Grower's Omen (The Fixers, book #2: A KarmaCorp Novel) (16 page)

I
wafted
the steam from the tea gently toward my nose. Barely acceptable by Mundi’s standards, but the best I could pull off on a world where most of the plant life still hated my guts. That much wasn’t going to change until a certain rogue Talent and his tree were done with their unholy temper tantrum.

Making the right choices didn’t always mean you made them gracefully. From what I’d heard, almost everyone in the biome was taking a wide berth around experimental dome Alpha at the moment.

Part of my mission this afternoon was to change that. To plant my trapped, rebellious, hostile duo in the beginnings of good soil.

I took a seat, cross-legged, on the straw mat Toli had scared up from somewhere when I told her I was hosting tea. It wasn’t even close, culturally, to the woven rugs of my ancestors, but she’d offered it with a diffidence that told me using it mattered. And cultural rituals that couldn’t adapt to the people using them were about as useful as square ball bearings.

Moving slowly, just as Mundi had once taught me, I carefully poured fragrant tea into four shallow cups. Three sets of eyes followed my movements. I kept an eye on Glenn—he’d spent the last few hours monitoring the situation in dome Alpha, even though he was in no way recovered from his own attack, and while he looked strong and alert, I was prepared for that to change at any moment. Judging from Nikki’s solicitous glances, she had the same concern.

Toli couldn’t figure out if she was more interested in the tea pouring or the slightly pink cheeks of her two companions.

I hid a wobbly smile—lab managers never missed much. I didn’t know exactly what had happened in the medical pod, but it had gone beyond a lab tech nursing a medical with a sore head back to health. Fortunately, Growers had a pretty broad definition of what constituted healing.

I sipped my tea and waited for the energy in the room to find itself. Slowly, the tea peeled back the layers of politeness and uncertainty and unveiled what lay underneath.

Polite, betrayed distance. Three very good people who were making an effort—and didn’t understand.

I set my cup down with hands that were once again shaky. “I asked you to come here so I could apologize.” And ask a favor, but that needed to come second.

Toli raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

Because I’d broken more than one promise in the middle of the night. “We made a commitment as a team to try to save the willow. I poisoned it instead.”

Glenn let out a sigh and set down his cup beside mine. “The old medicals used to cut off limbs to save a patient’s life.”

I shuddered at the very vivid visual that produced.

“Ugh.” Nikki punched him in the shoulder. “That’s totally disgusting.”

He grinned at her and rubbed his shoulder. “I don’t think you’re supposed to hit people at tea ceremonies.”

Not usually, but in the interests of finding good soil and water, I could be pretty broadminded.

“We get it.” Toli was still sipping her tea, clearly used to minor squabbles in her space. “And that tree was dead anyhow the minute Mary Louise found a shovel.”

“No,” I said gently. “Dr. Salmera has enough Talent to have prevented that.”

Glenn grimaced in remembered pain. He understood better than anyone just how much risk Jerome posed.

And now they knew why.

“I don’t like what you did,” said Nikki quietly, looking down at her tea. “But I believe you did what you thought was best.”

I closed my eyes, feeling the hesitant friendship they were still willing to offer me. The excuses they were trying to offer up on my behalf. Shaky community—but I was humbled by their willingness to connect at all.

I knew I had made a terribly hard choice for anyone else to understand. And the reactions of the people in this room were only faint shadows of what I would need to navigate at home. My family honored green, growing things. We didn’t threaten them, poison them, or hold them hostage.

I believed in what I’d done. But for the first time in my life, I’d acted entirely on my own, and I’d made a choice that was going to horrify those I loved. They’d take me back in, but something important had shifted and it wasn’t ever going to shift back—and I wasn’t at all sure how I was going to live without it.

Toli cleared her throat abruptly. “Are you going to be in trouble?”

“Yup.” I tried to deliver it with a dose of my brother’s zany casualness. “They’ll be getting in line to figure out who gets to thump me first.”

Nikki winced. The other two just looked a little rueful.

Toli winked at me. “You’ll live.”

Said by a woman who had never met Yesenia Mayes. There wasn’t much doubt what the director would think about the news that I’d intentionally provoked a rogue Talent—and then left him attached to a new and possibly sentient species of tree. Jerome wouldn’t be able to leave Xirtaxis Minor for years. There would be a river of trainers and scientists flowing this direction in the next few rotations. “You guys will probably be getting quite a few visitors.”

“Good.” Toli didn’t look at all disturbed. “That will shake things up around here.”

The power to do that lay in their hands—it always had. I took a deep breath. I needed to plant what I had started in good soil, and these were three people with excellent instincts and the seeds of a strong and vibrant community in their hearts. “I was hoping you guys might take the lead in making that happen.”

That had three tea cups pausing in midair.

“You’re more than a collection of scientists here, or you could be.” I could hear the passion in my voice—and the plea. “Feed each other. Know each other. Help each other figure out how to grow. Fight back the dark and the scary together.”

“We’re not in charge.” Nikki looked more than a little disturbed at the idea of the mutiny I was fomenting, even though she’d been headed on exactly that course two days ago. “The Basturs like things the way they are.”

Hopefully that was going to change. Part of my crisp message to Yesenia had suggested, in the strongest words I dared, that the Basturs be replaced. They weren’t capable of shepherding what needed to happen in this place. I’d even had the temerity to suggest one of my cousins as their replacement. Davie was a top-notch scientist, a master gardener, and mother to six kids who would make the willow look positively well behaved.

But the soil here needed to get better whether the powers at the top changed or not. I could have tried to convince Nikki of that myself. Instead, I reached for a small green plastic pot and set it in her hands.

She looked down at the spiky red mascot she’d let me borrow for a while, and finally grinned wryly. “You’re telling me to take lessons from a galactic weed?”

There were worse things to learn from. “The new and improved version with almost passable social manners, anyhow.”

She snorted. “They’re not that passable.” She swept a practiced eye over the plant, and homed in on the place where I’d taken off a sample.

I hadn’t healed it. She deserved to know.

Her eyes came up to mine, a woman careful, but determined. “What happened to it?”

“The potion I used on the willow came from many sources. Your little spiky guy here was one of those.” An irreplaceable one. The one that had tipped potion into poison. Even now, especially now, I regretted what I had asked one small plant to be.

We sometimes place the very hardest burdens on the feistiest amongst us.

Nikki cleared her throat—and then something fierce and protective swarmed into her eyes. “You made him into a poison?”

I could have told her that her little plant was both male and female, but that would have been avoidance of the highest order. “Yes.”

“How could you?” Her hands shielded the pot, but the rest of her looked ready to jump up and pound me on the head. With a grav-tank.

I told the truth as best as I knew it, hoping to soothe us both. “Sometimes it’s the harshest essences that are the greatest healers. I couldn’t ask a plant that was too cooperative to do this. I needed something that knew how to be strong, knew how to keep trying, over and over and over.”

“To kill the willow.” Her eyes were flat, hard, and entirely unforgiving.

“Yes.” I met her gaze as calmly as I could, well aware there were a whole lot of Lightbodies who would be standing behind her in the days to come, hating what I had asked of innocents. “And to give Dr. Salmera the opportunity to heal it.” Over and over and over.

Because true skill only comes from repetition. And because it was going to take a lot of opportunities for him to open to what he needed to learn.

The flatness in Nikki’s eyes shifted a little—but they were nowhere near forgiveness.

I yearned to reach out, to connect, to beg for that which she wasn’t ready to give. Instead, I did my job. I settled my hands in my lap, palms up. “Feel as you need to about me. But please—help him.”

She looked at me blankly.

I let my most important plea be two simple, whispered words. “Help Jerome.”

Glenn’s eyebrows flew up into his hairline. Nikki reached for his arm protectively, still glaring at me.

Neither of them would manage to stay mad for more than two days, if I knew my people. “He’s got a really hard job to do, and he’s going to need help.” Something he likely wouldn’t realize for months yet, but I wanted them to be ready when he did.

I turned to Toli, knowing she would end up the ringleader of the three, or at least the coach in the corner. “Wait until he asks for it, though.”

She snorted. “That will happen right after a meter of snow falls in the domes.”

I could have told her how to make that happen—it was standard Lightbody fare for the winter Festival of Lights. Instead, I set down my cup for the last time. It was time for me to go home. I’d put my feet in the dirt and done something so wrong, I could barely stay in my own skin.

I needed to begin my own healing.

“Wait.” Nikki stared up at me, something new sliding into her eyes. “Your face tats—they’re gone.”

I tipped my gaze down to my almost-empty cup and didn’t say anything. They’d find my tats on the willow tree soon enough.

“
W
e give
her to the soil, and from the soil may she both give and take. May they live as one.”

I took a deep, heartfelt breath as I murmured the final words of Gilly’s dirtwalker ceremony, feeling the healing comfort of ritual slide warmly over the wounded surfaces of my heart. Words continuing what the vibration of friendly dirt under my bare toes had begun—and only begun. I still had a long way to go to land back where I needed to be.

Mundi had been right. Normally I arrived back from assignments very grateful to get off the tin can and happy to step back onto home turf, but nothing more soul-wrenching than that. This time, as I had watched Stardust Prime come into view on the
Indigo’s
sensors, I’d been struck with a yearning that was shaking me still.

A need, bordering on desperate, to get my feet into the soil of my birth. To remember and to grieve and to let go and give to the land what it could hold and would one day be able to turn into new life. To remember, and to know that I would never feel quite the same again.

I’d lost some kind of important innocence on this mission—the simple belief that my dirt would always be ready to take me back.

There had been no chatting happiness at my arrival, not this time. They knew—they would have known hours before I had arrived, probably days. For starters, unless several planetary hells had frozen over, the botanical team Yesenia was almost certainly assembling would be peppered with Lightbodies.

My family was trying. Dad had fired the dirtwalker ceremony into gear about five minutes after I’d loaded off the cargo ship. I wasn’t sure if he’d done it for Gilly or for me, but I was pathetically grateful either way.

People were moving around me carefully—it didn’t take Talent to know I was a pretty shattered Lightbody. Or to know that my choices had rocked my family deeply. They loved me, but they were finding my recent actions very hard to accept.

I had tried to kill an innocent, and one we valued as much as we valued my small cousin. I had made a choice that violated the promise every Lightbody made right after we learned to walk—and it had walked me out of my tribe’s light. It was going to take a while to make my way back.

I watched as Gilly took small potted plants, one at a time, and handed them to the guests. She had a big smile for Yesenia’s daughter as the lithe teenager leaned down to accept hers. I raised an eyebrow, stirred for a moment out of my navel gazing—those two were awfully comfortable with each other.

“She’s been helping with the peas,” said a voice at my shoulder. “Some of your younger cousins have taken her under their wing.”

I looked at the Lightbody family matriarch. “That was fast.”

Mundi’s face gave away very little. “We know when something needs watering.”

They did. And if Tatiana was here and smiling, they’d decided to make that watering more public than usual. A choice I was quite sure her mother wouldn’t have missed.

I swallowed, knowing that a thirteen-year-old trainee wasn’t the only one desperate to be watered this day.

Mundi watched as Gilly handed out more plants, wildly proud of herself and yawning at the same time. “The child will need a nap soon.”

She wouldn’t be the first dirtwalker to curl up in a bed of flowers before her day was done.

“If Yesenia has any issues with our treatment of her daughter, tell her to come to me.”

I had no idea why we were talking about Tatiana, but I knew better than to push Mundi any faster than she wanted to go. “I don’t tell Director Mayes what to do.”

Her lips quirked. “I have, a time or two.”

It was a miracle Stardust Prime was still in one piece. “How big was the earthquake?”

An oddly satisfied silence, and then Mundi lifted her shoulder in a small shrug. “She can be quite reasonable if you take the right approach.”

I knew exactly zero other people on the planet who would agree with that assessment. It probably helped if you were a hundred and three years old and didn’t work for her. “It sounds like you have some interesting stories to tell.” Ones I hadn’t heard, which was particularly interesting.

She shrugged again. “Come have tea with me sometime, and I’ll tell you one or two.”

I would do that—but I had a story of my own to tell first. And there weren’t any broader, tougher, wiser shoulders to tell it to in all the galaxy. “I did something awful, Mundi.”

She laid a hand on my arm. “Yes, you did.”

Those three words nearly shattered me. I stared at a blurred clump of dirt. “I couldn’t think of a better way.”

Her hand was still for a long moment. “Perhaps there wasn’t one.”

That was weak comfort. I looked over to where my father stood, holding Gilly’s hand. “He thinks I did something wrong.”

“Yes.” She waited as one of the aunties walked past us with a fretful baby. “Do you?”

I’d spent three days meditating on that question on the long ride home. “No.” There hadn’t been a good choice—just awful ones. And this way, both Jerome and his tree had a chance.

“A good garden has all kinds of plants.” Mundi sounded as if she were going to peel off into one of her stories. “Some are beautiful and require lots of care, and some can grow wherever there is a bit of dirt and a ray or two of sun.”

She patted my arm again. “The Lightbodies plant their children in good soil, and most of them will stay there all their lives.”

I strained to follow where she was headed. “I missed that while I was gone, very much.”

“I know.” She bent down slowly, never taking her hand off my arm, and picked up a handful of dirt. “You should spend some time with a trowel in your hand in these next days.”

She turned to face me now, and slowly funneled the dirt into my cupped hands. “But you, Tyra Armenia Lightbody, are a plant that is capable of growing in the dirt where very hard decisions have to be made.”

I gulped. “Because I’m a Fixer.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Because it is who you were born to be in this universe. KarmaCorp merely gives you a means to find your way to the hard soil where you will sometimes be needed.”

I felt the tears coming. “I never thought I’d leave this one.”

“I know.” She smiled at me, deep pride in her eyes—and sadness. “Don’t judge the other plants in your family if they look at you from the very good soil they live in and don’t understand.”

I could feel the horrible aloneness trying to sneak back up on me. “I don’t want this.”

“I know that as well.” She closed my hands around the dirt. “But you know what it is to be planted in good soil, and for that, you are considerably lucky.”

Her tone had gotten distinctly acerbic. I managed a grin, even as a tear rolled down my nose. “Are you trying to tell me to suck it up?”

“Something like that.” She stepped back from me, her eyes stern. “You are a Lightbody, Tyra—don’t ever forget it, even when it causes you pain.”

I managed not to wince. Because she was right—and because no one on Stardust Prime had an intelligence network equal to Mundi’s.

If she thought I needed a pep talk for where I was headed right after this, I should probably just go jump in the compost chute now.

I took my spot on the well-worn area in front of Yesenia’s desk, clasped my hands behind my back, and reminded myself that I had Mundi’s genes in my veins and she’d be seriously pissed off at me if they quivered.

The boss lady sat in her chair, watching me silently.

I didn’t bother trying to out-wait her. That just wasn’t possible—people far tougher than me had tried. And I had one small administrative matter to take care of before we got down to the business of deciding just how much trouble I was in. “I would like to recommend the
Indigo
for mission transport services.”

Yesenia raised an eyebrow. “They’re a small and entirely un-noteworthy cargo vessel.”

Perhaps on the spec sheet. “They’re friendly and accommodating, and any Fixer showing up with a basket of real food will be made very welcome.”

A second eyebrow joined the first. “That is unusual for spacers.”

“They’re an unusual ship—half the crew is dirt born.”

A moment of considering pause, and then Yesenia made a notation on her tablet. “Noted.”

The
Indigo
would likely spend half their lives ferrying Fixers now—it wasn’t all that easy to find crews that truly welcomed the disruption that often came with our transport. I’d checked with Captain Kriggs before volunteering her.

I’d also invited her and her crew for Sunday dinner, and planted a whisper in my father’s ear about possible supplies trade. We produced some lightweight, easy-to-store teas and spices that would likely be very well received on the
Indigo’s
normal trade routes. And my family would enjoy the heck out of spacers who drooled over real tomatoes.

Trying my very best to repair the web that sustained me.

And telling the
Indigo
crew about the weekly Lightbody feast had provided at least some distraction from worrying about this moment. I gulped and stayed quiet. I’d broken the silence—it was the boss lady’s turn now.

Her eyes lifted to mine, steely and grim. “Perhaps we can use them to ferry the flotilla of scientists and trainers you apparently felt entitled to commit to a distant biome for any number of years.”

No part of that sounded good. “I realize that I stepped far outside the boundaries of what I was tasked to do.”

“You exceeded your authority as a Fixer in more ways than I can count, and committed a dozen people at a time when we don’t have them to spare.” The words were clipped, furious swords. “Do you think mine is the chair you sit in, Journeywoman?”

I could feel all the blood in my body plummet to my feet.

“I thought not.” She looked ready to spit nails. “However, I also find myself with the same problem you had—I can’t think how else you might have solved this and produced a better result.”

My brain had worked better when Jerome’s willow had tried to suck all my water out.

“I sent you in under-resourced and I was well aware of that. You should have had a team with you, but I didn’t have one to send. I had hoped that the situation would stay manageable.” She looked down at her desk and almost muttered her next words. “I also didn’t anticipate the communications blockade, and that was an inexcusable oversight on my part.”

Two things finally seeped into my numb, blood-deprived head. Yesenia Mayes, director of all the universe that mattered, was pulling some of the blame for my actions on her own head.

And she had expected me to fail. “You didn’t think I could do this.”

“No. I didn’t.” She took another look down at her tablet, and the ghost of a smile moved across her face.

“Invoking clause 47.3.ii.4a was well done, Grower.”

I blinked and tried to figure out what in the galaxy she was talking about.

The ghost of a smile returned. “I wish more of our Fixers would learn the power of a good legal maneuver.”

Memory finally twigged—the contracts clause I had invoked to buy some time when the Basturs had first imposed their death sentence on the willow. An event deeply overshadowed by the ones that had followed. “It didn’t really work.”

“Nonetheless, it was well done.” She tapped her tablet briskly. “Perhaps we have found a future instructor of our constitutional clauses class.”

I stared at her in horror, trying not to whimper.

“Or perhaps not,” she said dryly, looking almost amused.

I managed to find some words. “I would prefer alternate disciplinary action.” The cells of my throat felt like they’d wandered lost into the Arabi Desert. “Please.”

Yesenia had always known the value of strategically placed silence. She used it to full effect now.

I swallowed. Audibly.

She tapped her tablet. “There will be no disciplinary action. You were sent on a very difficult assignment and resolved it admirably. You presented Dr. Salmera with a choice—a hard one, but a choice nonetheless.”

She looked at me, and for the first time ever, I saw something akin to empathy in her eyes. “At great personal cost to yourself. That was very well done, Tyra.”

I could feel tears welling up—and the desperate need for them not to fall in this office. I grabbed the edge of her desk, needing something to hold me up.

“We all, at some point in our lives, end up in water far over our heads.” Yesenia’s voice was back to brisk, but I had the oddest feeling it was for my sake, not hers. “Not everyone can step up to such overwhelming responsibility. I wasn’t at all sure you were one of them.”

I was outright staring now, and I knew it. I just couldn’t figure out how to stop.

“Your sense of family is powerful, Journeywoman. It gives you strength and direction, and those are not small things.” She was silent a moment. “It is good to know you can also work without them.”

Somehow, she understood.

Yesenia Mayes knew what this had cost me. The woman who had abandoned her own daughter.

I swayed, rocked to the soul of my boots—and then whispered the single thought my brain could manage to form. “If you know about family, how can you leave Tatiana without one?”

I froze, knowing even as the words landed that I had just stepped way, way out of line.

Yesenia’s face could have been carved from granite, but her hands slapped down on her desk with vicious force. “I have my reasons. You would do well not to judge.”

I barely heard the words. I was too busy listening to what was underneath them—processing what my Talent had just incontrovertibly read from the energies passing through the desk that linked our hands.

Beneath the boss lady’s rock and steel lay terrible, beating anguish.

It lasted only a moment, and then the steel resonances of the planet’s best Talent came crashing down. I felt my chakras recoiling in panicked reverberation, but I knew what I had felt. And even as every brain cell I had scrambled for safety—the need to heal rose up, fierce and hot and desperate.