Sierra was at the wheel, because although North had napped for the past two hours he was still getting flashes of hallucinations. His senses were recovering rapidly but he did not trust himself to handle the narrow, rural road that was taking them deep into the Cascades.
A while back they had stopped to do some basic emergency rations shopping at a grocery store. They were expecting to arrive in Fogg Lake before sunset, but Olivia LeClair had warned them that it was never wise to drive the isolated road without enough food and water to last for a day or two. “If you get caught in the fog you’ll be stuck by the side of the road overnight,” she had explained. “Whatever you do, don’t try to drive in that stuff. And don’t leave your car. It’s not normal fog. It’s extremely disorienting.”
After the grocery shopping expedition, North had opened the cargo door of the SUV and taken out the machine he had found in Loring’s lab. The device was now sitting on the floor between his feet. He undid the flap of one of the pockets of his cargo pants and took out a compact screwdriver.
“Do you always travel with a full set of tools, a lockpick, penlights and a gun tucked away in your clothes?” Sierra asked.
“Yeah, just the basics,” he said. “I’d rather have a decent tool chest but it’s hard to haul one around when you’re trying to move quickly.”
“I’d hate to be the person behind you in an airport security line.”
“I rarely fly commercial. By the time my team gets called in to handle a problem the situation has usually deteriorated to the point where there isn’t time to go through the standard airport routine. We end up on the Foundation jet or in some very good, very fast cars.”
“You live an exciting life.”
“I guess.”
He examined the screws that held the box together. It was obvious they had been recently removed and replaced. He went to work on the metal box.
“Are you sure it’s safe to fool around with that thing?” Sierra asked.
“I am not fooling around with it. I am examining it.”
“Okay, okay, you don’t have to act as if I just insulted you. But what if it’s another paranormal weapon?”
“It’s not,” he said, very sure of himself now. “I can sense the vibe in it. I don’t know what it was designed to do but I am certain of two things: it was built by Griffin Chastain and it is not a weapon.”
He was sure of something else as well. He had screwed up that morning when he kissed Sierra. She had said she was okay with him touching her and he thought she got the same red-hot charge out of the kiss that he got. But he must have been wrong, because just when things were getting interesting she had gone cold and pulled back. Okay, maybe not ice-cold, but there had definitely been a chill in the atmosphere. His fault, probably. He’d moved too fast. They hadn’t even had a real date. Nearly getting murdered by a light grenade and attacked by some tattooed Puppets did not constitute the start of a relationship.
“How can you tell that box isn’t a weapon?” she asked. She sounded genuinely curious.
“I’ve been living inside my grandfather’s personal lab for nearly a year,” he said. “I know intuitively how to work his devices. He made his living as a magician in Vegas before he was recruited into the Bluestone Project, but he was an engineer by training.”
“An engineer with a sixth sense for manipulating light from the dark end of the spectrum?”
“Right.”
“Probably not a lot of job opportunities for him in the normal world,” Sierra said. “No wonder he wound up with a magic act in Vegas.”
“Until the Bluestone recruiters found him.”
North slipped the screwdriver back into his small tool kit and gently lifted the black metal plate off the machine. He set the plate on the floor and gazed into the box. There was a compartment inside. It was made of steel. He undid the lock that secured it and found himself gazing at a chunk of colorless gray crystal.
A thrill of anticipation crackled through him. He was on the brink of discovering something very important, something that would answer a few questions.
Gently he lifted the crystal out of the inner compartment and jacked up his senses.
“Looks like a gray rock,” Sierra said.
“It’s a crystal.” North sat back in the seat and studied the artifact. “Not a natural one. It must have been created in a lab. There’s a lot of energy inside it, but it’s unfocused. Shattered. Probably because whoever has been using it couldn’t handle the vibe. If you don’t control it, the vibe controls you.”
“Any idea what that machine is supposed to do?” she asked.
“I’m not absolutely positive, but judging by the energy and what I know of my grandfather’s engineering style and interests, I’ve got a feeling this is some sort of tuning device. I’ve got a crystal on my mantel back home in Vegas that looks a lot like this one. I always knew it was important but I couldn’t figure out why.”
“So that crystal is not a weapon, but it may be a mechanism for tuning one to a human aura?”
North turned the crystal in his hand. “But not just any aura. It would only function properly if it was used by someone with an aura that carried Griffin Chastain’s unique vibe.”
“One of his descendants?”
“Right. But regardless of the original intent, it’s useless now.”
“I’ll bet Loring was using it to try to tune the Puppets to some paranormal weapons, like the light grenade and the flashlight gun Matt described.”
“Probably. If that’s true, those four orderlies are in bad shape by now. This crystal was very powerful.”
Sierra tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “Delbridge Loring was trying to tune paranormal weapons in his lab at Riverview.”
“Looks like it. He managed to find a few people with enough talent to activate the weapons—the orderlies—but he would have needed subjects for his experiments.”
“Marge and the other inmates at the hospital?”
“Yes.”
“But where did he get the weapons?” Sierra asked. “I still think that if Loring had found the old Vortex lab the news would be all over the underground market.”
“I agree. But this tuning device and those weapons could have come from the lab that Griffin Chastain and Crocker Rancourt controlled inside the Fogg Lake complex. That facility was huge. It covered miles inside those tunnels. There must have been hundreds of rooms, labs and offices. The Foundation has barely begun to excavate the site. Trust me, if the Chastain-Rancourt lab had been discovered I would have heard about it.”
“Then where have those artifacts been all these years?” Sierra asked.
“Maybe our witness, Marge, will be able to fill in some of the missing pieces of the puzzle.” North looked at the semi-dismantled tuning machine. A frisson of certainty snapped across his senses. “It all began in Fogg Lake,” he said. “The answers must be there, too.”