Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Veronique walked Evelyn to the concealed room that Cairn used as a potting shed. Aiden had parted ways with them in the kitchen, heading off to see his mothers and look over the data Mathias had brought them from Tanalia.
“Go be great. I’ll find you in a bit,” he’d said, with a gentle kiss on the forehead. Evelyn had basically floated across the lobby to Cairn’s secret plant cave.
The small cuttings were arranged neatly on a table.
Evelyn could swear they looked fuller than they had only a few days ago.
Could plants grow new leaves that swiftly?
Horticulture had never been her wheelhouse.
She was allergic to too many plants — or “the outside,” as her childhood doctor had said — to ever really bother cultivating a green thumb.
Cairn had his back to them, elbow deep in rich, black soil. He seemed to be transferring it from bin to bin aimlessly, but as Evelyn got closer, she could see differences in the textures of the various elements he was scooping.
“Is that my beautiful wife I hear?”
“And our beautiful secret weapon,” Veronique said. She rubbed his neck and gave the space between his shoulder blades a soft kiss. “Take a break.”
“She’s ready for the plants? You’re ready for the plants?” Cairn removed his arms from the soil mixture and wiped them off on a towel he had tucked into the waistband of his pants.
“I am, theoretically, ready for a plant. Just one. Start small, I say. Are they bigger than they were? What did you do?”
Cairn picked up one of the small houseplants and gave a leaf an affectionate tweak. “I just repotted them in some decent growth medium. Water. Light. Plants are easy once you know what they want.”
Evelyn reached a hand out, and Cairn relinquished the plant he was holding to her reluctantly.
She grinned at him. “Relax, Cairn. It’s not like I’m going to set the thing on fire.”
“As far as you know!”
Evelyn nodded solemnly. “Yes, as far as I know. There is an element of uncertainty at play here. Still, I’ve not knowingly developed pyrokinesis.”
“Aye. You’d notice that,” he said. He reached for another of the seedlings. “Take a friend with you. And a lamp.”
“Maybe I should just bring it back here when I’m done with it? You can be the guardian of the plant matter.”
It took everything in her not to laugh aloud at the look of relief on his face.
Cairn tried to school his face as soon as he realized he’d telegraphed his opinion on her ability to keep the seedlings alive, but they all knew the damage was done.
Evelyn and Veronique both burst into laughter.
Cairn grinned and grabbed his wife around the waist.
“And a better plant guardian you’ll be hard pressed to find,” he said. He tucked Veronique against his front, propping his chin on the top of her head. If the soil caked on his arms bothered her, Evelyn couldn’t tell. Veronique wrapped her arms around Carin’s embrace and leaned against his body.
Evelyn had a brief stab of jealousy, witnessing the unabashed affection on display for everyone to see. How beautiful it was to belong to someone, and to have them belong to you in turn. Then she paused to reflect on the dozen examples of the same behavior Aiden had exhibited in the last day.
Fixing her lunch.
Casually touching her when being introduced to another man.
For fuck’s sake, the man had moved most of her possessions into his room.
Take the hint, Evelyn.
Feeling slow on the uptake, but happy with the conclusions she’d drawn, Evelyn took her seedling back into her storage area and placed the plant on the folding table.
It was a small thing, really. The pot was only a few inches around. A few green, leafy tendrils were poking out of the damp soil, rich and black with recent watering.
It was also a much larger hurdle to jump than Evelyn had been willing to let on.
It was easy to joke about her power, to plan robbing some high-tech building with Aiden.
But this was a living thing.
This was the reason she’d been told to hide her gifts since they manifested.
If she could drain this little seedling of its life’s energy, what could she do to a bigger plant? A bush? A field of crops?
A pen of livestock?
A person?
Could she drain the life out of a person?
Would she?
Evelyn’s life had been so much easier when all she had to worry about was making sure she had enough time to read her books and write her essays and make it to a concert on time.
It had been easier, though far less fun, when she had been wasting away in a medivessel, playing her part in Emil’s coup as his battery.
Her biggest philosophical problem had been who to back in a fandom love triangle.
Now she was sitting on a ship full of people planning to overtake an occupying force, possibly preparing herself to murder another human being if the need arose.
She couldn’t pretend anymore that Corrie didn’t intend for her to take the limits of her power as far as they could go.
Evelyn was now another tool in Corvinia’s war chest, and her job was to hone herself into a sharper-edged blade than she’d ever wanted to be.
She sat, grabbing the egg timer off the table and passing it from hand to hand as she worked out her feelings.
If someone came at her with a blaster, and she had one in her hand, would she defend herself? Evelyn could admit to herself that while she may not have at one point in her life, she was suddenly inundated with so much to live for, she would pull the trigger without any remorse.
So why was this any different?
Because wielding a blaster doesn’t necessarily make you a monster.
The thought echoed in her mind. It resonated louder and louder until all she could hear was the last word on a constant loop inside her mind.
Monster. Monster. Monster.
She dropped the egg timer. It made an indignant beep as it hit the floor, jolting her from her mind spiral. Evelyn bent to pick it up and shook her head. Her conversation — dissertation, more like — earlier in the kitchen came back to her in fits and spurts.
This was not a Tanalian philosophy.
If Evelyn really believed that everyone had a place in the universe that only they could fill, then she absolutely could not allow herself to think of herself as monstrous.
She was gearing up to kill the monster, in one way or another.
Maybe it takes a monster to kill a monster.
She sighed. Decades of negative self-talk wouldn’t be abolished in an afternoon. She’d work on self-acceptance as she worked on mastering the other talent.
Evelyn placed the egg timer back on the table and closed her eyes again. She was back in her visualization space, in her mauve velvet chair. The seedling sat on the table before her.
She got up and searched the shelves for the right jar, one that felt special enough to hold the life force of the plant. A simple pickle jar wouldn’t do. Not for the first time she tried this.
After a few minutes of searching, she found a jar, bottle-green with beautiful dips and curves in the blown glass and a crystal stopper for a lid. Perfect. She brought the jar back to the table and unstopped it.
Evelyn focused on the plant. The small vibrating strands that emanated from electronics were much more orderly than the pulsating energy of the seedling.
The energy of life was more chaotic. Evelyn probed the life force, and slowly, it responded to her, leaving in wisps rather than the tight orb that had emerged from the electronics.
The plant energy was clearly less eager to be nudged along than the energy in her earlier experiments. Evelyn didn’t blame it.
She led the wisps to the vessel, guiding the energy along gingerly. She coaxed, but they were reluctant. The plant’s energy did not want to be contained. It wanted to stay put.
Evelyn increased the mental pressure she was putting on the plant, and the tendrils of energy finally relinquished control to her, leaving the plant in a rush.
A sheer sense of revulsion in herself welled up as she led as much of the plant energy into the jar as she could without killing it entirely.
Its thrum was a drumbeat in her ears. She could take it all. She could take everything.
She stopped short, the message that had been drilled into her from adolescence screaming in her mind.
The little seedling, once so verdant and glossy leafed, sat sadly in its pot.
The soil was dry, the vines sagged listlessly.
The leaves were crispy. Her hands trembled as she looked at the results of her experiment.
She thought of that happening to a person, and the soup she’d had earlier churned unpleasantly in her stomach.
That she could be capable of doing this to another human being was a horrifying prospect.
She realized she wasn’t breathing. Her chest felt tight; her pulse raced.
She took a gasping breath, trying to steady herself.
As far as object lessons went, this one was doing the job.
Maybe Corrie should have taught me this one years ago. Respect is far better than fear.
That thought had to be Aiden’s influence on her. Evelyn’s knee-jerk reaction was always to blame herself. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She wiped her face with the sleeve of her cardigan and sorted her thoughts as she tried to reframe the information in front of her.
Point one: She possessed a very scary psychic ability.
Point two: She wasn’t an unhinged psychopath intent on draining the populace like juice boxes on a hot summer day. She respected that this wasn’t an ability to whip out at a party.
Point three: She may very well need to be scary to take back her planet from Emil.
Men like him didn’t respond well to reason. But they did respond to force.
She could show it, if she had to.
So, scary could be a good thing.
It’s not like idealism had served her the way she’d been raised to believe it should. Her father’s negotiations had been a waste of time. Her time in the pod had done nothing but actively harm her planet.
Now it was time to try a new direction.
Civilized negotiation time is over.
Evelyn opened the green jar. The wisps of energy she had temporarily stored burst forth to drift aimlessly around her visualization space.
She nudged them back toward the seedling.
The energy hummed, wisps curling around the leaves and stem, absurdly contented to be put back where it belonged.
Before her eyes, the sad, limp vines plumped as the energy returned to its rightful place.
The crispy leaves rehydrated, turning from a yellowish brown back to the deep green they had been before Evelyn had displaced their energy. Relief washed over her. The little plant looked as lush as it had when Cairn had given it to her.
For the first time, Evelyn thought she understood why people kept houseplants.