S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (58 page)

“I have faith.”

She rolled her eyes. “I hope you have enough faith for the both of us. Thanks for sticking with me on this, though. I do appreciate it.”

“Least I could do.”

She reached down to slip the glass slide into the biosafety container and saw that it was still full. “Did you ask Sudha to take care of these?”

“Yeah, but she ended up going home early yesterday. I meant to mention it to you. Guess it slipped my mind. I'll handle it.”

“Sick again?” Lyssa asked. “What is it this time?”

Sudha Hernandez was regularly out sick, though not for her health. A small, fiery, Pakistani woman, she rarely ever became ill herself. There were two other reasons for her absences: her twin sons.

They were high school-aged, and both seemed to garner more than their fair share of attention from the principal's office. Or, on occasion, the East Patchogue police department. There was also a six-year-old girl, but she was quiet and demure, the complete opposite of the rest of the family.

Whenever Sudha was out sick, everyone just assumed one or the other of her sons needed to be rescued.

“She's got the flu.”

Lyssa raised her eyebrows in surprise. “The flu? Or ‘the flu'?”

Drew chuckled. “I stopped by her place this morning on my way in. She's sick.”

“On your way?” East Patchogue was south of Medford, not exactly on the way.

And suddenly she realized something, and it made her pause and reevaluate everything she'd ever thought about the man.

Drew was one of those
good guys
, a man who'd go out of his way to help another, even a stranger. What he'd done for Lyssa the day before, trying for one final last-ditch attempt to ensure that the work they'd done these past sixteen months wasn't just thrown away, was typical of him. But this was different. This was more personal. There was more going on between him and Sudha than Lyssa had bothered to think about before.

Well, it didn't matter if they were more than friends or colleagues. So what if they were romantically involved? There was no standing policy against office relationships. That sort of rule just seemed to unnecessarily complicate things, especially in small, tight-knit groups such as theirs.

“Well,” she said, feeling her face flush imagining the two of them together. The vision came unbidden and was just as quickly gone. It wasn't anything pornographic, just the two of them standing side by side. If anything, the vision was more comedic. Drew was tall; Sudha, tiny.

Lyssa turned her back and made a show of shucking her lab coat and throwing it over the back of her stool before excusing herself. “I think I'll go see if that package has arrived.”

* * *

She was in her office when it did arrive a couple hours later. Ramon hand-delivered it, which both surprised and unsettled her.

“Front office is still out to lunch,” he informed her. “One of the Ames people actually signed for it by accident.”

He set the polystyrene container down on the chair by her door and asked what was inside. She could tell he was more than just curious why she was receiving something from her old lab at Harvard. He was suspicious.

She knew she couldn't keep it a secret from her husband forever, especially not after she'd accused him of keeping secrets from her less than twenty-four hours before. He'd find out eventually. “We're going to try assembling synthetic virus-like particles,” she told him. “One last experiment before we close the books on the PGE project for good.”

“Lyssa—” he started.

“It won't affect the Ames work at all. I promise.”

He sighed, but let it go. “I promise you, Lyssa, it's just temporary. Once the collaboration is done, you'll be able to get back to this.”

She frowned at him, trying to judge if he really believed that or thought she was too stupid to realize it was a lie. “And when will that be?”

He stared at her without blinking or responding.

“It's just one experiment, Rame.”

“The tissue culture takes at least an hour a day and lasts for weeks.”

“We're bypassing the TC and going straight into animals. A couple blood draws and amnios after the weekend. The rabbits are already caged and ready to go. The lab techs can run the analyses. Look, I know it's a Hail Mary, but you owe me this, Ramon. Next week, it'll be done, and either it'll work or it won't. Either way, I'm one hundred percent focused on your project.”

“It's
our
project, Lyssa. This is for the lab.”

She found it hard not to roll her eyes.

He moved the box from the chair to the floor and sat down with a heavy sigh, rubbing his face with his hands. Lyssa noticed that the sealing tape around the lid was cut. Had he checked what was inside without asking her first? Had the Ames person messed with it? She could feel her face growing hot.

“You're right,” he said at last. “No, you're right. You deserve this. And if it's good news — and I hope it is — it'll give us something to look forward to afterward. I'm sorry. It's just that with the lab, and money, and everything, I—”

Now it was her turn to feel conciliatory. “It's not your fault, honey. I understand. It's just . . . . Sometimes things just happen. Life has a tendency to get away from us.”

He raised an eyebrow at her, as if expecting her to continue.

“And . . . maybe there is some guilt to share,” she added.

“Uh huh . . . .” He leaned forward expectantly.

“I blame the puppy.”

“Shinji?” Ramon frowned in confusion. Then he burst out laughing. “That's the Lyssa I miss.” Shaking his head and still chuckling, he stood up and left her to her work.

Lyssa's attention drifted back to the box with its violated seal, and she felt the mirth slip away from her.

He already knew I was planning something because he snooped. He was just testing me to see if I'd tell him.

“I'm leaving,” Lyssa said.

Drew Royce looked up from the array of plastic tubes plunged into the half dozen buckets of dry ice on his benchtop. He held one up and squinted at the tiny permanent writing on the lid.

“Drew? You sure you can handle this by yourself?”

He nodded. “I got this. Go home. By the time you come in tomorrow morning, I'll have this all sorted out and maybe even have some preliminary results on the spectrometry.”

They had spent the majority of the afternoon inventorying the contents of the package. Much of the packing ice had sublimed away and the extra space had allowed the half dozen or so freezer boxes to open and the tubes to spill out in a confused mess. Apparently, Jim Pearce hadn't bothered to try and figure out what Lyssa might need and had instead opted to just send it all, leaving it up to her to sort out.

With the help of the documentation, they'd been able to match most of the tubes with their corresponding descriptions in the notes. They eliminated the irrelevant ones, leaving only a handful to further narrow down. Most of the tubes had had clear markings, all with Heather's initials and a code which corresponded to a notation in her notebook, but several tubes — a couple dozen — lacked initials or a code, and the markings they did have weren't informative. A half dozen tubes were missing any kind of label at all.

“Don't stay too late,” Lyssa said. She gave the doorframe a couple taps as she waited for Drew to assure her that he wouldn't. It was part of their routine, she realized, something they'd grown comfortable with over the past year and half.

“I won't,” he dutifully promised. “Scout's honor.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Just going to find what I need and see if we can do the intrauterine puncture tonight.”

They both knew the procedure could take a good six hours, and that was
after
combining the nanotubes and DNA and pulsing with microwaves to get them to assemble.

“I'll see you in the morning then.”

He nodded, then watched her go. When he was sure he was finally alone, he leaned back in his chair and let out a breath, releasing some of the pressure he'd been holding inside of himself. As much as he liked his employers, there were days when it drained him, both physically and emotionally, to be around them. They brought a lot of their personal baggage into work, and it was affecting them all.

The building seemed so much quieter than it did during the day, as if it knew the Stemples had finally gone home. He could almost feel it breathe a sigh of relief, as if a great weight had been lifted from its walls. At times like these, when he was alone, he sometimes imagined he could hear the ocean breaking on the rocks outside. The shore was a good hundred yards away and the exterior walls were too thick and the laboratory too centrally located within the building for it to be true.

Or maybe what he was sensing was the ground vibrating beneath his feet from the breakers rather than the vibration of the air in his ears. Whatever it was, in such moments he felt most connected with the world. In such solitude, he felt his most serene.

He lifted the sheaf of papers from the benchtop and rechecked the tubes they'd already verified against their descriptions. Out of the roughly six hundred plastic microfuge tubes sent in the shipment, the half dozen he figured they needed had been separated into a fresh rack. The rest needed to be put away for another day, if ever. Most likely, they'd just send them back.

He lifted one of the unlabelled tubes from the dry ice and held it up to the light and peered into the frozen liquid inside. A layer of snowy ice crystals quickly formed on the outside, moisture condensing on the surface and instantly freezing. The tube crackled and hissed as it began to warm from its subarctic temperature of minus one hundred degrees. Its contents weren't colorless, but instead had a slightly greenish tint.

He wiped away the layer of frozen condensate, then flipped the tube in his fingers, intending to reseat it in the rack. The hinged lid popped with a tiny bang, a release of pressure from the warming air inside the tube expanding. He felt a needle of cold hit his cheek near his eye, a splatter from some of the ice which had formed between the lid and the tube. Absently, he wiped the sting away with the shoulder of his lab coat, pressed the lid back down until the tube was newly sealed, and placed it into a storage box.

With a stack of boxes in his arms, he stepped over to the freezer. Carefully pushing aside a rack of tubes for another experiment he was conducting, he slid the unnecessary boxes in. Then he returned to the bench and began to outline his injection of the rabbits.

 

Goooood Thursday morning, Long Island! It's your favorite shock jock, WDQR's own Jay Bird coming straight atchoo from the top of our transmission tower on top of good old Jayne's Hill, from our new recording studio smack dab in the center of New York State's great big boner! Yep, we got a brand new antenna, folks. Now that's whatemtalkingabout! They'll be catching my spewage all the way down in Philly with this puppy cranking out some hefty duty wattage. Oh yeah! Hell, I bet if I sneezed, they'd catch cold clear up in Portland. It's going to be a busy day, folks. I'll be talking about the new tax propos—

Lyssa turned down the radio and cocked her head around until she located the siren she thought she'd heard. The ambulance approached in the opposite lane, slowly weaving its way through the parking lot of cars stuck on the
495
. Everyone was trying to get somewhere in a hurry, so naturally nobody was going anywhere.

She growled in frustration. At least this time the jam wasn't because of the construction. The towers were already up in this part of the island, poking their ugly heads up everywhere, tall gray poles topped by a trio of gray boxes and antennas. iTech had started the installations along the south shore and had migrated north to the opposite side. Now they were working their way west like a slow moving tide.

God they're ugly. Least they could've done is camouflage them, make them appear like they belong here.

The ambulance passed right next to her, its siren warbling in a way that made her feel as if her heart was a sheet flapping in a stiff wind. She was glad to see the vehicle disappear around a corner.

The cars in front of her pulled ahead. Soon she was moving again at a decent clip.

Other than a slight delay at Medford, where rubberneckers were ogling another work crew loosely gathered along the side of the highway, the rest of the drive into work passed without incident. She arrived just after eight o'clock, but didn't go right in. She needed to decompress. She was still tense from breakfast. It was their first together again, and it had been awkward. Hell, the whole morning had been awkward as they tried too hard to be civil.

Lyssa had gotten up, eager to cook bacon and eggs for everyone, but Cassie didn't come in from outside when Lyssa called her, and Ramon buried his head in the daily news on his tablet. Lyssa wanted to scream at him that they were supposed to be working on rebuilding the family. Instead, it was the same old routines already.

He mumbled something about unrest in the Middle East or Russia between bites of toast, then washed it down with a swig of coffee. Lyssa sat and watched him, waiting for him to come out of his bubble. But his mood seemed to grow darker the more news he read. “Now North Carolina wants to vote on a secession measure.” He shook his head. “This country's falling apart.”

Who cares about the country, Rame?
she wanted to say.
We're the ones falling apart.

“We should start carpooling again,” he said, abruptly setting the tablet down and looking up at her. The proposition so startled her that she stammered out an excuse, something about stopping by Sudha's place to make sure she was all right. Ramon had frowned at the obvious absurdity of it, the blatant pretext. But he didn't push the issue. He'd probably already done the calculus: They could be stuck in the same car with nothing but each other for company for ninety minutes, or they could see how living together again was going to work out before trying something so fraught with peril.