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

Anna touched his face, tracing the laugh lines in his cheek. “Yes, whatever you want.”

He released her reluctantly. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

“I hope so.”

Without a great deal of surprise, Anna discovered that the chip was damaged.

She was disappointed, but she told herself she hadn’t really expected it to weather such an event unscathed. The important thing was that it hadn’t been destroyed completely.

She had more pieces to her puzzle, enough to carve her research down to months instead of years. If the seeds Mrs. Bagley had rescued sprouted, she would have what she needed to prove her findings, but that wasn’t enough. She had to be able to reproduce the sequence to make large scale production possible, and it was going to take something massive to do what she hoped to do—cure world hunger.

Armed with her files, she approached the prosecutor after court and asked to speak with him.

He looked unreceptive, but he finally agreed to give her a few minutes of his time.

She supposed she could understand, under the circumstances, but his obvious reluctance put a severe damper on her own enthusiasm and confidence.

He listened to her pitch, but she left again with the distinct feeling that he hadn’t been convinced—at all. Frustrated and depressed when she discovered that he’d already decided to rest his case and wasn’t keen on reversing the decision, she barely even had the heart to work in her lab when she returned that afternoon.

Dismissing it with an effort, she checked on her seeds. The discovery that they’d sprouted heartened her and she headed into her lab with more determination. She’d moved all of the files from the damaged chip to the new computer the guys had gotten for her and set to work on trying to fill in the gaps on the damaged files.

She didn’t sleep at all well that night despite the progress she’d made, though, and she was almost as tired when she got up as she had been when she went to bed.

It wasn’t a pleasant surprise when she was called to the witness stand again. The prosecutor took her completely off guard, though, when he immediately introduced the subject they’d discussed the day before.

“We touched on your reason for being outside the night you were kidnapped, Dr. Blake,” he began, “I’d like for you to tell the court what your research entailed.”

“Objection! This has no bearing on the case.”

“I’d like the court’s indulgence to show that it does.”

The judge glanced from one man to the other. “I’ll give you a little leeway here, but I want to remind you that this trial has already dragged on for weeks. Come to the point.”

“I’m a genetic engineer,” Anna answered when the prosecutor nodded at her to continue. “I was designing a plant that would grow in seawater contaminated soil due to the fact that so much farm land has been lost to seawater contamination over the past several decades.”

“Why was it so important, that night, to remove it from the house? Why did you feel any need to move it?”

“I discovered that the plant I’d developed had properties I hadn’t suspected. The plant, while edible itself and fulfilling all of the criteria that had been established as necessary, went beyond that. It restored the soil. It had come to my attention that I was being watched and the importance of my finding was so significant that I suddenly knew that I couldn’t take any chance that anything might happen to it. People are starving. This plant could, within a few growing seasons, open up vast tracts of land that would end that.”

“But isn’t it likely that the company that hired you to develop it was the entity that was behind surveillance?”

“I thought it extremely likely. However, it had also come to my attention that my father was subsidizing my research and I didn’t trust my father.”

“Objection!”

“Tighten it up Mr. Steele,” the judge responded.

“But you were intercepted and taken before you could secure the data in a safe place?”

“Yes. Paul appeared and told me he was taking me to my father. Despite my suspicions, I was still shocked and appalled when he blew up my house.”

“Did he indicate why he’d blown it up?”

“He didn’t, but my father did. The first thing he asked was if Paul had ‘taken care’ of the evidence.”

“So he ordered Paul to blow the house?”

“I didn’t hear him order it, but his question seemed to indicate that he did.”

“He ordered the house blown up, that he owned, and one has to assume that he also realized that it would destroy your research that he had paid for. Why do you think that is?”

“Objection! She couldn’t possibly know what Miles Cavendish was thinking!

This calls for speculation!”

The judge looked at the lawyer hard for several moments and then the hopeful prosecutor. Anna held her breath.

“You’ll get to cross examine. I don’t especially care for the speculation, but I’m curious as to why he would do it myself.”

“Go ahead, Dr. Blake. Answer.”

“Paul knew Simon and Ian—or at least some of the watchmen had been keeping an eye on me. He tried to run them down with the boat when we left. My father also knew. My first impression was that it was an attempt to blame the incident on the mutants.”

“But you revised that?”

“No. I didn’t understand, then, what the impact could be. I thought it was Simon and Ian specifically that he meant to take the blame. When my father asked if Paul was sure