by Audrey Faye
I pushed harder, knowing as I did that I skirted every ethical line I’d ever vowed to uphold. Grieving as I did it, because I would never be the same Grower again after I did this—my heart understood that, even as it felt me guarding some of those lines, crossing others.
Committing small abuses to right a larger one.
I gripped my spoon more firmly. That kind of thinking was going to get me into deep, dark trouble. This was not abuse. It was hard choices, the very hardest of the hard. But if I chose straight and true and in alignment with that rightness I could feel, I was asking the herbs of Xirtaxis Minor to participate in its ultimate healing.
Even if the first step to get there was going to be unimaginably brutal.
I did this to heal, and if I didn’t believe that in every cell of my body, I had no business making this brew at all.
I closed my eyes and connected in to that nugget of certainty under my ribs. Let what lived in it spread in slow, definite ripples. And felt the resistance in the jars melt away. These were simple plants—they had no way to understand what it was I intended to do. But they could read the ripples as well as I could.
I could feel my cheeks streaking with tears. Brewer to the last, I raised the beaker off the heat long enough to collect a few of them. Adding my commitment, my sorrow, my sense of hard, and my deep, heartsick loneliness.
I stirred the brew a moment longer, and then what I was feeling penetrated my own thick skull. I slapped a palm to my forehead and reached for my travel bag. I had a small kit of potions I’d brought with me, ones designed to protect and heal and deal with the regular bumps and bruises of Fixer missions. My first aid kit. Nothing in there was equipped for what I was doing next—but they carried the energy of home. The potent, healing, comforting essence of Stardust Prime, grown in soil worked by ten generations of Lightbody gardeners.
I could feel my soul, my heart, my Talent reaching for what lived in the tiny bottles. My community might not be here, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel their presence.
I felt the resonance in the bottles reaching for me, responding easily to the Talent who had made them. Felt the vibrations of brisk comfort, seeking the bumps and bruises they were to tend.
And then I felt them recoil.
The energies of home, realizing what I was about to do. Reading the resonance of the brew in front of me and the Talent-infused intentions I prepared—and utterly rejecting it. Not contaminated by Jerome this time, but by what they could see inside my own soul.
My insides shattered as six tiny bottles of potion delivered thunderous, horrifying confirmation of what my heart already knew.
My family would never be able to accept what I was about to do. And never, in any important way, had I ever moved out of that circle of love.
The potion stirred nastily under my hands.
I cursed and pushed negative thoughts out of my mind. They were feeding to my brew and that was a tadpole mistake. Or it would be if we ever let tadpoles anywhere near a brewing station. So far, none of the trainers had ever been that brave or that dumb. Just the thought of it made me smile—and that helped with the awful hollows, just a little.
I calmed the uncertainty trying to take hold in the brew. There might not be anybody here to back up my skills, but I had really solid ones. The best in twenty years, if you believed the whispers on the Stardust Prime winds. Generally I ignored stuff like that, but at this moment, even petty rumors had the potential to make me feel better. Not the kind of fuel I was used to reaching for, but I’d take whatever I could get.
Because it was time for one Grower to act—with or without anyone at her back.
I took a deep breath and reached for Nikki’s spiky little red plant. In less than a day, it had already colonized its pot, baby explorers dangling over the edges, seeking new territory. I smiled, and regretted, to the very depths of my toes, what I was about to ask of such determined intrepidness, such gorgeous tenacity of spirit.
There wasn’t time to dry or distill, to use the tools of my trade to concentrate the plant’s essence. So I would use Talent. Carefully, I reached for one of the inner clumps of spikes. Baby explorers were all well and good, but they didn’t understand the hardships of the world nearly as deeply as those who had been around a bit longer. I needed the part of this plant that understood defeat and had risen up, over and over, to try again.
The spikes tensed under my fingers, a silent moment of fierce assessment. And then relaxed. My tears started flowing again as I felt the tiny clump under my fingers gathering energy from its neighbors. A wise and seasoned explorer—and a deeply generous one. I could feel its cells, speaking the core truth that underlay spiky fierceness. Abiding commitment of the many to the whole.
I needed only to ask it to extend what it saw as the whole.
The spikes under my fingers released from their dirt. I gently lifted them, honoring the gift, preparing the cells to integrate with the rest of the ingredients swirling in a potion that was color-shifting of its own accord now. Not pretty rainbows anymore, but the workmanlike colors of growing earth and stormy skies and barren cliffs.
This was a tough brew—and it was about to get a whole lot tougher.
My Talent absolutely focused on holding the energies steady, I let the spikes disintegrate and flow through my palm into the beaker.
The potion hissed, finally understanding what it was meant to be.
I calmed. Steadied. Demanded.
The color under my spoon now was nothing I’d ever seen—not in a potion of my brewing. Wild roiling of red and gray and streaks of inky black.
A potion it would be easy to fear.
Instead, I asked my DNA, my cells, my Talent—to see its beauty. To understand its need. To anchor its purpose deep in the energies of rightness and good as seen across a scale of time that might make a human heart quail, but would really only be a tiny galactic breath.
A potion willing to be the terrible first step on a journey that opened the way to grow into the light.
It churned under my hands, picking up my deep distress at the arrogance and the heart-stuttering risk of what I was seeking to do.
I closed my eyes, pulling every nanogram of my training into gear. By far the most important ingredient in a potion was the hand that stirred it—and mine was not yet as committed as it needed to be.
I reached deep inside for something to hold. Something that would give me the touchstone that would steady my shaking cells and help them do the work they needed to do. And found… pea shoots. Not the neat row of sturdy ones left after the thinning, reaching for the light and complacent in their role in the universe.
It was the thinning pile I thought of. The undersized ones, drooping already as their roots kept seeking for water that was no longer there. Green, growing things, just beginning to realize this turn around the cycle was done. Cells on their way to composting and dissolving and sacrificing all of who they had hoped to be so the next thing could grow.
My chin quivered, tucked into my chest. The pea shoots thought no such thing—they were far too simple, far more accepting of the cycle of life. But I thought it for them, every time I laid my hand on the pile of thinned discards and offered them gratitude for what they had given.
It was time to be a pea shoot—and not one of the victorious ones that would rise to be salad.
I needed to be one of the ones who sacrificed—and I knew exactly what it was that I needed to let go.
My innocence. The Tee Lightbody who believed that the easiest choice was always the one that served the goodness and the light. The Tee who knew she could walk into the core of her family and always find embrace. The Tee who had never truly shaken at her core.
It was not steadiness I needed to offer this potion.
It was acceptance of my own shaking.
22
I kept thinking I’d passed through the hardest darkness—and I kept discovering I was wrong.
Brewing the potion had been brutal. Feeling
the remnants of home reject me had been excruciating. Walking through a silent habitat, placing protections and realizing how many innocents were in harm’s way if I failed, had been slow, quiet torture.
But none of them were nearly as hard as this.
I stood in the lightening shadows of early dawn, watching a tree greeting the light, and wept. For her, and for me, and for the awfulness of what I was about to do.
It might be the last sunrise of her life.
I reached into my pocket, hands shaking so badly I nearly dropped the small test tube nestled there. I cradled it carefully in both hands and held it up to my heart. The hardest potion I had ever made. The one that had changed each ingredient—and the one that had changed me.
I was horrified by what I was about to do, and yet I could not escape the rightness of it, the ineffable sense of balance that had held me to this path through the long, dark night.
I was about to poison a living thing.
Everything in me rebelled against that as a way to act for good. If I had taken aim at the scientist instead, this would be called attempted murder at the very least—and my family would see it as that. To them, this would be no different than poisoning Rubio or Gilly.
But I knew that if Jerome Salmera didn’t learn to control his Talent, it would kill him. By saving his tree, he could save himself. Either both would die or both would live, and my Talent insisted this was the way, the path, and the light.
Even as everything I had been raised to believe cowered away in sharp rejection.
I was about to put a highly evolved being, capable of learning and communicating and connecting, on the path to death—and hitch her survival to the entirely uncertain choices of a man who loved her, but didn’t yet understand the fullness of what that love meant.
Jerome would need to give, and give deeply, for his tree to survive. And to do that, he would need to fill up. To find community. To let others give to him. No Grower could stay healthy any other way. More than any other Talent, ours needed to be regularly, reliably fed. By love, by connection, by the energy of things growing and things seeking the light.
My father trusted pea shoots to teach major life lessons. I could only hope that a temperamental teenage tree could do the same.
I stepped forward, taking the stopper out of the top of the small test tube. I would not stretch this out in some terrible act of drama, whatever my insides might be feeling. That would only add to the willow’s torture—and even in this, I was still a gardener. One who knew how to use her hands professionally and well, even as she wept.
I dug my bare feet into the dirt at her roots and poured the poison between my toes.
It took a moment, just long enough for me to push the potion into a handful of her cells. Destruction ferried in through the open gates, the ones that sought water, drank nutrients, made themselves vulnerable to what lived in the soil.
An instant later, the gates slammed shut. The tree screamed, her teenage soul keening even as she fought, fiercely, against what she had just innocently drunk.
It wouldn’t matter. The essence of Nikki’s red, spiky plant would invade now whether the willow allowed it or not.
My cells shook—I did not want to bear witness to this.
The tree screamed one more time, and then she began to tremble. Every cell, visibly fighting to live. Realizing she was about to die.
Something inside me stretched, nearly to breaking.
I dove my fingers into the soil, ignoring the poison.
With everything I had left, I packaged a couple of small messages for the willow and tucked them away, deep under the poison and the horror and my quaking, hideous grief. Deeper, into cells she wouldn’t heed yet, but one day might—the ones where she would one day find her inner wise elder tree, and a sense of scale and scope of time and humanity that would not look the same as that of a suspicious, dangerously self-reliant scientist.
Messages that asked her to look at human souls herself before she decided how she felt about us. To pass judgment last, not first.
And if she possibly could—to forgive me.
I could feel her cells resisting. They knew all too well what I had done.
I do it to save him. That, too, I tucked away deep in the willow’s essence. One day, perhaps she would want to know.
Today, she only fought. A teenager who knew what had just happened and couldn’t find any conceivable reason for such carnage. For such denial of her right to exist.
For such evil.
I could feel the tears streaming down my cheeks, the retching of my Talent as it heard her pleas. Much of me agreed with her.
I had once met a Fixer who had worked with a rogue Talent. She had come back little more than a shell, questioning everything she knew, and quietly retired to a desk job. I would find her when I got back—and ask her what she had done to heal.
Because deep inside me, things were tearing. I could feel my whole body shaking as it felt the willow’s struggles ebbing, her life force growing weaker.
But I couldn’t quit yet. I had one thing left to do.
Choking on my own sorrow, I hovered my palms near her bark. Resisted the need to touch. Resisted the need to heal, the call to help, the desperate, wrenching plea in every cell of me to undo what I had just done.
It needed to stay. And I needed a lock. One that could be undone, but only by a man and a tree working together and making the choices that the universe needed them to make.
A test, and one where the penalty for failure would be brutal.
My stomach churned. Fixers were sent to influence, to lean, to encourage. Not to demand. Not like this. It flew in the face of everything I believed and everything my family had watered over my soul since the day I was born.
And I couldn’t think of another way. Raven might—she was so wise and so damn tricky. Kish would just punch things in the nose until something worked out. And Iggy, with all the beautiful threads she could see, maybe she’d be able to find something I’d missed.
But they weren’t here, and I could only work with the possibilities I’d been able to find.
This was my choice, and I had to own every hideous moment of it.
I touched my fingers to my cheek bones, trying to dull the sharp pains in my head—and then realized what was under my fingertips. The essence of a thousand plants, painted there by the love of a friend.
A potion embedded in my own skin. Whatever else Jerome had been able to influence, he never would have been able to touch that.
And henna had exactly the qualities I needed. Given the right conditions, it would fade with time—and I was Grower enough to convince the essence of those thousand plants that had ridden many hours in my skin of exactly what those conditions needed to be.
Gently, working from memory and the energy trail that my fingers could read, I traced the art of my own face. Its lineage, its meaning, its hope.
The rest of what I’d done today had been poison—but I could make the lock purely the work of one who hoped that someday, the tree and the man would embrace the responsibility of their respective gifts and work their way free.
The lock could be broken, by a Grower with enough skill, enough connection, and enough sense of duty. Jerome didn’t have enough of any of those yet—but I was gambling the survival of the tree he loved on his ability to develop them.
It would take years.
But in this lock, I was giving them the gift of my own DNA and the lessons it knew. Every molecule of the henna had lived in my skin and resonated with the truths that I knew as a Lightbody, as a Fixer, as a human being who had chosen to serve the galactic good.
A lock. And perhaps, one day—an antidote.
23
“What have you done?”
Jerome’s face was an agonized, twisted mess as he ran to his tree and laid both palms on her rough surface.
I waited, knowing the beautiful, sick willow would tell him the truth more deeply than I ever could.
“
She’s dying.”
His whisper flayed me. She was, and that made me sicker to my stomach than I’d ever thought possible. I’d put a green, growing thing on the path to death—and I’d done it to serve my own ends.
Now we’d find out if that atrocious gamble was worth the price.
Jerome was pressed against his tree now, face to her bark. I didn’t blink when he backed away long enough to strip off his shirt and then returned, bare chest and arms embracing bark that was already starting to wither.
For a man with no training, he had excellent instincts.
I waited, Talent open and watching. Felt him find the poison and recoil from it. Felt his shaking fury as he fought the wild need to strike out at me with everything he had. Revenge. Hot, boiling rage.
But if he let go, his tree would die.
I did not so much as breathe a thought his direction. This choice had to be entirely, fully his.
For the first time in perhaps his entire life, Jerome Salmera was needed—body, heart, and soul. I could hear as his cells worked out the message I’d poured into the dying tree.
He turned his face to me, storming fury still making fierce tracks. “What did you do?”
He deserved as complete an answer as I could give him. “I created a poison, very specific to the DNA of your willow. It can only be cleaned cell by cell—and it will take years.”
He turned as white as the day lilies Mundi adored. “I don’t know how to do that.”
I shrugged—empathy wouldn’t serve him now. “You know everything you need to figure it out.” And if he didn’t, the tree would teach him, because she knew how. In the DNA of every living thing lies the knowledge of how to heal itself.
Her knowledge. His will. Their love.
It would render him as helpless as a babe, at least for the first few months. Others would need to feed him, water his garden, run his experiments. He would need every mote of energy in his Talent simply to sit and help her breathe—and slowly clean the poisons from both their souls.
