“You’re beautiful, Dahlia.”
I frown and my focus finds his eyes again. “Beautiful” isn’t a concept we apply to people. There is beauty in the graceful arch of a delicate growing vine or the plump perfection of grapes ready to be picked. There is beauty in the rambling shoreline of the lake that gives our city its name and in the explosion of color across the sky when the sun goes down.
Nature is full of beauty, but we are not made by nature. We are made by geneticists—scientists from the Specialist Bureau who know how to assemble human DNA like a construction worker assembles buildings, carefully piecing together the necessary components until the result has both the desired form and function.
Form.
Now I understand. I’m not sure the word beauty can be applied to my genome, but suddenly the term seems custom-made to describe his.
But he can’t take credit for his features, and they don’t belong to him alone, so what would be the point of such a compliment? The flush in my cheeks crawls down my neck at just the idea of voicing my thoughts. There could be no more pointless a violation of the fraternization directive than to waste forbidden words telling Trigger how pleasing I find the structure of his face.
Yet he’s just told me that very thing.
He glances again at the name embroidered on my jacket. “A dahlia is a flower, right?”
Actually, dahlia is a genus of tuberous plant consisting of many different species. It is a very diverse genus, which displays a wide range of sizes, colors, and types. And yes, many produce blooms. He’s walked by several hundred of them every day for the past month since one of the landscape gardening classes installed them in the flower bed on the east side of the secondary dormitory.
But I can’t tell him any of that, so I only nod. That’s not really fraternizing, right?
“Do you know what a trigger is?” he asks, and I shake my head.
“It’s the movable piece by which a mechanism is operated. In most contexts, the word refers to the part of a gun you pull with your finger to fire a bullet. And in that other context”—he smiles and shrugs—“it refers to me. I’m Trigger.”
I am transfixed. His name comes from the part of a weapon used to kill people. Which is appropriate for a cadet, who is himself a weapon presumably used to do that very thing. I can hardly imagine how different his classes must be from mine. I learn how to nurture life, and he learns how to take it.
None of my identicals would ever have locked me in a closet. Not even Calla, who’s more like a thorn than a flower. Are things so different in the Defense Bureau?
“You said you’re a hydroponic gardener?” Trigger says, and I frown at the reminder that I’ve actually spoken to him. “So what’s your favorite thing to grow? Fruit? Vegetable?”
I hesitate, because technically the terms fruit and vegetable are not in opposition. A fruit is the edible part of a plant that bears seeds, and a vegetable is any part of any edible plant—including fruit—that can be served as part of a savory meal.
But no cadet would have any reason to know that.
Trigger laughs over my hesitation. “Something that fits into both categories? Must be the tomato.”
He looks smug. He clearly has no idea how lucky his guess is, because many foods fit into both categories. But he’s right.
“I like tomatoes too,” he says. “And nuts. My favorites are pecans and walnuts.”
I laugh, because neither of those are true nuts. They’re seeds.
“What’s so funny?” he demands, and I really want to tell him. But if Management wanted him to know the difference between nuts and seeds and kernels, they would have cloned him from a different genome. All Trigger 17 needs to know about his food is how good it tastes and how much energy it provides.
His eyes narrow. “Okay, so you may be the plant expert, but have you ever eaten a nut right off the ground? Or a peach plucked from the tree? Because that’s what we do when we go out on patrol or war games.”
Envy burns deep in my chest. I’ve been growing plants my entire life but have never been allowed to sample one before the cooks-in-training chop them up, boil them down, and serve them all mushy and nearly tasteless on my cafeteria tray.
We learned in class that soldiers have to be able to cook for themselves on long missions. “Are you training to be a field cook?” I don’t realize I’ve actually spoken the question aloud until Trigger 17’s brows rise.
Trigger laughs. “No. I’m infantry division, Special Forces union.”
Yet he gets to pluck fruit straight from the tree. Suddenly my envy flares into an explosion of anger. He has no idea what it takes to grow a vegetable from a single seed. To keep the pH balance of the water steady. To trim, replant, and nurture. Why should he get to taste food right from its source when I cannot?
“Dahlia? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“What does a tomato taste like? Fresh from the vine?”
He shrugs. “I’ve never come across tomatoes growing wild, but I’ve had spinach so fresh you have to wash the dirt from it in a stream. I’ve had wild onions. And carrots. And yams. And several gourds.”
I am a storm of envy now, ready to rain spite all over him. How can a soldier trained to do nothing more complicated with food than eat it be so much more experienced with it than I am?
I know Management has reasons for the way it runs the city, and I’m not supposed to understand those reasons. But I can’t see how this could possibly make sense.
It’s gotten warm in the elevator, and Trigger unbuttons the cuffs of his jacket so he can roll the sleeves up. My gaze stops on his newly exposed flesh and my eyes widen.
“You look like you want to ask me something,” he says, and I can tell by the way he’s displaying his right arm that he knows exactly what I want to say.
But I’m starting to understand why fraternization is against the rules. I cannot afford to indulge in uninhibited speech, even here, where there’s no one else to hear it. What if I can’t stop talking to him once I begin?
“You’ve already spoken to me,” he says. “Stopping now is pointless.”
He’s right. And I can’t resist. “What happened to your arm?” I ask, studying the long, jagged scar winding around the flesh below his elbow.
Trigger remains focused on my face. “I got snagged trying to avoid a knife. It looks nasty, but there’s no permanent nerve or muscle damage.”
I only vaguely know what that means. What I do understand is that no two scars are alike. If Trigger 17 were to take off the jacket bearing his name, I would still be able to identify him at a glance.
“So you stand out.” Gardeners don’t have distinctive scars unless something goes horrifically wrong, which hasn’t happened in my lifetime, and the thought of being so conspicuous sets me on edge. “You’re different from your identicals.” Does that mean he’s no longer an identical?