Beyond Regeneration Read online

“Some lab records. Fortunately, client records are stored elsewhere. But breaking in for QNA records makes no sense.” His forehead wrinkled, and he automatically caught his glasses and shoved them more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. “That’s not why I wanted to see you. Charley, I’m sorry I questioned your professionalism, last night. The stories you pursue are your decision.” He frowned at her. “Am I forgiven?”

  “Do you want to know if I’m pursuing the Jabberwocky story?”

  His frown intensified. “It’s your decision.” He didn’t like the fact, but he’d abide by it.

  She smiled. “You’re forgiven, and for the record, I’m not tackling that story. Simple bio-enhancement is sufficiently revolutionary. I’ll leave the story of sensory bio-enhancement for someone else to tackle, when the time is right.”

  “Good.” The muscles of his face relaxed, the line between his brows vanishing. He went to take her hand, and for the first time noticed her grazes.

  She shrugged. “I cut myself on the rocks. It’s not serious.”

  “I’ll wash it for you.” He gripped her wrist, careful not to touch the grazed skin of her palm. “I have antiseptic cream in the office.”

  “Jack.” She dug in her heels. “It’s a graze, and the rocks are clean. I’ll just rinse it in my bathroom.”

  “Soap and water,” he insisted. He released her wrist, but walked with her to her apartment.

  “I can manage,” she said as she opened the apartment door.

  He simply moved closer, his jacket brushing her arm. “I know, but it’ll be easier if you let me help. You don’t want to leave any grit in the cuts.”

  She sighed. Obviously, he wasn’t to be dissuaded.

  He stripped off his jacket and dropped it over the back of the living room sofa before following her into the bathroom. He reached around her to turn the basin tap on, adjusted the flow until it ran warm, then soaped his own hands, rinsed them clean, and soaped them again. “Hold out your hand.”

  “I feel like a child.” But she obeyed. She tilted her hand so that the water washed away any grit, and bit her lower lip when Jack took her hand between his and thoroughly soaped it. The sting of the cuts was forgotten as he massaged the skin, the claws of his left hand carefully retracted.

  Charley wondered how they would feel dragged over her skin.

  “I think it’s clean now.” He rinsed their three hands together, then reached for a towel and patted dry her hand. “All done.” He turned from her and briskly dried his own hands.

  She cleared her throat. “Thanks.”

  He nodded without looking at her. “You’re welcome. If you’ll excuse me, the fuss over the break-in has put us behind schedule.” He met her eyes briefly in the bathroom mirror, then left.

  The shiver that had been building for the last few minutes, rippled through her. For the first time in two years, her body was awake.

  “Hell,” Charley said.

  Chapter Six

  Living in Sydney, Charley didn’t need a car. There were the trains—such as they were—buses, taxis and numerous distractions in walking distance: cafes, bars, theatres, libraries, even supermarkets with the twenty four hour opening times perfect for non-drinking lost souls who needed company. Charley had walked a few eerily empty supermarket aisles when loneliness was easier faced in a brightly lit, public space. But in Margaret River, or more particularly, at New Hope, she missed not owning a car. She was trapped, without the freedom to find distraction through a change of physical surroundings.

  The graze on her palm stung too much to hold a pen, and her mind was too skittery, too shocked, to do useful work anyway.

  The internet provided a limited distraction. She skipped through familiar discussion groups, trying to focus on a fellow writer’s deadline crisis—why were they online moaning about it when they could be writing?—science news and scientists’ views of it, archaeological snippets, and through it all, the thrumming awareness that her body was alive again.

  But it couldn’t be. It was just an aberration, a result of being stuck here, close to people. Maybe it was just that seeing Jack brought back memories of Eric, reminding her of a time when everything had been possible? Or was it that Jack was so familiar with amputations and physical oddities that she trusted him to see beyond them to her as a person? And he did—which was even more terrifying.

  Her physical awareness of him hadn’t been one-sided.

  Jack wanted her.

  “You are such a coward,” Charley whispered to herself. She abandoned her laptop.

  How many things scared her these days? Her mind flinched from further thoughts of Jack. If she let herself care for him, or anyone, there would be pain later.

  But there were other fears she could confront. Fears like her collywobbles in the QNA lab. She wasn’t scared of regeneration, was she?

  She looked down at the sleeve of her sweater. A Sydney dressmaker had cut and stitched it to hide the scarred stump of her arm. It had grown familiar, and she’d learned to compensate for the loss of her hand’s weight, standing straight rather than dragging down on the opposite right side. It had been a conscious discipline with her balancing a book on her head and walking round and round the confines of her flat, determined not to list.

  “I am not afraid of regeneration.” But she took the longer route to the QNA lab, delaying as she circled the central building to walk up the front porch steps.

  Focus on the garden. Concentrate on the journey, and the scary destination couldn’t loom so large. And when did I learn to live life within the constraints of coping strategies?

  Her mouth compressed and she focused on the flowers scattered with seeming randomness.

  The garden deserved attention. Give it another two or three weeks and it would be spectacularly in flower. She would be gone by then, with New Hope a memory rather than a life-challenging opportunity. She would be back in her Sydney nest.

  Charley bent and rubbed the leaves of a pineapple sage, inhaling the sweet tangy scent. The gardener must be some miracle worker to have the sage growing so close to the sea. Charley noticed a few other old favorites from her grandma’s garden mingling with the predominant planting of native species—alyssum, daisies, acanthus. She straightened up and caught Lillian watching her from the office window. The two women stared at each other, until Charley raised her hand in a tentative wave.

  Lillian dropped the blinds abruptly into place.

  “You’re a real hit in that quarter,” Charley muttered. She jogged up the stairs and found Lillian ostentatiously busy at the computer, her back to the door and the keyboard rattling a vicious staccato rhythm.

  Charley shrugged and looked into Jack’s office. Empty, but comforting. She halted. Through the window she could see a security firm’s car pull up and two uniformed men alight. They moved alertly. One stopped at the top of the porch steps, the other continued in.

  In the reception room, Lillian interrogated him sharply. Who was he, and why was he there?

  “Mr. Janz requested security. My colleague will stand by the front door and I’ll walk around the resort.”

  “We’re a clinic,” Lillian snapped. “Armed guards will spook the clients.”

  Or intrigue them, Charley thought wryly. Then her brain caught up with her ears. Armed?

  She walked out of Jack’s office into the heat of Lillian’s glare and the guard’s quick assessment.

  No threat. His shoulders relaxed, broadcasting his assessment of her as obviously as if he’d spoken. “I’ll be outside if you need me.”

  “Huh.” Lillian pulled a drawer open, apparently for the satisfaction of slamming it shut. But she didn’t dispute the guards’ right to patrol.

  At New Hope, Michael Janz still had influence, at least with Lillian.

  Charley took that thought with her as she walked down the corridor, looking for Jack. Had he agreed to the presence of armed guards? And what were they guarding? Not New Hope clients’ peace of mind. Maybe Jack’s bio-enhance
ment records? After all, the mysterious Jabberwocky project was Michael’s and involved sensory bio-enhancement. He had a vested interest in protecting the intellectual property of bio-enhancement.

  Or was it even more simple? Had the break-in been about acquiring the raw materials of regeneration and bio-enhancement, the QNA, itself?

  Jack stood in the corridor outside the QNA lab, talking with Alan Do.

  Charley’s heart jolted and picked up speed. Her mind weaseled for excuses. Perhaps now was not the best time to ask for a second viewing of the QNA?

  Except Jack saw her and smiled.

  “There are security guards,” she blurted. “With guns.”

  Alan Do ducked his head.

  Jack’s smiled vanished. “I’m expecting them. Charley, have you met Alan?”

  Introductions smoothed over the abrupt abandonment of the security guard question.

  Alan murmured appropriately, but his gaze seemed hardly to register Charley. He was stuck in some torment of his own.

  She decided to ignore him. “I realize it mightn’t be the best time to ask, Jack, but could I have another look at the QNA lab? I’d like to describe it, and I’m afraid I can’t really remember the details.” Because on first viewing, she’d panicked.

  Was hope really so scary?

  “Of course.” Jack put his hand on the door handle. “Don’t touch anything. I’d stay but—” He checked his watch. “The break-in and dealing with police have squashed my schedule. Perhaps Alan—”

  But Alan had vanished, silently. Clearly, he didn’t care to supervise her visit, either.

  Jack smiled wryly. “The door will lock behind you. Just pull it shut when you leave.”

  “Thanks.” She appreciated his trust.

  “No problem.” He touched her shoulder lightly as he walked past. His footsteps quickened as he headed for the front of the building, Lillian and the security guards.

  Charley drew a deep breath and ignored the lingering tingle of Jack’s touch on her shoulder. Privacy suited her for this visit to the lab. She hadn’t lied. Her story did require a description of the QNA lab, but she was here primarily to face her demons: all the emotions that had whirled up in her first visit to the lab.

  The door snicked shut behind her.

  She stared down at green culture dishes with their near-invisible QNA colonies, and found herself remembering an old friend from Africa.

  Elijah had been a local pathologist at the hospital where Eric worked. He’d become a friend, and his friendship had opened the strange world of Africa to them in new ways. That was what she remembered now, the flowering delight of welcome, the sense of venturing into new worlds, which had accompanied Elijah’s infrequent visits to their house. His lab had been an oasis of sanity in the busy hospital, the equipment battered but meticulously clean.

  Charley felt her tension relax in the sense of recalled welcome, and it spilled over into her perception of the present moment.

  The QNA lab was pleasant. It was well-lit and a gentle lullaby played. Charley flipped her notebook open and placed it on a high worktable. She scribbled a few notes.

  “Peaceful. Classical music.” She glanced at the sage green walls. “A conservatory without plants. A million miles from the stereotype of a sterile lab.”

  The memories of a Nigerian hospital, filled with the casualties, screaming and bloody, of a bus crash, flooded through the breach in her walls of memory. Although she’d lacked medical training, Charley had helped deal with the aftermath of disaster. She had sat with patients, carried supplies, mopped up, and everywhere Eric and the other staff had been frantically, professionally helping.

  But no human effort could heal tragedy.

  “Oh God.” She grabbed her open notebook and ran. The lab door swung shut behind her, and the memory faded into a jumble of welling emotion. She forced herself to slow down. She closed the notebook and slid it and her pen into her bag. Her quick steps had taken her close to the front of the building, and she continued on.

  Jack’s door was closed and Lillian absent, and Charley hurried on, grateful to be unnoticed. Her stupid eyes were brimming with tears.

  That was the problem with regeneration, with all the treatments available to her—they were elitist. She felt the guilt of prosperity, of knowing she had options where others had only pain. It was a twist on survivor guilt, perhaps even a distortion of her grief over Eric’s death. What right did she have to heal when he had died, when millions suffered?

  She walked around the corner of the building and into Alan, who was escaping through a side door. She recognized the self-protective hunch of his shoulders and the blank stare. She widened her own eyes and let the wind whip the tears from them. “Dr. Do, Alan, are you off to lunch?”

  “Uh.” Momentarily, he looked as if he had never heard of lunch, then he nodded. “Yes.”

  “May I join you? If you’re going into town, that is.” Despite his less than enthusiastic response, she was desperate to leave New Hope for a while to get some perspective. Alan could provide transport, and an acceptable reason for lunching away. “I have some questions. Jack said you’re in charge of the QNA lab.”

  Alan became very still. “Yes. I am.”

  A door slammed inside the building and he flinched.

  What’s wrong with the man? The break-in? She’d almost forgotten it. Did he blame himself? People could be irrational. Or was it a personal matter?

  She considered letting him make a dash for whatever hiding place he’d been slipping away to, but found she wasn’t that unselfish. “I’m sorry I don’t have a car, Alan, but if you could drive us, I’ll shout you lunch in town. A change of scene would be pleasant.” Please.

  His darting gaze focused on her. “Lunch in town?” It was as if he only just heard her. He seized on the suggestion. “Of course, you have questions for me. Jack said to offer you every assistance. Lillian couldn’t say I was running out.” The last, barely audible sentence seemed to clinch the matter for him. “Lunch in town is a good idea, Charlotte. My car is this way.”

  It was a three year old sedan, white, clean and unremarkable.

  He opened the car door for Charley, closed it gently and then drove out of New Hope with half his attention on the empty rear vision mirror. As the car’s tires left the driveway for the main road, dual sighs of relief filled it.

  Charley’s mouth twitched. They were both runaways. She settled back in her seat and watched the shifting pattern of bushland and farmland until both gave way to the town.

  They ate fish and chips at a beach side cafe. In front of them, gulls screamed and soared on the air currents. Around them, tourists wandered aimlessly, occasionally stopping to snap a photograph with frowning intensity.

  “This was a good idea,” Alan said, unwinding more and more with every greasy, salted chip.

  Charley nodded. She kept the conversation going with simple questions about the QNA and the challenges Alan had overcome to grow them so successfully.

  He was enthusiastic over the benefits of coconut water and the importance of temperature control. “I know it is not scientific,” he added shyly. “But I play them jazz recordings. I think they multiply faster.” He retreated into his fish and chips once more after that confession.

  “Do you spend a lot of time in the QNA lab?” she asked, charmed by his quiet manner.

  “About three hours a day. Sometimes more if I am harvesting QNA for surgery and preparing new dishes for population regrowth.”

  He stared out at the ocean. “My parents were Buddhist. I think background influences us more than we’re willing to admit. Sometimes I wonder—not that I believe it—if bio-enhancement will take more readily if the person undergoing the adaptation receives cells from an animal that their soul wore in an earlier incarnation.”

  Charley gave a little laugh, no more than a catch of breath. “I don’t know if I can see Jack as a cat in a previous life.”

  “Can’t you?” Alan shrugged. Apparently, h
e could.

  She studied him curiously. “Do you really think…?” She stopped her skepticism, and watched the flight of a seagull.

  The gulls were graceful in the air, and unattractive strident beggars and scavengers on land. Did context make so much difference to their nature, to everyone’s nature?

  “Maybe different people’s bodies will be more accepting of different animal parts,” she said into the silence. “There’s a long history of shamanism where people adopt the shape or nature of an animal that expresses some truth about them and what they want.”

  “Yes.” Alan looked at Charley with interest lighting his eyes. “Shamanism. Calling on powers that we desperately want, but which we don’t believe we have inside us. What John’s doing does build on a long tradition of human dreaming.”

  “Jack, and you, too.”

  He shrugged aside the suggestion that he shared the glory and responsibility of bio-enhancement with Jack. “It’s John who thought of the possibility of bio-enhancement and how to achieve it.” The animation of discussing shamanism dropped from Alan. His mouth set in a thin, tense line again.

  Charley turned the subject. “I noticed the new security personnel swarming, and of course, the breakfast crowd was buzzing with news of the break-in.”

  “The break-in, it was nothing.” He crumpled his fish and chips wrapper. “I must return to the lab.”

  “Okay.” She tossed the remains of her meal into a bin and followed him to the car. She waited till they had both buckled their seatbelts. “How did Lillian take the break-in?”

  The car started off with a jerk.

  “Sorry.” Alan focused on the small town traffic. Finally, he said. “Lillian was upset. Someone messed around with our records.” He cast a hunted look at Charley and switched on the radio.

  The black Porsche parked by the front steps declared Michael Janz’s presence at New Hope.

  Alan’s knuckles tightened on the steering wheel, but his small sedan continued slow and smooth up the drive. They parked in the shade of a gum tree. Michael hadn’t risked its nuts or evidence of its avian visitors on his paintwork by parking beneath it.