Page 19 of This Vicious Hunger
“The matter?” Petaccia raises an eyebrow. “No. We’re going to do something different today. I know I said we’d have a look at the difference between anatomy and morphology in phytological study but, well.” She claps her hands together excitedly. “Come—you’ll see.”
She walks away, not towards the staircase and our usual room at the top but instead to one of the locked doors on this ground floor. She pulls a key from her pocket and unlocks it with one quick, smooth movement. The latch clicks.
“Now, hurry,” she says. “Quickly.”
She ushers me into the room ahead of her, turning and closing the door swiftly behind us so that the latch clicks again, loudly. I jump. Petaccia thumps both hands down on my shoulders, guiding me to the left while she cuts ahead and gestures grandly.
The room is mostly bare, concrete and stone, with more large floor-to-ceiling glass windows dyed green so that the world swims in shades of emerald and chartreuse. The light along with the soddenheat that makes my clothes instantly stick to my skin make my stomach swim uneasily. A thermometer tracks the temperature, and there’s a gauge that looks to measure humidity too. In the centre of the room is a huge wooden box closed with nails as thick as my pinky finger.
“What is it?”
“A very exciting new specimen,” Petaccia says. “Sometimes providence smiles on us scientists when we least expect it. I wanted you to be here when I unpacked it. Let me just check the humidity—” She crosses to the gauge, tapping it with her fingernail before turning back to me with a wolfish grin. “Ready.”
“But… what is it?” I ask again. I approach the box with caution. It’s nigh on four feet in height, just about thin enough to fit through the door. Petaccia wastes no time pulling a metal bar from the only workbench in the room and attacking the side with the nails.
“So far we’ve dealt with mostly theory,” Petaccia says through gritted teeth as she works to prise the box open. “But you’ll know from the laboratory that I do most of my own work with live specimens. Dried plants are useful enough for some learning and research, but they’re pallid corpses compared to the real thing. I’m wary of over-collecting samples to the point of destroying precious plant life, but sometimes the Lord smiles and I’m able to get my hands on something truly special.”
With a crack that reverberates through the room the final nail releases the wood and Petaccia can peel back the side of the box, and then the top, and then the other sides until we are left staring at what I can only describe as one of the most hideous plants I have ever seen.
It’s near four feet tall, more a squat kind of tree than flowering shrub, but its dark purplish leaves and thick black branches hide small white fruits that look almost like a hundred tiny eyeballs.
“It’ll need to stay in here for a while. I’ve had it shipped from the rainforest in Odyll. Once it’s had some time to adjust to our clime, I’ll move it to one of my glasshouse nurseries. Today we need to get it settled, take some vital statistics to aid growth. I think it will do you good to use your gardening skills a little differently with me, so you can get a feel for how to handle unfamiliar vegetation. The principle can be applied to dried plant life as well, of course.”
I step closer despite myself, inhaling the strangely bitter scent—it reminds me of the garden near my rooms. I smell it sometimes, distantly, as I lie in my bed. Sleep evades me more often than I’d like and it’s this same bitter smell I catch often, just at the edge of my consciousness as I drift off.
“Nottoo close,” Petaccia says, stepping between me and the tree. “I believe the sap is a little caustic.”
“Is that what I can smell?”
Petaccia looks at me curiously.
“The bitterness,” I prompt. “Can you smell it too? I assume that’s what I’m picking up. It’s like lemons, only—not fruity.” It’s more than that, but I find it impossible to describe: woodsy, a little citrusy, like the rind of a lemon after the lemon has dissipated. Perhaps a little more like the pit of an olive mixed with something more animal, more tangy, like the iron in blood.
“You have a good nose.” Petaccia’s gaze is narrowed but I can’t make out if she’s dubious or impressed. “I’ve only ever heard one other person describe it that way. My father always claimed that certain plants have a stronger scent than others—not the flowers, you understand, but the stems and the leaves. Not simply the earthy green scent that we all catch but something beneath it as well. He always said it was stronger in plants with stingers,nettles, and thistles and the like. There’s no scientific basis for it, of course, and since scent is so variable it’s impossible to test.”
I frown when Petaccia turns her back.
“So, he thought every plant smelled different on its basic level and some had underlying smells too… But—if I smelled two plants with a similar scent, say, that same sort of bitterness, would that be unusual…?” I’m thinking of the garden, and the girl. I’m sure it isn’t the plants I can smell when I’m in my rooms—more likely the ghost of them, a scent memory—but through the gate they smell strong and bitter. Is it exactly the same as this tree, or am I imagining the similarity?
“I supposeunusualis one way of looking at it. Why?” Petaccia is staring at me again and there’s a glitter in her eyes I don’t like. It feels accusatory. I wonder if I’ve crossed some invisible line, betrayed the hidden boundaries of this new “freedom.” “Where have you smelled it before?”
A strange thought surprises me: What if the doctor tells me the garden is private, and I’m not allowed inside? If I ask, and I’m told not to enter, I’d be at risk of breaking the rules when I do eventually find a way in—and I desperately want to find a way in. Perhaps it would be better just to plead ignorance…
“Oh, I’ve never smelled anything exactly the same as this,” I say hurriedly, sweetening my lie with a smile. “I just wondered if it would be possible. If plant families have similar appearances, why not scents? When I was a little girl my father taught me that no two flowers ever smell the same and that always amazed me. It doesn’t feel as though it should be possible, especially when some types of flowerslooksimilar—”
“No,” Petaccia says, appeased. Her shoulders relax—and only then do I feel my own drop from near my ears. “Appearance andscent are not the same. But we can talk about that another day. Now, come—put on these protective armbands and gloves and help me lift this from the base. I need to check the soil.”
When I arrive at the dining hall later, Leonardo is being seated at my normal window table, his curls wild where he’s run his hand through them. He waves me over with a grin.
“Good timing,” he says. “I would have asked if you wanted to join me, but I didn’t see you around today.” His eyes travel to my arms. The cuffs on my sleeves are grubby, stained slightly green. I was too hungry to get changed before heading here.
“I was with Petaccia.” I sit and hide my hands under the table. “She called for me—all day. So I didn’t go to my lectures.”
Leonardo leans in with interest while the server pours our water. “Oh? Anything exciting?”
I hesitate. I’m sure Leonardo is only curious, but it feels wrong to share Petaccia’s excitement with him—not when she keeps it under lock and key the way she does. “It was a delivery,” I say honestly. “A fairly big one. She wanted an extra pair of hands.”
If Leonardo is disappointed in my answer, he doesn’t show it, just tucks into the warm bread and good, salty butter on the table. It isn’t long before I follow suit, letting him lead the conversation. My head aches, not badly, but the pulsing sensation is distracting.
