The flickering yellow text blurred, and he waved her dust away before it shorted out the old system. Rick had said no one worked on the weekend. “That doesn’t sound like security.”
“I’m guessing a secretary,” the tiny woman said. “I doubt it’s Trisk. She doesn’t look like an elf, and she’s wearing jeans and sandals. You want me to follow her?”
She was probably just what Orchid had guessed, and Kal shook his head, not wanting to risk the pixy being spotted. “No,” he said, scrolling through page after page of code as he looked for anything that might attach to an Inderland cell. “How are you doing? Warm enough?”
“I’m good,” Orchid said, but she’d parked herself right next to the terminal’s vent, her wings moving slightly in the air being pushed through the clunky system. “How bad is it?”
Kal frowned, his darting eyes recognizing patterns and loops of code that would need a computer to forecast results. “It’s beautiful,” he muttered, mood worsening. “All the data points to a twenty-four-hour toxic response, and then it dies.” He pushed the rolling chair back to stretch his legs out. “The perfect tactical weapon. It has no carrier, and according to this”—he shuffled through the printouts—“it can’t replicate outside of the lab.” He shook his head, wondering if he had made a mistake. “I don’t know how they did it. With the tools they have to work with, it would be like trying to plow a field with a horse.”
“You’ve only been farming without horses for forty years out of thousands.” Clearly warm again, Orchid darted up, her hands on her hips as she inspected the atomized demon fat on the ceiling until she realized what it was and flew to the windowsill, clearly shaken. “The only good human is a dead human,” she said as she landed next to the tomato sitting there. An entire field of them lay beyond the thick glass, out of her reach with the door closed.
“Everyone needs humans, Orchid. Besides, I don’t want the enclave angry at me.”
Orchid ran a hand over the tomato, then rubbed her hands, a frown on her face. “Why would they be mad at you? She’s the one who tweaked it.” She looked at her fingers as if they were dirty. “Dude. This tomato is fuzzy.”
“If I can’t prove that her tweaks to the tactical virus are faulty, I’ll never be able to prove her theory to use donor viruses is dangerous,” he said as he shoved his chair over to the shelf to look at the tomato. “And it is.” He took it up, seeing that it was, indeed, fuzzy. It was irritating. That her fix was perfect, not that her tomato was fuzzy. His research to save their species would falter and die without funding, a surety if he couldn’t bring Trisk down.
Orchid stood at his eye level, her wings drooping as he felt the fuzz between his fingers. It must be part of what made the tomato so drought resistant. “How can it be any good? It’s fuzzy,” she said, and he set it back down.
“It’s put together even tighter than Daniel’s virus,” he muttered. Somehow, she’d taken a sterile tomato cultivar that had most of the required traits, bettered it, and then gotten it to breed true. He could almost hear his work slipping into obscurity, and his chest tightened. He couldn’t save his species if he had no lab, no funds. Her work can’t be better than mine.
Frustrated, he pushed himself away from the shelf, the chair rolling back under the demon smoke ring and to the other terminal. He’d been searching the mainframe all night, and he still hadn’t found any hint of the universal donor virus she must have used to accomplish it. If he could find that, he could prove it was unsafe. Maybe.
“Mind if I give it the pixy test?” Orchid said, and Kal shook his head, his fingers a fast staccato on the keys as he went to the main menu to search again. “Smells good,” the small woman said behind him. “Not so sure about the fuzz.” Kal started, surprised, when he heard her punch it, and smiled at the obvious smacking of her lips. Unless Orchid had found something in the corridor, she hadn’t eaten in several hours.
“Mmmm. Sweet and tart. It can be as fuzzy as it wants if it tastes like this.”
“Great,” he said sarcastically, then stiffened, startled at the beeping door panel. Spinning in the chair, he gestured Orchid into hiding.
“Maybe it’s that cleaning lady,” the pixy said as she flew across the office to hide among the reference books.
Kal stood to wave her dust to nothing, but his face flamed when Trisk walked in, finding him looking just like the thief he was. “Trisk!” he exclaimed, holding a sneeze against the dust.
“I knew it.” Hip cocked, Trisk narrowed her eyes. “This is low, even for a Kalamack.”
Kal pulled himself upright, his gaze running over her. She was just as slim, just as dark, just as angry as he remembered, looking markedly casual in bell-bottom jeans and a bright halter top that showed off her curves. “I have every right to be here,” he said. “Rick—”
She came in, and he stumbled back, wanting to keep distance between them.
“Get out. It’s not yours until Monday,” she said, pointing to the open door.
“Rick knows I’m here,” he said. “I have every right—”
“Flagro!” Trisk shouted, and Kal ducked, hardly even feeling her tap a line, much less marshal it into a spell.
“Hey!” Ducking, Kal deflected the spell into the glass window, where it hit with a wet splat to spread out into a flickering greenish-gold glow that mimicked her aura. With a final hiss, it dissipated to leave nothing. “Ulbrine sent me!” he exclaimed, strengthening his hold on the ley line. He’d forgotten how wickedly quick she was. “Will you relax?” Orchid was peering out from between the books, and he hoped to heaven that she stayed where she was.