiled as the concoction under my spoon color-shifted to light purple. Better. Not anywhere near good yet, but even a brew base could have a little life and personality—and having one to chat with was steadying my Talent faster than anything else I could have done. It always had. The magic of color and light and the feel of substances stepping up to do the work that was their essence.

Helping things find their potential had always jazzed me, even if it was just a little methyl-hydrox.

I cycled the potion yellow, just because I could.

And then I anchored in the steadiness and the light and reached for a small bag of chamomile flowers. Not generally the first choice for what I was about to ask this potion to do, but these particular flowers and me, we had a history, and I wanted that history to infuse into the brew under my spoon. Because no flower got to slide down my throat and yell at me and try to wreak havoc in my soul. Not without a good, stiff talking to after, anyhow.

I poured out a few of the dried blooms into my hand, feeling their jumpiness. Not a surprise—it wasn’t in their nature to do what they’d done. Bits of dried plant, as off-center as bits of dried plant can get.

I soothed. Eased. Reminded the almost-weightless scraggles in my hand of their cell-deep knowing. It wasn’t hard. Chamomile lived and died to comfort, to connect, to heal. One of harmony’s best workhorses.

The vibrations in my hand slowed, gelled, even as I crushed the dried blooms into gentle dust. It was essence now—form no longer mattered, only that it had one. I made a funnel of my hand, sending the chamomile dust into my happy yellow liquid. And held my breath as the color dimmed, and then brightened again.

More orange now. A touch of passion. History not forgotten.

Good.

I reached for the next jar, feeling my muscles tense, asking them to release. I never worked with ingredients I needed to fight—but somehow, tonight, it made perfect sense that was what the task required me to do.

This was the kind of thing you never wanted to be comfortable.

Three more plants born in the soil of Xirtaxis Minor, and three more stern, gritty arguments with cells that were not at all convinced that I deserved what I asked of them.

I pushed harder, knowing as I did that I skirted every ethical line I’d ever vowed to uphold. Grieving as I did it, because I would never be the same Grower again after I did this—my heart understood that, even as it felt me guarding some of those lines, crossing others.

Committing small abuses to right a larger one.

I gripped my spoon more firmly. That kind of thinking was going to get me into deep, dark trouble. This was not abuse. It was hard choices, the very hardest of the hard. But if I chose straight and true and in alignment with that rightness I could feel, I was asking the herbs of Xirtaxis Minor to participate in its ultimate healing.

Even if the first step to get there was going to be unimaginably brutal.

I did this to heal, and if I didn’t believe that in every cell of my body, I had no business making this brew at all.

I closed my eyes and connected in to that nugget of certainty under my ribs. Let what lived in it spread in slow, definite ripples. And felt the resistance in the jars melt away. These were simple plants—they had no way to understand what it was I intended to do. But they could read the ripples as well as I could.

I could feel my cheeks streaking with tears. Brewer to the last, I raised the beaker off the heat long enough to collect a few of them. Adding my commitment, my sorrow, my sense of hard, and my deep, heartsick loneliness.

I stirred the brew a moment longer, and then what I was feeling penetrated my own thick skull. I slapped a palm to my forehead and reached for my travel bag. I had a small kit of potions I’d brought with me, ones designed to protect and heal and deal with the regular bumps and bruises of Fixer missions. My first aid kit. Nothing in there was equipped for what I was doing next—but they carried the energy of home. The potent, healing, comforting essence of Stardust Prime, grown in soil worked by ten generations of Lightbody gardeners.

I could feel my soul, my heart, my Talent reaching for what lived in the tiny bottles. My community might not be here, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel their presence.

I felt the resonance in the bottles reaching for me, responding easily to the Talent who had made them. Felt the vibrations of brisk comfort, seeking the bumps and bruises they were to tend.

And then I felt them recoil.

The energies of home, realizing what I was about to do. Reading the resonance of the brew in front of me and the Talent-infused intentions I prepared—and utterly rejecting it. Not contaminated by Jerome this time, but by what they could see inside my own soul.

My insides shattered as six tiny bottles of potion delivered thunderous, horrifying confirmation of what my heart already knew.

My family would never be able to accept what I was about to do. And never, in any important way, had I ever moved out of that circle of love.

The potion stirred nastily under my hands.

I cursed and pushed negative thoughts out of my mind. They were feeding to my brew and that was a tadpole mistake. Or it would be if we ever let tadpoles anywhere near a brewing station. So far, none of the trainers had ever been that brave or that dumb. Just the thought of it made me smile—and that helped with the awful hollows, just a little.

I calmed the uncertainty trying to take hold in the brew. There might not be anybody here to back up my skills, but I had really solid ones. The best in twenty years, if you believed the whispers on the Stardust Prime winds. Generally I ignored stuff like that, but at this moment, even petty rumors had the potential to make me feel better. Not the kind of fuel I was used to reaching for, but I’d take whatever I could get.

Because it was time for one Grower to act—with or without anyone at her back.

I took a deep breath and reached for Nikki’s spiky little red plant. In less than a day, it had already colonized its pot, baby explorers dangling over the edges, seeking new territory. I smiled, and regretted, to the very depths of my toes, what I was about to ask of such determined intrepidness, such gorgeous tenacity of spirit.

There wasn’t time to dry or distill, to use the tools of my trade to concentrate the plant’s essence. So I would use Talent. Carefully, I reached for one of the inner clumps of spikes. Baby explorers were all well and good, but they didn’t understand the hardships of the world nearly as deeply as those who had been around a bit longer. I needed the part of this plant that understood defeat and had risen up, over and over, to try again.

The spikes tensed under my fingers, a silent moment of fierce assessment. And then relaxed. My tears started flowing again as I felt the tiny clump under my fingers gathering energy from its neighbors. A wise and seasoned explorer—and a deeply generous one. I could feel its cells, speaking the core truth that underlay spiky fierceness. Abiding commitment of the many to the whole.

I needed only to ask it to extend what it saw as the whole.

The spikes under my fingers released from their dirt. I gently lifted them, honoring the gift, preparing the cells to integrate with the rest of the ingredients swirling in a potion that was color-shifting of its own accord now. Not pretty rainbows anymore, but the workmanlike colors of growing earth and stormy skies and barren cliffs.

This was a tough brew—and it was about to get a whole lot tougher.

My Talent absolutely focused on holding the energies steady, I let the spikes disintegrate and flow through my palm into the beaker.

The potion hissed, finally understanding what it was meant to be.

I calmed. Steadied. Demanded.

The color under my spoon now was nothing I’d ever seen—not in a potion of my brewing. Wild roiling of red and gray and streaks of inky black.

A potion it would be easy to fear.

Instead, I asked my DNA, my cells, my Talent—to see its beauty. To understand its need. To anchor its purpose deep in the energies of rightness and good as seen across a scale of time that might make a human heart quail, but would really only be a tiny galactic breath.

A potion willing to be the terrible first step on a journey that opened the way to grow into the light.

It churned under my hands, picking up my deep distress at the arrogance and the heart-stuttering risk of what I was seeking to do.