Her head dropped, but she was nodding, and he let go when the elevator chimed and the doors slid open onto the ground floor again. “I want this to work,” she said softly, and his breath caught. Gullible to the end.
“That’s my girl,” he said as she left the elevator, her shoes clicking. “Do you mind if I cancel on you for lunch? I have something special planned tonight. Just you and me.”
Trisk lingered before the elevator, but he could see the lie in her tentative smile. “Sure,” she said, hands clasped before her middle. “I’ll see you later today, though, right?”
“It would be hard not to,” he said. “Right after Rick’s meeting. How do you get out of them?” he asked, shaking his head in mock dismay.
“It’s in my contract. Bring me a doughnut?” Trisk said loudly as the doors began to shut.
“You got it!” Kal shot back. The doors closed, and he lost his smile.
“Thanks for taking me downstairs,” Orchid said meekly from under his hat. “I’m starved, and it takes me forever to get there through the ductwork.”
Kal loathed doughnuts, and he put his hands into his pockets and rocked back and forth. “She’ll be at least ten minutes, knowing Angie,” he said, adrenaline a slow burn as he felt the pinch of time. “You could forage in the field. That’s better than crackers.”
“Thanks.” Orchid sounded subdued. “What are you going to do? Your aura is ugly again.”
Kal’s eye twitched as the door opened onto the flat white of the lower floors. “Something I should’ve done last week.” He affected his usual pace as he walked to his and Trisk’s twin offices. The thought kept surfacing: Had Trisk and Quen had sex? She and Daniel clearly hadn’t, and he wondered just how far Trisk would play this game of girlfriend in her desire to salvage her career. The need to make her feel ugly was growing. She would feel shame. No—she would feel used when she found out he had known all along.
“Hi, George,” Kal said lightly, and George absently waved him through, bent close over the hissing and popping radio, the connection weak at best down here as it faded in and out of the two-chord, long-running, psychedelic sounds of “Season of the Witch.”
Kal’s fingers punching in the code for his office were light, but his good mood faltered when his eyes were drawn to the ceiling as the lights flicked on. The smear of fat was still up there, a constant reminder that the woman had borrowed teeth—should she be willing to pay the price. And clearly, she was.
Must be careful. Sitting down in the rolling chair, he carefully took off his hat, tossing it to the nearby empty console.
“Thanks, Kal,” Orchid said as she flew a subdued path to the entry pad and used her feet to punch in the code that opened the door to the subterranean greenhouse.
Kal absently waved his acknowledgment, glancing up only briefly at the flush of earth-tainted air. Her dust trail quickly vanished between the rows of waving green, and he turned to the terminal. Fingers fast on the keyboard, he brought up Trisk’s tomato, asking the computer to do a search for a sequence that was commonly used as a marker for engineered linkage points.
His brow furrowed as he waited, imagining the spinning wheels and disks down below his feet, evidence of his coming betrayal, but his tension vanished when three sets of entry points into the tomato’s genome flickered in yellow type before him. Trisk had put them among the genes responsible for the drought-resistant hairs. It wasn’t in an area that would invite plant/human crossover, and he smiled. He could use this. In her effort to leave a way to tweak her creation, Trisk had all but invited tampering, made it easy.
But who would ever dream that the glittering science of the sixties, wonders that were meant to save the world and make life easy, could ever turn upon their creators?
Kal’s attention flicked up as Orchid came back in, her dust thicker and brighter. Clearly she had been suffering, and he felt better that he’d been able to help her without tarnishing her pride. “Better?” he asked as she alighted on the console.
“Very much. Thank you,” the little woman said primly, still eating from a ball of pollen she’d gathered. “I swear, parking lots are a study of why my people can’t live near humans.”
“Yes?” he said as he pushed his chair to the adjacent terminal. He needed a look at Daniel’s virus. Fortunately Rick had given him the access codes for that as well.
“In two words, monospecies gardens.” Orchid moved with him, bringing the acidic scent of tomatoes along with her. Trisk’s tomato field was visible through her fitfully moving wings. “Grass and pine trees, pine trees and grass. And if the pine trees aren’t pollinating, there’s nothing to eat.” Standing atop the console, she gazed down at the yellow text. “Whatcha doing?”
“Fixing things,” he said distantly, surprised at how hard his voice came out. “Look.”