Hellbender - Dana Cameron Page 0,60

didn’t have a lot of time, and it did let me rule out the dangers I was aware of, like not trying to mix the powers from Pandora’s Box with an extra blast of energy from Vee. Once was enough to teach me that I wanted to avoid a repeat.

The screen showed me nothing recognizably dangerous. That just left a whole new universe of elements I couldn’t recognize.

It suddenly occurred to me that I’d been able to bring the chip, or maybe its essence, into the lab. Very useful to know. I called Sean, who had been cataloging the artifacts with the undergrads.

“Recognize anything? Good, bad, dangerous, odd, or otherwise? Any ideas what it might do?”

Sean shook his head. “Zoe, I can’t keep up with all of this. Since the library . . . we’re just swamped. We’re gonna have to make some changes, you want to go any faster.”

“Okay, okay.”

“It’s more a question for Dr. O anyway, isn’t it?”

I’d nearly forgotten about my newest . . . tenant? Too early to say “friend.”

As soon as I’d had the thought, he was there, in the archaeology lab. He had a chipped and tea-stained mug with a picture of Beethoven on the side and was happily nibbling a biscuit. The crumbs stuck to his cardigan indicated this might not be the first biscuit he’d had today, but there were ink stains on his fingers.

I guess he’d been busy at work.

“So . . . can you tell me about this?” I moved the scarab and chip to the workbench and tapped twice, splitting the “screen” on the surface into two parts. One showed the diagram of the scarab chip. Alongside it, on the other screen, I brought up a list of the artifacts I had already assumed into my form, their diagrams, and the powers that appeared or were enhanced after their addition. Nothing seemed to match this chip in any respect. Which was actually pretty exciting. Like baseball cards or other collectibles, you can find the common stuff pretty quickly and get a good range fast. But after a while, it gets harder and harder to find something you don’t already have.

“Far as I can tell, there’s no one-to-one correlation between my powers and the artifacts,” I said. “It’s like the artifacts are organized like those clear film map overlays that show the changing borders, or geographical details, or major cities depending on how many you put down. Or maybe like passes of an old-fashioned color printer. One pass lays down all of one color, next pass adds the next color, which also creates a third color, next pass adds more colors, and the definition of the picture becomes clearer, more resolved.”

He had been watching me intently, and reached out, touching the screen that had appeared in the workbench. He tried rearranging some patterns of artifacts and then looked up at me.

“Another analogy might be the arrangement and activation of certain genes,” he said. “It’s not really my game, biology, but it might be like a characteristic not depending on just one gene that’s switched on or off but requiring a certain combination of several switches, in the right order. More than one factor’s needed to make it work.”

I shrugged and nodded. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Do you mind if I spend some time on this?” He nudged the chip gingerly, almost as if afraid. “This is certainly different from the Fangborn artifacts I studied . . . when I was alive . . . and the ones that have melded with you. It might give me some excellent insights, the way they came at the problem.”

I thought about it and slapped the work-surface screens. A big red seal appeared, glittering in the corner of the screen, with the words “Read Only” on every “page.” It didn’t interfere with the text but like a watermark, was just visible behind it.

“It would be a huge help to me, thanks,” I said. “For now, we’re going to keep this so you can look at these things, see if you find anything by arranging them differently, but I’m the only one who can make them happen. Activate them or add them . . . to me.”

“Fair enough.” Geoffrey had already gotten the hang of how to flick through the pages of artifacts. The light from the screens reflected on his face, coloring his gray beard. “You know how I died?”

“You’d said you’d been studying . . . the physics of Fangborn abilities?”

“Yeah. Bit