Lawyers.

  Business offices.

  Then right there on the second floor was Rasmussen Laboratories, where Harrison worked.

  Once we got into the elevator, the differences immediately started.

  It looked like a typical silver elevator interior until we got to the buttons.

  It was a digital screen that required us to type in the floor number and scans our fingerprints.

  “Okay, here goes nothing,” I whispered as Kade punched in our floor number and then pressed the tape to the screen.

  I held my breath, waiting as I stared at the screen.

  A green line slid up and down over the digital numbers before the screen lit up a brilliant blue. “Floor Two. Welcome, Mr. Stevens.”

  Kade and I let out a big sigh as the elevator roared to life for the brief trip up to the second floor.

  As soon as the doors opened, we were welcomed by the cold blast chill like we had in our own labs.

  But while ours was sterile and white, Harrison’s was more like something out of a science fiction movie.

  Brilliant blue hues flashed in the darkened room as if everything was lit by UV lighting, from the metal walls to the floor of the open warehouse-like space.

  “Well…this is different,” Kade murmured, scanning the room.

  Unlike our facility, the place was completely empty, with no one in any sectioned-off facilities.

  And there were a lot of those with glass walls, filled with different metal shelves and dental-type chairs.

  What were those for? I didn’t even want to think about it.

  “Harrison’s desk has to be somewhere around here,” I said, already heading down the rows of metal tables.

  “How will we know it’s his? A framed photo of you two in college, all smiley and happy?” Kade asked.

  “Maybe one of him and Lucy,” I grumbled.

  Kade sighed, putting his hand on my shoulder. “I really am sorry about all of this, Maisie. I really thought you two had something great. I had no idea there were problems.”

  “Neither did I,” I muttered.

  But I should have known.

  From his late nights at the office.

  Up all night on his phone.

  And the lack of a sex life while we were trying for a baby, should have been the first clue.

  But now, I had to try and move on.

  As much as I could with whatever Harrison had injected me with coursing through me.

  Between that, the Batten’s, and my fertility drugs, I was a freaking mutant.

  I slowed my speed, glancing quickly over each desk before zeroing in on one near a big glass box.

  Our University coffee mug with our mascot and ‘Go fight win’ scrawled across it for the football team that neither of us had ever watched.

  The one I’d gotten him as a graduation gift because it was on clearance at the campus bookstore.

  We had absolutely no money, except what my parents had given me.

  He got me the same mug.

  I thought it was so sweet how we had matching mugs to use in our labs.

  Now the ceramic little white mug filled me with rage as I stomped toward it, my hands clenched into fists at my side.

  I yanked the coffee mug off the desk. Tiny remains of the day’s coffee spilled onto the floor before I threw down the ceramic piece, watching it shatter into dozens of little pieces.

  Kade jumped back before one of the shards got him in the foot.

  “Maisie, what in the hell are you doing?” he barked, scooting to the side, slowly approaching the desk.

  “That bastard!” I screamed, stomping my foot.

  “Hey…Hey…” Kade cooed, putting his hands on my shoulder.

  “Look, we both know that Harrison is an ass, but crushing his stuff and alerting security isn’t going to help either of us.”

  I sighed, looking down at the cement floor now littered with mug pieces .

  He was right, of course.

  He always was.

  But it still felt good to break something.

  “I’ll get a broom and start cleaning this up while you see what you can find in his files, okay?” Kade asked, giving my shoulder a squeeze.

  I sighed, looking down at the broken pieces.

  Just like Harrison and I’s relationship, the fragile pieces left of it had now imploded.

  But Kade was right.

  Now wasn’t the time to dwell on it.

  Even though I wanted it to be his head instead of the mug.

  “Okay…” I said as calmly as I could, but my heart was still racing.

  I didn’t think of myself as a violent person, but a surge of rage and energy continued to surge through me ever since I woke up in the crypt.

  Aside from fencing classes, I’d never fought anyone, let alone a gaggle of creatures.

  But now, with the new strength coursing everywhere in my veins, I felt like I could take on the world.

  But I guess. First, I had to figure out what was moving through me.

  Letting out a deep breath, I pulled out Harrison’s stool.

  I knew it was his because, just like everything he sat on at home, there was the familiar embedded half circle print edged into the surface.

  It was on his office chair at home.

  It was always on our lab stools when we were in university.

  I traced over the half-moon shape, pushing back the tears that threatened to spring to my eyes.

  Not for Harrison. No, that bastard deserved to rot.

  But for what our relationship was.

  For all of those years we worked together.

  The new discoveries and experiments we’d done through college.

  What we’d built together.

  I started the fertility treatments for him.

  Deep down, I thought a baby would solve all of our problems. The distance, the late nights.

  The intelligent intellectual knew that wasn’t true. That people did that all the time, and it was usually just an excuse and a horrible idea.

  I knew a baby wouldn’t solve our problems.

  But maybe, just maybe, I wanted to finally feel what it was like to hold one in my arms.

  To see if I actually had the nurturing mother side and was more than just a scientist.

  Though I’d taken care of Harrison for enough years, I knew it was deep inside me somewhere.

  Just like whatever this was coursing through me.

  And I needed to stop thinking about the past and move forward if I was ever going to find it.

  I finally took a seat on the stool and pulled out a stack of receipts from various fast food places with Harrison’s familiar scribble scrawl.

  “Did this man ever use anything digital?” I grumbled.

  “Are those seriously his notes?” Kade asked as he came back with a plastic broom and dustpan.

  “Yeah. Harrison always liked to have things written down. His lab coat was always filled with sticky notes or little receipts with random words. Some I’d understand like chemical compounds and others….”

  I held up the receipt from a fast-food burger place, the word rickettsiae scrawled in his terrible handwriting.

  “Rickettsiae? The bacterial infection? Like the one that’s a parasite and lives on fleas and ticks?” Kade asked, sweeping up the remaining shards of the mug.

  “Yeah. But that’s all he wrote on here, nothing else,” I muttered, digging through his other receipts.

  I laid out a few more, each only with a few words.

  I was staring back at receipts from different burger joints, all with different biological agents or toxins from bacteria to yeasts.

  “Seems like he was throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what stuck,” I voiced in an undertone.

  Kade finished sweeping the shards, dumping them in a nearby biohazard trash bin.

  “Maybe we should start with your blood,” Kade said.

  “What do you mean my blood?” I asked.

  “We know that whatever Kade injected you with was attacking the Batten’s. So what have we tried that attacked Batten’s,” he said, pulling out his cell phone before sitting on the stool across from mine.

  “The only thing we know so far that even slows down any of the effects of Batten’s is hydrolytic lysosomal N-terminal tripeptidyl peptidase. I don’t see any of that on Kade’s notes,” I grumbled, leafing through another pile of receipts.

  Kade shook his head. “Okay, what about the fertility drugs for the study?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “The progesterone?”

  Kade tilted his head. “Are you sure that’s all they were giving you?”

  My shoulders tightened as a cold chill crept into the back of my neck. “I mean…I guess I just assumed it was.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  I opened and closed my mouth, my cheeks flushing.

  As a scientist, I probably should have asked what they were putting in my body besides a new test with a mixture of progesterone and a new trial substance.

  Kade just nodded and didn’t judge me. Didn’t yell or call me stupid like Harrison would have.

  He just scanned through his phone.

  “Okay, we should look through your blood test samples again and see what else is in there that we might not have looked for before.”

  “Okay, what exactly are we looking for?” I asked.

  He shrugged as he sat his phone on the table and pushed a few buttons. A hologram of my lab results and a female silhouette loomed in the air, lighting the entire table in a bright green glow.

  “Anything that wouldn’t belong in your blood or DNA,” Kade murmured.

  “So a needle in a haystack?” I asked.

  He was the geneticist. I was the chemist.

  There were things the man could look at in a single strand of DNA and figure out the world’s problems. I was sure of that.

  If anyone could cure me, it would be him.

  If I wanted to be cured…

  I opened and closed my fists again.

  There was something to this new power.

  This new strength.

  Something that made me feel like I could be unstoppable.

  Then again, there was nothing that said even if we found out what was causing this newfound power, I would have to get rid of it.

  Maybe I could have my cake and eat it too.

  “Okay, so if we take out the strands with Batten’s and the progesterone…then we’re left with….” I trailed as Kade waved his hands in the air, moving the virtual DNA pieces around.

  His eyes lit up as he looked down at this phone and then back up at the hologram.

  “I may have an idea. Think we could use some of this lab equipment to test it out?” Kade asked.

  I smiled. “I think Harrison and Lucy at least owe us that.”

  “Then let’s get to work.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Okay, so if we change this sequencing….” Kade muttered, pointing at the hologram and moving another glowing strand of DNA.

  We were in the thick of working now and had moved into one of the glass-enclosed laboratories.

  I had no idea how long we’d been there.

  There wasn’t a single clock in the entire expanse of the room, and I hadn’t even looked at the one on Kade’s phone that displayed the hologram.

  “One more blood draw, and I think we have it this time. Do you need more water? Need me to go to the sandwich shop downstairs?” he asked, peering at me with wide eyes behind his thick plastic goggles.

  “Is the sandwich shop even still open?” I asked, already taking my seat at the stool and rolling up my sleeves for another poke.

  “I don’t know. But we can figure out something. I think I’ve stuck you enough, and after the day you’ve had, you deserve something stronger than a turkey melt.”

  We both laughed.

  “Yeah, when this is all done, we’ll have to go out for drinks. Or ice cream.”

  “Or both,” we said in unison, another round of laughter following.

  I remembered when things were this easy with Harrison.

  When we could laugh as we worked together.

  But it hadn’t been like that for years.

  Yet, with Kade…, it was always like this.

  I swallowed, trying not to focus on how the goggles pushed his hair back, bringing out the dimples on his cheeks.

  Nope. Nope. Not going to check out my lab partner right now.

  Especially not when he was about to draw more blood.

  “Luckily, this place also has an endless supply of blood draw equipment,” Kade said, pulling another plastic bag with a sealed syringe inside.

  “I’m feeling like a pincushion,” I said with a sigh.

  Kade stopped mid-rip on the bag. “You know we don’t have to do this right now. We could take a break. I don’t have a guest room at my place, but you can take my bed, and I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  I smiled.

  It was possibly one of the nicest things someone had offered me.

  And that said a lot for my love life’s current state of affairs.

  “That’s sweet of you to offer, Kade. But we both know that we have to get this done. We don’t know when Harrison will get up, and we need to figure this out.”

  Kade nodded, pulling the needle out of the packaging. “I know. I just didn’t want to go any further without being okay with it.”

  I sucked in a breath through my teeth as he cleaned my arm with a small wipe. “Guess this will never get easier either, will it?”

  “Well, you’ve winced a lot less since the first at least three or four times,” he laughed.

  I knew I wouldn’t feel it but focused on a spot on the wall out of habit.

  Somehow they managed to keep these big glass walls clean except for one tiny speck of dust or projectile.

  “All right and done,” Kade said, putting a piece of gauze in place of the needle.

  Our fingers brushed as I replaced his thumb on the gauze, and our eyes met.

  I thought maybe at that moment there was something in his eyes.

  Something unspoken.

  But as quickly as it was there, it passed as he went back to the array of equipment on the counter behind us and started working on the centrifuge for the blood sample.

  “Just a few more minutes, and if my hypothesis is correct, we should know what caused this.”

  “And how to fix it?” I asked sheepishly.

  He smiled, but it was forced as he nodded. “One step at a time.”

  “Okay,” I said with a big sigh and threw the gauze in the biohazard trash before slowly standing to watch the machine do its magic.

  I could watch it just fine when the blood was behind the machine or a glass.

  But not when it was draining from my own arm.

  Irony at its finest, especially for a scientist who dealt with blood day in and day out.

  “Okay, once we get the white blood cells separated, I think we’ll have a much clearer picture,” Kade said, staring at the machine.

  He may have been talking to me, but he was laser-focused on the screen before him. He watched the percentages slowly tick up from eighty percent to eighty-one. Eighty-two….

  Eighty-three.

  I watched the dial tick up with him.

  Wondering what he was looking for.

  What it would find.

  And more importantly, whatever it was, if we could fix it.

  If I wanted to fix it, that was.

  I still hadn’t decided if I wanted to get rid of this newfound power.

  Sure, it would probably affect my fertility, but without a husband…

  “Okay, I think it’s ready,” Kade called excitedly, knocking me from my gruesome thoughts.

  I put on my goggles and gloves, Kade doing the same before opening the hatch of the machine and pulling the vials from the device with a cloud of smoke billowing around us.

  The blood had separated, leaving just liquid gold plasma behind. The same things scientists used in platelet-rich plasma injections to help the body heal itself when there are torn tendons and other soft tissue tears.

  It was gold in our line of work, too, giving us all the good proteins of the blood to study.

  “Okay, now just for a sample,” Kade said aloud, grabbing a pipette and taking the plasma sample from the vial.

  He didn’t need to say all of this out loud.

  Maybe it was for my benefit.

  Or for his own.

  But I didn’t interrupt. I listened as he placed the droplet on a glass square before placing it under the microscope.

  The smile spread across his face. “Maisie, come look at this.”

  He stepped back, bouncing on his heels.

  “Take it you found what you were looking for?” I asked, raising an eyebrow as best I could behind my big plastic goggles.

  “See for yourself.” He held his arm out.

  I moved quickly, taking a look in the microscope, adjusting the lens size, and blinking a few times, ensuring what I was seeing was correct.

  “This… can’t be….” I whispered, shaking my head as I took a step back.

  Kade nodded, his smile faltering as he pulled up the hologram, letting it reflect off his phone.

  “So definitely not just progesterone in those shots they were giving me for fertility,” I grumbled, looking at the evidence.

  It was a cocktail of different chemicals, all of the compounds staring back at me from the hologram.

  Some I’d researched were used for routine fertility treatments like Clomid and follicle-stimulating hormones. Of course, never together like this.

  Then there were things that I’d only heard whispers of, like significant levels of acetylcysteine and Myo-inositol. Both in small doses and over-the-counter supplements were fine, but I should have been dancing off the ceiling with all of the sugar proteins at these levels.

  “So, that’s the fertility drugs, but now look at what Harrison worked on. I assume this came from whatever he injected you with because none of these compounds are in Batten’s,” Kade said, hitting a few buttons on his screen. A new hologram of different compounds popped up.

  We knew there were bacterial agents, but nothing like what popped up on the screen.

  “Staphylococcal enterotoxin B, coccidiosis, and rice blast,” I murmured, checking out the different compounds staring back at me from the hologram.

 

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