“There was another girl I grew up with, Laurel. She was very quiet. Dark red hair and the greenest eyes you ever saw. Whitney named her after the English laurel, which is often called the cherry laurel. She had that dark red hair and did when she was a baby, so I guess all that hair reminded him of a cherry laurel.”
She waited, trying not to hold her breath or give any indication that finding out about the women meant everything to her. Shedidn’t want him to have anything to hold over her. Whitney was good at finding weaknesses and exploiting them. Growing up together, the girls had inevitably formed attachments to one another, and Whitney used those feelings against them as a means of manipulation, punishment and control. She was determined that no one would ever do that to her again.
Jonas shook his head with obvious regret. “I’m sorry, Camellia. I wish I could say I knew where she was, but I haven’t heard anything at all. I would think if Whitney had managed to get her back, we would have heard something. We do have a way of spying on him. We have to be very cautious, but if he had one of the women from that first group, we would know.”
If she could believe him, and he seemed certain, at least Laurel was still safe, even if no one knew where she was. Like Camellia, she’d found a place to hide.
“You said that your people were able to keep Whitney from tracking the dust particle trackers in our tattoos? Laurel has one on her ankle as well. It’s beautiful, with glossy leaves and clusters of cherries. She would have found the tracker in her hip and removed it, like I did. We all suspected Whitney had implanted us with microchips.” She pushed her hand through her hair. “Maybe she thought of her tattoo. I didn’t, but she may have.” Camellia doubted it. She was the least trusting of the women, and it hadn’t occurred to her that the one thing Whitney gave her that she loved was just as poisonous as all his other “gifts.” She should have known.
“From what I understand, he isn’t able to use that tracking system to find any of you women anymore, at least not most of the time. I’ll find out more information for you,” Jonas promised.
She wasn’t going to stick around to find out more information. The moment he headed back down the mountain with his friends, she was leaving. She’d planned for an escape. She had alreadydecided on a destination if she had to leave. Middlemist Red would travel with her. The rest of the exotics would stay behind with the mycelium grid to buy them as much time as possible if anyone tried to follow them.
“There are children in the compound down below,” Jonas said. “Lily has a son. Whitney would do anything to get his hands on that child. He’s tried before. Ken and Marigold have twin boys. Whitney would like them as well. It has occurred to me that the threat I’m feeling is Whitney gearing up to make another try for the kids.”
Camellia couldn’t help but send out inquiries along both networks again, particularly the mycelium running beneath the forest, stretching far beyond her garden and even past the boundaries of the national forest into the wilderness areas. She had been using that connection for a long time and was very sensitive to every result. She could read the least little sign the mycelium returned to her, no matter if the source of the alert was many miles away. She needed the connections to spread out as far and wide as possible and tell her if there was anyone approaching the homes below her. Were there spies sent in the forest? One lone man? Two? An army? Animals that hadn’t been there?
Jonas looked up at her suddenly. “Camellia. What are you doing right now? I’m feeling something very subtle, as if there is a surge in the energy around me. Barely there. I know I blew it with you by my gut reaction, but I hope you can forgive me. I swear, none of what you felt from me was aimed at you. I just despise Whitney and what he did to me.” He thrust his fingers through his hair and made a sound halfway between a snarl and a growl. “Hell, maybe I was already fucked up, and all he really did was make me aware of it.”
Camellia had an inexplicable desire to put her arms around him and hold him. She felt a sudden surge of rage in him, red hot. Hesuppressed it automatically, as if he’d been doing it forever. She also caught a small edge of despair. He knew that level of aggression in him had been multiplied by Whitney and would never go away. Living with it had to be hell.
“Whitney didn’t much care how aggressive he made his soldiers, as long as he got the results he wanted,” she told him. “I’m glad all of you realized you shouldn’t document your talents. That must make him crazy.” She allowed satisfaction to show in her voice.
“I have to admit, we do talk about that a little too much,” Jonas confessed. “We hope Whitney is frustrated. We’re his first team, and we know he views us as his failures. He’d want to know everything about us that he could, if only to avoid making the same mistakes in future enhancements.”
Camellia had to agree with his assessment. She nodded and loosened her hold on the branch of Middlemist Red. She was able to breathe on her own and relax completely again, now that she realized just how difficult Jonas’s life had to be. Looking closely at him, she could see the lines etched into his face, when Middlemist Red was renowned for her antiaging benefits. Many thought that was a myth, but Camellia had barely aged, her skin glowing and flawless in spite of Whitney’s many experiments. Jonas looked young as well, but she could see those lines carved deep when he continually had to strive to control the raging instincts in him.
She sent him a genuine smile. “I know the word ‘fungus’ can sound off-putting. I don’t remember how I reacted, because I was used to all the strange experiments he performed on us. I didn’t seem to have any repercussions at the time. I was told to report anything new to him, and I honestly didn’t have anything to report. The mycelium connection is extremely subtle, and Whitney didn’t tell me what to look for. He never did.”
Jonas leaned toward her, his eyes going completely gold, utterlyfocused on her. She had leopard in her, and she recognized the cat instantly, but he had gone still, become the hunter as he absorbed the information. He was the predator. He couldn’t help it. That side of him was dominant. She tried not to react, not to feel uneasy. He wasn’t deliberately intimidating her, but she imagined any recipient of that stare would feel threatened.
“I was out on a mission when I first became aware, most likely the way you did, that danger was closing in on me,” she told him. “It was still a great distance away, so I knew the signal hadn’t come from any of the animal enhancements Whitney had given me. When I returned from the mission, I filtered through everything I knew for certain he had put inside me. When he told me ‘fungi,’ I looked up everything I could about mycelium and how it worked. Then I studied our brains and our nervous systems and how they worked together just in case. I had always been interested in plants, so I had already been studying and researching everything I could on the communication between them. I was extremely careful not to veer off course of what I was already working on, although I kept notes for myself off the computers and eventually was able to look up what I wanted.”
Jonas nodded his head. “That was smart, Camellia. Was Whitney aware at all of what you were doing?”
“We couldn’t use a computer without his knowledge. His techs always informed him of what we did on the Internet. I’m certain he knew, but I had researched since before I was in my teens on plants and mushrooms. My interest wasn’t anything new. I didn’t feel any hint of a connection with the mycelium network until my late teens. Whitney had already given up asking me. When it first happened, I wasn’t positive it was the mycelium network, but I have to admit, I had the opposite reaction as you when I discovered it. I was very excited. I thought if I could find a way to tap into it and communicate with it, I could not only send and receivemessages from it and through it, but I could maybe develop a few of my own weapons.”
The moment the words were out of her mouth, she wanted to recall them. She even put her fingers over her mouth. She knew better than to be so loose-lipped. It was just that she hadn’t had anyone to talk to since she’d been with her sisters, and even then, they’d had to be so careful. In spite of the fact that she’d broken her connection with Jonas and she no longer even knew how to trust anyone, she wanted to trust him. She wanted to talk to him, openly, honestly. To share what she’d learned with someone like her.
For years she’d had only Middlemist Red as company. Now here Jonas was. Not just another living, breathing human being, but the one person she’d been genetically altered to find irresistible. She stifled a groan and tried to marshal both her wayward tongue and wayward thoughts, as well as build her defenses. Being close to Jonas was so difficult.
“How does the connection work?” Jonas asked. “Would you explain that to me?”
She was grateful he hadn’t asked about what weapons she might be developing. She knew that slip hadn’t escaped him, but he’d given her a pass, most likely knowing she would clam up if he pursued the subject.
“Fungi share more than half their DNA with humans. Did you know that? Mushrooms actually inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Quite a few of our most successful antibiotics were made possible due to shared pathogens. Fungi don’t rot from bacteria.”
Jonas flashed a brief smile that didn’t quite make more of a glint in his golden eyes. “Good to know. So we’re resistant to disease. That’s what you’re telling me, right?”
Her smile was wider than his. “I’m hoping that’s what it means. All those neurons in our bodies are quite like the mycelium, a network delivering messages to our bodies to do what we want themto do, right? They use both chemical and electrical means to do so. Remember I told you that the average human shares more than half their DNA with fungi? You and I share more, so we’re able to connect with an enormous underground system that already exists.”
“That system is used to keep a forest healthy.” He made it a statement but didn’t sound as certain, as if he were pulling up knowledge from some time ago.
“Yes. The mycelium spreads out underground and acts as an extremely efficient communication system. The fungi send chemical, electrical and hormonal signals. Not only do they communicate beneath the ground, but they send pheromones and scent signals.”
For no reason, she found herself blushing. Those eyes on her seemed even more intense. He clearly understood the consequences of what she was telling him. It wasn’t only the genetic pairing that caused their instant and very powerful physical attraction; the mycelium network they were both a part of had contributed as well. Camellia knew there was also a third influence at work, and it was a big one.
“Camellia, I would have looked at you with or without Whitney’s manipulations or any mycelium-produced pheromones. I came into the garden and got so close I was practically on top of you. I couldn’t see you and I couldn’t smell you. For pheromones to work on someone, it requires them to be able to scent you. I didn’t. And I assure you, I have an acute sense of smell. Maybe it’s true that the connections gave us an extra boost, but the attraction was there between us naturally, no matter what.”
