The Apothecary Page 0,48

unfolded paper clip out, and was working on the lock.

“You can talk!” Benjamin said.

“Of course I talk.”

“Do you know my father, Marcus Burrows?”

The woman paused, as if unsure whether to trust us, then nodded. “Where is he?”

“We don’t know,” Benjamin said. “We thought he was in here.”

“You’re the chemist!” I said, remembering Shiskin’s note, and the gardener. I wondered if they had known she was a woman. “You’re Jin Lo!”

“How long have you been able to talk?” Benjamin asked her.

“Whole time. They think I have pill. So I pretend.”

“Can you make yourself invisible?” I asked. It was a long shot, but she was a chemist. It seemed worth asking.

She shook her head, her braid snaking on her shoulder.

“The door’s unlocked,” Pip announced.

Jin Lo frowned. “This is not trap?”

“You think it’s the kind of trap the British military’s likely to lay on?” Benjamin said. “Three invisible kids?”

“We just need some way of hiding you,” I said.

Jin Lo seemed to consider the problem, then untucked her shirt and removed several tiny glass vials from the sewn-up fold of the shirt’s hem, pressing them out of the slot in the fabric one at a time. She chose two, and stuffed the others in her pocket. One of the vials contained something orange, and one was a clear liquid.

“Smoke flare,” she said. “To signal plane. Will fill all of bunker.”

She poured the clear liquid into the orange vial, sealed it with her thumb, and shook it up. When she took her thumb away, a thick orange smoke started to pour out of the vial. In a few seconds it had filled the room. I held my breath so I wouldn’t cough.

“Open door,” she said, and Pip did.

There was no guard in the hall when we looked out— just Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret and Winston Churchill gazing at us from the wall. Jin Lo held up the vial, and the orange smoke filled the hall, obscuring the pictures. I’d never seen so much smoke pour out of such a small container. It surrounded us as we started silently down the corridor.

We were almost to the telephone switchboard, with the smoke billowing out behind us, when Pip whispered, “Look!”

He held out his arm, and I saw him do it, because there was a dusting of orange on his invisible skin. I could see his head, too, as if cast in orange mist. The smoke was clinging to us, and we were becoming visible, as orange ghosts. I looked down at myself and saw my hands and forearms, nearly transparent but outlined in smoke dust. I crossed my orange arms over my naked chest. The dusting had started at the top, where the smoke was thickest. I could see Benjamin’s head and shoulders, too.

“We have to get clothes!” I whispered.

We were outside the general’s office, where we’d heard Danby talking, and I peeked in. No one was inside. A long black wool overcoat was hanging by the door, and I grabbed it and put it on. It was enormous, but I didn’t care.

There were voices back down the hall, beyond the smoke screen.

“Look at this smoke!” the girl who’d gone for a coffee said.

“Is it a fire?” a man’s voice asked.

We ran silently towards the elevators, the smoke billowing behind us. Benjamin grabbed a jacket off one of the switchboard chairs and pulled it on just as his legs became orangely visible.

An alarm rang out, making me jump. There was coughing and shouting in the obscured hall behind us.

We reached the elevator lobby and Pip pressed the call button. It didn’t require a key to go up. I grabbed two khaki overalls and two hard hats off the hooks on the wall. Jin Lo was still waving the vial into the hall, spreading smoke.

“Take this,” I said, handing her one of the overalls. “And put your braid up under the hard hat. Pip, you take the other.”

She started pulling the overalls on over her clothes.

“You look like the invisible man,” Benjamin said to me, looking at my long coat.

“Well, you look like the invisible girl,” I said. The jacket he had stolen was actually a woman’s light blue raincoat, cinched at the waist, with a full skirt.

Pip, still naked and half visible, was busy brushing the orange dust off his skin. “It comes off!” he said. His arm had vanished again. “Brush it off and take those stupid coats off! Quick!”

We scrubbed ourselves clean as quickly as we could— the orange dust came off easily—and handed