Pyxis: The Discovery (Pyxis Series)

by K. C. Neal

  “This is so freaking weird.”

  “Yeah.” Ang folded her arms around herself in a sort of hug. “What do you think we should do?”

  “Maybe see if we can find anything online? We could at least try to figure out what a pyramidal union is.”

  She nodded, and I handed her the piece of paper before going to get my laptop. Having something to do made me feel a little more calm. Not much, but a little.

  || 8 ||

  WE SPENT THE REST of the afternoon trying to figure out what “convergence,” “pyramidal union,” and the letters “P S G G” meant. One website came up when we searched “pyramidal union” that seemed promising because it had a picture of a box that was sort of similar to my pyxis. It also had an animation with blobs of colors that slowly swirled and melded, kind of like wax in a lava lamp. But we couldn’t get past the home page because it needed a password or some other type of virtual secret handshake. Aside from some generic definitions of the other terms, we didn’t find much, and nothing that explained the four letters.

  After a few hours, we gave up.

  Ang sighed and flopped across my bed. We’d moved from the TV room to my room in case anyone came downstairs. We didn’t want to have the pyxis sitting out where anyone could see it or have to answer any questions about what we were doing.

  I suddenly wished Mason was there. He was kind of an internet genius. He could probably figure out how to get into the website with the color blobs.

  “Hey,” I said, suddenly remembering Mason’s email. “Mason’s going to be back soon. Do you think we should show him the list?”

  “That means you’ll have to be on speaking terms with him.” Ang gave me a sly look.

  I rolled my eyes. “I know. But maybe he’ll know something we don’t.”

  “Are you going to email him or wait until he gets back?”

  I grimaced and picked at a stray thread on my bedspread. “I guess I should email him. If he knows anything that could help us, it’ll be better to find out sooner than later. Right?”

  Ang nodded. “Definitely.”

  I knew she wanted me to stop freezing Mason out. She knew better than to keep bringing it up, but she was certain Mason and I were destined to be together. But then, Angeline liked to believe in true love and fairy tale endings.

  I sat up, dragged my laptop over, and logged into my email account. I sat for a minute, wondering if I should send him a terse message, or act like there was nothing weird between us and I hadn’t been ignoring his messages for the past four and a half months. I decided to keep it short and sweet. I needed info, but there was no reason to sound super stoked about it.

  Hey Mason, Do the words convergence, pyxis, or pyramidal union mean anything to you? Or the letters P S G G?

  I hit send and set my laptop back on my desk. Ang had the pyxis on the bed, and she was peering at the bottles in it.

  “You know,” she said. “It seems like it would be a good idea to learn more about these liquids.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “That was the whole reason I went to see Harriet Jensen. And that pretty much blew up in my face.”

  She frowned and tapped her finger against her lower lip. “You already used the blue and the yellow at the bake sale. So we know that at least people who eat some aren’t going to die or anything. I’m just thinking maybe we should do a small experiment.”

  “Really?”

  “Harriet seems to know something about the bottles, and we’re at a disadvantage because we don’t.”

  “True. What kind of experiment?”

  “Well, first we should try to come up with a hypothesis,” Ang said. “That means you need to try and remember everybody who bought petits fours from you, which color they got, and if something about them changed afterward.”

  I snickered, and it felt good to have something to laugh at. “A hypothesis? You’re such a nerd.”

  “Whatever. Focus, this is important. Do you have a notebook or something?” She tried to look stern, but a smile crept across her lips.

  I found a steno notebook I sometimes used to write down my homework assignments, and my favorite purple gel pen. I sat next to Ang on the bed and handed them to her. For the next half hour, I strained to recall all of my bake sale customers, what they’d bought, and how they’d acted afterward. I was surprised that I came up with a decent list.

  “Okay, I’m pretty sure that’s all I got,” I said, rubbing my temples. “See anything that says ‘hypothesis’ to you?”

  Ang frowned down at the notebook and a line formed between her eyebrows.

  “Don’t scrunch,” I whispered. She smiled a little and smoothed her expression. If she kept frowning like that, she’d end up with a wrinkle the size of the Grand Canyon when she was old.

  She chewed her lower lip and scanned her notes for a few seconds. “Well, some of the guys who bought the blue ones were definitely being weird toward you. Andy and Jordan, obviously. Then the other guys at the cove who were totally checking you out the whole time. But there are just as many who bought the blue cakes and didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. That we saw, anyway.”

  I groaned and looked at the ceiling. “This isn’t helping us at all. What about the yellows?”

  “Not much better,” Ang said. “Hannah and Genevieve were the only ones who stood out as being weird, with their sudden love of your hair and your baking skills.”

  She giggled, and I snorted a laugh.

  “And it’s totally possible that Sophie put them up to it and it was all fake,” I said.

  “I still think we should do a test.”

  “The experiment?”

  “Yes.” Ang flipped to a new page and started jotting some notes. “I think we should keep making observations about the people who are acting weird. But we should also make a few more cupcakes or something with the blue and the yellow, and pick people to give them to.”

  “Are you serious? I can’t believe you want to do this.”

  “I know.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t feel good about it at all, but it just seems like we need to gain an edge here. I mean, we don’t know anything about these bottles, or the list of names, or Harriet Jensen. And … all this is kind of scaring me.”

  “So it’s like a necessary sacrifice?”

  “Exactly.” She narrowed her eyes. “But we need to be really careful, Corinne. I’m totally serious. We don’t know what we have on our hands here, and we don’t want to hurt anyone. We’re not going to be crazy about it, passing them out left and right. We want to affect as few people as possible. Okay?”

  “Okay, gotcha. We’ll be careful.” I wanted to roll my eyes at her patronizing tone. Ang sounded an awful lot like my mom.

  That night, after Mom and Dad were asleep and Bradley finally got home at, like, one in the morning (jerk), Ang and I made sure all the doors and windows were locked before we went to bed. I thought it would take forever to get to sleep because I was all keyed up about Harriet, the pyxis, and the list of names, but I was so exhausted that I fell asleep in minutes.

  When I opened my eyes, I was at the cove again.

  Just like before, the dirty gray fog billowed over the lake toward me. A scream of panic swelled in my lungs at the thought of the fog touching my skin. I glanced at the bonfire ring, but it was cold. I stared at it for a second longer than I should have, willing Mason to appear, like last time. But I was alone.

  I faced the fog and briefly wondered if I could protect myself by diving into the ice-cold lake and staying under water until it passed. But what if it didn’t pass? I’d come up gasping for air, and suck in a big lungful of—no. That wasn’t an option.

  Anger began to mix with my fear. Tapestry was my town, and the cove was one of my favorite spots in the whole world. I couldn’t let this disgusting, smoggy cloud putrefy the pure white beach or hundred-year-old Ponderosa pines.

  The fog was close enough that I could smell its gritty, rotting odor. I could smell it, so it m
ust be creeping into my body. I gagged a little and swallowed hard, willing myself to not puke. Drawing a deep breath, fighting my gag reflex, I planted my feet in the sand, squeezed my eyes closed, and imagined a perfect, pure white light filling the entire valley, singeing the disgusting fog out of existence.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw the fog had stopped at the water’s edge and formed a swirling, gray wall fewer than twenty feet away from me. My heart leapt in triumph and I started to sag with relief. Then a figure began to form in the fog.

  I hadn’t stopped it at all. It had stopped of its own accord, and now some nightmare was taking shape and moving toward me. I tried to draw a breath to scream, to force myself to run, but what I saw paralyzed me.

  I couldn’t tell if the human-shaped figure stepping out of the fog bank was a man or a woman. But it had milky green eyes.

  || 9 ||

  THE NEXT MORNING, I told Ang about my nightmare. She was sympathetic and a little freaked out, but I could tell she didn’t get that it was somehow more than just a scary dream. Not that I blamed her. I just wished I knew what the dream meant.

  We went up to the kitchen, made ourselves toasted bagels with cream cheese, and carried our food back down to the basement. It was time to get started on our experiment.

  “So what’re we going to make?” Ang asked.

  “Maybe little cookies? Like, mini sugar cookies.”

  Ang nodded. “If they’re small, then people won’t want to break them in half and share them.”

  “Yeah, we don’t want anyone sharing them or saving them.”

  I rummaged around in the small kitchen area that my dad had built years ago, when he first started the café. He used to experiment a lot with dishes for the café’s menu, and the downstairs kitchen was like his laboratory. So, it was almost as if I had my own basement apartment. I used to have the third room upstairs on the main floor, next to Bradley’s, but when I got sick of sharing a bathroom with a gross teenage boy, my parents let me switch to the basement bedroom. I loved it. I had my own bathroom, though it was a tiny one with a pedestal sink and almost no storage space. I even had my own entrance, a door off the basement TV room that led to the back yard.

  I pulled butter from the mini fridge under the counter and set it out to soften, and gathered the rest of the ingredients, then joined Ang on the sofa.

  “So who should we give them to?” I asked. The experiment was her idea, so I figured she could suggest our victims.

  Ang held the steno notebook and my purple pen, which she tapped against her pursed lips for a few seconds. “I don’t think we even know enough to make informed decisions about who we pick. So I say we go random. Let’s just see who comes into the coffee shop during our shift on Monday.”

  “As good a plan as any, I guess,” I said around a yawn so big my jaw cracked. My nightmares were starting to seriously affect my sleep.

  I heard lumbering footfalls on the stairs and grimaced. Only Bradley would be that loud. He was singing to himself, probably a song from one of the obscure college bands he liked, and he paused at the bottom of the stairs for an air drums solo. I rolled my eyes at Ang. He looked like a complete idiot.

  “Aw, how nice of you to make something for me! What’s it going to be, a cake? Brownies?” he asked, surveying the ingredients spread out on the counter.

  “Yeah, right,” I scoffed.

  “Hi, Bradley,” Ang said, and gave me a disapproving look. On an intellectual level, she knew full well why Brad irritated me so much, but being an only child, she didn’t completely understand.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he said to Ang, then disappeared into the storage room and started digging around. A few minutes later, he emerged with a golf bag slung over his shoulder.

  “Catch you chicks later.” He saluted and pounded up the stairs, the golf clubs clanking around in the bag.

  “Chicks? Oh my God, could he be a bigger dork?”

  “He’s not that bad,” Ang said. “He’s friendly. Sometimes he’s pretty funny, really.”

  “If you have a crush on my brother…” I couldn’t even finish the sentence.

  “No! No. You know I don’t. It’s just, sometimes you seem kind of hard on him.”

  “Yeah, well, try having your attention-whore brother in the same grade as you.”

  “I know, old news—it sucks.” She tilted her head in sympathy. “But it’s not his fault.”

  “Yeah, yeah…” I flapped my hand back and forth as if shooing away a fly, and stood up. We’d had this conversation about a hundred times before.

  I pressed my finger against the waxed paper that encased the butter, but it still wasn’t soft enough. Some people might stick it in the microwave for a few seconds to hurry the process, but not me. My grandmother taught me that microwaving caused the solids, oils, and water in the butter to separate. “Loses its integrity,” she used to say.

  I slouched back down on the sofa and examined the chipped, midnight-blue polish on my nails.

  “He just gets away with everything.” I looked at Ang and sighed. “Seriously, he’s started breaking curfew, like, weekly, and never gets punished. It’s gotten to the point Mom lets him do whatever he wants. Dad’s not quite as bad, but he’s at the café all the time and doesn’t know half the stuff Bradley does.”

  “Well … I’m sure it’s hard, you know, when your kid almost dies.” She was going into Diplomatic Angeline mode, trying to be on my side, but at the same time letting me know that I was being a tiny bit unreasonable. She was pretty good at treading that line, actually. It was one of the things that made her such a great friend.

  “That was years ago.” I scrunched my mouth to one side. I really didn’t enjoy revisiting this stuff. I hated the whiney sound in my voice, but I couldn’t help it. “But it’s like … Mom just never went back to normal. Ever since Brad had cancer, it’s like he can do no wrong. And the fact that he got stuck in my grade just, I don’t know, rubs my face in it even more.”

  After Bradley went into remission, he started eighth grade over. And he had a strange sort of celebrity status. He already knew everyone in ninth grade, of course, but then he became friends with everyone in eighth grade—my class. I felt guilty for even thinking it, but it was like he came back to school and took over my territory.

  “But whatever,” I said, and shrugged. “It’s not like I can do anything about it. And I am glad he’s okay, even if he is a turd.”

  “Maybe you should give Brad one of the cookies,” Ang said, and giggled.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Or my parents.”

  We both busted up at the thought of my parents acting crazy because of some cookies. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe if we figured out what all those colored liquids did, there would be something in there to make my family go back to normal, like we were before Brad got sick.

  “We should probably stick with our original plan,” Ang said, still giggling.

  We measured and mixed ingredients in three different bowls. I let one drop of yellow fall into one bowl, and one drop of blue into another. The third bowl didn’t get any pyxis liquids because we wanted to have some regular cookies as controls in our experiment. Ang’s idea, of course.

  When they came out of the oven, we transferred them to three separate racks, careful not to let cookies from different batches even come close to touching each other. Once they’d cooled, we packaged them into three plastic storage containers, and I stashed them in my school bag.

  After school tomorrow, we’d choose our victims.

  || 10 ||

  THE NEXT DAY, MONDAY, Ang and I walked together from school to the café.

  “Poor, unsuspecting people,” Ang was saying. “They’re going to come in for coffee, but little do they know, they’ll get magic spell cookies.”

  “We don’t have to do this,” I said. I hoped she wouldn’t agree. I was dying to do this experiment.

  “No, I think we do.” Ang looked a little worried, but her voice was fi
rm. “And at some point, we’ll have to figure out what the rest of those bottles do, too.”

  “I just hope it’s worth it, you know? It’s driving me crazy. I hardly think about anything besides the pyxis, and my dreams, and…” I almost added Harriet to the list, but I didn’t want to sound completely paranoid.

  The night before, I’d stayed up until nearly two in the morning with my laptop, scouring the internet for info about the bottles and Harriet Jensen. I’d even started Googling things like “blue liquid,” “yellow liquid,” and pictures of old bottles, hoping to find something. A couple of times I arrived back at the website with the morphing color blobs, and I’d spent several minutes methodically clicking on every inch of the page. I thought maybe there was a hidden button that would get me into the website.

  Last night, I also had an email from Mason.

  I’d really like to know why you’re asking such a strange question. No, those words don’t mean anything to me that I can think of. It must be important if you’re finally writing to me. I still don’t get why you’re giving me the silent treatment. It’s stupid, and you know it. Games are so not your style. I’ll be back on Friday and I’m going to MAKE you talk to me. We can’t be like this, esp not after what happened. You ARE going to explain all of this to me, right?

  My face heated up a little when I remembered his words. He was right—the silent treatment thing was pretty lame. I hadn’t written back to him. I didn’t really know what to say. He obviously had no idea that Ang had seen him with Sophie after the Winter Solstice Festival—the day after he’d kissed me—or he’d know why I was ignoring him.

  But he’d be home in a few days. My pulse sped. I was going to have to face him, finally. I felt a mix of anger, nerves, and a tiny pinpoint of something else—anticipation, maybe?—at the prospect of it.

  I’d told Ang that Mason didn’t seem to know anything and that he was returning next week, but I didn’t give her the full details of his message. She tried to ask me how I felt about it, but I evaded her questions.