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

invaders.
    Fortunately, I had just the potion for that—and now I had enough peace of mind to use it.
    I thanked the dirt I hadn’t even touched, and turned to go. I would be back.

11
    I yawned as I exited the lab decontamination chamber and pulled on the universal white lab coat over my skinsuit. I’d worn a bright purple one this morning, hoping it would help keep my eyelids from falling accidentally shut. Nocturnal walks in the garden were a pretty normal part of my repertoire—staying up for two hours afterward meditating and reinforcing a set of energy barriers in my room wasn’t, however. I was pretty sure my dreams would be uninterrupted moving forward, but it had cost me a lot of REM cycles.
    However, missions didn’t go on hold just because Fixers were tired—and I was also very curious. I’d encountered a lot of intriguing resonances yesterday, and my scientist brain was ready to get to work. Carefully. Without spooking the locals.
    I ambled slowly along the corridor that seemed to connect most of the labs. Some had the walls and seals of facilities that did delicate or environmentally sensitive work. Others were open to the corridor and burbled with the sleepy sounds of scientists and their experiments slowly waking up.
    I noted a lab shelf sitting oddly empty—site of one of the most recent antisocial incidents, and one of the few that had taken place in the lab. Beakers tended to have a pretty short life, but they didn’t usually die in a fit of someone’s temper.
    I imagined Toli would have the shelves filled again shortly. She didn’t seem the type to leave unattended wounds on her turf, even minor ones.
    The rest of the shelves were interesting too, but for a different reason. Unlike the relatively low-tech gardens, the labs bristled with state-of-the art gadgetry. I could identify some of the obvious gizmos for gene splicing or chemical analysis. Others were the basic scopes and beakers and burners of labs everywhere. But a fair amount of it was mystifying, and I considered myself a pretty decent gadgetry geek.
    I turned a neat ninety-degree corner and felt the smoldering lab tech before I saw him. He exuded an energy that was hard to miss—especially when he noticed me ambling into his territory. Clearly I was his type.
    I kept walking. A Grower with her Talent turned on was anybody’s type. We know that attraction has everything to do with energy, and not nearly as much to do with externals as most people think. Or rather, the right energy can make any externals zing.
    This lab tech would hardly be the first person in my career who had wanted to check out the mythos of Growers for themselves, but the level of intensity behind it had me thoughtful again. In healthy tribes, sexual energies got routed in useful and satisfying ways—not left smoldering behind lab benches.
    Whatever else was going on here, Xirtaxis Minor had a pretty defective community. I wasn’t sure yet whether that was the cause of the troubles I’d been sent to investigate or just part of the reason why they hadn’t solved it themselves, but either way, it was something I intended to lean on before I left.
    Lightbodies work the soil, always.
    I turned corner number two in my transit of the lab’s square and found myself in the greenest section of research I’d encountered so far. Lots of growing things, although many of them were clearly in various stages of careful plotting, measurement, and dissection.
    I stopped to peer at a shallow, wide planter bed that looked like a battlefield. Splotches of a tiny plant with sharp red spikes were clearly invading the short, stumpy grass that covered most of the planter. I thought back to the dinner conversation of the previous night and looked over at the tech who had just approached me. “Testing for invasive species?”
    She nodded cheerfully and turned on a switch that cast a square grid of light beams over the planter bed. “Yup. This little spiky guy’s a right