The Compendium Read Free Page A

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