Thankfully this time the herd bolted into the cave instead of away, racing up the tunnel toward their home. Zowan followed at a wheezing trot, up the muddy floor and through the gateway, which was closing as he stepped under it. The moment its bottom edge hit the ground and he heard the whoosh of the air being exhausted from the chamber and replaced with fresh, he tore off the respirator and sagged against the metal barrier, sucking in air as if he’ d been suffocating.
Once he’ d caught his breath, he hurried after the goats, a deep fear curdling in his gut as he processed what Gaias had told him: toxicity spike. The rise so fast it had triggered the gate to shut before the six Enforcers could get back inside.
He was turning back to go try to open the gate when two medics from the clinic raced down the corridor toward him, both of them in hazmat suits. Ignoring his pleas for someone to go and get the gate open, they stripped off Zowan’s suit and the tunic and britches he wore underneath, tossed neutralizing powder all over his naked body, then wrapped him in a protective shroud and escorted him hurriedly through deserted passageways to the Enclave’s infirmary for emergency detoxification and treatment. One that all knew he might not survive.
Unity meetings were held in various locations, depending on the department. Since the Department of Applied Genetics was almost entirely labs and supply closets, they met in the third floor’s Desert Vista conference room. All meetings were mentored by members of K-J’s revered Inner Circle, most of whom were the actual department heads, as well. Because Cam had been brought in to be head of AG, but had not yet been invited to join that Inner Circle, their meetings were mentored by Assistant Director and Head of Human Resources, Genevieve Viascola.
When Cam and Pecos arrived, they found everyone seated in a circle listening to Gen enumerate the causes of stress. As Pecos returned to his own seat, Cam took the only remaining one, which was immediately to Gen’s right. She paused in her lecture to welcome him dryly and direct his attention to the handout that lay on his chair. With that dignified British accent she sounded perfectly poised, but he saw the anger in her eyes and knew there’d be reprisals.
He spotted Lacey McHenry right off, sitting across the circle and flanked by his technicians Jade and Mel. She seemed more relaxed than when she’ d confronted him in his office earlier. Perhaps she’ d grasped the meaning behind his words, and had taken his advice to heart to let the incident go. Certainly that’s what this meeting was encouraging her to do.
Gen assured them that experiencing a crisis of mental stability was nothing to be ashamed of. She was willing to bet that everyone in the room had experienced one sort of breakdown or another—or at least had come very close to it. To illustrate, she talked of her own depression as a young woman years ago. Then, to Cam’s horror, she encouraged everyone else to share their own experiences, in the interest of being “open.”
Jade started off by admitting to her own bouts of paranoia and near breakdown when she’d arrived. Another girl confided she was on Valium for the first six months she was at the Institute. As each story was told, others grew more comfortable sharing their own events, speaking one after the other as they went around the circle.
Cam alone grew increasingly tense as the progression moved toward him. For the first time in years, he felt old shields going up, surrounding him like a tube of accumulating layers of Plexiglas. The others’ voices grew increasingly garbled and faint, while his own heart beat a loud, rapid pounding in his chest.
Then they were all staring at him and he realized it was his turn. Sweat popped out on his brow and a prickle gripped the back of his neck, along with an old familiar sense of something stalking him. He wanted to jump up, cast the chair aside, and confront it, even though he had no weapon, even knowing there was nothing there.
Nothing there.
When the silence had stretched on too long to be comfortable, Gen nudged his arm, and for a moment sound and sense of the others returned as she prompted him: “I understand even
you
have struggled with a mental health issue, Cameron, religious faith and all.” It was always on a first-name basis here in the unity meetings. And she always had to bring his faith into it.
He stared at her, struggling to keep his face and voice neutral. How could she know of his battles with post-traumatic stress disorder? His medical records had been expunged along with the rest of the mission details. “I think you’ve got me confused with someone else, Gen.”
She cocked a skeptical brow. “You’ve never struggled with any mental health issues?”
“No,” he said firmly. Nothing official, anyway. And certainly nothing he could talk about.
She held his gaze evenly, pushing at him with her silence and the pressure of twenty-eight pairs of wildly curious eyes upon him to spill his guts. He had a pretty good idea how they’d react if he told them he’d been irrationally compelled to turn on every light in his apartment last night, where he’d not even tried to sleep for fear of the nightmares he was certain he would have had. Where he’ d popped a DVD into his player but had no idea what had been on it, for he was too busy jumping at every sound, checking all the rooms in his three-room suite, and shivering at the distant thumping of the choppers as they crisscrossed the desert with their searchlights. Which was how he’ d known they’d flown all night and why he’d concluded they’d failed to find the intruder.
Of course, he couldn’t tell them any of that, because that would lead to the flashbacks he’ d suffered today, and then on to the PTSD, which he wasn’t supposed to talk about, seeing as all the causal events were classified. Even if they hadn’t been, he’ d repressed so many of the memories, he couldn’t remember them himself. And didn’t want to.
When it became apparent he was not going to speak, Gen smiled, quite insincerely, and said, “Well, thank you for being so candid with us, Cameron.” She turned to Espinosa on her left. “What about you, Manny? You’ve achieved a lot of things. You must have had your share of stress to cope with.”
Manny—young, handsome, swarthy, and ultra-confident— shrugged. “Actually, Gen, I’ve never worried about that sort of thing. What others call stress, I consider a challenge. Maybe it’s because I know I can always make things work out for me.” He glanced past her to Cam and smiled.
As they continued around the circle, Cam began to relax, though with the withdrawal of fear came the inevitable embarrassment and self-condemnation. Thankfully, once the sharing got back to Lacey, the heart-baring session ended and Gen had them all get up and divide into teams of three. Each team she presented with two Nerf balls—one blue, one yellow—for a ball-passing exercise intended to relax them even as it “sharpened hand-eye coordination, stimulated areas of the prefrontal cortex, and provided an exercise in teamwork.” Standing in a straight line, each trio would pass the balls from one to the other in a continuous loop all the while keeping time to the music.
When she was finished with her demonstration, Manny erupted in incredulity. “You really expect us to do that? Who thinks these things up?”
Genevieve’s brightly painted lips tightened in displeasure. “Director Swain himself selects our weekly activities. But perhaps I should recommend your name to him as someone who would like to make the selections instead.”
Manny said nothing to that, and Viascola got them started. It was harder than it looked but was still a waste of time in Cam’s view, though better by far than the gut-spilling sessions. Thankfully, she only devoted fifteen minutes to the exercise.
Afterward, as she collected the balls into a mesh bag, she pointed out the moral: as long as everyone focused on his part, the balls were smoothly passed; let one mind drift to someone else’s part, though, and the pass would be missed, breaking the chain of motion.
“What does this have to do with stress management? Just that, if we’d simply learn to focus on what we have to do now, not the past, not the future, but right now, we’d find ourselves a lot less stressed. The key is concentration. And here at K-J, we’ve found the practice of meditating to be an excellent way to develop that power and reduce stress.”
She sent them all back to their seats, then slid a cardboard box from under her chair and pressed back the flaps to reveal it to be full of two-inch black plastic cubes. Plucking one out, she held it up for all to see. “Meditation is aided if you have a focal point, and we have one of these little cubes for each of you. The black box, as you all know, is the icon of our Institute, but do any of you know why?”
No one did, so she explained: “In science, a black box is something with known performance characteristics but unknown components and means of operation—we know what it does, but not why or how. Since our purpose at K-J is to discover those whys and hows, the black box is a perfect symbol. And the perfect item to use as a point of focus.”
After a brief lecture on meditation, she devoted the last five minutes to a guided practice session and ended the meeting.
Cam leapt to his feet and started to slip between the chairs, but Gen caught his arm before he got more than two steps and asked him to stay behind. As soon as the room was emptied and the door had closed, she lit into him. “I asked you specifically to be here today, Cameron.”
“I
was
here.”
“Fifteen minutes late. And only because I sent Pecos to drag you out of your lab. Even here, you made your disinterest obvious, refusing to cooperate with our activities.”
“I did your ball-pass thing without argument.”
“And all the while made it obvious you thought it was idiotic.”
“It
was
idiotic!”
“And now you continue to be disrespectful and insubordinate.”
Cam drew a deep breath and said no more, enduring her subsequent tongue-lashing stoically. Since he’ d been the victim of her antagonism—subtle and not so subtle—since the day he’ d arrived at Kendall-Jakes nine months ago, that was getting easier. He thought at first it was his Christianity, for she never missed the opportunity to take a swipe at it. Lately, though, he’d begun to wonder if she was jealous; if maybe it wasn’t just young, pretty women who threatened her, but anyone to whom Swain took a strong liking.
Born into an upper-crust British family, she’ d been the wild, rebellious daughter, running off to France at nineteen to hook up with Parker Swain, American exile and bad-boy intellectual. Together they’d traveled the world searching out secrets in the medical and religious practices of both ancient and aboriginal cultures. Swain had tutored her in the sciences, and she’ d become one of his top research assistants, eventually taking over as CEO of his research and development corporation.
Though they’d never married, she’d borne him two sons and was still so madly in love with him she alone seemed unaware that at forty-seven she’ d become too old for his tastes. Though Swain still trusted her more than anyone, everyone knew she would never share his bed again.
In some ways Cam felt sorry for her.
“Are you even listening to me?”
He snapped back to the moment. “Come on, Gen. You hate these ridiculous games as much as I do. Why can’t you just—”
“They are Parker’s direct instruction and desire for us, his employees,” she declared. “He believes they benefit all of us, help us to bond in shared endeavors and in baring our vulnerabilities.”
He was tempted to roll his eyes but confined himself to shaking his head. “They’re just more hoops for us to jump through so everyone will know he’s calling the shots.”
“He
is
calling the shots, Cameron. And he wants you at these meetings.”
“He only suggests it.”
“He’s only being polite. It hurts him that you are so stubborn. Especially after all he’s done for you. . . .”
Cam frowned at her. “I said I’d be there next time. On time.”
She exhaled in exasperation. “I’ll hold you to that, you know.”
He nodded, shifting his weight to make his escape. She cut him off by addressing an entirely new subject. “I’ve reviewed your request of transfer for Manuel Espinosa, and the answer is no. We can’t have him swabbing floors in the animal facility. It wouldn’t be right—he’s a graduate of MIT. Winner of multiple prestigious awards.”
Cam folded his arms and frowned at her. “Well, apparently he’s decided that’s all he needs to accomplish in life, because he’s been worthless to me. Too busy with his own project—his own
unapproved
project, I might add.”
Her brown eyes narrowed. “You aren’t doing this because he’s Latino, are you?”
Cam barked a laugh of scorn. “That’s ridiculous. I want him gone because he won’t do a thing I ask him to.”
She lifted the mostly empty cardboard box to the seat of her chair and laid the pile of unused handouts on top of the remaining black cubes. “Well, I’m sorry. You’re just going to have to deal with him, because we have no one to replace him with.”
“How about the girl taking care of the frogs?”
Gen stopped what she was doing to look up at him in surprise. Then her eyes narrowed again. “Why would you want
her
?”
“Because I saw her file this morning. She’s got her Master’s in Molecular and Cellular Biology. She’s wasted down in Animal Resources.”
“And Espinosa wouldn’t be?” She laid the stack of manila folders on top of the handout sheets and looked up at him.
“Espinosa would benefit from a lesson in humility.”
She lifted a finely plucked brow. “I hardly think
you
should be the one to give it to him, however. Besides, he’ d more than likely walk out on us. And rightly so, if you ask me. The switch you’re suggesting is preposterous.” She returned her attention to layering the box flaps closed. “No. Ms. McHenry will stay with her frogs and you will have to find a way to make peace with Dr. Espinosa. Maybe if you treated him with a little more respect, you’d have an easier time getting him to work with you.”
He huffed out a breath of exasperation. “Fine. Is that all?”
She tucked the last flap under the first, closing the box. “You will be here next Friday? On time?”