CHAPTER 10

Down in the basement, across from the safe Scott had cracked, Pym tapped a code into a hidden door. It opened with a series of beeps, exposing a large lab space. Scott couldn’t help but wonder how he’d built it. They must have been out under the street. “Twenty years ago I created a formula that altered atomic relative distance,” Pym said.

“Huh?” Scott had no idea what that meant.

“I learned how to change the distance between atoms. That’s what powers the suit, that’s why it works.” Pym led Scott into the lab, which was full of electronic gizmos that made Scott’s engineer-trained fingers twitch.

“Wow,” he said. He’d always wanted a lab like this. Then he saw there were ants everywhere in here, too.

“It was dangerous,” Pym went on. “Too dangerous. So I hid it from the world. And that’s when I switched gears and I started my own company.”

“Pym Tech.”

“Yes.” Pym was digging around in a duffel bag he’d taken out of a locker. “I took on a young protégé called Darren Cross.”

“Darren Cross.” Scott knew the name. “He’s a big deal.”

Pym had vials of the red fluid in his hands. “But before he was a big deal he was my assistant. I thought I saw something in him, a son I never had, perhaps.” He set up the vials on a work table next to a glass case full of ants crawling through tunnels they’d made in some kind of white substance. “He was brilliant, but as we became close he began to suspect that I wasn’t telling him everything. He heard rumors about what were called the Pym Particles, and he became obsessed with re-creating my formula.” Pym held up one of the vials. Scott guessed they had Pym Particles in them. That’s what gave the suit its shrinking ability. “But I wouldn’t help him, so he conspired against me and he voted me out of my own company.”

Scott didn’t know much about how big corporations worked, but that sounded weird to him. “How could he do that?”

“The board’s chairman is my daughter, Hope. She was the deciding vote.” It hurt Pym to remember this; Scott could see that. He didn’t stop, though. “But she came back to me when she saw how close Cross was to cracking my formula.”

Scott took all this in as Pym set the suit’s helmet on the table. “The process is highly volatile. What isn’t protected by a specialized helmet can affect the brain’s chemistry. I don’t think Darren realizes this, and, you know, he’s not the most stable guy to begin with.”

This was all useful information, Scott thought. But it wasn’t telling him what he really wanted to know. “So, what do you want from me?”

Pym looked up from his work. “Scott, I believe that everyone deserves a shot at redemption. Do you?”

“I do,” Scott said. He meant it, too. He wanted that shot more than anything.

“If you can help me, I promise I can help you be with your daughter again.” Scott believed he could. A guy with Pym’s money and clout could be a big help with the court. “Now, are you ready to redeem yourself?”

“Absolutely,” Scott said. Whatever he’d gotten himself into here, he knew one thing for certain. “My days of breaking into places and stealing stuff are done. What do you want me to do?”

Pym cracked a little smile. “I want you to break into a place and steal some stuff.”

Maggie, Paxton, and Cassie were sitting at breakfast when Paxton’s phone chimed. “You going to be home for dinner tonight?” Maggie asked him at the same time.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, distracted by the phone. It was a text from his partner, Gale: Lang’s “LAWYER” is Dr. Hank Pym, as in Pym Tech. Below it was a picture of Pym. Whoa, Paxton thought. This puts a new spin on things. “I’ll pick something up, okay?” He got up, suddenly anxious to be back on the case.

“Okay.” She nodded at the phone still in his hand. “Good news?”

“Uh, I don’t know.” How did a guy like Scott Lang get Hank Pym’s attention? And why was Pym lying about being Lang’s lawyer, especially when Lang had been caught coming out of Pym’s house? “It’s news.”

“Are you trying to find my daddy?” Cassie asked.

“Yeah, I am, sweetheart.” He wasn’t sure what to say, so he went with a half-truth. “I just want your daddy to be safe.”

“Hope you don’t catch him.” She dug back into her cereal. Maggie and Paxton exchanged a look. The situation, they knew, was going to get more difficult before it got easier—if it ever did.

In a lab deep inside the Pym Tech complex, Darren Cross hit the switch that would test the miniaturization beam on another experiment in a long line of living subjects. None of them had yet survived. Mice, sheep… the beam had killed them all. But Cross was not going to quit. Not ever. He was close, and when he had the miniaturization down, the Yellowjacket system wasn’t just going to make him rich—it was going to make him one of the most powerful men on earth. Not even the Avengers had tech like this.

The yellow fluid in the feeder tubes compressed and the beam flashed out into a glass box holding a three-month-old lamb. Cross held his breath, waiting for the afterimage of the flash to leave his eyes.

He looked at the table and at first saw nothing. Then his eyes registered a tiny version of the glass box… and inside it, a tiny version of the lamb.

I did it, he thought. At last, I did it.

From an observation room next to the lab, Hope Pym watched.