Secret Worlds (564 page)

Thorn has run off again. We find him pounding on the door to the operating suite.

Armonk puts his ear to the door and wriggles the latch. “The doctor never locks the inside doors. Dr. Varik,” he calls, then louder, “Dr. Varik, if you’re in there open up!”

I hear a faint groan, but wonder if it’s an echo off of the slick office walls. “Did you hear someone?” Blane and Armonk shake their heads so I keep searching.

Thorn tries the doorknob again. “Smell,” he exclaims.

Putting my nose to the crack under the door, I breathe in. “Ack! Stinks of stale potatoes but much more raunchy.” After another inhale my stomach quivers with a profound nausea.

Blane searches for a tool to pry open the lock. He finds one of Dr. Varik’s surgical tools—a curved metal blade with a narrow hooked tip, which does the trick—that, and a determined kick. On the operating suite table, our worst fears are realized.

A horrible yet strangely exotic sight lies before us. Someone has secured Dr. Varik to the surgical table with his own belts, and springing from his grey, decaying flesh are tall sprays of gorgeous red star-shaped flowers. They bloom from his chest, his forehead and his stomach. Smaller, curlicue fronds unfurl from his upturned arms. One single stalk with a crimson flower head rises from his mouth in a lyrical, triumphant arc.

Armonk approaches the doctor and checks for a pulse. “He’s gone.” With that, tears begin to slide down his cheekbones.

“The flower roots must’ve invaded his organs,” Blane says.

I gag and swallow. That reality is overwhelming. Those few times that I studied the doctor’s exposed skin and noticed stubs now flood back to me in lurid detail. He was shaving these blooms off. He’s hidden this horror from us, and now whoever secured him here and robbed him of his dignity and life, has released Varik’s secret to the world.

Varik truly was Fireseed One—the first transgenic variety of the species.

Tears spill from my eyes and onto Thorn’s head as we hug each other. Terror seizes me too. I know that the doctor said my transmutation was different than his but … I glance down at my arms. What if he was wrong? I hear Armonk, now crying in gasps, and Blane is frozen in place, still staring at the sight.

When I finally creep over toward the body, I’m afraid to touch it. I’m one and the same, though I’m supposedly a different breed.

“Is it catching, Ruby?” Blane whispers as he inches closer.

“No.” I will myself to believe this. The doctor has to be right. “If it was that easy to get, all of the kids at The Greening would have come down with it.”

“How did you catch it then?” Blane asks with a frown, as if it’s a plague.

I tell him what happened after Jan and Vesper stuffed pollen down our noses. Armonk chimes in and describes Dr. Varik’s pollination through his lesions. All the while, Thorn is rocking and holding his head.

“We need to help Thorn.” I rush to my brother’s side. “Dr. Varik would have wanted us to. We need to figure out what’s wrong with him.”

“I could examine him,” Blane offers.

Armonk peers at Blane with suspicion, and I shake my head at Armonk. “With the doctor gone, Blane is our only chance at figuring this out,” I insist, as much to myself as to Armonk. Again, Armonk nods with a dour determination.

Armonk holds out his arms to Thorn. “Come here, little man. Sit in my lap.” Thorn sinks down and wraps his arms around Armonk’s solid arms.

Blane collects an array of the doctor’s surgical tools and arranges them on a clean towel. Sitting next to Armonk and Thorn, he examines Thorn’s head, carefully thumbing through every inch of scalp, behind each ear and around the circumference of his downy neck. Blane’s hand stops at the nape of Thorn’s neck and he presses in. “Does that hurt?”

Thorn lets out a yelp and tries to push Blane’s hand away.

“No, don’t touch.” Blane looks over at me, where I’m kneeling. “Ruby, do you have your numbing elixir?”

I reach for the vial in my latchbag and unscrew the top. Blane shows me the red spot on Thorn’s neck and I spread my salve around the area.

“Hold him firmly,” Blane advises Armonk, and he complies, gripping Thorn’s shoulders and head so he can’t suddenly flinch.

What a relief that Blane and Armonk have finally gotten to a place where they can work together without sniping—even if it took the doctor’s death to get them there.

After a minute to let the salve do its magic, Blane takes a miniscule scissors and a tweeze style tool and gets to work.

I’m squeamish, and on top of the foul odor wafting from the doctor’s corpse, I have to steel myself not to spew. Veering away, I screw my eyes shut. My head screams with noise! It feels as if my head will detonate. Thorn must be feeling it too. Forget the nostalgic thrumming of the Reds and the Fireseed back at The Greening, what I wouldn’t gave for an annoying vanilla Stream Blast right now. Anything but this searing static. Clamping my head between my palms, I count down the seconds.

“Holy fire!” Blane exclaims.

“Mother of god!” Armonk cries.

Only then do I dare turn my head and stare at the object clamped in Blane’s surgical tool.

“It’s a totally different implant than Axiom stapled in us before the contest,” I say.

“That’s for sure,” Blane swivels the device in his clamps.

“Looks like a spiky space creature,” says Armonk.

“Or a collection device,” Blane says. “Whoever put this in Thorn wanted to get information from him. Maybe because he won’t talk, they tried something else to steal his thoughts from him.”

“Sucking on my brain,” Thorn murmurs.

I shudder. “It’s stamped with that NanoPearl logo. Who are those people?” As I say this, I realize that the dial on that horrible internal static has suddenly been turned down—no, it’s off!

Thorn says exactly what I’m feeling. “Better. No noise.”

We all stare at the implant, dripping with Thorn’s greenish gore. “Frying hellfire,” Blane mutters under his breath. “I’m sure this thing was collecting some kind of data from his brain.”

“And at the same time confusing it with noise.” I add. “Which I heard too because Thorn and I are connected through the stroma.”

“The stroma?” Blane frowns.

I explain to Blane how the stroma works, how all of the plants and even the Reds are connected to Thorn and me. How we read each other’s thoughts, how we feel each other’s pain.

Blane stares at me long and hard. I wonder what he’s thinking: probably that it’s one thing to have a formal knowledge of advanced genetics but another thing entirely to connect that with real people with beating hearts. “You say you turned into a chimera from inhaling Fireseed pollen?” he asks. When I nod he continues with an unexpected enthusiasm. “First we need to get the other chips out of our heads, and then we have to get back to The Greening. You have more pollen there?”

“I can gather more, why?”

“If we work collectively through the stroma, maybe we’ll figure out why they want Thorn’s thoughts so badly, what they intend to use them for.”

“You mean transform ourselves?” Armonk asks Blane.

“Exactly.”

“What a smart idea.” Armonk grins at Blane for the first time ever.

Thorn nods. “Stroma powers us.”

I’m proud of Blane. One by one, I smear numbing elixir on the napes of our necks and Blane surgically removes our implants. This time, I’m calm enough to watch him remove Armonk’s, and even his own, with me holding a mirror aimed at his neck so he can clearly see the entry site. It’s surprising how precise Blane can be with his bearlike hands and thickset fingers that always seemed best suited for sports and pummeling his enemies.

Armonk is amazing too, patient and gentle with Thorn. I imagine what a great father and husband he’ll make someday, to another woman—maybe even my friend Petal or Freeblossom. Thinking these happier thoughts I smile.

In the meantime, Blane lines up the implants on the towel like tiny monsters from a horror show. The new one from Thorn has a dozen spiky nodules like a lethal insect, but even the early ones that George stapled in us look alien in their smooth anonymity. How could I have been so eager to have that in my head, telling me what to think about, what to long for? I’ll never again have to be startled by those awful Stream blasts, never hear any more wheedling ads hawking the latest restaurant or cleaning powder.

Instead, we’ll be connected to the stromanet.

We bandage each other’s wounds. The harmonious thrumming from my being to Thorn’s, from Thorn’s to his Reds, from the Reds to the Fireseed has already begun as we wrap the good doctor in a length of clean surgical sheet. First we pluck off the majestic blossoms and place them in a vase with a dampened sponge to save for his memorial. How bizarre that he grew flowers from his own body for his memorial, I think as I wrap the last part of the sheet under the doctor’s cold arms.

Goodbye wise one, wise one, wise one,
goes the humming.

The memorial will have to wait. We need to deal with NanoPearl first.

As we pack up our supplies, I hear a tortured groan. This time it’s not my imagination. We stop what we’re doing to listen. Another. Someone is suffering, badly.

“Is it coming from the living room?” Blane asks.

“No, the kitchen, behind the pantry door.” Armonk is already there. As he swings it open, we’re shocked to see it’s someone we know quite well.

“Nevada! Oh, my god!” I cry and dash forward, fling my arms around her. She’s slumped, head on chest, and weaving in and out of consciousness. “How long have you been in here?”

She shakes her head in slow motion.

Thorn hides way back in the shadows of the room.

Armonk uses his pocketknife to slit her binding because someone tied her arms behind her back. She comes alive enough to bring them forward and paw at her bloody wrists. She has one black, puffy eye and her expression is glazed with hunger and sadness.

“Who did this to you, Nevada?” Armonk crouches next to her and feeds her sips of water that I’ve rushed to get.

She clears her throat, attempts to talk but it comes out as a grunt. Trying again, she puts a few words together. “Jan attacked me, at the school. Took me here and …” Tears wet her sunken cheeks. “Forced me to look at Varik’s body. All tied down, with vines coming out of—” She breaks out in sobs. “Jan killed him. Varik … I loved him so.”

My heart bleeds for her. I feel guilty for being so suspicious of her motives with the doctor. Armonk and I exchange glances. I see he feels the same way. But how were we to know?

Blane has collected a small bowl of sea applesauce from the doctor’s kitchen and he hands it to Armonk, who spoons some in. After a minute or so, Nevada raises her head and drinks more water.

There’s no way around asking her hard questions. “Did you know that NanoPearl was after my brother? Did they make any deals with you?” I study her; use my intuition to discern a lie or a truth.

“Nano Pearl, what’s that?”

Is she kidding? “You had a note from them in your desk. That female judge, who works for NanoPearl wrote it. She asked you to come talk business.”

“Oh, that pushy woman,” she mutters, “I wanted nothing to do with her.”

Blane kneels down, crowds Nevada’s space. “Jan says you took a bribe from her.” I know how intimidating Blane can be. She might just crumble if he presses her. “We found money in your desk.”

She narrows her eyes at Blane. “Who told you to snoop in my office?” I understand she’s our teacher but if she’s truly innocent this response won’t help her. “I only had a couple hundred in there, for emergencies.” That’s true, that’s exactly what we found.

“Nevada,” Armonk says in a gentle, patient voice, the one that warmed me to him from the very first days at The Greening. “This is a very serious issue. If you made any underhanded deal you need to come clean now.”

“What deal are you talking about?” she shrieks. In her tone, I hear she knows nothing.

“Jan said you took a bribe from NanoPearl, and got paid plenty to let them experiment on Thorn,” Blane explains.

“What?” This shriek is shriller. “I’d never let anyone touch Thorn.”

“We understand that The Greening’s on the verge of bankruptcy,” Armonk adds wearily. “We understand how incredibly tempting it would be to collect a payoff.”

“I did no such thing,” Nevada spits. “Yes, that woman wanted to talk to me about some sneaky deal, but as desperate as I’ve ever been …” she snorts under her breath. “And I’ve been plenty desperate wandering alone in the desert, living on shale and spiders; I would never use my students as pawns. Never!”

“Okay, okay.” Armonk sighs. “Then explain how Jan got a huge stack of cash.”

Nevada’s eyes grow round and feral. “You see what he did to me!” She holds up her blood-streaked arms. “You see what he did to the doctor?” With this more tears fall. “Jan’s capable of anything, that murderous bastard. Truth be told, I was always petrified of him, him and that delinquent, Vesper. I tried to give everyone the fair shake I never had as a teen. But …” Releasing a bitter moan, she sags down again. “What happened to Thorn?” she whispers after a moment. “He’s not hurt, is he?”

Thorn steps forward from the shadows and plops down by Nevada, takes her injured hand in his little one. “Here,” he says simply, and gives her a hug. Oh, my, god. My brother is an angel here on earth. In a way he really is the second coming of Fireseed after all. As more tears fall, she mumbles about how relieved she is that he’s okay.

Armonk hauls Nevada to her feet, guiding her around the long way so she doesn’t have to traipse through Dr. Varik’s surgical suite and see the sheet over his body. As he helps Nevada into a glider, Armonk addresses us. “Listen, Ruby, Blane, I’m taking Nevada to Marney’s Depot. Marney can watch over her until we straighten things out. Nevada has no business going to the school right now as long as Jan and Vesper are there. Her condition’s way too shaky.”

“Meet us at The Greening?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“We’ll take the doctor’s glider,” says Blane.

With that, Blane, Thorn and I pile in and fly over the dunes to Skull’s Wrath. The skeletal rock faces glower in the purple slants of sunset. Pitting myself to face Vesper, Jan and the rampaging Reds, The Greening and its environs feel more like a battlefield than home.