Secret Worlds (555 page)

We ring. After a moment, the door swings open. A man that I assume is Dr. Varik stares at Armonk for a few long seconds.

He glances down at Armonk’s pants leg where the prosthetic leg bulges out, and up at his twine shell necklace. An expression of shocked recognition transforms his long face. “Armonk?” he asks, “from Black Hills?” In answer, Armonk rushes toward him and they embrace. Holding Armonk at arm’s length, Varik takes another look. He states the obvious. “You’re no little boy anymore.”

Armonk laughs. “It’s been ten years.”

Varik is no young man either. He’s not the sprightly blond that Armonk described on the way over here. His hair is streaked with brown and his shoulders sag as if they carry an invisible weight. He’s wearing the curious dark clothes of the northerners—a navy blue shirt and black pants. His skin is mottled, nothing new for folks who live down here, but Varik’s not. I notice round nubs that look like shaving stubble, but in places where men have no facial hair—on his forehead, his upper cheeks, even on the bridge of his nose. What is Dr. Varik shaving off?

He glances at me, with blue eyes, still crystalline and curious. “Who’s the lovely lady?”

“Dr. Varik, this is Ruby. We live at The Greening, Nevada’s school. Do you—?

“I know of it,” he answers, abruptly interrupting Armonk, as if he doesn’t want to talk about the school, or about Nevada. Why?

Dr. Varik takes a step back, and waves us on to a kitchen that stretches out from the foyer. “Let’s sit.” Varik nods at Armonk’s leg. “How’s it holding up?”

Armonk shrugs as he limps to a seat. “Not too well. I had to solder on lifts, as I grew, you know.” He pulls up his pant’s leg to show Varik where he lengthened the leg with welded metal scraps. “It’s taken me through lots of adventures. Practicing with the bow you made me, hiking to The Greening.” His hand brushes over the deepest gash—where Blane tripped him and almost broke the artificial calf in two.

“And the sensors?” Varik inquires. He reaches out and presses one of the round dials that run down the leg. As he does this, I notice more strange nubs on his forearm and hand.

“The sensors are long gone,” Armonk tells him. “So the leg is much stiffer when I bend it. I was wondering if I could pay you, would you make—”

“Don’t even think of it.” The doctor sees me staring at his arms and tugs his sleeves down.

Armonk turns to me. “Dr. Varik was my childhood hero when he visited us, and told me that he fished in real ocean waters.” He holds out the shell on his twine necklace. “That last day Varik was in Black Hills Sector he pressed this into my palm.”

“Something from the ocean!” I say. “That
is
miraculous.”

“You flatter me,” says the doctor, and claps Armonk on the back “This guy taught me how to beetle hunt!”

“For a first timer you were pretty good at it. I wonder if you could take a look at something else.” Armonk’s smile turns serious as he takes my arm in his. “My friend, Ruby has a cut on her arm that looks suspicious. ”

“Sure.” Dr. Varik rotates my arm until the scraped part near the elbow is showing. Syrupy, green liquid is still oozing from the cut. His jaw stiffens. “Is this the first time you noticed your blood shift color?”

“My blood was always red. Then it changed a couple of weeks ago—”

“Weeks?” Armonk exclaims, “why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“Continue,” Varik remarks in doctorly fashion.

“Someone bit my hand a couple of weeks ago,” I say.

“Bit you?” Dr. Varik frowns. “A person?”

“A man from my old compound attacked me. But that’s another whole story. Anyway, the bite mark developed a green tint to it. At first I thought it was gangrene, but it healed normally, so I just forgot about it.”

“Forgot about it!” Armonk exclaims.

“This cut though, it’s more extreme in color. It’s scary. Also …” I hesitate, but decide to come clean. “You should know, I’m not hungry—ever. Could it be related?”

Doctor Varik places my hand gently on the arm of my chair and goes to a cabinet. He returns with sterile gauze, syringes, and other medical equipment. The blood samples he takes—if you could even call it blood—look weirdly chartreuse in the vials, and I silently scold myself for waiting so long to get help. What if I’ve waited too long to be cured? What if I have an incurable disintegration brought on by one of my own risky experiments with an elixir?

Dr. Varik inserts the blood vials into a shiny device that spins. He also takes skin samples. Then he logs onto a handheld info pad and addresses me. “Have you spent time around Nevada’s Fireseed plants?”

“We collect them, and we’re making things with the leaves. For a contest.”

“Ah, the Axiom Contest.”

“How did you know? And how did you know about Nevada’s Fireseed crop?”

“I’ve known Nevada for a while now.”

Armonk pipes up. “She was the one who saved Dr. Varik when he crashed inside that rock formation.”

If Dr. Varik is so friendly with Nevada why hasn’t he visited The Greening yet, since he’s obviously been here for a while, overseeing the construction of his clinic? I wonder if Nevada knows he’s here?

“Let’s get back to Ruby,” Dr. Varik advises. “Try your best to remember, did you have any cuts when you worked with the plants?”

“Not that I know of.” I think of Thorn and his amazing Red, how he made it out of stuffing his fingernails into the plants stamens and whatever other strange magic he performed. I need to keep that secret though. Otherwise Thorn’s chance of winning the Axiom prize will be about as big as a grain of sand.

“Was there any other way you may have been … contaminated by the Fireseed?” This time Dr. Varik’s concerned stare truly spooks me out.

“They attacked her,” Armonk blurts out. “They stuffed pollen up her nose.”

“Tell me about that,” Dr. Varik urges, over the whine of the blood device. “Who attacked her and how much pollen are we talking about?”

“A lot,” I admit. “I’d collected a whole bag. It was jerks from The Greening who had it out for me.”

Clearly he’s not interested in
who
did it. “Did you have symptoms afterward?”

“I was horribly sick, with fevers. I was in a coma for a week.”

“For more than a week,” Armonk corrects me. “We were very worried for her, that she might not wake up. Thankfully, she did.”

“How did you feel when you came out of the coma?” Dr. Varik writes holding his fancy holo pen just above his info pad. Flipping off the tiny blood readers, he waits for my answer.

“This may sound odd, but, um … I felt good.” I remember those early days after the coma, my incredible bursts of energy, how I practically flew through the Fireseed fields. “I felt incredibly light on my feet. I could walk super fast, but then I lost my appetite.”

“Maybe she got a parasite,” Armonk guesses.

“And the sun?” asks Dr. Varik, echoing my very next thought. “How did you feel about the sun—how do you feel about it now?” Scanning the holo printout from the blood reader, he grits his teeth.

“I love the sun. I crave it.”

“She stood in it for hours,” Armonk says. “See her scars? It burned her face something awful.”

Dr. Varik tilts my chin up and examines my scars. “I have a diagnosis.” He glances at Armonk and then over at me. “Ruby, would you prefer to discuss it one-on-one?”

“Will it frighten me?” My pulse speeds up. It’s pounding in my neck.

“It may startle you,” he admits.

“I’d like Armonk here then.” Armonk shifts closer to me and takes my hand. “Ready,” I say. Unbidden, the humming starts in my head. I haven’t told the doctor about that part. It’s embarrassing; he’ll think I’m absolutely bonkers.
You’re one with us, with us, with us,
it sings.

“Fireseed has very unusual properties,” Dr. Varik reveals.

“Figured it might,” I breathe.

“It seems that the pollen, well, has meshed with your system. I mean to say that you are part Fireseed now—part plant based.”

Even before I do, Armonk lets out a gasp and presses my hand to comfort me.

I squeeze his hand back. My heart races with every emotion: shock, fear, even a strange kind of joy, and finally, finally an understanding of the ever-present humming.
The freaking plants are talking to me in my head!

“H—how is that possible?” I slide my hand out of Armonk’s and move it to my face. I suddenly have a need to feel my jaw, my cheek and the curve of my brow to make sure I’m still identifiably human.

“My father, Professor Teitur, who was a marine biologist, created Fireseed with an almost magical breeding ability,” Dr. Varik explains. “He created it to withstand desert conditions—”

“To feed the climate refugees in the Hotzone,” Armonk finishes. “To be a super-plant and proliferate where nothing else would grow.”

“That’s right.” Dr. Varik nods. “And due to the nature of my interaction with the plant, I was one of the first transgenic, um, products, for lack of a better word.”

I gape at him. “What do you mean?”

“I crashed inside the rock formation and staggered around, eventually finding the first Fireseed. I passed out, hugging one.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“My arms had lesions on them—gaping wounds from my struggles in the desert. That’s a whole other story, as you say.”

“The Fireseed pollen migrated into your lesions,” Armonk finishes. “It merged with you!” His dark eyes glitter with the realization that Dr. Varik is more than he ever imagined.

“In so many words, yes. Its pollen invaded the wounds. Changed me.”

“But how?” I ask. “Are you healthy?” The hum in my brain has turned to uneasy static.

He snorts. Rubs his hands. “Healthy in the sense that I’m not on my deathbed,” he answers grimly. “But I go through a daily regimen to stay healthy.”

This is really scaring me. Maybe we shouldn’t have come here. I glance down at my own arms to see if there are any lesions, or things growing out of them. Nothing now, but when?

“What kind of health regimen?” Armonk asks him for me.

Dr. Varik waves away the question. “I won’t burden you all with my problems.” He attempts a hopeful yet unconvincing grin. “Because Ruby’s had a very different transmission than I did. You, young lady, should not worry about your health.”

But he
does
have me worried, quite worried, and also for my brother, Thorn. I tell Dr. Varik about Thorn, and he makes more notations in his holo tablet. “I’ll run more tests on you both,” he promises. “I’ll make sure I keep you two healthy.”

I hold out my arms. “Will I, um develop lesions or—?”

“No, Ruby. He shakes his head slowly, too hesitantly for comfort. “It sounds as if you’ve gotten more of the benefits of the
blending
than I did. As I stated, there seem to be different
varieties
of this, um condition.”

“What do you mean?” Armonk asks.

Dr. Varik studies me with his crystalline eyes. “You say that you run really fast?”

“Yes.”

“And that you crave the sun?”

“Yes, is that bad?”

“You’re getting nutrition from it—you’re photosynthetic. You’ll need less food. But you still need some, you’re still half human, so make sure to eat at least one small meal a day.”

“One small meal?” Armonk says incredulously.

I grin. No more stuffing food down three times a day. “Sounds good to me. Can I … sunbathe?”

“Yes, but not for hours.” Dr. Varik smiles. “You still have partially human skin.”

As he gives me a thorough checkup, Armonk sits there with a glazed, worried look. It’s funny, now that I know what’s going on, unlike Armonk; I’m relieved—relieved that I’m not going crazy or dying. For the moment my fear flips to giddy joy.

I’m part plant! I’m literally one with my god, Fireseed!

Ha! How the elders would envy me now.

After Dr. Varik is done consulting with me, he gives Armonk a thorough once-over and has him remove the worn, too-short leg off to take new measurements. I avert my eyes and move over to give them space. To see Armonk with one leg missing is like seeing him naked, and makes me ache. I think of all he’s been through: not being able to play soccer to the best of his ability, getting twice as winded by trekking through the fields as he goes on sentry duty at night.

Dr. Varik fits Armonk for a temporary prosthetic. He promises to deliver a new one in a couple of days. As he makes final adjustments to it, the doorbell rings.

We all startle, even the doctor at this prospect of company. This place seems so private and new, as if no one yet knows about it and we’re in a safe cocoon. Dr. Varik jumps up, with a guilty frown, or is that only my overactive imagination?

Before he can get to the foyer, someone enters from a side door and calls out in a cheery voice, “Varik, are you in there? I’m looking forward to this.” It’s a familiar wispy tone in the rangy drawl of folks from Skull’s Wrath. The hair on the back of my neck stands up when it dawns on me who the voice belongs to. Armonk and I exchange uneasy glances.

“Hello,” Dr. Varik calls.

Nevada bounds in, in her ornate fringe boots. Now it all makes icky sense—why she washed and colored her hair and dressed in her finery.

“Welcome, Nevada.” Dr. Varik ushers her to a chair.

She stops in her tracks at the sight of Armonk and me. “Oh!” is all she says at first. Her cheeks and neck bloom into a blotchy rose as she struggles for words. “Ruby, Armonk! This is a surprise.”

“What are you doing here?” Armonk blurts.

Nevada looks from Armonk to Dr. Varik and back to Armonk, clearly at a loss at how to deal with her students, catapulted into this radically different setting. “I um, well, the doctor and I ran into each other recently and we, well, wanted to visit.” She giggles nervously. “It’s been a very long while.” As she stares at us her expression hardens. “I don’t remember saying you could take hours to sightsee. You were to get groceries and come back. We only have two gliders and we need them in an emergency.”

I step forward. “We needed to see a doctor, Ms. Pilgrim. I haven’t been eating right, and Armonk needed help with his leg. The lady at the depot said there was a doctor nearby.”