“Alright. That should be everything.”

  Odette exhaled as she set a clinking box of vials down on a table in the SCR tent.

  After Caleb had absconded to meet with the arrivals, the burden of finalizing their workspace had fallen on her. The equipment, which she suspected had been flown in at some ungodly hour, was all here but the space had lacked samples from the specimen.

  Luckily, those had been easy to find. Far more core samples than a single department could effectively use had been taken from the specimen’s undecaying anatomy in the last few days. Odette, who understood the samples would actually decay faster outside of the specimen’s anatomy than within, had thought it was a waste, until now.

  Though the analyzer machine’s catalyst fluid didn’t damage the mutant’s cells, it made them resistant to more tests of the same kind, though they could still be used elsewhere. Even then, in the tent they only went through three vials a day amongst their entire battery of machines.

  Handling them required incredible care. As members in their field of science had learned in the past, mishandling mutant resources could lead to injury or death in some cases. Some beast’s biology invoked the spread of disease in humans or could damage upon contact with the skin. That was part of the reason they all wore such long clothing and why Odette needed to be careful in bringing the rest of the samples to the tent.

  With that done, she didn’t know what to do. Go back to the IDS tent? There wasn’t really a need for that right now. The machines inside were still busy extracting the specimen’s genes so they could compare it to other mutants, as she had set them up to do before breakfast.

  All she could do in the meantime was wait.

  Still, Odette felt inspired to run a few periphery tests on the specimen anyway. Those wouldn’t require any machines or even a whole sample, and she was in an uncommonly good mood after hearing from Lukas, despite taking some shit from Caleb.

  Science, before all of the politics and bureaucracy that came with it, was still her first passion. On the worst of days she called it work, but on good ones it could be the most enjoyable thing in the world.

  Odette had just sat down at her station when she heard her name being called from across the camp.

  “Odette! Get over here!”

  The Professor’s voice rang out with a tone that almost made Odette worry if there was a fire.

  Ducking out the tent she hurried over to a space in the desert where the site’s workers were unloading an airship's contents down from its ramp. Yet instead of seeing an emergency there, the Professor was simply standing and chatting with a group that had just come down from the ship.

  “Odette! Come meet the Madam Chief! She’s the Field Research Chief over at our sister department.”

  Odette walked up with a hidden scowl. So he just wanted to show her off? No, it was more likely intended to make himself look better.

  The first thing she noticed past her professor was the group of new arrivals, three men and four women all older than her who stood with a rigidity of professionalism. They glanced over while taciturnly appraising her.

  Contrary to the white and tan lab uniforms of IDS, the members of SCR were draped in forest green formal suits, their emblems nowhere to be seen unlike the placement of IDS’s over the chest and sleeves. Against the background of a lifeless yet natural desert, they looked alien.

  Though she knew better to say so, Odette thought their appearance actually suited them as a former private arms corporation, soulless and disconnected from the field of innovation she felt she belonged to.

  Bechdel, the Field Chief that the Professor introduced, was quick to speak. Though the same age as the Professor, her face only bore minor wrinkles and some grey in her hair that she wore well.

  Her figure was unlike a typical desk-bound researcher, toned and shapely to a degree that one usually only saw from celebrities or the extremely vain.

  Odette already knew who she was, but nodded anyway out of politeness.

  “Ah, Caleb! Now that I’m looking at her I realize I was wrong. We have indeed met haven’t we, girl?”

  “That’s correct, Field Chief. You were on the progressionary committee during my final advisory exam. I believe you asked a question about the relationship between pressurized air sacs in the Passerine mutant group and SCR’s series of combustion engines.”

  “Ah! That’s right!”

  Bechdel practically chirped in response, seemingly quite amused by her past inquiry.

  Was this why Odette had been called over? She wondered. To feed the curiosity of some corporate bigwig? While she knew that technically a field chief had the same authority as a head researcher, upon meeting Bechdel again after a few years she didn’t feel the respect she normally did for a superior.

  Lately Caleb had been the only exception to this, and for all she griped about Sam she was still better than the bipolar professor. Yet was it a coincidence that the one person Caleb wanted to introduce her to was just as unlikable?

  If she remembered correctly anyway, the question back then had been quite unfair, and she had only managed to get half of it right, which had ended up hurting her performance before the recruiting managers of several departments.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  For what college graduate knew the specifics of each department's proprietary tech? Much less that of SCR, which had been even more insulated back when Odette had been finishing the program. She had graduated just a year after they had integrated, and yet one of their officials, the woman standing before her now, had been the one to examine her skills.

  But Odette hadn’t stayed bitter about that, she believed. She had still been able to get into a good department. IDS wasn’t what she had expected, but she was happy with the work she was able to do there.

  Odette had always wanted to help people, especially those like her brother, and using mutant biology to do so was the best of that passion and her other interests in science.

  “So you’re Caleb’s assistant then. That’s good, that’s good—”

  “Well actually I’m not…”

  Odette rapidly tried to interject, but she was cut off just as quickly.

  “---Remind me again of your studies? Obviously bio-engineering, given your locality, but what did you study at the Publica Res? Let me guess, Genome Divisions and Applied Science?”

  That sounded far too specific to be a random guess, but it was wrong. Odette was starting to get the impression that the Chief’s words had some preconceptions behind them, like something had been said about her in the twenty minutes after they had landed. Or maybe the Professor had said something before that.

  “Not quite. At the Publica I studied Thermic Engineering and Tissue Science with a focus on mutant scalation. My thesis was on subdermal engineering in a closed system, or in other words–”

  “Using mutant scute genes to induce an increase in cell density.”

  Odette looked to the professor who cut her off, finishing her explanation to the Chief.

  Had he read her thesis? When? They hadn’t really spoken until the airship ride here, so it had never been brought up.

  The only person who had access to her personnel file with a copy of it would be the Director, so that wasn’t it. Had he heard about it at the time? Despite his moniker Odette hadn’t known him in the Publica Res, the Silver Republic’s central academy of the sciences, or knew if he taught there while she had attended if at all.

  Perhaps he had just anticipated the conclusion of her thesis. Even if he was contentious, he was still quite experienced.

  But did that really make sense? Odette wondered as the conversation passed her by.

  “Ah, I see. Well then, I’ll stop pestering you Researcher Odette, I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m questioning your capabilities here. I’m sure IDS has sent only the best from their available members.”

  It was too late to avoid that impression, Odette thought. But Bechdel’s final line roused her curiosity. What did she mean available members? Wasn’t it just the Director who had been busy?

  Bechdel turned to the Professor.

  “Our department appreciates the polished set up for our arrival as well. It looks like my people have already found our tent over there.”

  “Of course, and once again Alison, it's a privilege to be working alongside your team.”

  “Glad to hear that.”

  Odette glanced back and forth between the two researchers.

  …

  The day that SCR came to the site was odd, and caused a stir amongst the work and construction staff. But even worse at least for Odette, came the day after.

  Holding her brow up with a tired hand, the other was cupping the receiver against her ear as she listened, not to her brother Lukas but the nurse on the other side.

  “What the—what the fuck do you mean move?! Drue is the best in your country, isn’t he? Where else could you take him to get better treatment?”

  A spotty clicking was present over the line, not coming from Odette or the nurse she was speaking to, but she was too incensed to notice.

  “I’m sorry Miss Veron, but I can only relay the Doctor’s instructions. His assessment of your brother’s condition led to the call that it was no longer safe to hold him in the intensive ward, so he’s being relocated.”

  “Relocated to where!? You fuc–no, no! Just put the Doctor on the line! I want to hear from his mouth where my brother stands.”

  “...I’m sorry but the good Doctor is currently busy with another patient right now. Can I reach you here at a later time?”

  Odette grinded her teeth. It was bad enough that she couldn’t contact her brother, and now even the doctor treating him was unavailable? It was almost like a bad joke.

  “No you may not reach me, just get the doctor on the line!”

  “I’m sorry but–”

  “If you can’t do that then be prepared to pick up again at exactly this time tomorrow, all right? I refuse as my brother’s primary guardian to let you move him until I hear from either him or Drue the reason why. You understand?”

  “Yes, Miss Veron, your request will be honored.”

  BZZZT

  “Good, and one more–what?”

  “Your call has been disconnected by an operator. If you believe this was in error, please–”

  “Ah!”

  Odette threw down the receiver and transmitter, practically smashing them against the table. Storming past a terrified operator she left the communications tent to take a breath of fresh air. The day had already started off horribly, but this had just compounded things even more.

  Now she was supposed to resume her task of taking the SCR team through her and Caleb’s findings so far, to familiarize them with the project and to brief them on their future plans with the specimen.

  That wasn’t normally annoying by itself but Caleb, damn him, wanted her to do it in such a way to make the new team feel welcome, despite her overwhelming distaste for their department’s methods.

  That all meant that she would have to work alongside the SCR people with their own equipment. Because they would obviously be using their own blood distillers, tissue igniters, and other methods for turning the specimen’s mutant flesh into poison or corrosive gas, she had to use that abhorrent technology too.

  “And apparently we’re the only department nowadays that still requires people to take the advisory exam, while everyone else hires off the fucking street.”

  Odette exhaled while she walked through the camp.

  Okay, that was an exaggeration, but only for everyone else. SCR might as well have hired this team off of a street somewhere for all the experience they had with the aforementioned equipment. Even Odette was better at using it then them, and it wasn’t even in her field of research!

  Odette sighed again. She couldn’t help it.

  While worrying about Lukas and expecting the call tomorrow to connect, she knew the day was going to be a long one.