Chapter 2
At the intersection of Bridge Road and Aspen Lane, I immediately saw my precious cream building half a block away. The yellow sulfur pile peeked out behind the structures in the distance, barely visible as the coastline curved out into the inlet.
I suppressed the urge to run. In broad daylight–and in real life now–we had to be discreet. “It’s the plain cream building ahead, the one with the brown trim.”
“You’re sure?” said Ilya.
“I am. I had another vision.” I presented the grubby piece of rubber on my palm. Ilya walked over to the building while the rest of us hung back.
“Where did you get that?” Cole frowned in disgust.
Faith’s nose wrinkled and light glinted off the metal stud she always wore. “It looks like garbage.”
“No, it looks like the kind of stopper we used in the lab.” Jonah leaned in for a closer look and I caught a whiff of the musky aftershave I’d come to crave.
“I found it on the road back there,” I said with a nod towards the spot.
Ilya returned from evaluating the entrance. “The lot is fenced around the sides and the back. If we want in, we’ll have to either hop the fence or pick the lock on the front door. There’s nobody in there. Nobody I can hear, anyway.”
“What about those loading bays? I could try lifting the door if they’re not alarmed,” Cole said. “Anyone watching will think we’re authorized to enter.”
“Good idea.” Jonah rubbed his whole face.
“But there’s no way to know if there
is
an alarm.” Faith crossed her arms. “I can check to see if electric current is near the frame, but doors like this are probably rigged with motorized openers.”
“If an alarm starts, will you be able to short it, Faith?” I asked.
“I’d have to find the right circuit and melt it.”
“We’re expecting this place to be abandoned, right? I say we go for it,” said Jonah.
Cole nodded and walked towards the nearest bay door while we followed. He gripped the large metal handle at the bottom of the door and pulled it up as though it were made of paper. Cole stopped the door about three feet off the ground. We all froze, waiting for a wail or a siren. Nothing came.
“Good to go!” Ilya smiled.
“I’ll go in first. We still don’t know for sure this place is empty,” said Cole.
Nobody argued. Cole ducked under the door into the dark open space. We waited in silence. Faith and Jonah peeked in after Cole. I looked up and down the street to see if anyone was watching. I scanned windows of the few parked cars around us. I squinted at building windows in the distance in both directions.
“Nobody noticed us. There are a few bookkeepers in that building.” Ilya gestured to the nearest structure. “And that one,” he said pointing at the warehouse across the intersection, “has one forklift driver and a handful of packers, all of them concentrating on what they’re doing.”
“You can tell all of that from listening briefly?” I said.
“It’s easier to block out thoughts from people standing next to you if you cast a broader mental net, so to speak.” Ilya grinned at me. “But you were practically yelling your panic about someone watching us.”
I looked away. Even after practicing with Rubin, I’d never get the hang of someone listening to my private thoughts.
Cole emerged from the open bay door, brushing his hands on his thighs. “The place has been stripped. Looks like it might have been a grow op of some kind, but it’s hard to be sure. I don’t think we’re going to get much here, but we can poke around in there.”
“Irina got a vision from a piece of rubber trash. Anything is a potential lead now.” I heard desperation in Jonah’s voice. His passionate blue eyes revealed how intensely personal our mission was for him. Jonah’s increasingly unstable variation would claim his life if we couldn’t help him.
“Let’s get on with it then. Out here we’re waiting for an audience,” said Faith.
I slipped under the truck door with ease, being the shortest of our group. The others followed and Cole slid the door shut behind them.
Row upon row of long rectangular basins stretched from one end of the warehouse to the other. Only a few desks in the corner nearest the entrance suggested any kind of office presence.
I reached into one of the basins and dusted dry dirt off the side. Cole was probably right. This was a growing facility of some sort, but what could Innoviro want with plants? Had Ivan planned to change our world so much he’d need new plant life? Or would his group of variants need new food sources?
The terrifying part of Innoviro’s transformative projects was the veritable sea of inadvertent problems they could create. Ivan wanted a legacy of chaos and he seemed accustomed to achieving his goals. Could plant extracts spark or enhance variations? I never did learn the ingredients of the lavender liquid Tatiana and then Brad both shot into my arm.
I turned from the dirty basins to the three desks in the corner. The laminate-coated fiberboard frames of each workstation had only cables protruding from holes in the surface. Phones and computers had been here, but they were obviously yanked out unceremoniously along with the plants when the previous tenants left.
One desk held a few papers. A brochure for sushi and a real estate notepad. Another had a pen. A personal possession! I smiled and picked it up.
The room around me transformed and the basins were full of plants again, under hanging fluorescent lights. Slender aluminum tubes reached up over the basin edges like large insect arms. A bell jingled off to my left and a fine mist burst out of the arms in unison.
I walked up to one of the basins full of tiny lush bluish ferns. A small plastic label protruded from the dirt that read, RESISTANT STRAND 122B. Farther down the line, I could see a kind of evergreen seedling.
As I got closer to the evergreens, I saw glints of red in the spiky leaves and tiny spindly pods on the branches. Flies buzzed around the plants and I saw one of the pods open like a glistening green mouth. A fly landed inside and the mouth snapped shut. I shuddered as I contemplated the size those little mouths could be if they grew proportionate to the rest of the seedling.
I turned around to the desks in the corner. No longer bare, one was occupied. A balding man sat in front of a computer with his back to me. I walked as quickly as my vision self could manage.
The man typed furiously as I came around the desk to face him. He was older and slightly overweight with a ring of straw blond hair on an otherwise bald head. He looked up at the door behind me and frowned. I turned around to see Tatiana and two men enter. I recognized one of the men from Innoviro, but the other was a stranger. Both wore plain slacks and golf shirts. Tatiana wore her typical pencil skirt, buttoned blouse, and stilettos combination.
The bald man stood to greet Tatiana and his height struck me. The man was tall, even while slouching. In spite of his height, he looked defeated, dominated by the displeased look on Tatiana’s face. She opened her mouth and the scene evaporated. I was back in the dim empty version of the warehouse. I regained my focus to find everyone staring at me intently.
“It was a greenhouse. They were crafting weird plants. And Tatiana showed up. She looked grouchier than usual.” I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples to better concentrate. “The guy sitting at this desk was responsible for the place. I think Tatiana was about to give him hell when my vision ended.”
“Did you learn anything else? See anything else?” asked Ilya, leaning towards me.
“So all we know now is that this was some kind of variant grow show.” Faith swooped her arm at the empty basins.
“Did you see any printed material? Anything with a name or an address?” asked Jonah.
“The guy at the desk had an ID badge clipped to his breast pocket, but I couldn’t make out anything on it,” I said.
“So, have we made any progress at all?” said Cole. He rested his hands firmly on his hips.
As my friends started to argue about the chances of successfully tracking down any Innoviro activity, I opened and closed each of the drawers in the bald man’s desk. I reached the top center drawer and a plastic-sheathed card slid forward. The bald man’s face looked up at me next to bold print,
Dr. Kingston, George T.
I picked up the card and the angry voices beside me were silenced. I stood in a lush meadow watching Dr. Kingston survey a small field of bizarre plants. The carnivorous evergreens and their giant mouths loomed over teal blue ferns with pearl flowers. A glass and screen enclosure held large colorful bees that shimmered as though bathed in a slick sheen of gasoline. It looked like an alien planet, surrounded by BC’s steep coastal mountains.
A portable plastic table behind Kingston held specimen jars with plant fragments and a stack of pizza boxes with RIVERSIDE PIZZA HOUSE printed in bright red letters. I moved to step towards Kingston and a hand grabbed my arm, pulling me back to the North Vancouver warehouse.
“What happened? Why did you–,” I stopped.
Jonah lay unconscious on the ground.
Chapter 3
Ilya released my arm and I dove to the ground next to Jonah. Faith and Cole were already kneeling beside him. I repeated my question. “What happened?”
“He collapsed,” said Cole, checking Jonah’s pulse.
“It’s not that hot out. We weren’t running. We’re even near the ocean for fuck’s sake!” Faith yelled as she pushed her hair back from her forehead, sending her eyebrow ring out to prominence.
“We can’t take him to the hospital,” said Ilya.
“Let’s get him back to the hotel,” I said.
“How are we supposed to get him there? Carry him on the bus?” Faith shrieked.
“Faith, put a lid on it unless you want cops over here!” hissed Cole.
“Cole will carry him over his shoulder and Ilya will make Jonah look like a duffle bag,” I said.
“We’ll get him in a cab. Cole and I will keep the ‘bag’ on our laps,” Ilya said as he tapped on his phone.
Our hotel room was an inadequate clinic and we were feeble medical aids, but we all agreed not to resort to a hospital unless Jonah took a turn for the worse. Faith took the first shift with him, holding his hand firmly and stroking his hair gently. I bit my lip and said nothing. Nails bit into my palms when I gripped my fists so I wouldn’t slap her. I reminded myself that I needed to debrief Ilya and Cole about the garden in the field, so I turned my back on Jonah’s sick bed.
“I was about to tell you before Jonah passed out. They’ve transplanted the seedlings from that warehouse into an outdoor field. Kingston supervised the whole thing. I still don’t know what they’re doing with the plants, but they had a mutated strain of honeybee there as well–shimmering like a metallic rainbow. They were beautiful.” The image of the bees drifted back into focus. How could something so magical be malicious?
Cole flicked the thought away with his hand. “We still don’t know what he wants with those plants. It could be some benign little side project.”
“I don’t think so. In the warehouse vision, Tatiana looked pretty intense. I don’t think she bothers with silly little nothing projects.”
Ilya gently removed the ID badge from my backpack. “Is this the same guy?”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t working alone, although he seemed to be in charge. I still haven’t seen a glimpse of the other researchers.”
“Did you see or hear anything to help us find the place, Irina?” said Ilya.
“Not really. The mountains were pretty steep, and close to the site, compared to the mountains north of the city. But we might be able to find Riverside Pizza. Kingston had a stack of pizza boxes, like he’d been living off those pies.”
Cole took the badge from Ilya’s hand and examined it closely while Ilya turned on my laptop.
“I’ve never seen him. I don’t think he ever came to the Victoria office. Not while I worked there. I’d remember a dude like this,” said Cole as he peered into Kingston’s face.
Ilya quickly found a website for Riverside Pizza House in a mountain town called Hope. Google Maps told us we could get there in an hour and a half with no traffic.
“We should take my car this time. The Greyhound might take us to this pizza place, but if we’re lucky and Irina has another vision, we’ll need wheels to get out to a secluded grow site,” said Cole.
“
We
should take the car.” Ilya gestured with his thumb between me and him. “
You
should stay here with Jonah and Faith. She’ll need your help if Jonah takes a turn for the worse.”
My stomach sank as I looked over at Jonah’s sleeping form. Faith heard us, but she didn’t look up.
“Are you comfortable loaning us your car?” I asked.
“After everything that’s happened in the last couple of weeks, sharing my car seems like the smallest risk.” Cole rubbed his chin.
“Depending on where this leads, we may have to leave it behind at some point,” said Ilya.
“Let’s worry about that later.” I still felt like I dragged all my friends into a zero sum game. Stopping the work Ivan had started would force each of us to sacrifice far more than we could afford.
“We’re all in this because we want to be. We know there will be sacrifices–we’ve made quite a few already. And remember, I can literally speak for everyone,” said Ilya. Cole nodded his approval.
“Will you get the hell out of my head already?” Heat filled my face.
Cole tossed his car keys to Ilya and I stole one more glance at Jonah. Faith’s focus on him didn’t waver, while I felt Cole’s dark brown eyes on me. And Ilya could hear every angst-ridden thought. We had to focus on Ivan’s legacy and Innoviro. I also knew this was all going to get worse before it got better.
Vancouver’s mid-day traffic slowed our progress to a crawl, but I refused to make small talk with Ilya. In spite of my power to see through time and space, I would never have his gift for reading minds. It probably wasn’t the best gift to have. Some thoughts nobody wants to hear.
I still wanted to know where I stood with my friends, and with the man I’d started to love. I stared out the window as Ilya drove. We cruised in silence until the roller coasters of the Pacific National Exhibition popped out of the cityscape on our left.
“Would it make you feel better if I told you something embarrassing and personal about myself?” Ilya kept his eyes on the road ahead.
My head snapped in his direction. I could feel the glare on my face.
“When you’re this intensely upset, I can’t block you. Probably doesn’t help that we share near-replica DNA either,” said Ilya.
“I thought you’d had a hard time reading Ivan,” I said. “Wait, I think I know why!” I clapped my hand over my mouth.
“Seriously?” said Ilya.
“I wanted to tell you all at breakfast, but the conversation got hijacked by the North Van plan. I had a dream about Ivan getting possessed. Or infected maybe. My visions are usually pretty literal, but maybe this was symbolic somehow. I think it has to be.”
“Where did it happen? What was he doing?”
“He was visiting ruins with Mom. I think they were in England. He touched a stone and a dark shadow shot up from the ground and into his body. It changed him. The expression on his face changed, hell, even his skin color faded,” I said.
“That might explain why his mind always felt so different, so . . . brutally wild. After the other night . . . I guess we’ll never know. Then again, we should operate on the assumption he’s still alive. We both know how strong he was. Or still is, regardless of how he looked when we left him,” said Ilya quietly. “But, back to my offer to bare my heart and soul, do you want to hear my embarrassing confession?”
“Sure, why not? You’ll still have the advantage, but I’ve got to get used to it at some point.”
Ilya continued staring at the highway ahead, looking as though he was reconsidering. I gave him credit for bravery in my mind, hoping to give him courage.
“Yeah, this is pretty good. At least you’ll probably think so.” He paused again before saying, “I’m still in love with Faith.”
My first thought was,
Oh, good luck with that one
. The sentiment had already come to fruition in my mind by the time I tried to claw it back.
“Don’t you think I know she’s still got a thing for Jonah? If you can tell, and probably everyone else can tell, what do you think
I
have to listen to?” Ilya looked over at me briefly with raised eyebrows.
“I didn’t mean to think it. But even setting her feelings for Jonah aside, she is a touchy gal, you’ve got to admit.” I sat on my hands as though it might help me bottle up my thoughts.
“You mean she’s a bitch. Don’t hold back. I know what you think anyway. And she is. I can hear her unfiltered outbursts. She’s an angry woman even when she doesn’t have an axe to grind.” Ilya gripped the steering wheel harder.
“Are you going to do anything? Do you want to tell her?”
“I’d been planning to let you and Jonah get more established before I made a move. I’m not interested in competing with Jonah, even if he’s not in-the-ring so to speak. Of course now that you’re pushing him away–”
“Was he ever in love with her?”
Ilya didn’t answer and I was instantly sorry I’d asked. I didn’t want the answer to be yes.
“Honestly, I don’t know. He and I aren’t that close. I remember he felt an intense attraction to her for a brief time. Keep in mind though, the fleeting things people think and the way they really feel deep down can get muddled together. If interpreting thoughts came easily, if emotions and intentions were so cut and dry, my mind-reading would have kept me and Faith together. She ended it because I hadn’t told her I loved her. I know it was so much more complicated. If you think it’s hard to be friends with someone who knows your every thought, think how hard it would be to date that person. She always waffled between embarrassment and anger around me.”
“I guess if psychic powers aren’t much of a relationship enhancer, mind-reading might not be either.”
Ilya didn’t answer, but increased speed as the urban traffic broke up and the street turned into a highway.
The road to Hope led through Vancouver’s suburbs, through outlying cities, into farmland, and up against rugged mountains. The lush foothills and sharp peaks loomed higher and higher as the valley narrowed.
Ilya pulled off the highway at a sign for Hope’s city center. “According to the map, this pizza place should be across from a park. Can you check your phone again?”
“Turn right past the gas station at the next intersection.” We rounded the corner and saw a large chalkboard tent sign for Riverside Pizza House on the sidewalk.
I noticed the emptiness of my own stomach. “Are you hungry?”
“Sounds like we could both eat. Let’s go see if we can get a lead with our lunch.” Ilya handed me the ID badge I’d found at the warehouse. “Here. For inspiration.”
The interior of the Riverside Pizza House greeted us with sparse retro diner décor. As soon as the scent of fresh bread, herbs, and roasted meat hit me, the aroma made up for the lack of ambiance. We followed a sign instructing us to seat ourselves.
A young family had the best table next to the storefront window. Ilya and I grabbed a table for two nearest to the register. I put my hand in my pocket to feel Dr. Kingston’s ID badge. With my free hand, I plucked a menu out of the spice rack in front of me and the diner disappeared in a whirl of light.
I sat on the passenger side of a pickup truck. Dr. Kingston drove. Two Riverside boxes rested between us on the bench seat. Soft classical music drifted out of the speakers on the dashboard. I looked out the window for landmarks. We were already on a gravel road, so there was no signage. Time crawled as the truck rumbled, all but drowning out the trumpets and violins struggling to come out of the speakers.
We reached a fork in the road. And a sign! We could turn right to access Jewel Lake. Or we could turn left under the sign, Forest Service Road. Dr. Kingston turned left and the drive continued until the forest had practically choked the road out of existence. And then we burst out of the trees into the alien meadow.
I let go of the menu and ID badge simultaneously and snapped back into the Riverside Pizza House. “I know how to get there!”
“Lower your voice. I know you’re excited, but we’re surrounded by rural civilians here.” Ilya pushed his hand down towards the tabletop.
An annoyed teenage girl appeared next to our table. “Can I get you anything?”
“We’ll take a pepperoni and a veggie lover’s, unless you’ve got a better suggestion.” Smiling, Ilya cocked an eyebrow, trying to charm her, but she couldn’t care less. The server finished writing, looked at Ilya, and then at me with a lackluster expression suggesting to me she disliked tourists.
“Hey, that’s actually good. If she thinks we’re lame tourists, she won’t be committing our faces to memory,” said Ilya after she had gone.
“I guess if Ivan had other mind-readers, whoever’s still running The Compendium wouldn’t even have to question people to interrogate them.”
“Exactly. And don’t forget, I still think there’s a fair chance we’ll see our father again,” said Ilya as he pointed a finger at me.
We took our own two pizza boxes back to Cole’s car. Ilya found Jewel Lake on my phone while I related the vision and savored the best slice of pepperoni pizza I’d eaten in years.
Minutes later, we were back on the Trans-Canada Highway looking for a turn off to Jewel Lake.
“We can’t retrace Kingston’s route without the origin. But if you’re right and this lake has a back road access point, we can find the trail from there.” Ilya drove slowly through the lake’s rest-stop parking lot.
A gravel road at the end of the lot was blocked off by a thick chain hanging from two concrete posts. A sign proclaimed, NO ADMITTANCE STAFF ONLY. We both scanned the lot for signs of travelers or park staff. The few cars in the lot were all unoccupied. There were no pedestrians in sight, so I slipped out of the car and lifted the chain off its hook on one of the posts. Ilya drove through and I hooked the chain back in place.
I hopped back in the car and snapped the door closed. “I know this is gravel, but let’s get a move on.”
“This is me you’re with, remember. To everyone outside, there is no car.”
“Oh yeah! I keep forgetting about your illusionist side. The mind-reading has a way of drawing my focus, like it did with Rubin, even though he could also influence people. I suppose I should stop comparing you to Rubin.” I looked out the windows all around, unable to shake my concern.
“In every possible way, thank you.”
We reached the fork in the road and the signpost from my vision more quickly than expected. Jewel Lake was more like a large pond. The road past the sign got much rougher than the gravel and went on for longer. As the path narrowed and the trees closed in, we bounced and rattled through a claustrophobic amount of foliage. But like my vision, we burst out of the dense forest trail into an alpine meadow full of exotic trees and ferns. Dr. Kingston was nowhere in sight.