And then I ran like the wind, back along the path, back to Max, back to safety.
It was only once I’d made myself visible again and we’d sneaked back down the road and into the relative security of the town center that I finally stopped shaking and allowed myself to ask the questions I was pretty sure we were both thinking.
Who was that man? What was he doing breaking into the lab? Did he know about the crystals and our superpowers? And, if so, what exactly was he planning to do with them — and with us?
Max’s face was white as we sat on the bench at the bus stop. Anyone would have thought he was the one who’d nearly gotten caught breaking into a lab while invisible.
I told him everything I’d seen and overheard.
“He wants children to experiment on?” Max said numbly.
“Well, he didn’t exactly use those words. But, yeah, that was the impression I got.”
“Do you think he knows about us?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. He was too vague about getting kids to help him. I think he’d have been more specific if he’d meant us.”
Max sighed. “Well, that’s something, I guess. But what does he know? What’s he even doing here?”
“And, more important, who the heck is he?”
Max looked up, as if he’d only just remembered I was there. “You know, I — I think I might have an idea,” he said.
“You know him?”
Max shook his head. “I don’t know him. But . . .”
“But what?”
Max swallowed. “But I think I’ve seen him before.”
“Who is he?”
“I’m not sure. He told me he was a friend of my dad’s.”
For a second, I let myself feel relieved. So he wasn’t some weird psycho stranger after all. He was a friend of the doctor and probably had every right to let himself into the lab, even if he did do it in the middle of the night and sneaked around like a thief.
Like I said, I only felt relieved for a second. Because then Max added, “But I think he was lying.”
“Tell me everything,” I said.
“It was the first time I went to the lab,” Max began. “I’d just left and was walking down the road when I saw him. He seemed to come out of nowhere, and it made me jump.”
“Go on.”
“He came over to me and apologized for startling me. I wanted to get away, but he drew me into conversation. I felt a bit awkward, ’cause I wasn’t sure if he’d seen me come out of the lab and if he knew I wasn’t supposed to be there. I kept talking to him just to make sure I didn’t come across as suspicious. We walked along the road together. He was really friendly. Said he’d known my dad years ago and was hoping to get back in touch.”
“That all sounds innocent enough.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. He didn’t want me to mention anything to Dad, because he was going to surprise him. They were old friends and went back a long way, he said.” Max’s voice trailed off and he looked down at his feet.
“What is it?” I asked. “Did he say anything else?”
Max nodded. “He said he knew my mom. It was the only part of the conversation that seemed a bit strange.”
“Strange how?”
“He was talking about a time before I was born, maybe kind of overdoing it with how well he’d known my parents and how friendly they’d been. He told me how he’d been to a surprise birthday party for my mom once. Then he broke off and suddenly exclaimed, ‘Of course! That’s it!’ I asked him what he was talking about and he got flustered and said he’d just remembered he had to be somewhere.”
“Couldn’t you tell what he was thinking?” I asked. “Read his mind?”
Max shook his head. “I’d only just gotten the hematite. I hadn’t worn it yet.”
“So then what happened?”
“Nothing! He rushed off to his appointment, and I didn’t really give him another thought until now.” Max turned to look at me. His face had drained of color. “Jess, it was when he mentioned my mom’s birthday that he suddenly got strange and then disappeared on me.”
“Um. Yeah. And?”
“The combination on the keypad,” Max said quietly.
“Zero-six-two-six?”
Max nodded. “It’s a date. The twenty-sixth of June.” He looked down at his feet and added in such a quiet voice I could barely hear him over the sound of the approaching bus. “Jess, I think it was talking to me that made him realize how he could break in! The twenty-sixth of June . . . it’s my mom’s birthday.”
The next morning, I was waiting for the bus and mulling over everything that had happened when a car startled me out of my thoughts. I looked up. Nancy. She pulled over and lowered her window.
“Jess, get in,” she called, leaning over and waving me over. “I’ll take you to school.”
I looked over my shoulder, feeling like a spy in an action film. Then I realized two things. Thing one: Nancy was a close family friend, and there was nothing remotely suspicious or spy-like about her giving me a lift to school. Thing two: there were four other people at the bus stop, two of whom were talking about hairstyles so animatedly that there wasn’t the slightest chance they would be aware of anything else going on around them, and the other two were totally engrossed in their phones.
So I got in the car.
“What’s up?” I asked, concentrating very hard on making my voice sound casual and relaxed, neither of which I was feeling, as I pulled the door closed and fastened my seat belt. My brain was working overtime, trying to figure out how she’d found out about Max, if she knew we’d been to the lab last night, and exactly how much trouble we were in as a result. Turned out I didn’t need to worry.
Nancy pulled out onto the road and glanced at me. “I wanted to tell you,” she said brightly. “I went to the lab first thing this morning.”
First thing? I checked the clock on her dashboard: quarter past eight. Surely this was first thing.
“I’m an early riser,” Nancy said, noticing my look of confusion. “That’s what happens when you do too many night shifts. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep; I was worrying so much about the lab. So I decided to go down there and have a really good look around, and guess what!”
“What?” I asked, trying to inject the perfect I-have-no-idea-what-you’re-going-to-tell-me-because-obviously-I-was-nowhere-near-the-lab-last-night tone into my voice.
“It’s all there!”
“The crystals?”
“Yes! Well, actually, I haven’t found them all yet. There are one or two still unaccounted for — but I looked everywhere and found most of them. James must have knocked them off the table or covered them with his notes without realizing. But the great thing is, it was just an oversight. No one’s been breaking in.” She smiled broadly. “Isn’t that great?”
“Yay! That’s awesome,” I forced out of my mouth with as much surprise as I could muster. We’d done it! We’d gotten away with it. Max wouldn’t get into trouble. I was surprised at how glad I felt for him.
“I’ve also changed the keycode, just to be on the safe side. I should have done that earlier, but I didn’t want to do anything to unsettle James while I was unsure,” she went on as she drove. “Now that I know no one’s coming in, I feel happy to tell him it’s just a routine thing to keep on top of security. Anyway, we’re safe. I’m so relieved!”
“That’s wonderful news,” I said. And it was, actually. We weren’t in any trouble — which meant I was almost as happy and relieved as Nancy.
“I don’t know what we would have done if the project had come under threat now,” Nancy went on. “I dread to think what would have happened if all of this had gotten into the wrong hands. Can you imagine?”
Er . . . yes, actually. I’d done little but imagine what could happen. I’d practically felt the bars of the experimental cage that I was trapped in while scientists prodded and poked me. I’d seen the newspaper front pages with “Jessica Jenkins — Freak of t
he Century!” splashed across them. I’d imagined that horrible creepy man from the lab giving horrible creepy orders about what to do with us.
“The tiger’s eye, for example,” Nancy continued. “Imagine if some really bad people got hold of an innocent-looking crystal that could become a bomb!” Nancy shivered. “It’s unthinkable.” She turned to smile at me. “But, thankfully, we don’t have to think about it. No one’s breaking into the lab. We’re safe.”
“Yay,” I said weakly. Part of me really, really wanted to tell her about the man. I knew I probably should. But I’d promised Max I wouldn’t betray him, and how could I tell Nancy about the man without giving Max away? My greater loyalty was to him right now. I couldn’t break my promise. Not yet.
“This is the first time James has been happy for years,” Nancy said, making me even more determined not to tell her. “It’s as if he has something to live for again. I couldn’t bear the thought of him going back to the state he had been in for so long.”
“What made him so unhappy?” I asked.
Nancy checked her mirror and changed lanes. “It’s a long story,” she said.
It wasn’t even 8:20 yet. I didn’t have to be at school till quarter to nine. “I’ve got time.”
Nancy stopped at a traffic light and then turned to me. “It started with his wife.”
His wife. Max’s mom. “What about her?” I asked.
“Rachel had a rare genetic disease. She’d lived with it for years, but it had begun to spread through her body at an alarming rate. The awful thing was that she was pregnant when this happened, so the doctors didn’t want to use aggressive treatment to fight the disease.”
Pregnant . . . with Max?
“The doctors pretty much gave up on fighting her illness,” Nancy went on. “All except for James. We’d gotten to a really important stage with our research, and he was positive he could use it to help her.”
“So he tried the serum on his wife?”
Nancy nodded. The light turned green, and she set off again. “Not that it did anything. But she held on. Managed to carry her baby to full term. A beautiful little boy.”
I stifled any response. I wondered if Nancy had met Max lately, and whether she’d still describe him as a beautiful boy.
“I think it was little Max who kept her going. But just before his first birthday, she started to go rapidly downhill. James had been working around the clock on the serum. We’d added a few ingredients and changed the percentages a bit. We really thought we were onto something.”
Nancy took a left and turned onto the long road that runs parallel to the river all the way up to school. “Rachel was starting to slip away,” she carried on. “Her doctors said it would only be a matter of weeks. James was desperate. He never slept — just spent all day by her side and all night doubling his efforts on the serum. It was a powerful medicine, and we decided, together, that we would try this latest version of it on Rachel.”
“Did the hospital know that he tried the serum on his wife?”
“Good grief, no. He’d have lost his license on the spot.”
“But he still did it.”
“He would have done anything for her. Anything to make her better. I was there, and I can still picture the scene as if it were yesterday. The way James sat with her and held her as she sipped it . . .”
“And what happened?”
“Not a thing. In fact, that night she went downhill even more quickly. It was their wedding anniversary the next day. James had bought her a stunning necklace. She was so thin that she hadn’t been wearing her jewelry for months. Nothing fit anymore. James wanted her to feel beautiful again.”
I felt a twitch of something itchy running along my skin, making the hairs on my arms prickle. “What kind of necklace was it?” I asked.
“A beautiful pendant — a multicolored stone. Stunning. It was a black opal.”
My brain was whirring even faster now. The serum. A brand-new pendant with a precious stone in it . . .
“Rachel put the pendant on — and something incredible happened. She sat up in bed for the first time in months. She talked lucidly for the first time in weeks. She had a conversation with both of us. We laughed together. Then she started saying strange things.”
“Like what?”
“She said she could hear the wind — which was impossible, as we were on a ward in the center of the hospital. Plus, there was barely a breeze that day, but Rachel was convinced she could hear it.”
Nancy glanced at me and continued. “And there was more. Rachel looked up at the ceiling and said how beautiful it was, how many different shades of white she could see in it. Stroked James’s hand and told him she could feel the lines on his palm so strongly she half thought she might try reading his future from it. He said he could read his future himself, and that she was in it.”
“That’s so romantic,” I said.
“Yeah.”
We were approaching school. Still fifteen minutes early. Nancy signaled and pulled over down the road from the school gates. Then she cleared her throat. “Rachel died that night.”
I felt hot tears behind my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t just sorry for Nancy. I was sorry for Max. It all made sense now. His tough-guy image — and the fact that it wasn’t really convincing. I winced as I remembered my comment about the photo in the hall at his house. No wonder he’d been irritated with me after that.
“Is that why you said the serum might be dangerous for adults to drink?” I asked.
“Yes. We didn’t know it at the time, but we deduced later that if your brain is no longer in the developmental stage, taking the serum can speed up the multiplication of cells, which is highly dangerous.”
“And you think that’s what happened to Max’s mom?”
Nancy nodded. “James gave up on almost everything after Rachel died. His whole world caved in. He threw away every drop of the serum that he could find. All of it gone, apart from twenty bottles or so that I’d kept at home. James tore up and burned all the notes on the serum,” Nancy continued. “Deleted all the computer files. Threw away everything he could find that reminded him of it.”
“Why?”
“He couldn’t forgive himself for what had happened; he blamed himself for Rachel’s death — for getting it so wrong. And then, once he’d gotten rid of everything to do with the old serum, he started again from scratch.”
“Huh? He went back to his research?”
“James didn’t want Rachel’s death to be in vain. Trying to find a cure for the illness she’d had was the only thing that gave his life any meaning.”
“What about his son?” I prompted.
“Yes, of course, poor Max. James loved him, but he wasn’t the best father in those days.”
Or any days, judging by some of the things Max had said.
“He invested all his time in his research. He felt that if he could somehow make a breakthrough, perhaps Rachel’s death would have some meaning. Then one day he made the mistake of saying too much to the wrong person.” Nancy twiddled with her hair. “Remember I told you we were government-funded?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, James and I had become friendly with the man from the department who’d granted the funding — Oscar Finch. James and Oscar would go out drinking together — too much drinking, if you ask me, but at least it gave James someone to talk to. A friend whom he could confide in and trust. At least, that was what we thought at the time.”
“OK.”
“One night, after downing half a bottle of whiskey, James told Oscar what he’d done with the original serum, how he’d given it to Rachel. And he told Oscar what had happened.”
“Yikes. Did he lose his job?”
“Far from it! James got a message from Oscar the next morning asking him to come and see him. After the conversation they’d had the night before, James was convinced he was about to get sacked, but Oscar had different ideas. He believed we were on the verge of
a modern miracle.”
“Really? But that’s good, isn’t it? So he was happy for you to carry on with the research?”
“Not exactly carry on with it. He wanted us to go back to the original research. He wanted us to re-create the serum James had given his wife. Not just that, but he wanted us both to leave our jobs, take the whole thing out of the public sector, and run it with him as a private scheme.”
“I don’t understand. What does that mean?”
“It means that the research would no longer have been about medical advances. It wouldn’t have been about trying to find ways to cure the very sick and heal the unhealable. Instead, it would have become about developing a magic trick on a scale the world had never seen before — and selling it to the highest bidder. All Oscar saw was a magic potion that somehow enhanced people’s senses and gave them capabilities beyond anything anyone had ever heard of.”
“I see.”
“A medicine that could make you hear things happening a mile away, see things previously invisible to the human eye? Well, Oscar’s eyes just saw dollar signs — and lots of them,” Nancy went on angrily. “His idea was that we could develop it into the perfect weapon to sell to the world’s armies, the perfect spying tools to sell to intelligence agencies across the globe, the perfect product to make aging people feel younger. Basically, the perfect anything that would make him rich.” She paused for a second to take a breath. “Oscar didn’t care about medicine, about people’s well-being. All he cared about was getting rich and becoming powerful — no matter what it took or who it hurt.”
“I’m guessing Dr. Malone said no?”
“Darn right he said no! His medical research had never been about money or glory. Those things meant nothing to him, and they meant even less after he lost Rachel.”
“And how did that go down?”
Nancy laughed sadly. “They had a massive argument. James finally got it through to Oscar that he would never use his research to pursue gimmicks, egos, and money. Surprise, surprise — within a week our funding was cut and James was ordered to submit his final report and ditch the project. He had to sign a contract agreeing that he’d never go back to it.”