Grower's Omen (The Fixers, book #2: A KarmaCorp Novel) by Audrey Faye

dark night air.
    The details evaporated even as I tried to chase them.
    Skin too tight. Breath not enough.
    All that remained was feeling. Far too much of it, and not mine. Fractious, hot resonances.
    No one understands.
    My scientist brain knew that I had just gotten a front-row seat to the little problem happening here on Xirtaxis Minor.
    The rest of me, aching with the residues of interrupted sleep and the energies that had crashed into it, wasn’t ready to analyze anything yet.
    I stumbled to my feet in the dark, knowing exactly what I did need, and cursing the travel lag that was doubling the gravitational pull of my bed. I managed to make it out of my quarters without walking into a wall—barely.
    Scrubbing my eyes with my fists, I lurched into the dimly lit hall and tried to pull up a map in my head. I would sleep again, and soon—but first I needed to shed skin that felt too tight.
    -o0o-
    There were two places I went when I woke up hard, and since a warm pair of arms wasn’t something I knew how to find here yet, I’d gone for the other option.
    I sighed in gratitude as the first set of doors to experimental dome Alpha slid silently open when I approached. Apparently Mary Louise Bastur hadn’t revoked the access she’d very grudgingly given me after dinner. I’d known I would need to wander freely—I just hadn’t realized I’d be doing it in the middle of the night.
    I stood patiently as the air intakes did a basic job of giving me a vacuuming.
    My chakras felt jostled, disconnected. Kind of like how I generally felt while in a tin can on an interstellar journey. Not how I’d expected to feel in a biome with plenty of very nice dirt.
    The doors on the other end of the small decon area opened, and I stepped out, tugged by air that finally smelled right.
    The first visuals were stunning.
    The dome, on a different diurnal cycle than the main habitat, was just shifting to skydusk, shading the light in the grays and pinks and pearls of the inside of an oyster shell. Gorgeous, understated backdrop to an organic, architectural wonderland. A garden exquisitely planned—and so delightfully random that it teased you to believe it might have been born that way.
    I took two careful steps off the pathway into a bed of orange and yellow. Some kind of California poppy hybrid, cheerful and clearly better behaved than its wildly spreading Earth ancestor.
    This wasn’t remotely what I’d expected. From Gordie’s description, I’d expected to find dirt and plants subsumed to scientific progress. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was order here, and beauty, and a sense of timeless presence. Plants were likely rotated in and out of this garden on a very regular basis, but the overall resonance was one of harmony, permanence, and productive peace.
    It told me more about the man who had created it than meeting him ever had. Which was important, because I’d spent some time before I’d gone to sleep digging into the personnel and incident files again, and I’d placed my bets squarely on Dr. Salmera and his experimental domes.
    Now I was going to have to go revise those bets.
    I could see here what I hadn’t seen in the cafeteria. A beautiful, interdependent community. It told me two things. First, whatever was wrong on Xirtaxis Minor, I couldn’t believe it came from here. The dreams and behaviors were damaging, hurting a tribe that was already pretty darn dysfunctional. No plant that grew in a garden like this would be causing that.
    And whatever I might have felt from Jerome Salmera over dinner, a man who could create this was good people.
    I didn’t know yet why he wore so many masks, but my gut, drinking in the tranquil beauty around me, said that I needed to look somewhere else for the roots of the problem. An unhappy underling, maybe, or a project gone wrong.
    In the morning, I’d find Toli and tour the labs. Until then, I needed to catch some sleep—the kind without any dream