He had six months. He only needed two weeks, and everything she had would be his.
9
The late-October sun was warm, but Trisk was glad for her lab coat as she walked the long rows of sturdy tomato plants, fondly touching one here, another there. It was nearing the end of the season, and they’d grown tall in the strong summer light at Saladan Farms’ seed field just outside of Sacramento.
The leafy green stalks were almost over her head; the main trunk lines had become woody when the same hairs that gave the plant its superior drought resistance had unexpectedly matted together in a rude, keratin-like substance able to support the heavier growth. Even the simulated outside conditions of the underground labs hadn’t produced it, and she’d come out to take some final measurements before the field was razed next week. It never failed to surprise Trisk how an organism could respond unexpectedly to stimuli and do something completely wonderful.
Such as creating a summer-smelling canyon of shade, she thought as she took off her gloves and tucked them into her lab coat pocket along with her tape measure, pencil, and spiral notebook. The press conference to publicly release the patent to Saladan Industries and Farms was next week, and it felt as if she was saying good-bye.
Content, she scuffed through the ruts back to the farm’s office building. It was little more than a shack with running water and a single phone line connecting it to the outside world. She’d make her final report at Global Genetics this week and move on to a new project.
A smile crossed her face at the sound of kids in the field, and she laughed, shouting after the handful of exuberance that thumped past her in bare feet and exotic accents as they played tag in the setting sun. There was a farm-run school right on Saladan’s property, but it was patently obvious that it was only there to give the kids somewhere to go until they were old enough to work the field without the government crawling up Saladan’s back.
Trisk slowed as she saw her farm truck parked beside the rusted flatbed Fords and the decommissioned school bus waiting to take the migrant workers back to Saladan’s shantytown when the sun went down. She didn’t like bringing her little two-seater out to the fields on her rare inspections, but today, it would have been right at home beside Saladan’s black Jag and the red convertible Mustang that Kal had driven out from Florida, both now parked in the shade of the single tree hanging over the office shack. They hadn’t been here when she’d arrived, and she wasn’t eager to talk to either of them, as nice as Kal had been the last few days.
She’d first met Mr. Saladan last year when he’d bought the patent, suffering his large ego and patronizing slights as she fulfilled Global Genetics’ obligations during the patent transfer. She hadn’t liked the witch then, and she didn’t like him now.
Her faltering mood utterly soured when the door to the farm office banged open and Kal and Saladan came out, their pace and direction making it obvious they wanted to talk to her. Saladan was in slacks and a white dress shirt, his inappropriate shoes coated with dust and his hem discolored with it. His black tie was loosened, and as she watched, he took a pair of dark sunglasses out of a front pocket and put them on. Even with his eyes hidden, she could see the scowl making his few wrinkles fold into each other.
The older witch didn’t look hot, though, and was probably using a charm to keep himself cool. She’d heard the workers call him the Ice Man, and she thought he had better be careful lest the magic he used become obvious and break the silence. Seeing both men stomping toward her, she couldn’t help but wonder how many missing people were really unfortunate deaths needed to preserve the silence when some witch or vampire made a mistake.
Squinting, she brushed her hair back and tried to look professional in her slacks and white dress shirt. Kal, at least, was dressed appropriately for the field, his jeans worn and casual, and his lightweight shirt open at the neck. There was a bandanna in his pocket to mop up his sweat, and it was obvious that he’d been inspecting Saladan’s fields for most of the day; the dust was thick on his boots and had turned his fair, almost translucently white hair to brown. His quirky smile made her wonder if Kal might be responsible for Saladan’s bad mood.
Why not? Kal sure irritates me, she thought as she stepped from the field to the parking lot and wisps of her hair rose in the radiating heat. But even as she thought it, she flexed her hand, remembering how he had eased the sting of her sensory burn last Friday. She hadn’t expected that. It didn’t make up for anything he’d done to her as a kid. Neither had the coffee and dessert in his hotel room.
“Dr. Cambri!” Saladan called even before they closed the gap between them. “Did you get my memo concerning the modifications I want to next year’s crop? Those hairs must be removed. They’re getting into the workings of the washing machinery and causing trouble.”
She pulled herself straighter, halting where she was to force him to keep going. He was trying to weasel out of the final payment owed to Global Genetics. Again. “That’s why I recommended the wider screens, Mr. Saladan.”
His long face tight, Saladan halted before her, a breath of coolness continuing its momentum and washing briefly over her. She held her breath, not liking the reek of cigarette smoke that came with it, barely hiding the scent of redwood. “I wouldn’t need to retool my machines if you would retool your tomato. I don’t like the hairs in everything.”
Kal ducked his head, that same mischievous glint in his eye that she remembered from school when he looked up. That it wasn’t at her expense was an odd feeling. “I’ve been trying to explain,” Kal said dryly. “Removing the hairs would damage the drought resistance that’s making it so successful in Africa.”
Saladan smiled insincerely, clearly not liking their united front. “I spent a fortune on this product, and by God, it’s going to be exactly what I want. I don’t like tiny hair filaments in my ketchup, and neither do my buyers.”
Trisk exhaled, not caring that Saladan heard her exasperation. “Mr. Saladan,” she started patiently, “I have tweaked the organism per the original agreement to your specifications. No more modifications are allowed under the current contract. You have an entire year of profits already in the bank that say you’re satisfied with the product as is,” she continued, voice rising to drown out Saladan’s coming protest. “If you like, I can arrange a meeting with Rick. I’m sure he’d be more than happy to draw up a new contract for additional modifications not covered by the original agreement.”
“Bullshit,” Saladan swore, but the crass, unbusinesslike word didn’t faze her as he clearly intended it to. “I asked for a sterile cultivar, and I didn’t get that. If you can’t give me what I want, you’ve failed to provide the promised modifications and the contract is nullified.”
The Goddess save me from cheating businessmen, she thought.
“Every organism has limitations, Mr. Saladan,” Kal said, and Trisk raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Those hairs are what make the T4 Angel tomato grow to such an amazing size without the cost of additional supports. Change that, and you remove the very traits that make your product both exclusive and desirable.”
Which is a nice argument, but it won’t matter to the lawyers, Trisk thought, wondering what Kal’s game was. He’d been knocking on her door all this week, asking her to clarify things about her tomato and Daniel’s virus that he already knew the answer to, but to defend her smacked of a plan within a plan.
“The GMO oversight committee has already ruled that self-seeding won’t lower your profits in the commercial market or significantly impact sales in the private sector,” she said. “No one starts their own tomatoes from overwintered seeds, and certainly not the farms and commercial outlets you’re selling to. I’m sorry, Mr. Saladan, but if you’re trying to get out of paying Global Genetics your final installment to secure your right to the T4 Angel tomato patent, you’d better get your lawyers working a different angle, because my organism is perfect.”
Saladan looked at her over his sunglasses. That move had bothe
red her once, but after she’d seen a demon do it, it had lost much of its punch. “I’m sick of uppity women where they shouldn’t be,” the man said suddenly, and Trisk’s jaw dropped for an instant before she caught her mental balance. “Trying to do a man’s job when they should be at home.”
“To greet you at the door with a martini and bear your young,” Trisk said dryly, her anger carefully hidden. “Such an outdated philosophy makes you charmingly quaint, Mr. Saladan.”
“That was uncalled for,” Kal said to Saladan, shocking her more than the gender slur had. “Dr. Cambri is one of the top genetic engineers in her field. That she’s a woman doesn’t impact her qualifications.”
On a slow, deliberate heel, Saladan turned to Kal. His fingers were twitching but she felt no connection to a ley line to actually do a spell. He knew better. Not in the middle of a field surrounded by humans. He was probably just reaching for an absent cigarette.
“It’s that attitude that’s caused your family’s failing, Kalamack,” Saladan said as he took off his glasses and looked at Kal mockingly. “Broken not just in finances but also in genetic code, so degraded you can’t engender a child with even a human anymore.”
Trisk’s eyes widened as Kal went white in anger.
“You are a field manager, Kalamack,” Saladan said coldly. “Don’t lecture me on social demographics until you have a hundred more years behind you.” Tapping his sunglasses against his palm, he ran his attention up and down Kal. “And maybe a child or two. If you can manage it.”
Kal’s jaw tightened, and Trisk stiffened when the faintest tingle prickled through her aura. Kal might be stoically silent as he took the older man’s abuse, but his fingers were twitching behind his back in a ley line charm. He was spelling, using the energy in his own chi instead of tapping directly into a line so it would be harder to detect. It wasn’t a difficult skill, but she was surprised he knew about it. The technique would give his magic a stealthy finesse she hadn’t expected from the elitist snot.
She took a breath to warn Saladan . . . then shut her mouth.
Clearly thinking he had them both cowed, Saladan smiled. It was as ugly as he was. “It’s said the Kalamacks descended from the original slavers in the ever-after,” he said as he turned back to Trisk. “They don’t like to admit it, and they even changed their name when they migrated from the ever-after, but they’ll never be anything other than flesh dealers.”
Kal’s eyes narrowed. His fingers had gone still, but his hand cupped a tiny, almost-not-there ball of glowing haze. It was a charm, his aura peeping between his fingers coloring it a pale purple and green.
Trisk arched her eyebrows at Saladan, long practice at swallowing insults making it easy. “That’s nice,” she said in a show of nonchalance. “Insulting me into giving you a free modification to your new tomato isn’t going to work. If you’ll excuse me, I have to write up my final report. Do you want a meeting between you and Rick or not?”
Saladan’s lip twitched. He glanced at Kal when he snickered, then back at her. “Rick is an idiot, too,” he said. With a sound of sliding gravel, he turned on a heel and walked off, yelling at the kids to get out of the field and back to the school where they belonged.
A tiny line in Kal’s forehead showed, the only hint of the frustrated anger Trisk knew to be coursing through him. Under it was a growing embarrassment. “He built that school to keep them in the field, not out of it. Have you been to it?” Kal asked as he stared at Saladan’s back.
“No.”
“I have. It’s amazing. I’ve never seen so much potential intentionally stifled to maintain a cheap workforce.” With a flick of his wrist, Kal tossed the charm at Saladan. It was so small, it was hard to see it arcing through the low sunlight, but Saladan’s entire aura flickered into the visible spectrum for half an instant as the spell sank in. Smirking, Kal turned to face her. “How have you been able to stand working with him for over a year?”
Trisk rocked into motion and headed for her truck, her steps slow enough so there was no chance of catching up to Saladan. “An egotistical, chauvinistic, hard-to-please bastard? I have no idea,” she said, thinking the same words could be used to describe Kal. “I’ve never run into him outside of an arranged meeting, but I wanted to take some measurements of the woody stems.”
Is Kal’s family really on the skids? she thought as he silently paced beside her. The older families seemed to have been hit the hardest with the cascading genetic failure. Her line hadn’t been affected as badly as most, prospering even with the occasional dark-haired elf showing up. Maybe because of it. Her mother had almost transparent hair, but had to marry into a lower house, Cambri, because of her dark eyes. In hindsight, it had probably given her children an unexpected vigor that marrying a blond, green-eyed godling would have lacked. Every child was precious, but some were more precious than others.
Saladan stalked into the field office, the door slamming shut behind him.
“He had no right to say what he did about you,” Kal said, and she glanced up, surprised.
Her truck was just ahead, and she slowed even more. Seeing Kal in jeans and an open-collared shirt was giving her mixed feelings. He still had that insufferable confidence about him, but damn it if she didn’t like the casual look on him better than the suit and tie. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve been called worse by people who really mean something to me.”
A grimace crossed his face. Without warning, he touched her elbow to bring her to a halt as she reached for the handle of her truck’s door. She jerked back, startled at the twinge of ley line energy trying to equalize between them, tasting of ozone and power. “Trisk, I can’t tell you how bad I feel about how I treated you in school,” he said, and a bitter emotion flashed through her. She’d tried to set it aside and be the grown-up, but it had been there, coloring every chance meeting in the hall or request for information. “It’s part of the reason I took this job.”
Hand on her hip, she stared at him. “Really,” she said dryly. I am not going to let him cleanse his conscience and think it’s all better. “I thought it was so you could publicly find fault with my work.”
He flushed all the way to his hairline. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was a total ass. I can see now that my family let me get away with it, encouraged it even. My dad . . .” He hesitated, but her hot temper faltered as his breath shook on his exhale.
“It wasn’t fair or right,” he said instead, confusing her even more. “I think I tormented you because I was scared that if I didn’t bring you down, everyone else would see what a loser I was, and I wasn’t brave enough to be on my own the way you were.”
“Let me clue you in to something, Kal,” she said tightly. “I wasn’t alone by choice.”
“I can’t change the past, and I don’t deserve your forgiveness—” he continued doggedly.
“Damn right,” she interrupted. He had hurt her, and though she liked who she was, she could do without the scars.
“But could we . . .” His words faltered and died when he saw the old anger rising in her. “This isn’t coming out right,” he said, hands gesturing for patience. “I was furious at you when I lost that job at NASA, but in hindsight, I’m glad it happened. I was a total jerk, and working at NASA would have only fed that. Trisk, I’ve spent the last three years at a tiny lab not much better than the one here. No one likes me or my ideas. My theories are going nowhere, and frankly, I had to take this job before they utilized the escape clause and fired me.”
Poor baby, she thought, but she said nothing, intending to let him pour out his soul so she could gleefully stomp all over it.
“Saladan was right about my family,” he said, the rims of his ears red as he looked at his hands and forced them apart. “They aren’t dirt-poor, but they lost a lot, and I’m only now realizing how much they sacrificed for me in the hope that I could bring something back to them. Now, that’s not going to happen. It’s probably what I deserve.”
Trisk’s anticipation
faltered. Damn it. I can’t stomp all over him now. She curled her lip, disgusted with herself as she heard herself say, “Your parents didn’t spend their fortune as an investment. They spent it to keep you alive.”
A faint smile brightened his expression. “For all the good it did,” he said ruefully. “My family is going to end with me, regardless. I’m the very last one.” He took a breath, focus distant. “In a very long . . . line.”
He was sterile, then. It wasn’t a death sentence, but in a society focused on bloodlines and family ties, it was more humiliating than dark eyes and black hair. Surprised at his candor, she fumbled, not knowing how to respond anymore. “They’re making advances every day,” she offered hesitantly. “You’ve got a hundred years left.”
He looked up, and her breath caught at the vulnerability shadowed behind his eyes, the pain she’d never seen before, probably because she was too angry to look for it. “I didn’t tell you because I want your sympathy,” he said. “I told you because I’d like to think that I grew up a little over the last couple of years, and if you didn’t know the reason why, you’d never believe it. I know you will never forgive me, and frankly, I don’t blame you. But I’d like to be able to be nice to you without you thinking I’m working an angle.”
Trisk leaned against her truck, arms crossed over her middle. School had been a misery. The only time she’d had any peace was when Kal had been absent for months at a time. Now she knew he’d probably been in the hospital undergoing rudimentary, painful gene therapy, but back then, his absence had only seemed like a gift.
“I’m not asking for a clean slate,” Kal said as he saw her resolve. “But do you think we could maybe just . . . not be at each other’s throat all the time?”
“I found you poking about in my files, and you expect me to trust you?” Trisk said, and Kal bowed his head, looking almost contrite.
“I didn’t think you’d simply let me do what the enclave sent me for, but you’re right again. I should have asked. How can I convince you I’m not here to hurt you?”