3. Clair
CLAIR
In the coming weeks and months, Clair was unfailingly polite, perky, and cheerful. It was like her mother had always said—“If you can’t win them over, kill them with kindness.” And that was what Clair intended to do.
She continued to spread her things all over the lab, regularly crossing to Kaelus’s side whenever she needed to use a piece of equipment or borrow something.
If he complained, she gave him wide, innocent eyes and remarked on how it was much nicer to share and get along than to be stingy and fight all the time.
She made him a cup of coffee every morning too. And though the big Hybrid never asked for it, he always took it and drank the whole thing. In fact, it made a noticeable improvement in his mood, though he was still grumpy and distrustful of humans—herself included.
By being so relentlessly cheerful, Clair managed to stave off a fight for the whole first month…but that was when she made the mistake of using his Molecular Resonance Analyzer without permission.
The MRA, as she privately called it, was an amazing piece of Kindred technology and Clair had been dying to get her hands on it from the moment she first saw it.
It looked something like an extremely high-tech electron microscope, though instead of a single eyepiece it had a large, curved viewscreen that projected three-dimensional molecular models in glowing colors.
According to Kaelus, it could analyze biological material down to the molecular level and determine not only which compounds were present but also how those compounds interacted with different kinds of living tissue.
Apparently it could even model how a substance might be metabolized by different alien species, which made it invaluable to a Xenopharmacologist who spent his life attempting to turn strange alien substances into useful medicines.
It was also, unfortunately, very useful to a Xenobotanist, which Clair had pointed out to him several times.
Kaelus had not been impressed.
“You have your own analysis equipment,” he had told her when she asked to use the MRA the first time.
“Yes, but mine isn't half as good as this thing,” Clair had protested. “You could probably tell what I ate for breakfast just by having me breathe on it.”
“I have no desire to know what you ate for breakfast.”
“Well, that's good because mostly I just have coffee.”
“I am aware,” he had growled, throwing a pointed look at the coffee machine she had installed beside the sink despite his objections. “The entire laboratory is aware.”
But he still hadn't let her use the MRA.
Which was extremely irritating because it sat approximately twelve feet away from her workstation, gleaming at her from the other side of the black line like some kind of forbidden scientific fruit.
Still, Clair had behaved herself…mostly.
Until one afternoon when Kaelus left the lab to attend a meeting and the Vellarian star-vine she had been studying finally bloomed.
“Oh! Oh my God!” Clair breathed as the tightly furled silver bud suddenly opened, spreading translucent petals across the little growth chamber where she had been cultivating it for the past three weeks.
The flower was no bigger than the palm of her hand and looked almost like it had been made out of spun glass, each delicate petal shot through with tiny threads of glowing blue.
“You beautiful little thing—you finally did it!” she exclaimed, heart pounding with excitement. She’d been nurturing it for months and finally all her hard work had paid off!
She leaned closer to the transparent growth chamber, watching as the blossom opened wider.
According to the research notes she'd been able to find, the star-vine only bloomed for approximately twenty minutes before the flower began to wilt, and the medicinal compound she was interested in appeared only during the blooming stage.
Even more frustratingly, the compound degraded almost immediately once the blossom was picked, which meant she had an extremely narrow window to collect and analyze a sample.
Clair had been waiting ages for this, and she wasn't about to miss her chance.
Working quickly, she slipped her hands into the sealed gloves attached to the growth chamber and clipped one of the translucent petals.
Then she placed the tiny sample into a sterile specimen tube and hurried over to her own analyzer.
She slid the tube into the machine, initiated the scan, and drummed her fingers impatiently on the counter as the seconds ticked by.
“Come on, come on…” she muttered. “Hurry up already!”
The analyzer finally chimed and displayed its results.
Clair frowned at what she saw.
“That can't be right,” she muttered.
According to the scan, the star-vine contained several ordinary proteins, two alkaloids she'd already identified in the leaves, and absolutely nothing that would explain the extraordinary healing properties described in the Vellarian botanical records.
“No, you don't,” she told the glowing flower through the transparent wall of its chamber. “I did not spend months talking sweet to you, adjusting your humidity every six hours, and playing classical music because somebody claimed it made you bloom faster just for you to give me absolutely nothing.”
The star-vine, unsurprisingly, declined to answer.
Clair looked back at the analyzer. Her equipment wasn't bad—it was top-of-the-line by Earth standards—but there were limits to what it could detect, especially when dealing with compounds that existed only briefly before changing molecular structure.
Then her eyes wandered toward the other side of the lab, toward Kaelus's Molecular Resonance Analyzer.
“Oh, no,” she told herself firmly. “Don't even think about it.”
But then she looked at the star-vine. The glowing blue threads running through its petals were already beginning to dim.
“Damn it!” she exclaimed–she was running out of time!
Clair glanced at the door. Kaelus had said his meeting would last at least an hour.
She glanced back at the MRA. Then her eyes drifted to the whiteboard.
Stay on your side of the lab—ALWAYS.
No talking when I am working.
Do NOT touch any of my equipment.
“Well, you're not working because you're not here,” Clair pointed out reasonably, though Kaelus wasn’t there to hear her. “So technically Rule Number Two doesn't apply.”
She was aware she was arguing with an empty room, but that didn't stop her.
“As for Rule Number One…” She looked down at the thick black line running across the floor. “That's just ridiculous anyway.”
The glow in the flower dimmed another shade. Her time was almost up.
“Oh, to hell with it!” Clair muttered.
She grabbed another sterile specimen tube, clipped a second petal, and crossed the line.
It felt absurdly naughty, breaking her lab-partner’s rules, but it wasn't as though she hadn't crossed over to Kaelus's side before.
In fact, she did it at least five or six times a day, usually because she needed something he had and didn't feel like asking permission.
But she had never touched the MRA–mostly because every time she got within three feet of it, Kaelus appeared like an enormous, growling guard dog.
But he’s not here right now and what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him, Clair reasoned with herself.
She hurried over to the machine and looked at the controls. She’d watched him work it often enough that running a sample shouldn’t be a problem.
“All right, sweetie, let's see what you can do,” she muttered.
The display brightened at the sound of her voice and Clair blinked in surprise.
“Oh! Voice activation. Aren't you fancy?”
She hadn’t even known that was a function of the MRA, since Kaelus was always wrapped in silent contemplation whenever he used it.
A low chime sounded, and several options appeared across the viewscreen. Fortunately, they were in English. By now Clair had gotten her translation bacteria injection, but she was still relieved not to have to navigate unfamiliar Kindred technical terms.
She selected FULL MOLECULAR ANALYSIS and inserted the specimen tube…but nothing happened.
“What now?” she muttered, staring at the machine.
The screen flashed.
SAMPLE TYPE?
“Botanical,” Clair said.
Another menu appeared and she selected LIVING/ACTIVE SPECIMEN.
The machine chimed.
WARNING: ACTIVE BIOLOGICAL SAMPLES MAY CAUSE CALIbrATION VARIATION. CONFIRM?
Clair hesitated.
“Well…how much variation are we talking about?” she asked.
The machine, annoyingly, did not answer.
She looked toward the door again…still no Kaelus.
The star-vine's luminous veins were fading fast–her time really was almost up.
“Oh, for God's sake.” Clair pressed CONFIRM. “You can recalibrate a machine. You can't make a flower bloom again on command,” she said out loud, justifying herself.
At once, the MRA hummed to life and a pale blue beam passed over the specimen tube. Then, a complex molecular structure appeared above the viewscreen, hovering in three-dimensional space.
Clair's breath caught in her throat.
“Ohhh…” she whispered.
She leaned closer, watching as the molecular model turned slowly before her. Carbon chains and amino groups glowed in different colors while the machine separated the various compounds contained in the star-vine petal. Most were familiar from her earlier analysis.
Then something new appeared—a tiny cluster of molecules began flashing gold.
“Yes!” Clair whispered. “There you are!”
She reached for the controls, wanting to isolate the compound but at that exact moment, the laboratory door slid open behind her.
Clair froze. Crap—she was in trouble now.
There was a long, terrible silence and then…
“What,” a deep, rumbling voice said from behind her, “are you doing?”
Clair closed her eyes. Well, shit—she was caught.
Slowly, she turned and saw Kaelus, standing in the doorway.
The huge Hybrid looked even bigger than usual because his broad shoulders nearly filled the entrance. His golden eyes were fixed on her, then on the MRA, then back on her again. His expression went from disbelief to horror to fury in approximately three seconds.