“Jesus! Give it a rest! I fucked up! Alright? I admit it. I’ll keep my distance.”
“You saying you’re out?”
Simon glanced at him sharply, but he didn’t have to think it over. “I didn’t say that.”
“She might not accept you anyway.”
“That’s my problem. If she doesn’t … I’ll deal with it.”
* * * *
Anna felt hellish when she woke up. For a few moments, she considered the possibility that she was coming down with something. Her head hurt and her nose was stuffy.
Unfortunately, she remembered everything by the time she’d finished her morning ritual. It was something of a relief, though, to discover that she could feel almost distanced from it as long as she kept pushing the memories back into her subconscious. Feeling oddly detached, she went to her living room and flipped on the media center and then headed into the kitchen to find something to eat.
Settling at her coffee table with a bowl of cereal, she began a search for a job, preferably something in research for an agricultural corporation.
Of course, she couldn’t leave Agri-corp until she’d finished her current project, but she felt like she was on the verge of tying it up. After all, it fit all the criteria. It might taste like shit, but it was food and it would grow in seawater contaminated soil.
Well, not shit, fortunately—but fishy.
She stopped abruptly with a spoonful of cereal halfway to her mouth, considering that. She’d been trying to find recipes that would mask the taste, but what if she went with it?
Grabbing her bowl, she headed into the kitchen again, dropped the half-eaten bowl of cereal in the sink and took out a couple of her ‘fish’ veggies. When she’d sliced the eggplant shaped vegetables into thin, chip-like disks, she filled the sink with water and dropped the fruit in to soak in the hope that the water might leach some of the salt from it. Making a note of the time, she went back to her internet search and located three possibilities.
She wasn’t about to submit a resume until she’d thoroughly checked them out, but she decided to go check her new sprouts to see how the second batch was doing. Dismay and irritation flickered through her when she’d checked them. They’d hardly grown at all and she could see that a lot of the seed hadn’t even sprouted! After checking the water feeder, she decided maybe she’d put a little too much water to them, changed the rate of drip and the setting on the grow light and headed back inside.
Her resume needed updating, but it didn’t take more than a few minutes to do that. She hadn’t worked for anyone but Agri-corp. When she’d finished that, she went to work on a letter of resignation. After three attempts to come up with something that sounded reasonable and believable, she finally just cited personal reasons for her decision to move on.
It was liable to piss her father off if he read it. He’d have to know it was because she didn’t want anything to do with him either, but she couldn’t very well say she’d had a better offer somewhere else when she didn’t even know where she might be going.
Maybe, she thought as she headed back into the kitchen, she could rewrite it if someone responded to her resume.
She didn’t feel very hopeful about it, actually. She could claim to have successfully engineered a new food source, but if they checked it out ….
Shaking the thought, she took up the floating disks and put them in a colander to drip while she prepared a pan with oil and mixed batter in a bowl. Everything tasted better fried, to her mind. Frying it was bound to improve the taste! She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of that before!
Because she’d been focused on creating highly nutritious meals when she should’ve been thinking taste! It wasn’t going to feed the starving masses if they couldn’t stomach it!
She ended up having to blot the chips to get the excess water out, but the moment they started frying a perfectly lovely aroma began to waft from the cooking food.
Feeling a good deal more hopeful, she finished the batch, blotted the excess oil from it, took a deep breath, and bit into one.
She chewed experimentally for a moment and smiled with pleasure. “It’s good,” she muttered to herself, surprised but tremendously relieved. “It’s actually good! Tastes like some kind of exotic seafood.”
She wished that hadn’t popped into her mind. Her enjoyment took a nosedive, but she was able to dismiss it as she carried her chips into the living area and plopped down to see what she could find out about the companies she was considering.
It flickered through her mind to try to come up with a name for the vegetable—besides franken-veggie, as her peers referred to it—but she dismissed that, too. It actually belonged to the company. They would name it when they marketed it. She’d be lucky if she even got credit for it.
The thought brought Miles Cavendish into her mind and she felt a flicker of resentment knowing he would be profiting from her work. True, she’d been well paid.
She couldn’t quibble over that, but she hated the thought of what his profits would buy.
There was nothing she could do about it—not now. If she’d known …. But she hadn’t and she was legally obligated to turn it over to the company he owned to do whatever they wanted. They could file it in the trash, for that matter, and she couldn’t do a thing about it.
Not that she could think of any reason why they would. It might not be a gold mine, but it could be profitable and that was the name of the game.
She couldn’t understand why the new crop wasn’t doing better, though. That puzzled her and disturbed her. It wasn’t any good if she couldn’t make it happen twice in a row!
She managed to stave off all thoughts about the incident the night before by focusing with grim determination on her project and her financial concerns. It would work, she told herself. It had worked after her mother had died. She’d been devastated, but she’d focused and she’d managed to get through it.
Not that this was even close to being that catastrophic! It was silly, really, to be so upset about nothing. So, she’d been embarrassed! It wasn’t as if it was something that never happened.
She didn’t understand why he hated her, but what did it matter, really, even if he did? It wasn’t as if she had to see him again. They wouldn’t have to watch out for her once she found a new place and hopefully that wouldn’t take too long.
She woke in the middle of the night gasping for breath and trying to force a sob from her throat. It unsettled her, but she was groggy enough that whatever had upset her had faded by the time she tried to capture it.
She worked harder to put all the recent emotional upheaval from her mind the next day, but the effort took a downturn when she discovered that every single one of the damned companies she’d checked out were affiliated with another company that her father was connected with in some way.
“Damn it!” she exclaimed in frustration. “Does the bastard own everything?”
After glaring at her screen for a few minutes, she got up and headed out to her greenhouse. The new sprouts didn’t look any better than they had the day before. She studied them in disgust and headed back in to check her notes from the first crop.
Reciting the settings she’d used before, she returned to the greenhouse to check them and reset them again when she saw that she’d had the settings right to begin with.
Despite every effort, her second day after her disastrous meeting with Simon ended worse than the day before. She finally broke down and filled out an application for a federal grant, knowing the likelihood of getting one was just about zero. She tried looking for another job possibility in her field, but it was just so depressing she gave it up after a couple of hours.
Restlessness had been slowly building in her and she discovered a desire to escape the house that she’d never felt before. It felt as if the walls were closing in on her, though, and pacing the house in search of something to occupy her didn’t relieve t
he feeling.
She couldn’t avoid thinking about the incident, she realized. It wasn’t going to magically vanish if she could put it off long enough like so many things did that disturbed her.
Lighting finally on her couch, she turned her media center on, found a TV broadcasting network, and stared at the screen. She wasn’t upset because she was embarrassed, she finally concluded. At least, that was only a small part of it. She wasn’t even particularly upset because she felt like Simon had goaded her into making a fool out of herself, although that was certainly the source of a good bit of the pain.
She was upset because he hated her and she didn’t know why. Well, she did, because it wasn’t hate so much as it was distrust and she supposed that was understandable.
She would’ve liked to think it upset her because she just wasn’t used to people taking such a dislike of her when she hadn’t personally done anything to warrant it, but she didn’t think that was all of it.
Covering her face with her hands, she tried to block the thoughts when she realized she wasn’t really getting anywhere. She wasn’t ‘working it out of her system’ because she still didn’t understand why it had hurt so much. It made her feel like crying all over again.
Swallowing the urge with an effort, she dropped her hands and stared at the broadcast for a few minutes and finally began flipping from one station to another, searching for something to distract her. Eventually, she hit a news channel. She was about to flip to the next when the newscaster announced that there had been another tsunami. Pictures flashed on the screen of the devastation. It had been triggered by an earthquake at sea and although the warning had been immediately broadcast to everyone likely to be affected, the islanders hadn’t had time to evacuate. The tsunami had formed only a few miles from the island and swept over it within minutes of the shockwaves from the quake itself.
Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest the moment he mentioned that the earthquake had been at sea. She stared at the screen fearfully until the view switched to the area where the earthquake had been centered. Relief flooded her. It was in the Pacific. It wouldn’t have affected the Atlantis territory. They had a continent between them and the shockwaves.
She felt vaguely nauseated when the fright finally eased, felt almost tearfully relieved. Sucking in a calming breath, she mentally berated herself, wondering what was wrong with her. She wasn’t usually an emotional wreck over such things—or in fact much of anything. She didn’t usually get so worked up even about disasters. As awful as they were, they happened with such frequency it was impossible not to become calloused after a while. She felt badly for the people affected. She was horrified at the destruction, but she didn’t feel so deeply touched that she felt it so strongly.
Because she’d never had anyone to worry about before, she realized abruptly, not since her mother had died. It was always strangers—faceless, nameless—people she didn’t know and couldn’t care deeply about because she didn’t.
She was about to turn the media center off when something the newscaster said clicked in her mind. He was talking about the monetary losses, the loss of lives, and the estimated time it would take to clean up. It was the mention of the probability that it could take generations for the rich growing areas to produce again that made something click.
Anna stared at the screen as the man continued, but her mind wasn’t on it any longer.
Turning the media center off abruptly, she surged up from the couch and headed into her greenhouse. When she’d scooped up a sample of the soil from the growing bed, she headed for her lab. She was nearly dancing with nerves when the soil analysis finally began to scroll across the screen.
Sucking in a sharp breath, she held it unconsciously as she skimmed over the readout. Her stomach abruptly went weightless. She stared at the numbers, afraid to believe it said what she thought it did.
Rushing back to the greenhouse after a moment, she took another sample from an entirely different area and then a sample from each of the other growing beds. Her hands were shaking so badly she could hardly handle the samples. Finally, she managed to mark and transfer each one to the machine. She paced the floor while she waited for the results, chewing absently on a ragged fingernail she’d broken along the way.
She felt faint when she got the results. Slowly, a bubble of euphoria began to expand inside her until she almost felt as if she could float away. “I’ve done it!”she whispered disbelievingly, trying to assimilate what she’d discovered. Abruptly, a squeal of absolute delight and triumph erupted from her. She clamped a hand over her mouth, chuckling like a lunatic.
“I’ve done it! I really have! Oh my god!”
And she didn’t have anyone to share her moment with! She was too excited and euphoric for even that to burst her bubble, though. Turning up the music she kept playing for the plants, she danced a jig through her laboratory and into the greenhouse, chanting ‘I did it!’ over and over and kissing her plants enthusiastically.
It wasn’t until she paused to catch her breath that she suddenly remembered the house was bugged from end to end. It sobered her instantly.
Fear effectively banished her excitement. Her mind went chaotic the moment she began to review her antics when she’d raced around her house in excitement. Had she been shouting ‘I did it!’, she wondered? Or only thinking it? She couldn’t remember.
Well, she told herself bracingly, it wasn’t as if it was actually hers anyway. The discovery belonged to the company. It didn’t matter, did it?
She couldn’t dismiss the horrible fear that had swept over her, though. She had genetically engineered a plant that pulled the sea salt from the soil and left it clean! It was too important to take a chance with it, she decided, too vital to the survival of too many people!
But where to hide it if something happened to her? That was her foremost fear, … that something would happen and no one would ever know.
She was in too much turmoil to decide how to behave in a way that wouldn’t be suspicious to whoever was watching her, particularly after her insane dance around the house!
Heading toward her media center, she sat down on the couch again and pulled up her notes. As casually as she could, she took her backup chip, inserted it in the drive, and began to quickly type up her findings.
The food the plants produced was a success in itself, but that paled beside the other properties of the plant. There were vast areas of land all over the globe that had been devastated by the encroaching sea and the tidal waves that dumped gallons of seawater into the soil, making it useless for growing the things that had been grown there before.
When she’d finished her notes, she backed the file up, removed the data chip and pretended to put it away. Instead, she palmed it. Her knees felt like water when she stood up, but she made a production of stretching and then headed to her bookshelf and picked up her reader. Tucking it into the crook of her arm, she considered for a moment and then went to the front door and went out.
Her hands were shaking so badly when she tried to wedge the chip into the reader’s port that she nearly dropped it. Finally, she managed to insert it, though, all the while walking as causally across the front yard as she could to the paddler still tied up at the edge of her yard.
She’d set the book on the floor by the seat and bent down to untie it when a dark shadow fell over her. Her heart skipped several beats as her head jerked up guiltily.
“Your father sent me,” Paul said.
Chapter Eight
Anna came upright jerkily. “Paul!” she gasped faintly.
He glanced around and placed a hand on her elbow. “We need to get moving. He’s waiting.”
Anna gulped, trying to get her mind into gear. All she could think about, however was the chip lying not three feet from where they were standing and the fact that she didn’t want her father to have it. “I don’t understand,” she managed to say finally.
Paul pull
ed on her arm to get her going and began walking her briskly toward the back of her house. “He’ll explain. It isn’t safe for you to stay here anymore. They’ll have you under surveillance.”
“Who?” Anna asked uneasily.
“The damned mutants!” Paul said testily. “You didn’t think they would just let you go, did you? They’ve had you under watch since they released you.”
It took all Anna could do to keep from glancing in the direction of the sub. It occurred to her, though, that Paul and her father clearly knew she’d been taken in for questioning which meant she didn’t have to pretend they hadn’t. “They cleared me and let me go. Why would they watch me?”
“Because they know of your connection to Miles Cavendish,” he said tightly.
“They wouldn’t have picked you up otherwise.”
Did that mean they did or they didn’t know that she’d offered to turn him over to them, she wondered uneasily? Where were her watchmen? “But there really isn’t a connection!” she objected in dismay.
“He’s your father!”
Anna stared at him uneasily. “Besides that, I mean.”
“That’s enough,” he said grimly. “They’ve already tried to assassinate him several times. They’ll use you to get to him if they can.”
That was a lie! They couldn’t possibly have done any such thing when they didn’t even know what he looked like until she’d given them the image!
It occurred to her forcefully, though, that they did want to get her father. Maybe they hadn’t come because they were waiting to see if Paul would lead them to him? For several moments she felt lightheaded at the prospect, but even as Paul helped her into the boat he’d moored at the back of her property she realized that it might be their only chance to stop him.
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