by Sechin Tower
Instinctively, a list of old pick-up lines scrolled through Dean’s mind, and then his gut clenched as his grief for McKenzie recaptured his thoughts.
If he gave any external sign of turmoil, the woman didn’t seem to notice. She strolled slowly past the display case, one finger trailing behind her to caress the line where the glass met the metal frame. She ran her finger around the little sticker that said “Please Do Not Touch the Glass,” leaving it encircled in a faint smudge.
“I know how you’re feeling,” she said. “Been up all night, exhausted from the plane ride but unable to sleep.”
“How…? I mean, what?” Dean sat back. “How do you know I’ve been on a plane?”
She pivoted to face him by shifting the weight on the balls of her feet. She wore black running shoes—very practical and sporty, even if they were a little bit out of place with the suit. She also had a sleek, silver day pack, the kind you might buy at a high-end outfitter. The pack’s straps hugged her shoulders as snugly as a parachute’s harness.
“Of course you took the plane,” she said. “This is Detroit. The only people who actually live here are criminals or unemployed factory workers, and you don’t look like a factory worker. More importantly, I can see the stub of your plane ticket in your jacket pocket.”
Dean self-consciously looked down to see that, yes, the corner of his ticket protruded from his pocket, with the airline’s logo visible to the world. He tucked it back out of sight.
The woman leaned back against the exhibit window case. “So if you aren’t a criminal or a line worker, would you mind if I ask your line of work?”
“I’m a, um…” he almost said firefighter, but then corrected himself. “I’m in academics.”
“Academics,” she said with a laugh. “You don’t look like an academic. What’d you do to your nose, get it stuck in a text book?”
Dean rubbed his nose instinctively when she said that, and pain shot through his face. The swelling and the black eyes had diminished greatly over the last twenty four hours, but black tracks still filled the skin beneath his eyes and the whole area felt raw and tender.
“It was a… bicycle accident.”
Her head dipped back as she let out a light, tinkling laugh. “Looks more like the kind of thing that happens in a fight. Am I right? I’d hate to see what the other guy ended up looking like. Let me guess—he was huge? And bald? And he drove a motorcycle and had two friends with him. Lucky guess, right?”
Dean looked up at her in shock, his fingers frozen in the air an inch above his injured nose.
“Relax,” she said, walking over to him and placing a hand under his elbow and guiding him to his feet. “I know who you are, Dean. My name’s Angela. I graduated from the Institute last year, and now I’m here to help you.”
Dean’s mind reeled as he tried to re-categorize Angela from “random hot chick” to “unexpected ally.” He groped through his memory for explanations, particularly about how she had found him here. Perhaps McKenzie had asked her to keep an eye on the museum. Dean had also mentioned where he was going in his email to the current students, so one of them could have sent for her. Whatever the case, Angela seemed like she knew what she was doing.
“I’ll answer all your questions later,” she said, hooking her arm through his. “For right now, just walk with me.”
“Walk—where? Why?”
“Shhh. Walk casual.” She gestured with her eyes up to the ceiling at a black patch of plastic. “There are security cameras all over the place.”
“Why do we care about the cameras?”
“I thought that would be obvious,” Angela said. “We’re about to rob the museum.”
Chapter 26 ~ Soap
Victor let me into Topsy and even got me another key. After that, I worked through the night to improve Rusty. If I was going to get revenge on the Professor, I would need my robot in top condition.
The first thing I did was cannibalize one of the scaled-down antimatter reactors from some big gizmo that was already broken. As far as I could tell—and this was only a guess because I didn’t have time for any experimentation—the reactors worked by accelerating the formation of virtual particles on the quantum level. These virtual particles always came in pairs, one part matter and one part antimatter, and the energy came when these particles annihilated each other in the same instant they formed. There were no dangerous materials because the fuel—the virtual particles—were already everywhere in the universe. It’s possible they were coming through from a parallel universe or that they were quantum strings changing their vibration frequencies or something, but the bottom line was the same either way: unlimited, weightless fuel that was stable until use. Also, the only waste products were some gamma rays which could be soaked up by some nice, heavy cadmium-plated depleted uranium shielding.
Right then, I didn’t care about the operational theories or how the reactors seemed to scoff at the first law of thermodynamics. All I cared about was the power.
Before, Rusty was methodical and slow, so he was hard-pressed to keep up with a person walking briskly. Now, with the antimatter reactor in his core and superconducting servo motors for all his moving parts, he could carry a pair of anvils and still outrun me. I also restored his scorpion tail with the magnifying transmitter, which meant he could blast focused EMPs in different frequencies and with different strengths. I thought about adding some rail guns or flame throwers or something, but I didn’t have any of those things handy, and every hour I spent tinkering in the lab was another hour my Dad was rotting in jail.
Aside from robotic backup, I also needed information on where to find the Professor, or at least his men. I remembered that the Topsy House computers connected to the sheriff’s station servers, but Victor said that only Nikki had the passwords to get into the police databases. I dreaded seeing Nikki after what she had said to me, but I was ready to beg if that’s what it took.
The only problem was that Nikki never showed up.
“Where is she?” I finally said to Victor in exasperation.
Victor was taking a study break to feed the chupacabra. Choop, as we were now calling the creature, seemed very appreciative of the anything we gave him. My guess is that the Professor hadn’t been feeding him enough and was probably abusive in other ways, too. Now, the spiny gray reptile (Victor insisted he was a reptile and not a lizard) was all too happy to live in our jail cell. It turned out that Choop was really smart, too, and he even seemed to recognize a wide variety of verbal commands like “sit” and “roll over” and “stop trying to eat your bed cushion.” Not for the first time, I wished I knew where this creature had come from.
“Nikki usually isn’t gone this long,” Victor said. He had a pocket full of Slim Jims and was peeling them open, one at a time, and handing them through the bars of the cage. Choop would grab them eagerly and make a kind of chirping bird-song while he munched away. Then Victor reached through the bars to pet the creature. It seemed like the right way to lose an arm, but the big reptile nuzzled his hand and kept chirping.
“You think Nikki’s staying away because of me?” I asked. “I mean, because of the thing with the key?”
“Probably,” Victor was never one to candy-coat a situation. “Nikki gets pretty vindictive sometimes. Here,” he offered me a Slim Jim. “Help me feed Choop.”
It didn’t look like he needed any help, but he wouldn’t let me off the hook.
“Give it to him. Go on. He’s an amazing creature, you know. He reached right into the core of that badly shielded reactor and he never showed the slightest sign of radiation sickness. Don’t you think he’s earned a snack?”
I slid the stick of processed meat only a little way into the cage because I was afraid to get any closer than that. Those red eyes studied my face for a minute, then they looked over at Victor, then back to me. Finally, Choop grabbed it and retreated to a corner, where he could eat his prize and keep watch on me at the same time.
“Don’t feel
bad,” Victor said. “It takes time to build up trust.”
“Do you mean with Choop or with Nikki?”
Victor’s lips twitched upwards at the corners. I almost had him smiling.
“If you really want to talk to her, she’s going to be at the Pi Delta Pi party tonight. You can find her there.”
If she was there, then I was going to a frat party. Hannah would be proud of me.
On my way out of the lab I passed a shiny steel cabinet and jumped when I saw my reflection. Two solid days and one solid night in the lab had left my hair all tangled and messy, plus there were some evil black circles under my eyes. It made me look like an actual mad scientist. It was scary and I didn’t like it, but all I had time to do was pull the stray hairs behind my ears and head over to Pi Delta Pi.
Everything I knew about fraternities came from movies and television shows. All that stuff led me to believe that a frat party consisted of a bunch of attractive young women and buff young guys in polo shirts, all dancing with red plastic cups in their hands while pounding music playing in the background. In reality, the lighting was much worse, the music was much louder, the people weren’t nearly as good looking, and everybody stood around trying to talk over the music instead of actually dancing. Also, the Pi Delta Pi house radiated the stench of yeast, the result of decades of spilled beer soaking into the carpet.
I searched the main floor for Nikki’s face and then pressed my way upstairs to see that people were packed in all the way back to the steam-coated windows in each room. It wasn’t easy to find anyone in that crowd, especially since the lighting in one room consisted of blue Christmas lights strung around the ceiling, and in another room it was just a plastic, multi-colored disco ball that rotated around a sixty-watt bulb.
The people at the party were actually much nicer than I expected. Unlike the beautiful, selfish characters on those college television dramas, these people here were just regular students. They wore t-shirts and baseball hats and their main goal for the night seemed to be looking casual while standing near people they wanted to meet. At any given time, no more than three people danced to the deafeningly loud music, while the rest leaned against the walls or stood in tight clusters that made it difficult to get around them. I got polite but indifferent smiles from everyone I bumped into, and when I pushed my way past the keg in the kitchen, somebody slid a sloshing plastic cup into my hands.
“Oh, I’m not old enough to drink,” I said. I would have preferred to whisper it, but I had to yell to be heard. I offered the cup back to him but he didn’t take it.
“You’re in college,” he said with a half smile. “The drinking age is lowered for college girls.”
I didn’t remember reading anything about that addendum to the state liquor laws, but I thanked him for the drink and moved back into the living room.
Sidling through the crowd, I found a run-down beige couch that looked as if it had served as a scratch post for eight generations of tomcats. At first, I only had room to lean against one of the dilapidated sofa arms, but I found it was a great place to see the crowd and search for Nikki. From that couch, I had the front door ahead of me, the staircase that led upstairs on the right, and the kitchen on the left. If Nikki was anywhere at that party, she would pass by one of those places eventually.
The turnover rate of couch-sitters was high enough that I calculated that it would only take about five minutes to get a seat. Five minutes and twelve seconds later, there was still no Nikki, but I had moved down from the arm of the couch to claim a cushion, or at least a part of it. I had to be wedged up against one end of the seat because there was a group of rowdy guys in backwards baseball caps who were all excitedly discussing some sports video game.
I looked down and realized I still had the beer cup in my hand even though I hadn’t taken a sip. I sniffed it: it smelled like wet socks. I took a tiny drink and found out that it tasted like wet socks, too. There were no convenient potted plants nearby, so I couldn’t pour it out, and I wasn’t going to dump it out on the carpet, no matter what the norm in here seemed to be. So I kept holding onto it without drinking. Besides, everyone else seemed to have a cup, so I figured it would help me remain in disguise.
As I watched for Nikki, I tried to eavesdrop on the discussion of the boys next to me and thought about what Hannah would have done to join in. The first step of the Conversation Matrix, as I recalled, was to find something to compliment, but the problem was that I didn’t know much about sports. When the boy wedged into the couch next to me mentioned that his pinch hitter (whatever that was) kept flying out, I jumped at the chance to congratulate him.
“What did you say?” he shouted over the music at me. He had green eyes and his dusky-blond hair poked through his baseball cap at odd angles, which probably meant he had chosen the hat as a substitute for combing his hair that morning.
“I said: congratulations on your man flying out,” I shouted. “It sounds like he must’ve been moving really fast. Also: you must be exceptionally good at this game, which suggests talent in other areas as well.”
“Hey, no need to get sarcastic,” he said. I hadn’t meant to be sarcastic. I decided to cut my losses and move on to the second step.
“What sports do you play?” I asked. “Also: you seem to have a very athletic build.”
He looked at me for a moment with that blank look that people get when they try to solve differential equations in their heads. Then he smiled.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
That was trouble. He wasn’t supposed to ask my name yet—Hannah always asked theirs first. Had I missed a cue somewhere? Was he off script, or was I? I wished, not for the first time, that conversations were as predictable as microchips.
“I like to skateboard,” I said in a futile attempt to keep the conversation on track. “It’s all about vectors and geometry and stuff. Also: you seem to have an athletic build.”
I grimaced. I knew I was getting it all out of order even worse than before. I clutched the plastic cup a little too hard and it creased in the middle, just enough to send some of the pale liquid cascading down the side and over my fingers.
“How wasted are you?” he asked with a suddenly-huge smile. Now our knees touched and it made me uncomfortable, so I skipped to the final stage of the conversation.
“Want to go to a party?” I said. Then I wanted to smack myself because I realized we already were at a party.
The guy stretched his arm across my shoulder and said “Sure, baby, let’s go party. Where’s your room?” His friends were all watching us now, wooting like primates and high-fiving each other.
“I think I better go,” I said. If he heard me over the music he ignored me, because he kept his arm tight around my shoulder so I couldn’t leave.
Suddenly someone yanked me off of the couch. The boys behind me laughed uproariously and called for me to come back, but I was already being dragged through the crowd by a hand with long, pink-painted fingernails.
“Nikki!” I could hardly believe it. The person I had been trying all night to find had found me instead.
She didn’t say anything until she pulled me through the kitchen and into the back yard, which had even more empty plastic cups strewn about it than the inside of the house. It was a lot less crowded out there and the music was only a deep, thumping bass that didn’t impede conversation quite as much, even though my ears were still ringing like mad. I wondered how much permanent damage my eardrums had suffered even from the short exposure to that level of noise.
Nikki gestured for me to sit on one of the white plastic lawn chairs that were arranged around a wobbly plastic table on the patio. I took a moist towelette out of my pocket and wiped the beer residue off my hands. Then I used the towelette to start scrubbing the film of green mold off the chair.
“You’re still mad at me, huh?” I asked as I worked at the chair.
“I’m still mad at you because you’re still an idiot,” she said. I felt like someone had s
lapped me across the face, but she didn’t slow down. “You fell right into his trap, didn’t you? You almost got us all killed. And then I have to go and rescue you from a bunch of drunken frat boys. Honestly, Soap, you’re so naïve that you’re a danger to everyone, especially yourself.”
I started scrubbing the chair even harder. I was opening up a little clean spot in the middle of the field of mold. With each stroke the spot grew bigger, but it was still tiny in comparison to the rest of the chair, an insignificant dot of purity in the middle of a world of filth.
“I’m the victim…” I said pathetically.
“Victim? Ha!” she stopped her pacing to wave her hand dismissively in my direction. She was frowning and her teeth were clenched. “The Professor, he’s dangerous. You hear me? You’ve seen what he can do. He will kill you if he thinks it will help his cause.”
“That’s why I need your help,” I said. “The Professor’s framing my Dad for a crime he didn’t commit, but you can work the computer to access the criminal database. I know we have cameras in the parking lot, which means we have license plate numbers for those motorcycles—”
“Are you nuts?” she threw her hands up in the air. “I might as well kill you myself and save them the trouble.”
“I promise not to track them down in person. I just want to come up with information I can give to my Dad’s lawyer.”
It was a bald-faced lie. I wanted to go lay waste to their lives the way the Professor had laid waste to mine.
Nikki stepped in close to me, looking into my eyes. Something fierce burned inside of her, and I was sure she could see the same thing burning in me.
“You swear that’s all you’re fixin’ to do?” she demanded. “Maybe you deserve the chance to play Nancy Drew—so long as you stick to the paper trail only. You promise?”