It might actually have worked if Joshua hadn’t been so damned cheerful. By the time Simon and Ian got up to head first to the Watch Center and then to court, Caleb, Ian and Simon had all growled at Joshua and glared at her, and he didn’t look nearly as cheerful.
She looked at Joshua with a mixture of amusement and annoyance when they finally had the kitchen to themselves.
“What the hell’s with them this morning?” he growled resentfully.
“I think, maybe, it was your cheerfulness,” Anna said delicately.
He looked surprised and then favored her with a heated look. “I’m always cheerful.”
Shaking her head, Anna got up and moved around the table. Leaning down, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and kissed his cheek. “Of course you are, sweety! That’s why no one noticed,” she whispered in his ear.
His face reddened. “Well, shit!”
“It’s a good thing you left last night,” she said ruefully.
“Rub it in, why don’t you?” he muttered without heat, then added when he saw she was leaving. “You aren’t going to eat?”
She patted her stomach and sent him an arch look. “I’m still full from last night.”
He stared at her blankly for a moment and then laughed a little uncomfortably.
“We have to be in court in an hour,” Caleb reminded her as she passed him on her way to her lab.
“I’ll be ready,” she said. “I just need to check something on the computer.”
He caught her waist, reeling her toward him. She looked up at him in surprise. He studied her somberly. “When this is over ….”
Anna felt her heart flutter. She waited breathlessly for him to continue.
“We need to talk.”
It wasn’t what she’d hoped for, but it held a promise. She was sure of that—almost. She smiled at him. “Yes.”
He frowned at her a little quizzically. “Yes to what?”
“Whatever you want.”
He grinned lazily. “Whatever I want, huh?”
Anna touched his face, tracing the laugh lines in his cheek. “Yes, whatever you want.”
He released her reluctantly. “I’m going to hold you to that.”
“I hope so.”
Without a great deal of surprise, Anna discovered that the chip was damaged.
She was disappointed, but she told herself she hadn’t really expected it to weather such an event unscathed. The important thing was that it hadn’t been destroyed completely.
She had more pieces to her puzzle, enough to carve her research down to months instead of years. If the seeds Mrs. Bagley had rescued sprouted, she would have what she needed to prove her findings, but that wasn’t enough. She had to be able to reproduce the sequence to make large scale production possible, and it was going to take something massive to do what she hoped to do—cure world hunger.
Armed with her files, she approached the prosecutor after court and asked to speak with him.
He looked unreceptive, but he finally agreed to give her a few minutes of his time.
She supposed she could understand, under the circumstances, but his obvious reluctance put a severe damper on her own enthusiasm and confidence.
He listened to her pitch, but she left again with the distinct feeling that he hadn’t been convinced—at all. Frustrated and depressed when she discovered that he’d already decided to rest his case and wasn’t keen on reversing the decision, she barely even had the heart to work in her lab when she returned that afternoon.
Dismissing it with an effort, she checked on her seeds. The discovery that they’d sprouted heartened her and she headed into her lab with more determination. She’d moved all of the files from the damaged chip to the new computer the guys had gotten for her and set to work on trying to fill in the gaps on the damaged files.
She didn’t sleep at all well that night despite the progress she’d made, though, and she was almost as tired when she got up as she had been when she went to bed.
It wasn’t a pleasant surprise when she was called to the witness stand again. The prosecutor took her completely off guard, though, when he immediately introduced the subject they’d discussed the day before.
“We touched on your reason for being outside the night you were kidnapped, Dr. Blake,” he began, “I’d like for you to tell the court what your research entailed.”
“Objection! This has no bearing on the case.”
“I’d like the court’s indulgence to show that it does.”
The judge glanced from one man to the other. “I’ll give you a little leeway here, but I want to remind you that this trial has already dragged on for weeks. Come to the point.”
“I’m a genetic engineer,” Anna answered when the prosecutor nodded at her to continue. “I was designing a plant that would grow in seawater contaminated soil due to the fact that so much farm land has been lost to seawater contamination over the past several decades.”
“Why was it so important, that night, to remove it from the house? Why did you feel any need to move it?”
“I discovered that the plant I’d developed had properties I hadn’t suspected. The plant, while edible itself and fulfilling all of the criteria that had been established as necessary, went beyond that. It restored the soil. It had come to my attention that I was being watched and the importance of my finding was so significant that I suddenly knew that I couldn’t take any chance that anything might happen to it. People are starving. This plant could, within a few growing seasons, open up vast tracts of land that would end that.”
“But isn’t it likely that the company that hired you to develop it was the entity that was behind surveillance?”
“I thought it extremely likely. However, it had also come to my attention that my father was subsidizing my research and I didn’t trust my father.”
“Objection!”
“Tighten it up Mr. Steele,” the judge responded.
“But you were intercepted and taken before you could secure the data in a safe place?”
“Yes. Paul appeared and told me he was taking me to my father. Despite my suspicions, I was still shocked and appalled when he blew up my house.”
“Did he indicate why he’d blown it up?”
“He didn’t, but my father did. The first thing he asked was if Paul had ‘taken care’ of the evidence.”
“So he ordered Paul to blow the house?”
“I didn’t hear him order it, but his question seemed to indicate that he did.”
“He ordered the house blown up, that he owned, and one has to assume that he also realized that it would destroy your research that he had paid for. Why do you think that is?”
“Objection! She couldn’t possibly know what Miles Cavendish was thinking!
This calls for speculation!”
The judge looked at the lawyer hard for several moments and then the hopeful prosecutor. Anna held her breath.
“You’ll get to cross examine. I don’t especially care for the speculation, but I’m curious as to why he would do it myself.”
“Go ahead, Dr. Blake. Answer.”
“Paul knew Simon and Ian—or at least some of the watchmen had been keeping an eye on me. He tried to run them down with the boat when we left. My father also knew. My first impression was that it was an attempt to blame the incident on the mutants.”
“But you revised that?”
“No. I didn’t understand, then, what the impact could be. I thought it was Simon and Ian specifically that he meant to take the blame. When my father asked if Paul was sure that he’d taken care of the evidence, I realized that he was aware that I had concluded my research and the scope of it. It was worth a fortune to him if marketed, but he destroyed it. When I began trying to understand why he would deliberately destroy something with so much potential for wealth, then I realized that if it became known that mutan
ts had destroyed a plant that held such promise, everyone would turn against all of the mutants.”
Anna braced herself when the prosecutor returned to his seat and the lawyer came after her.
“What did you say your area of expertise was, Dr. Blake?”
“Genetic engineering.”
“Not … psychology?”
“No.”
“And yet you profess to know not only what was going through your father’s mind, but also how everyone would react if it was proven that mutant terrorists destroyed a plant that might or might not have been a new food source?”
“Is there a question there?”
“How do you account for your … perception?”
“Food riots,” Anna said succinctly. “In the past several decades there’ve been dozens of riots and each time thousands of people were killed before the riots were put down. Starving people are dangerous.”
Irritation flickered across his face. “How did you arrive at the conclusion that that was your father’s motivation?”
“The rumors arose almost immediately that it was mutants who’d blown up my house and they were started by Humans for Humanity—the organization my father freely admits he is the head of.”
He decided to try a different tact. “You are published, Dr. Blake?”
“Yes,” Anna said tightly, realizing her damned papers were about to bite her in the ass, again.
“These papers all pertain to genetically engineering food to feed the poor, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it true that you also deplored, in these same papers, the genetic mutation of humans?”
“It is.”
“And yet you accuse your own father of having so much hatred for mutants that he’s willing to throw away thousands, possibly millions of dollars, just to create an insurrection to kill them when you are on record as despising them yourself?”
“There is no record that I despise mutants, because I don’t. There are many indications that my father does, because he has lobbied repeatedly against their rights as human beings, stating that they aren’t, that as soon as they allowed themselves to be genetically altered they ceased to be human.”
“And you know this how?”
“Because I looked it up. It’s a matter of public record.”
“Let’s go back to your statement that your father argued that mutants weren’t human.”
Let’s don’t!
He strolled back to his table and unearthed one of the papers. He presented it to her. “What does it say there?”
“What is that?” the judge asked.
“Pardon. One of Dr. Blake’s papers. It is your paper?”
“One of them, yes.”
“What does it say about halfway down?”
“Genetically altering humans is a threat to humanity in that ….”
“That’s enough.” He smiled at her triumphantly and strolled back to his seat.
Anna was sorry she couldn’t put her foot up his ass.
The prosecutor stood up. “May I cross examine the witness?”
The judge nodded.
“I’d like to hear the entire statement, Dr. Blake. Will you please read it?”
Relief flooded her. “Genetically altering humans is a threat to humanity in that there are no guidelines for the safety of those who have volunteered for the procedure and there have been no long term studies done on the subject to prove that it is safe. In the past, this never would have been allowed and it may be discovered, too late, that these procedures are ultimately harmful. At the very least, it has the potential of dividing the human race in their natural evolutionary paths and could lead to social disorder. It is far safer to focus on genetically engineering food to feed the starving.”
She was so weak with relief when she was dismissed that it was all she could do to stand up and walk back to her seat. She didn’t glance at any of the men. They’d been at pains since the trial began to maintain the appearance of ‘professionalism’ which meant lack of emotion and she doubted that she would be able to tell what they thought about her testimony. Beyond that, it had taken far more out of her than she’d thought it would and on top of that, she wasn’t at all sure she’d made the point she’d been struggling so hard to make.
She wanted to escape. She wrestled with a sense almost of suffocation while the lawyer made his closing statement and the prosecutor made his. When the jury filed out, she leapt to her feet and led the way out.
To her dismay, she discovered no one was in any hurry to leave. Instead, she was parked on a hard bench while they paced, waiting to see what the jury would decide.
When it was eventually announced that the jury hadn’t reached a conclusion and deliberation would continue the following day, they finally trooped down to the sub and she was allowed the retreat she’d been hoping for for hours.
No one seemed inclined to talk, but Anna was so focused on her own anxiety, she barely noticed and when she did she figured they were as on edge with the waiting as she was. Tension was certainly high in all of them due to their doubts about the verdict. She began to get an inkling that they weren’t exactly happy with her after the second day of waiting for the jury to decide, though. By the third, she was positive that they weren’t just on edge about the verdict. They were coolly distant—to her. It was her they weren’t talking to. They were introspective. They didn’t seem inclined toward idle conversation at all, but were definitely going out of their way to avoid talking to her—to avoid her period.
As soon as she noticed that, she began to wonder why. Try though she might, however, she couldn’t think of anything she’d said or done that would explain the way they were behaving. It wasn’t anger, exactly, but she was definitely getting the cold shoulder.
The discovery diverted her almost completely from the wait for the verdict in the trial. She’d been looking forward to a conviction because her father needed to be removed from society where he could cause no more harm. She’d also been looking forward to it, though, because she’d been certain that that was all that stood between her and what she’d realized she desperately wanted—the romantic relationship the lawyer had accused her of.
She lusted over them. She had from the first and she would’ve been willing to settle for being their lover if she hadn’t begun to feel like they wanted more than that.
Once that seed had taken root, she couldn’t ignore or dismiss it and after a very little while of considering it she hadn’t wanted to.
It was what she wanted. She was positive. She still thought it was scary living in the sea. She still worried that a relationship and children would severely restrict her goals as a scientist. She still wasn’t used to their customs. She still harbored a lot of doubts about managing to function in a household so different from anything she’d ever known, let alone being able to provide them with what they needed and expected from her, but she knew she wanted to try. She knew what she felt was more than desire for four very attractive men. She respected and admired them for who and what they were and because she did, she’d begun to care for them too much to allow any obstacle, real or imagined, to stand between her and what she wanted.
She just didn’t know how to handle the one she’d run smack in to that seemed to have sprung up out of nowhere. She was angry and afraid and the outcome was too important to her to blunder blindly through the maze.
Were they waiting for her to ask them, she wondered? Were they angry because she hadn’t made the first move and suggested they stay together?
That didn’t seem to fit in with their customs, but then again nothing about her situation did. She hadn’t decided to come. She hadn’t chosen to announce her intentions by placing herself on the marriage market.
Should she do that, she wondered? The idea unnerved the hell out of her, though.
She knew if she did that, that anyone who had no woman and was
interested could bid.
What if nobody did? Wouldn’t that be the most humiliating thing imaginable?
What if a lot of men did, but the ones she wanted didn’t?
She didn’t have to take anyone only because they’d bid, but it was almost as disturbing to think of having to turn them away as it was to think nobody might offer.
She couldn’t do that. She thought she would get used to most of their customs in time—just not that one.
Should she risk rejection and total humiliation and inform them that she’d decided they suited her and she wanted to play house permanently? Pitch a screaming fit and demand to know why everybody was suddenly acting like she was a leper when they’d been behaving before as if they were just waiting the chance to jump her?
Had she been completely wrong about everything? Concluded all the things she had because it was what she wanted, not anything they’d hinted at?
Caleb had hinted at it, though, hadn’t he? What else could he have meant? She’d been so certain that it was only their anxiety about the trial that was holding them back and, as soon as it was over, things would change.
Well, they had and it wasn’t even over yet, just not the way she’d expected or hoped!
If they’d just give her a hint of what was bothering them, damn it, she might have some chance of working through it! She couldn’t seem to work up the nerve to bring the situation to a head, though, to demand what she’d been tried and convicted of. She was too afraid she wouldn’t be able to talk her way through it and she’d lose. Even when an opportunity finally fell in her lap, it took all she could do to seize it.
She’d been heading toward the bathroom for a shower when she met up with Simon in the hall outside coming from the shower. It was one of those disconcerting moments when one meets up with a person one can’t seem to get past. They ‘waltzed’ matching each other move for move as they approached until they deadlocked in the middle of the hall and stared at each other with a mixture of annoyance and embarrassment.
Simon had already begun to step aside to let her pass when it hit her that they were completely alone in that part of the house, that she could at least reduce the discomfort level—hers—by trying to work things out one on one. She had, in fact, taken a step to block his retreat before she’d completely made up her mind that she wanted to.
Dark Abyss Page 24
