by S. A. Beck
“That will all take time,” Isadore said, looking uncertain. “If the joint chiefs want results quickly, they’re going to be disappointed.”
“Your team needs to focus on getting that whiney brat of yours up to speed. In the meantime, I have something else that will satisfy the Pentagon. One of our test subjects is going to come out of hibernation and start the testing phase. If all goes well, he might get his first mission soon.”
Stephen leaned forward in his seat. “That sounds good, sir. By the way, Dr. Hollis, the therapist Jaxon used to have, the one who runs the Forever Welcome Group Home, he’s been making inquiries.”
General Meade frowned. “Suspicious little fellow, isn’t he? Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him. We have another problem too. Someone sprung Otto Heike from jail.”
Stephen looked confused. “Otto Heike? Oh wait, there was a line about him in our briefing. He was Jaxon’s boyfriend in the group home. He’s not important. Why would someone break him out of jail? Do you think Dr. Hollis is behind it?”
General Meade shook his head. “It was a professional job. One of the former Poseidon Project scientists, Dr. Yuhle, has disappeared. He wouldn’t have the capability to arrange a jailbreak, but he has the contacts to hire people who can. I think we might just have an Atlantean terrorist group on our hands.”
Marquis and Isadore looked at each other and smiled.
“We’ve dealt with plenty of terrorists before,” Marquis said.
General Meade nodded. “And you might be called on to do the same with this group. First we have to find out where they are and who they are and why they would want Otto. In the meantime, get Jaxon under control. I have plans for her.”
Chapter 12
JUNE 7, 2016, LOS ANGELES
7:20 AM
“Jaxon, you have a birthday coming up on the eighteenth. What would you like to do?”
Jaxon and Isadore sat at the breakfast table. It was Saturday, and her foster parents had let her sleep in. At least to their definition of sleeping in. They had woken her at seven.
She rubbed her sleepy eyes and took another sip of the smoothie Isadore had made her. “Um, I don’t know.”
“Would you like to have a party?” her foster mother prompted.
“I guess,” Jaxon said with a shrug. It was too early to expect her to think.
Isadore sighed. “It would be really nice if you could respond in something other than monosyllables.”
“Sorry.”
Isadore frowned then visibly controlled her impatience. “Well, at least ‘sorry’ has two syllables. In any case, I think it would be fun for you to have a party. Who would you like to invite? You must have made some friends at school. How about that Courtney girl you mentioned?”
“I think she’s busy next weekend,” Jaxon lied.
“Oh, that’s too bad. Anyone else?”
Jaxon shrugged, suddenly feeling lonely. She didn’t know anyone enough to bring them here. Nobody cared anyway. Then Jaxon remembered Brett. He was supposed to pick her up tonight, and she hadn’t even called him!
“Oh, um, we can organize the party later, but I was wondering if I could go out tonight?”
Isadore gave her an unreadable expression. Jaxon had become quite good at figuring out what foster parents were thinking. Stephen and Isadore were proving tough, however. They always had poker faces, or a fake face.
“With whom?” Isadore asked.
“A guy from my school named Brett,” she said and hurried to add, “plus some other kids. Girls. He—I mean, they—want to go to a movie or something.”
Isadore paused. There was that unreadable expression again. Then she smiled. Although Jaxon could tell the smile was fake, she couldn’t tell what real expression it masked.
“That’s great that you’re making friends! Of course you can go out,” Isadore said. “You’ll need to keep in touch though, and be back by eleven.”
“Okay.” That had gone better than she’d hoped.
Isadore gave Jaxon one of her flat little smiles and leaned in a little closer. “So… who’s Brett?”
“Just a guy from school. There’s a bunch of us going. I need to call them though. I didn’t have my phone with me, so I couldn’t give them my number since I don’t remember it.” Jaxon tried to keep the annoyance out of her voice but didn’t quite manage.
Her foster mother didn’t seem to notice though, and she went off to fetch Jaxon’s cell phone. Jaxon watched her go, wondering where Isadore kept it. She hadn’t told her, and Jaxon knew better than to ask. Her foster parents were a bit off when it came to stuff like that. They were secretive about a lot of things. Neither of them talked about their jobs much, which was strange. Most of her foster parents had talked about work too much. While Jaxon didn’t really want to hear about Isadore’s insurance job over dinner, it was weird that her work day never came up.
Isadore came back with Jaxon’s phone and, to Jaxon’s surprise, told her to keep it for the rest of the day. Once they were done with breakfast, Jaxon hurried up to her room and turned on her phone.
It was pathetic how happy she was to have her phone back. Not that she had many people to call, but everyone had a phone, and not carrying one in her pocket gave people yet another reason to think of her as strange. The corners of Jaxon’s mouth turned down when she saw she had no new messages. Go figure. Lying back on her bed, she played a couple of her favorite games and let her mind wander.
The sound of feet on the stairs made her hurriedly turn off the game.
“You doing okay in here?” Isadore asked, poking her head inside her room.
“Yeah, just about to call my friends.”
Isadore gave her one of her flat smiles. “That’s great.” She walked down the hall.
Jaxon stuck out her tongue at her now-empty doorway and grumbled, “How about a little privacy for once?”
She fiddled with her phone for a little while longer, checking some of her favorite movie websites. Then she felt an urge to check her photos. She didn’t have many, but there was one in particular she wanted to see. It was the last photo she had taken—a selfie with her and Otto in the weight room at the old group home.
Regret tugged at her heart. He’d been great. Jaxon looked at his smiling face, his head leaning so close to hers. She’d been smiling too—a real smile, unlike the one she forced herself to wear so often.
Damn, she’d finally gotten a boyfriend, and everything got messed up. She’d never see him again. He was in prison, and she was about to call some other guy for a date.
She felt guilty about that, but what could she do? Otto was gone. They’d never see each other again. She didn’t know what prison he was in, and even if she did, there was no way Stephen and Isadore would let her visit. Jaxon sighed. Time to move on. She’d done it a thousand times before, and it looked as though she’d have to do it again.
Her thumb hovered over the delete key. It would be best to start with a clean slate. Keeping fond memories of the past would only hurt her.
She clicked delete. On her screen popped up the question, “Are you sure you want to delete this image? Yes. No.”
Her thumb went for “Yes.” After a moment, she hit “No.”
She looked at the photo for another minute then closed out her phone without deleting it. She could call Brett later.
After she had done her homework for the weekend, she decided she’d better call the guy. Delaying would only make it harder. She pulled out the piece of paper with Brett’s number and dialed it. Brett answered after only two rings, making Jaxon wonder if he was a bit too eager, and they made arrangements for him to pick her up at eight and drop her off at eleven. He had his own car of course, but at least he was polite enough not to ask why she didn’t.
Jaxon reminded herself to get some driving lessons. It would be good to know how to drive. Sooner or later she’d get to drive off into the sunset like she’d been fantasizing about all these years.
Jaxon hurried down
stairs and found Stephen and Isadore reading in the living room. Suddenly she felt embarrassed. Sad to say, she had never been on a date and didn’t know what to tell her foster parents. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and tried to look Isadore in the eye. “So… um… they’re going to pick me up at seven.”
“That’s fine,” Isadore said, sounding unconcerned. “Be back at eleven like I told you, and call in sometime before that to let us know you’re okay.”
“Great, thanks!” Jaxon said. Maybe those two weren’t so bad after all.
Stephen spoke up. “Hey, I still haven’t shown you my greenhouse. Want to check it out?”
Jaxon shrugged. At least he wasn’t grilling her about tonight. Stephen put his book aside and led her out back.
Suddenly she was nervous. Isadore hadn’t come with them. This was the first time Jaxon had been alone with her new foster father, and she remembered that time with Mr. Spencer. Jaxon tamped down her nerves. Stephen didn’t seem like a pervert, though you never could tell. She didn’t want to end up snapping his wrist too. Who knew where she’d end up then?
The greenhouse stood near the back of the Grants’ well-tended back lawn, surrounded by flowerbeds and rose bushes. It was much bigger than the one at the Forever Welcome Group Home. Stephen opened the glass door and ushered her inside. She was surprised to find herself in a tiny room with another glass door on the opposite wall.
“I use an air lock to maintain constant temperature control,” Stephen explained. “I perform a lot of experiments right here. It saves time if I don’t have to commute to the university lab every day. Saves me the stress of dealing with LA traffic too.”
Her foster father opened the second door, and she stepped into the greenhouse. Jaxon gasped. A wave of humid heat washed over her. All around were palm trees and ferns and strange flowering plants she couldn’t even name. A thick, cloying smell assailed her nostrils, a mix of a dozen flowers all at once.
All the plants were kept in orderly rows, each one labeled with a name in Latin and another in English, plus the region where it could be found. She walked slowly down the aisle, feeling as if she was sucking in the life of this place. It felt so rich compared to the sterile sidewalks and shopping malls of Los Angeles. The air was obviously filtered and missing the sharp tang of pollution that had bothered her since she’d arrived. Why would anyone want to live in a city when they could be surrounded by all this? No wonder Stephen spent so much time here.
She felt her muscles relax, more so even than when Juliette led her in meditation. This warm, leafy place made her feel as if she was snuggled under a cozy blanket.
“Be careful not to touch anything,” Stephen warned. “Many of these plants are poisonous, and they’re all part of various experiments I’m conducting.”
Jaxon nodded silently and spent several minutes wandering along the three aisles of plants, staring in wonder at all the different varieties. There were large, sickly sweet red flowers from the Amazon big enough that she could have put her fist inside the bulb. Snaking, spiky vines from central Africa climbed up terraces, their cruel hooks glistening with something she suspected was poison. She also saw a few things that were familiar, including Venus flytraps. One of her science classes had had some of those. They had a pair of sticky pads that gave off a scent that attracted insects. The pads were surrounded by little spikes that were sensitive to touch. When an insect set down on the pad, it got stuck and the two pads closed like a mouth. Like every other kid in class, she’d found those fascinating.
Other plants she didn’t recognize by sight but by name, like hemlock and nightshade. Both were poisonous, she remembered. In fact, all of these plants looked a bit dangerous, or looked suspiciously safe, like that bush of tempting red berries.
“Um, you said a lot of these plants are poisonous, right?” she asked.
“Yes, they are,” Stephen said from a few feet behind her. He had followed her through the greenhouse.
Jaxon tensed once again with the thought that they were alone in there. “Are they all poisonous?”
Stephen paused for a moment. “Well, yes. Some have contact poison, like this cactus over here, while others you have to ingest. Don’t worry though. Most of them can’t hurt a human just by touch. Plants generally go after insects, like those Venus flytraps, or have a toxin to ward off animals from eating them.”
Jaxon turned to him, curious. “So why do you have so many poisonous plants?”
“I study them. It’s one of my specialties.”
“Why?”
Stephen smiled and looked away, studying a nearby cluster of yellow flowers. “Not all of these poisons have known cures, so that’s one thing to figure out. Plus the chemical compounds themselves are interesting. You never know what you can turn them into if you concentrate them and learn to mass produce them artificially.”
Jaxon’s brow furrowed. The only thing she could think of that that would do would be to create more and bigger poisons, like for chemical warfare or something. But Stephen was the scientist, not her, so he could probably do all sorts of stuff with them.
“Come here,” he said. “I have something to show you.”
He led her to the far end of the greenhouse where there was a bed of soil with no plants in it. A shelf above it had a selection of seed packets. On the nearby wall hung various gardening tools.
“This is for you,” Stephen said. “Dr. Hollis mentioned that you really enjoyed gardening. I’ve always found it relaxing myself, which is why I went into botany as a career. You can use this section of my greenhouse to do with as you like. There are some basic instructions on the seed packets, and over here is an introductory book on gardening. You can set up your own garden and grow whatever you want.”
“Wow, thanks!” Jaxon said, happy to have an excuse to hang out in here. It was much nicer than that uninviting mansion with its ugly art.
Then she became nervous. What about her weird ability? Back at the group home, she’d discovered that if she merely touched plants, she could make them grow faster than she ever thought possible. She’d actually seen plants grow a couple of inches as she held them. It was like magic. What was even stranger was she never used to be able to do that. While she’d always been a city girl, she’d touched grass and trees and flowers as much as anyone else. It wasn’t until a couple of months ago that this unexplainable power had appeared in her fingertips.
Why? Why was she so different? She looked different, she was stronger and faster than an NFL linebacker, and now she had some sort of magic power over plants. What was she?
She realized her foster father was still talking.
“So I need to have a teleconference in my office with some researchers in Japan. I’ll leave you alone to do what you want in here. Just remember to only work in this section and not to fiddle around with the other plants. Some can be dangerous, as I said. Have fun!”
“Okay, thanks again,” Jaxon said with a smile.
As he walked away, she felt relieved and a bit guilty. She had been wrong to judge Stephen. Like his wife, he was a bit weird and distant, but deep down, he was all right.
Once she heard the greenhouse door close, she sat on a stool with the gardening book he had pointed out and skimmed through the first couple of chapters. As usual, her dyslexia slowed her down, the words getting jumbled in her mind. She shook her head in frustration. She could take on a bunch of grown men and kick their butts, but she had the reading level of a third grader. Why couldn’t she just be normal?
She gritted her teeth and kept trying. Luckily the book had a lot of photos showing how things should be done, plus she had gained some experience at the group home. Once she felt as though she had gotten a handle on what she was doing, she went over to the seed shelf and looked over the bright photos of flowers and vegetables on the packets.
After a few minutes’ thought, she decided to plant half the bed with flowers and the other half with vegetables. The bed of soil was six feet long and
three wide, so she had enough room to grow plenty of both. The book said that vegetables took more room though, so she’d have to pick carefully.
She pulled a packet of carrots off the shelf. She puzzled through the planting instructions on the back, then she tore the packet open. Two dozen seeds were inside, each with a little green sprout poking out of them.
Jaxon blinked. They shouldn’t be sprouting in the packet, should they? Had she done that? She shook them out onto her palm and watched, fascinated and repelled, as the sprouts lengthened before her eyes. “Damn it!”
She dropped them on the soil and stepped back. Looking at the heavy growth all around her, she shuddered. What would happen if she touched all this poisonous stuff? She’d better be careful.
Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe she should thank her foster father and say she’d rather work on her homework or something.
But this greenhouse was so soothing—the warmth, the smells, even the soft sounds of the leaves and vines rustling in the breeze made by the air circulation system. It was wonderful. She knew she could be happy in here, just like in the greenhouse at the Forever Welcome Group Home.
She had to be careful though, or she’d be marked as different here too. Enthusiasm had gotten the better of her, and she’d picked up those seeds without thinking.
Hunting around, she found a pair of thick gardening gloves. She put them on and went back to her part of the garden.
“Looks like I have to run some experiments just like Stephen,” she said with a chuckle.
She picked up one of the carrot seeds. As she watched, the sprout lengthened, but it grew much more slowly than when she held it with her bare hand. Putting it down again, she thought for a moment then went hunting around the greenhouse.
Five minutes’ searching rewarded her with another pair of gardening gloves. She put on one pair over the other. It took her a few tries to pick up the seed again. Wearing two pairs of gloves was uncomfortable and awkward, but finally she managed to get a seed between her fingers.
