The Enclave

  Fifteen minutes later she walked stiffly into the staff dining hall, located on the south side of the ziggurat’s main floor. The spacious room had a window wall facing eastward onto a rumpled landscape of oak-and-grass-covered ridges. The other three walls were adobe-colored and were decorated with large desert watercolor paintings interspersed with potted ficus trees. A small stage with a podium stood at the south end overlooking the forty-some round tables that accommodated the Institute’s administrators and researchers. Director Swain’s table stood front and center before the stage. With him sat assistant directors Frederick Slattery and Genevieve Viascola, Swain’s gorgeous red-haired, sometime lover; Nelson Poe, head of Developmental Biology; Cameron Reinhardt, head of Applied Genetics; and the department heads of Molecular and Cell Biology, Chemical Engineering, and Senescence.

  The waitstaff was beginning to disassemble the morning buffet when she arrived, but Lacey managed to load her plate from what was left. As she approached her usual table—where she was gratified to see her seat had remained empty—she noticed that diners at the tables she was passing were staring at her. Given the rumor mill around Kendall-Jakes, she wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole room had already heard about her little escapade last night.

  Indeed, at her own table, everyone was listening raptly to Aaron Stiles, resident “inside man,” as he apparently shared yet another gossipy tidbit. As she walked into earshot, she heard “ . . . complete breakdown. She had to be sedated. . . .” and glanced around to see if she could guess who’d been sedated. Instead she found the three junior lab assistants— Pecos, Lauren, and Tina—who sat across the table from her, staring at her wide-eyed.

  “Well, you know,” Melissa Magursky said to Aaron, “some people just aren’t cut out for—”

  Mel broke off as she and the remainder of those at the table grew aware of Lacey’s presence, gaping at her just as the junior lab assistants had. Perplexed and blushing furiously, Lacey set her plate on the table beside Jade Kemmer and pulled out her chair.

  “What are you doing here?” Jade demanded as Lacey sat down. Jade’s blunt manner was not helped by her off-putting exterior. Thick black-framed eyeglasses perched on a narrow nose beneath heavy, unplucked brows, one of which had been pierced with a silver ring. Her ears were riddled with rings, as well, and her thick, wiry, two-toned hair had been cut in an asymmetrical style, chin-length black locks framing her face in contrast to the short-cropped blond hair in back. “The man who brought you back said you’d sleep all morning.”

  “My alarm woke me,” Lacey said, noting that the conversations at the adjoining tables had started up again, glances flicking repeatedly her way.

  “Oh,” Jade said. “Sorry. I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, so I just kept hitting the Snooze button. I guess I should have put it in the closet or something.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t,” Lacey said. She cocked her head. “You said a man brought me back?”

  “An orderly from the clinic. I think he meant not to wake me because he came right in. Scared the . . . er . . . stuffing out of me.” Jade frowned. “You don’t remember?”

  Lacey shook her head.

  “Well, you did seem out of it. He said you’d had a—” she hesitated, glancing uneasily at Aaron—“breakdown. Hysterics or something.”

  “A breakdown?” Lacey looked at Aaron. “I’m the one you were talking about just now?”

  Aaron shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Just passing on what I heard.”

  “Which is?”

  “My friend Tom at the clinic—we play racquetball—said you started hallucinating in the animal rooms last night, had a panic attack and called security. I guess the security guys brought you in for . . . well, he said for sedation.”

  For a moment Lacey continued to stare, her drug-fuddled brain frozen into blankness.

  “He said you’d bruised yourself up pretty badly,” Aaron went on. “That you thought there was some sort of monster down there.”

  Breakdown. Panic attack. Hallucination . . . No wonder everyone was staring at her as if she were a freak.

  She finally broke out of her stasis and snorted, shaking her head. “I can’t believe the rumor mill in this place! I didn’t have a breakdown, nor was I hallucinating. . . .” She paused, glancing around the table. “There was an intruder. The guards’ arrival scared him off—I didn’t call them. And I only went to the clinic because Assistant Director Slattery insisted I go. To make sure I—” she hesitated, realizing she couldn’t mention stitches when she had none to show—“didn’t have a concussion or anything.”

  “No one’s said anything about an intruder,” Aaron said.

  “Assistant Director Slattery was there?” asked Jade in astonishment.

  “He came down with the security guys,” Lacey said. “Dr. Poe was there, too. And Dr. Reinhardt.”

  The doubtful looks were deepening with her every word, and suddenly Lacey heard how it all sounded to the others: an AD and the heads of both the Genetics and Developmental Biology departments just happened to be down in the animal facility in the middle of the night rescuing her from an intruder no one had heard anything about?

  She looked around the table in desperation. “Didn’t any of you hear the helicopters last night? See their searchlights crisscrossing the grounds?”

  An awkward silence ensued. The crease between Jade’s dark brows deepened. At her shoulder, Aaron’s angular face grew stoic while Pecos and Lauren exchanged sober glances.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Mel said presently. She sipped from her cup of coffee. “Hallucination is a common symptom of severe sleep deprivation—as is hysteria. We all know you got very little sleep your first week here, and I doubt you’ve had a chance to make it up. Plus, you’ve been working really hard.”

  “I didn’t hallucinate,” Lacey declared.

  “If there really was an intruder in the AnFac last night,” Aaron asked, “why doesn’t anyone know about it? Why aren’t we on orange alert like we were the last time they thought we had a break-in? When they hardly let us out of our rooms. Or our labs.”

  Lacey hadn’t been at the Institute when the last security lockdown had happened, so that hadn’t occurred to her. Now, as disparate pieces of the puzzle fell into place, a horrible suspicion bloomed. Was Slattery trying to cover up the break-in? Was that why they’d used a proprietary and possibly unapproved process to heal the wound on her arm so swiftly? So she’ d have nothing to support her story should she try to tell others?

  And on that line, what was she planning to tell them about her mysterious intruder? That he tore the legs off frogs and ate them for amusement? Even if she’ d had a freshly stitched cut, they wouldn’t believe her. A wave of frustration surged through her. “I only know what I saw,” she said finally, mortified by her tremulous voice. Though her stomach had become a small hard knot, she stabbed her fork into a cube of cantaloupe and stuffed it into her mouth, desperate for something to do in the excruciating silence.

  Snatches of conversation drifted from the adjoining tables:

  “ . . . let all the frogs loose . . .”

  “ . . . panic attack . . .”

  “ . . . overstressed . . .”

  “ . . . happens with new ones . . .”

  Everyone thought she’ d had a breakdown! She felt her face flame, and suddenly she wanted to fling down her fork and run away. But that would only make things worse. As would trying to explain further. All she could do was cling to what she knew was the truth. Maybe they’d caught the intruder last night and that was why security hadn’t been tightened. After breakfast Swain would probably tell them all about it. Then Tom at the clinic and his busybody friend, Aaron, would be the ones with egg on their faces.

  “You sure you’re all right?” Jade asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “ ’Cause, you know, it’s really better to just admit it. Then you can get treatment for it.”

  “I appreciate y
our concern,” Lacey replied tightly, wishing her voice wouldn’t shake so. “But I’m fine. I didn’t have a breakdown. I just needed a . . . a few X rays.”

  Jade frowned at her, and when Lacey added nothing more said, “Andrea Stopping wouldn’t admit anything was wrong, either, and look what happened to her.”

  At Lacey’s side, Mel gasped and the tension ratcheted up.

  Andrea Stopping had been a postdoc from Johns Hopkins when she’d come to K-J last fall. Unable to handle the stress, she’ d fallen into manic depression. One day in January she’d hiked into the mountains and vanished. Her body was never found, but everyone called it a suicide.

  After a moment Jade said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  “It’s all right.”

  More awkward silence enfolded them. Finally Aaron asked with forced brightness if anyone had seen the heated exchange yesterday between Cameron Reinhardt and his new department assistant, Manny Espinosa, the Rhodes scholar from Argentina, a man who had demonstrated a marked preference for pursuing his own projects over Reinhardt’s.

  Given her experience with Reinhardt last night, Lacey should have been interested in Aaron’s gossip, but she hardly heard him. Now that she was no longer the center of everyone’s attention, her thoughts whirled in a tangle of disbelief and crushing disappointment that they would so dismiss her word . . . and the unsettling fear that things might not be as she’ d recalled after all.

  Not only was her story bizarre, but she could recall hardly anything of her time at the clinic last night. A bout of hysterics could certainly account for that. It would also explain the seemingly irrelevant questions she’ d been asked by clinic personnel upon her arrival: “Do you often work late? Have you been working overtime? How long have you been at K-J now? Been getting enough sleep? Would you say you have felt stressed lately?”

  She remembered being irritated. Remembered people standing over her, discussing her as if she weren’t there, and thought maybe someone had given her a shot, which could have been Aaron’s sedative.

  Had she imagined it all? The frogs, the intruder, Reinhardt and Poe and Slattery? The question made her chest tighten so much she could hardly breathe.

  Then she felt the new scar on the inside of her arm, rubbing against the side of her shirt as she ate. Still tender, and very real. No. She might not recall all that happened at the clinic, but everything before then was crystal clear, the memories too vivid for her to believe them figments of a panic attack. And as weird as the intruder was, as inexplicable as his motives were, there was logic and cohesion to all that had happened.

  There were the helicopters, too, which she’d seen on the ride down to the clinic, their strobe lights lacerating the night sky.

  “Esteemed colleagues . . .” Director Swain’s voice blared over the loudspeaker, interrupting her thoughts. “May I have your attention?”

  Still expecting an announcement that would put everything to rights, Lacey abandoned her ruminations and focused on K-J’s director, standing now on the palm-flanked stage at the podium. Six-feet-four-inches tall, Parker Swain was still handsome and trim at sixty. His smooth skin, startling blue eyes, and thick, shoulder-length blond hair belied his years even more than his physique did, though the greatest marker of his youthfulness was the boundless energy that enabled him to work circles around men half his age. Institute rumor claimed he slept no more than four hours a night, and even a personal assistant and two secretaries on separate shifts strained to keep up with his demands. Which the particularly malicious rumors said involved frequent stints on the plush leather couch in his ninth-floor office.

  His audience now waiting in expectant silence, he hesitated, regarding them all with that provocative wordlessness he so liked to use in his presentations. Then, just when it seemed someone had to move or speak, he raised his chin dramatically and said, “I have an honor to bestow this morning.”

  He paused to let his words sink in as Lacey’s heart fell, her disappointment so great it nearly choked her.

  Swain went on. “As most of you know, nearly a year ago we at Kendall-Jakes were pleased to welcome Dr. Cameron Reinhardt into our ranks. By now most of you have had the privilege of meeting him and some few the greater privilege of working with him. But I’ll wager our modest doctor has not mentioned to any of you that he’s just had his fourth paper published in the last three years. Nor that he has been selected by the ASHG to receive the Stern Award for that same series of papers at this year’s fall meeting.”

  Of course he’ d make this announcement first, Lacey told herself. Just be patient. He’ll get to the other at the end.

  “In light of these honors,” Swain continued, “and the honor they bring to all of us, as well as his exemplary contributions to the field, K-J’s board of directors has unanimously voted to grant him our coveted Black Box Citation.” Swain held up a large wooden plaque with a dark metallic glazing, the Institute’s familiar ziggurat shape shining in hologram upon it. “Dr. Reinhardt, would you come up here, please?”

  Polite applause echoed through the dining hall as Dr. Reinhardt rose from his spot at the table in front of Swain. Unfortunately, he took the edge of the tablecloth with him for a moment, giving all the place settings a good lurch—even as he tipped his chair backward out of control. It would have fallen to the floor had Dr. Viascola not caught it.

  No one laughed nor spoke because it was so typically Reinhardt. “The brilliant man in his bubble, wreaking havoc as he advances,” as Aaron liked to say. Nothing like the man she’ d seen last night who had carried her easily to the prep room and so swiftly and competently doctored the bleeding cut on her arm.

  Reinhardt ascended the stage without further mishap and stopped at Swain’s side, half a head shorter and dressed in jeans and a blue flannel shirt. Appearing bemused and embarrassed, he shook Swain’s hand and accepted the plaque, mumbled an inarticulate response into the microphone, and looked as if he’ d give anything to get off the stage. Instead of releasing him, however, Swain spoke again into the mike, going on about Reinhardt’s educational past and his road to this moment.

  Lacey hardly heard him as it became clear there would be no report about last night’s intruder, and thus no exoneration for her from the nasty rumor someone had set into circulation. The realization brought tears to her eyes, and she spent a few moments blinking them back and fighting for emotional control.

  After a moment, Swain’s words registered again. “And now he’s here with us.” He turned to Reinhardt. “It’s an honor, Doctor. You are an outstanding scientist and a brilliant mind, despite your archaic and irrational belief system.”

  Reinhardt smiled sheepishly, and a number of the audience tittered. Cameron Reinhardt, as Swain made sure everyone knew, was a Christian. A born-again, evangelical, Bible-believing Creationist. Aaron liked to mock that in him, too.

  Swain’s voice blared over the speakers: “We forgive you for it, though. Mere temporary insanity.”

  The director grinned good-naturedly, though Lacey did not think Reinhardt appreciated the jab nearly so much as Swain had enjoyed giving it. With that the director held out a hand toward Reinhardt. “Friends and colleagues, may I present our newest Black Box Fellow.”

  The audience supplied a round of dutiful applause, and Reinhardt was released with his plaque to return to his seat. Swain finished up his remarks with a few administrative details, a reminder of the coming review and open house for which they all needed to be ready, and nothing at all about the incident in the animal facility last night.

  Though Lacey had accepted by then that he wasn’t going to mention it, the reality of having her expectations fulfilled still hit her like a blow. As the others stood and headed over to congratulate Reinhardt, she sat unmoving, struggling once more to regain her composure and trying to ignore the glances of amusement, pity, and curiosity that came her way.

  Later, as she passed through the congratulations line herself, it occurred to her that Dr. Reinhardt
might be able to straighten all this out. If nothing else, he could explain to her what was going on. Thus, on her morning break she went to his office in Lab 500, only to learn he was down at the clinic gathering project data.

  That took the wind out of her sails for a moment. Then she realized she could go down to the clinic herself and have a look at the records from her admittance last night. Nestled halfway across the bowl-shaped desert park planted at the center of the Institute’s campus, it was only a five-minute walk from the zig.

  At ten in the morning in June, it was already 103 degrees outside, and when she stepped out of the air-conditioned building, the sun’s heat hit her like a cosmic pile driver. Heat waves shimmered off the asphalt path and wrapped her in an embrace that felt good after the chill of the Institute’s excellent air-conditioning system. By the time she reached her destination, though, she was dripping with sweat.

  Sliding glass doors bracketed an airlock that kept the clinic’s cool air from escaping as people entered and exited. Inside, she crossed the spacious lobby and waited at the main desk while the two receptionists helped those who had preceded her.

  The clinic was part of the Fountains of Eternal Life Health Resort, whose buildings occupied the western side of the Institute’s campus. Though some said the resort and clinic paid a good portion of the Institute’s expenses, many of the researchers considered it an embarrassment of commercialization that compromised their reputations as scientists. Even worse was the infamous Vault, also operated by the resort, which held the cryonically preserved remains of those who believed that one day the Institute’s scientists would find a way to revive the dead and grant eternal life to the living. Membership numbered close to one thousand and was available to any willing to pay the two-hundred-dollar fee and sign over their life insurance to the clinic.

  “Name, please?” The receptionist’s voice brought Lacey back to the moment.

  She gave her name, the woman typed it in, then said, “I’m sorry, but your appointment’s not till 2:00 p.m. . . .”