Page 18 of This Vicious Hunger

Chapter Eleven

I wake to the sound of paper being pushed under my suite door. It takes a moment to orientate myself; my dreams were full of the roar of burning, though I’m not sure now if it was my own—flames licking at the sides of a cradle designed by my father—or somebody else’s.

I slept with both sets of shutters open last night, hoping to stir the slightest breeze into the stuffy rooms, but the sun’s barely pinking the sky and the air is already soupy.

I shake the dreams from my limbs along with the sleep as I shuffle to the door and pull the crumpled piece of paper from under it.

It’s another note in Petaccia’s scrawl, familiar to me now that I’ve spent much of the last few weeks pawing through several of her messy notebooks.

Ignore lectures today , it reads. Come to La Vita. I’ll wait for you. Bring notes.

I puzzle over the letter for a moment, trying to work out what could have got her so riled up.

Our tutorials are the highlight of my week and I’m often giddy in the hours that lead up to them, but they are normally like clockwork, more like mini lectures than the partnership she promised, and we’re not due to meet again until Friday.

Last week we spent the afternoon discussing pigmentation and photosynthesis.

There’s a page in her notebook dedicated to how plants with darker leaves are able to produce the energy needed to thrive; some, she writes, are actually brown or red and have other pigments in addition to chlorophyll in their leaves that may mask the green to the human eye.

The following page features a sketch of a plant with black flowers and dark, near-black leaves.

In the margin she scrawled Black eg. Nigrescens: protects itself by shielding chloroplasts against stress .

“She’s a genius,” I’d said to Leonardo afterwards. “I spent an hour just staring at that sketch. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a plant with properly black leaves, but I don’t doubt they exist.”

“She wrote a paper last year, potentially from those notes,” Leonardo replied. “I’m amazed she lets you see the primary material. All I get from Almerto is proofing his papers as he’s writing them.”

“Right?” I gushed. “She wrote another one around the same time about toxicity in plants as a defence mechanism; what’s interesting there is the idea that there’s a tolerance level for animal exposure and how contact with intoxicating plant life can give extreme reactions at first, but with repeat exposure the level of tolerance builds—until it reaches a crescendo, at which point the body stops metabolising the toxins and the symptoms escalate.

So plants that aren’t entirely poison, in theory, could be metabolised and tolerated, to a point. ”

Leonardo was quiet at this, his face thoughtful.

“Honestly,” I said. “She’s making groundbreaking hypotheses as often as you or I make coffee. Do you think she ever gets tired?”

“Not like you or I do,” Leonardo replied with exaggerated remorse. “That’s why we’re the ones always making coffee.”

Discovery is invigorating, that much is true, so Petaccia must be up to something this morning if she’s posting notes under my door at dawn. I crumple the paper into the waste basket and get to dressing.

When I let myself into La Vita I barely have time to blink my way into the dimness before Petaccia is there, looming in front of me like a ghost. I jump and then let out a surprised laugh.

“You got my note. Good.”

“Have you been waiting long? I skipped breakf—”

“Don’t worry about any of that.”

I’m exhausted, limbs humming with tiredness after my restless night, but I nod anyway. There will be coffee today, and a lot of it. Petaccia drinks it near black most of the time, so thick it might as well be tar.

“I thought something was the matter,” I say.

“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 sodden heat 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.

“ Not too 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 suppose unusual is 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…