Blood Music читать онлайн

’re ruined.”“Fuck ‘em.”Hazel’s eyes widened. “My, aren’t you in a mood.”“I’ve been shut down. I have to clear out all my extracurricular work, give it up, or Harrison will issue my walking papers.”“That’s rather even-handed of them,” Hazel said, returning to her scan. Harrison had shut down one of her own extracurricular projects the month before. “What did you do?”“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather be alone.” Vergil glowered at her from across the counter. “You can finish that in the share lab.”“I could, but—”“If you don’t,” Vergil said darkly, “I’ll smear your little piece of agarose across the floor with my wingtips.”Hazel glared at him for a moment and surmised he wasn’t kidding. She shut off the electrodes, picked up her equipment, and headed for the door. “My condolences,” she said.“Sure.”He had to have a plan. Scratching his stubbly chin, he tried to think of some way to cut his losses. He could sacrifice those parts of the experiment that were expendable—the E. coli cultures, for example. He had long since gone beyond them. He had kept them as memorials to his progress, and as a kind of reserve in case work had not gone well in the next steps. The work had gone well, however. It was not complete, but it was so close that he could taste success like a cool, clean swallow of wine.Hazel’s side of the lab was neat and tidy. His was a chaos of equipment and containers of chemicals. One of his few concessions to lab safety, a white absorbent mat to catch spills, hung half-off the black counter, one corner pinned by a jar of detergent.Vergil stood before the white idea board, rubbing his stubbly beard, and stared at the cryptic messages he had scrawled there the day before.Little engineers. Make the world’s tinies