Dark Abyss by Kaitlyn O'Connor (classic novels for teens .txt) 📕

small paper cup filled with seeds. “Your neighbor, Mrs. Bagley, sent these to you.”

Anna stared at the seeds blankly for many moments before it sank in to her that they were her seed and she still felt distanced by a wall of disbelief. She looked up at Simon again and then at Ian, who’d moved to crouch beside him and was holding a bowl filled with her fruit!

“How?” she whispered finally. “I don’t understand.”

Simon shrugged. “Apparently, it rained them onto her roof and lawn—threw a couple through her living room window, too.”

“And she saved them for me?” Anna gasped, struggling with the excitement threatening to explode from her.

“These and a few other things she found. They aren’t in very good shape, but we brought them so you could look through them.”

Anna didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. She did a little of both. “This is wonderful! Unbelievable! I thought I’d lost ….”

She launched herself at Simon, flinging her arms around his neck and hugging him tightly, and then leapt at Ian to hug him with equal enthusiasm, and then bounded up and hugged Caleb and Joshua, laughing and crying at the same time. “That wonderful woman! I don’t know how I’ll ever thank her.”

Simon straightened, smiling faintly. “Well, think about it. You’ll get the chance to thank her in person. We brought her with us.”

Anna’s eyes widened. “She’s here?”

“In New Atlanta. We put her up at the hotel.”

Anna stared at him blankly. “You brought her down here and put her up at a hotel?”

“She’s a witness. She saw Paul Warner abduct you. The Attorney General’s staff is taking her statement right now.”

“Oh my god! A witness! That’s … almost the best news yet!”

“Almost?” Simon asked, smiling at her a little quizzically.

“This is the best!” she said, chuckling as she held up the ugly vegetables they’d considered discarding. “Oh! I need seawater.”

The demand confused them all. “What do you need seawater for?” Caleb asked curiously.

“Oh, these won’t grow without it. I designed them to grow in seawater contaminated soil. I’ll have to get the soil prepared before I can see if they’re still viable.

At the very least, I’ve got them and I can reverse engineer to replace the notes I lost, but it would be much better if I can present the plants and the produce when I write my paper,” she said, more to herself than them.

“I guess that’s why Mrs. Bagley didn’t have any luck growing them.”

Anna nodded, but absently. She’d gathered up the seeds and moved to the lights to study them. “I had special soil trucked in for my experiments from the fields that had been contaminated. I’ll have to see if I can recreate the conditions with seawater and the potting soil.”

“They’re sea plants?”

Anna glanced a little absently at Caleb when he asked the question. “Partly. I started with sea plants, because of course they grow in salt water, but I had to engineer something that would grow on land and produce food.”

She looked up at them and smiled. “This ugly little franken-veggie will grow in seawater contaminated soil and produce a prolific crop, but it gets even better and it’s the most important thing about this little plant! It draws the salt from the soil into the plant, which means after one or two growing seasons with these, the soil is restored and whatever was grown there before can flourish. Without something like this a field that’s been contaminated can be lost to generations while nature slowly leaches the salt from it.

In the mean time, people are starving because they’ve lost some of the richest farming land and, in a lot of cases, it’s land used to produce their staple food.” She shrugged, a little embarrassed to make such a grandiose statement, but she knew it was true. “This little plant can change the world.”

Not surprisingly, they didn’t look like they quite knew how to take that. When she glanced around again, she saw they’d left, but she was energized by the recovery. It was still disappointing that they hadn’t been able to retrieve all of her notes, but this put her years closer to full recovery. She needed both the notes and the plant itself as proof that it worked.

Simon and Ian, she discovered when she went to the atrium in hopes of dipping water from the pool, had taken the sub and left. She spent the rest of the day carrying seawater into her greenhouse and carefully adding water to the soil and then analyzing it against what she remembered about the original soil she’d used.

Caleb met her at the top of the ladder when she climbed up to the main floor of the house. He chuckled when he got a good look at her. “Is there any dirt left in the trays?”

She gaped at him in dismay. “I’ve got it on me?”

He laughed outright then and walked her to the mirror in the bathroom off the living room.

She’d smeared it on both cheeks and her forehead, she discovered, probably pushing her hair out of her face. She even had dirt in her hair. She supposed that had fallen off the trowel while she was fussing with her hair.

“I need a bath.”

“Want company?” Caleb asked instantly.

She turned to look at him searchingly, feeling her pulse leap despite the weariness and aching muscles from working in her greenhouse most of the day. “It wouldn’t …cause trouble?”

She saw he was already regretting the impulsive suggestion, though. He sighed in disgust. “Probably,” he muttered. “Go bathe. I was just about to start supper.”

“Oh! I