“Well, this is where I work,” Colin said, sweeping an arm in front of him with a wry tone in his voice as they entered the growing room. “I doubt you’ll find it much more interesting than being at home. But you can spend the day here with me and see what you think. If you don’t like it, we can find you something to do in town.”

Her lips parted, no doubt to start in with questions, but Colin stayed her with his hands again. “Sorry, but I need you to save your questions for a bit,” he said. “I have to get on a comm with the others this morning, but I can show you what to do before I go into the office.”

He led her closer to the large table with the batch of seedlings. Several had just broken through the surface this morning. But most were just still hints of pushed up earth. “This is our latest and most promising crop, Condrafurs. They’re hybrids.” He lifted a small clear bottle from the edge of the table that was filled with a handful of tiny black dots and shook it. “These are the seeds. We’ve tinkered a little with their genetic code, hoping that they’ll fair better than the other things we’ve tried to grow. There’s no telling until they get a little bigger,” he said.

He put his hands on his hips as he surveyed them, knowing what was to come already based on the bio scans, projected mutations, and the fact that the terminals had less than a one percent error rate. “They’re supposed to look something like that when they’re grown,” he said motioning to the picture he mounted on the wall as good luck.

“They need to be given nutrients and water. As I mentioned, normally there’s a droid that does that twice per day. But I’m waiting for its replacement parts, so it has to be done by hand. You’ll be doing me a favor,” he said with a smile. “I’ve been doing it since the droid went down. They each get exactly the same amount. It’s a boring task, but I hope you won’t mind.”

“Not at all,” she said looking eager.

He provided her with the equipment, quickly showed her what to do, then watched as she fed and watered one in the first row.

“Can I touch them?” she asked, surprising him.

He shrugged. “I don’t see why not. As long as you don’t damage them, they’ll be fine.” He glanced at the terminal along the wall, which blinked a reminder. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.” He strode into the office for his meeting, new worries crowding his mind.

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GENEVIEVE STOOD FOR a moment, gazing around the odd room which was filled with more strange containers and devices that made her wonder. Then she placed a hand on her midriff as a mild nausea came upon her. Had breakfast not agreed with her? But, no, the nausea wasn’t actually centered in her midriff, or anywhere in her physical being. That much she could tell. It was more of a twinge at the edges of her energy, her life force.

Jinn were rarely ill. And, so far from home with no way to contact anyone she knew, it made her worry. But perhaps it was simply an effect of eating strange food and being in a completely new environment. Or maybe it was a result of the ride over. Colin had a strange form of transportation that had been hidden behind the housing unit. It was a small silver pod-like structure that lifted and glided over the ground smoothly and quietly, as though they were in a bubble effortlessly moving through the air along its surface. It had been a huge thrill, so much better than apporting, and ten times better than the plane to the island. But maybe the ill feeling she had now was a result of that. It didn’t seem to be getting worse, so she began her task and hoped it would go away on its own.

She stopped for a moment to have a look at the picture Colin had pointed out. It showed a whole field of plants with broad, purple-veined leaves and what looked like oblong berries growing from their tops. Fascinating how seeds could become so much more. She returned to the table and lifted the strange white row of tubes that Colin had loaded for her. There were six in all and they fed and watered three plants in a row simultaneously. She watched the marker on its side carefully as she emptied a fraction of its contents by pushing the button on its side, then moved to the next ones. In her mind, she kept track of the grid of containers wanting to be sure she didn’t miss any. She had a great interest in seeing what happened with them. In her mind, she’d already labeled them baby plants. The thought made her smile and feel a special fondness for them and their journey as she made her way down the middle of the table with the tubes.

In Tarmange, the city where she’d grown up, everything had been engineered and embellished by a millennia of Jinn magic. Every detail had been attended to from the largest architectural details such as homes, streets, and plazas down to the smallest like signs and buttons. Everything could be attributed to a Jinn that had come before or those who had augmented it afterward, even the jewels, paintings, sculptures, and rich fabrics of her home. As a result, most of the plants she’d seen were the ones that came at mealtimes.

She reached out a finger to touch the tiny and fragile stem of one of the seedlings, just poking up through a small clump of dirt. It was a pale-green that almost glowed in the light. And, as her fingertips came into contact with the delicate appendage, she was struck with the strange realization that the nauseas feeling wasn’t coming from her. It was coming from the plants. How she knew, she wasn’t certain. But now, she could more clearly make it out.

She touched the slender stalk of another seedling to gain its impression and then a third. No, they didn’t feel well to her at all, and she couldn’t help but feel sorry for them. They, like her, were in a completely foreign environment struggling to do their best to survive. And, as she continued with her task of providing the nutrients and water to each, she couldn’t help whispering words of encouragement to them and picturing in her mind how they would look once they’d passed this stage and were stronger.

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DURING THE COMM, COLIN found his gaze often wandering to the monitor to see what Genevieve was doing in the other room. In the monitor, he could see her lips moving and wondered what she was saying, which was distracting. Thankfully, the meeting was short. No one had much to offer, including him. He’d dug through a great deal of the research, both past and present, before returning home last night. All that remained to try were more variations of the combinations they’d already tried.

“So, let’s give it a shot then,” Colin said as they wrapped up. “Aardin, how soon can you have the new nutrient mix available?”

“This evening,” the nutrient scientist said. “I’ll send it around to everyone via drone, as usual, when it’s ready.”

Colin nodded and pulled up the notice he’d received that morning. “Also, the shipment of supplies, along with some additional ones Director Banes approved for the helpmates, are arriving today. I’ll have to go to the platform later to sort it all out. Since it looks like we’ll be leaving soon, it’s probably better not to unpack all of it, just enough to cover the remaining mission days and two weeks following while we’re packing up for evac. Can each of you send me a list of which of your men acquired helpmates so I can allocate it?”

The four of them perked up at his mention of the platform. It had turned into a makeshift after-work meeting spot since they’d arrived.

“Why don’t we meet you there for a little down time?” Brace said. “Might be good to shift our mindset for an hour or so and for everyone to get to know the new arrivals.”

Colin hesitated. Personally, he’d been intending to spend the evening in the lab trying to work out a solution. But Brace was right. They were humans, not machines. And sometimes a little down time actually helped spur thought. He glanced at Genevieve in the monitor again. She, too, could use some interaction with the others, it would help her adjustment to her new life.

“Sounds good,” he said. “See you there.” He smiled at the little cheer they let out and ended the comm then wandered into the growing room to check on Genevieve.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

She was leaning forward to reach the seedlings on the far side of the table. “Good. It’s easy.”

He couldn’t help noticing the way her backside curved as she stood like that and how her dark ponytail swung forward over her shoulder. It was long, and the tips of hair nearly brushed the containers below. He’d had to help her brush it and put it up this morning because that had been another task she was unfamiliar with. He couldn’t help noticing how soft and silky it was as he’d undone a few tangles and then gathered it in his fist to tie it. The unbidden fantasy of wrapping it around his fist as he pulled her head back to kiss her neck had sent blood rushing down to his pants. And, before they left, he’d had to take a few moments in the bathroom, splashing cold water on his face, to relax his erection.

“Were you talking to the plants before?”

She gave a small laugh, her pink lips curling upward at the corners. “I was. Yes. You heard me? I didn’t think I was speaking very loudly.”

“I can see you on the monitor in the other room, but I couldn’t hear anything. What were you saying to them?”

She ducked her head, shifted the feeder to the next row, and pushed the button. “I know it’s silly, but I was just giving them encouragement. It’s amazing, don’t you think, how they fight their way through the darkness and dirt and later become something bigger and stronger?”

“It’s been a while since I’ve thought about it, but yes.” He glanced at the seedlings, then back at her. “Have they said anything back?”

Her eyes widened and she straightened to look back and forth from him to the table. “They speak?”

He laughed. “No. I was just teasing you.”

“Oh.” This time she did smile. A big bright beautiful smile. The first real one he’d seen from her, and it changed her entirely, making her look younger ... fresh. Like a maiden who had the world sitting at her feet but didn’t know it. He felt as if he was getting a glimpse of the real Genevieve. One who was light, flirtatious and—if it was possible—even more stunningly beautiful than when she was brooding.

“Do the plants where you come from speak?”

“I have no idea. Like I said, I know it’s silly.” She tossed her head, flipping the ponytail back behind her shoulder, and held the feeder unit up. “This is empty.”

Colin approached to take it from her. “It’s not silly at all. In fact, there’s plenty of studies showing that plants do respond to sound vibrations. We’ve even tried a couple of batches where we played music here in the lab for them.”

“Really? But if it works, why did you stop playing it?”

He pulled more of the nutritional concentrate from the storage cabinet and moved to the sink to refill the corresponding tubes with first water, then concentrate. She moved closer to watch him as he worked. “The music helps to make them grow, but that’s not really the issue we’re trying to solve. We need to get them to stop mutating after they emerge from the dirt.”

She glanced back at the rows of delicate green sprouts. “I have a good feeling about these ones. I think they’re going to do well.”

Colin’s doubts and the data strongly contradicted her, but maybe there was something in her optimism that would bring good luck. If not for the sprouts, at least for the team. It had been a while since anyone had been as hopeful as she was right now. He smiled. “I hope you’re right.”

“Why do they keep mutating?” she asked.

He snapped the unit in is hands back together and handed it to her. “If we knew the answer to that, we could all go home,” he said.

One of her slender brows furrowed. “You have to stay here and make plants grow where they don’t want to grow? I don’t understand. Why don’t you just eat the ones that grow on Earth?”

“You mean Eardia.”

She blinked. “Yes, that’s what I meant,” she said and moved back to the table to resume her task.

He shook his head and frowned. How could she not know what happened on Eardia? Everyone knew. “You know, sometimes I don’t know if you’re doing this to make fun of me, or if you really don’t know all the things you claim you don’t know.”

She remained silent, but he could see that she’d stiffened slightly and purposely kept her eyes down on her work.

He signed, ran a hand through his hair, and gave her the short explanation. “We can’t eat the plants because we ruined the planet, basically.”

“How?” she asked, glancing up at him.

There it was again, that rabid curiosity of hers. He could see it in her eyes, and it was the purity of it that convinced him of the truth of her lack of knowledge more than anything. She was a puzzle. But if there was one thing he’d learned about puzzles, it was that he always eventually figured them out. With enough patience, all the pieces would come together and he would finally see the whole picture.

“It happened a long time ago. In an effort to develop more efficient farming we started messing with plant genetics even more than in the past. After the total ban on pesticides was passed, farmers got sick of losing a sizable percentage of their crops year after year.”

He leaned back against the counter behind him and folded his arms across his chest. “Because of the skyrocketing birthrate on Eardia and colonies on other planets, scientists began engineering bug-resistant, rapid-growth plants. The problem was that anything bug-resistant was also inedible. Even though they were extremely careful and worked with the plants in biosecure labs, it didn’t matter. Spores got out into the wind and took over the planet. The massive shift in flora affected not only the environment but the fauna, too. The atmosphere changed as the native plants died out, making formerly good land unusable. Entire species of animals became extinct, others adapted somehow. There was no stopping it. The last stores of the original, edible strains were taken off-planet. How can you not know any of this? It’s a history that has affected every human no matter where they are in the multiverse.”

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GENEVIEVE HAD TROUBLE imagining a crisis that could affect an entire planet and its people. It was so huge that her mind balked at the enormity of it.

Colin continued, “We’ve been able to establish green houses and even limited crops on other worlds, but it’s not enough. There’s always an obstacle that keeps the plants from really taking root and propagating on their own.”

Suddenly, Genevieve grasped what Colin and her team had been trying to do. “You’ve been trying to create a whole new Ear— Uh, Eardia?” It shocked her that humans would even attempt such a feat, that they would even imagine such a thing was possible.

He nodded. “Eventually.”

Tampering with living things on the scale they were had to go against all that the creator had intended. Or did they have the right to do so? Was that power also given to them along with dominion of Earth? She couldn’t remember. She just knew that Jinn were forbidden from interfering in certain ways with life of any kind, for fear of incurring the creator’s wrath.

Jinn had the power to harness and shape the inanimate, which they took great pride in. But they still jealously coveted the home that had originally been theirs. There was nothing they could do, however. They could not harm the creator’s precious humans, though many delighted in playing pranks on them.

A million more questions ran through her mind that she badly wanted to ask Colin, starting with why he had no knowledge of Earth. He was clearly human. But if he wasn’t from there, and didn’t know anything about it, then where in existence had Chin-Sun and Itembe sent her?

He was still standing there against the counter next to the basin, watching her. But from the calculating look on his face, she thought better of continuing down that train of thought. He was a very intelligent man. Had he figured out that she wasn’t human? But it was better not to provoke him into forcing to her to confess what she really was. He’d already extended a generous amount of unquestioning acceptance to her and she had no idea how he’d react to the truth. Not that it mattered. She had no way to prove to him that she was Jinn. He already thought she was lying about her lack of knowledge about their world. Why give him more to ponder? For all intents and purposes, she would soon be declared one of them anyway. Why not practice assuming the role now? Better to change the subject.

“You said you were married before,” Genevieve said as she finished administering nutrients to the last row of seedlings. “What happened to your wife?”

He paused before answering, and looked away from her, his eyes going out of focus. “She passed away about two years ago.”

“Here? On this planet? In your home?”

“Our home,” he corrected her, his eye flicking back to her face. “Her name was Maddy,” he said. “She passed on my previous assignment. We were on a planet much like this one. Well, most of the planets I’m assigned to are like this one because of the nature of my work. What about you? Did you have someone back home?”

Genevieve shook her head and suddenly felt shy. “No. Nobody.” She returned the conversation back to him. “Was there an accident?” she asked, drawing closer with the tubes in her hands.

“No.” He swallowed hard as though the word had caught in the dry air of his throat. “She just ... gave up. She suffered from depression. And being so far away from home and family all the time ... she just couldn’t handle the solitude, I guess. I came home and found her dead. She swallowed an entire bottle of medicine and just slipped away.” His eyes glistened with grief.

Genevieve set the tubes down on the counter and placed a hand on his forearm. Though he wasn’t a very expressive man, the pain radiating from his soul was almost palpable. “I’m so sorry,” she said. Death among Jinn happened far less often than it did among humans due to the difference in their life spans, but she knew that didn’t mean it was any less painful.

Genevieve squeezed his forearm, and looked up at him. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s okay. I should be able to talk about it by now.”

But the anguish behind his eyes said otherwise, and she felt bad about prying. Then, she was reminded of him yelling at her this morning about the changes she’d made to his home and she gasped. “Her things,” she said. “I ruined her things.” And this time she felt tears gathering in her own eyes.

How could I have been so stupid? At the time, when she’d found the boxes of women’s clothing and possessions, it hadn’t occurred to her that they might be irreplaceable. She’d just been focused on making the house look better. In the Jinn world, material things were easily replaced or remade. It was so easy to conjure what they needed in endless supply that she hadn’t immediately put together that Colin wouldn’t be able to do the same.

She raised her hands to her cheeks. “Colin, I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry I am!”

He let out a long sighing breath. “It’s all right ... actually, you probably did me a favor. I should have gotten rid of that stuff a long time ago. I don’t know why I held on to it so long. Maybe it’s better this way. They’re transformed and serving a new purpose, just like she is.”

Genevieve couldn’t help it, she threw her arms around him in a tight hug, wishing there was more she could do to apologize and take away his pain.

“It’s all right,” he said, wrapping his arms around her in return.

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “Why can’t I do anything right? You’ve been so kind to me, and I’ve been nothing but a burden.” Sadly, it was the story of her life. He’d called her selfish this morning, and the words had lingered in the back of her mind all day. But how could she contribute to others when she had no talent to contribute with? Even when she tried to find ways to contribute, it always ended up a disaster just like this morning. Why even bother to try?

But now wasn’t the time to be thinking of herself. She wiped the gathering moisture from her eyes and noticed a strange warmth forming in her chest at being held by Colin in this way. Though it felt good to indulge in burying her face in his strong chest for a few moments and breathe in his earthy scent, it wasn’t right that he was the one to be comforting her after what she’d done.

She pulled back and looked up at him. “I’ll make it up to you,” she said. “You have my word.”

“There’s nothing to make up,” he said, giving her a kind smile. “These things happen. It’s fine.”

Genevieve was struck again by his generosity and inner strength. He was like no one she’d ever met and she couldn’t help admiring him. “I will. I want to,” she said firmly. “I’m going to find a way.”

Then he gave her a cheeky grin. “Okay. Well, if you really mean it—”

“I do. I’ll do anything,” she said earnestly.

“Then the store room could really use a good cleaning and reorganizing.”

She groaned in response. But then they both laughed, and she followed him as he led the way.