Page 6 of Tamed By Her Touch

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.