Your timing is quite terrible, you know,” muttered the wizened gremlin of a curator as he led Tom, Noodle, and Colby through a room of Italian Renaissance paintings. “The Science and Mysticism exhibit doesn’t open until next month.”

The curator waved his magnetic ID badge in front of a glass door, which unlocked it.

“Whoa,” said Noodle as they followed him into the dark exhibit. “Do you ever feel like you’re the commander of the starship Enterprise?”

“Sometimes.” The curator chuckled.

Tom was thankful he had Noodle. The kid could charm a troll, and the term off-limits simply wasn’t in his vocabulary. At first, the curator had been less than thrilled to let three seventh graders into a closed exhibit. That was, until Noodle went into a long-winded story about their extra-credit history project on medieval sorcery, peppering in heart-wrenching details about how it had been his great-grandfather’s dying wish to see a copy of The Alchemy Treatise in person, as well as Noodle’s own life-changing field trip to Sir Isaac Newton’s alchemy lab in England. None of it was true, of course. But it got them access to—

“The Curt Keller exhibit.” Colby read the name off a metal placard affixed to the entrance archway. Tom’s neck hairs prickled at the name. Curt Keller? Could it be the same Curt Keller who’d just laid off his father? The man who was responsible for his family’s move?

Inside, the exhibit was incredible. Gold-painted star maps covered the walls, and glass cases displayed manuscripts and illustrated texts from all over the world. It was hard to miss the overriding theme of this exhibit. Most of the precious objects were related to one thing—alchemy. There were oil paintings of dour alchemists in their labs, plus a group of shelves filled with golden weighing scales and antique vials used for distilling liquids.

“Do all these pieces belong to Mr. Keller?” Tom asked.

“Most of them,” said the curator. “His interest in the occult is widely known. And he’s especially fascinated by alchemy. Much like yourself, Mr. Zuckerberg.”

“I’d like to meet this Mr. Keller,” said Noodle, surveying the room with a scholar’s seriousness.

And then Tom saw what they had come here for, open and displayed inside its own sealed glass case—The Alchemy Treatise. So stunning, it almost made him swallow his gum. Its pages were razor thin, its edges dipped in gold leaf, and lavish paintings of astrological imagery adorned the borders of its calligraphy text.

Tom touched his nose to the glass. His fingers itched to turn a page.

“Hands to yourself!” the curator loudly reminded him from across the room. “That’s a five-hundred-year-old artifact.”

“Er, sorry.” He jammed his hands back into his pockets.

Mouth twitching in suspicion, the curator glided a little closer to Tom to give him a quick once-over.

“Tom, I think I found something,” whispered Colby as she tugged on his sleeve and nodded toward the adjoining room. Her eyes were alive with excitement. “You’ll definitely want to see this.”