So why had she made the offer?
“I want to go home,” Kiya said. She pulled one leg onto her chair and rubbed her knuckles into her shin, as if trying to massage away the pain. “I want to stop fighting.”
The churn of disappointment Gamora felt told her precisely why she’d made the offer, which answer Gamora had hoped for.
And it wasn’t going to happen.
Kiya wouldn’t be part of the Guardians’ world. She wouldn’t stay.
Gamora had met what might be the sole other Zen-Whoberian in the universe, and it was a traumatized girl who didn’t understand why Groot might want to keep going on missions, who didn’t want to fight, who wanted to go home and grow her plants and leave this part of the world behind for good and never think the name Gamora again.
She had to push out the words: “All right.”
“I am Groot,” the Grootling said apologetically. He looked torn between staying put and coming to Gamora’s side. Gamora shook her head: Kiya’s work with him was too important for him to leave now.
“Good luck with your research.” Gamora stepped back and quietly slid the door shut behind her.
THE GIRL had been busy since her escape from the Collector.
Over the next days, they found another three Groots, along with the remains of a fourth. There were still others out there. Some, Kiya had jotted down in a list she updated whenever she remembered a buyer or location; others would be harder to track, like the handful she’d sold in open markets or to anonymous buyers, but they had leads on even those. They intercepted transmissions, overheard gossip, put out the word. Their list of locations grew quickly.
It wasn’t going fast enough for Rocket’s taste—for any of their tastes—but this situation was never going to be resolved in a matter of hours.
The telepaths they knew were either impossible to track or wouldn’t be available for days. The for-rent ones they tried on various planets were too green to even recognize the brainwashed Groot’s thought processes, let alone stick their psionic fingers inside without risking damage.
“We can try”—Rocket made a disgusted face—“Earth. It’s a trash-fire planet, but it’s infested with telepaths.”
It was on their list of options, but that list was growing longer and more nebulous, and they didn’t know what other surprises the Grootlings crawling around the galaxy might hold. Retrieving them took priority.
While they were retrieving them, though, the team could still handle other issues. They spoke to the brainwashed Grootling as much as they could, and sent false tips to the Collector whenever they found a moment—sometimes a dozen tips at once, sometimes nothing for hours.
And there was, of course, the issue of Kiya herself.
“Any progress on those implants?” Gamora leaned against the kitchen counter, watching Rocket and Drax eat. Groot sat by her side, with a smaller Grootling on the edge between them. Two more Grootlings sat cross-legged on the kitchen table.
“Eh.” Rocket chowed down on the oddly shaped fruits they’d bought on a nearby moon. They were chewy, with a juicy, meaty taste, which was a lot easier to enjoy when Gamora wasn’t yapping at his head. “Not really.”
“Meaning you haven’t looked yet, or meaning you don’t know?”
He tried to weather Gamora’s stare, but after a few moments, he admitted, “I dunno. Look, it’s a big universe, I got a lot on my plate. I can’t recognize every bit of tech out there.”
“Yet you often claim that you do.” Drax raised his eyebrows at him from across the table. The two Grootlings on the table did the same, giggling quietly.
“What? I never said that.”
“You said those precise words yesterday, when we retrieved that Grootling at the circus after he escaped and contacted us—”
“Never said it.” Rocket tore off another chunk of fruit. “Look,” he said while chewing, “it’s good tech, I can tell you that. Advanced. Not only predicts her movements, and reallocates energy and shifts elasticity based on those predictions, but the way the cybernetics integrate and interface with her remaining biological functions is some of the smoothest work I’ve seen. I’m almost jealous—I don’t see why she wants it torn out so bad.”
“I am Groot,” one Grootling on the table said, disapproving.
Rocket had dubbed that one “Yellow.” He didn’t want to give the Groots actual names—they had a name already—but Kiya’s research required labeling them in her notes. He’d helped her once or twice with the tech side of her research, or with translating the Groots; he’d ended up naming them after colors instead of numbers like Kiya had proposed.
“What’s the problem?” Rocket said. “I don’t know who put the implants in, and I can’t get them out, but that don’t mean I can’t admire them.”
“I am Groot,” Indigo—the other Grootling on the table—said. “I am Groot.”
“Oh, please, the implantation process can’t have been that bad. The incisions looked clean, the integrations solid, and the Collector would’ve knocked Kiya out for the surgeries. He’s a fanatic, not a sadist.”
“I am Groot.”
“I am Groot.”
Their own Groot, standing by Gamora, watched the conversation on the table uncertainly. “I am Groot?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’d like to know.” Rocket leaned into the nearest Grootling—Indigo. “What do you mean, Kiya talked to you about the surgeries? I thought she didn’t think any of you were, y’know, smart?”
Indigo clambered upright to answer, looking self-conscious in a way Rocket wasn’t used to from the original Groot. Maybe this was another case of the Grootling being raised differently, like the fighting one at the market. As far as he knew, though, all three of the little Grootlings in the room had been taken directly from Kiya’s apartment, and they looked the same age. They couldn’t be that different from each other.
Still chewing on the fruit, Rocket listened to Indigo’s explanation.
All right, that made sense: When Kiya got lonely with no one to talk to after her escape, she’d talked to the plants she grew, even without realizing they were sentient. It was kind of pathetic, but Rocket understood.
And see, according to Indigo, the Collector had made sure Kiya was knocked out for the surgeries. It was a little messed up that the Collector hadn’t warned her beforehand when new surgeries were about to happen, but Rocket had heard of worse.
All right, yeah, if the Collector anesthetized her while she slept and carted her out for surgery, he could see how that’d make her nervous about going to sleep.
And if the Collector had mixed anesthetics into her dinner so she couldn’t stay awake and alert at night, that was a jerk move.
And yeah, all right, fine, Rocket understood it might be traumatizing to wake up in the morning and find new scars stretched along your skin and not know what part of your body had been changed or how, but—
“All I said was the tech was good. Sheesh.” He slumped back, arms crossed. He knew Groot cared about this kind of stuff, and that the Grootlings had gotten weirdly attached to the girl—he didn’t know why, and probably neither did Groot. But he didn’t need a fricking sensitivity lecture.
The other Grootling on the table, Yellow, had stayed quiet, sitting and listening. Now he said hesitantly, “I am Groot?”
“Oh?” Drax replied. “It seems like a memorable story.”
“Perhaps you weren’t there when Kiya talked about it,” Gamora suggested.
“I am Groot,” Indigo said, confused.
“You are certain this other Grootling was indeed present at the time?” Drax asked Indigo. “You all bear a strong resemblance. It may have been another.”
“I am Groot.” Orange—that was the Grootling sitting on the kitchen counter in between Gamora and Groot—bobbed his head, backing up Indigo’s claim about Yellow.
“I am Groot,” Yellow said, looking embarrassed at having to deny remembering a second time.
“Aww, flark,” Roc
ket groaned. He had a hunch where this was going. “You two, you’re sure he was there when Kiya talked about this? And you, you’re sure you don’t remember?”
“I am Groot!”
“I am Groot.”
“I am Groot. I am Groot?”
The fruit abandoned, Rocket stood upright on his chair. He faced Groot, his Groot, leaning against the kitchen counter. “Groot, you notice any missing memories?”
This was the point where Groot should have shaken his head or shrugged sheepishly. Instead, he looked scared.
“Guessing that’s a yes. All right, all of you sap-brains, hands up if you remember this one: You and me, scamming the fighting pits on Kara-ae. I mean, participating. Legally. I mean… Aw, Quill ain’t here anyway.”
Three out of four pairs of hands went up.
“And this one: saving that herd of weird cow things because you felt bad about leaving ’em as food for Fin Fang Foom.”
Four hands.
“Rescuing the galaxy from all of time and space collapsing around an intergalactic, interdimensional rift of terrors?”
Two hands.
“I figured that one would be memorable.” Rocket wrinkled his nose.
The Grootlings looked at each other, stricken. Groot seemed to shrink in on himself.
Looked like it wasn’t just the Grootlings’ bodies that were chipping away.
It was the rest of them, too.
KIYA’S slow progress, and the Grootlings’ continued deterioration, worried Drax. The girl kept herself isolated, sitting out the missions to work long hours in the med lab. Bit by bit, she deciphered patterns in her observations of the Grootlings.
The first correlation she reported was age. Grootlings of around the same age seemed to get further along in the process, on average, before rejecting the merge.
Kiya’s other findings were more nebulous: similarity of demeanor. Or perhaps it was mood, or something else entirely—but when she tried to merge a cheery Grootling with, say, the violent little one they had retrieved near the fighting pits, their bark didn’t so much as twitch. She had more luck combining similar Grootlings.
Bits and pieces of progress was not enough. Drax did not want notes, or theories, or disturbing attempts at fusions that went nowhere.
He wanted his friend fixed.
The clearest conclusion of Kiya’s research was that the barriers keeping the Grootlings separate could be more mental than physical. That, perhaps, the core problem lay in the presence of multiple, incompatible consciousnesses bumping into each other.
So how could they circumvent that?
Grudgingly, Kiya and Rocket put their heads together and stopped by the Knowhere market for supplies. They managed to pick up two dozen custom sensors that could measure the Grootlings’ brain activity more accurately than what they’d been using.
“This will read their minds?” Drax asked on a late-night visit to the med bay, frowning at the screens Rocket had set up to keep track of their readings.
Rocket was fixated on one of those screens, so it was up to Kiya to answer. She shook her head. “Just energy. Activity. Whatever you want to call it. It’s the only thing we can measure.” She took a second to attach a new sensor to the Grootling sitting on the counter, pinning it gently onto the bark. “Groot’s physical makeup is so odd, we’re not even 100 percent sure whether these readings correlate to neurological activity, his physiological state, or both. We can’t translate what the sensors pick up, only measure it. Look…” She pointed at one screen, which showed the sensors’ readings from across the ship. “This is the original Groot. See the waves? They’re calm. He may be asleep. But these two, these are younger Grootlings. They’re energetic. They’re probably running in circles around the couch again.”
“Yeah, but they’re the only ones.” Rocket sat perched on one of the chairs, flipping through dozens of readings in a matter of seconds. “Yesterday, when they were swinging from those vines in the engine room, there were at least five of ’em, and the readings were way different. Now it’s just the two. And all day long, they’ve been slowing down.”
“You sure?” Kiya tested the Grootling’s sensor with a light pull. It stayed put.
“’Course I’m sure!” he said. “Averages and peaks for all the Grootlings we’re measuring are down since yesterday. You think I don’t know how to read these things? You think I can’t tell how my best friend is doing?”
Kiya shot him an annoyed glare, but didn’t push. “Well, it makes sense. Even if we’re not planting any new ones, the Grootlings are using up more energy as they grow bigger.”
“The young Grootlings still have a lot of growing left to do. And there are many of them.” Drax did not like how worried he sounded. He preferred his voice to fluctuate between “simmering anger” and “Thanos-inspired rage.”
“Exactly.”
“That is not good.”
“Nooope,” Rocket said.
“It’s really not,” Kiya said.
“I am Groot.”
She smiled crookedly at the Grootling in front of her. “Heh. I know, right?”
“Hey!” Rocket shot upright in his chair. “Don’t do that. Don’t freaking fake it.”
“I was only—”
“You don’t know what he’s saying. Don’t pretend you do.”
Kiya pressed her lips together. Then sighed. “Gotcha,” she said, turning away from him.
Rocket kept grumbling, only so low that neither Kiya, Drax, nor the Grootling could hear.
“I am going to leave,” Drax announced.
“I am Groot,” the Grootling said.
23
EVEN in the low light of the ship’s nighttime mode, Peter could see the chaos in what had been the leisure room.
The couch was flipped over. A few feet away, a pile of Grootlings lay curled up in a sleepy heap.
Two Grootlings had climbed into the water jug and were trying to dunk each other. One splashed out when he saw Peter, tumbled onto the table, then thunked down to the floor.
“Shhh,” Peter said, crouching to help him up. “Don’t wake up the others.”
“I am Groot,” the Grootling whispered confidentially. He stretched, splashing drops everywhere. “I am”—yawn—“Groooot.”
The brainwashed Grootling sat off to the side, still in the entrance to Groot’s quarters. The hatch was open; it looked as if he could walk right out. The force field keeping him contained was barely visible even under full lighting—now, in the dark, it might as well not have been there.
Peter had offered to let the Grootling free yesterday. They’d been able to have a handful of peaceful conversations. The Grootling had refused, though. He felt the Guardians would be safer with him trapped behind the field—even he didn’t know for sure what might trigger him.
The thought that the Grootling trusted himself so little nagged at Peter, but he had to admit that part of him felt grateful. One less thing to worry about.
Another Grootling—nearly an adult—and the original Groot sat dozing beside the force field, branches slowly growing in their sleep. Rocket lounged in that Grootling’s lap, curled up so that the tip of his tail just barely brushed his face. His hand twitched. Peter was almost sure he was trying to pull a trigger.
He watched them for a moment, a pale shadow in the dark, wearing only a T-shirt and shorts.
The brainwashed Grootling leaned into the force field. “I am Groot?” he whispered.
Oh, good. He was talking. He’d been up and down: Sometimes engaging in hesitant communication, sometimes withdrawing as if he wanted to disappear into the walls.
“No, nothing’s wrong.” Peter kept his voice low, but the two Groots by his feet woke up anyway.
“Mrrrr?” Rocket lifted his head at the movement. He looked around, blurry-eyed, then snapped awake and scrambled to his feet when he spotted Peter. “Quill. The hell are you doing, scaring me like that? I could’ve shot you. I know I got a gun here…somewhere…”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Peter said. Rocket didn’t seem to have that problem—he’d looked downright comfy in the Grootling’s lap—but even Peter wasn’t enough of a jackass to point that out, under the circumstances. “Wanted to check on whether Kiya had heard from her DiMavi buyer yet.”
“Her what now?” Rocket rubbed sleep from his eyes, then took the blaster from Groot.
Peter sank to the floor, cross-legged, and yawned despite himself. “She sold a genetically modified version of Groot to another DiMavi, but doesn’t know where to find him.”
Groot sat upright. The web of branches growing across his skin retreated slowly. “I am Groot?”
“Genetically modified as in poison spores.” Peter grimaced. “We really need to get a hold of this one.”
“Poison spores, huh?” Rocket looked up at Groot. “Wow. That one’s got to be a real badass.”
“I am Groot.”
“I mean, you’re sort of a badass—”
“I am Groot.” He gave Rocket a playful shove.
“I can shoot you, you overgrown houseplant,” he said, then turned to Peter. “Once we get this one, can we drop by the Collector’s or what?”
“Not yet.”
“Oh, come on. It’s been ages.” He propped the blaster on the floor and leaned on it. “This about Kiya again?”
Peter wasn’t yawning anymore. “The Collector wants her, he practically invited us over, it’s—”
“I know it’s a trap! So what? Since when do you care about plans, Quill? Now that Groot’s life is at stake, you’re suddenly playing it safe?”
“I don’t want to risk it. The Collector is an Elder with a grudge, and I already—” He cut himself off and looked away. He let air hiss through his teeth.
He didn’t want to say it. Not with Groot here. But Groot already knew, didn’t he?
“Groot had been weakening for days—weeks—before we found out about the Grootlings, and I didn’t see it. I didn’t do anything.”
“I am Groot,” a timid Grootling behind him said.
“No, it’s not okay. We messed up. We need to fix it. But I don’t want to walk into a trap and risk even more of the team because I’m too stupid to stop and consider the facts.”
Guardians of the Galaxy: Collect Them All Page 14
