Splice
Aleks could feel it coming. “Not now,” he muttered. “Please, not now.”
“As you all know, this is the most delicate part of the process,” Master Fyodor was saying, “so be careful. This is where your chosen strains join together, merging to become one.”
Aleks and six other young men hovered over their benches, peering down through the open holes of their transmuters with expressions of concentration as they watched their gloved hands work.
“You have a very brief window,” Master Fyodor said. “Those of you who are trying for a third strain must enter it into the primordial ooze within the next five seconds.”
The glowing symbols on the transmuter were hurting Aleks’s eyes. His neck ached from the bent angle, and he fought to control the shaking of his hands as he picked up the jellied pebble with his tongs and dropped it into the middle of the ooze.
“There,” he whispered. He’d added the third and final strain. He could close the seals on the transmuter, Master Fyodor would activate the runes, and in three days it would present him with a seed.
Then he felt it come again. “No,” he groaned to himself. He pulled his head away but he was too late. The familiar onset of a nosebleed was bad enough, but not here, not now!
With horror, Aleks saw a single drop of blood fall out of his nose and fly through the air, to slip neatly through the open viewing port of the transmuter and land with a sudden speck of red on top of the ooze.
“Students,” Master Fyodor said, “please step back from your transmuters.”
Aleks pulled back, looking hurriedly to the left and right, but no one had noticed that he’d inadvertently added his own blood to the primordial ooze.
“Please,” Master Fyodor said when he came to Aleks’s bench, “step back from the bench, Aleks. I’m looking forward to this. I can’t wait to see yet another of your marvelous creations.”
“Master Fyodor…” Aleks said.
Before he could say anything, his teacher had closed the seals on the transmuter and spoken the words that would activate it, incubating the primordial ooze and transforming it into a healthy seed. Master Fyodor then dripped essence from a small flask into a funnel on the incubator’s side, where it would be absorbed by the ooze and condensed in the seed.
Aleks had spent weeks gathering his three strains, building them from a multitude of other stock to give his seed the properties he wanted. It was to be a guardian plant – a small warrior to protect a field of crops from the ravages of birds and rabbits. What effect would the droplet of blood have? Would it have any effect at all?
“You may go, students,” Master Fyodor said. “I will see you in three days.”
Aleks hurried over to his teacher, wondering what he would say. This would ruin his entire project; the master would give him no grade at all, and instead of finishing at the top of his class, he would end up somewhere in the middle.
Aleks opened his mouth to speak, his head tilted to the side as he blinked rapidly, when another voice came from behind him.
“Master Fyodor.” It was a girl’s voice. Vera’s voice. “I’m having trouble understanding the transmuter’s second stage.”
Aleks turned to look at her. Lord of the Sun, she was pretty. She had a tip of her raven-black hair twisted thoughtfully into her mouth, and her blue eyes sparkled with intelligence. Like him, she didn’t seem to have many friends among the other students. How could he say what he needed to say in front of Vera?
“I have an appointment I must keep, Vera,” Master Fyodor said, “but why don’t you ask Aleks here? I’m sure he can explain it to you.”
Master Fyodor busied himself putting books into a bag, while Vera turned to Aleks expectantly. Aleks opened his mouth, blushed, and then turned and fled.
~
Three days later, the students collected their seeds, and by now Aleks felt it was too late to say anything to Master Fyodor. Along with everyone else, he planted his seed a finger’s depth into the rich soil of the Lyceum of Cultivation in the living city of Rosarva, capital of Vezna.
Over the next month the plants grew according to the characteristics the students had imbued them with. Some were wide and spiked, used for fences and walls. Others were tall and willowy, with two trunks forked like legs, and rope-like arms; these would make good laborers or even warriors. Aleks’s guardian plant grew as he had designed it – light green to camouflage itself amongst fields of crops, thin and spindly so it would bow in a breeze but not break, and with a splash of color across its head to attract harmful insects to its waiting mouth.