Coco du Ciel

by Elise Noble

  “Then it’s true? The legend?”

  “Oui. It’s true.”

  An involuntary gasp escaped Rhys’s lips. Klein sure looked as if he meant what he was saying, and nothing in Rhys’s research had suggested the man was a kook. But even so… How the hell did a tree replicate a human?

  Klein strode over to a leather couch, one of three arranged in a U shape around a low table. A crystal decanter sat on a tray with four tumblers, and he poured a generous measure of amber liquid into one of them.

  “Cognac?”

  Why not? Day-drinking seemed like the appropriate response in this situation.

  “Thanks.”

  The clock’s minute hand ticked past three as Rhys took a seat opposite Klein. Hmm. The strict time slot wasn’t quite as important as Rhys had been led to believe.

  “So,” Klein said, holding out a glass. “What do you want to know?”

  CHAPTER 21

  EVERYTHING. RHYS WANTED to know everything. He had a thousand questions, but one was more intriguing than the rest.

  “What do the trees do? I mean, how can they create a person?”

  “You’ve asked the one question I’m unable to answer. That perhaps nobody will ever be able to answer. The trees have been alive for millennia, but nobody’s studied them in any depth.”

  “Why not? I mean, surely it’d be the discovery of the century? We could bring back Einstein, Newton, and Faraday. The advances they could make… And the arts… What if Van Gogh were alive to paint again?” Rhys paused, his mind working overtime. “We could even bring back Amy Winehouse.”

  “Amy Winehouse?”

  “Underrated musical genius.”

  Klein rolled his eyes. “You think I haven’t thought of the possibilities? For years, I tried to study the trees in their natural habitat, and I have the scars to prove it.” He rolled up a trouser leg to reveal a bumpy white line on his calf. “The Karaza are fierce fighters. You know about the Karaza? You must, since you addressed your note to them.”

  “Just a little.”

  “They’re fond of arrows. Plus disturbing them is against Brazilian law, and the more people you bribe, the more questions get asked. And could you imagine what would happen if I did study the trees and wrote a research paper? Either I’d get laughed out of the scientific community or the trees would go extinct. There are fewer than three thousand specimens, and they’re very slow growing. It takes over forty years for them to mature. If their powers became widely known, they’d be decimated through greed. Far better for them to remain a myth.”

  Rhys had to concede that Klein had a point. “If nobody’s studied them, how did you find out what they could do?”

  “By chance. Your uncle may have told you I suffered greatly after Cambria’s death?”

  Rhys nodded.

  “I became obsessed with finding a way to bring her back. With the advances we’ve made in science in the past few years, I refused to believe it was impossible. I kept Cambria’s body cryogenically preserved at my company headquarters, waiting for a breakthrough, but every avenue I tried was a dead end. Cloning, reanimation, gene splicing—they all failed.” Gee, that wasn’t creepy in the slightest. Rhys wasn’t sure what was worse—that the man kept his dead wife on ice or that he could speak so casually about it. “I hunted through every resource from scientific journals to the theories of madmen to ancient texts, searching for a miracle. Then I found it.”

  “Where?” Rhys asked.

  Klein put down his glass, stood, and walked over to the wall. A moment later, an ugly old painting of a horse slid to the side, revealing a safe hidden behind it. What did it hold? Cash? Gold? The elixir of life? No, a pile of musty papers.

  “In this.” He placed the papers on the table. “Are your hands clean and dry? This manuscript is almost three thousand years old.”

  “Seriously?”

  Forgers could do clever things with fakes nowadays.

  “I had it carbon dated. The goatskin it’s written on is older than most religions.”

  “Uh, my hands might be sweaty.”

  “Then please don’t touch.”

  “Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?”

  “We’re not in a movie. Gloves can snag on the edges and lead to more problems than they solve.”

  Rhys stuffed his hands into his pockets, just in case he got tempted to reach out. “Where did you get it?”

  “It was at the bottom of a box of papers I bought on Victorian medicine.”

  “And what is it?”

  “Think of it as an instruction manual.”

  He carefully turned to the first page. A drawing showed a bearded figure emerging from a dark opening—an oval with a flat bottom and pointed top—carrying two small trees in his arms. The rest of the page was taken up by strange symbols, a cross between Morse code and hieroglyphics.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think it’s an artist’s impression of how the trees arrived in Brazil. There’s a ruined temple with a door in the shape of that portal in the Mala Valley, although I’ve only seen it in drone footage.”

  “I don’t understand—is it saying the trees came from another world? That they’re some kind of alien being?”

  “Not a being, more of a biological machine. And why is the idea of coming from space so far-fetched? There are billions of planets out there. It stands to reason that we’re not the only life forms.”

  Thank goodness Rhys was sitting down because his legs would have given way otherwise.

  “You think Coco came from another planet?”

  “Not at all. The trees merely use human DNA as a blueprint to build a replica, and it’s delivered via a seed pod.”

  “That’s…that’s insane.”

  “Oui, I agree with you. But it happened. I’d almost given up hope by then.”

  Klein turned the page, and it was like looking at an ancient comic strip. In the next scene, a figure poured something onto the roots of a tree—a coco du ciel judging by the shape of the leaves. The following page was torn, half of the illustration missing, and Klein let out a heavy sigh.

  “Are those planets?” Rhys asked.

  “Yes. This is the page I wish I’d understood before I did what I did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The Frenchman didn’t answer, just kept flipping the pages. The drawing of the tree’s giant fruit was remarkably similar to the actual fruit in Uncle Albert’s lounge. On the last page, a crude sketch showed a figure sitting on the ground under the trees, surrounded by pieces of smashed fruit.

  Holy fuck.

  “Surely you couldn’t have worked out everything from these pictures?” Rhys asked.

  “The process was surprisingly simple. And fast. A mature coco du ciel tree can grow a fully formed adult female body in less than two weeks. Compared to these ancient instruments, our current cloning technology is still in kindergarten.”

  “You really think they came from outer space?”

  “Truthfully, I don’t know. While I was waiting for the trees to work their magic, I happened across Albert’s grandmother’s journal in his study one evening. She’d written notes from her stay in the Mala Valley.”

  “You read Great-Grandma Alice’s diary?”

  “Oui, Alice. She was quite a woman. But unfortunately, it was too late by then.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “To stop the process. Perhaps I should have cut the fruit down, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

  Rhys’s blood turned icy. “Something went wrong?”

  “The trees are biological machines. Feed them DNA, and they’ll build you a living body. But the soul… That turned out to be an issue.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “To work, the trees must be paired, and a regeneration must be performed within one lunar cycle of a person’s death or there’s no guarantee that their original soul will be reunited with their body.”

  The ice became liq
uid nitrogen.

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I recreated Cambria’s body, but the person who now inhabits it? She isn’t the woman I married.”

  Now Rhys broke out in a cold sweat. He’d come to France searching for answers, but now that he’d got them, he wished he could turn back the clock and live in blissful ignorance.

  “Then who is she?”

  “I don’t know, but we decided to call her Celine. They’re essentially two different people. Her new soul, well, it was as if somebody wiped the hard drive. Memories are funny things. There are many different types, did you know that?”

  “Types of memory?”

  “Oui. At the top level, there are short-term and long-term memories. For our purposes, we’re only concerned with the long-term memories. Those can be further divided into explicit and implicit memories, or conscious and unconscious if you prefer. In the case of Celine, it appears that her unconscious memory remained with her body. She recalled how to speak French, how to use cutlery, how to brush her teeth, how to ride a bicycle. She didn’t have to relearn everything from scratch as a child would. And sometimes, I see glimmers of Cambria in the way she does things.”

  Rhys sensed a “but” coming.

  “But her explicit memories, those are a problem. She retained a little general knowledge, such as the grass being green, for example, but for the most part, her semantic memory’s a blank. And her episodic memory—of personal events and feelings—is non-existent while she’s awake.”

  This got worse and worse. “So to use your computer analogy, the operating system’s installed, but the files have been deleted?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Was it too late to walk out of the château and pretend today’s meeting never happened?

  “And while she’s asleep? What happens then?”

  “She relives her murder. Tell me, what does Coco dream of?”

  Rhys’s throat went dry, and he had to force the words out. “She thinks she’s drowning.”

  “Then that’s how she died.”

  “But I don’t understand—how did her body end up in the coco du ciel tree?”

  “Her DNA must have found its way into the soil at the base of the trunk. That’s how it worked with Celine. I amplified her DNA using a polymerase chain reaction, mixed it with distilled water, and poured it in the right place.” Klein turned the pages of the manuscript back to the picture of a three-thousand-year-old stick figure doing precisely that. “Several millennia ago, I suspect they’d just have poured blood.”

  “That explains the logistics, but not where Coco’s DNA came from in the first place. I never poured any blood on the trees.”

  “I can’t help with that question.”

  Rhys thought back to his days in the greenhouse. Albert’s instruction manual, the red-slash-pink pot with the fancy label, mixing the plant food into a can full of water, sprinkling it around the trees. What the hell had been in that tub?

  Only one person knew the answer.

  “I think I need to call Uncle Albert.”

  Klein gestured towards a cordless phone in a cradle on a side table.

  “Be my guest. I’m as curious about this as you are.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THE PHONE RANG once, twice, three times. Ten times. Fifteen times. It was gonna go to voicemail, wasn’t it? At the last second, Uncle Albert answered, sounding breathless. Had he been out with those bloody trees?

  “Albert Evans.”

  “Uncle, I have a question for you.”

  “Rhys?”

  How many other nephews did he have? As far as Rhys knew, he was the only child of Albert’s only sibling.

  “Yes, it’s Rhys.”

  “Good to hear from you, son. Did you ever make it to France? What was the place called? Villance?”

  “I’m there at the moment. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “Excellent! How’s it going over there?”

  “Could we discuss that later? I don’t have much time right now.”

  “Same, same. I’m meant to go over to Branwyn’s for lunch, and one of the frangipani plants is covered in red spider mite. I don’t suppose you happened to see the neem oil when you were here?”

  “The what oil?”

  “Never mind. What was your question?”

  “The coco du ciel trees—what have you been watering them with?”

  “The hosepipe?”

  “No, I mean what have you been putting in the water? Your notes told me to use the powder in the red tub?”

  “Ah, yes, the blood meal. Some of their lower leaves were looking slightly yellow, and I was worried about a nitrogen deficiency. That new additive seems to have done the trick, though.”

  “B-b-blood meal?”

  “It’s perfectly normal. A slaughterhouse by-product. I use bonemeal too, although that’s a source of phosphorus rather than nitrogen.”

  Rhys collapsed into the nearest chair. Coco had been turned into plant food? Or rather, her previous body had? Did she have a different soul? Fuck. What was he supposed to tell her?

  “Are you okay?” Klein asked softly.

  He shook his head. How could he ever be okay again? Because Coco most definitely wouldn’t be okay, and in the past few weeks, his happiness had become linked to hers. Perhaps he could just…not tell her? Oh, great move, asshole. Lie to the woman you love.

  That he loved? Yeah, he did.

  “Where did the blood meal come from? Where did you buy it?”

  “Hmm, no, I didn’t buy it. That particular tub came in my goody bag at the Chatsworth Flower Show a few months ago. All the presenters got one. Pricey stuff, as I recall, and I’m not sure it’s much better than my usual brand from the local garden centre.”

  “What brand is it?”

  “From the garden centre? Supagro. You can’t go wrong with Supagro.”

  “No, the expensive one.”

  “I forget. Why? Is that important?”

  “It might be. Could you go and look?”

  Albert grumbled a bit, but he grudgingly agreed. “Give me a minute.”

  Rhys put his phone on mute just in case his uncle was still listening, then cursed liberally. Klein leaned against the wall, watching him.

  “There’s a problem?”

  “Hell, yes, there’s a problem. Coco came from a bloody slaughterhouse.”

  While Albert ambled out to the greenhouse—which would take him a lot longer than a minute—Rhys filled Klein in on the latest developments. It felt weird sharing with a virtual stranger, but the Frenchman was the one person in the world who might understand.

  “So you believe Coco’s DNA came from this blood meal?”

  “Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it? If you’re right and she dreams of her death, then somebody drowned her and disposed of her body in a slaughterhouse. Part of the remains got made into plant food, and fuck, how am I meant to explain this to her?”

  “Take one step at a time. I doubt her killer transported the body far, so by finding out which slaughterhouse supplies the plant-food manufacturer with raw ingredients, you’ll be closer to finding out your girlfriend’s original identity.”

  Rhys didn’t bother to correct Klein on the “girlfriend” part. He was sick of fighting his damn feelings anyway.

  “Her original identity? What if she’s got another soul now?”

  “What if she does? Unless she turns out to be a chess grandmaster or a concert pianist, the chances of finding out her new soul’s origins would be slim. Once I accepted that, I learned to love Celine too. Not in the same way as my wife, but I’d be devastated to lose her.”

  “When was the Chatsworth Flower Show?”

  Rhys opened up a browser to find out himself, but Klein was faster.

  “The second week in June. When did Coco appear?”

  “June twenty-sixth.”

  “And the incubation period is two weeks, give or take. So the fate of her soul depends on
how long the manufacturing process took. And how long the product was sitting on the shelf. Ask your uncle for the batch number.”

  “Do souls get assigned at the beginning of the incubation process or the end?”

  “That I do not know.”

  “Rhys?” Albert was back. “The brand’s Eastlake. From the United States, it seems—there’s a flag on the front.”

  So Coco was American? That explained the hint of an accent he thought he’d heard right after they met.

  “Is there a manufacturing date on the label?”

  “Let me fetch my glasses… Okay, it says to use by the end of June next year.”

  “But it doesn’t say when it was made?”

  “No, but this stuff lasts a year or two as long as you keep it cool and dry. Otherwise it starts to smell funny, and I don’t suppose the trees would like that.”

  What would the mutant trees do with defective DNA? Create their own version of Frankenstein’s monster? It was the stuff of nightmares.

  “Does the label have a batch number?”

  “In the bottom right-hand corner.”

  “Could you read it out?”

  “N-V-4-2-8-9-3-2-5-0. Or that last zero could be an O, I’m not sure. Say, did you ever find Remi?”

  “I’m with Mr. Klein right now.”

  Klein took the phone out of Rhys’s hand and hung up.

  “Hey,” Rhys started, and then remembered who he was talking to. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t appreciate being gossiped about. And call me Remi, for goodness’ sake. I’d say we’ve gone beyond formalities now.”

  True. They weren’t friends, but with their shared secret came a weird intimacy that left Rhys twitchy.

  “Right, yes, I understand. On both counts.” He glanced across at the clock. So much for fifteen minutes—he’d been there for over an hour. “I’ve got the batch number. I guess I should try contacting Eastlake now?”

  “Precisely.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got any idea what to tell them? I mean, if I just come right out and ask which slaughterhouse their product came from, they’ll send the message straight to the trash folder.”