Ultraviolet Catastrophe

by Jamie Grey

  I shuddered. “Can we just hurry up and find the freezer where they found Avery please?”

  Asher smiled and shook his head. “Some scientist you are.”

  “Yeah, there’s a reason I’m not going into biology, thank you very much.”

  We’d reached the far end of the room, and I peered through the thick glass of the door into another room with tall freezers. Several men inspected one hanging open, dusting for fingerprints and scanning the space with a weird, hand-held sensor that looked like a laser gun.

  “What are they doing?” I whispered.

  “Scanning for biochemical markers the killer might have left behind. Everyone at QT is on file, and even the smallest skin sample could register.” Asher frowned. “The room looks clean to me. I doubt we’ll find anything there to help us.”

  “Maybe we should try searching his office?” Goosebumps pricked my arm, and the only thing I wanted was to get the hell out of this place. I turned toward the exit, then spotted a scrap of fabric stuck on the edge of the door.

  I bent down to study it. “Did you see this?”

  Asher shook his head. “Looks like it’s from a shirt.”

  “Do you think it’s from Avery? Or the killer?”

  “Let’s find out.” He crossed the room and pulled open a drawer that held a set of shiny metal instruments. He grabbed a pair of tweezers and held them out to me.

  I carefully pulled the fabric from the doorframe, then paused. “What about those scanner things? Wouldn’t they be able to pick up skin flakes on this?”

  Asher looked like he wanted to grab me in a bear hug, but he dropped his arms before he touched me. “You’re a genius, Lexie. Come on — I know where they store the machines. We might get lucky and sneak in unnoticed since everyone’s down here.”

  A warm glow surged through me. I liked holding my own with the resident genius.

  The technical storage warehouses were located in Division Ten and, lucky for us, completely deserted. I pressed my thumb to the scanner, and we slipped inside one of the huge storage rooms. The fluorescent lights flickered on with our movement, and I gaped at the floor-to-ceiling shelves stretching as far as I could see.

  “The manifest is stored on the computer. Over here.” Asher booted up the computer in the corner and typed in a search term. I was still blinking at the sheer number of gadgets and devices piled on the shelves. And this was the smallest of the storerooms.

  “Got it. Row 13, Section G.”

  We started toward the other end of the room, our shoes squeaking on the cement floors. “I can’t believe Avery’s dead and no one seems upset,” I said. “I mean, he was creepy in class, but was he really that bad?”

  “The guy was an asshole. He hit on every female scientist here. And there was more than one whisper he’d had affairs with some of the senior students in the past. The only reason they didn’t fire him was because he was a brilliant scientist.”

  I frowned. “I don’t care if you’re brilliant or not. If you act like that, you should be gone.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” Asher led us down Row 13, his eyes scanning the shelves as we walked. “I don’t know why Danvers kept him around. She doesn’t seem like the type of person to put up with his shit.”

  “And to give him a promotion? Why would she put him in charge of the project if he was that bad?” I searched, too, though I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for. There were stacks of boxes labeled with odd names and descriptions like the Eyre Star Gazer or the Shepard Mass Effect Generator. I tugged at the tip of my ponytail. How many experiments was QT involved with exactly?

  “Found it,” Asher called from down the row.

  He bent over a small machine, fiddling with the controls. It almost looked like a price gun they used in supermarkets, but it had a small computer screen and a keypad.

  “Put the fabric on the shelf there, and I’ll scan it.” He pressed some buttons, and the machine squawked. A fluorescent glow started at the gun end, and he passed it slowly back and forth over the piece of cloth. “It’s looking for biological markers now. If it finds any, it’ll start beeping, and we can try to type them.”

  I held my breath as the machine hummed and vibrated. Seeing a QT invention in action was pretty cool.

  A shrill beep echoed in the storage room, and Asher looked up with a grin. “Gotcha!” He pressed a few more buttons, and the light coming from the machine turned red. “Biological marker found. Now to figure out who this shirt belonged to.”

  I inched closer so I could see the screen on the machine. The image of a DNA helix spun slowly as it searched the database. Asher’s lips were twisted into a smile, and his foot tapped the cement floor as we waited. He looked as excited as I felt. What if we found the killer? What if this solved everything?

  Finally, the machine vibrated, and the helix disappeared from the screen. Our shoulders touched as I moved even closer, and Asher tilted the screen so we could both read.

  We both let out a sigh of disappointment. The shirt belonged to Dr. Avery.

  Asher dropped the machine back on the shelf and crossed his arms. His dark hair flopped over his forehead. “Damn it. I thought we had something.”

  I frowned. “I suppose it tells us one thing. Someone dragged him down there. He didn’t die in the cryo chambers.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “There’s a seam in the fabric, like at a shoulder. But the fabric was caught on the door at waist-level. Someone dragged him through that door. He wasn’t walking.”

  Asher’s eyes widened. “You’re right. So if he wasn’t killed there, where was he killed?”

  “His office!” I said.

  We sprinted for the door at the same time.

  Unfortunately, even Asher’s mad acting skills couldn’t get us past the guards blocking Dr. Avery’s office. Name dropping didn’t work. Bribes didn’t work. I think the only person who could have gotten inside was Dr. Danvers, and she wasn’t around to ask. She was still barricaded in her office with security.

  “Come on, man, we just need to get inside for a minute.”

  “You heard me, Rosen. No one gets in.” The guard’s hand inched toward his waist. Where his stun gun was.

  “Let’s go find Max and Zella.” I tugged on Asher’s arm. Pissing off security was not going to get us anywhere but locked in a cell.

  “Fine. Whatever.”

  I inched closer to whisper in his ear, trying to ignore the way his long lashes curled against his cheekbones. “Making them suspicious isn’t going to help. We need to figure something else out.”

  “I suggest you get back to classes, Mr. Rosen,” one of the burly guards growled.

  “Whatever, Jim. See if I help you next time you need your pulse pistol fixed.” Asher turned away and marched toward the elevators.

  “Let’s find the others and see what they think. With that much genius in a room, we’re bound to come up with something.” I snuck a glance at him from the corner of my eye. His shoulders were hunched around his ears, and a scowl twisted his face. “What’s up, Ash?”

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I just hate not knowing what’s going on. I’m the student liaison. I should be involved.”

  “In a murder investigation? Aren’t you taking on a bit much? Let security and police do their jobs. Avery’s death doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

  He stopped to face me. “Doesn’t it?”

  My brain whirred and spun, things finally connecting.

  I’d discovered Avery’s calculations were wrong.

  Then we’d found an anomaly in the simulation.

  Our data was wiped from the network.

  Avery was murdered.

  Sure seemed like it was connected to us. I shook my head, not wanting to believe it. “Maybe it’s just coincidence?”

  “There is no such thing as coincidence.” His eyes were suddenly cold. “The project lead is dead. He was the only person who knew how he developed his calculations,
how everything was connected. What else did he know?”

  Shivers crawled over my skin, and I wrapped my arms around my waist. “What do we do?”

  “We keep searching.”

  “Maybe we should tell someone. Let Dr. Danvers or my dad take care of it.”

  He shook his head. “No way. We’re the ones who discovered the connection; we’re the ones who are going to solve it. As soon as we get anyone else involved, they’ll shut us out of the investigation. This is my project, too, and I’m not going to let it fail.” He spun on his heel and marched toward the elevators. “Come on. Let’s go find the others.”

  Luckily, we didn’t have far to look. Max, Zella, and Amy were already in the library when we walked in. They were gathered around a table in the corner, heads together. I had a pretty good idea of what they were talking about.

  “Did you guys hear the news?” Amy asked.

  Asher nodded and slipped into the chair beside her. I took a seat across the table beside Zella.

  She flashed me a shy smile. “Hey, Lexie.”

  I blinked in surprise before turning into a responding smile. “Hey, Zella. Have you guys heard any updates? Do they know anything yet?”

  Zella shook her head and tapped at her tablet for a second to pull up an email. “Dr. Danvers sent a short message this morning with the news since it was already spreading. She said they didn’t have any details yet, but they’d keep us informed. She also said this would not affect the project and everyone should keep working.”

  My eyebrows went up. Not even a pause for the investigation to be completed? I met Asher’s gaze across the table, and he frowned.

  “Lexie and I have a few more details, but they can’t go any further than this table,” he said, his voice full of warning.

  “Of course not,” Amy said. “Who are we going to tell? And who would believe us anyway? We’re just kids.”

  “The smartest kids in the country,” Asher said. “Someone might believe us, and then we’ll all be in trouble. Because Lexie and I discovered Avery wasn’t killed in the cryo labs. Someone killed him here in QT and then hid his body down there, hoping he wouldn’t be found. Hoping that it would postpone the project.” His voice went deep as he whispered, “Someone is trying to sabotage us.”

  Max shook his head. “But who? This project will make QT the most important technology company in the world. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Asher leaned forward, his face grim. “It makes perfect sense. Think about what you just said, and then imagine if you were another company, another government agency. There would be no way to compete. This has got to be freaking them out. So we have one option: Find the saboteur before something else happens. Are you in?”

  Around the table, everyone nodded.

  “We need to be smart about this then,” Zella said. “If something on the network wiped our research, if someone’s suspicious about our findings, we’re going to get caught. We need to stay off the QT grid and only talk about this in person. No emails, texts, voicemail, anything. And any work we do has to be on our own secure network. Asher, can you handle that?”

  “No problem. I’ve already started networking our home computers and blocking the QT signal.” He tapped a finger on the table. “We need to finish rebuilding the simulation, track down the source of the network scan to see who created it, and search Avery’s office to see if we can find any clues to what he was working on.”

  “We’re almost done with the sim rebuild,” Max said, flicking through his tablet to bring up a spreadsheet. “The algorithms need to be reworked, and we’ll have to reenter the control data by hand instead of downloading it from QT. Probably eight to ten more hours of work.”

  Asher made a note on his own tablet. “Good. I’ll start the network search at home tonight. I should be able to hack into QT and run a trace.”

  “I thought there wasn’t anything you could do about the scan the other day,” I said, wrinkling my forehead. I might be smart, but I was no computer genius.

  “I couldn’t do anything at the time, but I have a program at home that can help me trace the scan back through the network. It’s going to take a while though, I have a feeling it’s hidden behind all sorts of closed doors that may take a while to hack.”

  “In the meantime, we have to get into Avery’s office if we’re going to find any real clues.” I chewed my lip and watched Joan the librarian file books across the room. An idea sparked in my brain. “The QT gala is next Friday, and I would think security’d be done searching Avery’s office by then. We could sneak in while everyone’s at the party.”

  Zella nodded with a reluctant smile. “That’s a great idea.”

  I tried to hide my surprise at Zella actually agreeing with me.

  “I like it,” Amy said. “Asher and I can sneak in and search, and the rest of you can keep an eye out for us.”

  My mouth gaped. She had not just stolen my idea.

  Asher shook his head. “I think Lexie and I should do it. Our parents both have offices in that wing. We can use them as an excuse if we get caught.”

  Amy pouted, twirling a piece of hair around her finger. “But Ash…”

  “He’s right,” Max said with a nod. “I’d volunteer, but my dad’s office is in the south wing. It just makes sense.”

  “We still have a lot of work to do.” Asher’s expression was unusually serious; he even sat upright in his chair instead of lounging in it like usual. “We have simulations to build and clues to dig up.”

  “You sound like Veronica Mars,” Amy said with a smirk. “Okay, guys. Let’s go back to Max’s and keep working. I’ll see you at dinner tonight.” She kissed Asher on the cheek as she got to her feet.

  He went still. “Um…I’ll have to cancel our study date tonight. My dad’s going to need me with this mess going on.”

  “I need you, Ash. And you already know he’ll never miss you. He barely knows you’re around half the time.” Amy waved and flounced off with the other two, leaving me to stare awkwardly down at my own tablet. I hated this. Hated feeling jealous when I had no reason to be. Hated being the fifth wheel in the group.

  “What exactly do you want me to work on?” I asked, not meeting his eyes.

  “This morning I realized some of Einstein’s early work was on theories for disproving the ultraviolet catastrophe.” He rubbed the back of his neck before turning to me. “This is going to sound crazy — and I know they’re two separate things — but I swear I recognized part of the equation for the UVC wrapped in with Avery’s calculations for the Einstein-Rosen bridge. And it just doesn’t make sense. Maybe you could search for a connection.”

  I nodded, more pleased than I wanted to admit. This was a real task, not some busy work. “I’ll see what I can come up with.”

  “It might be nothing, but it’s just a hunch.” He got to his feet and paused, staring at me like he wanted to say something. “Lexie, you know my dinner with Amy isn’t a date. I’m just helping her with her calculations. She was feeling like she’d fallen behind.” He shrugged. “I wanted to be a good friend.”

  I hated the relief that surged through me. It shouldn’t matter to me what he did with his time. He’d offered to help me plenty of times, but I’d been too stubborn to take him up on it. “You don’t have to explain to me. You can hang out with whoever you want. We’re just friends.”

  He stared at me for a long moment before finally turning away. “I’ll see you around, Lexie.”

  Dad pulled into the QT parking lot, and I opened the door into the clear, dark night. Lights blazed from the building, and I knew inside would be filled with laughing, chatting scientists. But out here, for this moment, it was calm and peaceful. The scent of dying leaves filled the air, and a cool breeze caressed my cheeks. It was amazing how different the air was here from back in Ohio. Maybe because of the altitude, or maybe it was something else. But though I’d never admit it to anyone else, I was starting to like the way it always smelled crisp and c
lean, with just a hint of metal behind it.

  “You ready for this, Lex?” Dad asked, coming around to my side of the car and offering his arm.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.” I pulled my shawl closer, teetering on my spiky heels, and clutched at him.

  “You look very pretty tonight,” Dad said, leading me toward the building. His black tuxedo had a slight sheen in the lights from the building and fit his tall frame perfectly. He’d shaved and smoothed his hair for a change, but I knew in twenty minutes it’d be standing on end again after he forgot and ran a hand through it.

  “Thanks! You don’t look so bad yourself.” I beamed at him, then smoothed my hands down the crisscrossed fabric of the corset of my dress. I’d never had a gown like this before. It was strapless, the dark purple of the bodice fading subtly down the dress until it gave way to a flowing skirt with a lighter purple hem where it skimmed the floor. It reminded me of moonlight and mystery, and part of me felt like I’d suddenly hit some milestone of adulthood.

  A twinge of loneliness shot through me. I’d emailed Mom a picture of me before we left, but I wanted her here in person to see me. To have helped me pick the dress out instead of going to the mall myself. To help me put my hair up into a half-twist and curl the tendrils I’d left down over my shoulder. I missed her every day, and communications with her were spotty at best. I’d asked again in my last email when she was coming home, but there’d been no answer.

  I sighed, and Dad squeezed my arm. “What’s up, Lex?”

  “I wish Mom was here with us.”

  He nodded, his sandy hair dark in the moonlight. “Me too. She has a few things to finish first. But soon.”

  I snuck a glance at him. “What’s up with you guys? Does she know about Jordan?”

  “Jordan?” Dad frowned. “Jordan and I are coworkers — that’s it. Lexie, I’ve never stopped loving your mother. There’s never been anyone else for me.”

  I stared at him, blinked. Until I’d seen them kissing, I’d never dreamed he hadn’t gotten over her. What else didn’t I know about their relationship?